Wayne Thomas Hodgman

New Town: Origins

Wayne Thomas Hodgman was born on 7th November 1950 at the Royal Hobart Hospital, the eldest child of Gerald Raymond Hodgman and Patricia Anne Hodgman (née Swayne). The family lived in New Town, in a cream fibro house two streets back from the main road, in a neighbourhood of similar houses occupied by similar families — tradespeople, clerks, women who worked part-time when the children were old enough and sometimes before. Gerald was a clerk at a Hobart shipping company, a position he held without complaint or particular ambition for the entirety of his working life, and which gave the household a modest but reliable stability. Patricia did bookkeeping two days a week for a North Hobart grocer and managed the domestic economy of the house with the efficient attention of someone who understood that the margin between enough and not enough required continuous care.

Wayne's brother Colin Douglas arrived in 1954, and the two of them grew up in the company of the New Town streets with the freedom that the era and the suburb permitted — afternoons on bicycles, summer evenings at the Domain, the long walk to the waterfront on Saturdays that Gerald occasionally joined and more often did not. The household was warm without being demonstrative. Gerald read the newspaper every evening with the focused attention of a man for whom the world beyond New Town was primarily a source of information about how things were going, and Patricia read novels — whatever the local library branch stocked, which was more than Gerald thought was strictly necessary and which was, in the household's quiet negotiation of tastes and habits, a line she held without argument.

Wayne absorbed both orientations: the practical confidence in having a view about the world, and the more private habit of looking for things inside texts. He was a child who read widely and without discrimination — adventure novels, histories, the encyclopaedia volumes Gerald had purchased at a hardware store sale as a single decisive act of parental aspiration, a set of Reader's Digest condensed books whose structural relationship to literature Wayne would not have been able to articulate at eight but felt instinctively. The encyclopaedia had a page on Keats in the K volume that included a brief poem excerpt — something about beauty and truth and cold pastoral — and Wayne read it three times in sequence, then closed the volume and sat for a moment with the particular disorientation of someone whose sense of what language was for had just shifted. He was nine. He returned to the page twice more over the following days before the interest settled into something less urgent and more permanent.

Gerald noticed none of this, or noticed it without knowing what to do with the observation. Patricia noticed and said nothing, which was a form of encouragement she had learned was more durable than the spoken kind.

School

Wayne attended New Town Primary and proceeded to New Town High School, where the curriculum was adequate and the teaching was uneven in the way of state secondary schools of the era — a handful of staff genuinely engaged with their subjects, the remainder performing competence at a level that satisfied the formal requirements and asked nothing more of the students than the formal requirements asked back. Wayne found his way through by reading around the edges of what was assigned rather than through it, arriving in class with context that the lesson had not provided and questions that occasionally unsettled teachers who had prepared for a narrower range of responses.

He was not a sportsman and not a prefect and not visible in the school's social machinery beyond a moderate reputation for being good with words, which was useful in certain contexts and irrelevant in most. He found his way to the English teacher in Years 9 and 10 — a Mr Baskett, whose first name Wayne never learned, whose professional situation he only understood much later as that of a man trapped by circumstance in a role that had not turned out as he had hoped, and who channelled whatever remained of his own literary enthusiasm into the two or three students per year who seemed worth channelling it toward. Baskett gave Wayne a slim paperback anthology of Australian poetry in Year 10 — Marcus Clarke and Henry Kendall and Louisa Lawson among others — with a handwritten note inside that said you might find this useful. Wayne kept the book for the rest of his life, and when his own students decades later asked him how he had come to colonial Australian poetry, this was the story he told, or a version of it.

He completed his Leaving Certificate in 1968 with strong results in English and History and enrolled that year at the University of Tasmania — the first in the family to do so, a fact that Gerald received with a mixture of pride and mild bafflement, and that Patricia received with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had been expecting it and had been careful not to say so too often.

University of Tasmania (1969–1977)

Wayne arrived at the University of Tasmania's Sandy Bay campus in 1969 with the particular quality of excitement of someone who had been preparing for an environment without knowing what it would actually be like, and found that the reality exceeded rather than disappointed the expectation. The seminars that assumed genuine engagement, the lecturers who treated students as capable of following an argument to its conclusion, the library that was substantially larger and less orderly than the New Town branch — all of it felt like the right scale for what he had been trying to do in the wrong contexts for years.

He enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts with a double major in English and History, and by the end of the first year had settled into a primary focus on literature with the particular conviction of someone who had found, rather than chosen, the subject. The Australian colonial tradition absorbed him with growing intensity across the undergraduate years: the poets and prose writers who had attempted, with varying success and in conditions of considerable social and geographic strangeness, to make legible a landscape and a social order for which the inherited European literary conventions were structurally inadequate. The effort of that making — the places where it succeeded, the places where it failed, the places where the failure was itself the most revealing thing — seemed to Wayne a question worth taking seriously, and he pursued it with the systematic energy of someone who had found the problem that would occupy the better part of his working life.

He graduated with First Class Honours in 1972, his thesis examining the prosody of Adam Lindsay Gordon — a choice that surprised his supervisor initially and satisfied him considerably by the end — and was encouraged directly to proceed to doctoral study. He did, spending the following years in close engagement with the archival and textual material of nineteenth-century Australian poetry, developing a methodology that combined rigorous attention to historical context with a genuine willingness to argue for the literary significance of writers the metropolitan canon had consistently neglected. The doctorate was awarded in 1977. Gerald, who had never read Adam Lindsay Gordon and did not after the thesis was submitted, attended the graduation ceremony with Patricia and stood for photographs with a pride that expressed itself as straightened posture and a firm handshake, which was, Wayne understood, the fullest available expression.

The Academic Career

The university offered Wayne a tutoring position while he completed his thesis and a lectureship in 1978, which he accepted with the uncomplicated satisfaction of a man who had found a professional home that matched his temperament and his interests with unusual precision. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1982 and to Associate Professor in 1991, a progression that was steady rather than spectacular — the record of someone whose contribution was valued continuously and urgently never, which suited him. He was offered positions at mainland universities on two occasions, both of which would have represented significant career advancement by conventional measures and both of which he declined, citing genuinely his commitment to the Tasmanian literary tradition as a research field and his preference for the scale and character of UTAS as a teaching environment. Both statements were true. The fact that his life was in Hobart by then in ways that had become structural was also true, and he did not pretend otherwise to the people he trusted.

His teaching was what his students remembered. He was the kind of lecturer who treated the seminar as a genuine intellectual event — who arrived with a view and invited disagreement with it, who had read everything he assigned and considerably more besides, who held the position that close reading was both a technical skill and an ethical practice, and who had the gift of making a nineteenth-century colonial poem feel not like an artefact of historical interest but like a living account of an experience that had not finished happening. Students who arrived in his courses expecting a peripheral subject delivered in a minor key tended to leave with a different understanding of what peripheral meant and who had decided it. This was, by the measure he applied to his own work, the most useful thing he could do.

He published three academic monographs over his career. The first, in 1984, was a revised and expanded version of his doctoral thesis — thorough, carefully argued, well-received in the field, and read by the number of people that serious academic literary scholarship was read by, which was not a large number and had never been expected to be. The second, in 1993, examined women writers in colonial Van Diemen's Land, was reviewed more broadly than the first, and was adopted across Australian literature courses at several universities, giving it a readership that gratified him without changing his sense of the work's purpose. The third, in 2004, was his most ambitious and his most contested: a study of the relationship between colonial landscape writing and the ongoing fact of Indigenous dispossession, which argued positions that some colleagues found uncomfortable and which Wayne had taken a decade to feel ready to commit to in print. It was the work he was most proud of and the one he had taken the greatest risk in publishing, which he understood to be the same thing expressed from different angles.

Rowena

Wayne met Rowena Margaret Turner in 1977, at a recital she gave in the university's music department — a programme of Schubert and Ravel that a colleague had mentioned in the corridor on a Thursday afternoon and which Wayne had attended with the mild expectation of a pleasant hour and the actual experience of something considerably more disorienting. He introduced himself afterwards in the way of a man whose intellectual confidence substantially exceeded his social ease in unscripted situations, and Rowena received the introduction with the attentiveness of someone who was very good at reading what was happening beneath what was being said and who had decided, in the space of the conversation, that what was happening was worth pursuing.

