AustLit

For writers, painters and performers of all stripes to talk about a sense of calling is commonplace these days. The idea that art is destiny, that the artist has no choice but to follow their vocation, has become a well-established part of popular discourse. For this very reason, perhaps, the concept of the artist's vocation is easy to dismiss. It has been invoked too often, and in too many situations where it simply does not apply. As well, its romance has been used to disguise unacknowledged privilege, depicting an individual artist's success as entirely the result of their own personal qualities and glossing over the social and cultural advantages that readied the platform for them. (Introduction)

Gwen Harwood's most direct account of the development of her writing ambitions appears in Blessed City, a selection of letters she wrote in wartime Brisbane when she was in her early twenties to Tony Riddell, a new friend on active service in the navy. At the time, she was not a poet — far from it. She was working in the War Damage Commission, a public service institution set up to provide insurance against possible damage resulting from World War H. She found the organisation ludicrous in every aspect, from its aims to its processes to its earnest employees, and in a spirit half of mischief, half of outrage, she began a one-person campaign of mocking, corrupting and destabilising it. Her behaviour was extraordinary. She developed an impenetrable filing system, explicable to no one but herself. She inserted made-up people into the official records. She dedicated long hours at her desk to cutting out cardboard animals and writing private letters. She even staged elaborate phone conversations in German with imaginary interlocutors. Many yeas later she would tell a friend that she could not imagine how she was not fired, or at least moved on.  (Introduction)

In one of Dorothy Hewett's later poems, 'Lines to the Dark Tower', a girl moves into an empty wheat silo.' There she lives alone, entranced by the view of blowing grass and flowing river and spinning windmills, and weaving what she sees into a magical web, like a twentieth-century West Australian Lady of Shalott. But unlike Tennyson's Lady, she does not pretend to be indifferent to the passing parade. The moment a knight rides by — or, rather, 'some talker / ...his helmet / hanging on the back of his head', or 'one of the silent watchers / ill met by moonlight / his eyes flaming underneath his visor' — she runs from her sanctuary, irresistibly drawn by the promise and the possibility, the drama and the pleasure, of love. was always ready to be inveigled / out of the tower', she confesses. She is a figure for Hewett herself, who at 16 was as excited by the possibilities of her future as a lover as she was by those of her future as an artist. At that age, indeed, she saw no distinction between them.'  (Introduction)

'Christina Stead was always prickly about the idea of vocation. Indeed, she often insisted to interviewers that she had never had any such thing. Yet in her semi-autobiographical novel The Man Who Loved Children, she gave the character based on herself, 12-year-old Louisa, a potent sense of predestination. In one scene, Louie is cleaning her brothers' bedroom and dreaming of being an actress. Her father has just finished telling her that she looks like a gutter-rat, while downstairs her stepmother is grumbling about her 'dirt and laziness'. Her younger sister is about to ask her to carry down the slop bucket. But Louie is far away, 'declaiming...to a vast, shadowy audience stretching away into an opera house as large as the world'. Her conviction that she is extraordinary saves her from the catastrophe that is her home life. 'If I did not know I was a genius, I would die', she declares — but to herself alone. She is the ugly duckling, whose future as a glorious swan will, she knows, take her far away from the chaos and violence around her.'  (Introduction)

'The question of vocation takes centre stage in the two volumes of Ruth Park's autobiography, A Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx. From earliest childhood, Park writes, she knew she would be a writer: 'It had been as if a voice spoke from a burning bush.' Her depiction of her vocation to the literary life contains all the classic elements of the artist's call: it came out of nowhere, it was a summons that could not be set aside or ignored, and it shaped her destiny. Normally, however, this call takes shape in a specific cultural context: the little girl who longs to be a writer begins her life as a passionate reader surrounded by books, and as part of a family or society that holds writers (in the abstract, at least) in high esteem. Park's context was very different. According to A Fence Around the Cuckoo, for the first ten or so years of her life, she had no books, and no access to books. In the early 1920s, her father was part of a work gang that travelled around remote parts of the North Island of New Zealand building roads and bridges, and until she was six years old her home was a tent. Neither her father nor her seamstress mother owned any books. Even when the family settled in the tiny town of it Kuiti, where Ruth would go to school, books were in short supply. As Park Writes in Fence, 'No one I knee. had any books.' The irresolvable problem of Poverty was compounded in the wider community by a moral distrust of all that books stood for. As Park explains, 'It was thought that reading poked your eyes out and kept you from doing wholesome things.' (Introduction)