Staff Papers
Windows onto Australia: Steps in Constructing The Oxford Book of Australian Letters
Paper written by John Thompson which was presented at the NLA's 'Private Lives Revealed: Letters Diaries History' seminar.
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In 1995, following the publication in Britain of The Oxford Book of Letters edited by Frank and Anita Kermode, [1] Brenda Niall and I were approached by Peter Rose-commissioning editor of Oxford University Press (Australia)-to see if we might be interested in editing an Australian book of letters to be published under the probable title The Oxford Book of Australian Letters. Peter Rose is one of Australia's most urbane and sophisticated publishers: a noted poet, an enthusiast of the novels of Henry James and a man of wide interests in the world of literature both in the specific context of Australia and internationally. I mention this to indicate that we have a very valuable resource in our publisher who brings an acute and well-informed judgement to the material we are working with.
The idea for an Oxford anthology of Australian letters came from Peter Rose, not in any sense merely to imitate the Kermodes' confident excursion into the complex and challenging world of English language letter writing (their volume includes Irish, American, South African and Australian letters), but rather, through letters, to construct what might be identified in Oxford's formal invitation, as a 'kind of personal, oblique history' of Australia. In an otherwise highly anthologised country like Australia, it was suggested that a major survey and selection of letters would fill a surprising and auspicious gap. Although numerous collections of letters of individual letter writers have been published in Australia-the most celebrated of them David Marr's 1994 edition of the selected letters of Patrick White, followed recently by Janine Burke's sensitive editing of the spirited correspondence of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed [2]-no attempt has been made to prepare a wide-ranging historical anthology on the scale of this projected Oxford University Press publication. [3]
And so, this invitation. Encouraged by my friend and colleague, the
Melbourne historian Dr Ian Britain, Peter Rose approached me to see if I might
embark on a challenging adventure, one which would build on my years as an
appraiser and collector of manuscripts first in the State Library of Victoria
and later in the National Library of Australia. My companion on this journey of
discovery is Dr Brenda Niall-the biographer of the novelist Martin Boyd and
most recently of the colonial pioneer Georgiana McCrae. Brenda Niall's
biographies are graceful and deeply perceptive works of scholarship which have
relied on a thorough and critical reading of large quantities of letters. Many
years ago now, Brenda Niall was one of my teachers at Monash University where
her incisive, judicious and penetrating critical sensibility marked her as a
scholar of careful discernment, discrimination and literary connoisseurship.
Her sustained researches as a biographer have in recent years taken her deep
into some previously little-explored areas of nineteenth and twentieth century
history where she has performed with great style. She is an impressive
collaborator.
Remembering that this Oxford anthology has been commissioned by an enterprising Australian publisher, what is our brief? More importantly, how are we approaching the task of interpreting and bringing this project to fruition to meet a publication date of late 1998? Although no prescription has been given, Peter Rose has sketched a broad framework: 'historical in scope and representative of the Australian epistolary genre and temperament'. His suggestion is that different kinds of correspondents and correspondences would be included-not just literary ones. Men and women, public figures, business types, scientists, artists, writers, journalists, the sporting world, explorers, eccentrics, the hoax letter, the testimonial and the public letter-all these and more should be represented. Regional balance, although important, should not lead to the obligation to include any letter for purely political or geographic reasons. The aim is to look for sharp, characterful, ironic, profound and idiosyncratic letters. Brenda Niall and I see this to be a stress essentially on the letter as a particular form and medium of human communication which offers a reflection on and insight into the most intimate and private musings of one person to another, and also offers a picture-unvarnished and perhaps unintended-of the world in which those correspondents lived. As one of our prospective writers noted in one of a long exchange of letters written between lovers separated by 12 000 miles and the gulf of the 1914ñ18 war: 'If all our letters were to be read through on end, alternately yours and mine, what a lot they would tell that we had not in mind to tell at the time of writing. They would tell of all sorts of changes and fluctuations and gradual evolvings that we knew nothing of at the time'. [4]
