Valerie Helson asks why this talented author, who removed himself from the ‘smallness’ of his own large country, remained relatively unknown elsewhere In the early 1980s, the expatriate Australian writer Ray Mathew wrote to a friend from New York, ‘I was moved unreasonably by the fires at home … sometimes remembering it is more vivid than happening. It reminded me of how the air of Sydney one time was acrid with smoke and damp with heat, and so still, so trapped. I remember driving to the mountains and seeing the red flames on buds on the black charcoal near corpses of trees. And how no one in Australia grows up free from that fear of smoke and threat of fire … and that promise of rebirth. I longed for home—longed more physically than I have for a long time’. An earlier letter, addressed to the artist Pixie O’Harris from Italy in 1964, contains a similar reference to Australian bushfires: ‘the sciroco (Italian spelling) has begun. It’s quite extraordinary. It’s hot, dry, breathless outdoors (like the air when there are great bushfires near) and rather sick-making’.
Ray Mathew, who died in New York in 2002 aged 73, left Australia in 1960 never to return, yet often expressed a desire to do so. His writings were noted for their rich imagery of the Australian landscape and its sounds and smells, as his early poem ‘A Year Ago’ demonstrates:
Chiefly remembered as a playwright, Mathew was also an accomplished poet. In fact, as one critic of the novel The Joys of Possession commented in 1967: ‘he has tended to move fairly easily from one medium to another’. In fact Mathew’s output encompassed poetry, drama, short stories, novels, art and literature criticism and non-fiction. He published three anthologies of poetry, numerous poems for magazines, many short stories, a novel, studies of Miles Franklin and Charles Blackman, radio plays and film scripts. Mathew’s first publication was a book of poems, With Cypress Pine (1951). His next anthology, Song and Dance, appeared in 1956, followed by South of the Equator in 1961. His first play was Sing for St Ned, about Ned Kelly. It was performed only once, ten years after it was written, at the University of Queensland. But it was his best known play, A Spring Song, that brought Mathew the recognition which remained long after his creative flow dwindled. It was first performed in Brisbane in 1958 by the Twelfth Night Theatre Company, then in 1964 at the Edinburgh Festival and the Mermaid Theatre, London. Currency Press published it in 1985.
Set in a small country town in New South Wales, it examines the lives and relationships of its inhabitants, as seen through the eyes of the new schoolteacher, Peter. It is not only autobiographical, but prophetic as well. The following passage gives a hint as to why its author decided to leave the wide but stifling expanses of Australia for a more cosmopolitan lifestyle:
And this was the course Mathew’s life took. Born in Sydney in 1929, Raymond Frank Mathew lived first in the suburb of Leichhardt, then Bondi. He was educated at Sydney Boys High School and Sydney Teachers College. From 1949 to 1951 he taught in New South Wales country schools, where he was often the only teacher. At various times, he also worked in shops, moved furniture, gave school broadcasts and adult education lectures, turned out literary reviews for The Sydney Morning Herald and worked for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). He left Australia in 1960. After a period in Italy—a country he visited more than once—he arrived in London. There he won a British Arts Council bursary for drama, the first Commonwealth writer to receive the award. His play The Life of the Party did not, however, receive good reviews and this disheartened him. At first the struggling playwright hated London. To his friend, the poet Rosemary Dobson Bolton, he described it as ‘a grey, frightened place, a big city and a small town’. Later in life, in an interview with Kate Jennings published in the National Library’s Voices magazine in 1993, Mathew reflected ‘I never felt at ease with them [the English] as characters, or familiar enough with their dialogue’. Despite the cold and poverty, Mathew’s letters to his friends were spiced with lively descriptions of people and relationships, weather, places and food, interspersed with morsels of conversation. Clearly, Mathew’s ‘poetic insight with a sharp and observant eye’ was being put to good use in his correspondence.