They were together through 1978 and 1979, navigating the practical complications of a relationship between a UTAS lecturer whose schedule was at least predictable and a concert pianist whose performance calendar was not, with the patient negotiation of two people who had decided the complications were worth managing because the alternative was worse. They married in June 1980 in a ceremony small enough to be genuinely relaxed, attended by family and a modest number of friends, and purchased with combined savings and a twenty-year mortgage the West Hobart Federation house that became the household of their marriage and the childhood home of their children.

The house filled quickly with books and with the piano that Rowena had moved from her previous flat and that occupied the front sitting room as the gravitational centre of the house's daily rhythm. Wayne's books colonised the shelves and then the floors and then, over the years, the stairs, the windowsills, and a second-hand bookcase acquired specifically to contain the overflow that immediately failed to contain it. Rowena maintained the garden. Wayne maintained the fiction that the book situation was manageable. Both positions were held with affectionate insincerity, which was a mode of domestic discourse they had established early and found durable.

Children

Jenny was born in April 1986, and Wayne met the occasion of her birth in the manner the birth record preserved: sitting in a waiting-room chair, reciting poetry under his breath, which was either a coping mechanism or simply what he did when the situation exceeded his available expressive range, and which Rowena, when she heard about it afterwards, found entirely characteristic. He was a father who was more at ease with older children than with infants — more comfortable in the mode of reading aloud, of conversation, of the shared examination of something interesting — and who grew steadily more engaged as each of his three children developed the capacity for sustained exchange. Jenny's theatrical energy and emotional directness were, by the time she reached school age, something he engaged with with genuine delight even when it exhausted him, which it regularly did.

Kevin arrived in August 1990, and proved over time to be the child whose mind moved in closest proximity to Wayne's own — the same accumulative curiosity, the same preference for the circling question over the closed answer, the same instinct to read around a subject rather than through it. Wayne recognised this without making it into a prescription, understanding that the resemblance was not a mandate and that Kevin's version of the inclination would find its own direction. He fed it by leaving books around rather than assigning them, by having conversations at the dinner table that treated children's contributions as worth engaging with seriously, and by being available for the kind of extended, tangential discussion that the question of what a poem was doing at the level of the line sometimes required. Robert came in 1994, inclined from an early age toward the practical and structural, and Wayne met this with genuine support that contained, honestly, a component of affectionate bewilderment, which was a response Robert found more amusing than anything else.

The household that Wayne and Rowena made for the three of them was one in which literature and music were the ambient atmosphere rather than the object of instruction — present not as subjects to be studied but as the natural medium through which the family thought and talked and organised its understanding of what was happening in the world. This was not a deliberate pedagogical strategy so much as simply what two people who took those things seriously produced when they made a home together, and the children absorbed it in the way that children absorbed the fundamental assumptions of the households they grew up in: completely, and without always knowing they were doing it.

The Illness and Death

Wayne was diagnosed with lung cancer in the autumn of 2012. He was sixty-one, in the final years of a full academic career that had produced three books, several hundred students, and a body of work in the Tasmanian literary field whose influence was quiet and genuine and not always traceable to its source. The diagnosis came at a stage where treatment was possible, and he pursued it with the practical cooperation of someone who was prepared to do what the situation required and who did not find the medical machinery of oncology anything other than exactly what it was. The prognosis was cautious, and the illness moved across the following months faster than the cautious prognosis had suggested.

He continued teaching through the first semester of 2013, reducing his load gradually but remaining present in the department and in the seminars he had been running in various forms for thirty-five years. His students that semester understood something was wrong; most of them did not ask directly, which was itself a form of attention. His colleagues arranged around the situation with the quiet accommodation of people who understood what the work meant to him and what removing him from it before it was necessary would have cost.

Wayne died 22 April 2013, at home in the West Hobart house, with Rowena and Jenny and Kevin and Robert present. He was sixty-two. He had spent the better part of his working life arguing, in seminar rooms and in print, that the literature produced in a small island colony at the far end of the world deserved sustained and serious attention — that the effort of people trying to make language work in conditions of strangeness and dispossession was not a footnote to a more important story but a story worth reading on its own terms. He had made that argument to enough people, and persuaded enough of them, to consider the effort justified. His chair remained in the front sitting room beside the overflowing bookcase. Rowena did not move it.