This story, which came to be called We Were Not Men, is also inspired by a boy who never really got to be one. His name was Ron James and I only knew him by association, but he was a hero to me and to many of us in our area. Ron died on a river in a boating accident when he was nineteen; I started writing this story the week he died. I would have loved to have dedicated this story to him but I didn’t know him well enough and I don’t want to sound like a fake. Instead I chose to dedicate this book to my mum and dad because their support has been so unflinching. The character of Bobbie in this story is not based on my mum, but like Bobbie my mum’s talents have never been given the air and respect they deserve.
All that said, I thought for a very long time that this book would and should be dedicated to my wife, writer Thalia Kalkipsakis. The number of times she’s heard me rabbit on about this book, oh my lord. Thalia and I have lived and worked out of the same office as freelancers for most of the past twenty years. The holes in the road of our writing journey together have at times been cavernous and yet we have ridden these bumps together. This book would have been dedicated to Thalia save for the fact that she didn’t just witness the writing of it, she was part of it.
This book though, outside of our house, was written in a kind of wilderness. By that I mean that it was written completely on spec, with no promise that it would go anywhere, and with no ‘contacts’ in the book industry for it to go to. At some point – I have no recollection of where or when – someone suggested that Tara Wynne at Curtis Brown might be a good fit. I served the manuscript of We Were Not Men to her cold. Incredibly, she read it and responded. For this alone I will always be in her (and in Caitlan Cooper-Trent’s) debt. Tara then put the book in front of Catherine Milne at HarperCollins/Fourth Estate. I worked for all those years on this story and then Catherine Milne, just like that, made it better. Much better. Catherine Milne’s name should at the very least appear on this book’s imprint page; it wouldn’t be what it is without her.
Books, when they are made to be the best they can be, never appear out of thin air. I still can’t quite believe the roll call of people who have helped this story see the light of day; at every step it felt like I was in the hands of the best in the business. Alex Craig did the most sympathetic-but-firm copy-edit a writer could ever hope for; Scott Forbes not only steered the publishing ship in the safest and most astute of ways but was tireless in his efforts to make the book better; cover designer Sandy Cull is my new idol; Alice Wood takes book publicity and shows everyone how it should be done. I’m not just grateful to these people, I’m in awe.
One day way back in 1996, a publisher, who had read an early version of this novel, called me and arranged a chat. We tossed around ideas over a drink, and I promised in the most carefree and confident of ways to come up with a book within a year or so. I didn’t. Because I couldn’t. Because I wasn’t good enough to. This is how things stayed for a long time and while ups and downs are all par for the course there were moments, forged at length in these years, when I couldn’t have felt lower. These were the moments when I thought I would never finish the one story that I’d set my heart on telling.
And yet, here we now are; somehow, it’s finally done. I might have been hopeless and stubborn but, for whatever reason, I didn’t give up. My final acknowledgement then is to all those people who have subscribed to my words over the past twenty-plus years, and to all those editors and publishers who have kept my wife and me afloat, out here in the wilderness with our sleeves rolled up, as freelance writers, unsecured. You helped get us here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CAMPBELL MATTINSON started a journalism cadetship in 1987. He’s mostly worked as a writer, editor, photographer and wine critic, though he’s also had stints as a dishwasher in an Indian restaurant, as a data entry clerk at a stockbroker and as a proofreader of phone books. He won the Best Australian Sports Writing Award in 1996 for a story that is the basis of We Were Not Men. His 2006 biography of winemaker Maurice O’Shea, The Wine Hunter, has won numerous awards, as has his website, The Winefront. He describes We Were Not Men as ‘the only story I ever really wanted to write’.
COPYRIGHT
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
HarperCollinsPublishers
Australia • Brazil • Canada • France • Germany • Holland • Hungary India • Italy • Japan • Mexico • New Zealand • Poland • Spain • Sweden Switzerland • United Kingdom • United States of America
First published in Australia in 2021
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
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ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Campbell Mattinson 2021
The right of Campbell Mattinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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ISBN: 978 1 4607 5952 3 (paperback)
ISBN: 978 1 4607 1315 0 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia
Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko
Cover images: Background with wave line curls by Yulia Drozdova/Alamy Stock Vector; bee by YAY Media AS/Alamy Stock Vector
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