The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, Henry Kingsley

For a long time in Australia, up until at least the 1980s, the only Nineteenth century Australian books in print were Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1870), Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (1882) and, to a lesser extent, Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859). Even today, along with Lawson and Paterson, these three are the only ‘old’ books you will consistently come across in bookshops.

I have written often enough about the role of Dale Spender in getting our early women writers back into print, in Pandora and Penguin in the 1980s, though whether they still are is another matter, and maybe all we have left is Virago. Whatever we might tell ourselves about our urbanity and sophistication, Australians have an endless fascination with men being virile in the Bush.

The Recollections must have remained pretty well-known for at least half a century after publication, as Furphy in Such is Life (1903) went to some pains to express his contempt for the Buckleys – Kingsley’s English gentlefolk who take up a grazing property in the Australian Alps. In fact, a search of Trove shows that The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn ran as a serial in country newspapers in 1871 and again in 1894.

Written in 1859, after be had been five years in Australia, Henry Kingsley’s Geoffry Hamlyn, now appearing in a new edition, published by Ward, Lock, and Bowden Limited (of London and Melbourne) deserves the welcome which one gives to an old and cherished friend. [from The Australasian (Melbourne), Sat 8 Dec 1894].

I can’t find any reviews, but in 1910, the novel was being run for a third, or more likely, fourth, time. One introduction concludes: “It is almost unnecessary to note that the justly celebrated author of Westward Ho !, Charles Kingsley, was our author’s brother”. I’m afraid I only know Charles for The Water Babies which Gee insisted I read to her over a long series of nights, protesting if I ever seemed to be ‘skipping’ (which I would if I could get away with it).

Joseph Furphy writes: “Those whose knowledge of the pastoral regions is drawn from a course of novels of the Geoffry Hamlyn class, cannot fail to hold a most erroneous notion of the squatter. Of course we use the term ‘squatter’ indifferently to denote a station-owner, a managing partner, or a salaried manager”. There are “a thousand types”, but none of them include “the slender-witted, virgin souled, overgrown schoolboys who fill Henry Kingsley’s exceedingly trashy and misleading novel with their insufferable twaddle.” (Such is Life, 164)

Langa-Willi, Skipton, Vic.

Henry Kingsley (1830-1876) left Oxford without graduating and came out to Australia in 1853 to join in the Gold Rush. “For some time Kingsley had little or no money and carried his swag from station to station. Philip Russell stated in 1887 that he employed Kingsley at his station Langa-Willi, and that Geoffry Hamlyn (1859) was begun there. Miss Rose Browne, daughter of Rolf Boldrewood, stated it was on her father’s suggestion that Kingsley began to write. Russell’s story is confirmed by her further statement that her father gave Kingsley a letter to Mr Mitchell of Langa-Willi, that he stayed with Mitchell, and there wrote Geoffry Hamlyn.” (wikipedia). Kingsley returned to England in 1857, wrote some more, and died of cancer of the tongue aged 46.

If you’re wondering about that photo, Victoria’s Western District, the home of our squatting aristocracy, looks more like England than it does like the rest of Australia.

The novel begins with some very tedious, and very Victorian – meaning the era – opening chapters. Introducing first Hamlyn and the Buckleys, in 1857, in oldish age on the verandah of an Australian homestead, about whom Hamlyn has written a book; and then going back half a century to establish the various families on their estates in England.

We’ll ignore their antecedents, and by say, the 1820s, all the principal characters of the novel were gathered in or around a Devon village, Drumston. They are the Buckleys, who, no longer able to afford its upkeep, have given up their ancient estate, Clere and moved into (youthful) semi-retirement; their baby son, Sam; the widowed vicar, his spinster sister Miss Thornton, and his wilful daughter, Mary; Mary’s cousin, Tom Troubridge; Hamlyn; his friend Jim Stockton; Dr Mulhaus, a German aristocrat; George Hawker, son of a villianous farmer and his gypsy ‘housekeeper’, Madge; William Lee, a convict escaped from Tasmania and his off-sider Dick.

George Hawker is led, rather willingly, into a life of crime and gambling by William Lee. Mary is an heiress twice over, and moreover is keen on Hawker, who can act the gentleman as necessary; so Hawker runs off with her to London where they are married, she gets pregnant and he runs through her first fortune. Mary finds her way home, running into Hawker’s cousin and the mother of another of his children along the way. The Vicar dies.

Stockton, who Mary should have married, goes to NSW with Hamlyn, where they take up land and prosper. The Buckley’s decide that sounds like the way to revive their own fortunes and head off after them. Dr Mulhaus, Troubridge, Mary with her son Charles, and Miss Thornton, her aunt, decide to accompany them.

You may remember that when the various sides of Miles Franklin’s family arrived in Sydney, they were forced to go south, into the mountains at the headwaters of the Murrumbidgee and Murray, for free land. Hamlyn and Stockridge have land further south again, on the far side of the mountains where the Snowy rises and rushes south into Bass Strait. Out one day looking for a lost bull, they come across, purely by accident, a party of travellers. Yes, it’s the Buckleys.

Mary Hawker and Tom Troubridge (he’s her cousin remember) take up land on the edge of the mountains, and the Buckleys take up land some miles further out into (relatively) open country, in what is today East Gippsland (Victoria). Dr Mulhaus lives with the Buckleys, and the reformed William Lee is their overseer. Dick turns up one day in the bush, and he becomes Hamlyn’s manservant, because of course he does.

There are a couple of aristocratic families nearby – a widow with a son and two daughters, Capt Brentwood with a son, and a daughter, Alice, away at school, and some Irish families who of course are not aristocratic (and have rather more children). Listen, it’s just an ordinary British adventure book, with all the prejudices that implies. But it also just happens to be the first set in the Australian bush, which is rather better described than you might hope.

A new heaven and a new earth! Tier beyond tier, height above height, the great wooded ranges go rolling away westward, till on the lofty skyline they are crowned with a gleam of everlasting snow. To the eastward they sink down, breaking into isolated forest-fringed peaks, and rock-crowned eminences, till with rapidly straightening lines they fade into the broad grey plains, beyond which the Southern Ocean is visible by the white sea-haze upon the sky.

The properties prosper. The young men grow up together, with little education except that Dr Mulhaus acts as tutor to Sam Buckley. Alice comes home and is of course the most beautiful, intelligent and good natured girl that Hamlyn has ever seen. A notorious bushranger turns out to be another native of Drumston. There’s an exciting battle (if you want some real colonial bloodthirstiness check out the rape of the bridal party in Ralph Rashleigh).

Everyone makes their fortune – without the Goldrush being mentioned, though much of Sam’s comes from speculating in Melbourne property (plus ca change, what) – and they all go back to Britain (or Germany) and resume their rightful titles.

