Marjorie Barnard: a re-examination of her life and work

June Owen

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

University of

School of the Arts and Media

Faculty of Arts and Social Science Thesis/Dissertation Sheet Australia's Global UNSWSYDNEY University

Surname/Family Name OWEN Given Name/s June Valerie Abbreviation for degree as give in the University calendar PhD Faculty Arts and Social Sciences School School of the Arts and Media Thesis Title Marjorie Barnard: a re-examination of her life and work

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A wealth of scholarly works were written about Marjorie Barnard following the acclaim greeting the republication, in 1973, of The Persimmon Tree. That same year Louise E Rorabacher wrote a book-length study - Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw, after agreeing not to write about Barnard's private life. This led to many studies of the pair's joint literary output and short biographical studies and much misinformation, from scholars beguiled into believing Barnard's stories which were often deliberately disseminated to protect the secrecy of the affair that dominated her life between 1934 and 1942.

A re-examination of her life and work is now necessary because there have been huge misunderstandings about other aspects of Barnard's life, too. Her habit of telling imaginary stories denigrating her father, led to him being maligned by his daughter's interviewers. Marjorie's commonest accusation was of her father's meanness, starting with her student allowance, but if the changing value of money is taken into account, her allowance (for pocket money) was extremely generous compared to wages of the time. In 1935, when Marjorie, as a middle-aged woman, gave up work to write full time, Oswald doubled her allowance and, because she never did earn enough from writing to provide her own pocket money, he kept on paying her that allowance until he died. This surely is evidence of both his generosity and his interest in helping his daughter pursue her ambitions. There is also the matter of him privately publishing her first book, a collection of her schoolgirl stories.

Barnard left no diaries, and her letters and interviews were often designed to conceal. It is time that Barnard's life is shown more accurately in its setting, within a comfortable home in middle-class during a large part of the 20th century. This biography offers a fuller, more accurate, and comprehensive investigation into her life and the wide variety of her work-from novels and shortstories to history and critical literary studies and political pamphlets, and also her constant effortsto have Australian writing recognised as a distinct and important part of a separate Australian culture.

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Marjorie Barnard: a re-examination of her life and work By June Owen Table of Contents Introduction ...... 2 Chapter 1 - Nurturing Marjorie: Childhood, first fiction, 1897-1915… ...... 15 Schooldays, Earliest Juvenilia Chapter 2 – University & The Ivory Gate – 1916-1920… ...... 33 Chapter 3 – Librarian & A House is Built 1921/1929… ...... 48 Chapter 4 - Green Memory and comparing two novels 1929- 19 ...... 62 Chapter 5 – Collaboration – 1921-1956… ...... 72 Chapter 6 - Essays in Australian Fiction 1929- 1938 ...... 84 Chapter 7 – Short stories 1931-1987… ...... 97 Chapter 8 – The Glasshouse 1931 - 1936 ...... 115 Chapter 9 – The Affair – 1934-1942… ...... 131 Chapter 10 - Barnard's introduction to politics 1931-1942… ...... 146 Chapter 11 – Plaque with Laurel 1936 -1937… ...... 161 Chapter 12 - M Barnard Eldershaw's three histories 1936 -1939… ...... 171 Phillip of Australia The Life & Times of Captain John Piper My Australia Chapter 13 Marjorie Barnard’s Solo Histories (1935-1947) ...... 184 Macquarie’s World Chapter 14 –The CSIRO years1941950… ...... 195 Chapter 15 - To-morrow and Tomorrow andTomorrow ...... 207 Chapter 16 - Barnard’s later career in literary criticism 1941960 ...... 227 Chapter 17 A etc 1952-1962… ...... 237 Chapter 18 -Barnard's Biography of 1967 ...... 247 Chapter 19 – Saying Goodbye with Panache 1897-1987… ...... 262 Selected List of References

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Introduction

A wealth of scholarly works have been written about Marjorie Barnard since the acclaim that greeted the republication, in 1973, of The Persimmon Tree, and even more were written when the republication of the complete Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, in 1983, again drew the public’s attention. Interest increased when she was chosen to receive the Patrick

White Award that same year, and in 1984, a special Premier’s Award.1 Bruce Malloy, Robert Darby, Maryanne Dever and others led scholars and journalists in interviewing Barnard before writing an array of theses, dissertations, lectures, journal articles, broadcast interviews and longer biographical studies. Many of these scholarly works encompassed only one or two aspects of Barnard’s life or writing. Some scholars concentrated on her collaboration with Eldershaw or her connection with , some focussed on discrete aspects of her work such as her political pamphlets, while some studied her short stories and others saw the novels she wrote with Eldershaw as her major work. Judy Washington, an oral historian employed by Lane Cove Council, conducted a comprehensive set of interviews in 1983 when her memory was as fragile as her frame.2 Though several of her history books, large and small, were re-published in response to reader interest, only a few academic historians felt moved to comment on them. I gratefully acknowledge the value of all the many studies published. They helped me immensely, though many of them were written while the secret affair that dominated Barnard’s life from 1934 to 1942 was still a secret to all but writer Jean Devanny, in whom Barnard confided as early as 1947. Much of the mis-information about Barnard’s life, deliberately disseminated to protect the secrecy of her affair, was published as fact even thirty years after the love affair was over. Sometimes it is difficult to correct a worn-in falsehood for it is often more interesting than the truth.

1 donated his Nobel Prize money, to establish an award for an Australian writer whose achievements had not received the recognition or acclaim it deserved. 2 Barnard was resting in a Longueville private hospital while her carer, Vee Murdoch, had a few days holiday in Victoria.

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Bruce Molloy interviewed Barnard in 1973, 25 years after Tomorrow and Tomorrow was first published, to little acclaim and minus one Tomorrow.3 It was the censored version and Molloy asked Barnard to explain why she had chosen a story of the Depression with a futuristic superstructure to spread her political views. Barnard denied her interest in politics of any flavour, saying she was interested only in society and the stresses which wrought changes in behaviour among its people. In her view ‘political’ was restricted to what we would normally call ‘party political’. Already she was making clear how her world could not be described in commonly understood terms. Maryanne Dever has been a prolific scholar and commentator on Barnard’s life and work, and I have drawn on many of her studies including her editing of M Barnard Eldershaw in 1995.4 It consists of the full text of M Barnard Eldershaw’s fourth novel, Plaque with Laurel, and also some of Barnard’s essays and correspondence. Dever’s studies were sometimes concentrated on one aspect of Barnard’s life or work, such as the chapter, ‘Marjorie Barnard Falls In Love’ in The Intimate Archive which features love affairs kept secret, including Barnard’s.5 Robert Darby’s thesis ‘While Freedom Lives’ is a study of Barnard’s relationship with Davison seen through their co-operation in politicking against the war in the 1930s. It also shows us how their writing was influenced by the politics of the times between 1935 and1947. Darby’s explanation: ‘Barnard could leave her job in March 1935 only because she had a spacious parental home in which to live and because her father gave her an allowance; she had savings from her years of employment, and no dependents’ 6 Darby shows himself as rare among commentators in describing an accurate picture of Barnard’s circumstances.

3 M. Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], 26 July 1973, for Molloy’s MA. Tape & transcript, Fryer Library, F793, . 4 M. Dever (ed.), M. Barnard Eldershaw: Plaque with Laurel, Essays, Reviews & Correspondence. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1995. 5 M. Dever, A. Vickery and S. Newman, The Intimate Archive: Journeys Through Private Papers. National Library of Australia, , 2009, pp. 41-80. 6 R. Darby, ‘While Freedom Lives: political preoccupations in the writing of Marjorie Barnard and Frank Dalby Davison, 1935-1947’. PhD thesis, ADFA, 1989, p. 349; available at UNSW Library.

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His ‘Reflective imagery in the fiction of M Barnard Eldershaw’ is a brilliant look at some of Barnard’s most appealing short stories such as ‘Habit’ and ‘The Wrong Hat’. His comments on mirrors in particular force us to consider whether Barnard reveals herself as a woman who concentrates mainly on appearances.7 It also forces me to question how clearly we see the internal feelings of others, even writers. Darby’s interpretation of ‘Dry Spell’ is remarkable; as mystifying as the story itself.8 Did the narrator describe a real drought or was it just an imagined destruction, as was the burning of Sydney in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow? Certainly Darby’s study of Barnard’s short stories invites us to weigh them against her life at that time, for the time was often at the outbreak of war or during the preceding months of protest. Even Darby, despite his wisdom in understanding Barnard’s motives and moods, was so beguiled by the screen of stories with which she hid her affair with Davison, that he believed her excuse about needing to escape the routine of library work in 1935: ‘Anybody who has worked at a routine job while yearning for the opportunities and dangers of something more creative will know exactly how she must have felt.’9 He even assumed from this that ‘her parents seem to have been uncongenial company.’10 And so a whole negative picture of the Barnard home was built up from Marjorie’s efforts to hide the existence of her intense relationship with Davison. No full-scale biography of Marjorie Barnard has been published though Louise E Rorabacher, an American scholar, published a comprehensive study of her collaborative work produced under the name of M Barnard Eldershaw in 1973, combining it with a study of Barnard’s later literary output, for though Eldershaw’s active years of writing ended some time before she died in 1956, Barnard wrote on for another twenty years.11 A few flaws crept in owing to

7 R. Darby, ‘Reflective imagery in the fiction of M Barnard Eldershaw’, Southerly, Vol. 61, No .3, 2001, p. 146. 8 R. Darby, ‘Dampening incendiary ardour: the roots of Marjorie Barnard’s ‘dry spell”, Quadrant, 46.6, June 2002,p 62(7). 9 Darby, ‘While Freedom Lives’, p. 312 10 Darby, ‘While Freedom Lives’, p. 311 11 L. Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw. Twayne Publishers Inc., New York, 1973.

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Rorabacher’s unfamiliarity with Australian conditions. After describing Barnard’s successful university career, complete with top honours and university medal, Rorabacher continued with, ‘Her father predictably refused both permission and funds… for post-graduate study at Oxford.’12 The ‘predictably’ suggests that this opinion was drawn straight from Barnard’s interviews, though, at that time young Australian graduates setting off for Oxford or Cambridge were unlikely to be planning post-graduate work, for they were usually expected to do an undergraduate degree all over again.13 Surprisingly, Rorabacher then added, ‘Marjorie’s nature and her circumstances both precluded the kind of active participation [in university life] that her friend Eldershaw knew.’14 This points to Rorabacher’s mistaken view of the limitations of Barnard’s pocket money, but it is impossible to imagine that Eldershaw would have had more pocket money than Barnard; she almost certainly had much less. Eldershaw’s station manager father and his large family lived in a comfortable station homestead 500 kilometres away, but his salary would have been very much less than Oswald Barnard’s as accountant in a city firm. In her student years Flora lived at a convent that was probably chosen for its cheap board and lodging. If she had a Teachers Scholarship it would have been no more than the £5 per month that Cusack had to manage on five years later, whereas Barnard had £1 per week private pocket money to spend as she liked while she lived at home with all expenses paid. At least one other biography of Barnard was attempted late in Barnard’s life. Lyn Brown, a former librarian in the CSIRO library, a poet and a friend, attempted a ‘life’ of Barnard, but gave up when her initial short biographical articles were rejected by Clem Christesen at Meanjin. Some time after Barnard’s death, Lyn gently provoked me into attempting this biography by suggesting that I could find the answers to questions still lingering in the air

12 Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw, p. 22 13 J. Davidson, ‘Bouncing on the Trampoline of Fact: Biography and the Historical Imagination’, Australian Book Review, July/Aug 2010, p. 44. 14 Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw, p. 22

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about this very different, sometimes troubling, but fascinating mid-century Sydney writer. From early in her writing career, Marjorie Barnard was concerned by the lack of respect for women’s writing, and pointed out in Essays in Australian Fiction, that women were well-equipped to write novels. ‘The novel demands nothing that the feminine brain at its best cannot encompass,’ she wrote. ‘Its raw material is humanity— a substance with which woman has long been familiar. Its medium is words, with which she is also traditionally familiar… ‘15 Perhaps, later in her life, Barnard may very well have re-used that persuasive statement in relation to women as biographers, for their contribution in the field is notable. After Miles Franklin’s death in 1954, Clem Christesen commissioned Barnard to write a long essay on her life and work for Meanjin. Nearly twenty years later Barnard decided to extend her work on Franklin by writing the first biography of that well-known Sydney woman. Both works were made difficult by the lack of available records, for Franklin had been very secretive, particularly about the large middle section of her life, spent overseas. Barnard managed to circumvent this lack by subtly using her personal relationship with Franklin during her last twenty years spent living in Sydney. , writing Stella Miles Franklin, published in 2008, faced no such handicap. Vast quantities of Franklin’s papers had become available for study in the Mitchell library. It may be that the very superfluity of material swayed Roe to present the work more as an historical biography than as a literary study, for Franklin had saved and copied boxes full of correspondence and other notes. After many years’ work Roe lay before the reading public 569 pages of enlightenment about this intriguing woman who after starting her life in country New South Wales, and making a dramatic entrance into Sydney’s literary circle with , had adventured across the world before returning to spend her last twenty years in suburban Sydney.

15 M. Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction. University Press, Melbourne, 1938. p. 2 The essay had already been presented as a lecture by , several years earlier.

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Another 140 pages of family trees, appendices, explanatory notes and other information, allowed historian Roe to furnish with great attention to detail, the nest which held the story of this unique and famous Australian, even though Roe had already published two earlier books (My Congenials in 1993 and Gregarious Culture; topical writing of Miles Franklin in 2001) of Franklin’s more personal writing. Franklin bequeathed her huge archive to the Mitchell Library, surely in the hope that someone like Roe would come along to sort it all out and display her life to Australia and the world. Otherwise the bounty of the hoard is puzzling when compared to the secrecy with which Franklin conducted her life. Did she, perhaps, trust that future readers would be more sympathetic to the decisions she had made, the life she had led, than her contemporaries?

Two of the most notable recent biographies of Australian writers were written by women writers of note, and include Hazel Rowley and her biography of Christina Stead. In attempting to write this biography of Marjorie Barnard I find myself nudged close to that now-famous group of women novelists who played such a surprisingly dominant role in 20th century Australian letters. Franklin’s, Stead’s and Barnard’s lives often occupied the same space even though they walked different paths. Franklin and Stead had bravely shaken themselves loose from their large families and the safety of Australia for independence abroad, while Barnard never regarded that course as a possibility. Her parents and a series of loyal friends offered her support and security at home, to which she clung. Christina Stead and Marjorie Barnard both grew up on the watery edge of Sydney city, and both attended Sydney Girls’ High School where they both benefitted from the enlightened English and History lessons of Pearl Barnes. Their time there did not coincide nor did their time in tertiary study, for Stead was five years the younger. Each left school carrying a bursary to Sydney University, but Stead did not pursue the science course she qualified for, choosing instead to go to the Teacher’s College. Both had their hearts set on a writing career and it is hard to believe that they never met in Sydney’s small literary circle, but in Barnard’s lengthy

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and admiring essay on Stead, published in Essays in Australian Fiction in 1938, there is no hint that they had met before Stead left Australia. Both later became a friend of Sydney’s most renowned writer, Patrick White. The admiration was mutual for White personally chose both women to receive the Patrick White Award for the unrecognised excellence of their writing. They were also both close to Clem Christesen who commissioned many essays from Barnard for Meanjin, including long essays on Patrick White and Miles Franklin. Cristesen’s relationship with Stead was more personal. She stayed as a guest in his house when she needed accommodation during her later years in Australia. Hazel Rowley’s picture of Stead’s life is vivid, allowing readers a view of her emotional ups and downs. The three women - Franklin, Barnard and Stead were all complex, and each craved love, but only Stead experienced what could be described as a long-term, fulfilling and supportive relationship with a man who matched her in intellect, and provided total commitment. Bill Blake’s death diminished Stead. She lost not only her love but the agent of calm who had steadied her rather tumultuous personality. In contrast, Franklin had a vast family that did not always offer support and sometimes became a burden. Barnard’s life was supported by her parents, with its high point an eight-year sexual affair that ended disastrously, and at its best did not provide a reciprocated love. Beyond that her quiet life was book-ended by thirty years of devoted loyalty from Eldershaw in the early years and then Murdoch at the end. Franklin and Stead have been served by other biographers, but the clarity, the extent and detail as well as the grace of Roe and Rowley are unlikely to be matched. We are fortunate to have had those two biographers to tell the stories of two of our most notable literary women. It is time a more open biography of Marjorie Barnard can be attempted. All the secrets and the camouflage erected to hide the affair can now be swept aside to reveal a truer, more richly-hued picture of the woman at the centre. In the words of Hermione Lee:

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Whether we think of biography as more like history or more like fiction, what we want from it is a vivid sense of the person. The reader’s first question is always going to be, what was she, or he, like?16

With such an enormous amount of material to examine, I soon learned another of Lee’s tips— that - coming at a likeness will always involve a messy, often contradictory, mixture of approaches. It’s that all-encompassing quality which gives biography some of its appeal—makes it so resistant to theorising. History, politics, sociology, gossip, fiction, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, documentary, journalism, ethics and philosophy are all scrambled inside the genre.

Surely such a warning would make any would-be biographer hesitate. In 1973 Marjorie Barnard asked Louise E. Rorabacher, researching Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw, not to include information about her personal life. Thus Rorabacher’s Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw of 1973, includes comprehensive assessments of the pair’s literary works, but deals lightly with Barnard’s twenty-two years as a librarian and Eldershaw’s life as, first a school-teacher and then a Commonwealth public servant. Of the pairs’ loves and hates, their passions and their delights, there is hardly a glimpse. Because Barnard discussed much of her life’s events with selected friends and later spoke freely about her affair to others, I feel she would now accept that all aspects of her life are of interest to students of 20th century . This biography is a study of Marjorie Barnard’s life and work. It does not follow Flora Eldershaw’s career or life. However it acknowledges the immeasurable value of Eldershaw’s important role in the production of the books they wrote together as M Barnard Eldershaw, as well as the associated talks and lectures and peripheral writing created together over nearly twenty years. Those five jointly written novels remain their only published novels. Together with the three history books the pair also produced their milestone book of Australian literary criticism. Indeed those jointly written books are among the most recognised and esteemed of Barnard’s writing.

16 H. Lee, Body Parts. Pimlico, London, 2008, p. 3.

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Their all-encompassing friendship is also an important element silently underpinning this study, for without it, Marjorie Faith Barnard’s life would have been poorer; she may have remained the shy librarian who before 1928 only dreamt of living a life immersed in literature. A House is Built, was their first collaboration and its win in the initial Bulletin Novel Competition in August 1928, opened the door to Marjorie’s writing career.

Over the years it became apparent that of the pair, it was Barnard who did most of the actual writing.17 She had more time and was a more fluent writer, but Eldershaw’s ideas and knowledge of literary structure supported all their writing and her editorial skills were matchless.18 In addition, she empowered the timid Barnard with her confidence in their enterprise. Barnard often spoke of their contribution as being equal, though different.

In this study I will be writing wholly about Marjorie Barnard and I will most often refer to her as ‘Barnard’. The surname seems to suit my key player’s personality though I also refer to her as Marjorie in less formal or family settings. When I refer to the writing of ‘M Barnard Eldershaw’ (and it always refers only to some aspect of literary work, never to a ‘person’ or ‘persons’) it is clear acknowledgement that both women have contributed their separate skills to produce the joint work. Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw remained two separate women with vastly different personalities and talents who, despite their lifetime of warm admiration for one another, were quite unalike and often did not attract the same friends. By studying the publicly available correspondence of that contemporary community of letter- writing women, it is evident that some of them admired one of the pair, but were not at all attracted to the other.

Writing alone, Barnard mastered short stories and turned to non- fiction, keeping up a steady flow of short histories, literary articles and

17Evidence of voluminous letters over the years and free flowing literary work of all kinds in the years Barnard wrote alone, compared to the very limited output of Eldershaw is evidence of Barnard’s ready flow of words on paper. 18 See Chapter 5 for Collaboration, with frequent praise for Eldershaw’s editorial skills from, among others, Miles Franklin and Tom Inglis Moore and also M. Barnard, ‘The Gentle Art of Collaboration’, in H. Lindsay ed., Ink No. 2, Society of Women Writers, Sydney, 1977.

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lectures until the 1950s and 1960s when she worked on larger more time- consuming books such as A History of Australia and her literary biography of Miles Franklin.

It was Barnard’s contribution to so many branches of literature, including the manner in which she actively promoted its development, that makes her such an interesting study. She was fascinated by the power of language, and practiced her skills in various forms constantly. Even when her books were not financially or critically successful, she felt she had touched success if she had learned a new way to evoke a scene, enlighten a life, tell a story. In seeking to know this writer better, I applauded her story telling and wondered whether the stories she told sprang from, or were related to, her own life. A closer look at Barnard’s life, including the people she had known and cherished, raised more questions, for Marjorie Barnard’s life was obscured by another layer of secrets, or imaginings, presented as truth for no easily identifiable reason.

Barnard’s imaginative personal fancies increased with age, and many interviewers respected her venerable age too much to question her stories of the past. Two examples taught me caution in dealing with facts and figures. A well known story, often repeated among her friends, claimed that the reason Barnard failed to take up a Sydney University scholarship to study in Oxford was her father’s refusal to facilitate her travel.19 As Barnard was born in 1897, and graduated from Sydney University in 1920, a few months before her 23rd birthday, she could have obtained her own passport without her father’s permission. In addition, although Marjorie topped the History Honours list in 1920 and won a University medal, she was not offered a scholarship. She did not win the prestigious Frazer Scholarship that year, or any other year. Barnard’s version of story was easily proven to be untrue by reference to the University archives.

Marjorie often implied that her father was a mean man. Some writers, including Rorabacher and Roe, miscalculated the relative value of the pocket

19 I first met this story among several of her ex-librarian friends, then heard it repeated by her long-time neighbour. I have not found it in print. Scholars would have checked its veracity.

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money her father allowed her as a student. Many commentators repeated Marjorie’s denigration of her father unchecked; Jill Roe, called him parsimonious. 20 An accurate calculation of the changing value of money over time indicates that Oswald Barnard was remarkably generous. He was not Scrooge, not when his daughter was a student, nor later when he gave her an allowance when she was middle-aged and, because she never earned enough from writing to supply her needs, he continued to give her an allowance for the rest of his life. Misunderstandings about this led to a series of false pictures of the Barnard family structure. By the time Barnard’s fame drew interviews with scholars and journalists, her insight and hindsight was often tainted by memory loss. A significant number of her interviews were unreliable, sometimes slanted by the listener and also by Murdoch, as well as by Barnard herself. Thus a distorted reflection of Barnard’s life was carried into many of the earlier biographical studies. Telling stories played an important part in Barnard’s early life, and that it continued to do so should not surprise us.

According to Nabokov, ‘Every great writer is a great deceiver.’21 I was fortunate in being able to interview some of Barnard’s close friends but they had been young when she was in her middle years, and they had seen only fragments of her life. In examining what we can know of Barnard’s life it is clear that there is another strong trend affecting her life and her writing, quite apart from her family and her many friends. Living in Sydney was her bedrock. Much of her fiction and most of her histories were centred on Sydney. Even her much admired History of Australia, the result of six years research in the Mitchell Library, was marred, according to some critics, by its Sydney-centric emphasis.22 One of her underlying aims seems to have been to record Sydney as a city, to write its biography, chapter by chapter. Yet even the accident of living in Sydney, which dominated her life, left gaping holes, spaces

20 J Roe, ‘The Historical Imagination and its Enemies: M Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’, Meanjin, Vol. 43, No. 2, 1984, p. 243. 21 V. Nabokov ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’ in Fredson Bowers ed., Lectures on Literature, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1980, cited in H. Rowley, Christina Stead, a Biography. Minerva, Melbourne, 1994, in her prologue. 22 AGL Shaw and MH Ellis among others.

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she did not record. During the late twenties and early thirties, when Barnard was developing as a mature writer, Sydney was changing. The Harbour dominated the lives of north shore residents, as Barnard was from childhood. Passenger ferries, big and small, chugged between all the settlements along the foreshores; they were the main means of transport. Barnard’s family never owned a car and her father travelled to the city daily by ferry during all his working life, as did Barnard. She often mentions the ferries, the water and its many moods,23 but the most spectacular change ever made in Sydney — the building of the Harbour Bridge — never appears in her public nor her accessible private writing. During the early 1930s she travelled not only alongside, but underneath those growing webs of steel twice a day, but she wrote nothing of the bridge. If such a momentous occasion escaped mention, how many other events that shaped Barnard’s life remain unrecorded and thus unrecovered by later students of her life. Barnard left no diaries and her letters, while being descriptive and engaging, were often designed to conceal. There are several elements of her life and work that need re-examination and re-consideration: firstly, Barnard’s just mentioned passion for her home-place, Sydney, and its influence on her life and writing; secondly, recognition of her father’s love and care, which for reasons of her own Barnard disguised and misrepresented after his death and thirdly, understanding the many misrepresentations of her life and why she felt the need to tell a different truth.

The breadth and scope of her contribution to the development of Australian literature also needs more attention. Notwithstanding Dever’s assertion that the influence on Australian literature of Barnard and Eldershaw was almost as powerful as that of the Palmers24, though it has not been as widely celebrated. In an article in Meanjin, Jill Roe expresses the view that an ‘authentic and impassioned native voice was silenced for a generation’ because

23 One descriptive example is: M. Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 4 January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, Library, . 24 Dever, M Barnard Eldershaw, p. ix of Introduction

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M Barnard Eldershaw’s last novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was sadly neglected after its first publishing.25

A re-examination of the main facts of Barnard’s life should enable us to at least partly understand its relationship to her literary career. In particular we may uncover the reasons for so much secrecy, so much re-writing of the facts of her life. We may learn to know and better understand the woman behind the writing —or maybe not. As Hazel Rowley advised: “A biography is not a life; lives cannot be recovered.”26 I shall have succeeded in my aim if, in the following pages, I prop open another window to allow readers another, clearer and different view of the Sydney writer, Marjorie Faith Barnard.

……………………………………..

25 Roe, The Historical Imagination and its Enemies, p. 243. 26 Rowley, Christina Stead, p. 1x prologue.

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Chapter 1 – Nurturing Marjorie: Childhood – first fiction 1897-1915

‘…it may be possible to track the ‘inner experience’ of women writers as readers and to look at the solitary space of reading which for many women writers has embodied one of the most formative pleasures of their lives. 27

Marjorie Barnard had a warm and supportive family life that has often been overlooked or misunderstood. Her father, Oswald Holme Barnard, was born in Paddington, an inner suburb east of Sydney city, in 1866. Three years later in neighbouring Woollahra her mother, Ethel Frances Alford, was born. Both were the first generation of their families to be born in Australia. Oswald’s father had come from Kent and his mother from Manchester while the Alfords had come from London. After Ethel’s mother, who came from north Devon died in childbirth, Ethel and her siblings were brought up by her much- loved maternal grandmother. It was this great-grandmother, known as a ‘blue stocking’, who was credited, within the family, of being the source of Marjorie

Barnard’s literary talent. 28

At that time, middle-class families such as the Alfords and the Barnards, even though born in an Australian colony, still thought of themselves as English, and of England as home.29 English families had been populating their scattered colonies temporarily for hundreds of years, so many of the settler families regarded their sojourn in Australia as temporary. Even after several generations, they were reluctant to accept that moving across the world, for whatever reason, meant permanently forsaking their connection to their British homeland. Others, whose situation may have been vastly improved by their re-settlement in an Australian colony, were quicker to break their ties with their former homeland.

Federation did not automatically extinguish all signs of British dominion. Institutions in all the Australian colonies were still dominated by

27 H. Lee, Body Parts. Pimlico, London, 2008, p. 45. 28 M. Barnard. [interviewed by Judy Washington], Longueville, 1983, transcript, Lane Cove Public Library, Local Studies Collection. 29 G. Giuffre, A Writing Life. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990, p. 146 – Barnard: ‘We always called it home.’

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British traditions and titles. The Australian Medical Association was still the BMA. The church of Barnard’s early life was still the Church of England, headed by an English Bishop. In 1962 it began to function as the Church of England in Australia, but it did not formally become the Anglican Church of Australia until

1981.30

Marjorie Barnard’s mother, Ethel Alford, married Oswald Barnard in Woolloomooloo, in 1894, and the young couple were living at 17 Joseph Street, Ashfield when their daughter was born on 16th August 1897 and registered as Marjory Faith Barnard.31She was baptized into the Church of England, for Oswald Barnard had grown up in a devoutly religious family and retained his strong religious faith all his life.32 Among the few of her father’s possessions retained by Barnard through her long life was his well-worn prayer-book – leather bound with brass trim – a twelfth birthday present from his mother.33

Oswald Barnard spent most of his working life as an accountant with the Sydney firm of T H Kelly. On his 1894 marriage certificate he is listed as a ‘clerk’, but when enrolling his daughter at Sydney Girls’ High School 17 years later, he is an ‘accountant.’34 It is likely he began his working life as a young clerk and gained his skills while he worked, possibly assisted by evening classes or correspondence courses affiliated with one of the several accounting bodies then operating in Sydney.35

Oswald Barnard was a successful professional man who owned his own home from 1904; from 1910 it was in harbourside Longueville.36 In recorded correspondence, Barnard gave no hint of any lack of money in the household, no suggestion of the need for prudence, concern about costs, or

30 Anglican Church of Australia, Part 2 - The Anglican Church in Australia. Accessed 1 May 2017, http://www.anglican.org.au/home/about/history/Pages/part_2_the_anglican_church_in_aust ralia.aspx 31 Her birth name was mistakenly registered as Marjory, the only time the ‘y’ spelling was used in her records and papers. 32 G. Giuffre, A Writing Life, p. 134. 33 It can be seen with its inscription in the Marjorie Barnard room at Lane Cove Library. 34 See Enrolment book in the Sydney Girls’ High School records, at Moore Park. 35 Enquiries led to no definite information on whether Oswald Barnard had acquired ‘paper’ qualifications, as no reliably comprehensive membership lists of accounting bodies or qualification requirements during that period could be traced. 36 It is possible to trace a resident of Sydney and its suburbs through the local councils and Sands Directory, but there is often a time lag of the dates properties change hands.

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habits of thrift, and she offered financial help freely, as if recognising that among her friends and acquaintances many needed assistance. Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s there was always abundant domestic help in the Barnard household, including a live-in housekeeper/cook as well as a maid, and a part-time laundress and gardener.37 Well-managed retirement funds allowed these comfortable domestic arrangements to continue after

Oswald Barnard’s death in 1940.38

The family shifted their place of residence several times during Barnard’s childhood, firstly from Ashfield to “Raitea” in Grosvenor Road, Croydon where Marjorie remembered playing with neighbourhood children, especially the little boy next door.39

It was probably while living in Croydon that Marjorie contracted the dreaded infantile paralysis (as polio was then known). She remembered nothing of it and recovered remarkably well, but her parents from then on, considered her health to be delicate. In 1901 Oswald Barnard, aware that bubonic plague was driving many Sydney parents to flee their inner city homes for the southern highlands or the mountains, to ensure that their children grew up far away from the city’s diseases, determined to follow suit. He moved his delicate wife and daughter away from the ills of the crowded city to the fresh air of Eastwood in what was then outer suburban bushland. 40 Marjorie Barnard said goodbye to her playmates in Croydon, and later recalled that exciting move:

We went to Eastwood and that was really the country then, and father had ideas of being on the land in a romantic way. Of course, he kept his job … but he liked to play around [as a farmer] ... We had, I think, three and a half acres of land – an orchard and

37 R. Stimson, Barnard’s neighbour [interviews by author]2009 & 2010. Also Alan Alford’s eulogy, 1987, in Marjorie Barnard Papers, Lane Cove Library. 38 M.Barnard. [letter to Jean Devanny] 24 November 1942. Even in the darkest days of World War II with all its shortages, the Barnards had full-time live-in help. 39 M.Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington], Longueville, 1983, Oral History transcript, Lane Cove Public Library, Local Studies Collection, p. 5. 40 A very good description of the living conditions which led to the outbreak of bubonic plague in the Rocks first diagnosed on 19 January 1901 can be found in John Birmingham, Leviathan. Random House, Sydney, 1999, p. 209 onwards.

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a bit of bushland and, of course, a chookie-yard and all those sorts of things.41

Like her father, Marjorie Barnard loved living in Eastwood; she loved the free and easy country-style life, the romance of using kerosene lamps, a wood stove in the kitchen and friendly neighbours.42

There was an old husband and wife, the Hendersons … only just up the road. I could take myself there and they always had a welcome, a cake for me … I liked it at Eastwood very much. I used to have my duties, picking strawberries and all that sort of thing and I’d use the time to make up things and imagine things for myself.43

Asked about her ‘play’ or childish pursuits Barnard replied, ‘Reading— as soon as I could read and before that, being read to.’44

Barnard, from very early in her life, knew she was the well-loved centre of the little family group, but as she grew older she came to feel that her parents never fully understood her love of literature and its importance in her life. Barnard may have underestimated her parents’ positive influence, for from her earliest years, they surrounded her with books. Barnard remembers being read to by her mother and her mother’s sister, Kitty, from when she was a tiny child — or as far back as her memory took her. She spoke of those years.

We were largely dependent on the books that were in the house…I didn’t have many children’s books… one or two sort of Golliwog books… I loved Sir Walter Scott… Ivanhoe and all that.’45

As her mother or aunt read aloud to her, Barnard would follow the story on the page. Her father, careful to protect his daughter’s delicate health, banned formal lessons, believing they might put too great a strain on her. Learning to read books for herself, she was told, would be a special treat for her when she was seven. Barnard spoke of her childhood in outer suburban

41 Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington], 1983, p. 8. 42 A Stewart, ‘History is a Creative Art’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 12 September, 1978. 43 Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington], 1983, pp. 9-11. 44 Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington], 1983, pp. 5-6. 45 Probably books by Florence Upton in which Golly was the hero.

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Eastwood as being a wonderful time and place.46 She credited the development of her creativity to her seclusion during those years, remembering how she made up stories, ‘played my own talking games’. When she was six, Barnard’s parents, realising that schooling should be delayed no longer, hired a governess, Nellie Hazelwood, who taught Marjorie to write stories, as well as tell them. Sometimes Barnard presented her written stories to her parents as gifts.47 Thus she learned early that the fruits of her imagination were things of value to share with others. She remembered Nellie Hazelwood fondly:

She was a delightful girl. I suppose she would have been about 18. She only had to teach me my alphabet … And she was ideal because I could love her and she was my friend till she died and her daughters are my friends [still]…48

This friendship lasted through not two, but three generations, for the rest of Marjorie’s long life. Ethel Barnard was not as happy living in the country as her husband and daughter were. She became very unwell with what may have been another pregnancy, or perhaps a prolonged recovery from an unsuccessful child-birth. As her health deteriorated, Oswald, anxious to relieve her of further household responsibilities, moved his family temporarily to Dulwich Hill where they lived in the home of the Warre family. There, Ethel was freed of all the cares of housekeeping, and could rest and recover her strength.

Living with a family of several children gave Marjorie a taste of family life such as she had never known. In 1907 when she was ten, John Warre took her to her first day at school, at Marrickville Public School in Livingstone Road. The school, now called Marrickville West Primary School, is still there but retains no records of Barnard’s attendance nor even of John Warre’s. I have

46 M.Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], 26 July 1973, for Molloy’s MA. Tape & transcript, Fryer Library, F793, University of Queensland. 47 Z. Fairbairns, ‘Marjorie Barnard: Talking with Zoe Fairbairns’ in M. Chamberlain ed., Writing Lives – Conversations Between Women Writers. Virago, London, 1988, p. 10. 48 Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington] 1983, p. 9. This friendship lasted through three generations, until Marjorie’s own death. When contacted, Nellie Hazelwood’s grand-daughter sent the author a copy of a note Marjorie had sent her when she was a small child, and she told me of her joy at receiving as a gift from Marjorie, a decorative ivory fan.

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not been able to confirm a possible closer connection between the two families, the Barnards and the Warres, but Barnard and John Warre, the boy who took her to school, remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Much later, in 1983, Marjorie shared ‘a family secret’ that offers an explanation for this unusual interval away from the family home. ‘My mother nearly died from childbirth.’ Marjorie confided to Judy Washigton, the Lane Cove Council’s historian, that their home had been changed by her mother’s illness; it had wrecked her parents’ marriage.

It changed my father a great deal. He was a normal man… the marriage ceased to be a marriage… he couldn’t kill his wife by [subjecting her to] the possibility of having another child… I know that it changed my father… I think it was very hard on him because he was an extremely good man, a Presbyterian … and of course he didn’t seek it [sex] anywhere else. He wasn’t that kind. He would have thought it was a mortal sin and so he was, as a normal man, very frustrated… 49

It is significant that Barnard told this very personal story to Judy Washington, on a rare occasion when the interview would be private. For a week or two Barnard rested in a private hospital in Longueville while Vee Murdoch, visited her own family and friends in Melbourne. Vee Murdoch, Barnard’s constant companion in later life was a loving but intrusive contributor to many of Barnard’s interviews.50 After Candida Baker’s interview with Barnard, she reported that: ‘Murdoch was as talkative as Barnard is reticent. Murdoch often answered on Barnard’s behalf.’ 51 There were other similar comments from interviewers though some were pleased that Murdoch was voluble when Barnard remained silent.

Marjorie’s story of how the birth and death of her little brother had brought her mother close to death, explains Ethel’s lifelong frail health.52 It also explains the unusual step Oswald took in moving his family to temporary

49 The date of this unrecorded pregnancy after which the little son died has not been disclosed, but it fits what little we know about Ethel’s illness and it would explain the unusual move to another household where Ethel could have complete rest. 50Murdoch had come to live with Barnard in 1949 after Ethel’s death. 51 C. Baker, Yacker 2 Australian Writers Talk about their Work. Picador, Sydney, 1988, p. 31. 52 R. Stimson [interview with author] in 2010.

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shelter where Ethel could be cared for within a family setting, and it also offers another reason, apart from his religious upbringing which could explain Oswald’s seeming dependence on his church-related activities.

When the family returned to Eastwood in 1908, it was to sell up their home.53 For Oswald Barnard it was time to give up his dream of living on his own acreage in the fresh country air, time to seek a home more suited to the needs of his wife and daughter. He decided to build on the north shore of the harbour, which combined fresh air, yet proximity to all the conveniences of city living. Early in 1909 the family rented a house in St Georges Terrace, Drummoyne, while their permanent home was being built across the river in Longueville. For Marjorie it was ideal. At the end of the Drummoyne street stood a wharf where she could catch a ferry to the Cambridge School, directly across the Parramatta River in Hunters Hill. Almost certainly the convenient access to this well-regarded school had influenced the Barnards’ choice of temporary residence.

Marjorie told interviewers that her father had switched from the Anglican Church to the Presbyterian because he wanted ‘a bit more hell-fire’,54 but there was a more mundane reason. When he chose Longueville as a place where Ethel could be happy and there was a suitable school nearby for Marjorie, there was no Church of England in Longueville. Oswald was welcomed by St Andrews Presbyterian Church and its members who soon sought his help in establishing a Sunday School.55 In preparation for their move to Longueville Oswald shifted his allegiance to the Presbyterian Church in Drummoyne.

In the middle of 1910, the Barnard family left Drummoyne, and moved across to the northern side of the river, to the brick cottage, “Cooroona”, that

53Sands Directory lists the Barnards as living on their property in Vimiera Road, Marsfield (Eastwood) in 1905, but not in 1906. These directories are often a year out of date, so it is probable that the Barnards were in Dulwich Hill with the Warres for part of 1906 and 1907. This would support Barnard’s recollection of starting school at ten. When the family returned to Eastwood they hired a Miss Waite as governess for Marjorie briefly. She was efficient but was not remembered as a friend. 54 Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], 26 July 1973. 55 An old register now in the Ferguson Archive of the Presbyterian Church lists Oswald Barnard as attending worship in the Presbyterian Church at Drummoyne in 1909 and 1910.

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Oswald Barnard had had built at 9 Mary Street, Longueville. In an unexpected coincidence, only a few months later the Church of England decided to open a church in the area. His new church, St Andrews, generously opened its doors and its pews for the incoming Anglicans to use while they set up their own place of worship.56 It was a generous gesture, not unusual among protestant denominations in spreading suburbs and developing country towns as the population of Australia swept across empty acres taking their religion with them. By then Oswald was already an actively participating member of the Presbyterian congregation. He became the Superintendent of the St Andrews new Sunday School at the beginning of 1911, and later, served as an Elder and Sesssion Clerk.

Ethel and Marjorie were not churchgoers. Despite Oswald Barnard’s firmly held life-long faith, in rather more patriarchal times than these, he did not insist that his wife or daughter attend his new church, or indeed any church. They chose not to keep up any regular religious affiliation. When questioned about her faith or lack of it, Barnard explained her feelings as mixed, even confused.

I’m a Protestant without being a Christian… It’s the way you’re brought up. My father was a very religious man…I never went to church and my father was offended by that.57

After Oswald Barnard died in 1940, Barnard became very critical of his religious commitment. It is possible that her emotional reaction against a faith that neither she nor her mother chose to practice, sprang from resentment that her father sought and enjoyed an active life away from home, for his church and Sunday School duties would have absorbed much of his non- working time.

56 Such ‘helping’ practices were common among Protestant denominations in Sydney’s spreading suburbs. Information about Oswald Barnarad’s membership of St Andrews in Longueville provided by the current minister, the Rev Krikor Youmshajekien, from church records. 57 MBarnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], 26 July 1973.

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Marjorie still travelled to school by ferry, now across the much smaller Lane Cove River. She explained how she mined her memories of that daily journey for her prize-winning novel written many years later:

‘Merimba’ in Alexandra St, opposite the Council Chambers is the house described in A House is Built… I crossed the [Lane Cove] river by ferry and walked up Alexandra St and down the other side of the hill to the Parramatta [River]. Every day I passed ‘Merimba’ and struck up friendship with the children [of Dr Biansen, the Swedish Consul-general] living there… (T)he house was then called ‘Rhinegold’… Sometimes I was invited in and played with the two girls, Ingaborg and Gerda, who were about my age… The house seemed to me mysteriously foreign … Many years later, in 1928, when writing A House is Built, I remembered ‘Rhinegold’ and thought that it would do for the Hyde family.58

This anecdote of her youth reveals Barnard’s propensity for friendship and the importance of inter-personal relationships to her, even as a child. It is as if she deliberately gathered friends to make up for her lack of siblings. As well as using this house from her childhood for the Hyde family’s mansion at the time of their greatest wealth, I believe that Barnard had also used it in one of her earliest short stories, a juvenile ‘horror’ story in which ‘Rhinegold’ became the castle where the princess is entrapped by an ogre.59

Barnard’s preference in describing “places” in her fiction from life led her to go back and view the house again during the writing of her novel, so I followed her example.60 In 2010 the house at that Alexandra Street address, viewed from outside the garden wall, was a rather grungy Victorian pile, divided into apartments.61It looked far more like an ogre’s castle than the elegant Italianate house Barnard re-created as the ultimate residence of the Hyde family in A House is Built.

Schooldays The owner and headmistress of the Cambridge School, Miss Florence Earle Hooper, was the first Australian to complete a Teacher Training Course

58 M.Barnard responding to a survey coducted by the Hunters Hill History Museum, 1978. 59 See “Betty” in M. Barnard, The Ivory Gate. H.H. Champion, Melbourne, 1920. 60 M. Barnard, survey response, Hunters Hill History Museum, 1978. 61 House viewed by author in 2010.

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at Cambridge University. After opening a school in Phillip Street Sydney, she re-located to Hunters Hill, in 1904, finally settling at “Chambley”, an historic house at 4 Stanley Road, Hunters Hill in 1907. This was the Cambridge School Barnard knew with its enclosed Tarban Creek swimming pool. The school gained a reputation for its modern methods of teaching with Miss Hooper recognised as one of Sydney’s premier educationists. English was the most important subject of study and a love of good literature was instilled while the girls acquired acceptable accents.62

This was the school Oswald and Ethel Barnard chose for their daughter when they realised that she was strong enough to commence regular school attendance in 1909, a few months before her twelfth birthday. Barnard spent a little over two years at the Cambridge School, and later wrote of it:

It was the outstanding river school. Miss Florence Hooper … was a thin, (or should I say a spare?) woman, severe in expression and wore very thick spectacles. Her pupils held [her in] awe, rather than affection. … In retrospect I see that as an educationist she was rare in her time and had ideas that were both advanced and eminently sensible… Competition was out. No marks, no prizes, no top of the class.63

Barnard had forgotten much over the years. The Bunyip, the school’s paper,64 regularly listed the girls’ marks. During the few terms that Barnard attended, her name was usually found among those who reached honours standard, A or A-. The lists did not stop at mentioning the honours students, but went down through different levels of pass, to failure. Another old girl of The Cambridge School, Louise Carne, remembered other activities:

Schooldays were a pure joy… History, literature, geography became as vividly real as our own schooldays … We made our own models of everything that could be modelled. We painted and illustrated our textbooks as well as our exercise books …65

62 E. Moroney, Schools of Hunters Hill 1857-1981 (1968). Hunter’s Hill Historical Society, Woolwich, 1981 and Royal Australian Historical Society, Newsletter of the Royal Australian Historical Society, February 1968, p. 3. 63 Gleaned from results of survey undertaken in 1978. The Hunters Hill Historical Museum asked former residents to share their memories of early schools of the area. 64 Some copies are still available & can be seen at the Hunters Hill History Museum. 65 Hunters Hill History Museum, Cambridge School file.

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Barnard is listed as a new student in the June 1909 school paper and attended regularly until the middle of 1911 when her father noticed that she knew nothing of mathematics.66 He withdrew her from the otherwise admirable Cambridge School, and enrolled her at Sydney Girls’ High School, a school already renowned for its success in preparing girls for university, on 7th July, 1911, a few weeks before her fourteenth birthday.

Situated in the city, between Castlereagh and Elizabeth Streets, the building was the Georgian school building planned by Governor Macquarie as a charity school. A large two-storey building was built within a high brick wall, and opened in 1823, but by then Commissioner Bigge had begun his audit and Governor Macquarie had left the colony.67 His planned school for the children of convicts was soon replaced by the Church of England’s St James Grammar School. It waxed and waned with Sydney’s economy and in 1867 it became a

‘certified’ school, existing only with financial aid from the government.68

In 1880 the Public Instruction Act proclaimed the need for eight state high schools in NSW, four for boys and four for girls, to prepare children for entry into the .69 Formerly, boys had needed a private school education to qualify for entry and when, in 1882, the university opened its doors to women, most of the private schools for girls did not teach a curriculum that allowed their students to qualify for entry. In 1883 the education department took over the old St James School for the new joint High School, with boys occupying the ground floor and girls the first floor. A bigger property was soon found for the boys, and the girls took over the whole of the historic Georgian building between Castlereagh and Elizabeth Streets. Barnard now travelled by ferry from Longueville to Circular Quay, then by tram up Pitt Street, before walking along Market Street to the school’s new entrance in

66 In Barnard’s hand-written letters available at Hunters Hill History Museum. 67 Lilith Norman, The Brown and Yellow - Sydney Girls’ High School 1883 -1983. , Melbourne, 1983. She claims Francis Greenway as the designer, but I can find no mention of the school building among listings of Francis Greenway buildings. Barnard does not mention it in her small book - Barnard, M., Australia's First Architect - Francis Greenway. Longmans, London, 1961 – which was designed for use in schools, or in her text in Max Dupain’s elegant Georgian Architecture in Australia: With Some Examples of Buildings of the Post-Georgian Period. Ure Smith in association with National Trust of Australia, Sydney, 1963. 68 Norman, The Brown and Yellow, pp. 4-8. 69 Which had been established in 1852.

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Castlereagh Street.70 The curriculum was broad: Latin, Mathematics, Modern Languages (French and German), English Language and Literature and Elocution, Physical Science, Drawing, Music, Cookery and Needlework. It was expected to turn out matriculants for the now available university places, but also to fit them for wifely duties. This was the Sydney Girls’ High School that Marjorie Barnard attended from 1911 to 1915.

Discipline at the school was strict, rules were many and detention was common.71 Girls were encouraged to play games without squealing although there was no organised sport nor anywhere for the girls to play except a small asphalted ‘playground’ shaded by two massive fig trees. A teacher checked every girl leaving the grounds to ensure that she was wearing hat and gloves. In the early years there was no school uniform but, as at the Cambridge School, a hatband with the school crest was worn. Barnard may well have found the large number of girls at Sydney High overwhelming after the much smaller Cambridge School, but her remarkable talent for friendship enriched her life then too.

Letters from Myrtle Colefax, a shy girl from the country, remind us that Barnard’s kindness made a difference to the lives of many people she touched.

One day in my first week when I was probably looking somewhat lost, I was ‘adopted’ by one of the senior girls whose name was Marjorie Barnard and who afterwards mothered me, taking me home on odd holidays and writing to me when I was in Moruya.72

This letter and excerpts, below, from some of Barnard’s later letters, give us a rare glimpse of Barnard as a schoolgirl. From Leura where she was holidaying with her family, Barnard wrote to Colefax in March 1914:

I hope that you will grow to love school and to understand what it really means… It is at school that friendships that should last for ever are made, where one is prepared for life…

70 George Street was considered too risqué to be used as the girls’ route to school. 71 Norman, The Brown and Yellow, including all the information re daily habits of girls and rules, conditions etc. at the school. 72 Letters held in the Sydney Girls’ High School archives at Moore Park.

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And the following month:

You’re feeling better now I hope and are quite able to read. Ceres was kind enough to take you a couple of books I looked out for you and some flowers.... The books were ones I always loved, and indeed love still… If there is any other thing that you are wanting and I can send, tell Ceres and I shall do my best…

A third letter, written a few months later, reveals a different Barnard. She valued her friendship with younger students but I have not confirmed whether she also made friends of her own age. She was shy, almost timid with adults, even familiar teachers. In another letter to Colefax, Barnard wrote about her favourite history teacher, Pearl Barnes, calling for tea at the Barnard home in Longueville:

I … do hope you had a good passage down and were not sea-sick, … Yesterday Miss Barnes came to see me and indeed I was so happy although I did every dreadful thing imaginable from breaking down in the middle of grace to going fairly purple in the face from excitement.73

The letter makes it clear that the Barnards welcomed their daughter’s school teachers among the friends who came to their home for meals, over- night stays and week-end visits. This gracious hospitality continued throughout their lives as Barnard’s university friends and lecturers and later her writing friends as well as friends from the libraries where she worked, were all welcomed into the Barnard family’s Longueville homes. In the above letters, Barnard’s trust, her naive expectation that her love would be reciprocated is clear, and they reinforce what we have found—that though timid with outsiders, her emotional security within her family circle was robust.

Barnard’s life-long interest in history was inspired by Pearl Barnes, that teacher who had caused her such an attack of nervousness when she was sixteen. Miss Barnes must have been truly inspirational, for a later student of

73 Myrtle Colefax lived on the South Coast of NSW. Her papers are in Sydney Girls High School archives.

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the school, Christina Stead, also prized her memory.74 The school nurtured many successful writers including, Louise Mack, who, while editor of The Gazette, rejected a submission from Ethel Turner.75 The girl who later became famous as the author of Seven Little Australians responded by establishing a rival paper. In the early years of the Sydney Girls’ High School, writing offered girls a profession at a time when, although the university was now open to them, family pressures often prevented them from undertaking further formal education.

In 1983, Barnard confided to an interviewer:

I could always write things well, but I didn’t have a profound knowledge and my prose really got me through most things especially the university because if you can present things well, they seem much better than they are.76

In Barnard’s second year at the school, she even won a poetry prize though poetry had no lasting interest for her. 77

Earliest Juvenilia During 1912 and 1913 the newly named school paper, the Chronicle, published three of Barnard’s stories, her earliest known fiction to survive. This early venture into literature has not been previously considered in examining

Barnard’s development as a writer.78

‘The Rose’, printed in the June 1912 issue of the Chronicle, is a fairy story set in a place far away: ‘Long ago there was a beautiful garden that grew on a high mountain where nobody ever went. Despite the fairytale location, this story is full of familiar images drawn from Barnard’s childhood, stories she was told by her Aunt Kitty Alford and governess Nellie Hazelwood. ‘The Flower Mother’ echoes Barnard’s adoration of her mother as well as memories

74 H. Rowley, Christina Stead, a biography. Minerva, Melbourne, 1994, p. 39. 75 Unsigned hand-written note in records of Sydney Girl’s High School Gazette File in the school’s archives. 76 Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington], p. 20. 77 Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington]. The text of the winning poem could not be located. 78 These stories, all printed in the Chronicle, established in 1906 and still the Sydney Girls’ High School’s official paper. They can be examined in the records held at the Sydney Girls’ High School at Moore Park.

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of being taught about cultivating garden flowers - about violets, daphne, daisies, lilies and jasmine by Nellie, whose family, the Hazelwoods, were well- known in the district as professional garden designers and nursery-men.

The story elements in ‘The Rose’, the attempted personification of flowers, the flights of imagination, are aimed at children much younger than Barnard’s high-school classmates, yet her word use, and her sentence structures are astonishingly sophisticated as she self-consciously strives for literary style. ‘The Rose’ is a complete story. It has a strong protagonist, amid minimal conflict. A little thorn bush presents the only problem, and it is solved by the brisk action of the protagonist. The Flower Mother creates for the sad thorny bush the loveliest bloom of all: the rose, thus giving the story the traditional happy ending — until the coda.

The coda is a surprising addition for a fourteen-year-old whom one would expect to be on the edge of the excitement of growing up, standing tip- toe to peer into the years ahead. Instead, Marjorie looks backward to the world of childhood that she is reluctantly leaving. Her coda: ‘there is no more work for the Flower Mother in the modern world. When her tears fall they are seen only as dew.’ It is as if Barnard, at fourteen, fears the oncoming responsibilities of adulthood.

In November of 1912, the Chronicle published ‘Moon Babies’, another fairy story in which Barnard forces solidity upon dreams. In a giant leap of the imagination, she makes dreams into babies who are rocked, who flutter and whisper. Barnard’s language and sentence structure are, as in the first story, sophisticated, adult, and sometimes voluptuous.

At night when the mantle of gentle sleep has fallen on the tired earth they flutter down from their aerial cradle on the wings of sleep and come whispering a moment to people’s hearts of fairy love and the wonders of the skies…

There seems to be no real plot, no definitive characters; this seems to be not a short story, but an essay about the possibility of dreams materialising. The personification of dream-creatures falters, but suddenly it ceases to be an

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essay; Barnard finds her story. Lost dreams build a stairway along a moonbeam to get back home. Barnard makes a tremendous effort to connect imagination to reality. For example: ‘Once a dream, a little tear-crowned one…’ How could a reader put shape and size to that image? A crown of tears upon the head of a cherub or a fairy would be too solid for Barnard’s word-picture. She writes of a crown of tears upon the brow of a dream! This magical, extravagant, elegant and evocative image that Barnard tried so hard to communicate when she was fifteen may have failed its first test, for Barnard’s first readers were approaching adulthood; they were in high school, perhaps already grown beyond her world of fantasy.

Five months later, in April 1913, the Chronicle published another of Barnard’s stories, ‘Rosemary’. Barnard returns to the flower garden, this time to the rosemary, usually valued for its spicy herbal perfume and as a symbol of remembrance, rather than for its insignificant flowers. Barnard uses the plant as a symbol, almost a synonym, for an ailing new-born child. Twice the length of the other stories, this work is structured more like a novella than a short story. Its action is spread over four years, and it is well-plotted with complications, sub-plots and a satisfying conclusion. Of the three stories, this is the darkest; it confronts the inevitability of death.

The garden plot is dug by the growing child character, Rosemary. It includes not only the pansies and violets and mignonette that Barnard remembered from her own garden and Nellie’s instructions, but unusual philosophy-saturated gifts for the story-child. These gifts are both material and ethereal, indiscriminately mixed. There are fairies of sleep to give rest to weary people, angels of great resolve, a heavy golden crown of self-sacrifice, brilliant flame-coloured flowers of fame and a delicate chaplet of tenderness which is topped by an airy-light crown of right and beautiful thought. Barnard’s conclusion is that this last gift, right and beautiful thought, is the most treasured of all, eliciting a breathy sigh from readers of 1913 as of to-day, who feel that yes, we can all aspire to right and beautiful thought – at least sometimes – until the coda.

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Years later Barnard acknowledged that the time she spent ‘making up stories’ as a child was the key to her literary development.79 Perhaps it is also the key to the made-up stories of her adult life. Not knowing or understanding the real world, the younger Barnard may well have been immersed in a ‘made- up’ world where no hard boundary line forced its way between real life and the imagination. It is clear that Barnard was reluctant to leave this world of make-believe behind.

The philosophic coda, added by Barnard to explain her thinking in each of these childhood stories is undeniably gloomy. In ‘The Rose’ the youthful author concludes that reading books has made men too wise to believe in dreams. At the conclusion of ‘Moon Babies’ the characters cannot climb the magic staircase to the moon because the path of pure and perfect thought is too hard for human feet. And at the end of ‘Rosemary’ we learn that right and beautiful thought is out of date.

In 1915 Barnard turned 18, and was nearing the end of her secondary schooling. As she described it:

Sydney Girls High School was opposite Angus and Robertsons… in the noisiest position imaginable … After school I always had a bit of time…(so) I went into Angus and Robertsons and stood there reading the philosophic dictionary…. It was a most attractive book; I could just plunge into it and find treasures all the way…. I think it was sold just when I was getting towards the end… One day a sort of sigh went up from all the assistants and one said to me, ‘I’m sorry, but it’s been sold.’ And it was the only copy.80

Barnard remembered the Sydney Girls’ High School as being a very good school, especially for her as she had what she called an ‘uneven mind’ — so good at some things, so poor at others. ‘…the pressure was really on me. I was so happy to leave school…Even so I was in love with learning and I wanted to go to university.81

79 Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], 26 July 1973. 80 Full script can be found among Barnard’s papers in the archives of the Sydney Girls’ High School at Moore Park. 81 Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington], pp. 17-18.

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Barnard’s Leaving Certificate results at the end of 1915 reveal that she was awarded Honours in English and Botany, an A in Modern History and a B in Latin, French and Geology82. She was granted an Exhibition (a bursary) to study Arts. This upheld the reputation of the High School in having many bursary winners among their Leaving class. In 1915, eighteen of the thirty-five girls who passed the Leaving Certificate at Sydney Girls’ High School were offered Exhibitions to study for a degree at Sydney University.83 Barnard decided to study English and history, with added philosophy —a fitting foundation on which to base her dreams of a career in literature.

……………………………………………………………

82 School results from Barnard papers Mitchell Library. Still no pass in Mathematics. 83 List recorded in archives at Sydney Girls’ High School.

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Chapter 2 – University & The Ivory Gate – 1916-1920

‘He gave my mind a bent towards history which has never straightened out’.84

The Barnards were a happy family. There can be no question that Ethel, though frail in health shared a constant and deep love with her daughter, and all verifiable evidence indicates that Oswald Barnard made every effort to support his wife and daughter in comfort. Oswald died in 1940, and after his death Marjorie often complained about him, comments such as: ‘he was always a thwarter.’85 Yet, when Candida Baker, during her interview with Barnard asked, ‘What about your father? Was he a bit of a dictator? I’ve read that you didn’t get on with him.’ Barnard replied, ‘That is not true. He was a darling and

I got on very well with him.’86 In 1983, when Barnard was 86 years old, she was asked if her father had objected to her going to university. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘If I could pay for it, it was all right. Father had sort of given up hope of trying to mould me. He’d lost his little girl.’87As a man of his times, Oswald Barnard could have been reluctant to allow his daughter to enter university, but it seems unlikely. He had facilitated her further education, even planned for it, by sending her to the high school specially designed to educate girls for university entrance. Her accusation that he had been reluctant to pay her university fees though, rings hollow. In 1916, he may well have expected her to win a university exhibition since a very high proportion of students in that era did. In 1918, 53% of students at Sydney University received financial assistance that paid for all their course-related costs and fees. As we have seen, more than half of Marjorie’s class at Sydney Girl’s High School were granted University Exhibitions in 1916. As in Marjorie’s case, many of the grants did not include an extra living allowance. Most would have been living at home through their

84 Barnard speaking of her debt to Professor George Arnold Wood, from M. Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], 26 July 1973. for Molloy’s MA. Tape & transcript, Fryer Library, F793, University of Queensland. 85 G. Giuffre, A Writing Life, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990, p. 139. 86 C. Baker, Yacker 2 Australian Writers Talk about their Work. Picador, Sydney, 1988, p. 37. 87 M. Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington], Longueville, 1983, Oral History transcript, Lane Cove Public Library, Local Studies Collection.

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university years, as was Marjorie. Even in her earlier years, she had been sent to a fee-paying private school88 when a good public school was available and now Oswald Barnard arranged a generous allowance for her — pocket money that gave her the independence of having money to spend as she pleased.89 In marked contrast, many middle-class fathers of the time did not allow their daughters to undertake tertiary education. Eleanor Dark’s father, Dowell O’Reilly, poet and sometime teacher at Sydney Grammar School, was also a progressive Member of the NSW Parliament where he introduced the first private member’s Bill for Women’s Suffrage in 1894. He was a vocal supporter of women’s rights, yet he refused to allow his only daughter, Eleanor, to attend university, despite her pleas and her lifelong feeling that she had been unfairly deprived.90 No matter how much she longed for literature, further explorations into deeper studies, Eleanor was allowed only to undertake a secretarial course. Another near-contemporary of Barnard’s, Dorothy Cubis, (formerly Edwards) told of how her father had tried to force her into an early marriage to dissuade her from attending university. Her mother, a graduate of Sydney University insisted that Dorothy attend.91 The belief that daughters did not need, or would not benefit from education, as sons were expected to do, was not unique to Australian fathers. Author P. D. James, born twenty-three years after Barnard, in Oxford, was denied the possibility of completing her schooling. Her father removed her from high school at sixteen because ‘he was not disposed to educating women’.92 Louise Rorabacher, in her 1973 biography of Barnard and Eldershaw, suggests that Oswald Barnard’s allowance of £1 per week was so miserly that Barnard ‘didn’t get into the habit of clothes.’93 Let us put that into accurate historical perspective. 1916’s £1 would be worth $97.40 a hundred years

88 The Cambridge School at Hunters Hill. 89 B. Fletcher, History & Achievement. Braxus Press, Sydney, 1999, pp. 6-7. 90 S. Wyndham, ‘Dowell O’Reilly’, Sydney Morning Herald, June 6-7, 2009, quoting Michael Dark, Eleanor’s only son. 91 Fletcher, History & Achievement, pp7-8. 92 Born Phyllis Dorothy White. N. Gerrard, Into the Mainstream: How Feminism Has Changed Women’s Writing. Pandora, London, 1989, p. 124. 93 L. Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw, Twayne Publishers Inc., New York,1973, p. 21.

