Ever Wondered?

What Ever Happened To Helen Demidenko?
Here's an interview, ten years on. It's pretty fascinating how she came about donning her false persona to sell her book.

Lynne Malcolm: So you became so fascinated, though, that you assumed a different identity. You assumed the identity of Helen Demidenko.

Helen Dale: I got to know—and I don't want to go into too much detail about this—but I got to know a couple of people who, for want of a better word, had very dodgy war records in Australia...from overseas. In one of those circumstances, without explaining where I saw this particular gentleman, he was clipping a hedge and he was clipping a hedge with his hands up above his head and I saw the Waffen-SS tattoo in his armpit and I knew what it was. It's the kind of obscure thing I knew, but then I never picked up a Dolly magazine the entire time I was at high school. I think I might have read a Cleo magazine once in my life. I was reading things like Men's Action Adventure. And so I knew stuff like that.

And I said, 'Oh, which Waffen-SS division were you in?' And he of course dropped the shears and was clearly somewhat worried and realised I was the wrong age group and ethnic background to be from organisations that were attempting to arrest these people. So I found that out, and I suppose the price I paid for getting access to that story, for having a journalistic instinct but also a novelist's instinct—oh, gee, this is a ripper yarn, I reckon I could do something with this. The price I paid was, people are going to want to know where I got this from. So I thought, well what's a way round this? And of course this was in the wake of Polyukhovich, the High Court decision that effectively allowed war crimes trials under the amended War Crimes Act 1945 to proceed.

And I thought, well if someone finishes up in jail because of something I wrote about them, they're going to have the right to come after me. And I might quite a calculated decision about it. I thought well if people think that it's me, and that it's my family, and that they're all dead, then I might be able to get away with it. At least until this guy dies. But then he didn't die, and people found out about it. And then they took it in a way that I didn't expect.

Interesting. I always thought she donned the false name and identity in order to get in through the SBS angle. In other words, she faked an outargeous (as in not just an Italian, not just a Greek, but a Ukrainian!) ethnicity because she knew she would be short-listed on the Vogel; that she then proceeded to write the most critic-provoking book by writing about gencoides and lo and behold she wins the Vogel Award. In other words, she was manipulating the 'multi-cultural agenda' in the worst possible way.
Cry ethnicity.
Cry victimhood.
Cry femininity.
Cry wolf.
Throw in the Holocaust
Throw in some mass murder.
Talk about a way to get to the front of the queue. The irony is she says she's more cynical now. And a right winger too.

When the Demidenko Affair all blew up, I thought "So much for Australian Literature". It's a small pool with very small minds trying to keep the pool as small as possible and starved for oxygen. In that sense, it lies parallel to the mind-set in the film funding agencies of this country, but that is another topic.
Basically, Helen Darville was the very destroyer they had conjured through their excessive ideological manipulation of ticked-box approval systems. Here was a woman who walked in with the perfect idenitikit book, except she herself was a phony. But what's the big deal? A Fiction Writer Wrote Fiction?

Aah, but you say she lied about herself! She misrepresented important truth claims; but what of it? The literary set had reduced itself to games where points could be scored; she came in and scored her points and left with ther $20,000. It wasn't just the publishers who looked like dills, it was Dame Leonie Kramer no less who was left standing looking like an idiot; and she did look pretty idiotic in her publc defence at the time. If anything, the Demidenko Affair showed just how pathetic arts & literature were in this country, and there's hardly been any visible improvement since.
And here is Helen Demidenko, having sworn off fiction writing in Australia - All water under the bridge.