Oxford has guided us to eschew perfunctory accounts of political life but rather to look for elements of reportage, those immediate, eye-witness accounts of historical interest of the kind brilliantly brought to life by Audrey Tennyson at the inauguration of the first Commonwealth Parliament and the succeeding celebrations: 'the Duke read the proclamation extremely well worded, & everybody was surprised at the strong voice coming from such a little man. There was profound silence, all the thousands of people being, I think, at least I felt so, awed at this tremendously important moment for Australasia.' This note of solemnity and high formality is juxtaposed with other detail, and a humour perhaps not altogether intended: 'the poor bandmaster of the Westralians tumbled down dead just as he was marching up to the saluting point but he was carried off the ground so quickly that scarcely anyone saw it'. [5] Another, rather more tangential, insight into Australia's federal history is provided in Patrick McMahon Glynn's letter of proposal of marriage. One of ten South Australian delegates to the Federal Convention of 1897 (which produced the Australian Constitution) and later a Commonwealth Attorney-General, Glynn enlivened proceedings at the second session in Sydney by suddenly risking what he called 'the inevitable question'-his proposal of marriage to Abigail Dynon of Melbourne. Writing from the floor of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly and with the colonial Premier William Lyne 'within a yard of me, pouring on the too-thinly protected top of my head, a niagra of figures', Glynn put the question. 'The Sum of it all is this, if you consent to marry me Miss Dynon, you will, for the sacrifice deserve Heaven, and probably save me from somewhere else. May I ask you to do so'. [6]
As editors, we seek letters which are intimate, philosophical, confidential. Many will concern relationships, friendships, feuds or scandals. Generally, the great majority of correspondents will be well known, but we plan that our selection should also include unknown but representative voices so that we may present, through letters, a picture of Australia as inclusive as possible. Our intention is to strike a balance between famous correspondents and those who represent what is sometimes called 'the ordinary Australian' but whose experience can speak for a whole generation. We have in mind, for example, the letters written by pioneer women and men during the nineteenth century which speak of the separation from 'Home' and loved ones and which grapple with the challenge of adapting to a new country. Or the experience of indigenous Australians both during the period of major cultural dislocation and intimidation and more recently when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are asserting claims for recognition and independence of action. Two examples: the voice of Minnie Koran, forcibly separated from her legal husband in 1902 to marry at the direction of the Queensland Protector of Aborigines: 'Mr Merton wants me to get Married to a Black boy at Woodford Mission Station; but I wont get Married to nobody as I am Married already to you. Everyone in Brisbane told me to get married to no one but my own man'. [7] And the printmaker Banduk Marika writing in 1991 about the commissioning of the non-Aboriginal architect Glenn Murcutt to construct what is now called the Marika Alderton House at Yirrkala in Arnhem Land: 'Sadly we have been greatly disrupted, socially and psychologically by various experiments in Aboriginal Housing often undertaken by people who had no prior knowledge of our needs. It is my personal struggle to create a design whereby myself and my family can live in a healthy and dignified way and so express our true worth as Australian citizens'. [8]
The voices of women will be important in this anthology since in the intimate sphere of the private and the personal, letter writing was a vital means of both communication and self-expression in the lives of Australian women. [9] Such letters, it is now widely recognised, offer one of the best windows onto the nature and character of Australian history and society as it emerged and took shape from the brutish origins of the penal settlements at Port Jackson and Port Arthur to, eventually, a more civilised and sensitive place reflected and represented in the rich and complex conversation and discourse which flourished between women such as Katharine Susannah Prichard, Miles Franklin, Jean Devanny and Marjorie Barnard. Their letters, as Carole Ferrier has pointed out, shrank the distance which separated women of like mind in Australia and provided an important means of expressing ideas and the offer and acceptance of trust, reassurance and encouragement. Ferrier has highlighted the significance of letter writing in uniting this circle of literary friends, noting in the words of Miles Franklin in a letter to Katharine Susannah Prichard, 23 September 1952: 'The quality of your rarely-prized letter keeps me alive'. [10]
