Rex Winston's paintings, the return of the morals' police, Tom Keneally's The Commonwealth of Thieves

I have just discovered Kempsey's Dunghutti-Ngaku Aboriginal Art Gallery (DNAAG). This painting, Milky Way Dreaming - Turquoise is by Rex Winston.

Born in Sydney 1968, Rex belongs to the Gamilaraay language group.

He was adopted by a white family at three months of age and grew up at Nyngan. Winston’s interest in his birth mother and Aboriginal heritage was sparked when he first began painting. With the support of his adoptive parents and a government agency, he was able to locate and meet his birth mother.

A self-taught artist, Winton is an established commercial contemporary artist who has undertaken numerous commissions. Works are held in numerous private collections, including the Kerry Stokes collection.

Winston’s contemporary paintings are a response to his environment and landscape, expressed through an innate skill for precise dot markings.

Do have a browse through the Gallery's collection. I found a number of the works visually appealing and the prices are pretty good too.

I hadn't heard of the American writer Joseph Bottum until kvd pointed me to this piece in US publication the Weekly Standard, The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas. The piece is subtitled How it is that we once again find ourselves rooting out sin, shunning heretics, and heralding the end times.

Given Bottum's apparent prominence as a US thinker, I probably should have known who he is. Still, I tend not to follow US thinking unless I have a very particular reason for so doing.

I grew up in a strongly protestant Methodist/Presbyterian tradition tempered, to some degree, by an Anglican thread and by the sometimes broadness of view of my family with its perceptions of progress and action. I certainly understand the concepts of sin and guilt! Still, I had some difficulty in translating Bottum's very American frame to an Australian context. However, I could see what he was on about.

We actually live in very strange times marked by a proliferation of secular theologies and the imposition of right views of behaviour as seen through the eyes of a growing multiplicity of increasingly narrowly focused beholders. They all tell us what we should do, should not do, and in many cases have the political influence to enforce their views.

In the end, I did get two books for Christmas. One was Tom Keneally's The Commonwealth of Thieves, the story of the establishment of the penal colony in NSW.

I was interested in the book for several reasons. For example, how did Keneally turn what is, after all, a narrow niche subject into something that seems to appeal to a broader global audience? Then I was interested at a technical level in the way he structured his sentences, paragraphs, sections and chapters for effect.

The two link, of course. Keneally is a very good writer with the capacity to tell a tale. His simple writing structures link to his story telling role. Then his global reputation breaks through barriers in the minds of those who do not know where Sydney is, know little about Australia and care less about either. They are prepared to read because they have liked his previous books, know that he can tell a good yarn. They find from the first paragraph that they do not need background knowledge, it's a story with its own internal cohesion and context. In this sense, it can be read  just like  a novel.

I still have to finish, but I am enjoying the book.

Lydia O'Neil's Dinkum Aussie

Ursh, a Facebook friend of mine, collects old books, particularly anything to do with Australia and the Australian Military.

Among her collection is a book of poetry published in Brisbane by Watson, Ferguson & Co. Ltd. in 1924 and written by Lydia M. D. O'Neil. The poems are about Lydia's travels around the world during WWI and her time in Brisbane and in particular the Wynnum, Manly and Lota areas of Brisbane.

I had not heard of Lydia O’Neil, so looked her up on the AustLit data base. I quote:

O'Neil's maiden name was Dunham. She was educated in Pennsylvania public schools in the United States and published short stories in American popular magazines from 1913 to 1934 with her peak output being 1918 and 1919. A story, 'Pennsylvania' also appeared in Stockman Stories (1913) and was originally published in the National Stockman and Farmer, a Pittsburgh publication. O'Neil lived in Brisbane, Queensland, during the early 1920's before moving to Killarney on the Darling Downs. She contributed poetry, fiction and magazine articles to Queensland and other Australian newspapers and journals including The Bulletin. H. A. Kellow's Queensland Poets (1930): 246 comments: 'The courageous poetry of Lydia O'Neil, devotee of the creed of Kipling and Noyes, braves its discipleship in Dinkum Aussie (slang for 'genuine Australian') and leaves no observance out. For Miss O'Neil loves to write of soldiers and sailors and other of the King's men, of bonny jackaroos, of lean brown men nursed in a lean brown land - Australians all;...She is a typical extraverted sensationist, viewing Port o' Spain, Hong Kong, Alaska, Norway, Bokhara, or Ning-Po-Fu! The romantic glamour of these places lies primarily in herself. And so everywhere she puts a brave face on the outside world; there is the will to make the beautiful and to see all things at their best, as that best is conditioned by the poet.' (Source: J.H. Hornibrook's Bibliography of Queensland Verse With Biographical Notes (1953): 58)

The book opens with Ursh’s favourite poem of all. I wonder how many modern Australian men would recognise this image of them?

DINKUM AUSSIE.

He is long, he is lean, he is wiry;
He is loose-limbed and carelessly hung;
He is quick on the flare-up and fiery;
He swears with an eloquent tongue.
He's at home on a horse or a camel;
He could sleep in the top of a tree;
He'll try anything twice, and again if it's nice,
For a dinkum Australian is he.

His skin is as brown as a gipsy's;
Like a gipsy he's thoroughly versed
In the lore of the high-stepping ponies;
He is blessed with a marvellous thirst.
He smokes cigarettes by the thousands;
He is happy-go-lucky and free;
Independent and shows it, and "don't care who knows it,"
For a thoroughbred Aussie is he.

His fingers were born to a rifle;
His long legs for marching were made;
He'll stand up to the world to a finish,
And go down, if he goes unafraid.
For he's lord of the earth and its master,
The mountains thereof, and the sea;
Don't dispute or forget it, or he'll make you regret it,
For a dinkum Australian is he.

