by Jill Roe
In response, Miles sent him her photo as requested, and a meeting was arranged when she was in Melbourne. Joseph Furphy’s high opinion of her book endeared him to her, but she was hardly prepared for this ‘bush Hamlet’, a self-educated up-country foundry worker already sixty years of age, a man who was at once controlling and eager for intimacy. Furphy’s biographer John Barnes traces an uneasy relationship between the older man and the young woman after their meeting at the National Gallery of Victoria, where to Furphy’s dismay Miles was monopolised by his young women friends who made it their business to be there too. Even so, he found her immensely satisfying, despite her nose, famously snub. He described her afterwards to a friend as:
. . . pure Aboriginal . . . Yet when you have listened for two minutes to the torrent of commonsense, pathos and humour, clothed in mingled poetry and slang, and delivered in a deep, sweet contralto, you wouldn’t . . . have a feature of her face altered. She is right enough as she is. Spontaneous!17
Miles Franklin and Joseph Furphy met again the following day, but only for an hour. That would be their last meeting. In early 1905 Furphy and his family moved to Western Australia, where he died in 1912, by which time Miles was in America. After 1907 it seems Miles and Furphy did not even correspond (though she sent him a copy of Some Everyday Folk and Dawn in 1909).
Back home by May, Miles’s first priority was to write up the ‘Mary-Anne diary’. The sketches fill two volumes, a unique account of life in service by an Australian-born woman. For various reasons, such as length and the sensitivity of the approach (Grandma Lampe characteristically thought it deceitful), it could hardly have been published at the time; and while its findings may seem tame today — ‘I think it’s nearly time that the big part we working girls play in life was better recognised’ — such historicity does not diminish the interest and value of the ‘Mary-Anne’ manuscript. Quite the reverse: close examination shows that it is characteristically quirky but comprehensive in its understanding of one of the great questions of the day, and well written too. From a biographical point of view its very existence is significant, because of its evident commitment to the problems of working women.18
The non-publication of ‘Mary-Anne’ made three manuscripts in three years held over. What should Miles do? Grandma Lampe thought she should marry. This had been the constant concern of her letters over the preceding year. Of course she would not advise marriage with a man her granddaughter didn’t like. But why, she wondered, did Miles lead so many of them on? (Which she evidently did, though perhaps unwittingly. Miss Gillespie too wondered how many poor heartbroken fellows Miles had left behind in Melbourne.) By February 1904, Grandma was becoming impatient: ‘Have you found anyone you like better than yourself?’ she asked sharply. In her next missive, she said flatly that Stella should come home and settle down before it was too late: ‘When you get old there will be no chance, you could write all the same.’19
In truth Miles had not totally given up on marriage. The evidence, literary and other, indicates that, in the absence of the ideal man, she was trying to reconcile herself to reality through eugenics, another fashionable prescription of the early twentieth century, in which good genes were the basic consideration. Miles’s approach becomes clearer in Some Everyday Folk and Dawn. Here she analyses ‘the marriage market’, which in fact as well as fiction was in increasingly bad shape due to the misfortunes of depression and drought in the 1890s. The reality was that no matter how hard Grandma Lampe pressed, the depression of the 1890s, which made such a sharp dent in Australia’s hitherto upward demographic history, significantly diminished the scope for marital choice for Miles Franklin’s generation of Australian girls. But did she really care? In Some Everyday Folk and Dawn romance is never serious. To Joseph Furphy Miles wrote with insight that even if she were to go abroad and marry some nonentity and thus be forced to endure a death-in-life existence, as he predicted, she would still persist with the life of the mind.20
Miles tackled the marriage problem by writing about it. Suddenly the necessary inspiration came to her at Penrith. Linda pinpoints the moment for posterity: ‘I wish,’ she wrote from Talbingo on 23 July 1904, ‘we could get worked up about our election like you all at Penrith.’ They had three candidates at Talbingo, none of them any good, she complained. Thirteen days later, on 5 August, she wrote again, about her forthcoming wedding to Charlie Graham, to be celebrated at Penrith on 23 November, with the added injunction: ‘Great day tomorrow. Don’t go up to town and forget to vote.’ Excited by the coincidence of the vote and Linda’s wedding, and always quick off the mark, Miles began the political romance eventually published as Some Everyday Folk and Dawn.21
