Colin Roderick

Monday musings on Australian literature: Who is Colin Roderick?

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Regular readers here will know that a couple of recent Monday musings were based on two books written in the late 1940s surveying Australian literature. At the time of writing those posts, I’d never heard of the man behind those books, one Colin Roderick. I soon learnt, though, that he was a somewhat significant figure in 20th century Australian literature. In fact, according to Peter Pierce*, in his obituary for Roderick in 2000, “no other figure has been more influential in giving intellectual rigour and self-belief to Australian literature”. Wow … this is clearly someone I should know at least something about I thought. And so I did a little research and discovered some interesting things.

I didn’t know, for example, that there is a Colin Roderick Award. It was established in 1967 by James Cook University’s Foundation for Australian Literary Studies which Roderick founded. The award is presented annually, and has been won by many writers I’ve reviewed here, such as Deborah Robertson, Peter Temple, Tim Winton, Ruth Park, Peter Carey, Alan Gould and Thea Astley. It is not limited to fiction, so, for example, Don Watson has also won for his book on Paul Keating, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM, and Peter Rose for his memoir, Rose boys.

This is great – I’m a believer in literary awards – but, what struck me was the award’s criterion: “the best book published in Australia which deals with any aspect of Australian life”. Now, if you are an Australian literary award watcher, this will ring a bell – and the bell is the criterion for our premier award, the Miles Franklin Award. Its criterion is “the best Australian published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases”. It’s not totally surprising, I suppose, that awards created in Australia be targeted to Australian published books about Australia. But there is something particularly interesting about this case, because …

Colin Roderick was one of the original judges for the Miles Franklin Award. In fact, the terms of Miles Franklin’s will set out the first judging panel for the Award. According to the Miles Franklin Award website, the panel was to include “the then Mitchell Librarian at the State Library of New South Wales; two representatives of Angus & Robertson publishers, Beatrice Davis and Colin Roderick; the poet Ian Mudie and George Williams, Miles’ accountant.” Colin Roderick remained a judge from the first award in 1957 to 1991 when, according to Peter Pierce, “he resigned in acrimonious circumstances over the definition of what constituted a work of Australian fiction”. Ah, awards controversies! Don’t you love them? Patrick Allington wrote an article about the award, including a discussion of this affair, in the Australian Book Reviewof June 2011. I won’t go into details – you can find Allington’s article (a pdf) online – but apparently Roderick felt that Nicholas Jose’s The avenue of eternal peace, that was on the 1990 shortlist, should not have been eligible (though he apparently felt it was a better book than the winner).

This controversy aside, Roderick played a significant role during his life in promoting Australian literature through much of the mid to late 20th century. Allington describes his “career long commitment to Australian literature”, a commitment that can be demonstrated through his:

  • work as an editor (and later director) of Australia’s then premier publisher of Australian literature, Angus & Robertson, for around 20 years
  • role in the movement to establish a chair in Australian literature at Sydney University
  • creation of the Foundation of Australian Literary Studies (and the associated annual Colin Roderick Award and Colin Roderick Lecture) in 1966
  • role as a Miles Franklin judge
  • prolific, wide-ranging writings on Australian literature including critical and biographical works on Rosa Praed, Miles Franklin (whom he knew), and Henry Lawson.

This is not to say he was universally revered. Even Miles Franklin, who chose him for her first judging panel, wrote to Angus & Robertson’s most famous editor, Beatrice Davis:

You can measure how much I miss you when I say that Roderick seems the flower of the flock to me there now, and I’m glad of his friendly welcome till he spoils it by some literary obtusity.

Oh well, we all have our feet of clay. I’ll be returning to Colin Roderick’s books on Australian literature in future – and when I do, at least we’ll all know a bit about him.

* The obituary was published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 17 June 2000.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Twenty Australian novelists in 1947

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My Monday Musings of two weeks ago was about the first book in a series of four books on Australian fiction. The books were written by Colin Roderick and published by Angus and Robertson. The second book, which is today’s topic, was published in 1947, two years after the first, and was titled Twenty Australian novelists.

