Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  MAP

  Map by Laurie Whiddon, Map Illustrations

  DEDICATION

  To the memory of my grandmothers,

  Elizabeth Norman Heath and Anna Elizabeth Roe,

  Australian girls of the period

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Dedication

  Letter from S.M. Franklin to Angus & Robertson, 1894

  Prologue

  PART I — AUSTRALIA: 1879–1906 1 Childhood at Brindabella: 1879–1889

  2 Near Goulburn: 1890–1898

  3 From Possum Gully to Penrith: 1899–1902

  4 With Penrith as a Base: 1903–1906

  PART II — AMERICA: 1906–1915 5 Among the ‘Murkans’: 1906–1911

  6 The Net of Circumstance: 1911–1915

  PART III — ENGLAND & AUSTRALIA: 1915–1932 7 Pack Up Your Troubles: 1915–1918

  8 At the Heart of the Empire: 1918–1923

  9 To Be a Pilgrim: 1923–1927

  10 Enter Brent of Bin Bin: 1927–1932

  PART IV — AUSTRALIA: 1933–1954 11 ‘As a Natural Fact’: 1933–1938

  12 Maintaining Our Best Traditions: 1939–1945

  13 The Waratah Cup: 1946–1950

  14 ‘Shall I Pull Through?’: 1951–1954

  Afterlife

  APPENDICES Principal Published Writings of Miles Franklin

  Commemorative Awards and Their Winners

  Brief Guide to Main and Frequently Cited Sources and Titles of General Significance

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgements

  Publisher’s Note

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  LETTER FROM S.M. FRANKLIN TO ANGUS & ROBERTSON, 1894

  PROLOGUE

  On Sunday 1 June 1879, a young woman set off from Brindabella Station in the high country of southern New South Wales to ride to Talbingo, some fifty kilometres south-west as the crow flies. Susannah Margaret Eleanor Franklin, née Lampe, wife of John Maurice Franklin, co-occupant of Brindabella Station, was over four months pregnant and she was going to her mother’s place before winter set in to give birth to her first child.

  For reasons unknown, possibly to do with the weather, Susannah took the less direct northern route to Talbingo, following a bridle track westward over the Fiery Range through Argamalong to Lacmalac, east of the township of Tumut, turning south thereabouts for Talbingo, where, at the junction of Jounama Creek and the Tumut River, her redoubtable mother, Sarah Lampe, oversaw a considerable estate. On her journey, Susannah passed through some of the most mountainous terrain in Australia, so rugged it had only ever been lightly touched upon by the Indigenous Ngunawal and Ngarigo peoples. It is not recorded whether she was accompanied.

  In the manner of the day, Susannah rode side-saddle, attired in a fashionably tight riding habit, and it is said that her sure-footed horse, ‘Lord Byron’ — the same horse that had borne her from Talbingo to the fastness of Brindabella as a bride less than a year before — was up to the girth in snow for miles.

  On Wednesday 4 June she arrived at Talbingo and four months later, on 14 October 1879, she gave birth to a daughter. Seven weeks after that, on 6 December 1879, at All Saints’ Church of England, Tumut, the baby was baptised Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin.

  This impressive name captured much of the child’s diverse Australian inheritance dating back to 1788. Stella’s mother, Susannah, was the great-granddaughter of English convicts Edward Miles (a First Fleeter) and his wife, Susannah, who arrived in Sydney in 1803. Their native-born daughter Martha, who married an emancipist, William Bridle, was Susannah Franklin’s grandmother, and her mother was their firstborn daughter, Sarah, who married Oltmann Lampe. Oltmann was the younger son of a small landholder near Bremen, Germany, who emigrated in the 1840s and in 1866 took over Talbingo Station.

  John Franklin was a younger son of Irish immigrants of the 1830s, Joseph Franklin and his wife, Mary (known as Maria). A native-born bushman, John Franklin had a touch of poetry in his make-up. Perhaps the name Stella, meaning star, was his idea.

