Exiles at home: Australian women writers, 1925-1945 9780207197437

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Drusilla Modjeska was born in England in 1946 and has lived in Australia since 1971. Her books include Exiles At Home (1981), Poppy (1990), Sisters, as editor (1993), The Orchard (1994), Secrets, with Amanda Lohrey and Robert Dessaix (1997) and Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999). She lives in Sydney.

Also by Drusilla Modjeska Poppy (1990)

Sisters, as editor (1993) The Orchard (1994) Secrets, with Amanda Lohrey and Robert Dessaix (1997) Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999)

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20 « Exiles At Home

idea of writing and being a not unworthy daughter of Christopher the poet.’’® Yet there is enough evidence, however fragmentary, to offer another interpretation and to suggest that it was a genuine desire, that her overtures to Jack Lindsay were serious attempts at literary interaction. Anne Brennan tells us a great deal about the inhospitable environment of the twenties. There was no way for

women to penetrate that bohemian group except through their sexuality. Women’s intellectual and literary endeavour was simply not taken seriously and often, as in Anne Brennan’s case, not even recognised. Both Axel Clark and Jack Lindsay point out that Anne Brennan did have a particularly complex and disturbed relationship with her father and Lindsay sees it as the key to understanding her. Without denying this, what interests me are the social and cultural manifestations of the conflicts she was caught in. Here, it seems to me, is

a clever, talented, intellectual young woman, proud of her association with a leading poet and the French and German intellectual and literary traditions in which he was expert. She was a

woman who had ability as a writer, who expressed her wish to write, and hung around the clubs where the writers met. Yet she did not become a writer. Instead she became a whore. She entered that group through her sexual favours, dancing on the tables for them, their eyes and their hands on her ankles and her thighs. It was not simply that the bohemian life-style was antagonistic to women. Rather their political and aesthetic ideas were antipatheti-

cal to women’s intellectual endeavour. Indeed, Vision and the Lindsay group represented, as John Docker has put it, a ‘‘disguised

anti-feminism’’.’ Their notions of art and the artist were highly elitist. Art was, for them, the product of a creative mind and the society that was necessary for such a mind to flourish was culturally hierarchical, ensuring a sacrosanct position for the Artist. Rejecting war and the civilisation that had produced it, they were pinning their hopes on an antipodean renaissance of Vitalism and Beauty. In doing so they were rejecting any social or political intervention

and opposing the more egalitarian nationalist literary tradition. Looking back in his autobiography, Jack Lindsay wrote: The break between our conception of high art and that of

national expression was only one aspect of a whole series of breaks—between art and people, mind and matter, man the image bearer and woman the child bearer. And so our struggle for wholeness and integration was betrayed before it began.®

The break between ‘‘man the image bearer and woman the child bearer’’ was part of an anti-feminist aesthetic.

Isolation and Escape * 21

In Norman Lindsay’s view the artist-aristocrat was to dedicate himself to the discovery and definition of Beauty in his search for the ideal values of Mind. Beauty was embodied in Woman and was

to be discovered both sexually, and artistically through the

intellect, which was seen as inherently ‘‘male’’ and ‘*transcendent’’. Thus women were granted an active sexuality but

a sexuality that was considered only in relation to men; women were denied any intellectuality. ‘‘Woman as the active principle in life; Man the active principle in Art or Thought.’’ Women as sexual

beings were to be used in the search for Beauty and artistic integration and wholeness, but at the same time they were to be distanced as prostitutes against a deep fear of ‘‘woman the social

animal conspiring to trap a man in family responsibility’’.? Describing his own sexual exploits during this period when he was a

very young man, Jack Lindsay admits that he had ‘‘in the last resort, a conviction that the world of women was suffering from a

lack, a void, a chill, which it was my duty to offer to fill with warmth and purpose whenever the chance turned up’’.!°

With these aesthetic principles, the Lindsay and Vision group paid no attentian to writers like Katharine Prichard and Nettie

Palmer struggling to develop their writing in a very different literary tradition. ‘‘We were unaware at the time,’’ wrote Jack Lindsay, ‘Show the novel was breaking into a new dimension through H. H. Richardson, K. S. Prichard and Vance Palmer.’’ Further, with an aesthetic that devalued or denied women’s intellectuality, they were hardly likely to take seriously the work of

women writers. It was, perhaps, partly in reaction to this neglect and dismissal that Nettie Palmer was suspicious of avant-garde writing, a wariness that had, sometimes, a pedestrian influence on

her work. Katharine Prichard was more interested in D. H.

Lawrence and an exploration of sexuality that was tied to modern romanticism than to the crude, sexually degrading and politically elitist aesthetic of the Lindsays. At that time her work was centrally concerned with sexuality, but she made her exploration through

fiction that drew both on romanticism and a realist Australian

literary tradition. The Lindsays were much more interested in a writer like Zora Cross who caused a minor sensation with her love poems in 1917 and 1919. They were excited ‘‘to find a woman saying over and over again that she was passionate’’.'' But, as Jack Lindsay put it in a recent letter, ‘‘we treated her rather as a joke, in part because of her connection with McKee Wright, whom we looked on as a typical empty rhymster. . . It seems to me [now] that we should have taken her seriously as a woman trying to express her sexual being’’. Zora Cross’ poetry was remarkable for that period. As well as

22. « Exiles At Home

confronting the degradations of jealousy and dependence that women too often experience in sexual relations, it was searching for an autonomous expression of female sexuality and erotic passion

which did not depend on a masculine reference point. But during the twenties this direction in her poetry faltered to a halt, and she moved into the safer areas of poetry for children, criticism and

fiction. Such an expression of sexuality would not have been welcomed or encouraged in a literary milieu which saw women’s sexuality as passive, a passage to male artistry. Such poetry would have threatened their sexual ideology and it was easier to ridicule Zora Cross through her association with an also ridiculed man: in the late twenties McKee Wright was editor of the literary section of

the rival Bulletin. The American journalist C. Hartley Grattan described him as ‘‘a kindly soul to whom rhymes and poems are indistinguishable, and to whom literature is something ‘genteel’ and ‘refined’ in the most wishy-washy senses of those wishy-washy

words’’.'? While there seems to have been a solid relationship between McKee Wright and Zora Cross, it is doubtful if he would have given her the necessary support for a struggle to develop the

sensuous in her poetry, running against the dominant literary thrust. Even as a young man Jack Lindsay began to see the limitations of this aesthetic. Looking back in The Roaring Twenties, he argued that there was a fundamental conflict at that time between national

literature and a literature absorbing the world heritage. ‘‘But, leaving when I did [in 1926], I turned my back on this problem, which is still rending Australian culture as I write, in 1959. In many

ways I regret that I departed and ceased to play my part in the struggle. But by 1926 I had reached a stage, I feel, where the work I

was doing had been carried to a point beyond which it could not fruitfully develop in Australia.’’'? In 1936, largely in response to the Spanish Civil War, Jack Lindsay became a Marxist and although

uncritical of sexual attitudes, The Roaring Twenties does offer a critique of the literary politics of the period: Our main failure was to see that the life-process involved production as well as artistic activity and that there was an inviolable bond between these two aspects. Because of this failure we staked everything on love, on sexual activity, making it do the work both of itself and the productive sphere,

labour process. If we had realised this limitation we would have found the bridge between our ideas and the life of the people, between Grand Form and the national tradition, and

would have begun to purge our ideas of their platonic

transcendentalisms. '4

Writing in 1959, at the end of that anti-feminist decade, Lindsay

Isolation and Escape ¢ 23

was disarmingly uncritical of the bohemian attitudes to women, and in this he gives away a lot in relation to Anne Brennan. With no sympathy or understanding for her position, there was no way that the Lindsay group would have offered her the necessary support to

confront and attempt to understand her conflict with her father and to use her intellectuality as she wished to, through writing.

Anne Brennan did not live long enough to benefit from the development of a female literary network during the thirties. She died of consumption on 3 October 1929 at the age of thirty-one. During the last years of her life she had distanced herself from the Lindsay group. She had married a man called John Gibson from a wealthy Melbourne retailing family and had finally settled, as she had always wanted, in a house near the beach. They were living in Bondi when in February 1929 John was taken by a shark off Bondi Beach. ‘‘Her yearnings for escape, her repeated wish to get away to the clean sea, the wind of God, the healing earth’’, as Jack Lindsay put it, ended in tragedy. The sea had been for her a last attempt at

escape from the conflicts and degradations of bohemian

prostitution, an opportunity, maybe, to find her creativity outside

the constraints of the dominant and misogynist cultural movements. But solutions are never as simple as that. In a recent correspondence with me about Anne Brennan, Jack Lindsay discusses the way in which he now sees that period in the

light of sharpened perceptions about women’s estate. His first response to my suggestions about a feminist interpretation of Anne Brennan’s situation was that he had no recollection of her at all as

wanting to write. But on re-reading The Roaring Twenties and thinking about the period he writes: Why I had forgotten was no doubt because Anna never

showed me anything she had written or was trying to write. I therefore assumed, rightly or wrongly, that her remarks were merely an effort to assert herself against the demoralising life she was living, and did not represent any active element in her. But I may well have been wrong. Perhaps throughout she had the image of herself as going down into the inferno in order to emerge as a female Rimbaud.

He goes on to say that he thought that part of her literary ambition was tied up with her ‘‘father antagonism, father fascination’’ and

that he feels now that Anne was trying to meet Christopher Brennan on his ‘‘own level, own terms. Brennan’s retort of blind jealousy to her personal and sexual assertions had the effect of enclosing her in the situation’’. Jack Lindsay also writes that he had been afraid of her sexuality, had kept his distance from her for

fear of being overpowered. Now in later life and from a very

2A @ Exiles At Home

different perspective, he recognises that she has a much more complex history than he had realised. He makes the sound point

that rather than the Freud piece she wrote for the Bulletin confirming, as he had argued in The Roaring Twenties, her neurotic relationship with her father, it represented, perhaps, ‘‘an

effort to reply to those who saw her only as an example of a Freudian dilemma’’. He also points out that by 1924 Anne Brennan was moving out of the bohemian circles and that the article might

have been ‘‘a point of break, a repudiation of her own Freudian past, a determination to get over the earlier phases and meet her father, struggle with him, on a purely intellectual level’’. What Lindsay does not add 1s that there was no environment, literary or social, which could give her the intellectual and emotional support that would have been necessary to do this. ‘‘Perhaps,’’ he writes, ““she was trying to get out of her earlier role of Queen of the Underworld.’’ But there was nowhere for a woman like her to go in the Australia of the twenties. The respectable world of Nettie Palmer, anxious to keep Australian literature above reproach, would have

been wary, had it even known of her existence. Similarly Nettie Palmer made no gesture towards Zora Cross. When Zora Cross retreated from her attempt to define the self that is sensual, erotic,

creative and separate from men, her poetry relapsed into the genteel rhyme that marked the poetry of the many minor women poets who wrote for a journal like the Spinner. The Spinner, a short-lived poetry magazine producing three volumes during the twenties was dominated by rather homey poetry and was a far cry

from the modern if not modernist Vision. But it did publish women; they accounted for almost half the contributors. Little is known about most of these women, but occasionally a familiar name crops up. One volume published a poem by Nettie Palmer, another by Eleanor Dark writing under the pseudonym Patricia

O’Rane. It was an outlet, and however unsatisfactory, 1t does indicate the numbers of women hidden away in homes across Australia who were writing. It is not surprising, therefore, that the 1928 Bulletin novel competition should attract entrants, nor that it was women who tied for first place. Women were writing in the twenties, but they were writing in isolation. Even a glimpse of Anne Brennan, read between the lines, makes sense of the lady-like poets

at home, and the novelists working by day in kitchens and schools and libraries, biding their time, which came only a few years later. It makes some sense too, of their wariness of avantgarde literary innovations as well as the sexual behaviour of such groups.

Isolation and Escape ¢ 25

As a young woman in the twenties, Christina Stead was fascinated by Vision and the bohemian writers. She saw them as up-to-date and cosmopolitan and their advocacy of sexual freedom seemed,

from the sidelines, to offer something to her intense adolescent frustrations, living at home under her father’s eye. She read Vision and describes a journal that makes clear references to it in For Love Alone, the novel that draws heavily on her experiences in Australia during the twenties, leading to her departure in 1928 for London. She describes a magazine ... written and illustrated by the young artistic set in Sydney, run by the Brimley family, dominated by the Brimley family, in which, with imitations of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Donne and free verse, it was chiefly a question of free love and naked women; on each page were drawings of voluptuous, fat-faced, naked women, running away from a crowd of satyrs, carried off by centaurs or tempted by evil-eyed fauns. In between were

prose pieces, either condemning the masters of English

literature who had written with reticence, or recounting the adventures of the young men of the circle, with ‘‘good, easy girls’? or ‘‘lusty wenches’’. The Quarterly was elegantly

printed; being of small circulation it would become a

‘‘collector’s item’’. It was too expensive for Jonathan, but Teresa had managed to get a few copies. It was the only magazine she bought; she read no newspapers...It was enough that a naked, buxom ‘‘wench’’ flew along the cover.!>

This is an excellent description of Vision, but while it appealed to

the young Teresa, who was chaffing against the strictures of a provincial city, the mature Christina, writing For Love Alone in the

late thirties, was critical of the Nietzschean influence in the aesthetic of the Lindsays and Vision, and in particular its oppressive implications for women.!* Christina Stead, admiring and envying the bohemian freedoms during the twenties, had the sense, or maybe simply the luck, to remain on the fringes; when she

sought her own freedoms, she did so in London. Once in London she moved into a left-wing, Marxist circle from which she could

assess the Lindsays quite differently, and critically. After the Second World War she became a friend of Jack Lindsay by which time both had made sufficient political changes to see that period of their youth in Sydney in a very different light. Escaping to Europe, or America, was the only other alternative for women in the harsh years of the early decades of this century and there was a long tradition of distinguished expatriate women in whose footsteps to follow. Marjorie Barnard’s history would have been quite different had she not been denied this option. In 1919 she graduated from Sydney University with first-class honours in

history and the university medal. Encouraged by her professor,

26 ¢ Exiles At Home

George Arnold Wood, she applied for and was offered a place at

Oxford. For her it was an opportunity she badly wanted, for freedom and expansion away from a family environment that did not understand or encourage intellectual achievement. But despite her tears and pleading, despite Professor Wood’s supplications on her behalf, her father refused her permission to go. She stayed in Australia reluctantly. She was unable to continue her studies, and professional possibilities were limited. She ended up as a librarian

in a job she was, at best, unenthusiastic about. Throughout the

twenties she lived at home and wrote quietly. She and Flora Eldershaw, who was working as a teacher, lived impeccable lives,

writing with the scraps of their time. It was not until they were published in 1929 and were taken up by Nettie Palmer that they had

any contact with other writers. Until then they wrote from the

isolation of their rooms. The question is why was it that Marjorie Barnard obeyed her father and stayed at home in such unpromising circumstances while Christina Stead disregarded her father and went anyway? It would

have been particularly hard to leave in 1919. The war had just ended, everything was unsettled; Marjorie Barnard would have been going into a more uncertain, precarious existence than most expatriate women. It would have taken some time for her to save up her fare and with returned soldiers flooding the job market, high unemployment and low wages for women, it would have been a slow and daunting prospect. In the meantime she would have lost

her place at Oxford and would then be facing an even more uncertain future in England. This is not meant simply as a justification, to excuse her. When Christina Stead went in 1928 it

was, perhaps, a little easier, but it still took her three years to scrimp for her fare. It was a hard and courageous step and For Love Alone, published in 1944, dramatises the enormous difficulty of making it alone. What has to be recognised is that disobedience was possible, that despite the enormously oppressive and restrictive

situation young women found themselves in, there were possibilities for escape, but the price was high indeed, and for many it was too high. For Marjorie Barnard it would have meant too big

a break with her family, too much instability and insecurity. She was underconfident and timid as a young woman, and to go alone without the support of her family and without the security of a university place, would have been very frightening indeed. Yet, by staying, she should not be seen simply as a victim. There is an extent to which women are complicit in what happens to them. It was not a failure of will on her part; her caution was bound into what it meant to be female, so that to be dependent, submissive, afraid, was built into her social being.

Isolati dE 27

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28 « Exiles At Home

Christina Stead, too, had to struggle with dependence, submission and fear. She took the hard way out and left, but to do so, even with her much tougher personality, was hard; it cost her her health for some years and ruptured her relationship with her family. For Love Alone is, by her own admission, Christina Stead’s most autobiographical novel and it is a brilliant portrayal of this period of her life through an examination of the psychological as well as social impetus that led a young woman to leave Australia in the late twenties. Her character, Teresa Hawkins, leaves for her own reasons, for love and for her own sense of destiny, a rather melodramatic but strong need to achieve love and her own creativity on her own terms. But it was impossible to confront this impetus that came from ambitions and aspirations deep inside her that were far from humble, and the only way Teresa could do it was by pinning it on love. With the selfless justification of doing it all for love and with love awaiting her in London, it was possible to take such a giant and frightening step. Although she knew with some part of

herself that it was not true, she was still within the ideological bounds, just, of feminine behaviour, risking all for love, enduring for love. Selfishness can thus be justified as selflessness. And so Teresa falls in love with Jonathan Crow and makes ‘‘the infernal compact with herself’’. She gives up teaching and takes instead a

job in a hat factory near Central Railway. It is as limiting and dreary as teaching, but at least she feels less hedged around by the

failures and compromises of the other young women teachers, biding their time for an advantageous marriage, eager to settle for a suburban villa. Saving up to leave, Teresa walks to save her train

fares, she eats less and less, withdrawing from the world into a strange nether region of suspended existence. As the obsession mounts it becomes clear that it is not simply a choice between dreary Sydney and exciting London. For Love Alone is the story of Teresa’s quest for herself, for her own creativity and freedom to love. Christina Stead’s early novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney,

written soon after she arrived in London, portrays different and diverse possibilities in Sydney. But Teresa in For Love Alone can allow herself no possibilities. She has to create a desert in order to

leave it. She rejects a more hopeful possibility for love, for she

knew that ‘‘if she loved him she might stay here—for ever, anchored in the little harbour where she was born, like a rowboat

whose owner had died and which had never been taken off the slips’’. She tells him, against his remonstrations: ‘‘I have to go, it isn’t my fault. I am forced to. If I stay here, I will be nobody. I’d just be taking the line of least resistance.’’!’ Yet there are, too, very real frustrations for Teresa Hawkins in Sydney during the twenties. There are the sexual frustrations of a

Isolation and Escape ¢ 29

young girl who lives at home and dreams about love, standing naked in her window, while despising the girls around her who marry dull

and puny men and settle in the suburbs. There are the intellectual frustrations of a creative young woman bored by school teaching,

‘‘forgotten by the world and drying up in the chalk dust’’,!® hovering on the fringe of a pretentious bohemian student group.

There are the social frustrations of a girl surrounded by her spiritually cramped family and work fellows. These she must escape, so that when she abandons school teaching and takes a train out of Sydney, she is embarking on ‘‘the first stride on a

grand perilous journey’’. Although she does this alone, the independence of her decision is quickly covered over by her relationship with Jonathan Crow. There is never any doubt that Jonathan Crow is little more than the necessary rationale for a venture that has to do with herself; it is easier, and safer, to stake her journey on ‘‘love alone’’ than on an intangible and a sense of destiny: In a few months she would leave them for ever, this herd trampling shoulder to shoulder in its home march. They

married, settled down in the Bay or in the suburbs along bus routes to the city, in order to reach their work in the shortest time, and that was the end, then came the marriage-sleep that lasted to the grave. She would sail the seas, leave her invisible track on countries, learn in great universities, know what was

said by foreign tongues, starve in cities, tramp, perhaps shoeless, along side roads, perhaps suffer every misery, but she

would know life. She did not once try to imagine what Jonathan’s greeting would be, nor what would happen between them. She knew by now that she was wretched-

looking but said to herself: ‘‘ Just the same I need Jonathan as an aim so as not to fail, even if he rejects me’’.!?

The focus is narrowed from the social restraints which compel Teresa Hawkins towards her ‘‘grand perilous journey’’, to the psychological compulsion underlying her decision to leave. While the core of Teresa’s desire to leave is a journey of self-discovery, the question unravels itself backwards again in the insistence that social, sexual and familial limitations make it impossible for Teresa to embark on that journey in Australia.

