White Lies – Where There Is Smoke or the “Dickie White Saga”, as the locals entitled the tale, was originally told to Janice Newnham as an explanation for the spooky atmosphere which she experienced as a tenant living in the house originally built for the Dickie and Elizabeth White.
The tale fuelled a desire in Janice to find out more about Dickie White, the shadowy protagonist of the ghost story. Over the subsequent years, she spoke to a plethora of actual- and second-hand witnesses of the saga. Janice sourced documents and records from the Trove website (hosted by the National Library of Australia) and the archives of the Public Records Office of Victoria, accumulating a mass of research material. She pored over the grainy black and white images and deciphered the smudgy old newspaper articles and ancient documents, trying to fathom the depths of the story and details of the characters. Due to a very busy business and family life, the story remained stalled in her mind and she didn’t make a start on writing the novel for decades.
In December 2019, just short of the 80th anniversary of the final event of the Dickie White Saga, the Black Summer Bushfires stormed through the Upper Murray, and the house, centre stage to the saga, was destroyed. It was a profound echo of the past: In January 1939, the Black Friday Bushfires, fires of a similar magnitude and with similar disruptive impacts on individuals, property, environment, and community bonds, ripped through Walwa and the rest of the Upper Murray. The repercussions of the bushfires led to the sudden and tragic demise of first, Elizabeth White (nee Brennan) and subsequently, her husband, a man known to the Walwa community as Raymond / Richard /Dickie White. He was a man with a mysterious past and who was the focus of small-town rumour and gossip.
The similarity of events and fractured community bonds in the aftermath of a massive bushfire disaster in 1939, and then again in 2019/20, caused Janice to look at the mystery of Dickie White with fresh eyes. She took it as a sign to stop procrastinating and turn the history and folklore into a novel.
White Lies – Where There Is Smoke is her interpretation of the ‘Dickie White Saga’ or ‘Walwa Tragedy’, as the newspaper journalists of 1939 dubbed the sequence of events.
This novel is based on fact but re-imagined with dialogue and descriptions which may often flagrantly deviate from reality and venture into creativity in the interests of continuity and colour. Many of the characters have the names of actual witnesses to the event as detailed in inquest records and local history, but some are pure imagination, as is all of the dialogue.
The story is an intriguing mystery laced with local history and firmly set in the location of Walwa, in the Upper Murray. The tale hooks the reader from the opening chapter making it very difficult to put down, so ensure you clear your schedule before opening the book.