Seeing as these fortunes have all been made on someone else’s land, let’s have a look at that. “The land referred to as ‘East Gippsland’ is country that spans three indigenous nations, these are the nations of Bidewell, Yuin, Gunnaikurnai and Monero (Ngarigo). These nations never ceded sovereignty and continue their custodianship of the land of waters within so called ‘East Gippsland'” (here).

At this point trucking calls. I have two trips back to back, and no time for writing. As I have quite a bit to say about Hamlyn’s unselfconscious settler-colonialism, I will post at this point and write up his representation of settler-Aboriginal interactions as soon as I can.

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Charles Kingsley, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, first pub. 1859. 474pp.

Fifty (Australian) books up to 1950 you must read

Read that title as “…must read to understand how Australian Literature began and developed”.

For the last twenty years, for my degree, and here on this blog, my objective has been to establish that the Independent Woman is at least equally as strong an archetype for Australianness as the Lone Hand in the Bush/Brave Anzac so beloved of politicians.

The Lone Hand myth was the product of AG Stephens at the Sydney Bulletin at the turn of the C20th, building on the ballads of Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson, the short stories of Henry Lawson and Steel Rudd, and Joseph Furphy’s groundbreaking novel Such is Life. And building also on what seems to be suburban Australia’s love of the Bush and the Outback.

Stephens was actively misogynist, writing approvingly of men “going home to beat their wives”, and anti-Melbourne to boot, so it was easy for him to characterise the earlier (and overlapping) school of Ada Cambridge, Catherine Martin and Tasma to name a few, as Melbourne-based, women writers of domestic and romance fiction. Melbourne’s premier writer, Marcus Clarke, was guilty more or less by association.

The idea of Australians as rugged individualists at home in the Bush was only given strength by the wartime (WWI) reportage of CEW Bean and Keith Murdoch. Then after the War, with universities studying only English Lit.; the overweaning influence in publishing and education of Colin Roderick, himself no mean misogynist; and the dominance of returned servicemen in education generally; that first generation of women was lost to view, out of print for another 60 or 70 years.

Between the Wars, male writers like Vance Palmer struggled to be the next Henry Lawson, Xavier Herbert maybe a notable exception; while women writers, working in the mostly urban Modernist and Social Realist streams, regained centre stage. Those women whose spiritual home was the Bush pushed a third theme, both in Literature and in Politics, reclaiming a place for women alongside men, as ‘Pioneers’. Ironically, the most successful of all the writers following Lawson was Eve Langley, whose Steve fights so hard to be both Independent and at home with Bush life.

The novels I have listed below are both worth reading for themselves, and important for their contribution to these themes. Interestingly, leaving aside the very early writers, nearly everyone here says that the Australian writers they read initially at least, were Kendall, Gordon, Lawson and Paterson. Of the English they say Milton and Byron. Some say the Vicar of Wakefield, Thackeray, a few Dickens. I am yet to see one who says Austen. Novel-reading I suspect was not seen as serious.

I admit I have not read all these works yet myself, and some I have read I actively dislike (looking at you Mrs Gunn). Often I have chosen just one work, or sometimes two, to stand in for an author’s whole body of work.

The themes a work contributed to are in brackets at the end of each listing. Quite a number give views of Aboriginal life, only Unaipon is himself Indigenous. There are roughly 50 novels and 25 others – Poetry, Criticism, Non Fiction

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Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, 1793, review (NF, Pioneer, Indigenous)

Henry Savery, Quintus Serviton,1831, no review (Lone Hand)

Charles Harpur, The Bushrangers and Other Poems, 1853 (Verse)

Catherine Helen Spence, Clara Morison, 1854, review (Independent Woman)

Rafaello Carboni, The Eureka Stockade, 1855, no review (NF)

Frederick Sinnett, The Fiction Fields of Australia, 1856 (Criticism)

Louisa Atkinson, Gertrude the Emigrant, 1857, review, (Pioneer)

Henry Kingsley, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, 1859, review (Pioneer)

Caroline Leakey, The Broad Arrow, 1859, review (Independent Woman)

Henry Kendall, Leaves from the Forest, 1869 (Verse)

Marcus Clarke, For the Term of his Natural Life, 1870, no review (Lone Hand)

Adam Lindsay Gordon, Bush Ballads & Galloping Rhymes, 1870 (Verse, Lone Hand)

Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery Under Arms, 1882, no review (Lone Hand)

Fergus Hume, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, 1886, no review (Urban)

Tasma, Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill, 1889, review (Urban)

Rosa Praed, The Romance of a Station, 1889, Proj. Gutenberg (Remote)

Catherine Martin, An Australian Girl, 1890, review (Independent Woman)

Ada Cambridge, The Three Miss Kings, 1891, review (Independent Woman)

William Lane, The Workingman’s Paradise, 1892, no review (Urban, Anarchism)

Price Warung, Tales of the Convict System, 1892 (Short Stories)

Ethel Turner, Seven Little Australians, 1894 (YA)

Banjo Paterson, The Man from Snowy River, 1895 (Lone Hand, Verse)

Henry Lawson, While the Billy Boils, 1896 (Lone Hand, Short Stories)

Mary Gaunt, Kirkham’s Find, 1897, review (Independent Woman, Outback)

Louise Mack, Teens, Girls Together, 1897-8, review (YA)

A Sutherland & HG Turner, The Development of Australian Literature, 1898 (Criticism)

Steele Rudd, On Our Selection, 1899, review (Pioneer, Short Stories)

Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career, 1901, review (Independent Woman)

Henry Lawson, Joe Wilson and his Mates, 1901 review (Lone Hand, Short Stories)

AG Stephens ed., The Bulletin Story Book, 1901 (Lone Hand, Short Stories)

Barbara Baynton, Bush Studies, 1902, review (Independent Woman, Short Stories)

Joseph Furphy, Such is Life, 1903, review (Lone Hand, Modernism)

Mrs Aeneas Gunn, We of the Never Never, 1908, review (NF, Pioneer, Indigenous)

Mary Grant Bruce, Billabong books, 1910-42, review (YA)

Mary Gilmore, Marri’d, 1910 (Poetry)

Louis Stone, Jonah, 1911, no review, (Urban)

CJ Dennis, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, 1915, review (Verse, Urban)

Louise Mack, A Woman’s Experiences in the Great War, 1915 (NF, Memoir)

Rosa Praed, Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land, 1915, review (Outback, Indigenous)

Maurice Furnley, To God: From the Weary Nations, 1917 (Verse)

May Gibbs, Snuggle Pot and Cuddlepie, 1918 (YA)

Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding, 1918 (YA)

DH Lawrence, Kangaroo, 1923, no review (Modernism)

DH Lawrence & Mollie Skinner, The Boy in the Bush, 1924, review (Lone Hand, Modernism)

Kenneth Slessor, Thief of the Moon, 1924 (Verse)

