Miscellaneous nibbled pages from the power and glory of Frank Hardy's books .
Seemingly unrelated events such as the induction into the Journalism Hall of Fame of the late crusading Northern Territory News editor, Jim Bowditch ; a book bought at an open air market in North Queensland ; an attempt to salvage parts of a broken and wormed copy of Frank Hardy's controversial novel , Power Without Glory, plus the current French riots , somehow, prompted this article.
By Peter Simon
Bowditch and Hardy were deeply involved in the struggle by the Territory Gurindji to obtain landrights , which resulted in the book at the top of the post. When Hardy , a Communist writer , came to Darwin from south he and Bowditch would invariably adjourn to the Workers' Club . The admiration and affection Hardy had for Bowditch was expressed in the inscription in a 1980 presentation copy of a novel from the author to Bowditch .
Bowditch is referred to as Dear dear old Jim . Hardy, a mad punter , was never very flush with cash . At times he stayed in the Bowditch house and drew cartoons for the children . While in Melbourne on a visit , Jim called on Hardy and they adjourned to a pub with a box of Frank's latest book, probably the one above, and they went about selling them to patrons to raise drinking funds for him , salesman Bowditch describing Hardy as " the famous author ."
During wide ranging discussions I had with Hardy over years , he repeatedly told me Big Jim Bowditch was one of Australia's finest citizens, a great editor who fought for humanity . During a session with him in Melbourne he took me on a tour by car of Collingwood in which was the illegal betting shop that inspired his novel , Power Without Glory , which saw him charged and acquitted of criminal defamation of the wife of powerful Melbourne sports promoter , financier and gambler , John Wren .
From an archival bin filled with tragically despoiled books , this week , I took Power Without Glory , with Hardy's riddled East Malvern l950 author's note, in which he said the novel was the first in a series planned to give a picture of the mainstreams of Australian life in the 20th century .
Inspiration for the series came from Balzac's Human Comedy . In his preface, Balzac had described Christianity , especially Catholicism , as " a complete system for the repression of the depraved tendencies in man , declaring he wrote under the light of two eternal truths, religion and monarchy .
In turn , Hardy declared : I will write under the light of the fundamental historical fact of our time -that the social order of Capitalism , having served its historical purpose, is convulsively passing , to be replaced by a higher social order ,Socialism, under which the " depraved tendencies of men " will slowly disappear and his unlimited worth and grandeur will be fully realised . This concept is , of course , not original to me ; it is a basic contention of Marx's Historical Materialism , a philosophy that is , as I write , under threat of being " declared "illegal.
Hardy added that his series would not advocate class struggle; it would recognise its existence . The first book dealt with characters who did not feel the terrible weight of the economic depression of 1929-31; the next would deal with those who did experience the horrors directly , the proposed theme covering the disintegration of social and human relations in a country town under the impact of the crisis .
A Balzac quotation and one of the many chapter illustrations. Hardy had lived in France and compared the French Socialist Party with the Australian Labor Party , which professed to be a social democratic party . One of the great failures of the ALP, he said , had been its inability to educate the electorate , since l948, towards a socialist or working class solution to problems .
As a result , the ALP was reduced to trying to win the votes of the middle class . In France, the French Socialist Party under Mitterand had a great victory when he campaigned on a platform of nationalising many industries . This, he contended , would be unthinkable in Australia .
In the 1980s , I had a taped interview with Hardy in Melbourne during which he said he was working on his latest novel, The Obsession of Oscar Oswald ,which had started as a 40 page short story . The genesis had actually been an episode when he had been writing Power Without Glory and he took a cricket bat to try and stop a bailiff from repossessing his radio .
In the worldwide downturn of the l980s, Hardy said many Australians were being crushed by the " debt bomb ". He was fighting for them to urge Labor to change the " rotten " system which saw people lose their homes, cars , furniture , hounded by police and private armies of debt collectors .
Courts , he continued, were filled with people charged over small debt claims because of the economic downturn . These cases were not covered by the media so big companies were not revealed as the heartless people they were . It was another case of ordinary people paying for the collapse of capitalism and the media and politicians looking the other way .
Hardy went along to courts and at times stood up and demanded the plaintiff companies be named so the firms advertising themselves as great were revealed in their heartless true colours .
Out of this had evolved The Obsession of Oscar Oswald ,published in 1983, in which the narrator is an American writer who had come to Australia with a feisty Australian wife who urges him to write a powerful novel instead of commercial crud . Like Hardy, he punts on nags , becomes increasingly involved with a lone man, Oscar Oswald , who lives across the road , a kind of bush lawyer , armed with a cricket bat , who wages war against well known companies , debt collectors , bailiffs , lawyers, magistrates .
In Australia today , with growing mortgage stress , financial help advisers unable to cope with the demand for assistance , the debt bomb exploding , loan sharks in action , sliding real estate values and ruinous power bills , it is a contemporary novel , a copy of which was obtained recently on Magnetic Island , North Queensland .
