AustLit

'In the early 1950s, the writer Hal Porter, then in his early forties, lived for a couple of years in the Tasmanian village of Fern Tree, halfway up kunanyi (then known as Mount Wellington). The scattered settlement was home, he would later write, to ‘a community of city-eschewers and suburb-disdainers’, ‘escapees from what they call The Rat Race’. These proto-hippies favoured ‘cabin-like weatherboard houses of singular unsightliness set, with a view to views, in what much resemble the crude clearings of early settlers’. Undeterred by ‘built-in snowstorms, visiting bushfires, and resident soggy clouds’, Fern Tree’s residents showed a decided partiality for ‘flagons of claret, political leftism, bellicose pacifism, the taking up of crazes and causes: palmistry, immorality, astrology, starving children (far-off and coloured), air-conditioned cells and caviar for criminals, preservation of murderers, carte blanche for abortionists’.'  (Introduction)

'For much of her career, Gwen Harwood (1920–95) was best known for her hoaxes, pseudonyms, and literary tricks. Most notorious was the so-called Bulletin hoax in 1961, but over the years she orchestrated a number of other raids on literary targets, mainly aimed at challenging the power of poetry editors and gatekeepers. For L’Affaire Bulletin (as she sometimes called it), she submitted to that august magazine, under the pseudonym Walter Lehmann, a pair of seemingly unexceptionable sonnets on the theme of Abelard and Eloisa. Only after the poems were published did the Bulletin discover that they were acrostics; read vertically, one spelled out ‘So long Bulletin’, and the other, ‘Fuck all editors’. The first could have passed as a harmless joke, but the second threatened to bring the Vice Squad down on the Bulletin’s hapless editor, Donald Horne. He was not amused, and newspapers around the country echoed his tone of injured outrage. The appearance in print of an obscene word was shocking enough, but the revelation that the author of the sonnets was actually a woman turned shock to horror. To many in Australian society, it was an article of faith that, as an acquaintance of Harwood’s put it, ‘No WOMAN would ever write such a word.’ ‘I had a mental picture, as I heard her pronunciation of “WOMAN”, of little bluebirds with daisies in their beaks,’ Harwood wrote wryly.' (Introduction)

'The question of vocation takes centre stage in the two volumes of Ruth Park's autobiography, A Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx. From earliest childhood, Park writes, she knew she would be a writer: 'It had been as if a voice spoke from a burning bush.' Her depiction of her vocation to the literary life contains all the classic elements of the artist's call: it came out of nowhere, it was a summons that could not be set aside or ignored, and it shaped her destiny. Normally, however, this call takes shape in a specific cultural context: the little girl who longs to be a writer begins her life as a passionate reader surrounded by books, and as part of a family or society that holds writers (in the abstract, at least) in high esteem. Park's context was very different. According to A Fence Around the Cuckoo, for the first ten or so years of her life, she had no books, and no access to books. In the early 1920s, her father was part of a work gang that travelled around remote parts of the North Island of New Zealand building roads and bridges, and until she was six years old her home was a tent. Neither her father nor her seamstress mother owned any books. Even when the family settled in the tiny town of it Kuiti, where Ruth would go to school, books were in short supply. As Park Writes in Fence, 'No one I knee. had any books.' The irresolvable problem of Poverty was compounded in the wider community by a moral distrust of all that books stood for. As Park explains, 'It was thought that reading poked your eyes out and kept you from doing wholesome things.' (Introduction)
 

'Christina Stead was always prickly about the idea of vocation. Indeed, she often insisted to interviewers that she had never had any such thing. Yet in her semi-autobiographical novel The Man Who Loved Children, she gave the character based on herself, 12-year-old Louisa, a potent sense of predestination. In one scene, Louie is cleaning her brothers' bedroom and dreaming of being an actress. Her father has just finished telling her that she looks like a gutter-rat, while downstairs her stepmother is grumbling about her 'dirt and laziness'. Her younger sister is about to ask her to carry down the slop bucket. But Louie is far away, 'declaiming...to a vast, shadowy audience stretching away into an opera house as large as the world'. Her conviction that she is extraordinary saves her from the catastrophe that is her home life. 'If I did not know I was a genius, I would die', she declares — but to herself alone. She is the ugly duckling, whose future as a glorious swan will, she knows, take her far away from the chaos and violence around her.'  (Introduction)

