Good Weekend January 20, 2007
(Good Weekend is the magazine liftout of the
Saturday Sydney Morning Herald newspaper)

 

Once upon a time, Arthur Upfield was one ofAustralia's most successful is novelists.  Today, he and Bony, his part- Aboriginal detective hero, are despised as a pair of embarrassing jokes. Caroline Baum finds out why.

 

When my French girlfriend brought her husband to Australia in 1994 for us to meet, he stepped off the plane carrying a paperback with an Aboriginal dot painting on the cover. "What's a French book doing with an indigenous Australian artwork on it?" I asked indignantly. Taken aback, he replied: "But this is an Australian author. Arthur Upfield:' I looked more closely at the book but the name meant nothing to me. "He's hugely popular in France;' my friend's husband continued. "There are more than a dozen works by him in this collection:'

I felt embarrassed that I knew nothing about an Australian author who was a hit overseas, but I was not alone. When I asked well-read friends, they looked blank. In bookshops, staff were flummoxed or mumbled that Upfield was out of print. Occasionally, I stumbled across people who remembered a popular but controversial TV series from the 1970s featuring the character he created - an Aboriginal detective called Bony. (A follow-up series in the early '90s had Cameron Daddo playing a descendant of the original Bony.)

So why had Arthur Upfield disappeared from the literary landscape? I decided to do some detective work of my own, following a trail full of twists and turns to France and the US, as well as across Australia. It was too late to talk to the man himself (he died in 1964, an event that rated a mention in The New York Times), and very few people who knew him are alive today, but those who are, like his former agent and friend Pamela Ruskin, were happy that someone was taking an interest in a man they believed to be maligned and misunderstood.

Upfield's big mistake - his crime, at least in the eyes of some - was to create a detective hero who was part Aborigine, part white man. Bony (full name Napoleon Bonaparte) is said to have been born to a black mother and found abandoned under a tree next to her body. By the time readers meet him, he not only bears the scars of traditional initiation on his chest but also has a university education.  Dapper in dress and slightly arrogant in tone, Bony solves outback murders by using black tracking skills and native intui­tion combined with supposedly white intellect and reasoning.

Upfield called his hero a man of two tribes. Today he belongs to neither. He is an embarrassment or a pariah, according to academics, critics and lit­erary gatekeepers. But Bony is a fascinating, complex and mysterious figure in Australia's written heritage. Upfield never apologised for him - on the contrary, he scorned the aristocratic tendencies of much British crime writ­ing at the time. "It has been much more gratifying to prodp.ce an Australian half-caste than to import the moronic son of a fifth earl;' he once wrote.

 

Born in 1890, Upfield migrated to Australia as a young man who had failed to show any interest in his family's drapery business in Gosport, England. As a child he was prone to naughty behaviour: he spent a night in a police cell for an incident involving a catapult and a pane of glass, and later, perhaps displaying his first talents as a writer of fiction, got into trouble for sending letters to the local paper pretending to be two opposing politicians. But he was also a sickly child who was often bed­ridden with asthma, which meant days at home devouring books by his favourite writers, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens. A poor student who failed his exams, he was packed off to Australia by an exasperated father who clearly thought he was saying good riddance to the black sheep of the family.

Arriving in Adelaide in 1910, Upfield headed to the bush, where he got work as a station cook, a cattle drover and a rider on the rabbit-proof fence. He loved both the solitude of his work and the companionship and yams of itinerant workers he encountered on the various pastoral stations.

He also met several Aboriginal trackers who told him stories about their work with local policemen. And gradually he developed a taste for telling stories of his own, sitting around the camp fire. A station owner's wife, hear­ing some of them, encouraged Upfield to put them down on paper.

After writing a derivative and lacklustre murder mystery with a white detective hero, Upfield turned his hero into Bony in The Barrakee Mystery in 1929. This was followed by The Beach of Atonement, Wings Above the Diamantina, Mr Jelly's Business and dozens of other titles, each story set in a new remote location until virtually all of Australia, except for Tasmania, Ing SUllIe Ul UIC111, Cll\.uUl<l5<'u '"'P""£""_ y_' _._U. __..u --- r-r--­

After writing a derivative and lacklustre murder mystery with a white detective hero, Upfield turned his hero into Bony in The Barrakee Mystery in 1929. This was followed by The Beach of Atonement, WIngs Above the Diamantina, Mr Jelly's Business and dozens of other titles, each story set in a new remote location until virtually all of Australia, except for Tasmania, had become the scene of a Bony mystery.

