Featured article from Issue 11 March 2010

Larrikin Angel: A biography of Veronica Brady
Kath Jordan
Perth: Round House Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9806108
RRP $32.95

As a practising literary critic, I jumped at the opportunity of reading about an Irish-Australian elder in the field. Three female colossi bestrode literature in the 1970s, and I am privileged to have been taught by two of them – Judith Wright (who taught Australian poetry to honours students at the University of Queensland in 1968) and Dorothy Green (my postgrad supervisor). I have met Veronica Brady often in the course of my career, have often been reviewed by her, and am proud to think of her as a fellow-traveller in Australian Studies, but of the holy trinity of redoubtable female Australianists of this era, she is the least well known to me, so it was a pleasure to find out a lot more about the pilgrim journey of this great Australian. I’ve admired her for a long time – for her feistiness, fearlessness, feminism, passionate advocacy of Aborigines and other marginalised people, and for her energy.

Kath Jordan’s biography confirms her place in the genealogy. She has a lot in common with Wright and Green, and it is no accident that she re-entered their orbits later in life giving the inaugural Dorothy Green address at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature in Ballarat in 1992, and writing an authorised biography of Judith Wright. Separated by half a generation, all three of these women are/were tiny, nuggetty persons physically, with not a whiff of old-lady-ness about them, and very prepared to use their tongues and gimlet eyes in defense of their beliefs. Each of them cultivated mild eccentricity both as a defence against the bourgeois expectations of women of their respective times, and for the freedoms eccentricity confers on such outré souls. Each of them was a passionate educator, and charismatic (even Judith Wright after deafness made her vocation as a teacher difficult), but with an edge of dogmatism and abrasiveness. All three were radicals, with strong views about the corrupting influence of money, and left-leaning to the extent that at least two of them earned the dismissive and derogatory moniker, ‘commie’. Each of them was driven by social justice agendas which literature was made to serve, and this in times that long predated the academy’s easy acceptance of aestheticism as a norm, and each suffered for this choice. It is easier for the academy to support them in a post-modern and post-colonial theory-driven context. They were pioneers for women in the academy, and suffered the disdain of their male contemporaries, as this book makes clear.

Veronica Brady was born into a strongly Irish clan, Bradys from Cavan (in the 1860s), farmers originally, and later railwaymen, but not as strapped as many famine migrants, with the family’s wealth augmented by marriage into the Molloy and Collins families, who had a much stronger entrepreneurial streak. Second-generation Irish-Australian is an affiliation Veronica was pleased to acknowledge throughout her career. The family had middle-class money and good connections in a period when most Irish were working class, and girls in the family were educated by the Loretos. After taking a degree in History and Literature at the University of Melbourne, Veronica became a Loreto nun. She honed her skills as a teacher in secondary schools, and later, because the Loreto rule followed the Jesuit one, got the opportunity to teach at tertiary level, first at Christ College in Melbourne, and later as a tutor at University of Western Australia. There she established the first serious course in Australian Literature at UWA. She also fitted in postgraduate studies in Chicago and Toronto, making a major contribution to Patrick White studies in her PhD. Her research had always strongly focused on the sacred, and on heterodox forms of religious experience, and White was a passionate master for the young Veronica Brady, with his anti-bourgeois satire, mysticism, hyper-nationalism, his troubling of gender fixities, and his yearning for European sophistication and aestheticism. There are many traces of Patrick in the trajectory of the young academic. She was at the younger end of the generation which made Australian literary studies respectable. It was hard to dislodge the cultural cringe and instal Australian literary studies as a central part of the curriculum, and Veronica and her ilk deserve much credit for this. However much Patrick may have fallen into desuetude in recent years, he was a strategic piece of armoury in what could be bloody battles (the case of Sam Goldberg at Sydney University is part of this story). Kath Jordan reminded me of the pleasures of consuming the latest new work by Patrick White in long, days-and-nights reading sessions, and as soon as the books came on the shelves in bookshops, or if the cost was prohibitive, in libraries.

