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

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By the girls we love, by the God above,
By the surge, and the surf, and the wind,
By the sun and air, and the death we dare,
Is the charm of the chains that bind. 1
Still with Dalgety, Brady moved after twelve months to Town’s Bond store where he
had more leisure for both reading and scribbling, “as no one was ever strictly sober
after ten o’clock in the forenoon”. He began to feel more like a man. He patronised
the Public Library every spare moment, reading scientific, philosophic and general
literature.
There must have been many things in this position which grated against Brady’s
increasing sensitivity. In a short story, written many years later, he provides a vivid
description of the store, particularly the multitude of rats which over-ran the place.
Wryly he refers to it as “an assembly and distribution centre for those hateful
creatures”, packed, as it was, with “English ales, China teas, American tobaccos,
French perfumes, Portuguese wines, cigars from Manilla, jute from Calcutta” – all
brought in sailing vessels from the ports of the Seven Seas.
From the Bond store the young clerk went to learn the Day Book and Journal in the
merchandise department of Dalgety’s Bent Street store and was shortly placed in
charge of that section. He was now earning two pounds a week and he and his
fellows regarded themselves as “the crème de la crème of the commercial class”.
They dressed to suit. “Our tall collars were immaculately white; no mundane mud
ever adhered for long to soles of our aristocratic shoes” Brady recalled. And during
this time, leisure hours continued to be devoted to reading in philosophy, politics and
sociology – Kant, Spencer, Schopenhauer, Mill and Marx receiving special attention.
These years from 1884 to 1889 saw the beginnings of literary production. One
authority quotes Brady as stating that had begun to write even earlier, exchanging
poems for cakes with his mother. 2 Certainly he wrote early verse on religious theme,
especially Biblical, his Juvenilia containing long ballads about Moses and Abraham
as well as least one long poem of about a thousand lines on Spanish and Moorish
themes – “Zayda – a Tale of the Alhambra”. Short stories, character sketches and
articles were also produced.
1890 was a momentous year for Brady. The Maritime Strike being in progress,
Dalgety and Co., in common with many other firms at the time, were sweating in their
employees as special constables to help police the stores and warehouses long the
waterfront where wool shorn by non-union labour was beginning to arrive. 3 When
Brady refused this assignment as a matter of principle, regarding it as a form of
treason against the workers whom he saw actively trying to better their working
conditions and wages, he was instantly dismissed.
1 “They Have Bound Us” The Ways of Many Waters (Sydney, 1899)
2 James McDonald, “Edwin Brady – a Checklist”, Biblionews, August 1952.
3 E.H. Lane, Dawn to Dusk (Brisbane, 1939) gives a vivid picture of the tensions aroused by this event.
Robin Gollan, Radicall and Working Class Politics, gives details of the appointment by the unions of
pickets on four hour shifts, of the increase of the Police by the Government from 559 men to 3952, of
the decision to create special constables and of the enmity and distrust these moves engendered. A
union offer to supply them was rejected.