Even though Beatrice’s background was as a scientific rather than a literary editor, she had quickly discovered that she loved editing fiction. As she wrote to Lawson Glassop in 1944, ‘Producing literature, when I get a chance to deal in it instead of textbooks, is the only thing that makes this job worth while for me.’1 By now she knew that this was where her future lay.
Beatrice also joined the English Association, encouraged by a new friend, Guy Howarth, who taught literature at the University of Sydney. Founded in 1923 by Professor Sir Mungo MacCallum, the association maintained a lofty intellectual tone, preoccupied with protecting the English language from the corrupting influence of Australian and American slang. (Their quarterly bulletin always had examples of ‘the misuse of speech or writing in the English language’, and severely mentioned were such usages as ‘comics’, ‘debunking’ and ‘I will’ instead of ‘I shall’.) Like the FAW, the English Association met once a month, at the Lyceum Club in the Bank of New South Wales building on the comer of King and George streets, to hear a paper by a guest speaker or a member of the society about an aspect of English literature, and to discuss topics of literary interest over bad sherry and biscuits afterwards.
While Walter Cousins was naturally pleased that the energetic Miss Davis was taking her job seriously enough to network outside office hours, he could not see how her new contacts – those who were not already A&R authors – would benefit the company. Publishing novels, short stories or poetry whose literary merit outweighed their popular appeal was not, Cousins thought, A&R’s business. A conservative, quiet and rather owlish man, he was a commercial publisher through and through. George Robertson had published a great deal of fiction and poetry in his time but Cousins, said one of his authors bluntly, had never read a novel in his life. In his view contemporary literature could not compete with the chatty historical non-fiction and adventure yams by Frank Clune and Ion Idriess, steady sellers for many years. His chief literary advisers were Idriess and E.V. Timms, a writer of historical romances. However, it was not long before Cousins had to modify his views, partly because of a change of staff at the Bulletin’s Red Page.
The pink inside cover of the Bulletin had provided an outlet for contemporary Australian poets and writers of short fiction since A.G. Stephens founded it in 1896. Under the editorship of Cecil Mann, who became editor in the late 1930s, the Red Page developed a wide-ranging eclecticism: one week it might feature Mallarmé, the next Christopher Brennan. Early in 1939 Mann took on a new assistant, the young New Zealand-born poet Douglas Stewart, recently settled in Sydney. Stewart, who had already published one book of verse, was twenty-six, dark, intense and ambitious. When Mann went into the army in 1940, Stewart – whose flat feet saved him from a military career – took over the Red Page. He remained its editor for more than twenty years.
Stewart started as editor at a time when a whole new generation of Australian poets were either at the peak of their powers or just reaching maturity – they included Ronald McCuaig, Rosemary Dobson, David Campbell, David Rowbotham, Nancy Keesing, Nan McDonald, Francis Webb and Judith Wright – and he made it his business to encourage and foster their work. He went to a great deal of trouble for Bulletin contributors, sometimes helping them revise, though he was careful never to interfere any more than he thought necessary.
Beatrice and Douglas Stewart met shortly after he started at the Bulletin. They liked each other immediately, found they had literary tastes in common and knew the same people in Sydney’s small literary world. Four years younger than Beatrice, Stewart was a more seasoned judge of poetry. Beatrice expressed great respect for his literary acumen as well as his talent; she always said Douglas Stewart introduced her to the best in current Australian poetry, which became one of her great interests thereafter. Stewart was also an indispensable source of literary gossip at a time when women were not allowed into the public bar of Bateman’s, close to the Bulletin’s office in lower George Street, or by tradition into Mockbell’s coffee shop next door to the Bulletin, where many writers and journalists congregated.
It was a happy accident that, when Beatrice advertised for an assistant in 1941, into the office walked another poet.2 Nan (Nancy) McDonald, a slim and beautiful blonde in her early twenties, had graduated in Arts from the University of Sydney and had recently been doing war work on a pig farm while she wrote her first book of verse. Beatrice probably knew her name already from the Red Page of the Bulletin; she hired her immediately and ever afterwards considered it one of her best decisions. Quiet, almost paralysingly self-effacing but with an impish sense of humour, Nan McDonald was, in Beatrice’s opinion, ‘the most brilliant editor as well as the most enchanting person’, who had ‘imagination, intelligence, knowledge and feeling’, and who was equally proficient in literary fiction, reference works, military manuals and the books of lon Idriess.3 She remained Beatrice’s lieutenant at Angus and Robertson for more than thirty years.
