In England, although he had been exhibited at the Royal Academy, it had again rejected his application for membership. His English and European landscapes, they seem to have felt, were not distinctive enough: his watercolours — and he was active in marketing the genre generally — were seen as potboilers. Glover hoped for some sort of rejuvenation. “The expectation of finding a new Beautiful World,” he wrote to a patron, “new landscapes new trees new flowers new Animals Birds &c &c is delightful to me.”

“I mean to take possession of 2,000 Acres,” Glover continued, and “to have a vineyard &c &c upon it.” Born the son of a tenant farmer, a gentleman-proprietor is what he wanted to be, and became. A responsible but strict father, he ran a tight ship: one (unmarried) son functioned as his personal assistant. Altogether, with the sons and their families, free labourers and convict servants, Glover was patriarch to some thirty or forty people. (We tend to forget that big colonial properties were in effect small villages.) Eventually he ran some 3000 sheep on the property, named Patterdale after a favourite spot in the Lake District. And there he died.

Ron Radford’s book, building on the scholarship of Ian McPhee, David Hansen and others, is particularly focused — as the subtitle indicates — on Glover’s Tasmanian period. But due attention is given to the English and Continental paintings, since Glover kept producing them even at Patterdale. The thing was, they sold — in England. In Tasmania, inferior paintings by English artists were preferred by homesick settlers. And they had no interest in local scenes. Apart from a few commissions, it was only at the end of his life that Glover sold one or two major Tasmanian paintings locally. He was, as Radford puts it, “the key, though isolated, figure in what can be called Tasmania’s ‘golden age’ of colonial prosperity, culture and art.”

Radford, as a sometime gallery director, is fully aware of the importance of the market, together with patronage and questions of framing. This practicality carries across to the placement of the sumptuous illustrations: they are always adjacent to the discussion of the paintings, even repeated if necessary.

Glover was a practical, prudent man — except when it came to his house. Perhaps in his enthusiasm he was led to over-estimate his own abilities, for Patterdale was built hurriedly and mistakenly on damp clay, near a soak, and of rubble sandstone. Floors and walls were inadequately joined: the façade fell away in the 1940s, to be replaced by one in concrete and weatherboard. Later there was risk of further collapse. An interesting chapter relates the post-Glover history of the house, culminating in its purchase, rebuilding and elegant restoration by Rodney and Carol Westmore.

Glover had already turned to oils in England, but at Patterdale he painted in them almost exclusively, responding to the new environment with his greatest burst of creativity. The result, writes Radford, is a succession of “realistic and light-filled celebrations of his recently adopted country.” He explains that Glover adapted a technique from his watercolouring, using a white ground which would glow through translucent glazes, helping to capture the intensity of Australian light. Indeed, the painter rose immediately to the challenge of a new country: in an early painting of a gully on Mt Wellington there is no idealisation, but characteristically Australian forest regrowth after fire, and dead stumps.

Even so, while alive to the “thrilling and graceful play in the landscape,” Glover found it more difficult to render than European ones. “There is a remarkable peculiarity in the trees,” he noted, “however numerous, they rarely prevent your tracing, through them, the whole distant Country.”

As was customary at the time, Glover did not perceive such vistas as the direct result of Aboriginal land management — burning the undergrowth to create pastures for kangaroos and wallabies, thereby making hunting easier. The assumption of white settlers was that all this was a God-given natural pasture, just waiting for the sheep and cattle to arrive. (A rare romantic strategy by Glover was to supplant sheep in his paintings with cattle, more picturesque.)

Radford is at pains to show that Glover was keenly sympathetic to the Palawa (Tasmanian Aborigines). The last tribals were being rounded up by George Augustus Robinson when Glover arrived in the colony. Robinson turned up at Patterdale with a small group of them, was well-received, and was shown massacre sites. Tellingly, Glover’s very first — and possibly last — paintings there would be of moonlight corroborees. At every opportunity he inserted the departed Aborigines into his landscapes. For Robinson he produced a painting of Aborigines Dancing at Brighton, Tasmania, explaining that “the figures are too small to give much likeness — my object was to give an idea of the gay happy life the Natives had before the White people came,” and also, he added, “an idea of the Scenery of the Country.” Interestingly, there are almost no whites and no cultivation in his landscapes. They are Edenic, essentially a record of what they were like before the invasion.

