Volcano Street

by David Rain

  Her cat slept peacefully as the keys clicked.

  Author’s note

  Those familiar with the state of South Australia may imagine they recognise Crater Lakes. They don’t. The town is fictional, as are all the people in it.

  Some things are not of my invention. ‘Fuckarada’ and all the jokes told by Sandy Campbell and others are, without exception, real jokes I heard when I was young. Ditto the numerous profanities, insults, taunts. And Brenton Lumsden, or a boy not unlike him, really did do that to the mother cat.

  An Enemy of the People is quoted from the translation by E. Marx-Aveling, daughter of Karl, which appears in William Archer’s 1890 edition of Ibsen’s Prose Dramas. The Crater Lakes Players would, in all likelihood, have used that version; there are later versions which nowadays may be regarded as superior, including those by Arthur Miller, Peter Watts and Christopher Hampton.

  ‘Mowser’ was a strip cartoon – in its way, a work of genius – created by the British artist Reg Parlett (1904–1991). One of my happy childhood memories is of sitting with a stack of Lion comics and reading episodes of ‘Mowser’ one after the other. Dr Lyall Watson’s article about future population growth, ‘Standing Room Only’, from Eagle, 21 October 1967, is reprinted in Daniel Tatarsky’s Eagle Annual: The Best of the 1960s Comic (2009), pp. 181–2.

  Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh made a famous and tumultuous theatrical tour of Australia and New Zealand with the Old Vic company in 1948. It figures in all Olivier and Leigh biographies, and a whole, quite splendid book has been written about it: Garry O’Connor’s Darlings of the Gods: One Year in the Lives of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (1984). Olivier really was on the lookout for new talent. In Adelaide, he discovered Keith Michell – to become famous for his portrayal of Henry VIII on British television – and sent him to train in England; Australian actor Peter Finch, later Leigh’s lover, also came into the Oliviers’ orbit during this tour. Another notable Olivier connection, Sir Laurence’s later wife Joan Plowright, evokes life at the Old Vic Theatre School in London in the late 1940s in her memoir And That’s Not All (2001).

  Many people helped me write this book, sometimes without knowing it. I am grateful to John Wright for introducing me to the Arthur Collection, an archive of historic photographs in the State Library of South Australia; Garry Costello, who taught me to read ‘Henry Gibson’ – and, in a sense, all the other books I’ve read; Deborah Madsen, who gave me, long ago in another life, the content of several pages; Antony Heaven, who has never lived in Crater Lakes but understands it – and helps me understand it, too; Mary Nash, who is in every line; Ravi Mirchandani, Margaret Stead, Toby Mundy, James Roxburgh, and all at Atlantic Books; Clara Finlay, who has made this book much better than it otherwise would have been; and Sara Menguc, without whom it would never have appeared at all.

  I have not written this book because I hate Crater Lakes. Often I wish I could have spent my life there.

  I haunt it, like Roger Dansie.

  Note on the Author

  David Rain is an Australian writer living in London. Formerly a lecturer in English Literature at Queens’ University, Belfast, he presently runs the MA in Creative Writing at Middlesex University. His debut novel, The Heat of the Sun, was published in 2012 by Atlantic Books.