  Mother and daughter left Talbingo for Brindabella the following January, when the last of the snowdrifts had melted, according to Miles Franklin’s memoir Childhood at Brindabella. They travelled ‘over the daisied plains, by the sparkling rivulets’, probably eastward over Talbingo Mountain, turning north near Yarrangobilly up the gullies to Brindabella. This time Susannah was definitely accompanied, by one of her brothers, William Augustus Lampe, who bore the sometimes noisy infant — always called Stella by her family — before him on a purple pillow strapped to the saddle.

  Nothing now survives of old Talbingo. The Lampe homestead site was submerged in 1968 under Jounama Pondage, part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, which today waters much of inland Australia. A fingerpost pointing mid-pond indicates the spot. But a new Talbingo has been established uphill, and in 1979 residents built a memorial to mark the centenary of the birth of Susannah and John Franklin’s daughter. Much of the terrain traversed by Susannah a century before is now part of Kosciuszko National Park, an area of great natural beauty that lies between the Australian Capital Territory and the Victorian border and encompasses well over half a million hectares.

  Although in recent years the desert may have supplanted the mountains in Australian iconography, the high country still has the power to sustain and uplift the human spirit. For Susannah and John Franklin’s daughter it became a special place. ‘No other spot has ever replaced the hold on my affections or imagination of my birthplace,’ she states in the opening lines of Childhood at Brindabella. Any account of the life of the spirited individual known to history as Miles Franklin must start in this beautiful place, and end there too. What lies between is a remarkable story, especially for an Australian girl of the period.

  PART I

  AUSTRALIA

  1879–1906

  1

  CHILDHOOD AT BRINDABELLA: 1879‒1889

  I was not the least suprised when your book came before the public and I often told my frends of a wonderful child I met in the bush with a grate force of character and would some day be heard of.1

  The childhoods of writers vary greatly, but they often contain books and solitude. Brindabella, Stella Franklin’s first real home, was an even more out of the way place than Talbingo, her birthplace, which is pleasantly situated upstream from Tumut on the Tumut River, along today’s Snowy Mountains Highway. By contrast, Brindabella is tucked away in an isolated valley in the Great Dividing Range at the northernmost end of the Australian Alps, through which runs the still-sparkling Goodradigbee River on its way north to join the Murrumbidgee. In today’s terms, Brindabella is about halfway cross-country between Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory and the New South Wales town of Tumut, which dates from the 1820s. However, this remote setting at the edge of Empire was far from solitary, as the mature Miles Franklin recalled in the posthumously published Childhood at Brindabella and portrayed in her most enjoyable pastoral novel, the prize-winning All That Swagger.2

  The homestead at Brindabella Station, where Stella Miles Franklin began her schooling; from an oil painting by her tutor, Charles A. Blyth, c. 1898. (National Library of Australia, Pictorial Collection, R 8957)

  The name Brindabella is said to go back to Aboriginal times and mean ‘two kangaroo rats’. According to All That Swagger, the valley was a stopover for Aboriginal people making their way south annually to feast on bogong moths, and preliminary feasting occurred there. Some sources refer to a less benign environment than the one Miles Franklin evokes, describing fierce clashes with the first squatters, of whom her paternal grandfather, Joseph Franklin, was one; others tell of inter-tribal conflict. Whatever the truth, it was a special place. Miles
Franklin was fortunate in her childhood, and she knew it. When the family left the mountains for more cramped circumstances on the Goulburn Plains in April 1889, it was like an ‘exit from Eden’.3

  It seems somewhat astonishing that shortly after mother and newborn daughter arrived at Brindabella, the family set off for a brief visit to the great city of Sydney, some 240 miles (386 kilometres) to the north-east. As recorded by Susannah Franklin, ‘We all went to Sydney International Exhibition February 1880’, probably by train from Queanbeyan, over the range to the east of Brindabella. They returned to Brindabella in mid-March. This adventure could not have impinged significantly on Stella Miles Franklin, but it is a sign of connectedness with the wider world, and an earnest of things to come.4

