Dymphna Stella Rees is the daughter of writers Leslie Rees and Coralie Clarke Rees and now manages her parents’ literary archive. For many years she was Principal Officer: English and Humanities in the New South Wales vocational education and training sector. During her time in TAFE, she created the first Diploma of Aboriginal Studies and drove other innovations in post-secondary curricula. Dymphna holds a Master’s Degree in Aboriginal Studies and postgraduate diplomas in education and counselling. She is an elected member of AIATSIS (the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies). Dymphna has also been an advocate for families affected by mental illness and has worked as a counsellor with women and children escaping family violence. She lives in the Hunter region of New South Wales and delights in her large family.
Published Works by Leslie Rees and Coralie Clarke Rees
Works by Leslie Rees
Children’s Literature
Digit Dick on the Great Barrier Reef (1943)
Gecko the Lizard Who Lost His Tail (1944)
The Story of Shy the Platypus (1944)
Digit Dick and the Tasmanian Devil (1946)
Karrawingi the Emu (1946)
Sarli the Barrier Reef Turtle (1947)
Mates of the Kurlalong (1948)
Bluecap and Bimbi, Australian Blue Wrens (1948)
Shadow the Rock Wallaby (1949)
Kurri Kurri the Kookaburra (1951)
Digit Dick in Black Swanland (1953)
Two-Thumbs the Koala (1953)
Aroora the Red Kangaroo (1953)
Australian Nature Tales (1956)
Koonawarra the Black Swan (1956)
Wy-lah the Black Cockatoo (1957)
Digit Dick and the Lost Opals (1957)
Russ the Australian Tree-Kangaroo (1964)
Mokee, the White Possum (1973)
The Big Book of Digit Dick (1973)
A Treasury of Australian Nature Stories (1974)
Bluecap and Bimbi, Gecko and Mokee (1975)
Digit Dick and the Magic Jabiru (1981)
Digit Dick and the Zoo Plot (1982)
Billa, the Wombat Who Had a Bad Dream (1988)
The Seagull Who Liked Cricket (1997)
Drama and Theatre
Australian Radio Plays (editor) (1947)
Modern Short Plays (editor) (1951)
Towards an Australian Drama (1953)
Mask and Microphone (editor) (1963)
The Making of Australian Drama (1973)
A History of Australian Drama (1978)
~ Vol. 1 The Making of Australian Drama
~ Vol. 2 Australian Drama in the 1970s
Young Adult Fiction
Quokka Island (1951)
Danger Patrol (1954)
Boy Lost on Tropic Coast (1968)
Panic in the Cattle Country (1974)
Here’s to Shane (1977)
Autobiography
Hold Fast to Dreams: Fifty years in theatre, radio, television and books (1982)
Plays
Sub-Editor’s Room (1937)
Lalor of Eureka (1938)
Mother’s Day (1944)
The Harp in the South ~ with Ruth Park (1949)
Works by Coralie Clarke Rees
Plays
Shielded Eyes (1928)
Wait till We Grow Up (1947)
Poetry
Silent His Wings (1945)
Children’s Literature
What Happened After? Nursery Rhyme Sequels (1972)
Collaborations between Leslie Rees and Coralie Clarke Rees
Adventure Travel
Spinifex Walkabout (1953)
Westward from Cocos (1956)
Coasts of Cape York (1960)
People of the Big Sky Country (1970)
Australia the Big Sky Country (1971)
For my Dear Ones who have gone before – they have shown me the way
and
for my children and grandchildren – this is part of their story, too.
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
– Christina Rossetti
What a reminder to future generations of the significant heartbeats of the past!
– Leslie Rees in a letter to Coralie Clarke Rees
Contents
Prologue
1. My Paper Inheritance
2. Genes Worth Having
3. Mod and Tin Pot Alley
4. The Dawn of Women’s Rights
5. Love Must Wait
6. Letters from the Ship: 1929
7. The Girl He Left Behind
8. Full of Love and Literature
9. Betrothed
10. Luxury and Freedom
11. Seven and Sevenpence, Please
12. Coming Home with Eileen
13. On the Air
14. Searchlights over Sydney
15. Two Writers – One Typewriter
16. My First and Second Mothers
17. Patience Rewarded
18. A Writer for a Father
19. An Outback Explorer
20. Peripatetic Parents
21. Collaborating: A dicey business
22. The Perils of Literary Coupledom
23. Valentine’s Day, 1972
24. Sheer Gallantry of Spirit
25. The Dream Museum
26. Small Volumes
27. A Place in the Sun
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Biographical Timeline
Select Bibliography
Prologue
Shellcove: that place of tender memory and delight. One sunny winter’s day, through circumstances I would not have chosen, I walked right into the setting of my early life. I could not remember the last time – how many decades – since I had been on foot in this part of the world, the geography of my childhood, etched like a Google map upon the landscape of my heart. Neutral Bay slopes down to the harbour from its junction with Military Road. I was born right there, on the corner of Yeo Street and Wycombe Road ‘under a jacaranda tree’, as my mother would wistfully recall. She was always prone to hyperbole.
