PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet Surname or Family name: «OCC5 First name: Other name/s: Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: ^ School: H^Oia ANO PfiftFOB^KlAi^ AiLtS

Ps ycHiC WAitiMC fOfi^THe HC^L M/US fnAf^iCUi^

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Current scholarship on Miles Franklin emphasises the gaps and contradictions of a secretive and mysterious author. The eagerly awaited release of her private papers was marked by Paul Brunton's 2004 publication of her diaries, an edition that has been conceived and understood as a revelation of "the real Miles Franklin" (Lecture Title, State Library). This thesis disrupts the concept of a "real" Franklin by arguing that these diaries, in their manuscript form, give us more delay. Foregrounding the performative guises of the private diary subject, this thesis establishes that we are, and will always be, waiting for the real Miles Franklin to arrive. The insights of diary and textual theories illuminate Franklin, I will argue, as one who seeks the proliferative creativity of the anonymous author, and who would use her diary writing to escape definition within public discourse. Yet the tension between creativity and the daily enables us to see how potential is distorted into waiting in the surrogate space of these diaries, as Franklin seeks protection within the nostalgia of a national past and an Edenic vision of the future. This vantage point directs us to identify, as will be seen, the vulnerabilities and instabilities of this space for Franklin, as it implicates her in the dilemma of her times. In this way, we can ascertain how she holds the line as a "spotless virgin" (3 May 1942) in her resistance to the gender performances of new women, her refusal to be defined as one thing or another. This resistance to imitation will also be analysed as it plays out via the curse of Franklin's self-repetition in an Australia that waits, disrupting her attempts to achieve anonymity as the embodiment of a national literary tradition. In her avoidance of being a private text to be read. Franklin promotes herself, I will contend, as a "world classic" (Franklin Furphy 3) author of and in these diaries, resisting the transition from the readerly to the modernist writerly text at a time of artistic revolution (Barthes S/Z 4). In illuminating Franklin's exposure to these very vulnerabilities as a subject-in-process, in a document intended for posthumous publication, this thesis will establish that she has made a courageous contribution to the complexities of a particular moment within Australian modernity.

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THIS SHEET IS TO BE GLUED TO THE INSIDE FRONT COVER OF THE THESIS Q JO The Performances of a Psychic Privacy:

Waiting for the Real Miles Franklin

Sandra Knowles COPYRIGHT STATEMENT 'I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.'

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1 certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.'

Signed I would like to dedicate this thesis to my much loved cousin Jane

(1974-2006) Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor Dr Elizabeth McMahon for her contagious optimism, her consistent support and commitment, and her nurturing and creative approach to the ideas of this project. I would also like to thank my co-supervisor Professor Peter Alexander for his years of encouragement, and for his valuable insight into the world of autobiographical studies. Thanks also to the School of English for their assistance and support throughout my candidature. This thesis would not have been possible without the generosity, tolerance and support of my parents, Harry and Susan Knowles, to whom I will be always indebted. A special thanks also to my sisters; to Karen whose kindness and affection has seen me through every dark cloud, and to Lisa whose logic and insight has kept me grounded. I am also grateful to Sam Newman and Viki Strobl for their friendship, encouragement and frivolity. I would finally like to acknowledge the other members of my family who have also been a comfort and support during my candidature — Helen, Richard, and my nieces, Chloe, Molly and Louisa. Contents

Note on the Sources

Introduction — The Private Masking of an AustraUan Woman Writer: A conceptual and archival study. 2

Chapter 1 — Miles Franklin Diaries: between "text" and "work". A theoretical study 33

Chapter 2 — Miles Franklin's Authorial Voice: The modernist resistances of a world classic 64

Chapter 3 — Miles Franklin's National Voice: Australia waits 105

Chapter 4 — Miles Franklin's Female Voice: Alone of all her sex 154

Conclusion — The risky business of diary writing: Franklin's contribution to a history of artistic revolution 212

Works Cited 221 Note on the Sources

The manuscript diaries of Miles Franklin discussed in this thesis are held at the Mitchell Library, Sydney. The diary material used includes her Diary Notebooks, Literary Notebooks, Pocket Diaries (Ref: ML MSS364) and a book of Thoughts and Impressions (Ref: ML MSS1360). This thesis also refers to the diary manuscripts of some of Franklin's colleagues, as held at either the Mitchell or National Libraries (see works cited). Franklin's Pocket Diaries cover the period from 1909 to 1954. Her Diary and Literary Notebooks cover the years 1934 to 1953. There are no dates for her book of Thoughts and Impressions but internal evidence suggests it was written after her return to Australia in 1932. For this reason, this book is cited with page numbers. As none of these sources, apart from the Pocket Diaries, are strictly chronological, the date has been given as accurately as possible. There are occasional entries that have only been cited with a year. There is only one date provided for her three-week trip around Australia (6 June - 1 July 1937). The majority of diary material used in this thesis has been taken from her Diary Notebooks. For this reason, it is marked either in the citation or in text when an entry has been used from her Travel Diary (which has been catalogued with her Diary Notebooks by the Mitchell Library), Literary Notebooks, Pocket Diaries or book of Thoughts and Impressions. Franklin's Notebooks also include a great deal of extra-textual material, which are also specifically cited in this thesis (most notably her letters). This thesis has kept as closely as possible to Franklin's original script. Omissions are marked with ellipses. Where a word is unclear in the original text, either a presumption has been made and included in brackets — [word?] — or the absent word is noted — [word incomprehensible]. To emphasise Franklin's own editorial and re-reading processes, the signage is used to indicate that a word or phrase has been asserted above the original text. Introduction

The Private Masking of an Australian Woman Writer: A conceptual and archival study

Miles Franklin's story is, as Susan Sheridan has written, one with "so many blanks in it, blanks which there is no chance of filling until her personal papers and journals become available" ("Women" 93). These papers, though only officially embargoed for ten years after Franklin's death in 1954, remained so for many subsequent years due to the candid nature of her references to friends and colleagues. The anniversary of her death in 2004, was marked by Paul Brunton's published edition of her diaries. This thesis, in offering one of the first in depth analyses of these private papers, disrupts expectations that Franklin's diaries would be revelatory by arguing that they are a further delay of the real Miles Franklin. Given the prevailing consensus among Franklin scholars at the turn of the century, that they were still waiting for the intimate story of her life, her diaries were keenly anticipated and commonly conceived and understood as a major contribution to the revelation of the real Miles Franklin. In place of the 'authentic' reading implied by Brunton's conception, this thesis presents an examination of Franklin's 'delayed subjectivity', suggesting further we as readers will always be waiting, in part at least, for what Jill Roe describes as "the dynamics of her interior life" ("Changing" 44). This argument does afford insight into the life and thoughts of Miles Franklin, but it also asks broader questions about how we read diaries, exposing in turn anxieties and resistances behind the writing process. While Franklin's desire to self-name is well known because of her proliferative use of pseudonyms in her lifetime, this thesis augments current scholarship on her multiplicity by arguing that she was preoccupied with being the Barthean notion of a "classic texf {Sfl 4). In this way, we see that her proliferation of manuscript material is more than prolific. In identifying and examining the complexities involved in Franklin's simultaneous maintenance of multiple diaries and her constant reworking of them, this thesis argues that she is grappling with the tension between the creative freedom offered by the endless proliferation of the subject, and her desire for agency over self-production. As a genre that foregrounds processes of production, the diary enables us to see, as this thesis identifies, her attempts to assert control over her self-objectification, as one who "can be read, but not written" (5/Z 4). In a study that centres on Franklin's most proliferative diary writing years from her return home in 1932 to her death in 1954, her authorial dilemma will be examined as that of the inherently paradoxical Australian woman writer, whose masking is necessary to the writing process, and yet who is searching for a space to be the 'essential' woman unveiled. As she writes in her diaries: "If ... women would take off their masks + go hammer-and-cat-fight-tongs to take full control of men as well as possession perhaps there would be a surprisingly different order" (3 May 1942). Whereas Brunton's edition serves to support and reinforce Franklin in the image of the national icon, this thesis complicates her iconic status by bringing to the fore her obvious public intentions for her diaries, thereby examining the significance of the process behind the product. In his introduction to this edition, Brunton reveals that Franklin's diaries were bequeathed to the Mitchell "making it likely that one day they would be published" (Brunton vii), though in their manuscript form we discover that they were also self-edited, with an in depth referencing system including titles, page numbers and an index. Corrections and additions provide evidence of a detailed re-reading and re- working policy. Furthermore, a selected edition disguises the scope of her diary material, which includes five diaries written simultaneously after her return to Australia in 1932 from twenty-six years abroad. These diaries are comprised of Diary Notebooks, Literary Notebooks, a Travel Diary, Pocket Diaries (from 1909) and a book of Thoughts and Impressions. As manuscripts, they reveal Franklin as an excessive autobiographer, suggesting through their proliferation her preoccupation with her iconic status. As Brunton stated during our interview. Franklin's private papers reveal that she was building a "posthumous monument" to herself (March 2004). They are an expression of her desire to project herself into the national consciousness as one who existed "for the good of Australian Writers to aid Australian writing for the interpretation of my beloved Australia" (6 March 1948)\ The most significant gap to be found in scholarly accounts of Franklin concerns the lack of a well-rounded and unified perception of her as a person. As Roe has recently argued:

Although the contours of her life are by now well enough established, the dynamics of her interior life and its expression in personality, and that more sombre concept, character, are still being clarified ("Changing" 44).

An outline of her life has been established by feminist scholars and literary historians, whose efforts have produced a comprehensive understanding of a public Franklin, albeit with the still prevailing contradictions between her political feminism and hyper- conventional nationalism (Barnard 149). This was one of the many paradoxes it was assumed the release of Franklin's private papers would address. Sheridan expressed this hope in 1982 when writing of her desire for clarification on the obscure relationship "between this disillusionment with organised feminism and social work, and Franklin's later self-definition in relation to cultural nationalism" ("Women" 93). This thesis takes up these scholarly expectations concerning Franklin's "interior life" as they elucidate her own interest in the 'real' subject. This interest can be seen in Franklin's relationship to biographical and autobiographical writing, as expressed in her diaries and her other work. In her biography of Joseph Furphy, she illustrates her desire to produce the author as "classic text". In the first chapter, she poses the question "who was Joseph Furphy?" and answers this question with "a digression concerning Australian literature", most notably via a reading of his "world classic" Such Is Life (3). She performs the role as biographer for Furphy that she would have performed for herself — to be read as a "classic", as one who is "truly Australian and reasonably great" (Franklin Furphy 3). By disguising the authorial hand that attempts to produce a "classic" of these diaries, Brunton performs a similar role for Franklin. Taking her at her word, he relegates

^ This is written in her diaries is reference to the role she believes the Fellowship of Australian Writers should serve. her to the status she desires for herself, to be an "indomitable and brave Australian writer" (Acknowledgements). Franklin would also have approved of the comment made by Marjorie Barnard in her 1967 biography that "Miles writing is indivisible from Miles living" and thereby requires "her life and writing" to be presented "as one organic whole" (Preface). She would not, however, have approved Barnard's "critique of her writings" (Barnard Preface), as one she believed "more academic than original or adventurous" (Franklin Furphy 1). An examination of the methods by which Franklin attempts to produce herself in the holistic image of the author enables us to identify, as this thesis contends, that any portrayal of her "interior life" must involve the affectation of secrecy. Rather than unmasking Franklin, this analysis shows other forms of mask wearing and disguise evident in her resistance to being made a private subject. Barnard also poses the question "who was Miles Franklin and what was she?" as a first chapter heading of her biography, writing that she hopes "to unravel the riddle that was Miles Franklin" (1). This thesis argues that the riddle was a necessary part of Franklin's social and psychic persona, facilitating her career as a woman writer outside the confining objectifications posed by public discourse. Her tendency towards secrecy and disguise is well documented by her colleagues and scholars. In Carole Ferrier's publication of letters, As Good As A Yam With You, she records Katharine Susannah Prichard's posthumous description of the author as "a simple, loveable person, and yet more than that. Somebody we never knew" (6). Barnard similarly commented in her biography of Franklin: "Who knows exactly what Miles felt — even when she told you?" (Barnard qtd in Ferrier 6). Ferrier also writes that in her letters, "Franklin does not generally reveal a great deal about her personal life" (6). In Exiles At Home, Drusilla Modjeska describes her as "a curious character, and more than any other woman in this book, hard to pin down, contradictory and idiosyncratic" (156). In a more recent article, Susan Magarey refers to "the pseudonyms and the secrecy in which she entangled her literary reputation" (389). Franklin's mystery was, as scholars have argued, part of her self-publicity; as Barnard writes: "Miles is reported to have said that a mystery was a good advertisement and helped sales" (77). Yet the exploration of Franklin's pseudonymous identities as a psychic necessity directs us to identify the wider significance of anonymity for the woman writer at this time. By initiating this shift into Franklin's interior hfe, this thesis recasts the dichotomous reading posed by Barnard, who writes of being confounded by Franklin as a paradox of truth and deceit:

Miles undoubtedly enjoyed mystifying people even when there was no reason to do so ... You may well ask how the more than normally truthful, honest and forthright little girl developed this characteristic. I do not know, of course. But she did; it became part of her character to indulge in all sorts of minor evasions and deceptions. Her sense of humour was involved but it went deeper than a joke. It was Miles trying to hide even when there was no cover at all. She gained nothing by it and no dishonesty or any other moral turpitude was involved (77).

A more complex analysis of the public and private of Franklin's masking allows us to see that, on the contrary. Franklin achieved a great deal through her anonymity. In its variety of different forms, it served as the "psychic privacy" (Nussbaum "Diary" 135) that enabled the writing process. Franklin's prolific use of pseudonyms is matched by the proliferation of her writing, fictional, critical and private, via which she has created her "posthumous monument". The papers bequeathed to the Mitchell Library have added several manuscript novels to those already published under her own name, and under those of the pseudonymous Brent of Bin Bin and Mr and Mrs Ogniblat L'artsau. These papers also contain over 30 plays, some of which were entered into literary competitions under pseudonyms, along with a selection of other critical and essay style writing. The recent discovery of much of this material has enabled an expanded picture of Franklin's writing life, as scholars have come to represent her as more than a novelist in the nationalist tradition. Susan Pfisterer, for example, has taken Franklin up as a playwright of note. More attention has recently been given to what have commonly been seen as Franklin's expatriate novels, both published and unpublished, thereby complicating her simplistic portrayal as "a cultural nationalist par excellence'' (Roe 67), notably the American-based On Dearborn Street and the recently discovered manuscript for the novel Red Cross Nurse. This vast array of writing is not, however, spread evenly throughout her literary career, thereby introducing questions concerning Franklin's consistency of authorship during her most prolific diary writing years. Indeed, as Modjeska writes. Franklin did not produce another novel after 1933, apart from the satirical novel Pioneers on Parade, produced in collaboration with Dymphna Cusack. She did continue during her years in Australia to rework some of her earlier novels, notably her fictional autobiography My Career Goes Bung, of which several self-edited manuscripts have been posthumously discovered (Webby xiv). Her childhood autobiography My Childhood at Brindabella was a creation of the late 1940s, a decade that also saw the production of much critical material by Franklin, particularly in her adaptation of those lectures she delivered for the Commonwealth Literary Fund in 1950, posthumously published in 1956 under the title Laughter Not For a Cage. In a consideration of these shifts within Franklin's authorship, this thesis contends that the limited production of Franklin's creative work, in the years in which she was writing her Diary and Literary Notebooks, indicates the extent to which her diaries were a surrogacy for what she considered to be, as she herself argues, "real writing" (1948). In one entry, she describes these diaries as "only a substitute" that she is "sick of, claiming that the "literary notes" alone "wd. be useful to me" (25 February 1938). However, the cross-over in her Literary Notebooks, from book reviews to personal content, further indicates the confusion and dilemmas Franklin experienced as an author during these years, caught within the art/life dichotomy she both establishes and destabilises. Recent scholars have highlighted this link between art and life in readings of the performative Sybylla, as these performances reflect on Franklin as a writing subject. These readings foreground the ways in which Franklin adopted masking techniques to refuse a gendered identity and complicate the authenticity of a national subjectivity. Catherine Pratt argues that the representation of Sybylla in My Brilliant Career indicates that "Franklin recognised the extent to which conventional femininity was a performance in which her gender was 'dressed up' in opposition to "Australianness" (216). Ian Henderson similarly writes of the significance of Sybylla's refusal "to endorse any stable and unified model of identity, most crucially, with regard to her gender" (165). This recent focus on the instability of Franklin's authorial I, as established in readings of her fiction, is further elucidated by an analysis of her diaries in which, as will be seen, the iconic author is simultaneously undermined. In her 2007 study focussing on Franklin's novel Cockatoos, Leigh Dale draws a comparison between Franklin and Virginia Woolf in the way both authors "centralized the problem of how to act politically (as critic Mark Hussey puts it) whilst in a state of 'radical doubt'" (379). In her novels, this doubting can be seen, as Dale writes, in:

the twinned horror and pleasure of authorship, the fragility of the fantasy that books are somehow able to fix and thereby transcend the intimate and the general social relations through which they are produced (382).

This thesis extends the complex relationship between truth, fiction and reality that Dale highlights here by examining the process via which the "classic text" is produced and the doubts that intrude upon "the fragility of the fantasy". In her analysis of feminist politics in realist fiction, Susan Lever writes of the "classic realist texf as reliant on "the notion of the free individual or 'autonomous subject'" (8). A similar notion can be seen to play out in Franklin's diaries in an analysis that exposes her desire to transform proliferative writings into a "classic texf in which she can be autonomous. Diaries foreground the now prominent idea, as Lever writes:

that art cannot offer any unmediated reflection of life; therefore, indeed, the very division between 'art' and 'life' suggests a dichotomy where art is somehow apart from life, and life operates on a different plane where reality can be known (7).

Current diary scholarship enables us, as I will argue, to examine both the merging of and tension within the art/life dichotomy for Franklin as she seeks authorial prominence. Diaries of her modernist contemporaries in particular display a hybridity of form; Elizabeth Podnieks writes of Woolf that her "diary reflect[s] the diversity of her writing styles" (98). This thesis utilises theories of textuality and post-structuralism as they contribute to current scholarly accounts of the diary as a "signifying system" (Nussbaum "Diary" 137), further allowing an analysis that accommodates Franklin's paradoxes and exposes the shifts and changes within her multiplicities. This amalgamation of theories further allows us to explore the tensions evident in her desire to be both a totalising and anonymous author, to produce herself according to Barthean ideas of the "classic text" whilst maintaining the disguise of her authorial hand. These two incongruent features of the author-function are problematised in the space of the diary where, as Barthes writes, the I never escapes its image, its own othered self:

In other words, I never get away from myself. And if I never get away from myself, if I cannot manage to determine what the Journal is 'worth', it is because its literary status slips through my fingers (494).

An exploration into Franklin's self-reflexivity directs us to identify her diaries as the unmasking of her need for totality. Yet it is in the paradoxes exposed by the hybrid diary, and in the déstabilisation of totality, that we can also see the personal costs involved for Franklin in being a woman writer in Australia at this time. This thesis takes up Barthes' anxiety concerning the "literary status" of his journal in an exploration of Franklin as she manipulates the author-function in her diaries, thereby arguing that she paradoxically writes against autobiography and outside discourses of life to be protected as a subject in art. This thesis identifies several key preoccupations in Franklin's diaries, as they enable an examination of her authorial anxieties and resistances. Her complex positioning within the art/life dichotomy can be further elucidated by an exploration of her use of a language of nakedness in the psychic space of her diaries, a method by which she refuses to be defined as one thing or another under the gaze of her public. Her resistance to being mortalised within gendered discourses is, as will be identified, what enables her self- mythologising as a divine subject, as a contemporary Joan of Arc, reflecting outwards but never subject to the anxieties of her own self-reflection: In the transformation of her body, and in the different emphases of different times, we have a diviner's cup, which reflects on the surface of the water the image that the petitioner wishes to see (Warner 7).

Yet her claim to the creative potential enabled by this divinity is also distorted into endless waiting for the 'real' subject, the Utopian dream — a distortion that is encouraged by her use of the diary as surrogacy, and therefore by the realisation that, as Barthes writes, "the intimate Journal" is only ever a copy, that in being "inessential, uncertain", the genre "is also inauthentic" (493). The figuration of Franklin's diaries as a mimicry of life and fiction also allows us to see the shadow implications of Franklin's self- proliferation, of one who writes herself into a perpetual state of delay. Although her diaries serve as "a bastard relief for a desire to write", they cannot escape their surrogate role as "only a substitute" for fiction — never achieving the status of proper writing (25 February 1938). In this exploration of Franklin's resistances to her own mimicry — as one who can "never get away from" herself — this thesis further identifies the complexities within Franklin's otherness, providing a revelatory insight into her relationship with the stranger within. It is through her relationship with her self-reflected otherness in these diaries, and as a reflection of her worst fears of the monstrous other, that we are able to examine the shifts between confidence and anxiety according to what Julia Kristeva refers to as a lack of familiarity with her own ghosts {Strangers 187). Her lack of familiarity emerges as a response to her denial of the other throughout these diaries. This denial will be explored within the national and gendered complexities of her time, as necessitated by her need for a space of "psychic privacy" in which to write, and more than this, to be her own woman. By taking up Franklin's alienation as author, Australian and woman, this thesis further argues that her diaries are an expression of her desire to return through writing to a pre- adult space in which she was always her most productive. In this way, we are able to extend current understandings of the adolescent space as preoccupation in her autobiography My Childhood at Brindabella and her fictional autobiographies. In her diaries, this psychic need for her childhood plays out in her expressed fear of being 'perverted' by the reading public. This thesis explores how Franklin's most productive space is made unproductive as her fears create the monster. In her anticipation of the academic pedants who would, as she writes in her diaries, make a "hunting ground" of her "visceral dust" (Literary Notebooks 1948), she is also a victim of her own internal, playing the part of her enemy reader. The first chapter is a theoretical study of the tools through which this thesis examines Franklin as a textual reproduction. It advances the preoccupations of this thesis by exploring how Franklin utilises her diaries according to the Barthean definitions of "text" and "work", notably the idea that 'Hhe Text is experienced only in an activity of production'' whereas "the work closes on a signified" ("Work" 157, 158). This chapter argues that Franklin is attempting a similar task over which Barthes deliberates in his article ironically titled "Deliberation" — "How do I make the journal into a 'work'?" (480). Yet for Barthes, the diary does not even reach the status of the "well-written" text — "am I as big as the text? Never! You aren't even close" (494). His journal is not "anonymous, or at least produced by a kind of nom de guerre, that of the author", but is instead "a 'discourse' (a kind of written word according to a special code), not a text" (491). Given the insights of Barthes into the authorial anxieties promoted by diary writing, we can explore how the generic features of Franklin's proliferative manuscripts reveal her need to be an author both totalising and anonymous. New diary theory foregrounds "a fascination with process rather than product" (Hooton "Life-lines" 7), and thereby enables an examination of Franklin in the tension between "text" and "work". For it is in approaching the diary as process that we are able to see the dilemmas of her gendering and her national producfion, as she struggles within a space of proliferative creativity that also promotes the fear of an open-ended subjectivity, and further with a productivity that can be distorted into delay and self-imitation. By adopting the post-structural concepts prominent in diary scholarship, this chapter elucidates both the dilemmas and the productive resistances available to a proliferative subjectivity, further advancing the concept of 'diary' as a seamless system of signs. This approach allows us to identify a different kind of masking by Franklin, one in which she utilises her multiplicity to be a totalising author, occupying all available subject positions to avoid outside interpretations. Yet as a "signifying system", the diary also offers insight into the obstrucfions to this totality, and the self-reflexive implications of this shift between paradoxical positions. Our understanding of this authorial dilemma is also advanced, as will be seen, by scholarly developments in the area of diary performance, which encourage a reading of the "persona as a mask which conceals as much as it reveals" (Fothergill 86). Furthermore, by reading the diary as a "continuous present" (Holmes xix), as "the act of writing in the days rather than <9/the days" (Sinor 123), we are able to examine how Franklin used this genre to immortalise herself as a divine and creative subject, and further how this act was destabilised by "the fragility of the fantasy", highlighted by her attempts to close textual meaning. From here, this chapter will further argue how diaries, in what Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff describe as "exchanges between reader and text" (1), enable the destabilising of Franklin's self-promotion as "a principle of a certain unity of writing" (Foucault 204). By adopting post-structural concepts as they elucidate this exchange, and thereby open up a space of haunting between binaries, we are able to identify Franklin's paradoxical relationship to her readers: "What happens between two, and between all the 'two's' one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself some ghost" (Derrida Specters xviii). An examination of the self-proliferation that allows for immortality, for the idea that there is "writing to be done for all eternity" (Lejeune 101), also directs us to identify the ways in which Franklin is made vulnerable to "the audience hovering at the edge of the page" (Bloom 23), the audience that also, in Barthean terms, initiates her death as an author. Theories of embodiment, which similarly foreground the body as a mediating space between binaries, further allow us to discover how her language of nakedness is stimulated by the potential reader that encourages a fear of mortality. By utilising this array of theoretical positions, this thesis argues how Franklin avoids and is exposed to the phantom presence of the enemy reader via the flexible and hybrid features of her diaries. The second chapter takes up these theoretical tools in a study of Franklin's authorial voice that argues her desire to be a "world classic", examining her diaries as an expression of the dilemmas involved in being an author during a time of literary revolution — as signified by the modernist move towards what Barthes refers to as the "writerly text" {S/Z 4) in her lifetime. This chapter looks at the specific dynamics within Franklin's desire to self-name, by utilising the Edenic model that she herself sets up as a way productively to escape the difficulties of authorship. This model will be used throughout the chapters that follow to represent Franklin's nostalgic impulse, her tendency towards retrospection and Utopian idealism via which she imagines herself into a different way of being. Her Eden is, as this chapter contends, a necessary part of her illusions of totality. She presents an Edenic scenario via the idealised relationship between writer and reader in her account of the emotive reactions of friends Jean Devanny and Pixie O'Harris to a reading of her autobiography, an experience that validates her as an Australian and an author in the productive space of her childhood. This exploration into her Edenic desire also allows us to see how her fallen relationships play out within those various authorial guises that, as a performance, stimulate her fear of self-parody. By exploring her attempts to be an anonymous writer outside the implications of ego, we are further able to establish how moments of self-assertion are a response to the distortion of anonymity — her fear of being left in the shadows of authorial success. In this way, her shifts between modesty and ego, as she engages in the Barthean dilemma of "how to keep a journal without egotism?" (492), elucidates her paradoxical need to be both anonymously contained within artistic discourses and her own assertive I, even as this I is undermined by the vulnerabilities it expresses. A comparison between her authorial diary voices and those of the fictional Sybylla further demonstrates this particular paradox. As a fictional entity and a mode of authorial anonymity, Sybylla is able to make the bold claim to generic parody in My Career Goes Bung, as one who wades "in without apology or fear" (30). Yet in a genre without a '"nom de guerre". Franklin is implicated in her own diary otherness, the reflexivity that makes her fear the self-imitation that poses no threat to the fictional Sybylla. To elucidate further this particular dilemma of authorship, this chapter goes on to examine how the authorial I is destabilised as Franklin engages with the different types of readers in her diaries. This vantage point enables us to identify her resistance to a nation of readers, to those academic pedants or culturally inferior colonials, whose reading abilities she undermines in the psychic space of her diaries. Her resistance to these readers is particularly evident when she writes of having deliberately produced an autobiography "so remote, so sedate and of no consequence" (9 March 1953) that no-one would read it. Another technique by which Franklin attempts to hold a nation of readers at bay is in the occupation of all readerly positions available to her as a diary writer. An exploration of how she self-objectifies as the pseudonymous Brent of Bin Bin — the only one of her numerous pseudonyms to receive attention in her diaries — and as her own self-biographer, allows us to see the process by which she asserts her totality and the haunting that undermines the attempt. In this way, we can read the "horrible, terrifying, humiliating" thought that "my dust should make a hunting ground for book-worms" (Literary Notebooks 1948) as an expression of her desire for self-resurrection rather than a call for posthumous absence. The final focus of this chapter centres on Franklin's alienation from her readership as an expression of her own stranger within, arguing that this strangeness is an essential part of her self-preservation. This self-protection plays out, as will be seen, in Franklin's attempts to create her Eden via an authentic preservation of the past, a past that, as she writes, "must be captured by the artist" in its "original loveliness" (9 March 1953). Here again she takes her readers to a youthful space of potential, describing herself in a self-devised obituary from her Literary Notebooks as one who "was a heady, passionate adolescent of so much + such varied content" (17 February 1935). This desire to return to youth can also be seen when she states to William Dobell, after he expresses a desire to paint her, that she would rather be hung on the walls of a gallery in her childhood image: "I said I had started life moon-faced & any beauty had been beauté du diable and it was not fair to paint me now when I was old & ruined" (Literary Notebooks January 1947). An exploration of the images of her failed Eden, as represented via the feared contamination of her naked body, allow us to identify the psychic consequences of her authorial paradoxes, as she resists being objectified by the public that is also the place of destination for the iconic author — thereby signifying the inevitability of her death as an author. These consequences can be seen when she writes in her diaries of her fear of being portrayed as either a "mortifying corpse" or "battered mound of flesh" (4 February 1944) in the context of Dobell's art. The third chapter on Franklin's national voice examines how her Australian identity is implicated in the Edenic space of youthful creativity, exploring the ways in which this idyllic national space allows her to be a productive and successful author. However, this exploration also enables us to see that the authorial I is again undermined by her potential readers, as signified by the presence of a banal and uncultured populace, who threaten to distort her Australian Eden. This argument traces Franklin's identification with and against a colonial Australia as this movement exposes her fear of being the embodiment of an innately deficient nation, one that fails to reach its potential. Her dilemma is a temporal one, as it concerns the question of how to be an embodiment of the monumental nation in a genre that foregrounds daily realities. This dilemma is examined as it plays out in a series of paradoxes via which Franklin's national identity is destabilised. An identification of the shifts she makes between the I and we of nation further enables us to elucidate the tension between the unique national subject, distinguished from her fellow readers, and the anonymous author who takes refuge in the nation through which she has made an authorial name. In this way, we can see that Franklin's national identity is made up of a range of impossibilities, as she attempts to create a space in which she can be both, as she writes in her book of Thoughts and Impressions, "a cosmopolitan, and yet indelibly Australian" (61). The exploration of these impossibilities in a genre that accommodates, but does not resolve, the contradictions between the elitist and the egalitarian, the expatriate and the faithful Australian, clarifies current perceptions of, in Modjeska's words, the exile at home. Here we are able to illuminate further the psychic consequences and resistances posed by her complex positioning as a nationalist. Having established the complexities within the I and the we of Franklin's paradoxical national subjectivity, this chapter goes on to contend that her impossibilities are part of a temporal dilemma of nation — a nation with which she is out of time. An examination of the shifts between diary and national temporalities enables us to see Franklin's particular predicament of how to preserve an Australian past, from which she is also alienated, in its "original loveliness". There is a tension between her desire to be the monumental time of nation and her entrapment within the daily Australia in which she is a delayed subject. It is the tensions within the banality of her daily Australia, as exacerbated by her use of diary writing as surrogacy, that leads us to identify the techniques through which she avoids a reality of cultural imitation and delay. The nostalgia and Utopian idealism that prevails in her nationalism also enables what Franklin describes as the "reanimation of the present" (Thoughts and Impressions 66), thereby positioniing her as a writing subject outside daily discourses. But once again in "the fragility of the fantasy", we see that Franklin is condemned to a reality of self-repetition and national myth-making. This reality plays out in Franklin's many frustrated references to a nation that is waiting to return to its Edenic origins: "Australia waits — remaining the same for incredible stretches of time" (23 April 1938). Furthermore, the nostalgia of Franklin's Eden is, as this chapter goes on to argue, distorted into a "nostalgia of oblivion" (6 September 1943) in the surrogate space of her daily diaries, as she is confronted by the reality of a past and future in which there is only absence. The discursive mode of post-structural theories of nationalism enables us to see the psychic implications of one simultaneously both inside and outside nation, and to explore her displacement according to the Kristevian concept of "strangers to ourselves" {Strangers 1). In this way, we can see how Franklin has internalised the racism of her exclusory Australia, as signified by her protection of the permeable boundaries of a 'pure' nation and a virginal body, both of which are described in these diaries in terms of cleanliness. Indeed, self and nation conflate in her description of her Australia as "so clean + warm + dry that I cd. burrow into it bodily" (8 February 1948). Yet in the nature/nation paradox that exposes the mortality of Franklin's Australian identity, we are able to identify the key paradox in Franklin's national positioning in these diaries — the dilemma of how to be contained as a living personality via a nostalgia for a landscape on which you are foreigner. For Franklin was sympathetic towards what she describes in the title of a public essay as the "Invasion of Aboriginal Australia" {Laughter 1). This sympathy distorts into alienation at those moments when, far from embodying the Australian spirit. Franklin is haunted by images of "a dark spirit running over the land", as it represents a "nostalgia of oblivion [that] lay there unquenched and unforgiving" (6 September 1943). She is, in these entries, caught within a present moment that serves as a reminder of all that has been lost and cannot be recaptured. The final chapter on Franklin's feminist voice takes up the tension between process and icon in these diaries as a specific dilemma of her gender. In her desire to be embodied as a state of creative potential, neither one thing nor another. Franklin resists a death to her potendal via sexual definition. In this way, she makes similar choices to those of Eve Langley's transvestite protagonist in The Pea-pickers, as Elizabeth McMahon writes: "[her] resistance of sex is due to her understanding that any sexual definition would signify a death to self ("Oscar" 105). By tracing the movement between the illusory distinction Franklin herself establishes between social and psychic resistances to gender definition, we are able to see how she is problematically implicated in the performative and her contrasting need to be alone of all her sex. This distinction is marked, in this analysis, by shifts between the discursive realms of the literary historical and the psychoanalysis prominent to French feminism, which thereby directs us to identify the internal consequences of Franklin's gendering in a particular historical moment, one in which the performative was understood in opposition to essentialism. Through an exploration of the range of gender performances Franklin occupies and/or resists in these diaries, we are able to see the techniques by which she constructs herself as a representation of normality — "decent normal me" (22 January 1947) — and resists her own perverse image reflected from the place of public discourse. In this way, she reverses prevailing perceptions of those relationships society deems 'normative', portraying marriage as an institution that "swallow[s] women" (27 May 1949). The sexual exploits of new women are also represented as the distortion of the "sisterhood" (14 June 1948) into, as she describes friend Jean Devanny, "the real man-debauched female who makes war on her own sex and wd. prey on both" (13 March 1948). Having established Franklin's need for a different kind of normality that comes from refusing gender performances, this chapter goes on to identify the ways in which, as a woman writer, she is necessarily implicated in the man-woman distortions she also resists. The man-woman image is particularly evident in the shifting between, as this analysis will show, the "sound clean body" of the divine and virginal subject, and those phallic strategies that enable Franklin to be a writer. The only way that Franklin can ensure "no man in heaven or hell cd ever say what I was or wasn't" (17 April 1938), is by phallic modes of engagement — by a "stiffened ... determination not to let them use me" (3 May 1942). At this point, this chapter takes up the phallic mask, which Franklin uses as a strategy of subversion, to identify the ways in which the creative potential of the anonymous author is in tension with her use of a male disguise. This tension can be seen in her descriptions of her Brent pseudonym, who offers Franklin creativity as an enigma that can be both or neither gender, and yet also signifies a freedom that is only available as a male writer. Continuing with an examination of the subversive strategies Franklin adopts in her writing — the play she utilises between romance and realism, gender and nationalism — we are able to see how her diaries signify a return to what Sanjay Sircar refers to as the "fiery fictional heroine" Sybylla, a persona Sybylla chooses in preference to "her own docile, modest self (177). An exploration of this particular distinction between Franklin's female diary voices further enables us to identify the ways in which she is caught between anonymity and the fiery "outbursts" of what Kristeva refers to as the repressed feminine (155). In this way, her diaries function as the psychic space in which the masking that has ensured her authorial recognition within a masculine Australian literary tradition is in tension with the woman writer who claims ownership to an assertive female I. From here, this chapter examines the convergence of Franklin's social and psychic spaces in the act of writing. Taking up the insights of Kristeva into the protests of the repressed feminine, we are able to see Franklin's own acts of psychic sabotage, as one who "sullenly hold[s] back neither speaking nor writing, in a permanent state of expectation" (155). In the act of writing. Franklin is, as will be seen, caught between the interruptions of her daily realities and her desire for what Felicity Nussbaum describes as "the fiction of continued existence" (43), which plays out in her diaries through her imaginative and nostalgic reflections on how male writers live. It is in her relationship with her mother that we can see the extent to which Franklin is made a victim of her own internal. The exploration of this relationship directs us to identify the key dilemma posed by Franklin's gendering within the discourse of the domestic family, for in the conflation of public and private worlds she is confronted with what it means to be a daughter of nation. In the distortion of her nostalgia, she champions her dead mother as the ideal charwoman of the pioneering era, and a "sisterhood" as "a nation of charwomen" (7 April 1938). By clarifying the role Franklin performs as the dutiful daughter in this way, we can see that she is trapped in a temporal paradox, yet another state of delay, rejecting association with the "knitting recipe-char-minded" (11 January 1938) whilst simultaneously representing the charwomen that symbolise her alienation from nation as a gendered subject. Having examined the conceptual framework of this thesis, I continue here with an archival study of Franklin's manuscript diaries as they elucidate the concepts already discussed — most notably how the diary genre destabilises the authorial voice it also promotes and makes her vulnerable to the stranger within. By exploring the variety of spatial dynamics, features of hybridity, and shifting temporalities of Franklin's manuscripts, we can see that, in their very form, these diaries are an expression of the tension between the iconic author and endlessly proliferative subject. This archival study advances the concepts of this thesis by arguing how, as both and neither "text" and "work", these manuscripts can be read as they facilitate Franklin's occupation of the potential space of pre-defmition and simultaneously place her at risk of being a failed version of both life and fiction. In an exploration of the generic features of these diaries, we are able to identify the ways in which Franklin attempts to build a "stout wide slab station home" from within an endlessly proliferative writing process that collapses distinctions between inside and outside (Letter to Mary Fullerton 5 November 1944). By establishing the destabilising features of the manuscript diary here, we are provided with a point from which to examine the significance of these features for the Franklin diary subject throughout this thesis, via the theoretical insights of new diary scholarship and post-structuralism. Furthermore, a study of these archival features enables us to identify the tension between art and autobiography, as evident in the form and style of these manuscripts. For while the fictional features of these diaries offer a resistance to "the dynamics of her interior life". Franklin also shifts into modes of autobiography that make her vulnerable to the public gaze, a private subject in the hands of her readership. Her engagement with a readership can be seen to play out in the daily intrusions on the narrative space of her diaries. It is within the temporal complexities of these contrasting literary styles that we are able to establish Franklin's paradoxical intentions for these diaries — as a psychic space of creative potential that refuses public discourse, and as a process-text that enables her self-creation as an iconic author in a consciously literary work.

^ This quotation is used in a comparison Franklin establishes between her own authorial stability and that of the critic Barnard, who is described as throwing stones from her "glass house". This letter is explored in the authorial chapter. This archival analysis is framed by an exploration of the diary as both "conscious literariness" (Fothergill 87) and unmediated genre, for it is in the tension between diary practice and reading expectations that we are able to see Franklin's own paradoxical intentions as a diary writer. In their generic hybridity, these manuscripts resemble the diaries of Franklin's modernist contemporaries. As Podnieks writes of Woolf:

the various identities she gave herself in her diary reflect the diversity of her writing styles, so that just as she can never be relegated to one self, so her diary cannot be reduced to one genre (98).

Yet in the features that illustrate Franklin's resistance to the Barthean concept of the writerly, of the reader as "no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text" {S/Z 4), these manuscripts stand apart. It is in privileging this contradiction between the modernist and "classic" that we are further encouraged to read Franklin as a paradox of her times, as represented within the conventions and subversions of genre. It is also in the gaps created by these generic paradoxes that Franklin can be elucidated as a stranger within, who lacks familiarity with her own otherness. Franklin's simultaneous production of five different diaries introduces questions of generic categorisation, particularly as the multiplicity of this self-creation destabilises reading intimacy and illusions of authenticity. For Franklin, diary definition extended beyond Robert Fothergill's two-sided, although not absolute, model; "the first summarizes what T did today; the second gives vent to a state of feeling" (84). The Mitchell Library holds Franklin's Pocket Diaries from 1909, and the Diary Notebooks and the Literary Notebooks she kept after her return home in 1932, which includes a Travel Diary from a three-week holiday to central Australia. These are the manuscripts from which Brunton has made his selection, from the years 1932 to her death. There is, however, other material in Franklin's vast archive that can be, and indeed has been, defined as 'diary'. Franklin kept a book that the Mitchell has catalogued as "Thoughts and Impressions", which is treated as a diary notebook in Modjeska's Exiles At Home, as well as in this thesis . There is also material classified by the Mitchell as "Miscellaneous notebooks" that includes diary-like material, notably rough notes taken while travelling. The reasons for Brunton's exclusion of certain diary material can be attributed primarily to the expectations of the diary reading public, markedly for a narrative that will promote intimacy with the diarist. Her book of Thoughts and Impressions is made up of casual jottings and ideas that are rarely linked and not always coherent. It also does not contain any dates, which poses a disruption to readerly expectations of the temporal consistency of a diary. Her Pocket Diaries are a daily account and necessarily short, but regularly express her moods, and are thereby used by Brunton in his portrayal of the melancholic Franklin. Her Literary Notebooks contain a large amount of literary commentary, but commonly cross over into more personal diary content. Her Diary Notebooks are the most personal of all, but they also include much discussion of literature, and their elaborate narrative style and sporadic temporal structure gives the impression of an autobiography as much as a diary. Indeed, the parallels between her Diary and Literary Notebooks reveal the extent to which she associated the personal and the literary. This thesis primarily utilises the Diary and Literary Notebooks, a selection necessitated by the diaries themselves as they foreground the tensions between autobiographical and fictional modes of production. A comparison between Brunton's selected edition of Franklin's diaries and their archival form further introduces questions of readerly desire and expectations, for these manuscripts can be seen to foreground the integration of public and private modalities that Brunton's published edition attempts to disguise. Publishing diaries necessarily imposes order on what is often a proliferation of material. Processes of selection and editing are also processes of self-production that, as in the case of Franklin, can disguise or mute the diarist's own role as self-editor. Furthermore, the features of her manuscripts that highlight her publishing intentions insist on the presence of a readership; the contradictions they pose to her denials of her audience, to her "retreat into my secret outlet - my diary" (13 March 1948), reveal her as a performative subject and further foreground the presence of the stranger within. Through his selection, Brunton has

^ References to this notebook can be found throughout Chapter Seven of Modjeska's book, entitled "Miles Franklin: A Chapter of Her Own". produced an image of Franklin that claims to be revelatory — "revealing, engaging and witty" (dust jacket) — and that augments the popular perception of her as an "indomitable and brave Australian writer" (Acknowledgements). In his claim that these diaries are revelatory, Brunton is in keeping with traditional expectations of diary writing, in this instance as it exposes the contrast between Franklin as a subject full of life, of a "companionable, intelligent, witty person whom men and women sought out" with one who was "in private deeply unsettled" (xviii). In this way, he has taken Franklin at her word in keeping with the popular perception of the diary as unmediated text. Targeted to a general audience, Brunton's edition has been conceived and understood according to popular perceptions of diary reading intimacy and authentic representation. A public lecture given by Brunton at the Mitchell Library soon after publication was entitled "The real Miles Franklin". Publicising the edition in the Sydney Morning Herald, Brunton highlighted the intimacy between reader and diarist when he wrote that "to read the diaries of Miles Franklin is to be caught up in a remarkable life .. . and to make a new friend" {Sydney 2). Indeed, this comment suggests that Brunton felt he had received the trust and confidences of his subject. He describes the reading process as a journey of the continuous present partaken by both himself and Franklin:

I delighted in Franklin's company as I journeyed with her to Chicago, to London, to Macedonia, home to Sydney, by air to Alice Springs, to Melbourne and across to Perth. She liked a convivial lunch and I have now had many with her, as it were, relishing her table talk. (Brunton Sydney 2)

The language he uses in his acknowledgements further reveals feelings of affection and intimacy, notably as they encourage an idealised portrayal of the diary subject.

My first acknowledgement is to Miles Franklin. No one who has had the privilege of working among the literary papers of this indomitable and brave Australian writer could fail to love and admire her. To publish her diaries is an honour and I only hope I have done them and her justice. She will undoubtedly let me know if I have not. (Brunton vi) We can see from this dedication that Brunton has resurrected Franklin via the eternal present of her diary writing, immortalising her in the public consciousness as an iconic figure. An examination of Franklin's own editorial features in these manuscripts illustrates that Brunton was performing the role she hoped to be filled by a "friend", thereby establishing the kind of Edenic relationship between writing and reading practices that she herself idealises in her diaries. Yet it is in identifying these self- practices, Franklin's own initiation of particular modes of writing and reading, that we can explore her significance as a diary writer who undermines herself, who destabilises the bonds of intimacy she also establishes. For Brunton's resurrection of Franklin has necessarily resisted the paradoxes between public and private that are exposed by her manuscripts. The pre-published form of Franklin's diaries is not alluded to in this publication. Although the introduction begins by informing the reader that these diaries were bequeathed to the Mitchell "making it likely that one day they would be published" (vii), to include Franklin's referencing would disrupt the reader's sense of unmediated access to the diary, their desire for the writerly text. Indeed, during an interview with Brunton, when I questioned him about the obviously performative nature of these diaries, his answer reflected a prevailing public belief in the ability of diaries to reveal, and even extract, inner lives: "no one can keep diaries for almost fifty years, even if they're trying to put forward a persona, without their true character coming through" (Interview March 2004). His answer illustrates the readerly resistance to an affectation of privacy in diaries. An examination of the archival features of diary writing can be used, as scholars have suggested, to undermine this intimacy and encourage instead a complex understanding of the relationship between the diarist and the text they produce, as it plays out in a "signifying system" that marks the endless proliferation of the subject. Bunkers has argued how the role of diary editor can reveal the diarist's own processes of "selectivity, self-censorship, shaping of self-image" as well as the "danger of caricature" ("Whose" 11, 12). In this way, we can see Franklin as both self-creator and as a subject at the mercy of readerly processes, simultaneously establishing coherency and made vulnerable by her place within an inexhaustible signification, a scenario to which Foucault refers when he writes: "we fear the proliferation of meaning" (209). This vantage point enables us to see how the conflation of form and content can be used to elucidate a reading of the tension between the public and private Franklin. A productive comparison can be made, for example, between the control Franklin asserts as self-editor and the discomfort she expresses in her diaries with various forms of intimacy, as one who continuously fears what friends and colleagues "will say behind my back" (3 February 1938). Yet as a diarist who intends a readership, we can also see that Franklin desires the intimacy she is reluctant to expose herself to: "what pleasure, or ease or comfort in association would there be without affection and trust?" (13 March 1948). A consideration of the archival features of Franklin's diaries further clarifies the paradoxes within notions of reading intimacy and highlights the transient nature of meaning. In manuscript form, diaries foreground spatial relationships — that between the literal space on the page, the space or place of writing, and the metaphoric space the diary provides for its writer. There is also the intimate space that is encouraged between diarist and reader when the reader has access to the actual paper on which exists the diarist's own handwriting, as well as the archival pleasure of reading what is not widely available to others. But by conflating these literal and metaphoric spaces, we can also see how the diary destabilises the coherency implied by reading intimacy and further implicates the reader in the production of textual meaning. These issues arise, for example, in a reading of Franklin's book of Thoughts and Impressions, half of which is illegible due to water damage. The rough notes she took on her travels, which she admits to writing whilst in the car, are illegible or contain only basic descriptions and observations. Her pocket diaries in particular highlight the governing influence of space, as single word entries, such as "office", insist on the reader's involvement in textual interpretation. Furthermore, evidence of Franklin's own process of textual production can be used to elucidate the dilemma to which Barthes refers, between diary as "discourse" and as a "work" constructed by a totalising author. An examination of these features allows us to see how self-promotion imposes on Franklin's use of the diary as a surrogate private space. The Mitchell Library holds rough notes taken on her trip around Australia, catalogued under "Miscellaneous notebooks", which suggest that Franklin may have produced the travel diary from this less polished form. Textual production is most pronounced in the publishing conventions adopted by Franklin, and removed by Brunton. The Diary and Literary Notebooks contain in-text referencing, which relates material across entries and notebooks. Content from the Diary Notebooks also references the Literary Notebooks, for example, "See Vol XV pp761-2 for other ref. to A.J" (7 April 1949). A similar referencing system appears in less detailed form in her Travel Diaries and there is also at least one reference in her Pocket Diaries to a "see pgs ...". Franklin numbered the pages of those diary booklets that did not include their own numbering, which enabled her referencing system and further creates the impression of a published work. People, places and events are underlined and ticked to indicate that they have been included in the extensive index she created for these diaries. Corrections are often made, substituting one word for another, and paragraphs are occasionally imposed with a bracket ([), presumably on re-reading. Franklin's re-reading practices highlight a dilemma that plays out in the temporality of her diaries, raising the question of how it is possible to be unmediated when you are also exerting a "conscious literariness". In this way, we can see that evidence of re-reading in these manuscripts further elucidates Franklin's complex attempts to narrativise the self and exclude the interpretations of her readers. For in these refusals, she is making herself the place of destination in the creation of a diary written, as she claims, "for my own entertainment" (9 March 1953). A detailed re-reading process is indicated by the vast amount of extra-textual material included in these notebooks. Newspaper articles, invitations, letters, programmes, tickets, receipts, photographs and other additional material can be found loose or pasted into her notebooks. All of this extra-textual material serves to advance the narrative, and in some instances responds to an entry made several years before. Her Travel Diaries also include Frank Clune's own photographic narrative of their trip, as published by the Sydney Morning Herald, and there is occasionally a short, typed narrative from Franklin adjoining this. An asterisk (*) serves a similar purpose throughout these notebooks, functioning in a footnote type fashion to provide additional narrative information.

