AustLit

'Providing a detailed account of the early, and indeed the late, life of D'Arcy D'Oliveres - author, apiarist, amateur sleuth, alleged amputee, larrikin aristocrat, renaissance postman - presents the prospective biographer with a number of problems. For it is not only the case that the readily available details of D'Oliveres's life are incomplete, sketchy and, at times, contradictory: the primary source of information about his background and his exploits is D'Oliveres himself. And he is an idiosyncratic character, to say the least. His opinions are unusual in many respects. His autobiographical writings - such as they are - are by no means comprehensive and contain much that is questionable, if not deeply implausible. A genial sort of bloke, he is always willing to give visitors guided tours of the small town of Dog Rock - 'a trivial town, where nothing ever happens which is not essentially trivial' - where he spent many years in the employ of Australia Post. It must be said, however, that he is not always the most reliable of guides. For a period in the 1980s, he tried (unsuccessfully) to maintain the fiction among his fellow Dog Rockers that one of his arms had been amputated above the elbow. And when, in late-1996, rumours began to circulate that D'Oliveres, who is known to be partial to a smoke, had succumbed to cancer in the small town of Obliqua Creek in Far Eastern Gippsland, the rumours were not only greatly exaggerated; it turned out he started them.' (Publication abstract)