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Private Lives Revealed: Letters, Diaries, History

Private Papers and a Sense of Place / Peter Read

The poet John Clare grew up in Northamptonshire, England, in the early decades of the nineteenth century just as the centuries-old practice of enclosing pastoral paddocks for agricultural fields-the process known as the enclosure movement-was coming to an end. Northamptonshire was one of the last areas in England to suffer the process, and Clare hated what he saw: a vanishing population, abandoned pathways, a marooned church, the childhood places of affection overgrown and forgotten. Much of his poetry concerned this particular part of vanishing England. He wrote not about enclosures generally, but about what had gone from his exact and precise part of the world. So acutely aware was he of the particularities of his neighbourhood that he used an old-fashioned form of Northamptonshire regional dialect, and his laments, though strange, are among the most powerful of nineteenth century lost place poems.

Clare's poetry, then, was singular in several respects. This is a verse from his sad poem 'Remembrances':

When jumping time away on old cross berry way
And eating awes [haws] like sugar plumbs ere they had lost the may
And skipping like a leveret before the peep of day
On the rolly polly up and downs of pleasant swordy well
When in round oaks narrow lane as the south got black again
We sought the hollow ash that was shelter from the rain
With our pockes full of peas we had stolen from the grain
How delicious was the dinner time on such a showry day
O words are poor receipts for what time has stole away
The ancient pulpit trees and the play. [1]

There are at least three elements here worth noticing. The first is the references to places which were important to him but obscure to everyone outside the village. In this quotation, Cross Berry Way, Swordy Well and Round Oak Lane were real places known to everyone in Clare's village of Helpstone; the hollow ash and the pulpit trees were known, probably, to most of the village children-but to no one else. The second element is that intense personal involvement with the area, through activity and sensation: the 'we' in the poem (known well to the poet, unknown to outsiders) is implied throughout the verse. The third element is the related strong feeling of nostalgia for a place in which he was once vitally engaged and which is now gone. Nostalgia for a childhood spent in these now almost unknown locations is present in the whole verse but emerges clearly in the invocation of the last two lines.

I've analysed the verse to this extent because it exemplifies to me what makes some private papers so exciting. Clare's poetry was so eclectic, his language so personal, his personal involvement so touching, that I'm going to argue that the poetry was much more akin to a collection of private papers that we might find in a Northamptonshire library than to a poet who could have become-but didn't-one of the best-known poets of the nineteenth century. Instead, wrote the cultural historian John Barrell, 'insofar as Clare was successful in expressing his own sense of place, he was writing himself out of the main stream of European literature'.[2]

It would be silly to argue, of course, that these elements are never to be found in published papers or literature. Nevertheless, it is hard to think of a major Australian literary work which is so set in rooted emotion, or of such idiosyncratic style, regional language or obscure reference, that we fail to fully appreciate its meaning from the text alone. We don't need to know either the New England ranges or Buladelah intimately to appreciate the attachments of Judith Wright or Les Murray. Accomplished poets and novelists are fully aware of the need for their readers to be able to generalise from the emotions which they present about a described particular place to their own world view and life experiences.

What the non-professionals write is different. In many collected or uncollected private papers one finds the same strong emotion for places of attachment unmixed by the felt need to communicate beyond the poem-and the place-itself. No potential publisher approaches the private diary to blue-pencil local usages, abbreviations or nicknames. No editor scribbles 'Obscure-please explain' in the margin of letters when individuals and places appear and disappear in the narrative. Private papers are, by definition, private and that is their strength. Intense feeling for a birth site or a place where we grew up, or raised our own children, or lived part of our lives, is one of the most powerful but least known of Australian life springs. Private papers reveal such private emotions, and private emotions often reveal intense, ungeneralised concerns for particularities which hardly ever surface amongst the published works of professional writers. We're the poorer for it because we remain unaware of the attachments which so many Australians have felt, not for 'Australia', or 'the bush' or 'eucalypts', but for a quite particular half acre, or a suburban garden, or neighbourhood or a rural retreat.

The first element I mentioned was the interior language of obscure place and individual. There are many analogies to Clare's Helpstone in the private papers of Australians who lost their own loved places. Talbingo and Adaminaby were two towns inundated by the Snowy Mountains Scheme in the 1950s. Consider first two verses about one of the Snowy Mountains towns which were drowned for hydro-electricity generation in the 1950s. These are some lines from Jack Bridle's 'Farewell to Talbingo':

