The Title Page of E.J. Banfield's the Confessions of a Beach

H.P. HESELTINE THE CONFESSIONS OF A BEACHCOMBER The title page of E.J. Banfield's The Confessions of a Beach- comber bears this quotation from Thoreau: If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears. We have it on the authority of the naturalist Charles Barrett' that this was Banfield's favourite quotation from the American writer. Indeed, the range and number of his quotations from Thoreau's books suggest that the lord of Dunk Isle had a deeply familiar admiration for the hermit of Concord. Two chapters of Banfield's second book, My Tropic Isle (1911),2 for instance, carry epigraphs from Thoreau. Chapter V, "Silences," is headed, thus, by the quotation, "Who has not hearkened to her [Nature's] infinite din?" Chapter VI, devoted to "Fruits and Scents," establishes its theme through Thoreau's phrase, "The pot herb of the gods." There are more than specific echoes of Thoreau in Banfield's prose. The whole of the Con- fessions is structured on much the same lines as Walden: in each book, opening chapters which give some account of the back- ground to and motives for the writer's retreat from society, are followed by descriptions, varying from the lyrical to the virtu- ally statistical, of the surroundings where he makes his new life. Such explicit borrowings and analogies of structure seem to invite a comparison between Banfield and Thoreau, between Dunk Island and Walden Pond (between Townsvile and Con- cord even?) as a profitable way into something like an exact understanding of the Australian writer's achievement. If I resist that invitation at least in part it is both because the comparison is subject to some immediate limitations and because other sources present themselves in the long run more illuminating than Thoreau. A cursory glance at the affinities between the This paper was read at the Seminar on North Queensland Writing held by the Foun- dation for Australian Literary Studies (Townsville), August 2-3. 1980. 35 two men, however, is worthwhile, if only to establish the length of time spent withdrawn from society, their manner of compor- ting themselves, and their degree of isolation from humankind. Out of an inspection of their obvious affinities will grow an appreciation of their deeper dissimilarities. There is, for instance, a distinctly exemplary purpose behind Thoreau's removal to Walden Pond which is absent from both Banfield's decision to'go to Dunk Island and his motives in writing about it. Thoreau thus appended this quotation (from the second chapter of his book) to the title page of the early editions of Walden: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbours up. The cheery didacticism of Thoreau's last phrase cannot be mis- taken. And the point of his lesson to his readers is, of course, summed up in the most famous ethical imperative of nineteenth century American letters: "Simplify, simplify!" Banfield lags far behind such vigorously educative intentions when he discusses the aim of his book in the Foreword to The Confessions: "My chief desire is to set down in plain language the sobrieties of everyday occurrences - the unpretentious homilies of an unpretentious man." 3 I am not absolutely persuaded that Banfield's stated aims square with what follows in the ensuing pages, but there is in my mind little doubt that his writing is far less in- formed than Thoreau's by any deliberately exemplary goal. His original purpose in going to Dunk Island was, if we are to believe his repeated assertions, a matter of quite literal self-preservation. So debilitated was Banfield by the rigours of Townsville journa- lism that his weight was reduced to a pitiful 8 stone 4 ibs (My Tropic Isle, p. 54) and he believed himself within twelve months of the end of his life. Within months of his official arrival on 28 September 1897, however, he had gained weight, recovered his health, and had every prospect of enjoying a long and vigorous life. He chose to enjoy it, nevertheless, not back in the fleshpots of Townsville but on the island which had preserved him - dying there, indeed, in 1923, some twenty-five years after taking up residence, in his 71st year. Thoreau, by way of contrast, occupied his house at Walden Pond on Independence Day, 1845, and, having proved his point, left it some two years later. During those two years he seems to have lived a genuinely frugal, independent, but by no means isolated life. Dunk Island is, to be sure, a good deal fur- ther from Townsville than the mile and a half which separated Walden Pond from Concord. Nevertheless, throughout his quar- ter century stay in his offshore retreat Banfield does not appear to have lacked for company. Indeed, he took the precaution of taking with him his wife, several aboriginal friends and (a fact which is revealed in my edition of The Confessions only by a photograph) a faithful Irish servant called Essie. With the fre- quent passage of coastal steamers, and fairly regular visits to Townsvile, he can scarcely be thought of as the compleat anchorite. Charles Barrett was right when he wrote of Banfield, his wife, and Essie, that "Their way of living was a compromise perhaps; not too simple and not too far from the comfort that middle class folk demand" (p. 171). Barrett was also right, however, to insist (along with A.H. Chisholm) that the life Banfield led on Dunk Island was far from that of a lotus eater. Here is Barrett's testimony on the matter: I must tell you that Banfield's energy kept me on the move. Readers of his books may imagine him as a leisurely man, happiest when lazing on the beach or sauntering among palms and his fruit trees. As I knew the Beachcomber, he was active and alert, even sometimes energetic in talking. (p. 170) Chisholm also points to a hard working, physically active exis- tence when he reminds us that "in the nature of his semi-isolated case the Beachcomber was faced with a wide range of workaday tasks—did he not confess to being a slave to his own wheel- barrow?" (Confessions, p. xiii). In other words, it seems to me that, starting with the very choice of nom de plume, Banfield was constructing in The Con- fessions a literary personality a good deal futher removed from the historical individual called Edward John Banfield than the speaker of Walden was from Henry David Thoreau. My chief interest in the rest of this paper will be to delineate the created 37 personality of The Confessions, to discover the attitudes and assumptions that went into its making. I can most usefully begin to do so by altering my point of reference from the American writer to the literary figure inevitably suggested by Banfield's title—Jean Jacques Rousseau. I do not know whether Banfield ever read the Confessions of Rousseau. Nevertheless, the iden- tity of titles implies a common cultural tradition—of which Rousseau was an initiator and Banfield a late antipodean inheri- tor. I refer of course to Romanticism, a phenomenon at the height of its power in Europe in 1788, when British settlement began in Australia, and one of the chief repositories of cultural assumption and commitment transplanted from the northern to the southern continent. Transmitted vigorously, if with some variation from its northern source, through the nineteenth century, Australian Romanticism finds at least three characteristic modes of expression in The Confessions of a Beachcomber all directly descended from the doctrines developed by Rousseau or his European and English contemporaries. They relate to the self, society, and nature. Rousseau's Confessions open with a celebrated hymn of praise to the actuality, force, and value, of the individual self: Je forme une entreprise qui n'eut jamais d'exemple, et dont l'exécution n'aura point d'imitateur. Je veux montrer a mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature; et cet homme, ce sera moi. Moi seul. Je sens mon coeur et je connais les hommes. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent. Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moinsje suis autre. Banfield patently knew neither the unaffected egotism which animates these lines nor the raging talent which supported it. Within his own modest compass, indeed, he apparently felt so little confidence in the reality of his own self that he used his books to create one which the world might find of some interest. If that creation started with the choice of nom de plume, it con- tinued through a whole range of imaginative extemporisations, appeals to some of the most respected cultural models of his generation. Most notable among them, of course, was that of his elected isolation—the adoption (at least for literary purposes) of 38 the role of anchorite. Now while English and European Roman- tic literature can offer some few examples of the hermit as hero, it seems by and large to have been a role which very few Roman- tic writers in the northern world were inclined literally to em- brace. The literal enactment of the myth of the isolated self is a mode of Romantic behaviour which seems to have acquired a special prestige among creative artists in Australia. It is certainly true that from the end of the nineteenth century on, the decision to withdraw more or less from human society for greater or lesser periods of time has been if not endemic among Australian artists, at least widespread.

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