The Precarious Lives of James McAuley and Harold Stewart
Michael Ackland had a quest to discover what McAuley was searching for in the jungles of New Guinea, and what lay behind his terrible nightmares and abiding self-distrust. Best known to the public as the founding editor of 'Quadrant', an unrepentant Cold War warrior and a public advocate of the sanctity of Christian marriage, the poet and polemicist had far darker and more puzzling traits which escaped the lime-light. Similarly, answers had to be found to what turned Harold Stewart, a writer, critic and habiture of Sydney's bohemian world, into a rabid hater of his native land. Why did this great poet and intensely private person, yet a prolific correpondent, choose to spend the last thirty years of his life in self-imposed exile in Japan?
The resulting narrative traces McAley and Stewart's collaborative decades, peaking with Australia's most notious literary hoax, and their harsh falling-out in later years, set against the swirling backdrop of Australian life between the great depression and the Vietnam war.
