In 1997 the author of this biography wrote a review essay for the Journal of Folklore Research commenting knowledgeably and appreciatively on the then recently published twelve-volume Australian Folk Song: Index from 1788 to 1992, by Ron Edwards. As reviewer of the massive Index, McKenry lamented the seeming disregard for this monumental work among Australia’s own research circle, and he expressed a hope that Edwards and his many outstanding contributions to folklore preservation and research would eventually receive the homeland recognition it deserved. That hope was never fully realized. With this excellent biography, Keith McKenry tries once again to address this lack of scholarly attention to a man whose life work included a relentless “fight for Australian tradition.”
This chronological narrative biography of Australian folklorist Ron Edwards is a companion piece to McKenry’s 2014 book, More Than a Life: John Meredith and the Fight for Australian Tradition. Both books are clearly intended to celebrate the efforts of Meredith and Edwards in collecting, preserving, and making publicly available often-neglected examples of folklore found in twentieth-century Australia. The subtitle of the book on Ron Edwards reads: “A life dedicated to saving Australia’s songs, traditional bush crafts and ancient rock art.” The Edwards biography is both a life story and a telling look into the emerging area of folklore research in Australia from the mid-1900s to early 2000s. Ron Edwards was part of a grassroots effort to document the folklore of Australia’s settler society as well as some traditions of Aboriginal and islander people. McKenry recounts the story of Edwards’s life with a writer’s skill and a fellow folklorist’s delight in honoring how this exceptional person energetically devoted himself to preserving the traditions around him.
Ron Edwards and the book’s author were contemporaries, though Edwards was around twenty years older than Keith McKenry. Both men were enthusiastic performers of folk material—a common starting point for many folksong collectors in Australia. They knew each other through this conduit, but it was McKenry’s role as a committee member on the government’s Inquiry into Folklife in Australia that was a significant spark toward elevating folklore research in Australia and eventually toward writing this biography and documenting the stunning amount of work Edwards had done to preserve Australian folklore. Unfortunately, government support for folklore studies fell off soon after the Inquiry into Folklife Committee published its official report in 1987. Over the years since that time until Edwards’s death in 2008 at age 78, McKenry kept up a fairly regular correspondence with Edwards and even encouraged him to write his autobiography, which Edwards did complete in draft form and made available to McKenry shortly before he died. The four volumes of autobiography, Ron Edwards’s personal diaries and journals, a few interviews with Edwards, organizational archives and letters, and interviews with friends and family after Edwards’s death are among the important sources for much of the content of McKenry’s book.
The book is arranged into twenty-five chapters of varying lengths, with each chapter generally covering about three years in Edwards’s life. McKenry includes a chapter on Ron Edwards’s parents, both early twentieth-century Australian settlers from a region along the River Mersey in England. Born in 1930, Ron Edwards began, even as a young boy, collecting the kind of family stories and yarns that would fascinate him the rest of his life. At the age of sixteen, Edwards enrolled in Gordon Institute in Geelong to study commercial art. He became an accomplished artist—not simply a commercial illustrator, but truly an artist. Throughout his life he identified himself primarily as an artist, selling many paintings and drawings and teaching art-related workshops along with his wife, Anne Ross Edwards. In each of the twenty plus chapters of McKenry’s book, we see evidence of Edwards’s inclination to use his art as an essential part of his life work. Even his many books of folklore material and the journals he edited were always enhanced by his original drawings or paintings. His folklore collecting was simply one part of his desire to make the traditional culture around him available to everyone—whether visually, orally, musically, or in print.
While printmaking and book construction were part of Edwards’s training as an artist, he applied these skills in a more focused way in creating and maintaining his own commercial press—Rams Skull Press—a publishing house that allowed him to issue more than 200 titles, many of which were his own collections of folksongs or books documenting the folk crafts of Australia. Some of his best-known titles are the impressive twelve-volume Index of Australian Folk Song, Skills of the Australian Bushman, The Big Book of Australian Folk Song, The Australian Yarn, Some Songs from the Torres Strait, and Bush Leatherwork. He also offered for sale original works of art, maintaining throughout his life an inexhaustible interest in drawing nudes as well as creating excellent life-like portraits of people whose stories, songs, and crafts he collected. The drawing that immediately attracts the eye on the cover of this biography is Edwards’s own self-portrait. Besides these art and folklore activities, he worked for many years on the documentation of rock art he found in remote regions of northern Queensland. He made many extended trips to China and Japan, learning some dialects of both countries and writing books about some of the people, crafts, and building traditions he encountered through his repeated travels. In 2004 he was invited to participate in a leatherworking seminar in Oklahoma City—his only visit to the USA.
In writing Ron Edwards and theFight for Australian Tradition, Keith McKenry has contributed in an important way to our greater understanding of the struggle that characterized Australian folklore studies in the latter half of the twentieth century. While the United States had its ongoing battles between popularizers such as Duncan Emrich and academics such as Richard Dorson, Australia had its John Meredith and Ron Edwards representing the collectors grounded in the field facing off against any who would simply take bits of tradition and recast them as they wish while touting their supposed authenticity. The book gives us valuable insights into some of the conflicts that were a part of folklore’s slow emergence as a field of study in Australia, but even more than that, McKenry’s book shares with us a character we can all delight in getting to know as thoroughly as one would the main character of a good novel. Folklorists, anthropologists, artists, and historians will find the book informative and occasionally perhaps offensive, but also entertaining and a bit humbling. Few of us can match the disciplined energy that Ron Edwards brought to his life’s work.
Work Cited
McKenry, Keith. 1997. “Ron Edwards’s Australian Folk Song: Index from 1788 to 1992,” Journal of Folklore Research 34:59-65.
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[Review length: 1,126 words • Review posted on November 11, 2023]