The magazine Salt, produced from La Trobe Street, Melbourne, was staffed by a colourful band of journalists, photographers, and press artists in uniform, who covered all aspects of events at home, abroad, and on the battle fronts. But from the start, Salt policy encouraged contributions from all of the armed services and published some fine poetry, stories, feature articles, and drawings by men and women on active service and on the home front.

It must have been some time during 1944 when the lean, dark­haired, ebullient (with perhaps a shade more than the usual male vulgarity) Private Frank Hardy, an aspiring writer who had already won the School of Modern Writers Competition with his story ‘A Stranger in the Camp’, joined our unit, surprisingly not as a writer, but as an artist, a general penman for the journal and producer of dinkus and map illustrations.

Frank worked earnestly in his spare hours on his writing, and, we suspected, his talking. It seemed in those days when he was not doing one, he was certainly doing the other.

And so, myself, Ambrose Dyson, nephew of the famous Will and Salt’s editorial cartoonist who was to tragically die in the early postwar years, and Frank Hardy, formed the ‘art department’ and, for the remainder of the war years, an inseparable trio of mates endlessly discussing the political and aesthetic responsibility of the artist in society. Frank, in his autobiographical The Hard Way records some of our lighter exploits on Salt.

During this period in Melbourne, Frank was planning his Power Without Glory and I recall this title was settled before the first paragraph was written. Most of the book was later completed over a drycleaning shop on Richmond Hill close to the corner of Bridge Road and Lennox Street.

With his notorious trial, and acquittal for criminal libel that followed the crypto publication of Power Without Glory now in the past and behind him, Frank sailed for Europe and further study and experience. I did similarly. When he returned to Australia Frank lived in Sydney. During 1964 he wrote to ask me would I illustrate his Billy Borker stories which had been an enormously popular ABC television series now to be published by Reed in book form. At Frank’s Manly flat that year we ‘picked up the threads’ discussing travels, achievements, ambitions, and the job in hand which was of course concerned, indeed very much so, with Australian humour. At this time I had been pondering over, and analysing indigenous Australian humour for the Heineman edition-to-be of The Inkedin Image, a social and historical survey of Australian comic art. I had formulated the theory that Australian humour – certainly, that before 1950, or thereabouts, was humour of factual statement related to life, a humour that had no concern with the exotic or the bizarre, was bush­born, and had at its very core the persistent theme based on the reaction to environmental adversity the underlying attitude ‘you can’t win!’ This though was ironically expressed: ‘You can’t win’ as demonstrated in Australian rural-theme humour meant in a wry sense that the’ bushmen were not defeatist, pessimistic, or cynical. Quite the reverse: ‘you can’t win’ was simply an acceptance of the fact that there is no royal road to success – so you battle on.

To say Frank Hardy, was dumbfounded by my findings and theoretical distillate of Australian humour would be telling a lie. Frank is never silent for long, nor lost for words. But he was impressed – very – and in his Author’s Note to The Yarns of Billy Borker briefly acknowledged this. My views coincided with that he felt, but could not, or at least had not articulated as a working theory supporting that which he does supremely well, again demonstrated in some of the thirteen stories just published under the title The Loser now will be later to win. If proof be needed that today, Frank Hardy is the finest Australian writer of comedy fiction, doubters are urged to read his masterly piece of comic writing ‘Christmas Comes but Once’.

Frank Hardy’s subjects in The Loser, ‘stories of hidden Australian history’; he describes them, as al­ways concern people – or more properly ‘characters’ – within the trade unions, the poor, the blacks, with Henry Lawson and Victor Daley – two disastrous ‘losers’ in a fine piece of storytelling – and within events of the Cairns riot, of Rum Jungle, and at Wattie Creek.

Whilst this writing, unlike say, Who Shot George Kirkland?, has no ‘occasion’ about it, nevertheless, noting the Lawson echoes here and there in Hardy’s phrasing and syntax, the qualities emerge. This collection, because of his skill and indeed zest for storytelling of a sort together constructed with an ear alert for our observation, spoken language by white man and black, is not only entertaining but a documentation too of our times.

I reflect on that morning spent with Frank Hardy at Manly, then exactly midway in time between his beautifully told ‘The Load of Wood’ and the more involved writing of The Loser story ‘A Terrible Beauty is Born’. I wonder if anything I said then influenced Frank afterwards? Perhaps it is just coincidence that Frank Hardy, a writer who loves quoting other writers, was to discover these lines from a Bob Dylan song:

Cause the loser now

Will be later to win

For the times they are a-changing.