Australian communities in the novels of Hesba Fay Brinsmead.

Lyn Linning

Hesba Fay Brinsmead passed away as Spring yielded to Summer in 2003. Hearing the news brought to mind dialogue from her much-loved novel Pastures of the Blue Crane. Ryl has arrived to visit her frail great-grandfather just as the community nurse is leaving.

"The old chap's not looking too good." She hesitated. "It's the Spring, I suppose. The old folks always go at the turn of the year."
"Why," said Ryl, "isn't the spring supposed to be the time when everything's jumping?".

The nurse smiled. "Yeah, that's the drill they give you, but there's another side to it. The spring's a time that gives to the strong and takes from the weak." (p177)

Always physically and spiritually attuned to the natural world, Hesba Brinsmead shared her way of seeing into the life of things with children and young adults in publications dated from 1964 to 1993. Reading most of her books again in January 2004 I felt their power and importance as:

a living record of various Australian communities and environments
engaging stories blending adventure with self-discovery, coming-of-age motifs and enduring values
testaments of faith in young people, however disadvantaged, to make something of their lives
markers on the road to understanding for those Australians of any age who have learned to care about environmental conservation and social justice

Australian environments and communities

Brinsmead believed that places and communities, including their natural and human histories, make people what they are. There are always signs of the past and some characters who know and tell of a place's history in ways which relate to both character development and contemporary issues such as conservation, race relations and social justice. Stated explicitly in Longtime Passing, these beliefs consistently underpin her writing.

Most of the story of Longtime happened before I was born. Yet, because Longtime made me whatever I am, it is my story; and that is the way I must tell it. I must tell it all, even to the earliest coming of the white man to this secret country. (p1)

In several of the novels, the plot hinges on a young protagonist's growth through interactions with an unfamiliar environment and community. Brinsmead excels at depicting Australian settings and evoking the lifestyles of the various groups and individuals who inhabit them. Implicit in her stories are the beliefs that communities can effectively support young people as they make the transition to adulthood and that community attitudes can change for the better. To read Pastures of the Blue Crane is to experience what life was like for young people of the Northern NSW coast and hinterland in the 1960s - enjoying the beach, surfing, attending New Years Eve celebrations at Coolangatta; working in small towns, on banana and dairy farms; undertaking studies at the University of Queensland; responding to the first signs of the land redevelopment which has since transformed the region for tourists and rich residents; and thinking about their relationships with neighbours of different ethnicity and socio-economic class. Ryl quickly prefers her newly-inherited farm to city life and comforts, responding joyfully to her first view of pink matel-grass pastures, sugar cane, overgrown tropical fruit, and the blue crane itself. Raised in boarding schools and deprived of home life, Ryl's circumstances now ensure frequent contact with a range of people of different generations:

Dusty, her grandfather whom she met only at the reading of her father's will, is joint inheritor of the farm and plans to live on it for the rest of his life.
Clem and Rose, warm-hearted middle-aged neighbours, provide practical, social and emotional support.
Perry, first a friend but later found to be a brother, and his (their) Samoan great-grandfather live on the adjoining farm. Perry is helpful as a local taxi driver, member of the peer group of young people in the district and future agricultural science student.
Friendly young people including the chemist's son Glen have different opportunities and preferences from university education to local employment. They include Ryl in their social activities and willingly join working bees to help on her farm.
A surveyor and his young assistant notify Ryl and Dusty of Government plans to build a water tower on their land, but both sympathetically help them avoid it when they understand how much the farm means to its owners.
Mr Biggs the carrier, Phil the radio repair man, the district nurse, and King Cotton the farm labourer, though unimportant for the plot, flesh out the life of the community which sustains Ryl as she becomes a woman capable of managing a farm, choosing a career, resisting prevalent racial prejudice and caring responsibly for others.

Other novels follow a similar pattern of plot and character development in which the natural environment and community life are of integral importance.

Because Perry and his great grandfather have lived apart from other descendants of Islanders brought to the district to work on sugar cane plantations, Ryl does not meet them at close quarters. Listen to the Wind, set in the same region, begins with recently-widowed Bella Greenrush, daughter of an indigenous mother and New Hebridean father, fishing for her family's evening meal. The novel is as much about her struggle to have a church erected at 'the point' where they live as it is about 19-year-old Loveday Smith's efforts to own and work a trawler against the advice of her Anglo-Australian neighbours. An outsider, Loveday's challenge is to be accepted by the community in spite of acting atypically, firstly as a young woman aspiring to own and work a trawler-boat and secondly as a close friend and business partner of Bella's children Tam and Joey. In developing the two overlapping narratives, Brinsmead depicts a lively cast of minor characters from all sectors of the community at home and at work. The trawler men come to admire Loveday's grit, accept her friendship with the Greenrush family and help her; the hostile neighbour's generous wife becomes a financial partner; and the local constable manages matters so that the consequences of some illegal acts are not too dire for Bella's extended family and friends: without avoiding social justice issues, Brinsmead shows a community capable of rising above conservatism and prejudice to do the right thing by the young.

