by Ryan O'Neill
Septimus Swan died from liver failure in February 1939. With the small endowment his family received at his death, Catherine bought a second-hand typewriter. From the first she wrote for nine hours a day, six days a week, a schedule she followed religiously. Her first sales came immediately, and stories by Catherine Swan appeared in Saucy Mystery, Bush Sweetheart and Fantastic Farming Adventures in May, August and September 1939. Swan soon realised that she could have even more work published if she adopted a pseudonym. In fact, she took on at least thirty, including Harry Stagg, Jake Holliday, Guy Strong, Juliet Love, Edith Lamoure and Madeleine White. Under her male pseudonyms, she submitted to magazines such as Bonzer Bachelor Tales, Private Dick: The Magazine of Detection and Six-Shooter Stories, and as a woman to Jackaroo Romance, Stirring Secretary Stories and Scary Spinster Yarns. In her first two years of writing professionally she sold two in every ten stories, but this proportion grew markedly as she came to know what editors were looking for. The dozen short stories and three novellas in the April 1940 issue of Tear-jerking Tales of Motherhood were written entirely by Swan, under various pseudonyms. She was under no illusions that she was producing great literature; she called herself a hack and was proud of it. But her stories were better written and plotted than those of most pulp writers of the time, including the most successful, Rand Washington. Before long Swan acquired a literary agent, Oscar Musgrave, who coordinated her many submissions.
By the end of 1940 Swan was making enough money to move her siblings and mother into a four-bedroom home in Chatswood, and to rent a flat for herself in St Leonards, where she could write in peace. During this time she had relationships with a few women she met at a discreet bar in Kings Cross, but none of these liaisons lasted longer than a month or two. Throughout the 1940s, her output for the pulp market steadily increased, and by the end of the decade Swan had worn out four typewriters. Most of her income went to support her brothers and sisters at school and university, and to ensure her mother had a comfortable retirement. In 1943 her contributions to the romance magazines published by Fountainhead Press caught the attention of another pulp writer, J.R. Hardacre, and the two struck up a correspondence. Hardacre pressed for a meeting and when, in October 1943, Swan finally agreed, she was thankful to find that Hardacre was actually a woman called Joyce Reith.
The two became friends and, some time towards the end of 1943, lovers. They were cautious, aware of other lesbian writers in Sydney whose lives had been blighted by blackmail. In order to further camouflage their relationship, in early 1944 Swan married her literary agent. Oscar Musgrave was an Englishman and homosexual and was happy to take part in the pretence. The newlyweds set up house together, and Reith would often spend nights and weekends “visiting” the couple. Over the next two years, Swan and Reith collaborated on hundreds of stories, saving enough money to purchase a property near Leura, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, where they could be alone together. Nonetheless, Swan’s generosity towards her family and other writers who had fallen on hard times meant that she was always short of cash.
In 1946 Rand Washington, as publisher of Fountainhead Press, met Reith and offered her the editorship of the company’s romance line. The market for science-fiction and mystery stories was drying up, and the position afforded a large salary. Despite Swan’s protests, Reith accepted the job and was soon fending off marriage proposals from Washington. Swan asked her to quit, but every time Reith handed in her resignation, Washington offered her a pay rise. In 1948, Reith’s father faced ruin after a fire destroyed his business, and Washington offered to clear his debts if Reith would marry him. Swan begged Reith not to, promising to give her the money if she would only wait a few months until Swan had sold some more stories. But Reith was afraid her father’s health would not stand the strain, and she and Washington wed in June 1948. Reith fell pregnant at once. With the birth of her son, Galt, in March 1949, Joyce Washington told Swan that she would not leave her husband.
Swan was heartbroken and threw herself into her writing, averaging an incredible one million words a year for the next decade. With the decline of the pulp market in the early 1950s, Swan abandoned the short story and turned to the long form, writing a huge number of science-fiction, fantasy, Western, boarding-school and mystery novels under her many pseudonyms. She also worked on Sundays, a day she had previously reserved for relaxation; now, she devoted Sundays to writing nonfiction. For her first project she conjured the new pen name of Naomi Plume and created a series of abridged versions of classic books for children, including A Child’s Finnegans Wake (1948) and A Child’s Remembrance of Things Past (1949).
