Think About It 009: LIZ JENSEN

What no one ever tells you is that you’ll always be alone, trapped inside yourself forever.  It’s like a house you were born in, and some of the furniture belonged to your mum and dad but you can chuck that out if you want to, or if you can.  But you’ve got to bloody well live in this house, that’s the thing.  Even if it’s a hole and you prefer the look of other people’s.  Nobody tells you how it’s going to be, living inside yourself.  How grey things’ll look from the window, if that’s the mood you’re in.  But when you close the curtains it’s worse.

War Crimes for the Home (2002)


 

Use the link below to visit the website of award-winning British novelist LIZ JENSEN:

 

https://www.lizjensen.com/

 

 

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The Late Great... PAUL BLEY

PAUL BLEY

1932 – 2016

IDA LUPINO

PAUL BLEY [piano]; MARK LEVINSON [bass]

BARRY ALTSCHUL [drums]

from the 1969 Contemporary LP  

Ramblin'

YOU GO TO MY HEAD
CHET BAKER [trumpet, vocal]; PAUL BLEY [piano]

from the 1985 Steeplechase LP 

Diane 

Canadian born jazz pianist and composer Paul Bley died at his home in Florida on 3 January 2016.  He was eighty-three years old.

Bley began playing professionally as a high school senior, taking over from Oscar Peterson at the Alberta Lounge in his hometown of Montréal.  This marked the beginning of a seven decade career which saw the adventurous pianist perform and record with many a jazz legend including Lester Young, Ben Webster, Charlie 'Bird' Parker, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz, Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny among many others. 

Bley was best known, however, for his idiosyncratic and sometimes meditative solo and trio work which frequently featured the compositions of his first wife Carla Bley (who wrote Ida Lupino) and saw him successfully collaborate with his second wife, the singer/composer Annette Peacock, on several albums released throughout the first half of the 1970s.  The latter phase of his career often saw Bley perform and record as a solo artist –– a period which produced many outstanding albums including The Sankt-Gerold Variations (1996), the hypnotic Solo in Mondsee (2009) and Play Blue: Oslo Concert (2014).

The following is an excerpt from his memoir Stopping Time: Paul Bley and the Transformation of Jazz, co-authored with musician and critic David Lee and published by the Véhicule Press in 1999.  (Sadly, the book is now out of print.)

Chapter 3:  PARKER, MINGUS, YOUNG, ARMSTRONG, TRISTANO

 I was working with Pete Brown in Brooklyn on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, until midnight. Dick Garcia asked me if I'd come Saturday night and play with Bird in an armory up in Harlem beginning at one a.m. So I worked until 11:30 and then went up to play with Bird.

Bird was nowhere to be found at two a.m. We played the second set. At three a.m., exactly, Bird walked into the Armory, unpacked as if it was midnight, and of course no one said a thing, because sixteen bars into his first chart, it was midnight. Nobody remembered that he was late. 

That was the kind of self-test that the great musicians gave themselves in that period. They always came very late to gigs. Other than the fact that they might have had trouble getting to the job on time, that was a test of their abilities: to play so well when they began that the audience forgot that they were two hours late. Just as several decades later, you could be allowed a hostile attitude about yourself and your work and everyone around you, provided that your great playing justified your attitude. But if your playing did not justify the attitude then you were dismissed as being a fake. In short, you have to be able to afford your attitude. 

With Bird's concept, he would be playing a thirty-two bar tune and in the second eight, he would already be starting something that was going to get him into the bridge. Meanwhile, I was busy on bar three-and-a-half of the second eight, and in my conception of it, the bridge was a long way off. 

That was a very important lesson to learn. You never play where you are. You play where you're going. Thinking ahead. Some could think ahead 16 bars, some could think ahead four choruses. Now I've gotten to the point where I can hear a whole solo in advance – not note for note, but structurally. I get an idea, facing a rhythm section or a particular instrument in a particular environment, of what can be done in what length of time.

In hearing Bird's ability to anticipate what was coming and always thinking ahead, I've tried to extend the idea to listening to three things before I start playing a phrase: 

One: What was the last phrase that was played, and what was the last note of the last phrase that was played, and what should follow that? 

Two: What music has been played throughout the history of jazz that has to be avoided, leaving me only what's left as material for the next phrase? 

Three: Where would I like to get to by the time my playing is finished? 

All that in a split second during a pause in my phrasing.

Paul Bley is survived by his third wife Carol Goss, his three daughters and his two grandchildren.  Thankfully, much of his fine and challenging music remains widely available on CD and streaming services such as Spotify. 

