Commentary

Abandonments, magic papers, and dogs with bones

by Michele Field •

June 1980, no. 21

Commentary

Abandonments, magic papers, and dogs with bones

by Michele Field •

June 1980, no. 21

Frank Moorhouse recently sued Angus and Robertson for failing to return four of his manuscripts. The publishers found The Electrical Experience before the case came to trial; the author won his claim on Conference-ville and Tales of Mystery and Romance but lost on The Americans, Baby.

This judgment added a new word to authors’ conversations – ‘abandonment’, meaning that an author’s rough drafts and other papers cease to belong to him if he has ignored them for a number of years, as Moorhouse had ignored The Americans, Baby. Shipwrecks left too long at the bottom of the sea do not belong to their owners, and buried animal carcasses no longer belong to the farmer who buried them – those, believe it or not, are the legal precedents cited in the Moorhouse case for the author’s abandonment of his manuscripts in the bowels of his publisher’s files.

Michele Field

Michele Field (1942–2020) was an American-born writer, editor, and scholar who lived and worked in Australia in the seventies and early eighties. Having completed her doctorate on Jorge Luis Borges, Field moved to London where she was a regular correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and wrote columns for the Times Literary Supplement and Weekend Australian. She acted as a cultural ambassador of sorts in London, both as a representative for the Australia Council and as a local informant for Leo Schofield when the latter began his directorship of the Sydney Festival in 1998. With Timothy Willett, she co-edited Convict love tokens : the leaden hearts the convicts left behind (1998).