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NLA News - home September 2000 Volume X Number 12
My Last Great Work (HAH, HAH!)
The Juvenilia of Australian Writers


Kathryn Favelle gives us a glimpse into the childhood of some well-known Australian writers


Took 2 crews out today. Had a mild flirtation with a Ryson girl in the tram. Have written a short story about a cat. If anybody thinks its any good I might try to get it in the Mag.

Alan McCrae Moorehead was just 16 years old when he wrote this entry in his diary on 26 February 1926. In his last year of school at Scotch College, Melbourne, Moorehead filled the small red book, with its gold embossed school crest on the cover, with the details of his life—cricket matches, scout camps, progress in school exams, comments on the weather, the girls he met, and the books he read. Today, the diary offers the reader an insight into a world of boys' schools, rowing teams and mateship.

Moorehead's schoolboy diary is just one of many manuscripts held by the National Library of Australia that enable us to glimpse the early lives of men and women whose achievements have gained national recognition. The Library began collecting manuscripts in the early days of its existence and, by December 1999, the collection amounted to almost 10 000 accessions or 11 000 metres of shelving. Included on those shelves are the papers of politicians William Morris Hughes and Sir Robert Menzies, naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, social worker Daisy Bates, musicians Don Banks and Larry Sitsky, performers Robyn Archer and Sir Robert Helpmann, feminist Jessie Street and sporting figures like Sir Donald Bradman.

The Manuscript Collection, however, is not limited to the important events in the lives of important people. Amongst the papers of one of our most famous writers, for instance, is Ethel Turner's school notebook, where doodles lie between notes on '12 Caesars' and the 'Life of Virgil'.

'When we seek papers,' explains Valerie Helson, the Library's Assistant Manuscript Librarian, 'we do ask for a whole range of papers, from the earliest to the latest times. We're trying to document the whole person and the formative years are important clues to what they create later on.'

This is particularly the case in relation to Australia's writers. The National Library's Manuscript Collection includes many examples of writers' juvenilia. Some, such as the papers of poet Judith Wright and playwright David Williamson, remain tantalisingly closed to the general reader. This is because the National Library guarantees the rights of owners of personal papers to recommend the conditions under which the material is made available to readers. Others, such as the papers of Alan McCrae Moorehead, who had written some 17 books by the time of his death in 1983 (including Montgomery (1946), Darwin and the Beagle (1969) and The White Nile (1960)), can be used for general reference.

Moorehead wasn't the only budding young writer to document his life in a diary. On Wednesday, 3 October 1934, an 11-year-old girl 'with sore throat' began a diary 'while on holiday at Perth'. Dorothy Hewett, who would grow up to become a respected poet and the first Australian woman playwright to win widespread recognition and see extensive production of her plays, grew up on an isolated wheat farm in Western Australia. A holiday in the city, which included seeing 'the royal barge, like a huge grey, or silver, moth, come gliding' into Fremantle harbour, was an exciting event in a relatively isolated childhood. But Hewett's first diary entry, dated Sunday, September 30 1934, begins with her recollection of the trip to Perth.

Set off from home. It was a nice day, and before we left something rather queer happened. Nan came out, and she seemed to have been crying. As we set off, I looked back, and Nan leaning on the gate seemed to be praying. We had dinner at the old house, and went a new way through Rollystone. It was very beautiful. When you were driving along you could look far below, down in the valley, and paddocks and trees stretched away. But it was too beautiful to describe. I think I will have a house there, called Roseburn, when I grow up.

This affection for the landscape she grew up in permeates Hewett's subsequent writing, particularly her popular music theatre piece The Man from Mukinupin (1979), written for the 150th anniversary of the founding of Western Australia, and the recently completed but as yet unproduced Jarrabin Trilogy.

Judging from Hewett's papers, she is something of a hoarder. As well as her diary, there is a book of poems, now without its cover, written when she was 11 and which was recycled later as a recipe book, including recipes for such treats as plum pudding, queen cakes, apple and currant suet roll, and pancake batter. And there is also an exercise book of school history essays (all illustrated) on topics including 'The Rule of the Tudors' and 'The Settlement of Australia'.

