There he remained but a short time before he was attracted to Australia by the gold fever. He put in some hard work on the diggings and, winning a considerable quantity of the precious metal, decided to try New Zealand, arriving in Southland about the year 1857. Deceased built a store in those early days on the east side of the North Road at Avenal, and … supplied goods to miners as far away as the Mataura district, which he waggoned all that distance. Shortly afterwards he constructed a tramway through Queen’s Park, from the North Road at Avenal to Elles road, for the purpose of supplying firewood to the residents, and at a later date erected an hotel at the west side of the road, which he occupied for some years. It was known as ‘The Governor Grey’, and was then a small wooden building. Afterwards he re-erected a brick hotel near the site of the old one….

Deceased was a man of great physical strength, and his courage was exceptional. While on the Victorian diggings he demonstrated these qualities by capturing an armed bushranger named Higgins, for whom the authorities were in search …. Beneath his dark skin beat a kind heart, and those who knew him when he was in a position to assist others, say he was generosity personified …. Deceased was one of the oldest members of the St. George Lodge of Oddfellows. He leaves a widow, one daughter, and three sons, also nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.26

The problem of fact and fiction is not an easy one; most war books contained elements of both, including the memoirs. John Galsworthy saw this in his preface to R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm where he tried to put his finger on the nature of its ‘new form’: ‘I suppose you would call this a war book, but it is unlike any other war book that I, at least, have met with …. “The Spanish Farm” is not precisely a novel, and it is not altogether a chronicle … quite clearly the author did not mean it to be a novel, and fail; nor did he mean it to be a chronicle and fail. In other words, he was guided by mood and subject-matter into discovery of a new vehicle of expression—going straight ahead with the bold directness which guarantees originality.’27 The finest books from World War I were shaped—like New Zealander Alexander Aitken’s stoically elegiac Gallipoli to the Somme, David Jones’s In Parenthesis, Blunden’s Undertones of War, Manning’s Her Privates We. Each is, as William Blissett puts it, ‘both based on experience and thoroughly composed, a “thing made’”.28 Certainly Passport to Hell is ‘composed’; Robin Hyde is concerned to show the making of a man who can both murder a surrendering prisoner and carry a wounded comrade across no-man’s land as ‘gently as a kitten’. But she also wishes to claim the certainty of fact. She had to project a world in which Stark would live convincingly and assert, ‘This book is not a work of fiction.’ She relied too heavily on Stark’s veracity. In one particular incident concerning his schooldays she was forced to remove the account from the ‘new edition’ of 1937 and wrote to the Southland Times with a public apology:

I am given to understand that on page 26 of my book ‘Passport to Hell’ I have recounted an incident concerning which I was misled, and which may be understood to reflect unfavourably on the Gladstone School, Invercargill and on Mr Duncan McNeil, its headmaster during Starkie’s period of tuition there. Starkie himself informed me—though in a perfectly humorous way, and I am sure, without intention of injuring either one of his old schools or anyone else concerned—that at the time he was such an incorrigible truant that his father on three days chained him up to the school doorstep. I accepted this and recounted it in good faith, but on Mr McNeil’s statement that the occurrence never took place, had the paragraph removed from the ‘serialized’ version of my book, have written to the publishers to have it deleted from future editions, and finally will be glad if you will give publicity to this correction.29

The most powerful criticism of the factual background of the book came from one who had served like Starkie in the Otago Infantry Battalion (though he seems to have joined up some eighteen months later) and was a native of Invercargill. His name was John Tait and he wrote two letters to the Southland Times which annoyed Robin Hyde immensely, perhaps because she had followed Stark so closely. Tait begins:

In the New Zealand Division there were many stories told of J. D. Stark, commonly known as ‘Starkie’. Some of them were true, many of them distorted or exaggerated, some of them purely apocryphal; but all agreed in emphasizing his contempt of danger and discipline alike. Broadly regarded ‘Passport to Hell’ gives a vivid and plausible picture of a strange character. The detail, however, does not bear critical examination. The author opens her prefatory note with this sentence, ‘This is not a work of fiction.’ The natural presumption is that she offers her work as a record of truth in which case one would have expected her to verify such details at least as she readily could. A few minutes in a reference library would have corrected her ideas (and spelling) of Avenal, Waihopai, the time when Invercargill went ‘dry’ and ‘the battle of the Wasr’.