The Total Devotion Machine, Rosaleen Love

Have you heard of Rosaleen Love. I’m blowed if I have, but she’s a good writer, an old fashioned womens libber (b.1940), and funny! If the stars had aligned she may even have been my tutor in History and Philosophy of Science at Melbourne Uni in 1970 when I was in my third first year and she was doing her PhD. Love is a science journalist, writing on the Great Barrier reef, a futurist, and a Science Fiction writer. The Total Devotion Machine and other stories (1989) was her first collection followed by Evolution Annie and other stories (1993).

I’ve been reading, and enjoying, these stories over the past two or three weeks, but let’s go back to the beginning, for a close look at The Total Devotion Machine, followed by a brief look at the others – there are 17 in total averaging 10 pages each.

Mary Beth left it until the day before she set sail to tell Wim Morris and Baby about the Total Devotion Machine. “This time tomorrow I’ll be off, flying the solar wind to Mars,” she said …

Wim is an adolescent. He and Baby have absent fathers who are bound by shared parenting agreements.

I’ll miss you both, but the machine will send me those interactive videos so necessary for my full development as a mother, and of course by return I’ll send you back some of me, for your full development as children …

So Mary Beth sailed off on the Tricentennial Fleet, and even the fathers came to wave goodbye, which set back their self-improvement schedules at least an hour.

The tone is one of old-fashioned SF optimism, but intended ironically I think, as are her observations not just of the fathers, but of Mary Beth. The TDM finds Mary Beth’s two kids a handful, and soon …

Baby comes to visit Jemmy [her father] at work. The machine bustles in and places her on his bench. “I thought that since you failed to turn up for your contractual three hours’ parenting time on Sunday I’d take time off in lieu today,” it says.

“What contract? I didn’t sign any contract.”

“The contract you signed with Mary Beth, whom I am legally and morally replacing.”

“Oh, that contract. Well that contract was always more of an ongoing process, really, more than a legally binding document as such,” says Jemmy, looking round the room at people who hastily drop fascinated eyes to their work as his gaze meets theirs.

… Jemmy knows that tomorrow, when Baby is back home, everyone will down tools and invite him into a conference. They will discuss, in a mutually supportive and deeply understanding fashion, Jemmy’s domestic problems and possible solutions to them, as part of The Strategic Management Plan for the Better Utilisation of the Full Potential of each Employee.

William, Wim’s father cops the same. The two fathers give in and move back home and the TDM looks forward to a year of leisure.

In Bat Mania, Barbastella finds to her surprise she has reached that age where she is turning into an old bat, literally. She adjusts to her situation and gains revenge on a former workmate by investing the properties he’s hoping to sell with colonies of her fellows. She sets her ambitions higher, wishing to change the world: “Matriarchy is the power of the old bat.”

Tanami Drift is a story of knowledge workers forced inland by rising seawaters – a possibility that was taken more seriously in the 1980s than now, when it has actually begun – where children tailored to their parents requirements are purchased from a Baby Factory, and extended family networks are simulated by computer. It’s a complex story. Glory wants to know who supplied her genes; her ‘father’ is on a one-way flight to Jupiter; the community is under surveillance from metallic lizards; desert vegetation is kept under control, by fire, by ‘outstationers’ who have their children the old fashioned way; Dr Neville who runs the Baby Factory appears to be demented.

In other stories Love uses her knowledge of and love for marine biology. A research student loses credibility when she lets slip that she can actually feel what sea-life are thinking; two hippies and a maths nerd drive up the coast to commune with the dolphins but once the dolphins have learned math they will take over the world; fossilized bones from Lake Mungo subtly change their shape each time they’re measured, causing constant changes in theories about pre-history; a researcher into electric signals between fish discovers extra-terrestial messages.

There are stories that might be straight, but have a little twist at the end. Children Don’t Leave Home Any More, and mothers still pick up after them; the end of tea ladies and the contracting out of milk and coffee supply leads to mafia controlled bingo in the lunch room; heaven isn’t all it’s made out to be.

The final story is a report into the tourist possibilities of the Maralinga atom bomb test site in central Australia. It’s pretty dark, but then so was the ‘black mist’ of radioactive dust which enveloped workers at the site and Aboriginal communities left unwarned nearby. In some distant future, travellers will come to this planet and compare us with dinosaurs. ‘”Their brains were too small for their huge bodies”, they will say, nodding wisely to each other.’

Rosaleen Love, The Total Devotion Machine and other stories, The Women’s Press, London, 1989.
Republished in 2014 by Twelfth Planet Press, Classic Reprints ebooks (here)

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Turning the Century, Christopher Lee ed.

Australian Women Writers Gen 2 Week

Among the books sitting unread on the shelves behind me, most of them second-hand acquisitions lost in the mists of time, I have discovered patiently waiting its turn, and months too late for AWW Gen 2 Week, this anthology of Australian 1890s writing edited by Christopher Lee (author of the Henry Lawson biography City Bushman, another on my shelves I’m yet to review).

I see, for the first time ever in my life, a short story/piece by Miles Franklin, plus many, many others. For this review I’ll stick to the women. But first some words from the Introduction.

This new collection of 1890s writing represents the ways in which Australian literature responded to a set of social, cultural, and political problems that were typical of empire and yet richly inflected by local experience.

The predominately British Settler culture was inevitably preoccupied with domesticating the exotic spaces of the ancient continent and writers were imaginative about rethinking their new home and its relation to the Old World.

The emergence of a self-consciously Australian sentiment in the decade preceding Federation [1901] soon became the stuff of legend …

[The Bulletin] was racist, misogynist, socialist and republican … In art and letters it displayed its editor’s preference for forms of Realism compatible with the new journalism … The controversial French realist, Emile Zola, was a significant role model.

Lee also cites William Lane’s The Worker and of course Louisa Lawson’s Dawn as journals which took the workers’ side but were opposed to the Bulletin’s misogyny. Interestingly, Lee claims that chapters espousing socialism were edited out of both Such is Life and Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl.

The rights of Aborigines were barely considered: “The original inhabitants of the continent were represented throughout the nineteenth century by a set of recurring tropes that justified exploration, invasion and then settlement.”

Miles Franklin: A Governess in the Bush

I droop with disappointment. It’s just an extract from My Brilliant Career. The Mitchell has reams of Franklin’s shorter pieces, won’t someone resurrect them?

Ada Cambridge: Leaving “The Nest”

Cited as “from The Perversity of Human Nature” which is not a novel listed under Ada Cambridge in Wikipedia (here) but which is available from Project Gutenberg (here).

Lexie Brown and her husband have argued and she is sure that he no longer wants her. Over a couple of days she gets her money from the bank, purchases a second class ticket ‘home’, smuggles a suitcase past her servants, packs and leaves. This is very unexpected of Ada Cambridge, and with poor Lexie sobbing in her bunk as the ship pulls away from Williamstown (Melbourne) we can only imagine Robert following post-haste to England, all misunderstandings forgiven. (Now I’ll have to read the whole book).

Louisa Lawson: Marriage Not a Failure

Lawson argues that women must be protected from “free unions” because they will be abandoned by their husbands when they become unattractive in their forties, while men remain vigorous for one or two more decades:

For centuries woman has sighed under the inequalities which beset her in every relation of life as compared with men, but it is only now she is rousing herself to remove them… In a hundred years her economic dependence, which is one of the chief causes of trouble in our present marriage law will have given place to a recognition and accordance of her proper place in the monetary and social relations of the community.

Stirring stuff! Lawson was poorly educated and in her forties herself before she left her husband and the little bush block at Eurunderee to come to the city.

 Mrs EA Chads: Woman’s Opportunities and Home-Influence

I don’t know from whence this nonsense was taken, here’s a sample –

It is useless to deny that there are cruel and neglectful husbands in the world, but it is equally true that there would be far more happy homes if women only used their God-given power of influence in the right direction.

Tasma: Monsieur Caloche

A story of 15 or so pages which may also be found in her collection, A Sydney Sovereign (my review).

This is a difficult story to discuss without entirely giving away the ending, which in any case is foreshadowed almost from the beginning. Tasma only lived in Victoria – in Melbourne and on her first husband’s property at Malmsbury – for 10 or 12 years but her descriptions of country and people are detailed and accurate.

The sparse gum leaves hung as motionless on their branches as if they were waiting to be photographed. Their shadows on the yellowing grass seemed painted into the soil. The sky was as tranquil as the plain below. The smoke from the homestead reared itself aloft in a long thinly drawn column of grey. A morning of heat and repose, when even the sunlight does not frolic, and all nature toasts itself, quietly content.

A slight boy, his delicate features scarred by smallpox, applies at the offices of Bogg & Co. with references from France:

Homme de lettres! It was a stigma that Bogg, of Bogg & Co., could not overlook. As a practical man, a self-made man who had opened up new blocks of country … what could be expected of him in the way of holding out a helping hand to a scribbler … He was probably a ruffianly Communist. The French could not get hold of all the rebels*, and here was one in the outer office of Bogg & Co. coolly waiting for a situation.

Bogg, a bully, instead of giving M Caloche office work, sends him up the country where he unexpectedly distinguishes himself as a horseman. A year later, Blogg making the rounds of his properties, strikes the young man across the breast with his whip …

 

There’s plenty more, apart from the men (men outnumber women 90:24) – a gruesome piece about a young wife on a Victorian station who does battle with her husband’s cook (Chummy); Rosa Praed; an extract from An Australian Girl; more Cambridge; the usual Bayntons; poetry by Louisa Lawson, Louise Mack, Mary Gilmore and others.

 

Christopher Lee ed., Turning the Century: Writing of the 1890s, UQP, Brisbane, 1999

Reviews of quite a few of the works and authors mentioned here can be found on this site’s AWW Gen 1 and Gen 2 pages.

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*The uprising known as the Paris Commune took place in the Spring of 1871. Monsieur Caloche was probably written in the late 1870s.

The Butcherbird Stories, A.S. Patrić

As a writer I wonder about those of us who have been removed from our places of birth, who leave language, history and ancestry to begin anew somewhere else. We become proud owners of words inherited from parents that are not our own. Our first sentences are composed within a literary history that has given us so few pages we barely exist. (Punctuated Air).

Alex Patrić is an astonishingly good writer. I loved Black Rock White City (2015), his debut, and yet (illogically!) felt betrayed by his next, Atlantic Black (2017), read the reviews but wouldn’t read the book, wanted him back here, back in Australia, Melbourne, dissecting us, himself, Anglos and reffos, with his precis, ‘removed’ prose. And now we have him, in this collection, published by Transit Lounge in hardback. I bought a copy at Christmas, but was unable to give it away, have been reading one story each night I was sufficiently awake.

The collection consists of 11 stories, unrelated (to continue a discussion I’ve been having elsewhere), from a few pages long to sixty, that reflect in different ways Patrić’s heritage as an eastern European (Bosnian Serb) man in Australia. The longest story, Among the Ruins reads as a European fairy tale, of a street-vendor of roasted nuts, bankrupted when his nut wholesaling business burnt down, now supporting himself as a subcontractor employed to play terrifying tricks on others.

Bruna Kramzer had a wife and two children, and in-laws who lived in house, for the most part harmoniously. He lied to them every day when he told them he still ran his business selling nuts … His family came to know he was moonlighting as a professional rogue. They needed Bruno’s earnings so they didn’t speak about it openly.

So you can see the writing is simple, but deceptively simple. With each step forward we learn also a little about the past, as the tricks and tricksters circle round on each other.

In another story the protagonist attempts to stop an old widower from committing suicide. I don’t agree with him. It’s not your business. Walk away. Milly argued with me, each individual has a ‘line’ beyond which some acts, by others, are immoral. Me, I have enough trouble being moral myself without forcing it on others. I divide acts by others into the categories ‘useful’ and ‘harmful’.

Patrić resumes his love affair with his adopted home city, with the bayside suburbs he obviously knows and loves. A taxi driver and his passenger –

… had reached the car park overlooking the bay. The beach ran south for two or three kilometres. Red Bluff was barely visible in the overcast haze. The steep cliffs rose thirty metres into the air all the way out to Black Rock. The bay roiled with shallow surf below them. Hundreds of boats and ships bobbled at their berths …

What are the other stories? And more to the point what do I remember of the earlier ones? Taking notes interferes with the process of reading. Taking notes is studying, not reading. And much as I would love to, I cannot bring myself to underline, let alone to desecrate with marginalia. Ah, Avulsion. I’d forgotten the swimming story. A guy doing laps spots a small shape on the bottom:

I swim up the lane, come back. I really don’t want to see it again. I’d rather it was a hallucination… The lane ropes guide me over and past the finger …

Training is addictive, once you’re in you don’t want to stop. Just follow the line, tumble, follow the line, counting laps. But be careful, especially if you’re sharing the lane, not to drift to the side, not to catch your fingers in the hard, coloured circles that make the lane ropes float.

Dead Sun, a man is in hiding, in the attic room of an old couple’s house, in seemingly the room of their dead son, a longer story, placeless, strange.

Punctuated Air, a boy grows up in working class St Albans:

I was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in a part of the city called Zemun – right at the confluence of the rivers Danube and Sava. There was one small room for the three of us to sleep in… My parents were still driven by new love and talked for months about a long journey that would take us far from our two rivers… Australia was one of the first words I heard, whispered in the darkness of that cold bedroom. A word … filled with the warmth of their love for me and their hopes for the future.

In Black Rock, White City the protagonist comes to Australia as an adult, in Punctuated Air as a child, in The Flood he’s born in Mildura (Australia). The novel, these stories, are informed by his lived experience, I don’t expect, or wish, them to be biographical.

And the title story, Butcherbird. A Melbourne man, on a resort holiday with his family, wonders if butcherbird song is no more than a ringtone, mourns a dead lover, swims late at night with a flirtatious fourteen year old, a few pages, a fragment of a life.

The best story, well my favourite, and they’re all good, is Memories of Jane Doe, the last days of a young woman, told backwards.

I’m not sure how old Patrić is, fortyish I suppose. A bio (here) lists his earlier work. I look forward to reading him well into the future.

 

A.S. Patrić, The Butcherbird Stories, Transit Lounge, Melbourne, 2018

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) review (here)

 

Australia Writes, T. Inglis Moore ed.

My late father’s books are an endless resource, more than I’ll ever read, not before I retire at least and by then I’ll be too tired. I’ve shelved them with mine, not so ordered as Lisa’s, so I come upon them at odd times. The bookcase on my left as I write – jarrah shelves roughly knocked together by an old family friend of Milly’s late mother, years ago when she was a widow with six school age children – contains mostly stuff from when I was studying, Miles Franklin, her contemporaries, Lit. theory, but I found` there today Australia Writes (1953), a compilation of short stories and poetry “written or published since 1950” and which Dad must have got second hand (for $6.00, compared with the original price of 19/6 – 19 shillings and 6d for all you youngsters, or just under $2.00).

The title page says “Edited for the Canberra Fellowship of Australian Writers by T. Inglis Moore”. Moore (bio here) writes in the Foreword –

Within its diversity the fiction … holds characteristics common to contemporary Australian writing. It turns frequently to the countryside – perhaps because writers feel that the true traditions of Australia lie in “The Bush”. It is marked by vigour and sincerity. The feeling for social justice is pervasive. The outlook is upon a workaday world; over it we could hang the roadside sign: “Men at Work”.

Men at work indeed, of the 30 short stories, six are by women – Flora Eldershaw, Dorothy Harrison, Ethel Anderson, Kylie Tennant, Elyne Mitchell, Henrietta Drake Brockman. I didn’t count the poets, but it’s more or less the same, Judith Wright, 5 or 6 other women and 30 men.

Eve Langley’s there:

A youth, kicking the self-starter of a
motor-bike sends
A vast vibration out to the sun, and it
returns his shadow in rain.
Out from the sun startles the line of
things, and the flying cars
Set their undertones in a dark and
silver note upon the line.
(This year before it ends)

Drake Brockman’s is a puff piece about Miles Franklin; and Tennant’s is a funny, queer, all right – strange story, a slice of many lives during a flood in Narbethong (not the Narbethong NE of Melbourne I don’t think, but one on a river with a dam upstream).

The story I’ve chosen to review is The National Game by T.A.G. Hungerford, a West Australian writer about whom I wrote earlier this year (here). His ‘national game’ is not Australian football as I expected but a two-up game in the national capital.

WG do you recognise this landscape?

Eastside Camp squats on the top of a red gravel hill and droops in untidy folds of unpainted wooden buildings down the slope to where a road skirts the willow-lined river… Behind it is the sky, and in front of it the road and river, and the lush greenness of the lucerne flats. Dotted with red and white cows, they stretch almost unbroken to Duntroon and the aerodrome.

Map (here): The camp may have been near Mt Pleasant, in the centre of the map. Lake Burley Griffin was not filled for another decade. I can remember visiting Nana and Pop, Dad’s parents when the lake was just paddocks as Hungerford describes.

Two men, Ransome and Kernow, an Old Australian and a New Australian, a Pole, called a ‘Balt’ by the Aussies, are workers on a project, maybe Civic (Canberra Centre), which was completed in 1961. Hungerford imagines what it might be like to be in Kernow’s head, dealing with the vagaries of slang and the latent hostility of ‘Old’ Aussies, who complain about foreigners taking their jobs, despite, as Kernow points out, there being a chronic shortage of labour.

Ransome offers to take Kernow to play two-up:

“I’m going up the game – up to Ainslie.”
“Game?”
“Yeah, the game. Swy – two-up, you know, with the pennies? At Limestone Hostel. They run a big one there in the scrub, behind.”

They play, Kernow wins, wins big, and they are chased home by some sore losers. Hungerford’s point is not the outcome of the game but to discuss aspects of Australianness by shining a ‘New Australian’ light on it. Kernow offers Ransome half his winnings, but Ransome demurs: “No Paul … we don’t do things like that here – you won it and it’s yours. Whack it in the kick.”

Kernow (note that Hungerford makes no attempt to give him a typical Polish name. Too hard.) is unhappy that he is not accepted by Old Australians even after two or three years and proposes using the money to return to Germany (Not to communist Poland!) but Ransome persuades him he has enough with his savings to buy some land.

To buy some land! His hands clenched hard about the the wads of notes they held; not the rich black soil of Poland, farmed and loved for hundreds of years by his father and his father’s father, but the wild soil of this wild, wide country that would have to be tamed, and coerced, and then, with love, brought to yield.

It’s an interesting book of our white picket fence past, those last few years before the ‘sixties’, womens lib, the anti-war movement, multiculturalism. Aborigines are, and would remain invisible for many more years. They get one poem, Nomads by Roland Robinson, and maybe a second, The Ancestors by Judith Wright of which I could make not head nor tail: “in each notched trunk shaggy as an ape/crouches the ancestor, the dark bent foetus …”

I should give it to B2, to mark his birth year.

 

T Inglis Moore (ed.), Australia Writes, FW Cheshire, Melbourne, 1953

At Parramatta, Ethel Anderson

Ethel Campbell Louise Anderson (1883-1958) was born into the Australian squattocracy, in England to Australian-born parents, was brought up in Sydney and on her grandfather’s station, Rangamatty, near Picton, and went to school at Sydney CEGGS. Her name reminded me of Annabella Boswell (here), also a Campbell, and the Scots community she moved in half a century earlier. But “Rangamati” was a place name from Bengal and it’s likely she moved in Anglo-Indian circles. In any case she married a major in Bombay in 1904, whom she “accompanied … (usually riding)—whether he was shooting bears or marching with his battery”. (ADB)

She spent the war years in England and didn’t return to Sydney until 1924. Anderson, who retired with the rank of Brigadier, was private secretary to a number of NSW Governors, including Philip Game who dismissed Jack Lang. Ethel mixed in art circles with modernists like Grace Cossington-Smith but seems to have been decidedly old fashioned in her writing – which is why I am happy to deal with her in Gen 2. Another site (here) says “A well-travelled mural painter and writer, Ethel Anderson was considered one the most important supporters of modern art and its painters in the early part of the 20th century, thanks largely to the exhibitions she organised and the writing she did about it for numerous publications including Art in Australia and the Sydney Morning Herald.”

Anderson had short stories published in various magazines. At Parramatta appeared in the Bulletin in 1956, and is variously described as a novella and, to use a term coined by Frank Moorhouse, a collection of ‘discontinuous narratives’. The two stories from At Parramatta I review below are included in Australian Short Stories, ‘selected by Kerryn Goldsworthy’. The text itself doesn’t say when they are set but I would guess around 1880 or earlier. The coachman is a ‘murderer’, and by implication a convict. Transportation to NSW ceased in the 1840s but I don’t know for how long after that trusted convicts were let out as servants and labourers.