Hoarders, such as Hewett, are like diamonds in the manuscript-collecting crown. Today's smaller houses mean we are more ruthless about what we store, often discarding our childhood writings. Valerie Helson admits that 'it's a real bonus' when juvenilia is discovered. 'Not many people keep these things these days.'

Another apparent hoarder is the writer and teacher, Mem Fox. Fox, author of the acclaimed children's books Possum Magic (1983) and Koala Lou (1988), was born in Melbourne in 1946 but spent the first 19 years of her life living on Hope Fountain mission near Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia. Amongst her extremely well-organised and detailed papers are poems, described by Fox in 1997 as 'cheap verse by me, and mostly ghastly!' In fact, they are far from 'ghastly' revealing her humour and love of rhyme, qualities that have made her so popular with children and parents alike.

Fox's earliest extant piece of writing is a rollicking poem composed, she says, 'during my mock 'O' Level chemistry exam in 1962'. Written in a very neat hand, with only one correction, 'Thoughts Which Passed Through a Dense Mind in the Mock Cambridge Chemistry Exam' humorously details Fox's anticipated failure, commenting

It's very plain but quite absurd—
I have the brain of a little bird.

But even at the early age of 16 and contemplating academic disaster, Fox identifies herself as a poet, although admittedly she sees herself as one with a very short life:

Thank you for reading this far—

This is my last great work

            (HAH, HAH!)

Above the place where I will lie

Publish this on the gravestone

            when I die:

'Here lies a poet of very little brain

To whom all school work was a

           terrible pain.

Finding a chem. exam too much

She took many drugs and pills

           and such.

On Tuesday last they found her dead,

Cold and still beside her bed.

Her parents and friends mourned loud and long,

But her teachers all burst out in song.'

Then you may, if you like, add: R.I.P.

But that will be ASSURED with no

            chemistry!

Of course, Hewett and Fox are not the only writers to try their hand at poetry at an early age. In 1911, another would-be poet, one 10-year-old Kenneth Schloesser [sic], was also playing word games.

Today Schloesser is better known to us as the poet Kenneth Slessor, and there would be few Australians who went through high school in the 1960s who wouldn't be familiar with what is perhaps his greatest poem, 'Five Bells', a meditation on a drowned friend. But located amongst Slessor's papers—which include 'Where Is It?' books filled with pencilled lists of Christian names, aeroplanes, animals and cheeses—is a little worn black book. In this book, which like Hewett's diary was later recycled, is an unattributed poem written in pencil:

A is an actress who rolls at a rink
Annoyed to be recognised I don't think

B is a butterfly Oh what
grace I love to see them
about the place

C looks best in a
hat thats shady
C is a back-row chorous [sic] lady

D is a Debutante quite
alive to the number of beans
that total five

If this is, indeed, the early work of Kenneth Slessor, it is interesting to contemplate how the poet travelled from the obvious rhymes of 'A is an actress ...' to the fluent blank verse of Five Bells:

Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the
               Harbour floats
In air, the Cross hangs upside down
               in water

Perhaps the most beautiful juvenilia, however, belongs to Lady Casey. Born Ethel Marian Sumner Ryan (but known as Maie) in March 1892, Lady Casey is perhaps best known as a painter, illustrator and aviator, as well as being the wife of former Governor-General, Lord Richard Gardiner Casey. Her parents, however, probably thought their daughter was born to write and, indeed, she was, later publishing three autobiographical accounts, a biography of Dame Nellie Melba and two volumes of verse.

Held within Lady Casey's papers is a collection of old manuscripts, now brittle with age. One, barely legible, was written by Lady Casey when she was 'about 11'. Others include 'Lady Christian's Rock'; 'The Princess's Valentine'; a poem, 'The Pearl Maiden'; as well as scripts of plays and scenes. But Lady Casey didn't stop at drafting her stories, poems and plays. Some, such as 'The Plot That Failed', she fashioned into neat little booklets, illustrating them herself. She also created, in the tradition of the Bronte and Stephen children, her own newspapers. 'The Earimil Journal', of which there is only one issue in the collection, includes the serial 'The Legend of the Thimble', sporting notes, an illustrated 'Animal Page' and the news that

The blackberries are ripe now!!!!!!!!
The mulberries are being eaten by
starlings. The apples are being eaten
by grubs. There are no apricots but
many hard peaches. The gooseberries
are over.

