Honouring Eddie Mabo , this is the cloud reflecting entrance to the James Cook University Library , Townsville, where the Jean Devanny Papers are held in the Special Collections section.
During WW11, author Jean Devanny corresponded with Communist journalist Frank Hardy when he was a Corporal in the 8 Army Advanced Ordinance Depot , Mataranka , 420kms south of Darwin , NT, where he edited the lively camp news , Troppo, which he promptly renamed Troppo Tribune –the Tribune being the title of the Communist Party of Australia paper. For some unknown reason Troppo Tribune eventually underwent a name change–New Troppo, more than likely due to officialdom’s dislike of the Communist Tribune. The Australian Army Education Service provided books, films , sports , lectures and organised concerts in which Hardy was involved .
By Peter Simon
Also based there was journalist , Sergeant Frank Ryland , and Sumner Locke Elliott , the latter destined to become a prominent writer in America during a period described as the golden age of TV , who wrote a play based on his observations of the Mataranka camp life , which upset Colonel Blimps and censors .
Hardy (1917-1994) had joined the Communist Party in 1939 because of his observations and experiences during the Depression . In a letter dated May 15 , l944, Hardy, writing from Mataranka , told Devanny that Ryland had encouraged him to do serious writing and suggested he write down some of the stories he told at “ beer nights.” These were not literature, commented Hardy. ( Later in life , Hardy became a TV identity telling light- hearted Billy Borker stories, also turned into books . )
During his correspondence with Devanny, Hardy said it was an impertinence for him to criticise and make suggestions about her books , he being a “backyard journalist and cartoonist.” Nevertheless, he did .
In response to a letter she had sent him, Hardy, late in replying because of being over-active , he passed comments about her banned novel, Butcher Shop. Devanny had apparently told him she only now had a vague idea of what the novel was all about. He commented :-
The excellent vocabulary, the profoundity of expression and the reality of the characters contributed to making this, in my opinion, a great book; but it was, in addition, a powerful argument for equality of the sexes and against the bourgeois system of marriageWhile there were weaknesses in the book and even though the “villainess” was a socialist and there were other slight political weaknesses , he doubted if she would ever write a book to touch the “ Butcher’s Shop.” Getting rid of political vocabulary was quite a job-one formed the habit of using clichés, difficult to overcome. He would get a copy of her latest book-Bird of Paradise- and let her know what his thoughts were about the novel.
On the subject of her possibly writing an autobiography, Hardy said that these were often dull, despite how interesting a life the writer had led . He suggested she write a novel based on her life.It was a great pity that only ill health had brought her to the stage of withdrawing from political activity and concentrating on writing ..."The working class movement has plenty of political organisers but all too few really good writers!" The novel could traverse the development towards maturity of the working class movement in general and the Communist party in particular...
Make it something of a history, thread your life through it but depart from autobiographical facts where necessary. Deal with the struggle between the individual and society-by this I mean the struggle between you , the writer and you, the Communist organiser. Begin with the early days in NZ then with Australia, coming right up to the party reaching maturity during the struggle against Fascism and your enforced retirement .
In a postscript, Hardy said that he and Frank Ryland were going to spend the day writing . Ryland was finishing a couple of stories . Hardy was working on a short document entitled Romance and Reality in the NT in which he proposed to "tear to pieces" the romanticising of the Elsey Station and station life in the Territory. It would expose " the terrible position " –the exploitation of the Aborigines and the " death grip" in which Vestey’s held this potentially great land , the problems and possibility of the country,etc. “ I have gathered some startling material for it.”
This statement is highly significant , because it seems to indicate Hardy intended to challenge the Australian classic We of the Never –Never by Aeneas Gunn , centred around Elsey Station , not far from Mataranka .
A wad of newspaper clippings and other documents in the Devanny Papers shows that she was particularly interested in and informed about the condition of Aborigines in Australia . These items cover concern about NT pastoralists fighting recommendations that there be a scale of pay for working natives; quoting the 1929 Year Book , it is said that there were 2358 fullbloods regularly employed in Federal Territories, about 2000 not paid ; a 1933 International Labour Office letter is quoted in connection with the plight of Aborigines , halfcaste children; the expression “Aboriginal slave labour” is used in a letter to workers of the world, the value at anything from 100,000 to half a million pounds ($1 million) a year in WA, where" runaway slaves" were chased by the police and put in chain gangs for up to six months ; WA newspaper articles relating to these issues are mentioned , as is Hansard .
RUBBING IN THE SALT
Cartoon from section in SALT with the heading CAMP PIE , sketches by Australian and American artists .
