Adam Cairns McCay

by Brian Vickery

Journalist, scholar, poet, pagan, literary critic, editor and alcoholic, Adam McCay was well known among the literary bohemia of Sydney, Australia, in the earlier twentieth century. I lost contact with him when I was a little lad. This memoir presents something of what, in recent years, I have learnt about his life.

Adam began that life as a most unbohemian lad, in Castlemaine, Victoria. Castlemaine was a gold-mining town, the kind of place satirised in a novel Redheap by the contemporary writer and artist Norman Lindsay (perhaps the outstanding Australian bohemian of the period). Adam was the fifth son of the Presbyterian minister of Castlemaine, the Reverend Dr Andrew Ross Boyd McCay. The Reverend had emigrated to Australia from Antrim, Northern Ireland. The family has traced back its ancestry in Antrim as far as a Daniel Mackay (1730-1803), and had probably come to Ireland, from the home of the clan Mackay in the north of Scotland, in the seventeenth century (see Note).

Adam had a contrary nature from the first. His family gave him the nickname 'Dum' as a short form of 'Tweedledum', taking the name from Lewis Carroll's rhyme: 'Tweedledum and Tweedledee / Agreed to have a battle / For Tweedledum said Tweedledee / Had spoiled his nice new rattle'. Evidently he was argumentative from an early age. The nickname stuck with him all his life. Among relatives he was known as Uncle Dum (Wicked Uncle Dum, according to some). It seems that he worked hard on the scandalous reputation he eventually acquired.

Nonsense verse was the kind of thing all the McCays loved. At least four of Dr McCay's sons wrote poetry. They were adept at cryptic crosswords, too. Adam was doing French ones on his deathbed. There was little frivolity, though, in his father Dr McCay. Adam remembered his father's sermons and tried to laugh off their threats of hell and perdition throughout his life. His mother was widely cultured, spoke several languages, and encouraged the literary inclinations of her children.

After schooling in Castlemaine, Adam went to Melbourne University and graduated as a prize-winning languages and classics scholar. In 1895, he took over from his eldest brother James (later, General Sir James McCay - a very different personality) the running of the private school (Castlemaine Grammar) that the family had founded.

He stuck it out for eight years, during which time he married Edina Malcolm, with whom he had a son Lindsay. Poems written by Adam in the 1890's show a young man of romantic and passionate disposition. In diction and style they are archaic and derivative. Some, published under such pseudonyms as 'Wyvis' and 'Pagan', express sentiments such as those of:

The Anarchist

We trumpet a note to the hearts of men,

A note to stir them to freedom and life,

A note to sound in the darkest den,

Where sorrow and sickness and sin are rife,

To peal in the poorest of prostrate souls

And call them back to their own lost right,

To blare and burst where the way-drum rolls,

And riot and ring in the rage of fight.

A trumpet message to tell the earth

That its creeds decay and its gods are dead,

That its laws and its lying have lost their worth,

That the reign of rapine and wrong is sped;

That a sun, blood-red with a cycle's pain,

Is risen to wither the world away,

That a new light gleams o'er an altered fane,

That a new soul breathes in our quickened clay.

All's bright with a coming Freedom's glow ...

... and so it goes on

More personal, and less declamatory, is a poem written in the same year:

Commonplaces

There yet shall come a future time

When life will not be dumpy,

When need no more will be to rhyme

Away my feelings grumpy;

When I will not be soused full length

In desperate blues and dreary;

When my soul will know the use of strength

And not fall faint and weary.

When heartless maids won't sling me o'er

For more seductive mashes;

When on the football fields no more

I'll make such dreadful hashes;

When scornful youths won't mock and jeer

And wound my feelings tender,

When I'll not pay for others' beer

And make my purse so slender.

A day of reckoning will come

When I will be rewarded,

A day when I will make things hum

In paying spites I've hoarded;

A day I oft have seen in dreams

(That comes from supper eating)

A day - alas! and yet it seems

An image faint and fleeting.

