'He Lacks Almost All the Qualities of the Novelist': G.M. Glaskin and His Australian Contemporaries

Abstract

Gerry Glaskin was quite a guy, and quite a writer. With a prodigious output across a range of genres, he wrote nine novels, a number of dramatic works, children's fiction, science fiction, romance and short stories. He was not a writer parsimonious with words. Even at school, Glaskin was known for his long essays. In his memoir 'One way to Wonderland' (1984) he writes: 'How often, when telling us the subject of an essay we must write, did Mr Constantine [the English teacher] insist that we should fill at least two pages of the ruled foolscap paper we used. "But you, Glaskin," he would inevitably add, "must confine yourself to no more than ten!"'. Glaskin's writing owed much to his life's experiences. Even in fictional form, the majority of his works are closely modelled on events that happened to him. And, as we shall see, his was not an inconsequential life. Gerry Glaskin was born in Perth on 16 December 1923. His parents struggled to make ends meet, even though, or perhaps because, they managed to have seven children, of whom Gerry was the eldest by some years. The boy was academically gifted and selected for a scholarship to study at the prestigious Perth Modern School, the alma mater of such prominent West Australians as H.C. Coombs, Kim Beazley Senior, Bob Hawke, Sir Paul Hasluck, playwright Alan Seymour, entertainer Rolf Harris, economist Ross Garnaut and businesswoman Janet Holmes a Court. The school was opened in 1911 as Western Australia's first public senior secondary school, and it remains Western Australia's only academically selective school today. Glaskin began his writing there. As his confidence in his own abilities grew, he communicated with local writers in his first attempts at becoming a published author.