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2005,  258 P & notes

I don’t particularly remember Frank Hardy.  If asked off the top of my head, I would have said that he died in the 1970s. I’m like the former premier of New South Wales Barry Unsworth who said in 1986, “I thought Frank Hardy was dead. I really did.” In fact, Frank Hardy didn’t die until 1994, but for me he somehow seems always to be of the  black-and-white TV decades, always associated with the races and cigarette smoke. I don’t remember the television program “Would You Believe?” (1970 -1974) which seems to have been a forerunner to “Would I Lie To You?”, on which he appeared as a regular panelist. But I do remember the Channel 2 miniseries ‘Power Without Glory’, for which Frank Hardy was notorious when it was published in 1950 and feted when it was televised in 1976.  It tells the story of John Wren of Collingwood, fictionalized as John West of Carringbush, and the corruption of the local ALP.

Melburnites of a certain age (and older) will be familiar with the underworld figure John Wren and it seems that many Melbourne families have their own John Wren stories.  For myself, my first husband’s family’s foundry was in Johnston St Collingwood, just up the road from John Wren’s tote.  On my side of the family, my own great-grandfather joined in the Sunday morning horse races along Sydney Rd to the Sarah Sands Hotel  ( a turn of the century version of drag racing maybe?) where he ended up beating a horse owned by John Wren, who was keen to purchase the victorious horse. My great-grandfather was not keen to sell. Wren came up to my great-grandfather, assured him that every man had his price, and left his card with him.  I don’t know how the story ended.

The first word in the subtitle of Hocking’s book is ‘politics’, and it was politics that drove Frank Hardy’s life. Hardy, as a member of the Communist Party, was financially supported by the Party for four years to write Power Without Glory. I had naively forgotten that the Communist Party hated the Labor Party as much – if not more- than the Nationalists/Liberals. The book was a way of smearing the Labor party by publicizing links between Labor politicians and the underworld ‘entrepreneur’ John Wren.

In her biography of Frank Hardy Frank Hardy: Politics Literature Life, Jenny Hocking describes the writing of Power Without Glory and its effect on the rest of Frank Hardy’s literary work.  It was a big book that Hardy mapped out carefully, researching real-life figures and very  loosely fictionalizing them by giving them pseudonyms with the same initials.  The book’s Wikipedia entry has a long list of the real-life and fictional characters, and the renaming is all rather obvious.  It was an unwieldy book, and it was to solve a narrative problem that Hardy took up a rumour that he’d heard about an extramarital affair and a resulting illegitimate daughter.  As Hocking tells it, Hardy agonized over the inclusion of this illegitimate daughter and so he changed her identity into a son. He was to continue to agonize over this decision in his own reflections on the writing process for the rest of his career.

Power Without Glory was published in 1950 within the context of the Menzies government’s Communist Party Dissolution Act.  It was printed surreptitiously, as seen in a  fascinating article by Des Crowley about the State Library of Victoria’s four-volume copy of the book ‘Proof Copy or Clandestine Version‘.  Almost immediately Hardy was brought before the court by the Wren children for criminal libel of their mother Ellen Wren (Nellie West). Hardy was found not guilty, on the basis that John West was a synthesized fictional character, not a real person.  He had escaped the clutches of the law through the decision that Power Without Glory was fiction but he and his readers knew that, at its core, it was not. The questions of fact, fiction, truth, reality and memory lay at the heart of many of his later works, most particularly The Hard Way and Who Killed George Kirkland?  It was like a weeping sore.

But as Hocking shows, there was more to Hardy’s career than Power Without Glory. Hardy was a member of the Communist Party from youth. Hocking describes the Australian literary scene at the time, when ASIO agents eyed literary figures and organizations with suspicion, and when the Party itself fractured after Kruschev’s revelations about Stalin, and the rise of Communist China.  Hardy was an outsider to academia, he was very much a contemporary of the other realist writers at the time: Jean Devanny,  Dorothy Hewett, Katherine Susannah Pritchard.  Hocking captures well the jealousies and enmities within the various branches of the Society of Realist Writers, and the politics behind the editorship of the Melbourne Realist Writers’ Group’s publication Realist Writer as it metamorphized into Overland.  Hardy railed against the “Patrick White Australia Policy” which lionized White but starved Hardy of Commonwealth grants because of his politics. In many ways, he received more recognition overseas that he did in Australia, even though he affected a quintessentially ‘Australian’ identity and stage presence.