There was little possibility, the novel proposes, of a young woman exploring her creativity in the Australia of the twenties,

while living at home, working as a clerk or a teacher and hanging around the bohemian fringes. It is significant that Teresa Hawkins does not start writing until she reaches London. Once she is there the scales fall from her eyes and she can see Jonathan Crow for the

misogynist that he is. She moves into left-wing cultural and

30 ¢« Exiles At Home

political circles, marries a Marxist economist and begins to take on

the full intellectual and artistic existence she had so resolutely refused herself, or been denied, in Sydney. Christina Stead herself had started to write in Sydney, but when she showed a collection of her short stories to Angus and Robertson, she recalls, they rejected it, saying that she would have to be published in London first, before they would take her work. Some of these stories were included in the manuscript which her husband, William Blake, took to Sylvia

Beach at her bookshop in Paris. Sylvia Beach was the American

woman who had ‘‘discovered’’ James Joyce and _ Ernest Hemingway. She recognised the quality of Christina Stead’s writing and advised Blake to send the manuscript on to Peter Davies in London and, indeed, Davies published The Salzburg Tales immediately and without any changes. Within a few months in the same year, 1934, he had also published Seven Poor Men of Sydney. Thus while For Love Alone documents in a brilliant and complex

novel the very real limitations faced by women writing, or wanting to write during those years in Australia, particularly those attracted

to avant-garde circles, it is also imbued with the imperialist assumptions that the metropolitan centres are necessarily superior in every cultural area, that it is only by making it in London or New York that a writer can be sure of her or his ability. Expatriatism had become part of the mythology of being an Australian writer. More than twenty years before Christina Stead left, Miles Franklin had avowed: Sculptors, writers, singers, actors, painters, educationists, politicians all depart inevitably. I have been going with them in imagination ever since I saw the Heads standing up there with the spray playing around their base and the Pacific beyond like

a high blue plateau. It seems that only those remain who cannot get away, those who are tied to pots and pans by poverty and ignorance, by misfortune or incompetence.”°

Even Nettie Palmer, committed as she was to Australian letters, felt the need for periodic escape and, as Marjorie Barnard put it in 1938 when Nettie’s daughter Aileen was planning to stay in London: By and large it’s a tragedy that brains and initiative should immediately flee the country in the way they so often do, but when right. it comes down to individual cases, it’s inevitable and

Isolation and Escape ¢ 31

Miles Franklin’s expatriatism involved the same mixture of assumptions and restrictions that is evident in Christina Stead’s expatriatism, and similarly hard decisions. Miles Franklin left in 1906, some twenty-five years before Christina Stead, returning shortly before Stead left, although it was not until 1933 that she finally settled back here. For Miles Franklin, too, there was the Same complex of motives, the same web of rebelliousness, received

opinion about talent and expatriatism, the same determination to live her own life outside the moral strictures of her family and a colonial culture. But for Miles Franklin it was also an escape from ideological and political pressures that she could not confront or deal with in this country. She was caught between her rebelliousness and her distress at her family’s reaction to her writing; between her own desires and the expectations of femininity. Politically she was

caught between feminism and nationalism. When My Brilliant Career was published she was taken up by the nationalist writer

Joseph Furphy and by the feminist Rose Scott. Rose Scott’s feminism was oriented towards exerting influence in high places; it

was not an egalitarian or democratic feminism. Furphy, on the other hand, was democratic and nationalist but not sensitive to her feminism.

Unlike Christina Stead, Miles Franklin has not left an unequivocal account of her decision to leave. My Career Goes Bung can be read as an explanation or justification of that decision

but, as with most apologies, it tells only part of the story. Miles Franklin wrote My Career Goes Bung before she left, while shaken

by the reception of My Brilliant Career, and still young and inexperienced as a writer. As a result the novel lacks the complexity and assurance of For Love Alone; nevertheless it is an interesting, if rather precocious novel and it does tell part of the story. Further

clues have to be sought from My Brilliant Career and from her correspondence, but even there they have to be pieced together. Miles Franklin was veiled about her decision to leave and this tendency to be secretive stayed with her all her life. Few of her own letters dating from the period before 1905 have survived, but letters

to her indicate her reluctance to discuss her departure. Neither Joseph Furphy nor Rose Scott, her most regular correspondents, discussed her reasons for leaving. Furphy discouraged her and offered reasons why she should not go, but he did not discuss or counter reasons for going, as he might be expected to have done, had she written of her motives as well as of her intentions. Rose Scott wrote to her in March 1905, hurt that Miles intended to go without explaining herself: And so you are really going to America—and you say you will — ‘‘try’’? to see me first, if you don’t I am afraid I shall be very

32 ¢ Exiles At Home hurt, and wonder if you really care for me at all—as it 1s I have

felt lately as if you were miles and miles away from me—I

know nothing of yr plans and motives. Why this long journey?

Why, Why, Why?”

Miles Franklin had started My Brilliant Career at sixteen when, encouraged by a Mr T. J. Hebblewhite of Goulburn, she had been persuaded to abandon her ‘‘novels of English high life’’ and write instead of the life she knew. By the time the novel was finished, Mr

Hebblewhite had ceased to advise her, and having no literary connections she did not know what to do with the manuscript. It

was then, at the age of eighteen, that Miles Franklin, as she describes it, ‘‘conceived the idea of writing to Henry Lawson. [I] knew nothing of him, only through the sympathy and reality of his verse, but wrote to care of Bulletin. He came to my rescue most generously, took full charge of the MS. and saw it through like a— Henry Lawson’’.2? The novel was published in 1901 with extra-

ordinary effect. As H. M. Green has put it: ‘‘It struck the Australian nineties with the force of a small bomb, taking readers and editors by storm.’’*4

Miles Franklin’s papers still contain a number of letters congratulating her on the novel, praising her penetration of the Australian scene and asking to meet her. Her admirers ranged from

Joseph Furphy and Rose Scott who wrote to congratulate her ‘‘authenticity’’ and to introduce themselves, to a large number of less significant but still enthusiastic readers. A letter from a Mrs Daisy Stevenson of Randwick in Sydney indicates the flavour of

these letters. Daisy Stevenson described herself as young, ‘‘comfortable’’ rather than wealthy, married with two children and literary ambitions of her own. She wrote that she recognised the life described in My Brilliant Career, and wished to communicate the ‘‘feeling of friendship and fellowship your thoroughly Australian book has inspired in a woman who is above all things an Austra-

lian’’.** Like most of Mules Franklin’s correspondents, Daisy Stevenson’s assumption was that My Brilliant Career was autobiographical. Miles Franklin has taken pains to deny that either this or My Career Goes Bung were autobiographical and, indeed, in the

literal sense they were not. She was hurt that the fiction of My Brilliant Career was taken literally. This confused relationship of ‘*fiction’’ to ‘‘reality’’ was part of her subsequent literary misgivings, which resulted in long years of writing only under a pseudonym.

In My Career Goes Bung, drafted by 1904, Miles Franklin explained that her intention was merely to satirise autobiography in the telling of My Brilliant Career:

Isolation and Escape ¢ 33

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ata ee » SS eT f i oe

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, j ‘4 AAPA Y vo): PEREEEV EEE bee

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“a oo TT = Miles Franklin, 1902

34 ¢ Exiles At Home

Who has not read an autobiography beginning thus: ‘‘At the risk of being egotistical 1 must admit,’’ etc. I determined to flout these pretences with an imitation autobiography that would wade in without apology or fear, biffing convention on the nose.*6

By the same token she also wrote that she was ‘‘tired of illusions

and delusions in novels and...leant towards a little reality’’.2’

Later in life she wrote of ‘‘that truth which is clearer in fiction than in fact’’.?8 But in 1901, as a furious family storm broke around her,

the relationship between fiction and reality was not so clear. Relatives and neighbours felt slandered and misused and she felt herself the cause of her family’s disgrace. Her future references to herself and her family made a point of praising her parents and

rectifying the image she had given in My Brilliant Career of a drunken father and a harsh mother. My Career Goes Bung was written to explain, dispel the misconceptions and complete the story. Once again she wrote in the form of satirical autobiography but without the success and confidence of My Brilliant Career. She did not publish this sequel until 1946. Indeed, with the exception of a slight novel about a suffragette, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, published in 1909 and little read in Australia, Miles Franklin did

not publish in her own name agaii until 1931. This in itself indicates the profoundly disturbing effect on her of the reception of

her first novel. When she wrote in Chicago and after the First World War in London, she used pseudonyms and guarded them well.

The reception of My Brilliant Career was traumatic for her on several counts. On the one hand there was notoriety and disgrace at home; on the other hand she was taken up and lionised in Sydney, which, for a young girl from the bush, was, in its own way, just as

hard to handle. Furthermore the novel was fundamentally misunderstood and serious conflicts arising out of it, conflicts which were to affect her entire life, were not recognised. The fact that she

herself was barely articulating them, added to the problem; the

most important elements of the novel were informed by

unconscious as much as conscious conflicts. My Brilliant Career represents a feminist intervention into the nationalist tradition in the literature of the 1890s. While some of Henry Lawson’s stories dramatised the harsh and isolated lives of women like the drover’s wife, there was, in My Brilliant Career, a sustained feminism. The novel draws on aspects of the genre of romantic fiction that Rosa Praed and Ada Cambridge had used, but she imbues this tradition

with an egalitarian nationalism. Thus there were various

ambiguities in Miles Franklin’s fiction from its inception. My Brilliant Career points to the harsh lives of women in the bush, the

Isolation and Escape ¢ 35

drudgery, the anti-intellectualism, the stifling of creativity. Yet even when her heroine Sybylla is given everything at her grandmother’s house, she maintains a fierce loyalty to the swagmen, to

the proud and independent drovers she has left behind. Her admiration for Lawson is genuine and informs an important strand in the novel. Part of the impact of My Brilliant Career as a feminist novel is

the use of a traditional structure of the romantic novel while abandoning its traditional resolution. Sybylla meets Harry and the

two are put through the trials and tribulations that young lovers have to overcome in every romantic novel; yet Sybylla refuses him not once, but twice. The first refusal is necessary to the romantic structure; love has not been proven. The effect of refusing him for a second time is startling, for the trials have been overcome, love

has been tested and not found wanting. Yet this too is double edged. There are ironic overtones throughout the novel: the reader is invited to read the love affair as a satire, to ridicule conventions of romantic love, and to protest that while romance is expected of young girls, it is not always what they want. But there is also a more serious meaning; that in the early 1900s a young girl who wants a career, who wants to be a writer, has to choose between that and

marriage. It is important that Harry is not a buffoon, as he becomes in My Career Goes Bung. He is a serious and suitable lover; there is a possibility of passion for Sybylla. While the title is larded with ironies, the notion of a career, brilliant or not, is deeply serious. Within the ironies lies a bitter statement that women have

to make hard choices and they have to make them early in their lives. A career, as Sybylla recognises, would not be possible in marriage, even to a Harry Beecham. Because the novel ts light in tone, flippant almost in its not always controlled use of irony, these fundamental conflicts are rarely seen, and were certainly not seen at the turn of the century. Even so, that it was taken up so quickly

and forcefully both by the nationalists and by the feminists indicates the strength of the various strands within the novel. The problem was that there was nobody to take seriously a conflict that

Miles Franklin was herself not fully conscious of. While

momentarily flattering, no doubt, it was no help at all to be fussed and fought over. The Bulletin writers were entranced by a young nationalist girl, but as Norman Lindsay’s reminiscence of meeting her in A. G. Stephens’ room reveals, it was her ‘‘pert rump’’ that made the most impact.”? Joseph Furphy and Rose Scott were more serious, more important and more confusing to her. Little of this comes out in My Career Goes Bung. It is a slighter book than My Brilliant Career, written both as an apology and, as the title suggests, to cash in on the aspect of My Brilliant Career

36 + Exiles At Home

that had been successful and scandalous—her playful criticisms of

marriages, not the harsh choices; the ironies, not the bitterness. Nevertheless, My Career Goes Bung does dramatise the decisions and experiences leading to expatriatism. First and foremost are the

obvious restrictions on a young girl of the bush with no money. Through Sybylla it is demonstrated that, having decided against marriage at an early age, prospects for a girl with ambition were bleak: I loved to learn things—anything, everything. To attend the University would have been heaven, but expense barred that. I could become a pupil-teacher, but I loathed the very name of

this profession. I should have had to do the same work as a man for less pay, and, in country schools, to throw in free of remuneration, the speciality of teaching all kinds of needlework. I could be a cook or a housemaid and slave all day under

some nagging woman and be a social outcast. I could be a hospital nurse and do twice the work of a doctor for a fraction of his pay or social importance, or, seeing the tremendously

advanced age, I could even be a doctor—a despised ladydoctor, doing the drudgery of the profession in the teeth of such prejudice that even the advanced, who fought for the entry of women into all professions, would in practice ‘‘have

more faith in a man doctor’’. I could be a companion or governess to some woman, appended to some man of property. I rebelled against every one of these fates.*°

Marriage was an option which Sybylla did not discard lightly, recognising that it was only in marriage that a ‘‘respectable woman

[can] satisfy curiosity. The penalties for violating the social code are so painful that they are avoided by the sensitive with the care exercised against smashing over a precipice’’.2! The benefit of satisfied curiosity was, in Sybylla’s view, outweighed by the disadvantages. Love no longer came into it and the revelation of the choice Sybylla makes in My Brilliant Career is not repeated. My Career Goes Bung moves outside the structure of the romantic novel with a statement that there can be no respect for romance in the city, in Sydney, where the highest protestations were matched by the greatest fickleness and hypocrisy, making the judgment that:

‘‘Marriage evidently was a piece of trading: one took the best animal procurable and got on with it. Ah, me! Oh, well!’’** The old

suspicion returns, that marriage, children and domesticity would

swamp Sybylla’s career. Sybylla concludes that without the possibility of egalitarian marriage she would not marry. It is a protestation that is combined with a refusal to accept things as they are:

Isolation and Escape ¢ 37

I repudiate the crawl theory that we should be servile to our parents or to God for the bare fact of a mean existence. Most people are satisfied with a world run in a wasteful insanitary fashion. I am not. They are unashamed that seventy-five per cent of human beings are fit only for the scrap heap. I am not. They are thankful to thrive while others starve. I am not. I rebel with all my lung force against sitting down under life as it is, and as for a first child being an instrument of enslavement, both for his own and his mother’s sake, ’twere better he never should be.

The two greatest women in Australia are unmarried, and it would be a good plan for a few more to support them, to remain free to ventilate the state of marriage and motherhood and to reform its conditions.»

In My Brilliant Career Miles Franklin had dramatised her situation with rebelliousness, but had not suggested that Sybylla could do more than complain or find her own way out. The clue to this change towards a more political solution lies in her reference to the ‘‘two greatest women in Australia’’, both unmarried and both working for the improvement of women’s estate. She was almost certainly referring to Rose Scott and Vida Goldstein, both of whom

She knew and with whom she corresponded. But she discusses neither of them in My Career Goes Bung; nor does she mention

Joseph Furphy with whom she also had a long and detailed correspondence between February 1904 and January 1906. Indeed in My Career Goes Bung, with the exception of a brief exchange with A. G. Stephens, Sybylla is only allowed to meet writers who

argue against her belief that Australian literature should ‘‘do something on its own hook’’ and try to ‘‘comb the gumleaves out of {her} hair’’.24 Furphy, on the contrary, had been encouraging her to take her nationalism further. If Miles Franklin was writing to justify her departure, it would have been easier to leave out those

issues which complicated that decision, drawing her closer to Australia. As it was, the message of My Career Goes Bung is clear.

The bush offers nothing; Sydney offers nothing; marriage offers nothing; only fools and the poor remain while fame and fortune can be sought abroad. The letters from Rose Scott and Joseph Furphy indicate that her decision to leave was, in reality, more complex. Her reluctance to discuss her motives with either of these

friends and her omission of them from My Career Goes Bung suggest her unease at leaving when she recognised that there were

literary and political possibilities for her in Australia; it further

Suggests pressures on her which she could not reconcile, or confront, far less fulfil. In contrast to My Career Goes Bung it would seem that the impetus to leave Australia was, for her, contradictory and ambiguous.

38 « Exiles At Home

When Rose Scott took up the young Miles Franklin, she was working for the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales

and she sent Miles Franklin copies of lectures, pamphlets and details of her campaigns. Miles Franklin never joined her elite group which lobbied the establishment in an attempt to improve women’s estate through influence in high places. Instead she took a job as a domestic servant, wanting, she wrote, to examine for herself working conditions for women and the relations between mistress and maid. She hoped that by exposing her experience she would go some way ‘‘towards placing domestic work in a better position than it now occupies’’.35 While Rose Scott supported her in this venture, the impetus for it came more from her democratic ideals that were

fostered by Joseph Furphy. Nevertheless association with the feminism of Rose Scott and the Womanhood Suffrage League and

its successor, the Women’s Political and Educational League, influenced the direction of her feminism long after 1904. Miles Franklin met Joseph Furphy only briefly in Melbourne in April 1904, but corresponded with him for two years. Her letters have not survived, but his are concerned largely with the conjunc-

ture of literature, nationalism and democracy. It was in that context that he supported her venture into domestic service, pointing out, however, that its importance lay in writing about it.

He was not particularly interested in the specifically feminist implications of the venture. Furphy felt that his work and hers lay along similar tracks which would ‘‘demonstrate the existence of a bush-born type somewhat different from the crude little semi-savage of conventional Aus-

tralian fiction’’.36 He warned her against being ‘‘cajoled into exclusiveness’’ or tempted by bohemianism. He took it upon himself to advise her, he explained, because he considered her his

‘‘disciple’’; she could write, she was in touch with human and ‘‘feminine’’ emotion and she was not ‘‘exclusive’’. He urged her to keep writing and to participate in the development of an Australian tradition of democratic literature: Miles, you cannot help doing great work yet. Already you are entitled to be the most complacent woman in Australia; but I should be most sorry to see you avail yourself of this privilege. Cultivate discontent, dear girl. Put your foot in the best work you have hitherto done, in order to use it as a stepping stone to something better.

But there is another consideration of greater moment still. Better you were not gifted with literary utterance at all than that you should turn this endowment to any other use than the bettering of our race.*’

Isolation and Escape ¢ 39

He urged her not to go to America, pointing out the untouched possibilities for literature in Australia. In July 1904 he exhorted her

to ‘‘stay among the eucalypts, Miles, and earn the adoration of your countrymen by translating the hosannas and elegies of the bush into vernacular phrase’’.** A letter from him written in January 1906 is his last surviving letter to her; it is also one of her few letters that has survived from her time in Chicago. There is no way of knowing whether this letter was saved or whether it survived by chance; whether it was the last, or simply the last that remains.

He wrote: :

Mind you, I love the Americans. ..but Australia cannot spare you, Miles. We want to make our land a classic land; we want

to be the Ionians of modern time...And of all Australian women we can least spare Miles. There is a false note in

Australian literature, a note which your own mental temperament without any forcing may largely correct. I mean the note of cynicism, a contemptuous pessimism, arising simply from

lack of faith in the potencies of human nature. And this is

most shallow...And your business is to make a record; that’s what you are here for, and that’s what your broad

forehead was given you for. The question is not whether you would transform the world... but whether you'll apply your little pick and shovel to the vast alp of Ignorance which still obstructs our view of the promise land. . .*?