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later.94 But even that does not give us a true picture. While Barnard was at university from 1916 to 1920, young Australian soldiers were paid six shillings a day for fighting in the trenches of western France where they were considered to be the best paid soldiers among all the forces serving there.95 Other ‘apprentice’ writers of the time nurtured their talent on much less financial support than Barnard’s generous pocket money of £1 per week. Alan Marshall, born in 1902, also had polio as a child but with more disabling effects. He lived his life at school, at work and later as an active full-time writer, with his body ‘hung lop-sided on crutches.’96 In 1920, the same year that Barnard left university, Marshall, having completed a Stott’s Correspondence accountancy course, started work as a clerk in the Kangaroo Ground Shire office near Victoria’s Eltham for £1.5.0 per week. Of that he paid

£1.2.6 for his week’s board at the local hotel.97 , five years younger than Barnard, followed her to Sydney University in 1919, on a Teacher’s Scholarship of £5 per month. Cusack paid her mother £4 per month for her board and lodging, leaving Cusack £1 per month, a quarter of Barnard’s pocket money, to cover all else.98 Barnard, living at home with her parents, continued to enjoy all the privileges and comforts of a middle-class daughter – free food, lodgings, incidental expenses including family holidays in the mountains or at the coast, generous hospitality extended to her friends for meals, overnight stays and even holidays, while ample domestic help at home eliminated the drudgery of daily chores.99 Eleanor Dark, after being prevented from attending university, finished her secretarial course and began working in a city office for £1.5.0 per week.100

94 The Reserve Bank of Australia. Accessed November 2016 http://www.rba.gov.au/ 95 C. W. Bean, The official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918 (Volume 1), Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1934, p. 42. The other ANZACs, New Zealand’s soldiers, were also considered well paid at 5/- per day total. The Australian government had set their pay at 25% more than the basic wage prevailing at home. 96 J. Beasley, Red Letter Days, Australian Book Society, Sydney, 1979, p. 3 97H. Marks, I Can Jump Oceans-The World of Alan Marshall, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1976. p.113 98 B. H. Fletcher, History & Achievement, p. 7. NB There were 20 shillings or 240 pence in a pound. 99 It has been suggested that one of the reasons for some of the animosity towards Barnard during later years was fostered by what they saw as her comparatively comfortable/monied status. 100B. Brooks and J. Clark, Eleanor Dark: a writer’s life. Macmillan, Sydney, 1998, p. 53.

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As for Rorabacher’s suggestion that Barnard’s allowance was not generous enough to allow for adequate clothing in the year before she entered university, in 1915 Barnard could have bought herself two pleasant dresses for day wear or a warm tweed overcoat every week of the year, and still had change left over from her weekly pocket money.101 Oswald Barnard’s allowance to his daughter was generous despite the claims of later writers who failed to check cost-of-living changes, drops in the value of our coinage over time, or even wages of the day. At university Barnard became totally absorbed in her academic studies and there is little evidence of her forming close ties with other students except for the one all-important relationship that changed her life — the friendship of Flora Eldershaw. Allotted a locker immediately above that of Eldershaw, then a popular and self-confident second year student, Barnard was dismayed at her own clumsiness, as she rained her untidy mess on top of Eldershaw’s own tidy lower locker.102 That initial irritation for one and embarrassment for the other, must have sparked a mutual attraction for it was not long before a deep and lasting friendship developed, despite the fact that few of their interests coincided. Eldershaw was actively involved in sports and music and drama, while Barnard spent her time reading. However, they shared two of their major subject areas, history and English literature, and it was not long before they discovered that they also shared a private ambition — they each dreamed of becoming a writer. 103 Eldershaw’s Roman Catholic family lived near , about 500 kilometres west of Sydney, in country New South Wales, where her father managed a pastoral property. She stayed in a convent during university terms, and as the friendship developed, she often spent days, weekends and even holidays at Barnard’s home where the two young women nurtured their friendship and their literary ambitions.

101 N. Brash, The Model Store 1885-1985. Grace Bros, Sydney, 1985, p. 22 etc - various reproduced advertisements. There is no evidence that Marjorie was expected to outfit herself from her pocket money. 102 Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 18. 103 M. Barnard, ‘The Gentle Art of Collaboration’, in H. Lindsay ed., Ink No2, The Society of Women Writers, Sydney, 1947, p. 1.

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Through Eldershaw, Barnard was introduced to the possibility of overcoming the discrimination that, as women students, they met each day. During those years women could not belong to the Student’s Union, nor were they allowed to eat in the Union’s café or restaurant. The University Debating Society excluded women from speaking in their debates and when the Women’s Undergraduate Association sought to have a representative on the editorial staff of Hermes, the student journal, its committee of young men disallowed it, as a woman’s presence ‘would limit free and open discussion on matters sent in for publication.’ This did not prevent them publishing items sent in by women students, though I was not able to locate any from Barnard or Eldershaw.104 At the university Barnard joined a new and different community, one far more interesting but also more confrontational, and in some ways even more restricted, than the cloistered home of her childhood. It was a society that needed changing and Eldershaw set about doing so, but Barnard was not yet confident enough to take any overt action. Throughout her time as a student she remained the observer, the supporter, watching and admiring as her friend enjoyed student life organising the Women’s Union and a ‘women only’ debating group while becoming an active sportswoman and student leader.105 Eldershaw was outstandingly successful in many areas of student life but she relinquished her plan to study law when the Women’s Legal Status Act of 1918, while lifting the ban on women solicitors, did nothing to encourage practicing solicitors to accept women as articled clerks. This omission made that necessary step up the professional ladder extraordinarily difficult for a country girl with no connections in the law. Eldershaw became a teacher instead. Challenges that stimulated Eldershaw to action intimidated Barnard, while limited strength and restriction in her polio-affected right leg ruled out

104 Ethel Turner had been published in Hermes in earlier years. D. Spender, Writing in the New World Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers, Pandora, London, 1988. 105 Fletcher, History & Achievement, p. 62.

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active participation in sports.106 Her shyness, even timidity, was probably as much a handicap as her lack of physical strength, for Barnard always spoke of herself as being quite strong.107 Colleagues who worked with her in the library in her middle years remember no lameness, and some did not know that Barnard had suffered from polio. She had no long-lasting limp or other obvious handicap until later in life when she suffered from illnesses such as pneumonia with some frequency and complained of constant headaches and the embarrassment of having her right leg ‘fold up’ after only a little walking.108 Until quite late in her life, Barnard’s weakened leg restricted her normal mobility only very slightly and did not impede her reading and writing at all, nor her imagination.

The second great influence on Barnard during her years at university was Professor George Arnold Wood, the Challis Professor of History, holder of the first chair of History in an Australian University.109 According to L J Blake, in his Australian Writers, Wood was ‘Australia’s first notable academic historian’.110 During Barnard’s years at university Wood had no other lecturing staff, he was the history department and he made it memorable. He was widely admired and respected, even loved by students as a great spiritual force within the University. Barnard remembers nearly fainting with pride and joy when he told her, as they walked across the quadrangle together, that she was the best history student he had ever had.111 Barnard shared Professor Wood’s personal prize for first year History with Myra Willard,112 the only other student to be awarded a High Distinction in that year’s examinations. Willard, a young woman from the coalmining town of Greta, had worked as a pupil teacher in neighbouring schools before earning

106 Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 223. 107 A. Stewart, ‘History is a Creative Art’, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 12 September 1978 p. 40 & Baker, Yacker 2, p. 39. 108 Beasley, Red Letter Days, pp. 4-6. Such recurrence of illness is now recognised as a sympton of earlier polio. Alan Marshall drew attention to similar late onset symptoms of polio that haunted his aging body too. 109 Fletcher, History & Achievement, p. ix introduction. 110 L. Blake, Australian Writers, Rigby, Adelaide, 1968, p. 3. Wood wrote The Discovery of Australia in 1922. 111 Baker, Yacker 2, p. 35. 112 Sydney University calendar and archives.

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a Teacher’s College scholarship, and now, in her thirties, found herself attending evening classes at Sydney University. Wood encouraged a spirit of enquiry in all his students, and sponsored the annual Beauchamp Prize to reward student research into wider areas of the world than Britain and Europe. Barnard won it one year with an essay on the League of Nations and the United States of America,113 following Willard’s win with an essay on Japan. Although Wood was appointed to teach Imperial History, his interest in Australian History grew with the years he spent in Sydney and this interest was communicated to his students, not least Marjorie

Barnard and Flora Eldershaw as well as Myra Willard.114 Under Wood’s guidance Barnard’s love of history, begun in Pearl Barnes’ class in high school, flourished. Wood taught her to see history as inextricably linked to literature, though firmly based on the critical examination of original documents. His belief that the best history moved beyond documents into ‘the realm where imagination and intuition hold sway’, and that it ‘needed to be coloured by the historian’s experience and philosophy’, fed into and enriched Barnard’s own view of the inter-relatedness of the two disciplines and became evident when she and Eldershaw began writing their own histories.115 For Barnard, study with Professor Wood was just as interesting as listening to Ivanhoe being read in the nursery. Barnard gave credit to Wood for teaching her to be a thinking citizen with a concern for the less fortunate in society. She acknowledged that he was: … the greatest influence in my youth… He was a very great man and he had a profound effect on all of his students… His wide tolerance, his battle for liberty made a very deep impression on all of us. He made of me what I am, a 19th century liberal.’116

Brought up as a Christian, Wood discarded Christianity as a young man, and this may have influenced Barnard in her belief that religious faith was

113 Fletcher, History & Achievement, p. 69. 114 G. A. Wood, Discovery of Australia, Macmillan, London, 1922. 115 Fletcher, History & Achievement, pp 49-50. 116 M. Barnard, [interviewed by Giulia Giuffre] for A Writing Life, 1982-1987, transcript, National Library of Australia p. 2737. Also Giuffre, pp. 138-9. It is worth remembering that as a school-girl Barnard had already shown interest in the welfare of younger girls, so perhaps her parents could legitimately claim credit for developing her social consciousness.

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irrelevant.117 While still a student she declared her agnosticism: ‘When, I’m dead, I’m dead,’ she said. ‘I’m not religious’.118 Despite her early rebuttal of any religious beliefs, Barnard served some time on the Board of the Student Christian Union.119 That temporary allegiance may have been pragmatic, for the society where Christians met was accessible to her. She would have been familiar with the texts used, and their support of progressive social action may have interested her. Most importantly, the demands of membership were within her confidence level. There is a tantalising echo of another friendship in Barnard’s university years, about which we know nothing more than a brief mention in a later interview. ‘… at university there was a man who used to read my things and talk them over with me and encourage me, and I thought, yes, I can write.’120 She did not identify this mentor. He was probably a fellow student, though at other times she spoke of the men students disparagingly. There were more women than men students. It was during the War. There were only eleven (men) in Arts 2 and 3, because they were just at the age to enlist. Those that were at university had club feet, or a weak chest or something.121

During Professor Wood’s time in the History Department (1891 to 1928) Honours students undertook the Pass programme and examinations first, then worked on extra reading and essays over the long vacation before sitting their Honours examination in March.122 In March 1920 Barnard topped the Honours examination list with that year’s only first.123 In an earlier year this top mark could have qualified her for the Frazer Scholarship with its funds to assist further study, but the rules had changed, bringing more funds and another spectacular competitor for the prize.

117 Fletcher, History & Achievement p. 50. 118 Fletcher, History & Achievement p. 253. It is worth remembering that she had already absented herself from church attendance. 119 Fletcher, History & Achievement p. 62. 120 Z Fairbairns, ‘Marjorie Barnard: Talking with Zoe Fairbairns’, in Writing Lives – Conversations between Women Writers, Mary Chamberlain ed., Virago, London, 1988, p. 40. 121 Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington],1983. 122 Fletcher, History & Achievement, p. 52. 123 Sydney University Calendar for 1920.

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Myra Willard had topped the honours list and won the Frazer Scholarship in 1919, but in that first post-war year, the funding was found to be inadequate for further study abroad. She stayed at the university as an evening student and undertook further intensive research with Professor Wood. During that year funding for the Frazer Scholarship was increased and the rules were changed. The award would no longer depend only upon the results of the year’s honours list; all study during the year by a student would be considered, weighed. Willard, who had spent the year on research with Professor Wood was judged to be the1920 winner.124 Marjorie Barnard was awarded the University History Medal for topping the year’s examinations, but this carried no emolument. She did not win a scholarship.125 While she built a successful career as a librarian, and later as a writer, there is no record that Barnard showed any sign of being interested in further education. The success of The Persimmon Tree, (1943), A History of Australia (1962) and most particularly the successful re-publishing of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1983) drew the attention of scholarly interviewers, to whom she told her tales of winning a scholarship while she was under age. It became another way to blame her father for her failure to achieve something she now realised that she wanted. This tale could not have been told while her contemporaries from university were around to put the story straight. Barnard’s recollections, elicited by researchers, interviewers, oral historians, and journalists in the years of her old age, contain many mistakes— often under-estimations of her age. Transcripts of earlier interviews and studies of Barnard, repeat again and again that she had been under age, that is, under twenty-one, when she finished her degree. There is little doubt, that her memory, affected by age, was quite unreliable. In 1983, she told an oral historian, that she would have enjoyed an academic life, and insisted that she had been sixteen, seventeen and eighteen years old when she was doing her degree and thus too young to choose a career for herself.126

124 Sydney University Calendar in Archives. 125 Fletcher, History & Achievement p. 105. Also University Calender 1920. 126 Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington], 1983.

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It is clear from records that Marjorie Barnard was born in August 1897 and finished formal study at the University of Sydney with her honours examinations in March 1920, five months before her twenty-third birthday. It may have been this piece of misinformation about Barnard’s age at graduation that led some scholars to depict her father as not only less than generous, but also domineering and repressive.127 My study has not supported this view. Barnard’s first class honours degree and university medal for history would have probably qualified her to enrol at Oxford,128 but she was not offered a scholarship. In 1920, Oswald Barnard probably did not want his socially inexperienced daughter to travel across the world alone. Few middle-class Australian fathers of that time would have been happy to send a young daughter to the other side of the world for further study unaccompanied, since it meant separation from the family for years. Oxford in 1920 would have been full of the post-war influx of young men, returning to their studies after military service. This circumstance would only add to a father’s fears, but there is no evidence that Marjorie Barnard considered the possibility or even the desirability of further study at this time. If she had wanted to continue study there were several opportunities available locally. Professor Wood actively encouraged his students to continue with post-graduate study and even helped them to study Law or Theology or Science or Agriculture if they wanted to equip themselves more directly for a profession. If students wanted to add to their history or philosophy studies, or other Arts subjects, they could complete an MA with more examinations and essays. Sydney University had decided not to award Master’s degrees merely for time passed after graduation, as was offered in Oxford and Cambridge.129 Had Barnard decided to continue at Sydney University there would have been no crippling cost to consider, whereas young Australians who made it to

127 J. Roe, ‘The Historical Imagination and its Enemies: M Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’, Meanjin, Vol. 43, No. 2, 1984: 243. Also Rorabacher, pp. 22-3. 128 Fletcher. History & Achievement, also University Calendar for 1920. 129 Fletcher, History & Achievement, pp. 68-70.

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Oxford during the years between the wars, were usually supported by generous scholarships or independently wealthy families. Research reveals very little information that directly illuminates Oswald Barnard’s character, but we know he did not dominate his wife and daughter and that he was deeply concerned about his daughter’s health and education and made costly decisions for her benefit.130 We also know (if Barnard’s story is factual), that consideration for his wife’s welfare led Oswald Barnard into abstinence in their marriage.131 It was only after her father’s death that Barnard claimed that he had not been interested in her, or her writing. ‘I was my mother’s girl. My father did not like me and I did not like him. I think he was jealous. I adored my mother; I was important in her life. We just clung together. My father was the third one…132

In that context ‘jealous’ must mean that Barnard believed her father was jealous of the closeness of the mother/daughter relationship and that he felt excluded. Perhaps he did. One can imagine his sadness if this accurately depicts relationships within the Barnard family. A three-cornered tug–of-war for an only child’s love is not unusual, particularly if it includes an always- present semi-invalid mother. Until the middle years of the 20th century the father-figure in middle-class Australian families represented power, control and responsibility as well as nurture and emotional and financial support. A father’s domination was considered part of being paternal, part of being financially responsible for the entire family’s welfare, upkeep and safety. Barnard admired the two great, independent Australian women writers of her era. Both Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead emerged from difficult father-dominated homes and used familial conflicts as the basis for their most successful books.133 In 1973 Barnard, in speaking of the way

130 For example, he hired governesses rather than send her to school when he thought a school day might tire her. When she was ready for school he chose the fee-paying Cambridge School though a well-respected primary school was nearby. 131 See chapter 2 for information which explains some of the family actions in terms of this event. 132 K. Williamson, ‘The Remarkable Marjorie Barnard’, The National Times, Aug 15, 1983. 133 H. Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1930 and C. Stead, The Man Who Loved Children. Simon & Schuster, Sydney, 1940.

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Richardson had successfully used her father in The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, said: ‘I think Henry Handel Richardson is magnificent. Absolutely heartless. She used her own father — with such clinical ability — screwed the very last drop out of him. I think that takes great strength of character…134

Barnard did not use her father in her fiction; she was adamant that her characters were imagined, not drawn from life. It is worth considering that Barnard’s many criticisms of her father after his death could very well be the deliberate manipulation of a writer making her quiet supportive family sound more interesting — turning her past into a story, imagining conflict, possibly to win sympathy. Robert Darby points out, there is ‘no evidence that Barnard ever rebelled against parental restrictions while they were alive.’135 Barnard’s father gave her an allowance, not only during her youthful study at university, but later, in 1935, when she left her job at the library to write full-time. As a middle-aged woman, she happily accepted another much more generous ‘allowance’ from this father whom she called a ‘thwarter’. Initially they had agreed on two years as the time to allow her to establish a writing career, but he continued to pay her this allowance for the rest of his life. Despite Barnard’s assertion that her father was not interested in her writing, he financially supported her dream to become a writer from the time of his private publication of her juvenilia, The Ivory Gate, in 1920 and continued doing so until his death in 1940. The Ivory Gate was published by H H Champion, Aust. Authors’ Agency, Melbourne in 1920. It is not known whether Oswald Barnard, or Marjorie herself, tried to have this collection published commercially before approaching Champion. According to Hazel Rowley, Angus and Robertson, the major Australian publisher at the time, were not interested in budding new writers unless it was commercially viable. Their editor rejected Christina

134 Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], 26 July 1973. 135 R. Darby, ‘While Freedom Lives: political preoccupations in the writing of Marjorie Barnard and Frank Dalby Davison, 1935-1947’. PhD thesis, ADFA, 1989.

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Stead’s collection of youthful stories submitted by her father in 1925 with this explanation, which could have applied equally to Barnard’s stories: They are remarkable for their language and imagery—in fact they are charming. The trouble is that poetical fancies like these are too old for young children and older boys and girls…mostly prefer books of adventure...136

Oswald Barnard was sufficiently interested in his daughter’s dreams of writing to invest in the publication of what we must presume to be the best of her youthful writing. The collection in The Ivory Gate is a mixed group: adventure stories with boy protagonists and fathers in the army, gothic tales complete with a house of horror, a Cinderella story echoing the wish-fulfilment dreams of a shy little girl, boarding school stories seemingly taken straight from an English schoolgirls’ annual but localised by a well-depicted Blue Mountains setting, what seems to be a school science project expanded to incorporate fantasy, and a fairy story with an original and imaginative twist. There is even a picaresque tale, and one powerful and beautifully disciplined essay. Through them all, the language is sure and sophisticated but where there are plots they are often loose and characterisation is more often thin than robust, and frequently unconvincing. Everything about these stories suggests a very young and inexperienced writer struggling to express herself, using language confidently and revealing attitudes that seem dated even for 1920. Barnard, even at this early age was experimenting, trying out various structural forms to see how they worked. As noted earlier, she claimed that her childhood reading was limited to Scott and Dickens and Shakespeare with some ‘Golliwog’ books137 but there is evidence of some run-of-the-mill English school stories, too. Overall the stories lack balance; seeming to be aimed at an audience of young children but couched in language that is adult. There is no evidence that Barnard was exposed to the realism of Ethel Turner, Mary Grant Bruce or even Ethel Pedley’s Dot and the Kangaroo, stories that she would have found much more relevant as models.

136 H. Rowley, Christina Stead, a biography, Minerva, Melbourne, 1994, p. 60. 137 Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington], 1983.

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In ‘The Runaways’, one of the few stories featuring boy characters Barnard used ugly spelling to emphasise class difference in the boys’ speech, which jars to-day and possibly did in 1920, too. Some stories in The Ivory Gate seem to be set in England. In ‘Shadows’, a gothic story, in which a child’s horror of being alone in her bedroom with ghostly shadows is beautifully evoked, has the absent mother returning home from India much more quickly than expected because she travels overland for the first half of the journey. Except for probably using a Hunters Hill house that had fascinated her during her daily walks to the Cambridge School, Barnard rarely taps into her own life experience, with the notable exception of the essay, ‘A Bush Walk’. Throughout her life Barnard had spent holidays with her family in the Blue Mountains, that jumbled series of grand ridges and hidden valleys directly inland from Sydney. When she was sixteen, she wrote to a school- friend from Leura, where her family had taken a holiday cottage, of the immensity of the bush and its beauty. Her effort to share her impressions were poured out breathlessly: … The young trees have shed their bark and are clean and silvery in the sunlight; here and there one bears the mark of an old forgotten fire. Every little patch of undergrowth conceals some tiny heaven of gold and blue flowers. I love it all and it makes me desperate because I cannot express it.138

This powerful urge to communicate emotions aroused by the beauty of the natural world lasted all Barnard’s writing life. It is one of the qualities that make her writing vivid, lively and engaging, but in this collection only the essay reveals this Barnard.

‘A Bush Walk’ is mature, controlled and calm compared to her earlier letters and compared also to the rest of The Ivory Gate collection. Indeed it seems almost certain that the essay was written somewhat later, perhaps even immediately before the collection was assembled. One can imagine Barnard writing it while enjoying another holiday in the mountains after finishing her final university examinations; what one cannot imagine is that it was written

138 M. Barnard, [letter to Myrtle Colefax], March 1914. Held in the Sydney Girls' High School archives, Moore Park, Sydney.

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contemporaneously with the other stories in this collection. Its language is fluid, vivid, alight with images without a redundant flourish: Just where the trees had grown and the real bush commenced on the steep, graceful curve of the mountain, a bush fire had swept and left behind it nothing but a wide, black band, fit mourning for all the bright leaves and straight young saplings that had once made it beautiful.

Gone are the strained words and convoluted images: Sometimes, as I watched, a bird soared up from some crevice in a rocky cliff and far down below, ringed in by trees, was a tiny clearing and a little green house in the midst. Of all that lonely, silent scene that spot seemed loneliest and most remote from life.

Most of the stories in The Ivory Gate are practice scales for the future novelist, rather than for the future short-story writer. An enormous gap yawns in the history of Barnard’s writing between the ages of twenty-three and thirty. If she did write, sometimes, with Eldershaw, nothing of it remains. She confessed to destroying all her ‘failed’ attempts once A House is Built won the literary prize, thus confirming her belief that she could write.139 ……………………………………………………………

139 Barnard, ‘The Gentle Art of Collaboration’.

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Chapter 3 – Librarian & A House is Built 1921/9

‘Writing a novel seems as easy to almost any literate woman as making a dress.’ 140

Notwithstanding her father’s efforts in publishing her first collection of short stories in the months after her graduation Marjorie Barnard was not yet ready to embark on a career in literature. Librarianship was a popular profession among women history graduates, so in 1921 Barnard answered an advertisement that offered training at the Public Library in Macquarie Street. After three weeks training there, Barnard moved to the Sydney Technical College Library where four years later she was the senior of two staff members sharing the work-load. ‘I enjoyed the job,’ Barnard told Judy Washington, Lane Cove Council’s historian, ‘The students were mainly working men who had night lectures until 9pm…After a day’s work they just came to read their text books.’141Barnard helped the teaching staff with research but even among the staff there was little interest in books as literature and none at all in writing. Barnard and Eldershaw were pleased to have entered two professional fields that welcomed the employment of women; but they both knew that neither area of work offered them the satisfaction of complete immersion in literature that they yearned for.142 So, during week-ends they spent together in the Barnard home and longer stays in the mountains or on the coast, they read new novels as they came out, discussed and assessed them and dreamed of writing their own. For seven years Barnard, happy in her work as a librarian, practised for her future career as a writer.

In 1922 the Barnard family moved house again, this time to realise Ethel Barnard’s longing to live overlooking the Harbour. From nearby Mary Street they moved to Jerrara, at 2 Stuart Street, Longueville, the address found on most of Barnard’s many letters. It is a comfortable brick and tile house built

140 V. Palmer, ‘Women and the Novel’ The Bulletin, 20 July 1926. 141 Marjorie Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington], Longueville, 1983, Oral History transcript, Lane Cove Public Library, Local Studies Collection. 142 Eldershaw began her teaching career at Cremorne Grammar School in 1920. Two years later she moved to the Presbyterian Ladies College in Croyden where she lived in as a house- mistress teaching English, Latin and sports. See John McFarlane, The golden hope: Presbyterian Ladies' College, Sydney, 1888-1988. Presbyterian Ladies' College, Croydon, 1988.

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in the California bungalow style popular at the time. Fronted by a wide and deep verandah and backed by accommodation for a live-in housekeeper, it sits on its corner of Stuart Street still, extended and renovated, and now another family’s home. Nancy Keesing describes it as it was when Barnard lived there:

Marjorie Barnard lives in a house her father built on a high ridge at Longueville. The expansive view from its deep verandahs sweeps from Hunters Hill and Woolwich across the Lane Cove River… Hunters Hill is where the Quartermaster built his house and the central prospect is…the soil on which Australian history began. This is no longer Macquarie’s world and Captain Piper might scarcely recognise his harbour, but… just outside Marjorie’s gate … the bush, … retains its untameable and timeless quality.143

Barnard’s bedroom windows looked out at two different views of the harbour, and it was here that she wrote for fifty years, most often sitting propped up in bed with a card table nearby to collect the finished manuscript pages.

In 1928 Virginia Woolf made her famous pronouncement that a woman writer needed a room of her own and £500 a year. It is likely that many Australian women writers had their room, but few had anything approaching the £500 income that Woolf deemed necessary. To provide for their living costs most Australian women writers needed recourse to another income. Some had regular full-time work, as did Eldershaw throughout her writing life; some had help from family members. Barnard managed comfortably on a combination of the two.

Close friends since they met at university in 1916, the two young women had thought about writing a novel together for years though nothing came of it but a few pages of notes and some despair.’144 In January 1928, a notice about the Bulletin’s first novel competition, drew them to more positive action. They decided to write their novel, using the competition deadline of August as an incentive.145 It seems almost to be a lucky accident, that

143 N. Keesing, “Everything in Not Enough – an interview with Marjorie Barnard”, Quadrant, 1977, p. 30. 144 M Barnard, [a statement], Marjorie Barnard Papers, 1927-1960, MLMSS 451 Box5(3), Mitchell Library. 145 Barnard, Marjorie Barnard Papers, 1927-1960 MLMSS 451 Box5(3),

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temptation of the £500 prize led them to extend their friendship into a literary partnership that rapidly presented them both with a new career. As both were history graduates they began work on their entry by researching background for their story in the Mitchell Library where they soon realised that their main interest lay in Sydney’s history of the mid-19th century.

Australia’s writers had used its history in novels, short stories and poetry for a hundred years, usually in tales of exploration, convicts or bushrangers in outback struggles against the continent’s natural adversities. Instead of trying to follow this pattern of the previous Bulletin stories, Barnard and Eldershaw would write about the world they knew. Their characters would not be the pioneers, shearers, squatters, and drovers’ wives but men and women of Sydney’s comfortable middle class.

In their story they would avoid the gritty underside of the city. Nothing would be seen of street crime, abject poverty or prostitution. Convicts at work and rats scuttling along lanes in The Rocks might appear, but only at a safe distance. Their novel would be of a Sydney peopled by merchants, sea- captains from the busy port, and well-dressed ladies serving tea in elegant drawing rooms.

Their choice of a town setting may have been an instinctive feminine drawing aside of skirts from the heavily masculine flavour of the usual Bulletin stories or it could have been the authors’ deliberate concentration on their own solidly middle-class social world. Or, as modern young women, they could have guessed that city readers might like to read of people and places more akin to their own lives. Whatever the reason, Barnard began, with this novel, a lifetime of putting Sydney on paper. From that first decision, the greater part of her considerable literary talent was focussed on telling the story of Sydney and its people. Barnard and Eldershaw, in 1928, wanted to show Sydney’s vibrant growth as a commercial centre by telling the story of the rise and eventual fall of one family and its commercial house. Barnard explained how they went about writing that first novel:

We collected our local and historical colour from the Mitchell Library, in the streets of Sydney and from old friends.… the plot began as the

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story of James Hyde’s grandson Lionel and his family. But the prologue proved so rich in material & the period so fascinating to us that we abandoned our original idea and developed the prologue into a full- length novel…146 We worked on the idea and gradually the picture of a family developed. We talked and talked and then we wrote. I did most of the writing. Flora went over it, suggesting alterations.147

Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw submitted ‘A House is Built’, using a pseudonym (as was required) that coupled their second given names together as ‘Faith Sidney’. That first choice of pseudonym was an evocative and even-handed one, exhibiting as it does poignancy in the simple ‘Faith’ while ‘Sidney’ honours their home city. Why they discarded it and chose instead M Barnard Eldershaw has never been established, though Maryanne Dever suggests that their pseudonym was chosen to reveal rather than conceal the identity of the authors.148

It also had the disadvantage of giving the surname and thus the filing rights in libraries and bookshops to Flora Eldershaw, and that positioning inevitably swayed opinion towards her as the likely major contributor in the partnership. This was unfortunate because for various reasons, including the poor health and early death of Eldershaw, Barnard did a larger share of the actual pen-on-paper writing within the partnership, though she frequently proclaimed that each partner’s contribution was equal: that Eldershaw’s ideas, clever editing and revision were essential.

The Bulletin announced the results of that first literary competition in its issue of 22nd August 1928. After considering 540 entries the judges awarded two first prizes: one to ‘A House is Built’ by Faith Sidney, the other to ‘Coonardoo’ by Ashburton Jim (Katharine Susannah Prichard), with a third

146 M. Barnard, Marjorie Barnard Papers, 1927-1960. MLMSS 451 Box5(3) Mitchaell Library. Another version printed in ‘The Period Novel – an Infinity of Problems’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 & 30 November 1929. 147 M. Barnard, [ABC interview with D. Modjeska], Marjorie Barnard Papers, 1927-1960, together with the papers of Flora S. Eldershaw, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 148 M. Dever, ‘Subject to Authority: A study of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw’. PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 1993. Also available for study at the UNSW Library. There is also the possibility that the suggestion of masculinity in the name might give them an edge in a period during which books by male authors were more highly regarded.

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prize to ‘Men are Human’ by Bryan Ward (). 149 For Barnard and Eldershaw the icing on the cake of their euphoria was an additional comment in the judges’ report:

Our first choice is ‘A House is Built’, an Australian prose epic of marked literary quality. We find, however, such great merit in ‘Coonardoo’, with its outstanding value for serial publication, that we recommend it also as worthy of a first prize.’

Generously, the Bulletin gave two first prizes. Each winner was awarded the originally offered £500. One was shared by Barnard and Eldershaw, the other went to Katharine Susannah Prichard. In the same issue of the Bulletin the editor of a column entitled: ‘A Woman’s Letter’ was quick to trumpet the pre-eminence of women among that elite group of prize-winners: ‘The Bulletin asked the judges to choose one first prize story and they came back with two in their hands, and both of them the work of women.’150

Vance Palmer was already an experienced writer and it is likely that he smarted with resentment at his third place behind three women writers, (two of them beginners), for he thought that –‘Writing a novel seems as easy to almost any literate woman as making a dress.’151 Barnard and Eldershaw were both young unmarried women busy in their different professions, so it is unlikely that either spent much time sewing their own wardrobes, but, Vance Palmer’s statement was startlingly candid and couched in terms that were less than flattering to the many successful women writers of the time, including his wife, Nettie. Was his comment just a male put-down at a time when women were struggling to make their way out of the purely domestic realm and into the arts and professions? Or was it a generous recognition of women’s pre- eminent skill in handling telling details, whether in words or stitches? By the time Palmer won the Bulletin’s second novel competition the following year, he

149 D. Modjeska, Exiles at Home, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1981, p. 5. 150 Anon, ‘The Women’s Page’, Bulletin, 22 August 1928, p. 44. 151 V. Palmer, ‘Women and the Novel’, Bulletin, 29 July 1926, p. 3.

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and his wife, Nettie, had established an important mentoring relationship with

Barnard.152

After the favourable publicity surrounding their win, Barnard and Eldershaw were immediately welcomed into the literary world of Sydney, aware that sharing their Bulletin prize with Katharine Susannah Prichard, an already acclaimed Western Australian writer, helped ease their way. The first instalment of her Coonardoo was printed in The Bulletin just a week after the announcement of the prize, but the Bulletin’s editorial team assessed A House is Built as too long with too diverse a plot to serialise. Under the authors’ pressure they reluctantly agreed to publish an abridged version. Everything beyond the death of James Hyde, was deleted, with the resulting short version titled with the now more fitting name, ‘The Quartermaster’.153

Angus and Robertson declined to publish either of the first prize- winners, and in 1973 Barnard told a meeting of The Society of Women Writers assembled to honour her 76th birthday, of how the publisher’s editor, having declined to offer her a chair in his office, had flung the manuscript of ‘A House is Built’ across his desk towards her with the words, ’Quite impossible. Take it away.’154 That editor may have rued his hasty dismissal for, in the hands of George G. Harrup, its English publisher, A House is Built was successful, and has remained in print for most of its eighty plus years.

The last two years of the 1920s were good years for Australian literature and very good years for women writers. After the 1928 Bulletin Prize with its three women prize-winners came the Australian Literary Society’s Gold Medal in 1929, awarded to Henry Handel Richardson’s Ultima Thule, the final book of a trilogy that followed Richard Mahony through the vicissitudes of nineteenth-century Australian life. A House is Built has some similarities to that trilogy - The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. They both tell the story of nineteenth-century life in Australia as distinct from life in England. Both outline a colony’s coming of age, its gold

152 See the many letters, most in the Papers of Vance and , 1850-1966. National Library of Australia, MS 3942. 153 Barnard, Marjorie Barnard Papers 1927 - 1960. ML451 Box 3 Mitchell Library, Sydney 154 H. Lindsay (ed.), Ink No2, Society of Women Writers, Sydney, 1975.

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rushes, the resulting inflow of migrants and wealth, and the vagaries and values of a new society, through the dominant male head of a family. But what different stories they tell. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, set in Melbourne and Victorian country towns, is a story of failure, violence on the goldfields, and a sensitive doctor’s longing to go back to England only to find disappointment there. Returning to Australia, disillusioned, he is forced to live in poverty exacerbated by mental deterioration and despair. It leans heavily on the life of Richardson’s father. In contrast, A House is Built, set almost entirely in Sydney, is the story of a vigorous, confident seaman striving with enthusiasm, ambition and hard work to build up a business in order to provide a comfortable life, even wealth, for his family. The gold rushes only add to his success and he would never entertain a return to England where opportunities for riches and advancement would not have been available to him. Unlike The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, A House is Built has almost nothing in it of the authors’ lives; its characters are wholly fictional. The vast difference in the tone of these two novels begins with the circumstances in which they were written. Richardson, arguably Australia’s first great novelist, left her home city of Melbourne to pursue her first love, music, in Europe. There she discovered her writing voice and there she made her life, never returning to live in Australia. Barnard chose to stay safely at home in Sydney, writing as she looked from her windows across the Harbour to the growing city. A House is Built is a song of adulation to Sydney, written by two women who lived in that city and loved it. Every day they saw and enjoyed the places they were writing about. Barnard and Eldershaw’s first novel, A House is Built, was written over nine months in the partners’ scanty spare time; the plot was carefully planned. Barnard explained it as ‘painstakingly designed with each chapter first discussed, then written by one and edited by the other.’155 This is perhaps Barnard’s first description of how their collaboration was managed. She wrote

155 Barnard ‘Creative Fiction’ [Lecture], 1929. Marjorie Barnard’s Papers 1927-1960, MLMSS 451 Box5(3), Mitchell Library.

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of it in response to the many questions and doubts from writers about the incongruity of fiction, a creation of the imagination, being written jointly by two people. In A House is Built the story begins in 1837 when James Hyde, a former naval quartermaster steps ashore in Sydney Cove from his ship the Intrepid and decides at once that this is the place where he will spend the rest of his life: Immediately below him were the harbour waters glinting in the winter sunlight. Its great expanse seemed almost crowded with the motley craft that lay moored within its sheltering heads. Square-rigged whalers from the East and South Pacific lay anchored close to the wharves… tall East Indiamen and …weather-beaten traders from the China Sea and the western ports of America, and small staunch vessels for the coastal trade.156

James Hyde’s words highlight his character, and his enthusiasm for the mercantile life, and set the tone of the novel. Compare his view of Sydney Cove with how another Sydney writer, , saw the same port with the eye of a poet, The sky was pierced to heaven with masts, with the purgatory of sailors’ years between them and the earth.157

Within three pages, the story has begun with the protagonist introduced and well-characterised, the setting and the theme laid out, and the tone of the story established. In the ten years between Barnard’s juvenile writing and A House is Built she had taken time to study successful novels. She had also benefitted from Eldershaw’s editorial skills. The earlier weaknesses have vanished. The structure of A House is Built is chronological, divided into three books, one for each of the three houses in which the Hyde family lived on their way to wealth — ‘Windmill Street’, ‘City Road’ and ‘The Hill’. Within two years Hyde has gone home, settled his affairs and is back in Sydney buying the store on the waterfront with its own wharf from which he will build his fortune. Within months his young adult family, William, Fanny

156 M. Barnard Eldershaw, A House is Built. Australasian Publishing Company, London, 1966, p. 9. 157 M. Gilmore, Old Days, Old Ways, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1963, cited in D. Stewart, The Broad Stream, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1975, p. 105.

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and Maud are settled into their home above the store in Windmill Street. The Quartermaster dominates his family as he dominates the book; he is vital and positive, a fountain of goodwill and good sense, quite certain that Sydney holds a great future for them. His three children are divided in their opinion about their father’s venture. William misses the Englishness of England; he sees nothing good or tasteful about Sydney Cove. Our view of William is distorted early in the novel when, delivering furniture, he is trapped by a wash-stand falling up-side down, encircling his shoulders, and confining him comically within its legs. His driver must release him in full view of a rival business family, who happens to be passing. William’s humiliation makes an amusing scene of the exaggerated slapstick variety in which Barnard and Eldershaw seldom indulge. Perhaps they put this scene early in the novel to alert readers that the book would have its light-hearted moments, for William is not a ridiculous character, he does not go through the novel as a figure of fun, but soon settles down to become a competent businessman. His sisters like to observe the buzz of Sydney from their rooms above the store. Activity at the store and the wharf ebbed and flowed. Sometimes the men were working from sunrise until far into the night, hurrying to and fro with lanterns, shouting to one another. The girls in the room above the store would lie awake and listen to … the thud and rattle of ships’ gear… and the excitement of the night.158

Serene and competent, Hyde’s elder daughter, Fanny, calmly accepts her household duties as mistress of their home, though she is envious of William working with their father in the store. Maud, James Hyde’s younger daughter, is pretty, charming, with ‘an eye for the lads’ and ready to enjoy whatever life brings.159 The Quartermaster branches out, buys a half-share of a whaling ship and eventually brings its captain home to dinner. Captain Hildebrand, grave and reticent in manner, is polite and deferential to his host’s daughters, but

158 Barnard Eldershaw, A House is Built, p. 15. 159 Barnard Eldershaw, A House is Built, p. 16.

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Fanny, inexperienced in the ways of men, imagines that he is attracted to her. Their relationship has no substance, and she is rebuffed. The barest minimum of emotion is presented in the text. Captain Hildebrand’s polite and flattering attention was just that; he had a wife somewhere, and is amused that his casual courtesy had been so misunderstood. Fanny is mortified, and she never really recovers from this humiliation. Somewhat bewilderingly for readers, her character changes from that of a pleasant, competent young woman to a silly girl lacking poise and common- sense. Years later Barnard admitted to a school-girl reader that they had made a mistake in rendering Fanny so easily diminished. ‘Fanny had a disappointing life,’ Barnard explained to the child, ‘but we were wrong to make her always sad. Somebody with her strong character would not have been.’160 In women-starved Sydney of the 1830s and 1840s spinsterhood was by no means inevitable for Fanny, who is rendered early in the novel as an intelligent, attractive young woman. She remains unmarried to fill the authors’ desire to depict a society in which there is no place for unmarried women. It is likely that they felt that Sydney society of their own times, nearly a century later, had hardly changed. Fanny’s shame at rejection is so intense that she falls ill. The first book ends with Maud’s elopement with a wealthy young man from a successful business family. Maud is happy, but with her move away from Windmill Street, she drops out of the main action of the book. As Barnard said, there is ‘always less to be said about happy people’.161 William, meanwhile, will not bring his fiancée from England to live above a shop! They buy a house in City Road from which they can watch the slow building of the sandstone University across the park. Pretty and gracious, an adored youngest daughter, Adela left her family to join a man she had not seen for seven years. One day she says wonderingly: ‘Is it not strange, I have been in New South Wales for more than a year, and yet I know very little about it? … We live much the same sort of lives as we did in England. I thought it would be so different.’

160 Barnard’s answers to a questionnaire put to her by the students at Leichhardt Junior Girls’ High School. Marjorie Barnard Papers at Lane Cove Library. 161 Barnard’s Lecture on ‘Creative Fiction’ 1929. Barnard’s papers 1927-1960, MLMSS 451 Box5(3), Mitchell Library.

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William replies with the speech that has caused laughter among Australian readers ever since: I have striven to reproduce our English life as far as possible…I think it is the duty of every Englishman to reproduce English conditions as far as possible wherever he may happen to be. The man who does not, I don’t scruple to say, is a renegade… What finer thing can we do for Australia but to make it like another England? Australia of itself is nothing… Ours is a race of empire-builders because no Englishman worthy of the name ever yields to climate or environment.162

Invigorated by the birth of James, his first grandson, the Quartermaster begins pursuing business in the gold-fields. He leaves Sydney in the mid- winter of 1851, and except for brief visits, does not return for over six years. Without his robust figure fronting the cast in Sydney, the story loses much of its vitality. With increasing wealth the Hydes buy their third house in Hunters Hill163 and the Quartermaster, having set up subsidiary businesses all the way from Bathurst to Melbourne, returns home. Young James takes his boat out onto the harbour in a storm. His boat overturns and the pride of the Hyde family drowns. The Quartermaster has a stroke on hearing the news of his favourite’s death. Then William has a heart attack triggered by overwork and grief. All these tragedies just prior to the end of the story expose too starkly the engineering used to bring Lionel (William’s second son and the future father of their originally planned protagonist) to the point of heading up the business. Overall the plot is simple and straightforward, and strictly chronological. Most of the sideshows are kept away from the main thrust of the Hyde family’s forward and upward movement, a movement that mirrors Sydney’s progress at the time. George G Harrup of London published the full manuscript of A House is Built, to acclaim, in 1929. Much of its success, particularly overseas, is said to be owed to Arnold Bennett’s review in the Evening Standard, London’. Bennett considered the novel ‘a major phenomenon of modern fiction’, adding: ‘Its

162 Barnard Eldershaw, A House is Built, p. 152. 163 Modelled on the house Barnard had admired when she played with the children of the Swedish consul on her way home from the Cambridge School.

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quality is epical… and the emotional power is maintained right to the end.’164A House is Built was soon published in America, with an abundance of favourable reviews. It has been reprinted many times in Australia as well as England and has rarely been left to languish out-of-print. It has been on school reading lists, and is often recommended for an understanding of the history, and social mores, of nineteenth-century Sydney. In 1949 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation scripted and broadcast A House is Built as a radio serial in 119 episodes, read over the air by Kevin Brennan after being adapted by Colin Roderick, and later it had another appearance as a radio play. Many excerpts have been published, notably by Clem Christesen, long-time editor of Meanjin. He used a section as a chapter in Australian Heritage claiming that ‘it presented as true a picture of the gold- rush era as any non-fiction.’ 165 I have compared A House is Built with Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, for the contrasting views of early Australia, but Rorabacher, less aptly I feel, compared it to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.166 It could also be compared with Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, published the same year, for both reflect the rise and fall of a middle-class business house and the personal relationships operating within the family at its core. Several stories within A House is Built have little to do with the main plot and represent the beginning of Barnard’s interest in the use of layered stories which culminated in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, often referred to as a novel within a novel. The most memorable story apart from the wash-stand fiasco is the story that Meikle, the whaling ship’s mate, told of Captain Hildebrand quelling a threatened mutiny by his starving crew as he forced them to wait for the coming of the whales in the southern seas. The long digression when the Quartermaster follows customers to the gold-fields, takes him all over the New South Wales fields and into Victoria, introducing Chinese miners and problems related to their importation. Convict transportation and

164 A Bennett, A book review, Evening Standard, London, 1929. 165 C. Christesen (ed.), Australian Heritage. Longmans, Green & co, London, 1969. 166 L. Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw. Twayne Publishers Inc., New York, 1973, p. 34.

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the need to end it also creeps in as historians Barnard and Eldershaw present their story against vivid backdrops of nineteenth century Australia. Descriptions of rural industries such as flour-milling, farming at Camden and contemporary attitudes such as the tension between Australians and the Englishmen still exercising colonial power, and noteworthy events such as the wreck of the Dunbar, enliven the text. The authors even introduce the discoverer of gold, Edward Hargreaves, in conversation with the fictional James Hyde. Contemporary reviews suggest that readers in the 1930s were happy to have their Australian history served up as an accompaniment to the family saga, and force us to question Barnard’s claim that this was a period novel not an historical one.167 John K Ewers, writing only a decade or so later, accepted this history-studded packaging as a legitimate and interesting way to present a novel, and wrote of A House is Built as ‘an excellent piece of historical reconstruction coupled with some fine characterisation.’168 The descriptions of dress, furnishings and decorations, are a highlight, as they depict not only the physical objects in the lives of the Hyde family but the part they played in value judgments within the early Victorian society of the newly-rich in Sydney. The foibles and vanities of the age are described with the gentle irony that later became a trade-mark in Barnard’s writing. When the Hyde family went out to the theatre — the strictest decorum was observed within the family. Adela, as the wife, wore the most handsome gown, the greatest quantity of jewellery, and she was handed in and out of the carriage first; Fanny as sister and spinster, dressed more plainly; and Esther as dependent, dressed very plainly indeed and contented herself with a simple locket containing a wreath of her sainted mamma’s hair. She sat with her back to the horses.169

In 1930 a Mr. Watson wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald pointing out that a naval quartermaster would not have had the all-important buying and selling experience and skills that enabled James Hyde to build a mighty

167 Barnard, in answer to a question by schoolgirl, Lorelle Bruhn, of Leichhardt Junior Girls’ High School. Marjorie Barnard’s Papers, Lane Cove Library 169 J. Ewers, Creative Writing in Australia, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1945, p. 55. 169 Barnard Eldershaw, A House is Built, p. 155.

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business. Watson maintained that Barnard and Eldershaw had confused the duties of a naval quartermaster with those of an army quartermaster. We have no record of any response, but my enquiries have confirmed Mr. Watson’s

claim.170 Proud though Barnard was of their first very successful novel, she was anxious that she and Eldershaw try more and different literary challenges. One of the elements they had looked for in their private study of literature was whether the author under review progressed in skill from one work to the next. Barnard applied the same expectation when criticising her own work and in planning a new novel. In the chapters to come I will discuss how she tested her versatility in writing articles, essays, criticism and reviews, short stories, histories, biographies and other, very different novels over what became a long writing career. ………………………………………………………………..

170 In the Army a quartermaster is in charge of supplies, but in the navy, a quartermaster is the one who steers the ship. A naval man with the skills Barnard and Eldershaw sought was most likely the purser— then as now one of the people in charge of obtaining supplies. It could have been the bosun or the master, for in the Royal Navy responsibility for the purchase of the goods required aboard ship is divided according to their purpose. Before 1860 the purser was often not paid a salary; but was expected to earn his income by charging an allowable mark– up on all the food, drink other supplies he purchased for the ship and its crew. The cleverer he was in purchasing, the larger his profit. This exactly fits the descriptions of James Hyde’s experience and would have trained him to become the canny trader who set up his own successful business in Sydney Cove. Information supplied by friends of the author: former Australian Naval officer Captain David J Dalton FIE Aust. RAN (Ret’d) and former Australian Army officer Lt Colonel Michael R Price (Ret’d).

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Chapter 4 – Green Memory-comparing first two novels

‘We are at work now on our second book, but it goes very slowly. We feel we can never love another as the first….’Barnard171

In 1928, while they waited for the result of the Bulletin competition and in the frustrating period while they sought a publisher for the prize-winning A House is Built, Barnard and Eldershaw worked on writing their second historical novel, Green Memory.172 It took them two years to write, which Barnard thought much too slow.173 Like A House is Built, Green Memory is set in Sydney and follows the fortunes and misfortunes of a family in the middle years of the nineteenth century. It offers another view of Sydney’s middle-class world with characters who are connected with the government rather than commerce, and while the Hyde family is driven by the excitement of their success, the Havens face the stress of failure. In a reversal of the Hyde family’s rapid climb to success and riches in their mansion in Hunters Hill, the Haven family falls from a high point of affluence in Darling Point to disaster, chaos and penury in Woolloomooloo. However, Green Memory is not about the accumulation or diminution of wealth, but the transformation of a family as each member copes with the loss of everything they have held dear. Even though George Harrap, their London publisher, was happy to publish Green Memory, Barnard had qualms about whether its downward plot action would appeal to readers. As soon as it was finished she sought Nettie Palmer’s professional opinion.174Then, only two weeks later, she followed up the synopsis she had sent Nettie Palmer with another ‘explanation’.175 Nettie Palmer’s reply has not survived, but Barnard’s response suggests that it was encouraging.

171 M. Barnard, [letter to Mary Gilmore], 7 August 1929. Angus & Robertson Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 172 Competition result announced in August 1928. A House is Built published by George Harrap, London in 1929. 173 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 1 December 1930. MS1174/1/3721, Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 174 Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 16 November 1930. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers. 175 Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 1 December 1930, Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers.

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Set in the 1850s and 1860s Green Memory tells the story of how the children of a disgraced government official fight to keep their memories of their beloved father fresh - or green. A charming, well-respected and successful head of a government department, Alfred Haven, supports the pastoralists against the growing power of Sydney’s politicians, townspeople and small land holders and abuses his position by ensuring that one squatter wins a ballot for more land. His dishonest behaviour is not motivated by greed, but thoughtless folly with little motivation except perhaps a whiff of toadying to the wealthy pastoralists whose society he sought. His seemingly casual decision to defy the ruIes of public service prudence brings chaos and poverty to his family, and for Haven himself, disgrace and death. The development of the five Haven children, towards weakness or strength, after their father’s suicide determines the plot, while Lucy, the eldest daughter, and the driving force of the novel and the family struggles to lift the family out of genteel poverty. Eldershaw, the middle child of a large family, may well have been the premier creator of these vivid and believable young people, for they in no way resemble the wooden children that a much younger Barnard had found so difficult to imbue with life in The Ivory Gate stories. Barnard had little exposure to children in her life, however she was an avid student of the craft of writing, studying modern writing not only from Australia but from America and England as well as translations of European literature. Except for the dead Alfred Haven, male characters do not occupy a major part in this story and the two lightly-drawn school-boy brothers present a particular problem for Lucy. Their education looms as an expensive necessity in order to guarantee an income to support the wilting mother and the youngest child, Mina, who already shows signs of mental instability. Charles, the elder brother, is astute enough to see that the extra years of expense to equip him to work as a lawyer is too much for Lucy to provide. He decides to seek his fortune in the country in the vague hope that one day he will be able to contribute to the family’s needs. Gerald, the younger brother, echoing more truly Alfred’s charm and his weakness for seeking gain by cutting corners,

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cheats to win a scholarship that will ease Lucy’s financial burden. Like his father, he is exposed and considers suicide. However the memory of his father’s body stays his hand on the razor and he faces the consequences of his action. Adult male characters are few, but newly-rich Michael Henderson who rescues Charlotte is well-drawn and likeable. Richard, Lucy’s patient admirer, is not. The best the authors can do for him is to describe his physical perfection and his manly arrogance in words even more stiff than his posture. His most passionate speech, when he realises how he has betrayed Lucy by staying away from what was to have been their engagement party, is delivered as: I see I owe you an apology, Lucy. I was bitterly chagrined when I realised the position in which I had unwittingly placed you and the interpretation you and others might put upon it. I hastened to you to entreat your forgiveness.176

Surely no healthy young man ever hoped to touch his beloved with such dullness and lack of sensitivity, even in the 1860s. Creating convincing female characters who lack charm is one of Barnard’s strengths and she succeeds in making Mrs Haven even weaker and less admirable than Esther in A House is Built. When called upon to lead her family out of disaster Mrs Haven abrogates her natural role to Lucy and sinks into lassitude and romantic novels. It is a measure of Barnard’s writing skill that she so well portrays the continuing respect and love the children give this inadequate mother. This is an area where Barnard’s life experience provided a rich and useful background, for she loved her own invalid mother and that could have been the basis for allowing Mrs Haven to retain at least the appearance of a mother’s dignity. Lucy and Charlotte both change as they face disgrace, and in Lucy’s case, poverty. The balance of personalities between these two young women is much more difficult than the tension between Fanny and Maud in A House is Built. Each novel has a calm and sensible older sister followed by a more light- hearted younger sister who marries earlier but always feels second-best within the family. The tension increases vastly in Green Memory because

176 M. Barnard Eldershaw, Green Memory, Harrap, London, 1931, p. 77. All further references to this edition.

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Charlotte’s personality changes. Her early kindness and open-hearted generosity shrivel after her marriage to the adoring and wealthy Michael. It is not a character development that is easily understood. Charlotte’s imperious disregard for Lucy’s struggles, and her careless benevolence to the rest of her family, are a deliberate ploy to undermine her sister’s efforts. Her malevolence is directed most keenly towards keeping alive her dead father’s spirit by raising her baby son in his image and, even worse, by adopting her late father’s superior attitude towards her husband, even though she had loved him when difference in class rendered him unattainable. Mina, the youngest child in the family, is eight when she finds her father’s bloodied body in the garden. Her subsequent mental trauma intensifies the mystic unreality of the world she occupies. Alarmingly she breaks through the bounds of the stifling Woolloomooloo house by filling her life with dreams and fancies and sometimes quite dangerous escapades into Woolloomooloo’s poorly lit streets. She seems to challenge the darkness – the unknown - to overcome her. The shadow of her increasing mental instability hovers over the whole family. In Barnard’s writing, language is always the most important element; the danger of Mina’s tenuous grip on reality is brought to the fore by the language employed from the first scene of the novel. It is early evening, just before the elaborate ‘engagement’ ball at the Haven’s Darling Point home. Mina, a ‘light brown leaf of a child’, is in the garden. ‘Every plant stirred restlessly’ and there is a ‘shimmer of movement over everything.’ Thus we are alerted that other-worldly things are about to happen. They will weaken Mina’s connection with reality as fancies ‘flickered in her mind as fast and as confusedly as the shadows of the lilac leaves.’177 Most of the book is written simply and reads easily, but Barnard loved extravagant language and sometimes her culling pen fails to trim the overblown, as in her description of the candlelight later in that first evening. Towards the end of the party Alfred Haven emerges from his study, then, after all the guests have left, takes his wife and adult daughters into his study to tell

177 Barnard Eldershaw, Green Memory, pp. 7-8.

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them the dreadful news of his disgrace and dismissal. The room had a dismal air of disaster and stale candle smoke, and must have looked and smelt as depleted and dejected as they all felt. Barnard describes it: A single branch of candles set down on the table cast a wavering light over them all as the flames struggled like agonised St Simeons on their white pillars. The room was filled with flickering light and shadow, so that of itself it seemed possessed by hesitation and bewilderment, dark creepings of shadow and sudden effulgences, as if it had begun to pulse with a life alien to and at variance with the people in it.178

This powerful suggestion of death and disaster heralds the fall in the Haven family’s fortunes and could not differ more from the beginning of A House is Built with its ambitious plans, and burgeoning promises of a wonderful future. Lucy’s efforts to save the family are convincing. She, alone in the family, recognises the true nature of Alfred Haven’s weakness, but she still tries to follow his plan for the family’s future because that is the only pattern for living that she knows and, by following it, Lucy believes she can succeed at a task that her father failed so publicly. Ultimately, Lucy’s effort to maintain the family’s place in society at what she considers to be a suitable level of comfort and dignity, fails. She has undertaken an impossible and perhaps a foolish task, for her attempts at imposing the necessary economy alienate the younger children, and even her mother. The underlying tragedy is that Lucy yearns to fulfil her father’s dreams for the family even while despising him for his poor judgment. That first night when she explains the extent of the disaster to her mother and sister, she is blunt: ‘To please a stranger, a man he hardly knew, he has brought us into this impossible position. We are disgraced. We can never hold up our heads again.’179 The single strand of plot unfolds in a linear manner with few of the side stories of A House is Built. Only one story varies the tone by introducing rather heavy-handed irony centring upon the Kingsways, Mrs Haven’s clerical brother and his wife. They play a crucial part in the family’s welfare by generously supporting one of the boys at school despite the financial pressure

178 Barnard Eldershaw, Green Memory, p. 35. 179 Barnard Eldershaw, Green Memory, p. 45

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of their own six daughters who must be supported decorously on a parson’s salary until suitable husbands can be found for them. An astute reader may have detected an echo of Jane Austen180 in Green Memory’s language, or the tone of voice, or even the plot, built, as it was, around a young, gently-bred female protagonist struggling selflessly to overcome her family’s misfortune, before being rescued by a handsome and wealthy husband. Sometimes the omniscient viewpoint of the novel is too overpowering, even distracting, as it speaks from every heart and every mind. The novel was published by Harrap of London, in early 1931 after Farquharson, Barnard’s London agent, warned that Arnold Bennett, whose favourable review he credited with making A House is Built a success, was ill and unable to review Green Memory.181 The book did not sell well in Britain or Australia and most contemporary reviews were lukewarm. One, titled ‘A Spinster’s Tale’, written by Guy Innes and published in The Sun, May 2nd 1931, was notable for being the first book review to be sent by airmail from London to Sydney. It began: Honest journeyman work of singularly level quality marks Green Memory… As to style, the sentences are short and conventionally constructed, a sense of earnestness is much more in evidence than a sense of humour…182

Much of the critical comment of later years has been followed by even cooler reviews. H M Green regarded Green Memory as, though ‘well- constructed and smoothly written … has the monotony of a long passage of music in a minor key.’183 Colin Roderick praised Green Memory faintly: ‘After A House is Built came three novels of fair average quality.184 The best of them is Green Memory, …’ He acknowledged that the treatment of background is more skilful in this novel but it lacks the appeal of A House is Built.

180 Perhaps from Pride and Prejudice and Emma. 181 Farquharson, [letter to Marjorie Barnard]. Marjorie Barnard Papers, 1927-1960, MLMSS 451, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 182 Guy Innes, ‘A Spinster’s Tale’, review of Green Memory by M. Barnard Eldershaw, The Sun, May 2nd 1931. Newspaper clipping in Flora Sydney Patricia Eldershaw papers, MSS 5601 2(2), item 6 (newspaper cutting) in Mitchell Library. 183 H. Green, A History of Australian Literature (volume 2). Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, p.1184 184 C. Roderick, An Introduction to Australian Fiction. Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1950, p. 118.

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Louise Rorabacher’s damning judgment that Green Memory is ‘justifiably forgotten, important only in an examination of the authors’ entire works...’185 is, I believe, somewhat harsh, for Barnard Eldershaw’s writing shows evidence of a growing maturity in this second novel. The plot itself is simple and straight-forward, lacking the free-ranging ease of A House is Built, but then in that first novel the authors drew in extraneous characters whenever they were needed to enrich a plot development; in Green Memory the authors were more disciplined. It is inevitable that M Barnard Eldershaw’s first two novels, both set in Sydney during the nineteenth century, should be measured against one another. Their most important difference is the trajectory of their plots. A House is Built rises sharply on enthusiasm and good luck to an unexpectedly high peak. The energy and hard work of the characters support the plot, and the upward curve of James Hyde’s endeavour is only dented by bad luck and the occasional mishap, such as the betrayal of the younger James. In Green Memory, with the disgrace and death of Alfred Haven, the family’s fate drops away, with bad judgment rather than bad luck being the deciding factor. Only the good luck of the two older daughters’ marriages to wealthy husbands and the rather clumsy insertion of an unexpected inheritance from an almost unknown uncle in England, saves them. The other noticeable difference is the circumstance of the first novel quickly achieving vast popularity, and still in print after eighty years, while the second novel is barely known. It is possible that the wide-ranging action, introducing many notable events of history and a vast array of minor characters that enrich the action of A House is Built, was welcomed in an age more attuned to reading, but I think the smoothness of the action and the individual contribution of each member of the family in Green Memory makes for a warmer relationship with the reader. Both novels highlight the father-daughter relationships but with a difference. In A House is Built James Hyde’s personality dominates the novel’s action; in Green Memory it is Lucy’s personality and her surprisingly steadfast

185 L. Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw. Twayne Publishers Inc., New York, 1973, p. 41.

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character that rule the plot’s outcome, though not the family relationships. It is Alfred Haven’s malignant influence that lasts, contributing only memories of disgrace and a life-style they can no longer afford. The first novel covers a longer span of years, overlapping the five years or so covered by Green Memory. While the Haven family sit a little higher in the social scale than the Hydes, both families occupy a position of comfort (psychological and physical) far removed from the majority of the population. Both authors felt comfortable writing of this somewhat elevated slice of society. Most of Barnard’s short stories also fit into this middle slice of society nestled within our superficially classless system. The novels have much else in common: the main concern of both A House is Built and Green Memory is to chronicle the lives of Sydney families with an emphasis on the experience of young women and their fathers. Though the father in Green Memory is less powerful in a worldly sense, his power is fixed for all time. In addition, both novels are about young women, and how their position in the family and society changes with marriage. Both novels have a pair of sisters, each pair consists of a serene, intelligent, reliable older sister — each their father’s favourite child — and a younger, prettier, more light- hearted sister who attracts suitors, marries early and produces children to ensure the continuation of the family, while incidentally raising her own position in the family as a married woman and the mother of the next generation. The two safe, sensible elder sisters, Lucy and Fanny are practical and level-headed, frustrated less by spinsterhood than by intellectual and cultural deprivation in the patriarchal society of their times. Lucy in Green Memory is the better-drawn, more fully rounded of the two. The journey Lucy takes is more believable, too. She overcomes difficulties that change her, and even if her failures are catastrophic, she survives them all without losing her self-esteem. Fanny’s aim is lower and more self-centred. She never has to take responsibility for the well-being of her family; she only seeks to raise her own self image by joining the family business. When that fails she does not have the imagination to develop her charity work into anything more than busyness.

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Her biggest challenge is a personal one and she is destroyed by her failure to overcome her first romantic rebuff. Captain Hildebrand’s amusement at finding his good manners misread as courtship devastates Fanny, yet how minor that transgression is, compared to Richard absenting himself without notice from what was to have been his and Lucy’s engagement party. Lucy may have been devastated, but it does not destroy her, or turn her to bitterness, it strengthens her desire to succeed in the reinstatement of the family and determines her to refuse Richard’s later pleas. She is a much stronger and more admirable a character than Fanny. Given these two remarkably different female responses to male power, it is surprising that women readers of the 1930s did not find Green Memory more appealing than A House is Built. Both novels reflect the authors’ own experiences of being unmarried, and the difficulties contemporary women still had to overcome in the professions and the social world compared to opportunities open to men. For example Fanny, in 1930, would probably have had a place in her father’s business, but it is unlikely that she would have inherited it. Independence for single women was still tenuous in the thirties. Eldershaw was independent all her adult life, and lived away from home from boarding school days until shortly before her death, but she always maintained close ties with her large family. Barnard never tried to be independent, made no move to leave her father’s home nor to forsake his financial support, yet after her parents’ deaths, she became bitterly critical of her father. Green Memory has fewer minor characters, and that is its strength. Those relations and friends and neighbours who are drawn into the story are clearly delineated and they are not there for nothing, as seems to be the case sometimes in A House is Built. The major characters too, are fuller, more rounded, more alive. Perhaps this is possible because the tighter plotting of Green Memory allowed more time to develop each member of the family more fully in this much slimmer novel. Only Charles is left rather shadowy. A House is Built is a great tumbling saga, telling the story not only of the Hyde family, the authors’ avowed aim, but almost everyone who comes in contact with it, too.