Brent of Bin Bin (Miles Franklin), Up the Country, 1928, review (Pioneer)

M Barnard Eldershaw, A House is Built, 1929 (Pioneer)

C Hartley Grattan, Australian Literature, 1929 (Criticism)

Katharine Susannah Prichard, Coonardoo, 1929, no review (Remote, Indigenous)

David Unaipon, Native Legends, 1929 (Indigenous)

Arthur Upfield, The Barakee Mystery, 1929, no review (Lone Hand, Indigenous)

Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, 1930 no review (Pioneer)

Frank Dalby Davison, Man Shy, 1931, no review (Independent Woman, Outback)

Flora Eldershaw, Contemporary Australian Women Writers, 1931 (Criticism)

Leonard Mann, Flesh in Armour, 1932, no review (Lone Hand, War)

Ion Idriess, Drums of Mer, 1933, review (Indigenous)

Dorothy Wall, Blinky Bill, 1933 (YA)

Eleanor Dark, Prelude to Christopher, 1934, no review (Modernism)

Georgiana McCrae, Georgiana’s Journal, 1934, review (Pioneer Memoir)

Dymphna Cusack, Jungfrau, 1936, review (Independent Woman, Modernism)

Miles Franklin, All That Swagger, 1936, review (Pioneer)

Ernestine Hill, The Great Australian Loneliness, 1937, review (NF, Outback)

Xavier Herbert, Capricornia, 1938, no review (Outback, Indigenous)

Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children, 1940, no review (Modernism)

Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land, 1941, no review (Pioneer, Indigenous)

Kylie Tennant, The Battlers, 1941, no review (Social Realism)

Eve Langley, The Pea Pickers, 1942, review, (Independent Woman)

Miles Franklin & Kate Baker, Joseph Furphy, 1944, review (Criticism/Biog.)

Ern Malley, The Darkening Ecliptic, 1944 (Verse/Hoax, Modernism)

Norman Lindsay, The Cousin from Fiji, 1945, no review (Independent Woman)

Christina Stead, For Love Alone, 1945, no review (Independent Woman, Modernism)

Ruth Park, The Harp in the South, 1948, no review (Social Realism)

Patrick White, The Aunt’s Story, 1948, no review (Independent Woman, Modernism)

Judith Wright, Woman to Man, 1949 (Verse)

Frank Hardy, Power without Glory, 1950, no review (Socialist Realism)

Colin Roderick, An Introduction to Australian Fiction, 1950 (Criticism)

Nevil Shute, A Town like Alice, 1950, no review (Outback)

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That’s about 1200 words already. I’d like to do a commentary on each book, but 50 words per book would take me past 4000. Meanwhile, where I have them, I’ve linked to my reviews.

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NB. Loiusa Egerton (Castle Herbert), 1830 by Mary Grimstone who was in Tasmania from 1825-29, was probably the first novel written in Australia but it has no Australian content. Women’s Love, 1832 sounds more interesting. Back in England, Grimstone moved in Socialist and Unitarian circles which included Elizabeth Gaskell.

I will cross Australia

Journal: 093

November is Brona’s AusReading Month. Also Non-Fiction November, Novellas in November and MARM, but one thing at a time (I hope I get to MARM). Not to mention I am a month behind with my North America Project, for which this month I am reading … I’m not sure I even have anything suitable downloaded, though I did buy Light from an Uncommon Star by Ryka Aoki to feed my SF addiction.

So, AusReading Month. Bron is having a Voss readalong. Week 1 was meant to be Voss in Sydney, meeting Laura and getting ready to depart, but I listened on to his two farmstays – at Rhine Towers in the Hunter (north of Sydney) and then Boyle’s in the Darling Downs (south east Queensland) which is to be the stepping off point of his expedition inland.

In my head I bookmarked Voss saying, “I will cross Australia from top to bottom, I will know it with my heart”. I have at hand the Penguin Modern Classics copy I inscribed to Milly nearly 40 years ago, but I can’t find those words, which are the perfect expression of how I feel about crossing and re-crossing Australia.

Patrick White (1912-1990) is an interesting/unlikely person to be writing the perfect Australian novel. He was born into Australia’s ‘landed gentry’, the squattocracy, with grazing properties throughout NSW, but particularly in the Hunter Valley. He was sent away to boarding school in England then returned home for some years jackarooing on family properties. Especially Walgett in 1931 (David Marr p. 109) which feeds into Voss (1957), and which, along with his service in North Africa during WWII, are his only experiences of desert life. I attempted to cheat by checking Wikipedia but parts of White’s entry appear to be wrong or incomplete.

On his return home – and Australia had hardly been that, up till then – from WWII with his life partner, Greek/Egyptian Manoly Lascaris, they took up a hobby farm on the outskirts of Sydney which is ridiculously blown up into the pair being the Adam and Eve of Australian bush pioneering in The Tree of Man (1955).

Voss is supposedly based on the story of Ludwig Leichardt, of his final, failed attempt to cross the continent from the Darling Downs to the Swan River (basically, from Brisbane to Perth) in 1848. White, inspired by the desert paintings of Sidney Nolan, researched Leichardt from the safety of Sydney. Marr writes:

White came to the Australian desert through Nolan’s eyes… In his magpie fashion White searched for the historical details he needed for the book. He found accounts of Aboriginal painting and ritual in the Mitchell Library. For life in early Sydney he drew on M Barnard Eldershaw’s A House is Built [itself an historical fiction written only 20 years earlier] and Ruth Bedford’s Think of Stephen, an account of the family of Sir Alfred Stephen… Chief Justice of NSW in the 1840s when Voss made his journey into the hinterland.

Marr p. 316

My initial impression is that we are seeing Voss’s actions but Laura’s mind. Here she’s speaking to Voss:

‘You are so vast and ugly,’ Laura Trevelyan was repeating the words; ‘I can imagine some desert, with rocks, rocks of prejudice, and, yes, even hatred. You are so isolated. That is why you are fascinated by the prospect of desert places, in which you will find your own situation taken for granted, or more than that, exalted …’

‘Do you hate me, perhaps?’ asked Voss, in darkness.

‘I am fascinated by you,’ laughed Laura Trevelyan, with such candour that her admission did not seem immodest. ‘You are my desert!’

With Voss we, Australians, asked our greatest writer to write our central story, one man alone against the vast interior, not one that he knows from experience but which he knows from all the Australian writing that preceded him. We had a shot at it once before, asking the outsider, DH Lawrence to write The Boy in the Bush. Both are fine marriages of Bush Realism and High Modernism, but it is Patrick White’s which has stuck.

What else?

The photo above, sunset at Pardoo, is of me (of course) heading home from Darwin after four weeks getting an engine rebuild. Most of which time was spent – by the truck – sitting, waiting for its turn to be worked on, which is standard in these post-Lockdown, labour shortage days. It ran nicely, which is the main thing, and maybe uses less fuel, it will take me a while to tell.