In love as in war, he's a terror,
Whom nothing can daunt or dismay;
If he doesn't run after the sheilas,
He never, at least, runs away.
His eyes are brown blossoms of passion,
Gold-glinting, a glory to see;
Sparkling and sprightful, and wholly delightful,
For a red-blooded Aussie is he.

He may hail you in French or Egyptian,
As suits his immediate whim;
The slang of Port Said and Toowoomba
Alike are familiar to him.
For he's gone where his banners have beckoned,
And his tremulous drums made their plea,
And he's picked up the platter of half the world's chatter,
For a dinkum Australian is he.

Right down to his toes he's a gambler,
A sport to his very last breath;
He will laugh in the face of disaster,
Toss pennies or guineas with Death.
He puts not his trust in his princes,
But dare to asperse them, and see
With what personal feeling he'll send you far-reeling,
For a loyal Australian is he.

He is lovable, natural, forceful;
He is versatile, vivid, alert;
Audacious, courageous, resourceful,
Aspiring, inquiring, expert.
He's at home in the air or the water,
For a dinkum Australian is he;
And I've done some hard thinking, and I'll say without winking,
It's a dinkum Australian for me!

my mama was black, dadda a scotsman

Yesterday Neil Whitfield and Winton Bates came to lunch, the first time Winton and I had met for a long time. Winton on the left, Neil right. This was the first time that Winton and Neil had met.

As I can and when I can, I am slowly bringing together the people in our little blogging village. Winton and I were co-editors of Neucleus, The University of New England student newspaper. Neil and I met as bloggers via the death of Australian playwright Alex Buzo.  

As you might expect,  it was a wide ranging conversation that gave us all great pleasure.

Over lunch, Neil gave me approval to reproduce one of his 1983 poems. You will find the background story here. I hope that you enjoy the poem as much as I did. To my knowledge, it's very true, although the ending was happier than you might think from the poem itself. 

Marie: Glebe 1983
(for the “stolen generation”)

my mama was black
dadda a scotsman

in the home there was a flower
it woke us up

see here it is

and here’s one i’m saving for matron
(i loved you matron)
i’ll write a book for matron

she’s gone now
they say she died

sometimes
i think i will come back to her

she said “you’re in trouble, marie”
she said “have the baby”
(i was nineteen or twenty)

i know all about cocks
men can be cheeky
but the girls are worse
two backyard jobs

matron’s gone now
see her flower?
i’ve pressed it for her

i’m forty-two years old i am nothing
a woman not married in this society
is nothing

my dream is to get married
i said to matron
“i will have babies for you”

tomorrow

i’ll give up smoking
i must control the grog
but when my head’s upset i need a beer

the pub is good
nobody looks down on you there

i hope my joseph is happy
he chose his family
and thomas
where is thomas?

there have been too many men

i’ll go picking again
on the riverina

this is not my place

this is a dead end street this is a dead man’s house
but there is a lane

they call me
abo
schizo

words are very powerful
you must be careful how you use them

do the children still read?

the television
i got mine at the hock shop forty bucks
it freaks me out

sometimes

i see myself and matron and joseph and thomas
i learn a lot
it freaks me out

sometimes

this is not my place
my head hurts here

all that fucking going on
over my head

i’ve never hurt no-one
let them kill me it’s good
it doesn’t matter
i’ve never hurt no-one
but i’ve been hurt

do you know my dream?

this is my dream
i’ll have a coffee shop
and there will be little huts
and no-one will be turned away

we did that once
had pillows all over the house

i learned
dressmaking
and elocution

i’ll get up early and get a job
it’s good i reckon
tomorrow
will be good
after christmas
next year
i’ll leave this place

but it’s good
i reckon

see this flower?
i’m saving it for matron
and here is the one
that woke us in the home

my dadda was a scotsman
my mama was black

Copyright Neil Whitfield 1983

Rambles - opinion polls, a dispute at the opera with just a dash about writing

Yesterday's post (Will PM Gillard win the next election? And possibly why) drew a comment pointing to the latest poll showing an apparently stronger than expected result for the Newman Government in Queensland. This contrasted with my perception that it had been slipping in the polls, something that I would have expected at this stage in the life of any change government,

My interest lay in the impact that the new(ish) governments in the Eastern states were having on the Gillard Government's chances, but I hadn't seen the poll so I went investigating. In a piece on Pollytics  (Qld State Polling and Bad Analysis) Possum Comitatus points to the methodological difference between this latest poll and alternative measures. The later suggest that the the position of the Newman Government has indeed weakened.

At his place, Don Aitkin wonders about the future of the Greens - Go the Greens! (But where?). I wonder, too. Meantime, marcellous has been in disagreement with Don (As I was saying) on Opera, more precisely what it is and is not. I am not an opera lover, although I have enjoyed those performances I have been too. I browse marcellous' descriptions of the various concerts he goes to in part for the writing, in part because it is another slice of local life.

In a somewhat loose segue, over on Club Troppo, Richard Tsukamasa Green's Australian Art : In the suburbs, and below them begins:

Last week I was reading Why Nations Fail. The topic is of close interest to me, but the book was an aggravating mix of the detailed and insightful ideas, and of furious handwaving substituting for a central framework[fn1]. The day was too pleasant for aggravation, and called for greater things. So I turned from the topic of institutions to another topic in which I have a deep, but decidedly niche interest in.

Dog walking in Newcastle drains, and what I like the most in Australian art.

Attracted by this introduction, I read on. Like Richard, I am interested in the variety and detail of local life. Like Richard, I think that literature and film is somewhat unrepresentative of the variety in Australian life. Like Richard, I think that children's books are probably the best portrayal of that variety. However, I have to part company with him on his typology.

