THE INTIMACIES AND REPULSIONS OF PLACE

Price has the interest and only a very little of the bitterness of experience. Rage was a rare emotion as he contemplated the world and its evils, sadness and melancholy a more common feeling. The great incitement, the chief stimulant and support to this prolific poet was, of course, his religious proclivities. The promptings of the moral tradition of his Faith controlled his behaviour, for the most part, and gave him a shining goal to aim toward. But he lacked the hard, irreducible, final deposit of the conscience of the perfectionist, the morally superior being; the savage striving to knit himself into the social fabric was tempered perhaps by a certain indolence and timidity of spirit, perhaps by a fatigue, perhaps by the fabric itself whose warp and weft he developed a distaste for, at least in certain carpets which he gazed at in several of the lounge rooms and meeting rooms of his travels.

PriceÂs journey was an individual one. EveryoneÂs is, of course. It had taken him from Eskimos communities to Aboriginal settlements. He had plunged into life, into the crowd, into a pioneering journey at eighteen, and, after thirty years of swimming, he wrote of his experience with the solicitude of a thinker who knows that art is long and the world very old. His aim was to engage menÂs minds with his story and the story of the Cause he fought for, worked within and believed in with passion. He gave his readers the intimacies and the repulsions of place from a memory which stored the fears of ECT treatments, the dreariness of excessive meeting-going and the inspiring greenness of the Hanging Gardens. -Ron Price with thanks to Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge, editors, Gissing: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1972.

I think fear coloured the streets

and offices where I worked.

I got so tired of writing minutes

and sitting at meetings that I felt

my soul had completely dried out.

But there were beautiful moments,

intimate times, all across Australia

where IÂd gone to live back in Â71,

where IÂd lived half my life now and

where IÂd grown old, where one day

I will lay my bones, abandon this

mortal life, fly to the Kingdom of

immortality and yearn for the

favour of meeting the Friend.


Ron Price

18 April 2000