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Most reviewers and critics assess A House is Built as a vastly better book than Green Memory but literary scholars interested in Barnard’s writing would be aware of the ways in which her writing skills improved in writing Green Memory. Its poor sales probably played some part in turning her away from historical fiction. Barnard established her plan of seeking new and different writing techniques. She set out to learn something different with each book. She was, of course, disappointed when a book did not achieve good sales, or a story was rejected, but if she had learned a new skill, she saw even her less successful projects as upward steps on her learning curve. The thought of becoming, with practise, a better writer was enough to encourage her to continue. ……………………………………….

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Chapter 5 – Collaboration – 1921-1956

‘I think collaboration [in creative work] is impossible, but now and then it happens.186

Amid the acclaim following the release of A House is Built there was interest in the nature of the Barnard/Eldershaw collaboration. While collaborative writing in non-fiction was fairly common, and seen for what it was— a co- operative task of research and reasoning, collaboration in the writing of creative work, born of the imagination, was questioned, seen as complicated, almost impossible. Other writers doubted that it could work and some tried to find out who wrote what. That grand old lady of letters, poet Mary Gilmore, was sceptical about the new partnership and questioned Barnard directly. Barnard, aware that their friendship was one of the reasons they worked so well together, was unstinting in her praise for her partner. She explained that it was Eldershaw with her outstanding qualities who was the key to their success187. ‘… I think if you knew her’ Barnard replied, ‘you would understand this business of collaboration.’188 An early anonymous interviewer who had spoken to the new authors immediately after they won the Bulletin prize reported that: They feel that it [writing together] is a very revealing process, and their success probably hinges largely on the fact that the confidence and friendship existing between them permit a full revelation of their mental processes…189 They never wavered in that belief. Over forty years later Barnard claimed that their collaboration ‘had cemented friendship, not broken it.’190 Nettie Palmer was impressed when she met Barnard in1933 at the beginning of her overseas trip.191 Later that year Barnard sent the Palmers a letter introducing Eldershaw as she, too, began her trip abroad by calling in on

186 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 9 April 1935. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 187 We have little written evidence about what Eldershaw felt. She did not keep a diary and her available letters are brief and businesslike. 188 M. Barnard, [letter to Mary Gilmore] Angus & Robertson papers, MSS 123, Mitchell Library. 189 ‘GB’, ‘M Barnard Eldershaw’, Woman’s Budget, 1 March, 1933. 190 M. Barnard, ‘The Gentle Art of Collaboration’, Ink No 2, Society of Women Writers, Sydney, 1977, p. 128. 191 See chapter 8.

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the Palmers. ‘She is worth ten of me in every way. I set that down in black and white in case you think I did not realise it.’192 Eldershaw’s vivacity did impress the Palmers; it impressed Nettie so much that a few months later Barnard was shocked, and her newly-won self-confidence jolted, when Nettie Palmer asked her if she felt able to keep up with Eldershaw in the collaboration.193 Because Barnard’s presence was quieter, Palmer may have assumed that the partnership included one weak and one strong member, but both these women when working together, were strong. That was one of the keys to their success - that they each added to the other’s strengths. In 1974, Barnard explained the nature of her collaboration with Eldershaw to Bruce Molloy: You must talk everything over before you put pen to paper … I did most of the writing. Because I had more time and Flora’s forte was criticism… I’d go ahead, writing with enthusiasm, and we’d talk it over afterwards and she would curb some of my exuberances…194

After the first two novels, interruptions to their constant discussions did sometimes affect their collaboration. During the writing of The Glasshouse, the partners were less able to share their thoughts throughout the planning process. In speaking to the Society of Women Writers in Sydney in 1973, Barnard was explicit: Collaboration in creative writing is a discipline, and, if it succeeds, the sharing is fun and an enrichment… [But] it is not easy to collaborate and to expect it to be so is mistake number one…. Each (collaborator) must contribute roughly equal if dissimilar abilities. It is better if their gifts are not equally divided but complementary. Hero worship and a unilateral diffidence are fatal disadvantages.’195

After years of working within a successful collaboration Marjorie Barnard understood some of the elements that made her collaboration with Eldershaw not only achievable but usually a joy and a satisfaction. Firstly, their respect and trust for one another over many years of friendship held firm and, secondly, their talents, though of a different order one from the other, were

192 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 11 December 1933. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 193 N. Palmer, [letter to Marjorie Barnard], March 1934. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 194 M .Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], 26 July 1973, for Molloy’s MA. Tape & transcript, Fryer Library, F793, University of Queensland. 195 The talk was later published – M. Barnard, ‘The Gentle Art of Collaboration’.

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evenly matched in depth and value. Perhaps most mportantly, both were happy to share, or combine, or even to compromise for the benefit of the work; and it was this attitude of sacrificing one’s individuality for the end work that Barnard interpreted as the necessary lack of individual vanity. As for the actual writing, Barnard found that task easier, and she usually had more time. What she did not like was revision, which she thought tedious. In a note to Nettie Palmer one can almost hear Barnard’s sigh of relief.196 ‘… how magnificent to have a partner—to throw the thing in her lap and say, “See if you can make something of it.” And think of something else…’ Eldershaw, with her love of order, liked to revise; she enjoyed the precision of editing. Eldershaw’s lack of vanity enabled her to accept Barnard’s version of the first draft of their shared ideas, and then contribute her editorial skills to improve it. Barnard’s lack of vanity enabled her to accept her partner’s criticisms and then smooth out the ‘seams’ between Eldershaw’s alterations and her own first draft until the whole was seamless. Thus their joint manuscripts were created.197 Barnard encapsulated the advantages as well as the difficulties encountered in her long and successful collaboration with her friend, in an article she wrote in 1975, nineteen years after Eldershaw’s death and when Barnard herself was nearing the end of her long writing career: From the inception, or conception, of a novel we talked about it to one another, discussed it at length, story, characters, background, treatment, in that order, getting the feel of it, coming to know it in depth, all this without putting pen to paper. We discussed every aspect until we came to agreement…and our thoughts became inextricably blended into a whole. There was no mine and thine but ours.198… Curiously, it seems to follow that when two people have worked and thought together on a book their prose styles even become similar. They unconsciously take up from one another. This is much better than making adjustments after writing.199

196 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 17 April 1934. Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/4411, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 197 A summary of Barnard’s two explanations on previous page. 198 Phrase borrowed as title in a paper by Maryanne Dever, ‘No Mine and Thine but Ours: Finding M. Barnard Eldershaw’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1995: 65- 75., in which she explores many aspects of the M Barnard Eldershaw collaboration. 199 Barnard, ‘The Gentle Art of Collaboration’.

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Thus she answered critics who wondered how it was possible for two such individual people with such different writing styles to write so seamlessly as a team. The writing of their joint works displays a remarkable unity; none of the construction methods Barnard describes are visible in the polished final product. Though the completed works cannot be divided into vertical sections attributable to either author, some critics have insisted that they can be loosely divided horizontally. The sensitive subtlety, the brilliant and sometimes surprising language, the imaginative flourishes must, they think, be Barnard’s, while the life experience and the humour are Eldershaw’s.200 I would add that Eldershaw’s input also included structural unity and gracious editorial skill. In the same article, in which she discussed their contributions so freely, Barnard also added, ‘One of the bonuses of collaboration is, I think, great versatility, a range of two instead of one.’ The pair’s method of lengthy discussion before anything was committed to paper worked for them in A House is Built, the next three novels and also in their historical biographies. At the time of their creation both authors lived in Sydney and were able to meet regularly and often. There were no detectable ‘seams’ because Barnard re-wrote most of the final drafts, as she described.201 Their determination that nothing should diminish the book also meant that they never drew attention to the fact that there were two authors; their choice of pseudonym suggests only one. At times this led to some confusion with personal pronouns, but in Australia, at least, both authors were well known and they made no effort to hide their individual personalities. Dever, of her study of the collaboration, reports: ‘When I commenced work on this … it was argued to me that my task was simply one of establishing who was the real author.’202 She suggests that a major element in the success of the collaboration depended upon Barnard’s recognition that she needed to rely on a stronger partner, to boost her own lack of self- confidence. Eldershaw was well equipped for that role and she was already a loved and

200 H. Green, A History of Australian Literature (volume 2). Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, p. 1182. 201 K Williamson, ‘The Remarkable Marjorie Barnard’, The National Times, Aug 15, 1983. 202 Dever, ‘No Mine and Thine but Ours’, p. 66.

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trusted friend. As part of ‘M Barnard Eldershaw,’ Flora’s confidence, good humour and sociability, shielded Barnard from the exposure that publication brought.203 Eldershaw’s critical ability was widely admired. Miles Franklin wrote to her: ‘I always contend that you have the best judicial sense of the whole toot of us.’ 204 Tom Inglis Moore, a lifelong friend, remembered Eldershaw as ‘Capable, sensible and constructive with a clear logical mind and practical ability, feet always on the ground.’205 Vance Palmer, writing of Eldershaw’s commitment as a fellow member of the Commonwealth Literary Fund Board, describes her as: …exuberant, gay, inexhaustible! There seemed no limits to her vitality. She could emerge from a dreary night’s journey under war–conditions and take her place fresh and expectant, at the conference table ready for a long day’s discussions and decisions. Her powers of concentration were remarkable…206

Barnard recognised Eldershaw’s greater confidence in their joint work and her brilliance as a public speaker, and was happy to designate Eldershaw as their ‘shop window’, the one who was the public face of the pair. She exhibited nothing but gratitude that Eldershaw was able to contribute the skills that she, Barnard, felt she lacked. On the other hand, it is clear that Barnard wrote more easily. Consider the number and clarity of her letters, as well as the ready flow of critical essays, short stories and history books that poured from Barnard’s pen when she began writing alone, even after she resumed demanding full-time work in the library of the CSIRO, compared with the simplicity and much smaller volume of Eldershaw’s sole publications. Throughout their active writing years the pair adamantly refused to elaborate on any details as to who did what, carefully preventing the

203 M. Dever, A. Vickery and S. Newman, The Intimate Archive: Journeys Through Private Papers. National Library of Australia, Canberra, 2009, p. 56. 204 M Franklin [letter to Edershaw August 20 1941 – in C. Ferrier, As Good as a Yarn with You: Letters Between Miles Franklin, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, p. 8. 205 L. Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw. Twayne Publishers Inc., New York, 1973, p. 18. 206 Eldershaw was a founding member and served for 15 years, as the only female member for most of that time. V Palmer’s contribution to Eldershaw’s ‘Tributes’ in Meanjin, summer 1956.

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dissection of their books by critics.207 Among Barnard’s papers in the Mitchell Library is a hand-written manuscript of A House is Built with each alternate chapter written by Barnard, the others by Eldershaw. In Barnard’s hand- writing and initialled by her is a note: ‘This ms is [written] alternately in the hand-writing of each author but if anyone thinks this was the key to the collaboration they would be mistaken.’ Later, asked by a child: ‘Do you share the writing of the books by each writing a part?’ Barnard replied: ‘No, we both write the whole book.’208 Louise Rorabacher, in her 1973 biography of Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw, pointed out that while a common bond of understanding is basic to successful collaboration between two writers, they must strike sparks off each other if their joint creation is to sparkle.209 They complemented each other…. Working together was not merely a doubling of their strength but a great multiplication of their spirits. In all those difficult years writing together, there was no flagging of their mutual respect and admiration, affection and dependence.210

Not long before she died Barnard told Zoe Fairbairns: There was no conflict. I can’t say where the first idea for a book came from because we both put in things… We never lived together but we talked the writing over, we went for long walks… She had a good critical mind and we very often changed things… but there were never any disputes...... 211

The unity of their joint work is convincing, and that was their aim. Eldershaw, as frequently noted, was outgoing, gregarious, confident, while Barnard was reserved, usually shy, though sure of her opinions. They were not alike, but their success as a partnership in friendship as well as in their writing life suggests that, harnessed together, they made a strong, smooth-running team. This was evident too, in their contributions to public occasions such as literary organisations. It was Eldershaw who served actively

207 Dever, ‘No Mine and Thine but Ours’, p. 2. 208 Members of a class of girls from Leichhardt Junior Girls High School who wrote to Barnard when studying A House is Built. 209 Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 15. 210 Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 26. 211 Z. Fairbairns, ‘Marjorie Barnard: Talking with Zoe Fairbairns’ M. Chamberlain [ed], Writing Lives – Conversations Between Women Writers. Virago, London, 1988: 37-44.

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on committees [such as the Fellowship of Australian Writers, the Australian English Association and later the Commonwealth Literature Fund Board]. Barnard was the loyal back-room supporter, and the writer of letters of supplication for grants as well as being the author of vehement protests. From the writing of their first novel in 1928 until shortly before Flora Eldershaw’s death in 1956, their collaborative career encompassed the major part of the literary work of both partners. It included five novels, two historical biographies, a social history of Australia, and a book of literary criticism as well as articles, short stories, literary reviews and several series of lectures. It is the longest-lasting and best-recorded literary collaboration in Australia, and arguably the most successful. It was a good even-handed partnership to which both contributed their different skills, and both benefitted. Nettie Palmer recognised that their close friendship was vital to their writing and that any ‘difference in the characters of the two women doesn’t make for a difference in their point of view or values.’212 But there were some important points of disagreement that could not be resolved easily. In the stressful time of almost universal political unrest when World War II loomed ever nearer, they became aware that their political values did not align, and probably never had done. Barnard and Eldershaw could not agree during the writing of their article for the Australian Writers for Democracy, Fellowship of Australian Writers’ (FAW) protest against Australia’s entry into World War II. Enmeshed within the FAW, which had been heavily larded with Communist Party members and communist sympathisers from its beginnings, mildly socialist Eldershaw, felt at home. Barnard, though deeply committed to FAW’s literary aims, could not quite give up what she called her nineteenth century liberalism. Barnard and Eldershaw agreed on the title for their essay – ‘Liberty and Violence’ and tried to come to agreement on what standpoint it would adopt. They even took a short holiday in Tasmania where, removed from day-to-day distractions they hoped to complete the essay; to no avail. They were both honest enough to remain true to their own values, knowing that though their integrity forced them to disagree on this matter, it would not

212 N. Palmer, Fourteen Years: Extracts from A Private Journal, 1925-1939. Meanjin Press, Melbourne, 1948, p. 28.

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damage their respect and love for each other. As to ‘Liberty and Violence’, neither was happy with their best combined effort. As it happened the political climate changed while they struggled with the essay, government censorship prevented the printing of that journal of protest— at least at that fractious time.213 Eldershaw’s 1941 move to Canberra, and later, to Melbourne presented the pair with another challenge to their collaboration. Distance demanded a change of what had been a close and constant dependence on one another. It was not their friendship that cooled, only their collaborative endeavours. Barnard was at pains to explain that Eldershaw was— ‘too busy’…. ‘And she wasn’t really well. She didn’t have the extra energy for her job and her writing and so it gradually phased out – no quarrel or no disagreement of any kind, but she just didn’t have the strength for her job and writing.’214

That same year, speaking of temporary problems she and Eldershaw had encountered while writing their longer works, Barnard told Kristin Williamson, There was never a spark of jealousy. We’d… talk about the book we were going to write until it was worked out thoroughly. After that it didn’t really matter who wrote it…Flora had a better brain than I had, but I was possibly the better writer. I would write a chapter and she would criticise it and then I’d re-write it. It was a happy and intelligent arrangement. 215

From the nineteenth century, when the writing of novels was accepted as a suitable activity for literary women, collaborations between women writers have not been uncommon. Jessica White, speaking at an Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference at the Australian National University in Canberra in 2009, expressed the view that two women, writing in collaboration almost always shared a lesbian relationship, giving Rosa Praed and Nancy Haworth as an example. White may have overstated her case. Many Australian women writers forged successful literary collaborations with no

213 See this period discussed more fully in the next chapter. 214 M. Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington], Longueville 1983, transcript, Lane Cove Public Library, Local Studies Collection, p. 136. 215 Williamson, ‘The Remarkable Marjorie Barnard’.

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suggestion that a sexual partnership was behind their joint writing endeavours. Dymphna Cusack and Miles Franklin, collaborated to write just one book - Pioneers On Parade - in 1938. ‘A crazy collaboration,’ Cusack called it, but the writing of it cemented a friendship that lasted till Miles’ death and influenced Cusack for the rest of her life.216 The pleasant and fruitful experience with Franklin encouraged Cusack towards a later collaboration with Florence James in writing the very successful novel of war-time Sydney, . When hints of a lesbian relationship between Barnard and Eldershaw drifted through Sydney’s literary community in the 1930s Miles Franklin would have none of it. These aspersions of frustration and lesbianism [against Barnard & Eldershaw], I have always resented, and refuted, because I think them foul and unfounded, and though Marjorie Barnard in particular has been so virulent to me I still will not countenance such a depiction of a good friendship and smooth collaboration between these women.217

Even to-day when lesbian partnerships are widely accepted, rumours of a hidden affair between Barnard and Eldershaw still drift about Sydney’s writing community. In 2009, while I was searching for out-of-print copies of M Barnard Eldershaw’s books, the book-seller, Bob Gould, who had the air of knowing everyone’s secrets and wanting to share them, greeted me with: ‘You know they were lesbians, don’t you’? Flora and Marjorie undoubtedly loved one another, were devoted over a long period and extremely loyal to one another, but there is no evidence that the Barnard/Eldershaw friendship included any physical sexual relationship. The view of Maryanne Dever, is that — prurient interest in the sexual behind the textual has certainly been a popular response to the Barnard-Eldershaw union. Issues of sexual identity are not central to their writing or their politics, and Barnard and Eldershaw both endorsed a social code that valued privacy.218

216 D. Cusack, ‘My Friendship with Miles Franklin’, in H. Lindsay ed., Ink, Society of Women Writers, Sydney, 1977, pp. 110-111. 217 Miles Franklin, [letter to Mary Fullerton], 16 August 1944. Miles Franklin Papers, MSS364/120, Mitchell Library, Sydney. See also Dever, ‘No Mine and Thine but Ours’. 218Dever, ‘No Mine and Thine but Ours’. P.55-65

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Later, she adds: However one cares to define the relationship between Barnard and Eldershaw, there is no denying that, while it lasted it represented a primary bond of extraordinary intensity. The relationship can be seen as the product of a period in which close, if not lifelong, friendships between university educated women provided an alternative to marriage and children, which were viewed as incompatible with careers… 219

I do not believe that Dever needed to limit the habit of women sharing their homes with friends, to the university-trained. It was a time of many unmarried or young, childless, widowed women, in an age when they were seeing that independence was possible. It was easier to share the stress of running a household with a cousin or another member of an extended family, or a friend – whether they pursued a profession or not. During the long years of the Barnard/Eldershaw friendship they never shared a house, except on relatively brief though frequent holidays. Interviewing Barnard in her last years, long after Eldershaw’s death, Candida Baker suggested to Barnard that despite her unmarried state, she had been tied for much of her life to two women - Eldershaw and Vera Murdoch. Barnard did not deny the love or the inter-dependence that she shared with those two women, but she protested, ‘… it’s not the same thing. It was sexless, so it was different.’220 Sometimes Barnard and Eldershaw lived in different cities, but except for one brief and affectionate note accompanying a mislaid manuscript that Barnard was returning, nothing remains of what must have been a prolific correspondence. It was Barnard who insisted that their letters be destroyed, probably to preserve the secrecy of her affair with Davison.221 In that matter Eldershaw had been her only confidante until it was over. Later, Barnard herself revealed information about the affair. If she had not done so, scholars trying to uncover the richness and diversity she brought to her writing, would have been handicapped.

219 Dever, ‘No Mine and Thine but Ours’, p. 71. 220 C. Baker, Yacker 2 – Australian Writers Talk about their Work. Picador, Sydney, 1988, p. 38. 221 Davison, central figure in Barnard’s emotional life. See chapter 9.

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In 1942 when Barnard was ill with pneumonia, Eldershaw rushed to her side. Realising that the break now dividing her two friends, was permanent, that their affair was over, Eldershaw helped Davison close up the little flat that Barnard had hired for their weekly trysts in happier times. Then, after her return to work in Melbourne, she helped Davison secure a job there, resumed their friendship and together they became even closer to the Palmers, visiting them regularly. Barnard was left in Sydney without her friend and missing her former lover. At the same time she felt the loss of former frequent correspondents Nettie and Vance Palmer, and wondered why it was necessary for them to exclude her, even more chillingly than geography did, from what was becoming a close literary group in Melbourne. There is no evidence that the affection between Eldershaw and Barnard weakened, but Barnard’s perception of the estrangement from the Palmers and her loneliness without either Eldershaw or Davison, was deeply depressing. She realised that returning to regular work was the best way to alleviate her loneliness, and she set about building a new life with the CSIRO library and its staff. Barnard and Eldershaw’s last joint project, the novel, ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’, moved only slowly. In the early stages Eldershaw contributed her share to the project, and they worked together when they could until its publication in 1947, but Eldershaw’s Commonwealth job in Melbourne was demanding and her health was failing. When Barnard’s mother died in 1949, she invited the Murdochs to come and live with her, and at the end of 1950, she retired from the library and began travelling around the world with Murdoch who had become a fixture at Longueville. Eldershaw, by then exremely ill, stayed with Barnard for a time in 1956. Barnard protested that the affection between the two old friends had not changed, but circumstances had.222 For a long time, during the stress of wartime, they had seen little of one another, and Flora Eldershaw, the beloved ‘Teenie’ of earlier years, was dying. She stayed only a short time in

222 See chapter 19.

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Longueville on her way to spend her last months with her sister, Molly, at her home near Wagga Wagga. …………………………………………………………

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Chapter 6 – Essays in Australian Fiction 1929-1938

When it came to questions of literary form…I could hardly have got better summaries than what have come casually in [Marjorie Barnard’s] letters… Nettie Palmer 223

In December 1929 the Sydney Morning Herald published M Barnard Eldershaw’s first critical article, ‘The Genetic Novel’.224 In it the joint authors explained how they set about writing A House is Built, naively blaming the Bulletin’s serial adaptation, The Quartermaster, for the reading public’s view that the novel is about James Hyde. The authors always maintained that their subject was, rather, the rise and fall of the Hyde family, and how that mirrored the growth of Sydney. Nettie Palmer encouraged Barnard and Eldershaw to pursue their interest in literary criticism, but they needed little encouragement. ‘Some important part of our self-respect is bound up in intelligent appreciation of our national literature,’ Barnard wrote to Palmer,

‘That’s where I want to drive a nail.’225 In 1934 Barnard wrote to Vance Palmer: that: ‘honest and intelligent criticism is a necessity – a necessity to our self-respect.’226 Ten years later, in May 1944, she wrote to Eleanor Dark: ‘About literary criticism, I think it’s necessary—it’s part of taking writing seriously. Writing … needs some sort of response or evaluation…’ 227 Her view that criticism was essential for the development of Australian literature did not change through a long career of writing literary criticism. Although Essays in Australian Fiction was not published until 1938, it grew from lectures and essays written over nine years from that first article about their first book, in 1929. In 1930 Eldershaw presented a jointly-written lecture on ‘Contemporary

223N. Palmer, ‘M Barnard Eldershaw’. Transcript of unpublished radio broadcast. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, 1174/25/1, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 224 Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Dec 1929, p 23 229 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 13 November 1934. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/4519, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 226 M. Barnard [letter to Vance Palmer] 7 December 1934 about criticism - quoted in Drusilla Modjeska, Exiles at Home. Sirius Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1981, p. 8. 227 M. Barnard, [letter to Eleanor Dark], May 1944. Eleanor Dark Papers 1910-1974, MS 4998, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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Australian Women Writers’ to the English Association.228 Its assessment of the work of Henry Handel Richardson and Katharine Susannah Prichard was received with such acclaim that the pair felt they had an audience for their lectures and essays on Australian writers. When Nettie Palmer asked Barnard for a copy of the speech, she responded with: It is our joint work though in the circumstances I do not claim my share. Flora speaks very well – brilliantly – and I very badly, so I have given up the practice entirely, and if anyone wants to hear our views, refer them to her.229

That first lecture on contemporary women writers led the way to their continuing interest in helping to establish the importance of women writers. That lecture also became an essay that was used as the first chapter of Essays in Australian Fiction, where Barnard Eldershaw pointed out that writing fiction was now a feminine profession — like nursing: There are, of course, people who say they do not care for books by women… They can evidently afford to do without Katherine Mansfield, Willa Cather, Sigrid Undset, Selma Lagerlof, Virginia Woolf and Rose Macaulay …. In no other art, except, of course song and the dance, have so many women excelled.230

Nettie Palmer boosted Barnard’s confidence by asking her opinion of The Passage, Vance Palmer’s recent winner of both the Bulletin’s second Novel Competition and the Australian Literary Medal for1930. Barnard did not hold back in her criticism and sent the rough notes she and Eldershaw had made when first reading Vance’s book.231 We do not have Palmer’s direct response. In her letters, Barnard continued to give Nettie Palmer her frank opinions, casually expressed, on a broad range of literary matters. At a time when Miles

228 A revised version of this lecture was published in M. Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1938 and another version titled ‘Two Women Novelists’ in M. Dever (ed.), M. Barnard Eldershaw: Plaque with Laurel, Essays, Reviews & Correspondence. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1995. 229 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 25 September 1931. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers1850-1966, 1174/1/3721, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 230 M. Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1938, p. 1. 231 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 16 November, 1930. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers1850-1966, 1174/1/3721, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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Franklin still hid her identity behind the Brent of Bin Bin pseudonym, Barnard wrote: and Ten Creeks Run seem to be selling .... I shall be very surprised if Brent is not an elderly man – probably a bachelor… I read his books with pleasure but without satisfaction...they were good in parts but missed the final synthesis that makes a novel…232

Barnard kept up her study of the art, or craft, of writing and in 1934, after publishing two novels, she asked Palmer to explain the creative process to her: Of course I’ve read the text books – appreciation, perception, conception and the rest, but these things don’t happen to me. I don’t think at all. I simply wait and watch, make myself as hollow and impersonal as possible, and then just wait and when an idea comes floating by, seize it.233

By then Barnard was publishing occasional criticism in the Sydney Mail which impressed Nettie Palmer enough for her to tell Frank Dalby Davison of her admiration for Marjorie Barnard’s criticism and history, adding: ‘She’s rare and alive and we need such a person.’234 Throughout the ‘thirties Barnard and Eldershaw gave frequent lectures, publishing them and other critical work in newspapers and journals, and Barnard confidently included criticism of recently published books in letters to her growing number of correspondents.235 She believed, that literary criticism was best undertaken by practicing writers, rather than by literary scholars. I am a novelist. Set a thief as the proverb goes. And whether I’m a good or a bad novelist I have had practical experience of the art and come before you not only as a critic…but as a journeyman.236

232 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 25 September 1931. This may have been one of the criticisms that upset Franklin, the anonymous author. 233 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 9 October 1933. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 234 D. Modjeska, Exiles at Home, Australian Women Writers 1925-1945, Angus & Robertson, Sirius Books, Sydney, 1984, p. 82. Date of Palmer’s letter not recorded. 235 Including by 1935 The Bulletin, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Daily Mail. Some have been re-published in M. Dever (ed.), M. Barnard Eldershaw: Plaque with Laurel, Essays, Reviews & Correspondence. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1995. 236 M Barnard Eldershaw, ‘The Writer and Society: Vance Palmer and Frank Dalby Davison.’ Lecture delivered at the University of Sydney (for the Commonwealth Literary Fund), 1944. MLMSS5601, Mitchell Library, Sydney, Flora Sydney Patricia Eldershaw papers, 190-?-1985.

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In 1935, when Barnard and Eldershaw joined the Fellowship of Australian Writers they were both asked to deliver lectures on literature that would help educate new members. That same year Eldershaw delivered another notable lecture prepared by the collaborating pair on ‘Australian Literary Society Medal Winners’ – The Montforts, by Martin Mills [Martin Boyd’s pen-name], Ultima Thule by H H Richardson, The Passage by Vance Palmer, Man-Shy by Frank Dalby Davison, Flesh in Armour by Leonard Mann and Pageant by G B Lancaster. In 1937 M Barnard Eldershaw was commissioned by The Bulletin to write articles on five leading contemporary Australian writers— Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, Frank Dalby Davison, Eleanor Dark and Leonard Mann. Earlier lectures/essays on Frank Dalby Davison, Vance Palmer and Leonard Mann were re-used, a new essay was composed on Eleanor Dark, who had recently won two literary prizes, and another on Christina Stead, who had only lately been ‘discovered’ writing overseas. The series ran in the Bulletin from 27th October to 24th November 1937.237 These Bulletin articles plus the texts of earlier lectures presented to the English Association were then re-arranged to form Essays in Australian Fiction. It was published in 1938 by Melbourne University Press — reluctantly. Believing that they could not sell a book on literary criticism in Australia, MUP persuaded the authors to delete several chapters and to accept in-house editing and, perhaps more importantly, to forego all royalties for the first print run of 1000 copies. It was M Barnard Eldershaw’s first non-fiction book and the first of their books to be published in Australia. By writing their contemporaries into Australia’s literary history Barnard and Eldershaw acknowledged the value of the work, and they also established their own position as literary critics. In ‘Two Women Novelists’, the first essay in the book, Barnard, representing M Barnard Eldershaw, wrote about ‘women’s writing’, even though at other times she resented the idea that it should be labelled and thus

237 C. Ferrier, As Good as a Yarn with You: Letters Between Miles Franklin, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 40-41.

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separated. There is a hint of separating masculine vs feminine skills in the essay itself: The novel demands nothing that the feminine brain at its best cannot encompass. Its raw material is humanity… Its medium is words ... It demands subtlety, insight and observation rather than erudition and logic.238

Barnard does not mention the long tradition of women writing under male pseudonyms to disguise their gender though the pair’s own choice of authorial name could well have been guided by this consideration. Presenting the opinion that H H Richardson and K S Prichard were the best of Australian women writers, Barnard praised Richardson, in particular, for the tenacity that carried her through the fifteen years it took her to write the three volumes of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony: ‘This is the perfect way to write a novel, and yet few have the stamina to do it; we are too impatient…’239 She may well have been rebuking herself for though she thought deeply before putting pen to paper, Barnard wrote very quickly, and was often impatient with herself if a writing project was delayed or seemed to take too long.240 Richardson, pursuing her career in Europe, was hardly known locally until, with the publication of Ultima Thule, she won the Australian Literary Medal in 1929. Only then was the value of Richardson’s trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony fully appreciated for its reflection of both the author and her times. Barnard assessed the writer with admiration: Richardson is not a stylist, and this is a definite advantage in a book so intensely introspective and emotional. As the story is told largely from within, most of the prose is in character and a great deal of it is in broken sentences, the shorthand of the mind.241

238 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, p. 2. 239 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction (1938), p. 5. Barnard knew herself to be unable to sustain such a lengthy period of work as she complained that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was weakened by the length of time it took to write in comparison to the partnership’s other novels. 240 This was mentioned in a note to Palmer. See chapter 4 (Green Memory). Two years for that novel was, in Barnard’s estimation, too long. 241 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, p. 20.

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She sketches Richardson’s other books only lightly, espousing the view that the quality of her prose improved with experience, culminating in Ultima Thule. Each of her books, ‘in varying degrees of intensity, describes a losing battle against life.’242 Barnard sketches the Mahony plot as it follows the dramatic fall of the protagonist, while allowing those he dominated - his wife, Mary, and son, Cuffy - to show individuality, before they gain strength as Mahony shrinks.243. Katharine Susannah Prichard, the second star among women writers, is dealt with as a woman more comprehensively than as a writer. Barnard looks at her character, her way of telling a story, even her attitude to life itself. Prichard’s political stance as a communist is mentioned for it cannot be ignored, but Barnard’s view is that Prichard ‘is too great an artist to grind axes in the sight of her readers.’244 Barnard briefly sketches the plot of Prichard’s four major novels – Black Opal, Haxby’s Circus, Coonardoo and also Working Bullocks. Then, in considerable detail, sifts through Prichard’s collection of short stories, A Kiss on the Lips (1932): There is much that is fine and memorable in this collection. It would seem to be the slow distillation of years and to recognise fully the difficult and intricate art of the short story. There is nothing casual or haphazard about the stories. Each one is finely bred, made and shaped, sometimes to the point of artificiality….245

Barnard’s critical assessment of the thirteen stories in Kiss on the Lips is nearly as long as that of Prichard’s four major novels, revealing Barnard’s interest in short fiction at that time. It is almost as if she is teaching herself the elements of what makes a good short story by analysing Prichard’s, just as she confessed to having studied the stories of Vance Palmer in order to gain insight into his skill. In seeking the magic balance that results in a successful short story, she observed that… (The) descriptive passages are scattered through the narrative and the dialogue, always short and pointed, striking the note to which both

242 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, p. 23. 243 Adrian Mitchell, ‘Fiction’ in L. Kramer (ed.), The Oxford History of Australian Literature. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1981, pp. 82-96. 244 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, p. 27. 245 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, p. 34.

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narrative and dialogue conform. It is in the descriptive passages that the individuality of each tale is rooted.246

In comparing Prichard’s writing with that of Richardson, Barnard studies the realism in their work. The plots are analysed as well as style, voice, tone and structure and she concludes that the major difference between the two writers under examination is that: Prichard’s men and women cannot be destroyed utterly as Mahony and Maurice Guest are destroyed because they have qualities indestructible by anything that life can do to them. The brave are never wholly conquered, they still have their valour.247

There is an added proviso that —

if Richardson stands for the universal in art, Prichard stands for the individual. Richardson is taken up with what life can do to a man, Prichard with what man can do with life … Neither time nor place is a crucial factor in Richardson’s tragedies – the actual tragedy depends upon neither, while in Prichard’s books background is of prime importance.248

Nettie Palmer professed the Prichard/Richardson study to be outstanding. ‘The essay on Katharine Prichard, is a poised and brilliant study…249 She was rather less enthusiastic about Essays in Australian Fiction as a whole. In a letter to Leslie Rees she wrote: ‘the B-E essays are mostly beautiful, but … the amount of space devoted to different writers is so unequal, too much Davison and Palmer, not enough HHR…’250 Six of Davison’s books are discussed – particularly his two remarkable animal books, Man Shy and Dusty which are short and written in such a deceptively simple style that they were often mistaken for children’s books.251 The story of a little red heifer, a scrubber, won the Australian Literary Medal for 1931. This is how Barnard described it –

246 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, p. 37. 247 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, p. 26. 248 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, p. 24. 249 N. Palmer, [letter to M. Aurousseau], 31 January 1937, cited in Smith (ed.), Letters of Vance and Nettie Palmer, p. 142. 250 N. Palmer, [letter to Leslie Rees] 10 June 1938 cited in Smith (ed.), Letters of Vance and Nettie Palmer, p. 157. 251 Man Shy was less than 40,000 words

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The life and death of this cow is the perfect symbol. The kernel of all life, ours as well as the beasts’… The story does not pause to explain itself, it draws no moral, makes no comment, just gets itself told clearly and quickly, yet all its parts fall together into a perfect whole...

And: It is comfortable prose … It interposes no barrier between the reader and the story; it is as unobtrusive as a pane of glass...252

Despite this praise of Davison’s prose, Barnard insists it is the spirit of the book rather than the prose that makes it memorable and concludes her discussion: Man Shy has delicacy, sincerity, beauty. The author places a little world between our hands and it is a world so natural, so fully imagined and so deeply set in life that it should not perish.253

Barnard would be pleased to know that this novel, begun as a hastily written short piece to fill the demands of his father’s monthly magazine, and first printed as a book privately and clumsily on shoddy paper, still lives. It has remained in print for more than eighty years, perhaps justifying Barnard’s extravagant praise, praise such as: ‘The best essay on this subject (Davison’s work) would consist entirely of quotations.’254 Despite the impressive longevity of Davison’s best work, it did not attract universal acclaim. Adrian Mitchell is dismissive, calling the author ‘a clumsy stylist, tending to exposition, long wordy sentences and an unnatural level of idiom.’255 But this view does not seem to be widely shared. Harry Heseltine supports Barnard’s glowing assessment of both Man-Shy and Dusty, ‘Davison imagines his way into the animal mind with remarkable insight and complete avoidance of sentimentality…his prose assumes an unassuming lyricism unique in Australian fiction of the period.’256 H M Green also praises Davison’s ‘new way of writing about animals’. 257 Though Barnard’s praise of Davison’s writing seems to be excessive and it would be easy to shrug it off as

252 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, pp. 55-57. 253 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, pp.59-60. 254 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, p. 41. 255 Mitchell, ‘Fiction’ in L. Kramer (ed) Oxford History of Australian Literature, 1981. 256 G Dutton, The Literature of Australia, Ringwood. Aust., 1964, H. Heseltine, ‘Australian Fiction since 1920’, p. 194. 257 H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature. Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, p. 1121.

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favouring a friend,258 one has to accept the objective views of Green and

Heseltine.259 Vance Palmer, a prolific writer of short stories, plays and journalism as well as prize-winning novels, was the subject of another of Barnard’s very long critical essays. His writing seems to be little known to-day but his reputation stands high as a leading literary figure in Melbourne for a generation, and a supporter of other writers. Only his novels and two volumes of short stories were examined in Essays in Australian Fiction, for Barnard believed that it was as a short story writer that Palmer excelled.260 Nettie Palmer, who was usually encouraging and appreciative of Barnard’s critical writing, found it difficult to set aside loyalty to her husband for a less-than-enthusiastic assessment by another critic. Nettie defended her husband’s writing, protesting that Barnard was unappreciative of his talent. In her letter to Marcel Aurousseau the hurt Barnard caused Nettie Palmer by Barnard’s criticism of Vance’s work, is spelled out: The Barnard Eldershaw essay on Vance is most painstaking and thoroughly honest, saying some very fine things…. I grieve though that it ends on the words, ‘careful craftsman’. How boring that is. As if a house were always to be seen through its scaffolding. I want some day to be free to show Vance’s knowledge of human character…

Nettie also picked up on what must have been a fairly common criticism — the inclusion of Davison’s non-fiction tale, The Blue Coast Caravan in a critical work on Australian fiction.261 Other correspondents (although not all wrote directly to Barnard) such as Miles Franklin, K S Prichard, Eleanor Dark, Jean Devanny and Dymphna Cusack as well as Frank Dalby Davison, Vance Palmer, , Judah Waten and Leonard Mann were themselves writers of fiction, colleagues who must have felt varying degrees of dismay at the negative criticism. They may

258 See chapter 9. Davison was a firm friend of both Barnard and Eldershaw. 259And Eldershaw’s part in the book’s creation. 260 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, p. 113. 261 N. Palmer, [letter to M. Aurousseau], 31 January 1937, cited in Smith (ed.), Letters of Vance and Nettie Palmer, p. 143

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have found it hard to remember that Barnard’s sometimes trenchant criticism was directed at the writing, not the writer. Leonard Mann is not well remembered to-day, but in 1932 he won the gold medal of the Australian Literature Society for Flesh in Armour, a novel drawing on his memories of serving in the Australian Army in France. The other Mann work discussed, Human Drift, is set in Victoria’s gold-fields and is ‘a picture of the times rather than a narrative of individual lives; its virtue is in its verisimilitude rather than its drama.’262 Barnard and Eldershaw knew most of these authors, some of them intimately, but their enthusiastic and truly prescient support of original talent did not always depend upon the involvement of their emotions. They praised The Montforts highly before they knew anything about Martin Mills, or even that the pseudonym hid Martin Boyd. The Montforts, an English family living in Australia, or an Australian family constantly renewing its ties with England, presents a picture of how Englishmen became Australians in a manner equally as valid as that describing the journey of James Hyde and his family in A House is Built. According to Barnard: Mills sees that no story of the early days here can be complete without some picture of English influence. One of the most fascinating things in this rich book is the slow emergence of an Australian spirit. First there are the wealthy pioneers, proud, happy and a little patronizing… their homesick wives trying to model the new life to the old. Then comes the second generation in boom times, finding the world their oyster ready opened for them, returning to England with little object except spending their money…Then come the bad times, the forced return, the slow saturation of mind and outlook by the Australia environment. The third generation is part sunk into the Australian landscape, part restless…the fourth comes home, surrenders without knowing it, becomes unselfconsciously Australian.263

Born in Sydney five years after Barnard, Christina Stead, another writer who earned a chapter in Essays in Australian Fiction, had worked hard at poorly paid jobs to save money to travel overseas where she became a true expatriate. Barnard saw Stead’s books as rich and strange, and highly variable in quality. Then comes a note that causes the reader to blink, look twice, and

262 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, p. 135. 263 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction, p. 143.

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re-read. For Barnard describes Stead’s use of language, with a tone of disapproval: The author is given to unusual words…which strike sharply and questioningly on the attention. They are used as ornament, but carelessly, not pedantically, but out of a plentiful store.264

This description could so easily be used to describe Barnard’s own writing. Stead’s use of words strikes Barnard forcibly, perhaps because in it she recognizes a tendency to excess which she cannot see in her own work. For example, Barnard writes of Stead: ‘Sometimes she falls in love with a word and repeats it over and over again…’265 which reminds one of Barnard’s own repetitive use of interesting and unusual words which sometimes become jarring repetitions, but are always delivered with such confident enthusiasm that the reader is charmed into embracing them.266 These two writers, who differ in so many ways, share a remarkably similar manner of using fluent descriptive language coupled with a vast vocabulary. Reading Barnard’s novels and also much of her non-fiction, becomes a teasing adventure of discovery, charming readers into accepting unusual words that are lavishly, almost carelessly and often repetitively, dropped into her descriptions, and also in her conversations. Remember Nettie Palmer’s delighted shock on first hearing Barnard’s conversation in 1933. 267 Stead and Barnard shared one important experience that may have influenced the quality and their unusual facility with language: their attendance at Sydney Girls’ High School where they both benefitted from the teaching of Pearl Barnes. 268 Barnard lays down a clear, detailed outline of what she sees as the job of the literary critic:

264 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction p. 160. 265 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction p. 161. 266 For example, ‘simulacrum’ from the third page onwards in The Glasshouse and many of her contemporary letters, the seven extravagant adverbs in a short exchange between Stirling and Miss Williamson, p. 25. 267 See discussion of The Glasshouse, chapter 8; Nettie Palmer comments on this during Barnard’s first visit to her home in 1933. See N. Palmer, Fourteen Years: Extracts from A Private Journal, 1925-1939. Meanjin Press, Melbourne, 1948. 268 H. Rowley, Christina Stead, a Biography. Minerva, Melbourne, 1994, p. 39.

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When the hardy critic lays an author’s works upon a table in chronological order for the purpose of reviewing them, the first thing he looks for is movement.269

This is how Barnard examines each writer’s accumulated work, to see if there has been progress in the development of the author’s talent. If the author ‘has accepted a formula and sticks to it’ or if there is only repetition, not advancement, then the body of work fails. This is exactly the measure Barnard used on her own work. Though she admitted disappointment when the public did not like one of her writing projects, she was appeased if she knew that it showed evidence of growth, of doing something new and different from anything she had written before. Eleanor Dark, Barnard decides, has grown in skill through each of her first three novels, even though the early work had all been standard romances. In a letter to Dark in the early forties, Barnard specifically criticised some of her later work but in Essays in Australian Fiction, her tone is one of admiration. It seems that Barnard felt that criticising other members of the writing group robustly in private could only help them, but in published work she avoided expressing a negative opinion, possibly aware that it might have an influence on their sales. Since most of the writers whose work they examined were known to Barnard and Eldershaw the questions of frankness and bias must have been considered. Was not the critic obliged to be honest for the benefit of the unknown reader? The book, Essays in Australian Fiction, brought up the problems of being criticised and/or reviewed by friends – and not only friends, but known rivals. If the critique is flattering, then an author might feel grateful, but if the assessment is negative, how does one discuss it with the author one meets at the next book launch or writers’ meeting? After Essays in Australian Fiction was published, Barnard wrote to Nettie Palmer that: ‘friends seem to think that little book of essays a delicate subject to be tactfully avoided.’ Later, she added: ‘we hear of them now and

269 Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction p. 182.

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again, but never actually meet anyone who has read them.’270 Among the letters circulating between women writers there was quite a lot of negativity expressed, especially towards Barnard. At least some of it stemmed from responses to what they saw as unfair criticism, but a core of dislike for Barnard herself seemed to hover around Miles Franklin and Katharine Susannah Prichard. Sometimes it spilled out to be shared with other correspondents, too. Significantly, it was Barnard, not Eldershaw, who attracted criticism. It seems that everyone realised that Barnard did most of the hands-on writing that was published under their joint name.271 Her letters bear witness to the fluency with which she wielded her pen — so the hurt or annoyance about disappointing reviews or literary criticism was directed towards Barnard. Geoffrey Serle considered Essays in Australian Fiction to be a ‘milestone in its time.’272 And despite H M Green’s doubts about the over-representation of Palmer and Davison, he believed that ‘this collection is one of the landmarks of Australian criticism…’273 Essays in Australian Fiction, though seeming to-day to be full of articles of interest about important writers, was never re-published. It was among the critical writing overlooked by Richard Nile and David Walker in the Penguin New Literary History of Australia274, who proposed that “it was not until 1945, when J K Ewers’ Creative Writing in Australia appeared, that a volume of criticism was made readily available to reader and students.’ ……………………………………

270 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 6 November 1938. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, 1174/1/5458, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 271 Most particularly Miles Franklin’s letters to friends or their comments to her. See chapter 18. 272 Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788-1972. Heinemann, Melbourne, 1973, p. 124. 273 H. Green, A History of Australian Literature, pp. 1284-6. 274 R. Nile and D. Walker, ‘Marketing Literary Imagination’, in L.Hergenhan [ed], The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (Australian Literary Studies). Penguin Books Ltd., Melbourne, 1988, p. 294.

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Chapter 7 – Short stories 1931-1987

‘Not until Patrick White was there an author who came farther from the Australian tradition – more deeply into the psychological nuance.’275

In the early 1930s Barnard and Eldershaw changed the focus of their writing. The poor reception accorded Green Memory induced the women to move away from historical fiction and engage more fully with the world around them. Barnard wrote to Nettie Palmer that they did not know when they would write another novel, and that their present interest was in writing contemporary short stories.276

Short fiction had always been an important form within Australian literature, and in the early days was often known as a ‘piece’ or a ‘sketch’ before demonstrated the power of his tightly plotted stories. His stories and those echoing the bush tradition had been immensely popular but in the early twentieth century, Lawson and other city-dwelling authors began to use settings more familiar to them and at the same time, they relaxed the fairly rigid structure of their stories.277 By the time Barnard began her assault on short stories in the 1930s successful authors had found that they could write stories of any shape, plotted or not, within a structure chosen to fit the subject. According to H M Green resolution was no longer required; a mood, an atmosphere or even an individual tone of voice was often enough:

The short story writer is free to write as he likes, about whatever he likes, bound only by the limitations of his own talent … accordingly he has abandoned the introduction, the conclusion and the rather too obvious plot…278

Given her life-long fascination with words and her insistence that she was always more interested in ‘form’ than ‘content’ it is no wonder Barnard

275L. Rorabacher writing of Barnard’s short stories in Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw. Twayne Publishers Inc., New York, 1973, p. 87. 276 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 25 September 1931. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers1850-1966, 1174/1/3816-8, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 277 B. Matthews, ‘A Lawson for our Times’ in Australian Book Review, May 2011, Vol. 311, No. 11, 2009, p. 11. 278 H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature. Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, p. 1238.

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thought that writing short stories would suit her. She expected to find a place among contemporary authors who regularly published short stories as part of their fiction output—authors such as Katharine Susannah Prichard, Vance Palmer, Frank Dalby Davison and Dal Stivens.

Unfortunately, the short stories Barnard and Eldershaw were writing at that time failed to elicit a positive response from editors. After their early success with A House is Built, they were surprised, even puzzled, when they failed to interest even one editor. Barnard studied published short fiction assiduously, hardly believing that she was missing some necessary ingredient in this form of fiction that she had set her heart on conquering.279 Her habit of planning a story in her mind before putting it on paper was not working, despite her confidence and her skill with language. For now, it seemed, form was no longer the key; she faced the problem of how to convince editors, and even her friends, that her stories were worth reading.

In late 1931, when Palmer enquired about their writing, Barnard replied: The stories are rather long and elaborate. What we really admire and would like to write is the short story with the delicate point, but there is an inexorable power that pushes one back into one’s own mental groove and will not let one escape from it… You may say, very sensibly, ‘Why attempt short stories?’ Technically we find it a most satisfying form and we are quite pleased with some of our designs.280

As revealed in the last sentence she still thought of the stories as a joint effort. They were ‘designing’ their short stories much as they had designed and constructed their novels. But readers were looking for something different, something more than a condensed novel. In the1960s Ian Mudie simplified the difference: a novelist, he said, sits in comfort on a wide verandah and tells a tale of the marvellous and complicated world he sees spread out before him. A short story writer stands

279 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 16 November 1931. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra. The only evidence we have about this study of other writers’ stories is in Barnard’s own letters – further evidence that it was Barnard who did the writing. 280M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 26 November 1931. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers, National Library of Australia

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on tip-toe to squint through the slit below a closed window blind. What he can see of that one room is all he has to describe his view of the world.281 Brian Matthews defines even more succinctly, what a short story is in the twenty- first century: ‘a narrative which must be told, implied or barely hinted at with restraint’.282

Long before Barnard and Eldershaw had their first story published they had written enough stories to form a collection titled ‘But Not for Love’.283 After failing to interest local editors, they sent the collection to Farquharson, their London agent, in August 1932 with the warning that the stories were rather gloomy.284 Farquharson could not find a publisher for them and sent the manuscript back. Disappointed but undeterred, Barnard and Eldershaw would not give up; they were determined to continue trying to conquer what they must have seen as a code they couldn’t decipher. Early in 1933, confounded by their lack of success, Barnard began to suspect that the writing had been too easy: ‘I have a lurking suspicion that anything so facile is not honest ….’ They sought the advice of their mentor, Nettie Palmer and while Barnard was in Melbourne on her way to London, Palmer advised her to put the collection aside and return to writing novels. This response must have been a great disappointment, dampening Barnard’s excitement as she set out on her long-planned trip abroad. When Barnard returned home after her six-month holiday in Britain and Europe, she found Eldershaw preparing to begin her own sabbatical year abroad. Eldershaw took the collection back to London, even with her personal attention the stories did not interest any of the publishers she approached. Meanwhile, Barnard returned to work at the Technical College Library and, during 1934, continued to write stories alone, stubbornly determined to write a successful story, refusing to believe that her skill in crafting novels could not be extended to include proficiency in this shorter form of fiction. She

281Paraphrase of a lecture given at Adelaide University in the late 1960s by Mudie, South Australian poet, short fiction writer and historian, attended by author. 282 Matthews, ‘A Lawson for our Times’, p. 11. 283 Title drawn from ‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ Shakespeare’s As You Like It. 284 M. Barnard, [letter to Farquharson], copy in Marjorie Barnard Papers 1927-1960, MLMSS 451, Mitchell library.

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studied the work of her successful contemporaries, over and over, confessing to Vance Palmer: ‘I’ve positively preyed on your short stories but the secret is unstealable.’285 Barnard’s continued efforts to master short stories reflect her overall attitude to writing. She worked constantly not only to strengthen her writing skills, but to expand them. Repeating a successful style or, in her terms, ‘adopting a pattern’, did not interest her. She wanted to practice all the different ways of drawing a character or a scene with words. She did not see her long struggle to write a publishable short story as a failure, but rather as the practice she needed to perfect a skill she desired to master. After Eldershaw left on her long journey and with no one to share planning and discussion, Barnard found it more convenient to just jot down ideas as they occurred to her. The ideas grew into stories in her mind. In a letter to Vance Palmer, she announced that she now saw the ‘seed’ of her stories ‘as an idea or an angle of vision or sometimes just phrases… [that] have to be clothed in synthetic flesh.’286 She was beginning to leave behind the idea of deliberately designing stories. Instead she was encouraging each story to ‘grow’ around an idea. She continued to write short stories alongside other short creative work— essays, reviews and historical articles. In 1934, while still struggling to achieve publication for her short stories, Barnard met Frank Dalby Davison, whose short fiction was selling well. When she felt confident about his friendship she asked him for his opinion of some stories she had written. Davison responded so negatively that she reported it to Nettie Palmer: Frank declares that they are beautifully done but that every time I write one I ‘leave life poorer than when I found it’! I ought to commit suicide after that.287

285 M. Barnard [letter to V Palmer], 7 December 1934, cited in Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 81. 286 M. Barnard [letter to V Palmer], 22 January 1935. cited in Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 81. 287 Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 20 November 1936, Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS3942.

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Barnard overcame such put-downs and threw herself into a variety of writing, including more short stories, still destined to be rejected. In May 1936, when still no story had sold, she confided to Nettie Palmer: when I’ve had one of my periodic bouts of wrestling with a short story, I sometimes send the products on the rounds, safe in the knowledge that no one will take them—and they don’t.288

At first reading Barnard’s stories seem thoughtful, even insightful, but a second reading sometimes lends weight to Davison’s criticism. If a reader is looking for a happy ending or even a satisfying development of character, or for any improvement in the human situation in Barnard’s early stories, then they must seek them out, for they more often expose a weakness, a bleakness in the human heart, sometimes an injustice, often an ugliness. Her stories, even after she achieved regular publication, do not fit anywhere as a type and are frequently gloomy, even those written at a time of great personal happiness. Barnard herself pointed out: ‘Someone usually gets hurt in my stories, don’t they?’289 H M Green recognised this even in her later stories, but he was wise enough to see that Barnard had something different to contribute to Australian literature—not her subjects or her characters, but ‘the delicacy and penetration with which she interprets and illuminates.’290 Rorabacher, also an appreciative admirer of Barnard’s writing felt that though her short stories lacked warmth, they had unusual integrity: Marjorie was a realist in a far truer sense than the ‘slice of life’ writers had been. Not for her sentimentality, the happy ending, stuck on like a bouquet of plastic flowers. She was too honest, too intelligent, too much the dedicated artist to speak other than the truth as she saw it even if it was painful. And it usually was.291

288 Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 5 May 1936, cited in cited in Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 80. 289 M. Barnard [letter to Vance Palmer], 10 November 1949 about her short story, ‘Say Goodbye and Mean it’, cited in cited in Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 85 290 Green, A History of Australian Literature, p. 1251. 291 Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw pp. 83-85.

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In September 1936, Barnard sold her first short story: ‘The Bride Elect’. It was published in Home.292 Soon they began appearing regularly in a wide range of journals and newspapers. She recalled this change in her publishing fortune: ‘There was a moment in time when an editor, Sydney Ure Smith, thought I could write, and accepted, at £5 each, whatever I sent him for publication in Home…293 Barnard gave Ure Smith rather less than his due. Artist and publisher, active and generous in Sydney’s cultural community, Sydney Ure Smith admired Barnard’s writing and published her articles and short stories and short essays as well as being instrumental in having the Limited Editions Society commission her to write The Life and Times of Captain Piper in 1939 and then Macquarie’s World. In 1942 re-using some of Barnard’s articles already published in Home, he published Australian Outline and later commissioned her to write the texts for several illustrated historical publications. Ure Smith was a powerful positive force in Barnard’s literary success over a long period. That first story, ‘The Bride Elect’ is an example of Barnard’s unrelenting exposure of ugly characters, often with no hint of possible change. The bride, Myra, a city girl visiting her fiancé’s busy sheep station, feels out of place. She admires the beauty of the out-back property but does not recognise in it her future home. Lacking the ability to adapt, she uses her beauty and her fiancé’s love for her to ruthlessly change the climate of the house of which she will soon become mistress, forcing it to function as an adjunct to her personal whims instead of as the centre of a large and complex business. A temporary resolution, Jim’s capitulation, is reached within a short page. The dominant sister-in-law will withdraw to live her own life and Jim makes light of the death of his favourite sheep- dog. He begins to make decisions to suit Myra’s whims rather than fulfilling the needs of the property from which he still must wrench the wherewithal to sustain their comfortable life-style. We are left to wonder whether Myra’s power will outlast her youthful beauty, or whether the first sustained drought or other climatic crisis

292 And in 1943 included in the collection The Persimmon Tree 293 In reply to questionnaire to authors by Australian Literary Studies, Vol 10, No2, Oct 1981.

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will force a change. Beneath the tone and the delicately slanted language, one can almost hear the old countrymen tut-tutting over Myra’s demands, taking bets on how long she will last, for city brides are not uncommon on country properties. The brides are forced, eventually, to adapt – or leave, for the weather, the dust -swept country and the smelly sheep cannot. Written at a time when Barnard’s own love affair was flooding her life with newfound happiness, ‘The Woman Who did the Right Thing’ is the story of an unhappy love, a woman unselfishly truncating an affair in order to induce the advancement of her beloved’s career. Barbara is on the brink of an affair with Murray, a composer of great talent. To reduce any distraction for him, to avoid wasting any of his precious time, she relinquishes their time spent together, only to learn that he has taken up with a young music student! There is a link in the story to Barnard’s extraordinary faith in Davison’s talent, but unlike Barbara, Barnard did not have to sacrifice time with her love to allow him to develop his talent. She was able to nurture his writing skills, and did. The story appeared in the Home magazine in 1937 and was also included in

The Persimmon Tree.294 In the decade following her breakthrough publications in Home, Barnard wrote and published story after story, sailing at last over what she had formerly seen as an insurmountable barrier. A stream of stories appeared: ‘Station Street’, ‘Canaries Sometimes Advertise’, ‘The New Dress’, ‘The Burden of Riches’, ‘The Lottery’. Many of the stories were published in Home; some were re-published in Coast to Coast, a few were re-published in London, and later, after the war, some were re-published in Germany. Her characters were usually people she could have known, occupying a comfortable social position. Many of her stories are about women and their problems or fears and how they see themselves as fitting into a man’s world. ‘Beauty is Strength’, also first published in Home is another story in which the protagonist’s concentration on the value of her beauty as currency to purchase her chosen life-style, is the key story-line. A haughty middle-aged woman visits a beauty salon with its worn-out fittings and its falsely French hairdresser, hoping to

294 S Ure Smith (ed) Home, September 1937 and later in the collection The Persimmon Tree in 1943.

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restore her youth and beauty so she can once again charm her wandering husband into loyalty. Alas, Mademoiselle Paulette can only restore the curl in her customer’s hair with yet another permanent wave. After a stretch under the hot hair-drier, the haggard face reflected in the mirror reminds her that she is foolish to hope. She mutters to herself that when you pass forty, you dare not show emotion, for it shows up in wrinkles. Yet minutes later, with her hair primped by Mademoiselle’s clever fingers, she feels she still has a chance. She will fight to keep her husband. This story is about an unpleasant woman, and is so heavily weighted with irony that it teeters on the edge of the comic. But it delineates with accuracy the hair- dressing salons of the 1930s and 1940s, dens of pain and embarrassment that no woman of today would seek as a restorative refuge. ‘The Wrong Hat’ was also published in Home Magazine295. An unnamed woman is in danger of becoming dowdy, ‘a professional widow’, according to her daughter, who sends her mother off to buy herself a new hat. The mother is drawn to a shiny black straw – ‘the gayest, smartest hat that she had ever seen.’ Despite the saleswoman’s warning that it will not suit her, she tries it on. It fits perfectly. It feels exactly right. Her spirits rise. Then she checks her image in the mirror and her heart sinks—‘The hat was jaunty and young but the face beneath was old and tired’. Here the hat is used cleverly to illustrate the agony of an ageing woman who does not yet accept the diminution of her youthful beauty, let alone see anything of beauty or joy in ageing. Robert Darby draws attention to the role of mirrors in Barnard’s short stories, suggesting that their frequent appearance is due to the importance of mirrors in the lives of women such as Barnard and Eldershaw.296 Barnard’s recorded behaviour does not reveal an excess of personal vanity, and she probably sees mirrors only as an aid to dressing and grooming, just as a man also sees his first grey hairs and fleshy chin in a mirror, and he also uses mirrors to help him present his best self to society, that scene is not written about so consciously, by either male or female writers.

295 And in 1943 in The Persimmon Tree. 296 R. Darby, ‘Reflective Imagery in the Fiction of M Barnard Eldershaw’, Southerly, Vol. 61, No .3, 2001, p. 140.

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Mirrors are sometimes used as a literary device, as in two of these Barnard stories. The solitary character would otherwise have had to imagine her looks or seem self-obsessed by describing her reflection. By using a mirror the reader can see the reflection, and feel the emotion, directly.297 ‘Sunday’, a Barnard story with a young male writer as protagonist, was published in Home in December, 1937.298 John, the struggling writer, had left his suburban home and the family who had no faith in his ambition or his talent. He lives alone in the inner city and visits his family one Sunday. Barnard liked writing about writers: successful ones such as Stirling in The Glasshouse, and the many writers gathered in Canberra in Plaque with Laurel. Most of Barnard’s writer-characters do not suffer the privations [frayed cuffs and hunger] that are part of John’s every day. On that Sunday his mother ministers to him lovingly and relentlessly. She twitters around him, feeding him, pressing his clothes, while his father — sat in a deck-chair in the sun, behind the knotted leafless screen of the wisteria, the Sunday paper strewed about him, a large dominant old man with jutting brows and a thick mouth.

Barnard’s language is less lyrical when used to portray this dull suburban house with its dull suburban family, but it is still precise, realistic and evocative. She sets out the scene, common in so many Australian homes in the 1930s and 40s, of a family loving enough, comfortable enough with one another to eat a huge dinner, prepared and served by the women —John’s mother, his sister, the neighbour who would like to be John’s girl-friend and the ‘mother’s help’.299 When the last spoonful of the rich dessert is finally swallowed, the two men, retire to sofas to nap and recover from the arduous labour of eating, while the four women, three of whom have already worked all morning preparing the meal, now clean up the debris and wash the dishes. The men will not stir from their sofas until the women call them for afternoon tea.

297 Green, A History of Australian Literature, p. 1250. 298 And in The Persimmon Tree, in 1943. 299 It is noticeable that the maid or the housekeeper is never called the ‘mother’s help’ in the Barnard home. Thus she unwittingly reminds us of class language differences-even in Sydney.

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Barnard’s depiction of life in such a family is impeccable, illustrating vividly how family relationships have changed beyond recognition in two or three generations. This story of the male role in a lower-middle-class Sydney family can be used now, eighty years on, as A House is Built has always been used, as an accurate and detailed fictional replica of a slice of Australian social history. One wonders how much of John’s longing to escape the burdensome love of his family, is a reflection of Barnard’s own feelings. Barnard’s outline of John’s courage in leaving his family to struggle alone in pursuit of his dream, supported only by his faith in himself, may have been a recognition that while possible for John, it was too hard for her. Although she had chosen to leave work so she could write full-time, an allowance from her father had cushioned her, and though she often complained about the dominance of her parents, she never left their home for independence. ‘The Lottery’ uses a negative male viewpoint character. Ted’s wife, Grace, has won a lottery after buying a ticket with the proceeds of selling her mother’s wedding ring. With the money comes courage to leave her self- righteous husband and unappreciative children. This could have led to a happy ending, but it lacks conviction. Grace may leave for a different life but her attainment of a happier future is not certain. Ted, the viewpoint character, loses the wife he has ignored and the wealth he had expected to share; that is the only result. It does not seem to be enough. The cost is children left in the care of a neglectful father and part-time home-help. The children pay far to high a price for being unappreciative of their mother—surely a common attitude for children. In 1941 ‘The Plover’ appeared in Home and also in the first edition of Coast to Coast. Rorabacher describes it well: (It) builds up for us in leisurely fashion a comfortable sense of familiarity with life in a station …This is the story of the youngest child, Susan, whose duty … was to care for the aviary, a wire-netted enclosure in the orchard where lived, thriving and content, an assortment of once wild birds…300

300 Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 79.

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That is, until a plover is introduced— a discontented bird longing for release. One night, Susan, moved by the plover’s unhappiness, leaves the door to the aviary open. In the morning all the birds have flown, some to their former freedom of the skies, many to their deaths. But the plover huddles, still discontented and longing for release, inside the open door. This story reflects, however ironically, Barnard’s longing for freedom, and her unwillingness to take the step into independence which would have called for her to take responsibility for herself. The plover didn’t dare to step outside, no matter how discontented he was; neither did Barnard. Although Davison admired Barnard’s historical work he withheld his approval of her short stories until, in 1940, she asked him to comment on ‘Dry Spell.’ He was impressed.301 This was not a story of women in their private quarters, nor of writers, but a story evoking the essence of Australia, a story of drought. Drought robs the land of life-giving rain. Trees, grass, crops and animals dry out, shrivel and die. In such an arid world the souls of its people, too, shrivel and shrink. Drought is the scourge of dry inland Australia but sometimes it blights the mountain slopes of Bathurst, too, and even the coastal fringe. Barnard wrote to Jean Devanny of the dry weather in Sydney, of how she transferred some of her life experiences directly to her fiction. The ache of the drought is on the city, the yellow, dry gusts of dust, the enormous dryness of the earth, the brittle restlessness. Sydney seems like a frontier city again. I recognise a landscape of the imagination eg ‘Dry Spell’ and the fall of the city in T&T&T…302

‘Dry Spell’ is regarded as one of Barnard’s most remarkable stories. It is a story of Sydney, but not quite the real Sydney. It is likely that Barnard was imagining entering Sydney via the Great Western Highway and Parramatta Road, for that is the likeliest route of the many ‘swaggies’ seen by the narrator as they flee the wasteland of the drought-stricken inland. It is possible that Barnard’s holiday west of the mountains in 1938 was in her mind. The story

301 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 10 July 1940. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra. Chosen for Coast to Coast in 1941 before being re-printed in The Persimmon Tree collection. 302 M. Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 5 January 1945. Jean Devanny Archive, JD/Corr 5, James Cook University Library. Note this letter was written after the writing of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow but before it was published.

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was written during wartime, and ‘Anzac Highway’ has a more nationalistic ring to it than ‘Parramatta Road’. Barnard is still writing of Sydney, but not the watery Harbour-side Sydney she knows so well. Robert Darby goes further. He suggests in his ‘Dampening Incendiary Ardour: the roots of Marjorie Barnard’s ‘Dry Spell’303, that the story should be read only as a dreamscape, not as a version of reality. He reminds us that the devastation wrought by drought in Australia is also a step towards the renewal of life. This is in stark contrast to the deliberate destruction of Sydney in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It seems likely that Barnard, distressed by the war she believed unnecessary, and mulling over how she would show the destruction of war in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, was having a ‘practice run’. She was showing Sydney in the grip of a heatwave, before undertaking its total destruction in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. ‘Dry Spell’ was chosen for publication in Coast to Coast in 1941. In July 1942 Barnard’s most memorable, and most often re-published short story, ‘The Persimmon Tree,’ was first published in Home, then chosen for inclusion in Coast to Coast. The narrator, a middle-aged woman recovering from illness, wishes to free herself from the clutter of her past. She leaves her home and rents a flat, just one bare room ‘as chaste as a cell in a honeycomb’ and after seeing another woman shopping realises that she is a neighbour, living opposite her window, across the narrow street. There has been speculation about the ways in which Barnard uses the trauma of the break-up of her own love affair in this story of these two lonely women. Barnard remembered falling ill as a way of escaping the pain and one can easily imagine Barnard casting herself as the woman in recovery, but she could well have been both women — how she sees herself suffering, and how she wishes to be seen by the world. If the two women are both manifestations of the narrator, then the window is a magic mirror through which she observes the woman she would like to be. Was it a replay of a dilemma such as Barnard earlier confided to a friend that she felt that her life had been ‘narrow

303 Robert Darby, ‘Dampening Incendiary Ardour: The Roots of Marjorie Barnard's 'Dry Spell'’, Quadrant, Vol. 46, No. 6, June 2002, p. 62.

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and protected like a room with a magic casement but no ordinary windows with a view’.304 ‘The Persimmon Tree’ raises more questions than can be answered. Why does the narrator see spring come only once? The consciousness of watching and really seeing the change of seasons is rare. Even the daily movement of the sun is often noted after the event. Many of us rise early to watch the sunrise, and then become distracted by the flickering of dreams left behind or new thoughts of the coming day. The morning’s rituals take over, and we suddenly realise the sun has cleared the horizon, the shafts of pink and gold and purple have spread far and wide. The night has quite faded and we have missed the sunrise —again. Thus it is with spring. Many springs had come and gone while the middle-aged narrator was not paying attention. Her slow recovery from illness means she has time to watch. It is the only thing happening. Even so, she does not try to see the first buds burst green and glittering on the bough. She chooses instead to observe the coming of spring not directly, but at one remove. Instead of the colours of spring-time, she watches black shadows of buds as they swell against a bare white wall. Is this also her choice in life? To watch life muted by distance, seeing it one step away from the hustle and bustle — and the colour— of reality? And does she do this to prevent reality from touching her too harshly? Perhaps she is unwilling to risk more pain. Is she really seeing a naked stranger behind the shadow of the curtain, or is this the only way she dares to look at herself— with her body half-hidden in muslin? Barnard’s own life, recently shattered by loss, seems to be an obvious source of this tale of remorse.305 Barnard was frank, though not specific about re-telling her own emotions when, forty years later, Candida Baker asked her whether she

304 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 January 1945. Jean Devanny Archive, JD/Corr 5, James Cook University Library. 305 See chapter 9.

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identified personally with this story. ‘Yes,’ Barnard replied. ‘I had to live something before I could write it.’306 Robert Darby suggests she is shocked by the naked woman’s youthful body, contrasting it with her own ageing self.307 She may well have been shocked by the sudden exposure to nakedness proudly displayed, but the woman in the opposite room who goes to work each day in a dark suit is not a younger woman. The narrator specifically introduces her as ‘about my own age’. There may well be regret for youth that has passed; the woman across the way could well be an echo of the narrator’s own busy and happy former life, but now the narrator herself feels old, a husk, no longer needed, not as a lover, not even as a friend.308 She has endured the end of her affair. For Barnard it was the end of love. Rorabacher felt that this story, ‘The Persimmon Tree’, rivalled Patrick White’s prose in its dependence upon psychological nuances.309 Barnard herself felt that it was the only story that achieved what she had aimed for310 and its faery-like air of other-worldliness forces us to recall the mood of some of her juvenilia.311 In 1943 Barnard’s short story collection The Persimmon Tree & Other Stories was published in Sydney by Clarendon Publishing Company. Barnard was unimpressed, describing it as having been — published almost accidentally in wartime … a scrubby little book, shortly remaindered. None of this upset me. I knew that unless I conformed to the fashion of the time there would be no market.312

She was mistaken. The collection was re-published in 1973 and remains in print. John K Ewers in 1966 remarked on the ‘hardness’ of the stories in The Persimmon Tree, despite their emphasis on femininity: There is something hard and brittle about all the stories. Sometimes the brittleness is like that of delicate china, as in the title story. Sometimes

306 In Point Clare in 1984 on the day after she was awarded the premier’s Medal. C. Baker, Yacker 2 – Australian Writers Talk about their Work. Picador, Sydney, 1988, p. 34. 307 R Darby, Reflective imagery in the fiction of M barnard Eldershaw’ p. 10 308 Barnard, [Letter to Jean Devanny], undated, probably January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, JD/Corr 5, James Cook University Library. 309 Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 87. 310 Candida Baker’s interview recorded in Yacker 2 , p. 38. 311 See chapter 1 312 War-time shortages meant grey unattractive paper- Box 5 Marjorie Barnard’s Papers, Mitchell Library

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it is the brittleness of hard, cast metal as in ‘Beauty is Strength’ a story of a woman who felt that while she had her looks she could do anything.313

Elizabeth Webby, in comparing some of Barnard’s stories with those of Katherine Mansfield, felt: [They] showed Barnard to have a delicate poetic sensibility…. Each word is so carefully placed that any change might destroy the spun- glass artistry; and in the title story and the ‘Mistletoe Arrow’ the short crystal clear sentences evoke a mystic lyricism.

Webby pointed out that: At the same time Barnard is a realist, chronicling Sydney and suburban life mainly in the 40s, with an irony and an elegance which guard against sentimentality.314

Of the twenty stories in the Virago edition of The Persimmon Tree & Other Stories, published in 1985, just ten of them are exclusively dominated by women. Three later stories were added for this edition: ‘Speak to Me’, ‘Tree Without Earth’ and ‘One Bright Leaf’ ‘, which I believe to be the last short story Barnard wrote. Only one of these three stories is about a woman. In the interim, since Barnard’s stories were first published, the whole literary field has become more welcoming to women’s writing, and that movement encouraged Barnard, in her later stories, to swing away from her earlier emphasis on feminine subjects. Barnard was equivocal about her feminism, but the movement changed the place of women as producers of fiction whether they directly acknowledged the importance of the social movement or not. ‘Speak to Me’, published first in the Sydney Morning Herald Magazine, and then chosen by for republication in the 1945 Coast to Coast, begins ‘Since I have been sleeping badly—thin meagre sleep like an old shrunk blanket that never quite covers my tired mind, under which I lie tensed, cramped.’315 The reader is alert, wondering who is this fragile old

313 J. Ewers, Creative Writing in Australia (5th edition), Georgian House, Melbourne, 1966, p. 160. 314 E. Webby, ‘Short Stories & The Persimmon Tree’, tape recording. Marjorie Barnard Papers, LH ARC L71, Lane Cove Library. 315 M. Barnard, The Persimmon Tree and Other Stories. Clarendon Publishing Co., Sydney, 1943, p. 62.

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person who lies so shrunken, so diminished. Surprisingly, he is an eye surgeon, still possessing his full powers. Called upon to operate on a deaf-mute boy, he recalls sign language learnt as a child from a similarly afflicted neighbour. This memory enables him to calm the boy, to gain his trust as he proceeds with the operation. Barnard learned of the story in a bus. As they travelled past the Eye Hospital, a fellow-passenger told her of his brother, a surgeon, and how he had used a memory from his childhood to save a boy’s sight. ‘Tree without Earth’ is one of Barnard’s last stories. It was published in the combined 1965/6 Coast to Coast. A family is overwhelmed, almost destroyed by grief when the youngest child, a boy, dies. The following year they host a gay Christmas party as the father tries to draw his wife and daughters back to a normal life. Neighbours and friends are delighted and congratulate the mother on her recovery. The little girls are happy to have their mother back again. When all their guests have gone home, their daughters asleep, the husband closes up the house anticipating the quiet of a late evening spent with his wife, who seems to have recovered some of her former joy in life. In her bedroom the wife, overcome with grief still, disregards the pain she is about to inflict upon the rest of her family. She asks her husband to pour them both a last drink while she silently retrieves the full bottle of sleeping tablets she has hidden for use this night. “One Bright Leaf” is set not in Australia but on a harsh subsistence farm in Norway. It covers an unusually long time-span for a short story, telling of a family’s journey over years of hardship including the German occupation of World War 2, through the death of both parents and most of the children, emphasising the value of holding onto their miserable, tight-fisted piece of land. It is a hard story of people living through difficult times but softened throughout by the respectful love the family members have for one another. It is foreign to Barnard’s usual subject matter, and may have been inspired by her visit to that cold, northern land, a few years earlier. ‘One Bright Leaf’ was first published in Quadrant in 1982. Barnard died just five years later.

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Barnard’s sense of how she wrote her short stories, so clearly and openly discussed earlier in her life, faded until by the time she was recognised as a prolific writer of thought-provoking short stories, she had forgotten her struggle. She remembered that she rarely read short stories and did not see her stories as being in the mainstream of her writing—just indulgences: I have written short stories when I have an idea or an impulse that could only be expressed in that genre…. Short stories have been the most private sector of my literary output. I used no models.’316

She had forgotten how anxiously she had pored over the published short stories of her peers, seeking the key to their success. She could have claimed, truthfully, that she did not find their key to success; she had to develop her own. She also explained, in answer to other questions from an Australian Literary Studies questionnaire: My short stories … never have a message, social or political or moral. Their only intention is that of all creative fiction—to communicate. I do not have any formal or aesthetic considerations. Form comes from within the story; like prose it adapts to the story’s need for expression.317

To another question, whether she considered that an author’s approach to short fiction would be the same as to a novel, Barnard, replied: Completely different. Novels are architectural and must be planned before writing begins in all aspects, plot, characterisation, philosophy, so that the end result is an organic whole and not a patchwork quilt. Short stories would expire under such treatment. They happen generally as complete as a bubble.318

Her stated purpose, ‘to communicate’ and the aptness of the adjective ‘gloomy’ that she used to describe her own work, raises questions about Barnard’s own inner happiness—or otherwise. Short stories, perhaps because of the years Barnard spent struggling to understand how to write them, held a special place in her consciousness of herself as a writer. When Bruce Molloy interviewed her in 1973 she pointed out that what she had most wanted to see

316 Part of Barnard’s answer to the 1983 Australian Literary Studies questionnaire: Marjorie Barnard, ‘Authors’ Statements [Marjorie Barnard].’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 1981. 317 Barnard, ‘Authors’ Statements’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 1981. 318 Barnard, ‘Authors’ Statements. ’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 1981.

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in Rorabacher’s recently published biography was the author’s opinion of her short stories—‘So maybe that is where my heart is.’319She had had to learn that short stories came spontaneously from her emotions, from her heart, whereas novels, biography and history had to be planned; they came from her head. Barnard’s short stories are rich in well-chosen language and carefully drawn imagery. The situations and characters described so precisely, so delicately are sometimes unusual, always memorable, but often rob the story of joy. One can see the links with her juvenilia for they often contain hints of restlessness, dissatisfaction, a deep feeling of loss, or unfulfilled expectations—the coda. Barnard exposes the flaws and failures found in men and women; she forces us to look more closely at our world, at our friends. She forces us to look at ourselves. ………………………………………………………..

319 M Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], 26 July 1973, for Molloy’s MA. Tape & transcript, Fryer Library, F793, University of Queensland.

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Chapter 8 – The Glasshouse 1931 - 1936

‘Where lies the land to which the ship would go? Far, far ahead is all her seamen know.

And where lies the land she travels from? Away, far far behind is all that they can say.’320

By 1932 Barnard was well-established in her professional life, but after twelve years working in the Technical College Library, she felt she needed a change. She was due for leave, and determined to venture abroad for six months. Early in 1933, Barnard set off with her mother for London, with a break in Melbourne to meet the Palmers for the first time. Several years of correspondence had established a friendship but Barnard’s modest self- introduction when she telephoned to arrange a meeting made such an impact that Nettie Palmer recorded it in her diary.

How musical her voice sounded on the phone, and how it lifted at the end of every phrase: ‘You’ll easily know me . . . I’m middle-aged. . . I wear brown . . . I wear glasses . . . I’ll be watching for you.’ Next evening, when she came to dinner, I remember being still conscious of that musical lift in her voice. With it was a sort of demureness that, at every fifth moment was swept away by a most unusual frankness, often a spontaneous brilliance of expression that made you catch your breath…I knew from her letters, that she had all the significant virtues – loyalty, selflessness, industry and of course, sincerity.321

As mentioned earlier, it was during this visit that Palmer advised Barnard to abandon the collection of short stories she had sent earlier, and return to writing novels. Barnard was shattered, but she trusted her mentor and passed on the dreary message to Eldershaw before setting off to enjoy her longed-for overseas holiday.322

320 Part of the Ballad quoted by Sterling in the novel: M. Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse. Harrap, London, 1936. 321 V. Smith (ed.), Nettie Palmer: Her Private Journal ‘Fourteen Years', Poems, Reviews and Literary Essays. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Queensland, 1988, pp. 126-7. 322 It is noteworthy that Barnard did not include her mother in the visit to the Palmers and hardly mentioned her in the scant records we have of her overseas journey.

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Among the passengers aboard the Norwegian cargo ship, Esqualina, Barnard met Vera Murdoch, from Melbourne, fifteen years younger, and travelling with her parents. The two young women became friends immediately and, after returning to Australia, letters and visits kept the friendship alive over the following seventeen years.

In 1933 Barnard and her mother spent a quiet holiday together in England and Europe. We know little of it except that London became Barnard’s favourite city after at first bewildering her. They travelled home from Antwerp on the Tallyrand, another Norwegian semi-cargo ship, late in 1933, when the rigours of the Great Depression were beginning to ease. That voyage home was a happy spiritual experience for Barnard. She was so moved that, at its end she felt she had to share it immediately.

‘Living in and on the sea,’ she wrote to Nettie Palmer, ‘was like living in a sonnet, better than an island for it moves.’ The empty sea and sky were ‘like a dare to the human mind’. Her enjoyment of the last three days, spent almost wholly in the company of the captain of the ship, was even more important than being on the sea. Significant for the novel that she would soon write, was Barnard’s delight at having: ‘a whole row of human specimens held in a vise for your inspection. It is the best laboratory in the world for studying human nature.’323

The exuberant letter to Palmer was not all. On the voyage home she had begun to write a play, in which she planned to gather her ‘row of human specimens’ together and record their journeys through Europe though, from the little we know of Barnard’s first trip abroad, it was less than extensive. She had hoped to continue writing the play with Eldershaw, but by the time Barnard arrived home, Eldershaw was planning her own escape abroad and, by the end of 1933 had set off on a year-long journey.

Barnard continued to work doggedly on the play, sending sections of it by mail to Eldershaw for comment. She kept Nettie Palmer informed of her

323 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 10 September 1933. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 1174/1/4970, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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progress: ‘I must finish the first draft and post it to Teenie324 in England. There is only an act to write and an act to revise…’325 The distance, the time-lag, and also Eldershaw’s busy itinerary made anything resembling their former collaboration difficult. ‘The Conquest of Europe’ was never finished and there is no extant manuscript. It was cannibalised and used in their next novel, The Glasshouse.

Meanwhile, Barnard returned to her professional life at the Technical College Library, but without the stimulus of Eldershaw’s company, their constant lively discussions on contemporary writing, and their work together on their own projects, she soon became frustrated. She complained about the seemingly pointless research on ‘honey and clocks and welded bridges’, and the physical demands of the job. ‘After hauling heavy books, can hardly hold my pen.’326 Tired of library work, Barnard began to see it as a hindrance to her own writing.

At the end of 1934 Eldershaw came home bringing tales of a marvellous adventurous trip sullied somewhat by the disappointment of more rejections for the manuscript of ‘But Not for Love’, their short story collection which she had hawked around London publishing houses. Frustrated by the failure of their short stories to elicit interest, Barnard and Eldershaw returned to the form of writing in which they were confident of success—the novel. Still available for study are undated handwritten notes outlining characters for a new novel titled, at that stage, ‘The Voyage’327.

The cast list includes an ‘elderly couple’, ‘the captain’, and ‘an old man’, ‘a young man coming out to Australia because of his lungs – doomed,’ and ‘Desmond’s story of a missed moment,’ ‘narrator Stirling,’ ‘a mother and two daughters’ and ‘a woman who was leaving her husband.’ The authors closely followed this cast of characters for the novel that was finally entitled The

324 Eldershaw’s pet name. 325 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 25 March 1934. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/4411, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 326 M. Barnard, [letter to Vance Palmer], 24 July 1934. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966, MSS 1174/1/4411, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 327 In Marjorie Barnard Papers in Mitchell Library MSS 2809 MB Box 1.

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Glasshouse, with only a few additions. The ‘old man’ was dropped and Desmond was re-named David, the elderly couple were now accompanied by their no-longer-young daughter and a new sporty school teacher was added as well as the important ship’s doctor.

Barnard outlined the plan for their new novel in a letter to Vance Palmer.

We’ve begun a book – the story of a voyage, twelve passengers on a cargo ship. It’s to be a conglomerate – stories inset, not ‘true’ stories, but stories that one passenger makes up about the others… It’s really too young to be talked about yet. For us it is in its happiest stage – all hope and nothing yet disapproved. I’m terribly happy – dangerously.328

Barnard’s very personal and emotional ending to that letter suggests something left unsaid; she rarely revealed her emotions so nakedly. One wonders whether her exuberant happiness is related to Eldershaw’s return and the accompanying feeling of expectancy, as she sees the challenges posed by their new novel, or was it inspired by something else?

It may well have emanated from a memory she had hugged to her breast since the last days of her voyage on the Tallyrand. In her letter to Vance Palmer about the new book, Barnard used much the same language to describe the fictional journey that is to be the backbone of the book, as she had used fifteen months earlier in her letter to Nettie Palmer329 after her journey home. It is possible that she kept copies of her letters and re-read them, but not likely. Barnard did not have the eye for posterity of Nettie Palmer or Miles Franklin330. It is far more likely that her emotion during that journey a year and a half earlier, was fresh in her mind, awoken by her plan to re-live the experience in fiction.

328 M. Barnard, [letter to Vance Palmer], 2 January 1935. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/4411, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 329 M.Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], approximately September 1933. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/4411, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 330 Barnard destroyed her own personal papers, including letters she received, and asked her correspondents to destroy the letters she wrote to them. Fortunately for our understanding of the period several of her correspondents did not accede to her request.

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Now thirty-eight years old, Barnard re-told her story of those last three days of her journey home, but this time she revealed that her heart had been touched by romance. Whether it was her first experience of being in love, or not, the letter shouts her joy in the experience. At the very least, Barnard and the captain of the Tallyrand had enjoyed a companionship close enough to inspire thoughts of romance.

Of those exciting last days on the Tallyrand she had written:

I was the sole survivor on the passenger list. The Captain and I breakfasted, lunched and dined together for three days and made ruthlessly merry.331

It seems likely that the three days Barnard describes after other passengers disembarked could well have been the journey from Melbourne to Sydney. One wonders, then, where was Barnard’s mother, Ethel, during this crucial period on the near empty ship?

For The Glasshouse, instead of hours and days of researching in the Mitchell Library to establish an authentic background, Barnard and Eldershaw were free to use their own recent experiences, embellishing as the mood took them. The ‘glasshouse’ of the title was the steel and glass superstructure where a limited number of passengers were accommodated on many of the Norwegian freighters trading between Europe and Australia332. On the fictional Therikion passengers shared two-berth cabins on the lower of two levels, while the upper level housed the captain’s quarters, those of the ship’s doctor, an adjoining sick-room and one expensive suite for more affluent travellers, as well as the smoking room and the dining salon.

The structure of The Glasshouse is reminiscent of A House is Built. This new novel is also is divided into three parts, structured around the ship’s approach and arrival into, three key ports—Lisbon, Cape Town and Freemantle. The plot is meticulously planned to force the passengers into close contact, closer even than the shared dining salon demands. The shipboard

331 Marjorie Barnard, [letter Nettie Palmer], 10 September 1933. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/4411, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 332 Norwegian ships such as these were still visiting Australian ports well into the 1960s.

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setting is dominated by the sea — crashing storm-lashed foam, or gently rocking waves. It fills every day with its rise and fall and light-filled fluidity, forcing notice of its presence beyond the enclosed foreground of static sharp edges in the glasshouse and the various, irregular contributions of its passengers. This setting is vividly portrayed and constantly interesting.

The passengers are a mixed company, some Australian, some British and one very sick Belgian boy.333 The authors introduce us to them through narrative, sometimes in objective authorial voice, sometimes face to face as the spot-light falls upon each of them, and sometimes through the viewpoint of one of their number, Stirling Armstrong, an Australian novelist who has lived many years in London, and is now returning home. As a writer she is a trained observer, one, she says, who enjoys watching by choice and long habit, but never participates. She is not only the major viewpoint character but also an unmarried woman writer of a certain age who shares some important personality traits with her creators.

At the beginning of the journey Stirling seems to be truly an objective observer of life. She observes the embarkation of Raymond Becque as he leaves his family on the Antwerp wharf, and renders that parting convincingly, only colouring her interpretation of events, by what she observes from the clothes and demeanour of Raymond’s sisters and father. Thus far the cast of characters are introduced with flair and eloquence. This objectivity does not last. Stirling’s vision sours as the story proceeds. Her observation of Miss

Williamson and Dr Gregory quickly become personal and highly critical.334

Out of Lisbon, Stirling brings her half-finished novel to the corner of the deck where she sits.335 The emptiness of the voyage will allow her time to finish it, thus overcoming the ‘writers’ block’ that has been dogging her since she put the novel aside in London. She shares her thoughts on the difficulties of writing a novel. This is the first of Barnard’s interjections about the craft of writing that she inserts in this and her next two novels. The hints and

333 In the text he is always referred to as a ‘boy’, though his age is given as eighteen or nineteen. 334 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse. p. 49 and others. 335 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse, p. 96.

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comments replicate her own opinions on her profession and interrupt the story-line of each novel. Stirling has no illusions about inspiration. She knows finishing the novel ‘was going to be a matter of will and intelligence, a long, hard hammering job’.336

Barnard and Eldershaw had been lecturing and writing widely on the craft of the novel since they first spoke about writing A House is Built in 1929. This is the first of their “writer” novels. In each one an important writer- character is used to dispense her hints on writing and literature in general.

As the ship nears the equator, Stirling, growing irritable in the heat and unable to break through her writers’ block and get ahead with her unfinished novel, ruminates about writing stories about the other passengers. ‘Why shouldn’t she pin them all out on a sheet of paper… It wouldn’t be any less amusing because secret.’337 Instead of waiting to see what she can tease out in the enforced intimacy of the small ship-board company, she decides it will be even more amusing to create imaginary backgrounds and lives for her fellow- passengers.

Thus another layer of stories is created, a second plot-line within the primary plot. This is a precursor to the creation of two separate narratives with greater success in their last novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. In that novel it is the secondary plot that is most often admired and remembered. But when Stirling’s invented stories intervene in The Glasshouse, they introduce fantasy and the main narrative flags. At the same time Stirling’s frequent malicious comments risk alienating, rather than amusing, the reader. These stories of Stirling are dominated by negativity, as indeed are many of the stories in that almost forgotten early collection ‘But not for Love’.338 In 1932 when Barnard first sought publication of the collection in London she had added a note pointing out this characteristic. ‘I am afraid many of them are

336 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse, p. 97. 337 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse, p. 111. 338 But Not For Love as a collection was not published until 1988 after the death of both Eldershaw and Barnard.

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somewhat sombre,’339 she had written. A similar sombreness, and the underlying malice, threatens to stifle the reader’s enjoyment of Stirling’s stories.

It may be that Barnard and Eldershaw identified themselves too closely with Stirling. After relying on research and history for their first two novels, they may have felt themselves drawn very closely into this novel, built so directly upon their own experiences. The lead character, Stirling, is not only a woman novelist, but as her biography is sketched she is shown to be a successful author who has supported herself by her writing in London, living independently in her own home. Stirling is the successful writer Barnard and Eldershaw wanted to be; they had created a character who was the fulfilment of their literary ambition.

Many critics have pointed out the difficulties arising from Stirling’s inserted stories. According to H M Green the problem encountered in the writing of The Glasshouse stems from Stirling. The novel takes its tone from her. These stories

must not seem as real as the main story if they are not to detract from its reality, and yet they must be reasonably lifelike, if, as intended, we are to regard her as a novelist of ability.340

In his Introduction to But Not For Love, Robert Darby refers to Stirling’s stories as obviously inferior. But why are they required to be obviously inferior to the authors’ own stories when they are produced by such a successful London- based writer, who is the envy of much less successful Barnard and Eldershaw?

Though M Barnard Eldershaw planned this novel meticulously, the partners worked on it separately, and as a result a flaw in the collaborative writing partners’ tightly controlled method of designing a novel is exposed. It highlights the difficulty of changing course once begun. By sticking to the plan, the whole was made less perfect. Barnard herself suggests, ‘We might have had

339 M. Barnard Eldershaw, [letter to George Harrap], 14 August 1932. Marjorie Barnard Papers 1927-1960, MLMSS 451 Box 5(3), Mitchell Library, Sydney. 340 H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, p. 1184.

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better results if we had divided the work logically. One writing the stories, the other the main story – but it did not fall out like that.’341

Stirling examines the travellers in the glasshouse but as Darby notes, her stories bear no resemblance to the characters as they are. In other words, she does not report on what she sees, but writes an imagined story about each of them. One could argue that this complication was thrust upon the authors by their involvement in the contemporary controversy regarding the legitimacy of non-fiction writers that was being discussed as a major contemporary issue by their Sydney colleagues.342 Despite her early claims to be an observer with a captive audience to be studied, it was essential that Stirling write fiction not factual stories, or the taint of mere reporting might be suspected.343 The fact that they were short stories, the form of fiction that Barnard and Eldershaw were unsuccessfully trying to have published at that time, is significant.

Among the passengers, the family group, the Weatherells, consists of a recently widowed woman and her two daughters travelling home to Australia. Sisters Helen and Lois are fond of one another, without the uneven relationship of Fanny and Maud of A House is Built, nor the complicated power struggle of Lucy and Charlotte in Green Memory. The almost-adult girls here reflect something of their creators. Helen, the elder sister, gentle and introspective, reaches out only to Stirling and Raymond Becque and the odd stray bird that flutters across the upper deck. She reflects Barnard’s gentleness and timidity, while Lois is the only genuinely out-going, cheerful, naively helpful character who could possibly suggest a younger Eldershaw.

The two sisters vie for their mother’s attention openly while secretly claiming a special relationship with their recently deceased father, a pallid reminder of the fate of the sisters in Green Memory. The divisive behaviour

341 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 26 February 1936. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 342 See chapter 11, in Plaque with Laurel where this contemporary argument about whether journalists can call themselves writers is more widely discussed. 343At that time in the world of Australian literature and writing, the argument about who was a ‘writer’ and who was merely a journalist, raged. See Margorie Barnard Eldershaw’s next novel Plaque with Laurel.

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that separates Lucy and Charlotte could not occur between Lois and Helen for their strong and supportive mother is ever present to moderate angry feelings or unwonted jealousy. She is unobtrusive enough to allow her daughters to develop according to their own desires, while all the time keeping them safe, physically and psychologically. She is the direct opposite of the weak and uninvolved mother in Green Memory, yet despite her strength of character and resilience in the face of recent widowhood, Mrs Weatherell is depicted as the epitome of dullness, with the emphasis on cardigans and knitting.

Barnard’s use of fathers and daughters suggests that her own relationship with her father was probably much more important than she admits. A House is Built had the all-powerful James Hyde, followed in Green Memory by the dead, but still powerful Alfred Haven, and now the dead Mr Weatherell whose personality still affects his devoted and grieving daughters. These men are all viewed in relation to their daughters, not their wives.

Mr Cartwright disrupts this pattern. He is quietly pleasant and conciliatory, his only immoderate emotion being his unqualified adoration of his haughty wife. Little is shown of his relationship with his unmarried daughter of indeterminate age who has been so defeated by life that she relies upon her imagination for any pleasure or satisfaction. Her main fantasy is that of achieving intimacy with the Captain, which runs parallel to Stirling’s much more sophisticated and fruitful imaginings.

James Gregory, the ship’s doctor, an Australian returning home, is a seasoned traveller, relaxed, urbane and friendly to all. He is a dedicated professional, devoting his time and skill to Raymond Becque’s recovery, but when his medical skill is not needed he is also a carefree man-of-the-world. He enjoys the company of any attractive woman in the vicinity and enters into light-hearted flirtations with at least two of the women on board. He is also a socially adept and charming companion, sharing pleasant and intelligent conversation with all aboard, including Stirling and the Captain. In Fremantle he is met by a boisterous wife who gives him an unselfconscious public kiss that Stirling sees as diminishing him for she has misinterpreted the Doctor’s

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true equanimity as something akin to her own assumed and falsely self- assured exterior behind which she hides her growing dissatisfaction with her life and her worries about the future.

The Devlins, a bright young British couple with their baby, occupy the ship’s only suite as they journey to South Africa where the husband will take up an imperial post. They bring aboard the brittleness and snobbery of London in the nineteen thirties, which has already disenchanted Stirling. When they leave the ship in Cape Town the suite is taken by the second willing victim of Dr Gregory’s charm – the woman who has left her husband. She airs her husband’s faults to anyone who will listen all the way to Fremantle, and when she is not met by a message from her husband entreating her to return, she is devastated.

While Stirling is undoubtedly the key character in The Glasshouse, the development of the other passengers throughout the novel is fascinating. In their variety they represent Barnard and Eldershaw’s interest in humanity, but the imagined stories all reflect Stirling’s moods. Miss Gloria Williamson, Stirling’s cabin-mate, is a jolly teacher with a brusque, over-familiar and irritating manner344. Stirling gets her revenge by conjuring up for Williamson a particularly cruel and humbling fate. This creative settling of scores, and Stirling’s obvious satisfaction with her revenge, reeks of malice and of

Stirling’s dissatisfaction with her own life.345

Early in her career Barnard had felt that a work of fiction was not completed until it was read. By the time she was writing this novel, she had begun to value the reader less. Later in her life, to a question about whether she thought of the reader when she wrote, Barnard replied, ‘I’m not obsessed by the reader, to please the reader, or anything like that.’346 The Doctor, though a charming and sympathetic companion does not stir Stirling

344 Remarkably Rorabacher suggests this irritating character is based on Eldershaw, Barnard’s most beloved friend and co-author. L. Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw, Twayne Publishers Inc, New York, 1973. P. 345 M. Dever calls Stirling’s revenge ‘malevolent’, in her thesis, ‘Subject to Authority: A study of M. Barnard Eldershaw’. PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 1993, p. 144. 346 Interview in G. Giuffre, A Writing Life. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990, p. 45.

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emotionally. Only the Captain arouses Stirling’s sexual interest. Throughout the novel there is a subtle thread of suspense. We wait all through the novel, watching the Captain’s slight moves towards Stirling, as she constantly makes herself available in a quiet corner of the deck, either writing her stories or struggling with writer’s block. She fails to engage with her half-finished novel, but for a time, at least, has more success with the Captain. Stirling’s insubstantial love affair with the Captain, that hovers over the last quarter of the novel, almost certainly has its roots in Barnard’s earlier homeward journey – but since she did not ever include her mother in her record of this journey, that story was probably slanted by what she wished had happened, rather than what did happen.

In the novel too, it is very late in the voyage before Stirling and the Captain reach any sort of emotional connection. Kristiansen, the Captain, is a solid man with the loneliness of having the top job, and unable to share his worries. His heart-breaking responsibility for the death of his only son and the resultant emotional break with his wife of many years adds pain to his loneliness. He senses Stirling’s interest, seeks her out and enjoys her company. He misreads her, though, just as she wanted him to do; he accepts her assumed sophistication as self-confidence.

Stirling is poised, on the brink of falling deeply in love with him when the Mate’s ill-temper forces the Captain back to the ship’s bridge. Stirling knows the Captain is withdrawing from her. ‘She patiently waits for him to come back…’ Just as, a few years later, Barnard stays very still, patiently waiting for her own lover to come back to her.347 Upon reaching Fremantle, Stirling realizes it is too late for her; the Captain has chosen duty and his wife. She avoids further hurt by leaving the ship early.

The Glasshouse, indeed any M Barnard Eldershaw novel, is notable for its occasional bursts of wonderful language. Words like ‘mulcted’348, ’discursis’ might send the reader to the dictionary, but repetition of striking words and

347 Described in Marjorie Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville. 348 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse. p. 20.

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writing manoeuvres sometimes becomes irritating. ‘Irrifrangible’349 is used too often and, at least three times in this novel, Barnard employs the conceit of following a thread running through one or another character’s fingers as a metaphor for coping with life’s recurring confusions.350

Despite these repetitions, one of the joys of reading Barnard is her enthusiastic wielding of unusual words and vivid images; The Glasshouse is no exception. A miserable cabin light is ‘burning shabbily’.351 After a sleepless night as the ship ploughs through a fog, ‘They put away the night that was like a bruise on their spirits…’ It is so easy to see ‘a man in a torn blue jersey with a dead lantern in his hand…’ and she begs us to enjoy ‘…the white city of Lisbon spreading up over the hillside from the spindly chaos of its quays… ‘352. The city is simply lifted up and away from the waterfront to rest on the unsteady spikes of ‘spindly’.353 Thus does Barnard carelessly throw us bouquets of effortless prose, words that are sometimes mundane but surprisingly right.

The narrator, Stirling Armstrong, describes herself as one of the band of ‘middle-aged spinsters with small but steady incomes, inconspicuous exteriors and reflective minds’ – a description that would fit Barnard comfortably354. Stirling had a ‘cool dry interest in people, as long as she was not brought into close contact with them.’355 Barnard herself was reserved, hesitant about meeting strangers. As she wrote to a friend ‘I am a stranger and an outcast in my environment,… yet I don’t really belong anywhere else.’356

Though friendship was exceedingly important to her, Barnard too, preferred a little distance, a small barrier that allowed her some private space.357 Her many friendships with other women writers, though warm and generous, were continued mostly through correspondence, which

349 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse. p. 13. 350 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse. pp. 42, 66 & 198. 351 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse. p. 25. 352 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse. p. 37. 353 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse. p. 69. 354 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse. p. 10. 355 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse. p. 66. 356 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville. 357 M. Dever, ‘Subject to Authority: A study of M Barnard Eldershaw’, p. 215.

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automatically gave her time and distance. She made many long-lasting friendships in the libraries in which she worked where the formal hierarchy created the distance. She was the senior librarian, the other women on her staff were her ‘young’.358

In The Glasshouse, Stirling’s own story, and her personality are central to the whole novel. She is an inconspicuous spinster of reflective mind, a woman fleeing loneliness in London for a country with which she seems to have little empathy. Her decision to leave London is done with ‘hidden malice’, not relief or joy — or even regret — as one might expect. From the beginning the reader is led to see Stirling as not so much reflective, as unhappy, disappointed and, perhaps as a result of this, somewhat spiteful. This is slowly reinforced by constant reference to her malicious feelings about most of the other characters. In The Glasshouse, in order to make sure the reader understands the importance of the malice felt by the protagonist and main viewpoint character, there is a whole separate chapter on the pleasures of malice. Did Barnard not trust the reader to ‘get’ the point, without labouring it?

When Stirling notices Dr Gregory leaning nonchalantly against the ship’s rail she recognizes him as another seasoned traveller, a man relaxed aboard ships.

Is he, she wonders a trifle jealously, a more seasoned traveller than I? Has he got to a stage when he genuinely doesn’t give a damn for anybody? She was full of happy, confident malice.359

This negative view of another Australian returning home is baffling, and risks rendering her viewpoint as warped with selfishness; she is not to be trusted. Stirling’s shyness at the thought of meeting other passengers in the salon is unfitting, too. One doesn’t expect that reaction from a woman who has moved alone from Australia to London, lived alone there for some years, and in the ten days when she was preparing to leave, delighted in declining invitations. It

358 A term by which she referred to many of her devoted junior staff. 359 Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse. p. 48.

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sounds much more like Barnard herself, who still lived in her parents’ home, and who, throughout her life, never chose to cope with life alone.

Stirling’s country up-bringing, her travelling by train to boarding school, was borrowed from Flora; her Australianness, noted by the American Rorabacher, is not evident to me.360 Stirling was identified by the ship’s crew as English and also by the other passengers, even by Dr Gregory, the well- travelled Australian. It is fairly clear that she was not returning because homesickness drew her, but because she had recognized the barrenness of her borrowed life in England. As a woman of her times and class she would have felt herself to be British while living in Australia. Only during Stirling’s long residence in London did doubts about where she really belonged creep in.

The Glasshouse, published in January 1936, by George Harrap of London, and recommended by the London Book Society and the London Book Guild was reprinted in London and in Sweden that same year, but was not printed in Australia until 1945 when it was selected by the Commonwealth Literary Advisory Board for inclusion in the Pocket Library edition of Australian Authors— a cheaply bound wartime edition. It was, nevertheless, welcomed by Australian readers. In the five years since Green Memory was published, there had been only short non-fiction from M Barnard Eldershaw. The contemporary reviews of The Glasshouse were mostly good, particularly in Europe361, but sales fell far short of the authors’ expectations.

As soon as The Glasshouse was published, Barnard wrote to Nettie Palmer: ‘everything depends on your opinion’.362 When Palmer not only liked the novel, but thought it an advance on the first two novels, Barnard felt justified in treading new paths in fiction, although she herself did not consider that the inserted stories had been a success. Colin Roderick found only praise for it in The Australian Novel and Robert Darby thought this novel was

360 L. Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw. pp. 49-56. 361 Farquharson, [letter to Marjorie Barnard], 7 August 1935. Marjorie Barnard Papers 1927- 1960, MLMSS 2809 MB Box1, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 362 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 8 October 1935. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers, 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/14793-6, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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significant as a literary exercise.363 Many of its contemporary Australian readers may have seen it as a clever and intriguing play on the familiar journey home from England and wondered about the poisonous injection of malice— another instance of Barnard being ahead of her time.

It was Barnard Eldershaw’s first novel about writing and writers and its sturdy structure, pivotal characters and dancing language befitted their first successful foray into contemporary fiction.

…………………………………………….

363 R. Darby, ‘While Freedom Lives: political preoccupations in the writing of Marjorie Barnard and Frank Dalby Davison, 1935-1947’. PhD thesis, ADFA, UNSW Library.1989, p. 310.

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Chapter 9 – The Affair – 1934-1942

One doesn’t have to worry about his vanity. He’s too proud to be vain but there are some curious formal streaks to his pride so that friendship with him is just a little like a game of snakes and ladders.’364

In 1933, when Nettie Palmer suggested that a meeting between the Barnard and Eldershaw pair and Frank Dalby Davison would benefit both parties, Barnard was abroad on her first trip to Europe. Davison met Flora Eldershaw and found her ‘charming but elusive’.365 Perhaps he was in awe of Eldershaw, for ‘elusive’ is a surprising word to use about a woman most often described as open and friendly, brilliant, eager, confident and energetic. When Barnard returned from Europe later in 1933, it was she who felt in awe of Davison. Having already been impressed by Man-Shy and thus poised to admire its author, Barnard asked a friend for Davison’s address and a luncheon was arranged—a luncheon so important to Barnard that she wore her ‘best hat’.366 Davison found Barnard more approachable than Eldershaw. I like her well. Like myself she is inclined to be forthright in her opinions. I like that even if I don’t always agree with the opinions expressed.367

Davison’s biographer, Louise Rorabacher, was even more positive. She believed that his meeting with Barnard and Eldershaw was ‘most important to his life and work’.368 Barnard was thirty-six years old, with no evidence of any earlier romance in her life except the hint of a fleeting attraction to the captain of the Tallyrand. She fell in love with Davison over that first lunch: I loved him from the first time I saw him. He was in love with someone else then. He was very unhappy and in straits with the Depression. He

364Barnard [letter to Nettie Palmer] about her edit of Davison’s Blue Coast Caravan. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/14793-6, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 365 F. D. Davison, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 2 January 1933. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra. Davison’s novel Man-Shy won the Australian Literary Society Medal in 1931. 366M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 26 April 1934. Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/4411, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 367 F. D. Davison, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 8 April 1934. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966, MSS 1174/1/4411, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 368 L. Rorabacher, Frank Dalby Davison. Twayne, Boston, 1979, p. 92.

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turned more and more to me. He could talk to me about the woman he loved. It hurt but I could hide it… 369

Barnard and Davison, without the restraining presence of Eldershaw who, during 1934 was travelling overseas, became friends quickly. They spent time together at writers’ gatherings and visited art galleries. Soon he was invited back to the hospitable Barnard home at Longueville. Barnard confided to Palmer that: ‘I’ve only made friends quickly twice in my life—you and Frank’.370 Having Davison’s company filling the empty hours while Eldershaw was absent overseas, allowed the spark that kindled Barnard’s one passionate love affair to flare. It blew away her emotional calm and upset her restrained self-image. Suddenly enlivened by a new enthusiasm for experimentation, for change, Barnard began to question her quiet life as a dutiful daughter, a busy librarian and part-time novelist. These new feelings were so strange to her that she didn’t understand them. Unable to explain the excitement of her adulterous love to her friends or family, Barnard described her new state of mind as a physical breakdown.371 Davison’s most pressing need in those early months had been finding a sympathetic listener to whom he could pour out his disappointment and frustration over the failure of his current ‘on again-off again’ extra-marital love affair with Pixie O’Harris. A children’s book illustrator, O’Harris had charmed Davison into writing Children of the Dark People as a vehicle for her illustrations372, and he had fallen in love. However she decided to end the affair and return to her husband. Barnard listened patiently as Davison’s poured out his distress.373 Barnard wrote to Nettie Palmer: He’s ready to throw away everything for this shoddy affair that is over and done with. Kay wants to come back and patch things up. He says

369 M. Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville. One of a flood of letters in Jan 1947when she needed to confide in a friend the secret of her affair years after it was over. 370 Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 16 January 1937. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966, 1174/1/14589, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 371 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 16 January 1937. Also reported in D. Modjeska, Exiles at Home. Sirius Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1981, p. 209. 372 On the NSW Government Education Dept list for recommended children’s books for primary schools for many years. 373 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 13 February 1935. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/622, National Library of Australia, Canberra

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he won’t have her, patching isn’t good enough.’374

Later Barnard told Palmer of how Davison’s wife, Kay, had sought her help: “taking my hand under the table and trying to tell me in a very low voice the story of their latest quarrel.’375 It was too late to restore Kay’s marriage, but her plea was convincing evidence that Barnard’s disguise as merely a sympathetic friend was intact. Davison did accept a patched-up marriage for the next eight years— the years of his liaison with Barnard while he lived with Kay and their children. The emotional upheaval in Barnard’s life during 1934, the year that Eldershaw was abroad, was unsettling enough for her to write a letter to Davison that is startling in the intimacy it suggests. The mood and language of this letter written to a married man still living at home with his wife and children is hard to explain except as a glimpse into Barnard’s emotional vulnerability coupled with her extreme naivety: Went to a choral concert in the Great Hall at the University last night. It was very fine, especially Brahms’ lovely, intricate Gypsy songs. Afterwards I climbed the tower in the dark, up among the bells and got out on the roof. It was good to lean my head against the stone and look at something big. The University always looks so unreal at night with the lawns unnaturally green under the electric light and the shadows falling with a sort of inevitable rightness…. 376

She ended the letter with endearingly child-like frankness. ‘I want your friendship very much.’ Since Barnard later destroyed all her incoming correspondence, it remains an unlikely possibility that Davison may have written something to initiate this seemingly spontaneous offering of intimacy. Later letters from Barnard to Davison that have survived are in a ‘casual friendly’ style, such as direct invitations: ‘you must come and have dinner with us, also Mrs Davison…

374 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 22 March 1935. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/622, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 375 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 10 November 1935. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 376 M. Barnard, [letter to Frank Dalby Davison], 19 September 1934. Frank Dalby Davison and Marie Davison Papers 1930-1990, MS Acc11.106, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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I’ll speak to Mother [to organise housekeeping details], look up my duty roster and write to you again.’377 Barnard and Davison both benefitted from their friendship—for it was a friendship as well as an illicit affair— but they benefitted in different ways. Davison gained almost immediately from Barnard’s skilled help with his writing. One of the first writing projects for which Davison needed help, was the re-writing of his recently rejected Blue Coast Caravan. Barnard gave it a thorough sub-edit, and handed it back to Davison with seven closely written pages of comment and corrections that Barnard said were necessarily brutal. ‘He swallowed the seven pages with the best grace in the world…he’s too proud to be vain.’378 Davison was wise enough to recognize that he needed Barnard’s help. He made the alterations and Angus and Robertson published the Blue Coast Caravan, his first non-fiction book. Barnard sent a copy to Nettie Palmer in October 1935 with the note: ‘It’s too soon to know how it’s going … it deserves to do well…’ In her biography of Davison, Rorabacher acknowledged how much he had benefitted from his association with Barnard and Eldershaw: His wider comments on literature indicate the remarkable extent to which he had remedied his lack of education through books and the company of those who knew them.’379

Davison did not add to Barnard’s writing skills, not even in short stories with which she was struggling when they met. Perhaps he was unable to do so as his writing style was markedly individual. It may be that the only way Davison could help Barnard was in providing the life experience that enriched her emotional life and, incidentally, her later short stories. One of the positive results of that seven-to-eight-year period was that his friendship was probably the key to Barnard’s decision to leave her job to

377 M. Barnard, [letter to Frank Dalby Davison], 13 September 1934. Frank Dalby Davison and Marie Davison Papers 1930-1990, MS Acc11.106, National Library of Australia, Canberra. Barnard’s Technical College Library job included night shift. The Barnards always had a live-in cook-housekeeper as well as other domestic help so the work of entertaining guests would not have been too burdensome on Mrs Barnard. 378 M. Barnard [letter to Nettie Palmer] about her edit of Davison’s Blue Coast Caravan. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/14793-6, National Library of Australia, Canberra 379 Rorabacher, Frank Dalby Davison. p. 99.

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write full-time which resulted in a stream of successful work of various genres that flowed from her pen. That period became the most energised and prolific period in Barnard’s writing life. Being in love, and feeling that she was desired stimulated her productivity and awakened her political awareness as well as her sexuality. As we have seen in Essays in Australian Fiction, the chapter Barnard and Eldershaw wrote on Davison was full of superlatives about the quality of his writing. For example: ‘The miracle is that he makes it as nourishing as the onion and as perfumed as the rose.’380 In marked contrast to the praise the two women heaped on Davison’s work, his article on M Barnard Eldershaw, in a series on Australian writers published in The Bulletin, was very critical of their first three novels. Rorabacher called it ‘nit-picking’.381 Davison was much more positive in his treatment of their first three histories, and their fourth novel, Plaque with Laurel. One of the really difficult things Barnard had to organise right from the beginning of this friendship was how to keep the affair with Davison a secret. She lived at home with her parents, so Davison’s visits there had to be above reproach. Her parents knew many of her writing friends, too, so the affair had to be kept a secret from everyone. The friendship brought Barnard excitement and Davison’s good company, which escalated quite rapidly into something else. She found it difficult to take the next step into a sexual relationship. Later she told her confidante: Frank wanted to make love to me and I found that hard to come at, because I loved him and he didn’t pretend to love me and there hadn’t been anyone else…382

Eldershaw’s trip abroad extended throughout 1934 and, despite Davison’s newly important role in her life, Barnard’s days were still dominated by the routine of the Technical College Library. She was now dissatisfied with her working life there and wanted change. In a letter to Vance Palmer she complained of tiredness and, spurred on by the possibility of seeing more of Davison if she escaped the demands of her regular library job, she dreamed

380 M. Barnard Eldershaw, Essays in Australian Fiction. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1938, p. 72. 381 Rorabacher, Frank Dalby Davison. p. 95. 382 M. Barnard during her outpouring about the affair to Devanny in early January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville.

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of a life writing full-time. It would call for financial sacrifice; earning a living by one’s pen was almost impossible. Dare she try? Her head was full of projects, but she had no time to pursue them. In February, 1935, Barnard wrote to Nettie Palmer, seeking advice: I believe that I am a writer — not just an educated woman who wields an occasional pen, but I don’t know what my staying powers are, how deep it goes. There’s a lot of life banked up in me, rather painfully. In other words I don’t know whether I’m worth this upheaval.

Palmer’s reply evidently boosted Barnard’s faith in herself for she organised her finances by withdrawing £140 from her superannuation account and she agreed to her father’s offer of an allowance of £150 per year for two years— the time they estimated that it would take for Barnard to establish herself financially as a writer. She acknowledged her father’s generosity with a grudging comment: Father is not a poor man and the £300 would not mean a sacrifice for him… There’s a little matter of pride but I’ve got to a stage where that is not very important…383 Despite Barnard prolific output in the following years, their estimate was too optimistic and Oswald Barnard continued paying his daughter this allowance for the rest of his life. Barnard continued to take great pains to conceal the real nature of her affair from her family. As far as we can ascertain Barnard’s parents never knew the sexual nature of their daughter’s friendship with Davison, nor realised that she was using her father’s allowance to finance it. Much of Barnard’s confusion and dissatisfaction with her library job probably arose from the demands of her new love interest, and the adjustments she had to make in her private life to enjoy it. She ‘explained’ it differently to Palmer, and possibly, even to herself: I always thought I could never live by writing, but I find I can’t live without it…This isn’t temperament or anything like that. It’s the quite natural desperation of a human being who can’t live without any of the major satisfactions of life.384

383 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 13 February 1935. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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How cleverly she appears to confide her emotional upheaval to Palmer while not revealing the true cause of it. Barnard handed in her resignation at the library soon after Eldershaw returned home in early 1935 and wrote to Vance Palmer that she had no regrets about taking the plunge and resigning her job, ‘and not more doubts and hesitations than are necessary to my character…’385 Flora Eldershaw, back in her place as Barnard’s closest friend and confidante, took on an additional new role. She now offered herself as ‘chaperone’, ‘excuse’, ‘cover’ for the lovers’ trysts. Indeed only Eldershaw’s vigilance and loyalty made secrecy of the affair possible within full view of the observant Sydney writing community, over so many years. Eldershaw, in her usual frank, friendly manner resumed her former position as Barnard’s ‘chief friend’, and made it seem that the two of them, as long-term best friends, were now welcoming a third writer, Davison, into their tight circle. Publicly they became known as the Triumvirate, a powerful left-wing group within the Fellowship of Australian Writers and, according to Dever, second only to the Palmers in influence in the literary world of the day.386 Barnard was strengthened by her new relationship, even as it now included Eldershaw, for both women enjoyed Davison’s company. To disguise the real nature of her relationship with Davison, Barnard began to spin an extensive web of stories. To Nettie Palmer Barnard wrote of Frank spending an evening with her at Longueville listening to a concert on the radio, and of how he tried to wheedle an old photo of her from her mother.387 If this really happened one wonders why it did not alert Ethel Barnard to the true nature of her daughter’s friendship with Davison whom she knew to be a married man.

384 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 22 March 1935. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. Almost certainly Barnard was referring to her own sexual fulfilment, knowing that Palmer would not see that. 385 M. Barnard, [letter to Vance Palmer], 22 March 1935. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 386 M. Dever (ed.), M. Barnard Eldershaw: Plaque with Laurel, Essays, Reviews & Correspondence. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1995, introduction. 387 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 19 May 1935. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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Another story was probably invented after an embarrassing meeting with Frank Clune who came upon Barnard and Davison waiting for a tram early in the morning while they were still wearing evening clothes. This hard- to-believe-in–full story was that Barnard spent the night caring for Kay, Davison’s wife, who had become sick while the two women attended a concert together. Frank, returning home very late had then given Barnard breakfast before escorting her to the tram stop to go home. To keep the affair secret Barnard had to constantly make up tales, exaggerate half-truths and create imaginative cover stories. Barnard’s emotional involvement during this period and the measures she took to cope with it poses questions as to how the passionate affair, with its requisite secrecy and attendant fact-shifting, affected her life and her writing. It is even possible that some of the more believable flights of fancy may have been re-structured as short stories. In 1936, to secure privacy for her trysts with Davison, Barnard rented the first of a series of small apartments in the Kings Cross/Potts Point area. In order to disguise the real purpose of these hideaways Barnard and Eldershaw began to use the rooms regularly for informal meetings, inviting other writers to join them to eat and drink together during wide-ranging discussions. Davison’s presence was taken for granted as he was known to be a trusted friend of them both, and his presence made it easier for them to invite a wide group of male friends including Xavier Herbert, Louis Esson, Tom Inglis Moore, Frank Wilmot, and Leslie Rees.388 Many women writers also came in staggered groups. All seemed to believe the charade that these regular literary, soiree-type entertainments were the reason that Barnard rented rooms away from her family home, despite the fact that many of these same guests had been dining occasionally at the Longueville home for years. The Barnard Eldershaw ‘salon’ became widely recognised and was sometimes publicly acknowledged as a source of ideas and inspiration. Davison publicly credited discussions at the salon as the source of his ill-fated political pamphlet ‘While Freedom Lives’.

388 Mentioned in many of Barnard’s letters and also found in D. Modjeska, Exiles at Home. Sirius Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1981, p. 209.

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In 1938 when her assignations with Davison became more regular, Barnard rented a bigger and better flat. I kept a place for us at Kings Cross, we had every Monday evening together. I never asked for any more or tried to have a bigger part in his life. …I was very happy… I loved him with all my heart.389

In the years until 1940 the affair matured, settling into a kind of permanence. It was prevented from ever falling into the rut of routine by the constant need to maintain secrecy. During the years when Davison was dominant in her life Barnard may have changed from an apolitical liberal to an extreme socialist in her public politics, but not in her personal beliefs and values. Extra-marital sex was not socially acceptable in the church-going mainstream of middle-class Australia in the 1930s and 40s. Nothing could shake Barnard’s determination, to protect her parents from the knowledge that she had entered into a sexual relationship with a married man. She had strayed beyond the bounds of their devout Christian social rectitude and it was a step she was determined to conceal from them. To hide her secret in the face of so many mutual friends not only in her home and at various public meeting places, but also in the lovers’ hideaways she rented in Kings Cross and adjacent Potts Point, required a good memory, amazing dexterity with speedy explanations and extreme watchfuness. Eldershaw, Davison and even Barnard herself may have regarded keeping the secret as part of a game at first, but kept up continually for over seven years, it cannot have been less than a severe nervous strain for all of them. The extreme measures Barnard took to shield her parents from what would have seemed to them to be a disgraceful betrayal of their values and her upbringing, indicates her desire to keep their love and respect. Perhaps her secrecy also held an element of anxiety about her own reputation, the picture she held of herself. The fear of losing the financial help of her father’s allowance was probably not an influence, for her offers of financial help to others continued. One might imagine that the psychological damage of those

389 M. Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville. Devanny became her confidante just a short time before Ethel Barnard died.

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seven years of secrecy, subterfuge, lies, would be immense, but the evidence suggests the contrary. It seems not to have diminished Barnard’s joy in Davison’s company. During those years she continued to write at an impressive pace, consistently well, while also greatly expanding her repertoire. In 1940 Barnard’s father died, and in 1941 Eldershaw left Sydney to work in the Department of Reconstruction in Canberra. She had shown no evidence of disappointment at having to share Barnard’s time and attention, but her friend’s long and utter absorption in Davison, together with the fact that Eldershaw, as the loyal ‘cover’, was complicit in the necessary lies to people who were her friends, too, must have been stressful. The pressure on the conscience of a Catholic woman cast in such a position of conflicting loyalties may well have contributed to her decision to leave Sydney. Throughout his liaison with Barnard, Davison continued to live with his wife, Kay, who was known to many mutual friends, as well as to Barnard’s family. Without Eldershaw as the always evident chaperone, Barnard’s and Davison’s attendance together at writers’ functions must have attracted attention, and certainly their presence in the King’s Cross flat had to become more furtive. Barnard missed the company of her long-time friend keenly, too, though she was also distracted by her mother’s need for company after her father’s death. Of her life with Davison during this period Barnard recalled- We never went anywhere together. I kept everything very still, not that I was ashamed but because I didn’t want to put any sort of bond on him. It would have if anyone had known — a woman like me…390

That last unconscious phrase is enough to convince us that, despite everything, at heart Marjorie remained the proud daughter of Oswald and Ethel Barnard. Her whole unconscious self was permeated by their values and indeed by her own self-image. This remained true even during the years when the love affair was at its height. Her emotions led her into playing a role she could not recognise as her real self.

390 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville.

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Barnard’s social experience widened immeasurably during those years when she was dominated by her love for Davison. The uncertainties she experienced influenced many of her attitudes to love and marriage and man- woman relationships that she later re-interpreted in her short stories. Who could say that experiences that challenged and expanded her in so many ways were a mistake? But they came at a cost. They led to heart-break and also to Barnard’s eventual disappointment in her own literary achievement. For Davison it was a convenient liaison, enriching his career, his education and his self-esteem, and it was he who defined the limits of the relationship. For several years he controlled Barnard’s happiness. For him it was an affair, a sexual and intellectually rewarding relationship, but never a love affair.391 Barnard saw the end coming, but was incapable of extricating herself before the crash. A couple of times he decided to finish with me. I swallowed my misery and did nothing and he came back. In 1942 I knew things were really coming to an end. I still saw him, but never alone. Nothing was said.392

In 1942 Davison met Edna McNab,393 the woman who became his second wife. She was twenty-nine, he was forty-nine. For Edna, he left Kay and distanced himself from Barnard. Amid all his affairs, Davison had found love.394 Though Barnard had always understood that the love that consumed her was not reciprocated, and that the relationship could not last, Davison’s flaunting of his new love caused her great distress. He was in love with Marie [Edna] and wanted to tell me about it. He was unhappy and on edge. I was, as he said, very naive, I found it hard to believe that there was nothing left of our friendship… 395

In July 1942 Barnard fell dangerously ill and lay, a helpless in-patient in Sydney’s North Shore Mater Hospital. She later interpreted this illness as an

391 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville. 392 Barnard, [letters to Jean Devanny], January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville. 393 Davison re-named Edna, Marie. 394 Rorabacher, Frank Dalby Davison, p. 137: “Frank himself marked the 1940s as a happy turning point in his life as both a man and a writer.” 395 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville.

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emotional response to Davison’s abandonment ... “I think I took refuge in pneumonia…”396 Eldershaw came from Melbourne to visit her in hospital, and realising the affair with Davison was over, she closed up Barnard’s flat at Kings Cross and persuaded Davison to come to the hospital to say good-bye to Barnard. She was pathetically grateful for his visit.397 Though she had known the sexual relationship could not last, she had believed she could retain his friendship. She did not realise that to Davison her friendship was to a great extent a mentorship and he probably felt he had now outgrown it. Barnard was more financially sound than he, better informed, better educated, occupied a higher social status.398 She had taught him much, but now, it seems, the sexual activity had meant very little to him. Now he had a new love. He didn’t need Barnard. Barnard was unable at that time to deal gracefully with her predicament, but before many months had passed she was able to put her failed love behind her, and she also pulled back from the leftish political views that had accompanied it. She could have ended her writing career then, too, and sunk back into a quiet life with her mother. Together with Eldershaw she had written four novels, three major histories and several minor ones, a book of literary criticism, and many articles and essays. As well, she had written Macquarie’s World399 alone and many of her short stories had been published. She had attained some level of success as a writer. Her private life, though, was in bad shape. The man she loved had abandoned her, her country was pursuing a war she believed to be wrong in every sense, and for the past seven years she had lived a life of deceit that had distanced her from her beloved mother and all her friends except Eldershaw. Barnard could not immediately drop the web of lies that enmeshed her, for it was still essential to keep knowledge of the now-dead affair secret from her mother who had grown even more frail. As Barnard recovered from

396 A dramatic increase in respiratory problems and notable loss of bone strength are now a recognised symptoms in the later years of polio survivors. 397 Barnard’s letter to Palmer. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 398 Rorabacher. Frank Dalby Davison. 399 M. Barnard, Macquarie's World. Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1946.

