The Unpublished Plays of Miles Franklin

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Jocelyn Hedley

Master of Arts (Research)

2007

Faculty of Arts

University of New South Wales THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Hedley

First name: Jocelyn Other name/s: Patricia

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: MRes

School: English, Media and Performing Arts Faculty: Arts

Title: The Unpublished Plays of Miles Franklin

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

With the publication of her novel, My Brilliant Career, in 1901, Miles Franklin became the darling of the Sydney literati. Great things were expected of the little girl from the bush. But five years later, nothing had eventuated; her talent, Miles thought, was barely recognised in Australia. In the hope of gaining greater writing opportunities, she shipped to Chicago where she became involved in social reform. It was hard work and ill paid, and though she bewailed the fact that it sapped her writing energy, she nonetheless felt a commitment to the cause such that she remained for almost a decade.

In her spare time, though, she continued to write – and not just prose. More and more she wrote for the theatre, attempting to push into a world of which she had always dreamed. Blessed with a beautiful singing voice, she had long desired to be on the stage. This was impossible, though; her voice, she believed, had been ruined by bad training in her youth. To write for the stage, then, though a poor substitute, was at least in the field of her original ideal.

Miles’ plays, though, are not remembered today, and are little thought of in scholarship, are considered, in fact, to have failed. This gives the false impression that they were always little thought of. Her correspondence, however, reveals that at least five of the plays were produced, indicating a certain level of success.

Miles Franklin’s theatrical work, then, is surely worthy of further examination. This thesis looks at five of the plays in the light of Miles’ life and in the light of the society in which she found herself. In turn, it uses the plays to reveal something of the nature of the playwright herself and to show that Miles Franklin’s theatrical writing did not fail as once thought. In addition, it provides a complete bibliography of the plays (inclusive of locations), lists the duplications as they appear under alternate titles and provides synopses of a large number. This will make up for a gap in Miles Franklin scholarship and will facilitate other scholars in accessing the plays. This thesis, then, is an introduction to a new facet of Miles Franklin scholarship.

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‘…if I could go about as the women who belong to men do.’ Miles Franklin, 1949

Table of Contents

Chapter I Introduction………………………… 4

Chapter II The Survivors………………….…… 23

Chapter III Phoebe Lambent and Love…….…… 38

Chapter IV The English Jackaroo..…………….. 53

Chapter V Tom Collins at Runnymede………… 71

Chapter VI The Dead Shall not Return…….…… 87

Chapter VII Conclusion.……………………..….. 104

Synopses of Selected Plays………………………… 115

Bibliography……………………………………..… 125

It is October 1906 and a young Australian woman steps off the train at Chicago. Her journey has been long and full of adventure, coming as she has from quake stricken San Francisco – devastated just days before her arrival there – over the Rockies and across the plains of the Mid West of America1. And before that, she had crossed the Pacific Ocean by means of the 6,000 tonne steamship SS Ventura, boarded some six months earlier in Sydney, Australia. From far to the south-west of that city – outside the area now established as the nation’s capital – she has come, from a mountainous region named the Brindabella Ranges. Here she grew up the child of pioneers and here her father and his family worked the land. Here she lived, then there at the edges of Goulburn, then fleetingly in Sydney and Melbourne, right until now as she stands by her little pile of luggage, gazing at the vast vault of ceiling that crowns Chicago’s Union Station. Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin is she who stands upon the emptying platform. She is twenty-six and already has something of fame behind her. Five years earlier her novel, My Brilliant Career, was published and young Miles, as she chose to call herself, was on the road to success. She was beckoned forth from what was deemed the simplicity of the bush to the sophistication of the city where she was swept up at once into Sydney’s luminous literary world. Everybody wanted to meet the little bush girl who had written this ‘Bookful of Sunlight’2, and so showered her with invitations to dinners and salons and harbour picnics. She thrived on the life, made lasting friends and eventually took work as a parlour maid so that she might stay in the city permanently. Domestic service was not her first choice of how things might be, nor was it her only option. Vibrant, youthful and artistic, Miles attracted the attentions of numerous eligible gentlemen, one of whom was Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson. The debonair poet, lawyer and war correspondent acquainted himself with the young writer and suggested they enter into a literary collaboration. She was reluctant, put off by his imperious manner towards her, and refused. Shortly afterwards, however, she succumbed to the allure of this dashing figure and

1 For a full account of the journey across America, see Coleman, Verna, Miles Franklin in America: Her Unknown (Brilliant) Career, Angus & Robertson, London, 1981. 2 A. G. Stephens in September 1901 entitled his review of My Brilliant Career ‘A Bookful of Sunlight’. Ibid., p. 38. 4 suggested that they work together on a play. Paterson, eager to begin, sent her a letter offering to pay her expenses for a week in Sydney. He followed this letter with one containing a cheque for £5 that she might make her way at once from her family’s home in the country to his writing side in the city. There were, it seems, suggestions of romance, to the delight of Miles’ beautiful younger sister Linda (‘When are you going to be Mrs Banjo?’3), herself affianced and desiring a similar joy for her sibling. Others, though, were less than pleased. Bush poet and Miles’ mentor, Henry Lawson, and his wife, Bertha, expressed grave concerns. The former, it seems, was so distressed by the situation that he confronted Paterson in a far from sober state and compelled him to finish the affair. A month later, Paterson effectively did so, writing to Miles and thanking her for the returned cheque.4 Miles, clearly, had already decided not to engage further with Paterson, had rejected what appears to be an offer of marriage, possibly acting, Verna Coleman suggests, on the advice of those family members and friends she held in high esteem. Within months she had retreated from the headiness of the literati into domestic service, taking up a position as a parlour maid first in Waverley, then in the harbourside suburbs of North Sydney and Kirribilli. She was well- trained for such employ, and was a hard, fast and extremely efficient worker. So diligent was she that feminist and philanthropist Rose Scott pressed her by letter to take regular time off for fear of ‘hurt[ing] the girls you want to help’5. Miles had first visited Rose Scott at her home in 1902 at the older woman’s invitation. Miss Scott’s two-storey cottage was located on glebe land in Woollahra and was salon to the city’s intellectuals and artists. It was here in the company of others of like mind that Miles’ feminist ideals were fleshed out and strengthened. When she settled on the concept of working as a maid in order to earn her keep and stay in the city, she did so also as a sort of feminist mission, to investigate the conditions of such workers and, with Rose Scott as mentor and guide, to work towards bettering them. In addition, she was intent on gathering information for a play that she planned to write detailing the adventures of ‘Mary Ann’ the parlour maid.

3 Coleman, Miles Franklin in America, p. 49. 4 For a more detailed description of the relationship between Miles and A.B. Paterson, see Chapter Six of Coleman, Miles Franklin in America. 5 Roe, Jill (ed.), My Congenials: Miles Franklin & Friends in Letters, Volume One 1879 – 1938, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1993, p. 26. 5

A year on, from a domestic situation in Melbourne, Miles wrote to Rose Scott asking her to inquire from her nephew, Helenus ‘Nene’ Hope Scott Wallace, whether he considered her, Miles, appropriate to play Mary Ann in the aforementioned play. She says too that she will require Nene to create the star part in order to ensure the production’s success. It is plain from her letter that the play is not as yet actually written: one assumes Miles’ domestic workload is such as puts her dramatic writing somewhat to the rear. By the time she stands beneath the vaulted ceiling of Chicago’s Union Station more than two years later, there is still no evidence of the Mary Ann play having been penned. Nor is there particular indication of an independent writing of that dramatic collaboration she had put forth to Banjo Paterson in 1902. In the five years between the publication of My Brilliant Career and her arrival in America, Miles Franklin’s writing, despite her intentions, appears to be unswervingly prose based. This is hardly surprising given that Miles is remembered, after all, as being a prose writer. More specifically, Miles is remembered as being the author of My Brilliant Career. That she tinkered in her younger years with the idea of writing a couple of plays is surely of little significance. But what of that neglected phrase in her last will and testament that clearly acknowledges the worth and importance of things theatrical? The Miles Franklin Award, as her generous benefaction has become, is Australia’s most prestigious and, until very recently, lucrative award6, established, so her will tells us, ‘for the Novel for the year which is of the highest literary and which must present Australian Life in any of its phases’7. In the event that no novel is deemed appropriate for the award, she states that the prize be given instead to ‘the Author of a play’. Is this an indication of Miles’ love of all things cultural, or does it provide an insight into an element of that culture that was of particular importance to her?

6 The most lucrative award in Australia is now the Melbourne Prize for Literature. In 2006, $42,000 was awarded to the winner of the Miles Franklin Award, $60,000 to the winner of the Melbourne Prize. 7 North, Marilla (ed.), Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters between Dymphna Cusack, Florence James and Miles Franklin, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2001, p. 377. 6

Miles picks up her valise and walks to the end of the platform, hails a streetcar and rides to Halstead Street on the West Side, not far from an area known as ‘The Ghetto’. She makes her way to a red brick, three storey building, the former homestead of one of Chicago’s pioneer citizens, Charles Hull, but now remembered as the birthplace of modern social work in America, Hull House. Here she is welcomed by the director of this ‘symbol of … goodness, charity and concern for others’8, Jane Addams, she who, by 1900, was, second only to Queen Victoria, the most famous woman in the world. Jane Addams established Hull House in 1889 when she was not yet thirty as a haven for those struggling to find support in the great city. Immigrants found help and refuge there, the needy and desperate of the city good care and counsel, and workers assistance and camaraderie in the form of a crèche, clubs9 and classes of different types, a theatre and a gymnasium. It was a place where people could come together to talk, to exchange ideas, a place where feminist ideals were discussed and embraced, a place where women were encouraged to discover and exercise their talents. Cultural activities and outings were offered with the intention to develop understanding and appreciation of such.10 For Miles, to be in such a place in such a city was extraordinary.11 There is a photograph of Miles atop an apartment building with the city scaped behind her, all sky and growing skyscrapers. She is wearing a long white dress and sits back in a deckchair with a frothy hat on her lap and her hands resting loosely on her shoulders. Her eyes are narrowed against the glare of sun and her mouth is stretched wide in profound contentment. The setting, her age and bearing all suggest it is the beginning of her time in Chicago12.

8 Coleman, Miles Franklin in America, p. 81. 9 Hull House operated the Shakespeare Club, the Plato Club and the Dante Club, to name just a few. Miller, Donald L., City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, Simon and Schuster, New York 1996, p. 420. For further discussion on the establishment, work and effect of Hull House, see Jane Addams’ own work, Twenty Years at Hull House, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1912. 10 Verna Coleman reasons that such excursions were purely for entertainment. Jane Addams’ writings, however, strongly suggest otherwise. 11 For further discussion of the role of Jane Addams and Hull House in the greater context of social reform, and particularly in relation to links with German reform, see Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Schüler, Anja & Strasser, Susan (eds.), Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue of Documents, 1885-1933, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1998. 12 Undated. Mitchell Library, PX* D 250 (v.1). 7

Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century was young and vigorous and dripping with money. Industries were thriving; early investments in railroads and lumber and newspapers were proving extraordinarily profitable. The founding fathers had ‘turned a prairie village into a great city’13, though with little thought for the welfare of those employed to undertake the physical work. These workers consisted predominantly of immigrants, lured to the city by its promise of wealth and prosperity but finding conditions appalling. ‘Chicago,’ Jill Roe tells us, ‘plumbed the depths of late-nineteenth century capitalism.’14 The wealthy, meanwhile, were indulging in excessive materialism, always, as Verna Coleman tells us, where it could be seen – in the purchasing of magnificent homes, precious objects, expensive clothes and jewellery, and in the giving of extravagant balls and parties. Alongside this conspicuous consumption15, however, was an upsurging interest in the arts and culture, evidenced in the erection of great public buildings such as art galleries and museums, in the funding of such endeavours as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chicago University, and in the establishing of patronage and support for artists, writers and musicians. Theatres were built, burned down in the string of fires that are so intimately connected with the history of Chicagoan theatre, and replaced by larger, more elaborate structures. These were the stages for opera, ballet, comedy, satire, melodrama, pantomime, burlesque and vaudeville, as well as for travelling attractions. By the end of the 19th century, there was no dearth of overseas theatre,16 and at the turn of the century, the Little Theatre movement was a vibrant force, among their number Jane Addams’ own Hull-House Players.

Into all this steps Miles. She is welcomed as a friend of Hull House and finds herself surrounded by a world she could hardly have imagined. She engages with all aspects of communal living, is put on the guest roster and takes meals in

13 Coleman, Miles Franklin in America, p. 76. 14 Roe, My Congenials, v. 1, p. 57. 15 For a satirical look at modern capitalism, see Veblen, Thorstein, Conspicuous Consumption, Penguin Books, London, 2005. 16 Notable among these was Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, which made its premier in Chicago in 1882, a year before its first performance in Helsingborg, Norway. 8 the long dining room with artists, socialists and vocal feminists. Afterwards, the party moves through the rooms to the House’s theatre and watches plays performed by the Players. Later, when the lights are out and all is quiet in the dormitory she shares with other young women, Miles takes the scenes of the day and presses them into bright, theatrical shape. Miles is in a new land of promise. She is full of hope. She believes the ‘‘Murkans’, as she calls the Americans, will recognise her talent in a way that the Australians never truly did. She thinks about how she will be picked up for publication here, about how she will become famous here, about perhaps taking up the voice training she had started in her youth. She thinks, too, about how she will be able to earn her money from writing, about how she will never have to engage with domestic servitude again, about how her artistic work will be so profitable that she will be able to set herself up for life. She is strong, confident, able, sure. But in the waking, immediate hours, she knows she must find work, and more permanent accommodation. She takes up a position as a clerk in a department store, possibly also selling shoes and waiting tables in the restaurant17. She leaves the shared dormitory for room and board in nearby South Wood Street and begins to settle into her new life. She embraces joyfully the culture offered to her by this glorious growing city, attends the theatre, opera and concerts, usually as a guest of one of her newfound and generous friends. One imagines it is at their expense, too, that she appears to lunch and dine out so very often, for her wages are low. But, it seems, they are more than willing to foot the bill, for Miles is no ordinary conversationalist. For her American hosts, to hear Miles speak of the exotica that was the frontier land of Australia, so very far away, to hear her spin yarns and unravel tales of the Australian bush in the manner of the ‘old bush granddads’ is a generous payment in kind. One of these new friends is Alice Henry, fellow feminist, writer and Australian, who Miles meets during the first few weeks of her time at Hull House. Alice, aged 49, works for the National Women’s Trade Union League as editor of their journal Life and Labour, and it is through her that Miles, too, is introduced to the founder and director of the League, the charismatic Margaret Dreier Robins. A

17 For Coleman’s argument that this was the case, see Coleman, Miles Franklin in America, p. 89. 9 room becomes available at Alice’s address on Park Avenue and Miles shifts her little valise to join her new friend and mentor. The two expatriates form a vital and lasting friendship, one which Jill Roe terms ‘puzzling’18, for, presumably, its intensity and familiarity. Later, when they are separated by oceans, they correspond; Miles begins her letters to Alice with ‘Dear Pops’, and Alice to Miles with ‘Dear Maw’. They are, it seems, kindred spirits, or, as Miles would say, true ‘congenials’.

Early in October, 1907, a year after her arrival in Chicago, Miles receives a letter addressed to her in her mother’s hand. Susannah Franklin writes the tragic news of the death of Miles’ adored younger sister, Linda, of pneumonia, after flu. She and her husband and new baby had only nine days earlier moved into their home in Queensland, the place to which Linda had attempted to lure her literary sister with the promise of it being a perfect haven in which to write. It becomes, instead, a place of sickness, suffering and death. That her beautiful sister is no longer living is beyond belief for Miles. She is crippled by the news, and is able to do little other than yield to the kindness of Alice and others who ferry her away from the city to the home of the wealthy Lloyd family in the outlying suburb of Winnetka. The next months she spends in recuperation from complete breakdown. While convalescing, she receives a letter from Margaret Dreier Robbins offering her work with the League. When, some weeks later, she returns to the city, it is as the League’s part-time secretary, the salary of $12 per week paid for from Robins’ personal account.

The offices of the National Women’s Trade Union League are initially located in Robins’ flat, but later move to La Salle Street, then to a skyscraper on

18 Jill Roe makes the point that Miles ‘once remarked that Alice Henry was more like a father to her’. Roe, My Congenials, v. I, p. 131. 10

North Dearborn Street19. ‘We have an office suite of four rooms in one of the big skyscrapers’, Miles writes to her Aunt Annie back in the Brindabellas, ‘and one of them is my private office. I have an assistant to help me. I have my own telephone switch and all sorts of conveniences. Quite a change from the life of an Australian bush girl.’20 She writes too that she loves her work ‘very much as it brings me in to close friendship with everyone in the world who is making thought and history.’21 She is often laid low, though, with colds and, it seems, with depression. Only a few short months after taking on her new role with the League, she writes in her pocket diary that she is ‘depressed and weary’, ‘unhappy’, ‘damnably unhappy’, ‘miserable beyond words’22. Her work gradually increases from part time to full time – though the salary stays the same – and she finds herself growing weary with all that is expected of her. It is hardly surprising, in the light of the situation, that her real work, her writing, is seen to have slowed down. But it does not completely stop. Despite the exhaustion she is enduring as a result of her activist work, Miles begins, here in the darkening hours when she is away from the office, to work on the first of the Chicagoan plays, The Survivors.

There is a strong sense of the autobiographical in Miles’ writing. Despite her insistent comments to the contrary, it is generally considered that My Brilliant Career is based very much on her own life and experiences. From the broad strokes of a bush setting akin to that of Miles’ own place of upbringing, and the outworking of a tale of a young woman born for things artistic, to the finer details of character, both of the protagonist and of those surrounding her, it is hard not to see her writing as the playing out of her life in literature. Miles must write, and she must also be successful. When she lies in her darkened room after a long day in the organisation of factory workers’ strikes and the writing up of minutes from conferences and meetings, the memories of the preceding hours form themselves as scenes, clear and colourful, before her eyes.

19 Miles later wrote a novel, published posthumously, based on this period entitled On Dearborn Street, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1981. 20 Roe, My Congenials, v. I, p. 83. 21 Ibid., p. 83. 22 FP, ML MSS 364/2. 11

She rises in the night, takes up pen and paper, and begins to scrawl in her thick, sloping hand. She writes and she writes, often in prose where the fragments of her life are there for the readers to fill in and colour, but more and more she writes for the interpretation of directors, of actors and of set designers. She writes stage settings and directions, scenes and acts, dramatic dialogue and plot. She writes, unswervingly so, for the theatre. And much of what she writes is her own life.

Miles Franklin grew up in the bush and visited the city as a child only rarely. Despite their frequent straightened circumstances, her family maintained a level of culture and refinement. Miles learned the piano and played well. She read Tennyson, Byron and Shakespeare. One imagines that she would have directed her siblings on a makeshift stage before parents and visiting relatives, and performed scenes from Hamlet, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Perhaps as a teenager she wrote her own plays inspired by these classics, or plays not dissimilar to the prose she was writing at the time, tales ‘prinked with castles with ivied towers and hooting owls, which were inhabited by the unaccommodating guardians, thrilling seducers and more thrilling rescuers of titled maidens, as pure as angels.’23 These stories, she said, ‘adhered to the design of the trashy novelettes reprinted in the supplement to the Goulburn Evening Penny Post’24. Thomas J. Hebblewhite of the Post advised her to leave such subjects and write using the material at hand. Her life then was the bush and the characters who peopled it, so it was with these as inspirations that she wrote My Brilliant Career, that work that the Melbourne Booklover found ‘the most thoroughly Australian novel yet given to the world.’25 And A.G. Stephens of The Bulletin, whom Marjorie Barnard considers the greatest critic of his day, deemed it ‘the very first Australian novel’26.

23 Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career and My Career Goes Bung, Harper Perennial, Sydney, 2004, p. 261. 24 Ibid., p. 261. 25 Roderick, Colin, Miles Franklin: Her Brilliant Career, Rigby Publishers Limited, Sydney, 1998, p. 84. 26 Barnard, Marjorie, Miles Franklin, Hill of Content, Melbourne, 1967, p. 46. Sylvia Lawson qualifies this when she states that Stephens went on to say that this was in contrast with the work of Marcus Clarke, Henry Kingsley and Rolf Boldrewood which were simply ‘novels written in Australia’. Lawson, Sylvia, The Archibald Paradox, Allen Lane, Ringwood, 1983. 12

But now, here in Chicago in her little room in Dr Young’s house, with Alice Henry across the hall and a job to go to in the morning in a building that has not a hint of ivy on it anywhere, Miles draws her inspiration from the hardness of the American factory workers’ lives, from the generosity that she sees in the kind and munificent benefactors of Hull House and the League, and, indeed, from the theatre itself.

Miles clearly fostered a strong interest in the theatre, in performance, and in singing particularly. She was said to have had an extraordinary singing voice: a ‘deep contralto’27 is Colin Roderick’s description of it. Vida Goldstein, writing a story back in Australia based on Miles, refers to her heroine as having a voice ‘of peculiar power which would have won her a place on the concert platform or stage’28. Miles complains, however, of having earlier ruined her voice by bad instruction, a grievance echoed by Ignez in the novel Cockatoos (written under the pseudonym of Brent of Bin Bin) whose dream of being a singer was crushed for this very reason. While in Chicago, Miles receives singing lessons from a pupil of Mathilde Marchiesi29 in the hope of undoing the damage done. The stage was a constant in her work. We see Sybylla in My Brilliant Career yearning for a life beyond the bush, a life as an actress and singer. In Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, the narrator is an actress forced to retire early from the stage due to her heart problems, an ailment of which Miles herself frequently complained.30 And here in The Survivors, the first play that is ascribed her, we meet the lovely Avis Gaylord, generous heiress and famed stage actress. We see, too, Dick Dallas, a worker like many of the other male characters and suffering many of the appalling conditions the others also suffer, but a man who knows himself to be more than this, who knows himself to be a writer, who has been requested, in fact, to write a play specifically for Avis Gaylord. We see the way

27 Roderick, Miles Franklin, p. 87. 28 Coleman, Miles Franklin in America, p. 63. 29 Mathilde Marchiesi was Dame Nellie Melba’s singing tutor. As Miles was a great fan of Dame Melba’s, it seems that there would have been some mention of the fact if her tutor were the prima donna herself. 30 Miles’ wavering health, it appears, was exacerbated by the recurring malaria initially contracted while serving in Macedonia with the Scottish Women’s Hospital during WWI. 13 art is able to bring truth and beauty and goodness to the lives of those in the play and it is no great leap to make that this, surely, is what Miles herself desired deeply to achieve.

If one is to measure success, for a writer at least, by the number of publications one is able to produce in the course of a life, then it is fair and true to say that Miles Franklin, with nineteen books under her belt, and countless articles, was indeed just that – a success. Perhaps, too, one might consider the manner in which one is remembered when measuring success. In this case also might Miles be deemed successful given that she is remembered as being instrumental in developing an Australian national identity via literature with the publication of the aforementioned books and articles, with her frequent addresses on the subject, and with her championing of the issue in general. Her letters and diaries are rich with such discussion, and her efforts acknowledged by His Majesty King George V in 1937 with the offer of an O.B.E.31 which, incidentally, she refused. Socially, too, she was a success. Her status was high; she was part of an extraordinary social network and numbered among her friends and acquaintances many notable individuals. Despite her protestations to the contrary – she considered herself deeply shy – she came across as friendly, gregarious and affable, and appears to have made connections with people easily. Her papers held in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, include vast collections of correspondence from her ‘congenials’32 – her kindred spirits – among which can be found the letters of Henry Lawson, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Dymphna Cusack, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Walter Burley Griffin and Rex Ingamells, to name just a few. When she was back in Sydney after almost three decades abroad, she instituted the tradition of The Waratah Cup. The cup was a delicate porcelain affair, its elegant sides hand painted with images of the national flower, and it was with this set that Miles would favour her honoured guests when it came time for tea. The guest, upon draining the final drops of their brew, would then be invited to write

31 The title ‘Officer of the British Empire’ is awarded annually for service to the country. Miles declined the honour because she believed that ‘it was a synonym for failure. The unimportant senile nincompoops were fobbed off with it.’ Brunton, Paul, The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 70. 32 Jill Roe’s edited collection of Miles’ letters is entitled My Congenials for this very reason. 14 an account of the pleasure, and would be offered ‘The Book of The Waratah Cup’ in which to inscribe. And everyone, so The Book tells us, was indeed most delighted to drink tea from the cherished vessel and in the company of so intelligent, feisty and charming a host. The names in The Book are of folk long associated with Australian letters: Henrietta Drake Brockman; Jean Devanny; Pixie O’Harris; A.B. Paterson; Tom Inglis Moore. But for all this, for all the publications, the distinction, the renown, Miles had little perception of herself as a success. Rather, she was dogged into old age by the belief that she was a failure.

A photograph33 taken at the time of the publication of My Brilliant Career shows Miles in a dark, fitted suit buttoned smartly from the stiff white collar at her throat to the tightly pinched in waist. The stiff whiteness is also at her cuffs, guarding her wrists. Her hands are sheathed in dark skin gloves and she holds on her lap a riding whip. She is both sophisticate and daredevil, with her smart suit offset by a clutch of jaunty feathers sticking up from her wide-brimmed hat. She is perched on the arm of a cane settee as though on the edge of her career, on the edge, indeed, of the world before her. Her gaze is direct to the camera, sassy, forthright and brilliant. There is no question for her that her career will not be likewise. It will be brilliant. She will be brilliant. As she stands by her little pile of luggage in the great cavern that is Chicago’s Union Station, five years have gone by and there is again that sense, that perched on the edge sense. She is able to forget for the moment the previous few years of difficulty and frustration in the anticipation of the new life ahead, of the new world ahead. This time, this time – she is certain of it – her work will be joyously received.

The workload at the League grows heavier. In 1912, Miles leaves the secretarial role for the position of assistant editor of the League’s journal Life and

33 Mitchell Library, PX* D 250 (v.1). 15

Labour. In 1913 she is made co-editor with Alice Henry, and in 1914, for a brief period, editor.34 She is weary, aching, in fluctuating health. Her pocket notebooks trace the course of her days: ‘exhausted’, she writes, ‘sick from insomnia, ‘violent nervous headache’35. There is little time to write creatively, and her singing is limited to a part in the League’s choir which she enjoys but which is a far cry from the stage and fame that she had desired. She cannot keep at bay the despair of failure. It is perhaps through the character of Ignez in Cockatoos that Miles voices her difficulties of this time. She writes:

The days in New York were, in so far as the development of her special talents were concerned, wasted. She had fallen among reformers, and that for an artist is more fatal than for a merchant to fall among bandits. Her heart was frozen by her secret tragedy. There were five heavy, sealed years when in the anguish of her own loss she could not bear the performances of other musicians, days when she eschewed concerts and was separated from music. She suffered no personal neglect but lovers were never permitted to become paramours or husbands, and perhaps she was no more unhappy while the fever of self-sacrifice lasted than she would have been on any other track. The days were a turmoil of high-geared living and hard work.36

Marjorie Barnard, who knew Miles personally in her latter years, states that Miles’ journey to America was with the intention of pursuing her musical career.37 It seems that this was at least in part the case; as Verna Coleman too points out, Miles had originally been heading for New York – that great metropolis of show biz – before she was met with the excitement of Hull House, Alice Henry and social reform.38 But we see also that Miles’ cousin Edwin Bridle, who had declared his love and was waiting (in vain, it turns out) for Miles to return to Australia and be his wife, writes in September 1906 asking how negotiations are going with New York publishers and when she would arrive there.39 Clearly, it seems, Miles’ reason for journeying abroad was that same one

34 Roe, My Congenials, v. I, p. 57. 35 Mitchell Library, Franklin Papers, ML MSS 364/2. 36 Miles Franklin in Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 65. 37 Ibid., p. 62. 38 Coleman, Miles Franklin in America, p. 88. 39 Ibid., p. 88. 16 seen over and over throughout her writings: to be in a place in which one has room to grow and succeed as an artist. To consider, using Ignez’s phrase, that Miles had simply ‘fallen among’ social reformers would appear to be the afterwriting of despair. Plainly, she needed work to maintain herself while she built up her artistic life and, given her interest in the movement, her good fortune of holding an introductory letter to Jane Addams40, and a general aptitude and skill for things administrative, reform work seems have been a fine way for Miles to earn her money. And, despite the workload, there was much that she plainly enjoyed in this work. So when one contemplates the nature of Miles’ ambitions, when one sees that she envisioned for herself a life of unhampered artistic satisfaction, success and fame, it is easier to see why it is that she believed herself to have failed.

