Swinging Theodolite

The Sydney surveyor and poet R.D. FitzGerald (1902–87) played a role in leading Australian writers out of the era of the balladeers to seek a more poised and mature attitude towards the Australian identity and our place in the world community of letters. He enjoyed a long career from the roaring twenties to the swinging sixties, and during the 1930s he shared with Kenneth Slessor the mantle of “the leading poet in Australia”. H.M. Green was an enthusiastic admirer, as he recorded in his History of Australian Literature: 

The work of Robert David FitzGerald blows like a fresh wind across today, exhaling a courage and confident aspiration, a sense of wonder and mystery that are strange in a world which is bored and afraid and sorry for itself, and a poetry in which this attitude was intensified under the shadow of the early work of T.S. Eliot. FitzGerald represents in fact a life and an interest in life that wars and depression have dammed back after the upwelling of the nineties; that upwelling had found its most characteristic expression in the ballad revival in Britain and the dominions, but FitzGerald’s poems have none of the qualities of the ballad, Australian or other, except vigour and an adventurous spirit.  

His reputation has not worn well. Some critics would say he is lucky to find a place in the recent anthology Australian Poetry since 1788 edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray. Judgments have been mixed, ranging from Green’s endorsement to others who have noted a number of limitations—“ungainly, lacking in lyricism, grace and spontaneity”. He was never popular or fashionable, as indeed a serious literary writer in Australia could not hope to be in his time. Not surprisingly, self-consciously modern poets have little use for a relatively conservative figure who used his poetry to address complex philosophical ideas. James McAuley was also prepared to mix ideas with his poetry but he was not a great admirer of FitzGerald. He wrote: 

The difficulty felt by many readers is that, if one looks at the work as an artistic achievement, it becomes necessary to bring in aid a conviction of the value and importance of the ideas; and if one looks at the ideas, it becomes necessary to bring in aid a conviction of the artistic worth of their embodiment. 

However, as long as he is not completely forgotten FitzGerald will have admirers who appreciate his integrity, his craftsmanship, the example that he set as an elder statesman in the profession, his sustained productivity and the quality of his best work, including a beautiful short essay on poetry, “Cinderella and Others”: 

Poetry is a natural language for anything that requires to be conveyed from mind to mind a little more movingly, a little more directly, a little more nakedly than by the ordinary medium of speech. It is that Cinderella which dances on ahead of our thoughts on feet which that part of us which is princely may, with luck, fit a glass slipper to, but which pedantry is not likely to squeeze into stock size: “These are the latest in iambics, madam.” 

The thoughts in the essay were inspired by a surveyor’s assistant, sitting in the back of the car at the end of a hard day in the field, as they looked for a pub at Bondi Beach: 

Prettiest thing I know is a wave breaking.
Same with a fire; I can watch a fire till it burns me. 

R.D. FitzGerald was the third in a line of Robert David FitzGeralds, all of them surveyors by profession. His grandfather founded the line in Australia when he came from Tralee in Ireland. He became the Deputy Surveyor-General of New South Wales and in his spare time he established himself as the leading authority on Australian orchids.

The second R.D. FitzGerald rose to the position of Deputy Chief Engineer in the New South Wales Public Works Department. He never travelled to Ireland but his son (the poet) recalled that his ordinary speech often gave way to a distinct brogue, sometimes for effect when telling Irish tales, sometimes at moments of excitement. He recalled phrases such as “It’s a fine soft day” when there was a grey drizzle, or “It’s better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick!” to express delight. The young FitzGerald wondered about the veracity of the brogue and the turns of speech, for he did not meet other born-and-bred Irish folk who talked quite the same. However, he was agreeably surprised when he made the pilgrimage to Tralee and was warned by the hotel manager, “The day’s a bit soft”, as he was about to venture out.

The third R.D. FitzGerald studied science at the University of Sydney but did not complete his degree and instead turned to the profession of his father and grandfather. He hung his shingle in a Sydney city office where Philip Lindsay sometimes turned up in the morning, rather the worse for wear, to borrow a shilling for a cup of coffee. At first FitzGerald’s partner resented this intrusion because he was afraid that “this hobo” would frighten away potential custom. However, when he discovered that they shared an interest in literature, it was the partner who often enough provided the shilling.

