David Manning Foster (born 1944) is an Australian novelist and scientist. He has written a range of satires on the theme of the decline of Western civilization and produced short stories, poetry, essays, and several radio plays.
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Early life and education
David Manning Foster was born in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia, to George and Hazel (née Manning) Foster, vaudeville and radio performers who had separated before his birth. He spent his early years in Katoomba, raised by his mother and maternal grandparents.
In 1950, Foster spent six months in Katoomba Hospital recovering from poliomyelitis, a disease that left him with a slight limp. His mother married a bank officer, and Foster attended high schools in Sydney (Fort Street High School), Armidale (Armidale High School), and Orange (Orange High School) as the family moved from city to country towns. At Orange High, Foster began playing drums professionally in a jazz dance band.
In 1961, Foster commenced Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney in Sydney, but he left studies after a year to work and travel. A year later, in 1963, he returned to the university to study chemistry at the University of Sydney School of Chemistry.
Foster worked part-time as a musician and as an engineer at Marrickville Council while he completed his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry. He was awarded the University Medal for Inorganic Chemistry in 1967 and moved to Canberra for a PhD in Biological Inorganic Chemistry at the Australian National University, from which he graduated in 1970.
Career
Scientific and early literary career
At the end of this degree, he went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States, to pursue postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Pennsylvania.
He began to write his first novellas, later published in North South West (1973). Back in Sydney in 1972, he worked as a research officer in the Department of Medicine at the University of Sydney before abandoning science for a career as a novelist. Since then, he has supported himself and his family through various jobs as a pool attendant, musician, postman, truck driver, martial arts instructor, and trawler fisherman. After the publication of North, South, West by Macmillan, Foster was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship.
Literary career
Foster's first collection of novellas was well-received, and his first novel, The Pure Land (1974), won the inaugural The Age Book of the Year prize. The story is intensely autobiographical, as it traces the experiences of the young scientist Danny Harris in America and Australia. At the novel's end, Danny has abandoned science and appears to be inventing the novel in which he is a character. His grandfather, Albert Manwaring, has left his life as a photographer in Katoomba to seek success and, finally, spiritual purity in America; Danny, born in America, reverses the journey to find a pure land in Australia. The novel depicts the materialism of America and the colonial history of Australia. Another collection of stories followed this novel, Escape to Reality (1977), which pursued Foster's interest in male irresponsibility and the paradoxes of science and art. With a fellow scientist at the Australian National University, called 'D.K. Lyall' (Des Kirk), Foster published The Empathy Experiment (1977), a strange exploration of paranoia in the context of scientific experiments in empathy.
A 1978 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship enabled Foster to travel to Scotland to research Moonlite (1981), his acclaimed satire on colonialism, which places the experiences of Scottish islanders during the clearances of the nineteenth century in paradoxical comparison with the colonising of Australia at the same time. Plumbum (1983) uses Foster's experience in jazz bands to satirise the contemporary Western adulation of rock musicians, contrasting this enthusiasm with the various religions of Bangkok and India. The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross (1985) is a burlesque historical satire on the paradoxes of religious belief, following the picaresque adventures of Christians as they search for the philosopher's stone. Dog Rock: A Postal Pastoral (1985) offers a more benign comedy as Foster examines the trivia of an Australian country town like Bundanoon. A second Dog Rock novel, The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger Cover (1988), continues this nostalgic view of a disappearing rural life with particular reference to the misuse of animals. In 2012, Foster published a third Dog Rock novel, Man of Letters. Testosterone (1987), inspired by a residence in Venice in 1984, uses the convention of the separated twins to satirise the cultural differences between Britain and Australia, with a third possibility represented by Italy. Among its many allusions and parodies, the novel invokes the traditions of Carnival and Carlo Goldoni's play, The Venetian Twins.
After the Australian Bicentennial celebrations of 1988, Foster published his satire of the state of contemporary Australia in Mates of Mars (1991). The novel follows martial arts enthusiasts travelling from Sydney to the Northern Territory and encountering spiritualism that challenges their beliefs and attitudes. The characters represent a multicultural Australia and demonstrate the novel's premise that 'Australians are not just members of the internal proletariat of...Western Christian Civilisation (a civilisation now decrepit that can never take Colonials seriously) but also, in certain key aspects, chiefly, but not exclusively, economic barbarian members of the external proletariat of the Sinic Mahayana Buddhist Civilisation, in its Westernised Japanese, Korean, and Colonial Chinese branch, on the southernmost march of that civilisation.
Personal life
In 1964, Foster married his Orange High School girlfriend, Robin Bowers, with whom he had three children: Samantha (b. 1968), Natalie (b. 1969), and Seth (b. 1973).
In 1974, he left his wife and family to live with Gerda Busch, the singer in the Canberra jazz band where he played drums. They moved to the country town of Bundanoon, where they married and had three children: Antigone (b. 1975), Levi (b. 1976), and Zoe Foster Blake (b. 1980). Foster worked as a postman at Bundanoon for many years, and his Dog Rock novels provide a comic version of the town.
Awards
1974: The Age Book of the Year Book of the Year and Imaginative Writing Award for The Pure Land
1975: Barbara Ramsden Award for The Pure Land
1978 Marten Bequest For Prose
1981: National Book Council Book of the Year for Moonlite
1991: Australian Government Creative Fellowship (Keating)
1996 James Joyce Suspended Sentence Fellowship, UC Dublin
1997: Miles Franklin Award for The Glade Within the Grove
1999: Courier-Mail Book of the Year for In the New Country
1999: joint winner (with Bruce Pascoe) of the FAW Australian Literature Award for In the New Country
2008 Harold White Fellowship NLA
2010: Patrick White Award
Selected works
Novels
The Pure Land (Macmillan, 1974)
The Empathy Experiment co-authored with D.K. Lyall (Wild & Woolley, 1977)
Moonlite (Macmillan, 1981)
Plumbum (Penguin, 1983)
Dog Rock: A Postal Pastoral (Dog Rock #1; Penguin, 1985)
The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross (Penguin, 1986)
Testostero: A Comic Novel (Penguin, 1987)
The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger Cover (Dog Rock #2; Penguin, 1988)
Mates of Mars (Penguin, 1991)
The Glade Within the Grove (Vintage, 1996)
In the New Country (Fourth Estate, 1999)
The Land Where Stories End (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002)
Sons of the Rumour (Picador, 2009)
Man of Letters (Dog Rock #3; Puncher & Wattmann, 2012)
The Contemptuary (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018)
Short Stories and Novellas
North South West: Three Novellas (Macmillan, 1973)
Escape to Reality (Macmillan, 1977) - short story collection