J. M. Harcourt

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John Mewton Harcourt (1902–1970), commonly known as J. M. Harcourt, was an Australian writer.

Life[]

John Mewton Harcourt was born in Katanning, W.A, 1902. He had two sisters, WInnifred the first born and Gweneth the last. His parents were parents strict Methodists, his father the son of Methodist missionaries to the Katanning and Kalgoorlie area. Harcourt senior was a surveyor often away from home working for long periods; mother bipolar, prone to manic, violent, psychotic rages. (Contrary to the previous statement, John Harcourt never mined for gold with his father. The family was very poor. Considering a boy's education more important than girls', saved to send John Harcourt, to boarding at Wesley College in Melbourne, Vic. At 12 years, he travelled to Melbourne alone by train. (To me) John Harcourt described running the gauntlet (initiation), having his bottom roasted in front of a fireplace, having his head flushed in a toilet by older boys. He described having been brutalised and bullied, as he said, "exactly as in the novel Tom Brown’s School Days". Harcourt never admitted to having been sexually molested or raped by boys, prefects, house master or teachers but had a lifelong prejudice against homosexuals; not compatible with otherwise 'liberal' views on sex and sexuality. Harcourt ran away from the school at 13, never went home and never saw his parents again. As he told me the story, he carried his few things in a swag, became a sundowner, travelled and hitcher through countryside, did chores in return for bed and meal often in barn. Became a jackaroo in the NT, also a racing car driver and Charleston dance teacher. He learned to sail and operate a pearling lugger (sails + engine) from Broom for three years; became the captain. The crewmen and divers were Japanese. He found a £13,000 pearl, of which his share was £2,000.

Harcourt used the money to move to Perth and fund himself to teach himself to write in teh Perth Library, during which time he joined the Australian Communist Party. His first marriage was to, Sylvia, a vicar’s daughter. Their son, Peter, died a 31, having fallen asleep at the wheel of his sports car. Sylvia left Harcourt for a doctor when Peter was only 2, taking her son with her. (My guess is that Dad was probably already drinking by this stage, and often violent.)

Dad paid for Peter’s schooling and upkeep, and moved to Melbourne to write for Truth, a somewhat sensationalist leftist rag. He specialised in reporting on business and stock exchange. At Truth, Harcourt met the journalist and writer, Betty Rowlands, a member of Eltham’s Montsalvat crowd. Dad became closely involved with this crowd. Their chief attributes, bohemian, (small-l) liberal, Fabian, rationalist, existentialist and atheist. Most were artists and craftspeople. However, students of Sydney University's Chalice Professor, John Anderson, often dined with them at Montsalvat and were also a strong influence.

During the Great Depression work waned. Harcourt published his second novel, Upsurge, in 1934the first novel to be banned by the-then Commonwealth Book Censorship Board and the first to be prosecuted by police in Australia. Harcourt told most copies were burned on a Perth beach but he managed to rescue three. I have one still in my possession, still with its scorch marks. It was later reprinted for Perth Uni’s Aust socialist lit curriculum for 10 or more years. harcourt wrote two other novels: The Pearlers, 1933, John Long Ltd, London, U.K., and It Never Fails, 1937, by the same publisher.

While writing his novels and freelancing for Truth, Harcourt needed a better income. He attempted to invent a refrigerated railway carriage so rabbits shot in the bush could supply cheap meat to Melbourne. Someone else achieved it first. He noticed housing was in short supply and hard to afford and became interested in the prolific mudbrick building oot at Montsalvat and in the Eltham area. He noticed Alistair Knox's modernist houses tended to suffer from rain due to narrow eves and concrete footings. He researched traditional mudbrick and pisé dee terre housing from around the world in Melbourne University's architecture library. He designed traditional pisé houses with much wider concrete foundations and eves than the norm, and built first version as his own house, Clay Newnham. This house is still standing and is now listed with the National Trust. He subsequently built nine more pisé houses for clients, and four for himself which provided him with an income from rentals.

In 1945, Harcourt was interested in the question of a Jewish homeland and supported the idea of trying to get the Ord River area declared as a suitable place. For obvious reasons, the idea went nowhere. It is clear from this that at this time he had no idea, like most white Australians of the time, about Aboriginal rights and sovereignty.

In 1953, when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia, Harcourt left the Communist Party, having decided that the USSR was totalitarian and that communism in that form appeared to be a failure. During this time, Harcourt met and married a Melbourne socialite, Faye. The marriage crumbled, both partners drinking heavily. His estranged son, Peter, then 30 years old, looked him up. They became friends and Peter worked as a labourer on Harcourt's building sites. He died only a year later.

Around this time, my mother, Diana Elizabeth Watson (née Whitenead) returned from England and arrived back at the Montsalvat scene. She and Harcourt began an affair and fell in love, during which time I was conceived. Fay was furious and divorced Harcourt. John Harcourt and Diana travelled to London where she divorced her first husband, married Harcourt and I was born. When I was three months old, they travelled to Ronchi, a village on the Adriatic Coast of Italy. They lived there for six months, then returned to Australia, to Sydney. Diana preferred to be as far from her mother as possible. She, an heiress, chose a block of land in the bush at 20 Beauty Drive, Whale Beach. They rented a bungalow at Bilgola for two years while Dad built Ronchi, a house designed like the house they had rented in Italy, but with a few of Harcourt's inventions in the flat concrete roof. Six months after moving into Ronchi, Harcourt's second daughter, Nicholina Sandra Caroline was born.

Harcourt's experience with the stock exchange and business now became useful. Diana put him in charge of investing her money. He helped her choose a broker and an accountant, and spent most mornings reading and keeping up with the movements of companies and share prices. Twelve years later, he organised a private family trust fund. In the meantime, he sold off most of his houses, except Clay Newnham, which had a friend as a tenant. He invested his own funds and used part of it to stock a wine cellar, buy a DS Citroen and an all teak Crown yacht called Nimitabel. He moored Nimitabel off Dr Nick Stonter's place at Clareville in Pittwater. He spent some off his last years in several activities: attempting to write a fourth novel about a dentist, inventing a wooden deck chair that could fold into a standard car sailed with cronies on weekends, created a dinner party club which met monthly in each other's homes for six years, corresponded with friends in Italy, maintained friendships with members of the Montsalvat crowd, a few Eltham locals and the Sydney Push, kept a large library and read a lot, and played chess by mail with a friend in Fiji. He cooked about once a fortnight, usually steak and kidney pie, Yorkshire pud with roast, or "Harcourt Hash" a stew from recycled roasts. He refused to lift a finger to help with housework or gardening; that was left to Diana, a twice-weekly cleaner, and a gardener paid for by his wife.

Harcourt was not a racist, or if so, it never showed to me. He loved and welcomed Australia's booming migrant population. However, he never spoke to me about Aboriginals, though I'm sure that as a Jackaroo he would have known and worked with many. He was intensely homophobic (unlike Diana who loved gay men) and intensely sexist. He was slightly afraid of any woman with high intelligence. He was evangelistically atheist and intolerant of all forms of religious belief. One of his favourite "pass-times," if he met a believer, was to ask dialectical questions that led to serious and obvious problems with their faith -- and then ridiculing and lampooning them in the presence of their friends and family. He was a pederast and incested me from when I was four years old until I was ten when he became impotent, probably due to his failing heart. He also attempted to get Diana's ex-boyfriends in on it; fortunately that failed. Almost every day, from four to five years old, he shouted at my sister at the evening dinner table, primarily over table manners, sending her to bed in streams of tears, dinner unfinished. I believe that at the time she was too young to be able to hold her knife and fork properly.

The marriage with Diana began failing after 4 years, primarily due to the alcoholism of both; Harcourt moved into a separate bedroom. He was violent towards her on average between once a month and once in six weeks. On one occasion, I saw him attempt to drown her in the swimming pool; he stopped when he realised I was behind him, frozen still.

Six foot, one inch tall, round-shouldered and lean, he exercised hardly at all, ate sparingly and never put on weight. The couple continued living in the same house until 1970, when Harcourt died, officially of double pneumonia caused by heart failure. I am certain, from his chronic and increasingly serious cough, that my father also had emphysema from a lifetime of constant pipe smoking. He never fished his last book and the manuscript was never found among his things.

There is, of course, much more to this story. I have included all these personal details because I find that biographies on Wikipedia often lack sufficient detail to show the whole person; too much is either not known or left out. I regard my father as neither a hero nor a monster; rather, he was a man who never fully recognised his own internal trauma and never recovered. He was uncompromisingly honest in most things, and yet had double standards and was apparently unaware of his own levels of denial and lack of insight. Yet nothing can excuse the violence and incest; he made it clear to me that he knew it was wrong and would be gaoled if found out.

I, Amanda Sarah Anne Harcourt (a.k.a Manna Hart or Manna Hart-Ehrlich), the writer of this entry, am John Mewton Harcourt's eldest daughter, born in London, U.K, 2 July 1956. I have completely rewritten the original entry because it contained predominantly false data. The information I provide here I learned from my father's own accounts, from my mother, my father's younger sister Gweneth, her daughter and my 2nd cousin Elizabeth Anderson, and from Dad's friends in the Eltham area, primarily Steve and Kay Dattner and George Chalmers.

<ref> J. M. Harcourt, It Never Fails, 1933, Long, London, U.K. J. M. Harcourt, Upsurge: A Novel, introduction by Richard A. Nile |publisher= University of Western Australia Press – facsimile edition, 1986 J. M. Harcourt, The Pearlers, 1937, Long, London, U.K.

Selected works[]

Novels[]

• The Pearlers 1933
• Upsurge 1934
• It Never Fails 1937

References[]

Further reading[]

• "J. M. Harcourt". AustLit.