Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This time, it is 1961, and it runs from 13th to 19th April. Once again, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

I have already written about 1960s for the 1962 Club. It was an exciting decade, one in which we thought we were really going to change the world for the better. Older and wiser now, I can see how naive that was. But, idealism is not a bad thing, and some good changes did happen. Just not enough. This decade was also the height of the Cold War. Literature reflected all of this – the enthusiasm for change looking towards a fairer more equitable world, the fear of communism, and the tension between the two. In Australia, the conservative government of Robert Menzies had a strong grip.

A brief 1961 literary recap

Books were, naturally, published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1961:

• James Aldridge, The last exile
• Mena Calthorpe, The dyehouse (my review)
• A. Bertram Chandler, The rim of space
• Kenneth Cook, Wake in fright
• Dymphna Cusack, Heatwave in Berlin
• Nene Gare, The fringe dwellers (Bill’s review)
• Xavier Herbert, Soldiers’ women
• Elizabeth Kata, Be ready with bells and drums
• H.A. (Harold) Lindsay, Janie McLachlan
• John O’Grady, No kava for Johnny
• Ruth Park, The good looking women (aka Serpent’s Delight) 
• Hal Porter, The tilted cross
• F. J. Thwaites, Beyond the rainbow
• George Turner, A stranger and afraid
• Arthur Upfield, The white savage
• Judah Waten, Time of conflict (Bill’s review)
• Morris West, Daughter of silence
• Patrick White, Riders in the chariot (Lisa’s review)

Several short stories, and short story collections were published, including by some favourite writers of mine like Thea Astley and Shirley Hazzard, by other writers I’ve posted on here before like D’Arcy Niland and Hal Porter, and by one Ray Mathew, an Australian expat whom I discovered around a decade ago when I attended my first Ray Mathew annual lecture at the NLA.

The thing about the 1960s is that we start to see more authors appear that we still hear of today, even if not all are still keenly read.

The main literary award made this year was the Miles Franklin, which went to Patrick White’s Riders in the chariot. The ALS Gold Medal was not awarded in 1961.

Novelists born this year include Jordie Albiston (who died in 2022) and Richard Flanagan (who should need no introduction).

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove for what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. However, because 1961 is less than 70 years ago, I frequently confronted roadblocks, with Trove regularly telling me that “This newspaper article is still within its copyright period and can’t be displayed on Trove right now. The National Library of Australia will make it available as soon as copyright permits, or with the copyright holder’s permission”. Fortunately, some newspapers have – generously – released their material “ahead” of time! Thank you The Canberra Times, and more specialist papers like The Australian Jewish Times and Tribune.

Communists and other reformists

Communism was still a hot topic in the 1960s, and several writers in my 1961 list were Communists or, if not, Marxist or leftist writers, writers like Mena Calthorpe, Dymphna Cusack, Judah Waten – and Frank Hardy, whose nonfiction book about his most famous novel Power without glory, The Hard Way: The Story Behind Power without Glory, was published in this year.

I’ll start with Frank Hardy, who wrote a piece for Tribune (June 7) about The Communist Party of Australia’s Draft Resolution for its 19th Congress. ALS reviewer Teri Merlyn wrote in 2005 that “Hardy’s commitment to literature as a vehicle for working-class education and the Australian radical literary tradition was unwavering”. This is on display in his response to the Draft Resolution, for which he proposes the following additional lines:

An important part in interpreting Australian reality is played by realist literature and art. Art which lays bare the contradictions of capitalism, exposes the ramifications of monopoly, affirms class struggle, and reveals the worth and dignity of the working people and their ability to transform society.

While the “Party’s work has been decisive in the development of the working class literature and art movement”, this work has, he says, been “marred” by “errors”. He briefly discusses these, before concluding that literature and art are part of “the working class arsenal”, and the Party must make it a “whole party” issue.

Given the period, many of our serious writers were keenly interested in reform. What is interesting is how contemporary reviewers saw their works. For example, Mena Calthorpe’s The dye house is a factory novel, which, says The Canberra Times‘ reviewer, R.R. (16 September) ‘is “formula” novel, set in a Sydney textile factory’, and, “despite its immaturity of style … an impressive piece of work”. It’s a mixed review, panning much but also suggesting she has potential. R.R. suggests that editing out ‘schoolgirl words as “clatter,” “click clack,” and “tic tac,” which jangle irritatingly through it, would improve it immensely’. I, however, loved this language, as I wrote in my review.

Similarly, M.P., writing in The Canberra Times (13 May) about Dymphna Cusack’s Heatwave in Berlin, is less than complimentary. S/he describes its political content, adds s/he is not qualified to confirm the facts, and then critiques the book as

something which cannot be taken very seriously. The characters have the larger-than-life quality of figures in a melodrama, and they speak with something of the same staginess.

Not having read the book, I can’t comment, but there are some reviews from, for example, Hungarian and Estonian readers on GoodReads whose reflections offer some fascinating perspectives.

The aforementioned R.R. also reviewed Nene Gare’s novel, The fringe-dwellers, in The Canberra Times (21 October). S/he is far more complimentary about this one, calling it “a most compelling book and one of the best written on this theme”. Today, it would be critiqued for not being an “own story”, for being a story about First Nations people by a white writer. However, this was 1961, and Gare, I think, brought an important story into the main culture. It draws from her experiences in Geraldton, Western Australia, between 1952 and 1954, when her husband was District Officer with the Native Welfare Department. R.R. writes that Gare

captured completely the atmosphere of the part-aboriginal community—its pride, its squalor, and its terrible inertia — people caught between two ways of life and belonging to neither.

S/he says that it has a few – but not serious – false notes, and pronounces it “an outstandingly good, pertinent, and touching story”.

On reviewing

In my last Year Club post (for 1925), I shared some examples of reviewing style. I found some more interesting examples for this year, but will share just one here, by “Tinker”, who reviewed four books in The Canberra Times (12 August), including two by Australian writers, One rose less, by Pat Flower, and And death came too, by Helen Mace. Tinker – who must surely be a “he” – writes of the four books that, three

are by women authors, another saddening fact drawing evidence to the sex’s determination to invade almost every field of male activity.

What? Further, while “he” thinks that Flower’s book is the better of the two Aussies, he says she “just cannot resist the feminine love for tidying up”! Mace’s novel which “has some reasonably good word pictures of the Victorian countryside, but not so good as Pat Flowers’ Sydney scenes” also “unfortunately … suffers from the female tidying up complex”. Feminism still has battles to fight, but reviewers would be unlikely to get away with this today! Incidentally, several of Pat Rose’s novels have been republished in the 2020s.

I found much more, and might write a Part 2 next week. We’ll see … meanwhile I hope this post has piqued your interest about 1961.

Sources

(Besides those linked in the post)

• 1961 in Australian Literature (Wikipedia)
• Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine, Annals of Australian literature, 2nd ed. OUP, 1992
• Teri Merlyn, “Review of Frank Hardy and the Literature of Commitment, edited by Paul Adams and Christopher Lee” [Book Review], Australian Literary Studies, 22 (1), 2005

Previous “Year Club” Monday Musings: 1925, 1929, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1952, 1954, 1962 and 1970.

Do you plan to take part in the 1961 Club – and if so how?