§§§

The Survivors is complete. Chicago, reform and romance feature large in this play, but it is the first of these that sets it apart from her previous work. As My Brilliant Career reveals the bush, so The Survivors reveals this new and booming city with its underbelly of grime and of injustice, with its bright gloss of society ladies and fundraising luncheons. There is wit and there is life in this work, there is the capturing of a time, a place, a series of people. It is a work made the more interesting because it is the pen of an Australian woman that so captures these things, the pen of an Australian woman not remembered for being a playwright. For this, surely, is what Miles Franklin was aiming to be – in the wake, at least, of a failed musical career. There can be no question of her intention, given that it is plain that she wrote for the stage for almost her entire adult life, the earliest date ascribed one of her plays being 190841 – the year she turned twenty- nine – the latest being 195242, two years before her death at age seventy-four. In her book A Fringe of Papers: Offshore Perspectives on Australian History & Literature, Susan Pfisterer writes that Miles Franklin ‘hounded’ actors, producers and theatre managers to take on her plays, that she tried ‘desperately,

40 This was given her by Carrie Whelan. Coleman, Miles Franklin in America, p. 79. Carrie Whelan was a friend of Carrie Catt, who was in turn a friend of Vida Goldstein, who had been introduced to Miles by Joseph Furphy when first they met in Melbourne in 1903. 41 The Survivors, FP, ML MSS 445/25. 42 The Dead Must Not Return!, FP, ML MSS 445/26. 17 and without success, [ ] to establish herself as a serious … playwright.’43 These theatre practitioners, we read in the Franklin Papers, responded in no uncertain terms. Miles was told that her plays were ‘not artistic’, were full of American idiom, were ‘unsuitable for English actors and actresses’, were ‘artificial and unreal’, that they employed ‘creaky dramatic technique’, that they were lacking in ‘emotional satisfaction’44. When she wrote to Lady Gertrude Forbes-Robertson45, the actress’s secretary responded refusing the play on her ladyship’s behalf and asking if she was ‘having it re-written in a more “playable” form’46. Given her ability in writing often very popular works (like My Brilliant Career and the Brent of Bin Bin series) and her clear dedication to the task of things theatrical, why was there no success? For this seems to be the common apprehension amongst those few scholars who make reference to her theatrical writing. And certainly there is no common knowledge of her theatrical forays today. Miles writes extensively, explores themes feminist, social and national. Underlying each of these, though, is romantic sentiment, a constant in much of her prose as well. This is interesting – and not just dramaturgically – given her strident feminism. Did Miles choose to write this way because she thought that was what plays ultimately were? Outworkings of romantic tales with political or social comment tacked loosely to them? Even in those theatrical works which painted the life of the Australian pioneer, the cockatoo farmer and the squattocracy, even here where she was consciously contributing to the creation of a national identity for her country is the sentimental romantic ideal present and glorified. Within her plays, this writing of the romantic is frequently overdone, to the degree that certain of the works are almost inaccessible. Others, though, thrive under the heavy hand of love. The play entitled Phoebe Lambent and Love,

43 Pfisterer, Susan and Mahony, Edel (eds), A Fringe of Papers: Offshore Perspectives on Australian History & Literature, Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Inst. of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, England, 1999, p. 80. 44 These comments relate primarily to Miles’ submissions of Phoebe Lambent and Love (Frame 44), The Onlooker Sees Most (Frame 137) and Release (Frame 135) to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Sydney’s Independent Theatre. Numerous responses to other plays can be found at FP, ML MSS 364/88. 45 Lady Gertrude Forbes-Robertson (1874-1950) worked as an actress using the name Gertrude Elliot and was said to be a highly charismatic performer. Married to actor Sir Johnstone Forbes- Robertson, the couple were best known for their interpretations of Shakespeare. 46 FP, ML MSS 364/88, frame no. 66. 18 penned in 1923 when Miles was living in London, is a fabulous work, intricate, compelling, with good characterisation, convincing dialogue (dialogue is a continual strong point of Miles’) – in fact, the full check list of dramaturgical essentials appropriate to the genre employed. Its subject matter, however, includes an illicit affair and an unwanted pregnancy, issues that, although not unknown within the theatrical world, were not the most sought after by its practitioners. And Phoebe Lambent and Love is by no means the only one of Miles’ theatrical works to explore such taboos. There are frequent open discussions of free love, suggestions of abortion and of illicit affairs. Although content surely played some part in Miles’ ‘failure’ as a dramatist, other elements also need to be taken into account. On first reading, there are apparent truths in certain of the criticisms she received during her lifetime. The plays are often ‘creaky’ and inauthentic. Some start off well, but seem to fall short of the promise of earlier scenes. Some are heavy and laboured, while others appear to suffer from fragile or unresolved endings. But Susan Pfisterer again offers insight in naming these ‘classic example(s) of feminist dramaturgical non-closure’47. Still other plays were criticised for being rambling, or episodic, but Miles herself gives a clue to this in a letter she writes to Nettie Palmer in 1929:

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. … The desultory style of pioneer settlements themselves should be suggested, growing up unpretentiously as they did to meet immediate need. An easy, unrazored, pipe-smoking, almost casual method is needed. The old pioneer yarns ‘yarned’ by the old bush granddads (with as like as not a grandma contemptuous of their inconsequence and deviations from original versions) rubbing their tobacco in their palms and holding up the climax (they mustn’t have too much climax) to light and draw, have a charm as characteristic as their environment…48

47 Pfisterer, A Fringe of Papers, p. 81. The context of Pfisterer’s comment is within her discussion of Miles’ play Somewhere in London, written in 1916. For a synopsis of this play, see Synopses of Selected Plays in this thesis. 48 Roe, My Congenials, v. I, p. 219. 19

Pfisterer makes the point that Miles worked and reworked her scripts, and that she ‘refused to sacrifice the impelling dramatic pace created by this episodic structure.’49 Plainly, Miles was quite conscious of the manner in which she constructed her plays. So what might have been seen by those theatre practitioners who rejected her dramatic work as examples of poor writing, could well have been indicative of a theatrical sophistication that had not at the time developed in the industry at large.

The volume of correspondence between Miles and various theatre practitioners is substantial – around 200 pieces – and the overwhelming sense of them is certainly that of desperation met by constant rejection. But amidst this exists another story, a story that speaks, indeed, of Miles’ success. The theatrical fraternity at the time – despite difficulties with many of the plays and contrary to the current misapprehension that she failed in her playwrighting career – deemed as many as five (as far as is known) worthy of production or public reading, at least two of which were produced more than once. One of these, entitled Call Up Your Ghosts, was written with Dymphna Cusack and shared first prize in Melbourne’s New Theatre one-act play competition in 1945, receiving a production by the company in October of the same year. Call Up Your Ghosts is set in a bookshop and is a comment on the tragic state of the Australian literary and publishing industry at the time. It was written after the playwrights had attempted to spend £20 on Australian books, had been able (because of the limited works on offer) to spend barely ten, and had been met by booksellers with snobbery and derision that their interest was not in literature English, American or European. There’s no point in Australian literature, they were told. Literature should be universal. Appropriately, one of the characters in Call Up Your Ghosts is named The Ghost of Australian Literature. Call Up Your Ghosts received at least another three productions50. It was produced by the Adelaide Theatre Group in 1946, by the Perth New Theatre

49 Pfisterer, A Fringe of Papers, p. 82. 50 There is evidence to suggest that Call Up Your Ghosts also received a production at the New Theatre in Brisbane. Miles writes a letter to playwright Laurie Collinson in December 1948 giving him permission to produce the play. Roe, My Congenials, v. II, p. 215, 243. 20

League in 1948 – who played it in three different venues – and by the Players’ Club of Sydney in 1949. Miles was told that the play was ‘admirable, excellent, amusing, “a scream”’51, that it was ‘unusual and striking’52. The Players’ Club wrote that they were ‘glad of the opportunity to produce an original Australian work for the first time in Sydney and [felt] it was very successful.’53 The Sydney and Perth companies paid the playwrights one guinea in royalties, and Adelaide paid two. For Miles this was a great boon; it was not unusual for her to receive royalties for prose works in the form of postage stamps. There was also No Family, published in 1937 in Best Australian One Act Plays by Angus & Robertson and the recipient of several productions across some decades. In 1946, No Family was the final play in a program of four short plays, presented by the Australian Playwrights’ Theatre at the New Theatre, Sydney. The programme opened Wednesday 26th June and also included plays by Dymphna Cusack and M. Barnard Eldershaw. The New Theatre was likewise the venue for a reading of Tom Collins at Runnymede, presented to the Sunday night meeting of the Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1944. And the same year, the young journalist Godfrey Bentley produced a reading of Virgins and Martyrs Out of Date under the auspices of the Australian Literary Fund in the Newcastle WEA rooms. Intriguingly, there exists a contract presented by J. and D. De Leon of the “Q” Theatre54, London, for production of the play Bouquets. The blanks have not been filled in, however; Miles’ name does not appear anywhere, and the contract is unsigned. It is quite possible that this is because it is Miles’ own copy of the contract and that the production went ahead. Perhaps it was even a success.

51 FP, ML MSS 364/88, frame no. 179. 52 Ibid., frame no. 171. 53 Ibid., frame no. 187. 54 The Q Theatre was built on the Brentford side of Kew Bridge in 1924 and seated 500. It was known for trying out new plays, and for the number of actors who made their first appearance on its stage. It was refused a performance licence in 1955 and, with the death of its founder, Jack de Leon, a year later and insufficient funds to modernise the building, it was demolished in 1958. Banham, Martin (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, p. 891.

A photograph55. Miles in old age in her house in Carlton, Sydney. It is the 1950s. She is standing in her library, her back to a wall of books, wearing a crisp, striped shift. The sun is shining in from an unseen window and falling onto one side of her face, and onto the vase full of sunflowers she is tending. She seems to be standing carefully, as though having deliberately placed the sunflowers between herself and the camera, as though, in fact, desiring to be certain of the cover they offer. Her eyes are tired and sad, her mouth now devoid of the once bright, fearless smile. It is not as though there is no softness to her – there is. But, not surprisingly, it is edged with a wariness, a film of circumspection, the lot, one imagines, of many a writer, regardless of the level of success. It is hard not to look back, not to compare this image with those taken in her younger years. No longer does she sit perched upon the edge of her career, or stand overawed by the enormity that is possibility; that is many years past. There is a sadness to this photograph, a quiet sort of brokenness, but a sadness and a brokenness which, strangely, seem not a tragedy but a right and glad fulfilment of a life lived in hardship and difficulty for the sake of art, a hard road trod for the creation of truth, beauty and goodness. This thesis, then, is an examination of those theatrical works that were seen to have failed. It is an attempt to analyse them in the light of Miles’ own life and experience, of the times in which she lived, with the issues that she faced as a woman, a writer, a feminist, an Australian and an expatriate. It will demonstrate the importance of her work in the light of the formation of an Australian national identity, and will work towards the possibility of her plays finding an appreciative audience today. Most importantly, though, it will show something of the woman whose faithfulness to her calling speaks clearly of her success but who died in the tragic and mistaken belief that she was a failure.

§§§

55 Mitchell Library, PX* D 250 (v.1).

‘Winter. Corner of a down-town street in a shabby part of a great American city. … Streets muddy and puddled. Bedraggled remnants of snow here and there wilted down to ice, making the pavement exceptionally slippery. … An occasional labourer goes by, seamed, bent and dirty from toil. It is the slack time of the afternoon.’

Thus begins the first of Miles Franklin’s theatrical works (at least of those of which there is record), The Survivors56, written in 1908. The city, we discover later in the play, is New York, that great metropolis of the arts that had been our heroine’s first intention upon setting out for The New World. A newsboy, Ginger, stands outside a saloon selling the latest headlines: ‘Evening pap—eer! Wreck of the Midland Flyer! Seven dead and many injoored!’ Nearby, Billy, a man in his thirties, ‘a fine intelligent, robust looking man’ (p. 1), holds a stack of newspapers in his arms. His body stops short at the knee, the result of an horrendous workplace accident. These two are joined by a third, Charlie, whose lungs are weakened by tuberculosis, that curse of the working man. They are passed at times by various ‘cripples’ – a fellow with one arm, another with just one leg – victims all of the cruel and careless system upon which they depend for their bread. Joining them is Dick Dallas who, when first we meet him, ‘walks with energetic swinging strides, whistles a lively air and carries a dinner pail’ (p. 5). He is described as ‘a muscular young man in working clothes’ who speaks ‘cheerily’. His manner, we see, is affectionate, his hand strong. He is drawn into conversation by Charlie who tries to persuade him to join the union; he has, Charlie considers, ‘something to him and would be worth gettin’ in.’ Dick rejects the offer, refuses to help ‘the weaklings’ for fear of becoming one himself. He isn’t concerned about the overtime he is doing; it’s all part of his plan to better himself and to get out of the factory once and for all. ‘I’m stronger than you’, he

56 This term was used by Sidney Webb, the founder of New Statesman, in 1910, when he remarked on eugenics: ‘It is accordingly our business, as eugenists, deliberately to manipulate the environment so that the survivors may be of the type we regard as the highest’. In Freeden, Michael, ‘Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity’, pp. 144-172, in Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth Century Progressive Thought, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005. 23 says when Charlie warns him of the possibility of tuberculosis. ‘[I]t’s the irrevocable law of the survival of the fittest.’ As the men discuss bills and unions and social reform, they are approached by the marvellous Avis Gaylord, celebrated stage actress and heiress to the fortune of a manufacturer. She is elegant, graceful, charismatic, and brings with her the brilliancy and allure of another world – the world, as Dick Dallas would have it, of the ‘survivor’. Young Ginger, having been befriended by the actress the previous year on her daily constitutional walks to the ‘theayter’, proudly shows off his connection with her. Earlier, the men had been reading a newspaper article about Miss Gaylord so we know something of her character, that she is ‘dissatisfied with her art’, and ‘weary of amusing the inane in brainless roles’. She is reported as having said that she desires to forsake her fortune in order to ‘earn her living as a poor but honest chambermaid or nurse for the sick’, unless a playwright ‘can supply her with a drama outlining a cure for trusts, sweatshops, dudes and all the similar evils of modern society…’ (p. 3). So when she sees poor legless Billy, her response is no surprise to us: a fervent and sincere desire to help him in some way. ‘Help, be damned!’ booms Billy. ‘You can’t give me back my legs’ – but the eternally majestic Avis is not put off. Deeply affected by his plight, she alters her tone from one of imperiousness to humility, and wonders if he is the teacher she has been looking for. ‘I want to know everything from the other side’, she says. ‘You must not spare me.’ She leaves to catch one of the passing street cars – ‘…I like to ride in them once a day if I can – it brings one so in touch with life.’ (p. 12) As she approaches the edge of the sidewalk, she slips, but is ‘reverently rescu[ed]’ by Dick Dallas and falls no further. Before she can thank him, or he delight in her gratitude, Gerard Grosstin, the son of a manufacturer and a fervent admirer of Avis, pulls up in his chauffeur driven automobile and ‘seizes Avis Gaylord as one having the right’ (p. 12). This act, we see, is also one of rescue, though in this case merely apprehended; Grosstin considers that he is saving Miss Gaylord from the ‘contamination’ that is Dick Dallas. ‘Gee whiz!’ says Grosstin, for he is not so long out of college and speaks at times as one still batting for the junior league. He recognises Dick Dallas – who introduces himself as an employee of Grosstin & Co – and so rewards his faithful 24 servant for his efforts with a coin. Dick Dallas, furious, hurls the coin at the receding automobile, cursing Grosstin and swearing that one day their situations will be reversed, that one day he himself will be the survivor. Act II opens in summer, ‘nineteen or twenty months later’. Much has happened, it appears, in the intervening period. Avis Gaylord has taken on Billy – clean shaven now and enjoying the newfound mobility of a wheelchair – as her ‘lady companion’ (p. 18)57 and Ginger – ‘looking well-dressed, pert and prosperous’ (p. 16) – as her ‘confidential advisor’ (p. 18), and has set them both up alongside her in a first class summer resort hotel. The lads are taking in the sun on the piazza when they see approaching an old friend, Dick Dallas, ‘in the garb of the leisured or moneyed but looking a physical wreck.’ (p. 17) Clearly, he’s been ‘surviving’ in terms of wealth and status – he’s earned himself something of a name as a playwright – but, by his own admission, he should be ‘confined in a jail for consumptives’ (p. 19). He is bitter as he speaks of it, bitter also to hear that Gerard Grosstin, he with his ‘autos and jewels and palaces’ (p. 21), is still hanging around Miss Gaylord. Dick Dallas’ views have changed; he wishes he had listened to unionist Charlie, now on the other side of the grave. He thinks he would have been further ahead if he had. Billy and Ginger leave to ‘butt in’ on Gerard Grosstin and Miss Gaylord (the latter has promised Ginger 50c for every time he disturbs one of their meetings), and Dick Dallas meets with Lincoln L. Freeman, artistic agent for Miss Gaylord, over a Manhattan. Lincoln L. informs Dick Dallas of Miss Gaylord’s intention to go into ‘a nunnery or philanthropy’ (p. 22) unless Dick writes her a play pertaining to the ‘evils of our present social systems’ (p. 22). ‘Clever women are queer kettles of fish to handle’, says Lincoln L. in his appeal. Clearly he thinks little of her views.

You see this Billy she has around here – a fine fellow in his place, but you know – (shrugs his shoulders) well, she has engaged him as her tutor in sociology. She says that he should be a professor at Harvard, that his leglessness is the highest diploma she’s seen, and that he’d teach more of economics in one day than most of the philosophers and political economists ever know – there now! (p. 23)

57 On p. 23 he is also referred to as her ‘tutor in sociology’. 25

Dick Dallas, as it happens, agrees with her, emphatically in fact, and recognises that there is a general stirring of the public conscience regarding the problem of poverty. Lincoln L. also recognises a shift in the social order, but he terms it a ‘craze’. ‘There is always some new fad…’, he says. ‘This one will go on in the old order. It cannot change. Socialists may sputter and anarchists rave, but at bottom there is no escape from the one immutable law of life and that is – the spoils to the victor! The survival of the fittest!’ (p. 24) Dick Dallas, spurred, dashes his glass to the ground, and leaves, refusing, for some undisclosed reason, to meet with Miss Gaylord whom he has not seen in person since the event on the street corner close to two years ago. Avis Gaylord, appearing with Gerard Grosstin, Billy and Ginger in tow, appears nonchalant at the news that Dick Dallas did not stay to meet her, but Gerard is completely bemused at what he considers to be ‘peculiar’ behaviour. ‘[T]o know of her is to want to know her’, he says. ‘[A]nd if he knows of her and doesn’t want to know her, Gee Whizz, don’t you know, he is still more peculiar.’ (p. 26) Miss Gaylord, though, becomes greatly intrigued by the playwright when Lincoln L. tells her that Dick Dallas considers ‘no actress on the American stage today capable of doing anything but wearing a sensuous Paris gown and disporting herself in some pornographic balderdash for the edification of the moneyed degenerates.’(p. 26) Her curiosity is piqued still more when she discovers that she has in fact met the playwright previously, and that when he was a working man. ‘I remember the incident quite distinctly,’ she says, ‘because Mr. Grosstin meant to be generous but the man was of such calibre that his pride was hurt, and to see anyone hurt always hurts me so that I never forget it. I would much rather be hurt myself.’ (p. 27) She reaches the opinion that he must think very little of her to spurn her so. Her opinion appears vindicated in Act III when she and Dick Dallas – initially stiff and ungracious towards her – are at last forced together in a social situation. Avis Gaylord has called upon the Sociological Committee of the Women’s Anti-Rust Club to stage a discussion, the topic in question being what she is to do with her enormous inheritance now that she has a fully developed social conscience. Speaking are: Mr Gerard Grosstin, whose recommendation is that the money be spent on ‘welfare’ for those in the employ of large factories, that it provide ‘comfortable, attractive and well equipped libraries, and rest rooms 26 and when space permits, keep small parks for the benefit of employes [sic]’ (p. 41); Dr. William J. Splick, President of the International Tuberculosis Society and a prominent physician suggests the funding of ‘an institute properly equipped for the treatment of this fell plague’ (p. 42); Miss Geraldine Garity, Office Secretary of the Allied Militant Suffragette Associations, who proposes the money be put ‘into the business of obtaining the vote for women…’ (p. 43); and Dick Dallas, notable writer and author of “The Inadequacy of Contemporary Civilization”, presents his idea that all ‘sane’ adults be given ‘a stake in public life’, that they be educated ‘to a knowledge of their rights and that by organization those rights may be theirs here and now in this generation’ (p. 45) and not in the possession only of ‘the survivors -- the fittest’ (p. 46). Avis Gaylord is roused by Dick Dallas’ speech – to which he appends his own sad tale – and tells him before those gathered that she will play his drama at her new theatre. Despite the fact that he does not seem to have invited her to do so, he bows graciously: ‘The play would be honored by such an interpreter’ (p. 48), he says. But the exertion of the occasion is too much for him in his weakened consumptive state and he collapses into Avis’ arms, ending the Act most dramatically. Act IV, we are told, opens a ‘little later in the height of the theatrical season.’ Billy is in the reception room of the new Avis Gaylord Theatre while Dick Dallas’ play – featuring Miss Gaylord herself and entitled The Survivors – is in full swing. He is confronted by Lincoln L. who tells him that Dick Dallas is refusing to come to Miss Gaylord’s party that night or to join the others in curtain call. Billy is bewildered by this and assumes Dick’s refusal is to do with changes Avis has made to his play. He questions Ginger as to the nature of the changes, who tells him that:

…Dick wrote about a guy being crushed an’ wore out by modern society or somethin’, an’ losing the girl he loved, at least never havin’ the nerve to tell her he loved her at all. Maybe he was thinkin’ of himself – eh? … Well. Miss Avis, she up an’ says the public wouldn’t stand for anything so pipe the eye as that, so in the last act what does she do but take an’ change it all so that the guy is goin’ to get well after all an’ the girl -- sure Billy (He lowers his voice confidentially) I believe she means herself is goin’ to marry the guy and anyhow it winds up leaving you guessing that it has a first class finish to it. (pp. 49, 50)

When Avis, in between her scenes, discovers that Dick will not be present at the party or, indeed, for curtain call, she is disturbed. In conversation with Billy she lets slip a sliver of her feelings for the playwright; moments later Ginger appears with a bunch of red roses left at the theatre by the same anonymous admirer who has been leaving a bouquet every night of the run. (p. 53) Avis is summoned back to the stage and, as she goes, charges Ginger with ensuring Dick Dallas’ appearance that evening. Ginger and Billy are joined by Gerard Grosstin and three other young men dressed in college regalia with pennants and a banjo who introduce themselves as ‘co-eds with Miss Gaylord at Yalverton’ (p. 54). This ‘Chorus’, as they are called, are cut from the same cloth as Gerard ‘GeeWhiz’ Grosstin, and punctuate their statements with a rousing ‘Rah! Rah! Rah! Sis, Boom. Ah! Yalverton!’ They have come to surprise their heroine, the lovely Miss Avis, but are roped in by Ginger to capturing Dick Dallas, binding him hand and foot and bringing him to the reception room. Billy, alone in the reception room with Dick Dallas (whom he shortly releases from his bonds), reasons with the furious playwright and forces him to confront his feelings for Miss Gaylord in a manly way. As Billy exits, Dick admits to himself to being ‘a coward and a crawler’. When Miss Gaylord appears, he is again thrown into confusion and threatens to leave, but she convinces him to stay. Brief and embarrassed flurries of love are exchanged, then together they make their way onto the stage to greet the audience and to announce that ‘life is going to be true to the end of the play.’ (p. 63)

An Inclination to Empathy As Miles writes The Survivors, ideas pertaining to the concept of social Darwinism are widespread. Only half a century earlier, Herbert Spencer expanded Malthusian ideas of ‘population control by moral restraint’58 with the publication of his work, Social Statistics. This made popular the term ‘survival of the fittest’, the idea that ‘(t)hrough evolution, the “fittest” would naturally continue to perfect

58 Black, Edwin, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 2003, p. 11. 28 society. And the “unfit” would naturally become more impoverished.’59 ‘The whole effort of nature’, Spencer wrote, ‘is to get rid of such, and to make room for better. … If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.’60 When, in 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species, he put forth the theory of natural selection. This was ‘the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case, there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage.’61 For Darwin, Black reminds us, the focal point was the ‘natural world’, being the world distinct from humanity. Nonetheless, the works of Malthus, Spencer and Darwin were picked up by others and labelled with a single term, that of ‘social Darwinism’, which term Darwin himself never used. And encapsulated in this was the idea ‘that in the struggle to survive in a harsh world, many humans were not only less worthy, many were actually designed to wither away as a rite of progress. To preserve the weak and the needy was, in essence, an unnatural art.’62 It is such ideas that inform those within The Survivors. It is, Miles writes at the beginning of the play, The Present, a time when men are under the closed fist of those who profit from the ‘legs and lungs’ (p. 6)63 of others. Despite her own struggles as a reformer working for improved workplace practices and conditions, or perhaps because of them, she writes as though she cannot conceive of a time when such practices and conditions are policy, when it is not a given that a man will lose his limbs merely because he operates heavy machinery, or sacrifice his lungs for the want of appropriate protective apparatus and ventilation. It is as though she believes that even if a century passes, still will her play contain a remnant or more of relevancy. And so it does.

(Enter a bleary-eyed, hapless, disreputable woman of the streets who stops to drop a nickel into Billy’s hat, but refuses the paper he offers.)

The Derelict: News don’t mean anything to me.

59 Black, Edwin, 2003, p. 12. 60 Spencer, Herbert, in Ibid., p. 12. 61 Darwin, Charles, in Ibid., p. 12. 62 Ibid., p. 12, 13. 63 Also, Avis, on p. 28, says: ‘…it was made from the lungs and legs of strong men and at the expense of the health and purity of defenceless young girls…’ 29

Billy: Thanks, old girl, but don’t you want it as bad as me. Life kinder treats your sort an’ mine about the same, don’t it?

The Human Derelict: Sure, but it will be all the same in a hundred years. (p. 7)

The advice given to Miles Franklin as a teenager by Thomas J. Hebblewhite back beneath the silvery leaves of the gumtrees of New South Wales is something she does not forget here in the cold, wet streets of America. Again, she takes it to heart and writes about what is around her, about what she knows. The difficulties and hardships of the working man and woman are hers now too, she thinks, inasmuch as she, as part of the National Women’s Trade Union League, fights with those suffering and against those who make suffering part of their employees’ lot. The fact is, though, that Miles’ knowledge of this life is not the same as her knowledge of life in the Brindabella Ranges or on Talbingo station, her grandmother’s property where she spent much of her time. Nor is it the same quality of knowledge as those who actually live it. Certainly, Miles has her own difficulties which she must endure – long hours, overwork, poor pay – but it is not to be compared with the conditions of those of whom she writes. She always has recourse to help and aid in the form of those well-met friends about her, can rest and recuperate when she feels the need in the home of the wealthy Lloyd family and, essentially, is free at any time to remove herself from the role of social reformer and take a better paid position as a stenographer in an office or a cadet journalist for The Chicago Tribune if all she is interested in is making for herself a comfortable living. But to her credit it is not, and she does not. Nor, as we have already seen, does she follow the path of marriage purely for the sake of establishing her status – a viable situation for women in any age. Rather, Miles is, among many other things, a romantic idealist, which idealism must be exercised at all costs. At this point in her life, then, romantic idealism is showing itself in this selfless, caring work for others, in the building of a better world. Still, despite her dedication to social reform, the fact remains that were things to get too much for her she could extricate herself from them and pick up a

30 life elsewhere with comparatively limited disruption. How, then, does this bear itself out in The Survivors? It would be easy to say that The Survivors doesn’t go deep, that there is a sense of remove about it, as though we are looking at the characters from the outside and not really experiencing their suffering and pain, the suffering and pain of the true working man. It would be easy to say that this is because Miles doesn’t really know the depth of the difficulties of those of whom she writes given that she is from beyond their sphere, and that her upbringing, however poor, was one that insisted upon a certain level of culture and class. It would be easy to damn it for its fairytale ending, so apparently out of touch with any authentic situation, to smear it as merely the fantasy of a young girl on an adventure from another country who believes the dressing of all wounds with romance is the sure path to happiness. And, in one way, this would be a fair reading. But there is something else at work here, something beyond the immediate dramaturgical concerns and something that any scholar of Miles would see at once. Woven deeply into the fabric of this play and exemplified over and over is something of the essence of Miles, is an outworking of the spirit of the woman herself. To take the first point, that of the play not going deep and having to it a sense of remove: the answer given to this in the above paragraph adheres to Hebblewhite’s view that one should only write what one knows. One imagines that this advice was given in the knowledge that the recipient was a young girl, lacking in experience but plainly not in talent or ambition. For such a one it is appropriate and extremely helpful advice as we see from the results, that is, from My Brilliant Career. Presumably, Hebblewhite would not have given the same advice to a more experienced writer, in recognition of the place that imagination and research play in the writing life. What we are seeing in Miles’ writing of the working man’s experience is not as simple as not having lived the life and so not truly knowing it or being equipped to comment on it. What we are seeing is rather a natural inclination towards empathy. It cannot be forgotten that, although she does not share the life of the working man and woman to the detail, it is for their sake that Miles strives. There is a genuineness and sincerity about her reform work, not least because she needs

31 to be kept employed herself. In a way, she really does believe that she is one of them.64 Miles’ inclination to empathy was not suddenly aroused in the ghettoes of Chicago. It was, of course, evidenced in the Mary Ann scheme concocted with Rose Scott back in Sydney, and, yet further back, seen in her daily life at Talbingo Station where, as a very young child, she would load up the passing swagmen with food for their continued journey, to the surprise and delight not only of the recipients themselves but of the various family members and farm hands who witnessed her generosity. It was common in this place and time – and a fine model for anyone, not least a future reformer – that the poorer members of society be cared for by the wealthier, but the fact that one so very young should be ensuring it be so was of great delight to many.65 It must be remembered, too, that Miles writes in The Survivors not only of the poor but of the rich, particularly of those rich confronted with the plight of the poor and seeing it within their power to bring about some sort of change. She sees models for such characters in her friends Margaret Dreier Robins and her husband Raymond. Margaret, of course, is the dashing leader of the National Women’s Trade Union League and pays Miles’ salary as secretary of the League from her own pocket. Entrepreneur Raymond made much of his wealth from a lucky goldmining strike in the Klondike in 1897 and now preaches the social gospel from Chicago’s Plymouth Church.66 The Robinses, though wealthy, choose to live in the down at heel end of town in solidarity with the poor. Such an act could be thought little of in others who, once the novelty of pious slumming has worn off, leave the grimy tenement or dingy basement for a large, light and roomy home set in a colourful garden suburb more in keeping with their class and status. But clearly such derision is misappropriated if applied to the Robinses who made tremendous financial sacrifices for the sake of their beliefs and for the service of others.

64 This belief is furthered, of course, by the work previously undertaken by Miles in domestic service, and as a seller of shoes in a department store. Though the idea of working in a department store may not sound particularly loathsome, it should be noted that the wages were frighteningly low, and that, according to Miles, young girls were not infrequently forced into acts of prostitution in order to supplement their incomes. In The Net of Circumstance Miles writes, ‘Many a girl had graduated to the brothel by way of the department store and its starvation wages.’ Franklin, Miles, The Net of Circumstance, in Coleman, Miles Franklin in America, p. 89. 65 To read of Miles’ first ten years, see her book Childhood at Brindabella, Angus & Robertson Publishers, Sydney, 1979. 66 Coleman, Miles Franklin in America, p. 99. 32

There was also the Lloyd family, that great bastion of wealthy Chicagoan reformers who had so cared for Miles after the shock of the death of her sister and whose friendship with Jane Addams and philanthropic largesse situated their home, The Wayside, in Winnetka, as almost an extension of Hull House.67 Avis Gaylord and the Sociological Committee of the Women’s Anti-Rust Club, clearly, are born from these models, an example of Miles acting upon the advice to write what she knows, as well as exercising her own imagination and concerns.

