Silver Donald Cameron (June 21, 1937 – June 1, 2020) was a Canadian journalist, author, playwright, and university teacher whose writing focused on social justice, nature, and the environment. His 15 books of non-fiction dealt with everything from history and politics to education and community development.
An avid sailor, Cameron wrote several books about ships and the sea. He was the author of a young adult novel and a thriller, both set in Nova Scotia where he lived for more than 40 years. Two of his books, The Education of Everett Richardson (1977 and 2019) and The Living Beach (1998), are included in Atlantic Canada's 100 Greatest Books.Adams, Trevor and Clare, Stephen Patrick. (2009) Atlantic Canada's 100 Greatest Books (2009) Halifax: Nimbus Publishing. The Living Beach ranked 35th, pp. 96–97, while The Education of Everett Richardson ranked 47th, pp. 120–121.
Cameron's only stage play, The Prophet at Tantramar, was about Leon Trotsky's month-long confinement in a prisoner-of-war camp in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and was also produced as a radio drama, one of more than 50 Cameron wrote for both CBC Radio and CBC Television. In addition, he produced radio and television documentaries, as well as writing and narrating two documentary films for The Green Interview, Bhutan: The Pursuit of Gross National Happiness (2010) and Salmon Wars: Salmon Farms, Wild Fish and the Future of Communities (2012).
His magazine articles numbered in the hundreds and his newspaper columns appeared in The Globe and Mail and the Halifax Chronicle Herald. He also wrote extensively for provincial and federal government departments as well as for corporate and non-profit clients.
Cameron served as writer-in-residence at two universities in Nova Scotia as well as at the University of Prince Edward Island. He was dean of the School of Community Studies at Cape Breton University and served as its first Farley Mowat Chair in Environment. He also taught at Dalhousie University, the University of British Columbia and the University of New Brunswick.
One of Cameron's last projects involved a series of video interviews with environmental thinkers, writers and activists that appeared on subscription website "The Green Interview". Interviewees include Vandana Shiva, Farley Mowat, James Lovelock, Jane Goodall and David Orton.
Cameron's writing and journalism earned him many awards, and in 2012, he was appointed as both Member of the Order of Canada (CM) and Member of the Order of Nova Scotia (ONS).
Early life and education
Donald Cameron was born in 1937 in Toronto, the son of Hazel (Robertson) and Dr. Maxwell A. Cameron. He joked that, at age two, he fled to British Columbia, taking his parents with him.McLeod, Paul. "Wadih Fares, Silver Donald Cameron awarded Order of Canada". Halifax Chronicle Herald, June 29, 2012 His father was the head of the faculty of education at UBC beginning the mid-1940s. He grew up mostly in Vancouver and attended the University of British Columbia, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1960. He earned his Master of Arts at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962 and returned to UBC to teach for two years before leaving for the University of London, where he received his Ph.D. in 1967. He based his doctoral thesis on his study of the structures in six major novels by Walter Scott. He served as a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University (1967–1968) before becoming an English professor in 1968, at the University of New Brunswick.
Career While teaching at UNB, Cameron served as publisher and founding editor of The Mysterious East. During its four-year existence, the left-leaning, monthly magazine published a wide variety of articles and editorials on issues in Canada's Maritime Provinces, including everything from pollution, housing and censorship to birth control, drugs and the problems of native peoples.
In 1971, Cameron took a leave of absence from UNB and moved to D'Escousse, a village on Isle Madame, a small island off the southeastern coast of Cape Breton. He wanted to write, he missed the sea and his first marriage had ended.McCulloch, Sandra. "HORIZONS - Freedom found at sea," Times Colonist (Victoria), November 7, 1993. He arrived in Cape Breton, a divorced father of three sons and a daughter. As he told a journalist 20 years later, "Dr. Donald Cameron left his university office, drove to the village of D'Escousse, stepped into a phone booth and emerged as the award-winning author and playwright Silver Donald Cameron."MacDonald, Cathy. "A silver lining: Silver Donald Cameron's book salutes Cape Breton's good life," The Daily News (Halifax), October 21, 1991. (He added the name "Silver" to set himself apart from the multitudes of other Camerons. Folk-singer Tom Gallant suggested the name because Cameron's head of prematurely grey hair was his most striking feature.) Cameron also explains the origin of the name "Silver" in his sailing book Wind, Whales and Whisky, p. 72. Cameron settled in D'Escousse after buying a house he describes as "composed of two tiny ancient buildings pushed together to make one comfortable home." He adds that the house was "spang on the roadside, the floor plan was awkward, and it was half-renovated in a style not much to my taste. But it felt right: a serene and happy little house where generations had loved and laughed and wept and died."Cameron, Silver Donald. (1991) Wind, Whales and Whisky: A Cape Breton Voyage. Toronto, Macmillan Canada.
