Brief Biography

Frank Hardy was born into a large Roman Catholic family in 1917 and was brought up in Bacchus Marsh, a small town to the west of Melbourne, Victoria. He left school at 13 to work as a fruit-picker, a road-construction work, seaman, grocer and cartoonist. This varied work influenced his political leanings to the left and he joined the Communist Party of Australia in 1939. He enlisted in 1942 and was posted to the Northern Territory. Hardy left the army in 1946 and commenced work as a part-time journalist in Melbourne. It was during this time that he collected the material for Power Without Glory, a semi-fictional account of the life of John Wren - a legendary figure on the criminal fringe in the inner Melbourne suburb of Collingwood. Although subsequently accepted as one of the great Australian novels Hardy had difficulty getting his work published and was later sued by Wren's wife over certain allegations about "her" in the book. The trial lasted nine months and was eventually won by Hardy.

Frank Hardy died in Melbourne in 1994.

Bibliography

Novels
Power Without Glory 1950
The Four-Legged Lottery 1958
The Outcasts of Foolgarah 1971
But the Dead Are Many 1975
Who Shot George Kirkland? : a novel about the nature of truth 1981
The Obsession of Oscar Oswald 1983
Warrant of Distress 1983
The Loser Now Will Be Later to Win 1985
Mary Lives 1992

Short Story Collections
The Men From Clinkapella 1951
Legends From Benson's Valley 1963
Australians Have a Word For It : short stories from down under 1964
The Yarns of Billy Borker 1965
Billy Borker Yarns Again 1967
The Great Australian Lover 1972 being a reprint of Billy Borker Yarns Again with extra stories
It's Moments Like These 1972 being a reprint of Legends from Benson's Valley with one addition
The Needy and the Greedy : humorous stories of the racetrack 1975
You Nearly Had Him That Time : and other cricket stories 1978
A Frank Hardy Swag 1982 - edited by Clement Semmler
The Loser Now Will be Later to Win 1985
Hardy's People 1986
Great Australian Legends 1988
Retreat Australia Fair 1990

Drama
Nail on the Wall
Leap Seven Times in the Air
The Outcasts of Foolgarah
The Ringbolter
Who was Henry Larsen? 1984
Faces in the Street 1988
Mary Lives! 1992

Non-Fiction
The Hard Way : the story behind Power without Glory 1961
The Unlucky Australians 1968

This page and its contents are copyright © 1997-2006 by Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Last modified: April 30, 2006.