Hardy was often impecunious, often because of his gambling, in which he followed his father. He was a difficult husband, conducting multiple affairs, leaving his wife Ross [sic] to cover the family expenses, and in effect doing exactly what he wanted to with little thought of his obligations or responsibilities. He was a loving brother to his sister Mary, who compered that weird Channel 7 trotting show Penthouse Club, which I loathed.

[As an aside, Marieke Hardy who appeared on the late, lamented First Tuesday Book Club, followed her grand-father and great-aunt into screen-writing and television]

He was also heavily involved with the Wave Hill Walk Off, acting as scribe and reporter for Vincent Lingiari and the Gurindji land rights struggle.  It was an involvement that drew the enmity of business, the Liberal government and the Communist Party, which dominated the indifferent North Australian Workers’ Union.  It was through this involvement that he became a close friend of Fred Hollows.

I really enjoyed this book, which took me to many events and places that I didn’t anticipate.  Hocking draws heavily on Frank Hardy’s own papers, but also Hardy’s autobiographical writing, newspapers spanning some 40 years, correspondence and papers of a slew of contacts and interviews.  You don’t need to have read Hardy’s works (I’ve only read Power without Glory) because Hocking gives a good taste of their flavour, and her list of Hardy’s works at the end of the book highlights how prolific he was as a playwright, journalist and writer of both short stories and full length novels.  The book is painstakingly researched but easy to read.

But -oh- he was a slippery character.  He was a great ‘yarner’ and gave the appearance of being open, while boiling inside with secrets. His carefreeness barely cloaked carelessness and irresponsibility.

Near the end of the book, Hocking sums up his life:

In Hardy’s fragmented character, the committed political activist, tireless Party worker and determined writer coalesced with the man who shamelessly abandoned himself to the lure of racing, gambling and debt.  It was this divided character, with its alternating obsessions that had enabled Hardy to withstand decades of official disinterest, denial and derision, sustained by a political cultural milieu that he had himself helped create. But the uneasy juxtaposition of literary revelation, political action and personal secrecy within him always threatened to fracture, held together through continuing self-examination and by the unmet promise of eventual disclosure. Although he wrote extensively about himself, presenting each new work as the opportunity for self-reflection and revelation previously denied him, in each retelling Hardy revealed little that was new. (p 256)

Source: La Trobe University Library

Read because: My interest was piqued after reading Paul Strangio’s book about the Victorian Labor Party Neither Power nor Glory

My rating:  9/10

I’ve read this as part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2018.

It’s been a rough month or so, and we decided to head away for a couple of days. I’m keen to head back to Tasmania this year but Steve’s U3A commitments preclude going away for more than a week. So instead we decided to head up to one of my favourite places, Marysville.  When I was a child, we used to stay there for a week each September at Marylands Guest House.  We went up there again in about 2005, by which time Marylands was somewhat out of our price league, having been rebadged as Marylands Country House.

Marysville was almost obliterated during the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009, along with all its guesthouses.  Although there has been a lot of rebuilding, there is now only one Guest House as such, complete with tennis court, billiard table, table tennis table, lounge, library etc.  That’s what I wanted: not a B&B, not a motel room, but a proper guest house.

El Kanah was originally one of the ‘Mary’ chain of fake-Tudor guesthouses, called Mary Meadows. There’s a picture of it in its Mary Meadows form here.  During the 1970s it was taken over as a Christian enterprise and renamed El Kanah. In fact, my best friend Micheline and I stayed there after end-of-year exams one year.  You can see the pre-fire El Kanah here and some interior shots of the guesthouse here.  You can see photos of El Kanah in the aftermath of the fires here.

The present-day El Kanah is still a Christian undertaking, but no questions are asked about your religious affiliations when you book in.  I don’t know how they would have reacted if we declared our  Unitarian and an agnostic leanings, but they were very pleasant and friendly people. The Billy Graham video, the wafting sound of hymns and ‘blessings’ didn’t bother us. It’s certainly a large undertaking, and I wonder quite frankly how they can afford to run the place.  It’s not cutting-edge in its architecture, but it’s very comfortable, and I’m glad they kept the curved windows at the front to reference the old El Kanah (Mary Mount). It’s a patchwork bed cover sort of place and it only has instant coffee.  If it’s real coffee and modern decor you want, go down to the Vibe instead.