Cameron had already published magazine articles and a literary book, Faces of Leacock, a 1967 study of the great Canadian humorist, but now he was finally free to begin his apprenticeship as a full-time writer. For him, D'Escousse was an ideal home base. "For a writer," Cameron writes, "the great benefit of a village is the way you can know people." He added that in cities, writers are inevitably drawn into limited circles, but villages let them escape. "My friends in D'Escousse include welders, fishermen, millwrights and mothers on welfare as well as teachers, potters, priests and businessmen." Moreover, a writer who lives in a village watches people change and grow. "An electrician becomes a politician, schoolboys become truckers and contractors, middle-aged civil servants retire and old people take their departures. Knowing them year by year, I can grasp something of the flow of their lives."
In 1973, Cameron bought an unfinished boat named Hirondelle in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. In the book Wind, Whales and Whisky, he writes about spending the summer completing it by adding masts, toilets, compasses and handrails before sailing the 33-foot schooner back to D'Escousse. Hirondelle became the first schooner moored in D'Escousse since 1928 when Leonard Pertus sold his own boat Maple Leaf. Pertus became Cameron's tutor and mentor teaching him how to sail safely and well. Cameron dreamed of sailing across the Atlantic and, with the help of friends, began a nine-year project building a 27-foot cutter named Silversark.
Notable books
The Education of Everett Richardson
In 1977, Silver Donald Cameron published The Education of Everett Richardson: The Nova Scotia Fishermen's Strike 1970–71. Portions of the book had previously appeared in three Canadian magazines, Maclean's, Saturday Night and The Mysterious East.Cameron, Silver Donald. (1977) The Education of Everett Richardson: The Nova Scotia Fishermen's Strike 1970–71. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Everett Richardson was one of 235 trawlermen from the tiny ports of Canso, Mulgrave and Petit de Grat who fought for better pay, safer working conditions, job security and most of all, for the right to belong to the union they had chosen, the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union led by Homer Stevens, a member of the Communist Party of Canada. Their main adversaries were two, huge, foreign-owned fishing companies. The fishermen also faced stiff opposition from what Cameron calls the "cod aristocracy", rich members of the Nova Scotia elite, as well as from leading politicians, judges, government bureaucrats, members of the clergy, the province's main daily newspaper, and the Canadian labour establishment itself. "In the end," Cameron writes, "this is not a story of the fishermen, or even of the labour movement. It is a story about privilege and poverty and injustice in this country, and about the social and political arrangements which cheat and oppress most Canadians, which stunt our humanity and distort our environment."
After a seven-month strike and many more months of struggle, the fishermen eventually lost the right to be represented by their chosen union. However, Cameron points out that they did win collective bargaining rights for fishermen in Nova Scotia breaking centuries-old rules that prohibited them from joining unions. The strike also brought better pay and working conditions. Cameron concludes that the fishermen were both "collective heroes and martyrs, who lost the battle for themselves but won it for their brothers." He adds that the striking fishermen "changed the law, changed conditions on the boats, and left the see-saw of power balanced a little more evenly."
Shortly after the book was published, it received a hostile review in The Globe and Mail. Critic Patrick O'Flaherty complained that the book contributed to a Canadian literary atmosphere that "continues to stink of parlor radical sanctimoniousness."O'Flaherty, Patrick. "The Education of Everett Richardson." The Globe and Mail, August 20, 1977, p. 35. Two years later, critic Michael Greenstein praised the book for its even-handedness, but suggested Cameron got too bogged down in the official account of the strike and could have used more lively anecdotes to entertain his readers.Greenstein, Michael. "Down and Out Across Canada." Canadian Literature No. 81, Summer, 1979, pp. 134–137. However, more than 30 years after its publication,The Education of Everett Richardson attained the rank of 47th in a volume listing Atlantic Canada's 100 Greatest Books. Authors Trevor Adams and Stephen Clare write: "Cameron takes readers to the strike's seminal moments, giving them a real sense of the people on both sides of the conflict, and showing a keen understanding of this pivotal moment in Canadian labour history." They add that "through the lens of Atlantic Canadian history, or the labour movement, or the history of the fisheries, this is an important book. Yet few books on those subjects stand as large as The Education of Everett Richardson. That's because this book's ultimate strength is in Cameron's storytelling skills. His writing is taut, tense, and blunt, perfectly reflecting the powder-keg feel of the times."
Wind, Whales and Whisky
Wind, Whales and Whisky: A Cape Breton Voyage recounts Cameron's adventures as he, his wife Lulu and 12-year-old son Mark Patrick sail around Cape Breton Island on their 27-foot cutter Silversark during the summer of 1990. Cameron himself says the book is a family adventure, a portrait of Cape Breton and "an essay on values, what is it that makes a good life." The book has also been described as "a wonderfully entertaining Bruegel painting of a book—at once a travelogue, a history, a geography, a folk study, a social commentary and a book of humour."McDonell, James. "Joyful romp around Cape Breton," The Ottawa Citizen, December 14, 1991, p. J5. Cameron introduces his readers to a wide variety of characters that he meets during his voyage including moonshine makers, malt-whisky distillers, musicians, poets, American Buddhists, fishermen and coal miners.