Juvenilia, says Valerie Helson, gives us a glimpse of 'the great person reduced to a child'. But juvenilia also reminds us what it is to be a child, whether it be Dorothy Hewett recording the purchase of a Mary Pickford notebook; Alan Moorehead describing a friend's sister as 'a pretty, naughty, empty little thing'; or Lady Casey's homemade 'advertisements' in her newspaper. Juvenilia offers the contemporary reader an escape into the world of childhood.


Wednesday, August 18

Scouts.Quite a sunny day. Have been thinking
what it will be like when I have left school. ... Very
tired tonight but bucked up. Beautiful moonlight
night—I wonder whether there will be any girls at
the Lakes to take out on a night like this...

Alan McCrae Moorehead, aged 16

KATHRYN FAVELLE is a freelance writer who lives in Canberra


School Note Book of Ethel Turner Ethel Turner Papers Manuscript Collection (MS749, series 1-4, folder 114-115)

School Note Book of Ethel Turner
Ethel Turner Papers
Manuscript Collection (MS749,
series 1–4, folder 114–115)

 

 

 

Alec T. Bolton (1926-1996) [Portrait of Dorothy Hewett, Darlinghurst, 1985] 1985 gelatin silver photograph on resin-coated paper Pictorial Collection (P385 P788 LOC R23)

Alec T. Bolton (1926–1996)
[Portrait of Dorothy Hewett,
Darlinghurst, 1985]
1985
gelatin silver photograph on
resin-coated paper
Pictorial Collection (P385 P788 LOC R23)

 

 

 

 

Unknown Photograher Ethel Turner and Jean 1898 gelatin silver photograph Phillipa Poole Collection (P656/43) Pictorial Collection (Album 858)0


Unknown Photographer
Ethel Turner and Jean 1898
gelatin silver photograph
Phillipa Poole Collection (P656/43)
Pictorial Collection (Album 858)0

 

 

 

 

 

 

['Thoughts Which Passed Through a Dense Mind in the Mock Cambridge Chemistry Exam'-dated 18/06/62] Mem Fox Papers, 1961-97 Manuscript Collection (MS9190/11-drafts of poems and short stories c.1962-80)

['Thoughts Which Passed Through a Dense Mind in the Mock Cambridge Chemistry Exam'— dated 18/06/62]
Mem Fox Papers, 1961-97
Manuscript Collection (MS9190/11—
drafts of poems and short stories c.1962-80)

 

 

 

 

Unknown Photographer [The 'Barberrions', Barbara Bacon and me, Mem Fox, 1963 (Merrion Partridge, as I was then)] photograph Mem Fox Papers, 1961-97 Manuscript Collection (MS9190/15-Photographs, 1963-97)

Unknown Photographer
[The'Barberrions', Barbara Bacon and
me, Mem Fox, 1963 (Merrion Partridge,
as I was then)]
photograph
Mem Fox Papers, 1961-97
Manuscript Collection (MS9190/15—
Photographs, 1963-97)

 

 

 

 

School Diary of Alan McCrae Moorehead at Scotch College Melbourne Alan McCrae Moorehead Papers, 1926-1971, Manuscript Collection (MS5654, Box 34)

School Diary of Alan McCrae
Moorehead at Scotch College Melbourne
Alan McCrae Moorehead Papers, 1926-1971
Manuscript Collection (MS5654, Box 34)

 

 

 

 

 

Unknown Photographer, Portrait of Kenneth Slessor (1901-1979) 1911 photograph Kenneth Slessor Papers (MS3020/7/108) Manuscript Collection (neg.5529)

Unknown Photographer
Portrait of Kenneth Slessor (1901-1979) 1911
photograph
Kenneth Slessor Papers (MS3020/7/108)
Manuscript Collection (neg.5529)
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