Dear Friends
The Newsletter of the Friends of the Strathalbyn Community Library
NUMBER 9
CONTENTS
MARCH 2008
PROFILE
A Long Life in Lucindale
Committee Member HELEN WATSON
Cover Story
„A LONG LIFE IN
LUCINDALE
Profiling Helen Watson
Page 2
„MACCLESFIELD’S
GERMAN BOOK
CONNECTION
Frank Caspers
Page 3
„THREE VOLUME
NOVELS
Petronius
„COMING EVENTS
Report
Page 4
„NAGGING FOR
BEGINNERS
Book Review
Editor: Frank Caspers
8536 3045
H
ELEN WATSON was born in
Adelaide into a loving family,
with one older sister, “at the
end of the depression”. Her father
managed a furniture store, and her
mother stayed at home, at least while the
girls were growing up.
To avoid “the rough boys” at
Westbourne Park Primary (the Editor’s
school!), Helen was sent to Cabra for three
years, a not unusual practice for noncatholics. After a stint at Methodist
Ladies College, Helen entered Teachers’
College, and after graduation was sent to
Lucindale in the South East to teach an
aggregate of 50 students covering three
classes.
Helen’s first billet was with a family
who lived in a Nissan Hut, with no
electricity, and a prohibition against
bathing more than twice a week. This
lasted about six weeks until her parents
intervened and the Education
Department found more suitable
accommodation.
After three years of teaching Helen
married a local farmer, her husband
Lance, at that time a wool grower, and
produced four children. When the wool
prices collapsed they turned to seed
growing with mixed success.
When the children were grown up, and
after twenty years away from teaching,
Helen worked from home for her degree
through external studies, which was very
hard as the needs of the farm always
came first. But Helen won her degree and
took up relief teaching at first and later
special needs, especially “reading recovery”, where students who were falling
behind received intensive one to one in-
Helen caught informally in her garden.
struction five days per week.
Helen and Lance gave up the farm
about seven years ago and decided to
settle in Strathalbyn for all the good
reasons: “It’s a country town, close
enough to the city and the children,
including the five grandkids, and it’s
beautiful, and so are the people”.
Helen lives a very busy life within
the community, as a volunteer and as a
‘joiner-in’.
She is a volunteer for the Women’s
and Children’s Hospital, has been in
the schools’ Learning Assistance
Programme (LAP), is on the Hospital
Auxiliary, spends duty time at the
National Trust Museum, visits the
Nursing Home especially as a reader of
the Southern Argus, has been president
of Women’s Probus, is a member of
U3A, the garden Club, and of course
has been a valued Committee Member
of the Friends of the Strathalbyn
TRAVELLING BOX LIBRARIES
Macclesfield’s German Book Connection
FRANK CASPERS
D
URING my late Primary
and High School years in
the 1940s, I lived in Westbourne Park, and at the end of our
street was an Institute Library from
which I borrowed each week a pile
of books by such authors as Wodehouse, Dickens, Edgar Rice Burrows, Leslie Charteris, Edgar Wallace, Kenneth Grahame, and many
more, but I give only those names
which first spring readily to mind.
My reading was undirected and
my taste became, and remains to
this day, eclectic, but the old
Institute library nourished my love
of reading, as it must have done for
thousands more.
Nancy Gemmell has brought my
attention to the book “A Chance to
Read” by M R Talbot, a history of
the Institutes Movement in South
Australia, particularly a reference
to Macclesfield and German books,
and suggested it would make an
interesting article for the FOL
Newsletter. I was interested, and
will give it a try, but first let me give
you some background briefing.
*
There were attempts to establish
Institutes in South Australia from
about 1850 onwards, and by 1857
we know that there were at least ten
Institutes with their own libraries.
Maintaining a good, interesting
collection had always been difficult
for institutes with limited resources,
which usually was the result of their
small memberships, so a service
was
established in 1859 to address this
problem by circulating among the
institutes a centrally owned
collection of books, called the
Travelling Box Library.
