Robin Marsden’s Legacy to Quadrant

“Big Sister” Robin Marsden (1936–2021), who sadly succumbed to faculties-withering Parkinson’s disease in August after a long struggle, was a poetic spirit. She fastened onto an image from the American poet Robert Frost, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—, I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.” In 2003, looking back on her earlier creative life, Robin mused, “I think I found the road ‘less travelled by’ or it found me.” It was serendipity that her road and the road that Quadrant was on intersected at a moment of mutual benefit and opportunity.

Robin offered Quadrant a rich background of English (plus German and French) literary studies, embracing all eras and genres, passionately enhanced over twenty years of meticulous, motivational scholarship and teaching. She had extensive critical experience, honed to the level of an instinctive perfectionist. To this she added inspirational drive and energy, an ability to persuade through her nuanced choice of words, and above all a warm, magnetic, empathetic personality, which endeared her to and earned respect from most with whom she interacted. Robin smoothly bridged the gap between the university teaching staff and her student status. At a very tender age, she confidently approached senior professors for discussion of academic issues over which she had been pondering.

Although I am biased, she probably seemed ideal back in 1976 to the Quadrant leadership, as a potential additional staff member, capable of achieving much to take the magazine forward at that stage of its development.

Robin was always discreet, where discretion was required, but I gradually gleaned an impression from her, reinforced by front-cover encouragement of readers to “Help Save Quadrant”, that the magazine’s finances were tight in those days. This had obvious implications for the office’s “head-count”. For several years Robin was the only full-time employee on the payroll (for “full-time” please read “fuller than full”, averaging about fifty hours per week). The senior colleagues on the management and editorial side and all members of the Board, although generously accessible, had other important day jobs to handle. It is therefore no exaggeration to assert that Quadrant came to depend on Robin then for its continuing viability at the standard required.

During each working day Robin, whose schedule was obviously dominated by the publication deadline, had to keep an eye on: the inward flow of contributors’ drafts; any issues with the Greek printers, with whom good relations were essential and to whom she personally had to deliver the final versions, on foot across town, down dark lanes; layout, headlining and emphasis. Occasionally, she had to beg for special time concessions from the printery, in order to squeeze in important (but overdue) contributions. She did all the editing herself and was trusted to deliver a fully proofread, high quality product. This sometimes included negotiating with the writers, not all of whom were instinctively accommodating. To be on top of her job, she had to understand fully the potentially contentious issues in every draft article and to stay abreast of all relevant, unfolding news.

The above was only the more process-driven part of Robin’s work. Where she made a big difference, I’m told by several people who benefited from it, was in creating an atmosphere in the Quadrant office that encouraged contributing writers, both “regulars” and “potentials”, to feel welcome to gravitate there to discuss ideas or specific issues with her. It was not the rather Spartan facilities of the old office at 404 Kent Street that attracted return visits. Overwhelmingly, it was the confidence that Robin’s warm, intelligent, scholastically-based feedback and conscientious follow-up would make the meeting worthwhile. Many of those visitors were also happy to encounter other writers there. It made the atmosphere even more congenial.

In the same 2003 retrospective article, Robin  named some of the most prominent writers with whom she had worked at Quadrant over her almost twenty-one years of association with the magazine: “I have been blessed to have worked as an editor with some of our finest writers, including the Literary Editors of Quadrant, Dr Vivian Smith and Les Murray. The late Professor A.D. Hope, Barry Humphries, David Malouf and Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) were contributors to Quadrant, among quite a galaxy of Australian and some notable overseas writers.”

Including all the phone calls that she regularly fielded from various stakeholders, Robin could anticipate that any of roughly one hundred people currently “in play” might seek her attention on any given day.

EVIDENCE that she loved creating and being part of a relaxed atmosphere of intellectual ferment was that many of Robin’s weekends at her East Roseville home were turned over to casual “drop-ins” by writers, English scholars, critics, Quadrant editors past and present, at least one journalist and personal, long-term kindred spirits. To this crowd were sometimes added young musicians and orchestra performers, as her two daughters, Justine and Marina, were making their way towards careers in the strings section of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. It was a Parisian-style salon milieu, transplanted to Sydney, minus the seamier side.

I am sure that Robin hoped that such impromptu gatherings would foster camaraderie and facilitate new friendships and working relationships. She had no time for or patience with any political agendas or petty intrigues that might sour the atmosphere, whether there or at the office.

Not long before she joined Quadrant, Robin consolidated an earlier academic focus on the Australian poet Christopher Brennan, by teaming up with two friends from Sydney University, Axel Clark of the English Department and John Fletcher, a lecturer in German, to found the Christopher Brennan Society. This attracted interest and support from, among others, the University’s Challis Professor of English Literature, G.A. Wilkes, who was himself researching Brennan at the time. He was Robin’s earliest supervisor for her PhD work on French and German influences on Brennan’s creative thinking and writing.

Robin personally contributed a major, cover-piece article to the November 1977 edition of Quadrant, “Christopher Brennan’s Berlin Years”. In this she meticulously tracked his every move from 1892 to 1894, including locally stimulated currents of his thought, his big love affair, his correspondence with long-time friends in Australia, new literary and philosophical contacts that he made abroad, every book that he bought and annotated, and the circumstances under which he experimented with new prose and poetic compositions. She also noted the rather cavalier way in which Brennan treated the starchy sticklers for respecting the rules within the hierarchy of Berlin University. He was not, in the end, granted his PhD.

This thoroughness and perseverance were evident in all of Robin’s systematic bibliographical and analytical work. She built up such a store of knowledge and documentation about Brennan over more than half her lifetime that she developed a well-deserved reputation as among the foremost experts on one of Australia’s most colourful and controversial literary figures. It is fitting that many of her notes and thesis-related documents are now preserved for future scholars in the Rare Books and Special Collections Library of Sydney University’s Fisher Library.

Roger Brown was First Secretary in the first Australian Embassy in Beijing under the PRC (1973 to 1976) and the first Australian Consul General in Shanghai (1984 to 1987). He was Corporate Affairs and Government Relations Director for Coca-Cola Amatil Central Europe, based in Vienna, from 1990 to 2000