by Kim Kelly
‘It will be if you have any say in it.’ I nudge her playfully, but I don’t share anything like her certainty. It took Federation itself a decade to come from Sir Henry Parkes’s call for it and it could all unravel at any moment. Even if we do get the vote it can be snatched away as quickly, and will be if and when it suits the men who decide how we should live our lives. Still, I tell Flo, and I almost believe it too: ‘One day, you will make a run for parliament. One day, you will be our first female prime minister.’
‘Heavens, I’ll take that wish for my own,’ she says up into the furthest boughs of the pines, and she’s already writing her acceptance speech.
I look up too. How many times I have looked into these pines from the train and felt only cool, dark dread in the sight of them. Huge, looming black monsters of loss. But now they stand at the entrance to my sanctuary, love and memory whispering through every needle on the breeze.
The rusty gate squeaks as I lift the latch.
‘Oh my word! Is this the house?’ Flo squeaks in reply. ‘How very beautiful – I’m so glad I overdressed.’
The ivy is rampant right up to the front door and there are jungles of blackberry and jasmine strangling every camellia, engulfing entire flowerbeds, but its wide weatherboards are still a merry white against all the deep greens of the garden, its portico posts still gorgeously turned – Just like your mother’s ankles, Papa used to wink.
Greta waves from the bay window of the front parlour. She is up on a ladder, curtain rod in hand. Prince is leaping up and down below her, his silly face bobbing over the high sill, ears flapping. He still can’t believe he’s allowed inside.
‘Jumping Jezebels,’ Flo exclaims, looking down to her right at the path that snakes towards the low wall at the cliff, pointing out at the vista. ‘You’ve got the Three Sisters in your front yard.’
‘We do.’ I am all grin again. ‘And in a moment we shall be three sisters having tea on the terrace.’
I hunt about for the key in my pocket. I jiggle it into the door and feel the click as the metal gives: the liberty that is so dear to me. Greta shouting out down the hall: ‘Hello! Hello!’
I look over my shoulder at Flo and my heart is racing crazily again: because I am home. Finally, home.
My spirit flies out across the gorge and back to me.
Ben
Even the wire grass is battling to hang on in this paddock, set just off the tablelands where the hills become plains. It’s been turned over exclusively to sheep now for twenty-five years or more, with plans to soon put it all under wheat. But I am here, Mama. I made it.
I look around her old family selection, which once was the Trentons’ and now is the Bentleys’, and the pair of them combined have just about completed the destruction of whatever indigenous ecology was here before them. Even the creek seems to be drying off at this point – exhausted – exposing the roots of the native sandalwood scrub on the banks: thirsty.
Jack snorts: What did you bring us out here for?
That’s a very good question.
But there’s a lonely old tree up ahead, just the other side of the creek. It looks like a bimble box, with its slender trunk and vertical branches, the high sun playing glassy on the leaves. It reminds me of Mama, of riding out to the billabongs of the Jordan with her; making mud pies out there as a boy, making her smile. I’ll go and pay my respects and then let’s call it a day – let’s call it three days with Berylda in Katoomba instead of two, making her smile. I will when I tell her I left her for nothing but a brief chat with a bimble box. There really is little else here. Sheep bleat at me as I walk through them, dimly annoyed at the interruption; they are saying: That’s right, we ate every last daisy that ever was in this place, and they were delicious.
The tree is not a bimble box, though, I see as I get closer; we’re possibly too far south to see them here anyway. I think it’s just a young ghost gum then, tall but not yet filled out, the shine on the leaves just a trick of the light. I walk across the creek for a closer look at the bark to identify it, and the water is deeper than it appears – I’m soaked up past the knees at halfway. But when I get to the opposite bank, I see under the dappled shade of the tree, a cluster of low woody stipes – greenish-brown. You could easily mistake them for a twiggy hand of gum leaves fallen from above; I could easily have trodden on it.
The leaves are long, lanceolate and few; the flocculence almost prickly to the touch. Three plants – no, four. The bracts are russet globes, still shut tight yet. One’s about to go, though – and I can just see the first of the rays are red. This is it. These are Mama’s everlastings.
I look around at Jack and laugh.
This bloom will be fully opened come the morning.
