Some have spoken well of a pilgrim’s life at first that after a while have spoken as much against it. I have loved to her my Lord spoken of; and wherever I have seen the print of his shoe in the Earth, there I have coveted to set my foot too. You dare to insult God’s high priest? Do not speak evil about the ruler of your people. Dead emperors have very little delight in their monuments. Stop looking for happiness in the same place that you lost it. Simply put it, violent storm that originates in a tropical region and features extremely high winds—in excess of 74 miles per hour. It also brings drenching rains and has the ability to spin off tornadoes. It is almost always born in the tropical regions because ocean temperatures must measure above 80 degrees F. As it is not possible for any man to learn the art of memory, except he has a natural memory before: so is it not possible for any man to attain any great wit by travel, except he have the grounds of it rooted him before. We should not conclude that a man who strives earnestly for success does so with a strong sense of his own merit. He may see how little success has to do with merit, and his motive may be his very humility. The holiest among us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit which would look aspiringly upward. Poor, blind, conceited humanity! Interpreters of God, indeed! We reduce the Deity to vulgar fractions.

We measure infinity with a foot-rule. His emotional involvement in the question goes back to his childhood at Kalgoorlie, when he saw what he calls the poor dejected run-down abos and mixed-bloods on the goldfields, and concluded that no people should exist in such hopelessness and degradation. His novel, Snowball, published in 1958, has an aborigine for its central character, and constitutes a demand for justice for the aborigines, and he has written a play, The Hero Comes Home, based on some of the incidents in Snowball. The Film which Reuben Harris intends making from Randolph’s story could easily be the most devastating comment yet attempted, in terms calculated to reach a World audience, on the plight of the aborigines; the tentative title is The Flung Spear. The Australian economic recession of 1960-61 forced Harris to defer production of the film until better times should make money easier to get. He did not, however, think of abandoning it. Randolph was born in Kalgoorlie in 1907 and grew up there. In an article on his schooldays (Harris Research and Development, 18 January 1961) he has written: This town was big, vigorous and full of life, yet it was not a city that engulfed and limited one. It overflowed into the bush, and this was the real bush, not just a pattern of farms and roads. It was flat country, covered with low, grey scrub, perhaps dull to adult eyes, but fascinating to us.

It was full of romantically interesting things, shallow lakes that were often dry but sometimes filled with water and ducks, and rabbits to hunt, dams in which to swim, abandoned leases and workings on which to play dangerous but most satisfying games. We used to pedal many miles, hunting and camping getting punctures from the doublegees, cooking bits of meat and heating up the pies our mothers had made in the fettlers’ huts, seven miles along the trainline to Menzies. You could not get lost in that flat country, because except on the cloudiest of days (and there were seldom days which were cloudy at all) the great cloud of smoke and dust that hung over the big mines of the Golden Mile could be seen for miles. Just head for that, and you were right. His father died when he was ten and his mother when he was sixteen, and, after a State school of Mines education, he went to work as a cadet for the Kalgoorlie municipal electric light station. Looking back on himself at seventeen or eighteen, he knows he was a brash youth. His career in electricity ended one day when he checked his boss, who suspended him. Randolph said, “I will go for good, I am not proud of that episode. The boss was right, I was wrong.” He was not contrite then, however, and he caught a train to Perth and found a job selling motor cars and motor bikes. That was in the late 1920s, and motor salesmen were doing nicely. Randolph earned good money until the depression gained a firm hold about 1931. Then, jobless, he went back to Kalgoorlie, an took any work he could find. For a good while he worked in the mines—as a laborer, a blacksmith’s striker, and electrician’s offside. “At that time, I really began to see human beings as they are. The depression gave me a new set of values. As a kid, I would read The Magnet, The Gem, and Deeds That Won the Empire, and never questioned their philosophy.

“In the depression, I discovered how off-beam they were. I have never written anything substantial about the depression, and in spite of what some people say, I do not think my books are gloomy. However, I am a product of the depression, and if what I learned then were not reflected in y writings it would be astonishing.” Casting round for ways of making extra money, he got himself into motorcycle dirt-track racing, which was not then the big-money international sport it has since become. He persuaded the committee controlling the trotting ground to let the Goldfields Motorcycle Club organize a series of dirt-track carnivals, and rode in these on his unpaid-for motor bike. “I was so broke that I was more reckless than usual, and I won a fair amount of money.” He married in 1933, and about the same time a Perth Sunday newspaper, The Mirror, appointed him its Kalgoorlie representative. He had to sell advertising space, as well as write a weekly page of goldfield news. He liked to work. He particularly liked reporting the Kalgoorlie riots in 1934. These were the culmination of racial clashes between Australians and foreigners, and Casey says those days were pretty wild. Then the racial enmities simmered down, and the riots stopped.

