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Significant prose appeared in Australia later than poetry. If in the last decade the novel has arrived with a strange rush, it had been preceded by 50 years in which the joke about our huge crop of spring poets was as monotonous as the mother-in-law joke in America. Furphy, Lawson, Barbara Baynton -- a few names of story writers stood out like islands in an ocean of balladry. This lag in prose was caused, I would cautiously suggest, largely by external conditions. For the novelist there existed no vehicle at all, but it was possible for almost any competent verse-writer to be published in some journal, the awful truth being that he has consistently been paid by the line, by quantity, instead of quality, with every incentive to pad; and all honour to those who have kept sound and terse! After appearing in a journal, a poet could fairly easily publish his work in book form -- at his own expense, of course, for that is expected of a poet. It costs less to produce, in the usual small edition, the comparatively few words of a poet, stringing down the page like a small mob of cattle, than to publish the sixty, eighty, or a hundred thousand words of a novel and to put that novel into effective circulation. The publishing of poetry can be an amateur matter: to publish novels steadily, a country needs to be more professional in its publishing habits, a little more grown up. Even when our novels of the past decade were actually published abroad, they were more or less well circulated here and helped to change the whole literary outlook.

No Audience in Advance

What novels were these? One after another, they were so unexpected, and their writers' names usually so little known, that it was natural to call them novels from nowhere. Not that they lacked marks of their origin: from Katharine Prichard's "Working Bullocks" in 1925, to F. D. Davison's "Man Shy" three years ago or Brian Penton's "Landtaker's" last year, each one belonged to some part of this huge and varied country. If they came from nowhere, it was that they came like rain from a blue sky. As Joseph Furphy said roundly about his "Such Is Life," they were definitely not written in answer to numerous requests. Our novelists had no eager audience in advance. Perhaps the same blank was felt by a novelist in Russia before Gogol and Goncharov; perhaps it was felt in America a hundred years ago, when Fenimore Cooper timidly began his literary career, I understand, by writing society novels set in the drawing-rooms of London, where he had never been. What it was that turned him bravely in the direction of the Redskin I don't know, but there it was, and his books made it seem natural for Americans to expect something interesting; from their country. With us the age of such a discovery is still in the present. Those of our novelists whose books are something more than imitative commercial products have had to write without models, and to descry their own patterns of life in this chaos; their work has indeed been

    All carved out of the carver's brain.

Attempting what had not been touched before they had to be original or perish, and they have not perished.

If one names a certain few of these, it is because their influence as part of what has been called the "literature of direction," has been so important. In these notes I can only suggest how our literature has begun to develop and perhaps indicate a few growing points. As a novel of "direction" as well as for its own greatness, H. H. Richardson's, trilogy, "The Fortunes of Richard Mahony," stands out; the only trouble is that it could not arrive several decades earlier. In Australian novels the literary pace was set in the nineties -- with no guarantee of maintenance -- by a novelist like Boldrewood, who for all his robust qualities had a "colonial" attitude and observed the conventional formula of the happy ending. If at that time we had had an H. H, Richardson, somewhat as South Africa had as her literary initiator, Olive Schreiner, the doors of opportunity for our genuine literary expression would almost certainly have been forced open long ago, and publishing houses would have become active far sooner. As it is, the existence of the Mahony trilogy has made publishers less reluctant to handle Australian books of literary quality, and readers less automatic in their demand for a happy ending at all costs. It used to be assumed, at least by publishers, that an Australian novel would give its characters plenty of physical adventures, plenty of "out-west," but no complex adventures of the spirit. That we are just beginning to live that down is due largely to the world-wide respect for H. H. Richardson, who, after her great European success with "Maurice Guest," thought it worth while to give 15 years to the construction of a novel on Australia's major historical problem -- that of the immigrant in all his resistances, faced by this new country in all its early crudities.

A True Prospector

The literary courage of a novelist like Katharine Prichard it is impossible to express except in comparing her with a prospector in the desert, and having only a few tools. In "Working Bullocks" she first found her true tune, weaving into her prose the bush sounds and words and little songs that nobody had known how to combine before, and thus presenting her illusions -- a bullock team in a jarrah forest, men working in a timber mill, lovers picnicking in a drowsy hillside noon. Her style is a very subtle web, but because she constructs it out of dead leaves and sticks as well as diamonds, its quality has often gone unnoticed. Her successive books have opened one window after another upon our scene; one of them, indeed, as an admirer wrote in a recent book, "Haxby's Circus," "moves like a gaily coloured beetle across the Australian panorama"; but to suggest as Professor Hancock did some time ago that Miss Prichard has merely covered our geography with descriptive writing is to miss her fathomless and unfailing human sympathy.

Novels from nowhere

There was F. D. Davison's beautiful small book, "Man Shy," cunningly reviewed once by Elzevir in such a way as to astound you when he at last revealed that the attractive, tragic little heroine was a wild cow. In an American edition just out there is no ambiguity, for the title is "Red Heifer." There were those unexpected books of crowded adventures and reminiscences, chronicles of the early days in the romantic Snowy River country, by Brent of Bin Bin: "Up the Country " and "Ten Creeks Run." Several years have passed since M. Barnard Eldershaw's decorative and four-square novel of old Sydney, "A House Is Built," was followed by a smaller canvas, "Green Memory," but this composite author has not said her last word. Leonard Mann's war novel, ''Flesh in Armour," in itself would justify a surmise that we were now adult: in his fearless adherence to invigorating fact and his few passages of lyrical ecstasy this writer shows that the novel is not his master, but his biddable slave.  

If like many people I am unwilling to believe that poetry should yield any of its real territory to prose, still I am convinced that the production of imaginative prose literature is necessary to any country to-day. What is a novel? "The development of character through narrative" is a definition that will serve. We need interpretation in such a form, and we are gradually getting what we need.  Our novelists are now, if not encouraged, at least permitted to write in the fullness of their talent. Some of their books, in a secondary function, may, like "Man Shy," act as our ambassadors abroad. 

First published in The Argus, 9 March 1935

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

Vance Palmer, who has won the first prize offered by "The Bulletin" for a serial this year, is a Queenslander, although he is at present living in Victoria. Last year he was also a prize dinner in this competition; and his recent novels and stories have been of such exceptional quality that no one is surprised at their success.

His many friends winner and admirers will be delighted, for Vance Palmer is one of those Lamb-like men whom everybody loves. His kindliness and charm of manner are reflected in his writing; as also the tranquil depths of his austere mind and sensitive humor. He has written poems and plays, essays and novels, the best known of which are: "The Forerunner" (poems), "The Black Horse," a one-act play, "The Man Hamilton," a novel, and "Men Are Human" to be published in book form presently.

After wandering about the world a good deal in his youth, inspecting a revolution in Mexico and journeying across Siberia to call on Tolstoy, Mr. Palmer lived some years in London, Paris and New York, contributing yarns of adventure and more serious sketches to the "Munsey Magazine," "Adventure," "The New Age" and other reviews. In 1913 he married Miss Nettie Higgins, a niece of Justice Higgins, herself a poet and critic of distinction, and renouncing dazzling prospects in England and America, came home to devote himself to a knowledge and expression of his own country and people.

So capable a craftsman might have made the easy fortune which is to be had by churning out horrors or cowboy romances. But Vance Palmer is an idealist, the most generous and single minded of men, and so devout in his service both to literature and this country that he has given the best he is capable of in his books always.

First published in The Daily News (Perth), 26 March 1930

If the achievement of Bernard O'Dowd in the development of Australia's literary life was to reconcile what I have had to call the belltopper and the moleskin, there have been other poets, slightly more recent in their activities, whose achievement it has been to take such a reconciliation for granted. As writers, both the hesitating colonial gentleman and the robustly crude bushman were to be followed by those who were neither childish, like the first, not adolescent, like the second, but adult. Australia, to a writer in this modern vein, does not seem, as America to Henry James, a meaningless and dreary place of exile. It is not a colony to exploit but a home and he grows up in it naturally and critically.

Consider in this light William Baylebridge, a writer so typical, such a symbol, that we should have to invent him, though we should hardly be clever enough. Like O'Dowd, this poet is conspicuous for a certain dignity and austerity, but these of a type all his own, differing from O'Dowd's more and more as you penetrate the stately avenue of words. His important book of 123 sonnets, "Love Redeemed," has just been published and made accessible in the ordinary way. One mentions this matter of publication because for more than 20 years this writer has been apt to appear in limited editions, privately printed, subtly circulated, very remote -- more remote even than the usual poetry in a "practical" community like ours. One further point is that when Baylebridge began to write -- his first book of poems appeared, I think, in 1912 -- and for long afterwards, he used the name of William Blocksidge. Those who read Baylebridge and therefore want more of him should not make the mistake of passing by a book with Blocksidge on the title page.  

An Individual Type

William Baylebridge presents throughout a peculiarly unswerving literary type. Whether writing in the strict sonnet or the most untrammelled of free verse, whether making verse or prose, he is always himself, a composite, an amalgam from his personal heritage and experiences, but above all, and at great distances of time, a unity. In diction he shows an eclectic archaism liable to be fused, very thoroughly with a racy modern slang, as in the prose of Shakespearian soldiery. His sensuous images, when concerned with landscape, are sometimes general, as if taken from a common poetic treasury, but taken with this poet's own strongly conceived purposes and rhythm ever in mind:

Sometimes again his images spring from an individual vision which his style endows with a universality. In another of the new sonnets there is a characteristic passage where the very name of the wind, having a slight extra syllable, shakes the line: -

Baylebridge's ideas and sometimes his verse forms are heavily tinged with German literary influences which he experienced in his youth; influences of the more epigrammatic and lyrical sort. Some of his brief early lyrics in "Moreton Miles" were surely influenced by Heine.   As for his prose style, at least in fiction, I have an admission to make. There is only one man whose work, from its style and subject-matter, I was once inclined to ascribe to Baylebridge. That was Mr. A. W. Wheen, whose "Two Masters," an unforgettable short story of the war, appeared perhaps 10 years ago in the London "Mercury" and has often been reprinted in anthologies and as a small chapbook. The man who found he could not serve two masters was a soldier in the Australian forces, who, on account of his intimate knowledge of German, was detailed as a spy. Behind the German lines he involuntarily makes the most intimate friendship of his life, the two men leading and thinking together in excitement and joy. When the hour strikes for the work he has come to   do, the spy cannot bring himself to complete it, but walks out into a barrage on No Man's Land. This story, with its dignity and fullness was not, after all, by Baylebridge author of "An Anzac Muster," with its chain of stories. Mr. Arthur Wheen, also an Australian, is an author in his own right, and as a translator has been responsible for perhaps the most famous of all German war-books. The   resemblance in style between the two writers is remarkable, to judge from "Two Masters." Striking, too, was the coincidence that two Australians should be so closely intimate with German literary expression.

Epigram and Essay

For the rest, Baylebridge's prose style in epigram and essay is his own. In a curious book of related fragments, called "National Notes," he set down part of his credo some years ago. If I have called him the examiner perhaps some of these notes will go far to explain why, though the same questioning -- not wistful, like O'Dowd's, but rather an assured challenge -- pervades his poems, too.  

    The time has arrived for a judicious examination of our convictions, our principles, our dreams.

    Leave the past and live in the present; in the mind of the present even must the past be conceived. Let not the present live at the cost of future.

    We would fling large gifts, fling gifts with both hands into the abyss of the future.

Baylebridge very early evolved for himself a diction that seems always competent to express his particular view of life -- vigorous yet subtle; a diction nobody else could use. With the sweep of Elizabethan rhetoric, yet with the vision of a new country always before his eyes, he can use old, robust words and make them his own: some of them being rather Latin words that peered into English, centuries ago, and then withdrew, words we could have done with very well. "The utile canons," he writes in one sonnet, and then --

I have been led on to transcribe the whole sonnet! It is for the reader to see how the man who uses half-forgotten, yet vivid, words, such as "queasy coils" and "affined," can somehow handle, in verse, a prosy word such as "fuss" and make it work hard and well. If may be said, indeed, that Baylebridge wears neither the Victorian's belltopper nor the bushman's moleskins. His costume, worn as naturally as a bird wears its feathers, has something of the Elizabethan about it, a hint of inconspicuous Australian khaki, yet the general contour of modern man. If he has suffered as well as gained by being an Australian, it is in this way, that to be a writer in this country is to be a disregarded person engaged in a freak occupation, and there may creep into the words of even the boldest and least apologetic of poets a slight note of isolation, a take-it-or-leave it obscurity of phrase. Past any such obscurities, however, comes flooding Baylebridge's strong assurance that we can share in the whole of life; that we are not, as the phrase goes, cut-off and isolated, but here, and ready for the future.

First published in The Argus, 2 March 1935

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

Although he has lived in Sydney for the last 20 years, since returning to Australia from England, William Baylebridge is Brisbane-born and educated, an old pupil of the East Brisbane State school and the Brisbane Grammar. He is the greatest poet Queensland has produced.

Baylebridge's poetry is frequently very obscure, but his lines are as polished as an agate; and he is one of the few really accomplished writers of poetry in Australia. His latest volume is entitled "Sextains"; and, like, all that he has published of recent years, it has been issued from his own private Tallabila Press, beautifully printed and delicately bound. In this work Mr. Baylebridge is as keen a craftsman as he is a poet, always a lover of the beautiful.

What he calls 'Sextains' are poems of six lines, each complete in itself. In the sonnet he has no equal in Australian poetry, although many of those in "Love Redeemed" are obscure in meaning and full of the conceits of the 17th century poets, who have had on him a curiously marked influence. In the same way he has made himself a master of the sextet, a vehicle of verse that is rarely used because of its rhythmic difficulties and its need for compression. Mr. Baylebridge has collected 40 of them. That entitled "The Miracle" is an illustration of his mastery of this kind of verse:

   My heart: its birds away, its branches bare,
      Swooned in eclipse; the wind through these that sighed,
   Chill-breath'd, seemed 'burthening, in some lost despair.
      Its perished music and its withered pride.
      You laughing came: it woke; and flowering wide,
            All Spring was there!

All are like that: lines of intense beauty, but obscure in meaning until you seek it out. However obscure he may appear to some readers, he is certainly not slovenly. He knows what he wants to express, and he will search until he has found the one word that will serve the purpose. Like the poetry of Chris Brennan, it is not popular, but popularity is not one of the things that William Baylebridge has ever sought.      

"SEXTAINS," by William Baylebridge (private Tallabila Press, Sydney).

First published in The Courier-Mail, 28 January 1939

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

Two solid books on Australian literature written in 1866 by G. B. Barton for   the International Exhibition in France -the whole thing is incredible enough -- show us the literary intentions of the period. One called "Literature in New South Wales" is devoted to specimens of work, but apart from Wentworth's early verse and a long descriptive poem by Charles Harpur there is little to make a reader remember that he is in a new country. There is distinct avoidance of atmosphere, the prose is rhetorical, abstract, above all imitative and sterile. Barton himself has unusually constructive ideas and a forthright style in the companion volume he even lays down propositions and makes demands still ahead of us in 1934 -- that we ought immediately to have literary and general reviews, build- ing up an intellectual life of our own. When he said that we needed more vigorous and firsthand intellectual experiences he knew what he was asking, for had he not been reading through all that had been produced here? He seemed to suggest that it was not enough to keep the world safe for imported belltoppers; that, in fact, we needed to grow up. Indeed those early writers, as we now see them, perhaps unkindly, seem like children playing "Father." They were not grown up; too many of them were for avoiding the real problems of this new world and of life in general. As colonials, not yet Australians, they were for making a fortune and going home with it.

The Old Bush Songs

Meanwhile, outside the view of these litterateurs, certain people were beginning to grow up. Bushmen in moleskins, scrambling for wood and water and the means of existence, miners and bullock-drivers, overlanders and informal explorers of all sorts -- these were the youth of Australia, their words the expression of a fumbling adolescence. You sometimes hear them still if you find one of the old bush songs, in its half comical roughness, suggesting a boy's voice breaking. Outrageous as they must have seemed to the frock-coated gentlemen, whose own words were a preservative of recognised cultural commodities, these old songs often harked back to more ancient traditions, those of the broadsheet ballad and its mysteriously anonymous predecessors. These bush songs are disappearing. Having an inkling of one of them, I asked more than once if any wireless listener could reclaim it, and this was recently done by taking the words down gradually from the memory of an old man who had not heard or sung them for 50 years.  This song without an author has a theme as old as the Crusaders at least-that of the young woman willing to dress as a page and go with her lover to the wars, the crusade of the bush being the industrial struggle. The transposition is grotesque, but by no means a parody; there is at least adolescent seriousness.

There may be variant readings, there may be more verses; but such is the Condamine ballad, arising from the moleskins, the bushmen. Between the gentlemanly, retarding rhetoric of writers such as Richard Rowe and the rough-and-tumble illiteracy of these eager campfire balladists, how was a literature to emerge? Gordon, for all we can regret in him, did at times, as in "To the Wreck," achieve almost an impossible reconciliation of the two; but a genuine literature would have to discard more than it could retain from such beginnings. It would retain from the derivative sterility of the colonial gentleman only his respect for our literary inheritance: "Let us not lightly cast aside anything that belongs to the Past, for only with the Past can we rear the fabric of the Future." It would retain from the inconsequence of the balladists their feeling for romance, "quod semper, quod ubique"; also the spirit of a new comradeship, of what Lawson in his stories was to call mateship, and what Tom Collins in "Such is Life," was to make the corner-stone of his philosophy. This was only at the close of the last century when for the most part the gentlemen had discarded frock coats and belltoppers in favour of unimposing sacs and felts, while the bushmen, glowing self-conscious in regard to their naive songs, were represented by deliberate verse-writers, who used and adapted their refrains. Someone was needed to appreciate at the same time the two origins,   the belltoppers and the moleskins; to show that there was an exercise for intellect, for subtlety, for discrimination, in our own ways and works.  

An Expatriate's Lament

Did some colonial literary gentlemen, aghast at the prospect, write these words?:

An Australian to excel, has just ten times as much to learn as a European. We lack the deeper sense. We have neither taste nor tact nor power. How should we have them? Our crude and garish climate, our silent past, our deafening present, the constant pressure about us of unlovely circumstance, are as void of all that nourishes and prompts and inspires the artist, as my sad heart is void of bitterness in saying so!

No, the writer, of course, was Henry James, and he began with "An American," yet the parallel holds. When in another passage, writing to W. D. Howells, he lamented, as a restless expatriate, that America had no ivied churches, no Eton, no Westminster, no Royal Courts, no -- the list was enormous -- he asked, "With all these absent what is left?"

"What remains," said Howell stoutly, "what remains for us is simply the whole of life"; and he went on writing moderately well, his quiet novels that gave heart to later Americans to write better ones. The whole of life! Who was to show us that we too could share in the whole of life, and were not mere fugitive colonials clinging to a spot on its circumference? We have not been without our seers.

First published in The Argus, 16 February 1935

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

POEMS AND SONGS by HENRY KENDALL. Published by J. R. Clarke, 356, George-street, and printed by F. Cunninghame, 184, Pitt-street, Sydney. 114 pages, 8vo.

