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Down by the Dockside
A young widow struggles to survive the harsh conditions of life in the slums of Melbourne during the 1940s
256 pages, Hardcover
First published May 6, 1963
33 people want to read
About the author
Criena Rohan
4 books4 followersCriena Rohan was the pseudonym of Deirdre Cash. She grew up in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, and in South Australia. Her mother, Valerie Cash, was a professional singer, and her father Leo a minor poet. After a Catholic education, she studied singing at the Albert Street Conservatorium for a year. Later she worked as a singer in night clubs and taught ballroom dancing.
Rohan married twice, with a child from each marriage, before being diagnosed with cancer in 1961. While undergoing treatment, Rohan wrote her two novels: The Delinquents (1962) and Down by the Dockside (1963), the latter of which was published posthumously after her death at age thirty-eight. An alleged third novel, The House of the Yellow Door was reportedly completed in manuscript, but has never been found.
Rohan's novels depict the lives of young people growing up in the slums and backstreets of Melbourne, with elements drawn from her life and those of her parents. She experienced a revival in popularity during the 1980s, when The Delinquents was made into a major film, and is now considered an important member of the school of Australian social realism that flourished in the two decades after World War II.
Rohan married twice, with a child from each marriage, before being diagnosed with cancer in 1961. While undergoing treatment, Rohan wrote her two novels: The Delinquents (1962) and Down by the Dockside (1963), the latter of which was published posthumously after her death at age thirty-eight. An alleged third novel, The House of the Yellow Door was reportedly completed in manuscript, but has never been found.
Rohan's novels depict the lives of young people growing up in the slums and backstreets of Melbourne, with elements drawn from her life and those of her parents. She experienced a revival in popularity during the 1980s, when The Delinquents was made into a major film, and is now considered an important member of the school of Australian social realism that flourished in the two decades after World War II.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 23, 2014
Down by the Dockside by 'Criena Rohan'
A review by Paul White.
Sometimes and for some unknown reason a book resonates within your soul, this is one such book that had, and still does resonate within me.
Down by the Dockside is a too long unrecognised Australian urban classic.
Compassionate and sympathetic to the working class in post war Australia.
I first read this years ago, (circa 1975). It is about a plucky, literate girl who grows up in poverty in Port Melbourne during the Depression, marries a sailor during the war and loses him in a fight at Christmas in 1946, teaches dance and consorts with the criminals her childhood pals have become, it's a lively and endearing tale of Australia in the 1930s and 1940s.
You may encounter problems when searching for biography on Criena Rohan, because this was her Irish pseudonym. Her real name was Deirdre Cash (1924-1963), novelist, was born on 16 July 1924 at Albert Park, Melbourne.
Criena’s first book was The Delinquents (1962). A compassionate tale, set in the 1950s, of defiant, street-wise, 'bodgie-widgie' teenagers oppressed by their elders and the welfare state, it was dubbed 'a back-street Tristan and Isolde' by London's Daily Mail. The Times Literary Supplement called the characterization of the heroine Lola 'a triumph'. In 1989 The Delinquents became a teenage cult film with Kylie Minogue as Lola.
As poignant and harsh as the life and stories of her characters, so was Deirdre’s own life.
Deirdre was pregnant when, on 4 February 1948, she married a law student Michael Damien Blackall at St Augustine's Church, Melbourne, but she was also lunging at a gentility she could not sustain. Leaving her husband and son, she earned a living as a torch-singer and ballroom-dancing teacher, occasionally on the fringe of the demi-monde. Although the autobiographical glow of her novels suggests otherwise, she was teetotal, earthy but not indecent in speech, and never in trouble with the police. Similarly, her fictional, family-based portraits are sometimes romanticized, sometimes cruel. In 1954 she met her true inamorato, a coastal seaman Otto Ole Distler Olsen, whom she followed to various ports. Her divorce having been granted on 18 October 1956, she married him eleven days later in the office of the government statist, Melbourne.
Cash was dying from a now correctly diagnosed colonic carcinoma when she finalized her second novel, Down by the Dockside (London, 1963), which attempted a more complex characterization of alienated, working-class people in wartime Melbourne. While her often sentimental and melodramatic social realism lacks literary polish and form, this weakness is offset by Dickensian humour, sharp dialogue, throwaway gibes and a gutsy narrative style. She allegedly wrote a third novel, 'The House with the Golden Door', but, if so, the manuscript mysteriously disappeared. Survived by her husband and their daughter, and by the son of her first marriage, Cash died on 11 March 1963 at the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, and was buried in Fawkner cemetery.