  Bush-bred Susannah Franklin had high expectations of her first-born. Herself an eldest daughter, Susannah had been ‘stiffly governessed’ at the original Lampe homestead, ‘Wambrook’, west of Cooma, and was thoroughly grounded in the domestic arts and feminine accomplishments. From the age of fifteen when Susannah’s family moved to Talbingo until her marriage to John Franklin thirteen years later, she was the mainstay of her mother’s household. The difficulty that arose for Susannah with the onset of motherhood was that whereas she was a well-regulated and rather humourless person, her daughter Stella was, in her own words, possessed of ‘an uninhibited ego’, and a lively sense of humour.5

  The relationship between Stella Franklin and her father seems to have been less challenging. In their early years daughters often idolise their fathers, and it is not until puberty that the relationship becomes problematic. So it was for Stella and John Franklin. Very little contemporary evidence survives, but there are many later literary references. The portrait of Richard Melvyn, the unsuccessful selector-cum-horsedealer with a weakness for the drink in My Brilliant Career, is the best-known instance.

  That fierce portrayal in what Miles Franklin always insisted was an adolescent work was regretted by some at the time and has been contested by relatives since. Miles’s younger sister Linda felt she had been ‘pretty hot on . . . poor father’, and her aunt Helena (Lena) Lampe felt sorry for him being used as material ‘for a not very creditable character’. It seems clear the young writer was not only mortified at the too-close identification of her characters by some locals, but also at pains to correct the impression that Melvyn resembled her father. Responding to a letter from an admirer of My Brilliant Career in 1902, Miles described him as an indulgent father, of the ‘Man from Snowy River’ type; and in the late glow of Childhood at Brindabella she recalled him as ‘irresistible’, ‘proud of his capable young wife and full of good humour’.6

  More importantly, perhaps, for the development of his daughter as a writer, John Franklin was of a philosophic and poetic cast of mind, even though his education, at the Reverend Cartwright’s church-school, Collector, had been limited. Miles believed that this was due to his having been left alone for long periods in the bush when young: ‘He retained his sense of wonder.’ He also developed advanced political views and was capable of a well-argued letter to the press.7

  Nothing now remains of the slab house with its roof of mountain ash shingles built by John Franklin for his wife and family at Brindabella except a pile of blackened stones — possibly the remains of a chimney — on a rise in the valley about a mile south of the main homestead, where John’s older brother, Thomas, resided with his growing family. A charming watercolour of the house by Brindabella tutor Charles Blyth survives, and Miles gives an affectionate account of the house in Childhood at Brindabella, especially the garden of roses and sweet william, lilies and honeysuckle, with a lilac tree, poplars and a picket fence, on ground laboriously prepared by her father, and still partly identifiable sixty years later. In due course she would be given her own patch and a tulip bulb to plant.8

  Outside the house lay the wonders of Brindabella Station, a vast, wild domain of mostly leased land. Its exact extent is now difficult to determine, due to the ever increasing complexities of colonial land legislation and the uses the Franklins and others made of it through purchase, grazing licences and scrub leases over time. But the figure of 16,000 acres (6500 hectares) is mentioned in the 1860s, and there were still some 3000 hectares attached in 1979. It probably reached its greatest extent in the early twentieth century. When it was sold in 1928 the run covered almost 29,000 acres (11,700 hectares), though very little of it was freehold.9

  Miles Franklin was brought up to appreciate the natural world, not to fear it, nor the people in it: ‘I was without fear of horses, cattle, dogs or men,’ was how she would put it. Once, with an uncle’s whip in hand, she successfully urged a bullock team forward, ‘a stupendous moment’, recalled as a first exercise in power. The ease she felt was no doubt mostly due to early familiarity and to her parents’ attitudes, but also to the fact that even as a very small child she was already something of a prodigy and accustomed to being the centre of attention. Moreover, there was no shortage of people to watch out for her. Many more ‘hands’ were needed in the country in those days, and there were men everywhere. In 1885, there were still as many as fifty-eight people living on Brindabella, and the two remaining Franklin brothers, Thomas and John, ran considerable stock on and beyond the 1500 acres (600 hectares) they actually owned: some forty-five horses, 650 cattle, and an estimated 31,750 sheep. The portrayal of the young Clare Margaret, ‘the pride of the station’, in All That Swagger, conforms closely to Miles’s own recollection of that gone-forever pastoral age, when women were scarce and young women were placed on pedestals:

  Little Clare Margaret . . . held court with station hands, squatters, drovers, remittance men and relatives in her kingdom of eucalypts . . . At three, and four, and five, there were males slaving for recognition, and opportunities for mischief were illimitable.10

  By the time she was capable of enjoying such personal freedom, the merry mountain child had several siblings, all born at Talbingo, as she had been; and she always journeyed there with her mother on these occasions. The first trip was for six months in 1881, for the birth of Ida Lampe Franklin (known as Linda) on 12 September, shortly before Stella’s second birthday; the second between August and December 1883 for the birth of Mervyn Gladstone Franklin on 3 October 1883 (Miles’s favourite brother, who caught typhoid fever and died in 1900); the third in early 1885 for the birth of Una Vernon Franklin (who died at Brindabella that same year, aged six months, and was buried there in a bush grave). The last of these birthing trips occurred in 1886, when her longest-lived brother, Norman Rankin Franklin, was born at Talbingo on 26 September 1886. Subsequent Franklin children — there were to be two, Hume Talmage (‘Tal’) and Laurel — were born at home.11

  Talbingo was bigger and better established, a more comfortable environment. There a stable matriarchal order prevailed. Sarah Lampe had been widowed since 1875, when Oltmann Lampe’s years of increasing helplessness following a bush injury ended, and thereafter she ran the property with great and much admired acumen. Tiny Stella was surrounded by young aunts and uncles who found her frank curiosity amusing and treated her as a pet. Her strongly evangelical and greatly revered grandmother was not deceived, however, especially when Stella refused to participate in standard religious observances (which Sarah Lampe conducted herself in the absence of clergy): this was a ‘froward’ child.12

  ‘Froward’ is an old word, but a good one. According to the Macquarie Dictionary it dates back to medieval times, and the meanings given are ‘perverse; wilfully contrary; refractory; not easily managed’. When her baby sister Una died on 11 September 1885, according to Miles she saw her mother cry for the first time. She realised then that it was a solemn occasion, and though told not to, followed the men to the burial site.13

  There has never been a public school at Brindabella, and at least until the end of the nineteenth century education was a matter of private tuition. About this time, probably late 1885, Thomas and Annie Franklin employed Charles Auchinvole Blyth as resident tutor f
or their then four children, and Stella was expected to join her cousins at the homestead under Mr Blyth as soon as possible. As things turned out, that was in 1887. This may seem rather late, since she was by then seven years old; but a good part of the previous year had been spent at Talbingo for the birth of her brother Norman. As recorded by her mother, ‘Stella went to school to Mr Blyth 1 January 1887, got her second front teeth the same year.’14

  Like a good Victorian, Blyth insisted on the importance of perseverance. Things might come more easily to the cleverest people, but everyone has to try. Learning is lifelong, and people don’t value things they learn easily.15

  At Brindabella, the classroom was situated on the verandah behind the post office, and the pupils sat each side of a table under a window with Mr Blyth. Teaching in the country, where more exciting activities than reading and writing lie just outside the schoolroom door, could be a dispiriting calling, even for highly conscientious teachers such as Charles Blyth, who prepared lessons in advance despite his small number of pupils and always acknowledged their individual differences.16

  Stella particularly enjoyed Friday afternoon poetry classes, when they read Scottish border ballads (though the boys had to be bribed with adventure serials such as ‘Sinbad the Sailor’).17

  Looking back on the years she spent with him between 1887 and early 1889, Blyth would summarise Stella’s abilities in the following way:

  I always felt you would progress educationally for you have not only the ability but the desire to do so, and the energy to persevere with your studies; besides a love of reading, which I consider essential to success in that way. I regret to say I have not found the latter a distinct trait in the majority of my pupils hereaway.18