The Wisdom Interviews: Veronica Brady

Hello, and welcome to Big Ideas, I’m Peter Thompson. Today the third of our Wisdom interviews, a series that offers insight into the lives and attitudes of some fascinating Australians – we talk about their childhoods, their education and critical moments in their lives, as well as their achievements and views on contemporary Australia.

My guest today is Veronica Brady, she’s known for her teaching of Australian Literature at Western Australia, her time on the ABC Board, and for her writing, most recently a biography of the poet Judith Wright. Veronica Brady has changed people’s lives, and continues to inspire and provoke as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Veronica Brady, welcome.

Veronica Brady: Peter, it’s good to be here in these hallowed halls. I’m a great fan of Radio National.

Peter Thompson: At Melbourne University you attended at the tender age of seventeen, you encountered Professor Crawford and his views about the Enlightenment.

Veronica Brady: Well his views actually about the Reformation, this particular lecture in my first year, all of seventeen years old, he gave a lecture on the causes of the Reformation, and fresh from Catholic school I took him aside after it and gave him the Catholic view. But one of the things which stays in my mind was his courtesy. He listened, he thanked me very much for my views and said they were interesting and off he went. And so I realised then that the importance of allowing other views and not wishing to berate people and not making them think as you think.

Peter Thompson: Did it have an impact on you there and then?

Veronica Brady: Not really, but gradually I came to think how wonderful the university was, particularly as the time when I was there was just after World War II, and most of my fellow students were young men. As far as I know there were no returned servicewomen who’d survived World War II and most of them were very idealistic, at least those who were reading Arts. They really believed that they wanted to make a better world so of course, it was the best of all times. It was before the Cold War set in, and that really influenced me profoundly, that and being in North America in the late 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement, and the anti Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Peter Thompson: Did you feel compelled then at university as that young person, to make a better world?

Veronica Brady: Yes. Well I think that’s part of my upbringing. I’m Irish on both sides, my father was one of these tiresome persons who wasn’t born in Ireland, he was more Irish than the Irish. He really did have a passion for justice, and he was a very honest man, he got out of a family business which he discovered was dishonest.

Peter Thompson: In real estate.

Veronica Brady: He thought it was dishonest, but who knows whether it was or not. And he refused, he didn’t marry until he was in his forties, not uncharacteristic in those days, and he refused to fight in World War I because he thought, being of Irish extraction, there was no point in going to be killed for the British Empire, so I have in my background that sense that it’s our business, and I think it’s also part of my idea of what Christianity is. I take that point of Dostoyevsky’s in The Brothers Karamazov So long as one child suffers, the world is not what it should be. And I’m also quite fascinated by Walter Benjamin’s point that the history which matters is the history not of the winners but of the losers, because so long as there are losers, then things are not as they should be. So I don’t do much about it, but that’s part of my world view, that we’re all responsible for one another, and again, I think that our contemporary understanding of what reality is makes that fairly clear. Consider what the consequence of world poverty, the diseases and so on; dare I mention terrorism? So that if we want to live decently, then we’ve got to care for one another.

Peter Thompson: I want to take you to the threshold of the convent door. Still a very young woman, and in spite of those ideas you’ve just expressed about making the world better, you chose to go over the threshold into what was then a silent order.

Veronica Brady: Yes. Oh no, we weren’t silent, we were cloistered. But that Peter, was part of the idea of making the world a better place. And I didn’t choose it. In sense, I was chosen. Whatever you say about this, I didn’t want it, I’d had a good time at the University, I had boyfriends and so on, but I’d felt since my last year at school, and my very sensible mother said, ‘Get it out of your system and go to University.’ But it was still there, and so I thought, Look, I’ll have to give it a go. And all my friends said we’ll see you in six months. But they didn’t.

Peter Thompson: The novice mistress didn’t think you’d last, either, did she?

Veronica Brady: No, and, well I’m in Sydney at the moment and two of the people who joined the community in the same day were reminiscing about all of this, but you see that’s one of the reasons why I believe in this otherness flowing through your life, and so there I was. I taught, and I think in those days teaching really meant something. I mean it still does, but I thought Well that’s one way of changing the world and then lo and behold after I’d been teaching for ten years, and English and History which I think are very potent things, then I was asked if I would like to go and do a Doctorate in North America. So I said Yes. So I’m a great believer in just following what happens to you and then it’ll be all right.

Peter Thompson: Let’s go back to the cloistered order. Paint a picture of it, what was it like in those days? I mean this is the end of the Second World War.

Veronica Brady: Yes. Well –

Peter Thompson: 1950 or thereabouts.