The world they say is much maligned

And not a bad old dwelling,

But what I've found to please my mind

Is hardly worth the telling.

My 'share of pastime and of toil'

Has been a dismal story,

No Egypt here for me to spoil,

Not even a local glory.

It is not hard to imagine that the young schoolmaster was preoccupied with matters other than his work. So far as one can judge by his writing, Adam McCay replaced the Presbyterian faith he was raised in with an allegiance to art, physical passion, wit and friendship - very much the prevailing neo-pagan values of the bohemians of the day. It was during this time that he wrote anarchist poetry - a time when a newly formed Anarchist Club was very active in Melbourne.

In 1903 Adam joined the staff of the Argus newspaper in Melbourne, Victoria. From the start he was a versatile journalist, tossing off verses for the 'Passing Show' column while covering parliamentary debate. There is some evidence that both he and his brother Delamore (also a journalist) were keen to prove that they could write anything from a leader to a sports paragraph like old hands, precisely because they did not enter journalism until they were nearly thirty.

From this period comes a set of verses written for a young niece:

To Bix, on her ninth birthday

'Way 'way over

On the other side of the moon

Is a place that nobody sees from here

Or from up in a big balloon.

For the moon turns round with her spotty face

Towards us all the while,

But I think on that other unseen side

That everything wears a smile.

There are lollies and fruit on every tree

And a great big lemonade lake!

You can eat as much as you like all day,

And your poor little chest won't ache.

And tall green palm-trees shed their leaves

In the softest summer gales,

And every leaf is a picture book

With wonderful fairy tales.

There are people there never are tired

Or worried, or even cross,

And nobody know the meaning, Bix,

Of trouble or pain or loss.

It doesn't hurt if you bump your head,

It doesn't hurt if you fall,

And nobody ever grows unkind,

'Cos that hurts worst of all.

I'd like to go to that wonderful land

With a nice little niece of mine,

To that wonderful land on the other side

Where the pebbles like silver shine.

To the land where children can go, as well

As grown-up women and men,

So, shut your eyes and dream of it all,

And I'll take you when you're ten.

In 1911 Adam moved to Sydney, New South Wales, to work on the Sun newspaper. Under the pseudonym 'Peter Persnurkus' he wrote a satirical column, and on literary and other topics under the pseudonym 'Hugh Kalyptus', and in a few years became editor of the paper.

A poem from that period describes an untoward event in Buckingham Palace. It was inspired by a news item: “Queen Mary dismissed several servants because she overheard them arguing in favor of suffragette militants.”

Belinda’s martyrdom

Belinda was a servant plain,

Who scrubbed the Royal floors,

And polished, till they shone again,

The handles of the doors.

Her task she never tried to shirk,

Her character was high,

But now Belinda’s out of work –

The Queen can tell you why.

Belinda read the daily news

About the suffrage crowd,

Belinda formed emphatic views,

And spoke them out aloud.

She said, “The suffragettes who fight

Are leaders to my mind,”

Then realised her woful plight -

The Queen was right behind.

Discussions in the servants’ hall

On politics were dead,

Lest Mary’s Royal wrath should fall

On some devoted head.

But in a passage dim and drear,

At nightfall might be found

A pair who whispered low in fear,

“Is Mary lurking round?”

Belinda scorned clandestine ways,

She burned with eagerness

To wear the martyr’s bitter bays

And figure in the press.

Therefore she called, while all aghast

The footmen from her shrank –

Just as the Queen was going past –

“Three blooming cheers for Pank!”

She stood, her duster in her hand,

Filled with heroic pride,

And when she heard the Queen’s command,

"Hooray for Pank," she cried.

“What,” said the Royal Dame, “How now?”

Her countenance was black

With sudden rage – and that was how

Belinda got the sack.

In 1916 Adam was divorced from Edina and married Violet Watson, with whom he had a son Brian, myself. They separated in 1924, and this was my last contact with him: in 1928 my mother remarried and we left Australia.

