Garry Satherley

Garry Satherley was born in Blenheim, New Zealand, forty-three years after his great-grandfather vanished in that town and became the focus of the sensational murder case dissected in Whitebait. Between stints as a journalist in New Zealand and Australia, he worked in various down-to-earth occupations and knocked about a good deal in both countries. Upon marrying and becoming a father, he restricted himself to journalism, and in time was Deputy Editor of the Illawarra Mercury and, later, National Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. On the strength of skills acquired in the knockabout period, he was mate and engineer in the schooner Dick Smith Explorer on the Oceanic Research Foundation’s expedition to Commonwealth Bay, East Antarctica, where he excavated the famous hut of the 1911-14 Mawson Expedition. In 1990, the Satherley family emigrated to Hungary, then in the throes of “democratisation,” so that son Joel could attend the Petõ Institute, known worldwide for its work with disabled children. Back in Australia, while the Satherley parents battled endlessly with education authorities to have Joel admitted to the system at a level appropriate to his intellectual abilities, Garry wrote a novel based on the Hungarian experience, published in 2000 in Australia as The Arch-traitor’s Lament and in Germany as Der Mann, Den es nicht gab. Satherley continues to write both fiction and a factional genre where hard history and fiction intertwine (as in Whitebait). In 2008, Joel Satherley, musician, actor, comedian, advocate for the rights of disabled people, and inaugural winner of the Australian Disabled Personal Achievement Award (2007), died of an undiagnosed cancer four days short of his 25th birthday. The writer then went back to sea in an old sloop he named Joely’s Reel. An account of this voyage and of Joel’s life, illness, and death, Swimming to Krk, is upcoming.