John Naish’s contribution to the literature and history of the Queensland canefields
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/qre.25954Keywords:
The Clean Breast, The Cruel Field, immigration, John Naish, North Queensland, sugar cane, That Men Should FearAbstract
Welsh-born author and playwright John Naish worked and wrote on the North Queensland canefields between 1950 and 1963. Assisted by unpublished works, letters and diaries shared by the Naish family, this study outlines the full contents of Naish’s known oeuvre for the first time. It focuses on the depiction of canefield labour and society in two novels, an autobiographical piece and five plays – some newly discovered. Attitudes in his writings to sugar country class divisions, to workers and their rights, to canefield labour and labourers, to gender divisions and conflicts in the towns and fields, to race, Indigenous Australians and to British and Italian immigrants are exemplified and examined. Extensive evidence supports the conclusion that Naish was a liberal and compassionate thinker. Always competent and sometimes powerful as literature, together his works comprise an authentic socio-historical document.
References
John Naish, The cruel field (London: Hutchinson, 1962).
Olaf Ruhen, ‘The canefields’, The Bulletin, 16 February 1963, 41.
Elizabeth Smyth, ‘Sugarcane and the Wet Tropics: Reading the Georgic mode and region in John Naish’s farm novel The cruel field (1962)’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 20 (2021), 5. Available from: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/14901 [2 November 2023].
See John Naish, The clean breast: An autobiography in eleven episodes (London: Hutchinson, 1961).
John Naish, letter to Mr and Mrs J.W. Naish, 17 December 1950.
‘John Naish brief biography’, North Queensland Heritage: John Naish Archive, James Cook University. Available from: https://nqheritage.jcu.edu.au/891/130/891_John_Naish_Brief_Biography.pdf [2 November 2023].
‘The Clean Breast: A “rave” review for John Naish’, The Times, 29 June 1961, 15.
‘John Naish body of work’, North Queensland Heritage: John Naish Archive, James Cook University. Available from: https://nqheritage.jcu.edu.au/891/129/891_John_Naish_Body_of_Work.pdf [2 November 2023].
Peace polony, The factory, The lease of life, Picture night, Oliver in Aden, The strange black creatures, Mark, the syrup and the ashes and That men should fear, unpublished plays.
The first Mrs Peters and The Maoris, unpublished plays.
The good fortune of Frank Rees, unpublished short story.
The auditors, Cutters at White Road, Woman at sundown and Glamour, unpublished plays. A note in the type-script states that Cutters at White Road is suited to performance as a radio play.
https://manuscripts.library.uq.edu.au/index.php/informationobject/browsetopLod=0&sort=relevance&query=John+Naish [2 November 2023].
John Naish, That men should fear (London: Hutchinson, 1963).
John Naish, The claw, in Greg Branson (ed.), Australian one-act plays, 2 vols (Adelaide: Rigby, 1962), pp. 35–54.
For instance, David Ireland’s play Image in the clay, written c. 1958 and revised as a novel, Burn, in 1974, was initially entitled Heirs of the dead heart. Changing the title of Deuteronomy 24-1, which was published and had been performed in Fiji in 1957, to The first Mrs Peters allowed Naish to enter it in the 1960 Far North Queensland Amateur Theatrical Association One-Act Play Competition, which required that all plays were newly composed. See John Naish, Deuteronomy 24-1, Derwent Series of Australian Plays (Hobart: Tasmanian Adult Education Board, 1957).
Eunice Hanger, ‘Queensland drama’, Southerly, 20 (1959), 216–25, 223.
Hanger, ‘Queensland drama’, 225.
See Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui, Gentlemen of the flashing blade (Townsville: James Cook University, 1990), which examines the history and experience of immigrant cane cutters in depth and detail. The title is based on Naish’s dedication of The cruel field.
Kerry Boyne, ‘The legend of the “gentlemen of the flashing blade”: The canecutter in the Australian imagination’, The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 11, no. 2 (2022), 45–62.
Jean Devanny, Sugar heaven, ed. Nicole Moore (Melbourne: Vulgar Press, 2002; first published Sydney: Modern Publishers, 1936); Carole Ferrier, Jean Devanny: Romantic revolutionary (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999), p. 133.
Jean Devanny, Paradise flow (London: Duckworth, 1938).
Jean Devanny, Roll back the night (London: Robert Hale, 1945), p. 182.
Jean Devanny, Cindie, ed. Carole Ferrier (London: Virago, 1986; first published London: Robert Hale, 1949).
