She is matter-of-fact also about the failings of her husband, her son, and her appalling old father. ‘Come down and have a row with me,’ he would order her in his later years. Husband and son gave her hell a lot of the time with their frequent suicide attempts. The drug-related violent death of her son left her bereft of a baby grandson, the missing heir, who was adopted out of the family.

‘I am descended from many thousand years of suffering,’ she wrote. ‘Occasionally I have nightmares but nobody is interested so I never mention them.’ This is about the only time her robust philosophy lets her down. Generally she mocks herself and the accolades that eventually flow to the writer who began her career at the age of twenty-three in 1935 when her first novel won the S.H. Prior Memorial Prize.

This is one of the few autobiographies produced by that extraordinary generation of women writers who began to flourish in the thirties – Dark, Pritchard, Cusack, Palmer, Barnard Eldershaw. And for that reason alone, despite Kylie Tennant’s best endeavours not to define herself or her times, The Missing Heir is doing what even the most skilful biography couldn’t have done; it is allowing us to hear for ourselves where a lot of their work and attitudes came from.

Like most of the writers of her generation, Tennant grew up in the educated Christian middle class, with all its snobberies, its moral injunctions, and misdirected childrearing practices. She somehow managed to get her family to accept her as an eccentric at an early age, although, when she threw in her first job at the ABC in Sydney and ended up working in a newspaper kiosk on Kew railway station, her father came ‘trumpeting down to Melbourne like a mad bull elephant … and demanded that [she] be taken into custody and deposited in a home for delinquents.’ Here aged nineteen in the kiosk of ‘a brilliant raconteur’ Tennant received just the education she needed to be the kind of writer she believed in.

She abandoned the notion of becoming a journalist and instead ‘built up a technique as others did elsewhere of using facts as a foundation for a broadly comic fiction which people would read drowsily for entertainment without realizing that my stories were penetrating the subsoil of their minds and presenting a picture of their society.’

That picture of society was informed by the Depression, by Spain, by the social divisions created by the Russian Revolution, and by the threat and reality of war.

You either had to champion the fusty secondhand sham handed down from England to its mortgaged estate of Australia, the suburban cowardice that rushed to the money trough, the Saturday afternoon tennis, the Sunday surfing, the sport, all the distractions that kept people in neat little breeding boxes in long rows of clean streets, or you had to say that, yes, you were in favour of a country where men and women were legally equal, where married [women] teachers were not sacked as a matter of course from their jobs as soon as a depression hit, where marriage and childbearing were not iron clad religious obligations ruled by a church openly patriarchal.

To get her stories, Tennant went on the track. ‘I walked from Coonabarabran to Brisbane [600 miles] the first year I married.’ She jumped trains, talked to rural workers and their families, stayed in travellers’ camps among people who were moving from town to town for the dole and odd jobs in exchange for a feed. The Battlers, published in 1941, was written after going on the road for many months with a half draught horse and an old laundry cart, accompanied by a feminist friend, ‘whose unfair and uncomplimentary picture I gave in The Battlers (she did not last very long).’

Tennant’s books were poorly published in Australia, suffering from the lack of a strong local publishing industry. Tiburon was rejected by English publishers because it had first appeared in Australia and had had ‘the cream skimmed off the market’. Other books were unavailable here for long periods of time although they were well received in the UK and the States.

Her father and husband finally got together after the war to produce their own editions for Australia, under the Sirius imprint, which sold straight from the printer, poorly designed and not proofread. Their homegrown appearance, plus their subject matter, probably did nothing to help establish Tennant’s reputation amongst academics who disparaged her work from their English Departments.

Australian writing was not yet regarded as literature, not yet deemed worthy of inclusion in reading lists, despite a large local readership for fiction and poetry. Tennant was one of those writers who, under the auspices of the Commonwealth Literary Fund, was invited onto the campuses to speak of Australian writing from the early 1960s, when things were beginning to show signs of change.

She spent a good deal of her life in the bullring ‘barracking for the bull’ – working for those who were dispossessed by a society that in the main mindlessly took what was meted out. Australian writers were dispossessed too, and Tennant, in spite of her attempts to put herself down, is a major figure on the literary landscape.

I only hope the ABC gets round to taping Kylie Tennant reading The Missing Heir. The book goes some way towards illuminating a considerable slice of our cultural history – certainly further than a well-modulated biography ever could. But the voice of this kindly and gutsy old girl telling her tale would be better still.