Alice Guerin Crist

Her first book of Poetry named ‘When Rody came to Ironbark’ was published in 1927 in Sydney, Australia. Up until this point in her life she had some of her poetry published in the ‘Catholic Advocate’ in Brisbane and her following increased with eagerness as they looked forward to her weekly contributions of verse. Feedback received from her readers made it quite apparent that they wanted her poetry in a more permanent form.

Through her connection with the Dean of Nudgee College in Brisbane he was able to persuade her to make her work available to a much wider audience. After agreeing to do this she asked Mr D. G. Purton (Dean) to choose the selection on her behalf, being a lady of modesty he agreed to do this. He felt quite confident that her poetry would meet ‘with a more than favourable reception’

Her verse interpreted the life and character of the pioneers of Australia, having a special appeal to the Irish migrants of Australia. Alice seemed to be under the spell of the bush, and the magic of the wattle time.

As a teacher and the wife of a settler she knew every phase of Australian pioneering. She is, however at her best when drawing word pictures of her native Ireland whose warmth of heart and flashes of humour she is able to share with the reader in just a few strokes of narrative.

Mr D G Purton wrote in his Foreword (quote “There is something else in Mrs. Crist’s poetry: an elusive note, which seems to make her akin to the fairies that inhabit the storm beaten shores of County Clare”

In her ballads we find power, sincerity, humour and strength and in her lyrics a Celtic imagery, spiritual journey perhaps.

We leave you, the reader to touch on her poetry, to perhaps experience the Australian bush from a woman’s perspective or to take a short trip to Ireland, the homeland of this incredible lady".

The poems listed are from her first book of poetry. Any subsequent books are yet to be located. ( @ 8th April 2003)

Acknowledgment to the Dean of Nudgee College Brisbane Queensland

Mr. D G Purton (1927) for the information available from the foreword to

Mrs Crist’s ‘When Rody came to Ironbark”

Sundance- Old Poetry Researcher

The following is written by Mrs. Dimity Dornan, grandaughter of Alice Guerin Crist - all copyright belongs to the author as is added with permission from Mrs. Dornan.

ALICE WITH EYES A’SHINE’

Seedlings of an Irish-Australian Childhood

The story of Alice Guerin Crist, [1876-1941]

Dimity Dornan AM

Published Church Archivist’s Press, 1998p.

One of my earliest memories is of visits to Toowoomba. My childish senses were impressed with air so cold it made my cheeks scald pink, camphor laurel leaves crunchy underfoot or scented on the tree, delicate poppies glowing in a garden bed of rich soil, and on the wall of my grandfather’s house, a picture of a mysterious lady.

The lady looked out of her frame and her eyes looked into mine. They were dark eyes, pansy-soft, and half closed as if she was imagining something delightful while the tiresome photographer manipulated his equipment. She looked special in her fur coat, and she had a fresh rose pinned on her shoulder. Beside her, on the wall were two framed silver and gold medals on faded coloured ribbons.

I remember standing in the spacious living room where the picture hung, wondering why the room was so big, and the dining table so long, and asking who the lady was. Imagine my delight at finding the mysterious lady actually belonged to me, and was my own grandmother!

Fifty years later, “Alice With Eyes A’Shine”was born out of my child-like pride and curiosity, and later the need to investigate myself through the secrets behind those mysterious eyes.

Dimity Dornan

My need to search for Alice started very early in my life when, at 7 years old, I was given a volume of her poems, intriguingly entitled “When Rody Came To Ironbark”. It soon became apparent to me that my mysterious lady was a well-known writer. It was only as an adult that I learned of the extent of her talent as I delved into the contents of Alice’s own tin trunk, stuffed full of her works, both published and unpublished, and all lovingly saved as if she knew someone would want to know her at a later date.

The seeds of her formation were sown on Irish soil, in County Clare “West of Fanny O’Dea’s”, a local inn that was used as a landmark in 1876. Alice’s father, Patrick was a feisty school teacher with classical training and a propensity to align himself secretly with the Land League. As school teachers were not allowed to have political leanings, this affiliation initiated his hasty exit from Ireland with his wife, Winnifred , “a delicate little lady of the old school”, as well as two year old Alice and her baby sister Nancy.