Those manuscript features that make conscious or unconscious allusion to the reader further complicate our understanding of Franklin's diary as a space of "psychic privacy". These references, possibly intended for herself as future reader, implicate the other in the production of textual meaning. One of these features is evident at those times when, for example. Franklin presents two equally suitable words in the place of one, as though unable to choose. She is, therefore, inadvertently involving the reader in the selection process and encouraging questions about the destination of the edited text. In this way, we can see that although her re-reading and re-writing practices assert control over self-image and attempt to polish, organise and validate identity, they ultimately foreground her fragmentation and multiplicity as an 'unfinished' subject, for re-reading will always, as Rebecca Hogan suggests, "compose the diarist who has composed the entries" (13). Franklin's practice of including a selection of letters, either received or carbon copies of those sent, in her manuscripts further foregrounds questions of audience and the 'private' space of diary writing. For in bequeathing her monumental letter collection to the Mitchell, Franklin ensured that all her 'private' material would be available to a general public. As current autobiographical scholarship suggests, certain distinctions need to be made between the two genres on the grounds of audience. As Katie Holmes argues, letters are a form of communication and dialogue with an immediate and known audience (xvii). Even as a genre with an audience, the diary possesses a different kind of dialogue than that which targets a particular reader; letters are, in Anne Lindberg's words, "usually written not only to communicate with the recipient, but also to amuse or to please him" (qtd in Hogan 12). However, recent scholarship has even more commonly emphasised similarities between letter and diary writing, representing both as private genres that possess "no intrinsic censoring features which would suppress or resolve cultural contradictions" (Ferrier 20). Fothergill writes that letters are "a form to which the diary sometimes comes so close as to be indistinguishable", for they share a "spectrum of possibilities ... in their scope, tone, consistency, conscious literariness, and degree of formality" (87). From this vantage point, given that Franklin herself conflates the letter and diary writing genres by their inclusion in the same manuscript, we can take up the insights of Fothergill to consider both forms as they exemplify Franklin's "conscious literariness". This conflation is exacerbated by Franklin's own process of selection, as she commonly chose to include letters that bore a thematic relevance to a particular diary entry. Furthermore, a distinction between these genres is also undermined in her book of Thoughts and Impressions in those entries that are seemingly a draft of letters or public writings. In what appears to be advice to upcoming writers that could have been a rehearsal of an essay or speech (for she did make public addresses to young authors), she writes:

Don't get into an impasse with publishers' editors over a phrase or a sentence. If they can't be lulled by veering a point or two, pull out + land the [part?] by entering another port (126).

These entries could also, however, be seen as points of advice to Franklin herself. Either way, they raise questions concerning the otherness of the diary subject: "I throw off a few ideas — mere assertions to assist you to take off in thought" (110). An in-depth look at Franklin's use of titles in her manuscripts also directs us to identify the complexities within her authorial role as a diarist, encouraging questions concerning the kind of diary she saw herself as producing. For in the hybrid style of these diaries, as an amalgamation of fictional and autobiographical forms, and a space of experimentation and play, we can see that Franklin maintains her role as author. Yet the titles she gave to her exercise books also undermine the author as they imply different intentions for these manuscripts, shifting between the nostalgia commonly associated with autobiography, the present of diary writing, and preoccupations with fiction. Although the black exercise books in which she wrote are self-titled as "Diary Notebooks", other words appear on this title page, some of which imply an autobiographical focus, such as "Reminiscence". One Diary Notebook is distinguished from the rest in its titling as an "autobiography", thereby suggesting that Franklin intended it for a memoir. Indeed, this is the only booklet that includes reflections on her life overseas. In contrast, other titles imply a literary focus, or in the instance of the sub- title "Life and Such", a combination of the daily and the imaginary. For the "and such" implies that Franklin was expressing more than life in her diaries, a kind of meta-reality, which allowed for the world of fiction. Some of the titles to her Literary Notebooks similarly indicate flexibility of content, such as "Odds and Ends" — or with a more literary bent, "Minor works, trivia, tripe etc etc". The appearance of "Aust. Lit" next to the request for the owner's name on the cover of one Literary Notebook also indicates that she was producing a diary subjectivity in association with literature and with nation — that she was, indeed, an Australian author both of and in these manuscripts. A further examination of the titles Franklin uses within the content of her Diary and Literary Notebooks enables us to identify the methods via which she attempted to maintain author-ity^ over the narrative of these manuscripts. When present circumstances lead to the recollection of a distant memory. Franklin often titles the story. This can be seen, for example, in a saga told to her regarding an illegitimate son entitled "Miss Gillespie's Tragedy". This narrative develops into a story of the son, who was at risk of being destroyed in a divorce case because he had taken up with a prostitute, and is therefore further entitled as "Cyril's Tragedy" (14 January 1936). Other fictional techniques can be seen when, for example, she records conversations as scripted speech, notably those with friend "Jean" (Devanny). Her book of Thoughts and Impressions lacks the narrative cohesion of her notebooks but is more obviously a writer's diary, as she utilises this space to record ideas useful to her fiction. She even notes one quotation as included in her novel All That Swagger. Some notes are seemingly an attempt at poetry:

The night wore late — the night wore out. Enchanted beauty, free from humans to the Pole. / Dumb as a fish. / Where silence lies in [viceless?] sleep but poets fill their dream with its magic (3).

More commonly, she includes romantic images or communicates ideas in an overtly literary style: "Dreams, clad in samite or velvet, fustian or home-spun, sackcloth, hair- shirt or golden mail" (99). A consideration of the temporality of Franklin's Pocket Diaries allows us to see the authorial implications when imagination is excluded from the diary writing process. This examination elucidates the over-riding tension that exists throughout these manuscripts between the banality of daily life and the "continuous present" of the diary writing moment. The temporal shifts and changes within these pocket diaries, notably

This word is used in specific reference to the authority of the author. between writing in and of the daily, directs us to identify the contrasting features of Franklin's more mediated diary practices, as they indicate her need for the consistency provided by imagination — "the fiction of continued existence". In this way, the diverging temporalities between and within Franklin's various manuscript diaries further clarify the tension she experiences between what Modjeska describes as the "long periods of contemplation" (11) necessary to be a writer, and the "continual state of expectation" she experiences as a delayed domestic subject (27 January 1936). As a mundane, day-to- day account of her activities. Franklin's Pocket Diaries promote her life as mundane, emphasising her place amongst those Australians who, as she writes in a public essay, "have to wear the same hat and overcoat for several seasons, who do our own charring and chores" (Franklin "Amateurs" 136, 137). An account of the day is often dismissively summarised in these diaries with the phrase "same routine". In contrast, there are other entries from these diaries in which Franklin takes pleasure in the present moment, and thereby asserts herself as a subject in, rather than of, the daily. This distinction can be seen in her 1914 New Year's Eve reflections when she writes: "Had a lovely hot bath while the whistles were blowing a fanfare to the New Year" (31 December 1914). This vantage point also enables us to identify how the daily contrasts with the creative space provided in Franklin's other diary writing. For in exploring her as a subject entrapped within the daily of her Pocket Diaries, a dailiness that is enforced by the size and arrangement of these booklets, we see that she is prone to feelings of depression that are associated with an instability in her authorship. Her New Year's Eve reflections tend more commonly to reveal her in a state of extreme depression. At the end of 1913 we read: "if in two yrs the results are no better than in the past I shall die of my own volition" (31 December 1913). It is not uncommon to fmd an entire week of phrases such as "Miserable! Miserable" (22 May 1915); on 20 March 1916 she is "At World's end". The entry from 5 January 1916 suggests that depression is a condition she is prone to in her daily life: "Pegged away feeling the general depression keenly." By exploring her self-representation as an author in these diaries, we see that it is as a non-progressive subject within the daily that Franklin is made a morose and even suicidal subject, as she commonly associates activity with achievement, measuring success against the banality of the daily. She wrote at the end of 1909: "Hoping the new one will be more eventful less futile and >very< lucrative" (31 December 1909). And in 1913: "I cannot recall one thing of usefulness or worth that I have accomplished for others nor one of pleasure or satisfaction for myself (31 December 1913). She hopes going into 1915 that she can "make it a busy" and therefore satisfactory year (31 December 1914). In this way, we can see that in desiring these diaries to be a reflection of activity and achievement, Franklin is resisting their daily function. Their temporal structure is necessarily a reminder of the sameness in her life. A comparison between these daily diaries and the complex temporal arrangement of Franklin's Diary and Literary Notebooks enables us to see how this sameness is more successfully resisted in the imaginative and nostalgic space available to these larger exercise books. For in these notebooks, Franklin is able to write in the narrative mode that she associates with the productivity of the author, a productivity that is undermined by the contrasting use of her diary as surrogacy — as "only a substitute" for proper writing. This tension in her writing allows us to see that these diaries were, paradoxically, a way to be writer in an environment that prevented her from writing. As a space in which she could reminisce, her notebooks offered a nostalgic escape from a "same routine". These are not daily diaries in the literal sense of objective time, for there is a lack of clarity between the day of writing and the date of the event written about that undermines the linear progression commonly associated with diary writing. Yet their temporal inconsistencies could also be seen to exemplify a disruptive daily existence that problematises the writing process, particularly in the contrasting lengths of entries (which are occasionally short and every day but more often lengthy and sparse) and in the temporal gaps of days, months and sometimes years from one entry to the next^. These disruptions are also apparent in the content from those entries she titles as "Interruptions" — a technique that allows her to fictionalise the banality of her daily domestic life. At other times, the psychic intrusion of these interruptions is made evident by the styling of her writing as scattered thoughts: "Mother has tortured me so that I cannot write — the

^ There is a notable absence of diary material in the years 1938 and 1942 (with the exception of her Pocket Diaries), which can be accounted for by the increasing demands and subsequent death of her mother in 1941: "Well, my diary, it is a long time since I said anything to you. Too desolated by Mother's going and more recently by Norman's to take up life again." (3 May 1942). only trouble is that I cannot make ends meet + no book to sell — no income" (28 December 1937). An analysis of the temporality of the travel diary, as the aberrant element in the routine of daily life, allows us to see how Franklin's authorship is destabilised by the unfamiliar. In this way, we are also able to identify a central paradox to her diary temporality — for the "same routine" she resists, thereby creating a space of haunting within the self/other dichotomy, also provides the familiarity by which the stranger within can be held at bay. This paradox can be seen to play out in Franklin's Travel Diary, in the way that she constructs the aberrant as home, thereby making the unfamiliar a space of familiarity. This feeling of "unfamiliar familiarity" is, as Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs argue, a prevailing feature of the paradoxical Australian national identity (23). Entitled "Rolling Around Australia", this diary situates Franklin paradoxically in a place that is both home and away. In this diary, the mundane is invigorated in a new environment, notably one that Franklin champions in her diary as her authentic home — the Australian bush. Given this conflation of the home and away binary. Franklin's diary contrasts with travel writing as it has traditionally been understood, as Casey Blanton argues, to exemplify a relationship between the "observing self and "foreign world". In writing of "the strange, the exotic, the dangerous, and the inexplicable", these home and away stories require "the traveller/narrator's well-being and eventual safe homecoming" (xi, 2). Yet it is in travelling to the "dead centre of my Australia" that Franklin claims to have found her home, and yet also remains a foreigner — she is "at home" but also "as some pilgrim reaching the goal" (6 June - 1 July 1937). At this point, we can see that Franklin's Travel Diary foregrounds a link between the exile at home and the exile within, which offers us another key insight into ways of reading her manuscripts — as they open up the contradictions within her psychic spaces. Franklin's travel writing could further be read as a metaphoric expression of her desire to reach a destination in which she is reconciled with her own foreignness. For travel writing is also, as Blanton suggests, a space "where the experiences in the outer world can be 'transferred' to the self that is being scrutinized", and further a narrative in which "inner and outer worlds collide" (3). Having established the ways in which the archival features of Franklin's manuscripts, as they elucidate the shifts between inside and outside, destabilise her textual authority, this thesis goes on to examine the theoretical insights into the diary as a process-text that undermines the public icon. With the next chapter, this thesis takes up the destabilising features of the diary genre, as they elucidate the tensions that have arisen in this manuscript study, between life and text, fiction and autobiography. In a theoretical analysis, as will be seen, the temporal and spatial features of the diary can be further examined as they conflate the living and textual spaces, thereby enabling a more complex insight into Franklin as a process of textual production. This vantage point also enables us to identify those qualities that distinguish the diary genre, as they offer a different kind of reading of Franklin, one in which instability accompanies self-production, and the permeability of textual boundaries foreground the anxieties and resistances within her psychic spaces. In this way, the following chapter will clarify her modernist dilemma, as a writer displaced at a time of literary revolution, trapped in the delayed space between "text" and "work". Miles Franklin Diaries: between "text" and "work"

A theoretical study

This chapter will provide the theoretical tools that enable us to examine Franklin as more than content — to identify the methods by which she makes herself paradoxical, thereby allowing the destabilising process that puts the public icon at stake. By taking up new diary theory, as supported by post-structural and textual theories, this chapter explores the contradictions evident in Franklin's use of the diary as Barthean "text", as a way to immortalise herself in the proliferative creativity of an eternal present, and her contrasting attempts to "make the journal into a 'work'" (Barthes 480). For in her desire to be sole producer. Franklin manipulates the flexibility of the hybrid diary genre to resist the modernist transition to the writerly text, to a state where "the reader [is] no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text" (Barthes S/Z 4). Given these new tools, we are able to examine the space between process and product that Franklin occupies in these diaries. The elucidation of this space directs us to identify Franklin's paradoxes as they arise between her totalising and anonymous authorship, within the preference she displays for art over life, and within her desire to embody the eternal present of the writing moment. It is, as will be seen, the ability of diaries to accommodate these paradoxes, to elucidate the space "between all the 'two's' one likes" (Derrida Specters xviii) that allows us to read the anxieties of a Franklin in process. In this way, we can see that the proliferative creativity made available to her as one that is less than product is necessarily accompanied by the fear that she will never be the thing itself, and thereby always a stranger to herself. These theoretical tools offer a reading of Franklin that contrasts to Brunton's celebration of her as "posthumous monument". As Brunton's edition attests. Franklin's private diary is destabilised by notions of design, publicity and audience, and therefore evidence of the 'public' subject — that is, the celebrity as writing subject — must be neglected for these diaries to be the revelation of "the real Miles Franklin". A detailed analysis of the diary genre, according to its destabilising function, enables us to identify Franklin in the guise of one who affects privacy and writes against autobiography and secrecy, thereby complicating the scholarly request for "the dynamics of her interior life" (Roe "Changing" 44). As Nussbaum writes:

the diary signifies a consciousness that requires psychic privacy in a particular way. Although the diary is not always strictly secret, it usually affects secrecy, and is often sold today with lock and key ("Diary" 135).

This chapter takes up new diary scholarship as it elucidates Franklin's paradoxical need for both "psychic privacy" and public fame. As a genre placed between public and private discourses, diaries allow us to explore the implication of Franklin's "movement towards and away from the public eye" (McMahon 174)^. In an examination of the unstable authorial I of these diaries, we are able to identify those methods by which, in her ambivalence towards biography, Franklin has produced a type of hybrid autobiographical form in which she simultaneously asserts and undermines her textual author-ity. An exploration of the diary in its hybrid form, as pre- defined text, allows us to see that Franklin's inexhaustible self-objectification is an attempt to avoid contamination as a unified authorial persona, and that it is in the complexities of this process that she both resists and invites a posthumous biography. Roe, who is soon to release her biography of Franklin, has identified the author's ambivalence towards being the subject of a biography: "As with every other category of data pertaining to Miles Franklin — the idea that she did not want a biography to be written cannot be sustained" ("Changing" 44). Indeed, the current biographies of Franklin by Barnard and Colin Roderick offer the kind of critiques she feared from the imperfect reader^. Roderick in particular perverts the Edenic scenario Franklin desired between writer and reader, as promoted in a space of adolescent productivity, by describing the young author of My Brilliant Career as one who "lacked mature thought" (84).

^ McMahon uses this quotation in reference to Gertrude Stein as feminist celebrity. It is a claim equally applicable to Franklin. ^ Verna Coleman has also written a 1981 biography of Franklin's time in America entitled Her Unknown (Brilliant) Career: Miles Franklin in America that is much less critical than those of Barnard and Roderick, and that has contributed a great deal to the oudine of Franklin's Hfe during these years of her politically active feminism. This vantage point enables us to see how Franklin utilises the potential of her diary as pre-defined text to avoid the perverting gaze of the imperfect reader. By foregrounding diaries as they defy generic categorisation, refusing a simplistic association with either life or fiction, we can clarify the ways in which Franklin uses these texts to indulge the creative possibilities that come from refusing to be one thing or another. In this way, we see that her diaries provide a space of "psychic privacy" in which she resists engagement with an outside readership, and conversely, that it is also this resistance that challenges her desire for posthumous fame as a public icon. An elucidation of these particular instabilities that Franklin herself sets up in these diaries further allows us to identify the comfort she experiences in this state of proliferative process, and it disrupts the authority she seeks in the totalising role of self-biographer. She writes in her Literary Notebooks of her desire to be "safely dead" and of the "horrible, terrifying, humiliating, ironical thought if my dust should make a hunting ground for book-worms":

My fears are groundless! My erudites will save me from this perversity of fate. I have no desire for posthumous 'discovery', to be remembered when others are forgotten, which seems to soothe some of the neglected or undeserving. Dear old Furphy himself was normally addicted to this mirage of comfort (1948).

Yet in the paradox within Franklin's own sources of "comfort", as derived from thoughts of being both "safely dead" and thereby safely immortalised within the public consciousness, we see that it was not "posthumous 'discovery'" that Frankhn desired but to be the "classic text" that is taken at her word. As his introduction established, Brunton performed this role for Franklin in the same way she did for Furphy. She satisfies Furphy's "mirage of comfort" by attempting to make him a "world classic" like his famous novel Such Is Life, ranking him as a "candidate for immortality" via his body of work (Franklin Furphy 3). Brunton has also created Franklin as a "posthumous monument" by giving her "the last word on literary Sydney" (Interview March 2004). It is by prioritising the diary as a destabilising genre that we are able, as this chapter attests, to see that Franklin sought productivity within the paradoxes of both her Edenic space of youthful potential and as a totalising author. The chapter first centres on the destabilising features of the diary as they put the iconic Franklin at stake by taking up recent developments in autobiographical scholarship. These developments enable us to see how the diary can be used to challenge generic categorisation and undermine difference, an approach that is further advanced by post-structural and textual theories as they promote the signifying features of the diary. In examining those disruptions made to the life/writing dichotomy by expanding concepts of text, we can also identify the ways in which diaries challenge the authority of the writer, and therefore undermine the author-function as it promotes "a principle of a certain unity of writing" (Foucault 204). Without this unifying function, as will be seen, diaries further undermine the distinction between experience and reality, highlighting the shifting temporalities that take place in the play between life and writing. Indeed, from here this chapter goes on to attest that it is by examining Franklin's use of the temporal spaces in her diaries that we are able to identify the contrasting need she had for both the immortalised space of an "eternal now" (Olney "Memory" 242) and the narrative progressive of a closed and "classic text". Furthermore, a consideration of those readerly expectations that accompany the present moment of diary writing can be seen to pose a threat to Franklin's textual authority. For as her own reader in these diaries, she exerts the anxieties of one who both insists upon, as Fothergill argues, the authenticity of immediacy (90), and who indulges her performative freedom, a freedom that allows her to shift between subject positions and occupy them all as a totalising author. At this point, this study takes up the tensions in the diary genre between "design" and "truth" (Hogan 9) as they elucidate Franklin's awareness of a diary readership — an awareness that complicates her desire to produce an authentic persona, free from external distortions. In this way, we can see that her imagined readership becomes the stranger within from whom she must dissociate to be her own person, thereby encouraging her paradoxical claims to unmediated writing in a self-edited journal designed solely "for my own entertainment" (9 March 1953). Having established how diary temporalities can be used to reveal the tensions between Franklin's need for "psychic privacy" and public fame, this chapter takes up the insights of textual theories to further elucidate the tensions between author and reader. Using Barthes' theories in particular, we are able to see how the privacy of one who writes not "for others, but only for myself (9 March 1953) can be distorted into the fear of one who is "only a substitute" (25 February 1938) and can never be the thing itself. At this point, this study takes up Franklin's fear that she is, like her diary, "infinitely suppressible" (Barthes 492) as it is explicated by theories of gender and embodied writings, particularly as these theories foreground the relationship between women's writing and women's absence. As Lever writes, regarding the influences of post- structuralism on feminist theory, "the very conventions of language may render women as absence, so that the attempt to find 'woman' in a text faces intractable difficulties" (7). Shirley Neuman has related this issue to women's autobiography by questioning "how the woman autobiographer can achieve agency, rather than self-silencing, through autobiography" (3). Such an argument has been particularly important to diary scholars who have further suggested that this genre offered a space for women's voices that was previously unavailable (Holmes xiii, Nussbaum xiv). Situating Franklin's diaries within these debates directs us to identify the complex relationship between Franklin's fear of absence and of sexual definition. In this way, we can see that her use of the diary as a space of productive potential is also an expression of her need to transcend what Kristeva describes as "the temporality of the Father" (153), to exist as a 'divine' subject in a pre- sexualised state of existence outside public constructions of woman. She is celebrating her virginity in the knowledge that "sexual definition would signify a death to self (McMahon "Oscar" 105).

By positioning the diary within debates concerning hybridity and classification that have prevailed in autobiographical theory, we are able to identify how this genre further destabilises the very concept of autobiography, thereby elucidating a key dilemma that plays out in Franklin's diary writing — namely how to "make the journal into a 'work'?" (Barthes 480). Diaries have traditionally been excluded from studies of autobiographical writings because, as a hybrid form, they defy generic categorisation. A distinction has traditionally been implemented between autobiography and the diary form largely based on ideas of temporality, of perspective over a life as opposed to the spontaneity of a life in fragments. Philippe Lejeune provided what is still the most renowned definition of autobiography, describing it as "a retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focussing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality" ("Autobiographical" 193). James Olney and Georges Gusdorf developed Lejeune's position, explicitly excluding the diary from definitions of autobiography because they did not consider the genre to be grounded in ideas self-consciousness, and therefore because it failed to give insight into "the effort of a creator to give the meaning of his own mythic tale" (Gusdorf 48). The most notable challenges to these definitions arrived with post-modernism and its critique of the unified and coherent identity. Indeed, post-modern ideas have broadened the concept of autobiography to life writing — a more inclusive definition that has encouraged a place for diary scholarship. Paul de Man, in a criticism of Lejeune's approach to the genre, argued that autobiography should be considered "a figure of reading or understanding" (921, 922). Contemporary scholars in autobiography have continued this argument by relating generic definition to the 'problems' posed by textual closure. Similarly to de Man, Nussbaum has argued the advantages of "redefining autobiography as a code of understanding that shifts its forms as it is produced in particular historical moments" (xvii). Linda Anderson writes that autobiography produces "an unease that it could spread endlessly and get everywhere, undermining even the objective stance of the critic if it is not held at bay or constrained by classification" (6). Gillian Whitlock also suggests that "anxieties about boundaries and ways of writing and reading lives are throughout ... the field of contemporary studies of autobiographical writing internationally" (ix). The ability of diaries to disrupt generic and textual boundaries in this way has been a central focus of diary scholarship because it enables the genre to be liberated from its place in the margins, and from its relegation to a space outside artistic discourses. Developments within autobiographical scholarship concerning the artistry of the genre have opened up a space for the diary within literary studies, particularly as the diary can be used to elucidate the tension between fiction and non-fiction that prevails in academe. As Bunkers and Huff argue, the diary is "a logical choice for interdisciplinary study and a prime exemplar for interrogating the future direction of academe" (1). David McCooey refers to this tension when he writes of the developments made to traditional concepts of autobiographical writing, the shifting focus from its "non-fictive", historical qualities to the more recent concept of the "literary autobiography" (5, 6). Referring to an essay by Chris Wallace-Crabbe, McCooey writes of how Australian literary autobiography:

in the 1960s, and again in the 1980s, represents a move away from the belief that autobiography is merely a secondary form of writing, towards an acceptance of it as a 'discernible artistic genre' (2).

An examination of these debates allows us to see how recent theoretical developments have raised another key issue with which Franklin is preoccupied in her diaries — the criteria by which writing is credited as artistic. These developments have, as Nussbaum writes in a 1980 study, encouraged new ways of reading by offering a place to incoherent texts — texts that do not constitute a "work":

in a postmodern theoretical context, as we begin to relinquish demands for theme, pattern, structure, and certain meaning, it is, I think, an auspicious moment to consider the formerly unread and unreadable — the voluminous autobiographical constructs that defy nineteenth and twentieth-century generic paradigms ("Diary" 128).

Bunkers and Huff advance Nussbaum's position when arguing that the diary in particular raises questions of literary value, acting "as a lightning rod for issues of aesthetics and canonicity" (2). Bunkers has also argued that diaries, in encouraging us "to question our previously learned conceptions of what is or isn't autobiography" also require us "to recognize and critique our own presuppositions and biases regarding what counts and what doesn't" ("Subjectivity" 118, 119). Derrida raises these issues when referring to the journal as "the least scientific expression of a thought" (Grammatology 119). It follows that in privileging questions of literary value, diary studies further encourage us to ask "what sort of T is called into being in these submerged and discredited texts"? (Nussbaum xvii). By taking up Franklin's preoccupation with the question of how her diary can be a credited text, we can identify the ways in which her own constraining, classificatory attitudes towards autobiographical and fictional genres compete with her use of generic play. This vantage point also enables us to see that the tension between the classificatory and the subversive has consequences for her other writings, particularly the already hybrid form of her fictional autobiographies in which the protagonist actively sets out to make a mockery of the autobiographical form. This mockery is evident in Sybylla's claim in My Career Goes Bung to have constructed "a fictitious autobiography to make hay of the pious affectations of printed autobiographies as I know them" {Bung 30). From this approach, we can examine Franklin's use of parody as it allows for anonymity within her multiplicitous authorial personas, as is suggested by Sircar's reference to Sybylla as an author who insists on depicting "a fiery fictional heroine, not her own docile, modest self (177). The highlighting of generic play as a key feature of Franklin's writing more generally, further permits a reflexive study that destabilises the totalising author and elucidates instead the shifts between her authorial replications. An examination of these shifts directs us to identify both the "docile, modest" Franklin, safely embedded in the shadows of anonymity, and the "fiery fictional heroine" who creates a space of "psychic privacy" through diary writing to vent emotion. Her modest persona is evident when she gives the appearance of down playing her authorial success, as is suggested when she complains of the "whining enthusiasm" she received from the judge who awarded her the prize for All That Swagger (22 August 1936). At other times, however, her diary is a space for outburst and expression — free from the restraints posed by thoughts of a readership. This freedom is evident in her response to the comment that Australia is a matriarchy: "Wouldn't it! Too right! Good oh! Plus all the unmentionable expletives are inadequate to express my 'reaction' to such erroneous perspicacity" (31 March 1948). This vantage point enables us to see that it is also in the divergences between diary and fictional genres that Franklin emerges as an unstable I, as one whose use of authorial disguises is undermined by the aesthetic and artistic questions that emerge in diary writing. In her fiction, Franklin can use her diary as a claim to authority. Indeed, in her sequel My Career Goes Bung, Sybylla writes that her "corrective" autobiography has been "slightly and somewhat expurgatedly compiled from my diary" (11). The same claim is made by the protagonist in Furphy's Such is Life, whose use of diary randomness, via the spontaneous selection of a date from his diaries as a way to tell his story, is challenged by his authorial intrusions throughout in the construction of a coherent narrative (2). In comparing these claims to diary authority with contrasting theoretical and scholarly accounts of the unstable diary I, we are encouraged to question how fictional techniques can be used to transform the diary, awarding it the author-ity it also undermines. This comparison enables further insight into Franklin's use of the diary as surrogacy, as an inferior version of both or either fiction and autobiography. In this way, a reflexive study, as encouraged by the hybrid form of the diary, allows us to see that Franklin's lack of faith in her diary's artistic status is also a reflection of her discomfort with the writerly form. An examination of the tension between fiction and surrogacy illuminates the creative potential of Franklin's pre-defined diary, as this potential can be distorted into imitation; it is a failed version of a "work" because it is not offered the same artistic assurances as her fiction. This ambiguity between art and diary is further elucidated by recent developments in diary theory that have highlighted how the genre collapses distinctions between life and writing, promoting, an idea of text that is more than words on a page. These ideas are augmented by post-structural concepts that argue the inexhaustible proliferation of textual meaning, concepts that have subsequently been adopted by diary theorists because they bring into question concepts of origin and value. Nussbaum has argued that diaries challenge prevailing discourses by which we understand what is real and original, writing that the diary is "not a failed version of autobiography" but "the thing itself ... a mode of perceiving reality and a signifying system within discursive practices available in the social-cultural domain" ("Diary" 137). Bunkers and Huff similarly suggest that diaries challenge the way we categorise life and writing, arguing that they "encourage us to assess the social, political and personal repercussions of segmenting our lives, our texts, our culture, and our academic disciplines" (2). These ideas can also be seen to coincide with Derrida's theories of textuality, notably on the mutation of textual boundaries, the process of perpetual rewriting and the notion of coherence in fragments. His theories concerning the decentred text in particular, his argument that the "roots" of a text live only by their representation, "by never touching the soil, so to speak" (Grammatology 101), can be used to clarify further the tensions Franklin experiences within the inexhaustible signification of her diaries. For it is as a self-proliferative subject that Franklin is challenged in her desire to return to a place of origin, of coherency, that will ensure her completion outside the gaze of public discourses. Another key consideration of diary scholarship, within the wider context of the life/writing dichotomy, has concerned the author-ity of the author. Recent theoretical insights have revealed the ways in which diaries, because they are not 'closed' texts, complicate the idea of a coherent body of "work" as it exists under a single authorial persona. As Nussbaum writes in reference to the mutating space of the diary:

We tend to think of a printed text as a fixed entity rather than a textual space that is always undergoing revision, in part because an author's name encourages a reader to regard a text as all of a piece, the 'expression' of a subjectivity coherently held (18).

As a genre that undermines fixed entities, diaries can also be seen to complicate the unity of the author-function, challenging that idea that:

the author is a particular source of expression that, in more or less complicated forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity, in works, sketches, letters, fragments, and so on (Foucault 204).

These theoretical insights enable us to examine Franklin in her thwarted desire to be a totalising author, as she is continuously undermined within a genre that is, as Barthes writes, "only an Album ... a collection of leaflets" and therefore fails to constitute a "text" over which the author resides: The text is anonymous, or at least produced by a kind of nom de guerre, that of the author. This is not at all true of the Journal (even if its T is a false name): the Journal is a 'discourse' (a kind of written word according to a special code), not a text (491).

Recent diary theory has similarly promoted a kind of diary "discourse" by highlighting the album-like quality of the genre, as this quality can be used to complicate distinctions between the act of writing and other acts of autobiography. Huff argues the benefits in reading diaries outside limited perceptions of the written document when she writes, in reference to the extra-textual material commonly found in diary manuscripts: "If we look at manuscript diaries primarily as written texts, we may well fail to see their complexity" (521). She further promotes a kind of diary "discourse" when she writes that the inclusion of these "added items" indicates "our crutch-like dependence on the written and published word" (518), begging the question of how this material can "modify or extend the spatial boundaries of the diarist's written account" ("Textual" 124). Fothergill also argues that diaries complicate our understanding of what comprises a "text":

Entries can be typed, word-processed, or, as in my opening example, tape- recorded. But what about a 'text' not in words at all? A series of photographs? A daily videotape? As one diarist might carry a notebook to note impressions, another might carry a video-camera to record images. By what criteria could such a 'text' be included or excluded? (83).

In elucidating the complexities of the diary as "text", we are further able to examine the temporal paradoxes of a hybrid writing form that, as Holmes writes, "contains its own sense of time" (xxi). Diary scholars have indicated a contradiction within the prevailing perception that diaries construct reality while also inferring a 'true' representation of experience. Hogan writes of how diarists have used the genre in a way that complicates the very concept of original experience, providing the example of Anne Morrow Lindberg whose writings foreground an "important function of the diary; to shape, savor, or enhance experience rather than to just record it" (12). In contrast, Fothergill writes of the diary as it exempUfies the gap between the autobiographical act and original experience: "As verbal discourse [the diary] is equally, and inevitably, at as much of a remove from actual experience as any autobiographical utterance" (90). A tension between experience and its reproduction can be seen to play out in scholarly representations of the diary both as a "continuous present" (Holmes xix) and as daily discourse. For the daily, by inferring the linear progression of objective time, also encourages the illusion of an accurate representation of events. The presumption of authenticity is evident when Fothergill writes that the diary:

in its emphasis on the day as the founding unit ... surely comes close to reflecting a true universal, the experience of life's continuum being divided by the alternation of day and night, the death of each day's life, the punctuation of consciousness by sleep (82).

An examination of the tension between the diary as "true universal" and as a genre that undermines this very claim to authority also enables us to identify the immortalising implications of the diary writing process. For although the daily promotes ideas of a 'truth' of representation, it also invites the discourses of life and death, discourses that threaten, as we can see in reference to Franklin, control over her self- objectification in the eternal space of the "continuous present". Lejeune writes of the diary as a postponement of death in his article "How Do Diaries End?", in which he concludes that the genre's lack of closure is significant to the diarist's sense of mortality: "the diarist is protected from death by the idea that the diary will continue. There is always writing to be done for all eternity" (101). Franklin's preoccupation with the immortalising implications of diary writing can be seen in her Pocket Diaries, in which the depression she associates with a lack of achievement is exacerbated by a daily structure, as this structure signifies the linear progression of objective time towards death. As the most prominent representation of the daily in her assortment of diaries. Franklin's Pocket Diaries are particularly prone to the banality and depression that is so commonly linked to thoughts of death. An entire week can be summarised thus: "Depressed + Miserable ... Depressed + weary ... Dreary + miserable ... Damnably unhappy" (16-21 May 1909) while yearly summaries threaten that if life and work do not progress "I shall die of my own volition" (31 December 1913). By similarly approaching Franklin's Diary and Literary Notebooks with the insights provided by Lejeune, we can see the mortal implications of daily intrusions on a "continuous present", for there are days on which she finds, as in 1945, that she arrives home "feeling futile + depressed, by the experience. What is life anyhow?" (17 April 1945). This exploration into the immortalising potential of the diary further allows us to see how Franklin avoids death within the eternally present act of diary writing. From this vantage point, we can identify Franklin's desire endlessly to proliferate in this present space, as this desire distinguishes her diary from other forms of writing, most notably autobiography. Here we see the benefits, as several scholars have suggested, in distinguishing diary from autobiography, particularly in their varying temporal structures. Harriet Blodgett redresses recent attempts made to "obscure the differences" between autobiography and the diary that have resulted from "the diary's recent passage into literature" (167), and agrees instead with May Sarton's description of autobiography as "memory, a past time summoned back" and the diary as "'what I am now at this instant'" (Blodgett 168, Sarton qtd in Blodgett 168). Olney similarly distinguishes between autobiography and an autobiographical piece by declaring the latter to be autobiography without memory, when one is "conscious of consciousness" and "aware only of the importance of an eternal now" ("Memory" 242). Hogan also writes of the "cyclical, repetitive and cumulative structure" of diaries in the context of "their capturing of a series of 'present moments' in the diarist's life, their unfinishedness" ("Engendered" 98). Jennifer Sinor recommends the recasting of dailiness as "the act of writing in the days rather than of the days" (123). In this respect, the daily is, she argues:

the single quality that marks the diary as a distinct form of writing. It is what prevents the diary from being reflective and forces both writer and reader into the immediate present, a place from which the critical distance a reader/writer is typically taught to obtain and value is impossible (123).

At this point, we are further able to examine the "continuous present" of the diary as it is elucidated via post-structural concepts. For these concepts allow us to see how Franklin avoids the misery and mortality in being of the day by asserting command over the past, present and future of her diary writing. Here also, we can identify how Franklin attempts to achieve her Eden via the complex temporality of her diaries, as they offer her a space to be reflexive and nostalgic within the context of an "eternal now". This idea is extended by Derrida's insights into the play between presence and absence, insights that enable us to clarify Franklin's use of her diaries to make present what has past:

play is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Play is always play of presence and absence ("Structure" 121).

Barthes plays with the expression of past and present selves in his journal by creating ambiguity around subjectivities that have "caught up to the moment"; the reader is sometimes encouraged to question if he is experiencing or recalling. "Early in the morning, coming back with the milk, I stop in the church to have a look around" (486). In his description of the diary as "essentially diurnal", Fothergill similarly foregrounds the temporal flexibility evident in the shifts between past and present subjects:

Sometimes an entry which has rendered in the past tense the experiences of a day- not-yet-over will shift into the present tense to utter the 'now' of the instant of writing. Having caught up to the moment, the writer and the text attend at the frontier of time (84). But although Franklin is able to utilise the creative opportunities of this play between past and present in her diary writing, presence is always accompanied by, as the insights of both Barthes and Derrida suggest, the haunting threat of absence, thereby signifying her inability to return to the past over which she is nostalgic. In this way, we see that her preoccupation with death exposes a key paradox — for any attempts to postpone death through temporal transcendence will inevitably also invite it. This paradox is particularly apparent in those moments of grief and loss in her diaries, which always bring her back to her isolation in the present moment, to a space of mortality:

I can see them in my mind in every poignant detail, in all their heartbreaking significance as I write here, alone, tonight, the only one of the family remaining nearly 50 years later ... Shadows, we leave no records! (13 March 1948).

This vantage point also directs us to identify yet another contradiction within the past and present of diary temporalities, for it is also the eternal "instant of writing" that enables the endless self-revisions of the diary subject. According to Nussbaum, diaries reveal that "a given autobiographical act ... is also a series of accumulating acts of writing, revision, and reception" (18). This theoretical focus elucidates our understanding of the iconic Franklin, bringing to the fore her attempts to achieve monumental status in these diaries through acts of revision and editing. As a prolific and unfinished text, the diary can be seen to offer Franklin the possibility of endless rewritings — of an eternity as a creative and pre-defined subject. This re-writing process is evident in Franklin's self- editing in these diaries, in her asterixed additions, her referencing system ("(See also pp46-54 ibid)") and her in-text changes. In one entry, for example, she substitutes "review" for "recapitulation", "deliberately thought ouf for "studied" (7 April 1944). In this way, we see that the formation of the coherent I is always tempered with a state of incompletion in the diary genre. Holmes refers to this temporal paradox when she writes that: The writer's relationship to the time she records is ever shifting. As writers return to their previous entries, their understanding of them changes, mediated by intervening events. Diaries become a repository of memory, and for some the temptation to add or change things is often too great to resist (xix).

The re-reading process can indeed be seen as part of the diarist's attempt to extend, and further to immortalise, the present moment. As Hogan suggests: "Being able to read back over the diary gives one a longer perspective than is granted by the present moment" (13). By highlighting the complex and contradictory processes of production, diaries reveal, as Nussbaum argues, the requirement we feel "as writers of ourselves and readers of autobiographies to construct a 'self" (33). In exploring the diary as a draft version of the coherent I, scholars have also revealed how autobiographical and diary genres intersect within the "ever shifting" continuous present, thereby elucidating the diary as both the I of the instant and "memory, a past time summoned back". Here again, we see how the difference between diary and autobiography can, complexly, be used to destabilise that difference. Generic definition is problematised by evidence of those diarists who, as Blodgett writes, "have kept a future autobiography in mind" (156). In her study of early English women's diaries, she refers specifically to Mary Fountaine's hybrid diary, which:

was kept serially like any ordinary diary, but it was also rewritten annually as a continuous first-person narrative by a woman who clearly envisioned it in some respects as an autobiography and yet as a diary nonetheless (156).

She further suggests that pocket diaries often provided useful notes for writing up detailed entries later (163). This practice is also evidenced in Franklin's diaries from the notes she wrote while travelling that were later turned into her more polished Travel Diary. Furthermore, Franklin's description of one of her Diary Notebooks as "autobiography" is another example of the methods by which she herself sets up a relationship between the two genres. These generic and temporal complexities can also be productively explored as they play out in Franklin's relationship to an audience. Acts of revision also, as scholars suggest, introduce ideas of audience, complicating the common perception that the journal is written for one's "own entertainment". As readers of their own journals, diarists foreground the integral relationship that exists between writing and reading practices within the process of self-creation. Hogan highlights this relationship when she states that "both writing things out and reading through what has previously been written out compose the diarist who has composed the entries" (13). Scholars have commonly argued that it is an awareness of the reader's presence that encourages coherency of subjectivity. Bloom writes that "the audience hovering at the edge of the page", most notably for "the sophisticated diarist", can serve as "the impetus either for the initial writing or for transforming what might have been casual, fragmented jottings into a more carefully crafted, contextually coherent work" (23). This suggestion is, as Bloom writes, a disruption to the prominent idea of the 'private' diary: "contrary to popular perception not all diaries are written - ultimately or exclusively - for private consumption" (23). Cynthia Gannet similarly argues the now well-established idea in diary scholarship that no act of writing is completely private or personal (2). Furthermore, it is in privileging these stages of textual production that we can see how diaries traverse between public and private discourses:

Very often, in either the process of composition over time, or in the revision and editing that some of the most engaging diaries undergo, these superficially private writings become unmistakably public documents, intended for an external readership (Bloom 23).

Taking up the diary as it complicates the personal, unmediated subject allows us further to elucidate Franklin's use of these diaries as public documents that both insist on secrecy and resist privacy. These disruptions to the public/private dichotomy of diary reading practices can be further illuminated via another key feature of new diary scholarship — that concerning the performative implications of diary revision. In discussions of diary privacy, recent scholarship has highUghted the tension between concepts of design and authenticity. Fothergill foregrounds the relationship between intimacy and the audience when he writes:

The free conception of 'A Diary' depends upon an implicit undertaking that it has not been revised. Edited, perhaps. Expunged even, though we shall be disappointed. But not rewritten. What we are reading now, we need to be assured, must be what was written then. Here is a feature that distinguished diary from most other kinds of discourse from a reader's point of view (90).

Hogan foregrounds similar generic presumptions regarding intimacy and immediacy in a study that challenges "the idea that writing for an audience will make a writer behave unnaturally, that only when we're absolutely by ourselves are we truly ourselves" (9). She thereby draws an important distinction between the private and the authentic diary subject: "But here the idea of audience seems to be closely linked with the idea of artifice, design, and perhaps with less authenticity of feeling" (9). An examination of these readerly expectations in the context of Franklin's diaries enables us to ascertain further the shadow implications of her desire to "keep a journal with a view to publication'' (Barthes 480), for she is at risk of alienating the readership for whom she produces these self-edited diaries. In this way, intimacy can be read as another form of disguise that Franklin adopts in her need to maintain secrecy and privacy, and therefore as part of the complexity of her own internal processes. Her explicit denial of an audience in the content of these diaries is an attempt psychically to mask the implications of her self-editing in these diaries — to make anonymous the reader she so obviously writes for. From this vantage point, her denial can also be seen as evidence of her awareness of the readerly desire for the writerly text, of the reader's need for an unmediated subject. And yet in her Pocket Diaries, there is an entry that further reveals how explicitly she intended her diary to be a "work": "Worked on diary ... Read diary + clipped holes" (11 and 16 December 1916). These instances of authorial intrusion also raise crucial questions concerning the masked diary subject as public figure in private discourse. This vantage point further enables us to identify how Franklin's claim to intimacy is also compromised by the performative implications of her fame. However, it could also be argued that, as a celebrity. Franklin is accorded different rules and expectations, for the presumption of self-imitation often accompanies fame. McMahon writes of this paradox when she refers to the commentators on female celebrity culture who have noted "the preoccupation with the 'authenticity' of celebrities in their self-impersonations for public consumption" (174). Bloom distinguishes the public figure in her reading of the diary audience, arguing that "for a professional writer there are no private writings":

The private performance may be less polished than the manuscript destined for publication from the outset, but once a writer, like an actor, is audience-oriented, such considerations as telling a good story, getting the sounds and the rhythm right, supplying sufficient details for another's understanding, can never be excluded. All writers know this; they attend to such matters through design and habit (24, 25).

By taking up these expectations concerning the "audience-oriented" public writer, we are able to ascertain the ways in which Franklin herself sets up a distinction between performance and her 'authenticity' as an unmediated subject. Li this way, we can contextualise her preoccupation with 'privacy' — with "the real Miles Franklin" — as a dilemma of her time, a consequence of being an Australian woman writer. In the performative realm of the diary, her mask of authenticity can be understood as it was necessitated by her place outside 'normative' gender relationships and within an Australian literary tradition. For she was, as we see in these diaries, eager to maintain the importance of 'truth' in portrayal — of literature that was "intrinsically indigenously Aust[ralian]" (11 November 1937) and a sisterhood in which "women would take off their masks" (3 May 1942). Furthermore, this tension between diary performance and 'authenticity' allows us to see that Franklin's disguise of her own masking was part of her desire to be, like Furphy, an author unified by her body of work. In this approach, we are able to ascertain that Franklin was pre-occupied with establishing the public image of her authenticity as an author across her different writings, for only as an author unrevised, and therefore with "a subjectivity coherently held", could she serve a unifying function that would encourage her posthumous presence. This perspective on her authorship once again opens up a reflexive study between fiction and diary, in which issues of authenticity are further elucidated. This dilemma is particularly evident in her fictional autobiography My Career Goes Bung, in the preface to which Franklin insists on the novel's authenticity by denying that any changes had been made to the original text. She writes that, although published forty-eight years after its original conception, she "remained faithful to the girl that once [she] was by not meddling in corrections" with the original manuscript (7), and yet, as Elizabeth Webby writes in her introduction to the novel's 1996 edition, more than one draft was discovered amongst Franklin's papers. Indeed, there are significant differences between the 1902, 1910 and 1946 versions of this novel, originally titled The End of My Career (Webby xiv). Many of the dilemmas discussed here, concerning female celebrity, self- impersonation and the relationship between body of writer and text, can be seen to play out in those controversies surrounding the Helen Demidenko scandal. Taking up Natalie Jane Prior's diary publication of her experiences with Demidenko further enables us to explore these recent debates as they illustrate the paradoxes in contemporary diary reading practices, stemming from ideas of multiplicity and the concept of an authentic authorship. In her preface. Prior promotes the readerly text through a description of writers as "intrinsically truthful because we write from the heart, from our sense of self Our books are extensions of who we are" (5, 6). In this way, we can see that Prior's celebration of the totalising author, and the diary's role in producing the writing persona, is an indication of the author-function at work, of the author as "the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning" (Foucault 209). Like Franklin with My Career Goes Bung, Prior insists on an author's authenticity of intention and on their coherency of identity. Indeed, the authorial product is destabilised by any evidence of the process of authorial construction:

Like everybody else who read it when it was first published, I assumed that Helen's book sprang from this essential self Instead it sprang from a self which was largely a construct. The foundation I believed in did not exist and, like the Biblical house built on sand instead of the rock, it all came tumbling down (5, 6).

