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

The whole is entitled “When Shall We Three Meet Again?” and the accompanying
illustration shows the three stout figures, clad in long, flowing robes, dancing around
the boiling cauldron aptly labelled “Parliament”. 1
In his taking a popular news item and writing a jingle about it, Brady was following a
custom made popular by The Bulletin. The practice was in line of descent in Australia
from Robert Lowe’s satirical verse (and William Forster’s) in the Atlas in the 1840’s,
especially in their attacks upon Governor Gipps, Harpur, Kendall and Daley all wrote
political satires and jingles and in The Bulletin, the art reached a fair degree of
sophistication and impact. Brady’s political verses usually showed the effects of
hurried composition but they generally contained a sting which struck their designed
target and left a barb embedded. They were usually humorous, but succeeded in
deriding politicians, no matter to what party they belonged. Parkes, who had
pretensions to being a scholar and a poet, was quick to make political capital when an
item mentioned that George Reid had no knowledge of books or of English literature.
Brady disliked Parkes even more than he did Reid and for once sided with the stouter
politician. In heavy-handed ridicule, he wrote, in part:
So he hasn’t read the ditty of the froggy on the loggy
By the namby-pamby Parksey, put in metre weak and groggy,
Or the startling tale of Stella on the mountaintop so high;
Or the jagged Janey jingle by the Federation “Hi”.
Or that wicked, greedy Reidy who, to collar all the fame,
Went playing with the Premiers at the Federation game.
What a naughty, haughty fellow, he should spanked soundly be,
Till he says his little lessons to his grandpa, “Eneree. 2
But it was not only politicians of the opposing party, which he derided, who came in
for comment. The continual divisiveness of the Labor Party was satirised in the “The
Political Crisis” 3 and the tendency of Labor candidates to forget their principles once
elected to office was treated in jingle. Perhaps there was a bitter taste in Brady’s
mouth at his own defeat in the political arena or perhaps he was exercising what is
coming to be recognised as a an Australian national habit, but all politicians were
regarded cynically as men of expediency and hypocrites because of their political
activities alone. This sardonic view of the political scene and its inhavitants contains
elements which Professor Inglis Moore has examined. After recounting a story in
which a Queensland waitress shows a complete lack of awe in the presence of a
bishop, he comments:
The irreverence represents the Australian democrat insisting on his (or her)
equality with all classes. It also represents, perhaps the convict mocking at
the authorities of the system, the worker asserting his independence, the
radical critical of the upper or wealthier classes, the Irishman with a chip on
his shoulder defying the authorities, the realist reducing the pretensions of the
might, and the bushman employing his own new scale of values in a new
environment remote from the hierarchies of the old world. 4
1 The Sunday Times, 21.7.1895
2 “H.P.”, The Sunday Times, 10.2.1895
3 Bird-O’-Freedom, 24.12.1892
4 Social Patterns in Australian Literature (Sydney, 1971), p 178
65