A Fortunate Life

by A B Facey

  I now wish to end this story. On the thirty-first of August 1977, I will be eighty-three years old – another birthday. The loss of my lovely girl, my wife, has been a terrible shock to me.

  I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled by it when I look back.

  AFTERWORD

  BY JAN CARTER

  Albert Facey is Australia’s pilgrim. He wrote about his life as if it were a journey. Along his route, crossroads offered crucial choices – in some cases his very survival was at stake – and the tracks he followed led to learning, pain, and enrichment. Finally all routes, rough and smooth, were brought together in his old age in a powerful outburst of creative activity – the book that integrated the experiences of his ‘fortunate life’.

  In his early life, Albert Facey travelled alone, although his isolation was reduced, if only temporarily, by unexpected acts of tenderness and kindness from strangers met on the way more frequently than from his kith and kin. His guiding star became hope. There was always tomorrow and the promise of a fresh start. His hope came from facing and surmounting adversity and became a practical belief in the wholeness of most men, despite the evil encountered in some.

  Albert Facey’s life was a literal journey too. From childhood to old age he was moving on constantly. Parochial as his journeys were (most took place in Western Australia) they were always adventures. Whether he travelled on foot, on horseback, or by cart, train, boat, or tram, it was the travel as much as the arrival which intrigued him.

  ‘This is the true joy in life… being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heaps… being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.’ This might have applied to Facey, but George Bernard Shaw was commenting on a much earlier writer, John Bunyan, whose odyssey, The Pilgrim’s Progress, is regarded as an epic journey in English literature.

  Every culture needs a pilgrim. John Bunyan was to Puritan seventeenth-century England what Albert Facey is to secular twentieth-century Australia. Like John Bunyan, Albert Facey was uneducated. Writing a book from a background of poverty and illiteracy is not easy, yet both stories recreate gripping adventures, peopled by lively characters whose ordinary speech is vibrant and recognisable. Facey, like Bunyan, had to work hard to support himself and a family. Neither man had time to write books; both wrote only when periods of enforced idleness gave respite from the practicalities of earning a living (Facey retired; Bunyan was imprisoned). If there were similarities in their background, there were also parallels in their writings. Both drew from everyday experiences in developing characters; both wrote as they spoke. Both argued for the importance of courage and persistence in meeting disappointment, treachery, inexperience and isolation. Both were firmly opposed to the establishment. And if Facey did not share Bunyan’s literal religious vision, both believed in a Providence that brought a traveller of integrity through hazard and despair.

  Facey has given flesh to many central myths of Australian culture. There are stories of Albert as the abandoned child and as a young boy lost in the bush, as the mate of itinerant bush workers, as the young Australian male ‘blooded’ at Gallipoli, as ‘the Sentimental Bloke’ in the love story between Albert and Evelyn, and as the family man, battling against the Depression of the thirties. He takes all these ideas and makes them real and believable. Yet it was not Albert Facey’s evident personal qualities as an unaffected, courageous man, or even his traumatic experiences, which fired him to give our myths such appealing written life. His qualities are literary as well as human. He has the artistry of a true story-teller, an ear for the rhythms of natural speech; he observes and explains.

  The styles of both Bunyan and Facey came from an oral tradition. Bunyan was, by all accounts, a colourful and lively preacher. Facey, too, developed and shaped his stories throughout his life by telling them to an audience. His style was born of an era uninfluenced by electronic media, when story-telling was still a principal form of leisure. He was known as a story-teller to his family and friends; his work as union official and local government member gave him opportunities to express himself and to convince others. The confidential intimacy – the feeling that Albert Facey addresses each reader personally and directly – is related to this, for from early childhood, Albert had yarned. ‘So I told them all that had happened to me,’ he said as he recalled how, as an eight-year-old, he was found one night by a Scottish family, after he had escaped his captors at Cave Rock. Or, when he arrived at Geraldton, after the cattle drive in the Nor’West, he went immediately to see the proprietress of the Coffee Palace. ‘I said I had to tell her all about the trip,’ he wrote. ‘She invited me to come to dinner one evening and have the talk of our lives.’

  Facey’s family knew these tales well before they read the book. The stories were told and retold as family history for six decades or more. Then after retirement Albert was restless and time weighed on his hands. His active mind needed more challenge than his vegetable garden offered. Evelyn suggested that he write down his stories for a book. So he set up at one end of the kitchen table and wrote, whilst Evelyn made jam or peeled potatoes, and encouraged.

