September 2011 Archives

In a book-lined room of a quiet Hawthorn (Melbourne) villa a tiny white-haired woman sits at her writing desk-- a woman who "never-never" forgets. She is Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, a 78-year-old author of the unforgettable Australian story, "We of the Never-Never" and the enchanting tale of Bet-Bet, "The Little Black Princess."  

It is more than 40 years since she wrote of the immortal band at Elspy cattle station, in the Northern Territory: 

"And all of us and many of this company shared each other's lives for one bright, sunny year, away Behind the Back of Beyond, in the Land of the Never-Never; in that land with an elusive name -- a land of dangers and hardships and privations, yet loved as few lands are loved -- a land that bewitches her people with strange spells and mysteries, until they call sweet bitter and bitter sweet."

This memorable crew, all but three have passed on -- The Maluka, The Sanguine Scot, The Head Stockman, The Dandy, The Fizzer, The Wag, Tam-o-Shanter and Cheon and many others.  

Only the Quiet Stockman, Mine Host and Jeannie Gunn, the "Little Missus" of her story remain.

But when one talks to her to-day of the characters of her books they are as fresh in her star-lit memory as if it were yesterday (writes Neil Newnham in the Melbourne "Herald"').

WHEN THE FIZZER FIZZED

Remember the Fizzer? Mrs. Gunn wrote of this hard, sinewy, dauntless mailman who travelled on his "Pat Malone": "and yet at Powell's Creek no one has yet discovered whether the Fizzer comes at sundown, or the sun goes down when the Fizzer comes." (Fizzing was his term for driving mails through waterless tracts.)

Last word Mrs. Gunn had of him came only, a few years ago, although he died in April, 1911.

Says Mrs. Gunn: "The Fizzer was Henry Ventlia Peckham, of Adelaide. After losing the Katherine-to-Anthony's run when the Government accepted a lower tender than his, he was granted the Katherine-Victoria River run, and by just that we lost our Fizzer.

"For on his first return trip he reached the ford built up over Campbell's Creek to find it in flood. Sending back to the station homestead, he inquired if there were any special urgency in the small amount of mail he had. He was told that the manager's wife, farther in, was ill and that medical advice was being sought in that mail; so he drove his pack team into the ford with his black boy leading.  

"The Fizzer and bis horse were swept off the ford into the raging turmoil below. To the black boy, Raven, he shouted, 'Save the mails,' and was gone. Next day his body was found, and he was buried on the high banks above the ford -- and the Government had saved its few pounds."

"The tragedy of it all was that the manager's wife had died before ever The Fizzer braved the flood," recalls Mrs. Gunn.  

GRAVES OF A HOUSEHOLD

Mrs. Gunn describes the decision of A.I.F. men in the Nor thern Territory, 30 years later, to move the graves of The Fizzer and others of her bushmen to the Elsey graveyard as "a beautiful, ambition." The Fizzer was the first to be brought in.

An obelisk has also been built by tribesmen of the Territory to the memory of her characters.

Mrs. Gunn can go on "Old Elsey yarning" about the others. The Sanguine Scot (John MacLennan) remained here and there about the Territory and eventually settled peanut growing at Katherine. He died in 1932 after a distressing illness.  

Dan, the head stockman (David Suttie, of Victoria), went to the Ord River station as a teamster. He died suddenly of heart failure on the road between Wyndham and Ord River, and is buried beside the road, where there was "still enough bush to bury a man in."

The Dandy (H. H. Bryant) died at Angaston, South Australia, in 1938. The Wag (Constable Kingston) left the police force to take over storekeeping, and died at Katherine in 1908.  

Tam-o'-Shanter (Jock McPhee) was always curiously pleased with "Our Book", and   corresponded by telegram. He perished terribly of thirst on the Willeroo - Katherine road in October, 1910.  

Even the fox terrier, Robinson of the Elsey, is recalled to memory. He died after a surfeit of roast bush turkey, says Mrs. Gunn.  

THE SURVIVORS  

In April this year Mrs. Gunn was visited by The Quiet Stockman (Jack McLeod, 78) and Mrs. McLeod. "He named his first child Jeannie Gunn McLeod, and his two sons bear the name of Gunn.  

"I think that tells of his loyal, true heart more than anything I can say," said Mrs. Gunn.  

The other survivor -- Mine Host (Thomas Peace) -- is 89.    

MRS. GUNN'S OWN STORY

And now, the "little missus."

Her husband, The Maluka, accustomed to rugged bushmen, described her accurately as a "little 'un". But through the 40 years since he died she has retained that vitality which makes size insignificant.

One can imagine even to-day why the woman-less community of Elsey cattle station in the Northern Territory was baulked in its attempts to stave off the Maluka's missus. Her approach to the social problems of two wars and their aftermaths is direct, sympathetic and courageous and holds the qualities which earned her the bushmen's praise-- "she's a goer, a regular goer."

SUCCESSFUL BOOKS

Why, after the success of her first two books ("We of the Never-Never" has gone to more than 300,000 copies) did Mrs. Gunn never write another? Her answer, "I have been too busy," may seem incredible to the many who do not know of her unostentatious social work -- especially for the soldiers and soldiers' sons of Monbulk in two wars.

[But Mrs. Gunn has two manuscripts in hand -- a history of Monbulk and some stories of the Victorian blacks.]

EARLY LIFE    

Jeannie Taylor was born in Carlton, opposite St. Jude's Church, on June 6, 1870. What has made her the envy of her wide circle of very young friends is her confession, "I never went to school."

But her mother was a wonderful reader and teacher. She combined visits to the art gallery, where historical scenes were observed, with visits to the library, where the corresponding historical account could be read.