From the front

View from our balcony

Our room

Anyway we had a lovely few days, ambling down to the town for our real coffee and a read of the newspapers, kicking back and reading a whole book in one day in either their very comfortable library or out in the garden, and driving around to the various forest walks.

We drove past where Marylands used to be. When we visited on Cup Day a few years back, there were plans to subdivide the site.  I’m rather pleased that the driveway  lined with oak trees is still the same as it used to be, with no sign of building yet.

We drove up to Lake Mountain, a popular cross-country ski-ing location. Of course, there was no sign of snow at all on a 25 degree day. We were interested by the Bjarne K Dahl memorial boardwalk which was constructed before the trees all began growing back.  This image on the information board from October 2013 shows the outlook at that time, with the surrounding mountains clearly visible.  There’s been so much growth in the intervening five years that it is unrecognizable.

That’s not to say that there’s no evidence of the bushfire.  Particularly on the tops of the mountains, there is little regrowth yet.

I was interested to learn that the reason that Lake Mountain has large grassed expanses is because the mountain ash trees did not have a chance to regenerate after the 1926 fires before they were burned again in 1939. The rapid succession of bushfires disrupted the usual seed-dropping cycle that allows mountain ash forests to recover from fire.

We visited Cambarville, which had been a timber town during the 1940s, following the 1939 bushfires.  It is now an empty site, with a few interpretative signs laying out the school, mill and ‘main’ street.

It, too, was burnt out during the Black Saturday fires, although it was long gone by then.  It must have been a pretty bleak place to live, with no electricity, mud and inhospitable terrain.

The waterfall walks were beautiful.

Even though there has been lots of money poured into Marysville to ‘save’ it, there’s still something ghostly about it. I know that we went up mid-week during summer, but it feels as if the rebuilt town is too big for itself.  The Vibe hotel and convention centre dominates the main street, and the rebuilt bowling greens do not have a bowling club to use them. There are very few ruins any more, but many footpath crossings lead only to empty blocks.

The autumn leaves will turn soon.  All of the oak trees in Murchison Street are flourishing, and Marysville will be just as beautiful in autumn as it was before the fires. And it does have a real guest house.

I’ve taken to trying to walk a bit more for fitness, and so I kit myself up with my smartphone and wireless headphones, turn on a podcast and off I go.  For the past 23 hours I’ve been listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History opus, ‘Blueprint for Armageddon’, which runs for six episodes ranging in length from 3 hours and 7 minutes to a massive 4 hours and 29 minutes.  It’s about World War I, told chronologically and based largely on primary sources and a survey of secondary sources.

Dan Carlin is not a historian, but a broadcaster who loves history. He spends too much comparing people and events for my liking, and at times I felt as if the series was descending into trench-porn as he tried to capture the experience of fighting on the western front.  He cited frequently from primary sources from soldiers fighting on different sides, read in a harsh tone to distinguish it from his commentary.

So why did I persist for 23 hours? Well, he did a really good job particularly in the first episode on laying out the groundwork for the war that was to follow, drawing heavily on Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. Even though he confessed his frustration at what he left out (even at 23 hours!), I thought that he did a good job of ranging across the different theatres of war, even picking up on the Australians and New Zealanders although his main focus is the western front. He does go on and on about things, but I didn’t mind that as my mind could go off on a little wander of its own, then I could refocus and catch up with what he was saying (indeed, by the time I tuned in again, he was often still making the same point!)  And although he does labour some ideas, at heart they’re often insightful, original and interesting points that he’s making.

Still, that’s enough military history for me for now.

2002,  328 p & notes

This might seem a really perverse book for me to have read recently. My father died a fortnight ago, and I began reading it while he was gravely ill.