In one of Dorothy Hewett's later poems, 'Lines to the Dark Tower', a girl moves into an empty wheat silo.' There she lives alone, entranced by the view of blowing grass and flowing river and spinning windmills, and weaving what she sees into a magical web, like a twentieth-century West Australian Lady of Shalott. But unlike Tennyson's Lady, she does not pretend to be indifferent to the passing parade. The moment a knight rides by — or, rather, 'some talker / ...his helmet / hanging on the back of his head', or 'one of the silent watchers / ill met by moonlight / his eyes flaming underneath his visor' — she runs from her sanctuary, irresistibly drawn by the promise and the possibility, the drama and the pleasure, of love. was always ready to be inveigled / out of the tower', she confesses. She is a figure for Hewett herself, who at 16 was as excited by the possibilities of her future as a lover as she was by those of her future as an artist. At that age, indeed, she saw no distinction between them.'  (Introduction)

Gwen Harwood's most direct account of the development of her writing ambitions appears in Blessed City, a selection of letters she wrote in wartime Brisbane when she was in her early twenties to Tony Riddell, a new friend on active service in the navy. At the time, she was not a poet — far from it. She was working in the War Damage Commission, a public service institution set up to provide insurance against possible damage resulting from World War H. She found the organisation ludicrous in every aspect, from its aims to its processes to its earnest employees, and in a spirit half of mischief, half of outrage, she began a one-person campaign of mocking, corrupting and destabilising it. Her behaviour was extraordinary. She developed an impenetrable filing system, explicable to no one but herself. She inserted made-up people into the official records. She dedicated long hours at her desk to cutting out cardboard animals and writing private letters. She even staged elaborate phone conversations in German with imaginary interlocutors. Many yeas later she would tell a friend that she could not imagine how she was not fired, or at least moved on.  (Introduction)

For writers, painters and performers of all stripes to talk about a sense of calling is commonplace these days. The idea that art is destiny, that the artist has no choice but to follow their vocation, has become a well-established part of popular discourse. For this very reason, perhaps, the concept of the artist's vocation is easy to dismiss. It has been invoked too often, and in too many situations where it simply does not apply. As well, its romance has been used to disguise unacknowledged privilege, depicting an individual artist's success as entirely the result of their own personal qualities and glossing over the social and cultural advantages that readied the platform for them. (Introduction)

''I need to be a writer,' Ruth Park told her future husband, D'Arcy Niland, on the eve of their marriage. 'That's what I need from life.'

'She was not the only one. At a time when women were considered incapable of being 'real' artists, a number of precocious girls in Australian cities were weighing their chances and laying their plans.

'A Free Flame explores the lives of four such women, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead and Ruth Park, each of whom went on to become a notable Australian writer.

'They were very different women from very different backgrounds, but they shared a sense of urgency around their vocation - their 'need' to be a writer - that would not let them rest.

'Weaving biography, literary criticism and cultural history, this book looks at the ways in which these women laid siege to the artist's identity, and ultimately remade it in their own image.' (Publication summary)

'In August 1961, Gwen Harwood smuggled two acrostic sonnets into the Bulletin under the name Walter Lehmann. The first, 'Eloisa to Abelard', spelled out 'So Long Bulletin,' and the second, 'Aberlard to Eloisa',  'Fuck all Editors.'  The presence of the acrostics, and the identity of their author was soon discovered, and for a few days, the hoax was front-page news. In Brisbane, Truth announced the 'Great Poem Hoax : Experts Fooled by Naughty Sonnets' while in Hobart the same newspaper proclaimed : 'Tas Housewife in Hoax of Year.' Meanwhile an outraged Bulletin expressed its disdain for Harwood's 'sad jest,' remarking snippily that 'a genuine literary hoax would have had some point to it' (3). For Harwood herself, things were 'rather nasty really' for a few weeks (Idle Talk 49), but soon enough, the so-caled Bulletin hoax faded quietly from public view. since then it has sometimes been referenced as an amusing snippet of Australian literary history - usually in relation to the Ern Malley affair.But unlike that earlier hoax, which Ken Ruthven has dubbed Australia's primal scene of literary forgery' (31). Harwood's hoax has rarely been seen as having any real literary or cultural significance.' (Introduction)

'This essay examines the role of Gwen Harwood’s Eisenbart poems in helping to establish her career as a serious poet. It argues that Harwood had more trouble breaking into the male-dominated world of Australian poetry than is generally acknowledged, and that the Eisenbart poems, which centre on a fictional scientist, represent a turning point in her literary fortunes. In the 1950s, Harwood struggled to get the kind of attention she sought from a number of influential poetry editors and reviewers, many of whom were also academics. Chief among them for her were A. D. Hope, Vincent Buckley and James McAuley. Her Eisenbart poems, which both play up to and satirise the cultural icon of the god-professor, were an attempt to subvert expectations of so-called ‘lady poets’ and beat the ‘professors’ at their own game. They also gave literary expression to the debate between positivism and humanism that dominated some aspects of academic life in the 1950s, and to the anger and frustration Harwood experienced at repeated rejections of her work.'

Source: Abstract.