The Devil and James McAuley, page 22
… God will approve
The work you have pursued with burning love,
And all shall be made perfect at the last.
In Part Three, Quiros, anxious for another voyage south, petitioned the Spanish court again and again to raise the funds for a mission to carry the word of God to Terra Australis. As Belmonte reports, this ‘labour in the public cause’ was foiled by two duplicitous churchmen who ‘made baseness seem a mode of piety’ and for whom prudence was synonymous with treachery. The first prelate was ‘a cold mean creature with placarded smile’ while his associate was ‘practised in dissembling double thought / In double speech’. Together they cautioned patience and restraint, while they defamed and mocked Quiros until he found himself dismissed as a mere crank:
Bitter indeed the chalice that he drank,
For no man’s pride accepts so cheap a rate
As not to call on Heaven to vindicate
His worth together with the cause he served.
Despite the best efforts of these two venal prelates—characters with no counterparts in the historic record—Quiros was finally given approval for another voyage, but he died en route, in Panama. On his deathbed he relates to Belmonte a vision of Terra Australis in the future, where he foresees the journeys of other explorers, the discovery and settlement of Australia, the development of a Christian community, into the secular sterility of the mid-twentieth century when
… dreadful signs appear,
Figures and portents of apocalypse.
The ancient Dragon wakes and knows his hour,
The shaken stars fall in a burning shower,
Blue horses rearing throw their charioteer.
In his last moments the dying Quiros hears a voice ‘as deep twilight fell’ echo the Apocalypse of St John the Divine:
… ‘You shall be
The children of the second syllable.’
The second syllable of the word CHRISTUS is the Latin word for incense. St John prophesied that when the seventh seal is opened, incense will rise to the hand of God and the seven trumpets will sound the Last Judgment and the End of Time. It is then that those who are estranged from their unbelieving society, who have held their faith against prevailing custom, who, like Quiros, have died ‘wretched and alone’, will achieve transcendental fulfilment and reign with Christ for a thousand years.
The death of Quiros brings to an end his quest for a new world with a powerful apocalyptic flourish. It is Belmonte, the poet and scribe of Quiros’s travails, who brings the epic narrative to its close. In the final stanza he leaves the dead navigator and walks into the night:
With purest ray the star of morning shone,
Like a bright jewel in the angel’s wing
Whose scarlet plumage rose aslant the dawn.
I heard the voices of the silence sing;
And then the birds woke ready for the day.
Calm to the west the clouded Ocean lay;
But I had reached the end of voyaging.
Quiros’s quest to escape ‘this blind world’s evil’ and shape a New Jerusalem will remain unfulfilled; Belmonte will not venture again into that clouded Ocean. The bright morning star, which Belmonte witnesses as he walks away from Quiros, reinforces the poem’s ultimate message. In Revelation Jesus names himself ‘the bright and morning star’, come to testify that the prophecy of the book is true and that the time of the apocalypse is at hand, saying: ‘Surely I come quickly’ (Revelation 22).
When it was eventually published, Captain Quiros did not fare well. Hope wrote cautiously about his friend’s poem in the Jesuit magazine Twentieth Century, describing it as sui generis, a dramatic epic which was ‘a challenge and an act of faith’. For him the problem was that the poem required the reader to take Quiros’s vision as seriously as Quiros did himself.494 Others offered less than faint praise. The negative critical reaction prompted Leonie Kramer to plead for critics not to focus on the poem’s failure, but rather on the nature of its success, which she located in its high seriousness and plain style. Even she admitted that to those ‘ready to see plainness as lack of depth and conviction as dogmatism, it may well seem impossibly conservative, even perverse’.495 For Vincent Buckley, no amount of talk about the poem’s intentions could wish away its contradictions and poetic failure.496
Captain Quiros, even more than The End of Modernity, represented the culmination of McAuley’s intellectual and political engagement. The sensuous descriptions of the Pacific islands were saturated with images from his time in New Guinea, while the ritualised community of Malope was a restatement of his views about the sacred tradition. Quiros’s bitter humiliation, and the frustration of his pious mission by two treacherous prelates, revisited the collapse of the Industrial Groups and the Movement split in the mid-fifties, while Quiros’s final vision gave full reign to McAuley’s apocalyptic despair at the state of contemporary Australia. Yet, for all the ‘bitter personal manifesto’ that Buckley and others identified in the poem, it did not conclude with the sense of terrible urgency and the imperative for redemptive action so characteristic of McAuley’s writing. Rather, the poem ended on a note of calm resignation that in the fullness of time God’s will would be done. It was as if McAuley had walked away from the visionary attempt to forge a new political order and that he, like his poet narrator, ‘had reached the end of voyaging’.