After two years at Mataranka, Hardy was sent to Melbourne as an artist on Salt, the Army magazine, above . The title of the publication was an acronym of Sea, Air and Land Troops . It had a staff of 10, including well known artists and writers with a circulation of 180,000.The deputy editor , Hume Dow , had graduated from Harvard University in l938 and became involved in the peace movement .
After the war , Hardy received Australia-wide notoriety and fame with his explosive novel, Power Without Glory, which saw him charged with criminal libel. With the Menzies Government taking steps to outlaw the Communist Party, Hardy went to the Berlin Peace Conference with his wife to dodge being gaoled if the legislation came in, feeling he would be a prime target. He returned after the bill to ban Communists was rejected by a national vote. Jean Devanny was named by a politician as a " security risk" to the nation because she was a Communist who travelled freely about the country .
On July 19, 1959, Hardy wrote to Devanny , then living at 38 Ocean View Road , Harboard , Sydney. In it he gave her tips on a manuscript, which he said compared favourably with her novels, Sugar Heaven and Butcher Shop. These novels, he wrote, had been well focused , artistically integrated and the dialogue had been a conflict between the characters , as it should be , not the author telling their side of the story, as it often was... " I think you should read aloud every word of dialogue in the book and revise where it is stilted or explanatory.There are some beautifully written parts in the book..."
In the final analysis, only the author could really know what must be done to a manuscript .The thing to do was neither to accept or reject criticism for the sake of it .The author’s own self critical faculty was the ultimate guardian of good writing. As authors grew older, they seemed to lose the capacity to weigh up criticism .The letter contained a PS : My London publisher has flatly rejected my latest novel.
RYLAND’S WORLD VIEW
Freckled Sergeant Frank Ryland , a journalist during the Depression , a sensitive , observant person, had close contact with Devanny and leading Australian literary figures. He had worked on the Labour Daily , Daily News and spent 20 years as a parliamentary reporter in Canberra .
From Mataranka , he wrote to Devanny in May 1944 telling her that, "out of the blue, " he was being transferred to Melbourne to write some war history. He was writing a short story for the ABC on his typewriter with a copy to Coast to Coast , produced by Angus and Robertson. Mention is made in the letter that he had won the camp Pedigree Competition which involved naming horses for the Mataranka Cup, with Invasion , by Great Expectations, out of Channel Crossing, with the added comment : He’s a long time getting started , eh?
In another communication he said he had started to write a play for an ABC competition about an "ammo dump and abos ," though he did not know much about them. Digressing , he asked : " Why do Aussies use that abbreviation “O” such as you see in Abo, compo, commo, goodo, ammo, demo(demolition),dermo ( dermatitis ),Troppo, and so forth . “Is it a sign of our happy go lucky laziness ?”
Ryland continued his correspondence with Devanny when he went to Japan -Osaka and Tokyo- with the Occupation Forces. Before leaving Sydney for Japan , Ryland had seen author Jon Cleary who told him he was going to England writing a script for RKO and that a gangster thriller he had written would probably star Alan Ladd . In Japan , Ryland had a Japanese girlfriend, Toshiko Oda ," Rose", perhaps a play on Tokyo Rose , the wartime radio propagandist , whom he later married, she also wrote to Devanny. Frank took an interest in Japanese music and floral arrangement.
Ryland wrote many articles for the British Occupation Force News about Japan emerging from the chaos of the war. There are interesting snippets in remnants of a burnt letter at James Cook University Library : The White Australia Policy, he said, was losing friends in Asia ; mention is made of author Miles Franklin and her "strange" Sydney house; Frank Clune had sent him a copy of his travel book , Sky High to Shanghai, Ryland commenting that Clune knew little about Japan ; writers in America used to be Leftish , but had"veered" to the right.
Racism was another subject covered by Ryland . It was hard to understand " the rotten attitude " of (white ) Americans to coloured Americans . Most “Aussies”were indignant about the treatment of negroes .
Of all the cruel prejudices in the world, surely the one of race is worst... man can and does change religion and politics , but how the hell can he change his race –even if he wanted to. Ryland said an Australian girl married to an American in Yokohama fell in love with a Jap at an art school and they suicided by poisoning themselves on a railway station. A number of American soldiers and Jap girls had made suicide pacts
Living with Frank on a quiet mountain with pine trees and a pond Rose wrote to Devanny, addressing her , Dear Mrs Jean. Ryland noted that author Flora Eldershaw had written a thoughtful and provoking piece in which she was right in saying that none of Hardy's characters really lived in Power Without Glory .
Ryland told Devanny that Rose could inspire him to write a long short story or a novel and that she considered herself lucky because she only had consumption in one lung. There is a surprising part in the correspondence in which Ryland reveals that Rose had shown him that one of her legs was shorter than the other .