I left Psyche in that medical cliche – stable – which is a good thing, except when you (she) feel the urge to jump up on a table and dance. She doesn’t read me regularly, though her main carer does (Hi, Sienna) but she doesn’t like me to underplay how much mobility she’s lost, or how much energy even simple actions now take.

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Recent audiobooks 

Eden Robinson (F, Can), Son of a Trickster (2017)
Patrick White (M, Aus/NSW), Voss (1957)
Robert B Parker (M, USA), Now & Then (2007) – Crime
Sally Hepworth (F, Aus/Vic), The Mother-in-Law (2019) – Crime
Adele Parks (F, Eng), Lies Lies Lies (2020) – Crime

Currently Reading 

Dorothy Hewett (F, Aus/NSW), The Toucher (1993)
Corey J White (F,USA), Killing Gravity (2017) – SF
Tricia Sullivan (F,Eng), Dreaming in Smoke (1998) – SF

AWWC Oct. 2022

Date	Contributor	Title
Wed 05	Elizabeth Lhuede	Writer, teacher, farmer’s daughter: Jessie Maria Goldney
Fri 07	Stories FTA	Jessie Maria Goldney, A Daisy Crushed (short story)
Wed 12	Jonathan Shaw	Lesbia Harford
Fri 14	Stories FTA	Lesbia Keogh, “Angel” (short story)
Wed 19	Bill Holloway	Miles Franklin in America
Fri 21	Stories FTA	Miles Franklin, The Old Post (short story)
Wed 26	Whispering Gums	Capel Boake: Three short stories, and more
Fri 28	Stories FTA	Capel Boake, The Necessary Third (short story)

The Great Australian Loneliness, Ernestine Hill

You know that I am fascinated by intertextual geography. So, for instance, last month’s AWWC subject, Ada Cambridge, on her first excursion into the bush, was caught up in exactly the same loops of the Murray River in 1870 as Tom Collins (Such is Life) a decade later.

Ernestine Hill (1899-1972) is one writer who intersects many others. The journey around northern Australia she describes in The Great Australian Loneliness criss-crosses the paths of a number of notable Australian writers and books. She hitches a lift with Michael Durack, father of Mary (Kings in Grass Castles) and Elizabeth (“Eddie Burrup”), in northern WA (and later becomes friends with both, and her son Robert maybe becomes Elizabeth’s lover); she hears about the Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence girls in a pub in Marble Bar, and their epic walk home to Jigalong; Daisy Bates owned a cattle leasehold near Jigalong, to which she had famously driven cattle south from Roebuck near Broome, 900 kms north (“3000 Miles on Side-Saddle”); Hill later catches up with Bates at Ooldea in outback South Australia and does the work on Bates’ papers which leads to the publication of The Passing of the Aborigines; four or five years earlier, Katharine Susannah Prichard had been at Turee Creek, a couple of hundred kms south west of Jigalong, writing Coonardoo; later, Hill and Henrietta Drake Brockman travel in Hill’s ex-army amoured personnel carrier to Kalgoorlie to catch up with KSP who is there writing her Goldfields trilogy.

Then there is the mystery of who did Kim Scott’s aunty (Kayang & Me) see driving an apc across the Nullabor to meet with Daisy Bates? Hill’s condemnation of Aboriginal slavery in the WA pearling industry; Chris Owen’s excoriation of the Duracks’ complicity in Aboriginal massacres in Every Mothers’ Son is Guilty; Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis’ account of her family coming in from the desert (Pictures from my Memory) – she was at school for a while at Karalundi mission where Daisy, one of the Rabbit Proof Fence girls was working, in 1972; and of course, Robyn Davidson’s journey by camel across the desert (Tracks) whose beginning and end points, Alice Springs and Hamelin Pool, Shark Bay, mirror those of Hill, who started from Hamelin Pool and ends her account two years later riding a camel into Alice Springs.

This is all by way of an introduction to my review this month of The Great Australian Loneliness on the Australian Women Writers Challenge site. Read on …

A Mere Chance, Ada Cambridge

Here I am, doing a second Perth – Mt Isa, unloaded last night. Luckily, I wrote this review for my AWWC gig before I left. Right now I’m negotiating for a load home, which may or may not involve me in running to Townsville over the weekend. Meanwhile I can sit in the (mild – 26C) tropical sun and read and write.

You might see that I had last week’s Australian Legend post on my mind as I wrote this one.

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It’s a tragedy that Australia’s early women writers were denied their place in the canon by the rabid misogyny of the turn of the (C20th) century Bulletin, and by its fellow travellers Colin Roderick and Vance Palmer who dominated what we were allowed to know about Australian literature right up to the 1960s. With the consequence that important writers like Catherine Helen Spence, Catherine Martin, Tasma, Rosa Praed and Ada Cambridge were dismissed as romance writers and remained out of print for up to a century.

Read on …

The Australian Legend, Russel Ward

I should of course have written up my ‘namesake’ book years ago, though if you wished, if you had the fortitude, you might always have read my Masters dissertation, The Independent Woman in Australian Literature, which is one of the pages above.

This book attempts to trace the historical origins and development of the Australian legend or national mystique. It argues that a specifically Australian outlook grew up first and most clearly among the bush workers in the Australian pastoral industry, and that this group has had an influence, completely disproportionate to its numerical and economic strength, on the attitudes of the whole Australian community.

Ward, Foreword

The Australian Legend (1958) arose out of Ward’s PhD thesis, and it’s themes must have been ‘in the air’, as it followed Vance Palmer’s much less well argued The Legend of the Nineties (1954). It had an immediate impact, I think, crystallizing the thinking around Australia’s view of itself as a nation of knock-about, rugged, bush-savvy (white male) individualists despite the great majority of us (around 80%) living quiet suburban lives in the cities on the coastal fringes of our ’empty’ continent.

Feminist Gail Reekie wrote in 1992 that “Russell Ward’s Australian Legend has since its publication in 1958 constituted an almost irresistible magnetic pole of historical debate about the nature of Australia’s difference.” That is less true today, I think, as the multicultural (and multi-gendered) nature of modern society belatedly makes its way into our literature; but is still important, to decode the dog-whistling of right-wing politicians who use the themes of mateship, independence and (laughably) lack of respect for authority, to valorise military service; and to secure our placid acceptance of their post 9-11 incursions into our civil liberties.

I had intended this post as an ‘open letter’ to Marcie/Buried in Print, who is of course Canadian, to introduce her to Australia’s master of the short story, Henry Lawson. But that brought up so many other things – in my mind, anyway – that I decided to start from here.

