In a long past Monday Musings I mentioned the names of several people who had commented on the state of Australian literature. Many of these were pseudonyms, including the intriguingly named “6×8”. I decided to dig further, and back in 2015, I pretty quickly discovered that his “real” name was Dick Holt. (It’s not always easy to track down pseudonyms used in the newspapers.)
I didn’t find a lot about him back then – besides his own writings – but from what I could gather, I ascertained that Dick Holt had travelled the outback doing charcoal drawings and writing articles for the Bulletin and other journals and newspapers of the time. I presume his “6×8″ pseudonym refers to the old (non-metric) picture size of 6″ x 8”, and the fact that he included drawings in his articles. Presumably there’s a metaphorical layer to this pseudonym, too, in that his stories provided little windows on his world.
In the 1890s, according to a 1934-written reminiscence by “Stockwhip”, Holt travelled with Henry Lawson. “Stockwhip” describes him as ‘the jocular writer and “charcoal” artist, Dick Holt” and says he was “a well-known writer to the Sydney Bulletin and Western Herald of Bourke”. He had his own newspaper column “On the Wallaby”. This title references the phrase “on the wallaby track”, which is Australian slang for travelling from place to place looking for work, which is exactly what he and Lawson were doing in Stockwhip’s anecdote. His columns, at least those I’ve seen, ran anywhere from 1500 to 3000 words, and tended to comprise a collection of anecdotes.
I haven’t found a biography for him – he doesn’t appear in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, for example – but returning to my old draft post this week in order to actually post it, I found that AustLit has documented him a little more. They give him as Richard Holt (a.k.a. Dick Holt, and also writing as 6 x 8), and say that he “wrote a weekly column called ‘On the Wallaby’ in the North Queensland Register from January 1899 to August 1920″. So, over twenty years. AustLit says he was born in 1868, and died ca. 1923 in Tasmania (though a reference to him in February 1923 said he was now “living near Melbourne”.) Anyhow, this roughly accords with my research, which had uncovered that he had died by the mid 1920s. The reference came from columnist, Bill Bowyang (pseudonym of Alexander Vindex Vennard, 1884-1947), who wrote the following little anecdote about him in 1926 in his column, “On the track”:
It was the late Dick Holt (‘6×8’) of ‘On the Wallaby’ fame in the ‘N.Q. Register’ who once stated that when he visited a bush township he always gazed into the jail yard to see if there was a load of wood within. If the wood was there it was a certainty that the police would be searching for some inebriated individual to use the axe or crosscut. The sight of that wood was sufficient for Dick Holt, and without wasting any time he always passed on to another town where there was no lone wood piled up in the jail yard.
Holt was, it seems, a character – but one of his time. I’ve only read a tiny proportion of his voluminous output, much of which is in a jocular vein. (Indeed, a 1923 article, identifying Bill Bowyang as his successor, describes them as writing “racy bush yarns”.)
In the post that inspired this one, I shared that “6×8” had criticised Australian literature as being characterised by too much exaggeration of characters and incidents, to which another had replied that the problem was not this sort of exaggeration but a “diseased hankering after the abnormal”. Anyhow, “6×8” clearly didn’t think he was exaggerating character and incident – and perhaps not. But he did like to put a humorous spin on his wanderings about the bush, commenting on anything from a terrible Australian stamp design to what you can read from the newspaper in which the butcher has wrapped your meat. He also saw the poverty that often attended life in the “backblox” noting that country people didn’t like to pay newspaper subscriptions (which affected him), school masters, and parsons. He frequently makes comments like “do these people expect parsons [or whomever] to live without food and clothes?”
However, there’s a problematic side too. Given he’s an outback “wallabist”, he comes across many characters, including non-white Australians. He identifies First Nations Australians with terms like “black fellows” or “dusky brethren” or “dark son of the forest” or, even, “n****r”, and the Chinese are “chows”. In one instance, when listing people of Asian and Islander origins, he adds “and other colored abominations”. I looked for anything that suggested an awareness of the racism implicit in these terms, but I didn’t see it. This makes distressing reading, but for contemporary readers it’s instructive about the attitudes of the day to those they saw as other. Also, by mentioning these “others”, he also tells us about the people who populated Australia and something about their relationships with each other, which I’d argue is better than rendering them invisible.
You can see, perhaps, why I’ve taken a while to write this post, but in the end I thought there was value. Hope you agree …
Whispering Gums 
Fascinating snippets, as always, Sue! Thanks for delving into this interesting character’s life and times.
Thanks Judith… I’m glad it’s interested not just me.
I honestly don’t get why you can be distressed by something written so long ago, Sue: those were times when beliefs, thinking, ideas, opinions and every associated noun were so different that it was a bit like living on a different planet.
Fair question MR. I thought about that sentence and tried different descriptors, none of which felt quite right but I decided on that one because I know that not all people thought that way and I had kept hoping that this person who seems to have carried some weight wouldn’t either. Any way I tried to describe the sorts of things he was saying came out wrong as I couldn’t quite capture his tone … and who am I, anyhow, to say what he actually meant and how it felt (and feels) to those to whom he is referring? Complicated to write about.
You have a very big <3, as well as very big talent for reviewing. xo
Thanks MR … you are always good for me!
That was a great post of yours and I enjoyed every word of it. Cannot help but romanticise those times when the Australian character was in full bloom. Would not have enjoyed living them, however. Hard times.
In the great American tradition of “-isiting” words, I simply must start a column written by “The Wallabist.”
Fully agree with MR and likely everyone here that it’s absurd for us to get angsty about language used in old literature.
In a poky little essay, I did call our First Nations folk “Arafura Pedestrians of Antiquity.” Pretty sure that offends someone. Hope so.
Thanks Throsby … I spent a lot of time on this one so it’s nice to hear you enjoyed it.
I do take your and MR’s point re the language.
PS is that essay available somewhere?
I have DM’s you via the quaintness messaging system.
Ah thanks very much Throsby … DM’d me via which service?
email – quaintness exemplified 🙂
Haha … got it (your reference to quaintness AND the link!)
Ah, another stirrer ! – hooray ! 😀
😀
Don’t encourage her, Throsby!
You are incorrigible MR – haha.
YETH !!!!
I’m pleased to see that you’ve figured out the provenance of that intriguing pseudonym!
Thanks Lisa … there are some interesting ones out there.
I’m interested in how you work out the real name behind the pseudonym?
My grandfather (1865-1937) wrote as J.R.C. He was born plain old John Clark, but along his lifetime, stuck Rutledge in the middle. Still unsure whether that was a hint of his true parentage or plain old pomposity.
I’m definite he was the author of many wordy early 20th century works, but there are some pieces circa 1886 in such newspapers as The Queenslander which SEEM to be his. But? Could it be there was another writer using this moniker at that time? One article documents his travels by horseback in the “The Gulf Country” with “a wee mite of a blackboy”. He then adds some of that typical language of the day. He would not long have arrived from England – no doubt bringing a “certain attitude” with him. I would think one would have to be rather young and brash to set out with only one companion on the trip he describes, which influences my decision they are really his words.
With difficulty in some cases is y answer Gwendoline! In this case just searching on the pseudonym revealed several articles that gave his real name. The challenge with him then was getting good info about his life. BUT I have a big list of pseudonyms that I am working on. Some fairly generic, including initials like your J.R.C., and they involve all sorts of fossicking around – narrowing searches, widening searches, and so on. One of the things I do, but I’m sure you’ve done it, is to try to find death notices and obituaries. They can help narrow things, but I can’t always find them. It sounds as though in this case those articles might be his.
Many thanks WG! Feel free to add my J.R.C. to your list. Not that he was one of the greats, but my research has linked him with some luminaries, such as Cecil Lawrence Hartt (of Smith’s Weekly and The Digger cartoons), who in turn, was a great mate of Henry Lawson’s.
(And please feel free to email me any time you would like to have an off-blog conversation).
Thanks Gwendoline … sounds like you’ve enjoyed your research… and ditto re off-blog conversation. (Sorry for delayed reply… it’s always full on when we are in Melbourne.)
You (your post) reminds me of the Australasian Post, which seemed to take over that ‘outback’ style of writing and drawing from the Bulletin. I have Jim Graham as the guy who travelled with Lawson to Bourke, but I’m suppose lots did, and lots more claimed they did.
Good catch Bill … I’m pretty sure I saw a reference or two to him regarding the Australasian Post, but I’m not sure that Trove has digitised The Australasian Post?
As I was reading this something about it sounded familiar. Still can’t quite put my finger on it, but the Tasmanian reference made me think I saw something in an historic house, pub or museum whilst travelling recently about On the Wallaby.
Sorry not much use at all really, but it’s odd how an image of a copy of On the wallaby behind a glass cabinet popped into my mind straight away….
Fascinating Brona. I think his work mostly appeared in Qld papers, though he did live for some time in Sydney. And Bowyang says he’d gone to Melbourne. I struggled to find him in Tasmania/ I looked for death notices in Trove around 1920s – but Richard Holt/Dick Holt are not exactly unusual names. However, AustLit must have source for them to say he died there. If only you’d known I was looking for him, that reference might have added something to my bio!!
That’s what I was thinking too!
The end of your post hit me right in the heart. Someone close to me occasionally throws racist jokes into the conversation, and they seem to think there is no harm because they don’t actually believe non-white people are inferior. Interestingly, this person is connected to my school program, meaning if, in the future, they wanted a letter of recommendation, despite all their other accomplishments, I would not attach my name to them when they are so willing to drop racist jokes in front of anyone.
Agree, Melanie … they aren’t reading the room at all it sounds to me, and that would be a worry. You really do have to be “seen” to be non-racist as well as “be” non-racist.
We are both troubled by this kind of attitude unearthed in historical writing. It’s hard to remember that there have always been abolitionists working for freedom even when writers/books like this one were being read and published; everyone would like to dismiss that as “another time” but there were people then who recognised the immorality of slavery, too, and it’s also (as Melanie’s comment reveals, and that’s more common than many want to think/believe) all too common in “this time” in “our time” too.
Yes, thanks Marcie. That’s my point too. There were/are always people who believed in fairness and social justice, so while you know other attitudes abounded/abound you are always sorry to see them – particularly in a popular person or place.