After emigrating to Australia in 1903 at nineteen, Theo Price, then a plumber, settled in Victoria. He later travelled extensively through northern Queensland where he undertook employment in a variety of occupations, including cook and bookkeeper. In the early 1930s Price and his daughter, Rima, lived in Townsville, at times in very straitened circumstances, and at this time he stated his occupation as author.
Price had submitted a manuscript of a novel with 'a romantic fictional treatment of Aboriginal legends' to P. R. Stephensen's (q.v.) Endeavour Press in 1932. He referred to it as his 'Australian Mystical Romance' entitled 'Moongooloonga'. Craig Munro's Wild Man of Letters : The Story of P. R. Stephensen (1984) reports that Price wrote Stephensen a series of pleading letters desperately requesting an advance of twenty-five pounds as he and his daughter were almost starving. In July 1933, Price threatened suicide. Stephensen responded by sending Price an abridged version of the novel for approval and urged him to stay calm. Price realised there had been extensive amendments to his novel which he believed reduced his 'poetical prose' to 'school-boy simplicity'. However, he signed the contract to ensure he received the twenty-five pound advance on royalties.
The book was published in 1934 as Gods in the Sand. Munro comments: 'There was, however, almost universal acclaim for the improvement in book production and design which Stephensen brought about. Price's book, based on Aboriginal legends, had a particularly effective black jacket, and the The Labor Daily thought the best part of the book was its "well-designed cover", a sentiment shared even by Price's hometown paper, the Townsville Daily Bulletin.' The jacket of Price's Gods in the Sand was praised by the Melbourne Sun as 'cover artwork at its best - arresting, imaginative, delicate'. (Munro, p.142).
Just a few years later, in 1938, Price was living in Brisbane when he died. A brief article in the Courier Mail of 6 August 1938 states that 'Theo Price, 52, of Gordon Street, Paddington, died in the General Hospital last night from incised wounds on the neck and left arm. It is alleged that the injuries were received at his home yesterday.'