  Albert Facey, like Bunyan, never anticipated the success that would follow the publication of his life story. In cramming his stories into school exercise books, Albert’s aim was to ask a publisher to print and bind enough books to enable him to present copies to members of his family. His efforts to get his book published were far from confident and when, in 1979 at eighty-five, he heard that his autobiography had been accepted for publication, he wrote to the Fremantle Arts Centre Press: ‘Sir, I am thrilled to know that my book will be published… I can’t thank you and your connections enough… I feel that you have a job ahead of you and that you won’t let me down. Thanking you and wishing you well and the best of luck.’

  By this time, Albert’s sight was failing and his war injuries from the Gallipoli campaign six decades before were bothering him. ‘I would love to come to see you at Fremantle,’ he wrote, ‘but that is impossible. I have a job to walk and my eyesight is failing badly: I have a job to see forty yards now.’ Evelyn’s illness and death had profoundly saddened him. Most of what he wanted to say had been written, but in the absence of Evelyn’s care, he felt that his manuscript had deficiencies; he knew that his punctuation and spelling, against conventional standards, were very shaky. The gulf between being the family story-teller and the author of a book was a large one.

  Apart from Evelyn’s encouragement, Albert had worked alone. The rest of his family, with the familiarity that breeds complacence, knew the stories so well as not to see the importance of a book. Books and writing were not, in any case, part of the Facey family tradition. Albert was not ‘discovered’ by established writers, nor sought out by publishers. The manuscript sat untended in a cupboard for a couple of years, until a neighbour typed it for a fee of $300 from Albert’s pension savings. Then the Fremantle Arts Centre Press were asked to help by printing and binding twenty copies or so of the story for the family.

  When the editors reviewed Albert Facey’s writing, they realised its importance and devoted a lot of time to preparing the text for publication. To make the book a manageable size, some material from the end of his life was omitted, while spelling and punctuation were, at last, amended. Albert was at this stage in poor health, so he was unable (as most writers would have done) to amplify or refine his text. However, he did comment by tape recorder and these verbal extensions were inserted into the manuscript. During a taping session, the title for the book emerged as Albert reflected on his ‘fortunate life’. But the language of the book, the chronology of events, and the style remain Facey’s own.

  In its first year of publication, 1981, Albert’s book, a life written down for his family, sold 8000 copies. The book was awarded prestigious prizes and Facey was nominated as ‘Australian of the Year�
��. Albert Facey, the unschooled, octogenarian kitchen-table writer, became a famous figure. In the last nine months of his life there were receptions, dinners and press conferences, telegrams from Premiers and letters from the literati. Hundreds of people – children, teenagers, old people, immigrants, trade unionists, members of religious communities – wrote to Albert. But Albert’s declining health signalled the end of his short, surprise career as best-selling author. He was able to attend the launching of his book in a wheelchair and was aware of his success, although his family considers that he never appreciated its scale. By 1985, three years after his death, about 250 000 Australians would have bought his book and probably many more had read it.

  The way in which Facey the writer touched the lives of his readers is reflected in the mail he received. Children commiserated with Albert’s unloved childhood; young people felt that they now understood the social changes between the generations. One wrote: ‘I find that stories like your own, told to me by my own elders are unbelievable and often I do not accept them as being true, but now after reading your story I have begun to understand that life in the beginning of this century was totally different than it is today, that the traditional roles of the child in the family is different, let alone an adult in society. I cannot believe after all you had been through that you could still call it a fortunate life. Most of the older people I know are always bitter about their past and present lives, including my own father, but you seem quite content in the way your “destiny” has unfolded. Your destiny has been an inspiration to me and has helped in my understanding of the past and how fortunate I really am. I only hope that I can gain as much out of life as you did.’

  Facey hardly had a childhood, as we think of childhood today. His lack of schooling, hard work under conditions of slavery, his harsh treatment and the lack of attention to his emotional needs, would be viewed today as marks of a grossly deficient upbringing. Facey’s portrait of childhood is a social history of changes in the status of children this century. Many young readers found grounds for sympathy: ‘Mr Facey,’ wrote Simon, aged seven, and Celia, aged six, ‘this is a bit late to wish you a happy birthday. We wanted to send you a card as you did not get any when you were a child.’

  For those between youth and old age, A Fortunate Life provided the opportunity of a review. ‘Your book inspired me to take a look at life from a different angle and to see what are the most important things. Thank you for passing on some of your courage, enthusiasm and inspiration’, wrote one. Another said: ‘I have learned more about the everyday Australian from reading your book than from all the other history books and historical novels I have read.’

