Straightshooter: Autobiographical Stories

By TAG Hungerford, Fremantle: FACP, 2003, 606 pages, paperback, $29.95. Reviewed by Nathanael O'Reilly in the April 2004 issue.

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Bearing the sub-title Autobiographical Stories, Straightshooter combines Hungerford's three short story collections, Stories from Suburban Road (1983), A Knockabout with a Slouch Hat (1985), and Red Rover All Over (1986). Fremantle Arts Centre Press, the original publisher of the collections, has reissued them in a single volume, perhaps to capitalise on Hungerford's success in 2002, when he received the Patrick White Award. Read together, Hungerford's collections constitute an impressive body of work, functioning as a discontinuous narrative providing a detailed and fascinating record of a long and remarkable life (Hungerford will be ninety next year).

Stories from Suburban Road contains sixteen stories, beginning with Hungerford's childhood in South Perth during the 1920s and concluding with the start of World War Two in 1939. The first twelve stories pertain to events Hungerford experienced before the age of thirteen; the way he tells it, his childhood was a happy one spent largely outdoors in an eternal summer. When he is not studying under the watchful eye of nuns or completing a plethora of daily chores, Tom spends his days hunting for birds' eggs, fishing, swimming, breaking into the zoo, or stealing from the 'Chinamen's gardens', usually with his mate Ernie. Although the Hungerfords are Protestants, Tom attends St Joseph's Convent. 'The Battle of Barney's Hill' recounts a fight between the kids from the convent and South Perth State School, where Tom's older brother Mickey is a pupil. The story serves as a vehicle to describe both the differences between the Catholics and the Protestants and the sibling rivalry between Tom and Mickey.

The childhood depicted in Stories from Suburban Road shares many similarities with the modern Australian childhood; however, it is the differences that make Hungerford's childhood so enjoyable to read about. He writes of a time when horses and cows were common backyard animals, daily chores included 'cutting up another stack of paper squares from the West Australian for the dunny', seeing a car was an event, and most roads were unpaved. For many readers, Hungerford's stories will provide not only a description of his childhood, but a fair approximation of their grandparents' or great-grandparents' childhood. After leaving school in his teens, Hungerford took a job in the linotype department at the Daily News, where he worked until the outbreak of World War Two, described in 'The Day it All Ended'. While spending the weekend at Scarborough Beach, Tom and his friends sit around the wireless and listen to Menzies announce that Australia is at war. Hungerford notes that two of his mates won't survive the war; it is a fitting and sobering end to both the story and the collection.

A Knockabout with a Slouch Hat contains twelve stories, covering the period from 1942 to 1951. 'Boots, Boots, Boots' concerns army training at Northam, where Hungerford introduces Ham, a green young soldier who becomes Tom's closest war-time companion. 'Going Back, Say the Wheels' is a wonderful tale about travelling by train from Adelaide en route to Darwin, depicting two-up games and rabbit hunts. Tom and Ham serve together as commandos in Bougainville behind Japanese lines; 'A Splash of Scarlet' focuses on a memorable exploit with their three 'kanaka' assistants, the capture of a Japanese soldier. Unlike many writers, Hungerford wisely avoids the glorification of war, simply portraying the events realistically. With characteristic understatement, he describes the sudden end to the war: 'The Yanks had split an atom and dropped it on a place called Hiroshima, in Japan, and it looked like it might end the war'.

Finding himself unexpectedly unemployed, Hungerford joined the British Commonwealth Occupation Force and travelled to Japan, where he spent a year, described in 'Tourist with Haiku' and 'A Sort of Grocer'. After returning to Australia, Hungerford took a job in Canberra at the Australian War Memorial in June 1948. While in Canberra, Hungerford wrote Sowers of the Wind, which won the Sydney Morning Herald Literary Competition, and The Ridge and The River. Both novels were accepted for publication by Angus and Robertson. Hungerford describes his contracts with the publisher as 'perfect demonstrations of how to screw a writer out of everything but the window' (p. 301). 'A Sort of Boswell' recounts Hungerford's three week tenure as former Prime Minister Billy Hughes' one hundred and twenty-third press secretary, often with hilarious and scathing descriptions of the 'Little Digger': 'W M H was cold as sea ice, vain as a peacock, cruel as a butcherbird, sly as a weasel and mean as catshit' (p. 317). The collection's final story, 'My Turn in the Barrel', concerns Hungerford's time at the Eastlake migrant camp, where he washed dishes and cleaned toilets while gathering material for a novel, Riverslake, about recent European immigrants.

The final collection in Straightshooter, Red Rover All Over, contains just seven stories, although they are longer and less tightly structured than those in the first two collections. 'Long Before Now' finds Hungerford looking back from the mid-1980s on his life, especially his childhood, meandering through observations about birds, an eccentric neighbour, the pleasures of summertime, and reminiscences of his mother. 'Red Rover All Over' focuses on Hungerford's time as a journalist for the Australian News and Information Bureau, a job which literally took him to all corners of the country, and even to Antarctica for six months (detailed in 'The Land Beyond The Ice'), perhaps the most interesting of his adventures. After covering the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, Hungerford was posted to New York, where he spent four years, covered in 'Give My Regards to Broadway'. Hungerford's descriptions of America contain a few glaring factual errors, such as incorrectly naming the state of New Jersey as one of the five boroughs of New York, and claiming that Lake Tahoe is in Colorado.

Red Rover All Over contains a lot of material that could be cut, as it serves no apparent purpose. On several occasions Hungerford admits that he forgets details, an admission which does not exactly inspire confidence in the reader, especially when coupled with knowledge of the aforementioned inaccuracies. Another troubling aspect about Hungerford's writing in general is his tendency towards self-promotion: he constantly reminds readers of his past literary successes. Overall, however, Straightshooter is a wonderful collection of stories that enrich the reader through beautiful language, stunning details, and unforgettable similes. The sheer variety of Hungerford's experiences, the breadth of his travels, and his portrayal of an Australia that has in many ways ceased to exist, makes reading his work a thoroughly rewarding experience.

Citation

• Nathanael O'Reilly. 'Review: Straightshooter: Autobiographical Stories by TAG Hungerford' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), April 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• This single volume combines three classics from the grand old man of Australian writing: Stories from Suburban Road, A Knockabout with a Slouch Hat and Red Rover All Over.
  
  Packed with superb storytelling, this collection traces TAG Hungerford's childhood and adolescence in South Perth, his experiences during the immediately following the second world war, and finally his recollections of the post-war years, from 1952 to 1986, in places as diverse as Beijing, Macau, Manhattan and Antarctica.
  
  Hungerford does much more than recapture the past. Full of humour and life, these are also creative works of the first order. TAG Hungerford received the Patrick White Award in 2002 for his contribution to Australian literature.

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