We are always happy to receive fresh flowerets for the Chaplet of Australian Poesy, and it is thus with feelings of unaffected pleasure that we take up the neat little volume of poems recently published by Mr. Henry Kendall, some of whose compositions (distinguished by their smoothness of versification and elevated turn of thought) have already appeared in these columns. Mr. Henry Kendall is a poet of much promise, a native of New South Wales, whose inborn genius has already gained for him a respectable standing as a colonial writer, and who is, doubtless, destined, at no very remote period, to assume an honourable place amongst the constantly increasing ranks of British authors. Already the English Athenaeum has made favourable mention of the name of this young Australian, and has quoted a set of verses written by him -- doing justice to the abilities of the youthful aspirant after fame, and encouraging him to proceed onward in the toilsome ascent of Mount Parnassus. It is an old adage -- so old that it remains embalmed in the idiom of a dead language -- that "A poet is born -- not made," and Mr. Kendall would certainly appear to be one of the fortunate few who may fairly advance his claim to be so described. The forty-five poems which are now placed before the public in this little work are an incontestable proof of the talent of the author -- of his passionate love of the sublime and beautiful, and of his ambition to give utterance to thoughts that may long live in the stately rhythm and sonorous cadences of the English tongue. One very pleasing characteristic of his writings is the the obvious fact that he delights to draw his imagery from Australian scenery, and is evidently thoroughly familiar with its distinctive peculiarities, and its many singular beauties-and deeply impressed with that vague and dreamy tone of thought generated by a personal contemplation and consideration of all that is to be seen in the wilds of the bush, whether in the pathless solitudes of the interior or in the woody mist-laden glens of our picturesque coast scenery. Mr. Kendall resided, we believe, for some time in the beautiful southern district of Kiama, and expatiates with all a poet's enthusiasm upon the glorious scenery with which that secluded and lovely locality everywhere abounds; its rugged barrier of mountains, its pleasant, rolling hills, verdant valleys, pretty homesteads, and sparkling streamlets something rather unusual in Australia), seem to have awakened in the soul of the young Australian all the spirit of poetry. In the third poem of the series he thus expresses himself in language which will give the reader a very fair idea of his style.

The following poem on "The Muse of Australia" contains some very fine lines, and will be read with pleasure, although it is not entirely free from a degree of carelessness and obscurity which might have been beneficially avoided, especially in the second stanza. The first verse appears to us to be, as a description of scenery, particularly graphic and well expressed:

Mr. Kendall has written, we perceive, several poems in which he has idealised the war songs of the aboriginal natives, and thrown a veil of poetry over much that in the actual facts of savage life cannot but be homely and unpleasing, if not absolutely barbarous. In this he has done no more than avail himself of a poet's license -- seizing the more picturesque points as they presented themselves, and passing over all that interfered with the more ideal. Viewed in that light "Kooroora," "Urara," and "Ulmarra" are poems that will not be read without some considerable pleasure. The "Song of the Cattle Hunters," "The Wild Kangaroo," "The Barcoo," and "The Opossum Hunters" are pieces of far greater merit, and contain many passages evincing powers of description, and a degree of thought which would do honour to a much more experienced writer. Mr. Kendall is always pleasing where he depends solely on his own unassisted powers, and only fails when he adopts the ideas and mannerisms of other writers. This he does sometimes (perhaps unconsciously) in a style that cannot be approved of. The grand, quaint metre of Edgar Poe has, doubtless, a peculiar charm in its rhythmical cadence, but his obscurities are defects which it is impossible to justify, and therefore most undesirable to imitate. It is also, we must here remark, much to be regretted that the poem entitled "The Maid of Gerringong" should not have been carefully revised for the author before it went to press. It contains (on page 92) lines which are mere adaptations from the second, third, and fourth stanzas of a poem that appeared in the Nation newspaper about fifteen years ago -- the exquisite beauty of which doubtless captivated the taste of the youthful writer until imagination and memory must have become absolutely blended together. The lines we refer to are as follows :

It is always more agreeable to praise than to censure, however gently, and we have thus much pleasure in concluding this notice by republishing Mr. Kendall's admirable poem "The rain comes sobbing to the door," which is, to our taste, one of the best in the whole book.

THE RAIN COMES SOBBING TO THE DOOR.

The list of those who have won recognition, both at home and abroad, is long, and, considering our short literary history, and the even shorter time that has elapsed since women entered this field, imposing.

Victorian-born Henry Handel Richardson (Mrs. J. G. Robertson) is one of those whose names first leap to mind when a survey of Australian literary endeavor is being made. Critics in England and America were quick to notice and acclaim the splendid work in her first novel, "Maurice Guest," published in 1908, and those who praised her in those early days had their prophecies more than borne out when the three books making up her famous trilogy, "The Fortunes of Richard Mahony," appeared.

This author's work lacks the sensational pages and meretriciously "clever" touches that would undoubtedly make it better-known among that great reading public which can provide a novelist with ocean-going yachts and several cars, or condemn her to comparative financial obscurity.

But by a relatively small audience-- numerous enough overseas to be important--Henry Handel Richardson is regarded as an outstanding figure, one whose writings will undoubtedly remain when more talked-of books are sifted out on to the dust-heap of mediocrity.

In Helen Simpson we have another woman whose reputation in her own land pales beside the acclaim her books have brought her in other English speaking countries. Miss Simpson, although she has written for the stage, is best known by her novels. "The Woman On the Beast" was a particularly fine example, both of her ability as a story-teller and of her craftsmanship. "Boomerang," a novel that could be compared with any book written by a woman of recent years, won her the distinction of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1931. Her latest book, "Saraband For Dead Lovers," will be no disappointment to admirers of her talent.

Other Famous Figures

The name of Katherine Susannah Pritchard is better known in this country, as is her work, than that of either Henry Handel Richardson or Helen Simpson. "Coonardoo," joint winner with "A House is Built" of the first Bulletin Novel Competition, brought her name well before the public, but even before that she had made her own circle of admirers with earlier novels.

Possibly no book written by an Australian, and very few written by any woman, has met with the unanimous praise that critics gave to Miss Christina Stead's "Salzburg Tales" on its publication in London. It was compared, and not unreasonably, in scope and understanding and craftsmanship with the most famous classic collections of its type. The "Salzburg Tales" is certainly a splendid achievement, and one that, even without Miss Stead's later book, "Seven Poor Men of Sydney," would qualify her for an eminent position in the ranks of contemporary writers.

Success came to G. B. Lancaster with the publication of "Pageant," one of the most colorful and capable of Australian historical novels. This book sold extraordinarily well not only in the Commonwealth but overseas, and, as a picture of the Tasmania of a bygone day, has certainly given the author a definite place in Australian letters.

Mention has been made of "A House is Built." This novel of early Sydney was the work of two women, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, and is an excellent piece of work, and a fine kaleidoscope of the era with which it deals.

Poetry and Criticism

To do full justice to the fine work that has been done, and is being done, by Australian women in literature would demand a book rather than a short article. Still unmentioned are novelists of the calibre of Winifred Birkett, whose "Earth's Quality" was recently reviewed by us, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, author , of "Blue North," Mary Marlowe, and, among the writers of juvenile books, Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce.

Then there are the writers of verse: Mary Gilmore and Dorothea MacKellar, whose names have become household words, and Zora Cross, some, of whose best sonnets have not yet achieved their full recognition. Nor, in a country sadly lacking in critical standards, should Nettie Palmer be overlooked. Mrs. Palmer's flair for work of good quality, her honesty of outlook, and genuine critical ability place her in that numerically inconspicuous, outnumbered band of Australian critics who know.

First published in The Australian Women's Weekly, 13 April 1935

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

I think I have not hated any man. -- Dark Rosaleen.

David McKee Wright once told me that he tried to make his poems "simple, sensuous, and sweet." It was an accident of memory, as well as a natural bias, that made him substitute sweetness for passion in the Miltonic trinity, but all readers of "An Irish Heart," his most important published collection, will agree that he achieved remarkable success in his aim. Simplicity is everywhere, in the definite outlines, the honest thought, the dreams that unfold like green leaves the clear expression. And no less noticeable is the profusion of his sensuous imagery that makes us see, hear, and touch what he describes -- for example, the

And the whisper and murmuring mirth when --

And the light touch of soft lips when the fairy was gracious to blind Ryan--

      Och, she kissed like a butterfly's wing,
      When it touches a weed on the wall.

And sweetness seems the most essential of all his poetic qualities, for it is the constant expression of what was naturally in his heart. It is in his quiet love of beautiful things, his tender humour, his faith in human nature, his hopes for the future of mankind, and the musical modulations of his verse. And sweetness does not exclude passion; but, in Wright's poetry, is often the fine savour of the heady wine. Passion with him is not violent, however deep, however exquisite. Everything seems to be magically softened and transfigured, and realities have the charm of what is at once remote and familiar, like fresh and clear reflections, or memories recovered and represented in dreams. He can be forceful, but he never lacks artistic delicacy. He handles words with the same sure and caressing touch with which I have seen him lifting and turning the unset gemstones which he loved for their colour and form and lustre.

As a metrical artist, he made an exceedingly valuable contribution to our national literature. The Australian muse had been too often slatternly, a virago carelessly singing a heartstirring strain in an uncultivated voice. Wright was skilled and careful, and could take liberties with his metres without clumsily doing them injury. Influenced definitely by the modern school of Irish poets, chiefly W. B. Yeats, he could vary stress and quantity in weaving a lovely wavering pattern of words. And sometimes as the voice lingers over a series of long syllables, one feels how he must have delighted in the sounds that he dropped with that reiterated emphasis:

Those who have heard him repeat or read verses that he appreciated will know just how the music of his own poems can best be rendered. A soft voice was his, answering consciously to every wave of the verse as an exultant swimmer feels himself rise and fall to the full rhythm of the sea.

Perhaps from his Irish fairies he learned something of his suave manner and his insidious speech, for, city-dweller though he was, there was something of the faun about him. Irresponsible, impulsive, warm-hearted, and humorously tolerant, he moved among men, but how different was their world generally from his. Where they saw stone walls and rigid barriers, he ran with the shee over the green hills and felt the freedom of the wind. Holding the leafy wealth which is given to those who have kissed the lips of the good people, he was careless of worldly riches. An indefatigable worker, producing vast quantities of marketable literary and journalistic ware, he was able to win money though he could never keep It. Meticulous in his handling of verse, he was blithely careless of his handling of money. One afternoon, when I was lunching with him rather late, he cashed a cheque for me to save me the trouble of going to the bank. That, for him, was the end of the transaction. He forgot about it. Many a long month afterwards he sent me the cheque. Imploring me to tell him how it had come Into his possession, and apologising for having neglected to apply it for some charitable purpose. Those who knew him will understand. He was well paid for his work, and he was lavish in reward of those who did him service. So genorous a man must needs die poor, for he lived as though he possessed the purse of Fortunatus. He has left a fine heritage for all Australians, no doubt; but it is in the delicate workmanship of precious verse.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 February 1928

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

C. J. Dennis has the distinction of being one of the few in Australia (or anywhere else) who has made a living by writing poetry. "The Sentimental Bloke" went into five editions in three months. In less than 18 months it sold 66,145 copies.

How this and other successful books of verse by the same author came to be written, and something of the man who wrote them, are described in 'The Making of A Sentimental Bloke," by Alec. H Chisholm (Georgian House, Melbourne, 10/6). Strangely enough Dennis, "the laureate of the larrikin," was a country-bred boy. He was brought up very strictly by two maiden aunts in Laura, South Australia. Mr. Chisholm suggests that the contrast between his up-bringing and his subsequent literary output is not without its psychological significance. However, at 17 he was standing on his own feet and discovering values for himself. He became junior clerk to a solicitor, was for a time on the staff of the "Critic," a social weekly and then at the age of 29 founded an illustrated journal, "The Gadfly" -- devoted to cheerfully malicious comment on the Australian scene at large, and in particular to light satirical verse by its editor, C. J. Dennis."

Financial difficulties ended that venture, but not before it had given him an avenue to express his undoubted talent for verse-writing. In 1908 an artist friend, Hal Waugh, established him at Toolangi, 40 miles east of Melbourne, and here he lived for the remaining 30 years of his life. A few years later he met Mr. and Mrs. J. G. Roberts, who introduced him to a fraternity of writers and artists whom they entertained at their home at Sassafras. He had already published his "Backblock Ballads" (1913) and a few verses that were the forerunners of "The Sentimental Bloke." But the publication of that book in 1915 gave him immediate security and confidence for the future. His subsequent output, "Ginger Mick," "The Glugs of Gosh," "Doreen," and other books contributed to his popularity.

C. J. Dennis's own contacts with the types of people in his books was perhaps more slight than his skill in delineating them would suggest. Mr. Chisholm suggests that he drew some inspiration from Louis Stone's novel of larrikin life, "Jonah" (1911). Stone is quoted as having said: "That man Dennis is a scoundrel. He has taken his ideas from my book. I should like to meet him and tell him what I think of him!"

Original Creations.

Nevertheless, Dennis's characters were original creations, and whatever literary derivations he might have made from Stone's book or elsewhere cannot detract from his own achievement. In addition, he gave permanence to the type of larrikin slang current at the time. In later years he married and lived in his quiet hills home at Toolangi, where the spirit of the bush-bred boy found peace and happiness. These years produced his final volume, "'The Singing Garden" (1935).

"Dennis," writes Mr. Chisholm, "developed a sustained and sustaining interest in the sunlit world about him... Wild birds were not subjects for study, but 'mates' and, in some instances, 'personalities.' Two especially solemn-looking kookaburras became known as Bernard O'Dowd and Archie Strong, after a couple of eminent literary figures in Melbourne." Here, because Dennis was unable to visit Melbourne himself, Masefield went to see him. Of Dennis at the time of his death, Masefield said: "A charming fellow and a delightful host...Poetry with such a universal appeal, reaching all classes of readers, must have great merits."

While one wonders what is his appeal to the present generation, it is interesting to note that one of the latest additions to the Australian Pocket Library was "The Songs of A Sentimental Bloke," with the original illustrations by Hal Gye.

Reading with great interest the description given in the "Courier" by "Nut Quad" of a voyage in 1861 from England to Australia, it did not take long before the name of the ship, "The Queen of the Colonies," roused quite another train of thought. To me, there will always be two n's in "Colonnies," because here, at Caloundra, the name is spelt so, carved on a tree. The tree is a shaky-looking old pandanus palm, exposed to the weather on the very edge of Moffatt's Headland. Those palms, though, seem to have the nine lives of a cat, holding on to the flimsiest of sandy soil long after their umbrella-like roots have been exposed to the air. The "Queen of the Colonnies" tree, then, embedded in grass and clay, may live there for centuries yet, if it is left untouched.

Nothing threatens its life, probably, so much as its extraordinary interest. People go to look at it, with its deeply carved inscription, and an impulse seems to make them want to knock the tree about; to carve something else on it, perhaps their own initials; or even to knock it down, though this has not been done yet. This tree's inscription goes back to the year before "Nut Quad's" description. In 1863 the "Queen of the Colonnies" was sailing in, when there was a death on hoard. For some reason it seemed better to have the burial on land so a boat put off for Moreton Island and the funeral took place there. When the boat set out on its return journey to the ship though it met with bad weather, so bad that it was driven right across to the mainland and wrecked near Caloundra Head. The boat's crew carved the name of their ship and the year 1863 on the tree. So far as as I can hear, they got away quite safely in the end, and the worst misfortune that happened to them has been that ever since every kind of false version of their adventure has been given. I may have some mistakes left in my version but at least I have given the barest bones of the story, and can hardly be far wrong. I have heard ten different accounts of it, I think. One, for instance printed last year in a Sydney paper with a photograph or the tree as it is at present, stated that the skipper's wife was buried at the foot of the tree, and that the boat was returning to the ship from Caloundra Head when it was wrecked. If this had been so, surely this inscription would have had some suggestion of an epitaph about it. At any rate, the other version does seem nearer the truth, and in any case it's a very exciting tree, standing there and staring over at South America.

Preservation of the Tree

What people now ask is, Who will guarantee the preservation of that tree? It stands on what is private property, I believe, but it is a place where everyone walks. It might be destroyed at   any time, as so many such accidental monuments are. What is the procedure for preserving them? They are best kept on their real position, though they would probably be safer in a museum. If they are to be left where they stand, with all the interest that is rent by their environment, I think they need to be put under some one's special care. It would be a loss to our already rather thin historical sense if such a link with the past were lost to Australia. Yet everything threatens it, from the universal small boy with his active tomahawk to the storms beating up from all sides on such a promontory.

Other Voyages

The account given by "Nut Quad" of life on such a sailing ship was very vivid, and makes our present-day voyages seem very artificially protected. I daresay there are a good many families in Australia which have kept a record of such a voyage. I can think of two: One is a voyage diary kept by a relative of mine, and presented in typescript to members of the family on the fiftieth anniversary of his arrival in Australia. Read such a journal, you are struck chiefly, I think, by the sense of adventure that sustains whole groups of travellers. Not even the bad food, and the fact that it was doled out in a ration which each group had to cook for themselves, could outweigh the romance of porpoises and flying fish and the New Australia. In the second volume of "The Fortunes of Richard Mahony" there is another account of such a voyage, not given in detail on the way, but with the conditions sketched while the boat as in port. One thing that we find hard to grasp now is that you took your cabin furniture with you, including a carpet, if you wished to be comfortable. If you brought a carpet home with you on your cabin floor nowadays, you'd merely be suspected of trying to evade the Customs.

The Spirit of Adventure.

In those days people carried to sea hearts that were both more adventurous and more anxious than ours are now. Not that we are always safe, but there is a sense of travelling to scheduled time, a fortnight behind one ship, a fortnight in front of another, and the waves seem to be ignored -- to say nothing of the winds, whose co-operation was done without long ago. If it is dangerous to go to sea now, that is because every way of living has its dangers. After the Titanic disaster, Joseph Conrad, the lover of solid old wooden sailing ships, wrote explaining that if people went to sea in a ship like a large-sized biscuit tin they might expect to be stove in by an iceberg! Most of us, though, are cheerfully willing to be hypnotised by the sense of safety on board a huge liner. It is only people of far inland countries, like Central Europeans, who have ever asked me nervously about the voyage from Australia, "and can you bear to be for five weeks in constant danger of death!" One can bear it. The "Queen of the Colonnies" bore it for something like five months. It is good to remember the courage and energy of those days. Will we seem as courageous, 70 years hence, when our descendants are flying overseas and wondering how we stood the boredom of a five-weeks' voyage?

The occasional essay is a medium which is not much cultivated in Australia, probably because of lack of opportunity. Still, we can quote some good examples. For example, the gift has been exhibited by the late Sir Archibald Strong, Professor Murdoch, Mr. F. C. Phillips, and others of whom by no means the least is Mr. S. Elliott Napier. Mr. Napier is the author of several pleasant books of which we cherish grateful memories. But many will think that in this one he is at his best. The art of the occasional essay consists in taking any peg upon which to hang a light disquisition; sometimes merely humorous, sometimes with series implications. Here we have "the hansom cab" of literature so employed.

There is a range of reading and a happy allusiveness which reconcile one to Mr. Elliott Napier, even in apparent inconsistencies. Brains, he says, will always conquer brawn in the long run. School sport is in danger of being overdone. Travel, rather than school or sport, is the most educative influence. But he allows that it is not for all to travel, and that cricket, in which he would no doubt include other forms of sport, has played a great part in establishing and maintaining the ties of Empire. "For in this respect every 'test' team is a more efficient band of ambassadors than any that the chancelleries have known." Collecting antique allusions to the game of cricket, Mr. Elliott Napier has discovered that in its infancy a serf was pressed into the office of wicket-keeper, "a position which one would have thought to be eminently suitable for a knight, considering the advantages of his customary defensive armour plate." That is true, but in those days there were no appeals.

In his essay, "The Loveliest Lyric in the Language," Mr. Elliott Napier enters difficult country, and traverses it with signal success. In the conventional view, even of the British themselves, the British are a heavy, cloddish people, insusceptible to the spiritual claims of beauty. Yet even in the very materialistic ages the ability to turn a graceful lyric was part of the normal equipment of anyone who aspired to be someone. It was the better equivalent of the modern after-dinner orations. Jacobean profligates composed dainty and delicious verse. But these were agreeable play-things. Mr. Elliott Napier, rightly in our opinion, puts his money on Keats. He places his favourites in the following order:

(1) "Ode to a Nightingale."

(2) "Grecian Urn."

(3) "Melancholy."

(4) "Autumn."

Had we been the judges, we should have bracketed (1) and (2) as a dead heat, and placed "Autumn" third. But it is difficult to decide.

Quite one of the best things in the book is a parody on Macaulay's criticism of the poems of Robert Montgomery. In this case, Shakespeare is the target, and the travesty is admirably sustained. Shakespeare, an uncouth yokel, coming from nowhere, presumes to write plays for the stage. They are stuffed with colloquialisms, ungrammaticisms, solecisms, plagiarisms, anachronisms, verbosities, and neologisms. One queen might have said, "I am not amused." Another, her ancestor, might have said, "I was." These essays renew our hopes for the Australian essay. (Angus and Robertson; price 6/.)

