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Mumblings from Munchkinland 34 GRAHAM STONE, 1926-2013: A LIFE IN SCIENCE FICTION A leading authority on Australian science fiction, the librarian and bibliographer Graham Stone, died on November 16, 2013, after being incapacitated by a serious illness in January. Graham had devoted much of his life to original research in the genre and was also a central, albeit controversial, figure in Australian fandom. Graham Brice Stone was born in Adelaide on January 7, 1926, the youngest member of Nelson and Jeannie Stone’s family. Their ancestry was a mix of Scots and English, including couples on both sides of the family who had migrated from England to South Australia within five years of the colony being proclaimed in 1836. Hermon and Emma Brice, Nelson Stone’s maternal grandparents, raised a family of six in Adelaide before sailing back to England in 1855, only to reconsider after two years and return to South Australia. Nelson’s paternal grandfather, James Doveton Stone, emigrated from London around the same time and became a noted landscape artist and photographer based first in Melbourne and later in Adelaide; some of his works are still held in collections in both cities and in Canberra. Nelson Brice Stone, Graham’s father, was born in 1885 and became a linesman for a private firm of electrical engineers in Adelaide. Early on Christmas Day, 1903, he suffered a serious accident whilst fixing an electric cable to a warehouse in Hindley Street in the city. The cable was being suspended by a rope, part of which became entangled in the hooves of horses drawing a passing butcher’s trolley on the road 20 feet below. Nelson was jerked upwards, lost his balance and fell to the ground. The trolley driver immediately took him to Adelaide Hospital, where he remained unconscious for around a day. After recovering, he later joined the public service, becoming an instrument fitter, mechanic and eventually, a telephone technician in the Postmaster-General’s Department. In February 1911, Nelson married Jeannie Campbell McAnna, the daughter of a prominent Adelaide tailor. The first of their sons, John, was born late in the same year. Their marriage was clearly successful at bringing the Stones and McAnnas together, as Gladys Stone, one of Nelson’s sisters, married Jeannie’s brother Alan in 1914. Nelson and Jeannie had a second son, Brian, the following year and a third, Alan, who was born in 1922 but lived only a few days. Graham was their final child. Later in life he would always be rather pleased that he had been born the same year as Amazing Stories, but he wouldn’t see a copy of this or any other American sf magazine until he was 11. His earliest interest in sf was sparked by the futuristic tales he found in the weekly English story papers for boys like The Champion, The Triumph and The Modern Boy. He became a regular reader of these in mid-1933 and especially enjoyed the Captain Justice stories which ran in the latter. - 2 - Just a few months later, in September 1933, the family’s fortunes changed when Nelson Stone died. The immediate cause of death was pneumonia, but he had been suffering ascending myelitis for at least a year. He was only 48. Graham was not yet 8 years old. Jeannie received a small government pension and help from relatives, but struggled to support the family during the Depression. His two brothers could not find regular work in Adelaide and both left within a few years to try their luck elsewhere, initially Sydney. Alan and Gladys Stone had moved there years earlier and established a clothing factory and John was given a job there by his uncle. Graham was put on a bus to visit them there in late 1936 and found Sydney enthralling, but his other brother Brian could not find a permanent job in the city and travelled further north to try his luck at mining in northern New South Wales and Queensland. Jeannie and Graham stayed in Adelaide, but in 1937 they had to move, too, from their home in Newstead, a near-eastern suburb of the city, to beachside Semaphore, further from the city to the north-west. A decade earlier, the beach, jetty and various seaside attractions might have made an exciting change for Graham, but by the mid-1930s the suburb was in decline. The jetty had suffered severe storm damage for which there was no money for repairs and the local tram line into the city had closed. Jeannie ran a residential (boarding house) for a while and then a commercial rental library. By this time Graham was following the comic strip adventures of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers in the newspapers and The New Idea, but he had also found adult works by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells at home. He sought