Marjorie Quinn, servant of literature

A new donation to our collection is The Years that the Locust hath eaten: Memoirs of Marjorie Quinn, published by Arcadia, an imprint of Australian Scholarly Publishing.
It is of particular interest to Manly readers because the Quinn family were long-time residents, living in Darley Road and Addison Road. Marjorie Quinn was the niece of the well-known poet, Roderic Quinn, whose poem Manly was at one time a standard recitation for a generation of schoolchildren (see below). Her father, Patrick Quinn, was a journalist and was friends with many of the Bulletin poets, including Henry Lawson, Victor Daley and Henry Kendall. He became MLA for the Sydney Bligh electorate, and on his death in 1926 was buried in Manly Cemetery.
Marjorie Quinn was born in Sydney in 1889, and made her name as the founding secretary of the Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1928. She mixed in artistic circles and made pen portraits of many of the celebrities of the inter-war period. The value of her memoirs lies in these sketches of the characters of the likes of Dorothea Mackellar, Miles Franklin, and Ion Idriess as well as other minor writers with Manly connections such as Dora Wilcox and JHM Abbott, both of whom lived locally at one time, and the formidable administrator of Papua New Guinea, Sir Hubert Murray, (who grew up in a big house on North Steyne named The Pines). She seems to have had a talent for introducing unlikely individuals to each other.
Although her memoirs are primarily about other people, and are light on recollections of Manly, Marjorie Quinn remembered how much she relished body-surfing at South Steyne every morning well into her 50s.
My thanks go to Kath Berryman, who with Deborah McMahon was responsible for salvaging and publishing these memoirs, for her kind donation of a copy to our collection.

Manly

By Roderic Quinn


Lulled by breezes serene and tender,
Set by surges and snow-white sands,
Crowned with beauty and clad in splendour,
Matchless Manly for ever stands.

Hers forever the anthem olden
Breaking waves through the ages raise;
Mellow moonlight and noontide golden
Light with glory her nights and days.

Set apart with her hills and hollows,
Pines and beaches, at peace she dreams;
Hers the witch-lights the artist follows –
Held and spelled by their magic gleams.

Sought by all are the gifts she proffers –
Weary women and worn-out men,
Who so tastes of the cup she offers,
Longs to drink of its wine again.

No place else may a man discover
All the glory she ceaseless pours:
West of sunset are hearts that love her –
Dreaming ever of her lit shores.

Girt by waters that slumber never,
Swathed in glamour that ceaseless shines,
Loved and lovely she glows for ever –
Manly dreaming behind her pines.

Fishing with Gelignite

     Three men were arrested by police in December 1913 and charged with “destroying fish by means of an explosion.”  They had been observed throwing gelignite into the waters of Middle Harbour, with the resulting explosion killing hundreds of fish.  They were each fined £10, a heavy fine for those days, with the option of hard labour.  The use of explosives to catch fish, apart from being very unsporting, also resulted in the deaths of spawning fish, which could be disastrous for local fisheries.

     But the use of gelignite in fishing was an early adoption of the explosive, with predictable results.  In January 1918, three men went on a fishing expedition to the rocks at the base of North Head.  One of the men, John Kelly, heard a bang, and saw his two mates, Richard Flew and George Gibson struggling in the water.  Flew had been in the act of lighting a stick of gelignite when it blew up before he could throw it.  He lost his right hand, and suffered injuries to his arms, legs and body.  Gibson suffered severe facial injuries.  Both men were taken to hospital and were reported to be in a critical condition.  Richard Flew seems to have made a good recovery, since he lived on for a good few years, dying in Manly in 1946, aged 81.

     Several other similar incidents happened throughout the next thirty years at an almost annual rate.  A young man at Port Kembla blew off his hand in 1919.   A 16 year old blew off his hand in 1938 at Perth – prompting the question, how did a 16 year old come to have gelignite?

     Xavier Herbert, author of Poor Fellow My Country, used to recount how when he wished to dive for gold in the Northern Territory, he would detonate some dynamite to clear an area of crocodiles.

     The startling aspect to modern eyes is how readily available gelignite and other explosives seem to have been, not to mention the cavalier way it was handled, right up to the outbreak of WW2.  After the war, its use was much more tightly regulated.

