A Northern Affair: Victor Kennedy’s Northern Affairs in/and Australian Magazine Culture

The brief life of Northern Affairs positions it within a tradition of many short-lived literary magazines published in the 1930s. For comparison in the Australian context, we might look to Manuscripts (1931–35), Pandemonium (1934–35) and Stream (1931), all published in Melbourne – or, in the case of Manuscripts, Geelong, in the first few years of its life. In the literary history of North Queensland, we might also consider Expression (1962–71), North (1963–68), LiNQ (1969–2016), Westlife (1970–73), In Print (1972–74) and, more recently, Sūdō Journal (2019–) as examples of periodicals established and sustained through the dedication of enthusiastic locals. In their reviews of North Queensland literary journals, neither Cheryl Taylor (1972) nor Wayne Bradshaw (2022) mentioned Northern Affairs;¹ and at that time Northern Affairs did not appear in AustLit, the bibliographical radar David Carter and Roger Osborne were using at the time they were writing about the history of literary magazines in the twentieth century (2003).² Perhaps the prevalence of periodicals in Townsville instilled a prejudice towards looking to Far North Queensland for literary culture. Why bring it up now? We might link this question with Patrick Collier’s pertinent question about provincial periodicals: ‘why should anyone be interested in a careful analysis of a heretofore critically obscure periodical? And how do we, as scholars, articulate the value of the artifact, and of work that explores the artifact, in ways that make theoretical sense and successfully justify and undergird a corresponding methodology?’ (100). Collier’s provocation has led to an expansion of periodical studies during the last ten years, one which sees even the most obscure journal as ‘a potential source for new critical inquiries and conversations rather than as a window onto preexisting, valued critical categories’ (109). Drawing attention to the work of Hammill and McGregor on the important literary and cultural role played by regional Canadian periodicals, Matthew Levay argues that a focus on seriality itself ‘helps to counter the critical devaluation of popular, regional authors, genres and forms … to move away from the hierarchies of modernism implicit in first editions, canonical authors and major urban publishers and towards the kind of variety one finds in those smaller, regional periodicals that formed so rich a part of their readers’ experiences with the literary field’ (xv). This movement in periodical studies from the metropolis to the region – or province – supports a richer understanding of isolated local communities, but also the ways in which such analyses can inform an understanding of larger regional, national, and even trans-national networks and cultural practices. As we will argue in this paper, Victor Kennedy’s Northern Affairs contributes to that understanding.

Victor Kennedy was a blow-in, arriving in Cairns (from Bendigo) in March 1926 to work as a journalist for the Cairns Post. He did not waste any time during the next few years, drawing on his literary and journalistic experience to write many articles and poems, publishing them in a wide variety of southern periodicals, but also in the Cairns Post and the weekly Northern Herald. In November 1927, the Sydney Bulletin published his first poem of the North, ‘Farthest North’, subsequently the title poem of Farthest North and Other Verses, published locally in 1928 by Cairns Post Print. Two years later, Cairns Post Print also published By Range and River in the Queensland Tropics, a selection of Kennedy’s travel writing that had previously appeared in both local and southern periodicals. Kennedy also wrote the content for the Cairns North Queensland Guide Book: Winter Tours (1933), rounding out a diverse array of contributions to local print culture. Far North Queensland grew on Victor Kennedy as his prose and poetry developed with it, a primary inspiration for him to write about the beauty of the local area, and also the potential for the development of mining, agriculture, business and tourism. He was a proponent of separating North Queensland as a northern state with Cairns as its capital, communicating this in travel writing and historical and biographical sketches, but also developing out of a series of essays focused on the 1929 state elections. But, with the Depression starting to impact the economy, freelance work dried up and newspapers and periodicals began retrenching staff. Kennedy lost his job in February 1931. With little hesitation, he responded to his retrenchment with a plan to establish a magazine devoted to fostering writing from and about the North. The first issue of Northern Affairs was published in May 1931.

