Cold Light (96 page)

Smith, ‘Scraper’ Warren, lawyer, badly disfigured in World War I. He was a friend of Edith from student days at the University of Sydney.

Staples*, Jim, became a member of the Communist Party as a student at the University of Sydney. As a young lawyer, he was the first to publish the report of the 20th Congress secret report in Australia, and was expelled from the Party. He was a civil liberties lawyer who did much pro-bono work and later became Deputy President of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.

Strachey*, Giles Lytton (1880–1932), British writer and critic. Known for creating a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. The best known of his books is
Eminent Victorians
. He spoke openly about his homosexuality and had a relationship with John Maynard Keynes, who, like Strachey, was part of the Bloomsbury group. Also had an intimate relationship with the painter Dora Carrington, who committed suicide two months after his death.

Theo, chauffeur at the British High Commission, then ran a hire-car service in Canberra. He was personal chauffeur for Edith.

Thring*, Frank William (1926–1994). Gathered a gay and transvestite set around the Arrow theatre in Melbourne, which he relaunched with a controversial production of Oscar Wilde’s
Salome
. He then financed his own production of
Salome
in London, in which he played Herod.

Titterton*, Sir Ernest William (1916–1990), English nuclear physicist. In 1950, he was appointed Foundation Professor of Nuclear Physics at the Australian National University. He also held high positions on various science, defence and nuclear-related committees, institutes and councils in Australia.

Turner*, Ian Alexander Hamilton (1922–1978), educated at Nhill State School, Geelong College and the University of Melbourne. Became a political activist and historian. He was an official of the Communist Party of Australia after World War II and left the Party in 1958 to become an academic historian. A close friend of Stephen Murray-Smith (see Murray-Smith* and Amirah Inglis*).

Vittoz, Swiss, Freudian psychiatrist, not to be confused with the psychiatrist Roger Vittoz* who treated the poet T. S. Eliot.

Waltz*, Kenneth Neal (1924–), a member of the faculty at Columbia University and one of the most prominent scholars of international relations. Also one of the founders of neo-realism in international relations theory.

Watt*, Ray (1889–1967), brother of the Australian diplomat Alan Watt*. He was the founder and official of the Australian League of Nations Union from 1921 until World War II, an unsuccessful politician, a broadcaster, and later a PR officer for the Pakistan High Commission.

Watt*, Sir Alan Stewart (1901–1988), Australian diplomat. First joined the Department of External Affairs in 1937 and became head of the Department of External Affairs in 1951. Brother of Ray*.

Westwood, Ambrose, British, personal staff of Sir Eric Drummond, first Secretary-General of the League of Nations, later in Internal Services. Trained as a medical doctor and served in Medical Corps during World War I. Subsequently on staff of Lord Curzon and then in the British Foreign Office. He joined the staff of the League of Nations but went home to England after suffering a breakdown in the late 1920s. He returned to Geneva in the 1930s to work in a non-government body called The Federation of International Organisations. He also had connections with British Naval Intelligence for a time in the twenties. During the war, Edith employed him as a personal assistant. After the war, he rejoined the Foreign Office and was seconded to SIS (MI6). He and Edith married in 1949.

Whitlam*, Gough (1916–), elected Labor Prime Minister of Australia 1972–1975 after twenty-three years of Liberal–Country Party rule.

Young*, Courtenay, SIS (MI6) officer seconded to Australia in the 1950s to assist with establishment of ASIO.

When writing an historical novel, there is always the dilemma of whether to give sources for key events and behaviour that concern identifiable people in the book. It is accepted as a convention that novelists are not obliged to do this, and the reader is asked to trust that the writer has tried hard to get it right. I tried hard to link such events and behaviour in the book to sources likely to be a safe record, before transmuting them through imaginative dramatisation.

Many hundreds of conversations, many hundreds of books and many documents fed my imagination, but for me as a writer the agony is that research is infinite and sooner or later the book must be written and published while much remains unknown to me.

‘Our doubts are traitors, / And make us lose the good we oft might win / By fearing to attempt’ William Shakespeare,
Measure for Measure
, Act 1, Scene 4; ‘We should demand more accountability from our friends . . .’ Craig Farmer; I am particularly grateful for the work done by Joseph Rothschild in his thesis on the impact of the Secret Speech of the 20th congress of the CPSU on the Australian Communist Party; ‘He was the rarest musician that his age did behold; a cheerful person he was, passing his days in unlawful merriment,’ Thomas Fuller,
The Worthies of England
(1662); Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse,
The Hungarian Countess
; ‘Which Side Are You On?’, Florence Reece (1900–1986); Robert Ingersoll,
Declaration of the Free
; ‘You are at the crossroads of circumstance’, Eudora Welty,
Ponder the Heart
, 1956;
The Book of Crossroads
is from the film
Pan’s Labyrinth
, written and directed by Guillermo del Toro; ‘We’ll all go together when we go’, a song by Tom Lehrer; David Thomas, lawyer, South Australia, for legal maxims;
John Latham in Owen Dixon’s Eyes
by Professor Philip Ayres; John Williams, University of Adelaide, for
Latham and Cromwell;
‘Stormy Weather’ is a 1933 song written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler; Wendy Johnson for recollections of Madame Ollier; Linda Young for the expression ‘Canberra has a bush soul’; information about clothing of the period of the book from curator Glynnis Jones at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney; the orations for Edith’s mother and family are a collage drawn from the lives of actual contemporaries, as recorded in the
Australian Dictionary of Biography
; the conversation between Edith and Latham in the Melbourne Club in ‘Loss of a Mentor’ is, of course, imaginary, but Latham’s dialogue is constructed from his High Court judgement on the
Communist Party Dissolution Act
, his personal papers in NLA, mentions of Latham in memoirs, and a construction of his views and style interpreted by the author; as an accredited writer, I observed the dramatic renegotiation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in Geneva, mixing them with the various delegations; and I also observed the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, again with contacts with the delegations; I am grateful to Gareth Evans for valuable conversations; Phillip Deery, Victoria University; John McLaren; Dr Libby Robin of the National Museum of Australia on the history of science in the ACT; Peter Freeman for information on Canberra and for the book
The Early Canberra House
; Robert Freestone, University of New South Wales, for guidance; Peter Proudfoot and Deborah van der Plaat on geomancy; Jill Waterhouse on University House and the Causeway; Dr Susan-Mary Withycombe, for work on Eilean Giblin and on Canberra social life; Jane Barder for research on the British High Commission, Canberra House and Westminster House; Ian Batterham and his work as a conservator who spent years restoring the works of Marion Mahony; the Canberra and District Historical Society and their marvellous bulletins; the estate of David Campbell, for the quotation from the poem ‘Harry Pearce’,
Collected Poems of David Campbell
, Angus & Robertson (1989).

