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

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After days had gone, days and nights of suggering for a child, it came that I
was to die. Will you believe me that I knew that the time had come for me to
die? Where is one room of all the rooms of my years that I remember best. In
that room there is a table with a lamp burning, a couch and a bed. There are
four people in the room – my father, my mother, the doctor and myself. My
mother is kneeling; my father stands rigid, erect, outside the circle of
lamplight. I sense his presence rather than see him there. Dr Eaton bends
over the table. Very carefully he measuring something in a teaspoon, which
he pours into my mouth, something that warms my lips… They all fade away
and leave me on a strange road. I came again to that road fifty years later. It
was the road going down into Chillagoe in Northern Queensland, through
desert sandstone that reflects the burning heat of a tropical sun. In the
country through which it winds stand strange monsters caarved out of solitary
rocks, behemoths, mastodons – creatures of an unreal world. It is the haunted
Land of Ulalume, which lies out of Space and out of Time. I know it well for I
followed that grim road right to its Outward Border. All my life, as a
consequence, I have suffered from a nervous apprehension, a recurring dread
of impending calamity which requires some philosophy to overcome… 1
The impressionable boy was greatly disturbed also by the orthodox religious ideas
which were presented to him at an early age. The stage was set for confusion in this
regard by the fact that his father came from a long line of Protestants, stretching back
to the time or Henry the Eighth, while his mother came from an equally long line of
Catholics. The doctrine of eternal damnation struck him suddenly and savagely, an
effect heightened by a sense of personal guilt which occasioned a fear and dread
lasting at least three years, destroying much of the joy natural to a growing country
lad. He recalled making altars of sticks, modelled on pictures of Judaic pyres in The
History of the Bible, upon which he sacrificed small birds, pledging life-long piety in
exchange for absolution and for success in the hunt.
His guilt was further increased under the impact of co-educational experience in the
small bush school, the turning to “certain fascinating chapters” of the Old Testament,
which awakened carnal emotions, and Shakespeare”s “Venus and Adonis”, all of
which helped to introduce the neophyte to the world of sex-phantasy and
experimentation – the very world of Hurtle Duffield. Brady hypothesised later that
his guilt, in the rigid maternal morality of the world of his rearing, led to his early
verse-writing as a method of sublimation. 2
Brady’s accounts of his childhood fears – his dreams of malevolent green-eyed cats,
of night-flying, of night-mares in which long-barrelled Winchesters continually bent
and faced him in moments of crisis – all provide material of great interest to the
sexually-oriented psychoanalyst, but to the casual observer there is an air of
mysticism as well as an extraordinary revelatory quality. While Brady does not
profess to understand all the emotional strains of childhood, he is unusually coherent
and suggestive in retelling and describing them.
He betrays a sensitive mind and a vivid pen in recalling some of the actual scenes of
the countryside and people from these early times. They provide an interesting
picture of a way of life since passed:
1 Southerly No. 4 1952, pp. 194 - 5
2 Note appended to Brady’s Juvenilia in Fryer Library