Clancy Departs Dog Eat Bone World: Richard Freadman remembers Laurie Clancy

One of my first sightings of Laurie was in a framed photo in the old Eagle Bar at La Trobe University. Entitled 'The Coach,' the photo featured a young and rather fit-looking Captain Coach addressing his players at the quarter or three-quarter time break. The players, it has to be said, look completely uninterested in proceedings; but according to the picture's caption Laurie is pulling out all the rhetorical stops. The caption reads:Senior Lecturer in English Laurie Clancy urges on the football team in mid-1969 with accounts of existentialism and the thinking of Kierkegarrd.Laurie was one of those naturally funny people. Great company and a marvellous droll wit, he could also be hilarious without meaning to. Tall and angular with huge ruckman's hands, bulbous eyes and a 'bog-Irish' face, he often looked abstracted, as if on the way to, or perhaps recovering from, a hangover. And indeed this was not infrequently the case. Laurie, as they say, liked a drink. One of his fictional characters, taking a leaf out of his author's book, frames the motto 'in vino veritas' for himself. A refugee from a stern Catholic childhood, Laurie the writer could still put liturgical Latin to good use.An appearance of slightly shambolic approximation about Laurie was both accurate and misleading. Ann Blake, a colleague from the early days in the La Trobe English Department, remembers slapstick-like instances of Clancy absentmindedness over details like lecture times and venues. But she also remembers this same colleague coming in to work early, tapping furiously at an old portable typewriter whence issued a steady stream of novels, stories, reviews and opinion pieces. Beneath the laconic exterior Laurie was a man of high ambition and high accomplishment. He published four novels, three volumes of short stories, four works of literary scholarship, a book length introduction to Australian culture, and a vast, as yet uncounted, number of literary reviews and occasional pieces. He was one of several important early La Trobe academics who won the University its enviable and ongoing reputation as a home for public intellectuals. Laurie was equally at ease publishing in refereed literary journals, the Bulletin and the Sun. Left-wing, always a touch home-spun, and a passionate Richmond supporter, he viewed the High Theory that permeated his academic domain of literary studies from the 1980s onwards with bemusement and even suspicion.Laurie made a lasting contribution to the La Trobe English Department (now Program). He played a major part in the introduction of courses in Australian literature in the early 1970s (a move spearheaded by John Barnes). In addition to a great deal of effective team teaching with colleagues on big undergraduate courses he designed and taught an innovative course in Contemporary Literature which continued, with revisions that reflected Laurie's wide reading in late twentieth century fiction, until he retired from La Trobe in 1994. Hugh Underhill, who sometimes took seminars in the course with Laurie, says: 'What stands out for me, indelibly still, are Laurie's easy friendliness towards and never-failing solicitude towards his students, his way with anecdote or an amusingly apt riposte, and his egalitarian no-nonsense manner with us all.' He was indeed immensely popular with students, some of whom became personal friends, and a thoroughly congenial colleague. Former Head of Department, David Rawlinson, recalls Laurie as 'having an influence for balance, openness and common sense in the Department, never single-mindedly of one line, always independent and his own man.' In a poem, 'Hospice Time,' written during Laurie's final weeks, Max Richards writes of meeting in a dream 'Laurie, my old colleague, / ambling, genial as ever, considerate.' A particular Clancy skill was specially honed for staffmeetings. When things became fractious Laurie would sit like a Buddha, apparently oblivious to the tensions in the room. …

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