"OUTRAGEOUS" SUMNER LOCKE ELLIOTT
Sumner Locke Elliott’s mother , nee Helena Sumner Locke , a vivacious , much travelled playwright and author , died October 18, l917 from eclampsia , one day after he was born . According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography , a mourner said : " I hope the son will be worth the sacrifice ." Sumner, subject of a custody battle , was brought up by his aunts , at one stage sent to boarding school.
A secret gay, he was an actor and writer with Doris Fitton’s Independent Theatre , Sydney, before being drafted into the Army as a clerk in 1942 , posted to Mataranka. There he told Hardy he was a professional theatre writer and took part in sketches, concerts and contributed items to Troppo Tribune . His experiences in the NT inspired his controversial play Rusty Bugles, performed in 1949, causing an outcry , banned in Sydney .
A Sydney Morning Herald review described the play performed at Fitton’s Independent Independent Theatre , as fine theatre . It read -
The boring, demoralising life of an Australian army camp sweating in the backblocks of the Northern Territory would seem to be, of all the places that saw the furious human drama of the last war, the least likely to offer easy stage material for a dramatist.Yet Sumner Locke-Elliott has made this lonely military grease- spot the setting for some of the most brilliant and honest stage writing we have yet had from an Australian.His "Rusty Bugles," a string of sketches rather than a play (the author calls it "a documentary"), opened successfully at the Independent Theatre last night. The consummate skill of the dialogue, although heavily loaded with cuss words that will bring the pink to modest ears, and the affectionate observation of a batch of doggedly Australian Australians kept last nights audience royally entertainedDoris Fitton's fine, fast production, and some exceptionally good acting from the all-male cast made the most of the comedy that ripples constantly on the surface of Locke Elliott's writing. And yet the performance was not so heavily loaded for laughter as to disguise the essential ugliness and degradation of the lives that these soldiers were forced to lead
A further SMH review said the play was one of the most thoroughly Australian in tone and character.
Fond mothers may not care to see their soldier boys drawn as the author has drawn them - there are more innocuous obscenities to the minute than in any other play we know of-but that was the way so many of them were. Perhaps "Rusty Bugles" is too long to sustain interest fully, there is a limit to the number of ways a monotonous life can be varied for the stageThe author has been ingenious enough to write to that limit-the talk of leave, the bad news from home, imagination of kisses and cuddling in the remote cities, the soldier whose mind cracks, the futile 'phone calls home on a bad line, the ingratiating organiser of unwanted fun and games.Outstanding in an excellent cast were Ralph Peterson, Lloyd Berrell, Alistair Roberts, Frank O'Donnell, Ivor Bromley-Smith, all of them with a vocabulary which, true to type, included copious references to illegitimacy, the bloodstream the anatomy and advanced biology
Due to official protests about the language , the play was rewritten and attracted the following SMH review by LB under the heading : RUSTY BUGLES SOUND NEW LILY WHITE TUNE .
"Rusty Bugles," polite version, was presented at the Independent Theatre last night.Two representatives of the Chief Secretary-the chief clerk of the Chief Secretary's Department, Mr. F. R. Lake, and Inspector F. Nunan , were present in the audience to see that the actors minded their p's and q's (and their b's).Critical opinion is that "Rusty Bugles," as bowdlerised, is still a very able show, although the last-minute revisions of the script slowed the pace of the acting and steeply reduced the original play's crackling vitality.It will not be known until today whether the Chief Secretary, Mr. J. M. Baddeley, is satisfied with the revised script which is a lily-white echo of last week's performances. There is so much water in the new performance that an audience, only rarely, could taste the original jungle juice.An occasional harsh word has been retained in order to prove that the lovable soldier characters in this play are not really dandies at a garden party. On the whole, the revision has been done "not too baddeley," as one punster put it. The Minister for Housing, Mr. Clive Evatt , was in the audience and said at the interval that he wanted to congratulate the playwright, Sumner Locke Elliott, on the vigour of his writing and characters.
Sumner Locke Elliott went to the US in 1948 without seeing his contentious play performed . There he wrote numerous TV shows and movie screenplays . In l955 he became an American citizen and did not return to this country until l974 . His autobiography, Careful, He Might Hear You, won the l963 Miles Franklin Award and was made into a film. In l990 he “came out “ in his book Fairyland. Residing in Manhattan, he died in June 1991 at the age of 73 ; an obituary in the New York Times said that during WW11 he had served in Australia’s " outback ." NEXT : Another Mataranka luminary whose tragic death impacted on the Northern Territory .
