F. M. Alexander fragment for biography

In his book Gallipoli, L. A. Carlyon offers a partial insight into the Australian character that was emerging in the early decades of the 20thcentury. He writes:

“A Character, ambiguous and quirky, was forming in the old convict settlement. The people were proud to be ‘British’, part of the ‘superior’ race and of an empire that seemed to be short of its peak. Yet they didn’t much like the mother country’s class distinctions, particularly the notion that, when it came to classifying human beings, the past and the pedigree determined the future. Australians were cheekier and rougher and more inclined to look to the future rather than the past because there were too many things in the Australian past that were best forgotten. [Charles] Bean was probably near to the truth when he wrote that ‘Men passed among Australians for what in themselves they were worth.’ ”[1]

The author Donald Horne[2] entitled one of his critical books about Australia The Lucky Country (pub. 1964).[3] Yet Australia was, for many, a place to begin anew to work for a lifestyle and a freedom that was not possible in the United Kingdom or Ireland. And while the European settlement of Australia began as British, it was not long before people from other lands followed.

But for many who came to live there, this ancient land was often viewed as alien. What’s more, the elder aboriginal inhabitants were dispossessed of their ‘dreamtime’ places[4], suffered catastrophically from introduced contagious diseases, were often hunted and chain ganged. In several instances, such as the Darling Downs in southern Queensland, European settlers slaughtered tribal groups.[5]

Out from this, under the southern cross landscape, with the crackling mustering whip, stockmen, Banjo Patterson and The Man From Snowy River, the search for Lassiter’s reef, torrential floods, burning droughts, swagmen and sundowners, raging bush fires, hard ground on which to play dusty cricket, Afghan cameleers, dingoes, wallabies, brumbies, young bustling cities, struggling outback cattle stations, and Broken Hill mining came F. M. Alexander,[6] shaped by all of this and yet as he strove to bestow upon his own life freedom from the known, this external shape became less, dissolving into a life lived now. Such a life comes to be alone, and it is so that the alone returns to the Alone.

Over the years I have heard and read different views of F. M. Alexander: he was gifted, compassionate, understanding, patient, stubborn, racist, imperialist, a gambler, paranoid, conceited… the list goes on. Dr Gordon Latto[7] humorously related to me the following story: “One day I walked into a room, and there was F. M. sitting, eating the most godawful rubbish. ‘F. M.,’ I said, ‘what are you doing eating that stuff?’ He replied, ‘I am F.M. Alexander. I can eat anything.’ He was the most extraordinary man I ever met, a genius, but you know, completely unbalanced.” I have also heard Alexander described as a rare and balanced man who enjoyed wholesome food, fine wine, and a good cigar in moderation.

A great deal more than the obvious is being indicated by Alexander when he stated, “I can eat anything.” In his aphorisms he was recorded as having stated to a pupil, “If you will let me raise the standard of your vital capacity and teach you to use yourself properly, you can eat anything and not hurt yourself.”[8] There are several forms of nourishment, and what is often overlooked is the quality of how one eats rather than what is eaten.

Towards the end of his long life, a young Australian woman came to Alexander for a lesson. He invited her to sit with him, share a glass of wine, and speak about her life. She found herself moved to speak, as it were, from the heart. Time passed. He listened. That is all that happened. Throughout the subsequent years she recalled many times the quality of the listening she experienced that evening.[9]

F. M. Alexander worked something out for himself; in this he is among a unique group of people. To be able to follow accurately a process he had reasoned out, he needed determination, perseverance (often against apparently insurmountable odds), power of observation, an ability to discriminate, a strong ego, and humour.

He codified something universal and ancient, and made it accessible to our age. It is all the more remarkable that he did this without the outward guidance of a teacher. For him life itself was the teacher; gradually many were drawn to him to receive help, and some grew sufficiently to become responsible and assist him and his work. He supported an extended family, offered financial help to many in need, responded to numerous calls from those in crisis, gave of himself to aid others to awaken, and as is so often the case for those who make such effort, “some to whom he gave the most, eventually found fault and condemned him the most”.[10]

 

[1] L. A. Carlyon Gallipoli  Bantam Books edition 2003, Ch.7, p.145. Charles Bean was a correspondent and historian. He was a reporter at Gallipoli and was known to have put his life on the line to help the wounded and dying. He received an honorary doctorate from the Australian National University (Canberra). He died in 1968.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Horne

[3] 'Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.'

The phrase 'the lucky country' has become part of the Australian lexicon; it's forever being invoked in debates about the Australian way of life, but is all too often misused by those blind to Horne's irony.

In The Lucky Country Horne took Australian society to task for its philistinism, provincialism and dependence. The book was a wake-up call to an unimaginative nation, an indictment of a country mired in mediocrity and manacled to its past. Although it's a study of the confident Australia of the 1960s, the book still remains illuminating and insightful decades later. The Lucky Country is valuable not only as a source of continuing truths and revealing snapshots of the past, but above all as a key to understanding the anxieties and discontents of Australian society today.  (See Penguin Australia)

Later in The Lucky Country ‑ Revisited (1987), he was to re-examine the title and content of the earlier book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Country

http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/lucky-country

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/09/08/1125772645916.html

[4] The Dreamtime is the collective mythology of the Aborigines and in part relates how the ancestral creators made their world. Traditionally every Aborigine is intimately linked to the created environment. “It is a very close personal link that dominates his entire philosophy, code of behaviour and way of life. It is the foundation of all his social, secular and ceremonial activities. As it was done in the Dreamtime, so it must be done today.”  Shadows In The Mist, Australian Aboriginal Myths In Paintings by Ainslie Roberts and Text by Dale Roberts  Art Australia 1989, p.5

[5] For brief insight into a portion of this side of Australian history see Rabbit Proof Fence 2002 Miramax, based on the story of Molly Kelly (d. January 2004). In 1931 Molly along with her sister and cousin was forcibly removed from her family and sent to a government institution to be trained as servants. Many thousands of such forced separations occurred and the children so treated have become known as the stolen generation.

When Fred Hollows the noted ophthalmologist travelled through the Northern Territory in 1968 to investigate the state of Aboriginal health, he recorded that “It was like something out of the medical history books — eye diseases of a kind and degree that hadn’t been seen in Western society for generations. The neglect this implied, the suffering and wasted quality of human life was appalling.”  In early 2004 the Hollows Foundation, which he established, stated that little had changed. The life expectancy of the Aboriginal population was lower than in Sudan, Eritrea, and Bangladesh.

[6] F. M. Alexander 1869 – 1955 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Matthias_Alexander

[7] Dr Gordon Latto 1911–1998 one of the foremost exponents of ‘natural medicine’ was for a time physician to F. M. Alexander.

[9] As related to me by Walter Carrington

[10] As related to me by Walter Carrington