Bennet & Pender's From a Distant Shore

Bruce Bennett & Anne Pender, From a Distant Shore: Australian Writers in Britain 1820-2012. Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2013.

The cover of this book is suggestive, though perhaps misleading. It is a photograph of Peter Porter and his partner enjoying an English summer day in a punt. Their body language suggests a dreamy detachment. Could Porter be musing on the familiar quandary of the expat—the “Why am I Here?” sense of contingency? “What am I doing,” he might be pondering, “up this Norfolk backwater?” After all, he once wrote gloomily that after thirty years’ residency he had gained “nothing/ but English dirt/ under my fingernails”. But in truth expatriation had served Porter well: he had made a living and a fine poetic reputation.

However, when we get into From a Distant Shore we find it is not, except peripherally, about the socioeconomics of expatriation or the “push-pull” factors which encouraged departure. Nor does it deal with the cultural consequences in Australia of so much talent leaving permanently. Again, although it is arranged chronologically , it says nothing about the factors which have progressively reduced the expat experience from a bridge-burning decision to a relatively trivial undertaking. In other words, it does not tread over the fertile ground broken by Angela Woollacott, Stephen Alomes or Ros Pesman. What it does offer is an assessment of some literary expatriates’ careers while living in Britain.

This approach raises three questions. First, have the authors bitten off more than they can chew? Careful bio-bibliographical enquiry by John Arnold and others has ascertained that, in the period up to 1945, two hundred or more Australians left their birthplace to try to make a literary career in Britain. Many dozens more have joined them since, especially during the massive haemorrhage of talent right after WWII. Tackling a span of nearly two centuries’-worth of expats required a narrow selection to avoid the book’s 240 pages becoming a mere roll-call of names and works. The authors’ strategy is to select a representative forty-five writers, the intention being to “reclaim [their] lives and careers” (6). They say grandly that they have “considered postcolonial, diasporic, nationalistic and other theories” but have opted instead for a “more author-centred” approach (2). What this means in practice is potted biography, transcribed and annotated interviews with ten of the living, and some fairly bland critical evaluation. Some of the forty-five are obvious choices; others idiosyncratic, such as the 19^th century pornographer W.N. Willis and the television lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, neither of whom has added much to the lustre of literature. Some of the omissions are striking. Surely Melian Stawell, the Classical scholar, Alan Moorehead or Russell Braddon could have been allocated space. Moorehead, for instance, was a household name as a war reporter and later a popular historian whose books still sell. He, or several other more deserving candidates, could have annexed the four pages occupied by Maysie Greig, a forgotten churner-out of six flimsy romances a year in her prime.

Second, there is the question of whether it is worthwhile to distinguish a batch of writers who have little—nothing?—in common except being both Australian-born and long-time stay-aways. From a Distant Shore grapples with this by organising its subjects into thematic groups. The two chapters dealing with the prolific expat “romancers” and “crime” writers outline their interesting careers. Another chapter usefully explores parallelisms in the careers and subjects of Patrick White and Barry Humphries as the best satirists of the suburbs. In other cases the labelling is too vague and capacious to mean much. For example, it puts Michael Blakemore, Walter Turner, Porter and Clive James into a chapter called “Arguments with England”—a label which fits most of the writers here, in their work, or their lives, or both.

Third, who might read this book? Little of the content is very original. Most of the minor figures already have entries in the standard reference tools sufficient for the casual enquirer. As for the bigger names—Stead, White, Praed, Mack, Greer, Richardson, etc.—all have been the subjects of substantial biographies and critical surveys, on which the present authors rely heavily themselves. (They give just a page and a half to Martin Boyd, for example, and most of that is drawn directly from his biographer Brenda Niall.) It is a great pity that they use no archival material. The polymath Jack Lindsay is rightly given several pages, but the NLA’s holdings of his papers and diaries, scarcely used by scholars since they were returned from England by his family, are not sounded at all. Yet they deal minutely with his fascinating personal and authorial life in England over decades: potentially rich pickings for this book.

Finally, one must not forbear to mention that From a Distant Shore suffers from inadequate proof-reading and fact-checking. There are some strange slips and non sequiturs, and much insipid writing. We are told solemnly that Agnes Murray, nursing her baby Gilbert, “could have had no idea” that he would grow up to be a professor of Greek (20). No indeed—since Mrs Murray was not blessed with precognitive powers. As for factual errors, the authors tell us that the novelist Clemence Dane was a man (42); that Boyd was born in England (8); that the Brontё sisters grew up in “Howarth homes” [sic] (217), that the oldest literary award is called “the Horthenden Prize” (238); and that the bohemian mid-brow novelist Philip Lindsay was a “a specialist historian of the middle ages” [sic] (47) and so on. Bruce Bennett, who died before publication, would never have allowed solecisms such as these to stand, and Anne Pender or her publisher should have detected and rectified them.