There were always regular "school hours", however. Mrs. Gunn remembers the great W. G. Grace, "when I was a very small person." She is an admirer of Don Bradman. "There is no greatness without simplicity," she says in a tribute to Don.

FIRST MEETING    

She is contemptuous of the romantic, but erroneous, accounts of her meetings with Aeneas Gunn.

The true story:

With a Mrs. Kerr, an Irishwoman, she drove in a trap into Narre Warren for a concert. Outside the hall the horses would not stand, and young Jeannie offered to leap off over the wheel and hold them.

She stepped on the wheel, but the horses backed and spun her into the air.

As she fell a "long-legged Scotchman" detached himself from a group of people and caught her. So Jeannie met Aeneas Gunn, son of the first Gaelic preacher in Victoria, the Rev. Peter Gunn. They were married on New Year's Eve, 1901.

"Always throwing yourself at the men," chided Mrs. Kerr.

FIRST PUBLICATION

Since "We of the Never Never" captured its public, interest in the book, its characters and its authoress has never dimmed. 

Before it was published in England on Christmas Eve, 1908, "We of the Never-Never" was rejected by five publishing houses. Result of the first edition -- a debit of £11.    

Plates for the book were commandeered for ammunition metal in the First World War.

Mrs. Gunn has had many film offers for her story, including one of partnership in the filming company and another of £100 for film rights!  

The story of harum-scarum Bet-Bet (The Little Black Princess) was written on the recommendation of a Quaker, who insisted that Mrs. Gunn tell his grandchildren fairy-tales "as long as they were true ones."

From time to time aged lubras are hailed by Territory visitors when they cunningly claim, "Me Mrs. Gunn's Bet-Bet."

Typically. Mrs. Gunn regarded her O.B.E. award in 1939 as an honour to Australian literature.

First published in The Worker, 15 November 1948

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

Jeannie (Aeneas) Gunn (1870-1961)

In the year 1908 there was published in Australia a book which was destined to achieve an immediate and wide popularity, and which many competent critics -- and those not Australian alone -- belleve to be one of the few "classics" that Australian literature has yet produced. This was "We Of The Never Never," a book which not to have read is to have missed one of the good things of life. It is a tale of experiences on a station in the Northern Territory, and the reason why every incident rings true and every charactor is clothed with flesh and blood is -- apart from that natural aptitude for the pen which is the great gift of the author, and which in her amounts to genius -- simply because those incidents and characters are not only based on actual happenings and actual people, but are very often complete reproductions of them. "We of the Never-Never" abounds in humour; but as with so much true humour, the tears are never far behind. Sentiment which never degenerates into sentimentallty; vivid description of scenes and people; and above all a natural and unaffected style, inform every page of this great story. For it is a "great" story, and the man or woman who can read it without yielding to its cheery laughter or its simple pathos is not to be envied.

The authoress of "We Of the Never-Never," Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, is now resident in Victoria, and the story is really of her own life at Elsey Station in the "Territory." Married on January 31, 1901, Mrs. Gunn set out for her new home three days later. She arrived at Elsey in February; and from that time onwards until her final departure from the Territory, the events of the daily round were chronicled by her assiduous pen. Transmuted by the fire of her genius into the gold of literature, they stand to-day, and will stand long, as a sympathetic, true, and striking picture of North Australian life.

Quite recently the Melbourne "Argus" conducted a plebiscite upon the question of the relative merits of Australian novelists. The result placed Mrs. Gunn third upon the roll of honour, the only two to gain precedence over her being Marcus Clarke and "Rolf Boldrewood." It was a verdict that speaks well for the taste and judgment of those who participated in it; but, nevertheless, there are many who believe that "We of the Never-Never" is a finer and a better book, both as a novel and as literature, than elther Clarke's grim story of "the system," or "Robbery Under Arms."

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 September 1927

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

Rough Wallaby by Roger McDonald, 1989
Cover photography by Hal Missingham
Picador edition, 1995

I have a fair walled garden,
   The winds are shut outside;
Secure and free from vandal,  
   Demesne both snug and wide.

No fruit of growth so foreign
   But in its soil finds room,
And never lift mine eyes in vain
   To find some bough a-bloom.

The flowers gleam like beacons,
   For dragon-flies that throng;
Nor doth it lack for nightingales
   To jewel it with song.

And where the friendly shade trees
   Clasp hands to arch a shrine
Are carven all the names I love;
   A radiant roll they shine.  

The leaves disdain to wither,
   And when a breeze goes by
They flutter into laughter
   Whose echo is a sigh.   

At eve, when tent of twilight
   Shuts out the spying sun,
I almost hear them whispering
   The Thousand Tales and One.

Yet (by a strange enchantment  
   Their eyes were veiled so!)
Some who within my garden walked
   Saw only books in row!

First published in The Brisbane Courier, 23 March 1929

Though Australia has produced no great poet, no lyric singer like Shelley or Swinburne, no poet philosopher such as Browning, and no sweet singer of simple lays who could rise to such stupendous heights as Wordsworth did in the 'Prelude" and other poems, yet, in comparison with its population, Australia has produced more poets than any nation in history. Of the 3000 books and booklets of poems that have been published within the last 50 years -- most of them within the last 25 years -- there may be only a few of outstanding merit. But that few will live because their authors have been the interpreters of the soul of virile young nationhood. Of such is George Essex Evans, who was born in London on June 18, 1863 -- 63 years ago yesterday.

Essex Evans was not a great poet. He was not one of Australia's best. He had not the lyrical sweetness of a Kendall; the flashing humour and passionate intensity of a Brunton Stephens, the fierce democratic picturesqueness of a Lawson or a Bernard O'Dowd. But he was a patriot in the fullest sense of the word, and it might be said of him as he himself said of Brunton Stephens:---

   "The gentle heart that hated wrong,
      The courage that all ills withstood,
   The seeing eye, the mighty song,
      That stirred us into nationhood."

George Essex Evans combined the best that is English and Welsh. His father, John Evans, a barrister and a politician, was also a poet, and his mother, one of the Bowens of Llwyngwair in Wales, was a highly cultured lady, a classical scholar, and a linguist. He was brought up in a home and atmosphere of culture, but unfortunately be was handicapped by deafness, a handicap that was almost a barrier in those days to success as a student. Essex Evans was but a child when his father died; and at 18 years of age, in company with a brother, Mr. J. B. O. Evans, and other members of the family, he came to Queensland. He and his brother engaged in farming operations at Allora, aud it was while he was there that he commenced to contribute verse to the "Queenslander." At that time one of the greatest influences in Australia in the development of Australian literature. Every keen newspaper man is always watching for any new literary comet that might float into his ken, and Reginald Spencer Browne, now Major-General Browne, was probably the first man to detect the merit of Evans's poetry and to give him encouragement. They became fast friends, a friendship that was intensified by the fact that both were athletic, both were lovers of good literature, and both were endowed with a sense of bantering humour. Like other poets in this sunny clime, Evans wrote because his very heart leaped into verse. At the same time it would be difficult to over-estimate Browne's influence on his young friend, on influence that lasted throughout the poet's life, because he encouraged him to write poetry when Evans would probably have preferred to talk of his prowess on the fields of sport or of his latest reading. Thus, from "Christophus" of the "Queenslander" he jumped into fame in 1891 -- 10 years after his arrival in Queensland -- with his first volume of poems, "The Repentance of Magdalene Despar and Other Verses," a little volume that revealed much imaginative and romantic poetic diction. Six years later he published his second volume, "Loraine and other Verses," and in 1906, three years before his death, his greatest book, "Secret Key and Other Verses," was issued, and indicated that if Evans had lived he might easily have attained a very high niche in the pantheon of Empire poetry.

POET AND PATRIOT.

Evans, like many other Australian poets, had to make money from his poetry. Unlike Gray, he could not afford to alter and to polish for eight years. From time to time one hears of people who "dash off" something in an evening. But no writer ever "dashed off" any poem of first rate rank, or anything else of high quality, for that matter. Shelley and Keats, Gray and Tennyson, all weighed and measured and altered and realtered; and even Macaulay scored and underscored his writings till it was difficult to read the final drafts. But most of our Australian poets have had to write "white-hot" for the morning newspaper. Thus, for instance, Evans wrote his well-known poem, "The Lion's Whelps," in the office of the old "Darling Downs Gazette" one night in December, 1899. The cabled story was coming through, telling how Methuen had failed at Magersfontein, and how the Black Watch and the Gordons had been slaughtered. Every one was despondent, for it had been a month of reverses. Next morning the paper contained the cable, but with it were the inspiring verses, commencing:  

   "There is scarlet on his forehead,
   There are scars across his face,"

and going on to tell how the lion's whelps were gathering, and answering the call,

   "From sunlit Sydney Harbour,
      And, ten thousand miles away,
   From the far Canadian forests to the
      Sounds of Milford Bay." 

One does not expect great poetry in such circumstances. But it served its purpose, that of cheering the despondent hearts of a nation.

One school of critics claim that patriotic poetry can never be real poetry. But such critics conveniently forget all about Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson, Kipling and Newbolt, and a hundred more. It is perfectly true that the only kind of patriotism that great poetry can care much about is a patriotism in the truest sense of the word, as distinguished from the narrow political sense. The statesmen die and are forgotten, but the poet never dies; and there is no measuring the degree in which poets like Brunton Stephens and Essex Evans have helped to mould the true patriotism of the Commonwealth, the really big Australianism that thinks in terms of a nation and of an Empire.

First published in The Queenslander, 3 July 1926

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

George Essex Evans (1863-1909)

To-day will see the publication of the most ambitious piece (technically speaking) of book-printing which has occurred in any Queensland town, excepting, of course, Brisbane, up to the present time. It is seldom that a book like "The Garden of Queensland," representing as it does merely an account of the Darling Downs, is excellent from every point of view. Usually the letterpress is sacrificed to the illustrations or the illustrations to the letterpress. In this instance neither alternative has occurred. The name of the compiler, Mr. George Essex Evans, is more than sufficient guarantee that, in point of literary merit, the book is all that can be desired. The author has thrown his whole heart and soul into the work of gathering and editing the different facts, and the result is a perfect mine of information ready to the hand of any who care to delve in it. The historical part of the book is particularly good, and shows a complete grasp of that particular branch of the subject. Mr. Evans begins with an introductory chapter dealing with the discovery by Allan Cunningham of the vast extent of open downs to the north of New England, christened by him the Darling Downs, in honour of the then Governor of New South Wales. Then follows an "early sketch," devoted to a discussion as to the climate, natural features, and the quality of the soil, and giving in addition a short record of the pioneers who first opened up the country after Allan Cunningham had proclaimed its virtues. The rest of the work is given up to a description of the principal towns and settlements, stations, and selections which are now scattered over the Downs in all directions. In this portion of his work also, Mr. Evans is intensely interesting. No matter what may be the calling or inclination of the reader, he will find in the pages of the book something that will be of great service or at least attractiveness. Mr. Evans has not been content with the dry-as-dust facts That statisticians usually affect, but has chosen rather to place his data in a setting of prose which is both pleasant to read and to remember. Not only is Mr. Evans's work on the highest plane, but the more mechanical part, performed by Messrs. J. H. Robertson and Co., of Toowoomba, is likewise much to be commended. The general typography, the illustrations (from excellent photographs by James Bain), and the display generally combine in the production of a book that is completely satisfactory.

