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Monday, May 10, 2021

Something About John Bellair

Down to the letter.

I was looking through the files making up archival versions of old Bellairsia site pages and found we had a resources section which included a list of questions visitors asked the site admins. I don’t know how frequently such questions were asked at the time (thereby making it an FAQ list) but there was one I was curious about myself, all these years later.

The question was “what books did John Bellairs not write?” Did people actually ask this?  The admins failed at their oft-repeated mantra of “let us not be silly” and responded with “This answer could go one forever...instead, let’s focus on books that were not written by our John Bellairs but rather by similarly-named authors.”

Sure.  Once your George Bellairs supply runs out, I suppose.

One such author named was John Bellair (1909-2001) and his obituary paints an assortment of extraordinary adventures:
...captain of Scotch College, Ormond collegian, agricultural scientist, expert horseman, steeplechaser and drover, farmer and grazier, shire councillor, sailor, traveller and adventurer, historian, francophile, mountain climber, poet and writer.
The obituary notes his distinguished military record, which featured in his first two books, noted below. Bellair was also an adventurer who ventured far and wide to tell the story of Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-Irish author who wrote volumes on Japanese culture. Bellair’s research took him to the Mediterranean, the West Indies, New Orleans and Japan, where he was greeted as something of a celebrity as he wrote his book about Hearn, who is known to all Japanese schoolchildren.

The Bellair bibliography includes the following titles:
  • Amateur Soldier (1984)
  • From Snow to Jungle-a History of the 2/3rd Australian Machine Gun Battalion (1987)
  • In Hearn’s Footsteps : Journeys Around the Life of Lafcadio Hearn (1994)
  • Yesturdays Man & Other Verse (1995)

2 comments:

Russ said...

A very odd question to ask. I wonder if the person was really looking for a list of the books written by Brad Strickland, but just asked a very backwards question.

Broteus Mitchell said...

That's a decent guess. It was the early years of the 21st Century, so who knows what people were trying to properly ask.