A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF EDWIN JAMES BRADY - Mallacoota ...

109
These examples show that Brady can begin in a way that catches the reader’s
attention, draws him in towards the action to follow and suggests a mood, an
evocation of atmosphere. Most have definitive Australian flavour, for despite Brady’s
pride in his Celtic ancestry, he is Australian through and through; most of his stories
are as national as Dyson’s Lawson’s or Steele Rudd’s.
There are many times however, when the openings of his stories carry excess weight,
where detailed description and expository material replace compression and
suggestion, both so essential in the short story writer’s art. This can be seen in a good
story, “The Healing of John Pye”, an effective story in many ways but one which
begins:
The trees on John Pye’s selection grew thick if girth and high. Some of them
had been seedlings when Sir Joseph Banks and Dr. Solander stepped ashore
from the “Endeavour” to gather wild flowers at Botany Bay. Others were
probably ‘grown up’ when Marlborough was only a boy. In either case it did
not matter to John Pye, who put an edge on his axe which a Viking might have
envied and sallied forth one balmy September morning to ‘do for’ an ancient
bluegum trunk that ante-dated the burning of Moscow but interfered with the
building of the stockyard fence. Antiquity being an abstraction that entered
not into the calculations of John Pye, that commonplace selector had saw and
cut the tree almost through before noon. 1
Brady shows here a nicely balanced sense of antithesis (a favourite device of his)
between the important event of Moscow’s destruction and Pye’s stockyard fence, but
the attention given to the establishment of a sense of antiquity is really wasted. True,
Pye is later trapped by a branch of the big tree, but antiquity has nothing to do with it
(or with anything else in the tale subsequently). While this kind of verbosity can add
interest to a general newspaper article or a political editorial, or even to a humorous
serial, it detracts from the force of a short story.
Brady’s stories usually have a plot which is adequate and at times extremely
appropriate for this form He has a liking for the informal yarn, the often humorous
event in the life of the people of the outback and can create the atmosphere of
isolation and hardship which are Lawson’s forte. But he is also keen on the
“vignette” – a word he often uses in a subtitle – which he describes as a scene
“frozen” for examination by a sensitive observer to throw light on the microcosm
from which it is taken. There are times when his plot is melodramatic, as are
particularly some of the Arrow stories (such as “The Snake and the Woman” where a
love-crazed doctor uses his knowledge of snakes to dispose of a rival 2 ).
This tendency towards the melodramatic treatment is seen also in “The Healing of
John Pye’, already mentioned. Pye’s moments of misery stretch into hours when he is
trapped by a fallen branch. His wrigglings and wrenchings, the grating of the broken
bones and the digging up of the ground by agony-driven fingers are told with all the
journalist’s loving attention to sordid details. Contrast heightens the effect as the
trapped man, whining to God, “held like a beetle pinned to a sheet of paper”, biting
chips and leaves as he struggles, suffers in a world of beauty, surrounded as he is by
flowers, trees, parrots and fleecy clouds – all evidence of a peaceful universe.
1 “The Healing of John Pye”, The Worker, 4.2.1905
2 4.4.1896