This letter supports the suggestion that Miles Franklin’s departure was confused by literary ties, aspirations and misgivings, and very

possibly by a sense of guilt at abandoning duty, even destiny, concepts that were built into Furphy’s notion of a nationalist cultural elite as they were later to be by Nettie Palmer. It is not surprising in the face of such letters that she was secretive about her

intentions to give it all up and leave the country. Yet these letters

from Furphy are highly significant, for she came back to these ideas many years later in a different context. After the First World War, by which time she had spent over ten years in political work, Miles Franklin was certain that her future and her talents lay with writing, and she developed a complex view of the political significance of literature in national development; her literary national-

ism of the twenties and thirties has its roots in Furphy and My Brilliant Career. But, at the same time her later fiction and politics make sense only in the light of her work in Chicago and London, and need to be understood also in relation to the developing debate over a national culture that occurred in Australia between the wars. It is for these reasons that a full discussion of Miles Franklin is left until Chapter Seven. From Miles Franklin and Christina Stead’s experience of living

40 « Exiles At Home

abroad, it is clear that there was very little to keep a woman writer in Australia during the first decades of this century. Surprisingly

little changed in the twenty-five years between their departures. That Miles Franklin came back and that Christina Stead did not, until very late in her life, relates also to the question of national culture. As a young woman Christina Stead was attracted to avantgarde literature and her Seven Poor Men of Sydney is one of the few Australian modernist texts between the wars. Australia would not have provided an environment in which she could have taken

this direction. The Lindsays were dangerous for women; Nettie Palmer’s concept of a national literature was, in a very different way, antipathetical to the sort of writing that attracted Christina Stead. Her early novels were being read by the tiny avant-garde in 1934, but Nettie Palmer had not read them when they met in Paris in 1935. The first major critical examination of her work was by M. Barnard Eldershaw in 1938, in an essay which did not relate her work to modernist influences in writing. Miles Franklin, in contrast, was concerned with nationalism from her first novel and for her, in the end, being Australian was as important as her feminism. While Christina Stead’s writing flourished outside Australia, Miles

Franklin’s attempts at non-Australian fiction were her least successful. When she returned she did so not through loss of nerve, but because the roots of her writing lay here and she had to make an accommodation, however uneasily, with the social constraints that still existed for a woman living alone. When she returned the debate over literature and national culture had changed and taken on different implications for Australian writers, so many of them,

by that time, urban women writers.

It is in contrast to the gloomy years of the twenties and the dreadful isolation that women writers experienced in the early years

of this century that the thirties take on significance. The changed direction of literary debate during those years was intimately related to the explosion of women’s fiction and to the work of critic Nettie Palmer. For a complex of reasons, Nettie Palmer set herself the task of drawing together writers struggling in tsolation across the country, and to foster the development of a national literature

that would be tied to progressive social reform. It was in this context that the younger urban writers were able to see themselves as professionals and, later in the decade, as socially critical writers.

These women and the group that formed around Nettie and her novelist-husband Vance Palmer were brought together largely through her extensive correspondence and it is her central role, both nurturing and territorial, which throws into focus many of the political and literary tensions that marked the period.

Isolation and Escape ¢ 41 1. Jack Lindsay The Roaring Twenties, London, The Bodley Head, 1960, p. 152 2. Axel Clark, Christopher Brennan: A critical biography, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1980, p. 240 3. ibid., pp. 241-2 4. Jack Lindsay, op. cit. p. 141 5. ‘Anna T. Brennan, ‘‘Psycho-Analysis and Youth’’, Bulletin, 17 April 1924 6. Jack Lindsay, op. cit. p. 207 7. John Docker, Australian Cultural Elites, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1974, ch. 2 8. Jack Lindsay, op. cit. p. 227 9. ibid., p. 168-9 10. ibid., p. 156 11. ibid., p. 143 12. Quoted in Humphrey McQueen, The Black Swan of Trespass: The emergence of modernist painting in Australia to 1944, Sydney, Alternative Publishing Coop Ltd, 1979, p. 15

13. Jack Lindsay, op. cit. p. 226 , 14. ibid., p. 227 1S. Christina Stead, For Love Alone (first published 1945). Edition used: Angus & Robertson, 1975, p. 209 16. lan Reid, Fiction and the Great Depression, Melbourne, Edward Arnold, 1979, ch. 7, passim 17. Christina Stead, op. cif., pp. 284-5

19. ibid., p. 265 , 18. ibid., p. 82

20. Miles Franklin, My Career Goes Bung, Melbourne, Georgian House, 1946, p. 233

21. Marjorie Barnard to Nettie Palmer, 28 June 1938. Palmer papers, NLA.MS. 1174/1/5396

22. Rose Scott to Miles Franklin, nd. (March 1905). Franklin papers, ML.MS.

364/8/161-2 23. Miles Franklin, typewritten curriculum vitae, written before March 1905. ML. MS. 1128/6

24. H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature, Vol 1. Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1961, p. 640 25. Daisy Stevenson to Miles Franklin, 22 May 1902. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/8/211-4

26. Miles Franklin, My Career Goes Bung, Melbourne, Georgian House, 1946, p. 30 27. Miles Franklin, curriculum vitae (1905). ML.MS. 1128/6

28. Brent of Bin Bin, Prelude to Waking, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1950. Author’s note p. vii 29. Norman Lindsay, Bohemians of the Bulletin (first published 1965), Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1973, p. 143-5 30. Miles Franklin, My Career Goes Bung, p. 20-21

42, ¢ Exiles At Home 31. ibid., p. 229 32. ibid., p. 220 33. ibid., p. 226-7 34. ibid., p. 180 35. Miles Franklin, ‘‘Concerning Mary Ann’’ (handwritten MS. dated Melbourne 1904). Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/59/17-33 36. Joseph Furphy to Miles Franklin, 17 February 1904. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/9B/1-2

37. Joseph Furphy to Miles Franklin, 28 June 1905. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/9B/347c-50

38. Joseph Furphy to Miles Franklin, 17 July 1904. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/9B/21

39. Joseph Furphy to Miles Franklin, 28 January 1907. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/9B/55c-59 Note to 1991 reprint Since publication it has been suggested to me that the Anna Brennan who wrote ‘Psycho-Analysis and Youth’ was not Christopher Brennan’s daughter, Anne. | apologise for this error. That it could have occurred, that this assumption has been made (and not only by me) is an indication of the difficulty of retrieving a history of women as intellectuals and writers. Despite this error, which stands in the reprint, much of my argument still holds.

3 THE ARBITER

Nettie Higgins was born into Melbourne’s professional middle

class. Her father, John Higgins, was an accountant and her mother, Kitty Higgins, a staunch member of the Baptist church. Although neither of her parents was an intellectual, they both respected intellectual achievement and encouraged their children in

their studies, Nettie as much as her brother, Esmonde. While austere, her parents held liberal thinking in high regard and were in

contact with liberal social and political thought through John Higgins’ brother, Henry Bournes Higgins, the Arbitration Court judge. There was close contact between the families and Henry Bournes Higgins was a significant figure in Nettie’s formative years. As a child he ‘‘seemed like God’’ to her. He encouraged her early writings, took an interest in her progress at school and closely

followed her academic career, first at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College and then at Melbourne University. It was through financial

assistance from Henry Bournes Higgins that both Nettie and Esmonde were able to study overseas. Nettie Higgins graduated from Melbourne University with a BA in 1909 and in 1910 went to

Europe to study linguistics and phonetics. She returned the following year and received her MA from Melbourne University in 1912.

Intellectual thought in Melbourne 1n the years before World War I and the milieu in which Nettie Higgins moved during those years

was dominated by the New Liberalism of such men as Deakin, Fisher and her uncle. Influenced by T. H. Green’s theory of the ethical state, Australian New Liberalism broke with earlier /aissez-

faire liberalism in favour of social welfare and an ethic of social responsibility. New Liberalism stressed service to society, concepts

of moral right and duty and the creation of an intellectual elite which would lead the way to national unity through consensus, social reform and individual fulfilment. Nettie Higgins’ early letters were conversant with these ideas although she was concerned

particularly with language, literature and cultural development within Australia. She was writing poetry and two volumes of her poems were later published, The South Wind in 1914 and Shadowy

44.¢ Exiles At Home

Paths in 1915. As a university student she had joined the Melbourne Literary Club, editing the Club’s magazine for a short period. Through her friendship with the poet Bernard O’ Dowd, she was also drawn into the circles surrounding the Victorian Socialist Party. Then, in 1907, she met Vance Palmer, whom she married in 1914. She shared with him a concern for the nature of a national culture and its development in Australia. Vance Palmer was at that time immersed in the British guild socialism of Orage and the New

Age, which advocated the organisation of industry into selfmanaging guilds. This concept of worker control of industry was based on the notion of the craftsman as a creative being, bringing artistic care to his work and joining in brotherhood 1n the guilds. This industrial organisation was envisaged as a basis for a revival of folk culture and national traditions which would restore the dignity

of work to those forced into servile working conditions under capitalism. Vance Palmer’s involvement with guild socialism is

discussed in detail in David Walker’s Dream and Disillusion. The

significance of it here is the attraction of guild socialism to an Australian writer like Vance Palmer, deeply concerned with what

he perceived as the erosion of national traditions in Australia. What was important for Nettie was that guild socialism allowed her to extend the basis of her conviction that a strong national culture,

based in a society’s environment and tradition, was intimately

associated with social equality, the dignity of labour and harmonious social evolution. Thus she was able to blend aspects of guild socialism with her liberalism. One of the recurring themes of her early letters was her concern with the question of class conflict and it was on this issue that she diverged from the socialists. This is important because it remained central to her writing and her criticism throughout her life despite the shifts in her politics during the late thirties when she aligned herself, if ambiguously, with the left in the struggle against fascism. During the war she supported the unions in their clash with Hughes

and was active in the anti-conscription campaigns. But her humanitarianism and her democratic idealism were deeply rooted in liberalism. She was unable to accept the inevitability of class struggle and repeatedly reconfirmed her confidence in ‘‘reason’’, ‘‘love’’ and liberal education as solutions to social conflict.

In 1909 she wrote to Vance describing a socialist discussion group during which class and class conflict had been at issue. She had been swayed by those arguing for ‘‘enlightenment gradually through education’’. She was clearly uncertain of her position and diffident in her approach to Vance: ‘‘I felt that you would say that declaiming against class war was like declaiming against sunrise, but honestly isn’t there a whole set of Socialists who pin their faith

The Arbiter « 45

to law and evolution?’’! Unconfident though she was, and wary of writing the wrong thing to Vance, she was dogged in her persistence in this issue, and she remained so throughout her life. For Nettie Palmer the First World War coincided with the first years of marriage and motherhood. During the next war she wrote: One thing that isolated me, in feeling, from the last war, was

that our children were babies then. The second was born

between the February and October Russian revolutions: or if you like, between the two conscription referenda here: or just after America entered the war. As you know, such persons are very absorbing. . .2

Nevertheless she experienced the war as a period of intellectual upheaval. She wrote to Esmonde Higgins as early as December 1914 that it had ‘‘put [her] notions in the melting pot’’. Despite her hesitancy, her conviction remained that class conflict was not the motive force in society and that consensus and the fulfilment of the

needs of a community of individuals were threatened by the collectivity of class struggle. This is particularly clear in the misgivings she had about the Russian revolution and the formation of the Communist Party of Australia. Of the Russian revolution she

wrote to Esmonde in 1920 asking: ‘‘If the cause of friction is removed, will they plant orchards and write poems and build bridges? We all want ferment till things are righted, but what will

they be like when they are right? Mustn’t we ask the aim of a revolution?’’> Significantly, her political assessment of the revolu-

tion brought her back to cultural issues and the centrality of this concern acted against her becoming a Marxist. Her views during the war years are revealed in her letters to her brother, Esmonde Higgins. The two had been close while living in the parents’ home until Nettie went to Europe in 1910. During that

visit to Europe and her subsequent visit to England in 1914 to marry, Nettie and Esmonde corresponded frequently. In 1917 he left Australia for Oxford and was away until 1924. During those years her letters were still frequent but their relationship was difficult. By 1920 Esmonde Higgins had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was already critical of his sister and uncompromising with his parents. From the beginning of this family

conflict, Nettie took the archetypically female position of mediating between Esmonde and their parents, as well as attempting to defend her own political position while demonstrating that she understood his. In reply to his criticism of her as a

jingoist, she wrote that she did not feel she could support an internationalist position as it went against what she saw as the reality

of the war, which had to be won, and she pointed rather tartly to

46 + Exiles At Home

the militarism of the German Social Democrats. She added that as a woman she found war alien and repellent and supported it only reluctantly, because she saw no alternative. She argued that her

politics were in a state of flux and compared herself to Vance, saying that he was much more of a nationalist than she would ‘‘ever

be, though not in an imperialist way’’. Vance, she said, was confident of his brand of nationalism, ‘‘a patriotism like Ireland’s, cherishing idiosyncrasies and liberties’’ .* In response to the Russian revolution she wrote to Esmonde that

Vance ‘‘still believes that the guild propaganda has been well thought out’’, but her own response was one of uncertainty. She did not hold out any hopes for guild socialism as a possibility in Australia and she was suspicious of the Soviet Union. Her unease was heightened during the war when two very close women friends,

Katharine Prichard and Christian Jollie-Smith joined the Communist groups that were forming in Australia after the Russian revolution; but Nettie remained distant from them to the extent that the friendships became strained. In 1919 she wrote to

Frank Wilmot (the poet ‘‘Furnley Maurice’’) that she felt ‘‘marooned on a bourgeois island of death’’.° Her major misgivings about the Communist Party came back to the question of individual freedom, particularly for intellectual and creative work. She was disturbed by the way in which Katharine Prichard and Christian Jollie-Smith were affected by their membership. She felt that Katharine was emotionally swamped by Bolshe-

vism and was rigid in her application of Marxism, and she was concerned that Christian had ‘‘consented too readily to be the instrument of whatever certain very bookish members of the ‘rebel movement’ say is the next plan’’. Her irritation with her brother mounted in the face of his self-righteous criticism of her and she told him, in response to being called ‘‘narrow’’ that ‘‘in practice you are less all-embracing than all-rejecting except Marx’’.° In 1923 she wrote angrily: You say I am always begging you to save your soul. I don’t mean to do that. I think you’ve been saving your soul furiously

these last few years, casting yourself headlong into a movement that will use you and consume you and never ask

you to question anything again. The spiritual luxury of

belonging to some big impersonal movement is immense, and you know it.’

Similarly her primary reservation about the Russian revolution was

her concern for individual freedom and autonomous artistic expression under the pressure of a Soviet state. She complained that none of her Communist friends, nor any of the literature she

The Arbiter ¢ 47

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Back row, left to right: Vance and Nettie Palmer, Edmond Higgins.

Front row, left to right: Mrs John Higgins, Aileen Palmer, Mr Higgins, Helen Palmer.

48 ¢ Exiles At Home

had read, gave any assurances on these issues and her acquaintance with guild socialism made her suspicious of forms of economic and industrial organisation used after the revolution which went against

workers’ control:

What we want to know most about Communist Russia is whether there is a degree of individual freedom. We hear of Lenin’s devotion to the Taylor system in industry and again

there come reports of an idea of collective action for the

production of works of art (with the allegation that

individualist artistic work is a bourgeois thing). The question all the time is, suppose the Soviets work well and are relieved from pressure from without and so forth, what kind of normal life do the Communists aim at for everyone?®

Certain threads can be drawn from these early letters which were to continue in her political and literary thought for the next fifteen years or more. Her underlying concept of the Australian nation was of a people who shared basic interests and could live harmoniously through education and the development of cultural standards based on selected national traditions. She never denied the existence of class and class interests but, for her, class conflict could be resolved by reason, tolerance and consensus. Implicit in this is a view of the

state as a neutral apparatus that could be controlled and

administered in the national interest. For Nettie Palmer the dilemma of capitalism was that in practice the state was not administered in this way, but fell to sectional interests—a view that

is apparent in her biography of Henry Bournes Higgins and her assessment of the breakdown of arbitration at the end of the war.

Throughout the twenties and early thirties, however, Nettie Palmer’s explicit political views were restricted primarily to an assessment of the social function of a progressive intelligentsia and

its literature. Nevertheless, an understanding of her emphasis on the development of a cultural elite and a strong national literature must rest on this underlying liberalism, uncertain though it was.

For it is only by recognising the political significance of this concept of the state and of social change that Nettie Palmer’s long hard years of literary journalism begin to make sense.

In 1920 Nettie and Vance Palmer were living at Emerald in the Dandenongs and working with the playwright Louis Esson and the Pioneer Players. In Dream and Disillusion, David Walker argues that Vance Palmer was by then disillusioned by the anti-cultural and materialistic nature of Australian society and the extension of

The Arbiter ¢ 49

state power during the war. His prewar guild socialist hopes for Australia seemed remote. Although Nettie Palmer, too, had found the war and its aftermath disheartening, her attitude was different. She had written to Vance early in 1919 that she was ‘‘afraid of this world’’ but even then, alone with two small children, worried about money, lonely and unsettled, she maintained a certain confidence: It’s an ugly world to look out on just now, and I don’t think

I'd be happy if you and I were away from it somewhere

together. The most heartening thing that can happen now is for anyone to do progressive, constructive work in this chaos.?

This response was partly a matter of personality. She had long recognised in herself a quality of pragmatism which in 1909 she had expressed to Vance in self-deprecating terms: ‘‘I’ve a certain coarseness of fibre—I’m not proud of it nor ashamed either—that makes it easy for me to face some realities that are an agony for

finer natures.’’'® It may also be that this social optimism was possible for Nettie Palmer with her intellectual and class background, in a way that it was not for Vance with his intellectual investment in guild socialism and an educated but poor rural background. While Nettie Palmer was well aware of the problems, there

was an underlying optimism in the potential of a literary elite to reconstitute cultural life in Australia. She set herself the task of working towards this end and within a decade had became an authoritative critic.

In 1924 Nettie Palmer’s Modern Australian Literature was published. The essay won her £25 in a competition run by Lothian Publishing Company in Melbourne for the best critical essay on

Australian literature since 1909. In the essay she argued that a nineteenth century self-consciousness, ‘‘occupied in showing off Australia to an outside audience’’, had given way in the 1890s to a literature written as though for people who knew their country. ‘‘In

these stories the writer never apologised, never explained, never stepped outside the picture.’’ It was these initiatives towards a national literature which Nettie Palmer wanted to see developed: In an appreciation of Lawson’s stories, the English critic, Edward Garnett, said that they expressed a continent. That

phrase may suggest what we have to demand from our

literature, that it shall to some extent express our virgin and

inarticulate continent.!!

At the same time, she emphasised the difficulties faced by Australian writers of isolation, fragmentation and dependence on English publishers. Such unity as existed between Australian writers, she

argued, did not come from conscious associations of schools of

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thought, but from ‘‘the sharing of some common depth, which it is the task of the prose writers and of poets to reveal’’.'!? This view of an organic connection between culture, environment and national experience is part of the historicist tradition which John Docker has identified within Australian intellectual history.'? This philosophy of history underlies Nettie Palmer’s thought and, associated with

her liberalism, helps to explain the optimism she maintained throughout the twenties for the development of Australian national

culture. It is significant that she ended Modern Australian Literature hopeful that ‘‘if our literature has had to struggle with a

stubborn soil, it may make for ultimate hardiness in the plant. Australian writers have somehow managed to keep their craft alive’’.

Modern Australian Literature was a landmark not only for Nettie Palmer but for Australian criticism. As Nettie Palmer herself pointed out, it was the first critical essay and survey of twentieth century Australian literature. It was not an easy task: There is practically no record of [recent literary] work but in the scattered books themselves. There are not even groups of writers, each group gathered round some centre. Except for the accidents of journalism Australian writers remain isolated, and often their books are issued from obscure presses. !4

From this point on Nettie Palmer drew together and discussed

developments in Australian literature through her literary journalism, and over the next twenty years and more, she became

the most influential critic since A. G. Stephens. In 1940 Miles Franklin wrote to her: ‘‘After him [A. G. Stephens] no one held the

floor more worthily than yourself. We have had many brilliant

critics but they did only sporadic work—you were more continuous.’’'> Whereas Stephens had had the Bulletin’s literary Red Page, Nettie Palmer never had a comparable focus for her criticism. For a while she had a regular outlet in A// About Books, but its scope and circulation were limited. Later she used the ABC. as a regular voice, but on the whole she built up her influence and reputation by writing for a range of publications. This was not a matter of choice so much as the force of circumstance. The Red Page was under S.H. Prior’s control and the Bulletin, based in Sydney, was in any case but a shadow of its former self. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether such a journal would have employed a woman as a permanent editor. There was, in short, no suitable outlet available to her. As Louis Esson put it to Vance Palmer in

1930: ‘‘She is doing excellent reviews and seems to be better informed than anybody here. It’s a pity there isn’t one decent review in the whole country.’’'6

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Nettie herself regretted this lack, though assiduously making the

most of what was available. Recounting to Vance, a few weeks earlier, a comment by Hugh McCrae that she should have the Red Page, she regretted that that would never be possible and wrote that she ‘‘would like to ‘have’ such a page, as anonymously as possible. I do what I can with All About Books, but I don’t see the likelihood

of capturing Stead’s [Review].’’"’ Although there was a proliferation of little magazines during the thirties, none was suitable for her purpose. Most were short lived and of limited circulation. Few were specifically literary and the editorial knowledge of Australian literature was frequently low. Until 1935 she relied mainly on the daily press. While the Palmers lived in Queensland from 1926 to 1929, she contributed regularly to the Brisbane Courier and irregularly to the Brisbane Telegraph. During

those years she also had a regular column with the J/lustrated Tasmanian Mail, but her contributions petered out with the Depression and in 1935 the paper was incorporated into the Mercury. The Argus, the Age, Bulletin and Australian Women’s Mirror all offered frequent though not regular outlets.

