Gerald Glaskin

His novel A Waltz Through the Hills was made into a 1988 film of the same title. His most commercially successful work was a novel about a homosexual love affair, No End To The Way (1965), published under the pseudonym Neville Jackson. Interviewed in later life about the novel, Glaskin said: “It was banned in Australia and the paperback publishers, Corgi, researched the Australian censorship laws, and discovered that the book could not be shipped to Australia. So they chartered planes and flew them in”. It was not inspired by his relationship with noted genealogist Leo van de Pas (Leonardus Francisus Maria van de Pas, 1942–2016), whom he met in 1968 in a gay bar in Amsterdam, and lived with from then onwards till the end of his life.

In 1967 he met the British writer Iris Murdoch, who was visiting Australia. In a letter to her friend Brigid Brophy she wrote: … the opera house is the most beautiful single object I’ve seen since getting here (with the possible exception of a West Australian novelist called Jerry Glaskin, whom I had reluctantly to leave behind in Perth).

Some sources claim that he won the Commonwealth Prize for Literature in 1955, but subsequent research has disproved this, finding that he was awarded a grant in 1957 which he could not retain due to living outside Australia at the time. His works were received more favourably in Europe than in Australia. He lived mostly in Asia and later the Netherlands, until returning to Perth in 1967. His extensive time overseas may have been because of the oppressive Australian moral climate of the period against homosexuality. In 1961, he had been charged with indecent exposure on a Perth beach.

He was also a silent financial partner in The Coffee Pot, a popular Perth meeting place for homosexuals, bohemians and students which was established in the 1950s by Dutch Indonesian migrants, and was then the city’s only late night cafe.

Gerald Glaskin (G. M. Glaskin) (16 December 1923 – 11 March 2000) was an Australian author.

Gerald Marcus Glaskin was born on 16 December 1923 in North Perth in Western Australia.