THE PAULINE GROUP A Literary Society SYDNEY UNIVERSITY, 1949: 1955 Edited by Julian Woods

By Julian Woods

This collection of poetry centred on Sydney University and St. Paul's College was created by Wilhelm Rechnitz, a P.O.W. and an inspiring educator, long forgotten. From 1946 for a dozen years The Pauline Group flourished, stimulating University and College life. Of great interest to poetry lovers and to families and friends of the many contributors. A landmark undertaking at the time demonstrating hidden excellences not apparent in the formal everyday courses of universities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julian Woods
• Release date: Dec 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370658060

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THE PAULINE GROUP

A Literary Society

SYDNEY UNIVERSITY, 1949 – 1955

Edited by Julian Woods

FOREWORD

The few pieces of prose come early in the series and discontinued, one imagines, because of the amount of work for the member producing the stencils.

One venue, as I recall (and it would have changed over the years) was a rather shabby room in Macquarie St. in a building no doubt long since giving way to high-rise city flats for barristers and business men. It was certainly at 151 Elizabeth St. in July, August and September, 1952. Roger Milliss recalls that some meetings in the 1950s were at St. Paul’s College.

I guess most of the poets were of the Arts Faculty and knew many, if not all, of the fellow members in their particular undergraduate years. I have been unable to discover the origins of the Pauline Group and even in 1952 the origins were unknown to most members apart from a vague connection to St. Paul’s College. One may guess the originator was Bill Belson but that seems doubtful he being probably the first compiler of the meetings and copying them for distribution.

The bundle of faded and torn roneoed sheets that comprise what remains of the Pauline Group from its first meeting on the 5th of April, 1949 until it (apparently) petered sometime in 1955 came into my possession from Keith Free in 2013. From the dilapidated cardboard cover, Bill Belson, then of 33 Roslyn St. Kings Cross, it seems, was the first keeper of the file and probably roneoed the copies for the first meeting and (one supposes) many subsequent ones. Roger Brown passed it to Jeff Miles who was the editor in 1952, full of enthusiasm to the extent of producing many copies of David Haig’s famous poem, Impotence: If I could grasp the gambit of my life … - and distributing them in the quad at the foot of the Old Fisher Library stairs. Keith Free, at Sydney University, some time in 1954 then took over. Subsequent editors were Manfred Mackenzie, and Colin Black. After that I have no information. Manfred MacKenzie was either in charge or received the manuscripts later and at some time in the decades since, copies from 1954 and 1955 went missing before they came back to Keith Free’s keeping.

On re-typing these poems into a computer it became clear what a large amount of work the editors put into each issue from the several contributors, the cutting of stencils, running off copies etc.

There was further clarification of origins, yet more puzzles from the St. Paul’s College historian, Alan Atkinson. Six Pauline Group contributors only were on his College files, Jim Lance, E.H. Manchester, T.W. Horne, Bill Moriarty, Dave Rutherford and John K. McLaughlin. Yet apart from the last named all were born in the 1920s and left the College before the manuscripts came into existence in April 1949. In addition none were Arts students. One may assume that earlier meetings, if any, took place with poets reading their own works, at the College and the readings not collected.

All of us are in our seventh or eighth decade so I decided to turn the series into a book before death or decay, with no further research. Several in my years in Arts are deceased, John Croyston, Marie Kuttna, Sue Vacchini, Robin Pratt and Dick Appleton. Dick Appleton was never an actual student. Colin Black disappeared decades ago, as it were, in Hamburg. In latter years, Lex Banning, who died in 1965, would attend a few meetings and assert criticism that never discouraged. Another prominent poet, Vincent Buckley, was a guest attending during his Sydney visit in either 1955 or ’56.

Among the missing issues I recall a Canto of Dick Appleton’s of similar form to those of Pound’s. Also at least one translation from Rilke by Colin Black.

To my surprise we are looking at a collection sixty and more years old. One has to imagine what an editor would see as an historical collection and the changes if he were doing this in 1913 looking at poetry from the early 1850s - to secure a non-personal perspective of time. Apart from anything else the collection records the concerns and styles of the undergraduate poetry of the time and the influences and fame of different masters of the period such as Eliot and Auden, Pound etc. as well as the Romantics, even back to Milton, on individuals. Dick Appleton was obsessed with Ezra Pound and the influences of Whitman, Sandburg, Hart Crane, e.e.cummings and others may be seen. Such is youth. I have kept the punctuation as it occurs noting how carefully colons and semi-colons were used in those days.

If by chance this collection comes to the notice of anyone, to the authors themselves, to descendants or friends, with more information, and especially if the lost issues come to light, I would bring out another edition. As for me, curiosity and nostalgia has been satisfied.

On contacting me at my address copies may be ordered for $20 a copy including postage.

Julian Woods

Pumpkin Creek

491 Williams Drive

TARAGO, NSW 2580

16/11/2013

FOREWORD TO THE ONLINE EDITION

Since the limited edition of the Pauline Group collection of poetry, published in 2014, more information about the Group’s history emerged researched by Alan Atkinson, the Historian of St. Paul’s College, Sydney University. Even more interesting and important came his singular discovery of the great educator, Wilhelm Reichnitz, long forgotten, who initiated and fostered poetry and prose in the College magazine, The Pauline and spread its coverage beyond the College into the wider community.