Australian art (in the form of literature and film) is afflicted, Richard suggests, with three horrible Australias that substitute for the Australias we actually live in.

The first is the fake hinterland. The small country town, the drover, the bush. Australia has always been mainly urban, but this doesn’t rid us of the idea that the rural is an authentic part of a nation’s soul, and the city a false one – so we end up with a literary bush that represents neither Australia, nor even the bush that exists. We should be thankful I guess. This distrust of the urban led to pogroms elsewhere, here it just led to shitty literature.

The second is focus group suburbia. Apparently the same demographers that control political campaigns also write dramas for television. They’re understanding of the country is as strong, and as fruitful in both contexts. The resulting product is for an average Australia in suburban Sydney or Melbourne that doesn’t exist, and is resolutely (and carefully) boring.

The third is determined to address the chronic underrepresentation of middle class white people on TV. They’re there to remind you that the self conscious Fitzroy/Newtown monoculture is fascinatingly distinct, despite all evidence to the contrary. To remind you that all one needs to know about an entire society is found in a shallow pond of wealthy lawyers.

Looking at this typology and subsequent remarks left me with the feeling that Richard might actually be guilty of some of the same sins that he accuses others' of! 

Problems with literature & locale

Neil Whitfield's Poetic is a review of the DVD A Poet’s Guide to Britain (BBC Four 2009). It's obviously an interesting program. While I have not watched the DVD, reading Neil's post reminded me of my own present and still limited efforts to link locale and literature.

A post on the New England history blog, Maslyn William's New England, reports on my initial reactions to Maslyn Williams' His Mother's Country (Melbourne University Press, Carton, 1988). Since then, I have read the book several times.

The book won the 1989 NSW Premier's award for non-fiction and deservedly so. Written in the third person, Williams refers to himself as the lad throughout, it records his reactions upon leaving England and then working as a jackaroo on a large station outside Tenterfield.

For those who don't know it, Tenterfield is a small town towards the northern edge of the New England Tablelands. It is probably best known today for Sir Henry Parkes' 1889 Tenterfield speech on Federation and for the Peter Allen song Tenterfield Saddler. This song says in part:

The son of George Woolnough went off and got married
And had a war baby
Though something went wrong and it's easier to drink than go crazy
And if there were questions bout why the end was so sad
Well, George had no answers bout why a son
Ever had need of a gun

Time is a traveller
Tenterfield Saddler turn your head
Ride again Jackaroo
Think I see Kangaroo up ahead

The grandson of George has been all around the world
And lives no special place
Changed his last name and he married a girl with an interesting face
He'd almost forgotten them both because in the life that he leads
There's no where for George and his library or the son with his gun
To belong except in this song

And here's a clip of Peter Allen singing the song. 

You will again see (hear) the reference to jackaroo, a young man who worked on a station for several years to gain experience in order to become an overseer or property manager. Later, the word jillaroo was added to cover the female equivalent.  

The station that the lad ended up on was quite a big one, 20,000 acres (8093.712 hectares) of freehold plus an equivalent amount of leasehold, with 20,000 sheep and 1,000 head of cattle. The station itself was a self-contained world, a small village, although the lad did become involved in the broader community.

This contrasts with Judith Wallace's Memories of a Country Childhood (Queensland University Press, St Lucia, 1977), another well written book set on another station to the south from roughly the same time period. Whereas the lad's station looked out to a broader world, Judith Wallaces' world looked in, centring on the world of the property, Ilparran, itself.

Maslyn Williams would go on to become a well known Australian documentary film maker and writer. Already he was recording details of life in letters and diary notes. To Williams after his experiences in the Second World War, life on the station became enshrouded in golden memory.

  Earlier I said that I was wrestling with questions of locale and literature. Part of my problem is the sheer richness of the material.

I don't know why the New England or Northern Tablelands spawned so much writing. It actually gives rise to a balance question, for I am writing a history of which the Tablelands is but a part.

"South of my day's circle, part of my blood's country," wrote the New England poet Judith Wright. She went on:

rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees, blue leaved and olive, outcropping granite -

Williams expresses the same feelings in prose.

Part of my problem, too, is that some of the writing is just so good. Leaving aside my own feelings of literary inadequacy, I constantly want to incorporate the writing because it tells stories in a way that gives very real emotional content to the narrative.

Take, as a simple example, Peter Allen's line:

Though something went wrong and it's easier to drink than go crazy
And if there were questions bout why the end was so sad
Well, George had no answers bout why a son
Ever had need of a gun

The troubles of those who came back from the First and Second World War were glossed over at the time. I am not being critical when I say this. It just reflects the numbers involved, as well as social attitudes. 

Williams talks a little about this, focusing especially on soldier settlers. These were returned servicemen settled on the land. A large number failed.

This photo shows as soldier settler's cottage at Kentucky south of Armidale.  This was actually a relatively successful exercise. But it will give you a feel for the difficulties.

When I first started my history of New England I actually had no idea what I was getting myself into. I am writing a history, yet the things that I want to include grow exponentially and extend beyond history narrowly defined. I really want to tell a story that will be interesting.

There is just so much to tell.

This is a photo of the adventurer and spy Harry Freame. I spoke of him in New England Story - The life and death of the mysterious Harry Freame. 

After the First World war, Freame settled on the Kentucky Estate as government storekeeper following its subdivision as a soldier settlement scheme, then acquired a block and established an orchard. So Freame was one of those who appears in the New England slice of the soldier settlement story.

Lap and overlap, all things that need to be integrated into the story.

In Imogene an odyssey (Australasian Publishing Company, 1944) Hugh Frewen wrote:

The forest melts as we o'ertop the crest,
Yielding to homely scenes and paths we know,
While grassy uplands open to the west,
The rolling hills and downs of Dorrigo

I wrote of Cappie Frewen in Saturday Morning Musings - Hugh Frewen: a New England story.

