Thanks to Sue and Genevieve. Yes, to answer your query, Tom Wills almost certainly did drink beer as a schoolboy at Rugby School. The alternative was tea or water. The latter was often infected and cholera regularly swept through the school. The boys lived in School Houses and each House had a family brewery attached. The boast of the brewery attached to Tom’s House was that no boy would get cholera because the ingredients were so thoroughly boiled before the beer was made!

I am fascinated by the comments of my fellow writers and readers.

You see, I don’t  come from a writing background at all.

As a boy, I played cricket, footy, ran fast and loved maths. I read, but in the manner of a lot of boys - it was very specific and repetitive. I loved reptiles - and spent hours wandering up and down the Merri Creek in search of creatures to bring home - and what little I read concentrated on animals. My mother took me to the Natural History Museum of Victoria every school holidays and I still remember my favourite exhibit in the McCoy Hall - the skeletons of two reticulated pythons entwined about one another in a kind of macabre embrace. My love of words and of writing is a recent development.

Indeed, although I briefly met two of the Summer Read authors at the launch in November, prior to that I had only met one writer - ever. That was just a week or two earlier while I sat waiting for a radio interview about the Tom Wills biography. As I waited to be interviewed, one of Australia’s best known writers of fiction came into the same room. He was to be interviewed after me. We chatted for 10 minutes before our respective interviews. After my interview, and as I was leaving the studio, my recently met writing colleague leaned over and said: ‘I guess biographers have it pretty easy. It’s a matter of just laying out the facts.’

My first impulse was to stretch over his publicist and throttle him by the neck unitl his eyes hung out to dry in the Sydney sun. This, of course, would have been poor form and deprived Australia of one of its best writers. What struck me in that moment of homicidal haste was that, while I was writing the Wills biography, I had reached the opposite conclusion. I thought fiction might be easier and had decided: ‘Right, my next book will be a novel.’

I can pinpoint the exact time this thought occurred to me - about 12 months into the research for the biography. The first 12 months, or so, of biography research is the easiest. It is a bit like the first gold miners wandering around Eaglehawk and Bendigo, nonchalantly finding clumps of gold poking through the soil. No difficulty at all. But I knew that to dig out the remaining information about my biographical subject might take years. And there was no guarantee of locating surviving archival information. I might be wasting time - better to write fiction to make up the gaps. This was the voice that kept at me.

Surely all biographers must experience this temptation. To some extent we must all succumb because there are moments in the biographical reconstruction that require a little guesswork. I would dearly love to meet biographers to hear their tales and their moments of ‘guesswork’ and reconstruction. This is the secret work of the biographer. For the Tom Wills biography I expunged anything that could not be traced back to archival evidence. To some biographers this may seem too severe. But I had my reasons. The story of Tom Wills has been laden with mythology and distortion. And so I endeavoured not to embellish a single sentence.