Bryce Courtenay was dynamic, complex, and driven – rising to fame immediately as one of Australia’s most beloved authors with his book The Power of One.

To his son Adam, he was also larger than life, mercurial, and ultimately unknowable. In My Father Bryce, Adam embarks on a moving and unforgettable search to uncover the man behind the legend.

Read on for an extract and listen to a podcast with Adam Courtenay.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Bryce Courtenay was one of Australia’s highest-selling and most-loved authors as well as a larger-than-life character. From his first book, The Power of One, he captivated readers. With his third, the non-fiction title April Fool’s Day, he captured their hearts. Many of his fans would have thought they knew him, and they did – they knew the version of him that he wanted to present to the world.

Bryce’s son Adam also knew that version. And he knew the Bryce the rest of the world only glimpsed, or never saw at all. His father was a natural born storyteller and occasional fabulist whose tales never quite felt true. He was a man who forever publicly grieved the loss of his son Damon, the subject of April Fool’s Day, but who seemed reluctant to connect with his remaining two sons.

Several years after his death, Bryce still looms large in Adam’s life. In seeking to understand his father, who made so many people happy with his books, Adam recounts his own 1960s and 1970s childhood, Bryce’s career in advertising and his metamorphosis into bestselling novelist. In the years after The Power of One, Bryce became a household name even as his personal life was plagued by tragedy and heartbreak – some of his own making. All the while Adam did his best to love his father and hang on through the wild ride of his life.

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CHAPTER 12

Feedback Frenzy

Author Adam Courtenay

I knew instinctively that this was the big book Bryce had promised. After I read the first three chapters, I told him he had gold – and meant it. The story of Peekay – replete with smart chickens, Zulu witchdoctors and a callous tormentor known as The Judge – couldn’t be put down. Mum was equally mesmerised. Bryce’s imagination was running riot. It was a tight, tension-ridden boy’s own adventure with side-servings of pathos and humour. And clearly genius.

A dam had burst in my dad’s brain. Bryce was writing feverishly late into the night. Each morning I’d excitedly pick up a fresh instalment left for me on the kitchen table, and that evening we discussed it. Clearly Dad was worried about whether it had any merit. I certainly wasn’t – I couldn’t wait to know what happened next. It was obviously bestseller material.

I had never seen him so inspired. But he was also a man in a hurry. The manuscript was doubling or trebling in size every few days. He was writing at a pace even he found bewildering. It was,

I remember, just like Jack Kerouac writing On the Road – he was attacking it in one long pass.

What was behind this manic urgency? He was staking every- thing on this and as apprehensive about the results as a schoolboy handing in a final exam. Dad was handing in a paper every night, which Mum and I had to mark. But Bryce would never accept anything less than a score of 100 per cent.

Every night, he’d arrive back from work with a strange look, a combination of worry and expectation. ‘What do you think? Is the story still working? Are the characters strong? How’s the continuity?’

It was not only our job to read, it was also our job to console and calm him, and affirm the story’s quality. For the first time, Bryce was on creative tenterhooks. But it irked me a little that he would brook no criticism. He was thin-skinned – and remained so for years afterwards, even after selling millions of books. Failure was not to be countenanced, and yet the fear of it was ever-present. The copper mines of Rhodesia, where he had parried with ‘the man from beyond beyond’ all those years ago, were in the book.

I suggested he should make more of the escaped Nazis who made life such hell there.

‘No,’ he said tersely. ‘It is written the way it has to be.’

I wondered what the point of my reading the manuscript was. It certainly wasn’t to discuss it or to offer suggestions. The only ‘advice’ he accepted was total approval.

This was how the book transformed him. He developed a strange mix of ego and fear that would haunt all his writing from thereon. Years earlier I might have mocked his advertising copy – and he’d usually take the criticism and laugh back. He was never riled by jokes about cat-food commercials. But his books were different. Of course, all authors fear rejection and ridicule – including myself. But his first book was a much bigger risk. It was his ticket out of the second act and into the third. This was make or break.

This process also confirmed my suspicions that my father could not spell. Of course, this is an easily solvable problem and about the only job I could do. Sian was the real subeditor, an expert at rewriting clumsy or clunky copy and teasing out inconsistencies. Mum and I were rather vaguely termed ‘continuity readers’. I am glad to say that Mum, who was far more literate, had greater influence on him than me. She had recently read a book that started simply ‘This is what happened’ and had encouraged Dad to do the same. Bryce was sceptical at first, but eventually incorporated it as the opening line.

In the original version of what was then called ‘The Tadpole Angel’, Bryce had written a few interstitial chapters that were non- fiction pieces about his actual life. One detailed Bryce running a marathon and ‘coming second’ to a close friend. As he described it, coming second to anyone was unconscionable, almost a sin. Dad got beaten in a running race by a mate. So what? It was out of kilter with the rest of the book, which was working beautifully as the story of Peekay evolved. Thankfully, these non-fiction additions would later be spiked by his future agent, Jill Hickson. Hickson told me in January 2025 why she took out these ‘lost interstitials’. ‘It was like preaching – Pentecostal preaching,’ she said. ‘Bryce telling readers how to live the good life. It was a series of sermons.’

