Byline: Brian Matthews

Brian Matthews, a former chair of the Literature Board and an accomplished author whose books include the award-winning biography, Louisa, describes how he discovered that Helen Darville had plagiarised his writing. IN 1989, I published a story called The Anecdote Affair (in Quickening and Other Stories, McPhee Gribble). The unnamed narrator of this story is a bloke who rather fancies himself - not without reason, it emerges - as a raconteur. He is not so much a teller of jokes as a retailer, embroiderer and exaggerator of his own personal experiences and sometimes those of his family and close friends. He becomes increasingly distressed to find that these anecdotes - his own remembered life - are being told by others (sometimes back to him) as if they were their life experiences. He comes to feel that his very life, his personal self, is being leached out of him with each telling. And it is then he notices that small parts of his body are disappearing; a fingernail; a mole; a little toe ... When the story opens, he is holed up in a hotel room, half crippled by the increasing rate of his physical diminution, desperately trying to record the truth of his condition before he becomes forever unable to do so .... I wrote The Anecdote Affair as a vehicle for the yarns that are sprinkled through it and are running out of the narrator's control. They continue, it seems, to run out of control. WHILE quietly holidaying recently near a small village of X in the Principality of Y (I've always wanted to start a story like that), I received a strange letter - or rather, I had it read to me while I fed about Ã50 worth of unfamiliar currency through the gut of the only public phone in the sleepy village square at X. The letter, faxed to my office in London and dated 16 August, was from someone called Helen Demidenko. The name was familiar and as I listened to the distant voice of my London interlocutor rising above the clatter of rhythmically dropping coins, I summoned up what I knew of her: she'd won the Vogel Award; the resultant novel was called The Hand That Signed The Paper; it had become the centre of much controversy because of, among other things, alleged anti-Semitism; it had gone on to win, controversially, the Miles Franklin Award and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. The gist of Ms Demidenko's letter was that she was publishing a story in the literary magazine, RePublica. Because of the controversy surrounding her and her work, The Sydney Morning Herald wanted to syndicate the story. RePublica's publishers, Harper Collins, thought this was a splendid idea but Demidenko was holding off because, as she explained, her friend, Michelle, whose judgment she unreservedly trusted, had read her story (entitled Other Places) and commented that it reminded her of a story by Brian Matthews. Demidenko said that she had made unsuccessful efforts...