First published in The Brisbane Courier, 12 August 1899

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

Slipstream by Roger McDonald, 1982
Cover illustration: Geoff MacQualter
Picador edition 1992

Lulled by the sob of a southern sea
   He sleeps, who waked by the northern foam,
To dream of a brown land, wide and free,
   And make it his home;
Who sang great songs to its bluer dome,
   And netted the strong, strange speech it stirred
With the mourning note of an older lay,
   And swept from us like a wild, bright bird,
      Singing his heart away!

A fighter ever, a conqueror still,
   With his last ride ridden, his last song sung,
And the hemlock measure to drink or spill,
   While the vain shouts rung,
Swift from the tourney his strong soul swung
   Out through the dark to the Giver of Dreams;
Boldly as ever he rode fared he,
   West with the sunset's red triremes,
      Into his own country!

Small need had he of a graven stone
   Who rests so well in his quiet place
'Neath the drifted gold of his wattle, blown
   Through her leaves' green lace.
Nor ever in Hellas' years of grace,
   When Echo played with Olympian chords,
More proudly lifted a laurel tree
   To point the grave of a lord of words
      Sleeping in Thessaly!

Small need had he of a graven stone
   Whose songs have rung through a continent,
Like the notes of a morning bugle blown
   In the winds' high tent,
Reveillé to lands magnificent,
   Where beggars are monarchs of Come-by-Chance,
With titles too clear for a king to break,
   And more than a king is the bold free-lance,
      Singing for singing's sake!

First published in The Bulletin, 30 October 1919

Time, which tries most things, is the one sure test of a poet's popularity, and there are indications that the poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon have satisfactorily responded to the test (says a writer in the "Australasian"). When that personal and friendly intimacy which so often mistakes zeal for genius has passed away, when only a few of those who knew Gordon in the days when he wrote and rode remain upon the scene, there is opportunity to view his work in a better perspective. It is pleasant, therefore, for those who hold Gordon's memory in fond regard to find the annual pilgrimage to his grave in Brighton Cemetery exciting wider interest as the years pass on. It is significant as an earnest proof of the admiration which Australians have for his poetry. And the fact that another generation of poets has since arisen has in no way disturbed the high estimate of his work or the sympathetic interest ever associated with his name. But when we come to consider Gordon's place in Australian literature, his influence upon Australian people, it is not as the "Laureate of the Centaurs" that he most impresses us.

Apart from considered criticism, there is always the unconscious test which in relation to the singer we employ with neither will nor intention. Poetry, if it is to satisfy the popular mind, must have music in it as well as thought and fancy. The things that in moments of abstraction go singing through one's head to a music of their own are often Gordon's. Under that test he is still the most widely read, the most popular of all Australian poets. In such a test it is seldom the hoof-beats of the galloping rhymes that come to us unbidden, almost unconsidered. Rather an echo of steel, with the glamour of cavalier days, when knighthood was in flower; from the half-legendary sources where Tennyson drew his inspiration for the Idylls of the King, or, as in Podas Okus, from the romance of the classics. The horse lover in all moods, he would have gloried more in the war horse than in the steeplechaser; had he lived and written to-day, he would have found an epic in deeds of the Anzacs. If there was one thing more than all else that would have appealed to Gordon, it would have been to adventure with Chauvel's horsemen over the plains of Palestine on that long war trail where so many conquerors have ridden, where Crusader and Saracen clashed, and holy writ and history meet. He is the singer of the sword, born out of his generation, some centuries too late for the picturesque times of the Cavaliers, too early by just a lifetime for the war of all time. It is ever his sword songs that go ringing through our minds; examples might be taken from many poems, beginning with the Rhyme of Joyous Guarde, the betrayal of Arthur, the remorse of Launcelot.

   Then a steel-shod rush and a steel-clad ring,
   And a crash of the spear staves splintering,
      And the billowy battle blended.
   Riot of chargers, revel of blows,
   And fierce flush'd faces of fighting foes,
   From croup to bridle that reeled and rose
      In a sparkle of swordplay splendid.  

Such are the "ringing major notes" which caught Kendall's ear -- a far finer estimate of the real Gordon than Marcus Clarke's mental summary, "love of horsemanship and a head full of Browning and Shelley." The influence of Shelley and of Swinburne upon the form of his verse is at times obvious enough, but the spirit of it was born long before their day and generation, springing from heredity, rather than iron acquirement. Even in galloping rhymes and racing tips the glory of the soldier still shines through:--

   Did they quail, those steeds of the squadron's light?
      Did they flinch from the battle's roar,
   When they burst on the guns of the Muscovite
      By the echoing Black Sea shore?
   On! on to the cannon's mouth they stride,
      With never a swerve nor a shy,
   On! the minutes of yonder maddening ride
      Long years of pleasure outvie.

Through the "Romance of Britomarte," the "Roll of the Kettledrum," and many a fragment of "Ashtaroth" the same note rings. Will Ogilvie, writing first of "Fair Girls and Grey Horses" in Australia, found back home his deeper life-spring note in the " Border Ballads," and with Gordon the process was reversed. He was the singing cavalier long before he rode steeplechases and wrote galloping rhymes. With him shrine and sword are notably close together. Though a man rode and lived recklessly, who was in some sense fatalist as well as pessimist, a strong religious note permeates much of his verse -- a religion less familiar and assured than that of his Roundheads, but obviously sincere. From one who ended the weary debate with a rifle bullet one hardly expects maxims, yet there are some sound and sure enough to be a rule of life such as only a very numan philosopher could have written:--

   Question not, but live and labour
      Till yon goal be won,
   Helping every feeble neighbour,
      Seeking help from none.
   Life is mostly froth and bubble,
      Two things stand like stone --
   Kindness in another's trouble,
      Courage in your own.

