Helen Darville a plagiarist. Who would have believed it? Certainly not Helen. When the Courier Mail drew her attention to the fact that most of her second column in that paper had been ripped off from an article on the Internet, Helen with her trademark wide-eyed naivete ("You mean to say I'm not Ukrainian?") said she had thought the article was by a British friend of hers, Mel Richards, who "gave me full permission to use it." Oh, well that's all right then.

Except it wasn't. The Courier Mail then pointed out that the article, a parody of science fiction/fantasy writing methods, was the copyrighted work of Dr Peter Anspach from the University of Oklahoma. "I can apologise and say it was given to me under false pretences," said Darville, with typical good grace. "Mel gave me the right to use it. I said to her that I liked her writing and wanted to recycle it in my columns. She said, 'okay'."

Okay. Now, given my personal starting point that Helen Darville is a cunning shameless liar, my first reaction was that Mel Richards was a made-up name, like Bob Roberts or John Smith or Markov Demidenko. But then I thought the unthinkable. What if Darville is telling the truth? So, taking a leaf out of her book (which is probably somebody else's), I logged on to the Internet in search of Mel Richards.

I found her in Bournemouth, England, where she works as a journalist. And, yes, Mel Richards confirmed that the story was pretty much as Darville told it. She knows Darville well: the two studied Arts at the University of Queensland. "Helen and I go way back," she said. "We're quite good friends."

Over the past year she had sent Darville "masses of information" from the Internet, including the Anspach item. "I found it on the Forteana list (an Internet site devoted to logging paranormal occurrences and odd events) and sent it over to her for a laugh in October or November last year. It didn't have any name on it, and what I saw there had no copyright on it."

Which is all well and good, but why was Darville - who was being paid $700 a column by the Courier Mail - "recycling" (!) someone else's work? Well, Richards, who believes that Darville is one of Australia's most talented writers, had generously given Darville permission to use her writing in her columns. (I have similar deals with Salman Rushdie and John Updike. Award winners or not, they're always in need of good material.) And had Richards given Darville permission to use other people's writing as well? Not really. She must have "inadvertently misled" Darville into thinking that the Anspach item was hers. "I didn't make it clear enough where it was coming from," she said. "Mea culpa." Mea culpa? Mea culpa? Mea maxima culpa, honey.

Naturally, Richards was slightly put out by my evil-minded suggestion that her old buddy had acted unethically. "It's not plagiarism," she said. "I personally don't see any problem in her using the material. She's a columnist after all. She's just making a point." In fact, Darville's column, "When I am an Evil Overlord", made 22 points, every single one of them written by a man who had not given Darville permission to "recycle" his work.

Anyway, she said, Darville's own lawyers had proved back in 1995 that she wasn't a plagiarist. I assumed here she was referring to the cute farce in which a legal firm hired and paid for by Darville gave their client - in September 1995 - a clean bill of health on the allegation that she had plagiarised in The Hand That Signed The Paper. This was despite the fact that in August 1995, her publishers already knew (at least according to one-time friend Natalie Jane Prior, in The Demidenko Diary) that Darvill e had unquestionably plagiarised from author Brian Matthews in an essay she wrote for RePublica. News of this plagiarism was kept well under wraps until October 1995, a month after she was "cleared". Clearly neither Darville, nor her lawyers nor her publisher considered this evidence of her plagiarism relevant in deciding whether she was a plagiarist. Nor did Richards.

"When I write an article, I take points from all over the place," she said. "I'm not going to explain where it all came from. I'm making a point of my own. If she'd written them to me, I would have used them the same way." Some combination, eh? With these two in journalism, who needs bylines? Or staff, even? Just give them Internet access, sit back and wait for the stories to flood in.

I pointed out to Richards that neither the editor of the Courier Mail, Chris Mitchell, nor Dr Anspach shared her rather singular views on copyright and attribution, and that both had concluded Darville had plagiarised. She was unswayed. "This is a media beat-up. I don't think that he (Dr Anspach) even knew about it until some muck-raking Aussie journalist rang him up and made him outraged."

Then came the clincher. The problem had arisen, she said, because the media and members of the Australian Jewish community were out to get her friend. "They started up all this rubbish about her being anti-Semitic, and when that didn't work they said she was a plagiarist. You guys (Australia/Israel Review) have been out to get her from the start."

After our chat, I surfed the Net for anything Mel Richards might have written, to better understand this woman whose writing Darville so admires. One of her outlets is the English conspiracy theory magazine, Encounters, which exposes hideous plots and UFO abductions. One Richards piece was entitled "Brotherhood of the Masters: Hidden Powers Which Secretly Control Our Lives", in which she presented "circumstantial evidence of a mysterious cabal of 'Illuminati' who manipulate multinational business interests and individual will as part of a plan to bring global society under the heel of a single world government."

Oh, how I would have loved to have read that under Helen Darville's byline. All I'd want for then would be Dame Leonie Kramer's postal address.

DAVID GREASON