LITERARY AND GENERAL

Opunake Times, 8 January 1935, Page 3

LITERARY AND GENERAL

FROM SWAG-MAN AUTHOR’S VARIED CAREER It isn't so long' since booksellers considered books by Australian authors about the most difficult stock to move from their shelves, but a new generation cf Australian writers has sprung up whose work can compete for popular favour on equal terms with that of the greatest of overseas novelists. Among these gifted moderns is Arthur W. Upheld, whose novels, “The Sands if Windee,” “Gripped .by Drought” and “The Beach of Atonement” commanded tremendous sales all over the Commonwealth. It is only of recent years that Upheld has down to steady writing; prior to that he had a most varied career, and had ample opportunity for gathering the material which was afterwards to make his stories of the Australian interior so vivid. Mr Uph lid compresses his life hisfory, into a few breezy words. “I was born,’ he says, ‘in Gosport, England, where iho ‘Endeavour’ was built. Like U o ‘Endeavour,’ I came out to Australia. Landed in Adelaide at the innocent age of twenty-two good heavens, I’m forty-six now! —and marched off to a big stock and land agency with a bundle of credentials as big as a roll of newspapers. They all explained that i was a model young man, and the very chap to succeed by Perseverance, Punctuality, and Strict Attention to Business.

“Well, there was a job for me all right, and the boss—a joker with a waxed moustache and the highest collar I ever saw; wonder it didn’t choke him—told me to be there on Monday morning at nine sharp. But the more I thought of office work the less I thought of it, if you understand what I mean. I went all cold at the notion of sitting at that desk from nine to five-thirty, with an hour oft' for lunch. So without a word to anyone, I went off ato the bush, and left my boss-to-be lamenting. I’ll bet he often wondered what the deuce happen id tq me.

‘“You can believe me when 1 tell you that there were plenty of times during the next four years when /I wished myself firmly seat ed on that office chair, wiin. my pay envelope waiting for me every Friday. For there I was carrying my swag, getting .jobs on stations here and there whenever 1* wore out my boots and wanted a new pair. Yes, I humped bluey for four years. Solid years, The more I think of ’em the solider they seem! None of the people who saw me marching along the road in those days thought to themselves ‘That chap is going to be an author some day; I’ll give him a lift.’ Not they; all they said was ‘I don’t like the look of that bloke with the six weeks’ growth of beard. He’ s up to no good.’ After a while I got on in the world end bought a push bike. The word ‘push’ is the right one; I pushed it from Port Augusta to Pine Creek, if you know how far that is. And then I pushed it back again. That’s my'record; 1 have* not broken it since and I haven’t any intention of trying. “I was .on a pineapple plantation in Queensland when the Great War broke out, and I joined the A.I.F. in August, 1914, and put in the next four years keeping myself alive. I emerged at the other end of the war still whole, but without any medals. After tlie war I stayed in England awhile, working as private secretary to the head of a big ordnance planf, but I soon chucked it and cam© back to Australia and the bush. “That was in 1020. I began to think I had wandered enough and that it was time I put in a little work. I tried droving, rabbiting, kangaroo-hunting, prospecting, opal-gouging and anything else that was going. In PJ27 I migrated to W.A., and worked for four years on the longest fence in the world, the Number One llabbit Fence. By this time 1 acquired a wife, a son, and a taste for scribbling., In 1925 I started writing in my spare time ,working in camel carts, station kitchens, in tents, on tucker boxes under the inulgas—anywhere I could use a pencil and paper. I wrote six novels under those conditions, ami had them all published. In addition, Ive contributed fo many well known periodicals. One of my short stories appears in the January “Australian Journal.” Not a bad record for a swagmen, eh P”