The kindness of patrons

Early last month we launched our Patrons Scheme. One hundred friends and supporters celebrated the event in style at ‘Cranlana’, in Melbourne. A full report appears on page 5, next to a list of all our Patrons. For ABR, as we have already reported, private philanthropy is absolutely essential. Without it we can’t grow, can’t take the odd risk, can’t introduce many new features.

Because of this recent munificence, we can announce the creation of the first ABR Patrons’ Fellowship, worth $5000. This program is intended to reward outstanding Australian writers, to enhance ABR through the publication of major works of literary journalism, and to advance the magazine’s commitment to critical debates and literary values. We hope to offer two or three Fellowships each year.

According to the author’s note at the end of The Grand Hotel, this will probably be the last of his stories to be set in fictional Mangowak, a coastal town in south-western Victoria. The first, The Patron Saint of Eels (2005), won the 2006 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. The second, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (2007), was shortlisted for the 2008 New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Fiction.

All three novels have themes and motifs in common. There is also nostalgia for an Australia which is fast disappearing. In an interview with Michael Shirrefs for Radio National on 21 May 2008, Day said, ‘we’re definitely vulnerable when we lose our stories and we lose the sense of where we came from’. During the Howard era, he claimed, people became dismissive of the Australian vernacular, when, ironically, the prime minister was making political mileage out of so-called ‘mateship’. In his work, Day wants to ‘document the inner life of those accents and those dialects’. So it is not surprising to discover characters in his novels who seem authentically Australian. Blokes such as the guest at the Grand Hotel who brags about his sexual exploits are all too recognisable.

Name a selection of your own most interesting and iconic Australians of the last century. My personal list would begin with John Monash, Donald Bradman, and W.K. Hancock.

‘W.K. who?’ We have always favoured the military and the sporting over the intellect in our national pantheon. Even this splendid study of Professor Sir William Keith Hancock – A Three-Cornered Life – has the unusual subtitle: The Historian W.K. Hancock. It is hard to imagine a biography of ‘The Don’ informing us that it is of ‘The Cricketer Donald Bradman’.

In 1996–97, three young women were abducted from the nightclub area of Claremont in Perth, and murdered. One of them was a young lawyer, Ciara Glennon. Her mother, Una Glennon, has written a memoir of her passage from despair, anger and grief to a mature and rounded understanding of the complexity of the human condition. Her book is a wise and beautiful one – written sparingly, without unnecessary personal embellishment. ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,’ she says, quoting Kierkegaard. Thirteen years after Ciara’s death, Una Glennon has reached the point where she can write:

Never had I felt so much pain, yet never had I felt so much joy in the simple pleasures of life. Never had I felt so dead inside, yet never had I felt so alive to the external world around me. Never had I felt God so present in my life and so mysteriously a part of what I was experiencing ... A shift had occurred and I was finally able to accept Ciara’s death. The stranglehold of grief loosened and … I emerged a different person with a different perspective on life.