Like Freame, Frewen deserves a full biography. 

A first cousin of English Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Frewen's story spans from the world of Empire in the the early twentieth century to his arrival on the rolling hills of Dorrigo. When my grandfather wrote a book on constitutional change and new states, Frewen sent a copy to his cousin. Clemantine Churchill responded quite politely!

This post has taken longer to write than I allowed. Yet it reflects my passion, indeed my obsession, to tell a story. I really want to bring the world that formed me alive, to save it from the dust bin of history. You really won't find it anywhere else.   

Memories of Australian childhoods

At the end of May, the ALR blog carried an affectionate celebration of the work of Australian writer Randolph Stow who had just died in England at the age of 74. I didn't know his work very well, but it got me musing in a new direction, the way in which so many authors' memories of childhood (autobiographical and fictional) provide an emotional content to the changing pattern of Australian life. In Mr Stow's case it was The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965), described on the ALR blog as a beautiful, poetic evocation of a boy’s childhood in Geraldton (WA) during and after World War II.

Growing up, I wasn't much interested in this type of book. My reading tastes, while very eclectic, took me in other directions. However, in recent time I have found myself immersed in this form of writing because of my historical writing. It isn't just childhood memories, of course, but a wide range of writing that in some ways illumines that particular slice of the past that I am presently interested in. However, childhood memories are of special importance.

I think that the reason for this lies in the way that those memories capture the texture of domestic life in a place and at a point in time. Necessarily the work is informed by, influenced by, later experiences and views. The resulting picture is always partial; it is like an archaeological exploration of the writer's mind in which some things stand out, others are discarded as unimportant. Generally, it is the big things that survive. Not big in an absolute sense, but things that were of sufficient importance then to survive down through the years, with the passage of time often adding that extra glow.

Over the last few years, Neil Whitfield and I have often had literary exchanges. Neil knows far more on what we might call "Oz Lit" than I do, far more on literature generally. While I did English at school and got reasonably good marks, I had no interest in doing University level English. The thought of having to analyse and discuss yet another book set by someone else that otherwise I would not want to read offered few attractions.

The irony, of course, is that now that I am reading for my own purposes, purposes that have nothing to do with English writing as writing, I have become far more interested in the writing itself.     

Regional traditions in Australian culture

Too much serious political stuff recently on this blog, at least for me!

Just at the moment I am wrestling with one of my periodic topics, the relationship between geography and life and the way we see the world. The trigger in this case is, as is often the case, my research into New England history.

I don't think that Australian history is especially well served by its focus on national history because it ignores variation. The cultural histories of Sydney and Melbourne, for example, are not the same. Both link to different social structures and patterns of life.

Why, for example, was the left stronger in cultural terms in Melbourne rather than Sydney, whereas the right was more dominant in political terms in Melbourne?

My feeling is that this links to the structure of society. Melbourne was more rigidly stratified than Sydney, making cultural activities a more important form of alternative expression. Yes, a gross generalisation I know, but one (I think) not without merit.

To the degree that Australian historians have been concerned with regional variation in cultural activities, their focus has been on differences between the main capital cities.

Perth, Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane are very different cities, remarkably different if you stand back and consider them against a backdrop set by so much writing that presents Australia in terms of standard national trends or patterns. Still, the differences have been recognised and indeed play themselves out today in terms of, for example, tourism and city promotion. These promotional activities focus on and try to present differences.

Sydney may be ranked above Melbourne in international livability rankings, but pretty much everybody I know outside Melbourne ranks that city ahead of Sydney in lifestyle terms. It's a marketing triumph.

Outside the metros, there has been very little writing that I know of on regional cultural variation. Yet the work that I am doing on New England suggests the presence in this area at least of a distinct if varied cultural tradition.

Just to put a rough scale on this, I suspect that there are more literary works (fiction, poetry etc) being published each year by Armidale writers alone than the total Australian output of equivalent works seventy years ago.

The definition and analysis of cultural and especially literary traditions is a complicated business. It involves the identification of patterns that then themselves feed back into the tradition. The observer influences the observed.

Earlier New England historiography had a strong political, institutional and economic focus. There was very little such writing before the establishment of the New England University College in 1938. Those specifically New England histories were generally local celebrations; the jubilee of this, fifty years since that.

With the establishment of the College, local and regional histories began to expand through monographs, theses, articles and books. This writing peaked around the bicentenary and then went into decline as historical fashions shifted. By the 1990s, very little was being written.

Interest in New England cultural history first really emerged at the start of the eighties when Michael Sharkey and Julian Croft, both distinguished writers in their own right, started the basic process of documenting writers with New England connections. Both had political (ideological?) as well as literary reasons for so doing, for this was the time that the Armidale poets were attempting to establish themselves as a credible alternative voice to what they saw as the dominance in power as well as intellectual terms of the Sydney and especially Balmain push.

There was then a gap, before a renewed interest led by people such as John Ryan (Ryan had been writing throughout) and Alan Atkinson led to new writing. By 2006 when High Lean Country was published, sufficient time had passed that Julian Croft was able to reflect on the history of modern New England, especially Tablelands and Armidale, writing.

Julian pointed to two key themes.

The first was the writer in a new land. Some New England writers, Judith Wright is an example, had grown up there and in that sense wrote as an insider. To the degree that I can be classified as a writer, I do too. By contrast, many New England writers and especially those from Armidale were new arrivals. Their writing records their response to a new place.

The second was the the juxtaposition of the very different worlds of coast, tablelands and slopes and plains. Each influenced writing. However, the tablelands as what Julian calls the vestibule, a distinct world but also the point from which you could go east and west, forms a central unifying element.

