Ernest Briggs
Brisbane: Ernest Briggs, 1967.

The unpublished childhood memoir of Australian poet, broadcaster, and critic Ernest Briggs (1905-1967), prepared in Brisbane in 1967, the year of his death from myocardial infarction. The typescript offers a vivid first-hand account of early 20th-century life in rural New South Wales, particularly around Marsden Park and Riverstone, then bush settlements on Sydney’s north-western fringe. Laced with his verse and literary flourishes, Briggs recalls his early years in a cottage at Marsden Park, the death of his mother when he was three, and the following three years spent at the Ashfield Infants’ Home under the care of Matron Rebecca Marston. Returning home at six, a frail child excused from school by doctor’s order, he spent his days in his father’s bootmaking workshop at Riverstone or exploring the surrounding bush. Family reminiscences extend further back: his father’s recollections of childhood in Ballarat and Clunes, Victoria, and colonial family correspondence from the early to mid-nineteenth century, marking Briggs as a fifth-generation Australian. The memoir also recounts his reluctant return to schooling, the regular corporal punishment, and his growing sense of creative independence. Domestic scenes reveal the artistic atmosphere that shaped his imagination: “Once when a visitor had said, ‘Quite an art-showing you’ve got here, Charlie,’ my father walked around the room saying, ‘It comes of mixing with artists in my younger days … This is a Burket-Foster; here are a couple by the noted water-colourist Miss Allingham … this is by Uncle Tom Roberts, the first man in Australia to paint extensive oils…” Briggs also recalls excursions with his father into Sydney on public holidays, evocative tours of the city’s landmarks and recollections of its colonial past, as well as chance encounters with actress Nellie Stewart and, later, Dame Nellie Melba during his brief employment as a messenger-boy, moments that helped form his artistic sensibility. Other recollections include trips to Campbelltown, Windsor, Richmond, and Camperdown Cemetery, each described with a historian’s eye and a poet’s nostalgia. A richly detailed and intimate account of childhood, environment, and creative formation, this unpublished typescript provides valuable insight into Briggs’s literary development and into everyday colonial heritage in early twentieth-century New South Wales.