JMacR

Baby's Day Out

    

Cargo Boat Narrabeen at Manly Wharf c1920

      I'm sure a good writer could use the following story as the basis for an opening chapter of a novel.  The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 10 November 1913:

     “One of the crew of a Manly cargo boat last Thursday discovered a little boy 2½ years old sleeping peacefully among the cargo.  The boat was then taken alongside the Manly Wharf, and, as nobody knew whom the child belonged to, he was handed over to the care of the police.

     The police at once got in touch with the other stations, but it was not till 10.30pm that the little fellow was claimed by his mother, living at Darlinghurst.

     She left him outside a church in that suburb while she went in to her devotions, and on coming out she found that the boy had disappeared.  How he managed to get to Manly is a mystery.

     When found he was minus the boots and socks he was wearing when his mother last saw him at the church door.”

JMacR.

Bombing of Darwin

This weekend marks the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Darwin.  It is thought that more than 240 people lost their lives in the two raids on 19 February 1942, including 68 civilians.
These images, which as far as we can tell have not been published before, come from an album kept by Squadron-Leader Ray Thorold-Smith, one of the Spitfire pilots who fought in the defence of Darwin.  He was killed in action on 15 March 1943.

Banks, the Police Station and the Post Office were dive-bombed and machine-gunned.

Ships were sunk in Darwin Harbour.

Graffiti reads "Nuts to Tojo, [Hitler] and Musso", "The Ship Inn" and "No beer served after 4 bombs fell".

Spitfires taking off from a jungle airstrip in defence of Darwin.

The Japanese weren't the only threat.

JMacR

A link to Dickens

     This week marks the bicentenary of Charles Dickens, so here is a very tenuous link from Manly to the great novelist.

     In February 1837, the Australian newspaper published the following poem:

Address to North Head

By Epsilon  25 January 1837[1]

Hail! Hail! In awe I gaze on thee,

Stern warder of the wave,

O’erlooking shore, o’erlooking sea,

While round thee tempests rave;

And through thy rocky portals sweep

The solemn voices of the deep,

And Ocean as a slave –

Now like a mirror spreading forth,

Then rising in rebellious wrath.

Thou smil’st on either element

When by thee swiftly borne,

The stout ship flies with canvas rent

And rigging rudely torn;

When viewless gales in tumult keep

High revel o’er the frighted deep

Thou smil’st a smile of scorn;

Opposing to each futile shock

In sullen pride thy sterile rock.

Say, hoary headland, hast not thou

Some wond’rous changes seen

Since by thy weather-beaten brow

First swept the Ocean Queen,

And past thy wall careering went

Britannia’s earliest armament?

While thy majestic mien

Cast o’er the whole a somber gloom,

Fit contrast with surrounding bloom.

How changed from when thy watch thou held

Across the lonely main,

When on the surge that past thee swelled

Came no adventurous train –

None present, save thy bride and thee,

The silent solitary sea;

No sound except the strain

Of some lone tenant of the sky

Who thought of home and hastened by.

But now thy beetling rock around

The busy vessels glide,

From many a distant region bound

They swarm the people tide;

The sturdy mariners who chase

Old Ocean’s mightiest monster race,

Within thy harbours ride,

And in thy hundred coves we meet

By bay and shore a gallant fleet.

Frown on, old barrier, still frown on,

In grandeur aye alone,

And they who stand thy brow upon

Thy majesty must own,

When gazing from thy craggy steep

In wonder o’er the vassal deep,

As from a sea-king’s throne;

And future sovereigns of the sea

Shall send their mandate forth from thee.

 

 

     It's not exactly Lord Byron, and stanza four is particularly unfortunate, given the long Aboriginal association with North Head, but the first four lines of the last stanza are still apt.

     Who was "Epsilon"?  Epsilon was one of the pen-names of John Lang (1816-1864), regarded as the first native-born Australian novelist, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography.  He was born at Parramatta, and attended Sydney College.  He contributed verse to the Australian from 1834 to 1838, including an unusual poem in praise of swimming, so the verses above are the effort of a teenager.  He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and was called to the Bar at Middle Temple, before returning to New South Wales to practice as a barrister.  Later he settled in India, where he ran a newspaper and wrote novels.  In the 1850s he was in England, and contributed stories to Charles Dickens' periodical, Household Words.

