Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This week, it is 1925, and it runs from today, 20 to 26 October. As for the last 8 clubs, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

The 1920s were wild years, at least in the Western World. The First World War was over, and neither the Depression nor Second World War were on the horizon. It was a time of excess for many, of the flappers, of

A brief 1925 literary recap

Books were, naturally, published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1925:

• Martin Boyd (as Martin Mills): Love gods
• Dale Collins, The haven: A chronicle
• Erle Cox, Out of the silence
• Zora Cross, The lute-girl of Rainyvale : A story of love, mystery, and adventure in North Queensland
• Carlton Dawe, Love: the conqueror
• Carlton Dawe, The way of a maid
• C.J. de Garis, The victories of failure
• W. M. Fleming, Where eagles build
• Nat Gould, Riding to orders
• Jack McLaren, Spear-eye
• Henry Handel Richardson, The way home (the second book in the The Fortunes of Richard Mahony trilogy)
• M. L. Skinner, Black swans: Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno
• E. V. Timms, The hills of hate
• Ethel Turner, The ungardeners
• E. L. Grant Watson,  Daimon
• Arthur Wright, The boy from Bullarah

EV Timms had a long career. Indeed, he also appeared in my 1952 Year Club list. Zora Cross has reappeared in recent decades due to renewed interest in Australia woman writers. Both Bill and I have written about M.L. (Mollie) Skinner, a Western Australian writer who came to the attention of D.H. Lawrence. And then of course there are those writers – Martin Boyd, Henry Handel Richardson and Ethel Turner – who have never “disappeared” from discussions about Australia’s literary heritage.

While my focus here is fiction, it’s worth noting that many of Australia’s still recognised poets published this year, including Mary Gilmore, Henry Lawson, Dorothea Mackellar, Furnley Maurice and John Shaw Neilson.

The only well-recognised novelist I could find who was born this year was Thea Astley.

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. Because 1925 is a century ago, I had already started researching the year for the little Monday Musings Century ago subseries I started in 2022. So far, I have written just one post on 1925. It focused on two literary societies which were active at the time, the Australian Literature Society and Australian Institute of the Arts and Literature, so I won’t repeat that here.

I found a few interesting tidbits to share, including, in a couple of newspapers, a brief report of a talk given to Melbourne’s Legacy Club by local bookseller, C. H. Peters, manager for Robertson and Mullens. He reported that the English publisher, John Murray the Fourth, said

that the Australian consumption of fiction was enormous, compared with the English market, and that, making allowances for differences in population, the Australian read five novels to every one read by the Englishman. 

Some of the other items of interest I found were …

On a cult classic?

One of the surprising – to me – finds during my Trove search was the book Out of the silence by Erle Cox. It was, says The Argus (9 October) and the Sydney Morning Herald (28 November), first published in serial form around 1919, but there were many requests for it to be available in book form, which happened in 1925. The story concerns the discovery of a gigantic, buried sphere, which contains the accumulated knowledge of an ancient civilisation. The Argus’ reviewer says that the sphere’s aim “was to exemplify the perfection attained in a long past era and to assist the human race of the time of discovery towards similar perfection”, with the finder being helped in this goal by the “dazzling Earani”, a survivor of that civilisation.

The reviews at the time were positive. The Argus says that “the story is carried on with much ability”, while The Age (17 October) describes it as “brilliantly conceived and charmingly written … original and weird, maybe a little far-fetched”. Edward A. Vidler writes for the Sydney Morning Herald that “Mr. Cox is to be congratulated on a story of rare interest, which holds the attention from beginning to end”.

It has been republished more than once since 1925, including in other countries. For example, in 1976, it was republished in a series called “Classics of Science Fiction” in 1976, by Hyperion Press, and in 2014 an ePub version was published “with an Historical Afterword by Ron Miller”, who featured it in his “The Conquest of Space Book Series.” The promo for this edition describes it as “the classic lost race novel” in which a pair of amateur archaeologists “inadvertantly revive Earani, the survivor of an ancient race of superbeings”. But this is not all. It was also adapted for radio, and turned into a comic strip. You can read all this on Erle Cox’s Wikipedia page.

On reviewing

I enjoy seeing how reviewers of a different time went about their business. Some reviews in this era – the 1920s – tell the whole story of the novel, and do little else. Others, though, try to grapple with the book, finding positives as well as negatives, and sometimes discussing the reason for their criticisms.

