Dal Stivens's career spanned half a century, from the period of the Great Depression to the late 1970s. In that time he established a reputation as one of Australia's foremost short-story writers and as an accomplished and innovative novelist. He was especially known and admired for his refinement of the Australian "tall story," which in his hands became a genuinely original fictional form. His four novels vary markedly in subject matter, technique, and tone. All of them, like his shorter fiction, are characterized by an idiosyncratic comic sense. Among Australian writers of the middle twentieth century, none more successfully adapted the themes and attitudes that, laid down in the nineteenth century, had become the basis of a distinctively Australian tradition of prose narrative.

Dallas George Stivens was born on 31 December 1911 in Blayney, in the central west of New South Wales, the son of Francis Harold Stivens and Jane...