smallralphdeboissiere.jpg

 

largeralphdeboissiere.jpg
Ralph De Boissiere (10 works by)
Born: Established: 6 Oct 1907 Trinidad ; Died: 16 Feb 2008 Balwyn North
Gender: Male
Arrived in Australia: Jan 1948
From wife's email: As a young man in Trinidad, Ralph de Boissière joined the Beacon Group of writers and had a number of short stories published in local magazines. Fired by his humanism and a craving for a just society not possible under colonialism, de Boissière took the 1932 uprising on the oilfields of Trinidad as the theme for his first novel. He migrated to Australia in 1948, joined the Realist Writers and completed 'Crown Jewel' (1952), followed by 'Rum & Coca-Cola' (1956) and 'No Saddles for Kangaroos' (1964), a musical play 'Calypso Isle' and screenplays of the novels. The enigma of Ralph de Boissière's career is that he mainly wrote of the situation in Trinidad, where problems of race, class and colonial power were magnified, but his work was written and published in the more egalitarian colony of Australia. At the time, this limited his readership to subscribers of the left wing Australasian Book Society, and to readers of the eight languages into which the first two novels were translated. His outstanding work on colonialism, then, set in what was, to Australians, a 'foreign country', did not reach the larger readership for which it was intended until the 1980s when the first two novels were published in England. This time they received rave reviews, with Salman Rushdie, for instance, asking if the failure of publishers to take up 'Crown Jewel', a 'humane, vibrant' book, earlier, was due to the political repression of such left-wing humanism. By this time, Australia had moved beyond the Realist Writers of the 1950s and the two stages of de Boissière's career were out of kilter with each other. He wrote two other novels, 'Homeless in Paradise' (completed in the 1980s; set in Trinidad and Australia) and 'Call of the Rainbow' (completed in 2003; set in Trinidad) to make up his Trinidadian Quartet, and his autobiography, 'Life on the Edge', due to be published in 2008 by the University of Trinidad and Tobago (which awarded de Boissière an Honorary Doctor of Letters in 2007). When de Boissière died (of kidney failure) in 2008, the editor of Overland wrote that 'Crown Jewel' was 'one of the finest works to be written in Australia,' that Ralph de Boissière 'belonged to a generation of writers who believed...in the creative powers of ordinary men and women' and that 'we will not see his like again.'

BiographyHistory

Ralph de Boissiere grew up in Trinidad where he then worked as a clerk and salesman. He spent six months in the United States of America to re-train in motor mechanics, prior to migrating to Australia where he worked as a car assembler and machinist with General Motors Holden.

As a young man in Trinidad, de Boissière joined the Beacon Group of writers and had a number of short stories published in local magazines. The influences on de Boissiere's writing have been many: Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy during his formative years as a writer, and Galsworthy to a lesser extent; later, John Morrison, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, T. E. Lawrence, Judah Waten and Romain Rolland. When de Boissiere arrived in Australia he brought with him a first completed novel in manuscript. He was a founding member of the Realist Writers' Goup and an original member of the editorial board of Overland. In 1981 he toured English and German universities to lecture on his novel Crown Jewel.

Notes

  • Author writes in these languages: ENGLISH

  • Tape of an interview with De Boissiere by Hugh Anderson held ANL.
    Papers held at ANL MS 8402.

Awards