Goya Dmytryshchak
A Williamstown author has told of the tragic inspiration behind his debut fictional book.
Campbell Mattinson spent more than 20 years writing We Were Not Men, whose storyline was sparked by the death of a young local football hero Ron James.
Twins Craig and Ron James, aged 14, started out together in the Williamstown Football Club thirds in 1985 after transferring from West Newport juniors.
Ron would be sensationally selected to make his debut in the senior grand final team later in the year.
He was killed in a water-skiing accident on the Murray River at age 19.
“Ron James played for Williamstown and then went to play for Footscray, and so he was an AFL footballer on the cusp of being a star when he died,” Mattinson said.
“It was his tragic death that caused the initial outpouring and beginning of the story.
“Subsequent to me revealing recently that that had inspired the initial creation of this story, I heard somebody say, ‘no Williamstown person worth their salt will ever forget where they were when they heard that he died’.
“I’m kind of amazed that people still talk like that 30 years later, even though I still talk like that.
“It’s not easily explained and yet that death just hit people so hard.”
We Were Not Men is a fictional tale about twin boys Jon and Eden Hardacre who spend their whole lives on the river and swimming in the Williamstown and Newport area, and they have tragedy in their lives.
“You can see how I springboarded straight off that story, but I’m not trying to tell the story of the James twins,” Mattinson said.
“There was an initial outpouring after the death [of Ron] and in less than a year, maybe even in less than nine months, I had a finished novel that was big in size –150,000-plus words.
“I was at the stage where I’d done the final printout and had the envelope and was about to mail it to publishers and I just did one last read through … and I just didn’t feel like [the fictional twins’] grandmother [Bobbie] was strong enough.
“I thought that was a quick fix … and it turned out I was never happy with the story for a long time and it really did take more than 20 years for me to start being happy that I was capturing that character and I was hearing that character talk and be a rounded character rather than just a character who served the boys.”
