Jonah Read online

  LOUIS STONE was born in Leicester, England, in 1871. He and his family migrated to Brisbane in 1884, and soon moved to Redfern, then Waterloo, neighbouring inner suburbs of Sydney.

  With the aid of a scholarship Stone attended Fort Street Training School and studied arts at the University of Sydney. He qualified as a teacher in 1895. Intermittent work in Sydney primary schools led to country postings from 1900. Stone returned to the city in 1904, where he married and began writing. Health problems, the result of anxiety, plagued his teaching career.

  Jonah was published in London in 1911. The novel painstakingly describes the conditions and distinctive characters—larrikins—of the working-class inner city. Norman Lindsay, A. G. Stephens and Nettie Palmer admired its realistic depiction of Sydney life.

  Stone subsequently wrote, without success, the novel Betty Wayside (1915). He began writing for the stage and went to London in 1920 to try his luck. On his return to Australia his plays The Lap of the Gods (1923) and The Watch that Wouldn’t Go (1926) were published.

  In 1933 Jonah was published in the United States and in Australia, where it stayed in print for many years. It was eventually adapted for television by the ABC and performed as a stage play.

  Louis Stone died in 1935, having retired from teaching four years earlier.

  FRANK MOORHOUSE has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays, and edited many collections of writing. His books include the three Edith Campbell Berry novels: Grand Days, which won a South Australian Premier’s Award; Dark Palace, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award; and Cold Light, which won a Queensland Literary Award.

  ALSO BY LOUIS STONE

  Betty Wayside

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  Introduction copyright © Frank Moorhouse 2013

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  First published in the United Kingdom by Methuen 1911

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147448

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148490

  Author: Stone, Louis, 1871–1935.

  Title: Jonah / by Louis Stone; introduced by Frank Moorhouse.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.2

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Gangland

  by Frank Moorhouse

  Jonah

  ONE of the pleasures of reading Jonah, first published in 1911 in London, is that it gives us rare and vivid access to urban life at the beginning of the twentieth century in Australia—or more particularly inner Sydney, although I suspect that Louis Stone’s novel describes life in many of our cities one hundred years ago.

  Another of the pleasures is that some of the houses of the period still exist in Waterloo—just. One of my friends lives in one of these buildings in a street in neighbouring Redfern very like the one where Jonah is set: a terrace house which opens straight onto a step to the footpath—no front garden—and has three rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs, one with a small balcony overhanging the street. In Jonah’s time there would have been an outdoor toilet and almost certainly no bathroom. Lanes run behind these old streets, from which the outside toilet was emptied into dunny carts which called during the early hours.

  The houses are cramped—my friend’s has three people living in it. In the days of Jonah a family of six or seven would have crowded into the space. Ceilings are about three metres high and the gas light fittings still remain. In the time of the novel the houses were lit by kerosene lamps and candles.

  The central street of Stone’s book is called Cardigan—a name taken from other suburbs which I suspect Stone transferred into Waterloo to protect identities.

  It is possible to see the historical demographic divisions of Jonah in a direct lineage from the first European settlement, with its strictly demarcated society of convicts, free settlers, soldiers and administrators. The convicts’ place was taken in the mid-nineteenth century by poorly paid unskilled workers who lived in tight inner-city communities but had the same attitudes as the convicts—non-cooperation with the authorities, with the police and ‘government’.

  This fierce demarcation continued in Waterloo and adjoining suburbs, especially Redfern, well into the twentieth century. It is characterised by a vigilant hostile insularity—that is, a community akin to an island surrounded by dangerous seas. Strangers who wandered into the neighbourhood could expect to be insulted or jostled or robbed. These were no-go areas.

  The first part of Jonah describes the life of a ‘push’—the gangs which operated in these neighbourhoods were usually named after the street which was central to their lives, so we have the Cardigan Street Push and the Ivy Street Push. (Ivy Street is in nearby Darlington.) They policed their turf brutally and recklessly, punishing those who transgressed the gang or who were suspected of cooperating with the authorities. They did not place much value on marriage as a rite or contract, were not fussed about illegitimate children and ignored religious morals—‘people who spoke about love were either fools or liars.’ They had their own argot, and were to varying degrees illiterate. There was an ethic of mutual aid among neighbours.

  The interiors of their houses were sparsely decorated with calendars and almanacs which contained astronomical data, ecclesiastical and other anniversaries, and sometimes astrological and meteorological forecasts, public holidays and other miscellaneous information, as well as advertising the businesses which gave them out. One character in Jonah brings home two undescribed prints he has come across, which he and his young wife hang with careful consideration. Furniture was second-hand or homemade.

  A delicacy on Saturday nights was provided by the Pieman, whose cart came around selling pie and gravy, or pie and mashed peas, or mashed peas on their own, or saveloys: fat, red-skinned smoked sausages of seasoned pork. Beer was the drink of choice for both men and women, with the women sometimes drinking brandy or gin and water, and often becoming staggering drunk. Cigarette smoking and gambling, especially two-up, were acceptable habits.