At one level Glover was, as the historian W.K. Hancock put it, “shedding an economical tear” about the displacement. For it was so recent, and in stark contrast to Glover’s sense of his own achievement on the same land, caught forever in the famous paintings of his house and garden and in the “My” of My Harvest Home. A contradiction: you might say that — surrealistically — his characteristic spaghetti gum trees had buckled under the strain. For there are few like that around Patterdale, yet Glover fixated on them; they became a trope. Significantly, Radford points to a yearning for synthesis: late works include an ambiguous Ben Lomond (Scotland — or Tasmania?) and the fanciful A Dream At 82.

Glover is still underestimated. Working in Tasmania alone and now perceived as a white man, he was described only a few weeks ago in the press as the “so-called father of Australian landscapes.” Yet, as Ron Radford tells us, he is still the Australian artist most widely represented in galleries abroad — extending to a good half dozen American ones, and the Louvre. Equally tellingly, Tom Roberts — having married into a northern Tasmanian family — painted the landscape Glover’s Country in homage around 1929. When he died a couple of years later, Roberts chose not to be buried where he lived, at Kallista in Victoria, but in a Tasmanian churchyard within view of Glover’s Ben Lomond. And twenty years ago, the locals of Evandale instituted the annual Glover Prize for Tasmanian landscapes, a prestigious and generous award.

In all, it is an impressive node of continuing influence, buttressed by the preservation order recently placed on the Patterdale landscape and the scrupulous restoration of the house. Ron Radford’s book will go a long way to making Glover even better known. •

John Glover: Patterdale Farm and the Australian Landscape
By Ron Radford | Ovata Press | $49.95 | 216 pages

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Apart from its isolation, Tasmania encapsulates extremities. First there is the primeval environment, containing the second-largest rainforest of its kind in the world, now besieged. In the past there has been the near extermination of the Indigenous people, while the simultaneous convict experience was more pervasive and shaping than elsewhere in the country. There remain persisting poverty and lower levels of education among the non-Indigenous than almost anywhere else. All these elements give the island state a particular importance in understanding the nature of settler Australia.

“Change came slowly,” Flanagan writes of the Tasmania he grew up in, and until recently “it was possible to conceive the nineteenth century as a time not unlike now.” The past receded more quickly, “people died younger and memory struggled to see over the great embankments of history — the war, the depression, the Great War.” Yet it projected forward in unrecognised continuities: everyday speech was still peppered with convict terms; labourers on the big sheep properties still received the old convict rations, supplemented by meagre wages. Occasionally a cruel convict man trap, designed to ensnare escapees, might be found in the bush.

Rural Tasmania, while cluttered with ancient gossip, was in denial about convict ancestry and the persistent Aboriginal presence. Except on rare, electrifying occasions — as when the limousine of the visiting governor was stolen by some miners who drove it about with an Aboriginal local character in the governor’s seat, waving to the locals. “A bitter joke which cut every way,” writes Flanagan.

The author is highly appreciative of his parents: of his schoolmaster father, solid and decent, a survivor of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, who — perhaps partly because of that — believed in the power of small acts of kindness. And his mother, impetuous, boisterous, funny, crimped by the codes of her time and place but for all that fiercely loving. “My parents were frugal,” Flanagan writes, “not simply because they had to be careful, but because they saw little reason in making life about money.” They faced the world with dignity, looking at fate squarely in the eye.

The full contrast came some time after. Flanagan left school, worked as a labourer, and had a near-death experience on the Franklin River (grippingly narrated here). He then decided to go to university, and on graduating won a coveted Rhodes scholarship. But he came to see Oxford, with its superior airs, as a citadel of conceit. He ended up rejecting it — and academic history as well. “In Tasmania,” he came to write, “history was not a story of progress… nothing ever quite went forward and everything finally returned. There was no straight line… only a circle.”

To this Flanagan would eventually bring a necessary double-sightedness — on the one hand understanding what impels the agents of destruction but, at the same time, “be on the side that loses everything.” Readers of The Narrow Road to the Deep North will be familiar with this approach, evident in the empathetic depiction of Japanese officers on the Burma–Thailand railway.

