Australian Author.

Born 13 September 1913 in Cottesloe, Western Australia.
Died 25 August 1983 in Broome, Western Australia.

In his childhood, Donald Stuart heard stories about his Scottish immigrant grandfather finding gold on the Victorian fields and about the part his father, Julian Stuart, played in the 1891 Queensland Shearers’ strike. His poverty-stricken, but peaceful upbringing in Perth Western Australia was overtaken by the 1930s Depression when, as a rebellious fourteen-year old, he left home and took to ‘the road’. In the next decade or so, he adopted the north-west outback life and was exposed further to Australia’s traditional yarns and philosophies.
        He emerged from this period as the outspoken, outrageous ‘Scorp’ Stuart, a persona that would endear him to some and antagonise others. At the start of World War II, Scorp volunteered for the 2nd AIF and, as a 2/3rd Machine Gunner, served in the Middle East. He went on to survive three-and-a-half years as a Prisoner of the Japanese, including a time on the infamous Burma-Thailand railway.
        On his return to Australia, he began to tread the writer’s path, supplementing his memories with renewed visits to the outback of his youth and working on yet another railway. Encouraged by his sister and her friends, supported by his wives and recognised by the Australian writing community, Donald R. Stuart played the role of noted author, a construct only possible because of Scorp Stuart’s adventures.
        The varying facets of his complex character come together in his writing, notably through his deep love of the land and in his sympathetic examination of the north-west Aborigines’ position since white settlement. In his eleven novels and many short pieces, Donald Stuart set out to preserve a record of Australian life, much of which has been overtaken by time.

Donald Robert Stuart—Bibliography

1959 Yandy. (Yandy of the Winds). Melbourne: Georgian House Pty Ltd.

1961 The Driven. London: Michael Joseph Ltd. in conjunction with Georgian House Pty Ltd..
          The Driven. Australasian Book Society.
          The Driven. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

1962 Yaralie. London: Michael Joseph Ltd. in conjunction with Georgian House Pty Ltd.

1963 Yaralie Sydney: Australian Book Society.

1971 Ilbarana. Melbourne: Georgian House Pty Ltd.

1972 Ilbarana. London: J.M. Dent.

1973 Morning Star, Evening Star: Tales of Outback Australia. Melbourne: Georgian House Pty Ltd.

1974 Prince of My Country. Melbourne: Georgian House Pty Ltd.

1975 Walk, Trot, Canter and Die. Melbourne: Georgian House Pty Ltd.
          ‘The Driven’. Readers Digest Condensed Book. Illustrated by Frank Beck. Surry Hills NSW, Australia.
           Readers Digest Services Limited.

1976 Malloonkai. Melbourne: Georgian House Pty Ltd.

1977 Drought Foal. Melbourne: Georgian House Pty Ltd.
          Yandy. Melbourne: Seal Books, Rigby.

1978 Wedgetail View. Melbourne: Georgian House Pty Ltd.
          Yandy. Berlin: Putten and Loerning.

1979 Crank Back on Roller. Melbourne: Georgian House Pty Ltd.

1981 I Think I’ll Live. Melbourne: Georgian House Pty Ltd.

1983 Broome Landscapes and People. Photography by Roger Garwood. Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

Donald R. Stuart. 1913-1983. A Biography.
by Sally Clarke.

In her wide-ranging biography of Donald Stuart, 'In the Space Behind His Eyes', Sally Clarke examines Stuart the bushman, the soldier and Stuart the recognised Australian author. She draws upon his writing, references some revealing interviews conducted with him in his later life and canvasses the opinions of those who knew him. Woven around accepted and persistent myths found in the Australian psyche, this colourful life story traces the life of a writer whose cultural stories help us to understand what it is to be Australian.

 

Short - Listed
2006 WA PREMIER'S BOOK AWARD

Awarded Equal 1st Prize
Non-Fiction
The NSW Writers' Centre
2006 Best Self-Published Book Competition
Sponsored by Gary Allen P/L

This Biography is published in Perth, Western Australia by CLAVERTON HOUSE and
can be purchased from the following book stores

For details re ordering direct plus packaging and postage costs within WA, interstate and outside Australia, email here

Excerpts from In The Space Behind His Eyes

Introduction

A young swagman arrives at a government well in the north of Western Australia. He takes off his heavy pack and ‘the sweat patch on [his] back turns cold’. It is 1928, just before the worst bitterness of the Great Depression. Recognising that the youngster must be new on the track, two old-timers invite him to join their campfire. They fill his pint with hot sweet tea and give him a good feed. He falls asleep to ‘a blur of two voices humbly boasting, as each one denied his own riches of travel and friendship with known men’. In the morning, they fill his tuckerbag, give him tobacco and set him off on the next leg of his journey. No searching questions are asked, no judgements made. At the campfire, the young boy begins to learn about life on the road, he finds the hospitality and comradeship of the outback and meets those who will encourage him on his difficult way. These are his riches of travel.

Chapter V

‘They didn’t know, we didn’t know, that we would be the raw material for ‘39-’45.’ Made in hindsight, Donald’s comment turned his swag-carrying days into some sort of training march, and the privations endured in the Depression years into a preparation for the testing times he and many others would go through before the war ended. In 1939, he was twenty-six, older than many of those who joined the Army with him. He recognised that the Depression had touched the majority; even the younger ones had fathers, older brothers and uncles who had gone out on the track to look for work. For those who remembered what it was like to be unemployed and hungry, or remembered being in a family affected by unemployment, war and the Army offered a solution.