I am at the stage now that I have sufficient knowledge to start capturing and building on the New England cultural tradition. I do wonder, however, just how much exists in other major regional areas that I know nothing about.

Literature, locale and license

Back from Armidale Sunday. It was too difficult to post while I was away. Then yesterday a fair bit of wheel spinning and catching up.

I really enjoyed the trip. However, as is so often the case with research, I ended up with more questions than answers!

One difficulty of trying to write a general history of an area, in my case the broader New England, lies in the decision as to what to include, exclude. Here I complicated my life by spending some time with John Ryan.

John came to the English Department at the University of New England in 1959, and is still teaching on a part time basis. That's a very long time. It's a bit frightening to think that I have known John since 1963.

Actively involved in university extension, John has also written extensively on things Northern. Here he defines just one of his interests as New England Heritage matters, especially the writings, customs, legends and other  folk materials relating to the Northern third of New South Wales.

There were two main areas in my discussion with John that drew out my own lack of knowledge.

The first was the role of the University extension offices. These were established in Lismore, Grafton, Port Macquarie and Tamworth, providing University outreach at a time when far fewer options were available. Of course I knew the story in a general sense, but I had not realised some of the local impacts.

I knew of the role that the central campus had played in Aboriginal studies, for example, but did not know of the role played at local level by people such as the Lismore based R M (Max) Praed. In early 1974, for example, the Lismore and Grafton offices combined with Federal funding to run a four day workshop     

in human relations and community organization ... open to Aboriginal people who wish to improve their leadership skills and develop an understanding of the changes taking place in Aboriginal society.

Unlike previous workshops where most participants had been men and women involved in voluntary organizations or in full-time positions in government and private agencies concerned with Aboriginal Affairs, this one made specific provision for inclusion of Aboriginal young people.

Of itself, not such a big deal perhaps. However, if you look at the planning committee you get a feel for the spread of interests:  

• Ted Fields, Aboriginal Field Officer, Credit
  Union League.
• Ray Kelly, Aboriginal Research Officer, National
  Parks and Wildlife Service.
• Bob Walford, Field Officer, Aboriginal Tutorial
  Scheme, Armidale and President Armidale
  Aboriginal Association.
• Terry Widders, Secretary, Commission on
  Aboriginal Development, Australian Council of
  Churches.
• Lilla Watson, University Student, Brisbane.
• Frank Wigham (Workshop Director), Department
  of University Extension, University of New
  England, Grafton.
• Dr Ned Iceton, U.N.E. Department of University
  Extension, Armidale.
• Max Praed, U.N.E. Department of University
  Extension, Armidale.

There are two major sub-texts here: one is Aboriginal advancement, the second a broader one linked to the introduction of University education to people who had had no previous direct contact with tertiary education.

The second area where discussions with John revealed my own lack of knowledge lay in the field of writing itself. I have often commented on the number of writers with New England connections, but did not realise that I had barely scratched the surface. John pointed me towards North Coast writers and literary traditions that I was simply unaware of.

A little later I acquired a copy of His Tales From New England (2008), a series of essays on various writers with New England and especially Tablelands connections. Some I knew, some I did not. Even for those I did know, I learned new things. There is almost an embarrassment of riches.

In 1974, the publication of Death of An Old Goat in the British Collins Crime Club format launched Robert Barnard's international crime writing career. The plot deals with the attempts by a young English lecturer Bob Bascomb to assist police in solving the apparently motiveless murder of a recently arrived visitor to the Department of English at the University of Drummondale.

Drummondale is, of course, Armidale, while Bascombe is based in part on Barnard himself. Barnard arrived in Armidale early in 1961 as an English lecturer, leaving at the end of 1965 to take a post at the University of Bergen in Norway. While in Armidale, he married local girl Mary Tabor, a graduate librarian with a degree in French and English.

The book is a sometimes very funny, satirical and a somewhat cruel picture of life in Armidale and at the university in the 1960s. It is especially funny in places to those who know Armidale because of the tendency to play spot the person.

Clearly Barnard's book provides one picture of life, but it was only a partial picture and needs to be balanced with other accounts. This was, for example, the period of university out reach that I described earlier. 

I have at least read Death of an Old Goat. However, the same cannot be said for all the others discussed by John Ryan. He discusses ten writers in all, in some cases with multiple books with New England connections. In some cases I have not read the books at all, in other cases not for a long while.

As you might expect, there are links and cross-links. I will explore these properly later on my New England blogs. What I would like to show is how literature, locale and sometimes license interact with history; it is a story of writers, but also of relations between writers and their environment.  

Saturday Morning Musings - Australian indigenous poetry

In a piece I wrote earlier in the week, Australian History and the art of Herbert Badham, I referred to the conflicting perceptions of Bernard Smith and Robert Hughes on Australian art.

Smith focused on the evolution of Australian art as a visual expression of Australia, its identity and culture. Hughes looked at Australian art in a more global context. To Smith, Australian art just was. To Hughes, Australian art was essentially derivative and second class. Anybody who reads this blog will know that I belong to the Smith school.

I make this point because Neil Whitfield focused on indigenous poetry in his latest post in his Friday Australian poetry series.

Like Australian art, indigenous writing can be viewed at two levels - as an expression of evolving indigenous thought and culture or, like Robert Hughes, from a broader literary perspective. Again like Australian art, I am interested in the first.

I know far less than I should about Australian indigenous writing. Here I am using the term indigenous rather than Aboriginal to include Torres Strait Islanders.

My views are also complicated by my reactions to the way in which non-Aboriginal writers write about the Aborigines because they strike against my own perceptions, including my view that non-Aboriginal writings actually create a barrier to the understanding of the diversity of the Aboriginal experience.

