In 1940, Ernest G Moll’s poetry collection, Cut from mulga, was chosen by the Commonwealth Literary Committee as the book of the year. In that same year, in a talk on the ABC, he exhorted Australian writers to stop being apologetic about being Australian.

So, who was Ernest G Moll? He was born in Victoria in 1900, but moved to the USA in 1920 and was appointed the Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon in 1929. He retired from there in 1966, and lived out the rest of his life – he died in 1997 – in California. However, he did return frequently to Australia during this time, including in 1939-40 when he lectured on exchange at Sydney Teacher’s College. I must admit that I am not familiar with Moll or his work but he is clearly of some note – one of his poems, “On having grown old” (don’t you love the way this title is worded?), was selected for the rather gorgeous anthology published in 2008, 100 Australian poems you need to know.

Moll, then, has a certain amount of cred – and presumably did back in 1940 when he gave his talk on the ABC. A brief summary of this talk was reported in The ABC Weekly of 28 September 1940. Here is an excerpt:

If we write of things as they affect us as individuals – imaginatively and not as adherents of a literary tradition or of a relatively impersonal discipline of scholarship – we must write as Australians.

There’s no other way.

Our skies, our seas, our birds and plants, our landscapes, the qualities of our men and women, surely we have an eye for these.

Scientists find them distinctive enough and surely the eye of the artist is not second to the microscope in delicacy, discrimination, penetration?

I’m not sure what specifically prompted this outburst. There were many Australians writing “as Australians” in the 1920s and 1930s – Katharine Susannah Prichard, M. Barnard Eldershaw, Henry Handel Richardson, and Frank Dalby Davison to name a few. However, it is possible that they were working against a backdrop of cultural cringe: M. Barnard Eldershaw, for example, could not find a publisher in Australia for their award-winning novel A house is built, and so it was first published in England (1929).  Perhaps there was some politics behind Moll’s exhortation?

(NB The ABC Weekly column attributes the talk to “Professor E J Moll”. However, my research has not turned up a likely EJ Moll and so, given EG Moll’s background and the fact that he was in Australia at the time, I have assumed that this was a typo.)