Letters to the Editor

The Frank Hardy I Knew Dear Editor, Frank Hardy was a larrikin. It was probably one of his most endearing qualities, but he did tell me once that his membership of the Australian Communist Party enabled him to become something more than a larrikin. He didn’t always pay his debts, except for the one big debt and the only one worth remembering: the debt of living, to the end, a writer’s life. For a boy brought up amongst working-class Irish Catholics in the potato belt in Victoria, that was no mean feat. He was also an addictive gambler and was found dead with the Racing Guide open in front of him, still trying to pick a winner. He couldn’t have had a more fitting epitaph. Was he a lecher, an exploitative husband, a plagiarist, an anti-Semite, and an inconstant friend? Frank liked women. He had many love affairs and enormous sexual charm. Unlike most Australian men, he was a talker. Oh, he could talk with a tongue like silver. I knew Frank Hardy off and on for more than forty years. I never heard him make an anti-Semitic remark, nor have I ever seen any proof of his so-called plagiarism To me he was never an inconstant friend, but a friend who demanded that I become a writer again when political work in the Communist Party had swallowed up my creativity. He believed in my talent when I was isolated and unknown, and told me truthfully when I wrote well and when I wrote like a Party hack. In a bleak and terrible period of my private life, he gave me the best advice I ever received. Any man who wrote as constantly and as tirelessly as he did over a long period of ups and downs could hardly be called a bludger. His support for the causes of the dispossessed was never better illustrated than in his generous commitment to the Gurindji and their struggle for land rights. Frank was a dedicated communist for the whole of his life, but a communist who was not afraid to tell the truth in his series of articles Stalin’s Heirs. Because of it, he lost considerable sales, the free trips abroad and the ardent devotion of his thousands of fans in the then Soviet Union and its satellites. As for his gifts as a writer, in Power Without Glory he set himself the enormous task of exposing the villainy and corruption in right-wing Victorian Labor politics and amongst some leading figures in the Catholic church. It does exhibit all the faults of a first novel, but it is still one of the rare and important political novels in Australian history. That, I believe, was why Power Without Glory became a best seller, not because of the scandal about Nellie West, whose one commendable act was to dare to have an adulterous love affair with a decent working-class man. Frank did, in my opinion, write a handful of excellent short stories, beginning with A Load of Wood and continuing with Legends from Benson’s Valley. The life and language of the Australian working class are honestly portrayed – a rare thing still in our literature. Darkie, in A Load of Wood, is one of the great, unforgettable characters. I believe his masterpieces are The Outcasts of Foolgarah, a ribald comic satire, and But the Dead Are Many, the only novel to seriously take on board the tragic lives of those believers who discovered the betrayals of communism. Can one call Ross Hardy’s devoted hours of research and typing of his manuscripts acts of exploitation? She certainly bore him no malice. Every Friday, right up to her death and long after their marriage was over, she met him when the Manly ferry docked at the quay and they had dinner together. In Pauline Armstrong’s biography, Frank Hardy and the Making of Power Without Glory, Hardy is portrayed as an untalented lecher, plagiarist, welcher, bludger, and anti-Semite. What about his dedication to the cause of the working class, the endless struggle to become a writer, and the generous help he gave to new writers, all of which needed a deeper honesty and commitment than the writer of this biography or your reviewer, James Griffin, seem able to comprehend? I am not suggesting that biographers and reviewers should whitewash their subjects, only that they treat them with fairness, objectivity, and respect. Dorothy Hewett, Sydney, NSW A Civic Culture Dear Editor, It is not my view that ‘Australia should be held together by a civic culture … and nothing else’, as John Hirst suggested in his NSW Centenary of Federation Committee Barton Lecture (reprinted in your February/March 2001 issue as the La Trobe University Essay). That would be an idiotic statement. The last time I declared myself on civic anything was in my own Barton Lecture, the first of the series. In that lecture what I said was that our political leaders seem unable ‘to speak to their fellow citizens from time to time about the civic values that most of them share’. That’s all – nothing on this occasion, or any other, about Australia being held together ‘by a civic culture and nothing else’. In fact, what I said wasn’t all that different from John’s own statement in A Republican Manifesto: that ‘there has never been a moment when we have attached ourselves to our political system as the embodiment of our nation’. I then added that, if there was to be any test of Australianess, it could only be a civic test. ‘Holding together’ is a different question. I argued that a big element in our ‘holding together’ was the old economic faith in ‘national development’ – now defunct, disastrously with nothing to replace it. I rejected the view that dominant uniformity is necessary for an harmonious society and suggested instead that social harmony depends partly on tolerance of difference – which in turn depends partly on politicians not overdoing appeals to prejudice. I also suggested that a strong civil society and feelings of trust help sustain social harmony. Then I added affection for landscapes, patches of history and achievement, the mass-culture industries (including sport), all kinds of local individual feelings and attachments, and the ways we relate to each other. John’s own references to ‘a distinctive Australian culture’ are, unfortunately, just made in passing, so we don’t know whether this is a monolithic view or, indeed, what he means by ‘culture’. (What I mean by ‘culture’, in the broad, is a repertoire of habits of thinking and acting that give particular meanings to existence; in the narrower range, intellectual and artistic life.) He provides McCubbin’s The Pioneers as OK Australian culture. What about a streetscape by Jeffrey Smart or Clarice Beckett? Or a family scene by Noel Counihan or John Brack? Are they also OK as distinctive Australian culture? If they’re not, we’re slipping back into the kind of authoritarian cultural identity that was around when I was a boy. I can’t imagine that he takes anything other than a pluralist view. How can one seriously talk about any modern industrial society in any other way? Donald Horne, Sydney, NSW

The Frank Hardy I Knew

Hidden Author

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