Take, as an example, Judith Wright's poem Bora Ring. In my January 2007 post on the poem, I pointed to Judith's poignant description of a vanished race and the reality of a continuing Aboriginal tradition in the area that she was writing about. My work since then has extended this point in showing the continuity and complexity of Aboriginal experience in New England.

The poem by Kath Walker, a friend of Judith Wright, is the same type of poem, if written this time by an Aboriginal woman.

The problem for a non-Aboriginal person like myself is to break through the stereotypes including my own perceptions to the writing itself. This is very difficult.

Take, a further example, Adam Shoemaker's Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988. This is a valuable introduction, one that I had not seen before Neil referred me to it. Yet it has major ideological overlays.

Shoemaker makes it clear that he is looking at "black" writing. He uses this term to cover not just Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander writing, but extends it in some ways to cover all "blacks". He tries to fit Aboriginal writing into a fourth world perspective, the term used to describe original indigenous inhabitants around the world. And he points and counter-points between European and indigenous perspectives.

All this is valuable at one level, but still stands as a barrier between the reader and indigenous writing as indigenous writing.

I am interested in the way that certain Australian writers such as Roland Robinson, a poet who I like and should write about, have attempted to integrate the indigenous experience into their perspective of Australia. But, like Judith Wright, they write from a non-indigenous frame.

Their work is part of broader Australian cultural history, and has little to do with indigenous writing as such, except to the degree that it influences indigenous writing.

Quite a lot of indigenous writing, poetry in particular, is overtly political, formed out of the struggle for indigenous rights and advancement. Kevin Gilbert’s writing is an example.

Kill the legend

Butcher it

With your acute cyncicisms

Your paternal superfluities

With your unwise wisdom

Kill the legend

Obliterate it

With your atheism

Your fraternal hypocrisies

With your primal urge of miscegenation

Kill the legend

Devaluate it

With your sophistry

Your baseless rhetoric

Your lusting material concepts

Your groundless condescension

Kill it

Vitiate the seed

Crush the root-plant

All this

And more you must needs do

In order

To form a husk of a man

To the level and in your own image

Whiteman.

This is angry poetry. Some Australian critics have criticised Gilbert's poetry on technical grounds. Yet while I do not agree with him - I actually turned off a TV program about him in protest - there is a raw power to his words. He is writing as he is.

Another issue is the English itself in some writing. There is not scope here to discuss what is now called Aboriginal English, an evolving English dialect that mixes together several very different streams and is in fact a modern media construct. However, we can get a feel for it by looking at another Gilbert poem:

Poor fellow

Simple fellow

Sweet fellow

Strong

Sittin’ in the desert

Singin’ desert song

Cryin’ countin’ chickens

Chickens made of lan’

Now in all this, and here I am returning to one of my constant themes, in looking at indigenous writing I want to understand what the writers say, not the external commentators. I also want to understand the variety in the writing, the way that it reflects different experiences across a complex group.

Henry Lawson's "Faces in the Street" - setting a context

Rereading Neil's Friday poem post on Henry Lawson's Faces in the Street and especially the poem itself as well as my initial response, I have changed my mind on approach.

I said that I might disagree with Neil's interpretation. I am not sure that's true. Rather, I thought that I might try my hand at putting the poem in a broader context.

For the benefit of international readers, Henry Lawson is one of Australia's most famous writers. His poems and especially his short stories - I think that his short stories are far better than his poems - were staple fare for generations of Australians. His turbulent life including his battles with alcohol also helped, making him a figure of legend.

According to the entry by Brian Mathews in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Henry Lawson was born in 1867 at Grenfell in NSW, the son of Neils (Peter) Larsen and his wife Louisa.

Norwegian born, Larsen had jumped ship in Melbourne in 1855 to join the gold rushes. There he met and married Louisa Albury in 1866. Louisa was a remarkable women, one who occupies her own place in Australian history.

Henry was a frail, moody and somewhat introverted child, cut off from others, distressed by the growing troubles in his parent's marriage. Already slightly deaf, at fourteen he suffered a sharp deterioration in his hearing that left him further cut off from the world.

Henry's schooling was limited and interrupted. In 1880 he left school, working initially with his father on local contract building jobs. Then in 1883 he moved to Sydney to join his mother where he was apprenticed as a coach painter and studied at night towards his matriculation.

His troubles moved with him. He was no happier and failed his exams. However, he had also begun to write. His first poem was published in the Bulletin in October 1887.

Now I want to go back to Faces in the Street. This poem was published in July 1888. Henry was twenty one. I make this point because while I pointed out to Neil in my initial response that 1888 was still boom time, something that Neil himself recognised as his comment on my post makes clear, I myself misread the poem through a frame set by my knowledge of later developments.

This is in fact a somewhat raw young man's poem. I like it better for that reason. It is also a poem of revolution.

But not until a city feels Red Revolution’s feet

Shall its sad people miss awhile the terrors of the street —

The dreadful everlasting strife

For scarcely clothes and meat

In that pent track of living death — the city’s cruel street.

The nineteenth century was a time of great political and intellectual turmoil. This was the century that saw the emergence of the various socialist movements, the publication in 1848 of the Communist Manifesto, the foundation of the communist movement.

These ideas spread around the world, taking various forms in various countries, including the Australasian colonies.

There is not room here, nor do I have the knowledge, to trace all the details of this spread. Very broadly, within the British Empire (then the world's leading political and economic power) the outcomes were more pluralist, more gradualist, less ideological and hard edged than in continental Europe.

This may seem hard to believe if you read some of the writing of the time from the radical left on one side, the very conservative right on the other. Or if you look at the detail of the political and industrial strife of the 1890's. Yet, at least as I see it, in this varying mix of ideas and idealism there was a melding of thought in the Australasian colonies that formed one core component of Australian political and social thought during much of the twentieth century.