This is not a literary masterpiece in the common sense, even being rejected by several Australian publishers whom she subsequently scorned as jingoistic. But it is haunting and touching and should be on every ones ‘Must Read’ list.
A review by Paul White.
Sometimes and for some unknown reason a book resonates within your soul, this is one such book that had, and still does resonate within me.
Down by the Dockside is a too long unrecognised Australian urban classic.
Compassionate and sympathetic to the working class in post war Australia.
I first read this years ago, (circa 1975). It is about a plucky, literate girl who grows up in poverty in Port Melbourne during the Depression, marries a sailor during the war and loses him in a fight at Christmas in 1946, teaches dance and consorts with the criminals her childhood pals have become, it's a lively and endearing tale of Australia in the 1930s and 1940s.
You may encounter problems when searching for biography on Criena Rohan, because this was her Irish pseudonym. Her real name was Deirdre Cash (1924-1963), novelist, was born on 16 July 1924 at Albert Park, Melbourne.
Criena’s first book was The Delinquents (1962). A compassionate tale, set in the 1950s, of defiant, street-wise, 'bodgie-widgie' teenagers oppressed by their elders and the welfare state, it was dubbed 'a back-street Tristan and Isolde' by London's Daily Mail. The Times Literary Supplement called the characterization of the heroine Lola 'a triumph'. In 1989 The Delinquents became a teenage cult film with Kylie Minogue as Lola.
As poignant and harsh as the life and stories of her characters, so was Deirdre’s own life.
Deirdre was pregnant when, on 4 February 1948, she married a law student Michael Damien Blackall at St Augustine's Church, Melbourne, but she was also lunging at a gentility she could not sustain. Leaving her husband and son, she earned a living as a torch-singer and ballroom-dancing teacher, occasionally on the fringe of the demi-monde. Although the autobiographical glow of her novels suggests otherwise, she was teetotal, earthy but not indecent in speech, and never in trouble with the police. Similarly, her fictional, family-based portraits are sometimes romanticized, sometimes cruel. In 1954 she met her true inamorato, a coastal seaman Otto Ole Distler Olsen, whom she followed to various ports. Her divorce having been granted on 18 October 1956, she married him eleven days later in the office of the government statist, Melbourne.
Cash was dying from a now correctly diagnosed colonic carcinoma when she finalized her second novel, Down by the Dockside (London, 1963), which attempted a more complex characterization of alienated, working-class people in wartime Melbourne. While her often sentimental and melodramatic social realism lacks literary polish and form, this weakness is offset by Dickensian humour, sharp dialogue, throwaway gibes and a gutsy narrative style. She allegedly wrote a third novel, 'The House with the Golden Door', but, if so, the manuscript mysteriously disappeared. Survived by her husband and their daughter, and by the son of her first marriage, Cash died on 11 March 1963 at the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, and was buried in Fawkner cemetery.
This is not a literary masterpiece in the common sense, even being rejected by several Australian publishers whom she subsequently scorned as jingoistic. But it is haunting and touching and should be on every ones ‘Must Read’ list.
September 25, 2020
I lived with my grandmother. She had been born and reared in Dublin. Her father had been a ship's captain, and so also had her husband. She had borne two sons and six daughters and her husband had died when the youngest child was six weeks old. The shipping company gave her a clock.
Criena Rohan is a name nearly forgotten in the annals of Australian literature, which is both understandable and rather sad. Rohan (a nom-de-plume for Deirdre Cash) grew up in a down-on-their-luck Irish-Australian family, had two marriages (the first, in the late 1940s, precipitated by a teenage pregnancy) and two children (one from each) before being diagnosed with cancer in her mid-thirties. Rohan managed to churn out two novels - allegedly a third that has never been found - before succumbing to the cancer at age 38. Her "social realist" novels were successful in the 1960s, republished in the 1980s when the other - The Delinquents - was made into a popular film, and appear from time to time in new editions aimed at maintaining her legacy.
Down by the Docks is the story of a young woman from an Irish immigrant family, relocated from Rohan's childhood homes north of the Yarra to Port Melbourne. Strange, as a regular in Port Melbourne these days (where it is gentrification personified), to read about its dark past as the slums, home of immigrants and dock workers and the socially dispossessed. As the heroine, Lisha, grows from girl to young woman, she must confront her family demons, youthful love and often brutal adult relationships, violence, crime, and sorrow. The authorial voice is sly, sensitive, and clear-eyed about the characters, young and old. Her world is one of humour and elan, but mottled by the brutal reality of the lives of the downtrodden. Rohan was, simply, a natural storyteller, and this feels like a quintessential slice of Aussie historical fiction.