The Need of the Rich The Survivors, despite its grim and difficult theme, is, like so much of Miles’ work, a romantic tale imbued with a heady idealism. It speaks plainly of the marrying of opposites – of rich and poor, of beauty and ugliness, of wholeness and brokenness – and of the rescuing of the one afflicted by the one enabled. Most obviously we see this in the eventual coming together of Dick Dallas and Avis Gaylord, but it is apparent also in the delivering by Avis of Ginger and Billy from the cold and arduous world of the sidewalk to the ease of the summer resort, and the eventual rescue of the suffering by the wealthy that Avis considers will occur as a result of the play in which she is performing in her new theatre. And there is, of course, that beautiful moment when, after Dick has given his speech in Act III before Miss Gaylord and the Sociological Committee of the Women’s Anti-Rust Club, he ‘falls in a faint’ and is caught – is rescued – by the heroine herself, who cradles his head in her arms. It is, again, a rescuing of the poor by the rich, and, in addition, of the man by the woman. Though there is no doubt that Miles holds to the concept of noblesse oblige – that of the obligation of the rich to the poor in respect of social responsibility – we see embedded in The Survivors also something of the need of the rich for the poor. Avis is struggling with her conscience. She cannot bear the weight of wealth that she knows has been accrued at the expense of others. She is bored with the plays she has been performing in. The newspaper headlines in Act I declare that she is ‘Wear[y] of amusing the inane in brainless roles! Thinks the

67 Coleman, Miles Franklin in America, p. 109. Miles would later develop close friendships with the Lloyd sons, William Bross and Demarest, and would find in them amusing escorts. 33 stage worthy of a higher purpose!’ and believes that ‘Actors and actresses should be more than harlequins or clothes horses!’ (p. 3) She has vowed to leave the life of the stage and ‘earn her living as a poor but honest chambermaid or nurse for the sick’ (p. 3) unless, as stated earlier, she can find a play to perform that is appropriate to her concerns. It is not enough for her that she acts merely for the sake of acting; she must act for the fulfilment of art and for her soul. Because she is prevented from this, she experiences restlessness, disenchantment and emptiness. The first stage of her salvation comes in the form of Ginger and Billy. These two become her reason, her meaning. While she is waiting to find her way in terms of things artistic and philanthropic, her gaze rests on them as her two shining and now prettily dressed mascots. Presumably, during the ‘nineteen or twenty months’ that pass between Acts I and II, Ginger and Billy become for her an outer sign of her inner churnings, a reminder too of the work yet to be done, the decisions yet to be made. There is a sense that Avis comes into her own during this period, elated at being able to enact a complete overhaul on each of these young, working class men. One imagines her ordering about tailors and barbers (in her most charming manner, of course!), dealing with smithies and craftsmen in the creation of a wheelchair for Billy, establishing the two of them in pleasant apartments and generally cooing over them as though they were foundling kittens. For that period of time between her public declaration of dissatisfaction and the debate hosted by the Anti-Rust Club, Ginger and Billy become her project. For that period of time she forgets the slow coldness of her boredom and the burgeoning emptiness of her soul as she attends to their every necessity and, indeed, desire. There is for Avis a profound need to fill herself by first emptying herself. In giving her money she is gaining some sense of meaning. In pouring herself out over Ginger and Billy she is experiencing the sensations that come with generosity and largesse. The boredom, the emptiness, is forgotten in this outpouring. Her soul, for the present, is enriched, enlivened. For close to two years she is diverted – in a good way – from the troubles that were eating her earlier. The poor, then, have fulfilled something for her, have, in a sense, rescued her. Her need for them is at least as great as their need for her. That the lives of Ginger and Billy are now significantly easier does not alter this fact; her 34 momentary fulfilment and satisfaction in generosity indicate that she has been rescued by them as much as they have been by her. Once the two poor men are poor men no longer but are settled on the flourishing lawns of the summer resort hotel, Avis again grows restless, again begins to look about for meaning. Only now does she organise the talks at the Anti-Rust Club. And here she makes the decision to use her money to build a new theatre so that all can be recipients of the bounties of art, whatever their position in life. Here, too, she vows to perform in Dick Dallas’ new play, is overjoyed, in fact, that at last there is a piece of drama that speaks plainly of her own concerns. Dick Dallas, then, by offering her something that she has yearned for – that is, something of substance – has rescued her for a second time. Dick Dallas’ play has been written by a man who has known much of suffering, first because of the lowliness of his station, and now because his illness – due in part to the tuberculosis and part to the love of Avis that is eating him up. Though he is no longer poor, there is an equating with poverty in his current physical suffering. His suffering in illness now is offered in exchange for his suffering in poverty then for, it seems, that good art can only be created in the context of sacrifice. We see this not only in Miles’ drawing of the character of Dick Dallas, but in the artistic history that informed her – that of the tradition of the impoverished artist suffering for their art, sacrificing all in order that they might create. Art, we have seen, equates with meaning, with substance. Avis is not suffering, has sacrificed little, and so cannot create. She is dependent on, is rescued by, the suffering of others. This is when she can begin to find some meaning, some substance. The rich need the poor, Miles tells us. Their wealth cannot fill the internal abyss and good art cannot come from comfort. Avis’ pouring out, then – onto Ginger and Billy, and into her newfound plan to build a theatre for all – is an attempt at sacrifice and therefore suffering. It is her effort towards that which leads to wholeness of soul and beauty of creation, towards meaning and substance and art. Her attempt at rescue is a learned one; she has already been given the pattern of such by those she is trying to save.

Miles and the Meta The title of this play, of course, is the title, too, of that theatrical work written by Dick Dallas, that play within the play to which end the narrative moves. The metastructure is made present by this method of mirroring – of character, of story, of theme – which mirroring is present not only within Dick Dallas’ play but within Miles’ own life. A larger play, then, becomes present, a play that extends beyond the proscenium arch into the imagination of the audience and out through the theatre doors. As we watch – or read – The Survivors, as it moves towards its culmination, we are aware that Dick’s play of the same name is also being watched, though by an audience unseen by us. In addition to this is the fact that the final scenes of the narrative with which we are engaging are likely very similar to those engaged with by that other audience, that audience on the other side of the wings. As Dick and Avis struggle into an admission of love, and as we cringe and ache and grow breathless with anxiety at the possible losing of the moment, so too do those characters to whom Dick has given life confess their devotion before a fevered auditorium. More intricately, it is to this auditorium that Dick and Avis – as playwright and actor – make their way at curtain call, to demonstrate most cheerfully that life indeed is mirroring art. The audience of which we are a part stand and cheer and throw roses. Miles is among us, then with the milling crowds in the foyer afterwards. As she passes through the theatre doors to make her way home she steps into another level of narrative, or rather, she leads us into that level of narrative from which these others emerge. Her own wonderings at love, her own desire to make art: these are the reality from which all we have just seen is reflected. But that which we have just seen is also the reality that provides for Miles the possibility of a happy ending, that spurs her on into the making of art, that strengthens her resolve to not give up the struggle of the artist. And again the mirroring. We have seen Miles choosing to work in a difficult, underpaid position with the National Women’s Trade Union League rather than merely seeking a comfortable living in an office as a stenographer or journalist. In the same way, we see Avis declare that she no longer desires to be ‘amusing the inane in brainless roles’ but rather wants to present something of

36 substance and worth, something that shows the truth of how the working man lives. We have seen too that Avis is not suffering, has sacrificed little and so is unable to create art. We have seen that she is dependent upon, is rescued by, the suffering of others. Miles, writing about issues of social justice, writing about aspects of life regarding which her knowledge goes only so far, also is dependent upon and is rescued by the suffering of others. The life of those for whom she works is the life of those of whom she writes, is the life, in turn, that gives to her the content and context of her work, that gives to her, indeed, the ability to move into art and create.

III

‘An ordinary living room in an ordinary flat…’

Phoebe Lambent and Love is set at the very beginning of the 20th century. Act I takes place in ‘an ordinary living room in an ordinary flat’, in a London suburb, ‘say Fulham’, the home of Phoebe Lambent. We find our heroine, ‘a tall well- formed woman of thirty’, swathed in a negligée and shawl and reclining on the couch. Dr Brown is completing his examination of her; it is immediately apparent that Phoebe is pregnant and is not happy about it. The doctor, a kindly fellow but ignorant of her domestic situation, writes her a prescription to relieve her anxiety and exits, leaving the door unlocked so that the delivery boy can enter at once with the medicine. A moment later, a beautifully dressed young woman, Joyce Lattimer, appears. She is not known to Phoebe, but the latter gathers herself to comfort the girl, for she is plainly distressed. Between sobs, Joyce manages to tell Phoebe the purpose of her visit: she has received a letter informing her that Phoebe Lambent is the mistress of her fiancé, Mr Percy Lovejoy, and she is here to investigate. Phoebe is moved by the love that Joyce plainly has for her fiancé, and convinces the young girl that the letter was an attempt at blackmail by an unknown enemy of Mr Lovejoy – a not unlikely scenario given that he is standing for Parliament – and that Mr Lovejoy is no more than a lodger to her. She insists upon Joyce’s complete secrecy regarding this ‘adventure’ (p. 8), for her own sake as well as for that of Mr Lovejoy. She calls Joyce a ‘[b]rave little woman’ (p. 8) and they part warmly, Joyce expressing her desire to call on her again. No sooner has Joyce Lattimer left than another beautiful woman, this one of about forty, enters. She announces herself as Mrs Lattimer and the mother of Joyce. She is seeking her daughter’s whereabouts, guided, she says, by a letter she found addressed to Joyce. Phoebe assures her that Joyce left in a calm state, implying in this that she is not the mistress of Mr Lovejoy. Mrs Lattimer, however, is a woman of sophistication and plainly knows that Phoebe is not speaking the truth, and so challenges her as to why. ‘It was she and I, face to face’, says Phoebe, ‘and she loves him. Love like that should have right of way to happiness.’ (p. 11) When Mrs Lattimer indicates that her daughter will have to be 38 told of the truth of the matter, Phoebe makes plain her disagreement. ‘Why break her heart – prematurely?’ she asks. She goes on to declare that ‘[i]t is simply a matter of polygamy. While so many men are killed in war or emigrate to more masculine pursuits, you have your daughter’s side of the case, and you have mine. We both want love.’ (p. 11, 12) On cue, a newsboy is heard outside proclaiming the headlines of the day: ‘War Extry! 20,000 more men! ‘Bobs’ wants 20,000 more men. Official!’ Mrs Lattimer is not convinced. She cannot accept the idea that her daughter is to marry a man ‘of the world’ (p. 13), nor that Phoebe might ‘condon[e] men’s lapses’ (p. 14). Her focus shifts, however, when Phoebe suddenly becomes faint. The latter insists it is a ‘sick headache’ (p. 17), but Mrs Lattimer is at once suspicious when she administers the medicine – delivered at that moment by the doctor’s boy – which she associates with pregnancy. She insists that Mr Lovejoy be told immediately so that he might accept his responsibilities. Phoebe becomes anxious and declares that she would rather destroy herself than have Mr Lovejoy know. She informs Mrs Lattimer that she will be going away the next day, and insists she not betray her secret to anyone. Shortly after Mrs Lattimer leaves, George Goodwood, best friend to Mr Lovejoy and a ‘broad-shouldered hearty looking young man’ (p. 19), enters to find Phoebe stretched out on the couch in darkness. He has let himself in to gather Mr Lovejoy’s things for a political journey north and speaks with great cheerfulness about his friend’s engagement. It is apparent to the audience before it is to Phoebe – she that is still suffering with her ‘head’ – that his happiness at Mr Lovejoy’s forthcoming nuptials is due to the fact that Phoebe, whom he had thought was in a relationship with Mr Lovejoy, is not, and is in fact ‘free’ (p. 23). He declares his love for Phoebe, who in turn declares that it cannot be. ‘I have had a hard training’, she says. ‘It has taken the softness and simplicity – the power to make a god of a man out of me – and that is what is needed to make a happy marriage.’ (p. 24) Goodwood, however, is persistent, relentless, begs to be allowed to ‘redeem men in [her] eyes’ (p. 24), and is finally rewarded with Phoebe’s agreement that he can claim her if he waits for her a year. During this time he is not to see her, nor to communicate with her. Goodwood, manly, accepts the challenge, kisses her hand, and leaves. 39

Phoebe’s ‘ordinary living’ room is graced with yet another visitor. Mr Lovejoy himself at last makes his appearance, casual, nonchalant. He says nothing of his engagement to Joyce and is startled and suspicious when Phoebe offers her congratulations. Realising that she is genuine in her sentiments, he commends her for being so ‘sporting’ (p. 30), and gives her a cheque for fifty pounds. ‘This has taken a weight off my mind’, he says. ‘It is better than a thousand pounds in my pocket.’ (p. 31) Again Phoebe extracts a promise from her visitor – that he will tell no one of their affair – then informs him that she too is to be married, and to his old friend, George Goodwood. Lovejoy is horrified at this and berates Phoebe for her lack of decency. He insists that she forget Goodwood, emigrate to Australia or Canada and find a man there. He will not let her have Goodwood. Phoebe retorts that if he breaks his promise of silence then she shall ‘follow [him] to the ends of the earth and shoot [him] like a rat.’ (p. 34) She tears up the cheque and tosses the pieces at him. Lovejoy, furious that she extracted the promise before he knew who her fiancé was, puts down her behaviour to hysterics, but is clearly affected nonetheless. He takes his leave and Phoebe ‘falls sobbing wildly in the dark.’ (p. 35) Act II opens 20 - 22 years later, in the spring of 1923, in the home of George Goodwood, O.B.E. (who looks poised for Lord Mayoralty), and Mrs Goodwood (née Phoebe Lambent). Mrs Goodwood is paid a call by Lady Lattimer (Mrs Lattimer of Act I) and Mrs Lovejoy (née Joyce Lattimer) who inform her that the latter’s daughter, Pamela, has struck up a friendship with Phoebe Jr Goodwood, Mr and Mrs Goodwood’s daughter, and that the two girls are keen to spend the holidays together at the Lovejoy’s home. Lady Lattimer takes her leave, Mrs Goodwood exits briefly, and in this time a young man, Percy Benlove, is admitted who declares himself to Mrs Lovejoy (previously Joyce Lattimer) to be her son. He attempts to extract money from her, is momentarily deflected, but makes plain as he leaves that this will not be the end of it. Later, Lady Lattimer speaks with Mrs Goodwood (Phoebe Lambent of old) of a situation involving her ‘boy Percy’. She tells the younger woman that she has received a letter from his foster parents informing her that he had been sent down from Oxford for some hazy reason – ‘something to do with funds’ (p. 59) – that he had confronted his foster parents – ‘…if he was a bastard he had to be paid for it…’ – and proceeded to ‘practically [hold] the old couple up for 40 money.’ (p. 60) In the light of the impending trouble, Lady Lattimer entreats Mrs Goodwood to tell her husband of the existence of this other child. But the latter refuses. ‘I would even prefer that he should die and I be left alone, than he should know’ (p. 63), she says, startlingly. Act III opens with Mr Lovejoy and Mrs Goodwood together in Lady Lattimer’s garden room. Mr Lovejoy has requested this meeting to discuss the growing friendship between his daughter, Pamela, and her son, Paul. He is not happy about it, wants an end to it, but Mrs Goodwood will not oblige, saying that they will have to ‘make a tragedy for the children’ (p. 69) in order to end it, and that she will not do. She wants to keep their secret – that is, their past affair – to themselves, and wants it to affect no others. ‘It’s a great secret Phoebe!’ he says. ‘A member of the Cabinet and the future Lady Mayoress! Ha! Ha! Ha!’ (p. 70) Phoebe begins to speak about the past, about that period of ‘nearly a year’ (p. 70) in which she was very ill, as though attempting to tell him of her pregnancy. ‘There are certain crises,’ she says, ‘where only a woman can help a woman, and save her, without increasing complications.’(p. 71) Mr Lovejoy, however, does not seem to get it. The two renew kindnesses, forgive each other for past grievances, and Mr Lovejoy hints at a remaining desire for her. Aware that someone is coming – his wife, in fact – Mr Lovejoy exits carefully through the garden door. Mrs Lovejoy enters. She has been looking for Mrs Goodwood and was told by the latter’s maid that she may have come here, to Lady Lattimer’s house. She prefaces her speech by informing Mrs Goodwood that she wants to be her friend, then tells her that she now knows ‘[a]ll that you and Mother tried to keep me from knowing.’ (p. 74) She says she is ‘too good a politician’ to have allowed her husband to discover that she is aware of his past affair. It becomes plain that Mrs Lovejoy had known of Mrs Goodwood’s early affair with her husband since almost the very beginning of the marriage, and that, also, Mr Lovejoy continues to participate in adulterous behaviour. She tells Mrs Goodwood the real reason for her visit: to inform her that ‘a most diverting young Japhet68 in search of a father bounced in and insisted that

68 Japheth, son of Noah, is considered by some to be the father of the Japhetic race, that is, of the Europeans. Japhet is the term used to denote those who allege connection with royalty, based on the idea that any two Englishmen, for example, have at least one common ancestor and so can 41

[she] was his mother.’ (p. 76) She said she had barely thought of the event ‘in the rush of that wretched bye election’ (p. 76) but was forced to when she saw the young man again, this time in the company of their children at a dance at Claridge’s69. She was struck – as she had been the first time she had seen him – by the young man’s resemblance to her husband and comes to an understanding of the situation. The women agree to continue to keep the information secret.

Mrs Lovejoy: We mustn’t let it ruin the men’s careers. That would be all-round social suicide.

Mrs Goodwood: Disaster worse than death.

Mrs Lovejoy: Now you are sentimental. It is not a star affair so that our daughters would be offered fabulous engagements in the music halls and you and I could make a pile writing the story of our lives for rival Sunday papers – while the men put up with it.

Mrs Goodwood: Oh Mrs Lovejoy, how can you be flippant!

Mrs Lovejoy: I was never less flippant. (p. 79)

Upon assuring Mrs Goodwood of her every help in the matter, Mrs Lovejoy takes her leave. The matter, however, becomes more and more challenging. Lady Lattimer, who has been the one supporting young Percy for all of these years, works diligently to pacify the boy who now believes that it is Mrs Goodwood and not Mrs Lovejoy who is his mother. Mrs Goodwood, despite the advice of others, softens; her maternal instincts rise and she wants only to bring her son, neglected by her for so long, into the bosom of her family. Later that afternoon, now the beginning of Act IV, the Lovejoy and Goodwood children have discovered something of the situation. Percy Benlove,

claim kinship with the king. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part II comments, ‘they will be kin to us, or they will fetch it from Japhet.’ (II.ii 117-18) 69 Claridge’s is a luxury hotel in Mayfair, London, founded in 1812. It was acknowledged by Baedecker’s Handbook for Travellers to London and its Environs’ (first edition published in 1877) as being the first hotel in London. It enjoys a long association with royalty, and is hence sometimes referred to as an extension of Buckingham Palace. See Burnett, John, England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating Out in England from 1830 to the Present, Pearson Education Limited, London, 2004. 42 whom the children met at the aforementioned dance at Claridge’s, presents his case, mentioning such evidence as a monogrammed handkerchief, a letter and a wine stain birthmark. Pamela Lovejoy and Phoebe Jr Goodwood seem almost accepting of the situation; Paul Goodwood, however, is furious and distraught.

Paul: But it couldn’t be with us! It would be a scandal like they have in the papers.

Pamela: Well, these things are like murders or divorces, they have to happen to someone. We don’t know when it will be our turn.

Paul: It doesn’t happen to people like – like Mummy. It is putrid! This is your own father. What would your mother say?

Pamela: Mother always says you mustn’t be surprised at even an archbishop.

Paul: You can think things about your father if you like, but I can’t have it about – about – MUMMY! (p. 94)

Paul, tremendously upset, boxes Percy’s ears and tells him that he’d like to kill him for what he has said. He leaves in haste to inform their father of the events. Percy, insolently smoking a cigarette, blows out the smoke in rings and scatters his ashes across the floor. When Pamela upbraids him for this latter behaviour he retorts, ‘[i]t’s modern to scatter the ashes. Only the fogies use trays. I forgot I was in a museum.’ (p. 96) Pamela then makes known that she foresaw trouble and so left a note to her father telling him to arrive to meet his ‘natural son’. (p. 96) Phoebe, in turn, announces that she has organised for her mother to appear. Mr Lovejoy and Mrs Goodwood arrive, and dispatch the three young people. While they are in conversation, George Goodwood, informed by Paul of events, enters silently from the garden ‘and stands as if petrified in the long silk curtains.’ (p. 100) Mrs Goodwood admits to Mr Lovejoy to being the mother of Percy Benlove, but firmly will not tell the name of his father. At Mr Lovejoy’s suggestion that it is perhaps George, she is horrified: ‘My husband’s name in this connection – how dare you, Sir! How dare you! This is infamous.’ (p. 101)

George Goodwood appears from behind the curtain and Lady Lattimer enters. She has sent Pamela home in a taxi and Phoebe has gone to look after Paul. There ensues a hard discussion. George Goodwood shows himself a true and noble fellow; he makes plain his support of his wife and insists there will be no scandal. At the same time, he is ‘bowled over by everyone’s lack of trust in [him]’ (p. 106), and wishes that he had been confided in at the time. Mrs Lovejoy arrives and announces practical and immediate plans. She has arranged for Mr & Mrs Goodwood to come to dinner and the theatre with her the following night in case there is a leak. She asks her mother to come too, and suggests she book a box at Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife.70 ‘Courage’, she says to Mr Goodwood, ‘will teach you that most of the agony is mere sentimentality.’ (p. 110) She exits, doesn’t respond when her husband calls after her. Mr Lovejoy follows her out through the garden as Lady Lattimer takes her leave to be with the children. Mr and Mrs Goodwood are alone. Their love remains intact despite the difficulty. Still, George is saddened that his wife did not trust him enough to tell him of the situation earlier, and wonders if this is because he did not love her enough. To this, Mrs Goodwood says, ‘Oh George, it was because I loved you so much that I deceived you. Your love was heaven open for my entry.’ (p. 111) The subject turns to Paul and the fact that he is taking it all very hard. They agree to go to him when Phoebe Jr rushes in ‘panting with agitation and haste’: ‘Daddy! Mummy! Come quick! Mummy! Mummy! Paul – Paul has - -’ The stage direction indicates that ‘[s]he hurtles into her mother’s arms in a dead faint’, and the play ends with a ‘QUICK CURTAIN’ (p. 111).

The Landscape of Art Such an ending, naturally, raises questions of resolution and closure, questions that are not unique amongst Miles’ plays to Phoebe Lambent and Love. Not infrequently does she leave her audience hanging, though with this particular play she does so with high melodrama. As mentioned in Chapter I, her endings frequently adhere to the designs of what Susan Pfisterer terms ‘classic example(s)

70 Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife is a play in four acts set in Paris, France. It is based on the French book by Alfred Savoir and premiered at the Ritz Theatre, New York, on 19th September, 1921, playing until February of the following year. Retrieved 12.02.07, Internet Broadway Database, ibdb.com. 44 of feminist dramaturgical non-closure’71. The emphasis, though, for numerous of Miles’ plays in this regard is that of the gradual unfolding of a yarn, in a way that might hold fast to principles feminist but just as well might not. Feminist methods perhaps appear to underscore Miles’ work, but whether they were utilised consciously or not in determining form and story is another matter. We might recall the ‘easy, unrazored, pipe-smoking, almost casual method’ mentioned in Chapter 1. We might recall Miles’ words ‘that a story to be truer than reality should follow natural contours and rhythms.’72 These words were penned by Miles some years after the writing of Phoebe Lambent and Love and were referring particularly to her Australian writing – ‘I find myself capturing a technique to retail the subtleties of Australian life and landscape’ – but clearly such methods were at work in her earlier writings, and indeed in her plays, as evidenced here. Phoebe Lambent and Love is a tale of life in London, and so the landscape that informs its writing is one of streets and squares and tall office buildings. The natural contours comprise corners and train tracks and flights of stone stairs into laneways, the rhythms those of the churning of traffic, the bustle of crowds, the music of dancehalls, the heave and swell of modern life. In such a context, the idea of an ending of suddenness, of abruptness, by no means appears anomalous: for what city is devoid of dead ends and blind alleys, or of unforseen detours and diversions? It is interesting to consider the manner in which a writer takes to a work, for so much of the method and intent, naturally, determines so much of the ultimate content. To think of Miles developing her plays in an ‘easy, unrazored, pipe-smoking, almost casual method’ tells us immediately what sort of plays these are not. Hers are not examples of the well-made play: they are not pristine, elegant, with every component meeting by the final act its theatrical perfection. To know that she adhered to the idea ‘that a story to be truer than reality should follow natural contours and rhythms’ makes it plain that there will not necessarily be evenness of form, symmetry of structure, exactness of resolution in the traditional genre sense.

71 Pfisterer, A Fringe of Papers, p. 81. 72 Roe, My Congenials, v. I, p. 219. 45

And having awareness of a playwright’s method in turn gives insight into the shape of the play. So those characters, for example, who are present in Miles’ theatrical works that might appear once then never again and who seem to have little if any bearing on the plot, can now be seen as mirroring those characters who in reality appear and disappear in the self-same way: a conversation at a bus stop; a one-off meeting at a social event; an interaction with a street vendor. Likewise, those portions of the plays that might be considered episodic can now be viewed as echoing the turns taken into unexpectedly short byways, or pausative moments over tea, or rests on park benches part the way through a long walk. And the endings, so fragile at times, or startlingly abrupt as in Phoebe Lambent, or so very often lacking in any sense of resolution that comes with a ‘well made’ conclusion – creating in fact the opposite state, that of frustration, of irritation – are now suggestions of the ceaseless lappings of water at jetties, of the endless way of streets giving onto streets giving onto streets, or, as in the case of Phoebe Lambent and Love, of sudden drops or unexpected cul-de-sacs. In short, it is the sense of the non-completion of any earthly tale until the turning of the final page of death. It is not, perhaps, inappropriate to refer to certain of Miles’ plays as adhering to themes of modernist nihilism. The incidental or episodic component, the frequent lack of direction, the pointlessness, the emptiness and waste – all are indicative of such a theme. And, in a sense, Miles herself is the quintessential modernist, or is the quintessential embodiment of Australia’s birth into modernity. She leaves the frontier and tradition where things, though difficult, are known, quantified, understood, for the uncertainty and danger of the new, unknown and modern world. Bizarrely, ironically even, in arriving at the shores of the New World, that is, at San Francisco, she finds it flattened, ruined by the earthquake that shattered the city only days earlier: a picture of modernism73 in pieces. And Paul, who one would think to be, as a member of the younger generation, modern, is not, and makes plain his revulsion for such ideas in the sudden and abrupt ending, we assume, of his life. There is much, then, in this ending, in the suddenness of it, in the shock. Theatrically, there is an element of a not inappropriate frustration – of wanting to really be certain, of desiring to see – that works to heighten the experience of the

73 What is meant here by modernism is that confidence and faith in progress that was associated with and exemplified in America in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. That a major, thriving city could be destroyed by natural means seemed to destroy also this confidence. 46 audience, to leave them struck by not only the horror of Paul’s death, but by the outworking of ideas that led to such a tragedy.

Miles Franklin and Love Our heroine – like Miles’ own – has no dearth of gentlemen callers. In leaving Australia she leaves also her adoring cousin, Edwin Bridle, who has promised to wait for her while she fulfils her ambitions abroad. His letters to her are patient and loving; there is no question of his devotion to her. But Edwin is quickly forgotten – if he was ever thought of very much at all – in the whirl and enormity of American life. As she travels across the Mid-west towards the Windy City, Miles becomes attached, albeit briefly, to a circus troupe. So impressed are these folk by her horse riding and sharp shooting abilities that they invite her to join them. The strong man, clearly besotted, proposes marriage. ‘You bad girl to leave such a lot of broken hearts behind,’ writes her sister Linda from Goulburn. ‘To be hoped you won’t break so many in America, if so stay with one of them & console the poor thing.’74 The strong man, though, is not the one, and, clearly, is left unconsoled. In Chicago there are the Lloyd brothers who provide her with ample diversions, and the delightful Fred Pischel who teaches her to drive75. She is a sought after dinner companion for her wit and charm, not infrequently attends the opera and the theatre, and rarely spends an evening in. But for all the attentions paid to her, for all the flirtation and fun, Miles, it seems, is never in love. To this – and perhaps not surprisingly – her view of such a state comes out a romantic one, an idealistic one. Something of this is seen in Phoebe Lambent and Love during the first exchange between Phoebe and Mrs Lattimer. Mrs Lattimer, remember, has just discovered that Phoebe has been having an affair with her daughter’s fiancé, and that she has hidden this fact from the bride to be.

Phoebe: Your daughter has a right to happiness in her love. We should protect her to the death against any breath of knowledge that would spoil her heaven.

74 Roe, My Congenials, v. II, p. 47. 75 Coleman, Miles Franklin in America, p. 156. 47

Mrs Lattimer: You have a romantic idea of love!

Phoebe: Love is the illumination, the only explanation of life.

Mrs Lattimer: You have not loved yourself?

Phoebe: Because love has passed me by I must not block its right of way for others.

Mrs Lattimer: Books have been your chief companions?

Phoebe: They have been my only friends.

Mrs Lattimer: Your theory of love shows it. I have loved wildly, but in practice.

Phoebe: And you found - -

Mrs Lattimer: - - that it can bring bitter heart break. (Rising, she walks to the mantel)

Phoebe: It might be worth it just to have loved. (p. 15)

But Phoebe, as we see from Act II, does of course come to love. Miles, however, does not – at least, she does not appear to. Though on the one hand she esteems love through the voice of Phoebe as ‘glorious’, as ‘life itself’, indeed declares such a state to be one which she’d ‘walk barefoot through hell to keep’ (p. 25), she decries too the manner in which she perceives that marriage enslaves women to men, in which it traps and limits them, and ensures that theirs will be a life of drudgery and nothing beyond. She appears, too, to have had a strong aversion to physical intimacy, something her prose characters, as Marjorie Barnard notes, not infrequently pronounce. Freda Healey in Back to Bool Bool has ‘an incurable disgust for marriage’76, and Milly in Ten Creeks Run thinks:

It was disgusting that the wonder of a lovely little baby of one’s very own should rest upon such vulgar horror. Ugh! She would not marry at all, no matter what anyone said about old maids.77

76 Franklin, Miles, Back to Bool Bool, in Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 154. 77 Franklin, Miles, Ten Creeks Run, in Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 154. 48

Miles further determines never to take the bonds of holy wedlock because of war: the idea of ‘the breeding of future heroes for destruction’78 is anathema to her. In old age and living alone in Carlton, a suburb in Sydney’s south, she declares herself as having maintained a state of chastity throughout her life. The interesting thing about all of this is that it comes back to the point made earlier in this chapter: to that of story and to the manner in which a playwright approaches the crafting of a play. For Miles who clearly had such deep opinions about marriage, love and the various outworkings of each, and who was engaged throughout her life in work or thought of an actively feminist nature, it is worth noting that themes of romance, love, love lost and later retrieved are recurring ones throughout her theatrical endeavours. But more interesting than this, perhaps, is the manner in which such themes are expressed. There is very much a sense of Miles writing through her conflicts in order to come to some sense of understanding of her opinions, as though the creation of tales of love in others will somehow bring her a clarity, an apprehension, of the place of love in her own life. The thing about Miles’ plays – and it is unsettling for a reader to experience this – is that, despite the amount of stage time given to discussions of love, despite the fact that many of the plays have love as their central theme, the subject in a way seems tacked on, seems somehow appended to the story. Any dialogue pertaining to the matter appears as thin, studied, laboured, of a tone at odds with other components present. What is it about Miles that, despite her apparent aversion, continuously drives her to write about love? Why does she not choose subjects with which she has a little more affinity? Why are there not more plays embodying, for example, the subjects contained within The Survivors?