 

Use the links below to visit the website of PAUL BLEY and read his obituary published in The New York Times on 5 January 2016:

 

http://www.improvart.com/bley/

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/arts/music/paul-bley-adventurous-jazz-pianist-dies-at-83.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1

 

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

PAUL BLEY
c 2014

 

Watch That Man REMEMBERING DAVID BOWIE

DAVID BOWIE

1973

 

 

The number of performers whose work has extended the boundaries of popular culture can be counted on the fingers of one hand.  David Bowie was one such performer and his death on 11 January 2016, following a long unpublicized battle with cancer, marks the passing of a never-to-be-repeated era in the history of Western music.  Bowie's impact as a songwriter and genre-defying iconoclast made him an irreplaceable figure on the cultural landscape whose far-reaching influence will continue to be absorbed by future generations for decades if not for centuries to come.

 

 

DAVID JONES, c 1958

 

 

The artist the world would come to know as 'David Bowie' was born David Robert Haywood Jones in the London suburb of Brixton on 8 January 1947 (a birthday he shares with Elvis Presley, one of his earliest childhood influences along with black performer Little Richard but someone he preferred not to meet when offered the chance to do so in the early 1970s).  After performing as a saxophonist/vocalist in various school and local bands throughout his teen years, he began his professional career in 1963 as lead singer of rhythm and blues outfit Davie Jones & The King Bees which would go on to release Liza Jane, an unsuccessful debut single, in June 1964.  This was the first of three groups –– The Manish Boys and Davy Jones and The Lower Third being the others –– he would lead during the next two years, none of which caught on with the public or brought him to the attention of those with the power to make him a star.

 

 LIZA JANE

DAVIE JONES & THE KING BEES

Debut single, June 1964 

 

DAVID BOWIE, c 1971

 

 

In 1966, eager to find an audience for his growing catalogue of original material, he went solo and adopted the stage name 'David Bowie' to differentiate himself from the 'other' Davy Jones, then at the height of his fame as a member of the popular North American television band The Monkees.  Bowie's self-titled debut album –– a hybrid of Mod-pop and the kind of neo-Edwardian variety-style music made famous by Anthony Newley –– appeared on the British Deram label in 1967.  (The fact that it was released on the same day as The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was an unfortunate coincidence which didn't see it widely reviewed or help to boost its sales.)  It was not until 1969 and the release of a single titled Space Oddity –– launched just weeks before the Apollo II moon landings –– that Bowie began to be appreciated as a singer/songwriter with a sound that, while clearly indebted to its various wide ranging influences, nevertheless managed to be unmistakably his own.

 

 THE LAUGHING GNOME

DAVID BOWIE

from the 1967 Deram LP 

David Bowie

 

 

Although he made several landmark albums over the next six years it was not until 1972 –– and the release of his audacious fifth solo album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars –– that Bowie found the recognition and mainstream commercial success which had previously eluded him.  The phenomenon this LP so rapidly became established him as one of the most original and, by the time the decade ended, most influential recording artists of the 1970s.  His decision to 'play' the Ziggy Stardust character, on-stage as well as off, also made him the key figure of Britain's emerging Glam Rock movement –– a label that, while never harmful to his career, tended to overshadow his achievements as a composer and witty, often highly insightful lyricist.  He also found time to produce and add his distinctive backing vocals to Lou Reed's 1972 breakthrough LP Transformer, gaining the former Velvet Underground frontman his biggest-ever hit in Walk On The Wild Side in the process.  He would later go on to produce three albums for Iggy Pop, another North American friend whose early work with The Stooges he greatly admired and who asked him, in 1973, to remix what proved to be that band's chaotic third LP Raw Power.  Four years later he would also produce, arrange, perform and sing on what are now generally regarded as being Iggy Pop's two solo masterpieces The Idiot and Lust for Life (both 1977).

 

DRIVE-IN SATURDAY

DAVID BOWIE

from the 1973 RCA LP 

Aladdin Sane

 

 

DAVID BOWIE, ANGIE BOWIE and son, c 1973

 

 

Abandoning the Ziggy persona in 1973, Bowie went on to record the equally adventurous albums Aladdin Sane (1973), Pin Ups (also 1973, consisting entirely of cover versions of songs originally performed by Them, The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds and other UK bands he'd seen at The Marquee and other London clubs as a teenager) and Diamond Dogs (1974, loosely based on George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four) before confounding the critics and his fans, yet again, by abandoning rock music altogether for the smooth 'plastic soul' of Young Americans (1975). 

 

The album's second single Fame (co-written and performed with ex-Beatle John Lennon) handed Bowie his first US #1 while the album itself went on to become one of his biggest sellers, with a punchy, radio-friendly title track that confronts the listener with an extraordinary outsider's vision of post-Watergate North America, packed with up-to-the-minute references that are as trenchant as they are cannily observed.  In a little over five minutes, Bowie gives you the story of a young couple –– their wedding and honeymoon, their disappointment and eventual alienation from each other and the safe suburban middle class life they've been raised to expect to lead together.  The fact that it's all backed up by an infectious beat which looks ahead to disco while completely avoiding that genre's sometimes ludicrous banality only emphasizes what a thought provoking, brilliantly conceived dissection of its times Young Americans is and remains forty-one years after it was written.

