The following year, she was the subject of a major Australian literary controversy because she had falsely claimed Ukrainian ancestry as part of the basis of the book (and her pseudonym).
[5] While studying English literature at the University of Queensland, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who collaborated with the Nazis in The Holocaust.
[citation needed] The novel tells the story of a Ukrainian family trying to survive a decade of Stalinist purges and state-imposed poverty and famine.
They suffer abuse by the drunken local commissar and are refused treatment by the village doctor and his wife (a secular Jew).
The two young brothers are separated in military assignments: 16-year-old Evheny to Nazi Einsatzgruppen C (a mobile killing squad) and the elder 19-year-old Vitaly to the SS training facility for Ukrainians at Trawniki in Poland.
Evheny is implicated in the massacre at Babi Yar outside Kiev, while Vitaly is posted to Treblinka extermination camp as a guard.
The novel is told primarily from the point of view of Kateryna, sister of the two brothers, and Magda, Vitaly's common-law wife from the Polish village near the Treblinka extermination camp.
The book is frank about the antisemitism of its major characters (who blame Jews for the excesses of Communism), and Dale represented the lives of Ukrainian military men in a sympathetic manner, rather than featuring their victims as is more usual in Holocaust literature.
There was a perception that the attitudes of the author "Helen Demidenko" may have been informed by her Ukrainian ethnic identity, until her pseudonym was revealed along with her false representation of the book as history.
[citation needed] When Dale submitted her novel to the University of Queensland Press in 1993, she said it was based upon recorded interviews with her own relatives, among others her uncle "Vitaly Demidenko".
In 2017, an investigation by BuzzFeed revealed that Dale had also plagiarised a number of social media posts in her Twitter and Facebook feeds.
"[12] In 2000, Dale was again accused of antisemitism after interviewing David Irving, a Holocaust denier, for Australian Style magazine during his libel trial in London.
Graduating with a first class honours degree in law in 2005,[citation needed]she commenced work as a judge's associate for Peter Dutney, a justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland.
Dale is reported to have worked variously as a graphic designer, property law lecturer, and physical education teacher.
[citation needed] In 2014, Dale returned to Australia, becoming a senior adviser to David Leyonhjelm, a Liberal Democrat member of the Australian Senate.