The Women of Sideshow Alley and the Boxing Tents: a Novel and Exegesis

This town, last town, next town: the women of sideshow alley and the boxing tents: a novel and exegesis. Delia Frances Allen, BA Hons. College of the Arts, Victoria University Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of a Doctorate of Philosophy, Creative Writing 25 February, 2014 Abstract This town, last town, next town: the women of sideshow alley and the boxing tents: a novel and exegesis. This doctoral creative thesis comprises a novel This town, last town, next town, and an accompanying exegesis. The novel is set in Western Australia in the 1950s in sideshow alley, a unique part of Australian culture that has not previously been represented in Australian fiction. It is a period in which the sideshow is coming to the end of its heyday as a place of carnival and spectacle. The three main characters are: Joan Tiernan, a dancer and married to the owner of an entertainment show; Rose Jackson, the wife of a boxing tent owner; and Corrie Cooper, married to an Aboriginal boxer. Joan and Rose travel with the show but Corrie stays behind, living in a small timber shack on the outskirts of a wheatbelt hamlet, while her husband travels with the tent most of the year. The narrative explores the women’s hopes and personal desires and how these are negotiated and shaped by the needs of the community. Official records show that women played a significant role in the sideshow community as performers, spouses and operators. Some women travelled with the show for a large part of the year, while some stayed behind to care for children. However, the details of their lives and their particular circumstances remain largely unrecorded. The central artistic and theoretical aim was to explore the representation of women in writing back to the past, and the accompanying exegesis reflects on the creative writing process in addressing the questions: Considering that women have largely been left out of the historical records, what are the challenges for a fiction writer imagining and writing about their lives? What are the challenges for a non-Aboriginal writer imagining and writing Aboriginal characters? What are the ethical challenges for a contemporary writer i imagining and writing the ‘freak show’, its participants and audiences in its historical context? The exegesis reflects on the ambiguous positionality of the creative writer as a white settler woman and examines some of the current debates within postcolonial and feminist frameworks around the larger themes of gender, race and class. It reflects on how these larger themes are complex, shifting and ongoing issues, and when explored creatively with notions of the body, body image and ageing contribute to ways of writing back to the past in addressing the absence of women from the historical records, giving voice to Aboriginal characters, and the ‘other’. For the doctoral examination the novel is weighted 70% and the exegesis 30%. Although the exegesis is an integral part of the whole thesis, the novel should preferably be read first. ii Doctor of Philosophy Declaration “I, Delia Frances Allen, declare that the PhD thesis entitled This town, last town, next town: the women of sideshow alley and the boxing tents: a novel and exegesis, is no more than 100,000 words in length including quotes and exclusive of tables, figures, appendices, bibliography, references and footnotes. This thesis contains no material that has been submitted previously, in whole or in part, for the award of any other academic degree or diploma. Except where otherwise indicated, this thesis is my own work. 17 February, 2014 iii Acknowledgements I wish to thank my supervisors, Dr Enza Gandolfo and Associate Professor Barbara Brook, for their academic rigour, and unstinting guidance and support. I also thank the inspiring and creative women in the post-graduate writing group, my son David Allen, and Tamara Rewse, for their invaluable constructive feedback and encouragement. iv Contents Part one: Novel This town, last town, next town……………………….1−213 Part two: Exegesis Introduction...………………………………………………….1 Chapter I.…………………………………………………….15 Chapter 2.……………………………………………………37 Chapter 3.……………………………………………………53 Conclusion.…………………………………………………..70 Bibliography.…………………………………………………76 v Introduction The whole point, after all, is to avoid laying down requirements for what a woman’s writing must be like. Every writer will have her own voice, and her own vision. Inevitably, a woman writer writes as a woman, not as a generic woman, but as the (highly specific and idiosyncratic) woman she is. Toril Moi (2008: 268). I lived in Perth from my late teens to early thirties, married into a West Australian farming family from the South West, and my children spent their childhood in Perth. During that time I travelled extensively through the state, camping out, and the more remote, the more I loved it. Coming from Victoria, my initial love was for the space and emptiness, the vast skies and the light. My first impression of the bush was of the muted greens and greys, the spindly shrubs, often prickly with brittle leaves, and the tough, tussocky grasses. Then, once a year, the seeming blandness transformed when it flowered: some amassed, like the everlasting daisies in the desert, which covered the red soil in carpets of gentle cream and pink; the Hardenbergia creeper, which splashed the bush with purple, or the ‘egg and bacon’ shrubs covered in tiny pea- shaped flowers, bright yellow with a slash of red. Then there were the tiny, exquisitely shaped and coloured orchids, so small you could easily miss them. In the early 1980s I was employed by Mount Lawley Teachers College to work in Fremantle and Canningvale prisons as a tutor in literacy and numeracy for Aboriginal inmates. Most of the men were young, aged seventeen to early twenties and most were Nyungar, from the southern and Wheatbelt areas of Western Australia. This program was initially set up as a bridging course for Aboriginal teachers’ aides in remote areas so they could gain entry to tertiary training to become teachers. 1 The program proved successful in the prisons and several students were accepted into university. For most of the young men, having a separate classroom space not directly in the field of vision of the prison officer’s cubicle provided a time for more than just literacy and numeracy. My memories of that time are of being challenged in many different ways. I had assumed that the removal of Aboriginal children from their families was something that had happened in the generations before mine, but it was not uncommon for the students to tell us that they had found a brother or a cousin whom they had never met before. The laws under which Aboriginal children were removed from their families leading to what is now known as the Stolen Generations, are discussed in chapter two. There was sadness and alienation in these young men’s lives, yet they had the ability to find humour, and, in spite of the sadness I felt and the anger at their circumstances, I have never laughed so much as I did in that prison classroom. We did not ask questions, but often the students would tell us things about their lives. However, I remember one day I did ask one of the students what he did before he was ‘inside’. He told me he worked in a boxing tent. I had never heard of a boxing tent and asked him what it was. As he described, in just a few short sentences, what he did, travelling to country towns, I could see the pride in his eyes. Pride was not something in evidence in that place and this moment has stayed with me all the years since. I grew up in Croydon, Victoria. We moved to a small house on an unmade road about two years after migrating from England. My father was a journalist and accepted a job in Australia to work at The Argus newspaper. I have very clear memories of a sort of double life as a child growing up in the outer suburbs of Melbourne in the 1950s. The parents of my school friends were addressed as Mr or Mrs and there were all sorts of social niceties that had to be followed and rules that had to be obeyed. It was a serious world and adults were remote, mysterious and authoritarian. One never answered back to an adult or questioned their rules; having ‘good manners’ was essential, as was deference and obedience. 2 My other life happened on weekends when my parents had parties at our house with all the journos, their wives and children. These would sometimes revolve around a large keg of wine being decanted into bottles and everyone taking their share home. My father’s would be stashed in the cupboard in the hallway to be left for a year or so ‘until the wine matured’. Those bottles never lasted a year. There were none of the rules that governed my other world here. Adults were addressed by their first names. I would climb onto Sam Seba’s lap and ask him to draw me a cartoon. I can still remember his pictures of fat ladies. We would cajole Brian Hansen into taking us for a ride in his red sports car. We would all clamber in and he would take us for a drive, the roof down, our hair blowing. These men were accessible, unlike the remote fathers of my school friends, and the women were funny, opinionated and some of them swore; such a contrast with the mothers from my other life. I was always very impressed by the way Gwen Deamer, wife of Adrian and sister of cartoonist Les Tanner, could hurl out a string of ‘bloodies’ and ‘buggers’.

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