The Morality of Gentlemen

by Amanda Lohrey

A true classic, The Morality of Gentlemen was first published in 1984. It is one of a few great political novels ever written by an Australian about Australia political conditions. Editor of Overland, Ian Syson who writes the introduction to this publication says that it is ‘the book that Frank Hardy spent his life trying to write.’The author Amanda Lohrey is one of Australia’s leading novelists and social commentators. She grew up the daughter of a waterside worker and calls on the semantic tendrils of this early experience in this authentic literary masterpiece. In The Morality of Gentlemen Amanda Lohrey uses a writing technique that derives as much from the great Dos Passos as it does from the German playwright Brecht. With the skill of a true artist she has created a full-blooded political narrative that is gripping to read and has the sweep, colour and ambition we usually associated with the great European writers of the twentieth century.The Morality of Gentlemen is a unique Australian history as relevant today as it was when first published in the 1980s. It tell a story from within the perspective of working class culture of intelligent, ironic and sophisticated men and women dealing with the timeless challenge of oppression by the rich and the political Right.

Genres: Australia, Fiction

Paperback

First published February 1, 1985

About the author

Amanda Lohrey is a novelist and essayist. She was educated at the University of Tasmania and Cambridge. She lectured in Writing and Textual Studies at the Sydney University of Technology (1988-1994), and since 2002 at the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

My reading of Amanda Lohrey's debut novel The Morality of Gentlemen (1984) was prompted by the arrival of another book chez moi: Julieanne Lamond's Lohrey, published under the prestigious Miegunyah Press imprint from Melbourne University Press, is the first in a series called Contemporary Australian Writers, and is a 'guide to the world of Amanda Lohrey's fiction. I was up to page 4 when an intriguing reference to The Morality of Gentlemen sent me to retrieve it from the TBR...

Lohrey's novel is, as Ian Syson says in the Introduction, a bit of a rarity in contemporary Australian fiction.  It is a working class novel: a political/industrial novel about the lives of a group of workers during a long lockout.  

#StayWithMeHere... this is a most enjoyable novel. There are lots of reasons why it is such a pleasure to read...

The Morality of Gentleman purports in part to be research notes of a lofty academic who is writing a history of the waterfront dispute in Hobart.  His narration is in italics. The rest of the novel consists of fragments: interviews, recollections, fly-on-the-wall observations, transcripts, press articles, letters, (hilarious) letters to the editor and court transcripts.  The narrator is looking for reliable witnesses to make sense of these conflicting accounts, but the novel teaches him a lesson that he ought to have known anyway.  Historical objectivity isn't possible.

There are witty juxtapositions of the characters' expectations and behaviour.  Some of them are laugh-out-loud. Here is the unionist Plunkett taken aback by the appearance of the Chief Justice, George Cosgrave:

Plunkett had pictured him as a tall man who would preside poker-faced and with an air of immaculate decorum, his magisterial features an impressive portrait of total, unobtrusive concentration.  Instead he is a man of barely medium height with broad shoulders who moves restlessly on his grand chair and fidgets with a pen on the bench.  From time to time he scratches his nose, managing to look like a banker who has wandered into his scarlet, white and black judicial robes by mistake, presiding with the impatient and patronising air of a man filling in for a friend and anxious to get back to his stocks and bonds. (p.250)

There are perceptive descriptions of the places where the paths of the characters cross, especially interesting when a character is out of his comfort zone. These include the drinking holes of the rival factions; homes both working class and petty-bourgeois; barristers' chambers; and the court room.  Here we see the narrator on his quest to interview the State President of the union, Eyenon, a tall, thin man with a long scimitar nose. 

I seek him out in the Marquess of Queensberry where he drinks after work.  The Customs House around the corner is a proletarian pub, bare and shabby with green walls and scratched brown chairs. The Marquess has more character: brown furry wallpaper, sporting trophies over the mantel; pictures on the walls of old whaling boats, the local slipways in 1900, the colonial docks with sailing ships; and framed photographs of local sporting heroes, including one of Jaz [Eyenon's son] in his blue and white football strip [sic*]. Ten minutes after the five o'clock siren the bar is strong with booze and smoke and thronged with wharfies, seamen, bookmakers, politicians and lawyers who are slumming it. (p.92)

*Alas, there are a fair few typos in this edition, and I have a suspicion that this word should be stripe/s.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/07/23/t...

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult to rate. It has been hailed as the greatest Australian political novel. It is a (sort of) fictionalized version of the late 1950s Hursey vs the Waterside Workers Federation case. Hursey is renamed Mosely, and all the other characters except Bob Menzies who makes an appearance re given fictional names. There is a mixture of place names: the Derwent River becomes Winspear River, but Gladstone St and Montpelier Retreat remain as is. I first read this 20 years ago when one of the characters Max Bound in real life, who was a friend of mine, could give the real names of most characters. Others are immediately recognizable: Bertie Baker was the notorious Senator Reg Wright and Justice Cosgrave was the nasty Sir Stanley Burbury (vide Orr vs the University of Tasmania) and nasty he is here too. The difficulty for me is that I wanted to know the real story: we get plenty of detail here but who is who apart from the above and did it really happen like this? – very much so, the name calling, picketing, the incidents and so on, but all of it? This is faction not fiction and can more readily be misleading as to what is true and what not. There are multiple POVs, which is of course deliberate, each telling their own version of what happened – including the Narrator who is researching the 50s story over 20 years later. I can see why, but it makes for difficult reading, unlike Lohrey later on. A small example in the 50s they are talking about dollars not pounds: it would be dollars from the Narrator’s perspective but not when the action is happening. The title is ironic, the gentlemen here are some of the militant wharfies, the Establishment figures, apart from Conlan, are often amoral. The language and nuances of working class and Establishment are very accurately caught: I know, I was contemporaneous with much of the action, although I had left for England at the time of the trial itself. So it was a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, which makes it difficult to judge. I think I’ll go with the majority: ****.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fictionalised account of a waterside dispute in my hometown in the 1950s. Scab Moseley plays patsy for the anti-communist, catholic right and refuses to pay his union dues on a closed site because of an ALP election levy, is chucked out of the union - and kicks off a prolonged industrial dispute involving the state and church, when his union workmates refuse to work with him.

It was interesting to read of the dispute and strikebreaking tactics and to see some of the characters from the Orr case (fictionalised in my previous read Gross Moral Turpitude reappear hear Justice Cosgrave was based on Sir Stanley Burbury apparently).

[Oanh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellently written and wonderfully nuanced portrait of the Moseleys v Waterside Workers Fed dispute of the 50s. Really made a difficult and complicated legal case come alive.