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pneumonia and heartbreak she slowly absorbed the loneliness that descended upon her after Davison withdrew. The home in Longueville had shrunk with her father’s death, but now, lacking the two former protectors of her emotional life, that home was the only shell to which Barnard could retreat.400 She tried to resume her social life but it had become a desert. Other things seemed to wither up, too: Vance and Nettie no longer wrote to me or answered letters. When Len [Mann] came to Sydney he no longer got in touch with me. I don’t know if there was any connection and I wouldn’t look to see. Probably they just got a feeling that I wasn’t fit for human consumption.401

This period must have seemed to Barnard as a sort of trial or test. After being immersed in her own prolific writing, a lively involvement in the literary world and, most particularly, basking in fulfilment and emotional happiness with Davison and Eldershaw she now found that she must restructure her nearly empty life. Her father had died, the country was plunged into war, Eldershaw had moved permanently to Melbourne and Barnard had lost touch with many of her friends. She was resilient. She adjusted. She turned once again to the quiet enjoyment of her mother’s company and she continued to write. In those dark days of war and labour shortages the government directed unemployed people of all social ranks and education into factory work supporting the war effort. Barnard’s poor health and her age, of forty- four, placed her beyond this call-up, but the social climate had changed. She could not ignore the prevailing attitude that writing full-time, no matter how successfully, smacked of the dilettante. She adjusted to a much quieter life, without too much disabling resentment and she took care not to go to places where she would meet

400 See two long letters Barnard wrote to Jean Devanny in January 1947, Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville. 401 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville. Barnard did not know why Palmer and her friends withdrew from her. Much later Barnard realised that it was probably her overarching desire for peace & her opposition to the war that could not have pleased the Palmers who had been closely involved in the Spanish War through their daughter, Aileen.

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Davison.402 These reminders of the ‘Stirling’ character who behaved in ways so similar to Barnard’s response years later is slightly un-nerving, as if real events were mimicking fiction — for the real events were still far in the future when The Glasshouse was written. In Stirling, Barnard had created a character so like herself that the two women, one real, one fictional responded in a like manner when faced with similar situations. Is it possible that Barnard almost unconsciously turned art into life, drew on her own fiction to live her life? Creating fictional stories seeped through Barnard’s life. She had long drawn on fiction to create the history she wanted for herself. In 1944, his divorce from Kay over, Davison married Edna McNab, whom he re-named Marie, and they moved to Melbourne where he had a new job. In Melbourne, Eldershaw welcomed them as old friends and they become part of the Palmers’ convivial writing circle of which Barnard was no longer even a corresponding member. Barnard felt the abandonment keenly though her close ties with Eldershaw were never broken. As time passed she was able to view Davison’s work impartially, once again, as literature. In 1946 she wrote to Jean Devanny recommending Davison’s latest novel, Dusty, and pointing out her realisation of how her world had diminished while Frank’s had prospered: The latest issue of Meanjin Papers has pencil sketches of Vance, Nettie, Frank and Len. It was quite a shock to me to see the world I lost in a nutshell…Frank looks very different… prosperous and confident and somehow American... The old group is scattered. I rarely see anyone…403

Barnard was comfortable praising Davison’s writing, and she decided to print a chapter of his latest book in the 1946 edition of Coast to Coast, for which she and Eldershaw were the guest editors.404 In 1947, after she had seen Tomorrow & Tomorrow safely published Barnard confided in a letter to her confidante of those years, Jean Devanny:

402 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville. 403 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 16 November 1946. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville. 404 Barnard and Eldershaw were joint editors of the 1946 Coast to Coast despite Eldershaw’s continued residence in Melbourne.

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I was deeply in love with him. I think I still am, but it is now so confused with pain that I know I don’t want to see him again.’

Frank lived quietly on his farm outside Melbourne with his wife, Marie, who from all accounts was a good cook and ‘could sew buttons on his shirts’405 as well as help with the outside farm work while he wrote steadily. The White Thorn Tree, the novel he regarded as his most important book, took him fifteen years to finish. Over the years his Sydney friends kept in touch with him and in April 1970 Barnard wrote to Davison: Leslie [Rees]has told me that you are desperately ill but that your morale is high. I am very sorry, and salute you. It is good news that The White Thorn Tree is to come out in a large edition. I have read it, but I cannot find in it any shred of you as I knew you. That was a long time ago and no one stands still. Love, Marjorie406

Frank Davison died a few weeks later, but remained an important part of Barnard’s life. In her later years when her mind became clouded, she was happy to speak of him, without rancour or obvious heartbreak, but she usually fictionalized the affair, tilting it toward the memory of the love affair that she might have had. ………………………………………………….

405 Rorabacher, Frank Dalby Davison p. 157. 406 Barnard, [letter to Frank Dalby Davison], 16 April 1970. Papers of Frank Dalby Davison and Marie Davison, 1930-1990, MS Acc11.106, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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Chapter 10 Barnard’s introduction to politics 1931-1947

The kind of civilization we have depends upon books.407

Barnard was introduced to both feminism and politics when the Bulletin prize opened the doors of Sydney’s literary world, but at first the various societies and active groups of writers had no appeal for her. In 1931 she wrote to Nettie Palmer: The Sydney Branch of the English Association is not very exciting. I do not belong to it, but occasionally “gate-crash” a meeting … They hold it in a room smelling of ancient cake crumbs and the speeches good or bad fall into the vacuum with an identical thud. Most societies are depressing, they fill me with dismay.408

What was probably the most interesting and influential literary circle in Sydney at the time, was not available to Barnard.409 Led by Norman Lindsay, it included Christopher Brennan, Kenneth Slessor and a varying number of poets and painters, scholars, and novelists who met in clubs and bars for evenings of literary discussion, intellectual argument and raucous fun. Many of the writers in the group were published regularly in the Bulletin; their poetry and their critical ideas were highly regarded. A few women attended but none with the serious literary intent of writers such as Mary Gilmore, Eleanor Dark or Barnard Eldershaw. Barnard was cynical about the activities of the group, even about Norman Lindsay’s interest in publishing.410

In the early 1920s, perhaps because this famous group welcomed few women and the well-established, but more mundane, Journalists Club was not open to women at all, Mary Gilmore had led a group of women writers

407 D Green in L. Fox, (ed.), Dream at a Graveside: The History of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, 1928-1988. Fellowship of Australian Writers, Sydney, 1989. Frontispiece. 408 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 25 September 1931. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, 1174/1/3817, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 409 Known loosely as the Bohemians. 410 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 16 September 1932 in M. Dever, ‘Conventional Women of Ability: M. Barnard Eldershaw and the question of women's cultural authority’ in M. Dever (ed.), Wildflowers and Witches: Women and Culture in Australia 1910-1945. University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1994, p. 137.

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including Connie Stevens, Dora Wilcox, Zora Cross, Dorothea McKeller, Dulcie Deamer and Ethel Turner, in meeting regularly for friendly informal discussions. In 1925 the Journalists Club drew unfavourable attention to itself by excluding the women among a group of visiting UK journalists visiting Sydney for an International Conference from their club. Gilmore and her friends decided it was time to organise formally. They founded the Society of Women Writers, just the sort of club that could have attracted Barnard, but she did not join that group until the 1970s, when her writing years were almost over.411 The men of the Journalists Club did not admit women into their club as full members until 1972. Three years after starting the Society of Women Writers, Mary Gilmore called another meeting. She invited all interested writers to a meeting at the Lyceum Club on 8th November, 1928 where the Fellowship of Australian Writers was formed to promote Australian writers and their works, ie to advance not only the cause of literature, but also the cause of its often struggling creators. 412 Most of the members were politically left-leaning, but the young FAW also attracted writers of all shades of politics, or none. John leGay Brereton, Professor of English at Sydney University, was its first elected president, supported by Gilmore and Steele Rudd as vice-presidents. Thus the group was firmly grounded in Sydney’s literary establishment. Even so, Marjorie Barnard, was not attracted to it for some years and wrote to Nettie Palmer: I don’t belong to anything but the PEN.413 That, too, is disappointing as it has failed even in its short life, to maintain any standard. It seems to me, speaking generally that writers have a great deal of vanity and very little proper pride. 414 Palmer encouraged Barnard to persevere with writing groups for they were valuable in helping to promote Australian literature.415 Barnard assured her

411 The Society of Women Writers now incorporated as a state branch of what had become a national society, thus adding NSW to its name since 1987, is the oldest continuously active writers’ club in Australia. It still meets every month in Sydney for discussions and lunch. 412 L. Fox (ed.), Dream at a Graveside, p. 8. 413 Poets, Essayists & Novelists. 414 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 25 September 1931. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, 1174/1/3817, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 415 M. Dever, ‘A Friendship Grown on Paper’, Antipodes, June 2005, p. 14.

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that the best intellectual group she knew was Nettie’s own circle of correspondents.416 The newly established FAW planned to exert pressure on the government to recognise and reward Australian writers in a more generous manner than the meagre financial assistance of the Commonwealth Literary Fund that was still the same as that legislated by the Deakin Government twenty years earlier.417 They also sought to establish a base payment rate for freelance writing.418 Forty years later Geoffrey Serle, in From Deserts the Prophets Come, pointed out that the 1930s saw the very worst of Australia’s ‘cultural cringe’ when Australia was dominated by a marked lack of recognition of the worth of anything Australian.419 Women writers generally felt that they were not valued equally, and many, including Barnard and Eldershaw, found a readier acceptance of their work among English and Scottish publishers than was possible locally. Some authors, despairing of ever being published in book-form, sold their novels to newspapers and magazines to be published as serials in instalments over a number of issues.420 This was, after all, how the Bulletin’s prize-winning novels first reached their readers. At FAW meetings, there were heated arguments about the standard of women’s writing, and these arguments were formalised by debates in late 1933. At the September meeting six women debated ‘The Feminization of Literature’. Dora Wilcox, Nora Kelly and Ada Holman felt that the value of literature had nothing to do with its author’s gender. Flora Eldershaw, not yet a member of the FAW, but invited to participate, Alice Henry and Miles

416 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 9 October 1933. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, 1174/1/3817, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 417 Fox (ed.), Dream at a Graveside p. 26. 418 Between £2 and £10 per thousand words of fiction. Fox (ed.), Dream at a Graveside p. 26. 419 G. Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788-1972. Heinemann, Melbourne, 1973, pp. 134-6. Serle credits A.A. Phillips with inventing the brilliantly apt term ‘cultural cringe’ that is still in common use in Australia. 420 B. Hoskins, ‘Before You Read: A Reconstructed Literary History in Reading by Numbers’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2014 –discussing Reading by Numbers by Katherine Bode.

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Franklin argued that women’s entry into literature was just one aspect of the current surge of women entering the professions and the arts. Miles Franklin pointed out a related and important discrimination— that although women were now writing and publishing as many novels as men, and as successfully, all the significant editorial and academic positions in Australia were still held by men.421 The men responded with their argument in October 1933. Frank Davison felt women writers should be respected: ‘Our feeling towards the really fine woman writer should be one of comradeship; we should applaud her, not look on her as a rival.’ But Kenneth Wilkinson pointed out that women’s feminine constitution prevented them from joining literature’s mainstream, for ‘Women cannot stand outside their emotions in writing as men can.’422 It is not recorded whether the debate relieved any of the tension between the genders at FAW meetings, and it did not change the prevailing attitude towards women writers markedly, for seven years later, in 1940, E Morris Miller, in his two-volume Australian Literature divided authors of fiction into ‘Novelists’ and ‘Women Novelists’. However, as a subject of discussion at Fellowship meetings it was overtaken by concern with the political affairs of Australia in a rapidly changing world. In 1931 Joseph Lyons, formerly of the Australian Labor Party, then leader of the United Australia Party, won a landslide victory and his Government responded to the increasing activity of Communism in Europe, by trying to limit public discussion of the situation in Europe lest it encourage Communism at home. During the early 1930s conflicts blazed across the globe like bushfires ignited by lightning. In 1932 Japan attacked Manchuria, and Ho Chi Minh, stiffened with Communist ideology, began his long campaign in Indo-China. Then, from 1933 Fascism became the ‘ism’ to watch and fear. Hitler and the Nazis gained power in Berlin and violent skirmishes in Austria led to civil war. It is likely that Barnard’s story, ‘Fighting in Vienna’, sprang

421 Two years later Barnard pointed out a glaring example – A young Oxford graduate who gaily admits to knowing nothing of Australian letters is employed as the ABC Radio’s critic of Australian Literature—from D. Modjeska, Exiles at Home. Sirius Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1981, pp. 2-20. Immediately after the debate, Eldershaw published an essay, ‘The Feminization of Literature.’ 422 D. Modjeska, Exiles at Home, p. 9.

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from news broadcasts about that city.423 In Australia the Government suspected the New Guard of Fascism. The Fellowship writers and other intellectuals tended to view any censorship of political discussion as restrictive - a threat to their freedom of speech. During the years leading up to these changes in the political climate, Barnard had been innocently apolitical. Her quiet life between the library and her home protected her: she took little notice of worldly affairs. She had admired her protagonist’s capitalist ambitions in A House is Built and, emphasised of how Fanny felt about her exclusion from the family business, but she had not doubted the equity of nineteenth-century Australia’s socio/political system. Barnard’s own experience of living through the Depression in Sydney had not touched her. She did not question the reasons behind the widespread poverty. Life at home went on as usual.424 The family still lived comfortably with abundant household help.425 The Palmers, as well as being leaders in Melbourne’s literary community were also involved in left-wing politics in Australia and in Europe. It is possible that they alerted Barnard that her sheltered life had blinded her to the world she was living in, or perhaps her limited travel in the UK and Europe in 1933, had allowed her glimpses of a changing world, though there is no evidence that she and her mother ventured further east than Paris. Barnard’s shift in outlook was a gradual process — a slow and incremental politicisation. At first she was influenced by the important people in her life— the Palmers and Eldershaw, though she may not have been aware at first of the depth of their socialist position. By that time Christina Stead was moving among Marxist intellectuals in London and New York, and Katharine Susannah Prichard, Betty Roland and Jean Devanny were already members of the Communist Party. They emerged from their visits to Russia thoroughly in

423 First published in Home magazine in October 1936 424 Barnard’s salary had been lowered; her father’s had not. M. Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], July 26, 1973, for Molloy’s MA. Tape & transcript, Fryer Library, F793, University of Queensland. 425 M. Barnard, [letter to Vance Palmer], 8 July 1934. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers National Library of Australia, Canberra. Also quoted in Robert Darby, ‘While Freedom Lives: political preoccupations in the writing of Marjorie Barnard and Frank Dalby Davison, 1935-1947’. PhD thesis, ADFA, 1989. In UNSW library.

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awe of the Socialist system. Eleanor Dark and her husband though never joining the Communist Party, teetered on the edge of Marxism while economic collapse and depression threatened war in Europe.426 Then, in 1934, while Eldershaw was overseas, Barnard met Frank Dalby Davison, who rapidly stimulated her increasing interest in politics. He was, for a time, a member of the Communist Party, and those were the views he dispensed to an avidly attentive Barnard. That same year the Society Against War and Fascism invited the Communist Czech/German writer Egon Kisch to visit Melbourne to speak of his incarceration in Nazi concentration camps. The Lyons Government, viewing him as an agitator, denied him entry. He leapt ashore from the ship, breaking his leg and bringing with him a whiff of violence from the other side of the world. This visit and its prominence in the news of the day, stirred up its own little battle within the FAW. Frank Clune invited Kisch to attend a luncheon that the Fellowship of Australian Writers in Sydney was giving to welcome John Masefield, the famed English poet. Several conservative members were aghast at Kisch’s presence, seeing it as an insult to Masefield. They resigned from the Fellowship in protest.427 Len Fox, also a communist, described the views of many, perhaps most, FAW members: From 1934 onwards, it became impossible for any thinking Australian to ignore the threat of fascism and impending world war… If writers had any claim to being leaders of public opinion, then clearly they had to act.428

This was the atmosphere when Frank Davison persuaded Barnard to join the now heavily political Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1935. There, the left-leaning writers drew her into their concerns about the troubled conditions across the world. She participated enthusiastically in the discussions of how best to confront the problems of the day, despite her personal life being very happy and fulfilled at that time. As well as being

426 Modjeska, Exiles at Home, Sirius Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1981, pp. 2-20. 427 M. Dever, ‘Subject to Authority: A study of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw’. PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 1993, p. 108. 428 Len Fox journalist, biographer, poet, FAW member & editor of official FAW History, Dream at a Graveside (Fellowship of Australian Writers. Sydney, 1989), began chapter 10 of his history with this paragraph.

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enmeshed in her first love affair, she was achieving success as a writer, had no financial worries and entertained friends frequently while living at home with her family, but soon international politics became her most absorbing interest. Eldershaw, having returned from overseas, had also joined the FAW and was elected to the committee immediately. Later she served twice as president. In this role she visited Canberra in 1938 to press, successfully, for an increase in writers’ grants from the Literary Fund.429 Barnard did not take a public position in the FAW, except as an occasional committee member, but supported Eldershaw, and Davison while each served as president. Often it was Barnard who wrote the protests and pamphlets for which the FAW became known.430 Now in the constant public company of the much admired Davison and Eldershaw, Barnard became not only well known but powerful as a member of the ‘Triumvirate’ or the ‘Progressives’ as they were called. Miles Franklin sometimes scathingly called them the ‘Trinity’ as they led the left- wing members of the FAW into political activism. In the context of concern about the fate of Australian democracy, communist and FAW member Jean Devanny, urged the committee to mount a protest against the Australian Government. She saw it as upholding every Australian’s democratic right to protest against the encroachment of fascism,431 while the Government made public its doubts about the loyalty of the Australian Communist Party. News about overseas coups and take-overs filled Australian newspapers. In 1935 a coup failed to oust the Greek monarchy, and Mussolini took over Abysinnia, transforming it into Italian East Africa. In 1936 the revolution in Spain became bloody, drawing volunteers from across Europe and America and also Australia, while in Germany fascists marched into Czechoslovakia.432 In 1937, Japan invaded China, and Australians were awakened to the proximity of war.

429 Alfred Deakin had overseen the creation of the Commonwealth Literary Fund in 1908, but the value of the help it offered had shrunk with inflation and disinterest. Eldershaw’s mission was successful, the Fund was expanded fourfold in 1939. 430 M. Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], 26 July 1973, for Molloy’s MA. Tape & transcript, Fryer Library, F793, University of Queensland. p. 349. 431 R. Darby, ‘While Freedom Lives’, p. 54 referring to the draft of Jean Devanny’s autobiography in James Cook University library. 432 The Palmers lived in Spain for part of this time with their daughter Aileen.

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Barnard’s letters to her various correspondents over the next few years show increasing concern with political issues. She had come a long way in political awareness in only two or three years. Her concerns about the world around her revealed how much Barnard had changed in her political thinking. The quiet librarian of only a few years earlier had been subsumed, indeed she left her library work to write full time and in July 1937 she wrote to Nettie Palmer (who was by this time heavily involved in the Spanish cause): ‘I never felt so utterly futile. To be writing a book on [Governor]Phillip when our whole world is dying.’ In 1938, amid sesquicentenary fever, Barnard and Eldershaw published their first historical biography, Phillip of Australia, and a flurry of historical essays. Eldershaw edited The Peaceful Army, a collection of essays by women writers about high-achieving Australian women to which Barnard and Eldershaw jointly contributed a well-respected and much-anthologised essay, ‘The Happy Pioneer—Elizabeth Macarthur’.433 Barnard also wrote anti-war pamphlets and lent her support to anti-war demonstrations. She had swung, politically, to the left, but she baulked at joining any political party. In November 1938 Barnard wrote to Nettie Palmer that the FAW was bringing out a declaration of democracy and peace. Jean [Devanny] and I are in a head-on collision about it. She is all for keeping it large and vague and getting everyone to hold up their hand for peace and democracy. Of course everybody would. Joe Lyons would himself, and it would just mean nothing! I’d like to see something more in the shape of a battering ram…434

This startlingly violent language used by the usually passive, even timid, Barnard signalled her rising emotional involvement in politics. Eventually the project developed into a collection of essays by Miles Franklin, Leonard Mann, Brian Penton, Vance Palmer, Brian Fitzpatrick, Dulcie Deamer and Dymphna Cusack, condemning authoritarianism, militarism and infringements on civil liberties and the curbing of free speech by government.

433Dale Spender edited a re-print in 1988 in time for the bi-centenary. Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria. 434M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 6 November 1938. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, 1174/1/5458, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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It was to be edited by Barnard, Eldershaw, Davison and Devanny and entitled, ‘Australian Writers in Defence of Freedom’, and the whole production would emphasise the dangers of war to Australian readers. Barnard and Eldershaw were to write the final essay on ‘Liberty and Violence’, but the writing of this short work revealed a crevasse in the partners’ hitherto seamless collaboration. No amount of discussion led to the comfortable agreement that they had reached in all their former work together. Barnard took a long-term view of the dangers of fascism: ‘While war as an end is unthinkable, war as a means is still preached. The question is, can war be a means of progress? This is the eternal problem of doing ill that good may come.’435 The essay was never finished to the satisfaction of either Barnard or Eldershaw as their political, or philosophical, views could not be reconciled. Barnard wrote to Palmer: ‘We had a tortured two days on the ship trying to plan our contribution. Nothing came of it for we could not agree.’ Barnard’s philosophical adjustment was huge. She struggled to come to terms with what she saw as vast changes in the FAW and the political interests of its members. She was no longer the quiet observer of life, and she was filled with fear about what she did observe. As she wrote to Palmer: Everyday reality moves further and further away from my political philosophy, yet I cannot bring myself to abandon the beliefs that are part of my flesh. My mind is a gulf of black melancholy.436

In 1938, while her politicking and writing of letters of protest to the government was at its zenith, she was also writing to Palmer that: ‘I have no politics, only a political philosophy held … with passion.’437 In 1939 she wrote to Nettie Palmer: I’m looking, rather desperately, for a point of attachment…Possibly my home would be with the Peace Pledge Union or the Christian Socialists, but for the insurmountable fact that I’m not a Christian. The Party is even further out of bounds…while I find myself in agreement with the

435 Darby, ‘While Freedom Lives’ p. 387. The text of the Barnard Eldershaw essay can also be found in M. Dever (ed.), M. Barnard Eldershaw: Plaque with Laurel, Essays, Reviews & Correspondence. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1995, p. 251. 436 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 20 January 1939. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, 1174/1/5488, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 437 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 29 April 1938, Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966, 1174/1/5380, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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philosophic principles of Communism, it seems to me that the Party’s means of survival are going to be the death of it…Violence, dictatorship, Machiavellian diplomacy…438

On 3rd September 1939, Prime Minister Menzies’ solemnly announced that Australia had followed Britain into the war against Germany. Wartime regulations meant that the FAW’s ‘Writers in Defence of Freedom’ project could not be printed. 439 Soon afterwards Barnard joined the Peace Pledge Union, becoming a contributor to their newsletter, Fact440 When, a week after the commencement of the Second World War, the Government passed the first of its National Security Acts, The FAW objected to the section that declared: A person shall not endeavour, whether orally or otherwise, to influence the public opinion (whether in Australia or elsewhere) in a manner likely to be prejudicial to the defence of the Commonwealth or the efficient prosecution of the war…441

Barnard helped long-term socialists Davison and Eldershaw as they led the Fellowship of Australian Writers towards active socialism.442 For a time they became more powerful within the writers’ group than the conservatives led by George Mackaness and Mary Gilmore. The topsy-turvy mood in politics of the time had now branded Mary Gilmore, the famously active supporter of the early Labor Party and well known trade union activist during the violent

1890s, as a conservative.443 In February 1940, Barnard joined the Lane Cove branch of the ALP444 where she worked for a time on the Education Committee. Her efforts were aborted once again by a government that saw danger in her short plays though she protested that they were based on Labor Party history. They were banned

438 M. Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], 26 July 1973. Barnard joined the Peace Pledge Union later in 1939. 439 Darby, ‘While Freedom Lives’ p. 54. 440 More can be found about the Peace Movement in the Journal of the RAHS, June 1993. 441 D. Fitzpatrick, “End of Six Years Under National Security Act” quoted in Dever, ‘Subject to Authority: a study of M Barnard Eldershaw’ PhD Thesis, Sydney University,1993. 442 Davison, Eldershaw and Miles Franklin as well as the better known Communist Katharine Susannah Prichard were speakers at the Cultural Conference of the NSW Aid Russia Committee, 8 November, 1941. C. Ferrier, As Good as a Yarn with You: Letters Between Miles Franklin, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, p. 72. 443 L. Fox (ed.), Dream at a Graveside, p. 9. 444 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 13 February 1940. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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from being broadcast.445 The FAW activists did not rein in their hostility towards the Menzies government, even amid preparations to protect Sydney’s population from war. While air-raid shelters were being built in the Domain and disused railway tunnels taken over to be used as emergency air-raid shelters, the anti-war ‘intellectuals’ in Sydney continued their protests, Barnard among them. On 16th May 1940, the Fellowship committee sent a letter which had been substantially written by Marjorie Barnard and A. B. Piddington446 to Prime Minister Menzies condemning the National Security Regulation and calling for freedom of speech. One section of the letter read - Everywhere we see freedom of speech curtailed and freedom of conscience infringed – in the suppression of the Communist newspapers, in the drastic censoring of the Labor and Trade Union press, in the curtailment of speaker’s privileges in the Domain and elsewhere, in the censor’s ban on broadcasting plays dealing historically with Labor’s war policy in 1914-18 ….447

Barnard’s belligerent rhetoric in this letter was so anti-government that she was cast into the unlikely role of rebel. Some members of the executive of the FAW, who held Australia’s security uppermost in their minds, delayed the letter and two members of the committee resigned over the decision to send it.

448

In an unpublished talk, ‘The Maintenance of Culture’ (1940) Barnard again pushed the ‘freedom of speech’ theme: ‘Injury is done to culture when any impediment is raised to free expression…’449 Urging Eleanor Dark to write a letter of protest to the newspapers in June 1940, Barnard pointed out that in protesting against the Government restrictions:

445 M. Dever, ‘Flora Sydney Patricia Eldershaw’ in S. Samuels (ed.), The Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol 260 - Australian writers, 1915-1950. Literary Resource Center, Detroit, 2002. 446 A B Piddington, well-known in Sydney’s legal and literary circles & president of the FAW in 1939. His wife, Marion Piddington was a well-known feminist. 447 The plays referred to may have been the playlets she had written for the education section of the Labor Party and the Peace Pledge Union noted in a letter to Nettie Palmer, Palmer Papers National Library of Australia. 448 F. Davison, [letter to Eleanor Dark], 14 June 1940. Eleanor Dark Papers MS 4998 The Daily News printed the letter in full 20 May 1940. 449 M Barnard’s papers, ML MSS 2809 add-on 1066 folder 2.

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…no time is either right or wrong – just do it. As I see it no time is inopportune for a protest, only perhaps, for the protester. Protest may not get much of a hearing just now, but it seems to me that the main thing is to keep it up.450

In October 1940 Barnard wrote another letter to Dark about the preparations for war that she observed from her eyrie in Longueville. Here her passion for peace is drawn to the fore by seeing young men setting out for battle: …All day troops have been embarking on the Queen Mary. She’s out in the Stream. Fort Denison looks like a lighter beside her. Ferries brown with men have been going out to her.451

It is likely that Barnard’s vehemently expressed leftist views were generated by her fierce loyalty to Eldershaw and Davison, rather than by her own calmly considered opinion, for she reverted to the more moderate views she had formerly held soon after Eldershaw’s move to Melbourne and Davison’s decision to distance himself from her during 1941-42. Barnard’s passion for peace, the strong central plank in her swinging political view, always remained. She dreaded war and could see no possible benefit in any action that led to war. Even in the face of fascism, the price of war was always, for Barnard, too high. ‘It’s possible that this madness will hit the buffers some day, reach saturation point.’452 As the war proceeded and Russia changed sides, most leftist members of the Fellowship of Australian Writers gradually softened their stance towards the government. Both the socialists and conservatives in the FAW accepted that temporary compromise was necessary, or perhaps they just remembered that as an organization, their first loyalty was to their members, to the writers of Australia. The 1928 Constitution and Rules of the Fellowship promoted ‘the growth and development of literature,’ ‘encouraging its study’, and ‘aiding authors’ as paramount among its purposes and activities. Nowhere

450 M. Barnard [letter to Eleanor Dark], 6 June 1940, Eleanor Dark Papers MS 4998 Binder 1 National Library of Australia, Canberra. 451M, Barnard, [letter to Eleanor Dark], 7 October 1940. Eleanor Dark Papers 1910-1974, MS 4998, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 452 M. Barnard, [letter to Eleanor Dark], 7 October 1940. Eleanor Dark Papers 1910-1974, MS 4998, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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does it mention encouraging active involvement in the politics of the nation or the world.453 There can be no doubt that the vocal differences of opinion that dominated the FAW meetings during those early years of Barnard’s membership played a part in giving Barnard and Eldershaw the theme and the cast of characters for Plaque with Laurel while the difficulties that arose between a politicised committee and the government must surely have enriched Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. One can recognise a direct connection with the character, Knarf, when he says, ‘The 1930s have been seen as the decade of the depression and also of extremist politics.’454 In hindsight, it seems likely that Barnard was led naively along the socialist path by her satisfaction at being part of the crowd, even an important part of the leading edge of the crowd. After spending her early life feeling separate, different, even solitary, it must have been intoxicating to be in the centre of things. As Modjeska argues, Barnard’s political thought and activities were becoming further and further removed from her long-held political philosophy, to which she later retreated.455 Years later Barnard experienced a blow that reminded her that the effects of her politicisation during those turbulent years echoed far beyond the confines of the FAW. Wartime censors severely cut favourable references to Russia from the pre-publication manuscript of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. One cannot help but wonder whether her reputation as a fellow- traveller of communists made that censorship more likely. Yet another repercussion was the 1952 protest from W. C. Wentworth, Liberal MP in Federal Parliament, in which he referred to Tomorrow and Tomorrow as a ‘trashy, tripey novel with a Marxist slant’, while claiming that Barnard had mis-used money from an Australian Literature Board grant to write it. This accusation was proven to be false, but Wentworth may have had a valid argument about the predominance of communist or socialist writers

453 L. Fox (ed.), Dream at a Graveside p. 18. 454 M. Barnard Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (A Virago Modern Classic). Dial Press, New York, 1984, p. 135. 455 D. Modjeska, Exiles at Home. Sirius Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1981, p. 109.

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among grant recipients. Of the authors who received Commonwealth Literary Fund grants between 1940 and 1954 at least half were members of the Communist Party (Jean Devanny, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Betty Roland, Eric Lambert and Judah Waten) – other recipients, included former members of the Party like Frank Dalby Davison. There were others, like Marjorie Barnard, Mary Gilmore, Gavin Casey, Dymphna Cusack and Alan Marshall who were socialist in their politics. Only very few right-wing conservatives such as Rex Ingamells and Kenneth Mackenzie received assistance. In 1947, depressed and in hospital as she recovered from a gall-bladder operation, Barnard wrote to her friend, the communist Jean Devanny, confessing that although she agreed with many of the socialist ideals of equality, she could never be a communist. Though she had discarded formal religion, her upbringing surrounded by the practice of love and forgiveness was deeply embedded, her horror of violence was so powerful that, for Barnard, there could never be a just war. It isn’t my own pain I fear. I am a stranger and an outcast in my environment— the sort of people I was born amongst, yet I don’t really belong anywhere else.456

In 1950 Barnard left the FAW disappointed, complaining that it had ‘withered away’: … the FAW in Sydney died of a collision between Catholic Action and Communism. I saw it happen. As I could subscribe to neither faith and felt that both loaded literature with chains of intolerance, I let my membership lapse, and so did others…457

In the post-war period, with the ageing of its extreme socialist members, the FAW drifted towards its original purpose of pressing for the improvement of pay and conditions for writers. Barnard seemed to lose interest in politics and turned to writing time again, not fiction now, but history and literary criticism. 1950 was also the year that she left her post at

456M. Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library Townsville. 457 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 17 February 1956. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/8794, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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the CSIRO library and began to enjoy a life she had long dreamed of, time spent travelling the world. ………………………………………………………….

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Chapter 11 – Plaque with Laurel 1936-1937

‘The novel…facilitates the exploration of the hierarchical relationship between journalism and so-called ‘serious literature’ in Australian culture…’458

In Barnard and Eldershaw’s fourth novel, Plaque with Laurel, the authors set out to write a contemporary novel cataloguing their recent experience in the politics of the Fellowship of Australian Writers.459 None of the collaborators’ first efforts at contemporary fiction, their short stories, had yet found a market, but The Glasshouse, a novel closely mirroring their own recent ship-board experiences had introduced a new way of writing, quite different from their former heavily researched work. The Fellowship of Australian Writers had recently become important in their lives and they had both rapidly absorbed the politics and current concerns of the Sydney literary world. Eldershaw, already an experienced committee woman, may not have been surprised, but Barnard was both surprised and amused by the vehemence and the pettiness of the discussions she witnessed at the meetings. Together they picked up the idea that a satirical novel could be written about the attitudes and arguments exchanged at FAW meetings. The Glasshouse, with its layered structure of inserted stories had attracted less favourable attention than the authors expected, so for this new novel they planned a simple chronological plot line. Once again, they would use a group of characters confined and lined up for inspection, but instead of a small group of travellers on a leisurely journey across the oceans, the plot would manipulate a multitude of writers jammed into a Canberra hotel for a three- day conference. In 1934, at Yarra Glen, the Victorian birthplace of , a group of writers had gathered to honour the great author of Such is Life. It is likely that this recent event inspired the central idea of the new novel — a memorial to honour a great writer upon which could be hung a satire about

458 M. Dever, (ed), M. Barnard Eldershaw: Plaque with Laurel, Essays, Reviews & Correspondence. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1995, p. xxi. 459 A keen interest in expanding their skill was most probably shared, but while there are many instances in which Barnard expressed her interest, even need, to try new ways in literature, I have not found similar expressions by Eldershaw.

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the concerns and foibles of a writer’s life. Barnard and Eldershaw spent a few days in Canberra to confirm its suitability as a setting for their story.460 Much of Australia’s populace could have expected the new centre of the country’s government to overtake Sydney as Australia’s cultural centre. That did not happen and Plaque with Laurel was the first use of Canberra as the setting for serious fiction. According to historian Patricia Clarke, the book became ‘an invaluable historical record of pre-war Canberra, as useful an historical document as A House is Built had become for mid–nineteenth century

Sydney’.461 The overarching question in this novel would be about the real greatness of Australia’s most admired writers. Only when the story spins out to its end are we reminded that each one of us could be tested and found wanting. The revelations of this complicated theme requires several points of view, each contributing information about the great writer, Crale, intermittently throughout the proceedings of the conference. When they won the Bulletin prize in 1928, Barnard and Eldershaw had made a point of claiming that they had published no journalism, as if their lack of interest in journalism (together with the fact that they were not driven to it by financial need) put them in a class apart as ‘pure’ novelists. The conflict between ‘real’ writers and journalists was a much-discussed topic among writers at the time, and was one of the main non-political issues occupying the members of the Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1935. On seeing their own prejudices about journalism publicly aired at Fellowship meetings, Barnard and Eldershaw decided to highlight the ‘authors vs journalists’ division they had observed being bounced between Fellowship members. Even while the pair was planning and writing Plaque with Laurel, Eldershaw was having a ‘stormy passage’ as President of the FAW because the members could not agree on the journalists / writers question. In the end the arguments made Eldershaw’s presidency untenable, and she resigned while the material for their novel accumulated around them.

460 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 8 October 1935. Vance and Nettie Palmer Palmer 1850-1966, MSS 1174/1/14793-6, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 461 P. Clarke, ‘A Novel Take on Canberra’, Canberra Times, 22 September 2012.

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Soon after beginning work on the novel Barnard became doubtful, almost fearful, that the ‘new pattern’ they had mapped out would not work, even though they had used similar elements in their earlier novel. The concentration of the many characters held captive at a conference to be examined at close range was really only an extension and intensification of the situation devised for The Glasshouse. Barnard hinted at the doubts that plagued her in a letter to Nettie Palmer: We are shuddering on the horrid brink of another novel— so far it is not much more than a design— a three-day literary conference in Canberra at which a plaque is unveiled in the national library to the memory of a writer, dead five years or so. His story is to piece itself together behind the comedy, inconsequence and vanity of such a gathering. Behind it all the beautiful and naturally decorative … Canberra scene. It is going to be technically difficult… I could never live a journalist’s life with a steady output. I don’t seem to have any permanent ability, nothing that is always there and that I can count on. Everything is a sort of accident, a narrow shave.462

Plaque with Laurel is the second of Barnard Eldershaw’s novels to feature writers. This time the great writer stars from the background while many writers play the chorus in front of stage. Its dramatic stage-craft drew the attention of interested critics. Plaque with Laurel is described by Patrick Buckridge as a ‘heavily populated and diffuse social comedy’463, while Maryanne Dever writes of its ‘gently ironic’ tone.464 In the novel Barnard’s attitude to writers en masse echoes her earlier opinion of the writers in PEN465 whose vanity she felt was more evident than proper pride. Its tone is sardonic as the concerns of the members of the fictional Australian Writers’ Guild unfold, very similar in manner and kind to those aired at meetings of the Fellowship of Australian Writers—the difficulty writers had in making a living wage, the possibility of seeking government support and the lack of encouragement for local writers in the English departments of Australian

463P. Buckridge, ‘Greatness and Australian Literature in the 1930s and 1940s: Novels by Dark and Barnard Eldershaw’, Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 1985, p. 33. 464 M. Dever, ‘Flora Sydney Patricia Eldershaw’ in S. Samuels (ed.), The Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol 260 - Australian writers, 1915-1950. Literary Resource Centre, Detroit, 2002. 465 Poets, Essayists & Novelists

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universities as well as the perennial rivalry between ‘writers’ who clung to their pride in excluding ’journalists’ from their ranks. The decision to intensify the action of their novel by using a large group of writers over a short period of time led to its major problem, the enormous and confusing number of characters. Colin Roderick, in his The Australian Novel put it bluntly: There appear to be too many characters in this novel…It would seem here that compression could have had a salutary effect on fixing the mind on the issues at stake without the distracting necessity [of] trying to keep track of the numerous Bohemians that flit about the stage.’466

The structure of this very short novel is very simple. It begins with the prelude to the conference on the road to Canberra, followed by the first, second and third days. The last chapter, the Road out of Canberra concludes the novel’s action in less than two pages.

The conference is held in October, in mid-spring. The participants go by car and bus through the less-than-lovely western suburbs that still ring the beautiful heart of Sydney. Now home to most of Sydney’s residents, the plains stretching flatly westward to the mountains are not the Sydney usually depicted in literature, films or travellers’ tales. Public Sydney is more usually the buzzing city, the nineteenth-century buildings of sun-kissed sandstone or the clusters of glittering sky-scrapers, perhaps an elegant harbour-side mansion. Sometimes the action centres upon the surprisingly ubiquitous and shining waterway itself, but in this novel, Barnard invites readers to visit a more basic and often overlooked Sydney. We are shown:

The Old Parramatta Road … [as it] carries traffic out of Sydney on the beginning stage of the journey towards Canberra. … past the university through dreary crowded suburbs – Camperdown, Leichhardt, Petersham … terrace houses with iron railings, old plastered cottages, factories, service stations in the last agonies of red and yellow, an occasional dark and dusty tree… here and there an old house standing four square above neighbours that cramp it in. These are the mansions of a former generation, built originally in rural surrounding…

466 Details in C. Roderick (ed.), The Australian Novel: A Historical Anthology. William Brooks and Co., Sydney, 1945.

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[now]turned into boarding houses or flats with inconvenient kitchens and an old tired smell in the passages.467 In Plaque with Laurel Barnard’s language is both generous and concise. The ‘Road to Canberra’ is vivid without recourse to excess or wordiness, and so cleverly accurate that one can barely resist noting how the road of today has changed since being seen through the authors’ eyes 80 years ago— ‘…[T]ussocky paddocks and small grey stones looking like sheep; white gums with scant foliage; long stretches of ring-barked timber, inexpressibly melancholy…’468 And, describing one of the characters, a tired writer fallen asleep in the upright bus seat: ‘He was utterly exposed to their eyes, ugly with the helpless and obscene ugliness that the fallen have to healthy eyes.’ When they arrive in Canberra:

...the women peered into small mirrors and renovated their complexions, the men flicked themselves…and began to grope under seats for their belongings. The coaches had the dishevelled look of long occupancy…Canberra silent, dignified received them without a flicker.469

A large number of writers, members of the Australian Writers’ Guild and supporters, attend the conference to honour Richard Crale, but the Great Writer is not the focus until little by little his dilemma is seen in the thoughts of those closest to him. Contributions to this revelation come from his wife, his mistress, his best friend and Owen Sale, the writer whose life and failures appear as an unsuccessful shadow hovering at the feet of Crale. Five years dead, Richard Crale’s character, actions, loves, literary work and war service still permeate the memory of many of the conference audience, but he only comes alive for the reader at the end of the conference and the novel. The medley of characters (more than forty of whom are named) have a variety of connections with the great man — or none, as in the case of various beginning writers who cluster at the conference hoping that propinquity with successful authors will magically transform their own so-far-unpublishable prose into something that will please an editor.

467 Barnard Eldershaw, Plaque with Laurel in Dever (ed.), M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 3. 468 Barnard Eldershaw, Plaque with Laurel in Dever (ed.), M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 9. 469 Barnard Eldershaw, Plaque with Laurel in Dever (ed.), M. Barnard Eldershaw, p. 13.

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The widow, Ida Crale is there, grieving for the husband she lost years before he died. He had not been a good husband, but now she feels justified in her loyalty to him, for now she is recognised as the widow of a great man. It eases the hurt she felt when Crale left her and their children to be with his mistress, Imogen. 470 The mistress, Imogen, sometimes called Jenny, is there, too. The sympathy of the authors, but not of all the conference attendees, rests firmly with the usurping mistress rather than the abandoned wife. Jim Walters, the organiser of the conference, Crale’s former friend, and now Imogen’s admirer, points out each character to her as they arrive into the dining room. She pleads that she has reached saturation point and readers may be inclined to feel sympathetic, and to wish the authors had allowed some of the barely contributing conference-goers to remain anonymous. Professor Standish brings gravitas and the status of a well-paid university appointment to his key-note speech, but he unwittingly insults many in the audience with his outspoken views on the lack of quality in Australian journalism and journalists, though the professor’s view is shared by many contemporary writers, including Barnard. She made her view clear in a letter to Nettie Palmer late in 1935 urging a mutual friend, Leslie Rees, to leave journalism and return to ‘real writing’: A few more years of such … journalism & he would, I imagine, have been incapacitated for life as a writer… 471. Professor Standish refuses to admit that there is such a thing as an Australian writer, even while honouring the well-known Crale. It was independent writers, not scholars occupying the seats of literary learning, who fought for the recognition of Australian literature within the universities. In 1938 Barnard was one of a group of writers who approached Dr Wallace, the Vice Chancellor of Sydney University, about the possibility of founding a Chair of Australian Literature. He was not open to the idea. Through most of Plaque with Laure,l the melancholy shadow of Owen Sale is dragged along beneath the intermittent story of Richard Crale, as if

470 Barnard Eldershaw, Plaque with Laurel in Dever, (ed.), M. Barnard Eldershaw p. 21. 471 Leslie Rees, best remembered now for his Digit Dick children’s books, but then employed as a journalist London. M. Barnard [letter to Nettie Palmer], 8 October 1935. Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966 National Library of Australia, Canberra, two years before the publication of Plaque with Laurel.

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reminding us that there is some kind of relationship between them, yet never quite clarifying the quality of that relationship. After serving in the Great War the two writers had returned to Australia in the same ship where Sale had heard the story of Crale’s disgrace472—Crale’s responsibility for the death of one of his junior officers, the husband of Imogen, who later becomes Crale’s mistress.473 Sale’s later literary career does not match Crale’s literary success, though his life is similarly marred by sorrow and regret for a lost life. Sale blames himself for his wife’s suicide and he is now unable to write. His dilemma, and his accompanying despair, overwhelms all intelligent action. … It was as if his mind were held prisoner in a magnetic circle. He could no longer write. Ideas, conceptions, hung before him like mirages in the sky. But he could not reach them; the thoughts in his mind were rootless. Whenever he tried to concentrate on so much as the writing of a sentence a black shutter cut him off; he found himself insulated. Other ideas thronged his brain, but between him and the one he needed was blindness – a thick impenetrable vacuum…474

Owen Sale goes missing, and the last day of the conference is dominated by the search for him. He has committed suicide by walking into a shallow river to drown in waist-deep water. Sale had not known or loved Crale as Jim Walters did, and it is through Walters that we finally get a glimpse of Crale, the richness and intensity of his life, a life that had been forever marred by the messy lack of accuracy and timely communication across the battlefields of France. Walters grieved for what his friend had lost in war-time, even more than for his more recent death. Barnard presents the revelation of Crale’s spirit and his life in uneven patches as if seen through a lace curtain, so the reader can never clearly see the greatness of Richard Crale, nor the measure of his injury. He had made a mistake in battle. He had not heard the senior officer’s message correctly, or perhaps he had misunderstood it. In the noise and confusion of battle, he only realised that he had taken the wrong course when it was too late, too late to save his young officer’s life. Crale was never

472 Barnard Eldershaw, Plaque with Laurel in Dever (ed.), M. Barnard Eldershaw p. 61. 473 The novel is ambiguous on what Imogen knew about the truth of this connection. 474 Barnard Eldershaw, Plaque with Laurel, in Dever [ed.], M. Barnard Eldershaw p. 42.

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officially blamed. His punishment was that he blamed himself. He lived the rest of his life knowing that he had made a mistake and another man (Imogen’s young husband) had paid for that mistake with his life. During the conference there are several minor sub-plots about late-age marriage, fruitless love affairs and the arrogance of youth. Some of the characters in these small sub-plots linger in the reader’s mind, as the major characters do not. Robert Darby argues that the irony hinges on the fact that all writers’ lives are made up of similar intricacies and complications, that ‘The most successful aspect of Plaque with Laurel is its satirical portrait of the writing life.’475 In the first half of the twentieth century, in every facet of Australia’s literary world, writers, critics, publishers, all worried about the depth, the strength, ultimately the lasting worth of Australian literature. At the conference while there is widespread admiration for Crale’s work, the estimate of his greatness is mixed. The literary establishment needs him to be great, but is he? Jim Walters, the man who loved him chose, in his speech, to praise the writer not his writing. As to whether the reader is convinced that Crale or even his writing was great, we hear only Barnard’s oft-repeated protest through Victor Bemerton’s voice: We aren’t honouring Crale because he was an Australian, but because he was a great writer. Race consciousness has been the bane of our literature. Really to admire work because it’s Australian is a form of inferiority complex. It’s a weak argument that tries to bolster itself with patriotism.476

Patrick Buckridge argues that M Barnard Eldershaw’s concern about whether their writing would ever be accepted as part of the ‘canon’ led to this novel, as did Eleanor Dark’s anxiety about being rated highly amongst writers lead to Sun Across the Sky, being written.477 Both novels feature a ‘great’ writer but the comedic tone of Barnard’s novel seems to question the validity of the Great Writer theory itself.478 Perhaps her background in history made it hard

475 R. Darby, ‘While Freedom Lives: political preoccupations in the writing of Marjorie Barnard and Frank Dalby Davison, 1935-1947’. PhD thesis, ADFA, 1989. 476 Barnard Eldershaw, Plaque with Laurel, in Dever [ed.], M. Barnard Eldershaw. 477 Buckridge, ‘Greatness and Australian Literature’ pp. 29-37. 478 Buckridge, ‘Greatness and Australian Literature’, p. 36.

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for Barnard to accept a parallel with the ‘Great Man in History’ theory which refers to a leader who changes the course of history by the power of his intellect, skill, imagination or the weight of his military forces.479 H M Green argues that Plaque with Laurel had some of the better qualities of the pair’s most successful novel, A House is Built, though differing from that earlier novel in almost every respect.480 The novel’s tight constraints as to time and setting, echo some elements of their most recent novel, The Glasshouse, and the confusing multiplication of characters does not dilute the novel’s underlying subject matter —Australian literature and the writers who produce it. The weakness of Crale as a character is one of the novel’s most potent flaws. How dimly Crale appears compared to ‘bit players’, such as Helena Josephson, and even the fluttering assistant secretary, who are unforgettable. Rorabacher offers perhaps the fullest, most interesting assessment of why Plaque with Laurel, despite excellent writing, found few admirers. The English, she said, did not see it as Australian for it lacked bushrangers and in Australia only a very small section of the public was interested in the foibles of writers. While Rorabacher’s summing up: ‘this was sophisticated writing in an unsophisticated time and place’481 could be seen as bluntly honest, it also jarred in Australian ears as being patronising. The descriptions, the language and many of the characterisations are imaginative, vivid and elegant but to quote another, more modern writer: ‘turning good writing into good books…is quite another thing.’482 Frank Dalby Davison, after writing critically of Barnard’s first three novels, much more graciously, called Plaque with Laurel a ‘nourishing brew’, and a ‘serious and passionate book with a surface glitter.483Robert Darby pointed out that Plaque

479 Such as Bismark, Napoleon or even Hitler. 480 H. Green, A History of Australian Literature, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961. pp. 1184-5. 481 L. Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw. Twayne Publishers Inc., New York, 1973, p. 64. 482 D. Biron, ‘The True Story of Butterfish by Nick Earls’, Australian Book Review, July-August 2001, p. 14. 483 F. D. Davison, ‘Australian Writers: M. Barnard Eldershaw’, The Bulletin, Vol. 58, No. 2980, 1937, p. 8.

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with Laurel demonstrated Barnard’s capacity to respond rapidly to social and political developments. The Fellowship of Australian Writers played an important part in Barnard’s political education and Plaque with Laurel, seen in the guise of a novel of ideas, is clearly a step towards that most political of her novels, Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow. Altogether a very diverse range of criticism can be found to generally support the unusual quality of this very interesting novel. Harrup of London published Plaque with Laurel in 1937 after much delay caused principally by the publisher’s insistence upon changing the fictional name of the writing organisation from the authors’ choice of the ‘Australian Literary Society’ to the ‘Australian Writers Guild’.484 The novel sold quickly and was re-printed within a year. No Australian edition appeared until the University of Queensland Press published M Barnard Eldershaw, edited by

Maryanne Dever, in 1995.485 After completing this experimental novel with its multitude of characters, Barnard and Eldershaw turned immediately to the solace of writing short stories and history, both of which suggest a preference for orderly restriction rather than more expansion. They, too, may have tired of the clutter of those almost anonymous walk-on characters. ………………………………………………………………………..

484 Farquaharson [letter to Barnard Eldershaw]. Fearing libel, the publishers had insisted on changing the name of the literary group from the Australian Literary Society, considered to be too similar to that of an existing society. He enclosed the letter from Harrup to Farquaharson 22 December 1936. Majorie Barnard Papers in Mitchell Library, Sydney. 485 Dever’s book contains the whole text of Plaque with Laurel as well as essays, letters, commentary and a lengthy introduction.

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Chapter 12 – M Barnard Eldershaw’s three histories 1936-1939

‘[We are] teetering on the edge of a decision whether to break into biography or not. We have our eye on Phillip’ 486

Phillip of Australia It was time for Barnard and Eldershaw to turn to history. With their background it was an obvious choice, and the approaching sesquicentenary celebrations made it a canny one. They chose Captain Phillip, the nearest Australia has to a founding father.487 With its of sub-title, An Account of the Settlement at Sydney Cove, it satisfied contemporary interest in the 150th anniversary of the nation. In this first history, Barnard established her method of writing a lengthy and detailed background before introducing her core subject. It was a pattern she continued to use in all her major historical work. In Phillip’s biography she started with outlining the different interests in England calling for more space for convicts after America’s War of Independence removed America as a solution to England’s overcrowded gaols. She explained how William Eden’s idea of reinstating the Elizabethan punishment of ‘banishment’ was combined with the suggestion from Captain Cook’s voyage that Botany

Bay could be used to house unwanted felons.488 Barnard details Phillip’s careful preparation for the transportation of the motley group of convicts for which he was responsible, and how the little fleet made its slow journey across the world, through Teneriffe, Rio de Janiero, east across the Atlantic to Cape Town, then east again through icy uncharted waters until, south of Van Diemen’s Land, they turned northwards to sail up

486M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 8 November 1936. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra. Also see L. Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw. Twayne Publishers Inc., New York, 1973, pp. 92-9. Much of her excellent chapter 5 is devoted to Phillip. 487 M. Barnard Eldershaw, Green Memory. Harrap, London, 1931; M. Barnard Eldershaw, The Glasshouse. Harrap, London, 1936 and M. Barnard Eldershaw, Plaque with Laurel. Harrap, London, 1937. 488 In Elizabethan times ‘banishment’ had been the solution to dealing with the sanctuary provided by the church. Those leaving their sanctuary were banished, they had to leave the realm forever. If they returned they had to accept their original punishment, even death if that was called for.

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the east coast of Australia to within sight of Botany Bay. They had sailed safely half-way around the world, and now: Australia awaited its first settlers—a continent larger than the whole of Western Europe, of which only a few miles of the littoral were yet of interest to any man. It was the most mysterious country in the world, … the most difficult for Europeans to comprehend and utilize.489

Though the continent met Phillip with ‘a clenched fist’ the journey had been safely completed in a little more than eight months.490 Phillip’s task was to emply the convicts, skilled and unskilled, to build a colony and ensure its permanence by encouraging them to stay on as free settlers after the expiry of their sentences. As to the native inhabitants of the land, Phillip’s instructions were clear, he was to open an intercourse with the natives, and ‘to conciliate their affections…’ And if any of our subjects should wantonly destroy them or give them unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations, it is our will and pleasure that you cause such offenders to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the offence…. 491

In the view of Barnard and Eldershaw, Phillip was an outstanding colonist and leader of men. His notes indicate that, even before he left England he had decided that ‘there can be no slavery in a free land and, consequently, no slaves.’492 Barnard used Phillip to illuminate the story of the birth and growth of the first colony in much the same way as she had used the fictional James Hyde to illuminate the growth of mid-19th century Sydney in her first novel. It was a technique that the much better-known American historian Barabara Tuchman

489 M. Barnard Eldershaw, Phillip of Australia. Discovery Press, Penrith, N.S.W., 1938, p. 93. 490 Barnard Eldershaw, Phillip of Australia, p. 96. Barnard brought emotion to the perceived lack of welcome for the travellers with words like ‘clenched’. 491 Barnard outlines Phillip’s efforts to fulful this instruction, even to refusing to punish the tribesman who speared him in the shoulder, but hindsight gives evidence of his failure to succeed. Perhaps his reign was too short to achieve such a vast change for both the incomers and the original residents. 492 M. Barnard, ‘The First Australian’, Home, 9 January 1938, p. 27.

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later made famous in A Distant Mirror, Stillwell and the American Experience and other of her histories.493 Phillip’s respect for all the new citizens was important. During the dangerous scarcity of food in the first two years the Governor had the rations divided equally between the convicts, the soldiers, the settlers and even himself, thus providing a convincing example of his intention that this would be a settlement where everyone would have equal rights. Barnard takes only a few words to place before the reader the early days of a nation where the equality of its citizens is still seen as one of its major characteristics. Early respect for the different needs of the indigenous peoples has not lasted so well, but Phillip tried to adhere to the best of his instructions to establish good relations with the original residents of the land.494 Though this historical biography of Phillip, and the novels before it, were all the work of both Eldershaw and Barnard, it was the latter who did most of the research and writing. She had left her job at the library while Eldershaw, though participating as always with ideas and close editing, was still occupied with her teaching. Barnard explained how their work proceeded from this point on: I read all day in the Mitchell and Teenie dashes in any instant she gets and in the chinks, we brood. It takes a lot of brooding to lay the foundations of a book… 495

I use Barnard’s name in all references to their writing, and Eldershaw’s only occasionally because my research centres on Barnard’s life, all aspects of it, including all her endeavours and achievements, her life and how it was touched by many people, including, most importantly, Eldershaw. As already mentioned, Barnard’s ease with writing was known and utilized by other writers. During her years in FAW she was often called on, even within a fellowship of writers, to write letters, speeches, pamphlets on behalf of the

493 B. Tuchman, ‘Biography as the Prism of History’ in B. Tuchman (ed.), Practising History: Selected Essays. New York, Ballantyne Books, 1981, pp. 80-90. This essay first appeared at a symposium in 1978. 494 Barnard Eldershaw, Phillip of Australia, p. 101. 495 M. Barnard, [letter to Leslie Rees] 24 March 1937. Leslie Rees Papers Mitchell Library MSS 5454/1 regarding Phillip of Australia, also quoted in R. Darby, ‘While Freedom Lives’.

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group, while Eldershaw worked on committees. Even when they both worked on a text together, it was usually Barnard who wrote the last draft as she was skilled in blending the work of them both into a seamless text. As I have indicated in many areas it is the language and the way it is used that gives much of the value and uniqueness to the literary work of M Barnard Eldershaw, as indeed it is in the separate work of Marjorie Barnard we are examining. H M Green, in his massive A History of Australian Literature wrote that it ‘could make even a dull story interesting…’496 In her pursuit of details about Phillip’s journey Barnard drew freely from Bowes ‘Journal of a Voyage from Portsmouth to NSW and China in the Lady Penhryn,’ Clark’s ‘Journal and Letters’, Bradley’s ‘Journal’ and Spain’s ‘Journal’, in the Mtchell Library. The above-mentioned journals existed only in manuscript form, necessitating close and tiring scrutiny,497 but they revealed and enabled Barnard to show us the personal experiences of the new settlers, though alas, few convicts left written records, and the original inhabitants— none at all. Barnard was an efficient researcher; in less than six months she was writing to Vance Palmer: ‘The research is finished, the first sorting and classification of notes made, and the first chapter almost finished…’498 The text of Phillip of Australia, though a history, has a similar feel to that of her first two historical novels, rich in detail expressed in sometimes surprisingly vivid language. Mostly, in this non-fiction work, Barnard presents the facts as she finds them and allows the reader to make his or her own judgment, but sometimes she adds her own nod of approval, such as: ‘He [Phillip] was the first man to believe in the future of Australia as a white nation while it was still unreasonable to believe. Australia is his monument.’499 Barnard is convincing

496 H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961. p. 1368. 497 Such research over many years must have contributed to Barnard’s later trouble with her eyes, although she may have had an inherited defect for she spoke of reading her stories to her mother whose eyesight was too poor for her to read. 498 Barnard, [letter to Vance Palmer], 8 April 1938. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 499 Barnard Eldershaw, Phillip of Australia, p. 345.

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in her view that Phillip’s government, and then Macquarie’s laid the foundation of democracy in Australia. To-day the civil and democratic traditions are strong in Australia, and there is a deep-seated tendency, despite cynical distrust of politicians to look on Government…as the natural prime mover, the source of reform and progress, the common shield of all…500

By July 1937 the book was finished and sent to Harrup, the publisher of their four novels. Both Harrup and their London agent, Farquharson, warned that it would not sell, that there was no interest in Phillip among the English reading public, but Harrup honoured their promise to publish the book with its dedication to George Arnold Wood, and it came out in January 1938, in time to meet the demand for a book about Australia’s early history that accompanied the sesquicentenary celebrations. Sydney publishers, Angus and Robertson republished it in 1972 and again in 1977. Two important critics valued the book more as an example of an imaginative literary work than as a history of Australia’s settlement or the biography of an important historical figure. H M Green in his History of Australian Literature wrote of it as: a work of imagination and recreation as contrasted with a record of facts; yet it does not constitute the standard biography of the founder of Australia for which we have waited so long …501

And in 1968 L. J. Blake wrote in Australian Writers: Ultimate definition is not quite achieved, but … their writing is fresh, touched with bright phrases and vivid descriptive passages.502

The Life & Times of Captain John Piper In 1938, after the popularity of their biography of Phillip, M Barnard Eldershaw received their first commission from the Australian Limited Editions Society— for a biography of Captain John Piper. The Society was a group of 500 intellectuals and book-lovers, among whom Sydney Ure Smith

500 Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], March 1940. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, NLA 1174/1/5745, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 501 H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature, revised edition. Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, p. 1367. 502 L. J. Blake, Australian Writers. Rigby, Adelaide, 1968, p. 51.

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was prominent. The books they produced were usually sumptuously bound in calf leather (three books per calf) printed on hand-made paper, allowing Australian bookmakers and printers to display their skill. The cost of production was high so the print runs were limited to what they could sell - usually only a few copies more than their membership list. Barnard confessed to being embarrassed by the lavish binding of that first printing of The Life and Times of Captain John Piper, protesting that her friends could not afford to buy it. And indeed few did, until it was reprinted in 1973 by Sydney Ure Smith and the National Trust, in clear typeface and a soft cover but still carrying reproductions of the original illustrations by Adrian Feint and enhanced by a reproduction of Augustus Earle’s portrait of Piper adorning its soft cover.503 This work is more easily recognized as a biography than their earlier book on Phillip, for Piper had no particular place in history nor power in the society in which he lived. He was a prominent but unimportant citizen during all but five of Sydney’s first sixty years. He moved through three levels of society and between Sydney and its outpost Norfolk Island—as a member of the Army corps, as a prominent public figure and as a country gentleman- farmer. The ‘Times’ in the title are full of the minutiae of Piper’s long life. Barnard’s story begins with Piper’s journey to the colony. Ships of the day took the route across the Atlantic to Rio de Janiero, just as she had described in Phillip of Australia, then from Cape Town to below Van Diemen’s Land. Then turning north they followed the east coast of the mainland to Sydney. That part of the journey is described thus: For days, or weeks if the winds were contrary, the great curve of the continent hung, an anonymous entity on the port bow, like the shoulder of a dead leviathan thrust out of the sea. Now it was a grey smear on the horizon, now brown headlands and dark escarpments caught between the glittering blue of the Pacific and the flawless blue of the midsummer skies, white rocks like snow, dark thick vegetation, never a sign of life, opaque and blank. The white cottage on South Head, where watch was kept, was the first human habitation seen since Cape Town. Entering

503 By permission from the Mitchell Library. It is this big-print, soft-cover edition of 1973 that is used as a source in this chapter.

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Port Jackson was like passing through the grey rind of the continent into another world.504

Barnard, as usual, called up visual images to introduce 19-year-old John Piper to Sydney Cove, four years after the first fleet. ‘The little settlement lay within the arms of the cove...like a temporary encampment, a tatterdemalion collection of huts…’505 By the time Piper died, Sydney was a busy trading port and manufacturing centre, an established town with smart department stores and a University. It was 1851 and the gold rush was imminent. In addition to Piper’s life as it rises in good fortune, and falls into disgrace, Barnard shows the many different faces of Sydney, drawing a picture of many notable citizens, all of whom were Piper’s friends. There are also sharply evocative descriptions of the developing industries of the time – the four breweries, the commencement of weaving blankets, linen and druggets in the Government workshops at Parramatta, the tanning of leather and how salt was collected by evaporation at Rose Bay. Arriving in the colony in 1793, as an ensign in the NSW Army Corps led by Major Grose, Piper learned to make money by trading just as his fellow- officers did, but Barnard presents Piper as having been cut from a different cloth. The son of an Ayrshire doctor, he was nothing like Major Grose and the rest of the NSW Army Corps. Barnard feels that Piper: took with grace where others snatched and grabbed; he was gay where they were rapacious, heedless where they were calculating. He was a man born to be happy and live in cloud castles…’ 506

Piper opted to serve his first years in Norfolk Island where living was cheaper. Then, on his return to Sydney, he acted as second to Macarthur during that gentleman’s famous duel with Colonel Paterson, in which Paterson was seriously wounded. At the end of his term with the Army, Piper left Sydney and on his return several years later as a private citizen, he was appointed to several official positions including that of the Controller of

504 M. Barnard Eldershaw, The Life and Times of Captain John Piper. Ure Smith in association with the National Trust of Australia, Sydney, 1973, p. 6. 505 Barnard Eldershaw, The Life and Times of Captain John Piper, p. 7. 506 Microfilm lecture by Barnard, Mitchell Library CY 3182.

