The guest of honour was the director, Bruce Beresford. I had been looking forward to meeting him. His fame as the director of films such as Breaker Morant (1980) had gone before him. Had he suggested I read an obscure Patagonian novelist, I would still have taken him seriously. Besides, I was always on the lookout for novels to adapt. As a novelist myself, I had long been fascinated by the ways in which stories told on the page could be retold in other media, a transformation described by the critic Peter Craven – reviewing, coincidentally, Bruce Beresford’s memoir in the September 2007 issue of ABR – as (and I paraphrase) ‘art form assisting art form’. Privately, I thought of the process as a kind of literary cross-dressing, a phrase I had been foolish enough to use in conversation with Rosamond, when trying to explain why some scenes, crucial in the novel, could not be ‘dressed up’ as drama. Rosamond was not amused!

By the end of that dinner party, having listened to Bruce describe the landscape of Boyd’s novels, I was hooked. Not one to let a good idea lapse, I immediately set about trying to locate Boyd’s novels. It wasn’t easy. Several of the books were out of print. In those pre-Internet days, the only way to find existing copies was to scour second-hand bookshops. Some of the titles – Such Pleasure (1949), Nuns in Jeopardy (1940) – made me wonder if Bruce had been having a laugh at the expense of a fellow Australasian. But he had not. And he was right. The novels, most of them, are wonderful.

So began my relationship with a writer whose tales of a lost generation of Anglo-Australians, stranded between two worlds, crippled financially and emotionally by World War I, have never ceased to fascinate me. To this day I have not given up hope of seeing Bruce – with whom I have kept in touch intermittently over the years – direct one of those stories, ‘crying out to be made into films’.

My first port of call, after my reading marathon, was my agent’s office. Without her support I might as well go whistle in the wind. I had narrowed down the list of novels to one, Lucinda Brayford (1946). Despite the difficulties of filming a story that takes its main character from birth to late middle age, I was sure this Anglo-Australian tale of love and betrayal, war and social change, would make a compelling film.

Fortunately, my agent agreed with me. A proposal was written, and sent to Andrew Brown, the Australian head of Euston Films. That was when we struck the first hurdle. The novel had already been made into an Australian miniseries (1980), with Wendy Hughes in the title role, opposite a young Sam Neill. Undeterred, Andrew dug deeper. The series (four fifty-minute episodes) had been only a qualified success. Budget limitations meant that the Old World–New World conflict, central to all Boyd’s work (he once described himself as a ‘geographical schizophrenic’), could only be hinted at visually. Scenes that should have been quintessentially English were shot on the cheap in Australia. A similar problem arose when Outbreak of Love (1957) was filmed the year after Lucinda. This time it was not the lack of authentic Englishness that let the series down, but the penny-pinching nature of some of the public scenes.

‘We could do it better,’ I insisted. ‘As a co-production.’

Andrew was up for that, but perhaps understandably, no one in Australia was.

So we moved on to Boyd’s Langton Quartet (1952–62). Here we felt we were on firmer ground. The story, as I wanted to tell it, would centre on the character of Dominic, the hero of A Difficult Young Man (1955), another of Boyd’s inept titles. Andrew was keen. As, like me, an expat, he was drawn to the story of a young, Anglo-Australian man, who volunteers to fight for England in World War I, then loses not just his faith in the Empire but his sense of having a home in either country.

But it was more than that. As I got to know Andrew better, I realised we had a common interest in writers who had somehow fallen through the cracks of literary fashion. Martin Boyd was one of these. Popular and critically successful in the 1950s in both Australia and England, the very different world of the 1960s saw him marginalised, pushed off the perch by writers who more comfortably conformed to the national mythology. Boyd, like the characters in his books, was seen as ‘dated’, ‘irrelevant’, ‘snobbish’. His stories, which look backward not forward, told of a world that had already disappeared. The ‘squattocracy’, principal object of Boyd’s social satire, along with its offspring, materialism (a force brilliantly personified by Boyd in the character of Straker in Lucinda), had triumphed. The literary tradition these movements would spawn was as alien to Boyd’s aesthetic as chalk is to cheese. Yet the world Boyd writes about existed. It is, as Andrew and I agreed, integral to Australia’s story.

