What makes a writer - or artist - a local?

I have just been doing an update on the New England's History blog. This and its companion blog, New England Australia, are my attempt to preserve and present the life and history of a major sub-state area, one that has striven for self-government over a long period.

My updating raised in my mind the question as to when we should classify someone as a local writer or artist.

On New England Australia I put up a post on Australian painter Margaret Olley, Margaret Olley's New England connection.

Margaret Olley was born in Lismore and spent part of her early life on the Tweed. Yet while New England might claim her as its own, she is not (to my current knowledge) a New England artist in that I know of no evidence that her painting was affected by her New England experience.

Compare her to Judith Wright or Alex Buzo.

Judith Wright's work was deeply shaped by her New England Tableland's family and up-bringing. South of my day's circle, part of my blood's country, Judith wrote of her homeland.

Alex Buzo was born in Sydney and came to Armidale with his parents. Alex loved Sydney and returned there after school. His writing was informed by his sense of irony and love of the Australian idiom.

Yet his Armidale experiences - he retained his links to the city and his old school to the end -also informed his writing. One of his plays - I do not remember the name - captured his flight from Armidale back to the big smoke. Alex expected me to identify the characters, and indeed I did.

Coming to a place does not make you a local. Often, as with D H Lawrence's presentation of Australia in Kangaroo (1923), the outsider can write from a sometimes jaundiced perspective.

Robert Barnard's crime novel Death of an Old Goat, drawing from his experiences while an English lecturer at the University of New England can hardly be described as a sympathetic portrayal of Armidale. The blurb reads:

Professor Belville-Smith had bored university audiences in England with the same lecture for fifty years. Now he was crossing the Australian continent, doing precisely the same. Never before had the reaction been so extreme, however, for shortly after an undistinguished appearance at Drummondale University, the doddering old professor is found brutally murdered.

The characters, many instantly recognisable to locals, are presented with a degree of disdain, even contempt.

Patrice Newell is very different.

Born in Adelaide, Patrice (here and here) came to Gundy in the Hunter I do not think that Patrice would even recognise herself as a New England writer, yet her books capture both the local and broader New England linkages and experience.

I am not sure where I go with all this, but I find the ideas interesting.

Ludwig Mises, the Australian connection

Ludwig Mises (1881-1973) is likely to be revealed as one of the sleeping giants of the 20th century. Unlike his Austrian colleague Karl Popper he never touched down on the sacred shores of Australia or any of the outlying islands in the vicinity, not even Tasmania, but there is a strange and fortuitous involvement of an Australian in the translation of his book On Socialism.

The Australian connection is Brian Penton, whose life gives some credence to the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction. Patrick Buckridge wrote a biography of Penton and this is a freestanding piece that gives a fine flavour of the man and his work.

Brian Penton (1904-1951) would surely have achieved the status of the most memorable journalist and commentator in postwar Australia but he died in his prime and left too many enemies to achieve the reputation that he deserved. He was born in Brisbane and left school at the age of fourteen to make an early start in journalism with the Brisbane Courier. At nineteen he travelled to England and worked as a freelance journalist for eighteen months before returning to Australia to join the Sydney Morning Herald.

In 1929 he returned to England, acting as business manager for Jack Lindsay’s Franfolico Press. That episode ended, typically, in prolonged litigation with one of the business partners.
Walking in a London park he met a Hungarian refugee, an economist named Jacques Kahane. They became friends and collaborators in the English translation of a book written in German (1922) on (against) socialism by Ludwig Mises. Kahane was recruited for the task by Professor Lionel Robbins after they became friends while they were students at the London School of Economics.

This brush with the cutting edge of anti-socialist thought served Penton well in later years when he challenged the pillars of the “Australian Settlement” (White Australia, tariffs and central wage fixing) long before they came under widespread attack.

Kahane became a close friend and occasional house guest of Olga and Brian Penton. Each of them dedicated their first books to Kahane, in the case of Brian this was his novel The Landtakers. For Olga it was A Rapid Latin Course with the inscription that she had “hoped that her first book would be a different one”. She was writing a novel while she worked as a Latin teacher to pay the rent.

Neil Whitfield's Friday Poem - Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells

I little while back Neil Whitfield and I were having a discussion about the "decline"/decline - the inverted commas are Neil's, the absence of them mine - in Australian literature. For those who are interested, you can find an entry point here.

One great outcome from my perspective was that Neil started a Friday Australian poem series. In response, I started writing a companion piece.

Last Friday, Neil took Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells. This is one of Australia's most famous poems. Do read it out loud.

Now this was actually a slightly difficult poem from my perspective. I first came across it at school and found it difficult. So it was many years since I had actually read it.

What to say that might be helpful?

To answer this, I started digging into the people, and especially the writers, who surrounded Kenneth Slessor, looking at the links and ideas.

I hope to write this up properly. In the meantime, a question.

One of the things that I am interested in is the differences in thought across Australia. Australia has never been a single uniform country.

In this context, why did so many Melbourne writers come (or seem to come) to Sydney in the period before the second world war? What was there about Melbourne life and society that caused this apparent shift?