All About Books was established in December 1928 and in

January 1929 Nettie Palmer began a substantial three-part article on Australian literature. Then in June of that year she started a regular column, ‘‘A Reader’s Notebook’’. This column continued until she left for Europe in March 1935, when Frederick Macartney

took over her place with a weekly review of ‘‘New Australian books’’, which ran until the journal ceased publication in 1938. All About Books was badly affected by the Depression. With the loss of advertising, it became smaller, was printed on cheaper paper and

the contributors’ fees fell. Nettie Palmer was depressed by the prospect of losing A/l About Books and wrote that if it closed down

‘*]’jl have to battle for more wireless jobs, but I want a literary column somewhere’’.!8 It did not close down until 1938 and she had

left it well before that, in 1935, to go to Europe. In England she contributed to English papers including the Listener and the Times Literary Supplement, as well as writing for Australian papers. On her return in late 1936 she relied more on broadcasting and had by then a more established reputation. Nettie Palmer’s explanation of the difficulties facing Australian

writers during the twenties and early thirties rested on her

observation that Australian literature was being eclipsed by the success of film and the mass production of cheap fiction and magazines. She was extremely antagonistic to the incursions of mass culture and particularly to film. Throughout the twenties she dismissed film as vulgar and as early as 1917 she was warning of the

effect of cinema on literature. Hilda Esson, an old school friend,

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had been writing to her from New York on this subject. The Essons

had gone to America, she wrote, ‘‘hoping to see in it...some suggestion, some hope, for the Australian Republic to be. Nothing could be less inspiring’’.'? Nettie Palmer was reading American fiction herself and in February 1917 she wrote a long article for the

Argus on the insidious effect of cinema on modernist American literature. She could detect, she wrote, that ‘‘the trail of the cinema is Over it all, fiction, drama and criticism’’, making it restless, with a quick exciting presentation of externals at the expense of internal form, This was a criticism levelled particularly at the modernists.

Yet her analysis of the problem rested on the simple concept of supply and demand. She was not objecting to a cinematic approach to literature so much as to the changed expectations and demands of the reading public. As editors and publishers were seen simply to

cater to the tastes of the reading public, she argued that it was writers who satisfied this demand who succeeded.”° Similarly, in an article she wrote for the Red Page in 1926 entitled ‘‘Why Authors

Leave Home’’, she argued that the initiatives of the nineties had been undercut by commercial demands for a ‘‘smart, mechanical story, such as is featured chiefly in glossy magazines in the States or in England’’. She characterised Australian culture in the twenties as

vulgar and commercial, shunning any distinctively Australian product. If Henry Lawson had written then, she said, even his finest stories would have been rejected. ‘‘An Australian story has to be Australian in style and attack (not merely in place names), or it is nothing’’, and that was precisely what magazine editors did not want.?!

Nettie Palmer laid some of the responsibility for this situation on the editors and publishers for their complicity in this situation. She was, for example, suspicious of the 1928 Bulletin novel competition as she felt that its literary value would be seriously jeopardised if the judges were required to adjudicate with serialisation in mind, or, as she suspected, if they were to make their decision with an eye

to public demand. She recognised also that publishers were manipulating the market. When a spate of war books was published in 1929 and 1930, either as second editions of books not published since 1918, or as first editions, she quickly pointed out

that the publishers had been suppressing war books for nearly a decade. ‘‘The years following the war’’, she wrote, ‘‘were noted for

a cessation of poetry. ..and for the publication of nothing but the frothiest of ‘bright’ books. ‘On with the dance’: publishers refused to consider war books.’’”?

Implicit 1n this analysis, however, was the assumption that writers, publishers and editors were all controlled by public demand for mass culture. Consequently a regenerated and

The Arbiter ¢ 53

demanding readership was, for her, the essential factor in the deve-

lopment of an Australian literature, just as it was the duty of the critic to educate this readership. In her correspondence with writers she tried to instil a sense of responsibility for this task. During the twenties most of the responsibility, as she saw it, in fact devolved

on to her. As late as September 1934 she complained to Frank Dalby Davison about the pressure of reviews and talks which she could not refuse for fear they would not be done, or that they would be done by the wrong person.”? It was no easy task and

throughout the twenties she saw Australian readers as undemanding and unresponsive. When she had discovered in 1928

that Henry Handel Richardson was a woman and that, like her, had been to the Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Melbourne, she wrote in her journal: It’s fantastic that with all the newspapers and their gossipcolumns you can remain completely uninformed about the people and things that matter. Probably the story of Richard Mahony, if they knew about it, would not be regarded as a good advertisement for the country.”4

In 1932 she wrote to Frank Davison: ‘‘Why is anyone so proud of

being deaf: or so glad to say we have no poets and writers? So anxious to keep Australia negative, derivative, apologetic?’’2> In short, she held a neo-colonial reading public responsible for the low level of Australian literary culture, with books out of print, unread and unrecognised. ‘‘The plain truth is’’, she had written in 1927, ‘‘that our promiscuous reading public is not used to the deepest kind of reality in books about the background it knows.’’6

Nettie Palmer never defined what she meant by ‘‘reading public’’. But it is clear from a close look at her reviews that she was referring to an educated middle class reading public with money to spend on books. In a speech she gave on the last day of Brisbane’s Authors’ Week in 1927, for example, she told her audience that the

cause of Australian literature would be enormously encouraged if in ‘‘each Australian home with literary tastes an Australian bookshelf were established—even if it contained only twenty Australian books’’. In All About Books, a journal with an appeal limited to a

section of the professional middle class, she explained that she supported the journal because what was needed in Australia were readers, not writers. In 1930 she urged readers to buy Australian books for themselves and as presents and to make sure they were in

the libraries they used.2? This was advice which, during a depression, could only be given to the bourgeoisie. More

importantly, she was addressing herself to the ‘‘reading public’’ through a press appealing to a middle class audience, often in

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small, expensive journals and in the language and cultural tradition of the bourgeoisie. Again and again in her criticism and essays of the twenties she

put the argument that the reconstitution of Australian literary culture required the strengthening of a cultural elite into a strong, active and influential force involved in the literature of its own country, rather than the passive receptors of cultural opinions and forms from Britain or America. When she did discuss class and this

cultural elite, her position became murky. She insisted that sensitivity was not the preserve of the bourgeoisie. While those born to privilege and education may acquire a cultural veneer, this should not be equated with artistic sensitivity. Conversely someone

‘‘naturally sensitive and responsive’? may be excluded ‘‘by the

accidents of birth and training from this accepted world of Opinions’’, and to join it is a hard and painful task: ‘‘People, however subversive it may be to admit it, are born with all sorts of qualities and capacities that cut across the distinctions of class.’’* Despite this awareness of the way in which social access to culture is

mediated by class, her analysis of the political significance of literature subsumed class interest into the greater national interest. In 1929 she took on the new professor of English at Melbourne

University, G. H. Cowling, for his cringing remarks that Australian literature was as yet underdeveloped and too thin to constitute a literary tradition or to merit inclusion in university courses. Nettie Palmer retorted quite rightly that it was easy to apologise for Australian literature and to deplore its inadequacies.

But her attack was a personal criticism in an argument that was hard for her to win. Certainly she was right: to make the universities a target of criticism and to campaign for the teaching of Australian literature. The universities are, as she well recognised, among the most powerful and significant institutions in the legitimisation of cultural forms. But she had no defence beyond moral indignation. She had no social theory from which to present her position. She also recognised the shortcomings of state education and was arguing for a broad cultural training in schools. If Australia was to

become a culturally mature society there would have to be less emphasis on vocational training and more on extending the liberal education established in the private schools into the state system. It

should not only be the sons of gentlemen, she wrote, who have those cultural advantages. But she never reconciled this ideal with

the fate that awaited the majority of school leavers for whom, unlike the sons of gentlemen, ‘‘work...means largely, the tending

of some machine, or part of a machine, taking down business letters, selling products over a counter. It is rarely a matter in which human beings can find any joy or self-expression’’ .2° She criticised

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an education that trained children only for a tedious and

mechanised work future and did not allow them the ‘‘luxuries’’ of culture but, as she could not confront the implications of class, she did not offer a solution that would change their work experience beyond giving them something to ‘‘look back on’’. Her confidence

in the power of liberal culture and a liberal education seriously underestimated the realities facing the majority of Australians when this essay was published, first in 1928, and then again in 1932.

Nettie Palmer’s emphasis on education and her promotion of Australian fiction in both mass circulation newspapers and professional journals like A/l About Books, played a key role in the establishment of the as yet unaccepted form of the Australian novel. Her criticism and her championing of Australian literature had, however, considerable political implications, promoted as it was in the context of social amelioration and national interest. She

used her position to introduce European literature, especially French and German language literature, in which she was fluent,

establishing a climate of tradition and literary respectability in

which to discuss contemporary Australian literature. She emphasised the traditional rather than the innovative, and she avoided the avant-garde; beneath her rhetoric of a national culture, she was advocating the acceptance of a bourgeois cultural form. While her criticism was crucial to Australian writers who were

struggling to be heard, it was also a constraint. This was experienced consciously by the writers she was sponsoring as they came up against her territoriality and her bossiness. It also had its effect less consciously in the development of their work. A writer’s work is affected by the definitions and interpretations given to it by

critics, other writers and by its public reception. It develops continuously, through the interaction of its own integrity and the critical, political and intellectual context in which it is produced. Thus the ‘‘meaning’’ given to a writer’s work will evolve as it is interpreted, as some aspects within it are emphasised and validated,

Others rejected. It is in this way that the critic can be highly influential. By acting as sponsor, friend and mentor to young writers, Nettie Palmer was in effect setting up standards of what

Australian literature ought to be. She was encouraging those aspects of their work that conformed to her conception of a national literature and criticising or ignoring those aspects that did not. This is not to say that Nettie Palmer’s success as a critic was the result of consciously manipulative techniques. It was, after all, largely through her hard work that the Australian novel began to be

taken seriously. Her success depended on the acceptance of her criticism. Her work was influential because she was addressing

herself to central problems that were confronting Australian

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writers at that time. In this way the group that formed around Nettie Palmer did so not fortuitously, but by taking account of each other, by giving meaning to each other’s work and thus to their own. It was a process that was both necessary for forging a position for themselves as writers in an unconducive environment, and difficult as conflicts and tensions inevitably surfaced.

Throughout the twenties Nettie Palmer’s articles, letters and diaries were concerned primarily with literary matters and from 1922 she made little or no reference to specifically political events and issues.

She wrote reams, encouraging and promoting contemporary Australian literature. She had moved from a diffident and depressed reaction to the political crises during and immediately after the First World War to an almost exclusive preoccupation with cultural issues. This was accentuated by a decade of physical isolation from the cities. During the twenties the Palmers spent very

little time in Melbourne, living first in the Dandenongs and then, from 1926 to 1929, at Caloundra in Queensland. But more importantly, she was preoccupied during those years by the demands of

her two small daughters and with the family’s domestic and financial needs. In that situation it was possible for her to write and

work as a freelance journalist for it was work that could be combined with family responsibilities.

In 1929 the Palmers returned to Melbourne and in that year Nettie began work on the biography of Henry Bournes Higgins. The biography confronted her with overtly political issues that she

had avoided throughout the twenties. Writing about industrial disputes and the Arbitration Court during Higgins’ period on the Bench, she could not avoid the conflict, raging as she wrote, between labour and capital over the Arbitration Court and the basic wage. The biography marks both the culmination of her liberalism of the twenties and a significant step away from her

confident literary preoccupations of that decade. That she

undertook the biography at all, a difficult and demanding task, is evidence, perhaps, that she was being drawn back into the political

debates that she had laid aside for ten years. She had been commissioned to write the biography by her aunt, Higgins’ widow,

and she felt under an obligation to his memory. The girls were at high school so she had more time; Henry Bournes Higgins had left her a small annuity which, with the advance she received from the publishers, took the financial impetus out of the time consuming weekly reviews.

While she was writing the book Australian liberalism was again

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in crisis and arbitration was a central point at issue. It was a crisis that surfaced in the biography, emerging in her discussion of the conflict between the Prime Minister, W. M. Hughes, and Henry Bournes Higgins, then President of the Arbitration Court, at the

end of the First World War, and in the confrontations between Hughes and the Miners’ Federation and Maritime Unions. She upheld the principles of arbitration through a narrative which allowed her an ostensibly distanced, ‘‘objective’’ stance, offering an explanation and a criticism of both sides. At the same time, this narrative structure itself held her back from confronting the impli-

cations of her material. Beneath her cautious and reasoned approach she never resolved her scarcely articulated reservations of the very principles she upheld. Nevertheless Henry Bournes Higgins

was an important statement of her liberalism which had incorporated, if shakily, some of the uncertainties she had

experienced during and immediately after the First World War. Nettie Palmer blamed Hughes for the breakdown of arbitration during the war and for the bitterness of the conflict between the government and the unions. She accused him of undermining and

circumventing the Court’s authority by the appointment of the Special Tribunals, and she hinted that he had betrayed ideals for which he should have stood as an ex-unionist and one-time secretary of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. But she had significant reservations, and there was little of the vitriol against Hughes that had marked her letters to Vance and Esmonde in 1919.

She conceded what she would never have conceded then, that Hughes had a national responsibility to keep ‘‘the main services of the country running at any cost’’.*° In other words the principles of

conciliation and social amelioration were running counter to national interest when the state was under threat. Her liberalism was faced in practice by the conflicting demands of principle and national security and efficiency. Despite this hesitation, however,

Henry Bournes Higgins offers its support to arbitration. She defended its governing ideology to the last, stressing that the limitations of the Court and its cumbersome structure were the result of government interference. Another shift in her politics between 1919 and 1929 is evident in Henry Bournes Higgins’ reservations about the leftwing opposition to the Court and militant union action. She discussed the criticisms

of the ‘‘Left-wing Industrialists’’, guild socialism and Belloc’s Servile State in terms of pressures that were put on the Court. There is no hint that these had been the very ideas which she had been toying with herself at that time. She described the ideas but did not argue in their terms. Her support had, of course, been ambivalent. Her letters from that period indicate a sympathy both

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with the militants and with Henry Bournes Higgins and the Arbitration Court. In June 1919, for example, she had described the maritime strike to Esmonde Higgins in terms of the conflicting views of Higgins and Guido Barrachi. She clearly had sympathies with both and was torn by the bitterness of the conflict. She noted particularly Higgins’ use of reason and, once again, his commitment to keeping ‘‘the work of the country done’’ during a period of

political crisis. Affected by personal ties both with her uncle and

with friends on the left, and standing on very uneasy ground between them, she sounded a note of desperation in her letters of 1919.

By 1930, when she was writing about this conflict in Henry Bournes Higgins, she had not resolved the contradiction, but her political alignment is clearer. The IWW and guild socialism were no

longer politically viable and their adherents had moved either to Marxism and the Communist Party or to liberalism. Nettie Palmer had rejected Marxism and the Communist Party and had by 1930

incorporated strands of her early utopian socialism within her liberalism. Thus in Henry Bournes Higgins she spoke of Belloc’s

Servile State as a work ‘‘which in the years before the war influenced the minds of great numbers of people, even those not directly interested in industrial problems’’. In this she was describing the influence of Belloc on people like herself as something of the past.

As she was writing Henry Bournes Higgins, the Arbitration Court and the basic wage were once again under threat. The Bruce government had been defeated in 1929 over attempts to dismantle

the arbitration system but by 1931 the Harvester judgement had been overruled and wages reduced by 10 per cent. In his discussion of W. K. Hancock’s Australia (1930), Tim Rowse has argued that there was a significant shift in Australian liberalism during this period of economic crisis and of heightened class conflict.*' The

conflict was no longer argued within the framework of social

amelioration and the basic wage but in economic terms of productive efficiency and industry’s capacity to pay. While there is

a hint of the same dilemmas in Henry Bournes Higgins as in Australia, Nettie Palrner was not conversant with economic theory and her position remained more tentative. Nevertheless she made it absolutely clear that she stood firmly in support of the Arbitration Court and the principle of a basic wage determined by need and the standard of living and not by the capacity of industry to pay. Her defence was based largely on the grounds that Arbitration Court judgements on the basic wage since the war had been an adjustment of the original Harvester ruling, keeping wages abreast of rising

prices. That this process was continued and extended to allow a

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more equal distribution of wealth was, she insisted, essential to national development and to mediation between the classes. Nettie Palmer and Keith Hancock were corresponding during the production of the two books. It is perhaps significant that Nettie Palmer considered Hancock a ‘‘laissez-faire liberal’’ and that her reviews Of Australia, while favourable, stressed his treatment of the

labour movement and of the Arts in Australia. She did not comment on his treatment of the arbitration issue. In contrast

Hancock’s review of Henry Bournes Higgins hinted at its economic

simplicities and stressed the gap ‘‘which lies between the construction of idealistic intellectualism and the more humdrum conflicting motives of ordinary men’’, in an otherwise largely favourable review.?2 Henry Bournes Higgins was reviewed widely

and favourably. The Worker and Labour Call saw it as a vindication of arbitration and as an opportunity to condemn the current situation. It was considered as a scholarly work in the Morpeth Review and the Times Literary Supplement and as an essay in constitutional history by Sir John Quick. It also received descriptive reviews in the major Australian dailies.

In 1932 Angus and Robertson published 7Jalking It Over, a collection of Nettie Palmer’s essays, most of which had been published separately during the twenties. The publication of these essays, together with Henry Bournes Higgins, represent the peak of her political and literary development since the war. They represent the most confident statement of her liberalism. Yet even as they

were published, cracks in her confidence began to show. In September 1932, for example, as she was proofreading the essays, she wrote in her diary: I find myself thinking about the essay in general. Is it an entirely outmoded form? A vehicle for playing with words and

ideas in a dilettante way, suitable for a sheltered corner of society or a leisured and static world, not for this restless, changing one of ours?

She went on to reassure herself with a discussion of Montaigne and

his essays in an unsettled world that made him, too, feel a ‘‘fugitive’’. But it was a doubt she had not expressed as she wrote the essays during the twenties, or even as she prepared the essays for publication in 1931. Similarly, after the publication of Henry Bournes Higgins, she wrote an article for Stead’s Review about the social experiments of the 1890s and argued that they were not as encompassing as they might appear. There is a significant shift from: her position in the biography, in which she had accepted uncritically the notion of the 1890s as a period of social experimentation which had successfully provided for mediation between the

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classes. These social experiments, she wrote in Stead’s Review,

seem coherent and unbroken, especially when described as legislative principles to overseas observers, whereas in fact they

were never as seamless as they are made to appear. In a large country and complex society such order and uniformity has been impossible: ‘‘Life is always breaking in, but it 1s during the last few

years that it has broken in so tremendously and incalculably.’’* There was also a change in her attitude to her brother from the initial rejection of his Marxism and corresponding confidence in her own work, to a greater sympathy with his politics and doubts in her own position. ‘‘I can see Esmonde’s point of view’’, she wrote

to Vance in 1930, ‘‘and faintly guess how utterly trivial and purposeless my work must seem to him. Not that he has been aggressive. I’ve never felt so deep a friendship with him since he grew up.’’* Nettie Palmer did not give a lot of attention in her letters and

journals to the economic situation. There were occasional references to hawkers at the door, and when a young woman she

knew was murdered on her way home from the theatre to Elsternwick in Melbourne, she related this frightening event to the Depression: Sometimes I can’t help feeling that the meaningless tragedy is part of the cloud that has been lowering over the city this past

year—the sense of wheels running down...the shabby

hawkers drifting from door to door...the line of defeated men sitting on the Post Office steps. This isn’t a rational feeling. The murder is surely one of those inexplicable crimes

that might be committed any time. But it makes shadowy figures in the street outside seem more sinister, awakens a distrust of life in you, sharpens your sense of a violence sleeping beneath the unrevealing surface of these days.*°

Although this statement is surprisingly unanalytical and 1s indeed one of her few statements about the Depression, it underscores the rifts that were appearing in her previously confident work. As the mother of two teenage girls, both with emerging radical politics,

she was more closely attuned to its effect on the young people. Noticing that Conrad was no longer read by young writers, she argued that this was because he had no ‘‘explicit social-critical content, no required jargon about ideologies’’. The young, she wrote, were challenging the prewar ‘‘abstract values’’ and ‘‘simple ideas and emotions’’ that were expressed 1n Conrad’s work. ‘‘All the emphasis today is on intelligence rather than feeling, on taking the world to pieces and examining it rather than in celebrating the virtues that would hold it together.’’*’ In this attitude there is still a

denial of any conflict in class interest and still a hope, though a

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shaky one, in the resolution of major social problems through reason and consensus.

