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

Brady could have forgiven Lawson more if he had been more cheerful and optimistic.
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Yet it is Lawson’s universal appeal in his native land that overcomes for Brady any
deficiency. To have Lawson’s lines quoted round camp-fires from Albury to Bourke
and beyond is justification for his acclaim. To the bushmen they “portray for him
familiar experiences, voice his own impressions, appeal to his sympathies and express
emotions born of local sumpathies.” 3 It is part of Brady’s aesthetic creed that
creativity should be universally shared, should help enrich the lives of the common
man rather than attain a quality which meets the approval of the critics but remains
aloof from more general acceptance.
It is difficult to sustain the proposition that Brady “influenced” Lawson or that
Lawson “influenced” Brady, but there is not doubt that Lawson found solace and
comradeship in Brady and his other mates. They shared common, utopian ideals,
father in socialism and interests in literature and its functions in a democratic society,
thus having greater community of interest than most men. The fact that Brady helped
Lawson to recuperate after his gaol term, that he interceded between Archibald and
Lawson, resulting in Lawson’s holiday trip to the country with an advance from The
Bulletin office, that he, Quinn, Daley and Lawson often read each other’s work before
submission – all these things made Ted Brady a fairly important figure in Lawson’s
life, acting as a catalyst in a sense. As Elliott wrote, such writers can wield an
influence though they be outweighed in the ultimate result.
The attachment which Brady felt towards Lawson was strong, but even stronger was
his relationship with Roderic Quinn. This strong feeling was understandable, for the
two had sat together in the Harrington Street School, ultimately sharing much more
than a common beginning, for Brennan too, had started off in the same class but the
relationship never developed. But Brady and Quinn were alike in personality to some
extent. When Brady classified himself as a dreamer, a lover of Nature (“With
Nature’s glory all round me I laid my face upon the world’s face and caressed it
softly”), he spoke at the same time of another who shared his dreams:
A tall youth, with tawny yellow hair, who hated mathematics as heartily as
myself. But he read Tennyson’s poems with infinite appreciation, mouthing
their melting vowels like sugar plums. He was not averse to cricket and
football, but he gloried deep in “Christabel” and “St. Agnes Eve”. From the
mountains of Galway his Celtic forebears had looked out for ages upon the
Western Ocean, where lay St. Brandan’s Fabled Isle, and music was in his
blood. From the hills of Clare had my own folk looked out through centuries
upon the same seas, and we were akin. Through twenty years of life and
literature, of struggle and such ashes of success as fall to those who choose
the primal paths of Letters in new lands, his friendship has been closely mine.
It has been full of the mental sympathy and hind association that sweeten by
lucky chance the Day Dreamer’s earthy abiding. This Dreamer’s name is
Roderic Quinn, and when the end of the passage is nearing, and the shadows
are falling, I ask for nothing better than that he may sit beside me and read
again his “Camp Within the West” as he read it, fresh from the golden mint of
fancy, one blue day on Curl Curl Beach. 1
3 King’s Caravan, p.72.
1 “Day Dreamers”, Cerise and Blue (Sydney, 1907), p.15.