Sadly, my working relationship with Andrew came to an end with his departure, because of ill health, from Euston Films. The proposal then went to a new company, headed by Jo Willet, who had been Andrew’s assistant. Things went wrong at this point, and I almost lost control of my work. But I learned a valuable lesson. I would be more careful in future. Clearly, I was on to a good thing with Martin Boyd, but since his books were in the public domain I would have to make sure whatever ‘cross-dressing’ I engaged in had my name firmly stamped on it. Not always easy when writing ‘on spec’.

For more than a decade after that, the trail went cold. I suspect it is an urban myth that producers are hanging out for a forgotten ‘minor classic’ to turn up on their desks, but it’s a myth that sustained me through that time, when my attempts to interest anyone in either the United Kingdom or Australia in Martin Boyd yielded nothing more than an overdraft and the suggestion from well-meaning friends, though never from my agent, that I give up.

Then, as the 1990s were draw-ing to a close, a door opened. A friend from university days had founded a small production company in Sydney. Passionfruit Productions had recently made a successful miniseries called Aria and Pasta (2000), which drew on my friend’s experience as an opera singer on the world stage. In a moment of mutual folly, we decided to bid (there was another interested party) for the option on the two books in the Langton Quartet that had formed the basis of my adaptation. Neither of us really knew what we were doing.

Dominic’s War, my name for what would be structured, on Bruce Beresford’s advice, as a two-part series, has all the ingredients for both popular and critical success. An intimate story played out against the epic background of a world at war, it dramatises love in many guises: the youthful Dominic’s love for his first cousin, Helena; the love of an ageing English colonel for the charismatic Dominic; the aristocratic Sylvia’s doomed love for Dominic; his lust for her; Dominic’s intense sense of connection with the naïve young solider Hollis. With the right actor to play Dominic – the kind of role that could turn a little-known thespian into a star – the series should be a winner.

But it was not to be, least not with Passionfruit Productions. Despite several drafts, and Bruce’s name attached, the right co-partners could not be found, and the enterprise collapsed.

In the meantime, I had approached the BBC with a proposal for a radio version of Lucinda Brayford. To my astonishment, my proposal was accepted. For once I was not fobbed off with, ‘Who the hell is Martin Boyd? Can’t you choose an Australian writer people have heard of?’

The decision of the BBC was that I should tell the story in three, hour-long episodes, which they would broadcast as part of The Classic Serial. Things started to look even better when my suggestion that it be done as a co-pro-duction with the ABC in Australia was taken up. I had already met and been impressed by Richard Buckham of the ABC, in Melbourne. Richard, like me, was a Boyd aficionado. Working with him would be a bonus. Sadly, for reasons I don’t want to go into here, the co-production collapsed, and the BBC was left to go it alone. The result was something of a curate’s egg, with some cast members sound-ing not like nineteenth-century Australians but like citizens of an as yet undiscovered country.

I am still talking to Bruce Beresford about Dominic’s War, and I’m still hopeful. The BBC read the scripts and thought long and hard before concluding that the timing was wrong. The war in Iraq had just started. No one wanted to think about shooting war scenes. The ABC read the scripts and reacted favourably, but said it had no money. What it did offer was hope. If a British producer could be found, they might reconsider. My good friend John Clarke read the scripts, but all he could do was encourage me to keep trying. Another friend, Mark Gooder of Icon Films, told me I would have to rewrite the scripts as a film. Recently, John Barnett of South Pacific pictures read the scripts and offered to talk to the ABC. And so it goes …

Currently, Dominic’s War is with Nick Witkowski of Alchemy in the United Kingdom. Nick is a fan of Martin Boyd’s work. I am also talking to Richard Buckham about a possible radio version.

Peter Craven, in his review of Beresford’s memoir, called the failure of the Australian film industry to pick up Bruce’s script of Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortune of Richard Mahony (1930) a case of ‘poor fellow, our country’. The same might be said of my efforts to keep Martin Boyd’s work in the public imagination. But there is hope yet. Fortunes, like governments, do change.