Great Days Of The “Bulletin”

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30983, 12 February 1966, Page 4

Great Days Of The “Bulletin”

Bohemians Of The Bulletin. By Norman Lindsay. Angus and Robertson. 160 PP- -

At the turn of the century, when the Sydney “Bulletin,” under its editor J ,F. Archibald, was fostering an emerging national literature in Australia, Norman Lindsay was a young man just beginning to find his feet as an artist. In 1901, at the age of 21, he joined the “Bulletin” staff as a cartoonist, and it was there that he met such notable literary figures as Henry Lawson, “Banjo” Paterson, Hugh McCrae, Victor Daley, A. G. Stephens, Miles Franklin and Steele Rudd. In these casual essays, which are accompanied by his own delightful pen-and-ink sketches, he records his youthful impressions of many

of the famous —and not so famous writers who crossed his path. Mr Lindsay is no respecter of legends, and his profiles are enlivened by an exuberant sense of the ridiculous and a keen eye for idiosyncrasies of character; at the same time, with the possible exception of his remarks on A. G. Stephens, whom he disliked as a man, there is no deliberate malice, and his literary assessments are for the most part unbiased and even generous. Among other things, there are amusing glimpses of Henry Lawson greeting Aborigines in George street with an extravagant show of sentiment, the puritanical Irish poet Victor Daley, innocently drawing on a city pavement a very ambiguously shaped

diagram, and Steele Rudd, the creator of Dad and Dave, down from the country for his first literary banquet, at which he remarked to Lindsay: “You know. I’m beginning to get the .hang of this writing business. In the past, supposing I was describing a picnic, I’d say, *Mrs So-and-so brought the cake and Mrs So-and-so brought the sandwiches.’ But now I’d say, ‘Each guest brought the viands requisite for the occasion’.”

Apart from several sketches which are too slight to be of much interest, and an essay on Hugh McCrae which comes close to idolatry, Mr Lindsay has created a lively impression of the literary scene in Australia during the great days of the Sydney “Bulletin.”