Nettie Palmer was observing the Depression, but was herself relatively distanced from it. In 1932 she and Vance moved to Green Island off the North Queensland coast, for a year. They went there, she later wrote, because they ‘‘wanted quiet, to write and read’’.>8 They also went because it was a cheap place to live. Financially it was hard for them, making a living from freelance journalism then,

but it was possible—largely because of the hard work and hardwon reputation of Nettie. Their circumstances were straightened, but they found sufficient resources to go to Europe in 1935 with their daughters. That trip, too, was made as a literary venture. She wrote that they wanted ‘‘a quiet place to work and to keep contact with all that is going on in the world of literature, music, art’’.3° The eighteen months spent in Europe were of critical importance in Nettie Palmer’s political and intellectual development. There she saw at first hand the imminent dangers of fascism and her political alignments moved abruptly to the left. It was not simply a quiet visit to museums and art galleries, though she managed a lot of that, too. Although it was not until she returned from Europe that the change was clear, there were indications of it in her work before she left. She had begun, for the first time, to write political assessments of the books she was reviewing. She used a batch of pacifist

literature quite unashamedly to make her own protest against war and the highly lucrative armaments trade.“ Such a review comes as a surprise after the sedate reviews of the twenties. Similarly she had

no compunction in damning one slight novel as the murmur of a fascist while taking seriously an equally slight novel as it was ‘fhumanly speaking a more significant work’’.*! She also wrote a

lot about German literature, an area in which she had been a specialist since her student days, and she was extremely concerned

about the effect of fascism on a great tradition of literature. She challenged Australian press statements that Hitler had, in five years, risen from obscurity to Chancellor: ‘‘He was already well

known ten years ago,’’ she wrote, ‘‘and well hated in many quarters, himself and all his works, and well derided.’’*? She pointed out the range of critical and satirical literature that was being written in opposition to Nazism, although she was nervous that some of the younger nationalist writers would be caught up in

Nazism, mistaking it for nationalism. She made the connection between nationalism and fascism, but at this stage she drew no other conclusion than that Nazism was a false representation of nationalism.

In 1934 she gave a series of broadcasts entitled ‘‘In the Looking Glass’’ on the nature of the Australian character. These

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broadcasts were optimistic, uncomplicated and _ surprisingly simplistic. She declared Australia in 1934 ‘‘the most equalitarian nation in the world’’, and in broadcasts on Australian manners,

humour, facial characteristics and literature she praised the characteristic democracy arising from Australia’s equalitarian beginnings and union with the environment. In these broadcasts

she made no mention of class, emphasising the nation and repeating the familiar themes of the need for education and social

betterment through cultural understanding; the respect and freedom which should be accorded writers, poets and other intellec-

tuals; and a view of literature that addressed itself to national interests.*? They at first seem a denial of the doubts which permeate her letters, her journal and her other literary writing in 1934. It 1s,

perhaps, because of those doubts that she made them. This was Nettie Palmer’s most public voice. It may have been precisely because she was aware of the dangers imminent in reactionary nationalism, that she was concerned to link Australian nationalism with equalitarianism and democracy.

In 1935 Nettie and Vance Palmer went to Europe with their daughters. Away from the demands of Melbourne and with Aileen

and Helen responsible for running the household, Nettie Palmer had eighteen months in which to pursue her own interests. Both she

and Vance found it hard to get freelance work in London in the aftermath of the Depression, harder, she wrote, than on any of their previous visits.“ They lived frugally and were helped out with money from the family and assistance from English friends. They

followed contemporary events in Europe, attending lectures and

readings by exiled writers and intellectuals. And, as Nettie explained it to her aunt, Ina Higgins, ‘‘we’re meeting very interesting people here, not in social, set ways but personally, one bringing another’’.*> Of the expatriate Australian writers that she saw the most significant were Christina Stead and Henry Handel Richardson. Nettie Palmer visited Henry Handel Richardson twice

at Hastings. Her visits were significant, for Henry Handel

Richardson chose to see her at a time when she was working on The

Young Cosima and seeing very few people. When she had to postpone their first meeting, Richardson wrote: I want very much to see you, and was looking forward to a long talk over things literary. After our correspondence of so

many, years, I should be most disappointed if we did not

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Nettie Palmer was an important channel through which Henry Handel Richardson’s work was publicised in Australia, and through which she kept in contact with current Australian writing. Nettie Palmer gave considerable space in her journal to the visits, remarking particularly on Richardson’s library, her knowledge of

literature, admiring her ability to concentrate and envying her freedom to write without financial pressure. In Nettie Palmer’s canon of Australian literature, Henry Handel Richardson had a central place.

Her relationship with Christina Stead was very different. The two women met at the first International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture which was held in Paris in June 1935. At

Nettie’s insistence they stayed at the same hotel and often sat together at the Congress. Christina Stead resented Nettie Palmer’s

intrusion, finding her ‘‘snappish’’ and hard to oppose. Nettie’s journal made no mention of any tension, describing the young Christina Stead in cheerful tones. She recorded that Christina bought her hats in Paris, but did not discuss The Salzburg Tales and Seven Poor Men of Sydney which had been published in London the previous year and highly acclaimed. This extraordinary

neglect must have been hurtful and was probably a factor in Christina Stead’s hostility. She felt, not without cause, that Nettie Palmer’s championing of Australian literature was slanted to fit her

own, often inflexible, concept of a national culture; rather than confront something new, she would ignore it. Nettie in turn would have been disappointed that Christina Stead as a young Australian woman with a lot to give, was identifying with British Marxism and

a modernist literary tradition, rather than struggling, like the young women in Australia, for a national culture. Nettie Palmer’s insistence that Christina should sit with her was, apparently, based on the duty of Australians to stick together. There were significant political differences between the two women which also help to

explain the hostility. Nettie Palmer went to the Congress as an Australian observer, as well as a writer among writers she had read.

Politically it was significant for her as it brought her into an alliance with left-wing intellectuals and writers. While this represents a move to the left there was an important continuity within her political thought. Christina Stead, in contrast, went as the secretary to the English delegation, not as an Australian at all.

She had been involved with a group of Marxist intellectuals for several years, since soon after her arrival in London in 1928 from Sydney, and came to the Congress as an unaligned Marxist writer.‘

When she returned to London Nettie Palmer wrote an article about the Congress which makes a telling comparison with the report that Christina Stead, as secretary to the English delegation,

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wrote for Left Review.“ Both women reported the Congress favourably, stressing the vitality and the sense of unity and both

endorsed the broad alliance of writers against fascism. But Christina Stead’s article was a class analysis of the political situation that made the Congress necessary and of the delegates, whereas Nettie Palmer’s article was written in terms of the defence

of a culture that transcends a specific economic situation. For Nettie Palmer the importance of the broad left alliance was that while the Congress was ‘‘radical in its temper’’, it was influenced enough by ‘‘English liberalism and French humanism to question thoroughly the tendencies of Communism as well as of fascism’’. While Christina Stead quoted at length from André Gide’s opening speech, Nettie Palmer emphasised that of the first speaker, E. M. Forster. She shared his concern for the erosion of civil liberties in

England and alarm at the threat of fascism in Europe. She described his speech as ‘‘the confession of a liberal quietist, who. . .

welcomed a Congress like this as a reassurance that there were forces determined to preserve civilisation and culture through all wars and economic readjustment’’. Nettie Palmer discussed the question of Soviet writing, refuting

any suggestion of an inevitable clash between bourgeois and revolutionary literature. She agreed with Gide that ‘‘in every durable work of art we find something more and better than simple

responses to temporary needs of one class and one epoch’’. She approved, also, Gide’s observation that in the history of French literature, one common feature was that it renewed itself ‘‘as always, through the soil, through the people’’. Overall, however, she endorsed the importance of political commitment from writers, particularly in the face of fascism: Since writers no longer pretended to be bodiless angels,

unaware of the economic struggle (the fortunate writing for the fortunate, as Gide put it), why not make use of their new strength, their sense of human values, to push it to a happy solution.

Christina Stead agreed that the value of the Congress lay in the broad front against fascism and in the political solidarity of the

well-known and influential writers. But she was much more

concerned than Nettie Palmer with the differences in the Congress between the liberal and the radical writers. On the one hand she saw bourgeois writers whose market and freedom of speech had been threatened by the decline of capitalism since the First World War,

‘that great incentive to mechanical improvement and the instruments of class struggle, [which] smashed the bourgeois machine’’. These writers, Stead argued, were undergoing a crisis of confidence

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in their liberalism with ‘‘the disruption of the bourgeois world, its

disorders and anomalies’’. In contrast there were the younger revolutionary writers who, ‘‘trembling and eloquent with their will to survive and create, have to give up their poetic solitudes and soft

self-probings to study worldly subjects, enter the political arena, take lessons from workmen and use their pen as a scalpel for lifting

up the living tissues, cutting through the morbid tissues of the social anatomy’’. Although Christina Stead saw Soviet literature as underdeveloped and tentative, she pointed to Russia as the only

possibility for a revitalised literature that would escape the decadence of western culture. She saw the revolutionary commitment of the younger writers at the Congress as an indication of the increasing influence of ‘‘another class—more powerful, eventually richer and offering more opportunities to the writer’’. Nettie Palmer missed the Congress of the International Writers League which followed the Paris Congress in London in June 1936.

She was by then in Spain. In May 1936 Nettie, Vance and Aileen rented a house in Mongat, outside Barcelona, for a year. They had moved there to live quietly and inexpensively and to write. Nettie’s letters between May and June 1936 describe a quiet life with Vance and Nettie working each day, taking long walks, swimming, and visiting galleries and museums. Nettie was learning to read Spanish

and was ‘‘anxious to get in touch with modern Spanish literature’’.*? Aileen was in closer contact with political

developments working as an interpreter-secretary with the People’s Olympiad which was to have been held in July 1936 in opposition to the Olympic games in Berlin.

Their quiet year in Spain was interrupted in July by the attempted Falangist coup and the start of the Civil War. For both

Nettie and Vance it was a dramatic experience of lasting importance. Nettie had found Spain ‘‘peaceful’’ and had been impressed by the Republican government’s social and economic reforms since the elections. For her the rebellion was sudden and sinister: ‘‘Into the bright morning some evil seemed to have suddenly entered, violently shattering the quiet, threatening all the future.’’*° Her letters stressed the treachery of the Falangists, the legitimacy of the Republic and its popular support. Her sense of alarm was heightened as Aileen had spent the night of the rebellion

in Barcelona. The following day Nettie and Vance went into Barcelona to look for her:

We searched for A. at various hotels and at the Montjuich stadium; but while we were lunching at the Hotel del Centro she appeared, gay and grubby, in the blue cotton frock and white shoes she set out in last Sunday. For her the actual attack on the Spanish people has given them a mandate to set their

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house in order as they dared not do before; and now to be young is very Heaven. She had been busy helping to interpret for the little groups of athletes who were marooned here.°!

On the advice of the British consul the Palmers left within a few

days for fear of being stranded without money and access to Overseas communication. Aileen was furious and considered it rampant cowardice. Vance and Nettie left anyway and took the resistant Aileen with them. It was a decision that both justified as

necessary, but were clearly uneasy about. Vance returned to London at once to write about Spain and publicise what was happening. Nettie stayed for a week in Paris with an old friend from her student days. There she still managed the usual visits to galleries and museums, but she also attended a large Popular Front

Open air peace rally and spent some time with Popular Front writers. In London both she and Vance kept up their articles about Spain, partly from their genuine political commitment but also, it

must be added, to salve their consciences for their rapid flight. It was a frustrating experience. Only leftist papers and journals were interested in what they had to say; the establishment press continued with its distortions and lack of interest. ‘‘The world is in

terrible danger’’, Nettie wrote to her mother, ‘‘and a great deal depends on England’s attitude to Spain, yet the mass of people are either indifferent or chilly hostile to the Spanish government.’’* At

the end of August Aileen returned to Spain as part of the administrative support staff for a Medical Aid Unit. Nettie’s reaction was anxiety tinged with pride and the following years of commitment to the Spanish support campaign in Australia were overlaid by the tension of that anxiety. In September Nettie Palmer left Europe for Australia on the S. S. Moldavia, a few weeks before Vance. She arrived in Australia to a public welcome that was interested almost exclusively in her Spanish experience. In Fremantle Katharine Prichard had arranged

a lunch party of writers and intellectuals before taking her to the

Women’s Committee Against War and Fascism to talk about Spain. She was interviewed in Adelaide, disputing the reports of massacres of priests and pointing out that the churches had been used by the fascists as garrisons and stores. Brian Fitzpatrick had written to her on the ship at Fremantle for the Council for Civil Liberties asking her to address a meeting as soon as she arrived. Although she had hoped only to have made one public statement in

Melbourne she was soon caught up in a round of meetings and speaking engagements. These she found tiring and disorienting, leaving her very little time to write the full account of Spain that she was planning. She explained to Vance: ‘‘It’s the labour groups and

generally left people who ask me to speak, and I find it hard to

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refuse them, while I could have refused the salons bourgeois.’’3 In

the months that followed she wrote a good many articles, gave several broadcasts, and addressed meetings. When the immediate

pressures died down, she worked with the Spanish Relief Committee and over the next few years was involved in various publications about Spain. In all her writing about Spain, Nettie Palmer stressed that the war was not a civil war, but an attack by the Falangists with outside fascist support against a democratically elected government. She made this point partly to refute the daily press which referred to the Falangists as the patriots and those who supported the Republic as ‘*revolutionaries’’; but she also made it to stress that the threat of

fascism extended beyond Spain and had to be defended internationally: ‘‘We Australians should try to help ravaged Spain,

believing that her fight is our own.’’*> Nettie Palmer used her articles not only to support the Popular Front Against Fascism but

also to support the Communist Party. She argued that the Republican government which had been elected in February 1936

was a widely supported Popular Front government, introducing much needed agrarian and social reforms in a country with scarce

resources and a history of inequality and poverty. ‘‘Spain was having a national spring-cleaning, such as few countries dare to face.’’5> This was happening, she argued, with the support of the Communist Party who were ‘‘strengthening the People’s Front as a

whole’’, and with the full participation of the Spanish peasantry and working class. But her defence of the Communist Party was

made as a liberal in support of a democratically elected

government; she had not become a Marxist: There is such determination and courage in the working class as I have never seen before, and without distinction between men and women, all are morally and spiritually enlisted in the

anti-fascist militias. ‘‘All of us, from the republicans to anarchists are determined to destroy the false old Spain with

its crimes and pillage and to build a state of liberty and

justice.’’ I suggest that these are not phrases dictated from

Moscow: they might even make a sound Marxist wince. They

are written by an average and not very literate Spanish worker.>?

Her defence of Spain and her work for the Spanish Relief Committee are indicative of the political changes and the continuities in her position after 1935. She aligned herself with the Council for Civil Liberties whose principles she shared. None of her articles about Spain spoke in terms of class war and although

her use of the term ‘‘nationalism’’ was cautious, she wrote of a

united Spanish people working for national reconstruction,

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threatened by those who would not accept the decision of the majority. While her intellectual position was still based on her liberalism, she was working with the Communist Party in a Popular Front organisation, the Spanish Relief Committee. She publicly defended the Communist Party as working only ‘‘for peaceful co-operation with all anti-fascist parties, all democratic movements, in this period of great peril from fascism and war’’.*® Although her relations with the Communist Party were never easy and she was suspicious of their sectarianism, she was wholehearted in her involvement in the Popular Front. For this and her defence of Spain, she found herself under attack in Labour Call and less in sympathy than before with some of her more conservative literary associates .°?

On her return from Europe there is a. sense in her letters of feeling let down by the writers. She was getting few offers of paid work and was under considerable strain. She wrote to Vance: Here in Melbourne, except among the hard up intellectuals and pacifists, I’ve experienced the usual grudging and apathy. People who might be expected to look up have done nothing:

no word from Thorpe or Macartney, for instance.

There had been a note of frustration about the state of literary affairs in her letters from London, against the background of the much greater political involvement of European writers. She had written to Frank Davison of her irritation with the ineffectiveness and conservatism of the Fellowship of Australian Writers and of her disappointment with P. R. Stephensen’s right-wing treatise on a national culture, The Foundations of Culture in Australia. She felt it was full of omissions, was self-seeking and had taken credit for work that had been done by others.

Her letters and journal continued to discuss literature and literary matters, but the tone was political. She was pleased, for example, to discover that Frank Wilmot was less isolationist and was interested in Spain, but at the same time it was she who had to explain the situation to him and this was frequently her role with writers on her return. On the other hand she was irritated by those who had not changed; she was dismayed to find that Louis Esson was still talking about Douglas Credit: ‘‘All his old few clichés and no further understanding of the economic position than he had had years ago.’’®!

Nettie Palmer did, of course, keep up her literary ties, corresponding with those she already knew and trusted. Her journalism continued but not at the same rate and with a greater emphasis on

broadcasting. In 1938 she gave a series of broadcasts entitled, significantly, ‘‘Readers and Writers’’. Most of the lectures were

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simply bringing new publications to the attention of her audience, but there were references to the political situation and its effect on writers, which, as she knew only too well, could be devastating: Perhaps you’d say that poets ought to be above mere news of

calamity and transient fears. I think both these poets. ..are

quite brave enough not to be low-spirited on their own

account. But when a shadow, very like eclipse, threatens to cover the earth, a poet may be more sensitive than another person; like flowers, like birds before a storm.©

Most of the writers she mentioned in these broadcasts were women: Ruth Pitter, Eileen Duggen, Helen Simpson, Eleanor Dark, Henry

Handel Richardson, Elinor Mordaunt, Katharine Prichard, Rebecca West. Nettie Palmer did not have much to say about the nature of women’s writing, but she had always written a great deal about women writers. As well as the Australian women, during the twenties she had written of such women as George Sand, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and early in the thirties she considered

making a full study of George Eliot. In her only essay on the subject of women novelists, an undated broadcast probably given in 1934, she said that what distinguished women writers from men was that they engaged with their subject, were emotionally honest and did not stand back in an attempt to be objective. She suggested that women approached novel-writing in the same spirit in which they had traditionally written letters—as an act of communication and to express feeling. This is a sweeping generalisation that does not bear much scrutiny. It was not an area in which Nettie Palmer troubled to make a careful analysis despite the fact that she had encountered feminism as a young woman. Her aunt, Ina Higgins, with whom she was always close, was a feminist and a friend of Vida Goldstein. Nettie had joined feminist groups at Melbourne University and in England had attended meetings of the suffragette W.S.P.U. After her marriage, however, she no longer belonged to any feminist groups and there is no explicit feminism in her writing.