Veronica Brady: It was. It was thoroughly cloistered, particularly as novices we didn’t read newspapers, only in our first and third years did we do any teaching, we scrubbed floors, a great deal of the time we kept silence and there was a great deal of praying which centred me fine, and then when your novitiate was over, then you went out to teach. And you see, I was always very lucky because I had my degree, so I went to teach in Melbourne, teach the Senior English and History. There was a brief period when religious life being what it was in those days, I was thought to be being too successful so I was sent to Ballarat to teach French and Geography, but ha, ha, that didn’t matter because whatever else, I’m not much else, but I’ve got a few brains and my French is good. I knew a bit of Geography. So I had a great time teaching. And it really didn’t worry me much, because that was the way things were in those days. And I suppose I’d read a great deal; I’m a great admirer of Thomas Merton about the cloistered life, and that suited me fine.

Peter Thompson: What was it Merton said about the cloistered life?

Veronica Brady: Well you know Thomas Merton was a literature, a bon vivant, and all kinds of things, and he was called and became a Trappist monk, and he wrote a great deal about the cloistered life and contemplation and so on. And there was a chance for us to spend quite a bit of time in prayer, and I still do meditate every day and say the office, well, I do.

Peter Thompson: All of this has quite a bit of appeal to me, I must say, but I think more so as an older person rather than as a younger person, but you were quite young, when taking on this extraordinarily challenging life.

Veronica Brady: I was, but it was part of the whole Catholic culture. It was always assumed that at school they’d always say, Well some of you girls will be nuns, and in the boys’ schools, Some of you will be priests or brothers. I remember one priest in a sermon saying to us in our convent school, Well some of you will grow up to be wives and mothers, and some of you will become nuns, and some of you will become good women.

Peter Thompson: That’s a third category, a separate category.

Veronica Brady: So it was simply part of the culture.

Peter Thompson: When those things were said to you, did you think, Yes, I will be a nun.

Veronica Brady: I thought, I hope not. No, in fact it was only as I grew older, my last couple of years at school, I felt there was something saying, Yes, you have to be. You know the way conscience does? But No, I don’t want that, because in those days I was writing poetry and short stories and in fact I even had some poems published in The Bulletin when I was at university, and in university magazines, but then when I went to the University of Chicago, I did a creative writing course, and if you please, the prose professor was John Cheevers, and the poetry man was Edgar Bowers, and I discovered very rapidly that I was no good.

Peter Thompson: Pity, that.

Veronica Brady: Pity, but I wasn’t a good writer, but I’m a good teacher. That’s all. You’ve got to be who you are, in my view.

Peter Thompson: When you entered the convent what was your sense of the sacred?

Veronica Brady: I think it’s basically what it is now. The sense – somebody quoted to me the other day something, I said Look, spirituality is about being home in the world, and being aware of its mystery, and its ultimate goodness but also its terror, and trusting it. But also of the obligation to listen to what’s inside you. So in one sense I’ve never been what you’d call entirely orthodox. I think what we might call the mystical strain in Christianity has always been extraordinarily important to me, and I think that’s probably why this life suits me because I suspect I am probably a born celibate. I mean I don’t think I’m afraid of sex, in fact when I was thinking of joining a convent, one of my friends, who had been a Czech psychiatrist who finally escaped to Australia, and he was also teaching at the same school I was teaching at, teaching science, most unsuccessfully. But he put it to me that I was running away from sex, but I don’t think I am, just some people can, if you’ve got an inwardness there, that can give you something, the equivalent presumably of successful relationships.

Peter Thompson: When did you first become conscious of having an inwardness?

Veronica Brady: Oh, from childhood onwards. That’s again one of the advantages I think of being a cradle Catholic, which I always was, and also having parents; my father was one of thirteen, so no opportunity to go to university, but he was very well read, he’d travelled, he had a wonderful collection of art books and so on. My mother also hadn’t been to university, but she was, they were both educated people, so we were surrounded by books and ideas, and we had a big garden when we lived in the country and also when we came to Melbourne, and I spent an awful lot of time, I think that was my beginnings as an ecologist. We had two big old trees in our backyard, an oak tree and a beautiful old Norfolk pine, and I used to spend a lot of my time up those trees, looking at stars. But the Norfolk pine had been struck by lightning at one stage, at the top it was completely flat, but the branches spread out and you could lie on it, and feel the branches moving as if you were in a boat, and in fact if you sat up you could then see down to Port Phillip Bay. So no, I’ve always had that sense of reality. There were only two of us in the family.

Peter Thompson: A younger sister.

Veronica Brady: I was the elder. And plenty of time to be by yourself, and I think that’s very important.

Peter Thompson: What did your parents give you?

Veronica Brady: The sense that I was loved, that whatever I wanted to do, I could do, and a sense that the world was full of possibilities, and also, I thought in the best Freudian fashion, fought with my father as an adolescent, but as I look back, I can realise he was a man of very great integrity. And I had very deep love from my mother and for my mother. So it’s simply not fair, I had a wonderful beginning, even though we didn’t have much money,

Peter Thompson: I think you’ve said that your father was a person of mind, by contrast your mother was more of heart.