In writing a trilogy, research on the first two books inevitably spills over to the second and the third and I would refer readers to the acknowledgements in
Grand Days
and in
Dark Palace
.

One of the most substantial aids to research in Australia is the
Australian Dictionary of Biography
, established in 1966, which is available both in book form and on-line. It is a magnificent project and I wish to pay tribute to its founders, general editors and to its contributors. The
ADB
now runs to seventeen volumes, containing biographies of 11,237 representative Australians who died before 1981.

The Creative Fellowship Scheme (known as the ‘Keatings’) was set up by Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1989 and ran until 1996. I received one of the first fellowships in 1989. The fellowships provided funding for large-scale, research-based, imaginative projects, and funded the researching and writing of
Grand Days
(the research for which also informed
Dark Palace
and
Cold Light
). No comparable funding scheme replaced the Keatings, but over the five years that I have worked on
Cold Light
a group of institutions and individuals have gathered around to help me research and write this book and I wish to acknowledge them and their staff with great gratitude. They include: the National Archives of Australia’s Frederick Watson Fellowship under the directorship of Ross Gibbs; the National Museum of Australia and its research unit under Dr Peter Stanley; the Prime Ministers’ Centre, now part of the Centre for Democracy under Kate Cowie and Michael Richard, which also provided me with an office in Old Parliament House – a great historical experience in itself.

The Australian National University made me H. C. Coombs Creative Fellow in 2008 and I give special thanks to Tim Rowse, then Fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences, and Anne McGrath, whose department at ANU hosted me. I wish to thank those who put my name forward for the fellowship – Desley Deacon, Head of History Program; Simon Haines, Head of School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts; Chris Reus-Smit, Professor of International Relations, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies; and Professor Kim Rubenstein, Director of the Centre for International and Public Law.

The Fryer Library, University of Queensland, repository for my personal archive, was an indirect patron of the project. I also thank the New South Wales government through the offices of Frank Sartor for a Writers’ Fellowship for this project. In 2009 I was the inaugural CAL Writer in Residence at the University of Technology in Sydney under the directorship of John Dale, which gave me time to finish
Cold Light
. Professor Gerhart von Graevenitz, the Rector of the University of Konstanz, Germany, invited me to be a senior fellow in the Zukunftskolleg in 2009 to allow me to write and do European-based research for the book. Arthur Moorhouse, as executor of the Moorhouse estate, and his wife, Rhonda Moorhouse, at times undertook the role of literary patrons.

The
Griffith Review
, under the editorship of Julianne Schultz, published the first extract of the book in the December 2009 Fiction Issue under the title ‘Does Eros Remember My Name’.

Susie Carleton was a supporter and patron, as were Carol and Nicholas Dettmann, patrons, friends and advisers, who also provided a retreat at their magnificent Minnamurra House, where parts of this book were written. Steven Katz provided accommodation during my visit to the United Nations in New York.

I wish to express my appreciation to: Lenore Coltheart for assisting with accommodation arrangements in Canberra and also for over the years acting as a guide and adviser on the history and nature of Canberra and on politics generally, and for inspiration, learning and verve; Professor Kim Rubenstein and Garry Sturgess (senior researcher for the ABC’s 1993 ‘Labor in Power’ and co-creator and co-writer of SBS’s 2009 ‘Liberal Rule’), for intellectual advice and stimulation and accommodation in Canberra; Graham Willett; Tim Herbert and James Freston for conversational guidance and correction; Bill Pritchard, former Head of the Department of Defence; Myfanwy Horne for information on Canberra and Dr H. V. Evatt; Nicholas Brown, ANU, for background on Raymond Watt and the League of Nations Union and the Canberra Commission and South Pacific Commission; Don Anderson, whose father Gordon Anderson was in 1950 expelled from the Returned Services League for communist sympathies, for literary inspiration; Sam Dettmann, senior policy adviser with the New South Wales government, for obscure research; Professor Mary Kinnear, author of the biography of Mary McGeachy, for conversation and shared research; David McKnight for assistance on the Communist Party and other matters; Bob Gould; Amirah Inglis and Ken Inglis; Sebastian Clark for many conversations on many things, and Manning Clark House for accommodation; Selwyn Cornish, visiting fellow at the ANU College of Business and Economics; historian Garry Wortherspoon, who helped with gay history; Eric Walsh and Jim Spigelman, who helped with the Whitlam period; and Barry Price, who drew attention to the anomaly of the name Lake Burley Griffin.