Orphaned by losing his mother at three and his father - who
went missing at eight – Sydney author Francis Ravel Harvey
avoided the Welfare State by being raised by four older sisters
in the colourful environs of Sydney in the nineteen thirties.
The search for his cultivated English father is a constant thread
throughout the book and reaches an amazing and
heartbreaking conclusion when the author finally uncovers the
truth surrounding his father’s death.
Harvey’s writing has been compared by one critic with that of
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for his ability to create a real sense of
suspense and drama from his memories and for the description
of the colourful characters who inhabited his world.
Journalist and author, Francis Ravel Harvey was born at Homebush, New South
Wales in 1930 and began his career as a cadet journalist on the Sun newspaper in
1947. In 1950 he worked for almost ten years as producer of the independent
monthly music journal The Canon. He worked as a freelance journalist in the live
theatre in Sydney, wrote scripts for the ABCs Tales of Many Lands, and episodes of
Homicide for Crawford’s in Melbourne. In 1959 he founded his own bi-monthly
magazine Theatregoer which ran for five years and published the first theatre
yearbook for the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (1959-60). He was theatre
critic for the Canberra Times in the 70s. and then worked as an editor and writer for
Horwitz Publications and Ure Smith, founding the first magazine in Australia on
industrial design, Design Australia, for the Industrial Design Council of Australia,
which was endorsed by the Duke of Edinburgh.