Reviews for Dale Collins’s island adventure The haven are a good example. It seems that Collins had decided to have the main character – the male protagonist – tell his story. The reviewer in The Age (31 October) didn’t feel it worked, writing that Collins

repeats the experiment of blending psychology and sensation which he caried out so successfully in ‘Ordeal.’ It is a very clever and original story, but the reader who wants sensation will find there is too much psychology in it; and the reader who is interested in psychological studies will discover that the author has handicapped himself by making the central figure tell the story. As a result the psychology becomes monotonous …

The Argus (6 November) on the other hand was positive about the technique of Mark telling his own story:

Mr Collins has skilfully worked out the effect of the situation on each one of his characters, but especially on that of Mark, who reveals himself through a diary of their life on the island … The author has set himself a very difficult task in the carrying out of which he has been remarkably successful.

The reviewer in The Age (25 July) – the same one? – was disappointed in Zora Cross’s The lute-girl of Rainyvale, seemingly because of its supernatural subject matter concerning Chinese vases and curses, after the quality of her previous novel Daughters of the Seven Mile, but ended on:

The story has some vivid descriptive writing, which serves to emphasise that Zora Cross’s real gifts are wasted on fiction of this character.

Mollie Skinner’s Black swans was reviewed twice in the same column in The Age (12 September) with slightly different assessments. The first writes that it is “a very readable story founded on historical events in the convict days of Western Australia” and goes on to say that she had collaborated with D. H. Lawrence on The boy in the bush but that “her unaided work is preferable”. The review concludes that Skinner had “drawn her picture strongly and produced a good novel”.

Later in the same column, the reviewer (presumably a different one?) references Skinner’s work with Lawrence and then says of this new book that the story begins in Western Australia’s Crown colony days of 1849. Skinner “sends her childish heroine and hero on adventures amongst blacks and Malays, in company with an escaped convict” then “takes them to England for the social and love interest”. The reviewer concludes that

Miss Skinner writes well, with a special anxiety to set down striking phrases and epigrams. To quote a common, phrase, she is more interesting than convincing. 

Hmm … there’s a sense between the lines here that the story doesn’t hang together, but that Skinner, like Cross, has some writing skills.

As for Henry Handel Richardson, although her novel came out in mid-1925, I found only a couple of brief references to it. Martin Mills (Martin Boyd), on the other hand, fared better with some quite detailed discussions, including in the West Australian (4 July). The reviewer explored it within the context of being part of a rising interest in the “religious novel” and ended with:

Love Gods, with its old story of the unending conflict between the Pagan deities and the restraining influences of Christianity, is a novel of unusual insight, and most uncommon power of literary expression.

There’s more but I’ve probably tired us all out by now! I will post again on this year.

Sources

(Besides those linked in the post)

• 1925 in Australian Literature (Wikipedia)
• Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine, Annals of Australian literature, 2nd ed. OUP, 1992

Previous Monday Musings for the “years”: 1929, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1952, 1954, 1962 and 1970.

Do you plan to take part in the 1925 Club – and if so how?

I said in last week’s Monday Musing, which was dedicated to (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) 1952 “Year Club”, that I wouldn’t write about the ongoing issue of journalists and academics feeling the need to defend Australian literature, because I’ve discussed it before. However, I did read an interesting article on the wider issue that I thought worth sharing. Yes, I know the week officially ended yesterday, 27 April!

Bartlett on Aussie culture

The article I’m talking about came from someone called Norman Bartlett. Born in England in 1908, he migrated to Western Australia with his parents in 1911, so he grew up Australian (albeit he did live in England again with his mother and sister between 1919 and 1924). According to the NLA’s Finding Aid for his papers, he studied journalism, obtained an Arts degree, and served with the RAAF in World War 2. In 1952, he was literary editor and leader writer for Sydney Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. The article in question was written in reflection of the 1951 Golden Jubilee of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Titled “Let’s take stock of Australian culture”, it appeared in the Daily Telegraph (5 January). Bartlett’s fundamental question was whether Australia had “grown up as a nation”. This meant, he argued, much more than things like “Dominion status, industrial development, the fighting reputation of the A.I.F., a record wool cheque, and prowess at tennis, cricket, and, with reservations, Rugby, football”. Yes, indeed! Rather, it means

maturity in art and literature; a distinct and original “way of life”; a quickened awareness of what being an Australian means; and why being an Australian is different from being an Englishman, an American, or a European. 

A national culture is much more than a cultivated minority’s appreciation of good books, pictures, music, and architecture. 

It is the way we — the majority — feel, think, act, talk, wear our clothes, play our games, and fight our wars.

When our literature, art, music, architecture, and philosophy reflect our national idioms and attitudes they become part of our national culture. Thus, a truly national culture is the expression of a particular people living in a particular place for a long time.