Patrick Guerin was to be among the vanguard of Queensland’s earliest teachers, and was posted to Tent Hill, outside of Gatton, to a tiny bush school. Here, Alice followed her father’s lead in becoming whole-heartedly enamoured of her life in the new land, unlike her mother, who clung to the old ways. Winnifred lost her first-born son just a few months after arriving, and found it hard to make friends among the rough and ready characters who peopled their colonial life. However her eldest daughter learned to revere the early pioneers as well as the Irish heroes her father read about to her. Alice stored up all the details of her life in what she was to later call her “patch-work rag-bag of a mind” and later recalled them in her writings. Large local corroborees of the fine, strong aborigines living in the area were to influence her positively, and the birth of a new baby brother at the bush schoolmaster’s house, where the cracks in the walls were an unhealthy two inches wide, caused much joy and anxiety for the young family.

In 1880, Patrick was transferred to Cleveland, to a school on the spit between North Street and Shore Street, with Frances Bigge’s Grand View Hotel on one side and St Paul’s Anglican church on the other. Behind the school, on the beach was an aboriginal camp, where Winnifred and her daughter were appalled to see the ravages of the twin white man curses, drink and disease, much in evidence. Winnifred was greatly in sympathy with them, and showed many kindnesses which Alice remembered. Alice started her formal schooling here, and her father encouraged her to use her already well developed writing skills to record life as she saw it, a habit that was to last a lifetime. For the first time in Australia she was able to attend Catholic services with her family and start her music training.

At seven years of age the family was posted to Coomera, and the school at this river settlement posed new challenges for Patrick. His pupils, mostly the offspring of rough timbergetters, attended irregularly and their presence at school was further determined by the status of the river. Alice became a pupil-teacher at an early age in order to assist her father to keep the school grades up at a time of repeated floods and hardship. Writing now became a serious pleasure, as schoolwork and teaching filled her days. At 11 years she wrote and published “Afterglow”, a poem wise beyond her years.

Afterglow

A magic wrought of dying dreams,

A wizard light that creeps and glows,

Painting grey hills and sluggish streams

In tints of gold and rose:

Staining with fire the cherry-snow,

Lighting our hearts with sudden flame,

As if the love of long ago,

Back from its ashes came.

Rose-flushed and radiant everything!

And joy and hope are born anew;

Even the darting swallow's wing

Has caught its glowing hue.

Ah! swift it dies from hill and plain...

Be wise, dear heart, and let me go;

Not Love that lit our hearts again -

Only its afterglow!



She became famous as a writer while still in her teens, often appearing on the same page of the Bulletin as her mentor and pen-friend, Mary Gilmore. However Patrick’s classical bent and education methods proved too revolutionary for the local people, and he was removed from his post and the family moved to Douglas in the Crow’s Nest area. This was the start of a life-time association with the Darling Downs for Alice.

Life was hard after the devastation of flood and fire, and the economy was poor. Alice’s wage as a pupil-teacher was cut, as was that of her two younger pupil-teacher brothers, and teachers were forced to sell off school equipment after school to make ends meet. Alice knew that it was time to stand on her own feet and applied for her teacher’s certificate, subsequently being transferred to the Blackall Range and then West Haldon, again in the Gatton area. Following a pivotal point in her teaching career, she returned home and married Joseph Christ, a self-educated and clever German settler who was the type of man that could “turn his hand to anything”. Alice had always told her family that the poem, “Himself” had special significance for them both.

Himself

Last night, when I was listenin’

Alone, to wind and rain,

He took the chair beside me,

Himself - come home again.

His kind blue eyes were smilin’

Beneath his thatch of grey,

He laid his hand on my hand,

The ould sweetheartin’ way.

I pressed my cheek upon it,

Remembering bitterly

The times he faced his daily toil

Without one smile from me.

And yet, his meals were always good,

His clothes well kept and clean,

The neighbours, sure, will tell you,

The splendid wife I’ve been.

But in Life’s stress and struggle,

We somehow, grew apart,

You know these Irish mothers,

'Tis “the childer” has their heart.

And he grew grim, and close-lipped,

And harder, day by day,

Poor man - too tired for laughter,

Too worried to be gay.

But - how his care enclosed us,

For all he was so grim,

The very rafters of our home

Were cut and laid by him.

And I, that might have cheered him,

The bitter words I said,

Oh! God, that we remember,

Only when they are dead.

But now - my arms were round him,

The room seemed full of flowers,

And Youth came back and sunshine,

That glorious time was ours.

The firelight flamed and flickered,

The embers fell apart,

I woke to empty silence,

With sorrow at my heart.

The wild winds brought the morning,

The dawn was red and chill,

And Himself was lyin’ sleepin’

In the graveyard on the hill!

Alice reared her three daughters, Dorothy [later Sr M Julian of the Sisters of Mercy] , Billie [ later Winnifred Childs] and Hazel [later Sr Brendan of the Daughters of Charity].

