Self-publishing and boutique publishing ventures are not always exercises in self-indulgence. Forms of local writing, ranging from fiction to biography, memoir and history, have their own genuine interest and market, but tend not to attract the established publishing houses, if only because of the limited returns. In filling the gap, do-it-yourself publishers like Michael Jorgensen’s Black Jack Press manage to make available fascinating and valuable work that would otherwise never see the light. Such a case is his edition of Sue (originally Sylvia) Vanderkelen’s novel The Cruel Man, which her family has held in manuscript since her death in 1957.
In the 1930s, Sue Vanderkelen was a beautiful young woman who could not choose between the social acceptability of her silvertail upbringing and the bohemian alternative of her circle of friends. She was the daughter of the Belgian Consul, grew up in Melbourne’s Toorak, and was educated at a Catholic boarding school. She met the painter Colin Colahan (a Xavier College boy) in her late teens, and eventually they began a long and tortuous love affair. Neither of them, for different reasons, was able to take the final step of commitment to the other.
Through Colahan, Vanderkelen was drawn in to the Meldrumite group of artists, and became a devoted acolyte of Justus Jörgensen, who taught her painting and gave her relentless advice on how to live her life. Indeed, she was pulled between these two forceful rivals until Colahan left Australia in 1935. She then threw in her lot with the Jörgensen tribe and helped in the creation of the artists’ colony at Montsalvat, in Eltham, cooking meals for the workers and donating money for the buildings, one of which became known as ‘Sue’s Tower’. In the 1940s, she began quietly to write about it all.
The novel is set in the years leading up to her lover’s sudden departure, and although it is intensely autobiographical, it does have a wider canvas of characters and interests. I have to say here that I have mixed feelings about Michael Jorgensen’s editorial interventions, especially his decision to change the fictitious names given by Vanderkelen to her characters to the ‘real’ ones. In doing so he feeds our desire to pry into the private lives of well-known people—always irresistible—but also potentially undermines Vanderkelen’s writing by making this a book more about celebrities than about her insight into the human heart. It is precisely to get