Spurred on by Kennedy’s own convictions, the magazine aimed to draw on the support of the ‘reading people of the North’ to provide a venue for stories that would ‘interpret the life, aims and ideals of the people of the Farthest North’ (Kennedy, ‘Northern Affairs’ 36). Ultimately, Northern Affairs would provide a medium for expression, a forum for discussion or a clearing house for literary exchanges about any topic ‘that may directly concern North Queenslanders as such’. Within the constraints of a thirty-six-page magazine, including its yellow covers, Kennedy edited a miscellany of sections that remained stable throughout the short life of the magazine: opening columns of editorial opinion; ‘This City of Ours’; ‘People We Should Know’; ‘Mainland and Barrier’, short notes from various noms de plume; ‘Concerning Sports’; ‘Our Harbor’; ‘Books and Book People’; ‘The Northern Woman’; ‘Mother and Her Child’; ‘The Office Boy’s Column’; ‘While the Oven’s Hot’; ‘Cape York Brevities’; ‘Have You a Tropical Garden?’; ‘Amateur Theatricals’; and various untitled sections that provided space for commentary, short stories and poetry. This might sound parochial and of local interest only, but Northern Affairs would go on to provide readers with a view of themselves and others within a much broader political and cultural scope.

In this article, we aim to describe this scope by concentrating on the beating literary heart of the magazine, detected in its earnest engagement with the development of a genuine Australian literature within regional, national and international contexts. By focusing on this aspect, we hope to show that the other social, cultural and political elements of the magazine fall into place around literary aesthetics, revealing the seed of a vision that Kennedy would take with him after the magazine folded in July 1932 and he departed from Cairns in late 1933.

Northward: Editorials and Short Stories

Each issue of Northern Affairs opened with an editorial that foregrounded the economic, cultural and political development of Cairns and Far North Queensland. The first issue drew attention to the ‘shocking state of the road [from Cairns] to Double Island’, using this as a starting point for a discussion of planned improvements to increase access for tourists, making the beaches a ‘source of delight and a source of revenue to the city of Cairns, to Mossman, to the whole district that we have persisted in calling “Farthest North”’ (‘Northward – Out of Cairns’ 3). Discussion about improvements and development were a constant thread in the editorials, echoing the travel writing Kennedy had contributed to the Cairns Post and collected in By Range and River. The transport links to the north and south remained a preoccupation, seen as a necessary investment to overcome cultural isolation, but also for the economic benefit from efficiently exporting the abundant raw materials of Far North Queensland. The completion of the road from the northern beaches of Cairns to Port Douglas was essential: ‘[a]long that route when it is completed, not only will there be materials for development but there will be the ports from which to ship them direct to their own markets, be they Sydney, Hong Kong, London, New York or Oslo’ (‘The Things that Concern Us’ 3). Kennedy was committed to the idea of positioning Cairns within an international economic framework in which the ‘farthest north’ could make significant contributions (‘Cairns Gold to Help the World’ 3).

In Kennedy’s editorials, such developments were not pursued without an acknowledgement of the political and economic challenges of regional towns and cities in the 1930s. Escaping the worst effects of the Depression, Cairns was, however, not entirely immune, with a large group of unemployed men camped at Parramatta Park (‘A Subject We Must Touch’ 4; ‘A Word with the Unemployed’ 3). Several editorials addressed the issue of unemployment by turning to the Cairns Chamber of Commerce for solutions, calling for stronger leadership and political will with a reduction in the boards and committees that had proliferated (‘The Men We Need’ 3–4). Kennedy advocated for a more unified approach to the promotion of Cairns as a tourist destination, arguing that any progress ‘presupposes an ever-active committee cordially supported by the civic and public bodies and unstintedly assisted by the general and business public’ (‘Make a Business of It’ 3). The editorials argued that such unity and transparency were important in all matters, particularly in the development of infrastructure such as the Barron Falls hydroelectricity project (‘The Men Who Serve the Public’ 3). Financial support for such projects inevitably came from state and federal governments, which Kennedy, like many North Queenslanders, considered to be ineffective due to their distance from the region. With a state election looming in June 1932, Kennedy mused on the need for more effective and locally-targeted economic structures such as giving ‘provinces’ more independence in deciding their own affairs (‘The Only Way Out’ 4), arguing that ‘[t]he time seems opportune to go into the matter of reorganising our political machinery. In place of the present state parliaments the states could be split up into economic provinces with self-government in matters of local concern’ (‘J. T. Lang and North Queensland’ 3).