The Man.

But the most interesting thing about Bayldon is himself. He is a man of great energy, unquestioned ability. And yet a certain childlike simplicity seems to quite unfit him for the struggle of life. Some men have the ability that succeeds. Bayldon has the ability that fails. This is what he recently said in a New South Wales weekly of his own varied life in Australia during the last twenty years:

To enumerate the various parts I have played would take a column. A few of marked contrast will give an inkling of my many experiences. I have been a private secretary and a swagman; a rouseabout and a phrenologist; a fancy swimmer, an editor, and a canvasser of a comic monthly; teacher of English composition and clothiers' agent among kanakas; platform lecturer on Buddhism and Irish subjects, and a tea-traveller; bock canvasser and motto-writer; insurance agent and picture-dealer -- and hundreds of other things.

Yet Bayldon is a man of high character, fine appearance, insinuating address, and is still five or six years on the right side of fifty. Nature has dowered him with many gifts, but she has denied him the gift of succeeding-as the world understands success. And yet there are a few men in Australia -- and I am proud to be one of them -- who would rather spend a night with Bayldon than with the King of England. For Bayldon, in spite of bis failures, in spite of the buffetings to which a hard business world has subjected his gentle spirit, carries the gold of poetry in his heart. The world may despise him, and society may know him not, but God has laid his finger upon his brow. He is in very truth of that great company of noblemen who receive, as Burns put it, the patent of their nobility direct from Almighty God.

A Strange Meeting.

I will never forget the night I first met Arthur Bayldon. It was very late, and I was walking home alone. A young man over-took me, introduced himself, said he knew me, had heard me lecture, and at once dived into a long and involved metaphysical harangue on the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and other small matters. I walked on in silent amazement. His voice was a fine one, and he knew how to use it. He had also, as I could see by the light   of an occasional lamp, finely chiselled features, and a flashing eye. Arrived at my residence he stood at the gate and continued his monologue. After this had gone on for about a couple of hours, I ventured to remind him that it was about 3 o'clock in the morning. He regarded the observation apparently as an irrevelance. What in the name of reason had that insignificant fact to do with the problems of God and immortality? I had, however, to assure him as   politely as possible that, although philosophy was interesting, sleep was imperative, and eventually he departed.

Poet and Book Canvasser.  

I got to know him more intimately afterwards. He came to the town for the double purpose of selling his first volume of poetry and giving exhibitions in fancy swimming. He played both parts admirably. Some of his poetry was excellent, and his swimming was superb. But it was in his capacity of canvasser of his own books that he used to shine most brightly. As a poet   his place is comparatively humble; as a book-canvasser he certainly stands alone, towering above all the motley crew like a veritable colossus. Once he gained entrance into a house his book was as good as sold -- sometimes to every member of the family. For he had a masterful manner, and an arresting gift of eloquence. "Do you love poetry?" he would ask insinuatingly. When the answer was negative or affirmative, he would at once proceed to pour himself out on the subject. '"Poetry," he would cry, standing in the middle of the room gesticulating, "is the voice of God in the heart of man. As Shelley has said, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind." And then would follow what was really powerful and dramatic oration on all the poets, ancient and modern, dead and alive. The family, as a rule, would be entranced, and an hour or two later the exhausted rhetorician would sally forth, carrying with him the names of perhaps half-a-dozen subscribers in his pocketbook, and leaving behind him a memory never to be effaced. The book, when ultimately supplied, was not specially good value, but the oration itself was worth double the money.

A Queensland Newspaper Office.

In time Bayldon and I became very good friends. Indeed, he was one of many striking personalities who used to foregather at the office of the paper I was then con- ducting. Amongst these were Frank Morton, well known to readers of the Sydney "Bulletin," Mr. Rogers, a gentleman who had strange mania for writing books, and who was reputed to be connected with the great Coleridge family, Theodore Wright, a mysterious philosopher who was distinguished by the length of his hair and an unfaltering belief in astrology; Adam Tramp, who was then, as now, an anarchist of anarchists, and occasionally William Kidston, who is now Premier of Queensland. On one occasion I had a very heated argument with Theodore Wright. I had been expressing my profound belief in the monistic philosophy of Professor Clifford when Mr. Wright exclaimed:- "You are utterly mistaken. There is not one substance in the universe; there are three substances, matter, soul, and spirit."

"What is the difference between soul and spirit?" I asked.

"You would not understand if I told you," he replied. "You will have to evolve to a higher plane before you can understand."

"But," I said indignantly, "that is an assumption. If you cannot define your words, you have no right to use them."

"My dear fellow," replied Wright, half-sarcastically, "definitions of those higher things can only be understood by those sufficiently developed to comprehend them. Could I expound philosophy to a dog?"

This was too much. Accordingly, assuming an air of great seriousness, I replied: "Mr. Wright, the everlasting spirit which permeates the universe has made known to me at this very moment a new truth. That truth is that there are four substances in the universe -- matter, soul, spirit, and poojah."      

"Nonsense," cried Wright, "what do you mean by poojah? It's only a word."  

"Ah," I replied, "I cannot define it -- to you -- you have not sufficiently developed."

"But what is it at all?" he cried, forgetting himself.

"Can I expound philosophy to a dog?" I thundered. "No, sir. You will have to develop first. And so I again declare that there are four substances in the universe -- matter, soul, spirit, and poojah, and the greatest of these is poojah." In many subsequent metaphysical arguments I have found "poojah" exceedingly convenient.

About a Sense of Humour.

On another occasion an incident occurred which I am not likely to forget. Mr. Bayldon was aware of his own gifts, though in this he showed a certain childlike sympathy which made it almost attractive. Many of his friends, including myself, had denied him the gift of humour. This gave him a great deal of pain, and I have frequently heard him trying to prove by long process of reasoning that be possessed a wit of a very high quality -- a fact which almost demonstrated its utter absence.

"No gift of humour!" he would cry indignantly, "why I'm full of it. I frequently lie in bed o' nights laughing, hours on end."

"What at?" I once asked.

"Just at things in general," he replied. "I can see humour everywhere. There is humour in the wagging of the little tail of a dog."

One day, however, he happened to say something droll, and I observed: "Why, Bayldon, you've a sense of humour, after all."

He was beside himself with joy. "You have recognised the fact at last," he cried, jumping up and taking me by the hand. "Ah, I knew you would, I knew you would."

At this moment I had to go to a butcher near by and purchase a leg of mutton, which I had promised to take home on my bicycle. Bayldon followed, exclaiming all the way: "What kind of humour have I got -- like Swift, or like Sterne, or like Lamb?"

I entered the shop, secured the leg of mutton, got it well wrapped up in paper, and, attaching it to my bicycle, mounted and rode off. But Bayldon followed. I went fast. He followed suit. I went at considerable speed. He ran alongside. And all the while he was besieging me with questions as to the peculiar characteristics of the humour I had suddenly discovered that he possessed. In consequence of my endeavours to get away from the poet, and the poet's endeavours to detain me, the bicycle began to sway erratically from side to side of the street, and, before I was aware of it the mutton emerged from its wrappings and proceeded in all its nakedness to sway violently before the eyes of men and women. "I unconditionally withdraw the compliment." I cried, jumping from my bicycle, "if either of us had the faintest ghost of any sense of humour in our soul this spectacle would be the death of us." I then fled to a secluded spot and wept. 

First published in The Western Mail, 23 July 1910

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

I am, etc.,

Basil Garstang

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 November 1930

Note: Basil Garstang was a pseudonym of John Le Gay Brereton.

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

The author of a book that has sold to the extent of 300,000 copies in England alone, not to mention an enormous sale in Australia and America, and that has been so much talked about as "The Mystery of a Hansom Cab," may fairly claim a niche in the temple of, at least, ephemeral fame. Consequently, hearing of Mr. Fergus Hume's arrival in England from Australia, a representative of the Sunday Times waited upon him with the object of "drawing him out."

Mr. Fergus Hume, we are told, is a young man, in his twenty-fifth year, with a bright intelligent face, keen eyes, a dark moustache, and of middle height. His manner is quiet and unassuming, and his accent in speaking is somewhat provincial.

"I have been just twelve days in London," says Mr. Hume, " but have seen very little of it as yet, though I am just longing to see all the sights. But we -- that is, my friend Philip Beck and I -- have been working so hard to finish the adaptation of my new book, 'Madame Midas,' as we want to produce the play, for copyright purposes, before the publication of the book on July 7."

"That will be sharp work."  

" Ah, thank goodness, the play is now finished."

"'Madame Midas' is also a story of Australian life, is it not?"

"Yes; and chiefly concerned with the mining interests in the Colony. You see, Farjeon and Marcus Clarke, our two Australian novelists, have dealt with the Australia of a past day -- the rougher times of the Colony. But my desire is to picture the Australia of to-day, to destroy a common impression in England that the miners are still the lawless haphazard diggers of the past, and to convey a true knowledge of the mining industry, which is now carried on on the most scientific principles. To this end I spent some weeks at the Midas mine -- one of the best conducted and most promising in the Colony -- and studied the whole scientific system of gold mining, so as to make my story as realistic as possible. My heroine I have partly drawn from life, being a lady who has become famous in Australia on account of her gold-mining successes. She is an owner of many mines, and works them herself, and in the colony she is known as 'Madame Midas.' Of course, the incidents of the plot, though in the main based on fact, are highly-coloured and elaborated according to the requirements of the story. The first part is laid at the mines, and subsequently the story deals with the stock and share markets in Melbourne. There is an interesting case of poisoning, and the heroine's love story is quite romantic."

"Is the story dramatic?"

" I think so--very. And it is also, I hope and believe, a great advance in every way on 'The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.' That book I wrote when I was very ill and hard-up, not very encouraging conditions for an unknown author to write under; and I know there is consequently some very slippery writing in the book. It was six months before I could get any publisher to take it up, and then a Mr. Trischler, who was connected with a publishing firm in Melbourne, took a fancy to the story, and undertook to arrange for its publication. The Melbourne publishers expected only five hundred would be sold in six months, but Mr. Trischler believed in the book, and an edition of 5000 copies was accordingly printed. These were sold out in eleven days, and the type having been distributed it was two months before the second edition came out, and then they soon sold 30,000 copies. So successful was the book that Mr. Trischler formed ' The Hansom Cab Publishing Company,' and, publishing the book over here, they have made no end of money out of it."  

"I trust you have shared financially in this success?"  

"I can't complain; they gave me a good sum down for the copyright, though had I known that the success was going to be so immense, I would never have parted with the book. However, for 'Madame Midas' they have given me very handsome terms, and I need hardly say how anxious I am about its success. I should hate to be known as a 'one book man.' Consequently I have put my best into this work."  

"Was the 'Hansom Cab' your first literary work?"

"No. I had been dabbling in literature for some time, though intended for the law, and engaged in a lawyer's office. While living in New Zealand I wrote several stories for the newspapers, and one of these--a psychological romance--attracted some attention. Then I wrote two or three plays for Australian theatres, one of which, 'A Woman Scorned,' was produced by Miss Marie de Grey."

"Are you a native Australian?"

"No, but I have lived in the Colonies since I was two years old. My parentage is a mixture of Scotch and Irish. Till I was twenty-one I lived in New Zealand, where I was admitted to the Bar, but never practised as a barrister, and for the last three years Melbourne has been my home, and there I have spent my time between literature, the law, and the Stock Market."

"And now you are fairly launched on the career of a novelist?"

"And playwright. In that connection I have entered into a partnership with Mr. Philip Beck, the actor, who has been playing in Melbourne for the last two years, and who has just returned home with me. The play of 'Madame Midas' is our joint work."

First published in The Maitland Mercury, 18 August 1888

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

Another change in the programme was made on Saturday night. Several dramatised versions of Mr. Fergus Hume's sensational Australian novel have been witnessed before in Brisbane, but Mr. Taylor, in dealing with "The Mystery of a Hansom Cab," as told by the novelist, has succeeded in investing the story with a new interest. The principal incidents of the plot are brought prominently into view; and enough is made of the side issues to impart to many of the scenes the amount of comedy necessary in plays of this description. The result is a thrilling, yet at times amusing, comedy-drama. Throughout four acts, comprising close upon a dozen scenes, the interest is well kept up, and when in the final scene, Madge learns the truth at last, Sam Gorby brings the villain Fitzgerald to justice, and all ends as the audience has all along hoped it would end, no one gives a sigh of relief that all is over. Of the representation it is only necessary to say that it was really a good one. The members of the company have played so long together that there are no hitches in a first night's performance. All the resources of the actor were brought into play by Mr. Charles Taylor, who was seen now as Sam Gorby, the cool calculating detective, then as the ludicrous new chum swell, and again in the guise of a Jew insurance agent. Miss Ella Carrington ably filled the rule of Madge Frettleby, a typical Australian girl, and with Mr. Taylor shared the honours of the evening. The other members of the company gave efficient support. The drama was suitably staged, and the tableau in the first act, showing the hansom, cab, the horse, the driver, the victim, and the murderer, was sufficiently realistic for all purposes. The "Mystery of a Hansom Cab" has been repeated throughout the week.

First published in The Queenslander, 2 April 1892

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

Sometimes we are forcibly reminded that Australia is as big as Europe-without-Russia, or bigger. We remark that to send a letter from Brisbane to Melbourne is like writing from London to Madrid, or further. Then we notice that a book, which is quietly published in Melbourne, seems to Brisbane like something foreign, or, indeed, does not seem anything at all, since it is probably unknown. The poet who usually has chosen to be known as "Furnley Maurice," then, has published four sizable books of poems, but none of those books has made him known to Brisbane, and it is necessary to announce them as if they were new.

Four Volumes (1) "Unconditioned Songs."

The first book of Furnley Maurice's poems was not even published under his pen-name. In 1913 this book, "Unconditioned Songs," appeared anonymously, published by S J. Endacott, of Melbourne. The point of mentioning the publisher's name is that, for want of an other, it was taken to be the author's. I remember quite well seeing some striking lyrics from that book quoted in "T. P. Weekly" as the work of "S. J. Endacott Melbourne." So that was all the poet got for his anonymity! The book had considerable recognition, some reading it for the intenser of its little lyrics, and some for the sympathetic child songs. As for the title of the book, I take it to mean that the songs were -- what they were, fresh, free, not written to order. Here is a "Song":--  

The noticeable quality in the whole book was freshness. It was as if you had found some opals in the rough, still in the matrix: it made the poems in many other books seem only like cut glass. Scattered through "Unconditioned Songs" there were, as I have mentioned, a few delightful songs about children, one giving a picture of a tiny boy in some sort of rocking-cart--

and his tiny downfall. These verses were significant, for it was out of their big brothers that the second large book that Furnley Maurice published was made.

(2) "The Bay and Padie Book."

The whole title of this book was, "The Bay and Padie Book, Kiddie Verses."  The intention was modest; a collection of simple little songs and meditations arising naturally out of a happy suburban home, with its typical joys and sorrows. Two little boys are, I suppose, the heroes -- sometimes also the villains. The book has passed through at least four editions, and I am not sure that its rearrangement in the last of them has left a particularly jolly piece in the front. It was a sort of inspired catalogue of delights, each verse ending,

   Oh, what a lot of lots of things
   For little boys to do! 

Other pieces have more realisation of the occasional hardness of life: days in bed with a cold, baths when heads have to be washed and soap gets in a person's eyes, days when you're playing in the garden and nothing goes right, the wind blows toys away, pussy runs off, and

The book has two distinct kinds of poems in it -- those supposed to be said or thought by the children, which are printed in ordinary type and those that are grown-ups' meditation about the children, printed in italics. This distinction is important, but rather hard to sustain the two kinds overlap here and there. There was that one where the little boy came in quietly and told his mother that he had been out to the pool in the paddock, and "The sky was in the pool!"  You are conscious of the awe in the words: it is not a poem for children, for all its actuality. A "Kitchen Lullaby" makes a good song for a very tiny child to hear, and another isolated quatrain makes an evening song of its own:-  

(3) "Eyes of Vigilance."

If Furnley Maurice has been best known, in recent years, by the "Bay and Padie Book," his name, ten years ago, was associated with one remarkable poem, first published by itself in 1916, later included in his solid book, "Eyes of Vigilance," which appeared in 1920. That poem was called, "To God, from the Weary Nations," and was first published during the war. It was a piece of dignified musing, an ode with some superb lines, and a fine movement: a poem that met with heartfelt appreciation from many who felt the same, but were doomed to remain inarticulate. It uttered what we have all felt since, if not at the time: the pity of war!' It gives a realisation of

Republished in "Eyes of Vigilance," the war being over, the long poem was called, "To God from the Warring Nations."   Professor Walter Murdoch in his second version of an Oxford Anthology of Australasian Verse, printed, "To God, from the Warring Nations," in full, an extraordinary tribute of praise to a poem of such inconvenient length for an anthology.

The rest of "Eyes of Vigilance," which makes a large collection, circles, on the whole, round the theme of that longest poem. There is a large group of sonnets, most of them about the war, and its crashing into the life of man. Here is a sestet:-  

There was another sonnet, though, published in January, 1918. It was daringly called "Peace, 1918," and throbbed with a lovely radiance of hope. It took for an image a room, and a woman in it with kettles shining and polished, everything in order. In the last line she spoke, "The Prince may come to-night!" And that was written in the darkest of moments that did, after all, just come before the dawn.

(4) "Arrows of Longing."  

Of the fourth book it seems hardly fair to speak at all, and yet it contains much of Furnley Maurice's best work. The trouble is that it was published in an expensive and very limited edition, of which probably only a very few copies are left. Some few of the best poems in it have crept into an anthology or two, but what the public needs is a volume of Furnley Maurice collected from all four of his published books, and including the best of what he has written, even since "Arrows of Longing," that large and well-filled book, was published about 1921. If, in "Eyes of Vigilance," Furnley Maurice had been somewhat tendencious, propagandist, in "Arrows of Longing," he is propagandist for beauty only. Perhaps in the early book his theme was pity, and in the later one beauty. It is when he gives this beauty a local habitation that he names her best: -

Perhaps it is for these intense glimpses of beauty in natural things which many have "seen without seeing" that we welcome Furnley Maurice most. It is only right to add that with all his poetical vision he has also a rare wit, and that his critical prose at its highest is very effective indeed. His influence on his fellow writers has all been in the direction of building up a body of literature that should be recognisable as our own,"racy of the soil." A small book of essays, "Romance", published a few years ago, expressed some of his literary opinions.

First published in The Brisbane Courier, 24 December 1927

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

Furnley Maurice, whose real name was Frank Wilmot, has just died in Melbourne. One has to live in Melbourne, perhaps, to understand fully the high literary reputation that is his there. But whatever else may be said, it must be acknowledged that for many years he had been a force in poetry and criticism -- not to speak of publishing, for at the time of his death he was manager of the Melbourne University Press.

If he is known at all widely here, it is for his fine poem "To God: from the Warring (originally "Weary") Nations," written in 1917; for his children's verse, "The Bay and Padie Book," and for his more recent "Melbourne Odes," one of which gained the prize in the Dyer Centenary   Competition.

Other noteworthy publications of his are "Romance," a collection of literary essays, and the two successive books of verse, "Arrows of Longing" and "The Gully," which are patriotic poems in the truest sense. He once co-edited and published a magazine called "The Microbe" -- clearly a Rossetti culture!

Anthologists, when they consider his work, seem mostly to seize on a piece about a dust-bin, which, if nothing else, will assure him the popular immortality of the back-lane romancer.

Differing Opinions

There are detailed and, I think, generous appreciations of his work in Green's "Outline" of Australian Literature, and Morris Miller's bibliography of the same. My own impression, stamped deeper by a number of readings at various times, is that while his unconventionality in thought and form is admirable, his total achievement considerable, he belongs to the   "Phoebus Car-out-of-control" school of poets. As Ben Jonson said about Shakespeare (or didn't he?), he should have put the brake on. In other words, he wrote too much too fast, and almost any one of his longer pieces would bear reshaping, rephrasing, and certainly condensation. This may more readily be believed when I mention that he commonly let himself go in free rhymed verse -- which could often well stop anywhere. His early poems, according to Morris Miller, were remarkable for "brevity of words." That may have been because he began writing under the influence of O'Dowd.