The stream where Hume and Hovell crossed about 1822
Is now more like the Lachlan or the Bogan at Dandaloo,
Old Brander's Flat, may she rest in peace, where we swam so long ago,
Janey's sands and boulders too, it hurts to see them go.
Where we tramped along the grassy bank for many a happy mile,
With friendly old Talbingo watching o'er us, all the while.
But those good old camping spots are gone, those green and shady places,
They're scooping on the Joonamar where once we held the races,
Now the jackass laughs no longer in those tall old river gums,
The black jay and the currawongs from the hill no longer come
For the water is creeping over where once were fields of clover
And on the flats the waving yellow corn
Now I hear a fiendish rattle where once were grazing cattle
Oh how I loved the land where I was born.[3]

The naming of such obscure but locally meaningful places is matched, in this unpublished poem called 'Adaminaby The Old Town', with a recital of the names of locally known families:

Then talk flowed thick from Joe and Dick
of Kennedys and Shanleys
And Yens as well. You almost know they'll have to go
The Mackay men, and the O'Neills will sell.
They'll all move out without a doubt
Wave goodbye to Stewart and Rossiter
to Norman Lett, he'll go I bet
When the old town's drowned and they transfer.
When once begun the flight took on
Like a Biblical transmigration
Russells, Chalkers, Crowes and Fletchers
They sought new homes, a farm, a station.[4]

The power of the verse and the intensity of emotion is not at first sight accessible to those unfamiliar with Janey's Sands, Brander's Flat and the Joonamar. Even the Talbingo boulders are lamented. Who could possibly know, unless they lived at Adaminaby, the significance of the inundation to all those families? Imagine a poet asking an editor, 'Can I mention the names of fourteen families and individuals in twelve lines?' Of course not, it breaks all the rules! But the author does so, and the result is an anguished cry of pain because it names real families. Perhaps the capacity to generalise from their agony to save a loved place was beyond the capacity of the villagers. Just as likely is that they saw no need to. Communicating the tragedy to themselves and possibly their family or friends was a sufficient aim in itself. We readers of such private collections of pinpointed emotions will be enriched if we can absorb, not set aside, their particularity.

The second element was the intimate involvement with a lost place through activity and sensation. Again there are very many analogies to draw upon-if we only knew where they were. Two which I have found are both by men, and about their working environments. The first was shown to me by a friend of the family, the second by the author. Both are unpublished and drawn from their private collections of writings over many years. The first concerns the destruction, in the late 1970s, of the famous briquette factory chimney of Yallourn, Victoria, a town which was itself demolished a few months later. At no point does the author use the word 'I', but his attachment to what, to outsiders, was an inconsequential or even unlovely object is apparent in every line.

Tortured from within by the heat of fire and from without by the changing elements, it uttered no sound of distress, neither did it falter. To the ferocity of these onslaughts it merely swayed, only to recover and stand straight and tall, to again defy its tormentors.
The torture from within creased.
men no longer toiled beneath it.
The surrounds slowly crumbled.
Its service to man was ended.
Its work well done, its task complete, it succumbed to the hands of its creators. Watched by officials, a multitude of spectators and some who cared, it fell to earth with the same quiet dignity with which it stood for many years. And with equally great humility returned to the dust from which it was made.
Saddened were the hearts of many men.[5]

'The first summer at Sherwood Park' was written by Granville Crawford, a high-country sheep farmer who was evicted from what became the Namadgi National Park in the Australian Capital Territory. Granville Crawford felt the eviction, and the loss of his beloved country, deeply. He kept a diary to which he entrusted his deepest feelings, and he wrote poems about what he called his beloved mountain home. He and Rae Crawford moved from the valley to a property called Sherwood Park, near Illabo, NSW, on country which, he says, he respects but cannot love. This is his poem, also unpublished, about the country he loved most and where he had spent his life. Notice the setting of precise time and place, the equivalent, I think, of Clare's phrases 'the sky got black again' and 'such a show'ry day'. The precise setting of place and time is as important as the narration itself.

Really I was due back in Canberra to chair a NSW farmers meeting, and there was a foul-up with the trucks. They didn't arrive until late. I was sitting out there on the front verandah and the wind was blowing across the stubble paddock with these great swirls of dust. It was dry and it was desolate and it was hot. And I thought to meself, 'My God, what have I done?'

He called this poem, written for himself alone, 'The first summer at Sherwood Park'.