The link between the political and economic concerns of Kennedy’s editorials and the aesthetic concerns of his artistic manifestoes associated with developing a literary sensibility in Far North Queensland might be seen in the emphasis on ‘self-government in matters of local concern’. The latter concerns are usually confined to the ‘Books and Book People’ section of the magazine, but within the editorial discussion on financial and infrastructural development, the growth of ‘the latent art talent in the district’ was occasionally foregrounded in reports on the development of societies and associations such as the Cairns Arts Society of which Kennedy was a founding member. With the same logic he would use for the development of literature in Far North Queensland, he saw the need for organised events to cultivate artistic expression, even if that cultivation failed to produce high quality products. The conditions for cultivation were what was important:

Why will picture painters persist in imitating, in copying bad prints of bad pictures? Why waste talent upon perpetuating other people’s bowls of flowers or reindeer or flowing mountain streams in Scotland or Scandinavia, rather than set up their own models? An original work badly done has achieved more, in the cultural sense, than any copy well done (‘The North Has an Art Sense’ 4).

Kennedy’s editorials call for the development of an infrastructure and an economy that develops through an appropriate use of the natural resources and the natural beauty of the region. For literature to flourish, a similar creative ecology is essential.

Short stories in *Northern Affairs*

The short stories published in Northern Affairs would not be highly regarded in any evaluation that held them up for scrutiny against superior examples published in Australian magazines or overseas. Nevertheless, to assess them on the basis of literary merit alone misses the value of these short stories as a sign of organised storytelling in the region. For short stories published in Northern Affairs, Kennedy included his own work and also relied on a small group of contributors who were well established in North Queensland print culture. The most prolific was S. Scott Strutton or ‘Syd Swagman’, a freelance writer from Innisfail whose work appeared in many northern periodicals as well as in Brisbane and Sydney newspapers. As ‘Syd Swagman’, Strutton was a regular contributor to the ‘On the Track’ column in the North Queensland Register, edited by Frank Reid (‘Bill Bowyang’) and published at Charters Towers. Frank Reid also contributed stories to Northern Affairs, alongside other local freelance writers, Freeman Sandom and Holger Wilhelm Blom. In the decade after his first stories were published in Northern Affairs, Sandom’s short stories were published by the Sydney Bulletin, the Queenslander and the Melbourne-based Australian Journal. Blom worked for the Cairns Post, publishing his work in that newspaper but also in the Cairns weekly Northern Herald, the Queenslander and the North Queensland Register. Apart from several pseudonymous authors of short fiction, Dorothea Kennedy, Victor’s wife, was the only other named contributor.

The relatively small group of writers with well-established local and national careers contributed to the developing character of Northern Affairs with their particular brands of fiction. Two of Frank Reid’s stories involve the tracking of fugitives in the Far North Queensland bush, others feature crime and revenge in the Torres Strait pearling industry, and another story involves the redemption of an aristocrat whose life in the Torres Strait had descended into gambling and alcoholism. Freeman Sandom’s stories include one in which a young married man asserts his will after reflecting on an incident he experienced several years earlier, a humorous ‘cowboy yarn’, and a tale of a foul-mouthed and despicable sailor whose affection for his mother is only revealed on his deathbed. Hector Blom contributed humorous stories about a gift parrot that is not what it seems, a tall tale about a swagman who took on the personality of a dead man after mistakenly drinking his ashes, and another tall tale of a sailor saved from cannibals by an X-ray machine. S. Scott Strutton contributed tales about the reclamation of sunken treasure, the revenge and misfortune experienced by Chinese immigrants, stories of romance and unrequited love, and a humorous tale of a day’s fishing, all of which were set in Far North Queensland. As ‘Syd Swagman’, he contributed a story about opium-induced revenge set in Cairns. For his part, Kennedy contributed a humorous story about the mistaken identity of a chicken, a tale of the capture of opium smugglers off the coast of Cairns, a story of a man who goes mad when he encounters the son of his wife’s murderer, whom he had killed twenty years earlier, and another tale of murder with a twist. Dorothea Kennedy contributed a story about a monkey who takes revenge on its violent trainer, and the small number of pseudonymous contributors offered tales of mistaken identity, deception and revenge.

