Answers to Quiz 8: Writers
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1. Anthony Trollope: 'Fremantle has certainly no natural beauties to recommend it. It is a hot, white, ugly town, with a very large prison, a lunatic asylum and a hospital for ancient and worn-out convicts ... there is hardly a man whom it can be worth the reader's while to have introduced to him.' I got the quotation from Hutchison, who does not give a source.
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2. Joseph Furphy wrote 'Unemployed at last!' as the first sentence in his best-known book, Such is Life (1903) under his pen-name Tom Collins. He arrived in Fremantle in 1905 to help his sons, Felix and Samuel, in the Furphy Foundry, Grey Street, Fremantle. 'Such is life' are said to be the last words uttered by Ned Kelly before he was hanged 11 November 1880 in Melbourne Gaol. I don't know if Furphy was aware of that.
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3. Xavier Herbert: 'The town itself was no less colorful than its waterfront, peopled as it largely was by seafarers and globetrotters that the ships of half a century had left behind. The packed shops and restaurants, the wine bars, pubs, hash-houses, wash-houses, whore-houses, doss-houses, were run by people of all breeds'. Xavier Herbert, from his autobiography, Disturbing Element (1963): 95-97.
4. Paul Hasluck in his autobiography, Mucking About, writes about growing up in Guildford where his father, a captain in the Salvation Army, lived with his family in the building now usually known as the Lockridge Hotel: 'In a more intimate way than I had found in reading history I began to be aware of a life and activity that had been going on in my own country before I was born. I became interested in knowing when this or that place was built and where the old road used to go and what it was all like in Captain Stirling’s day and what were the names on the headstones in the old churchyard at Woodbridge. I grew to love Guildford and knew it intimately as it was in 1917 and 1918.' Paul Hasluck, Mucking About, MUP, 1977.
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5. Eric Silbert: 'My mother’s sister Essie married Charles H May, the jeweller, and caused a family scandal. Not only was he non-Jewish, but he decided to convert to Judaism, which created a debate of immense proportions. ... So Aunty Essie ran CH May Jewellers. She lived to the age of 90. ... When Charles May died she shifted into the Federal Hotel, which was only one door away from her. She stayed there for 50 years and played in a Sunday night poker school with all the bookies and racehorse owners of Fremantle.' Eric Silbert, 'Jewish personalities of Fremantle', Fremantle Studies, 1, 1999: 77-91.
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6. Bob Reece: 'Joseph Keane Hitchcock was Fremantle’s first historian, his History of Fremantle: The Front Gate of Australia 1829-1929 being commissioned by Fremantle Municipal Council in early 1928 and published as part of the celebrations marking the town’s achievement of city status on 3 June 1929. No doubt penned in his distinctive copperplate longhand, the manuscript was typed by Miss West, stenographer and dispatch clerk at J&W Bateman &. Co, who had been educated at Princess May Girls’ School, and printed for the Council in a run of 2250 copies by the SH Lamb Printing House in Fremantle.' Bob Reece 2012, 'Fremantle's first historian: Joseph Keane Hitchcock', Fremantle Studies, 7: 33-50.
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7. Tim Winton: 'One night in November, another that had somehow become morning while she sat there, Georgie Jutland looked up to see her pale and furious face reflected in the window. Only a moment before she'd been perusing the blueprints for a thirty-two-foot Pain Clark from 1913 which a sailing enthusiast from Manila had posted on his website, but she was bumped by the server and was overtaken by such a silly rush of anger that she had to wonder what was happening to her. Neither the boat nor the bloke in Manila meant a damn thing to her; they were of as little consequence as every other site she’d visited in the last six hours. In fact, she had to struggle to remember how she’d spent the time. She had traipsed through the Uffizi without any more attention than a footsore tourist. She’d stared at a five camera image of a mall in the city of Perth, been to the Frank Zappa fan club of Brazil, seen Francis Drake's chamberpot in the Tower of London and stumbled upon a chat group for world citizens who yearned to be amputees.' First paragraph of Dirt Music, Picador, 2001. Now a film directed by Gregor Jordan, 2019.
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8. Ron Davidson: 'My first Fremantle snapshot has my father driving along Cantonment Street around knock-off time on Victoria Quay. It is the late 1940s. Dad brakes sharply to allow a cluster of four or five men to saunter across in front of our car. They are wearing felt hats and serge pants, with cargo hooks hanging from wide leather belts. For each, a Gladstone bag and a large billy completes the uniform. They are heading for the front bar of the nearby Fremantle Hotel.
My father is an impatient man and he’s hurrying back to his job as editor of the Perth Sunday Times and the Mirror, after taking me aboard a new passenger liner crowded with migrants.' That's from the late Ron Davidson's 2001 article called 'Fremantle snapshots', Fremantle Studies, 2: 65-76, but could just as easily be from Ron's wonderful book, Fremantle Impressions, FACP, 2007. Ron's funeral is 20 October 2020.
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9. Stephen Kinnane: 'I am returning to a place where our skin means more than just colour. I am from this place. I am tracking all of my histories through this country, and the way is opening up, like the lines of story that crossed this land, that remain hidden within flooded valleys and transformed landscapes — unless we are willing to read them. Miriwoong women sang songs to try and spirit the children back to their country. The womens voices carried their despair, flowing through the valley and out to sea. Some were able to come back, many haven’t. Some created new lives for themselves against the lines of stories that were written for them, and they linked these stories back with the ones that were denied them. I am wondering if, in spirit form, my grandmother found her way back here after all.' The last paragraph of Steve's outstanding book, Shadow Lines, FACP, 2003.
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10. Alan Seymour: 'Noise; crikey. Y'd never know who’d come over the next rise at yer, burst of gunfire or bloody Turk. Then when the sun come up y’could see yr mates ... bodies ... corpses every where ... blood and everything. ... Sometimes y’d be runnin’ and y’d hear a noise and it’d be y’self sorta screamin’. Y’d have yr bayonet out and when they came at y' ... Y’couldn’t stop ’n’ help yr mates, that was the worst ... y’had to keep pushin’ on.' The One Day of the Year (1958).
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 16 October, 2020 and hosted at freotopia.org (it was last updated on 27 April, 2024), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.