Hal Porter: A writer I haven't read

The Tilted Cross by Hal Porter
Faber & Faber, London, 1961

Recently, I was given a copy of Hal Porter's Tasmanian novel, The Tilted Cross. Published in London in 1961 by Faber and Faber, the novel is set in Van Diemen's Land and is loosely based on the life of Thomas Griffiths Waineright, an artist, author and journalist, possibly a serial killer and 'multiple poisoner'. Surprisingly, given this colourful story, he was transported for forgery.

It wasn't Waineright who intrigued me, however (the Australian Dictionary of Biography provides a balanced overview of his life if you'd like to know more). It was the novel's author - Hal Porter.

Porter's memoir, The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony, was published in 1963. One of the first Australian memoirs, it is widely regarded as a classic and today it's the book for which he is best remembered. Now out of print and not a novel, it still managed to find its way onto Booktopia's 2010 list of 'The 50 Must Read Australian Novels'.

As an adult, Porter lived a peripatetic life. The ADB entry reveals he moved from Bairnsdale to Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart, Sydney, taking up short-lived teaching positions, tutoring, producing plays, running a hotel. In 1949 he joined the Army Education Unit and was posted to Japan twice. London beckoned in the early 1960s but he returned to Australia, spending the remainder of his life alternating between Melbourne and rural Victoria. Homosexual, his biographer Mary Lord revealed in 1993 he was also a paedophile. Was all this movement driven by the need to keep ahead of the law, of unhappy parents and school principals?

The one constant in his life seems to have been his writing. In an oral history interview recorded for the National Library of Australia in March 1964, Porter describes himself as a 'born writer', although one afflicted with a terrible disease.

Porter published Short Stories in 1942 and, according to the blurb on The Tilted Cross, 'won all the major short-story competitions in Australia'. A meeting with Angus and Robertson's editor Beatrice Davis in Sydney lead to the publication of poetry, novels and a trilogy of memoirs. Apparently a bit of a snob, he must have been over the moon to have been published in London by Faber and Faber, joining the likes of TS Eliot, Beckett, Harold Pinter and Ted Hughes.

The Tilted Cross received mixed reviews. In The Canberra Times review published on 9 December 1961, 'FX' wrote:

He spins his words like a thick spider's web and in the depths of the web he set an evil collection of characters - the impotent knight, his adulterous wife, the nymphomaniacal spastic, sadists, drunkards, homosexuals ... The book was written under a Commonwealth Literary Fund Scholarship. In spite of Mr Porter's previous achievements and record, I feel the money might have been better spent.

The full review is available via Trove.

Porter recognised that his writing wasn't liked by everyone, that some reviewers thought he was verbose, baroque and overblown. The opening paragraph of The Tilted Cross provides an example of why they might have thought that:

Van Dieman's Land, an ugly trinket suspended at the world's discredited rump, was freezing. From horizon to horizon stretched a tarpaulin of congealed vapour so tense that it had now and then split, and had rattled down a vicious litter of sleet like minced glass, that year, that winter, that day.

In his oral history interview, Porter claimed his large vocabulary was due to a childhood addiction to books and dictionaries.

Porter died in September 1984. A brief obituary in The Age noted that he once said that 'posterity would see him as a passable novelist, a fair playwright but a pretty good short story writer'. He was 73.

This post was written as part of the 2016 Sydney Story Factory Pen to Paper Challenge. I'm inspired by the work of Sydney Story Factory. I'd like to help them grow so that, one day, Martian Embassies will be all over this country. So during September I'm putting pen to paper - and hopefully rebooting my blog. If you enjoyed this post, please give whatever you can. Let's help the Sydney Story Factory grow.

Not Writing

I can't write. 

It's 6am and I've turned the computer on to write the blog post I've been mulling over for a week. But the internet connection is defeating me. The computer gives up before a page is fully loaded. I reboot the modem. Wait. Sip the mug of hot water that is part of my morning routine. Try again. Nothing. There's a message on the screen that assures me it's trying, that it will keep trying. Before it gives up.

The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clark -
a book that made me think about the thread
of racism that runs deeply in our society.

The idea for the post began simply enough. I wanted to review two recent reads. The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clark and Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms by Anita Heiss. One a memoir set in Kellyville on the edge of Sydney in the 1980s. The other a cross-cultural romance set in Cowra in 1944. Seemingly they have nothing in common. And yet both books allowed me to stand in someone else's shoes - young Maxine, who's Afro-Caribbean heritage made her a target in the school yard and 17-year-old Mary, living a life controlled by the Aborigines Protection Act during the war. Both books reveal what it's like to be black in Australia. And both books allowed me to learn what Australian racism looks like. I wanted to explain how they showed me how deeply ingrained racism is in our country. Most of us say we aren't racist. We love Chinese and Vietnamese food. We buy sushi for lunch and tickets to Bangarra Dance Theatre. But both books made me wonder about my very white upbringing, about whether I too am complicit.

One of the beautifully coloured
homes of Georgetown.

I am not writing. I thought participating in the Sydney Story Factory's Pen to Paper Challenge would be a wonderful reboot. Instead, I'm struggling. I'm avoiding. Yesterday, I helped the 11-year-old clean his room. I was thinking about the blog post, though. Thinking I'd write it in the evening. I'd turn it into a travel post on Georgetown in the US instead. I selected photos, researched the history of Georgetown on my phone. In the evening, with everyone else tucked in bed, I read Good Weekend. Sam Dastyari's problems and the role Scientology played in the end of Tom and Nicole's marriage were so much more compelling.

But my thinking was overwhelmed by my Twitter feed. All week, I scrolled through articles and comments about Lionel Shriver's speech about cultural appropriation, given at the Brisbane Writers Festival. I watched Twitter as Yassmin Abdel-Magied walked out. I read her impassioned explanation, Lionel's speech, Marlon James' Facebook post, Caroline Overington's comments, and Maxine Beneba Clark's report of meeting Lionel Shriver. And in the midst of it all, Pauline Hanson gave her second maiden speech in the Australian Parliament, replacing her 'swarm of Asians' with her 'swarm of Muslims'. 

Where, I wondered, did my simple review fit in all of this? Did I have anything new to add? Annabel Crabb in the Sydney Morning Herald and Nesrine Malik in The Guardian seemed to say it so much better.

Now, this morning, I'm here to face the screen. Willing. Committed. But the internet won't oblige. It's recalcitrant. It won't cooperate. It's a blank screen that will not load. I'm not putting fingers to the keyboard this morning.

If I want to write, I have to revert to first principals. I have to put pen to paper, follow the advice of the Sydney Story Factory to the letter. This isn't a keyboard challenge. It's pen to paper. I have to face the page, not the screen. Pick up the pen, hold it in my hand.

The pen bulges where my fingers grip it and my grip is tight. I dig words into the page. My hand can't keep up with the words. My hand tires in a way my fingers never tire on the keyboard. No matter how I twist the pen, how I adjust my grip, sooner or later the metal clip digs into the soft skin at the base of my index finger. It's uncomfortable. Awkward. But I'm holding on tight. Not giving up yet. Still writing.

This post was written as part of the 2016 Sydney Story Factory Pen to Paper Challenge. I'm inspired by the work of Sydney Story Factory. I'd like to help them grow so that, one day, Martian Embassies will be all over this country. So during September I'm putting pen to paper - and hopefully rebooting my blog. If you enjoyed this post, please give whatever you can. Let's help the Sydney Story Factory grow.

Richard and Ruby

I met Richard Neville in 1994. It wasn't a meeting he'd recollect. He was in Canberra to deliver the Ruby Hutchison Memorial Address at the National Press Club on 15 March. I was a young public servant, working for the Federal Bureau of Consumer Affairs. A bit starry-eyed. And he was a media star in a cream linen suit. Lanky, his deep fringe hid his forehead, emphasising his generous smile, disguising his critique of the 'sacred cow' of conspicuous consumption with wit and humour.

'Men and women are born free, ladies and gentleman,' he said, 'but today we are everywhere in chain stores.'

Last Sunday, Richard died. He was only 74. We have relived the founding of Oz Magazine, the court cases, the willingness to challenge the norms of the 1960s. For those of us who were too young to read Oz when it was first published, last year the University of Wollongong digitised it and, with Richard's blessing, made it available online for non-commercial purposes. Now we can read it and think about why it created the furore it did.

I, though, have been reliving that event at the Press Club. It turns out that the National Library of Australia (full disclosure: my employer) recorded the lecture. You can listen to it online. And there is Richard Neville's voice, his humour, his willingness to be a disruptor before 'disruption' was a thing. He argued for a 'Buy Nothing Day', saying that 'as long as we go on consuming it is the world that is going to die'. In less than an hour, he mashed up conspicuous consumerism, the Princess of Wales, Reeboks, Hey, Hey It's Saturday, the Body Shop, the Berlin Wall, poverty, wealth and cannabis.

Ruby Hutchison, after whom the lecture was named, was a disruptor too. Although if you compare photos of Ruby with her curled hair and cat's eye glasses with those of a young Richard Neville, it seems unlikely they would have anything in common. In 1954, she was the first woman to be elected to the West Australian Legislative Council. In her long parliamentary career, she argued for education, child welfare, and electoral reform. She was also a founder of the Australian Consumers' Association, publisher of Choice Magazine. When Choice Magazine was born in 1960 (three years before Oz), there was no consumer legislation as we know it today. Arguably, Ruby Hutchison's work helped to change Australian life as much as Richard's, paving the way for the passing of the Trade Practices Act in 1975. She died in 1974, a year before the legislation was enacted.

There is so much about the day at the Press Club that I've forgotten - but the recording of the lecture brings the memories back. Introducing Richard was the then Minister for Consumer Affairs, the Hon Jeannette McHugh MP. She launched a new resource for Australian school children, Consumer Power, the National Primary School Consumer Education Project. I sweated over that resource, working with colleagues in consumer affairs agencies across Australia and the ABC to produce a CD-rom, education kit and television series. There was a long evening in the State Library of South Australia, a few of us working on edits. I can see us hunched around a table in the reading room, searching the shelves in the children's section for references. What I can't see is what we were working on. Were we editing scripts, the education kit, the text for the CD-rom?

Consumer Power was distributed to every primary school in Australia. I still have a copy and there's one in the National Library too. But before we knew it, CD-roms were old technology, although the accompanying tv series was still being broadcast by the ABC in 2005.

I worked for the Federal Bureau of Consumer Affairs and its many incarnations until 2000. By then, it had changed shape significantly. It moved from under the umbrella of the Attorney-General's Department, eventually being absorbed into Treasury. But that's a story for another day and I wouldn't trust my memory to get the story right.

And it seems my memory is faulty in other ways too. For there was no cream linen suit. A photograph of Richard Neville published in The Canberra Times the next day, clearly shows him wearing a dark suit - and a tie covered in large white polkadots.

Richard Neville and Ruby Hutchison have both died. The Federal Bureau of Consumer Affairs is possibly only remembered by those of us who worked there. But Choice and the Australian Consumer Association still exist. So too does the Ruby Hutchison Memorial Lecture. Supported by Choice and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, it is held on the eve of World Consumer Rights Day (15 March). And perhaps the creators of The Checkout, which has brought consumer education into the home, heard Richard Neville's Ruby Hutchison Memorial Address and are carrying the flame.

This post was written as part of the 2016 Sydney Story Factory Pen to Paper Challenge. I'm inspired by the work of Sydney Story Factory. I'd like to help them grow so that, one day, Martian Embassies will be all over this country. So during September I'm putting pen to paper - and hopefully rebooting my blog. If you enjoyed this post, please give whatever you can. Let's help the Sydney Story Factory grow.