The possibility of publishing The Hanging Garden was broached with Mobbs in 2010. She was sceptical but did not veto the idea. A typescript was prepared under the supervision of Professor Margaret Harris and Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby of Sydney University, as part of their work on the White papers funded by an Australian Research Council grant. Harris and I then checked the transcription together, leaving about twenty unreadable phrases to be deciphered by Mobbs, the greatest living expert on White’s handwriting. We also enlisted the writer Angelo Loukakis and my colleague at the Sydney Morning Herald Anna Patty to deal with White’s Greek. One impossible Greek phrase defeated us. Otherwise we ended up with a clean and unambiguous text.
It is not a first draft. White had clearly been through the manuscript at least once making corrections. Nor is it a final draft. He had left notes here and there in the text about problems — nearly all trivial — that needed to be addressed. The most substantial comes in the manuscript’s last pages, where White has the news of Hitler’s defeat reaching Sydney (wrongly) in the evening. He had a lifetime horror of anachronism: ‘Foregoing passage on end of the war in Europe in need of revision as the news came through in the morning. First must come the address of school heads, then in the evening personal reactions of parents and children to the great event.’
Where White planned to take the novel after VE Day remains entirely opaque. I have found nothing in his letters to indicate what he may have had in mind. After he put the manuscript away he rarely mentioned it again. There is, however, a clue that Eirene Sklavos and Gilbert Horsfall might end up in contemporary Sydney. On the back page of the last of the five bundles of manuscript is this calculation in shaky ballpoint pen:
14 in 1945
50 in 1981.
Mobbs had the typescript in January 2011 and read The Hanging Garden for the first time. The decision to publish was taken in March. ‘I’m extremely nervous of posthumous publishing, which I usually don’t admire. But this is up to a very high standard and even though it is only part one, it is complete in itself,’ she declared. ‘I have no doubt it deserves to see the light of day.’