The Maslyn Williams Network

This paper provides some accounting for recent work by the authors on a cultural biography of Ron Maslyn Williams (20 February 1911 to 11 August 1999), an Australian photographer, writer, film-maker, and musician. An inveterate traveller and man of influence in many artistic and diplomatic spheres around the world, he became a leading Catholic figure, a kind of “cultural ambassador” promoting a worldview that far outreached “Anglican” constraints. Williams’s prodigious talent is mirrored in his multi-perspectival career, extensive travels, and numerous relationships with people on the world stage. In attempting to locate the most appropriate way in which to deal with the fragments and encounters in Williams’s life, as they inform the particular yet multifarious post-war culture in which he performed, the authors have taken an historicist approach to identify six nodes of a transnational cultural network in which Williams operated.