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Although he had married in 1917, it was not a success and, as Macartney put it, his appointment to the Territory
gave the opportunity for a ‘clean break’. (He eventually married again, but not until 1947). He was a man who
largely kept to himself, few having his literary interests. At times, he got ‘dreadfully depressed’ away from ‘all the
other associations to which I rightly belong and for which there is no substitute here’. For the most part, he lived
alone in a large bungalow that was close to the sea in the gully between what was then Fort Hill and the hill on
which Government House stands. It had long been the home of senior government servants. At times, he ate at the
local hotels but in November 1928, he noted that he was preparing his own meals ‘because the grub at the hotels
is vile’. At night, he had his gramophone for company, as music was another major interest. He made a life-long
friend of Judge R I D Mallam, who left him his entire estate when he died in 1954. In his turn, Macartney
published a booklet, entitled A Noticeable Man, about his friend.
During his years in the Territory Macartney kept in touch with the Melbourne literary scene. Among his
correspondents was Nettie Palmer and 16 of his letters written from Darwin to her survive. He acted as town
librarian and endeavoured to order books which would educate the literary tastes of the borrowers, though as he
was to say to Nettie Palmer: ‘There are only 25 subscribers, but we get a Government subsidy, and have about
30 Pounds a year to spend on books. I have the choosing of these, and have to make concessions to “popular”
taste, but manage to get a good proportion of good books. The selection is more or less restricted to fiction, with
occasional books of travel, biography etc., for I haven’t yet thought it discreet to introduce poetry or plays, though
we have the usual standard volumes of the former... In odd moments I’m going through the shelves, weeding
out old books no longer fit for circulation, and re-numbering and re-cataloguing the lot—between two and three
thousand altogether, so it’s a long job’.
There is a long history of amateur dramatics in Darwin and in 1926, Macartney produced a play. Nettie Palmer
was told ‘the show went as well as I could have wished but, oh the work I had to put into it. I gave my little
company to understand at the beginning that, if at the end of our rehearsals the performance was not up to a good
enough standard, I would not go onto public performance. But they really did well, and our solitary lady (who,
unfortunately is leaving Darwin) was a treasure in her part’. Macartney’s comment that his group ‘died with its
only effort’ may well have been a reflection on him!
Physically he appears to have been a tall, rather spare man who went bald early in life. Although generally
he liked the Northern Territory, his time here was very much a means to an end. The positions he held were well
paying and he hoped would lead to some measure of financial independence so that he could continue his writing
career. But the pressure of his duties gave him little time to write and at times he felt no inclination to do so.
Macartney was later to say that for half a lifetime he was obliged to do other things for a living but that writing
was always his main purpose. After he inherited Mallam’s estate, which included not only money but also a large
quantity of books and household china, his money worries were largely behind him.
In his later years, Macartney had an influential career as a literary commentator. He was relentlessly critical
about the popular ‘landscape’ school of writing which became popular in the 1920s and 1930s and which depicted
the outback adventurous lifestyle. No doubt owing to his experiences in the Northern Territory, he saw himself as
cultural arbiter of Australian literature, particularly material set in the north of Australia. He took over reviewing
the Australian books in the influential Melbourne literary journal All About Books after Vance and Nettie Palmer
went overseas. He ruthlessly demolished such writers as Francis Birtles, William Hatfield and Michael Terry for
their lack of plot, wooden descriptions and inadequate literary style. He maintained this role cheerfully throughout
his career and commented acidly in 1969 of Rex Ingamells’ poetry, ‘here you have a people whose habits belong
to a bygone stage of evolution, the Stone Age, and to imply, for instance, that there is a musical quality in their
songs, which are often prettified, that their legends are as you see them in most books, continuous and coherent,
when as a matter of face the whole of the primitive mentality has nothing of that precision... this was only a kind
of literary playing Indians’. His view in 1931, as he wrote to Nettie Palmer, was that there was a ‘tendency, which
I myself have noticed among bushmen, to want to seem more familiar with the ways and minds of the blacks than
they really are or could be’.
But Macartney also wrote about the north. Something for Tokens was published in 1922 and A Sweep of Lute
Strings in 1929, both written when he was resident and during these years, other poems were published in the
Bulletin, its Red Page then being very influential. Hard Light and Other Verses was published in 1934 soon after
he had left the Territory. In his autobiography Proof Against Failure published in 1967 Macartney described his
impressions of the Northern Territory between 1921 and 1933 as a chronological narrative. Clearly, in retrospect,
those years were simply an interlude in his life and his memories later softened his 1929 view that ‘I have seen
some elephants which have more understanding, and more discretion and intelligence, than any kind of people I
have met’. This was a quote from a book he was then reading, but as he said to Nettie Palmer, ‘I am pleased to give
this a local application without the same zoological restriction’. The venom is missing in the autobiography.
The painter Margaret Preston was said to have been influenced by her association with Frederick Macartney.
He died in 1980.
H de Berg, interview, 25 November 1969, No 442, Canberra, National Library of Australia; M Dewar, ‘In Search of the “Never Never”’, PhD
Thesis, Northern Territory University, 1993; F T Macartney, Hard Light and Other Verses, 1934, All About Books, 1935–1938, A Noticeable
Man, 1957, Proof Against Failure, 1967; Northern Standard, 20 October 1936; Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 18 December 1925;
Palmer collection, MS1174/1/2419–383, National Library, Canberra (courtesy P Elder); Who’s Who in Australia, 1955; W H Wilde, J Hooton
& B Andrews (eds), Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, 1985.
HELEN J WILSON, Vol 3.