BARBARA BAYNTON was born in the Hunter Valley town of Scone, New South Wales, in 1857. After being educated at home Baynton worked briefly as a governess before in 1880 marrying the first of her three husbands, whom she divorced after a decade. In the 1890s, financially secure from her marriage to the retired surgeon Thomas Baynton, she began writing short stories, poetry and articles for the Bulletin. Her first tale, ‘The Tramp’, was published in 1896.
After failing to find an Australian publisher for her collection of six short stories, she visited London and in 1902 Duckworth published Bush Studies. Thomas Hardy was ‘much struck with the strength’ of Baynton’s writing. Two years later Thomas Baynton died, and Baynton spent the next years between Sydney and London. Human Toll, a novel, appeared in 1907; Cobbers, which combined Bush Studies with two new stories, was published in 1917. Baynton married Rowland George Allanson-Winn, fifth baron Headley, in 1921.
A successful businesswoman and a campaigner for women’s rights, a lover of antiques and a renowned socialite, Baynton spent her later years in Toorak, Melbourne. She was renowned for her wit and for her jewellery, particularly her collection of opals. Billy Hughes thought her a ‘remarkable woman’. She died in 1929.
HELEN GARNER lives in Melbourne. Her books include Monkey Grip, Cosmo Cosmolino, The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and The Spare Room.
ALSO BY BARBARA BAYNTON
Human Toll
Cobbers (stories)
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First published by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, London 1902
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012
Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer
Primary print ISBN: 9781922079497
Ebook ISBN: 9781921961779
Author: Baynton, Barbara, 1857-1929.
Title: Bush studies / Barbara Baynton ; introduction by Helen Garner.
Series: Text classics.
Subjects: Frontier and pioneer life—Australia—Fiction. Women—Australia—History—19th century—Fiction. Short stories, Australian.
Other Authors/Contributors: Garner, Helen.
Dewey Number: A823.2
eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia
CONTENTS
Gall and Barefaced Daring
by Helen Garner
Bush Studies
A Dreamer
Squeaker’s Mate
Scrammy ’And
Billy Skywonkie
Bush Church
The Chosen Vessel
I was well into my forties when I came upon Barbara Baynton’s story ‘The Chosen Vessel’, and I have never got over it. It is shocking, and dreadful: a lone woman huddles with a tiny baby in an undefendable bush house at night, while a tramp armed with a knife slinks around it in the dark, seeking a way in. The terror Baynton evokes is elemental, sexual, unabashedly female in a way one hardly expects to read in literature of her time. Under the title ‘The Tramp’, the story appeared in the Bulletin in 1896. It was the first she ever published. She was thirty-nine.
A century later, I wrote an essay about a winter night I had spent alone in a shack on the edge of a forest. A male writer I showed it to was irritated by my anxious fantasies of marauding men, and by the mental manoeuvres I had had to perform in order to calm myself for sleep. I suppose he saw it as a piece of crude feminism. I have never got over this, either; and whenever I re-read ‘The Chosen Vessel’ I experience a deep solidarity with both its main character and its writer.
Baynton’s best-known story is probably ‘Squeaker’s Mate’. Here the bush woman is stripped of every vestige of femininity. She is childless, even ‘barren’—a tough, skilled timber-getter who smokes a pipe and always carries ‘the heavy end of the log’. Somehow this tireless worker has taken up with Squeaker, a bloke whom even the other men recognise as a whingeing bludger: to them, ‘her tolerance was one of the mysteries’. A falling tree terribly wounds her. The story is an account of a power struggle between the feckless man and the silent, devastated woman whom he leaves to lie in a corner of their shack, attended only by her dog. Every time I read it I am astonished by Baynton’s gall, the barefaced daring of the thing. It’s driven by a contained, contemptuous rage that no woman of spirit can fail to recognise, or to share.
Baynton was born a decade before Henry Lawson, but by the time she began to publish he was already a famous writer. Determined as she was to write from deep within a woman’s point of view, in her best work she can leave him sounding almost sentimental. Yes, Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ is a great story. We tremble for the hard-working, faithful, level-headed mother. We shed tears for her gutsy little son, for the brave dog, for the ‘sickly daylight’ that breaks over the bush. The story is what people nowadays call ‘iconic’. We can safely admire it. We no longer even need to read it: everyone knows what it stands for.
But Baynton’s bush wife inhabits a different uni-verse. Weakened by her absent husband’s cold mockery, she is not fighting for her family. No bushcraft, no weary stoicism can save her from sexual attack. She is lost out there in shrieking, existential abandonment. Her tale is never going to be an icon. It is too hair-raising, too hysterical—too close to women’s craziest and most abject suffering.
