Volume 39 Nº 2: July 2003

Being a bookworm in mid-century Queensland

Jane Hyde

The library was in the local School of Arts, a classic of Queensland public architecture: weatherboard, stilts, steps, high ceilings, cream paint with chocolate trimmings. It was situated beside a park amongst whose isolated gums and clumps of red and golden canna the local Brownies met on Saturdays. Dressed in a complicated brown costume with a scarf and a hat and a small scalpel for incising snake-bites, we formed a circle on the worn brown grass: 'I am a gnome / helping mother in the home.'

Approaching the library I would be gripped by queasy fear. Before finding Milly Molly Mandy, Peter Pan, The Saturday Children (who wrote that?) or A Little Bush Maid and sniffing the swoony fragrance of the gluey bindings and gorging on the encrypted magic inside the covers I had to overcome my terror of the formidable steps, the large plain silent room. It was my first experience of The Quest and the quality of character one needs in order to pursue it: fortitude. I also sensed the connection between sense and sensibility: that the sensuous pleasure of reading is won because someone, somewhere has come up with sensible systems to order and organise your reading matter. As much as the books I loved the bits and pieces of bureaucracy that went with borrowing them: the boxes full of cards, the borrowing slip inside the front cover, the date stamp, the inky pad.

In part this explains why I trained as a librarian. The other part was that I was advised to do so by a guidance officer who, like a tarot reader, held five cards on which hung the fate of virtually all girls in the fifties and sixties: librarian, teacher, nurse, secretary, air hostess.

Picture books were rare after the war and you joined a library in the community or at school only when you were able to read. There were two bookstores in Brisbane, the Queensland Book Depot and Barker's, and from the latter my parents bought us the children's classics of mid-century White Australia: The Popsy books by Mabel Lucie Attwell; A.A. Milne's quartet, When We Were Very Young, Now We Are Six, Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner; Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and Scotty in Gumnut Land by May Gibbs; and Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll with the original illustrations by Tenniel. I was also given a small box designed to look like a treasure-chest containing six tiny little books of stories by Hans Christian Andersen.

On my seventh birthday I was given Frank Dalby Davison's Children of the Dark People which described not only in words but in beautiful woodcut illustrations that I can recall clearly even as I write this a half a century later the adventures of an Aboriginal brother and sister, Jackageree and Nimitabel who are abducted by an evil Witch Doctor. Spirits emerge to protect the children from their scary nemesis as they traverse the landscape of river and plain, billabong and mountain, snow and sand, until they are rescued and reunited with their tribe. In the final scene they look down across the plains to see white men approaching with flocks of sheep whom Davidson embraces in his narrative as the benign portents of a new era in which white will live amicably with black under the protecting spirit of the land.

An Aboriginal friend with whom I discussed the book years later said she found it totally deplorable, and one sees her point: the story is westernised, historically false and chillingly valedictory. For all that, the characters had a humanity as real as my own: when they laughed I laughed too, when they were cut, I bled. This was a singular and salutary accomplishment when one remembers the universal demonisation and ribaldry Aboriginal people suffered in those racist times. I loved The Children of the Dark People more than any other book I ever owned and was heartbroken to lose it while moving house a decade ago.

The following year I received my own copy of The Book of Common Prayer. It had a pale blue leather cover and a prefatory photograph of Queen Elizabeth the Second in celebration of her coronation. I used it to learn the catechism. I memorised the words as I walked to Sunday School and forget them immediately afterwards except for a few arresting and highly puzzling fragments: the pomp and vanity of this wicked world and all the sinful lusts of the flesh... Soon afterwards my mother introduced me to the Gang of Children genre by giving me Patricia Wrightson's The Crooked Snake followed by Enid Blyton's Famous Five series.

At the age of ten I started piano lessons and this, oddly enough, added to my fiction repertoire. My teacher Raymond was a sleepy-head and to keep me occupied while he crawled out of bed, put his clothes and cracked his fingers to warm the joints, his mother gave me Seven Little Australians to read - and re-read. Without the enticement of this classic I would never have sped down the hill on my bike to fumble my scales and render Bach badly before going to school. I still wish Judy hadn't been hit by that tree.

My parents applied censorship based on some kind of vague fifties opprobrium for anything American. Because of this I could only read The Golden Books courtesy of my friend Margaret who had stacks of them. I loved these forbidden fruits of sentimentality with their faux gilt spines and brightly coloured illustrations, so startling in comparison with English and Australian books which were still illustrated in black and white, except of course for May Gibbs' drawings which were brown and white.

Reading comics was also difficult as they, too, were associated with American culture but we somehow acquired copies of Archie and Superman and The Phantom, making us better off than an Englishman I knew who was still, in his thirties, so deeply incensed at having been deprived of comics as a child, Rupert Bear in particular, that his wife made him a Rupert Suit to shut him up. Comic strips were different, you could read them in the Courier Mail in a section called 'the funnies'. My exemplar of boyhood was Ginger Meggs, of girlhood Suzie, of family life The Potts, and of action fantasy, Mandrake. For adult themes there was Dagwood and his dippy wife Blondie in her saucy little apron and polished high heels.

When I reached my teens I had that sense common among children brought up on books written for children and bestowed upon them by parents as a certain and unforgettable expression of their love that I had reached the end of a secure road back which I looked with forlorn and unhealthy nostalgia rather than face the grown-up literature that lay ahead. Young adult fiction came into being essentially to ease our arrestment but I was of a generation that preceded this innovation. Then an uncle gave me The Catcher in the Rye. Like thousands or should I say, millions of other young readers, I looked, I read, I jumped - out of my skin.

My mother glanced at it, noted the language, and reproached my hapless uncle, to put it mildly. But the deed was done. After Holden Caulfield I understood that in reading, as in all things, it's wise to put away childish things and grow up.

Jane Hyde qualified and worked for many years as a librarian. She also made a career as a public servant and writer. Her works of fiction for teens include the novella The Place at the Coast and the story 'Heaven' published in the anthology Nightmares in Paradise edited by Robyn Sheahan. Jane also teaches writing and has been a writer-in-residence at two schools.