Of course, Phoebe Lambent and Love is not simply about love qua love. It is about issues that come forth from this that are of great concern to Miles as a flourishing feminist: namely, those issues pertaining to a woman’s freedom – or

78 State Library of New South Wales Exhibition Booklet, Miles Franklin: A Brilliant Career?, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004, p. 12. 49 lack thereof – to conduct herself in the manner she chooses, which manner is deemed inappropriate by society at large. On a first reading, Phoebe Lambent and Love appears as a strong voice for feminism. The main character, a woman, leads a life of financial independence, is free to entertain her lover as she chooses but is not tied to him, nor is she expectant of the trap of marriage – why should she be when she has love and money without? She discovers, however, that she is pregnant, and so disappears for a year, deals quietly with the situation in the liminal space between acts. That her past returns to create difficulty in her life is indicative of the manner in which the systems of the day will not allow her to receive full absolution for previous ‘wrongs’. She is trapped in a world that is ungenerous to the expressive, individualistic woman, that never forgets, that makes it impossible to live a life beyond that which is prescribed. And it is for the sake of women such as Phoebe Lambent that Miles and others so boldly fight. Intriguingly, if one did not know something of Miles and of her feminist proclivities, one could be forgiven for taking the complete opposite reading. The woman who sows seeds of sexual immorality reaps a harvest of destruction and pain to herself and to those whom she loves. Though she may attempt to cover her past, she can ‘be sure that [her] sin will find [her] out.’79 In time, all will come to light, and she will be powerless to prevent it. The natural outworking of wickedness will not be held at bay: the day of accountability must surely arise, and arise most horribly. So is this a feminist play or not? There is something in the narrative type of Phoebe Lambent and Love that, though it is dramatic in nature as opposed to prosodic, is recognisable as that utilised by the pre-modern novel.80 Within this there existed a strong sense of right and wrong, of good begetting good and evil begetting evil. These judgments were meted out by the God-ordained hierarchy that proposed a God-fearing Society as its general conscience, measure and jury. Society, as representative of proper Christian behaviour, acted as a reference point to any character engaged in any activity. Its measure was plain and clear; there was little question as to what

79 Numbers 32:23. 80 For the relationship between Christian doctrine and the modern novel, see Jeffrey, David Lyle, People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture, Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1996; Prickett, Stephen, Words and ‘The Word’: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986. 50 was appropriate conduct and what not. Lines were deeply scored; whichever way you ventured there were outcomes directly pertaining to the path chosen. In all of this, Society as conscience, measure and jury was also aid, helpmeet and teacher. The concept of individualism81 in pre-modern days is not as it is now. There was a sense that one was able to live the life prescribed because of the strength of the framework that was Society. Repentance is evoked, and a right undertaking of penance. When we read a pre-modern novel we observe the manner in which the characters – and especially those inclined to waywardness – must engage, must grapple, with this framework. The method by which they choose to engage and grapple determines for them their outcome. It is impossible for any of these characters to not engage with Society; to suggest such a thing is to suggest that they do not engage with themselves and this, in the pre-modern novel, does not occur. By the time we reach the twenty-first century, however, the place of Society in the literary arts is far from what it once was. Either it exists as something to rail against, or it does not exist at all. In the first instance, there is the danger that the work will slide into politics and polemics; in the second, that, having no measure or mean, it will become little more than a glistening bubble adrift on the mindless, the meaningless, breeze. So what we see in Phoebe Lament in Love is something most interesting. We see that Miles has taken the form of the pre-modern narrative type with its presence of Society as character – that which establishes measure and mean – and juxtaposed it against twentieth-century forms of individualism and the descent to meaninglessness. Phoebe Lambent has a conscience, is still – because of her place in time – surrounded by a strong societal framework, but will not engage with either. There is no sense of clarity and repentance; all is about her efforts to cover up, to disguise, to keep hidden: the behaviour, surely, of one whose conscience troubles them. Miles, then, by using the pre-modern narrative type is giving to her audience a form recognisable to them, a form familiar and comforting in its initial appearance of Society as character, of Society as a right and proper measure for

81 For a discussion of notions of the pre-modern self within theatre, see Chapter 9, ‘Renaissance Theatre and the Crisis of the Self’, in Bouwsma, William, The Waning of the Rennaissance: 1550- 1640, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000.

51 behaviour. In doing so, is she softening her audience in preparation for what is to follow: that is, for the political affront in suggesting that a woman who participates in pre-marital sex, finds herself burdened with an unwanted pregnancy and spends the next twenty years trying to hide the fact, is not morally impure but is rather socially imprisoned?

‘A sultry afternoon in Tucker-Time Gully, seventeen miles out on Jingarah Run… A typical gully where a wealth of shrubs, tree-ferns and smaller cryptogamic varieties obscure a crystal stream. The slender trunks of gum trees ascend for hundreds of feet.’

Smith is The English Jackaroo, fresh from the mother country and turned out in a manner more appropriate to Rotten Row82 – what with gloves, hunting crop and monocle – than to the bush. His fair English skin, we read, ‘is sun-burned to a painful scarlet’. Clearly, he is finding it difficult to adjust to his new surroundings – ‘If ever I live to get away from these barbarians and this God-forsaken, jumped-up hole of ignorance… Confistication! Holy Moses! Smoke and brimstone!’ – in stark contrast with the young girl, Dulcie, who appears by the creek the picture of ‘capability and intelligence’, just after he has run off into the ti-trees to catch ‘Possum, the station’s ‘equine factotum’. Dulcie, with the whistled tune Believe me if all those endearing young charms soft upon her lips, is joined first by her equally bush-savvy brother, Phill, and then by their younger sister, Vera, a little girl in a short pinafore. Their older brother, Joe, a young man of about twenty, joins them too, and the four of them fall to their tucker and to talk of the new Jackaroo.

Dulcie: You didn’t tell young Smith to always keep a bell on ‘Possum, did you?

Joe: You bet I did! Blooming fool! He’s about as much use at a cattle muster as a clucking hen.

Dulcie: Oh, Joe! You’ll hurt his feelings.

Phill: Hurt his feelings! What a lark! I reckon he’s an idiot. Haw! Haw! Don’t cher know! (Phill gives his idea of the English Public Schools dialect).

Dulcie: I wish I had his education.

82 A broad track running along the south side of London’s Hyde Park, Rotten Row was popular in the eighteenth century among the well-to-do as a fashionable place to be seen. 53

Phill: Edjercation! I bet he can’t spell Woolloomooloo. (p. 4)

It doesn’t take much to spot that Dulcie is rather taken by the young man, but it is young Vera who first articulates it. ‘Aw! Haw! Dulcie is spoony on him’ (p. 6), she cries, and Phill exhibits the pair’s initials that he has carved into the white trunk of a nearby gum tree. The group is joined by Jim Froggart, smartly dressed and in his mid to late twenties, who works as the postman for the area. Jim’s horse has just died coming up the hill on the way to deliver parcels to Jingarah Run. After much discussion – during which the inadequacies of the English Jackaroo are further exposed and Jim replaces the Jackaroo’s carved initials with his own – it is decided that Jim can ride Phill’s horse up to the house. Thunder rumbles, a storm threatens. The young people gather their things and prepare to leave. Dulcie, though, is reluctant to go without Smith, who is still in the mess of ti-trees just beyond them.

Jim: Come on Dulcie. The blooming Jackaroo can’t get off the run.

Phill: She’s gone spoony, dicky, sicky on Smicky from London, with an eye-glass in his peeper. (p. 11)

When at last Smith appears, Jim is surly and unfriendly towards the Englishman. ‘The thunder affects him’ (p. 14), offers Dulcie in explanation, but Jim won’t be a spare wheel and so leaves, going, he says, to where he thinks he might get a welcome. The storm breaks at Flea Creek so Dulcie and Smith stay where they are till it passes. Dulcie promises that she will help him to adapt a little more to the ways of the bush and of homestead life, so that he will not be an object of ridicule. Smith is appreciative, then sees the initials carved into the tree and cuts his own back in over Jim’s. ‘I’m not going to let any man get ahead of me like that’ (p. 17), he says, and shows Dulcie his handiwork.

Jackaroo: What do you think?

Dulcie: Anything would look better to me than Jim’s initials.

Jackaroo: Rather rough on poor Mr Froggart. He seems to be wasting his appreciation…

Dulcie: Appreciation! Pooh, old Froggart got a mortgage on us in the last bad season and he always has his precious Jim pooching around to see that we don’t sell a cow hide that he doesn’t know about.

Jackaroo: Ah, ha, Miss Dulcie! A melodrama in the making! The squatter’s beautiful daughter and a mortgage…

Dulcie: If you want to be friends with me, don’t say such things, even in fun.

Jackaroo: What ho! Some fun to be the poor but proud knight and rescue the maiden. (p. 18)

The storm passes and the two head back to the homestead. As they go, Smith takes the bullock bell and hangs it around his neck. ‘Better wear the bally thing myself’ (p. 20).

Act I, Scene 2 opens ‘some ten or eleven weeks later’ on a hot afternoon in the sitting-room of the Jingarah Run homestead. Mrs Somerville is in her chair attending to the mending. Smith is lying on a makeshift bed in the middle of the room with the bullock bell and an array of books within reach. It is plain that he has broken his leg. Dulcie sits by his side, instructing him on the spelling of Woolloomooloo and putting the finishing touches on an elaborate counterpane she is working. Phill appears from under the bed, surprising Smith with a blast from a pair of bellows. He produces a magnificent snake skin from inside his shirt which he presents to the English Jackaroo. ‘What a beauty! Just the thing I had set my heart upon’ (p. 22), replies Smith, and promises in turn to give his young chum a watch. Dulcie finishes her work and spreads the counterpane over the reclining Smith – ‘I feel like the Sheik of Araby! Topping work!’ (p. 23) – then goes to the piano and asks for a singing lesson.

Dulcie: Oh! I’d like to stand up like this with a little tiara crown on my head like that picture of Melba waiting – just waiting in a great hall for the conductor to raise his baton – 55

Jackaroo: Yes, that first breath of the orchestra when it wakes and whispers and sobs like the wind in the trees before a storm!

Dulcie: Ah, isn’t it heavenly! (p. 24)

She indulges then in a little romance, imagining fleeing to England, attending the opera, riding in Rotten Row, perhaps even seeing the King and Queen at a garden party. She imagines being ‘really beautiful’ and having ‘all the nice queer young Englishmen with eye-glasses and haw, haw … [falling] in love with [her]’ (p. 25). She engages in a little ‘strumming’ (p. 26) of the piano, then leaves at her mother’s request to stir the mulberry jam. In the absence of her daughter, Smith makes mention to Mrs Somerville of the loveliness of Dulcie’s singing voice. Before he can get very far, Mr Somerville appears, covered from head to toe in white ‘like a bride’ to take the bees. ‘Is this a wedding, Mr Somerville?’ Smith asks of him. ‘Something pretty nearly as dangerous,’ replies the older man. (p. 30) He and Mrs Somerville exit to smoke out the bees and collect the honeycomb, while Jim appears with a new song for Dulcie to sing, which sing she does. She stops after a few bars, declaring it ‘the washiest thing’ and leaves to attend to the jam. Jim, though, will not be so easily put off, and insists she see his new brown mare. The mare’s name for the moment, he says, is Sweetheart (‘and who does that denote?’ Smith asks mischievously) but Jim wants Dulcie to choose another for her. Dulcie gives him the brush off – ‘Oh, I’ve often seen her’ – and it is Smith that says he ‘should like to see the horse worthy of such a name’. (p. 34) At that moment, however, Mr Somerville rushes in decrying a bee sting. ‘Ho! Stingaree! Come here, Dulcie. Where the devil are you! Get it out! Quick!’ Phill insists that ‘[y]ou soon get used to [bee stings]’, and defers to the stoic manner of Smith. ‘When all the bull dog ants stung him, he only said they were rather a bore, don’t you know.’ Jim, in aside, gives quiet vent to his desire to ‘try a shark on him’ (p. 35). Phill, adoring, does not stop. ‘Smithy rode ten miles after he broke his leg.’ ‘So I’ve heard’, groans Jim. The bees swarm and bells are rung and kerosene tins beaten in an effort to disperse them. Phill returns covered in dirt and honey, then exits under instruction to wash it all off. Dulcie takes her father out to put some stuff on the sting on his 56 eye and Jim, his efforts to talk to Dulcie constantly thwarted, leaves to run up the cows. Smith and Mrs Somerville are alone once again and they return to the subject of Dulcie’s voice. Smith insists that hers is a voice that should be trained.

Mrs Somerville: She gets it from me. There’s quite a romance there. The first time my husband saw me I was singing at a church concert, and he never rested till he married me. … Dulcie doesn’t sing badly, but I had a much more beautiful voice at her age. You ask her father!

Jackaroo: She’s too young to judge yet really. But I believe there’s a fortune in her voice and she would have a magnificent stage presence.

Mrs Somerville: Stage presence! A play actress! That sort of people lead very dissolute lives – good cannot come of it. My father never let me sing in public except at church concerts.

Jackaroo: But times have changed. Girls have a right to develope [sic] their talents in these days.

Mrs Somerville: That depends. To be a hospital nurse is all very well, but a public singer on the stage! Besides when I have my attacks Dulcie is so strong and capable, she takes charge of everything.

Jackaroo: It’s a pity to waste a gift like hers.

Mrs Somerville: Her first duty is to her parents.

Jackaroo: God has given her the voice. He must mean her to use it.

Mrs Somerville: She can use it as I did mine.

…

Jackaroo: But I could interest someone in a voice like that.

Mrs Somerville: You are little more than a boy. You must let me insist on a mother’s right to know what is best for her child. Dulcie will marry early, as I did, and then settle down safe from theatrical ambitions. (p. 40)

The course of the conversation makes it plain that the man who Mrs Somerville thinks her daughter should marry is Jim Froggart. That Dulcie does not seem to have the slightest interest in the young postman her mother puts down to ‘girlish perversity’ (p. 40). She insists that ‘[a]ny girl would be glad to stand in Dulcie’s shoes. His father has mortgages on half a dozen stations. … Besides there are business reasons that would make it the happiest thing for us all when the time comes.’ Smith is not convinced, but it is Mrs Somerville who has the last, powerfully elliptical, word: ‘A happy married life is more natural for a woman than any gifts, besides I can’t do without her. God never meant women to . . . . .’ Smith dozes with The Bulletin over his face, and when he wakes he finds himself in Act I, Scene 3. Mrs Somerville is still mending: the pile of patched up articles at her side has grown quite large. The others enter and gather around the piano for a sing-a-long. After the first number, The Gallants of England, Jim takes to the stage alone with Dulcie as his accompanist. His singing is so bad, however, that another group song is quickly suggested, and Jim’s voice is lost in the mix. Dulcie then steps into the limelight and, at her father’s suggestion, sings his old favourite, the very one that Mrs Somerville was singing when first he saw her all those years ago. Dulcie intones Believe me if all those endearing young charms and does so, we are told, ‘beautifully, her young voice ringing out with strength and feeling.’ When she is finished, Joe compliments her, declaring that Smith’s lessons are working a charm. ‘Stick to it old man, you know more about that than whip cracking, and Dulcie is a born singer.’ ‘Thankyou my girl’, says her father. ‘Very nice; but no one could sing it better but your Mother when I first met her; But she had the voice of a Jenny Lind83 or a Madame Pattie84, eh, Mother?’ And here Mrs Somerville ‘smiles triumphantly at the Jackaroo.’ (p. 46)

83 Jenny Lind was born in 1820 in Stockholm and studied opera at the Royal Opera School in the city of her birth. She performed before Viennese audiences to great acclaim, and was considered sensational when she debuted in London. Her European reputation led to P.T. Barnum arranging her American tour, which again was incredibly well received. ‘Her great popularity was based as much on her personal qualities as on her voice – her charity and her embodiment to a seemingly superhuman degree of Victorian notions of female virtue, propriety, and gentility.’ Randel, Don Michael (ed.), The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, The Belknop Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1996. 84 Madame Adelina Pattie was born in Spain in 1843 to a Sicilian father and an Italian mother. Gifted with a beautiful voice, she was singing at Covent Garden by the age of 18, and by the 1890s she was one of the most famous and highly paid women in the world. For a detailed discussion of the 19th century female opera singer, see Rutherford, Susan, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815- 1930, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006. 58

The young people head off to go fishing, and Mr and Mrs Somerville also are taking their leave from the room. As these latter two depart, Dulcie announces that she is entering a singing competition in the hope of winning a scholarship to become an opera singer. Her mother, shocked, replies: ‘I would rather that God would take your voice, as he did mine, my dear, than it should be a snare and temptation to you.’ (p. 49). But Dulcie is persistent.

Dulcie: Will you let me go to Sydney to try? … Mother, Dad, let me try – just try. The judges will know at once if I’m a fool.

Dad: I’ll never give my consent to the play-acting business. I’ll never help a daughter of mine to a loose life. …

Dulcie: Let me go, just this once. If they say my voice is no good I’ll just settle down without grumbling, honour bright I will.

Mrs Somerville: Much as it would grieve me, I would rather see you dead tomorrow than singing for money. …

Dulcie: … Please Dad wont you go down to the sheep show and come with me and see yourself that there is no harm.

Dad: (Kindly) No more my girl. You think about your duty to your home and Mother. … …

Mrs Somerville: Your Father is right, Dulcie – men understand the world. (pp. 49-51)

Distraught, Dulcie runs from the room sobbing angrily, and does not even come when Smith calls softly for her: ‘Dulcie! Dulcie mia!’ Scene Four opens two hours later. It is night time in the Somerville’s sitting room, the only light a small lamp beside the Jackaroo’s bed. He is reading the letters delivered to him earlier by Jim when Dulcie enters the room bearing cooked chicken, a red rose and an assortment of delicacies. Jim catches her hand and draws her to him, insisting she doesn’t yet depart. Dulcie sits beside him, swears him to secrecy, then tells him that she is going to run away from the bush. 59

Smith tries to persuade her not to run away before letting her into a secret of his own: that he himself got into a ‘row about music’ (p. 58) with his father and ran away – to Jingarah! His father, Smith said, had wanted him to be a barrister, but the young man had no interest. His ambition was to be a composer and so he got involved with a musical comedy company – but his father cut off all supplies and left him like ‘a stranded fish’. With a few pounds from an old aunt he made his way out to Australia, a trip that he wouldn’t have missed for anything and that ‘knocked all the tom-foolishness out of [him]’. (p. 57) The sequel, he says, holding up one of the letters, is here. His mother is unwell and is fretting for him, worried that he is leading a dissolute life (‘She doesn’t know Jingarah!’ retorts Dulcie) and his father has agreed to reconsider his musical career if he returns to England. Dulcie is pleased for Smith, then begs that he might take her with him. He agrees – ‘Oh, Dulcie, how sweet you are and that rose smells like paradise’ (p. 59) – but makes her promise that she will wait until he has organised things. She puts the red rose into his bedjacket and he spontaneously draws her near and kisses her.

Dulcie: You mustn’t do that. No man ever did that to me before. I hate it.

Jackaroo: Perhaps you never wanted anyone to before?

Dulcie: I didn’t want you to. You’re silly!

Jackaroo: You are only a little kid after all. You look so grown up I forget you are a child.

Dulcie: I’m not a child. (p. 59)

When Smith declares his love for her, she passes it off as that sort of ‘twaddle’ that ‘men think they have to say … to a girl.’ ‘I don’t like you when you are fierce and queer’ (p. 60), she says, but nonetheless effuses about going to London at his pleasure. She is not daunted by the amount of work – ‘drudgery’, as Smith calls it – that is ahead of her; she’ll do whatever it takes to become a singer. Smith proposes that his mother come out – ‘I believe that the long voyage and this sun here would just cure the Mater’ (p. 61) – and take charge of Dulcie, both on the journey and then in London. 60

Smith kisses Dulcie again as a seal on their promise. As he does so, something on the veranda disturbs Dulcie. ‘It might be a snake in the garden’, she says (p. 62). But we alone see the silhouette of Jim stealing away in the moonlight. Act II opens some years later, in London, on a late November afternoon in the Hotel Muswell. Phill is now Mr Phillips, smartly dressed in American clothes, and manager to his opera singer sister. And Dulcie has reinvented herself as Madame Ingera85, a beautiful creature fashionably attired and with a hat that intriguingly shades her features. Word has reached her that a certain Madame Estra who was to play the lead in a new opera by a composer by the name of Lord Tredenham – the story of which has been kept carefully embargoed by those who know it – has taken ill. Phill, by means cunning and crafty, has managed to notate part of the secret score, and Madame Ingera, who has ‘left Manhattan in the lurch’ (p. 65), is keen to learn it that she might audition for the role left vacant by the ailing Madame Estra. Though there is no guarantee of the quality of Lord Tredenham’s work, she wants to ‘sing it or die’ (p. 65). Phill thinks this is purely because Tredenham is ‘a lord and he’s rich’ (p. 65), but Madame Ingera enlightens him.

Mme Ingera: Do you remember Smith, the English Jackaroo, who broke his leg at Jingerah Lickhole?

Phill: You bet your sweet life I do! The blighter promised me a watch and never divvied up.

Mme Ingera: Yes, and to make a prima donna of me.

Phill: Did he? You never told me.

Mme Ingera: He was going to bring his mother out to see us and dear knows what.

Phill: And never a blinking word from him from that day to this. (pp. 66-67)

85 In her novel Cockatoos, Miles tells of the character Molly Brennan, an expatriate, who changes her name to Mollye and then becomes Madame Austra the famous singer. (See Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 99.) As a fan of Dame Nellie Melba, it is likely that Miles was influenced by the singer’s choice of surname as being an echo of the name of her hometown, Melbourne. Austra, one imagines, is echoing the name of Molly’s homeland, Australia, and Ingera is echoing the name of Dulcie’s station, Jingarah, sometimes spelt ‘Jingerah’. 61

Madame Ingera reveals that she has kept an eye on his career through the papers, but that Lord Tredenham will not know who she is when they meet later that day as she has presented herself as an American. Phill agrees that that will be a great lark; Madame Ingera divulges that she is so excited she can hardly breathe. The hotel attendant admits Jim Froggart and Vera. Jim is prosperous looking and stout. When he sees Madame Ingera, he approaches her ‘heartily’ (p. 69), but is affronted when the latter greets him with a formal handshake, then asks to be excused. ‘Is that all you’ve got to say to me after a year?’ (p. 69) he demands. ‘By God! I mean to assert my rights this time.’ He exits, fuming, as sounds from off stage indicate Madame Ingera is practicing the aria which Phill has notated.

Act II, Scene 2, on or before the empty stage of the Long Acre Theatre, shows Lord Tredenham – previously known as Smith – and his colleague, Schorr, in discussion of the singer who is to replace Madame Estra. Both – but particularly Lord Tredenham – are nervous, uncertain that this American Madame Ingera will be appropriate. Their fears are laid to rest, however, when they meet the magnificent creature (still with the hat shading her features) and hear her sing. The song that Tredenham has composed takes as its lyrics descriptions of long ago Jingarah – its ferny gullies, its blossomed trees, its sinking southern sun – and Madame Ingera, it seems, more than does justice to its beauty. Lord Tredenham is intrigued; there is something about her voice that is strangely familiar to him. He asks her to sing something that she is naturally more familiar with, and she commences the strains of Believe me if all those endearing young charms.

Tredenham: By George! A miracle! Is it – can it be?

Madame Ingera: (Laughing) Say Smithy, have you forgotten how to spell Woolloomooloo? …

Schorr: You don’t mean it’s the girl of your dreams – of your opera?

Tredenham: It’s the girl from Jingarah – miraculously. (p. 78)

It is agreed at once that Madame Ingera will perform the opera. Phill and Schorr exit to deal with the press – danger of story leaks surround them – and Madame Ingera and Tredenham are alone. Madame Ingera tells Lord Tredenham of the sad death of their mother, of her Father’s subsequent remarriage, and informs him too of her own marriage to Jim Froggart, the postman, seven years earlier. Tredenham is clearly distressed by this latter piece of news and is not helped by the fact that Phill, at that very moment, enters with Jim in tow. The latter is nonplussed at the presence of Tredenham, or, to him, Smith the Jackaroo. ‘What game is this?’ he demands of Phill. ‘What does this mean?’ (p. 84) He demands to have his wife to himself in future, but is informed that Madame Ingera needs to rehearse for the opening in a few nights’ time. Tredenham even goes so far as to tell him that ‘[o]peras are more important than husbands these days.’ (p. 84) Madame Ingera, however, postpones contract negotiations until after opening night – ‘if I am a success’ – then puts her hand on Jim’s arm and goes with him to tea. Schorr also departs, and Tredenham and Phill are left alone. Phill ‘flaps’ him on the back and the two talk as once they did. Neither, it is revealed, has married. ‘[M]arriage is a mug’s game’, says Phill. ‘The wrong people always seem to get tied up. Look at Jim and Dulcie.’ (p. 87) When questioned by Tredenham, Phill suggests the reason they married was because ‘she just got tired of turning him down’ (p. 87). Tredenham, plainly, is disturbed. Phill then asks Tredenham why it was that he didn’t write to them after he left Jingarah, and why he didn’t send him the watch he had promised.

Phill: Poor old Mother was always wondering if you got home safely – Dad too. Their feelings were terribly hurt.

Tredenham: I wrote a thousand times – more or less. You don’t mean to say you never got my letters!

Phill: (Sceptically) Must have gone astray. Dulcie was telling me only today how you promised to help her become a prima donna and then never a word – She’s had a tough struggle and no one to understand – only me.

Tredenham: Did she think I went away and forgot?

Phill: Of course, so did we all. (pp. 87-88)

Tredenham realises that there is some mystery here, and determines to get to the bottom of it. He recounts to Phill how his parents wrote to Mr and Mrs Sullivan ‘say[ing] all the proper things’ (p. 86) in regard to Dulcie, but figured that, in the wake of no reply, the Somervilles were concerned for their daughter’s welfare and so suppressed all communication. Phill assures him, however, that they could never have stopped all the letters because he always got the mail bag first. The only other person who had access prior to this point was, of course, Jim, who used his role of mailman as his means of courting Dulcie. Upon hearing this information, Tredenham acknowledges it then changes the subject. They speak briefly of the death of Phill’s brother, Joe, in the war. But Phill returns to the subject of the missing letters and, in particular, the watch:

Phill: How did you address it, Smithy?

Tredenham: I’ve forgotten. I must have made some fool’s mistake in the address – um, yes that was it. I remember now . . .

Phill: Dulcie will be surprised to hear . . .

Tredenham: I wouldn’t bother about it now, if I were you, Phill, old man. Too late to find it, and it’s better to begin on a clean slate.

Phill: I won’t tell her now while she’s studying; but you don’t know how Dulcie and I felt about it . . .

Tredenham: Well, let sleeping dogs lie. I’m bowled over about poor old Joe. It’s sad how life turns out. Come, let’s make the best of what is left us. We’ll choose another watch now for old sake’s sake. Come. (pp. 89-90)

And they go out.

The New Chum In 1922, Miles writes a draft letter to actress, Miss Phyllis Nielson-Terry86, asking her to read the enclosed play, a comedy about a girl from the bush who becomes a prima donna. ‘I have written it for you,’ she writes, ‘and only you could act it in toto.’87 She goes on to tell Miss Nielson-Terry that she ‘sat entranced by [her] Trilby88 both in New York and [London]’ and suggests that the enclosed play is an opportunity for her to ‘exploit [her] wonderful double gift’, that is, of acting and singing. Miles encloses a few ‘out of hundreds’ of press clippings of her worth as a ‘local colourist’ and asks upon closing for the recipient, should she find the play to her liking, to ‘please keep its source and subject a strict secret.’ There seems little reason to believe that a production of the comic melodrama, The English Jackaroo, went ahead, whether with Miss Nielson-Terry in the starring role or not.89 This is a sad thing – and not only for Miles – for it is a highly entertaining play, one that, it is not hard to see, would do very well for its merriment and mirth, for its various reversals, for its sting of thwarted love. It is immediately compelling, is rich in local colour and thick with recognisable, well- drawn and endearing characters. The title character in particular is one to whom audiences would instantly warm: as the English jackaroo, Smith is the typical ‘new chum’, that is, the newcomer, the English toff playing at being a bushman, wet behind the ears in terms of the things of the land and a fine target for humour and mockery by his more bush savvy colleagues. In the old melodrama, the new chum was an almost entirely comic figure, though affectionately, and sometimes even admiringly, drawn. Henry Lawson in his poem The New Chum Jackaroo 90 writes:

He may not ride as you can ride,

86 Phylis Neilson-Terry (1892-1977) was a member of a famous English acting family, the Terrys, and was an older cousin to Sir John Gielgud. Also known as Phyllida Terson, she was the daughter of actress Julia Neilson and actor Fred Terry. 87 FP, ML MSS 364/88. 88 Trilby is a musical production based on the book by George DuMaurier. It is likely the production Miles is referring to is that staged in 1915 – originally in New York then with successive touring – in which Phylis Neilson-Terry played the title role of Trilby O’Ferrell. 89 Though all that remains of Phylis Neilson-Terry’s response to Miles is her signature torn from the bottom of the letter, Miles’ following note to Neilson-Terry makes plain that the latter had refused the play. 90 Lawson, Henry, Verses Popular and Humorous, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1900. For more on the New Chum, see Blackman, Maurice (ed. and trans.), Diary of a New Chum and Other Lost Stories, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1990. 65

Or do what you can do; But sometimes you’d seem small beside The New Chum Jackaroo. … ‘Twas he who proved the world was round – In crazy square canoes; The lands you’re living in were found By New Chum Jackaroos.

