A new sideline to my professional life has emerged in recent years as an editor and proofreader of sci-fi and fantasy novels. I enjoy this work immensely, as I don't read much fiction these days. I used to be a big science-fiction reader in my teenage years, recalling many hours reading novels by HG Wells, Isaac Asimov, Piers Antony, Robert Heinlein and RG Ballard. Over the years my tastes shifted, and in the 1980s I explored a lot of fiction from different parts of the world. I became an avid reader of South American magical realism, and loved Irish fiction, especially the comic writers,Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. I found similar affinities in Australian fiction, being attracted to satirical writers like Peter Mathers, David Ireland and David Foster. I knew Mathers personally and edited his books - I have all three volumes ready for publication, of which only his first novel, Trap, has re-emerged; if the circumstances arose I could republish The Wort Papers (considerably revised) and I have compiled and edited a complete selection of his short stories that goes under the working title of A Change & A Chance.
It was the writing of Don Watson, specifically in Caledonia Australis, about the impact of colonialism on Aboriginal tribes in south-east Australia, that first hooked me into historical research.
Around that time I got a job as researcher on the book of the Queen Victoria Maternity Hospital in Adelaide, and simultaneously began accessioning my father's archive, interviewing him, and started assembling the biography. In the last decade of his life I prepared four survey exhibitions of his art, and prepared another in 2005, which provided me with an opportunity to assess the work from his last decade, up until 1999.
While I was waiting for my PhD to be marked, I completed the manuscript to my satisfaction, but it was only during a period early this year, when laid off with an injury, that I was able to finalise the book now published as Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz: A Partisan for Art.