Indeed she was conservative in her attitudes to the family and sexuality. Nevertheless she was sympathetic to women’s writing and she undertook a thankless task like editing the Centenary Gift Book, a collection of essays and stories by and about women to mark the Victorian Centenary celebrations. This can hardly be seen as a radical step. The centenary celebrations were extremely conservative and she herself was in public opposition to certain aspects of them; the book itself was enormously respectable. When Nettie Palmer returned from Europe she was much less engaged with literary events than she had been before 1935. A good deal of time was taken up by the Spanish Relief Committee and

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towards the end of 1937 she wrote to Alan Marshall that she was finding it hard to concentrate on literary matters: I feel you’re a real artist because you can keep on writing even

in times like this: ‘‘the hours we are living through’’ as the Spaniards keep saying. Perhaps I’m easily put out of my stride: I can’t write more than the merest few jobs.° _

As well as this her mother, now widowed, was ill at various times between 1937 and 1940 and had difficulties with her housekeeper. Nettie had to live with her for extended periods, returning to Vance only occasionally. Then in 1939 she was herself ill and run down. In 1940 she went to Tasmania to give the Commonwealth Literary Fund lectures, as much for a holiday as for work, but while she felt that her lectures had gone ‘‘fairly well’’ there was a note of depression in her letters. ‘‘I think we’re all ‘for it’ from now on.’ These were difficult years for Nettie Palmer but by 1939 she was

feeling less isolated as Australian writers, in part through her influence, were becoming more involved in the political struggles that had concerned her since 1936. In 1939 she wrote in her journal: For me the war is something that has been going on remorse-

lessly since July 1936, when that sudden attack came at Barcelona. Looking back over my journal, I can’t help noticing how little it has been concerned with purely literary questions since then. But is there, I wonder, any such thing as

**pure’’ literature? Isn’t it just a conception of people who look on writing as an escape from the living world? Perhaps a

painter or musician can cut himself off, in his work, from what’s going on around him, but a writer can’t. I remember thinking, when we came home from Europe, that our writers were trying to do just that, but lately all I know have had this sense of the ground quaking beneath them as acutely as I have.

There’s that manuscript of Leonard Mann’s, The Impending Crisis—impending whether war breaks out or not; there’s

Frank Davison’s While Freedom Lives, with its sense of urgency; there’s already in nearly every letter I get the feeling of Kipling’s footslogger, ‘‘there’s no discharge in ihe war’’.©

Nettie Palmer’s move to the left was part of the common response,

noted by Christina Stead at the Paris Congress, of bourgeois writers to the assault on their situation as writers, curbs on freedom of speech in the western democracies as well as under fascism, the contraction of the publishing industry. It was, however, more than a pragmatic or simply self-interested response to this situation. The

events of those years threw into doubt many of the premises of liberalism that had no defence against the violence of fascism. Nettie Palmer’s response was genuinely one of horror and her political shift during those years was an attempt to adjust to this

The Arbiter « 71

a= FF. i, i * # SiSeg S —_ ca: Sr3Pa ;jCSREES i eei Be 4 i.REE B tee & Sa RES ‘See aS Mssa=ee. ee.ess oe~i Sia ee ee oeaor. ae / ed SE=g& EEE aan.

:vee is=4;Reem See lr — =“TE = Beco OER -ee Oe :. me rym= “agqaoe “gee RE cea SE See Bo & 2 : a . oe Ss i na cs ; 3 -34bos & callSee BS ca: ee Then in October 1917 she wrote of Life and Labor: ‘‘What

a pool of poisonous platitudes we have sunk into. ..They are just the same old stuff and every word emanates from Mrs R.’’ She continued gleefully: With regard to ‘“‘L. and L.’’ did I tell you, that one day I

went to Jus Suffragai and introduced myself to Miss Sheepshanks as an editor of it, and she said in her very honest way. ‘‘Oh yes, we used to look forward to it as there was in it always a spirit that we could quote, but not of late, I suppose the war has compelled you—’’ ‘‘No,”’’ said I, ‘‘not the war, but Miss Henry and I are no longer on it.’’ ‘‘Oh, that accounts for it,’’ said she. I thought this would give you a smile of satisfaction. ‘‘It’s just the ordinary American platitudes now,’’ she

concluded. It is.%°

Whatever the story behind the resignations, there can be no doubt of the ambivalence of Miles Franklin’s attitude to those years in America and their importance in the development of her ideas. She wrote in 1916 that: ‘‘I could not return to social work in my present

frame of mind. It fills me with suffocation just to go to a sociological meeting of any kind.’’?! It was not immediately clear what she would do instead. She told Alice Henry that she needed time and space to think and recover, but her letters are undirected and uncertain, mentioning several possibilities, including a shortlived enthusiasm for film. It was not until the early twenties that she had turned seriously to writing; she never returned to the idea

of political work. As late as 1938 she wrote to Nettie Palmer: ‘‘No—public work is not my bent—I loathe it.’’3* The final straw was her war work. In June 1917 she joined a unit of the Scottish

Miles Franklin: A Chapter of Her Own ¢ 171

Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service as an assistant cook. She was stationed at Ostrovo, Macedonia, under the command of Dr Agnes Bennett. It was an exhausting and debilitating experience both emotionally and physically. She did not complete her contract and, returning before her year was up, forfeited her annual pay. None of the ‘‘most interesting’’ letters which Alice Henry records that she received from Miles Franklin in Macedonia have survived. But it would seem that the experience reinforced her earlier hostility

to war; thereafter she retained a consistently anti-war position. In Prelude to Waking she wrote of ‘‘that recurrent lunacy called war’’ and after war had broken out again she wrote to Nettie Palmer that she found ‘‘the weathering of the relapse of the 1914-1918 war... almost beyond [my] strength’’.*?

Miles Franklin’s encounters in America raise several questions about the involvement of middle class women in social work during the early decades of this century. Her experience before she left,

and her compulsion towards Chicago and political work,

encouraged in concepts of political and cultural duty by Rose Scott

and Joseph Furphy, then by Alice Henry and the Chicago feminists, were part of a situation In which women with the benefit of education, money and security, could express their feminism by working to improve the condition of their poor sisters. At the same time, of course, they attempted to extend their influence through

legislation and the control of supervisory positions in health, education and welfare. In both endeavours, they were caught in an ideology that viewed women as agents of social control. In line with

these roles, much of the feminism of this period is based on a humanism expressed in vague and indistinct ideas of the feminine

sphere and feminine principle. These notions, which can be described as a female humanism, occur repeatedly and were woven into the feminism of Australian women of this period. This female

humanism can be traced not only in the political activists but, in various forms, in the fiction of the progressive women writers

between the wars; it shares common assumptions with Nettie

Palmer’s notions of the social role of a national cultural elite. The significance for Miles Franklin was that while protesting that she could not face another ‘‘sociological meeting’’, she incorporated

these very ideas into her fiction and they became an important impulse behind it.

It was not until the twenties and the Brent of Bin Bin novels that Miles Franklin’s writing returned to Australian themes and was

received with acclaim. She had, however, been writing in the

172 ¢ Exiles At Home

intervening years, even in Chicago when she has always been assumed to have been too busy with WTUL work. The only novel known to have been published during this period was The Net of Circumstance (1915), by the British firm, Mills and Boon. It carried

the pseudonym Mr and Mrs Ogniblat L’Artsau and has only recently been recognised as hers.*4 The extraordinary nom de plume makes a little more sense when it is deciphered: Ogniblat read backwards spells Talbingo, her birthplace, always dear to her heart, and

L’Artsau is an anagram for Australfia]. So even during her ‘*American’’ period she retained links, however tenuous, with Australia. The extent to which she was writing has been slow to come to light, largely because she wrote under a range of obscure and closely guarded pseudonyms. In 1909 she had published the rather silly and not very successful Some Everyday Folk and Dawn,

and perhaps daunted by its indifferent reception, she did not publish again in her own name until 1931. The range of her unpublished writing over these years is quite remarkable and includes novels, plays and short stories. While she enjoyed the controversy over Brent of Bin Bin’s identity, even fuelled it, she was very careful to cover her tracks with Ogniblat L’Artsau. She did deposit a copy of The Net of Circumstance in the Mitchell Library, but she did so in such a way that it was not suspected as

hers and remained uncatalogued until recently. Jill Roe has suggested that it was because of the failure of her writing in this

period that Miles Franklin feared ridicule or, worse, pity; she could not face returning to Australia a failed writer. Most of these novels remained unpublished and there is no record that her plays

were performed. The royalty statements for The Net of Circumstance record no. sales. Worse still, when she was negotiating for an American edition she was told by the publisher’s reader that the novel placed ‘‘too much stress on advanced feminist

views, explicitly championed by the author’’. The heroine was dismissed as yet another ‘‘discontented old maid’’.*> The Net of Circumstance is a revealing though not a memorable novel. Although Mills and Boon were not, in 1915, the specialists in

heart-throb romances they are now, Miles Franklin did rely on a conventional romantic plot. Constance Roberts meets Osborne

Lewis in the first chapter, and after two years of trials, misunderstanding and soul searching, she finally accepts him, despite

his imperfect attempts to understand ‘‘the woman question’’. Within these strictures, the novel explores the penalties of living alone, the constraints of sexuality, the refusal to compromise for love. Constance’s resolution was, ultimately, to find a love that would not be too compromising. Miles Franklin’s own decision, of course, was to remain single. Nevertheless the parallels are striking

Miles Franklin: A Chapter of Her Own ¢ 173

and it would seem that Miles Franklin was working out, from another perspective, the conflict that had been dealt with so shockingly in My Brilliant Career. The Net of Circumstance addresses the hardships of that decision in practice, the little battles that have to be fought every day to maintain oneself alone, and the terrible sapping of energy that can result. For Constance this ends

in breakdown and Miles Franklin herself was seriously ill for a period in Chicago and had a long convalescence. These were

difficult issues and throughout the novel the romantic plot interrupts the exploration of them. To make her points Miles Franklin has to rely on the incursions of long discussions. Thus the

novel spans a range of issues confronting a woman in Miles Franklin’s situation and while interesting to a biographer, makes hard reading.

Motherhood was one such issue which must have been of

personal concern to Miles Franklin as a woman in her mid-thirties. In 1915 renouncing marriage meant renouncing motherhood and as

Miles Franklin was only too aware, while there was a great deal that was oppressive in the social experience of motherhood, it was also a source of very real satisfaction. A single feminist woman

would find it hard to disentangle the real fulfilments from conditioned expectations, but to forgo the bearing of children was

a harsh decision. Constance wants children but she also wants independence, a career, a full cultural existence. They were within reach and there was the very real threat that having children would

mean losing them. Zhe Net of Circumstance is irate in its condemnation of such gross alternatives and illuminates both the personal bitternesses and its implications. As Nancy, the socialist mother, puts it: Really, it is appalling all the glorious, noble women who struggle for the betterment of the race but who are themselves shut out from love and motherhood. What is going to be the outcome? It seems such an injustice to the children that are coming that they are robbed of the very noblest mothers.

But having said as much, Nancy almost immediately announces that after her second child, which she is carrying, she will have no more children for ‘‘I ought to help in the work of making the world a better place to bring babies into. I feel that this is going to be the higher, broader, human motherhood’’.*®6 The distance between these two statements both conceals and reveals the reckoning that women so frequently have had to make. Miles Franklin remained childless, like so many women writers. It has been rare for a woman writer to be able to say, as the great artist Kathe Kollwitz wrote in her diary: ‘‘As you, the children of my body, have been my tasks, so too are my other works.’’*’

174 ¢ Exiles At Home

A number of Miles Franklin’s unpublished works from the Chicago period were attempts to come to terms with sexuality, maternity and the implications of an existence for women which was independent of men. By the twenties, however, these attempts

have gone from her writing. Perhaps she was discouraged by failure; perhaps she had reconciled herself to spinsterhood; perhaps such writing was, ultimately, too revealing. While she was looking

for a publisher for a novel called Love Letters of a Superfluous Woman, she wrote that ‘‘there is too much real feeling in these observations for me to be easy in attaching my name’’.** In contrast

the Brent of Bin Bin novels are curiously asexual in tone. Back in March 1913, Miles Franklin had reviewed Elizabeth Robins’ novel My Little Sister, and in this review she had taken up the connections between literature and social reform. She had been

impressed with this novel, which was an indictment of the exploitation of young women through prostitution and white slavery, and felt it would go a long way to highlight the need for

legislative reform on these matters. The age of the ‘* ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ drivellers’’ was over; art must be for

‘‘life’s sake. .. attuned to the service of humanity. ..Culture has a new vocation, and, masquerading as sociology, is engaged in social readjustment’’. Those who were reluctant to listen to sociologists, trade unionists and suffragists, would read novels and absorb their

‘“‘truth’’. While consoling themselves that it was fiction and therefore ‘‘not true’’, they would be moved nonetheless by the greater truth that lies within fiction and thus be stirred to the progressive cause: The novel has become a greater educational force than the sermon. The most telling novels and dramas of the hour are

the most stirring tracts—their authors’ contribution of

propaganda towards some angle of the wide social movement.*?

In that article Miles Franklin had brought political reform and literature together, but her own relationship to both remained ambiguous. Her work with the WTUL was successful and praised;

her writing was a failure. She was trying to do what Elizabeth Robins had done, but she had less success. Elaine Showalter has argued that the ideological and structural constraints within which

the feminists were writing before the First World War often resulted in dour didactic novels. Miles Franklin insisted after Chicago that she was through with political work, that she was exhausted and could not bear another ‘‘sociological meeting’’. She turned to a very different tradition for her writing, but she was still

pulled towards social work; and the conception of a national

Miles Franklin: A Chapter of Her Own * 175

literature that she developed between the wars rested on that uneasy union between literature and reform. In London during the twenties Miles Franklin lived with Mary Fullerton, another Australian writer, and a woman called Mabel Singleton. Despite her protestations she was involved, although

only briefly, with the Deptford Nursery School which was

renowned as a pioneer public pre-school. It had been set up by Margaret McMillan who had been one of Miles Franklin’s referees

for the job with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, and who was associated with Chicago feminism through Jane Adams at Hull House. After Deptford, Miles Franklin worked for the National Housing and Town Planning Council in Russell Square. Although she was working in a lowly capacity as a secretary, she nonetheless

had chosen a progressive, if respectable, independent pressure group working for public housing and re-housing policies. But her serious work was done nearby in the British Museum where she wrote most of the Brent of Bin Bin novels. The first of them was

completed in 1925; all six had been written by 1933. She never

admitted that she was Brent of Bin Bin, although there is incontrovertible evidence that she was.“ She guarded the secret closely and neither Alice Henry nor Nettie Palmer had been told even by the end of the thirties. It must have been obvious to both, but they seem to have understood her reasons and maintained the secrecy. In 1931 Miles Franklin returned to London for eighteen months

to see publishers and to complete the last Bin Bin novels. She was secretive about going, insisting to Alice Henry that she tell no one. While overseas, she wrote letters to Nettie Palmer and Alice Henry as Brent of Bin Bin on the same typewriter, with the same sticking keys and the same idiosyncratic style that marked the letters signed Miles Franklin. Yet Alice Henry continued to profess that she did

not know Brent’s identity and Nettie replied seriously and differently to Miles and to Brent, and refused to be drawn into the speculations of others. Such speculation recurred, throughout the thirties and forties, and Miles Franklin took considerable risks by taking on a persona as Brent of Bin Bin in her letters, encouraging, if anything, the debate. This is in marked contrast to the Ogniblat L’ Artsau pseudonym which she took pains to ensure would remain unnoticed. The first of the Bin Bin novels, but the last to be published, was Prelude to Waking, in which Miles Franklin continued her attempt to write for a British market. Her descriptions of English social life are dreadful, forced and unnaturally jolly, and her only plausible

character is an Australian woman caught between London and Australia. In the rest of the Bin Bin novels she returned to the people and places of the Monaro and Goulburn districts where her

176 ¢ Exiles At Home

family had settled and she had grown up. The story of her family and neighbours and, in Cockatoos her own story, is woven into the fabric of the fiction. More importantly, these novels represent a return to questions about the nature and function of literature in Australian society; it may have been that the use of the pseudonym allowed her to explore her own position as an Australian writer, without the legacy of My Brilliant Career. The Bin Bin novels pick up other strands that had been in her earliest writing, extending the

preoccupation with literature and reform to the interlocking dichotomies of expatriatism and Australianism, the antagonisms

between city and bush, and the relationship of feminism to nationalism. It is in the contradictions as much as in their attempted resolution that her work begins to make sense. Up the Country, the second and much more successful Bin Bin novel, traces the early pioneering families in the High Monaro where she was born, an area ranging between Tumut, Gundagai, and Cooma. Ten Creeks Run and Cockatoos follow the next two generations until all the talented young leave the bush for Europe or America. Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang deals with the third generation of one branch of these pioneers and Back to Bool Bool brings the third generation, now in its maturity, back to Australia and the High Monaro. The early novels in the Bin Bin sequence accept, with very little criticism, a traditional even legendary version of history according to which hard work, resilience and resourcefulness had been the common attributes of the Australian bushmen who had established an egalitarian pioneering community based on mutual respect and high moral principles. As in My Brilliant Career, it is tartly pointed out that the casualties of this life are the women who do not marry, those who marry unsuccessfully and those, men and women, with an artistic or contemplative temperament. What is new about the Bin Bin novels, and where they depart from the legend, is in their insistence that the strength and success of pioneering society was

based on the real but unacknowledged power of women. The women worked hard because they themselves had a stake in the direction of that society. They were the stabilisers of that culture, the bearers of the tradition. There are some splendid scenes in Up the Country, in particular, where the patriarch and matriarch fight it out for supremacy. Rachael, the matriarch, ensures that the outward form of male supremacy is observed, but there is no doubt who controls the household. It is she who imbues the whole family

with her superior sensibility, and through the family, the whole community.

There is no attempt in any of the Bin Bin novels to analyse the

Australian legend in terms of class or race. Although good

Miles Franklin: A Chapter of Her Own # 177

treatment of the Aborigines and charity to the poor are a necessary part of harmonious social relations, neither the Blacks nor the poor Whites are seen as casualties. Indeed they are barely seen at all, relegated to the exotica of the background. Miles Franklin does not dwell on poverty and squalor as she had done so pointedly in My Brilliant Career. Throughout the Bin Bin novels the idealised bush society is treated as homogenous, with the primary area of conflict being that between the sexes. There is little trace of Miles Franklin’s earlier class awareness; the concept of class had, by this time, been subsumed within the concept of a reforming nationalist literature. In Back to Bool Bool the generation of artists and writers who had left, like Miles Franklin, early in the century, return to their

Origins looking for a way out of the cultural malaise they had experienced in Europe; but the Australia they returned to between the wars was disappointing. They had to look hard for the heritage they wanted and they pinned a lot on the little they found. There were only small pockets of the farming communities that bore any

relationship to the golden age of pioneering. Instead they

encountered, deep in the bush, jazz on the radio and large holdings

run by managers for absentee landlords and large corporations.

Back to Bool Bool is bitter in its attack on the incursions of American cultural imperialism and the destruction of the old values. The cities are condemned as the spawning ground for the

despised commercial culture. )

Nevertheless this generation of young and talented returned

expatriates set themselves the task of working for cultural

regeneration. This comprised both the resolution of their personal

artistic searchings and a way out of the cultural desert that had descended on Australia. The golden past was to serve as inspiration.

It was the artists and writers, now, who were the inheritors of the legend. Women, as a gender, had lost their claim. Eroded of their social base, they had become the custodians only of conservatism. This does not imply a weakening of Miles Franklin’s feminism; on the contrary, the Bin Bin novels are an indictment of the position of women in Australian society. One of the effects of the demise of the pioneering society is the disinheritance of Australian women.

Stripped of their social influence, they are reduced to parasites committed to drudgery for its own sake: ‘‘If there was a budding Madame Curie, or a female Pasteur or Einstein, or a Charlotte Bronte, in Australia, she’d still be compelled to be a charwoman; it’s the supreme preoccupation of my country women.’’*' In Back to Bool Bool the dichotomy its thus established between those who have common minds and those who are creative. The former are mean-spirited, pedestrian, anti-intellectual and conservative; the latter are the true bearers and inheritors of the Australian tradition.

178 ¢ Exiles AE biome

Once it was the women, now it is those who represent female sensibility and humanism-—the artists. Accepting histories and mythologies about Australia in preference to suburban realities, Miles Franklin used them to open the way for a cultural elite. [n this way a major dichotomy emerges between a glorification

of a past society, idealised as egalitarian, and a programme for

cultural revival along similar lines that is dependent on the guidance of an elite. The ease with which American cultural imperialism could penetrate Australian society with its tatty magazines and vulgar films was attributed to the failure of the pioneers to leave any ‘‘cultural monuments’’. There was nothing but ‘‘mental malnutrition’’ to withstand the commercial thrust. In the same way AuStralian workers had gained better conditions than any others through the dedication of the early labour movement; but there was nothing to sustain this achievement for there was no cultural edifice to support it. The conclusion reached in Back to Booi Bool is that Australia’s legislative progress, based on a very

rosy view of Australia’s history of social legislation, would be arrested further unless there were ‘‘leaders of vision. The herd cannot hold what has been won for it’’.** The failure of every facet of Australian democracy was attributed to the absence of a fortifying culture; that was all that was missing in the golden past. Thus it is cultural regeneration that would pave the way for reform.

