AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 457, 25 March 1948, Page 12

AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS

SINGING TO THE CATTLE. By Brian Elliott. Georgian House, Melbourne. E are so accustomed to seeing unimportant books dressed up in the hope that they will at least look important that a swing the other way is almost a sensation, This is a book of serious criticism printed and produced with such deliberate restraint that only the dust-cover takes it out of the school text-book class. There was some perversity, too, in giving it the title of one of the least important essays in the collection. "Singing to the Cattle’ is a pleasant essay to read-it was first written and delivered as a lecture-but it is not easy to make literary history out of the Australian ballad, and it is surely far-fetched to say that "the cattle-drover sang to the cattle because it was dangerous not to." Travelling cattle are nervous creatures and liable to stampede if they are frightened. A small noise, if it is sharp and unexpected in the quiet of the night, may set them panicking in a moment, and then the drover may not merely lose his mob or be at great trouble to get them together again, but they may actually trample him down. In order to keep the cattle reassured, one at least of the droving party usually rides round the camp throughout the night, and keeps up some sort of a noise to which they become accustomed. That is the primary necessity: some sort of noise. What emerged out of that nécessity was the ballad. It is easy enough to accept the familiar noise, but why should it tend to be a song? (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) No doubt it would have sounded a little mysterious to call the collection after the first essay, "Breath of Alchera," but that is of far more importance than the problematic origin of ballads with so small a chance of survival. "Alchera" is an Arunta word meaning a dream, or the "far past time when the ancestors of the totemic groups arose," and Mr. Elliott hangs an essay on it which becomes a criticism both of affected mysticism in Australian writers and of the ether extreme of forgetting that Australia has a past at all. I feel certain myself that this mythology which the enthusiasts seek to erect to provide Australia with imaginative inspiration will never amount to anything until the last aborigine has become a memory. While the native remains actual, he will still be a native; there is not much hope of making gods and kings and heroes and saints out of him while there is still a possibility of meeting King Billy and Black Mary round the corner. In Peru they might do something with the Incas, but here the poetic scope opened up by the Alchera is limited. Poetry that is real and actual can only have its actuality because everybody knows and sympathises with the basis of its making. e Alchera is, for white Australians, an exotic fancy. ... But I should be making myself very imperfectly understood if I gave the impression that I thought it a useless or altogether misguided thing to do. New Zealand readers will perhaps find Mr. Elliott most interesting in his last paper-an angry protest against the vulgarisation of Steele Rudd (Arthur Hoey Davis) on the stage and in film and radio presentations, It is bad enough that books should be written and forgotten because they are superseded by a mcre popular and cruder presentation of the same formal material; but it is worse that this new presentation should have acted to reshape the material until it became no more than barely recognisable, until the whole fiction had ered a change of emphasis which entirely invalidated its essential meaning. The original stories were a richly humorous interpretation, based firmly in a real state of affairs. Dramatization, the localisation in the theatre-or equally disastrous, in that unreal, completely dimension. less world of the radio theatre-forced an entirely new and incongruous function on Davis’s figures. They were required to amuse rather than to interpret. They were required to cease being comic in order to become comical; to leave off being laughed with, and to content themselves with being either sentimentally slobbered over or simply laughed at. There are ten long essays altogether, and these, with the six-page note on Steele Rudd, make a book of 186 pages which have all, in one form or another, been delivered as University lectures under a Commonwealth Government scheme for encouraging the study of Australian literature. There are at least three, and probably four, men in New Zealand whom it would be nationally stimulating to turn loose in our own University with something like the same job and the same general instructions.