Ray Ericksen

Ray Ericksen was attracted to a part of Australia I know quite well, having cared for land behind Apollo Bay for more than 40 years and chaired the Southern Otway Landcare Network for some of those years. Building in solitude is also something I also know something about. So, it's always interesting reading someone else's experience of inhabiting a place and seeking solitude.

There's a kind of formal yet warmly contrived naivety about Ray Ericksen's writing that encompasses acute observation, humour, and self-deprecation in a style that verges on being self-congratulatory.

He seems like a gentle man who had the courage to take charge of his former life when he was an academic and then Assistant Dean in the Arts Faculty at Melbourne University. He left academia, bought a Land Rover and explored Central Australia. This trip (and life change) became a book in West of Centre (1972 and is now on my to read list). Cape Solitary (Cape Solitary (1975) for which he won the 1976 National Book Council Award for Australian Literature, is about looking for a place to write about explorer Earnest Giles and realise, in solitude, an imagined way of life as a writer/recluse.

Despite his courage, Ray Ericksen emerges as a somewhat fearful man who manages to triumph over many imagined threats (cattle rustlers, errant cattle, disorientation and winds) that are, of course, no less real than if they were real. He repeatedly refers to the period of solitude in his Otway hut as an experiment but by the end of his two-year stay he seems to have sunk into a form of depression that may well have begun before he arrived.

I recognised some of the effects of prolonged loneliness: lethargy, lack of resolve and withdrawal; as he grapples with coming to terms with his self-imposed solitude on top of a windy hill. I suspect that his choice of site (exposed and amongst cattle) contributed to his difficulties. If he had chosen to be in a more natural setting (less agricultural) surrounded by wildlife, his experience may have been different.

There’s much to say about this book: his lack of craftsmanship and aesthetics; accurate description of the Apollo Bay Show, which is still much the same today; his excursion into the life of the reclusive Jim Andrews; and his reflections on solitude and land use. But although he paints a vivid picture of the Farriers and the quiet tragedy of Dot. This is a curiously self-absorbed book that ends in defeat and the suburbanisation of a man who appears to want a deeper connection with place.

The male Farriers were true sons of the Australian past. Locked into the utility consciousness which has determined so much of Australian history, they could see no value in land that had not been cleared of scrub, fenced, and put to productive us in growing crops or grazing sheep and cattle.

I’d like to know more about Ray Ericksen but there is scant information available. Apparently, He was a contributor to Biographers at Work (ed. James Walter and Raija Nugent, The Institute for Modern Biography, Griffith University, 1984) as well as Overland. He left a number of unpublished works of fiction. He had married Margaret Boardman in 1948, and though their marriage was dissolved they remained neighbours and close friends until his death on 1 January 1998.… (mehr)