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Bruce Steele. Walter Lindesay Richardson MD: A Victorian Seeker. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013, 200pp. ISBN 978-1-921875-97-7 AU $39.95. http://www.scholarly.info/book/324/
This new biography of Walter Lindesay Richardson is one of the products, perhaps the final one, of the many years of research carried out at Monash University on the life and works of his daughter, Henry Handel Richardson (HHR), the largest scholarly project yet undertaken on any Australian author. In particular, it draws heavily on the letters written by Walter Richardson and other family members, as published in Meg Probyn's Marriage Lines: The Richardson Family Letters 1854-1877 (2000), as well as on Dr Richardson's own publications on medical matters and on spiritualism.
As HHR herself eventually admitted in Myself When Young (1948), in broad outline the life of the eponymous hero of her best-known work The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930) paralleled that of her father. Like Mahony, Dr Richardson came to Victoria in the 1850s after the discovery of gold, was a storekeeper, then a doctor at Ballarat, married a younger woman called Mary and after some successful years in Victoria returned to England. After the failure of a couple of attempts at medical practice there, he came back to Australia where his investments in mining companies allowed him to retire in Melbourne and devote himself to intellectual pursuits, especially spiritualism. During this time, two daughters were finally added to the family, which in 1873 once again set sail for England. While there, Dr Richardson received bad news about his investments and hurried back to Melbourne. His attempts to resume medical practice there, and later at Chiltern and Geelong, were increasingly unsuccessful, in large part because of his deteriorating health. In 1878 he...