About a year later Beatrice was introduced to a dark-haired young teacher at Frensham (a private girls’ school south of Sydney) by their mutual friend Heather Sherrie. Rosemary Dobson was hoping to leave teaching and go into publishing. Her vocation, however, was poetry. Beatrice and Douglas Stewart knew and admired her work and Beatrice suggested she start as a proofreader with Grace George before moving over to the editorial department a little later, which she did. Rosemary and Nan shared an office and swiftly became great friends.
Meanwhile, over at the Bulletin, Douglas Stewart was becoming increasingly frustrated. While the magazine’s management gave him a free hand, Stewart, like every editor before or since, wanted more space, and there was no chance of that. In a magazine that focused on sport, politics and humour he said he felt ‘like an outlaw creeping around the outskirts’. Beatrice sympathised. The work of the new generation of poets should be given more of a hearing and Angus and Robertson were the obvious publishers. But how to convince Walter Cousins that A&R should move into literary publishing, especially when this was a synonym for ‘books that make no money’?
Help was at hand in the shape of the Commonwealth Literary Fund. A 1940 conference of publishers, booksellers and the CLF presided over by Prime Minister Robert Menzies agreed to consider a scheme for assistance in publishing Australian books recommended by the CLF. This effectively gave a publisher some guarantee against loss in producing non-commercial books. Low-risk literary publishing was now a possibility.
Another factor was the growing wartime demand for Australian books; small print runs of poetry or short fiction could now be produced with a reasonable chance that they would sell. Douglas Stewart argued that A&R should go further. He was sure there was enough literary talent in Australia to support an annual anthology of verse and one of short fiction – perhaps with a run of 500 copies for the poetry, 1000 for the prose. Each could be edited by a different writer every year.
Stewart has always been given the credit for initiating Australian Poetry and Coast to Coast, but he was not the one who had to persuade Walter Cousins. Beatrice used all her charm to talk her boss into accepting the idea. No doubt she emphasised the low risk and great prestige involved in publishing these anthologies, as well as the editorial and critical expertise A&R now had at its command. Whatever her arguments, Cousins agreed. The first volume of Australian Poetry, edited by Douglas Stewart, appeared in September 1941. Considering its ground-breaking status, it was surprisingly small and unimpressive-looking. Stewart chose a wide range of voices and poetic styles, including work by Mary Gilmore and Furnley Maurice (the pseudonym of Frank Wilmot) in the older, Bulletin tradition of bush verse, as well as younger poets such as Stewart himself, Kenneth Slessor, John Shaw Neilson and Robert D. FitzGerald. There was a solid grouping of new voices: Rosemary Dobson, James McAuley, Eve Langley, Elizabeth Riddell. Possibly because of Stewart’s own poetic preoccupations – at the time he was writing what he called ‘small nature poems’ – much of the work is lyrical and pastoral.
Australian Poetry reall
y came into its own with the anthologies of 1943 and 1944. Not even the horrible wartime paper, like shiny beige cardboard flecked with wood shavings, could detract from the quality of the work. Many poems in these editions have become Australian classics. Here are A.D. Hope’s ‘Return from the Freudian Islands’ and ‘Australia’; David Campbell’s ‘The Stockman’; Elizabeth Riddell’s ‘The Old Sailor’; Judith Wright’s ‘Bullocky’ and ‘The Company of Lovers’; James McAuley’s ‘Terra Australis’; Douglas Stewart’s ‘The Dosser in Springtime’, and Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Beach Burial’.
Giving expression as it did to the work of a new and significant generation of Australian poets, the importance of Australian Poetry cannot be overestimated. Certainly, without Beatrice’s ability to swing the resources of Angus and Robertson behind it, and her continued support of it, what Douglas Stewart called ‘the new movements in Australian literature’ would have taken longer to come to public attention. Australian Poetry continued to be published, either annually or biennially, until 1973.
