Guest of the ilb 2001
Rodney Hall was born in Birmingham, England, in 1935. Following the premature death of his father, he and his mother emigrated to Australia, her native country, in 1945. Hall grew up in Brisbane and left school at 16 to become an actor. He gained a degree from the University of Queensland in 1971. His interests include painting and music as well as acting. For several years he was poetry editor for 'The Australian'. Hall initially made a name for himself as a poetry writer. He published ten volumes of poetry between 1962 and 1981. He has also worked as a radio and television script-writer. His first novel, 'The Ship on the Coin', appeared in 1972. Later novels include two trilogies. Hall has won various prizes, including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in 1988 and the Miles Franklin Award in 1982 and 1994. Today he is a freelance writer and lives on the New South Wales coast. His most famous novel, the 'Yandilli' trilogy, has been translated into German.
The three novels 'Captivity Captive', 'The Second Bridegroom' and 'The Grisly Wife' form a chronicle of Australia extending from the time of the main immigration waves around 1850 to the post-war period around 1950. The author uses a historical crime – the brutal murder of three siblings in 1898 which was never satisfactorily solved – as a lever to gain insight into the immigrants’ mentality. For example, the constantly beaten children interpret their father’s violence as a result of natural selection. "Cruel’s no way to describe Pa", one of the children defends his torturer. "Pa always has to keep one step ahead. […] The world out there was full of enemies: trees, men, women, kangaroos. They had to be eliminated one by one to make room for us." As a poetic chronicler Hall intends to depict the monstrous elements in Australia’s history as well as the heroic legends. He illuminates the main pillars of an archaic family hierarchy – obedience, submission and humility – as well as the tough resistance to them and the yearning for freedom.
'The Day We Had Hitler Home', published in 2000, is the seventh and final volume of Hall’s great fiction panorama, which can be described as an allegory of Australia’s history. The second trilogy takes 17th century Europe as its backdrop. In the final novel, Europe and Australia become entangled in an unbelievable case of mistaken identity as a severely wounded German soldier inadvertently joins Australians returning home from the First World War in 1919.
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