It is however doubtful either that he understood or that his readers appreciated the depth of his achievement as a writer. In Red Letter Days Jack Beasley suggested, with some truth, that Marshall’s greatest artistic creation was his own public figure. Certainly, there was a continuity between the Alan Marshall you met in his books and the man himself, whether he was performing on the public stage or speaking to a few old or new friends. The key to this continuity was his gift for friendship, which enabled him both to communicate easily with others and to create on the page characters whom the reader can instantly accept as people he has known as friends for the whole of his life. Yet this quality of human ease, far from restraining Marshall from plumbing the depths of experience in his works, served rather to conceal from the reader the art with which he strung together his words.

Alan Marshall always regarded himself as a story-teller, a yam-spinner in the great Australian tradition. In an interview recorded some months before his death, he said that he felt he had never reached the greatest heights of the novelist’s art, and that his works remained fragmentary. It is true that he never attempted an epic novel, for he lacked the unifying ideological vision necessary for such an undertaking. But the lack of an over-riding abstract pattern in his work represents one of its greatest strengths. His faith was not in dogma but in the common man and woman and their ability to feel and act to build their own world, if only they were given the chance.

Although Marshall wrote in the humanist and democratic tradition of Henry Lawson, his stories have an affirmation which is usually lacking in Lawson. He learned from Lawson the apparently casual shape of the yarn, with its inconsequential beginning and the ending that places it firmly in its context, whether of theme or character. But whereas Lawson’s endings are characteristically downbeat, expressing the endurance of resignation rather than of hope, Marshall more frequently finished with an affirmation. We see this above all in his stories about children, whom he portrayed not as objects of pity but as tough-minded survivors, ready to empathise with the outcast but above all eager to incorporate the whole of experience in their own lives. The end of the story ‘Old Mrs Bilson’ says it:

Joe and I stood there in the morning holding our traps, but Mrs Bilson wasn’t there waiting for us. She was dead and in all the world there was no one we could talk to like we had talked to her.

The mention of traps and talk encapsulates the action of the story, and the sense of loss is absolute, but this sense is balanced by the knowledge that the two boys have taken what Mrs Bilson offered them and so had given her a small victory over her circumstances. Through them she lived, not in the future, but in her present.

In grasping the moment, the situation, the person, Alan Marshall lived in his present and offered it to us and his readers. He brought to his work the gifts of the observer and, above all, the listener. His people exist intensely in their words, and we are able to exist more intensely for having known them.

Alan Marshall once likened his life as a writer to the journey a man makes across the plains, through swamps and thickets, and up steep hills. But at the top of the hill, he said, he pauses and looks back, and then he sees the splendour of the landscape he has crossed. In his stories, he said, he tried to convey the view from the hilltop.

In his writings Marshall conveyed the darkness of violence, injustice, pain and loss, but he always kept also the view from the hilltop, all the clearer for its patches of darkness. He may not have emulated the epic accomplishment of his admired Tolstoy, but he shared with him the gift of making concrete in words the full reality of his world. Like his Mrs Bilson, he is now dead, and there is no who will be able to talk to us as he did.