The Sri Lankan Henry Miller, a Burgher with a German first- and surname and a to-hell-with-it attitude, says he will continue to write, furiously.
Carl Muller, undoubtedly Sri Lanka´s best-selling English novelist, coined the term "faction" to describe his work which he says is a combination of fact and fiction. There clearly is a strong streak of autobiography and sex running through his writing which, he is not shy to admit, has been spiced up some to make the story read better. Mr Muller is a Burgher or, to use the kind of language he favours, a "Burgher bugger". Most of Sri Lanka´s Burghers, relics of Dutch and Portuguese colonial rule, have emigrated to Australia, or, as many Lankans, have it: "Burghered off down under". Once favoured by the British for a variety of jobs in government departments like the railway, customs, excise, prisons and the police, the Brits also found them comfortable berths in the plantations in the countryside and mercantile firms in Colombo.
The attraction then was that they were more Anglicised than the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The majority of the Burghers lived among the Sinhalese, and spoke Sinhala well, but their preferred language of communication, or their "home language", was English. Sinhalese (or Tamil in the plantation bungalows where many Burgher planters served as superintendents or assistants) was only spoken to the servants.
Once the Sinhala Only Act was adopted in 1956 by Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, and English ceased to be Sri Lanka´s official language, the Burghers felt that their time was up in a nation which they had over generations learned to love. Usually white skinned and with European-sounding names, the white Australia policy of those days was no deterrent to their emigration and they left, first in a trickle and then in a stream. They might have done better in the USA or Canada, but few thought of striking in that direction. Australia, by far, attracted the greatest numbers and they are doing very nicely in that country where they have been joined by many Sinhalese and Tamils who, like the Burghers, found conditions at home not strictly to their liking.