Its prose companion Coast to Coast also made its first appearance in 1941, compiled and edited by Cecil Mann. Most of the twenty-one stories he selected had already been published in magazines, and some well-known writers were represented: Vance Palmer, Marjorie Barnard, Beatrice’s old friend Dal Stivens, Alan Marshall, Frank Dalby Davison, Henrietta Drake-Brockman. Others, such as Douglas Stewart and Hugh McCrae, were better known as poets. Beatrice herself compiled the 1942 edition of Coast to Coast. This was surprising because all her training, as well as an ingrained habit of discretion, had fuelled her belief that an editor’s place was in the background, not choosing stories for a collection. She agonised over the job; later in her career, when she had to compile other anthologies, she always took a long time and worried over her choices, often calling on Douglas Stewart for support. Her foreword is reluctant and self-effacing, and she vanishes into the passive voice: ‘Contributions were submitted from all parts of Australia …’ The stories she chose are generally conservative in form, well-defined narratives or character sketches with a twist. The now better-known writers include Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Gavin Casey, Dal Stivens, Marjorie Barnard (represented by ‘The Persimmon Tree’, later much anthologised). Generally speaking, the stories Beatrice chose do not reflect what became the hallmarks of her literary taste: allusiveness, brilliance of description, dazzling wordplay or evocation of atmosphere. But then, there probably wasn’t much of this kind of writing in Australia at the time: the best work of Hal Porter, Eve Langley and Patrick White was still to come.
Short stories were a staple of many magazines and newspapers of the period, including the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Herald, Smith’s Weekly, the ABC Weekly, Home and Man, among others. Having ploughed through more than 500 stories for the 1943 Coast to Coast, a rather grumpy Frank Dalby Davison categorised them in his introduction as ‘escapist fiction, magazine stories neatly carpentered according to approved commercial blueprints, and meaningless; innocent little pink sugar romances and ten-minute newspaper stories with the verities sacrificed to the indispensable trick ending’. But shining out from the dross that year was well-crafted, mainly realist prose from such writers as D’Arcy Niland, Dal Stivens, John Morrison and Gavin Casey. Coast to Coast was published every year until 1948, then biennially from 1949 to 1970. The final volume in the series, edited by Frank Moorhouse, appeared in 1973.
The period during and immediately after World War II was a time of great potential and vitality in Australian writing. Katharine Susannah Prichard, Gavin Casey, Frank Dalby Davison, Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant, Dymphna Cusack, Eve Langley were writing novels; the Jindyworobaks were trying to express mystical union with the spirit of the land in poetry, and the brilliantly mischievous Harold Stewart and James McAuley were bringing forth the poetry of the young genius Ern Malley. This was also the time of the great radio plays. The ABC’s Frank Clewlow and Leslie Rees were encouraging Australian dramatists; the ABC held an annual competition for radio plays in verse and Angus and Robertson published the best of them. As Douglas Stewart commented, ‘Writers rose and fell or flourished, so it seems, in all directions.’4
Three years after helping to set up Coast to Coast and Australian Poetry, Beatrice used Angus and Robertson to mount a literary rescue operation. In 1939 the English Association had decided to transform their quarterly bulletin into a fully fledged literary magazine named Southerly, publishing poetry and stories by Australian writers as well as critical material. From the time it came into being, Southerly’s life had hung by a thread. Though contributors were unpaid and the magazine was put together by members of the University of Sydney’s English department, headed by Guy Howarth who did the work for nothing, the combination of high printing costs and small circulation was slowly killing the publication. (The only other literary periodicals of note during the war years were the quarterly Meanjin Papers, founded in Brisbane by Clem Christesen in 1940 and Poetry, started by Flexmore Hudson the following year; both, mostly funded by their creators, were in a similarly parlous state.)
