In dialogue with A.D. Hope: dialogue one: childhood and adolescence

[Alec Derwent Hope, born in Cooma 1907, won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, after majoring in English and Philosophy at Sydney University, and returned to a life of teaching and writing from the ‘thirties. His pre-eminence in literary culture was underpinned by his appointment as Professor of English at University College, Canberra, the forerunner of the Australian National University. His work in poetry, translations, and criticism provoked intense response, never indifference. His first published volumes were the satirical sequence, Dunciad Minimus : An Heroic Poem (1950), and selection of poems, The Wandering Islands (1955); amongst the final volumes were the autobiographical Chance Encounters (1992) and Selected Poems (1992).<br />Dialogue One was designed to explore what connections can be made between the life of the child and the values engendered in this formative phase and the adult’s creative work and view of the world; an exploration shaped by what might be seen as a relentless irony inherent in his poetry and his other scholarly productions and by Hope’s view that childhood is a place of the sacred and of secrets that are best protected from the limiting force of definition--somehow best kept suspended between the unconscious and the conscious mind to draw from when enacting a poetic vision of life. To that extent, Dialogue One is an attempt to navigate territory that might be seen as Hope’s mindscape and landscape as it emerged in childhood and adolescence.<br />The following exchange comprises selected excerpts from the transcripts of Ann McCulloch’s videoed interviews in Melbourne 1988, The Dance of Language: The Life and Work of A.D. Hope, as well as from her many conversations with Hope between 1981 and 1996 in Canberra.]<br />