According to Follow My Dust!, an unreliable biography of Upfield by his then partner Jessica Hawke - widely believed to have been written by Upfield himself, and full of misinformation - Upfield claims he created Bony after meeting a particularly erudite Queensland Aboriginal tracker called Leon Wood who had read Shakespeare and a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte and, to top it all, had received a uni­versity education. This is fanciful mischief-mak­ing. There is no evidence of such a person ever having existed, according to either police or uni­versity records. (Indigenous Australians did not graduate from Australian universities until the '60s. Ironically, the first Aborigine to graduate, Charles Perkins, was later to become one of Bony's most vocal opponents.)

A more plausible theory is that Bony is a com­posite of various indigenous men that Upfield shared a smoke with. Whatever the origins, there is no doubt that Upfield was an early champion of Aboriginal rights, advocating the return of land to their custodianship, admiring their skills above those of white men, and advocating a greater respect for their traditions. He makes this clear in a number of articles and letters he wrote for various newspapers, urging fairer legislation and more humane policies. He was undeniably ahead of his time and out of step with popular opinion. In his novel The Bone Is Pointed, he writes: "It is the Aborigine who is the highly developed civilised being and the white man who is the savage:'

Bony quickly captured the public's imagina­tion with his unorthodox methods and his suave and slightly cocky personality, outwitting white criminals and white police officers alike. Upfield's outback settings and vivid descriptions were also a key part of his books' appeal. Even his detrac­tors today cannot dismiss his supreme gift for powerful evocations of the land, its weather and changing moods - though his plots are some­times a little clunky and his dialogue stilted.

With the success of the Bony books, by the late 1930s Upfield became one of only _o Australian writers - Ion Idriess was the other - able to sup­port himself entirely from his fiction. He was in­dustrious, writing up to 10,000 words a week. His career had also received an unexpected boost from the notoriety he gained as a witness at a sensational murder case.

There are many versions of exactly how life came to imitate art in the case of Snowy Rowles, an itinerant worker who shared a camp fire with Upfield on several occasions. But the most ac­cepted one is that around the fire with other stockmen one night, conversation turned to the subject of how to execute the perfect crime, with Upfield offering a pound to the person who came up with the best method. One of the stockmen suggested a scenario in which a body was thrown on a fire together with that of a dead kangaroo.

The remains of both carcasses were then pulverised in a dolly pot and scattered to the winds. Rowles later killed three people and adopted this method of disposal, but was caught after an incriminating wedding ring was found at the scene of one crime. Upfield testified in the case against Rowles in Perth in 1931, at a trial that made national headlines. His evidence was reported in the West Australian newspapers side by side with serialised instalments of his novel The Sands of Windee, featuring the same plot device. Snowy Rowles went to the gallows in 1932, while Upfield's bestseller status soared.

Real-life events were to give him another lucky break: during World War II, American publisher Doubleday had the inspired idea of publishing sev­eral Bony titles in the US to give GIs coming to Australia on R & R leave an idea of where they were headed. One title, The Widows of Broome, sold more than a million copies in hardback. Upfield became the first foreign writer to be inducted into the Murder Mystery Writers Guild of America.

Upfield always complained that his life was «all fame and no bloody money" but he did well enough to buy himself a Daimler, which he appar­ently drove roughly, «as if he were riding a horse': according to Pamela Ruskin. He also indulged his passion for big-game fishing and good whisky.

His private life was less of a success, at least initially. Never one to settle easily into domestic life, Upfield had married Ann Douglas, an Australian nurse he met after fighting at Gallipoli and being wounded in Egypt. (He proposed after just six weeks of courtship.) The couple had one son, Bill. Upfield soon grew restless and left his wife and son behind while he went bush again. He travelled the country in a specially fitted-out dray lined with shelves to accommodate his library and a fold-down table for his typewriter. Whenever he returned to his family and city life, things went bad: a boarding house the couple ran in Perth failed and Upfield proved to be a distant father. Eventually he left Ann, who refused to give him a divorce, and in 1946 met Jessica Hawke, a widow with a small son, Don. They moved into a house together at the foot of the Dandenongs in Victoria, and seemed to avoid scandal by keeping to themselves.

Today, Bonaparte Holdings, the company that manages the Upfield estate, is jointly administered by Upfield's only grandson, also called Bill, and the man Arthur Upfield regarded as his stepson, Don Uren. The two now have a polite relationship, but Bill Upfield is still bitter that his grandfather not only abandoned his natural family but took up with another woman and child and left everything in. his will to that child. Though he now regrets having done so, in 2000 he put all the Upfield memorabilia in his possession up for auction through Christie's. Not one of Australia's libraries or literary archives bid for any part of the collection and it was split up, with the bulk of it going to collectors in the US, where Bony still has a small cult following.

