A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  Beatrice first met Ernestine Hill early in 1941, after Hill had sent Angus and Robertson the manuscript of her new book. It was completely different from anything else she had published, for it dealt not with outback Australia but with the sea. Further, it was a novelised biography, the story of the explorer Matthew Flinders, a wanderer after Ernestine Hill’s own heart. Matthew Flinders, the man who circum-navigated Australia, explored the east coast in a tiny boat and gave the continent its name, was to most Australians a remote historical figure, a hero of primary-school history. But Beatrice read the story of a man whose life had encompassed high adventure, danger and tragedy, who was imprisoned for many years on the island of Mauritius at the behest of the French and cruelly estranged from the love of his life.

  Beatrice thought it the best Australian novel she had read in years, and Walter Cousins agreed. ‘Our people are very keen on this,’ he wrote Alec Chisholm, the eminent naturalist and author who had known Ernestine Hill since her youth in Queensland.3 The first printing was only 3000 copies, but it was a long book and a first novel. Publication was set for early December 1941.

  Trusting her author’s research and having confidence in Hill’s polished writing style, Beatrice seems hardly to have touched the manuscript, but the project had other problems. The first was its title. Ernestine Hill had wanted to call her novel He Named Australia, which A&R rightly thought sounded more like a primary-school social studies textbook than a novel. She also wanted her son Robert to design the jacket. Cousins said no to both, and in October 1941 he asked the illustrator Geoffrey Ingleton to submit a jacket design and to come up with a suitable title for the book. Ingleton obliged with three: The Sea a Jealous Mistress; Mistress Flinders Without a Bonnet and My Love Must Wait. Cousins decided on the last one; Ernestine Hill violently disagreed, bombarding A&R with telegrams of protest. But Cousins could be firm when he chose and he dug his heels in, telling her that if she refused to accept My Love Must Wait A&R would not publish the book at all. Hill gave in, and when the book became a success she wrote Ingleton a graceful letter of thanks.

  My Love Must Wait was published in November 1941 and it sold well almost immediately, the first run disappearing before Christmas. Its combination of evocative descriptive writing, sound storytelling and detailed research made it enduringly popular; here, as thousands of readers recognised, was a romantic hero who belonged to Australia’s history and to nowhere else. The book sold strongly right through the war and after, and went on to become a standard work on Matthew Flinders. It was adapted into a children’s comic strip in the Sydney Morning Herald, extracts were broadcast over the ABC, and it was used as the basis for textbooks. After the war it was published in the US and the UK. The Australian producer Charles Chauvel bought an option, and Laurence Olivier – who had recently paced the quarterdeck as Nelson in the movie Lady Hamilton with Vivien Leigh – was mooted to play Matthew Flinders. Unfortunately, after four years Chauvel dropped the project.

  Knowing they had a proven international success on their hands, A&R seemed oddly reluctant to keep My Love Must Wait before the public. More than once, after a 10 000 reprint had sold out, the novel stayed out of print for months. A&R were bedevilled by Manpower problems and rising costs all through the war, and juggling priorities at Halstead must have been a nightmare, but it is still a mystery why they did not print larger runs. Perhaps paper shortages were to blame.

  In 1948 Cousins wrote to Ernestine Hill that her novel had sold almost 100 000 copies, setting a sales record for a novel written by an Australian author and printed in Australia, though because of rising production costs and a shortage of printing machinery, they were not increasing her royalty rate. Though she thought A&R’s economic management left something to be desired, Hill remained gracious.