In her attempt to rebuild the "Biblical house" via the diary, to turn "Helen back into a human being" (10), Prior foregrounds the fear of proliferation that also motivates Franklin's diary writing. For Prior is the subject to Demidenko's object; together they establish a totalising author. Because Demidenko has "relinquished the right to her own story" (10) through her authorial performance, she has invited the interpretative responses of others — made herself a private text to be read. In considering Franklin as a subject caught between ideas of diary multiplicity and readerly expectations, we can ascertain how she was able to accommodate her recurring paradoxical self-image as an authentic performer. Prior also, in her account of her diaries, reveals a conscious revision of immediacy. An examination of the paradoxes in Prior's preface to these diaries permits us to see that, like Franklin and Barthes, she struggles with the question of how to make her diary creditable, and with how to achieve both objective 'truth' and intimacy. To make herself Demidenko's legitimate voice, she defines her diary as an historical, non-fictive account of the scandal: "My diary in particular I believe to be an important document, inasmuch as it is the only eyewitness, day-to-day account which has yet appeared" (8). Although claiming she does "not want to whitewash Helen", she further attempts to credit her story with intimacy. Admitting that "in tackling contentious events it is impossible to remain completely objective, particularly for someone as close to the situation as me", she argues "there is no doubt that I was closer to what was happening that almost anyone else who has written on the subject yet" (8). Yet intimacy must also be undermined to justify her production of "Natalie Prior's Helen" (7): "While she called herself my friend, ours was a literary or professional relationship, and I was never truly intimate with her" (9). This paradox is also applicable to Franklin who, like Prior, hopes that in utilising her diaries to establish a totalising authorship, and subsequently denying her multiplicity, she can maintain objective control over her voice. Prior's attempts at justification also infer the readeriy desire for a "text" over a "work". This is similarly the paradox in which Franklin is caught — how to turn her diary into a "work" that also meets the reader's desire for a "text". For her diaries are designed to make her a readerly text, and to do this they must be made creditable. Franklin's resistance to her readership is a necessary part of her claim to anonymity as an author in these diaries. This resistance, as it plays out across her various authorial guises, can be seen when she writes in her diaries, in reference to her childhood autobiography: "I'm not writing it for others, but only for myself (9 March 1953). This claim to a solitary authorship further enables us to see a key dilemma that will be taken up and explored throughout this thesis — Franklin can only function as a totalising and iconic author by occupying all available subject and object positions, those of writer and reader. She contrasts in this respect to writers such as Anais Nin, whose diaries, as Bloom suggests, are "invariably alert to the concerns of an audience" and accordingly "shapes the text" to accommodate their presence (24, 25). Nin is playful with her self- impersonations and the expectations of her audience. Re-reading her diaries, she discovers that:

nothing seems to be peculiarly mine, but pain, sorrow, triumph, struggle, vision, all flowing from some common, external source. I write for other people, even when I say T am alone, I am special, I am different' ... I play a thousand roles (qtd in Bloom 23).

Unlike Franklin, Nin is accepting of her performative persona and explicitly indulges her diary as "text". This vantage point allows us to further examine the implications of Franklin's failure to make her diary "into a 'work'". For whereas Nin playfully engages with a writerly text in which "nothing seems to be peculiarly mine", Franklin is both resistant to and made anxious by the prospect of her self-imitation. These resistances can be elucidated by Barthes insights into his own journal writing dilemma, his fear that the emotion expressed will always be "a copy of the same emotion one has read somewhere" (493). In his categorisation of the diary as "discourse", Barthes undermines the distinction between internal and external worlds, compromising the author's attempt at objectivity. He is unable to make his journal creditable because, as he discovers in the act of writing:

I never get away from myself. And if I never get away from myself, if I cannot manage to determine what the Journal is 'worth', it is because its literary status slips through my fingers (494).

Joy Hooton similarly references the interaction between self and text when she writes of the diarist's "immersion in the here and now" ("Life-lines" 7). Although Hooton, like other scholars, claims that this immersion allows for perspective (7), it can be seen to create a dilemma for Franklin who, like Barthes, is trapped in the loop of her self- reflexivity in these diaries, unable to unite with or escape her image-repertoire. This approach can be further elucidated by Lacan's famously designated "mirror stage", representing the moment when the subject has a false image of a unified self reflected back to him/her from outside, from the place of the other (Benstock 12). The image is, as Barthes' writings suggest, diffracted through a mirror, identified with its own delusional reflected gaze (Anderson 72). This theoretical perspective offers us insight into the shadow presence of Franklin's otherness as a 'perversion' of the idealised self-image she promotes. The dilemmas posed by this self-reflexive space of the diary also illuminate issues of textual and self-imitation. This vantage point directs us to identify another preoccupation of Franklin's in these diaries — how to avoid being a "substitute" for the coherent subject. Barthes' insights into the imitative dilemma of diary writing can be used to elucidate Franklin's paradox, for in her desire to be the immortalised embodiment of the act of writing, the endlessly proliferative "texf, she is also made aware that, as Barthes writes, the diary "'I' is a false name" (491). New diary scholarship has explored similar dilemmas, notably through the prevailing argument that diaries highlight the diarist's discomfort in the presence of his or her own I. Blodgett refers to this predicament as the diarist's tendency towards self-abnegation (158, 159). Fothergill similarly identifies self-effacement as a recurring feature of diary writing: But perhaps the suppression by some diarists of the 'F that would otherwise govern verb after verb, page after page, is a gesture of self-effacement, a tacit apology for the appearance of self-preoccupation (87).

He further argues that the presence of the performative self can instigate a need to destabilise the I, to undermine the process of self-production: "Some diarists exhibit an awareness of this persona as a mask which conceals as much as it reveals and actively work at strategies for deconstructing it" (86). In applying this idea to Franklin's diaries, however, we see that her dependency on her various personas is, paradoxically, a necessary protection against the alternative — the prospect that the self under the mask is only another false I. These scholarly insights into diary I as persona also have implications for Franklin's masking processes, as they expose her fear of absence. This fear, as elucidated by Barthes' theories concerning the "infinitely suppressible" consequences of the proliferative "Album" (492), can be seen to play out through the distortion of Franklin's anonymity as a totalising author. In exploring her resistance to the writerly text, we see that absence signifies for Franklin the threat of an authorial death that takes place "at the birth of the reader" (Barthes "Death" 172). An exploration of the tension between intimacy and performance, authenticity and copy offers us further insight into Franklin's desire to produce a publishable diary that is also a space for "psychic privacy". In this paradox, we see that her diaries would ideally be representative of a time, as Nussbaum writes, "before diaries were published", when "they provided a way to keep the truth about oneself out of the tangled skein of power before the subject is constructed by the human sciences" ("Diary" 135). Her claim to authentic performance is, in this way, also an attempt to keep what Nussbaum describes as "the subject's hidden discourse" from the contaminating gaze of the other. For to remain hidden is to maintain "the hope of knowing the self when the subject is still the sole censor and critic of his or her own discourse" (Nussbaum "Diary" 135). These insights into the 'private' subject of a hidden discourse enables us to see that Franklin's exclusory practices in these diaries not only reflect the dilemma of her time but also a tradition within diary writing. There is a history, as Nussbaum writes, in eighteenth-century diaries of the fear an outside oppressor could cause to the private subjectivity of the journal. Boswell writes of the "great harm" that could be caused "if the journal should fall into the hands of my enemies", thereby signifying the "secret and forbidden aspect of diary, of its boundaries edge between private and public" (qtd in Nussbaum "Diary" 136, Nussbaum "Diary" 136). Furthermore, this perspective allows us to ascertain the ways in which Franklin, in her desire for a hidden subjectivity that keeps "the truth about oneself free from harm, is made vulnerable to the haunting other of the performative text. Like Barthes, she is made anxious at the prospect of being an open text, and subsequently of the ''anyone who will read me''; Barthes further exemplifies this dilemma when he writes in a paranoid fashion of his Journal pages placed in front of anyone whom he is looking at, or "under the silence" of whom he is speaking to (491). This theoretical perspective therefore enables us to understand Franklin's otherness in relation to her resistance of the diary "text", which is also a resistance to being naked before the monstrous reader, the other made enemy. Feminist diary scholarship further elucidates the concept of the enemy other in diary writing via a consideration of women's need for a space of "psychic privacy". In this way, Franklin's resistance to the diary as "suppressible" can be understood productively, as a resistance to a public institution that "swallow[s] women" (27 May 1949), a method by which she avoids women's allocation to a space of absence. By refusing to enter 'normal' relationships, and therefore to be a "potato" to a man's "willow slip" (28 December 1937), Franklin was also refusing to be the woman relegated to the shadows behind the male "geniass", as she would playfully write (1948). McMahon refers to women's need for a place outside public discourse when she writes of Simone de Beauvoir's "insistence that women must not look to any form of external relationship to realise an identity — to become a whole woman" (173, 179). As a private genre, diaries have commonly been seen to offer women this escape. In a recent study, Podnieks writes that:

the diary is a particularly useful female space, for women can find in the private, unassuming pages of a diary a place to express themselves; confirm their value; and, paradoxically, both comply with and challenge the silence prescribed for respectable feminine conduct ("Introduction" 3).

Holmes similarly writes that "given women's general lack of access to other forms of writing", the diary allowed women to escape from pressures to be "self-sacrificing", providing "one of the few places where women were allowed to be self-centred" (xvii). Yet this private space has also been compromised by recent claims by scholars that diaries have not always been historically contained within the realm of privacy; as Bunker's writes, "the hard-bound diary with lock and key is a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon" (17). Reiterating an argument made by Margo Culley, Holmes similarly argues "the idea of the diary as a place for private thoughts and feelings developed during the last 100 years" (xvii). Hogan writes of how the "diary as 'inner sanctum'" became linked to "the increasing 'féminisation' of the private, the domestic, and the inner life over the last hundred years" ("Engendered" 98). But as Holmes argues, "whether this makes the diary entirely a 'private' world is another assumption that needs testing" (xvii). Recent developments in theories of gender performance have tested this assumption, as they foreground the relationship between women's public and private lives. The result has been, as Bunkers writes, a further destabilising of women's allocation to the private realm: "scholars have demonstrated [that] often a woman's diary or journal was not meant to be a secretive, well-hidden text" (17). Feminist interest in the recuperation of other forms of writing, in women as they lived and wrote their lives, has augmented debates concerning the I and the we of female subjectivity. Many feminist scholars have resisted post-structural developments, arguing that this theoretical mode has continued to consign women to an "unrecoverable absence" (Anderson 88). Feminist scholars in diary and autobiography have shown considerable scepticism towards women's self-effacement, for women's life writing has been used as a way to address women's absence. Hooton argues that women's relationship to the other is fundamentally different to men's, labelling the deconstruction of the self as a further development of "individualism in Western culture" (29, 30). Shari Benstock similarly suggests that the situation is different in women's life writing because women are already othered subjects: "the self that would reside at the center of the text is already decentered - and often is absent altogether - in women's autobiographical texts" (20). Nicole Jouve refers to the dangers within identity politics when she argues: "it is because subjecthood has become so difficult, has been so deconstructed, that there is a need to work towards it. This is particularly so for women" (10, 11). Diary scholars in particular have emphasised the prevailing significance of the relationship between the centred and othered female self as it emerges in women's diary practices. For as a space of "psychic privacy", diaries allow, as Anderson suggests, a woman to "remain hidden while providing her with a place to actualise her interiority, create herself for an 'other', even if the 'other' is also herself (qtd in Hooton "Life-lines" 6). However, diary theory has also utilised the signification of the genre to elucidate a reading of women's plurality, and therefore of the empowering possibilities in their allocated role as natural performers (McMahon 176). These insights enable us to identify and examine Franklin's pseudonymous and secretive personas as subversive strategies that promoted productivity. According to Judy Lensink, the positive nature of how we read women's lives is dependent on whether we award them agency as multiple subjects: "Rather than playing the manikin who arrives at multiplicity from chaos, a woman may see herself diS multiplicity" (42, 43). In a more recent diary study. Huff, in acknowledging the limitations involved in post-structural and other reading theories, promotes instead the "assumed and multiple voices" of the diary subject (508). She quotes William Spurlin's suggestion that:

it might be more productive to consider the multiple and contradictory subject positions of race, gender, sexuality, and other positions ... and to view identity as a site of shifting meaning, and subject positions ... as possible spaces for agency and resistance (qtd in Huff 508).

Her reading is a response to shifts within the feminist debate towards emphasising the plurality of women's lives, imagining multiple subjectivities that, as Anderson suggests, "are without foundation but located, instead, in particular times and places" (90, 91). These shifts have allowed a place for political analysis within theories of gender performativity. As Barbara Johnson argues: But such a politics of location and subject position does not dismiss as mere mystification the question of the readability of human beings as signs. Human being are constantly being read — and misread. Just because identities are fictions does not mean they have not had, or could not have, real historical effects (72).

The advantages in reading women's fictional identities as tools of agency can be extended through a consideration of the fictional techniques they adopt as diary writers. Steven Kagle and Lorenza Gramegna have argued in their study of early American women's diaries that "the techniques of fiction might offer a sense of empowerment by controlling reality as it became fixed by pen and ink" (85). These theoretical developments into the area of women's diary performance also direct us to identify a key contradiction posed by Franklin's masking — for her desire to be outside the public eye, is also, complexly, an assertion of her need to be invisible. In this paradox, she can be seen to resemble Gertrude Stein who, as McMahon writes, "was paralysed by the fame and came to relish if (175). By exploring Franklin in the tension between anonymity and fame, we can see that she addresses the threat of paralysis by refusing to be embodied as woman, laying claim instead to the productivity possible in the 'natural' and 'pure' space of an Edenic childhood outside the perverting gaze of public adult discourse. In this space. Franklin maintains a hidden subjectivity outside sexual definition, nurturing her potential in the inexhaustible possibilities of the self- creator. In a study of Germaine Greer's generational writings, McMahon writes of "her powerful sense of her own embodiment" as it derives from her reversal of the patriarchal gaze onto "the boy", who represents a space of "pure potential and youthful beauty" (178). Taking the concept of the reverse gaze into Franklin's diaries, we are able to further clarify her desire to be embodied as "pure potential", and therefore to elucidate the gendered implications of her return to a childhood Eden. For this time offers her the space of psychic isolation she requires as a woman writing, as can be seen when she writes, in reference to her production of her childhood autobiography: "I was not going beyond my tenth year — a record to please myself of an isolated and happy childhood" (9 March 1953). In this way, her diaries can be explored as they attempt to protect this Edenic space from the "erudite child psychologists" who would "most likely misunderstand and distort it and deduce I was some kind of a monstrosity, utterly at variance with the facts of my innocence" (9 March 1953). Theories of embodied writings also allow us to see the problems posed by Franklin's resistance to embodiment in these diaries, and therefore by the body/text conflation that she promotes in her desire to be a textual reproduction. For although Franklin wants to be "in the transformation of her body ... a diviner's cup" that reflects outward (Warner 7), her array of performances also complexly positions her as a plural body trapped within the loop of self-reflexivity. As Barthes writes in his discussion of photography, the authentic body is an impossibility because it is imphcated in the image- repertoire, only ever confirmed through the gaze:

Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens {Roland 180).

In this way, we can ascertain that the diary, as a genre that foregrounds the image- repertoire, is also unable to protect the virginal Franklin from potential contamination from the outside gaze. This failure is evident when she describes her fear of being represented in the distorted image of the "mortifying corpse" or "battered mound of flesh" in reference to William Dobell's art (4 February 1944) — of being a dismembered body "in bits and pieces" (Barthes Roland 61). By using a distorted language of embodiment to express her fear of the gaze. Franklin also displays a reluctant awareness of her body as both mortal and multiple. This reluctance can be explored by taking up, in a similar mode to Barthes, the multiplicity of the body as it plays out in the complex temporality of the diary — for there is the body that writes, the body that experiences, and the body that re-reads. Furthermore, this diary plurality can be elucidated by the gendered implications of women's bodies, as conceived in terms of the "easily bifurcated" bodies of natural performers (McMahon 176). Huff extends this concept when she argues that diaries, as they foreground the relationship between women's bodies, can be used to signify the intersection of women's public and private lives: what are the correlations between, and influences upon, a diarist's conception of her physical body, and / or place within the social body, and the body of the text she is creating? C'Textual" 124).

An exploration of the relationships between textual and social bodies in Franklin's diaries, as they elucidate the distinction she herself sets up between physical and psychic spaces, enables us to see her productive resistances within a gendered identity, as well as the inevitable costs involved in being a woman writer. An exploration into Franklin's gendered resistance to the mirror image allows us to identify how her virginity is used in these diaries to promote the exclusion of her own otherness. Theories of embodied writing, by highlighting the way in which the body, like the diary, functions as mediator between binaries, can also be used to destabilise Franklin's attempts at self-containment. As Elizabeth Grosz argues, the body defies generic categorisations and seeps "beyond the domains of control" (x, xi):

the body provides a point of mediation between what is perceived as purely internal and publicly observable, a point from which to rethink the opposition between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, the self and the other, and all the binary oppositions associated with the mind / body dualism (20,

21).

Sidonie Smith argues the importance of the body as a destabilising tool through which women's autobiographical writing rejects the "law of genre" and "breaks the old frames governing self-portraiture": "in its resistance it becomes a hybrid form" (4). In this way, the body enables us to explore Franklin's resistance to what McMahon describes as "the interstitial space of between" ("Oscar" 105) in her diaries, a resistance that exposes her as a stranger to herself. These insights into diary otherness offer a further elucidation of the gendered implications of Franklin's distortions, most notably the key distortion of her "pure potential" into the delay of the unprogressive writer. Having established that diary and textual theories enable us to both identify and examine Franklin, at the intersection of textual, social and psychic spaces, as a process of production, this thesis continues with a study of these processes as they elucidate the instabilities of the authorial L Given that diaries contain destabilising features that can be taken, as this chapter has attested, into other genres, they enable us to read across Franklin's life and text, and therefore to explore her other writings in a reflexive reading that foregrounds issues of author-ity. These issues are taken up in the next chapter in an examination of Franklin's resistances and anxieties in the "interstitial space of between", thereby illuminating, the ways in which she both productively and problematically engages with the dichotomies of life/text, author/reader and self/other. Post-structural theory in particular allows us insights into Franklin's shadow otherness, as it is always at play in these diaries. Utilising the theories of Barthes in particular, this thesis goes on to consider how Franklin, as she manipulates the shifting temporalities of her diaries, avoids her implication in the personal, in discourses of life, to promote her authority as an author. From this vantage point, we are also able to explore the consequences of her self- imitation in these surrogate diaries, as they play out in the reflexivity of her proliferative self-representation. Barthes' theories further enable us to contextualise these dilemmas as a resistance to the modernist writerly text, and therefore as another example of modernism held at bay in Australia. Theories of gender and embodiment are also taken up in an analysis of the "continuous present" of Franklin's hybrid diaries, as this temporal space offers her a way to be the embodiment of "pure potential" outside public discourses — to be both woman and writer. This productivity is, however, undermined by the intrusions of a diary readership, as they expose the haunting of the monstrous other within Franklin's own self-reflexivity, revealing her in the psychic complexities of the 'private' diary as the imperfect reader that distorts her potential into delay. Miles Franklin's Authorial Voice:

The modernist resistances of a world classic

This chapter argues that Franklin intended to be a "world classic" (Franklin Furphy 3), according to the Barthean concept of the "classic text" as "intransitive" and unchanging (S/Z 4). In these diaries she attempts to achieve a synthesis between author, text and reader that will allow her to be, as her friend Charles Hartley Grattan describes, an author of iconic status: "Miles F. was stands in solitary date the only woman who had produced a classic. Etc. etc" (16 March 1938). Yet we can also see that her diaries rehearse the authorial anxieties posed by the writerly text, the scenario in which the reader is "a producer of the text" (Barthes S/Z 4). Franklin is well-known for her practice of self- naming, and thereby occupies a central place within a long tradition of women writers who adopted pseudonymous identities. The complexity of these operations in Franklin's case, requires particular attention and indicates in no small measure, I will argue, an authorial fear of readers — a fear that plays out in modernist and national contexts. Written, for the most part, from the 1930s through to the early 1950s, Franklin's diaries are an expression of anxiety concerning the modernist change to reading and writing practices, specifically the re-examination of the relationship between author, text and reader. But her resistance to the features of modernism are complicated by her claim to being "a cosmopolitan, and yet indelibly Australian" (Thoughts and Impressions 61), that is bound up with the international community and yet a champion and representative of a distinctively Australian writing. For in these diaries Franklin is also expressing her anxiety towards a nation of readers incapable of appreciating the high art modernist fiction with which Franklin would be, and occasionally was, rated. She resembled her modernist colleagues in that she projected "an oppositional and hierarchical relationship" between the "artist-genius" and "a monstrous social Other" (Will 6, 7), but her anxieties were specific to an Australian audience. It is precisely the nature of Franklin's hybrid diaries and the tensions they rehearse between features of both writerly and readerly texts that this chapter contends we may find, in Brunton's words, "the real Miles Franklin" (title of lecture given at the State Library). Her interior life is found not in the revelatory exposure of the personal subject from behind the author, but in the conflation of the art/life dichotomy that is promoted by diary writing. In this conflation, we can see Franklin's own fears concerning what constitutes the 'real' and whether, as a textual representation, she can avoid a fate of self-parody through writing. An example of this particular dilemma can be found in Franklin's review of Palmer's diaries, made in her Literary Notebooks, in which she complexly occupies a space between writing as art and as imitation. Franklin assesses the success of this diary edition according to the same criteria she uses for fiction: "As a whole the book is well-written, discreet, circumscribed, polite, impeccable, literary. No marring outbursts of either genius or geniass" (1948). But her reading of Palmer's diaries also encourages her to reflect on the surrogate purpose of her own diary writing. When told her diary writing is wasteful, she responds with:

But what else cd. I do with my over-abundant contents? I have never had any confidence, nor have I lived with literary people who could have promulgated me, as Nettie's chums do each other. I fell among those blighting reformers, who had no understanding of real writing, and always impelled me to be mindful of some mediocre party policy. I am too turbulent spiritually and mentally to produce such ladylike reminiscences as Nettie's (1948).

Franklin writes of herself in this review as an over-abundance of content that spills onto the page. We can see from this account that she has an intimate relationship to writing beyond that which she shares with people, for she does not have Nettie's literary "chums". An examination of this relationship, as a prevailing preoccupation throughout this chapter, will enable us to identify the complexity of Franklin's life/text dichotomy as it plays out in her use of the diary as surrogacy, exposing her fear of what constitutes both real readers and "real writing". As the above entry suggests. Franklin felt muted as, in Sircar's words, the "fiery fictional heroine" Sybylla, by a readership that demands the "ladylike reminiscences" of a "modest docile" author (177). Indeed, given that these were years of creative "literary stalemate" (Modjeska 180), her diaries could be seen as a positive resistance to the "ladylike" demands of her audience, thereby indicating that surrogacy was, paradoxically, her most productive space. Franklin's only real "bastard relief was experienced through, as I will argue, "real writing" — as a totalising author of fiction — and with a readership made up of literary "chums". Franklin's authorial dilemma, as it is identified here, goes to the heart of the writing project, for the recognition of her anxieties and resistances on the topic of writing surrogacy re-opens the matter of her mask wearing — thereby introducing the significance of diary masks that indicate a preference for form over content. This preference is illustrated by Ray Mathew, who includes a selection of his own diary entries, as they refer to his personal experiences with Franklin, in an appendix at the end of his short 1963 biography of Franklin for the series Australian Writers and their Work. In one entry, he refers to a passage she had marked in an article: " ... the oft-repeated affirmation that form is more important than content, and precedes content — form being organic, being 'given' by the temperament of the artist; he submits to it, he does not devise'' (19 August 1953 37). Although, as Mathew writes, "there was no way of knowing if her marking signified approval" (19 August 1953 37), this entry illustrates a paradox that is, I will argue, central to Franklin's authorship — she desired to be both "organic" and iconic in form, as well as the "over-abundant contents" that refuse a single interpretation. Franklin's desire to be both famous and remembered has been well documented by scholars, notably Roe who has acknowledged the author's clear intent to be a posthumously biographical subject ("Changing" 44). Brunton also writes in his introduction, "she wanted passionately to be a writer and she wanted the success and recognition which would come from this" (vii), a claim that is supported by his diary selection in that it includes moments of authorial insecurity and envy. This publication does not, however, portray her heavily edited diaries as a form of authorial promotion in themselves. The particularities in her desire for iconic status have yet to be explored as they play out in "the dynamics of her interior life" (Roe "Changing" 44). In an analysis of the internal processes of the iconic author, the focus of this chapter first centres on the fallen relationships between writer and reader in these diaries as they contrast with Franklin's image of the Edenic ideal. The ideal scenario, which emerges in her account of Jean Devanny and Pixie O'Harris' reading of her autobiography, strongly resembles the scenario created by Brunton in his reading of her as both "indomitable Australian" and "friend". This account is emblematic, I will argue, in that it demonstrates the way Franklin uses her diaries endlessly to recreate her version of Eden, but through them ends up rehearsing the anxieties that come from occupying all available subject positions at once. Through these fallen relationships we see that Franklin is caught in the loop of self-reflexivity in these diaries. This is, as Barthes writes, the dilemma of diary writing: "I never get away from myself (494). The vacillation between authorial and readerly positions generates the cycle of anxiety for, as Derrida writes, "anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset" ("Structure" 109). Though "a bastard relief for a desire to write" (25 February 1938), allowing her to perform "the Kafkaesque goal of extirpating anxiety by writing" (Barthes 482), these diaries exacerbate her fears as one caught in the loop of "perpetual self-correction" (Barthes "Gide" 6). She resembles André Gide when he writes in his journals: "They want to make me into a dreadfully anxious being. My only anxiety is to find my thoughts misinterpreted. {Journal 1927)" (qtd in Barthes "Gide" 6). From this point, this chapter continues with an examination of how these fallen relationships between writer and reader play out in Franklin's various replications of the author, as they reveal her desire to maintain author-ity. Whereas the fictional Sybylla of My Career Goes Bung celebrates her use of parody, wading in "without apology or fear" in her production of a "fictitious autobiography" (30), Franklin is a stranger to her ego other, a strangeness that is necessary to maintain anonymity in the space of her diaries. A comparative study of the authorial guises in novel and diary enables us to examine Franklin, and the dilemmas of authorship, within the life/text dichotomy that she herself establishes. In this way, we can see that the role Sybylla chooses to occupy as author, that of "a fiery fictional heroine not her own docile, modest self (Sircar 177), is one Franklin finds herself unable to occupy in life. For though able to be a "fiery" heroine who champions the subversive and creative potential of generic parody in her fiction, she is caught within the implications of self-imitation in the use of diary as surrogacy. To recreate the (albeit illusory) totality of the fictional author, she commonly adopts the "modest, docile" façade that ensures anonymity in the self-reflexive space of her diaries, seeking confirmation of her abilities through the compliments of others. But in this practice of perpetual self-validation, as will be seen, Franklin also moves towards the egotism of the "fiery" Sybylla as she attends to the distortions made by imperfect readings. This discussion continues by contextualising this pattern of self-reflexivity within the field of modernist and Australian writing and reading practices. Franklin's diaries exemplify the modernist features of the writerly text that conflates the art/life dichotomy whilst projecting the image of a "classic" text. It is the anxieties, as well as the productive resistances, arising from this paradox that distinguishes Franklin's diaries from those of her modernist and Australian contemporaries, notably as they rehearse the particular dilemma of diary as surrogate writing form and as a mimicry of both life and fiction. Woolf, the most iconic of modernist diarists, explores the potential of the genre as a writerly form. As Benstock writes, Woolf de-centralises the position of the author in her diaries (26). She displays an "active awareness of herself as a diarist and of the diary as a literary form to be mastered" (Blodgett 60). Barbara Pym's diaries possess a similar form of literary play, for they are, according to Anthony Kaufman, openly performative and engaged with a readership; Pym emerges, in the words of William L. Howarth, "as a double persona: telling the story as a narrator, enacting it as a protagonist" (qtd. in Kaufman 188). Woolf s generic experimentation is encouraged by her behef that the diary is "so elastic that it will embrace anything" (qtd in Blodgett 60). Unlike Gide, Woolf does not express anxiety about being "misinterpreted", but writes of her diaries that "the main requisite ... is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes of anything whatever" (20 April 1919 qtd in Blodgett 60). Woolf has not, as Daniel Albright writes, produced a work of self-containment with her diaries: "the subject is not a definite body or face but a watery medium" (2). Many of Franklin's Australian colleagues were also producing multi-faceted diaries that, while concerning their lives as writers, did not necessitate a preoccupation with the tensions involved in being an author o/" their diaries. The manuscript diaries of Eleanor Dark, Florence James and Muir Holburn for example, unedited and unpolished, are not anxiously engaged with the promotion of an authorial persona. Palmer's diaries, which were published during her lifetime, bypass any overt engagement with an authorial voice by prioritising "outward" concerns; they offer a record of the literary and political scene in Australia and parts of Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. The manuscript diaries of Mary Gilmore are most similar to Franklin's in that they clearly engage with the possibility of publication. Her title pages, for example, announce that these diaries are not to be opened until after her death. In an examination of Franklin's response to an Australian audience, this analysis goes on to identify the combination of the modernist writerly text and Australian icon, as this combination plays out in her anonymous authorial guises in these diaries. For it is through these guises that Franklin paradoxically utilises the creative potential of the "indefinite body" to reach an international audience as an Australian "classic". In exploring these shifts between authorial guises, we are able to identify the ways in which Franklin refuses to allow the various facets of the Australian public — the colonial- minded, the male writer, the academic reader — to be legitimatised as critics, and therefore to be a final place of interpretation for her body of work. In her accounts of the pseudonymous Brent of Bin Bin in particular, she avoids these perversions by occupying, as will be seen, the role of reader, in an attempt to ensure his reputation as a "world classic". Furthermore, her defence of Brent exposes a central paradox within her authorial positioning — as both Australian author and cultured expatriate. By examining Brent — the only pseudonym to receive notable attention in Franklin's diaries — in this way, we can see how this particular identity elucidates the role played by her pseudonymous identities in general, as masks via which she both asserts and resists the implications of a nationally defined authorship. This vantage point further enables us to ascertain that Franklin believed her pseudonyms necessary to protect her creative potential. She is known for her prolific use of pseudonyms, for she published under many names besides her own: An Old Bachelor, Brent of Bin Bin, Field Hospital Orderly, Mr and Mrs Ogniblat L'Artsau, Stella Lampe, Sarah Miles, Sarah Mills, SMS, The Glowworm, Vernacular and William Blake. The unpublished plays posthumously bequeathed to the Mitchell have also revealed her use of the names Jim Barrington and Botany Bay, via which she entered into literary competitions. Pseudonyms were not, however, as important to the factual writing style used in Franklin's impressive journalistic career. As Roe and Bettison write concerning Franklin's pseudonymous output as an expatriate: "it was her journalistic work which kept her name alive in Australia" {Gregarious xxi). Having established the variety of author/reader relationships that, outside intimate contexts, destabilise an Edenic ideal, this analysis sets up a final fallen relationship as it plays out in Franklin's internal processes — signifying the reading role of the stranger within. This exploration into the psychic spaces of Franklin's authorship enables us to see how, in a final irony, her external reader is distorted into the alien within — making her the monstrous self capable of reflecting her worst fears of objectification by an external audience. From this vantage point, we are further able to ascertain that Franklin avoids the anxieties posed by an external readership by making herself the future reader of her own life. But in taking up the complexities of Franklin's authorial temporality in this way, this analysis also identifies the dilemma posed by mortality, as she is haunted by her inability to escape the final place of destination — her authorial death: "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author" ("Death" 172). Her desire to play the part of posthumous biographer to her famous authorial self is evident when she describes the horrible thought of this role being performed by an inferior literary figure, by those who "professoris[e] in visceral dusf (11 November 1937). In this way, it could be argued that her diaries, indeed all her writings, are a protection against "this perversity of fate" (11 November 1937). From here, this analysis goes on to consider the psychic significance of Franklin's Eden as a space of youthful potential that avoids an authorial death, as can be seen to play out in a kind of obituary she writes of herself as an adolescent author in her Literary Notebooks. Yet in highlighting the presence of the alien within, we see that Franklin's Eden is inevitably distorted in her resistance to her own monstrous ego other. For it is this resistance to reflexivity that, as will be seen, makes her perform the hostile role of reader in these diaries, perverting her own self-portrait into the image of a "mortifying corpse" or "battered mound of flesh" (4 February 1944).

This complex map necessarily begins at Franklin's ideal scenario for a writer/reader relationship, as it plays out in her use of the diary as surrogacy for autobiography. For Franklin's Garden of Eden is commonly represented as the landscape of the Australian childhood place that themes her published autobiography. My Childhood At Brindabella. In her discussion of this autobiography in her diaries, of the process by which it was produced, we can see that it is within this productive space of youthful potential that Franklin finds a synthesis between writing and reading practices. She writes of how she told her friends Frank Clune and O'Harris "I was not going beyond my tenth year — a record to please myself of an isolated and happy childhood" (9 March 1953). In this way, her diary functions as a process-text in which this "isolated and happy childhood" space can be recreated. Her return to the "organic" state of both childhood and nation offers her a way to transcend the limitations and anxieties posed by the "monstrous social Other" in her current life:

My first ten years were the only ones that were usual in a quiet way[;] through the isolation in unspoiled Australia is a circle where I never knew harshness, want, or fears — internal or external (9 March 1953).

In this conflation of inner and outer worlds, we also see that Franklin's autobiography makes her, like Joan of Arc, "a diviner's cup" (Warner 7), thereby allowing her to overcome the dilemmas involved in being a writerly text, where "the text must simultaneously be distinguished from its exterior and from its totality" (Barthes S/Z 6). An exploration of Franklin's autobiography as it is used to champion her virginity further enables us to identify how, in refusing the story of her own adult years, she is resisting her adult readers. For outside an Bdenic space of childhood. Franklin's autobiography is at risk of contamination, as is evident when she imagines it in the hands of "erudite child psychologists" who would "most likely misunderstand and distort it and deduce I was some kind of a monstrosity, utterly at variance with the facts of my innocence" (9 March 1953)^. At her friends' insistence that she write an adult autobiography. Franklin protests that she had not indulged in the perversions necessary to undertake the task:

I could not help it that I was too virtuous, respectable and humble for spicy autobiographical confessions ... I never was even drunk or starved or hungry or had the slightest tendency towards perversions or any moral turpitude.

All future references to the writing of her autobiography are from the same entry. This scenario provides an example of Franklin's productive use of the surrogate potential of her diary, as it allows her to imagine the Eden that is, necessarily, without the other. In this space, totality is achieved without the reader, as can be seen when she writes of the deliberate attempts she made to undermine the reader's interest, claiming to have produced material "so remote, so sedate and of no consequence". In this way, we further see that Franklin's Eden is a synthesis between self and text; writing becomes her ideal companion: "I did not expect or desire anyone to be interested ... I had merely written for my own ease in loneliness and exile from any stimulating human contact." There are several occasions on which Franklin refuses the reflexive impact of her potential readership. When Clune comments in reference to the autobiography "no one wanted to hear that baby silliness", Franklin tells him that she is "not writing it for others, but only for myself. These denials offer an elucidation of Franklin's totalising authorship across her body of work, as it insists on the privacy of writing practices and excludes an audience:

I have long contemplated writing, as I am writing this journal for my own entertainment, the facts of my childhood, just to see how clearly I can remember before my phenomenal memory shall become motheaten.

Paradoxically, we also see in this entry that it is only through Franklin's proper readers that she is able to achieve this transcendent state. For it is O'Harris that enables her to overcome the writing block triggered by the potential reception of her autobiography, when she says: "Don't write it for children or for anyone else; just write it". Only then is Franklin inspired to begin the writing process, and therefore able to adopt the guise of the totalising author: "I had an idea, one of what W.B. Lloyd used to call my devious, subtle, entangling moves. It was easy to write a few chapters of T remember —' my pen flew" (9 March 1953). In contrast to her deliberate attempts to undermine the interest of her readership, Franklin claims to have "wrote of these 10 yrs only to appease Pixie O'Harris", for it is O'Harris that makes Franklin an iconic author: Pixie maintained that the record of a happy child free from tragedies and honours and precocity in sex or vice would be delightful to the world at present, and also present a phase of Aus. life that no one but I am equipped to describe at first hand today.

In the act of reading Franklin's autobiography, both O'Harris and Devanny produce an emotive response that reflects Franklin as "artist-genius". Furthermore, this idealised reading scenario includes the conflation of author and text, as is signified by Franklin's embodied presence in the process. As she writes of O'Harris: "Her indulgence was such that she laughed or wept at each page - almost each paragraph. It was difficult to get on with my cooking". Her modest reaction to Devanny's similar emotional response to her work also enables us to see that her Eden is simultaneously a space of presence and anonymity, where she is made an iconic author free from the intrusions of her ego other. When Devanny "fell silent" after reading the manuscript. Franklin interprets this to mean "she was too bored to continue" — a reaction she "accepted as normal":

To my surprise she burst into heavy sobs ... 'Why can't I write like that! Why do I even try to write! I'm only a rough ignorant old hack. Miles this is glamorous writing! It is exciting! It moves and stirs me, it is so beautiful, so different!'

In this entry. Franklin has achieved the ideal scenario of the totalising author, both present and anonymous, who, in the conflation of self and text, has become a "classic". A similar idyllic scenario can be seen in Franklin's account of winning the Prior Memorial Prize for A// That Swagger in 1936. Here again she claims to have undermined public interest by thwarting her chances of success, so sure was she that she would "not win" (22 August 1936). She writes of having treated the competition as a mockery, entering under a pseudonym and giving the book what she describes as the "trite chauvinistic title 'Advance Australia'" (22 August 1936). This vantage point further enables us to elucidate the ways in which Franklin, in her modest desire for anonymity, successfully adopts the guise of the totalising author — a figure simultaneously both omnipresent and invisible. Her modesty is evident when she writes of having dismissed a judges "whining enthusiasm" about her book, and of her attempts to turn the conversation away from Frank D. Davison's compliments regarding the prize at a meeting of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, even threatening to leave if her name was mentioned (22 August 1936). In examining her resistance to her popularity in the public gaze, we are able to see that, in Franklin's Edenic scenarios, to be the embodiment of creative potential is necessarily to sacrifice the personal, to eradicate the intrusive presence of ego. This distinction between art and ego can also be seen in Woolf's diaries when she writes: "The art must be respected ... for, if one lets the mind run loose, it becomes egotistical: personal, which I detest" (18 November 1924 qtd in Blodgett 60).

Having explored the productive potential of Franklin's surrogate writing practices, we are now able to consider how this productivity, and its distortion into anxiety, plays out in the space of "real writing", that is, through the various authorial replications of My Career Goes Bung. Through this comparison, we can see that Franklin's preoccupation with exposure as a person necessarily disrupts a totalising authorship across genres, for while imitation can be subversively utilised by Franklin as a pseudonymous author of fiction, it creates fear for the author implicated in discourses of life. Through the character of Sybylla, Franklin explores the ego freedoms that arise from being an imitation of the author. In this "fiction about writing fiction" (Sircar 175), Sybylla writes that she intends her first novel to be a "copy" of an autobiography in which egotism is promoted in protest to the deceptive modesty evident in what Sybylla describes as "the false pose of the autobiographer" (28). Her interest was:

to make hay of the pious affectations of printed autobiographies as I know them ... to flout these pretences with an imitation autobiography that would wade in without apology or fear, biffing convention on the nose (30).

Yet Sybylla is not wading into the egotism of autobiography "without apology or fear", for she is not writing an autobiography at all. This exploration of Sybylla's performative guises directs us to identify that it is only as a pseudonymous author that Franklin can indulge her creative potential without reference to the "lady-like" demands of her audience, and therefore to be productive as a self-imitative, self-aggrandizing, "fiery" other. A comparison between the pseudonymous guise of Sybylla and Franklin as the author of this novel's preface allows us to see how she destabilises her own authority in her preoccupation with the art/life dichotomy. In this way, we can identify that there are consequences to being a fictional pseudonymous author, for the sequel Sybylla is responding against the autobiographical interpretation of her first novel. In the preface. Franklin disclaims responsibility for these autobiographical interpretations, which would be "a shock to one of any imagination (6), by conflating the distinction between art and Ufe: "while intentionally quite as little, unintentionally it was equally as autobiographical as my first printed romance; no more, no less" (8). In the novel, there are similar disclaimers by Sybylla, as can be seen in a letter she wrote in response to a literal reading of her first novel:

I wrote humbly that I had not known the specific people but had meant simply to make fun of general reality ... and then something came up in me and I jabbed down a postscript: 'I don't know you and am sorry that you are angry, but if the cap fits you and you make a noise and wear it, I can't help it' (63).

The distinction between authors is again undermined when both Franklin and Sybylla mock the emotive response of the girls who read the first novel literally, offering a notable contrast to idealised responses of O'Harris and Devanny to Franklin's real autobiography. Franklin recalls discussing with her father "the absurdity of girls from all over the continent writing to tell me that I had expressed their innermost lives and emotions" (6), while Sybylla also recalls that "girls from all over Australia wrote to say that I had expressed the innermost core of their hearts" (62). This vantage point also enables us to see that, as an echo of the Franklin author, Sybylla is undermined as a pseudonymous disguise. This destabilising of the authorial voice is also evident in Franklin's other fictional autobiography; Henderson identifies a similar quality in the first Sybylla from My Brilliant Career. "It is crucial to acknowledge her 'unreliability' as a narrator, because the text requires us to see through one mode of expression to its 'other'" (166). The instability of these authorial voices also enables us to identify a central paradox, as posed by her need to be an "organic" representation of the writing process. Although Sybylla is emblematic of a productive space of self-imitation, the author of the preface insists on an authenticity in production that exemplifies a discomfort in public discourse, and furthermore, threatens to distort Franklin's potential into an unproductive authorship. This dilemma is elucidated by Barthes' description of the writer's intertextual search for "some origin" which results only in a ''deferred action'\ an endless array of imitations ("Work" 158, 160). This search can be seen in Franklin's misleading claim in the preface, which was written thirty-eight years after the novel was first conceived, of having remained faithful to the girl who once she was by not "meddling in corrections". Franklin is, however, a perpetual self-correcting subject, as indicated by the posthumous discovery of the novel's various edited forms (Webby xiv). This false claim enables us to see that even in the realm of "real writing", of art that threatens to distort into autobiography. Franklin is engaged with the potential dilemmas of authorship — dilemmas that she once again avoids by returning to an adolescent space of productivity, a place of "some origin". For not only does this space offer creative potential beyond the distortions of self-reflexivity, it allows for a naïve innocence that further protects Franklin as a pre-defined author — which can be seen as a productive use of the accusation, made by Roderick, that the young author "lacked mature thought" (84). As she writes in the preface: "My father, equally with myself, lacked knowledge of practicing authors or association with people who had any conception of what authorship of fiction might entail" (6). A similar apology is made in the preface to her novel Ten Creeks Run, in this instance for what Barnard describes as its "waywardness in construction": "I am faced by a pattemless, trackless region out of which I must urgently beat my way like the early explorers" (79, Franklin qtd in Barnard 79).

A further exploration of these authorial guises as they play out in the surrogate space of diary writing allows us to identify Franklin's other masking techniques, via which she avoids the implications of being read by an improper audience. For as a mimicry of both life and fiction. Franklin's diaries exacerbate the instabilities of the authorial L This predicament is evident as she moves from the relief offered by diary as surrogacy to the anxiety posed by the self-imitative connotations of this:

This diary business has been a relief — a bastard relief for a desire to write, frustrated by interruptions and disharmony (arising out of uncongeniality) until my brain power is too scattered + irritated + finally exhausted to concentrate on anything extensive; but it is only a substitute; and now I am sick of it, and my small space will be over-crowded with the results (25 February 1938).

From this vantage point, we are able to see that Franklin utilises the potential of the diary as an immature space via its transcendent temporalities, thereby enabling an endless return to the Bdenic scenarios between writer and reader in a "continuous present" (Holmes xix). And yet this potential also, as the above entry suggests, is at risk of distorting into false writing, the haunting implications of which can be elucidated by Derrida's theories concerning the "exergue" — the anxious space between preface and novel. Indeed, Derrida's insights enable us to read these diaries as emblematic of this space. As Anderson writes in an analysis of Derrida's theory, because this space is "neither inside the author's work nor his life", it allows for the "act of self-engendering ... the endlessly repeating gesture of affirmation" (82). Franklin utilises this hybrid space as an author of My Career Goes Bung, by including a poem that ponders the dilemma of her self-refiexivity:

This tale's as true as true can be, / For what is truth or lies? / So often much that's told by me / When seen through other eyes, / Becomes thereby unlike so much / These others tell to you, / And if things be the same as such, / What is a scribe to do?

We can see from this poem that the "exergue" is a space in which Franklin experiences the discomfort of seeing herself through the eyes of her readers. An examination of Franklin's diaries as they foreground "the endlessly repeating gesture of affirmation" also elucidates the potential dilemmas of the writer/reader relationship. Barthes rehearses this dilemma when, reflecting on his journal writing practices, he is confronted with his own nasty critic:

The question I raise for myself: 'Should I keep a journal?' is immediately supplied, in my mind, with a nasty answer: 'Who cares?', or, more psychoanalytically: 'It's your problem' (491).

By taking up these anxieties as they play out in Franklin's diaries, we can see how, in a productive resistance to this undesirable reader, she attempts to isolate self from other. In utilising the imaginary capabilities of these hybrid diaries. Franklin engages in the game of avoiding the ego reflection she projects onto the place of the other. This process is, however, also problematised in a genre that joins writing and reading "in a single signifying practice" (Barthes "Work" 162). Vulnerabilities emerge because she is, like the queen in Snow White, "caught and trapped in a mirror rather than a window ... driven inward, obsessively studying self-images as if seeking a viable self (Gilbert and Gubar 37). These inconsistencies, as they arise in the shifts between imaginative potential and surrogate space in these diaries, illuminate the ambiguity in Franklin's use of the "act of self-engendering" to achieve "a viable self. The tensions within these processes can be seen to play out in the paradox between her rejection of and dependency on her readership. In this way, she contrasts with the confident authorial Franklin whose reliance on O'Harris and Devanny is readily awarded, resembling instead the pseudonymous Sybylla who defends herself against the "angry" critic by attesting to her innocence: "I can't help it". This vantage point further enables us to see that the presence of her nasty critic results in the perversion of her anonymity — she is at risk of falling from the omnipresence of the totalising author to the 'no name' that is forced into the shadows with her own otherness. For under the disguise of her claim to "not care" about her readers lies the Barthean fear of "who cares?". This authorial dilemma is evident when, in relation to a lecture she gave to Dymphna Cusack's school children, she writes: Some went to sleep, some grinned to each other privately, whether for or against me I don't know or care. I don't think I interested them, but D. Cusack told me later in the evening, if they looked at me like stuffed owls - they were interested (28 February 1938).

Here we can see that Cusack's reassurances are in tension with Franklin's declaration to not "know or care" about her reception. This declaration appears again in a letter to Palmer (included in carbon copy form in her diaries), when she writes, in reference to her biography of Furphy: "Though to be honest, the book dissatisfies me so that I don't care what's said about it on the critical literary side" (April 5 1938). Woolf made similar use of her diary to reassure herself that she had, as Blodgett writes, "transcended criticism". She also moves between expressing anxiety about her readers — writing that she "must get out of the way of minding what people say of my writing" (1921) — and denial: "My writing now delights me solely because I love writing & don[']t, honestly, care a hang what anyone says" (1915 qtd in Blodgett 60). This paradox in Franklin's anonymity can be further elucidated as it both offers freedom from the gaze and stimulates a fear of authorial absence. In reference to an event she attended, she describes herself as being "delightfully free" due to the lack of attention from booksellers, and suspects that the few copies of All That Swagger had been despatched by Geo [George Mackaness?] "after I had gate-crashed into his expedition" (1949). The costs of her exclusion from the literary world of authors are evident here — as the uninvited guest, present but not belonging, she is a distortion of the totalising author. At this point, we are further able to identify her repeated acts of self-engendering, as feelings of instability are commonly accompanied by a validating statement, in which she is a desired author: "However, some of the people who had heard me speak at the WEG forum when I was in Ncastle years earlier, came and brought their wives" (1949). Fear of being outside the limelight encourages a complex shifting between modesty and ego, for although she was "surprised to see Swagger among the exhibits" she also finds that "of course [Ion] Idriess and [B. V.] Timms had all the limelight, advertisement 4- a big display" (1949). Franklin's authorial dilemma concerning her Australian audience in these diaries can be productively explored, as the above entries suggest, in relation to the male writer. There are times in these diaries when her fear of absence is exacerbated by her confident male counterparts. Indeed, on one occasion she refers to being denigrated as an author by Idriess. Here again, we see that Franklin shifts between an expression of modesty and a self-validating statement. She recalls a time when Idriess asked her if she was "knocking out another book or ... resting on my laurels" (1949). On replying that she "had no laurels to rest on", Idriess says: "Oh, I wouldn't say that. 'All That Swagger' is a good book in parts" (1949). This denigration encourages Franklin to play the part of the "fiery" Sybylla, as she defends her place within the literary establishment: "It was good I was not advertised or the people might have come as they did to Hörgern's, and Timms cd. not have endured thaf (1949). These self-validating moments also allow us to see how Franklin uses her diaries to lay claim to her visibility. She writes, for example, of how at this same event "a flock of eager children beseiged me for autographs" (1949). In a much earlier entry, she describes having "arrived a little late" to an F.A.W meeting only to discover that "D. Cusack, Mr Hooper + Mr Crowley each had a chair saved for me" (17 Feb 1938). In Franklin's references to the limitations of the Australian Film Industry, we are further able to establish that the anonymous space in which she is least threatened is that of her "true Australianism". Franklin sarcastically indicts a film production company for being "great searchers that they have never sought even as far as me, even to discard me" (28 January 1938). Yet as this entry goes on to suggest. Franklin is protected against this rejection by her position as the embodiment of a literary Australia. For although these diaries indicate her anxiety concerning the reading public, they also reveal her ability to, like Woolf, "transcend ... criticism", by returning to a space of national authenticity. This national masking can be seen when she writes of this company: "They don't understand Australia scientifically, spiritually, mystically or intellectually, nor approach her with the ecstasy and infatuation of the artist" (28 January 1938). Given these concerns, it is indeed ironical that her name has been kept alive by the successful 1979 production of My Brilliant Career. A further examination of Franklin's self-engendering practices directs us to identify her complex positioning between the shadows and "limelight" of the Australian literary scene, notably as it emerges in her relationships with specific colleagues. For these relationships foreground the specific nature of Franklin's resistances to an Australian reading public, resistances that were, as is made evident by Idriess' response to her work, a legitimate response to misinterpretations. Furthermore, these relationships can be seen to exemplify both the costs and advantages involved in being the "diviner's cup", in being one that both deflects criticism and yet has no recourse to external validation: "I wonder what a person of ample perception would say of me. The trouble is that I am, so far, bigger than my observers and I cannot use them as an adequate mirror" (3 May 1942). An exploration of Franklin's responses to Gilmore in these diaries, enables us to see the fear cast by Franklin's own shadow as she asserts her desire to be rated as an Australian "classic" above her literary colleague. This desire is particularly evident when Franklin, on being offered an O.B.E in 1937, struggles with her public rating as an inferior literary talent to Gilmore, who had been awarded a dameship. Her response to the official reader who offered this title illustrates the extent to which her reputation depended on her rating as an Australian author, as well as her particular anxieties concerning the reading abilities of the Australian public. In framing this insult as a "blunder against Australianism" (26 April 1937) Franklin is protecting her reputation as the embodiment of an Australian literary tradition: "The Gilmore dameship has put Australian literature back a decade by putting a seal — a badge on its mediocrity and lack of values from which to erect standards" (22 January 1938). Marking her inferior rating as a failure of reading. Franklin asserts herself once again, via the authenticity of her national self, in the image of the "diviner's cup" that only reflects outwards: "[I] was outraged right through by the Australian jacks-in-office failure to be self-respecting in demands for recognition of true Australianism" (26 April 1937). She denigrates all such titles as unpatriotic, writing that "most Australians deserve this sort of thing for their servility", and further claiming that during the First World War the Order "was a synonym for failure, incompetence" (26 April 1937).

The psychic implications of the Franklin/Gilmore relationship can be elucidated by the Freudian concept of ego as "a repository of hidden desire", thereby enabling us to read Gilmore as Franklin's alter-ego in these diaries (Salih 92). In this way, we see that the alter-ego is another replication of the author, and therefore that Gilmore is the self- aggrandizing and celebrated writer that Franklin would be, if not for her fear of being a read text. In her discussion of the O.B.E., the authority she lays claim to through her "true Australianism", and therefore in opposition to Gilmore's "egotism amounting to mania" (2 March 1937), is destabilised as she ponders the price of anonymity. She criticises Gilmore as one whose success has occurred because she:

has been a most egregious tout and self-booster and politician [and] has also written some verses and undistinguished memoirs (which in all parts that I can check are unreliable) (26 April 1937).

In contrast. Franklin has never "put myself forward officially ... never touted in any shape or form" (26 April 1937). But her instability is made evident when, in her references to Gilmore's "slipshod verses" and "lying autobiography", she also expresses the fear that "it may be thought that [Gilmore's higher order] was for her literary work" (26 April 1937). Here again. Franklin's diaries can be seen to resemble the "exergue" as she includes a poem that, similarly to My Career Goes Bung, exposes her anxious reflection through the eyes of the reader: "Though I should be in letters so low / Still I resent this attempt of a foe / And can't be commanded / Like a sheep to be branded / The public my rating to show" (26 April 1937). Furthermore, this exploration of Gilmore as alter-ego allows us to see the costs involved for Franklin in giving up literary "chums" to form an intimacy with "real writing":

I wish I had a friend to whom I cd go and be sure both of truth & judgement in asking am I merely conceited to resent being rated lower as an Australian litterateur, than M.G (26 April 1937).

In this way, we are further able to see the extent to which the sacrifice of intimacy is a necessary part of her 'divinity', in her desire to be "the only woman who had produced a classic". This scenario is exacerbated as Franklin makes Gilmore a personal subject in these diaries, one who engages in gossip and scandal, thereby marking their distinction within the art/life dichotomy. After a visit to Gilmore's house. Franklin writes that Gilmore ''said that she never allowed gossip or scandal and proceeded to give real scandal" (29 November 1937). Franklin achieves intimacy instead through her surrogate diary writing, for it is in this space that she indulges gossip and scandal about others without fearing the personal repercussions. Indeed, it was the particularly personal nature of her diary content that lead to the prolonging of the embargo forty years beyond the ten years she deigned. A comparison with Gilmore's diaries enables us to see that it is possible to read these authors as they compete for "the last word on literary Sydney" (Brunton Interview March 2004). Similarly to Franklin, Gilmore denies the gossip she also indulges in these diaries: she claims that she will not record the private thoughts told to her by another (3 July 1942), while also relaying some slanderous gossip she has heard (27 October 1941).

Franklin's responses to the criticisms of colleague H. M. Green illuminates the dilemmas posed by the art/life dichotomy prominent within Australian criticism, as this criticism further necessitates Franklin's isolation from the external gaze. Green's comment that Brent of Bin Bin's books were "life itself ... a horrible example of how not to do it" (28 July 1943) are illustrative of the tension between national realism and literary greatness which prevailed in Australia at that time (Pratt 223). Franklin deflects his criticism as one who is both Green's "bigger" and a totalising author who sees "all the faults" of her own fiction:

the fault with Green is that in pointing them out he shows >only< his own inadequacy, not that of the writer criticised. This is, of course, inevitable of mediocrity — sometimes a genius has to be bigger than he can be, but a mediocrity never can be anything above mediocrity (28 July 1943).

Franklin relates Green's mediocrity to a failing within Australian criticism generally, thereby asserting herself as an expatriate "schooled in European nationalism" and claiming the "superior judgements of the European and American literary cultures" (Pratt 220):

what would have been accepted as the >magnificent< sprawl and excesses of American or Russian novels of the same size and scope, was picked + nagged-at by little Green in Australian work because he had no Bell Wethers to follow (July 28 1943).

Franklin's fervent response to Barnard's criticisms exemplifies the tension between the academic and self-taught Australian writer in these diaries, as this tension elucidates our understanding of Franklin's complex relationship with a nation of readers. Sometime after a critical lecture Barnard presented on the writings of Brent and Franklin, Franklin condemns Barnard Eldershaw's latest novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947) for "its academic pedantry and self-imagined superiority" (1948). Here again, we see that Franklin paradoxically undermines the "self-imagined superiority" of a colleague and replaces it with her own, asserting her "true Australianism" as defined against self-interest. Furthermore, in exploring the psychic implications of Barnard's "spiteful" attacks we are able to detect a distortion to Franklin's 'divinity', the conflation of her own nasty critic with that of her readers. Describing Barnard, in the context of her lectures on Franklin and Brent, as "either too ignorant or too poisonous" to point out positive aspects of Franklin's book Blastus of Bandicoot, she writes in a letter to Mary Fullerton, included in her diaries, that Barnard is:

definitely stupid as well as spiteful not to recognise that it is better progress for a writer to have [risen?] from 'Blastus' to 'Swagger' + Brent's three books unaided, than for 2 women to have started with their major 'rotten stick' 'A House is Built' and to have petered out in 'The Glass Hse' + 'The Persimmon Tree'. A person in such a frail glass house is unwise to throw stones at those in stout wide slab station homes (Letter to Fullerton 5 November 1944)^.

^ All future references to this date concerning Barnard's criticism are from this letter. Self-contained within the iconic image of a typically Australian "stout wide slab station home", Franklin takes on the role of nasty critic. In this way, we see that the threat of self-reflexivity perverts her idealised anonymous role, as the 'divine' entity "which reflects on the surface of the water the image that the petitioner wishes to see" (Warner 7). This reversal of Franklin's attack on Barnard further allows us to see how she conflates author and text to regain the anonymity that Barnard has disrupted. This disruption is particularly evident when, during her lectures, Barnard attempts to unveil Franklin as Brent of Bin Bin, stating that they were likely one and the same, although that Franklin had probably "been helped by others" (5 November 1944). Barnard's final word on the identity of the pseudonym was that "it was of no consequence, 'but it would be affectation for me not to take notice,' etc." (5 November 1944). Franklin responds by championing the author's right to anonymity:

Yes, and a bigger or more generous soul might have said; there are interesting rumours, as there used to be about Sir Walter Scott, but we need not bother about them — the books and their importance or otherwise to Australian literature are all that need concern us in this survey (5 November 1944).

This vantage point further enables us to ascertain that, in order to reclaim anonymity. Franklin denies Barnard creativity. In a similar mode to that seen in her writings of Gilmore, she makes Barnard a personal subject within life discourses:

Of course poor MB's unrewarded infatuation with FDD is common knowledge, and now he has taken up with a wide-and-wondering-eyed young blonde of apparently sweet disposition (5 November 1944).

Barnard's creative authorship is further denied in Franklin's later reviews of her novels: "My snap judgement after leaping through it is that it is a vast labored composition lacking inspirational creative fervour" (1948). She attempts to distinguish herself from Barnard's "poisonous" approach to criticism by claiming objectivity: she admits that although, given Barnard's "spiteful attack on my novels", she began the book "looking for shortcomings", she found she "really was surprised by its exceeding dullness" (1948). Yet here again we see that the presence of Franklin's shadow critic opens up a space of instability, encouraging her to reflect on her own nasty motivations and "[un]generous soul": "I shd dismiss the effort indulgently + be generous about it were it not for marjory's acid, superior, shallow criticisms of her biggers" (1948). The contradictions in this shadow space also elucidate Franklin's preference for authorship over companionship, in her isolation from the literary community to which Barnard belongs. This preference is evident when she writes of Barnard that:

it is no joke to have her denigrating me all around Australia. She has all the University guns - they will all stand by her. If she said a word they wd all grin and say I could not take criticism ... She knows I have no one back of me, no family, no powerful friends, and that makes her attack particularly wanton (5 November 1944).

Although Franklin asserts her creativity as an autodidact, her vulnerabilities as an author are exacerbated by the haunting image of the grinning community of nasty critics who undermine her authority within Australia — an author-ity paradoxically dependent on her isolation. These instabilities within Franklin's isolated authorship can also be constructively examined in relation to her use of the diary as a surrogate space, one in which she creates her own companions via her pseudonymous personas. This surrogacy is particularly evident in her writings about Brent, in which she occupies the role of reader, projecting a totalising authorship as both subject and object. As a pseudonymous author in her public life. Franklin promoted her own writing, notably through the praising reviews she wrote for Brent of Bin Bin. This praise in commonly given at a distance, through recording the compliments of others, as we see in one essay: "P. R. Stephensen refers to the 'vast jollity' of Brent of Bin Bin, C. H. Grattan to his 'great chronicle'" {Laughter 180). A similar approach is adopted in her diaries, in which we are further able to see that she utilises a critical distance to make Brent a productive space of creative potential. Pseudonymous identities have this potential because they allow for the play of anonymity. As Robert Griffm writes, the author-function describes:

precisely a function that may be fulfilled by a name but does not require one. It is first of all an empty function, a structural blank space, which may be signed or unsigned depending on the circumstances (10).

An examination of the pseudonymous Franklin in this space, where there is no "opposition between identity and anonymity ... but rather a play of subject positions" (Griffin 10), enables us to identify Brent as productive creativity, as a "blank space" on which Franklin's authorship can be written. Brent's creative potential is illuminated via the public/private dichotomy of Franklin's diaries, as he enables her to anonymously engage as an author with her public. In this way, she continues the game "of rediscovering the author" that, as Foucault writes, can only be accepted "in the guise of an enigma" (203) by keeping him as a pseudonym in the space of her diaries. There are few moments when Brent is unmasked: once in her discussion of the dilemmas involved in trusting someone with Brent's safety deposit key, but most often in slippages where she identifies one of his books as her own. This vantage point enables us to see that Brent is the open-secret that allows Franklin to be both present and unnamed with her readers. Barnard writes of Brent in this mode of the open-secret in her biography of Franklin, in arguing that "the cover of anonymity grows thinner and thinner" with each novel in the Brent series, and further that in public Franklin's "canons of truthfulness did not allow her to deny [her Brent identity] categorically" (75). Sylvia Martin writes of the pseudonymous open-secret as it offered women a way to indulge their performative potential as authors, allowing them to escape the private modes of discourse to which they had been relegated (37). An exploration of Franklin's role as reader also directs us to identify how, in her "perpetual self-correction[s]" as Brent, she resists being an "empty function", and therefore of being marked by any signature but her own. In this way, we see that her pseudonymous identities can be used to illuminate the contradiction in her desire to be both an embodied presence and anonymous. This dilemma can be productively explored in relation to Brent's paradoxical nationalism in these diaries, as Franklin makes him a "world classic" while defining his authorship via his "true Australianism". In the carbon copy letter she wrote to Fullerton, who shared in the Brent secret, Franklin validates his international status after it was challenged by Barnard:

I cd have said that some critics do not agree with Miss B about the words held up to ridicule so splenetically. BBB has been acclaimed by AGS as the equal of Galsworthy. Other critics have likened him to Feuchtwanger and Hardy's 'Dynasts.' Middle European critics term him the Australian Galsworthy and liken him to Thos Mann whose 'Buddenbrooks' was awarded the Nobel Prize for lit (28 July 1943).

Yet in a review of the G. B. Lancaster novel Pageant made in her Literary Notebooks, Franklin emphasises Brent's national significance: "Pageant is as full of gentility as Back to Bool Bool is of jollity; and jollity is more invigorating than gentility — more AustraUan" (October 1951). We see from this paradox that Franklin is utilising Brent's creative potential to occupy both a position of national authenticity and literary greatness, relegating Brent to a place amongst his modernist and European contemporaries. She argues through her critical role that Australia is not big enough for a "bigger" author like Brent, as evident in those entries in which she blames his lack of recognition on the artistic banality of the nation. After having read Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, she writes that she considers:

the whole Brent milieu much more interesting in everv way — action, characterisation, philosophy, humor, situation. Yet >in Europe< they gave Buddenbrooks the Nobel Prize (28 July 1943).

A similar description is made in another entry in which she argues that Brent transcends the talents of Thomas Mann, notably in defence of a comment made about Brent by author George Mackaness: Viennese reviewer compares B of BB to Buddenbrooks but Mackaness wd not discover that. I consider BB's people much livelier + much more interesting than the stodges in Buddenbrooks (16 March 1938).

In contrast, the role Brent performs as "a structural blank space" can be seen to elucidate his creative productivity, as an author that can both maintain iconic form and alter in content. In this way, we are able to see how this flexibility in Franklin's authorial identity allows her to avoid her fear of nakedness. This avoidance is further elucidated through her representation of Brent as a disembodied author, that is, through his ability to transcend corporeal modes of being — an ability that can be seen to promote Franklin's authorial immortality in these diaries. In the game of rediscovery, she plays with the image of Brent in various clothed states. This playfulness is evident when, in response to a critic who "once apologised for B of BB over the wireless", she compares the two figures as "an ox apologising for an elephant" (16 October 1937). She also plays with the gendered appearance of Brent when introduced to a male writer on her travels who had been speculated to be the real Brent, writing that he "looks the part magnificently", and describing him as a fine physical specimen with a commanding presence (Travel Diaries 6 June - 1 July 1937). This creative potential can also be efficaciously analysed as it plays out in relation to her own name in her diaries, on those occasions she adopts it as a pseudonym. In regularly referring to herself in the third person, via full name or initials. Franklin's makes her own name an enigma in her diaries, a mysterious and pre-defined subject position. In her letter to Fullerton, for example, she writes: "I congratulated her on her article in the first number on Women's Digest ... on the advisory board of which are MB, KSP, MF ..." (6 April 1938). This distancing technique could also be seen to undermine her exposure to an audience in a public forum; in the same letter she writes: "Flora however, when speaking of Miles F. did it genially, if merely incidentally and very briefly, before returning to her devotions over FDD, VP and LM" (6 April 1938). This vantage point enables us to see that subject and object positions conflate in Franklin's discussion of her own authorial name: "Then he went on to Miles Franklin, cramped in his deprecations + denigration by my presence" (28 July 1943) [my emphasis]. However, in her use of multiple authorial replications, we are also able to see the process via which Franklin resists the "opposition between identity and anonymity", in order to avoid the implications of being an "empty function". For to conflate her identity with Brent's is also to undermine her totality and to risk absence as a changeable author who has not settled on any one identity. This resistance is evident when she refers to a time her novels were overlooked for a film:

They wd not have had to seek through three vols of B of BB. On page after page they wd have found merry, merry scenes crying out to be acted. Or even in my book[s?] they could have had old Blastus growling about Lindsay ... (17 February 1935).

In elucidating the play between identity and anonymity, we are able to see how Franklin's name as "empty function" also carries the possibility and anxiety of death. Franklin's act of self-naming can be illuminated by Derrida's insights into the name as erasure, as he argues that a name is also an assertion of its owner's death: "the name begins during his life to get along without him speaking and bearing his death each time it is inscribed in a list, or a civil registry, or a signature" (qtd in Anderson 81). The tension between Franklin as name and nonentity can be productively explored in the most psychically complex subject position she occupies in these diaries — that of the future reader that attempts to transcend the death of the author. Franklin sets up this dynamic in her manipulation of diary temporality, as the diary's "own sense of time" (Holmes xxi) enables her to avoid the journey towards "the birth of the reader." At this point, we see that her endless acts of self-engendering returns her to herself, making her the past, present and future of her own authorship in a productive use of her diary as a proliferative and circular space of self-production. However, it is also in the proliferation of writing that Franklin is led to fear the loss of her identity. This sense of loss can be elucidated by Barthes' theories concerning the death of the author, in which he describes writing as "that neutral, composite, obhque space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing" ("Death" 168). Roe writes of Franklin as an author that "openly feared death" ("Franklin" 576). This fear of death can be productively explored here in relation to her fear of self-imitation in these diaries, to the possibility that, in being a replication of the author, she is also, as Barthes writes of the diary, "infinitely suppressible" (492). In this way, we see that she is confronted by what Barthes describes as the Journal's superficies, the multi-layering of the writer's "outward" selves:

Gide's work constitutes his depths; let us say that his Journal is his superficies; he draws his contours and juxtaposes his extremes; readings, reflections, narratives show how distant these extremes are, how enormous are Gide's superficies ("Gide" 5).

Woolf represents the diary in a similar mode when she writes in a 1939 entry: "'I never reach the depths; I'm too surface blown'" (17 December 1939 qtd in Blodgett 59). Furthermore, in wridng of being "doomed to simulation" in his journal, Barthes also refers to the particular diary predicament of emotion as copy:

for every emotion being a copy of the same emotion one has read somewhere, to report a mood in the coded language of the Collection of Moods is to copy a copy: even if the text was 'original,' it would already be a copy (493).

In relation to Franklin, the prospect of emotional copy can be seen to undermine her Bdenic writer/reader relationship by devaluing the authenticity of O'Harris' laughter and Devanny's tears. These inconsistencies within the life/text dichotomy of Franklin's diaries raise a key issue concerning her ambiguous role as future author, an ambiguity that plays out in the paradox posed by her attempt to return to "some origin" through the surrogate space of her diaries. For it is in this return that we can identify these diaries as a space of the "continuous present" in which she attempts to be self-contained as living personality. This paradox allows us to see that her potential is at risk of distorting into a ""deferred action'\ a space that is no longer productive. This possible distortion can be seen to play out in the relationship between her belief in the artist's responsibility to capture the past authentically and her need to return to a space of youthful productivity that escapes outside distortions. This relationship is suggested in her diaries when she writes of her memory as a tool that preserves the past as experienced:

It no longer holds, in the present, with its original tenacity: and things of the past are like a bouquet of flowers miraculously preserved in their original loveliness under glass, and must be captured by the artist before the glass is removed and the petals fade and fall (9 March 1953).

In an entry from Barthes' journal, he offers a contrasting scenario of a past that cannot be recaptured, but is further lost through the writing of it:

Paris, April 25, 1979 ... (On re-reading: this bit gave me distinct pleasure, so vividly did it revive the sensations of that evening; but curiously, in reading it over, what I remembered best was what was not written, the interstices of notation: for instance, the gray of the rue de Rivoli while I was waiting for the bus; no use trying to describe it now, anyway, or I'll lose it again instead of some other silenced sensation, and so on, as if resurrection always occurred alongside the thing expressed: role of the Phantom, of the Shadow) (490, 491).

Barthes' insights enable us to explore the ways in which this fear of an absent past haunts Franklin's ''original loveUness" in her diaries. This dilemma is illuminated in Franklin's references to biography, enabling us to see how the Phantom presence of a lost past plays out in her desire for self-resurrection. This future role is asserted as part of her resistance to an Australian audience, as can be seen in her criticism of the academic's role in posthumous biography. When asked to write a biography of William Hay following her work on Furphy, she refuses on the grounds that he is not worthy of resurrection: I see in Hay's another case of one safely academic in education and safely dead >being discovered< by small people whose tastes and literary ear are faulty, whose size >is< considerable, whose services to literature take the form of professorising in visceral dust (Literary Notebooks 1948).

The paradox evident in her desire to be both posthumous reader and "safely dead" can be productively analysed in relation to her isolated authorship, as one who, in claiming to be without literary "chums", has no access to the "literary ear" of the other. This idea is further elucidated by Derrida's theories concerning the ear as always belonging to the other, through which we can identify Franklin's resistance to the prospect of "not being heard or being heard differently" (Anderson 82). At this point, we can see that the potential evident in Brent's "empty function" is perverted in this scenario by the possible "professorising" of someone like Hay, who stimulates her fear of the permeable boundaries between inside and outside, the vulnerability suggested by the state of being in "visceral dust". Franklin resists herself in the Woolfian image of "not a definite body or face but a watery medium": "Thus I feel resistant of being made a claque use, not for Hay, but for those who must have someone - preferably dead - to preface and profess" (Literary Notebooks 1948). The tension created by mortality in a writing form that projects a posthumous authorship can be further illuminated in the conflation of life and text, as this conflation clarifies the ambiguity in Franklin's desire to be a body of work. These reflections on biography make her fear the fate of her own "visceral dust": "Horrible, terrifying, humiliating, ironical thought if my dust should make a hunting ground for book-worms of similar qualifications" (Literary Notebooks 1948). In this way, we see that thoughts of mortality can provide comfort for Franklin, as is evident when she imagines herself as "safely dead", protected by her anonymity as a nonentity: "My fears are groundless! My erudites will save me from this perversity of fate" (Literary Notebooks 1948). This vantage point also enables us to see that in seeking comfort, Franklin is necessarily a stranger to herself, denying her need for the posthumous resurrection to which her proliferative diary material also attests: "I have no desire for posthumous 'discovery,' to be remembered when others are forgotten, which seems to soothe some of the neglected or undeserving" (Literary Notebooks 1948). Her resistance to this shadow self could be seen to elucidate her fear of a lost identity, of what happens to the iconic author if "the glass is removed" and the "petals fade and fall". Indeed, her fears were not "groundless"; it is "ironical" that the "professorial" type of critic she most loathed was the first one to write a biography of her, for both Barnard and Roderick represent the kind of readers she wished to avoid. She writes of Roderick as an "unfit" author in her Literary Notebooks, in reference to another Australian work: "am I losing my wits and judgement or is Colin Roderick unfit to compile an anthology + accept criticism of Australian literature?" (5 September 1944). Franklin's defence against "this perversity of fate" is further evident in the obituary she writes of herself in these diaries, an examination of which enables us to see how, in signing her own death as an adolescent author, she attempts to be immortalised in a space of youthful productivity. With this act, Franklin marks herself as one of those authors who should be, as she writes in her diaries, glorified in the present and not when "he (or she) has gone" (17 February 1935)^°. Mathew also writes in his diaries of a time when Franklin expressed sympathy towards the unacknowledged anonymous author: "When Nancy Kessing was talking about the anonymous balladists who never knew their reward, MF said, 'Poor things'" (22 July 1952 36). This sentiment is seen again in her own diaries, when she reflects on the Gilmore-style approach to being noticed as it provides a comfort against death:

Tom Moore was buzzing about — no time for me when he has sweller fry — but that is the way to get there — and why not? My standards have led me to the grave only — whereas his may give him a little glory + ease beforehand to fill the megrim hours (30 April 1938).

On the topic of the diary as a "secret" or public document, it is interesting to note here that Franklin is continuing the disguise of Fullerton's pseudonymous identity "E"; she was responsible for promoting "E" in Australia. The inconsistencies within this adolescent self-portrait can be further elucidated as they play out in the temporal flexibility of her diaries, via which she avoids being an anonymous tragedy. Writing an obituary of both herself and Furphy, she uses this relationship to mark herself as a "world classic":

Two strange isolated examples that were never tinctured by the Bulletin School nor at home there, though one was published there + the other acclaimed there, were Joe Furphy and Miles Franklin (17 February 1935).

She describes Furphy as "a mature philosopher" who had "breadth + magnanimity, length and tolerance", whereas Franklin:

was a heady, passionate adolescent of so much + such varied content that she did not know what was the matter with her and was hermetically segregated from anyone of the requisite culture and knowledge or experience to help her (17 February 1935).

In this description. Franklin is not glorified but rather ambiguously represented as a naive youth. This ambiguity could be seen to reflect Franklin's uncertain journey towards "visceral dust", and thereby to represent her complex need to return to a productive space of youthful potential in which she is, paradoxically, "safely dead". In this scenario, to be "safely dead" is to be contained as a textual representation that signifies her potential as an author-in-process, as is evident in Franklin's textual self-description, as one of "so much + such varied content". In this way, we see that Franklin intends her role as posthumous reader, as the final word on her authorship, to allow for creativity and to refuse a single identity. Yet here again Franklin is "hermetically segregated" in the claim to an immature and naïve authorship, as one isolated from her literary "chums". The retrospective over Franklin's life further reveals her isolation as the price of one who seeks 'divinity' — who, like the first Queen in Snow White, having "not yet fallen into sexuality" sits by the window looking "outward". Franklin's psychic ambivalence towards a posthumous audience is further illuminated as it plays out in a dream Franklin recalls in her diaries, in which she can be seen to accommodate the writerly desires of her diary readers. The techniques adopted in the telling of this dream suggest her awareness of the readerly desire for the writerly text, as this awareness offers her both the freedom and anxiety of being a subject, in Freudian terms, not in control of herself. In this entry, Franklin explicitly refuses Freud's statement regarding the ego, and therefore the possibility that her dream could be revelatory. This refusal is evident as she claims to rather "poo-hoo" dreams, referring to Freud's theories in the context of those "garrulous and woozy egoists who will insist upon detailing their dreams" (12 January 1936)^\ Yet she paradoxically fmds that, although her own state of dreaming is only induced by an upset digestion, a "too big slice of cheese ... militates against my belief that they can have any psychic significance." She then, in the mode of the "woozy egoist", details her dream while inadvertently leaving it to the reader to make their signature on its "psychic significance". This vantage point allows us to see how the paradox between the writerly and readerly opens up a space for Franklin's own phantoms, in that space of haunting "between all the 'two's' one likes" (Derrida Specters xviii). This space of between can be constructively examined as it enables the Edenic ideal of the writer/reader relationship, as a relationship that is only possible in "a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds" {S/Z 5). This potential is evident in the way Franklin achieves an anonymous presence in this dream. She describes being taken to "a vast apartment with walls of glass and no blinds" by her friend Jimmy who, after she admits to having "a great dislike of being in a lighted room where anyone can look in at me", makes her "a tiny room within the room" in which she can feel safe. Then, on telling her that "'No one will see you here'" and "'no one will hurt you'", he leaves her alone. But in this isolation, she experiences a "sickening paralysis of terror" when she hears people in the apartment and sits in "goosefleshed horror, while form after form entered the room. I could see them silhouetted against the starlight against the glass." All fear leaves her, and she becomes "comfortable and interested", when she realises that these "forms" "did not know I was there", were "in another dimension" and were "Australians" — "There was complete

'' All future references to this dream are from this entry. harmony between them and me. They were ghosts." In the shifting between isolation and exposure, comfort and safety, this dream can be seen to exemphfy Franklin's desire for the ideal reader that makes her feel "comfortable and interested" as opposed to a "sickening paralysis of terror." This reader is, as with O'Harris and Devanny, someone with whom Franklin can be embodied yet totalising and anonymous, in "complete harmony" yet in "another dimension". This dream can also be read as Franklin's desire to harmonise with her own ghosts, to gain familiarity with her stranger. This idea is illuminated by Kristeva's insights into the stranger within, as an entity that produces either anxiety or ease: "To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts" {Strangers 191). Yet, in exploring this dilemma as it plays out in Franklin's psychic spaces, we are able to identify a paradox in Franklin's "unfamiliar famiharity" (Jacobs and Gelder 23), as one who finds comfort in strangeness. This paradox can be seen to play out in the role she occupies as the posthumous reader who also desires to be "safely dead", and is also evident when she refuses the Freudian statements that are then indulged in her recounting of the dream. The anxiety Franklin experiences in this dream at the prospect of being spied through the glass, and the comfort that is only gained in the knowledge that her ghosts "did not know I was there", further signifies her need for distance from this othered self. In this way, we see that the "worry" ensuing from the prospect of being a visible and definable subject prevails over her desire to become acquainted with her shadowed presence. It is only her shared Australian identity that offers familiarity and appeases anxiety, an identity to which she returns for anonymity, thereby further exemplifying her desire to stay in the shadow of self-disguise. This strangeness, as it occurs between Franklin and her ghosts, also raises crucial questions concerning her intimacy with friends and colleagues, as these others can be seen to signify the ghostly presence of the nasty reader. An exploration of the tensions evident in these relationships illuminates Franklin's use of her diary as a companion, as a surrogate for intimacy with others. She explicitly writes of these diaries as an escape from others, when she expresses the desire to avoid "self-seekers + retreat into my secret outlet - my diary" (13 March 1948), and when she refers to the "over-crowded results" that would take place if she stopped writing (25 February 1938). This crowding is a specific reference to the "uncongenial family" that "congeals one in a special hell shut out from friends" (25 February 1938). Yet in contrast, the complexity in these relationships also allow us to identify a problematic intimacy with her diaries, and subsequently herself, as she attempts to utilise this space to "shut out" her own self- seeking ego otherness, and therefore to be a writer in isolation. For her diaries, though "a bastard relief, are not the real relief offered by proper writing — the writing that makes her an author. In this way, we see that it is the unstable positioning of her authorship in these diaries that exemplifies the paradoxes within her intimate relationships, stimulating her resistances to being a personal text to be read.

These paradoxes can be productively explored via the concept of the ideal author in intimate discourses, for Franklin is attempting to achieve both totality and anonymity in these relationships, to promote a harmonious state as a presence that is, paradoxically, also "in another dimension". This point enables us to see how she utilises the egotism of others to be an anonymous subject. She explicitly claims in these diaries to find comfort in the companionship of those whose self-interest allows her to keep to herself. In this way, we can see that, even as Franklin resents being "used to selfish people" from whom she "never receive[s] any consideration or understanding", she simultaneously seeks them out as a way to attain peace in the company of others (18 September 1937). This contradiction is evident when she writes that she finds the self-absorbed Devanny "restful" because "it is similar to being with a boisterous old man, so concerned with himself that you can keep your inner life to yourself free from intrusion or prying curiosity" (27 May 1949). This examination of Franklin's ambiguous visibility also directs us to identify the extent to which isolation from literary "chums" was necessary to protect self-portraiture. Her many references throughout her diaries to an imagined backstabbing by others can be seen to indicate a fear of what she cannot see or control — that is, what occurs "behind my back" (18 September 1937). It is well acknowledged by scholars, notably in Roe's edition of her letters ütled My Congeniáis, that Franklin placed value on congeniality and affection in relationships. This value is evident when she writes to Devanny in a carbon copy letter included in her diaries: "what pleasure, or ease or comfort in association would there be without affection and trust?" (13 March 1948). Yet in exploring her preoccupation with mask wearing in the "psychic privacy" (Nussbaum "Diary" 135) of these diaries, we see that Franklin's use of disguise was as necessary in her personal relationships as it was for her professional career. Her concern with exposure in private contexts is evident in her interactions with American colleague Charles Hartley Grattan, when she writes that she would enjoy his "intellectual association" if she did not suspect him of backstabbing: "How does he dismiss me behind my back, tho he picks my brains eagerly?" (18 September 1937). In another entry, when recording compliments she received from a friend, she follows with: "Of course I don't know what she will say behind my back but shall presently hear or deduce" (3 February 1938). On another occasion, she makes the presumption of insincerity in others: "A Josephine O'Neill was introduced to me and pretended (falsely I'll bet,) that it was a great honour" (31 March 1948). This vantage point also allows us to see the dilemma posed by Franklin's embodied presence in these relationships, as is evident in an ambiguous moment of intimacy she shares with friend Xavier Herbert. When recalling an occasion on which he "kissed me kindly + sent me home warmed and cheered by his demonstration of affection", she remains vulnerable to his potential slandering, writing that she enjoys the affection "no matter how he may criticise me behind my back" (7 April 1944). Franklin's psychic need for this absent presence is further illuminated by an exploration into the effects of complete exposure. At this point, we are encouraged to ask what the consequences were for Franklin when there was no anonymity to be attained, no companionable ego other or Australian identity to function as disguise. This dilemma is particularly evident as it plays out in two scenarios in Franklin's diaries — in her discussion of stage fright and as the subject of a William Dobell portrait. Both these scenarios can be productively explored as a metonym for her nakedness. Franklin explicitly describes the fear of exposure that results in stage fright as an affliction that causes paralysis:

I knew I had it in me to be either an actress or a diseuse, but not even fabulous bribes could have tempted me to overcome that wild sick agonising fright each time I faced an audience (14 April 1948). An image she adopts in reference to friend Herbert's exposure to criticism also allows us to see how such vulnerability inspires a fear of being made monstrous. She writes of Herbert's confinement "in the small Darwin centre" whilst battling nasty critics as 'like being in a cage where people can gape at you + poke you with walking sticks + no cover or retreat" (16 February 1938). Here again. Franklin is ambiguously placed as an embodied subject in the presence of others. This ambiguity can be seen in her fear of exposure as it either makes her monstrous, as the above entry suggests, or ill. In another entry, her stage fright is physically manifested as it exemplifies her mortality, explicitly relating to her fear of death:

Once the fear of it used to give me sleepless nights, upset my digestion; and cold shivers ran all over me for weeks before the performance. The panic, as the moment approached, used to be like to fear of death (2 September 1942).

In this way, we see that, without recourse to the body of others, of Australian literature, or of writing. Franklin is made vulnerable as a private body. This idea is illuminated by Barthes' theories of embodied writing, for as a body that is not an "authentic body" but a plural one — "I have a digestive body, I have a nauseated body, a third body which is migrainous, and so on" {Roland 60) — Franklin is made vulnerable to the imprint of others, ''condemned to the repertoire of its images'' (Barthes Roland 180). In foregrounding the explicit dynamic she sets up between her own death and the birth of the reader, we are able to determine the critical role played by anonymity, as it creates the difference between being "restful" in the company of others and the "agony of stage fright" (2 September 1942). At the prospect of having her portrait done by Dobell, an opposite scenario arises to the Edenic one that occurred with O'Harris and Devanny, one in which she is again exposed to her mortality, as exemplified by the distortion of her embodied presence. In considering her response to being the subject of an artwork, we are able to see how her Edenic writer/reader relationship is disrupted by the stranger that could project her into the national consciousness as the image of the "mortifying corpse". In this way, the Dobell portrait is emblematic of her need to be eternally contained in the iconic image of a living personality. While the portrait has the potential, like her diaries, to immortalise Franklin in a "continuous present" as "original loveliness", the presence of the stranger creates disharmony, and introduces her haunting fear of the dead author. This paradox can be seen in Franklin's responses to current trends in art, more specifically to the Dobell scandal that took place at this time. Discussing Dobell in reference to the Archibald prize. Franklin argues why "the Penton portrait should have had the prize"; in a comparison of this work and his portrait of Joshua Smith, she writes: "Here at least is a picture of a living, if sinister, personality and not that of a mortifying corpse or a battered mound of flesh" (4 February 1944). Although Franklin champions the artist's right to experiment — "I leave the painter free to experiment whether I like the result or not" — she favours a more 'authentic' representation of the living subject (4 February 1947). She describes friend O'Harris' paintings as a "chocolate-box mess", but because O'Harris is Franklin's idealised reader, she agrees to pose as her subject: "but Pixie is so kind, and her lines are as pretty as herself — surely I can't come to much harm with her" (10 December 1946). Gilmore can again be interpreted as Franklin's alter-ego when, in reference to a portrait done by Dobell, Franklin describes her in the mode of the "classic" text that she herself desires to be; she considers the artwork to be both "dignified" and a "masterpiece" — and admits at this moment "How I wish he would paint me!" (22 January 1947). This vantage point also allows us to see how, as with her literary critics. Franklin resists the implications of a nasty reading as one who transcends self-reflexivity, placing responsibility for distortions of the 'authentic' body on the artist:

Because: it's all very well to say that such artists paint the soul + character of their subjects; but it is also evident that such artists frequently bemire their victims with the antagonisms + cruelty of their own souls: and not infrequently the soul of an artist is cowardly + snobbish, his character mean + ignoble (4 February 1944). Franklin's psychic resistances to the artist/other can be productively analysed in relation to the temporal complexities created by the embodied presence of an authorial icon. These complexities can be seen to play out in Franklin's specific interactions with Dobell, discussed in her Literary Notebooks, as they foreground the tension between her desire for the iconic recognition his portrait would bring and her need to control his artistic impression. Despite the criticism she expresses towards his work, she is clearly flattered by his desire to paint her, and even seeks him out after the rumours of his interest in her begin on the pretext of lending him a book (10 January 1947). It is only on Dobell's assurance that he would "do something that wouldn't wound me and make me an object of ridicule" that she acquiesces (10 January 1947). But before receiving these reassurances, Dobell is painted as "the villain" in her diaries, who would make her a mockery (3 October 1946). At this point, we can see that the prospect of a portrait at his hands again makes her a body ''condemned to the repertoire of its images"\ she can be an embodied presence in the process, as she was with O'Harris and Devanny, but cannot control the product. In this way, the Dobell portrait is emblematic of Franklin's authorial dilemma, of the reality that she is only even an image produced through the other. This dilemma can be seen to play out in another entry in which Franklin refuses her self- reflexivity, as it serves as a reminder of her journey towards death:

I never look in the mirror these days without wishing I could end it all as easily as I could have done when in my teens. I don't want to be victimised as a decayed moron corpse as a companion piece to Joshua. The cutting-away of my mastication muscles and gums has made me as exaggeratedly wrinkled as if a Maori Chiefs markings were age wrinkles. My face is entirely spoiled. It's hard to bear (3 October 1946).

Here we see, in the conflation of art and life, that Franklin's desire to return to a youthful space is part of her resistance to the inevitable journey towards the imprint of the reader/artist, as it takes place at the death of the author. In the paradoxes posed by this inevitable journey, she distorts her youthful space from the immortality of her Australian Eden to, as in her obituary, the place of her adolescent death — a "teen" plagued with thoughts of suicide. This dilemma could be seen as a consequence of her strangeness to herself, for when positioned as the other in the self-reflexive gaze, she sees only the "mortifying corpse" of death.

Having established how Franklin's iconic status is destabilised in the anxious and subversive space of the in-between in these diaries, this thesis continues with an exploration into how the monument of nation, as it provided both success and anonymity to her authorship, is also implicated in these destabilising processes. In this way, we will see that Franklin's authorial anxieties and resistances are a result of her displacement within the modernist era as an Australian "classic" who was also a cosmopolitan expatriate. She both championed the Australian realist fiction of a by-gone era and read high art modernist writers such as Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf, and was therefore placed at the centre of the debate concerning traditional and modem reading and writing practices. This thesis goes on to contend that it is in these national paradoxes, as they are accommodated in her diaries, that we discover "the real Miles Franklin" — she emerges as the impossibility of one "cosmopolitan yet indelibly Australian".

Given that Franklin is, as this chapter has attested, caught in a game of self- reflexivity, we are able to explore the significance of her shadow spaces as they play out in her other diary disguises, those of nation and of gender. Her diaries reopen the issue of her mask wearing, providing a more comprehensive understanding of how her various guises were utilised to promote productivity, as well as the costs involved in being anonymous. For anonymity provides Franklin with the freedom of creative potential that comes from refusing to settle on a single identity. In this study, we have seen how she uses disguise to orchestrate an avoidance of her external readers. Her pseudonymous identities allow for her own authorial imprint as "world classic". As a self-reflexive author, she can endlessly self-validate and yet can manipulate this space to be the "diviner's cup" that looks only outwards. Having established how Franklin utilises the productive possibilities of being "caught by the game", we are able to examine the benefits provided by her most defining authorial mask, that of the nation, when taken into the "dynamics of her interior life". The real insights of Franklin as mask wearer are found in the shadow spaces that haunt the productive uses of her anonymity. As an author, these shadows emerge as the threat of absence. Far from ensuring a posthumous future as an Australian icon, these shadows encourage her to fear her place in a past that cannot be recaptured. It is in the temporalities this thesis has established between the "continuous present" the unobtainable past and the posthumous future that we are able to see the tensions within a national subjectivity. For the productive spaces in which Franklin would be a writer are all framed by nation — she would be iconic and immortalised within the monumental time of nation, a pre-defmed, adolescent subject within the nostalgia of her conventional nationalism, and the creative potential enabled by a Utopian vision of nation. Yet because they are a form of surrogacy, a mimicry of life and fiction. Franklin's diaries are also the intrusion of the daily on national discourses. In the conflation of the art/life dichotomy in which we can see the dilemmas in Franklin's intimacy with herself and others as she avoids being a personal subject, we are also able to explore how an author can be national in a genre that creates the impossibility of a daily nation. Miles Franklin's National Voice:

Australia waits

This chapter continues the examination of Franklin's Australian mask of anonymity by arguing that she is also a metonym of the monumental nation, achieving iconic status as a 'divine' embodiment of a 'true' Australia. In the conflation of the I of the author ego and the monumental we of nation in these diaries, we are able to see a different Franklin to that offered in Brunton's edition of the diaries, in which he celebrates her as a national icon, a portrait of the "distinguished" author of a body of work. Through his selection of entries he has honoured the selection she herself makes as diary editor, for these diaries are pervaded by the nationalistic sentiment that similarly dominated her public writings. In an exploration of the complex operations of her national identity in these diaries, I will identify a series of paradoxes through which her iconic status is destabilised. This déstabilisation will be examined as it takes place in the collision of genre and nation, thereby raising crucial questions concerning how a national discourse can also be daily. In the interaction between the I of the diary and the we of nation, I have identified various positions of impossibility, positions that Franklin attempts either to reconcile or accommodate in her desire to be made a living personality via the Australian spirit. The focus of this chapter first centres on how the I and the we of diary and nation play out in the Franklin subject, in a reading that accentuates current perceptions of her according to Modjeska's idea of the "exile at home." Recent scholarship has shifted the focus from Franklin as a "cultural nationalist par excellence" (Roe 67) by identifying the contradictions within Franklin's nationalism, as posed by her expatriation. Verna Coleman, Modjeska, Pratt, Sheridan and most notably Roe have argued that Franklin's time overseas played a significant role in her sense of a national self, challenging the common perception that Franklin identified "unreservedly with the Old Australia" (Roe 67). As Roe suggests. Franklin's Australian identity was not a straightforward issue; "her Hfe story encompasses both the rise and fall of cultural nationalism" (67). Franklin identified culturally and nationally with her adopted homes overseas; Roe writes of the "three worlds of Miles Franklin" — America, England and Australia — and the evidence they provide that Franklin "valued diversity" ("World" 90). Yet it is not this diversity that prevails in Brunton's edition but a hyper-conventional nationalistic sentiment and her faithful dedication to the cause of Australian literature. In her manuscripts, she is nostalgic for an Australian past — there are only minimal reminiscences from her time spent living overseas. These inconsistencies raise crucial questions concerning the way in which nation is constituted within the dynamics of Franklin's "interior life" (Roe "Changing" 44). Her resistance to diversity relates, I will argue, to her desire to produce a "viable self (Gilbert and Gubar 37) anonymously under the guise of her Australian identity. This vantage point enables us to see that, in her public life, expatriation is necessarily sacrificed in her desire to be one of the elite that champions, and thereby transcends, the banality of life in Australia. This resistance to her expatriation is evident in her public essays in which she complexly both identifies with and dissociates from the "us of no special gifts" ("Proletarians" 136). Yet in these diaries, in the inconsistencies between exile and national subject, we see her struggle with both the threat of absence that arises from being a colonial nonentity and the Australianism that defines her authorship at the expense of the literary greatness available to those who have transcended their national roots. To avoid an authorial dilemma that undermines her claim to iconic status, she attempts to make her diary, I will argue, a space that accommodates impossibilities, in which she can be, as she describes herself in her book of Thoughts and Impressions, "unique in that I went abroad lived with some of the top wits without becoming precious — a cosmopolitan, and yet indelibly Australian" (61). This discussion provides a lens through which we can see how Franklin accommodates the contradictions involved in being "indelibly" one thing while also something else. Indeed, by exploring these contradictions, this analysis will establish that it is only as a citizen abroad, an author outside the confines of nation, that Franklin is able to champion herself as an expatriate Australian. From here, this discussion goes on to identify a central paradox in the collision of expatriate and faithful Australian, egalitarian and elitist in these diaries, as her displacement within her Australian environment inversely intensifies her need for a space of belonging — a space in which she can avoid the I of the private subject as the we of nation. Franklin's account of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) is, I will argue, emblematic of the nation. It provides a vantage point from which we can see how her exclusion from the various bodies of we inside her literary nation enables her to be the sole representative of an Australian literary tradition, a tradition based on a social imaginary that excludes political (and personal) realities. At this point, this analysis takes up the complexities within her isolation, the tension between loneliness and companionship, as it plays out in the intimate space of "my secret outlet — my diary", (13 March 1948). From here, I will contend that Franklin makes Australia the companion that protects her from the "wingless grabbers" (12 January 1937), or nasty critics, that are represented by her colleagues. This intimacy between self and nation will be productively explored via the concept of a nationalised religion, which Franklin herself sets up in these diaries, making her faith a metonym for her Australianism. By embodying Australia in this way. Franklin makes herself the "essence" of a nation, that is not, as Derrida writes, to be "confused with empirical factuality" (12). Having established how this gap between essence and fact plays out within Franklin's national subjectivity, this discussion takes up this contradiction as a dilemma of temporality, a dilemma that introduces central questions concerning what happens when the daily is implicated in the time of nation. The vantage point provided by this temporal paradox enables us to identify the techniques via which Franklin makes herself an iconic representation of nation. In the "psychic privacy" (Nussbaum "Diary" 135) of her diaries, her personal memory functions as a space that encapsulates the "original loveliness" (9 March 1953) of her nation's past, thereby making her an embodiment of the monumental time of Australia. Yet this embodiment is disrupted, as will be seen, in the tension between diary and national temporalities, from which Franklin emerges as a subject out of time, belatedly placed as a hyper-conventional nationalist between generations of Australian writers. For she was part of a general trend amongst writers of the 1930s who promoted Australia's distinctiveness through a return to the Utopian hope of the 1890s "this generation of young and talented returned expatriates set themselves the task of working for cultural regeneration" and for whom "the golden past was to serve for inspiration" (Modjeska 177). Clark Taylor's insights into the social imaginary further elucidate Franklin's temporal displacement, as it occurs in the tension between old and new practices. He argues that a "breakdown occurs when people are expelled from their old forms", during, for example, a time of war, "before they can fmd their way in the new practices, that is, connect some transformed practices to the new principles to form a viable social imaginary" ("Modem" 99). Modjeska writes that this breakdown takes place for Franklin at the approach of the Second World War, and further coincides with her failure to produce another major novel after 1933:

She was reduced to political disillusion and literary stalemate ... the old community values she so admired seemed further from Australia's reach than ever; her faith in the cultural leadership of 'idealists' was a pipe dream against the prevailing militarism (180).

In taking up this temporal focus, I want to contend here that Franklin's "literary stalemate" can be further understood in the distortions of her nationalism, as posed by her use of the diary as surrogacy for her fictional writing. At this point, the analysis takes up the distortions made from creative potential to self-imitation in national contexts, a dilemma examined in the last chapter in relation to Franklin's authorial instabilities. The potential on which her nationalism is founded, the belief in Australia as a country in which "only here and there we receive hints and portents of the Future" (Stephens 24) is, as will be seen, perverted into a waiting game in daily discourses — Franklin waits as her "Australia waits — remaining the same for incredible stretches of time" (23 April 1938). Yet an exploration into these expressions of delay further allows us to identify how the diary, as a space in which the daily can be rewritten, offers Franklin a safe place for the nationalism of an "eternal now" (Olney "Memory" 242). In analysing this conflation of the art/life dichotomy, we are able to see that Franklin desires the daily to be, much like the pseudonymous identity, a blank space on which a different present can be written, one that accommodates the potential of her nation-in-process. This desire is evident when she writes in her book of Thoughts and Impressions that "the re-creation and reanimation of the present" had "more power over the future" than "the study of the past" (66). Yet in the shifts from the creative to the surrogate diary, we also see how, in her frustrated daily experiences amongst the banal and uncultured in these diaries, Franklin's colonial Australia is an imitation of life elsewhere. At these moments, her Australia is not a space of potential but one that is innately inferior; lack of national "self-respect" serves as "a great exposé of what we are" (30 April 1938). From here, this discussion offers the contrast of Franklin's literary Australia, the nation contained within artistic discourses, through which she champions its innately unique and superior qualities, and condemns those attempts to imitate overseas standards in their writing — those that insist Australia "mustn't be itself in literature" (3 April 1938). In this way, we see how Franklin utilises literature as the space in which a social imaginary can be realised, and further, the psychic implications of her use of artistic discourses to prevent the self as metonym of nation from being perverted into the self-parody of a myth-making Australia.