When Alice was 37 years old, well knowing the educational restrictions of a bush school, she moved the family to Toowoomba for the sake of the girl’s schooling. My father Dick and his brother Terry were born. My father contracted polio at age two, but thanks to the work of Sr Kenny, he recovered after some years. With the children at school , Alice resumed her writing career at age 40. Among her first works were tributes to the gallant men fighting for Australia in World War 1, including her favourite youngest brother Felician, who was later killed in action in France. This event was to trigger a life-long dread of war and an annual series of Anzac day poems published in the Toowoomba Chronicle for many years to come. Jo and Alice legally changed their family name to Crist at this time to avoid the obvious comments and because of anti-German feeling current in Australia.

Six years later, Alice found her literary niche, a contract with the Catholic Advocate in Brisbane. With the blessing of her husband, she wrote profusely, and her subjects were life and events in South-East Queensland at the turn of the century. In 1927 she turned out 95 poems, short stories and serial instalments, a rate of production that was to ease only a little in the next 12 years. The editor chose them particularly for their faithful reproduction of life and also for their Irish-Catholic themes.

Two major factors contributed to her success, the first being her use of Irish-Australian themes at a time when the motor car and cinema were causing a decline in the Irish Catholic parishioners at church. Alice helped to keep the faithful and not so faithful mindful of their religious roots. Alice has been named by prominent historian ,Patrick O’Farrel as the “Queensland counterpart of Fr John O’Brien”, of “Around the Boree Log” fame.

The second reason for her success as a writer is her vivid description of bush characters at a time when Australians romanticised the bush life, This was because two thirds of the population lived in cities and, at the onset of the depression in 1893, people turned to idealise and draw comfort from the “simpler life”.

Dame Mary Gilmore once described Alice as “Queensland’s singer of graceful songs”. Her critics professed that she was able to create in the written word the simplicity, magic and wonder of childhood, and the range of her inspiration was as broad as her life experiences. She set herself among the forerunners of feminism by fulfilling her literary ambitions at a time when higher education for women was considered an evil, let alone the pursuing of a career being an option for a married woman.

I found in Alice’s works not only a human woman with faults as well as her talents and gifts, but also a sense of security and peace in an era of ever-changing technology. However I feel that Alice would have approved of the information age with her love of learning. Most particularly I feel she would have approved of my life work of teaching children who are deaf and hearing impaired to speak.

Alice Guerin Crist’s legacy can be found not only in her works, particularly those for children, but in the work of her family, particularly Dorothy, who became the founding principal of Macauley College, later the Australian Catholic University. Hazel became the first European woman to be honoured by being preceded to her grave by the aboriginal flag because of her work with mothers and babies on aboriginal settlements. Both Alice and her mother would have been proud.

Finally I would like to tell the story of how Alice’s biography came to be named “Alice With Eyes A’Shine”. I was sitting in a bunker during a bomb scare at the Jordan-Israeli border with my husband Peter some years back. We were on a tour of the Middle East, following “in the footsteps of the prophets”. As I kept my head down and tried to appreciate where I was, the beauty of the blue Star of David flag, hanging against the glaring blue sky of the turbulent land that is Israel, moved me. I thought about seeing, for the first time, the land where my father fought in during WW11. I remembered how his mother, Alice had hated war and the fact that she died before he returned home. I tried to pass the time by writing down the words of a poem she had written to him on receiving one of his letters fresh from the battle. It is a poem which reveals much of my fey little grandmother, and when I came to write down the last line, I knew that Alice’s works would live again.

A Letter From Palestine

A letter from “The East” it came today,
And all the house is lightened of its gloom:
A sun-browned desert wind through every room
Eddies, and bring strange scents of old bazaare;
Of orange-groves beneath the dreaming stars
O’er far Jerusalem. Through these ordered rooms
Where poppies glow and pale narcissi blooms
Nod in tall vases, sings the desert breeze
Telling of brown battalion overseas.
Khaki-clad soldiers, singing as they go
Along the road to Gaza, and we know
The very breath of freedom’s in the air
With their gay boast, “Australia will be there”
Mateship and courage, loyalty and truth
The very essence of Australian youth!
We have no fears! serene in faith we pray
For those dear gallant lads so far away.
AND ONE SMALL WOMAN WALKS WITH EYES A-SHINE
BECAUSE A LETTER CAME - FROM PALESTINE!

With grateful thanks to Mrs. Dimity Dornan-Grandaughter of Mrs. Crist & Mr D G Purton Dean of Nudgee College.1921