None of these stories would be out of place in other North Queensland periodicals, or, indeed, in national publications like the Sydney Bulletin and Smith’s Weekly. What sets them apart from these other periodicals is the editorial spirit Kennedy brought to Northern Affairs, a spirit of curation that aimed to establish a foundation that would foster a culture of storytelling that could contribute not only to development of a distinct brand of North Queensland writing, but which could also contribute something to the growth of a modern national literature. How this could be achieved was outlined in regular columns of literary criticism and reporting from Kennedy and Lucille M. Quinlan, who held an MA in French literature.

‘Books and Book People’: Literary Criticism

Across the one and a half years that he kept the magazine running, Northern Affairs indicates Kennedy’s efforts to help establish an intellectual community in Queensland’s far north. In the pages of the magazine, we can see Kennedy’s involvement in setting up a literature and an art society in Cairns, organising salons, and advocating for writers living in northern Australia. In a note to contributors that appears in several issues, Kennedy delineated the magazine’s position in relation to the development of Australian writing:

In its literary section [Northern Affairs] seeks that which will deepen the study of Australian literature and writers, and even here particular attention will be given to North Australia’s contribution to that literature. If the North has no real literature of its own yet, ‘Northern Affairs’ will do its best to develop one. The talent is here and all the materials have been here for a thousand years. (‘Note to Contributors’ 12)

In its ‘Books and Book People’ column, Northern Affairs developed a strain of literary regionalism in dialogue with a broader national context. Inevitably, this engaged the northern magazine with the emerging nationalist discourse of the south and positioned Kennedy alongside nationalist intellectuals who contributed to what David Carter describes as ‘The Nationalist Project’ (Carter 266–68). Kennedy’s later influence in national literary movements ensured that elements of the magazine’s environmental nationalism were carried through to later conceptions of Australian literary identity. Indeed, the magazine should be considered a formative – if largely forgotten – contribution to subsequent debates about the importance of Australian literary culture. The literary aspirations for Northern Affairs were grand, at a time when similar aspirations were beginning to coalesce in Adelaide and Melbourne in what would later become the Jindyworobak movement in 1937 and the Bread and Cheese Club in 1938. It is telling that both groups actively sought out Kennedy’s membership as an established proponent of Australian literature.

Every issue of Northern Affairs contains a ‘Books and Book People’ section, but for the first six months or so authorship of the column alternated between Lucille Quinlan and Kennedy.³ The first column was written by Quinlan and titled, somewhat unsurprisingly, ‘Australian Literature’. Quinlan’s first article is more an example of a well-informed survey than a manifesto – the manifestos would come from Kennedy – and it used a discussion of American perceptions of Australian literature to construct a mid-twentieth-century Australian canon. Henry Handel Richardson, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Flora Eldershaw, Henry Lawson, Tom Collins, John Shaw Neilson, Louis Esson and Aeneas Gunn were all raised and duly praised. In terms of aspirations for what an Australian literature might achieve, Quinlan turned to the words of Henry Handel Richardson as quoted in the work of Nettie Palmer:

To the new Australian born generation I look for the development of a characteristically Australian literature. The future is full of hope if the young writers will only remember to seek Australian themes and refuse to be seared into imitating the mannerisms of the old world writers (‘Australian Literature’ 16).

This statement captures the founding principle of Northern Affairs and its approach to developing a national literature: that Australian authors should portray local concerns, local ways of being, and the local environment, rather than imitating European or British literature. Quinlan went further still, adding that ‘America, with its sophistication, its spurious maturity, seems to me already to belong to the old world’ (16).

