far-away town interviewed her. I have long since forgotten whether or not the narrator of The Glass Spear was one of those unconvincing personages commonly occurring in fiction of the twentieth century: those narrators who claim to know the thoughts and feelings of more than one character in the work of fiction. I am therefore unable to explain how I learned the fictional fact that Huldah underwent her interview while sitting in an armchair in her room with a black (or was it a white?) veil covering her completely. Perhaps a crude illustration appeared on one of the pages of The Australian Journal . Certainly, the interview went well for Huldah. During the remainder of the story she was under no suspicion.
After I had read about Huldah’s having been interviewed, I surely hoped that I myself, ghost-character, might somehow be granted an audience. If I could have thought of myself as a cousin or a distant relative of Huldah, I might have dared to ask her some of the questions that I had for long wanted to ask her, but whenever I thought of myself as hearing only a female voice from behind a thick veil, I could only suppose that Huldah was a stern aunt of mine.
Huldah may not have been a murder-suspect, but The Glass Spear was one of those so-called mystery novels the narrator of which conceals essential information from the reader in order to surprise him or her at last, and so, for all that I can recall, Huldah herself might have stood revealed at last as the murderer or, at least, an accessory to the murders. The only details I remember from the day when my mother brought home the latest copy of The Australian Journal and read for herself the last episode of The Glass Spear , after having promised me that she would not let slip a word about the ending before I had been able to read it for myself—the only details relate to the unveiling of Huldah. Far from being a recluse in a locked room, Huldah spent most of her time in the open air. She was the Aboriginal woman who appeared as a minor character in the novel, the Mary whose epithet I have forgotten. The story of Huldah’s seeming dual identity was explained to the younger characters almost at the end of the book in a long passage purporting to come from the mouth of Huldah’s brother, who had known her secret all along. I seem to recall that I found this passage strained even as a child; that it brought to my mind an image of the author himself, he who had made up, as it were, Kinie Ger and all the characters who lived there. I was listening to the author while he tried to persuade me to believe that his characters could well have existed in the place commonly called the real world. (I long ago gave up trying to justify the reading or the writing of fiction on the grounds that either of those enterprises relates in some way to the so-called real world in which some persons write fictional texts. For the past fifty and more years, I have been more convinced of the fictional reality, so to call it, of Huldah, the recluse in the locked room, she who never existed, than I have been convinced of the existence of Huldah/Mary, she who can be said to have existed in The Glass Spear and who may well have been the fictional counterpart of someone who once existed in the world where I sit writing this sentence.)
Mercifully, the word gene was not yet in common usage in the early 1950s. Sidney Hobson Courtier was therefore unable to concoct the mock-scientific explanation that a novelist nowadays would use to explain the existence of Huldah/Mary. He could only claim that one of Huldah’s male forebears had fathered a child with an Aboriginal mother; that Huldah was a descendant of that child; that Huldah happened almost wholly to resemble her one Aboriginal forebear rather than her many Anglo-Celt ancestors; that Huldah’s appearance as a child had caused her parents and her siblings to be so ashamed of her that they and she had devised the way of life that she later led.
In
After I had read about Huldah’s having been interviewed, I surely hoped that I myself, ghost-character, might somehow be granted an audience. If I could have thought of myself as a cousin or a distant relative of Huldah, I might have dared to ask her some of the questions that I had for long wanted to ask her, but whenever I thought of myself as hearing only a female voice from behind a thick veil, I could only suppose that Huldah was a stern aunt of mine.
Huldah may not have been a murder-suspect, but The Glass Spear was one of those so-called mystery novels the narrator of which conceals essential information from the reader in order to surprise him or her at last, and so, for all that I can recall, Huldah herself might have stood revealed at last as the murderer or, at least, an accessory to the murders. The only details I remember from the day when my mother brought home the latest copy of The Australian Journal and read for herself the last episode of The Glass Spear , after having promised me that she would not let slip a word about the ending before I had been able to read it for myself—the only details relate to the unveiling of Huldah. Far from being a recluse in a locked room, Huldah spent most of her time in the open air. She was the Aboriginal woman who appeared as a minor character in the novel, the Mary whose epithet I have forgotten. The story of Huldah’s seeming dual identity was explained to the younger characters almost at the end of the book in a long passage purporting to come from the mouth of Huldah’s brother, who had known her secret all along. I seem to recall that I found this passage strained even as a child; that it brought to my mind an image of the author himself, he who had made up, as it were, Kinie Ger and all the characters who lived there. I was listening to the author while he tried to persuade me to believe that his characters could well have existed in the place commonly called the real world. (I long ago gave up trying to justify the reading or the writing of fiction on the grounds that either of those enterprises relates in some way to the so-called real world in which some persons write fictional texts. For the past fifty and more years, I have been more convinced of the fictional reality, so to call it, of Huldah, the recluse in the locked room, she who never existed, than I have been convinced of the existence of Huldah/Mary, she who can be said to have existed in The Glass Spear and who may well have been the fictional counterpart of someone who once existed in the world where I sit writing this sentence.)
Mercifully, the word gene was not yet in common usage in the early 1950s. Sidney Hobson Courtier was therefore unable to concoct the mock-scientific explanation that a novelist nowadays would use to explain the existence of Huldah/Mary. He could only claim that one of Huldah’s male forebears had fathered a child with an Aboriginal mother; that Huldah was a descendant of that child; that Huldah happened almost wholly to resemble her one Aboriginal forebear rather than her many Anglo-Celt ancestors; that Huldah’s appearance as a child had caused her parents and her siblings to be so ashamed of her that they and she had devised the way of life that she later led.
In
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