Ken Spillman

Bruce Dowding was born in 1914 into a middle-class family in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. He won scholarships to private schools, including Wesley College, where he taught French during his Arts degree at the University of Melbourne. In January 1938, he departed to France on a travelling scholarship, guaranteed a position on the staff at Wesley on his return.

I am still puzzling over why Ross Fitzgerald and Ken Spillman chose the odd title, Fathers in Writing, for this anthology of personal essays. Because of its academic resonance, I first assumed that this book would be a scholarly analysis of father figures in literature – or, perhaps, following on from the work of certain feminist theorists, that it would look at how different valorisations of ‘fatherhood’ are embedded in language itself. Then, once I learned that this was an anthology of Australian writing, the title led me to expect a collection of extracts from literature previously published. Or, if these were newly commissioned essays, that they would be pieces in which the difficulties and pleasures of the act of writing itself would take centre stage.