When Kennedy took to the ‘Books and Book People’ column the following month to discuss ‘Northern Literature’, he expanded Quinlan’s canon to include a more northern aspect. He singled out Louis Becke, Jack McLaren, Ion Idriess, Frank Reid, Randolph Bedford, S. Elliot Napier, E. J. Banfield, Edwin J. Brady, C. W. L. Bryde and, of course, Nettie Palmer. The list is a peculiar melange including journalists, adventure writers and natural historians, but in this article, and throughout Northern Affairs, Kennedy worked to bring a tradition into existence, to provide a platform on which to develop a national cultural identity. He proposed that ‘we have in these beginnings a theme and a method’ in these authors, but ‘[w]hen one considers the history, the tradition, the vast extent and scenic grandeur of North Queensland, one regrets that it has not been more exploited by the builder of books and the writer of songs’ (‘Northern Literature’ 17). Northern literature, like the broader project of Australian settler literature, needed to be worked into existence.

The position of Northern Affairs on what Australian writing might aspire to achieve is best found in a series of three articles written by Kennedy and published late in the magazine’s run, in 1932. The first of these is titled ‘A Plea for Bad Books’ (15), in which he suggests the importance of increasing the production of distinctly Australian writing, even at the expense of quality. Beginning from the assertion that he ‘would boost any Australian book merely because it is Australian’, Kennedy developed the argument that ‘[t]here is something to be treasured in the printed word, and without its bad books no country can develop its literature’ (15). Establishing a literary culture needed quantity far more than it needed quality by Kennedy’s estimation. Australian literature required an entire ecosystem – including masterpieces, dross, and everything between – in order to flourish. Waiting for great works to emerge fully-formed from the cultural consciousness stifled the creative imagination of the nation and deprived it of examples to build upon. As Kennedy put it, ‘every book written in Australia by an Australian has this one value that it familiarises the reader with Australian idiom, with Australian landscape and manners and, more or less in accordance with its literary quality, prepares the mind of the reader to see his own country, to breathe its air and atmosphere’ (15). Australian literature makes the creation of more Australian literature a possibility.

Kennedy’s argument in ‘A Plea for Bad Books’ was undoubtedly influenced by his experiences working with the writing community in Cairns. In defending poorly executed Australian writing that nonetheless reflects the local idiom and culture, he was also defending his own efforts to build a culture out of the work he was publishing in Northern Affairs. Kennedy was developing a theory of what we might call municipal nationalism while at the same time enacting the program of such a theory. He proposed that supporting local writing was a moral imperative for editors, publishers and critics:

One might suggest in passing that a great measure of the fault lies at the doors of those who are more concerned with decrying ‘pernicious’ literature out of the bounty of their own superior tastes – tastes which never lead them to apply the learning derived from ‘better’ reading to the assistance of their more backward fellows who, with the urge to acquire, lack a sense of discrimination. (15)

The Australian cultural climate necessitated that those with literary training and talent take responsibility for educating and supporting their communities. Culture, Kennedy seems to suggest, had to be cultivated and, like a tropical garden, required a copious amount of manure and hard work.

Then, in June, Kennedy penned ‘The Alien in Our Literature’, in which he argued that much of existing Australian writing was inferior primarily because it failed to accurately capture the Australian landscape and way of life. He proposed that ‘so many Australian writers, and not mean ones, spoil much of their work by false atmosphere and false characterisation’ (‘The Alien in Our Literature’ 16). Kennedy suggested this failing was understandable in first-generation colonists who tended to read the Australian landscape in relation to their English homeland, but that it was a burden imposed on the work of writers who were born in Australia. While ‘one expects when one goes back to the first decades of our short history, to find English idiom, English atmosphere and English people forming the principal bases of our novels’, this was not the case for a generation of ‘those whose eyes first opened in this world of newer landscapes, newer dreams and newer formulas of living’ (16). A generation of writers born in Australia could not write well about Australia if it was within the context of an imagined English homeland experienced only in foreign literature and alien conventions.

Developing a literary voice that was uniquely Australian and reflected the local landscape and character was about more than just improving the quality of the books being sold; it was a fundamental requirement for the development of national identity and for projecting that identity into the world. In fact, Kennedy suggested that a writer had an ‘obligation to his own people to find what is worthy in his wide inheritance, to study it and unriddle the riddles that are there, for the sake of his country in the world’s eyes’ (16). The production of literary works which reflected a defunct Britishness that belonged to a prior generation diminished Australia’s international reputation. As Kennedy put it, ‘[t]he world is not very much interested in an island continent occupied by a people who are sick for a “home” that they have never known’ (16). There is certainly an element of settler-colonial nativism to Kennedy’s views here, even if he falls far more on the side of place than race.

