J. M. Harcourt

John Harcourt was born on the 2 March 1902, in Katanning, Western Australia. He had two elder sisters, the younger, Jessica. His father was a surveyor and the child of Methodist missionaries to a local Aboriginal encampment. His mother was bi-polar the gene determined through Jessica's descendants. The family suffered her unpredictable psychotic rages when manic. As a small boy, he was sent by train to the Methodist boarding school, Wesley College, Melbourne, but ran away due to bullying in 1915. He did not want to return home because of his mother.

At first, he survived as a sundowner, walking and doing odd jobs in return for a meal and a place to sleep the night. He also learned skills of a jackaroo and worked on cattle stations. He turned his hand to almost any job he could get as he travelled up towards Darwin, including day labouring on building and railway construction sites, teaching Charleston, and racing cars. Eventually, he worked his way along the coast to Broome where he got involved in pearling eventually becoming the captain of a pearling lugger. After three years he found a particularly large and perfectly shaped pearl, and his share of the £13,000 value was £2,000.

Then aged twenty, sick of physical work and wanting to earn a living using his brain, he flew down to Perth and there educated himself in the State Library with the intention of becoming a writer. There he met and married his first wife, Sylvia, with whom he had a son, Peter. The marriage ended after only four years when his wife fell in love with a doctor. She took Peter, but Harcourt sent money for his education. During that time he reconnected and worked with his father, a surveyor. He began sending articles to newspapers.

Eventually, he was offered a job writing for Truth and so moved to Melbourne. He specialised in articles on business and investment. The newspaper was a Fabian and mildly sensationalist rag. Harcourt became a member of the Australian Communist Party and began working on another book, Upsurge, published in 1934. It the first novel to be banned by the Commonwealth Book Censorship Board, on the grounds that it portrayed a (fictional) communist uprising in a positive light. Most of the books were burned, but Harcourt managed to rescue three original copies. At around this time, his colleague, the journalist and writer, Betty Rowlands, introduced him to Fay, who became his second wife.

Betty also introduced him to Justus Jorgensen and the libertarian crowd of artists around Montsalvat at Eltham, not far to the northeast of Melbourne. There, due to the Great Depression and the shortage of affordable housing, Harcourt became interested in building houses in pisé de terre. He researched the technique in the architecture library at Melbourne University and began teaching himself by building his own place, called Clay Newnham (after the Harcourt family seat in Oxfordshire, England). He kept writing as a journalist during the time he was learning the rammed earth technique, how to build smoke-free fireplaces and all the technical aspects of traditional vernacular style for the material. 1945 when war broke out, Harcourt, relieved to be too old to fight as a soldier, took a job in intelligence as an editor of letters from soldiers to their families. It involving using a razor to cut out anything the government did not want the populace to know.

In 1955, he divorced Fay due to an affair with Diana Elizabeth Whitehead. Diana became pregnant so they travelled to England where she could divorce her first husband, and where she gave birth in 1956 to their first daughter, Amanda Sarah Anne. They married in a registry office shortly afterwards and then drove through France to Italy. There they lived for six months in a villa in a small village on the Adriatic Coast called Ronchi.

They returned Australia in 1957 and rented a bungalow at Bilgola Beach (on the Pittwater Peninsula to the north of Sydney.) Harcourt designed a solar passive house, based mostly on Diana's ideas and her memories of their villa in Italy, and so they named it Ronchi. Built at the top of Beauty Drive at Whale Beach it features Australia's first flat concrete roof using a design of Harcourt's which has never since been replicated. It has the unique feature of dipping by three inches in the centre to capture water as an aid to cooling and insulation. A covering of gravel was used to slow evaporation.

Due to two duodenal ulcers, which were then believed to be due to stress, Diana talked Harcourt into retiring. He had built fourteen houses in the Eltham area and still owned several of them, so he drew an income from rent. Diana had an inheritance which was managed by the Public Trustee, which Harcourt found to be over conservative and not doing well. He convinced Diana to get a personal stockbroker and accountant and used his own knowledge gained during the years of reporting on finance to assist in decisions. The plan worked well financially.

Soon after they moved into the new house in January 1959, Diana gave birth to their second child, Nicholina Sandra Caroline at the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital on the North Shore. It became the beginning of the unhappiness in their marriage because Diana had deliberately conceived for a second time without consulting Harcourt. He never forgave her. They began drinking. The alcoholism slowly became a serious problem for both of them, with Diana hospitalised three times due to coma. In 1968, when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia, he left the Communist party and became anti-communist. Through his connections with Montsalvat he became friend with many members of the Sydney Push and established a dinner club at which they met once a month. He sold one of his houses and bought a yacht; sailing became his main pastime on weekends.

The marriage stayed together unhappily for fourteen and a half years until he died of heart failure and double pneumonia on 3 September 1971. His death was a deliberate choice. Three months earlier, he had stopped taking the drug that prevented the build-up of fluid in his lungs, knowing what the outcome would be. He talked it over with the family doctor and Diana, to gain their consent that when the time came, there would be no emergency revival. He had a horror of senility and did not want to live long enough to experience frontal-lobe dementia, one of the effects of lack of oxygen supply to the brain caused by heart failure.

A strict atheist who disapproved of all religion, an existentialist, and libertarian, he was buried in the non-denominational section of Mona Vale Cemetery.

He was mentioned twice in the Australian editions of Who's Who in 1954 and 55. His book Upsurge is now on the reading list for Australian Socialist Realist Literature at Perth University.[1]