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Customs and chairman of directors of the wealthy Bank of New South Wales. Tempted by generosity towards his fellows, he used the Bank’s money for a loan and was suspended, went into bankruptcy and attempted suicide. He moved to Bathurst where another land grant enabled him to build another grand home and a successful cattle property, but eventually his lavish, free-spending ways led him to lose that, too. Piper himself was ‘absurdly generous, quite unpractical, amiably extravagant, a genial man who loved all the world’.507 Barnard does not portray Piper as an heroic figure; he was not. This is the story of an ordinary man with extraordinary charm who was well- loved by his fellow citizens. Barnard describes him as an entirely amicable gentleman who never did any harm in the world—he just went bankrupt now and again. Barnard’s first two biographies are hard to compare, for the subjects are so different. In the first four years Sydney was totally controlled and directed by Governor Phillip, while Piper was only an embellishment, a decoration, who was entertaining but had little or no influence over Sydney’s next sixty years. However, they both added to the ongoing story of Sydney that Barnard and Eldershaw began telling with A House is Built. Critic H M Green thought that both biographies were important, earning their place in his History of Australian Literature: M Barnard Eldershaw’s Phillip of Australia and her minor Captain Piper are among the leading Australian biographies of to-day. They combine the virtues of pure and applied literature to an extent that is quite unusual.508

Their commission called for a generous book-length work and Barnard responded by researching the times of Captain Piper and his extensive family in extraordinary detail. We learn about the condition of the roads, the sale price of horses, the friendliness of neighbours, and the visiting habits of their unmarried daughters. We even learn what cloth was used to make the dresses for the maids of the house.

507H.M. Green, A History of Australian Literature. p. 1358 508 H.M. Green, A History of Australian Literature. p. 1356.

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Barnard read boxes of Piper’s correspondence and complained about the horrors of reading all his unsorted letters that reinforced evidence of Piper’s generosity, his fondness for his family and the vast array of friends who loved him. 509After her research Barnard wrote, “I know Sydney of the 1820s better than I know the Sydney of today.”510

My Australia M Barnard Eldershaw had hardly finished Captain Piper in 1937 when the English publisher, Jarrolds, asked them to write an extended essay of about eighty thousand words on Australia to fit a series511. At first Barnard was not impressed: … after Piper I swore I’d see myself in hell before I took another commission, but this – this stirs me to the backbone… I’ll have three weeks thinking it over and then I’ll drown myself in it.512

Barnard designed the book in four parts – first she addressed modern contemporary Australia, then the land and its natural products. Thirdly, she looked at the Aboriginal inhabitants, and finally, she looked at, and even attempted to forecast an Australian culture. The first section, a social history and cultural commentary, was developed from several small articles Barnard had already published in local journals. Whether for a short journal article or a longer historical essay, Barnard’s pithy prose is always evident. She began: Australia has a short history and a long legend. The last continent to be discovered, it had long hung, insubstantial as a wreath of cloud, on the horizon of man’s imagination…’ 513

Re-visiting the reasons for settlement Barnard acknowledged the prime importance of the convicts before giving an overview of the land’s pastoral and industrial history. She then addressed modern Australian life. If she had not

509 Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], June 1938. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 510 Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 7 August 1938. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 511 Farquarson (agent)[letter to MBE] Dec 1938 forwarding Jarrolds’ terms, £100 advance and 10% on first 5000 copies. Mitchell Library, M Barnard MSS 451. 512 Barnard, [letter to Vance Palmer], 24 December 1938. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 513 M. Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia. Jarrolds, London, 1939, p. 23.

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written of, or even seemed to notice, the Depression while Australia suffered it, in My Australia, she cast a backward look at it, recalling the damage it wrought upon her fellow citizens. In addition to the appalling sum of human suffering and distress endured during the depression years, this period has left a scar on the national life. There has been … a callousing of the public mind, so that it acquiesces with hardly a thought in a permanent body of men on the dole and men on relief work. In a country of youth and plenty this is tantamount to … the defeat of the present social system. … The line between the haves and the have-nots took on a new and sharper demarcation.514

Not only had Australia changed, but Barnard had, too. This was the period of her deepest involvement in Frank Davison’s world of protests against social injustice. By 1937 Barnard (probably for the first time in her life) became personally acquainted with people who were short of money for daily living expenses. Davison and his family and also her Queensland friend Jean Devanny, often had to depend upon the dole to survive. Barnard quietly supplied on-going monetary help to both families. 515 The second section of My Australia is devoted to the land: how the continent’s land-mass has contributed to its history, to the development of Australia as a nation. Barnard’s sentences are short, blunt, and breath-taking: The Australian earth is very old. There is a shield of land in the north- west – the upper part of and the Northern Territory that is suspected to have been above water for one thousand, six hundred million years.516

In just over five pages, the soil, the overall terrain, and the movement of land and sea and ice and snow over uncountable ages are offered for inspection. Sentence by sentence, detail by detail. Barnard describes the land until we can see the ancient soil, feel it in our fingers and crunch it under our feet. Barnard writes of it as ‘the old core of Australia.’517 She emphasises the

514 Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia, p. 103. 515 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny] 1947 Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library Townsville. She wrote ‘Though I had never pulled strings before, I know people and I could always find a job for him (Davison) when things were bad, for the children when they left school and for Kay, too.’ 516 Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia p. 119. 517 Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia p. 119.

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continent’s physical structure as an important element of this story which began untold centuries before white settlement. There is a section on such features as the Barrier Reef and the bush — ‘the shaggy pelt of the country’. She was one of the early writers who drew attention to the damage white settlers did by introducing pests such as rabbits, and by overstocking the land. Australia, for Barnard, has been, ever since white settlement, making its contribution to the world, while being dominated by three great oligarchies – military, pastoral and financial. Barnard’s theme is that within these constraints Australia’s story is one of social progress, with little or no violence. To Barnard, an adamant lover of peace, ‘Australia’s greatest contribution to civilisation has been… its discovery and use of constitutional means of settling disputes.’518 Despite the disinterest of academic historians in Barnard’s work, she showed herself to be ahead of her time—in the third section of this history what was then known of Aboriginal history was examined. Lack of accessible records prevented knowledge of the pre-1788 life of the original inhabitants of Australia, and it was thought by most historians that their contribution to modern life was not meaningful to the country as a whole519. In 1930 Walter Murdoch wrote, ‘When people talk about the history of Australia, they mean the history of white people who lived in Australia.’520 This blinkered view was not universal, even a century earlier. In 1831 The Sydney Gazette published a poem about our debt to Aboriginal owners of our land that concluded with the lines: ‘We owe them all that we possess—The forest, plain, the glen, the hill,

Were theirs; to slight is to oppress.’521 In 1939, this social history, M Barnard Eldershaw’s My Australia, was published in England with its section on ‘The Dispossessed’. It was one of the earliest studies of Aboriginal society in a general historical work, and in it the

518 Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia pp. 115-116. 519 From J. A. La Nauze, ‘The Study of Australian History 1929-1959’, Historical Studies, Vol. 9, November 1959. 520 W Murdoch, Introductory History of Australia, Sydney University Press, Sydney,1930, p.9 - written for use in schools. Brought to my attention by Rosemary Eden’s BA thesis Marjorie Barnard’s Female Career, p. 9. 521 Quoted in Elizabeth Webby’s ‘Ealing Studio’s Australian Adventure’ from a lecture to the Arts Association in May 2004, and published in Art, vol. 6, 2004, p. 61.

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Aboriginal people are treated respectfully, being described as people who used their environment with a profound knowledge of its resources. Barnard appreciated their difference: To think of them in the same terms as we think of ourselves is to misunderstand them… They are neither inferior nor less intelligent; they are simply adjusted to a different world.’522

Barnard gives a detailed explanation of what she had learnt of the complex cultural beliefs and practices among Aborigines, of the kind that did not emerge in Australian historical writing generally until the 1960s according to Henry Reynolds.523 W E H Stanner in his 1968 ABC Lecture, ‘The Great Australian Silence’ criticised Australia’s historians for their neglect of the Aborigines. He did not acknowledge the history espoused in novels such as Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia in 1938524, nor in M Barnard Eldershaw’s chapter in this history. Barnard ended her section on Aborigines in Australia with: ‘We shall never know the earth as they know it, we brought too much with us.’525 Barnard fulfilled the publishers’ brief – an essay on Australia and its people. Its broad sweep echoes the width of the land, and poetic language dominates throughout, even when the information conveyed is mundane. Perhaps the most ‘modern’ idea that Barnard expressed within this study was her idea of an Australian culture – which she addressed in the last section, sketching the evolution of Australians into a different and unique people. Australian culture, she pointed out, inevitably began as a transplanted culture from Britain, but in time it became different simply because cultures perish away from home. They cannot survive unchanged on foreign soil: It must have one foot in the soil and the other in the spirit of the race. It cannot be handed over unaltered from one people to another… In common with other peoples of British heritage we inherit British culture, but once the geographical break is made we cannot go on

522 Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia Jarrolds, London 1939 p. 278, 523 See B. Fletcher, History & Achievement. Braxus Press, Sydney, 1999, pp. 128-130. Also Rosemary Eden’s thesis, ‘Marjorie Barnard’s Female Career’, note on Henry Reynolds - kindly loaned to me by the author. Much of what Barnard learnt has been discounted by more recent writings of historians including those from the First People themselves, but she recognised their importance very early. 524 Xavier Herbert, Capricornia. Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1938. 525 Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia p. 289.

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inheriting it… for the present and future it becomes … only an influence.526

Seeing Australia’s peaceful march towards democracy as one of its strengths, Barnard believed that it was precisely the political apathy of ordinary Australians that should be thanked for that fortunate result. ‘Distances and the slow earth have made us tolerant and, in a way, sluggish…’527 Barnard was able to conclude: If Australia has anything to give the world, it is the picture of a people growing, developing, progressing, without violence, working together in a world not yet defaced by irremediable hatreds and divisions towards a goal in which we can all share. If we can hold that we shall have earned our place in the world.528

That was written in 1939 when Barnard joined the Peace Pledge Union and the world gathered for war. Hatred of unfathomable dimensions was about to be released upon the world, leaving it, six years later, more divided than ever. Historians, generally, were not generous in their reviews of this or other of the Barnard Eldershaw histories, but the books were read. My Australia sold well. Clem Christesen used an excerpt, ‘An Ancient Continent’, in his popular small history book, Australian Heritage and in 1947 Barnard was asked by the publisher to ‘bring My Australia up to date’ for a new edition. She confided to Jean Devanny that she didn’t like the idea of working on it again, as she was ‘dissatisfied with the whole book, its stance and all’.529 Though she worked hard on her manuscripts, Barnard often expressed dissatisfaction with the books later. She always felt she could, and should, have done better. Australia had changed in the eight years since My Australia’s first publication and Barnard was probably prescient enough to see more changes coming. She concludes her outline of modern Australia and Australians with a disclaimer: This is not a history of Australia, it is no more than a shape of history, a review of the raw material from which we will mould our future.530

526 Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia p. 290. 527 Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia p. 309. 528 Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia p. 310. 529 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 18 January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library. Townsville. 530 Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia p. 110

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My Australia, the wide-ranging essay the publishers asked for, was the last history that Flora Eldershaw and Marjorie Barnard wrote together. ………………………………………………………………………..

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sChapter 13 Marjorie Barnard’s solo histories (1935-1947) “If you would read history, and most particularly. Australian history, study your atlas, for in the long run geography maketh man. It presents him with gifts and problems, and history is the story of how he takes advantage of the one and grapples with the other…”531

When, in 1935, Marjorie Barnard left her position at the Technical College Library to write full-time, she indicated that she would continue writing in collaboration with Eldershaw, as well as writing on her own projects. Working in whatever time they could both spare, the partners wrote two historical biographies, a social history, My Australia, and finished their fourth novel, Plaque with Laurel. More collaborative work was to come, most notably their fifth novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Macquarie’s World Barnard had been writing alone for some time— articles, essays and short stories. Her short non-fiction was published quickly, but she had to wait until 1936 before her first short story was published. She may have been a little anxious about beginning a book-sized work without Eldershaw’s support, particularly as she no longer had the security of a salaried job.532 Then, thanks to the charm of The Life and Times of Captain John Piper, Barnard was commissioned by the Limited Editions Society to write another biography — that of Governor Macquarie. Barnard had earlier expressed dissatisfaction at the stress imposed by working to a deadline, a stricture usually demanded with commissioned work, but now she accepted this commission readily, for it offered her the security of an advance and then a future income without

delay.533 She immediately repaired to the Mitchell Library to spend her days researching, and soon reported that she was ‘pushing Macquarie uphill.’534 He was Governor for twelve years – from early 1810 to late 1821 and Macquarie’s World was to be the story of how he tried to re-build Sydney during those years—how some of his endeavours were so successful that Sydney still smiles

531 M. Barnard, A History of Australia. Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1962, p. 1. 532 Barnard, [letter to Vance Palmer], 24 December 1938 Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 533 See her response when Jarrolds commissioned My Australia, chapter 12. 534 Barnard, [letters to Vance and Nettie Palmer], 10 July and 18 October 1940. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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beneath the result of his efforts, and of how, in the end, he failed. It was another episode in the continuing story of Sydney that engaged Barnard throughout her career.535 Eldershaw remained a close friend but she no longer had the time to continue as Barnard’s writing partner. As well as now being being a senior teacher, she had accepted an onerous appointment as the first female member of the Commonwealth Literature Fund Board and it was her membership of that prestigious committee that led to complaints against them both being raised in Federal Parliament.536 Malcolm H Ellis, a journalist and historian also working on a biography of Macquarie,537 accused Eldershaw of using her place on the board to secure a grant for Barnard. He followed this up by accusing Barnard of using the money intended to support her writing the Macquarie biography to write a novel. This led to questions in the House of Representatives, but the accusation was proven to be groundless for Macquarie’s World had been commissioned by a publisher, and the grant had been made to help finance Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.538 Ellis had probably been stirred by what looked to him like a conspiracy. The draft of his Lachlan Macquarie biography was turned down for the Prior prize by the chief judge, Frank Dalby Davison, while Marjorie Barnard had been asked to check his manuscript’s accuracy. However, he won the prize in 1940, sharing it with Eve Langley’s Pea-Pickers and ’s The Battlers. 539 Dymocks published Ellis’s Lachlan Macquarie in 1947, and it has been well regarded by critics, even as recently as 2010, when Geoffrey Bolton referred to it as ‘an elegant well-researched account’.540

535 A House is Built, Green Memory, Phillip of Sydney, and Captain Piper. 536 Since 1908 the Federal Parliament had established a fund from which they made small grants to destitute authors (or their widows & families) called literary pensions. FAW urged a broader form of assistance, and as their president Eldershaw was influential in urging Prime Minister Scullin to authorise grants of up to £600 to enable established authors to complete a project. 537 Ellis’s Lachlan Macquarie came out in 1947 & was re-published several times. 538 See more on this in Chapter 11. 539 Beverley Kingston, ‘Ellis & Macquarie’, SL the State Library of New South Wales Magazine, Spring 2010: 14-17. 540 G. Bolton, ‘Australia's 'first statesman’, The Weekend Australian Review, 24-25 July, 2010, p22.

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In 1940 Barnard researched and wrote her first solo full-length history with her usual phenomenal speed, and without any diminution of her verve and imagination. Of her home city she wrote that: ‘Sydney hung like a star in the southern void, blazing without visible means of support. The country could not feed the town, let alone clothe it.’541 Note the pattern of Barnard’s prose here. The breathtaking word-picture, followed by the prosaic interpretation before she draws the reader ever closer to the core of the scene: ‘The metropolis of the south lay within the arms of a little bay, seven miles up the harbour of Port Jackson, safe and secret like hearing in an ear.’ When she sets out to clarify the scene she sometimes offers vivid contrasts, as when she illustrates Macquarie’s hopes for a tidy town and an orderly and well-fed population despite the sprawl of the town when he arrived. The new governor could then have seen fashionable ladies and gentlemen in elegant dress and handsomely furnished houses, close by men who worked almost naked on the roads because the government had acquired no reserve clothes for them. In the Sydney he came to, Macquarie would have seen peaches fed to hogs, and fine cedar wasted on firewood, yet every resident lacked the simplest of necessities for a comfortable life.542 As well as the meticulous research into primary sources that one would expect from a librarian, Barnard also donned her novelist’s hat, using techniques more commonly used in fiction, such as repetition, to make her history books more memorable. Of the evacuation of Norfolk Island, she wrote: They could have felt it, had they been sensitive, the ancient loneliness of the island waiting to re-possess it. They went, and for ten years no human feet touched the island, the earth forgot the blood and the sorrow, but the birds, the birds did not come back.

Novelist Barnard knew that a chronological record of Macquarie’s sojourn in Australia which began with enthusiasm and confidence, then slid down towards what his superiors and he himself construed as defeat, would not be a satisfying shape for a story, not even a history. For all his grand plans

541 Barnard, Macquarie’s World, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1946 cited in C. Christesen(ed.), Australian Heritage. Longmans, Green & co, London, 1969, p. 50. 542 M. Barnard, Macquarie's World. Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1946, p. 23.

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and hard work, despite his humanity and compassion, Macquarie had failed, and he felt the failure keenly. So Barnard re-shaped the story. She began at the end, at its lowest point when, in 1822, Macquarie was forced to leave Sydney, disgraced and depressed. She then presented, as in a series of snapshots, his dreams of creating a modern city out of a convict settlement. She showed readers how he brought some of those dreams to fruition. She pointed out why some defeated him, and also why some of Macquarie’s greatest dreams could have succeeded if only he had been allowed a little more time to bring the citizens with him as he hauled the city from squalor to riches. In the early days, Macquarie had believed that he could re-make the shambling village into an elegant city with wide roads and grand buildings, peopled by orderly, church-going citizens who were proud of their homeland, but for one reason and another he could not always enlist the people to work with him. In relating the sorry dissipation of Macquarie’s dreams, Barnard used words deliberately weighted to force readers to feel his pain. She does not report that Macquarie is ‘going home’, she writes that he is going ‘into exile’, suggesting that after twelve years, Macquarie thought of Sydney, with all its imperfections and failures, as home. Macquarie had seen that the future of the colony rested upon emancipating and uplifting the convicts and Barnard was one of the first historians to put convicts at the heart of Sydney’s development. They were the first raw material of a nation, their work upon the roads and in the paddocks as shepherds, as builders, as labourers, was to have more significance than it would have had in the eroded world at home. They had been wastage and were to become, under compulsion, and often in misery and rebellion, the makers of a new world.543

Barnard links Macquarie’s expectations of the convicts’ contribution to the similar hopes held by Governor Phillip. She points out that at least some of the unpopularity of those two Governors stemmed from the free settlers’ objections to official compassion and encouragement reserved for the welfare

543 Barnard, Macquarie's World, p. 101.

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of convicts, that: ‘His emancipist policy was the cornerstone of his ruin.’544 Comparative freedom was enjoyed by most convicts – conditions that Lord Bathurst of the Colonial Office judged as too lenient. Except in the worst periods of Norfolk Island, Newcastle and Macquarie Harbour (the places of secondary punishment), the convicts were not segregated from life. The work they did was necessary and useful.545 They played a part in the everyday life of the town. Twenty-first-century readers may think corporal punishment of the day to have been frequent and harsh, but it was an age of violence, and there were strict rules by which the severity of punishment was controlled:546 ‘Death sentences were few…The truth is there was a surprising lack of serious crime, and a not at all surprising plethora of petty crimes, pilfering, running away, drunk and disorderliness…all the minor frauds and irregularities that the state of society fostered.’547

Barnard, outlining the ticket-of-leave system, stresses the success of Macquarie’s insistence on regular church-going, as a means of keeping order. Convicts were expected to go to church clean and decently dressed for the Sunday muster. This may not have turned the convicts into devout Christians, but it helped the authorities keep a weekly check on most of the convicts in what is a normal social occasion. The convicts also benefitted directly as their attendance at church earned them credit for time off during the week when they could work for themselves or just spend time with their families. Alongside these measures to include formerly unruly convicts as part of the shared social occasion, Macquarie also built the services needed for everybody to live a comfortable town life. He planned and completed roads, a hospital, schools and sturdy buildings of stone to house public offices with some degree of dignity. Macquarie planned a large school to educate orphans

544 Barnard, Macquarie's World, p. 129. 545 Barnard, Macquarie's World, p. 103. 546 Barnard, Macquarie's World, p. 117. 547 Barnard, Macquarie's World, p. 118.

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and the children of convicts for, of seven and a half thousand children in the colony in 1820, only nine hundred were receiving an education.548 Efforts were made to keep the population healthy, too. The Government handed out rations to convicts who fell ill or became too old to work. A hospital was built in Macquarie Street for the sick of all classes, though trained doctors and nurses were few. Conditions were hard for staff and patients but at least with Macquarie as governor there was a place where all citizens could be cared for in cases of injury or illness. Other services were also put in place. A news sheet afforded Macquarie a regular communication system for Government announcements549 and a sturdy Post Office was built in George Street. The improvement of roads within the colony was one of Macquarie’s greatest achievements. Despite lack of interest from the Colonial Office and complaints about the cost550 Macquarie planned and built roads of packed earth banded by crushed stone, linking Sydney with Parramatta, Windsor and Liverpool. Transport throughout the colony improved. The well-to-do rode in carriages, the farmer his cart, settlers rode horses, and convicts walked, while a fleet of boats of all kinds plied trade and carried passengers on the harbour, along the rivers and up and down the coast. Crossing the Blue Mountains was a triumph. In May 1813, Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth set off to find a way across what had been a barrier shutting off the inland, and less than two years later William Cox had built a road over precipitous terrain to newly discovered country. It opened up what seemed like endless land to farmers and graziers.551 Barnard suggested that though Macquarie’s efforts to uplift the convicts’ lives led to his downfall, it was his imaginative ambition to create a city in the place of a ramshackle Sydney town that had proved to be too expensive for the Colonial Office. Sydney, elegant or ramshackle, was too far

548Counted in 1820, by Commissioner Bigge. Later built to Greenwood’s plan, used as a school under various guises and later became the Sydney Girls’ High School, attended by Marjorie Barnard, Christine Stead, Ethel Turner, Louise Mack and other early writers. 549 A £60 p.a. salary, granted to printer George Howe, to issue a newspaper. He had been sentenced to 7 years imprisonment for provoking political discontent. 550 Barnard, Macquarie's World, p. 35. 551 Convict labour was purchased by shortening their sentences.

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from London for such expense to be tolerated. In January 1820, Commissioner John Thomas Bigge was dispatched from London carrying orders to investigate Sydney’s administration, and ‘not to permit your respect of any individual, however exalted in rank or sacred in character, to escape investigation.’ As expected, Bigge, took direct aim at Macquarie and his expensive developments.552 By April 1941 Macquarie’s World, Barnard’s story of Macquarie’s part in the growth of Sydney was finished, dedicated to Frank Dalby Davison, and brought out in an elegant edition of 350 copies by Australian Limited Edition Books. Unlike Captain Piper it was soon republished— in 1947 by Melbourne University Press, followed by second and third editions, then paperback editions until 1961. It was then published again in hard cover by Angus and Robertson in 1971. In October 1983 Judy Washington, then historian attached to Lane Cove Council, asked Barnard which of her solo books she most enjoyed writing. Barnard nominated Macquarie’s World for its research as well as the writing of it.553 She enjoyed rummaging around Sydney’s past. The republishing of Macquarie’s World again and again over thirty years must have given her great joy. H M Green in his massive History of Australian Literature pointed out that: What Marjorie Barnard presents in Macquarie’s World (Sydney 1941) is a series of bright, impressionistic pictures … Miss Barnard’s Macquarie is remarkably well-analysed…554

L. J. Blake also approved. In1968, in Australian Writers555 he indicated how Barnard in her Macquarie’s World— presented both the strengths and the weaknesses of Macquarie, accurately rendering the social classes and conditions of the times. On the other hand, historians paid it little attention. Sydney Tembolt a 1947 reviewer, wrote that Barnard’s scholarly style revealed subconscious

552 Barnard, Macquarie's World, p. 227. 553 Barnard, [interviewed by Judy Washington], Longueville, 1983, transcript, Lane Cove Public Library, Local Studies Collection. 554 H. Green, A History of Australian Literature. Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, p. 1348- 1349. 555 L. J. Blake, Australian Writers. Rigby, Adelaide, 1968, p. 51.

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antagonism towards her chief character,556 but I did not see any unusual attention to the Governor’s surly Scots temperament. Despite his humbling departure, she successfully showed us a Macquarie of ‘patent honesty, good intentions and energy’. Small Histories Barnard’s need to replace her library salary, relinquished in 1935, led her to produce a number of short historical books attracting speedy payment. For this she often re-shaped text from material assembled in earlier research. A short historical article that may have begun as a lecture would be re-used several times before eventually finding a place in one or more of her books. ‘The Happy Pioneer: Elizabeth Macarthur’ an essay written for The Peaceful Army557 was re-printed in whole or in part in several other publications. Barnard was commissioned by Sydney Ure Smith to write Historic Muster, a series of nine articles in a light-hearted vein about historic personages. Published in Home early in 1938, they also found a place in the full-length historical biography, Phillip of Australia. The first section of the full-length social history, My Australia,558 by M Barnard Eldershaw, published in 1939 by Jarrolds of London, grew from several of Barnard’s small articles published in local journals, and ‘This Australia’, first published in Ure Smith’s Home Annual found its way into Art of Australia, 1788-1941, and also into Australian Outline, published by Ure-Smith in 1943. Illustrated by Douglas Annand’s sketches and reproductions of early paintings and photographs, the Outline became an attractive little gift book. On demand, Barnard cut history down to fit any size the publisher required, and often worked with artists or photographers to produce illustrated books. When in 1947, the pairs’ last novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was received with so little interest that Barnard believed it to be a

556 Sydney Tembolt, Southerly 8, 4, 1947 p. 239. 557 F. Eldershaw (ed.), The Peaceful Army: a memorial to the pioneer women of Australia, 1788- 1938. Women's Executive Committee and Advisory Council of Australia's 150th Anniversary Celebrations, Sydney, 1938. It was republished fifty years later by Penguin, edited in1988 by Dale Spender. A collection of stories about women’s contribution to the Australian colonies. 558 This commissioned elongated essay is notable for its evocative language particularly of the Australian landscape. Many of its more picturesque phrases were used again and again, even as late as in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. See chapter 15.

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failure, she turned even more decisively towards writing history.559 Within most university history departments Barnard was thought of as an amateur. In describing her as a ‘novelist playing Clio’, Professor Ernest Scott560 was not far from the mark; history and literature were part of the same fabric to Barnard. They both involved the telling of a story about people and society; the only difference being that the story in literature was drawn from her imagination, while history was researched from original records before being shaped into a story. In 1949 C B Christesen,561 stirred by the first flush of non-English- speaking post-war migrants arriving in Australia, produced Australian Heritage, described on its cover as ‘a work which shows the relationship between our imaginative writers and our social history’. It was a small book designed to show something of Australia’s culture. He used excerpts from published books, both history and fiction, believing that fiction showed Australia’s real life as truly as histories. Of the seventeen chapters, four were from the works of Marjorie Barnard or M Barnard Eldershaw: ‘An Ancient Continent’ from My Australia, ‘Macquarie’s World’ from Barnard’s history of that name, ‘Gold!’ from A House is Built and ‘And Now, Tomorrow?’ from the newly published Tomorrow and Tomorrow. The other chapters in Australian Heritage included excerpts from Watkin Tench’s journal, from D H Lawrence’s Kangaroo and from the fiction of contemporary Australian authors Henry Handel Richardson, Eleanor Dark, and Frank Dalby Davison. ‘It was published by Longman, Green & Co. of Melbourne in 1949. Barnard never relinquished her stylish prose. She wrote two short books on the history of Sydney562: The Sydney Book563 in 1947, and another, Sydney, the story of a city, published by Melbourne University Press. It was a short and breezy account of Australia’s first 150 years.

559 See chapter on Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow 560 Professor Scott of the History Department at Melbourne University, in The Week-end Magazine, 5th February, 1938, reviewing Phillip of Australia. 561 Long-time editor of Meanjin. 562There are also undated galley proofs from Paul Hamlyn of a small manuscript – under 5000 words- titled ‘The Making of a Nation’ – perhaps intended as part of a larger publication. Barnard papers, Mitchell Library MSS 2809/1. 563 M Barnard, The Sydney Book, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1947.

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In just 79 pages, including many black and white illustrations and copies of the work of early colonial artists, Sydney, the story of a city is a lesson in compression. It begins: ‘In March 1787 a little fleet of 11 ships, its total burthen 3982 tons, set sail from England for the remotest known corner of the world, Botany Bay in New Holland…’ In two pages Phillip had found Botany Bay barren and lacking water, and after following the coast north, had raised the flag in Sydney Cove to claim half a continent. By page 32: Suburbs were spreading around the city and the population had already begun to move out. At the South Head there was a group of white cottages and a derelict chapel, at Double Bay a settlement. Darlinghurst was fashionable and Potts Point had its villas with hanging gardens… Terraced orangeries and vineyards climbed the hills of Woollahra…

Two pages later, in the 1850’s … Gold was discovered in quantities sufficient to dazzle the world… Ships poured a new sort of migrant into the port; the gold seekers poured out to the diggings and back again to spend their riches or look for jobs.

Whether a book was big or small Barnard wrote it ‘in technicolour’. This material was old fabric for her, familiar from her lifetime as a resident and observer as well her use and re-use of it in both fiction and history. She gave credit to four men for being the creators of Sydney’s beauty. Two were the early governors, Phillip and Macquarie. The other two were Francis Greenway and, much later, another architect, John Sulman.564 Barnard’s description of Sydney during World War II is presented in short, sharp sentences to echo the shock the war brought to the people: Air-raid precautions were organised. The Post Office clock tower was taken down for safety sake. Shop windows shrank to peep-holes … Sydney was infinitely dreary in those days. The very stones seemed exhausted… The atom bomb was dropped. The war ended…The full horror of what prisoners of war had suffered was brought home to spoil the taste of victory.565

564 That judgment was made when Sydney was a ‘sandstone city,’ before glass towers pierced the low-level horizon. 565 Marjorie Barnard, Sydney: the story of a city. Melbourne University Press, Carlton (Victoria), 1956, p. 77-78.

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Emphasising the utter sadness expressed in that final sentence, Barnard dared to risk a one-sentence dip into a subjective stance. Echoing her own bewilderment, she said: ‘It did not seem to end in the jubilation of 1918—or was it just that I was so much older. ……………………………………………………

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Chapter 14 –The CSIRO years, 1940 to 1950 On the home front, invasion fever was now endemic…There were air raid drills. Blackouts were enforced. Brown paper covered windows. Festoons of barbed wire appeared on beaches. Gun emplacements sprang up on headlands and hills. Sirens were tested. Search-lights roamed the night sky…566

Halfway through 1940, when all was quiet in Sydney with few obvious signs that the nation was now at war, 74-year-old Oswald Barnard died after potentially life-saving surgery. Miles Franklin sent a letter of condolence to Marjorie, and Barnard replied: Thank you for your letter and your friendliness. Father’s death wasn’t tragic, but it was terribly pathetic ... For two days it looked as if he would get through and then his 74-year-old body gave out. Mother bore up nobly but now she is paying for it in a nervous breakdown. I don’t know what we are going to do but fortunately there is no hurry. I’m looking for a job though…567

As if acknowledging how dependent she had been on her father’s continued financial support, Barnard’s tone was kinder towards him than usual. She did not seek work immediately. She was enjoying her life, her love, her writing, and had no financial concerns.568 In her reply to Franklin, Barnard introduced a few minor mysteries. She had also written: As far as the eye can see I can’t see myself going out at night. Suppose I’m old enough to do without these gaieties (committee meetings etc) but the naughty and forward heart rebels, however silently.

This may have been dropped in to confuse Franklin who would have seen Barnard frequently at evening meetings. Quite apart from separate evening outings, Barnard had been coming home alone for many years through school, university and after working night shift at the Technical College Library. She gave no clue as to why her father’s death might change this. It is only remotely possible that she felt she should stay home at night to keep her mother company, for Ethel would have been accustomed to spending evenings alone. Barnard’s busy life of evening meetings and Oswald’s regular evening visits to

566 Peter Grose, A Rude Awakening, Sydney, Allen & Unwin 2007 p.41 567 Barnard, [letter to Miles Franklin], 27 July 1940, Miles Franklin Papers, CY1174 Mss36, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 568 Including a legacy from her father’s estate noted in contemporary letter to J. Devanny, original in James Cook University Library.

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church members to fulfill his duties as Church Elder, meant she would have spent many evenings alone.569 There was, of course, always live-in staff. The comment ‘I don’t know what we are going to do’ is also confusing if taken seriously. Oswald, a successful accountant, had supported his family, including the now 43-year-old Barnard, in comfort. It is not believable that Barnard expected that her father would have neglected to arrange financial security for his semi-invalid widow. However, Barnard was aware that her financial situation had always been very much more secure than Franklin’s and indeed many of her writer-colleagues, and she often seemed to want to disguise or overlook this difference. By 1940 Barnard had been carefully hiding all evidence of her affair with Davison for several years, so she could have been just laying down another piece of the jigsaw to draw on if necessary to keep her screen of secrecy intact, or she may have been just telling a story to win the sympathy of a woman whom she knew did not like her. Whatever the reason, her words were prophetic. A little over a year later, by the end of 1941, her circumstances did change. That was the year Eldershaw moved away from Sydney, and a year later, in 1942, Davison began to distance himself from her.570 Nothing was said, and she didn’t ask him questions, but he had met Edna McNab. Barnard, without her two constant companions and protectors, stopped attending many of her regular activities. It was the easiest way to avoid the embarrassment of encountering her former lover while alone. Thus her prediction to Franklin was fulfilled. Her lack of frequent regular contact gradually loosened the ties of friendship with her former writing friends, but the causes of this estrangement had little, if anything, to do with the death of her father. In December 1941 Japan had entered the war with the bombing of Pearl Harbour and Singapore, and shortly afterwards, of Darwin, Wyndham, Broome and other northern Australian towns. The war now seemed very close.

569 Information from St Andrews Uniting Church in Longueville described Oswald’s responsibility to visit 20 local families regularly, at least every month. 570 Several Barnard letters (some undated) to Devanny in 1947, see Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library. Townsville.

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Many of those not formerly engaged in full-time work were directed by government manpower services into war-work.571 In poor health and at 44 years of age, Barnard was not expected to comply, but she missed her former regular contact with people and the obvious solution was to return to regular work as a librarian. Early in 1942 she had no difficulty finding a job at the Public Library.572 There, she was assigned to work as an assistant librarian during mornings, while in the afternoons she prepared lectures, fifty of them, for students in the Library School.573 Barnard, underpaid and over-worked by her combined duties in the Public Library felt herself to be pressured into ‘a permanent state of lunacy’. She no longer had time or strength for other activities and gave up her former anti-war protests.574 Barnard sought alternative employment and was soon appointed as the Head Librarian in the Commonwealth Reconstruction Laboratories, based within Sydney University campus and soon to be re-badged as the CSIRO. It was much more challenging than her previous library work and better paid. She handled scientific and technical material that was quite remote from her interests, but she threw herself into her new job even though she was now directly supporting the war effort —the war that she had tried so bitterly to avert. Barnard found her work at the CSIRO full of interest. Now head librarian, she was the boss of more than a dozen young librarians, all women, and most of them ready to offer her their friendship. She found their company very satisfying. She also found the work of the scientists interesting and she pointed out that being a librarian in such a place had nothing to do with liking

571 Three years later a young graduate in French (Lyn Brown) was so directed to join Barnard’s staff at the CSIRO library, becoming one of Barnard’s ‘young’ and a life-long friend. 572 Since 1975, the NSW State Library. 573 The lectures, most of which were not completed before she left the Library, were on Australia’s cultural history. The research and preparation of lectures on such subjects as ‘Life in Australia before Settlement’, ‘Captain Tench: Australia’s first publicist’, ‘The Rum Rebellion’, ‘The Australia Dream- Captain Piper’, MacArthur and sheep’ were not wasted, for they were later mined by Barnard and Eldershaw for articles, books, lectures and talks. 574 Barnard, [letter to Eleanor Dark], 22 March 1942. Papers of Eleanor Dark 1910-1974, MS 4998, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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books, ‘it was the science of availability.’575 She enjoyed being involved with handling the secret documents in connection with the Early Warning System developed to protect Darwin during the Japanese bombing raids. The people of Sydney, particularly those whose work involved them in the defence of the nation or handling war-related data such as the librarians in the CSIRO, felt themselves to be in the middle of the war at a time when most of the population were more affected by lists of casualties in the daily newspapers, the battle-news on the radio news and the shortages in labour and goods to which they were becoming accustomed. Most of Sydney’s people did not know about the two reconnaissance flights by Japanese planes over Sydney, on 17th February and 29th May 1942576. Those flights were silent and unobserved by the public, but the third visit by Japanese forces was very noisy, noisy enough to awaken much of sleeping Sydney. On 31st May 1942 three Japanese midget submarines entered the harbour through the defences at the Heads and fired several torpedoes. One torpedo sank the Kuttabul, at that time being used as a dormitory ship. Nineteen Australian sailors and two British sailors were killed while the more likely target, the large battle cruiser, USS Chicago, was left unscathed. Close to Barnard’s home, one of the submarines was blown up just off- shore in Taylor’s Bay with a blast that set iron bedsteads rattling on sleep-outs and residents dashing downstairs to more solidly built lower rooms or even basements.577 A week later, larger submarines still lying outside the Heads of Sydney Harbour attacked coastal shipping and fired ten shells into beach-side suburbs.578 Not all the shells exploded; only one building (in Bellevue Hill) was badly damaged. There was no loss of life.579 Sydney-siders counted their blessings while observing how the war was changing their city. American ships were an obvious presence in the

575 Anna, ‘History is a Creative Art,’ Australian Women’s Weekly, 12 September, 1973, p. 40. 576 Grose, P., A Very Rude Awakening. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2007, pp. 52 & 77. 577 Many of the big homes in that area of Sydney have deep covered verandahs, upstairs and down. Gauzed in, they made ideal summer sleeping rooms. Ray Stimpson whose grandparents and aunt survived their disturbed night. Author’s interview 18 July, 2009 578 Identified later as the ‘mother submarines’ whose crews now realised that the crews of the midget submarines would not be returning. Canberra Times 8 June1942, p. 1. 579 Joan Hansen’s e-mail to author on information–collected from residents by the Heritage Office of the NSW government. Also account published in Wentworth Courier, 27 May 2009.

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Harbour as were the American servicemen in the streets. At Captain Cook’s Graving Dock on Garden Island lights blazed 24 hours a day while 35,000 workers tried to complete it — too late for the European War, but useful against Japan. At war’s end, celebrations in Martin Place and elsewhere were joyfully triumphant; tinged with sadness and anger for lives lost, but not the hate and destruction Barnard had imagined in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Barnard’s fear of invasion influenced the plot of the novel that she worked on through the war, and remained one of her constant worries for many years.580 As well as organizing the very large scientific library, Barnard welcomed the lasting friendships she was able to make with the library staff.581 She had succeeded in building a life after Davison, and was now less concerned about a chance encounter with him, but she had fallen out of the habit of attending writing groups and literary functions. Though she welcomed her new librarian friends, she still missed Eldershaw and her common interests with other former writing colleagues. As Barnard wrote to Jean Devanny: I’m working out of the bad patch. I’ve no one to blame but myself so must right myself, which I shall. Everything would be easier if I had more time and could write. I have something to say and I’m just learning how to say it. It won’t wait forever… I rarely see any of the old group. Teenie is in Melbourne and likely to stay there.582

Even while so busy with the library, Barnard was back writing in the time she could salvage. Some small history books were published, including Australian Outline which re-used some of Barnard’s articles previously published in Home. The fictional ‘The Alabaster Box’ was published as a serial in The Australian Women’s Digest in December 1944, January and February

580Barnard’s letter to Jean Devanny suggesting that the dire forecast in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow could still come to pass. In her 1973 interview with Bruce Molloy she was still warning him, ‘We will fall to Japan…’ Marjorie Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], July 26, 1973, for Molloy’s MA. Tape & transcript, Fryer Library, F793, University of Queensland. 581 It was from some of these women (former CSIRO Library staff) and their children that I was able to learn more about Marjorie during her quiet post-Davison years. 582 Barnard [letter to Devanny], Jean Devanny Archive. JD/Corr 5, James Cook University Library, Townsville. Undated, probably 1944-5. Devanny was dogged by ill-health and often unable to get work that paid a decent wage. In this letter and others Barnard offered/ gave her financial help.

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1945. That year, too, her short story ‘Speak to Me’ was published in Coast to Coast,583 after first being published in the Sydney Morning Herald Magazine. Later it was re-published in Australian Short Stories second series by Oxford

University Press.584 In 1945 Barnard and Eldershaw wrote and presented a course of ten lectures on Australian literature to be given at Sydney University, and the following year she and Eldershaw were invited to edit the Coast to Coast anthology. This collection of Australian short stories was published annually and then bi- annually between 1941 and 1973 by Angus and Robertson. It was regarded as prestigious, and invitations to edit it were coveted. In 1946 she was asked to write a book to record the CSIRO’s development of the Radar defence system. It was to be called ‘One Single Weapon’, and Barnard finished the manuscript, but it was never published. It seems likely that at first the need for secrecy may have prevented publication, and perhaps later, developments in technology moved so fast that it lost its relevance.585 In 1947 her minor history, The Sydney Book, was published and another short story, ‘Say Goodbye and Mean it’. Barnard had regained her place in Sydney’s literary world, even while working at a demanding full-time job. She was proud of her success at the CSIRO library, but she still saw herself as, first and foremost, a writer. As she wrote to Jean Devanny: It’s a good job… I‘ve made a success of it and in the process deceived a lot of people. They think I’m there, all there but it is only a simulacrum, a life-sized imitation of a librarian.586

Interestingly, Barnard came to see her work as fulfilling a social responsibility. ‘I have some confidence in its usefulness……. Almost, you might say, a moral superstition that writing alone is not enough…, and if I refused the responsibilities I honestly believe to be mine & give less than my

583Begun in 1941, Coast to Coast was a collection, published yearly at first and then bi-annually until 1973, of the best short stories, edited by different writers by invitation. 584 In 1963. 585 A typescript can be seen among Barnard’s papers in the Mitchell Library. 586 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 5 January 1945. Jean Devanny Archive. JD/Corr 5, James Cook University Library. During those years ‘simulacrum’ became one of Barnard’s most used words.

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uttermost to the world that, after all has treated me personally very well, I show a defect that would, in time, show in my writing…’ 587

As well as many shorter works, Barnard continued working on M Barnard Eldershaw’s last novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, writing at nights and when she had a spare hour. If they could meet, Barnard and Eldershaw struggled together with it during the novel’s difficult pre- publication period. This included repairing the results of the censor’s over- zealous deletions.588 When that novel, their last, was finally published in 1947, Barnard tried to appease Jean Devanny who was upset by the published text which suggested to her that Barnard had forsaken all her socialist values. Barnard tried to reassure her friend that, at heart, she had not changed: I try to live as a socialist and run the library not as a dictator… but as a socialist state. It works, but I sometimes think… [only] because my young give it to me out of affection. 589

The ‘juniors’ I was able to interview agreed that there was much affection between the women in the CSIRO library. Over fifty years after Joan Hansen joined the library in 1945, when there were twenty-one women on its staff, she wrote that they were a ‘happy band’ and that parties were frequent and much enjoyed, adding: Marjorie was considerate as head of the Library and an easy person to work with. She had high standards but provided a person performed satisfactorily she was left to work without interference.590

Friends and other librarians remember Barnard as a competent and much admired librarian and an effective manager who was respected by the scientists and other university staff for her wisdom and judgment. 591 Barnard had amassed a team of supportive librarians, most of whom became her friends. She encouraged them to become involved in Australian

587 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 June 1945. Jean Devanny Archive. JD/Corr 5, James Cook University Library, Townsville. 588 See chapter 15. 589 Barnard referred to her team of young assistants as her ‘young’ perhaps tryng to replicate the family she now realised she would never have. M. Barnard’s letter to J. Devanny. 590 According to Hansen all librarians on the staff were women during that wartime period. Letter to author 17 March 2009, privately held. 591 See Wilma Radford’s eulogy 1987.

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literature by giving them books by contemporary Australian authors. She was generous, often giving presents to her young staff and though a stern boss in many ways, Barnard even in the war-time brown-out, took the team of young women from the library out to dinner, sometimes to a Chinese restaurant. When Sydney was at peace again they ventured further to the dining rooms of hotels such as the Gresham at Kings Cross, and when the post-war food rationing eased, the women I met late in their lives remember as girls trying out delicious items of formerly unavailable food.592 Most of the young women married and left the library, but Barnard continued to keep in touch with them for years, even corresponding with their children, sending presents and letters during her later overseas trips.593 Barnard became very close to some of the librarians. When Lyn Brown was ill she wrote, ‘It really is dreadful to see you knocking yourself to pieces before my very eyes.’ With many of her personal notes Barnard could not resist adding a literary opinion, such as: I’m reading Elizabeth Bowen’s Heat of the Day which is extremely slow and involved... These people with elaborate techniques so rarely have anything, commensurate with the effort, to say. Even James Joyce. I suppose you can’t have both substance and manner… 594

Lyn Brown, when she graduated in French, had not chosen librarianship as a career but had been drafted into it by the wartime Manpower Authority. She remembered how Barnard fostered a light-hearted mood rather like a kindly older sister among the young librarians. After Brown’s marriage to a CSIRO scientist, the friendship grew to include her husband and their children.595 Brown put together a detailed bibliography of Barnard’s literary work and then submitted a short biographical manuscript to Meanjin. When the editor, Clem Christesen, declined to publish it, Barnard sympathised:

592 Author’s interview with Joan Hansen - spoke of her first taste of zabaglioni, of drinking wine from a silver goblet. 593 It is these women, a generation younger than Barnard, and their families who have helped me to see her by sharing with me their memories of those years. 594 Barnard [letter to Lyn Brown], 24 March 1950 now in Lyn Brown Papers, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 595 Author’s interviews with Lyn Brown to 2009.

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Anyone would be happy to have such words said of them … don’t be put off by editors and publishers. The only discouragement you have to heed comes from within.596

Barnard’s friendship with the Browns lasted while the children grew into adulthood. Brown’s elder son, Paul, remembers the exciting gifts Barnard sent from abroad, especially a much-cherished hunting knife. He described family visits to Barnard’s home in the 1960s. I remember her leafy north shore garden … Much adult talk swirled around those visits, … they spoke of wide-ranging things— exchanging ideas… In hindsight I wish I’d had the sense to listen more closely... I remember a smallish woman who wore her hair … in a plait, like a halo but not quite. … I don’t think I ever saw Marjorie except in the company of Vee Murdoch. When they came, she (Barnard) was always foregrounded in relation to Vee, …. She was my mother’s friend, she was the respected author….597

Throughout the 1940s Ethel Barnard’s health had gradually deteriorated, and this affected Barnard, because she was accustomed to living in a well-run household managed by someone else - her mother, as long as her health permitted it. As her mother’s strength lessened Barnard’s correspondents heard much about difficulties with domestic staff. In a time of extreme labour shortages during the darkest days of the war and immediately afterward, Barnard complained of being reduced to having only a laundress.598 In July 1945, in other words a month before the war ended, when every possible person had been dafted into war work of some kind, Barnard was complaining about having an unsatisfactory full-time live-in housekeeper who wasn’t doing the work she was being paid for. We have been trying for 5 months to get rid of a woman who was originally engaged as domestic help and won’t do any work and is full of venom… [It] is so bad for mother that our lawyer has taken charge...

596 Barnard [letter to Lyn Brown], now in Lyn Brown Papers, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

597 Professor Paul Brown, former Head of the History and Philosophy School at the University of NSW, in an interview with author. 598 Barnard, [letter to Eleanor Dark], 21 October 1943. Eleanor Dark Papers 1910-1974, MS 4009 (binder 2), National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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Ethel Barnard died in 1949, and another letter came from Miles Franklin. Courtesy and fellow-feeling for the sorrowing daughter overcame the hostility often existing between the two. Barnard, in her reply, mentioned that she already had plans for welcoming the Murdochs from Melbourne into her life: Thank you… Mother and I were very close and she kept her youth even into her 81st year. I don’t exactly mourn for her for it was a good and easy way for her to go into the other world… Friends are coming up from Melbourne…to stay for the rest of the winter. I’ll be glad to fill this house which suddenly stopped being a home when Mother left it. 599

It is interesting that Barnard, in sorrow, refers to her mother entering another world, in contrast to her more usual comments dismissing even the possibility of life after death. Barnard had kept in touch with the Murdoch family whom she had met on the Esqualina in 1933. She knew that Vera’s father had died and that now mother and daughter were in need of a home. They had been renting rooms in boarding houses, the refuge of the respectable poor, but after the war such accommodation was becoming unreliable. No longer profitable for the owners, the big houses were being demolished and replaced by blocks of modern apartments which were beyond the means of the Murdoch mother and daughter. After their successful winter visit with Barnard in Longueville, the Murdochs moved in permanently. There was still a live-in cook/housekeeper, but Vera Murdoch took over some of the household duties. Barnard stayed only a few more months at the CSIRO library. The inheritance of the rest of her father’s estate meant she no longer needed her salary. She retired at the end of 1950, in the hope that with the new shared household she would be released from all duties at home and be free to return to full-time writing. Dr Ian Clunies Ross, head of CSIRO sent a letter on her retirement: Dear Miss Barnard, We are all very sad at the thought that on Dec 29th you are leaving us… It has been pleasant to have felt that we had not only a most efficient librarian but, what is more unusual, a distinguished novelist. Indeed if anything could reconcile us to your departure it is the thought that it

599 Barnard, [letter to Miles Franklin], 1 July 1949, Miles Franklin Papers, CY1174 Mss36, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

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may result in further contributions from your pen which will add lustre to Australian Lit.

Even while running the library Barnard had been in the midst of a productive phase of literary criticism. One can imagine how happy she was to leave the demands of the library behind her. She knew she had been successful in a job now completed, and she enjoyed the accolades from people she admired. Most importantly, in Vera Murdoch she had secured a constant companion who would replace her mother in providing a safety net at home, allowing her to sink back where she longed to be, settled in a home comfortably organised by someone else so she could spend all her creative energy in writing. It turned out exactly as Barnard had planned with the added advantage that Vera, or Vee, was able to contribute to Barnard’s activities. Her interest in music and entertainment meant that Barnard could enjoy concerts in the Town Hall,600 and they regularly attended ballet performances.601 Vee also shared Barnard’s love of animals, particularly cats. More adventurously, Murdoch owned a car, allowing Barnard easy access to the city and its surrounds, free at last of public transport.602 This valuable asset became available just as Barnard’s advancing age began to waken discomforts and physical weakness caused by her childhood polio. Even more adventurously, Vee, who loved to travel, was capable of planning and organising even the most complicated and lengthy trips overseas. Barnard, accompanied by the efficient Vee could go and see the world as often and for as long as money and time allowed.603 And that is what they did.604

600 Former venue of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Neighbour Ray Stimson, though she attended separately, often came home with them in Murdoch’s car. 601 Author’s interview with Joan Hansen, friend of Barnard from 1947. 602 Barnard still travelled to the Mitchell Library by ferry because from the Quay the Mitchell Library is just a short walk up the hill. She also probably found the ferry ride a welcome peaceful break in the day’s work, as many commuters do. 603 After many years of travelling Barnard imposed another proviso ‘they’d travel for as long as they could arrange care for their beloved cats.’ 604 Their last lengthy trip abroad which included Africa, the Middle East, islands of the Indian Ocean, Europe and America culminated in a Concorde flight from the UK to the USA.

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Mrs Murdoch, Vee’s elderly mother, though crippled by arthritis, insisted on accompanying Vee and Barnard on their first overseas trip together in 1951. With Vee’s meticulous planning, they chose their destinations carefully and travelled independently, using local transport when possible. On that first trip they visited several European countries including Spain where Mrs Murdoch fell ill and had to be hospitalised. After spending most of 1951 travelling abroad with the Murdochs, Barnard was invited back to the CSIRO Library by her successor, Marjorie McKechnie, for the 1951 Christmas party. Barnard brought home-made biscuits to share, and over 50 years later Anne Jack, then 18 years old and the newest member of staff, could still remember, in 2008, the ‘lovely smell of them.’605 When asked what she wanted for Christmas, Barnard responded with joy. She appreciated that she had reached a happy turning point in her life. Her inheritance from her parents enabled her to do whatever she wanted to do without having to take paid work. Tilting her head back and flinging her arms wide, as if to encompass all her friends with love, she said, ‘I want it all. I want the world.’606 ……………………………………………..

605Author’s telephone interview with ex-librarian Anne Jack, 4 October 2008. 606 Joan Hansen’s email to author.

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Chapter 15 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow 1937-1947 What is written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure. (Dr Samuel Johnson.)

Marjorie Barnard referred to her fifth novel as Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow for ten years while it was being written. She also used a variety of abbreviations, such as T & T & T, or just Tomorrow until its first publication (in censored form) by Georgian House, Melbourne in 1947. To Barnard’s dismay, the published version was titled Tomorrow and Tomorrow. ‘I’m set in my ideas,’ she confessed, ‘and this annoys me out of all proportion.’607 I think it likely that she was so vastly annoyed because removing one of the ‘Tomorrows’ meant that the title was no longer recognisable as a warning of the novel’s theme. Its reception was disappointing and after the first flurry of criticism it remained relatively unknown, under its publishers’ title of Tomorrow and Tomorrow, for thirty-six years until, in 1983, it was published by Virago Press in its full uncensored form under the authors’ original title. I refer to the novel as Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, whenever possible as being the least confusing option. The novel had a long gestation. In December 1937, Barnard wrote to Vance Palmer that she felt the symptoms of a new novel coming on. ‘Something well into the future,’ she wrote, ‘the death of [the]civilization after this one, when all the things we piously hope for will have been accomplished.’608 Barnard at that time was involved in anti-war protests against the government; she hated even the idea of the coming war, and longed for peace to reign despite the many conflicts then erupting across the world.609 Early in 1941, Barnard was still depressed by Europe’s and Australia’s slide into war, and angry that her anti-war warnings had not been unequivocally supported, even within the FAW. The whole subject distressed her profoundly, perhaps because her introduction into politics had been made

607 Barnard, [letter to Eleanor Dark], 21 September 1947.Eleanor Dark Papers 1910-1974, MS 4998, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 608 Barnard, [letter to Vance Palmer], 12 December 1937. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 609 See chapter 10.

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in a burst of emotional enthusiasm for the active socialism espoused by her lover and supported by not only the new friends she had met at the Fellowship of Australian Writers, but also by Flora Eldershaw who had always leaned quietly towards socialism. Barnard wrapped the anti-war message in fiction to make it palatable. She had done something similar to highlight the plight of Australian writers in Plaque with Laurel. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow featured a writer, too, who, combined with his audience of one, would convey Barnard’s philosophy about war and its destructive qualities, as well as Barnard’s usual tips about the craft of writing, and the value of history versus fiction as a vehicle for spreading ideas. In April 1941, watching troops being loaded onto transports in the Harbour near Fort Denison, Barnard counted the boatloads of khaki-clad men boarding the cruisers and liners, aware that their names might soon swell the daily newspaper casualty lists. ‘Of the war it is fruitless to say anything…my heart is molten with grief and anger,’ she wrote to Nettie Palmer. And then, surprisingly, she added: ‘I’m going to write a book — for the first time in my life, a book.’610 It is the best indication we have that the book she had been planning for over three years would differ markedly from anything she had written before. There are many reasons why Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow took such a long ‘thinking time’. For the setting, Barnard chose Sydney again, and manipulated history in order to reveal aspects of the society under observation, and to support part of the structure of her new novel within known history.611 Barnard trusted history, it gave her guidance, ‘rails to run on,’ but history needs time, time enough to encompass a lengthy past or the illusion of it. So, for Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Barnard pushed the present into the background and borrowed 400 years from the future to give her story depth enough to

610 Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 22 April 1941. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 611 There remains the possibility that Barnard’s desired cohesion suffered by the very design she created to ensure it.

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accommodate the destruction of the current civilization and then, some time later, its replacement. In that future world, a writer, Knarf,612 would write the story of Sydney between the 1920s and the 1940s, the years before the catastrophic end of our civilization. History, Barnard believed would be the strongest framework on which to build her story, for it had its own pattern— the past was always the cause, and the future always the effect. As she said,‘there are no fissures in history.’613 Barnard and Eldershaw began actually writing the book in 1941 shortly before Eldershaw left Sydney for Canberra. They both believed that they could continue their collaboration, using the mail and occasional visits in both directions to share the work as formerly.614 It turned out that this time the sharing presented hurdles they had not foreseen. With her new job Eldershaw had a heavy workload and could not edit as often as she wished. By the time she had made the corrections, and posted them off, it is likely that Barnard had accepted her own already-written version as permanent in a way that had not occurred before. Very probably too, Eldershaw, absorbed now in the quite different needs of her public service job in Canberra, felt separated, if not divorced, from the growing manuscript, and less confident about suggesting big changes. Barnard missed the continual support of Eldershaw’s editorial skill and also her company, and from early in 1942 she was distracted by her own re- entry into full-time work.615 Barnard had deplored the two years it had taken to write Green Memory. This current novel was much more complicated than that straight-forward historical yarn, and so was the labour of its writing. Barnard began to encourage herself by mentioning progress on the novel in letters to friends. She wrote to Dark, ‘I have a novel in construction,’ and ‘Novel

612 Frank (Davison) spelled backward. Despite everything that had happened, she was reluctant to let him go. 613 Paraphrased from: Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 January 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library, Townsville. 614 Barnard’s assurance to Vance Palmer that they were not going to let distance interfere with their work in Barnard, [letter to Vance Palmer], 8 May 1941. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 1174/5962, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 615 Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 8 May 1941. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850-1966, MS 1174/5962, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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lies idle.’616 ‘I picked it up at the week-end,’ and ‘spent desperate hours trying to remember the point of a half-written episode.’617 Just a month later she added, ‘the novel is three-quarters done. It has been almost at a standstill for four months. This waste of time is terrible…’618 In 1942 before moving to her new job in the Department of Labour and National Security in Melbourne, Eldershaw spent a few weeks in Sydney. They worked together on the book again but Eldershaw’s stay was short and she was already disenchanted with the new novel: “I feel nothing but a sick distaste for the book,’ Eldershaw wrote to Nettie Palmer, ‘and wish we had never written it.”619 It is unlikely that Barnard was aware, at that time, of how very disillusioned Eldershaw had become after her recent immersion in the novel. Rorabacher, in her 1973 joint biography of Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw, proposed that the chief reason for the delays in the writing of the novel was Barnard’s return to work.620 That certainly reduced the time she was able to spend on the manuscript, especially during those first few months when she worked in the Public Library, as so much was demanded of her physical strength there. But Barnard’s return to work was a deliberate ploy to re-open her world, to broaden her very restricted environment after Davison’s withdrawal from her life. Indeed, her anger at what she saw as her exploitation at the Public Library, probably helped her emerge from her grief more quickly, giving her the incentive to find much better and more congenial employment as head librarian in what is now the CSIRO research laboratory. There she unexpectedly found friendship, too, and the emotional support of professional respect. Surely of great importance to Barnard’s peace of mind at

616 Barnard, [letter to Eleanor Dark], 18 August 1941. Eleanor Dark Papers 1910-1974, MS 4998, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 617 Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 15 June 1942. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966 MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 618 Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 17 July 1942. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 619 F. Eldershaw, [letter to Nettie Palmer], July 1942. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers 1850- 1966, MS 3942, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 620 L. Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw. Twayne Publishers Inc., New York, 1973, pp. 66-7.

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this time, was also the release of stress now it was no longer necessary for her to constantly falsify her activities and whereabouts. Barnard set up the background in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow in a manner not unlike that in My Australia, the discursive social history M Barnard Eldershaw published in 1939. She even repeated memorable phrases and descriptions from that work.621 It was not unusual for Barnard to re-use text, if it was done with a purpose.622 The repeated story about the great age of the Australian continent helped to balance the time- scale and helped the reader navigate through the recent past to the fictional four-hundred-year leap into the future era of a new civilisation. In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the populations or civilizations of Australia are divided into three separate time-blocks. The first people are the Aboriginal inhabitants, who lived lightly upon the continent from ancient times. They are not given a continuous storyline. Scanty snippets of information about them are scattered throughout the book. From 1788, they were powerless against the industrialised and industrious second people, the English settlers who colonised the country and exploited it. These second people prospered for 150 years before they were displaced by invaders in 1943. In an unchronicled period following the worst years of the second World War and the destruction of Sydney, and before our meeting with Knarf and Ord in the Tenth Commune, a third civilisation developed. The tale of these third people who occupy Australia in the 24th century becomes the frame story of the novel. It is not clear who they are or where they have come from. They could be a mixed-race group absorbing some of the second people or their descendants and the 1943 invaders. Their life is peaceful, tightly controlled, and abundant; they want for nothing. Among the prominent citizens is Knarf, who has written a novel entitled: ‘Little World Left Behind’ based on the lives of the second people, whom he calls the ancients — those who lived in Sydney during the late 1920s to the 1940s. Through the

621 Barnard liked heavy backgrounds. Perhaps she thought of them as solid anchors for her work. The long background for their first novel became A House is Built, and they put aside the original idea. 622 For example, ‘the shaggy pelt of the bush’.

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course of one day Knarf reads this novel to his archaeologist friend, Ord, another intellectual. It traces a family in the slums of Sydney struggling through the decades beginning in 1924, through the Great Depression and part-way through the second World War — until Sydney is threatened by the Japanese. This second narrative, Knarf’s novel, is the section most highly regarded by critics. As a prelude to the reading, Knarf explains the novel’s background to Ord: The nineteen thirties, that was a fateful decade. The last chance before the cataclysm. The graveyard of lost causes. Those were the years when the margin between cause and effect in the international and social field narrowed to vanishing point—one of the really tragic periods of history.623

Throughout the day, the reading is interrupted by discussions and digressions about politics, history, literature and the craft of writing, allowing Barnard to project many of her own ideas and concerns through the voices of Knarf and Ord. The day’s events happening around them and also intervening, enable readers to see something of the daily life of this future, third civilization. To a great extent it is in this piecemeal way that the outer novel, the story of the 24th century, unfolds, allowing the reader to see the stories of the two civilisations side-by-side. Knarf’s book, ‘Little WorId Left Behind’, is a complicated historical novel enriched with great detail; we see the people’s political arguments about conscription during their war, the snappy moods of ordinary people squabbling over irrelevancies, even the lowly position of women. Particular emphasis is laid upon the ancient people’s antique fetish— the idea of liberty— which shines through a story of the poverty and hardship suffered by little people trying to shape good lives in bad circumstances within the novel’s key setting, the slums of Sydney. The inner story opens at 7.30pm on a Friday evening in November 1924, on an awkward, uncomfortable picture of the anger and frustration of a young mother who has carried her sick baby to the city from beyond the outer

623 M. Barnard Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Georgian House, Melbourne, 1947, p. 135.

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suburbs. The delays of the child’s medical needs are followed by wearisome marketing, before they head off home again on a crowded commuter train.624 Thus is introduced the family of the protagonist, Harry Munster, an Australian working man, an ex-soldier from the first World War. Superficially, a knockabout character, basically good with forgivable flaws, such as Australian male working-class heroes are most often portrayed. Munster is ruggedly individualistic, remarkable enough to escape class definition. Though happily independent on his small poultry farm, he relinquishes it to please his wife who longs to live in the city. With the coming of the Depression he loses his job, living conditions worsen, as does his marriage. Amid undernourished and sickening children their son dies and it is easy for Harry to believe the promises of communist revolutionaries who want to change Australia’s political system. Harry is killed by the first bomb of World War 2 that lands on Sydney. Before the invaders reach Sydney, local socialist leaders co-operate to destroy the city while former residents flee over the mountains and into the wilderness, taking what they can of their belongings in the vehicles that have survived. When she was writing the novel from 1941 to1943, Barnard was living and writing through the most frightening years of World War 2 when it seemed that nothing could stop the southward sweep of the all-conquering Japanese forces. The story Knarf reads to Ord is vividly realistic until it reaches 1943, then it yields to Barnard’s long-held fear of invasion which slid easily over her innate fear of war. The story then leaps 400 years ahead, as Barnard introduces us to the third civilisation. If Barnard wished to show her readers a possible peaceful life as a contrast to the violence and stress of the 1930s, she succeeded, for the future world of the third civilisation is calm, peaceful, rigidly controlled and dull. It is a life few Australians would choose to live, for the frame story is a dull story about dull people. It looks and feels like a chilly shadow falling at the base of the hot-blooded drama of the second people’s vivid tale. Political

624 Barnard Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, p. 53.

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discussions dominated by old men replace the gritty action of the second people. As if Barnard can’t quite decide about the desirable balance between freedom and guaranteed peace, she introduces Knarf’s son Ren into the plot. The day Knarf reads his novel is also the day Ren, has organised a vote to change their society by allowing each citizen to choose just one small step towards freedom. The older politicians now in power, warn him that: ‘liberty never comes alone, it has a partner, violence… Liberty is poetry and it intoxicates worse than wine… Violence isn’t only wounding and killing people. It can just as well be the ruthless use of power in any context and by any means. We’ve got it here and now. Ask in the workshops, listen in the factories. 625

In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’s future apathy wins over the newly awakening idea of liberty, freedom, and independent thought. Not enough people attend the meeting for a valid vote to be cast. Even Knarf and Ord have been too engrossed in reading and discussing ‘Little World Left Behind’ to walk across the village square to the voting place. The vote fails by default —and the trickery of the emerging politicians in whom Ren had put his trust.626 Though Barnard was highly critical of much of her own society and seemed to be trying to show that it could be replaced with a new and better one, it is clear even from its title that this book was never meant to be utopian. The wars and depressions of the last days of the second civilization caused untold horror, but the losses were eventually controlled by the world’s people. The people of Barnard’s third civilization, those of the 24th century could not have done it, for they have no control over their lives; aspirations for change are pointless, because unachievable. The seeds of their helplessness lie within. In 1943 six years after the first stirrings of the idea, but only two years after beginning the writing, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was

625 Barnard Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow pp. 224-225. Barnard uses her characters (even poorly differentiated ones) to spread the message of ‘Liberty and Violence’ though she protested for the rest of her life that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was not propaganda. 626 Barnard Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow p. 228.

