Anna Rutherford |
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Academic, publisher, editor Anna Rutherford was born and educated in Newcastle. After the award of an A Mus A (piano) from the New South Wales Conservatorium she trained at Newcastle Teachers' College, graduating in 1952. She taught music and physical education at high schools in Newcastle and the Hunter region, studying at night. The top student of the year in English, History and Philosophy, she was the first student to graduate from the University of Newcastle with first-class honours in English. As a young Australian arriving in London in the 1950s, she lived in “Kangaroo Valley”, and came to know many other immigrant 'colonials' (an English term she despised). The Caribbean Artists' Movement Centre was nearby, and West Indian writers Andrew Salkey, Sam Selvon, John La Rose and George Lamming all became a good friend. In 1966 she accepted a lectureship in Commonwealth literature at the University of Aarhus, in Denmark. Her distinguished forerunner there, Greta Hort, had previously served as the first principal of The Melbourne University's Women's College, and she had a fondness for Australian style and character. An enthusiastic sportswoman - holder of the Royal Life Saving Board's Examiner's Medal - Anna arrived in Denmark festooned, not with books, but with sporting equipment. Anna expanded Hort's course in Commonwealth Literature at Aarhus, raising it to an equal footing with British and American Literature. Then she looked to the rest of Europe. She founded the first regional association of EACLALS - the European Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Study (EACLALS) and she convened its first conference (in Aarhus in 1971). For twenty-five years, she was the 'shaping spirit' of Commonwealth Literary Studies in Europe. She introduced the Commonwealth Newsletter, and later expanded that into the highly influential international arts journal, Kunapipi. It was one of the first and still one of the best international forums for The presentation and discussion of Commonwealth - now more commonly 'Postcolonial' - Literature. Through it, she brought many 'new' writers to international attention. Many enjoyed a considerable readership in their own countries; but beyond they were unknown, marginalised by the unequal power relations of international publishing. Alongside fiction and poetry, she published interviews with these writers and scholarly articles about their work, which assisted in a major way to legitimise serious interest in The 'new' literatures (as they were then called). Anna poured much of her life and her savings into her own publishing house, Dangaroo Press, which gave many writers their first international audience. Her generosity was as legendary as her energy, passion and determination. She was famously proud of the covers of her books, and of the journal. Visually stunning, they were drawn from artists who she befriended and whose works she also championed internationally. Visitors to the apartment she decorated when, in 1996, she resettled in Australia, have been delighted to discover the originals on the walls, with her beloved Nobby's Beach serving as their natural background. The small cottage in the Danish countryside that she had shared for many years with former partner and life-long friend, Kirsten Holst Petersen, had been an exciting destination for writers and literary scholars from around the world. For Australians travelling in southern university vacations, The northern winter meant that the track to the house was impassable. Anna would park her car in the farm courtyard by the main road; and she and her guests, invariably weighed down with supplies, then had to stumble across the frozen fields in almost complete darkness. They would frequently lose their bearings and have to kneel down to sight the house against the sky so as not to be marooned in a waste of snow. But Anna clung fiercely to her Australian roots, perhaps the more so for her spending half of her life abroad, and these experiences only confirmed her sense that, even in Denmark, she could live a life reminiscent of the Australian bush. As a friend and fellow scholar Gareth Griffiths recently observed, her view of Australia was the opposite of chauvinist. It was broad and tolerant. 'Her Australia was one which reached out to embrace its place in a world of differences which she savoured and nurtured through her publications.' The place where she first learned the inequities of privilege was the proudly working class Newcastle suburb of Mayfield, where Depression and wartime hardship drew a sharp line between the Haves and Have-nots. She never forgot the lesson, and her life's dedication to literature was inspired by its strongly humanitarian ideal. She helped many people, she changed many lives, and many writers and artists around the world owe her their gratitude. In 1981 Anna was elected International Chairperson of EACLALS, the only woman to hold the position thus far. For a number of years she chaired both the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. In 1996 the University of Gothenberg awarded her an honorary doctorate. In his eulogy, the poet Les Murray declared that Australia owes Anna Rutherford its tribute. Certainly no one ever did more to introduce Australian Literature to Europe. In 1999 the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conferred on her its A.A. Phillips Gold medal for services to Australian Literature. But the same kind of award could equally well have been given for her services to Indian, Caribbean, African, Singaporean, Canadian and New Zealand literatures. The literary communities of all those places are mourning her loss. 'The West Indies loves you and misses you,' writes David Dabydeen, poet, novelist, scholar. Her Australian friends, however, suspect that what she most enjoyed was the one she received at an ASAL conference at Armidale at 1986: the Frank Moorhouse Perpetual Trophy for Ballroom Dancing! We will never forget her wit, her warmth, her mischievous cackle and her completely infectious intellectual excitement. As the English literary critic Alistair Niven, has written, 'Anna truly was a life force, and it is impossible to believe that it has been extinguished.' Russell McDougall and Robert Sellick (Many thanks to Russell McDougall for sending us this copy of an Australian tribute to Anna) Source: A-AASA Newsletter Feb 2001 < < < main > > > |