In his autobiography Santamaria makes the observation that McAuley could endure the harsh vicissitudes of the political struggle, but that the sheer tawdriness of political life would drive him into short periods of withdrawal, ‘like a diver who, too long submerged, has come up for air’.497 From 1960 there was such a period for six or seven years, Santamaria believed, when McAuley’s political engagement was greatly diminished, although he insisted that his friend’s commitment to the National Civic Council program remained ‘unequivocal’. Certainly McAuley’s correspondence with Santamaria during 1960 suggests that he had not slackened in his covert activity; ‘our line of work’ as he called it.498 However, a wariness towards the DLP was apparent in these letters, where McAuley discussed his determination to keep his NCC organisation clear of Jack Kane and DLP influence.
Not only had he walked away from political activism, he was finally finished with New Guinea, just as the Australian territories were entering a particularly critical period. His last visit was in February 1960 when, as always, he spent time at the mission on Yule Island. On this occasion he also did a tour of Netherlands New Guinea, which he found to be magnificent country, but he was troubled by the nagging question of what was going to happen to this colony once the Dutch quit, as they manifestly wanted to do. The Indonesian demand for the incorporation of West New Guinea horrified him. Indonesia, he was confident, was headed for chaos and communism. With the Dutch gone, the Indonesian nationalists would be keen to export their radical nationalism to Papua and New Guinea. He had reluctantly abandoned his view that Papua and New Guinea could become an Australian state and now supported John Kerr’s proposal that the best option was a Melanesian Federation sponsored jointly by Australia and the Netherlands.499 McAuley somewhat glumly agreed with Kerr that to keep West New Guinea out of Indonesian hands Australia must be prepared to grant self-government to Papua and New Guinea at the same time as the Dutch granted independence to its colony, so there could be a political union in New Guinea.
Kerr was most anxious that the Australian government foster an intellectual and political elite in Papua and New Guinea, and that in particular they establish trade unions. He argued that the right for workers to organise was central to all ideas of democracy, and that if free trade unions were not sponsored by the Australian administration, they would be faced with clandestine agitation directed by outside political interests. McAuley thought so too. After his return from New Guinea he did keep in regular contact with an NCC man in Port Moresby to assist the process of seeding their people into fledgling unions in the territory. When the position of general secretary for the Public Service Association was mooted, McAuley was contacted to see if the NCC had anyone to slot into the job. McAuley passed the request on to Santamaria, telling him ‘you might get your people to watch out for the advertisement’.500
He had little faith that things would work out for New Guinea and doubted that his boss, Paul Hasluck, would grasp the importance of blocking Indonesia’s claims. He also harboured deep anxiety about the proposal for a united independent Melanesian Federation, believing that Melanesia was nowhere near ready for self-government and would not be for many decades; most of its people could not even grasp the idea of self-government. Whichever way he looked at it, the Catholic missions had a central role to play. He said as much to Sister Dorothea on Yule Island, at the same time warning her of turbulent times ahead. Unless the missions had ‘a clear teaching of the social justice principles of the church as they affect economic life’, he told her, it would be too late, even within a decade.501 It was not for him. This was not an ocean into which he would venture again.