As may be read in Alan Atkinson’s article following, this German prisoner-of-war, Wilhelm Reichnitz, had been interned in Great Britain in 1939 even though enthusiastically integrated into English life and an anti-fascist. In two years he stimulated and transformed many areas of College life. He was one of the 3,000, mainly German Jews, fleeing Nazism, interned and sailing in the prisoner ship the Dunera to further imprisonment, for the duration, as the saying was to Australia. After the war he and many others stayed on and became so important in Australia’s cultural life. Would we had accepted fifty such Duneras and their cargo.

Some assumptions in the original foreword need revising. In particular the guess that most of the poets originally were of the Arts Faculty. The majority, it seems were not. Such was the prestige of poetry till recent years. In the 1950s members of the Pauline Group believed that its activities were limited to university students and graduates but this too is an error as Rechnitz wanted coverage to be Sydney-wide and even Australia-wide. Members had assumed that the first roneoed batch of papers in 1949 accompanied the founding of the Group. Meetings and readings by Pauline students, with selected poems published in The Pauline, started earlier and continued concurrently. Thus the name, the Pauline Group. The list of Rechnitz’s other impacts on college life is astonishing in such a short period.

As yet the missing issues from 1954-55 have not turned up so perhaps this spread on the Net may get results.

I am indebted to Josephine and Katy Woods for the stimulus and expertise necessary for this edition.

Julian Woods

12/9/2015

WILHELM RECHNITZ AND THE ST PAUL’S COLLEGE LITERARY SOCIETY

Wilhelm Lorenz Rechnitz was a German Jew with a doctorate from the University of Berlin who fled his country in about 1934 to escape the Nazis. He was a linguist and philologist and in Germany he had been editor of the learned quarterly journal, Bibliotheca Philologica Classica, published in Leipzig. And translated classical plays for the Leipzig’s Old Theatre. In England he looked for work with the British Academy but found nothing except part-time school teaching and some Latin tutoring. He made contact with the poet A.E. Housman, a keen classical philologist, and, as a man of deep spirituality, he was sufficiently impressed with his new home to undergo baptism in the Church of England.

This did not help. As a German, with the outbreak of war Rechnitz was interned and, in 1940, he was deported to Australia on the Dunera, together with nearly 3000 others, most of them German Jews, the vessel being designed to carry 1600. By one account the Dunera was an overcrowded Hellhole and Churchill himself called the whole episode a deplorable and regrettable mistake. Nevertheless, in Australia Rechnitz was again interned for the duration of the war. (Our current policy of imprisoning men and women who flee persecution is older than it might seem.) On release, he taught briefly at the Brotherhood of St. Laurence training centre in Melbourne and then at St. John’s College, Morpeth, before he was taken up by the interim Warden of St.Paul’s, Maurice de Burgh Griffith, who appointed him resident tutor in Classics and German from the start of 1946.

The Pauline of that year noted that Rechnitz had also started to do valuable work in sorting and cataloguing the College libraries, or in other words the mass of books which had been stacked for some years in the Fellows’ Common Room, the Bone Room and elsewhere. Rechnitz divided the volumes into a Students’ Library and a Fellows’ Library. The Fellows Library was set up in the Fellows’ Common Room and its holdings were surprisingly numerous and valuable. Rechnitz was not only a man of unquenchable spirit, he was also the College’s first learned bibliophile. The rare and hitherto unnoticed publications which he unearthed included a Roman Missal printed in Bavaria in about 1480, a Legends of the Saints, from Cologne, 1485, and a volume of Canon Law from Lyon, 1517. Print itself (movable type) had been invented only a generation or two before these dates.

Rechnitz spent two years in College and he made a deep impact. His interest in languages was encyclopedic, and he saw beneath each language he studied into a world of spirituality and ideas. He saw all communities in that way, including the College itself, and his interest in Anglicanism was interwoven with his interest in the subtleties of English and Englishness. Maybe it is no coincidence that A.E. Housman’s famous work, The Shropshire Lad, contains verse rooted in English soil and tradition, as well as being democratic, romantic and melancholy. Rechnitz seems to have echoed this attitude.

The men at Paul’s appreciated Wilhelm Rechnitz. His valete in The Pauline noted with wide-eyed admiration that while the Doctor had been among them he had written various academic books about anything from Anglican churches to German primers plus a couple of novels (one of them a detective story), as well as poetry in English and German. He was a notable character. He was ready to talk with anyone, it said. He was full, of life, and will never be forgotten for his unrestrained laughter at a (recent) General Meeting … which disorganized things for a considerable time.

Rechnitz appreciated them too. He was credited with discovering in certain men artistic ability which neither they nor anybody else knew it existed [sic] and encouraging it in those who already suspected it did exist. For artistic read literary. In his first year, early in Trinity (second) Term, Rechnitz established the St. Paul’s College Literary Society, which was designed to draw out original writings by students, beginning with a meeting on the 14th of August in the Common Room. These were poetry-reading sessions, and good recitation, by the author or someone else, and were highly valued. Even at this early stage there were hopes of extending the Society beyond the College, so as to include the University, authors of the city, of the State and even of the Commonwealth. Rechnitz, or perhaps it was only his enthusiastic followers, aimed to make a mark on Australia.

Rechnitz’s main supporters hardly needed drawing out. In the previous year, Edward Manchester, a medical student, had been one of the editorial committee responsible for an obscene issue of Honi Soit (12 July). Another man, Max Thomas (Arts and Divinity), had edited the 1945 Pauline, and in it had published verse by fellow-students and Rechnitzians, Andrew Clayton (Law) and Jim Lance (Medicine), Clayton sometimes using the pseudonym Strepsiades (the anti-hero in Aristophanes’ The Clouds). Lance more modestly called himself L. In 1946 Manchester filled the Pauline’s editorial chair and Clayton and Lance were both on the committee, with Clayton taking over as editor in 1947. Clayton and Max Thomas seem to have been the student convenors of Rechnitz’s Society during 1946-47.

The Society focused, so Clayton said, on attempts in the style of New Verse. Poetry survives from this time written by Lance, Manchester, David Rutherford (Vet), Bill Moriarty (Science) and Terry Horne (Medicine). Moriarty’s Posterity? was probably one of the first to be performed at the Common Room meetings:

As slowly as the cheerless twilight falls

I gaze in vague uneasy fear

On mighty summer’s ruined glory;

The failing light might mourn the year.

And tearing out of the icy north,

The wind assaults the frozen soil

And howls thro’ broken limbs a dirge

To a thousand years of useless toil.

Above, the steely cloud and grey

And ragged the clouds in terror flying:

While the pallid moon looks down, timeless,

A dead world above the dying.

Whatever the quality of the poem, it might suggest that New Verse as the College understood it, had more to do with Romantic Englishness, or at least the northern hemisphere, than with the literary nationalism so far favoured among Paulines. The literary critic and poet Tom Inglis Moore, who had lived in the College as English tutor and Sub-Warden 1932-34, had helped the tone hitherto. John Russell Roland, who was to be a poet of some celebrity, had used the same style in his student verse, 1942-44.

Now, post-war, the College mood was devoid of nationalism. Now, it pondered ancient things caught up in the present – earth-bound eternity and existential helplessness in the passage of the years (Housman with a touch of Eliot, if such is possible). A new familiarity with Roman missals half a millennium old might have helped, but Rechnitz himself must have made some such impression. He arranged the program and chose the poems. As another example, take Dave Rutherford’s Stone Walls, one of the few such pieces that referred to living in College:

Sandstone walls, grey walls,

Darkened in the dust of time,

Stand firm in storms

Are softened by the rains,

And bleached in sunlight.

The enveloping ivy and green creepers

Hide the strength of man-made walls

And give them contours and shadows.

Shadows on the stones,

As clouds make shadows on the fields;

Friendly are these walls, green coated walks

Which enclose us in our sheltered life.

As with Moriarty’s Posterity? this poem was considered good enough for recycling some years later.

These authors were all Paul’s students, but by the Society’s second year by far the greater bulk of contributions came from beyond. Two students at Wesley College distinguished themselves: Bill Belson, who was unusually prolific, and Werner Stern, whose Elegy on a Dying Author was said to be the best item that year. It no longer survives, but another of Stern’s poems (Brother are You Coming?) shows the same preoccupation with the power of passing time:

Walk on

Your narrow strip of wet sand.

No matter how big your feet,

No matter how quiet your beat,

The waves will rise,

And smooth out your path;

And the road will be flat again

For those that follow.

It is not clear what happened to Stern – the road he walked himself is quite smoothed out – but Belson was afterwards well-known on British radio as a social psychologist. The only other poet named at this stage was Winsome Latter, who for some years had been deeply involved with the Jindyworobak school of poets, and who had a son nearly ready, as she hoped, for College. In Michaelmas (third) Term a recital of the group’s best work was held at the University, but poor acoustics limited success.

Rechnitz was one of those keen educators who argues almost instinctively with his peers and superiors. He and the new Warden, Felix Arnott, did not agree, and he departed late in 1947 for Torres Strait, to take charge of St. Paul’s Mission School on Moa, a school founded many years before by Henry Newton, a Pauline Bishop of New Guinea. He was to spend most of the rest of his life there, working on the translation and preservation of Indigenous culture, including music. He was ordained in the Anglican Church in 1954. His papers, which survive in the State Library of Queensland, are a detailed and extremely valuable record of the life of Torres Straight Islanders, as ever, interweaving language, culture and spiritual life. He lived for a time on Murray Island (Mer) and Eddie Mabo must have known him. Certainly Rechnitz’s work echoes in the High Court’s Mabo No. 2 judgment from 1992, where Indigenous mystery finds its fruitful counterpoint in European learning.

At the same time the Society also lost Clayton, Manchester, Moriarty and Thomas. Having fallen away towards