Upfield at Albermarle

Arthur Upfield is known internationally for his crime novels featuring Bony, the Aboriginal Detective. Little is known about his life on Albermarle sheep station, in far western New South Wales, until now. Maxine Withers study on Upfield's time at Albermarle is augmented by Upfield's letters to the overseer, E.V. Whyte, and Whyte's own photographs of the period. In the summer of 1922, Arthur Upfield was trudging along a rough, winding track beside the Darling River when he came to Albemarle Station fifteen miles north of Menindee. He pulled the swag off his shoulder, straightened his aching back and asked the manager for a job. The boss hesitated at first (there were already more than thirty men employed on the station), then he took pity on the tall, thin, dejected traveller and offered him some work repairing a fence. That job in the middle of summer nearly killed him, Upfield admitted in later years, but it was followed by easier work cooking for the men at the homestead and afterwards at a hut outback, where he was able to complete the first of his many books of crime fiction. Upfield spent the greater part of five years at Albemarle, the longest period he had remained in one place since he arrived in Australia on 14th November 1911. -Maxine Withers