 

 

DAVID BOWIE, 1976

   

 

Unwilling as ever to repeat himself, Bowie shifted direction again with Station to Station (1976), combining some elements of his 'plastic soul' sound with a new, distinctly European elegance which nevertheless saw him invited to perform its first single Golden Years on the black-oriented TV program Soul Train.  (The LP concludes with a stunningly restrained version of Wild Is The Wind, the theme song for a 1957 film starring Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani which had previously been recorded by Johnny Mathis and Nina Simone among others.)  He could easily have jumped aboard the disco bandwagon after this, churning out hits in the then popular style of The Bee-Gees or KC and the Sunshine Band, but he characteristically preferred to re-confound everyone's expectations by starring in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 film adaptation of Walter Tevis's existential sci-fi masterpiece The Man Who Fell To Earth, giving a memorably unsettling performance as Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien from the planet Anthea who finds himself unwillingly stranded on this planet.  It was neither Bowie's first nor last appearance in front of the cameras, although his work in Just a Gigolo (1978) –– an atrocious flop set in 1920s Germany, a period he found fascinating and inspirational on many levels –– left a lot to be desired in terms of showcasing his acting ability.  Thankfully, his performances in the play The Elephant Man (1981) and in later films including The Hunger (1982), Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983) and as Andy Warhol in the biopic Basquiat (1996) proved he was right to refer to himself, as he did on the back cover of his classic 1971 LP Hunky Dory, as 'The Actor.' 

 

ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR

DAVID BOWIE

from the 1977 RCA LP

Low

 

In late 1976 Bowie decided to leave Los Angeles –– the city in which he'd been living since 1974 and in which he'd also developed a serious addiction to cocaine –– and relocate to what was then the divided German city of Berlin.  He described Low, the first LP he made here with his longtime producer Tony Visconti and his new collaborator Brian Eno, as '…a reaction to having gone through that dull greeny-grey limelight of American rock and roll and its repercussions: pulling myself out of it and getting to Europe and saying for God's sake re-evaluate why you wanted to get into this in the first place?  Do you really do it just to clown around in LA?  Retire.  What you need is to look at yourself a bit more accurately.  Find some people you don't understand and some place you don't want to be and just put yourself into it.  Force yourself to buy your own groceries… And that's exactly what I do… I have an apartment on top of an auto shop.'

 

Low and its successor "Heroes" were arguably his two most influential albums.  Not only did they serve as the perfect soundtrack for a disenfranchised generation coming to maturity in what had become a bleak post-industrial society, they almost singlehandedly introduced that generation to electronic music and laid the foundation for pioneering post-punk bands like Joy Division (who originally called themselves Warszawa after a track on Low) and others, like Ultravox and Duran Duran, who would go on to define the 'New Romantic' movement of the early 1980s.  Both albums contain lengthy instrumental pieces, several of which feature wordless singing, while the songs themselves saw Bowie adopt a new minimalistic approach to his writing which, again, would prove to be highly influential and inspire at least one imitator in the form of Gary Numan (about whom he was heard to make a few disparaging remarks at the time).  The title track of "Heroes" quickly became a kind of underground modernist anthem –– a hypnotic, unabashedly romantic tale of young lovers who meet each day by the Berlin Wall in defiance of the city's restrictive political and social partitioning –– and was released in both German and French versions to capitalize on Bowie's growing popularity in Europe.  "Heroes" definitely touched a chord in people (even though it failed to chart in the US and did not become well known there until he performed it as part of his Live Aid set in 1985) and remains one of his most iconic, ironic and frequently covered songs.

 

 BOYS KEEP SWINGING

DAVID BOWIE

from the 1979 RCA LP

 Lodger

 

 

1979 saw Bowie living in New York and collaborating for the third time with Brian Eno on a new LP called Lodger.  Its first single, the catchy riff-driven tune Boys Keep Swinging, featured him in drag and became notorious in its own right as it introduced audiences to what would become, by the mid-1980s, the new era of music television –– another artform at which he excelled and in which he wasted no time establishing himself as an important innovator.  Nowhere was this more evident than in the clip he co-created for his 1980 single Ashes To Ashes.  This song, a sequel of sorts to his 1969 hit Space Oddity, saw Bowie adopt the personas of a Pierrot wandering through a surreal pink-tinged landscape and a paralyzed marionette, while its lyrics contained, as one observer noted, '…more messages per second than any other single this year.'  It was a smash and, as another critic noted, marked the point at which he stopped being just another rockstar and became a genre unto himself.  The album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) proved to be his last for RCA, the label he'd been signed to since 1971, and served as a fitting finale to phase one of what, by anybody's standards, had been a fascinating and remarkably consistent career.