Plume’s publisher, Kookaburra Books, requested more popular works from the writer. Although she had never finished secondary school, Swan was able to absorb and synthesise complex ideas and interpret them for general readers. She produced wide-ranging introductions to science, history, philosophy, technology and language, all while completing a new novel every two weeks. Her Introduction to Australian Literature (1953) popularised the tale that Sydney Steele had made a deal with Satan, selling his soul in exchange for immense literary gifts, only to be tricked and lose everything he ever wrote. Swan took more care over her nonfiction than her novels, which she continued to write because they paid better and were easier to “knock out”, as she said. On one occasion she wrote to the Sydney Review as Catherine Swan to protest the journal’s glowing reviews of Westerns by Tex McAllister and boarding-school novels by Georgina Fairweather, two of her own pseudonyms.
In 1955, Swan published the work she was most proud of: Cor Blimey was a blistering and bilious parody of the Cor novels that so enraged their creator, Rand Washington, that he ran a full-page editorial in all his pulp magazines fulminating against Swan. Joyce Washington wrote to Swan, asking her not to attack her husband again, and Swan grudgingly agreed, although the titles of many of her 1950s novels referred obliquely to her frustration: Why Won’t She Leave Him? (1952), Murder in Washington (1954) and Pain in the Mars (1957).
Even Swan herself was sometimes confused as to which of her numerous pen names wrote which books; she relied on Oscar Musgrave to keep track. Swan’s publishers were unaware that an increasing number of books in their fiction and nonfiction lines were by one writer. In 1960, for example, thirty of the fifty titles published by Kookaburra Books were by Swan or one of her alter egos. A year later, at only forty, she was diagnosed with arthritis in her finger joints. She hired three secretaries, and had them sit in three separate rooms of her house; throughout the day she would walk back and forth between rooms, dictating three different books. In this way Swan was able to increase her already phenomenal daily word count. Inevitably, Swan sometimes renamed or forgot characters as she went along, or left plot threads dangling. Usually her husband picked up these mistakes; if he didn’t spot them, the editors and proofreaders at her publishers would. However, on one notorious occasion Swan dropped her drink while dictating to a secretary, who faithfully transcribed the writer’s profanity. The obscene phrase, nestled amid a scene describing a ball in Regency-era Bath, went unnoticed by editors at Kookaburra Books and no doubt shocked the many admirers of Anastasia Beaumarchais, under which name Swan wrote Lady Olivia’s Secret (1967).
By the end of 1968 Swan had published millions of words of fiction and nonfiction, encompassing nine of the ten classes of the Dewey Decimal System, excluding only religion. She was also one of the most prolific letter writers in Australian literary history; she responded to every piece of fan mail she received, and often sent five or six letters a day to friends or to one of her siblings. It is estimated that between 1948 and 1969 she wrote over eight thousand letters to Joyce Washington, but while a handful of Joyce’s replies remain, all Swan’s letters were later destroyed by Rand Washington. Joyce Washington’s surviving letters repeatedly allude to Swan’s entreaties to leave her husband, explaining that she could not while her son was a minor; Rand had once told her that if they ever divorced, he would find a way to gain custod
y of Galt and would turn the boy against his mother. From time to time Joyce even went so far as to defend her husband, telling Swan that he was not as bad as Swan thought; he was a decent father to Galt, and almost always kind to her.
Swan waited impatiently for Galt Washington to grow up. She would see Joyce two or three nights a year, but they had to be careful. Rand Washington was a jealous man. When Galt was conscripted and sent to Vietnam in 1969, Joyce still refused to leave her husband, at least until Galt had returned home safely. She told Swan that she felt sorry for Washington; his last book had flopped and he had become a figure of fun in the Australian science-fiction community. Late in 1969 the Washington marriage took a bizarre turn when Rand established his own religion. Swan scorned Washington’s claims to enlightenment, even as his Transvoidist Gospell was embraced by a number of prominent Australian writers, artists and celebrities. She was greatly troubled when Joyce told her that Washington had bought a property in the Barrington Tops and was gathering disciples. There was no telephone at the property, and Joyce’s letters ceased on her moving there.
Swan decided that it was high time to expose Washington for the charlatan he was. In January 1970 she began researching a short biography of the writer. Over the next few months she travelled to Washington’s hometown of Wollongong to speak to his few surviving childhood friends; in Sydney she interviewed Helga Smith, the elderly widow of James Smith, Washington’s first publisher. She also located a number of Transvoidist apostates, and gathered as much information as she could about the bizarre and often contradictory doctrines of Washington’s religion. Swan told her husband that she had made disturbing discoveries about Washington and was worried about Joyce’s wellbeing. In early May she wrote a letter to Joyce, the contents of which remain unknown; Joyce did not reply. Swan then informed the police of her suspicions that something had happened to her friend. A constable from Gloucester police station was sent to the Washington property; he reported that Joyce Washington was in good health.
On 10 May 1970, Swan told her husband she could wait no longer. Early that morning she set off from Sydney. It was raining heavily, and when she was twenty miles from Gloucester she was delayed by a flooded road. There was a long detour; it was evening before she arrived in the town, and dark by the time she drove up the narrow, unsealed road to Washington’s property. The rain worsened as Swan arrived at the Transvoidist compound, where Washington was leading a group of followers in meditation. She demanded to speak to his wife, and Washington made no objection. Joyce emerged from one of the small bungalows when she heard Swan calling her name. The two women embraced, then went into the house together. When they came out fifteen minutes later, Joyce Washington was carrying a suitcase. Washington did nothing to stop the pair as they walked to Swan’s car, but before Joyce got in, he called out to her over the sound of the rain, telling her that the Universal Galactic Controller would rebuke her unless she repented of her transgression. Joyce looked at Swan, who smiled at her. The two women got into the car and drove away.
Their bodies were recovered two days later by a police search party, who had been alerted to Catherine Swan’s disappearance by her husband. The brakes in Swan’s car had failed, and the vehicle had slipped off the road two miles from Washington’s property and plunged a hundred metres down a ravine, killing both women. A police investigation ruled out foul play and the tragedy was declared an accident, although doubt was cast on this finding in 1982 when it was revealed that both the investigating officer and the coroner had been practising second-level Transvoidists.
The tragic death of Catherine Swan, and with her the dozens of writers she had created, had the unexpected effect of bringing the Australian publishing industry to its knees. At the time of her death, the top twenty bestselling fiction and non-fiction books were all by Swan or one of her noms de plume. Four of the major publishing houses, including Berkeley & Hunt and Angus & Robertson, had unknowingly based nearly their entire catalogues on the work of one writer. With Swan’s demise, these companies lost not just one but nearly all of their most successful authors. By the end of 1970, all of the books Swan had submitted before her death had been brought out, and her publishers scrabbled to find new talent to fill the void. Sales of Australian fiction and nonfiction plummeted in 1971. Kookaburra Books went bankrupt, Berkeley & Hunt and New Dimensions barely survived, and Angus & Robertson did not recover its share of the market until 1980.
Oscar Musgrave died in 1974, leaving few records concerning his wife’s incredible output. Thanks to the research of Rachel Deverall, over six hundred books and fourteen hundred short stories, written under fifty-five different pen names, have been identified as the work of Catherine Swan, though there remains no full-length critical study of her writings. Swan’s research notes on Rand Washington were never found.
Frederick Stratford, circa 1907
(1880–1933)
Life; Brisbane; this moment of June.
From Mrs Galloway (1925)
FREDERICK STRATFORD, THE BOLDEST AND MOST SUCCESSFUL plagiarist of the twentieth century, was born in Cardiff, New South Wales, on 22 June 1880. (As the academic and novelist Peter Darkbloom was later to note, “Even the name of Stratford’s birthplace was lifted from somewhere else.”) Frederick’s father, Laurence, was a customs and excise officer who worked at the port of Newcastle. His mother, Helen, kept house for the family, which comprised four sons and three daughters. Frederick was a taciturn boy, often overlooked among his more outgoing siblings. When Frederick was five his father was transferred to Sydney and the family moved with him to the city. Frederick began his education at Calvin Grammar School, also attended at the time by Henry Watkins, the future short-story writer Addison Tiller, although there is no evidence the two knew each other. Frederick was an unremarkable student. After three years, his teachers still did not know his name, and although he was not bullied, he had not made any friends. He simply went unnoticed.
