Biography Wikipedia
Wikipedia:
Jon Stephen Cleary (22 November 1917 – 19 July 2010) was an Australian author. He wrote many books, among them The Sundowners (1951), a portrait of a rural family in the 1920s as they move from one job to the next, and The High Commissioner (1966), the first of a long series of popular detective fiction works featuring Sydney Police Inspector Scobie Malone. A number of Cleary's works have been the subject of film or television adaptations.
Biography
Early Life
Cleary was born in Erskineville, Sydney and educated at Marist Brothers College Randwick. When he was ten his father spent six months in Long Bay Gaol for stealing five pounds. Debt collectors took everything in the Cleary household "except a piano and my mother's double bed," said Cleary. "I remember sitting on the steps with Mum, who was weeping bitterly, and she said, 'Don't ever owe anything to anybody.' That sticks with you, and it's why I gained a justifiable reputation for being tight with money."However he added that "the night after we were repossessed, our friends turned up with chairs, an old table, cakes, sandwiches -- they were all battlers but they helped out."
Cleary left school in 1932 at the age of fourteen to help his family with money, and spent the following eight years doing a variety of jobs, notably as a commercial artist for Austral Toon under Eric Porter. He wrote his first story in 1938 at the request of Joe Morley, a journalist friend of Cleary's father. It was a piece about being unemployed which Cleary did not finish because he thought it was self-pitying but he found he did enjoy the process of writing.
War Service
Cleary enlisted in the Australian army on 27 May 1940 and served in the Middle East before being transferred to the Military History Unit. He served for a time in New Guinea, where his clerk was Lee Robinson, and was discharged on 10 October 1945 with the rank of lieutenant.
Writing Career
Cleary began writing regularly in the army, selling his first story in 1940. The following year he won ₤50 prize writing a story for the Daily Mirror. It was killed by the censor but the newspaper then hired Cleary to write a story a week. He also began writing for Australian Journal whose editor sent four of Cleary's short stories to American agent Paul Reynolds, who began selling them to American magazines such as Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post. and in 1945 won equal first prize in a competition for the ABC for his radio play Safe Horizon.
Cleary's first novel was the 1947 work, You Can't See 'Round Corners, which dwelt on the life of an army deserter wanted for the sensational murder of his girlfriend in wartime Sydney. He started writing this in the army and finished it on board a ship en route to London where Cleary had hoped to find work as a screenwriter. Instead he worked as a journalist for the Australia News and Information Bureau from 1948–50, a job he continued in New York from 1950–51. All this time he kept writing short stories and novels. The success of The Sundowners, which ultimately sold over three million copies, meant he could write full time.
Cleary lived in Italy for a year then returned home to Australia in 1953 after seven years away. However he continued to live abroad for long stints, notably in Spain and London. His novels became increasingly set in countries other than Australia, with Cleary travelling extensively for the purposes of research.
"I realised at 40 I did not have the intellectual depth to be the writer I would like to be, so I determined to be as good a craftsman as I might be," Cleary said later on.
In the 1970s Cleary returned to Sydney to live permanently, buying a block of land at Kirribilli opposite the Sydney Opera House next to businessman Eric McClintock, on which he built the house where he lived the rest of his life. During the 1970s and 1980s he continued to travel two months of the year to research. After his daughter's death from breast cancer in 1987 and his wife's subsequent ill health he travelled less. Writing the Scobie Malone series of novels enabled him to tell Australian stories which appealed to an international audience, and he remained popular with readers throughout his career. His last novel was published three years before his death.
Personal Life
Cleary met his wife Joy on his boat trip to England in 1946 and married her five days after they landed. They had two daughters, one of whom died of breast cancer when she was 37. Joy developed Alzheimers Disease and went to live in a nursing home prior to her death in 2003. "I was very, very lucky," said Cleary of his marriage. "We were in love from the day we met to the day we - sorry, I mean she - died."
Cleary was good friends with fellow writers Morris West and Alexander Baron. He was a regular church goer, attending Mass every Sunday. For the last three years of his life Cleary was in ill-health, attended by a full time carer, and in and out of hospital with age-related heart problems.He died on 19 July 2010, aged 92.
Assessment
During his life time, Cleary was one of the most popular Australian authors of all time. According to Murray Waldren, "his own assessment was that he lacked a poetic eye but had an eye for colour and composition and was strong on narrative and dialogue. And he took pride in the research underpinning his works."
Cleary said the book that influenced him most was The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. "He caught perfectly the almost heroism of a man who would have been shocked to hear that he was an hero," said Cleary. "I've always said that Greene could say more in one phrase than most writers in a chapter."