 

TEENAGE WILDLIFE

DAVID BOWIE

from the 1980 RCA LP

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

DAVID BOWIE and his 2nd wife IMAN, c 1992

 

 

Bowie didn't release a new LP until 1983, when Let's Dance saw him once again top the charts, largely thanks to a video clip (shot in outback Australia) which received high rotation airplay on MTV courtesy of his new label EMI and saw him become a major stadium attraction throughout North America and the rest of the Western world.  Mainstream success, while financially welcome, seemed (as it so often does with a certain type of artist) to cause him to lose his way, with his next album Tonight (1984) receiving disappointing reviews despite the presence of another hit single in Blue Jean which, once again, became a high rotation favourite on MTV.  Like so much of the music Bowie wrote and released over the next nine years, Let's Dance and Blue Jean alienated many of his older fans, leading some to prematurely dismiss him as a has-been –– a judgement apparently confirmed by 1987's over-elaborate Glass Spider Tour and so-called 'vanity' projects like his guitar-noise band Tin Machine.  

 

It was not until 1995 and the release of Outside, his fourth project with Brian Eno, that he began to regain credibility in the eyes of the music press and the fans who continue to revere his early RCA work but had, by now, almost lost faith in his ability to create relevant, cutting edge music.  This album was followed by the techno/jungle-based Earthling (1997), the more 'organic' Hours… (1999), and two well-received reunion LPs produced by Tony Visconti — Heathen (2002) and Reality (2003). 

 

I'M AFRAID OF AMERICANS

DAVID BOWIE

co-written with BRIAN ENO

from the 1997 Virgin/Warner LP 

Earthling

 

 

It was while touring to promote Reality that the singer suffered a heart attack and was rushed to a Hamburg hospital to undergo an emergency angioplasty –– an event which result in a ten year withdrawal from the music industry which ended in January 2013 with the unexpected (and virtually unpromoted) release of a new single Where Are We Now?, again produced by Tony Visconti.  Visconti, a North American draft dodger who had played with him in London in a band called The Hype back in 1970, would go on to produce what were to be Bowie's final two LPs The Next Day (2013) and Blackstar (2016) –– albums which saw the artist reflect on his old work even as he appeared to be deconstructing and making some effort to contextualize it for the Twitter and Instagram generation.

 

Bowie was, at all times, a great survivor –– a performer who managed to negotiate his way from 1960s rhythm and blues through Mod, the dying world of British variety, hippiedom, glam/punk, post-punk, electronica, MTV, stadium rock and into the digital era without permanently damaging his reputation as a plugged-in, game-changing legend.  He would still be as revered (and as widely mourned) as he is today had he never released another album after Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) –– a figure who was, in many ways, a pop music prophet who had the courage to pursue his own vision in an industry where the idea of 'stick with what sells' has always been the one inviolable rule.  Few performers ever manage to release one perfect album in their careers.  Between 1969 and 1980 David Bowie somehow managed to release thirteen of them, one right after the other, changing tastes, creating movements and redefining what rock music is, should and could be along the way.  He is to post-Beatles popular music what Louis Armstrong is to jazz and Ludwig van Beethoven is to the classical tradition –– an artist who seemed to appear out nowhere and made the world pay attention by offering it sounds it had never heard before and only discovered that it needed once it had.

 
  

 LAZARUS

DAVID BOWIE

from the 2016 ISO LP 

Blackstar

 

 

 

DAVID BOWIE released his twenty-fifth album, Blackstar, on 8 January 2016.  It followed the release of the critically acclaimed The Next Day in March 2013 –– an album which marked the end of his decade long absence from the music industry.

 

Use the links below to view a list of the 100 books which most influenced the life and work of DAVID BOWIE and all of his lyrics arranged by album:

 

 

 

http://www.davidbowie.com/news/bowie-s-top-100-books-complete-list-52061

 

 

http://www.azlyrics.com/b/bowie.html

 

 

 

I also recommend this BOWIE-related post from the insightful music blog Anorak Thing. 

 

 

 

Another BOWIE site of enormous interest is Pushing Ahead of the Dame run by writer and editor CHRIS O'LEARY which dissects, in intelligent and never less than fascinating detail, every song he ever wrote, recorded or was otherwise associated with to even a minor degree.  

 

 

CHRIS O'LEARY is also the author of the BOWIE-related books Rebel Rebel (2015) and its soon-to-be published sequel Ashes to Ashes. 

