User:Bluedawe/Ross Campbell (Australian journalist)

Ross Campbell (1910-1982) was an Australian journalist best known for the humorous columns he wrote about his children and family life.

Childhood and Schooldays

Campbell was born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, on 26 December, 1910. His parents were Douglas Campbell and Alice Paulin. His father was a 'traveller' (salesman) for an insurance company, later a real estate agent. The family soon moved to Melbourne, where eventually four more Campbell children were born. Campbell was a bookish child; he was dux of his final year at the State School in Thornbury, and won a scholarship to Scotch College, where 'I was soon recognised as one of the school swots'.

University Studies

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Early Journalism

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Military Service and Marriage

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Journalism in the USA

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Journalism in Australia

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Oxalis Cottage

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'Daddy, Are You Married?' (1962)
Cover by Clarrie King

Campbell's most memorable writings described the simple and eternal perplexities of being a suburban paterfamilias. Campbell had been a bachelor for 36 years: he was uncertain if he was cut out for parenthood. 'Like flying or eating oysters, you never know until you've tried it,' he observed.

The tone of Campbell's writing has a distinctive if mild Australian wryness: he styles their home 'Oxalis Cottage' after a weed well-known to Australian gardeners, and gives his four children the sardonic pseudonyms Theodora, Lancelot, Little Nell, and Baby Pip; though, like Samuel Pepys, Campbell in these pieces refers to his wife only as 'my wife'. He gave their neighbours and acquaintances improbable but evocative names like Ted Filcher, Mrs Peeking, and his family shopped at 'Anthony Foymer's', a confabulation of three Sydney department stores: Anthony Hordern's, Farmer's, and Mark Foy's, each now out of business, but part of Sydney's mercantile history.

Campbell's scholarly eye observed, his fatherly heart enjoyed, his journalist's soul reported and shared what he had learned.

His children were Baby Boomers, the first generation to know mass media television teenager.

They were more importunate, aware, assertive than previous generations, but still well-mannered and obedient. and more than the rather diffident but sharply observant Campbell. He documented a vital transitional stage in Australian culture at the day-to-day, family level, so subtly, and with such verisimilitude, that his writing was dismissed as trivial, long overlooked for its literary quality and its social-history importance. Campbell's pieces are so transparent that, like the best writing, they seem facile, until one tries to emulate them, when his art becomes evident.

He observes ' I tried the world-weary style of The New Yorker

The bourgeois pomposity fuelling the humour of Punch did not suit

Campbell says he was too diffident a person for 'foot-in-the-door' journalism. He was no stern leader-writer or portentous political analyst: he liked to write about the off-beat and the quirky, and the small absurdities of life.

Like Lennie Lower, Campbell wrote for mass circulation publications, and like Lower and cartoonist Emile Mercier, faced and met the challenge of making the ordinary Australian laugh, week after week. Lower dissolved into alcoholism; Campbell had a more equable temperament: 'His eyebrows were the only fierce thing about my father.' said (Little Nell). He was frequently sneered at for the simplicity of his prose and subject matter. (see his autobio)

Hunter Davies and his Father's Day are similarly engaging and

Unlike S. J. Perelman, Campbell never portrayed his children as precocious brats. His humour was far less self-conscious that Alan Coren's (another Oxford graduate), and more affine to the mundane than James Thurber - Campbell was no fantasist. Garrison Keillor is somewhat aloof and reproachful when he writes of hum-drum family life, but Campbell is right in the middle of such, approving without becoming banal.

From 'Silence is Golden':

The house was completely silent for a moment. It was rather eerie.

No yells, no Top Forty, not even the thunder of the refrigerator motor.

But instead of being pleased, my wife looked worried. She was thinking about Baby Pip. "I wonder what she's up to," she muttered, and went to have a look...

A difficulty which often comes up at our place is this. The older members of the family make so much noise that you cannot tell when the youngest one is silent.

Lancelot is playing Does the Chewing-gum Lose Its Flavour on the ukulele, Theodora is talking about her new tight slacks, and Little Nell is bouncing a tennis ball on the floor. Under cover of the din, Baby Pip goes off to enjoy the quiet pleasure of throwing her shoes and socks into the bath...

In his autobiography, Campbell remarked;

"I sharpened scores of coloured pencils, climbed on the roof to retrieve balls... searched for socks, garters, and plugs for rubber fish, washed sheets at midnight

Campbell's later pieces moved away from family life with young children, and were racier (for the time) and more topical.

Later Life

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Books by Ross Campbell

• Daddy, Are You Married? (1962) Ure Smith, Sydney.
• Mummy, Who Is Your Husband? (1964) Shakespeare Head Press, Sydney.
• She Can't Play My Bagpipes (1970) Shakespeare Head Press, Sydney. SBN 0 85558 000 3
• An Urge to Laugh (1981)

Bibliography

• Campbell, Ross. (1981) An Urge to Laugh. Wildcat Press, Sydney. ISBN 0 908463 09 x
• Gare, Shelley (ed.) (2005). Ross Campbell : My Life as a Father. Park Street Press, Sydney. ISBN 1 876624 71 X

External links

• Aust. Dict. Biog. entry