You’ll note from the title of this book Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918 that Jalland finishes her book at the end of WWI. In the epilogue she explains why she made 1918 the cut-off point. Most obviously, the death and disappearances of so many soldiers overseas in WWI, with their bodies  buried on the other side of the world (if found at all), forced a change in the way people mourned. Information was incomplete and delayed, and there was no physical grave nearby to be visited.  But she also points to the present-day medicalisation and denial of death that has emerged since 1918.  The influence of Christian churches declined; there was a change in the meaning of death as life expectancy rose with a shift from infancy to old age as the most probable time of death; the medicalization of death meant that the death of a patient represented ‘failure’, and the physical act of caring was relocated from women relatives to hospitals and nursing homes. (p.327)

So why read this book now? I felt with Dad’s death that we were reverting to an older, more traditional way of facing death. First, after several bouts of bypass surgery and an inoperative stent over a period of thirty-five years, Dad was dying with heart and renal failure – a slow, inexorable death for which there was no magical surgical or medical cure, just as was the case during the 19th century.  Second, we chose to help Dad die at home, not in hospital. Even though we had a hospital bed, carers and nurses attending him and twice-weekly visits from a wonderful GP, they were walk-on, walk-off players. The more common scene was just us, day and night, in the lounge room where Dad decided he’d prefer to be, with a bag of prescription drugs to be sure, but more importantly face-washers, ice chips and glasses of water. And so, I sought out this book, out of curiosity and fellow-feeling, and probably as an attempt to intellectualize what we were experiencing these last few weeks.

Prior to the publication of this book, Pat Jalland had written about death and the Victorian family, most particularly in Britain. In this book, she looks for continuities but also differences between the Australian and British experience.

Part I examines immigrant deaths at sea, both of children and of adults. Her time frame extends beyond the mass immigration of the 1840s and the gold rush, into journeys made later in the century. Chapter 1 ‘The Terror of a Watery Grave’ explores the experience of losing a child while on-board ship, which was all too common, and which was often dealt with expeditiously and without formal ceremony. That did not mean, however, that the parents did not grieve: they did, from the ‘poshest’ cabins through to the meanest steerage berth. Chapter 2 ‘Faith, Fever and Consumption’ took up the experience of on-board death amongst adult passengers, who rarely had the opportunity to have the ‘good death’ that nineteenth-century people sought, even though the ‘sea air’ and Australian climate was thought to be restorative.  Because the journey was such a huge life-event, taking people far from their families, there is a cache of correspondence that Jalland can draw on that represents a range of families of differing economic status.

In Part II, ‘The Good Christian Death’, she explores the transmission of ideals of ‘the good death’ from Europe to Australia. She notes that it survived strongly over two generations from the 1830s through to the 1880s.  She follows  Hilary Carey’s suggestion that during the last decades of the 19th century and early decades of the 20th, religious indifference increased among the working classes and intellectuals began to question their faith. She argues that the ‘good Christian death’ was experienced differently by Roman Catholics and Protestants. Protestants emphasized a more individualistic death, dependent on family support, where Catholics relied more on rituals dispensed through the priesthood, and thus somewhat removed from family responsibility.  She notes that deathbed scenes from the 1870s onwards, as described in condolence letters and correspondence to those at ‘home’, moved away from a pious concern with the spiritual state of the sufferer, to a desire that the patient die without pain. A ‘good’ death early in the century was a spiritual one; by the end of the century it was a painless one.  She notes that although funerals like Burke and Wills’ extravaganza consciously set out to emulate a British funeral like that of Wellington’s, there was discomfort both with the expense and extravagance on the one hand, and embarrassment at shoddiness of the colonial attempt on the other.   Strangely, amongst the clergy, there was more emphasis on hell in Australian theology than British theology, despite attempts by Unitarians and liberal Anglicans to abolish or at least moderate the terrors of the doctrine. Tombstones were derivative of the graveyards of Great Britain and Europe, but there was greater emphasis on ‘In Memorium’ advertisements in the newspapers.  Keepsakes, hair remembrances and photographs were popular, especially as they could be conveyed physically across the ocean.

Most of this section draws on the writings of middle-class, educated correspondents, and Jallard pauses to examine two particular examples of masculine middle-class memorialization: that of Herbert Brookes for his first wife Jennie.  Even though he later went on to re-marry Ivy Deakin, the daughter of Alfred Deakin, throughout his life he visited Jennie’s grave twice a year.  The other case study was Dr John Springthorpe, whose memorial tomb I wrote about here.  I found it interesting that both these intellectual men, who mourned so deeply and openly, were associated with (although not adherents to) Rev Charles Strong’s Australian Church – in fact, Jennie was Strong’s daughter.