Veronica Brady: I don’t know, I think my father had a big heart. One of my very earliest memories is sitting on his knee, believe it or not, my mother drove the car, he let her drive the car, and I was sitting on his knee as we were driving along, and he was teaching me big words. I still remember one of them was triantemontogong. So he was a great big man, believe it or not, but he was also very tender. So one of my problems in later life is that I cannot cope with violence. In the old unhappy far off days when I first came to Perth and I was not loved by many people in Perth, and I’d get these violent phone calls abusing me, for, well, I was heretical, Catholics abusing me for trying to be sympathetic to the plight of Aboriginal people, and I’d come away quivering, I just can’t – violence really frightens me. However, you’ve got to cope with it.

Peter Thompson: And a whole generation of your parents’ peers went through the war experience. Tell us about Uncle Joe, your mother’s brother.

Veronica Brady: Uncle Joe, well that was World War I. He was a darling man. According to the family legend, now historians may realise that this is not true, but according to family legend he was in the same year studying law at Melbourne University with Bob Menzies, and Uncle Joe said ‘I must go off and fight in the war’, and according to family legend Bob Menzies said, ‘Don’t be silly, stay home and get on’, which in a sense I suppose my father did, though for very different reasons. So off Uncle Joe went to war and he went off as a stretcher bearer, was very badly gassed, but survived, and when he came home his fiancée had died of TB, which people did in those days, and my memory of Uncle Joe is he was a darling man but he was a hopeless alcoholic. I mean he held down a Public Service job but God knows how they let him. But he was very, very tender and very loving. But that too gave me a sense of the terrible things war does to people and then when I was growing up the elder brothers of my friends were all starting off to enlist in the Air Force because they were middle class and those who came back were very different from the young men who’d gone away. So, sorry, I’m not sympathetic to war.

Peter Thompson: Was it Judith Wright who used those words, ‘ice about the heart’?

Veronica Brady: Yes, it was. Yes, her poem, Man Jack Home from the Wars, yes.

Peter Thompson: And that fitted Uncle Joe do you think?

Veronica Brady: No. The ice was setting in, but he was, I think it was just blackness. Just despair. Because all that he’d loved had been taken away, and he must have seen it. Imagine what stretcher bearers saw in France. So he must have been to hell and back. No, there was a very tender man but a heartbroken man I think.

Peter Thompson: How has all of that experience, World War I, World War II, affected Australian men, do you think?

Veronica Brady: Well it’s my theory that made so many Australian men what they are: afraid of emotions, afraid of talking about what they’ve been through, I think as somebody who was opposed to the Vietnam War, I do really repent about the lack of sympathy we showed to those men who were conscripted, and they went off to the Vietnam War. And they all had to pretend they were heroes, didn’t they? And we have this, I’m not pleased with our militaristic tradition, I mean after all, they were very brave but Gallipoli was slaughter, and I can’t see any point in being slaughtered. Hamlet puts it this way, ‘All for a’ – what is it? ‘a few feet of ground.’ I think war is out of date, and it doesn’t prove anything.

Peter Thompson: If the experience of war had that effect on the emotions of men in Australia, what’s it done to this country?

Veronica Brady: Well, you see after all we are the result of invasion, aren’t we? And some, yes, I will buy into the history wars, at the moment , some dreadful things were done to the indigenous peoples. Now that is not to say that the settlers were monstrous. We are who we are in our time. My great great grandfather who came out from Ireland, took up land , he took it up from somebody else, but the previous leaseholder had taken it from Aboriginal people, it had been gazetted as an Aboriginal reserve. Aboriginal people were not regarded as human beings, and all cultures have their own sort of collective fantasies, and the idea of terra nullius was a collective fantasy. So I’m not saying these people were monsters, I think terrible things happened, and when you don’t face the things that happened, they continue to haunt you. And after all, the German nation, most of them have faced what happened in the holocaust, and tried to do something about it, but I don’t believe that you can kill people, rape their women, humiliate them, despise them, without it having an effect on you, because I do have this, well the view that John Donne had ‘No one is an island, we are all part of this continent’. So I think there is a peculiar problem that we have in this country, and unfortunately we haven’t listened to the prophets, the writers, and unfortunately I think the institutions, the religious institutions which should have reminded us of the holiness of every human being, and the holiness of the earth, have largely failed to do so and so we have come to worship false gods in this country, many of us. And I’m not blaming anybody, and I’m not saying I’m right, but if money is your measure of value and if power over other people, power as domination is important, and if you’re addicted to mindless pleasures, then you’re barely human and it has to be said every time I go away, and being a fortunate person I do travel quite a bit, I love southern Europe, because for all their sins there’s a humanity there, and also a sense of memory, particularly in Spain. One of the interesting things, at least about the people I know in Spain, is how deeply scarred they still are by that memory of the Civil War, and how determined they are not to have it happen again. Our wars have always happened elsewhere. I also have very dear friends in Italy, the husband was a young Italian soldier lieutenant, who was ordered to arrest Jews and refused, spent the rest of World War II in a concentration camp. I have friends in Holland who remember back to the last year of World War II when the Dutch railwaymen went on strike and the whole country went hungry and cold. That’s the reality of war, and that’s what makes it untenable, in my view. I still believe we can make the world a better place.

Peter Thompson: Vatican II, what did it do to you?

Veronica Brady: Oh, it made me feel ‘Goodness, that’s what I’ve always really thought.’ Because it has to be said my parents were not really very orthodox Catholics. You know, we didn’t have family rosary. I remember being humiliated at the country convent where I started school, and they wanted to know who said the family rosary, so I couldn’t put my hand up. And every so often there was something else on, and we were travelling, we didn’t go to Sunday Mass. They were sensible human beings but deeply grounded because of this Irish ancestry, in a sense of, well the whole culture. You see being a Melbourne Catholic in those days, I won’t say in the present, the present incumbents, but it did give you access to a whole sacramental world, and as an undergraduate you see, I read a great deal. I read through all of Thomas Aquinas, believe it or not, I read Catholic philosophers like Jacques Maritain, the French novelists, you know, Mauriac, Bernanos, Bloy. I read and I still read and love very dearly, Dante’s Divine Comedy. There is an inheritance. And I also read the mystics, people like John of God and my favourite, Julian of Norwich. In a sense that’s a counter culture, you know, so I grew up in that, and I suppose it’s still with me.

Peter Thompson: Did Vatican II in a sense give validity to your counter culture, as you put it?

Veronica Brady: It did, in a sense, because let’s say it put a tempo, I mean there are all sorts of movements now going against all of that, but the general idea was that the local church was the important church, and there was not a separate priestly cast but there was the Communion of the Faithful and the definition church was the People of God, the Community of Faith, Hope and Love, and of course I’ve always been almost a crypto Anglican. I have many, many Anglican friends, and I think for the life of me at the moment I can’t see, leaving aside Sydney Anglicanism, that if I were an Anglican I’d have problems with Catholicism as it is at the moment, with the emphasis on the papacy. But I have no problems with the whole Anglican, with it’s sense of liturgy, with its history. My view, the Reformation’s over, we’d all better stop this nonsense of being in little separate groups, and realise that nobody knows what that word ‘God’ means, and there’s no one way of being Christian, just as there’s no one way of being Muslim. So that let’s respect one another and respect our traditions and go back to the beginnings.

Peter Thompson: Anglicanism stands on the abyss.

Veronica Brady: Oh well, according to the journalists.

Peter Thompson: According to some of those in the communion, too.

Veronica Brady: That is absolutely true, but Anglicanism doesn’t have to be one united communion, not like Roman Catholicism. I’m not an Anglican, but I would think if there are African, they probably call themselves Episcopalians, the American Episcopalians are following where they (or some of them are) they believe they’re called to do. I don’t see that as a disaster. I frankly I think uniformity is a very dangerous thing, because the world is not uniform, human beings aren’t uniform, we’re all very different. So what’s the fuss?

Peter Thompson: Now Vatican II also led in a sense by a chain of events to your provincial, saying ‘Go off, get an education elsewhere, go to North America’. So you walked into America in the midst of –

Veronica Brady: all that turmoil.

Peter Thompson: In fact you described that en route on the Pan Am plane the pilot told the passengers about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the big incendiary for the Vietnam War and American participation in it.

Veronica Brady: Yes. So the world was changing. Yes, I’ve always been fortunate in a sense to – well I was fortunate the time I went to university, I was fortunate then when I went to North America. Yes, and I think you simply go with the flow. And I still have friends in the States and I’m very fortunate I had a couple of Rockefeller Fellowships recently, and I’ve been back to the States, and I still have a great – I’ve spent some time t the University of Oregon in Eugene, and goodness they’re wonderful people there. I had a Fellowship to work on ecology and the sacred, and there there’s a deep sense of ecology. I arrived the first time about a week after 9/11 as they call it, and there were brave students and staff marching against the war on terrorism. There are many different United States, and I read every single word (it takes me some time) of The New York Review of Books. I get hold of The New York Times. I think it’s silly to characterise people as a whole, and I like to think that the age of the nation state is over, and that all human beings and throughout the world, can relate to one another and respect differences, that’s why I love travel.

Peter Thompson: And that’s a breathtaking topic. What does ecology and the sacred mean to you?

Veronica Brady: Well ecology I suppose means being in tune with the economy of life all round about you, and the sacred as I said, well Otto defines it as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a mysterious presence which makes you tremble with awe and fascinates you. And that’s what it is, and when you contemplate the world in which we live, and that living world, of course it’s awesome, I’m, fortunate enough to have a brother in law, who, yes, well he’s now retired, a solid state chemist, and when you look at the building blocks of life through an electron microscope, gosh, I mean the mysteriousness of things. See our problem is that we’ve lost the sense of wonder and of awe. It’s all ‘fix it, fix it, make it useful’. Now it’s not useful if it’s not enhancing our inner life and making us more sensitive and open to the mystery of things, because one thing is certain, we’re all going to die eventually, and you see I’m in that phase now, we talk about developmental phases, well next stop is death as far as I’m concerned. And it really quite fascinates me, I mean I’ve had a few adventures, but never really, I’m healthy. But either there’s something or nothing, and I hope the resurrection’s happened, but if there’s nothing, it’s also a good thought to feel that you’ll be part of this whole cosmic – if there’s nothing I won’t be conscious of it, but the –

Peter Thompson: Part of the cosmic life in what sense?

Veronica Brady: Well in fact that my body will decay and let’s hope nice gum trees and so on will grow up from me, I mean I won’t, if there is nothing I won’t be conscious of it, but you see, more’s the pity we don’t read people like Shakespeare any more. Now ‘we are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep’. I mean three quarters of the human race for just about all of human history have had that sense of mystery, and there’s something very funny about our culture, and fewer and fewer of us do. And part of it of course is the reason we no longer bring up young people with a sense of mystery, they’re not, many of them, have no introduction to the arts, they’re not enabled to be sympathetic to one another and imaginative, and what else? And we don’t know much history. So I sometimes wonder whether we’re breeding a race of non humans. Of course that’s terrible to say, but I think many contemporary Western people are very different from most human beings who’ve lived on the face of this earth, that’s my view.

Peter Thompson: Could you sort out the resurrection for me?

Veronica Brady: I can’t. The story is that, well it’s absolutely, I think it’s incontrovertible that somebody called Jesus of Nazareth walked on this earth, and my view of why he died was because the pious people wanted to put him to death. What he said was pretty heretical as far as pious people of his day regarded. I mean he was a God who cared for little ones and so on. And then the story goes, that he appeared again after he’d been dead. Who knows what that means? I mean good old Thomas Aquinas says we don’t know because nobody even – the tomb was empty, but nobody knows what happened. But the community believed that Jesus was still amongst us and his spirit is still amongst us. So I go along with that, I hope it’s true. I don’t think you can prove that God exists, we know that existence is mysterious, and I don’t think you can prove the resurrection, even as a child at school when we had all these proofs of existence of God and one of them was, if you came across a watch you’d say, Who made it? But the world is not a watch, you see. And how do we know? The Big Bang, maybe it was spontaneous. As I say we’re surrounded by mystery. So I hope the resurrection happened. I’m a great devotee of Pascal and no gamble. My friends often say that’s dishonest, you bet on it. You bet that God exists, because there’s no way of proving or disproving.

Peter Thompson: Was Jesus the Son of God?

Veronica Brady: Well I suppose I’ve got to say he was God in our midst. That’s how the story goes. And I’m quite fascinated actually by the idea of Trinity, that God, all gods, God is God, and that there’re as it were, three modes of God if you like, you know, the generating, creating, the God who’s caught up with humanity and caught up with this world and walked amongst us, and the God who’s powerful spirit, whose of my life on that subject a little Romanesque church in the north of Spain, in Asturias, and it was the day before the last election that the Socialists won, and they’re all lefties up there, or nearly all of them are, and the old priest said, (it was a Saturday night mass) and he said, ‘Yes, I know there’s the election tomorrow, and I know you want to talk about it, but let me tell you instead about the Trinity’, which was the most beautiful sermon about God being generous, outgoing, sharing, a nice Socialist sermon you see. So yes, I am sort of irrational, but I think it’s about time we got off the purely rational spectrum. That’s another thing my book might be about, and learn to open up more to intuition. Of course, if you believe the moon is made of green cheese, that’s not the case, and you need to check your intuitions for the consequences. I think intuition and imagination are more important that are generally thought to be at the moment.

Peter Thompson: Veronica, you said we have to listen to the prophets. Was Patrick White one of those?

