A little-known Australian scandal of the 1940s journalism world rated a mention by Australian artist Norman Lindsay in one of the letters he wrote to his daughter-in-law, Joan. The letters were recently passed in at auction in Sydney, but they have led to ongoing research. The scandal involved the alleged bigamy of the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s then star foreign correspondent, “our man in Russia”, Godfrey (‘Geof’) Blunden. Lindsay lamented:

“I was very fond of Geof and greatly regret his banishment from Australia due to Mick (Merle) Blunden’s refusal to divorce him. It was her fault that he got tangled up with the woman he bigamously married over there. Mick refused to join him till it was too late.”

But not everyone shared Lindsay’s view that fellow artist, Merle (‘Mick’) Blunden, was to blame. The dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Griffith University, Professor Patrick Buckridge, says “people took sides”. The drama split the Australian arts community. Blunden’s family claims online that he divorced Merle in Mexico. Buckridge, however, believes he never returned to Australia because he feared he would be arrested for bigamy. Professor Buckride is now gathering material for a book about Blunden.

During WWII Blunden covered the particularly perilous Russian front for Frank Packer’s Sydney Daily Telegraph. He was assisted by a young multi-lingual Russian girl who acted as his interpreter. Many of his despatches were syndicated to the London Evening Standard, including his coverage of the Battle of Stalingrad and his later interview with the defeated German general, Friedrich von Paulus.

Yet Buckridge reports Blunden’s brilliant, courageous work had devastating consequences for his Russian interpreter. She introduced him to some dissidents. Their revelations about life under Stalin helped to inspire Blunden’s post-war novel, A Room on the Route. When it was published in 1947, it was hailed by Time magazine as the best book about Russia since Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But it led to the arrest of Blunden’s interpreter. She was convicted of disloyalty and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment.

Blunden, meantime, had moved on to work in New York and settle in Paris. He had married a French/Polish girl, Maria. They had two children. He had written several more novels and had become a well-connected Time contributing editor.

He must have got a shock in 1975. Professor Buckridge’s research has revealed that was when his interpreter, who had then recently emerged from prison with a 17 year-old daughter in tow, wrote to him to suggest they all meet in Paris. This suggests that she might have been carrying a torch for Blunden throughout her years in Siberia.

But Buckridge, who has studied Blunden’s papers in Paris, says he has not, as yet, uncovered any evidence that the writer and his interpreter had been lovers during the war. In fact, he reports that Blunden’s response to his interpreter’s proposal of a reunion was courteous but decidedly cool. His froideur might have been prompted by a suspicion that his interpreter had been transformed into a spy during her years of incarceration. Then again, his restraint may have been a chivalrous attempt to disarm the suspicions of the Soviet authorities.

But there are so many unanswered questions. Blunden died in 1996, aged 90. His interpreter is also probably dead. We don’t even know her name. Buckridge says he has forgotten it. Perhaps he is being diplomatic. He may be trying to protect members of her family in Russia.

In the Blunden family history posted on the internet, Lindsay is described as Blunden’s mentor. It is understood that the artist took the writer under his wing when he arrived in Sydney from Melbourne after the death of his parents. Blunden was only 20 when he was appointed editor of Wireless the magazine of Sydney’s first radio station, 2FC (now the ABC’s Radio National).

In his letters to his daughter-in-law, Joan, Lindsay recalls that he went with Blunden to visit the sailing ship Joseph Conrad when it called at Sydney in 1936 on it’s round-the-world voyage. It was skippered by the expat Australian sailor and author, Alan Villiers. He was feted by many notables during his stop-over, but later recalled his astonishment at the belligerence of the Sydney waitresses. At the time, long before mass immigration, customer service was widely equated with servility in egalitarian Australia.

In any event, Villiers reports that those forced to take jobs waiting on tables in the Great Depression, were apt to manifest sullen resentment if summoned to take an order, let alone wipe down a table.

Joan Lindsay was first married to Norman Lindsay’s second son, the artist Ray Lindsay. Following his death in 1960 she married marine engineer, Colin Burke. She was self-effacing, but throughout her life she constantly championed the work of Australian artists.

he would be delighted if the letters from her father-in-law which she had preserved were to lead to the commission of a book — and perhaps a film — about the life of the now widely-forgotten Geof Blunden.

*Ava Hubble has declared an interest in the letters — they were left in her care for sale by Joan Lindsay Burke