In Henry's case, his move to Sydney where his mother had purchased the Republican brought him in contact with his mother's radical friends and inspired him with radical and republican ideas. His first published poem was called A Song of the Republic. This was also the world of Dame Mary Gilmore who featured in Neil's previous poem.

Two years older than Henry, Mary Gilmore came from a very similar country, small farming, background. They became friends and indeed may have been unofficially engaged at one point.

I find it interesting that both became such iconic figures, even among those who disagreed with them in political terms. Henry Lawson himself was very lucky in his friends and supporters, including such unlikely figures as the governor of NSW Earl Beauchamp who helped pay for his trip to England.

In all, I am glad that Neil selected him for his Friday Poet. I wonder who he will select next?

Henry Lawson - Neil's latest Friday poet

It's late, and I must to bed. But I could not resist a short post.

I see that Neil (Ninglun) Whitfield has selected a poem by Henry Lawson for his latest Friday poetry post. Now, as with every Friday poet, I face a challenge as to how to add something that will amplify, compliment the post.

At first, I thought that this poem was part of the controversy generated by the Bulletin school and especially Lawson and Banjo Patterson However, in fact I see that this happened four years later. So I need to address the post and poem in another way.

In my last post in response to Neil's introduction of a poem by Mary Gilmore, I came back with another Gilmore poem, The Saturday Tub, and a family link.

Now on this poem I think that I might attack some of Neil's interpretation.

Look at the tone of the poem.

Neil linked this to the depression of the 1890s. But the poem was written in 1888 when the 1880's boom was still raging. To European migrants, this land was still a land of milk and honey. More precisely, loads of cheap meat in a world in which meat eating was uncommon because of price.

This does not detract from the poem. Do read it out loud. It is wonderfully evocative of the misery that can attach to the human condition.

As Neil says, real poverty and homelessness is alive in Sydney today. Indeed it's worse, not just because of the comparison with surrounding wealth, but because those caught in the homelessness and poverty trap have fewer places to go in our more crowded and homogenised world.

But the poem should not be read as a historic document. The distress of depression, and that depression was not in fact universal but focused in particular places, and of the associated industrial disputes was still to come.

More tomorrow.

The Poetry of Mary Gilmore - The Saturday Tub

Each Friday Neil (Ninglun) writes about an Australian poem or poems. I have fallen into the habit of writing a companion piece where I know something about the poet.

This Friday Neil featured two poems by Dame Mary Gilmore (1865-1962), a writer I know a little about. As always, please read Neil's post first.

As Neil noted, Mary Gilmore occupies a special post in Australian history, general as well as literary. You can find out more about her life from the short Australian Dictionary of Biography entry.

Neil notes that she was a Utopian then a Communist just about all her life, but paradoxically became a Dame of the British Empire (1937) and has her face on our currency. As part of the paradox, her friendships extended well beyond the notional left. One was my grandfather, David Drummond.

I do not know when they met. I do know that Mary Gilmore was an inveterate letter writer who was always looking for support for her causes and who, understandably, wanted to promote her writing. I think that they first met when David Drummond became NSW Minister for Public Instruction (Education), a role he was to hold throughout most of the 1930s.

They wrote often. I remember one of my Aunts talking about a visit to see Mary Gilmore in the little flat she had in Kings Cross.

In 1948 Angus & Robertson published Mary Gilmore's Selected Verses. Drummond wrote to her to say how much one poem, The Saturday Tub, had 'hit him'.

The poem is a nostalgic look at childhood. The writer, dreaming back by the fire, is thrown

... back where I used to be,

in eighteen hundred and something three,

Still in my place for the old bath tub,

Flannel and soap, a rub-a-dub-dub!

Standing in a line by the fire, the children take their turn

To stand in tub the size of a churn,

It was, 'where's the flannel?" and, "Mind the soap!"

Slither and slide, and scuffle and grope

Then, bath finished,

When each little shirt went over each head,

"Gentle Jesus" and "Our Father" said

It was "quick with a kiss!" and "Now they run!

And off into bed with you, everyone!"

The warmth, happiness and security in the poem is unmistakable.

For Mary Gilmore, the poem probably related to her early childhood on the farm. For David Drummond whose later childhood was neither happy nor secure, I think that the poem 'hit him' because it reminded him of the early days on the little farm at Liverpool outside Sydney.

In September 1895 (Drummond was then five), his mother's aunt wrote to his father:

.. we were so delighted to hear that you and your darling boys are well ... and oh we were so pleased to get a letter each from them ... and to hear that they help their father on the farm - and little David will have to look over you all ... tell David that he is to let us know what is the name of his kitten in your next letter.

So, to return to Neil's theme, here we have a woman who in many ways encapsulated what was called the old left position in Australian thought, but whose friendships could reach across the divides to a Country Party politician from the New England populist tradition, the tradition from I still write.

If I had to chose a single word to summarise the common element that united them, that word would be the word I used in the title of my post on David Drummond's early life, David Henry Drummond and the Importance of Compassion.

A sense of compassion was central to both.

Judith Wright's South of My Days

Neil (Ninglun's) Friday Australian poem was Judith Wright's South of My Days.

I love this poem. I did not want to repeat Neil's material, so instead I have put a post up on the New England Australia blog talking a little about the poem and its context.

