Book Review - Hey Days by Alister Kershaw

HeyDays by Alister Kershaw

Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1991             ISBN 0207166757

Alister Kershaw is little-known now: truth be told he was little-known before his death, and little-known even when he was active in the world of letters. A quick scan through most of the better anthologies of Australian Poetry will reveal none of his work to a reader, and he doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, and only a scant entry in the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, which states that he was a "member of the city's artistic counter-culture of the 1930s and 1940s, contributing to such magazines as Comment and Angry Penguins." HeyDays is a vignette of his life in Melbourne during the war years, and a first impression of Paris, where he moved after the war.

Kershaw self-consciously chose a literary life and a bohemian existence. His world was one of artists, writers, and the Melbourne scene as it was, which centred around the Leonardo bookshop, the Petrushka cafe, and the Mitre Tavern. It is mostly around these places that Kershaw weaves his tale of feuds, fun and art, through describing his fellow travellers.

I use that phrase ironically, as one thing Kershaw certainly wasn't was Communist in any way shape or form. He had a clear-headed view of what Communism was, and as a true non-conformist, could not be trammeled by the rigidity required to be part of any such group or ideology. He lampoons several such followers in HeyDays, Noel Counihan and John Reed in particular.

Kershaw was a free spirit, and found a boon companion in Adrian Lawlor and to a lesser extent Denison Deasey, but people who get more than a passing mention in this book are Max Harris, whom Kershaw admired while forgiving him his shameful self-promotion, Geoff Dutton, who was a close friend, James Gleeson whom he met on the boat to Paris, Sidney Nolan whom Kershaw thought was second-rate, and Albert Tucker whom Kershaw grew to admire greatly after a rocky start to their acquaintanceship. He writes about the publishing scene in wartime Melbourne, Comment and Angry Penguins particularly, as well as the difficulty in publishing a book of poetry in Australia at that time.

HeyDays is a short book, full of anecdote and half-remembered adventures, but none the worse for that. As an evocation of a unique and short-lived period of Melbourne's cultural life (when the War finished most of the people mentioned in this book either went "respectable" or, like Kershaw himself, decamped to Europe), HeyDays is a wonderful way to spend an hour or three.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell