Journal of a Journey, Joseph Hawdon

The full name of the journal (as you can see) is: The Journal of a Journey from New South Wales to Adelaide Performed in 1838 by Mr Joseph Hawdon. It’s a slender hardback of 66pp, published in 1952, so 114 years after it was written, from mss in the SA State Archive, the Mitchell Library (NSW), and in the possession of the family. My father has inscribed his name on the flyleaf and the year 1959.

Joseph Hawdon (1813-1871) was an early settler in Port Phillip (now Melbourne), the first to drive cattle overland from the north (from around Gundagai maybe, on the Murrumbidgee), he established the first overland mail service between Melbourne and Sydney, and he was, as he describes in this journal, the first to travel overland between Melbourne and Adelaide.

Hawdon arrived in Sydney from England in 1834, joining his elder brother John who had already established himself with properties at Cowpastures (outside Sydney, and presumably neighbouring the Macarthurs) and then at Bateman’s Bay, though at the time of this journal John was on their Howlong property on the ‘Hume’ (the Murray). In 1836, “Soon after my arrival at Port Phillip, I formed a cattle station midway between that Settlement and Western Port” (at Dandenong according to ADB).

Hawdon writes, “Towards the end of last year (1837) I determined on making the arduous experiment of driving Cattle, for the first time since the colonization of New Holland, from Eastern to Southern Australia …”. His journey took him northeast from Port Phillip, then west following the Murray (map). Along the whole way he encountered local Indigenous people and relations were generally friendly.

My map of major Aboriginal languages (here) shows all of central and western Victoria belonging to the same family. I have sourced a more detailed map (here), and the SA section of the AIATSIS map (here). I’m sorry that’s the best I can do to name the people whose country Hawdon and his party passed through. Hawdon writes that he talked to the locals and his comments accord with my map of major languages – “The languages of these tribes [west of L.Bonney in SA] is different from that of the tribes near the junction of the Murrumbidgee [north of Swan Hill], and the people are of a much milder and more friendly disposition.” Lake Bonney was known to the locals as Nookamka, “but in virtue of my privilege as its first European discoverer” he named it after his travelling companion Charles Bonney.

Hawdon speaks to Aboriginal people all along the way, but fears them too, often waving his gun at or shooting near them, though funnily enough the person who came nearest to being shot was Hawdon himself when one of his men in fear of his life took a shot at a charging bullock, and missed, the ball grazing Hawdon’s chest.

Setting out on Jan. 1 from his own station, 17 miles SE of the Port Phillip Settlement, “crossing a small range of hills, wooded with stringy-bark, the rest of the journey [to Melbourne] was through an open forest well covered with grass”. Think of that next time you’re on the Monash Freeway.

Jan. 2. Breakfasted with Captain Lonsdale, the Police Magistrate, who also lent him a dray. Then set off in company with the Postman. Picked up Bonney at “Mercer’s Vale” (Beveridge) and crossed over the Great Divide (at Pretty Sally I guess), arriving at the Goulburn River on Jan. 5. Took 2 more days to reach Howlong, near Albury, on the north side of the Murray. There the postman exchanged mail bags with the postman down from Yass. So the overland mail service, which Hawdon instigated, involved three 180 mile stages – Sydney-Yass by coach, then Yass-Howlong and Howlong-Melbourne.

Selecting cattle from the herd which he and his brother ran at Howlong, he swam them back over the river which he describes as being 100 yards wide with a strong current. I’ve swum in the river above Albury and that’s much wider than I remember but I’m sure the Hume Weir upstream makes a big difference.

They return to the Goulburn River, battling sand and lightning storms. He never says he regrets making the trip mid summer but he may well have. A bit of winter rain would have made the long sandy stretches later in the journey much more manageable, and would also have meant more feed for the cattle. Bonney has 1,200 sheep, which some days later escape in the night and make their own way home.

Finally, on Jan. 22, they set out. Following the Goulburn and then the Murray, though staying a bit south as they cross the Campaspe and the Loddon. Near present day Mildura they use a sandbar to cross to the north side of the river and then almost immediately come on the confluence with the Darling (much of this country was ‘known’, having been reported on by Major Mitchell after his expeditions of 1835 and ’36) which they ford without difficulty, on March 1.

On March 4 he ‘discovers’ a lake which he names Victoria and which I didn’t know existed (there’s no road north of this section the Murray). The country is mostly rolling sandhills and the only feed for the cattle is the reeds along the river. Further along, he is separated from the river by high – he says 200-300 ft – limestone cliffs and each night must find a pass down to get the cattle to water.

By Mar 10 they are in South Australia and ‘discover’ Lake Bonney. When the river turns south (Overland Corner) they start looking out for the ranges which separate them from Adelaide. At Mt Barker, Hawdon can see across to Lake Alexandrina (through which the Murray drains to the sea) and then they must conduct the cattle down the precipitate slopes of Mt Lofty to present day Noarlunga and so on to Adelaide (settled a couple of years earlier) 20 miles back up the coast.

I won’t stretch your patience by including quotes, but Hawdon’s descriptions of the country he passes through, of the plentiful birds, fish and kangaroos, and of the people he encounters nearly every day make this a book well worth seeking out – especially for Victorians and South Australians who will recognise many of his descriptions.

For Hawdon’s history after 1838 an excellent starting point is Janine Rizzetti (The Resident Judge)’s alternative blog Banyule Homestead (here), as Hawdon was its original owner.

 

Joseph Hawdon, The Journal of a Journey from New South Wales to Adelaide, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1952

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On Feb. 22 Hawdon recorded: “On the opposite bank of the river in front of our tent, were a tribe of Blacks having their bodies painted in white streaks… I think this might have been part of the tribe that attacked Major Mitchell in 1836.” The date accords with Hawdon being in the region of Mt Dispersion, between Robinvale and Red Cliffs, where Mitchell ambushed and killed Aborigines he said were threatening him. I plan to look into this in a future post.

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Christina Stead, How to Write a Novel

Christina Stead (1902-1983) is one of our greatest writers, so her thoughts on the process of writing a novel are of some significance. Neither I, in my review of Chris Williams’ A Life of Letters, nor Lisa (ANZLL) in her review of Hazel Rowley’s Christina Stead, A Biography, picked up that in her time in New York in the 1940s Stead taught an extramural course called ‘Workshop in the Novel’ at NYU, in ’43/44 and again in ’46.

I discovered this, in an essay by Dr Susan Lever: Christina Stead’s Workshop in the Novel: How to Write a “Novel of Strife”, and some other stuff which I have provided links to below, while waiting for a load in Sydney, and idly looking around for references to Stead’s (adverse) review of Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago (1957) published in Friendship, the journal of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society (from what I can gather from Trove, it is yet to be digitised).

The title references Stead’s speech to the American Writers’ Congress in June 1939, entitled “Uses of the Many-Charactered Novel”, ‘where she argues for a “novel of strife” that offers multiple viewpoints rather than a thesis, leaving readers to make their own conclusions.’

These two instances, the workshops and the speech, are just one indicator of how much we lost by Stead’s decision to live overseas and our failure to embrace her as an Australian writer until well into the 1960s.

From what I could gather in preparation for this post, Hazel Rowley characterizes Stead as grumpy, alienated from friends and acquaintances after using them in novels, and as communist only in deference to her husband, Bill Blake. Yet my reading, both of Williams’ biography and of Stead’s novels, is that Stead was a lively, sexy woman, thoughtful about communism and able to transcend the limitations of socialist realism in her writing as Katharine Sussanah Prichard for instance was not.

Stead did not write many reviews and in those she did, she was mostly interested in the craft of writing. In a letter to a friend, she writes of Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves that “He is a devoted noble soul, etc. but he is trying to spread altar-juice all over Australia’s dark and bloody history”. Rowley writes that this is just the sort of approach that maddened all Stead’s friends, but Lever points out, “it is surely more interesting as an indication of Stead’s way of reading… . We can see it as evidence of Stead’s continued interest in history as shifting forces of power, so that, even in such a throwaway comment, Stead, the Marxist, sought a political reading of the historical background to White’s novel.”

Lever in her essay, with ‘several ring-bound notebooks’ of course notes at her disposal, is able to discuss in detail how Stead relied on real life for her material, and how her genuine commitment to communism came out in her writing.

Stead’s course consisted of 12 classes with headings as you’d expect: Choice of Subject; Making a Start; Kinds of Novels; Characters; Composition …. Unfortunately her notes for the tenth class, Novel of Social Criticism, Political Novel… are missing. Stead bases her teaching on her own by then considerable experience, and on books by communists Ralph Fox (her former lover who died in Spain) and Mike Gold.

In the first class Stead planned to talk to her students about the impulse to write, suggesting that “to express something” was not enough, but that writing needed “to combat something”, as well as “to shape something” and “to express self and others.”

Stead adds that the combination of revolt and the writer’s “interpretation of life” “always end in creation – but first is necessary an analysis of the problem that first attracted attention, of your own small society, and even of yourself in relation to that society.”

For her second class, Stead compiled a list of novels that she thought her students should have read. It is firmly based on the European naturalist tradition of the nineteenth century, including Zola, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Proust and Hardy… While she does not include Jake Home, a novel she admired by Ruth McKenny (the model for Emily Wilkes in I’m Dying Laughing) she does reference it in the course notes as an example of the powerful use of direct political material. A second list of books about the problems of women’s lives – possibly added because several students as well as the teacher were writing on this topic – shows how European Stead’s literary reading (often in the original French) had been … Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Marie Bashkirtseff and the Goncourt brothers.

Last quote, this time from Stead herself:

A writer will perhaps wish to use his talent to put forward in acceptable form his social or religious beliefs. This is also good form or organization for he he has then only to go to his own people to get his characters …

No, I have to go on. With the next couple of quotes we get to the crux of Stead drawing from life:

A golden rule: always draw from a model: keep sketches, keep notes mental or otherwise of people who will serve as models. Do not be ashamed to ring up a model, you can tell him (or not) as you please … If you are “haunted” by a certain person, use that person [Stead, notes for class on Character]

Stead’s consistent use of her friends as the source of her characters meant that she lost some of them, and she has been portrayed as an angry and even vindictive person in biographies. Yet this kind of advice suggests that she might be better seen as an artist who worked from life as a conscious method, even though that might mean the sacrifice of life for art. [Lever]

There’s much more in the essay, about Stead’s nuanced position on the ‘proletarian novel’ of the 1930s; about her position on women and how she addressed it around this time in For Love Alone and Letty Fox; about how she used her novels to critique individual communists; and her characters and who they were modelled on.

There you are – we can all be marxist writers now. How I wish I could have attended the course. Or that Stead had returned to Australia earlier and taken up a teaching position here as any number of writers do today.

 

Susan Lever, Christina Stead’s Workshop in the Novel: How to Write a “Novel of Strife” (not dated that I could see) here

For links to all reviews, start at ANZLitLovers ‘Christina Stead’ page, here

A Sydney Morning Herald article (3 Sept 2002) a new trove of Stead letters, here

Hilary McPhee, Introduction to Talking into the Typewriter (vol. 2 of Stead’s letters), Melbourne University Press, 1992, here

Mike Gold, Why I am a Communist, New Masses, Sept 1932, here

 

More Mistakes

Journal: 019

Not a mistake at all. I said I almost never saw wombats these days, so it’s inevitable that from then on I would. At dusk last week between Morgan and Burra, mallee country, there were wombats all along the verge. One started crossing the road, saw (or heard) me coming, and broke into an impressive gallop. I should get dash-cam and take my own photos like the above.

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I wrote I’m Making a Mistake at least partly to see how long it would take me to rectify it. The answer, so far, is a while. I thought I might have a job lined up which would keep me closer to home but it fell through, and anyway, while Dragan’s away Sam and I seem to be getting used to each other. There’s regulatory stuff I have to do too. Meanwhile, Milly seems mellow. I took her out to dinner for her birthday and gave her The History of Bees, Maja Lunde and Mary Leunig’s brand new, One Good Turn. We all used to love Mary Leunig and the kids would pore endlessly over her drawings.

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Last trip I made a mistake of a different kind, or more correctly I guess, a wrong turn. Following the multiple secondary roads which are the official cross country route (in South Australia) for trucks from NSW heading to the West, I got from Renmark to Burra ok, but then, in the dark with oncoming traffic, turned left 100 m before the correct turnoff to Spalding, Warnertown, Port Pirie and thence via Highway One to Port Augusta. I quickly realised my mistake but, unable to turn around, pressed on. The road turned to gravel, kilometres passed, tens of kilometres, I pressed on. I was forced into a left turn when I needed a right, I pressed on. Finally, I came to a bitumen cross road with a sign pointing right to Clare. I was way, way south of where I hoped to be.

I hadn’t been through Clare for 40 years, there were hills with 35 kph hairpin bends I’d forgotten, then just as the road levelled out:  “Bridgeworks”, “Road Closed”, “Detour”. I turned on to a track through the trees, under a railway bridge with 8 inches (0.2m) to spare and came out at a T-junction onto the main street. No signs. It was after 9.00 pm local time, the town centre was deserted. I stopped where I was in the road and went for a walk. A lone truck came along. The driver said turn right, go over the hill and turn left to Lochiel (which is on Highway One but a long way south of Port Pirie). I took his advice, I was sure there were shorter routes but it was late, drove an endless straight road to Lochiel, turned onto the highway, went to bed. I was hours and 100 km out of my way (map).

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I’m not sure if it’s a mistake or just old age, but I’m 20 kg overweight. Since starting this job in April I’ve gone over 100 kg. I feel (and look) like a blob. Yes I’ve stopped swimming, but even in full training four or five years ago, 20 km/week, the best I could hope for was the high 90s. I’m a vego. I live on fruit, vegies and nuts. It’s not fair. And then there’s this article in the Age about the Zoo no longer giving fruit to animals because it’s making them obese. I eat 5 pieces of fruit/day, more if stone fruit or grapes are in season. I’m back on the 5:2 diet. ‘Starvation’ days are porridge, one apple, one orange. It’s already killing me.

When I met Milly I was a rake, and I don’t mean the Georgette Heyer kind. I was 10 stone, driving all night on diet pills; half a briquette, 2 shakers and a bottle of coke every two hours. Eyes like saucers. Hair buzzing. A year into marriage and that little belly started coming. And kept coming. I stood it till 40, then mid-life crisis, vego, competitive swimmer. For a while most of my less than 90 kg was muscle. Now it’s just a foundation for all that extra flab. Hang ageing gracefully, I want to be that 40 something guy again. I want to pull chicks. What is it again I should do with them?

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I’m not going to a review any of the books I’ve read recently. Lincoln in the Bardo was try-hard (read Lisa/ANZLL’s post (here) on David Malouf’s comments about “clever” fiction). The 7th Function of Language (Lisa again) was fun, with a Lit. professor hero, and lots of lectures about literature, but in the end was just ordinary crime fiction. The Natashas (2016) by Yelena Moskovich was interesting, worth reading, I wonder if I bought it because one of you recommended it. The other day, waiting for the car to be serviced, I picked up Beloved for $2.00 from an op shop and I’m loving it.

Recent audiobooks

EM Forster (M, Eng), Howards End (1910) – Project Gutenberg
Terry Pratchett (M,Eng) , Strata (1981)
Ian Rankin (M, Scot), Blood Hunt (1995)
Matthew Quick (M, USA), Love May Fail (2015)

Currently reading

Toni Morrison, Beloved
Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel

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If you look on the Menu bar you’ll see I’ve started a Journal page to make it easier for new readers to find earlier posts. (Which begs the question, what brings in new readers? In my case it seems to be mostly posts about early Australian and English Lit.)

Crossing the Nullarbor

Journal: 018

The Nullarbor Plain (nul-arbor: no trees) lies across the WA/SA border and its cliffs hold back the Southern Ocean. Technically, the highway only crosses the plain around Nullarbor Station at the head of the Bight, but generally a Nullarbor crossing is the 1200 km from Norseman, WA to Ceduna, SA, though the Eyre Highway continues another 500 km across the Eyre Peninsula to Port Augusta (map).

The Plain is largely uninhabited except for the roadhouses every 60-180 km and the quarantine workers at the border (Eucla/Border Village Roadhouse). Driving across from west to east, the clay soils of the Goldfields and the Great Western Woodlands give way after Balladonia to limestone plains, light scrub and saltbush until well into South Aust. and the Mallee woodlands around Yalata. The Nullarbor itself is “the world’s largest single exposure of limestone bedrock”, but as far as I can see, sand, limestone and mallee scrub extend all the way across SA and into northern Victoria.

Much of the plain is fenced for grazing, sheep I imagine, though you never see any. Then from around Nundroo – a couple of houses and an old service station – scattered wheat farmers scratch a living from marginal soils and even more marginal rainfall. Penong, 70 km before Ceduna, is the one township, with a truck stop, a couple of shops and a police station. A while ago, I wondered why Kim Scott’s great grandmother Fanny (Benang) and her husband carried supplies from Esperance (on the coast) to Balladonia, 180 km east of Norseman. It was not a sheep station as I thought but a township, although for what purpose I cannot imagine, and is now long gone.

The signs along the highway, when they’re not being stolen by backpackers, warn of camels, kangaroos and wombats. There’s no shortage of kangaroos, or emus or wedge-tailed eagles; camels are a problem when they venture this far south, which is luckily not often, because their weight and high centre of gravity cause a lot of damage when you hit them; wombats dead or alive, you used to see a lot of at the eastern end of the plain, but not so much now.

I can only think of two literary references to the Nullarbor, Daisy Bates’ The Passing of the Aborigines, a selection of articles written by her and collated by Ernestine Hill, and Hill’s biography of Bates, Kabbarli (here); and Stephen Orr’s The Hands with its improbable Herefords (they certainly wouldn’t get fat!) and mathematically impossible train sighting (one hour horizon to horizon at 100 kph). Though at the edge of my memory is an SF novel written by Sean McMullen, a workmate of a friend but now apparently famous, Mirrorsun Rising about a post-apocalyptic future which somehow involves Victoria at war with Western Australia.

The Indigenous map I rely on (here) shows a major language group extending from around the Goldfields (Kalgoorlie) along the Bight to Nullarbor Station in South Australia. As best I can discover, the original languages along the coast were Ngadjunmaya to the west and Mirning to the east, both now extinct. The people of the Goldfields and out into the desert are Wangkatja, Western Desert people

Further east, from Yalata to Ceduna, were the Wirangu whose language was subsumed by the related Kokatha, another member of the Western Desert family of languages to their north, following the establishment of the Koonibba mission near Ceduna (map). Yalata on the highway has been a mission, a roadhouse and is now an Indigenous community centre. And the roadhouse where you could once stop for souvenirs and snacks is closed.

Not just out on the Nullarbor, but in the roadhouses I use in WA, in the Goldfields and the Pilbara, and in outback SA and NSW, you never – I think I can say never – see Aboriginal workers. Racism probably. Chinese-run roadhouses don’t prosper either, though there are a couple of Indian ones. Truckies it seems, like to be served by (white) housewives and backpacker girls.

The SA end of the Eyre Highway was sealed in 1976 and I made my first crossing at the end of 1977, so I never got to cross on the dirt, though long sections of the old road still run parallel to the bitumen. I’d always wanted to run east-west and my business, I was an owner-driver then too, was registered as “Go West”. I got my chance when Holymans in Sydney offered me a load of lawn mower grass catchers. I’d brought a mixed load of oranges and general freight up from Adelaide and the Riverland, unloaded Sunday night at the markets, went round to Holymans who had me going by Mon evening; was in Adelaide Tues arvo to top up; and more importantly pick up my girlfriend Tommy who had promised to introduce me if I ever got a load to Perth, to her busty blonde friend Xenia; arrived Perth Thurs, pulled up in inner suburban Rivervale outside Xenia’s duplex; and were met at the front door not by Xenia but by her slender younger sister  …

Milly and baby Psyche. I went off and unloaded. Xenia came home from work and took us down the beach. By that night I had been awake 6 days. I fell asleep in the shower, was discovered, crawled behind a couch and there lay oblivious to the five women who hadn’t seen Tommy for years since they were all together in Alice Springs, and now had a lot to say.

The next morning I woke early. Milly was in the kitchen feeding Psyche. We talked, we sat and read, I held Psyche. Later, the girls said if I was ever back in Perth I should come and stay. I rang Adelaide, organized a load for Xmas Eve. Took Tommy home. “You’ve fallen for Xenia, haven’t you,” she said – resigned after repeatedly losing boyfriends to her in Alice. “No,” I said, “her sister.”

Drove all day Xmas Day, absolutely no traffic, was back in Perth Boxing Day and stayed for 2 weeks. Down the beach, Cottesloe, Swanbourne, New Years Eve at Steve’s (a famous pub). The time of my life. Got regular east-west work, took Xenia to Melbourne, took Milly’s best friend to Melbourne. Brought my Monaro back, to take Milly to the drive-ins. It took a while to convince her. And where was the Young Bride you ask. In Holland as it happens – a story for another day.

I struggled to get work for my trailer, a pantec (van), so borrowed B2’s flattop. Rolled it with a load of jarrah when I came over the rise into Ceduna and there was a train on the line, took it off the road out into the sand and laid it gently on its side. Bought a new trailer but was soon broke and declared bankruptcy. Was a salesman for a few months, then a driver again, crossing the Nullarbor twice a week each way, two-up (one driving, one asleep) with Ipec fast freight. Rolled another truck in the Blue Mountains. Flew home. Retired. Lou was on the way.

After five years in Perth I dragged Milly and the kids to Melbourne where we stayed for fifteen years. Milly flew home sometimes and we made two trips by car, Mitsubishi Magna station wagons, a trailer for the tent and supplies. The first time the two youngest sat in the very back (with seatbelts!), talked and played games, Psyche listened to music, Milly read to me and kept everyone fed. The second time Lou had a broken leg, a corkscrew fracture when he was tackled by all his fellow scouts, including his sister, playing british bulldog, and he got the back. Psyche flew home early that trip to celebrate her 18th birthday while we came home round the coast, the Big Tree at Pemberton, Denmark, Albany, Esperance.

In 2001 Milly had had enough of Melbourne and drove back to Perth in her little Daewoo, came back to see us in July and again at the end of the year when she sold up. I hung on for a couple of months then drove my lovely Triumph 2500 TC I’d bought all those years ago back in Perth, round to the wreckers, piled all I had left in the Mitsubishi and drove over to join her (share housing you understand, we’d been separated a while). Started running out of Perth to north Qld for Sam, till in December (2002) a co-driver foisted on me for a quick trip to Darwin rolled the truck with me in the sleeper and I packed it in. And that was it for Nullarbor crossings until I rejoined Sam and Dragan earlier this year. The rest you know.

Indigenous Stories

Train refuses to stop for injured Aboriginal, Ooldea, 1941 (here)
Aboriginal Astronomical Traditions from Ooldea (here)
Our People, Ooldea (here)

Recent audiobooks

Ian McEwan (M, Eng), Sweet Tooth (2012)
Jonathon Kellerman (M, USA), Heartbreak Hotel (2017)
Margaret Atwood (F, Can), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Kerry Greenwood (F, Vic/Aust), Death at Victoria Dock (1992)
Kate Chopin (F, USA), The Awakening (1899) – Project Gutenberg

Currently reading

Laurent Binet, The 7th Function of Language
Yelena Moskovich, The Natashas

AWW Gen 2 Week

Frederick McCubbin, The Pioneer, 1904, NGV

The second generation of Australian writing, as I see it, covers the period 1890 to 1918. HM Green, who as I discussed earlier, divides my Gen 1 into two periods, 1788-1850 and 1850-1890, heads his account of this period Third Period 1890-1923, “Self-conscious Nationalism”.

In Australia the spirit of the nineties and early nineteen-hundreds… took the form, in the literary as in the social and political worlds, of a fervent democratic nationalism: it was based upon a broad social consciousness, a feeling of mutual relationship, that found its most characteristic expression in Lawson’s doctrine of mateship.

The writing, dominated by the influence of the Sydney Bulletin, could be called Bush Realism, an intense effort to portray Bush life in all its details, paralleled in the art world by Australia’s contribution to Impressionism, the Heidelberg School.

AWW Gen 2 Week, 13-19 Jan. 2019, will be an opportunity to discuss women’s writing, representations of women, and the role of the Bulletin, in the ’90s and up to and including the Great War. This is a very fertile period for discussion with women’s suffrage, Federation, the anti-conscription movement, the war itself. But perhaps, except in general terms we might leave those to another time.

Although the ‘AWW’ in the title is of course Australian Women Writers I think we should also discuss the outbreak of men’s nationalistic writing, led by the Bulletin, which gave rise to the dominant myths of Australianness, and which formed the baseline for all subsequent discussions of Australian writing. Men on their own in and against the Bush is the generally accepted theme of this period, but we have already seen that bush-women were equally alone, facing the extra hardships of childbearing and child rearing, not to mention predatory men. There is also a further myth that began in this period, although it wasn’t generally recognized until the 1930s, and that was the myth of the Pioneers, men and women working together to carve out a space for themselves from virgin country (and it is only recently that we have begun contesting that “virgin”). Miles Franklin believed that she (under her own name and as Brent of Bin Bin) and Steele Rudd were the founding writers of this myth.

In the subsequent, post WWI period, women writers focused on social realism, often in an urban setting, and I have used this to distinguish Gen 2 writers from Gen 3. In particular, I place Miles Franklin (1879-1954) in Gen 2 and Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883-1969) in Gen 3. As a sort of aside, and a follow-up to last week’s post on bush-women, I found this in the Bulletin Vol 57 No. 2946 (29 July 1936), on the release of All That Swagger:

Miles Franklin (a note on one point of criticism) –

“I am grateful to one reader of this MS who complained that too much prominence is given to childbearing. This shows that the effect of real life has been achieved. No doubt every old pioneer mother would have cordially agreed as each year found her in heaviness and weariness enlarging her brood until it reached a dozen, or seventeen, or a score; but in those days there was no redress. In a land sans serfs the women not only bore but had to rear and clothe, and frequently to educate, their children. There was some drinking in bars, and belligerence and roystering in mining camps, with carnal indulgence with a few trulls to enliven the unattached men and make livelier tales, but pioneering in this empty land was largely and respectably carried forward by women and children. It was a slow, unspectacular process, demanding stoicism, patience, heroism, fatigue, sheer passivity, pain and childbearing, childbearing, childbearing – above all, childbearing.”

I think we can see why Miles chose to stay unmarried!

The principal texts on this period are:

Nettie Palmer, Modern Australian Literature (1924)
Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties (1954)
Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (1958)
Frank Moorhouse (ed.), The Drover’s Wife (2017)
Colin Roderick was probably the most influential commentator for most of the C20th, but he is shockingly contemptuous of women.
Feminists who contested the men-centred (men-only, really) myths of the Australian Bush include Kay Schaffer, Marilyn Lake, Gail Reekie, Anne Summers. The Pioneer myth was developed by John Hirst, Judith Godden, Jemima Mowbray (and others, I suppose).

The main male writers were: Henry Lawson, Steele Rudd, Joseph Furphy, AB Paterson, Paul Wenz and poets Henry Kendall, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Maurice Furnley.

Gen 2 women writers:

Agnes Hay (1837-1909) Trove
Louisa Lawson (1848-1920) ADB
Barbara Baynton (1857-1929) ADB
Alice Henry (1857-1929) ADB
Mary Gilmore (1865-1962) ADB
Marion Knowles (1865-1949) ADB
Lilian Turner (1867-1956) Wiki
Mary Fullerton (1868-1946) ADB
Vida Goldstein (1869-1949) ADB
Ethel Turner (1870-1958) ADB
Beatrice Grimshaw (1870-1953) ADB
Mrs Aeneas Gunn (1870-1961) ADB
Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946) ADB
Elinor Mordaunt (1872-1942) ADB
May Gibbs (1877-1969) ADB
Mary Grant Bruce (1878-1958) ADB
Miles Franklin (1879-1954) Miles Franklin page
Louise Mack (1879-1935) ADB
Nettie Palmer (1885-1964) ADB

In and amongst all of the above are the Billabong novels, which I know one of you collects; an Australian grazier writing in French (Paul Wenz, Sous la Croix du Sud (1910)); opportunities to discover the Bulletin and Louisa Lawson’s newspaper Dawn on Trove; two of our greatest novels, Such is Life and Maurice Guest; and more besides, not to mention writers like Baynton and Franklin on whom we have already done a lot of work. Then, though I hesitate to put any extra burden on Nathan Hobby, who has two children under 3, a PhD and a major biography to finish, KSP’s first (I think) novel The Pioneers (1915) seems to fit Gen 2 rather than Gen 3.

Author Jessica White, whose “work of creative nonfiction on Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th Century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed” will be out next year, has already promised a review of Praed’s second last work Sister Sorrow (1916). Two other authors I considered in Gen 1, Mary Gaunt and Catherine Martin, were definitely on the cusp of Gen 2, and we should consider Praed’s later work in this context too.

I guess I’ve run out of excuses not to review The Australian Legend. I should also do Miles Franklin’s biography of Joseph Furphy and finish reading Frank Moorhouse’s The Drover’s Wife. I’ve had it in my mind too to review Verna Coleman’s Her Unknown Brilliant Career about Miles Franklin in America (1906-1915). Then I could always knock off a novel as well. (I wish!)

See what’s available online here in the AWWC database. And you know the drill, let me know in Comments if you have a post in mind, or if you have already done posts in this area (I’ll make up a list of my, Sue (WG) and Lisa’s (ANZLL) existing posts in the next couple of months).

Louisa Lawson v Kaye Schaffer

Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife (1896) is clearly the seminal short story of Australian Lit. against which all other accounts of life in the Bush must be measured. Frank Moorhouse’s The Drover’s Wife (2017) is a collection of essays on ways The Drover’s Wife has influenced and been reflected in Australian writing and painting. I won’t review the book here, not least because I’ve only just started reading it (and thank you B.i.L who gave it to me for my birthday) but what I do wish to explore are two essays within it which go to the heart of my thesis – that there is an Independent Woman in Australian Literature who is a counterpoint to the myth of the Lone Hand/Bushman/larrikin soldier which most Australians see as the only true symbol of Australianness.

Louisa Lawson, The Australian Bush-Woman (1889)

Louisa Lawson (1848-1920) was of course Henry Lawson’s mother. But she was also a story teller, a writer, a poet, a suffragist, a newspaper publisher, and for many years, a drover’s wife. By 1889 when this essay was commissioned by the Boston Woman’s Journal she had been publishing and writing in her newspaper Dawn and its predecessor for more than a year.

… for hasty purposes, my colonial sisters may be roughly sorted into three heaps – city women, country women and bush-women, and it is of the last I will write; for it is of their grim, lonely, patient lives I know, their honest, hard-worked, silent, almost masculine lives.

Bush-women she says may be all day in the saddle alongside the men, then doing “what little had to be done in the house on her return… It would not anyhow be much more than making a ‘damper’ in a tin dish and putting it in the ashes.”

For by bush-women I mean … the wives of boundary-riders, shepherds, ‘cockatoo’ settlers in the far ‘back country’; women who share almost on equal terms with men the rough life and the isolation which belong to civilization’s utmost fringe.

The bush-woman is thin, wiry, flat-chested and sunburned. She could be nothing else, living as she does.

… she will tramp five miles with a heavy child on her hip, do a day’s washing, and tramp back again at night. She works harder than a man. You may see her with her sons putting up a fence, or with the shearers, whistling and working as well as any.

There is one thing the bush-woman hates – it is discipline. The word sounds to her like ‘jail’.

In those remote and isolated spots, man is king and force is ruler. There is no law, no public opinion to interfere. The wife is at the man’s mercy. She must bear what ills he chooses to put upon her and her helplessness in his hands only seems to educe the beast in him.

Louisa concludes that all of the bush-woman’s hopes reside in her daughters – “now wherever a dozen children can be got together there is a school.” The girls surpass the boys, besides, the men always “have the drink washing away their prospects.” These girls, “quick, capable and active … will give us a race of splendid women, fit to obtain what their mothers never dreamed of – women’s rights.”

Louisa’s vision is remarkably similar, no doubt because of its inherent truth, to that of Barbara Baynton (1857-1929), another woman who spent her early married years imprisoned on an isolated back-block.

Kay Schaffer, Henry Lawson, The Drover’s Wife and the Critics (1993)

I went straight to Kay Schaffer’s essay because countering her arguments had been an important motivator for my Masters dissertation, The Independent Woman in Australian Literature (2011). Basically, Schaffer argues that “Women have been considered to be absent in the bush and the nationalistic bush tradition” and that the Bush stands in for the feminine, abused and conquered by men.

Yes, the tradition excludes them, but women are only “absent in the Bush” because Schaffer, and Marilyn Lake, and Gail Reekie and Anne Summers don’t look for them. I argued in my dissertation and I think I have demonstrated over a number of years on this blog that there is a considerable body of work supporting both the Independent Woman and Pioneer Women as ‘myths’ in their own right, most recently of course our own MST’s Elizabeth Macarthur.

Schaffer manages to dispute The Drover’s Wife, in which Henry Lawson essentially restates his mother’s thesis as a short story, by claiming that the wife is a surrogate man – “That is, she becomes part of man’s battle against the land as a masculine subject”.

So Schaffer claims that there is no myth of independent women in the bush because those women who are portrayed as independent are just standing in for men:

In most of [Lawson’s] stories the characters who struggle against the hostile and alien bush are men, but this is not necessarily the case. The position of ‘native son’ could, in exceptional circumstances, be filled by a woman. That is, the bushwoman can stand in place of her husband, lover, or brother and take on masculine attributes of strength, fortitude, courage and the like in her battle with the environment (as long as she also maintains her disguise of femininity). She could also be called and have the status of a pioneering hero. This is the position of the drover’s wife.

For a few pages she discusses The Drover’s Wife and its ongoing iconic status, variously interpreted. But still she comes back to –

She stands in place of her absent husband. The drover’s wife is a woman. But heroic status is conferred upon her through her assumption of masculine identity.

Schaffer can only support her thesis of men vs the Bush by claiming that independent bush-women are token men. Tell that to Louisa Lawson and Barbara Baynton, child bearing and child rearing on their own in the Bush while still working the properties of their absent husbands.

Kay Schaffer is an Emerita Professor in Gender Studies and Social Inquiry in the Faculty of Arts, University of Adelaide.

Postscript

In January, 2019 I’ll hold an AWW Gen II week – I don’t expect the tremendous response we got to Gen 1 week this year, but I guess I’ll have some time off work, and I think it would be worthwhile to discuss women writers who came of age in the period 1890-1918 and the background against which they were writing, ie. the Bulletin and the Legend of the Nineties. More anon.

 

Frank Moorhouse (ed.), The Drover’s Wife, Knopf, Sydney, 2017

Australia Post – celebrating the sesquicentenary of Lawson’s birth (here)
WAD Holloway, The Independent Woman in Australian Literature (here)
Brian Matthews, Louisa (review)
Bertha Lawson, My Henry Lawson (review)
Penne Hackforth-Jones, Barbara Baynton: Between Two Worlds (review)
Barbara Baynton, Squeaker’s Mate (review)
Barbara Baynton, Human Toll (review)

The Dry, Jane Harper

In the summer of 1994 the national Scout jamboree was in Perth and for those scouts unable to make the trip Victorian scouts held a smaller “jamborette” at Green Lake in the Mallee, coincidentally, adjacent to one of the three blocks farmed by my grandfather and after him by my uncle, only four years my senior, Les.

The Mallee is sandy country on a limestone base, flat except for low sandhills lightly bound by eucalypt scrub and wheat stubble. In bad years the cleared soil blows in the wind. During the Depression and again in 1984 the prevailing hot summer northerlies created huge dust storms blanketing Melbourne 400 km away with red Mallee dust.

Green Lake is (was) not natural, just a shallow depression in low eucalypt and acacia bushland, fed by the channel system which brought water up from the Grampians. Gone now I hear, converted to pipes. We had huge family picnics there every summer, all Granddad’s brothers and sisters and all their children, and us four boys, the first of the grandchildren.

On the Friday before the jamborette I drove Gee, an enthusiastic scout, and two of her friends up from Melbourne, to stay overnight at Les’s before going on to the camp. Up the Calder Highway through Bendigo, through Charlton, Culgoa where Grandma’s brother, Uncle George  (Cox) bred champion clydesdales and you could sometimes see huge colts gambolling clumsily by the highway, to Berriwillock. Turn left, past the little weatherboard Anglican church, where mum’s younger sister was married while we boys sat outside in the car being fed sausage rolls by the church ladies, out the Woomelang road, turn right at Uncle Bert’s – ‘Wheatlands’, my great grandmother’s home farm – then left again before the bush block with scrubby native pines and bulokes where we’d get our Christmas trees, past the Austerberry’s. Dirt roads now, hard packed sand, graded smooth, pulling up at Les’s side gate, padlocked, round to the front, up the half mile drive to the old familiar farmhouse surrounded by peppercorns, from Brazil I think, not native but endemic throughout all of Australia’s wheat farming country, and a few sugar gums.

The first time I had made this trip for 30 years, the first (and last) time ever as a driver, but ingrained indelibly in my mind by 15 years of school holiday after school holiday, sitting behind my father, 3 boys across the back seat of the Prefect, the FJ, the EK, our first new car, baby B4 in the front between mum and dad. Granddad and Grandma did their shopping in Sea Lake but went to church in Berriwillock, my uncles played football in the green and gold, and once memorably we went to a gymkhana there where Grandma and all the other ladies chased a greased pig.

Three of Dad’s dozen or so schools were in the Mallee, the first, Sea Lake as I wrote recently, but then Underbool west of Ouyen where B2 was born and from 1961-63, Murrayville, further west again and so we would drive, in hundred degree heat in summer, 68 miles across to Ouyen then 80 miles down the Calder Highway to Sea Lake. Just mallee scrub, paddocks of wheat and oats, paddy melons and tumbleweeds. Identifying and counting cars to pass the endless hours – weren’t all hours endless back then.

Oh, the book review. You really should stop now or jump over to Emma at Book Around the Corner (here). Emma enjoys Harper’s crime fiction and writes a sensible review, which is more than you will get from me.

The setting of The Dry (2016) is a fictitious small sheep farming community, Kiewarra, though not so small it doesn’t have a high school, “five hours from Melbourne”. The number of towns in Victoria that fit this definition is just two, Robinvale and Ouyen in the north-west, the Mallee. Five hours in any other direction takes you into NSW or SA.

Robinvale is on the Murray and has a twin town, Euston across the river. Farming is irrigation dependent – grapes and citrus. Which leaves Ouyen, to the west, semi-desert, mallee scrub country, wheat farming mostly but some sheep. Dry and flat, salt lakes, no rivers. Kiewarra on the other hand has a wide river which normally burbles and rushes along, a lookout hill with a 100m high cliff, and late in the story the bare “fields” which surround Kiewarra become dense bush, tinder dry, threatening to engulf the town with bushfire. Any descriptions are plain vanilla generic – houses, fields, trees, river (and yes “fields” really annoys me).

Even the title is annoying, “the Dry” in Australia is actually winter in the tropics. “The Drought” or “The Long Dry” would have been more accurate given that that is what Harper (or the marketing people who came up with the title) meant, but who am I to argue when sales have been so good.

As a crime fiction novel The Dry is not bad, though in a genre renowned for meticulous technical accuracy her ‘police procedural’ errors are probably unacceptable. But the story is well told and the characters engaging. I especially enjoyed the back and forth between twenty years ago and now, flagged by italic script in the book, but not of course in the reading. It’s the geography that makes me mad. You’d have to think that the closest Jane Harper has been to the Bush is the observation deck of the Rialto with a telescope and the only experience she has of drought and farming is the stories she’s read in the Melbourne Murdoch tabloid, the Herald-Sun.

When the Mallee was divided up for settlement one block was one square mile, 640 acres. These days mechanisation means that an average farm is at least five times that, yet a big farm in Kiewarra is 200 acres. No wonder the farmers are desperate. The basis of the novel is that the ongoing drought has led one farmer to a murder/suicide which his parents ask his Melbourne-based former school mate and Federal policeman to investigate. The school-mate, Falk, around whom Harper is building a series, was blamed for the death 20 years earlier of his friend Ellie who was found at the bottom of the river with stones in her pocket, and he and his father were run out of town.

By the end of the book both Ellie’s death and the deaths of the farming family are explained, with a few unexpected twists along the way, the tension builds nicely, and yes the treatment of Falk by his former townsfolk has a “Deliverance” feel to it. But. The title makes the claim that this is Australian writing in the long tradition of Bush Realism dating from before the Bulletin, Steele Rudd, Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy, back to the mid-1800s and the women we discussed in Gen 1 Week. And it is a spurious claim. Harper has appropriated the tropes of Australian bush fiction to make a setting for her crime fiction and she has done it really, really badly.

 

Jane Harper, The Dry, Macmillan Audiobook, 2016. Read by Steve Shannahan

I knew someone else as well as Emma had reviewed it. Kim at Reading Matters writes: “Quite frankly, The Dry, is an astonishing debut. It’s an exceptional crime novel, one of the best I’ve read in years.”