What's this all about?

The most tantalising conversations of all are those that never occurred. What would Churchill have said to Hitler at a private dinner party? Would Jesus have praised Pope John XXIII for initiating the Second Vatican Council? What advice would Marie Antoinette have given Margaret Thatcher? These conversations never happened. They have been sentenced to the prison of imagination by circumstance, time and mortality. These same factors have combined to ensure that this blog, by definition a biography I suppose, is full of questions and imagined answers. By the time I discovered the truth about the Swedish Australian writer, Hans Erikson, he was already dead and well on his way to being totally forgotten. His family back in Sweden had long before attained that desolate status. Despite years of searching, I would only ever find one person who had known him as a living, breathing human being. If only I had had the chance to interview Hans Erikson, to observe his demeanour and challenge his answers, I am sure this account would be a different tome. But I didn’t. Consequently, my biography of him is forced to inhabit the very shadow-lands he created with his numerous pseudonyms and mysterious wanderings.

The one thing in my favour was that he left behind some published memoirs: 122 pages obviously written for entertainment rather than accuracy. It was my discovery of this book strangely titled The Rhythm of the Shoe that began my obsession with the man and his extraordinary life. I had been working as an insurance solicitor in Brisbane and was browsing in a large second-hand bookstore during my lunch hour. Scanning the shelves, my Nordic eye settled upon the name Erikson. Was it Swedish? I wondered. At this point, I must confess to the reader that I am an unashamed Swedophile going all the way back to childhood. When I was in Grade 4 at Iona Catholic College, my teacher gave us some unusual homework: we were all to go home and ask our parents where our surnames came from. It was a question that had never occurred to me before; I had always assumed that my ancestors came from England like the First Fleet that sailed into Sydney Harbour in 1788. Nonetheless, being a conscientious student, I went to my father that evening and asked the question. He told me that his grandparents were Danish and Thelander was a Danish name. When I enquired further in the family, this was corrected to Swedish. As it turns out, the confusion was appropriate. My great grandmother came from the Swedish province of Blekinge, a region that for most of its history was a part of Denmark. Her husband was from neighbouring Småland, viciously forced into the Swedish kingdom by Gustav Vasa (Sweden’s Stalin) in the Middle Ages. It fascinated me that my ancestors came from a strange, frozen land with their own monarch and mother tongue. I began to read everything I could about Sweden and its history. Ultimately, I studied the language itself although never quite attaining fluency.

Joint book launch with Kath Walker

So it was that my eye settled upon the name Erikson and I found myself flicking through the pages of The Rhythm of the Shoe to see if the author was Swedish. He was. I checked the price: fifteen dollars, a king’s ransom at the time especially for such an insubstantial little book. I nearly put it back on the shelf. Not long before, I had bought a second-hand book on bush regeneration from this very bookshop only later to wander past another shop selling the same book brand new for less. What a rip off! I wasn’t impressed. But the blurb on the cover of The Rhythm of the Shoe made a strange impression on me. It promised me “the feeling that it has been your privilege to have met this man and share in his experiences.” I swallowed the promise and handed over my fifteen dollars, no doubt with a sour look plastered across my face.


But the book turned out to be worth every cent and more. Hans Erikson had indeed lived an extraordinary life. He had sailed the world’s oceans, survived bitter Lappland winters and explored the Dead Heart of Australia on the back of a camel. He had gone to school with royalty in Sweden and ended up a jailbird in Australia. The misery of his family memories stung the heart like a poisoned arrow. How did he ever find the strength to carry on? The story of his life captivated me; it was the stuff of drama. The idea of adapting The Rhythm of the Shoe into a play slowly took root in my mind, particularly after I attended a superb play about the life of explorer Frank Hurley at the Majestic Theatre, Pomona. That play not only used actors but historic photographs and film footage taken by Hurley in Antarctica and New Guinea. It was a spellbinding way to tell the man’s story and I was convinced that I could use similar techniques to do the same with Erikson’s remarkable tale.

The first step was to obtain legal permission. It was 1998 and I wrote to the publisher of The Rhythm of the Shoe, Jacaranda Press Pty Ltd, asking for contact details of the copyright owner. The Permissions Officer replied that the title was such an old one – published in 1964 – they now had no idea who the copyright owner was. She couldn’t even give me any clues. Of course, neither of us knew that Erikson had already been dead for thirteen years. I was determined to find him and when all the usual methods of locating someone failed to produce any results, I took to re-reading The Rhythm of the Shoe looking for hints about him and people who might still be in contact with him. It was a frustrating exercise; he had written his memoirs without including the critical details of names, places and dates. It was almost like deliberate evasiveness although I well knew that a big part of the book’s appeal was its comical, flippant style, something that usually doesn’t permit the rote recording of lifeless facts and statistics. There were hints to be found, however, but they required dogged time-consuming research and, for a busy lawyer, time was in short supply. In the end, it was my fortuitous ability to read Swedish that eventually led me to the awful truth: Hans Erikson was not Hans Erikson. It was an assumed name. His real name linked him to a notorious dynasty of right-wing pot-stirring journalists based in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city. Erikson continued the family tradition in Australia by pot-stirring at the highest levels drawing condemnation from the likes of John Curtin. Was he right? Did he tell the truth? Hero or villain? The more I dug into Erikson’s past, the more difficult these questions became. I leave you, the reader, to decide. But please do bear in mind something that writing this account has taught me: as I spent years thinking about Hans Erikson and his life, why did he do this and why didn’t he do that, I came to a realization that is the biographer’s nightmare. In the end, it was all about me too. Hans Erikson and I were trapped together in some karmic spider-web. We weren’t just writer and subject but kindred souls thrust towards each other irresistibly by common traits and failings. Time and death could not keep us apart. By the laws of the universe, we were meant to suffer together. And suffer we have.