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

“Cape Inscription 1616” 1 and “The Ways of Many Waters” are two poems which
stress this attempt to put the present into perspective, but there are many others.
Nowhere does Brady show the importance of vision as a quality of man in clearer
view than in his discussion of the part science is to play in the framing of man’s life.
Always alive tot scientific advances, he yet sees that unleashed scientific and
technological forces can destroy something essential in the human environment, if not
man himself. Man’s aim should be to strike a balance wherein scientific knowledge
would improve aspects of living, giving man more control over his environment,
making him economically self-sufficient and providing all the necessities of life, yet
allowing him to retain his basic contact with nature and the earth. While science has
the capacity to remove man’s difficulties, it can also remove his pleasures from
everyday life, as “The Modern Scientist” 2 rather aptly shows when scientists tamper
with life’s staples – bread, butter and water; it must use its powers judiciously and
strike a bargain with nature. Failure to achieve this balance can be dangerous, as our
modern pollution-conscious world is discovering. Brady’s vision foresaw this evil
also, warning against the pollution which would arise from the indiscriminate burning
of coal, a Caliban of man’s creating:
And his mantle, like a pall, sables cities; and the thrall
Of his burden heavy lies
On the blackened, barren fields; and his iron presence shields
The expanse of the skies. 3
Furthermore, exercising that recommended vision, Brady foresaw the end of steam
and its succession by atomic power as the main source of industrial energy – and this
in 1909 in a poem light-heartedly signed “E.J. Brady, Victoria, 1950 A.D.” 4 By
finding “how to draw direct its energy from matter” a certain Smith discovered a
“cheap and noiseless force” which did away with the coal-driven engine. Another
forecast, computer selection of dating couples, has already come true but another, it is
hoped, does not come to pass. This one has an anthropologist looking back from the
year 2018 when aboriginals, more fitted than others for nomadic existence, survive an
atomic way while the white population perish. 5
In addition to this use of verse for topical, political purposes and to using it for
drawing emphasis to some of the salient features of man in the industrialised world as
Brady saw him, there is a much wider approach to the function of verse. There is a
great deal of verse, and some poetry, concerning itself with man’s environment and
with his relationships to it – to Nature in its broadest sense. One aspect of this
environment which especially interested Brady was the sea and some of his best
poems are written about it, both as natural phenomenon and as a symbol of an
irresistible force, a great unknowable. So the sailors can understand life and death
and burial at sea, for death follows life as surely as night follows day; this they can
understand, but they have distinct reservations about the meaning of the sea itself –
“But, ah! The Great Gray Water!”.
1 The Bulletin, 23.10.1924
2 The Bird-O’-Freedom, 2.4.1895.
3 “Caliban”, The Bulletin, 3.6.1909
4 “Steam-Obit 1912 – an Epitaph”, The Bulletin, 28.10.1909. His selection of 1950 as a date-line was
not very far off. The world’s first full-size power station began operation at Calder Hall in 1956.
Power from the atom was, of course, released earlier. The first atom bomb was exploded in Los
Alamos, July 1945.
5 “The Conquest of Colour”, Focus, June 1946.
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