As directed by the central body,
institutes swapped boxes at three or
four-monthly intervals, presumably
2
enough time for readers interested
in particular books, to borrow and
return them.
The travelling box library began
in 1859 with 320 volumes put into
circulation in 8 book-boxes. In that
year the number of institutes was
only 18. By 1895 the number of
institutes had grown to154 with
6454 ‘travelling’ books distributed
between 199 boxes.
*
Mere weeks after the establishment
of the S A Institute library, a letter
to the Register urged that it would be
only fair to the large number of
Germans living in and around
Adelaide to treat them as full South
Australians by adding German
books and newspapers to the
library. The suggestion was taken
up eventually, and a list of works by
standard German authors was
‘compiled from the suggestions of
literary gentlemen, natives of
Germany’.
On behalf of the central library
the board purchased 266 works by
fifty-three authors, with the
collected works of Goethe,
Wilhelm Hauff, E T A Hoffman,
Adam Oehlenschläger, J G Seume,
Ludwig Tieck and C M Wieland
accounting for 132 titles. Fiction,
travel and history formed the backbone of the collection.
Once procured, the central
collection remained relatively static,
no doubt in the belief that as it was
a collection of classics it could
retain its relevance, but in 1859,
with the establishment of the bookbox scheme, the question of the
German boxes again arose. The
secretary of the institute at
Macclesfield suggested the
advantage of including some
German books in the boxes. The
board decided it could not act on
the decision, but adopted an
informal policy of lending small
parcels from the central S A
Institute German Collection. A
selection of 22 volumes by seven
authors was eventually forwarded
on loan to Macclesfield in August,
1860.
By 1900 only seventeen
institutes were taking German
books. Interest was dropping, and
the system was obviously coming
to an end, and in 1903 the board
finally decided to make a formal
end to lending German books.
As reported in the Register: “It
has been decided to issue no more
German books….It is considered
that the German colonists have
been long enough in Australia to
thoroughly master the English
language, and that every facility for
learning it is open to their
children.”
The Australische Zeitung protested
and said that the board showed a
lamentable ignorance of the value
of learning languages other than
English. It made its own ironic
comment on the statement that
most German colonists would
have
mastered English by now, by
pointing out that “few enough
POPULAR READING
Three Volume Novels
O
NE OCCASIONALLY
comes across a disparaging remark about “the
three-volume novel” of the midVictorian era. As the term is used, it
seems to place the subject novel
only a cut above “the pennydreadful”, the paperback pulp fiction of the late Victorians, putting
it below the level of the “air-port
novel” of our own day, or even the
“formula” novels of Mills and
Boon.
The three-volume novel was a
commercial product and should not
be confused with the literary
trilogy, such as The Lord of the Rings,
or a book of such length that it is
conveniently produced in three or
even four volumes, such as my
complete four volume translation
of The Hundred and One Nights.
At a time when books were
relatively much more expensive to
produce than they are today, there
was a large reading public, mainly
of the middle class, who borrowed
books from commercial circulating
libraries. By dividing a novel into
three volumes, the popularity of the
novel could be gauged from Part
One, thus estimating the print run
for the other two parts, and furthermore the librarian could then
place the three volumes of the one
novel on loan at the same time,
thus
effectively tripling his income.
The most prominent of the
London subscription library
proprietors was Charles Edward
Mudie. We come across Mr Mudie
in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of
Being Earnest, in the scene in Act
Two between Cecily and Miss
Prism doing school work in the
garden. Cecily is speaking about the
unreliability of memory and says:
“I believe that Memory is
responsible for nearly all the threevolume novels that Mudie sends
PETRONIUS
us.” To which Miss Prism replies,
“Do not speak slightingly of the
three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote
one myself in earlier days.”
Cecily is excited at the news and
expresses the hope that it did not
end happily, Miss Prism replies,
“The good ended happily, the bad
unhappily. That is what Fiction
means.” Fiction for Miss Prism is,
of course, the three-volume novel.
