{"id":1926,"date":"2017-03-20T08:00:22","date_gmt":"2017-03-19T21:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=1926"},"modified":"2017-02-15T16:13:30","modified_gmt":"2017-02-15T05:43:30","slug":"adrian-mitchell-blending-fact-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2017\/03\/adrian-mitchell-blending-fact-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Adrian Mitchell on blending fact and fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adrian Mitchell is one of our most popular and prolific authors at Wakefield. From\u00a0<\/em>Plein Airs and Graces<\/a>, the biography of George Collingridge that got Adrian shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, to\u00a0<\/em>Dampier’s Monkey<\/a>, on the south seas voyages of William Dampier, Adrian’s skills at biography are well documented. But in his last couple of books he’s moved a little left of centre, using historical figures as the basis of fictionalised work. It started with\u00a0<\/em>The Profilist<\/a>, a novel about Ethan Dibble, who bore more than a passing resemblance to S.T. Gill. His latest is\u00a0<\/em>The Beachcomber’s Wife<\/a>, based on the life of E.J. Banfield.<\/em><\/p>\n

Adrian explains his inspiration in this lovely little author’s note:<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For twenty-five years E.J. Banfield rambled about Dunk Island,\u00a0exploring its reefs and forests, drifting about its bays, and defending\u00a0the liberties of its nutmeg pigeons and all other small birds. He\u00a0sent off to the newspapers a steady stream of genial and sometimes\u00a0whimsical articles about the natural history of the island, and the\u00a0largely idyllic way of life there; and The Confessions of a Beachcomber<\/em>\u00a0(1908) inspired at least one enthusiastic reviewer to wish that he too\u00a0could \u2018go a-Dunking\u2019.<\/p>\n

Astonishingly, what Banfield largely leaves out of account is the\u00a0presence of his wife for all those years. Which strikes me as strange.\u00a0Even Defoe\u2019s castaway acknowledges his Man Friday. And keeps\u00a0him in his place. What kind of beachcombing is it which involves a\u00a0household?<\/p>\n

There can be all sorts of explanation for Banfield\u2019s silence, of\u00a0course, but what I have imagined here is how it might have been for\u00a0her, over those years, and more particularly in the three days as she\u00a0waited for help to come after her husband\u2019s death. To that extent,\u00a0yes, there is fabrication here. That is what writers do. But there is not\u00a0falsification. I have been guided by my reading of the source material.<\/p>\n

Because I have helped myself comprehensively to details from\u00a0Banfield\u2019s publications, rearranging them to suit myself, and likewise\u00a0from Michael Noonan\u2019s helpful biography A Different Drummer: The \u00a0story of E.J. Banfield, Beachcomber of Dunk Island<\/em> (1983), I have signalled\u00a0my free-handed pilfering by calling my character Edward, not\u00a0Edmund, and changing most of the other names too. Even the dogs\u00a0are renamed, to protect the innocent. I followed my sources by not\u00a0calling his wife anything because neither did Banfield, or not in the\u00a0published material.<\/p>\n

In giving her a voice, I am of course implying a critique of Ted\u00a0Banfield, a critique such as a wife of nearly forty years might allow\u00a0herself, especially one with a glint in her mind\u2019s eye, and who filled her\u00a0days by rummaging in her husband\u2019s library.<\/p>\n

It has of course occurred to me that writers are by their nature a\u00a0kind of beachcomber too. I should not want my own wife to read too\u00a0much into that.<\/p>\n

\"Dunk<\/a><\/p>\n

To read Adrian’s imagining of the life of the Banfields on Dunk Island, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adrian Mitchell is one of our most popular and prolific authors at Wakefield. From\u00a0Plein Airs and Graces, the biography of George Collingridge that got Adrian shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, to\u00a0Dampier’s Monkey, on the south seas voyages of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[348,629,631,634,633,350,630,632,628,349],"class_list":["post-1926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-extract","tag-adrian-mitchell","tag-dampiers-monkey","tag-drawing-the-crow","tag-dunk-island","tag-e-j-banfield","tag-from-corner-to-corner","tag-plein-airs-and-graces","tag-s-t-gill","tag-the-beachcombers-wife","tag-the-profilist"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-v4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1926"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1930,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1926\/revisions\/1930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}