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As a practising literary critic, I jumped at the opportunity of reading about an Irish-Australian elder in the field. Three female colossi bestrode literature in the 1970s, and I am privileged to have been taught by two of them – Judith Wright (who taught Australian poetry to honours students at the University of Queensland in 1968) and Dorothy Green (my postgrad supervisor). I have met Veronica Brady often in the course of my career, have often been reviewed by her, and am proud to think of her as a fellow-traveller in Australian Studies, but of the holy trinity of redoubtable female Australianists of this era, she is the least well known to me, so it was a pleasure to find out a lot more about the pilgrim journey of this great Australian. I’ve admired her for a long time – for her feistiness, fearlessness, feminism, passionate advocacy of Aborigines and other marginalised people, and for her energy.

Kath Jordan’s biography confirms her place in the genealogy. She has a lot in common with Wright and Green, and it is no accident that she re-entered their orbits later in life giving the inaugural Dorothy Green address at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature in Ballarat in 1992, and writing an authorised biography of Judith Wright. Separated by half a generation, all three of these women are/were tiny, nuggetty persons physically, with not a whiff of old-lady-ness about them, and very prepared to use their tongues and gimlet eyes in defense of their beliefs. Each of them cultivated mild eccentricity both as a defence against the bourgeois expectations of women of their respective times, and for the freedoms eccentricity confers on such outré souls. Each of them was a passionate educator, and charismatic (even Judith Wright after deafness made her vocation as a teacher difficult), but with an edge of dogmatism and abrasiveness. All three were radicals, with strong views about the corrupting influence of money, and left-leaning to the extent that at least two of them earned the dismissive and derogatory moniker, ‘commie’. Each of them was driven by social justice agendas which literature was made to serve, and this in times that long predated the academy’s easy acceptance of aestheticism as a norm, and each suffered for this choice. It is easier for the academy to support them in a post-modern and post-colonial theory-driven context. They were pioneers for women in the academy, and suffered the disdain of their male contemporaries, as this book makes clear.

Read more:  http://tintean.org.au/articles/2010/03/01/liberating-spirits/

Review written by Frances Devlin-Glass.

Frances Devlin-Glass in ‘retirement’ continues to profess Australian (and Irish) Literature as an editor of the Journal for the Study of Australian Literature and as the founding director of Bloomsday in Melbourne.

Reproduced with permission, Tintean magazine March 2010.