Perhaps it was Lawson’s writings which so influenced her, or perhaps it was a familiarity with a new chum of her own, for such affection and admiration is, of course, more than evident in Miles’ play. Smith, despite the fact that he can’t spell Woolloomooloo or crack a whip, becomes very much a part of the family. Moreover, he is praised for his vocal training ability, which Joe decrees is working like a charm on his sister. Dulcie, clearly, is fascinated by the new chum, but not because he is some sort of buffoon or joker, or the ignorant recipient of pranks. Plainly, there are strengths about the English jackaroo which set him apart from other young men and which add to his attractiveness and allure. How sad, then, and how difficult that the Somervilles received no letters from Smith once he returned to England. How even more so for Dulcie who, in the disappearance of Smith, lost not only the man with whom she was enamoured but lost too her help in the reinvention of herself that she felt that she needed.

Miles and the Question of Identity The character type of Dulcie Somerville is not the only one of her kind in Miles’ plays. In Mag-Marjorie, from a book by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which Miles began to dramatise in 1913, we meet Mag, a young chambermaid, who is rescued from a difficult situation by Mrs Yale, taken overseas and given a new life and identity. Mag becomes Margaret Yale, studies medicine and graduates as a doctor. A decade on, she appears before her past oppressor who, of course, does not see innocent little Mag in the sophisticated, educated woman before him. Dr Yale in her glory is triumphant, and her oppressor found unworthy. Though in Mag- Marjorie there is not so strong a sense of Mag being born to a life beyond that which she knows as there is for Dulcie in The English Jackaroo, the overall themes of identity and reinvention are most certainly present.

In fact, we see such themes – especially those of identity – in a number of Miles’ plays across the span of her theatrical writing. In The Thorny Rose, a radio play written circa 1942, Evadne believes her mother to be the woman who has cared for her all of her life, only to discover that she is not, and that her true mother is in an asylum. As has been detailed in Chapter II, Phoebe Lambent and Love is driven by such themes, with the appearance of the young man claiming first to be the son of Joyce, then of Phoebe. Miles’ final play (as far as is known), The Dead Must Not Return – a wartime play circa 1951 – also gives voice to questions of identity in the arrival at Miss Flora Fisher’s house of two uninvited guests. The first of these, Harry, presents himself as Miss Fisher’s brother, a soldier missing since an earlier war. The second, Ernie, presumed dead in the last war, is revealed to be the husband of Miss Fisher’s niece, Myrtle. There is also No Family91, Release, Sophistication and The Love Machine, and they all deal to greater and lesser degrees with a subject that seems for Miles to have been most important. It is interesting in the light of this to consider Miles’ significant contribution to the construction of an identity – a national identity – for her country, Australia, via literature. This she achieved, as we have seen in Chapter I, by the publication of numerous books and articles, by her frequent addresses on the subject, and by her championing of the issue in general. In 1950 she gave a series of lectures in Western Australia which were later gathered and posthumously published as Laughter, Not for a Cage92. These were the shaping of ideas she had long held in which she asserted, Marjorie Barnard tells us, that for ‘a national literature to be valid [it] must spring from the earth’, and that ‘any man or woman who left his country broke that vital thread.’93 Barnard points out, not surprisingly, that leave her country is exactly what Miles did, and says too that it wasn’t until the last twenty years or so of her life after she had returned to Australia (which she did in 1932), that Miles began to really start writing again. Then came, she says, her ‘furore scribendi, her furore of writing.’

91 Published in Moore, W. & Moore, T.I. (eds), Best Australian One-Act Plays, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1937. 92 Laughter, Not for a Cage: Notes on Australian Writing, with Biographical Emphasis on the struggles, Function, and Achievements of the Novel in Three Half-Centuries, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956. 93 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 144. 67

Strange, then, that just one chapter earlier, Barnard declares that ‘[b]etween 1927 and 1933 Miles wrote herself out’, that the ‘strain of writing so many long books in so short a time’ had ‘physically, mentally and spiritually depleted’94 her. Miles had written during this period the Brent of Bin Bin novels: Up the Country: A Tale of the Early Australian Squattocracy (1928); Ten Creeks Run: A Tale of the Horse and Cattle Stations of the Murrumbidgee (1930); and Back to Bool Bool: A Ramiparous Novel with Several Prominent Characters and a Hantle of Others Disposed as the Atolls of Oceania’s Archipelagoes (1931). Certain others, though initially held back from publication, are considered to have been written at this time, including two more of the Brent novels, Cockatoos (1954) and Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang (1956).95 And though there are no plays that are dated specifically during this period, there are any number that are not dated at all and could, for all we know, have been penned during this time. This discrepancy is most interesting for it has to do directly with Miles’ sense of identity, with her construction of her self. Miles in Chicago works and works, loses herself as we have seen to social reform. She is weighed down by the heaviness of it, burdened by the enormity. When she leaves Chicago in 1915 she faithfully fulfils her war duties as an orderly with the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Macedonia, and later takes up a position with the Housing Office in London. She works and works, writes through her letters and diaries the difficulty of it all, seems, as it were, to completely miss the fact that she is experiencing a fabulous life, if not exactly the life that she dreamed of when back in the bush, then another equally as adventurous, as dashing, as exciting. In reading the letters and diaries of Miles, one is struck by the manner in which she constructs her life; it is difficult not to think that she writes pointedly with posterity in mind, though she is apparently writing for the eyes of herself only or for those of one other. There is construction of her self, and there is construction, too, of her pseudo-self, or selves. Pseudonyms are fashionable most certainly when Miles first begins to consider their use – way back with the use of Miles over Stella for the publication of My Brilliant Career – but her application of them seems altogether different from their usual usage. For she has many, many of them, and they frequently hover around the ridiculous or absurd. Her

94 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 122. 95 Ibid., p. 77. 68 now most famous pseudonym, Brent of Bin Bin, is significantly more palatable than others, among which are Mr & Mrs Ogniblat L’Artsau, Tomphooll, Botany Bay, William Blake, Punica Granatum, Amateur Literary Factor and A Practicing Nonentity. Miles ranted volubly against the publicity that My Brilliant Career attracted, made plain that she never wanted to undergo such exposure again. In view of this, she creatively works much of her life under pseudonyms. Now she is not troubled by unwanted attentions, but neither are many of her works recognised as being hers. With her earlier dreams of singing, acting and the stage, all of which imply if not a desire for fame then certainly not an aversion to it, now there is little of this nature. In her small room in Chicago, in her tiny room in London, she grows cold and despondent – ‘unhappy’, ‘miserable’, ‘damnably unhappy’, she writes in her diaries96. She begins, despite the enormity and wonder of her life so very far away now from the bush, to believe her own press. It is perhaps, then, not surprising that Marjorie Barnard also believes. Though it is difficult to say exactly what led to Barnard’s contradiction, it is possible that, in her attempt to piece together the complexities of a literary and thoughtful life, she has inadvertently constructed the narrative to fit the theory. She has come to believe, through means of repetition and insistence, Miles’ statements regarding a national literature, that it is to spring from the earth, and that the author must not leave the country and break the vital thread. While it is pleasing to think that a writer flourishes in her own country, it is also idealistic and, in the case of Miles, not entirely correct. Nonetheless, she has touched on an important aspect of the discussion of Miles and a national identity. Miles is growing and forming in a way that echoes the growth and formation of her country: Australia, of course, is pushing to find its national identity. This echoing is perhaps of particular poignancy in that Miles is seen to be one of the influential figures of Australian letters at this time. While her country examines itself and works towards elucidating its defining characteristics, Miles too is looking at herself – is she a playwright? a writer? a singer? a social reformer? In a period of formative identity, identity itself is more fluid for the very fact that it is forming. The plays, in a sense, exemplify this in the strange disparity

96 FP, ML MSS 364/2, 3. 69 that frequently occurs within them. For though they often take the form of antiquated drawing room dramas, still there is this other component, that of a working through of ideas, of an examination of factors, that speak overall of the development for Miles of a modernist identity. Perhaps, then, her return to Australia marked a period of consolidation of identity, her last twenty years evidenced a strengthening of her understanding of her self and an eventual growing in to her writing skin.

‘The Verandah of the station store. Lolly tins, pickles, boots, horse gear, axes and a variety of goods can be seen through the open door and window. It is nearing sundown.’

Three young men – Felix Moriarty, the store owner, Arblaster, one of the overseers, and Toby, ‘an Aboriginal half-caste’ (p. 1) – are seen on the verandah as Tom Collins at Runnymede opens. They yawn and stretch and chew the fat, until there is a bark from the dog and, in the distance, they see a man approaching. At once, bets are laid as to whether the approaching figure is a tea or wool or book agent, or whether he has come for another reason altogether. Toby places five bob on it being Tom Collins, the ‘bloke they put all the yarns onto that you can’t get anyone to own up to.’ (p. 2) Moriarty snorts, considering these ‘[s]nake yarns’, that is, not real. Arblaster, however, shares something of Toby’s opinion; the pair of them discuss stories of Collins being some sort of ‘spook’, and of owning a dog who comes with his own set of tall tales. Toby insists on calling this creature – who is generally known as ‘Pup’ – the ‘kangaroo dog’ (p. 2). Montgomery, the managing partner of Runnymede Station, enters and confirms that he, too, has heard numerous stories pertaining to the hound, that ‘big slaty animal’. ‘Useless to any man but a sheep stealer’, he says. Moriarty doesn’t care: ‘It u’d be stunning to own him’ (p. 3). The figure draws nearer and shows himself – to Toby’s delight – to be indeed that of Tom Collins, looking slim and stylish and fashionably bespectacled. He comes, he says, as ‘Deputy-Assistant-Sub-Inspector in place of Randolph Winterbottom’ (p. 3) to deal with certain paperwork – a K Form and an M Form – for Montgomery to complete and return to him within four days. Montgomery is unimpressed by the additional administration, but maintains an appropriate social disposition and organises for the latter to doss down in the spare bed in Moriarty’s room. He calls in the housekeeper, Mrs Beaudesart, ‘a handsome pronounced woman in her forties’ (p. 4). Mrs Beaudesart is clearly won over by Collins’ fine figure, and does not pick up on the facetious tone in Montgomery’s voice when he says that Collins is ‘the last lineal descendent of Commander Collins’ and that ‘his grandfather was

Sir Timothy Collins’. (p. 5) Nor does she catch it that Mr Collins himself is toying with her in his comment that his family was ‘familiarly connected with the turf.’ The others exit and Collins and Mrs Beaudesart are left alone. Mrs Beaudesart makes much of the background of the new arrival – ‘So you’re one of the Collinses’ – and ensures that Mr Collins is in no doubt as to her own pedigree: that she is in fact the daughter of Buckley of Baroona in Victoria, sadly condemned to working as a housekeeper because of a downturn in fortune. She is, in fact, a widow thrice over, and, indeed, a most willing recipient of Mr Collins’ flattery. They talk much of social status, a lack of exclusiveness and the ‘topsy- turvy Colonies’ (p. 7). Mrs Beaudesart finds in Mr Collins an ear sympathetic to her difficult position, and a mind seemingly aligned with her own. Both, it appears, have suffered reversal of fortune; both, it would seem, are on the lookout for a way back up to their proper position. Mr Collins indicates his regret as to the comment made by Mr Moriarty, that pertaining to Collins’ lineage. He insists that Mrs Beaudesart think not of it, that she, in fact, accept him as he is, as ‘a member of the lower orders, one whose ignoble blood has crept through scoundrels since the Flood.’ (p. 8)

Mrs B.: Ah, Mr Collins, it is you who are heroic, to make a jest of reversed fortune…. But if there’s one thing that appeals to me, it’s a sense of humour… A sense of humour…. You are too modest about your connections, but you can trust me; your relationship to the Collinses will go nor [sic] further for the present. It will be a little secret between us.

Collins: A joke, more than a secret.

Mrs B.: You delightfully humorous man…. a secret! That makes me feel a girl again. How we revelled in secrets in our teens! (p. 8)

Mrs Beaudesart takes her leave, expressing her hope that she will soon see the newcomer again. Moriarty reappears.

Moriarty : The old girl bucking-up to you already?

Collins: That is a lady who seems to consider herself the real McKay in pedigreed distinction.

Moriarty: You bet your sweet life, she does! You go right ahead Collins, me shaver. Nobody’ll grudge her to you. (A din with a bullock bell breaks out in the distance.) Come on, or we’ll be too late to get any dinner, and I aint in love with the bodysark. (p. 9)

Scene II opens in the narangies’97 dining room, a weather board room furnished with a long narrow table and handmade stools. The men are eating their breakfast, served to them by Ida who, we are told, ‘has been specially chosen by Moriarty to wait on the men, as her total lack of attractions minimises amorous danger. She limps, the fingers of her left hand have been snipped by a chaff-cutter, and she has a straggly goatee and woolly sideboards of dingily white down.’ (p 10) Collins is greeted by the men, reintroduced to an old acquaintance – McMurdoo the Scot – and mildly heckled for his dapper appearance and large, dark glasses.

McMurdoo: Ah hear ye has ascentit in the worrruld, an the claes are in celebration…..

Moriarty: Don’t you believe it. The wardrobe’s for lady killing, pure and simple, and Jehoshaphat, how it’s working. Mrs Beaudesart’s making a dead set at the (adj.) Assistant-Deputy-Sub- Inspector…

Laughter

Collins: (With mild amusement) You forgot to add, “Of the Ninth Class.”

Arblaster: By the first-class way I saw them magging last night, it looks as if she’s hooked him. (p. 11)

97 ‘“Narangy” as I heard it used by old timers at Nyngan when I was a station-boy and by shearers (whose terminology was surprisingly archaic) referred to the overseer of a station or an enterprise, or a self-appointed boss of doubtful authority. There was usually a shade of dryness to its use designed to cut at the pretensions of a man who transmitted orders but didn’t formulate them.’ Abotomey, Peter, in Furphy, Joseph, & Glass, Frances Devlin et al (eds.), The Annotated Such is Life, Halstead Press, Sydney, 1999, p. 341. 73

Moriarty tells the others of how he introduced Collins as the son of a lord. ‘There’ll be betting on it’, quips Nelson, another of the narangies. ‘No man with a swell pedigree is safe.’ (p. 12) Moriarty and Nelson have just headed off, and Ida made another pot of tea, when Mrs Beaudesart arrives. She is cheerful and warm and most pleased to see Mr Collins once again. Her attention is turned quickly, however, to Ida, whom she insists on calling Mary as a named deemed more appropriate for one of her situation. She requests that the young woman leave off the cleaning up and attend her to Mrs Montgomery, the station mistress. Ida is at once upset, and begins to sob, declaring that she has done no wrong. Mrs Beaudesart won’t be shaken and begins then to criticise Ida’s parents for having ideas above their station, and for not teaching Ida to know her place. She speaks further, and now about Ida’s appearance.

Mrs B.: … A female so handicapped in appearance…..

Ida: (Blubbers noisily) I know I’m no beauty, but I didn’t make myself.

Mrs B.: Of course you didn’t, but in view of your appearance you should offset it with a perfect character. You should cultivate the modest and respectful demeanor befitting the sphere of life that will always be yours. Physical repulsiveness needs to be offset by a character beyond suspicion, but what I saw this morning – quite by accident….. (p. 13)

Ida flares up, and insists for her part that it wasn’t by accident, that Mrs Beaudesart was ‘sneakin’ round after Mr Collins’ (p. 13). Her tears now dry, she turns on Mrs Beaudesart in fury, which fury does not lessen upon Mrs Beaudesart telling her to leave the apartment.

Ida: (Still screaming) I won’t leave the apartment, to please you, so I won’t. Think God made me for the likes o’ you to wipe your feet on? Think I bin behavin’ myself decent all my life, for you to put a slur on me? If I wanted to bemean myself, couldn’t I cast up something you wouldn’t like to be reminded of? I wouldn’t sink to your level, but I know things. Aint you ashamed of yourself, you ole she-devil.

Mrs B: I must apologise for my servant. 74

Ida: I aint your servant, I’m Mrs Montgomery’s, same as you. (p. 14)

There are a few further words exchanged, and Mrs Beaudesart, head ever high, exits. Ida continues her vociferousness until McMurdoo tells her to hold her tongue and threatens to take a whip to them both. Moriarty, re-entering hurriedly and realising a scene has just taken place, says, ‘Ida and Mrs B. at it again? Golly, I’m sorry I missed the fun.’ (p. 15) Ida explains to Mr Collins the incident to which Mrs Beaudesart was referring: that when she – Ida – had taken scraps around to feed Pup, she had found the little buckle from Mr Collins’ unmentionables – his trousers – and had held up the trousers to discover from where the buckle had fallen. Mrs Beaudesart had appeared at that moment. ‘She said no gentlewoman would ever say the name o’ trousers, but I can’t see why w’en a gentlewoman can have three husbands….’ (p. 16) Ida tells Mr Collins that she still has the little buckle and that she’d sew it on for him ‘if only he’d stand still.’ (p. 17) Mr Collins makes plain that this would only exacerbate the situation, but tells her that he’ll wear his second pair to the swimming hole and leave these on the bed for her to attend to. Ida is happy to oblige. ‘There ain’t nothink I wouldn’t do for you, Mr Collins.’ (p. 17) Scene III opens several days later, with Collins just returning from a swim, a dip accompanied, he quips to Moriarty, only by the snakes. Moriarty returns the joke: ‘Has Mrs B. named the day yet?’ he asks. Moriarty expresses his desire to leave the station. He can’t stand it much longer. But he’s hopeful. He has a presentiment that something good is going to arrive for him in the day’s post, which he wishes was in already. ‘If you don’t speculate’, he says, ‘you won’t accumulate. If a man can’t make a rise by some sort of gambling, he might as well lie down and die, straight off. Of course you’ve got to take the risk.’ (p. 18) The two men speak of the future, of possibilities for distinction. ‘We’re knocking at the gates of futurity’, says Collins, ‘for the Australian pioneer of poetry – fiction – philosophy.’ (p. 18) Moriarty is little interested, doubting that much distinction could be had from such. He thinks rather to distinguish himself by gambling: ‘I plan to win twenty-four notes on the regatta, besides my chances

75 of the station sweep on the big Flemington, let alone private bets.’ (p. 19) Everyone gambles, he says, everyone except for Collins and Nosey Alf. The conversation turns again to Mrs Beaudesart. Moriarty insists that she told Mrs Montgomery only two days earlier that she and Mr Collins were to marry.

Mr Collins: You lying dog!

Moriarty: I hope I may never stir alive off this seat if I’m not telling the exact truth. Ask Nelson and Arblaster.

Collins: (Flabbergasted, murmurs) If I do sleep, would all my wealth wake me.

Moriarty: I reckon it’s all that magging about Shakespeare that’s done for you. (p. 20)

Miss King, the station governess, enters and Moriarty questions her about the information pertaining to the marriage of Mrs Beaudesart to Mr Collins. Miss King is shocked that Mr Moriarty is bringing it up in front of the Deputy- Assistant-Sub-Inspector. She says she only came to acquire some conversation lollies for the children, but that she won’t wait, that Moriarty can send them up after her. She hurries out, and Moriarty is left bewildered. Agitated, he again expresses his wish that Toby be here with the mail. And even as they speak, they see their ‘brown brother’ (p. 21) coming along the road, and decide to place a wager on who he has letters for.

Moriarty: Come, two to one he has letters for you; fifty to one he has letters for the station.

Collins: Hold on, Moriarty. Let’s hear that fifty-to-one offer again: if Toby has letters for the station and none for me, you win. If he has letters for me, and none for the station, I win?

Moriarty: That’s it. Are you on?

Collins: Make it a hundred to one. (p. 22)

Toby appears with the mail – and Collins is the winner of the wager. Moriarty’s ‘mozzle is out’. ‘I’ll never clear myself, Collins’, he says. ‘[N]ever in the creation of – cats. It’s all up. … It’s twice a finisher with Miss King now’ he adds. ‘She’ll never say good-day to me after this.’ (p. 23) He calculates the full amount – together with other wagers – that he owes to Collins: ninety-seven notes and his rifle. ‘I’ll clear it right enough if I don’t get the sack off the station. Mad – mad – mad! I wish I were dead! (p. 23) Collins, however, is a generous fellow, and makes a suggestion.

Collins: Will you swear off gambling altogether till my claim is discharged?

Moriarty: What do you mean?

Collins: On that condition I can extend the time – say to the Greek Kalends. (p. 23)

The Greek Kalends, it turns out, is a time that will never be reached98. It is the same time fixed for Collins’ promotion.

Collins: Moriarty, I’m out of a job.

Moriarty: Y’are! ,,, I’ll be (adverbed)! Ha! Ha! Your (adj.) inductions and subtle philosophy ain’t any better’n me own (adj.) presentiments of something good. If that ain’t rich, Collins! (p. 24)

Moriarty wonders if the new information to hand will have any affect upon Mrs Beaudesart’s designs. He reiterates that Mrs Beaudesart seems to think that she and Collins will marry. This, Collins believes, is ‘beyond a joke. … I’d far rather marry Ida. […] Partly from compassion; partly from the idea that such an action would redound largely to my honour […] and partly from the impression that such an unattractive woman would idolise a fellow like me. […] Ida’s gentle soul shows through its homely mask like a candle in a bottle.’ (p. 24, 25) Moriarty’s response to this is that Collins must have had a touch of the sun while he was out swimming.

98 Calends is the name of the first day of every month in the old Roman calendar. As the Greek calendar had no Calends, the above is a humorous term given to mean ‘never’. 77

But Collins realises that he is ‘in a (sheol)99 of a hole.’ (p. 25) Because of the fact that Mrs B. believes that they are to marry, then he must marry her in order to save her countenance. He suggests to Moriarty as an added condition ‘respecting that trifling debt of honour’ (p. 26) that he circulate ‘a very grave scandal’ (p. 26) about him, such that Mrs Beaudesert must spurn him for reasons of disgrace. They exit. Nelson and Arblaster appear, the latter with a towel over his shoulder, and look about for Moriarty. Nelson sits down and begins to study pieces of paper that he found by the swimming hole. He thinks at first that it is a letter, but, as he reads sections to Arblaster, realises that it is a study on Shakespeare. He crumples the paper, tosses it at Arblaster who opens it and continues reading. ‘Poor Ida has very little to be thankful for. She is lame.... […] Gosh, this must be some old remittance bloke who wants to set up in a humpy of his own with Ida to wait on him. It’s too (adj.) for anything.’ (p. 29) A moment later, Arblaster realises that the hand is that of Collins. ‘Gosh,’ he says, ‘this grows riper and riper!’ (p. 29) Moriarty enters ‘with an urgent air’ (p. 29) and suggests to the pair, as they see Ida approaching, that they follow his lead and play along with him. ‘The Professor’s in trouble’, he says to the girl when she arrives.

Moriaty: Say Ida, if you could save the Professor from the Bodysark, you would, wouldn’t you?

Ida: What’s that old she-devil been doin’ now?’

Nelson: She’s got poor old Collins up a stump for keeps.

Arblaster: If someone don’t get him down, he’s a goner, and no chiacking. (p. 30)

After some persuasion, Ida agrees to the plan: that she put out that she herself is engaged to Collins. There’d be no slurs, they promise. And Ida can have a fine hat for a reward. She exits, in agreement but not without some concern, and hurries out. Scene IV, two hours later, and Moriarty, Nelson and Arblaster are playing cards when they see Mrs Beaudesart and Miss King approaching. Moriarty

99 The place of the dead, or hell. 78 doesn’t feel up to the task of facing the younger woman yet, so the three of them scuttle into the store to hide. Mrs Beaudesart and Miss King arrive talking about the situation with Mr Collins. Mrs Beaudesart makes plain she believes none of the talk, either about Mr Collin’s family connections – ‘turf and peat, that is a pun’ – or about him marrying Ida. ‘She had him by the slack of his unmentionables …. revolting! I’m sorry for Mr Collins that his unworldliness should place him in such a position. […] When a gentleman is pursued by that kind of a creature his chivalry makes him helpless.’ (p. 34) Montgomery enters and calls out to Moriarty. The storeman appears from the back of the store. Montgomery confronts him about a story that he’s heard all over the station. Mrs Beaudesart chips in that anything concerning Mr Collins concerns her also, ‘seeing we are engaged.’ (p. 35) Mr Montgomery is shocked, not, as he says, by the rumours concerning Mr Collins, but by Mrs Beaudesart’s announcement. ‘I thought’, he says, ‘you looked a little higher.’ (p. 35) Ida appears. She is ‘terrified to be between the Bodysark and the boss as a result of what the young men have planned, but honestly holds her own.’ (p. 37) She stands up for herself well, does not relent under the ferocity of Mrs Beaudesart. Collins enters and enquires in his oft-used Shakespearian style, ‘My lords, what wild and whirling words are these?’ (p. 38) Miss King questions him as to whether or not he has lost his job. ‘Quite, Miss King’, he replies. ‘My property is what I stand up in, and my horses.’ (p. 38) When Mrs Beaudesart understands all – including that connection with the turf meant that Collins’ family cut peat from their local bogs – she exits in disbelief. Ida, in her absence, explains to Collins that she only said that she’d marry him to help him out of a spot, but that she wouldn’t be engaged to him ‘if he was the lars’ man. […] It would be like misbehaving with the ole Bishop or someone’s own father.’ (p. 40) The dinner bell rings and Ida limps away. Montgomery invites Collins to stay on a couple more days, but Collins insists that he be moving on.

Montgomery: What do you intend doing?

Collins: I’ll try to pick up a bit of droving out toward the Darling.

Montgomery: Hard luck it ended this way. Even with Mrs Beaudesart courting you, Winterbottom’s job was easier than droving in a bad season.

Collins: Ah, well, such is life. (p. 42)

Tom Collins: the reluctant dramatist What a piece of work is Tom Collins! An extraordinary fellow, the fullness of whom is barely touched on in Tom Collins at Runnymede. For this play is in fact an adaptation by Miles of Chapter Six of Joseph Furphy’s tour de force, Such is Life. The characters and setting she takes from their literary framework and places into a theatrical one, losing, sadly and at once, the density and lushness of much of Furphy’s tale. Some of this, certainly, is deliberate, but there is much too that must be lost because of the nature of the chosen art form: a play by its very nature and unless many hours in length simply has less words than does a novel. Added to which, in the majority, these now theatrical words are dialogic100 in nature, infrequently descriptive, and rarely immediately revelatory of the inner voice. In losing the purely literary aspects of the scenario, Miles capitalises instead on those elements which transfer well to the stage. She has a good eye for the dramatic: fleshy characters and meaty dialogue have long been her strong point. As we have seen, she has a penchant for the romantic, no less so than here in Tom Collins at Runnymede. The interesting thing is that Joseph Furphy’s writing of these scenes contains just a small aspect thereof, and then only in a very skeletal form. Miles cannot help herself, it seems: even the raw and the rugged is not complete without the romantic. In Furphy’s version of events, there never was any random, straying buckle, nor any accusation by Mrs Beaudesart of Ida’s inappropriateness of behaviour concerning certain ‘unmentionables’. True, there is a verbal attack – and this almost word for word with the original text – by Mrs Beaudesart on the unfortunate slavey, but it is in reference to Ida’s behaviour generally and not to any specific incident involving Mr Collins’ outerwear. Moriarty’s propensity to a wager is present, but the additional condition against his repaying Collins – that he start a rumour slandering the Government employee’s name before Mrs Beaudesart – is not. In essence, the elements that form the play comprise only a

100 The word ‘dialogic’ is here being used simply to mean conversational, and is not to be taken in the Bakhtinian sense. 80 very small component of the original text; beyond the pages of dialogue exists another world again of characters and scenarios.101 Perhaps, then, rather than referring to Tom Collins at Runnymede as an adaptation, it is preferable to consider the play an ‘appropriation’ – of characters, of setting, of certain key details, of aspects of plot. Miles has appropriated elements of Furphy’s work and combined them with a favourite theme, that of romance, to create the play we see today. Tom Collins at Runnymede may not completely resemble Chapter Six in terms of action and plot, but its characters and setting make a fine basis for what has become, in the hands of Miles Franklin, something of a (thwarted) romantic comedy.

The Man and His Book It is possible to view Miles’ appropriation of Furphy’s work as evidence of a limited imagination, which imagination results in the writer drawing over and over from the same small set of themes. But perhaps the more accurate view – and certainly the kinder – is that Tom Collins at Runnymede represents a tribute by Miles to a man – friend, mentor and fellow bush writer – who meant an extraordinary amount her. Joseph Furphy was born at Yering Station in Victoria in 1843 and wrote much and cleverly as a young boy and youth. When adulthood and its associated responsibilities overtook him, his writing was set aside for a time. He invested in a threshing plant in 1864 and travelled the districts of Daylesford and Glenlyon. A decade later he was the owner of a team of bullocks with which he set up as a wool carrier. When, several years later, his cattle were destroyed by an outbreak of pleuro-pneumonia, he headed for Shepparton, Victoria, to work with his brothers in their foundry, and to begin to consolidate his past experience and travels into a literary framework.