The outdoor entertainment season was ending about the same time, so Randolph, seeing little ahead of him in Kalgoorlie, decided to write stories which were to make him an Australia-wide reputation within a few years. His first story ever to be printed appeared in The Australian Journal in 1936. It was a piece of slapstick comedy, set on the goldfields, and its title was Collecting The Evidence. He wrote more stories and began selling them to The Bulletin; in successive years he won The Bullentin prize for a short story of any kind with Mail Run East. Randolph had nothing against the motor car selling, but when he saw a chance to enter journalism, he too it. For a time he edited a group of Perth magazines, then went to The Daily News as a general reporter and features writer. He was called up in 1942, and did a sequence of army jobs in which, he felt; he was not contributing much to the enemy’s defeat. So he had no regrets when, in 1943, he became a civilian again. After a spell as State publicity censor, he was sent to the Pacific as a Department of Information writer. “I got closer to the war then, than I ever had as a soldier.” He kept on writing throughout the was whenever he had spare time, and in 1942 published his first book of short stories, It’s Harder for Girls, which won the S.H. Prior Memorial Prize and in 1943 a second, Birds of a Father. His first novel, Downhill is Easier, came out in 1946. Like most of Randolph’s work, these three books were largely based on his observations in the Kalgoorlie region.

 After the war he had two and a half years running the Australian News and Information Bureau in New York then six months in London. He did little creative writing while overseas, but added something to his experience of life. One of his jobs was to get articles about Australia printed in overseas newspapers and magazines, and he once offered an Australian writer’s article on two-up to the U.S. magazine True. The editor of True said he liked the article but not the photographs. “Leave it to me,” Randolph said. He recruited twenty or thirty Australians from the Anzac Club, New York, and led them to Central Park, in the heart of New York City. There he marshaled them round a spinner with two Australian pennies poised on a kip made from a wooden ruler, and got as good a series of two-up pictures as were every taken. It looked like the biggest two-up school outside Broken Hill,” he said. The article, duly illustrated, was published in True, and seen by hundreds of thousands of Americans. Randolph enjoyed his years abroad, even—perhaps particularly—the crises, such as one which occurred when a recording of a talk between Frank Forde, then Minister for the Army, and Arthur Calwell, then Minister for information, did not arrive in time to be broadcast, as arranged, over one of the largest U.S. radio networks on Australia Day, 1946. The broadcast took place, however; for the occasion, Randolph was Calwell and another member of his staff, Lloyd Clarke, was Forde, and millions of American listeners were none the wiser. Calwell laughed louder than anyone did when Casey later confessed the deception to him.

 Back in Australia, Randolph had two years in Canberra, then six years in Sydney, working at a variety of journalistic jobs, and he went back to Perth probably because, like many Western Australians, he relishes the tempo of life there. He has one son by his second wife, who is an American; one was born in London in 1948. He does not appear to be troubled by this reminder that time is mounting against him. For some years, ill-health cut his literary production to practically nothing, but his later output of creative work indicates that he is by no means written out. This is reassuring, for it cannot be pretended that, as year followed year and he produced nothing but an occasional short story, and certainly nothing resembling the novel of lasting worth so long expected of him, even his staunchest admires did not begin to doubt. To put it bluntly, they wondered if he had found the loneliness of the novelist’s calling too much for him, and could not bring himself to stay long enough with any book tp pump it full of the creative magic that is in him; they also wondered if, for all the distinction of his best work, he had every truly discovered himself as a writer for the printed page and would perhaps, on the evidence of reports about the brilliance of his script for Reuben Harris, be remembered (if he was remembered at all) chiefly as a writer, not of books but for the modern medium of films. Australia has had competent film writers, on a commercial level, but never a man whose stories have been both technically and artistically in Worldclass, and it seemed possible that Randolph Harris could prove to be that man. This still seems possible, and it is likely to be proved or disproved only when the flung Spear has been made. However, it is the rebirth of Randolph Harris the novelist, with Amid the Plenty, that really matters. A film has to be the product of many hands, a kind of multiple collaboration, and Randolph could stamp any film only with so much of his own mind and his own personality. To fulfill himself as a writer he must go it alone, and that is what he is doing now.