It is our plan to give a broad interpretation to the term 'Australian' so that when we talk of an Australian letter we might include letters of important Australian association and subject matter of the kind written by astute, or sometimes clumsy and culturally insensitive, visitors or temporary residents. Charles Darwin who reported from Tasmania in 1836: 'You would be astonished to know what a pleasant society there is here. I dined yesterday at the Attorneys General, where, amongst a small party of his most intimate friends he got up an excellent concert of first rate Italian Music. The house, large, beautifully furnished; dinner most elegant with respectable! (although of course all Convicts) Servants. A short time before they gave a fancy Ball, at which 113 people were present.-At another very pleasant house, where I dined, they told me, at their last dancing party, 96 was the number-Is not this astonishing in so remote a part of the world?' [11] In 1864, the Shakespearian actor Ellen Kean, travelling on tour in Australia with her husband, wrote of the ignorance and lack of sophistication of their local audiences: 'They come and see us act-but they know nothing about it. They say the arts are in their infancy here. This is a gross exaggeration-they are not yet born.' [12]
In 1898, the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb toured the Australasian colonies, critically appraising and analysing all they saw. Their several letters from Australia and New Zealand provide a valuable picture of Australia as a kind of social laboratory. But inevitably, with the Webbs' sense of cultural superiority, their letters take on a tone which, even at a distance, can be offensive-if sometimes the observations strike uncomfortably near the truth. At the Melbourne Cup, Beatrice surveyed the crowd and noted that: 'All the rich women in Australia put on their best dresses for the Cup: I never saw an uglier crowd-a predominance of cheap silks and satins ... elaborately made: figures like those of town-bred servants and no notion of how to walk or hold themselves'. [13]
Another and strikingly different picture is given in 1922 by D.H. Lawrence who wrote of Australia as 'a weird place. In the established sense, it is socially nil. Happy-go-lucky, don't-you-bother-we're-in-Australia. But there also seems to be no inside life of any sort: just a long lapse and drift ... Australia would be a lovely country to lose the world in.' And again, in a second letter: 'One can be so absolutely indifferent to the world one has previously been condemned to. It is rather like falling out of the picture and finding oneself on the floor, with all the gods and men left behind ... If I stayed here six months I should have to stay forever-there is nothing so remote and far off and utterly indifferent to our European world ... We don't know a single soul ... not a soul comes to the house. And I can't tell you how I like it. I could live like that forever'. [14]
But contrast these views with the sensibilities of the native-born Australians who, while recognising the limitations posed by distance and isolation and a small population, nevertheless embraced what might be called the essential idea of Australia and were prepared to anticipate the realisation of its potential. Percy Grainger in 1908: 'The future of Australia may not lightly be dismissed by judgement upon her money earning folk of today. The scenery, the animal life, the air, and so on of the country is wondrously tender, pure, high souled, aloof, delicate, refined. Sooner or later its darling influences must tell, & we will get weird lovable ravishing highly unworldly human showings.' [15]
With the work of selection still proceeding-we are at this stage barely a third of the way in identifying what is expected to be 300 or more letters for a book of possibly 400 pages-we have decided not to impose a thematic arrangement on our material but instead to work within a chronological framework. Our span will be the period from the late eighteenth century until the present but within this chronology we expect to reflect and illustrate themes and aspects of the history of this country: penal settlement, the pioneer and settler experience, exploration, race relations, bushranging, politics, nationalism and federation, feminism, the arts and sciences, war, New Guinea and Antarctica, expatriotism and so on. While providing a focus or a series of pegs, as editors we believe these themes should be inferred by readers rather than made explicit by us since we see this anthology, at its core, to be a demonstration of an on-going conversation between Australians about Australian ideas as well as personal concerns and issues as these have ebbed and flowed over two centuries. Some letters will interweave public and private concerns; others will reveal the private inner life of writer and recipient.