Of course, he doesn’t consider the nation’s original inhabitants in any of this, particularly when he says “originally, Australians were colonials. That is, slips from older stock transplanted into an initially alien soil”. I will just leave that thought, because we are talking 1952 and I think the best thing for us to do is to recognise this context in all he says.

His article aimed to analyse “whether we’ve taken root; whether we are making a collective, intelligent attempt to adjust ourselves to our environment; whether our environment reflects itself in our speech, attitudes, art, music, and literature”. He argues that by the late 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, writers and artists were moving away from “writing and painting in the English style”. They were “beginning to wake up to the fact that Australians had grown different from the parent British stem”. Not only were writers like Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy (“Tom Collins”), “Banjo” Paterson, A. H. Davis (“Steele Rudd”) expressing this difference in their stories and verse, but they were writing in “everyday idioms of the Australian people”, as Mark Twain had done in America.

He quotes American critic, C. Hartley Grattan, who argued that a fundamental characteristic of ‘this budding Australian literature was an “aggressive insistence on the worth and unique importance of the common man”.’ But, Bartlett says, with “the growth of a more sophisticated city life, many writers began to feel that aggressive semi-socialistic nationalism [as seen in many of the above-named writers] wasn’t enough”. Writers and artists like the Lindsays and Kenneth Slessor wanted to “liberate the Australian imagination from droughts, gum trees, drovers, and the wide-open spaces”. In 1923, they created a literary magazine called Vision, but soon, says Bartlett, the Lindsays’ romanticism, with its “bookish carnivalia rosy with the fumes of canary wine and cheerful with the seductions of full-breasted wantons … blunted itself on Australian realism”. Love this!

By the Jubilee, increasingly more Australian writers were “realising that life is where you look for it”. He said writers like Kylie Tennant, Frank Dalby Davison, and Xavier Herbert showed there was ‘still plenty of kick in the Australian “bush” tradition”‘ while those like Ruth Park, Dymphna Cusack, M. Barnard Eldershaw, and Dal Stivens, were “more interested in the cities”. He separates out Eleanor Dark, who, despite setting some of her novels in country towns, had “a sophisticated interest in character rather than place”. Overall, he argued, that Australia’s contemporary fiction writers were “more analytical than exultant about the Australian way of life”.

Bartlett also wrote about poetry, visual arts, music and, briefly, dance. You can read these thoughts at the link provided above. He concludes by stating that “Australians are a reading people”, who spent significantly more on books than Americans and Canadians. This rather quantitative conclusion doesn’t answer much in terms of his framing question. However, I liked his discussion of how the bush and city strands were playing out in mid-20th century Australian literature, and his assessment of contemporary writers being more “analytical than exultant” is what I’d like from our artists of all persuasions. What do you think?

Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This week, it is 1952, and it runs from today, 21 to 27 April. As for the last 7 clubs, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

The 1950s represent the main period of the Baby Boomer generation (1945-1964), but of course, those born at this time had little to say about the literature of the period! Instead, Baby Boomers, of which I am one, are the product of times that were prosperous in the west (at least) but also overshadowed by the Cold War and its fear of a nuclear war. It was a conservative time, with men in charge, and women and other minority groups oppressed, which led to the various rights movements that appeared in the 1960s.

I wrote a post on 1954 when that was the Club’s year back in 2018, so much of what I found for that year, applies to 1952.

A brief 1952 literary recap

Books were, naturally, published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1952:

• Martin Boyd, The cardboard crown (on my TBR)
• Jon Cleary, The sundowners (read long before blogging)
• Ralph de Boissière, Crown jewel
• Helen Fowler, These shades shall not vanish
• T.A.G. Hungerford, The ridge and the river
• Rex Ingamells, Aranda boy AND Of us now living
• Philip Lindsay, The merry mistress AND The shadow of the red barn
• Colin MacInnes, June in her spring (aka Colin McInnes and Colin Thirkell; son of Angela Thirkell; primarily known as an English novelist)
• Charles Shaw, Heaven knows, Mr Allison
• Nevil Shute, The far country (read in my teens)
• Colin Simpson, Come away, pearler
• Christina Stead, The people with the dogs
• E.V. Timms, The challenge
• Arthur Upfield, Venom house

Two of these writers – Martin Boyd and Christina Stead – are recognised today as part of Australia’s literary heritage. Others are still remembered, and at least occasionally read, such as Jon Cleary (whose The sundowners was adapted to a film starring Robert Mitchum in the main Aussie role!), Arthur Upfield (whose novels were adapted for the Boney TV series , and Nevil Shute (who has been adapted mutilple times for film and television). T.A.G Hungerford is especially remembered in the West where there is an unpublished manuscript award in his name.