During the 1920s, FitzGerald collaborated (professionally but not recreationally) with the bohemian avant-garde who were inspired by Norman Lindsay. Two of Lindsay’s sons provided a pen picture of the young R.D. at that time: 

Impatience is his keynote, an impatience with flesh and bone, boisterously thumping his fist on the marble-topped tables of Mockbells [coffee shop], or the linoleum covering of a bar, while he insisted that Vision found a new school, the pre-Kiplingites, escape from the modern mathematics of verse, from the intellectual cottonwooling of emotion. Huge, lean, gaunt Fitz, with his bright dark eyes and tousled hair, striding down Pitt Street. I can see him now, a theodolite tossed carelessly over one shoulder, roaring suddenly at sight of a friend, and swinging around, theodolite and all, so that had he been of ordinary height, he’d have brained at least a dozen passers-by; Fitz bellowing in the Angel or some other pub, or trying to fold his long legs under a restaurant table. 

That was Philip Lindsay’s account, which FitzGerald repudiated (in part) on the grounds that he would never have been so careless with a precision instrument!

Jack Lindsay wrote in his memoir The Roaring Twenties that he liked FitzGerald for his 

engaging humility and ready mind, and perhaps it was only my liking that made me feel sure that his verses would get better. At that time they were rather tame. He did develop quickly, and so he was one of the few cases in which a wish of this kind came true.  

Several of FitzGerald’s first poems appeared in the short-lived journal Vision that was the vehicle for the Lindsay circle’s highly idiosyncratic rejoinder to modernism. Another young contributor was Kenneth Slessor; these two took the lead through the later 1920s and 1930s to show Australian writers the way to a new maturity and poise. They were more serious and “literary” than the balladeers, without aggressive nationalism yet without deference to foreign models and especially without morbid and self-conscious introversion. In the words of Jack Lindsay: 

FitzGerald and Slessor were the poets who were to carry on in their own ways the impetus begotten by Vision and in the 1930s to dominate Australian poetry, lifting it definitively to a new level of intellectual responsibility and ending once for all the reign of the slipshod, the pedestrian and the emotionally inchoate. 

During the 1930s FitzGerald spent several years in Fiji conducting surveys for the Native Lands Commission to pin down the vague traditional boundaries of the tribal lands. Most of the time he was the only European in the vicinity, and he learned to speak Fijian. Later he wrote (too briefly) some charming memoirs of those times. Back in Australia he worked as a municipal surveyor with the councils of Manly and Ryde until he joined the Commonwealth Department of the Interior in 1940 and surveyed sites for wartime aerodromes. By the time he retired in 1965 he had become the supervising surveyor of the New South Wales branch of the department. 

His first collection of verse consisted of short poems, unified by the theme of man torn between the opposing attractions of the transcendent reality (the Greater Apollo) and the material world. His second collection, of thirty-three poems, including “The Greater Apollo” series won a significant award in Britain. Due to the demands of his work in Fiji during the 1930s his third collection did not appear until 1938. This included “The Hidden Bole”, a long and intricately constructed elegy on the transience of beauty, using as examples the banyan tree and the ballerina Anna Pavlova.

Heemskerck Shoals contains short poems and a long dramatic monologue inspired by the almost disastrous Fijian experience of the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman who encountered a reef, which he named Heemskerck Shoals, near Nanuku Island. The monologue, in irregular rhymes and half-rhymes, concerns the frustrated ambition of Tasman and his obsession with the lost opportunities presented by the continent of Australia. FitzGerald depicted a character who combined elements of the imaginative dreamer and the practical man of action.

His next collection included a long poem which he wrote over a period of many years, an ambitious five-part narrative and meditation based on the remarkable saga of a young seaman who was adopted by a Tongan chief after his ship was burned and the crew massacred by the natives in 1806. Focused on the evolving relationship between the sailor and the chief, the poem has a theme of action and the need for “acts of resolution” while a subtext is the transience of life, lasting only “between two tides” before the evidence of our presence is washed away, like footsteps in the sand.

