John Redrup, Banished Camelots: Recollections of a Catholic Childhood: A Celebration and a Requiem; ; Bookpress, Sydney, 1997; 302pp. (RRP $24 plus $4 postage from the author 16/4 Henrietta St., Double Bay, NSW 2028)

Reviewed by Michael Cooney

With a ripely emerald green cover, and slightly over-ripe sub-title and sub-sub-title, I expected Banished Camelots to wallow in nostalgia - to lament the passing of a pre-conciliar Church in Australia, innocent that that Church contained in its most fondly remembered characteristics the seeds of its destruction. It does not.

The last part of the book, describing the "lost Camelot" of the Marist Juniorate (a high school for boys following a vocation to the Marist Brothers) at Bowral certainly fills even a young reader with the homesickness which is the root of nostalgia. But in describing the monastic life of the Juniorate, and especially its liturgy and music, John Redrup is describing a kind of Catholic liturgy, and more broadly a kind of Catholic culture, which never spread in Australia. A reader, far from fuming at the perfidy of the post-conciliar reform which swept away the Juniorate and its culture, might lament the failure of the pre-conciliar Church to have more durably founded it. Like trees drawing water from the soil in sheep country, such "high" liturgy and culture would have drawn resources from the faithful; but like trees holding that same soil down in drought, such liturgy and culture might better have stemmed the erosion of Catholicism in Australia.

John Redrup's book did not only defy my expectations by describing in large part the life and culture of so atypical a religious community. Its first chapter makes a most unexpected gambit, describing the life of the author's first known ancestor, Robert Rudroppe. Robert, a rural Elizabethan scholarship boy, having completed his Bachelor of Arts failed to complete preparation for ordination at Christ College Oxford, but late in life became a country vicar. The chapter goes on to detail the ten succeeding generations of Redrups leading down to the time of the birth of John's father Jack.

Redrup has a neat sense of the ironies revealed in his life and in the lives of his ancestors. Some of the drollest of these are revealed by a re-reading of this first chapter. Banished Camelots is at its most satisfying when it expresses this ironic sense. The passage describing the visit of a priest to a migrant camp in Western Australia notes that the priest, "[t]hough he was Irish ... turned out, too, to be wise". The dry delivery just outweighs the familiar stereotype.

The story of John Redrup's family - for this book is, much more than a memoriam to a particular social milieu, the history of a particular family - moves from Scottish slums to the naval towns of the English south coast, by ship to Western Australia, and on to the Mornington Peninsula, Melbourne, and a Sydney in the shade of the steadily enlarging Sydney Harbour Bridge. The portraits of John's parents Jack and Terry (Theresa) Redrup are carefully drawn. Both are illustrated principally with details of which the child Jack would have been aware. There is only a small degree of retrospective comment; and that rarely directed toward the most traumatic details of what, while a fixed and permanent union, was clearly not an untroubled one. A reader thirsting for confirmation of his deductions may be disappointed by this coyness. I think that it preserves the dignity of the couple's life together while not vitiating the exercise of publicly recording that life.

Banished Camelots is not a mawkish or a sentimental book; in parts it is very funny. And it is not only a religious book - the main subject is the Redrup family; the events of their lives, and the content of their personalities, which become familiar and dear to the reader. Their joys and sorrows, particularly those of Jack and Terry, each born a hundred years ago, could not be more contemporary. Employment and income for the parents; health and education for the children; the threat of war and depression in this world and the hope for a life with Christ in the next. As a family history, Banished Camelots suggests that while the past may be a foreign country, it is not peopled by aliens. And as a recollection of what was clearly best of an age in the Church now often credited with more rigour than is strictly accurate, Banished Camelots does more than remind us of what was good and is gone. It shows us what the Church in Australia can be, now - not again, but for the first time.

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