A Posthumous Editor’s Note on My Own Work

This is a posthumous editor’s note, assembled from the public record of my writing after my death in 2016. The voice is mine; the ordering belongs to those preserving the archive. A writer cannot return to correct a paragraph or answer a newly raised objection, so this note works differently. It gathers the questions that shaped my work, identifies the responsibilities attached to it and leaves the final judgement with readers who encounter the books in their own time.

My career in law and public debate gave me an enduring distrust of statements that sound complete while concealing their human cost. That instinct runs through my concern with race, civil rights, institutional power and the uneasy position of the individual within a system. Travel supplied another kind of discipline. Ireland taught me to look at familiar assumptions from a distance, while my writing taught me that distance alone can become another form of evasion.

This website gathers the pieces that a short biography would leave out: information about my books, selected blog writing, excerpts, reviews and media interviews. It also preserves the trail of publication and the practical routes to acquiring the books. That combination matters because my literary legacy is not confined to two titles. It is a continuing argument about law, responsibility, place and the ways societies decide who receives a fair hearing.

The work behind the work

The public often arrives at a writer through a life story: birthplace, education, occupation, family and the accident that produced a first book. Those details have their uses, but they can harden into ceremony. The more consequential history lies in the ideas that kept returning. Mine returned because public decisions are rarely made by abstractions. They are made through forms, language, procedure, habit and the quiet pressure to leave another person’s difficulty unnamed.

Law offered a practical education in this subject. Its rules can protect people, yet they can also preserve arrangements that powerful institutions have become comfortable maintaining. Civil rights work exposes the distance between a principle and its application. A nation may speak easily of equality while courts, employment practices, housing or public administration continue to distribute disadvantage unevenly. My writing grew from the attempt to describe that distance without pretending that moral outrage alone could close it.

A posthumous note should also declare what it will not do. It should not turn an imperfect record into a flawless one, nor treat historical language as though it belonged to a less responsible age. It should preserve the work as evidence of questions asked at a particular moment. The margins around a novel or memoir can contain contradictions, hesitations and blind spots. Leaving those visible serves the reader better than smoothing them away.

Gideon’s Children and the pressure of justice

Gideon’s Children entered my writing through the pressure point where private conscience meets public procedure. Its title carries the weight of inheritance and judgment, while the novel itself investigates what happens when people expected to administer justice are themselves constrained by prejudice, fear or institutional convenience. The subject demanded narrative because abstract argument could not convey the hesitation that precedes an unjust decision.

For Australian readers, the novel belongs within a country whose public language has long contrasted equality with exclusion. The familiar expression “fair go” expresses a genuine expectation that people should receive a reasonable chance. It does not mean that race relations have been fair. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have faced the repeated gap between national aspiration and enforceable treatment, especially where law and administration have been slow to recognise the experiences of those living under discrimination.

That history should accompany a reading of Gideon’s Children, though it should not dictate every response to it. Fiction can examine a social structure from within rather than serve as a simple transcript of history. A character may speak in ways that jar with present usage because the narrative is recording a past social formation, including the limits of that character’s understanding. Context can deepen judgement without replacing it. The essential questions remain: who is believed, whose account carries weight and what price is paid when a decision is deferred?

The title of this note may suggest that I have become the final editor of my own work. I have not. A reader in Adelaide, Darwin or Hobart now possesses something the original circumstances did not: the ability to compare the book with later testimony, changed laws and the lived experience of communities whose voices were once mediated by others. That comparison is part of the book’s afterlife, provided it is carried out with attention rather than reflexive condemnation.

An Irish Experience and the discipline of attention

An Irish Experience is a memoir-travelogue, but it is not a list of places consumed between departures. Its form belongs to a writer testing the difference between an itinerary and an encounter. Ireland appears through movement, observation and conversation, and the experience of being elsewhere gives the traveller an opportunity to discover which habits travel intact and which had merely seemed universal at home.

Many Australians encounter Ireland through football, family weddings, songs and the convivial image of the pub. These are genuine routes into Irish culture, though they can become predictable when they are never complicated by the country itself. In the familiar Australian way, a first response may be to organise an afternoon as an “arvo”, but even familiar patterns shift under Irish light, weather and humour. The traveller is obliged to ask whether an apparent ease is shared understanding or merely the traveller’s relief at finding a familiar language.

Travel writing risks turning a place into a mirror for the traveller. An Irish Experience is most valuable when Ireland is allowed to answer back, when customs become strange under scrutiny and the writer’s assumptions are exposed alongside those of the people encountered. The same discipline applies in reverse. Australian readers may recognise a Melbourne laneway bookshop with coffee on the tables, or a Sydney ferry crossing where rain briefly erases the skyline, and then see how differently distance and familiarity function on an island shaped by its own histories.

The book should therefore be read as both departure and return. Ireland changes the terms of observation, and that alteration returns the traveller to Australia with a sharper sense of national habit. This is not a claim that one place explains another. It is an acknowledgement that comparison can clarify, especially when the traveller remains answerable for the frame through which comparison is made.

Recommendations for keeping Franklin in circulation

Australian readers have unusually strong access to books through public libraries, local lending collections and the shared catalogue maintained through Trove. Borrowing can be the first practical way to encounter this work, particularly for Gideon’s Children, where discussion of historical context will improve the experience. Buying is also easier through a mixed market of Dymocks, Angus & Robertson, independent bookshops and online booksellers, though availability and price can vary between stores and editions.

A considered reading path can connect the two books without allowing either to eclipse the other. The following recommendations begin with that path and continue into the civic and material ways a book survives its author.

• Begin with Gideon’s Children. Keep a notebook beside the novel for questions about authority, evidence and procedural delay, then compare those questions with the civil rights debates surrounding its writing.

• Follow it with An Irish Experience. Notice where the travelogue shifts from description to interpretation, and identify the assumptions that function as a mirror for the travelling narrator.

• Borrow through your local library. Request the relevant edition from the library catalogue, consult any available notes or reading guides, and place the title on a shared reading list for a book club or community group.

• Support an independent Australian bookseller. Ask about older stock, recommended editions and signed or archival copies, then visit the shop in person if local shelves reveal something an online search has missed.

• Use the biography, excerpts and media interviews together. Compare the public account with shorter pieces of writing and recorded conversation, noting where memory, institutional history and editorial selection produce different versions of the same life.

• Discuss race and civil rights without reducing the books to a political checklist. Give fictional characters the complexity of people, retain the historical record in view and treat disagreement as part of a serious reading rather than a failure of it.

Keep the work in public conversation

An author website can do more than display a photograph beside a paragraph of biography. It can act as an archive with an active front door. The pages devoted to Gideon’s Children and An Irish Experience bring together publication details and bookseller links, while the blog, reviews, excerpts and interviews show how the work has been read and discussed since publication. Each format supplies a different kind of evidence for the literary legacy.

Preservation also requires restraint. Old reviews should remain identifiable as judgements made at the time of publication. Interview transcripts may need clear labels when edited, and corrections should be visible when they are made. A trustworthy archive does not make the author sound permanently complete. It shows the unfinished nature of a public life, including the useful points at which readers may resist the account offered to them.

The final task belongs to those who continue the conversation. Read the biography, then move directly into the books. Borrow an edition through a library, check the publication pages, support an Australian bookseller and share the reading with a group that values difficult evidence. The pages of Gideon’s Children and An Irish Experience remain available for that exchange, carrying their arguments forward each time a reader refuses to treat them as closed records.