From 1916 to 1940, Adam served on a number of papers, 'bucketing about' as he put it, either as editor or literary editor. He was particularly associated with Smith's Weekly, a boisterous and populist newspaper, and many stories about him date from that association. Over the years he wrote a vast amount of light verse, commenting on current events. Adam was aware that his light verse was more successful than his more ambitious pieces: 'In lighter pieces I sometimes get a neat or even a delicate phrase, but when I accidentally strike a more intense idea, I never get the luminous flash of language that alone can rightly clothe it.'

In his book Remember Smith's Weekly?, George Blaikie writes of Adam as a wise old man with no teeth (he liked to remove dentures when they irritated him) who explained that practical jokes played on the new recruit Blaikie by the unconventional staff of the paper were not a sign of hostility, but acceptance. As he delivered this reassurance, Adam toothlessly munched a meat pie, and continued by giving a libellous account of his father's sermons, claiming that the old man was fiery in the pulpit thanks to Scotch whisky before breakfast. (I remember from my mother an even more scandalous - and untrue - story that Adam told, that his father was unfrocked because he gave up his clerical duties and went to earth in his study with whisky and books of philosophy).

The male staff of the Weekly (I am sorry for the females in this macho environment) regularly repaired to a local pub for lunch. Adam's pub trick was to write the first line of an obscene ballad and challenge fellow drinkers to keep it going. The most notorious was started with the line 'The loveliest whore in Darlington was in the family way'. This was capped with 'In spite of her diamond pessaries and jewelled whirling spray'. Legend has it that the later verses were unprintable.

As a literary critic, Adam was seldom savage. He expressed, however, a respect for the Australian tendency to be critical of theorists, and his remarks in an article on 'Us Australians' come close to a defence of the national habit of cutting down tall poppies:

In political and social matters the Australian is calmly tackling every problem over which the philosophers are knitting their brows. Among Us Australians there are a few savage theorists, but the perpetual comfort and surprise of our politics is the regularity with which every Wild Man who 'goes over the odds' is kicked into oblivion. From this point of view, I regard the Australian as a large and serviceable boot, exercised with proper effect upon the appropriate spot in the anatomy of the man who has been trying to sell gold bricks.

On a more positive note, Adam speaks of Australians in the same article as the 'free wandering energetic type, which was bound to be the parent of democracy and fraternity'. That is the tone of some of his newspaper poetry, including The boy at the Dardanelles, published during World War I and celebrating the bravery and suffering of young soldiers during that disastrous military episode.

One of his poems, The birthstain, took its title from a statement by the contemporary Governor of New South Wales, which referred to the fact that many of the original settlers of the state were convicts: 'Your birthstain you have turned to good'. Adam turned this round in a spirited piece of light verse.

The birthstain

If only my great grandsire had been sent

Out of his country for his country's good

To help to people some new continent -

If thus I traced my lineage, I would

Face all the world with gallant hardihood,

For in my pedigree would be an entry

Like that of the nobility or gentry.

So I'd be glad if a pickpocket smart

Had captured grandma with his loving smiles;

I wouldn't go around with careful art

Expunging records in the public files

(Criminal records of the British Isles),

But I would glory in the demonstration

Of genius in a previous generation.

I would be proud of some forefather who

Rode boldly on the highway for his gain,

Would brag of that rare cut-throat if he slew,

These being things of an heroic strain;

Nor would I view his memory with pain

If he were dauntless in the inveterate habit

Of snaring in the dark the landlord's rabbit.

Better than some prosaic, dull descent

It is to have a forebear who at least

In some way well above the average went.

Got by his loins, my worth would be increased,

For history shows (and history has not ceased)

How richly the new generation fallows

Whose procreator barely missed the gallows.

Thus would I thank my sires because they gave

To me the faculty of thinking free,

Would bless their memory ere in the grave

For lending me the rebel's ecstasy,

Making me scorn the futile Powers that Be,

But most for that fine talent they transmitted

Of beating fellow creatures less quick-witted.