  Some of Facey’s readers felt they had got to know him well enough to write about their personal feelings. Nearly all found his book a challenge, although the announcement of Albert’s anti-religious views took some by surprise. ‘Sadness filled my heart on reading that you believe there is no God,’ wrote a reader from New South Wales. ‘To blame God for allowing trouble and strife to occur on this earth is misplaced. Sir, the blame for those things rests squarely upon man… If man was obedient to God’s command to love one another there would be no war and trouble on earth, only love and peace. But thank you for enriching the life of each person you have met.’

  It is not altogether surprising that Australia’s bush Pilgrim should oppose conventional religious institutions: many bush men had done so before him. Yet contrary evidence suggests that Facey was a religious man. He had a keen sense of what he called ‘Providence’, and his daughter, Barbara, recalls that he felt himself to be in communication with Evelyn after her death. ‘I’m off to have a talk to my darling,’ he would say as he left the house to walk to the cemetery to sit and meditate by Evelyn’s grave. A Fortunate Life is also a touching love story of a devotion and romance that lasted sixty years. ‘To Mum, to my life-long Love and Wife’, wrote Albert, in shaky hand on his sixtieth wedding anniversary. His marriage, a rare blend of close companionship and sympathy, healed the wounds from the hurts and pains of his childhood.

  No one can predict decay in old age; it is lucky that Facey completed his writing before he was overcome by illness. Old people view his book as a personal communication and wrote to him with their life story in exchange. ‘I first saw the light of day in June 1900, so am almost on a par with you,’ wrote one woman, nearly blind, at age eighty-two. In a spidery scrawl, she declared, ‘I have had the extreme pleasure of reading the book written of your life. I was able to enjoy so many experiences, fears, terrors, anxieties, lonelinesses, a love of trees and birds that was especially delightful. The dingoes, yes. They are so frightening. I could go on and on.’ Facey was able to express, on behalf of a generation, an experience of people and practices now gone forever.

  If Albert Facey’s childhood was remarkable, so was his old age. His writing during the last decade of his life could be seen to be part of a normal process in old age: what the sociologists now call ‘the life review’ – a desire to set the record straight and to integrate the strands of the past and give them a personal meaning. But Facey’s life review went far beyond the usual: his career as a writer commenced in advanced old age, at a time of life thought by our society to be past everything. That old people may have latent creative gifts is not considered: the aged are classified generally as being fit only for the community rocking chair. But Facey marshalled one of the precious attributes of old age – long memory – and turned it to the more difficult task of recreating it in writing. It was not only that Facey had a fortunate life, but that he set it down. Without his own creative energy at the end of his time, we would not have known about him, as he had no biographer and no oral historian had sought him out. Many old people have stories to tell: comparatively few ever write them down; others tell them to writers or historians who make records on their behalf. But Albert Facey, alone, wrote his stories down himself.

  Eventually, Albert Facey’s productivity was brought to an end by failing sight and a broken hip. Barbara, his daughter, had come to Perth to look after him, but she became ill herself and, against her wishes, Albert Facey was admitted to a private nursing home. He seemed ready to die – his work was over and his energy and drive much diminished. It was ironic that the battler who had fought since the age of seven to maintain his autonomy should have had his independence negated at the end. Albert Facey, the confronter of birth and life, was enveloped, at death, by the nursing home, one of the more doubtful institutions of the twentieth century, developed to cushion and disguise the natural processes of death. So a life which began with extraordinary self-reliance ended with an ordinary degree of dependence. He died in February 1982, nine months after his book was published.

  What has Albert Facey left us? There is his description of childhood and adult–child relations at the beginning of this century which indicate how great the changes in childhood have been. There is his personal account of the dehumanising and brutal effects of war (the one defeat he felt morally unable to accept). There is his documentation of the types and processes of work including some vanishing occupations. There are all these things and more, but in the end, Albert Facey’s autobiography must be classified as political history, for he contributes to the neglected history of this country. Born on the underside, Facey never joined, or aspired to join, the establishment whose history has been recorded. Facey’s story is a social counterpoint to the well-established economic and political themes of Australian history. From Facey, we now know what it was like to be poor and young at the gold rushes, thus balancing the previous accounts of the rich and powerful. We now know what it was like to be an itinerant worker, as an antidote to the histories of established landowners. We understand the predicaments of a first-world-war private, thereby amplifying the accounts of generals. He describes being a husband and father with mouths to feed in the Depression, a neglected perspective compared to that of political decision-makers and academic historians. Now Facey’s personal achievement in reconstructing his li
fe belongs to all of us.

  Albert Facey has provided for ordinary people an understanding of their past which has challenged their view of the present and realigned their aims for the future. In this respect, his journey was most fortunate for all of us.