Part III shifts gear, and looks at ‘Death and Destitution’.  Part II had been drawn from the correspondence and writings of middle-class families, but here Jalland turns to the statistical reports and records of ‘benevolent’ asylums, where the individual voice is rarely heard. Although by the 1870s reforms in Britain were gradually changing the nature of the workhouse from a punitive institution to a form of general hospital . This did not occur until decades later in Australia.  Jalland compares the major institutions in different states, noting that conditions were better in Adelaide and Melbourne Asylums. In Tasmania, there was a particular stigma attached to the convict stain, and many sick and dying paupers were ex-convicts. She devotes a whole chapter to benevolent asylums in New South Wales, where a number of government inquiries called on inmates as witnesses, eliciting changes to key institutions in the early 20th century.

In Part IV, Jalland examines death in the bush and in the Great War. Although the literature and artwork of the 1890s sentimentalized the bush burial, or emphasized the heroic deaths of explorers and bushrangers, it was more common for men to die of accidents, illness and – quite frankly- stupidity.  The harsh environment made elaborate rituals impossible and inappropriate. There was respect for the dead, and a stoic acceptance of its inevitability. There were wakes- often “noisy and exuberant masculine affairs” (p. 259). Aboriginal deaths at the hands of settlers were silenced, and many old bushmen, often ex-convicts, died lonely and destitute deaths.  Lost children captured the public imagination, but more commonly women died in childbirth, and children often died after birth or through illness.

In the epilogue, Jalland links the stoic, pragmatic attitude towards bush funerals with the death of mates in the trenches during WWI.  For those at home, there were no graves to visit, and death permeated the community. Churches became more feminized, especially in Protestant churches, and some turned to spiritualism.  As in Part II, Jalland turns again to the example of middle-class, intellectualized masculine grief at WWI loss through the example of John Roberts, who kept detailed scrapbooks about his son and Justice Henry Bourne Higgins who suffered silently.  These men were not religious, and their response marked the increased secularization of death in the twentieth century.  Jalland explored this further in her later book Changing Ways of Death in twentieth-century Australia: war, medicine and the funeral business.

This was a strange book to read at a strange time.  I much preferred the chapters where she cited letters and case studies, rather than the demographic and statistical chapters.  I really liked the way that she approached the question of 19th century death from so many aspects: middle class/ working class; male/female; Catholic/Protestant; Urban/Rural; English/Australian. Other writers have since picked up where she left off (for example, Tanya Evans on benevolent asylums, or Bart Ziino on war graves).  But there is real human interest here,  with a common humanity, even though practices may have been different.  At a difficult time I found it interesting and oddly comforting.

I’ve read this book as part of the Australian Women’s Writers Challenge.

This certificate was awarded to my mother when she was in Grade Six.  It’s hard to imagine Grade Six girls (because I’m sure that it was only girls) being taught baby-wrangling at school today.  No doubt these 1930s girls would have been expected to help their mothers.

And her 77% result? Well, I guess that’s 3/4 of a baby.  It was obviously enough.

We’re going through photos that we can show at Dad’s memorial.  One Australia Day several years ago I wrote about the Bicentennial Beacon, and Dad’s fortuitous involvement. And lo and behold, I found a photo!

You can read about it and see the newly discovered photo here.

We’re going through boxes of photographs, in preparing for Dad’s memorial service. We started doing it the other day and rushed through it, because we were finding it hard. We did put aside a pile of photographs that have since inadvertently been placed back into the pile of boxes, so I’m going through them again, more slowly. Very slowly. It’s hard to stop being the historian!

I was interested by this leaflet, issued by the Father and Son Welfare Movement. It starts off in the mother’s voice, but seems to become very abstract and third-person by the end. “The opening in front of my body” seems an odd place to be born from: no wonder some children thought they came from their mother’s belly button!  It was presumably a different place from “your private part” (singular).  It reads as if this little letter was designed to be left somewhere to be discovered by the young daughter.

I’m mystified to know why and by whom this leaflet was kept. It was in an old case of photos and documents belonging to my parents, but everything in it predates their wedding (and my birth as their daughter). Curiouser and curiouser.

My dad died last week from congestive heart failure and renal failure. He lived with us, in the back unit adjoining ours, and I feel as if he is present everywhere I look.  With the assistance of Banksia Palliative Care and Kincare, we nursed him at home to the end. We will miss him so much.