Alan Collins

A Thousand Nights At The Ritz will be launched at the Astor Theater - 20th February, 2:30pm.

The the book will be launched by Arnold Zabel.

Sydney Launch - Alvas Boy

Sydney launch – 11 March 2009 – speech by Barry O’Farrell MP, Leader of the NSW Opposition
Alva’s Boy by Alan Collins

Aldous Huxley told us that “Every man’s memory is his private literature”.   In Alva’s Boy, Alan Collins makes very public his earliest memories.

Despite the deprivation and The Depression this memoir describes, this is a great read.
It is, as has been said, both a memoir and a history.

Alan Collins’ writing is evocative and moving.  He tells the story of his first 14 or so years with humour and heartfelt honesty:

“School was the one constant in my life.  Its dark-red bricks, poorly-lit classrooms, smelly toilets and pensionable World War 1 teachers were only made bearable by my determined exploitation of a talent for swimming and reading.  In a school’s precarious hierarchy, I needed these to survive.  I absorbed the schoolyard anecdotes of family doings, adroitly avoiding my own situation.  Among my ethnic gang, I was aware that some of them, too, were reticent about their home life.  Running free with them seemed to preclude any reference to what went on in their houses.”

North Bondi Jewish Kindergarten and Day School – the pioneer of Jewish day schools in Sydney and now better known as Moriah – wasn’t established until 1942.

Alva’s Boy is also a history – a history of both Bondi during the 30s and of the Australian Jewish community.

Those far more familiar with this suburb than I will delight in the book’s description of the shops, hotels, schools and way of life Alan witnessed:

“A low mesh fence surrounded Bondi Beach Public School.  A couple of gates were guarded by the sixth-class boys, who were readily bribed by fags from the cheap and nasty Cavalier (five for threepence) packet to let you out during the hour lunch-break.  We either headed for the fruit shops to steal the produce stacked invitingly outside them on pineapple cases, or, as I did, raced across the road to the beach, unbuttoning our clothes as we ran so that by the time we had reached the water’s edge we were in our skimpy Speedo swimsuits and threshing through the waves.”

For those interested in trivia, Speedos were first produced by MacRea Knitting Mills in Australia in the year Alan was born – 1928.  It was bought by a British company in the 1990s.
But it’s the theme of what Ros describes as the ‘interplay between cultures – Australian Jews and refugees or Jews and non-Jews’ that, for me, had the biggest impact.

Suzanne D. Rutland in her book The Jews in Australia describes Australia’s Jewish community pre-1933 as ‘Anglo-Jewish’ – “…very assimilated and conservative, tending to be more British than the British…”.

Alan’s father, Sampson Collins – the “knight of the road” portrayed in this memoir – captures that perfectly.  Someone caught between cultures, with scraps of retained Yiddish, struggling to make a living and who ends up marrying (for the fourth time) “…a shikse, a gentile, a woman who did not bring with her the religious overburden of the Sydney Jewish community.”

But Alva’s Boy also reveals the changes that were underway as the gathering clouds of war affected Australia.

In 1933 there were an estimated 23,000 Jews in Australia.  Yet by 1940, 9,000 Jewish refugees had arrived on these shores.  The advent of the ‘reffos’, amongst them European Jewish immigrants, had a profound impact upon areas like Bondi and the lives of those who resided here:

“The refugee women stowed their shopping in string bags, counted out coins carefully to the shopkeepers, at the same time naming each coin…The rings on their fingers represented their entire capital, all they could salvage from the wreckage of their former European lives.  The shopkeepers did not always understand this ostentation: they were branded as rich Jews.  Did the shopkeepers know that they kept their suitcases at the ready on the tops of their wardrobes, prepared for flight?”

Alan describes his father’s “…malevolent reaction to the foreigners ”:

“It was 1941 and the foreigners on Bondi’s streets could hardly be missed, but with a quick shuffle he could avoid their proximity.  His xenophobia was even more puzzling for me; after all, were they/we not Jews?”

But it’s the story of Mrs Gelman, who Alan encountered while working in Angelo’s Bondi Road fruit shop, which is so telling.  After asking about his family, Mrs Gelman shows him a photo album:

“Louis, only eight, his mama Bertha and his papa Alfred, all gone.”  Her voice choked.  “Why am I living, Eln, tell me why?  Because my second husband was not a Jew.  A gentile who ran a dye works that the Germans needed.  He knew what was happening to all the Jews in our city and he paid thousands for me to get passage on a ship to anywhere.  The first one to sail from Bremen was also the last one to take us refugees.  What did I know of Australia?  I knew nothing…”

This episode, and an increasing number of reports in newspapers like the Sydney Morning Herald,  brought to Alan’s attention the activities of the Nazis, especially against Jews.
This was a time of the ‘great awakening of Australia’.  When this country’s gaze expanded from a narrow focus on Britain, to a wider, more worldly view.

