He was captured by the Germans in the first days of World War I in France at the Battle of Mons and spent the next four years in prisoner-of-war camps.

His four-year incarceration included lengthy periods of solitary confinement as a result of repeated escape attempts.

In 1918, he studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and then privately with Johan Hendrik van Mastenbroek [nl].

[1] By this time his paintings had become widely known and had already been acquired by the Contemporary Art Society, London, the Tate and Leicester City Gallery.

He built a hut on Bribie Island in Queensland, where he lived for the rest of his life except for visits to India and London during the 1960s.

It was singled out by fellow Australian artist James Gleeson, who said, "He has fashioned an extraordinarily fascinating hybrid from the pictorial traditions of Europe and the calligraphy of China..." (The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 June 1961) He is one of the few European painters to have drawn extensively from Oceanian art.

He often used the cheapest materials such as cardboard or newspaper and poor quality paints, and many of his works were lost or became damaged by the tropical climate in which he lived.

It is a novel based on the life of Tao Chi whose eccentric approach to religious teaching was in accordance with an ancient and respected Chinese tradition of how a sage should behave.