William Nicholas Willis was the third child of native born parents, John Willis, a blacksmith, and his wife Margaret nee Lehane. A Roman Catholic, he was educated at the local denominational school and at St. Mary's School. Willis started work as an office boy at nine years of age and was later employed at the Victoria Theatre and appeared as 'W. N. Kington' with William Creswick's Shakespearian company in 1877-1878. In the period 1879-1888, Willis opened and managed stores in the country areas of New South Wales in partnership with T. L. Richardson.
The year 1888 saw him marry Mary Hayes, take up a homestead lease and own the Central Australian and Bourke Telegraph. In 1887 he won the seat of Bourke as a Protectionist and held it until he won Barwon in 1894. Willis held that seat for a decade but was defeated for Darling in 1904. In Sydney he had become a land and financial agent. In August 1890 Willis and George McNair founded Truth, a weekly journal of sport, crime and exposés. It was immediately successful, soon achieving a circulation of over 30,000. Willis remained a major shareholder until 1896 when he sold his share of the publication to John Norton (q.v.), possibly as a result of blackmail. While Crick was Secretary for Lands in 1901-1904 Willis made a profit from shady land transactions that required ministerial assent. The appointment of (Sir) William Owen as royal commissioner into the Lands Department saw Willis leave the country. In July 1906 he was returned to Sydney under police escort to face criminal charges but twice juries failed to convict him.
Willis left for London around 1908 or 1909 and established the Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company, possibly in 1912. He also seems to have had a share in the Camden Publishing Company which existed until 1955. John Arnold describes the Willis publishing venture in the following terms: 'The staple of the firm was, in the words of critic and Australian literature bibliographer Frederick Macartney, "novelettes [that] relate chiefly to problems of sex, the stage and the underworld." Titles included Coral Pearl, A Woman of Forty, Eve and The Man, The Dancing Girl and The Wife, The Husband and The Lover. The suggestive titles were matched by their colourful illustrated covers. Most of these novelettes appeared under the pseudonym of 'Bree Narran'.' Miller notes that 'The advertisements state that 'Bree Narran' is an 'Australian author'. Both Cyril Pearl and Miller and Macartney argue the Bree Narran novels were written by Willis but Martha Rutledge suggests they were written by the son, also William Nicholas Willis, who joined the business in 1919 after serving in the 6th Light Horse Regiment. None were published under the pseudonym before 1919 but John Arnold states 'further research and correspondence with family members suggests that they were in fact the work of Willis senior.' It is worth noting that the 'Bree' and the 'Narran' were rivers in northern New South Wales in the area that Willis once held as a member of the New South Wales Parliament. Arnold also suggests in his 'Working Checklist of Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company/Camden Publishing Commpany Ltd Publications' that Willis may have written the novel, Defiance (1910) under the pseudonym 'Oliver Wentworth'.
Willis wrote a series of books on prostitution and venereal disease with racy titles such as White Slaves in a Picadilly Flat (1913). His crusade against the white slave trade was allegedly supported by the Bishop of London and other religious dignitaries. In an unsigned preface to Should Girls be Told? [1917] they are quoted as claiming of Willis: 'his untiring and persistent efforts to awaken the national conscience to the system of commercialised vice (with its attendant evil, venereal disease) which thrives in our midst, have succeeded in completely revolutionizing public opinion.' (Preface, vii) Under the pseudonym of Marion Lehane-Willis Willis wrote a novel, The Painted Women, which also warned against the dangers of a sinful life.
In 1914 Willis published The Kaiser and his Barbarians. : An Authoritative Record of the Crimes Committed by the Germans in France and Belgium in the Name of War, Together with the Official Reports of the Commission of Enquiry Appointed by King Albert of Belgium. He also produced translations of risque French literature which were not published until the early 1930s and a 'Sexual Science Series'. In 1920 Willis published Wedded Love or Married Misery which horrified Marie Stopes by implying she was encouraging immorality. In November 1920 the Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company was successfully prosecuted for sending a racy translation of Guy De Maupassant's A Woman's Life through the mail on grounds of indecency. (The Times, 3.11.1920: 9). Despite claims that the 'Bree Narran' novels sold over three million volumes, Willis died penniless. The Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company was wound up in late 1932 but the 'Bree Narran' novels continued to be issued under the Camden imprint in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is not known if the younger Willis was still connected to the company; he had moved to Ireland in the 1930s.
Melbourne Punch (2 August 1906) described Willis as 'a stout, florid man, whose vigour seems unabated by trouble, who challenges attention by his strong individualism, who talks in the racy vernacular of the street, and who may be relied upon to put up a good fight.' John Arnold argues: 'In the Bree Narran novels and in Defiance, Willis showed that he could write and he certainly had a good sense of imagination. And there was a message, whether deliberate or not in his books. The cad and bounder, in the long run, always got their just punishment. In regards to the novels of Bree Narran, if the company's sales figures are to be even half-believed, he is without doubt one of Australia's least known most successful authors.'
Source: Adapted from Martha Rutledge, 'Willis, William Nicholas (1858 - 1922)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, MUP, (1990): 512-513); John Arnold, 'Promoting, Publishing and Sensationalizing Sex: W. N. Willis and the Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company', British-Australian Studies Association Biennial Conference, 'Projecting Australia', Cardiff 2-5 September 2004; John Arnold, 'Australian Books, Publishers and Writers in England: 1900-1940' (2008); John Arnold, 'Working Checklist of Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company/Camden Publishing Commpany Ltd Publications' (Unpublished paper)
See also the full Australian Dictionary of Biography Online entry for 'Willis, William Nicholas (1858 - 1922)'.