Much of FitzGerald’s poetry was not published in book form until the 1950s, partly because he frequently revisited old poems to improve them. This Night’s Orbit contained two important poems, “The Face of the Waters”, a meditation on the Creation, and “Fifth Day”, an incident from the trial of Warren Hastings. Hastings was the first Governor-General of India (1773–84) and was impeached for allegations of extortion against several of the local rulers. The prosecution, led by Edmund Burke, lasted ten years and Hastings was vindicated but financially ruined. The record of the proceedings was taken in shorthand by the court reporter Gurney, and FitzGerald discovered the event in the course of researching various forms of shorthand, which was one of his interests. In 1965 he published a collection, Forty Years Poems, containing most of his later work and a section titled “Salvages” with that portion of his earlier poems which he wished to retain.

During the 1950s and 1960s FitzGerald was something of an elder statesman among Australian writers and he exerted a deal of influence by reviewing and occasional lectures in addition to the example he set with his own poetry. His influence was beneficial, especially in the balance and moderation that he brought to the “national–international” debate, the long-standing conflict about how distinctively Australian our literature should be. On the national side stood the Bulletin writers of the 1890s and those of the Vance Palmer group and the Jindyworobaks who sought to emulate them. On the other side are those who question whether a self-consciously Australian tradition has any relevance to young writers. FitzGerald envisaged the two strands of national and international literature converging into a broader stream. In a 1967 article, “Nationalism and Internationalism”, he wrote: 

I do not really foresee any dirty greyness of uniformity as a result of the loss of an independence which already does not really exist. We take pleasure in the Australianity of our literature. We like it, though we must never accept it as a sole test. If we were ever to lose it or deliberately abandon it, Literature in English could lose a great part of its flavour: something of that greyness would descend.  

One of the themes that appears from time to time in his poetry was identified by H.M. Green but is not generally noted. That is FitzGerald’s interest in scientific exploration and the frontiers of knowledge, as well as adventures in the life of action. Green reported that FitzGerald was deeply influenced in his middle period (the 1930s) by reading Alfred North Whitehead’s book Science and the Modern World. This endorsed his own view on the need to combine an interest in particulars with general speculation about the human condition. FitzGerald’s interest in the adventure of ideas and action is manifest in his poem “Beginnings”: 

not to have watched Cook
drawing thin lines across
the last sea’s uncut book
is my certain loss; 

as too is having come late,
the other side of the dark
from that bearded, sedate
Hargrave of Stanwell Park 

and so to have missed, some bright
morning in the salty, stiff
north-easter, a crank with a kite—
steadied above a cliff. 

Lawrence Hargrave was an exceptionally gifted and industrious Australian inventor who almost produced a flying machine before the more famous Wright brothers. 

Lehmann and Gray selected four items for their anthology, the short poem “1918–1941”, “The Face of the Waters”, “Fifth Day” and “The Wind at Your Door”. They describe “1918–1941” as one of his first poems to have a “modern” feel to it, and it also has the expression of personal emotion which is generally not present in FitzGerald’s work: 

Distant the guns are, and no wind veering
has brought them into hearing, nor yet in these lands
do they bawl between hills as between a pair of hands;
but there’s what we were bred to … and strange it is then
to be lifting our sons up to watch the marching men. 

The editors note that FitzGerald wrote more anti-war poems and became an opponent of the war in Vietnam. “The Face of the Waters” gives “an imaginative sensory form to his preoccupation with the philosopher Whitehead’s metaphysical system”: 

Out of the tension of silence (the twanged string);
from the agony of not being (that terrible laughter
tortured by darkness); out of it all
once again the tentative migration; once again
a universe on the edge of being born:
feet running fearfully out of nothing
at the core of nothing:
colour, light, life, fearfully
Becoming eyes and understanding: sound becoming ears …
The egg-shell collapses
in the fist of the eternal instant 

“The Fifth Day” is included as an example of FitzGerald’s narrative poems: 

Pitt sits near Fox and the managers, listens and learns.
Burke’s heavy features liven with that magic
under them and their spectacles, which turns
knowledge to vision, and vision to strategic
marshalling of words and march of logic
through illustrations like landscapes and up steep
Quebec heights of statistics. Fox is asleep. 

They consider this to be a more striking piece of work than the poem which is usually selected in anthologies, “The Wind at Your Door”, which has “local flavour” because it deals with the convict past. 

Rafe Champion, who lives in Sydney, has been an occasional contributor to Quadrant over many years.