Though Gordon may not have lived up to his own maxim, it was still his con- sidered creed and his poetry. Had destiny been kinder, he would have been a soldier following in the footsteps of his father, and, since sing he must, would have sung arms and the man with a fine swing of old-fashioned chivalry.

Even in the best of his bush notes there is ever the touch of old association:--

   Hark, the bells on distant cattle
      Waft across the range,
   Through the golden-tufted wattle,
      Music low and strange;
   Like the marriage peal of fairies,
      Comes the tinkling sound,
   Or like chimes of sweet St. Mary's
      On far English ground.

It is not for any special or consistent note in Gordon's poetry that people are making pilgrimage to his grave, but because so many find something which they may admire. He has interpreted, idealised the bush note which they know by contact and experience, while keeping them in touch with the glamour of that distant past which is their racial inheritance, which has inspired so much of their romance, their poetry, and their history.

First published in The Queenslander, 6 December 1919

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

Adam Lindsay Gordon postage stamp issued by Australia Post in 1970.

   Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave,
      With never stone or rail to fence my bed;
   Should the sturdy station children pluck the wild flowers o'er my grave,
      I may chance to hear them romping oberhead.   
                                -- "Sick Stockrider," A. L. G.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir-- Having read in a Melbourne paper that the grave of 'our own poet' was sadly neglected, I took the opportunity during a recent visit to Victoria to satisfy myself as to the truth of the statement. As Gordon has many ardent admirers in this city I thought perhaps they might be interested by a description of the place where lies all that remains of Adam Lindsay Gordon, and for that purpose avail myself of your valuable columns.

It was a cold though bright Sunday afternoon when I wended my way to the Brighton Cemetery, where the poet sleeps. The burying-ground is large and undulating, enclosed by a plain post-and-rail fence, and is divided into sections for the various religious denominations. On a gentle slope in the portion set apart for the adherents of the Church of England I found the object of my quest. The monument erected to his memory is in the form of a tall column of fluted unpolished granite, roughly broken off at the top and encircled by a wreath of flowers carved in marble, emblematic, it seemed to me, of the life cut off all too soon, but still crowned by the wreath of poetic fame. The base of the column is faced square, with marble tablets, the inscriptions on the various sides of which read thus-

   Erected in Memory of the Poet Gordon,
      Died 24th June, 1870, aged 37 years.
         Seaspray and Smoke Drift.
               Ashtaroth.
      Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes.

A few plants are growing round the grave, which seemed to have been recently tended, and one little ivy plant clings lovingly to the discoloured stone. The unfenced grave is sentinelled by wattle and gum trees, and it seems almost as if the wishes of the poet, as expressed in the lines at the head of this epistle, had been carried out to the letter. It pleased me to think so, at any rate. There, with the breezes sighing through the boughs, bending with the surging of the not too distant sea, whose roar he loved, for a lullaby, Gordon sleeps calm and undis- turbed, waiting, only waiting, for the time when

   The world as a withered leaf shall be,
   And the sky as a shrivelled scroll shall flee,
   And the dead shall be summoned from land and sea
   At the blast of his bright archangel.

   Then, ah, then, perchance--
         The night rack lifting
         Shall discover the shores unknown.

As I bade farewell to the tomb a cold fog rolling up from the sea shrouded the place in gloom, somewhat according with my feelings at the time.

I am, Sir, &c, ALFRED J. ROBERTS.

First published in The South Australian Register, 4 July 1887

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

Out of Ireland by Christopher Koch, 1999
Cover design by Alex Snellgrove
Doubleday edition, 1999

The winners of the 2011 Queensland Premier's Literary Awards were announced last week.  The winners were:

Fiction Book Award
Reading Madame Bovary, Amanda Lohrey (Black Inc.)

Emerging Queensland Author - Manuscript Award
The Beloved, Annah Lee Faulkner

Unpublished Indigenous Writer - Arts Queensland David Unaipon Award
'Mazin' Grace, Dylan Coleman

Non-Fiction Book Award
An Eye for Eternity: The life of Manning Clark, Mark McKenna (The Miegunyah Press)

History Book - Faculty of Arts, University of Queensland Award
Northern Voyagers: Australia's monsoon coast in maritime history, Alan Powell (Australian Scholarly Publishing)

Children's Book - Mary Ryan's Award
Just a Dog, Michael Gerard Bauer (Omnibus Books)

Young Adult Book Award
Being Here, Barry Jonsberg (Allen & Unwin)

Science Writer Award
Voyage to the Planets - Episodes 1, 2 and 3 - Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, Richard Smith (Essential Media and Entertainment)

Poetry Collection - Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award
Starlight: 150 poems, John Tranter (University of Queensland Press)

Australian Short Story Collection - Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Award
Reading Madame Bovary, Amanda Lohrey (Black Inc.)

Literary or Media Work Advancing Public Debate - The Harry Williams Award
Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania's Forests, Anna Krien (Black Inc.)

Film Script - Screen Queensland Award
The Hunter, Alice Addison (Porchlight Films)

Drama Script (Stage) - Griffith University Creative Writing Program Award
Life Without Me, Daniel Keene (Currency Press Pty Ltd)

Television Script - QUT Creative Industries Award
Paper Giants: The birth of Cleo - Part 2, Christopher Lee (Southern Star John Edwards)

You can read the full shortlists here.

