To write a book was more difficult than I had imagined. It called for stamina, for literary stamina. You don’t know whether you have stamina until you have shown yourself that you do.
To write the early chapters I used long strips of shiny yellow paper recently obtained in Hobart. The guillotined leftovers from a printing office, they were like a yellow scarf. I wrote on them with a fountain pen and very black ink, and for some reason I used black crayon to delete. Scores and scores of the corrected paragraphs I wrote in this way appear in the book, almost unchanged, but most paragraphs on the long yellow sheets were deleted. I had written about ten chapters when suddenly I felt at home; by groping and experimenting I had found a rapport with an imaginary audience and at last felt confident that the audience was listening to me.
Chapter 11 which I called ‘A Land of Fire and Brimstone’ was one potential hurdle. A gnawing chapter, it consisted of a mosaic of tiny facts culled or scrounged from everywhere, and yet with my new confidence it was speedily composed in maybe three or four days. It had a vitality that impressed me, though part of the energy came from bursts of short sentences that perhaps continued too long. The chapter concluded with my attempt to explain the most remarkable change in the terrain:
Sulphur, rain and fire swiftly painted a new landscape. Fogs heavily charged with sulphur made green grass and plants yellow in a day. Bushfires raced through the scrub in successive summers and left blackened hillsides. No fresh vegetation grew, for the sulphur fumes killed almost all the plant life within miles of the smelters. Heavy rain began to erode the top soil. Early in this century the landscape was black and desolate, a cemetery of black stumps. Two beautiful valleys had become as ugly as battlefields.
By the end of 1953 my manuscript was almost completed. I knew that the book was too long. I counted 129 000 words before crossing out, with many strokes of the fountain pen, hundreds of sentences that did not pull their weight. I was guided by the skilled American writer Carl Sandburg, the biographer of Abraham Lincoln, whose advice I copied into my notebook: ‘Write till you are ashamed of yourself and then cut it down to next to nothing so the reader may hope beforehand he is not wasting his time.’ His advice, I thought later, was too extreme.
The heads of the Mount Lyell Mining & Railway Company were eager to read my typescript. As I had used many of the company’s own confidential records, I required its permission before I could publish it. Sir Walter Bassett, now the chairman, smoothed the road. He liked the book though several of his colleagues were worried about the chapter describing recent years, because conceivably it could affect the shares in their company, then an important one on the stock exchanges. For my part I wasn’t very interested in the last couple of years, and wrote about them with a visible lack of enthusiasm. It was a legitimate criticism of the book that it fell away in the last chapter or two. The more remote past was my domain, because there I had freedom essentially to write what I wished.
Walter Bassett, now enthusiastic for the book, as was his wife, insisted that I must publish it. His company offered no money as a subsidy, but I hoped the book would stand on its own. Late in 1953 I took the typescript to the Melbourne University Press and handed it personally to Gwyn James, the manager. Keen on Australian history, he had compiled one of the few significant books to come out in the wartime years, A Homestead History. Kindly, almost fatherly, he questioned me about the typescript in his English Midlands accent. While I answered him, he swiftly thumbed a page or two. He suddenly remembered that on maybe his first day on Australian soil he had left his cargo-passenger ship at the port of Burnie and made a short rail trip towards the west coast. At once we seemed to be on the same wavelength.
I was astonished to observe that a skilled publisher could assess a potential book in a few minutes. Enthusiastically he confided to me, without exactly committing himself, that my book was very promising. After a few weeks he sent me a phone message to say that he would be pleased to publish it. I was in seventh heaven, as they used to say in that era when one heaven was more than enough.
He offered me a royalty of 3 per cent on the retail sales. Ultimately each copy of the book went on sale in the bookshops for thirty shillings, and so I would receive just under one shilling for each copy sold. It was a small royalty – the normal was 10 per cent – but I would have accepted an offer even if I had been obliged to pay him a royalty. A decade later Peter Ryan, who succeeded James as general manager, raised the royalty – without being asked – to 10 per cent, the book then being in its third edition.
Meanwhile it was a bundle of typed pages, not a book. James intimated that he had half-a-dozen books in the slow publishing pipeline and said that mine would be printed late in 1954. He himself edited the book, displaying all his literary skills. He made a few suggestions on every second page, chopping out half a sentence or adding a semicolon or occasionally a phrase that added clarity. With few exceptions I agreed with him. Sometimes, if precise accuracy was at stake, I insisted that my wording was the best, and he would give in. The whole editing process was amicable and decisive. Walter Bassett, Hugh Murray and the other heads of Mount Lyell had spent a long time discussing minor matters that came up in the typescript, but James usually overruled them all. If the book was to be published his word was law. I doubt whether they even knew of some changes he made to the manuscript.