Veronica Brady: Yes. And so was Judith Wright. So I think (I hope he doesn’t blush when he hears it) David Malouf, Mick Stowe, those writers, I’m going back, I’m very, very interested in wonderful Joseph Furphy, in fact he’s got to be a chapter in my book, and the writers of the nineties and women writers of the twenties and thirties, yes, but you see, and some of our painters. But who cares about them? Many of them become aestheticised. I think one of the reasons why there was a great deal of opposition to dear Patrick White was because he insisted also in speaking out in prophetic mode, and that was not popular. And also he was a crusty old gentleman.

Peter Thompson: What about as a writer?

Veronica Brady: I think he was a magnificent writer. Someone above all who cared about language and about form. I remember he said once that he wanted to be a painter and his writing is painterly. There are sort of blobs of language thrown onto the canvas, it’s not always grammatical but it opens up possibilities. It’s sort of semi poetic, and he has a huge and often obsessive world view. And reading a Patrick White novel’s like being blown up, and I keep going back to him all the time. He changed my life, because I wrote my doctorate on him, and I actually got to know him a little, and I still think he’s a very, very important figure.

Peter Thompson: Was he sympathetic to you?

Veronica Brady: Yes, he was very kind to me, because I started writing my thesis in Canada. My supervisor was an American who said, ‘You’ve got to write to Patrick White’, and I said, ‘No I don’t, he’s got to get on writing his novels and I read his novels.’ However he said I had to and I did, and I must have given Patrick the impression that I didn’t really want to do this, and anyway, Patrick has always been fascinated by nuns. So he was very kind to me when I came back to Australia. But, (you might want to cut this out, but it’s a lovely story) I was staying at Loreto, Kirribilli down there, and Patrick said, look, he’d come and see me and talk to me. But in those days there were lots of, we used to call them poor men, you know, homeless people, who after dinner every night, we’d cut sandwiches, and when somebody rang on the bell at the side door, you’d clutch some sandwiches and rush to the side door. Well Patrick arrived and somebody got there before him and offered him a sandwich, and he loved it, I think that broke the ice. I didn’t get to know him at all well, but from time to time I’d see him, and he seemed to approve of the things I wrote about him which meant a lot to me.

Peter Thompson: As you say, you wrote your doctorate on him; what was your thesis about him?

Veronica Brady: Well my thesis was, (I wrote more after I’d finished my doctorate) was that he was a very good example of the writer as somebody suspended, suspended, Australians, suspended between the two sides of the world, suspended between the aesthetic and the metaphysical, and I forget what the other, the political, the mystical, whatever. And I think my study only got as far as The Solid Mandala, and it shows his stature even then because I was writing at the University of Toronto, and they usually had a policy you couldn’t write about living writers, but they allowed me to do it. But when I came back and got a job at UWA I kept on writing about him. And, well, I’d still like to be writing about him. I think we haven’t exhausted the things he has to say.

Peter Thompson: You taught at the University of Western Australia, and then I think you might have even been surprised that you were given the opportunity to write Judith Wright’s biography.

Veronica Brady: Oh, absolutely surprised. I was about to retire you see, because I do believe there’s stages in your life. When I got to sixty five I said, Well, I’m going to retire. And they said, ‘You can’t, we’re short staffed’. So I said, ‘All right, I’ll stay around for another year’ and then they found somebody else. And I was wondering what would happen, what would I do when I was retired? And I was rung up and asked would I like to do the Judith Wright biography. And apparently she, well many people had been wanting to write her biography and being Judith Wright, she said, ‘No, go away, I’m writing my autobiography’, and part of it has already been published. So she thought, being Judith Wright, offence is the best form of defence, so she said ‘I’ll find somebody to do it.’ So they gave her a list of names and she chose me, which was a great honour. There are disadvantages though, being the official biographer. She was very, very good to me, she shared everything with me, but there were things I was not supposed to talk about for perfectly good reasons, because of the people involved and so on. So it’s certainly not the definitive biography. But I’ve had people say to me that I should have just gone ahead, but being old fashioned I said, ‘I can’t, I couldn’t betray the trust of somebody who asked me to do something.

Peter Thompson: What we’re talking about there are elements of her personal life.

Veronica Brady: Precisely. That might be journalistic ethics of the sort of the lesser kind, but I thought No, she chose me, she asked me to do this, it’s her life. Other people can do it later.’

Peter Thompson: We’ve been talking to you about your intellectual life, about your spiritual life; what about you, the activist? You’re the Commie Nun, weren’t you?

Veronica Brady: Oh yes, and then when, well Perth’s a funny place, and I’d say, ‘What do you mean by Commie?’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, it’s godless atheism’. So that wasn’t much help. And I’d say, ‘Well as a matter of fact I am a Communist in the sense that we do as members of a community, we do share possessions, and so on.’

Peter Thompson: No Stalinist, but …

Veronica Brady: Not a Stalinist, no, no, of course I’m not a Stalinist. I still believe in whatever, we look for Socialism you need Socialists, and under our sort of system it’s a bit difficult to have, but I still believe in the importance of sharing. No, more or less by accident, because you see my father had always been interested in politics and used to write letters to newspapers. So when Charlie Court’s government was attacking trade unions, I thought that was disgraceful, and so I write letters saying it was terrible, because I know a bit of history. Any Australian who doesn’t want to have anything to do with trade unions or to get back their paid annual holidays, your wages and all sorts of things, so I got drawn in, and particularly the Noonkembah affair. That was during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and I wondered in the newspaper, in those days they used to publish my letters, they don’t any more, how Charlie Court could say the Russians were dreadful and were encouraging people to do the same themselves. Because that multinational company was encouraged by the Court government.

Peter Thompson: This was all about oil drilling, or exploratory drilling.

Veronica Brady: Exploratory drilling on the sacred sites of an Aboriginal community and they had that lease, it was theirs. And Court told that company, I don’t think they wanted to go in, that they would never get a licence to explore for oil ever again in W.A. unless they went in and provided a police escort. The truck drivers, all scabs, were paid I think about $10,000 each to go in. They forced their way in. Now it was invasion all over again, and see that way you get involved a little bit, and you see, in Perth, Perth’s a very funny place, they’re a very small group of people who care about these sorts of issues.

Peter Thompson: I think you’ve described yourself as a non person in Perth.

Veronica Brady: Yes, I am.

Peter Thompson: That is, the media wanted to ignore you, the local media.

Veronica Brady: Oh well I can’t get any letters published in the West. A group of us last year, all academics, they presumably know how to write a letter, over a period of six weeks between us, we wrote thirty seven letters to the one and only newspaper and one got in. Most of the letters in the west if you’ve ever seen them, are about who has grown the biggest pumpkin, or how wicked young people are, and that kind of thing. So, well, you’ve got to take what comes, and I’ve lived in Perth for a very long time, and I’m coming to think more and more the important thing is just to try to build community, to talk to people. I think mainstream media in Australia is, to put it at its mildest, is not helpful. I think we’re more and more obsessed with money, power and so on, but I still think there’s so many decent people and decent people need to talk to one another. You need to make a community of trust, and mutual respect, and that’s what I try to do just in my local community.

Peter Thompson: Does it make you sad that the religious orders are disappearing?

Veronica Brady: No. No, I think everything has its time. And we’re still getting a few young people, I must say for the life of me, I can’t understand why. If there is what this word ‘God’ means, and if God’s spirit is still working in the world, then people have been called to do other things. I don’t think you have to have a Christian or Catholic label on you, I do think you need a community to support you, and I have to say that my own community has put up with an awful lot from me. They do support me always, and well, after all, I said to that provincial who sent me away to study in North America, I say ‘I’m the Frankenstein you created’. But basically we’re an educated order, and there’s always been a great deal of mutual kindness and respect, so I’m very grateful for the way they put up with me. I remember in the early days when I first came to Perth, and if you understand Perth, particularly under the long reign of Charles Court, Perth was not the most avant- garde place in the world, particularly as far as Perth Catholics were concerned. And another Provincial came. She said to me one day, ‘I’m sick and tired of you. Every time I come over to Perth I have to spend hours on the phone with these good capital K Catholics denouncing me.’ But you know, she stood up for me. She mightn’t have quite understood the things I was about and to me that’s what it’s about, to have mutual trust and to understand that people are trying to, as Robert Bolt had Thomas More say, ‘We must serve God wittily in the tangle of our mind’. No one has any final truth, we’re all groping for it.

Peter Thompson: You talked about ‘this stage of your life’, what remains to be done? Have you lost energy? I mean you seem remarkably energetic.

Veronica Brady: No. I’m extraordinarily fortunate. As I say, one of the things I’m also very fortunate about, is that my parents were obviously very healthy, and I look little and frail and that’s lovely when I travel overseas, all the fellows rush to carry my luggage for me and so on, but I’m actually very tough. I’m very wiry. I’m in very good health, I’ve got a very good GP who looks after me, but I know that this won’t go on forever, and I would very much like to go while the going’s good, because as I say, I don’t think I’m afraid of death, I may be if I get cancer or something, but I never make plans ahead, I always take what comes, because that’s much more interesting. And also in some sort of superstitious way I believe there is a providence that shapes our ends, you know, you say Yes to things and see what happens. It certainly led me into some interesting situations. So I hope bits don’t start dropping off. A couple of years ago I was going blind and that was a bit interesting. Everyone has cataracts but I had glaucoma, but see I’m a lucky woman, and this very nice young eye surgeon did his tricks and I can read all but a couple of words in the very bottom line of the chart. My eyesight is really good. So if you’re privileged, I sometimes feel ashamed of being so privileged, but you’ve got to take it.