Born this year were novelists Janine Burke, Nicholas Jose, Larry Buttrose, John Embling, Suzanne Falkiner, and John Foulcher. Suzanne Falkiner edited the first book my reading group did back in 1988, an anthology of short stores by Australian women writers, Room to move.

There were not many literary awards, but the ALS Gold Medal went to T.A.G. Hungerford for his novel, The ridge and the river. Fourtriplezed who often comments here has reviewed it on GoodReads, noting that its racist language would not be acceptable today, but that it is nonetheless “a very “important and significant piece of Australian literature”. The Grace Leven Prize for Poetry went to R.D. Fitzgerald (whom I don’t know).

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. There was the ongoing issue of writers/journalists/academics feeling the need to defend Australian literature, but I’ve discussed that often before, so will not focus on it here, because they essentially bring out the same arguments, including that Australia did have great writers, like Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, and Xavier Herbert.

However, two issues, in particular, captured the imagination of the papers – the idea of banning “indecent” or “crude” literature for Australia’s youth, and the place of “red” or Communist literature in Australian society. These two issues in particular encapsulate much about 1950s Australia – its conservatism, and fear of Communism.

On “indecent” or “crude” literature

The main issue here seemed to be the influx of American comics and movies. It got a wide range of people excited, including First Constable Pat Loftus, Children’s Court prosecutor, and the visiting Mrs J. Kalker, a Dutch headmistress representing the International Montessori Organisation. North Queensland’s The Northern Miner (5 July) cited these two as urging parents to censor what children were reading and seeing. Mrs Kalker, for example, “was horrified to see so many Australian children going to picture matinees and reading comics” and said that “some films and comics are evil influences that contribute to sex crimes and delinquency”. She also said

Australian children were more intense, more restless, and more undisciplined than Dutch children.

Ouch!

On 9 July, in the Illawarra Daily Mercury, it was the state premiers who took up the cause. Indeed, “a magazine with a photograph of a nude woman on the cover was passed around the table at the Premiers’ Conference” during a discussion about “the undesirable comic books being imported into or published in Australia”. Tasmanian Premier, Mr. Crosgrove, wanted such books and comic magazines to “be passed by the censor before their distribution was permitted” but conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies neatly side-stepped, saying that works published in Australia, to which Cosgrove had referred, was a State issue!

Meanwhile, in the same newspaper report we are told that Mr. Kelly, the N.S.W. Chief Secretary, had received complaints about children being “found during school hours examining indecent publications they kept hidden under their desks” and that he’d sought “legal advice whether a number of publications now circulating in N.S.W. could be regarded as indecent literature. Churchmen and others had represented to him that an evil existed through these publications”.

In August, there were reports in papers like Tasmania’s Advocate (18 August), about the Young Christian Workers’ Movement aligning itself ‘in the battle for a ban on the sale of indecent literature … especially the violent and sex-ridden U.S. “comics”.’ They were developing their own campaign, and were including in their sights an Australian nudist magazine.

The articles abounded, including another report later in the year from the Australian Council of School Organisations, but I think you get the drift.

On “red” literature

There was an earnestness about socialist literature at the time, one that led to what now seems like a narrow definition of what is “valid” literature. Joan Clarke, President Sydney Realist Writers, praised the Communist newspaper the Tribune (28 May), for “publishing so many of the winning poems and stories from the Literary Competitions run by the Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship” but offered a criticism of two winning stories in the spirit of encouraging development. The authors of the stories aren’t named, but their stories failed in her eyes because, while they were in the approved “realist” style, one failed to identify the “larger reality” surrounding the issue at hand while the other failed to extract “the essential dramatic truth” (as, she says, Frank Hardy does in Power Without Glory).

This was the year that the Australasian Book Society, about which I wrote last month, was formed. Frank Hardy, a member of the Communist Party of Australia, was quoted by Queensland’s Maryborough Chronicle (25 October) as saying its aim was to “foster the country’s cultural literature”, and that “the best authors were people who would concentrate upon human and down-to-earth stories” – and these, the Society believed, were realist stories.