Sometimes I dream myself of that good strain

Wherein there is no vile suburban smudge,

See my great-grandad in the dock again,

Taking his gruel from the thin-lipped judge,

Thus having dreamed, to work I gaily trudge

Rich in the ancestry which surely traces

My breed above the breed of commonplaces.

Alas, it is a fond and idle thought;

My veins contain no fluid so sublime;

My family always did the things they ought,

Sold socks, mixed drugs, preached sermons all the time

And never rose to one immortal crime:

But oh, if only happy fate could fall so.

I wish I had a birthstain! Don't you also?

In later years, the death of a friend drew remarks from Adam which applied equally to himself:

He was a lover of beauty: he could say with Keats on his deathbed that he had worshipped the principle of beauty in all things; in his very best pages he could reach a white simplicity of style which was singularly beautiful and tender. The gospel he preached was the essential happiness of life; and so tolerant was he of every quest for human pleasure that stern moralists habitually charged him with lewd hedonism.

My mother used to tell one story about his tolerance: they met an old tramp, and Adam insisted on giving him money. 'He'll only spend it on drink', a friend said. 'If gin's his only solace, let him have it', said Adam.

The Australian poet Kenneth Slessor wrote a poem which celebrated Slessor's defeat by Adam at various tests of skill ranging from billiards to miniature golf or the consumption of beer:

To a friend

Adam, because on the mind's roads

Your mouth is always in a hurry,

Because you know 500 odes

And 19 ways to make a curry,

Because you fall in love with words

And whistle beauty forth to kiss them,

And blow the tails from China birds

Whilst I continually miss them,

Because you top my angry best

At billiards, fugues or pulling corks out,

And whisk a fritter from its nest

Before there's time to hand the forks out,

Because you saw the Romans wink,

Because your senses dance to metre,

Because no matter what I drink,

You'll hold at least another litre,

Because you've got a gipsy's eye

That ends the rage of catamountains,

And metaphors that pass me by,

Burst from your lips in lovely fountains,

Because you've bitten the harsh foods

Of life, grabbed every dish that passes,

And walked among the multitudes

Without the curse of looking-glasses,

Because I burn the self-same flame

No falls of dirty earth may smother,

Oh, in your Abbey of Thélème,

Enlist me as a serving brother!

One of Adam's abilities which impressed Slessor was his memory for classical literature. If he could not declaim 500 odes, he could come closer to that feat than most of his contemporaries. In his obituary in the Sun it was stated: 'He read in Latin, Greek, French, German and Italian'. (He could also read in English! - I remember his reading to me from Longfellow's Hiawatha).

Adam McCay was an alcoholic, and fell on hard times in his last years - his third wife Maideau died in 1935. One of the most penetrating and succinct character sketches of him was written by his Smith's Weekly colleague Stan Cross: 'A scholar too intelligent to remain a scholar. A journalist too scholarly ever to be satisfied with journalism. Can write both sides of a given argument with equal facility and equal faith and despise himself either way. When quite a small Presbyterian lad he discovered there was no god and has been damned lonely ever since. Historically he dates from the later Roman Empire'.

Rest in peace.

Note: My known family tree (just looking at the male line!) seems to be:

• Donald Mackay in Antrim, Ireland, 1666, probably came some years previously from Northern Scotland
• son not known
• Daniel Mackay (1730-1803) of Mosside, Antrim, believed to be Donald's grandson
• James Mackay or McCay (1772-1842) of Mosside, Antrim
• James Whiteside McCay (1804-1847) of Mosside, Antrim
• Andrew McCay (1837-1915) of Ballynure, Antrim, emigrated to Castlemaine, Australia
• Adam McCay (1877-1947) of Castlemaine, then Sydney, Australia
• Brian McCay, subsequently Vickery (1918- ) of Sydney, to England 1931
• Michael Vickery (1950-) of Welwyn, Herts, England
• Liam Ellis (1981-) of Totnes, Devon, England

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