The novelists Roderick chose for this volume are:

Wow! While there were only two or three authors I didn’t know in the first post’s list, there are several I’ve never heard of in this one. Interestingly, the writer in the West Australian on 12 July 1947 commented that “perhaps Katherine Susannah Pritchard (sic), Henrietta Drake-Brockman and other well-known writers have been selected for discussion in one or other of the two remaining volumes which are to complete the series”. Certainly, these two writers, particularly Prichard, are better known today than many in the above list. They must be … They have Wikipedia links and I’m sure most of you have heard of Wikipedia’s notability requirement!

Despite my ignorance, I enjoy seeing which authors a previous generation deems important … and I did learn something interesting. Seaforth Mackenzie apparently died by downing in Goulburn, which is about an hour’s drive from where I live. I knew his name but not that he had a connection to my region. And I haven’t, I’m ashamed to say, read him.

Geoffrey Hutton, writing in the Argus in September 1947, critiqued the book. He started by arguing that Australia had yet to produce:

a figure of the type of Hemingway or Falkner*. You may say God forbid, but the point I want to make about these two writers is that they built a literary style out of the speech-habits and speech-rhythms of the American people, which is as distinct from the metropolitan English style as it is from Hardy’s slow-moving Wessex dialect. Even when they are not talking local slang or describing canyons or skyscrapers, their writing has an un-English, a specifically American taste.

I do love that “You may say God forbid”? It speaks volumes. Anyhow, he went on to state that “Australian-ness” was conveyed primarily through subject matter rather than in “style or method”, and, while he agreed that Colin Roderick was undertaking a job worth doing”, he concluded that:

Mr Roderick’s study of the trees has little reference to the wood, and although you may say that the wood is only the sum total of what grows in it, there is a great difference between a tree that grows on its own and one that grows in company. Specifically, Mr Roderick gives little or no indication of the development of the Australian novel out of the colonial novel; he does not place his novelists or satisfactorily estimate their relative significance. He has done useful work, but the growth of the Australian novel is another story.

I haven’t read Roderick’s book, but my reading of the various newspaper reports and reviews suggests it is more survey (or “panoramic view” as one journalist put it) and anthology than an analysis. Hutton clearly wanted more … I will explore this mid-twentieth century issue of the developing Australian novel a little more in coming weeks.

* What’s that they say about learning something new every day? Today, about to leap in with my proofreading pen, I discovered that William Faulkner was born Falkner. However, the name change was apparently made in 1918, so perhaps I should have used my red pen anyhow!

Acknowledgement: National Library of Australia’s Trove and Newspaper Digitisation Project.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Australian Novel, 1945 style

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Joseph Furphy (Tom Collins)

Joseph Furphy (Presumed Public Domain, from the State Library of New South Wales, via Wikipedia)

Every now and then I like to delve into the newspapers digitised by the National Library of Australia and made available via its website. Last week, I was pottering around researching another topic for Monday Musings (for which you’ll now have to wait) when I came across an article written in 1945 about a series of books,”arranged” by Colin Roderick, being published about Australian prose. The series aimed “at introducing to students the work of Australian writers of prose fiction” but another article suggested that it would be of value to adult readers interested in the subject.

The first volume is titled The Australian novel and was published in 1945. It’s an anthology containing précis and excerpts from the selected works, and some critical analysis, and has a foreword by Miles Franklin. She wrote that:

People settling in new lands need novels and dramas closely concerned with their own time, place and community to support and lighten the great classics and world masterpieces in literature. Certain stories relate us to our own soil, and when such works find universal acceptance, they still retain greater significance for the people of their origin than for other readers by imparting a comforting glow which springs from the intimacy of home … writings, redolent of our own land and our life in it, thus fulfilled one of the functions of imaginative literature by heightening and illuminating everyday life in familiar surroundings.

I love her description of “writings redolent of our own land and our life in it” and their importance to “illuminating everyday life”.

The 19 (strange number, eh?) works were presented in order of their age:

It’s an intriguing list for me. Some of these works and authors I’ve read, and some have been on my list to read for a long time. But there are some here that I have never heard of – such as Brian Penton and Leonard Mann. It makes me wonder which writers from our last half century or so will be no longer well-known in 60 or 70 years. Longevity in the arts is such a fickle thing really, isn’t it?

Next week, I’ll write on the second volume in which Roderick presented 20 significant novelists.