  Her next book was a short burst of patriotism and natural history called Australia, Land of Contrasts, published in 1943. However, Ernestine Hill had two much bigger works in mind, which had been germinating for many years. The first was a history of the Flying Doctor Service, a project she tackled with enthusiasm, for she wanted to celebrate the achievements of a service that had started ‘where railways end [and] miles begin’, whose evolution she had observed for more than fifteen years.4

  Hill delighted in journeying through the outback to research this book, and wrote to Beatrice in exhilaration about her travels. Her long, detailed letters often made Beatrice feel wistful, even though she did not necessarily want to cook johnny-cakes over a griddle in a dust-storm, set up and dismantle a tent every day, or load and carry water for daily baths over hundreds of miles. Beatrice enjoyed getting out of the city – usually to visit relatives, including her brother John and his family in rural New South Wales – but she was basically an urban creature. Even so, the round eternal of the manuscript and the galley proof occasionally made her, like the narrator of ‘Clancy of the Over-flow’, want to take a turn at travelling where the seasons came and went. Hill told her she was being silly: ‘Oh, my dear, never envy me. I always feel the waif of the world. That 8.30 to five regime is one of the best things … we all grieve most, not about the things we do but of those we have not done.’ Yes, retorted Beatrice crisply, but ‘You give me, and the world, a wonderful impression of achievement and a life lived as you want it.’5

  Beatrice probably suspected that Hill was not the calm, quietly resourceful pioneering woman her correspondence conveyed. Far from being a female version of Paterson’s Clancy, Hill was slight and wary-looking, with wide dark eyes under a thick fringe, a long narrow face and thin lips. She was a constant smoker who, as the saying went, ‘lived on her nerves’, and she could be very intense. She was also a creature of contradictions. Compelled to be on the move all her life, she was always telling Beatrice how much she longed to settle down. She needed, she said, a quiet place to work, somewhere to stay, so she could stop her constant travel for a while and write up the vast amount of material she had collected. No sooner did she find such a place than she was off again, happy to be settled only when she was not, and vice versa.

  Beatrice received the complete manuscript for the Flying Doctor book just before Christmas 1946, and it was given the matter-of-fact title of Flying Doctor Calling. Hill and Beatrice had a few jousts over the editing; Hill criticised Beatrice for being too ready to leach colour from her words for the sake of grammatical exactness. ‘If we set out with a copy of [Fowler’s Modern] English Usage,’ she wrote half jocularly, ‘think of the character we could take out of Mark Twain or even Robert Louis, and as for your friend Hemingway and the moderns, and the newspapers of today!’6 Beatrice gave some ground, though she insisted on grammatical exactitude.

  Flying Doctor Calling did not appear until November 1947, A&R still being plagued by rising costs and a shortage of workers. The book had sold out by Christmas, and a reprint was ordered in January 1948. Australian readers were not reacting to any romantic notion of the Flying Doctor Service, for Ernestine Hill described the lives of the people who lived beyond the farthest roads in words as bleak as any Henry Lawson ever wrote.

  Meanwhile she had been collecting material for her master-work, the story of the Northern Territory. This was a combination of descriptive writing, reportage, personal experience, stories – some true, some yarns – and social history. She carried her material with her everywhere – transcripts of interviews with Territory ‘identities’, newspaper cuttings going back years, drafts and redrafts of chapters, bank ledgers filled with single-spaced typing, copies of letters to and from friends – a huge amount of paper in boxes or large square tin trunks to protect it from marauding white ants. ‘The poor old manuscript has gradually grown deeper through all the last years of travail and travel, becoming less a book than a hypnosis,’ she wrote to Beatrice in a letter that enclosed some draft chapters. ‘I find on this morning’s reckoning that I have written 177 160 words! and still some chapters to go.’7

  Beatrice must have received this letter with some apprehension. She had no idea
how long a book Hill was planning, or what sort of book it was going to be. Hill also had a habit of posting chapters to A&R with no indication of where they belonged. But Beatrice managed to be warmly encouraging, even when Hill told her that an account of the ‘haywire history’ of the Territory should be a combination of Macaulay, Gibbon and Edgar Allan Poe. Hill continued to worry and to ask Beatrice for reassurance about the monolith that was then called The Book of the Territory, asking whether she found it heavy going.

  But Beatrice was really enjoying the manuscript and did not hesitate to congratulate the author. ‘You have achieved the miracle of being a first-rate writer who is popular as well,’ she wrote to her in March 1949. ‘There is some magnificent writing here, and I feel so thankful that these stories have been told you before they become formalised in the hands of a mere historian. What a macabre, dramatic, heart-breaking narrative this story makes!’8 But she did cavil at the size of the book, saying that it would have to cost at least a guinea per copy, about twice the average price. Hill was grateful for her enthusiasm and prepared to be conciliatory. ‘I’ll cut to make it crisp all the way,’ she promised. ‘I find that a very good test of direct writing – avoid, even at the cost of what they call “good writing”, the condition of mind best described by the blacks as “My ear been knock up.” ’9 Beatrice invited her to stay at Folly Point to discuss the cuts, and she accepted with delight.

  But she didn’t make it to Beatrice’s house, going to Narrabeen on Sydney’s northern beaches and then on to Frankston in Victoria. From here she wrote Beatrice an apologetic letter. It was July 1949 and Sydney was in the grip of a housing shortage and coal strike, meaning blackouts and no gas. Her son Robert, who had come with her, was out all day and she said she had nothing to do at Narrabeen but listen to the roar of the waves and try to keep the sand and soot down. ‘To tell you the truth the newspapers screaming their maledictions … made Sydney so much a horror that I had to quit.’10 A house to work in alone was not for her, she wrote.

  So often Ernestine Hill’s letters were full of frantic and compulsive activity, of restless erratic movement, rather than the eager discipline of exploration. But as well as the alarming anxiety and depression that her letters often revealed, there was the exhilaration of travel, the exultation in describing what she saw.

  In mid-1950 Hill sent Beatrice a sensuously evocative verbal snap-shot from Broome:

  I’ve just seen the famous Broome full moon rise over the mud-flats – ebb tide in Dampier Creek – brush of silver and runnels of gold, every cape of dusky mangroves, three old luggers lying over on the sand … if you hear of my bones being tucked away in the queer little graveyard out in the pindan, to enjoy the birds and the breeze with Japs, Jews, Frenchmen, Filipinos, Chinese, Malayans, Binghis, old sea-captains and nuns you’ll know that’s me, happy indeed in the quietness by an ever-changing sea.11

  A few months later she sent Beatrice some delicate, pink-tinged shells that Beatrice placed on the mantelpiece, as well as prawn paste from Singapore which, Hill said, should be fried in coconut oil to make what sound rather like pappadums. Beatrice served them with sherry before dinner.

  Beatrice was still worried that The Book of the Territory was too long – it was at least 200 000 words – and suggested it be made into two books instead of one enormous one. No, said Hill, the book had been envisaged, and must stand, as one. Beatrice rather sadly agreed. By October two chapters remained to be written, and Elizabeth Durack had agreed to do line drawings, chapter headings, endpapers and jacket. Late in April 1951 Hill, still in Broome, wrote to say the book was nearly finished: ‘I’ve been grinding away for so long I don’t know whether I am a woodpecker or a horse in winkers,’ she wrote to Beatrice.12

  A few weeks later, Beatrice received the final manuscript of the book that was now called simply The Territory. Published as one volume in a print run of 15 000 in November 1951, it has an elegiac quality – the story of the first hundred years of settlement, a chronicle of a way of pioneering life that was already disappearing. It blends loving and evocative description, history and adventure, and years after first publication the red dust still clings to its pages.

  Angus and Robertson solved the problem of its length by shrinking the type size and conflating paragraphs: it looks rather solid, not exactly user-friendly. But this did not prevent the book receiving rave reviews in Australia and overseas. The Age called it ‘a notable contribution to Australian literature and a book that will live’. The English reviews were equally flattering, with John O’London’s Weekly proclaiming that ‘Ernestine Hill writes with a fire in her bones, using words as Van Gogh used paint’.13 A pleased and relieved Ernestine Hill sent a grateful note to Angus and Robertson, describing the book’s production as ‘beautiful’ and adding how delighted she was that the reviews had been so good. She even intended to send all the reviewers a personal note of thanks.