In terms of how to achieve his aspirations for literature, Kennedy’s primary focus was on the importance of educating a new generation of writers to appreciate the artistic importance of the Australian environment and way of life. He proposed that ‘[t]he sons of the exiles became natives of the soil’, but ‘his mental leanings were misdirected by an exotic system of education into belief in a “home” that was not his and a world of ideas and traditions that could never be his’ (16). When such a writer did attempt to convey the reality of Australian cultural life, they were inclined to view it as deficient. The perceived superiority of European culture transformed Australian writing into pastiche:

Thus it came about that the Australian of the second and even the third generation leaves his school with a confused mentality engendered by love for things that are alien to his experience. He knows instinctively that the history of his people and his race is to be treasured; he knows that he is part and parcel as it were of his ancestry; but what he cannot know is that the English hedgeway daisy and the chill of an October day upon an English moor should precede, in his acquired thoughts, the majesty of an Australian bush or the sunlight that flushes every grey speck from a Southern sky. (16)

It was only once Australian writers could see themselves and their homeland as distinct – and subjectively superior – that they would be able to depict ‘the Australian, neither as an exiled Englishman nor a rough and boorish colonial wood cutter or farmer, but as a virile person with eyes full of dreams and a brain full of practicable schemes’ (16). In this way, an image of the nationalist view of literature advanced by Northern Affairs is explicitly communicated in its final issues.

With Northern Affairs, Kennedy had attempted to develop and publish literary work that reflected the northern way of life, though with limited success. In the selection of its short stories and poetry, Northern Affairs had emphasised settler-Australian culture ahead of technical proficiency. As he argued in ‘A Plea for Bad Books’, Kennedy found it more important to publish what there was of genuine Australian writing than to wait for it to emerge in a mature form. Nevertheless, at this late stage, in the second-to-last issue of his magazine, he felt sufficiently buoyed to declare that a new contingent of writers was ‘painting a new country in which the world is beginning to distinguish the colours and warmth and living reality’ (16). Whether writers should commit their ideas to print was much more a case of determining whether the resulting work would aid in this project of illuminating the colours of Australian experience or dull them with shades borrowed from the European mindset. As Kennedy put it, since ‘the writer is the country’s greatest asset, it behoves him to plant his feet upon his native soil and work for it, live for it and, if need be, remain silent for it’ (17). Australian literature ought to serve Australian identity, and if not, it was not worth publishing.

With ‘A Plea for Bad Books’ and ‘The Alien in Our Literature’, Kennedy expended far more effort identifying the problems facing Australian writing than putting forward a model of what great Australian literature might practically aspire to. In ‘The Book of Dreams’, he took a more positive approach, outlining an idealised work in a prospective canon of Australian literature. The article appeared in the same issue as ‘The Alien in Our Literature’ and appeared on the following page as part of a series of articles on ‘The Far North in Books’. Kennedy begins this short piece by proposing that he has ‘been thinking of my Book of Dreams, chiefly because I cannot lay my hand upon a less chimerical book for this column this month’ (‘The Book of Dreams’ 17). In this way, he set about describing the great Australian novel that did not yet exist, attempting to write into existence the central work of a northern literature that Northern Affairs was itself attempting to summon into being.

What stands out most about Kennedy’s imagined magnum opus is the extent to which it is concerned with depicting the natural environment of far-northern Queensland. The work he describes – and by extension his vision of Australian literature – is absolutely dedicated to representing local ecology. Kennedy claims that ‘this Book would paint with better touches than a thousand Ruskins the sunlight of the Barrier Reef’ and that ‘[t]he Far Northern coast and the lilting tablelands that stretch seemingly to the end of all things finite have their place in its fabric’ (‘The Book of Dreams’ 17). In comparison to the previous two essays that have been discussed here, Kennedy’s language soars when describing the natural environment of the north. What most distinguishes Kennedy’s vision of Australian literature, what we here describe as ‘municipal nationalism’, is an overriding commitment to the natural environment and a dedication to the immediate surroundings of the writer. This is an ecological nationalism focused on developing the municipality, socially and culturally. Working himself into a passion, Kennedy provides us with an example of the writing he is describing in the act of describing it:

Let them churn the crystal waters of the great north coast with the shuddering screws of their meat boats; let the ‘thinking’ men convert to garden manure the foundations of this coral reef and let the men of animal mind shatter to a million fragments the rock and coral beds where sea life recreates itself when Nature functions in her own inimitable way. But leave to my Book of Dreams the glamour and the warm, rich colors of the tropics; leave it to capture and to hold the emotional whisper of the breezes seaward-borne since the centuries began. (17)

There are elements of romanticism here, but there is also a practical dedication to founding a sense of communal identity in relation to the Australian environment. Kennedy suggests that his ‘Book of Dreams will give permanence to the emerald light that filters through the broad leaves of both the cane and maize’ just as it makes ‘imperishable the majesty and strength and ageless grandeur of those towering giants of the cedar and kauri forests’ (17). This approach was not in direct opposition to the idea of industry, but it was clearly opposed to the development of industry at the expense of the environment.

Poetry in *Northern Affairs*

The verse published in Northern Affairs characterises both the strengths and weaknesses of a municipal approach to cultural identity. At its best, Northern Affairs promoted a lyrical poetry deeply grounded in the Australian natural environment. At its worst, it leant a little too hard into what one might call a ‘tourist brochure’ aesthetic that is inexorably connected to Kennedy’s non-fiction published in By Range and River and the Cairns North Queensland Guide Book. Writing in the tropical heat of Cairns, Kennedy was approaching similar conclusions about a nascent Australian literature as those being arrived at by Rex Ingamells in Adelaide. With Northern Affairs, Kennedy was developing a nationalist aesthetic that fed into Jindyworobakism but predated the virulent influence of ‘Inky’ Stephensen’s The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936). The poetry of Northern Affairs foreshadowed the development of Jindyworobakism, a movement of which Kennedy went on to become an important part. Dan Tout has observed the Jindyworobaks’ ‘turn towards what Ingamells would call “environmental values”, as well as – in a spirit of appropriation yet with sometimes positive long-range outcomes for the subjects of said appropriation – local indigenous peoples, in a varied set of attempts to overcome the exigencies of the settler-colonial situation’ (3). Kennedy might have chafed against the political chauvinism of the Jindyworobaks but he was certainly drawn to their focus on an aesthetic grounded in Australia’s environmental peculiarities and purported connection to Indigenous cultures.

Like the short stories, the poetry published in Northern Affairs included much of Kennedy’s own work. He was certainly one of the more talented – and experienced – poets writing for the magazine. His ‘Northland June’ gives a good example of what could be called the ‘Northern Affairs aesthetic’, with its grounding in local realities and environmental values. The poem plays with the Antipodean inversion of seasons and the temperate beauty of winter in the Far North:

There’s fancy on the running hills

That guard the Bay,

The charm of many a perfume fills

This winter day.

A million rioting colors fall

From moistened clouds that cling

Above the peaks that, lowering seem

to call

This Winter, Spring. (‘Northland June’ 19)

Here, European assumptions about seasons provide a counterpoint for the realities of the Australian tropics. By comparison, some of the other poetry demonstrates how this approach can go somewhat awry. Ursula Clinton’s ‘Fugitives’ is so explicit with its metaphor of moths escaping the harsh southern climate of the ‘storm-ridden’ Dandenong Ranges that it becomes mawkish:

Why can’t they fly to the North,

Hide in the tropical calm,

Follow the martin, and swallow and swift

Cut of these regions of harm?

There in the deep Barron Gorge

Moths robed in purple and blue

Wander at leisure by palm branch and vine,

Sunning the winter days through.

Poor little brown, southern waifs,

Would they not welcome you there?