  The arts enjoyed by these communities were mouth-organ music and singing, street hymns sung by the band of the Salvation Army, and occasional visits to the Tivoli for pantomimes and music-hall theatre. There was no radio or film, and the only books for those who could read were novelettes—short, light or sentimental novels. Upward mobility was symbolised by having a piano.

  In the novel there is a church nearby, Trinity, which sounds like a Methodist-leaning Anglicanism. The new rector

  had brought some strange ideas from London, where he had worked in the slums. He had founded a workman’s club, and smoked his pipe with the members; formed a brigade of newsboys and riff-raff, and taught them elementary morality with the aid of boxing-gloves; and offended his congregation by treating the poor with the same consideration as themselves. And then, astonished by the number of mothers who were not wives, that he discovered on his rounds, he had announced that he would open the church on the first Saturday night in every month to marry any couples without
needless questions. They could pay, if they chose, but nothing was expected.

  Louis Stone was born in Leicester in 1871 and was in his late thirties when he wrote Jonah. His description of inner-Sydney life was based in part on his own experiences of growing up in Waterloo. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature refers to Stone ‘painstakingly gathering material for his representation of city life’.

  It also says that Stone was the first Australian writer to make the larrikin popular—though C. J. Dennis’s ‘Sentimental Bloke’ poems had started to appear in the Bulletin a couple of years earlier. Jonah was later published in the US under the title Larrikin.

  The Australian intelligentsia has for some time held a romantic idea of the ‘larrikin spirit’ which conveniently forgets the brutal gang life while enjoying the slang and the anti-authoritarianism, insofar as it is an expression of egalitarianism and a rebellion against capitalism and its attendant state structure of courts and police. This aspect of Australian identity is often described nostalgically, yet it seems to glorify antisocial attitudes and behaviour at odds with contemporary values.

  Slipping in and out of realism, Stone’s novel follows the rise of two Push members—Jonah, a violent leader, and Chook, his loyal mate and offsider—into the shopkeeper class, towards bourgeois married respectability. Jonah marks his eventual ascension by buying a piano for his son.

  Stone captures the language of this subculture with some success, although he is tripped up by history as words change or lose their meanings—one example is his rendering of the word ‘come’ as ‘cum’. I am unsure how ‘come’ was pronounced by, say, the university educated at that time, but Stone’s phonetic spelling seems to imply that there is some distance between their ‘come’ and that of the working class, and, of course, the word has since picked up another meaning. (I recently read George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, where she tries very hard accurately to render dialect but like Stone does not realise that the other classes—the university educated and the upper class—also speak a dialect, ‘proper English’.)

  Jonah’s publication history tells us that the book has nevertheless enjoyed a near-constant readership. Published in the UK by Methuen in 1911, and praised by John Galsworthy and Norman Lindsay as well as the Sydney press, it had an Australian edition in 1933, with subsequent republications in the 1940s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and an Angus & Robertson Classics edition in 1991. Dorothy Green, in her introduction to the 1991 publication, says that Stone continued to make changes to the book in the early editions. There was a stage version and the ABC adapted the novel for a television series in 1982. It was also made into a musical with the title Jonah Jones by the Sydney Theatre Company in 1985.

  Stone, a school teacher, suffered debilitating nervous illnesses, and despite a pilgrimage to London to seek success—something which quite a few of the promising young Australian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Henry Lawson, did—and despite having his first novel published in the UK, US and Australia, he did not create a body of accomplished work. Only Jonah lives on. Stone died in 1935, aged sixty-four.

  Within a few decades most inner-Sydney housing had passed from the white working class, who moved to the outer suburbs after being forced out of their homes or selling them to young, well-off people who saw that the houses could be renovated and that inner-city living could become fashionable.

  But Redfern, next door to Waterloo, continued to be a holdout, especially after the white working class there had been replaced by Aboriginal tenants in and around the precinct called The Block. During the wave of gentrification they refused to leave and resisted with violent protests. Over the past thirty years the Aboriginal Housing Company gradually purchased houses for use as an Aboriginal-managed housing project.

  Some of the Aboriginal dwellers had shown many of the characteristics of poor white renters. Until recently the suburb was still considered a no-go area by taxi drivers and outsiders, continuing its two-hundred-year reputation as a hostile enclave.

  Jonah is an enduring and very readable novel which throws up curious and fearful connections with the places we have come from and the stories that brought us along.

  (Thanks to Professor Brian Kiernan for his portrait of Louis Stone in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and for a conversation about Stone.)

  PART ONE

  LARRIKINS ALL

  1

  SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE CORNER

  One side of the street glittered like a brilliant eruption with the light from a row of shops; the other, lined with houses, was almost deserted, for the people, drawn like moths by the glare, crowded and jostled under the lights.

  It was Saturday night, and Waterloo, by immemorial habit, had flung itself on the shops, bent on plunder. For an hour past a stream of people had flowed from the back streets into Botany Road, where the shops stood in shining rows, awaiting the conflict.