It is too soon, however, to attempt to estimate Furnley Maurice fully. Perhaps his best merit is that he is a poet who can be read by all. What poet could wish more? 

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 February 1942

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

Lately I have been re-reading Louis Stone's novel, "Jonah," first published in 1911. The chief impression it leaves is a secondary one, a feeling of sadness that such fine work should be ignored and forgotten. For it is ignored; people will be saying that they wished Australia had produced a novel about larrikin life in Sydney, a novel which would show our larrikin emerging from push life, and becoming a commercial magnate, a novel showing the contrast between sordid, slumming Sydney, and the exquisite movement and colour of the harbour; well, here is the novel they dreamt of, and they have not read it. I feel inclined to take them on a personally conducted tour through its subtly wrought chapters.

A "Written" Book.

"Jonah" is a book in which every page, as a novelist said to me lately, "feels written." What that means is, I think, that the words are not slammed down in a hit-or-miss fashion. The author has felt aware that he has only, let us say, about ninety thousand words to use, and that there must be no waste pages, no dead paragraphs, no words that are mere counters. Perhaps his best drawn side character is Mrs. Yabsley, the good humoured, selfless old charwoman who becomes Jonah's mother-in-law. The careful drawing of Mrs. Yabsley is a specimen of what I mean by "writing"; every word is faithful to its task, thus:

Mrs. Yabsley came to the door . . . and surveyed Cardigan-street with a loving eve. She had lived there since her marriage 20 years ago, and to her it was the pick of Sydney, the centre of the habitable globe. She gave her opinion to every new-comer in her tremendous voice, that broke on their unaccustomed ear like thunder:

"I've lived 'ere ever since I was a young married woman, an' I know wot I'm talkin' about. My 'usband used ter take me ter the play before we was married, but I never see any play equal ter wot 'appens in this street, if yer only keeps yer eyes open. I see people as wears spectacles readin' books. I don't wonder. If their eyesight was good, they'd be able ter see fer themselvs instead of readin' about it in a book. I can't read myself, bein' no scholar, but I can see that books an' plays is fer them as ain't got no eyes in their 'eads."

The matter does not end there with Mr. Yabsley's dogmatic statement. The author makes you feel that you really do see that street through Mrs. Yabsley's lively, interested eyes. This Cardigan-street is a Sydney variant, perhaps, of the street known as "Little Lon" in Melbourne, celebrated variously by Louis Esson and C. J. Dennis. It is the street of pushes, stray hawkers, family rows ex- pressed out of doors, feuds, struggles, love making, bargaining; yes, it does give you a contempt for people in spectacles staring at a book! Then you suddenly remember that this is all being brought before your mind through the pages of a book, a book extraordinarily weil written. You realise again that the art of letters is a consider- able one.

Jonah Himself.

In very many novels, especially those in a bizarre setting, the hero is negligible, a mere figure-head, as we say, or a tailor's dummy. Not so with "Jonah," whose real name, used in commercial circumstances as time went on, was Joseph Jones. The reader finds no difficulty in believing that Jonah really was a powerful character, powerful in physique and in personality. His physical deformity accompanies our thoughts of him: we remember his tragic tramp and his over-long arms, remember them especially when Jonah is torn between two sets of motives. You feel he is a spirit in prison: yon can even believe in his passion and talent for music, although his only instrument is the mouth organ he won in a shilling raffle. It is important to emphasise this power of Louis Stone's to portray an artistic temperament: very few novelists can make you believe for a moment in the "artists" they describe. Can't we all remember novels in which we are assured that the hero was a wonderful painter, the despair of all rivals alive or dead, and how we felt that nothing less than some "habeas corpus" of his canvases would make us believe for a moment that this dull person ever knew how to mix paint at all? As for the musician in an ordinary novel, with his power of binding his audience in a spell, whatever he played, we usually want to tell him to go and break stones. Jonah does not come before us as a skilled musician, not a prodigy of any sort; but we do believe that he cared for music, and that it was real to him. Parallel to this, we believe in his bewildered physical power and his business shrewdness. Jonah's rise in life through skilled use of advertisement and publicity at a time when such things had not been exploited as they are to-day makes very interesting reading, like a development of some chapters in the early part of H. G. Wells' "The World of William Clissold." Jonah began as assistant to an old-fashioned cobbler, but felt that he was getting no further on. Borrowing a little money, he started an opposition business just across the road. At first he got no custom, his former boss was known, and he was not. Soon, though, hearing his wife say how cheap some baby's bonnet was at four and   eleven, he asked if it would really have been dearer at five shillings:-

"Why don't yer say five bob, an' be done with it?" said Jonah.

"But it ain't five bob; it's only four and eleven," insisted Ada, annoyed at his stupidity.

"An' I suppose it'd be dear at five bob?" sneered Jonah.

"Any fool could tell yez that," snapped Ada.

This discussion bore fruit in Jonah's cynically practical business head. He advertised flamboyantly that he would mend men's shoes for 2/11, and women's for 1/11, while his former chief's old dingy sign, from which "the paint was peeling, still said: "Gent's, 3/6; Ladies. 2/6." In addition, Jonah announced a "While You Wait" service, and bribed a friend to come in and read a newspaper, and spectacularly wait. The miracle was done! In a while Jonah had a special trade sign, and a chain of shops, through Sydney suburbs. It is only after this that he draws breath and emerges, for one of two brief episodes, on the Harbour; you then realise that you have been in Sydney all this time, seeing the tapestry from the wrong side -- the seamy side.

Jonah's Mates.  

Yet that wrong side, was not all sordid. Jonah's friend of his early push days, known as Chook, was a youth with a pretty wit, and his idyllic little love affair holds very genuine sweetness to the very close of the book. ' And humour -- humour of the heavy, farcical kind in his foolish, selfish, step-mother-in-law; humour of delicate moments in his relations with his sweetheart, Pinkie, with her pale face and hair the colour of a new penny. Chapter by chapter, the episodes of their developing life are charming, and also solid. At the end of the book, though, comes the question of why these episodes do seem to float away from the mind. In some books, the framework is so firm and well balanced that at the close you see every episode even more clearly than while you were reading it. In others, the close means a breaking up. "Jonah" is not quite "fitly framed together"; that is its weakness, in spite of all its other strength. Every chapter is rather too much like a separate still-life study, though not "still" within the boundaries of the separate, lively chapter! The story does not quite carry all the characters along in its sweep: when Jonah takes up his new commercial existence, Chook is never mentioned again except in his wholly separate environment. You never hear Chook mentioning Jonah's rise in life, or comparing it with his own struggles as a green- grocer. You never hear Jonah wishing he had lived on with Chook. They are separated, watertight, further from each other than Cardigan-street was from the Habour. Still, Chook and Pinkie and the rest remain as excellent sketches. The whole book is a sketch-book of types very difficult to capture, and we feel they have been saved for us between the covers of "Jonah." It is a book that certainly ought to be republished and well distributed.

First published in The Brisbane Courier, 7 January 1928

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

Mr. Louis Stone, novelist, who died at his home at Randwick on Monday, at the age of 63 years, was the author of "Jonah," a story which dealt with the life of the larrikin element of Sydney of about 30 years ago. It was first published in London in 1911, and re-published in 1933. Mr. Stone was also the author of "Betty Wayside," which was published in London in 1914. He retired from the Education Department a few years ago, for health reasons. He had been first assistant at the Coogee Public School and a teacher at the Sydney Boys' High School. Mr. Stone came to Australia with his parents when 12 years of age, from Leicester, England, where he was born. After some years in Brisbane, he came to Sydney in 1885. He entered the Education Department. Mr. Stone was a fine musician. His wife, formerly Miss Abbie Allen, was a pianist and a member of a prominent musical family. Mrs. Stone survives him.

The funeral took place yesterday to the Randwick Cemetery after a service at the home conducted by the Rev. A Morris who also officiated at the graveside.

The chief mourners were Mrs Stone (widow), Messrs. A. T. Allen, F. W. Allen, S. Allen, Wilfred Allen and Roy Allen (brothers-in-law), and Miss  Dora Allen (sister-in-law)/ Others present included  Messrs. H. W. Moffitt, T. A. Lawler, J. Wolinski, W. H. Woodward, Scarlett, Mr. and Mrs. William Moore, Messrs. Roderic Quinn, Mick Paul, Green, Davies, C. Kinsela, A. Woolland, W. Lawson, H. and H. W. Webb, Wallace, P. Waterman, Miss Jean Wallace, Mr. and Mrs. H. Julius, Messrs. L. Cutler, W. Barnes, Thornton, Oates, Smedley, Bosward, Mason, Proud, J. Fitzgerald, Mesdames Mooney, N. Lindsay, Green, Flowers, Gibb, Messrs. Singleton, Homer, Martin, C. Morrisby, Misses H. Holloway, Russell, McKern, E. Dwyer, Soutar, Garrett, B. and E. Bubb, Warren, Bertie, and Sabine, Dr. Mackaness, Mesdames Fossell, Buettel, Craig, and Chapman, Messrs. G. L. Dwyer, O. and W. Young, W. S. Russell, and Brown.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 September 1935

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

Many years ago now Henry Kendall, that lost child of a mellower civilization, bewailed the hardships which befall "a man of letters here." There is no New Grub street in Australia, but the reporters' room of a newspaper, and the ledger of a city firm here and there might tell of inkier servitudes than those of Gissing's sombre heroes in the murk of London's literary underworld. "Genius," says one critic finely, "though it may often desire money and fame, is never silenced by the lack of either," and there is always a comfortable tradition that poets will be poets in spite of us. What is there to hinder a man dashing off a three volume novel on his Saturday afternoons or late nights at the office? Tolstoy, who had an austere belief in the sweat of the brow, would even have held that an author was the better for it. Australian writers, however, have not flourished under these conditions; and it is even beginning to be suspected that leisure, or, in other words, the assurance of an income, is a favourable condition for good literary work. Few men, in setting out to write a masterpiece, can quite free themselves from the ignoble anxiety of how they and their dependants are to live in the meantime. In Australia the settled income is still almost exclusively associated with families newly enriched by commerce, which circles; however valuable their contributions to trade, have not often displayed leanings to literature. The would-be man of letters, bereft both of the princely patron of old and the unearned increment which is his substitute in older civilizations, relies for his leisure on democracy's interest and appreciation. Has democracy any interest and appreciation for Australian literature?

Views from a Bookshop.

Adelaide booksellers, deep in preparation for Australian Authors' Week, expressed varying opinions on the question. Mr. F. W. Preece, President of the Associated Booksellers of Australia and New Zealand, was, unfortunately, too ill to be interviewed; but Mr. E. H. Lowe, secretary of the Adelaide Association, who is also the manager of the Methodist Book Depot, suggested that if Australians did not appreciate Australian books after Authors' Week it would not be the book sellers' fault. He explained that in Melbourne the Associated Booksellers were working through press, platform, and wireless, and had given prizes for a "slogan." The competition had resulted in such bright ideas as 'Buy books by Australian writers now and by and by,' and 'Australian writers write the right books; buy one by one.' Adelaide booksellers clung to the Adelaide tradition that dignity and dulness were not synonymous, and preferred a quieter poster. They were all supporting Authors' Week in proportion to their smaller numbers, and relied on a joint advertisement and window displays of nothing but Australian books to capture the bookbuyers' interest.

As manager of the Methodist Book   Depot, Mr. Lowe could not express an opinion on the general attitude to Australian books. He could only indicate the attitude of Methodists, which was to show interest in books by ministers' daughters, but restricted enthusiasm in other directions. "Take," he said, "this fairy book by Pixie O. Harris. It is a delightful thing, but we can't sell it. Our people do not care for fairy tales. We can sell any number of Bible stories and copies of "Pilgrim's Progress," but fairy tales sent out for children's prizes are almost invariably returned. In fact, we don't send them now. The novels of Miss Dorothy Langsford have a great sale among our people."

Speaking, not as the manager of the Methodist Book Deport, but as a bookseller of wider experience, Mr. Lowe held that there was a distinct prejudice against books by Australian writers. "Unless there is some strong personal interest, or interest in the historical events described, Australian readers don't want them."

At Tyrrell's.

Mr. S.J. Stutley, happily at home in the bookish and delightful atmosphere of Tyrrell's, Limited, responded in a manner befitting the surroundings, which always seem to suggest that even in this hasty and commercial age there is still room and leisure for talk on general ideas. "I suppose," he said candidly, "that you know as well as I do what the public's attitude has been to Australian literature, It has been apathetic. It is only just lately, since the war in fact, that bookbuyers have realized that Australians can write. Now Angus & Robertson have printed at least half a dozen novels, which have been as well received as English novels of the same type, and as well read as if they had been published in England with all the advantages of the advertising of well-organized publishers. In England, too, the tide has turned. At least two leading firms of publishers, Hodder & Stoughton and Hutchinson's, have representatives in Australia, keeping a lookout for Australian novels.  

"A good example of changed, conditions is the fate of Katherine Susannah Pritchard's "Working Bullocks." That is a really fine thing, outstanding among Australian publications. Her "Pioneers" met with very meagre success. This is a much more mature work, showing real   power, and it has been readily recognised both in Australia and England. It is a novel of the dairy districts, and very realistically written. Jonathan Cape, who brought out the English edition, wrote asking her to tone down the expressions used in some of the dialogue, but she cabled, in effect, "What I have written, I have written," and they thought so highly of the work, that they accepted her ruling. We have just cabled to England for more copies-- a thing most rare with an Australian novel-- and have received a reply that more are being printed so that apart from its Australian success it has made an impression in England." Mr. Stutley touched on Australian publishing, and expressed the opinion that at present it was best for Australian writers to publish in Australia, with the prospect of an English edition if their venture proved successful. It was the hardest test. The Platypus series of cheap reprints were going to make a difference, he thought, to the Australian prospects.

Fairy Books and Others.

Mr. J. Morley Bath, manager of Rigby's, Limited, is one of the most enthusiastic workers for Australian Authors' Week. He believes intensely in encouraging Australian writers, and shows his belief very practically by publishing their books. The Australian text books published by Rigby's are well known, and include works by A. Grenfell Price. Gordon L. Wood. M.A., and Cyril M. Ward, M.A. Their publications, however, are often in lighter vein, and Mr. Bath, rejoices in the distinction of being Pixie O. Harris's "Fairy Publishers," and appearing in her marginal illustrations complete with bowler hat. umbrella and wings. He also published Maud Renner Liston's "Cinderella's   Party"' Mr. Bath has been most anxious that Adelaide should do its part in Australian Authors' Week, and has worked hard in the cause.

Missing Colour.

Mr. B. B. Beck, of Cole's Book Arcade, has seen many changes in the public taste for books, and is now slow to predict. He thinks, that the readers he is most in touch with care little for Australian, or even for English books, compared with the American novel.    

"There," he said, "they find picturesque scenery, the romantic events of two wars, the glamour of Red Indian life, and adventures among primitive conditions. We have as yet no distinctly Australian colour. Most of the novels written here might be written about any part of the continent. Mr. Gask, the dentist, writes detective stories, which are translated into three or four languages, but they are translated because they are detective stories, not because they are Australian. Mrs. Doudy's "Magic of Dawn" sold because of the interest in historical events connected with it. We have as yet no distinctly Australian architecture, no Australian costume even. Australian readers will read more Australian books when they have the interest of strong local colour."  

From all of which the aspiring Australian author may or may not, draw comfort.  

First published in The Register, 10 September 1927

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

West Australian novelist Katherine Susannah Prichard, of Greenmount, has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature.

Confirming this today, author John K. Ewers said that the WA section of the Fellowship of the Australian Writers was invited by the Nobel committee of the Swedish Academy to nominate a candidate.

English professor Alan Edwards of the University of Western Australia readily consented to support the nomination which was sent to Sweden a fortnight ago.

Professor Edwards said that he could think of no Australian writer who better deserved the honour than Katherine Susannah Prichard.

"A very large meeting of the fellowship unanimously endorsed this opinion," said Mr. Ewers.

It is believed that the invitation to the WA Fellowship came as a result of an article by Mr. Ewers in a Melbourne weekly paper last December titled.- "Why not a Nobel Prize for Australian Writers?"

* Katherine Susannah Prichard, widow of WA Victoria Cross winner Hugo Throssell, has become a world figure in literature. Some of her work has been translated into French, Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and Afrikaans. Four of her novels have been published in America. She won a £1000 competition in London in 1915 with The Pioneers. Working Bullocks was published in 1926. In 1928 she shared first prize in a Bulletin competition with Coonardoo.

This phenomenon, among others, is being discussed by upwards of 200 men and women from many parts of Australia at the third annual Science Fiction Convention, which was officially opened yesterday in Sydney.

Most of the magazines now on sale look as though they have arrived from Outer Space. In fact they have come from the United States, by way of Britain.

Science fiction, broadly, is a story that begins something like this:

"Two hours before the vessel plunged into minus point, building up for a hundred and fifty   parsec jump through hyperspace, Captain Jack Warren was so high on narcol he couldn't read his own manifest . . . it was too late. The skags had taken over control of the ship."

Around the world there are now about 50 such magazines in 15 languages, and about 40 of them originate in the United States.

However, the deluge into Australia does not mean that the number of Australian followers has increased so suddenly.  

There is simply a bigger variety of the magazines available here. The dollar restrictions since 1940 have blocked American publications, but now they are being reprinted in Britain.

An executive of a large wholesale magazine distributing firm in Sydney told "The Sun-Herald":

"We're testing the market. In this State the Westerns are dropping back a bit in sales and science fiction is taking their place in popularity, but not yet spectacularly.

The Professors Can Relax

"A few of the science fiction magazines are really just crude Westerns dressed up in space-suits and swimming costumes. But many are far from moronic -- even some with the sexiest or most gruesome covers.

"Those covers are only a come-on. The writers, it seems, won't pander. Trouble is," he added regretfully, "the readers som times have to be pretty bright to understand them.

"In America the publishers have had to issue a couple of books which are virtually popular science dictionaries, so that new s.f. fans can know what they're reading about."

Some of the Australian readers hardly ever need a glossary, for quite a few are honours graduates in physics, mathematics and engineering.

Professors used to relax with a crime story. Now the hand gropes on the bed-side table for "Astounding Science Fiction," "Galaxy," or "If". After all, this new reading is itself detective fiction of a sort.

An American high priest of the cult declares that it can render a great public service by "pointing out the probable results of present trends in science, and then letting the reader decide whether that's what he wants."

But the British novelist J. B. Priestley, after confessing recently that he had read "a good deal" of American science fiction, went on to denounce a current trend in the stories.

"Having ruined this planet," he wrote bitterly, "we take destruction to other planets. It is a move undertaken in secret despair, in the wrong direction . . .

'The rocket ships no longer represent man's triumphant progress. They merely show him hurrying at ever-increasing speeds away from his true life as a spiritual being."

A reasonable-voiced supporter of science fiction, Mr. Vol Molesworth, director of the Futurian Society of Sydney, makes this reply:

"The idea of embodying scientific ideas in fictional form fills an urgent educative need. It's not new. It started with the Socratic Dialogues."

Purists apparently date the birth of modern science fiction at about 1926. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, to their mind, were not sufficiently scientific in their predictions.

They declare that fantasy is strictly different from science fiction, and even when they admit that the two are usually merged in the magazines they add that science has had a habit of overtaking intelligently conceived fantasies.

They Exchange Fanzines

In Sydney a small group of the more enthusiastic readers formed the Futurian Society on the eve of the World War I. To borrow one another's magazines and books and hold their abstruse discussions, these addicts met on Thursday nights in a coffee shop.

Last year they made their present clubrooms in an old Darlinghurst factory, visited fairly regularly by about 100 enthusiasts.

Similar groups exist in the other capitals, and there are lesser groups about the Sydney suburbs. Between some rival groups there is even admittedly a certain amount of bad feeling.

