La Nauze; but the fact that he felt deeply his geographical and intellectual isolation in Perth was not evident to even his close associates there. Through the inter-war years, Murdoch broadened his influence upon Australian life—most noticeably within the western state but extending throughout the Commonwealth. On the young campus, he had a considerable following outside his own department and his immediate academic colleagues. Murdoch was known for his help to students and junior colleagues in difficulties. Sympathy for underdogs and a willingness to champion lost causes extended beyond Murdoch's academic environment. It coloured his second major contribution to Western Australian life: his association with several other members of the foundation professoriate in building closer links between the university and the community. His most effective medium was the column he contributed to the "Life and Letters" page of the West Australian on alternate Saturday mornings. Combined from 1933 with occasional day and evening talks on radio—he was to prove a very effective broadcaster—and appearances on public platforms, frequently in the chair, it brought Murdoch a wide and varied local following. His writing attracted, in his biographer's words, varying types of people "who read him, all with interest, most with pleasure, some with disapproval, over many years". "No other writer in the history of Australian letters has built so wide a reputation on the basis of the essay as a form of communication." These essays were directed at the widespread literate, but by no means academic, population of the still very isolated state. But Murdoch's audience did not stop there. Indeed, the "Elzevir" articles had begun to reappear in the Argus in 1919, and the essays in varying forms found an all-Australian market when Murdoch's writings were eventually syndicated on the Melbourne Herald network, then chaired by his nephew Keith Murdoch. Walter Murdoch's essays came to be read by others, then and much later, through collection and book form, from Speaking Personally (1930) onward. Moreover, for nearly twenty years from 1945, he conducted a weekly "Answers" column consisting of "little essays" on various questions, which was syndicated throughout New Zealand and most states and which was read by a huge public. What Murdoch described as his one "real book", Alfred Deakin: A Sketch (1923), was the result of work done in a year's leave in and around Melbourne. It was not successful financially, nor as an introduction either to a larger