Listen, have courage, and hasten your flight,

North to the sun greatly dare! (19)

In both of these examples, poetry is serving the very practical cause of propagandising for the Far North. Municipal advocacy is an important aspect that binds much of the content published in Northern Affairs – and Kennedy’s other initiatives during his time in Cairns. In all cases artistic expression, regional development and environmental values are concomitant with each other in the work of cultural production.

Conclusion

Writing about the attempts by the Nambour Chronicle to foster reading and writing in the surrounding region between the wars, Pat Buckridge pointed to the ‘lack of a well-established and articulate literary culture’ experienced by visitors to that region – visitors such as Vance and Nettie Palmer – a lack that might be better considered as ‘a stimulating absence and a positive incentive to leave a footprint in an environment that could be seen … as culturally as well as geographically marginal’ (316). We might consider Victor Kennedy’s Northern Affairs in a similar way. Recovering from illness after the last issue was published in July 1932, Kennedy travelled south on a lecture tour, promoting the beauty and wonder of the Great Barrier Reef. What he left behind was not only a small archive of fifteen issues of Northern Affairs that record his attempt to ‘found a Far Northern school of writers’, but also a creative ecology manifested in the various organisations of which he was a founding member, a point reported to readers of the Sydney Bulletin: Cairns ‘has an art society, a literary society, a naturalists’ club and an Alpine Club ... Behind all of these organisations one finds the energy of Victor Kennedy’ (‘Pen-and-Ink’ 55).

Amongst the writers who Kennedy claimed had benefitted from the brief life of Northern Affairs were ‘practical fishermen, a lawyer in the making, two nurses, business managers, policemen, school teachers, miners, two M.H.R’s, a registrar of education, three authors, a scientist, two practical gardeners, an accountant and others’. Submissions came from ‘Cape York and Melbourne; from the Outer Barcoo and Innisfail; from Brisbane and Townsville, Bilboohra, Gordonvale, Rumula, Watsonville and Herberton’ (‘What is Northern Affairs’ 35). While few of these have a literary merit that find them written into the pages of literary history, their presence in the archive provided the conditions for Victor Kennedy’s aesthetic to flourish and seep into the fabric of Cairns society. Maybe we can see a method in Kennedy’s ‘A Plea for Bad Books’, in which he called for ‘glimpses of sunlight’ in contrast to the ‘murky atmosphere of Channel fogs’ encountered in imported English fiction: ‘if the rest of the book is rubbish, the writer has achieved something in that one chapter that may be an inspiration’ (15).

Kennedy took this spirit with him on his journey south towards the literary cultures fostered by Melbourne’s Bread and Cheese Club and the Jindyworobaks. Kennedy was developing a profile of poet, editor and advocate for an Australian literature in which Ellen Smith identifies ‘a kind of modernity [that] might inhere in the circulation of provincial, local, and national cultures’ (3). Smith demonstrates how Kennedy’s Jindyworobak pamphlet Flaunted Banners (1941) describes a creative ecology in which participants could follow modernist principles to ‘make it new’ – ‘[w]hat we might see as Kennedy’s tempering appropriation [of] “modernist” characteristics (the manifesto, the little magazine, the self-identification as a movement) … also retains a commitment to certain ideas often seen as antithetical to metropolitan modernism, notably landscape and the nation’ (10). As we have seen, Victor Kennedy established and fostered a nascent form of such a creative ecology in Cairns a decade before he emerged as a significant voice and organiser within the Jindyworobak movement. With Kennedy’s eye on the development of art, music and literature within the economic and infrastructural development of the city of Cairns and the ‘Farthest North’, we can see a municipal modernity that articulates what Kennedy brought to the Jindyworobaks, a plan for ‘bringing together a dispersed population of both professional writers and amateur enthusiasts’ (13). This desire is manifested in Kennedy’s edition of the Jindyworobak Anthology (1942) in which the work of several Northern Affairs contributors appeared.⁴ Victor Kennedy’s Northern Affairs and the creative ecology it fostered might be seen as a prototype for a number of literary activities that sprang up around Kennedy as he moved south from Cairns in 1933. And yet, more than a parochial provincial periodical, it provides a starting point for examining the local and national networks that engaged with and contributed to a modern Australian literature in the 1930s and 1940s.