It is this concern with Australia itself that will in one sense clearly demarcate the ground between the Kermodes' anthology and ours. Rather than producing merely an Australian version of The Oxford Book of Letters, our aim is to present an emphatically Australian book. Its first and essential purpose will be to offer an exploration, a sampling, of the range and variety of Australian letter writing as it has been practised and enjoyed since the time of the First Settlement or the decade or so before this. On another level-and we think it will be a bonus for the reader-we hope that our choice of letters might provide an opportunity for our audience to infer and observe details and aspects of the evolution of Australia from a colonial outpost to nascent republic. The Kermodes' selection of 328 letters ranged over five centuries but in no sense, other than incidentally, do these letters contend with England as a subject. Of course, a profound sense of 'Englishness' pervades the volume-that grand, all-embracing certainty and confidence which comes when a country and a people are seen by those who inhabit that world to be at the centre. The rest is periphery. Our task, in part, is to give voice and expression to Australia as it has been written about, responded to, embraced, rejected, despised and celebrated by several generations of letter writers.
This brings me to the problems which Brenda Niall and I face as anthologists in making a selection of letters which is coherent and in some sense representative of the lives and experiences of Australians. The number 300 is daunting in two ways. Depending how it is viewed, it represents a large number of letters when it is remembered that each letter must meet certain standards of tone, character, meaning, content, style and effectiveness and must have a certain shape and shapeliness as a demonstration of the ways in which the form of the letter has been exploited by each writer. But when one thinks of the millions of letters which have been written and the vast numbers of them which are held in libraries and archives as well as in private collections, the task of surveying and reading at least some thousands of letters in order to distil a selection of a mere 300 is immense. And of course we cannot survey and read all the letters which are held in public collections. In the end, we must follow our instinct, assisted by the reading of biographies and other works of scholarship, testing hunches, following leads and responding to the ideas and suggestions of others. It must be said that the choices we finally make will be ours and will represent and reflect the taste and sensibility, the wit and the imagination, of two people at a particular point of time. The choices we make will not and could not please everybody but that is to recognise that others, faced with the same task, would come up with a different set of choices no less valid and no less worthy than ours.
Perhaps a greater problem is to choose for each correspondent, and perhaps from very large collections of letters, a single telling example or, at best, say two or three letters where a writer is known to be an especially brilliant correspondent. We are conscious of Vita Sackville-West's apprehension:
We should ourselves be sorry to think that posterity should judge us by a patchwork of our letters, preserved by chance, independent of their context, written perhaps in a fit of despondency or irritation, divorced, above all, from the myriad little strands which colour and compose our peculiar existence, and which in their multiplicity, their variety and their triviality, are vivid to ourselves alone, uncommunicable, even to those nearest us, sharing our daily life. [16]
So many letters depend, for a later reading and comprehension, on a detailed knowledge of context and historical circumstance. As editors, we will of course provide brief details of explanation but, as a rough rule of thumb, we have agreed that if a letter requires too much explaining to make its meaning comprehensible, then in the anthologist's sense it fails as a letter. For an anthology of letters, the best test is how far the letter stands alone and if it may be read not as an expression of the narrow and particular, but as a statement which transcends time and place and speaks in some comprehensive way about human experience. And even where the purpose and occasion of the letter is specific to a precise time and place in history, it may have a resonance and force which will speak readily both to our own generation and to those who follow us.
In ending, I would like to give you a letter-a single example-which makes the point about transcendence, and asserts the form and distinction of the letter as an instrument of communication. In October 1919, Edmund Barton, then a Judge of the High Court of Australia but who served as Australia's first Prime Minister, wrote to Pattie Deakin expressing his sympathy and sense of loss on the death of Alfred Deakin. It is, we think, a superb letter, a model certainly of the condolence form, written with what now seems to be an old-fashioned grace and courtesy. And yet, for its time, it is remarkably brief. In its larger dimension, it is a letter which evokes and symbolises the great collaboration of Barton and Deakin and their colleagues in the creation of the Australian federation. In its particulars, it is an intensely focused and moving expression of personal regard, love and friendship of a kind surely unusual in Australian public life. Addressed to 'My dear Mrs Deakin' and dated 8 October 1919, the letter runs thus:
However you may in later days have seen that the day of parting was not far off, such a parting is a harsh severance in the case of those who love, and in your case no one can realise a tithe of its meaning or its effects. But I trust that you will have the strength to bear the burden which your daughters will do their best to make less heavy.
