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

And when the teams are successful in carrying “our golden booty / Along the wool
roads free” they make for the one destination – “towards the waiting sea”. 1 If
Mallacoota played into the hands of Brady’s interest in the sea, it also gave him ample
opportunity to appreciate the wonders of nature in the country – a wonder transmitted
to the reader in “Knights of Chance” which proclaims freedom from the trammels of
the city, with its meek-faced merchants “dissembling all their days” and raises a
catchcry of rejoicing in the purity and freshness of the country: “Ours are the open
places; ours are the plain and the sky; / The clean, deep-hearted ranges, the hills which
cannot lie!” 2 This proposition is heartily acceded to by many other poems – “Bells
and Hobbles”, “Riverine” and “The Lost Brigade” among them. This purity of the
country serves a cathartic and therapeutic, even an escapist, purpose for it restores the
jaded spirit made weak by too-long intervals away from nature:
‘Will your city give nepenthe?’ cries the Spirit of the West –
‘Will its markets fill the chalice of the longings in your breast?
Is the traffic in its thunder
Like that still and quiet wonder
Of the moon above the mulga where the weary riders rest?’ 3
There is a lyricism about Brady’s poems of the countryside which shows his deep
love for it in its many moods, from the earliest morning when “pale swamp-mists
slowly rise / To white-winged clouds of mystery”, through the full day when “Night’s
lingering coolness flies at length, and o-er the maize and cane / The sun, despotic
overlord, triumphant reigns again!” 4 After the creatures of the bush and the farmers
of the land have fulfilled their daily routines the bush night with its possums, owls and
phalangers begins to close in; “like a curtain through the trees, by Nubian fingers
drawn, / Dusk closes in”. 5 This lyricism conceals the most unifying force for Brady –
the love of Nature in all her manifestations. A lover is seen in terms of the natural
world in “Love and Death”:
Night is in her hair and through its maze
White stars like diamonds blaze.
Her cheeks are Day; and all Earth’s glory
Flames on her lips’ sunrise. 6
This love of nature is alloyed with personal experience in many poems, giving an
intimacy and directness wholly refreshing. So when an earlier lo9ve is recalled
among the orchards, magpies and scented blooms of Castle Hill, the memory is
almost wholly idealistic except for the plight of the panting hare who hears the
“dappled death” which stalks him when “in summertime the thorn / With white
defiance scents the morn”. 7 A similar vividness and romanticism attends the passage
of a coach along the high Blue Mountains roads of Brady’s boyhood, bringing views
of civilisation to lonely workers on the fringes of the towns:
1 “The Wool Roads”, The Sydney Mail, 9.12.1903
2 The Earthen Floor.
3 “Where the Saltbush Grows”, Bells and Hobbles.
4 “Northern Morning”. Bells and Hobbles.
5 “Night in the Bush”, ibid.
6 Our Swag, 22.12.1905
7 “In Cumberland”, The Bulletin, 9.3.1922
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