Of course, this was the 1950s and there was much anxiety about Communist influences. On 5 September, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on a little furore regarding Commonwealth Literary Fund grants. Apparently during the parliamentary Estimates debate, Liberal MP, Mr. W. C. Wentworth, and Labor MP, Mr. S. M. Keon charged that too many of the fellowships granted by the Fund had gone to Communists. The paper presented the arguments for and against, referencing past and present Prime Ministers, and identifying several writers who were accused of being said Communists, such as Judah Waten, Frank Hardy, John Morrison, Frank Dalby Davison, and Marjorie Barnard. It was a he-said-she-said type article, with no resolution, but concluded with a reply by Labor MP, Mr Haylen. The article closes on:

“There are certainly no Communists in the literary fund, whose leader is the Prime Minister himself.”

Mr. Haylen said members of the advisory committee had done an honest job. There had not been one book published under sponsorship of the committee that had the faintest tinge of Communist propaganda.

Politics never changes!

That will do for my brief introduction to 1952, unless I decide to share a little more next Monday!

Sources

• 1952 in Australian Literature (Wikipedia)
• Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine, Annals of Australian literature, 2nd ed. OUP, 1992

Previous Monday Musings for the “years”: 1929, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1954, 1962 and 1970.

Do you plan to take part in the 1952 Club – and if so how?

Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This week, it is 1970, and it runs from today, 14th to 20th October. As for the last 6 clubs, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

Despite the excitement and idealism of the 1960s, 1970 Australia was strongly conservative, politically speaking, with some notorious conservative leaders (like Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Sir Henry Bolte, and Robert Askin) being premiers of their respective states. But, there were exceptions. The socially progressive Don Dunstan became premier of South Australia during the year, and, while our Prime Minister, John Gorton, was a conservative, he was recognised as a supporter of the arts.

The war in Vietnam was still underway but was becoming increasingly unpopular. This was the year Australia decided to go metric for weights and measures, and, more relevant to this post, it was also the year that Germaine Greer’s The female eunuch (which I read the following year) was published.

A brief 1970 literary recap

Books were of course published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1970:

• Jessica Anderson, The last man’s head
• Richard Beilby, No medals for Aphrodite
• Richard Butler, Sharkbait
• Diane Cilento, Hybrid
• Jon Cleary, Helga’s web
• J.M. (John Mill) Couper, The thundering good today
• Geoffrey Dutton, Tamara
• Catherine Gaskin, Fiona
• Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon
• Edward Lindall, A gathering of eagles
• William Marshall, The age of death
• Cynthia Nolan, A bride for St Thomas
• Barry Oakley, A salute to the Great Macarthy AND Let’s hear it for Prendergast
• Dal Stivens, A horse of air
• Colin Thiele, Labourers in the vineyard
• Ron Tullipan, Daylight robbery
• Barbara Vernon, Bellbird (based on the ABC television series)
• F.B. Vickers, No man is himself
• Patrick White, The vivisector

A few of these writers are still respected and read today; a few are known but read less frequently; while some have fallen out of public consciousness (to my knowledge, anyhow!)

Of those I didn’t know, a couple caught my attention for their subject matter. F.B. Vickers is one. Trove describes No man is himself as “A novel set in the north west of Western Australia concerning an officer in charge of Native Welfare who is sympathetic to Aborigines but involved in personal difficulties with the white community and his wife.” The other is Edward Lindall whose A gathering of eagles is also set in Western Australia, and has a First Nations character. Google Books describes it as a “thriller set in the remote barren wasteland of north western Australia; an outcast Aboriginal woman, Ilkara, assists the survivors of a murderous plot to outwit their would-be killers.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says Lindall was the pseudonym used by Edward Ernest Smith (1915-1978). He is also listed at a Classic Crime Fiction site.

Writers born this year include novelists Julia Leigh and Caroline Overington, and those who died include Herz Bergner (whose Between sea and sky I’ve reviewed), children’s fiction writer Nan Chauncy, Frank Dalby Davison (who was part of “the triumvirate” with Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw), and George Johnston.

There were not many literary awards, yet, though the state awards we know were getting close. And, several of the main awards made in 1970 weren’t to fiction. The ALS Gold Medal, for example, went to historian Manning Clark, and the Colin Roderick Award to Margaret Lawrie’s Myths and legends of Torres Strait.

There were some fiction awards, however, including of course, the Miles Franklin Award, which went to Dal Stevens’ A horse of air. The trade union-supported Mary Gilmore Award (my post on this award) was made to Keith Antill for Moon in the ground. It’s an Australian science fiction story set around the secretive Pine Gap near Alice Springs. The “$1,000 Rothman’s award for the best Australian novel of 1969” was awarded in 1970 to George Johnston‘s “semi-autobiography Clean straw for nothing” (from Trove).

