Australian Dictionary of Biography

David Martin, 1961, by Louis Kahan © estate of Louis Kahan and the University of Melbourne

Prints and Drawing Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of Melbourne

David Martin (1915–1997), writer and political activist, was born Lajos Frigyes Detsinyi on 22 December 1915 in Budapest, younger of twin sons of Leon Leopold Detsinyi, a Hungarian Jew and officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, and his German wife, Hedwig, née Rosner. His mother died of influenza in Berlin in 1917, so he and his brother were raised by their father and stepmother, along with two half-sisters. Ludwig (as he was known) was educated at schools in Berlin, and at a private boarding school at Haubinda, Thuringia, where he ‘started to write aggressively satirical poetry’ (Martin 1991, 42). After leaving school, he became an apprentice in the garment trade and was briefly a member of the Communist League of Youth before it was supressed in 1932.

With rising antisemitism in Germany, Detsinyi fled to the Netherlands in 1934 and spent a year working in a Zionist training camp in the Zuider Zee. He worked for a horticultural firm in Budapest and on a kibbutz in Palestine, then served in the medical corps of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Joining his father in London in 1938, he was employed in the family button manufacturing business and began to write poetry in English. On 17 July 1941 at the register office, Hampstead, he married Elizabeth Richenda Powell, a bookstore employee and a great-great-granddaughter of the Quaker and reformer Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845). Detsinyi later described Richenda as ‘an agnostic Christian socialist’ (Martin 1991, 156). The couple had a son, Jan, in 1944.

Moving to Glasgow with Richenda after their marriage, Detsinyi was a radio monitor and translator for the London Daily Express, and published his first book of poems, Battlefields and Girls (1942). He adopted the pen name David Martin, later changing his name by deed poll. Back in London, he was a feature writer (1942–44) for the European service of the British Broadcasting Commission, then literary editor (1945–47) of Reynolds News. During this time he published a novel, Tiger Bay (1946), about a Somali seaman and a drifting girl in Wales; a play, The Shepherd and the Hunter (1946), about Jewish heroism and Arab tragedy in Palestine; and The Shoes Men Walk In (1946), a collection of autobiographical realist stories.

Martin was naturalised as a British subject in November 1947. The next year he shifted with his family to Bombay (Mumbai), where he covered the partition of India and its aftermath as a stringer for the Daily Express. His novel The Stones of Bombay (1950) featured a young refugee from Pakistan who finds his place in the world through communism. Travelling to Australia in February 1949, Martin was briefly the Sydney editor of the Australian Jewish News, and wrote Birthday of a Miner, an agit-prop play commissioned by the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. In mid-1949 the Martins moved to the hamlet of Putty, 150 kilometres north-west of Sydney, where Richenda was the sole schoolteacher.

Deciding to stay in Australia, the Martins moved to Boronia, near Melbourne, in 1951. Richenda continued to teach, and David earned a modest income as a freelance journalist and lecturer for the Council of Adult Education. Feeling he was losing touch with the masses, Martin moved with his family to the suburb of Coburg in 1955. He covered the Melbourne Olympic Games for The Hindu, an English language newspaper based in Madras (Chennai), becoming its Australian correspondent until 1967. In 1957 he was a research assistant for the sociologist Fred Emery, with whom he co-wrote a book on the psychological effects of television viewing. Later he carried out social surveys for advertising agencies and taught creative writing at a business college and through his own correspondence course. He had occasional affairs, of which Richenda was aware, but the couple remained married. More than that, Martin wrote appreciatively about their literary collaboration, with Richenda critically reading and editing all his work.

Having joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1951, Martin was an active member until 1956, when he became disillusioned following the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He was associated with the Melbourne Realist Writers’ Group but insisted that his poetry went beyond socialist realism. When reviewing Martin’s 1953 collection, From Life: Selected Poems, A. D. Hope acknowledged Matin’s ‘real poetic gift’ but described the collection as ‘nearly all red-hot propaganda of the crudest sort’ (Hope 1954, 11). This led to a good-natured exchange of verses between Martin and Hope, which was published in the first edition of Overland. Martin became a regular contributor to the journal, writing political commentary and literary criticism. He also wrote for Meanjin, notably two essays in 1959 which dismissed the work of Patrick White and the modernists in favour of the realists Frank Hardy, Judah Waten, and John Morrison.

In January 1958, during a trip through South-East Asia, Martin interviewed Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi and wrote a sympathetic but somewhat critical report of the North Vietnamese president for The Hindu. Back in Melbourne, he was asked to resign from the CPA by the State secretary, Ted Hill. He eventually joined the Australian Labor Party and continued to be interested in various political and religious movements, including anarchism, Buddhism, and even, for a short time, Scientology.

While living in Coburg, Martin published two more collections of poetry (1958 and 1965) and wrote his four best-known novels. The Young Wife (1962), set in Melbourne’s Greek community, was one of the first Australian novels to delve into the politics of a migrant community; while The Hero of Too (1965) drew on Martin’s experience of bush life at Boronia, both mocking and celebrating country town stereotypes. His travels in Indo-China inspired The King Between (1966), a satire about the fictional kingdom of ‘Lhaodia,’ caught between American-controlled territory and China. Martin was an active opponent of the Vietnam War and an early advocate in 1966 of armed neutrality, later publishing a well-argued manifesto, Armed Neutrality for Australia (1984). After a two-year trip to Europe in 1967–68, he published Where a Man Belongs (1969), about an epistolary courtship between a German widow and an expatriate German living in Australia.

Martin became depressed by his surroundings and took to travelling in both Australia and India. A hitch-hiking trip led to the travel book On the Road to Sydney (1970), with illustrations by his son. In 1972 the Martins moved to the Victorian town of Beechworth, where David wrote a series of fourteen children’s novels characterised by their clarity of narration, attention to social issues, and optimistic conclusions. This mood continued, although more quizzically, in his autobiography, My Strange Friend (1991).

Appointed AM in 1988, Martin was honoured with the Patrick White award (1991) and an emeritus award (1996) from the literature board of the Australia Council. Survived by his wife, son, and two grandchildren, he died at Beechworth on 1 July 1997 and was buried in the local cemetery. In 1953 his friend Alan Marshall had praised Martin’s ability to ‘interpret Australia and Australians’ and to understand the people of different cultures: ‘You carry the brand of no country. … You sit at ease in the setting you fill absorbing its atmosphere so that it seems part of you’ (Marshall 1953).