Whether Veronica Brady’s social conscience came from her father, the scriptures, or life experience, does not much matter, but from her early days she was a fearless unionist (hence the appellation ‘commie nun’). She got many opportunities to put her beliefs into practice at the university, and later when she took on a highly visible role as an ABC commissioner in the 1980s. The question of whether she was a good appointment (she unwisely let it be known she did not watch TV) is too lightly skated over by the biographer, but certainly in this short-lived role the staff appreciated her characteristic efforts to get to know them. This kind of genuine interest from the board was exceptional. As in her teaching, she had a passionate commitment to the educative and cultural roles of the ABC and stoutly resisted commercialisation. She had the temerity to suggest that if money were to be saved, it should be done in sports coverage.

The book details, in a rather fractured and fracturing way it has to be said, the myriad of causes with which this dynamo of a woman has been and is associated. She proudly teaches Aboriginal literature and culture (in properly post-colonial consultative and collaborative ways with elders), but also concerns herself with living conditions, land rights and native title, and deaths in custody. She preaches and enacts reconciliation as a speaker and writer, and deals with racism in head-on ways with students. She reports finding that difficult in Western Australia, and she often despairs of the ‘Perthlings’ whose outlook it has been her life’s work to change. Other causes include East Timor, campaigns against nuclear proliferation, the ordination of women, Amnesty International. The list is long and one senses that she feels obliged to say ‘yes’ if the cause is good, even if it might be wiser to say ‘no’ because of the ways in which she is stretched. I am sure the organisations that can claim her as a figurehead or as a spokeswoman are grateful for her energy, even if she is hard to pin down.

Kath Jordan’s book gives a good sense of her as a clannish family woman, of the simplicity of her living arrangements, and also of the chaotic whirlwind she seems to generate. It’s a story of warmth, and compassion and giving. However, I do have reservations about this book and believe it does not serve its subject well. I think Veronica should have said no to a close (and admittedly good-hearted) friend writing a biography. It is gushy and overwritten, sentimental (witness the title, which is intended affectionately but does disservice to a firebrand of a woman who is neither angelic, nor truly a larrikin). There is too much unsubstantiated enthusiasm, too many hurrahs (‘very’ is a key word). I longed for the counter-evidence to be examined and for the writer to engage critically with the data she has amassed. The segués are often baffling and trivialising (from ironingboards to aborigines on p.125), and too chronology-driven. There’s not a lot of argument to act as spine for the book, nor a deep immersion in the intellectual world Brady inhabits.

Jordan’s book gives a lot of background, but if it ever goes to a second edition, there’s much more that could be done with the material. I’d appreciate some analysis of how it is that a woman with her ‘crypto-heretical’ (she has called herself an ‘unbelieving believer’) views of church teaching (on abortion, gay rights, ordination of women) is able to skate under the Episcopal radar when her male colleagues (like Peter Kennedy in Brisbane) are being threatened with excommunication? Does her order offer protection? Are women better buffered than male religious? Are her education and her ability as a debater forms of armour? Is it her high-profile public intellectual status that protects her? Or her independent means? Or her femaleness? Clearly, she makes waves within her order, but maybe it is her personal charisma, or forthright challenging manner, which protects her? We get glimpses of her struggles with church, but also of her compliance with its demands at less strategic moments. She is a woman who has strong personal loyalties, and somehow seems to be able to accommodate the demands of her order. Jordan’s puzzlement is too easily defused by Veronica’s too glib ‘explanation’: ‘that’s the deal.’

Perhaps my misgivings about this book suggest that we need a frank and thoughtful autobiography. This is a woman with a sense of humour and she undoubtedly has a huge capacity for modesty, so I’d really like to see her muster that fierce, even lacerating honesty to explain the enigma that is Veronica Brady. In doing so, I am sure she would justify my locating her in that superb genealogy of sisters-in-literature: Wright-Green-Brady. Between them, they helped forge a nexus between social justice, environmental awareness and the literary arts.

Frances Devlin-Glass in ‘retirement’ continues to profess Australian (and Irish) Literature as an editor of the Journal for the Study of Australian Literature and as the founding director of Bloomsday in Melbourne.