After his marriage with an Australian, he and my grandmother sailed for England, but returned when my mother was a year old.
As a result of the asthma I was sent to school in the country, and only visited Sydney for brief, violently asthmatic sojourns on my way to a house we owned in the Blue Mountains.
At this period of my life I was in love with the theatre and was in and out of it three or four nights of the week.
Both my father's and my mother's families were yeoman-farmer stock from Somerset, England.
During the early, comparatively uneventful months I hovered between London and New York writing too hurriedly a second novel, The Living and the Dead.
Each vacation I visited either France or Germany to improve my languages. I wrote fitfully, bad plays, worse poetry.
Even if a university should turn out to be another version of a school, I had decided I could lose myself afterwards as an anonymous particle of the London I already loved.
Grandfather Withycombe seems to have found difficulty in settling; he drifted from one property to another, finally dying near Muswellbrook on the Upper Hunter.
Here I hope to continue living, and while I still have the strength, to people the Australian emptiness in the only way I am able.
I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.
I have tried to celebrate the park, which means so much to so many of us, in The Eye of the Storm and in some of the shorter novels of The Cockatoos.
I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on.
I think it is impossible to explain faith. It is like trying to explain air, which one cannot do by dividing it into its component parts and labeling them scientifically. It must be breathed to be understood.
In 1964, submerged by the suburbs reaching farther into the country, we left Castle Hill, and moved into the centre of the city.
In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.
In spite of holidays when I was free to visit London theatres and explore the countryside, I spent four very miserable years as a colonial at an English school.
In the meantime, in London, in Alexandria on the way out, and on the decks of liners, I was writing The Aunt's Story.
Like everybody else I was intended for the land, though, vaguely, I knew this was.
My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.
None of my ancestors was distinguished enough to be remembered, though there is a pleasing legend that a Withycombe was fool to Edward II.
On the edge of Centennial Park, an idyllic landscape surrounded by a metropolis, I have had the best of both worlds.
Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
The failure of The Aunt's Story and the need to learn a language afresh made me wonder whether I should ever write another word.
The part I played in the war was a pretty insignificant one. My work as an operational intelligence officer was at most useful.
The Withycombes enjoyed less material success than the Whites, which perhaps accounted for my mother's sense of her own superiority in White circles.
Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
When I was rising eighteen I persuaded my parents to let me return to Australia and at least see whether I could adapt myself to life on the land before going up to Cambridge.
You can share a link to this page with your friend!