Gird you no more at poets. They have sought
   To utter the unutterable joy.
The gesture breaks the dream; acts ruin thought,
   Whose color is debased with gross alloy.

A leaping horse, a sea-pool clear and cold,
   Night or her stars -- these have not found a name.
The rose is barbarous yet: and who has told
   The frightful grandeur of a leaping flame?

Men have grown used to glory, let it pass
   Im powerless lassitude -- vain, oh, so vain!
Are swept with glory as the wind the grass,
   Drink and are silent as the rose the rain.

But poets, being fools, are not content:
   They will name mysteries and utter most
Unutterable things; their blood is spent
   In Beauty 's woundings -- Beauty that's a ghost.

First published in The Bulletin, 7 December 1929

Two men wrapped to one skin sat on the other side of a table in the hotel lounge and talked about poetry. The skin and the dominant personality were those of Mr. Frank Wilmot, manager of the Melbourne University Press. The second personality was Furnley Maurice, who stands to the first rank of Australian poets.

Mr. Wilmot reached Perth last Mon-day on a short holiday visit and left again by boat on Thursday. An interview was sought with him on Australian poets and poetry during his brief visit.

I had known the voice and had tried to know something of the mind of Furnley Maurice for several years, but I knew practically nothing of Mr. Wilmot except that he had been engaged in the book trade for most of his life in Melbourne and that some 30 years ago, rather shyly it would seem, he gave the name of Furnley Maurice to that part of himself that wrote poetry. The link between Mr. Wilmot and the poet has not been a secret for many years, but it is still the name of Furnley Maurice that appears on the title page and the initials F.M. that sign the preface.

Mr. Wilmot, the book trade man, is an agreeable chap to meet. He does not look any more like a poet than Browning, Wordsworth, John Donne or William Shakespeare did in their time. He is a man of about fifty, with nothing strikingly unusual about his appearance. There are some lines of humour on his face, and a quick interest, but with hints of an almost quizzical observation on the ways of the world rather than of fervent enthusiasms. He might be called typically Australian in general appearance and he is typically Australian, too, to his apparent dislike of any thing resembling a literary pose. Momentarily, one guessed, he felt it was a bit funny to sit, down to the lounge of a hotel to the middle of the day and start talking about poetry to a man you had never seen before. His order to the steward was 'proletarian beer.'

Then he talked, and gradually a third person appeared -- or the other two withdrew. This may sound silly to the author himself and his intimates, but my impression is that, to start with, 30 years ago, there were the somewhat romantic Furnley Maurice wanting to write poetry, and the somewhat hesitating, logical and also keenly sensitive Frank Wilmot who was rubbing very closely against the external world. They were put into separate compartments. But to the course of 30 years they worked on each other to make the complete and mature man that is the writer of today. This was the third person who now emerged slowly and did most of the talking, once the way was found to be clear. Now and again the original Mr. Wilmot would pop in a little nervously with some humorous remark; and once or twice, faintly, could be heard the voice of the youthful and romantic Furnley Maurice.

"Literature Must be National."

After preliminaries we got down to the needs of Australian literature. "The first need," he said, "is a clearer and a stronger Australian nationality-- an insight into what Australia is. In spite of what these professors say, I firmly believe that any literature must be national."

He quoted as an outstanding example the Irish national movement to literature, which, he said, succeeded to producing the greatest English-writing poet of modern times and one of the most interesting dramatists-- Yeats and Singe. "Although their ideas were what professors would regard as local, even subsurban, they have produced really great writers. That seems to be the same with the Russians.

'There is an idea I have expressed again and again and nobody seems to have taken any notice of it," he continued with enthusiastic warmth. . . ."

("Most people spend their lives to trying to get one idea understood and they are damn lucky if they do," put in Mr. Wilmot with a nervous chuckle lest his other half should be thought a crank.)

"My idea," continued the poet, "is that all literatures are national and must be national in their origin, but they may become international later and by accident. Every literature belongs first of all to its own time; it may come later and by accident to belong to all time."

Illustrating his point he mentioned Walton's "The Compleat Angler," written for its own period and its proper occasion and later hailed as a classic. Shakespeare, too, wrote not for posterity or the world but for and of his own day.

Writing to a "Recipe."

The second need of Australian literature, he went on, was a genuine critical method. Following up that quite uncontroversial point we talked for a while about "the enormous amount of sheer imitation" to Australian literature and of "a chap he knew" who purposely set out to write according to "the recipe" which other popular novelists had found successful.

"What would you make the young writer do? Read less and live more?" "I would not seek to restrict their reading to any way but when they write I insist that they have to write from their own observation," he answered. "Life is different. It is different in each of the Australian capitals . . . (Here Mr. Wilmot, the business man, interjected with some thing pleasantly diplomatic about how nice Perth seemed) ... It is different to every age. It is different to every coun- try. You have to see it."

Following up his theme he placed Henry Lawson and Tom Collins to a high place as builders of Australian literature, because of their direct observation of life. Vance Palmer and Katherine Susannah Pritchard were quoted as examples of conscientious writers of today.

Eventually the poet was asked to talk about his own work. "Well, first there was 'Unconditioned Songs' " he said, "that is first, except for another little book that is only a bit of a curio now. 'Unconditioned Songs' was written without any attempt to polish the work off. It was a try-out to see if there was anything to the ideas just as they stood."

"Then Came the War."

"Then came the war." He grinned slowly. The next thing rose out of what you might call an anti-war attitude. That was 'Eyes of Vigilance.'''

In a casual way, smiling and occasionally chuckling over the recollection he told of the circumstances of the publishing of what has been described as one of the most notable Australian literary works the Great War produced -- a volume containing that sequence of verses called: 'To God: From the Warring Nations," which, if only they knew them or could hear them read would be greeted with endorsing cheers by the hosts of youth today.