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. This was a little trickier for 1970 because, due to copyright, many newspapers from this time have not yet been digitised. However, some papers, most notably The Canberra Times and Tribune, along with some regional ones, have made their content available to Trove. To them I am most grateful.

George Johnston

If one name loomed large in my my 1970 Trove research, it was George Johnston, and not just because he died in July. There were, of course, the obituaries, but, unrelated to his death, is his being used as a benchmark by commentators. For example, John Lleonart, reviewing Barry Oakley’s A salute to the Great McCarthy in The Canberra Times (8 August), has some “niggles” about the book but concludes that “Oakley has given us in McCarthy a classic figure of Australian mores to rank with George Johnston’s My brother Jack“.

Meanwhile, in discussions about the need for more Australian content on television, the television miniseries of My brother Jack was suggested as a benchmark for good Australian television content. Frances Kelly, writing in The Canberra Times (August 26), discusses the economic and artistic challenges to producing more “good” Australian content, and suggests one solution could be for Australia to

follow the BBC’s lead and begin work on adaptations. There are many fine Australian novels, which if we must still fly the flag, would bear dramatisation. My brother Jack was a shining example. 

The obituaries sum up Johnston’s career well – at least as it was seen at the time of his death. Maurice Dunlevy writes in The Canberra Times (23 July) that:

He had come back to his gumtree and kookaburra womb to find a new land, a people without a soul, and some uncomfortable ghosts from his past. “I would like to help Australians to find a new identity, a new soul, a new spirit”, he said on television. But to do so he had to sort out his own attitude to a country where he had left “the irrecapturable rapture of being young”. He was trying to do this in the third volume of the trilogy [A cartload of clay] during the past year.

Roger Milliss discusses Johnston at some depth in Tribune (12 August), concluding that

the important thing is the task that George Johnston recognised and set for himself — that of modernising Australian literature, of dragging it screaming into the 1970’s, of giving it a shape consistent with the world around it. That task must now be taken over by someone else — perhaps a writer who will emerge from the ranks of this new emerging generation.

These two obituaries make good reading if you are a Johnston fan.

Bookworm diggers

Meanwhile, over in South Vietnam, reported the Victor Harbour Times (May 29), Australian soldiers were well supplied with most amenities, but were running short of reading material. They had, says the report, “ample supplies of newspapers and regularly published magazines” but “novels, other books and paperbacks [were] in short supply”. Donations were being called for, and the Army would deliver them.

Australian classics

Publishers publishing classics is not new, but it’s always interesting to see “what” publishers see as those worth publishing at a particular time. In 1970, the Australian publisher Rigby published two Australian classics, Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery under arms and Marcus Clarke’s For the term of his natural life, in $1.25 paperback editions. The Canberra Times (May 30), described them as “quite massive little tomes as paperbacks go” but said they gave readers “the opportunity of owning at a reasonable price two books that will be read and reread as long as Australian literature survives”. I love the qualification, “as long as Australian literature survives”. I wonder what the reporter thought might happen? Anyhow, these are still recognised “classics” but more have been added to the Australian classics pantheon since then.

While not quite making classics status, two other authors from the past were mentioned in the year’s papers. One was Communist Party member, Jean Devanny, whose papers were donated by her daughter to the University of Townsville. (I included her in my post on women writers and politics in the 1930s.) The Tribune‘s report (January 28) says that Jean Devanny had had more than 20 books published by Australian and overseas publishers. One of her best known, Sugar heaven (1936), is a novel of class and politics on the Queensland cane fields, and was published in the Soviet Union in 1968.

The other author, Vance Palmer (1885-1959), came from the same era, and while not a Communist, was left-leaning politically. By 1970, he was seen as old-fashioned, but Professor Harry Heseltine thought he was due for a reassessment, and published his Vance Palmer in 1970. I will share more about this in another post.

Censorship and Book Bans

“Australia is still the country of interfering and sometimes ridiculous censorship, but there are signs of vitality on the cultural scene” (Paris newspaper Le Monde, The Canberra Times, December 21, 1970).

The last book banned in Australia was Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s complaint. It was banned in 1969, but after protestations by booksellers and publishers, and two trials in New South Wales which ended in hung juries, the ban was lifted in 1971. In 1970, however, it was all still happening. There’s way too much reporting for me to cover here, so I’m just to entertaining references to whet your appetite.

The University of New South Wales’ student newspaper, Tharunka (April 21), devoted a special literary supplement to the issue, asking writers to comment on censorship. One was Thomas Keneally, who commenced his piece by saying he felt “uneasy contributing to a forum on censorship because I have never achieved banmanship”. He is tongue-in-cheek about the reasons for the ban, which had to do with its being a “dirty” book. Keneally doesn’t see orgasm as “the key to the vision of man”, and argues that “there is very little of less value to the novelist than a person enjoying himself”. Fair point! Nonetheless, despite his “spinsterish views on eroticism in literature”, he thinks the ban is “an embarrassment”.