James announced, being a traditionalist, that on the cover of the book I must not call myself Geoff Blainey, the name by which I had always been known, but should formally call myself Geoffrey. I was dismayed. To change one’s name is a bold step. After protesting, I made the step. I felt like an impostor taking on a new name, even though I had been so christened as an infant.
For the book I suggested a variety of titles. He wanted colour but not dazzle. I have subsequently had no trouble in devising titles for books, but he it was who suggested the title for my first one. He based it on a passage in Chapter 7 that described how in the cold winter of 1891 two mining promoters, fresh from making a fortune at Broken Hill, led their horses along the narrow track and suddenly ‘saw the peaks of Lyell, veiled by mist and rain’. Triumphantly he said to me, ‘Call the book The Peaks of Lyell!’ When some of the high officials at the mine heard of the proposed title, they protested that Mount Lyell itself was round rather than peaked. They did reluctantly concede, however, that if it were seen from certain angles or viewed through clinging mist, a few of its rocky outcrops did seem peaked. After the book appeared in print, the title increasingly won favour. Occasionally a book gains by adopting a title that is slightly askew.
After completing the book, I had time to spare – I had no job – and resolved on the spur of the moment to see Henry Lawson’s country. Of all Australian writers he appealed to me the most. I do not know when I first read him; I am pretty sure that it was not in school, even though my English teacher, A. A. Phillips, was later a national expert on Lawson. Probably I discovered him in the second-hand bookshops where two of his paperbacks were available in the Australian Pocket Library. How primitive they were! If you ran your hand down the spine you could feel the iron staples that held the pages together. The cover was so thin that it could be torn by a kitten’s teeth. One book of his short stories, entitled On the Track and Over the Sliprails, I liked best, for they were heartwarming sketches of life on the goldfields and small farms.
I wished now to see Lawson’s country. Buying a second-class ticket I went by train to Albury, changed to the uniform gauge and went on to Sydney where late that night I caught the mail train to Bourke. As it began to rush through the night I thought of Lawson’s poem ‘On the Night Train’ and its opening words: ‘Have you seen the Bush by moonlight, from the train, go running by?’ At daybreak we were out on the western plains, where sheep were lightly scattered in all directions. When we halted at the little station of Nevertire I knew I was in Lawson country, for one of his ballads, recited at bush concerts, was entitled ‘Jack Dunn of Nevertire’.
In the afternoon the train reached Bourke, the base for Lawson’s only visit to the arid outback. Next day I saw the old red-gum wharves and the brown Darling River and walked through the town before travelling by train to Mount Boppy and to Cobar where the abandoned copper smelters were a nostalgic sight. Only after my journey of nearly 4000 kilometres was complete did I realise, with my new knowledge of the countryside, that more of Lawson’s finest short stories were centred around accessible Gulgong, an old gold town near the Great Dividing Range, than the pastoral country I had just traversed.
I longed for my own book to appear. I had no idea that the typesetting, proofreading and printing could be slow. Now entering its final stage at a printing works in Melbourne, the book’s future was suddenly threatened by a few sentences I had written in a chapter appropriately entitled ‘The Disaster’.
It so happened that in October 1912, after weeks of industrial tension, a fire began in the North Lyell underground mine. Really an underground city it consisted of miles of ‘corridors’ or narrow roads, the roofs of which were supported by props or columns of heavy timber. Fortunately the fire which began at the 700 level, or about 200 metres underground, did not spread so far as was feared, but unfortunately the smoke and carbon monoxide fumes spread with speed. In the space of an hour they penetrated to every place where miners were at work. Many men managed to escape, travelling in the fast cages up the shaft to the surface. When evening fell, ninety-five men were still missing, their rescue impossible because of dense and dangerous fumes. Jimmy Elliott, my friend, was among the missing.
While the nation waited for news, an intricate rescue plan was adopted. A ship carrying firefighting equipment, smoke helmets and diving suits steamed across Bass Strait in record time. At the wharf in Burnie fast steam trains waited to carry the rescue equipment to the distant mine. Meanwhile, attempts were made to reach those men below. In the end more decorations were awarded for bravery at Mount Lyell than for any previous event in Australian history – until the assault on Gallipoli three years later. After five days the living were rescued but forty-two lay below, dead. The mine remained dangerous. The vast workings had to be flooded, and the fire extinguished, and the mine pumped dry before, in the new year, the bodies could be retrieved. Curiously they were well preserved by the mineralised waters in the mine.
What had caused the fatal fire? A royal commission, after questioning numerous witnesses, expressed its uncertainty with this memorable sentence: ‘Forty-two men are said to have lost their lives in various parts of the mine; and, with so many voices lost to us in the silence of death, the evidence is necessarily incomplete, and we can only deplore the fate of those whose testimony concerning the happenings in the mine on the fatal 12th of October will never be given before an earthly tribunal.’