 

 

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 

 

 

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Words for the Music 001: DAVID BOWIE

 

 
Une vie intense REMEMBERING JACQUES BREL

 

 

 

 

Last updated 17 October 2021 § 

 

 

The Commandant (1975) by JESSICA ANDERSON

 

Penguin Books Australia, c 1985

 

 

Frances murmured an excuse and got up, gathering her shawl tightly around her, and went to the side.  Mrs Bulwer's warning voice followed her.  'It does not do to be opinionated.'  She pretended not to hear.  On the bay were amazing stretches of turquoise and violet, and the sky was empty of everything except a dandelion of sun, mildly blazing, and a meek white crescent of moon.  From beneath the frill on the back of her bonnet a strand of dark hair dropped and was caught and extended by the wind.  The sun, the boom of sails and the race of water, would have held her there at the side, in a dream or a trance, as had happened so often on the voyage out, had not Mrs Bulwer, small and black and compact in her side vision, waited.  And with a sense of facing something lately evaded, Frances admitted that also waiting, the more insistent because only inwardly visible, was the commandant.  Deliberately, she set herself to visualise him, in five hours or so, descending the river bank to meet the Regent Bird.

 

 

 

The Novel:  Frances O'Beirne is the seventeen year old sister of Laetitia 'Letty' Logan, wife of Captain Patrick Logan, Commandant of the Moreton Bay penal settlement located in a remote part of northeastern Australia.  An innocent and idealistic girl lacking in neither wit nor intelligence, Frances is on her way to the settlement from Sydney (via Ireland and England) to serve as companion and helper to her sister who recently suffered a miscarriage and already has two small children to care for in what is a very inhospitable environment far removed from the familiar comforts of home.  

 

Although delighted at the prospect of being reunited with Letty, Frances has mixed emotions about being reunited with Letty's husband –– a man she hasn't seen since childhood and whose reputation for harsh discipline and needless brutality were much discussed during the time she spent in Sydney before boarding the Regent Bird to complete her journey north.  Nor is the girl alone in harbouring these misgivings about her brother-in-law.  The Commandant is also a controversial figure in the eyes of his fellow colonists, a prime target for the reforming Sydney newspaper editor Edward Smith-Hall against whom he has recently filed a suit for libel.

 

Frances also has something of the reformer in her –– an attitude encouraged by her would-be suitor Edmund Joyce during the arduous voyage they shared from England to the new colony.  Having grown accustomed to Edmund's society and to that of his outspoken sisters during her stopover in Sydney, Frances has now become a little too free in expressing her opinions to those –– the officers' wives Amelia Bulwer and Louisa Harbin, the alcoholic and faintly comical surgeon Henry Cowper, Logan's new second-in-command Captain Clunie –– who are accompanying her on the final leg of her journey to what will one day become Brisbane Town and eventually just Brisbane, capital city of the Australian state of Queensland.  Frances combines this unpopular attitude with a romantic view of life which often sees her give way to 'elated trances' in which she imagines herself remaining permanently in Australia at the side of her own dashing (but as yet unidentified) 'beloved husband.'  

 

But these girlish dreams are tested by her arrival in what is, at best, a rudimentary township built to serve and shelter the troops and officers charged with the grim task of overseeing and doling out punishment to convicts whose incorrigible natures and unrepentant recidivism have seen them transferred to this barbaric prison on the edge of what remains a hostile, largely unexplored wilderness.  Frances's youthful idealism soon brings her into conflict with her brother-in-law –– a taciturn, difficult-to-fathom man whose moods swing between conviviality, stern dismissal of her humanitarian ideals and black despair as he seeks to impose his will on the settlement by having any prisoner who flouts the law he feels himself to personally embody brutally flogged.  And Logan's job is not made easier by the arrival of Clunie, an officer of the same rank whom he suspects of having been sent by Governor Darling –– a man he fears neither likes him nor approves of his methods of maintaining law and order –– to replace him.  

 

Logan and his sister-in-law tolerate what they see as being each other's moral weaknesses as a kindness to Letty, still recovering from her miscarriage and filled with trepidation at the thought of her husband being transferred to India to rejoin his regiment and what such a transfer will mean to his career, their children's futures and to the libel action he's shortly due to pursue against the currently imprisoned but increasingly popular Mr Smith-Hall.  While Letty remains determined to accompany her husband should he suddenly be packed off to India, she's understandably saddened at the thought of being parted from young Robert and Lucy who, for their own safety, will have to be sent back to Ireland should the family be forced to leave Australia to avoid diseases like cholera and typhus which run rampant in the unhealthier climate of the subcontinent.