From the analysis of Franklin's daily nation, as elucidated by the complexities of genre, another impossibility emerges between the reanimation of the present and a nostalgic nationalism that requires a kind of "stalemate" — an unprogressive Australia that is protected in its "original loveliness". This paradox can be productively explored, I will argue, as it plays out in the 'authentic' Australia she associated with the potential and innocence of childhood. For although this youthful Australia is a productive space for Franklin, and indeed it was this theme that inspired one of the only books she wrote during these years. My Childhood At Brindabella, it also, as will be seen, exacerbates her place as a subject out of time. In this way, we see that creativity can only take place in an Australia that waits. This temporal disparity will be illuminated via a reading of her nostalgia, as it plays out in the distortion of the proliferative diary writing subject who only produces mimicry. For in the collision of mortality and nation, her nostalgia exemplifies, as is evident in moments of grief at the death of loved ones, that a national past is unobtainable: "we are helpless about the past. It has gone away for ever" (Thoughts and Impressions 116). From here, these distortions are further explored as they elucidate Franklin's fear of absence, confronting her with a future that is not an Australian utopia but rather a journey towards death — with a "nostalgia of oblivion" (6

September 1943) that introduces the haunting of her ghosts. In a further analysis of the link Franklin herself sets up between nation and death, the final focus of this chapter centres on the impossibilities in the nation/nature dichotomy of her Australia. Taking up Derrida's insights into the irreconcilable relationship between the "philosophy of spirit" and the "philosophy of Being" (15), this discussion productively examines Franklin's uncanny relationship to Australia as it is exemplified by her own foreigner within. Kristeva's theories on the internal stranger further illuminate Franklin's otherness as it plays out in her complex positioning both inside and outside nation:

Confronting the foreigner whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify, I lose my boundaries, I no longer have a container, the memory of experiences when I had been abandoned overwhelm me, I lose my composure {Strangers 187).

From here, this analysis explores the permeability of Franklin's national boundaries as it elucidates the ambiguity in her promotion of an exclusory Australia, one that, in the mode of her hyper-conventional nationalism, supports policies of racism. Yet in highlighting her movement inside and outside of nation, we further see how her racism is morphed into a condemnation of suburbanites as national aliens, as she negotiates the contradictions within a national space she requires to be both authentically defined and transcendent. This contradiction can be illuminated by theories concerning the imaginary nation, as it is made up of concepts that are, as Benedict Anderson writes:

capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations (4).'

At this point, in a further analysis of Franklin as she internalises the dilemmas of an uncanny nation — a nation that was, according to John Williams, in a "disturbingly isolationist phase" at this time (5) — this discussion takes up a reading of Frankhn's national ghosts as they exemplify her own fear of being a self "capable of being transplanted". Here, historical and literary contexts will be explored as they elucidate this conflation between national and personal spaces. Writing of the nineteenth century/z/z de siecle, "as a period of heightened anxiety and unrest, fragmentation and disruption" across the Western World, Susan Martin relates the growing concepts of nation and nationalism which occurred during these years to the postmodern notion of a "rising concern about the permeability of boundaries - geographic boundaries as well as those defining gender, sexuality and the boundaries of the self (92). From this vantage point, we can see how, in her inability to reconcile her embodiment of the living spirit of nation with her own foreignness. Franklin's Australia becomes an uncanny space of alienation and exclusion. She internalises a national isolationist policy to escape her own stranger, but in this resistance fmds herself further exposed to her ghosts — phantoms that represent the distortion of the Australian spirit into an unfamiliar "dark spirit" that "runs over the land ... with a mystery so baffling that it is tragic" (6 September 1943). At this point, this discussion establishes that Franklin, in the uncanny space of nation, is distorted from an embodiment of a monumental Australia into displaced white Australian, who is made aware of her place within generations of alienated subjects with no ownership of the nation's past: "It is as if I felt the tremors of the first exiles. We took it from the Aborigines. We do not yet possess it spiritually" (6 September 1943).

This array of impossible positions is encapsulated within the dream Franklin recalls in her diaries, as it offers us insight into the psychic spaces of her complex national identity. Having looked at the implications of this dream for Franklin's self- reflexive authorship in the previous chapter, we can extend this analysis here by establishing the metaphoric significance of the dream as a space for the national imaginary. This dream can be read as a metonym for Franklin's ideal Australia because it signifies an imaginary space in which we can identify her preference for the creative potential of artistic discourses over the realities of daily life. As Franklin writes to colleague Kate Baker about her novel All That Swagger.

I only hope that the book will contain something to help, however humbly, in furnishing the Australia of our dreams — those dreams which are stronger than reality, more nourishing to soul and mind (9 September 1936).

Ill The idea that an Australian reality existed only in the imagination was prominent to 1890s nationalism. In her article "Novels of the Bush", Franklin praised fiction that had "done service in crystallising reality - that spiritual and national reality which, complexly, must be reflected in our art before it becomes part of our consciousness" (121). Also complexly, art was seen to offer white Australians a way to escape the uncanny, to avoid the national ghosts that signify their alienation. Palmer writes that:

a region or a way of life does not begin to exist until it has been interpreted by one artist after another ... Without this illumination ... the human nature in Australia must 'appear to the imagination absolutely uncanny and ghost-like' (qtd. in Smith xxiv).

Yet paradoxically, the writings of Henry Lawson and Marcus Clarke among others illustrate that the uncanny was a defining feature of the nation's literature. In Franklin's dream, her national ghosts can be seen to exemplify the tension between this need for a space of belonging and the haunting of the uncanny. Like the diary, dreams represent the in between — conscious and unconscious, life and death — and can therefore be explored as a space in which national ghosts meet the stranger within. This space is further elucidated by Derrida's theories concerning a national haunting, where the imaginary is at risk of contamination by death: "Between life and death, nationalism has as its own proper space the experience of haunting" (15). Franklin's account of the dream is as follows:

I suddenly found myself the guest of station people far from Sydney. They were to spend the night at a dance at a distance and I did not want to go. The alternative was to return to the homestead and remain quite alone. 'Would I be frightened?' 'Not the least, if someone would only come back to the house with me and take me in.' Jimmy volunteered to take me. He was small, slight, young and most lovable. He was in the uniform of the AIF khaki, but very grey, and his hat turned up at the side was bleached almost grey. He took me back to the house and we entered. The lounge was a vast apartment with walls of glass and no blinds. I have a great dislike of being in a lighted room where anyone can look in at me. Jimmy was kind about it. He took me to the centre of the big place where there was a little sunken square containing a desk + chair. Around this he drew heavy screens making in fact a tiny room within a room. 'No one will see you here,' he said. 'Besides, there is no one living within a hundred miles, and no one will hurt you.' No sooner was he truly gone than I began to hear people moving and talking, not one but a number. I froze with fear — that sickening paralysis of terror which, thank God, I have never experienced save in nightmare. I turned out my light for safety and sat in goosefleshed horror, while form after form entered the room. I could see them silhouetted against the starlight against the glass. In a minute or two all fear left me, I was comfortable and interested. Little Jimmy's kindly words came back, 'No one will hurt you.' These people did not know I was there. They were in another dimension. They were all Australians. There was complete harmony between them and me. They were ghosts. That vast apartment was some mansion lent as a convalescent rest home. Its comfortable divans and chairs were occupied by men in all stages of mutilation. Some had an arm missing, some a leg, others an eye or ear. All were maimed, but all were in the high spirits of war time, telling yams, laughing. And I heard all they said, but it will not come back to me, though the room itself is as clear as actuality (12 January 1936).

Franklin's Australia is a nation of monumental time in this dream, and as such signifies the relationship between her own and a national consciousness, a relationship she lays claim to throughout her diaries. The Australian ghosts in whose company she finds comfort are part of a national mythology — that of the Aussie digger. Li this way, we see that Franklin is a monumental subject with access to the nation's memory. Yet this monumental and nostalgic Australia is also reduced to "stalemate" in the endless repetition of a present moment that waits for the future to arrive. The room "containing a desk + chair" could be read as a national waiting room, the space in which Franklin waits for something to happen. Here we can also identify the tensions posed by both national and self imitation, for the room in which Franklin escapes the gaze of the other is a replicated room, not the thing itself, and therefore complexly symbolises her comfort in spaces of self-replication and disguise. There is also metaphoric significance in this anonymous space of retreat into "the centre of the big place", as the Australia in which she seeks to embed and protect the private I. In this way, her dream Australia enables us insight into the complexities of her self/nation conflation, as evidenced throughout her diaries. In her Travel Diaries in particular, there is an elucidation of her need for this space of mergence in "the silence — the glory of the dead centre of my Australia"

(Travel Diary 6 June - 1 July 1937). Yet as this dream also suggests. Franklin remains an outsider within the body of nation.

A further exploration of this dream as it foregrounds the outsider within allows us to identify a major paradox within her nationalism, for her claim to an authentic national identity also necessitates her isolation, thereby making the nation itself her only real companion. Here, given the ghostly theme of this dream, we are able to see how the national ghosts that constitute her companions, and thereby strengthen her link to a national past, also serve to signify her alienation. Like so many of her contemporaries.

Franklin finds that the national imaginary does not transform the "uncanny and ghost- like" into reality, but rather embodies this dilemma. Jacobs and Gelder elucidate this predicament in their descriptions of the "unfamiliar familiarity" (23) that has prevailed in the experiences of white Australians. In a reading of Freud's essay 'The "Uncanny"', they write:

it is not simply the familiar in itself which generates the anxiety of the uncanny; it

is specifically the combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar - the way in

which one seems always to inhabit the other (23).

In this dream, an uncanny Australia is exemplified by the apartment that is not her own home, the room that is a replication of a room, and, most significantly, the fellow

Australians that are separated by a "different dimension". Her Australia is not the impenetrable fortress of the "stout wide slab station home" (Letter to Fullerton 5 November 1944), but a penetrable glasshouse that conflates inside and outside spaces. In the problematic conflation of these spaces, her national ghosts can be seen to represent the impossibility of reconciling "philosophy of Being" with "philosophy of spirit", thereby bringing to the fore her instability as a living personality, the distortion of the Australian spirit into the haunting of death. These distorting effects of mortality on a national mythology are further elucidated by the image of the dismembered bodies of the Aussie diggers "in all stages of mutilation" — an image that contrasts with the "clean + warm and dry" (8 February 1938) body of nation that she also sets up in these diaries in her resistance to contamination. Here also, in the unstable space between past and present, self and other, we see that Franklin's only comfort is found in returning to the national memory she is simultaneously part of and alienated from, as signified by her invisible presence, her witnessing a history that is distorted, or dismembered, by real events. This vantage point also enables us to identify the ambiguity essential to national haunting; the presence of the other encourages paralysing fear, but in these ghosts Franklin recognises herself. By taking up the dream as it foregrounds the space of between, we are able to illuminate Franklin's psychic space of otherness, in which foreigner confronts self. As Kristeva writes:

The foreigner is within us. And when we flee from our struggle against the foreigner, we are fighting our unconscious - that 'improper' facet of our impossible 'own and proper' {Strangers 191).

In taking up Kristeva's insights, we can identify Franklin's journey away from the other and towards a national mythology as it symbolises her desire to escape her own otherness in the anonymity offered by nation. The dilemmas set up here in this reading of Franklin's dream can be used to illuminate the complexities within her nationalism as they are currently understood. Recent scholarly interest in Franklin's diversity as an expatriate has encouraged readings of her fiction that destabilises her reputafion as a "cultural nationalist par excellence'". Her part in the generational return to the myth-making of the 1890s has been comprehended not only as a response to political realities but as a necessary ploy by one whose authorial reputation was entirely dependent upon her "ardent Australianism" (Pratt 217). Yet neither of these reasons can comprehensively account for the national sentiment embedded in the "interior life" of the Franklin diary subject, a sentiment promoted by Brunton, nor the lack of nostalgic interest she shows in her twenty-six years spent overseas. A further exploration of this interiority allows us to see how and why, even in her personal life, Franklin undermined her diversity via the projection of an ardently Australian persona. This resistance to diversity can be seen in an entry from Palmer's diaries that alludes to Franklin's projection of a distinctly national self-image. On an evening spent with Franklin, Palmer reflects on how her commitment to Australia encourages the exclusion of talk about other places:

We are making for Europe, and in a way it would have seemed natural to ask for her view of the international scene which at times she has known so well. Yet the evening has passed and she has gone, without any of the talk leaving her Australia — the country where she has known both tradition and character and where she has been so angry about the downfall of women's careers and yet so furious with visitors who don't see what a fine and peculiar life is arising here (19 March 1935 143).

In the private space of her diaries we are able to identify a contrasting resistance, as evident in her occasional outbursts as one "that has been where I've been" (25 February 1938), and who has undermined her diversity in preference for authorial cohesion. In her public essays also. Franklin accommodates the paradox between her elitism as one of Australia's leading artists and her egalitarianism, but sacrifices her expatriation in her projection of a distinctly national self-image. Modjeska refers to the elitist/egalitarian dichotomy as prominent to the 1930s Australian literary scene: a major dichotomy emerges between a glorification of a past society, idealised as egalitarian, and a programme for cultural revival along similar lines that is dependent on the guidance of an elite (178).

This is a paradoxical position commonly held by the elite who have, as Taylor writes, been traditionally responsible for the social theories that eventually infiltrate the whole community (24). The diversity of the expatriate, however, posed more significant problems within public discourses. There is some evidence of the "cosmopolitan yet indelibly Australian" in Franklin's public essays. Roe and Bettison write of the contradiction throughout Franklin's topical writings as she expresses a "cultural authority" in a mode similar to the British women writers of her day (Gregarious xxii). Roe also argues that these essays indicate that "she was alert, not only to nativist but to 1 0 modernising features" (xviii) . However, the prevailing sentiment of the faithful Australian across these public writings indicates the extent to which Franklin was implicated in a national resistance to modernism, in the lack of tolerance at that time for "those [seen] as infected with the modernist virus" (Williams 6). An exploration of these inconsistencies as they play out in her 1936 article "Amateurs but Proletarians: Peculiar Predicament of Australian Literati" enables us to identify how Franklin undermined her national diversity by promoting instead the self-portrait of an elitist Australian. One level of this disguise is evident in her celebration of banality as a distinct feature of Australian life, when it was also a preoccupation of the modernist writers from whom she so adamantly distinguished herself: Australia is not the few who go home and curtsy to their Sovereign as efficiently as the daughters of courtiers ... nor yet those choice intellects who emigrate to lead among the giants of culture, science and scholarship. These and our sports champions may be our panache, but Australia mothers equally all the others of us of no special gifts, who are ignorant and stupid and unmannerly, who have to wear the same hat and overcoat for several seasons, who do our own charring and

Indeed, I would also contend here that the contradictions and instability of Franklin's nationalist identity in her diaries marks them as modernist. chores, and who go in fear of an old age of poverty. We cannot abolish our history. We cannot disguise our banality, our fusty conventional mentality, our bumble politicians. ("Proletarians" 136, 137)

An elucidation of the shifts Franklin makes between the I and the we of nation in this essay also allows us to see the paradoxes within her desire to be the elitist representative of a banal populace. In this way, we see that only by positioning herself amongst the "ignorant, stupid and unmannerly" who perform banal daily tasks, can she be both an elitist and an egalitarian. This dual positioning is evident in her association with the we of the banal populace, with the "us of no special gifts", and in her implicit self-promotion as one of the "extraordinary minds" who can turn banality into "the richest material" (Franklin "Proletarians" 138). She argues that the fact that "Australians are dull and uninteresting" need not deter its writers: "Should our material be the most banal in the world, that in itself is a difference which could be made a distinction by authenticity and courage in portrayal" (138). Here we see that Franklin is paradoxically positioned at the top of the rung of her social imaginary, utilising what Taylor describes as "the hierarchical differentiation" that "itself is seen as the proper order of things", a hierarchy within which "some had greater dignity and value than the others" ("Modem" 95). The tensions involved in being the voice of an egalitarian nation can also be seen to play out in an entry from Palmer's diaries, in which she refers to a debate that took place between Will Dyson and Fumley Maurice on the role of the intellectual in the nation's development. While Dyson criticised the "mental timidity" of Australian intellectuals in letting others "outsiders or colonial-minded people—speak with the country's voice", Maurice argued:

there was as much thought and creative activity going on in Australia as anywhere, but you couldn't expect the people engaged in it to waste their time in a struggle for limelight (25 September 1929 54). This debate exemplifies a key paradox regarding an intelligentsia in Australia as understood by Franklin — to be a great Australian author, you needed to be understated as such. Yet this public essay also highlights that there is no place in Franklin's public nationalism for her expatriation; she explicitly refuses her position as one of "those choice intellects who emigrate", and who are not representative of Australia. By renouncing her expatriation in this way. Franklin was abiding by the well-established binary of expatriate versus faithful Australian, and thereby avoiding association with the "outsiders" to whom Dyson refers. She did not heed the advice of A. G. Stephens in 1901 when he urged the nation's writers to remain in their home country, "there is a wealth of novel inspiration for the writers who will live Australia's life and utter her message" (27). Instead, she joined with Lawson's disenchanted and cynical response to the lack of financial support and appreciation he received in Australia:

My advice to any young Australian writer whose talents have been recognized, would be to go steerage, stow away, swim and seek London, Yankeeland, Timbuctoo - rather than stay in Australia till his genius turned to gall, or beer (Lawson "Pursing" 12).

Her journey beyond the nation's borders was a refusal, as it was for so many of her colleagues, to be one of the colonial "nonentities" she refers to in her diaries (1 February 1938). As Moorehead wrote in reference to Lawson's decision to leave Australia for broader horizons: "to go abroad - that was the thing. That was the way to make your name. To stay at home was to condemn yourself to nonentity" (qtd. in Alomes 99). Her veiling of her expatriation on her return was a way to avoid the harsh criticisms commonly directed at those artists who "fled to England to seek sanctuary from the problem of creating a new tradition here", authors whom P. R. Stephensen describes as "renegades" who are "lost to us" (3). Franklin's resistance to national diversity can also be seen as an attempt to protect the reputation she had attained from early on in public life as "the country's voice". From the publication of her first novel she became, and in many respects remains, an embodiment of the Australian literary tradition. Arriving the year of Federation, her first novel, as Tanya Dalziell writes, was celebrated "as a founding narrative of nationhood" (40):

For its early critics, My Brilliant Career heralded a new era in Australian literature and nationalism that would refuse imperial prescriptions and focus instead on the narratives of an emerging nation (40, 41).

Her authentic depiction of the past was praised, despite the fact that she was adopting "the formulaic mode of the family saga" — indeed, as Pratt argues, critics considered her to be performing "some kind of necessary national service" (217, 218). In a hterary and cultural environment "divided by imperial and national sentiment", she was distinguished from other expatriates, such as Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead whose Australian credentials were often questioned (Pratt 214, 215). This distinction can also be made in relation to a tradition of Australian expatriate women writers, of which Franklin is also a part. Tasma and Rosa Campbell Praed, for example, were neglected for their failure to write in the prominent mode of "bush realism" (Spender 160). Praed's short story "Gwen's Decision" and Tasma's "Monsieur Caloche" imply the importance of foreign or expatriate influences on Australian culture. In contrast, as Pratt writes. Franklin's "expatriation was overlooked by contemporary reviewers and critics" because of her "ardent Australianism" (215, 217). At the time of her return to Australia, to be nationally 'authentic' was to be rated as a writer. Considerations of national and literary value were closely related in the inter-war period as literature was considered to serve "an important national function in boosting both Australia's national identity and its world profile" (Pratt 215, 218). Coleman writes of Franklin's role in this national function in her 1981 biography of Franklin's overseas years:

It was when she returned to live permanently in Australia that she became the Miles Franklin of legend, the 'infatuated Australian', the apostle of Australian literature and an institution amongst the Australian writers of her day (x) However, there was a tension in this period between national realism and literary greatness in which Franklin was necessarily implicated. As Sheridan writes, Franklin's reputation as a great author was also tarred with the national brush:

Behind the aesthetic and moral judgement lay a modernist account of Australian fiction, in which Franklin was regarded as a sentimental nationalist whose bush sagas were stuck in the 1890s ("Brilliant" 332).

Richardson's literature was for many years ignored by Australian critics largely because her status as a permanent expatriate "schooled in European nationalism ... undermines the hegemonic projections of Australianness associated with a writer such as Miles Franklin", while her international reputation automatically awarded her authorial superiority (218, 219, 220). Stead's work, focussed on urban Australia, was less judged according to standards of literary nationalism than to notions of literary "greatness" (Pratt 223). The assessment of Australian literature via the "superior judgements of the European and American literary cultures" was common even in the most radically nationalist of reviewers and authors — there were both overt and covert implications of the cultural cringe (Pratt 220). As Leon Cantrell writes, both writers and readers struggled with "the cultural cringe", which encouraged a fear that Australian writing "may not be 'good enough'" (xiv). Franklin's anxiety concerning her worth as an author was necessarily influenced by these conflicting modes of criticism, for in these conflicts, the "ardent Australianism" of her writing held implications of inferior literary talents. These inconsistencies raise crucial questions relevant to a reading of her diaries, concerning the internal consequences of an ambiguous national authority, and the haunting created by the implied threat of being an authorial nonentity. This destabilised national authority is illuminated by her complex expatriation in these diaries, an identity that, when not disguised, is used to assert her "greatness", both as an author and a national subject. This complexity was explored in the previous chapter in the context of the "worid classic" pseudonymous Brent of Bin Bin, who she champions as a national author of international importance. Here we are able to extend this national contradiction as it plays out in the collision of expatriate and indelible Australian, complicating the anonymity and authority provided by a national mask. She was not mistaken in her assumption that her ardent Australianism protected her from authorial absence. Stead argued that the "neglect" of her own writing was due to the "Australian suspicion of foreignness": "I belong to three countries, hence to none. The Australians seem quite outraged that I have stayed away so long" (Pratt 221, Stead qtd. in Pratt 221). Yet in contrast, as Stead's critique suggests, to refuse to settle on a single national identity is also to have the creative potential of the diverse and pre-defined subject. These contrasting authorial positions can be illuminated in a reading of Franklin's diaries as they enable us to identify how her Australia serves both as the productive space of creative potential, and to entrap her in the cycle of self-repetition. Like so many of her colleagues. Franklin utilised the imaginary possibilities of Australia as a nation-in- process, as "a concept of a Nation in process of being formed" (Stephensen 3). As she wrote in her article "The Prospects of Australian Literature", the only way the Australian nation could achieve "a place among high-powered thinkers of other nations" would be by "producing books worthy of our potentialities" (118). A. G. Stephens captured this sense of potential when wrote in his introduction to the Bulletin Story Book in 1901:

Australia is still a suburb of Cosmopolis ... Only here and there we receive hints and portents of the Future. Australian nationality today is like an alchemist's crucible just before the gold-birth, with red fumes rising, and strange odours, and a dazzling gleam caught by moments through the bubble and seethe (24).

Yet in exploring her resistance to the distortion of a national potential into a "literary stalemate", we see that her diaries also offer her a space outside Australia, in which she can utilise a potential that is achieved, as in Stead's case, by refusing nation. In this way, a different kind of dilemma emerges concerning the anonymous and absent author, one that illuminates Franklin's internal rifts, her own "suspicion of foreignness". These inconsistencies between the both and neither of Franklin's national positioning can be productively explored as they play out in her self-description as "cosmopolitan yet indelibly Australian" in her diaries. This vantage point enables us to identify how, in a daily reality, the protection of her national identity necessitates a choice between one and the other. This necessity is evident in Franklin's struggle to promote herself as a "unique" subject whilst amongst her fellow uncultured Australians, a struggle through which she negotiates being both an elitist and an egalitarian in a daily Australia. In this way, we see that her nationalism exemplifies the paradox between refusing the label of "transplanted Briton" (Williams 2) and the threat of being subsumed as a colonial nonentity. In her desire to establish a distinctive national culture against British imperialism, which is commonly communicated in her diaries via descriptions of the "disgusting servility" (3 February 1938) of urban Australians, Franklin also reveals her anxiety at being labelled colonial: "These invitations are a few crumbs thrown at nonentities publicly from the imperial junketings of the privileged English hordes that better our Colonialism" (1 February 1938). Franklin's "low-esteem for Australians" (Modjeska 182) can be seen as she shifts between a nationalist resentment of "servility" and her cosmopolitan desire for intellectual and cultural stimulation. Here we are able to identify the profound difference for Franklin between championing a mundane colonial populace in literary contexts and living amongst those who are "without any intellectual or spiritual plus whatever" (27 May 1949). The collision of the national and the cosmopolitan is particularly evident when she describes her young military friend Stanley as an inferior Australian for his lack of cultural sophistication: "a truly banal Australian in the way absence of any appreciation of any deeper culture or new thought" (27 May 1949). These inconsistencies, as posed by daily contexts, illuminate Franklin as the exile of a domestic home, thereby enabling us to identify how the diary I prevails over the egalitarian in the collision of private and national spaces. As a space in which she sacrifices the we of nation for personal autonomy, her family home serves as a metonym for the costs involved in being the embodiment of a national home. Exploring the I and the we in this way, we see that it is in her most intimate association with the Australian shearers and charwomen, as represented by her brother Norman and her hired help, that she lays claim to her expatriation. Norman's refusal to acknowledge her superiority as a cosmopolitan sophisticate is a regular source of vexation for Franklin: His only interest is to ridicule people — me or anyone else. All people have that tendency, but in Aust. segregation and isolation it grows out of proportion + results in a lot of soulless cock sure ignorant ridiculers of their betters (25 February 1938).

In these moments of ego intrusion, she discards the veil of egalitarianism to, paradoxically, refuse her place amongst the "cock sure" Australians of "no special gifts". From this vantage point, Norman could be seen to represent the colonial Australian mentality that will not allow her to be both an expatriate and an Australian. She complains of how he, seemingly threatened by the breadth of her life experience, leaves the room whenever she speaks about her time overseas (February 1938). In these domestic contexts. Franklin is no longer a representative of "that early Australian nationalism [that] embodied progressive egalitarian ideals which led to the creation of a 'working man's paradise'" (Birrell 5). Far from identifying with the "us" who do their own "charring and chores", or celebrating the naïve colonial working man. Franklin seeks a dimension of her own outside these national spaces:

He [Norman] has had, poor fellow, nothing from women but Mother's criticism + then her senile torment; + his wife mad as a hatter from her terrible pathological condition — that and wrestling with rough shearers — and he puts me in the same category evidently. I have to listen to his limited dogmatic statements on everything — me that has been where I've been. etc. To be reduced to this level + that of the small-witted (Mrs W) + defective (Ivy G) is pure, long-drawn torture. (25 February 1938)

In contrasting the domestic space with Franklin's reflections on her overseas experiences, we see that she achieves a synthesis of diverse expatriate and indelible Australian, paradoxically, by transcending national borders. This vantage point enables us to identify how, in the freedom of creative potential that comes from belonging to more than one nation, she is able to champion an Australian mythology that is not distorted by reality, thereby transforming her from the exile at home to the citizen abroad. It is well acknowledged that Franklin maintained links to nation while overseas, pseudonymously, through the writings of Brent of Bin Bin and Mr and Mrs Ogniblat L'Artsau (both names reference Australia)^^ Roe and Bettison refer to the contradiction evident in Franklin's invigorated national identity overseas when she writes: "Paradoxically, being in London, the heart of the Empire, made Miles feel more Austrahan again" {Gregarious xvii). It is indeed ironical that Franklin is only at home in her Australian identity when she is at Home in Great Britain. This contradiction is elucidated by Franklin's particular use of the diary genre as a narrative and nostalgic space of creative potential. For in this space we see that a synthesis of national and expatriate is only achieved in the transcendence of national boundaries and daily contexts. This point is exemplified by the fact that she only wrote of her overseas experiences in the diary notebook she titles "autobiography". In one reflection from this notebook, she writes of a time when, working in London, she was put in the position of having to fmd an Australian representative for the World Conference of Women on Housing. Experiencing difficulties with London bureaucracy and in reference to problems she was having with her employer, Franklin writes: "'This,' said I, 'is a private tow-row, nothing to do with you ... or boosting or busting the Empiah, it's simply me springing to the aid of my own, my native country'" (7 April 1949). Here we see how, in this particular scenario. Franklin achieves an identity as the I of nation:

I said I was not an Englishwoman, overlooking some important or inconsequential colony, I was one of the most dyed-in-the-wool Australians alive, always jealous of and eager for the development + recognition of my country (7 April 1949).

The tensions within the I and the we of Franklin's national identity as examined here can also be productively explored as they play out in her discussions concerning the

Brent, although a name with, as Barnard writes, an "American flavour" (77), was most particularly associated with a national literature because of the pastoral saga of six novels published under this pseudonym. FAW in her diaries. An analysis of the FAW as a microcosm of nation enables us to further identify the ways in which Franklin is alienated within the various literary bodies of nation of which she is also a part. From this vantage point, the shifts between exclusion and belonging can be seen to illustrate Franklin's search for a space within nation, a room within a room, in which she can conflate her authorial and Australian identities and achieve a permanent state of anonymity. In her accounts of the FAW, she positions herself as both the I and we of nation, self-promoting as the ideal representative of nation in contrast to her colleagues. Recording a debate that took place between herself and Devanny regarding the increasing politicisation of the FAW, she writes:

On some lines Jean and I agreed, only that I want the Fellowship for the good of Australian Writers to aid Australian writing for the interpretation of my beloved Australia. Jean wants it to further communism — that's where we go separate roads (10 March 1948).

An exploration of Franklin's isolated embodiment of nation in relation to the FAW further illuminates her alienation from the various bodies within nation. She resisted, for example, the communist presence within the FAW during the 1940s. Indeed it was during that decade that the organisation became, according to Len Fox, largely an instrument of the Communist Party (43). In these diaries. Franklin champions the egalitarian ideals of nation as they clash with the "doctrinal thinking" of her communist colleagues, and considers any deflection within literary debates away from broader Australian concerns to be a national disservice. In this way, we see that Franklin initiates a choice in her diaries between being an Australian and being a communist — it was not possible to be both. This distinction is evident when she describes a lecture given by Katherine Sussanah Pritchard as:

good in regard to Australian literature but she split her theme with her tribute to the Communist Party, which befogged the issue and put it into the narrow confines of controversial party politics instead of leaving it as a national, artistic and cultural consideration (November 1943).

In self-promoting as a distinctively Australian writer here, she accommodates both the I and the we in a similar mode to that achieved as a citizen abroad. This distinctive authorial positioning is also evident when she writes that: "In F.A.W. I wanted the equivalent of a trade union, a fighting organization for all writers whether blimps, torries, socialists or commos" for "writing literature is not the endowment nor prerogative of wearers of shirts of any one color" (10 March 1948). Yet in analysing the FAW as microcosm, we are also able to see how, despite her Utopian desire for an organisation that serves writers irrespective of their politics or religions" (10 March 1948), the daily political realities make the FAW another example of Australia's potential unrealised. As portrayed in Lawson's story "The Union Buries its Dead", egalitarian ideals can be easily distorted by fragile connections and "vulnerable loyalties" (Cantrell 85). A further exploration of the tension between potential and reality in the FAW directs us to identify a crucial dilemma within Franklin's national positioning — that her isolation as the I of nation is necessarily at risk of distorting into the ego I of personal discourses. Her resistance to this distortion is illuminated by the egotistical assertions she makes of others in the FAW, portraying the communists in particular as the ego I that contaminates the we of nation, arguing that their aim, like that of all political regimes, is "to obtain some extra privilege" (10 March 1948):

the commos are so naïve that they don't recognise that a top heavy beaurocracy would soon be sitting fat and self-indulged and as bossily as any other regime. A plague on all exploiteers! (10 March 1948).

This projection of the ego I is, as the previous chapter attested, a technique established by Franklin in her avoidance of the self-reflexive implications of her diaries. Here it can be seen to play out in her description of the over-fed I that prevents the productivity of the FAW, reducing it, like the nation, to a position of "stalemate": "the organization is languishing like a fruit tree infected with too many blights and borers" (10 March 1948). These allusions to infection are also evident in Franklin's references to those who use the FAW for personal advancement. In her Literary Notebooks, she portrays writer Velia Ercole, who confessed in a lecture to removing Australian references from her writing to further aid her opportunities for success overseas, as a prostitute that in sacrificing Australia, has sold herself: '1 should have asked her if the price for this betrayal was very high and why she did not keep a brothel or some other business" (January 1938). Here again we see that Franklin utilises the body of self as a metonym for the body of nation, a metonym via which she sets up comparisons that serve to emphasise the conflation of her own virginal "clean body" (7 April 1949) with a "clean" nation.

Yet the 'divinity' awarded Franklin in this self/nation conflation is undermined in the frustrations of daily realities, frustrations that can be productively explored via her isolation from these self-interested bodies, as they foreground her position as outsider. She often writes of herself as outside the cliques that dominate the FAW:

Marjory B. thought I was a love so to praise 'Prelude to C.' but the cliques have compromised on her rather than accept anything intrinsically indigenously Aust. and the Cliques must hang together to attain some body (11 November 1937).

In her self-descriptions as one of the few remaining autodidacts in these diaries, we are able to see how, in identifying with those self-taught authors of a literary past, such as Furphy, she promotes herself as creatively superior to her learned colleagues. This divide between the learned and the creative was prominent in the nationalist rhetoric of Lawson who, as Stephen Alomes writes, "justly attacked his 'cultured critics' in their cloistered university worlds, they who knew nothing 'of the tracks we tread' and 'of our people'" (28). Her claim to a collection of writers from a by-gone era offers her a way of belonging in isolation, of maintaining anonymity in "a different dimension". But at this point, we also see that a state alienation is exacerbated in her daily experiences with the FAW. As an autodidact, she sets herself apart from university-trained writers whom she describes as "clever at learning, but lowellers at creating" (11 November 1937), arguing that they produce self-interested work that is largely, as she writes of Barnard Eldershaw's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, "academic pedantry and self- imagined superiority" (1948). She writes in 1944 that university students represent "the menace of mediocrity" (7 April 1944), and portrays herself in contrast as one of the truly national writers who are unappreciated in academic environments. This self-assertion is evident in her book of Thoughts and Impressions, when she refers to a time it was suggested that she should write more for university students, arguing in response that it would be better for the nation if they would educate university students to appreciate her (4). Taking up these self-assertions as an illustration of authorial egotism, we are further able to see that the absence threatened by her alienation from the FAW complexly necessitates the presence of the ego I she condemns in others, thereby complicating her conflation with nation. This ambiguity plays out in another 1948 diary entry when she writes of her intention to withdraw entirely from the FAW:

I have never had an idea of how to use the Fellowship for my own ends, in fact, it has contained only people of less experience and scope than myself who are continually coming to me for help and information, and using my name. In any case, my only thought was to do something for Australia through its writers. Now I find it has been a waste of my ability, a lowering of tone to be among such a piffling lot. What a fool I am, as Xavier said. People shd put something into life to entitle them to take something from it (31 March 1948).

Here we see that Franklin simultaneously seeks to be an anonymous author, withdrawing from the self-interested I of the FAW into the national we, whilst asserting the authorial "name" that is exploited by others, claiming her superiority from those with "less experience and scope than myself. This dilemma raises a central paradox in Franklin's national positioning — how to be the author of nation without being an author ego within nation. She is, in this way, a further elucidation of the dream Franklin, for although she seeks spaces within nation in which she can escape the gaze — and rest, and write — anonymity is only achieved as an invisible subject of a monumental Australia. There is no place of comfort to be found for Franklin within the daily worid of the FAW. Indeed, it is her fear of being caught within the cycle of scandal and gossip that motivates her to withdraw from the organisation:

And oh, my, oh, my! How simple I am! I cannot poison my days by suspecting dirt, never having been personally concerned with it except to realise that it is a deplorable phenomenon of human behaviour. No doubt much of this is the baseless slander, also a distasteful phenomenon of human association, but at any rate I shall withdraw from it, I shall cease expending myself to work for these [word incomprehensible] (+ normal) self-seekers + retreat into my secret outlet - my diary (23 March 1948).

This vantage point further enables us to identify how Franklin utilises her diary as an escape from the personal discourses she associates with an outside world. Yet, in the complexities posed by her own ego presence, her withdrawal from the self-seeking I can also be read as a desire to escape the self-reflexive space of her diaries, to achieve an ideal state of anonymity as an invisible presence. Here we see the particular predicament in which Franklin is trapped as an embodiment of a national literary tradition — how to achieve literary greatness without being an ego author or sacrificing the anonymity provided by her indelible Australianness. The conflation of national and religious iconography in these diaries further illuminates Franklin in the guise of the isolated Australian, as she withdraws into a companionship with an imaginary nation to avoid a private subjectivity within daily discourses. Her nationalised religion can be usefully analysed as another technique by which she distinguishes herself from the "self-seekers" and "doctrinal thinkers" in the FAW as an I that is both anonymous and special, thereby escaping the loneliness of isolation via the 'divinity' of nation. In representing imperial loyalism as a kind of false reUgion, she aligns her own nationalism, her Australian faithfulness, with a 'true' religious cause. This false religious imagery is evident when she writes of a time when the Imperial representative Lady Gowrie was backed against a wall while some crawlers kneeled down in front of her, as though she were a "holy idol" (14 February 1938), and again when she describes Australians generally to be "a people ... debauched by worship of royalty" (1 February 1938). She similarly portrays communism as a misplaced faith, "a substitute for religious fanaticism" (10 March 1948). In the midst of the debate she records that took place with Devanny regarding her resistance to party politics in the FAW, Franklin represents her own belief system as an embodiment of the egalitarian ideals of her nationalism:

Returning to my religion, I think it is to give all I can and not to take too much. Never take anything is what I'd like, but one is not entitled to give as a pleasure without similarly accepting from other (23 March 1948).

Here we see that, in the conflation of nationalism and religion. Franklin escapes the ego implications of the I, making herself a servant of nation. There is, however, a contradiction evident in the way Franklin's religion also encapsulates the contemporary liberal thought that marks her as an international subject. Robert Birrell writes of this paradox as a tension that runs through nationalism generally:

contemporary liberal thinking emphasises ideals of personal autonomy and freedom, and thus chafes against an ideology involving constraints and duties in the interest of the national community (3).

Taking up these insights, we are further able to identify the transcendent qualities of Franklin's nationalism as they highlight her expatriation and resist daily and personal discourses. These qualities are evident when, in replying to Devanny's question on whether she has any religion, she champions both personal autonomy and egalitarianism:

The strongest tenet of my religion perhaps is to allow freedom of thought, to allow the human mind to probe, to imagine, to discover: and sympathy: to realise that each human being is a frail mortal prone to suffer, to be defeated, to be full of fears and longings; to share and to help wherever possible (23 March 1948). This vantage point enables us to see how Franklin utilises a transcendent nationalism to associate herself with the potential of the imaginary over daily realities. Li a 1937 entry, Franklin promotes the dream/reality dichotomy in an emotional speech that argues the productive power of the imagination over the limitations of fact. Describing a conversation that took place between herself and American colleague C. H. Grattan, Franklin criticises his suggestion that "what we [Australians] suffer is a dearth of facts scientifically assembled to support our windy idealism":

But I lead him on to enlarge it and felt he knows the world by facts. Facts, facts. Yes, but a factual world that discounts the dream world would never rise above the dust. There never yet has been a fact but it was hatched from the brain of a dreamer. Take flying. Think of the facts that were adduced of old to show that iron ships could not float in water, let alone in air! If the winged dreamers were not enslaved by the wingless grabbers - well, that would be paradise, and there never will be heaven in this dimension, for the dreamers are forever checked by the grabbers whose flag is facts. They know how to plunder and exploit and then when gorged and dyspeptic cry to the dreamers for comfort and diversion (12 January 1937).

Here we see that Franklin's Utopian desire for a synthesis between the factual and "the dream world" is again undermined by the "self-seekers", thereby further indicating the impossibility of a daily Australia. It is the unrealisable dream, posed by daily political realities, of a "heaven in this dimension" that necessitates Franklin's withdrawal into "a different dimension", to a space outside public discourses in which she can hope to achieve her idealised state of anonymity as both the I and we of nation. At this point, having established the impossible I and we of Franklin's national subjectivity, of one who is problematically "cosmopolitan yet indelibly Australian", the dilemmas of a daily Australia can be further productively explored as an issue of temporality. This temporal paradox raises crucial questions concerning the instability of an Australian authenticity in a daily context, directing us to identify the dilemmas posed when nation, as in Franklin's dream, is distorted as a replication of the real thing. This distortion is illuminated as it plays out in the contention between diary as a space for the reamination of the present and as daily discourse^"^. In this way, we see that the intersection of national and diary temporalities within daily contexts intensifies the impossibility of a synthesis between the real and the dream Australia. These moments mark a shift between Franklin's diary as a space for the creative imaginary and as a form of surrogacy, in which Australia is distorted as an imitation of itself. Caught as an embodiment of national potential within a nation that fails to reach its potential. Franklin is displaced as a subject out of time. From this vantage point, the Australia in which she attempts to find both anonymity and authenticity is, in the threat of endless self- replication, reduced to "stalemate". An examination of the tension between the monumental and the daily Australia allows us to identify how Franklin, in her attempts to encapsulate a national memory, is confronted with the unattainable Utopia of a myth-making Australia. There were many features of the national memory developing at this time with which Franklin was not in sympathy. The mythology surrounding Anzac emerged from an increasingly conservative trend in Imperial nationalism, in which the bushman was replaced with the post WWI image of the Australian digger, thereby forging links with Empire (Alomes and Jones 232). Franklin describes Anzac in her diaries as "the greatest blunder in history" (8 January 1936). Discussing an Anzac festival in 1938, she writes: "God that anything cd. be so amateurish, so stupid, so falsely + servilely loyal + pathetic! ... Australia waits — remaining the same for incredible stretches of time" (23 April 1938). Here we see that Franklin's national mythology is undermined as a performative stage for those "falsely" loyal to nation. There is a collision of national and personal memory as she exposes the myth-making of an inaccurate and distorted portrayal of Australia's past. In this way, she introduces the possibility of a national past that cannot be captured in its "original loveliness", and is therefore highlighted as a delayed subject within a replicated Australia^^.

This desire to reanimate the present can be seen in her fiction. As Barnard writes of Brent's chronicle of six novels, they indicate Franklin's intent to keep the past in the present in her resistance to a developing nation (77). Franklin's frustrations with a delayed nation can be seen again when she criticises an Australian artistic community that prioritises international works. After going to the theatre, she writes: "As it would have been difficult to choose anything more pointless, confused and boring these young people, if they had had This vantage point enables us to see how, in the context of daily realities, the "essence" of nation promoted by conventional nationalism can be distorted into what Palmer describes as an "essential lack" in the Australian community (13 November 1937 240). In the nationalistic mode commonly expressed by Franklin, Palmer describes Australia as a lethargic and superficial nation, lacking the nostalgia or Utopian vision required for inspiration. Regarding the poorly attended unveiling of statue to George Higinbotham, she writes:

The whole affair makes me wonder if there isn't some essential lack in us, something missing that keeps our life from having meaning and depth - interest in our past, reverence for those who have shown outstanding qualities of mind or spirit ... It must be because we have no sense of ourselves as a people, with a yesterday and a to-morrow (13 November 1937 240, 241).

Taking up this tension in relation to Franklin, we can see how this lack of a national "meaning and depth" is exacerbated by the surrogacy of her diary writing process, thereby eliciting the fear that there is nothing beneath the surface — that Australia is essentially imitative. These distortions to her authentic Australia are evident when she writes, in reference to a poor turn out to an Australian play:

how utterly indifferent and careless the public is, how unaroused or else entirely indifferent or lacking in cultural interest from the angle of self-respect ... A great exposé of what we are (30 April 1938).

Australia's innate failings as described here are also represented via the image of the distorted body of a genetically inferior nation when she writes, in reference to the appointment of a Librarian she considers incompetent:

one spark of initiative or indigenous self-respect could have done much better by producing some Australian work. Australia waits" (10 December 1944). Many of us know and deplore Metcalf, and the legend of how he happens to be a chief cockylorum librarian is significant of our biological + cultural backwardness and our political imitativeness (1949).

In this entry, we can see how Franklin's nostalgia is distorted into the nation's "backwardness" in daily contexts, stimulating her fear of an essential "imitativeness", and therefore a potential that can never be reached. This temporal dilemma is also illuminated by Franklin's accounts of her literary nation. This comparison between the artistic and daily spaces elucidates the ways in which her alienation from the mythology of a national past further exposes her to an Australia of imitation, myth and parody. In its ability to capture the essence of nation, art offers protection against the superficial implications of the dailyYet in examining how the artistic nation plays out in Franklin's diaries, we see that a tension is exacerbated between literature as a way to capture the unique nation and as an instrument of myth- making. In resisting the possible parodic implications of fiction, she intensifies the dichotomy between the real and the artistic, avidly promoting the idea, prominently associated with the 1890s, that an authentically national literature "locates the 'true Australia'" (Cantrell xiv). This dichotomy is evident in her diaries in her defence of a national literature against the prevailing trend towards imitation; as Alan Morehead wrote of the early Australian literary scene: "as far as possible the local environment was ignored; all things had to be a reflection of life in England" (qtd in Alomes 99). She expresses an objection towards "the expatriate mentality that wd. condemn Australians to paint + write in imitation of European standards + conventions" (10 December 1944). Palmer expresses a similar nostalgic attitude to Franklin in her diaries when she writes of those Australian writers of a by-gone era "whose voices echoed so loudly through an Australia that had hitherto been modestly and timorously silent", but, unlike Franklin, also refers to the parodic quality of literature from that time (18 March 1933 112). This contrast is evident when she writes that it is a pity the "patriotic and Utopian" men of the

In her diaries, Palmer quotes a letter from Conrad in which he champions hterature as a space of authenticity, in which the "surface" qualities of life are transcended. Describing the need to approach fiction "in a spirit of serious devotion", he argues: "he who undertakes fiction with no other purpose than earning a living has undertaken a contemptible task. He will never do good work — because he will never think it worth his while to look beneath the surface of things" (31 August 1927 26). nineties "laid such value on emphasis that they were easy to parody and often seemed to parody themselves" (18 March 1933 112)^^ A comparison between Palmer and Franklin on this topic elucidates the extent to which Franklin uses art to resist parody, allowing her to shift from the "great exposé of what we are" to the "'true' Australia". Relating a lecture given by George Mackaness on Australian literature, she expresses distress at the familiar announcement that, for English publishers, Australian novels "must be universal in theme, must have the world outlook":

In developing this he showed clearly that this means Aust. material must be de- Australianised, must conform to overseas ideas ... hum! Australia is the only country which mustn't be itself in literature. Supposing you set out to Eng. Novelists that they must not mention the elm or oak or the ferns or downs! Pursue that thought (3 April 1938).

Here we can see that fiction alone is the "dream world" that enables Franklin's Australia to be the thing "itself, thereby contrasting to the daily realities that promote the inferiority of "what we are". In another entry, to avoid the association of fiction and imitation, she defends against the perverting of a national mythology into nationalistic clichés, criticising commercials that "are trying to exploit the novelty of Australia by carpentering it up in jazz from Hollywood and London" (18 September 1937). She again makes the body a metonym of nation in her resistance to the contaminating effects of parody. This metonym is evident when she compares the seduction of art to the rape of nation by a film commission looking to interpret Australia for an international audience: "The idea is to imitate Hollywood in a get-rich-quick rape of a new field ... Trade rape instead of the seductive wooing of art" (28 January 1938).

This analysis of art as a resistance to the daily further raises the crucial question of what happens to Franklin's national identity when the nostalgia on which her national literature depends is distorted into mimicry in the surrogate space of the diary. This

^^ The increasing awareness of Australian mythology as parody can also be seen in Palmer's diaries when, asked by a young German writer what was "the proper persona for Australia?", she and husband Vance can only suggest "half-heartedly that there might be something in the idealized figure of the digger - or the bushman", finding they "couldn't meet him on his own exalted ground" (6 August 1933 122). vantage point enables us to see how, in the colHsion of nostalgia and the daily discourse of Franklin's diaries, the past comes to represent the absence of what cannot be recaptured. In the shifts between the immortality of an "eternal now" of diary writing and the mortality of a present moment that indicates a lost past, we can see how Franklin's nostalgia is distorted into alienation and the threat of absence. In this way, her nostalgia in these diaries clarifies her temporal displacement within nation, signifying "a sign of longing that expresses a sense of being out-of-tune with one's present time and place" (Williams 4). There are several jottings from her book of Thoughts and Impressions in which the reflections on the past serve to signify Franklin's inevitable journey towards death and her unrealisable desire for immortality, thereby elucidating the way in which the Utopian vision of her nationalism can be distorted into the sense of loss and loneliness that haunts the present:

We may rebel in the present, and have the heady delusion that we can improve the future, but we are helpless about the past. It has gone away for ever / If only death would die and Life be less fleeting and uncertain (116).

Furthermore, by exploring Franklin in a temporal space that is "fleeting and uncertain", we can see how this mortality destabilises artistic discourses; literary production is prevented by the realisation that she is unable to contain the past in its "original loveliness": "Everything, everyone slips away. I too shall soon be gone, leaving this beauty without ever having had time, strength, opportunity or ability to articulate it" (26 January 1936). This examination of the mortal space of Franklin's nostalgia also enables us to identify a central paradox in her diary writing, for it is the sense of loss arising from her reflections on the past that necessitates her use of diary as surrogacy, and prevents the creative productivity inspired by an imaginary nation. In this way, we can see how her nostalgia is implicated in the imitation of life. This predicament is evident when she represents the past as a series of empty scenes, waiting to be performed in the present: "It is sad beyond endurance to return to old scenes, but when the scene is empty, the arena cold" (6 September 1943). She refers to her diary writing as the only way to "shed the chronic anguish of remembrance" (25 February 1947). This vantage point allows us to see that it is in the present moment, while reflecting on the act of writing, that her nostalgia is distorted into reflections on death — indeed, she concludes that death is the only cure for the "anguish" of nostalgia:

To set it down in writing is an old cure, perhaps it has some efficacy. Some new shock treatment that would fmish me altogether would be the only cure, but would it be the end, or perchance to dream? (25 February 1947).

Here we see how, in the complexity posed by a present moment nostalgia. Franklin is caught in the collision of the dream/reality dichotomy on which her nationalism is dependent, shifting between, as her Shakespearean reference implies, her Utopian desire for a "heaven in this dimension" and the haunting of death. Furthermore, this contradiction also elucidates her nostalgia as it signifies the endless repetition of the proliferative writing process. This dilemma is evident when she writes of nostalgic grief as "that seductive sadness which sucks its victims into the quicksands of inertia" (Thoughts and Impressions 122), thereby making the present a lethargic and unproductive space of delay. This link between nostalgia and "inertia" can also be productively explored as it elucidates Franklin's fear of being a forgotten author, as one who lacks totalising control over the imagination of the nation. From this point, her references to a "nostalgia of oblivion" (6 September 1943) can be seen to indicate her anxieties concerning the place of destination, for as a "state of being forgotten" (OED), oblivion is also the empty space to which nonentities are destined to return: "As I let go there will be no wrack nor wraith of any of us. We shall have faded as all the other countless myriads of nonentities" (25 February 1947). To "let go" is, in this way, to relinquish textual authority and be exposed to the great unknown. In this state of potential absence. Franklin is an isolated and lonely subject with no claim to divinity or immortality:

I must not again go alone. The gone-awayness is too sapping. The sunlight caresses the gravestones and the wind sweeping over them intones the very essence of that oblivion from which we came and to which we go (6 September 1943).

In taking up the insights of Barthes into the death of the author here, we are further able to elucidate this space of oblivion to which Franklin must go as it signifies the space in which the reader is born, this reader that, while marking her death, also signifies the possibility of life. This paradox is illuminated by those moments in which Franklin, in the throws of nostalgic grief, experiences silence as death — and thereby as the haunting of the reader who, by Derrida's theory, is necessary for "communication to occur" and who places Franklin at risk of "not being heard or being heard differently" (Anderson 82). In this way, silence signifies Franklin's most profound fear concerning her death as an author — that there will be no-one to hear or to read her, or to use her name. This fear can be seen in Franklin's use of silence in her diaries as a metaphor for absence: "The mystery of life is for ever at the mercy of the silence called death ... We are baffled and defeated by the silence of the dead ... The dead are so pitilessly silent" (Thought and Impressions 122, 114, 118). At this point, we can extend the study of Franklin's national temporalities as they play out in her occupation of an Australian space, thereby enabling us to see how the paradoxical position she occupies both inside and outside of nation exposes her to the foreigner within. This dilemma is illuminated in the tension between her desire to embody the living spirit of nation and the haunting ghosts that signify, as in her dream, a national past from which she is alienated. This particular tension is elucidated by post- structural and psychoanalytical theories, which provide a way of understanding nation as a metaphor of self via the image of the ghost. These theoretical insights allow us to read the ghost as it represents the unstable boundaries inside/outside nation in which the foreigner is an expression of Franklin's own otherness. From this vantage point, we see that her ghosts are paradoxically both emblematic of a fear of death and of what Freud describes in "The 'Uncanny'" (1919) as the rejection of mortality by the unconscious. As Kristeva writes: "Apparitions and ghosts represent that ambiguity and fill with uncanny strangeness our confrontations with the image of death" (Kristeva Strangers 185). The ambiguity created by Franklin's rejection of mortality is evident in her dream when the spirits that terrify her with exposure to the gaze, symbolising her death at the hands of her readers, also offer her the comfort of a place within the monumental time of nation, as both an anonymous and immortalised author. This dilemma can also be productively explored as it plays out in her diaries in the tension between her search for "the glory of the dead centre of my Australia", and an Australia that represents the inevitability of death. In this way, as we see with the dream subject. Franklin's search within the rooms of her Australia for a space of mergence also produces the shadow anxiety of the replicated nation that can never "be itself. This perspective allows us to examine Franklin's ghosts as an expression of her "fear of foreignness", and as a key dilemma of her time, that also destabilises her relationship to nation, thereby exposing her as a subject caught in the haunting space between the self/other dichotomy. Here we can see that the shadow space is also the space of impossibilities within her national identity; alienation occurs because she is haunted by those same dilemmas that confront the dream subject — how to escape the readers that are also the place of destination, and how to be isolated as the divine expression of nation while avoiding the loneliness of her journey towards death. These questions can be further elucidated as the particular predicament Gelder and Jacobs describe: "the difficulty of disentangling what is one's 'home' from what is not one's 'home' — what is 'foreign' or strange" (26). An examination of this ambiguity also allows us to identify how Franklin uses her diaries as a "psychic privacy" in which to disentangle the foreigner from the self. This vantage point illuminates the extent to which she had internalised the anxieties of her time concerning national boundaries. Roe writes that World War I, in forcing the issue of national identity in Australia and elsewhere, "sharpened the distinctions between nationals and aliens" (69). WiUiams also refers to the 1920s and 1930s as Australia's "disturbingly isolationist phase", a time when "keeping out the 'other' meant ensuring ... Australian racial purity" (5, 6). In this way, we can see that Franklin's expressed need for isolation in these diaries, both as a national subject and from her Australian counterparts, emerged from within a cultural ideology that "presented a need to deny and decry all that was seen as confronting and potentially contagious, whether within or outside the frontiers of the nation state" (Williams 5). Racism was also a prominent feature of the Australian literary tradition from which Franklin emerges. As Alomes writes, "the potential for radical dreams of a millennium, of a new world, to be distorted into racism and militarism was apparent in the stories of the Bulletin and of Henry Lawson" (32). It is well acknowledged that Franklin held some of the racist ideas of the time. Modjeska comments on the racial prejudices evident in her letters, prejudices which were "all too common in Australia at that time", most particularly her support for the white Australia policy and opposition to the immigration of Jewish and Southern European refugees (181). Although never a supporter of fascism, she was attracted to some of the ideas of the Australia First Movement (Modjeska 185, 186). This racism is not, however, prominent in her diaries, and indeed she is even prone to criticising the bigotry in others, as can be seen when she complains of her friend Stanley's anti-Russian post-war sentiment (27 May 1949). The distinctions Franklin is preoccupied with making between national and alien is prevailingly that of the radical nationalist versus the imperial loyalist. In this respect, she was an active participant in the debate that was, on the cusp of World War I, "still being waged about what being an Australian meant, and even whether white Australians were as yet other than transplanted Britons" (Williams 2). An exploration of the psychic space of her exclusory nationalism further enables us to see that her withdrawal into the rooms of nation, like her "retreat into my secret outlet — my diary", is a way to negate any reflection that challenges the dignity of her authorship. For it is through this dignity that Franklin nurtures an exclusory nation, as one who needs to "deny or decry all that is potentially contagious" to the national imaginary. This exclusion is evident a letter to colleague Kate Baker in which she writes, in reference to her novel All That Swagger: "It was written for Australia, + those who love + understand Australia are Australia" (18 October 1936). From this vantage point, we see how Franklin exacerbates her authorial isolation to be the sole embodiment of Australia as living spirit:

Other countries pile up against their background. Australia has nothing to take a stand against - so, wraith-like she eludes. Unique, she has no comparison. Comparison does not present her. She escapes from the unperceptive. She is as different from other countries as a eucalypt is different from other trees (22 June 1937).

This image is emblematic of Franklin's claim to a "unique" subjectivity, a claim that prevents her from being caught in the loop of self-replication. In this way, this description serves as another example of how nation makes her "a diviner's cup" (Warner 7), one who looks only outwards — a "wraith-like" and elusive presence that sees and cannot be seen. Furthermore, as an embodiment of living spirit and with no fear of her Australian ghosts, she is in harmony with the monumental time of nation as expressed within what Williams describes as a "'back-to-the-land'" nostalgia — her celebration of Australia as a pre-developed nation (5). A nostalgic attachment to the land has indeed been a prevailing feature of nationalism generally. In English literature, the romanticised landscape can be traced back, at the very least, as far as Shakespeare's description of England as "this fortress built by Nature for herself ... this precious stone set in the silver sea" from Richard II (ii 1). This nostalgic movement was around "in the folkloric revival of north-western Europe in the late nineteenth century" and "had waxed and waned in 'new society' cultures for generations", receiving "vital shots in the arm" due to the disenchantment that followed World War I (Williams 5). They re-emerged post World War I "as the power élites in many societies claimed to seek ... a return to the racial and simple values of that imaginary past" (Williams 5). Alomes similarly writes, in reference to the early days of New South Wales:

this was, as always, the first stage of patriotism, the love of the immediate environment; for those 'currency' lads and lasses this was the love of the soil, even the dry soil of Australia and the affection for its familiar, and no longer completely foreign, eucalyptus trees and distinctive fauna (5).

This '"back-to-the-land"' nostalgia raises crucial questions concerning the ambiguity of a daily nationalism because it foregrounds, as Susan Martin suggests when writing of the 1890s/zn de siecle, a paradox between a return to the past and a present day culture.

there is some tension in Australian writing across this period between an idea of nation constituted through its people, and an idea of nation understood through place and distinctive environment (95).

This contradiction highlights the distinction between Franklin's expatriation and her "true Australianism". In this way, we see that it is by negotiating this paradox that she is able to occupy three worlds and belong to one. This accommodation is evident in a letter she writes to friend Leonora Pease:

It is the land itself that I love as a separate entity. I think I love the Americans best of all the peoples I know. In England I love the things that men have made, the food for the intellect, the art treasures, the social contacts possible, and in Australia it is the continent itself (12 March 1938 qtd. in Roe 72).

An exploration of Franklin's "back-to-the-land" nationalism as it plays out in her diaries allows us to see further tensions between her desire to conflate her own identity with that of the Australian spirit and with Australia as the thing "itself. At this point, taking up the insights provided by post-structural theories, we are able to identify Franklin as a living personality that invites the haunting of death. Derrida illuminates the dilemma posed by a nature/nation dichotomy when he argues that nature introduces the possibility of death, and is, therefore, "a denaturation of life" (15). In this way, nature necessarily challenges the immortality of the national imagination. As Derrida writes, "the philosophy of Being as philosophy of nature (in opposition to the philosophy of spirit and therefore life) is a philosophy of death" (15). An examination of the Being/spirit dichotomy of Franklin's diaries directs us to identify the strategies by which she resisted the distortion of the national spirit into a philosophy of death, attempting to make her Australian ghosts a familiar and comforting presence rather than an expression of the uncanny and a source of alienation. The nature of this resistance can be efficaciously analysed as it plays out in Franklin's strategic return to the familiar landscape of her Australian childhood, a technique via which she conflates personal and national memory in the celebration of a pioneering colonial history. For in this return, she is able to avoid the distortions of nostalgia by protecting the pre-developed nation in its "original loveliness". This vantage point allows us to see the extent to which her Australian home is exemplified by the family home of her early years. She writes in her diaries of the journey she takes back to her family home of Stillwater (an outback property near Canberra), and yet in this return home is also confronted with the impossibility of a return, as she discovers a childhood place that has been distorted from its original form. Once again adopting the metaphor of nation as body, she writes of how she was saddened to fmd that the wattle blossoms had been "skinned" and sold: "Must all beauty go in the trade necessity of supporting shoddy and often soulless human beings?" (28 June 1936). Here we see the dilemma of the native/nation binary, in the tension between Franklin's desire to protect Australia as living spirit and the tangible reality of a developing nation. She is only able to avoid this contradiction in the productive space of writing, through which she can capture, as she writes of her autobiography My Childhood at Brindabella, the Australia of "my first ten years", reanimating the Eden in which she transcends the anxieties of her ambiguous positioning inside/outside nation: "through the isolation in unspoiled Australia is a circle where I never knew harshness, want, or fears — internal or external" (9 March 1953). A further exploration into this family space enables us to identify another technique via which Franklin attempts to recreate this Edenic national space in her diaries — bringing her parents to life in writing as an embodiment of the pioneering colonial Australia of her childhood. By writing to her parents in the temporality of an "eternal now", she reanimates this Australian home in the present writing moment, and therefore in an immortalised space in which, as Lejeune writes, "the diarist is protected from death by the idea that the diary will continue" (101). In the diary letter she writes to her father where she describes her visit to Stillwater, she represents him as a spiritual embodiment of the hard working colonial man: I miss you always and ever. A spirit exerts a stronger influence than all else, and you were never unkind ... On, on you went on the toil of indestructible hopelessness, and when only spirit was left you, you were richer with each year (28 June 1936).

While living, Franklin's mother is representative of the nation's "spiritual poverty" (8 January 1936); she is not only "dead spiritually" herself but is accused by Franklin of "killing her spiritually" (6 February 1936). After her death, however, her mother is also nostalgically remembered as a spiritual embodiment of a colonial past: "Oh, Mother, how you struggled! You never let go, never missed a stitch. You had unrelaxing fortitude" (25 February 1947). In the language Franklin adopts here regarding her colonial heritage, we can see how Australia signifies her refusal to relinquish control, for to "let go" of the nation's past is to give in to the threat of her own "gone-awayness" (6 September 1943), to an oblivion in which "there will be no wrack nor wraith of any of us". Her nostalgia for her parents is part of this resistance; she makes them emblematic of the Australian home of her childhood, using their resurrections as a way to keep alive a space that has always been productive.

Conversely, an examination of Franklin within the present day Australian home she occupies in the suburbs of Sydney enables us to see that she champions herself as an alien. From this vantage point, we can identify how, for Franklin, the suburbs represent the spoiling effects of a developing nation, and thereby a space of spiritual death. By refusing her place within this Australia, she is abiding by the bush/city dichotomy that prevails in hyper-conventional nationalism. This dichotomy is most memorably played out in the poetic debate between Lawson and Paterson, published in the Bulletin, in which Lawson mocks Paterson's celebration of the bush in describing him as The City Bushman and concluding in his An Answer to Various Bards that "to hang around the townships suits us better, you'll agree" (qtd. in Alomes 28). Franklin suffered a similar dilemma as an artist who preferred the intellectual stimulation of the city but championed the bush as the home of 'real' Australia. On her 1937 journey around Australia, she recalls saying to Frank Clune while coo-eeing in the outback: 'Now,' I said, 'You'll understand why I am always drumming it in to you that the only original Australian culture we have is bushmanship, + why no townie can ever overawe me, no matter what his assumed superiority' (Travel Diary 6 June - 1 July 1937).

The ambiguities in her identification with the bush over the city also allows us to see how she is further alienated as a subject outside nation. She describes the suburbs in these diaries as a place of foreignness, of intrusion on an original nation, in which she is displaced. This alienation is evident when she writes, after a walk of the area surrounding her home in Carlton: "How hideous is that way: this common ugly street reflecting the stage of development of its denizens" (January 1936). The term "denizens", if taken to mean "a foreigner allowed certain rights in their adopted country" (OED), associates suburban development with an alien population from whom Franklin is distinguished as a 'native'. Here we can also see how, as representative of the potential of a pre-developed Australia, Franklin finds she has her autonomy limited in her suburban home: "But I am more circumscribed in isolation among these petty suburbanites with no gorgeous scenery to refresh my famished soul" (Travel Diary 6 June - 1 July 1937). Nature is the only place in which Franklin finds relief from the loneliness of this isolation, as a 'native' in an alien environment. In a 1936 entry, she writes that she is saved from being "sunken in despair" in the suburbs when she is able to "see and smell the red rose at the foot of the garden ... the perfume of the pittosporums" (January 1936). Yet her nostalgia for plants that are, respectively, native to England and America can also be seen to signify that, as one who has had different national homes. Franklin cannot easily lay claim to a single continent as a space of belonging. Franklin's alienation at home can also be productively explored in her account of the 1937 journey she took to "the dead centre of my Australia", as it illuminates her ambiguous national positioning, as one who remains an exile in the "glory" of her mergence with the 'real' nation. This ambiguity is evident in the very concept of a journey that takes Franklin 'home', for this is also a journey that must necessarily be returned from. As an artist who, much like her contemporaries Lawson and Paterson, had no intention of living in the bush, Franklin makes her journey into the bush precisely because it is an idealised, unattainable other. This displacement is evident in her Travel Diary when she writes of being lost in the bush:

The silence, the wide emptiness, how frightening to an alien abandoned in it ... the vast palpitating presence of the atmosphere flowed all around like an ocean. I loved it. I was at home here as some pilgrim reaching the goal (6 June - 1 July 1937).

Here we can identify a contradiction in the way that, although Franklin claims to have returned "home" through this journey, she also sees her 'native' Australia as a site of pilgrimage. This pilgrimage can be elucidated according to Blanton's concept of the home and away dynamic of the travel diary in which "the strange, the exotic, the dangerous, and the inexplicable" plays out in stories that also require "the traveller/narrator's well-being and eventual safe homecoming" (xi, 2). This vantage point further enables us to see that it is paradoxically because Franklin is on a pilgrimage that she escapes the alien "terror" of the exile at home, as experienced by the dream subject. As an unknown traveller at the "dead centre" of Australia, she attains complete anonymity, thereby enabling the conflation between self and nation without the haunting of her own stranger within. In this way, her anonymity allows her to achieve her goal of being at one with the "continent itself. Here her Australia is illuminated as "the atmosphere that flows all around" her, as well as the silence that is transformed from the symbol of a lost past into the positive isolation of self from otherness. This transformation is evident when she describes the silence of the bush as "absorptive" like the dust (6 June - 1 July 1937). Furthermore, it is only in her mergence of an "unspoiled Australia" with the "clean body" of her "spotless virginity" (3 May 1942) that she paradoxically experiences what Kristeva refers to as jouissance. This contradictory pleasure can be seen when she describes the bush, not long after her return from her travels, in terms both virginal and sensual; whereas H. M. Green "still thinks the bush grim and gloomy". Franklin in contrast "always feel it so clean + warm and dry + safe that I cd. burrow into it bodily" (8 February 1938). The inconsistencies evident in Franklin's relationship to an uncanny Australia can be elucidated as part of the literary tradition concerning a melancholic landscape, a tradition that indicates the extent to which white Australia's alienation from the land has been embedded in its writing. In their discussion of Australian ghost stories, Gelder and Jacobs argue that there is commonly "a structure in which sameness and difference embrace and refuse each other simultaneously" (42). This tradition emerged, as literary scholar Michael Ackland suggests, partly in response to an international literary movement, for sensational writing was in demand in Australia as elsewhere during the nineteenth century, "and aspiring authors wasted no time in peopling the bush with ghosts and inexplicable occurrences" (xxiv). Australia's unique landscape was defined within these international literary trends, thereby creating a contradiction that can be seen in Marcus Clarke's description of "the dominant note of Australian Scenery" as "Weird Melancholy" — a term taken from the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Clarke also argued that "in Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird ... and the beauty of loneliness"; he encourages a picture of a "grim and gloomy" Australia with descriptions of the mountain forests as "funereal, secret, stern" and the animal life as "either grotesque or ghostly". Lawson's representations of the spiritually enticing and perplexing Australian bush are often compared to Clarke's, for they both "offered a grim démystification of country and small-town existence" (Ackland xxii). "The Bush Undertaker" highlights the obscurity and strangeness of life on the land: "And the sun sank again on the grand Australian bush - the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands" (9). Franklin's relationship to an alienating Australian landscape can be constructively examined as a mimicry of this melancholic literary tradition, as it signifies her estrangement within an endlessly replicated space. This vantage point enables us to see that, despite her resistance to Green's descripfion of the bush as "grim and gloomy", she is exacerbated as an exile at home via descriptions of an uncanny landscape. Here we can further identify how, by returning to these images in the surrogate space of her diaries, she is ambiguously placed as an author that produces neither life nor fiction in a destabilising space that conflates the inside and outside of her Australia. This instability is illuminated by Franklin's descriptions of a national past that she fails to capture, thereby confronting her with the realisation that there is no opportunity for mergence with this Australian continent, with an "original loveliness" that precedes white settlement. Her alienation can be seen to play out in her descriptions of voices from a national past that she fails to recall. This failure is evident in her account of the dream where, despite the comfort she experiences in her placement as an invisible presence in the company of her ghostly "war-time" veterans in her dream, she finds when she wakes that their conversations "will not come back to me". When recalling the "glamorous sight" of visiting the place where "Sturt met the blacks like a man and a gentleman" in her Travel Diaries, Franklin is again both within sight of her nation's history and outside the hearing range of her national ghosts:

The place seems haunted with that historical event. The tribes still stand there as in a mirage, the atmosphere is instinct with long-gone presence. The voices seem to be almost within hearing (6 June - 1 July 1937).

At this point, we can see that this ambiguity in her relationship to a national past opens up a space of haunting within her nationalism. Furthermore, an exploration of this haunting enables us to identify how the "long-gone presence" of these ghosts can be distorted into the threat of absence, as Franklin experiences the alienation of generations of white Australians: "The haunting silence, the sense of gone-awayness left by the passing of my grandfather's generation, by my father's and by many of my own" which "had left no dint on the gone-awayness of the vanished Aborigines who had wraithed away leaving obhvion as oblivion had found them" (Thoughts and Impressions 111-113). These ghosts introduce a crucial dilemma concerning which national past Franklin has access to as a white Australian. An examination of this dilemma enables us to see how a national haunting prevents her return to the pioneering colonial Australia of her childhood, exposing her instead to the unfamiliar pre-colonial Australia, and therefore to a national history in which she has no place. In this way, the ambiguities created by the presence of the unfamiliar can be seen to create a process of decolonisation in her diaries, as she realises that "what is 'ours' is also potentially, or even always already, 'theirs': the one is becoming the other, the familiar is becoming strange" (Gelder and Jacobs 23). The anxiety of this process is, as Kristeva writes, a symptom of the uncanny, signifying the extent to which Franklin is a stranger to herself when outside the anonymity provided by nation: 'To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts" {Strangers 191). The dilemma of this choice can be seen to play out in the dream subject whose "terror" is a response to the failure of anonymity, and who smiles only when distance from the ghostly other of a national past is achieved via "a different dimension". Kristeva's insights further direct us to identify how her own foreignness is exacerbated at other moments of failed anonymity in her diaries:

Each death in my circle, and particularly the going of those who have known or shared my childhood, drenches me with chill terror of the emptiness of this strange isolated land. It is as if I felt the tremors of the first exiles. We took it from the Aborigines. We do not yet possess it spiritually. We destroy, deface, insult, misunderstand it - whack it - but it resists (6 September 1943).

Here we see that her loss of her childhood, as signified by the death of childhood friends, is explicitly linked to her alienation from nation. The exposure that results from the lack of a national mask is signified by the distortion of "the emptiness of this strange isolated land" from a space of comfort, as on her travels, into lonehness and the threat of absence. Later in this entry, a lack of spiritual connection is elucidated by a further distortion, as the Australian spirit that she would embody is transformed into the haunting of death from an alien past:

In the shock of bereavement - the thinning of family support - I see a dark spirit running over the land, a spirit akin to a sardonic smile, with the same mockery that is in the laugh of the kookaburra - that laugh which is loud, robust, hilarious, but aches with a mystery so baffling that it is tragic. That dark smile that runs over the land as if all the nostalgia of oblivion lay there unquenched and unforgiving (6 September 1943). In illuminating this link between the spirit and ghosts of a national past, we are able to read Franklin's Australia as it is emblematic of her own foreignness. This perspective enables us to see that moments of isolation and exposure as a mortal I always accompany the failure of her national masking. The destabilised boundaries of Franklin's nation can be further clarified by a comparison between her description of an uncanny Australia in the above entry and the alienating landscape referred to by foreigners such as D. H. Lawrence. For Lawrence also writes of a "sombre", "lonely" landscape and a Jormless beauty" of Australia, "which is undeniably there, but which seems to lurk just beyond the range of our white vision" {Kangaroo 87). In this way, we can identify Franklin's descriptions as a modernist and an outsider's perspective, as both she and Lawrence experience the Australian spirit as an entity that precedes white history. Similarly to Franklin's depiction of Australia's "dark spirit", Lawrence writes of the outback as "a dark face. It is so aboriginal, out of our ken, and it hangs back so aloof (87). Having established Franklin's desire to be, as this chapter attests, an embodiment of the living spirit of Australia in the continuous present of her diaries, this thesis will further go on to explore how this national masking is implicated in her withdrawal form sexually defining discourses. This chapter has augmented the analysis provided by the previous chapter concerning the I and we of the totalising and anonymous author by determining that it is only as the monumental nation that Franklin's terror of exposure can be abated. From here, this argument can be further extended to consider how nation was also a replacement for Franklin's gender, offering freedom from the confines posed by sexual definition. By exploring this anonymity, we can see how, as an author who stands alone as the embodiment of nation. Franklin is also alone of all her sex. The divinity she claims through her identification with an "unspoiled Australia" is also promoted by her "spotless virginity", thereby indicating the extent to which her withdrawal from gender and into national discourses was essential to her productivity as a writer. The paradox posed by the 'divine' I in the self-reflexive space of the diary, as analysed here in relation to Franklin's national masking, will be taken up in a study of her gender, notably as it offers a productive vantage point from which to explore how the ego I plays out in her relationships with other women. This dilemma is also illuminated within the complex temporality of Franklin's diary writing, as it elucidates the tension between an "essence" — of nation or gender — and the performances within her daily environment. Having explored the tension between imitation and potential as it plays out the implications of the daily in nation, this thesis continues with a consideration of how women are positioned within the daily of Franklin's Utopian feminism, as a community that fails to reach its potential, and for whom she is also waiting in the space of her diaries. An examination of the way in which women are also implicated in the essentiaUst/performative dichotomy directs us to identify how this distinction, as a dilemma of her time, plays a determining role in her own self-mythologising. This vantage point also enables us to see how disruptions to this mythologising expose her as a stranger to herself, as she is haunted with the possibility that there are no essentials in which to seek anonymity, and therefore that there may only be a space of endless replication.

This gender study takes us further into the psychic spaces of the performative Franklin, thereby illuminating her claim to flawlessness and consistency as a necessary technique by which to escape the "terror" of exposure. From here we see that her ambiguous positioning in relation to the permeable boundaries of nation plays out in similar ways in relation to the sexual definition that threatens her with death, placing her both inside and outside gender. In this way. Franklin is further elucidated as a private subject in public discourse via her reluctance to settle on any single identity, to be one thing or another. A further exploration into the dilemma posed by the productive possibilities of being all things and the debilitating prospect of being none of them also allows us to identify Franklin as a victim of her own internal. Having examined the curse of Franklin's self-repetition as a national subject, this thesis goes on to explore how her acceptance of the role of dutiful daughter causes a similar, and particularly costly, psychic entrapment. This entrapment, as it plays out in the intersection of the domestic and national homes, raises crucial questions concerning what it means to be a daughter of the nation. Miles Franklin's Female Voice:

Alone of all her sex

This chapter concentrates a reading of Franklin's iconic AustraHan authorship with a specific gendered focus. Such a focus allows us to examine the ways in which her daily life as a woman writer destabilises the authority of the L These instabilities can be productively explored, as will be seen, in the conflation of biblical and national iconography, via Franklin's self-mythologising as a 'divine' entity, one who is alone of all her sex. In a further examination of the tension between process and product extending from the study of her authorial voice, this chapter identifies how the gendered process of writing and living undermines a totalising authorship, and thereby a claim to national superiority. This analysis illuminates the paradox posed by Franklin's desire for the pre-defined creative potential enabled within processes of production, and her need to be the unchanging "classic text". This vantage point enables us to identify Franklin as a productive subject in her ability to be all things, adopting the best of masculine and feminine discourses. And yet here we also see the debilitation caused by the prospect of occupying no position, of the absence of "oblivion" (6 September 1943) that threatens to linger behind the mask. An examination of the shifts between the social and the psychic in "the dynamics of her interior life", allows us to see, as will be analysed, how gender functions as a destabilising factor in the production of the coherent subject. Utilising Butler's theories on gender performativity, this chapter attests to the instability of the gender I, promoting the idea that if "the 'inner world' no longer designates a topos, then the internal fixity of the self and, indeed, the internal locale of gender identity, become similarly suspecf (108). Here the conflation of self and gender further facilitates an understanding of the tension between Franklin's use of the diary as a place of adamant self-assertion, in which she can lay claim to the ego I of the diary, and a space in which to refuse self-definition. This refusal indicates her awareness that, as McMahon writes in reference to the protagonist of Eve Langley's The Pea-pickers, "any sexual definition would signify a death to self ("Oscar" 105). This ambiguity, I want to contend here, goes to the heart of the writing project as it re-opens the matter of Franklin's gendered masking, illuminating her struggle with the dilemma of how to redefine the national space to include the assertive female whilst attempting to maintain her position as an iconic representation of a masculine nationalist literary tradition. This vantage point enables us to see how Franklin's diaries, as both hybrid and process texts, can be used to uncover what Sheridan describes as "'the suppressed opposition between masculinity and femininity'' on which the distinctive Australian literary tradition in based (50). There are further implications here, as will be seen, for the national I, ambiguously asserted by the woman who, as Woolf suggests in her 1938 essay Three Guineas, is necessarily without country. In foregrounding processes of national and gender construction in a genre that "compose[s] the diarist who has composed the entries" (Hogan 13), we can identify Franklin as she is trapped by the dilemma of her times. For in reality, as Sheridan writes of the early Australian literary scene, ''women can only be admitted to the ranks of Australian literature despite their gender — they cannot be writers, Australians, and women all at once" ("Women" 94).

The focus of this chapter first centres on current scholarship concerning Franklin's public and private feminism, elucidating the self-assertive woman writer as she emerges in the prevailing tension between perceptions of her "fierce" feminism (Cusack ABC Broadcast 1975) and her reputation as a "cultural nationalist par excellence'' (Roe 67). As the only one of her Australian colleagues to have, as Sheridan writes, "had that experience of feminism as a political movement" ("Women" 94), Franklin has been a figure of interest in what Modjeska describes as "a period of crisis in feminism" (14). It was expected, as Sheridan wrote in 1982, that her private papers would elucidate the obscure relationship "between this disillusionment with organised feminism and social work, and Franklin's later self-definition in relation to cultural nationalism" ("Women" 93). Brunton's selection of the diaries, having neglected Franklin's more outspoken feminist views in these manuscripts, could be seen to augment this obscurity by promoting her in the image of the national icon. In this way, his edition is not representative of the complex relationship between her public and private feminism. Expanding on the more recent performative readings, as offered by Pratt and Henderson among others, this discussion goes on to argue that these diaries are a return to what Pratt describes as the "fiery fictional heroine" of Sybylla (Sircar 177). For as a hybrid combination of the fictional and the autobiographical, these diaries allow Franklin a place of "psychic privacy" (Nussbaum "Diary" 135) in which to, as Sybylla writes, orchestrate a "rebellion against artificial WOMANLINESS" {Bung 20). The analysis continues with an exploration into the tensions between the assertive ego I and totalising author as it plays out in the variety of Franklin's gendered performances. From here, we are able to identify the distinctions she establishes between the social and the psychic of her gendered identity and how this segregation reveals her need for a de-gendered internal space in which to be a writer. An analysis of the shifts between her use of gender masks and her fear of inauthenticity focuses the central dilemma, I will argue, in Franklin's identity as woman — that between the essentialist and the performative. This dilemma, as it foregrounds the difficulties of the woman writer at that time, can be productively explored in relation to Franklin's dream. Indeed, in conflating social and psychic spaces, this dream illustrates the specific nature of Franklin's performative predicament. The "tiny room within the room" (12 January 1936) that friend Stanley sets up for Franklin to escape the potential gaze of the other is reminiscent of the Woolfian dilemma concerning the woman writer's need for "a room of one's own". Given that this "little sunken square containing a desk + chair" is a replication of a room, this dream can be read as it signifies the crucial question that haunts Franklin throughout these diaries — is gender more than imitation and performance?

This discussion goes on to consider how, as a flawless representative of the essence of her gender. Franklin avoids implication within the performances that mark the 'perversions' of her colleagues, and is therefore able to assert herself as a symbol of normality — "decent normal me" (22 January 1947) — in the hybrid space of her diaries. In this way. Franklin's virginity indicates in no small measure, I will argue, her desire to make herself iconic as "a universal figure who is female" (Warner 6). Indeed, Franklin's pre-occupation with the theme of the displaced virginal subject, and her desire to normalise this gender role in a present day context, can also be seen in the titling of a 1932 play manuscript held with her private papers, Virgins and Martyrs Out of Date. From here, this discussion continues with an examination of the self-reflexivity of these diaries as it implicates her in the gender performances of her friends and colleagues. This

vantage point further enables us to see how, in the aberrance of her own perversity as a

'divine' subject, Franklin is also destabilised as an authorial voice, encouraged to fear

that "I may not rank as a writer" (10 March 1948). At this juncture, we can also identify

how Franklin utilises the anonymity provided by her position as the idealised

representative of "the sisterhood of women" (14 June 1948) to avoid her reflection from

the place of the perverse performative — and therefore of becoming "the real man-

debauched female", as she describes Devanny (23 March 1948). Taking up the insights of

Butler and Kristeva into the performative female body, this discussion goes on to identify

how the 'pure' nation — "so clean + warm and dry + safe that I cd. burrow into it bodily"

(8 February 1938) — serves as a substitute for the "impossible impermeability" of

Franklin's female body (Butler 108). In this way, we see how the gendered body

complicates Franklin's authorial I, undermining coherence and totality as an unstable

"enclosure [that] would invariably be exploded by precisely that excremental filth that it

fears" (Butler 108).

These instabilities can be productively explored, this chapter goes on to contend,

as they play out in Franklin's assertion of a childhood naivety and the threat of a

monstrous innocence, a threat posed by the other that would "deduce I was some kind of

a monstrosity" (9 March 1953). Yet an exploration into these distortions enables us to see

a central paradox within Franklin's own gendered performativity — for in her refusal she

ends up substituting one performance for another, shifting between the coquetry of the

pre-sexualised subject and the phallic mask of resistance. From here, this discussion

continues with an examination of the phallus as a performative strategy adopted by

Franklin, both as an author and in her writing, to enable productivity. By taking up her

public resistances to gendered literary practices in a study of her diaries, we are able to

see that she paradoxically adopts the phallus to promote a de-gendered space for writing, either through the use of male pseudonyms or the phallic mask of nation. The argument established in the previous chapters concerning Franklin's productive use of her pseudonyms, notably Brent, as creative potential, is advanced here by an exploration of her specific intent to escape sexual definition through the authorial mask. Yet, this vantage point also allows us to identify how Franklin is drawn back into gendered economies of writing by her critics, returning to her own objectification of Brent as nation and male writer to avoid the implications of a female authorship. It is these complexities within Franklin's performative gender identity that Brunton disguises when he describes her in a National Library media release as "a terrible flirt who left a number of suitors broken hearted" (14 April 2005), thereby normalising her mode of gendered engagement. A comparative study of the subversive techniques adopted by Franklin in her diary and fictional writing further complicates, I will argue, her reputation as "cultural nationalist par excellence'". For this perspective enables us to identify her use of the diary genre as a space for the "fiery fictional heroine", further illuminating her desire for a definition of nationhood that includes the assertive female 1. There are implications in this mode of analysis for women writers more generally, and in this way can be seen to re-open the debate concerning gendered writing and reading practices, developing current scholarship that foregrounds the contribution Australian women writers have made "to the formation of national heroic models" (Giles 231). From here, this discussion goes on to extend scholarship on the performative Sybylla by establishing her as a metonym of the female diary I, as this I problematises Franklin's claim to textual authority and confronts her with the dilemma of how she can be her own creator as a woman. This dilemma can be seen to play out, as will be detailed, in Franklin's use of irony, another subversive writing strategy commonly adopted by her contemporaries. For it is in the conflation of humour and feminist rage in these diaries that we can identify Franklin's thinly veiled attempts to temper self-assertion in the public realm of male literary discourse with the anonymity of the ironic voice, an anonymity that wavers at those moments irony turns to "outbursts".

This analysis develops here from Franklin's performative strategies as a writer into the gendered implications of the act of writing in these diaries. This shift into the writing moment enables us to see how Franklin's diaries elucidate the gendered processes of women's daily lives. These processes play out, as will be analysed, at the intersection of the social and the psychic, as this space of between illuminates the haunting of Franklin's own otherness, thereby raising the crucial question, as Elizabeth Gaskell writes to Charlotte Bronte, of how "to be your own woman...T (qtd in Foster 1). This vantage allows us to see that the performative space of the dutiful daughter is a space of psychic otherness; as in the instance of the dream subject, Franklin's home is not her own but a replication of the thing itself. Indeed, the surrogate space of her diaries was an attempt to be the I outside the dutiful we, as is evident when she writes of a psychic over- crowding that would take place if she stopped writing: "but it is only a substitute; and now I am sick of it, and my small space will be over-crowded with the results" (25 February 1938). This space of surrogacy also highlights the female I as mimicry, elucidating women's role as "natural performers" (McMahon 176) that can only imitate the coherent subject. At this point, this analysis continues with an exploration into Franklin's imaginative attempts to capture the continuity available to male writers in these diaries, wishing into existence a scenario in which there is "no one to dictate to me or to be managed" (3 January 1936). In this way, we can identify her attempts to transcend the interruptions that prevail in her daily life and achieve the "fiction of continued existence" (Nussbaum 43). Yet in the paradoxical purpose served by these diaries, as they occupy the space between mimicry and a reanimated present, productivity is undermined and her writing is becomes a "tortured" battle (8 January 1936). Taking up the psychoanalytical theories of Kristeva and Riviere, the final focus of this chapter centres on the psychic complexities of this domestic space by examining Franklin as a victim of her own internal, particularly in her relationship with her mother. This dilemma will be productively explored as a distortion of what Kristeva refers to as the protest of the repressed feminine, a protest that, I will argue, becomes an act of sabotage. Here we are able to see that the inertia of the delayed writer, the "permanent state of expectation" of one who "sullenly hold[s] back neither speaking nor writing" (Kristeva 155), is implicated in the protests of the female I — a protest that distorts Franklin, as will be seen, from living personality to "living tomb" (25 February 1938). This discussion goes on to examine this tension between immortality and a living death as it is illuminated in Franklin's relationship with her mother, for whom she initiates her own death as an author. This death is, at least in past, resisted in the rivalry that exists while her mother is living, a rivalry that can be constructively analysed according to the psychoanalytical concept of the fight for the phallus. Taking up these theoretical insights, enables us to see how, on her mother's death. Franklin relinquishes the phallus and is subsequently trapped in a perpetual performance as the ideal daughter. An examination of this gendered role directs us to identify how Franklin, in the act of awarding her mother the status of national heroine, is distorted from the Australian icon into a champion for "a nation of charwomen" (7 April 1938). Her rejection of the body of domestic women she describes as "ladies' maids" (23 November 1937) forces her increasing reliance on nostalgia for a pioneering past in which women are domestic heroines. In this way, we see how her gender necessitates her alienation from nation, distorting her from the 'divine' and anonymous I into what she describes as an isolated state of "matelessness" (9 March 1953).

In the ambiguity highlighted by current Franklin scholarship between readings of her earlier active liberal feminism and the feminism of her later years, crucial questions arise concerning the masking of her assertive female I. Recent debates regarding her public feminism indicate the gaps and contradictions that, as Sheridan suggests, the release of her private papers were expected to elucidate. A key paradox can be seen in Modjeska's study when she describes Franklin as having an "enduring feminism" that "never wavered" and yet also argues that "divorced from a viable political base [her feminism] became increasingly conservative and was reduced to a murmur" (2, 180). This silencing of her feminism has been attributed to the de-politicised feminism of the 1930s and her "later self-definition in relation to cultural nationalism". However, a comparison between these scholarly insights and the accounts provided by her contemporaries enables us to see that Franklin was also accused of possessing a "fierce" feminism in comparison with her colleagues. This is a claim made by friend Dymphna Cusack, who also stated that Franklin was a "passionate" and "very political" feminist in an ABC Broadcast (1975), while Nettie Palmer refers to her "indignant feminist rage" in her diaries (23 December 1933 127). Douglas Stewart similarly described her as possessing an "alarming" femininity (qtd in Pratt 217). Her feminism was fiot, it seems, a "murmur" to those in her immediate environment.

This ambiguity within Franklin's public feminism has been in part at least explained by the contradictions and resistances of her time. For although a network of Australian women writers was emerging during the 1930s in a way that had never existed previously, this was also a time of a depoliticised feminism, when "feminism's name was mud" (Sheridan "Women" 95). Franklin's disillusionment with organised feminism occurred during the 1930s and 1940s because she felt that women writers were becoming diverted "from an early promise of feminism into the broad left anti-fascist struggles" (Modjeska 2). Here we can see that her political feminism during these years was, similarly to her nationalism, in a state of delay because of her own temporal displacement in her Australian environment. Indeed, Modjeska attributes the fact that Franklin did not write another novel after 1933 to "the contradictions within her work" that brought her to a position of "political disillusion and Hterary stalemate" (180). Recent published editions of the letters of Franklin and her colleagues, although highlighting the ways in which a sisterhood of female friendships prevailed in spite of the depoliticised feminism of these years, have similarly emphasised the central issue of Franklin's mask wearing. Ferrier argues that although there was "a frequent solidarity despite political or aesthetic disagreements", judgements and criticisms "suppressed in public utterances" were much more common in their private communications (10). Roe's edition of Franklin's letters titled My Congeniáis reveals that she herself did a great deal to promote and nurture relationships between women writers. Within this network, scholars have identified a paradox between friendship and rivalry, for these letters have also exposed a range of hostilities between women writers. Roe writes that certain associates of Franklin's "were as much rivals as friends" {Congeniáis xxi). However, Franklin is also ambiguously placed within these relationships as one who rarely disclosed her private life. As Ferrier writes, "Franklin does not generally reveal a great deal about her personal life in her letters" (6). Barnard highlighted Franklin's resistance of privacy when she wrote in her biography of Franklin: "Who knows exactly what Miles felt even when she told you?" (qtd in Ferrier 6). In the tensions posed by what Modjeska describes as "the silences and the silencing" in the lives of Australian women writers, the contradictions "between their ability to write and their internal barriers against speaking out" (13, 14), Franklin remains a largely enigmatic and secretive figure. The gaps that emerge in these literary historical accounts of Franklin's public and private feminism have in part been addressed by the recent scholarly shift towards the performative of her feminism, as it plays out in her early novels. In a study of My Brilliant Career, Pratt argues that the performative gender identity of Sybylla reveals Franklin's awareness of the complex relationship between a masked femininity and the 'authenticity' of nation: "Franklin recognised the extent to which conventional femininity was a performance in which her gender was 'dressed up' in opposition to 'Australianness'" (216). In this fictional autobiography Sybylla is, as Lever and Pratt suggest, "doubly marginalised by her sex and her nationality, her alienation manifests itself in uncertainties about what kind of story she wants to tell" (xxii). Henderson also writes of the disruptions gender poses to the stability of nation in this novel, arguing that the realism of her Australian bush narrative is undermined by the story's "overtly problematic ... 'woman-centredness'" (165). These insights, by representing Sybylla as a pre-defmed expression of creative potential, enable us to further illuminate Franklin's mask wearing via the gender complexities of her character: "the 'trouble' with Sybylla is that she refuses to endorse any stable and unified model of identity, most crucially, with regard to her gender" (Henderson 165).

These performative readings can further be seen to complicate Franklin's secrecy by illuminating the masking/authenticity dichotomy that prevails throughout her writing. Sircar represents this dichotomy as a dilemma of genre, particularly as it plays out in the burlesque autobiography My Career Goes Bung. In this "fiction about writing fiction" (Sircar 175), Sybylla insists on producing "imaginary character-types" that, according to the family friend Old Harris, "may be more real that way" (Sircar 177, qtd in Sircar 177). Sybylla also admits to modifying her authorial voice according to the appropriate mode of gender performance. This modification can be seen when she takes on the advice of Old Harris who tells her to "project [herself] upon the canvas", but insists on depicting "a fiery fictional heroine, not her own docile, modest self (qtd in Sircar, Sircar 177). Here we can take up this genre study to elucidate those questions that remain concerning the ambiguity of Franklin's gender mask wearing as they play out in the tension between surrogate and creative spaces in her diary writing. This vantage point enables us to identify how the contradictions between her feminism and nationalism can be clarified within the temporal complexities of one who has been brought to a "literary stalemate". There is a key similarity between Franklin's increasing reliance on the nostalgia of her nationalism as explored in the previous chapter, and her nostalgia for the political feminism of a by-gone era. In the complexity of these temporal spaces, we can see her desired Utopian vision to encompass the best of both gender and nation, and the banality of her daily life that destabilises this vision. This Utopian idealism is evident in an anti-war comment made in her Diary Notebooks:

Any revolt against war of any magnitude will have to be a mass movement of men + >of< women. Workers and women compose two great masses of humanity and if they cd. see this + rise en masse Utopia wd. be at hand (6 April 1938).

The tension between Franklin's friendships and the condemnation she expresses towards the banality of women who keep her Australia, and indeed her writing, in a state of delay can also be productively explored in the collision of surrogate and creative spaces. This temporal perspective further complicates her nostalgia for a politically active feminism, the "flourishing international network of progressive feminism" into which she was launched in 1906 (Roe xvi). This complication is evident in her review of Palmer's diaries from her Literary Notebooks, in which her envy towards "Nettie's chums" is stimulated by her condemnation of those politically active colleagues who failed to grasp real literature. She never "lived with literary people who could have promulgated me" but rather "fell among those blighting reformers, who had no understanding of real writing, and always impelled me to be mindful of some mediocre party policy" (1948). Here we see how the daily distorts her nostalgic feminism, indicating a rift between the author and the feminist that was, as the above entry suggests, always present for Franklin. Coleman suggests this dilemma when she writes of Franklin's "anguished" experience of her years overseas, as one "torn between the writer and the activist" (x).

Taking up the shifts between the two Sybyllas, that of the "fiery" feminism and the "docile, modest", further enables the elucidation of another key issue that prevails in Franklin scholarship, notably that of the tension stemming from the "murmur" of a feminist voice that is also in a state of rage. An examination of this conflict at the intersection of the fictional and the autobiographical in these diaries complicates her claim to "real writing". An illumination of her desire to be a totalising author of "real writing" also allows us to see how her feminism is implicated in her resistance to privacy. In this way, the release of Franklin's personal papers can be used to elucidate the various contradictions between her feminist voices, but in a way that reveals her "internal barriers" as a psychic dilemma of the performative subject who wants to be a 'real' author.

This complex map of the social and the psychic necessarily begins at the various gender performances in which Franklin both engages and refuses engagement, in an analysis that directs us to identify her internal resistances as they illustrate the dilemmas involved in being a totalising woman writer. These dilemmas can be seen to play out in these diaries via Franklin's social resistances to marriage, as she refuses the possibility of self-reflexivity with contemporary women who enter into these 'normative' relationships. When describing a wedding ceremony she attended of a man who had left his former wife. Franklin writes:

When the bride advanced her bridal coquetries about F. remarking of her packages that the feminine invasion of his premises had begun, it seemed pathetic to me. In her place, well, I never was or wd. have submitted to such a place: I'd have been too conscious of the other woman who had had it all long ago when F was young; of her two grown children; of her frantic rebellion and heartbreak when F. favored others. Where is she now? It appears if a woman wants marriage she has to submit to the least worst man available and not look such horses too closely in the mouth or wig (10 December 1944).

Here we see that, by refusing to be in the place of the bride, Franklin is removed from the implications of absence posed by an institution that, as a friend describes it, "swallow[s] women" (27 May 1949). In this way, she avoids disappearance by refusing performative gender roles, for even as the first wife erupts via her "frantic rebellion" against a recurring substitution, she ends up a forgotten subject: "Where is she now?" This vantage point illuminates Franklin in the position of the totalising author who sees but is not seen, whose omnipotence allows an understanding of the pitfalls of the marriage state but who is not implicated in its deleterious effects. These resistances are further elucidated as they are used by Franklin to assert a totalising perspective over a history of women's disappearance into the caretaker role. In her Literary Notebook, when discussing with William Dobell the reasons why she had not carried through on her several engagements, she agrees with his statement that he would not have been happy married:

'Hardly!' I agreed, and retreated with part of my mind into vast archives of data of women who forsake their own prospects to nurture male practitioners like the potato the willow slip (10 January 1947)

Her possession of these "vast archives" can be interpreted as her attempt to make herself a representative of a monumental time of 'woman'. This authority is also evident when she addresses the inequalities of the female role of caretaker by reflecting on the woman behind Shakespeare:

Very many great women have died without marriage or free lovers, but how many great men have been really unsupported + continual bachelors? Dear little Edith Phelps used to threaten to make herself famous by research that wd. unearth the women who had held Shakespeare's literary arm up. I go further + believe Shakespeare was merely a stalking horse for a woman (28 February 1938).

Having identified how Franklin makes these resistances as a totalising authorial I, we are further able to read her diaries as a celebratory expression of the self she protected from being swallowed, thereby enabling her to be a writer. The examples she provides from her "vast archives" of women who self-sacrificed for men's careers support the benefits that she claims can be derived from refusing these 'normative' relationships. As she writes in her Diary Notebooks concerning a scandal involving a man's despicable treatment of his wife: "The commonness of such marital atrocities is one reason why I cd. never be lured to destruction by the fevered male" (16 February 1938). She also writes of the time her friend Winnie Stephensen was required to hide her pregnancy for fear of damaging P. R. Stephensens's reputation: "They had been vacillating about abortion or becoming parents — complications for his career and the respectability of PRS's etc" (28 February 1938). A comparative study with the diaries of Betty Roland enables us to see how women's performative mode of existence within marriage was, as Franklin determined, a necessary defence against absence. In the account Roland gives of her husband's philandering, she writes of the need she feels to engage in game playing, in order to compete with her husband's mistress and "match men". She describes her husband's philandering as a situation that makes her feel "invisible" (1937), thereby indicating that she experiences the disappearance Franklin rebels against. Like Sybylla, who argues that "without the possibility of egalitarian marriage, she would not marry" (Modjeska 10), Franklin champions her choice of authorship over the marriage state by utilising the authority of the diary/autobiographical I. When her nephew Jack insists that she would make a great wife (because she can cook, clean and do the ironing) and suggests that she should marry and write in her spare time. Franklin mocks his ignorance of the literary life: "He was the general as well as the particular Australian male. Write books in my spare time! He has no idea about writing and its demands upon the writer" (19 December 1935).

This vantage point also allows us to identify the necessary role played by isolation and loneliness in Franklin's assertion of authorial genius. In this respect, she contrasts with many of her married colleagues who sought for change to women's conditions within and through the marriage state. Florence James outlines a story idea in her diaries, titled "A Woman's Epic", that she claims would, through its representation of marriage, be "the battle ground for a new idea of womanhood" (1 February 1934):

the core of the book is the struggle of a woman to live a full life of her own within marriage, when her husband does not understand her need. He is happy in his marriage, happy in his work - is it not enough that they love one another + that he has built his fortune on her beauty? (1 February 1934).

In the end, James writes that both husband and wife experience an "awakening", an understanding of the modem world and a life fully lived (1 February 1934). Such a story would, she argues, challenge "women's place in the world as it is at present constituted - physically inferior, economically inferior. Temperamentally personal + concrete" (1 February 1934). Franklin's fiction commonly presented a more cynical approach to marriage. As Modjeska writes of her novel All That Swagger, the female protagonists are "lured into marriage by romance" and maternity is represented as "women's bargaining position" (179). Taking this comparison into her diaries, we see that, whereas James is expressing a desire through this story to be an I within the we of 'normative' relationships. Franklin champions a solitary state as the only real state of existence:

Oneness in marriage: it is impossible ... The greater the soul, the greater its loneliness and even marriage tho a wonderful adventure, experiment, partnership, fulfilment, friendship cannot eliminate separateness — loneliness (Thoughts and Impressions 88).

Franklin's rejection of marriage here is implicated in her claim to a greatness of soul. In this way, we see that she can only assert her superiority as an author outside gendered institutions. In the conflation of the authorial ego and the diary I, she is refusing "a new idea of womanhood" within those categories through which women have been conventionally defined. However, a further exploration into Franklin's protests against 'normative' gender relationships in these diaries allows us to see that the totalising author does not protect her against the psychic implications of being a woman outside conventions of gender normaUty. In the self-reflexive space of these diaries, we can also identify Franklin's fear of being made vulnerable to the 'perverse' image of the unmarried woman. As Sylvia Martin writes:

spinsterhood was not valued in a society that judged its women in terms of their reproductive capabilities. The stereotypical spinster, then and now, is a frustrated woman, dried-up and unfulfilled (36). Kingston argues that unmarried women were considered a threat to the social order; "in minds informed only by the misogyny of the Bulletin for example, the unmarried woman was anathema, a product of rampant feminism, a threat to the future of the race" (38). In Barbara Pym's diaries, we are able to see a playful resistance to the implications of what Modjeska describes as "the ignominy of spinsterhood" (10). These resistances are evident in the performative distancing created by the character of the "neglected, yet grimly stoic spinster" Miss Pym, who purchases nightgowns "without embroidery or frills" in her prediction of a life of celibacy (Kaufman 192, Pym qtd in Kaufman 192). A comparison with Pym's protests here enables us to see the complexities within Franklin's resistances, as exacerbated by her refusal to be implicated in the performances she associates with other women. Franklin's condemnation of these women is, in this way, elucidated at the intersection of her public and private feminism, as it foregrounds the relationship between her general views on the marriage state and her wider fear of a perverted authenticity. This vantage point allows us to identify that, in a genre in which she can "never get away from" herself (Barthes 494), Franklin refuses her place as a self- reflexive subject by reversing the gaze, projecting abnormality onto those society deems as 'normal'. This refusal can be productively explored in the tension between the performative and the essential of gender, as she promotes images of the dehumanised woman who sacrifices herself for a man. When referring to the "cruel and cowardly" treatment of an acquaintance Phyllis by her husband David, Franklin describes Phyllis as "merely the suffering turkey-hen female that would crawl to her male instead of standing up to him" (16 February 1938). Xavier Herbert's partner Sadie is portrayed as his "faithful dog" (16 February 1938). Men achieve a similar fate in these diaries in their representation as parasites that threaten to destroy women's lives:

Well, there never was a man who achieved anything without some woman as (potato) to his willow slip, but they like to do it without acknowledgement. Men are inherently parasitic — congenitally financially parasitic upon women (28 December 1937). Extending this idea into the sexual performance of new women at this time further directs us to identify how Franklin's claim to decency and morality allows her self- representation as the totalising concept of 'woman'. The 1948 conversations Franklin records in her diaries that took place between herself and Devanny on the topic of sex illustrate her reasons for valuing sexual abstinence over the promiscuity of new women, who she felt were betraying their sex by engaging in the worst of male discourse. Although surrounded by an artistic environment that was experiencing a relaxation of sexual mores. Franklin's attitudes on sexuality did not vary from the Chicago days of her role as editor for Life and Labor, a journal which advocated the conservative perspective that, as Modjeska writes:

sex was for marriage; self control and a reverence for sex was recommended. The double standard was to be overcome by demanding of men the same high standards of moral virtue as those found in the best of women (164).

According to Holmes, a form of femininity was coming into prominence around this time in which women's "appeal was sexual and sensual, she was young and full of life, slightly daring, and ready to embark on the adventure of romance" ("Diamonds" 43). An exploration into how Franklin sets herself up in contrast to the promiscuity of these women, and in particular Devanny, enables us to see how she makes herself an embodiment of a "sisterhood", one that is emblematic of the moral values of a by-gone era: "Thinks I: - Pity you wouldn't sacrifice yourself to self-respect and the cause of the sisterhood of women and not make such a some about self-indulgent lust" (14 June 1948). At this point, we are again able to identify that it is only outside these gender discourses that Franklin can be an omnipotent author, looking over the dilemmas posed by women's sexuality from her place of transcendence. Whereas Devanny champions sexual liberation as the only way to deal with the old "double-standards", reflecting on a time when a man who wanted sex with a woman "liked to have to rape her each time he wanted". Franklin sees the failure of sexual morality as a further degradation of the already highly problematic relations between men and women. In her discussion of these changes, her opinions are awarded superiority from her place as the authoritative onlooker:

In days that are passing men have organised behaviour and taken 'moral' liberty to indulge their lust so that a man could have carnal traffic with numbers of women but a decent woman was confined to one man. Men may be changing social morality and bringing about a situation where a woman will serve the overgrown sexual appetites of herself and a number of men, and a man find it difficult to secure a permanent mate sacred to his own use (23 March 1948).

The tensions between the I of the totalising author and the we of the "sisterhood" can also be productively explored in the conflation of Franklin's national and gender identities, as both enable her projection of an authentic, and thereby superior, subjectivity. In this way, we see that, as the author of her diaries, she positions her female characters as objects whose performative engagement in gender discourse prevents them from being their own self-creators. She uses her history of expatriation, as one who is, paradoxically, "cosmopolitan yet indelibly Australian" (61), to position herself as the worldly "classic text" capable of unmasking the performative. When discussing an unmarried girl who committed suicide after allegedly falling pregnant. Franklin writes that her "perceptive faculties and experience from Chicago days recognised a European 'sophisticate' using this girl":

He was taking advantage of the slacks, the holder and whole pathetic façade of sophistication, which to me exposed her inexperience through every pore ... some said a child was coming and he, of course, acted as one knew he would after a casual glance at him, and the poor girl was left with her helpless unsophistication, as unmodem as time (10 March 1948).

In her ability to identify the performative in this entry. Franklin is also alone in her recognition of the Utopian ideal that could exist if women lived — like her — 'authentically'. Furthermore, this vantage point enables us to see that Franklin's condemnation of women and their "pathetic facades" is a consequence of the isolation provided by her unique status. In a conversation with Xavier Herbert concerning his affair with Cusack, when he says that "It was all D's fault, ... It is always the woman's fault". Franklin agrees with his criticism on the grounds of the performative roles women play:

I began reluctantly to admit this. If, with this full admission, women would take off their masks + go hammer-and-cat-fight-tongs to take full control of men as well as possession perhaps there would be a surprisingly different order (3 May 1942).

At this point, we can also identify how, as a woman outside these performative modes. Franklin has avoided implication in those scandals and "marital atrocities" in which women are "lured to destruction by the fevered male". The benefits of her exclusion can be seen in her diaries when she writes of the sexual scandal that Devanny was victim of — a scandal that damaged her writing career. Franklin writes in a letter to Devanny, included in her diaries, of how she defended her against accusations of promiscuity, saying that someone of Devanny's age and health could simply not have maintained that level of sexual activity:

You were openly spoken of as infamously immoral. I often defended you on the grounds that you were suffering what demanded a big and dangerous op. And that not the hardiest of bawds in such physical conditions could have the appetite attributed to you for sexual adventure (20 April 1953).

In contrast to Franklin, Devanny was optimistically out-spoken on the topic of sex in literature. Her books were, as Nicole Moore writes, declared to be "sex-novels" and she was also a victim of book banning, an activity that became particularly prominent during the 1940s (322). She pubUshed an article on "The Literary Moral Standard" in which she argued:

bringing up into the light certain aspects of the sex-life which have always been there, but hidden, has necessitated an understanding of those aspects so that they might be dealt with (qtd in Moore 325).

As an advocate of women's sexual exploration, Devanny was guided by her communist beliefs — a doctrine in which, as scholars agree, feminism is heavily marginalized. Yet her literature also shows a complex understanding of the problems posed by her political feminism. Her short story "The Springs of Human Action" engages with the tensions between the sexual equality that was philosophically endorsed by Communism, and the reality of a patriarchal environment that encouraged sexual double standards. Franklin was conversely part of the literary movement that reacted against the bohemian ideas that prevailed in the Australian artistic scene in the 1920s, ideas that, as Modjeska argues, did little to help to endorse women's writing during these years (16-24). Many women writers were "biding their time" in the twenties, desirous of a "respectable world" where women writers would not be relegated to the back pages of literary journals. Franklin shared the attitude of many literary women who were understandably wary "of avant- garde literary innovations as well as the sexual behaviour of such groups" (24). Although it is acknowledged that Franklin celebrated herself as a virgin amongst new women, as Roe writes, "in the end defiantly identifying herself as a virgin" (Congeniáis xxvii), the significance of her virginity can be productively explored in her diaries as it allows her to be a pre-defined subject, and thereby to avoid a death to her potential. She is similar to Langley's transvestite protagonist whose "resistance of sex is due to her understanding that any sexual definition would signify a death to self (McMahon "Oscar" 105). Here again her condemnation of other women emerges from her desire to be an omnipotent author, for in objectifying their gender performances she further asserts her own superiority from outside the gaze. In this way. Franklin can be seen to represent "the interstitial space of between", as one who has "not become one thing or another" (McMahon "Oscar" 105): "Lordy I'm always so thankful that no man in heaven or hell cd ever say what I was or wasn't. The whole business is so disgusting" (17 April 1938).

An examination of Franklin's use of her virginity to avoid sexual definition in these diaries allows us to see the extent of her psychic resistance to being perverted into a performative representation of both man and woman. Her attitudes can be elucidated as they coincide with those of psychoanalyst Joan Riviere, whose early twentieth century theories on women's performances indicate that she had no language available with which to complicate the assumption of an authenticity behind the gender mask. In Riviere's account of the man-woman in her 1929 article "Womanliness as a Masquerade", she refers to women who, "while taking no interest in the other women", wish "for 'recognition' of their masculinity from men and claim to be the equals of men, or in other words, to be men themselves" (37). For Franklin, Devanny falls into this category of the woman who, while interested in men, is implicated in the destruction of women, thereby becoming the worst of both sexes: "but Jean must destroy women when the opportunity arises — the real man-debauched female who makes war on her own sex and wd. prey on both" (23 March 1948). At this point, we can also see how, in her condemnation of Devanny in these diaries, she is resisting the reflexive gaze from the place of "the real man-debauched female". In aligning herself with the moral and virtuous. Franklin portrays Devanny in her opposing image, accusing her of misogyny, nymphomania and prostitution. She writes that Devanny has "tried to ferment trouble between married people, and always downs the wife or woman with the virulence of a commercial 'madam'" (23 March 1948). During a time in which Devanny had come to stay. Franklin questions whether she has "closed doors with a bawd" to whom:

women to be commendable ... must be nymphos, and men of [word indecipherable] indiscrimination and lecherousness. Decent men are perverts, and chaste women positively criminal, in her code (10 March 1948).

Here we see that accompanying her fear of being both rather than neither sex is Franklin's concern that her virginity makes her an aberrant and abnormal subject. In this way, by portraying Devanny's deviancy, she is also attempting to normalise her own decency. In reference to Devanny's tendency to praise the mistress over the wife, and indeed her acceptance of her own husband's mistress, Franklin describes herself in contrast as one whose "own sexual poetic soul never rose to a man who was neglecting his wife and thereby trying to dishonour me" (14 June 1948). She self-promotes as one whose lack of masking has meant she was never involved in a deception with a man, for she has "never trusted a man to befool" her (3 May 1942). Yet it is this vantage point that also enables us to see the shadow side of the self-reflexive diary subject, and indeed that the celebration of her virginity is necessarily accompanied by a fear of her own perverted mnocence:

I have noted that nymphomaniacs never can conceive of women having other

tastes. I wonder what obscene and perverted interpretation Jean will give of my

healthy and not unhappy continence and abstemiousness? (23 March 1948).

Franklin's resistance to self-perversity is also illuminated by an examination of her response to homosexuality in these diaries, enabling us to see how, on this topic, she is made most vulnerable in her claim to representing a gender authenticity, the essence of womanhood. Butler's theories further elucidate this idea as a dilemma of the embodied subject that assumes a "gender core" (110). She writes that "the 'integrity' of the subject" is instituted by:

the illusion of an interior and organising gender core, an illusion discursively

maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory

frame of reproductive heterosexuality (110).

These insights let us see how Franklin's defence of her own sexual 'normality' is asserted via her insistence on a self-contained "gender core". In her Literary Notebooks, she describes homosexuality as "this slimy perversion" that "so poisoned everything at one date that no women cd. be friendly without foul aspersions of Lesbianism, forsooth. I always revolt against insinuations of it with honor and disgust" (22 January 1947). As part of her self-protection, she also defends colleagues against accusations of homosexuality, as in the case of Barnard and Flora Eldershaw: "These aspersions of frustration and lesbianism, against them, I have always resented and refuted, because I think them foul and unfounded" (7 April 1944). Her resistance to the self-reflexive implications of these accusations is further evident when, in reference to the scandals regarding the sexuality of Dobell, she asserts the normality of her own 'purity'. She refers to a friend who "is sure it is a vile calumny in this case as her painter friends — decent normal me — know Dobell. What a wicked implication if false! If true, alas! alas! alas!" (22 January 1947).

In an explicit defence against these possible aspersions on her own sexuahty. Franklin conflates the diary I with a "gender core", making herself the voice of authority from outside sexual modes of discourse. This defence takes place when Devanny claims to Franklin that "all women artists and writers of any kind are simple and soft about men" and "if they are not, they are homosexual" (10 March 1948):

'There's one that's not,' thought I, but halted on the realisation that I may not rank as a writer, but I pursued my stand unspoken — 'One that was not weak about men carnally yet who is normal and healthy; one who finds incest, lesbianism, onanism, homosexuality, sodomy and all such vices and perversions revolting even to mention, one who never knew of such infamies till fully adult, and who remains unacquainted with them in actuality, and is aware of them only in books and gossip' (10 March 1948).

Here we see that the I that Franklin denies herself publicly in the fear that she "may not rank as a writer" can be asserted in the "psychic privacy" of her diaries. This idea of the diary as a space for women outside sexual discourse is supported by Holmes when she writes that, in contrast to the "sexual and sensual" expectations that dominated women's public lives, their diary writing allowed them "to be subjects, to construct themselves as they wanted" ("Diamonds" 43). This psychic space can also be productively explored in relation to Franklin's projection of a childhood innocence. This exploration directs us to identify how her purity distorts into the perverse image of the adult/child, whose championed naivety and revulsion at "such vices and perversions" serves to highhght her aberrance in an adult world. This innocence is evident when Franklin claims that she:

must have been 40 before understanding of this foul disease reached me, and cleared up something that had been lying in my memory like the singer's instrument being alway[s] with her — p513 herein (10 March 1948).

Here we see that Franklin's innocence also introduces a paradox in her totalising authorship, for omnipotence is undermined by her child-like claim to ignorance. Warren foregrounds this contradiction as a dilemma of the time when she writes of how sexual 'perversion' was often perceived as a form of immaturity:

all other forms of genital eroticism [besides heterosexual copulation], from masturbation to homosexuality and other 'paraphilias', have been seen as sinful, perverse, pathological, or simply immature (143).

This vantage point also allows us to see that it is once again Franklin's association of nation with this childhood innocence, the purity of her "clean + warm and dry + safe" Australia as emblematic of what she also describes as her "thoroughly sound clean body" (7 April 1949), that protects her against perversity. Franklin's use of the image of cleanliness signifies the extent to which nation and virginity are integrally linked for her. This link can also be seen in an essay in which she writes of her preference for a national literature that rejects the themes of sexual experimentation and taboo in favour of "clean human affection" (Franklin "Unusual" 116). National and virginal subjectivities can also be seen to conflate when she identifies with the naive colonial workingman in her avoidance of a 'perverse' adulthood she associates with the life in the cities. She describes a young man who it was rumoured was willing to oblige working settlers at night in their tents as a "city cigarette-smoking youth", and supports the response given by the "rough" Jack Pappin who used to take an axe to bed with him in readiness: Mystification clung around that surreptitious anecdote for half a lifetime till it was cleared up by the knowledge that the fellow must have been homosexual. Ugh! No matter how rough Jack Pappin, he and I had congeniality on one point (22 January 1947).

A further analysis of this ambiguity between Franklin's childhood and adult worlds enables us to see that it is paradoxically in her resistance to sexual knowledge that she is implicated in the performative traits of flirtation and coquetry. For in her claim to naivety and innocence, Franklin makes herself a pre-masked subject, one whose ''inexperience through every pore" prevents her from being positioned inside the realm of feminine performance. In this way, she uses her diaries to refuse a narrative of, as McMahon writes, "original sexual transgression", for in "the conflation of an initial act of will and initial sexual knowledge, is the pivotal moment whereby the subject enters the world of man" ("Oscar" 106). These insights allow us to identify Franklin's attempts to avoid "initial sexual knowledge" via a space of adolescence, and further, how in this resistance her diaries become a space in which she relives moments of sexual initiation, thereby revealing her preoccupation with the perversity she finds "so disgusting". Here we see that she is, like Langley's protagonist Steve, paradoxically inviting and resisting her own sexual definition, saying to her readers: "But don't talk to me of sex ... I fear it. I only know there is beauty" (qtd in McMahon "Oscar" 105, 106).

These contradictions can be constructively examined as they play out in a comparison Franklin makes in her diaries between Cusack's sexual game playing and her own virginal purity. This comparison enables us to see that Franklin's refusal of "an initial act of will" at a moment in adolescence when sexual knowledge is imposed is offered in contrast to Cusack's willingness to engage in game playing. The story she relays of Cusack's coquettishness in her diaries, as told to her by Herbert, concerns a time when Cusack fainted on being asked by Herbert whether she had an emotional interest in him. Cusack's insincerity with this act, described by Franklin as her "plumb brazenly faking", and Herbert's willingness to believe it, makes a mockery of them both: "When she recovered she said he must not bruise hearts like that. (Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!)" (3 May 1942). Here again, Franklin's "perceptive faculties" allow her to see the masking that escapes Herbert, a mask that was always, according to Riviere, "successful with men" (41). In the discursive realm of psychoanalysis, Cusack's behaviour with Herbert can be read, similarly to Devanny's, as the "intellectual" woman's need for reassurance on asserting their masculinity. Her performance is similar to that of Riviere's American patient (thought to be Riviere herself) whose anxiety about pubHc speaking led her to seek attention and compliments (always at least partly of a sexual nature) from men who attended the event, "in spite of her unquestionable success and ability" (36). In this way, the performative traits of "flirting" and "coquetting", as masks "behind which man suspects some hidden danger", offer Cusack a way into the socio-symbolic order; they are "an unconscious attempt to ward off the anxiety which would ensue on account of the reprisals she anticipated from the Father-figures of her intellectual performance" (Riviere 37, 43). Given that coquetry is, by this account, a way of entering into the world of man. Franklin's contrasting portrayal of her coquettish refusal to act can be seen as particularly paradoxical. For she is attempting to anchor herself at a place of pre-sexual initiation by engaging in the very performative act she condemns. Here we can see a key contradiction play out within the complexity of her psychic resistance towards a gender identity — the adolescent space through which she avoids her progression towards becoming man or woman is also the self-protective space that exacerbates her need for gender performances. This vantage point further allows us to see how, as one caught in the loop of adolescence. Franklin struggles to maintain textual authority, and is thereby confronted with the dilemma of how to be "a universal figure who is female". This moment of sexual initiation occurs when discussing the attentions she received from Banjo Paterson in her youth:

I remember Banjo exclaiming when he startled me with furious first kisses, T wd know what to do with an ordinary woman; I cd. offer her a diamond bracelet, but you make me feel a cad, little one.' He offered me a grand piano because my voice had moved him deeply, but I simply shook my head + continued to sob because I was reared never to accept anything beyond chocolates from young men: it wd. have tarnished my spotless virginity to have done so (3 May 1942).

The playful language adopted in this entry elucidates Franklin as the young "spotless" virgin who must, like her colleagues, find a way to engage with "the Father-figures of her intellectual performance".

A further consideration of Franklin's "intellectual performance" as it occurs at the expense of her corporeality enables us to identify another consequence that results from the self-promotion of her "spotless virginity". For she exacerbates the mind/body dualism in her refusal to act, repressing the female body in her association with the intellect of the male writer. Here we can identify how, as a result of this repression. Franklin's body absorbs the psychic anxieties that she rejects in her desire to be a holistic representation of the authorial 1. In this way, she resembles the Cartesian subject who, as Sidonie Smith writes, believed themselves able "to transcend the contingencies of 'desire, affectivity, and the body' those constraining particularities of human existence" (7). The insights provided by these theories of embodied writings also illuminate how, in her desire to be "unique, unitary, unencumbered" Franklin makes herself "the self escapes all forms of embodiment" (Smith 6). She is, at this vantage point, a distortion of the man-woman, ambiguously situated between her association with the male, intellectual mind and the "secondary sphere" in which, as Nussbaum writes, the female gender is "ascribed to nature":

The construction of a female subjectivity ... is complicated by women's subjugation to the universal 'male' in a secondary sphere ascribed to nature and submerged so that it cannot be easily contradicted (xxi).

Taking these theories into a reading of Franklin's body allows us to identify the corporeal manifestation of the protesting female I in her diaries. Franklin's physicalised anxieties can be read as another form of resistance by a woman who, refusing her role within the socio-symbolic order, will "sullenly hold back neither speaking nor writing, in a permanent state of expectation, occasionally punctured by some kind of outburst: a cry, a refusal, 'hysterical symptoms'" (155). Foster elucidates this idea when she writes, in reference to the Victorian period, of the intemalisation of anxieties as a dilemma of the woman writer who has entered male literary discourse:

women entering the commercial worid of publishing caused considerable anxiety in some (male) circles because it was perceived as threatening the traditional female roles of marriage and motherhood ... However artistically ambitious, many women themselves internalized these anxieties (2).

Franklin writes in these diaries of her anxiety as a diagnosed condition for which she was prescribed medication. It often results in feelings of weakness (particularly in the heart) that limit domestic activities, although is most noticeably displayed through the frustrations of sleeplessness. Recalling a doctor's appointment in her diary autobiography, she represents her anxiety via descriptions of a body sabotaged by intellect, suffering under the tensions of an over-active mind. Although she claims to the doctor that "when it came to strain that I could out do all the heavy cowlike people, that if I made up my mind I'd let nothing, however horrible, derange me", he warns her that "too much engine power for my physique" would mean "that my mental activity drove me to wear out my body":

I hadn't a pain or ache, really was an example of a thoroughly sound clean body — if only the tension could have been loosened, if only I could have acquired the habit of sleep and a saving realisation that something was due to myself as well as to my colleagues and the unfortunate! If only — (7 April 1949).

This entry illustrates that the "sound clean body" of the "spotless" virgin is still at risk of contamination, notably by the social injustices that are manifested as psychic anxieties and resistances. The paradox posed by a body both "sound clean" and tense is further clarified by Butler's observations concerning the "impossible impermeability" of the body which inevitably invites the perversity that threatens it: For inner and outer worlds to remain utterly distinct, the entire surface of the body would have to achieve an impossible impermeability. The sealing of its surfaces would constitute the seamless boundary of the subject; but this enclosure would invariably be exploded by precisely that excremental filth that it fears (108)

A comparison of Franklin's descriptions of her body with those of her female colleagues in their diary writings further enables us to see the extent to which she was resisting the potential repercussions of being a private body in public discourse. In the diaries of Roland and James the social consequences of being an object of the public gaze can be seen to play out in their experiences of their female bodies. Women's bodies are, as Holmes argues in her study of Australian women's diaries, "expressed and understood in relation to public constructions of them", for a woman's experience of her body "was influenced by notions of social production, sexuality, power" (xxii). An analysis of the bodily representations in the diaries of Franklin's colleagues illuminates women's more ambiguous experiences of their own bodies, as they shift between a desire to escape "public constructions" and a celebration of jouissance, notably through images of the maternal body. Roland and James write details about their pregnant bodies in their diaries; for James in particular, the female body is not a fixed entity but rather one that morphs and changes. She recalls her altering shape, the bladder problems that resulted from pregnancy and is vocal on the topic of both the "pain" and "ecstasy" of childbirth, which she refers to as an "animalistic" experience (August 1938). In contrast, Roland writes of her attempts to hide her pregnant body in public, describing herself as "handicapped" by pregnancy and expressing shame about her shape in comparison to that of her husband's mistress (for example, her "ruined waistline") (1937). James also expresses anxiety as a private body in public discourse via concerns about weight loss and body image.

A further examination of Franklin's gender ambiguities clarifies how, in her rejection of the female body, she becomes a representation of the phallus. At this point, we can see that, in her virginal resistance to gendered economies, she necessarily engages in phallic strategies of refusal. These strategies can be seen when, in celebrating her virginity against those who are made the victim of sexual scandal, she represents herself as a phallic monument of resistance:

In my nubile years I used to be contemptuous of the treachery of men when they boasted of their conquests which [replacing?] + stiffened any determination not to let them use me. Does a man ever keep such a thing to himself unless his own safety depends on meh reticence? (3 May 1942).

Here, having established Franklin's (albeit problematic) authoritative positioning outside the various discourses of gender relationships, we are also able to see how it is often as a phallic I, "stiffened" against intrusion, that she initiates the subversive strategies that enable the writing process. These strategies were by no means unproductive, but rather allowed the creative anonymity that awarded her a place within national literary discourse unmatched by any of her female colleagues. From her first novel she was, as Dalziell writes, associated with "a founding narrative of nationhood" (40). An exploration into her social and psychic resistances to gendering further illuminates that her phallic masking was a compromise on her desire for the Utopian ideal of a pre-defmed creative space in which to write. In this way we see that, although desiring to be outside gender discourse, she is inevitably drawn back into defining categories of woman and performative strategies of resistance. Furthermore, as is evident in her "stiffened" resistance to men's treachery, there are consequences to Franklin's positioning inside and outside gender. In using the phallus to assert her virginity, to lay claim to a "gender core" which transcends the performative, she is made a victim of her own perversions, emerging in the image of the monstrous man-woman (or in this instance as the phallic-virgin) that she commonly projects onto others. An examination of these phallic resistances also enables us to see that Franklin uses a national mask as a way to overcome the difficulties of gender, a technique that is evident in her public opinions on the topic of gendered writing. In a public speech on 'The Féminisation of Literature", she argues that the liberation of women who "might be writing novels" but "were far from free" needed to begin with the de-gendering of reading practices, thereby criticising the prevailing notion that women's writing was both intrinsically recognisable and generically limited (Modjeska 9). Reflecting on the distinctive categories of male and female writing that dominated the 1890s literary scene in her essay of the above speech. Franklin writes that "the attempt to segregate men's and women's minds in watertight compartments had some ludicrous and impoverishing results" ("Féminisation" 112). She returns to the nation as the appropriate mode through which to challenge this segregation:

Now for a little Australian moral in the goanna's tail of these remarks. We here have no need to take the jitters about either the féminisation or masculinisation of our literature. What we need is spiritual independence in the realisation of our unlimited opportunities. To be worthy of our unique, our magic continent we must be self-respecting, independent, unafraid of originality, sincerely and naturally wayward in the Australianisation of our contribution to world literature ("Féminisation" 113).

There is a contradiction in her use of an Australian literary tradition based upon ''the suppressed opposition betw'een masculinity a?id femininity'' to encourage a de-gendering of the writing process. From here, this contradiction can be examined as it plays out in the complex "psychic privacy" of her diaries, illuminating the internal consequences of being a nationally defined woman writer. The study of the previous chapter concerning Brent as both national icon and "world classic" can be productively explored here in relation to another key paradox — for although she uses Brent as a pre-defined creative identity, she also finds she cannot escape the gendering imposed by public discourses. In this way, we see that it is as a pseudonymous subject in the public realm that Franklin necessarily returns to the productive anonymity provided by her masculine and national masking. In the extensive tradition of pseudonymous women writers, male or androgynous masks were commonly adopted as a way to avoid the consequences of a gendered reading. The adoption of pseudonyms was a response to the reality that women's writing was treated differently. Foster writes that Gaskell was reluctant to use her own name as author due to "worries about the effects of entering the literary marketplace" (2). These worries were a reaction against the critical focus on the "feminine qualities" of her work; she attacked one reviewer who had ignored her request to be judged "as an author, not as a woman" (Foster 3). Valerie Kent writes that Henry Handel Richardson's adoption of a patriarchal pseudonym, that of her father's family, was an attempt to conceal her female identity, and further indicates, according to Lever and Pratt, that "Richardson identified strongly with a male perspective" (xiv). Her male masquerade was, as Lever and Pratt suggest, integrated into her gendered sense of self: "her letters to Mary Kemot reveal that she felt herself to be partly a man" (xiv). Scholars commonly write of Franklin's pseudonyms as an attempt to dissociate from the stereotypes about female writing in the hope of being taken more seriously as a writer (Kent 46). She originally intended the use of her middle name Miles to serve this purpose, but had this opportunity stymied by Henry Lawson, who wrote in his preface to My Brilliant Career that he had not read three pages before he saw what we, the reader, "would no doubt see at once - that the story had been written by a girl" (Preface Brilliant). Her initial request of her literary agent J. B. Pinker was that she did "not wish it to be known that I'm a young girl but desire to pose as a bald-headed seer of the sterner sex" (qtd in Webby vii). Recent studies of women's private writings have argued the extent to which pseudonymous identities were implicated in these women's need for a space of "psychic privacy". The performative qualities that these women indulged in the creative anonymity provided by their pseudonyms allowed them this private space, offering them a way to be an author outside the limitations posed by public discourses. Sylvia Martin writes of how letters, as a private discourse of the times, reveal the extent to which pseudonymous secrecy was important to a woman writer's identity, affording them a great deal of subversive pleasure:

women who are relegated to the sphere of the 'private' within a patriarchal society have used secrets to provide a network of connection that goes unnoticed by the masculine hegemony (37). In the letters between Franklin and her London friend and colleague Mary Fullerton, as Martin writes, there is evidence of this subversive play in reference to the performative ambiguity of Brent of Bin Bin: "the sheer fun of talking about the theories of Brent's identity and whether he was male or female enlivens many of the women's letters" (38). In this way, a shared privacy is established between these women in opposition to the public aspersions made about the gender of their authorial selves (for Fullerton also published under the pseudonym "E"). This authorial play is evident in one of Fullerton's letters:

have they not guessed that the vigorous Brent outburst could only be the work of a MAN? Yum, perhaps they are right in denying a mere woman to stride across a continent. Maybe they can explain away Swagger author [Miles Franklin], perhaps it is the man Brent borrowing a woman's name - she of course only too proud to mother stuff beyond her own capacity! (qtd in Martin 38).

Here we see that in the creative potential provided by masking these women were awarded a kind of totality of authorship, for by refusing to be defined as one thing or another they also possessed the productive capacity to be all things. A comparison between the playful tone of this letter and Franklin's discussions of Brent's gender in her diaries allows us to identify how the creative potential of the pseudonym is distorted on re-entering public discourse. In a similar mode to her letter writing, Franklin indulges dressing Brent up as a man. This indulgence is evident when she writes, on meeting an author speculated to be Brent, that he "looked the part magnificently" (Travel Diary 6 June - 1 July 1937). Yet in exploring the stories she relays involving public speculations about Brent's gender, we see that even her pseudonymous names cannot escape implication in the gendering of reading processes. Indeed, there is a contradiction evident in the way women's pseudonyms, though adopted to avoid the confines of sexual definition, inspire a greater interest in gender than would otherwise be the case. This idea is elucidated by Foucault's theory concerning the reader's lack of acceptance of anonymity in relation to the author-function, thereby enabling us to see how Brent's readers engage in the game "of rediscovering the author" (Foucault 203). This game is at play when, recalling the lecture by H. M. Green in which the topic of Brent's identity arose, Franklin writes:

At first reading he never thought k Brent was a woman — for the first three readings he was too interested in the story, but after this more poisonous professor had pointed it out to him he cd. see. (Men not being phallicly worshipped + slavishly commended for rapings and sex lunacy brought suspicion on Brenfs sex (28 July 1943).

Here we can see the extent of Franklin's psychic dilemma concerning Brent's entry into gender defining discourses. There is anxiety and resistance evident when she describes Brent as an androgynous "it", and then crosses "if out, bypassing the gendering process by settling on the name "Brent" in preference to a personal (and gendering) pronoun. Although she commonly refers to Brent as "he" throughout her diaries, she is, in this instance, protesting against the limitations posed on her as an author of 'feminine' writing. These inconsistencies in her treatment of Brent further facilitate our awareness of the intrusive presence of Franklin's critics on the de-gendered space she desires for her pseudonym, as this intrusion necessitates his return to the productivity available in a masculine and national identity. Promoting him as an Australian male, not only in her diaries but in public reviews and essays, Franklin defends her authorship against the "poisonous professor[s]" who would make her a woman writer. This mode of authorial promotion could also be seen to indicate her awareness that the national was also a masculine space of writing, rather than a pre-defined, creative space of gender transcendence. Yet Franklin's array of other pseudonymous identities further illuminates her resistance to these authorial categories. In her amalgamation of national, male and androgynous names, we can see the extent to which she utilised the proliferative possibilities offered by her authorial masks. She could be both "An Old Bachelor" and the English "William Blake", the male and Australian Brent of Bin Bin, or both man and woman in the national pseudonym Mr and Mrs Ogniblat (the town of Talbingo spelt backwards). Franklin's predecessor Jessie Couveur was also subversive in her adoption of a pseudonym that was both national and feminine sounding — Tasma'. It is, however, Franklin's abundant use of names that makes her stand apart in her desire to be all things and her refusal to be defined as one thing or another. An examination of the performative strategies Franklin deployed within the writing itself allows us insight into the generic features that defined 'feminine' writing at this time, and thereby into the ways in which she both avoids and subversively utilises these conventions as an author of a surrogate fictional form — the diary. Recent scholars have re-opened the debate concerning gendered reading and writing practices in eariy Australian women's fiction by privileging the tension within a national literary tradition that confined women to the conventions of the romance genre — a genre that was prominently considered an inferior literary form. According to Fiona Giles, "in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was, as in Europe, an Australian reaction by realist writers and critics against romance", as it was associated with the feminine and against the national (225). Sheridan describes the treatment of early Australian women's writing as "offensively feminine", arguing that the "lady novelists" of the 1890s were patronised, and their work marginalised, by both the "urbane and gentlemanly" of the "all-male clubs and societies of the colonial literati" (whom they were associated with by default), and their "radical nationalist contemporaries" (53). The former group, believing fiction "a lower branch of literature", gave faint praise, saying that these women "dealt quite properly with social life and relations between the sexes". The latter felt that romance devalued fiction, the reputation of which they were attempting to improve, and so gave no "chivalrous praise of their proper womanliness" (Sheridan 52, 53). Kent writes that the emotional lives of the protagonists of these "lady novelists", "the passion, frustration and anger of their heroines", were "often viewed with disquiet by both male and female critics" (46). Franklin's early writing highlights the prevailing tension of the time between "alarming" femininity and nationalism, notably in the way the feminist content of My Brilliant Career was marginalised in a critical appraisal that situated her firmly within a national tradition. As Sheridan writes, with her first novel Franklin was relegated to a station above her contemporaries, for she had "transcend[ed] their female qualities and preoccupations" with her representation of "The Bush" which came to "signify nationalism, literary originality and, by implication, masculinity" (54). Although My Brilliant Career is "a work which professes to distance itself from romance fiction" (Giles 231) it was still, as Kent suggests, seen as a girl's book and the emotional aspects were dismissed to her sex (46). Lawson encouraged such a reading when he wrote in his preface to the novel that he leaves the "girlishly emotional parts of the book" for the "girl" readers to judge (he, as a man, has no possible response to romance). Yet he happily concedes that "the descriptions of bush life and scenery" make the book "true to Australia - the truest I ever read" (Preface)^I Extending on the argument of the previous chapter concerning Franklin's productive use of an all-encompassing national authorship, we can further see that her move away from the feminism in her early writing was motivated by her desire to be read as "an author" and not as "girlishly emotional", or a female writer shrouded by the presumptions of autobiography. Pratt writes of this shift in Franklin's later writing, such as All That Swagger, as the subduing of her "'alarming' femininity" in favour of her "'ardent' nationalism": "Franklin/Brent was seen to be writing history because the history she wrote accorded with a teleological view of Australia's growth to glorious and mature nationhood" (217). The necessity of this shift is further elucidated by Barnard's description of Franklin's feminist authorship in her biography, in which she criticises the "fierce" assertive tone that prevailed in her life and writing:

Hers is a very special and illogical sort of feminism, not a reasoned case for the equality of men and women. It expresses itself in an attack on men, a denial of love and a plaint that the possession of intelligence puts women at a disadvantage in a man's world (138)^^

Recent scholarly readings have redressed the limited distinctions made at the time between the romance genre and the realism commonly associated with nationalist

18 Indeed, as recently as Roderick's 1982 biography the feminist content of this novel has been undermined, notably through his description of the book as one of "mediocre literary quality" that "coasted alone before a coincidental breeze of feminism" (84). ^^ Barnard also refers to Franklin as "rampandy feminist" in the context of her novel Prelude to Waking (137). writing. Sheridan and Giles, among others, have argued that Australian women writers adopted the conventions of romance within realist modes of writing in a subversive practice that challenged their marginalised place within a national tradition. Lever writes that both male and female writers in Australia recognised the limitations of the realist literary form, and further that they were "negotiating formal conventions rather than being determined by those conventions" (12, 13). In relation to the romance genre, Sheridan argues that women writers of the late nineteenth century were offering a commentary on their marginalised place within colonial Australia:

the apparently un-changing conventions of the love story are themselves used in these novels to mediate, precisely, social comment on the colonial marriage market and its cultural implications — for women (53).

Giles writes that a neglected area in readings of nineteenth-century romance is the contribution "to the formation of national heroic models provided by this wide range of heroines in the women's writing" (231). In Rosa Praed's fiction, we fmd that romance is often treated with irony and tempered with reality. The Bond of Wedlock confronts its protagonist Ariana with harsh truths about men and marriage while her short story "Gwen's Decision" encourages the reader to question whether Gwen would not have been happier as an artist living in Italy than attached to Alec, the hard-working colonial boy. The latter story foregrounds a prominent feature in romance novels concerning the place of expatriation in the formation of a national history, of "the importance of distance between the two cultures and the difficulty of the choice between them (Giles 229). In Tasma's "Monsieur Caloche", sexual and national definition is problematised by the visceral female body. The unveiling of a young man's 'femaleness', at point of death, represents the inside turned out, as well as the intersection of the national by the "European divided self, embodied in the French Henrietta Caloche (McMahon "Oscar" 109). Praed promoted "a new idea of womanhood" in her writing by suggesting that a woman in "essence" could represent an ideal Australia. This suggestion is evident in a comment made by the character Hardress Harrington concerning the "powerful but isolated and inexperienced" Honorio Longleat in Praed's 1881 novel Policy and Passion: "Such a creature could only have had a birth in a wild, free atmosphere ... she is the classic nymph — the essence of womanliness. You are the ideal Australia" (Giles 232, Praed qtd in Giles 232).

These recent insights into the genre complexities of Australian women's early writing enables us to see how Franklin's diaries, as a hybrid and surrogate literary form, offer a way to advance this debate. For these diaries elucidate the subversive strategies Franklin adopted as a woman writer, further complicating her national reputation and highlighting the presence of a masked female I. This idea is illuminated by recent scholarship that has highlighted the instability of Franklin's national and gender identities via a genre-focused study. In his reading of My Brilliant Career, Henderson positions the novel within "explicit cultural debate about nationally appropriate modes of writing: in part a genre war fought on gender lines" (166). Adopting Butler's theories of gender performativity, Henderson further argues that Sybylla's narrative "offers a model of identity based not on a single gender/genre, but on a process of performing gendered genre roles in a manner that never quite matches the ruling prescription" (165). It is in a further examination of this relationship between gender and genre that we can identify how these diaries allowed Franklin a space for the assertive female voice that could challenge women's place within national contexts . This vantage point illuminates her struggle to be an authorial I as a gendered subject by making it a more specific dilemma of her plurality within multi-genred discourse — of how to be a "fiery fictional heroine" in national writing that demands the "docile, modesf narrative voice. In this way, her diaries can be read as a return to romance, to what Giles describes as the heroic quest for "a sense of origin [that] can be integrated into the presenf (227).

The perspective offered by this "heroic quesf enables us to see how Franklin's diaries exacerbate the gendered dilemma of textual authority, of how to be a totalising and complete I with "a sense of origin" in the present moment. A consideration of her subversive use of the romance genre in her diaries as in her early fiction raises the crucial

As Franklin's public essays suggest, she was involved in the resurrection of her female literary predecessors, writing them into a new idea of nationhood and challenging their limited association with romance. In her article "The Anglo-Australians: Mrs Campbell Praed, Ada Cambridge, Tasma, Catherine Edith Martin; also Simpson Newland, Fergus Hume, and Nat Gould", which was adapted from her 1950 Commonwealth Literary Fund Tour, she describes Praed as an expatriate writer "with an inbred love of her native soil" (Laughter 71). question with which Franklin herself was engaged in her writing — how a woman can be her own creator. Her desire for this creative control also situates her within the conventions of realism, which has traditionally allowed, as Lever's study reveals, a way for novelists "to resist or embrace the authority of the genre" (13). The clash of tone between Franklin's various female voices in the psychic space of these diaries allows us to identify the ways in which she both resists and embraces authority, thereby revealing the tension between the protest of the repressed feminine and her attempts to achieve a productive anonymity. Franklin's negotiation of the conflict between the assertive female I and the "murmur" of the totalising anonymous author in her diaries can be productively explored via another of her subversive writing strategies — that of the ironic narrator. Irony and satire were other literary techniques commonly adopted by Australian women writers, often to challenge conventional modes of gender discourse. Lever refers to Richardson and Stead's use of "subtle irony" and of Cambridge's "habitual irony, her unwillingness to leave a statement to stand as authoritative without modifying it or offering some critique" (13, 32). In Cambridge's short story "Deposed", irony is used to undermine a prejudiced protagonist who warns of the dangers of educated women and promotes the stereotype of the female vixen. In this way, irony could be seen as a strategy adopted to disguise subversion. It allowed women to produce writing in the acceptable 'feminine' romantic mode while giving a realistic commentary on women's lives. This subversiveness can be applied to Franklin's Sybylla in My Career Goes Bung who claims to have produced a fictional autobiography in an ironic mode, "to make hay of the pious affectations of printed autobiographies as I know them" (30). In this respect, Sybylla enables Franklin to distance from the "girlishly emotional" interpretations of her first novel and to dissociate from the "fiery" female voice even as she asserts it. Franklin's use of irony is illuminated as a subversive technique of gender disguise in her diaries when she writes of having adopted a playful humour to send men up "with a little good natured ridicule" (28 July 1943). In this way, we see that irony serves as a strategy that allows her to suggest injustices without resorting to "indignant feminist rage". This subversive playfulness is evident when, discussing the way in which friend Ida Leeson was passed over for a job at the State Library of NSW because of her gender, Franklin makes fun of how men protect themselves against women's emancipation: "Even so the Fathers of Wisdom were afraid; what if the Chief Librarian fell ill and a female had to deputise — think of the unthinkability of that!" (1949). In relation to this situation, she also recalls a humorous story told by Ida about why her colleague Metcalfe was paid more money than her: "'Oh' said she airily, 'He has the genital organs of the male; they're not used in library work but men are paid more for having them'" (1949). This vantage point also enables us to identify that ridicule turns to "rage" when the ironic mask fails to achieve its subversive aims. At these moments, there is an eruption of the self-assertion that has previously been tempered with humour. One of these eruptions occurs in response to the accusation that Franklin's writing is "anti-man":

How ferocious men become if women have a point of view of their own! Men call women rags + bones and hanks of hair, say they have neither brains, honor nor character, while the yowls of their own defeated lust rend high heaven through the ages, but if a woman dares to show them up with a little good natured ridicule, how vicious they become! Cannot they see the one-sided cruelty of this, rooted in sheer cowardice? Anti-womanism of great virulence (28 July 1943).

Accompanying this entry is a newspaper cartoon of an old, uptight looking maid who has trouble identifying the male sex of a child, on which Franklin writes: "Men vent this kind of spite against women who escape them & expect women to accept it, but the mellowest laughter at men's foibles is denounced as anti-man. Pook!" (28 July 1943). Here we can see that the failure of Franklin's subversive use of irony in public discourse necessitates her feminist outrage in the private. When examined as part of Franklin's psychic resistances, the above entry also illustrates how, in the conflation of male humour and "indignant feminist rage" in these diaries, she attempts to negate the object positions assigned to her by the socio-symbohc order to be both and neither her own man-woman. In a psychoanalytical mode, these two voices can be seen to signify a paradox as Franklin shifts between productive engagement with and resistance of a masculine culture. As a defining trait of mateship in Australia, humour offers a way of engaging in male discourse that does not, according to Riviere's theories from the time, pose the threat of "womanUness". Estabhshing herself as one who, as Riviere writes, "herself has male attributes". Franklin is made less threatening to men because "to them her claims on them are less" (42). This tempering of the female I can be seen when she recalls a moment of joviality with her male literary colleagues in her diaries in which she reiterates Leeson's joke concerning men's genitalia:

Idriess yelped something about men getting two pounds a week more and that men needed it for the said possessions, + I said you mean they need compensation for such a handicap? (1949).

Riviere further suggests that a woman adopts a "flippant and joking" manner to show:

her masculinity to men as a 'game', as something not real, as a 'joke'. She cannot treat herself and her subject seriously; cannot seriously contemplate herself as on equal terms with men (39).

