'Lenora Jane Frayne' comprises two small sections from a larger work of creative nonfiction and fiction, 'Faith, Hope and Stubborn Pride: Searching for Heaven in Aotearoa and Australia' (2016), based on my research into my family history. Much of this larger work is written from traditional research and conforms to the tenets of biographical writing in that statements are supported by facts and evidence. Some sections of the larger work, however, are purely imagined, though inspired by known facts and historical evidence. They are my attempts to cast light where my traditional research provided none. On one hand I have stolen the identity of family members whom I never knew and used them in fictional narratives; on the other hand I have used what facts I could uncover from historical sources to create a biographical narrative. 'Lenora Jane Frayne' offers an example of the imagined as well as a more traditional biographical sketch.

The archetypal detective in American crime literature is a heterosexual male, usually living alone though enjoying female company. Dashiell Hammett was an expert in creating such characters and the genre he helped create developed its tropes further with the works of writers such as Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy. In the 1950s, one young writer aimed to emulate these successful others. Joseph Hansen (1923-2004) did not succeed in becoming a writer of pulp crime novels, but he did have some success writing as James Colton and publishing paperback originals marketed in sex-oriented bookshops.

When I first began this work, my aim was to provide a simple chronicle of my family, a potted history for my great nephews and nieces who had little knowledge of how their forebears had come to the Antipodes. The truth was I lacked much knowledge of those forebears myself. I did not know what I was to encounter. I began with a few resources but quickly found I needed many more. And the story expanded. I found I was no longer writing a chronicle; instead, I was telling the story of people with faith, people who came from a history of discrimination and prejudice who sought the freedom to worship as they saw fit in new lands. It was a story that resounded with my own personal experience, even while it went counter to it in many ways. What was apparent to me was that, while the faith of these people was strong, they did not seek to enforce it on others. They were humble with it. In the main, they did not seek great wealth. If it came their way, they accepted it but with little pretension or ostentation. A large number of these people came from the non-conformist churches founded in Britain by John Wesley and his followers. Some, once they were in New Zealand, still questioned the faith they had been born into. My maternal grandmother and grandfather became Unitarians in their youth, my grandmother coming from a Catholic background and my grandfather from an Anglican one, and they remained in this small church for the rest of their lives. The Unitarians were considered heretics when the church was first formed in the sixteenth century. Because the principal tenet of the church is a denial of the Trinity, that is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, some argue the church remains heretical and is not Christian at all. The battle of faith continues.

Holding each of these books is a pleasure. Their two-tone covers have different but complementary botanical design motifs while the master design elements of the UWAP Poetry series, pushing on 23 titles, of which they are part gives them a uniform appearance. They are a credit to Terri-ann White and her team at UWAP in Perth. The miserably small print runs for volumes of poetry often lead to scrimping and saving on design and production, but here at least design costs have been defrayed over the entire series and it pays off in the look of the finished product.

Early gay Australian novels stepped delicately in their depiction of homosexual relationships. In a murky legal climate, both publishers and authors fumbled in their efforts to recount overt homosexual narratives. As well, they were constrained by social conventions. In this environment, writers acted as their own censors, sometimes guided by their publishers, but more often cautiously coming to terms with being able to tell their own stories. Fifty years on, it is possible to document the manner in which some writers of novels with overt gay narratives navigated their problematic world and how the final works were influenced by self-censorship and censorship. As well, some reception of these writers' works by the mainstream literary market is given a preliminary analysis in this article.