Author Note
Paper Daisies, like all of my novels so far, is a fiction inspired by the history of the country I call home, a quest to uncover what threads of the past remain woven through our present. This time there was one great cracking spark that set this particular quest in train: Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s now infamous misogyny speech, delivered in October 2012, and the various reactions to it. In some shock at the most critical interpretations of the speech, namely that Gillard was cynically ‘playing the gender card’ and that there was no substance to the issues she raised, I began writing this novel, and what began as an exploration of what misogyny means quickly evolved into expression of the grief that sexual denigration, control and abuse causes, and an allegory of how it has not only affected me personally but also the lives of many women I love.
In real life, for the women I know, being raped and otherwise brutalised, terrorised and sneered at for another’s gratification is not as pleasure-inducing as some fashionable contemporary erotic literature would have us believe, and my quest for some truth about the sickness that is misogyny became more urgent as the legal cases surrounding the murders of Jill Meagher, Lisa Harnum and Allison Baden-Clay unfolded across my writing days. And amongst all of this, when a schoolgirl in Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai, was shot in the head for campaigning for female education in her country, some commentators in this country pointed at her assailants, the Taliban, and cried: ‘See look, real misogynists! We don’t have any misogynists here!’ Of course not.
But one of the quieter and more insidious reasonable-sounding attitudes coming from the sisterhood today is that we don’t need feminism in this country because women have all of the opportunities they need. The ignorance of this view chills me. We only have the opportunities we have as women because of feminism, and by the support of good men who believe in the benefits of sexual equality – men who still predominantly control our world.
There is one historical fact here, though, of which Australians can be justly proud. Contrary to my Berylda Jones’s doubts, Australian women received the right to vote in federal elections and to stand for office the following year, in June 1902. It took nineteen attempts for the legislation to be passed, and decades of work by the suffragists to see it happen; this franchise bill also excluded Aboriginal and all non-White people from voting, and not all states granted the women’s vote at that time, but the bill was still a world leader, second only to New Zealand in the granting of universal, national suffrage. Women in the United Kingdom wouldn’t win the right to vote in their general elections until 1928.
Sadly, though, it seems to me that we are only ever a breath away from returning to a time where the rights of women are secondary to those of men, or nonexistent. It remains a fact that a majority of women are economically and physically more vulnerable than men. It remains a fact, too, that a woman is most likely to be raped or otherwise physically abused or murdered by someone she knows, most often her partner or a close family member or friend, and that the abuse will most likely go unreported. According to White Ribbon research, in 2013 forty percent of Australian women over the age of fifteen had experienced an incident of physical or sexual violence; currently,
on average, one woman per week is killed by a male partner, or ex-partner. Given this, it seems to me that it can never be wrong to talk about violence against women, or their denigration, or the challenges they face simply by being women in our society. It can never be wrong to ‘play the gender card’, or ‘the race card’, or ‘the victim card’, or whatever card the bullies want to wave about contemptuously at anyone who criticises them. Justice is a whole house made of cards, and it is one we all live very much inside. We have to maintain it wisely and carefully, for all our sakes.
But Paper Daisies is, I must stress, fiction. In real life, I would never condone a resort to murder for any reason. Such murders of violent bullies occur of course, and women are still occasionally gaoled for them, but I’ve only killed some demons here, an exercise I highly recommend to anyone seeking restitution where no other kind but the imaginary might be found.
I must stress, too, that all of the characters in this novel are also fictional. There was no such Queensland Minister for Agriculture called John Wilberry; and nor was anyone called Alec Howell treasurer of the Liberal League, or member of the Free Trade Party, or District Surgeon of Bathurst Hospital. As for the mythical daisies that Ben finds along the way, they are inventions for him alone – but then again, perhaps they are still waiting to be found.
I would like to acknowledge here the invaluable treasure that is the Australian literature collection of the Mary Elizabeth Byrnes Memorial Library, Orange. It is wonderful to have such an incredible resource sitting in the middle of the New South Wales Central West, not far from where I live. And of course, as libraries go, I can’t do anything or go anywhere without Trove, the National Library of Australia’s database of newspapers, books and photographs.
The quotes at the beginning of each of the parts are all taken from Friedrich Nietzsche’s experimental novel, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, first published in English in 1896 – and of which the Sydney Morning Herald ’s review of 1899 declared, ‘everyone to his taste’. And the Louisa Lawson quote that opens the novel is from her 1911 poem, ‘The Mount of Achievement’, sourced from Elaine Zinkham’s essay, ‘Louisa Albury Lawson’, which appears in A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Debra Adelaide, 1988 – because I could not find any reference to this poem anywhere else. If this is not a prime example of our neglect of the literary heritage of our women writers, I don’t know what is. Louisa Lawson was hardly a nobody – she was editor of The Dawn, a well-known contemporary poet and journalist in her own right, and the mother of our beloved Henry. Without her, and other women of her calibre, Australian women would not have won the vote so soon, and would not have had a voice in print much beyond baking recipes and knitting patterns.