Marcie, however, would recognise the foundations of the Australian Legend which begin with North America’s “Noble Frontiersmen” – fur traders, buffalo hunters, and then cowboys.

The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin … he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness …

FJ Turner, The Significance of the Frontier, 1893 (Ward, p.239)

In the C19th, in Australia as in America, the proportion of native-born was very much higher in the interior than on the eastern sea-board. Following Turner, the two most important effects of the frontier were to promote nationalism and to promote democracy. The US then was already a nation. I don’t know about Canada, but in Australia the outback (the “frontier”) was where the seeds of nationalism, independence from Britain, and the labour movement all took root.

Popular culture – from ES Ellis to Zane Grey to Hollywood – glorified the ‘wild west’, and while we outsiders always associated the US and cowboys, I imagine most Americans had a more nuanced self-image. The bulk of Ward’s thesis explores why in Australia this didn’t happen. Why we stayed fixated on the ‘frontiersman’.

He suggests that the difference is Australia’s aridity. In the US homesteaders headed out into the plains for their 160 acres of land, where their values were those of the small businessman. Australia however was taken up initially by squatters on runs of tens and hundreds of square miles, which only later were partially broken up so that settlers could take up square mile (640 acre) blocks. So by the recession of the 1890s there were great bands of itinerant workers roaming the interior seeking short term work – shearing, mustering etc, – and with a common ‘enemy’, the squatter, often an absentee living in luxury in Melbourne or London. Hence our real national anthem, Waltzing Matilda.

From the 1880s onwards, the Bulletin picked up on this, actively fostering nationalism, and providing a platform for descriptions of bush life. And so we get back to Henry Lawson, whose stories in the Bulletin provide much of the basis for the ‘Lone Hand’ myth or archetype; back also to my own thesis, and to Henry’s mother Louisa Lawson – born and married into poverty in the bush, single mother, raconteur, newspaper publisher, suffragist, Independent Woman.

I have written at some length in the past about both Louisa and Henry –
Brian Matthews’ biography, Louisa (here)
Louisa Lawson vs Kaye Schaffer (here)
My Henry Lawson by (his wife) Bertha Lawson (here)
Poetry Slam, Lawson v Paterson (here)
All My Love, Anne Brooksbank (here)
The Drover’s Wife, Frank Moorehouse ed. (here)

Henry Lawson (1867-1922) was born on the bush block in Grenfell, NSW where his father scratched out a living fossicking and droving, often away for long periods until Louisa got sick of it and moved to Sydney in the early 1880s. Henry’s education was greatly restricted by deafness, but he read widely. While working with his father as a labourer he had some poems published, notably A Song of the Republic in the Bulletin in 1887.

Meanwhile Louisa had purchased a small newspaper which in 1888 became Dawn, a newspaper for women, mixing housewifely tips with suffragism. In 1894 she published Henry’s Short Stories in Prose and Verse. I can’t see when his stories began appearing in the Bulletin, but in 1896 they brought out the collection which made his name, While the Billy Boils.

If you read Lawson closely, you can see Louisa almost as much as you can see Henry. So, The Drover’s Wife is a story Louisa recounted and embroidered on while Henry was growing up; in the Joe Wilson stories leading up to Water them Geraniums Henry redraws a young Louisa and Peter falling in love and then falling apart. Louisa has made Henry aware, in a way that adopters of the myth of the Lone Hand generally are not, that the lifestyle of the itinerant bushman is based on the subjugation of women. Henry just doesn’t know what he can do about it.

Ward concludes that “admiration for the simple virtues of the barbarian or the frontiersman is a sentiment which arises naturally in highly complex, megalopolitan societies.” Maybe. In any case, the Bulletin took Lawson’s “mates”, made them archetypal at a time when Melbourne and Sydney were still very conscious of the ‘frontier’ just over the ranges; united them with the nationalism which led to Federation in 1901; and then had them caught up and incorporated into the new myth of the brave, ruffian ANZAC, created in 1915 and which has proved ‘the last refuge of scoundrels’ ever since.

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Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, first pub. 1958. OUP, Melbourne, 1981. 280pp.

Mt Catherine Massacre

Buried in Print and I are read-alonging Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Goldfields trilogy in which, Nathan Hobby in his recent biography of Prichard says, KSP made a serious attempt to tell the Aboriginal side of the story, as well as that of all the white (mainly) men who rushed out to Southern Cross, Coolgardie, Kalgoorlie and beyond, into the dry, mostly scrub country east of Perth, in search of gold.

Interestingly, her POV in book 1, The Roaring Nineties, at least, is a woman, Sally Gough who insists on accompanying her husband, Morrie. Sally, while camped at Hannan’s (Kalgoorlie) in 1895, makes friends with an Aboriginal girl who is the mistress of Morrie’s then partner, Frisco [the young woman, Maritana, is left with Frisco, off and on, by her older husband in return for food]; and she is later rescued while suffering typhoid on a trek north (to the new Darlot discovery), by Maritana’s mother Kalgoorla and is returned to Kalgoorlie in the care of Kalgoorla’s tribal group.

Kalgoorlie and the Goldfields is Wangkatja country, of the Western Desert peoples, though immediately to the south (and east) was/is the smaller Ngadjunmaya nation (map).

Prichard, who researched this work in the 1940s, explains that men prospecting as far north as present-day Laverton had antagonised the locals by polluting their waterholes and stealing their women, and that isolated prospectors would quite often come under attack.

In Chapter XXVI, Sally hears of a prospector, ‘Mick Gerald’ who has discovered ‘a mountain of gold’ a couple of hundred miles north east

He and Bill and Syd Parry struck a big quartz hill … and called the place Mt Catherine… further on [they] discovered another reef which they intended to register as Daisy Bell.

While they were out prospecting, natives raided the camp, and speared the pack horses. They went out after the natives and met Ned Robbins who had struck the far end of the Daisy Bell reef and pegged a lease there. Ned went with them to settle with the natives.

[Back in Kalgoorlie ‘Gerald’ and the Parry’s register their claim to Daisy Bell, cutting Robbins out]. Robbins swore to get even with them.

He gave information to the police about that massacre of the blacks. [Mick] Gerald and Bill Parry were arrested. Syd Parry [subsequently] gave himself up.

The Coolgardie Miner came out with an article drawing attention to the ill-treatment of natives by certain unscrupulous prospectors. “Blacks had been killed wholesale”, it declared, “without regard to age or sex. Infants had been taken from their mothers and the brains battered out of their tiny bodies with rocks, innumerable outrages were perpetrated on the women and the unfortunate savages slaughtered ruthlessly.”

It was easy enough to find that story again, in Trove, in The Coolgardie Miner of 12 Feb 1895, and days following. Interestingly though, there is no massacre at that time/location on the Newcastle University ‘Colonial Frontier Massacres’ map (here).

