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

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A ready example is the account of the exploits of so many bushrangers not really
connected with the activities of Trooper Brady. There is insufficient editing of the
family background material obtained by correspondence with existing branches of the
family in Ireland and America. Furthermore, Brady succumbs very obviously to the
temptation to intrude his own theories and beliefs into the narrative, losing the thread
on many occasions. As a result of his interest in sociology he attempts to give a
picture of the cultural environment of his subject, an environment that is of far more
interest to the book’s author than it was to the older Brady. It made no discernible
difference to him that Clay and Daniel Webster, Longfellow and Whittier, Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Emerson, Melville and Whitman were alive and writing, but the
book uses them to help its own orientation. Edward John was not a literary man and
such details, as they are used, are extraneous and superfluous. Nor do they assist in
an understanding of the subject’s mental state, for there is little attempt to plumb the
emotions or intellectual development of the older man. The account is little more than
an external narrative of events and places.
Yet there are many areas of interest within Two Frontiers, from its early anecdotal
account of Irish customs and manners through many aspects of life in nineteenth
century America with its Indian fights, civil war and hazardous occupations, to early
Australiana with its soldiers and bushrangers. As one has come to expect from Brady,
there is humour in anecdote and description. There are countless instances of man’s
heroism and hardihood (such as Glass’s survival of a mauling by a bear) and of man’s
inhumanity to man (the Indian massacres, for instance). There are details of the
endurance of working conditions which make one feel more respect for the gains won
by unionism (the life led by seamen on whalers was arduous in the extreme). And in
each situation, there is an unwritten code of behaviour which inexorably guides action
and responses. The seaman who is closest to the required action must oblige or face
ostracism or reprisal, as Dan recognised. Two Frontiers is an interesting social
document, particularly of the American scene of it s period. Edward John found the
American negro infinitely better off than the poor Irish peasants he had left behind,
for the market value of a slave dropped considerably if he was ill-treated, and this
gruesome fact in itself assured reasonable conditions for most. While deploring the
trade in men Edward Brady yet saw their treatment on the whole better than Harriet
Beecher Stowe had depicted it, for her book appeared while he was in the deep south. 1
All of this might suggest that Two Frontiers is a gripping book. In general terms it is.
But is has so many defects that it could obviously have been made so much better
with careful craftsmanship. The surplus family and political detail and rather too
much social and historical background detract from the narrative’s free play, thrilling
as it is. There is also an annoying habit on the author’s part of previewing what is to
come – a damaging kind of authorial intrusion. So when Edward receives a draft
which to pay his fare to American, we read:
He would make acquaintance with the grey sisters, Poverty and Pain. He
would fare with Peril and have Hardship for a bedfellow; he would sit face to
face with Black Death, and gamble with him for life in that New Orleans for
which he thought he was sailing when he stowed away on that brig at
Limerick. He would see red wounds opening on dusty battlefields. He would
shoot the bison, lance the whale, hear the war-hoops of Indians, the crash of
icebergs, challenging shouts of bushrangers; and live the free life that such
men enjoyed when foundations of modern civilisation were being laid by
courageous hands on two frontiers. 2
1 Two Frontiers (Sydney, 1944), P. 62.
2 P. 27