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

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The tawdry nature of the ensuing courtship, the girl’s bored, reluctant acceptance of
the last century Albert Steptoe provide as interesting social comment on the period,
especially since her new house, like twenty-two others in the street, had a front garden
precisely ten feet by three, a tiled verandah and a porcelain doorknocker. Seeing the
motivation of the young girl, the reader is not surprised at the ensuing clandestine
meeting with a richer man before the sardonic conclusion, pregnant with meaning for
the average Australian – “The Belle of Sooner’s had drifted to the private bar”.
With his interest in people – their motivations and their reactions to various
circumstances – Brady writes many stories which attempt to elucidate aspects of
human behaviour. The feelings of a man pursued by a femme fatale on board ship,
the reactions of a quiet country family when a city-bred superstitious aunt comes to
stay, the mental machinations of a creative but lazy farmer who would rather work on
his inventions than his fields, all provide subjects for his examination. When reading
the stories he wrote, especially those published between 1894 and 1905, one feels that
he is happier with the situation which involves ordinary people, or those with
eccentric foibles, but which is highly charged with pathos and humour. He can draw,
with sure swift strokes, the swagman who wages war on those arch-fiends of the bush,
the crows who have killed his sheep. The masterful way in which the very
atmosphere and dust of the bush is created, the blanched bones and dusty fleece of the
dead sheep with the crows sitting on a bleached, exposed rib and cawing morbidly are
scenes familiar to most Australians of the inland. He can enlist sympathy also for his
subjects, so that when the owner of the dead sheep baits a fish-hook and catches a
crow one is not appalled at this cruelty but mentally applauds while the unfortunate’s
brother crows behave in a way characteristic of their species and familiar to most rural
observers. 2 Likewise he can sketch the two young humorists who shear a man’s longhaired
horse, the country man who can tell maize from sorghum at a mile but cannot
see to cross city streets, as well as the stevedoring bully who was soundly beaten by
the smaller and more agile Spider Magee.
Knowing of Brady’s difficulties in politics, literature and life in general, of the
hardships he experienced in many aspects of existence, it is not surprising to find him
coming out, time and time again, on the side of the under-dog, the under-privileged,
the inadequate. He leads the reader to rejoice at the fall of the bully, Buttenshaw, and
at the discomfiture of the “flashjack” who is outwitted in horse-trading by the quiet
German farmer who had for years been the butt of local jokers. The fury of the
callow yough is well depicted when he returns to complain that the hose he bought is
nearly blind. Complacently the old farmer states the he told him that several times:
Jack Dobie gasped.
‘You mean to tell me that you told me – that – that horse was blind?’
“Yah, four or five times I say to you, “He vos a goot horse, Chack, but choost
now he does not look well!”
A light gradually dawned on Dobie. Peter stood before him with a bland
smile on his face – a bland triumphant smile.
Suddenly Dobie whirled his horse around. ‘Done!’ he yelled; ‘Done like a
damned dinner! And by a --------- German, too!’ he added, driving in the
spurs viciously. Peter stood by the fence, watching the cloud of dust as it rose
along the track.
“Yah,’ he said to himself, ‘he vos a goot horse, but he did not look well!’
Then we went inside, chuckling. 1
1 “A Horse Deal”, Kangaroo Tales.