Maurice Dunlevy takes satire further in his article “The Portnoy tug-of-war” (The Canberra Times, September 5). Do read it … And, for a more recent history of the saga, check this article by Sian Cian in The Guardian (February 2, 2022). She quotes Des Cowley, of the State Library of Victoria:

“There’s been a lot written about the whole saga with Penguin and the legal case, but a little part of that story is that a small group of people got together and defended the right of literature to exist. It is such a beautiful case because, in a way, it ushers in the change Australia saw between the 1960s and 70s, with the progressive Whitlam government, and going from a literary backwater to a world stage.”

I’m not finished with 1970 … but this post is long enough. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have about the year, or about the stories I’ve shared here.

Sources

• 1970 in Australian Literature (Wikipedia)
• Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine, Annals of Australian literature, 2nd ed. OUP, 1992

Previous Monday Musings for the “years”: 1929, 1936, 1937, 1954, 1940 and 1962.

Do you plan to take part in the 1970 Club – and if so how?

Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This time the year is 1937, and it runs from today, 15th to 21st April. As I’ve been doing for a while now, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

If the 1960s, from which our last “year” came, were exciting for many of us, the late 1930s were very different, particularly for those living in Europe. Of the 1930s, in general, Wikipedia writes that “the decade was defined by a global economic and political crisis that culminated in the Second World War”. For my purposes here, that just about says it all. It certainly provides a flavour for what concerned the major writers of the period. Realist fiction was still in force, and in Australia writers like Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw, Frank Dalby Davison, Eleanor Dark, and Katharine Susannah Prichard were expressing their ideas about social and economic injustice, for example. Many were pacifists, and many supported or worked for the trade union movement. It was, generally, an unsettled time, here and abroad. (By way of contrast, the best-selling book in the USA in 1937 was, apparently, Gone with the wind! But this was also the time of John Steinbeck, et al!)

I found books published across all forms, but as my focus here is Australian fiction, I’m just sharing a selection of novels published in 1937:

• Marie Bjelke Petersen, Jungle night
• Martin Boyd, The picnic
• Eleanor Dark, Sun across the sky
• Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Younger sons
• M. Barnard Eldershaw, Plaque with laurel
• Arthur Gask, Night of the storm
• Ion Idriess, Forty fathoms deep
• Michael Innes, Hamlet, revenge!
• Seaforth Mackenzie, The young desire it
• Leonard Mann, A murder in Sydney
• Vance Palmer, Legend for Sanderson
• Katharine Susannah Prichard, Intimate strangers (Nathan’s review)
• Helen Simpson, Under Capricorn
• Mollie Skinner, Tucker sees India
• F.W. Thwaites, Rock end
• Arthur Upfield, Mr. Jelly’s business and Winds of evil

There were very few literary awards at the time, but the ALS Gold Medal went to Seaforth Mackenzie’s The young desire it. He is now among the least known of the authors listed above.

Writers born this year include novelist Colleen McCullough (died 2015) and political scientist and writer Don Aitkin (died 2022). I didn’t find many deaths, but novelist Catherine Martin (born, 1848) died this year.

Finally, also in 1937, the Commonwealth Literature Censorship Board replaced the Book Censorship Advisory Committee. It temporarily lifted the ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses – only to re-apply it again in 1941 after pressure from church groups.

The state of the art

As always, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian literature, fiction in particular. In addition to references to specific books and events, what I found overall was concern about the state of Australian literature, along with discussions about causes and remedies. This is similar to 1936, which I wrote about in my Monday Musings for the 1936 Club, so I’ll try to supplement – rather than repeat – what found then.

One issue discussed several times through the year concerned the importance of a good critical culture, so that’s my focus for this post. The Telegraph (14 April) took up this issue, arguing that the “leading articles” papers publish at the end of the week, versus the reviews published during the week, make a “considered contribution” to “strengthening … literary values among the numerous readers who look to the daily Press for guidance among a vast and ever-changing array of books”. The article comments on the importance not of comparing (“grading”) writers, but of offering

a consideration of their absolute quality as writers. The practice of relative appraisal too often leads to confusion where the authors considered are admittedly worthy of critical study, but derive their literary strength from different sources. The wise newspaper critic of fiction — it is with fiction that for the moment we are primarily concerned — is he who endeavours to establish the qualities which explain his attraction to, or repulsion from, a writer and then evaluates those qualities by the degree and consistency of his own sensibility.