Chapter VI

Donald Stuart’s individual experience provided the material for 'I Think I’ll Live', a story set against a background of events readily supported by official records. Choosing to write about the men he had gone along with, he saw them as typifying the ordinary Australian; the same men he had met on the road and sat with around camp fires, men with whom he shared the prospector’s dream and love of the Australian outback. Now, they find themselves in another isolating and testing situation. Though the Japanese Prisoner of War experience places them in an infinitely more dangerous position, in many ways their situation has not changed. Stuart tackles the storytelling in his usual way, exposing the Australian character through anecdote and dialogue in another of what his friend, Richard Speir, calls: ‘His spare records of men being men in the hardest conditions and being decent about it.’

Summary

Donald Stuart is an Australian author whose writing has an acknowledged significance beyond the Western Australian region where many of his stories are set. Twenty years after his death, a biographical study of his life and work allows an opportunity to reconsider this author and recognise his contribution to Australian literature. His first book, Yandy, (1959) was on the Perth best seller list for months and was translated into German. Publicity surrounding his second book, The Driven (1961)—published in London, New York and Australia and as a Readers Digest Condensed Book —extolled him as ‘one of Australia’s best living authors’ and commentators predicted he would be considered an important Australian writer.
       Between 1959 and 1981, Donald Stuart published eleven novels and one collection of short stories. Four of his novels, Yandy, The Driven, Yaralie and Ilbarana, were republished overseas. In The Literature of Australia (1976), Harry Heseltine stated that Stuart’s first five books, the fifth being Morning Star, Evening Star: Tales of Outback Australia, would ‘in the long term, come to be regarded as one of the most impressive groups of novels published by a single writer during the period’.
       Several of the novels were studied at Leaving Certificate level in Western Australian and interstate high schools. His short fiction pieces appear alongside significant Western Australian and Australian authors in a number of representative collections and literary magazines. In the 1960s and 70s, he was a well-known broadcaster and regular speaker on ABC radio; served as President of the Fellowship of Australian Writers at State and Federal levels; and received Commonwealth and Arts Council funding for much of his writing.
       In his last four novels, Donald Stuart depicts a life which very much resembled his own. While acknowledged as semi-autobiographical and providing a useful reference for the life, these four novels present only a limited view of Donald Stuart. To ignore the considerable output of his writing which carries an Aboriginal theme would be to deny the man himself. Donald Stuart’s writing on Aboriginal issues, the unpublished 'Yandy of the Winds' manuscript and his published works, Yandy (1959), Yaralie (1962), Ilbarana (1971), Malloonkai (1976), and the first two novels in 'The Conjuror’s Years' six novel sequence, Prince of My Country (1974), and Walk, Trot, Canter and Die (1971), merit a separate study and analysis, which may prove the value or otherwise of this writing.
       In considering his long-term acceptance, the timing of his publications assumes some significance. Donald Stuart’s novels about World War II, published in 1978, 1979 and 1981, arrived at a time when Australians were engaged in reliving a previous war. Patsy Adam-Smith’s prize-winning The Anzacs (1979) was reprinted several times during this period and, on film and television, there was a spate of productions around the familiar theme of Gallipoli, the Western Front and Australia’s involvement in World War I.
       Twenty years after his last publication, predictions that Donald Stuart would be recognised as an important Australian writer have not been realised. Apart from a selection lodged by Donald and his sister, Lyndall Hadow, in the National Library, his family’s determination to preserve the work became a close-guarding of the papers, but did not advance the writing. Editions of the novels are held in the Battye Library of Western Australian History, yet have been all but discarded from the Public Library system. Copies are available, at a price, from better second-hand book shops as rare and out-of-print books and, no doubt, are held in universities and private collections. The demise of his publisher, Georgian House, a distinctively Australian publishing house associated with the Australasian Book Society and specialising in the work of realist writers, occurred shortly after Stuart’s death hampering any reissue of previously published works or publication of later manuscripts.
       There are still people who remember him and wonder what has become of him, but there are many who have never heard of him. It is not fanciful to suggest that his work is in danger of being overlooked. Some might say that Donald Stuart had his day and recognise that, at the time of his death, his realist style of writing had already lost favour, even before his last books were published.
       His work may have come at the end of an era, but, as Sally Clarke’s biography, In the Space Behind His Eyes, aims to show, his is a significant body of writing, deserving of recognition. With Australians now more acutely aware of their past, an opportunity for republishing some of Donald Stuart’s work may become possible. Thirty years after its original publication, his short story collection, Morning Star, Evening Star (1973), could prove accessible to a present-day audience, as might also his novel, The Driven (1961).
       Donald Stuart’s story, as he wants it to be told, is in his writing, in recorded interviews and in material he made publicly available. Other versions of his life rest in the memories of those who had known him and estimates of his work add further opinion. In the Space Behind His Eyes preserves a living memory of him, aims to provide an insight into this Australian life, and acknowledges him as a Western Australian author deserving of recognition.