Peter Thompson: As you were saying earlier, it’s a mystery to know what happens after death. Have a shot at it, what’s going to happen the day after.

Veronica Brady: Not the slightest idea. I mean I’d love to think that Dante’s Paradiso is right, and what we see is this great rose and the angels like the bees flying round the different petals, but no idea. No, as I say, I don’t like to work things out beforehand. Maybe nothing happens, but one of our old ladies died recently and it was about time she died, the poor old, she was in a very bad way. I didn’t feel it but a lot of the others say, Look we feel Merce is still around, in fact what did I do the other day? Oh yes, I had to go and talk to some people and I lost my car keys and there was no way I could go by bike, so I rang up Marg who’s in charge of our community and said, ‘Marg, do you by any chance have a spare set of keys?’ and she said No, she didn’t, but she said, ‘You ask Merce’. And I don’t believe in these things. I said, ‘All right Merce, where are they?’ There they were. So, well as I say, I think we can be too rational about things. I mean personally, I actually don’t believe in praying for things. Because that creates so many theological problems, if I pray for rain and somebody else doesn’t want it to rain, what does that make God?

Peter Thompson: A judger. Now you’ve just come back from Portugal where you attended a conference with the delightful title, Australia, Who Cares? Who does care?

Veronica Brady: We have to. That was my paper. I got very grand and I took Heiddger’s idea of care, sorga – care for the earth. We must care for the earth, we must care for one another. Of all the earth. We can’t just build on it, we have to be aware of the claims that it’s making on us, and hence of course the importance of indigenous cultures, terribly important. Because they cared for this land for so many thousands of years and within about 200 years we’re going pretty close to wrecking it, particularly in W.A. The Southern Ocean there’s dreadful. So I hope we’ve got it in time and we’ll be able to care sufficiently. We also have to care for one another. I think it’s such a heartless – it appears to be so heartless. The way we are allowing the things that are happening to those asylum seekers to happen is just atrocious. I write letters, have been writing letters to some of them in Port Headland. Their stories would break your heart, and nearly all of us, unless we’re Aboriginal, we’re all migrants. My ancestors were poor Irish and nobody put us in concentration camps and so on. Now yes, I agree, maybe there’s some criminals coming into the country and so on, but you do not put them in concentration camps and you do try to show them sympathy and compassion. And when you’ve released them on a Temporary Protection Visa you don’t let them quietly starve or go into despair. I mean it is, as I say it damages me to think that those things are happening to other people. I remember I used to wonder when I learnt about what happened in Hitler’s Germany, I used to wonder how could Germans let that – and they did know, and we do know, most of us, what’s going on, but we don’t want to know. Now that demeans us as human beings. I mean it’s hard to know what to do, because writing letters to pollies doesn’t do much good. But just talking to people I think, and trying to change the climate of our society, and there are, well I’m sure in every city, there are wonderful people in Perth who are trying to help those asylum seekers, teaching them English, providing them with somewhere to live, furniture, clothes, all of that, and companionship and kindness. So that I think is what you can do. I’m almost giving up on politics. Not quite, because there are good politicians, but they’re very lonely, most of them.

Peter Thompson: Just in the broader sense, what’s most worth wondering about?

Veronica Brady: Well, Wittgenstein put it this way. He said, ‘Not why the world is, but that it is’. You know, as I kid I used to love lying on my back and watching an ant climb up a stalk of grass, and in my little house, I’m very lucky, I’ve got a little side garden when I’m toiling away at my computer, I’ve got a beautiful gum tree, and I love watching the birds playing in the gum tree, and just the wonder of, well, that the sun rises, and one of the things that Perth does seduce you a bit, it is beautiful, especially if you live where I live, near the river, and the ocean the other side. And the beauty of the world, and the wind and the river smells and also my sense of great gratitude for being alive and being healthy, and having had the good life that I’ve had. And then trying to get to know other people and feel with them, because I’ve got very good friends all round the world, and that’s an immense privilege you know, to go to another country and feel, Oh here are my friends, even if my friends in Spain do try on things. Like last time I was there the first day, Lunch, 5.00pm. Even with somebody with robust health that can be trying.

Peter Thompson: They eat late.

Veronica Brady: They do, yes indeed, but for us it can be trying.

Peter Thompson: Veronica, it’s been lovely to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming in.

Veronica Brady: Peter, thank you for listening to me. Not everybody does, you know.

Peter Thompson: On the Wisdom interviews, my guest today has been writer, academic and nun Veronica Brady. Next week on The Wisdom Interviews, that towering figure of Australian drama, David Williamson. The phrase “Australia’s leading playwright” has been tied to his name for over three decades now, and he continues to create popular plays with a social conscience. I’m Peter Thompson, I hope you can join me for that interview with David Williamson, next week on Big Ideas.