This week-end, in Federation Hall, Philip Street, the Science Fiction Convention is fascinatedly tracing out paths man's future may take.

A B.Sc. and two B.A.'s have given addresses in a symposium on The World of To-morrow. ("If you want to see the future, look at yesterday and to-day", was a sober keynote); and to- night there will be a "variety" session.

The membership of the organised science fiction groups in Australia, the convention visitors learned, is still small but it's growing. And there is no doubt about the members' keeness.

At least 15 of the groups circulate their own papers, some roneoed and some printed, containing reviews, comment and amateur science fiction.

"Fanzines" (fan magazines), these are called, as distinct from prozines, or professional magazines.

Yes, they adore new words, these science-minded students of strange goings-on in strange worlds along the time-space continuum -- and not all the words, certainly, are strictly scientific.

Back, for example, to the story of Captain Jack Warren's adventures, which ends:

"When last heard from, K'Gol and his skag companions had settled down to conferring with terrestrial scientists, making and discarding countless plans to revive the Rigel culture, and drinking narcol . . .

"Who knows the mind of a skag?"

"Up the Country."

The modest title of the book is confirmed by the preface, where the author says that "if only half a dozen genuine old pioneers commend the verisimilitude of their story as here writ down I shall be rewarded extravagantly in excess of my desserts." Brent of Bin Bin surely has his reward. Old pioneers, both in his own lovely district, "where the winds and the streams are made," and in all places like it by aspect and history, will surely say he has achieved "verisimilitude." More than that, he has achieved something like ecstasy, a communicable delight in fine memories.

The book could be called, like some old-fashioned romances, by the names of its chief families. "The Pooles and the Mazeres, or Laughter and Tears" (such books always had a sub-title). But, no, I am wrong in suggesting that "Up the Country" is an old-fashioned book, with its characters seen as if through the wrong end of a tele- scope. Its characters may wear crinolines, but their hearts and speech are young, contemporary. Here is some of their talk:

"You've mourned long enough for poor Emily now. You oughtn't to waste your life any longer. It's a pity for you to be an old bachelor when you see the kind of husbands many women have to put up with."

"That's all very fine, but who'd I marry? I can't go mashing after one of those little squeaking girls that I see about."

That very modern horror of flappers! The second speaker was the hero of the book, Bert Poole. A glorious figure of a bushman, from boyhood to middle age, capable, alert in all his senses, the mainstay of the country-side, Bert Poole was adored by every one of the girls (little squeaking ones and older), and imitated by all the men. If Brent of Bin Bin had done nothing but render the personality of Bert Poole, and make it credible, his book would have been worth writing. But such a man is incomplete without his environment, and that is given, too, his environment, human and physical.

Bush Ecology.  

There is a rather new branch of science called "ecology." It must have existed long years ago without being defined: it was the basis of every bushman's power. An English scientist described ecology recently in this way:

An ecologlst is a field-naturalist, who concentrates attention on the relations between one species and another, on their reactions to their environment, on their numbers, birth rates, death rates, and movements. He has to know a little of everything. When an ecologlst says, "There goes a badger," he should include in his thoughts some definite idea of the animal's place in the community to which it belongs, just as if he had said, "There goes the vicar!"

So much for ecology in general. Now let us see what the ecology of Bert Poole and his friends amounted to:  

Every nook of Eagle Hawk Gullies was familiar to them, it having been their playground ever since they bestrode a horse. They were not to be deceived by any beast or bird that ran, flew, swam, crawled, or burrowed in its environs. Brands were a superfluous means of identification: one glance at a cow or colt and they could make an affidavit as to its dam or sire on points.

Or again, of Bert himself:

He could glance at a forest giant and tell which way it would fall to his axe, and how many slabs it would yield to fashion his habitation. ... He could canter over a stretch of country and estimate how many acres it contained, and how many beasts it would graze. . . . There wasn't a beast from the Upper Murray to the Murrumbidgee that he didn't know by the cut of its jib, and no bird could call to its mate, nor outline its wing on the sky at dusk or dawn, without his reading it like the alphabet.

Not an ecology quite satisfying to the pure scientist, perhaps, but something much nearer to it than that of the average specialist, for the bushman had to "know a little of everything"; often he knew a great deal.

A Book of Adventures.

Being a chronicle of two families and their more significant neighbours, the book's high lights shine on those events that would be most inevitable to whole clans. It opens on the waters of the Great Flood, when brave, charming Mrs. Mazere insisted on crossing the river to help a sick woman. Bert Poole and a young mate rowed her over; strong men stood on the banks imploring her not to take such a risk. She won through quietly, and her consistent courage has been part of the district legends ever since. Another high light shone on an attack by bushrangers, in which Bert Poole, at first misunderstood, then glorified, came out very strong indeed. Then there was the tragedy of lovely Emily Mazere, drowned in her golden youth, a blow for the whole district. These events bind the district-life together, but the background is even more strongly drawn. There is the account of the rival clergymen when they first came to the district. Kind Mrs. Brennan was ill when the priest was to come, so Mrs Mazere, an Anglican, threw open the Mazere homestead of Three Rivers, and every one came to the service. Mrs. Brennan sobbed with joy, saying to her husband:

"There niver was nor could be such a woman agin as my dear Rachel Mazere. Now, ye listen to me, Timmy bhoy, whin next her heretic bishop comes to the district he spinds a noight in all honour at Brennan's Gap..."

She had to wait years, but it is part of the history of Bool Bool that the bishop was nearly smothered in the Brennan's goose-down bed, the only one of its succulent floculent proportions up the country. Thereafter it became customary for the chief of the Church of England when he came to spend a night in great state at Brennan's Gap, and for his colleagues to return the courtesy at Three Rivers.

The Homesteads.

"Up the Country" is a book of homesteads, huge, growing places with as many inhabitants, year in year out, as one of the country houses in Tolstoy's books. But there were no peasants:-

When war, gold rushes, or over-speculation affected the price of stock or wool, the squatters would be flush of money, or strapped for it, according to the swing of the pendulum. But they always had plenty of blood-horses to ride, prime beef to eat, fruit, eggs, cheese, butter, and vegetables, and were able to do their own work if put to it, whether building a new habit or habitation.

It seems necessary to quote at some length like this to show the racy idiom that pervades the book, alternating, unfortunately, with some heavy journalese now and then. "Flush of money or strapped for it" -- that runs very well; such phrases have been lived with.

Finally, it may be mentioned that, as "Bool Bool" is an old settlement in the Mother State, its frontier district is Queensland, whose gold rush takes in its wake many undesirables. So that was Queensland's function then! She has outlived it.

First published in The Brisbane Courier, 2 March 1929

Note: it was not until the 1950s that the author of this, and subsequent novels, was identified as none other than Miles Franklin.

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

When Mr. Roy Bridges startled "The Times" into reviewing his "Vale of Tyre" at great length, Australian reviewers took heart of grace, realising that a notable novel, written in Australia and published in London was a possibility. When, more recently, Mr. Dale Collins published the most enthralling story of adventure at sea since "Treasure Island," it became possible to claim a great novelist for Australia. Ever since, one picks up a novel by an Australian author with a sense of pleasurable anticipation which is quite illogical and quite often unjustified. In a population of less than six millions, carrying, perhaps, a larger proportion suffering from cacoethes scribendi than is usual in older countries, it is absurd to expect a very large number or a very high percentage of literary successes. We have, considering population, an amazing number of better than average versifiers and minor poets; we have two or three really good novelists. That is a literary record of which a young and sparsely populated country may well be proud. Yet a reviewer may perhaps be forgiven for deploring the publication of second and third rate novels by Australians, as tending to lower a standard set proudly high by Australia's literary pioneers.

Perilously close to this category of second-rate Australian novels falls unhappily, the latest effort of Miss Zora Cross. With every desire to be sympathetic and encouraging toward an author who has written much good and almost good verse, it is impossible to write enthusiastically of this novel, "The Lute Girl of Rainyvale." Its central theme is Art (with a large capital), yet one of the characters is made to say of an early Lindsay drawing "Has anyone in Australia such an art treasure? Has anyone in this world? I like to think not." London, which recently saw and passed judgment upon a representative Lindsay collection, is likely to smile indulgently at such naive hero-worship as that. Furthermore, London (assuming that London reads "The Lute Girl of Rainyvale") will draw from these pages a strange picture of Australia as a whole and Queensland in particular. Many of the characters are Chinese; educated Chinese, who are made to fit with an appearance of complete naturalness into an Australian background. A stranger would be likely to receive the impression that wealthy Chinese of collecting habits and sauve manners were a normal feature of the Australian landscape. Throughout Miss Cross shows a knowledge of many highly interesting chapters of Chinese mythology, and for this reason alone many readers will find a curious charm in the book.

"The Lute Girl of Rainyvale," by Zora Cross. Hutchinson's, London. 7s. 6d. From Albert's, Ltd.

First published in The Western Mail, 6 August 1925

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

To be sure, for 30 years Catherine Spence used her brother's name to sign her articles, but she had a message, and she was determined to deliver it without being side-tracked by any irrelevant nonsense about what sex one ought to belong to.

Her message was a strange one for a woman of that day; she believed passionately in democracy, and she believed even more passionately that democracy could not exist without proportional representation, or "effective voting," as she preferred to call it.

It was to the campaign for proportional or preferential voting, which nowadays we take so much for granted, that she devoted the whole of her long life, sparing neither time, energy, money, nor health to bring it about.

Catherine Helen Spence is identified with Australia as a whole by the cause to which she dedicated her life; she is identified with South Australia and the city of Adelaide in many ways besides.

In a sense, she grew up with South Australia, for the colony was only three years old when she arrived there with her family in 1839 at the age of 14.

She was born at Melrose, on the Tweed, in Scotland, in the romantic neighborhood of Abbotsford and Sir Walter Scott. One of her earliest memories was of the funeral procession of the great novelist winding its way to Dryburgh Abbey, where so many of her own family were buried.

"I account myself well born," she says in a memorable sentence, "for my father and mother loved each other. I account myself well descended, going back for many generations on both sides of intelligent and respectable people. I think I was well brought up, for my father and mother were of one mind regarding the care of the family."

A better description of gentle birth could hardly be devised.

Her father was David Spence, a lawyer, and her mother, Helen Brodie, daughter of one of the most enterprising farmers in Britain.

Young Catherine, who was fifth among eight children, had a happy childhood, and for those days an exceedingly good education.

Languages were well taught, and a love and a discriminating taste for good books were stimulated and encouraged along with the more "womanly" pursuit of fine needlework.

Catherine, indeed, was set fair for an academic career, with Edinburgh as her goal, when her gentle, incurably trusting father was ruined by wheat speculations. With recovery impossible, David Spence, fortified by a gift of £500 from his wife's people, took his family to Adelaide.  

Their early years in this hard, raw, new colony were extremely difficult, and David Spence lived only six years longer.

For some months after they landed, the family lived in a tent on Brownhill Creek, and sold milk from their small herd of cows.

During this period they lived chiefly on rice -- it was the only cheap food, and Spence bought a ton of it. Later he got the job of Town Clerk of Adelaide at £150 a year, but lost it again with thc break-up of the municipality.

In 1843, to help the family finances, Catherine went out as a governess at sixpence an hour, and the knowledge that she had 5/- a week to put into the common fund restored her sense of independence and dissipated her shyness.

Meanwhile, she was writing for the Press, a modest beginning with stray verses and an occasional letter to the "South Australian," anonymous, of course.

Later she ran a small school, with the help of her mother and sisters, but in 1850, when she was 25, she gave up teaching and turned to novel-writing.

In all she wrote seven novels, and though fiction was never more than a by-product of her intensely busy existence, her writing is competent and professional, and she has her own distinct and not unimportant place in the development of Australian literature.

Her first two books, "Clara Morison" and "Tender and True," were published in England, and though well reviewed netted their author only £50 between them. The third, "Mr. Hogarth's Will," into which she wove her ideas about voting, yielded £85, but this included serial rights in the Melbourne "Telegraph."

Her best novel, and her last, "Handfasted," was never published at all; it was submitted for a prize of £100 offered by the "Sydney Mail," but the judge "feared it was calculated to loosen the marriage tie -- it was too socialistic, and consequently dangerous!"

In 1859 Catherine received the inspiration for what was to be her life's work.

The English philosopher John Stuart Mill had written a pamphlet advocating Thomas Hare's scheme for proportional voting, and, fired with enthusiasm after reading it, Catherine lost no time in getting her own views on the subject into print.

At that time she was Adelaide correspondent for the Melbourne "Argus" (under her brother's name), but the "Argus" showed no enthusiasm for their employee's new ideas; it recognised them as ingenious, but said it was definitely committed to block voting and that was that.

Two years later, when telegraphed news services made Catherine's work as correspondent unnecessary, she began to write a series of letters to the Adelaide "Register" on her pet theme, signed with her initials.

Her brother John encouraged her to write a pamphlet, and got it printed under the title of "A Plea for Pure Democracy." It was described by John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hare, and other authorities as the best argument from the popular side that had been presented.

Through the kindness of friends, Catherine was enabled to visit England and Scotland in 1865. During her visit she met Thomas Hare himself, and Rowland Hill, then better known as a post-office reformer than as a pioneer of effective voting, and the great Mill also, as well as George Eliot and many less dazzling celebrities.

She and Mill enjoyed each other's society very much, but her meeting with George Eliot was something of a fiasco, and Catherine gives an amusing account of it in her autobiography. George Eliot apologised handsomely years later for her brusqueness, which was caused by ill-health, and Catherine never ceased to regard her, together with Jane Austen, as one of her favorite English novelists.

By this time, of course, Catherine Spence was a well-known public figure, and her services were in demand in Adelaide for all sorts of reform projects.

She was a pioneer in the fight to provide destitute children with normal home lives instead of allowing them to be herded together in institutions; and for 14 years she worked hard to help make the foster-parents scheme under the Boarding-Out Society the success it undoubtedly became.

The movement spread to other States and to New Zealand, while a little book Catherine wrote on the subject, "State Children in Australia," reached the desk of the Under-secretary of State in the British Government and greatly influenced the preparation of the Children's Bill that came before the House of Commons in 1908.

Public speaking was another activity for women pioneered by Catherine Spence. She began in a modest way with travel and literary talks, but later on branched out into preaching and political speaking. She had abandoned the gloomy Calvinism of her forefathers, with its doctrine of predestination, and had joined the Unitarian Church, whose pulpits were open to women ministers.

Catherine was frequently in demand as a preacher, not only in Adelaide, but in Melbourne and Sydney, and later in America.

An address given at the Unitarian Church in Sydney on the subject of International Peace gave her the opportunity to express her disapproval of the South African War, and she was described (by the Sydney "Bulletin") as "the gallant little old lady who has more moral courage in her little finger than all the Sydney ministers have in their combined anatomies."

As one might imagine, Catherine had little time in her life for romance; she had two offers of marriage in her whole life, both of which she declined. She said in later years that though she had often envied her friends the love of their children, she had never envied any of them their husbands!

Books, pamphlets, and articles on all sorts of subjects poured from her tireless pen. She was a pioneer of educational reform in South Australia, and wrote a notable little book on civics called "The Laws We Live Under" for use in State schools.

She was a foundation member of the Adelaide Hospital Commission and gave help to women's suffrage movements.

She was guardian time and again throughout her long life to the orphan children of friends or relations; she kept up her literary studies and taught herself Latin; and all the while "carried her flag" for proportional representation up and down the continent, speaking at meetings, and travelling under all sorts of discomfort and hardships.

In 1893, at the age of 68, she left for a lecture tour of America as a Government Commissioner and a delegate to the World's Fair Congress in Chicago. Her visit was an enormous success, and her passport to the hearts of progressive Americans was the fact that she came "from Australia, the home of the secret ballot!"

This incredible woman, nearly 70 years old, travelled up and down the United States, addressing meetings, preaching from pulpits, and giving interviews to the Press. She met many famous people, including Henry George and Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as the young Helen Keller, about to take her university degree.

One homely little touch is the way Catherine was impressed by the superiority of American domestic arrangements, even 56 years ago. She speaks of a terrace of 40 houses in Brooklyn, all warmed by central heating from one furnace, with hot water laid on, lifts, and "cupboards everywhere, ensuring the maximum of comfort with the minimum of labor."

On her return to Australia she had the satisfaction of seeing women in South Australia given the vote, and she herself was the first woman to seek election in a political contest, standing unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Federal Convention in 1897.

Her candidature aroused great interest and gave the cause of proportional representa- tion further impetus, especially with the example of Tasmania, South Africa, and Belgium before the world.

By 1902 effective voting had taken shape at least in the form of a Bill introduced into the South Australian Legislative Council, and by 1909, the year before her death, her goal was in sight, though she was not to witness the final victory.

Catherine's mother had died in 1884 at the age of 97, and though Catherine remained cheerful and active, she never really recovered from the blow. At the age of 84, still young in heart and forward-looking, she sat down to write her autobiography, but left it unfinished at the point at which her mother had died. She herself died at Norwood, in South Australia, in April, 1910, and her autobiography was finished by her friend and colleague, Mrs. Jeanne Young, and published by the Adelaide "Register," for which she had written so long.

Mrs. Young's words are her most fitting monument: "No truer friend, no better helper, no more sympathetic worker on behalf of the distressed, the deserted, and the destitute ever lived than the 'Grand Old Woman of Australia.'"

First published in The Australian Women's Weekly, 16 September 1950

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

It is rather amusing in reading the list of distinguished Australians whose portraits are to be placed in the Commonwealth Gallery, to find not one woman's name.

It is true that, in the making of Australia, the women who have contributed the most are those whose names are unknown to the public, though their memories are enshrined in the hearts of friends and families. They are women who have quietly taken their share of the burden, and walked shoulder to shoulder with their husbands through all the dangers of a new land; they are pioneer women who have bravely faced, and are still facing, the hardships and loneliness of the bush; they are the women who have worked unobtrusively at the making of good citizens; and for such women the nation itself is a monument, for without their part, the nation could not have come into being.

But out of the whole brave army of silent women there are a few who stand out as leaders, and those names are known to all. They are the women who have cut a path through the network of prejudice, and "blazed the trail" for their sisters following on behind them; and they have earned the right to the title of "distinguished Australians."

The first of these names which will come to every mind is that of Catherine Helen Spence, the "grand old woman" of Australia. Our State Children's Relief Departments stand in every state as an undying monument to Catherine Spence, and generations of children throughout the years will have cause to bless her name, which is known throughout the world. There was never politician yet who more nobly earned a place amongst the "distinguished Australians."

No Books.

The problem of what to do with our books in an ordinary house, where no room is set apart for a library, is a very real one. Books have an exuberant habit of increasing by compound interest, and people who like a place for everything, and everything in its place, come to consider an overflow of books as just so much rubbish to be removed. People of that temperament, though, have their own remedy, a very sound one, if only it is used in time. The good old way, the simple plan: If you don't want to be faced with difficulties about books, don't have any books. Refuse to collect them, either for yourself or your family. Ignore them. Evict them. Personally, I don't know how this is done. I couldn't do it, but I know there are homes where books are simply eliminated; I have seen them; we have all seen them. You look round a room and see tables, chairs, flowers perhaps, a gramophone perhaps, but no disturbing element in the form of books. With regard to books, the room is as bare as the back of your hand. Now I call that masterly: ingene solitude. Those who actually love, books, the disturbers of our mental peace, may deplore the barrenness of such rooms. Perhaps in some moods I do so myself. Still, one must admire the consistently bare surface presented to the eye and mind. "They make a desert and call, it peace." Somehow it's hard to find ex- pressions of unmixed admiration for the achievement of bookless calm! Yet I repeat it; the achievement is masterly, and I don't know how it is done.

Books As Upholstery.

