One day in 1980 Wendy Jenkins pulled a roughly typed bundle of papers, tied with green and white string, from the submissions pile in her publisher’s office and began reading.
“It did not look promising but almost immediately had my attention – and kept it,” Jenkins recalled on seeing the unsolicited single-spaced manuscript.
Jenkins, then a junior editor and manuscript assessor at the Fremantle Arts Centre Press (now Fremantle Press), knew right away that the words she held in her hands were not only a compelling narrative but also a significant social document told by a man who, as she later learned, had taught himself to read and write.
Albert Barnett Facey, then aged 86, was a pig farmer and inveterate storyteller. He had spent several years at the kitchen table, encouraged by his wife Evelyn, writing into notebooks the yarns he had been telling his children for decades. Having painstakingly typed his final draft, his only request was that Fremantle would “vanity publish” 20 copies that he could give his family as a memento of his life.
Instead, AB Facey’s A Fortunate Life would become one of Australia’s most enduring literary classics, with more than 1 million copies sold.
Jenkins died suddenly this month aged 70, after a highly successful 40-year career in publishing. But the day she first read Facey’s manuscript remained a glowing highlight of her working life.
“I experienced that almost visceral feeling I have had maybe three or four times when reading a manuscript by an unknown author that has arrived truly out of the blue. This is special. This is important. This is unique. It lifted from the pages and insisted on itself,” she wrote in 2011.
“I read with growing interest, then excitement, skipping ahead to get a sense of the sweep of the life and to see if the story and voice were sustained. I probably also wanted to know, like the hundreds of thousands of readers after me, what happened to that little boy born in turn-of-last-century Australia into such nation-shaping and difficult times.”
Jenkins and her publisher, Ray Coffey, set about editing Facey’s sincere, self-effacing writing in meticulous fashion.
“Ray Coffey and others at Fremantle Press quickly shared [my] enthusiasm and the manuscript consumed a good deal of our time across the coming months – we had hooked on to a whale and it would be quite a ride,” Jenkins said.
Released on Anzac Day 1981, the simply told memoir recounts Facey’s extraordinary life in which he faces adversity, danger, adventure and loss, his story mirroring dramatic world events and depicting themes of mythical Australia: broken Gallipoli veteran, lost boy in the bush, battler of dingos and snakes, boxer, cattle musterer and ringer.
Facey enjoyed his late-in-life literary fame for just nine months, dying in 1982, aged 87. But his story lived on, reproduced in huge numbers and multiple formats.
Since reprinted 100 times, it has been produced as an audio version, translated into Chinese and Japanese, formed part of the school curriculum and is currently a stage play. In 1986, Kerry Packer’s miniseries of the book became the most-watched television event of the year, and a documentary, The Facey Phenomenon, was also released.
Jenkins was not defined by its success, instead focusing on identifying, editing and mentoring Western Australian writers. Facey’s memoir was one of her most significant finds, but it is estimated she assessed more than 10,000 manuscripts through her career, working with many of the state’s leading authors and poets. She also wrote two books of poetry and four children’s books.
Colleagues remembered her as having a wicked sense of humour that defied the seriousness with which she approached her work as one of the country’s best poetry editors and a passionate advocate for a generation of Western Australian writers. In 2018, she was made a member of the Order of Australia for her service to literature.
Over the years since the book’s publication, and with new access to digital resources, critics have questioned the authenticity of Facey’s memoir and the degree of editorial intervention. Facey did not begin transcribing his memories until his 70s, and sometimes had difficulty remembering details or reading his own notes as Jenkins and Coffey worked to hone his narrative clarity. They did not have access to Facey’s military records, which were not released until 2012, to confirm dates, places and events.
Although Facey’s manuscript required much correction, Jenkins and Coffey sought to maintain his voice and meaning while reorganising his life story into 68 short chapters, Jenkins editing his early years and Coffey his wartime and postwar life.
“The first editor of Albert Facey was time,” Jenkins said on the book’s 30th anniversary. “Barely literate until his teens, he told and retold stories to himself and others. In the process, his memory and stories rubbed down into the lines and shapes that would so memorably underpin the extended memoir that became A Fortunate Life.”
