Francis Webb and the 1960s

Abstract

After seven years in England, Francis Webb (1925- 1973) flew back to Australia in November 1960. While his English experience was a chequered one character- ized by various experiences of institutionalization, his final four years in the Norfolk region permitted him some freedom of movement and creative inspiration through the area's medieval roots, which for the poet were also ancestral, his great-grandfa- ther hailing from Yarmouth. In Francis Webb, Poet and Brother: Some of his Letters and Poetry (2001), his final letter from England prior to his yearned-for departure paints an idyllic scene:a traipse along empty amusement piers and sea-front, meeting only the few indomitable lovers and fishermen and seagulls; then fish and chips; and then, in an exqui- site, very old Catholic church, by accident a lovely Bene- diction-first time for over a year that I'd participated in this glorious ceremony. Up among the kids, my horrible voice sang lustily; a darling Sister smiled and handed me a hymn-book. It was heaven, (qtd. in Meere and Meere 148)Webb's return, while physically reconnecting him with his sup- port network of family and friends, played out in stark con- trast to the day-releases he enjoyed in Norfolk. This article traces Webb's physical and poetic return to Australia through biographical sources, including newly published accounts by his friend Sr. Pauline Fitz-Walter and his direct influence on two Generation of 68 luminaries, Bruce Beaver (1928-2004) and Robert Adamson (1943-). Though, as with most genera- tional nomenclature, this term (used here interchangeably with 68er) is amorphous and overtly Sydney-centric, it perfectly fits the amorphous and Sydney-centered nexus between Webb and the younger poets of the 1960s over whom he exerted the most immediate influence.Webb's account of his return in Francis Webb, Poet and Brother contains his trademark concern for others' affairs more than his own and self-depreciating humour about being locked up for the public good (Meere and Meere 152). Yet as his biographer Michael Griffith reconstructs it from the letters of strong Webb supporters David Campbell (1915-1979) and Vincent Buckley (1925-1988), the situation was a far more sobering one:After being picked up from the airport by Campbell him- self and one of the secretaries from the Prime Minister's Department (the Prime Minister [Robert Menzies] himself having written to the State Minister for Health requesting information on Webb's case), Webb was taken to St. John of God Hospital, Burwood, from where it was hoped he would go on to the hospital's country farm. Within a week, however, Webb had to be heavily tranquilized and taken off to Parramatta Psychiatric Hospital, that prison horror as Vincent Buckley was to refer to it. Webb was admitted on 10 November 1960. His admission papers describe him as WEBB: Francis Charles. Aet 35. Single. Labourer. R.C. So much for the poet who sang the historical epics of this country and who dedicated his songs to God [...] as Webb's letters over the next few years indicate, he was deeply morti- fied at this need for being hospitalised and the repeated rebuttal of his requests for freedom. (Griffith 254-55).Webb's time in Parramatta would lead to his celebrated Ward Two, possibly the first poetic sequence to feature an insider's view of mental illness in Australian literary history. Preceding Ward Two in his final collection The Ghost of the Cock (1964) is the shorter sequence Clouds, which juxtaposes Sydney department stores, pubs, teahouses and other images of 1960s modernity with his own sense of colonial imprisonment:As we bank into it, and all the giant sad pastClutches at me swimming through it: hereIs faith crumbling-here the engines of warIn sleek word and sad fresco of print,Landscapes broken apart; and here at lastIs home all undulant, banners hanging drearOr collapsing into chaos, burnt. …