Summary

This item is one of our 50 Treasures: Celebrating 50 years of James Cook University.

Liz Downes answers the question 'Why is this significant?'

The acquisition of the Devanny Archive for the fledgling University College library in 1969 was quite a coup for one young staff member. Ron Store was attempting to build a north Queensland literature collection by acquiring significant works of fiction and non-fiction by the region's writers. He had soon identified the controversial social and political activist and writer, Jean Devanny, as one of the north's key literary and political figures.

A New Zealander by birth, Jean arrived in Sydney in 1929 and first visited north Queensland in 1934. Over the following years she spent long periods living, working and writing in and around Cairns, the Tablelands, the Gulf country and the coastal sugar towns. But, after two years back in Sydney, she arrived in Townsville in 1950, describing herself as 'adrift and rudderless'. The city was to remain her home until leukaemia claimed her in 1962.

Intent on acquiring Devanny's published works for the library (especially the novels set in the north's sugar towns and canefields), Ron Store discovered that Jean's daughter and son-in-law, Patricia and Ron Hurd, were still living in Jean's humble West End cottage. To his excitement, this small dwelling (which still survives) also housed many boxes full of letters, articles, unpublished manuscripts and much else, charting the course of Devanny's eventful life and achievements.

Aware of the importance of her mother's legacy, Patricia agreed to donate the material to the University. Here it has been well cared for while remaining accessible to students of Devanny's turbulent life and impressive body of work. The archive has been used by researchers from Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Its contents enabled writer and academic, Carole Ferrier, to prepare Jean's unpublished autobiography, Points of Departure, for publication in 1986, and to research and write her own definitive biography, Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary (1999).

Life on a Barrier Reef Island is one of several substantial unpublished manuscripts in the archive. Based on Jean's extended winter stays on Magnetic Island in the early 1950s it reveals a very different Devanny from the fiery speaker who made headlines battling for workers' rights, racial equality and sexual freedom.

Here is a woman full of life, curiosity and enthusiasm for adventure. Revelling in wild nature's infinite variety, oddity and grandeur and equally fascinated by human nature, she is Magnetic Island's perfect chronicler. Entranced by the island's beauty, its rich natural history and the unusual characters she meets on her explorations of its hidden corners, Jean Devanny has given us probably the most engaging and evocative account of Magnetic Island ever written. That is a treasure indeed.