Apart from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange having once lived on Queensland’s Magnetic Island with his mother , a woman who challenged conventional thinking on many fronts spent time on the same rocky outcrop named by Captain Cook . She was New Zealand writer , (Jane) Jean Devanny , a Communist , whose first novel ,The Butcher Shop (1926), which condemned sexual oppression in marriage , was banned in NZ, Australia, Boston and Hitler's Germany .
Little Darwin has a copy of the book with an inscription from her son- in- law . It is the 1981 edition edited and introduced by Heather Roberts, printed at the University of Auckland , with extensive margin marking of the text in pencil . It contains notes on the banning of The Butcher Shop by Bill Pearson.The cover design is based on the first edition, owned by the original publisher, Gerald Duckworth and Company ,and the Alexander Turnbull Library.
One of 10 children, she left school at 13 and at 17 met and married militant coalminer ,Francis Harold Devanny, they having a son and two daughters. They moved to Australia in 1929 hoping to improve the health of a son, but he died.
Active in the labour movement and the literary world , she helped found the Writers League with Katharine Susannah Prichard and Czech journalist Jewish Communist , Egon Kisch, who jumped from a ship in Melbourne rather than be deported when the Australian government tried to stop him from attending the 1934 Movement Against War and Fascism . Stern magazine in 1977 founded the Egon Kisch prize for journalism .
Little Darwin has a copy of the book with an inscription from her son- in- law . It is the 1981 edition edited and introduced by Heather Roberts, printed at the University of Auckland , with extensive margin marking of the text in pencil . It contains notes on the banning of The Butcher Shop by Bill Pearson.The cover design is based on the first edition, owned by the original publisher, Gerald Duckworth and Company ,and the Alexander Turnbull Library.
One of 10 children, she left school at 13 and at 17 met and married militant coalminer ,Francis Harold Devanny, they having a son and two daughters. They moved to Australia in 1929 hoping to improve the health of a son, but he died.
Active in the labour movement and the literary world , she helped found the Writers League with Katharine Susannah Prichard and Czech journalist Jewish Communist , Egon Kisch, who jumped from a ship in Melbourne rather than be deported when the Australian government tried to stop him from attending the 1934 Movement Against War and Fascism . Stern magazine in 1977 founded the Egon Kisch prize for journalism .
She joined the Australian Communist Party and was appointed national secretary of the Workers’ International Relief and in 1931 attended its Berlin conference. At Sydney's open air debating arena , the Domain , she spoke out about war and fascism and supported socialism and the International Brigade in Spain . Often she called on women to oppose the war for the sake of children everywhere. Expelled from the party in 1940, she rejoined in 1944 and left again in 1949.
Devanny published 20 books and many short stories and articles in Australia and overseas. The Australian Dictionary of Biography states that Devanny treated the novel as an instrument for propaganda , written often in a “fiery agitational style”.
In the years 1950 and 1951 she and her husband, known as Hal, employed at the Alligator Creek meatworks in Townsville , rented accommodation at Alma Bay, Magnetic Island , during which time she worked on a novel, The Island, which was never published. While on the island she spent a lot of time with Clarrie Scrivener, a dreamer , who spouted poetry and lived in a small inlet ,White Lady Cove,named after a rock formation resembling a woman nursing a child. He leased the cove and was building a house there , wandering about with a dog called Splinter. While she had a lot of respect for Scrivener , an island resident, involved in oyster farming both on nearby Great Palm Island and in Darwin , told Little Darwin he had been annoyed by Scrivener, even suggesting he may have been responsible for the introduction of cane toads on the island.
With Hal’s health poor, they considered moving back to Melbourne , but Jean bought a house in the Townsville suburb of West End. The last child , an activist like her mother , died in a swimming pool.
Jean Devanny died of leukemia in 1962 and railway workers stood in quiet tribute at Townsville railway station as a train left for Rockhampton with her body to be cremated.
Her personal papers are in Townsville’s James Cook University library and include many letters from Australian literary figures- Dame Mary Gilmore (handwritten ), Vance and Nettie Palmer, Frank Hardy, Ruth Park, Beatrice Davis , Eleanor Dark, Miles Franklin . One letter dated April 7, 1948 is from Lorna Moss, Honorary Secretary of the Alice Springs Kindergarten.
There is even a letter from the very colourful NZ Minister for Mines, Paddy Webb, the Australian born first president of the NZ Federation of Labour who served on the executive of the NZ Labour Party, an opponent of conscription in WW1,resulting in him spending two years in jail followed by a loss of 10 years’ civil rights. John A.Lee, a former Kiwi politician who had lost an arm in WW1 and had a bookshop in Auckland , mentioned Webb , a joker, in Rhetoric At The Red Dawn, pen portraits of leading figures in NZ politics between the two wars.
An obituary in the JCU collection is headed Jean Devanny –she fought as she wrote .
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