McAuley made his farewell to New Guinea in his essay ‘My New Guinea’, probably written in I960, although it was published in Quadrant the following year. While much of the essay was taken up with a discussion of his spiritual awakening, in the last section he turned his attention to the political question: ‘What kind of New Guinea are we making?’ The question had an urgency not appreciated fifteen years earlier, when he began his relationship with New Guinea. What had troubled him then continued to torment him:
How were the New Guinea people going to step out of a decayed primitive culture, and embrace and make their own, in knowledge and habit, in inward acceptance and institutional result, those things that seem to be essential: for example, the acceptance of the notion of the human ‘person’ with its structure of intellect and free will and moral responsibility, its intrinsic and inalienable dignity and obligations and rights, its need to find the freedom of self-fulfilment through order and love? … What wisdom would build this house, and furnish and decorate it, and maintain it?
For all the dedication and hard work that had gone into New Guinea from Australia, ‘nothing seems to take deep root, and nothing flowers’. It could not be otherwise given the sterile secularism of Australian society and institutions: ‘the shapeless cannot give shape, nor the formless form’. Yet he had surprised himself with a simple explanation: white women were to blame, they were the real ruin of empire. If only men had gone to New Guinea they would have interacted socially and sexually with the natives so it would have become a mulatto society, ‘a slatternly, but more colourful and easy-going society, with the minor vices of concubinage and sloth, rather than the major respectable vices of cold-heartedness and hypocrisy’. Whatever the original cause, ‘the seeds have been sown and the reaping is not far hence’. He still believed that New Guinea was ‘a test of our quality as a people’, but it was for others to work it out. He was signing off:
There the great island lies with its archaic bird-reptile shape. The smoking mountains speak low thunder, the earth shakes lightly, the sun glares down on the impenetrable dark-green mantle of forest with its baroque folds, the cloud-shadows pass over the green, a white cockatoo rises off the tree-tops like a torn scrap of paper, like an unread message …502
During 1960, while he was still wrestling with the question of his professional future, McAuley was invited to Tasmania to give a series of lectures funded by the Commonwealth Literary Fund. A number of factors conspired to make this an auspicious visit. The invitation came from Murray Todd, the youthful professor of English at the University of Tasmania. Todd had been a member of Alec Hope’s department before going to Tasmania and he knew McAuley through Hope. No doubt Alec had spoken of Jim’s dissatisfaction with his present job and his desire to move back into literature. Todd had recently been elected president of the Staff Association and had taken on the role of persuading hostile academics on the mainland to support his university’s position on the Orr case. The university was on the ropes with an international boycott of the chair of Philosophy, followed by demands for a total ban on all positions. Todd appreciated the assistance of McAuley in the Orr case and he made good use of the opinions of Kerr and Wootten in support of the university. McAuley’s role in the Orr business was also appreciated by his onetime compatriot in the Directorate, Keith Isles, who had been appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Tasmania in 1958. Isles had been forced by his University Council to publish a booklet defending the university over the Orr dismissal and was now facing hefty defamation writs in every Australian state. He needed all the help he could muster.
Murray Todd was also a prominent lay Catholic and had a connection to McAuley through Archbishop Guilford Young. It is very likely that Young had discussed with Todd the untenable position in which McAuley found himself within the NSW Catholic community; how attacks on Cardinal Gilroy had put him outside the pale, especially once those notorious stanzas from Captain Quiros had become known. Young knew the best thing he could do for McAuley was to get him into a more appreciative ecclesiastical environment.503 In Tasmania the NCC was firmly entrenched and enjoyed unwavering support from the archbishop. Its influence would be immeasurably enhanced by the addition of someone with McAuley’s lustre.