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finished. It was a big book, somewhat over 200,000 words.627 Six months later it still had not found a publisher, and its authors began to look at it critically. Never before had she so vividly appreciated that the writing of a book, no matter how difficult and drawn out, does not bring satisfaction. The task is not complete until the book is put before a reading public. During the next few years Barnard’s efforts were spent in achieving publication for Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It was a sobering time she had recently been spared as most of her recent books had been commissioned. In March 1944, Georgian House of Melbourne indicated that they would publish Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, if the authors agreed to delete large sections of the text— basically everything except ‘Little World Left Behind’. Barnard refused to consider the publisher’s request; the contrast between the two parts of the book must stay. Reluctantly, Georgian House acquiesced. In 1944 it was still wartime and the publisher voluntarily submitted some sections of the manuscript to the Government Censor for assessment. The Censor decided that some sentences, mostly those referring favourably to the Soviet Union should be deleted, even though by 1944 the Soviet Union was an ally.628 Both authors accepted the deletions of the censor as inevitable, for if they refused to sanction them, Georgian House would not publish. Worried about repairing text disrupted by the censor’s scissors, Barnard showed the manuscript to a few of her friends, including Eleanor and Eric Dark.629 ‘I’d like to show you and Eric the manuscript I am working on.’630 She asked for their comments, and in response to their next letter,631she relied,

627 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 5 January 1945. Jean Devanny Archive, JD/Corr 5, James Cook University Library, Townsville. 628 M. Barnard, ‘How Tomorrow and Tomorrow Came to Be Written’, Meanjin Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 3, 1970: 328-330. 629 Barnard, [letter to Eleanor Dark], 17 April 1944. Eleanor Dark Papers 1910-1974, MS 4998 (Binder 2), National Library of Australia, Canberra. 630 Dr Eric Dark, Eleanor’s husband, was a frequent and helpful critic especially when Barnard visited their Katoomba house. 631 Text of the Dark’s letter unavailable, but one can assume by Barnard’s reply that it was a request to keep the Manuscript of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow longer.

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’Yes, keep the ms of T&T&T. I have callouses on my brain from thinking of the beastly thing. I no longer care about it…’632 Barnard sent a copy of the censored manuscript of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow to Jean Devanny, too, and as a kind of apology for not being able to share her friend’s Communist views, confessing that she ‘would not lead the revolution.’ You won’t like ‘Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow.’ It isn’t a propaganda piece. It is a desperate effort to see where we are going. I haven’t pictured what I want, but what I think will be… 633

Then, later: Teenie has some ideas for picking it to pieces & re-doing but I am not enthusiastic… In any case she has not the time and no prospect of it to do the work. I just can’t… So ‘Tomorrow’ hangs like a carcass in a butcher’s shop, dead meat and deteriorating. .. 634

Eldershaw found the time. She wrote to her friend Miles Franklin about the “awful effort of having to close the gaps left by the censor and adapting the end...” 635 Later, it was Eldershaw who checked the final galley proofs of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow before publication. 636 In 1945, one year after Barnard had sent Eleanor Dark the completed manuscript of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Dark published her own novel, The Little Company, a novel with some similarities to Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Dark sent Barnard a copy of the published novel, asking for comment, two years before Georgian House finally finished publishing Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Barnard did not like The Little Company. She found an indefinable something wrong and saw weaknesses in the structure,637 but she made no recorded comment about detecting any similarity to her own much delayed novel.

632 Barnard, [letter to Eleanor Dark], 26 May 1944. Eleanor Dark Papers 1910-1974, MS 4998 (Binder 2), National Library of Australia, Canberra. 633 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 January 1944. Jean Devanny Archive, JD/Corr 5, James Cook University Library, Townsville. 634 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 31 July 1945. Letter. Jean Devanny Archive, JD/Corr 5, James Cook University Library, Townsville. 635 Eldershaw’s ‘pet’ name used by most of her friends. 636 F. Eldershaw, [letter to Miles Franklin], 22 February 1948, Miles Franklin Papers, MSS 3659/1/CY1262, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 637 Barnard [letter to Eleanor Dark], Eleanor Dark Papers 1910-1974, MS 4998 (Binder 2), National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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In 2004, over fifty years later, Ian Saunders published a thoughtful journal article638 ‘On Appropriation: Two novels of Dark and Barnard Eldershaw’ outlining similarities in the two novels, and suggesting that Eleanor Dark had appropriated much of The Little Company from Barnard’s manuscript of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow while she had it in her home. Dark did have ample opportunity to do so, but it is difficult to prove where ideas spring from. Dark was a more prolific and better-known novelist than Barnard, with stronger commercial success. It is improbable that she would deliberately risk a charge of plagiarism. It is certainly possible, even likely, that Dark was inspired by some of the ideas in the Barnard Eldershaw manuscript but how much this influenced The Little Company it is hard to say. If there was inappropriate borrowing, it could well have been inadvertent. Barnard now had no faith that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow would ever be published. She despaired at her inability to commence new literary projects while she fussed and worried about the abandoned novel. Even after finally deciding on the text, it took the publishers three more years to bring the book out. In that waiting period, Barnard wrote only one short story and the 4000-word text of an art book commissioned by Sydney Ure Smith.639 It must be remembered though that during these years Barnard was also managing a busy library with up to twenty assistants as her nine-to-five responsibility. On 19th August 1947, long after the war that had been the reason for the censor’s cuts in the text was over, Tomorrow and Tomorrow was released in its truncated form by Georgian House of Melbourne. Reviews were divided and sales much slower than expected, even though copies had been sent to the English market following good sales there for earlier books. It was soon remaindered.640 In the Bulletin Red Page, Ross Parker pinned it down as a novel -

638 Ian Saunders, ‘On Appropriation: Two Novels of Dark and Barnard Eldershaw’, Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4, 2002: 287-300. https://doi.org/10.20314/als.264ef21b97. 639 Barnard, [letter to Eleanor Dark], 21 September 1947. Eleanor Dark Papers 1910-1974, MS 4998, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 640 From Elizabeth Webby’s tape in Marjorie Barnard Collection in Local Studies Section of Lane Cove Library.

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made by Leftist writers for an audience of Leftist writers … humourless, glum, political …. fostered by the entirely erroneous theory that a novel, as a first essential, must be a sociological text-book: whereas of course the first essential of a work of art is that it should be a work of art…’

Shawn O’Leary in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote in similar vein. He gave Tomorrow & Tomorrow a large column, but a dismal review, ending with, Although Tomorrow &Tomorrow is a new novel about Australia by two Australians, it is not an Australian novel. Nor, regardless of what the Comrades may consider, is it a ranting, radical… plan for salvation.

Literary critic, H.M. Green in his massive History of Australian Literature, was impressed by the novel, comparing it favourably with Furphy’s Such is Life.641Political novels were rare at the time, so Tomorrow and Tomorrow drew attention, and sometimes attack, from all shades of political thought. Conservatives thought it overly communist in its sympathies and communists complained that it insulted communism. Among Barnard’s papers in the Mitchell Library there is a page in Barnard’s handwriting, undated but looking as if written while she was feeling fragile, perhaps ill or distraught. With the publication of T&T I was involved in a labyrinth of denials. No, I was not a Communist or a Trotskyist or a fellow-traveller or a reactionary or an intellectual or a prophet. I was still, inescapably a nineteenth century liberal. That had survived everything. I have never belonged to any political party… In writing my book I had no intention of peddling panaceas... My approach to my times was emotional and imaginative… I reject the label ‘intellectual’ nor do I claim any prophetic powers. It is obvious by now that I don’t possess them. 642

Some scholars were even-handed as to the politics, some were just confused. Colin Roderick in An Introduction to Australian Fiction could not decide

641 H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, pp. 1185- 9. 642 This is another memory lapse. Barnard joined the Lane Cove branch of the Labor Party in 1940 and did some work for the Education Committee but quickly dropped out of active commitment. Barnard had so many memory lapses that one is forced to consider that she liked to make her world as she wanted it to be. If she wanted to forget or ignore something in her life, then she seemed to erase them from her past as if they’d never been there. And in 89 years she changed her wants, ideals, hopes for her world many times.

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whether the novel was a satire about socialism, an attack on capitalism, or both.643 He also found a disconcerting number of inconsistencies. J.D.B. Miller in his review ‘A Footnote to Tomorrow’ found it ‘an absorbing and credible story of the decay of the capitalist society and its replacement by a managerial society’. He found the treatment of the 1920s and the 1930s believable, but the burning of Sydney unbelievable, even as fiction.644 Katharine Susannah Prichard was scathing about Barnard’s depiction of Communist revolutionaries: ‘The result would be damaging if anybody thought a nit-wit like her Communist would be responsible for a Communist policy.‘645 Jean Devanny did not like the novel either and wrote a hugely critical letter to J.B. Miles, calling the book a ‘hotch-potch of naïve rubbish’.646 She remained gracious enough to point out that Barnard and Eldershaw were her friends, and well-meaning, so they should not be ‘mauled unnecessarily’ by the Communist Press. In a mood of exculpation Barnard wrote to Devanny reminding her that the novel grew from her previous work on anti-war pamphlets of which Jean had approved at the time.647 She also explained the violent attack on the University: ‘I know the University and often I’ve marvelled at its extraordinary complacency and snobbery and deadness there on its oasis in the slums…’648 Almost universally the inner story of Harry Munster is highly praised —its plot, its characters, its historical accuracy, its language, its intensity of emotion.649 There is one notable exception. Robert Burns in his ‘Flux & Fixity: M Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow & Tomorrow’ published in Meanjin in

643 C. Roderick, An Introduction to Australian Fiction. Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1950. 644 J. D. B. Miller, ‘A Footnote on Tomorrow’, Meanjin, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1948, p. 125. 645 K. S. Prichard [letter to Miles Franklin], Miles Franklin Papers, MSS 3659/1/CY1262, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

646 J Devanny [letter to J.B. Miles] 27 September 1947. Jean Devanny papers 229 in James Cook University Library, Townsville. JB Miles was Secretary of the Communist Party in Queensland, and also for some time Jean Devanny’s lover. 647 Barnard [letter to Jean Devanny], 4 February 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library, Townsville. 648 Barnard [letter to Jean Devanny], 1947. . Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library, Townsville. 649 In the ABC Weekly of 11 Oct 1947 p. 20, also The Australian Book News of the Month review by Gilbert Mant in Mitchell Lib A820.5/13 called Tomorrow & Tomorrow “the most ambitious book that has come off an Australian printing press.”

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September1970. He described the inner story as ‘lumpen, stereotyped’ while the world of Knarf is posed as a ‘counterpoint to the crowd-driven drabness of Sydney in the 20th century.’ Interestingly Burns also thinks the third people are European, whereas their docility and their willingness to obey orders without question lead most readers to think that these people of the future descend from Japanese or other Asian invaders with perhaps a mix of Australians from places outside Sydney. There is textual evidence supporting such a mix. Knarf remarks on the looser, taller body of many of his people living in inland Communes, that the cast of their features are much less Asian-looking than those of his people of the third civilisation living on the coast. One of the more interesting parts of the outer novel, which Patrick White called the ‘boring outer shell’ was Barnard’s customary advice on writing. Her last three novels all feature writers in dominant roles who snatch opportunities to present Barnard’s views on the craft of writing. In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow she uses Ord to talk about the form of novel popular in ‘ancient times’ and to argue about the merits of fiction versus history in disseminating knowledge. Ord and Knarf draw attention to Barnard’s frequent argument that the reader is all-important. In 1970 Clem Christesen, editor of Meanjin, asked Barnard to write an account of how she and Eldershaw had written Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.650 She responded: This novel was to be written in collaboration with Flora Eldershaw. We often discussed it but from the first I think she was sceptical about the viability of the idea. She did not feel the same compulsion as I did to write it. The collaboration broke down almost from the beginning, not from any quarrel, disagreement or failure of friendship but by war and geography. Flora left Sydney, at first for Canberra and later for Melbourne. She was busy. So was I. We were both drawn into the war effort. We saw one another only at rare intervals; letter writing was almost impossible. I went on alone and the book was to suffer from the lack, most particularly of her critical judgment.

650 M. Barnard, ‘How Tomorrow and Tomorrow Came to Be Written’, Meanjin Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 3, 1970, p. 329. Also L. Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw. Twayne Publishers Inc., New York, 1973, p. 66. (It is noteworthy that Eldershaw died in 1959.)

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Christesen was probably as surprised as his readers by Barnard’s article. Her claim that the collaboration broke down early is not supported by contemporary evidence, for when Barnard wrote to Vance Palmer in 1937 that ‘we feel the symptoms of a new novel coming on’, she finished the paragraph with ‘…In any case it will have to wait… because Teenie is going away for the holidays and will have her hands full …’ They began the actual writing in 1941 just before Eldershaw left for Canberra, and at that time Barnard wrote to Palmer: We’ve taken the hideous plunge into the new novel and it is getting underway…Teenie is being translated to Canberra…We’re not going to let a little thing like distance interfere with the collaboration…651:

Both spoke of it as ‘our novel’ and when Edgar Harris of Georgian House652 wrote to the pair, he asked: Are you prepared to risk your reputation as front rank Australian creative writers for the sake of ideology?... is there any likelihood of either you or Miss Eldershaw visiting Melbourne in the near future?

It was Eldershaw who replied to that letter, Eldershaw who patched up and adjusted the censor’s deletions, and it was Eldershaw who did the final proof- reading. It is clear the collaboration did not break down early, but almost certainly it was less uniformly smooth than formerly because their method of collaboration had to change, become less immediate, and the extra time it took put pressure on them both. It is evident that Barnard’s memory was faulty and at 73 it may have been even less reliable than formerly. She may even have been influenced by her beloved companion of that time, Vera Murdoch. Coming late into Barnard’s life and fiercely protective, Murdoch often claimed too much on behalf of Barnard. Murdoch had not been there to see the collaboration working. It is noteworthy that most of Barnard’s many interviewers in her later life seemed to welcome Murdoch’s interjections, her answering of questions on Barnard’s

651 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 8 May 1941. Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer 1850- 1966, MS 1174/5962, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 652 22 March 1944, draft reply in Eldershaw’s handwriting in Barnard’s papers ML MSS 451/5.

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behalf. Perhaps even Barnard, aware that she was struggling to remember, was relieved, trusting Murdoch whose devotion she never questioned. In 1973 Barnard tried to persuade Bruce Molloy that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was not a political novel. We did not seek to prophecy or prognosticate the future only to show a possible line of effect from the causes set out in the earlier part. … We will fall to Japan, you know, one day. We will. We’ve got so much they want, and we have an indefensible coast.

When Molloy protested. ‘I thought you considered essential political issues… like liberty, individuality…’ Barnard countered with her own interpretation of political: No, it wasn’t politics, it was the human situation. That was a very special time when we watched a war coming; when we knew it was inevitable—when every thinking person was distressed to the point of anguish… in that book we were not writing about politics, we were writing about what was happening and the ideas that were boiling up… it wasn’t party politics of any kind…653

In 1983, the Australasian Publishing Company in association with Virago Books, London, published Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow in its original form, complete with the censored passages restored. This led to a much more successful new life for Barnard and Eldershaw’s fifth and last novel.654 Launched by Dame Leonie Kramer, Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University on Marjorie Barnard’s 86th birthday, it was greeted by the market and critics almost as a new book; its surviving author was welcomed back into the Australian literary scene with acclaim. Patrick White, who may have remembered the important part Barnard’s critical articles played in assuring appreciation of his work during his early years in Australia, nominated Barnard for the Patrick White Prize which he had established and funded from his Nobel Prize winnings. It was to be awarded to an Australian

653 Barnard, [interviewed by Bruce Molloy], July 26, 1973, for Molloy’s MA. Tape & transcript, Fryer Library, F793, University of Queensland. 654 Sadly, Eldershaw was not alive to experience this re-birth. She died in 1959.

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writer who had been rewarded less than he or she deserved for their contributions to literature. 655 Many reviews were favourable, among them were several from Science Fiction enthusiasts. Michael Tolley, described Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow as: Both a novel of social realism and a prophecy of doom… a future rational secure utopia in which eastern Australia has once again become beautiful after a long period of drought and desolation… (T)he novel may be gauged by two comparisons: I find it more impressive than The Dispossessed656 which it resembles in structure... and more impressive than Christina Stead’s as an alienated presentation of Sydney…. Barnard’s analysis of her society is that of an acute observer and independent thinker, whose pacifism informs the book… Her larger concern is, however, with the struggle between power and liberty … It is a book for thoughtful rather than rapid reading… . I’d like to see this novel used as a text-book in Australian Literature courses, … it is of particular interest to utopia specialists.657

Science fiction had moved closer to mainstream literature in the thirty- six years since Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’s first publication. The censor’s deletions were restored but later readers found that inconsistencies still thrust their heads high like exuberant weeds in a paddock amid the consistent style and power of Barnard’s writing. George Tucker, in the Australia SF News praised it as: the finest SF ever produced in Australia and one of the genre’s all-time best novels… [It] is in no sense a thriller or typical genre work; it is for those who prefer humanity to gimmickry. It has been too long forgotten.658

Both the two main narratives within Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow lack joy, but Barnard’s writing in most forms echoes the dark side. She remarked more than once on the gloominess of her short stories, and

655 Marjorie Barnard, ‘The Four Novels of Patrick White’, Meanjin, Vol. 15, No. 2, 1956: 156- 170. Barnard wrote the first extended critique of White’s early work after his return to Australia, drawing favourable attention to him when he was unknown in his homeland. 656 By well-known science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin. 657 M. Tolley, ‘An Unsentimental Utopia’, SF & Fantasy Review, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1984. 658 G. Tucker, ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’, Australian SF News, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1983.

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Green Memory, one of Barnard Eldershaw’s best written and historically accurate novels sold poorly; it was a gloomy book. In the years of writing Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow Barnard had reason to be gloomy: her passionate desire for peace and her anxiety at the likely death of so many young Australian men, had been overcome by bloody warfare, and she learnt to deal with the pain of betrayal at the withdrawal of Davison’s long-time attention. Her whole life had changed when she became aware of his deep love for another woman. The damage to her self-worth may have influenced the downward slide of her fictional women — for they filled only lowly positions, perhaps that is where she now saw her own discarded self. Even in happier times Barnard’s fictional women, with the exception of Lucy in Green Memory, were weak women in subordinate positions. In 1929 for A House is Built she created Fanny who became a diminished character. In Plaque with Laurel her women equal the men characters in strength, though not in the dominance of their roles in the plot. In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow no woman plays an important role in its plot. Their lack of power and the widespread undervaluing of women are seen as natural. Knarf, the writer and intellectual, is satisfied with his self-effacing wife, and says of a female character in ‘Little World Left Behind’: ‘She is merely one of those unfortunate women who are only women and not human beings. They are quite common.’659 In the outer story, the women’s lack of substance may have been partly because they lacked detail. We do not ever see them clearly. The whole outer story is seen as if through a fog. Dullness, shadowy lack of warmth emphasises the lack of sharp detail. Here Barnard had no memories to draw on, no history to interpret vividly and re-use. For all her astounding flair with words she found it difficult to create from the air a real tale with live characters. In an undated letter to Vance Palmer while she was struggling to finish writing this troublesome novel, Barnard almost wept her need for inspiration:

659 Barnard Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. p. 203.

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I’m in a predatory state of mind roving around seeking what I may devour—literally snatching features off people’s faces and succulent morsels from all over the place. I’d tear down the sky and drag it into my den to nourish this book.660

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow remains engrossing, despite patches of difficulty in suspending disbelief. Like J.D.B. Miller I find it hard to see Australians burning Sydney, or to believe that the children or even the great-grandchildren of pioneers could have become so helpless in taming the ‘wilderness’. I remind myself: ‘but this is fiction. This is how Barnard pictured these people of the inner novel,’ and I admire her consummate skill in her use of language. Perhaps the history encompassed in this novel is too good, too accurate, too dramatically drawn, too real. Perhaps that is the risk a fiction writer takes when cutting into recent and well-known history to design a fictional plot, for history cannot be made as malleable as the clay used to fashion a novelist’s pot. ………………………………………………………..

660 Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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Chapter 16 Barnard’s career in literary criticism 1942-1960

We place on paper without hesitation a tissue of flatteries, to which in society we could not give utterance for our lives, without either blushing or laughing outright.661

From 1935 to 1942 Barnard, writing full-time at home, had her most productive years of writing. As well as continuing the partnership with Eldershaw on specific projects, she was at last successful with her short stories. She continued with writing history and also had many reviews and critical articles published in a variety of newspapers and magazines.662 With the establishment of the literary journals such as Southerly and Meanjin, and also the shorter-lived Australian Women’s Digest and Australian Books she found more reliable outlets and more sympathetic readers. Three of her longer critical articles formed the basis of her reputation as a serious critic and bolstered her confidence to write other detailed critical assessments.663 Barnard also extended the range of lectures that she and Eldershaw had been giving since1929. They lectured in Sydney University extension courses, and with other practising authors presented several series of lectures funded by the Commonwealth Literary Fund, where members of the public were also welcomed. They thus became an integral part of English units towards arts degrees, an early step towards having Australian literature considered seriously by the universities. Among Barnard’s papers in the Mitchell Library are several sets of lecture notes on modern fiction, and Australian literature and its history which could have formed part of those early university lectures. Some are short, some are long, and there is usually no indication of the first or subsequent dates or purposes for which they were used. Many of

661 Edgar Allen Poe 1840. I owe this quote to Kerryn Goldsworthy, ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, Australian Book Review, No. 351, May 2013. The information that Poe’s article ‘The Literati of New York City’ in which he pointed out the discrepancy between critics’ private opinion of books and their polite published reviews. I remind readers that a similar discrepancy is seen in opinions expressed by Nettie Palmer, Marjorie Barnard and Jean Devanny. 662 Such as the Sydney Morning Herald, the Bulletin, the Sydney Mail and the Home magazine. 663 On Patrick White, Seaforth MacKenzie and Miles Franklin.

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them probably began as the lectures that Barnard prepared for the library instruction course as one of her duties during her brief period of work in the State Library in 1942. As she left that job as soon as she could, most lectures were not used for their original purpose. They were put aside to swell Barnard’s Larder and were used as a resource by both Barnard and Eldershaw to mine, re-use, alter, do whatever was necessary to fulfil any commitment for a lecture, article or even part of a book.664 Often several versions stayed in the Larder permanently to be re-used in its most suitable form when needed. In 1942 the Fellowship of Australian Writers put out a booklet, titled Australian Writers Speak. Experienced writers from the Fellowship were commissioned to write articles on such topics as ‘What is Literature’ (Frank Davison), ‘Is the Writer involved in the Political Development of his Country? (Miles Franklin and George Ashton), ‘The Workers’ Contribution to Australian Literature’ (Jean Devanny), ‘It takes Readers as Well as Writers to make a Literature’ (Nettie and Vance Palmer). The final essay was simply ‘Our Literature’ by Marjorie Barnard.665 Barnard had already written on her subject, where and how Australian literature was born, in her social history, My Australia.666 The essay was a rerun of a talk she had already broadcast as part of a programme called ‘We Australians’ on the ABC. As many writers did, Barnard nominated Furphy’s Such is Life as the first genuine Australian novel, as rambling as the bush communities that gave it birth. She recognised other younger writers as followers of Furphy’s style and proposed Kylie Tennant’s The Battlers, Leonard Mann’s The Human Drift and Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia as books that, like Such is Life, spread knowledge of the bush. Ironically, when these books were most popular, the

664 The Larder was used to store material to use and reuse. The unpublished book, The Gulf Stream was stored there. In later years Murdoch began calling it The Coffin because when Barnard ceased writing the material in it was no longer used, dead. Its contents ended up among Barnard’s papers in the Mitchell Library. 665 The other contributors were Louis Essen (introduction), Bert & Dora Birtles, Norman Bartlett, K S Prichard, Gavin Casey, and Leslie Rees. 666 M. Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia. Jarrolds, London, 1939.

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drift of the population from the bush to the towns gained pace and, by the end of Barnard’s life, the majority of modern Australians had become city-dwellers. For some years Barnard wrote a regular and somewhat lengthy column, ‘Fiction Chronicles’, for Meanjin. In it she gave short reviews of several new books, usually by Australian authors, shared news about local writers and publishers, and added her views on current literary topics. A long review published in Meanjin in 1954, re-introduced Seaforth Mackenzie, a writer who had never been adequately appreciated except in his native Western Australia. Of Mackenzie’s four novels, Barnard pointed out his first, The Young Desire It, as showing great promise. A story of youthful homosexuality in a setting of rampant bullying and sweaty boys, probably based on Mackenzie’s own experience at a boarding school, would have been difficult to handle with delicacy at any time, yet in 1937 Mackenzie, then a young man of twenty- three did it with confidence, sensitivity and tact. Barnard greatly admired his poet’s way with words and his use of the steamy late-summer countryside to illustrate Charles Fox’s sexuality. She summed up: Even in his first novel it is evident that the springs of Mackenzie’s work lie not in character, action, place, dogma or plot but in an emotional idea. In The Young Desire It, it is the idea of youth reconstructed with emotion. There is a flame-like quality about it… And it is occasionally uncomfortable reading.

The Young Desire It was admired for a time, then interest waned as his second novel, and his fourth, did not match the quality of the first. However Barnard believed McKenzie’s finest work to be his third novel, Dead Men Rising, a story about the outbreak of Japanese prisoners at the camp at Cowra, which Mackenzie had witnessed. A story of such a unique occasion in Australian history would have appealed to Barnard, but it did not sell well and few Australians would have recognised the author’s name when The Young Desire It was re-printed by Text Classics to great acclaim in 2013. In 1956 she drew readers’ attention to two exceptional novels: Patrick White’s Tree of Man that ‘could not be compared with other books of the year’, and ’s A Haunted Land, quite a different kind of novel, a poet’s

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novel. Readers interested in the state of literature in Australia were entertained and informed by her thoughtful ramblings. Some ‘Fiction Chronicles’ ran to ten pages of discussion on novels published during the year. In June 1957 she discussed several books by writers whose names are barely heard of now — Mungo McCallum’s A Voyage in Love and Elyne Mitchell’s Black Mean Snow. In 1960 her review offered even more variety. She wrote: In a spot check of Australian fiction published in the last twelve months … of the thirteen novels considered, seven were published in England… Only one book is touched by the flying fringe of greatness— ’s A Descant for Gossips… ‘The theme of which is loneliness rather than love. The surprise of the year is Julie Rolleston’s Pink is for Girls. Written at sixteen years of age, it should be insufferable but it is not. It is gay and witty and truly amazing… ‘

As her reputation grew Barnard was commissioned to write longer, more thoughtful commentaries by the editors of the literary journals of the day, heralding a change in the literary pages of the newspapers, away from dependence upon short reviews which were little more than advertisements. Barnard’s long essays for Meanjin and Southerly commented critically on the work of significant novelists. ‘The Harp in the Orchestra’— Barnard’s review in Southerly of ’s very popular novel, The Harp in the South, indicates disappointment.667 She did not mention that Park had only recently arrived from New Zealand, that she had had to undergo a double adjustment—to Australia, and then to the rats and rubble of Surry Hills in the 1940s. Barnard summing up of The Harp in the South was negative: ‘It is just the sort of book Americans describe as tough and tender… It is brightly and easily written. It has a good surface, the presentation is always plausible, but this is good journalism not good literature.’ In April 1955, a few months after Miles Franklin’s death Clem Christesen, asked Barnard to write an article for Meanjin celebrating her life. Barnard’s article started:

667 M. Barnard, ‘The Harp in the Orchestra’, Southerly, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1948, p. 224 – ML 059/13

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Miles Franklin was a legend in her own lifetime—which is not always a healthy thing for a writer. It generally means that the current acclaim for his or her books depends on qualities that are not literary, but on eccentricity, on fashion, on fame in another field.

In Franklin’s case she had been made famous by the sensational publication of her first novel, My Brilliant Career, in 1901. After a few years in Sydney which had their own difficulties for the young author, she went abroad in 1905 and was little heard of in Australia until she returned to live in Sydney in 1933. She soon became well-known and well-loved. Despite Franklin’s own interesting life, her best writing, Barnard pointed out, was rooted in the 1860s, and the life of her grandparents.668 In her research Barnard found that Franklin had revealed almost nothing of her life abroad and her papers were not yet open to the public. For details of her life in Sydney Barnard was dependent upon her own experience of shared meetings and friends, joint membership of a gossipy correspondence circle and the more informative and serious letters which Franklin wrote to Nettie Palmer. Barnard struggled through the Franklin piece, wishing to honour the woman and her writing and determined to leave a warm positive story to comfort Franklin’s many friends, yet handicapped by the memory of their mutual antagonism. There had been several occasions of public embarrassment that stretched the bond of friendship hanging precariously between the two. What Barnard considered fair criticism of Franklin’s literary work had sparked Franklin’s anger; she saw it as a personal attack. Their differences were well known within the small circle of Sydney writers so her tribute must be seen to be honest and unbiased. Barnard’s own feelings towards Franklin are shown in irony: Miles was a study in contradictions. She was young in heart but as old-fashioned as a bamboo-bead curtain. She was generous and loveable but had, on occasion, a barbed tongue. She was a good friend who quarrelled sooner or later, but seldom finally, with most of her friends. She was deeply bound to her family, yet …went in fear of it … She was passionately devoted to her country yet voluntarily spent a large part of her life away from it. She was of the bush but lived in the city.

668 M. Barnard, ‘Miles Franklin’, Meanjin, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1955: 468-487.

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Although that famous first book of Franklin’s was sponsored by Henry Lawson, and they both wrote mainly about the bush and its people, they came from very different spaces within that world. Franklin was born into the squatter’s homestead; the spirit of Lawson’s writing was lit by the drifters, the drovers, the itinerant shearers. Above all, her world was feminine, his masculine. In the years after the publication of her first novel, when she lived in Sydney and wrote for the Bulletin, Franklin used many pseudonyms. This practice continued, and ironically some of her best writing, late in her career, was done under her best-known, masculine, pseudonym. Franklin never admitted that it was she who had written as ‘Brent of Bin Bin’, but by 1955, Barnard was convinced, and convincing: ‘There is enough internal evidence to prove it ten times over.’ Barnard wrote that Franklin’s books of the past whether written under Brent’s name or her own were among Franklin’s best books. She critically examined Old Blastus of Bandicoot and All That Swagger. These two novels share humour and intensity and detailed descriptions of the homes, particularly the kitchens of the time. Although women were not given the spotlight, their work often was. This article led Barnard into the full literary biography she wrote of Franklin a few years later. In the same letter that he commissioned the Franklin article, Christesen had asked Barnard to write another author-profile, this time on Patrick White who was, he thought, still living in England. The young Australian author had caught Christesen’s interest because of his about-to-be-released new novel, The Tree of Man. Barnard discovered that, far from living overseas, Patrick White had been quietly settled for some time in rural/suburban Castle Hill on the outskirts of Sydney. In her essay, ‘The Four Novels of Patrick White’, Barnard started looking at The Ploughman and Other Poems. Barnard assessed White’s first published book, as the kind usually referred to as slender and consisting of poems such as many young men write. Barnard then addressed his novel.

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Happy Valley, The Living and the Dead, The Aunt’s Story and now, The Tree of Man, which had sparked Christesen’s interest. Published in England in 1939, Happy Valley, was, Barnard thought, the ‘most efficient of his books.’ ‘It bears few of the marks of a first novel, its occasional angularity being a persistent feature of White’s work.’ Barnard was impressed by White’s landscapes, so much brighter when compared with other descriptions of Australian country towns. Barnard thought Happy Valley settled and concise and the prose itself lucid, fluid, arresting, but it showed White to be at war with himself. Though Barnard clearly admired White’s skill with words, and his writing style, she did not enjoy his characters, or Happy Valley as a novel. In 1941 she had argued that Leonard Mann’s Mountain Flat should have won the Australian Literary

Society’s Gold medal instead of White’s ‘unreal’ Happy Valley.669 The Living and the Dead, published in 1941, struck Barnard as intricate, less real in its setting, perhaps because it is not set in Australia. Barnard thought it an unhappy book: ‘all the characters are lost or fractured or decadent…’ But, as Barnard had expected, White advanced in skill as a writer with each novel. Barnard thought The Aunt’s Story, White’s third novel, to be ‘a retreat from the abstract’ back to reality, though he had chosen a very strange reality. She saw The Aunt’s Story as an allegory of pain, a reflection of Theodora’s frustration. But Barnard’s consciousness of White’s pain forced her to wonder about a likely connection, for this was the story White brought back to Australia when he decided to return from Europe with his life’s companion, in 1946. The prose is richer than in his earlier books, the imagery more striking. Theodora Goodman, whose only relationship was as an aunt, had been an unloved child who grew up to be an unattractive and unattached woman. In 1956 Barnard thought it the most imaginative and bizarre of White’s novels. The Tree of Man, White’s fourth novel, Barnard saw as much better written and more skilfully structured. It tells the story of a Sydney pioneering

669 M. Barnard, [letter to Nettie Palmer], 8 May 1941.Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers1850- 1966, MS 1174/5962, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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family with infinite quietness, flowing from youth to age in long swirling sentences. In Barnard’s words: In The Tree of Man Patrick White turns away from the strange, the curious, the accidental, the pressure of abstract ideas, to the elementals, and delving deeply into them he uncovers the whole of life.

In assessing the characters, she found them to be fully drawn, with Stan’s life full of suffering. His wife’s infidelity and his son’s guilt were there to see: Patrick White is obsessed with pain and loneliness, the inability of human beings ever to know one another… which is the ultimate loneliness…. Never in any of the [four] books is a satisfactory and satisfying human relationship portrayed. In Patrick White’s philosophy of pain and loneliness it would seem that none were possible.

Christesen was delighted with Barnard’s essay as he believed it to be the first thorough criticism of Patrick White to be published in Australia and the most positive, for Barnard was immensely impressed by White’s work.670 Christesen sent a note to Barnard: Dear Marjorie, I’ve sent your script on Patrick White to the printer and I’m now writing to congratulate you on a fine essay. I’m really most indebted to you for all the time and trouble you devoted etc etc I sent a complimentary copy of Meanjin to White, but no response.671

Actually White had been so pleased with the review that he had aleady telephoned Barnard and thanked her. He also wrote to her. Despite Barnard’s habit of destroying her mail, we have a copy of this letter, published in Antipodes: Again I must say how impressed and gratified I am by your work. A great many people have become excited over The Tree of Man, but it is the first time anyone has shown I have been working towards it over the last twenty years…Nor has any other critic, however sympathetic, put his finger so firmly on the point of The Tree of Man as you have in your: ‘Each Man’s life is a mystery between himself and God.’672

670 M. Barnard, ‘The Four Novels of Patrick White’, Meanjin, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1955: 468-487. 671 C. Christesen [letter to Marjorie Barnard], 11 June 1956. Marjorie Barnard Papers MSS 2809 Box 1.Mitchell Library, Sydney. 672 Quoted in P.Excell, ‘Patrick White, The Tree of Man and Meanjin,’ in Antipodes, Vol. 9, Iss. 2, 1995. Source Meanjin Archives, Bailleau Library, .

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This exchange led to a literary friendship developing between these two writers whose life experiences could not have been more different. They met and to the surprise of both, they liked and respected each other; each found the other intellectually stimulating. Barnard wrote to Jean Devanny about it: ‘… quite a friendship has sprung up. I like him… we can talk the same language and he can write. It is good to see someone succeeding where one has failed.’673 They dined together, and for a time visited one another regularly for lunch. Then the friendship dwindled away; White no longer visited. Barnard may not have guessed the reason, but, according to David Marr’s biography of Patrick White, he did not like Barnard’s constant companion, Vee Murdoch.

She bored him.674 Christesen’s next request to Barnard was that she write a double review comparing the latest novels of both White and Vance Palmer.675 She did not wish to publicly compare her old friend’s work with that of the sparkling newcomer. Her views on the value of literary criticism had not changed even after nearly thirty years of practising it, but this was one occasion when the critic’s cloak irked her. Seedtime676 was Vance Palmer’s tenth novel, Voss, White’s fifth, and it had just won the inaugural Miles Franklin Prize (1956). From her earlier article on Tree of Man it was clear that Barnard was a great admirer of White, and now she has been asked to compare his latest novel with the latest offering of Vance Palmer one of her oldest friends, a man whose help in literary matters she has benefitted from since she first began writing. Seedtime is a sequel, one of a trilogy but strong enough to stand alone. It is low-key, as are its characters, for Palmer’s people are not shooting stars. Barnard liked and admired Palmer. Until now she had shown qualified

673 M. Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 25 June 1947. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library, Townsville. 674 David Marr, Patrick White, A Life. Random House, Melbourne, 1991, p. 14. Marr said White’s short story ‘The Cheery Soul’ was based on Alex Scott and Barnard’s companion Vee, whom White found to be ‘a worthy woman but a great talker and one of the most crashing Philistines I have ever met.’ 675 Published in a section called ‘BOOKS’, Meanjin, April 1958, pp. 94 to 100. 676 Vance Palmer, Seedtime. Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1957.

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admiration for his writing in its various forms, but it is hard to see admiration for this novel in such comments as: Of plot there is little, of drama, less. The brawl in which Macy is stabbed is little more than a piece of machinery to bring him on stage; the strike, at first so menacing, peters out.

There is more in the same tone, but Barnard finished her discussion of this novel with tolerance, even sweetness: ‘Seedtime rested on its characterisation and on its style and the fluent sensitive prose, so much a part of Vance Palmer’s work…’ But one cannot quite believe that Barnard was being totally honest. This time she was gently cushioning a friend, defending him against an infinitely more impressive rival. It was in marked contrast that she began her commentary on Voss: This is a book of extraordinary grandeur, of great impact. And a most disturbing originality… The question for discussion is: How were these results attained?

Barnard emphasises White’s variety. Voss has nothing in common with the Tree of Man which she sees as universal. Voss is individual, even more importantly, an individual in history. Firstly, it dances around the history of Leichhardt, the explorer who was lost in an endeavour to cross the continent from east to west, but Barnard does not miss seeing in Voss’s journey Christ on his way to Gethsemane. This is a surprising element to be broached by Barnard, who has disavowed all of her father’s religious beliefs, discarding Christ along with the idea of any existence of an after-life. She knows Voss would have preferred to go to his death alone, and the interior of Australia is the perfect place for Voss to seek the purging of his soul. Barnard is so absorbed, even fascinated by Voss’s philosophy that she has barely half a dozen sentences to spare to examine White’s structure and language within this novel. Her comments are sparse: The prose is highly individual but not obscure. Imagination is not ousted by theory but glows rich and strong beneath the skin of the book. Detail is sharply etched…Voss is a gadfly book….

Since Barnard has spent so much time on literary criticism and so deeply believed that it is essential for the well-being of literature in any

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society, she was the perfect person to critique a book purporting to be a critical account of Australian literature. She looked at the publication of Cecil Hadgraft’s Australian Literature – a critical account - with a keen, critical eye, and began: A full-length book on Australian Literature is certainly to be welcomed; that such a book, any such book, should be written and published is at least a sign of life; that it should be a critical analysis gives added importance …It is time for analysis, synthesis and penetration, for thinking together…

Barnard points out that a book also needs a reason for being written, and she could not understand why Mr Hadgraft had produced this book.677 She was aware that often his judgments were unsupported by evidence. For example: ‘Eleanor Dark’s historical novels are the most substantial and successful of their kind that we have678.” Barnard managed not to disclose her irritation that Hadgraft had ignored her own historical fiction. When Hadgraft did provide comparisons, he chose only overseas writers as benchmarks —Slessor was like Tennyson, Xavier Herbert akin to Dickens, Catherine Spence just missed being another Jane Austen and so on. Barnard did not like the book, and she said so, remorselessly. She knew more about literature and its criticism than Hadgraft, and was cruel in pointing out his omissions. The belief sticks obstinately in my mind that this book with its shallow wit, its pretentions, its reliance on other men’s opinions… its tendency to score off its subjects rather than to make an effort to understand them, is an exercise rather than a study well rooted in the author’s mind.

Hadgraft maintained his optimism to the end: ‘Indeed a spectator of the [literary] scene is tempted to think that …criticism is sitting pretty’. Barnard maintained her cruelty, or honesty. She felt that Hadgraft’s essay was itself evidence that criticism was not sitting pretty. …………………………………………………………….

677 M. Barnard, ‘The Unpretty Posture of Criticism [Book Review]’, Meanjin, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1960, pp. 323-327. 678 C. Hadgraft, Australian Literature: A Critical Account to 1955. Heinemann, London, 1960, p. 238.

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Chapter 17 A History of Australia etc 1952 - 1962

A full understanding of Australian literature is dependent upon a knowledge of its history, particularly social history.679

Barnard’s plan for her retirement years was to travel the world every second year. She would stay at home in alternate years and write. At the end of 1951, after a year abroad, she began 1952 already planning her year’s writing project—‘A History of Australian Literature’. It would require thought and much time, perhaps more than the year she had planned, though she had already made inroads into the subject with her many lectures and essays which could form a sturdy beginning. While she pondered and planned, Barnard worked at several short-term tasks such as indexing The Australian Quarterly in the Mitchell Library and, while visiting her friends at Leura in her beloved Blue Mountains, 680 she catalogued their book collection of Australiana and helped its owner prepare the collection for sale. She shared this experience in loving letters to Eldershaw who was still in Melbourne and still working though plagued by increasingly debilitating illness. In November 1952 Barnard still had to finalise the illustrations for her ‘Sydney Books’, and wrote of seeing friends for a pre-Christmas visit while her concern for Eldershaw’s health flowed through her letters to ‘ darling dear Teenie’. It seems that Barnard had already given up on travelling during the coming ‘alternate year, 1953, for she also wrote to Eldershaw that she was considering a part-time job as librarian at the Royal Society. She reminded herself that she must get onto the ‘History of Australian Literature’ soon and asked Eldershaw’s advice about whether she should apply for a CLF681 Fellowship: the £600 would support her while she wrote it.

679 C. Christesen (ed.), Australian Heritage. Longmans, Green & Co, London, 1969, p. x1. 680 M Barnard [letter to F Eldershaw] 17 December 1952, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer 1850-1966 MS3942 series 7, National Library of Australia, Canberra 681 Commonwealth Literary Fund

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As if responding to previous urging from Eldershaw, Barnard wrote: ‘No, I’m not the best person [to write the book—a ‘History of Australian Literature’— just better than Green. I’d better secure a publisher first. Wonder if Cheshire’s still interested in the idea’.682 Some time before Easter 1953 Barnard’s ruminations about her proposed ‘History of Australian Literature’ ceased. The small cache of Barnard’s letters that fell into the hands of the Palmer family and were eventually lodged in the National Library of Australia consist of only four letters to Eldershaw dated from November 1952 to an estimated pre-Easter 1953. No more is heard of ‘A History of Australian Literature’ in any of Barnard’s other correspondence, though no doubt parts of any preparatory work ended up in the Larder and may have been used in other endeavours. When she left the CSIRO library at the end of 1950, Barnard was only fifty-four years old and after inheriting from her parents, she looked forward to many happy years of travelling or otherwise living a hedonistic life.683 And yet, after dismissing the idea of ‘A History of Australian Literature’ she began researching A History of Australia in the Mitchell Library. It took her nearly six years. Ray Stimson, Barnard’s younger friend and neighbour told me of carrying Barnard’s handwritten manuscript to the library nearly every day: She used to cart all her notes around in a dreadful furry bag… and it was terribly heavy. She’d say, “Don’t drop them. I can’t afford to have them copied.” So though I helped her carry them home I always used to make her carry them over the plank to cross the water to the wharf. I didn’t want to be responsible for dropping them in the harbour! 684

By the time the book was completed Barnard was over sixty and her eyesight failing. She wrote of feeling that the book had become like the old man of the

682 M Barnard’s [letter to F Eldershaw] 4 November 1952 Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer 1850-1966 MS3942 series 7, National Library of Australia, Canberra. Information in these paragraphs came from a pack of letters Barnard wrote to Eldershaw during 1952/3. As far as I can ascertain, these letters have not been referenced earlier. They are important because most of the Barnard/Eldershaw correspondence was destroyed, and these letters clearly illustrate, as nothing else does, the depthn of Barnard’s feelings for Eldershaw, even after ten years of separation. 683 Barnard [letter to Jean Devanny], 12 December 1957. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library, Townsville. 684 Author’s interview conducted in Stimson’s home in Wollstonecraft in 2009. Former neighbour, Ray Stimson who also travelled to the city by ferry to her job as a secretary.

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sea on her back.685 Brian Fletcher in his History and Achievement which delves into the achievements of Professor G A Woods’ former students, maintains that Barnard’s HIstory of Australia, published by Angus and Robertson in 1962 was the first major history of Australia written by a woman.686 Barnard began A History of Australia, as she began nearly all her histories, by starting well before the beginning. She traced the ideas as well as the movement of explorers from the imagination of the Greeks to the spindly sailing ships of the Spaniards of the sixteenth century and then the Dutch who accidentally bumped into some of Australia’s least hospitable shores and sailed away, leaving a continent for Cook to rediscover in 1770. Barnard had covered much of this material in her earlier histories, but she told the story again of how the white men had moved into Australia and, ‘like a burr in a sheep’s fleece, they meant to stay.’687 A History of Australia re-introduced Barnard’s conviction that Australia’s history depends upon its geography and she drew attention to how Australia’s differed from, and therefore was endangered by, its near northern neighbours, while at the same time contrasting the vast distances separating

Australia from her ‘natural allies.’688 Distance is the continual theme, and has been one of the main conditioning factors in Australian history. She [Australia] was distant and dependent, a continent swinging on a long chain in antipodean darkness.689

In 1962 Barnard pointed out the importance of distance, both within and beyond Australia’s borders, of how this smallest continent stood geographically alone on the map of the world. It was not until four years later that Geoffrey Blainey’s remarkable book, The Tyranny of Distance, sang its theme into the consciousness of all Australians and became a kind of badge signifying our country’s prime characteristic throughout the world.690

685 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 12 December 1957. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library, Townsville. 686 Former Professor of Australian History at Sydney University. 687 M. Barnard, A History of Australia. Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1962, p. 68. 688 Barnard, A History of Australia, p. 14. 689 Barnard, A History of Australia, p. 3. 690 G. Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History. Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1966.

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Barnard saw the history of modern Australia as having a clear beginning. A disparate party of Britons came to make a home in a distant and sparsely populated continent. A long period of adjustment followed, beginning with Phillip’s regime.691 After dealing with the colony’s early years Barnard turned aside from following each Governor’s rule in chronological succession. Instead, in eye-catching language she examined subjects relevant to the new colony such as ‘transportation’, ‘the assignment of convicts’ and the various methods of distributing parcels of land as control of arable land wavered back and forth between local Governors and the Colonial Office. Barnard then pursued the importance of the control of water in our dry continent. Turning her attention to gold, she likened its discovery to the opening up of Australia, as a book opens its pages to reveal its secrets.692 The discovery of gold in large quantities changed the way Australia was seen by the rest of the world. Wealth could now be plucked from the ground. For the first time the convict colony took on an aspect of glamour, a depository of riches, and soon it became a desirable destination. Barnard treated the Federal Constitution, that brought the six British colonies together under one government as simply ‘An Act to Constitute the Commonwealth of Australia’ proclaimed on 17th September, 1900. The cities, the seats of regional settlement, remained as virtually separate entities just as they do today. In a separate chapter Barnard pointed out how dramatically the Tariff Protection Laws, followed by the White Australia Policy (both of them enshrined in the Constitution and Labor Party policy), affected Japan’s attitude towards Australia in the years before World War II. Japan’s 1942 entry into World War II threatened Australia and Australians as never before. In discussing this conflict Barnard returned to her theory that history depends upon geography by emphasising the difficulties inherent in defending Australia’s long coastline. By the book’s end Barnard had introduced post-war immigration, linking its impact with that of the first

691 Barnard, A History of Australia. p. 396. 692 Barnard, A History of Australia. pp. 247-251.

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English settlers. She even looked back to pre-historic times, when the first

Aboriginal people came, in their time, as immigrants.693 In the 1960s, a chapter on indigenous Australians such as ‘The Dark People’, was a rare addition in a general history of Australia. Ten years later Geoffrey Blainey was hailed as the first academic historian to consider that the Aboriginal inhabitants and their life before white settlement had a significant part to play in Australia’s history.694 Barnard had been taking them into account since she wrote the 32-page chapter, ‘The Dispossessed’ in her social history, My Australia, published in 1939. Her chapter on ‘The Dark People’ in this work is only twenty pages long and repeats many of the points she made in the earlier book. It begins: To discuss the aborigines695 in the last chapter of this history may appear … to be a reversal in the proper order of things, but history has made of them a codicil to the Australian story… To bring the two together as one people should be, and I hope will be, one of the advances of the future.696

Near the end of A History of Australia Barnard outlines her concerns about the welfare of Australia’s earliest people, though much more of their history has become known since this publication of Barnard’s in1962: At last expert advice has been called in and an effort is being made to redress the errors of the past. We owe the aboriginal a debt because we destroyed the immemorial pattern of his life when we took his land from him, by robbing him of his dream world …by confusing him when we broke his taboos and, often unknowingly, desecrated his sacred places... We cannot claim to have adjusted ourselves to the land we live in as well as the aboriginal did… We owe him a great deal, but it is difficult to pay back because our coin is not his…697

693 Barnard, A History of Australia. p. 553. 694 G. Blainey, Triumph of The Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia. The Macmillan Company of Australia, South Melbourne, 1975. Also R. Allsop, ‘Triumph Of The Iconoclast Who Sparked The History Wars’, The Weekend Australian, March 6, 2010. https://westerncivilisation.ipa.org.au/news/2082/triumph-of-the-iconoclast-who-sparked- the-history-wars/pg/2 695 In the middle of the 20th century Barnard did not use an upper case initial A, as is now the current practice. 696 Barnard, A History of Australia. p. 647. 697 Barnard, A History of Australia p. 666.

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Barnard’s mastery of language is, I believe, the most impressive element in her writing, history writing as well as her more general literature. Her repetition of favourite words such as ‘simulacrum’ and ‘malice’ may disrupt a reader’s deep immersion in the story briefly but becomes just one of her personal idiosyncracies. Through most of A History of Australia the language is well chosen and controlled, perfectly balanced, one could say well-tuned, rhythmic, and occasionally, as below, it includes sudden bursts of imagery and flights into poetry. When she writes of explorers, of people pushing their way through virgin bush, Barnard likens the bush to the vast, heaving sea— a rooted, tideless sea. It presented to the first settlers the same anonymity, wild and strange. Its dangers more passive were just as real. It closed like water over those who penetrated it. It went on and on across a continent as unlimited as the ocean.698

Barnard slipped into her novelist’s mode when she chose to illustrate the era of Australian exploration, not by teams of men endlessly struggling across waterless and trackless deserts (which is more usual in Australian tales), but by introducing a small sample. She wrote of the minor journey of Hamilton Hume and Hovell in their less spectacular trek of a mere 400 kilometres south from Lake George (near present day Canberra) through well-watered and tree- sprinkled country to Western Port (just west of Melbourne) along the approximate route of what is to-day one of Australia’s busiest highways. Angus & Robertson, who had commissioned the book, published A History of Australia in 1962 and brought out another printing the following year enabling corrections to be made. Under the heading: ‘Background of Progress’ Barnard explains the rather unfamiliar lay-out she chose for this long work.699History, she pointed out, cannot be written in strict chronological order, adding: The historian in his search for the modicum of truth allowed him by the circumstances of handling something in continual flux, must be given a certain latitude… [He] must handle his material as he sees fit and that will rarely be arbitrarily.700

698 Barnard, A History of Australia p. 156. 699 Barnard, A History of Australia p. 396. 700 I beg the reader’s permission to allow Barnard’s description to explain, too, the difficulties in organising a biography.

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A G L Shaw, reviewing, pointed out the difficulties Barnard’s loose shape caused readers, not least the cross-referencing it requires because it was not written chronologically.701 Shaw also complained, along with other reviewers, of the unwonted emphasis on New South Wales. However he readily conceded Barnard’s literary ability – ‘Miss Barnard has much to say that is of interest and she says it very well.’ He spoiled the compliment somewhat by adding that in his opinion much of what she wrote was inaccurate and misleading.702 Barnard confessed that she found history writing a ‘savage field’ in which any expression of opinion was liable to result in the author ‘being stung by a horde of other historians around you like wasps’703 And sting Barnard they did, even from faraway America, where a reviewer, Robin Winks, started enthusiastically: Marjorie Barnard has written a good and very useful account which by virtue of its size tells the Australian story…

This positive evaluation was then stripped away as Winks pointed out errors and inconsistencies with an unkind sneer.704 Academic historians were rarely complimentary about Barnard’s histories though Geoffrey Blainey believed A History of Australia deserved more praise than it received. He would have been conscious of two of her major and original ideas, passed over with little notice when described by Barnard. Yet when Blainey elaborated on these ideas a few years later, they made him famous.705 He wrote of Barnard as a ‘professional historian’ while assessing as ‘a novelist writing history’.706

701 A valid warning for any historian or biographer. I have tried to heed it throughout this study. 702 A. G. L. Shaw, ‘Exploring the Known…’, Meanjin Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1962: 229-232. 703In transcript of Barnard’s lecture on ‘Australian History and Literature’ in Marjorie Barnard papers, Mitchell Library ML MSS 2809 folders 1&2. Also mentioned in B. Fletcher, History & Achievement. Braxus Press, Sydney, 1999, p. 125. 704 R. W. Winks, ‘A History of Australia, by Marjorie Barnard (Reviews of Books)’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4, 1964: 1070. 705 Importance Barnard placed on including Australia’s earliest settlers as part of Australia’s history, and her emphasis on the importance of distance in Australia’s development. 706 G. Blainey, ‘Review of Thomas Keneally’s Australians: Origins to Eureka’ in The Australian Literary Review, Vol. 4, No. 8, 2009, pp. 10-11.

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On the eve of the 21st century Brian Fletcher argued that Barnard’s A History of Australia remained important as a work of literature while judging that, as history it had been overshadowed.707 Novelists such as Barnard, Palmer and Kenneally brought to history pace and drama, the gift of story- telling and a feeling for character that make a dull story sparkle. More recently, historians, moving into narrative history again, followed Barnard’s lead. converted his choice of historical facts into the story he wanted to tell and readers wanted to read, as did Robert Hughes and Inga Clendinnen. Readers from all walks of life loved their stories, Australians turned page after page and became a nation of history-readers. Barnard was their competent but less acclaimed precursor. It is a pity she never saw the rest of what Brian Fletcher wrote about her History of Australia: [S]he made effective use of narrative as a means of giving unity to the past… Her style was lively, evocative and picturesque spiced with humour and irony. Conscious of the importance of the individual in history she focussed considerable attention on those who had played a leading role in shaping the past, but she never lost sight of ordinary people… 708

The lack of positive criticism from academic historians of the day must have hurt, but did not deter Barnard. Most of her histories were commissioned, publishers liked her and readers bought her history books. Criticism of the ‘Sydney-centredness’ that inhabits most of Barnard’s work is more reasonable. It is true that Sydney is where Barnard’s main interest lay. The list of disapproving reviewers grew ever longer but A History of Australia was much more popular than their dominance suggests. The book sold well and was re- printed five times during its first decade before it was outsold by other historians tilling the same field. Two books on the architecture of Sydney: Greenway, Australia’s First Architect, and also Georgian Architecture in Australia were published in 1963 with Max Dupain’s photographs.709 In the introduction to ‘The Georgian

707 Brian Fletcher, History & Achievement. Braxus Press, Sydney, 1999, p. 126. 708 Brian Fletcher, History & Achievement, p. 126. 709 Illustrated and introduced by Max Dupain, this book also had a section on Tasmania for which the text was written by Daniel Thomas.

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Context: New South Wales’ Barnard’s text emphasised the importance of buildings as concrete history. Memory is fallible, interpretation an ever-changing spotlight... Memorials in brick and stone, more limited, more exact in their implications, are less variable and less at the mercy of human frailties… It is as if stones, like words that have lain a long time in the language… gather lustre from a thousand suns, to become in the course of time more than stones… 710

Lachlan Macquarie, only 30 pages long and published in 1964, is not just a condensed version of her earlier full-length Macquarie’s World. She may have written it as a response to M H Ellis who in criticising A History of Australia (published two years earlier) had accused her of not understanding Macquarie or his term as Governor. Early in her career when Barnard was writing historical fiction, she had lamented the shortness of Australia’s history and its lack of drama such as enemies, wars, revolutions.711 She wanted, in the end, to be remembered as an historian, and in a short obituary in the Royal Australian Historical Society newsletter, she was. Valmai Phillips, a friend, and herself a minor historian, praised Barnard as an historian: ‘Marjorie Barnard,’ she wrote,’was an acclaimed novelist, but it was in history that she was a pathfinder.’712 Sydney University’s Vice Chancellor Dr John Ward also praised Barnard as an historian, when conferring on her the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters, in May 1986: Miss Barnard has been one of the first people to write Australian history to professional standards. She is outstanding among the first generation of Australian women historians. Her work is characterised by sensitivity in the use and selection of evidence, firm intellectual control, and a graceful literary style.713

…………………………………………………………………

710M. Dupain, Georgian Architecture in Australia: With Some Examples of Buildings of the Post- Georgian Period. Ure Smith in association with National Trust of Australia, Sydney, 1963, p. 13. 711 An address to RAHS, ‘History as Raw Material’ prepared by both partners though delivered by Eldershaw. 712 V Phillips, RAHS Journal 1987 713 On 13th May, 1986.

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Chapter 18 – Barnard’s biography of Miles Franklin 1967

‘Biography is a very chancy thing to write,… it shows up the inner flaws of its author most piteously!!!’714

When Louise Rorabacher was writing the biographical Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw, she asked about Barnard’s own biography of Miles Franklin. Barnard’s reply was blunt: ‘I was lucky,’ she said, ‘Miles was dead.’715 Rorabacher observed that Miles Franklin was lucky, too, for death had spared the sensitive Franklin the pain of enduring more of Barnard’s critical judgment of her novels. But Barnard’s criticism was not always harsh; she particularly admired Franklin’s wit, her amazing memory and her facility with words. She recognised, too, that most readers were entertained by Franklin’s writing, even her rare non-fiction literary criticism, in Laughter, not for a Cage. In its frontispiece, Barnard’s biography of Franklin is named as one of her most notable literary achievements. It was her last major work and her only literary biography. It called on her passion for history and her deep interest in literary criticism, as well as honouring Franklin who, indeed, had become a legend in her own lifetime716. Barnard had written, ‘Miles writing is indivisible from Miles living,’ and she proceeded to show the reader how Miles’ own life and her family history had supplied rich material that needed only the lightest touch to turn it into into fascinating fiction. Writing this biography also gave Barnard an additional venue in which to expand on Australia’s growth as a nation. It was a comfortable fit because the best of Franklin’s novels tells the inside story of the development of an important layer of Australia’s rural history — its great pastoral age when, in common parlance, Australia rode to riches on the sheep’s back. Barnard leads us into this story via her favourite introductory time-frame— Australia shown as a great unknown continent where the native population and animals exist in

714 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny] undated. Jean Devanny Archive, 80L-82L, James Cook University Library, Townsville. 715 L. Rorabacher, Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw. Twayne Publishers Inc., New York, 1973, p. 167. 716 Barnard, ‘The Four Novels of Patrick White’, Meanjin, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1955: 468-487.

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perfect harmony with the land until it is changed forever by the first white settlement, a penal colony. In five pages Barnard gives readers a hasty history of the development of Australia leading to its great expansionary pastoral age, in order to introduce Franklin’s grandparents, the Franklins and the Lampes, who as squatters were active in building up wealth, and encouraging the spread of population across New South Wales. Miles Franklin was of the fifth Australian-born generation descended from Edward Miles who came to this land with the First Fleet. Whether as a convict or a free man, Barnard does not say. A skilled historical researcher with all the resources of Sydney’s libraries and archives available for study she could have ascertained the complete details of his arrival, but she chose not to divulge more. In the 1960’s, convict ancestors were still hidden in shame rather than displayed as trophies, and this was one of Franklin’s secrets that Barnard allowed her to keep.717 Jill Roe, in her later comprehensive biography revealed that Edward Miles was a First Fleet convict who married Susannah, who came as a convict in 1803.718 Their children were Miles Franklin’s first Australian-born ancestors. In the twenty-first century Roe could be unconstrained, for convict ancestors had become a subject of pride. Barnard considered Franklin’s childhood well documented in Childhood at Brindabella, the autobiography in which Franklin had clung to her precious secrets by hiding her family behind initials and altering place names.719 Those disguises were not too hard for Barnard to circumvent and she drew on Childhood at Brindabella for information about the intervening generations of Franklin’s family in Australia, and their farming and grazing properties. Barnard thought it essential that readers understand Franklin’s background because, as she wrote, ‘To read Miles’ novels with sympathy and understanding you must know something of the country in which she was born, the times in which she grew up and her bush background.’720 This was a

717 Questioned by Louise Rorabacher in 1973, Barnard told her: ‘I was careful not to touch on things she kept hidden.’ In Jill Roe’s foreword to M. Barnard, Miles Franklin: The Story of a Famous Australian. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Qld., 1988. 718 J. Roe, Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography. Harper Collins, London, 2008, p. 2. 719 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 27. 720 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 13.

