Memories of an orphan boy

Orphaned by losing his mother at three and his father - who

went missing at eight – Sydney author Francis Ravel Harvey

avoided the Welfare State by being raised by four older sisters

in the colourful environs of Sydney in the nineteen thirties.

The search for his cultivated English father is a constant thread

throughout the book and reaches an amazing and

heartbreaking conclusion when the author finally uncovers the

truth surrounding his father’s death.

Harvey’s writing has been compared by one critic with that of

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for his ability to create a real sense of

suspense and drama from his memories and for the description

of the colourful characters who inhabited his world.

Journalist and author, Francis Ravel Harvey was born at Homebush, New South

Wales in 1930 and began his career as a cadet journalist on the Sun newspaper in

1947. In 1950 he worked for almost ten years as producer of the independent

monthly music journal The Canon. He worked as a freelance journalist in the live

theatre in Sydney, wrote scripts for the ABCs Tales of Many Lands, and episodes of

Homicide for Crawford’s in Melbourne. In 1959 he founded his own bi-monthly

magazine Theatregoer which ran for five years and published the first theatre

yearbook for the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (1959-60). He was theatre

critic for the Canberra Times in the 70s. and then worked as an editor and writer for

Horwitz Publications and Ure Smith, founding the first magazine in Australia on

industrial design, Design Australia, for the Industrial Design Council of Australia,

which was endorsed by the Duke of Edinburgh.