CJ Dennis’s “sentimental bloke” Bill, the larrikin who fell for Doreen and changed his rugged ways for a bucolic life of marital bliss on an orchard, is one of Australian literature’s most celebrated fictional characters.
But 110 years after Dennis introduced “The Bloke” through his book of verse The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, the true identity – and deeply troubled life and battlefield death – of the “real” Bill has finally been discovered by a researcher, Gary Fearon.
Fearon and an historian, Philip Butterss, have revealed Dennis’s much-loved and self-improved Bloke was based on an itinerant street-fighting drunk, horse trainer and jack of all trades, Bill Mitchell, whose short, less sentimental and tragic life was at odds with the fictional man’s.
“Much energy has been expended trying to unearth the original Man From Snowy River [by AB “Banjo’’ Paterson],” Fearon and Butterss write in the Victorian Historical Journal. “The original Sentimental Bloke, however, seems to have rested peacefully in an unmarked grave until now.
“The author consistently stated that the Sentimental Bloke was inspired by a real person [but] the information about the real person that can be pieced together from the archives reveals just how fictionalised Dennis’s character was.”
Their revelation starkly illustrates how profoundly fictional worlds and characters can diverge from human experience.
While South Australian Dennis had enormous success with the 1915 publication of The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (it sold 1,000 copies a week in its first year and more than 300,000 to date, making it Australia’s bestselling book of verse) the origins of his most famous character have been under-scrutinised.
Indeed, Fearon and Butterss write, the success of The Sentimental Bloke can be attributed to the highly fictionalised Bill, whose “world offered comfort for the Australian public in the context of a brutal war, an increasingly divided society and difficult economic conditions”.
Fearon explains what compelled him to establish the identity of the “real” Bloke: “Over a year ago I was living in the Melbourne CBD and became interested in the history of its laneways. It was while researching them that I stumbled across a newspaper article about the original Bloke, which said he frequented Chinatown. I did a bit more digging and realised he had never been identified. Dennis’s biographical sketch contained just enough clues for me to suspect only one person in history fit the profile. I went from there.”
In their journal article Fearon and Butterss carefully trace the genesis of Dennis’s Bloke and the life of Bill Mitchell.
Dennis moved to Toolangi in the forests above Healesville outside Melbourne in 1908. The Bloke first appeared in the Bulletin magazine in 1909 in his poem, Doreen. Bill expresses love for Doreen while renouncing his drinking, fighting and gambling ways. In 1911 Dennis reprised the same characters in a prequel about the couple’s first encounters and did so again in 1913 in Spring Song of a Bloke. Later that year he began work on The Songs of the Sentimental Bloke.
Dennis never wrote about the Doreen’s origins. But in a 1932 interview with Sydney’s the Arrow, he recounted how a neighbouring Toolangi farmer had a couple of worn-out horses and one day a “chap” who’d “led a life that interested me” was “given his board and a few bob a week” to train them. It was 1909.
“I became friendly with him,” Dennis said. “I enjoyed listening for hours to his escapades in the Chinese joints and two-up schools of Little Bourke Street [in Melbourne]. He was full of slang expressions which were quite new to me and I studied him.”
Dennis recounted how the trainer had fallen in love with the farmer’s daughter. The farmer discovered the pair kissing “down in the stable” and evicted the trainer.
“He came to me in tears, and told me all about his love troubles and made the remark, ‘Gorstruth, Mr Dennis: I wouldn’t do anythin’ crook. A bloke’s got sisters of his own.’ He then went on in such a stream of sentiment, combined with his slang, that the thought occurred to me that it would be rather original to combine the two in verse form.” That night he “sat down and wrote” Doreen.
Dennis said the original Sentimental Bloke had fought in the first world war and died in the second Battle of Bullecourt of May 1917.
“It is now possible to add to the story as recounted by Dennis,” Fearon and Butterss write. “The farmer who hired and then fired the original Sentimental Bloke was a nearby neighbour named Joseph Smedley, and he and his wife were among many people on whom Dennis relied during his life.”
The farmer’s daughter was Ivy – though one of the two racehorses he owned in 1909 was called Doreen.
“Although he is not named in any records associated with Toolangi during the short time that Smedley owned Doreen, a good case can be made that the original Sentimental Bloke was William Mitchell, born in Temora, near Wagga Wagga, in 1880,” they write.
“After extensive research, he emerges as the only person who is a good fit with the original Bloke’s profile, as recounted by Dennis. Mitchell is a horse-trainer and sometimes labourer and is recorded in Chinatown and nearby.”
Before and after leaving Toolangi Mitchell was constantly in trouble. Fearon and Butterss document his many brushes with the law, arrests and court appearances for drunkenness, foul language and fighting.
If the lives of Mitchell and the Sentimental Bloke intersect somewhat in Doreen, they soon diverge sharply. Courtesy of his sweetheart, Dennis’s character renounces his previous habits and tries to behave respectably. Through hard work and fortune his life is one of upward mobility and happiness. Mitchell, conversely, might have expressed his love for Ivy but he also lost his job. “He does not give up drinking, gambling, and fighting, and his life becomes bleaker and bleaker, underlining just how fictional Dennis’s Bloke was. There is no happy ending.”
By mid-1911 Mitchell was living in Bendigo, central Victoria, with Ethel Weddell, and her three children (she was pregnant with the third to her estranged husband when she and Mitchell became a couple). They moved to Melbourne in 1912 where he was soon arrested for brawling in Chinatown and convicted of assault. In April 1913 Ethel gave birth to a daughter with intellectual disabilities, Ruby Pearl Mitchell.
In mid-1914 and early 1915 Mitchell was working away from his family in another Victorian town, Shepparton. There was more trouble for drinking and alleged theft. He joined the army and was deployed to Egypt in March 1916 with the Australian Imperial Force’s 23rd Infantry Battalion.
“His fourteen-month career after embarkation is essentially a cycle of insubordination and punishment, punctuated by a couple of periods of illness and some interludes of calm,” Fearon and Butterss conclude.
His misdemeanours began while sailing on the HMAT Wiltshire. After disembarking in Egypt he endured considerable illness, including a bout of gonorrhea. In August 1916 he was court-martialled for using insubordinate language to a military police officer, saying to him, “What the bloody fucking hell are you interfering for?” and telling the officer to “mind [his] own fucking business”. He was sent to England where he met further alcohol-fuelled strife and was hospitalised with mumps before going absent without leave.
He was sentenced to 28 days of field punishment “but before this period was over, he was dead”, the authors established – a sergeant saw him blown up by a shell in the German lines at Bullecourt on 3 May 1917, one of 7,500 Australian personnel killed or wounded in the battle. “His body was never recovered.”
Ethel and the children received an army pension.
By the end of The Song of a Sentimental Bloke, the authors write, “a rough larrikin from the inner-city slums is a good husband and father, living comfortably in an arcadian setting, while retaining his slang and other traces of his origins”.
The book comforted a divided, war-ravaged and mourning fledgling Australian federation. It is testimony to the power of story, of characters inspired by – but diverging from the grittier elements of – life, to entertain and give succour.
The fictional Sentimental Bloke is celebrated in film, plays, musicals, ballets and countless reprints. But an unmarked grave on the European western front and his name on the roll of honour at the Australian War Memorial are the only acknowledgments of the man he was most likely based on. Until now.