In my book I came to a different conclusion. On the basis of fairly strong circumstantial evidence, I argued that the fire could well have been lit deliberately. The likely culprit was a militant miner whose brother, not long before the disaster itself, had been killed in a mining accident. On his brother’s grave in the Queenstown cemetery had duly appeared the indictment: ‘A human life sacrificed on the altar of dividends’. It was true that on the morning of the fire, the militant miner had been seen acting suspiciously. Moreover he possibly had another incentive to light a fire, and thereby expose what he saw were hazards, because on that very day a senior delegation was on its way to Mount Lyell to investigate the safety of the mines. If indeed he lit the fire, he had no intention of causing the loss of life. As I wrote in the book, ‘He did not suspect that the fire would give off deadly fumes.’ In essence, ‘the guilt of the suspect should not be magnified’.
About three months before the book was published, I became worried about the libel implications of this chapter. Presumably a friend raised the risk with me – I was ignorant of the law. Indeed I had written the book with a fearlessness that might now be called naive or innocent.
As the day of publication came nearer, my fear persisted: what if the miner were still alive? If so, might he take legal action? If he were thirty years of age at the time of the disaster he would now be in his early seventies. Belatedly I made enquiries as to whether he was alive, and discovered nothing. Meanwhile I wrote from Melbourne to the registry of births and deaths in Hobart, enclosing my search fee of £1, and enquiring whether the miner had died in Tasmania in the years between 1920 and 1950.
From the registry office in Hobart came a receipt for my payment dated 3 October but no information was inside the envelope. The search among the records was slow, and eleven days passed before Hobart wrote to say that the miner had not died in Tasmania between the years 1920 and 1930. Eight days later it wrote to report that his death had not occurred, at least in Tasmania, in the following twenty years. I replied, enclosing more money for a final search of the remaining years.
As miners were migratory, it was possible that he could have died at Broken Hill, Bendigo or another mainland field during the past forty years, but a search in the interstate records would have been long and slow. I made further enquiries, without success. An urgent letter to Fred Jakins, who had been a young mining engineer at Mount Lyell during the disaster, yielded a more reassuring response. In his recollection, the miner had gone to Victoria and probably had died there. He gave no date or place: it was just his feeling, his vague memory. At that time I was writing a very short history of the old engineers Johns & Waygood; and the two brothers Peter and Owen Johns, hearing of my futile searches, generously engaged a detective agency to join in the search. So far as I know, it found nothing.
Perhaps I was worrying too much. Then, as distinct from now, Australian authors and publishers of books were rarely sued for libel. But for my first book the glow and anticipation were dimmed by the fear.
Just before Christmas 1954, I went the office of Melbourne University Press. Gwyn James, chatting in his genial way, suddenly picked up a book from the side of his desk, and handed it to me. It was the first copy of The Peaks of Lyell, straight from the printer. It was wrapped around with a dust jacket that, by the standards of the day, was spectacular. The book’s front and back and spine displayed a sepia panorama of the Lyell field, with the steep, strangely denuded landscape staring at the reader. In the sky above the landscape was printed in green letters the title of the book. In a cloud-shadow on the slopes below was printed my unfamiliar name, Geoffrey, in such small letters that I could not possibly take offence. I instantly wondered how many pages were in the book, and turning quickly to the back I saw there were 310. That evening I took it in the train to Dandenong and showed it with scarcely disguised pride to everyone who happened to be at my parents’ home.
Publishing was then more like a cottage industry, and James was vague about the date when the book would be first seen in the bookshops. I looked in vain at the windows of city shops to see if copies were on display. After two months I saw them.
So few books of Australian history appeared at that time that mine received a volume of attention that would be inconceivable today when a monthly flood of new Australian books pours into the shops. The largest book window in Melbourne, Robertson & Mullens in busy Elizabeth Street, gave most of its space to displays of copies of my book, along with handsome specimens of North Lyell peacock ore, rich in copper, and photographs of old Mount Lyell. On several days I dawdled on the busy footpath in front of the shop window, pretending that I was a neutral observer. A week or two later The Age devoted most of the front page of its Saturday cultural supplement to the book. It was a generous review but I, like every new author, did not think it was generous enough.
For a few months I was almost a talked-about author. I heard by word of mouth that among its readers were Douglas Mawson the Antarctic explorer, and Captain Davis who was celebrated for his navigation of Antarctic waters. Other readers wrote to me: bent bushmen who rarely took up a pen, women who had once lived at Mount Lyell, and the descendants of people named in the book. A retired New Zealand goldminer working in the packing department at the printery told me that he often sneaked a read of the book while wrapping copies in brown paper for delivery to the shops. He was now almost up to page 100. He never told me whether he reached 200.