Shellcove Road forks off to the left several blocks down the hill. There’s an Anglican church called St Augustine’s on the corner. My sister, Megan, and I both went to Mirradong, the nursery school in the basement, and less than thirty years after that we sat in the church above with our father, sharing our frozen disbelief at our mother’s funeral service.
But the road has a more public history. It once had a work of literature named after it: a stage play by Alex Buzo, a satirist, who sent it up as one of the most expensive streets in Sydney. My father thought that a great joke, an absolute irony. He and my mother had lived there for almost thirty years, paying what they described as ‘a peppercorn rent’ for the privilege. They would have hated the idea they might be considered among the plutocrats. To them, any sort of social pretension, any class stratification, was anathema. And their lifestyle was determinedly, brazenly non-materialistic. They’d never had much money anyway. My father had grown up in threadbare poverty and both had lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. They had learnt to live on just enough and, des
pite that, to create a richly interesting lifestyle.
However, there’s no getting away from it. Shellcove Road is a favoured street. That is because, as you move down to the lower end, the left side of the road fronts that narrow finger of water called Shellcove that fits between the two promontories of Kurraba Point and Cremorne Point on the northern shores of Port Jackson. It is one of the most desirable small bays of Sydney Harbour. The western side of the road boasts gracious homes with formal lawns and plantings while those on the water side have gardens rambling down to a boatshed, jetty or harbour pool. These properties look across the bay to the Cremorne side, which has, from midway down the incline, a bush reserve that stretches down to the rocky shoreline and provides a winding pathway right along to the point, a place that was so much a part of my early world.
Hardly a weekend would pass without taking that bush walk at least once with our father. Along its length is where he taught my sister and me the musical names of trees – angophora, lilly pilly, casuarina – where we learnt about the different banksias and ti-trees, where we watched for small scrub birds and identified their songs. It was here we grew to savour the colour and texture of Hawkesbury sandstone, the feel of the glowing rocks scattered along the shoreline, their small crevices alive with crabs, periwinkles and filmy sea lettuce. Once, but only once, I even took that walk by myself. I was probably only eight when I trundled my doll along its leafy length and as far as the ferry wharf on Cremorne Point. At the small kiosk, I handed up my sixpence for a roll of LifeSavers. On the way back I cautiously eyed several passing strangers who must have hidden their smiles at this small child walking alone, head down, through the filtered afternoon light, pushing an old doll’s pram with a rubbery-limbed faux baby inside.
More than half a century later, here I was, wandering along Shellcove Road, pointing out to my companion the various places that held memories for me: where a school friend would invite me to play; the portico of a Spanish-style mansion where our father, on one of those weekend walks, had ushered us in to shelter from a sudden downpour, much to the surprise of the owner who cautiously opened the front door and gazed suspiciously at a man and two girls dripping onto the quarry tiles. I would like to report that we were invited in for tea and cakes but that did not happen. She surveyed us wordlessly then shut the door firmly in our faces.
Getting to the lower end of the road, our walk brought us to No. 9, the property where I spent my first twenty years. On the face of the sandstone block wall fronting the footpath I was surprised to see a brass plaque. It read, in raised letters:
Coralie Clarke Rees and Leslie Rees, writers, lived at Flat 1, 9 Shellcove Road, from 1937 to 1966 with their daughters Megan and Dymphna. Relaxing in the flats’ harbour swimming pool on Shellcove between typing drafts, Leslie wrote thirty children’s books including the Digit Dick and Shy the Platypus series, and histories of Australian drama. Coralie collaborated on travel books and radio scripts, and wrote Silent His Wings and What Happened After.
North Sydney Council
North Shore Historical Society
The plaque was dated 2003 but until that moment I had no idea of its existence.
Like most kids, I always thought my childhood was ordinary. While I now know that everyone’s beginning is unique, not all families score a historical society plaque on the front fence. AA Milne, the creator of Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear, was emphatic when my mother interviewed him in his study: ‘One writer is enough for any family!’ But we had two in ours. My parents wrote separately for years and then together. Establishing themselves as individual names was hard enough, but then they collaborated on a series of works and found that a dicey business. Nonetheless, they became a power couple – ‘one of Australia’s best known literary partnerships’.
When I was a child they were part of the thriving literary community, which included that lady of letters later to grace our ten-dollar banknote, Mary Gilmore; the novelists Dymphna Cusack, Miles Franklin and Frank Dalby Davison; collaborators Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw; and the playwrights Betty Roland and Max Afford. There was the poet and literary editor Douglas Stewart; Gwen Meredith, writer of Australia’s longest-running and most popular ABC radio serial, Blue Hills; the critic Tom Inglis Moore; and Pixie O’Harris, a writer as well as an artist. Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland, another literary duo, were close friends – their older children came to our birthday parties and we went to theirs. Vance and Nettie Palmer in Melbourne appointed themselves our honorary grandparents, and in my parents’ home state of Western Australia Katharine Susannah Prichard, Henrietta Drake-Brockman and Mary Durack remained friends of long standing.