The ‘great day’ referred to by Linda was the New South Wales election of 6 August 1904, the first election in which women were eligible to vote at state level. The women of New South Wales, along with all other Australian women of European origin, and even a few Aboriginal women in South Australia, had been enfranchised by the Commonwealth Constitution in 1902, and had voted in Federal elections for the first time in 1903, but enfranchisement at state level was a spread-out affair, with South Australia first to give women the vote in 1894 and Victoria last in 1908. New South Wales came in between, in 1903. To fully appreciate the coming of the ‘great day’, it needs also to be remembered that the states were still immeasurably more important to most people than the fledgling Commonwealth. Furthermore, tension over ‘votes for women’ continued at grassroots level, and not only for the voters: many electorates doubled in size with the inclusion of women, an uncertain prospect for politicians, although voting then was optional, not compulsory. In this situation, last-ditch opponents hoped the new woman citizen would be too frightened to venture forth on polling day or would mess up her ballot if she did. Statistics for New South Wales (as elsewhere) show nothing of the kind: the self-respecting and highly literate women of the state participated in at least equal numbers with men in the election of 1904, and nothing special happened to the informal vote. These women were leading the world, and they knew it.22
Some Everyday Folk and Dawn is set in a country town called Noonoon — the word is a palindrome, we are informed — across the river from Kangaroo (obviously Penrith and Emu Plains) during the 1904 state election. The title refers to the novel’s two main subjects: the people of Noonoon, and Dawn, an Australian girl of the period. It is ‘affectionately’ dedicated ‘to the English men who believe in votes for women . . . because the women herein characterised were never forced to be “SUFFRAGETTES”, their countrymen having granted them their rights as SUFFRAGISTS in the year of our Lord 1902’, and there is a quaint accompanying glossary which translates Australian slang and colloquialisms into American and English equivalents; for example, ‘blokes’ to ‘guys’. These were mere marketing devices, however, inserted by the author in 1909 when the book was finally published in England, as the militancy of the British suffragettes was mounting. By then interest had abated in ‘votes for women’ in politically advanced Australia, where, as Miles rightly observed, there had never been a need for suffragettes.23
On 22 June 1905, Miles Franklin wrote to publisher George Robertson asking if he would look at the manuscript of Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, which she was just completing. ‘It has often been suggested to me,’ she went on, ‘to put the life of a small country town in a story as part of Australian life not depicted to any extent, and as an opportunity of studying one together with women’s first appearance at the ballot has lately come my way, I have seized it.’ It was not an adventure story, like some favourite American yarns, but it had quite as much plot as Winslow Plain, and the characters were all alive, she averred.24
Robertson would have appreciated the reference to Winslow Plain, by the New England writer Sarah P. McLean Greene, as he had published an Australian edition in 1903 and sent Miles a copy. If it was an inspiration, all that can be said today is that she greatly exceeded her model. Compared with Winslow Plain, a dour, pious and self-punishi
ng New England novel of now forbidding length, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn is an up-to-date work of marvellous vitality.25
Alas! The Angus & Robertson reader could only get through six chapters, finding them tedious and dull, accurate in the vernacular no doubt, but ‘very small beer’. Reviewers were kinder when the book finally appeared in 1909, published, apparently without difficulty, by Blackwood; but by then it had dated. The Sydney Morning Herald welcomed a book with ‘strength and insight and a sense of humour’, rightly regarding it as more factual than novelistic; but the Bulletin merely commented that Grandma Clay was the best thing in it, and that the story itself was uninteresting.26
By late 1904 Miles Franklin was unhappy. As a single woman just turned twenty-five with no visible means of support, she was unlikely to relish her role as principal bridesmaid at Linda’s forthcoming wedding at Penrith. In the wedding photo she looks pensive (though that may simply be à la mode). However, she managed to write a ‘splendid description’ of the ceremony to her brother Norman, who was working up country and unable to attend.27
Linda Franklin’s wedding at Penrith, November 1904, with the groom, Charles Graham, seated, sister Stella (as bridesmaid) seated on Linda’s right, and Aunt Helena Lampe on her far left. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, PX*D250/1, No.32)
During her extended stay at Penrith in the later months of 1904, occasional trips to Sydney kept her ‘in the swim’. Sir Francis Suttor, recalled by Miles Franklin as ‘one of the most charming, lovable and best-looking men in Australia’, sometimes took her to lunch at Parliament House. In a note arranging one such meeting, he urged her to leave Penrith: ‘You must not live at home and let your brain rot.’ On another occasion, Rose Scott introduced her ‘spirit child’ to Sydney Jephcott, a self-educated poet from the Monaro, like Sir Francis now in his later years and, rather like Joseph Furphy had been, greatly excited by the prospect of meeting Miles. At that same soirée at Miss Scott’s in December 1904, Miles encountered more of the liberal intelligentsia of Edwardian Sydney, including the patrician politician B. R. Wise, whom she thought a cold fish but who proved handy for her later as agent-general for New South Wales in London. Wise’s testimonial at that later time stating that she was an author and journalist and a lady of good social standing came straight out of these years when Penrith was her base.28