It had been a tortuous journey but literature and reform were finally united in the Bin Bin novels in a concept of nationalist cultural elite that would spear-head political reform and serve all

sectional interests. She had brought together the dichotomy between writing and politics that had tormented her since My Brilliant Career; but it was a precarious balance, and one that did not withstand ihe brutal realities of fascism and war, In 1936 All That Swagger was published. It is the major novel of Miles Franklin’s maturity, appearing, at last, under her own name.

All That Swageer draws together many of the threads that are scattered through the Brent of Bin Bin novels. It is a one-volume chronicle of the pioneering society in the same location of the High Monaro, again on iand that had remained after ‘‘the easy land was

grabbed by the big fellows with Capital’’. It is a chronicle of Australia’s national development and the role of women in that development. Once again, while the men swagger, it is the women who are the true progenitors of the legendary Australia and who lay

the foundations, holding the pioneering society together. The influence of the pioneers is represented, as in the Bin Bin novels, by

an antagonism to the cities and the commercialisation that has undermined the cultural basis of the pioneer society. Once again the novel explores the cultural impotence that has accompanied the

Miles Franklin: A Chapter of Her Own ¢ 179

erosion of social democracy and egalitarianism in Australia. The final scene in A// That Swagger takes up themes that had pervaded her work for decades. It is a plea for continuity of leadership from the old pioneers. For Miles Franklin, technology gives the means:

Brian is an airman, in recognition of the importance of

communications. But technology has to be controlled by those with their roots in the past, by those who represent the high sensibilities

of the bush men and of feminism, in order to prevent the

domination of man by the machine ‘‘looming as the destroyer if manipulated to Satanic ends’’.43 Miles Franklin’s analysis of the control of technology vacillated from sentimental aspirations to fears that technology, under its own momentum, would move completely out of control. There is a concentration in All That Swagger on the nature of romantic love that had been of secondary importance in the Bin Bin novels. In contrast to her early fiction the novel exposes romantic love as an ideology that papers over the inevitable separateness that is experienced in marriage: ‘‘Oneness in marriage: it is impossible.

After the first flush of passion has subsided each regains separateness.’’*4 Only those passions interrupted by death and

preserved in memory, do not devolve into boredom or hostility. For the rest, ‘‘once curiosity has been satisfied, monotony

sets in’’. The novel is curt in its insistence that the real considerations are ‘‘the name and business standing afforded by

marriage’ in a society that offers little to women who remain unmarried.* Even so, young women have to be lured into marriage by romance. Maternity, while perhaps having its own pleasures, is now seen in terms of a woman’s bargaining position, giving her ‘‘more security of sexual tenure’’, especially if she produces a son.

In contrast to relationships with men, real friendship, for Miles Franklin, has become possible only between women. It is in the companionship and solidarity among women that her fictional women find satisfaction: ‘‘Men are merely beasts—women are

often friends.’’*’ These changes could indicate either a

reconciliation of the early conflicts over sexuality, passion and aloneness, a clarity of wisdom; or a rejection of these issues, a satirical dismissal of them tinged with the bitterness of having turned them in on herself. There were significant differences between Miles Franklin’s fiction

and that of the younger urban writers, differences which partly

arose out of their differing class positions. The dominant contradiction in the fiction of Eleanor Dark, M. Barnard Eldershaw and Dymphna Cusack is between a rejection of the crude effects of the individualism inherent in bourgeois society and emphasis on individual choice and individual solutions to political

180 ¢ Exiles At Home

problems. For Miles Franklin the contradiction lies between an

idealised sense of community based on her vision of early Australian pioneering society and a counterposing desire for strong

leadership to bring Australia out of its cultural and political stagnation. Through her family Miles Franklin understood the experience of the rural poor who were forced into the suburbs by urbanisation and industrialisation. While she was in America this

move to the cities had been accelerated by the development of

manufacturing industry and the rapid urban and suburban development of the twenties. When she returned in 1927, her family had moved to Sydney’s outer suburbs where they were discontented

and restless. Her experience as a rebellious and creative young woman gave her an added distance from the bush so that within that dominant conflict between the bush and the city, her attitude to the bush was highly ambivalent. That same rebelliousness had taken her out of the bush and into the city; out of Australia and into American feminist and trade union politics. Her social and political experiences in Chicago had brought her into that urban society she despised and the liberalism which underpinned Life and

Labor’s social democratic union politics. The ambiguities in her

work and attitudes have their roots in conflicting ideological pressures between liberalism, the old communalism of bush society, idealised in its passing, and an urban petit bourgeois desire, sO common in the thirties, for strong leadership that would show the way out of the economic, cultural and social morass into which Australia had fallen. That Miles Franklin did not write another major novel after 1933

has to be related to the contradictions within her work which brought her to a position, in the face of the political crises of the thirties, in which she was left with inoperable alternatives. She was reduced to political disillusion and literary stalemate. With fascism,

her nationalism and her espousal of strong leadership needed reappraisal; as war approached, the old community values she so admired seemed further from Australia’s reach than ever; her faith in the cultural leadership of ‘‘idealists’’ was a pipe dream against

the prevailing militarism. Even her enduring feminism, which contained so much insight, divorced from a viable political base, became increasingly conservative and was reduced to a murmur. The political outcome of the thirties was, for her, the defeat of

reason and she saw the war as a ‘‘failure in fundamental humanity’’ and the triumph of male supremacy: Every decade or two this brave competitive civilisation blows the best of its sons to pieces—for what? and reduces nations to beggary through an orgy of spending in lethal weapons—result of male rampant.*8

Miles Franklin: A Chapter of Her Own ¢ 181

She was angry and bitter at what seemed to her mass inability to see

the obvious. But she could no longer envisage a way out of the *‘present impasse’’. Culture had failed. Socialism was, for her, as ‘subversive of freedom of thought’’ as fascism.*? In her notebooks

She had, by 1940, given up looking for a literary or political solution:

1938. The very glimmer of intellectual freedom remains to be won all over again in Europe. This world must be peopled with spoiled souls—throw-outs from some other world—nothing

else would account for its lunacy.. .It is most unflattering to

be here. °

Miles Franklin’s literary ideas, as explored in her fiction of the twenties and thirties, are confirmed by her letters of the period. There are letters, startling on first reading, which are disparaging

and often contemptuous of Australian ignorance and pettymindedness. Thus she wrote to Alice Henry: A community that would ban A// Quiet on the Western Front is beyond hope. You’ve got to live here for three years to know how atrophying it is. It’s all very fine for a hurried visit, or if

one can make contacts, but Lord, it has cured me of all sentimentality about the beauty of the common people. |

loathe common minds. They shd be kept down like weeds or inferior animals, rabbits and such.

The tone of this letter is repeated throughout her correspondence and casts a conservative complexion on her support for the White Australia policy and underscores the elitism inherent 1n her concept of an Australian national culture, led by the artists and writers. She

opposed the immigration of Jewish and Southern European refugees and her letters are filled with the racial prejudices that were all too common in Australia at that time. She insisted that the refugee shopkeepers were running Australians out of business and

cheating the housewives: ‘‘The hands that feed the refugees will find themselves bitten to the bone bye and bye.’’*? She also opposed

their immigration because Jewish and Southern European patriarchal attitudes would hold back the movement towards women’s rights that she had worked so hard for, and undercut the gains of the trade unions. At the same time she had no respect for or confidence in the Australians. ‘‘I think the Australians would give in after one blitz here’’, she wrote to Mary Fullerton in April 1941. ‘‘I have been studying the ordinary common people. They have no need of free expression, don’t miss any liberties in that line

182 ¢ Exiles At Home

that are suppressed in aid of war. So long as they have beer and betting they are all right.’’ It was because of her low esteem for Australians that Miles Franklin argued for a realist national literature which would act as a mode of reform and capture their anti-cultural imaginations. She

rejected modernism as decadent, effete and unsuited to unsophisticated Australians who required not ‘‘a veneer of spiritual

gracelessness’’ but ‘‘a tangible symbol of things unseen in the human soul but keenly to be felt’’.°* Writing to Nettie Palmer as

Brent of Bin Bin in October 1930, she argued that Australian writers and artists should develop a technique based on a realism that would ‘‘retail the subtleties of Australian life and landscape’’ with an art that was ‘“‘truer than reality’’. Australian writers would need the courage to stand by their own perceptions and standards: ‘*Those of us who Anow must not surrender our self-respect, we must stick to the rhythm and contour of our native continent till we are accepted or rejected on our own terms artistically. We must not genuflect to suit other scenes and forms.’’ Australian artists and

writers needed skills learned abroad and the perspective that distance could give; but above all they needed the confidence to complete their task. A critic of Nettie Palmer’s calibre was essential

in nurturing and guiding Australian writers in their search for an Australian culture: We do need in Australia those to mother us out of the caterpillar stage and this cannot be done except by those who first of all have the education and ability for literary appraise-

ment, then they must have an inside understanding of

Australia plus a tender enthusiasm for its wares. Only such can

water our plants, set out in a desert without the aid of measuring sticks.

... 1am so grateful to you.”

Miles Franklin worked with a variety of cultural groups and cam-

paigns after her return to Australia. She was eclectic in her affiliations and consistently opposed to ideologues, while maintaining her own idiosyncrasies and defending the ideological

insertions into her own fiction. Accused by Hartley Grattan of introducing ideology into All That Swagger, she replied that she did

so because she had no other forum, ‘‘not because I am not an

aware artist’’.°© She worked for the extension of the Common-

wealth Literary Fund, she was a member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, PEN, and a local writers’ group. She had a brief flirtation with P. R. Stephensen’s publishing attempts, she edited, with Kate Baker, a collection of letters and reminiscences of Joseph Furphy, and she had a wide literary correspondence. While

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zoe QZ—o ee a. ar

on ; a i ce i en : | . , oe | | a Seen oS SS Hy fee

ce. . Be race Rca a. nn ne -—.. papas ees Bn.

Miles Franklin, Sydney, around 1940

184 ¢ Exiles At Home

Miles Franklin’s literary nationalism was _ riddled’ with contradictions it had enough in common, at least superficially, for her to work with Nettie Palmer and the Popular Front writers in the Fellowship and in their related projects. At the same time she had a

series Of rows with fellow writers. Her idea of an elite cultural leadership was not very harmonious in practice. She fell out with Kate Baker over Joseph Furphy and was quite unpleasant to her; her relationship with P. R. Stephensen was stormy; she was furious with Vance Palmer for his abridgement of Furphy’s Such Is Life;

she had a public row over a lecture Marjorie Barnard had given.

Yet she was often enormously generous to young writers and whatever the fears and disappointments she had to contend with, she did battle on to the very last years of her life, in her own idiosyncratic way, in the service of an Australian literature. During the Second World War, Miles Franklin twice spoke about

the nature and function of a national literature. Her statements articulated tendencies that had been developing in her fiction for over twenty years. In 1942 she and George Ashton broadcast a discussion entitled ‘‘Is the Writer Involved in the Political Development of his Country?’’ which was subsequently published in

the Fellowship’s pamphlet, Australian Writers Speak. On this occasion she concentrated on the political influence of writers. She described writers as the ‘‘voices of their nation’’, the creators of a ‘‘climate of national consciousness in which politics take form and gather force’’. Without cultural support there could be no political

advances. She used Germany as an example of the power of literature: Nazism had failed to control the writers. Those who escaped and were writing in exile were the backbone of the resistance. She concluded with an attack on Australian antiintellectual hypocrisy which patronised sportsmen and businessmen in peacetime and turned to Lawson for slogans in wartime.*’ The other occasion was a speech given to the cultural conference of the NSW Aid Russia Committee in November 1941. She made many of the same points but included a veiled broadside on censor-

ship and cultural control in the USSR. Turning to Australian culture she argued that ‘‘the best culture begins at home’’ and pointed to the enormous wealth of untapped material waiting for Australian writers in ‘‘a new and uncluttered land’’. Too many Australians, she wrote, were suspicious of change and ‘‘wedded to

the status quo’’. The importance of literature lay in its ability to change hearts as well as minds and to foster gradual social change ‘‘by making ideas so familiar that they no longer terrify the non-

thinking’’. She had identified herself with the trend towards realism after 1918 as a necessary political response to war and

sentimentalism, but she insisted on freedom ‘‘to our own

Miles Franklin: A Chapter of Her Own # 185

inconclusions’’ with an implied heavy criticism of socialist realism and the cultural policies of the Comintern.** These ideas have their origins in Miles Franklin’s early years in Australia and her admiration for Furphy, but took form during the twenties when she brought her political experiences from Chicago to bear on the redirection of her own creative and political energies.

The recurring themes of literature and reform, fiction and reality had bounced her between writing and political work until their tentative resolution in the novels of the twenties and her more confident expression of literary nationalism in the forties. The years in Chicago had left their mark on her thought, and political assumptions of that era informed her subsequent literary analysis. She always maintained the position that social change must come about through reason and evolution rather than through violence

and class conflict. She allied this to an understanding of the importance of literature, bringing fiction within that conception of

reform. She was able to develop this idea of social change and national development through literature because of the underlying assumption, dating from Life and Labor that class interests could

be subsumed within the greater interests of the nation or

community. She extended Life and Labor’s notion of ‘‘social balance’’ in her subsequent fiction. For Life and Labor imbalance was a result of the exclusion of women from social influence and

was based as much on an idealised past in which women had enjoyed it, as on the possibility of a future in which women would once again achieve it. In her subsequent fiction she continued to equate humane influences with the innate—uncorrupted—dqualities represented by women; and she could write in her notebook just

before the outbreak of the Second World War that ‘‘the present impasse is due to failure in fundamental humanity’’.*°? In the Bin Bin novels the idea of social balance was extended to culture with the writers and artists becoming the repository of the humanism once represented by women.

Another notion inherited from Life and Labor was the role of women in race regeneration. Associated with literary nationalism and detached from its class base, this idea became a strand in her

support for the White Australia policy, her attraction to the Australia First Movement and her opposition to Southern European migration after the war. Although Miles Franklin did not follow the other women writers in the move to the left, discussed in this book, it is too simple to say that she became more conservative

and moved to the right. Attracted to some of the ideas of the Australia First Movement, she was personally suspicious of P. R. Stephensen: she agreed with his culturally assertive nationalism, but her attraction to Australia First was more an opposition to war

186 ¢ Exiles At Home

and a despair at the state of Europe than an attraction to fascism. Her two wartime statements had made clear her opposition to its cultural policies. A more helpful approach to understanding the ambiguities of Miles Franklin’s ideas lies in the contradictions within her work. On the one hand there was an attraction to strong leadership, a disdain for ‘‘common minds”’ and an elitism inherent in her literary analysis. On the other hand, there were her praise for the ordinary

bushman and her espousal of democratic Australianism. This conflict explains both her attraction to Australia First and her counterposed feminism. That it occurs so persistently is explicable

in terms of her nationalism and her merging of social conflict within a unified concept of the ‘‘community’’ or nation. Yet her attraction to strong leadership, so confident in the twenties, became highly problematic in the late thirties, as fascism cast its sinister Shadow. She never came to terms with the implications of

authoritarian cultural control on a literary nationalism that espoused the revival of an egalitarian history. The example of fascism made this hard to avoid. Her response was to rely even more heavily on the idealised pioneering past, warding off the present with the notion of holding Australia in trust for the future. The conflicting pulls of bush and city were equally persistent. Despite her literary idealisation of bush life, Miles Franklin had herself been confined and unhappy in the bush and had longed for the freedom of the city. In highly industrialised Chicago she had learned her skills and had spent ten years of fruitful, if ultimately frustrating, political work. Many of her ideas were given form in this period. In Life and Labor she, as editor, had recognised the

importance of the industrial working class in the future

development of American politics, yet in her subsequent novels she rejects the cities, ignores the urban proletariat and both returns to an idealised bush and seeks the solution to the future in a literature

that had its roots in the past. This obsession with the bush and hostility to the city sets Miles Franklin apart from other women writers in Australia. In part, it was the result of the difference of generation and class origins between her and the younger urban educated women like Christina Stead, Eleanor Dark and Marjorie

Barnard who, twenty years her junior, had grown up and been educated in the city. Similarly her idiosyncrasy can be explained through the tug between her Australianism and her expatriatism.

She described herself as ‘‘an expatriate cosmopolitan and yet indelibly Australian’’.© Her return to Australia in 1927 was related to the Bin Bin novels; her writing had brought her back to Australia

and she needed to revisit the bush both for the sake of her own creativity and to complete that work. She had not initially intended

Miles Franklin: A Chapter of Her Own ¢ 187

to stay in Australia permanently and in 1931 she returned to London for eighteen months, but she was ready to face the frustrations of family life in 1933 both because of that old sense of duty to Australia and because she considered herself under an obligation to

her widowed mother. It was not an easy decision and the mature years she spent alone in America and Britain had not fitted her for the restrictions of life in Sydney’s outer suburbs. Her friend Alice Henry returned to Australia in 1934. This was a blessing, though it was one that was mixed for Alice Henry herself. She had returned largely because, at nearly eighty, she dreaded the “responsibility of an illness and a last illness is sure to come some day’’.®! Like Miles Franklin she found it hard to settle after thirty years abroad and she missed her many American feminist friends.

Although Alice Henry was living in Melbourne, her presence in Australia was enormously comforting to Miles in Sydney. They had

had a long and close relationship and they had shared important experiences. Despite her long absence Alice Henry, like Miles Franklin, considered herself an Australian. ‘‘I gave more than half my life to Australia,’’ she wrote to Miles Franklin in 1929, ‘‘so I do

not feel that I forsook her, and I’ve done much for her since.’’® Back in Australia the two women continued to share a commitment

to Australian literature and worked together on various projects. They were both organisers of Hartley Grattan’s 1936 study tour, and Miles Franklin helped Alice Henry with a comprehensive bibliography of works by Australian women which she compiled for the Victorian branch of the Australian Council of Women. In December 1941 Alice Henry fell in her room and broke her hip. The bone mended but when she was discharged from hospital she could ‘‘scarcely walk at all’’.®’ She spent her last years in a rest home in Melbourne and died in January 1943 at the age of eighty-

six. Miles Franklin, alone in her house in Sydney, was grieved to lose her only friend in Australia who understood the difficulty of belonging to two countries. Miles Franklin had lived her life an expatriate, a ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ and an Australian. She understood well the need to go and she was living the pain of having to return.