In Act Three the significance of
introducing Miss Prism’s novel is
brought to the fore when Lady
Bracknell confronts her with the
question of the missing child which
had been left in her care many years
before: “…the perambulator was
discovered at midnight standing by
itself in a remote corner of
Bayswater. It contained the
manuscript of a three-volume novel
of more than usually revolting
sentimentality. But the baby was
not there! Prism, where is that
child?”
We learn that Miss Prism, “in a
moment of mental abstraction”,
put the baby in her “capacious”
handbag, and her novel in the
perambulator.
And Wilde’s true opinion of the
three-volume novel?
“Anybody can write a threevolume novel. It merely requires a
Lady Bracknell interrogating Miss Prism, as depicted by Cecil Beaton in the
illustrated edition of “The Importance of Being Earnest” from the Folio Society, published in 1960.
COMING EVENTS
THURSDAY, 8th MAY: Helen Nutt, ANTIQUES ET AL
A Collector’s Evening
THURSDAY, 26th JUNE: Louise MacIntosh, COORONG RANGER
History of the Coorong—Its Present State—The Ranger’s Job
SUNDAY, 14th/21st SEPTEMBER: Concert, A GROUP OF FLUTES
Flautists from the Elder Conservatorium. Date to be confirmed.
THURSDAY, 16th OCTOBER: Sophie Thomson, GARDENING
Including take-away bags of ‘goodies’.
3
DUE RECOGNITION
Nagging for Beginners
BOOK REVIEW
I
T IS A SMALL BOOK,
13x16cm, a paper-back in
black and white with a splash
of red on the cover. It’s Wendy
Harmer’s Nagging for Beginners, published in 2006 by Allen &
Unwin. Between the half title page
and title pages is a brief ‘blurb’
about Wendy Harmer’s career as a
humourist and her publishing
history, and the book begins with
an introduction by Wendy Harmer
on the history and social
importance of nagging.
Wendy Harmer’s name takes up a
third of the cover and equally
prominent is a cartoon sketch of
the author. Unmistakeably, the
publishers consider this to be
Wendy Harmer’s book.
But what of the cartoonist? He is
mentioned, once, on the title page,
in the smallest type size, with the
line, “Illustrations by Andrew
Joyner”.
What annoys me is there is
plenty of room on the ‘blurb’ page
to give a few lines to Andrew
Joyner’s career, which I for one was
interested in, and I wondered why
Wendy Harmer, in her
introduction, did not at least
mention Andrew Joyner’s
contribution, without which her
little book would hardly catch any
attention.
I found Wendy Harmer’s text
overall mildly amusing, with now
and again a little gem which rang a
bell with my own experiences, but
her definition of nagging was
stretched too far. Perhaps with
heavy pruning it would have made
a good magazine article. Or perhaps because Wendy Harmer is a
performing comedian, what is lacking is her own unique, real voice,
rather than words printed on a
page.
But back to Andrew Joyner.
4
‘Illustrations’ is not the word to use
for his contribution, which is some
36, or thereabouts, full page
drawings, usually free from text.
These are cartoons, often in their
own rite, not illustrating the text at
all, but rather commenting on it.
For instance, on the page, “The
Retrospective Nag” is the following
text: “If you’d looked it up in the street
directory as I asked you to in the first
place, Daren, we wouldn’t be sitting here
in this traffic now. Do you ever listen to
anything I say?”
On the page opposite is the cartoon
of the lifeboat.
A delicious comment, but hardly an
illustration, and what is more it can
stand on its own, without words.
One page of nags suggests the
nagger leave notes, or better still,
leave large objects in strategic
places:
“A broken toaster on front steps.
A rubbish skip in the middle of
Carport.
A pile of damp bathroom towels on one
side of bed.”
On the page opposite the above
text, Andrew Joyner gives us the
delightful tattooing cartoon, again
not an illustration but a comment,
and definitely not needing words.
I would have liked to have seen
Andrew Joyner and Wendy Harmer
given what in theatrical circles is
known as equal billing.
Andrew Joyner is yet another of the many
talented people who have chosen to live in
Strathalbyn.
ƒ