Tribute

To write about a biographer is to be aware of a presence, psychologically if not spectrally, sitting on your shoulder. This presence is not an angel, more like an imp, the minor demon that arouses bad deeds, or thoughts. In writing about a biographer we can feel not angelic inspiration, but the imp of doubt, saying: This is not good enough, I could do better.

In an essay on the poetry of George Crabbe, Peter Porter wrote, ‘It is a great pleasure to me, a man for the littoral any day, to read Crabbe’s description of the East Anglian coast.’ Happily, there is by now a substantial and various array of writings about Porter’s work, and I would like simply to add that his being, metaphorically, ‘a man for the littoral’, with all its interfusions, is one of his distinguishing qualities, and something to rejoice in. Coastlands, and marshes, are essential to his intellect and to his imagination. He may never have had one foot in Eden, but he did rejoice in a plurality of territories.

John Button was rare man, rare for any time, any place and in any calling. The public face – the Senator John Button, long-time Leader of the Government in the Senate, the hands-on, hard-hat minister of the Button car plan, the policy innovator and party reformer, the straight talker, unbridled political wit, notorious doodler, note writer, and scribbler of politically incorrect postcards to Senator Bronwyn Bishop (imagine it!) – that is the John Button Australia knows. His achievements have been many and they are exemplary.

Bruce Beaver died peacefully in his sleep on February 17, a few days after his seventy-sixth birthday. He had been under dialysis for a dozen years, so the news was not unexpected. But it is always a shock and a sadness when a commanding poet dies.

Bruce Beaver (born in 1928) published his first collection of poems, Under the Bridge, in 1961, a time when Australian poetry was paddling through something of a lull. The generation of poets who had come to maturity during World War II (Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson, Douglas Stewart, John Blight, David Campbell et al.) had by the end of the 1950s become, in a sense, predictable. The newer generation was spearheaded by Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s remarkable and zesty first collection, The Music of Division (1959): urbane, a bit Audenesque and very Melbourne. Beaver immediately announced himself as a regional poet – Manly, indeed – and he sustained that capacity to give Manly a soiled, solid, sordid and singing quality, with the whiff of ozone and salt, and an old resilience that would not be smothered by the superficial changes of the subsequent decades.

Frank Graham Little was born in Belfast 1 November 1939 and died Melbourne 24 February 2000. He spoke quietly and literally made a profession of observation, of seeing through and beneath human behaviour, so could appear passive. He was not. He was a man who took hold of his life, and was absolutely in the middle of yet another intellectual adventure when he died suddenly last month.

Geoff Dutton was a man-of-letters who for many years made (with Max Harris) Adelaide seem one of the lively centres of Australian literary culture. One thinks of him in association with the magazines Angry Penguins, Australian Letters, and the original Australian Book Review, not to mention the inauguration of an Australian publication list for Penguin Books, and then, when that soured, the setting up of Sun Books, one of the most innovative of Australian publishing ventures at that time – which was in the difficult slough period of the 1950s and 1960s and into the 1970s.

Aboriginal poet and activist, Kevin Gilbert, died in Canberra on 1 April 1993 after a long battle with a respiratory disease. He was sixty years old.

Although Sumner Locke Elliott spent more than half his life as an American, his native country Australia was, for him, his land of imagination where memory could be both crystallised and transformed and temporal and spatial boundaries ceased to exist. Of his ten published novels, six (or five and a half, as he liked to say) were set in Australia. Not coincidentally, I think, these were his most successful. His death in June, at the age of seventy-three, marked the passing of not only an incandescent literary talent but also a generous spirit, a superior and entertaining wit and, that rarest of all species, a successful yet humble man.

Dear Manning,

I’m writing you this letter for want of better ways of continuing the conversation we’ve been having for the past eight years, sustained by weekly letters while I was in Japan. We began to walk and talk in 1983 as you were preparing for heart surgery and I wasn’t coping with a broken heart. You wanted someone to walk with, and I needed company.