It was otherwise when they appeared. "It was rather funny," said the writer. 'The publisher showed it to two people. One was Chris Brennan (the late Professor C. J. Brennan) and the other was Walter Murdoch. It was very interesting to read their opinions. I have the two letters still and I always keep them to gether. Professor Murdoch readily accepted it as a genuine expression of a certain feeling. He was very friendly. But the other man was terrifically hostile. There were four pages -- he wrote a beautiful, neat hand with close lines-- four pages of beautifully-written savagery, attacking it from the point of view of poetry and technique and what not, but all the time trying to justify the militaristic attitude against the pacifist one"' The poet laughed. "Mind you," he added more seriously, "Brennan was quite earnest to his dislike of it."

He suddenly laughed again, quite happily and without bitterness, at another recollection. "Professor Archie Strong, of Adelaide, described it as the 'pathetic out-pourings of a professional pacifist' or something like that," he said and recounted how Professor Sinclaire (at one time lecturer to English to the University of Western Australia) took up the coun- ter-attack to characteristic fashion.

And these 'pathetic outpourings' contained the sonnet beginning "The sparrow has gone home into the tree"; and such a couplet as:

   "How can we hate for ever, having proved
    All men are bright and brave and some where loved?"

Asked about the state of mind to which he wrote it, the poet said: "I thought it was only common sense. I remember when I was writing that, my only feeling was that it was taking a fair while to write, although it was written very hurriedly, and that after all it might not be much use because everyone else would be thinking the same things before it came out I thought that they would have had enough of this brutality and would be eager for a return to humanity."

The Poet and Social Wrongs.

After further conversation about the war volume we switched on to the question of how far literature should concern itself with public affairs. (Unfortunately that meant that we did not proceed to discuss his best volume, "The Gully.")

"What attention should the poet give to social problems?" he was asked. "Any reader could gather that there are some things to this world that make you yourself very indignant."

The poet chuckled again. "Have you noticed that?" For a moment there was a chance that we might have heard more about it from the Furnley Maurice side of him, but Mr. Wilmot decided that the discussion should be kept on a literary level.

We began by making the distinction between literature and propaganda. "I hardly think that propaganda as such is likely to inspire any great literature," he said. "It is the ideas behind writing that are of importance." Although we had made no direct reference to it up to that point, we both apparently had to mind his latest book, "Melbourne Odes." The poet started to discuss some of its themes, and particularly that biting third ode, "Upon a row of old boots and shoes to a pawnbroker's window"-- a composition filled with the cry of human distress and the mingled pity, anger, and bitterness of a man who finds it unbearably wrong that such things should be, an ode that echoes the cry that was to the war poems.

'"Old Boots' is not propaganda," the   poet said. "It is stating some sort of a case. It depends on some sort of observation."

"I have always been interested to the backwashes of life," he added later. He recounted a scene he saw going home from work one night down a lane. "I had just turned down a lane after having a drink at a pub," the story commenced. Then he saw a crowd of hungry men scrambling and wrestling around a tray of scraps that had been put outside the back door of an eating house. It was hunger. "It sets you thinking, and it does not matter a damn what your politics may be," he said; and his manner showed that it is pity, not theory, that is behind whatever he may say about social wrong.

''A record made of observations is to the realms of literature," he insisted; "and, to any case, I think a writer is quite justified in sacrificing his aesthetic sensibility if it is necessary to do so with the object of expressing some idea and correcting what he considers to be some great wrong."

After a diversion to Shelley, Zola, and Tolstoy, tested as propagandists, we came back to the "Melbourne Odes."

"The function of a poet is to create a state of mind that makes the acceptance of ideas possible," he said. "Lead your country into a deeper sense of the importance of life. The poet also helps to reveal the life that people are living to themselves. People are patient and complaisant, and it takes imaginative penetration to get the real meaning of a lot of things that people have been considering to be common-place."

Time called the limit to our talk. I may have come away a little uncertain whether I had talked with the author of "The Gully" or of such lines from "Plunder" as --

   From the drowned gardens where slow water-gales
   Wash unknown jungles and world weary hulls.

But there was a very definite knowledge of having come into a vital contact with the writer of "Melbourne Odes"-- a romantic who faces reality, an idealist who looks around him.

First published in The West Australian, 15 February 1936

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

The winners of the 2011 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards have been announced.

The winners were:

C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry
The Taste of River Water, Cate Kennedy

Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction
That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott

Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction
An Eye for Eternity: The Life Of Manning Clark, Mark McKenna

Literature for Young Adults
The Three Loves of Persimmon, Cassandra Golds

Louis Esson Prize for Drama
Do not go gentle..., Patricia Cornelius

You can read the full shortlists here.

Frank Wilmot (aka "Furnley Maurice") (1881-1942)

Author reference sites: Austlit, Australian Dictionary of Biography

See also.

The shortlisted works for the 2011 Man Booker Prize have been released.

The shortlist is:

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Carol Birch, Jamrach's Menagerie
Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues
Stephen Kelman, Pidgeon English
A. D. Miller, Snowdrops

The full longlist is here. The winner will be announced on Tuesday October 18.

Notes: Hollinghurst missing the cut is a bit interesting, I think he was one of the favourites leading in. There are no previous winners on the list, though Barnes has been shortlisted three times previously. How his great novel Flaubert's Parrot lost out to Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner in 1984 I'll never know.

The Guardian has some comment about the shortlist, with a photo of Hollinghurst looking out a window - wistful, perhaps.

Frank Wilmot, writing under the pen-name of "Furnley Maurice," was a social poet, who made a distinctive and original contribution to national tradition, being a keen critic, as well as a poet.