Down by the Docks is not a perfect novel, far from it. For one, we are witnessing an author who never made it past her literary infancy. Two novels and gone at 38 is not a recipe for fully-evolved writing. Then there's the reality of the publishing situation: her English publishers must have viewed the book a little anthropologically, and seem to have forgiven some overripe passages and youthful flights of fancy (I sometimes wonder if we do the same when foreign writers - from Ferrante to Garcia Marquez - become briefly fashionable outside of their home language). And there are the excesses of the genre itself. Australian social realism of the post-war period was designed as a rebuke to literature that dealt with the higher-ups (think Martin Boyd) or with literary pretentiousness (Patrick White) or even the very good but deeply sentimental writing of Ruth Park. Instead, the social realists defined themselves by their clear-eyed nature, the vernacular nature of their characters' dialogue, the downward spiral of their self-consciously "ordinary" characters. This was a noble and successful genre but it can tend itself toward sentimentality or, as people would now call it, "poverty porn".
All this having been said, Rohan is a marvellous chronicler of the Australian experience. Take one example (excerpted in the introduction to my edition):
I remember it was a misty morning, misty and still, as though autumn were trying to prolong its time. A soft vapour lay along the top of the Yarra and I knew that later in the day the sunlight would not break through the clouds, it would just filter down in a golden web, wrapping itself around the buildings, throwing a sheen over the trees and putting beauty into the faces of the people that went up and down the streets.
It is impossible to know, when a writer leaves us early, what they could have become. Still, I suspect that the "raw material" found in Rohan's two novels suggests she could have been a national treasure.
Criena Rohan is a name nearly forgotten in the annals of Australian literature, which is both understandable and rather sad. Rohan (a nom-de-plume for Deirdre Cash) grew up in a down-on-their-luck Irish-Australian family, had two marriages (the first, in the late 1940s, precipitated by a teenage pregnancy) and two children (one from each) before being diagnosed with cancer in her mid-thirties. Rohan managed to churn out two novels - allegedly a third that has never been found - before succumbing to the cancer at age 38. Her "social realist" novels were successful in the 1960s, republished in the 1980s when the other - The Delinquents - was made into a popular film, and appear from time to time in new editions aimed at maintaining her legacy.
Down by the Docks is the story of a young woman from an Irish immigrant family, relocated from Rohan's childhood homes north of the Yarra to Port Melbourne. Strange, as a regular in Port Melbourne these days (where it is gentrification personified), to read about its dark past as the slums, home of immigrants and dock workers and the socially dispossessed. As the heroine, Lisha, grows from girl to young woman, she must confront her family demons, youthful love and often brutal adult relationships, violence, crime, and sorrow. The authorial voice is sly, sensitive, and clear-eyed about the characters, young and old. Her world is one of humour and elan, but mottled by the brutal reality of the lives of the downtrodden. Rohan was, simply, a natural storyteller, and this feels like a quintessential slice of Aussie historical fiction.
Down by the Docks is not a perfect novel, far from it. For one, we are witnessing an author who never made it past her literary infancy. Two novels and gone at 38 is not a recipe for fully-evolved writing. Then there's the reality of the publishing situation: her English publishers must have viewed the book a little anthropologically, and seem to have forgiven some overripe passages and youthful flights of fancy (I sometimes wonder if we do the same when foreign writers - from Ferrante to Garcia Marquez - become briefly fashionable outside of their home language). And there are the excesses of the genre itself. Australian social realism of the post-war period was designed as a rebuke to literature that dealt with the higher-ups (think Martin Boyd) or with literary pretentiousness (Patrick White) or even the very good but deeply sentimental writing of Ruth Park. Instead, the social realists defined themselves by their clear-eyed nature, the vernacular nature of their characters' dialogue, the downward spiral of their self-consciously "ordinary" characters. This was a noble and successful genre but it can tend itself toward sentimentality or, as people would now call it, "poverty porn".
All this having been said, Rohan is a marvellous chronicler of the Australian experience. Take one example (excerpted in the introduction to my edition):
I remember it was a misty morning, misty and still, as though autumn were trying to prolong its time. A soft vapour lay along the top of the Yarra and I knew that later in the day the sunlight would not break through the clouds, it would just filter down in a golden web, wrapping itself around the buildings, throwing a sheen over the trees and putting beauty into the faces of the people that went up and down the streets.
