The True Story of Spit MacPhee
JAMES ALDRIDGE is the author of more than thirty books for adults and young adults, including novels, short stories, plays and non-fiction, as well as television scripts and journalism. His work has been published internationally in forty languages.
He was born Harold Edward James Aldridge, in 1918 in White Hills, a suburb of Bendigo in Victoria, and he grew up in the town of Swan Hill on the Murray River. As a young man he worked in Melbourne as a copyboy, and then in the picture library, at the
Sun
newspaper.
In 1938 he moved to London where he worked on the newspaper the
Daily Sketch
for a time before becoming a war correspondent in the Middle East and Europe during World War II. His first novel,
Signed with Their Honour
, was based on that experience. It was published in 1942, in both Britain and the USA, and it quickly became a bestseller.
In the mid-1960s Aldridge began to write for a younger audience, setting his novels in the fictional town of St Helen, which was closely based on his childhood home of Swan Hill.
The True Story of Spit MacPhee
was published in 1986 and won the
Guardian
Children’s Fiction Prize and the New South Wales Premier’s Ethel Turner Prize. The novel was made into a television mini-series in 1988.
Aldridge won a Lenin Peace Prize in 1972 for ‘his outstanding struggle for the preservation of peace’. That year he also won the Gold Medal for Journalism from the Organisation for International Journalists. And he has won the World Peace Council Gold Medal.
James Aldridge married Dina Mitchnik in 1942, and they had two sons. He now lives in London.
PHILLIP GWYNNE was born in Melbourne in 1958 and spent part of his childhood in Waikerie in the Riverland district of South Australia. He has written more than twenty books for young adults and children, including his debut novel
Deadly, Unna?
which won the 1998 Children’s Book Council of Australia’s book of the year and sold more than 250,000 copies. Phillip lives in Bali.
ALSO BY JAMES ALDRIDGE
S
igned with Their Honour
The Sea Eagle
Of Many Men
The Diplomat
The Hunter
Heroes of the Empty View
Undersea Hunting for Inexperienced Englishmen
I Wish He Would Not Die
The Last Exile
A Captive in the Land
My Brother Tom
The Statesman’s Game
The Flying 19
Cairo: Biography of a City
A Sporting Proposition (Ride a Wild Pony)
The Untouchable Juli
Mockery in Arms
The Marvellous Mongolian
One Last Glimpse
Goodbye Un-America
The Broken Saddle
The True Story of Lilli Stubeck
The True Story of Spit MacPhee
The True Story of Lola MacKellar
The Girl from the Sea
The Wings of Kitty St Clair
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Copyright © James Aldridge 1986
Introduction copyright © Phillip Gwynne 2015
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published by Penguin Books Australia, Melbourne, 1986
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2015
Cover art & design by W. H. Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetting
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System Printer
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication
Author: Aldridge, James, 1918– , author.
Title: The true story of Spit MacPhee / by James Aldridge; introduced by Phillip Gwynne.
ISBN: 9781922182074 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925095074 (ebook)
Series: Text classics.
Subjects: Grandparent and child—Australia—Juvenile fiction.
Orphans—Australia—Juvenile fiction.
Adoption—Australia—Juvenile fiction.
Australia—Social life and customs—Juvenile fiction.
Other Authors/Contributors: Gwynne, Phillip, 1958– writer of added commentary.
Dewey Number: A823.3
CONTENTS
A Boy Living on a Marvellous River
by Phillip Gwynne
The True Story of Spit MacPhee
A Boy Living on a Marvellous River
by Phillip Gwynne
JAMES Aldridge was born in Bendigo in 1918, and he spent his childhood in the Victorian country town of Swan Hill. He wrote in 1977 that it was ‘a Tom Sawyerian sort of boyhood on our lazy Murray River which had steamboats, floods, good fishing and hunting and the sort of river adventure that lasted as a faint and unbelievable nostalgia for the rest of my life’.
Aldridge left Australia for good when he was twenty, becoming a distinguished war correspondent. It was his experiences in World War II and then the Cold War that he drew on for his early fiction. In the 1960s, however, Aldridge returned to that ‘faint and unbelievable nostalgia’ of his childhood town for inspiration.
The town, the townsfolk and the ‘lazy River Murray’ proved to be a rich lode of material. Aldridge wrote a series of eight books set during the Depression in St Helen, his fictionalised version of Swan Hill, starting with
My Brother Tom
in 1966.
The True Story of Spit MacPhee
, published in 1986, was the sixth.
Though published as young-adult literature in Australia, Aldridge never thought of these books as that: ‘All my stories have been written about children, not as children’s stories,’ he said in an interview in 1987. In fact, the St Helen books were published as adult fiction in many countries.
The Murray River, with its ‘complex twists and turns in the currents and eddies’ courses through
The True Story of Spit MacPhee
, in much the same way as the Mississippi River does through the
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
(One wonders if Australia’s mightiest river had a similarly poetic name—perhaps the Aboriginal Tongala—whether it would figure more predominately in our literature!)
Spit’s character is defined by the river. With his overloud voice and habit of spitting, he is an awkward presence in town; nobody seems quite sure what to do with ‘this wild, barefoot and growing boy (he was almost eleven)’. On the river, however, he comes into his own. He knows all the Murray’s moods—from high and fast in winter to low and clear in summer. He fishes the river, he swims in the river, and he spends ‘a lot of his time studying and trying to puzzle out the course of every curve and current’. In his author’s note, Aldridge tells us that he ‘borrowed a useful nickname from an old friend’. Spit is the perfectly aquatic name for the book’s central character. Spit MacPhee, like Huck Finn, has river water in his blood.
If water is the vital force of this book, then that other elemental force, fire, is the destroyer. It is fire that kills Spit’s father, that ‘burned his lungs to shreds’, and the same fire that disfigures his mother and leads to her premature death. And a fire in the renovated boiler, in which Spit lives with his grandfather, ultimately causes the death of his guardian, and renders Spit an orphan.
Despite these tragedies, this book is remarkably free of sentimentality—the death of Crispie, Spit’s best friend, is dealt with in a only few lines:
One day Crispie didn’t come to school. He didn’t come the next day, and on the fourth day Mrs Masters told the class that Crispie had been bitten by a tiger snake in one of the canals near his house and he had never recovered.
It is almost inconceivable that a modern YA novel—including my own—would let such an event go without at least a few paragraphs of hand-wringing and psychologising; Aldridge just gets on with the job.
Unlike many more recent works, this novel is not greatly interested in the interior lives of its characters; we actually spend little time inside the head of Spit MacPhee. He is essentially a man, or a boy, of action, not contemplation. Perhaps this is due to Aldridge’s training as a war correspondent, or his life long identification as a Marxist, but it is the larger forces at play—the big universal themes that have engaged writers since Homer and Plato—that he is concerned with, namely: what is an individual’s duty to society, and what is society’s duty to its individuals? Once he has fire take away Spit’s family, and a snake his best friend, once he has effectively cut Spit adrift, Aldridge is able to explore those questions: how will the citizens of St Helen treat one of its vulnerable members; what will become of this barefoot boy?
I, like Aldridge, grew up in a small country town. I, too, used that experience to write fiction, especially in my first books
Deadly, Unna?
and
Nukkin Ya
. Those books engage with many of the same contradictions of rural living as Aldridge’s book, especially how country towns can be big hearted but also narrow-minded.
Whereas my books are predominately concerned with racism—the divide between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations—it is sectarianism that is Aldridge’s preoccupation, in this case a tug-of-war, as both sides lay claim to Spit, a boy who has set foot in a church only ‘a couple of times’. It is perhaps difficult for the modern teenage reader to understand the depth of the antipathy that once existed between Protestants and Catholics in a ‘country as divided and passionate as Australia was by sect and prejudice’. However, there might be case for suggesting that this schism has been replaced in modern Australia by one between Christians and Muslims.