  By now Ernestine Hill had an assured and growing reputation. Two of her five books – My Love Must Wait and The Territory – were considered classics; the latter, one critic wrote, should be in the swag of every Australian. Hill was in her early fifties, and Beatrice, despite any misgivings about ‘nerviness’, had every reason to believe that more great work lay ahead. But as the 1950s progressed, disquieting signs appeared. Hill was still travelling around Australia, turning up in unexpected places, assuring A&R that she was working hard. To Beatrice’s tactful suggestions that she should settle somewhere to help her achieve peace of mind Hill agreed – and the next letter Beatrice received might be from deep in Queensland, or Broome or Alice Springs. There was something driven, panic-stricken, neurotic, about Hill’s need to be always on the move.

  She was constantly short of money, often asking A&R for advances against royalties. Beatrice and her close friend the author and reviewer Henrietta Drake-Brockman suspected that quite a lot of Hill’s money went on supporting her son. The relationship between mother and son was often difficult; Drake-Brockman told Beatrice that she spent hours being ‘an ear’ for both of them. Beatrice was sympathetic: ‘The poor girl, with her temperament as well as Bob to contend with, must have many upsets,’ she wrote. ‘And I can imagine how difficult it would be for anyone to help her.’14

  But Hill assured Beatrice that, despite all her problems, she was continuing to write. By early in 1955 she was at work on a new novel, Johnnie Wise-Cap. Beatrice and George Ferguson (Walter Cousins’s successor) hurried to tell her how much they were looking forward to receiving the manuscript. Hill applied for and received a CLF fellowship and continued to move around Australia, taking her huge trunks and tin boxes of notes with her, sending frequent progress reports. So confident were A&R about Johnnie Wise-Cap that they announced its publication for September 1955. The novel was ‘the story of an aboriginal taken from his tribe to work with the pearlers at Broome, then brought to Melbourne to live among the white men … for the lightness of his skin presents a mystery that several people are determined to solve’.15

  But month after month passed without A&R seeing a manuscript. Beatrice, who guessed that Hill suffered agonies of worry and self-doubt, did what she could to encourage her. But Johnnie Wise-Cap did not materialise, and Hill insisted that her need for money continued to be acute. In 1957 she sent A&R a profit and loss account, describing what she had spent on accommodation (she had been staying on Brampton Island and in Sydney that year) and fares, stationery and small necessities. Beatrice might have felt disquiet about the works in progress Ernestine listed in the same letter. They included ‘sixteen books, three volumes of short stories. Ballets, Plays. Volume of notes and work … covering travel well over a million miles, with research covering 27 years.’16 Ernestine Hill was beginning to sound ominously out of control.

  Beatrice and George Ferguson insisted that the answer to Hill’s problems was to complete Johnnie Wise-Cap as soon as possible. George Ferguson even suggested that if Hill provided the framework Beatrice could supply the finishing touches and the n
ovel could be published. But Hill’s letters continued to be both panic-stricken and depressed, full of worries about the novel, freelance journalism and other writing. Beatrice tried to soothe her, but she must have remembered a comment by Henrietta Drake-Brockman that with Ernestine ‘no line of action is followed consistently for long enough’.17

  In 1960 the Commonwealth Literary Fund awarded Hill a pension of £7 a week for life – and in August her son Robert wrote to Beatrice that his mother had collapsed and was in hospital in Queensland, confused, thin and very ill. Beatrice was most concerned about her friend and also confessed to Robert, in confidence, that while she was sympathetic to his mother’s problems she sometimes wondered whether Johnnie Wise-Cap would ever be finished.18

  Hill recovered but continued to fret. Late in 1960, insisting she needed a decent sum of money with which to buy a place of her own, she offered to sell A&R her copyrights, denying herself all future royalties. Beatrice tried to dissuade her in a letter that, considering Hill’s prickliness and sensitivities, was surprisingly tactless:

  How well I understand your need for security and a place of your own to work in! At the same time I know how quickly any lump sum of money you had would be spent, and I should hate to see you with no source of income except [the CLF pension]. Though I personally continue to have confidence that you will complete further work, we have to presume that you may not have the strength to do so.19