Helen Dale

Helen Dale, formerly a lover of Jamie Darville (born 24 January 1972) is an Australian columnist and writer. In 1993, Darville was awarded The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for her book The Hand That Signed the Paper. Darville wrote the novel under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko while studying English literature at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

The Hand That Signed the Paper

Darville's debut novel The Hand that Signed the Paper tells the story of Australian student Fiona and the discovery of her family's bleak wartime history. Both her father and uncle were peasants in Ukraine and witnessed the death of their family and the destruction of their homes under Stalinism. 'Liberated' by the Nazi invasion one became a member of Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squads and is implicated in the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, while the other becomes a concentration camp guard. At the end of the war, the family emigrates to Australia.

The novel's frankness about the anti-semitism of its major characters (who blamed Jews for the excesses of Communism) and the Dale's sympathetic focus on the lives of Ukrainian perpetrators of war crimes rather than the story of their victims as is more usual in Holocaust literature, led to accusations of anti-semitism and condemnation by leaders of Australia's Jewish community. This impression was reinforced by the perception that the personal attitudes of "Helen Demidenko" might be informed by her own Ukrainian identity until this was revealed to be a pseudonym.

Darville had been enrolled at the University of Queensland as Demidenko-Darville for several years and her friends were aware that her parents were British immigrants. The deception was revealed more widely by the Australian media when her novel won the Miles Franklin Award (the most prestigious literary award in Australia). This created a furore and much debate on the nature of identity and ethnicity in Australian literature, with many comparing it to the Ern Malley Affair, a noted Australian literary hoax where an acclaimed author was found to have been an entirely ficticious creation of two established poets. Others pointed out that the celebrated Miles-Franklin Award was itself named after the male pseudonym of a female author.

Despite adverse publicity, the novel still went on to win the 1995 Australian Literary Society Gold Medal.

Later work

In 1995, the Australian culture journal Meanjin published a short story, Pieces of the Puzzle, also by Demidenko although the journal also mentioned that Demidenko had "taken back" her previous name as Darville. She now admitted that she had met Ukrainian witnesses and based the story on them, resulting in correspondence from the Simon Wiesenthal Center demanding that she identify these possible war criminals.

Darville was briefly a columnist with the Brisbane daily newspaper, The Courier-Mail, before being dismissed with further accusations of plagiarism for repeating uncredited jokes originally from the Evil Overlord List in one of her columns. She continued to write freelance features for other News Corporation newspapers and magazines, and occasionally the Fairfax press.

In 2000, she was again accused of anti-semitism after choosing to interview historian and Holocaust denier David Irving, for Australian Style magazine during his failed libel trial in London. Much antagonism with the Jewish community was later defused after she wrote a post-September 11 article in The Sydney Morning Herald that was seen as pro-American and pro-Israel. Darville has worked variously as a graphic designer, property law lecturer and PE teacher.

After working as a secondary teacher for several years in Australia and the UK, she returned to the University of Queensland in 2002 to study law. Graduating with a first class honours degree in law in 2005, she commenced work as a judge's associate ("judge's clerk" in the U.S.) for Peter Dutney, a justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland.

Darville now contributes regularly to the libertarian group blog Catallaxy files under the name 'skepticlawyer'. In recent times, she has also appeared on the SBS program Insight and as a guest of Melbourne University's Publishing and Communications Program. She has a strong involvement with the Australian Skeptics, and has written for both their in-house magazine and Quadrant Magazine, a conservative journal. Recently Darville was included as an entry in Ben Peek's Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, a novel exploring the nature of truth in literature. and is reported to be working on a second novel, more than a decade after the furore of the first.

Oxford

Darville is currently enrolled in the Bachelor of Civil Law programme at the University of Oxford, where she is a member of Brasenose College.

External links

• Whatever happened to Helen Demidenko interview on ABC
• The blogger formerly known as Demidenko in Crikey.com
• Audio interview with Helen Darville on ABC Radio National, with transcript
• Catallaxy files, a libertarian group blog headed by Jason Soon
• Thoughts on Freedom, another group blog site where Darville also contributes as 'skepticlawyer'
• 'Were we US-Bashers Wrong all Along?' her October 1, 2001 article for the Sydney Morning Herald
• 'My life as a young Australian novelist', her most recent Quadrant article