Once or twice it has happened to me, as it may happen to the best of us, to stay in a house where the choice of books was simply inexplicable. One was the home of a wealthy widow, who had just had her whole house redecorated and refurnished. The room where I slept had a elaborate fireplace, and the mantelpiece had several little brackets and shelves at the sides. The shelves could not be left empty, but they would not hold large books; besides, this was a bedroom, unfit for large tomes. The upholsterer had evidently realised this; for he had supplied, along with the elaborate mantelpiece, twelve inches of short books to fill each of the shelves. The most becoming series of books that would fit those shelves happened to be the series known as the Temple Classics, bound in soft green kid, very delightful. Twelve inches of those books gave you quite a selection. Three volumes of Dante, three of Sterne, two of Matthew Arnold, Abelard, and Heloise, a good deal of Carlyle, "much riches in a little room"' indeed! The trouble was, though, that the upholsterer had gauged the space on the shelves so well that none of the books would come out. He had also, I fancy, chosen them "classical" in hopes that nobody would ever want to take them out, as he did not want them disturbed. As for me, I felt that I now knew the meaning of the words, "spirits on prison."

Another Solution.

You can deal with books by refusing to deal with them at all, that is by abolishing them. You can solve the problem by treating them as upholstery and never reading them. Other people, again, though fond of books, honestly dislike seeing them about a room. It is a distaste that I cannot understand, but I suppose some people feel the same about their friends, enjoying their existence, but not wanting to be made aware of it too often. Lately I came across this description, for instance, in Wells' book, "The World of William Clissold." The writer is describing his simple and delightful study, and says:  

There is a large cupboard in which books are hidden, for the backs of modern books, if they are displayed, talk overmuch.

So you hide them in a cupboard, where they might be rifles, or jam-pots, or old boot ! So if you, enter that room, admitted to be a study, you would not be aware of the presence of books at all!  Most of us have seen rooms that came to be called "study," in which there actually were no books; probably a drawer containing fishing-tackle was their nearest approach to the material of meditation. But Clissold has books, and has a comfortable home for them, only he condemns them to lie concealed. His reason is that the backs of modern books are too blatant, and perhaps that is true. We have learnt the ways of reclame too thoroughly. Every book is its own advertisement right up to the day of its death, especially since the glaring jackets have been made so attractive that people seldom have the courage to discard them. Well, Clissold solves the problem to his own satisfaction; a book should he read but not seen. He is entitled to his own choice.

More Positive Pleasure.  

All these solutions, it will be noticed are negative. They are ways of treating books so that we are almost untroubled by them. What about people who enjoy the troubling things? Even apart from their contents, for instance, French books are probably the most troublesome of all, for they are bound in thin paper. The theory is that you are a wealthy person with a well-established library and a pretty taste in bind-ings. What you want, then, is a well-printed book on good paper; to you the temporary binding, which the book wears when you buy it, is negligible, as you intend to have the book bound at once by your ancestral book-binder. He will use the special morocco or calf, or half-calf (I always wonder which end of a calf they use for that), which will agree with all the other volumes in your collection. Good.  But most people are not like you; the paper cover in which a book is born is good enough for them. The book falls to pieces soon; so much the better for the booksellers. And besides, how attractive those French books can be in their fresh paper covers! Leaving aside those that are in covers with pictures, there are those enormous series in an inconspicuous lemon-yellow. No, not, "yellowbacks." This binding can cover anything from the sermons of Bossuet to the latest word by Proust's successors; the point is its fresh attractiveness. Somewhere in his novel of Paris life, "The Ambassadors," Henry James grows positively lyrical about those yellow books, comparing them with a mass of fresh fruit, ripe and enticing. You feel they are coloured by the sheer presence of vitamines. Who could bear to hide such treasures in a cupboard? Besides, the lettering on their backs is discreet; their delicate personality it is that beckons. And Henry James was not alone in feeling that enticement.

When Books Take Charge.

So far I have discussed people who know how to keep books in their place. Is the reverse picture too gloomy to be borne? Shall I tell you what a home is like when books take control, hold the helm, steer the car, wield the lash, and sa forth? Well, this is the way it goes. You move into a new house, even temporarily. You. find there is only one bookshelf, and you construct another, which should be more than enough, as you will not spend more than a few months here. In three months' time, what has happened? Well, the few books you had when you came are still there, but unnoticeable, among the hundred or so more that have accumulated. "Like breeds like"; is that it? Some of the new ones are real acquisitions; you will never part with them. Others are horrible accidents that have occurred to you because So-and-so wanted to try to convince you of double-tax, or auto-ventriloquism, or how to make wine from papaws. What does one do with books like this? That, I admit, is a real problem. One can't take them up and write on the flyleaf, "To Mary, with love," because then Mary will read the book as from you, and will imbibe its doctrine as yours and tell her friends you're a double-taxer who lives on papaw wine. The thing to do with these books in the end, I suppose, is to dump them very anonymously somewhere. Meanwhile, they help to crowd our real books off the two small shelves. Suddenly some one wants to look up something in the small Shelley that is always being submerged by heavier books: small Shelley lurks darkling. Every consultation of him is a crisis:  

   Lest storms should overset the leaning pile
   Deciduous, or its own unbalanced weight.

Cowper's haystack knew all about our book problems. Meanwhile, by facing those dreadful risks of collapse and of flooding, we have at least a small Shelley at hand, and can read aloud a chapter of James Stephens' "Crook of Gold" when "the world is too much with us." We have some poems and novels that their writers have sent us, and that no one can be allowed to borrow. We have above all the sense of abundant life, the overflowing life of the mind, that the visible presence of books can really give. I admit that it is a disturbing presence, but a seed, in the ground is also disturbing when it insists on germinating. After all, some one else must put the case for the swept and garnished room, devoid of books. I cannot put it fairly, for I am too willing that books should have it all their own way.

First published in The Brisbane Courier, 20 August 1927

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

"The Man Who Loved Children" by Christina Stead. (Peter Davies, London).  

Australian-born Christina Stead, in "The Man Who Loved Children," has written an extraordinarily good novel of the disharmonious life of an American family.

It is a grim story set in an atmosphere of hatred, a realistic presentation of a ruthless egocentric and his unfortunate, harassed wife, who quarrel brutally and bitterly in front of their children.  

But it has many amusing moments: the dialogue, of which there is a great deal, is witty, strikingly original, and some of the situations are riotously and robustly comic.  

Sam Pollit, a fantastic figure, dominates the book. Head of a Scientific Department in Washington, he is a boastful buffoon, an idealistic egoist, who struts and performs before the appreciative audience of his six young children. He is forever talking, demonstrating bis love for the children, whining for sympathy against the im- possible conduct of their mother.

The mother, Henrietta, belongs to a wealthy family of Baltimore people, but, like the other Collyers, is wasteful, improvident and unreliable. She is a beautiful, headstrong creature when she marries the handsome, good-living widower, Sam Pollit, but marriage soon changes her. Finding Sam ungenerous with his money, she quickly gets in the toils of moneylenders, and for the rest of her life is dunned by them, always borrowing more to pay off interest, never having enough money for household expenses, always deceiving Sam about where the money goes.

At the beginning of the book the Pollits are living in a lovely, large house outside Washington, a house belonging to Henny's father. Here Sam revels in the garden, the little menagerie he has, and, of course, always the children. Henny, condemned to do the housework and the children's mending, complains bitterly, never speaks to Sam, lives on cups of tea, curry and aspirin, and has frequent trips to town to enjoy the company of a young admirer.

Then Sam, who is an anthropologist, is sent on an expedition to Malaya. His ways so irritate the head of the expedition that numerous complaints are made to Washington, with the result that, on.his return, Sam is suspended without pay. But worse is to come. Henny's father dies hopelessly in debt, and the Pollits have to move out of their grand home and take a tumbledown old house in a poor district outside Baltimore.

Here, while Sam potters happily about with his growing children, repairing, pulling down, and making himself generally a handyman, Henny frets, sells all her treasures to get money to meet the demands of the usurious lenders, and becomes more and more desperate.

All the time frightening quarrels go on, quarrels that lead Henny to the verge of insanity, that make Sam feel more righteous than ever. The end, of course, is tragedy for Henrietta, but some promise of a future for the overbearing Sam.

That is the bare outline of the book, but there is much more in it than that. It is a novel over which Christina Stead must have slaved to provide the right quality of scene, dialogue, characterisation. Her Sam Pollit is a memorable, larger-than-life figure, a contemptible character if ever there was one, yet a man whom we cannot wholly despise. Henrietta, on the other hand, is drawn as a rather sympathetic character, but we cannot keep patience with her dramatics, her threats of murder and suicide, and her flamboyant show of self-sacrifice.

The children are only sketched in on this large-size Pollit canvas, but their inclusion adds life and color to the picture.

The only gentleness in the book is in the chapters about the adolescent Louie, Sam's child by his first marriage, an ugly, clumsy girl, a slovenly drudge in the house, who yet has some thing of the poet in her, has her soul uplifted by her devotion to her teacher, and is the only one of the children to draw completely away from her domineering father.

It is on Louie that the atmosphere of hate in the house has the greatest effect: Louie precipitates the inevitable tragedy.

Besides the Pollit household, Miss Stead brings a number of other characters into the story--Sam's sisters, the large Collyer family, Louie's mother's relations, all oddities; and the more prosaic figures of the neighborhood, and Sam's office cronies and enemies.

Miss Stead is a writer with remarkable literary creative power. With this novel she comes to the peak of her career, assumes a place among the greatest novelists of the day. "The Man Who Loved Children" is a book that merits unqualified literary appreciation as well as providing rich and original reading entertainment.

First published in The Advertiser, 13 September 1941

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

"I wish I had some of the versifying talent of Halloran," exclaimed Sir Thomas Mitchell (he was then engaged on the translation of "Camoens"). "I would make this a rhyme, not a prose transalation, as I must now call it." "Mr. Halloran?" I rather queried than said. "Yes; he is in my office. I call him our colonial Lovelace, or Davenant; but I expect he will make a name for himself." "Unless," I answered, "He might have too many sheep on a Shenstone's Leasowes. Don't you think, Sir Thomas, we have poetry enough?" "No. We never have had, nor never will have too much of the right sort. Poetry is the grand purifier of the wave of intellect which keeps seething and boiling around us. We owe more to our poets than we do to our prose writers, just as a Christian would know more of the Psalms than he would of any other portion of the Scripture." "Give me the songs of a nation and I shall know know how to rule it," said a great man, and if the more elaborate works of Campbell or Burns, or of Moore were forgotten, "Ye Mariners of England," "Scots Wha Hae," or the "Sweet Yale of Avoca," would be remembered as long as our language is spoken." Here," said an old and valued friend to me, who had been long prostrated by that terrible affliction, a nervous disorder, "here I have received more benefit from those few lines of good old quaint and pious George Herbert than I have from the Pharmacopiae. Shall I repeat them to you?" "Do."

   Who would have thought my withered soul
      Should have recovered greenness?
   It was gone quite underground, as flowers depart
      To see their mother-root, when they have blown
   Where they together all the hard weather
      Dead to the world, kept house unknown.

   And now in age again I live and write;
      I once more smell the dew and rain,
   And relish versing. Oh! my only light,
      It cannot be that I am he
   On whom thy tempests fell all night.

I have never had the pleasure of reading Mr. Halloran's poems in a collected form, nor do I even know whether they have been published; but from the different fugitive pieces of his which I have met with in the colonial newspaper press, he is a poet of no mean order; more classical, I should say, than artistic, breathing a deep spirit of refinement, which is the more remarkable as he wrote at a time when the grossest sensuality was the order of the day. Like most men who are not compelled to depend upon their pen for subsistence, there is nothing paradoxical in his effusions; there is an easy, quiet flow of gentlemanly, good humored musical rhyme, more of the Corinthian than the Doric about it, more of the urbe in rure than the rus in urbe, and, above all things, possessing the rare merit of modern poetry-- that is, of being understood. When I first saw Mr. Halloran, he was in a carriage; when I last saw him he was in a carriage; and I sincerely trust that he will ascend Parnassus in the same vehicle, and get crowned, too, as one of first who stepped boldly forward as a purifier of the public taste.

First published in The Queenslander, 10 April 1869

   A scented song blown oversea,
      As though from bowers of bloom;
   A wind harp in a lilac tree
      Breathed music and perfume.

We seek in vain in Daley for profundity either of passion or of philosophy. He bears the heart of a boy, kindling to the raptures of youth echoing its sadness and revealing its undying charm. His strange poem "Ponce de Leon" expresses his longing to voyage with that conquistador of the Floridas.

   "Grieved am I, senor, and sorry,"
      Very courteously it said,
   "But I may not take you with me --
      But I only take the Dead.
   These alone may dare the voyage,
      These alone sail on the quest,
   For the fount of Youth Eternal,
      For the Islands of the Blest."

It was Daley's aspiration to write "songs and sonnets carven in fine gold." Of the eight sonnets he preserved the best is ''Anacreon," ending --

   There's honey still and roses on the earth
   And lips to kiss and jugs to drain with mirth,
   And lovers walk in pairs, but she is gone . . .
            Anacreon, Anacreon.

Daley's verse owes little to our Australian scenery beyond its golden sunshine. It seems rather to be an emanation from the Celtic wonderland, the true home of his spirit -- "His best verse," said Strong, "has peculiar grace and distinction, and sometimes achieves an almost Heinesque quality, as when he addresses his soul,"

   Be still and wait, O caged immortal Bird,
      Thou shalt be free;
   Not all in vain hast thou the voices heard
      Of lives to be.
   Be still and wait! No being that draws breath
      Thy bounds can set;
   Though God Himself forget thee, Faithful Death
      Will not forget.

Zora Cross has characterised Daley's verse with the same fine perceptiveness which marks his own laurel tribute for the brow of Kendall--

First published in The Courier-Mail, 18 May 1935

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

Prominent amongst the early band of bush balladists developed by the Sydney "Bulletin" and yet with a distinctive note of his own is Edward Dyson. A. B. Paterson, Henry Lawson, John Farrell, and Edward Dyson, it has been said, all graduated in the same school, that of journalism and the Sydney "Bulletin" was their nursing mother. John Farrell is the oldest member of this little group, Edward Dyson is the youngest. Like Lawson, Dyson has written wore notable work in prose than in verse, but his poems constitute a unique contribution to the literature of Australia.

''There is a certain similarity of style running through the whole four," says Henry G. Turner, of this group, in "The Development of Australian Literature," and though they frequently view the same subject from a totally opposite standpoint, the influence of Adam Lindsay Gordon, of Bret Harte, and of Brunton Stephens is in them all." Apart from their common interest in singing in differing strains of the life of the bush, Dyson is distinguished from the other members of this group in the peculiar inspiration he drew from the mines and the miners in the days when it was possible to invest mines and mining fields with a poetical glamour. Dyson is also distinguished by a genial humour, which in his prose run to the broadest farce.

In an account he once wrote of his methods of work, Edward Dyson asserted that he went though "a process of soakage and seepage." He said that he allowed his experiences to soak for years in his memory before he attempted to draw upon them for use in fashioning stories and verses, as he held that experience needed the mellowing influence of time before it acquired literary value. His variegated literary output must therefore be regarded as the evidence of a rich and varied experience which has "soaked and seeped," in his own geological metaphor, through the personality of the writer.

Edward Dyson was born at Morrison's, near Ballarat, in 1865. His family had come to Australia in 1852 and were in the thick of all the gold rushes of the period. Shortly after Edward's birth the family moved to the big mining field of Alfredton. Later moves carried the family to Melbourne, Bendigo, and Ballarat until, when Edward was 11 years old, they were back at Alfredton again. In the meantime the big mines had closed down and the worked-out shafts and abandoned workings excercised a peculiar fascination for the young Dyson, to be reflected in such of his later work as "The Worked-out Mine," with its--

  "Above the shaft in measured space
      A rotted rope swings to and fro,
   Whilst o'er the plat and on the brace
      The silent shadows come and go.

   And there below, in chambers dread,
      Where darkness like a fungus clings,
   Are lingering still the old mine's dead,
      Bend o'er and hear their wisperings." 

Other experiences of this period when Dyson actively shared the adventures of the youngsters of his age, are no doubt reflected in the rollicking boys' story - "The Gold Stealers," in which Waddy forms a counterpart of Alfredton. Before he had reached 13, Dyson had set out to explore the world as assistant to a hawker, his adventures in this capacity providing the raw material for his later story "Tommy the Hawker." Returning to Ballarat, he worked for a while as whim boy, his recollections of this life providing the foundations for his most effective poem, "The Old Whim Horse," paralleled by Dyson's own dream, as he sang:--

Later mining at Clunes and Bungaree, on the alluvial field at Lefroy in Tasmania, and then back as a trucker in a deep mine, and afterwards at battery building in Victoria, Dyson became familiar with every detail of the mining life of the period. This experience is all reflected in his first book of poems ''Rhymes from the Mines and other Lines," published in 1896. In "The Trucker," in particular is a vivid account of the life of the lads which Dyson had shared:

And in "The Prospectors" he paints the characteristics of a type that is by no means extinct to-day:--

It has been said that Dyson's poems, on their first appearance, suffered by comparison with those of Paterson and Lawson because his mining songs lacked any distinctive Australian note, but it is certain that the vivid realism, the genial sense of humour and the kindly human understanding which inspires these simple poems will ensure that the best of them will live.

In his prose work Dyson has achieved a number of successes. "Fact'ry 'Ands" and "Benno" were responsible for the creation of characters which have become as well-known as the most famous characters of Dickens. The characterisation is fine throughout, but the humour runs to the broadest farce.

"Below and On Top," and "The Missing Link," contain some of the best of Dyson's short stories. With "In the Roaring Fifties," a more ambitious novel, published in 1906, Dyson was less successful than with his lighter sketches. Many other short stories have not yet appeared in book form.

Altogether Edward Dyson has been responsible for a notable addition to the literature of Australia. He has opened new veins and exploited them according to their peculiar requirements. Lacking the imagination which would have raised his creations to the higher levels of literature, he has shown himself a faithful recorder of much that is interesting and a versatile and adaptable craftsman. Living wholly by his craft he has shown that it is possible even in Australia to devote a life to writing and manage to live.

First published in The Morning Bulletin [Rockhampton], 12 January 1931

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

"Benno; and Some of the Push," by Edward Dyson. (N.S.W. Bookstall Co., Sydney.) In his "Fact'ry "Ands," Mr. Dyson proved himself a master craftsman in the handling of Australian slum slang; and in continuing his comic history of a Melbourne paper-bag factory, he displays an even more copious vocabulary of language, that would tax the philological understanding of Professor Max Muller himself. Nevertheless, what might have been less intelligible to the linguistic pundit than Sanskrit in Assyrian cuneiform character, is probably quite easily understanded of the people constituting a Little Bourke-street push. Even when not absolutely lucid to a reader whose slum dialect education has been somewhat neglected, the language of Benno and his pals is always patently expressive and picturesquely forceful. Thus, for example, one may not know the precise meaning of the following exordium -- "G'out, yer monkey-mugged slum mungrool, yer'll cop yer doss" -- but no reader is liable to misconstrue it as a flattering eulogy or a polite invitation to afternoon tea. Mr. Dyson's factory hands are, of course, wildly, grossly exaggerated; but they are not intended to be more than expressive and suggestive caricatures. Their ruggedly rhetorical vituperation and cryptic verbiage lend force and point to situations and incidents which, despite a not inconsiderable flavouring of humour, would sound somewhat flat in decorous English. It is true that the vraisemblance of the dialogue is somewhat marred by the rigorous exclusion of the larrikin's pet adjective and substantive and of his most vigorously damnatory expletives -- but that was virtually unavoidable. A taste of Mr. Dyson's quality may be given, however, in respect to a desperate fistic duel between rivals in the affections of a flirtatious "donah." The Helen who had caused this war, it may be explained, was from the hue of her capillary attractions known as "Ginge." Thus speaks the jealous factory knight:

 "It's all fixed up, Mills."  

 "Wot! as she guv yeh brusher?" cried the packer.  

"No blinded fear. Ginge know's w'en she's got a good thing. The fight's 'ranged 'tween me 'n th' other bloke. We fight the prelim to the Bull Green 'n Coffee Hogan scrap et th' Smithers St. Hathletic room, Monday night fortnight, catch-weights, for harf a Jim 'n a five bob side wager-eight rounds, one t' win. Markis o' Queensbee rules, four ounce gloves 'n regerlation trunks. Prelimery starts punctooal at eight. Prices, two, one, and a tizzie. We've both signed harticles."  