Finally, as always, I owe an inexpressible debt of gratitude to Selwa Anthony, my agent, and the angel who told me to lose myself to this work precisely when I needed to hear those words. To Cate Paterson also, publishing director at Pan Macmillan, who embraced this story from the very first and helped me to strengthen its sinews; to editors Emma Rafferty and Julia Stiles for wrangling my words where they needed it. And, last but never least, to my muse de bloke, my perennial hero and gentlest giant, Dean Brownlee: you are the best random stranger I ever met.
About Kim Kelly
Kim Kelly lives and writes in a large shed on a small property just outside the heritage town of Millthorpe in the Central West of New South Wales. Paper Daises is her fourth novel.
Also by Kim Kelly
Black Diamonds
This Red Earth
The Blue Mile
MORE BESTSELLING TITLES FROM KIM KELLY
The Blue Mile
As 1929 draws to a close, Irish–Australian Eoghan O’Keenan flees his abusive family home, gets a job on the Harbour Bridge, and embarks on a new life in Balmain.
In her cottage on the north side of Sydney at Lavender Bay, the chic and smart Olivia Greene is working on her latest millinery creations, dreaming of becoming the next Coco Chanel.
A chance meeting between them in the Botanic Gardens sparks an unconventional romance. But with vastly different backgrounds and absolutely nothing in common, the blue mile of harbour separating Olivia and Eoghan is the least of the obstacles that threaten their love.
By mid-1932, the construction of the Bridge is complete, but the city is in chaos as the Great Depression begins to bite and the unemployed edge ever closer to a violent revolt.
And then Eoghan disappears.
Set against the spectacular backdrop of Sydney Harbour, The Blue Mile is a tale of both the wild and calculated gambles a city took to build a wonder of the world, and of the marvellous risks some people are willing to take for the love of a lifetime.
This Red Earth
It’s 1939, another war in Europe. And Bernie Cooper is wondering what’s ahead for her.
She knows Gordon Brock is about to propose. An honest country boy and graduating geologist, he’s a good catch. And she’s going to say no.
But the harsh realities of war have other plans for Bernie, and once her father is commissioned to serve again, she accepts Gordon’s proposal mostly to please her adored dad. And with Gordon off to New Guinea she’ll be glad of the reprieve from walking down the aisle, won’t she?
As Gordon braces for the Japanese invasion of Rabaul, Bernie is in the midst of the battle being fought on home soil – against the worst drought in living memory, the menace of an unseen enemy, and against the unspeakable torment of not knowing if those dear to her are alive or dead.
From the beaches of Sydney to the dusty heart of the continent, This Red Earth is as much a love letter to the country, with all its beauty and terror, as it is an intimate portrait of love itself.
Black Diamonds
Available as an ebook
From the foothills of the Blue Mountains to the battlefields of France, Black Diamonds is a love story to make you laugh and cry.
It is 1914 and Lithgow is booming. Daniel is a young German–Australian, a coalminer and a socialist; Francine is the bourgeois, Irish–Catholic, too-good-for-this-place daughter of one of the mine’s owners. When their paths collide, they fall in love despite themselves – raising eyebrows all around town.
But before the signatures on their marriage certificate are dry, war erupts, confronting them with a new and much more terrifying obstacle. Against his principles but driven by a sense of solidarity, Daniel enlists; Francine, horrified, has no choice but to support him.
As they hurtle towards a daunting world of war, separation and grief, they learn things about themselves and one another that they would never have expected in more certain times – about heroism, sacrifice, the thin line between courage and stupidity, and, most of all, about the magical power of love.
First published 2015 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © 2015 Kim Kelly
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
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Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available
from the National Library of Australia
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
EPUB format: 9781743536636
Typeset in12.5/16 pt Adobe Garamond by Post Pre-press Australia
Cover design by Nada Backovic
Cover images: Woman,
© Malgorzata Maj / Arcangel Images; daisies, © Shutterstock; background texture, istockphoto
The characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The author and the publisher have made every effort to contact copyright holders for material used in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked should contact the publisher.
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