Bryce Courtenay’s secret letters!
AN EXCITING DISCOVERY LEADS TO A INSIGHTFUL NEW CHAPTER
Bryce Courtenay always used to say “his books belonged under the Christmas tree with the socks and chocolates,” the late author’s wife Christine tells New Idea.
A decade on from Bryce’s death from stomach cancer in 2012, Christine says she still gets inundated with messages from his fans every festive season, asking if there’s a “secret unpublished manuscript” he may have been working on that is yet to come out.
This year, Christine can offer them the next best thing – a biography she penned about her beloved husband’s early years and their life together. Best of all, the book, titled Bryce Courtenay: Storyteller, does include words written by Bryce himself !
It was a project that Christine started in June 2020, after she decided to give her garage a bit of cleaning out.
“I found an old box of letters, over a hundred of them, that I almost threw out,” she explains.
“It’s so lucky I checked. They were written by Bryce, starting from when he was a child growing up in Africa in different institutions, to working in the mines where he nearly lost his life, and sailing off to London to do his journalism diploma.”
The notes were mostly sent to Bryce’s mum, Maude Greer. In reading them, Christine discovered Bryce’s many tales of heroes with tough childhoods who risked it all for a dream, that he wrote about in novels such as The Power of One and Whitehorn, were largely based on his own experiences.
“I was absolutely shocked to read about all the poverty and hardships that Bryce went through in his youth,”
Christine explains.
“But each time he was able to pick himself up, dust himself off and keep going. He always held onto his dream of being a writer and the struggles helped make him the remarkable storyteller he was.”
To fill in the gaps, Christine pored over interviews conducted during Bryce’s lifetime and tracked down friends and family overseas who shared their stories of him.
The last two decades of his life are told from her personal experience of being a colleague, then friend, then wife of the bestselling novelist.
Christine and Bryce met in 1993 through her marketing company, before they began dating in 2005 and finally tied the knot in 2011.
Her book is a tender tribute to the man she loved, which sheds light on the Bryce which only she knew.
“I always said I was a rugby widow, not a writing one, because Bryce was a rugby fanatic,” Christine shares with a laugh.
“He also loved gardening, especially growing vegetables, and he’d hand out his produce to everyone who would come visit.”
Several of Bryce’s works have been adapted for the screen, and Christine knows exactly who she’d want to play Bryce in a biopic.
“It would be hard to go past someone like Hugh Jackman,” she says. “He’d really catch Bryce’s spirit and how full of life he was.”
By Kylie Walters
‘He always held onto his dream’