Louis Alan de Norville (called Alan after his uncle) was born in Tallangatta in a hospital that is now underwater, and this seems to have set the trend of his whole life.  His parents were in a disfusional marriage so they shifted from pillar to post taking little Alan an only child with them His father was of French origin ,an optician who believed in being the only one in town as the most profitable way to survive in those depressed times.  

As Alan grew up by the age of 13 yrs was reading the Arabian Nights at boarding school and being taught by those wonderful teachers at Ballarat Grammar, who read novels and poetry out loud to the class injecting him with a sense of the power of words and a feast of intelligence and at the same time a quest for the future a liberation that had no limits.  

He went to live with his father and his mistress when his mother died and they were the dominating forces in his life.  What better manic beginning could one want as an apprentice Prophet And Poet.?  

The peace de resistance was when his father put him on a train in Bairnsdale in Victoria and sent Alan to his old French mistress in Melbourne to live in her dining room . That's where he started writing to sort out the cyclone of feelings that raced through his 16yr old body. Even though he has started working as an apprentice in research and development of cars, he wrote poems that captured the aspirations and hopes of his workmates and piers, and dreams of travel in the future.

This compulsiion to write Poems never stopped. He was married at 24 and his wife was well into art and was quite a talented sculpture in clay. They had 4 children and during the marriage, while building his 35ft yacht, he wrote poems in chalk on the huge hull in the backyard.

One day, realising that they should be kept and preserved as a voice to record the failing marriage, as his wife left to live in Africa to follow the beat of her own drum.