Donovan Joyce

On leaving education he was employed by BHP but, finding himself unsuited to that work, he performed in amateur theatricals in Melbourne and was stage manager for several productions of the Little Theatre Company.

He could not enlist during World War II because of a childhood injury, so instead he served as an air-raid warden.

Although Joyce wrote the script for a television episode of Homicide in 1966, he never adapted to writing for the small screen.

After a brief return to radio in Australia, he published The Jesus Scroll (Sydney, 1972; London, 1973), an original account of the life of Christ that became a best-seller and led to controversy and death threats.

[3] Joyce died of hypertensive heart disease on 16 October 1980, aged 69, at Prahran in Melbourne and was cremated.