The tilted cross

by Hal Porter

In convict days, Campell Street, Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land, was the privy of London, an Alsatia of squalor and crime. Just beyond its teeming stews lay Regency elegance, colonial luxury and civilised hypocrisy. It was unimaginable that the two worlds should ever commingle. Then the ex-convict Judas Griffin Vaneleigh - a character based on the notorious and enigmatic Thomas Griffiths Wainewright - began sketching portraits of the houses of the rich, accompanied by his dramatically handsome henchman, the cockney Queely Sheill. The shadows and flames of the two worlds ran together in a conflagration of incidents. Queely Sheill’s bawdy Campbell Street world and its mêlée of Hogarthian denizens became ravelled with the very different world of the aristocratic Lady Knight, the eccentric cripple Asnetha Sleep and her rococo page-boy. What each world learned of the other, and of itself, is the novel’s theme.

266 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Harold Edward (Hal) Porter (16 February 1911 – 29 September 1984) was an Australian novelist, playwright, poet and short-story writer.

Porter was born in Albert Park, Victoria[1], grew up in Bairnsdale, Victoria and worked as a journalist, teacher and librarian.[2] A car accident just before the outbreak of war prevented him from serving in World War II. His first stories were published in 1942 and by the 1960s he was writing full time.