101 Most notable here is Tom Collins’ visit to boundary man Nosey Alf, labelled such for his absence of a nose. Prior to the advent of antibiotics, syphilis was frequently the cause of the loss of many a nose, resulting in the flourishing trade of prosthetic noses. Glass et al consider that Furphy’s inspiration for the character of Nosey Alf was his meeting with Johanna Jorgensen, whose face was disfigured after a kick from a horse, and who changed her name to Johannes and lived as a man. Jorgensen’s true sexual identity was only discovered after her death. The Bulletin, 16 September, 1893, comments: “The Jorgensen case revives that of ‘Edward de Lacy Evans’, who for years worked as a miner on Bendigo. … Johanna Jorgensen’s face alone seems to have prevented her from emulating the famous Bendigo woman miner, who married three wives without being denounced as a connubial imposter. When Johanna began making up to the girls they declined her suit on account of her nose.” In Furphy, & Glass, et al (eds.), The Annotated Such is Life, p. 439. 81

The regular hours worked at the foundry afforded Furphy the time to be able to attend once more to his long neglected writing. He built a ‘sanctum’102 some twelve feet behind the house and set to work writing articles for the Bulletin using the pen name of Tom Collins.103 He received many visitors in his little hut, being as he was ‘a natural philosopher – the bush yarner for which Australia is noted’.104 One of these visitors was the young Kate Baker, teacher of his brother’s children and boarder at his mother’s house. It was Kate’s encouragement that spurred him into the writing of a longer work, the work that became Such is Life. When A.G. Stephens of the Bulletin first read the manuscript of Such is Life, he recognised at once a book “fitted to become an Australian classic”105. But, he thought, at 1125 pages, it was far too long for publication. Much, then, was excised from the work before it was deemed suitable for publication in 1903, the edited sections forming the basis for two following works, Rigby’s Romance and The Buln Buln and the Brolga, published posthumously in 1921 and 1948 respectively. Although written before My Brilliant Career, Such is Life is not published until 1903. In the interim period, Furphy reads the little bush girl’s novel and is struck by certain similarities with his own. The year following the publication of Such is Life, he writes to her:

I particularly desired to draw your attention to some striking parallelisms in My Brilliant Career and my own book, Such is Life; coincidences of thought, expression and description, which are the more remarkable as both books must have been placed in the publishers’ hands as nearly as possible at the same time. (The Bulletin is slow for a young fellow, hence the delayed issue of S’L.)

In Chap. II of S’L (I have no copy for reference; never being able to keep one for 48 hours), may be found the portrayal of a bush-born girl, almost verbally reproduced in your description, on p. 7 of MBC. And this is especially noticeable, inasmuch as the portrait is, I believe, unprecedented. I think our joint yet independent record ought to

102 Miles Franklin in association with Kate Baker, Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and his Book, Halstead Classics, Sydney, 2001, p. 47. 103 Furphy chose Tom Collins as his pen name for its meaning at that time: idle rumour. As the entry about him in The Australian Encyclopaedia points out, ‘it was an amusing coincidence that during World War I his real name, Furphy, came to mean the same thing.’ Chisholm, Alec H. (Editor in chief), The Australian Encyclopaedia, The Grolier Society of Australia, Sydney, 1962. Vol. IV, p. 235. 104 Franklin & Baker, Joseph Furphy, p. 47. 105 Chisholm, The Australian Encyclopaedia, v. IV, p. 235. 82

demonstrate the existence of a bush-born type somewhat different from the crude little semi-savage of conventional Australian fiction.106

This letter, penned 17th February, 1904, is the first piece of correspondence between Furphy and Miles in what was to become a friendship of inspiration and encouragement. Furphy’s appreciation of Miles is something she finds most pleasurable and something she makes much of, sometimes, as Colin Roderick points out, to quite an astonishingly narcissistic degree.107 When she comes – in 1937 and in association with Kate Baker – to write Furphy’s biography, she does not forget to tell us that he considers her ‘the Tenth Muse’ and that he ‘perceived remarkable promise in [her] writings’.108

For Australia – and for Furphy Events that spurred Miles to the writing of this biography were by no means lacking in drama. In 1937, a situation arose that caused great trouble within the Australian literati. Vance Palmer,109 O.B.E., novelist and critic, together with the English publisher Jonathan Cape, released an abridged and altered version of Such is Life. Miles, having been requested to do so by Tom Mutch of the Bulletin, was writing an anticipatory review of it based on the text that she had to hand, that being the book in its original published form. But when she received the new version, she was horrified. She was less concerned with the abridgment than she was with what she considered an incredible reduction and flattening of the work into ‘dull and humourless mediocrity’110. And she was not the only one disturbed.

Cecil Mann, then on the literary staff of the Bulletin, called it a ‘bloody outrage’ and was for horsewhipping the perpetrator. Kate Baker looked through her copy as soon as the postman brought it and took to her bed. Inky Stephenson long after recalled how he had ‘belted hell’ out of it in his Publicist. It struck the bibliophile Walter Stone speechless.111

106 Roe, My Congenials, v. I, p. 29. 107 Roderick, Miles Franklin: Her Brilliant Career, p. 102. 108 Joseph Furphy in Roderick, Miles Franklin: Her Brilliant Career, p. 102. 109 Vance Palmer, 1885 – 1959. 110 Roderick, Miles Franklin: Her Brilliant Career, p. 154. 111 Ibid., p. 169. See this reference also for a full account of events and reactions surrounding the Furphy fiasco. 83

Miles writes to Kate Baker – ‘Oh, Katy Baker!’ – with seriousness and intent: ‘…what you say, the ruined Such is Life shd be withdrawn with apologies to Tom Collins’ memory.’112 A couple of weeks later she writes in turn to Vance Palmer himself, expressing hope that things can be sorted out between them. Nonetheless, she does not lose her fervour regarding an apology to Tom Collins and by the end of October 1937 has concocted a plan which she writes to Kate Baker:

My suggestion is that you do the Furphy material in a book form with my help. The Bulletin prize is for a biography this year. You would have to get your stuff in order and come for three or four months as soon as possible. My suggestion is to tell no one what we wd really be doing – I can’t work if I say anything of my plan. You could live like a nun with me till we get the thing in shape and then have three weeks or a fortnight seeing everyone before you go back. …This would be an adventure for us both.113

It is testimony to Miles’ own penurious state to note that she includes in her letter detailed information regarding fares to and from both the city and the railway station, adding that perhaps Kate ‘could find someone coming over who would give [her] a lift and thus save fare.’114 This plan (or something very like it) is actualised and the manuscript is ready for publishing by 1939. The manuscript, though winning a Prior115, does not at first find publication. It is not until 1944, after Miles has rewritten the work with the assistance of a Commonwealth Literary Fund Fellowship, that it finally makes its way into print. Angus & Robertson publish the work under the title Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and His Book and Miles and Kate ‘[enjoy] a greatly soured relationship.’116 That same year, presumably in the wake of the publication of the biography, Miles is approached by the New Theatre in Newtown, Sydney, offering to present a reading of her play, Tom Collins at Runnymede, to commemorate Joseph Furphy’s birthday. This is an offer which, one imagines,

112 Roe, My Congenials, v. I, p. 359. 113 Ibid., p. 384. 114 Ibid., p. 384. 115 Samuel Henry Prior (1869-1933) was a mining and financial reporter before succeeding James Edmond as editor of the Bulletin in 1915. Together with P. R. Stephensen and Norman Lindsay, he founded the publishing house Endeavour Press. ‘After his death his son, H.K. Prior, instituted the S. H. Prior Memorial Prize, in recognition of his father’s services to Australian literature. The sum of £100 was awarded annually for 10 years for an Australian novel.’ The Australian Encyclopaedia, v. VII, p. 286. 116 North, Yarn Spinners, p. 82. 84 must have brought to Miles something of a sense of achievement in her efforts towards a theatrical career. There appears, however, to have been some sort of preliminary trouble; perusal through associated correspondence makes plain the fact that Miles is asked to absent herself from the rehearsal room, the reason for which is unclear. A possible clue is given in a letter Miles later writes to Rex Ingamells – poet, publisher and founder of the Jindyworobak movement117 – informing him that ‘the casting in several instances was lamentable.’118 Could it be that Miles vocalised this opinion in the rehearsal room? Quite likely she did, given what is known of her nature. The reading, nonetheless, goes ahead presented by members of the New Theatre to the Sunday night meeting of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. And it is deemed something of a success, at least by Ingamells, for he requests a copy of the manuscript with the view to possible future production.

Miles is entering the final decade of her life. She is not yet known as a playwright despite her endless attempts to break into the theatrical world. She continues to approach theatre managers, actors and directors with offers of scripts. There is a tone of desperation to these letters, a tone barely concealed by the civilities of correspondence. She has, it would seem, little concern for appearances. She looks only for success, bemoans her domestic situation which she sees as hampering her work. ‘I no longer have the strength or the urge to be a continual self-starter,’ she writes in 1949. ‘[B]ut if I could be relieved of the charing [sic] and the garden I could plunge into a rich kind of life, such as a stay

117 Jindyworobak is an Aboriginal word meaning ‘to annex’ or ‘to join’, and was chosen by a group of Australian writers to indicate that they were attempting to ‘free Australian art from whatever alien influences trammel it: that is, to bring it into proper contact with its material’. The movement, under the leadership of Reginald Charles (Rex) Ingamells (1913-1955), published as a company the Jindyworobak Review and Jindyworobak Anthology, as well as much material individually. The Australian Encyclopaedia, v. V, p. 135. Other members of the movement were Ian Mudie, Max Harris, Colin Thiele and William Hart-Smith. For a detailed examination of the movement, see Elliot, Brian, The Jindyworobaks, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1979. 118 FP, ML MSS 364/88, frame no. 164. The cast list is written in pencil on the title page of the play, ref. MLMSS 445/27: Allan Herbert is Felix Moriarty; Eric Game is Arblaster; New Fewinks (illegible) is Toby; Bruce Bull is J.G. Montgomery; Cedric Flower is Tom Collins; Jean Blue is Maud Beaudesert; Bob Mitchell is McMurdoo; Dola Smith is Ida; David Murray (?) is Nelson; and April Ledis is Miss King. 85 in Greta119 among the immigrants. … What interest I could have, what rich material as a basis for novels I could experience, if I could go about as the women who belong to men do.’120 Miles files away the latest rejection letter and feeds another sheet of buff coloured paper into her typewriter. There should be time enough for one more play.

119 Greta is the name of a small town in New South Wales’ Hunter Region. Long a mining town, it became in 1939 a base for military training. Once WWII was over, the military camps were converted into transit camps where thousands of European migrants were housed upon arrival in Australia. Many chose to settle in Greta and surrounding areas, creating one of the first multicultural communities in the nation. Such a community, clearly, would have been of great interest to Miles. 120 Brunton, Paul, (ed.) The Diaries of Miles Franklin, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2004, p. 248. 86

‘Ashville, a minor, inland, working-class suburb of Sydney.’

The Dead Must Not Return, penned circa 1951, opens in a long room dressed poorly in shabby, old-fashioned furniture. On the overmantel stand two framed photographs of soldiers: one, ‘a very young sub-altern in the uniform of World War I’ (p. 1), has a medal hung across the frame; the other ‘wears the uniform of a private in World War II.’ (p. 1) French doors121 open onto the garden, and it is through these that Flora Fisher, a woman in her sixties and dressed in a bag apron and old shoes, enters. Moments later, her niece by marriage, Myrtle, a woman in her forties, and the latter’s daughter, June, also appear. Mother and daughter are wearing new dresses and hats and have just returned from an investiture ceremony in which Myrtle was the proxy recipient of a Victorian Cross, awarded to her missing – presumed dead – husband, Ernie. June hangs the bright new medal across her father’s photograph, so that both images are now thus adorned. The women are joined by a neighbour, Mrs King, who is not impressed by the medal. ‘Tom has a whole row of them’, she says of her husband. ‘What good are they? … Your poor Daddy’s just as dead as if it was a leather medal for lunacy.’ (p. 3, 4) Mrs King bewails the difficulties of living with a returned soldier, pities, she says, ‘all women who have to put up with ‘returned men’.’ (p. 4)

Myrtle: A lot of them come out of it better than they went in. War makes men of them.

Mrs King: Those that sat at headquarters perhaps. Those that really had it are never the same again.

Flora: How could they be?

Mrs King: Yes. Perhaps it’s better that your man did not come back, Myrtle.

121 French doors, for their ease of theatrical revelation and concealment, are a feature of the set design not only of many of Miles’ plays, but of many comedies, drawing room dramas, farces and others. 87

Myrtle: The uncertainty was the worst – at first the hope that he might come back some day…

Mrs King: I know it all. And then the fear that he would. (p. 5)

They contemplate then the possibility of Ernie still being alive, even of walking back into this very room. ‘Heaven forbid!’ exclaims Flora. When asked by June if she wouldn’t like to see her brother, Harry, return from World War I, she replies strongly, ‘The dead must not return!’ (p. 6) ‘They couldn’t if they were dead, but why shouldn’t the dead return, Aunt Flora, if they could?’ asks June. ‘They couldn’t stand it – neither could we’, replies her aunt. ‘The dead are silent.’ (p. 6) When Mrs King departs and Myrtle leaves to get tea, June asks her great aunt why it is that she continues to keep her brother’s things as though indeed he might return and need them one day. ‘Because I’m weak,’ replies Flora. ‘Grief is a nervous disorder.’ (p. 8)122. They exit. Myrtle appears garbed in a ‘showy house gown chosen to display her ripe charms’ (p. 9), with Ivor Cadman, ‘a man in his forties, prosperous in dress and self-assurance’ (p. 10). He embraces her, but she is cautious, concerned about the others seeing. ‘What odds if they do?’ asks Ivor. ‘It’s time we came out in the open.’ (p. 10) But Myrtle pleads for time, wanting first to win June around, who presently is ‘on the high horse about her Daddy’ (p. 10). Still, she is quick to propose their future: ‘I want a house of my very own – modern furniture, all electric – exactly as I plan it before I marry again.’(p. 10) Ivor, though, makes it plain that he is tired of waiting around, tired of ‘losing chances’. He has decided to run for Parliament – ‘Which side?’ asks Myrtle. ‘I haven’t decided that yet’ – and he ‘needs a wife for the public shows.’ (p. 11)

122 When Miles’ brother, Norman, died she kept all his possessions carefully. She records in her diary of 1942 that Norman’s son, Jack, as he was leaving for R.A.A.F. training school, said to her, ‘Get rid of everything: I may never come back.’ In the same entry, she writes, ‘If he too should come back no more ever again I could no longer survive. Why this anguish of suffering? It cuts like a knife & leaves me drained and helpless. There are none to grieve for me who has grieved so desperately for each as he or she went: and grief will not soften. Time instead of lessening or dispersing griefs has rounded them all up and intensified them. Grief is an illness and is particularly deleterious to the mental powers. It is a form of nostalgia.’ Brunton, The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 143. 88

Myrtle: Do you want me only as a trade asset?

Ivor: … A man needs a suitable mate, not a flimsy gold-digger to squander money. You like money as much as I do – or what can be got with it – and that’s about everything. (p. 11)

Politicians, we are told, need some sort of expertise. Ivor’s would be the resting sites of soldiers abroad, the ‘far-flung graves of our heroes’. This, he believes, would enable them to travel the globe: ‘What would you think of lunching at Buckingham Palace and all the trimmings – all expenses paid by the Government?’ (p. 12) He becomes amorous, trying to win over Myrtle with his smooth words, when the telephone rings. June enters, garbed in a ‘crisp white overall and [looking] like a nurse’, to answer it. After a few moments of garbled, one-sided conversation, she hangs up, declaring the person at the other end of the phone to be a man wanting to know only if Miss Flora Fisher lived here. ‘Another waiting for her to die’, says Myrtle cynically. ‘They’re always pestering us, wanting to buy the house. They’ll lift it off us some night.’ (p. 13) Ivor studies the new medal, makes reference to his own. June, knowing that he didn’t go to the front and fight, asks what his medals are for. ‘HEAD work’, he replies. ‘[A]dministration.’ (p. 13).

June: I like soldiers best who go to the Front and fight.

Ivor: They couldn’t all do that. Too crowded. It takes dozens of men in administration and behind the lines to keep one man in the front line.

June: If there has to be war, like you always say, I think all soldiers should get into the Front line and really fight. That’s what I’d make them do if I were administrating.

Ivor: (Laughs indulgently) But pretty little girls can’t run wars. A nice mess there would be only for the head work in administration. (p. 14)

While they are speaking, ‘an elderly man of unkempt appearance and reconnoitring manner’ (p. 15) appears at the door and stands listening to them. He announces himself as a ‘returned man’, and refers to Ivor as ‘one of the shiny bums’ (p. 16). There is recognition between the man and Flora. 89

Flora: It cannot be – it’s never Harry!

Harry: It is – what’s left of him. You must be Flora – oh, Sis.

…

Myrtle: Who is it, Aunt Flora?

Flora: The dead. He has come back from the dead. (p. 16)

Ivor at once warns Flora not to be too hasty in accepting the genuineness of the man, but Flora seems in little doubt. A strange sound like choking is heard from outside and Harry introduces his mate, Ernie, a ‘piteous human scare-crow’ clutching an old army rifle who at once takes refuge behind the couch. Animosity between Harry and Ivor – who Harry calls ‘Shiny’ – is very quickly established. Ivor tries to insist upon some sort of proof of the identity of each of these men; Harry continues to ignore him. June brings the two returned soldiers tea and plates of food. Ernie remains behind the couch to eat, rising occasionally and peering cautiously over the top of it like a frightened animal. While the men are eating, Ivor suggests to Myrtle that she slip out and phone the police. She gathers plates and carries them out as though to the kitchen. Meanwhile, Harry and June try to coax Ernie into having a bath. June, dressed as she is in the white overalls, is able to pretend that she is a nurse – ‘Ernie’ll do anything for a nurse. He thinks nurses are angels’, says Harry. (p. 20) When, at the latter’s suggestion, she puts a large table serviette around her head in the manner of a matron, Ernie goes with her ‘like a lamb’ (p. 23), followed by Harry and Flora. Myrtle re-enters, and comes ‘all-overish’ (p. 24), upset now that she has called the police. It is plain that she thinks that Ernie is her husband returned. ‘It’s the shape of his head – his ears…. And the other fellow said Ernie knew his way home better than he did.’ (p. 25) The police arrive and a rather confused period of questioning ensues in which little is achieved beyond the irritation of the police sergeant. ‘Ratbags to the lot of you’ (p. 34), he says. He does manage, however, to get Harry to give some

90 account of his activities over the past decades: ‘Cooks tour of the global wars’, says the returned man. ‘Anzac Beach to France, the Middle East, North West Frontier, all the near North – Kokoda, Okinawa, etc., etc., etc..’ (p. 37). The act ends with June at last realising what her mother and great aunt realised some time earlier: that Ernie is indeed her father. Act II opens a few months later and, like Act I, is set in Aunt Flora’s living room. Myrtle receives Ivor warmly, though plainly the latter’s ardour has cooled. He speaks of his plans regarding war and the election, declaring that ‘Australia will be out of the track of the big smash for another generation’, and that he ‘shan’t have much use for the place after that.’ (p. 42) Myrtle is disturbed by this, and pushes him to talk not just of his plans for himself but of his plans for both of them together, for his plans for their marriage. He reminds her of the facts: ‘Ernie didn’t desert you. You can’t get a divorce on the grounds of cruelty or adultery. Insanity’s in the for-better-or-for-worse contract till death do you part.’ (p. 43) When she suggests an alternative to marriage – ‘There’s no stigma attached to de facto marriages these days. They’re all the go’ (p. 43) – he replies, ‘[n]ice cry the Opposition would have about the man who took the wife of the V.C. hero.’ (p. 43) Ivor questions her as to whether her affection for her husband has revived. ‘Women’s love…’, he says, ‘wonderful thing. Look at those women who take on blind and limbless soldiers.’ (p. 44)

Myrtle: If you had a wife come home like that would you be happy to be tied down to look after her tenderly for the rest of your life?

Ivor: It’s different for a man. I’d see that she had every care.

Myrtle: In some asylum?

Ivor: That u’d be best for her and me.

Myrtle: Then everyone would praise you and sympathise with you while you defactoed with some other woman. (p. 44)

Ivor offers to get a fund, possible because of Ernie’s V.C., to keep the returned soldier in a small convalescent home. He suggests that Myrtle watches for an opportunity to get him certified then slips away as Harry and Ernie enter. 91

The two have been at the pub and Harry is in a rancorous mood. In his inebriation and his irritation at having seen Ivor slip away, he launches into a tirade about the foolishness of war. Ernie, of course, crawls into his spot under the couch.

Harry: You fat fools of women think [a soldier’s] a thing on posters in a smart uniform, but I’ll tell you…. He’s a monster who has to do in better blokes than himself in every treacherous, cowardly way that blood-lust driven mad by fear can devise. … If he gets by with it they give him a medal – the D.S.O. … to urge other young blokes on to do worse. (p. 49)

While he speaks, Ernie crawls out from under the couch and slips through the exit, seen only by Myrtle. She tells Harry that she’s had all she wants of his ‘throwing off’ (p. 52) at Ivor and he listens equably to her. He does not leave the subject of war, insists that a ‘man is war, but a real woman is peace. It’s a woman’s job’, he says, ‘to stop war.’ ‘Men believe in war till they are too old to fight’, retorts Myrtle, ‘then they egg the young fools on. You stop war yourself.’ (p. 53) The subject of Ernie and his welfare comes up.

Harry: Ernie’s V.C. wasn’t’ like my D.S.O. .. When they killed Ernie – as they thought – they really did kill all but a little bit of him.

Myrtle: We all know that poor creature is not Ernie.

Harry: Yes it is. Torture and fear took away his senses but what made him stand up to torture is still there – a grain of pure gold. How much gold would be in your fat carcass, done up in perfume and paint, if you had been melted in hell like Ernie? There’s nothing left in me like that. So now, to level it up, I’m going to look after Ernie. (p. 55)

When Myrtle expresses concern as to what would happen to Ernie when Harry gets too old to care for him, Harry suggests that, given that she has made up her mind to be a nurse, June could take over.

Myrtle: It’s not fair to sacrifice June! … [She] has a right to marriage and children of her own.

Harry: What for?

Myrtle: I don’t want her to be one of those hard-faced old-maid nurses.

Harry: Now you show you can’t think. She might marry someone who’d go like Tom King, or like me. She might as well be looking after Ernie.

Myrtle: That’s not good enough for a beautiful girl like June.

Harry: But you can’t lay-out a marriage scheme for June without the coming crop of soldiers. And if you had a son you’d rush him into war so you’d have these mother’s medals on your fat front, and go around licking-up sympathy for what you were suffering as a mother.

Myrtle: Oh, no, I wouldn’t! I’d see that any son of mine got into a protected trade.

Harry: Ah, ha! I knew that’s just what you were – you fat fool! You think you’ll be sitting here like the last war. You don’t know what it means when millions and millions get on the march all wanting nothing but food, like hungry beasts….Oh, God, you don’t know anything!

Myrtle: I know Australia ought to be neutral and ….

Harry: (With drunken contempt) Aw, what you know! If the world kept on as it is, you and Ivor are respectable enough like other ordinary people round about. I understand about you and Ivor – you want a man – you are suited to each other as animals; but you’re only animals, but there are some men and women who have something more in them than mere sex and breeding …. Ernie and June … They’re superior to you …. (p. 55, 55(bis))

Concerned again for Ernie, he removes a rug from Flora’s chair to give him against the cold. Myrtle, having previously seen Ernie creep out of the room, takes the rug from Harry and drapes it across the couch ‘as if affording [him] more shelter … but really to hide his absence.’ (p56) Harry leaves for a snooze and, a moment later, Flora enters laden with shopping. Myrtle receives a telephone call 93 which, from what we hear, seems to indicate that Ernie has been found somewhere. She makes no mention of this to the others but only disappears through the kitchen. In her absence, Harry and Flora engage in conversation, primarily about the nature of men, of how there are, in effect, two men in the one man, the torturer and the tortured, and that women cannot understand what it is like. He is haunted, he says. He and Ernie have been ‘smelted in hell’ (p. 61). He tells his sister of that which haunts him, of that which earned him ‘that bit of tin’.

Harry: It’s a boy – a baby lieutenant, younger than I was. You remember how good I was at German. I meant to go to Heidelberg…. It was in the mud in France. I got a German uniform to reconnoitre in No Man’s Land. I fell into a shell hole with this boy. He was as scared as I was… He and his company were cut-off…. He had such a nice face – fair hair and blue eyes. I got his confidence. (Gets up suffering wildly, like a man in a nightmare). He was as much in love with adventure as I was before Gallipoli. His fright went as he talked to me…. Don’t ask me, Sis … We didn’t know how to kill till the old-country regulars coached us – Oh, Sis…. If only I had let him escape…it wouldn’t have made any final difference…. (As if seeing some past horror). I led his men to our lines. They gave me that bit of tin for capturing a dozen men unaided…. but the boy …. (Stands wide-eyed and hopeless). (p. 61)

It is plain from what he says a little later that the boy died at his hands, and that, no matter how he tries, he cannot forgive himself for this act. ‘That’s why I mustn’t fail Ernie,’ he says. (p 62) He goes to the couch to see how his friend is and realises that he is not there. Myrtle, from the kitchen alcove, puts forth the idea that Ernie may have sneaked out when she went to the letterbox. Harry exits to find him. Myrtle then tells Flora that the telephone call earlier was ‘from Mrs Wright in the next street. He [Ernie] was yelling up and down there with the rifle, frightening everyone.’ (p. 63) Mrs Wright, she says, was going to call the police, but Myrtle told her that she’d call them and so slipped out to the phone box on the corner. Harry returns without Ernie, greatly concerned that the police will pick him up before he does. At that moment, Mrs King appears with Ernie in tow, saying that he appeared as she was having tea. Ernie wanders out to the back

94 garden and the others discuss again what is to be done. There is a ringing at the bell and the Sergeant is admitted. Myrtle tells the policeman that Ernie is in need of institutional care as she can no longer properly care for him at home, but the Sergeant replies that he can only pick up Ernie from the street and not from his home, unless he has a warrant. Harry is pleased by this latter piece of information, and claps the Sergeant on the shoulder. ‘We’re free men, eh, Sergeant. Free in our own homes?’ (p. 65)

Harry: The poor boobs of soldiers rush to all the rows around the world for alleged freedom, and more and more of their own freedom at home is whittled away behind their backs by the wise guys who know how to keep their skins whole. But the dictators haven’t got everything sewn- up here yet. A man’s home in good old Australia is still his [private] bit of heaven.

Myrtle: (Wearily) Not much heaven for others. (p. 66)

June enters ‘very pretty in outdoor attire’ – she has been for a drive with Mrs King’s son, Bill – and, upon seeing the police sergeant, rushes out to find her father in the garden. Mrs King declares that it ‘would be the saving of the child if Ernie were put where he can have proper treatment.’ (p. 67) Her mother is concerned that it is ‘making [June] old before her time.’ (p. 67) Harry, Ernie and June re-enter. Ernie has his gun and tries to stand with it between the Sergeant and the others. June takes his hand and Harry takes the gun. June says that she will not go out again if Harry is not properly on the job, and Harry promises that he will be. Myrtle, with contempt, says, ‘A drunk’s promises!’ (p. 68) Ernie, exhausted, moves away from them and under the couch. ‘Poor devil’, says the Sergeant, ‘he’s not fit to be at large.’ (p. 68) Ivor appears. He had heard there was trouble with Ernie and has come by to see if he could help. ‘Too late, Shiny’, says Harry. ‘Everything’s under control.’ The Sergeant goes to leave, but Harry makes him stay as he wants to conduct an investiture. He takes his old medal and gives it to Ivor, telling the latter that the ‘medal was won for something you send the boobs out to do under one cry or another. Pin it on your seat, Shiny, to save the cloth. Next war, perhaps even on the black markets you won’t be able to get so much as an old bag to cover

95 your fat behind – old Bum – easy!’ (p. 69) He tells them that they are ‘all such slimy humbugs – worshipping the soldier when he goes off to fight. When he comes back broken you’d shut him up so he can’t be a nuisance…. You should all go down on your knees to worship Ernie. He stood between enemy torturers and horrible death till a score of his mates got away.’ (p. 70) He goes on to tell the horrors that Ernie endured. ‘They jabbed him everywhere with bayonets. When he would not speak or tell how many mates he had they jabbed him in the throat: now he can’t speak any more. He’s not a man any more. You couldn’t believe what his body is like, even now. Ernie was tied to a tree. He’s come back from the dead. Angels resurrected him – angels with fuzzy heads. They crept back and took him down from the tree and poulticed him.’ Ernie creeps out from under the couch and June runs to him, weeping. ‘I’ll never let him out of my sight again.’

Sergeant: (To Harry) You’re a great mate, Fisher. I’ll do anything I can for Ernie, but you understand I must carry out the law. There’s nothing I can do for the present.

(Harry takes the V.C. medal from the mantel piece.)

Harry: Oh, yes, there is. Something you all can do. (He pins the medal on Ernie’s coat. Ernie fingers it vacantly. Harry stands back at salute.) Salute Ernie! The King would if he were here.

(Ivor rises smartly to salute. The Sergeant likewise with bulky dignity. Mrs King rises too. June clasps Ernie affectionately. Flora makes a motion to rise but instead gathers Myrtle to her.) (p. 71)

Suffering, sacrifice and salvation This sad and vivid play appears to be the last written by Miles. It is heavy with grief, both of a personal and national nature, and thick with politics, both pro- and anti-war. Clearly, it is a play written towards the end of a life by one who is exhausted with all that she has seen, but who insists upon holding still to the belief that heroism and, indeed, salvation are to be found in the undertaking of duty and obligation.