Question 7’s hybridity comes to the fore with two great arcs that run through the book. To round them out, fictional techniques are used — very tellingly in the case of the romance between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. But Flanagan’s primary purpose is to link Wells’s famous novel The War of the Worlds to Tasmania. This is easier done than might be imagined, for there is a passing reference to the eradication of the Tasmanians in the text, while it seems the germinating idea for that novel had been Wells’s discussion of the Tasmanians’ fate with his brother, as they went for a walk in the English countryside. In a daring leap, Flanagan calls the invading British settlers Martians, and — in retrospective revenge — decides the denizens of Oxford are best tagged that way too.

The second arc is no less daring. A second Wells novel (of 1914) is cited as the first to deal with atomic war. Flanagan traces the development of the idea of the atom bomb, again resorting at times to fictional techniques. His purpose is singular. The opening section tells of his journey to the site of the prison camp where his father was a slave labourer, but finds even the memory of it scarcely remains. At the same time, he knows that had there been an American invasion of Japan instead of the Bomb, his father would have been killed along with all the other Allied prisoners. Richard Flanagan cancelled; instead, a child of the A-bomb. The fortuity of his birth, the fortuity of his later survival. Contingency and fate, and the arbitrariness of destiny, loom large in this book. It poses many fundamental questions.

As Peter Carey recently remarked in the Age, “Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last hundred years.” He may very well be right. •

Question 7
By Richard Flanagan | Knopf | $35 | 280 pages

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The Oxford English Dictionary was partly based on these assumptions. But the idea didn’t come out of nowhere. In Germany, the brothers Grimm (yes, they of the fairy tales) had embarked on a German dictionary that proved the exemplar. Applying comparative linguistics, it was they who pioneered the descriptive method of defining and tracing a word’s meaning across time — and who also, more practically, devised the crowdsourcing techniques and everyday policies and practices adopted by the OED editors.

Arising from a proposal made to the London Philological Society, the dictionary took some time to attach itself to Oxford. But in practice — rather like the University of Melbourne and Meanjin — Oxford was reluctant to fully endorse the project.

James Murray, whose long editorship from 1879 to 1915 was crucial, was never embraced by the establishment. He was underpaid, given a grant by the university which (unrevised) had to cover expenses as well as provide him with a salary. Indicatively, the dictionary operated not from an office amid the dreaming spires, but from a large tin shed — “the Scriptorium” — built by Murray in his own backyard. It was often so cold that staff working there had to wrap old newspapers around their legs.

In Oxford Murray was an outsider: a Scot who left school at fourteen, an agnostic and a liberal moving among Tory Anglicans — and without benefit of the usual social props, for he was a teetotaller and non-smoker. Beyond concerns with his large family — often recruited to dictionary work — Murray applied himself totally to the great project.

When Sarah Ogilvie happened upon Murray’s (undisturbed) address book, she realised she had found the key to how the dictionary worked. Here all the contributors were listed — the people who read books (usually sent to them) and recorded strange words, with their context, on standard slips that were then sent back to Oxford. (So many arrived that the post office put a special pillar box outside Murray’s house.) Often they read in areas totally disjunctive from their professional concerns; they were complemented by specialists who were consulted as the need arose. Staff then organised the citations according to shades of meaning, Murray generally providing the definitions.

Ogilvie soon found that a lot of the readers were outsiders too. “The OED,” she writes in The Dictionary People, “was a project that attracted those on the edges of academia, those who aspired to be part of an intellectual world from which they felt excluded.” And some had been, in the most absolute sense. One was Dr Minor (whose story has been told by Simon Winchester in The Surgeon of Crowthorne), locked away as a murderer in an institution for the criminally insane. Others too had mental problems; obsessionals were attracted to such projects.

But many were also progressives; a number of the women were suffragists — less militant than the suffragettes — while the men were sometimes rationalists or vegetarians. One contributor, the acclaimed writer of verse dramas Michael Field, was in fact a lesbian couple, doubling their everyday roles as aunt and niece. But conventional families were also involved: reading for the dictionary around the fireside could be a wholesome collective enterprise.

As one might expect, there was a contingent of vicars. But the army of readers included a great variety of people, many of whose stories are briefly told. Perhaps the most extraordinary was Sir John Richardson, a survivor of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated polar expedition, who had been reduced to cannibalism and also killed a man. Then there was Eleanor Marx, Karl’s daughter, unsatisfactory from the dictionary’s point of view but a notable translator and political activist. Contributions also came from Henry Spencer Ashbee, who had built up the world’s largest collection of pornography, an embarrassment to the British Museum when he left it to them. And so the list could go on — although it includes few novelists.

But it did extend across the world — to places as different as Jamaica, China and Madagascar. Particularly significant was a node in Melbourne, where E.E. Morris, building on a network of well-placed English immigrants, gathered so many words that he was prompted to write a special Dictionary of Austral English.

Yet the OED, while both an exercise in soft power and a kind of cultural stocktaking, was not overtly imperial. This can be seen in its attitude to America, where it enjoyed huge support — the New York Times publicised the venture and American academics were always helpful. (English ones were rather frosty.) For his part Murray maintained that Americanisms “must be admitted on the same terms as our own words.” This involved recurrent tussles with the Delegates of OUP. He was right: later H.L. Mencken pointed out that in the eighteenth century, the fastidious had bridled at the transatlantic crossing of such words as “talented,” “reliable” and “lengthy.”

Murray was interested in local, indigenous words that were in common use among English-speakers. British imperialism and interaction across the world was so extensive, and English’s origins so mixed, that the language is said to contain almost three times as many words as French. This partly explains the size of the dictionary, with its ten walloping volumes, and the fact that it wasn’t completed till 1928.

A number of books have been published about the dictionary. There’s Peter Gilliver’s The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary and the acclaimed biography of Murray written by his granddaughter, Caught in the Web of Words. But the unique attribute of this one is that it is focused on the foot soldiers of the enterprise, and the contribution they made.

In the last few pages of the book, Ogilvie reveals that she is from Brisbane, and had been fascinated by the slips that arrived in Oxford from a Mr Collier, bundled together in old cereal packets. He too was from Brisbane, and so on a return visit she sought him out. A bachelor and a shorts-and-T-shirt man, he was capable of casting off his clothes and running nude through suburban streets in the dead of night.

Since Collier had been so assiduous — sending 100,000 slips — she raised the possibility of his being flown to Oxford. “No way,” he said; “imagine all the Courier-Mails waiting for me on my return.” Indeed, as she points out, the citations from the Courier-Mail exceed those from Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot or the Book of Common Prayer.

In his own distinct way, Collier fitted what Ogilvie would come to see as the classic contributor template: an autodidact, an isolate with strange ways, but hell-bent on getting a word into the dictionary. She took steps to have him awarded a gong for services to the Australian language, but unfortunately he died too soon. Ogilvie’s interest in contributors broadened then, and this book is the happy result. •

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
By Sarah Ogilvie | Penguin Random House | $35 | 368 pages

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Mindful of the precedent of Oxford and Cambridge university presses, some members of the board were aware that for the University of Melbourne to have projection — to display its wares, promote research — a publication program was desirable. But given the restricted market, the press would have to feel its way forward. Its first publication was Myra Willard’s History of the White Australia Policy to 1920, the work of a Sydneysider (ratified locally by her having won a University of Melbourne prize for an essay on the subject). The book was authoritative and crisply written, if plainly produced in brittle and unattractive paper wrappers. MUP found it expedient to co-publish this and other titles with the long-established firm Macmillan.

The press began without a full-time director. Stanley Addison, a key figure in its establishment, doubled its management with his other job as the university’s assistant registrar. Even so, considerable progress was made. From a mass of submissions emerged important books in economics, public policy, Australian history and literature. Publications extended to a metrical translation of the psalms, and a comparative work on Melanesian languages. In its first decade, MUP produced fifty-six titles.

But Addison was not as scrupulous as he should have been, nor was he supervised in financial matters. There were dubious withdrawals from the firm’s account and doubtful conduct by his brother, whom Addison had appointed to the staff. But he was known to be ill — largely attributable to his war experience — so was simply relieved of his duties. The governance of the press was tightened immediately after.

MUP’s first full-time director was Frank Wilmot, a socialist, who had already run a significant press of his own, had been a bookseller, and as “Furnley Maurice” was one of Australia’s best-known poets. From a field of one hundred, he was the stand-out applicant — despite having no academic qualifications. Wilmot proceeded to expand the list, extending to philosophy, education, demography and, most notably, poetry and Australian literature and history. In poetry, his business sense balanced enthusiasm. “Is it so good that it is our duty to lose money on it?” he asked his reader of an R.D. Fitzgerald collection. In history, Brian Fitzpatrick’s radical The British Empire in Australia: An Economic History 1834–1939 was the most notable publication. MUP’s historical and scholarly books began to rival those produced by Angus & Robertson in Sydney.

But it was still necessary to co-publish, this time with Oxford University Press, itself a useful endorsement. In the decade Wilmot was at the helm, ending with his sudden death in 1942, around a dozen titles each year were published by the press. Wilmot had steadied it during the Depression.

The next director was a history lecturer who’d already had some dealings with the press. Gwyn James was an Englishman with a gritty Midlands accent who was drawn to book production in all its aspects. A fastidious editor, he was also driven and temperamental, some said irascible. (There would be fireworks when Clem Christesen brought Meanjin to Melbourne and MUP, for he had a similar personality.) But James had flair and a vision. He insisted on bringing publication to the fore, dramatically expanding the list. He wanted a book-binding plant, indeed the capacity to print books, for MUP should match the best American university presses in scale and quality. At one point, to get his way, he submitted his resignation; the board allowed him to withdraw it, and provided its first subsidy — not as big as he would have liked, but enough to set about realising his plans.

As Kells explains, “James’s strategy, and his answer to any problem, was growth.” MUP operations soon extended across eight sites and three capital cities, and the staff expanded. But James lacked the necessary managerial capacity. The overdraft steadily rose: by 1961 it was £150,000. Alarmed, the registrar went so far as to lobby the council to have the press shut down. There was a reconfiguration, some scaling down. James would henceforth be styled “Publisher to the University” — something he had dreamed of — but would now be responsible to a director. He resigned.

MUP’s next director, Peter Ryan, would be in harness for a quarter of a century. Not long after leaving school he had enlisted in the army and fought in Papua New Guinea: this created a lasting attachment to that country, and engendered what would be regarded as Australia’s best war memoir, Fear Drive My Feet. Despite a notable quirkiness, Ryan would always retain something of a military manner, and ran the operation with commendable efficiency. Publications followed in the tracks of his predecessors, with a notable return to poetry, but there were in addition some blockbusters. One was the three-volume Encyclopaedia of Papua and New Guinea, which appeared in 1972, an intellectual Domesday Book assembled on the eve of independence. Another was the first eleven volumes of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

There were also the six volumes of Manning Clark’s History of Australia. The first (1962) sold extraordinarily well and had an enormous impact (as well as attracting fierce criticism). Vividly written in a high literary style, it placed Australian history in a world context. In fact the History was a James legacy that Ryan saw through, but with increasing reluctance.

In Clark’s subsequent volumes, considerable editing was needed to correct errors, tone down the prose and remove hackneyed phrases. This was done so successfully that the History rolled on, collecting prizes. Ryan bided his time, and then years later wrote an attack on Clark and the History in Quadrant. As MUP had profited from the publication, and Clark had died only recently, many felt the article was a betrayal.

After Ryan’s retirement in 1988, there was a period of instability. The brilliant publisher John Iremonger was lured back to Sydney; Brian Wilder occupied the directorial chair twice. At this stage the press was producing up to eighty books a year. It received no regular subsidy from the university, but the bookshop was one of the most profitable in Australia, while the Grimwade bequest was tweaked to enable MUP to produce quality books under the imprint of the Miegunyah Press. But by the end of the nineties the press was facing recurring deficits: John Meckan, a notable “money man,” took the director’s chair.

Meanwhile the University of Melbourne was entering a decisive new phase. Alan Gilbert was appointed vice-chancellor: the scholar of religious history became a high priest of economic rationalism. His hallmark was the launching of Melbourne University Private, an auxiliary fee-paying institution. Touted as MUP, it helped itself unblushingly to the well-known acronym of the press.

The press itself was subject to an exhaustive review, urging it to adapt to the new world of online publishing, ebooks and print-on-demand technologies. Separation from the bookshop was also recommended and implemented, to clarify publishing purposes. The board would now be more commercial, bringing in accountants, journalists, politicians. As Melbourne University Publishing Limited, the press would become a “profit centre” of the university. That, at least, was their hope. In its first year its operating loss was $646,830.

Enter Louise Adler. No one else in Melbourne had so much experience across universities, publishing and the arts, or was so well networked (she was also married to the actor Max Gillies). To gusto and single-mindedness she added a capacity to charm. Adler’s appointment made her the first female head of MUP; it was unkindly suggested that it might be “an attempt to resurrect, if not a dead duck, certainly a dying one.” For in the six previous years, Kells tells us, MUP “had been burning equity.” To use management speak, Adler was expected to act as a “change agent.”

Part of Adler’s brief — aligned with her flair for publicity — was to produce books that were noticed, and that would feed debates in the community. “Commercialisation” became the watchword. MUP would now seek to compete directly with trade publishers, not least in the high advances paid to chosen authors. “The point is not to have more,” Adler said, “the point is to have less. The trick is to have less that you sell more of.” So the outlook was broader, the tone decidedly different. “You’re not to write for your peers,” she told Stuart Macintyre as he collaborated with Anna Clark in The History Wars. “You’re writing for me.”

As Mark Dreyfus has said, Adler viewed every politician as a potential author. MUP published The Latham Diaries and, to balance, Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington’s authorised biography, John Winston Howard, Tony Abbott’s Battlelines, and the conspicuously successful Costello Memoirs, which sold 40,000 copies. These did promote public discussion. But publication of the autobiography of an underworld figure, a book by a celebrity chef, and the story of the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup raised eyebrows.

Meanwhile the academic list became, as one MUP observer scoffed, “Siberia.” Of this I had some personal experience. Adler originally welcomed the idea of a biography of historian Keith Hancock, venturing a print run of 3000 copies. I suggested a sober 2000. I was therefore surprised to receive, ten days later, an email saying that she had decided not to publish it. No reason given. But I soon worked it out: after having published a book on the History Wars, this one would have appeared too retro. Ah well. A Three-Cornered Life went on to win four major awards, including the Prime Minister’s History Prize.

The publication of Louise Milligan’s Cardinal — which Kells sees as having created the climate that led the police to lay the charges of sexual misconduct — added to the university’s dissatisfaction. It had, after all, pumped $26 million in subsidies into the press over fifteen years. Another review was undertaken, urging structural changes and a renewed emphasis on scholarly books. Adler resigned soon after, followed by five members of the board, including Bob Carr, shaking his head: “It is a sad, sad day, that an independent publisher so important to Australian publishing gets snuffed out to be replaced by a boutique, cloistered press for scholars only.” The tail should always wag the dog.

Stuart Kells gives an even-handed account of the Adler experiment, and this is characteristic of the book’s sound judgement. This history benefits from Kells’s broad knowledge of books and the book trade; there are short sections on topics such as publishers and dust-jackets, which while discursive are always illuminating. He is particularly good on the participation of women, and how they were habitually taken for granted by the press and the university. A stalwart of MUP was the tough and exacting Barbara Ramsden, who at times — between male appointees — sat in the directorial chair. But women’s proper place was held to be editing. When the directorship became vacant before the appointment of Wilmot, the advertisement specified that applications would be taken from men only.

At the same time, Kells brings out the two basic tensions operating. First, between the publication of scholarly works (which rarely pay) and the publication of more marketed-oriented books (which may make money but could be frankly populist). Hence the second tension, between the university’s desire to exert influence (or why have a university press at all, if not scholarly?), and the press’s need for independence and flexibility in order to survive.

Once it was simpler: as Gwyn James put it, making a comparison with trade presses, “A university press must create demands: it must aim to bring the best books within the range of as great a number of people as possible.” In the 1950s, that sense of mission could be propounded: less than 1 per cent of the population were university graduates. Now it reeks of elitism.

So Nathan Hollier, MUP’s publisher and CEO of three years’ standing, has his job cut out for him. He speaks of “producing scholarly books for the trade.” Academically credentialed, but also weathered by editing Overland and establishing Monash University Press, he’s in with a chance to square the circle. •

MUP: A Centenary History
By Stuart Kells | Miegunyah Press | $60 | 544 pages

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