What major figure in Australian history, apart from Ned Kelly, has had more biographies than Archbishop Daniel Mannix? Librarians can give a decisive answer to this far from rhetorical question. Certainly, Mannix looms large in serious Australian historiography. There are personal studies by Captain Bryan (1919), E.J. Brady (1934), Frank Murphy (1948 and 1972), Niall Brennan (1964), and Walter Ebsworth (1977), and B.A. Santamaria’s short, weighty lecture of 1977. As well, the Mannix shelf is crammed with books like Michael McKernan’s Australian Churches at War, Gerard Henderson’s Mr. Santamaria and the Bishops, Patrick O’Farrell’s The Catholic Church and Community in Australia, and B.A. Santamaria’s Against the Tide – in all of which Mannix is a dominating force. There is no lack of information about the archbishop.

What we need is interpretation. What was the meaning of Mannix? Why did he loom so large? Why all those books? Years ago, when Macmillans were starting their series In Search Of, I suggested they ask Vincent Buckley to write In Search of Daniel Mannix. Nothing, however, came of this and we are poorer for it. Then I heard that Mr Santamaria was turning his hand to a full-length work. In the hope that this book might be conjured forth by academic necromancy, I put it on a reading list for students. To date, alas, there has been no sign of it.

‘This internment of ours is but a sideshow of the war’, says a former Dunera internee in this book. Yet this footnote to Britain’s war on the home front has acquired considerable importance for Australia.

Approximately one thousand former Dunera internees became Australian citizens after the war, many of them highly gifted, even distinguished, post-war Australians. Historically, their wartime and post-war presence enabled many Australians, including some politicians, to understand for the first time the meaning of Hitler and Nazism, and the nature of the ‘Jewish refugee’.

The story should by now be familiar. Panic and spy-phobia, not to mention appalling MI5 intelligence work, led Britain in mid-1940 to conduct a bizarre mass internment of ‘enemy aliens’, most of them convinced anti-fascists, Jewish refugees from Hitlerism. A political scandal quickly developed in Britain. Most of those wrongly classified and interned were released for war work.

In an increasingly secular age, The Lines of the Hand is an unusual book. Almost half of the poems it contains are direct communications with an evident and accessible God, while others are celebrations of Creation.

The portrait likely to emerge in this article will be more that of a trend in Australian literature than of a writer named Frank Hardy.

Most people know a good deal about Frank Hardy, the writer and the man, little or nothing is known about the social forces which created him or his part in the ideological struggle which has characterised Australian literature for one hundred years.

One hundred years? He’s not that bloody old, surely!

But I did know Mary Gilmore well and Henry Lawson’s widow, Bertha, and the first writer I tried to model myself upon was Lawson, especially his early writings about the great economic depression of 1888–93 (‘Faces in the Street’, ‘Arvie Aspinall’s Alarm clock’, etc.).