As I stand out on this open plain
I think of the place from where I came
Where the everlasting daisies grow,
That's where I would like to go.
Where the alpine ash grows straight and tall
And the lyrebird to his mate he calls,
And the magpie with his joyous singing
Sets the mountain ranges ringing,
For the mountain air is so pure and clear
That every bird call one can hear.
Now the red dust blows about my feet
And my body wilts from this dreadful heat.
What would I give once more to roam
In my beloved mountain home.,sup>[6]

It is difficult to believe that the official and public pronouncements about the evictions from the Orroral Valley were that the farmers didn't care about, and were glad to leave, the places they had worked for so long. [7]

The third element of Clare's verse was the aching nostalgia for the lost past rooted in a particular place. Words indeed, as Clare puts it, are poor receipts for what time has stolen away. These attachments are revealed in the private collections of many Australians, ungeneralised, unrhetorical and unrehearsed, communicating their passion to the reader who looks at the photos they've taken, the oils and watercolours they've painted, the speeches, the submissions, the letters and the poems. 'The Turpentine Tree' is a poem which came out of the imminent destruction of the loved neighbourhood of half a dozen streets in Beecroft in Sydney's north-west, a suburb once threatened, and now destroyed by the construction of the M2 Motorway. The 'ancient pulpit trees and the play' of Clare's childhood have become in this poem, the native forest of Sydney and the act of raising a family.

The Turpentine Tree
'How long ago did you come here?'
We look at each other
Seeing the young couple we were.
'Well, Jacqui was a baby in a basket
She's thirty now'.
Thirty!
Thirty five years it must be
Since we came
to picnic on the Block
Our Block of Land
in the Bush
Under the Turpentine Tree.
The house smelled new, Scented
The Turpentine Tree
friend of birds
Laden with blossom
Welcomed us.
'And the neighbours' Houses?'
One by one they came to build
in the Old Orchard
-that's why it's called Orchard Road.
First the Percevals,
Then the Tanners, the Wassons,
the Austins and the Johnsons
-and the McKelvies
All our kids grew up together.
We all shared what we had
A pool, a barbecue, a swing set
a trampoline.
The children explored the bush
Climbed trees
Played in the creek.
The blossoms of the Turpentine Tree
fell on the pool
marking the summers.
'When did you hear about the Road?'
It seemed nothing at the time, in '66
One day, a County Road would be built
On the Golf Course, in a cutting
behind the trees,
They said.
'You'll hardly know it's there,
If indeed it is ever built',
They said.
The years flew by
Our children grew and flourished.
Now the road would be a Freeway
they said.
We want your land.
We'll demolish your houses.
But don't worry
We'll give you a Fair Price
After all,
You've always known
there would be a Road.
'Did you fight the proposal?'
We fought against it
for years
We even won
a government enquiry
To no avail
The Freeway will be built
they said.
'And the bulldozers are here, I see?'
The neighbours went
One by one.
The Johnson's house next door:
One day, men on the roof
throwing down tiles
Smashing them in the garden.
Curtains still at the windows
Carpet on the floor
All ruined.
Bulldozer in the living room
Pushing down walls
Ken loved his pool
Cleaned it every day.
The bulldozer dug it up in an afternoon.
'And you? You're going too?'
Ours was the first home built;
We watched
Our neighbours' houses grow,
One by one.
Now we watch the bulldozers
demolish them
One by one.
Yes, we will go
Far away
And never come back
To see what has been done
To our house, our home
And the Turpentine Tree.
The Turpentine Tree
Friend of birds
Laden with blossom.
Knew the Aborigines
And the Settlers
The Soldiers and the Farmers
The young couple
Who built a house
And raised a family.
Knew them all.
Sacred tree, Tree of Mystery and Life
Dance by moonlight
Stars in your branches
Dance on my friend
Dance On.[8]

Julia Garnett wrote this expression of emotions just before the destruction of her neighbourhood. All of the elements we've noticed about the private nature of the private collection are here-the fierce particularity, the named site, family and individual, the intensely personal memory, the microscopic history, the individual's participation in locally crucial events. I hope the poem will reach the anthologies for its literary qualities, but it was not the poet's intention.

Locality, in the last years of the twentieth century, is no longer a place-in-itself, but is mediated by other places; local knowledges are part of larger areas, and what is special and particular is forgotten, except to the residents of those places, by surveyors, cartographers, and planners of freeways and supermarkets. The private collections, steeped not in parochialism but in particularity, invite reflections on the tight sense of belonging to a place and a time and a community which we all once had, many of us still have, and which all of us, should we desire it, could have again.

Notes

  1. John Clare, 'Remembrances' in Merryn and Raymond Williams (eds), John Clare Selected Poetry and Prose. London: Methuen, 1986, p. 148; ll. 21ñ30.
  2. John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ñ1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972, p. 188.
  3. 'Jack Bridle's Farwell to Talbingo', c. 1957.
  4. Marge Mackay, 'Adaminaby, The Old Town', read to the author by Ms Mackay.
  5. George Kimberley, reproduced by permission of Ms Erna Jessup.
  6. From the diary of Granville Crawford, read by Mr Crawford to the author.
  7. For example, Margules and Deverson Pty Ltd, Proposed Gudgenby National Park Land Use Study. Canberra: Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service, 1976, pp. 46, 48.
  8. Julia Garnett, February 1995, sent by Mrs Garnett to the author, and reproduced with permission.

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