Like any writer, she is not always at her best. Her sentences can strike the modern ear as clogged and heavy-handed, like Victorian interior decoration. You can feel her sometimes putting on side, striking writerly poses, indulging in misty poeticisms: betimes, she says, or ’twas a dingo; her heart smote her, or ever and ever she smiled. On the other hand, her desire to convey Australian speech leads her into passages of dialogue so manically phonetic that the only way to traverse them is to read them aloud, when they reveal her superb ear—but at what cost! I long to take the pencil to these extravaganzas, to drag her into my own century and hit her anachronistically over the head with Elmore Leonard’s dictum: ‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’
But, my God, when she hits her straps she can lay down a muscular story.
She drew out the saw, spat on her hands, and with the axe began weakening the inclining side of the tree.
Long and steadily and in secret the worm had been busy in the heart. Suddenly the axe blade sank softly, the tree’s wounded edges closed on it like a vice. There was a ‘settling’ quiver on its top branches, which the woman heard and understood. The man, encouraged by the sounds of the axe, had returned with an armful of sticks for the billy. He shouted gleefully, ‘It’s fallin’, look out.’
But she waited to free the axe.
With a shivering groan the tree fell, and as she sprang aside, a thick worm-eaten branch snapped at a joint and silently she went down under it.
(‘Squeaker’s Mate’)
At their height, her dry, sinewy sentences stride forward powered by simple verbs. She knows how to break off at a breathless moment. Her understanding of dogs and their meaning is heart-rendingly fine. She is familiar w
ith labour, fear and abandonment. She knows the landscape, with its bleak terrors and its occasional beauties. She has observed with a merciless eye the dull stupidity and squalor that poverty brings. She is not going to gussy it up.
Between Two Worlds, the enthralling biography of Baynton written by her great-granddaughter Penne Hackforth-Jones, makes it clear that the six stories in Bush Studies, the core of her small output, draw directly on the first half of her life.
She was born Barbara Lawrence in 1857, the seventh of eight children, at Scone in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where her immigrant father was a timber-worker and coffin-maker. She seems to have been a strange, short-sighted, grittily emotional girl, a passionate reader of the few books she could get hold of, and possessed by confused fantasies of escape and adventure.
As a teenager she answered an advertisement for an up-country housekeeper. After a gruelling train trip to the property on the north-western plains of New South Wales, the naïve girl was coarsely challenged, humiliated and sent packing. A few years later, in her early twenties, with little more than her hard-won literacy and numeracy to recommend her, she was hired as a governess by the Fraters, a Scottish grazing family of impressive style but varying fortunes, whose glamorous son she soon married.
Set up by his disapproving father near Coonamble on the Castlereagh River, the handsome horseman Alex Frater soon showed his true colours. He drank, he gambled, he flirted with girls fresher and prettier than his clever, over-worked, furious wife. The property slid into disarray while he went off droving and boozing for months at a time, leaving her and their babies without protection. The theme of a weakened and dependent person alone at night in a flimsy bush dwelling, which occurs again and again in Baynton’s work, surely originates here.
By the time Frater had seduced and impregnated Barbara’s young niece Sarah, who had come to help her with the children, the iron had entered Barbara’s soul. In 1889 she blasted her way out of the marriage, keeping custody of their three children. Her divorce, according to Hackforth-Jones, was ‘the four-hundred-and-fifty-first of the colony’. Throughout her life Barbara liked to deliver a terse piece of advice to her daughter Penelope: ‘If you make yourself a doormat, don’t be surprised if you’re walked on.’
Poor Sarah’s fate enacted this bitter wisdom. She toiled on in wretched poverty, bearing more and more children to the ever-unreliable Frater, until soon after the birth of the ninth she fell into despair, and died in a Sydney mental hospital.
Meanwhile, Barbara shook the dust of the bush from her feet and lit out for Sydney. She was engaged as a housekeeper in pleasant Woollahra by the res-pected Dr Thomas Baynton, a widower of more than twice her age. Barbara had learnt from her former mother-in-law how to conduct herself among educated people. Within a year, and the day after her divorce from Frater was finalised, she and the doctor were married.
Though only in her early thirties, she had experi-enced enough affront, desolation and rage to fuel a lifetime’s literary output. Now, sharing an orderly urban life with a man she loved and respected, she could begin to write.
It irked her that some of her contemporaries were starting to romanticise, or to present in comic form, what she knew as the grinding slog and suffering of people who worked the land. She would make it her business to show the truth.
No one in Australia would publish Bush Studies, so she took it to London, where she met the usual insults dealt out to colonials; she even contemplated burning the manuscript and going home. But at last, in 1902, the book appeared in both London and Sydney. A. G. Stephens, who had first run her work in the Bulletin, opined annoyingly that the stories offered ‘a perverse picture of our sunny, light-hearted, careless land’; but Baynton had many admiring reviews, and felt at last established.
Nothing else that Baynton published packs the raw punch of Bush Studies. Her novel, Human Toll, contains powerful and sensitive passages, but I am one of those who find her obsession with phonetic dialogue frustrating and fatiguing. Her natural form is the short story. Her poetry, I’m afraid, is terrible.