While we were slow to offer refuge to European Jews – despite the urgings of people like Stanley Melbourne Bruce – thousands made their home here before and after the war.  Along with peoples from many countries, they helped set this country on the path for success.  Their legacy is felt today.

And in Alan Collin’s Alva’s Boy their first, tentative, difficult steps are detailed, their reception captured. He describes a period that is as much a part of this nation’s history as Cook’s voyage of discovery or the arrival of the First Fleet.

Jewish Australians have contributed significantly to this country in so many fields.  This book reveals its author as one who, by using the skills with which he was blessed, has equally left a legacy of which all can be proud.

It is very appropriate this book’s Sydney launch is here, in a library.  Equally it was either serendipitous or, at the least, fitting that in Ros – the self-confessed ‘£10 Pom’ – Alan found a life partner who was a qualified librarian.

As Ros has described, Alan Collins enjoyed writing.  Whether as cadet journalist, journalist and editor with the ‘Sydney Jewish News’, columnist for its successor the ‘Australian Jewish News’, advertising copywriter or as an author of short stories, novels or this memoir, books and the words they contained were important to him.

Those who read this memoir will be left in no doubt about the significance of reading in Alan’s early life and development:

“Reading though, now that was simply marvellous: I pursued the printed word relentlessly, even if it was the tiny print on the Worcestershire sauce bottle: Ideal on steak, roast meat and cutlets.  Adds life to casseroles and gravies.  None of which I ever tasted while resident at 48 Francis Street.

His access to books came thanks to the unnamed, elderly couple who ran the “penny” lending library in Bondi Road who:

“…for as long as I could remember, never charged me for borrowing books, steering me ever so skilfully into those Australian writers who transported me beyond the dunny door to the limitless horizons of the Australian outback…”.

As Alan got older the library changed hands and “…the new owner, an elderly man with hooded eyes, downturned mouth and a dyspeptic disposition, charged me full rates and never looked up while he date-stamped my books.”

But, as befits a writer whose style has been described as ‘Dickensian’, in the end the new librarian turned out to be another, rare benefactor in a life that, as Ros describes, and this memoir confirms, was appalling and abusive.

Alan’s experience with libraries and books was common to many who grew up impecunious during the Depression or in earlier equally challenging economic times.  It’s an experience shared by some today.

Private lending libraries, along with Mechanics Institutes, were the usual avenue for people like Alan to gain access to books and the information, escapism and ‘life lessons’ they contain.

It wasn’t until 1939 that the NSW Library Act was passed and provided for State Government subsidies to municipal or local government libraries like this.  That Act recognised the importance of access to books to a person’s development. It was the culmination of effort by a range of people representing concerned citizens, progress associations, returned service organisations and unions.

Regrettably it’s a lesson that seems to have been forgotten.

Recent State Budgets have cut funding for libraries by more than $1 million.  None of us can be proud of official ABS statistics that reveals NSW’s per capita funding for libraries services is 25% lower than that in Victoria or Queensland and well below the national average.

These cuts are forcing councils to consider closing libraries or introducing fees for borrowers.

Tonight, in launching the memoir of one who so obviously sought, and found, in books relief from a difficult, abusive home life, and who’s love of books and writings continued throughout his life, I renew my call upon the State Government to reverse its funding cuts and restore funding to the State’s libraries.

It is a political comment to be sure – but one I am confident would have enjoyed Alan Collins support had he been here.

And that brings me to my only regret tonight – that I never had the chance to meet Alan Collins.

Reading his memoir, sharing his experiences, being given an almost intrusive insight into the difficulties Alan experienced is a privilege that I encourage you all to share.  There is little doubt his first 14 years were difficult and that he survived despite the odds stacked against him.  There’s also little doubt from Ros’ account that, remarkably, it seemed to leave few scars, and Alan went on and lived a full, rich and loving life.

I am reminded of the Leonard Cohen lines:

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Ultimately what impresses most about this memoir is its optimism, the strength of character and – yes humour – that shines through this book.

I am honoured to officially launch it here in Sydney – in a locality of special significance to its author.