kerry b. collison

KERRY BOYD Collison is an Australian writer of such books about Indonesia as Merdeka Square, The Timor Man and Jakarta. I hadn't heard of any of them prior to this interview but the world is evidently full of Collison fans. Minutes after we met, Collison told me how only that day he'd met a man in the lift with whom he'd had a brief conversation culminating in the man reeling back with startled pleasure, crying, 'But you're not ... Kerry Collison?' 'Happens all the time,' said Collison. Indeed, his conversation was peppered with accounts of satisfied fans and captains of industry weeping in first-class at the ending of his latest oeuvre, The Fifth Season.

Now, to prepare myself for this meeting, I'd actually sat down and read all 384 pages of The Fifth Season. Two things were immediately apparent: every left-hand page had Kerry B. Collison's name inscribed at the top in larger print than that of the actual story. And he has, an irritating tendency, to place commas in strange, places. This suggested a one-man operation and, sure enough, Collison is a vanity publisher who does all his own marketing. 'No,' he corrected me, when I used that term. 'There is confusion about that. I self publish, we don't say 'vanity publishing' in Australia. I had to publish the books myself because they were refused by publishers who said the information in them was too sensitive.' The whole point about Collinson - the foundation on which he has built this literary empire - is that he once worked for the Australian Embassy in Indonesia, between 1966 and 1969, as assistant air attache, and then set up business in Jakarta. He spent the first hour of a two-hour interview describing this period and he speaks very much as he writes: at extreme length, employing the sort of thrilling phrases ('deep penetration', 'clandestine meetings', 'covert operations') which irresistibly call to mind the shenanigans of 'Allo, 'Allo.

The result is that his way of recounting his past makes it sound positively novel-ish. For instance, the story of his falling-out with the Australian embassy, which culminated in him losing his passport and gaining an Indonesian one, has a sub-Chandleresque flavour: 'The new man they sent up to the embassy as senior spy and I had a history. A personal thing, not worth going into. Had I known what I know now, I'd have run him over ... So they concocted a scheme and started to squeeze me. I asked the Indonesian generals to investigate. Suharto turned round to one of his aides and said, 'Fix it' ... I went to see this piece of work at the embassy and he held up my new passport and said, 'This is yours, buddy, and the only way to get it back is to do what we want' ...' I have to assume what he says is true but he certainly has a knack of giving it an unlikely flavour. One could make the observation that while his prose is turgid beyond belief, his life (makes fortune, loses fortune, is told at 40 - 14 years ago - he's dying of cancer, recovers, goes into property in Vietnam, sets up publishing company, sells 40,000 books, becomes self-proclaimed 'best-selling author') appears to have seeped up all the missing colour. I found this deeply ironic. I was also slightly on my guard because of an incident involving Collison and this very newspaper.

In 1996, his book The Tim-Tim Man, now re-named The Timor Man (the Australians kept getting it confused with Tim-Tam chocolate biscuits) was reviewed in our Saturday Books page. 'Confusing', 'nauseating', 'irritating', harsh words to which the reviewer also felt obliged to add, 'It could have been a compelling story but ...' and went on to list all the reasons why it wasn't. This review mysteriously appeared on subsequent Collison dust-jackets as the brief but glowing tribute: 'a compelling story'.

'Why would I put something negative on the back?' he responded when I raised this sensitive matter. 'I thought it was a licence to put it there, why not? The editing team said it was acceptable in the industry. I'm not according blame but it's a matter of experience, I didn't believe it was a matter of integrity. You'll find it's now been removed.' Actually, if you peer closely at the inside back-flap of The Fifth Season, you'll find it's still there. Maybe writing all that faction has confused him; it surely puzzled me. The Fifth Season has an Indonesian president called Suhapto who has a vice-president called L.B. Hababli, and beavering away in his shadowy lair there's a super-terrorist called Osama bin Ladam. There's even a Hong Kong investment company which puts its funds into Indonesian taxis and promptly goes belly-up; it's called Perentie.

No prizes for spotting the originals but as Osama bin Laden, for example, is unlikely to sue for defamation why the pointless subterfuge? 'It's playing the game,' explained Collison, who now lives in Australia, patiently. 'Here's the point, okay, I've got an Indonesian passport which is still current, my wife is Balinese, and I don't want to take the risk.' The book covers the actual events of last May, when Chinese women were raped by Indonesians, then moves on to the imagined political breakdown of Indonesia and the subsequent overwhelming of northern Australia by boat people. If you happened to be a paranoid Australian, it would feed your every fear; the only flash of wit in the entire tome, in fact, is the arrival of a massive cyclone which scatters all the boats and is called Pauline. Is he deliberately scaremongering? 'No. It makes Australians more conscious and aware. These books are recommended reading in three universities, I get a lot of support from academia. And Australian diplomats are one of my biggest markets.' But isn't he in breach of the Australian Official Secrets Act? 'They stripped me of my Australian citizenship. I would argue that in court. Anyway, if they were going to do something they'd have done it by now. I'm trying to teach not just Australians but expatriates in general. There are very few expatriates with my background, and I do believe I have writing skills.' Collison then produced a pen to sign my copy which, naturally, not wanting to cart it around with me, I'd left at home. I murmured that he needn't worry (thinking, frankly, that I didn't really want two copies of The Fifth Season) but the point about self-publishers is that they're never short of their own work. He produced another one from a bag and signed it with a flourish, as if to the manner born, saying, 'The real test will be when I send a manuscript off to a publishing house. I'm quite sure they'll publish.' fionnuala mchugh