Graham McInnes: 1912-1970

Graham McInnes was a member of a well-known and sometimes eccentric artistic family. His mother, a cousin of Rudyard Kipling and granddaughter of the painter Edward Burne-Jones, was a prolific novelist who wrote under the name Angela Thirkell. His younger brother, Colin, became a well-known British novelist in the 1950s and 1960s and achieved notoriety for both his lifestyle and the subject matter of his fiction.

Born in England and raised in Australia, Graham McInnes moved to Canada in the 1930s and soon became a well-known journalist and arts critic, penning A Short History of Canadian Art (1939) amongst other books. He worked as a producer for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), and in 1945 left to join the Foreign Service, eventually becoming Canada’s first ambassador to UNESCO. During this time, McInnes wrote a series of successful memoirs and novels about growing up in Australia, including The Road to Gundagai (1965), Humping My Bluey (1966), and Goodbye Melbourne Town (1968). His writing has been praised by Mordecai Richler and Robert Hughes among others, and he died in Paris in 1970.