But what a woman! When her dear Dr Baynton died, she inherited and sensibly invested a comfortable fortune. In London during World War I she was a generous host to many a lost Australian serviceman on leave. She fought her way up the social ladder in the most marvellous and increasingly hilarious way. Her third husband was a baron who had converted to Islam and was offered the vacant throne of Albania. To Barbara’s great disappointment he refused it. The marriage lasted barely a year.
By now, though certain good friends never gave up on her, she seemed stuck in the role of the perverse dowager in jewels and long white gloves, known for her jealousy, bursts of wild rage and equally violent remorse. She returned to Melbourne and took up residence next door to her daughter. Her historian son-in-law had the sense of humour and strength of character to keep the matriarch in line. Her grandchildren she thrilled by writing and reading aloud to them cautionary tales ‘of human unpleasantness and folly’. These stories were never published, and when at the age of seventy-two the champagne-drinking old termagant died, her faithful daughter, who loved her, threw them into the fire.
To
Helen McMillen
of Sydney
New South Wales
A DREAMER
A SWIRL of wet leaves from the night-hidden trees decorating the little station beat against the closed doors of the carriages. The porter hurried along holding his blear-eyed lantern to the different windows, and calling the name of the township in language peculiar to porters. There was only one ticket to collect.
Passengers from far up-country towns have importance from their rarity. He turned his lantern full on this one, as he took her ticket. She looked at him too, and listened to the sound of his voice, as he spoke to the guard. Once she had known every hand at the station. The porter knew everyone in the district. This traveller was a stranger to him.
If her letter had been received, someone would have been waiting with a buggy. She passed through the station. She saw nothing but an ownerless dog, huddled, wet and shivering, in a corner. More for sound she turned to look up the straggling street of the township. Among the sheoaks, bordering the river she knew so well, the wind made ghostly music, unheeded by the sleeping town. There was no other sound, and she turned to the dog with a feeling of kinship. But perhaps the porter had a message! She went back to the platform. He was locking the office door, but paused as though expecting her to speak.
“Wet night!” he said at length, breaking the silence.
Her question resolved itself into a request for the time, though this she already knew. She hastily left him.
She drew her cloak tightly round her. The wind made her umbrella useless for shelter. Wind and rain and darkness lay before her on the walk of three bush miles to her mother’s home. Still it was the home of her girlhood, and she knew every inch of the way.
As she passed along the sleeping street, she saw no sign of life till near the end. A light burned in a small shop, and the sound of swift tapping came to her. They work late tonight, she thought, and, remembering their gruesome task, hesitated, half-minded to ask these night workers, for whom they laboured. Was it someone she had known? The long dark walk—she could not—and hastened to lose the sound.
The zigzag course of the railway brought the train again near to her, and this wayfarer stood and watched it tunnelling in the teeth of the wind. Whoof! whoof! its steaming breath hissed at her. She saw the rain spitting viciously at its red mouth. Its speed, as it passed, made her realize the tedious difficulties of her journey, and she quickened her pace. There was the silent tenseness that precedes a storm. From the branch of a tree overhead she heard a watchful mother-bird’s warning call, and the twitter of the disturbed nestlings. The tender care of this bird-mother awoke memories of her childhood. What mattered the lonely darkness, when it led to mother. Her forebodings fled, and she faced the old track unheedingly, and ever and ever she smiled, as she fo
retasted their meeting.
“Daughter!”
“Mother!”
She could feel loving arms around her, and a mother’s sacred kisses. She thrilled, and in her impatience ran, but the wind was angry and took her breath. Then the child near her heart stirred for the first time. The instincts of motherhood awakened in her. Her elated body quivered, she fell on her knees, lifted her hands, and turned her face to God. A vivid flash of lightning flamed above her head. It dulled her rapture. The lightning was very near.
She went on, then paused. Was she on the right track? Back, near the bird’s nest, were two roads. One led to home, the other was the old bullock-dray road that the railway had almost usurped. When she should have been careful in her choice, she had been absorbed. It was a long way back to the cross-roads, and she dug in her mind for landmarks. Foremost she recalled the “Bendy Tree”, then the “Sisters”, whose entwined arms talked, when the wind was from the south. The apple-trees on the creek—split flat, where the cows and calves were always to be found. The wrong track, being nearer the river, had clumps of sheoaks and groups of pines in places. An angled line of lightning illuminated everything, but the violence of the thunder distracted her.
She stood in uncertainty, near-sighted, with all the horror of the unknown that this infirmity could bring. Irresolute, she waited for another flash. It served to convince her she was wrong. Through the bush she turned.
The sky seemed to crack with the lightning; the thunder’s suddenness shook her. Among some tall pines she stood awed, while the storm raged.
Then again that indefinite fear struck at her. Restlessly she pushed on till she stumbled, and, with hands outstretched, met some object that moved beneath them as she fell. The lightning showed a group of terrified cattle. Tripping and falling, she ran, she knew not where, but keeping her eyes turned towards the cattle. Aimlessly she pushed on, and unconsciously retraced her steps.
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