Lost in the Syrup and the Ashes: Reclaiming John Naish, sugar country author and playwright
Vidonja Balanzategui, Bianka (2025) Lost in the Syrup and the Ashes: Reclaiming John Naish, sugar country author and playwright. Australian Journal of Biography and History, 10. 1. pp. 7-34.
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Abstract
Welsh-born John Naish, or Jack as he was known to family and friends, is not a luminary in the records of Australia’s literary heritage. Yet, in 1963, Olaf Ruhen opined in the Bulletin that the calibre of Naish’s autobiographical The Clean Breast and first novel The Cruel Field2 indicated that he was ‘the finest acquisition from abroad in the Australian literary foundation’ and that he would assume a ‘dominant position’ in Australian literature.3 When Naish succumbed to suicide in 1963 at the age of 40, his bright potential was extinguished.
| Item ID: | 90257 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 2209-9573 |
| Keywords: | biography, tropical Queensland, sugar industry, cane cutting, north Queensland literature |
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| Copyright Information: | All issues published from Volume 4(1) onwards are published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Issues published previous to this are under a standard copyright licence. |
| Date Deposited: | 28 Jan 2026 00:09 |
| FoR Codes: | 36 CREATIVE ARTS AND WRITING > 3602 Creative and professional writing > 360201 Creative writing (incl. scriptwriting) @ 50% 43 HISTORY, HERITAGE AND ARCHAEOLOGY > 4303 Historical studies > 430302 Australian history @ 50% |
| SEO Codes: | 13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1301 Arts > 130103 The creative arts @ 50% 26 PLANT PRODUCTION AND PLANT PRIMARY PRODUCTS > 2606 Industrial crops > 260607 Sugar @ 50% |
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