Miss Aminta Wirraway and the Sin of Lust

Here’s something for my fellow 60-ish bloggers to consider –

A picnic was to celebrate Miss Aminta Wirraway’s seventeenth birthday, chiefly because it was the one form of entertainment likely to be eschewed by the ‘agéd’. “Though I do not call people really old till they take their baths with the door open,” Victoria McMurthie had observed, “people begin to be elderly when they look thoughtful after eating apple dumplings – “.

Half a dozen girls go down to the beach in the vicarage buckboard, down the sandy track with its little creek crossings from Mallow’s Marsh to Lanterloo Bay.

“Across the harbour Sydney begins to look like a real city, doesn’t it? There’s St. James’ spire – such an elegant candle snuffer.”

But the subject of the moment is Dr Phantom, the most eligible bachelor from Mallow’s Marsh to Hornsby Junction, who apparently wishes to stay free to “go to Burragorang or to cross the Wollondilly, or to explore the Nepean, or the Diamantina … or to the Snowy River, to fish for trout …” The girls chatter on, about the advantageous marriages made by their friends, and that they might make themselves, Aminta confesses to being in love, leaves a pagan offering on the shore, and then it’s time: “Juliet, you slip your clothes on and run and harness Ruby.”

Juliet McCree is accused of Gluttony

Dr Phantom is making his way in his dashing “Hyde Park”, ‘a canopied and curtained vehicle, its four wheels rimmed with iron, drawn by a piebald Waler, and driven by a white-gloved, personable murderer.’ It’s a fine early autumn day, he’s laden with baskets of peaches, plums, grapes and pears, and making his way to the home of his friend and partner, Dr Boisragon “(pronounced Borrygan)”.

There he finds seven children, various shades of green, holding black papier-mâché basins to whom Boisragon has administered a strong emetic in order to discover which one of them has stolen and eaten the nectarine he had been awaiting with some eagerness to achieve perfect ripeness.

Juliet is discovered – by the nectarine peel in her vomit – to be the criminal. She argues forcefully that fruit is often taken without asking, that the doctors both receive and indeed have in their possession at this moment, fruit which they neither grew nor paid for, that Dr Phantom has in his pocket a lace hanky which is not his (it’s Aminta’s!), and that she was unaware she was committing a crime. Boisragon has no mercy, and she is sent home in the care of Phantom’s murderer.

I enjoyed these stories, grew up on tales of English school children, mostly boys of course, never read Little Women or Anne of Green Gables (I can’t think of any English examples), love Tom Brown’s Schooldays, though my favourite was and remains Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age.

Researching for Gen 2 Week has left me with a surfeit of C19th school-girl stories. I’m also reading Louise Mack’s Teens (a pdf accessible from the Gen 2 page). Mack’s ADB entry says she was friends with Ethel Turner at Sydney Girls High School and that the two published rival papers. Turner is 9 years older, so that is unlikely. But it is possible Mack’s Teens (1897) was influenced by Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894). Hopefully one of you will review one or both of these books for AWW Gen 2 Week, 13-19 Jan. 2019.

 

Ethel Anderson, At Paramatta, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1956

The cover above is from the Penguin, 1985 reprint. It looks familiar but I can’t see it anywhere amongst my unread books, or dad’s. Abe Books has 3 copies in fine condition for £6.85.

The Drover’s Wife, Frank Moorehouse (ed.)

The cover painting above is Russell Drysdale’s The Drover’s Wife (1945) from a trip he made the previous year and his drawing A Drover’s Camp near Deniliquin (1944). Deniliquin is in NSW, 80 km north of the Victorian border at Echuca. I have often been through that way, heading east to Conargo, Jerilderee, Wagga or north to Hay, Hillston, Bourke and on into outback Queensland, and drovers and their mobs of sheep are still a common sight. Twenty years ago, destitute, I seriously considered the merits of getting an old truck and a plywood caravan and travelling at walking pace as the sheep in my care grazed the back roads and byways of the Riverina. As it happens Milly saved me, for the time being anyway, and that’s a story for another day.

Drysdale always claimed the naming of his painting was unconnected with the title of Australia’s most famous story, but many have sought to connect the two, not least Murray Bail, who in his own The Drover’s Wife (1975) claims that the big bodied woman is his (or more strictly, his dentist narrator’s) missing wife.

In this book Frank Moorehouse brings together a whole collection of this, his own and other writers’ stories and essays – on some of which I have already written (Louisa Lawson vs Kaye Schaffer, The Drover’s De Facto) – to make a fascinating whole.

Let me attempt a brief chronological overview (Moorehouse’s book is arranged thematically). The undoubted source of Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife (read it here) is his mother, Louisa’s early married life in the bush near Mudgee, NSW, her husband often away droving and prospecting. Louisa chucked it in in 1886 when Henry was about 19, moved to Sydney, bought a newspaper, and became a passionate advocate for women’s rights. She was a loud forceful woman, Henry was not, and a great story teller.

Moorhouse includes an essay by Louisa, The Australian Bush-Woman (1889), see above, which discusses many of the elements of hardship and isolation which Henry includes in his story. Henry’s The Drover’s Wife first appeared in the Bulletin in 1892. Two years later Louisa used her presses to publish “a poorly printed collection” of Henry’s stories entitled Short Stories in Prose and Verse. Then in 1896 Angus & Robertson brought out a more comprehensive collection, While the Billy Boils.

Academic Ryan O’Neill demonstrates how the Bulletin‘s house style moulded Lawson into one of world’s great short story writers. He argues that the influence of the Bulletin‘s and Lawson’s “Bush Realism” was to be hugely influential in Australian short fiction into the 1960s. Moorhouse looks at iterations in the text to interrogate Lawson’s attitude to race. So, the B in Blacks is capitalised for the first time in the version the Lawson’s printed, but is subsequently discarded, while the comic King Billy intercedes between the drover’s wife and the Black midwife, Mary only in later versions and, according to Moorhouse, only after Lawson got feedback from his cronies down the pub. In a separate essay Matthews argues that Lawson was gay.

Lawson’s genius was to both write within the Bulletin format and to rise above it, subtly – and not so subtly in The Drover’s Wife – spreading his mother’s first wave feminism, while all the time being upheld by men as the messiah of mateship. Men sought to emulate his laconic style, from Vance Palmer to Roger McDonald, but he was also influential with women, not least Miles Franklin and Eve Langley.

In lieu of interrogating this influence Moorhouse has included ten or so short stories which reference Lawson’s story. I have already reviewed The Drover’s De Facto; others include The Drover’s Wife’s Dog by SF writer Damien Broderick; a long story of a young woman’s coming of age, Afraid of Waking It by Madeleine Watts, good but barely relevant; Murray Bail’s story about the woman in the painting; and Moorhouse’s own mock account of an Italian student’s misreading of the Lawson and Bail stories and Drysdale’s painting, which allocates to Australians the extreme affection for sheep usually ascribed to Kiwis.

There are some excellent photos of Drover’s Wifes paintings, images from stage works, notably Leah Purcell’s play (and also stage notes), and a wonderful pair of images titled the Drover’s Wife, Urisino Bore (1958) of drover Ronald Kerr and his sixteen year old wife Mavis, married 39 weeks pregnant (by Jeff Carter (1928-2010)), and again in 2011 after more than 50 years together (and quite often apart, as is the case for all drovers’ wives).

Sue/Whispering Gums has recently re-brought Barabara Jefferis (1917-2004) to our attention and her The Drover’s Wife (1980) is a fitting story to end this review.

It ought to be set straight. All very well for them to spin yarns and make jokes but nobody has written any sense about me. nobody has even given me a name except one and he got it wrong and said I was called Hazel. The drover’s wife, the doctor’s wife, the butcher’s wife. You wouldn’t think of all the countries the one where women are the fewest would be the one where they don’t exist, where men’ll say ‘the missus’ sooner than give a name.

In a chronology I couldn’t quite keep up with Jeffris’ DW is first a kid from the backclocks of NSW who runs off with a dentist [the Murray Bail story]; runs into Henry Lawson – “so I told him a lot. Talked too much – must’ve – because some of it he took and turned into that story about the snake …”, and the story about Mary, the Aboriginal midwife, and the story about the baby she lost – “That was the story I told Mr Lawson a long time afterwards, or at least the parts of it that were alright to tell a man.” Meets and is painted by Mr Drysdale, and then there was Murray Bail “who must have known the dentist”.

What I meant was to tell not so much about me and the drover and the dentist and the rest of them but about how women have a history, too, and about how the Bushman’s Bible and the other papers only tell how half the world lives… We’re not sheep or shadows, or silly saints the way Mr Lawson would have. There’s more to us. More to me than any of them have written, if it comes to that.

But she still doesn’t tell us her name.

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

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AWW Gen 2 Week, 13-19 Jan. 2019

I’ve put up the first iteration of the AWW Gen 2 page (here) with links to reviews and posts by me, Lisa/ANZLL, Sue/Whispering Gums, Kim/Reading Matters and Brona’s Books – check them out and see what else I can add – and links also to stories and novels readable as pdfs or downloadable to e-readers.

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see also:

Brian Matthews, Louisa (review)
Bertha Lawson, My Henry Lawson (review)

Nancy Elin’s review of Leah Purcell’s play The Drover’s Wife (here)

The Drover’s De Facto, Anne Gambling

Mack cattle truck, triple road train

The Drover’s De Facto (1986) is from Frank Moorehouse’s collection of stories and essays inspired by the iconic Henry Lawson short story The Drover’s Wife, which I visited earlier (Louisa Lawson vs Kaye Schaffer) and which, if I spend yet another day stuck in Sydney, I might finish reviewing.

BTW isn’t ‘de facto’ so 1970s. I was passionate back then about not requiring government approval for my relationship status. Though I was eventually brought to realise that spouses and children should be acknowledged in some sort of formal way, about the same time as ‘de facto’ lost its stigma and fell out of common usage.

The ‘drover’ in Gambling’s story is a cattle truck driver from a Queensland cattle/oil town – think Dalby, Roma, Moonie (map). The Mack pictured above is about the right vintage (I care, I’m not sure you do) but from Victoria River in the NT. I would have included a photo of me and the Young Bride in front of my own much more modest cattle truck in 1974 but it’s home on my desktop. YB and I started off de facto, from day one, but in 1973 I got a job driving for a neighbour of my grandfather’s and mum couldn’t stand the shame if Grandma and Granddad found out about us living in sin.

‘She’ picked him up in a singles bar in the city,

… left with him.
He took her to a classy hotel in his big Mack truck.
Called ahead on the CB to reserve the honeymoon suite while she giggled like a schoolgirl, twenty-five with a degree.

His wife has shot through with their kid. He doesn’t have much to offer, a small house in a country town. He’s away a lot.

The romance of the bush overtook her sensibilities, Paterson and Lawson combined to urge her toward a life for which she was uneducated and unprepared.

But that’s OK, she said, I’ll work on my Masters. Yeah, he said, something to do, I guess.

This is starts out as an amusingly written story, though, in the Lawson tradition, with a sad ending – I would say with a pathetic ending but there’s a word whose meaning has been taken from us – of, I estimate, about 4,000 words or a third more than the old Bulletin 3,000 word limit which taught Lawson to write with such concision. But the undertones are savage, and I begin to wonder what truckie done her wrong.

‘She’ battles with the old wood stove. Chopping wood, which I like most country kids did routinely, gives her blisters and open sores. Having a hot meal on the table when he gets home. Or when he’s ready.

And he’d arrive home at whatever time it was and want to lay her. At first she thought it romantic until it came to the physical torture of no foreplay and no satisfaction ever, for her, enduring half an hour at a time … She’d go limp in his arms and if it was dark, she’d cry. Whimpering that he took for signs of ecstasy … Then he’d finish with a thrust … Soon, he would lift his head and say I’m hungry, how would you like to cook somethin’ for me, love?

 

They start to fight. She goes into town while he’s away, drinks and dances with the engineers in from the oilfields. He hears of course, from his mates, and belts her. And that’s it, it’s over, and soon she’s on the road out of town.

It’s an interesting, if obvious, riff on The Drover’s Wife, a middle class city girl thinking through an idle daydream. Working out for herself the consequences, though she might be pleased to know we’re not all stereotypes.

 

Anne Gambling, The Drover’s De Facto, first pub. in Latitudes, 1986

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

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I have to put this here in case I later lose track of it, as I inevitably do. A terrific essay in the London Review of Books (June 2003) by Marxist literary academic Terry Eagleton, whom I greatly admire, reviewing three George Orwell biographies (here).