His talent for evoking a sense of place and character through the barest amount of description and dialogue was one which he worked hard to achieve from his earliest theatre and radio days during the 1930s in Sydney. He joined Doris Fitton’s Independent Theatre when he was only sixteen and worked for the George Edwards Players whose serials were broadcast not only on Sydney radio but also in countries around the world. Elliott caught the Australian vernacular to perfection long before such a feat was considered fashionable and his watershed stage play, Rusty Bugles (1948), which was drawn from his own Second World War experience as an ordnance clerk in the Northern Territory, broke all box office records with its two year-plus run around Australia. Ironically, Elliott had already left Australia for America, and throughout his life he never saw a production of his most famous play.

Postwar Australia held little attraction for the electric energy Elliott had to offer. He had been fascinated by America since his boyhood when he was enchanted by the movies of the day. Family tales told to him about his deceased mother, also a writer, of her pilgrimage to the US while pregnant with him, promoting her works and savouring the experience of the Arizona deserts, also influenced his vision of America as ‘the promised land’. And America presented the young writer-actor with opportunities simply not available back home.

Within a few short years, he rose to fame as one of America’s twenty best television writers. Beginning with adaptations of the classics, he later gained accolades for his original screenplays which were broadcast coast-to-coast from New York. He was esteemed by the many then rising stars and directors who are now members of the Hollywood élite. But he never forgot the circle of friends from his youth nor the country that gave him identity.

His critically acclaimed television plays were screened across America. These included The Crater (1949) and The Grey Nurse Said Nothing (1959), which was based on. the famous ‘Sydney Shark Arm Murder Case’. Both of these dramas are set in Australia. While Elliott had fallen immediately under the spell of America on his arrival there, and his love for his chosen country sealed its place for him as ‘home’, like so many expatriate Australian literary figures, he gained a clearer vision of his native land from a distance. Australia was the canvas he painted and repainted, not through landscapes but through vivid and varied character portraits. Each of his works was at once highly critical and fiercely proud of the land and culture he had chosen to leave.

It was firstly a disenchantment with the television industry in the United States as the studios moved from New York to California, and secondly the dismal and discouraging experience of his first and only play produced on Broadway (Buy Me Blue Ribbons), that saw Elliott turn to the novel and produce the first and, some might say, still the best of his books, Careful He Might Hear You (1963). This is the autobiographical story of his childhood and the custody battle over him waged between two of his aunts which came about as a result of his mother’s death the day after he was born.

The innovative narrative form of this novel and its articulation of the then denied class divisions in Australian society set it apart from contemporary works. It is testimony to his humble nature that in 1983 he waited in a long queue in the rain outside the Paris Theatre in Manhattan to buy a ticket to see the film version of his novel. ‘It ran for thirteen weeks at The Paris, you know’, he told me some years later, his face gaining that glow of a delight remembered. ‘Well, my dear, that sort of run was almost unheard of for an imported film. And there I stood in this longish queue in the rain, and I wanted to call out “This is my movie! This is my movie!”’

Several more ‘Australian’ novels followed: Edens Lost (1970), Water Under the Bridge (1977), About Tilly Beamis (1984), Waiting for Childhood (1987), and Fairyland (released in Australia last month). Edens Lost and Water Under the Bridge have also made the transition to the screen and Elliott had nothing but praise for the adaptations of his books and for the performances of the various players. He won the Miles Franklin Award for Careful He Might Hear You and the Patrick White Prize for Water Under the Bridge.

He remembered the smallest detail of his native country so well that he scarcely ever needed to research or consult journals or books. ‘I have a marvellous memory, you know’ he confided, ‘and I slot things into different areas in my mind, in a sort of internal computer’. He referred to the piecing together of his mental plans for the novel he left unfinished as ‘opening drawers’ and said that he usually made only the briefest of notes before beginning the actual writing: ‘Perhaps five pages, none of which I’ll probably use in the book itself.’

In an interview I carried out with him late last year, at the mention of Sydney he instantly described ‘a tram coming around the corner of a street’. It seemed he really did just need to call up the right computer file. ‘Keep it simple and always know where it will end’, was his advice on writing novels.

His last novel, Fairyland, artfully demonstrates such advice. Through this final book, Elliott addressed his homosexuality and in line with his rule about knowing where it will end he begins his story at the end. Prophetically perhaps, the central character’s death dominates the opening and closing scenes, with the substance of the story fulfilling that old belief that ‘your life flashes before you at the moment of your death’. If such is really the case, we can only assume that Elliott himself must have experienced a vision splendid!

Sumner Locke Elliott remembered and rewrote the Australia he loved so often and so vividly that his own memory will extend far beyond his lifetime. He remembered well and will be well remembered.