Taking up this theory in relation to Franklin, we can identify another dilemma of the performative when in tension with the idea of a "gender core". For even as she performs man in her use of humour as a "good natured ridicule" of the male sex, she is only ever a lesser and imitative version of the thing itself. An exploration into how these phallic performances play out in the act of writing further elucidates this state of mimicry, for this act highlights women as gendered process — never more than an imitation of the complete subject. The vantage point provided by the dailiness of women's lives allows us to see how the social and the psychic intersect to implicate Franklin in otherness, and therefore in the dilemma of what it means "io be your own woman''. This dilemma can be productively examined in the relationship between the psychic and literal spaces available to women writers, as is signified by the replicated room of Franklin's dream. Women writers have often experienced the tensions between domestic and psychic spaces in relation to their familial responsibilities, and a sense of injustice that accompanies this. As Foster writes, Gaskell always felt that "family matters - the needs of her daughters, for instance - must predominate over her desire to write" although was found in letters to frequently debate "the conflict for a woman artist between engagement with the world of the imagination and the calls of home duty" (1). A sense of duty has, as Modjeska argues, always been deeply ingrained in women's subjectivity:

It is not just that men have had a better time of it as writers than women. This facilitating and supporting of others, this burying of her identity in another's runs deep in a woman (199).

The diaries of Roland, James and Eleanor Dark can also be seen to highlight the presence of the other within the act of writing, indicating the extent to which the family was part of their daily lives and their identities. Children in particular emerge as a central focus, and indeed James' diaries turn into an account of her daughter's development after her birth. Gaskell's internal paradox manifested itself in the literal space she set up for writing; she accommodated her ongoing ambivalence regarding her literary career by conflating writing and family spaces, making her room of her own "freely accessible to all the members of the household" (Foster 2). Yet amidst these accommodations, Gaskell pondered on the dilemma of how the female I could be isolated, to enable a psychic space for writing. As she asks of Bronte in her biography The Life of Charlotte Bronte:

Do you, who have so many friends, — so large a circle of acquaintance, — fmd it easy when you sit down to write, to isolate yourself from those ties, and their sweet associations, so as to be your own woman...? (qtd in Foster 1)

Taking up these tensions in relation to Franklin enables us to see the struggle she experienced in her desire for isolation, both internal and external: "Oh, for some refuge - for myself - to be myself (30 August 1935). These psychic needs can be productively examined at the intersection of gendered space and time. For this juncture allows us to explore Franklin as an endlessly proliferative process, and thereby to identify her struggle to capture a "sense of origin" in the present moment, as one who imitates but never achieves a continuous or coherent subjectivity. Holmes recommends that women's lives be read in the conflation of gendered time and space: "The experience of time cannot be separated from the space in which it is lived. Like time, space is also gendered" (xxii). These insights can be used here to illuminate Franklin in her desire for the temporal consistency that would necessarily accompany "some refuge - for myself. A consideration of Franklin within these dimensions enables us to see how, as an interrupted subject in search of continuity, she is distorted into a state of continuous disruptions: "My life now is merely a low form of existence and has sunk to a stream of interruptions" (10 March 1948). As Nussbaum writes, diaries in particular illustrate this desire for a coherent subjectivity by elucidating our narrative attempts to achieve it: "We imagine that there is not interruption or variation; these gaps can only be resolved through the imaginative creation of 'the fiction of continued existence'" (43). For women, this desire is thwarted by a daily existence that is, according to Tillie Olsen, "at best part-self, part-time ... distraction, not meditation ... interruption, not continuity" (qtd in Dever xv, xvi). The vantage point provided by these temporal and spatial tensions enables us to identify the several strategies adopted by Franklin in her attempt to reanimate the present in her diaries, to create the illusion of a narrative "fiction of continued existence". Here we can see how, through the techniques of imaginative recreation and nostalgia. Franklin becomes an imitation of the male writer. As her surrogate private body, a space in which to escape the domestic home that keeps her in "a special hell shut out from friends" (25 February 1938), these diaries are a way for her to, as Gaskell writes to Bronte, "isolate yourself from those ties" and write. Yet in the surrogacy of her diary writing, at the intersection of daily and imaginative spaces. Franklin's desire for those "long periods of contemplation" (Modjeska 11) necessary for the writing process can be seen to play out as a form of imitation, as a mimicry of man. This dilemma is evident in the nostalgia she expresses for a time when, living in London and free from the domestic responsibilities that oppress her back in Australia, she managed to write her novel "Up the C" [Up the Country] in six weeks: Free, Free I was! In such different circumstances from Geo Moore & Yeats, but free. No one to dictate to me or to be managed. It was as if a cork popped out and freed stored thought ... But ah! It was short-lived and then Mother's [word incomprehensible] power began and has never ceased (3 January 1936).

She also substitutes her own situation with that of C. H. Grattan when she imagines herself in the isolation that for him stimulates a fear of loneliness: "God, if I could sit free from worry, in luxurious quiet and retreat in a flat like his even for 2 weeks!" (18 September 1937). Gaskell expresses a similar desire for the life of the male writer when she writes to friend Charles Eliot Norton: "If I had a library like yours, all undisturbed for hours, how I would write!" (qtd in Foster 1). An exploration into the intrusion of daily realities on this imaginative space also enables us to see how Franklin's Edenic writing scenarios are distorted into the psychic interruptions of the charwoman. This distortion can be further elucidated as an indication of the way in which "different understanding of time impinged upon women's lives in immediate and often contradictory ways" (Holmes xxi). In a similar mode to Gertrude Stein, who famously established the society for women's genius, Franklin champions women's writing ability and argues that it is domestic circumstances alone that prevent female Shakespeares, thereby conflating the social and the psychic in gendered writing processes. She writes in her diaries, in a way reminiscent of Woolf s A Room of One's Own, of a public ignorance regarding the limitations posed by women's private lives: "then men, not commoners or outsiders but writers get up in the library societies and wonder what women have been doing, why they have produced no Shakespeare" (27 January 1936). The complexity of her own psychic resistances to the act of writing can be productively analysed as it plays out in relation to the oppressive effects of women's objectification in the social realm. Describing feelings of frustration at the knowledge that a meal was waiting to be prepared, she compares her inability to forget about the vegetables to a man's ability to prioritise his writing over them, arguing that whereas his forgetfulness would be a part of "male genius", her failure to produce a meal would be evidence of her "inferiority as a female" (2 February 1936). This vantage point also allows us to see how her desire for substitution with the male writer is distorted by her own integrated sense of otherness. This distortion illuminates a tension between her diary as a document whose "literary notes wd. be useful" (25 Februaryl938) and as a mimicry of literature. This tension is evident in her Literary Notebooks when, in the context of reviewing a book by Vidal, the narrative shifts into the realm of domestic realities as she writes of how, unlike a male writer, she feels obliged to ensure that her hired help is not overworked: "Think by contrast of my two [word indecipherable] in this small cottage and how I have to do most of the work myself so that the poor pets won't be overdone" (30 October 1937). A further exploration into the narrative intrusions of an interrupted subject elucidates Franklin's use of the Diary and Literary Notebooks as a "substitute" for fiction, a space in which she fmds herself caught in the loop of writing about the act of writing. In a 1936 entry, she writes of how, after doing the daily chores, she fmds herself too tired to capture the "train of thought" necessary for her fictional writing (2 February 1936). Her Literary Notebooks are further broken up in their thematic structure with the title "interruptions", which Franklin often uses to indicate the daily intrusions on her literary attempts: "Interruptions. Friday afternoon: Ivy Vernon ..." (September 1936). This titling can also be seen to indicate the extent to which, in her desire for complete isolation, she considered others to be an imposition to writing progress.

An examination of these internal resistances also illuminates a key ambiguity in the way Franklin, confined to literary mimicry, can only be the author of a delayed writing process. She perpetuates feelings of a lack of literary progress by writing in the repetitive mode of the interrupted subject, whose desire for continuity is inevitably distorted into "a stream of interruptions". This writing dilemma is made evident in an entry concerning the banality of her friend Emily Fullerton's tenancy problems that continues for six pages:

Well, nothing done, nothing done! Sunday morning garden, afternoon Lena + full Wilkes' family, evening took Lena to call on Miss Gillespie. Yesterday nice wet morning so hoped for a few straight minutes between mothers' demands + telephone calls, to read ^All that Swagger' for edition. Em Fullerton rang at nine demanding my presence at Sommers a lawyer + Mrs Ackhurst the outgoing tenant of 9 Edward Street had been a bitch and a fiend, etc. etc (16 March 1937).

This vantage point allows us to see that, in her inability to transcend her gendering within the act of writing. Franklin is implicated in the dilemma involved in being a woman writer, one who is unable to shift from the processes of production to become totalising author. In this way, we also see that it is her simultaneous engagement with and resistance to textual authority that makes her diary a subversive space for writing about writing, in a similar way that My Career Goes Bung, in the tension between authorial voices, is made into a "fiction about writing fiction". An exploration of this imitative and subversive space illuminates the costs involved for Franklin in attempting the act of writing. These costs are evident when she refers to her domestic life as a process of repetitive strain that prevents writing. In the frustrated reflection that "it is years since I have had enough unbroken time to do the paging of so long a MS in one slap", she writes that she had:

latterly found myself too exhausted, after the ceaseless interruptions and the constant friction of the day, to do anything but chores such as mending, or light reading, until my mother was pleased to retire. The strain of holding out usually left me so overdone at bedtime that sleep was elusive - and so it went (28 June 1936).

A comparison between Franklin's complex resistances and those of her female diary writing colleagues further clarifies the relationship between psychic strain and a discontinuous writing process. Dark, for example, complains of having no time due to interruptions, and subsequently of being in the wrong frame of mind to write. These internal struggles are marked in some instances by a shift between feelings of inertia and torture. For whereas interruptions occur in a ceaseless stream for these women, the writing process itself is often represented as a battle. James writes that, although she desires to write, feelings of "inertia" prevent the process (1933). Similarly to Franklin, James adopts the strategy of "daydreaming" in what can be seen as an attempt to imaginatively recreate the illusion of continuity. Indeed, her diaries were intended to break cycles of delay and encourage the consistency necessary for writing fiction, as is evident in her continual assertions of the importance of being focussed and concentrated, and of giving up daydreaming (28, 30 June, 25 August 1933). In this way, we see that her diaries become, as she writes, a space in which she is "fighting a battle with her writing" (30 July 1939). Franklin uses her diaries in a similar mode of psychic battle with the writing process, as can be seen when, on describing her life as "ceaseless interruptions", she writes of the difficulty in finding "spare moments for tortured literary attempf (8 January 1936). James and Franklin both illustrate here the distorted protests of the woman writer, for whom acts of daydreaming or repetitive accounts of "ceaseless interruptions" create a delayed authorship. These acts of sabotage can be productively explored through Kristeva's insights into the repressed feminine, illuminating those occasions when women "sullenly hold back neither speaking nor writing, in a permanent state of expectation". Franklin adopts a similar description of her own delayed writing process in a diary entry in which she writes that obstructions to her fictional writing, an activity she describes as her "only inclination", unnerve her and keep her in a "continual state of expectation" (27 January 1936). These feelings are elucidated in another entry, providing a vantage point that allows us to see how her failure to engage in the act of writing results in her distortion from the living personality of the immortalised author to the living death of one trapped as a delayed subject in an eternal present:

I used to feel 10 yrs ago that I was in a very long tunnel with the light faintly glimmering ahead. Then I lost the light but kept on hoping it wd be seen again around a turn. Now I feel that the tunnel had fallen in and is my living tomb. It doesn't matter that I was too ungifted to come to anything but it is wearing + uncomfortable to myself (25 February 1938). Here Franklin's "living tomb" can be read as an analogy for her sense of entrapment as a stationary author, thereby further enabling us to identify her as a victim of her own internal, as one who poses the threat of a death to her potential. It is in Franklin's relationship with her mother that the psychic trauma of her gendering can be most productively illuminated. For the perspective provided by this relationship enables us to identify that Franklin is no longer involved in the rejection of patriarchy that has enabled her to be a writer, but is rather confined in her role as dutiful daughter in the discourse of the domestic family. The psychic implications of this role can be elucidated via the psychoanalytical observations of Kristeva and Riviere, as these theories allow a complex analysis of the mother as an expression of Franklin's own otherness. Here we see that, although Franklin's repression of the maternal is necessary for her to enter objective time and be a writer, her mother is also, paradoxically, the other without whom Franklin could not write. This psychoanalytical reading can be extended by the self-reflexivity of the diary, as a space in which the mother is also Franklin's alien within, threatening her with her reflected image as the monstrous man-woman. Kristeva writes of this distorting as part of the inevitable eruptions that result from the repressed maternal:

the invasion of her speech by these unphrased, nonsensical maternal rhythms, far from soothing her, or making her laugh, destroys her symbolic armour and makes her ecstatic, nostalgic or mad (150).

Taking Kristeva's insights here into a reading of Franklin's diaries, we can see how she becomes the worst version of a gendered self through the gaze of her mother. Her mother makes her into a version of the monstrous man-woman when she describes her as being both a "madwoman" (6 February 1936) and a "monster of selfishness and conceit" (8 January 1936), and further insults her with the accusation that she talks "like a man" (27 December 1935). In this way, her mother is reminiscent of Sybylla's "Ma" who commonly declares her a monstrous child who is "possessed of a devil" (Franklin Bung 17 36) Indeed, this comparison also enables us to identify that, like Sybylla, Franklin is performing both the "docile, modest" and the "fiery ficdonal heroine" as she moves between identification with the phallus and the "madwoman" of the repressed feminine. At this point, we can see that she uses the "secret outlet" (23 March 1948) of her diaries to refuse identification with and indeed triumph over her mother, as a superior man. As Kristeva writes in the article "About Chinese Women":

Thus at the price of censoring herself as a woman, she will be able to triumph in her henceforth sublimated attacks on the mother whom she has repressed and with whom she will always fight (150).

An analysis of this rivalry between Franklin and her mother directs us to identify how, in her desire to appease her mother, she performs acts of sabotage on her own authorship. In this way, she is denied the romantic heroine's request of a return to her beginnings, paradoxically, by the mother who is both point of origin and of destination. Indeed, this perspective enables us to see that Franklin is enacting a return to absence — to her death as an author — in this relationship. Riviere's theories of the mother, in claiming that the daughter is punished for laying claim to the phallus, offer further insight into Franklin's willingness to appease a mother who demands the sacrifice of her writing career. The mother's aim is, by Riviere's theory, to:

execute the punishment that fits the crime — destroy the girl's body, her beauty, her children, her capacity for having children, mutilate her, devour her, torture her and kill her (41).

Furthermore, Franklin can only safely deal with this "appalling predicament" by "placating the mother and atoning for her crime" (Riviere 41). Taking up this theory in relation to Franklin's enactment of an authorial death for the mother enables us to identify how her mother's attacks undermine her authorial status by forcing her anonymity and making her life resemble a "living tomb". Anonymity is, in this respect, not a mark of the totalising author but of the author's absence. This dilemma is particularly evident when she is awarded the Prior Memorial Prize for All That Swagger.

mother, of course, made the situation killing to me. I have had to endure contempt for business failure with my books, but now as soon as I try to hold off for a while to make up my mind Mother is at me again. 'I despise people who don't face things.' Continual jibes in this key. Why don't I go somewhere else so that she won't have to be bothered with my telephone calls? I intercepted postman and stifled telephone and shut door in face of reporters to kill off notice as much as possible, but still Mother jibed. I verily believe if she could discredit me as a criminal and she be a heroine, so noble and perfect as she is, to have the tragedy of such a daughter as that would be, she would be better satisfied (August 1936).

Here we see the costs in Franklin's attempts to pacify her mother, or in Riviere's terms, to use her masculinity "'at the service of the mother", in a mode that is "never enough": "this device was worked to death, and sometimes it almost worked her to death" (42). In this way, her mother is a distortion of the "fiery" heroine "so noble and perfect as she is", who makes Franklin an internalised expression of her own "indignant feminist rage". Caught in the gaze of the mother. Franklin is prevented from being "a diviner's cup" that "reflects the image that the petitioner wishes to see" (Warner 7), but is reflected instead as a perversion of the ideal daughter — as "the tragedy of such a daughter". This vantage point enables us to see that, in the self-reflexive shifts between "criminal" and dutiful daughter, there is little opportunity for her progression as a writer: "I have been the slave of a free boarding house. Let them come, as mother has tortured me so that I cannot write" (28 December 1937). A further examination of this self-reflexivity also illuminates that it is, paradoxically, through the rivalry between Franklin and her mother that she is able to occupy both roles, to be totalising as both an author of a "masterpiece" and the ideal, dutiful daughter. Although, in the above entry. Franklin is sabotaging her authorial success for her mother, she is still a famous author with "notice" to "kill off. In another entry from a year later. Franklin's "triumph over the mother" is even more prevalent: When I did the house alone for months I did all that MrsW and Ivy do plus the fowls, the garden, the laundry, the pies, my own room + a hundred chores and in addition attempted to write a masterpiece and yield to a certain number of public appearances and endless calls and correspondence. And all the time had to put up with Mother's representation of me as idle + selfish (30 July 1937).

This rivalry can also be productively examined as it plays out in Franklin's national subjectivity, for in marking the shifts between her performance of and psychic resistance to the role of the dutiful daughter, we can identify how she is undermined in the guise of the Australian icon. In this way, to "kill off notice" as an author is to risk being killed off as an embodiment of the nation. This predicament is evident when Franklin writes that her mother, "dead spiritually herself, is also "killing her [Franklin] spiritually", and by implication threatening her identification with the Australian spirit (26 February 1936). Furthermore, Franklin cannot be a representation of nation as a distorted version of the ideal daughter. The ways in which she addresses this predicament can be clarified in a reading of her relationship with her deceased father, a relationship that is intensified in her attempts to maintain a link with a masculine national tradition. Through its connection to nation, this relationship can also be seen as an extension of Riviere's theory concerning the daughter's desire to have her masculinity affirmed: "if he sanctions her possession of the penis by acknowledging it, she is safe" (43). However, at this point we can also see that Franklin is ambiguously placed in a national identification with her father, as is evident when she finds herself unable to self-promote in the image of the colonial workingman. For whereas she recalls her father in his ability to slave away "in the toil of indestructible hopelessness", she is less idealistically represented: "you never lost courage as I do" (28 June 1936). Although she is being killed off spiritually as a daughter of the domestic home, her father maintains his place within the spirit of nation: "when only spirit was left you, you were richer with each year" (28 June 1936).

Yet a further consideration of the father as nation also enables us to identify that it is through this relationship with her deceased father that she is able to return to the Australian home of her childhood, as is evident when she writes to him of her visit to their family property of Stillwater. This visit home for the father can be read as an attempt by Franklin to occupy the masculine gaze, and thereby to further lay claim to a place in a national past. This masking is also evident when she writes of taking over her father's role in the garden, notably after completing a writing task. Having finished off her MSS-\ she then turns "to the garden.. .2 or 3 more onslaughts and I shall be on top of the garden where you tended your plants so tenderiy & patiently" (28 June 1936). In this way, we see that she was able to be a totalising figure, adopting all positions, by taking the place of the father. Riviere also alludes to the role of the daughter as surrogate father when she writes that the daughter "performs many of his masculine functions herself- for 'him' - (her practical ability and management)" as a way to maintain ownership of the phallus (42). This surrogate role raises crucial questions concerning whether, in her attempts to recapture her childhood. Franklin is returning to an imitation of the past. This vantage point allows us to identify a central paradox between her representation of a childhood in which she never "knew harshness, want, or fears — internal or external" (9 March 1953), and her torturous relationship with her mother — a mother who "is unfailingly cruel to me, always has been since my earliest memory" (8 January 1936). Franklin's return to an imitative past is suggested when she writes of her childhood as an adult space, describing herself as one raised on "adult books and adult horses" (9 March 1953). In Mathew's diary entries concerning Franklin, he also refers to a time that she:

assured him she'd had no children's books, never knew there were such things: T had Shakespeare, the Bible, Dickens, Aesop's Fables — that's what I was brung (or drugged) up on.' (13 August 1952 35).

This concept of a lost childhood is elucidated in the self-reflexive space of these diaries, as a space in which Franklin is denied her place as the daughter because she is made to perform the role of mother to a "quarrelsome child" (27 December 1935). In this way, her mother can be read as the other that prevents Franklin's return to innocence; she is the

Identifying with the Father, and thereby entering the temporal scene, allows Franklin to write, but this identification is taking place here when the father is absent. This could be seen to coincide, at least in part, with Woolf s writing experience - her father had to die before she could write. nasty critic who would pervert Franklin's place within the tale of an idealised Australia, who would "most likely misunderstand and distort ... and deduce I was some kind of a monstrosity, utterly at variance with the facts of my innocence" (9 March 1953). Franklin's alienation from this childhood past can also be illuminated as it plays out in relation to her mother's death. For on her death, her mother no longer signifies a spiritless Australia but becomes instead a symbol of the ideal nation. Yet here it can also be seen that relinquishing the phallic mask of nation to her dead mother results in a kind of gendered distortion of nation, as her mother becomes the national heroine who is only ever an ideal charwoman. In the diary letter she writes to her mother after her death, she associates her with those charwomen lost to the pioneering era, emphasising the resourceful qualities of her "fortitude and effort" through "trials, disappointments and griefs" (13 June 1939). This perspective enables us to see that, without the productive rivalry they shared while her mother was living. Franklin substitutes the role of the father for that of the mother, taking on her mother's gaze as she awards her the title of heroine and accepts herself in the image, so often attributed by the mother, of her own inferiority. This acceptance is evident when Franklin writes that, unlike her mother, she has struggled "unavailingly with insufficient strength", and where her mother "had such fortitude" which "steady + calm ... never failed in any trial". Franklin questions her inadequacies: "why can I too not have fortitude?" (13 June 1939). In this way, we can see that, in Franklin's ambiguity towards her role as dutiful daughter, a crucial question arises concerning what it means to be a daughter of the nation. An exploration into this dilemma enables us to see that Franklin accepts the role of the dutiful daughter she resisted during her mother's lifetime, symbolically, on her mother's deathbed. This transition is evident in the diary letter Franklin writes to her mother, in which she is idealised in her performance of this dutiful role: "'Stay a little while with me, and comfort me' you said. And I am tortured by that, fearing that you did not realise that I never left you at nights at the end" (13 June 1939). A consideration of how this role plays out in the context of Franklin's other relationships allows us to identify the costs involved in her belated performance of the dutiful daughter, as she occupies her mother's place as the ideal charwoman. Whereas she was made "the slave of a free boarding house" while her mother was living, as ideal charwoman she takes on her mother's role as one who promotes a "generous hospitaUty, which made of your home a free boarding house" (13 June 1939). This hospitality is particularly evident in her generosity towards Devanny, to whom she often plays the role of caretaker in these diaries. Here we also see that, in accepting the role of charwoman, Franklin relinquishes her authorship, awarding Devanny the authority of the male writer:

Had I any faith in my talents I could put my work first and tell Jean that I cd. not possibly have her now. I am crippled by the apprehension that my writings will never be either acceptable or esteemed and that I should therefore devote myself to assisting Jean, who has confidence in her ability as a writer + has publishers wanting her stuff (9 March 1953).

Later the same entry, Franklin again writes of herself in the mode of the female caretaker who, like the woman behind Shakespeare, holds Devanny's "literary arm up": "I postponed my own efforts once again and devoted myself to Jean" (9 March 1953). At this point we also see that occupying this dutiful role for Devanny is preferable to the isolation Franklin experiences as a subject that is neither a totalising author or an embodiment of nation. In this way. Franklin's gendering as ideal charwoman exposes her as a lonely I alienated from nation. This alienation is evident when she describes Devanny's presence as "so heartening to my isolation from any mental or spiritual contact, so warming to my 'matelessness'" (9 March 1953). Here we see that in her "matelessness". Franklin is the isolated I of a woman with no country, estranged from an Australian tradition of mateship. The failure of her anonymity in these gendering moments illuminates a key consequence of the self-distancing that, in other contexts, enables her creative productivity outside gender discourses. Franklin's alienation can also be usefully analysed as it plays out in her relationship with a national body of women — or more specifically "a nation of charwomen". Here we see that, once again. Franklin preferences nostalgia over daily realities, in this instance for the "well-rounded" women of a by-gone era (12 January 1937). Her isolation from a body of women she considers to be performative and superficial is marked in her diaries by a distinction between charwomen and ladies' maids. This distinction can be seen to offer her a way to maintain a link to nation in the gendering of her domestic role, as she associates ladies' maids with the gentrification of an English-style city culture. Her idealised perception of women's domesticity emerges from the democratic environment of the 1890s in which "old class restrictions were being broken down" (Webby "Colonial" 53). In contrast to the egalitarian ideal of the past, Franklin saw her female contemporaries from the 1930s and 1940s as being representative of a performative culture that, as she writes of a women's social event, "touched nothing fundamental" (14 February 1938). She writes of how a Mrs Pao, rather than "talk of the terrible situation in China" told "old Mrs Watson how she could procure Chinese rugs at reduced cost" (31 March 1938). A visit to a local school reveals "pampered creatures ... [that] play at housekeeping", a scenario she describes as "a depressing ladified circus" where "girls will still learn, or cook without learning, potatoes on a stove in the far west in the heat. And depend on the can-opener, + slave along as best they can" while "war savages ravages China -i- Spain, and all the world trembles on the brink of explosion" (28 February 1938). Franklin condemns these ladies' maids as the "tame and privileged women who enjoy what rebel + martyred women have won" (14 February 1938). At this point we can see that, in her desire to be associated with these national heroines from the past, she is alienated from the women in her present, often finding "there was no use talking to this lot of oddments" or that she "could not have made any contact with such women — knitting recipe-char-minded" (14 February 1938, 11 January 1938). An examination of Franklin's nation of women in domestic contexts enables us to see the ways in which they signify her own psychic resistances to an interrupted daily existence as well as her anxieties concerning the delayed writing process. In her internal resistances to these particular gender anxieties, women are once more dehumanised, this time as a distortion of the body of nation:

These dreadful old Australian women with no avocation but charring + gossip, when they get old have no more soul than a dog. It is like listening to the experiences of an animal — good heavens is this life? (9 September 1935). This vantage point also allows us to see that Australian women represent, as a perversion of nation, the monstrosity that prevents her "psychic privacy". On a day that finds her mother in town and Franklin alone, she writes:

I shut up gates + hoped for relaxation —just quieting and growing dozy when the telephone rang — wrong number, but all my hopes of peace shattered, and the dreadful thing is that not one of the awful women with whom I am interned to associate wd have the slightest realisation that my situation was not ideal, they wd all think I have plenty of time for writing. They are just like animals, utterly without mental or spiritual development (10 September 1935).

Here we can see that the "char-minded" signify the worst of Franklin's nation, stimulating her fear of an imitative Australia with "no more soul than a dog". Furthermore, in her desire to escape their mundane company and be amongst intellectuals, those with "mental or spiritual development", her cosmopolitanism poses another complication to her national subjectivity. In this way, Australian women are emblematic of Franklin's ambiguous and tenuous connection to nation, representing her entrapment in the repetitive and banal daily of her isolated Australia. As she writes to Palmer in a letter from earlier that same year: "I said I had a letter to catch the English mail but I'll have to appear and provide tea. Curse it! Australian life is nothing but animal mechanics. The women are horrors" (13 April 1935). A further analysis of this ambiguity allows us to see how Franklin's condemnation of the "char-minded" is in tension in her diaries with her nostalgic celebration of Australia as "a nation of charwomen". Indeed, there is a contradiction evident in the way Franklin embodied the performance of the hard-working charwoman when she adopted the pseudonym of Mary Ann Smith, taking a position of servitude for a year so that she could report on what she describes as "the hardships of Maryanning" ("Letter" 8). She expresses pride in an Australian egalitarian domesticity when recalling a meal that was cooked for her by Ada Holman, the premier's wife, declaring the act proof that "Australia is 'a nation of charwomen'" (7 April 1938). There is, however, a temporal paradox in her attempts to champion a nation of women in the present that belong to the past. This paradox can be seen when she writes:

Servants :- Charwomen, now only Ladies' maids. One or two young men have lately asked me why I say we are 'a nation of charwomen'. On receiving my explanation they say they wish their wives were so useful and all-round capable — that they can do nothing, and lived helps are equally unsatisfactory. This has set me observing anew + noticing the help I have to employ because of Mother. It seems that the old charwomen belong to the pioneer resourceful era. Women through conveniences etc. are now merely ladies' maids. They can knit and make a sponge cake, but baulk at washing up (23 November 1937).

Here Franklin is again asserting the egalitarian/class-bound dichotomy prominent to Australian nationalism, but in doing so highlights a tension between her claim that "we are 'a nation of charwomen'" and paradoxically that "the old charwomen belong to the pioneer resourceful era". In this way, it is the conflation of the past and present in these diaries that allows us to identify Franklin's alienation from her fellow Australian women as a more specific dilemma concerning what is means to be an ideal daughter of nation. This dilemma can be seen to play out in a 1949 entry in which she makes no distinction between "charwoman banality" and mental inferiority of "ladies' maids"; she is complexly positioned here as the intellectual who may not "rank as a writer", and the charwoman who would escape her place amongst "a nation of charwomen":

I've been sinking in isolation and the complete separation from any intellectual exercise or exchange ... will have to limit my sorties or the results will be as defeating of the inner life as the exile on Grey St., and be little better than the round of family visitings, outings and hospitality, with its attendant labor and banal jabbaty-tatting chatter among women confined to and with mental powers arrested by the charwoman banality of restricted homes run on one-woman power (1949). The ambiguity involved in Franklin's "nation of charwomen" can be seen, in this way, to emerge from its central contradiction — women do not represent nation. This vantage point enables us to identify that, in attempting to champion women in the domestic role a national tradition awards them, Franklin is also hoping to maintain a superior national identity as a gendered subject. But she is distorted in her role as the ideal daughter of Australia by the charwoman identity she also rejects. This contradiction is evident in an earlier entry in which Franklin returns once again to the voice of the "fiery" feminist, outraged by the injustice of a masculine national culture that confines women to their charring role. This moment occurs when a male visitor argues to her the importance of making his seven and five year old daughters do the housework: "I gritted my teeth. There you have the universal Australian male outlook — 'a nation of charwomen'. Imagine all boys being broken to and confined in houseabout occupations!" (8 January 1936). The complexity of Franklin's social and psychic resistances to gender, as established in this chapter, enables us to identify how her diaries offer an elucidation of rather than a resolution to the contradictions as they currently exist in scholarly readings of her public and private feminism. In this way, we can see that these paradoxes were an inevitable part of being a woman writer, of having to negotiate between the public activist who was also an outspoken raging feminist and the cultural nationalist with a tempered feminism. Yet the gaps that exist in this scholarship have also been illuminated in an analysis of her diaries that has established, as with the previous chapter, how Franklin's psychic integration of nationalism was part of her desire for both anonymity and the totality of an authorial I. The vantage point provided by her gender processing in these diaries, as a genre that foregrounds processes of production, has further allowed us to identify the specific ways in which being a woman complicated Franklin's claim to iconic status. From here, an analysis of these complications can be extended to argue further that Franklin's paradoxes were a necessary part of her unique positioning within an Australian literary tradition, as both a contributor to the formation of a national identity and the only one of her female literary colleagues to have "had that experience of feminism as a political movement". For the presence of the "fiery" Sybylla in these diaries highlights that Franklin remained concerned with the dilemma posed by women's place within cultural nationalism, maintaining a Utopian ideal in which "workers and women ... rise en masse". In this way, her dedication to her own place as a woman writer within an Australian tradition can be seen as a part of her feminist protest, as she negotiated the difficult terrain of how to function in the inherently contradictory mode of the Australian woman writer — that is, given that it was not possible for women to "be writers, Australians, and women all at once". The vantage point provided by these ambiguities allows us to see not an authentic representation of "the real Miles Franklin" but the costs and resistances involved in imagining herself into a world where she can be her own woman, and not the woman that public discourse assigns her. Here we can further recognise the state of delay, of "literary stalemate", that keeps Franklin a subject-in-waiting in these diaries as a repercussion of her impossible positioning both inside and outside gender. This delay is evident in the way she came to increasingly rely on the nostalgia and Utopian idealism that allowed her to escape the disappointments of daily realities. An illumination of these temporal complexities in this chapter has enabled us further to understand Franklin as she engaged her own contradictions, shifting between gendered masks and her claim to an essentialised "gender core" in her desire to progress the cause of a "sisterhood of women" as a writer. Yet within the productivity in this masking, Franklin is caught by the psychic dilemma in her gendering as it prevailed during her lifetime — how to be both a female I and a performer. It is within this dilemma that her condemnation of and isolation from other women was necessarily exacerbated. Having established Franklin in the complexity of these gendered guises, we are further able to see that it was the very loneliness of her anonymity, of a secret and mysterious subject she promoted in both pubhc and private discourses, that allowed her to pave the way into what had been previously unexplored territory for the Australian woman writer. Conclusion

The risky business of diary writing: Franklin's contribution to a history of artistic revolution

This analysis of the performative guises of, in Brunton's words, "the real Miles Franklin", has not unravelled the "riddle" to which Barnard refers (1), but rather revealed more contradictions. For what we see in the gaps that prevail in current accounts of Franklin, gaps that, as Sheridan writes, her personal papers were expected to elucidate (93), is that she herself is waiting for the real Miles Franklin to arrive. And indeed, this waiting signifies the perpetual state of delay in which she is caught through the difficulties and impossibilities involved in being an Australian woman writer in her lifetime. The discursive mode of post-structuralism, particularly as it prevails in diary theory, has enabled a destabilising of the category of the 'real' in a way that illuminates her complex positioning between public and private discourses. This vantage point has further facilitated a productive examination of Franklin as an important historical persona via the contradictions and impossibilities that are, indeed, the very features that constitute the real Miles Franklin. In this way, we can see that, although not a riddle unravelled or a secret disclosed. Franklin is an expression of the anxieties and risks involved for a woman attempting a writing life in a particular moment within Australian modernity. In their illumination of the contradictions and ambiguities that constitute the multiplicitous Miles Franklin, these diaries are a key document of their time. An initiation of the movement through three different areas of the performative subject in diary writing has enabled the transformation of debates concerning the public and private Franklin as they currently exist. Another way of looking at Franklin's dilemma has been made possible by the shifts between the productive and subversive approaches that enabled her to write, and the often painful costs involved. An examination of these ambiguities have further given us an understanding of the reasons behind her own complex self-castrating, of the intricate integration of vulnerabilities and courage that led to her production and bequeathing of these important private documents. From here we have also been able to identify how, through the act of writing diaries for posthumous consumption, she has risked exposure as a private subject in public discourse, an exposure that much of her Hfe was spent resisting, and thereby made an enormous contribution to the contemporaneous debates with which she was preoccupied. This paradox can be seen when she writes of her diaries, in the context of their role as a "substitute", as a posthumous threat to her private subjectivity; their only use can be found, she claims, in the possibility of their literary contribution: "Must burn them all in case I peg out, but shd I live + ever be free + my wits rested, some of the literary notes wd. be useful to me" (25 February 1938). The vantage point provided by these ambiguities, as they illuminate the complexities within her social and psychic masking, offers a perception of Franklin yet to be seen, of her wilful obstinacy as she attempts to promote immortality by imagining herself into a world that makes possible "a new idea of womanhood" (James 1 February 1934). These diaries are Franklin's attempt to write herself into a different way of being.

The application of diary theory, as it foregrounds the complex distinctions between "work" and "text", has allowed us insight into Franklin as a process of subjectivity, and therefore as an icon that necessarily undermines itself. In this way, we have been able to identify her resistance to the Barthean notion of the writerly text with these diaries, as it signifies the handing over of interpretative power to the reader. This resistance indicates her desire to be in an endlessly proliferative state of potential that refuses a place as woman within public discourse. And yet, as diary theory has also offered us a productive way to explore the readerly desire for the writerly text, a contradiction emerges from Franklin's complex intention for these diaries to serve as posthumously private documents for public discourse. For she is attempting to write herself as the "classic realist text" to enable her positioning as both a creative and self- generative creator, and to promote her authority as an authorial voice — but in a way that also refuses the Althussian idea of, as Lever writes, the "patriarchal endorsement of unified character and orderly narrative" (12). In these ambiguities we are provided with another example of the difficulty of modernism in Australia at a time when there was an increasing anxiety concerning "those [seen] as infected with the modernist virus" (Williams 6). In this way, these diaries give us a behind the scenes look at the processes of Australian writing, notably at a time of literary revolution as took place in the age of modernism.

As an expression of these modernist anxieties, Franklin's diaries can also be seen as a gendered response to the debate made emblematic by the Em Malley affair, an affair through which "the whole field of modernist writing and art had become vulnerable" (Haese 143). This hoax signifies the Australian fear of modernism as integrally linked with anxieties concerning identity, both that of the self and of nation. The fears that play out in this hoax specifically refer to the authority of the author, an authority paradoxically promoted through the use of masking. Gender performativity became a feature within these national literary debates concerning personal identity and textual author-ity with the Demidenko affair, which took place fifty years after the Malley hoax. The vantage point provided by an analysis of Franklin's mask wearing allows us to position her diaries squarely within these national debates, as they elucidate the role gender performances play in the modernist dilemma of her time. In this way, her diaries enable a more multifaceted understanding of how ideas of author, nation, and gender were being rethought and relived in the age of modernity in Australia. They are also a key document in that they provide insight into the kind of performative gender issues that entered the public realm fifty years later, offering a gendered perspective to the debate between modernist and "classicists" (Haese 142), as implicated in the complexity of a national identity. This examination into Franklin's masking has also highlighted the efficacy of the genre as a way of opening up these textual issues concerning the authority of the author and processes of gender construction. This perspective has enabled us to see the ways in which those traditional reading practices that initiated the Malley hoax are in tension with the readeriy desire for the writeriy text, a desire that necessarily illuminates the instability of the authorial 1. The elucidation of these instabilities further allows us to link seemingly aberrant elements of our nation's literary past, to discover patterns within both old and new reading practices. A comparison between Prior's publication of her diaries on the Demidenko affair and Franklin's manuscripts illuminates the genre as an effective way of opening up these textual debates, notably via the insights they offer into assumptions of immediacy and intimacy between author, reader and text. In this way. Prior's diaries can be seen to refocus the debate in the unstable space between public and private discourses, thereby highlighting those national anxieties concerning the permeability of boundaries between the gendered self, text and other. Franklin's diaries can be further seen to link private and public discourses via their place within what Richard Haese describes as "the revolutionary years of Australian art" (1), notably through her representation of the

Dobell scandal, which took place the same year as the Malley hoax. For while Franklin fears the possible artistic distortions of the subject, as a "mortifying corpse or battered mound of flesh" (4 February 1944), by accepting and even pursuing his artistic attentions she is also complexly placed as the "classic text". In her desire to be a "masterpiece" (22

January 1947), she willingly compromises her authority as she defers to the interpretative power of the reader/other.

It is in the productive analysis of this relationship between gender and genre, within the complexity of a particular historical moment, that this study has enabled a greater understanding of Franklin in her positioning as both classic and modern text, and thereby in the totality and anonymity of her authorship. The destabilising capacities of the diary illuminate Franklin as a national icon that undermines herself, notably via the resistances of the woman writer in process, as one who refuses to be gendered as a private subject. A recognition of these instabilities, as they play out in the surrogacy of

Franklin's diary writing, has re-opened the matter of her mask wearing, elucidating current perceptions of her secrecy. This vantage point has enabled us to see how her anonymity, as a necessary part of the author-function, offered her a way to both be an authoritative I and to avoid the self-reflexive implications of being taken into the

"dynamics of her interior life" (Roe "Changing" 44). In illuminating her use of a language of nakedness, her claim to a "spotless" and "clean" body, and her embodiment of a nation that represents all that is Edenic and virginal, we have been able to identify

Franklin as she holds the line on gender, refusing the journey into the performative mode of mask wearing represented by new women. In this way, she was facilitating a particular means of gendered existence that she felt essential to the enabling and nurturing of women's writing lives, and in championing this approach has, indeed, assisted the choices made by future generations. This held line has been productively explored via the ambiguities within the art/life dichotomy of Franklin's diaries, enabling us to see how she promotes the creative potential of the self-creator and imagines a space for herself outside the realm of women's daily realities. This juncture between art and life has elucidated Franklin in her desire to be immortalised as a living personality — a desire that is undermined by her own genre-focussed preoccupation concerning what constitutes "real writing" (1948). This preoccupation elucidates Franklin's authorial dilemma, as it arises in the contradiction between potential and totality. In this way, we have been able to identify Franklin's complex positioning outside the kind of performative modes she despises, and yet as an authoritative I within artistic discourses. Furthermore, by investigating her use of these diaries as a fictional "substitute", we have seen how Franklin invites the imitative consequences of this act, destabilising the authorial I as well as the authenticity of nation and gender within the context of daily realities. An examination of these diaries as a mimicry of both life and fiction, and of a diary subject who resists the personal in preference for the author-function, has enabled us to read Franklin as a complex amalgamation of all that is iconic and the potential that necessarily refuses a single identity. An exploration into the temporal instabilities elucidated by Franklin's dichotomous positioning between "work" and "texf has also enabled us to identify another consequence of her held line — for here she is made a subject-in-waiting, caught within a perpetual state of delay. This waiting is the distortion of her creative potential in the context of the daily, in which space she is prevented from imagining herself into another, notably coherent and complete, way of being. In further highlighting the efficacy of the diary as a way of illuminating aesthetic debates concerning "real writing", we have been able to see how Franklin is undermined in her attempts to achieve a "reanimation of the present". This vantage point has also allowed us to identify that while the proliferation of her diary writing responds to her need for the "eternal now", for protection against death by the idea that "there is writing to be done for all eternity" (Lejeune 101), it is also the act through which she is made into an endless state of processing and self-engendering. Indeed, it is the clarification of this temporal instability that has enabled us to identify a key ambiguity in Franklin — her unyielding commitment to a writing form that necessarily perpetuates the anxieties it also relieves. Although she never relinquishes her search for the pre-defined productive space of her adolescence as it plays out in her increasing reliance on her nostalgia and Utopian, Edenic vision in her diaries, she is also undermining this search by placing it in contention with a daily narrative. A consideration of Franklin's self-reflexivity within this space of surrogacy and delay has also allowed us to see how, as Australian, woman and writer, she inevitably returns to the same key dilemma — that of the subject who is a stranger to herself. This complex relationship to her own otherness has been further illuminated as a dilemma of her time via the destabilising capacities of the diary genre, as the "interstitial space of between" (McMahon "Oscar" 105) that foregrounds the interrelated nature of all binaries. As both public and private documents that situate the self/other dichotomy within national contexts, these diaries make a key contribution to an interdisciplinary study into, as Susan Martin writes of the 1890s foregrounds, "rising concern about the permeability of boundaries - geographic boundaries as well as those defining gender, sexuality and the boundaries of the self (92). In this destabilising function, we are able to identify a complex pattern to these diaries, in the way Franklin continually exposes herself to the haunting reader she is, as a "classic text", necessarily writing against. Indeed, in what could be read as her commitment to the facilitation of future generations, she makes herself vulnerable to the writerly implications of her paradoxical subjectivity. In this way, she allows herself to become entrapped in her own self-reflexivity, to be the subject that, as Barthes' diary theories elucidate, cannot get away from itself. An exploration into the dilemma of the self-reflexive diary subject has enabled us to identify how Franklin perpetuates the state of other as stranger, projecting her ego onto the friends and colleagues with whom she refuses intimacy. Here we see the specificity of her fears concerning her own perversity and distortions, as they play out in her resistance to being a private text in the hands of her readers — to the death of the author at the birth of the reader. These insights have given us a multifaceted understanding of Franklin's alienation as author, Australian and woman, in both social and psychic spaces, as she avoids familiarity by performing the role of "diviner's cup" (Warner 7) that looks only outward. The key insights as presented here have opened up the area of Franklin scholarship to enable further explorations into her body of writing. The vantage point provided by the diary as destabilising tool has also advanced a reflexive study between genres, and could be taken into a reading of Franklin's fictional work, particularly those hybrid forms such as her fictional autobiographies. From here, we could further ask what the instabilities and ambiguities identified in this study tell us about Franklin as the totalising author of "the classic realist text" across her fiction. By taking up Lever's insights into the subversive features of early Australian realist novels, such a study could further ascertain Franklin's place within a tradition of realist novelists who "resist or embrace the authority offered by the genre" (13). This contextual focus raises central questions that would enable an extended analysis into her authorship. To what extent is she, for example, a "classicist" who holds at bay the modernising features of her Australia, in her refusal to engage with the literary revolution of the time? Is there evidence of the ways in which her resistance to the interpretative power of the reader paradoxically destabilises her authorial voice in her realist fiction, in the 'safety' of a genre she considered to constitute "real writing"? Such a study could examine her use of subversive writing techniques, such as irony and romance, as well as offer insight into the authoritative first person voice of her female protagonists, particularly in those less explored novels such as Some Everyday Folk and Dawn. This inter-generic focus has also opened up the public/private area of Franklin's body of work, which could be taken into a comparative study between her diaries and her other private writings in a way that would further illuminate her relationships with others. Such a study could advance our understanding of the ambiguities within these relationships as identified here, the tension between perceptions of Franklin as central to the literary life of Sydney amongst "my congeniáis" (Roe Title), and the social and psychic isolation she believed necessary to write. Given that Franklin's abundant letters are also a significant part of the bequeathed posthumous material that she intended to constitute her body of work, they would be an efficacious point of comparison. Her letters have been used to highlight modes of connection between women writers in the various editions of published letters by Ferrier, Roe, and most recently Marilla North. Yet considered in relation to Franklin's resistance to intimacy and a self-inflicted isolation that plays out in her condemnation of others, this study could further elucidate the significance of her shifts between modes of connection and alienation. This shifting would offer insight into Franklin's mask wearing in relation to her audience, and thereby illuminate our understanding of her place within public and private discourses. The reflexive methodology of this thesis has also advanced the area of diary scholarship, particularly in Australian contexts, by utilising an amalgamation of theoretical positions to draw out the particularities and complexities of a single diary subjectivity. These theories — notably post-structuralism and other textual theories, French feminist and psychoanalytical theory, and theories of both embodied writings and nationalism — have enabled an in depth study into both the social and psychic spaces of an Australian woman writing at a particular historical moment. More specifically, in relation to Franklin, this approach has allowed us to see how her paradoxes, as inherent to a production of a diary subjectivity, can be productively utilised, both in revealing strategies of resistance as well as the risks and costs involved. These ambiguities play out in the difficulties involved for Franklin in being the iconic I, and the techniques she adopts in her attempts to achieve it. Similar strategies could be adopted to extend the area of women's diary writing, for a study that centres on self-reflexivity would clarify current perceptions of women's otherness, and elucidate the gendered significance of their positioning as strangers to themselves in the "psychic privacy" of their diaries. The conflation of social and psychic spaces here also extends Australian and diary scholarship by enabling us further insight into the place women writers held within the complexity of a particular historical moment. The selection of manuscript diaries offered in a comparative study by this thesis awaits further exploration, namely those of Florence James, Eleanor Dark, Betty Roland and Mary Gilmore. James, in particular, serves as a productive point of comparison with Franklin in that she produces a hybrid text that combines personal anxieties with literary intentions, notably her expressed desire for her fiction to produce "a new idea of womanhood". In the shifting of her female voices, particularly between her subversive tone concerning "womanhood" and her celebration of the role of motherhood, she also makes an effective contrast to the resistances offered by Franklin. The explicit publishing intentions and overt egotism evident in Gilmore's diaries would also make a productive contribution to an expanded study of the paradoxes. resistances and anxieties in women's authorial voices at this time. There is a wealth of other diary material to be discovered and explored in a detailed search of the collections of the Mitchell and National libraries. Such a search would enable innovative studies into the psychic spaces in which Australian women were writing, and therefore into both the courage and often painful consequences of being a woman writer in Australia, at a time when women were making such a marked contribution to the literary life at home. In relation to Franklin, these diaries become a celebration of her posthumous survival, as one who struggled against the grain of an artistic revolution in her commitment to, and facilitation of, the writing lives of women. Works Cited

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Franklin, Miles. All That Swagger. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1936.

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—. "The Féminisation of Literature." A Gregarious Culture: Topical Writings of

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QueenslandP, 2001. 110-113.

—. 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. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1956.

—. "Letter from Melbourne." A Gregarious Culture: Topical Writings of Miles

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2001. 8-10.

—. Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and his Book. Sydney: Angus &

Robertson, 1944.

—. My Brilliant Career. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1980. —. My Career Goes Bung: Purporting to be the Autobiography of Sybylla

Penelope Melvyn. 1946. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1980.

—. My Childhood At Brindabella. North Ryde: Angus & Robertson, 1989.

—. "Novels About the Bush." A Gregarious Culture: Topical Writings of Miles

Franklin. Eds. Jill Roe and Margaret Bettison. St Lucia: U of Queensland P,

2001. 120-124.

—. Some Everyday Folk and Dawn. London: Virago, 1986.

—. "The Prospects of Australian Literature." A Gregarious Culture: Topical

Writings of Miles Franklin. Eds. Jill Roe and Margaret Bettison. St Lucia: U

of Queensland P, 2001. 117-119.

—. "Unusual Aboriginal Romance: Review of William Hatfield's Novel about the

Aruntas." A Gregarious Culture: Topical Writings of Miles Franklin. Eds. Jill

Roe and Margaret Bettison. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2001. 114-116. ALLBOOK BINDERY

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