That’s a nice, clear description of criticism – to establish one’s criteria and then evaluate them.

The Telegraph makes the point that Australia is capable of producing good literature. It believes that while achievement is uneven across the different forms, there is “no cause for pessimism about the future of Australian literature”. Indeed, the article says that:

A country that has produced, among living novelists*, Henry Handel Richardson, Vance Palmer, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Miles Franklin, Helen Simpson, the Barnard-Eldershaw combination, and Brian Penton is not deficient in generative power …

And adds that more writers could be added to this list.

Meanwhile, “Norbar” (Dr Norman Bartlett) in The West Australian (7 August) also discussed critical culture, observing that

One of the great disadvantages under which those in Australia who are genuinely interested in national literature suffer is the lack of guidance. Other national literatures have reliable historical and critical signposts. 

His point was that in Great Britain, for example, “reputable literary periodicals, with critical traditions”, help readers make choices. Critics, he admits, “are often wrong, and commercialism has tainted the trade of criticism, but there is a tradition of judgment”. No-one, he says, who is interested in Virginia Woolf would buy books by romance novelist Ethel M. Dell. He then discusses the work of two critics, the American expert on Australia, C. Hartley Grattan, and the Australian, H.M. Green. Speaking of Grattan, Norbar makes an important point about the role of critics:

To accept him as a guide is not to accept his judgments, but he serves the purpose that competent introductions to English literature serve, by erecting signposts in the wilderness of letters.

In other words, it’s not the “absolute” lists of names that are important but the guide they provide to the literary landscape – and, thus, presumably, encouragement for debate.

The final two articles I’ll refer to come from The Age. The first (18 September) is ascribed to R.G. (presumably, the academic and founding editor of Southerly, Robert Guy Howarth), and the second (2 October) is a response from poet and critic, Furnley Maurice (Frank Wilmot), who takes offence at R.G.’s analysis of the state of Australian literature.

R.G. commences by arguing that:

Contrary to the opinions of some critics, Australian literature is not a dependent off-shoot of English literature, but is a vital entity in process of achieving expression of its individuality.

He has very clear opinions about the development of a truly Australian literature, much of which we would agree with now. He talks about its needing to pursue its own course, to be released “from the curb of nineteenth century influences, which have so long entrammelled imagination and held it in subservience to traditional forms and ideas”. While he names some writing that he believes is truly Australian, such as that of Henry Lawson, he believes things have stagnated:

Lack of canonical criticism is responsible to an unfortunate degree for this stagnation, because contemporary Australian criticism stands equivocally in the midst of several schools of thought. A false standard of values has been created by the persistent determination of many commentators to include everything written since Wentworth’s “Australasia” in the category of literature.

Unfortunately, as well as taking criticism to task, he also finds failings in Australian writers! Some have attempted to capture Australian experience, he says, but have failed, and he gives his reasons. These Maurice does not like, so he fights back:

One fact to bear in mind is that the shortcomings of our criticism are as great as the shortcomings of the writing, if not greater. The chief fault of the criticism is one that “R.G.” appears to share — that of making sweeping general statements and giving no particulars. Surely our writers have not all “failed because they lacked technical equipment,” because they “chose banal themes,” or because they “did not possess the basic culture necessary!” Such statements would suggest that “R.G.” has the bad national habit of forming definite opinions before he assembles the facts.

Take that, R.G! He then goes on to identify what he sees as quality Australian literature, and includes* Price Warung, Vance Palmer, Brent of Bin Bin (Miles Franklin), Martin Mills (Martin Boyd), M Barnard Eldershaw, Eleanor Dark and Capel Boake. He challenges R.G. to provide evidence for his statements, and then discusses “the facts” as he sees them, identifying the “difficulties” and “practical conditions” under which Australian writers “must work”.  

He is pleased though that ‘”R.G.” supports a proper national principle in writing even if he has not much to say for the work done to date’. 

While I think Maurice over-reacted somewhat, as R.G. makes some good sense, both writers have something useful to add to the debate, and if you are interested, the articles make good reading. Meanwhile, I will close here – but may very well write a second post next Monday.

* Links are to my post/s on these writers.

Sources

• 1937 in Australian Literature (Wikipedia)
• Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine, Annals of Australian literature, 2nd ed. OUP, 1992

Previous Monday Musings for the “years”: 1929, 1936, 1954, 1940 and 1962.

Do you plan to take part in the 1937 Club – and if so how?