The lives and works of several famous authors, and their New England contexts, is examined in a book launched today by a UNE author.
Tales from New England focuses on nine important writers, including Rolf Boldrewood (author of Robbery Under Arms) and D’Arcy Niland (author of The Shiralee), who have enriched their novels with imaginative re-creations of New England society and landscapes.
Author John Ryan, the Armidale scholar and well-known regional and cultural historian, said the texts he discusses tell us what we are in a way that history or newspapers never do.
Dr Ryan, an associate professor of English at the University of New England, said his aim in writing Tales From New England had been ‘to help readers appreciate the rich and accessible heritage content of these literary texts of the region, as they illustrate many aspects of our distinctive local identity’.
The other authors (and particular novels) given lively context in the book include Thomas Keneally (The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith), Dymphna Cusack (Picnic Races), Gwen Kelly (in various reflective works), Geoff Page (Benton’s Conviction), David Crookes (The Light Horseman’s Daughter), Robert Barnard (Death of an Old Goat and Cry from the Dark), and Gabrielle Lord (Bones).
The public launch of Tales From New England, organised by the joint publisher, UNE’s Heritage Futures Research Centre, is at the Armidale Dumaresq Council Chambers from 12.30pm.
Member for Northern Tablelands and speaker of the legislative assembly, Richard Torbay, is launching the book.
Everyone is welcome.
Dr Ryan said that the title of the book reflected the emphasis on ‘tradition – i.e., the passing on of stories’ – in the explorations and publications of the Heritage Futures Research Centre.
The eight larger tales Dr Ryan tells link the lives of the authors with the topics treated in the novels, and their rich evocations of New England life and environment.
There are dramatic stories, such as those encountered by Thomas Browne (Rolf Boldrewood) during his eight months in Armidale as police magistrate – including the attempted shooting and stabbing of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Armidale, Elzear Torregiani.
There are stories with a quieter rural and domestic focus, such as those connecting Dymphna Cusack’s New England nurture to her novel Picnic Races. These stories illuminate, in Dr Ryan’s words, those ‘timeless moments of quiet savouring of Australia’s colonial past and landscapes’ that the text contains.
Dr Ryan said these novels often give life and colour to historical events – for example the pursuit of the Governor brothers that inspired Thomas Keneally’s novel and the later film-based myth.
“A number of the writers have created very effective historical vignettes,” he said, such as Page’s local treatment of the 1916 conscription issue in Benton’s Conviction.
In the work of all the writers he discusses, he finds ‘a large measure of autobiography’ and ‘much investigation of societal/educational processes as they affect individuals’.
“The trials of education, as supplied at the primary, secondary, and – even more quirkishly – at the tertiary level, are explored both with some exasperation and also with a more profound investigation,” he says in his introduction.
The 68 illustrations in Tales From New England include many rare photographs, as well as reproductions of original or early dust covers to remind readers of the books they knew they should read one day.
Tales From New England provides a witty, wry and compassionate guide to such reading.
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