In her fiction she deplored the ‘‘wasted talent for want of

Opportunity and contact’’ in Australia but while she was in London she begged Nettie Palmer not to stay away too long from ‘‘that far, lone, siren land that enthralls us. The future is with her’’.™ In the mid-thirties she wrote in her notebook: ‘‘All the most gifted take off to England or U.S.A.—think of the psychological national defeat

involved. A form of submission to some sense of inferiority inspired by other egos.’’®

It had been to counter that sense of defeat that she had returned

and that she had placed her faith in literary nationalism. It 1s,

188 ¢ Exiles At Home

perhaps, through the conflict of her expatriatism and her Australianism that her literary development can best be understood. Miles Franklin was, in short, a complicated character; her political ideas

were inconsistent, conflicting and often contradictory. Her style

and her approach to the problems of her time were highly idiosyncratic, yet she remains an important figure in the cultural history of the period for not only was she a prolific and respected

writer, but she addressed herself to those same problems of literature, politics and national culture that were also the concern of other Australian writers of her day, and, like the other women discussed in this book, these problems were intertwined with her perceptions of herself as a writer and her situation as a woman. 1. Miles Franklin to Alice Henry, 13 May 1929. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/114/151

2. Marjorie Barnard has written a short biography of Miles Franklin which is a valuable introduction by a historian and a writer who knew Miles. (Marjorie Barnard, Miles Franklin, Melbourne, Hill of Content, 1967.) A detailed critical biography is badly needed. 3, Nettie Palmer (ed.), The Memoirs of Alice Henry, Melbourne, no publisher cited, 1944, p. 27

4. ibid., p, 89 5. Miles Franklin to Alice Henry, 27 July 1918. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/114/25

6. Life and Labor, January 1911, editorial 7. Life and Labor, December 1913, editorial announcement, p. 355 8. Life and Labor, February 1915, p. 33 9. Nancy Schrom Dye, ‘‘Creating a Feminist Alliance: Sisterhood and class conflict in the New York Women’s Trade Union League, 1903-1914’’. Feminist Studies, 1975, pp. 24-38

10. Life and Labor, January 1911, editorial 11. Life and Labor, July 1912, pp. 196-7 12. Life and Labor, June 1913, p. 182 13. Life and Labor, December 1913, p. 36 14. Life and Labor, March 1911, p. 77 15. Life and Labor, May 1913, p. 143 16. Life and Labor, August 1911, p. 250 17. Life and Labor, July 1913, p. 170 18. Life and Labor, May 1912, p. 134 19. Life and Labor, July 1912, p. 217 20. Alice Henry, ‘‘The Vice Problem From Various Angles’’, Life and Labor, May 1913, pp. 141-4

21. Life and Labor, September 1914, p. 261 22. Life and Labor, October 1914, p. 316

Miles Franklin: A Chapter of Her Own ¢ 189 23. Molly O’Reilly, ‘“The Answer of Women (To Men Who Make War)’’, Life and Labor, October 1914, p. 292 24. Alice Henry, ‘‘War and Its Fruit’’, Life and Labor, December 1914, pp. 357-9 25. Nettie Palmer (ed.), Memoirs of Alice Henry, p. 89

26. Miles Franklin to Alice Henry, 23 March 1916. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/114/5

27. Miles Franklin to Alice Henry, 17 October 1917. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/114/11

28. Life and Labor, April 1917, p. 55 29. Miles Franklin to Alice Henry, 23 March 1916. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/114/5 30. Miles Franklin to Alice Henry, 17 October 1917. Franklin papers ML.MS. 364/114/11

31. Miles Franklin to Alice Henry, 7 May 1916. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/114/7

32. Miles Franklin to Nettie Palmer, 21 July 1938. Palmer papers, NLA.MS. 1174/1/5401

33. Brent of Bin Bin, Prelude to Waking, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1950, p. 119; Miles Franklin to Nettie Palmer, 28 September 1940. Palmer papers, NLA.MS. 1174/1/5811-12

34. See Jill Roe, ‘‘The Significant Silence: Miles Franklin’s middle years’’,

Meanjin, 1980, No 1, pp. 48-59 35. Jill Roe, foc. cit., p. 56 36. Mr and Mrs Ogniblat L’Artsau, The Net of Circumstance, London, Mills and Boon, 1915, pp. 117-8 37. Kathe Kollwitz, quoted in Tillie Olsen, Silences, p. 211 38. Jill Roe, /oc. cit., p. 57 39. Life and Labor, March 1913, pp. 83-4 40. Marjorie Barnard has assessed the evidence thoroughly in Marjorie Barnard, Miles Franklin, pp. 73-7 41. Brent of Bin Bin, Back to Bool Bool (Edinburgh and London, William Blackwood & Sons, 1931). Edition used: Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1956, p. 57 42. ibid., p. 135

43. Miles Franklin, All That Swagger (Sydney, Bulletin, 1936). Edition used: Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1974, p. 418 44. Miles Franklin, Notebook, p. 88. ML.MS. 1360 45. Miles Franklin, A// That Swagger, p. 224

46. ibid., p. 412 47. Miles Franklin, Notebook, p. 47. ML.MS. 1360 48. Miles Franklin, Notebook, p. 94. ML.MS. 1360 49. Miles Franklin, Notebook, p. 123. ML.MS. 1360 50. Miles Franklin, Notebook, p. 48. ML.MS. 1360 51. Miles Franklin to Alice Henry, 23 December 1930. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/ 114/203

52. Miles Franklin to Dymphna Cusack, 2 February 1940. Cusack papers, NLA.MS. 4621/1/21

190 « Exiles At Home 53. Miles Franklin to Mary Fullerton, 20 April 1941. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/120/9 54. Brent of Bin Bin, Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1956, p. 89

55. Brent of Bin Bin to Nettie Palmer, October 1930. Palmer papers, NLA.MS. 1174/1/3699

56. Miles Franklin to Alice Henry, § February 1937. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/114/285

57. Miles Franklin and George Ashton, ‘‘Is the Writer Involved in the Political

Development of His Country?’’ in Fellowship of Australian Writers,

Australian Writers Speak, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1942, pp. 21-32

58. Miles Franklin, Essay on Literature and Drama in NSW Aijd Russia Committee, Soviet Culture, A Selection of Talks at the Cultural Conference, November 1941, Sydney, 1941, pp. 73-7 59. Miles Franklin, Notebook, p. 26. ML.MS. 1360 60. Miles Franklin, Notebook, p. 61. ML.MS. 1360

61. Alice Henry to Mrs Louis Post, 18 December 1931. Alice Henry papers, NLA.MS. 1066, Folder 34

62. Alice Henry to Miles Franklin, 3 March 1929. Franklin papers, ML.MS. 364/114/145

63. Alice Henry to Margaret Bondfield, 15 December 1941. Alice Henry papers, NLA. MS. 1066, Folder 34 64. Brent of Bin Bin to Nettie Palmer, October 193]. Palmer papers, NLA.MS. 1174/1/3769 65. Miles Franklin, Notebook, p. 18. ML.MS. 1360

8 THAT STILL BLUE HOUR BEFORE THE BABY’S CRY

‘‘A woman writer,’? wrote Miles Franklin, ‘‘except in rare instances, has no protection such as enjoyed by men who use their wives and mistresses as a marline to save themselves from the wear and tear of interruption.’’! She could have been writing of any one

of the women in this book—indeed she probably was. Being a woman intersected at every point with being a writer. Being a wife, a mother, even a daughter could not easily be laid aside; these were constant conditions grounded in the needs of family, of husband, of children and, not least, of the women themselves. So that even when there was someone to take over the chores, responsibility and

involvement remained. Writer-women were, as they still are, frequently caught between their professional needs and capacities and their desires as well as their duties as women. When Virginia Woolf wrote about killing the angel in the house, the angel who whispers as you write ‘‘be sympathetic; be tender; flatter, deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex... Above all, be pure’’,* she knew it was an unequal struggle; that the angel takes

many forms, that expressing oneself for and through others is deeply ingrained in women. Much of the strength of women’s fiction has come from this struggle, has grown out of the battle not to be passive, not to be drained, not to succumb. This is a struggle

fought out at an unconscious as much as on a practical level; so that, even for this new generation of ‘‘emancipated’’ women who could, on the whole, write without upsetting the family, without offending society, being a woman-writer was still far from straightforward. It took an enormous amount of energy to maintain any

kind of personal and artistic autonomy as a woman who was a writer, and sometimes their energy failed them, despair broke through. One approach to this web of conflicting identities is through an exploration of the ways in which these women lived while they wrote, and the contradictions that glared through their every domestic situation. Such an explanation opens the way for a discussion, in the next chapter, of the central place that is given to

marriage, sexual morality and maternity in their fiction. This underlines, too, the way in which being a woman writer was an

192 ¢ Exiles At Home

issue of class in a society in which fairly extensive financial and social support was necessary if women were to write at all. There

was an acute awareness of the changes that were occurring in women’s lives, an awareness that is evident in the shifts and dislocations throughout their novels. Their writing was interrogating what it meant to be a woman, and as war approached for the

second time within their generation, these questions took on a renewed urgency, uneasily and painfully, in the face of political crisis.

The inter-war years were a period of flux and change in women’s estate. Marriage statistics had been fluctuating since the early 1900s

and, with the death of so many young men at the war, marriage could no longer be regarded as a possibility open to all women. With growing emphasis on education for girls, the opening up, albeit slowly and grudgingly, of the professions, with technological

improvements in domestic equipment and smaller families, marriage began to be viewed more critically by those for whom work was an alternative rather than a necessity. Even so, working outside the home was not easy for a middle class married woman; running the house was still her primary responsibility and although the physical demands of housework were declining, domestic responsibilities took up enough time to require domestic help if work

was to be done on more than a piecemeal basis. For those few married women who earned a salary, this was comparatively easy; for women who wanted time to write it was much more problema-

tic. Writing brought in a pittance, and domestic help had to be paid from other sources. This was an added demand on the family purse, and one that these women frequently baulked at making, although accepting it where they could with gratitude and regret. They were wary of exploiting another woman; there was a sense of failure if they could not do it all themselves. To be a woman and a writer—this was the challenge. But in meeting the challenge there were a number of practical difficulties to be worked around, anda maid solved some of them. The first and most basic difficulty that women writers faced was

that their writing made very littl money. They were rarely economically independent. In 1928 Virginia Woolf made her famous pronouncement that a woman writer needs a room of her own and £500 a year. While most of the Australian women writers dealt with in this book had rooms of their own by 1928, none of them earned nearly that much. The changes in publishing during

the thirties had facilitated the development of a nationalist

bourgeois literature, but few financial benefits came the way of the writers. £500 was a lot of money in 1928. In the year 1928-29 Nettie

Palmer earned £251, nearly half the family’s income which, for

That Still Blue Hour Before the Baby’s Cry + 193

that year, amounted to £532 for two adults and two children. Marjorie Barnard was able to give up her job in 1935 because she had £140 saved in superannuation and her father was able to make her an allowance of £150 per annum for two years. That, as she put it, was ‘‘three years clear’’. Between 1929 and 1936 she and Flora Eldershaw, between them, earned £463 from their writing, most of it from their only successful novel, A House is Built. In 1936 Miles Franklin was indignant when she heard that the American critic

and historian Hartley Grattan wanted £10 a week to come to Australia for a working tour: ‘‘Ten pounds a week! Ah, if I could have had one pound a week or even two for the last nine years my

tale had been different.’’? |

Vance and Nettie Palmer were exceptional in that they did support themselves by their writing but it is clear from Nettie’s letters and diaries that anxiety and hard work were a constant presence. While they maintained appearances they were always very poor. Nettie wrote to literary friends of the difficulties faced by freelance writers but it was only to her family that she indicated

the extent to which she felt the ‘‘pinch of penury’’. She told Esmonde Higgins in 1921 that she had ‘‘no clothes, everything renovated or evolved out of something I had by me’’ and in 1922 she confessed that it was a struggle to feed their many guests: Ordinary cookery pages don’t help me much, but the Daily Herala’s home rulings are somewhere about my level. We’re hard up you know, and yet we have a good many visitors and

the dears are always hungry. This year I’ve gone on the basis—so far—of not actually inviting anyone; we just undergo invasions, that’s all—and very willingly.‘

By the mid-twenties their situation had begun to improve, but the eagerness with which she planned family presents from her £25

prize money for Modern Australian Literature in 1924 is an indication of their frugal life. She told Esmonde that she was planning a day in Melbourne to spend the money on a small bottle of rum for Vance, raffia for Aileen, wool for Helen and ‘‘books and fruit and cake and writing paper and more books’’.* By the end

of the twenties, the Palmers were doing well enough to support themselves in reasonable comfort. Their income rose from £532 in 1928-29 to £922 in 1929-30, but most of this increase was the result of a bequest from Henry Bournes Higgins who died in 1929. With the Depression their situation deteriorated and in 1932 they went to Green Island, off the North Queensland coast, where they could live cheaply. She wrote to her mother of their situation in October of that year: ‘‘We have to be very careful financially, as things get harder for the freelance. We’re probably better treated than other

194 ¢ Exiles At Home

freelances but they must be in a very bad way indeed.’’¢ In October

1933 she wrote to Frank Davison that ‘‘freelancing is the devil, especially in Depression times’’ and in 1934 she complained to Frank Wilmot that her A// About Books fee was ‘‘going nearer to the infra-red invisible every time’’. A// About Books had been badly hit, she explained: The exchange has killed the importation of English books and

the English publisher has no advertisements to spare,

especially since Gollancz speeded up advertising in English papers. Then the Australian publisher, who has flourished

through the exchange, hasn’t yet decided to advertise anywhere, and certainly will not yet in A.A.B.’

The Palmers had by then been planning to publish their own

magazine but it had come to nothing for lack of funds. Nevertheless they were among the more fortunate who were able to

live by writing even though they were, for their class and expectations, comparatively hard up. It was not until 1927-28 that they earned the equivalent of the average salary of a married man with two children in the Commonwealth Public Service. Few other writers were able to make even a meagre living from

writing between the wars. Katharine Prichard’s first royalty payment for Working Bullocks was £23. The typing bill, she wrote wryly to Vance Palmer, came to £25. During the Depression it was an uneven struggle to keep the family solvent by writing and in 1941 she was hoping for a Commonwealth Literary Fellowship, fearing that if she were rejected, it ‘‘will mean desperate scratching for a living, these days’’.’ Marjorie Barnard was only able to give up her job and write because of her father’s allowance. When he died in July 1940, she reluctantly returned to work: ‘‘I don’t want the job, I’d as soon put my head in the gas oven, but it would mean greater

security for mother.’’? Flora Eldershaw was unable to leave her teaching position until 1941 and had to suffer its frustrations while

trying to write. Miles Franklin rarely referred to her financial Situation but told Alice Henry that the family was surviving the Depression on the rent of a shop that her mother owned, and complained to Nettie Palmer in 1933 that she had ‘‘never had one penny from Old Blastus’’ .'!° Dymphna Cusack received only £23 for

her first novel, Jungfrau (1936), explaining that ‘‘at that time writers took ‘no payment’ for granted’’.'!! She supported herself by

teaching, and her writing depended on the demands of school. In Broken Hill, where she spent two years, she found plenty of time to type in the evenings and weekends on the verandah of the teachers’

hostel. But as resident mistress at Goulburn, she was unable to write in a routine that began before breakfast and ended when the

That Still Blue Hour Before the Baby's Cry « 195

girls had been seen to bed. It was not until after the war and her marriage to Norman Freehill that she could make writing a fulltime occupation. By 1940 Eleanor Dark was doing fairly well from her writing. In

1941 The Timeless Land was the US Book of the Month Club choice, and several of her novels were translated and published overseas. She could just have made a modest living for a short period. During the thirties, in contrast, with sales only from the Original editions of her novels, it would have been impossible. ‘*Without some other source of income’’, she told me, ‘‘Australian

writers have had a thin time.’’ During the thirties, with living by writing alone almost impossible, Australian writers were dependent

on some other source of financial support. Most of the men who were writing had jobs, often in publishing or journalism. Louis

Esson and Vance Palmer stand out as men who were writers without other forms of employment. Both had wives who were willing and able to supplement their income. Women writers, with

fewer work options, were more dependent on marriage or the support of a relative, and this in itself placed them in an ambiguous

situation. While they regarded their writing as a profession, they did not have the financial independence that usually accompanied a profession. However seriously they took their writing as a career,

they were limited and restricted by the demands of marriage in much the same way as those women who had no career. In this situation it was very easy for their writing to be demoted to a hobby; it was a constant battle with themselves as much as with the family to have their writing taken seriously, to be given precedence.

Eleanor Dark was, perhaps, among the more fortunate. She married Eric Dark in February 1922, and shortly after they settled

in a pleasant house in Katoomba. Eric always respected and supported her writing and with a studio-workroom in the garden, she had everything going for her. But even with these advantages

she had to fit her writing in with being a mother and a wife. Motherhood, even at the best of times, means, as Tillie Olsen has

put it, always being interruptible, responsive, and responsible. These are not attributes that can be left outside a workroom, taken up and set down at will. For Eleanor Dark there was the added res-

ponsibility of being a doctor’s wife; the telephone, for a start, could never be left unattended: ‘‘There was never enough time for

writing’’, she told me. She could only be sure of uninterrupted hours by rising before dawn, in ‘‘that still blue almost eternal hour before the baby’s cry’’ which Sylvia Plath has described so well. Once she was a mother, she, too, wrote many of her poems before the children woke. Even with domestic help Eleanor Dark relied on that interval, but help was not always available and without a maid

196 ¢ Exiles At Home

she was virtually unable to write at all. In September 1936 she wrote to Miles Franklin complaining that she had had to give up working

on the manuscript of Waterway for a few months because she had been without help. The question of domestic help was a serious problem and one

that was discussed in their letters. Nettie Palmer’s difficulty in getting a maid during the twenties was compounded, as she put it,

by the fact that she ‘‘hadn’t the conscience to offer less than a pound a week’’ and this was more than she could really afford. But even with a maid she complained of the pressure of domestic work: I’ve been washing and charing and I’ve got to lecture twice soon and write some regular articles for Stead’s and elsewhere

and sew some pants for Aileen and arrange some Pioneer

rehearsals and... '?

Miles Franklin was infuriated by the domestic demands that kept her from her room. Though unmarried, neither she nor Marjorie Barnard was appreciably better off. Marjorie Barnard’s parents expected her to run the household when there was no maid. She grumbled to Nettie Palmer in 1939 that ‘‘it would be very much

against their sense of the fitting to give their only daughter the

maid’s wages for doing the maid’s work’’." For Katharine Prichard the question of a maid had political implications for, as she said in 1919, ‘‘I don’t want us to be employers of labour’’, yet in the same letter she detailed to Nettie Palmer how it was almost impossible to work and maintain the household, the poultry and the cows. Initially she took on full responsibility for the household and its encumbrances, anxious to be a good country woman as well

as a writer, but already in 1919 she was considering a maid. She justified herself on political grounds: But there are ever so many people wanting work for their living just now. And while we are under the system, it seems to me, you’ve got to do certain things under it that you wouldn’t

do if the system were scrapped. Particularly if you’re not loafing but trying to do the work of two women. Isn’t it sweating yourself and keeping the other bloke out of a job? To

a certain extent it is. And yet I’d rather do everything if I could.

Even with this justification her last defence was that ‘‘if it’s a case of my work going to the wall, I think Jim will put his foot down’’.'4

Katharine Prichard’s creative period of the twenties was grounded on the firm support that Jim could give her, a maid and room to work. This support was precarious; it collapsed when Jim Throssell committed suicide in 1933, and without it her writing was

That Still Blue Hour Before the Baby’s Cry ¢ 197

seriously interrupted for nearly a decade. Yet in 1930, when the situation was still working to her advantage, even Vance Palmer could see the ambivalence of her situation. He visited Perth on his way to London and reported to Nettie: But I can see that Kathie must find it terribly hard to write there, though she has a bit of a maid and a woman to do the washing. Jim’s considerate of her in obvious ways. He’s building a place for her to write in, a little apart from the house, with a window overlooking a beautiful view: but there

is something in his attitude to her writing that isn’t quite happy. He’s proud of it, but he’s afraid of her letting it ‘‘worry’’ her—as though it should just flow out of her at odd

hours. Yet they get along well enough underneath and are awfully nice to one another. Kathie’s position is pretty hard. In a way Perth is much more unsophisticated than Brisbane and she’s taken more seriously as Jimmy’s wife than as a writer. !°

It is ironic that Vance Palmer could see this situation so clearly when he was going to London and leaving his own wife facing a crisis in a similarly ambiguous situation. He could recognise Katharine Prichard as the writer in the family; in his own he was the writer and Nettie his wife. He could do that partly because

Nettie took wife and motherhood at least as seriously as her writing. This was the crunch. Vance Palmer could see Katharine Prichard’s situation because she took herself seriously as Jim’s wife, and although she also took herself seriously as a writer, it was not possible for her to disentangle those identities. Vance Palmer

could: Louis Esson could. The men saw themselves primarily as writers, and so did their wives. Their work and their time to work was respected and treated as it would have been had they gone to an

office each day. For women writers, on the other hand, being a wife and being a writer were bound together not only in the day to day practicalities of life, but in their very existence as women.

Hilda Esson has appeared in this book as a friend of Nettie Palmer and Katharine Prichard, as a friend and doctor to Jean Devanny, and as the wife of the playwright Louis Esson. She was not writing

in her own right; but she facilitated the writing of others, most notably that of her husband. As a young woman Hilda had wanted

to be an actress, and for a while she worked without pay in

Australian theatre, but she had no career as an actress. Instead she worked for many years as a salaried doctor in a series of jobs, most of which gave her very little satisfaction. On one occasion Nettie

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