Season of the Briar (1965) and Echo in the Wilderness (1972) are set in the wilds of Tasmania, places Hesba Brinsmead came to know and love on visits to her sister's family. In Season of the Briar, young people are involved in complex interactions within and among groups as they experience isolation, hardship and adventure. Brinsmead drew on knowledge of her husband's agricultural weed-spraying business, realistically depicting a team of four young men driving heavy vehicles laden with equipment and chemicals to work for a remote community of German immigrants in the South West. A party of young bushwalkers whom the spraying team have encountered on their travels is also in the district to explore and climb. The search for a bushwalker lost in bad weather draws all the threads of plot and characterisation together, but the vivid sense of place gives the novel unity and leaves a strong impression of the streams, button grass plains, tundra and harsh, snowy mountains.

The community in Echo in the Wilderness consists of wilderness people, both long-term residents who support themselves by fishing and mining in a small way and friends anxious to save what animal and plant life they can when Lake Tara (Pedder) is flooded, including a professor of botany, bushwalkers and firewatchers. Light aircraft are of central importance to plot, characterisation and setting. The main protagonists are Clippie, a young charter pilot who has come to see and fix an old plane inherited from his uncle, and his girlfriend Bev, who takes a holiday job in Hobart. Both are soon involved in spotting animals to be rescued and other dangerous aviation exploits, allowing Brinsmead to give an aerial as well as a ground-level view of the landscape. When an airstrip is needed, everyone is happy to work on Christmas Day to make it. Brinsmead's authentic description of the process and picture of the diverse group working as a community and, afterwards, enjoying Christmas Dinner together is one of many scenes in her novels which express her belief in community cooperation, honest work and shared values. The episode is suffused with her passion for the wilderness and sadness at the flooding of the lake. In the end, Clippie and Bev must leave to get on with their lives in other places.

Brinsmead's protagonists are shaped by their interactions with the natural environment, the local community (including the tensions within it), work ( theirs and other people's) as well as the trends and events of the time. In Who Calls from Afar?, Lyn comes to live in Moree on the Western Plains of NSW and mixes with both the rural community to which her cousin's family belongs and the group of scientists at the Earth Station where she works. Stirred in equal measure by the beauty of leopardwood trees and the wonder of the first manned flight to the moon, Lyn knows she belongs in both a local community and the world.

In The Ballad of Benny Perhaps (1977), Brinsmead depicts the small opal-mining community of Sunday Creek in far Western Queensland where University drop-out Ben returns after a spell in gaol to work his claim in partnership with teenage Blue, daughter of an indigenous mother and Swedish immigrant father. The trigger-happy Bizley men cause conflict within the otherwise cohesive group, while the Squatter and a group from Sydney investigating the site's potential for larger scale operations threaten their lifestyle. Many aspects of the social and natural environment of Sunday Creek seem hostile to the healthy development of young people: violence; alcoholism; petty crime; no educational opportunities; no peer group; lack of respect from the local squatter, publican and police; adults who let the publican trick them into drinking all the profits from their hard work; harsh landscape; remoteness from services and facilities. Yet Benny chooses to live there and Blue, after her brief experience of city life, is willing to return at least until she is better prepared to further her education elsewhere. Sunday Creek has its own beauty and integrity: 'a dying land, that sang of life and the sweetness of it' (p3). Besides the lure of the glowing opal beneath the ground, Benny loves the birds, the leopardwood trees and, after The Wet, 'wild flowers springing from the dust'( p3). The men of Sunday Creek have different ethnic origins: British, Greek, Swedish and (Benny himself) Hungarian while the three women are indigenous. But there are no racist comments or disputes. The women's skill as hunters in hard times and the opal they find by noodling are important for the group's survival, hence they are accorded due respect as well as the affection of their partners. The Sunday Creek community accept Blue, allow her to grow into a confident young woman, and do not look askance at Benny's teaching and befriending her in a way scarcely credible in mainstream Australian communities at the time.

Though so many of her protagonists benefit from life and adventure in Australia's coastal, rural and wild places, Brinsmead avoids the simplistic equation of city life with alienation. In Beat of the City, Raylene's father and extended family have failed her, and so has the community of Mussel Flat. In Melbourne, she certainly gets into trouble but she also finds people to help her out of it and enable her to begin the process of reconciliation with her family. In A Sapphire for September, inner Sydney (Paddo and The Cross) is lively, interesting and a good place for Binny and her mother to make a living from their coffee shop, though Brinsmead also it makes clear why the Huntsmans love their rural property in the Blue Mountains too much to leave it without a struggle. Students and members of the lapidary club, all city-based, enable them to pay their debts and stay on.

The Longtime series (Longtime Passing; Longtime Dreaming; Christmas at Longtime; and Once there was a Swagman) tells the story of Brinsmead's parents, siblings and extended family from the 1920s when her father and his brothers came to live in the Candlebark Country in the Blue Mountains until the 1950s. Longtime Passing, the most popular in the series, can be read as a pioneering story.

Longtime Passing deals with elemental issues; the growth of the soil and the spirit that leads man into the wilderness to make and beautify a dwelling that will become a home for him and his descendants.... There is reverence in the telling, a nostalgia for the basic things of life, the hardships which make pleasure sweeter and more poignant.
(Saxby, 1993, p492-3)

However, it is not a simple celebration of pioneers and pioneering. There are tensions within the family: between the parents, between the father and only son, between the mother and one daughter. Inevitably, the children leave home and return only to visit and, later, to ensure that their children know the place and hear the stories. The timber provided the family's livelihood, but the tragedy of the lost blue-gum forests is acknowledged. In spite of all the brothers' hard work - farming, honey and timber - Longtime never made the family materially well-off or even comfortable. Flood, fire and economic depression took their toll. In spite of the pet magpie's timely attack on the surveyor and his notebook, the road was eventually built through the Blue Mountains and consequent 'progress' changed Longtime beyond recognition.

Romance, passion and humour: Brinsmead's special blend

Though there are boy-girl friendships and flirtatious episodes, the novels are not love- romances. The young people are more concerned with self-realisation, attaining economic independence and working for the causes they have espoused. Adventure-romance plots (often improbable, but entertaining) keep the stories moving along: a classic shipwreck-marooned-escape tale (Isle of the Seahorse); catching the louts who tried to destroy Loveday's boat (Listen to the Wind) search and rescue in the Tasmanian wilderness (Echo in the Wilderness); Clippie and a light aircraft to the rescue again in The Sandforest, this time in The Pinnacles, Western Australia.

Brinsmead's passion for the country, particular ways of life and beliefs is communicated by some of her characters and in authorial comments, and the tone is preachy at times. However, there is always enough wit and humour to leaven the loaf, even if the laughter is sometimes close to tears. Children love to act out elegant city-girl Imogen's first visit to her fiancé's Longtime home and family. Two high points of the dinner table conversation - the children's revelation that the roast lamb had been rescued from the dog under the house and rinsed before serving; and Uncle Sean's contribution about the best way to butcher a pig - always get hearty laughter from the audience.

The humour in The Ballad of Benny Perhaps elicits a complex response: laughter at the slapstick aspects, sadness and indignation at the truths beneath the surface. When Blue and the Sunday Creek women do their washing at the bore drain, the young squatter appears and tries to pull away the sheet Blue has around her while her clothes are drying. The women ensure that he 'accidentally' falls into the very hot water and runs off, defeated, but the scene underlines the extent to which they are really at his mercy. Australian folklore includes several exploding toilet stories and practical jokes on new chums, and the Sunday Creek version is in their best tradition. But for Sunday Creek people, what begins as fun is often precariously close to violence and disaster, as Benny's catastrophic birthday party makes all too clear.

Besides comic scenes, much humour derives from eccentric minor characters and there is plenty of light-hearted banter when peer-group members interact. In Who Calls from Afar? an important American scientist misses his flight from Moree to Parkes at a crucial time. The cross-country journey where he encounters various outback characters and attitudes is a hilarious adventure - just as funny as any scene from the much later film The Dish.

Recommending Hesba Brinsmead's books to young people today

There are several obstacles to young people's appreciation of Brinsmead's work today:

A new edition of Pastures of the Blue Crane is in press, but few if any of the other titles are in print.
So many attractive books for young adults compete for readers that the dated covers and formats would not encourage selection.
Some readers do not like nostalgia and reject historical perspectives.
Some of the young protagonists have annoying and/or dated habits of speech (eg calling others honey) and some (like Mary in Beat of the City) are too good to be either true or engaging.
The representation of and comments about indigenous Australians and the descendants of the Islanders brought here to work on sugar plantations are, in today's context, problematic. Qualifying our recommendations in notes or discussions about changing attitudes is inhibiting, but it would not seem right to many librarians to recommend some of the novels without comment.

