Farewell, Andrew McGahan

My friend Andrew McGahan, that great Australian novelist, passed away yesterday. Pancreatic cancer is persistent and February is the shortest month.

I first met Andrew in 1991, just at the moment when Praise changed the shape of Australian fiction and became the book of a generation. I had taken up a job at Queensland Theatre Company, charged with finding ways to develop the state’s playwriting culture. For a young director at the beginning of his career, this was quite a task. I had never set foot in Queensland. Praise was my introduction and Andrew became my buddy.

We hit it off immediately, hanging out, devouring beers, and talking about and exploring anything that took our interest. He was very happy to discover the theatre and even became a resident writer at the company. I commissioned him to write a play. Bait follows the story of Gordon Buchanan, the central character of Praise, just as he begins working in the absurd bowels of the Department of Social Security. If Praise was chiselled from Bukowski, Bait channelled Kafka.

Andrew was my assistant director for a few QTC theatre productions at that time. It was really a way for him to gather a bit of theatrical knowledge. He was an easy delight in the rehearsal room, always intrigued by what we were doing. The actors loved him. In Bait workshops, as we worked on the shaping of the play, he was able to bring these new skills to bear. We had such fun.

Bait was the sequel to Praise, and 1988 was the prequel. One day, Andrew handed me a brown box. It contained a draft of the book in loose-leaf A4 pages. I was so excited. No one had ever given me a draft of a novel to read before! By that time, Praise had already entered our culture, a marker in the lives of many, so I felt I was being handed something very special. But, as with all things with Andrew, in life and in death, there was no outward ceremony. He just thought I’d be interested in reading a draft, and it’s what friends did.

I still have that brown box. I have never been able to dispose of it.

Many years later, I arrived back in Brisbane to take up the artistic directorship of La Boite. I inherited the 2009 season from my predecessor Sean Mee, but there was something perfect in the fact that the first production was a theatrical adaptation of Andrew’s magnificent The White Earth. Andrew had adapted his novel alongside director Shaun Charles, who had been part of our theatre family back in the early 1990s and had become Andrew's principal theatrical collaborator. Andrew was also co-director of the show. It gave me, and I think Andrew, a lot of joy to reunite in this way.

Andrew met everything with calm and clarity, including his own death. He was also one of the most generous people I’ve ever encountered. I once rocked up to his house in Melbourne and spent most of a day drinking red wine and talking about, well, all the important and unimportant things. He always disarmed me - he always called me 'Dave' - and I think on that day in particular, through his own utterly genuine interest in the world and others, he made me effortlessly and contentedly confessional. I left unburdened, and happy. That was Andrew. Calm, clear, generous, graceful.

All love to you Andrew, and to you Liesje, and to all who will so sorely miss you.