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A Sense Of Place Publishing is proud to include author and former Australian Ambassador Dr James Cumes among its authors. His erudite and entertaining essay on the evolution of Sex and the Short Story shows him at his Renaissance best.

At first glance Cumes’ pursuit into erotica and the short story appears at odds with the official nature of much of his career, which ended with a string of senior diplomatic postings, including Head of Mission in Paris, Geneva, London, Bonn and Berlin.

Cumes worked his way up the Australian Foreign Affairs Department and subsequently became a distinguished Australian Ambassador to the European Union. His career has also included acting as Australian representative to the United Nations and Governor on the Board of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Dr Cumes has written a dozen books on economics, history, government and human behavior; and four novels, including Haverleigh, based on his experiences as a teenage soldier in World War Two.

His fiction and memoirs ranges across a broad range of subjects and locations while his exploration of sensuality, of the capacity of individuals to lose themselves in the warm embrace of another, takes readers into the very heart of desire.

Other books by Dr James Cumes include The Human Mirror: The Narcissistic Imperative in Human Behaviour and The Hedonist.

At first glance the authors’ interest in carnality, the beauties, fascinations and absorptions of the flesh, appears at odds with much of his other writing. Some of the material in Cumes’ collections of short stories, such as Life is a Belly Dance, is unequivocally erotic. Some have an admixture of war and individual gallantry.

The material in the subsequent volumes relates to events of the last 80 years. Cumes wrote his erotic stories during the half-century from 1954 to 2009.

On the economic side of the ledger, Cumes foretold and diagnosed the “stagflation” of the 1970s in his books The Indigent Rich (1971) and Inflation (1974). In his later writings he was unique amongst economic commentators in explaining how domestic inflation shifted to external trade and payments, especially from the 1980s onwards. This was a shift which created the Asian Tigers and enabled the resurgence of the giant economies of China and India.

Decades later, his tightly argued economic text America’s Suicidal Statecraft (2006) proffered a compelling critique of prevailing orthodoxies.

It is the very diversity of Cumes’ interests which makes him such a fascinating personality.

In Sex and the Short Story Cumes combines his natural love of life with his innate curiosity, long history of writing on the subject and broad reading to deliver a take on the West’s shifting definitions of what constitutes the obscene.

James shares his time between his homes in Vienna, Monaco and Australia. In his inter-personal and business contacts he remains forever the gentlemen.

We first made contact when I was asked in my role as a general news reporter at my country of origin’s national newspaper The Australian to write a story about an Australian themed play Cumes had written. It was receiving the unusual honor of being performed in Vienna, Austria.

The paper’s Arts Section, which generally disdained the uninformed work of news reporters, wanted someone who could tell a straight story uncluttered by the opinion which fills the copy of many art critics.

The article, titled Petrov Affair Dramatizes Injustices, was published in early 2008 in The Australian newspaper and began:

“Australian plays are rarely performed in Europe. But this week a new Australian play, The Lovers The Outcasts, has been advertised throughout the Viennese underground, on billboards and on the sides of buses and trams.

“Beneath a picture of a handsome young man stroking the belly of an equally handsome young woman is the declaration that the play, written by James Cumes, a former Australian ambassador to Austria, is about to have its world premiere.

“The Lovers The Outcasts is a historical echo: the story of the Petrov affair that transfixed Australia in the 1950s and, in an era of anti-communist hysteria, contributed to making Liberal Party hero Robert Menzies the longest serving prime minister in Australian history.

“The affair had all the elements to fascinate what was then an isolated culture: Soviet spies, a beautiful woman in the shape of Evdokia (Eva) Petrov, and scandalous accusations aimed at the highest reaches of the Australian government.”

The article went on to record James Cumes’ own association with the Petrov affair in his ever colorful life. As First Secretary in the Department of External Affairs in 1954, Cumes knew many of the people involved in the Petrov imbroglio.

As he cheerfully puts it, he worked "cheek by jowl with the 'nest of traitors' alleged at the time to infest the department".

Cumes knew personally those whose careers were "most unjustly" destroyed.

History has shown that many of the accusations made at the time about Soviet sympathizers infesting the Canberra bureaucracy had no foundation.

"I knew no one with whom I was not then and would not now be proud to associate," Cumes says.

"The story arouses a variety of emotions, personal, political and even, of course, strategic in so far as it demonstrates the clash of Cold War ideologies in the second half of the 20th century. Eva became a darling of the media. She was described as beautiful, elegant and a leader of women's fashion."

With the advantage of historical distance, Cumes has been able to unpick many of the ironies of the Petrov affair and to show how both husband and wife were exploited by the conservative government of the day. The documents Vladimir Petrov took with him when he defected destroyed people's careers and lives, but ultimately proved to be little more than gossip.

Cumes was one of the few people in all my decades of journalism who showed the common courtesy of ringing up and thanking the journalist for a positive story. We have remained in contact ever since. His unwavering support of other writers is an inspiration; as is his work ethic and the clarity of his particularly lively intelligence.

William John Stapleton.