By tropic sea and jungle (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1944), Chapter I, pp. 21–28.
Bird of paradise. (Sydney: Simmons, 1945), Chapter III, pp. 38–46.
Ferrier, Jean Devanny, p. 306.
Ferrier, Jean Devanny, p. 162.
Cindie, ed. Ferrier, p. 53.
F.E. Baume, Burnt sugar (Sydney: Macquarie Head Press, 1934); Robert Donaldson and Michael Joseph, Cane (London: Sphere Books, 1967). ‘[Burnt sugar]...the setting – well that exists only in the imagination of tourists from Sydney and Melbourne who take occasional hurried trips to North Queensland in the tourist season’: The Courier-Mail, 4 August 1934, 20. For the historical reliability of Cane! see Vidonja Balanzategui, Gentlemen, p. 34, n. 47.
Frances de Groen, Xavier Herbert: A biography (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1998), pp. 51–56.
de Groen, Xavier Herbert, pp. 147, 154, 157, 269.
First published in the Australian Journal, 1 May 1929, 664, 666, 668, 670–77.
Ray Lawler, Summer of the seventeenth doll (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1957), pp. 31–33.
Lawler, Summer of the seventeenth doll, pp. 65, 126.
Nancy Cato, Brown sugar (London: Pan Books, 1977; first published London: Heinemann, 1974).
Cato, Brown sugar, p. 168.
L. Such, Cane: A book of drawings by a canecutter (Townsville: T. Willmett & Sons, 1932), pages unnumbered. See https://www.daao.org.au/bio/les-such [2 November 2023]. The sexist and racist words in this article are quotes used for historical recreation. They are not meant to be offensive. Rather, their purpose is to expose the political and destructive nature of such language.
The cruel field, p. 129.
The cruel field, pp. 113–16.
The cruel field, p. 121.
Kay Saunders, Workers in bondage: The origins and bases of unfree labour in Queensland, 1824–1916 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1982), p. 157.
The strange black creatures, pp. 46–7.
Cutters at White Road, pp. 8, 11, 8, 15.
The clean breast, p. 153.
The strange black creatures, p. 2.
That men should fear, unpublished play, p. 61.
That men should fear, unpublished play, p. 28.
That men should fear, unpublished play, p. 61.
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The cruel field, dedication and p. 144.
The cruel field, p. 14.
The cruel field, p. 161.
Cutters at White Road, p. 11.
Ralph Shlomowitz, ‘Team work and incentives: The origins and development of the butty gang system in Queensland’s sugar industry, 1891–l 913’, Journal of Comparative Economics 3 (1979), 48.
Cane cutting terms and conditions were laid out in the Sugar Industry State Award and printed in the Queensland Industrial Gazette.
That men should fear, unpublished play, p. 34.
Vidonja Balanzategui, Gentlemen, p. 52.
Vidonja Balanzategui, Gentlemen, p. 52.
That men should fear, unpublished play, p. 52.
1915, 1945 and 1952.
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The cruel field, p. 22.
The strange black creatures, p. 9.
The strange black creatures, p. 64.
Report of social worker, Hazel Dobson, Letter 2 from Ingham: ‘Balt problems’, 12 August 1954, Department of Immigration, series CRSA434, file 50/3/13, Australian Archives, ACT.
K.S. Mulherin, ‘Cane-cutting awards in the Queensland sugar industry’, Quarterly Review of Agricultural Economics, 10 (1957), 147–52.
The cruel field, p. 205.
The cruel field, p. 35.
The cruel field, p. 16.
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The cruel field, p. 23.
The clean breast, p. 150.
See The strange black creatures, Glossary, p. 105; Diane Menghetti, The red north: The popular front in North Queensland (Townsville: James Cook University, 1981), pp. 29–42; and Beris Penrose, ‘Medical experts and occupational illness: Weil’s disease in North Queensland, 1933–1936’, Labour History, 75 (November 1998), 125–43.
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Mark, the syrup and the ashes, p. 9.
Mark, the syrup and the ashes, p. 37.
The cruel field, p. 33.
The cruel field, p. 33.
The clean breast, p. 148.
The clean breast, p. 142.
The clean breast, p. 148; The claw, p.48.
The cruel field, p. 32.
The clean breast, p. 150.
Vidonja Balanzategui, Gentlemen, glossary of cane-cutting terms, p. x.
The cruel field, p. 63.
The cruel field, p. 63; Vidonja Balanzategui, Gentlemen, pp. 52–53.
The cruel field, p. 37.
