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

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The sea exercises a strange fascination over the men who sail on her broad bosom.
Her siren voice calls men as plainly now as it did in the time of the caveman, the
Greek, the Roman and “Norse and Ersemen red”:
By my siren voice a-tune,
Sweet as honey, salt as brine,
As the spring tides and the moon
In a mystic wedlock shine;
By a seaward written rune
Ye are mine, aye, ye are mine! 1
Yet, if it attracts men, it is also a progenital and cleansing force and we are urged to
let the thought, engendered by meditation on the sea, bear us on to greater knowledge.
Such a process has therapeutic qualities as has the sea itself, which Brady refers to as
“This bosom of a world distraught, whose cleansing waters sweep / Around the
continents and isles in constant spring and neap”. 2 But above all the sea is alive – it
has personality which is ever-varying, complex and on the whole, benevolent. It has a
companionship which the sky and the stars, the clouds, the sun, moon and wind. It
has mother qualities, for when the surf drones on the bar “our Mother Sea is crooning
/ Her quaint cradle song afar” 3 while are other times she betrays the human qualities
of relentlessness and jealousy. 4
The sea, too, has its humour, as “The Whaler’s Pig” and “A Capstan Chanty” make
plain, but pathos usually predominates over this quality, whether it is the misfortune
of a stevedore with a broken back, fatally injured while trying to raise enough money
to bring an aged “mudder” over from Norway, 5 the dangling corpse of a mutineer in
“There’s Something at the Yardarm” or the rotting hulks of ships, retired from active
service to decay away in the harbour, or sunken in the ocean depths “By a viscid
seaweed slimed, by a hoar frost whitely rimed” 6 Then there is the ultimate pathos of
the lone sailor tortured by the pitiless sea after being shipwrecked on a sandbank in
the Indian Ocean. In an intensely moving poem the mariner gives an account of his
misfortune, writing it in blood and consigning it to the sea in a bottle, questioning the
justice of a fate which leaves him last to die:
One yet survives …Just God, the thirst
That tears my veins to-day …
The last! the last! …
Why last, not first?
And why not yesterday?
And as if to publicise the results of the unfair encounter, the sea conveys his final
message to a sympathetic audience who think they understand; but “only those who
know and care’, who actually fight the sea for her treasure, can actually know the
reality, the “inner Truth, red-written there”. 7
1 “Siren”, Wardens of the Seas.
2 “Sea Thought”, Wardens of the Seas.
3 “Twilight”, The Earthen Floor.
4 “What the Bottle Said” The Ways of Many Waters.
5 “The For’ard Hold”, ibid.
6 “The Dead Ships”. The Earthen Floor.
7 “What the Bottle Said”, The Ways of Many Waters.