When Robert was looking for a new subject after his fifth book appeared in 2011, his wife suggested her great-grandfather James Clark, known to his contemporaries as the pearl king. He was sceptical at first, thinking information about his life as pearl-sheller and pastoralist would be in short supply. A search of old newspapers through Trove quickly changed his mind, making it clear there was plenty to work with and, exciting to discover, a terrific story to be told. Digging deeper, many further sources came to light, best of all the very large collection of Clark’s letters at the John Oxley Library. The Pearl King is mainly a Queensland story, and Robert is most grateful to Dan Kelly and Boolarong for taking it on and doing such a nice job with it.
Robert wrote his first book, Beating the Odds in a Big Country, 20 years earlier, after a career in science writing at CSIRO in Canberra. It’s the story of a decades-long, Australia-wide cattle disease eradication campaign. That project sparked a taste for writing history and biography; his website: http://robert.lehane.id.au/ has information about the books that followed.
Book by Robert Lehane:
