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

While working on these books, Brady had been living mainly in Melbourne, but he
was once again fast tiring of city life. He told Moir that he was always fed up with
Melbourne – “too backward, too slow, too scared and too damned cold, climatically
and mentally”, so he returned to Mallacoota. Further warmth came into his life with
the birth of a daughter when Brady was 77! Delighted, the parents called her Edna
June to keep the E.J.B. initials which had been preserved for four generations; the
poet added the distinction of a “Natal Song” which concluded:
The land I love is their and thine,
And – be it late or soon –
I pray its boundless gifts will fall
By right of birth upon them all,
And You my Edna June.
Although pretty banal verse, some allowances must be made for the seventy seven
year old father.
Ever a keen letter writer (and duplicates were kept in their hundreds, even to the
ordering of supplies and provisions), Brady carried on a remarkably wide and
energetic correspondence. He wrote to James Devaney, who was editing a Catholic
periodical in Brisbane, to Robert Close, Darcy Niland, Muir Holburn, Ernest Lane,
J.K. Moir, Oscar Mendelsohn, Eustace Tracey and Allan Queale – to most of these
continuously and at length. He also wrote to Percy Cerutty, who sent his Essentials of
Good Health and wrote: “Am caught up in the culd of the physical, the old Greek
conception: Mens sana in corpore sano. You always did have it! Some of us have to
acquire it! 1
Occasionally special tasks were given to Brady. He received ten guineas for writing a
Foreword to a book on economic theory written by a young Australian whom he had
never met, happy to endorse a book whose theories he considered ran parallel to his
own. 2 He also wrote and Introduction and gave much helpful advice when Muir
Holburn and Marjorie Pizer collected the militant verse of V.J. Daley (“Creeve Roe”).
“Victor was my closest and most understanding friend in life, and his work has not yet
been appraised at its true literary value, here and abroad” Brady wrote. 3 But another
venture at this time was less well received. He had written a poem, “Australia
Remembers”, as a tribute to those killed in the war. A friend, Arthur Stubbs, set this
in a folder, planned to attach the biography of a particular soldier who had not
returned, and attempted to sell this memento to the bereaved family. Although the
project had the approval of several councils it aroused some misgivings and after the
Returned Servicemen’s League stated it opposition and after unfavourable publicity
from some newspapers the project was quietly dropped. 4
Brady was becoming increasingly disenchanted with The Bulletin. He not only
disliked its official policy in the mid-forties, which he had rather obtusely seen as
going downhill from the point of Archibald’s departure and going politically right
each year, but he did not like its encouragement of the more modern and extreme
form of poetry.
1
Percy Cerutty to Brady, 5.6.1949, in National Library
2
E.H. Anderson, The Economics and Finance of a New Order (Melbourne, 1946). Letter from
Anderson to Brady, 3.6.1946, in National Library
3
Brady to Muir Holburn, 11.12.1945, in Mitchell Library.
4
Smith’s weekly, 12.10.1946
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