  The butcher’s caught the eye with a flare of colour as the light played on the pink and white flesh of sheep, gutted and skewered like victims for sacrifice; the saffron and red quarters of beef, hanging like the limbs of a dismembered Colossus; and the carcasses of pigs, the unclean beast of the Jews, pallid as a corpse. The butchers passed in and out, sweating and greasy, hoarsely crying the prices as they cut and hacked the meat. The people crowded about, sniffing the odour of dead flesh, hungry and brutal—carnivora seeking their prey.

  At the grocer’s the light was reflected from the gay labels on tins and packages and bottles, and the air was heavy with the confused odour of tea, coffee and spices.

  Cabbages, piled in heaps against the doorposts of the greengrocer’s, threw a rank smell of vegetables on the air; the fruit within, built in pyramids for display, filled the nostrils with the fragrant, wholesome scents of the orchard.

  The buyers surged against the barricade of counters, shouting their orders, contesting the ground inch by inch as they fought for the value of a penny. And they emerged staggering under the weight of their plunder, laden like ants with food for hungry mouths—the insatiable maw of the people.

  The Push was gathered under the veranda at the corner of Cardigan Street, smoking cigarettes and discussing the weightier matters of life—horses and women. They were all young—from eighteen to twenty-five—for the larrikin never grows old. They leaned against the veranda posts, or squatted below the windows of the shop, which had been to let for months.

  Here they met nightly, as men meet at their club—a terror to the neighbourhood. Their chief diversion was to guy the pedestrians, leaping from insult to swift retaliation if one resented their foul comments.

  “Gar!” one was saying, “I tell yer some ’orses know more’n a man. I remember old Joe Riley goin’ inter the stable one day to a brown mare as ’ad a derry on ’im ’cause ’e flogged ’er crool. Well, wot does she do? She squeezes ’im up agin the side o’ the stable, an’ nearly stiffens ’im afore ’e cud git out. My oath, she did!”

  “That’s nuthin’ ter wot a mare as was runnin’ leader in Daly’s ’bus used ter do,” began another, stirred by that rivalry which makes talkers magnify and invent to cap a story; but he stopped suddenly as two girls approached.

  One was short and fat, a nugget, with square, sullen features; the other, thin as a rake, with a mass of red hair that fell to her waist in a thick coil.

  “’Ello, Ada, w’ere you goin’?” he inquired, with a facetious grin. “Cum ’ere, I want ter talk ter yer.”

  The fat girl stopped and laughed.

  “Can’t—I’m in a ’urry,” she replied.

  “Well, kin I cum wid yer?” he asked, with another grin.

  “Not wi’ that face, Chook,” she answered, laughing.

  “None o’ yer lip, now, or I’ll tell Jonah wot yer were doin’ last night,” said Chook.

  “W’ere is Joe?” asked the girl, suddenly serious. “Tell ’im I want ter see ’im.”

  “Gone ter buy a smoke; ’e’ll be back in a minit
.”

  “Right-oh, tell ’im wot I said,” replied Ada, moving away.

  “’Ere, ’old ’ard, ain’t yer goin’ ter interdooce yer cobber?” cried Chook, staring at the red-headed girl.

  “An’ ’er ginger ’air was scorchin’ all ’er back,” he sang in parody, suddenly cutting a caper and snapping his fingers.

  The girl’s white skin flushed pink with anger, her eyes sparkled with hate.

  “Ugly swine! I’ll smack yer jaw, if yer talk ter me,” she cried.

  “Blimey, ’ot stuff, ain’t it?” inquired Chook.

  “Cum on, Pinkey. Never mind ’im,” cried Ada, moving off.

  “Yah, go ’ome an’ wash yer neck!” shouted Chook, with sudden venom.

  The red-headed girl stood silent, searching her mind for a stinging retort.

  “Yer’d catch yer death o’ cold if yer washed yer own,” she cried; and the two passed out of sight, tittering.

  Chook turned to his mates.

  “She kin give it lip, can’t she?” said he, in admiration.

  A moment later the leader of the Push crossed the street, and took his place in silence under the veranda. A first glance surprised the eye, for he was a hunchback, with the uncanny look of the deformed—the head, large and powerful, wedged between the shoulders as if a giant’s hand had pressed it down, the hump projecting behind, monstrous and inhuman. His face held you with a pair of restless grey eyes, the colour and temper of steel, deep with malicious intelligence. His nose was large and thin, curved like the beak of an eagle. Chook, whose acquaintance he had made years ago when selling newspapers, was his mate. Both carried nicknames, corrupted from Jones and Fowles, with the rude wit of the streets.

  “Ada’s lookin’ fer yous, Jonah,” said Chook.

  “Yer don’t say so?” replied the hunchback, raising his leg to strike a match. “Was Pinkey with ’er?” he added.

  “D’ye mean a little moll wi’ ginger hair?” asked Chook.