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The clean breast, p. 155.
Vidonja Balanzategui, Gentlemen, p. x.
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The strange black creatures, p. 58.
The cruel field, p. 188.
The cruel field, p. 76.
The cruel field, p. 112.
The cruel field, p. 172.
The strange black creatures, preamble to Act 2, p. 40.
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The cruel field, p. 27.
The cruel field, p. 72. Spoken with a broad Australian accent, ‘Maoris’ sounds like ‘marries’.
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The cruel field, p. 45, pp. 147–49.
The cruel field, p. 92.
The cruel field, p. 14.
The cruel field, p. 19; cf. p. 79.
The cruel field, p. 64.
The cruel field, p. 217.
The cruel field, p. 222.
That men should fear (play), p. 37.
That men should fear, p. 253.
The clean breast, p. 161.
The cruel field, p. 39.
The clean breast, p. 142; launched in 1947, Christian Dior’s first collection introduced the ‘New Look’, featuring a narrow waist and very full skirt.
The cruel field, p. 32.
That men should fear, p. 36.
That men should fear, p. 85.
Aborigines could apply to the Chief Protector of Aboriginals for an exemption from the Protection Act. If provided with an exemption ticket, they were free to live and work where they chose. However, perceived transgressions could result in the ticket being withdrawn.
The cruel field, p. 20.
That men should fear, p. 85.
Smyth, ‘Sugarcane and the wet tropics’, 2.
The clean breast, p. 159.
The clean breast, p. 151.
The clean breast, p. 147.
The clean breast, p. 161.
The clean breast, p. 162.
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The clean breast, p. 107.
The clean breast, p. 182.
That men should fear (play), p. 19.
The cruel field, p. 100.
The cruel field, p. 103.
The cruel field, p. 188.
The cruel field, p. 55.
The cruel field, p. 88.
The cruel field, p. 91.
‘British Preference’, Cairns Post, 13 January 1931, 5.
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That men should fear (play), p. 69.
The Cairns Post, 16 September 1951, p. 6.
‘From Wales to Queensland’, The Bulletin, 22 July 1961, 34.
‘Books: unusual people’, The Sphere, 1 July 1961, 26.
‘The clean breast: A rave review for John Naish’, The Times, 29 June 1961, 15.
‘Touch of poetry’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 August 1962, 510.
‘Australian writing’, cutting dated 1963, publication details unknown.
Nancy Cato, ‘Three new novels’, Australian Book Review, 2(12) (1963), 199.
David Martin, ‘The mysterious unsettling stranger’, The Bulletin, 29 September 1962, 39.
R.J.S., ‘The cruel field’, The Cairns Post, 3 November 1962, 6.
Kylie Tennant, ‘Fiction Chronicle (2)’, Meanjin Quarterly 21(4) (1962), 507.
‘New fiction’, The Times 19 July 1962, 13.
Letter from Gordon Page, former cane cutter, to Vidonja Balanzategui, 17 March 2021.
Eunice Hanger, ‘A playwright’s collection of plays’, Sydney Morning Herald 26 May 1960, 29.
Hanger, ‘Queensland drama’, 225.
Alrene Sykes, ‘Theatrical events 1950–1965 and the rise of subsidised theatre’, in Harold Love (ed.), The Australian stage: A documentary history (Sydney: NSW University Press, 1984), p. 207.
‘Drama festival’, The Cairns Post, 25 June 1960, 5.
‘Far North Queensland Amateur Theatrical Association Playwriting Competition, Sixth Annual Drama Festival, Cairns 1962; ‘The Author’, in Naish, Deuteronomy 24-1.
‘Drama festival’, The Cairns Post, 15 June 1963, p. 7.
Michael Katahanas in conversation with Vidonja Balanzategui, 31 May 2020.
Martin, ‘The mysterious unsettling stranger’, p. 39.
Leslie Rees, Towards an Australian Drama (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1953), p. 152.
Hanger, ‘Queensland drama’, 216.
Catherine Duncan, ‘Preface’, in John Naish, Deuteronomy 24-1 (Hobart: Tasmanian Adult Education Board, 1957).
Tom Hegarty, ‘Memories of Vince’, eulogy from funeral service, 25 November 2004. Available from: http://www.crawfordproductions.tv/webstuff/moran.html[2 November 2023]. Innisfail-born Vivian James Moran first wrote plays for the Little Theatre and became better known for his television work with Crawford Productions from the 1970s until his death.
‘Author’ in Naish, Deuteronomy 24-1.
