Trevor WholohanThe Adventures of Burglar Bill
August 31st 2008 06:35
James Francis Dwyer was an Australian writer who spent most of his career working outside of Australia. He nevertheless remained proudly Australian.
Dwyer was born on 22nd April 1874 of Irish immigrant parents at Camden Park, 60 kilometres (about 40 miles) south-west of Sydney. The area was originally settled as a farming district, but is now being swallowed up by the inexorable suburban sprawl of Sydney. He was one of 11 children. His early life in the farming community provided the background for some of his written articles.
He left the farm at about age 14 and went to find work in Sydney. Some years later, in 1899, while working for the post office, he and an associate lost money at the horse races. They thought up a scheme to help themselves to some of the money passing through their hands as part of their daily work. His associate talked of the scheme to a third party, who informed the police. Dwyer was arrested charged and convicted, and sentenced to 7 years gaol. He served a little less than three years of the sentence in Goulburn gaol. Dwyer wrote under a number of pen names and his stories about life in gaol were written under the pseudonym ‘Burglar Bill’. He had a number of articles published in the Bulletin; He was a yarn spinner in the best Australian tradition. One article, fairly short, and published in July 1903 was called “The Horse-Breaking Electrician”. This is a delightful bushies’s yarn in the style of Lawson’s “The Loaded Dog”, and is well worth a read.
Another article, published in September of that year, was called “The Pig”, and told of the trouble a couple of farm hands had in returning a difficult pig they had bought to their farm. The animal died on the way, but not to be wasted, “His hide was so thick on the side that Dad cut a cricket ball out of it for young Pat”. Now that was some thick hide.
He did achieve some success in Australia, particularly when he was hired by John Norton to write for the Truth and Sydney Sportsman. The memory of his time spent in gaol remained with him for the rest of his life, and was part of his reasons for leaving Australia with his first wife in 1906. He initially travelled to London, but was unable to sell sufficient stories to make a reasonable living. He moved to the United States a year later. He relates a story, while in San Francisco, of knocking out a person attempting to blackmail him by threatening to reveal his criminal conviction.
In all he wrote ten novels, and had more than 1000 articles published. He had his greatest early success in the United States, having articles published in the most popular magazines, such as Harper’s Bazaar and Collier’s. His autobiography “Leg-irons on Wings” reads a little like one of his stories and I suspect the yarn spinner occasionally took over from the straight narrator.
He divorced his first wife in 1919, and married his agent, Galbraith Welch. He moved to France in the 1920s, where he spent most of his life. He tells of escaping from France just ahead of the invading Germans in 1940. He spent the war years in the United States and returned to his home in France in 1945. He and his second wife travelled extensively in North Africa, and he published a travellers’ newsletter describing his experiences.
He had a feeling for lyrical expression, as when he wrote of an old tale “tongue-polished by a thousand liars”. Stories certainly do grow with the telling. Thinking about the struggle of the writer, he wrote: “Words are hard. They are finger-marked by the millions who have used them before me and they have lost their value”. This thought brings to mind a writers’ need to avoid the bland, the banal, and the cliché, but the language we share carries all of this baggage.
One of his short stories, “A Jungle Graduate” was published in a collection by Alfred Hitchcock sub-titled “Stories TheyWouldn’t Let Me Do on TV”. The problem apparently was that Hitchcock could not do justice to the story with the techniques available at the time.
In the last sentence of his autobiography, he wrote of Australia: “But some day I’m going back...someday.” He never made it back. Jimmy Dwyer died at his home in Pau, in France, on November 11, 1952.
Dwyer was born on 22nd April 1874 of Irish immigrant parents at Camden Park, 60 kilometres (about 40 miles) south-west of Sydney. The area was originally settled as a farming district, but is now being swallowed up by the inexorable suburban sprawl of Sydney. He was one of 11 children. His early life in the farming community provided the background for some of his written articles.
He left the farm at about age 14 and went to find work in Sydney. Some years later, in 1899, while working for the post office, he and an associate lost money at the horse races. They thought up a scheme to help themselves to some of the money passing through their hands as part of their daily work. His associate talked of the scheme to a third party, who informed the police. Dwyer was arrested charged and convicted, and sentenced to 7 years gaol. He served a little less than three years of the sentence in Goulburn gaol. Dwyer wrote under a number of pen names and his stories about life in gaol were written under the pseudonym ‘Burglar Bill’. He had a number of articles published in the Bulletin; He was a yarn spinner in the best Australian tradition. One article, fairly short, and published in July 1903 was called “The Horse-Breaking Electrician”. This is a delightful bushies’s yarn in the style of Lawson’s “The Loaded Dog”, and is well worth a read.
In all he wrote ten novels, and had more than 1000 articles published. He had his greatest early success in the United States, having articles published in the most popular magazines, such as Harper’s Bazaar and Collier’s. His autobiography “Leg-irons on Wings” reads a little like one of his stories and I suspect the yarn spinner occasionally took over from the straight narrator.
He divorced his first wife in 1919, and married his agent, Galbraith Welch. He moved to France in the 1920s, where he spent most of his life. He tells of escaping from France just ahead of the invading Germans in 1940. He spent the war years in the United States and returned to his home in France in 1945. He and his second wife travelled extensively in North Africa, and he published a travellers’ newsletter describing his experiences.
He had a feeling for lyrical expression, as when he wrote of an old tale “tongue-polished by a thousand liars”. Stories certainly do grow with the telling. Thinking about the struggle of the writer, he wrote: “Words are hard. They are finger-marked by the millions who have used them before me and they have lost their value”. This thought brings to mind a writers’ need to avoid the bland, the banal, and the cliché, but the language we share carries all of this baggage.
One of his short stories, “A Jungle Graduate” was published in a collection by Alfred Hitchcock sub-titled “Stories TheyWouldn’t Let Me Do on TV”. The problem apparently was that Hitchcock could not do justice to the story with the techniques available at the time.
In the last sentence of his autobiography, he wrote of Australia: “But some day I’m going back...someday.” He never made it back. Jimmy Dwyer died at his home in Pau, in France, on November 11, 1952.
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