Two of those writers, Miles Franklin and Dymphna Cusack, were to become my literary godmothers, for they bestowed the gift – or burden – of their names upon me. In 1938, Sydney celebrated its sesquicentenary with great pomp and fanfare: a hundred and fifty years since HMS Sirius sailed into Sydney Harbour and planted the English flag on Gadigal land. In response, Dymphna and Miles produced a book they called Pioneers on Parade – a satire that ruthlessly sent up Australia’s colonial past and its reverence for the British aristocracy, which was still clinging to positions of power and authority. At the end of 1940, my parents produced a second daughter and decided to name me after their friend, Dymphna Cusack. Her erstwhile collaborator, Stella Miles Franklin, strenuously objected.
‘Give the child a decent name! Call her Stella.’
So began my life – as Stella Dymphna Clarke Rees.
1
My Paper Inheritance
My mother, Coralie Clarke Rees, was a beautiful and alluring woman. More than that, she was blessed with intellect, vivacity and grace. She used her talents to become an actor, playwright, editor, overseas correspondent, broadcaster, poet, travel writer and intrepid adventurer. She might have reached greater heights in any of these fields had not chance intervened in her young life, demanding of her not gifts but deep wells of courage, dignity and endurance.
My father, despite a rough beginning, had true good fortune. He had buoyant health, prodigious energy and an inquiring mind. But his greatest blessing was finding a partner who could share his passion for literature, theatre, travel and family life – who would be his devoted lover, critic, champion and ‘word friend’. Of course he was talented and determined – even driven. But my mother’s support, belief and generosity of spirit played no small part in the life he devoted to the written word. He started writing as a boy of twelve – an adventure story of finding gold nuggets in the Yukon – and published his last new title, The Seagull Who Liked Cricket, when he was ninety-two and a great-grandfather.
Leslie Rees was a prodigious and versatile writer across genres. He produced journalism, plays, radio documentaries, adventure novels, travel books, autobiography and a tower of literary criticism including four weighty volumes recording the history of Australian drama from its convict days. Most celebrated was his contribution to children’s literature: twenty-six titles, the first appearing in the early 1940s. Many were published again and again in various forms and editions over decades. The most recent versions appeared in 2016 – translated into Russian.
During my childhood, my father enjoyed enormous popularity as a writer of children’s books. He was very well known – and my identity was forged as ‘Leslie Rees’s daughter’. Digit Dick on the Great Barrier Reef, his first book, was a fantasy about a tiny adventurous boy, set on Sunshine Island and in the waters of the Reef with all its colour and life. The book immediately became a bestseller and was quickly followed by another, becoming a series.
My father’s publisher, John Sands, then invited him to try writing stories about Australian indigenous creatures, accurately depicting their life cycle and habitat. Walter Cunningham, a talented artist, would supply the illustrations. There were few Australian children’s books available during World War II and in the period of austerity that followed. Certainly there w
ere no others that celebrated our wild animals and birds – or not without turning them into caricatures of human behaviour. Blinky Bill featured koalas in frilly aprons and referred to them as ‘bears’, while May Gibbs delicately transformed eucalyptus caps into kewpie dolls and banksia cones into bogey men. Most Australian kids were more familiar with animals of the English woods: rabbits, badgers and squirrels. The Wind in the Willows introduced us to otters and moles, while Peter Rabbit might have seemed cute to English children, but in Australia he was an introduced pest to be shot on sight.
Suppressed resentment about this cultural cringe foisted upon the young no doubt led to the reading public’s delight when Shy the Platypus came out of her burrow in 1944. Shy was the first of a series of animal and bird biographies that changed the nature and context of Australian children’s literature and had influence for years to come. Karrawingi the Emu, Sarli the Barrier Reef Turtle, Two-Thumbs the Koala and the other titles that followed went on being read and published throughout last century and into this. Children treasured them; teachers and librarians lapped them up. They were books remembered and loved.
What makes a book endure for decades, even centuries, when the majority of titles have a shelf life of months? What in a book influences people and changes their lives? When Shy, now considered a classic, was republished in 2012 by the National Library of Australia, a man at the launch rose from the audience and spoke – his eyes glistening with tears – of how my father’s books had led to his life as a conservationist and environmental scientist. Writer Jackie French spoke of how, as a child, she borrowed Sarli the Turtle so frequently from the local library it practically fell apart. When growing up in Africa, Mem Fox was sent a copy of Shy the Platypus. In 1990 my father had received a letter from the self-described ‘44-year-old writer of a book called Possum Magic’. Mem Fox went on to write:
Well, I thought you were dead, the hero of my youth, the man who turned me on to books, to reading, to Australia, to writing […] I owe you my love of literature, my present fame, my wish to become a writer – and JOY of JOYS, today I discover that it’s not too late to say thank you – a million times over! Dear Leslie Rees, my eternal gratitude!
A Paper Inheritance Page 1