out more in the local Mechanics Institute and rental libraries, finding the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs first. He read through as many of the Tarzan, John Carter and other series as he could find in a few months. Other books he discovered were Vandals of the Void, the early space opera by the Australian J.M. Walsh, and John Beynon’s Planet Plane (author and novel both to become better known under different names: John Wyndham and Stowaways to Mars). The vast interstellar vistas of his reading contrasted sharply in his eyes to the mundane surrounds of suburban Adelaide. Around May of 1938 Graham made another startling discovery in one of the shopfront lending libraries: the second issue of the English magazine Tales of Wonder, which included a sequel to the Beynon novel Graham had read the year before. More importantly, it used two words on its cover – science fiction – that he recognised immediately as the name for the type of stories he loved. Excited to learn that they were regularly published in magazines, he promptly went in search of more. This was not an easy task in Semaphore, but he did soon have a few more Tales of Wonder and then a neighbour gave him some issues of a gaudier American pulp, Thrilling Wonder Stories. By October he had also found examples of Astounding and Amazing. Graham read every word of these magazines, including the letters from other readers, a few of whom were Australian. He never tried to contact any of them at this time, assuming that they must all be sophisticated adults. Many years later, looking back over a 1939 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories he found that he had missed a letter from another young Adelaide fan, John Gregor, “eager to start a Chapter of the SFL in his city” and announcing “that the first Australian fan magazine, Science Fiction Review, will soon be ready for distribution”. Had he xx - 3 - seen this letter earlier, Graham might have contacted John and gained a role in the production of that first Aussie fan mag. In reality, the two never met in person, but they did correspond about Gregor’s one-shot years later. Graham knew more about the fanzine than John remembered. In late 1939, Jeannie told Graham that they were moving again, as her brother Alan had offered her work in his clothing factory in Sydney, too. Graham was elated at the news and, once in the larger city, ecstatic at the abundance of remaindered American pulp magazines. He was soon frequenting a number of newsagents and rental libraries to find them and over the next few years he collected or read several hundred back issues. Around October 1940, Graham discovered that he was not alone. One of the bookstalls he often visited was at The Spot in Randwick. The owner, George Nash, asked Graham one day if he knew two other boys who read the sf magazines and lived nearby. Graham took their names and addresses, wrote to them and received an enthusiastic reply from Bert Castellari by return post. Soon he had met Bert and Jeannie Stone others and learned of the Futurian Society of Sydney. A dispute had led to a suspension of regular FSS meetings, so the first fan gathering that Graham attended was actually the First Sydney Conference held in early December to discuss how to get local fandom back on track. Soon after, back in Adelaide for the holidays, he wrote to Bert about this event. Bert used one line from his letter in the 15 January 1941 Futurian Observer, making it Graham’s first contribution to a fanzine and a prophetic statement on the future of the Futurian Society of Sydney: “As Ron Levy said at that meeting, everything will be all right until the next feud!” Indeed, the next feud erupted as soon as meetings restarted. Vol Molesworth was not readmitted to the FSS, so Castellari and Levy ‘retired’, prompting a Second Conference in April. Vol rejoined soon after. His strong personality and confident manner impressed Graham and the two would have a close association within the Futurian Society for decades. This was despite Vol’s propensity to be abrasive Alan Cordner, Graham, Vol Molesworth and and even, at times, cruel. One such instance was Edward Russell at the Second Conference, recalled by another early Futurian: 13 April 1941 - 4 - “Graham and I had visited Vol at what must have been his parents’ home at Oyster Bay or Kangaroo Point… It was here that Vol displayed a sadistic streak. Graham was/is an arachnophobe, a fact that Vol knew when he said “watch this” and told Graham that he had a spider on him.” (Arthur Haddon, letter to the author, 21 July 2008) As a regular attendee of Futurian meetings, Graham enjoyed compiling quiz competitions that the others found too hard.
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