Owen Paice, a leading trade unionist at Lyell, wrote the most engaging of letters, telling how his wife, a strong personality, wept when she read about her father’s rescue role during the mining disaster. In the district most adults either read parts of the book, or heard it being read aloud. The housekeeper at Bowers Hotel in Queenstown visited Jimmy Elliott, who was now fading away in an old folks’ home in Hobart, and heard that he had read the copy I posted to him; ‘he was lovely to talk to’, she wrote.
One day I opened a handwritten letter signed by Nevil Shute. He was at the height of his fame as a novelist, for his A Town Like Alice was reaching many lands and his On the Beach, and the filmed version, were soon to attract millions of fans. Presented with my book by a friend, he glanced at it and thought he would read just a few words – in case the friend asked for his opinion. ‘Instead,’ wrote Shute, ‘the thing held my attention to the end, so that I looked forward each day to reading a bit more of it in bed.’ He added his view that skilled writing ‘can make anything interesting’. When I showed the letter to Gwyn James, he clapped his publisher’s hands and proclaimed that an endorsement from Nevil Shute would boost sales. But it was a private letter not to be made public.
With some diffidence I posted the book to my old English teacher, Arthur A. Phillips, who eventually replied, addressing me to my surprise as ‘Dear Geoff’. Approving what he described as my ‘colourful succinctness’, he also waved a stick at me: ‘Whither has fled the Blainey I knew with the pure and wholesome milk of Marxism still wet upon his lips? Whence came this Running Dog of Capitalism?’ He did concede that I bit the legs of the capitalists.
Manning Clark must have read or seen the book. After passing through Queenstown in the autumn of 1958 he generously sent me a postcard depicting the almost-deserted main street. On the back, with a sense of fun, he scrawled: ‘Greetings to the historian of Lyell from Abel Tasman.’ It pleased him to sign postcards with names other than his own; and when Alex Jesaulenko became a celebrated Carlton footballer he sometimes appeared as the signer of Manning’s postcards.
There was then no bestseller list of Australian books. I assume that my book, though popular, would not have ranked as a real bestseller except in Tasmania where it was widely read. But Professor Grahame Johnston in his Annals of Australian Literature listed the more influential books published each year; and for 1954 my name was the youngest of the authors on his list, while at the senior end stood such long-reigning names as Miles Franklin and Mary Gilmore. My book recently was observed to be the only one of Johnston’s thirty-six books of that year to have been in print almost continuously since it first appeared. I would like to imagine that it was a worthwhile book, but when I set out to read a page or two now I am not always sure. Part of the reason for its longevity was simply that I kept on living and so was able to keep it alive by periodically updating it.
The book was the kind one might now submit for a doctorate, but I had a perverse attitude to degrees. At the end of my undergraduate course I had been awarded a first-class honours degree but refused to take part in the ceremony in the fine old Wilson Hall. Whether out of penury or principle or sheer contrariness, I had decided that the fee for the graduation ceremony was a tax on knowledge. In British history a tax on knowledge was eschewed in certain intellectual circles, and perhaps I was tacking my colours to this old mast, just because a mast was needed. I also held even then a suspicion towards degrees. Too many people holding no degrees seemed mentally superior to those who held degrees. I had met numerous people who had had no formal education but by dint of constant reading had eventually surpassed the typical university graduate.
Upon leaving university I had resolved not to graduate in the formal sense, and so, strictly speaking, I held no degree. Later at the registrar’s office the presiding official, the colourful Mr Glasson Williams, looked through the graduate rolls, making, I assume, his annual inspection, and could not find my name. He sent for me and, after hearing my reasons, chided me and gave me a knowing wink. He knew nobody else who had refused on principle to ‘take out’ a degree.
After I was awarded an MA for the first half of my book on Mount Lyell, the whole book being far too long for a master’s thesis, I decided again not to take out the degree. In any case, before I could graduate as a master, I first had to take out my bachelor’s degree and then wait for another full year. I sat tight, taking no action. Meanwhile I made no claim to possessing a university degree.
When eventually I taught at the university, first as a senior lecturer and later as a professor, officials at the University of Melbourne, slightly embarrassed, placed an MA after my name in official publications. I preferred not to budge from my position, though it had long ceased to be a matter of importance. The academic officials wisely bided their time. In 1982 I went to Harvard as a professor, and while I was there my friend Sir David Derham the vice-chancellor in Melbourne busied himself, arranging for the chancellor to confer officially on me the degree of BA (Hons), and then a little later conferring on me an MA, again in my absence. Through Derham’s patience and shrewdness I was made legitimate. Officially, the seal of wisdom was conferred on me but I felt none the wiser.