Drawing the Crow
by Adrian Mitchell
Published by Wakefield Press
ISBN 9781862546851
$19.95
Adrian Mitchell, who was to become Head of English at the University of Sydney, has written a series of essays looking back upon growing up in Adelaide in the 1950s and early 1960s. Experiences fruit picking in the Riverland, country holidays on South Australia’s peninsulas, Christmas traditions at the beach, and the legacy left by German immigration round out memories of Playford-era Adelaide. More than a memoir, he searches for the State’s identity, seeking to codify its uniqueness and separation from the mythology of our national character, whose ‘emblems and icons, costumery … and natural history, belongs elsewhere’ he feels.
While celebrating the ‘richness’ of his‘grotesque euphemism of early settlement’, the opening up of the plains, a process continuing apace with the sanctioned butchery of the tree canopy. Dust storms and heat have followed, amidst ‘the true brutality of the stobie poles’ only South Australia seems to need.