 

Frances's arrival only escalates the tensions which already dominate the lives of those obliged by military necessity or the rule of law to reside in Moreton Bay.  Something must break and eventually it does, with Frances becoming hysterical after a young convict named Martin –– a boy roughly her own age whom she has often noticed working in the Commandant's garden –– impulsively throws his arms round her while they're helping Madge Noakes, Letty's horribly scarred convict servant, to hang mosquito nets on all the family beds.  'She had already turned to leave the room,' we are told, 'so that it was a collision, breast to breast, his furious mouth jabbering hatred into hers and his thin arms clamping both hers to her sides.  In her first shock she thought of the knife he used on the sash cords, and fearing it in her back, sucked inwards a breath of fear, a soft scream; and when, in the next moment, the fury in his face became a sort of blind besottedness, and his imprecations a burble of love, she only screamed louder… and continued to scream, and did not know why.'  

 

 

Macmillan Publishing first UK edition, 1975

 

 

The incident, soon over, creates an impossible situation, with Frances fully conscious of the fact that her hysterical overreaction to Martin's advances has placed the boy, formerly a model prisoner, in a potentially lethal situation.  She pleads with Logan to be lenient in punishing him but the Commandant is contemptuous of her pleas, his anger at what her 'Yankee talk' has led to causing him to denounce her as an interfering troublemaker who would do well to return to Sydney and marry Edmund Joyce if that gentleman is foolish enough to want her.

 

Desperate to spare Martin pain and salve her own tormented conscience, Frances turns to her sister for help, begging Letty to intercede with her husband on the boy's behalf –– a plea that leads Logan to promise his wife that Martin will receive only the punishment the law demands he should receive and not a single stroke more.  This statement, conveyed to Frances by her sister, relieves the headstrong girl of some of the guilt she feels at having responded so disastrously to Martin's unsought declaration of love.  She even takes pleasure in the thought of becoming mistress of the house for the evening while Letty pays a call –– her first since regaining her strength –– on Mrs Bulwer.

 

But all does not go well.  Soon after her sister leaves the house, Frances is disturbed by the sounds of shouting coming the garden and rushes outside to investigate, only to discover that Robert has cut his leg open on a piece of rusty metal –– the remnants of an old convict leg-iron hidden in the uncut grass –– and is now bleeding profusely from his severe and probably infected wound.  Remaining clear-headed despite the imminent danger such an injury poses to her nephew, Frances decides to fetch Dr Cowper's new associate James Murray, who is managing the dispensary while Cowper pays his regular monthly visit to an outlying settlement, in person.  Leaving Robert and Lucy in the care of Madge Noakes, whom she stumbles upon in the bath, she sets off on foot for the hospital, arriving there shortly afterwards, breathless and exhausted.  

 

Another shock awaits her at the hospital –– the bloody, severely lacerated back of the groaning, barely conscious Martin, who is lying on a table having his wounds dressed by Murray after receiving the one hundred lashes the Commandant ordered he be given for having molested her.  Overcoming her horror by recalling her reason for coming to find the surgeon in the first place, Frances tells Murray of Robert's accident, urging him to return to the house without her while she finds Letty and tells her what has happened to her son.

 

Her visit to the hospital disgusts and overwhelms Frances, causing her to collapse when she returns to her sister's house as the knowledge of what she has seen and, in another sense, failed to prevent combine to rob her of her final illusions about life, mercy, the Commandant and, perhaps most distressingly of all, herself.  Later that evening, Letty and Dr Murray find her in a semi-conscious state in her room, lying on her bed in a puddle of her own vomit but unable, or unwilling, to get up and clean herself.  Dr Cowper is soon called in and with him comes her brother-in-law, eager to express his gratitude for the swift action she took to preserve Robert's leg and undoubtedly save his life.  Logan also uses his visit to express his regret at what Frances witnessed at the hospital, adding that it could have been much worse had Letty's intervention not persuaded him to let Martin off 'lightly' with only one hundred lashes instead of the two hundred he originally decreed he should receive.

 

It is at this point, the shrewd Dr Cowper notices, that Frances's incredulity finally 'gives way to hopelessness.'  Nor is the change in her vision of the Commandant and what would seem to be his true nature confined exclusively to herself.  Letty has also seen a new side of her husband and asks him, when they find themselves alone in their children's nursery, if he's been misleading her all these years as to what type of man he really is –– a challenge made all the more urgent by the fact that he is shortly due to depart for the bush on an exploratory expedition without having received confirmation from the Governor if Captain Clunie is to replace him in the meantime.  Logan leaves the settlement soon after with neither question answered, scornful as ever of warnings that the local aborigines have been joined by several convict runaways who are eager to take revenge on him for having subjected them to such cruel and ruthless treatment.

 

The settlement soon receives word, via one of the exhausted soldiers who accompanied Logan into the bush, that he's gone missing after breaking away from the main party to search for one of its precious lost horses.  Clunie, nominally in command of the settlement since Logan's departure, is obliged to send a party out to search for him –– a group which contains, in addition to Cowper, the convict Lewis Lazarus whose friend Boylan is one of the runaways suspected of having joined the aborigines.  