     Lang was apparently a fund of interesting stories about Australia, and I wonder if he ever regaled Dickens with them?  Great Expectations appeared in 1860, and it is tempting to speculate that the convict Magwitch had some basis in Lang's stories of Botany Bay.

     A collection of Lang's poetry was published in 2000 by the Mulini Press, and the John Lang Project aims to republish his books in time for his bicentenary in 2016.

 

JMacR

[1] Published in the Australian 7 February 1837, p4. 

---

A Nantucket Sleigh Ride

     The Sydney Gazette carried this story on 25 September 1819 (p3):

     “A whale has been for the last several weeks reported to be within the harbour, and the natives have given information that it had got on shore and perished in one of the creeks about North Harbour.

    If this report be true, it now appears that there must have been more than one, as on Monday last [20^th], three young men namely, Daniel Cubitt, John Jenkins, and John Abbott, when fishing off the Heads under the safeguard of a killock rope [a rope with a stone attached as a crude anchor], a large whale passed beneath their boat, and running against the rope, forced them to a considerable distance with the rapidity of lightning, but fortunately skimming the surface of the water did not take them down.

     The youths had immediate recourse to the only means that was left of saving their lives and preventing themselves from being either carried out to sea or drawn down to the bottom; and this was done by cutting away the rope as quick as possible.” 

     Whalers off Newfoundland would later refer to this sort of incident as a "Nantucket sleigh ride".  A whale could easily reach speeds of 20mph towing a rowboat, so it must have been a hair-raising experience.

JMacR

    

Kylie Tennant centenary

     Researching Kylie Tennant in preparation for her upcoming centenary, I found this photograph in our collection, showing the pupils of Brighton College in the mid-1920s.  From 1924-1927, Brighton College occupied 10 The Crescent, Manly, also known as Dun Aros, now one of the oldest surviving houses in Manly, dating from the late 1870s.  In the second row from the front, on the extreme right, is, I think, Kylie Tennant, who would be probably 14 or 15 years old.  This may be the first time she has been described as ‘on the extreme right’.

     She claimed to have been the first to have the ‘Eton bob’ hairstyle in Manly.

     Here, from the pages of the Brighton Chronicle, the school magazine, is a skit written by Tennant at about the age of 15, expressing her feelings about exams.

The Lords Appellant

Scene: Hades.  A number of gloomy shades very busy doing nothing.  Pluto presiding.

P: Ho!  Who’s without?  Make way and let him pass.

Why, ‘tis King Richard, second of that name,

Once king of England, now amongst us here

An honoured citizen.  What is’t your majesty?

R: I crave a boon, my honoured lord; ‘tis this:

That I may with your help revenge myself

Upon some schoolgirls on the upper earth

Residing now at Brighton College.  There,

Lest ye might think I take a mean revenge,

Go, haunt the girls and hear their daily talk.

They insult me, and all, forsooth, because

In sprightly fashion I was wont to utter

Sometimes a speech of extra-special length.

Because my chronicler of later date,

One William Shakespeare, here amongst us now,

Recorded these they never cease complaints

Against my blameless person, Ovid too,

Caesar, and poets other than our band,

All make complaints against the Brighton girls.

Grant me this boon and it shall be the last,

For I’ve a splendid plan!

P: Say on.

R: A thousand thanks, your majesty, my plan

Is simple in itself, ‘tis this my lord,

That Shakespeare’s tragic undiscovered play,

You know how long it is my lord and passing tedious,

(I heard him read it here the other night) –

We’ll find some learned men to dig it up

And set it for the next year’s Intermediate,

By hook or crook.  The girls who go this year

From Brighton College, entering the exam,

We’ll mark down, or lose their papers, some mislay,

And see that they gain not a single A.

Then next year they must study twice as hard,

The horror William’s worried over now.

Their groans will be as music to our ears.

Is not the retribution just, my lord?

P: Most excellent indeed!  We’ll set to work

And plan the details now.  Ye lazy imps,

Haste to gain passes over River Styx [and so on].

I love the wit of that “Say on” in the middle.  A pretty good blank verse pastiche.

JMacR