This was stated at the University College last night by Mr. T. Inglis Moore, when he delivered the second of his lectures in the series, "Two Social Poets."  

On his death in 1942, Frank Wilmot was manager of the Melbourne University Press, and spent his life in that city, writing, selling and publishing books. He was a prolific poet,     publishing 13 volumes, which covered pure lyrics, reflective odes, descriptive verse, satire, and even a book of children's verses.

Mr. Inglis Moore said that his most mature and valuable poetry was in his ''Melbourne Odes," published in 1934, one of which won the Dyer Centenary Prize during Melbourne's Centenary celebrations. Here he set out to give "Imaginative significance to everyday objects" in a modern, unpoetical language. Thus, he is important as a poetic revolutionary in Australia in his use of modern idioms to describe modern life.

Other poems in the Melbourne series included one on the agricultural show at Flemington and "The Victoria Markets, Recollected in Tranquility." From "Ode to a Grey-Haired Old Lady Knitting at an Orchestral Concert, Price Two and One, Plus Tax," his imagination created a fine poem, just as his sardonic humour found expression in the satires called "Odes for a Curse-Speaking Choir."

In conclusion, Mr. Moore pointed out that Wilmot was placed in the first six of Australian poets. His special value will probably be as a romantic realist, who presented Melbourne life around him in a highly individual amalgam of brute fact, satiric humour and penetrating imagination.

First published in The Canberra Times, 27 September 1945

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher Koch, 1978
Cover photograph: Michael Corridore
Vintage edition, 1998

Make your hero handsome, tall;
   A short man will not do;
Poor, always, but in all things else
   Equal to any two.

Per contra, write the Rival rich,
   Ugly, or with a scowl;
Spice with a stern, rich, cruel Pa,
   At poorer prone to growl.

The Heroine of course you write
   The sweetest of the sweet;
An angel quite in every way,
   In all but love discreet.

Mamma must with the daughter side,
   Be constantly a-fretting;
Per opposition to papa,
   The other one abetting.

Put in secret love walks sad
   Atwixt the loving pair;
Tears, sighs, love-vows hard sworn by both,
   Exchange of locks of hair.

Once (only once! mind) break the match
   By a love row separation;
Then put the lass in love consumption,
   Him in desperation.

To save both dying make it up,
   Gretna Green wise fashion:
Then send the girl's pa after her
   In a tearing passion.

The old gent then renounces her,
   Finding himself outdone;
After --- introduce a daughter wee,
   Or a tiny grandson.

Present the darling he or she
   On suppliant knee bent;
Then make the grandpa thus to say:
   "Dear children, I relent."   

For matter more to bulge the book,
   Library volume form,
Dish up your friends and enemies,
   And write of sunsets warm.

Rules general! Indulge extremes,
   And which of course must meet;
The more impossible such are
   The cleverer the feat.

If falls in love some lord or duke,
   The maid should lowly be ---
Who in secret loves some other swain
   Of social low degree.

If vice versa you should write ---
   Want the lady dashing --
Why! make her wear the you know what;
   Let her do the mashing.

Of one thing very careful be:
   Avoid in every sense
Things commonplace or practical,
   Or you will give offence.   

Religion never touch upon,
   'Tis poison to each sect;   
On politics, I would remark,
   Be just as circumspect.

Poetry mind you never write,
   Inspired though you be full;
'Tis to critics and the world as is
   A red rag to a bull.

As others do just so do ye
   (As proved beyond a doubt);
Copy from others others' thoughts,
   Just turned a bit about.

Or, better still --- fast, medium, slow,
   Mix up three novels well;
The characters but just re-name,
   And who the deuce can tell!   

Then, if successful you are not,
   Let this your mind relieve:
'Tis literary jealousy
   Drags fell you may believe ---

Newspaper cliqueism, unfeed,
   (P'raps) editorial spleen ---
Stop! Here of course I go too far,
   Such yet has never been!

But popular should you become,
   Kick up with pure delight;
By one and all will lauded be
   Whatever rot you write.

Au revoir! Success attend;
   A pot should you become,
Please don't forget who taught you how,
   Though doomed fell humoursome.

But humour grim is oft put on
   A lesson to convey;
Home-truths lie hidden under what
   Many a fool doth say.

First published in The Queenslander, 9 April 1887

The winners of the 2011 Age Book of the Year Awards were announced last week.

The winners were:

Fiction

Indelible Ink by Fiona McGregor (Scribe)

Non-Fiction

A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W. K. Hancock by Jim Davidson (UNSW Press)

Poetry

Starlight: 150 Poems by John Tranter (University of Queensland Press)

McGregor also won the Book of the Year award.

The winner of the 2011 John Button Prize was announced during the Melbourne Writers Festival.  "The John Button Prize seeks to enhance the quality of public policy writing and debate in Australia" and is named after the late Victorian Labour Senator.

The winner was

There Goes the Neighbourhood: Australia and the Rise of Asia by Michael Wesley

You can read the full shortlist here.

The winners of the 2011 Ned Kelly Awards were announced last night.

The winners were:

True Crime

Geesche Jacobson Abandoned - The Sad Death of Dianne Brimble Allen & Unwin

Best First Fiction

Alan Carter Prime Cut Fremantle Press

Best Fiction

Geoffrey McGeachin The Diggers Rest Hotel Penguin

SD Harvey Short Story

A.S. Patric Hemisphere Travel Guides: Las Vegas For Vegans

A good night was had by all. Well, I enjoyed it anyway - a new venue, reasonable beer, good company and music supplied by Stephen Cummings. Sounds about right.

You can read the full shortlists here.