By 1944 Southerly was threatened with extinction and Beatrice, a stalwart of the English Association, agreed that something had to be done. Late that year, after discussions with Guy Howarth and Douglas Stewart, she confronted Walter Cousins with the suggestion that Angus and Robertson take over publishing the magazine. The current printers – the Australasian Medical Publishing Co., whom Beatrice knew from her days at the Medical Journal of Australia – could continue to print the journal; A&R could finance and distribute it. It would not be too expensive: the print run was only 500 copies and A&R’s resources would maximise its sales possibilities. And it could all be done without taking up much of A&R’s staff time. Cousins finally agreed, even though he must have known that publishing Southerly was unlikely to make A&R any money. Lacklustre advertising that urged potential subscribers to ‘play their part in Australian cultural development’ not surprisingly failed to persuade enough people to part with their annual £22 and make Southerly profitable, though it became a significant force in the study of Australian literature. A&R paid the magazine’s bills for many years.
Why did the CLF not see fit to step in and subsidise literary journals? The answer lies in the political ideologies of the time. Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley considered literary magazines to be elitist, not serving the mass of the people; Robert Menzies, leader of the opposition, was also dead against government money being spent on ‘elitist’ individual enterprises. As critic and academic Tom Inglis Moore accurately observed, literary magazines got it in the neck both ways. (In 1950 Menzies, who had recently become prime minister for the second time, did manage to find some money for small literary magazines.)
Beatrice showed how keen she was for the company she served to develop and promote new Australian writing. In an undated memo to Angus and Robertson’s publishing committee arguing for A&R’s involvement in Southerly she observed that making the magazine the country’s premier literary journal would count in the future ‘when, in spite of opposition, we must remain the literary hub of Australia’. It was a means of bringing the best local writing to Angus and Robertson and was important because, Beatrice believed, ‘good writers … bring the best publicity and prestige’.
The importance Beatrice saw in attracting to A&R writers whose potential was literary, not simply commercial, was echoed by other members of the literary community, notably Douglas Stewart and Norman Lindsay. In 1944 Lindsay wrote to Beatrice, ‘I have the sincerest respect for your own soundness of judgement in selecting works of quality … but no publishing house can exist as great unless it builds up a strong group of [poets and prose] writers’, and he urged her to do what she could to ‘stimulate the whole literary aesthetic into strong action’.5 It was advice and encouragement that Beatrice found highly congenial.
Living on the Edge: Ernestine Hill
One of our enduring literary images has been the Australian writer as traveller, taking to the tr
ack with swag and notebook to discover the ‘real Australia’ that lies beyond the towns and cities, and putting it into words. Henry Lawson, Xavier Herbert, D’Arcy Niland, C.E.W. Bean, Ion Idriess all did it, continuing the tradition that writing about the bush was something that writers – male, of course – did. But the Australian writer who most consistently embraced the wandering life, bringing a journalist’s shrewdness and a novelist’s insight and descriptive powers to the lives and landscapes of the remote corners of the continent, was a woman. It was Ernestine Hill, as Beatrice once wrote, who most fully showed Australians their own country.1
Hill’s life as a bush writer began in the early 1930s with a series of articles involving travel around Australia for Sun Newspapers. The vividness and immediacy of her writing quickly found their mark and she undertook similar assignments for a variety of periodicals, notably the monthly magazine Walkabout. Her first book, The Great Australian Loneliness (published in England in 1937, with an Australian edition in 1940), was based on this journalism. She followed with Water Into Gold (1937), a history of the Murray River irrigation area. She also did a great deal of work – most of the writing, she later claimed – on Daisy Bates’s famous book The Passing of the Aborigines (1938).
When Ernestine Hill first approached Angus and Robertson in the early war years, she had firmly established her own literary legend, neatly summarised by a contemporary as ‘this slim, dark-eyed girl who appeared seemingly out of nowhere with practically nothing except her horse, her saddle, her typewriter and books and the makings of billy tea and some frugal food … and a passion for the land’.2 Like most romantic legends, this version of Ernestine Hill the indomitable battler cheerfully overcoming the hardships of the outback and writing about them was an oversimplification. She usually claimed she had begun her wandering life in 1933 after the death of her husband, and ‘Mr Hill’ is mentioned in most of the biographical material about her, but there is no detail about him – indeed, he is something of a mystery. Hill had a son, Robert, born in the 1920s, but she never spoke of his father, and it is likely that Mr Hill never existed. Ernestine Hill kept some areas of her personal life as secret as the indecipherable shorthand code in which she wrote many of her private papers.
A Certain Style Page 9
