Fritz Hart and the `Celtic Twilight' In Australia

Literary Review, Fall, 2001 by Peter Tregear

The Australian who came of age after the war was over, however, found little to warm to in such rough transpositions. Graham McInnes, in his childhood reminiscences (Goodbye, Melbourne Town!), describes a performance of Hart's Deirdre of the Sorrows in the Melbourne Playhouse in the late 1920s as `all sorrows and no Deirdre.' For his generation, the modern age could still be the `great adventure.' At the very least the artist's proper response was to confront modernity rather than run from it. Celticism also came in for criticism for appealing to what was felt by many critics to be an aesthetic attitude that was unhealthily `feminised'; that is, irrational and ineffectual. In this respect a musical Celticism was doubly suspect, the traditional Anglo-Saxon perception of the role of music as mere social ornament had travelled to the Australian colonies by and large unchallenged. And there was also a truth about Celticism to be observed in the title `Celtic Twilight,' which Yeats gave to a collection of stories in 1893. Celticism as a movement was doomed to be nostalgia, appreciable only as an eternal retrospect, as an after-image without a source, and this was particularly true in country developing as rapidly as Australia. By the mid-1930s, even those looking for ways of expressing their relation to the Australian environment had moved on and began tentative attempts in appropriating indigenous myth, such as evidenced by the so-called Jindyworobak movement, (7) or searched for some other means of expression not so powerfully connected with the old world. Following the Second World War, Celticism in Australia had largely faded away.

Today Hart might therefore seem to exemplify the type of artist in Australia who, by identifying with an `Other' that lay without, politically on the fringes of Empire, and aesthetically in opposition to urban industrial modernism, thereby avoided the Other from within, that of the indigenous inhabitants. Celticism could from this perspective be seen as perhaps just another cultural expression of the legal doctrine of Terra nullius which had underwritten the white appropriation of aboriginal land. The gradual incorporation in recent years of artistic motifs drawn from the original aboriginal inhabitants into white Australian music, art, and literature have furthermore allowed Australia, in a way Celticism never could, not only to present more of an original and liberal face to the rest of the world, but also at the same time quietly preserve those more desirable `Celtic' notions of `pure creativity,' `spirituality,' and art as potentially transformatory. Reviving a Celtic-Australian opera today would, however, be both seen and heard by more than a few as emblematic of a culturally deficient past, reminding the listener that for many an immigrant Australia was, as Andrew Riemer once put it, `the awful emptiness of an empty world.' Was there really `no place but Ireland' as Synge declares in Deirdre of the Sorrows, be it poetic or otherwise?