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COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Queensland Press
Struggle and Storm: The Life and Death of Francis Adams, by Meg Tasker. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2000. Hardback, $39.95
Jock: A Life Story of John Shaw Neilson, by Cliff Hanna. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999. Paperback, $19.95
Francis Adams lived the sort of life that cries out for a biography. Born in Malta, a son of the regiment, he spent his youth in England, Canada, and Ireland before being educated at Charles Darwin's old school, Shrewsbury. His first job was in Paris as an attache to the British Embassy. Later he was a schoolteacher on the Isle of Wight from where he travelled regularly to London for heady doses of socialism. Marriage was followed by an almost immediate departure for Australia, probably for health reasons since he was tubercular, without his wife, establishing a recurrent pattern of physical separation within apparently amicable relationships. (He once wrote invitingly to his second wife, `Dearest, You're [sic] having to come down again on the 14th [to join him] is the most dreadful nuisance imaginable, tho' I'll be glad indeed to see your dear face again' (172).
Adams established himself in literary Melbourne, first publishing articles on English poets, but quickly assessing Australian subjects, and within a year of arrival issuing his first book on Australia. He moved to Brisbane where he soon lost his wife and child, and plunged into the Labour movement, writing extensively for William Lane's Boomerang, as well as for the Courier and the Darling Downs Gazette. His...
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