I always looked on Alfred Deakin with a reverent admiration, until better knowledge of him turned admiration into love without effacing in the least my estimate of his greatness of heart and mind. At first his purity & nobility filled my mental vision, but later they shared the field with the tenderness which intimacy made so manifest. And thus his image was before me to the last & still is before me, like the effigy of some noble knight of the days of chivalry.
One wonders whether the present times are, or the times to come will be, such as to give soil for the growth of chivalry among men. The condition we see is such as to extirpate that holy plant.
All my sympathy. Say if there is anything I can do 'which may to thee do ease and grace to me.' My best regards to your daughters as well as to yourself.
Yours most sincerely
Edmund Barton[17]
Notes
- Frank Kermode and Anita Kermode (eds), The Oxford Book of Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
- David Marr (ed.), Patrick White: Letters (Sydney: Random House, 1994); Janine Burke (ed.), Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1995).
- The State Library of New South Wales and the National Library of Australia have each published an anthology of letters selected from the manuscript collections of those two libraries. See Warwick Hirst (compiler), My dear, dear Betsy: A Treasury of Australian Letters (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales and Hale & Iremonger, 1993) and Elizabeth Riddell (ed.), With Fond Regards: Private Lives through Letters (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1995).
- Olaf Stapeldon to Agnes Miller, 4 July 1916, in Robert Crossley (ed.), Letters Across the World: The Love Letters of Olaf Stapledon and Agnes Miller 1913ñ1919. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1989, p. xx.
- Audrey, Lady Tennyson to Zacyntha Boyle, 18 May 1901, in Alexandra Hasluck (ed.), Audrey Tennyson's Vice-Regal Days: The Australian Letters of Audrey Lady Tennyson to her Mother Zacyntha Boyle 1899ñ1903. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1978, p. 157.
- Patrick McMahon Glynn to Abigail Dynon, 7 September 1897, in Gerald Glynn O'Collins (ed.), Patrick McMahon Glynn: Letters to his Family (1874ñ1927). Melbourne: Polding Press, 1974, pp. 169ñ170. The original letter of proposal is now in the collection of the National Library of Australia, the gift in 1996, on behalf of the Glynn family, of Professor Maev O'Collins and her sister Mrs J.S. Peters, grand daughters of Patrick McMahon Glynn and Abigail Dynon.
- Minnie Captain (Koran) to Tabby Koran, 9 July 1902. Queensland State Archives, COL/14402/12740.
- Banduk Marika to Hon. M.H. Ortmann, 5 December 1991. Copy of letter in private possession.
- See the discussion by Patricia Clarke and Dale Spender of the social and cultural importance of letter writing by women in Australia in Life Lines: Australian Women's Letters and Diaries, 1788ñ1840. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992, pp. xxñxxxi.
- Carole Ferrier (ed.), As Good as a Yarn with You: Letters between Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); see discussion pp. 1ñ24.
- Charles Darwin to Catherine Darwin, 14 February 1836, in Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith (eds), The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, Vol. 1: 1821ñ1836, pp. 489ñ491.
- Ellen Kean to Mrs Horace Twiss, 1 February 1864, in J.M.D. Hardwick (ed.), Emigrant in Motley. London: Rockliff, 1954, p. 116.
- Beatrice Webb to Mary Playne, 7 November 1898, in Norman MacKenzie (ed.), The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, Vol. 2, p. 92.
- D.H. Lawrence to Catherine Carswell, 22 June 1922, and D.H. Lawrence to S.S. Koteliansky, 9 July 1922, in Harry T. Moore (ed.), The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. London: Heinemann, 1962, Vol. 2, pp. 710ñ713.
- Percy Grainger to Rose Grainger, 26 October 1908, in Kay Dreyfus (ed.), The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger 1901ñ14. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985, p. 238.
- Quoted in Ferrier, op. cit., p. 23.
- Sir Edmund Barton to Pattie Deakin, 8 October 1919, in Papers of Alfred Deakin, National Library of Australia, MS 1540/23/27.