"Good e-nough !" said the packer. I mus 'ave a deener's worth iv that."

Anyone who wishes to part with a "deener" can get for the money the whole worth of Benno and his push, whose adventures, it may be explained, have previously been chronicled in the "Bulletin. They are unmistakeably Bulletinesque.

First published in The Western Mail, 9 September 1911

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

One of the minor results of the Great War has been the addition to the English tongue of a great number of new and strange words, some of which, ugly and useless, are doomed to die on early death, but others will undoubtedly pass into the currency of the language. Some persons profess to look with considerable displeasure on the coining of words, treating all strange words as slang. There could not be a greater error. Of all the languages of the world, the English has the greatest power of assimalating to and incorporating with itself, all useful words with which it comes into contact. We cannot treat Englisn as we treat Greek and Latin, as a sacred treasure from which nothing must be taken, and to which nothing must be added. English is a living and growing speech, constantly expanding, and always ready to incorporate with itself any useful word. It borrows, it steals, it assimilates, and asks no questions about the origin. It is the only language that does this to any extent, and this indication of immense vitality is probably due to the great success of the British in colonisation, and to their world-wide association with other races. No language has influenced its growth so much as Greek has done, but practically all the languages of the earth have administered to its wants. Just as new worde are being constantly added to the language, so time has taken curious liberties with other words which, classic in the days of Shakespeare, have become obsolete or are regarded as slang. To refer in polite society in these days to a man on a drinking bout as being "on a bender" would be to leave oneself open to the charge of using slang. Yet in the days of Allan Ramsay it was the correct expression. The word "flunkey," as signifying a servile attitude towards somebody in a higher position, is slang, yet it was classical English when used by Thackeray and Carlyle. Thousands of such useful   words have been lost to the language chiefiy because they have been used loosely and incorrectly, and have lost their original meanings. Excepting in our Law Courts, for instance, the word "nice," as indicating a point of keen or fine distinction, is seldom heard in its proper sense, but is loosely used to mean something pleasant.

Quite recently a little book was published by the Lothian Book Publishing Co., Ltd., of Melbourne, entitled "Digger Dialects." Its author, Mr. W. H. Downing, late of the 57th Battalion of the A.I.F., set out to collect all the words of Australian slang that were born during the war, and he has compiled a glossary of probably 1500 words or more. The booklet naturally is interesting to a student of literature, but it certainly must not be taken for what it purports to be, because many of the words are of British origin, many of them were in the argot of the underworld in Australian cities years before the war occurred, and some of them owe their origin to America, which, of all countries in the world, is richest in descriptive slang, and has passed more words than any other English-speaking country into the currency of the language. It is, perhaps, an impossible task to expect anybody to compile a complete glossary of the plundered words that became part of the language of the soldiers. Some of them were, undoubtedly of French descent, but they were so distorted by faulty pronunciation that they have ceased to bear even the remotest likeness to their parents. For instance, the word "napoo" sounds like the name of a character in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, but it is the English rendering of the French phrase "il n'y a plus," and it is used to express any gradation of lacking from being absent to complete annihilation. "Toot sweet," from the French "toute de suite," betokens extreme urgency. Things that gave pleasure to the soldier linguist were "tray bong," whilst "tray beans" expressed the sense of goodness. ''Dud," in the classical English of two centuries ago, was a useless rag, and in the soldiers' dialect it came to mean something worthless, as, for instance, a shell that had failed to burst. "Stunt" is a particularly ugly word that seems to have crept into the language through American theatrical companies, but it now serves a useful purpose as representing some arduous enterprise or work, or some smart aerial evolution. "Camouflage" is probably the most useful word that has been directly stolen from the French, and it has now passed into every day speech, and especially that of politics, to which it fas no application in its original meaning.  

Perhaps the best compilation of Australian slang is to be found in the poems of C J. Dennis, yet many of his words, such as "clobber," meaning clothes, and "monicker," meaning a name, are well, known in the argot of East London. English slang, as a rule, is not descriptive, and while Australian slang is occasionally expressive it falls far short of those word-pictures which are presented by the really first-class slang of America, such as "high brow" to represent a man of learning, or "you're on the freight train" as a suggestion that one is slow on the "up-take," another useful American term. Turning to "Digger Dialects" we find a cigarette described as "a-coffin nail" or "a consumption stick."   A "deep thinker" is one who was late in enlisting, and a "rainbow"--we believe that is of English origin--represents one who joined the colours at the time of the armistice, or after the storm. To represent the various nuances of the state of drunkenness the "Digger" had several repressions, such as "blithered," "inked, "oiled," "molo," and "stunned," whilst the hard drinker was "a steady lapper," and his orgy was "a beer-up." A. "sin-shifter" was an army chaplain, and probably originated from the American cowboy term of "sin-buster." Unfortunately the origin of the words is not given, and slang falls very flat and unprofitable unless it conveys its own meaning, or its origin is appropriate., We know that an English pound-note is called a Bradbury, because Mr. Bradbury is secretary to the Treasury which issued the notes. But why is a "'Tired Theodore" a long-distance heavy shell? A "bucking horse," as meaning a sovereign, seems plain enough, but why should an Australian shilling be called "a rat and fowl"? The words "brass" and "tin," signifying money, are as old as Dickens, and such words as "dough" and "sugar" are much more typically Australian. "Tinkle-tinkle" for an effeminate man, "treacle-miner" for a man who boasts of his wealth or position, a "washout" representing a failure, and "a wind-bag," to describe a braggart, carry their own meanings, but why should a military cross and a military medal be called "Machonochie"? And why should the Queen's head on a coin be called "Mick,"' or "to take to the tall timber" be used as a term meaning to abscond? The rhyming slang such as "Almond rocks" for socks, or "Babbling brook" for an army cook, is even more absurd and tantalising. There appear also to be many nice distinctions in the slang terms, and some of them, such as "parakeet," meaning a staff-officer, because of the red tabs on the uniform, are expressive. Many of the words will die, and deserve to die, but others will be included in future dictionaries, and will add to the wealth of the richest language in the world, though, certainly, not the easiest to master or the most musical to speak.

CANBERRA, Wed.-- Federal Parliamentarians have varied views on the use of the term "Fair Dinkum."

Three of them to-day commented on the statement in New York by the Australian Consul-General (Mr. C. V. Kellaway) that the term was not a common expression among Australians.

Mr. W. M. Hughes (Lib.. N.S.W.): The expression is purely Australian and has of course been much more general than it is to-day. After the first World War it was much more common than it is to-day, but it is still understood by all Australians. Those who don't understand it - well whatever they are they are not Australians.

Mr. L. Haylen (Lab., N.S.W.): "Fair Dinkum" is part of the Australian speech and it is certainly part of the Australian literature. It was immortalized by C. J. Dennis, and was used long before that. It is an honourable label and one of our own words wherever it came from.

Dame Enid Lyons (Lib., Tas): The expression still has a meaning in Australia, but it has become unfashionable. Its period of greatest use was after the last war.

First published in The Courier-Mail, 11 November 1948

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

The recent correspondence in the "Herald," on the subject of the late Chris Brennan's poems sent me rummaging among old Press cuttings for a copy of an article, entitled "Poets and Poetry in New South Wales," which I compiled for the "Sydney Mail" 27 years ago. The article took its origin in what seemed to me a surprising piece of news I had stumbled upon, namely, that the output of verse in Australia exceeded per head of population that of any other country; and I felt that a public largely indifferent to the claims of poetry might still be interested to learn something about the diligent band of versifiers who had earned for us such a measure of pre-emience in this department of letters.

Reading that article now in the light of history, one gets the impression that those were halcyon days for poets, whether major or minor. "Banjo" Patterson, with 40,000 volumes sold, and Henry Lawson, with 17,000, loomed large in the public eye. Ogilvie (then absent from Australia) had several thousands to his credit. It was comparatively easy to get good verse printed and paid for, and publishers were almost benevolent in their regard for budding authors. Publishers to-day, alas! frown daily at the very mention of the word poetry.

AUSTRALIAN'S "LIVE" POETRY.

Not that everything was couleur de rose 27 years ago.

Our poets for the most part were ill-requited in the matter of rewards. One or two felt rather bitter about this neglect. Roderic Quinn, one of our sweetest singers, was not disposed to quarrel with the public on that account. "There has been a large amount of grumble," he said, "over the fact that Australian poets have not had adequate rewards, but with our small, almost stagnant, population, how can we hope for anything better? The circumstance that we are not a 'home' people is also bad for the poets. The sunlight, the beaches, the surf, and the harbour draw us out of doors, and we 'live' poetry instead of reading it." It was his opinion that Sydney Harbour, artistically and poetically, exercised a more potent influence over the people than any number of books or poems.

Discussing public taste in poetry, J. le Gay Brereton thought that here, as probably in all English-speaking countries, there was it distinct preference for what was melodramatic rather than for what was poetic. He had no quarrel with the bush or the horse poem. One could have good ballad or bush poetry of a definite Australian nature, but he should be sorry to see poetry limited to those subjects. In his opinion, a great deal of the stuff accepted as Australian poetry was not poetry at all. "The Australian," he said, "has an ear which catches up a swinging measure; give him that and a topic which he enjoys and he is liable to be deceived into thinking that the result is not only poetry, but even good poetry."

BRENNAN'S IDEAL POET.

Chris Brennan, who was considered our leading exponent of poetry, properly so-called, "knew nothing of the public." His appeal was to a small cultured circle. "Who are the public" he parried when I ventured to ask if poems printed in the conventional manner with titles, capitals, and punctuation marks, would not be more likely to attract readers. "Poetry requires that the reader should be in training for it-keyed to it. For that reason, probably, people read prose; it is so much easier and human nature has a loveable tendency to slackness."

Mr. Brennan readily satisfied my curiosity on other points. He was an entertaining talker.

"I'm afraid I am very unpatriotic." he said. "I've written nothing about the horse or the swagsman. As far as 'national' traits go, I might have made my verses in China.

"I know nothing of 'poetic pains.' Writing poetry is a job like any other. One of the essentials to writing real poetry is to put in three or four hours at the desk every day. The popular idea about dashing off a poem in a fine frenzy is but an amusing piece of credulousness on the part of the public. Poets themselves have encouraged this idea ever since they began to write. They are beginning to see, however, that 'inspiration' is not enough, that a good deal of thought and self criticism is also required.

"Some people say I have not the afflatus, that I have made myself write poetry. I am prepared to agree with that to a certain extent. Poetry and criticism are two ways of getting a lot of fun out of life. Any man with a certain amount of literary ability may now and then produce a set of polished verses which it might be difficult to distinguish from real poetry.

In New South Wales we have produced a certain amount of poetry. There are achievements in verse to the credit of Kendall and Daley, and in this particular sphere good work is being done at the present time by Mr. Roderic Quinn and Mr. Brereton.

The great poet has not arrived yet, but Australia will welcome him-when he is dead, probably.

The ideal Australian poet will be a man of genius, possessing abundant wealth, with strict guardians to regulate his mode of living, and occasionally to lock him in a room supplied with writing materials."

TWO BEST SELLERS.

Of the fourteen writers featured in my "Sydney Mall" article (which ran to three pages), Patterson, Roderic Quinn, John Sandes, E. J. Brady, Colonel Kenneth Mackay, Hugh McCrae, and Miss Ethel Turner (Mrs. Curlewis) are still with us; the others, Henry Lawson, Brennan, Brereton, Arthur Adams, P. E. Quinn, T. W. Heney, and Miss Agnes Storrle (Mrs. Kettlewell) have joined the great fraternity of poets in the shades.

Mr. Patterson, who had just retired from the daily grind of a city newspaper office to his native bush, asked to be excused from inclusion in a "personal detail" article. "I have a great objection to the personal element being dragged into literature," he wrote. "The best poetry as a rule was written by men who were bad characters, and I do not think it concerns the public at all how or why a man writes." On the principle that the play of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark would be no play at all, I had to make shift without any help from the most popular of our bards.

Henry Lawson was the most elusive man I ever tried to catch up with. I had followed his trail for a couple of weeks when a note left at one of his haunts brought to the "Herald" letter-box "An Answer," written in pencil on the back of an advertisement form. "Dear Quinn," it ran, '"I could meet you and tell you the same old piffle (rot), or you could write an interview without meeting me at all. But if I told you the truth the paper would not dare print it if you dared to write it. I'll tell you something worth while later on."   Encouraged by this "answer," I redoubled my exertions to get into personal touch. When at last I did run him to ground he could do no more than sing me snatches of song and shuffle his feet to a dancing measure. With his pinched features and tall spare frame, he seemed to me a tragic figure. There was a time when the author of "In the Days When the World Was Wide" had the world at his feet. But Fortune is a fickle jade, and much prefers a lover to a master.

HAS POETRY A FUTURE?

Overshadowed by his younger brother Roderic, P. E. Quinn was content to play the role of critic rather than of poet. It was his belief that the days of the poets were numbered. "The race" he said "is losing its singing power not that it lacks the qualifications of art and expression, but because the impulses that made great poetry are not to be looked for now." To his mind science was taking the place of poetry in satisfying the imaginative needs of man. The poet had no special message now. As Macaulay predicted poetry was declining with the advance of civilisation. A world movement in the direction of humanitarianism was manifesting itself and its needs would be satisfied by legislation. Poetry might retain its place among the arts, and that which was transcript of the emotions of the romantic period in the life of individuals might always be appreciated, but as the expression of the spirit of the age poetry would lose its significance. Of course, no one could foresee what tricks fortune might play upon us. Here in Australia we might experience some national crisis or discipline which would act as an incentive to national poetry. Nobody could tell.

Roderic Quinn did not share his brother's outlook. Despite Macaulay's dictum, despite the fact that we had weighed the sun and discovered a new planet, he was confident that world interest in poetical productions would remain as steadfast as ever. The more science discovered the broader would be the base whereon man would build his temple of imagination.

Whether Roderic will outshine his brother P.E. as a seer only time will show. What appears to be unquestionable at the moment is that poetry readers are dwindling in number. Publishers go as far as to say that "Poetry is dead."

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December 1936

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

The following is the third of a three-part discussion of the works of Christopher Brennan that took place in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald during 1936.  It began with a report of a lecture by Hilary Lofting, and continued with an essay by John Sandes on the merits, or otherwise, of Brennan's poetry.

CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE HERALD.  

Sir,-In last Saturday's issue, under the heading "Literary Misapprehension," Mr. John Sandes says: "Mrs. Mary Gilmore wrote in a letter to the Editor of the 'Herald': "The desire to see Christopher Brennan published in enduring form is equally a desire to see Australians stand face to face among the writers of the world." Then he adds, "It may surprise Mrs. Mary Gilmore to learn that Chris. Brennan's poetical work, or, at any rate, a large part of it, was published by subscription in Sydney."

May I reply that it is no surprise to me, as I bought several copies of this collection, as well as of the smaller book. But these are but a portion of his work, and it was to a complete edition of all he did that I referred, and because no partial collection can give him the standing in Europe that his scholarship should command. Mr. Sandes in his article does not mention either Brennan's published prose or his lectures -- which even in notes were literature. It was in the desire to see all this published that I wrote the letter referred to by Mr. Sandes; and this Is, I am told, the aim of the executors. I have been told that the volume in contemplation will be about four times as large as the (sectional) one that was published by subscription.

I am, etc.,

MARY GILMORE.

King's Cross. Sept. 7.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 September 1936

CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE HERALD.

Sir,-Mrs. Mary Gllmore's letter in your issue of September 10 covers the ground in relation to the partial collection of Brennan's poetry mentioned in Mr. John Sandes's intensely interesting article. May I, as the lecturer from whose words this discussion sprang, add that I also have known this partial collection for many years, that I, in fact, read my excerpts from it at the fellowship address in question?

The theme of that address was that a "complete" collection of the work of an Australian major poet should be made available before its absence becomes a present reproach and a future loss to Australian Imagination and scholarship.

I am, etc.,

HILARY LOFTING. Sydney, Sept. 12.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 1936

HOMAGE TO BRENNAN.    

TO THE EDITOR OF THE HERALD.  

Sir,-There has been much wild talk and there has been much lip service about Australia's greatest poet. We think that those of our readers who were friends of Brennan in his life, and the still larger number to whom he is an honoured name, will be glad to realise that there is no call for lamentation over the prospective loss of his work.

Brennan, before his death, had the insight to make one of his dearest and loyalest friends, R. Innes Kay, his literary executor, and Mr. Kay's loyal and thorough stewardship has prevented any ill-judged, sporadic, and inaccurate publication of Brennan's work, and has prepared the public for the edition of the forthcoming Brennan omnibus. The editing of this omnibus will be in the hands of a committee, Messrs. R. Innes Kay, J. J. Quinn, and C. H. Kaeppel, with Miss Kate Egan, treasurer, and Miss K. Donovan, secretary, It will include every surviving thing that Brennan has written, with the possible exception of his lectures on the Homeric question and his compositions in German, which have now only an antiquarian interest. The omnibus would have appeared long since, but for the difficulty in securing a small portion (not more than ten per cent.) of Brennan's work that was in the hands of others. But the committee felt, and rightly, that the omnibus should be definitive.

There is another matter to which with great happiness we refer. All lovers of Brennan's work have noted the irresistible songfulness of some of his lyrics. No one has noticed it better than Mr. Horace Keats. It has been our privilege to hear his first scores of "The Wanderer" cycle. Properly to appraise them, would, we think, take a Strangways. We would only say we recall the singing fairy of "Midsummer Night's Dream," and, that hearing them, we heard the fusion of two artists-the poet and the musician. That these gems of art will be heard in England and America it is good to know, but we may be acquitted of any parochialism if we are avowedly glad that they will be heard first in Australia -- at the forthcoming series of lectures on Brennan, all of which will conclude with selections from the Wanderer cycle, played by Mr. Keats and sung by his gifted wife, so well known by her platform name, Miss Barbara Russell.

I am, etc.,

KATHLEEN DONOVAN.

Hon. secretary, Chris Brennan Committee.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 September 1936

Note: this last letter was originally published on this weblog on 6 April 2011.  I've reprinted it here as it fits the rest of the discussion.

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

The following is the second of a three-part discussion of the works of Christopher Brennan that took place in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald during 1936.  It began with a report of a lecture by Hilary Lofting, and will conclude next week with letters to the paper in reply to the essay below.

BRENNAN'S POEMS.

A Literary Misapprehension.

(BY JOHN SANDES.)

Mr. Hilary Lofting, in addressing the Fellowship of Australian Writers on July 15 on the poetry of the late Chris. Brennan, stated, according to the report in the "Herald" next morning, that "there is no published collection of his works." Mrs. Mary Gilmore, who is herself a well-known authoress, in referring to the statement by Mr. Lofting, wrote in a letter to the Editor of the "Herald". "The desire to see Christopher Brennan published in enduring form is equally a desire to see Australians stand face to face among the writers of the world." It may surprise the lecturer, and also Mrs. Mary Gilmore, as well as the reading public in general, to learn that Chris. Brennan's poetical work, or, at any rate, a large part of it, was published by subscription in Sydney, shortly before the war, by G. B. Philip and Son, Pitt-street. A few copies of it are still available at the publishers' well-known bookshop.

Turning over a mass of old letters and papers recently, this present writer came across a cutting from a Sydney morning newspaper. The cutting was printed early in the fateful year 1914. The journal itself has since passed away, or, perhaps, it might be more truthfully said of it, in the words of another great poet, that it

    " . . . has suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange."

The cutting contained a review article entitled "Three Poets," "An Appreciation." It dealt with "Poems" by Christopher Brennan, The Witch Maid" by Dorothea Mackellar, and "The Three Kings" by Will Lawson. The reviewer, in introducing the three, remarked that "they had little in common except for the share that each of them manifested in those inborn qualities of sympathy, reflection, intuition, depth of feeling, sensitiveness to beauty, and gift of expression, which help to make the poet as distinct from the verse-writer." He went on to observe that the poetical works of the three poets were "as dissimilar from each other as a Tschalkowsky symphony, a group of Schubert's "Lieder," and a collection of Sousa's marches -- but they all have poetry in them."

WARM EULOGY.

There is no lack of enthusiasm for Chris. Brennan's poetical merits in the review. "Mr, Chris. Brennan's large and handsomely-produced volume," we read, "brings together a mass of poetic work the composition of which has extended over many years. The author has long since established his claim to be recognised as a writer of marked originality, whose deep thought is set forth in an ornate diction, jewelled with far-sought words and phrases, that not seldom dazzle the reader so thoroughly that it is difficult to make out the outline of the idea under the rich and glittering dress in which it is presented. Mr. Chris. Brennan's poetry is not easy reading. His appeal is to the lettered few. Not at the first, or even at the second, reading will the line and mass of his thought emerge from his verse, but gradually there dawns on one an impression that this poet's plummet goes down to the profundities -- that he takes soundings in a mighty ocean where the purely lyric poets never venture. A huge discontent with the present ways of living looms up with menace. One might say that the Celtic temperament of the poet has -- blended with it -- something of the old Hebraic denunciatory fire."

That Judgment seems to be in general agreement with the opinion of Mr. Hilary Lofting that "one had almost to study Brennan's verse before one could like it." The reviewer, however, goes on to show that the poet is not always obscure and also that at times Chris. Brennan wrote not only with Hebraic fire, but also with the prophetic gift of one of those old Hebrew seers. Take, for instance, those typically Brennanesque verses ending with a prophecy the fulfilment of which at the present time, more than twenty-two years after the critique was printed, appears -- not only to the members of the Rositrucian Order at Perth, who are bent on building an asbestos tower from which to view the conflagration, but also to many millions of other people -- to be dismally imminent.

The first line of the first verse shows that the piece was written in the poet's youth. Here are the verses, sombre and powerful in thought, vividly clear in expression, assuredly indicating "a huge discontent with the present ways of living":

That last line stands out stark and grim at the present crisis in the history of civilisation.

The reviewer in his notice comments: "Unlike a great deal of the poetry in this volume, that passage is perfectly straightforward. And it opens vistas. It grips the mind." That cannot be denied. But it is the grip of horror, not of pity. How differently Tom Hood has treated the same "motif" in those lines that begin

"THE WANDERER."

The reviewer reports that there are four long poems in Chris. Brennan's book, the parts of each being loosely connected together by a central idea epitomised in the title. Also there is a set of epilogues. He picks out specially "The Wanderer," because, he says, in it the central thought is clearer, as well as nobler than in the others, while the diction is at the same time less heavily loaded with illusion and more apt in helping the reader to comprehend the complex of scenes, ideas, and emotions, that the author conjures up. "Yet even this poem," he says, must be read again and again before its full meaning beats into the mind. The reflections of an old man with a lifetime of memories behind him -- memories of wife and child long dead, memories of hunger and cold, and everlasting struggle -- arouse clear-cut mental pictures, and the poignant sympathy that is, in fact, a shivering realisation that what the poet describes may be the lot of any one of us some day." Then he adds: "Yet one has sudden glimpses of a new outlook'" and he quotes these lines from "The Wanderer":

Here is the reviewer's summing-up of the poet's message: "That passage conveys the impression somehow that one has been living in a narrow box and that the bottom has suddenly dropped out of it, precipitating one that the immensities. We find in this poem that profound dissatisfaction with life as it is today, which is the moving spirit of all evolutionary progress, and also a noble craving to fight againnst the powers of evil. There is no happiness in inertia. Energy for the strenuous upward climbing, and courage for the combat -- these are the themes of Mr. Brennan's muse."  

Within the past few days this present writer held in his hand, in the publishers' bookshop, one of the large handsomely produced volumes of Chris. Brennan's "Poems" referred to in the old, faded, yellowing "appreciation." It awakened poignant memories. It is the same book, but it was not the identical copy of it that was received two and twenty years ago, "With the compliments of the publisher -- For Review."

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 September 1936

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

The following is the start of a three-part discussion of the works of Christopher Brennan that took place in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald during 1936.  It begins with a report of a lecture by Hilary Lofting, a Sydney journalist and brother of Hugh Lofting (author of the Dr Doolittle books), about the Australian poet Christopher Brennan (1870-1932).

"Only Major Poet": Christopher Brennan

"Christopher Brennan is our one major poet, and there is no published collection of his works. It is a standing disgrace."

This statement was made by Mr. Hilary Lofting, the author, at a meeting of the fellowship of Australian Writers at the Shallmar Cafe last night, when he pleaded for recognition of the poetical talents of the late Christopher Brennan.

Mr. Lofting said that Brennan had been a member of his household during one of the last years of the poet's life. One had almost to study Brennan's work before one could like it.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 July 1936

And in response:

Christopher Brennan: To the Editor of the Herald.

Sir,-In his address to the Fellowship of Australian Writers, Mr. Hilary Lofting said: "One had almost to study Brennan, work before one liked it." Then, striking a comparison, he offered the supplementary remark that it needed three hundred years of Shakespeare to be liked. A quip, droll enough to have made old Chris shake his sides, if he had been there to hear it.

Later on in the evening, Mr. Lofting specified it as being "our job to read and know Brennan . . . " a splendid idea for those who can spare themselves "that time which never can return." But, "extra jocum," one cannot govern taste; because no man considers rightly who is unable to think for himself. Moreover, genius owes nothing to testimony; or, if it does, we might subscribe to a new maxim, "Poeta fit non nascitur." In the present case it seems certain that Brennan will come to his fame with a merry wind. During the period of his life, he was a very dear and lovable man; one who, in the words of Edward Gibbon, "multiplied his own experience by reading and reflection, and lived in distant ages and remote countries."

I am etc.

HUGH MCCRAE.

Camden, July 17.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 July 1936

And then:

Christopher Brennan and Fame

Sir, - In regard to his letter in this morning's paper, there is no one more capable of assessing the place of Christopher Brennan, either personally or in his prose and poetry, than Hugh McCrae, and it is always a delight when he writes of anyone. But may I seem to differ and yet go further than Mr. McCrae, and say that perpetuity rests, not on genius, but on rag paper? Genius dies, books perish, but rag endures. Because of this I last week formulated a proposal to the Fellowship of Australian Writers that it initiate a movement for a subscription rag-paper edition of Brennan's complete works. Perhaps there might be a conference arranged of heads of all the bodies interested in scholarship, art, and literature, so that something universal could be done. Brennan was a scholar as well as a writer, and art should be represented in all our commemorating and perpetuating books.

I am, etc.,

MARY GILMORE

King's Cross, July 20

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 July 1936

Followed by:

Chris Brennan.

Sir, - The recently published remarks of Mr. Hilary Lofting as to Chris. Brennan and the subsequent correspondence appearing in your columns are very encouraging. They give, not more heart -- for it is a labour of love for the man as much as his work - but more promise to the writer and Mr. J. J. Quinn in their joint labour already well advanced, of the publication next year of as complete an edition of Chris's prose and verse as the reluctance of some who survive him to produce his books and manuscripts will permit. It is hoped soon to give your correspondents and others interested in the publication of Chris's works an opportunity of displaying that interest in a practical manner. Every time I read in the Press enthusiasms from admirers of Brennan's verse, I am reminded of an occasion when Chris's intellectual attainments being exclusively in eulogy, the late A. G. Stephens stamped angrily about the grass saying, "Why doesn't somebody say what a lovable man he was?" We shook hands. In conclusion, may I ask for leave, publicly, to thank Mr. Hugh McCrae for his letter.

I am. etc.,

CHRIS'S EXECUTOR.

Sydney, July 24.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 July 1936

Everybody knows "Punch's" famous advice to those contemplating matrimony, "Don't!"  

The same curt reply must be made in all sincerity to those who are contemplating entering the bonds of Australian authorship. Marriage without means is everywhere regarded as a foolish proceeding, fraught with the probability of disaster. So it is with Australian authorship. Yet there are, strange to say, practising authors in Australia. The itch for writing may explain this paradox; for the real author would write at the North Pole for the pleasure of expressing himself, even if he knew that no eye, save that of a seal, would ever glance at his pages. Australia is a poor country for authorship; and in the arts literature has been, and probably will be, the poor relation of genius. It is true that a subsistence can be made; but it is doubtful whether any writer in this continent has achieved even a modest competence from the sole product of his typewriter. The earnings of the most important profession, that of letters, are meagre and intermittent; and, what is just as important, the writing profession is looked down upon by all worthy citizens. So low down in the scale of importance is the author in Australia that in the honours conferred by the King I cannot remember even an O.B.E. that has been gazetted to an Australian author, unless, of course, he his gained that honour outside   of Australia. No Nobel literary award has ever reached this country.  

THE HELP OF JOURNALISM.  

What authorship we have in this continent is due to the help of journalism or publicity work; and I know only two poets who are able to publish their works as they should be published. The plight of our authentic Australian authors is too well known to need particularising; our poets die in poverty or are kept alive by the kindness of friends or of the State. Yet our poets are the most important people in the six millions of our inhabitants; they are the voices of Australia; and their songs are the most vital things In our lives. By our poets and our novelists shall we be judged by posterity; and our anthologies will remain immortal while mere prosperous citizens will be forgotten.

One fine thing for which the Director of Education of this State is to be lauded, is the insertion in the school books of our education system of the poems of this land of ours. No longer are the school children taught "The boy stood on the burning deck," but the finest poems in the Australian language. And it is my belief that as these children grow up they will hand down to their children the fine things produced by our poets for eternity. Recently I was asked by a Western Australian blind institute for some of my poems and those of other Australian bards to be translated into the newer Braille type. Hitherto only English verses had been included in the library for the blind.

In order to exist as an author it is necessary to call in the aid of extraneous help. Journalism is the crutch by which most of us manage to exist; and judicially used it is a valuable help. But usually the poet finds that poetry (in Australia) does not pay; and who can fault him when he marries and has to keep a family? The goal is a distant one for the poet or the novelist and the best he can look forward to is a modest competence, though so far I have not found a single poet who has earned enough to retire upon his exiguous gains from Australian literature. The rest of us have to stick to journalism.

ANYTHING BUT AUSTRALIA.

There is one important disability that affects all Australian authors, a handicap that is not observable in other English-speaking countries. This is the inherent prejudice of our reading public against Australian novels. The reason is that the reader does not really want to read about his own country. The English novelist is sure of an audience when he writes about England, and similarly the American novelist. Those oversea novelists have not to range the globe to obtain acceptance by the publishers; the majority of English and American authors can set their scene in their own land. The Australian reader prefers the wild west of America to our equally interesting wild west of Australia. There is something exotic in big, broad- brimmed hats of the cowboy that the Australian lacks in the slouch-hat; the stockwhip is a less romantic weapon than the six-shooter. We regard our own country as a dull field for fiction, thought that prejudice is happily dying out. There is, naturally, no romance in the Australian country town or the selection, no romance for us who live in those places; though, of course, romance is everywhere and more so in Australia than in Texas. If an average reader were offered the choice of a novel set in Bourke or one in Piccadilly, the London novel would be chosen. We think we know all about Bourke, perhaps because the right interpreter of Bourke has not yet been born.

Another prejudice that must be killed to give the Australian author his chance is the fact that we meet our local authors and know them too well. Most of them are engaged in journalism; none of them are well off. How can a reporter on a newspaper produce a work of genius? I know no Australian novelist who can afford even a Ford. The Autralian author remains permanently within the employee class, with a few exceptions.

The Australian author has not only to produce readable novels of his own country, but he has to meet a very stern competition against the flood of imported novels. He needs a tariff preference against the imports from America and England. One does not want a high tariff against imported novels, but there should be some arrangement, such as that suggested in regard to the film releases, a percentage of Australian works to be displayed on the booksellers' counters, among the imported fiction. Yet books cannot be bought as boots are. If the Australian reader does not want to read the books of his own country, heaven help us; and that is the only place whence help can come.

As for publishing Australian books in London, there is one important draw-back, the British income tax. I have suffered severely from that impost. I have for many years paid three income taxes, and the British impost is not light. So serious is the aspect that I have told my London literary agents to stop the impending publication of a cheap edition of two or my books; the small profit I would expect is not worth it. The British income tax would swallow my small earnings.  

Yet we novelists and poets go on; we cannot help ourselves.  

It has been suggested to me by a well known collector of Australian letters that my recollections of my father, Charles Harpur, the poet, would be of interest to many. I have a very good memory, and events that took place when I must have been very young stand out clearly in my mind. As I was not seven years old when my father died, part of what I shall put down has been told to me by my mother and others.

When we were children we were never tired of listening to my mother telling us stirring incidents that happened on the Araluen goldfield in the days of its prosperity. Among other things my mother told us was that my father, as gold commissioner, was treated like a prince by the hundreds of gold-diggers on the field at the time; also, that his word was law in all things -- there could be no appeal against his ruling. He must have been wise and just, as my mother said there was very little real trouble among the gold-diggers at the time.

MOVED TO NERRIGUNDAH

When Araluen was on the wane, my father was transferred to Nerrigundah goldfield -- it was always called "The Gulf" in those days. My father had to go and take up his duties at "The Gulf" but my mother remained at Araluen with her children until he had made a home for us. He selected about 500 acres of land on the banks of the Tuross River at Eurobodalla, and called the property Euroma, which I believe, is a black's name. He had a comfortable house built, and a garden and orchard laid out and planted. As the result of my father's forethought, we had a lovely garden and a fine orchard in bearing long before there was another in the district.

I must tell how we had to travel from Araluen to Eurobodalla, about 75 miles -- nothing in these days, but an awful journey at that time. My mother said the road was little better than a rough bridle track. Only saddle and pack horses could be used. There was quite a party of us, consisting of my father and mother, my brothers, Washington and Charley, our nurse Bella (who had been with mother for years), and Mr. Glover, a young man that my father was taking with him to manage and farm the land at Eurobodalla. All of them were riding. There were two or three pack horses. One which Mr. Glover was leading had two Chinese baskets slung across its back. In one was my sister Ada, who was about four years old and in the other my brother Harold, about six years old. I (the writer) being at that time one year and six months old was carried by my father in front of him all the way to Moruya, our first stopping place. A few miles out of Moruya we were met by Mr. Caswell, the police magistrate and his wife, at whose house we spent the night. The next day we continued our journey to our new home. My mother said she was delighted with it as she never expected anything so nice in such a short time.

THE CLARK GANG

There was great excitement in the district shortly after this. The Clark gang of bushrangers was reported to be in the hills, and would be sure to stick up "The Gulf" as there was a large amount of gold on hand just then. Most of the storekeepers and hotelkeepers were gold buyers. My mother and servants gathered up their money and valuables, and my mother and Bella hid them in the garden. Mr Glover brought his wife up to our place for the night, so he could look after us all. My brothers were melting lead and making bullets and talking excitedly about the brave things they were going to do if the bushrangers came. Quite a number of men had mustered at our place to proceed to "The Gulf" to help to protect it against the bushrangers. At that time it was nine miles from Eurobodalla to "The Gulf," over a rough track winding around the mountains. Years after a road was made over the mountains, which shortened the distance between the two places to six miles.

The party of horsemen could only ride at a slow pace, so it was after dark before they arrived at "The Gulf". The bushrangers had already attacked Nerrigundah, and had shot a young policeman named O'Grady dead. A stone monument to Constable O'Grady's memory was erected near the old police station. The leader of the gang, Tommy Clark, went into the store of Pollock, one of the largest gold buyers, and demanded the key of the gold safe. Mrs Pollock had it in her hand at the lime, but instead of giving it to him she threw it out into the dark street, saying, "Go and find it." I believe that as he raised his gun angrily she said, "Would you be coward enough to shoot a woman?" Just then my father's party and other men arrived, and they drove the bushrangers to the hills again before they had time to get the haul of gold they expected. My father and a number of others followed them all that night, exchanging shots with the bushrangers several times, but the country was so wild and mountainous that they lost them before daylight. However, the bushrangers never appeared in the district again.

FAMILY SORROWS.

The first great trouble came into my father and mother's lives not long after this. My brothers, Washington and Charlie, were out duck shooting with a number of other boys. When they were about to return home, Charlie, who waa only 13 years old, stood on a log to mount his horse, and pulled his gun up after him. It went off, and shot him through the heart. I have never forgotten that dreadful evening. Even now, when I think of it, I can see my brother Washington galloping wildly home, screaming "Charlie's shot! Charlie's shot!" Washington was only a young boy, and the awful shock at seeing the brother he loved so dearly, dead in a minute before his eyes almost unbalanced his mind for the time. From this   time, my father was a changed man. Instead of being kindly and loving, he became stern and silent, and as children do not understand grief we grew to be rather in awe of him. I have often wondered since if we had had the courage then to let him know how we missed his loving ways, would he have thrown his brooding sorrow off a little for our sakes.

My mother has told me that my father was not unduly worried by the office of gold commissioner being abolished, as Sir John Robertson had assured him that as soon as his health was restored he would receive an appointment as police magistrate, and Sir John was always a man of his word. Unfortunately my father's health did not improve, and was now causing a great deal of anxiety. He had to take frequent journeys to Sydney, often accompanied by my mother, to see his doctors.  

Soon he became too ill to go anywhere. I can remember clearly the night he died. My brother and sister and myself were taken out of our beds by our nurse, Bella, and, going into my father's room each of us kissed him. I can see my mother standing at the head of the bed on which my father lay, but I think what impressed itself most on my memory was seeing Mr. Glover kneeling at the foot of the bed sobbing bitterly. I stood on a chair with Bella's arms around me, and she was saying over and over again: "Oh, the poor fatherless darlings."

Most who have written about my father's life seem to imply that he was most improvident, and a poor business man. No man could leave a fortune behind him on a salary of eight or nine hundred a year. My father left no debts, an unencumbered farm, a well- furnished, comfortable home, which I am sure was much better than most would have done on the same salary, although he was a poet.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 August 1929

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

We are glad to see the works of the late Charles Harpur rescued from their fugitive and disconnected state of existence, and given a fair chance of long life by being collected in a substantial and presentable volume. Those who now read his works for the first time will be surprised that a man who had advanced so far in the path of lyrical achievement should be so little known, and so seldom referred to. Considering the outcry that is so often made against Australian poets, on the ground that their work is simply English poetry transplanted; that it lacks the voice, colour, and flavour of Australia, and that it might as well have been written anywhere else, for aught of characteristic spirit it has absorbed from its surroundings; it is, indeed, surprising that this writer, who fulfilled just such requirements as are desiderated in such strictures; who was, in truth, all compact of the very essence of his environment; is not more fondly cherished and more proudly pointed to as a genuine representative of Au tralian song. Our reading public may at least rely upon this, that the future historian of Au tralian literature will take large account of Charles Harpur as one of the true pioneers of poetry on this continent; not merely treading in other men's paths, but impelled by his own inward force to traverse new regions, with no guide but his own spontaneous muse. It has been remarked by critics that Harpur lacks smoothness, and it is impossible to deny that almost any man of culture and versatile talent could take many of his verses and "lick them into shape." But we question very much whether they would gain anything by the polishing process. In many passages there is something pleasingly sturdy in the very uncouthness of the mode of expression. There is not a page in all the book, however bristling with discords, in which the highly developed poetic temperament does not overcome the obstacles of speech through sheer force of earnestness, and through a communicative vividness of imagination that compels the reader to feel that he is under the sway of a genuine master. It has been said, in excuse for the roughness of his speech, that

   All of his aptest years were passed
   In primal solitudes wild and vast;

but it seems to us that this rather supplies the clue to his excellence than the excuse for his defect. In no other school could he have acquired such capacity of observation, such mastery of nature in all her moods, or such an intenseness of what we can only call "insight," which is the most authentic mark of the true poetical genius. In what other school could he have learned to use such an expression as we have italicised in the following quotation?--

   Instinctively, along the sultry sky
   I turn a listless, yet inquiring, eye;
   And mark that now with a slow, gradual, pace
   A solemn trance creams northward o'er its face.

What other mode of culture could have given him the power to conjure words into vehement noonday heat? as when he writes--