 

Upfield professed to hate television but he was keen for the Bony books to be adapted for the screen. Sadly, he did not live to profit from the sale of the books' rights, which occurred after his death. The television series might not have happened were it not for an un­likely admirer: Orson Welles was a Bony fan and recommended the books to fellow actor and producer John McCallum.

McCallum's company, Fauna Productions, was basking in the success of its international hit series Skippy and looking for another authentically Australian subject to consolidate its reputation. He assembled a team of writers, including Bob Ellis and Frank Hardy, to write scripts, and hired the young cameraman John Seale, later to win an Oscar for The English Patient, to shoot the series on location in Central Australia.

McCallum went to several Aboriginal communities to try to cast the part of Bony with an indigenous performer. "There were dancers and musicians at that stage;' he says, «but no actors, not anyone who was trained:' And no one he felt could carry a 26_part series. At one stage he considered giving the part to Malaysian-born singer Kamahl, but when he eventually chose Scottish actor James Laurenson to play Bony all hell broke loose. Charles Perkins flew to Alice Springs to try to close down production, but was even­tually dissuaded by McCallum, who pointed out how many local Aborigines were working on the series in minor parts and as extras.

Laurenson, who regularly appears in classy British TV dramas about machinations at Westminster and on stage in Sir Peter Hall's repertory company,. still regards Bony as the highlight of his career. Unaware of the controversy until he landed in Australia, he spent most of his spare time befriending the young David Gulpilil, who, at just 18, played a bad seed in one episode, danced a sequence in the opening titles and advised the pro­duction team on hunting and other traditional details.

"I had no problem with the casting of Laurenson as Bony;' says Gulpilil. "He was a whitefella with a nose at least as big as mine!" On a more serious note, Gulpilil never felt that it was an insult to fellow Aborigines that the part went to a non-indigenous actor.

Although the TV series was faithful to the spirit of the books, it had a more racist backdrop, which may have wrongfully helped consolidate later prejudice against Upfield. Scripts featured dialogue in which Bony was insulted by patronising pastoralists or suspicious townsfolk. McCallum explains that "when Upfield wrote his books, there was no alcohol in Aboriginal communities. By the time our TV series was made, it had had an impact on the lives of indigenous people. Because our series was contem­porary, we felt the scripts had to reflect the social attitudes of the day:'

Racism was rife while the series was shot. Cast member Kate Fitzpatrick remembers Gulpilil not being served at a group dinner at a hotel in Orange, NSW. When the rest of the company got up to leave in protest, staff relent­ed. By the end of their stay in the town, Gulpilil was performing traditional dances at the pub, drawing capacity crowds.

 

There was no such thing as aboriginal crime-writing in Upfield's day - today there are a few practitioners of the genre, among them Philip McLaren. McLaren is critical of Upfield's cliched characterisation of Aborigines and his factual errors, such as referring to a bad spirit as a banshee, which is a purely Irish term. But Upfield also had unlikely supporters. Leading Aboriginal activist turned historian Gary Foley found a role model in Bony and borrowed the books from the Tenterfield library. To this day, the man who was one of the most radical firebrands for his people credits Upfield with giving him a positive image of Aborigines at a time when none existed in popular culture.

Other Australian crime writers are often surprised, if not a little irked, at how often Upfield comes up among readers on overseas tours. "I get asked about him when I go to France;' says Shane Maloney, who regards Upfield as little more than a kitsch anachronism.

But Bony's French champion, Jean-Claude Zylberstein, an urbane Paris barrister who runs a parallel career as publisher of crime fiction, is mystified by Australia's embarrassment over Upfield's creation. "Tony Hillerman, the writer of Native American crime fiction, first introduced me to Bony and said that he could not have created his own indigenous detective series if he had not been inspired by Upfield;' explains Zylberstein. His sales figures are consistent: each of the more than a dozen Bony books currently in print in French sells between 25,000 and 50,000 copies a year.

Rights to the Upfield books have also been sold recently to Poland and Japan. There is renewed interest in them from a US publisher;' and an American scholar has recently completed a biography of the writer.

And yet when broadcaster and commentator Michael Duffy was at the helm of his own publishing company, Duffy & Snellgrove, in the '90s, he reissued two of Upfield's best novels, Man of Two Tribes and Death of a Lake, but found he could not persuade any high-profile Aborigine to write introductions to the books. They were not reviewed and sank without trace.

Could it be time for Bony to be given the acknowledgement he deserves, as one of the most intriguing characters in Australian fiction? Perhaps the last word should go to him. In The Bone Is Pointed, he says defiantly: "In this country, colour is not a bar to a keen man's progress, providing he has twice the ability of his rivals." GW   .

 

In Search of Bony screens at 8.30pm on Thursday (25 January  2007 on SBS.

 

 

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