Harcourt Whipple Ellis: An outrageous life

This book attempts to do the impossible: to try to untangle a mare's nest of one man's obscure, fascinating, dangerous and duplicitous life - the intersection of historical truth and rumour, family history, half-truth and urban legend. Ellis' real life and times were no less rollicking than his purported father King Edward VII. Ellis' careers as an engineer, inaugural registered dentist and chemist, lively goldfields journalist and would-be scourge of the Western Australian government's Forrest administration, outrageous fantasist, and teller of tall tales (mostly about himself), all helped to mask a grimmer reality: that of quack doctor, illegal abortionist, adulterer and wife deserter. He is quite possibly the only person in the State's history - or indeed Australian history - to have both run for parliament and be tried twice for murder. Yet through it all, Ellis seems to have preserved an insouciance and attitude of noblesse oblige that kept everyone guessing about his real origins. In The Mirror, newspaper published in Western Australia on the 29th August 1931, page 12, it was quoted: "He [Ellis] is a cosmopolitan of philosophic temper and his reminiscences (if they are ever published) should make most interesting reading."