In spite of these obstacles, Brinsmead's recurrent plot motif - young people setting out in the world, making friends, finding a career, exploring and feeling a connection with the natural environment - is equally engaging in 1964 and 2004. The authentic regional Australian settings and the details of work young people might do would have added appeal for those who dream of back-packing. Walter McVitty's summary of the novels' positive qualities is still true, though he wrote it in 1981:

(She) has such urbanity, humour and genuine style that her work can incorporate the most obvious moralizing, the most unreal characters, the most unbelievable circumstances of plot and a constant reworking of thematic and symbolic material and yet come up with refreshingly individual novels every time.
(in Pollak and Macnee, 2002, p148).

(For further information, refer to Days Never Done: the Life and Work of Hesba Fay Brinsmead by Michael Pollack and Margaret MacNabb, Neutral Bay NSW, Unity Press, 2002.)

Born: Hesba Fay Hungerford, 15 March 1922, at Bilpin in the Blue Mountains.

Family: Formerly missionaries for the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Java, her parents, Ken and May, left Sydney soon after World War I with their three small children, one of whom was seriously ill. Ken and his brothers built their own homes, worked the timber and farmed in this beautiful but tough, isolated place while the five children grew up. Hesba was the youngest and, for several years, the only child at home when her siblings were at school in town.

Education and work other than writing: Though determined to be a writer from an early age, Hesba Brinsmead had very little formal education. She taught both in a one-teacher school and as a governess in the far west of New South Wales and the Derwent Valley of Tasmania. In her thirties, she did a correspondence course in journalism. At 20 she married Reg Brinsmead, then a teacher, and had two sons. Later, when Reg owned and managed a pest control business active in three states, Hesba was kept busy with clerical tasks and catering for employees' food and accommodation needs. Finding time to write or study was a struggle.

Writing, recognition and literary friends: The ANZ bank near her home in Nunawading allowed her to use a spare room on their premises and she also escaped to a caravan in the back yard or to coffee shops to write. Nance Donkin and Lu Rees were her friends and, after she moved to Northern New South Wales in 1976, younger writer Nette Hilton appreciated her advice and support. Twice the winner of Children's Book Council of Australia's Book of the Year Award (for Pastures of the Blue Crane in 1965 and Longtime Passing in 1972), and winner of the Dame Mary Gilmore Medallion in 1965, Hesba Brinsmead was invited to speak to adults and children at seminars, conferences, meetings, school and public library events. One Brisbane school where Pastures of the Blue Crane was set for detailed study made several annual trips to view the setting, culminating in meeting Hesba in a local hall for an address and question time. Translated into Czech, Japanese, Italian and German as well as in British, American and Australian editions, some of her books have reached an international readership.

References

Novels cited
Pastures of the Blue Crane (1964) ill. Annette Macarthur-Onslow. London, Oxford University Press.
Season of the Briar (1965) ill. William Papas. London, Oxford University Press.
Beat of the City (1966) ill. William Papas. London, Oxford University Press.
A Sapphire for September (1967) ill. Victor Ambrus. London, Oxford University Press.
Isle of the Sea Horse (1969) ill. Peter Farmer. London, Oxford University Press.
Listen to the Wind (1970) ill. Robert Micklewright. London, Oxford University Press.
Longtime Passing (1971) Sydney, Angus & Robertson.
Who Calls from Afar? (1971) ill. Ian Ribbons. London, Oxford University Press.
Echo in the Wilderness (1972) ill. Graham Humphreys. London, Oxford University Press.
The Ballad of Benny Perhaps (1977) Stanmore NSW, Cassell Australia.
Once there was a Swagman (1979) ill. Noela Young. Melbourne, Oxford University Press.
Longtime Dreaming (1982) (with Ken Hungerford). Sydney/London, Angus & Robertson.
Christmas at Longtime (1983) ill. John Caldwell. Sydney, Angus & Robertson.
The Sand Forest (1985) North Ryde NSW, Angus & Robertson.

Critical and biographical references:

Pollack, Michael and MacNabb, Margaret (2002) Days Never Done: the Life and Work of Hesba Fay Brinsmead. Neutral Bay NSW, Unity Press.

Saxby, Maurice (1993) The Proof of the Puddin': Australian Children's Literature 1970 - 1990. Sydney, Ashton Scholastic.

Lyn Linning was a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology and its antecedent institutions from 1976 to 2002. Since retiring, she has been 'relieving' teacher-librarians in schools and loves being amongst young people again, directly involved in their studies and recreational reading. Lyn enjoys reviewing for teachers and librarians. She is a keen and active member of the Children's Book Council of Australia.

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