We see the outworking of these virtues firmly in the characters of Ernie and June. Father and daughter are held up by Harry as ‘superior’ to Myrtle. ‘There are some men and women’, we are told in a firm comment against Myrtle’s self- indulgence, ‘who have something more in them than mere sex and breeding’ (p. 55(bis)). Harry himself willingly undertakes what he considers his duty in his care of Ernie; indeed, his goodness is such as to cause him to be a minor hero of this play. His honesty means that issues are discussed that would not be otherwise. His bravery brings further to light Myrtle and Ivor’s less than noble characters. His working for the good of his friend ensures the protection and right reward of one who might otherwise be treated poorly. June, too, sees the call of duty and responds accordingly. She gladly takes on the duty of care for her father and, by curtain close, has willingly offered her life as one of service to he who suffered so tragically for the sake of others. Her surrendering to duty, her willingness to sacrifice her own desires, is portrayed by Miles as noble and good, as, indeed, heroic. Ernie is, of course, the true hero of The Dead Must Not Return, though he does not look at all like one. He is, we are told, no longer a man. He cannot speak for the stab wound in his throat. He lives in fear behind the sofa, his instincts seemingly more animal than human. Throughout the course of the play he seems to do nothing that one would consider heroic. All that he appears to do is to suffer and to cause suffering. But prior to the lifting of the curtain, Ernie has enacted deeds of greatness that well earn him the title and status of hero. ‘He stood between enemy torturers and horrible death till a score of his mates got away’(p. 70), Harry tells us. There is every sense of rightness about the investiture which Harry conducts; at last the Victoria Cross can be pinned to the noble breast that actually won it, rather than to Myrtle’s ‘fat front’ (p. 55). It is a profoundly moving scene, made all the more so for the physical and mental frailty of he who is being so honoured. Plainly for Myrtle, though, and despite the medal, these deeds mean little. The full resonance of the return of her husband is not just the difficulty of managing a severely broken man, but the immediate and unheralded destruction of her own dreams for a bright new future, for a second chance. We see most clearly demonstrated in this play, we see it over and over, that the one who responds to duty and obligation with willing sacrifice opens 97 themselves not only to the suffering that ensues from such sacrifice but to the fulfilment too. This fulfilment is seen in the manner in which each character who so sacrifices also becomes something more than they were at the beginning of the play, or than what we were told they were earlier. Character development in The Dead Shall Not Return seems to hang almost solely on this. No more plainly is it seen than with Harry. Prior to developing his relationship with Ernie, the course of his life was devoid of structure, was peripatetic, wandering. He had loosed himself of all ties, even to the point of not alerting his sister to the fact that he was still alive. His life was that of the adventurer, the itinerant. Clearly there was already much good in him for his relentless and tireless service to his country, but this good is perfected in his sacrifice of the life he had led for the care of Ernie. No longer does he travel the world and meet adventure head on; now his world is the closed streets of suburbia, his adventure no more than the care of a broken and suffering man. The sacrifice he has made is a willing one, and made, it would seem, in response to the needs of one other and greater than himself. ‘Torture and fear took away his [Ernie’s] senses but what made him stand up to torture is still there – a grain of pure gold’, he says to Myrtle. ‘There’s nothing left in me like that. So now, to level it up, I’m going to look after Ernie.’ (p. 55) In June too we see how the move to sacrifice leads to a sense of refining, of perfecting. As has been previously made apparent, Miles’ valorises the single life over that of marriage and family. Plainly, too, she considers highly the life of sacrifice. Here, then, is June, engaging with both, choosing both, and rejecting a future that is more conventionally considered to be appropriate for a young woman, especially for one so lovely. Myrtle clearly thinks it is an inappropriate prospect for her daughter – she is completely set against her becoming ‘one of those hard-faced old-maid nurses’ (p. 55) – but there is no turning back June from her vocation once she has set upon it. Because of her inherent goodness, it is plain to her what course her life must take from this point on. Once things are made apparent she does not shirk but embraces her fortune resolutely. Her choice of duty over desire in turn further refines an already nigh to pure heart, such that her duty becomes her desire, thus making yet purer the grain of gold that resides within her. For Myrtle, we see something more of the story arc, something more of the struggle. The trajectory towards a decision to sacrifice is not as simple for her 98 as it is, say, for June. Harry’s decision was made prior to the play’s opening act, so we see only the fruits of that decision, not the actual process. June’s decision is made with relative ease, apparently because of her yet youthful innocence and her inherent leaning towards right. But for Myrtle, who knows how much she has at stake, there is a struggle before a decision can be made. This struggle, of course, involves the reconciliation of opposites: of fidelity with infidelity, of duty with the spurning thereof, of obligation with refusal. Such profoundly contrary points are, of course, impossible to unite, which is what makes Myrtle’s struggle so very difficult, and the reading of her character so very interesting. Throughout the course of the play, there are scenes during which one sincerely hopes that her materialism and selfishness has not always been so overt, but that rather it is an outworking for her of the hardship of war and all that war brings. Again, there is the hope that, like June, she will choose duty over desire, that she will be true to her marriage vows and, in turn, will come to desire that which previously she had looked on with great difficulty. When, at the very last, Harry enacts the investiture and pins the Victoria Cross to Ernie’s breast, those present respond accordingly. Ivor and the Sergeant, we read, rise and salute. Mrs King also rises, and June clasps her father ‘affectionately’ (p. 71). Flora is about to rise, we are told, ‘but instead gathers Myrtle to her.’ Only Myrtle appears to make no response, no gesture of recognition of honour duly awarded. She does not rise with the others – she cannot for the weight that is upon her – but nor does she reject the arms that enfold her. Her response, then, is a softening, and in this softening is seen at last her relinquishing of desire to duty, her submission to suffering, her recognition of frailty in the knowledge of the hardships to come. In allowing herself to be so gathered, Myrtle takes strength for the unwanted future that she knows she must now accept. In so doing, she acquiesces not only to the difficulties yet to be, but to the possibility of finding a hidden grain of gold in her chest, of finding, indeed, salvation.

An inborn sense of duty When one scans across the sweep of Miles’ life, one of the strongest and most enduring themes is that of duty, of obligation, of sacrifice. We see it in her earliest days as the eldest of seven children growing up in what was still considered 99 frontier country, a hard and difficult life which, though studded with certain joys, was plainly one of obligation and responsibility to the family as a whole. In Chicago, hers again was a life of duty; though she considered herself to have ‘fallen among’123 social reformers, she did not leave but, because of a strong sense of right, continued despite overwork, little pay, illness, depression and, most importantly for Miles, at the expense of her writing. In 1917 she travelled to Macedonia to undertake war work with the Scottish Women’s Hospital Unit124, drawing on brief training she had had as a nurse way back in Sydney days. Later in London, she involved herself again in service to others, undertaking community work for the National Housing Office. Her very nature, it would appear, was one that felt a burden for others, such that, at so many levels, she was compelled to serve. Plainly one of the most significant periods of her life in terms of duty and obligation came when she returned from almost three decades abroad to care for her aging mother. Miles’ parents, John and Susannah Franklin, had been living in Carlton, Sydney, since 1915. Her father had passed away in 1931, aged 83125, and her mother was left alone in the bungalow, ‘Wambrook’, named after the place of her birth. Miles, the only surviving daughter of four and unmarried, returned for the last time from abroad; there was no question but that it would be she of the remaining two offspring who would act in response to this familial need. Though sacrifice, duty and obligation seem to be virtues very much esteemed by Miles, they did not necessarily come easily to her. The five and a half years that she cared for her mother were often greatly trying. The relationship between mother and daughter was a fraught one, causing Miles deep distraction: ‘Hot day’, she writes in her diary in 1938. ‘Mother spiteful’126; ‘Mother on her old warpath of wounding’127; ‘I had Mother six weeks on my hands unaided again

123 Miles Franklin in Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 65. 124 This is a most interesting period of Miles’ life, though much of the associated correspondence has been lost. Susanna De Vries has, however, been able to piece together a fairly solid account of this period and presents it in Chapter Six of her book Great Australian Women: From Pioneering Days to the Present, Harper Collins, Sydney, 2002. More information on the Scottish Women’s Hospital Service is to be found in Hugh Gilchrist’s book Australians and Greeks. Volume 2. The Middle Years, Halstead Press, Sydney, 1997. 125 John Franklin was born 27th January, 1848, at Yass Plains, New South Wales, and died 31 October, 1931, in Sydney. For a good history of Miles’ family and forebears, see Colin Roderick’s biography Miles Franklin: Her Brilliant Career, Rigby Publishers Limited, Sydney, 1982. This book also contains a most useful chronology of Miles’ life, publications and surrounding events. 126 Brunton, The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 94. 127 Ibid., p. 59. 100

– and she is a handful – 2 handfuls – no chink of harmony or repose possible near her’128; ‘Mother went out for afternoon, thank Heaven … oh, for time to myself without interruption and the disharmony.’129 She feels constantly harried, put upon by endless domestic duties and considers her work to suffer. Yet she continues, she does not leave and, upon her mother’s passing, Paul Brunton tells us, experiences ‘guilt, sorrow and a feeling of profound loss.’130 New obligations arise. Her nephew, Jack Franklin, moves in to the house in Carlton as does her brother, Norman, Jack’s father. Miles accepts, once again, the familial duty, but begrudges the expectation that she will act as an unpaid maid. ‘I can’t wait on Jack & Norman – I resent their uselessness & unkindness & selfishness & self-indulgence & ignorance.’131 In October of 1940, she writes: ‘Jack nasty and selfish and insolent – Norman instead of helping me to discipline him as usual helped to insult me … Mother broke me down 2 years of N & J have completed the wreck.’132 Despite her complaints, however, it is plain that her care for both of them, and particularly for Jack, is strong. Jack’s tale is a sad one, and quite likely was at least something of an influence for the writing of The Dead Must Not Return. He was a fine, strong, handsome lad who, despite his rankling of Miles, thought much of his aunt, and considered her housekeeping skills of the highest order. ‘Oh, Auntie,’ he says when in his early teens, ‘such a pity you are wasted. You would make such a splendid wife. Look at the way you make cakes, and iron Dad’s shirts, and the way you can shop and cook! Couldn’t you get married now?’ ‘I’m too old.’ ‘That oughtn’t to be against you. You could keep house so well, and write books in your spare time. I’d marry you, only you are my relation.’133 Jack joined the Royal Australian Air Force in October, 1942, and qualified as a pilot a year later. Miles, his only surviving relative – his mother had died when he was just a boy and his father in January, 1942 – often writes about him, in both diaries and letters, expressing her concern for his welfare. ‘My

128 Brunton, The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 40. 129 Ibid., p. 21. 130 Ibid., p. 116. 131 Ibid., p. 129. 132 Ibid., p. 129. 133 Ibid., p. 21. 101 nephew is still in hospital – it is bright’s disease134. I am very unhappy about him’135, she writes in 1941. The following year, upon the death of Jack’s father, she writes to Alice Henry, now living in Melbourne: ‘The boy is very cut-up of course but he is working beyond his strength in military transport. … I hope he will be alright.’136 Paul Brunton tells us that, by this stage, Jack ‘was on the road to alcoholism.’137 ‘The trouble with his eyes is enlarged pupils – from kidney trouble. Poor boy’138, we read in a diary entry of Miles’ dated 30 June, 1942. Miles had written to her friend, Margaret Dreier Robins, a few months earlier: ‘We nearly lost him this winter with pneumonia and nephritis.’139 The following month he is in a collision in which his captain – ‘a nice fellow of 38 (and a baby coming to his wife) and interested in my writings’140 – and another young man were killed. ‘God send he comes back safely’141 is Miles’ prayer of 1943, and in 1945 he is, at least, alive though ‘still away flying in the Pacific.’142 He does return, and safely, but by 1950, Jill Roe tells us, he had ‘collapsed into alcoholism.’143 Miles wonders if ‘Alcohols-Anonymous [sic] would be helpful.’144 Just months later, he ‘is in the free-est part of the re-pat hospital – could go out if he wished without trouble but he never does. He gives no trouble to anyone but seems to have lost initiative.’145 The Assistant Superintendent of Rozelle Hospital tells Miles that her nephew’s outlook is ‘not good’, that he is ‘schizophrenic’, ‘depressed’ and will be given shock treatment. ‘That poor boy – he feels abandoned. God help him. God help me.’ In 1952, two years before her death, Miles writes to past fellow member of the Women’s Trade Union League, Magdalen Dalloz: ‘The only relative of my immediate family left is a nephew who was a pilot in the air force. He is what they call a war neurosis case and is in a hospital with other wrecks through nerves. What I went through with him delirious, all alone for years, finally wrecked my

134 Bright’s disease is known in modern medicine as acute or chronic nephritis, and is a form of kidney ailment. 135 Roe, My Congenials, v. II, p. 60. 136 Ibid., v. II, p. 64. 137 Brunton, The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 134. 138 Ibid., p. 136. 139 Roe, My Congenials, v. II, p. 67. 140 Roe, My Congenials, v. II, p. 70. 141 Ibid., p. 104. 142 Ibid., p. 141. 143 Ibid., p. 151. 144 Ibid., p. 246. 145 Ibid., p. 265. 102 heart. It is now ‘fatigued’.’146 There is some grace in the fact that Miles had passed away two years previously when her once strong and vital nephew was killed in a road accident aged just thirty-five.

146 Roe, My Congenials, v. II, p. 298. 103

VII

These are days of much work, much reminiscence and much publication. In the final decade of her life, Miles publishes a book every two years, with more to be published posthumously. She sits at her desk in her book-lined study and does not answer the door if she does not feel like it. She hates to look in the mirror. Her face, she says, is covered in wrinkles in the way that a Maori Chief’s is covered in markings. The substantial dental work undertaken in Chicago in which her mastication muscles and gums were cut away is to blame. It is, she says, ‘hard to bear.’147 In the past if she was depressed she would make herself a new hat and then, lo and behold, ‘up would go the mercury’. By 1946, she notes ‘as a sign of gathering age that hats no longer delight [her].’148

She does not stop her diary entries. These become not so much accounts of the day as accounts of days many decades past. She sifts through memories, sets distant events into prose, recalls friends from far-off countries, all as if she is making solid her life, making it concrete. She writes her response to certain books, writes reviews of them, so that, at first glance, her journal entries appear as an intellectual exercise. A sentence or two later the angle has shifted: the journal entry is now about how the book in question relates to Miles’ own life. In April 1948, Miles begins an account of Christina Stead’s book Letty Fox: Her Luck, first published two years previously by Harcourt Brace in New York. Miles writes critically:

This Australian girl has gone abroad and brought her production up to international standards by writing a handbook on whores. Such a gallery of bitches (the mot just in this case) makes one wonder is chastity among women entirely out of demand in America.

147 Brunton, The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 174. 148 Ibid., p. 174. 104

There were plenty such as Letty’s colleagues forty years ago, but they were the exceptions not the mass, as they would seem to be by the novels of today.149

She begins then to write of the house parties she was sometimes invited to back in Chicago days but to which she never went.150 These were, she says, ‘weekends where husbands were exchanged and virgins were ‘taught to live’.’151 It was more than apparent that her friends wanted to instruct her in ‘the doctrine of promiscuity as part of freedom for women.’152 She did, on one occasion, attend an afternoon event where the conversation revolved around the advocation of ‘the new sexual freedom – as ancient as Babylon and Sodom and Gomorrah.’153 Miles and another young woman present were disgusted, and not at all amused as their friends expected them to be. When Miles is questioned by her liberated friends as to her reactions she does not hide her sentiments:

Floyd154 said I was denying life. I said I was not denying life, but what was offered me here would be death to me. ‘But you’ll become an old maid!’ exclaimed Floyd. ‘I’d rather be an old maid than an old harridan,’ I replied. This silenced Floyd. ‘What do you want?’ inquired Margery later when we were alone. She had been deputed to talk to me intimately out of our evident friendship. ‘You can’t give me back my voice,’ I said passionately. ‘What I want is an income that would free me to study music and to try some method that might mend my voice, & free me to write as a second interest.’(p. 227)

Marjorie Barnard makes the point that Miles’ attitudes and opinions changed very little in her life. ‘[Her] outlook in her seventies was very much the same as it had

149 Brunton, The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 226. 150 The milieu of which Miles was a part, clearly, included those who held to ideas of free love. This does not mean that all first wave feminists held libertarian views. Quite the opposite. Many early feminists were staunchly opposed to free love, and were fervent in their expounding of chastity and monogamy. For a further discussion of this, see Chapter 1 regarding the temperance women and the early suffragettes in DeBerg, Betty, Ungodly Women, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1990. Also, in respect of Vida Goldstein and Veni Cooper-Mathieson, see p.192 of Bongiorno, Frank, ‘In This World and the Next: Political Modernity and Unorthodox Religion in Australia 1880-1930’, in Levy, Neil and Dolin, Tim (eds), Antipodean Modern, Australian Research Institute, Curtin University, 2006. For details regarding the more libertarian attitude, see Kennedy, David, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990, and Taylor, Barbara, Eve and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, Virago, London, 1983. 151 Ibid., p. 226. 152 Ibid., p. 226. 153 Ibid., p. 226 154 Floyd and Margery (later Currey) Dell were members of the literary set in Chicago. Roe, My Congenials, v. II, p. 377. 105 been in her youth. … Her outlook remained that of the 1890’s [sic]. She went on fighting old battles.’155 There is something worthy about this, something noble, for it speaks of an indomitable spirit. And the battles Miles fights are themselves worthy, though certain aspects may, to some, seem strangely incongruous one with another. While much of the feminist movement, alongside equality for women, was promoting a more liberal approach to sex, Miles remains staunchly chaste. Though the quintessential New Woman in so many ways and the embodiment of modernism – in her reinvention of herself, in her independence, in her decision to remain single – this component that is chastity sets her apart. Clearly, too, the fact that, so very many years after the event, she continues to bewail the ruin of her voice indicates the extent to which this ‘old battle’ remains. It is here that one can see again a glimmer of why she feels herself a failure. For all along and all these years, she really just wanted to be a singer. But even if she is accepting of her lot as a writer, is she accepting of the manner in which she must live this lot? We see over and over in her writings that financial difficulty, not surprisingly, is something she loathes, is something she fears. She aches for an income, a patron, a means by which she can focus entirely on writing. Despite her decision to remain unmarried, intimations of regret break into her diarising from time to time. With them breaks in too the knowledge that her life could have been so very different, and not necessarily for the worse. ‘What interest I could have, what rich material as a basis for novels I could experience, if I could go about as the women who belong to men do’156, she writes in April, 1949. After the death of her parents she is able to secure the rent of the two small shops that they had owned, an amount of two, sometimes three pounds a week. By now, though, her health concerns are increased – another difficulty besetting her endeavour not to die a failure. To what end, then, does this fighting of old battles show itself in her playwriting? Certainly, there is the pragmatic showing – that of Miles simply not writing as much as she would like. But the content, plainly, must also participate in this disclosure. We recall Phoebe Lambent and Love, that two-act play set in London that makes up the body of Chapter III. We recall how it is that the title character leads an independent life, becomes pregnant, disappears for a year to

155 Barnard, Miles Franklin, p. 154. 156 Brunton, The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 248. 106 give birth to the child and adopt him out, spends the following two decades hiding the fact, and ultimately creates a situation that is too modern for her legitimate son to bear, such that, one presumes, he kills himself. As discussed in Chapter III, a feminist reading of this play can certainly be made. It is, indeed, a most immediate and obvious one. Chapter III states too that such a reading is not the only one possible, that there may be room for another that pushes aside the feminist, the modernist, to enable another to exist. In 1923 when Phoebe Lambent and Love was written, there is the sense – not least because of the obliqueness of the point of Phoebe Lambent in Love – that Miles is still working out her politics and opinions, and that she is doing this, successfully or otherwise, through her theatrical writing. By the last decade of her life, it would by no means be beyond the realms of reason to suggest that Miles is not unhappy with a somewhat more traditional reading of this play, a reading that views certain behaviours engaged in by some modern women as immoral, that views her struggles with society as her right punishment for dissolute actions, that sees that horrendous death of her son as, ultimately, wrought by her own hand. Another play that must be mentioned at this point is Virgins and Martyrs out of Date, also called Modern!. Another two-act play, this one written circa 1944, it tells the tale of Betty Belgrave (or Belfrage in Modern!), a young ‘modern’. Betty has various sexual partners and falls pregnant to one of them, though she is uncertain as to which one. She finds sympathy in her father’s sister, Beryl. Although Beryl has never married or had lovers, she is, to Betty’s continual surprise, almost a modern herself, if not at times even more so than Betty. Betty tells her father of her predicament and his hand is forced. He arranges for the various young men with whom his daughter has been romantically involved to come to his office and undergo an interview. Beryl meets each of them in turn and directs them into her brother’s study where Betty, unbeknownst to the visitors – or, indeed, to her own father! – is out of sight but able to hear every word. Some of the fellows offer to help out Betty financially so that she might terminate the pregnancy; others want to marry her. By what appears to be the end of the play – for it does have a strong sense of incompletion – two of the fellows give her ample money for the termination. This is another play that appears at first reading to be feminist – or certainly modernist – in nature. Note its basic premise: a sexually liberated young 107 woman comes up against a society that does not allow her to be as truly liberated as she would wish. She is trapped, and must find a way out. But present too in this play is a strong reading against a sexually liberated behaviour. Such behaviour, Miles tells us, results in much trouble and deceit, results, indeed, in destruction – of relationships, of reputations, of social standing, of lives. Betty is not drawn as a character with whom the audience is meant to sympathise, but rather as one of whom we are meant to think little. She is needlessly thoughtless of the sensibilities of her chaste sister and of her father’s household rules. She flaunts her unconventional behaviour, does not seem to register that it is harmful and difficult for others. There is the suggestion that the entire charade – that of Mr Belgrave being forced to interview the various young men while Betty listens in – is all a ruse planned by Betty long before she even takes the fellows as lovers, and all with the purpose of ascertaining which one would make the more suitable husband. Such a reading gains further credibility when Miles’ views on promiscuity are examined a little more. Nancy Lee Jones tells us that ‘Franklin never openly advocated birth control (nor did the reformist Women’s Trade Union League of which Franklin was a member) and therefore it would have been folly to suggest sex outside of marriage.’157 Miles writes further of her friends in Chicago, and recalls the moment when Floyd Dell and his liberated male companions announced to her that they were feminists:

I listened while they extolled the liberties that ‘feminism’ would extend to women. It seemed to me that the most striking of these were some of the vices of men – smoking for instance – a mild one – and whoring – which they were to enjoy as men did without losing their respectability. It did not seem to me that such indulgences would make women any more free or happy, but merely that it would relieve men from any sense of responsibility or social disapproval in debauching them. At that time, some men sometimes had to suffer social disapproval for ruining some girls, but this feminism would free men from any sense of regret, responsibility or remorse to any girl. That was far from what I considered freedom or fair play for women.158

157 Jones, Nancy Lee, Reality and the Shadow: The adventure of Identity in Twentieth-century Australian Women’s Fiction, Ph.D. Thesis, Tufts University, 1989, p. 31. 158 Brunton, The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 229. 108

She goes on to say that, upon returning to the United States in 1923, ‘Floyd’s brand of feminism was operating. Abortions were the order of the day. Margaret Currey (long since divorced from Floyd) said all the numerous office girls with whom she was in contact had ‘been through it’. The lid was right off virtue, men told me.’159 Floyd Dell and Margery Currey are, of course, those two mentioned earlier in the diary entry whose opinions Miles found loathsome. If there is any doubt as to the tone and intent of these reflections, she makes yet plainer her meaning when she states, a couple of paragraphs later:

I am glad I am not young now, I don’t desire life to stagnate outside outworn customs, and the monogamous marriage, so far, has been monogamous for women only: a new experiment or an extension of the pre-1914-18 one is due. Also, if men will not set themselves against the basic madnesses which end in war, it doesn’t matter how each generation is produced for the slaughter, but I deplore the mad waste and degradation of the great power of life-giving in doubtful pleasure which inevitably ends in disease, disillusion, pain and poverty of soul and body.’160

Plainly, she considers the notion of free sex of a piece with war and with the destruction it wreaks. In a journal entry in 1948 she writes: ‘My standards may be silly, unavailing, but I have to make my own, and they serve me. They are the pole I swing to.’161 She is writing of literature but she could be just as easily explaining nineteenth century morality to a twenty-first century audience.

She sifts, she filters, she takes stock. She writes up her will, lists her possessions: a blue and gold Paragon China tea set; dessert bowls patterned in roses; a small brooch made of a natural gold nugget; a silver one of a fish on a South Sea paddle; a necklace of silver grape leaves; a folding table desk of walnut. She bequeaths sketches, scrapbooks and photographs to the National Library in Canberra, books, diaries, correspondence and manuscripts to the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Other papers she carefully marks for burning upon her demise. She

159 Brunton, The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 230. 160 Ibid., p. 230. 161 Ibid., p. 209. 109 leaves 50 to cousin Ruby, 100 to nephew Jack; for the latter there is an additional ten shillings a week for life as well as her Hansen piano. The bulk of her estate she designates to the establishment of what is to be called the ‘Franklin Fund’, continuing, after her death, that to which she so dedicated herself during her life: ‘the advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature’162. When one considers the nature of Miles – of her work, of her dedication, of her intent – such a benefaction represents a profound bringing to fullness of many parts of her. Most immediately there is her commitment to Australian literature, that which she championed relentlessly from her earliest days. Enmeshed in this is the idea of Miles as Guardian of such literature, as Defender, and, when we consider how she was deemed by A.G. Stephens of The Bulletin to be the author of the first true Australian novel, perhaps it is not histrionics to regard her as, indeed, the Mother of Australian literature. Dymphna Cusack tells us that Miles referred to her as her ‘literary daughter’163, and plainly the older woman pours tremendous energy into the encouragement of individuals in their literary aspirations.164 Miles as a young woman was the recipient of such adopted maternal relations, which relations plainly had a lasting affect upon her. Those she shared with her actual mother – the lovely, intelligent and extremely hardworking Susannah Lampe Franklin – were strained, fraught, difficult. As we have seen, Miles grieved at the death of her mother, but not just at her loss. She grieved too that she didn’t love her mother more, grieved that things weren’t better between them. As a literary ingénue making her way in the big city of Sydney after life on the frontier, it was the feminist and philanthropist Rose Scott, a woman at that stage in her early fifties, who took Miles under her wing. Miles benefited hugely from this relationship; the gregarious Miss Scott, devoid of children of her own, accommodated Miles in her cottage in Edgecliff, introduced the young writer to established members of the literati, encouraged her in her career, corresponded

162 North, Yarn Spinners, p. 377. 163 Ibid., p. 371. 164 Notable among these is Mary E. Fullerton who published under the pseudonym ‘E’. It was Miles who organised for Mary’s poetry to be published and who acted as agent on her behalf. In return, Mary undertook the part of go-between in Miles’ efforts to ensure the identity of Brent of Bin Bin was kept secret. 110 with her about poetry and was in on the Mary Ann scheme. She was friend, mentor and surrogate mother to Miles. Once in Chicago, there was Alice Henry, herself an expatriate Australian and some twenty years older than Miles, with whom our young heroine experienced an immediate affinity. Both were from the bush, both ascribed to feminist principles, both were of a literary inclination. Again did Miles find herself taken care of in a particularly maternal way: Miss Henry is for Miles in Chicago what Miss Scott had been in Sydney. This type of relationship is acknowledged to varying degrees in certain of Miles’ plays. In 1913, as we have seen, she began to adapt Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel, Mag-Marjorie165, into a play of the same name. The adaptation shows an older, more experienced woman, Mrs Yale, rescuing a young, unwed chambermaid, Mag (short for Marjorie), from the shame and humiliation of pregnancy, whisking her abroad, providing her with an education and enabling her most comprehensively to reinvent herself. Young Dolly, Mag’s child, is brought up believing that she is Miss Yale’s adopted daughter, Mag graduates to become Dr Marjorie Yale and, ten years later, the three of them return to Australia to confront he who mistreated her in Act One. Without Miss Yale, Mag’s life would have been sorely different: there is every indication, in fact, that she would have even ended her life. Likewise would Phoebe Lambent’s trouble have been greater without the assistance of the older Lady Lattimer. Although Miles’ own situation was not quite the same Mag’s or Phoebe’s, clearly her way in life would have been far more difficult without the able assistance of Miss Scott and Miss Henry (to name just two) to help her on her way, to encourage, comfort, aid and inspire. In 1948 in her little bungalow in Carlton, Miles does not forget the help of those mentors in her life. She does not forget the assistance, the kindness, the care shown to her as a young, inexperienced woman making her way in the modern world. As she sifts through documents and letters, as she bequeaths 50 here and 100 there, she puts onto paper that which has been brewing in her mind now for some time: she leaves to the writers of her nation the benefaction that is to become the Miles Franklin Award, the most prestigious award in the country,

165 Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 – 1935), US feminist writer and theorist. Miles was first introduced to Gilman’s writing by Rose Scott with the novel In this our World. Miles admired Gilman greatly, and was honoured to become acquainted with her during Chicago days. 111 committing herself even in death to the care and encouragement of Australian writers. It is an act emerging from her love of literature and from her gratitude to those whose kindness to her made easier her way to a writing life. It is an act, too, which has ensured that we remember Miles as a champion of writing in this country, that insists, indeed, that we acknowledge her as the Mother of Australian Literature.

Miles travels the last leg home by taxi. She is old now and tires easily, finds the brief stretch from the railway station too much for her. In the mailbox there is a letter from Magdalen Dalloz, an old friend from Chicago days and a past worker too for the National Women’s Trade Union League. Miles’ lips press together, frustrated. ‘You beat me to it,’ she writes in her reply, ‘as I have hoped to write to you for weeks but my heart has gone phut and everything is beyond me these days. Now that I have reached the allotted span, I don’t know whether it is worth while to struggle on. My mother lived till nearly 88 but at over 80 she was much stronger than I have been for four or five years now. … Growing old is a pest.’166 She has become stiff, used to get up from the floor like a cork but cannot now, finds it difficult. Her knee is arthritic and swollen to the size of an ostrich egg. Some weeks later she writes to Vance Palmer from a cousin’s home in the suburb of Beecroft. ‘I had your book ready to read when I was taken with a heart attack five weeks ago’, she says. ‘As you have had a heart attack will you please take time to tell me how long you were in bed & what they did to you & how you felt. … I do not know whether it is worth struggling to survive so will you please tell me lots about your illness’.167 Her kind cousins give her ‘the minutest and tenderest attention’168, and she rallies herself for another letter. ‘I have never gained self-confidence & my writing fills me with a sense of tortured failure’, she pens to poet Marjorie Pizer Holburn. ‘Critics don’t see the underside or innerness of what I attempt.’169 She

166 Roe, My Congenials, v. II, pp. 348, 349. 167 Ibid., p. 350. 168 Ibid., p. 350. 169 Ibid., p. 351. 112 makes an effort to read the newspaper, sits in bed wrapped in eiderdowns but is unable to rise and dress. She thanks her friend Pixie O’Harris for her ‘expensive extravagant gifts’, but asks that she send no more. ‘Writing is an affliction worse than TB’, she writes to Pixie, ‘for TB can be cured.’170 Two weeks later fluid develops around her heart, and she dies just a few days after its removal.

A century has passed since young Miles arrived on the shores of America, more since ‘the very first Australian novel’ was published. The Miles Franklin Award has been bestowed half a hundred times, and half a hundred writers have been able with the proceeds to write another book or more. Every year during the lead up to the announcement of the winner, a tension builds up. Debates are rife: should this novel be admitted, or that one awarded? To what extent can or should the parameters of Miles’ last will and testament be pushed to incorporate all aspects of the Australian novel today? Should novels written about Australians but set overseas be admitted to the award? Or those written by expatriate Australians and containing no Australian content whatsoever? And what is Australian content, anyway? What does the phrase ‘[to] present Australian Life in any of its phases’ really mean? It is cheering to consider that she who so staunchly engaged with discussion pertaining to the nature and importance of an Australian literature should leave not only a generous benefaction to the furthering of that literature, but should do so in terms ensuring that it will be surrounded in debate until the last trump sounds. Miles, who was never short of an opinion or a comment, who loved a lively conversation, has ensured that, once a year, she is again the centre of vigorous discussion. And as Australian writers push and grow, so too will the debate. Once a year, Miles will be remembered in a not inappropriate manner. But is this enough? Is this sufficient homage to she who was so vitally important to the establishment of an Australian national identity through literature, who continues, indeed, to be so? Is this sufficient for she who, by rights, should be titled the Mother of Australian Literature?