One evening in June 1894 Frederick was sent by his mother to bring his father home from the local pub. Frederick found Laurence Stratford asleep on a stool at the bar. As he tried to wake him, a fight broke out nearby. A jeering crowd gathered around two brawling men as Frederick watched, mesmerised and appalled. Finally there emerged a victor, a tall, blond-haired man who stood on a nearby table, took out a much-folded piece of paper, and started to read from it through bloodied lips. Although he could not be heard over the noise of the bar the man continued to talk, and gradually the room fell silent. Frederick and the fifty or so drunkards listened, spellbound, as the man declaimed a poem. Sometimes they laughed, and at other times they had to wipe tears from their eyes. Frederick’s father came to during the final verse; he applauded with the rest as the man finished and climbed down from the table. Frederick’s father explained that the victorious fighter was a bush poet called Sydney Steele whose verses had recently thrust him into the limelight. There were even rumours that Steele had bargained away his soul in return for becoming the greatest writer in the country. Frederick stared at the grinning poet, the centre of attention, surrounded by wellwishers. There can be no doubt that as soon as he glimpsed that world, he wanted to belong to it. He quickly realised that there were two ways to achieve his aim: through violence, which was out of the question, since he was peaceable and timorous by nature, horrified by the mere sight of blood; or through literature, which is a surreptitious form of violence, a passport to respectability, and can, in certain young and sensitive nations, disguise the social climber’s origins. He opted for literature and decided to spare himself the difficult years of apprenticeship.
Frederick helped his father home, then slipped out of the house again (as usual, no one noticed) and returned to the bar. He waited outside long into the night until Sydney Steele emerged, unsteady on his feet, his torn shirt still damp with sweat and blood. Frederick followed Steele to his home, lingering in some nearby bushes until the candles in the house were extinguished, before creeping towards the only open window. Ins
ide, the poet was snoring on a cot, his trousers hanging from a hook by the windowsill. Carefully, Frederick reached in and snatched the wad of papers from the back pocket of the trousers, then turned and ran. The next morning was a Saturday, and Frederick spent the morning leafing through the purloined manuscript. It was called Bush, Beer and Ballads, and the twenty-five poems it contained were written in a neat, almost feminine hand. Frederick copied out the poems, then destroyed the original. That Monday he showed two of the poems, “The Stringybark” and “Charlie Cobb’s Shadow”, to his English master, who had barely spoken to him in the past. The teacher was excited by the poems, and encouraged Frederick to enter them into the school poetry competition. Frederick did so, and within the month had been awarded first prize. His family were impressed, and his teachers finally seemed to know his name.
Flushed with success, Frederick submitted “The Stringybark” to the Western Star, whose editor, Jim Taylor, replied with a letter praising the work and asking Frederick to come to his office that Friday to discuss terms for publication. When Frederick arrived, a furious Sydney Steele was awaiting him. Taylor had recognised “The Stringybark” as Steele’s work the moment he read it, and he informed the poet that he had found his thief. Frederick broke from Steele’s grasp and sprinted home in terror, where he quickly disposed of Bush, Beer and Ballads down the dunny. When Steele and Taylor banged on the door of his house an instant later, Frederick flatly denied their charges. After a heated argument with Frederick’s father, the police were called. Taylor and Steele had no proof that Frederick had stolen the poems. Before they were moved on, Steele begged the boy for the manuscript, telling him it was the only copy he possessed, and he could not remember most of the poems in it. Again, Frederick denied any wrongdoing, and finally the two men departed. Throughout the course of his long life, Steele was to attempt to reconstruct Bush, Beer and Ballads many times, always without success.