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brave undertaking as Barnard herself knew little, first-hand, of country life and, in 1967, she no longer had country-bred Flora Eldershaw by her side. She renders Franklin’s bush experiences through the eyes of a city woman of imagination and wit but more than once, she risked misinterpreting Franklin’s country experiences. Barnard drew attention to the importance of Franklin’s vivid recurring childhood memory of seeing ‘a big black snake [that] lay full length at his ease beside the water in the thin fringe of maiden-hair fern.’721 Barnard explained the power of this mental image on Franklin’s memory by representing it as Franklin’s first artistic experience. As a child of the bush, I feel easier in explaining the sight of a big black snake nearby as causing a thrill of fear. Encountering a snake while alone and on foot is many a bush child’s (and parent’s) nightmare. Franklin did not recall her fascination with the snake as fear on that occasion, but she did remember that she acted instantly and instinctively. Obeying a parent’s urgent instruction, she ran immediately to the nearest adult for help— just as every bush child is taught to do. They all know a relative or a neighbour who has been bitten by a snake encountered accidentally, and, in the days before anti-venene was widespread, death occurred often enough to instil caution in every country dweller — and it still does.722 Returning many years later on horseback, to the site where she met the snake, Franklin expected the snake or one of its descendants to be there—and it was. Many years of travel and city living had repressed her instinct to kill the snake, but her uncle, still a country man, did not hesitate. He wasted no time in despatching the snake. City-bred Barnard saw Franklin’s deep emotional experience as a child’s artistic response to great beauty. I cannot see a bush child interpreting the flicking tongue and flashing scarlet belly, as anything but a warning. Move quietly away and seek help immediately from the nearest adult. The biographer saw Franklin’s life through the blinkered vision of her own

721 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 16. 722 Snakes still kill. While I was writing this, on 14th Feb 2016 ABC News announced the death by snakebite of a 6-year-old girl in country NSW. Even though stocks of anti-venene are now held around the country, sometimes the time-lag between snake-bite and death is too short to allow access to it.

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experience. That is what we all do. It is one of the hurdles a biographer has to negotiate. Barnard represents Franklin’s life as being divided neatly into four parts: the first of which is the ten years of her early childhood spent with her parents and her siblings at Brindabella in the upper Murrumbidgee district and also with her beloved grandparents at Talbingo in the Monaro. That lovely landscape, even with the minor blemish of poisonous snakes in the grass, remained the home of Franklin’s heart throughout her life. Her next eleven years were spent on a farm near Goulburn where her father, in financial difficulties, had been forced to re-locate when she was ten. Miles hated it. Keenly aware of her diminished social status, she felt deprived even though it was while living there that she was able to go to school, and there that she wrote her first and most famous novel.723Despite the favourable world-wide reception of My Brilliant Career and Henry Lawson’s preface, Franklin was devastated when her friends and family thought it was autobiographical. They thought she had misconstrued their lives and was laughing at them. In an effort to remove that impression Franklin wrote, My Career goes Bung, but it lay unpublished for forty years. Barnard presents excerpts from many of the contemporary critiques of My Brilliant Career, pointing out that they concentrated not on its literary merits, but on Franklin’s youth. She decided to deal with the novel fully and critically, because she believed that My Brilliant Career was not only Franklin’s first novel, but her best, and that Franklin’s contemporary novels, were of a much lower standard. Of My Brilliant Career, Barnard wrote that: Everything that Miles was and was to be, already showed itself in this first book.’724‘Then, as if to emphasise the unevenness of Franklin’s writing, she gave what must be her toughest ever criticism to Franklin’s first contemporary novel, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn: The girl is praised ad nausea. We have a surfeit of her ‘fine spun hair’, ‘tapering fingers’, ‘high-arched feet’ and ‘dainty toes’…. ‘Some Everyday Folk and Dawn is badly written with stiff dialogue and more split

723 In country society, even to-day there is a wide gap between the status of a pastoralist or station–owner, and that of a farmer. 724 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 45.

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infinitives than are humanly possible…. The book is now little more than a museum piece….Miles never talked about it afterwards.725

In the third section of the biography, Barnard looks at the period in Franklin’s life from 1905 when she went abroad, exiling herself in the United States, England and Europe for nearly thirty years. Dismal at what she saw as her failure as a writer, Franklin had determined to study music in the United States while working at any job she could get to support herself. Barnard must have noted Franklin’s brave efforts to change her circumstances in contrast to her own passivity a score of years later. Soon after she arrived in America, Franklin met Alice Henry, another Australian. Miles joined her in working in the Women’s Trade Union League based in Chicago, probably giving only simple clerical support, for although they worked together for ten years Barnard found hardly a mention of Franklin in Alice Henry’s book about those years. Barnard thought Franklin’s move to England in 1915 could have been the result of a cooling off in her relationship with Henry, but Henry’s view was that Franklin wished to serve the British in time of war.726 Franklin worked in the Scottish Hospital while it retreated from the battle-front in Macedonia, but she never wrote of the experience, and none of her letters from that time have survived. Undoubtedly the experience affected her. From that time, Franklin hated war and called it the ‘unforgettable betrayal’ and the ‘recurring lunacy’.727Hate is not too strong a word to describe the shared passion felt towards any armed combat by both Barnard and Franklin. It was one area of politics where the two women were closely aligned, and they were also both activists, even agitators, during the 1930s, and into the first years of World War 2 as members of the Fellowship of Australian Writers in Sydney. Information about Franklin’s life overseas was not easily available to Barnard, and Franklin’s habit of using pseudonyms made any of her published work difficult to trace. Many stories thought to be lost were recovered when

725 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 65. 726 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 71. 727 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 71.

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Franklin’s papers, held in the Mitchell Library, were made available some years after Barnard wrote her biography. 728 It seems that many of Franklin’s novels waited years to find a publisher, perhaps partly because of the intervention of the war, but it is likely that there were also long gaps when Franklin could not write. Prelude to Waking, written in 1925, was, according to Barnard, a ‘sad, perplexed work’. Her comment: ‘Perhaps this book had to be written to get Miles into the habit of writing again. It did not have to be published.’729 In contrast, Up the Country, with its subheading, a Tale of the Early Australian Squattocracy, caused quite a stir when it was published in 1928. Nobody had ever heard of its author, Brent of Bin Bin, and Barnard’s initial response was that the writer must be an elderly man from the country, probably a bachelor.730 She was interested in his novels as showing a new style of Australian writing, particularly when two more books by Brent of Bin Bin were printed in quick succession. Ten Creeks Run came out in 1930 and Back to Bool Bool in 1931—both set deep in Australia’s pastoral heart. I don’t know when Barnard realised how mistaken she had been about Brent of Bin Bin. She would have studied the texts thoroughly, and she met the author soon after the books’ release, for Franklin returned to live in Sydney in 1933. Another Brent of Bin Bin book, Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang,731 that we now know was entered into the first Bulletin novel competition in 1928, was not published until 1956— after Franklin’s death. Franklin never admitted to being the author of the Brent of Bin Bin books, but she became a new and exotic player in the literary activities in Sydney for twenty years. Meeting Barnard and Eldershaw, and knowing (as they did not) that her Brent of Bin Bin novel had lost to their first prize-winner, A House is Built, suggests another possible reason for Franklin’s antagonism towards Barnard.

728 See J. Roe, Stella Miles Franklin, pp. 128-141 for more recently available information about Franklin’s years in America. 729 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 139. 730 Barnard in a letter to Nettie Palmer passed on the news that at first Mary Gilmore had suggested the author was her brother. Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers1850-1966, MS 1174/5962, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

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When Barnard asserted confidently that Brent of Bin Bin was one of Franklin’s pseudonyms, she put forward as evidence the many similarities in the use of language and writing style in the Brent of Bin Bin books when compared side by side with Franklin’s own titles. Barnard’s own command of language used so precisely was of the utmost importance in her own work, and she indicated here how closely she weighed language and its use by other writers, comparing the writing word by word, phrase by phrase: It is difficult perhaps to hear in short isolated passages but in page after page, volume after volume, the similarity mounts up. The cadences are there. Miles had a very individual vocabulary, using a lot of strange words and phrases. Some of them are old fashioned, traditional to the bush and rarely if ever heard to-day. Some of them she invented. They run through both series of books.732

Barnard pointed out that the settings of Franklin’s ‘country’ books were closely allied with the settings of the Brent novels. Those featuring cattlemen and squatters on their runs in both series were set in the Monaro and the mountain country of the upper Murrumbidgee. The Goulburn district was where the poorer farmers lived. In both series the same variety of country people— squatters, farmers, and bush characters— all exhibited the same brand of humour. There was the same disorganised construction and similar lop-sided and stiff dialogue in obscure sentences. As she critiqued the texts Barnard dispensed similar praise to both: ‘The descriptions are magnificent.’733 and ‘More words were spent on descriptions than on events.’ In assessing the Bin Bin books, Barnard thinks Ten Creeks Run the best constructed while Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang receives Barnard’s harshest criticism. Back to Bool Bool, the last book of the Bin Bin series, according to Barnard, suffered from ‘too much of everything. Certainly too much soap-box oratory.’ Of the comparable books that Franklin published under her own name, Old Blastus of Bandicoot starred. Barnard wrote at length on Franklin’s portrayal of Old Blastus and all the other characters. She enjoyed the novel but

732 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 74. She also lists dozens of words she doesn’t recognise – not all invented by Franklin. 733 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 81.

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claimed it was exaggerated, indeed she felt the exaggeration showed up as falseness and that other characters were trite, though humorous. It would be easy to argue that modern readers would be aware of exaggeration in all Franklin’s Australian novels. It is part of her style, the inherent element that links her novels irrevocably to yarns around the camp-fire, with their mutually understood exaggeration which acts along with rhythmic language and rhyming syllables as aids to memory, enabling variations of those yarns to be repeated around campfires across the country with only slight additions and topical markers. Though Barnard did not always admire Franklin’s writing, it supported her own oft-repeated view about the development of a truly Australian literature. Franklin’s novels play a significant part in supporting Barnard’s description of how truly Australian literature developed.734 Barnard recognised Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life as the first of the genuinely Australian novels —those that grew from country people absorbing bush tales and rhymes and adapting them onto remembered ballads as a step further towards a native literature than that which Barnard labelled as ‘observer literature’.735 Barnard’s exposition of Franklin’s works makes it clear that Franklin, in the Brent of Bin Bin books and the other similar works that she published later under her own name, followed the Furphy tradition closely. If his was the first truly Australian novel, then Franklin’s novels followed. Hers, of course, were different; they were written from a feminine viewpoint. Her characters lived more settled lives within families and kitchens. Furphy probably recognised this element in Franklin’s writing, even on the slender evidence of My Brilliant Career, when he offered her support and mentorship early in her career.736 Barnard, who lays out the evidence so clearly, must have made the connection between Furphy’s writing and Franklin’s. Franklin herself explained it well: I find myself capturing a technique to retail the subtleties of Australian life and landscape. It seems to me that a story to be truer than reality… should follow natural contours and rhythms.…An easy, unrazored, pipe-

734 See chapter 17. 735 See chapter 17 736 AG Stephens also made this connection according to Jill Roe in her preface to M. Barnard, Miles Franklin: The Story of a Famous Australian. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Qld., 1988.

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smoking-almost-casual method is needed. The old pioneer yarns ‘yarned’ by the old bush granddads… have a charm as characteristic as their environment…737

Barnard declared that: ‘Many people think of All that Swagger as Miles’ great book.’738 A massive 500 pages and covering four generations from the 1840s to the 1940s, it was published in 1933 by Blackwoods and in 1936 won the Prior Memorial Prize739 This led to Australian publication that same year by the Bulletin. The critics liked it, and so did Barnard, who explained: ‘This book has so much life in it, it would be heartless to carp at its faults, like spoiling a friendship because of some small imperfections.’740 Barnard, in her biography, also drew attention to Franklin’s attitude to sexuality.741 In the section headed ‘Of Love and Marriage’, Barnard points out that Franklin has drawn a distinction between love, which is rare, and what she calls amour. Amour is sex, and Franklin warned: ‘the quicksand of sex forever confronted the unwary.’742 Barnard gives several examples from Franklin’s novels in which women characters spoke negatively about relationships within marriage, particularly the ‘slave-wife’, though perhaps some of the emotion centred upon unevenness of sexual power in marriage. Marjorie Barnard suggested that a fear of childbirth and its dangers was deeply entrenched in Miles’ thinking. This must surely have reminded Barnard, that her own grandmother had died young in childbirth, and that Ethel, her mother, came near death at least once when delivering a child, who died at birth. Critic Colin Roderick in his 1982 biography: Miles Franklin: her brilliant career, discussed this aspect of Franklin’s attitude to sexuality as it was reflected in her own life. He proposed that ‘Franklin was doomed to spinsterhood by a childhood fixation about the death of her infant sister.’ He argued that witnessing her baby sister’s death and burial instilled in four-year- old Miles a morbid fear of childbirth, which drove her later, to avoid marriage

737 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 79. Franklin’s words appear as an explanation from her about her reasons for using less than organised construction. 738 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 111. 739 Offered by the Bulletin. 740 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 119. 741 Chapter 11. Barnard, Miles Franklin p. 153. 742 Brent of Bin Bin, Back to Bool Bool: Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh,1931 p. 151.

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and retreat into coquetry. To-day this fear seems exaggerated, but before the days of hygenic practices in child-birth it must have occupied many a bride’s thoughts. P D James suggests it as an explanation for Jane Austen’s avoidance of marriage.743 Very little was known about the great central section of Miles Franklin’s life until her papers were released to the public some years after her death and after Barnard’s biography was written. During the fourth period of Franklin’s life, the years after 1933 when she lived in Sydney and knew Barnard, she was elusive about her life abroad. Franklin’s involvement in Sydney’s literary life was significant. Both Barnard and Franklin were active members of the Fellowship of Australian Writers and met frequently at social gatherings. Franklin was sometimes an invited guest at Barnard’s Kings Cross apartment, but it was not a constant, nor a close friendship; their differences were many. Barnard was nearly twenty years younger, better educated, and much more comfortable financially, whether she was working professionally as a librarian or not. They were both prolific letter-writers and while there was generally widespread support and friendship exchanged among that wide group of women letter-writers, this was not always so. Barnard’s published literary criticism caused resentment; her too freely expressed judgment or critical evaluation may well have struck other writers as arrogant, especially novelists already lacking self-confidence, and needing the encouraging massage of praise for their work. Barnard claimed that she did not criticise the author, only the work. But authors so often feel themselves to be their work, that this distinction was often not always appreciated. Barnard often let her critical comments on literary matters spill over into her personal letters, but her literary criticism struck only a minor sour note compared to acrimonious passages contributed by others. Most of the surprising volume of antagonism expressed seemed temporary, but a core of dislike for Barnard lingered in many of Miles Franklin and Katharine Susannah Prichard’s letters, and they also drew other correspondents into vituperative exchanges. It could have begun from envy that Barnard seemed to have money

743 James PD Time to be in Earnest, Faber & Faber Ltd, London,1999 p225

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to spare and few domestic chores to steal her time from writing, though it seemed that it was Barnard’s intellect, or even her education that was most often pilloried, particularly in relation to her critical writing. Eldershaw was not a target of this dislike though she shared so much with Barnard including almost all her published writing. Cusack, who had graduated from Sydney University only a few years after Barnard was not targeted either. Why? Was it because Flora and Dymphna Cusack were teachers, and teachers were ‘allowed’ to have a university education? Carole Ferrier tells us that ‘While Franklin admired Barnard’s professionalism and competence, she resented what seemed to her to be sarcastic criticism. Franklin, always sensitive about her scanty bush education, wrote to Prichard: Barnard on me remains the top-notcher in denigration. The passing of a few set examinations gives them (petty pedants) a dangerous authority with their superiors, the naturally gifted.744

For many years Franklin referred to Barnard’s criticism during that well- reported lecture at Sydney University, as, ‘Barnard’s splenetic attack on my absence of literary quality,’ and her anger and hurt travelled through the wide correspondence circle of mutual friends and connections. Franklin re-told her version of the story to Cusack, who replied in a manner designed to boost Franklin’s ego, but added a surprising criticism of academic education. ‘I feel one sentence of your crystalline prose is worth reams of the pseudo-mystic, even academic, egg-bound MBE stuff,’ she wrote.745 The story was also passed on to Frank Ryland, who passed it on to Jean Devanny who checked it out with Barnard, who protested: Ryland mis-represented me…I [spoke of]… her very original humour etc and illustrated it with quotations from Old Blastus… traced the same qualities in her other books showing how she reached the top of her form in All That Swagger… I don’t think there was any unjust criticism in it… nor did anyone else…except Miles … There’s no special good in

744 Mary Lord, ‘Letters from the Fellowship’, Weekend Australian, 8-9 August, 1992, p. 7 quoting Ferrier’s As Good as a Yarn with You: Letters Between Miles Franklin, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992. 745 D. Cusack, [letter to Miles Franklin], 24 September 1945, CY1174 Mss36, Mitchell Library, Sydney, Miles Franklin Papers.

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raking over the coals—Miles quarrels with … everyone sooner or later. We’ve had some quite amiable exchanges since…746

Barnard was mistaken. Franklin’s hurt feelings had not ‘blown over’, but had been spread far and wide, bearing the ‘splenetic attack’ accusation.747 So vivid is Franklin’s language, in private letters as much as in her novels, that one can almost hear her chuckling. Franklin was at least mischievous, if not trouble-making, in defence of her hurt pride. She wrote to Prichard about a presentation of local books being made to a visiting dignitary, describing the possible reaction of the recipient: With the Timeless Land, and Roaring and All That Swagger, he may have sufficient of old times but Marjorie’s exquisite, sophisticated, imitative, eviscerated, pretentious Glasshouse will correct all these rather rough- hewn pioneers.748

Yet in 1946, two years after the memorable lecture where she had been so distraught that she refused to have lunch with Barnard, Franklin sent a sympathetic note to Barnard when she was ill. Barnard responded immediately, ‘Dear Miles, Your little note, like a friendly hand, came to me just as I was waiting in hospital for the operation. I was warmed and cheered by it…’749 Barnard told Giulia Giuffre in an interview many years later, ‘I knew Miles Franklin very well and liked her very much.’750 And to oral historian Judy Washington in 1983 — “I liked Miles,….she was eccentric…’ Of Franklin’s writing, Barnard said, ‘She has a style completely her own.’ Barnard was more forthright when speaking of Franklin to Zoe Fairbairns ‘She was a curious person. She had an extraordinary vanity, and…it’s hard to describe Miles,… I

746 Barnard, [letter to Jean Devanny], 31 July 1945. Letter. Jean Devanny Archive, JD/Corr 5, James Cook University Library, Townsville. 747 See Miles Franklin Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, MS364/30/137-9. 748 M. Franklin, [letter to Prichard], Listed in C. Ferrier, As Good as a Yarn with You 749 Barnard, [letter to Franklin], 26 December 1946, noted in C. Ferrier, As Good as a Yarn with You: p. 154. 750 For G. Giuffre, A Writing Life. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990, p. 136.

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didn’t always agree with her …She was very generous in some ways, and very ungenerous in others. A complex person.’751 In this biography of Franklin, Barnard indicated that Franklin’s dislike had not left her completely unscathed.752 ‘Did she not threaten us all with her diary, to be published when she was safely dead?’753 Wryly, Barnard added,

‘Who knows what Miles felt, even when she told us?’754 Barnard described Franklin’s physical presence kindly: ‘a small, old- fashioned woman with an abundance of dark hair, a nose its owner thought frivolous, and a memorable smile which lit up her face.’ Franklin was witty and charming, but, Barnard pointed out, not everyone found Miles charming. Sometimes her scorn for modern make-up and dress, together with the

‘earnest, domineering voice’ —were intimidating. 755 It would be safe to say that Barnard did not really understand Franklin, nor did Franklin understand Barnard. When Barnard began this biography some years after Franklin’s death, she knew the scene; she had been an alert witness to many important years of Franklin’s life and that endows her biography with a special integrity. Both writers enjoyed a prolific correspondence with Nettie Palmer, who allowed Barnard access to the letters Franklin had written to her. o In 1938 when Franklin turned to collaboration with Dymphna Cusack, Barnard thought Franklin ‘one of the last people to make a success of such a venture because she was such an individualist.’756 Franklin and Cusack remained friends after Pioneers on Parade, but Franklin’s next essay into collaboration was less enjoyable. She wrote Joseph Furphy-the Legend of a Man and his Book with . That collaboration ended with bitterness and an OBE for Kate Baker, for her services to Literature.

751 Interviewing for Z. Fairbairns, ‘Marjorie Barnard: Talking with Zoe Fairbairns’ in M. Chamberlain ed., Writing Lives – Conversations Between Women Writers. Virago, London, 1988, p. 43. 752 See chapter 17 for more. 753 Barnard, Miles Franklin p. 15. 754 Barnard, Miles Franklin p. 49. 755 Barnard, Miles Franklin p. 2. 756 Barnard, Miles Franklin p. 109.

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In 1950, Miles Franklin followed Barnard, Eldershaw and other authors in presenting lectures on Australian literature for the Commonwealth Literature Fund. Her lectures at the University of Western Australia were a great success and over the following months and years Franklin arranged her lecture notes into a book of literary criticism Laughter, not for a Cage which Barnard assessed as ‘biased, emotional and some-times ill-informed but also entertaining’. 757 When she died alone on the clean, cold, green linoleum of her kitchen floor in the winter of 1954758 Miles Franklin left enough money to endow a foundation to help Australian writers. Her foundation (of about £9000 originally) is still important in funding Australia’s most-esteemed literary prize—the for the best novel of the year. That one sweeping act of selfless generosity ensured that as long as the prize is given, Miles Franklin will be famous, but she will be remembered for much more than the prize. She will be remembered for the history of Australia she embedded into nearly every book she wrote, and Barnard, her sometimes friend, will be remembered as being Franklin’s first biographer, the woman who reminded Australians that Franklin’s unusual, country-style story-telling had an important place in the early development of a literature Australians could call their own. As to the place of this biography within Barnard’s literary output, it falls quite comfortably beside the two historical biographies that Barnard wrote with Eldershaw. Each tells the history of a period in Australia’s development through the life of one notable citizen. This literary biography, by incorporating the content of Franklin’s own books, does no less. It focuses on the century (approximately 1850 to 1950) during which Australians changed from country folk to city dwellers, and the world reluctantly saw that Australia did have a literature separate from that of England. Barnard presents this biography of her compatriot in the voice of a gentle, modest but sharply intelligent woman, telling of the achievements and the life story of another woman, one who was both innocent and flirtatious, proud yet rambunctious,

757 Barnard, Miles Franklin p. 135. 758 Kathy Hunt, ‘Her Brilliant Veneer’, Australian Review, December 10, 2010: 5,6.

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adventurous and very courageous, whose writing helped the next generation of Australian women writers take an important step forward to a truly Australian literature even though most would not recognise or acknowledge her as their ‘tuning fork’.759 Barnard spins the tale of Miles Franklin and her many charms and complications in her own sharply accurate language, sometimes lyrical, sometimes stern, but always as precise as possible while recognising that Franklin would not always agree with her. Here are some scraps Barnard throws in our path that we might come to a deeper understanding of the part Franklin played in the development of Australian literature: ’All that Swagger is not so much a novel as a quarry from which a hundred novels could be taken...’760 Barnard herself explains how to best enjoy Franklin’s historical novels: ‘Miles was on her home ground, using family lore …. [it was] well mixed with fiction, her family chronicle.’761In writing this biography, Barnard opened up the chronicle for us like a photograph album, a stack of slides, a video, even a history book. …………………………………………………………

759 Barnard’s use of this phrase in Miles Franklin, p. 114. 760 Barnard, Miles Franklin p. 114. 761 Barnard, Miles Franklin p. 121.

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Chapter 19 – Saying Goodbye with panache 1897-1987

‘… a completed biography invariably leaves so much else to be discovered…762

It is in the nature of biography that the pace slows, as life does, and comes to a natural end with the death of the subject. If she (or he) lives a very long life and the frailty of old age is accompanied by a gentle closing down of activity, as Marjorie Barnard did, then the biography, too, might softly take its last breath. That is not what happened in the life we are examining. Barnard’s life ended just as she had lived it, choosing her own path and time out for surprises. Her sharp mind clouded, but she did not just fade away. She made time to fulfil some long-held dreams, when, in the last few years of her life, fortuitous combinations of events led to a flurry of interest in Barnard and her work. These activities led, in turn, to a handful of celebratory events and, just as the star of the show comes forward to take a final bow to the audience, Barnard was brought to the front of the stage again, before she gently made her exit. After Ethel Barnard died in 1949, and the Murdochs, mother and daughter, came to live in Longueville, Vee became, for the next 38 years, Barnard’s companion/helper, and her most important support. Eldershaw’s position as Barnard’s dearest friend and colleague was unassailable but she remained in Melbourne until her increasing ill-health forced her to stop working. In 1955, a series of heart attacks and strokes made Flora an invalid and in 1956 she came to Sydney and stayed with Barnard for a short time before her final journey back home to Wagga Wagga with her sister, Molly. There are many hints that Vee did not appreciate Eldershaw’s special relationship with Barnard; perhaps she was jealous. Certainly Barnard and Eldershaw seem to have lost something of their closeness which may have been partly because of Eldershaw’s unwillingness to let go. Everyone who knew Eldershaw seemed to admire her and she never replaced Barnard with any later special friend in her life. On that last visit Barnard felt that her

762 R. Holmes, Sidetracks, Harper Collins, London, 2005, p. 1x prologue.

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friend’s unhappiness was overwhelming, and it weighed on her as she sent her beloved Teenie off with her sister on the flight back to Wagga Wagga.763 Before the end of the year, Barnard had the news that her dearest friend had died. Clem Christesen organised a “Tribute to Flora Eldershaw’ in Meanjin from her friends: Vance Palmer, who had seen so much of Flora during her last twelve years in Melbourne and had spent many years working with her on the Commonwealth Literary Fund Committee, Tom Inglis Moore, a family friend of many years, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Morris Miller and, of course, her former writing partner. Barnard acknowledged Eldershaw’s various attributes, already praised by the other contributors, but the Flora Eldershaw she remembered best of all was the ‘dark- haired vivacious girl, a fountain of energy, ideas and laughter’ who had widened her horizons and quickened her mind from the time they were students at university.764 As noted above, Barnard had hoped to spend every second year, after retirement from the library, seeing the world. She planned to fill alternate years with concentrated spells of writing at home. The plan had to be adaptable. After their first year-long trip to Europe a longer stay in Sydney was necessary as Barnard began extensive research on A History of Australia. That long book kept Barnard at home between 1951 to 1960, and also enabled her to spend time with Eldershaw during the last few months of her life. During her year abroad and the following nine years at home, Mrs Owers, Barnard’s long-time live-in cook/housekeeper stayed with them at Longueville. After A History of Australia was off her hands, Barnard resumed travelling. She used her inheritance from the remains of her father’s estate to fulfil a dream, to see the world. During those nine years at home Barnard also established herself as a serious literary critic. Though Barnard did not mention changes to her household, it is likely that when they began their series of long overseas travels again in1960, Vee began to take responsibility for the cooking as well as the management of the housekeeping and other chores. Their long

763 M. Barnard [letter to Nettie Palmer] 17 February 1956, cited in M. Dever (ed.), M. Barnard Eldershaw: Plaque with Laurel, Essays, Reviews & Correspondence. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1995. P. 278 764 M. Barnard et. al., ‘Tributes to Flora Eldershaw’, Meanjin, December 1956: 390-394.

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periods away from home would have made this a sensible adjustment with extra casual help hired during the months they were at home. Joan Hansen reported that Vee was an excellent cook, who soon adopted a sharply proprietorial attitude about her authority in the kitchen.765 Vee organised all details of their travel, with flair, and they often stayed away for a year, sometimes longer and their trips were not economical. From London, in 1961, Barnard wrote: We have a bed-sitter in South Kensington. Have our own bathroom and an old dear to clean. A French window and a sooty garden, tiny of course, but it grows a tree and many birds and a small black cat who visits us nightly. We call him Midnight Sun. 766

She also wrote lyrically of ‘the lovely lanes of Kent in the long twilights after dinner’ and the Channel Islands, ‘all blue sea, purple heather and tranquillity’ and the Chichester Festival where they saw Sir Lawrence Olivier as Othello. Despite their wide area of travel, they did not rush but made time to make new friends and keep in touch with friends at home. Probably in response to Lyn Brown’s gentle prodding about her concern that Barnard had not, even with passing years, followed her father’s, and Brown’s own, Christian faith767Barnard replied gently, explaining her atheism and why it was now unchangeable: Working my way through various crises in my youth I came at last to the realisation that I had nothing but myself, no God, no north-west passage, just the working out of myself and my content. It was liberating… I was rid of immortality... I should hate to go on and on and not die all through a lonely windy eternity… It’s no good crying. No one will come—there is no one to run to… I had a religious upbringing; not, as you see, successful. 768

In 1962 they sailed home on The Hector, but were travelling again quite soon, and with more speed. Barnard wrote from the Raffles Hotel in Singapore

765Author’s interview with Hansen, a former junior librarian to Barnard, 2013. 766 M. Barnard, [letter to Lyn Brown], 14 December 1961. Papers of Lyn Brown, MS 9508, National Library of Australia. 767 Brown mentioned her concern about her friend, Barnard’s, lack of faith many times to the author. 768 M. Barnard, [letter to Lyn Brown], 14 December 1961. Papers of Lyn Brown, MS 9508, National Library of Australia.

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in April 1964, about the pleasures of the short flight from Sydney compared to the former long sea-voyage.769She wrote again to Lyn Brown, from Norway: We are as far from home as we are ever likely to be. This tiny settlement far into the Arctic Circle is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. … You won’t find the place on the map. It is a few fishermen’s cottages, neat and painted in bright red, yellow and blue … The children are bonny and perhaps the best-dressed children in the world because of their mother’s prowess in knitting the traditional pattern and the national flair for colour. The young men and girls are pleasing but all the middle-aged people and the old are plain, battered and weather-beaten.770

Barnard’s last story, ‘One Bright Leaf’, a tale of families and poverty and loyalty to the land, may have been inspired by the harsh landscape of Norway. Subsequently, they visited many other countries within Europe, including all those under Communist rule except Albania, as well as Iran, Turkey and Israel, islands of the Indian Ocean and America. Lured by their shared love of animals, Marjorie and Vee made at least two extensive trips through Africa, but

Barnard’s favourite country was England, and London her favourite city.771 After returning from one of her long trips in the late 1960s Barnard wrote her last novel, the only one she wrote alone. It remains unpublished. A short novel set in the Blue Mountains, outside Sydney, entitled, ‘The Gulf Stream’, it is dedicated to Vee, ‘my Gulf Stream.’ According to Candida Baker this dedication sums up the relationship she saw between the two women. ‘The frailer, older Barnard relies on Murdoch for just about everything, but Barnard is still the creative, dreamy one…’772 Other friends who were close to Barnard and Vee at the time, agree. One former junior librarian wrote, ‘Relationships were important to Marjorie. People were drawn… by her gentleness and kindness, I cannot remember any occasion on which Marjorie displayed anger.’773 Ray Stimson, her long-time next-door neighbour described

769 M. Barnard, [post card to Lyn Brown], April 1964. Papers of Lyn Brown, MS 9508, National Library of Australia. 770 M. Barnard, [letter to Lyn Brown], 15 November 1964. Papers of Lyn Brown, MS 9508, National Library of Australia. 771 Candida Baker, Yacker 2 – Australian Writers Talk about their Work. Picador, Sydney, 1988, pp. 40,41. Barnard refers to it being dangerous for a writer to stray far from her roots. 772 C. Baker, Yacker 2: Australian writers talk about their work. Picador, Sydney, 1987, p.32. 773 Joan Hansen [letter to author], in private hands.

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the dependence between the two women in her usual forthright manner: “Vee was a funny lady but she did look after Marjorie very well.”774 In 1973, The Society of Women Writers gave a party for Barnard’s 76th birthday. Speaking to the members about her early writing and her friendship and collaboration with Eldershaw, she called herself ‘one of the survivors’. Also in 1973, Sydney Ure Smith, in association with the National Trust, published a new soft-cover edition of The Life and Times of Captain John Piper, M Barnard Eldershaw’s second history book. An attractive book, it is fronted by Augustus Earle’s portrait which hints at Piper’s charm. Behind the new front cover Barnard could not resist adding a new introductory page that brought up to date her continuing informal . She describes, in lyrical prose, the death of modern Sydney: how everyone now leaves the city overnight, bustling out to suburbs where it is easy to park, only to come flooding back again each morning. According to Barnard, Sydney has ceased to be a home and has become a workplace, through which the tide of humanity flows in each morning, and then recedes. She describes it as she sees it: ‘The city dies. Only at night, from a distance, is it beautiful — jewelled towers piled up against the sky. It is lit and nearly empty, sparkling with neon.’775 Only now, as I hear the sadness of her voice seeping through her written words do I understand Barnard’s distress at the changes in her beloved city. Those changes enabled Barnard to leave her home in Longueville without too much regret. In 1977 she sold the house that had been her home for over 50 years and moved to a modest bungalow at 25 Sunshine Drive, Point Clare, on the New South Wales Central Coast. After more than two decades of travelling the world together, Vee Murdoch, the organiser of their travels, had become dominant in most everyday matters. Barnard’s bright wisdom slipped away with age, as she came to rely heavily on Murdoch. Barnard explained the move north as necessary for financial reasons - the Longueville house needed expensive maintenance, and she had begun to find climbing the twenty-one entry steps difficult, but one suspects that the

774 Interview with author in her current home in Wollstonecraft. 775 Part of Barnard’s extra inroduction in frontispiece of M. Barnard, The Life and Times of Captain John Piper. Ure Smith in association with the National Trust of Australia, Sydney, 1973.

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move was instigated by Vera Murdoch, for Barnard revealed, that she was not at all happy about living on the fringes. Living in the provinces is not all it’s cracked up to be…The scenery here is glorious, the winter climate superb, the summer abominably hot. The neighbours range from odd to peculiar, mosquitoes and garden pests are a way of life. The Leagues Club and Woolworths are the lodestars of society. We are really happy and it doesn’t matter that we’ll never belong. At Christmas we go back to Longueville and celebrate with friends. A family Christmas, the first in either of our lives.776

It is easy to see Barnard’s unhappiness through her words, and how she smothers her disappointment and reminds herself of the positive aspects of her present life. She has burnt her bridges financially and, the Point Clare house is a much smaller house, easier for Vee to manage. Most importantly, Barnard knew she could not manage daily living without her devoted companion beside her. After moving to Point Clare, Barnard and Vee travelled abroad only once more, and they made that last trip a memorable one. Beginning in 1979 they traversed Africa from south to north, as outlined in Barnard’s letter to Joan Hansen from the Serena Hotel, Nairobi, in August 1979. It was lovely to receive your birthday card…on arrival last night from an 11-day safari in Northern Kenya, full of dust and very tired…. We spent my birthday on the muddy shores Lake Ruddy... It was quite a riotous birthday [her 82nd]. There were 22 friendly Italians staying in the Lodge, some of whom spoke English, so dinner was like a party… Lake Rudolph is near the Ethiopian border and looked and felt a long way from everywhere… No swimming as the lake is full of crocodiles. We had three long desert journeys … stones with thorn bushes, graduating to clay pans on which there was nothing and salt pans that had even less… As soon as the country relented to the point of having a few blades of harsh grass the herds of Brahmin cattle and goats were with us again. The pasture seemed as digestible as steel knitting needles and what they did for water I can’t imagine but all the animals we saw, wild or herded were in good condition. Vegetation, animals and men are all adjusted to the hard country, all xerophytic. We met three herdsmen who came to us for water… They were fine physical types, well armed

776 Barnard, [letter to Nancy and Arch Gray]. Nancy Gray - papers 1939-1989, MLMSS 5803, State Library of NSW.

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against lions and bedizened with handsome and intricate head ornaments… 777

It is interesting to note how sharp Barnard’s memory is of her recent African adventures and how observant and precise and imaginative her descriptions. This contrasts quite markedly to her vague replies to iterviewers which were often inaccurate and confused. After Africa, they visited London again. She used very little of her travel experiences in her writing, though she joked that she would write a book one day called ‘Travel Broadens the Feet’. What little writing she did for publication retained its solid Australian base, but she did keep detailed lists of all the places she visited, not only the cities, but the buildings, the sights, the galleries.778 She noted how she got from place to place— by boat up the river, by train, by car over the mountains. Perhaps the lists were to remind her of the people she had met, the gifts she had bought, for Barnard collected friends as she travelled, and gifts for her friends at home in Australia.779 Despite Barnard’s protestations about lack of faith, after London, they visited the Holy Land where Barnard wrote to her former neighbour Ray Stimson: Everyone is frenetically religious in one way or another. They all have holy places and are madly modest… The old city teems with life and colour and there is no doubt who is the top God there— Money. We are, I think the only Christians in this hotel and we are NOT the chosen people. This makes us feel rather more Christian than is our wont.780

From Jerusalem they went to Europe again before flying across the Atlantic in the Concorde, that unforgettably inspiring aircraft, for a last visit to America, and then home. On arrival back in Australia, Barnard was presented with an Order of Australia for her contribution to literature. In 1983 Virago

777 Barnard, [letter to Joan Hansen], 24 August 1979, still in private hands. 778 They can now be found in an exercise book among her papers in the Mitchell library. ML MSS 28909 MB Box 1910. 779 Author’s interview with Hansen, examples of her collecting of friends, also mentioned by Alan Alford, Barnard’s cousin in a speech after her death. Notes can be seen in Barnard’s papers in the Mitchell Library. 780 Barnard, [letter to Ray Stimson], 1 September 1979. Collection 03: Ray M. Stimson - papers, 1978-1996, concerning Marjorie Barnard, MLMSS 6744, State Library of NSW, Sydney.

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Press republished Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow in its original form, restoring the censor’s deletions and its original title. Later that year, the Patrick White Award committee chose Barnard, as a writer who had not received acclaim commensurate with her literary output.781 When, on 8 November 1983, Barnard received the letter announcing that she had won the Patrick White Award, then valued at $12,500, she may well have just finished feeding the cockatoos at the bottom of her garden for her response was reported as a decision to use the prize-money to buy all the caged cockatoos in pet shops and let them out to be wild and free.782 The award and the spate of favourable reviews for the re-published Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow drew the attention of journalists and scholars who sought interviews with Marjorie Barnard. Some interviewers in those last years of Barnard’s life were so captivated by her charm that they may not have realised how depleted her mental reserves had become. Vera Murdoch, her companion of over thirty years, certainly did understand how difficult Marjorie now found insistent questioning, and she often interrupted the interviews, to save Barnard from embarrassment. No matter how kindly meant, her contributions were often not accurate and were sometimes misleading. Experienced interviewers, such as Candida Baker, more clearly understood the situation: Murdoch was as talkative as Barnard is reticent. Murdoch often answered on Barnard’s behalf. While Murdoch was in the kitchen, Barnard opened up the question of her writing and work… but it was sadly evident that she remembered her writing less clearly than did the reader.783

Zoe Fairbairns’ comment was similar: …Barnard was 85 and already showing signs of being less able to answer questions succinctly—sometimes unable to answer them at all

781 Patrick White had donated his Nobel Prize winnings to fund an annual award for Australian writers who had not been sufficiently acknowledged or rewarded. 782 Janet Hawley, ‘Writing Award May Free Cockatoos’, The Age, November 19, 1983. 783 C. Baker, Yacker 2. P.31

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although she never lost her ability to fend off questions she did not want to answer.784

In 1984 Barnard was given a Special Award at the Premier’s Literary Awards, but could not attend. Professor Elizabeth Webby, who had nominated

Barnard, accepted the award on her behalf. 785 In 1985 Barnard’s successful collection of short stories, The Persimmon Tree, was republished by Virago Press, and Barnard was made an honorary life member of the Royal Australian Historical Society. The Lane Cove Library asked for permission to name the new extension of the Library in her honour, and Justice Michael Kirby officially opened the ‘Marjorie Barnard Local Studies Room’ on the evening of 24th September 1985. Unfortunately the spiral stairs leading into the room where the party was held were inaccessible to

Barnard.786 She was nearing the end of her life when the University of Sydney honoured her achievements in history. Marjorie Barnard, aged 88, was presented with an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the Vice-Chancellor, Dr John Ward, at a conferring ceremony in the Great Hall of the University of

Sydney 13th May, 1986.787 In March 1987 the NSW State Library, the institution where Barnard had spent so many years finding stories, presented an exhibition of Marjorie Barnard’s career in their vestibule, as part of Senior Citizens Week. The exhibition held some interesting objects including a copy of Barnard’s first collection of stories, The Ivory Gate, loaned by Mrs Edgecombe (Nellie Hazelwood’s grand-daughter), the original manuscript of A House is Built, and a copy of the 1947 edition of the censored Tomorrow & Tomorrow.

Barnard, growing more and more frail, stayed at her home in Point Clare under Vee Murdoch’s care, being attended by visiting nurses, until early in May 1987. Then, four months before what would have been her ninetieth

784 Z. Fairbairns, ‘Marjorie Barnard: Talking with Zoe Fairbairns’ in M. Chamberlain ed., Writing Lives – Conversations Between Women Writers. Virago, London, 1988: 37-44. 785 Elizabeth Webby, former Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, provided this information in her Examiner’s Report for this thesis, 23 October 2017. 786 Next morning the staff gave her a morning tea in an easily accessible staff room. 787 The Sydney University Gazette.

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birthday, Barnard slipped and fell. The ambulance took her to hospital for the last time. She lived only four more days. Marjorie Barnard died on 7 May 1987. Vee, her loving companion for thirty-seven years, wrote: It was sad to watch the good mind go downhill. The tired old heart found it an effort to write letters and she needed so much rest. …It became an effort to eat… She said she was ready to die… 788

Marjorie had chosen cremation at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium, Sydney, where persimmons decorated her coffin for the funeral service on 12th May 1987. Vee described the occasion to a friend: There was a loving funeral— girls who had been on her library staff and now in the grandmother class were there. Friends from various groups were there. Even Pat Eldershaw was there. Marjorie has left me this home for my lifetime, and then to charity and her not very large amount of money goes to a few relations and her favourite charities. At least I am glad that Marjorie was recognised in her lifetime.789

In her eulogy at the funeral, Wilma Radford, a long-time friend and fellow librarian, chose to highlight Barnard’s capacity to forge so many warm and lasting friendships which over the years embraced so many of the people she met during her long life: ‘I would say Marjorie nourished and relished human relationships because she loved life and people.’790 In his funeral address Marjorie’s cousin, Alan Alford, the son of her mother’s brother, also spoke of Barnard’s capacity for friendship, ‘If you want an example of true friendship you can’t look beyond Marjorie and Vee.’ Marjorie had distributed small amounts of money to two of the writing organisations in which she had been involved. Meant to fund a few small prizes for members’ writing, the grants soon ran out, but the Fellowship of Australian Writers still funds an annual short story prize in Barnard’s honour, and the Society of Women Writers offered a bi-annual prize for a novel written

788 V. Murdoch, [letter to Nancy Gray], 7 June 1987. Nancy Gray - papers 1939-1989, MLMSS 5803, State Library of NSW. 789 Vee Murdoch, [letter to Nancy Gray], 7 June 1987. Nancy Gray - papers 1939-1989, MLMSS 5803, State Library of NSW.

790 The complete eulogy can be read in the Lane Cove Library, Marjorie Barnard Papers.

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by a member for some years. However the funding was soon exhausted, leaving only an engraved cup to be passed from each winner to the next.791 The importance of Marjorie Barnard as a member of that group of Australian women writers who were so productive during the 1920s to the 1960s, lies in the breadth of her participation right across the Australian literary landscape. She was interested in it all, and participated widely with the exception only of poetry. Her short-lived activity in radio plays probably occurred because the ABC paid well for them at the time. It was a minimal essay into drama, but one of her plays Watch at the Headland, was re-played by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation several times and published by Leslie Rees in Australian Radio Plays. The mark Marjorie Barnard made, sometimes in collaboration with Flora Eldershaw, spread across a wide range of literature, including short stories, novels, histories, biographies and well balanced and insightful literary criticism, as well as political essays of protest and light-hearted articles for magazines and newspapers. This was not all; perhaps Barnard’s most important contribution was her belief in the value of Australian literature as a major component of Australian culture, and her work towards its development with her constant stream of lectures and articles. In the months before her death, Robert Darby, with Barnard’s full support and interest, had been preparing for publication, But Not For Love, M Barnard Eldershaw’s long ago rejected collection of short stories. The original package submitted to their London agent in August 1932 contained nine fairly long stories.792 With Barnard’s permission, Darby gathered what he believed to be the nine original stories and added another nine, written later by Barnard alone. In the intervening years some of the stories from both sections had been published in magazines and newspapers. With Darby’s introduction, But Not For Love was published by Allen & Unwin in 1988. Thus Barnard’s career as a short story writer was extended past her long retirement and even after her death.

791 Since 1988 the NSW branch of that Society. 792 MBE [letter to Farquarson] presently held in Barnard’s papers in Mitchell Library

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Barnard’s journey as a successful short story writer, had begun with Sydney Ure Smith’s frequent publication of them in the Home magazine from 1936 on. Her major collection, The Persimmon Tree, first published in 1943 remains one of Barnard’s best remembered and best-loved publications793. The title story is remarkable for the delicate precision with which Barnard renders her two connected characters, suspending them like bubbles in the space above the street-scape. Although first published over seventy years ago, it has not lost its appeal, and it has been anthologised and reprinted many times. Barnard claimed that her short stories were the most personal of all her literary work, and the intensity of their connection with her own life can be seen in many of her best stories. In writing on ageing in ‘Contentment’, she observes how a nurse cares for her very old and very frail mistress: ‘[She] did everything for her as if she were a child again, but so cheerfully and comfortably that her services left Deborah unimpaired, she was not humiliated … as she so easily might have been. ’794

This story could have grown from watching her mother age, or Mrs Murdoch, but it was also a preview of being nursed in her last days by Vera Murdoch, her loving companion. Later in the story, ‘sleep’ for that same frail old woman was described as, ‘like shallow water that barely covered her’. Introducing the texture of water, fluidity to the thinness of rest on a sleepless night is so unusual it surely must be a remembered sensation. The ageing Barnard often complained of sleeplessness. In “Speak to Me’, she used a more common image — of an ageing eye surgeon who also slept badly, she wrote of his air of fragility and thin meagre sleep like an old shrunk blanket that never quite covers his tired mind.795 His fragility in daily life contrasts with the brilliance of his still agile professional activity, as he executes the sight-saving surgery on a young patient. Barnard often omitted to

793 First published in 1943, republished by Virago in 1973. 794 ‘Contentment’ – Robert Darby (ed), But Not for Love: Stories of Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988, p. 154. A later addition by Darby of one of Barnard’s own stories. 795 ‘Speak to Me’ – M. Barnard, The Persimmon Tree and Other Stories. Clarendon Publishing Co., Sydney,1943, p. 162.

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give her characters a name, but her descriptions are so precise and emotive that even unnamed characters dwell in the reader’s mind from the first reading. Barnard is probably best known, particularly outside Australia, for her novels. There were five published, all of them written jointly with Eldershaw. Two, the first and the last, were critical successes, but all of them were competently written and planned with a purpose, for Barnard dismissed repetition, loved to try new ways of looking at the world, new ways of presenting the interaction of characters within a society. Excerpts from some of the novels have been used in anthologies, and even as examples of social history. When Barnard was awarded the Patrick White Prize, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was subtly used as a political tool. The awarding committee (in reality probably White himself), used the occasion to plead for Australians to develop a new awareness and pride in their own country, expressing the hope that: Australians of to-day will be receptive to its warnings of our fate as a nation if we find no higher path than that of mindless consumerism and hiding under foreign umbrellas.796

The 1920s to the 1960s is a time remembered for the richness of Australian fiction, and particularly women’s writing. Among that group, Barnard’s novels written with Eldershaw, easily hold their own. A House is Built and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow sit comfortably among the best of Eleanor Dark’s, Katharine Susannah Pritchard’s, and Thea Astley’s novels, and brush at the hem of Christina Stead’s and Henry Handel Richardson’s, though those authors have achieved more lasting fame. Novels and short stories were only the earliest of Barnard’s literary achievements; she was also a successful and prolific historian. Barnard wrote her histories very much as she wrote her fiction, or even conducted her conversation (according to Nettie Palmer when she first met Barnard face to face). She painted pictures with deep swirling sentences that bore astounding

796 In Sydney Morning Herald, 19 November 1983.

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images in ‘a spontaneous brilliance of expression that made you catch your breath.’797 Brian Fletcher, former Professor of Australian History in the University of Sydney wrote of A History of Australia, ‘Her book was illuminating and entertaining, but it appeared at a time when narrative history was passing out of fashion…’ 798 Barnard’s histories, fashionable or not, were nearly all commissioned and sold well, most being re-printed and some being up-dated after a time, and re-published. Surprisingly, they proved to be the forerunners of a later wave of books by academic historians telling the story of Australia as literary narrative history. Historians such as Manning Clark and Inga Clendinnen and more recently novelist Thomas Keneally have turned ordinary Australian readers into avid history devotees, anxious to read the new exciting versions of Australia’s story from cover to cover. Barnard was the forerunner who introduced narrative history. Barnard was also ahead of her time in recognising the land beneath Australians’ feet as the core of its history, and also in her recognition of the importance of the people who were the occupiers of this continent when the Europeans came. Nowadays, her chapters pleading for attention to be paid to what those earlier Australians contributed, have been outdated by more recent knowledge of pre-history and also by input from Aboriginal historians themselves. But Barnard, from her 1939 history My Australia on, encouraged Australians to think about this ancient land and the ancient cultures of its earlier people at a time when they were not considered important by most mainstream historians. Published Literary Criticism formed another element in demonstrating Barnard’s versatility. Starting with reviews and then venturing into broader critical essays she and Eldershaw wrote the first book of detailed criticism of leading Australian authors, Essays in Australian Fiction, published in 1938. Clem Christesen of Meanjin commissioned Barnard to write what he thought to be the first comprehensive critical essay on Patrick White to be printed in his native land. So effective was it that White himself congratulated Barnard,

797 When Barnard called on Palmer in 1933, see chapter 8. 798 B. Fletcher, History & Achievement. Braxus Press, Sydney, 1999, p. 126.

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claiming that no other critic had so ‘nailed his aims’ and the progressive nature of his writing as she had done.799 Barnard also wrote a critical essay on Seaforth Mackenzie at a time when his work had dropped away into obscurity. For me, it is Barnard’s precision of expression and her vivid choice of words used so freely, indeed bounteously, that I find most memorable and charming about her writing. Whether in a lyrical short story or an imaginatively organised and deeply researched history, the gems of aptly chosen words are flipped carelessly into any description and used so generously that their strength and variety is almost more important than the structure and subject of the writing project itself. If anything could be more important than the music and variety Barnard communicated through her individual use of language it is the strength and the longevity of Barnard’s influence on the literature of Australia to-day. She saw literature as the key to Australia’s cultural growth, and contributed to its development. As a general rule Barnard did not find gatherings of other writers interesting, but their writing always interested her.800 Her membership of several literary societies was spasmodic and important only in the Fellowship of Australian Writers where she was a leading figure, with Eldershaw and Davison, during its left-ward tilt at political involvement before and during World War 2. She assisted Eldershaw (sometime president of the Fellowship) who was instrumental in achieving increased grants for the Commonwealth Literature Board. It was Barnard who wrote many of the Fellowship’s pamphlets and letters of protest during that period. According to Maryanne Dever, Barnard and Eldershaw were second only to Vance and Nettie Palmer in their influence in local literary matters.801 The Palmers themselves, tireless workers in advancing Australian literature, appreciated Barnard’s contribution to the development of Australian

799 White’s letter to Barnard, see chapter 17. 800 ‘most [writers’] societies are depressing, they fill me with dismay…It seems to me, speaking generally that writers have a great deal of vanity and very little proper pride.’ Barnard’s letter to Nettie Palmer 25 September 1931, Palmer papers NLA. 801 M. Dever (ed), M Barnard Eldershaw, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1995. Intro ix.

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literature. As early as 1936, Nettie Palmer wrote from Spain to Coralie and Leslie Rees that Marjorie Barnard has: an alert knowledge of what artistic success means and involves … she is not only the remarkable novelist but also a remarkable critic, with quite illuminating images and comparisons springing to her service. With all these gifts she has that remarkable generosity of spirit, which is rarer than one might like to admit.802

In 1936, Barnard was only at the beginning of her literary life. She spent another five decades contributing riches to Sydney’s, indeed Australia’s, literary bounty, blazing a trail in many areas. ……………………………………………………………

802 Nettie Palmer [letter from Barcelona to Leslie and Coralie Rees], July 6, 1936 in Smith, V. (ed.), Letters of Vance and Nettie Palmer 1915-1963. National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1977, p. 134.

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SELECTED LIST OF REFERENCES

INTERVIEWS BY AND CORRESPONDENCE WITH AUTHOR

Brown, L., [interviews with Author] 2009.

Brown, Prof P., [interview with Author] 2009.

Dalton, Capt D., RAN Ret’d, [interview with Author] 2016.

Hansen, J., [interviews with Author] 2009-2013.

Hansen, J., [letter to Author] 17 March 2009.

Jack, A., [interview with Author] by phone, 4 October 2008.

Lane Cove Council (Author visited several times)

Lindsay, Dr H., [interviews with Author] Friend of author, many phone and in- person interviews, 2010-2015

Price, Lt Col M., Ret’d [interview with Author] 2016.

Ryde City Council (phone calls by author)

Stimson, R., [interviewed by author] many phone calls and visits 2009-2010.

Youmshajekien, Rev. K., [interviews by phone] Current minister of St Andrews Presbyterian Church, Longueville, 2008.

Ferry person.

ARCHIVES AND COLLECTIONS EXAMINED

Barnard: Marjorie Barnard Papers, Local Studies Collection, Lane Cove Public Library, Sydney.

Barnard: Marjorie Barnard Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

Brown: Lyn Brown Papers, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Owen / Marjorie Barnard: a re-examination 291

Dark: Papers of Eleanor Dark, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Davison: Papers of Frank Dalby Davison and Marie Davison, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Devanny: Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, Townsville.

Franklin: Miles Franklin Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

Gray: Nancy Gray Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

Hunters Hill History Museum. Cambridge School records, and letters from M. Barnard, and other Cambridge School old girls responding to historical survey conducted by Museum.

Palmer: Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Presbyterian Church of NSW, Ferguson Library Archives, Sydney.

Rees: Leslie Rees Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

Stimson: Ray M. Stimson - papers, 1978-1996, concerning Marjorie Barnard, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

Sydney Girls' High School Archives, Moore Park, Sydney.

Sydney University Archives, Fisher Library, Sydney.

LETTERS From Marjorie Barnard Barnard, M., [letter to Myrtle Colefax], March 1914, Sydney Girls' High School Archives, Moore Park, Sydney.

Barnard M., [letter to Mary Gilmore], 7 August 1929, Angus & Robertson Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, MSS 123.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 16 November 1930, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1174/1/3721.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 1 December 1930, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Owen / Marjorie Barnard: a re-examination 292

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 25 September 1931, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1174/1/3721.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 16 November 1931, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1174/1/3721.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 26 November 1931, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1174/1/3721.

Barnard, M., [letter to Farquhar] August 1932, copy in Marjorie Barnard’s Papers 1927-1960, Mitchell Library, Sydney, MLMSS451.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 10 September 1933, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 1174/1/4970.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 9 October 1933, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 11 December 1933, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 25 March 1934, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MSS 1174/1/4411.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 17 April 1934, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MSS 1174/1/4411.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 26 April 1934, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MSS 1174/1/4411.

Barnard, M., [letter to Vance Palmer], July 8 1934, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Vance Palmer], 24 July 1934, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MSS 1174/1/4411.

Barnard, M., [letter to Frank Dalby Davison], 13 September 1934, Papers of Frank Dalby Davison and Marie Davison, 1930-1990, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS Acc11.106.

Barnard, M., [letter to Frank Dalby Davison], 19 September 1934, Papers of Frank Dalby Davison and Marie Davison, 1930-1990, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS Acc11.106. Owen / Marjorie Barnard: a re-examination 293

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 13 November 1934, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MSS 1174/1/4519.

Barnard, M., [letter to Vance Palmer], 2 January 1935, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MSS 1174/1/4411.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 13 February 1935, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MSS 1174/1/4589.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 22 March 1935, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MSS 1174/1/622.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 9 April 1935, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], May 19 1935, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], October 8 1935, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MSS 1174/1/14793- 6.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 10 November 1935, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], February 26 1936, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 8 November 1936, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 20 November 1936, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 16 January 1937, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1174/1/14589.

Barnard, M., [letter to Leslie Rees] 24 March 1937, Leslie Rees Papers, Mitchell Library MSS 5454/1

Owen / Marjorie Barnard: a re-examination 294

Barnard, M., [letter to Vance Palmer], 12 December 1937, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Vance Palmer], 8 April 1938, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 29 April 1938, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1174/1/5380.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], June 1938, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 7 August 1938, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 6 November 1938, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1174/1/5458.

Barnard, M., [letter to Vance Palmer], 24 December 1938, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 20 January 1939, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1174/1/5488.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 13 February 1940, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], March 1940, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, NLA 1174/1/5745.

Barnard, M., [letter to Eleanor Dark], 6 June 1940, Papers of Eleanor Dark, 1910- 1974, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 4998.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 10 July 1940, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Miles Franklin], 27 July 1940, CY1174 MSS36, Papers of Miles Franklin, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

Barnard, M., [letter to Eleanor Dark], 7 October 1940, Papers of Eleanor Dark, 1910-1974, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 4998.

Barnard, M., [letter to Vance and Nettie Palmer], 18 October 1940, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942. Owen / Marjorie Barnard: a re-examination 295

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 22 April 1941, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 8 May 1941, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 1174/5962.

Barnard, M., [letter to Vance Palmer], 8 May 1941, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS1174/5962.

Barnard, M., [letter to Eleanor Dark], 18 August 1941, Papers of Eleanor Dark, 1910-1974, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 4998.

Barnard, M., [letter to Eleanor Dark], 22 March 1942, Papers of Eleanor Dark, 1910- 1974, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 4998.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 15 June 1942, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 17 July 1942, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Jean Devanny], 24 November 1942. Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, Townsville, JD/Corr(P)7.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 15 December 1942, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Barnard, M., [letter to Eleanor Dark], 21 October 1943, Papers of Eleanor Dark, 1910-1974, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 4009 (binder 2).

Barnard, M., [letter to Jean Devanny], January 1, 1944, Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, Townsville, JD/Corr 5.

Barnard, M., [letter to Eleanor Dark], April 17, 1944, Papers of Eleanor Dark, 1910- 1974, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 4998.

Barnard, M., [letter to Eleanor Dark], May, 1944, Papers of Eleanor Dark, 1910- 1974, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 4998.

Barnard, M., [letter to Jean Devanny], 5 January 1945, Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, JD/Corr 5.

Owen / Marjorie Barnard: a re-examination 296

Barnard, M., [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 June 1945, Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, Townsville, JD/Corr 5.

Barnard, M., [letter to Jean Devanny], 31 July 1945, Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, Townsville, JD/Corr 5.

Barnard, M., [letter to Jean Devanny], 16 November 1946, Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, Townsville, JD/Corr 5.

Barnard, M., [letter to Jean Devanny], 1 January 1947, Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, Townsville, JD/Corr 5.

Barnard, M., [letter to Jean Devanny], 4 January 1947, Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, Townsville, JD/Corr 5.

Barnard, M., [letter to Jean Devanny], 18 January 1947, Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, Townsville, JD/Corr 5.

Barnard, M., [letter to Jean Devanny], 4 February 1947, Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, Townsville, JD/Corr 5.

Barnard, M., [letter to Jean Devanny], 25 June 1947, Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, Townsville, JD/Corr 5.

Barnard, M., [letter to Eleanor Dark], 21 September 1947, Papers of Eleanor Dark, 1910-1974, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 4998.

Barnard, M., [letter to Miles Franklin], 1 July 1949, Miles Franklin Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, CY1174 MSS36.

Barnard, M., [letter to Lyn Brown] 24 March 1950, Papers of Lyn Brown, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 17 February 1956, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MSS 1174/1/8794.

Barnard, M., [letter to Jean Devanny], 12 December 1957, Jean Devanny Archive, James Cook University Library, Townsville, 80L-82L.

Barnard, M., [letter to Lyn Brown], 14 December 1961, Papers of Lyn Brown, National Library of Australia, MS 9508.

Owen / Marjorie Barnard: a re-examination 297

Barnard, M., [postcard to Lyn Brown], April 1964, Papers of Lyn Brown, National Library of Australia, MS 9508.

Barnard, M., [letter to Lyn Brown], 11 September 1964, Papers of Lyn Brown, National Library of Australia, MS 9508.

Barnard, M., [letter to Lyn Brown], 15 November 1964, Papers of Lyn Brown, National Library of Australia, MS 9508.

Barnard, M., [letter to Frank Dalby Davison], April 16, 1970. Papers of Frank Dalby Davison and Marie Davison, 1930-1990.MS Acc11.106, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Barnard, M., [letter to Nancy and Arch Gray], undated, probably 1978, Nancy Gray Papers 1939-1989, MLMSS 5803, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

Barnard, M., [letter to Ray Stimson], 1 September 1979, Collection 03: Ray M. Stimson - papers, 1978-1996, concerning Marjorie Barnard, Mitchell Library, Sydney, MLMSS 6744.

From M Barnard Eldershaw Barnard Eldershaw, M., [Marjorie Barnard letter to George Harrap], 14 August 1932. , Marjorie Barnard papers 1927-1960. Mitchell Library, Sydney MLMSS 451 Box5(3).

Barnard Eldershaw, M. [letter to Farquarson) London agent, August 1932. Marjorie Barnard Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

From Others Christesen, C., [letter to Marjorie Barnard], June 11, 1956, Marjorie Barnard Papers 1927-1960, Mitchell Library, Sydney.MLMSS 2809 MB Box1.

Cusack, D., [letter to Miles Franklin], 24 September 1945, Miles Franklin Papers Mitchell Library, Sydney, CY1174 MSS36.

Davison, F., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 2 January 1933. Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Davison, F., [letter to Nettie Palmer], 8 April 1934. Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966 National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Davison, F., [letter to Eleanor Dark], June 14, 1940, Papers of Eleanor Dark, 1910- 1974, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 4998.

Owen / Marjorie Barnard: a re-examination 298

Eldershaw, F., [letter to Nettie Palmer], July, 1942, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Eldershaw, F., [draft letter to Edgar Harris], 22 March 1944, Marjorie Barnard’s Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, ML MSS 451/5.

Eldershaw, F., [letter to Miles Franklin], 22 February 1948, Miles Franklin Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, MSS 3659/1/CY1262.

Farquharson, [letter to Marjorie Barnard, Marjorie Barnard Papers 1927-1960, Mitchell Library, MLMSS 451.

Farquharson, [letter to Marjorie Barnard], 7 August 1935, Marjorie Barnard Papers 1927-1960, Mitchell Library, Sydney MLMSS 2809 MB Box1.

Farquharson, [letter to M Barnard Eldershaw], December 1938, Marjorie Barnard Papers 1927-1960, Mitchell Library, Sydney MLMSS 451.

Franklin, M., [letter to Mary Fullerton], 16 August 1944, Miles Franklin Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, MSS364/120.

Murdoch, V., [letter to Nancy Gray], 7 June 1987, Nancy Gray Papers, 1939-1989, Mitchell Library, Sydney, MLMSS 5803.

Palmer, N.,[letter to Marjorie Barnard], March 1934, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1850-1966, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3942.

Prichard, K.S., [letter to Miles Franklin], Miles Franklin Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, MSS 3659/1/CY1262.

Watson [letter to the Sydney Morning Herald] 1930 re naval quartermasters.

OTHER REFERENCES

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