Talk:Helen Darville
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[edit] Darville and Eastern Europe ancestry(ies)
Responding to an entry in the Edit History that Darville did not claim any Eastern European backgrounds other than coming from the Ukraine:
According to Sneja Gunew in Performing Australian Ethnicity: 'Helen Demidenko we find:
"As tireless investigative reporters from her home town of Brisbane, sifted the evidence, it was revealed that the author had a long history of 'passing' as an 'ethnic', although her specific allegiances had been all over the map, so to speak, ranging from Czechoslovakian to Hungarian etc. (Bentley 1995; Dibben 1995)."
I attended Queensland University with Helen Darville before her "literary career" began and was in quite a number of lecture groups and tutorials with her for many years. I can say that from the first meeting she claimed to be czech and that she had learned english in 8 weeks and that she had been in australia for only 6 months. I found out a few months later that she had told one of the Classics faculty lecturers and tutor that she was hungarian, and another student that she was polish (unconnected to the comment below i think). She claimed that her father was a poor taxi driver, even though in a lecture she made a comment that her mother collected Wedgewood. Also to anyone who was familiar with brisbane it was obvious that Helen was a product of a private girl's school (Grace Lutheran i beleive). I cannot explain it any better than that, but anyone from brisbane would understand this. She came accross as somewhat spoilt and on one memorable occassion for the tute group she was scathing in her criticism, to the point of offensive, of the Classics and Ancient History faculty when she did not recieve the marks to which she felt she was entitled. During my time at university with her, i can say the people began to realise that not everything that she said was necessarily factually based. By a strange coincidence, through mutual friends in the brisbane reenactment community, i happened to know Paul Gadaloff, the guy that gave helen access to The Black Deeds of the Kremlin; he was from a russian emigre family that claimed aristocratic heritage and he was seemingly obsessed with returning to russia to reclaim the family estates. For another reference to the gadaloff's, Garth, brother of the above:
http://www.courts.qld.gov.au/qjudgment/QCA%201998/QCA98-458.pdf
When her novel was released amid the claims that she was making regarding her background, etc, i thought that it would only be a very short time before the "fiction" was uncovered; instead it went on and no one questioned what was being said in the media. Given that i am only one person of the literally dozens if not hundreds of people that shared lectures and tutorials with helen darville, who knew that she was not who she was now claiming to be, i still find it remarkable that no one said anything. I also knew girls that had attended high school with her, who also knew that what she was claiming was not true. In the 1990's Brisbane was still a relativly "small town" and the number of people that knew the real truth about helen darville must have been remarkable.
When Helen Darville was awarded the Miles Franklin it was just surreal that no one had caught on the deception. Taken in the context of the long history of contradictory lies, fabrications and half truths that she had told about herself I think that it is amazing that no one at all thought to say anything or that the media didn't do even superficial research, so much for the efforts of those "tireless investigators"!!
And in Natalie Jane Prior's The Demidenko Diary Prior says that Darville claimed Polish-Ukrainian background when they were studying in a course together before the writing of The Hand that Signed the Paper.
I cannot remember that exact reference but it is on the first few pages of that book.
This site may or may not help: http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/18/sept99/victim.htm
I do know that these are second-hand sources at best, and the editor who first raised it had a first-hand source.
EuropracBHIT 11:15, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Fairfax are Yellow on Geocities
Is this really a reliable site to be using? Further, is it NPOV?
(I did have a look at it. It mainly seemed to castigate certain columnists who write for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and reviewers).
For those of you who don't know it, it seems very pro-Darville. I looked in Google and there were 133 references to it, mostly in directories. So its claim that it is suppressed is not very true.
Rather, its situation seems to be a case of self-promotion:
"Fairfax Are Yellow Monitoring the censorship of Australian writer and journalist Helen Darville by the Fairfax media and their associates." is seen in the vast majority of tags.
This is what is in the directories (which include DMOZ, Tiscali and Excite, to name a few): /Society/ Issues/Business/Allegedly_Unethical_Firms/One_Complainant/ EuropracBHIT 11:30, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
[edit] false accusations of plagiarism?
i seem to recall that those accusations may not have been so false as to justify a flat rejection by this article. this article appears to be a one sided defence of darville for most of it. if my memory recalls, some of the accusations against darville were substantiated. Xtra 12:44, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
- Apparent edits by pro-Darville anons like 213.105.232.92 - Skysmith 20:48, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
