George Landen Dann Papers at the Fryer Library

 As I understand it, for about four decades when people asked if there were any playwrights in Brisbane, you could answer "well... George Landen Dann." He toiled away for years in the most hostile of cultural environments; I grew up in Brisbane in the eighties and it wasn't fun being artistic then, but in the thirties, forties, fifties...? It would have been hard. So hard. Especially if, like Dann, you were interested in social realism: stories about Aboriginals and injustice.

No Australian supported themselves via playwriting at the time; I think David Williamson and Nick Enright may be the only two to achieve that. In Dann's era the playwrights tended to be actors (eg Bert Bailey), journalists, or radio writers. Dann was neither: his day job was a draughtsman at the Brisbane Council, which he did from 1924 until the mid 1950s, with a break for war service. That's a long time; presumably he could knock off at five and take time off as needed so he could be productive.

I felt a lot of kinship with Dann: like me, he was educated at Brisbane Grammar School, and did a "proper job", writing part time; also like me, he wound up at Coolum. Like me, his writing career was full of plenty of rejection, with enough half-nibbles and encouragement to keep going. Going through his papers at the Fryer Libary was moving - the rejections, the mild successes, telling Harvey Arthur he was going to quit altogether, the shabby amateur theatres, the ABC competitions. The occasional bursts of glory - the ABC wanting to buy Ring Out Wild Bells for instance, winning the odd competition - but no big hit, no classic.

Dann didn't leave Brisbane, at least not until he retired to Coolum. Would it have made a difference? Did he regret never making the leap? After World War Two seems the most obvious time; maybe there were others. He might have made a career in radio, then thriving. Or journalism - I have no idea if his inclination was in that direction. Could he have gone overseas? Should he? 

The horizons were so narrow in Brisbane, so very, very narrow.  Art existed on the fringes. And Dann didn't work in the crowd pleasing field: few comedies or epic or musicals; he did dramas about miscegenation.

There would have been compensations. A nice lifestyle. Friends. Maybe a lover, though I doubt it: Dann never married, or had kids; I assume he was gay, though maybe he was asexual. Neither would have been easy in Brisbane of the time.

What was he like as a writer? I've only read one - Vacancy on Vaughan Street. It was professional, accomplished work. It reads like someone who should have been able to get work in radio if he'd had some networking ability. Maybe he didn't want to.

He's very well remembered for someone without a classic on his resume: his papers at the Fryer Library, an award named after him, a thesis done on his work. And why not? His career was damn heroic. I hope he was happy - as happy as a writer can be anyway.