For the next few years, Mathew did a variety of jobs: editorial work, typing plays for the BBC, even working as a barman. All the while, he continued to write, one project being the novel The Joys of Possession. Aspiring to sustained literary success, he confided to Pixie that sometimes ideas did not come easily. In the early 1960s he was still seen as a writer of great promise, but as he wrote to Pixie in 1962, ‘Why does everyone think so highly of me and let me starve?’ In 1968, encouraged by hopes of a publishing project, Mathew travelled to New York. A friend in Australia had also given him an introduction to Paul and Eva Kollsman, who had connections in film and art circles. Paul Kollsman invented the barometric altimeter used in all aircraft and he was the founder of the firm New Hampshire Kollsman Inc., which specialised in medical, aviation and defence equipment. As patrons and friends, the Kollsmans helped Mathew to find his feet in the American literary world. At the same time, he also befriended the antiques dealer and collector Gareth Jones. What began as a visit became a more and more extended stay, then a permanent residency. Mathew was to spend the rest of his life as a friend and companion to the Kollsmans, sharing their New York apartment. He was a freelance writer and art critic, and at times worked on a novel. Life in America suited him, though some things were strange at first. He wrote to Pixie in 1969, ‘I’ve probably not been happier in my life. There are people here I like immensely … I’m 40—I feel very grown up’. In another letter he wrote, ‘I feel alive again. I actually sleep’. So, in many respects Mathew’s life began at 40. But how will Australia remember the writer who showed such early promise but published nothing major after 1967? Some critics regarded Mathew’s playwriting as reminiscent of Chekhov and Tennessee Williams. Director Peter Kingston described A Spring Song as ‘the work of a poet, every word is weighted carefully … Three sisters, the country itself is an element in the play … the evocation of landscape is marvellously achieved in words. A Spring Song is written by a man who wrote poetry—it’s lyrical, with the rhythm of our ordinary speech, but not in a prosaic way’. A critic of The Joys of Possession wrote, ‘He is one of several Australian novelists who are showing themselves to be wizards with dialogue’. Today, Mathew’s work is considered to be ahead of its time, anticipating a number of themes and modes of later Australian writers. At the height of his powers, he was praised for his natural style, his energy, freshness, Elizabethan gusto and frankness. Katharine Brisbane of Currency Press said, ‘In retrospect, his was the most innovative mind. His work also foreshadowed the indigenous forms that emerged in the late 1960s’. Mathew himself, when analysing why his early potential did not lead to greater things, ventured that, sometimes, early success leads to inhibition. ‘Everything in life had to be measured by its literary usefulness, which is inhibiting … There were certain emotional heights and depths I could not achieve.’ In his personal life however, he was able to form strong, deep and enduring friendships. A man of warmth, wit and charm, the young Mathew is recalled by Rosemary Dobson Bolton as bright and lively, one who enjoyed life and had the ability to make others enjoy life. Pixie O’Harris, with whom Mathew corresponded for decades, was deeply attached to him. This copy of a letter to a third person in 1954 is amongst O’Harris’s letters to Mathew: ‘Ray Mathew spent the day with us yesterday. He is quicksilver in talk and action. His face has the quality of spirit coming through, the eye that darkens and gleams, is full of light and—most dear of all—understanding. He strives to be completely honest, completely truthful, first of all to himself … He takes my age and flings it into the sea; he takes my heart and warms it with his friendship’. The Library is fortunate to hold both sides of this remarkable correspondence in its Manuscript Collection. As well as the papers of Ray Mathew and Pixie O’Harris, there are letters of Mathew to Rosemary Dobson Bolton and to the former New South Wales Parliamentary Librarian R.L. Cope. The Library has been collecting the papers of Mathew since 1977. After his death, the collection was significantly enhanced with additions presented by Eva Kollsman and further instalments are expected. Covering five decades, the papers include letters, diaries ‘observation books’, literary drafts, programs, press cuttings and Pixie O’Harris’s artwork. One appealing item is a handcrafted book entitled ‘Poems of Love, Childhood, Boyhood, Manhood’, containing cuttings of published poems interspersed with typescript and handwritten poems. Several of Mathew’s plays are held in the Campbell Howard and British Drama League series of scripts, which are also held in the Manuscripts Collection. Turning to other parts of the Library, there are theatre programs of Mathew’s productions, both in Australia and overseas, in the PROMPT collection. For those interested in the voice of Mathew, tape recordings of him reading his poems, made in 1958 and 1959 by Hazel de Berg, are located in the Oral History Collection. Biographical and book review articles on Mathew are available through the Petherick Reading Room. And of course his published works are preserved in the Library’s printed Australiana Collection. These combined resources furnish the means by which Australia will remember one of its most lyrical and inventive writers. VALERIE HELSON is a librarian in the Manuscripts Branch of the National Library
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