 

Many convicts, the surgeon informs Clunie, already believe that Logan is dead –– a belief it does not take long to confirm.  A few days after leaving Moreton Bay the search party discovers the Commandant's naked corpse, stuffed face-downwards in a shallow grave where it was left by those who killed him –– a group which clearly included at least one white man because the blacks, as a soldier soon reminds Cowper, never bother to bury the dead.  The convicts in the party are delighted, barely able to conceal their glee at seeing their tormentor receive what they unanimously feel to have been his just reward.  They refuse to carry or even touch his rotting flyblown corpse, prompting one soldier to suggest that it might be best, given the sub-tropical climate, to bury the Captain where he is.  But Cowper will not hear of this.  He insists on returning Logan's body to his widow for a proper Christian burial and, in the ultimate irony, it is Logan's sworn enemy Lazarus who agrees to transport his corpse back to the settlement after being promised a remission of his sentence for having done something no other prisoner has the will, the stomach or, indeed, the physical strength to do.

 

The return of Logan's body to Moreton Bay coincides with the arrival of Governor Darling's long-awaited letter, officially relieving him of his command and ordering him to India.  But neither Letty nor her children will now be forced to undertake this journey, with the widow choosing to return to Ireland –– and an uncertain social and financial future given her husband's unpopularity and his many unpaid debts –– rather than remain in the colony where it seems Frances will remain, perhaps to marry Edmund Joyce provided he agrees to her condition that they must never employ convicts as servants in their home.  Although Frances makes the expected show of grieving for her brother-in-law, it is really for his dead horse –– a grey pony named Fatima that she was fond of and was given permission to ride a few times –– that she finds herself shedding her bitterest tears for.  'She was shocked that she could grieve for the mare, and not for the man, and it was this shock, and her self-condemnation, that made her compose herself at last.'

  

 

The Text Publishing Company Australia, 2012

 

 

But the last word belongs to Captain Clunie who, when Frances asks him if Martin will be allowed to resume working in the garden now that her brother-in-law is no longer in command, tells him this will be impossible as the boy has become incorrigible and fallen into the company of the settlement's worst, most unrepentant prisoners.  When Frances asks if he blames her for this, Clunie replies that she must accept part of the blame for it, just as Martin himself must accept his share of blame as well.  ' "Then let me take mine, " ' she tells the reproachful officer, ' "and let him take his.  But let King George take his share, too." '  Clunie, who has never liked Frances since they travelled to Moreton Bay together so many months earlier, then asks her if she would have everyone take a share.  ' "I should, sir," ' she calmly replies.  ' "It is the whole of my argument.  Except my sister… I don't blame my sister." '  

 

It is for Letty's sake that Governor Darling sends the colony's best ship to bring herself, her children and her husband's body in its lead-lined coffin away from the settlement –– a gesture that seems to suggest she will now receive the Civil List pension she had been doubtful of receiving prior to this unexpected act of kindness.  Clunie spends the day of their departure writing a report to his superiors on the death of Logan and the role the soon-to-be released Lazarus played in the recovery of his body, his work accompanied by the sound of convicts building a gallows to hang two of their number whose death sentences his predecessor refused to commute to life imprisonment.

 

Historical fiction is one of the most difficult genres to master, particularly when the narrative requires the author to re-imagine real people as fictional characters in an 'invented' story.  Captain Patrick Logan was a real British Army officer who served as Commandant of the Moreton Bay penal settlement from March 1826 until October 1830, when he was murdered (most historians believe by aborigines rather than by convicts) while leading a routine cartographical expedition into the surrounding hinterland.  Like his fictional counterpart, he had a wife named Laetitia (or Lititia, sources disagree) and was renowned for his brutality, punishing men with up to a hundred strokes of the bullwhip for the most trifling infractions of his iron-clad rules.  Jessica Anderson takes these bald historical facts and uses them to create something that takes us beyond history into an entirely convincing nineteenth century world that is, as it must have seemed to those who inhabited it, an unsettling mixture of the beautiful and the abhorrent, the liberal and the dogmatically tyrannical.  That she does this largely through dialogue –– much of it of the sparkling Jane Austenish variety –– only makes The Commandant that much more remarkable and, for me, one of the greatest historical novels ever written by an Australian or, for that matter, anybody else. 
    

 
  

JESSICA ANDERSON, c 1978

 

 

 

The Writer:  Jessica Anderson was born Jessica Margaret Queale on 25 September 1916 in the small country town of Gayndah in southeastern Queensland.  Her father Charles Queale was the only member of his large Irish Catholic family to be born in Australia while her mother Alice Hibbert had emigrated to the new colony of Queensland with her English Anglican family when she was three years old.  Alice's mother, shocked by her daughter's decision to marry an Irish Catholic, refused to see her again following her marriage and consequently never met Anderson or her three elder siblings.

 

In 1921 the Queales left the farm of Charles's father for the Brisbane suburb of Annerley in the belief that a move to the city would improve their children's educational prospects.  Brisbane was to remain Anderson's home for the next thirteen years.  Following a brief period of home schooling necessitated by what was deemed to be an incurable stammer –– an impediment that was to remain with her, in varying degrees, for the rest of her life and gave her speech, in the ears of some listeners, 'a careful and deliberate air' –– she would go on to attend and graduate from the city's Yeronga State Primary School, its State High School and its Technical College Art School. 

 

Although she wished to become an architect, this was not a practical career choice for a young woman living in the parochial and still semi-colonial Brisbane of the 1920s and early Depression years –– years made harder for the family by the death of Charles Queale from emphysema and related respiratory ailments in 1932.  Anderson left the Queensland capital in 1935, bound for Sydney and what would be several years of odd-jobbing that saw her work in shops and factories and also as a slide painter and, briefly, as a designer of electric signs while she shared what she later described as 'big seedy mansions with gardens running right down to the harbour' with friends in eastern city suburbs like Potts Point and Rushcutters Bay.  During this period she also began to write and publish articles and stories under a variety of pseudonyms –– a practice that makes it impossible to know how much she published and in which newspapers, magazines and periodicals her early work appeared.  By the end of the 1930s she had gained enough confidence to write under her own name, producing a variety of half-hour radio plays for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that allowed her to hone her skills as a masterful writer of dialogue.  

 

In 1940 Anderson married Ross McGill, a painter she had met in 1937 and had travelled to London with soon afterwards in the belief that doing so would be beneficial to their respective careers.  This did not prove to be the case, with Anderson doing what she described as 'donkey work' as a typist and magazine researcher while McGill worked in advertising and struggled to find the time to create the serious art he yearned to create.  The couple's return to Australia –– not an easy journey to undertake during wartime –– saw them re-settle in Sydney, with Anderson volunteering for the Australian Women's Land Army soon afterwards.  In 1946 she became a mother, giving birth to a daughter named Laura who, under her married name Laura Jones, would go on to become one of Australia's most respected screenwriters whose credits include the adaptations of An Angel at My Table (1990), Oscar and Lucinda (1997) and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1996).

 

Anderson's marriage to McGill ended in 1954 and a year later she married Leonard Anderson, a Sydney businessman.  The change in her financial circumstances meant she was now free to devote herself to the novel she had begun to write in her late thirties, work on which had been sporadic up till this point as the need to earn money from her radio writing had taken precedence over her literary projects.  In 1960 she and her new husband bought a small home in the northern Sydney suburb of Hornsby and it was here –– living what her eulogist described as being 'a calm, domestic, isolated life' –– that she completed An Ordinary Lunacy, her debut novel published by the UK firm of Macmillan in 1963 when she was forty-seven years old. 

 

 

JESSICA ANDERSON, c 1994

 

 

The book, while not a commercial success, was well received by the critics –– a reception that did not help when it came to trying to publish her second novel A Question of Money.  The book was rejected and remains unpublished to this day despite Anderson's lifelong belief that it deserved to find an audience.  She would not publish again until 1970, when the detective tale The Last Man's Head was accepted by Macmillan who chose to market it as a cheap thriller rather than as the psychologically complex work of literature it was.  The company made the same mistake with Anderson's third published novel The Commandant, which was issued in 1975 with a cover which gave the impression that it was a bodice-ripping romance rather than a subtle, exquisitely written historical tale with much to say about the nature of innocence and evil and their sometimes inexplicable intertwining.

 

In 1978, two years after divorcing her second husband, Anderson published Tirra Lirra By The River –– her greatest commercial success and the novel she's generally best remembered for today.  Originally starting life as a short story, she expanded it to novel length on the advice of her publisher and later adapted it for radio.  When asked to explain its popularity –– it was a bestseller and became a set text in many Australian schools –– Anderson offered the typically modest answer that it was 'easier to read' than her other books.  Although she went on to publish four more books –– The Impersonators (1980), Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories (1987), Taking Shelter (1989) and One of the Wattle Birds (1994) –– it was the only one of her seven published titles to remain in print until The Commandant was re-issued by the Text Publishing Company in 2012, two years after her death from a stroke at the age of ninety-three. 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read the obituary of JESSICA ANDERSON published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 9 August 2010:

 

 

 

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/obituaries/domestic-isolation-got-creative-juices-flowing-20100808-11q5o.html?skin=text-only

 

 

 

 

 

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The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–1924) by HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON

 

 

 

The Watch Tower (1966) by ELIZABETH HARROWER

 

 

 

The Shiralee (1955) by D'ARCY NILAND

 

Last updated 28 September 2021 §