Launch of The Alex Buzo Company

Keeping Buzo flowing

The marvellous playwright and king of tautology, Alex Buzo, who died last year, was a firm R&M favourite. So it is pleasing to hear that his daughter, Emma, has formed The Alex Buzo Company, which will stage several of his plays. It will start with The Roy Murphy Show - his 1971 satire on TV sports shows which was inspired by Rex "Let me recapitulate back to what I said previously" Mossop and Ron "Won" Casey. The launch, involving a special appearance by HG and Roy, will be held at the Parade Theatre on September 4. As Rex would say: "I don't want to sound incredulous, but I can't believe it."

It's Nau laughing matter, Rugby Heaven

In a separate post on the New England Australia blog, I talk about the launch by Emma Buzo of a new theatre company to produce the work of her father. The new company will launch with a fund raising production of The Roy Murphy Show at NIDA in Sydney on 4 September.

Do please have a read and come if you can. I know that the tickets are reasonably expensive, certainly they are for us, but this is a chance to help set up something new.

The rise and fall of Alex, and now hopefully rise, as a playwright also links to the discussion that Neil and I are having on the decline (or otherwise) of Australian writing.

The decline in Australia Literature revisited

Earlier this month I mused about the apparent decline in interest in Australian literature. Neil (Ninglun) took something of an opposing view, adding an Oz Lit tag to his current blog. That, I thought, was a very positive outcome from the discussion since Neil is much more familiar with current writing than I am.

In a piece in the Bulletin headed Write Australia Policy, Professor Peter Pierce also lamented the decline. Here he said in part:

The number of academic courses in Australian literature has sharply fallen. Less and less of it is taught in schools. The quantity of Australian titles in print (the vital resource for course planning) has shrunk. The number of novels published fell from 60 in 1995 to 32 in 2004. Sales of Australian fiction declined from $123m in 2001 to $73m in 2004. Last year, there were two chairs of Australian literature - only two, and one of them mine - now there is one.

I was quite astonished at the low number of new publications. I do wonder about the definitions used. Do they, for example, include young people's fiction? There has always been an academic snobbery as to what counts as "literature" or, for that matter, "novels". Do they include books written by Australians, but published internationally?

All that said, Professor Pierce appears to confirm in rather dramatic fashion the point I was musing about.

Australian Poetry - a few meanderings

For his second Friday poem, Neil (Ninglun) chose The Poor, Poor Country by John Shaw Neilson. Ouch! The poem does capture one element of Australian mythology, one that I have much sympathy for, but I have always found it personally to be cringe-makingly bad!

Neilsen's first line begins:

Oh ’twas a poor country, in Autumn it was bare,
The only green was the cutting grass and the sheep found little there.
Oh, the thin wheat and the brown oats were never two foot high,
But down in the poor country no pauper was I.

Now compare this with the first lines of Judith Wright's The Hawthorn Hedge.

How long ago she planted the hawthorn hedge -
she forgets how long ago-
that barrier thrown across the hungry ridge;
thorn and snow.

Both poems are designed to be read aloud and do, I think, capture the rhythm of the Australian language. But they are very different.

It is, I think, increasingly hard for Australians to get their mind back into this country's past.

At the time Nielsen was born in 1872 the population was much smaller and also very dispersed. Most Australians received very little formal education. This was the age of the autodidact, the self taught man.

By the time Judith Wright was born in 1915, not only was the population much larger, but education was now widespread. Further, Judith grew up in a world of wealth and relative privilege. There is an enormous contrast between the formal world of the New England Girl's School where Judith received her secondary education and the two and half year's schooling that John Nielson received.

Both wrote because they had to. But Nielsen was part of a different school, the Bulletin school. This provided an outlet for a constant stream of bush and nationalist poetry.

Australians today struggle with the Bulletin school because of the racial attitudes built into the magazine and its writings. Neil captured the problem here rather well with his comments on Edward Dyson's A Golden Shanty. How do you handle something when it contains sets of attitudes now classified as unacceptable?

I accept that this is a problem. I also know that many of the attitudes now held in Australia will be classified as odd, quaint, unacceptable in the future. I just don't know which ones!

The Decline in Australian Literature

Driving to work I listened a radio program about the decline in Australian literature.

Apparently one of Australia's major universities that had been experiencing a dramatic decline in both the absolute number and proportion of English students studying Australian literature tried to introduce an honours course in the area. This failed because it did not attract a single student.

An academic complained that the only thing keeping Australian literature alive as an area of study was the interest in certain overseas universities. The solution offered was to increase Australian content in the higher school courses.

Whys should we be surprised that all this had happened?

There are general systemic factors at work that have affected all classes of literature. But here we are talking about a decline within a decline. So other things have to be at work.

Crudely, in rejecting the validity of the Australian past in the way so many have done, we have cut the underpinnings out from our literary tradition. Why should anyone study the literature coming from a narrow, provincial, racist past? What relevance does it have for modern multicultural Australia today?

This is a tragedy. I love Australian studies. I love the texture of Australian life over the years.

I understand the injustices that we have done to, for example, our indigenous people. Obviously we need to understand this. But I want to capture the indigenous experience too, focused on them as people, not as victims forever buried in an European paradigm of past black white relations. What do they have to teach me as an Australian living in 2007?

In all the decline in Australian literature there appears to be one growth area, and that is young peoples' literature.

I have read a fair bit of this, in part because of my daughters, in part because I have enjoyed it. This does deal with contemporary issues. But it also writes to the Australian experience. Long may it continue.

Postscript

Neil (Ninglun) provided a thoughtful comment on this post and also put up a post about the issues on his blog. This includes a link to his own OzLit writings as well as to Matilda and Wilson's Blogmanac, both worthwhile sites.

One of the difficulties in this time poor world is to find the time to trace through the material to test my own assessments. I will try to do so. In the meantime, a challenge to all.

To help educate me, what do you think the main trends and patterns have been in Australian writing over the last twenty years? How does this relate to other trends in Australian society and culture? What does it tell us about ourselves?