During his visit Todd broached with McAuley the idea of creating an entirely new position for him, unique in Australian universities, in his capacity as a prominent poet. What Todd proposed was a readership in Poetry attached to the Department of English, without an administrative and teaching load, which would allow McAuley to concentrate on his craft. It was a most attractive offer. McAuley remembered the proposition this way: ‘the university was locked in the problem of the Orr affair and they were losing status … [so] it wouldn’t be a bad idea from the prestige and public relations point of view to get me to come down’.504 The idea sounded fine. It was just what he wanted, a change of scene and an opportunity to get back into literature after twenty years. ‘I long to get away—from ASOPA—from Sydney’, he wrote in his journal. ‘If the offer is not finally made I shall be terribly disappointed.’505
When Todd put it to the academic faculty meeting in September I960 he argued that McAuley’s status as the editor of Quadrant would bring much needed prestige to a university faced with international censure and increasingly unable to recruit academic staff. The position was given priority in future academic appointments. Keith Isles enthusiastically recommended the appointment at the November University Council meeting, where it was agreed, subject to an examination of McAuley’s credentials. McAuley was overseas on a Cultural Freedom funded visit to India, Europe and America during these processes. When the University Council offered him the appointment, he readily accepted, agreeing that he would take up the job in May 1961. ‘I had no duties’, he recalled. ‘The Vice-Chancellor said “if anyone comes along and suggests you should do anything, you come and see me”.’506
These plans were thrown into turmoil with the totally unexpected death of Murray Todd from leukaemia in early January 1961. He was only thirty-five. The offer to McAuley stood. However, rather than being loosely attached to English it became a position within the English department, which had the effect of making McAuley, in the absence of a professor, the most senior appointment in the department. He resigned from ASOPA on 26 May.507 The question remained: what would become of the chair of English? With academic agitation against the university at its height, it could not have been a worse environment for advertising a professorship.
When McAuley arrived in Hobart he was much taken with the prospects of life in his new environment. The landscape was marvellous and even the poets were good. ‘I’m greatly impressed with the possibilities of good literary work coming from here’, he wrote to an old acquaintance. ‘Vivian Smith is among the most promising of our poets and Gwen Harwood is a most interesting poet.’508 Things would work out well for him, he thought, and he liked the fact that it put him in close contact with intellectual life in Melbourne.509 His wife Norma ‘had really fallen in love with Tasmania’.510 As he now held the most senior academic position in the English department, he thought he should throw his hat into the ring and apply for the chair. He received encouragement in this decision from Keith Isles and may also have been encouraged by his friends Alec Hope and Ian Maxwell, whom he had consulted about previous literary academic applications. By happy coincidence, both Hope and Maxwell were the external appointees to the selection committee.511
Although the position was widely advertised internationally, it attracted a very poor field—not unexpected, given the informal black ban in place against positions at the University of Tasmania. The choice came down to the acting head of the department, Ted Stokes, and Jim McAuley. Stokes was seen to be able and a very good head of department, but the committee expressed their preference for McAuley as someone who could bring much needed prestige to the university at a difficult time.512 Keith Isles reported to the University Council that in making their decision that McAuley was the better candidate, the selection committee relied heavily on the opinion of the external members who both spoke very well of McAuley and ‘highly praised’ his book The End of Modernity.513
The move to Hobart did not cause McAuley to sever his close connection with Richard Krygier and the AACF. His editorship of Quadrant was an important aspect of his credentials at the University of Tasmania and he was able to manage the editing from Hobart with Marie Gillis running the office in Sydney, to which he would make periodic visits. Krygier needed McAuley’s support, since the AACF was at a testing time. Latham now into his eighties had declined to serve another term as president and was looking around for a successor. He had considered Kerr as his natural successor and had been very disappointed to be told by Krygier that Kerr was intending to resign from the executive because of the pressure of his work at the bar.514 In August Kerr did, in fact, tender his resignation. Latham had then approached Richard Casey without success. He remained inclined toward John Kerr for president or, as a second choice, Dick Spann.515