It is impossible to know, when a writer leaves us early, what they could have become. Still, I suspect that the "raw material" found in Rohan's two novels suggests she could have been a national treasure.
Read
July 5, 2013I first read this years ago and enjoyed it; rereading, I find that it holds up well. About a plucky, literate girl who grows up in poverty in Port Melbourne during the Depression, marries a sailor during the war and loses him in a fight at Christmas in 1946, teaches dance and consorts with the criminals her childhood pals have become, it's a lively and endearing tale of Australia in the 1930s and 1940s.
January 8, 2024
Apparently, “Down by the Dockside” which was written in 1963 is a novel often overlooked by critics and compilers of lists of Australian literature but still in demand by the public through word of mouth.
The novel follows the life of Eilishe, a girl of Irish descent who grows up in the slums of Port Melbourne where people live in great want and poverty with the spectre of becoming “charity cases ̈ hanging over them in their daily battles to put bread on the table and keep their children from succumbing to malnutrition and disease. In fact, the most moving passage of the book is when a little baby dies in his mother’s arms while waiting in an endless queue to be attended by a doctor in a paupers’ hospital. But it’s not all pain and misery, there’s family, friends and neighbours, respectable and otherwise, dances, cinema, days on the beach and first love, all described by the author with great wit and humour and in the people’s own language.
During the war Eilishe moves to the city which at that time is teeming with soldiers, sailors, drifters, low-lifes and criminal gangs and where she leads a turbulent life. In those years she experiences deep happiness as well as great losses and loneliness which drives her into the arms of a man she doesn’t even particularly like but Eilishe is a battler, hard-working and determined and by the end of the book, back in her old neighbourhood, she finds the strength to be on her own and live life on her own terms.
So, why only 3 stars in comparison with the 4 stars I gave to her contemporary Dorothy Hewett’s “Bobbin Up” which deals with the same theme ? I can’t put my finger on it, the novel just lacks a certain “je ne sais quoi”. Maybe there are too many novels around about the struggling poor and this one doesn’t stand out. Maybe the residents of Port Melbourne are a bit too stereotypical. Maybe the first third of the book is the best part and the rest doesn’t hold up as well. Whatever it is, it’s a worthwhile if not outstanding read.
The novel follows the life of Eilishe, a girl of Irish descent who grows up in the slums of Port Melbourne where people live in great want and poverty with the spectre of becoming “charity cases ̈ hanging over them in their daily battles to put bread on the table and keep their children from succumbing to malnutrition and disease. In fact, the most moving passage of the book is when a little baby dies in his mother’s arms while waiting in an endless queue to be attended by a doctor in a paupers’ hospital. But it’s not all pain and misery, there’s family, friends and neighbours, respectable and otherwise, dances, cinema, days on the beach and first love, all described by the author with great wit and humour and in the people’s own language.
During the war Eilishe moves to the city which at that time is teeming with soldiers, sailors, drifters, low-lifes and criminal gangs and where she leads a turbulent life. In those years she experiences deep happiness as well as great losses and loneliness which drives her into the arms of a man she doesn’t even particularly like but Eilishe is a battler, hard-working and determined and by the end of the book, back in her old neighbourhood, she finds the strength to be on her own and live life on her own terms.
So, why only 3 stars in comparison with the 4 stars I gave to her contemporary Dorothy Hewett’s “Bobbin Up” which deals with the same theme ? I can’t put my finger on it, the novel just lacks a certain “je ne sais quoi”. Maybe there are too many novels around about the struggling poor and this one doesn’t stand out. Maybe the residents of Port Melbourne are a bit too stereotypical. Maybe the first third of the book is the best part and the rest doesn’t hold up as well. Whatever it is, it’s a worthwhile if not outstanding read.
August 17, 2021
I enjoyed this one to a certain extent, and it was certainly worth the $1.00 I paid for it at the goodwill!. I do think however that the back of the book gave way too much away, since there wasn't much plot to begin with. I did enjoy the characters, and style of writing, and glad it as finally published.
May 21, 2019
Captures the world of wartime Melbourne and the heroine Lisha's working class struggles.
November 19, 2012
Did not read. Cannot find a way to delete this book.
September 11, 2013
One of my favourities .....an old friend.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews