Mona Brand (22 October 1915 – 1 August 2007) was a twentieth-century Australian playwright, poet and freelance writer. She also wrote under the name Alexis Fox.
During her lifetime, Brand was better known in Europe than in Australia, to the extent that she subtitled her 1995 autobiography Enough Blue Sky: The Autobiography of Mona Brand… An Unknown Well-Known Writer.
Early life
Brand was born in Sydney on 22 October 1915, to Alexander and Violet Brand (née Nixon). She had an older brother, John, and a younger, Deryck.
In the early 1930s, her father was second engineer on ship S.S. Cape Leeuwin servicing lighthouses and lightships between Brisbane and Darwin. There were literary influences in her family. In one letter to Brand, her father included an original poem The Carpentaria Lightship which she unsuccessfully attempted to have published in The Bulletin. Brand's mother, Violet Nixon, was the youngest daughter of journalist, government surveyor, architect and poet Francis Hodgson Nixon (1832–1883), whose collection of poetical pieces The Legends and Lays of Peter Perfume putatively 'collected, corrected and edited by Francis H' was published in Melbourne by F. F. Bailliere in 1865.AustLit
When Brand was seven years old, her mother died after a self-induced abortion, and she was sent to live with relatives in Rockhampton, attending the Rockhampton Girls Grammar School. At the age of eleven she moved back to Sydney, finishing her education at North Sydney Girls' High School. Brand wrote of her childhood feelings of displacement in her autobiography, Enough Blue Sky, which she published in 1995. She often felt the disparity between her own treatment and the treatment her brothers received, and noticed other disparities in class and race from an early age. She believed this informed her later writing and opinions. When she was in high school she aspired to become a journalist.
Adult years
Brand's first job was as a copy-writer with The Sun in Sydney. During World War II, she worked as a social worker and then as a research officer for the Department of Labour and National Service (1945–48). She worked in London between 1948 and 1954, originally as a typist for the BBC, then in Hanoi, Vietnam in 1956–57 as an English teacher, subsequently returning to Australia.
On 26 September 1955 Mona married Len Fox, a journalist for the Communist Party, who was also a poet and fiction writer.http://www.austlit.edu.au/run?ex=ShowAgent&agentId=ALh AustLit entry Their marriage was, in the words of Brand's friends and herself, a "marriage of true minds". They remained together until his death in Sydney on 9 January 2004, aged 98.
Political views
Brand was a member of the Communist Party of Australia from 1947 to 1970 "making a clear distinction that she was a member of the Australian Communist Party, not the Soviet Party."New Theatre, The New Years 1932- (Sydney: University Publishing Service, University of Sydney, 2007):58. She was quoted as saying, "when I joined the Communist Party it was not so much because I agreed with Karl Marx (of whom I had read little) as because I felt he and his followers agreed with me."Brand, Enough Blue Sky, IV Brand was noted in the translation of Better a Millstone as a "progressive Australian writer."Yu, Ouyang, 'A Century of Oz Lit in China', Antipodes, 25.1 (Jun 2011): 65-71.
Much of Brand's social activism was expressed through her work, and particularly through her relationship with New Theatre. Most of her plays carry clear political messages.
One of her most popular plays, Here Comes Kisch, discusses the events of Egon Kisch's exclusion from Australia in 1935. Kisch, a communist and Anti-Nazi who was prohibited from entering Australia, is portrayed throughout the play as an intelligent, down to earth man, while the German officials are written as sycophants.Brand, Mona, Here Comes Kisch, (Montmorency, Victoria, Yackandanda Playscripts, 1983). Other notable political plays include Our 'Dear' Relations, a play which satirises the consumerism of Mother's Day and discusses the disadvantage of the working class within the capitalist system,Brand, Mona, Here Under Heaven: Three plays: Barbara, Our 'dear' relations, Here under Heaven, (Sydney, Wentworth Press, 1969). Better a Millstone, which concerns injustice in the criminal sentencing of youth in England and draws on the Derek Bentley case,Brand, Mona, Plays, (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1965). and Here Under Heaven, a play about sexism and racism, both towards Asians and Aboriginals.Brand, Here under Heaven : Three plays.
Brand was a prominent member of the NSW Branch of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, and was a strong advocate of Aboriginal rights. With Fox, she campaigned for a 'yes' vote in the 1967 referendum to have Aboriginal Australians recognised in the Australian Constitution, as noted by Governor General, Sir William Deane at the Reconciliation Convention in 1997.J. Holder, Comrades Up the Cross – Len Fox. http://www.crossart.com.au/L_fox.html
In 1956, Brand travelled to Vietnam to assist the Vietnamese revolution through her affiliations with the CPA. She assisted Radio Hanoi and the Voice of Vietnam, especially with English translations, returning to Australia the following year.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) held a security file on Brand from 1950, detailing her movements and activities. The file was 379 pages long when it was released from closed access. Brand read the file herself, and expressed her distaste for ASIO's actions in a satirical piece in The Sydney Morning Herald in 2002.
Literary career
Brand joined the Victorian Branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers during the war years, discussing her early works with fellow writers Leonard Mann, Frank Dalby Davison, and Vance Palmer. After the war she joined the Melbourne Realist Writer's Group, where her first play Here Under Heaven was read. This group, which included writers Frank Hardy and Eric Lambert, recommended the play to Melbourne New Theatre and it was performed in 1948. Its production that year by Louie Dunn won several prizes.
Brand began writing theatre with a one-act play for an evening aid event for the Red Cross. The plays needed to have women only casts because the event was being run and organised by the Presbyterian Ladies' College, Sydney. Her cousin was part of the event and was given a play to perform which she didn't like. Being roommates with Brand at the time, she asked if Brand could write something better for her that weekend. Brand agreed and wrote her first one-act play, a comedy about the learning curves of first aid treatments titled First Aid.Tompkins, Joanne and Julie Holledge, eds., Performing Women/Performing Feminisms: Interviews with International Women Playwrights, (Brisbane: Australasian Drama Studies Association, 1997): 110-11.
Brand travelled extensively overseas, going first to London in 1948. She attempted to interest London theatre groups with her work but was told that London audiences would not be interested in plays about Australia. During the five and a half years she was in the UK (1948–1953) Brand was active in London's Unity Theatre which shared common views with the New Theatre in Australia.Australian Drama 1920-1955, (Papers presented to a conference on Australian drama, University of New England, Armidale, 1–4 September 1984). During this time away Brand wrote Strangers in the Land which was set in a Malayan bungalow. As this play dealt with the Malayan Emergency, an issue of current interest, Brand hoped that the British would be interested in it. It was produced by the Unity Theatre in 1950 and then banned in the UK. It was later performed in Australia, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and India.http://www.austlit.edu.au/run?ex=ShowWork&workId=CUHS AustLit entry
Better a Millstone is a notable social realist play. Written in 1953, the play was inspired by the Derek Bentley case, which saw a young, illiterate man hanged for being involved in a robbery that led to the murder of a policeman. Brand centres the play around the campaign for a posthumous pardon.Tompkins and Holledge, Performing Women/Performing Feminisms, 111. She uses the play to consider issues of child abuse, commercial exploitation and the criminalisation of young people. The political nature of this play and the issues confronted are reflected in the title's biblical reference, "It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones." (Luke 17.2)Brand, Plays, 155. Brand makes the point that while the world treated her character, 'Ronnie' (i.e. Derek), poorly as a child the world took no responsibility for him when things went wrong.
Associations with New Theatre
Sydney's New Theatre, was concerned with the development of Australian women playwrights in the mid 20th century and provided unique insights of war and isolation, presenting feminist cases of internationalism.Pfisterer, Susan and Carolyn Pickett, Playing with ideas: Australian Women Playwrights from the suffragettes to the sixties, (Currency Press Pty Ltd, 1999). New Theatre has defined their philosophy in several ways since its establishment in the 1930s: from the slogan Art is a Weapon to the more recent Theatre with a Purpose.
It has been suggested that one of the reasons for Brand's artistic "isolation" from Australian Professional Theatre is due to her left-wing leanings and association with New Theatre. While it is relatively under-recognised in Australian theatre history, she did, in fact, have more plays produced, world-wide, than many other well-known Australian playwrights, for example, David Williamson,Leslie Rees, Foreword, in Enough Blue Sky, I-V but within Australia none of Brand's plays was professionally produced during her lifetime.
It is more likely that Brand's isolation from mainstream Australian theatre was due to the political and literary context of the period in which she wrote and to the wider treatment of progressive playwrights and writers in that period. With a conservative mainstream theatre industry dominant in Australia at the time, some moderately socialist or feminist playwrights such as Brand found an outlet in the New Theatre or repertory theatre movement which supported socialist and socially aware art movements. The flow-on effect of the lack of recognition in the mainstream was an increased association with the left and a further 'tainting' of these writers' reputations. During this period the New Theatre struggled for recognition, particularly in Sydney, as for fifteen years the commercial press did not publish reviews of their productions.Australian Drama 1920-1955, 9-12 Brand's works were, however, well received in Britain, Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany, Rumania, Poland, Latvia and India.Tilley, Mona Brand, 117-127.