Prichard had changed the names of the miners just slighty, so that ‘Mick Gerald’ was actually Michael Fitzgerald and ‘Ned Robbins’ was ___ Robinson. The words Prichard used above, “without regards to age or sex etc.” are Robinson’s (“The Mount Catherine find”, The Coolgardie Miner, 16 Feb 1895, p.6).

The Mount Catherine find was made on 7 Jan 1895. But a couple of weeks earlier, according to the Miner

a raid by blacks took place at the camp at Eucalyptus, where a part of the party was stationed. The natives stole a great quantity of provisions, clothes, ammunition etc. and speared a horse. On the return of the prospectors (who here consisted of Fitzgerald and the two Parrys) they started in pursuit of the n*ggers and tracked them to where their trail joined that of a big tribe. It was deemed prudent to go on to the Pendinni camp, find reinforcements and horses, and then proceed in pursuit of the thieves. [Robinson joins them]

The pursuit was continued until after New Years Day and what occurred in that time is not clearly stated. The party however, recovered none of the stolen goods.

When Robinson returns to the site of the massacre with the police, they are only able to find two bodies, of two young men who have been shot. The police charge Fitzgerald and the two Parrys with murder, with the case being heard by the Resident Magistrate at Coolgardie on Mon 25 Feb., 1895. Only Robinson gives evidence as to the events leading to the deaths, and the defendants are discharged. Robinson is arrested and held overnight, before he too is discharged.

It is interesting that Prichard would include this story in her work. And sad too that its publication in 1895, and its republication by Prichard, had so little effect on the Australian public, who even today are largely happy to accept the myth of ‘peaceful settlement’.

By the 1940s there was some sympathetic writing about ‘Aborigines’ – Prichard was clearly angry about the taking and rape of Aboriginal women, which she approaches first in Coonardoo (1928) then again here; Daisy Bates was in the newspapers from the early 1900s on, with her anthology, The Passing of the Aborigines coming out in 1938; then there’s Ion Idriess – Drums of Mer, Man Tracks, Nermaluk; Xavier Herbert, Capricornia (1938); and Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land (1941).

Ernestine Hill brings up Aboriginal slavery in The Great Australian Loneliness (1940), but Prichard’s The Roaring Nineties seems to be the first – outside of actual newspaper accounts, of which there are plenty – to include a massacre.

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References:
Katherine Susannah Prichard, The Roaring Nineties, first pub. 1946
Coolgardie Miner (WA : 1894 – 1911) –
Tue 12 Feb 1895, Page 3, ‘THE LATEST FIND’ (here)
Sat 16 Feb 1895, Page 6, ‘THE MOUNT CATHERINE FIND/THE PROSPECTORS ARRESTED ON SUSPICION OF MURDER’ (here)
Tue 26 Feb 1895, Page 3, ‘THE MT CATHERINE TRAGEDY/THE PROSPECTORS DISCHARGED’ (here)
Sat 2 Mar 1895, Page 6, ‘RESIDENT MAGISTRATES COURT/ALLEGED MURDER’ (here) – a full transcript of the evidence from the trial.

see also my posts:
Australian Genocide, Sydney NSW, 1779 (here)
The ‘Battle’ of Pinjarra, Pinjarra WA, 1834 (here)
Wardandi Massacre, Wonnerup/Lake Mininup WA, 1841 (here)
Cocanarup (Kukenarup) Massacre, Cocanarup Station, Ravensthorpe WA, 1880s (here)
Kimberley Massacres, 1886-1924 (here)
also in WA:
Flying Foam Massacre, in the Pilbara, 1868 (here)
Forrest River massacres, 1926 (Wiki here)

Wheel Tracks, WW Ammon

This is of course pure indulgence, but my recent adventures up dirt roads reminded my of this book of early Western Australian trucking which someone with a very neat hand gave me in 1985, my father, I guess. It has since led a hard life and not many of the pages are still attached to the spine.

Though Carnarvon, on the coast of Western Australia, has firmly established itself as the banana town of the west, it was not always so. Once wool was its only industry; and those who carried the wool from the out-lying stations were the truck drivers who are the theme of this book.

… trucks had come to stay, chiefly through the resourcefulness and initiative of that peculiar breed of person, the truck driver. What makes a young man love a motor so?

The trucks, little high-pressure-tyred vehicles always grossly overloaded, were pitted against those hundreds of miles of rutted wheel tracks, endless loose sandhills, washed-out river crossings, tropical deluges and a pitiless sun.

The map, though of course Ammon doesn’t say so, is all Yamaji country, bordering on Noongar at the bottom. Geraldton, which dates back to 1851, is not shown but it is more or less opposite the name ‘Indian Ocean’. The North West Coastal Hwy which is the road I use to go that way, now comes up from Perth between Three Springs and the coast, through Greenough to Geraldton, crosses the Murchison R at the Galena bridge and then follows the route labelled Sandalwood Track to Carnarvon, Minilya, Winning and northwards on to Karratha today, and back then, the 1920s, to Roebourne and Cossack (WA map).

Which reminds me, I am still unable to recognise sandalwood whose harvest was once an important WA industry, nor most of the other trees and shrubs the author casually mentions, “thickets of jam-trees … with cork-trees, mulga and beefwood, while a tangle of wild wattle, bluebush, quandongs, and a species of wild plum grew in abundance.”

And just for Melanie, “scorpions, six inches long with claws on them like the gilgies [fresh water crays] down south. And centipedes half as long as your arm, that can run like the very devil … Lizards won’t hurt you, but there are plenty of nasty little spinifex snakes about …”

On his first trip he learns to charge up sandhills, making multiple attempts and laying brush down to stop those hard, narrow tyres from digging in. Then someone invents trailers! First with one axle and only carrying a few more wool bales, then with two and carrying up to 18, or 3 tons. So now a hill they may have charged over, they are dragging this dead weight and are bogged all the time.

Of course these new-fangled trucks were fiercely resented by camel team drivers – a team of 23 camels, a wagon and all the gear might represent an investment of two to three thousand pounds. Nevertheless the camel teamsters lost contract after contract, hence the ferals I photographed the other day (maybe 400 km due east).

These days you see signs along the road about Charles Kingsford Smith, our most famous pioneer aviator. He made his start in this region delivering mail and the author for a while is driving a truck which once belonged to him.

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Realizing the great potential for air transport in Australia, Kingsford Smith formed a partnership in 1924 with fellow pilot Keith Anderson. They raised the capital to buy two Bristol Tourers by operating a trucking business from Carnarvon, the Gascoyne Transport Co. ADB

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I have to have a truck photo, so here’s a Graham truck manufactured in Evansville, Indiana, in the 1920s and the first truck Ammon drove.

Some things never change. Ammon was on trip rates, 3d a mile, no matter how long he spent loading/unloading or broken down repairing his truck on the road. Sixteen hours averaging 5mph would get you one pound/day. Today you might earn 44c/km, and average 90 kph for 14 hours, let’s say $500/day or 250 times as much. If that matches inflation then an average Perth house, $500K today would be the same as one thousand pounds then. I can’t find any figures to suggest whether or not that was the case. I suspect the 1925 house price might have been less.

And of course, other drivers “never passed another driver on the road without stopping for a yarn or boiling the billy with him. If he was in trouble they stayed …” I’m pleased to say drivers out here still stop, if you’re in trouble anyway.

There’s always a sad story in Australian bush yarns. Jimmy Stewart who taught Ammon the ropes, on his last trip before going home to Edinburgh to marry his sweetheart, was found dead on the track. He’d leaned out to look back at a dodgy tyre on his trailer, had lost his grip, fallen, hit his head, and the truck had carried on without him.

Carnarvon is at the mouth of the Gascoyne River, which is often dry for months at a time – “nothing but a sandy watercourse 500 miles long.” Carnarvon only has around 10 inches of rain/year so when the river floods it is generally from rain hundreds of kms inland. The streets of the town are quite low compared with the river and these days are protected by a long levee. Even so, one xmas 10 or 12 years ago I was held up there for a week, water all round so that they finally sent us dozen or so trucks an early xmas dinner by helicopter to keep us going. When the water went down the road south was so badly cut that we had to go home the long way (picture: the convoy setting out north along the river), 400 kms north, 400 kms inland, then 1400 kms south to accomplish what should have been a 900 km journey. Ammon describes getting across swimming, by boat and as the river went down, in trucks towed by camels.

As trucks got quicker, roads got worse, broken up by corrugations. Within a few years and before he was thirty, “Snow” Ammon was out of trucking for good, his back destroyed. Now, before I end I want to return to the Yamaji. How the West was won was pretty brutal – and the excerpt below is describing the situation, not so long ago, in my, and maybe your, grandparents’ time.

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WW Ammon, Wheel Tracks: Trucking accross the great north-west, Angus & Robertson, 1966. 220pp.

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Early on, the author gives a lift to “a pair of young aborigines returning to Bigemia Station”.

“One of these boys answered to the name of Charcoal, the other to Jumbo. These were the white man’s names for them and illustrated, I thought, the status they held in the white man’s world – a brand by which they answered the crack of the white man’s whip and did his bidding in return for a few shabby clothes and the scraps from his kitchen … a kerosene tin [into which went] all the left-overs, the slops and the scrapings from the dishes, the tea leaves … At the end of the day an old gin came from the native camp … and carried it away to be shared as the evening meal.

In the north I was often told that an aboriginal only understands what you bash into his head with a piece of wood. And while I have seen plenty of this kind of thing done, I never have believed, and never will believe, that the native appreciated it…” [!]

Such is Life (12), Joseph Furphy

Such is Life (01)
Such is Life (02)
Such is Life (03)
Such is Life (04)
Such is Life (05)
Such is Life (06)
Such is Life (07)
Such is Life (08)
Such is Life (09)
Such is Life (10)
Such is Life (11)

The fictitious memoir of Tom Collins, a NSW Government official, “of the ninth class” and former bullocky. Being reviewed in 12 parts over the course of 2021. And here we are at no. 12. At last!

Tom has left Jack’s (formerly Nosey Alf’s) hut and is making his way to Runymede homestead in the impressive costume with which Jack has supplied him (supplemented by his own glasses and the famous meerschaum pipe).

[previously] I lacked, and knew I lacked, what is known as a ‘presence’. Now however, the high, drab belltopper and long alpaca coat, happily seconded by large, round glasses and a vast and scholarly pipe, seemed to get over [that] difficulty; and, for perhaps the first time in my life, I enjoyed … the consciousness of being well-dressed.

We run into a fellow on a poorly broken horse and Tom discourses, with examples, for a number of pages on the nature of good horsemanship until at last we are able to proceed – to the store, where goods are both kept for the station and sold to travellers. Montgomery, the storekeeper undertook in the last chapter, though I kept it from you, to spread rumours about Tom which Mrs Beaudesert might believe, and so give up her intention of marrying him.

We hear news for the last time of Nosey Alf, headed way north, up the Diamantina Track, into western Queensland.

Montgomery repeats the story Mrs B was intended to overhear (“which is more than I can do”, interpolates Tom). They get into an argument over whether Tom is dishonored or disgraced.

“Poverty, for instance is disgrace without dishonour; Michael-and-George-ship is dishonour without disgrace. In cases like mine, the dishonour lies in the fact, and the disgrace is in the publicity.”

All the men go in to lunch, including two swagman who Tom has previously injured, though neither recognises him, and so he is not called to account. Now he must face Mrs B and enact “the aristocratic man with a past … Such is life, my fellow-mummers – just like a poor player, that bluffs and feints his hour upon the stage, and then cheapens down to mere nonentity.”

THE END

Was I happy to see that ‘THE END’! When this is done, I’m going to go back to reading books, not studying them. But for the nonce, let us go on. We are clear of course that Tom Collins is not Joseph Furphy. John Barnes writes, “In many ways Collins is an exaggerated, ironic self-portrait, in which Furphy regards humorously – and not too severely – the vanity of the “learned bushman. Tom Collins is a role that Furphy assumes, turning his irony against himself.” And further on .. “Furphy planted the clues that enable us to see the truth that Collins misses. As the reader grasps the relationships, the patterns of cause and effect which elude the cock-sure and loquacious narrator, he will come to recognize the cunning of the book’s construction.”

It is clear that in his years in the bush, often alone and reading by the light of his campfire, Furphy read voraciously and widely, though the fact that he carried a pocket Shakespeare wherever he went is evident from his frequent and often obscure quotations. On finally settling down in Shepparton, he began submitting stories to the Bulletin, as did many bushmen/writers. But what he brought to this novel was not just years of reading and bush experience but “also a fascination with the nature of fiction. In his sense of literary tradition and his conscious pursuit of originality, Furphy had no real counterpart …”

Such is Life is a unique work, a landmark in Australian literature, incomprehensible probably to non-Australians, and, outside literary circles at least, still carrying the burden of having originally been lumped in with Bush Realism. It is in fact the first, great work of the Modernist era, and so you will find when you read it.

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Joseph Furphy, Such is Life, Bulletin, Sydney, 1903

FD Glass, R Eaden, GW Turner, L Hoffman eds, The Annotated Such is Life, by Joseph Furphy, Halstead Classics, Sydney, 1999. 297pp (plus 170pp notes and annotations).

The cover is of the edition I own. A&R Classics is of course an imprint of Angus & Robertson. This edition dates from 1975, reprinted 1978, with a Foreword by John Barnes.

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Meerschaum. German for sea foam. A meerschaum pipe is made from the mineral sepiolite sometimes found floating on the Black Sea.

The ideal rider. “… wants  – or rather, needs – a skull of best spring steel; a spinal column of standard Lowmoor; limbs of gutta-percha; a hide of vulcanised india-rubber; and the less brains he has, the better … his thinking facilities should be so placed as to be in direct touch with the only thing that concerns him, namely the saddle.” He goes on …

A spill that perils neck or limb, a simple buster is to him, and it is nothing more, paraphrasing Wordsworth’s Peter Bell –
A primrose by a river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And it was nothing more

Michael-and-George-ship. KCMG (knighthood) awarded to colonials for services rendered. “Its possessors were prostituted instruments of British imperialism whose price had been paid in honours and titles.” The Boomerang.

John Barnes (1931- ) Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University, author of The Order of Things: A Life of Joseph Furphy (1990)

Irishness. This is a footnote to previous posts really, but in between finishing writing this post and putting it up, I read an essay by Francis Devlin-Glass in the ALS Journal of 30 Sep 2021, ‘Defining the Field of Irish-Australian Literature’:

“Furphy is not only a cornerstone of nineteenth-century Australian literature, but his critique of sectarianism, one of the most urgent cultural issues in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Australia, has not often been marked. It makes him and his Shandyesque manner of narration, unique in Australian fiction, of both cultural and literary interest to a study of Irish-Australian writers. That he is the only Australian writer … alluded to in detail in Finnegans Wake is another curious index of a transnational flow in the Irish direction.”

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< Previous. Such is Life (11)

The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, Randolph Stow

AusReading Month 2021

Randolph Stow (1935-2010) was born and grew up in the regional port town of Geraldton, WA, 430 kms north of Perth, nestling between the Indian Ocean and the line of hills separating it from a narrow band of wheatland and then endless kilometres of desert sand and scrub divided into enormous stations running merino sheep.

Inland 300 kms and connected to Geraldton by the Northern rail line were the Murchison Goldfields – Mt Magnet, Meekatharra, Sandstone, and in the distance Wiluna. All territory I’ve covered before, writing about Daisy Bates, the Rabbit-Proof Fence girls, KSP and Coonardoo/Turee Ck. Neville Schute’s Beyond the Black Stump (1956), which I have read and not reviewed, is also set in that country out towards Turee Ck,

Geraldton was the home of Nene Gare, a district nurse, her husband in charge of local State Housing, and the setting for her The Fringe Dwellers (1961). More recently John Kinsella and Charmian Papertalk Green have written (here) about Mullewa, on the Northern Line 100km east of Geraldton where they both lived, at different times, and attended school in Geraldton.

With The Fringe Dwellers and The Merry-Go-Round by the Sea we see Geraldton from the bottom and from the top (sorry, but conventional hierarchies have it that way) from the Indigenous unemployed (as seen by a judgemental white woman) and from the squattocracy, the great landowners. And more or less at the same time, the 1950s, though Stow’s recollections, and this is autofiction, begin in the early years of WWII.

The merry-go-round had a centre post of cast iron, reddened a little by salt air, and of a certain ornateness … The post began as a square pillar, formed rings, continued as a fluted column, suddenly bulged like a diseased tree with an excresence of iron leaves, narrowed to a peak like the top of a pepperpot, and at last ended, very high in the sky, with an iron ball. In the bulge where the leaves were, was an iron collar. From this collar eight iron stays hung down, supporting the narrow wooden octagonal seat of the merry-go-round …

[A small boy] went, scuffling leaves, to the merry-go-round, and hanging his body over the narrow seat he began to run with it, lifting his legs from the ground as it gained momentum. But he could not achieve more than half a revolution by this means, and presently he stopped, feeling vaguely hard-used.

And so we meet Rob Coram, whose story this is and a merry-go-round, though not “the merry-go-round in the sea” which is actually the mast of a freighter sunk in Geraldton harbour, whose rusting away over the years maybe signifies Rob’s loss of childhood innocence. The year is 1941. Rob is six and his idol, Rick, a 21 year old law student, a cousin in his mother’s extended family, is about to leave the Maplestead family property, Sandalwood, and go overseas with the army.

Rob, his little sister Nan, and his mother, Margaret, and lawyer father live in Geraldton. The father, who has also enlisted, is on army exercises at the weekend, but mother brings the children out to Sandalwood for Rick’s last day at home.

The hairs on the back of Rick’s neck were golden. Two crows were crying in the sky, and everything was asleep. The day, the summer, would never end. He would walk behind Rick, he would study Rick forever.

The summer goes on, endlessly as summer holidays do. Full of aunts and great aunts and little girl cousins. Rick is in Malaya, which we know, which the adults know, has fallen to the Japanese.

A man stood in the in the starlit rectangle of the doorway. He stood swaying for a moment, then stumbled forward… The hut was pitch-dark, steam-hot. It stank of men and the tropics.

And so we see we are to follow two tracks, Rob’s and Rick’s. Rick has just met Hugh McKay, who will be his life-long mate, in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.

As the Japanese advance through Indonesia, as Darwin and then Broome are bombed, the sense of war, for the boy, becomes very strong. There are strange boats in the harbour, strange people in strange clothes in the town. Refugees. The house gets an air-raid trench in the tennis court. There are air-raid sirens. Preparations are made to evacuate inland to Mt Magnet. When these are not followed through, the family’s boxes are left at Mt Magnet station where “the black ladies opened them”.

In the early part of the novel Rob’s perceptions are often what he has heard adults say. This is the first time Aboriginal people are mentioned. Subsequently, at a visit to the “hand cave” on Sandalwood, Rob asks (about the people who made the hand paintings), “Are they like the blackniggers in town?” It is interesting to observe, as Rob grows to adulthood, that he increasingly discards his mother’s prejudices.

As the war recedes, for Western Australians anyway, Rob resumes school in Geraldton and then Guildford Grammar in Perth where all the men of his family have attended. Just an ordinary boy’s story, very well told.

Finally, Rick comes home. The one letter he and Hugh received in four years was a postcard from Rob, in which he said he weighed 4 stone 6 lb. “And Hughie and I weighed 5 stone apiece,” Rick says.

The last third of the book is Rick’s failure to settle down, as Hugh gets a wife, a house in the suburbs, a family. And Rob’s struggle to understand. A wonderful book. An Australian classic.

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Randolph Stow, The Merry-Go-Round by the Sea, first pub. 1965, this edition (pictured) Penguin, 1968. 276pp

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Sandalwood. The Maplestead (Rob’s mother’s family) family property. Stow mentions location names from time to time, but I wasn’t taking notes. On the first trip there (in the novel) they first go south from Geraldton to Greenough and then inland to another family property. I got the impression Sandalwood was further inland, so maybe 60-80 kms west and south of Geraldton.