170 Roe, My Congenials, v. II, p. 352. 113

One month before she dies, Miles sends a letter to Dymphna Cusack with whom she’d had a long friendship, correspondence and collaboration. She wrote in it: ‘The unfaith of those who have tasted death is terrible strange.’171 Four months after losing one of her closest friends, Dymphna writes a letter to ‘the Spirit of Miles Franklin’:

There can be no “unfaith” for one who had the privilege to be your friend, Miles, for whatever I do, whatever I write, you are with me. In some strange way you more truly represent the Australia I love than any symbol, official or unofficial. If I admit any influence on me as a writer, it is yours. My friendship with you was the catalyst which brought all my own experiences, my emotions, my beliefs, into new relations. Nothing basically has changed. It was given new significance. You sometimes called me “your literary daughter”. I treasure beyond anything that precious compliment. I assert my faith against the “unfaith” of death. In your own words: “A writer must have a pole to swing to.” Your integrity was your pole. Your love of our country your pole star. Make me your heir in both. Dymphna.172

There can be no question but that Miles did not fail in her life. Her contribution, her influence, her significance cannot be overstated. There is much in her plays that sheds light on the nature of the woman herself, on the issues that she faced. Were she able to ‘go about as the women who belong to men do’ things may well have been different. Possibly, as we have seen from Chapter II – that section pertaining to The Survivors and the relationship between suffering and art – her life may have been one of an ease that hindered rather than helped her writing. As it was, she struggled for literature, and she suffered for it, yet she remained true to her vocation to the last. She paved a way for the writers to come, she helped to put literary Australia on the map, she had many publications and as many as five of her plays– possibly more – staged or publicly read. ‘Poor darling,’ writes Katharine Susannah Prichard to Dymphna Cusack. ‘I have been infinitely saddened – not only by her going, but by the discouragement she suffered. I’d have given anything for her to have had more appreciation and recognition in her lifetime.’173 And so, indeed, would I.

171 North, Yarn Spinners, p. 367. Miles is quoting from a poem by Mary Fullerton. 172 Ibid., p. 371. 173 Ibid., p. 369. 114

Synopses of Selected Plays

Note: ps. indicates the pseudonym under which the play was written. Alternative titles appear in italics. n.d. indicates no date.

Aunt Sophie Smashes a Triangle The Married Lover, The Homebreaker, Elaine Changes Her Mind; MLMSS 445/25, Item 2; also at ML MSS 6035/2 with thesis; c. 1916.

Chicago. The present.

David Mortimer is having an affair with the young and lovely Elaine Powell. His wife, Alice, middle-aged and worn, is alerted to the fact by her sister-in-law, Sophie. The latter engineers the situation to its outworking. She ensures that both Alice and Elaine take respite from their difficulties at the same sanatorium where they become friends. She instructs them soundly on things feminist, moving each to a point where a happy and appropriate ending will be more readily received by both. Unbeknownst to Alice, Elaine sends for David. He arrives and is greeted by his wife who is certain that he has sought her out and found her, that he has come to her to repair their marriage. Elaine breaks with him and she and Sophie (in Alice’s absence) insist that he return to the wife of his youth. And so he does. Elaine takes up Sophie’s offer to join the suffragist campaign. As she is leaving, Elaine faints, and is caught in the arms of the Sophie.

Somewhere in London MLMSS 445/25, Item 3; c. 1916.

London, 1916.

Joan is an artist who has chosen art over love. Her young Australian protégée, Brenda, insists that a woman should be able to have both, like a man. Joan is not so sure…

115

Brenda has romantic interest in Joan’s brother, Percy, and in her Australian cousin, Cyril, who is visiting London.

Mention is made early in the play of Joan’s ‘Cyril’, a man called Major Froggart. Circumstances were such that, despite their being in love, they did not marry. Joan says it was because Froggart was a very arrogant person, who insisted that she paint no more but follow him to the end of the earth instead. This she could not do.

Ten years have passed since this love. Joan finds out that Major Froggart has been blinded in battle. She gets down from the attic an old picture she painted of him during the height of their romance. The sight of it brings back old feelings. She excludes Brenda and others from her studio and works in isolation upon the half finished painting, adding to its face a bandage about the eyes.

Meanwhile, Percy and Brenda have been trying to persuade Joan to enter her pictures into the Academy for hanging. She had at first said that she would, but now, since working on the Major Froggart picture, finds her emotions are too much and she changes her mind. So Brenda and Cyril take the paintings from the studio and deliver them to the Academy.

In the scene that follows Major Froggart, his sister, Rose, Cousin Cyril and others appear. There is much talk of the unsigned paintings that are hanging in the Academy. After a time, Joan realises that they are her stolen paintings that she has already reported to the police. The course of action reveals the identity of the thieves; Joan is made more amazing and Froggart is flattered.

Much coupling ensues – Percy and Brenda, Cyril and Rose, Major Froggart and Joan – and happy endings for all.

116

Sophistication ps. Sceptic; ML MSS 445/25, Item 10; c. 1945. The Onlooker Sees Most, ML MSS 6035/10, c. 1945.

Sydney, 1939.

Act I opens in a hotel reception room where Etta is telling Ercil about the terrible time she has had of late as a result of her husband leaving her for a younger woman. She has gone so far as to grant him a divorce, possibly, we find out later, to lessen the shame for him. As they talk, Etta realises that in the very same room are her ex-husband, Alfred, and the young woman, Nedda Rich, though they are not together. Etta slips out.

As it happens, the man who is accompanying Nedda is an acquaintance of Ercil. Ted comes over and introduces the two women. They are joined by another acquaintance of Ercil, the poet Gough (sometimes spelt ‘Goff’) Rochester. When Nedda meets Gough she is overcome. The torch she holds for Alfred begins to dim in the presence of artistic glamour.

Scene II opens three weeks later at Ercil’s apartment. Etta arrives and is told by Ercil that Nedda has left Alfred for Goff. Nedda appears and Etta hides in another room. Shortly afterwards Alfred, then Goff, also appear. Etta, enraged at the entire situation, reveals her presence then storms out. Goff is shocked to discover that Nedda had previously agreed to marry Alfred. He leaves, once and for all, in pain and disgust. Ercil takes the upset Nedda to the other room. Alfred and Ercil continue in conversation when Mrs Revelthorpe, the housekeeper, comes running in to say that someone has jumped out of one of Ercil’s windows – a six storey drop – and that she thinks it is a woman.

117

Old Blastus of Bandicoot ps. Old Blastus himself; ML MSS 445/25, Item 7; 1925.

Southern Tableland, New South Wales, 1906-1907.

A fabulous tale of life for the Trask family on Bandicoot, the station overlorded by Father, that is, Old Blastus. He is named such for his temper and wild words, which account too for the situation that has developed over the years between he and his neighbours, the Lindsays.

Mr Lindsay is running for parliament, hoping to be elected as the local MP. Father finds this appalling given the man is not honest: on numerous occasions it has been made plain that Lindsay pilfers the livestock of others. There is the suggestion that Father likewise should run for parliament, but it is plain that his success would be limited given his tempestuousness which, it is thought, would rather deter voters from him. As the plot unfolds, one suspects the feud between the two families is to do with something more than simply the cattle duffing.

Along the way too we discover that there is past trouble pertaining to Mabel, and that her much younger sister, Dora, is in love with Ross Lindsay. When Dora – without her parents’ permission – attends a dance in town as Ross’ girl, Mabel alerts her father to the situation, who fumes and blusters. He is diverted, however, first by the appearance of his son, Dick, who left home fifteen years earlier, and secondly by a messenger come to warn him of a huge fire on the brink of destroying the Lindsay’s property. Father organises the others to action and, we learn in the following Act, is able to save the area.

Meanwhile, the truth about the Trask/Lindsay feud is revealed. Years before, Mabel and Sid Lindsay loved one another – and Mabel became pregnant. The child – a boy – was brought up as the youngest child of Father and Mother Trask. Everyone in the district knew, except, that is, for Dora and young Arthur himself. When at last Dora is informed, she is horrified. In addition, she wishes greatly that she had not gone to the dance without her parents’ permission, and begins to

118 behave coldly towards Ross, who by now has proposed. With time, however, she softens and accepts the proposal.

The final scene shows the attempt by the younger generation to reconcile the two clans. They are desirous of this for many reasons. Father, under the weight of the goodwill of his children, finally relents and agrees to vote for Mr Lindsay in the forthcoming election.

The Thorny Rose ps. Mr and Mrs O; ML MSS 445/25, Item 8; c. 1942. Youth to Youth: Drama for a Young Actress [ps. R.J. Duguid] and Elspeth Jane; ML MSS 6035/16.

Sydney and Melbourne, the Present.

Evadne is the foster daughter of Olive, though she thinks she is Olive’s birth daughter. Olive in turn is the niece of Eunice, and it is Eunice who acts as narrator in this radio drama. It is a wartime tale, and includes the not infrequent Franklin themes of romance and mistaken identity.

Evadne falls in love with Billy Badminster, a young and very handsome serviceman. They go out for an evening together and Evadne doesn’t return until the following morning. Olive is most disturbed, though it seems she could see evidence of the fact that Billy wasn’t caring enough for Evadne, not like good old Archie, who is always around bringing flowers and ‘chocs’.

Upon her return, Evadne announces that she and Bill Badminster are engaged, and that they will be married the moment he next has leave in Sydney.

A brief time passes – there is a suggestion of two weeks – and Evadne discovers that Bill has been back in Sydney for a week without seeing her. She feverishly searches him out and reminds him of his promise to marry her. She discovers that he is engaged to somebody else – but that does not quench her ‘love’; she

119 considers it a given that the engagement was broken the moment he laid eyes on her.

Things are not so simple for Bill, however. Although his desire for Evadne is certainly high, his marriage to Elspeth Jane has been arranged since he was a child. By chance, Evadne meets Elspeth Jane, who tells her that she herself has fallen in love with an American lieutenant, and does not want to go through with the familial arrangement. She happily releases Bill to Evadne, much to the latter’s delight.

But then, for some reason, Evadne begins to question her parentage. Her great aunt Eunice arranges for her to meet her father, Kendrick, who ends up being also the father of her new friend Elspeth Jane! Elspeth Jane’s mother, Eva, it is revealed, was a young servant girl in Kendrick’s mother’s household with whom Kendrick had an affair. The young girl became pregnant and Kendrick promised to marry her. However, he was engaged to Olive and just as Olive was preparing to leave for the church, Eva appeared. A flash back scene depicts Eva enlightening Olive to the state of affairs then leaving her three month old baby – of whom Kendrick is the father – with the bride to be. Olive refuses then to marry Kendrick, and brings the child, Evadne, up as her own.

As the play concludes, any number of its elements do not meet with resolution. At its cut off point, it is plain that Eva is now in an asylum – though Evadne has been led to believe that she is dead. Elspeth Jane is free to marry her American. We see suggestions that Evadne will ultimately end up with Archie, and possibly too that Elspeth Jane will end up with Bill. We know that Eunice and Olive have good reason to disapprove of Billy Badminster – something to do with his family, the past and maybe Evadne’s lineage. But all is left hanging.

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Modern! Jottings for First Act of a Play, Virgins and Martyrs out of Date; MLMSS 445/26, Item 7; c. 1944.

London, between WWI & II.

Modern!, also entitled Virgins and Martyrs Out of Date, follows the adventures of Betty Belfrage, a modern young woman. She has various partners and falls pregnant to one of them, though to exactly which one is uncertain. Her father’s sister, Beryl, is supportive of her. Although Beryl has never married or had lovers, she is, to Betty’s continual surprise, almost a modern herself, if not at times even more so that Betty.

Betty tells her father of her predicament and he arranges that the various young men with whom Betty has been romantically involved come to his office and be interviewed by him. Betty is hidden – unbeknownst to her father or the gentlemen callers – and is able to hear every word of the interviews. Certain of the fellows offer to help her out financially in order to terminate the pregnancy; others want to marry her.

By the end of the interviews we are still no clearer as to whom the father might be (if this is in fact the aim of the exercise). Betty later calls the fellows together herself, though for what reason is unclear. She is quite cool towards them and little seems to be achieved. Two of the fellows give her ample money for the abortive procedure. But Betty and Beryl concoct a plan to go away and use the money to create a new life for the younger woman. Though an alternative title for Modern! is Jottings for First Act of a Play, Virgins and Martyrs out of Date as a completed play seems little different.

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Mag-Marjorie MLMSS 445/26, Item 5; c. 1913.

New England, ten years ago.

Adapted from the book by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, Mag-Marjorie tells the tale of Mag, short for Marjorie. The young chambermaid keeps trysts with Dr Armstrong, a man ten years her senior. But he is not serious, and will not marry her, not even when she tells him that she is pregnant with his child. He hands her an address and a couple of monetary bills and that is that.

The kind Miss Yale comes to her aid. She adopts the young chambermaid and they flee to a new country to make a new life, leaving those behind to think that Mag drowned herself. Mag becomes Margaret Yale and, in the unwritten decade between Acts 1 & 2, studies and becomes a doctor.

When we see Mag, now called Dr Yale, and Miss Yale in Act 2, they have met up once again with the folk from Act 1, with young Dolly, Margaret’s daughter, in tow. Dolly has been brought up believing she is an orphan and that Mag is her adopted sister.

The party includes Dr Armstrong as well as his friend from Act 1, Dr Newcome. The former does not recognise Mag in Dr Yale; the latter does, has in fact been following her career over the past ten years. He is, as he was at the beginning, in love with her, but keeps his feelings quiet. Dr Armstrong, however, makes no bones about his desire for the beautiful doctor, nor of his lack of respect for her professional credentials. He believes that all women will gladly drop career the moment they fall in love. The fact that Dr Yale has not, he puts down to the fact that she has been broken hearted in the past. He is intent on marrying her.

Dr Newcome comes to the Yale women’s house to warn of Dr Armstrong’s intentions. He himself wants to marry Dr Yale, and we want him to as well. Miss Yale agrees to call him before the night is over if Dr Yale refuses Dr Armstrong.

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He exits. There is an unpleasant scene between Dr Yale and Dr Armstrong and the last thing we see is Miss Yale reaching for the telephone.

Release ML MSS 445/27, Item 3; c. 1934.

Sydney, 1930.

This play is the sequel to No Family, in which, ten years previously, a young war widow, Doris, turned up at the home of Mr & Mrs Morton declaring herself to be the couple’s daughter-in-law, having married their son, Claud, and given birth to a grandson while still back in England. It becomes apparent to the Mortons that the man Doris had married was in fact a good friend of their son’s, Gordon Randolph. Gordon too, like their son, was believed killed behind enemy lines. The Mortons decide not to enlighten the distressed young woman to the fact of mistaken identity, and rather accept her into their home as their own. Thus begins years of secrecy, which takes its toll upon those who know the truth, and especially upon Mrs Morton.

Release, then, is set a decade later, still at the home of the Mortons. Doris’ baby is now a boy of ten, called Claud after his father. The action takes place on a single day during which Claud becomes friends with a little American girl, Gordie, from the flats across the way, whose father bears the same name as the deceased Claud Morten’s friend, Gordon Randolph. Gordie’s mother, Mrs Randolph, meets with Mr Morten knowing that his son was once friends with Claud Snr. She is on a mission to discover once and for all if her husband was in fact killed in battle or not – there is some evidence that he was still living – as she is hoping to remarry.

Meanwhile, the family’s doctor, Dr Stamford, is in love with Doris and wants to wed her. But she is still in love with the image of the man who she married after a few short days.

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Into all this appears a disturbed and dishevelled stranger, who turns out in fact to be Gordon Randolph, something of a wreck from the war. The course of events reveal him to have married Mrs Randolph, and then to have been joined in Holy Wedlock to Doris. There is much confusion and distress, in particular for Doris and little Claud. Mrs Randolph, though, is happy that she can divorce her husband on grounds of bigamy. The Mortons comfort Doris and Claud Jr in the knowledge that they will always consider them as family. Doris is released from her bond to her romantic image of her husband and is free then to marry Dr Stamford, and Claud Jr is happy to have a new adopted father. Finally, Mrs Morton is able to enjoy release from the secrecy of the past ten years, and mourn her dead son without concealment.

Trapped! MLMSS 445/27, Item 5; n.d.

Time: 2am

Incredibly short play – only 8 pages – in which Cuthbert and Pearl discuss pearls real and fake. They make reference to the Midnight Visitor who stole fake pearls from them at another place. Clearly, one and the same visitor is hiding beneath the bed throughout this conversation. Pearl wonders if he were very cross when he found out they weren’t genuine. She is distressed at the fact that they own such wealth, and wonders if they shouldn’t sell them and give the money to poor men like those who they saw outside on the street. She describes one: an officer with his face hidden by a mask. Pearl becomes unwell, and she and Cuthbert exit briefly for the bathroom. The Midnight Visitor, whose appearance matches that of the officer Pearl has just described, takes his opportunity to steal the pearls but can’t find them. He tries to find a way out, but the doors are locked, it is a high apartment and he is trapped! Cuthbert and the Constable enter with revolvers. The man climbs to the window ledge. Pearl cries out that she will give him the pearls and not turn him in if he gets down. The man does not. He jumps, Pearl screeches and the play ends.

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Bibliography

Unpublished Plays by Miles Franklin

The Survivors, ML MSS 445/25, 1908.

Sophia, 1913, Reference only: see Coleman, p. 146.

Mag-Marjorie, ML MSS 445/26, c.1913.

Aunt Sophie Smashes a Triangle, ML MSS 445/25, ML MSS 6035/2 with thesis, c.1916.

Somewhere in London, ML MSS 445/25, c.1916.

Serbia, or by far Kajmacktchalan, ML MSS 445/25, c.1917.

Virtue, ML MSS 445/27, c.1917.

The English Jackaroo, ML MSS 445/26, c.1922.

Phoebe Lambent and Love, ML MSS 445/27, 1923. Also referred to as Three Women, Three Women and Love, and The Other Side of Love.

The Twin Screw “Chowder Bay” at Sea, ML MSS 445/25, 1924.

Old Blastus of Bandicoot, ML MSS 445/25, 1925. Also referred to as Old Blastus of Bin Bin, c.1926.

Old Blastus at Bandicoot: A Shorter Version, ML MSS 445/25, 1925.

Bouquets, ML MSS 445/26, c.1920s.

Release, ML MSS 445/27, c.1934. Play comprises two acts: first act entitled No Family (published as a one act play, see full bibliography); second act entitled Claude’s Wife or Clive’s Wife.

The Thorny Rose, ML MSS 445/25, c.1942. Also called Youth to Youth: Drama for a Young Actress [under pseudonym, R.J. Duguid] and Elspeth Jane, ML MSS 6035/16.

Virgins and Martyrs out of Date, ML MSS 445/25, c.1944. Also called Modern! or Jottings for first act of a play, ML MSS 445/26.

The Onlooker Sees Most, ML MSS 6035/10, 1942. Also called Sophistication, ML MSS 445/25, c.1945.

Tom Collins at Runnymede, ML MSS 445/27, c.1944. Also called Comedy at Runnymede and Ida was a Common Person, ML MSS 6035/3.

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The Scandal-Monger, ML MSS 445/25, c.1947. Also called Scandal at Glenties, ML MSS 6036/10.

Models for Molly, ML MSS 445/26, c.1948. Also called Johanna versus Hennessy, ML MSS 6035/4.

The Dead Must Not Return!, ML MSS 445/26, c.1951.

The Love Machine, ML MSS 445/27, no date.

Trapped! ML MSS 445/27, no date.

Canberra 1930, ML MSS 6035/1, no date.

The Waiter Speaks, ML MSS 6035/14, no date.

Burnt Out, reference only. Rasputin.

Published works by Miles Franklin

My Brilliant Career, Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1901.

My Brilliant Career and My Career Goes Bung, Harper Perennial, Sydney, 2004.

Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1909.

The Net of Circumstance [under pseudonym, Mr and Mrs Ogniblat L’Artsau], Mills and Boon, London, 1915.

Up the Country: A Tale of the Early Australian Squattocracy [under pseudonym, Brent of Bin Bin], Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1928.

Ten Creeks Run, A Tale of the Horse and Cattle Stations of the Upper Murrumbidgee [under pseudonym, Brent of Bin Bin], Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1930.

Old Blastus of Bandicoot: Opuscule on a Pioneer Tufted with Ragged Rhymes, Cecil Palmer, London, 1931.

Back to Bool Bool: A Ramparous Novel with Several Prominent Characters and a Hantle of Others Disposed as the Atolls of Oceania’s Archipelagoes [under pseudonym, Brent of Bin Bin], Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1931.

Bring the Monkey: A Light Novel, Endeavour Press, Sydney, 1933.

All that Swagger, The Bulletin, Sydney, 1936.

‘No Family’, in Moore, W. & Moore, T.I. (eds), Best Australian One-Act Plays, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1937.

126

Pioneers on Parade [with Dymphna Cusack], Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1939.

Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and his Book [in association with Kate Baker], Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1944, 2001.

My Career Goes Bung: Purporting to be the Autobiography of Sybylla Penelope Melvyn, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1946.

Sydney Royal: Divertissement, Shakespeare Head, Sydney, 1947.

Prelude to Waking: A Novel in the First Person and Parentheses [under pseudonym, Brent of Bin Bin], Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1950.

Cockatoos: A Story of Youth and Exodists [under pseudonym, Brent of Bin Bin], Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1954.

Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang: A Tale of the Jumbuck Pads on the Summer Runs [under pseudonym, Brent of Bin Bin], Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956.

Laughter, Not for a Cage: Notes on Australian Writing, with Biographical Emphasis on the struggles, Function, and Achievements of the Novel in Three Half-Centuries, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956.

Childhood at Brindabella: My First Ten Years, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1963, 1979.

On Dearborn Street, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1981.

Secondary Sources

Books

Addams, Jane, Twenty Years at Hull House, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1912.

Armstrong, Isobel (ed.), New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, Routledge, London and New York, 1992.

Arrow, Michelle, Upstaged: Australian women dramatists in the limelight at last, Currency Press, Sydney, 2002.

Barnard, Marjorie, Miles Franklin, Hill of Content, Melbourne, 1967.

Banham, Martin (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Black, Edwin, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 2003.

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Blackman, Maurice (ed. and trans.), Diary of a New Chum and Other Lost Stories, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1990.

Bluestone, Daniel, Constructing Chicago, Yale University Press, 1991.

Bouwsma, William, The Waning of the Rennaissance: 1550-1640, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000.

Brunton, Paul (ed.), The Diaries of Miles Franklin, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2004.

Burnett, John, England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating Out in England from 1830 to the Present, Pearson Education Limited, London, 2004.

Case, Sue-Ellen, Feminism and Theatre, London, Macmillans, 1988.

Chamberlin, Everett, Chicago and its Suburbs, Arno Press, New York, 1874, reprint 1974.

Chisholm, Alec H. (Editor in chief), The Australian Encyclopaedia, The Grolier Society of Australia, Sydney, 1962.

Coleman, Verna, Miles Franklin in America: Her Unknown (Brilliant) Career, Angus & Robertson, London, 1981.

Dalziell, Tanya, Settler Romances and the Australian Girl, University of Western Australian Press, Perth, 2004.

DeBerg, Betty, Ungodly Women, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1990.

De Vries, Susanna, Great Australian Women: From Pioneering Days to the Present, Harper Collins, Sydney, 2002.

DuBois, Ellen Carol, Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Rights, New York University Press, New York and London, 1998.

Elliot, Brian, The Jindyworobaks, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1977.

Fensham, Rachel & Varney, Denise, The Dolls’ Revolution: Australian Theatre and Cultural Imagination, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2005.

Ferres, Kay (ed.), The Time to Write: Australian Women Writers 1890 – 1930, Penguin, Melbourne, 1993.

Ferrier, Carole, As Good as a Yarn with You: Letters between Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjory Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992.

Freeden, Michael, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth Century Progressive Thought, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005.

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Freehill, Norman with Cusack, Dymphna, Dymphna Cusack, Nelson, Melbourne, 1975.

Furphy, Joseph, & Glass, Frances Devlin et al (eds), The Annotated Such is Life, Halstead Press, Sydney, 1999.

Gilchrist, Hugh, Australians and Greeks Volume II: The Middle Years, Halstead Press, Sydney, 1997.

Hamilton, Paula, et al (eds), Writing Lives: Feminist Biography and Autobiography, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 1992.

Hayes, Michael & Nikolopoulos, Anastasia (eds), Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1996.

Hess, Beth B. and Sussman, Marvin B. (eds), Women and the Family: Two Decades of Change, The Haworth Press, New York, 1984.

Jeffrey, David Lyle, People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture, Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1996.

Jones, Nancy Lee, Reality and the Shadow: The adventure of Identity in Twentieth-century Australian Women’s Fiction, Ph.D. Thesis, Tufts University, 1989.

Kennedy, David, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990.

Kossew, Sue, Writing Women, Writing Place, Routledge, London, 2004.

Lawson, Henry, Verses Popular and Humorous, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1900.

Lawson, Sylvia, The Archibald Paradox, Allen Lane, Ringwood, 1983.

Miller, Donald L., City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, Simon and Schuster, New York 1996.

North, Marilla (ed.), Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters between Dymphna Cusack, Florence James and Miles Franklin, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2001.

Pfisterer, Susan (ed.), Tremendous Worlds: Australian Women’s Drama 1890 – 1960, Currency Press, Sydney, 1999.

Pfisterer, Susan and Mahony, Edel (eds), A Fringe of Papers: Offshore Perspectives on Australian History & Literature, Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Inst. of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, England, 1999.

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Pfisterer, Susan, and Picket, Carolyn, Playing with Ideas: Australian Women Playwrights from the Suffragettes to the Sixties, Currency Press, Sydney, 1999.

Prickett, Stephen, Words and The Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986.

Randel, Don Michael (ed.), The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, The Belknop Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1996.

Reiger, Kerreen M., The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernizing the Australian Family 1880-1940, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985.

Roderick, Colin, Miles Franklin: Her Brilliant Career, Rigby Publishers Limited, Sydney, 1982 & 1998.

Roe, Jill (ed.), My Congenials: Miles Franklin & Friends in Letters, Volume One 1879 – 1938, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1993.

Roe, Jill (ed.), My Congenials: Miles Franklin & Friends in Letters, Volume Two 1879 – 1938, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1993.

Rosenbury, Rosalind, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1982.

Rothman, Sheila M., Women’s Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 – The Present, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1978.

Rutherford, Susan, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815-1930, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006.

Shaffer, Kay, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Camridge, 1989.

Shaffer, Kay, Women and the Bush: Australian national identity and representations of the feminine, South Australian College of Advanced Education, Adelaide, 1989.

Sheridan, Susan, Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing 1880s – 1930s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Schüler, Anja & Strasser, Susan (eds), Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue of Documents, 1885- 1933, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1998.

Stansell, Christine, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2000.

Taylor, Barbara, Eve and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, Virago, London, 1983.

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Thorstein, Conspicuous Consumption, Penguin Books, London, 2005.

White, Richard, Inventing Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981.

Wilde, W. H., Courage a Grace: A Biography of Dame Mary Gilmore, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1988.

Articles

Bongiorno, Frank, ‘In This World and the Next: Political Modernity and Unorthodox Religion in Australia 1880-1930’, in Levy, Neil and Dolin, Tim (eds), Antipodean Modern, Australian Research Institute, Curtin University, 2006.

Caine, Barbara, ‘Women’s ‘Natural’ State: Marriage and the 19th Century Feminists’, in Hecate: A Women’s Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume III, Number 1, 1977, pp. 84-102.

Gardner, Susan, ‘The Methodology of Feminist Biography’, in Hecate: A Women’s Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume V11, Number 2, 1981, pp. 40-59.

Garten, Stephen, ‘Contesting Enslavement: Marriage, Manhood and My Brilliant Career, in Australian Literary Studies, Volume 20, no. 4. October 2002, pp. 336- 349.

Gunew, Sneja and Adler, Louise, ‘Method and Madness in Female Writing’, in Hecate: A Women’s Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume V11, Number 2, 1981, pp. 20-33.

Lake, Marilyn, ‘Building Themselves Up With Aspros’: Pioneer Women Re- assessed, in Hecate: A Women’s Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume V11, Number 2, 1981, pp. 7-19.

Leon, Sharon M., ‘“A Human Being, and not a Mere Social Factor”: Catholic Strategies for Dealing with Sterilization Statutes in the 1920s’, Church History, Volume 73, Number 2, June 2004.

Pfisterer, Susan, ‘Identifying Miles Franklin: Suffragette, Playwright, Failure?’, in Pfisterer, Susan & Mahony, Edel (eds), A Fringe of Papers: Offshore Perspectives on Australian History & Literature, Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Inst. of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, England, 1999, pp. 73-86.

Pfisterer, Susan, ‘History and Mystery and Suffragettes on the Australian Stage: A Consideration of Women’s Suffrage as Presented in Australian Theatre’, in Maufort, Marc & Bellarsi, Franca (eds) Siting the Other: Revisions of Marginality in Australian and English-Canadian Drama, P.I.E. – Peter Lang, Bruxelles-Bern- Frankfurt/M-New York-Oxford-Wien, 2001, pp. 85-98.

Roe, Jill, ‘My Brilliant Career and 1890s Goulburn’, in Australian Literary Studies, Volume 20, no. 4. October 2002, pp. 359-369. 131

Roe, Jill, ‘Australian Women in America: From Miles Franklin to Jill Ker Conway’, in Approaching Australia: Papers from the Harvard Australian Studies Symposium, Bolitho, Harold and Wallace-Crabbe, Chris (eds.), Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Sheridan, Susan, ‘My Brilliant Career: The Career of the Career’, in Australian Literary Studies, Volume 20, no. 4. October 2002, pp. 330-335.

Shute, Carmel, ‘From Balaclavas to Bayonets: Women’s Voluntary War Work, 1939-41’, in Hecate: A Women’s Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume V1, Number 1, 1980, pp. 5-26.

Webby, Elizabeth, Reading My Brilliant Career, in Australian Literary Studies, Volume 20, no. 4. October 2002, pp. 350-357.

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