Dynamic, complex, driven: Bryce Courtenay was all of these as well as one of Australia's most beloved authors. To his son Adam, he was larger than life, mercurial, and impossible to know completely.

In this moving, unforgettable memoir, Adam searches for the real Bryce.

An extract from Chapter Four: School Days

If Bryce was fluent in fear and loathing, he was equally fluent in solace and comfort. ‘Adam’s a worrier’ was often said out loud by both my parents. I took too many things to heart. I took everything personally and was not very good at absorbing the slings and arrows. Others would cast them all off and move on, whereas I cogitated and stewed.

Bryce saw this very early on and tried to use words and persuasion to snap me out of my moments of despondency. I think he did it, as he did everything, with story. Planting a new one of hope in his troubled son’s brain was the best method he knew.

Bryce specialised in ‘small versus big’ homilies. He himself was the little guy trying to make his way in the corporate world, a battler for the primacy of the language in a world of verbal philistines. There was another example he brought out regularly: the little advertising agency battler going up against the big corporate behemoths.

‘There is no war you cannot win – with intelligence,’ was one he told. The analogies were always sporting ones (which I loved) and it was how I learned that Muhammad Ali had out-thought George Foreman when they fought in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) a year or so earlier. Foreman kept slugging away, while Ali took all the blows. Foreman came in harder and harder, working himself into a frenzy to finish off Ali quickly. ‘Ali just copped it all,’ Dad said. Foreman clearly thought he had the fight won and Ali did nothing to disabuse him of the idea. He just kept absorbing the punches with only the occasional retort, while Foreman got slower and slower. And then in round eight, Ali delivered a five-punch combination followed by a left and a right hook that put Foreman on the floor. ‘Ali had been playing possum,’ said Dad gleefully. ‘It was the smartest thing I ever saw.’

Being a little guy, Bryce clearly saw himself as the small man’s champion. When the very first Rocky film starring Sylvester Stallone came out in 1976, it struck a chord in him. ‘That’s kind of like the story I want to write one day,’ he told me. Stallone, he said, had got the idea pretty much right – the hardworking underdog versus the unbeatable champ. Bryce would go on to use a variant on the theme when he began writing The Power of One a decade later. And it’s perhaps not surprising that John G Avildsen, best known as director of Rocky and The Karate Kid, also directed the movie of The Power of One. But it would not be, like Rocky, about the street slugger versus the pampered, overconfident world champion. It would be the big evil judge versus the little good guy, Peekay.

Even back then, Bryce’s ideas for a book were beginning to form. He told me about the great rugby teams he saw playing in South Africa in the 1940s. The hulking Afrikaners, the nucleus of the South African Springbok team, hunted down their opposite numbers as a pack. If there was an especially talented player in the other team, one who showed flair and speed in their play, they would collectively seek to injure him – sometimes permanently. They played rugby to win and instinctively knew that any brilliance within the opposing side must be immediately neutralised. The most important thing was to win against their most hated opponent, the British.

‘That usually meant the Boks played the dirtiest rugby. The idea was to maim the opposition – beat them into total submission,’ Bryce said. Then came the Bryce clincher. ‘I saw an Aussie team get badly beaten one year, outmuscled by a giant Springbok pack at Ellis Park [in Johannesburg],’ he said. ‘They never played any enterprising rugby. All they did was push, shove and intimidate. ‘They’d bully the Australians up field, working themselves to a point where they could kick a drop goal under the posts – or simply create a pushover try by sheer force of weight and power,’he said.

Knowing close to the end of the match that they would lose, the Australians ran the ball from wherever they were on the field, stringing the Springbok defence wide. ‘They ran it from their own line. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. They would throw the ball over their shoulders without even looking. They chipped the ball just over the Springboks’ heads as they rushed through, regathered and passed it across the field. We’d never seen this kind of rugby here.’ With nothing to lose, the Aussies simply cut loose. Bryce never forgot what he saw.

‘After the game, all my schoolmates got together and talked about our favourite Australian players. We were big fans of the Aussie style.’

Whether this was a true story or just one of Dad’s moralising tales to enhance my mood, it was inculcated into my brain.

Thereafter I would start thinking a lot about moral victories. When the little guy lost, at least he did something smart. Win the battle inside your own head, Dad told me, and you’re almost there. I thought even then that Dad was clearly doing this to raise my oft-flagging morale. I think he saw a little of himself in me at a similar age – albeit in circumstances far more difficult than I had ever experienced.

There was something else I often wondered about. As I was reading an early draft of The Power of One around 1987, I discovered I already knew a lot of the story. It was almost a compendium of the many vignettes he had told me over the years about South African life, but now there were names and places added. Had we all been his beta readers? His test audience? I can’t help but think he had been rehearsing his book on me all those years, as well as the many others who had been bewitched by his African spell.

Bryce was all about his commitment to never letting the truth get in the way of a good story or pitch. It was only later that I realised the extent to which he reinvented himself when he came to Australia. In that post-war era of growth, his ability to re-tool and sell himself was a parallel to his ability to bend the truth to sell products as an adman. His philosophy seemed to be something along the line of ‘hold the truth – print the legend’. As I now know, The Power of One was his story as he wished it had been. Surely he had been writing it all his life? It was the tale and the movie in his head that his imagination created and kept alive through the hardship and bullying and the dark years.

Maybe that’s what natural raconteurs do? Part of their modus operandi being to hone their stories for years, watching the reactions, testing the ideas, changing the circumstances, sharpening the endings? He also couldn’t help telling stories, because they had been busting out of his psyche for his whole life. I believe that for many years prior to writing his inaugural bestseller, Bryce had been in training. In training for the big breakout into literary stardom.