Bryce once told me that he never rewrote his own copy. But in the case of The Power of One, huge swathes of the original text were expunged by Hickson and Bryce was forced to rewrite long sections. She had to get rid of the moralising element of the book. ‘I used to think he could have had another career as a pastor,’ she said.

It is only my theory, but I think his sudden leap into the world of books was based on two things. He wanted to capitalise on his blossoming position in the media, but also, his clout in the office was deteriorating. I don’t think Harris Robinson Courtenay was doing badly – quite the opposite – because by the late 1980s it had been taken over by a bigger firm and had become Harvie HRC. Bryce and his partners were minority shareholders in the new business. Their roles would never be the same. As 1987 moved into 1988, I sensed that Bryce wanted out. I began to notice that old stare return. The time to escape was now or it might never come again. So by mid 1988 he was creative director at George Patterson, lured there by Geoffrey Cousins and Alex Hamill. Patts was far more supportive of Bryce’s literary ambitions than Harvie HRC. He took the new job with relish.

What would eventually be called The Power of One (‘The Tadpole Angel’ was a curious title, I thought, which only made sense when you’d read well into the book) was a story of apartheid in 1930s and 1940s South Africa – but one written from a white person’s perspective. It centred on little guy Peekay’s victory over insuperable odds in a country that gave no quarter to the weak, the dispossessed – and those of a different colour. Peekay, reared by Zulu nanny Mary Mandoma, couldn’t understand the hate ‘between tribes’ in South Africa.

It was a book punctuated with brutality. There was the angry, inchoate violence between peoples, interspersed with a much more controlled form of violence – boxing. To this day, I rate Bryce’s boxing scenes (in this book, as well as in the sequel, Tandia) as the best ever put in print. Anywhere.

Quirky characters abounded: Doc, a cactus-loving German professor; and Peekay’s best friend, a valiant chicken known as Granpa Chook. There was the sjambok-wielding alpha female Mevrou (reminiscent of the teacher who put Bryce in a closet) and his boyhood nemesis, the censorious Judge, an Afrikaner bully. The Judge warned the hapless Peekay that when Hitler arrived in South Africa, the victorious Afrikaners would drive Peekay and his verdammt English-speaking friends into the sea.

Like Bryce, Peekay had a unique ability to weave stories from nothing, a talent that got him out of some serious scrapes. He was so naturally brilliant at spinning yarns, his would-be tormentors forgot to beat him up as he lulled them into story land. This was self-evident for me, having been lulled into various horror zones by Bryce for years. Peekay could produce life-saving, mesmeric stories on cue. Bryce could too. I thought this was a brilliant idea: storytelling as a diversion tactic. As Dad put it, stories were Peekay’s ‘path to salvation’.

While nothing was explicitly stated, it was clear where Bryce’s sympathies ran. The Dutch-speaking Afrikaners were purveyors of the evil of apartheid (and Nazi supporters) while the good, reasonable English-speakers were caught in the maelstrom, innocent of the worst wrongdoings and trying to make the best of a bad situation. This was largely disingenuous. The English were hardly innocent, but it set up the story nicely.

The Power of One ended with a pugilistic showdown between Peekay and The Judge, featuring the ‘Solly 12’ punching combination, a riot of explosive upper cuts and jabs that no opponent could with- stand. Not since Biggles had an Englishman given a Nazi such a damn good thrashing.

Just as an aside, I never actually saw Bryce box. Others did and said his punching speed was incredible. What I can say is that Bryce’s reactions were nothing short of amazing. I remember once, 13-year-old Brett pouring a bottle of methylated spirits straight from a bottle onto a fire. The fire leaped up the stream of the alcohol and in a trice my brother’s entire right arm was on fire. Before I even registered what was happening, Dad had his own shirt off and had quelled the flames. A split second longer, and my brother would have had permanent burns on his arm.

Dad once told me that a doctor told him his reaction speeds were quicker than those of racing car driver Stirling Moss. I put that one down as a Dad fact, but my dad was lightning fast.

Peekay, as far as I could see, symbolised South Africa’s moral confusion. He was a naïve young boy trying to fight his way through life, making friends of all races and creeds along the way, sorting out the mess with goodwill, good stories – and, where necessary, boxing gloves. In a world where the gloves were almost always off, Peekay fought the good fight and he fought it fair and square.

The Power of One was clearly Bryce’s paean to himself, a heavily exaggerated and idyllic version of his early life, which – I found out much later – was actually nothing like this. Peekay, like many of Bryce’s central characters, was multitalented and acutely intelligent. But strangely lacked self-confidence.

A natural brilliance, coupled with self-loathing, was a character trait that would run through nearly all the protagonists of Bryce’s books for the next twenty years. I later believed that Bryce had hit on a ‘personality formula’ with Peekay. He had worked out how to construct a main character who appealed widely, and in subsequent books rarely deviated from it. Brilliant and heroic but vulnerable and compromised was a combination that worked wonders with the readers.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Courtenay is a Sydney-based writer and financial journalist. He has had a long career in the UK and Australia, writing for papers such as the Financial Times, the Sunday Times, the SMH/Age and for magazines including Forbes and Company Director.

Adam has a love of Australian history and biography and has written six books, including The Ship That Never Was, The Ghost and the Bounty Hunter and Three Sheets to the Wind.