In the summer of 1905 Miles visited her favourite uncle William Augustus Lampe who had borne her on a purple pillow over the range from Talbingo to Brindabella as an infant, at his sheep property ‘Brohucting’ (changed during the Great War to ‘Buddong’, near Peak Hill). Uncle Gus Lampe and his wife, Martha, had five children, the eldest of whom, Thelma (later Perryman) cared for Miles Franklin in Sydney during her last illness. There she met her mother’s young cousin Edwin Ernest Bridle, who had a farm nearby at Wilga Vale.29
In a letter to Miles written on 10 August 1906, Edwin would recall ‘the heavenly time I was having with you last spring-time’, and in another of 9 September 1906, ‘all the little jaunts we had together this month last year’. There were pleasant excursions in Sydney after the shearing too.30
Of all the letters she received from her various suitors, those from Edwin are the only ones she kept. They make poignant reading today. The letters reveal that he was prepared to make every sacrifice, including conjugal relations, and that he made ever more drastic promises, seeking to pin her down. The relationship became increasingly one-sided.31
Family and friends who know of the relationship worried about consanguinity. Her sister, Linda, recently married to Charlie Graham, had confided something of the horrors of her first week of marriage and her wish that Stella would never have to endure such a thing — ‘I really wished I would die’. So began the evasions and the ever lengthening silences later from America.32
Miles Franklin had been trying to get some of her old supporters to read what she had written to date of Some Everyday Folk and Dawn. She asked J. F. Archibald to do so in secret, and to give her an opinion ‘from a publisher’s point of view’. She also asked A. G. Stephens for an opinion. This was after sending the first half of the manuscript to T. B. Symons at Angus & Robertson earlier in the month with an assurance that she had toned down the politics, and hearing nothing. Stephens tried to wriggle out of it by suggesting she contact the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and offer to write articles on such subjects as women’s work. He thought this might be an opening in journalism and ‘would enable a country girl to come & live in Sydney if she wanted’. It might be £3 or £4 a week, he suggested. That was the male basic wage at the time, and as much as the best-paid women journalists might hope to earn. Miles wrote to Herald editor Thomas Heney immediately, suggesting articles about the farming district where she lived, on the effects of drought, or on women working at grape, tomato and other fruit packing, even on the killing of caterpillars.33
Heney must have been agreeable, for Miles began writing for the Herald right away. Her articles appeared in the Saturday edition under the pseudonym ‘Vernacular’ (pseudonymous bylines being customary in newspapers until the mid-twentieth century). She also wrote a few features for the rival Daily Telegraph as ‘Old Bachelor’ between April and June 1905, mostly for the Wednesday edition. Counting an article for the Herald’s Wednesday ‘Page for Women’ on ‘Women and Humour’, a perceptive piece on gender difference in humour which appeared on 10 January 1906 over her own initials ‘S. M. F.’, Miles wrote thirty-one feature articles for the Sydney press between 19 April 1905 and 13 January 1906. For these she may well have earned two guineas apiece.34
The first thing that strikes the reader of these writings is that they are all substantial pieces, usually at least a column and a half and mostly more. Altogether they amount to something like 50,000 words. More striking still is how accomplished they are. In producing them Miles Franklin drew on the full range of her experience, and deployed a surprising amount of technical knowledge. The articles can be classified into five subject groups: four according to place and a fifth encompassing general topics. This fifth includes the very first (and entirely sensible) article on infant welfare called ‘Baby-Culture and Socialism’ and the final lyrical article entitled ‘A Summer Day’, plus articles on gardens (one of these in Melbourne) and topics such as women’s irrational dress (a favourite theme), always from a farm woman’s point of view. The articles shaped by place move in roughly chronological order through 1905, beginning with Penrith topics, then on to the Southern Highlands and the Monaro and the mountains, north to the western plains, and back to Penrith. Once the pseudonym is identified it is obvious from the content that they are all by Miles Franklin; and although quite impersonal, they contain or confirm a good deal of biographical material.35
What a boost publishing those articles must have been to her, even though they appeared pseudonymously. Mostly they are still very readable a century later, a nicely crafted compendium of contemporary topics, and they serve to strengthen the hypothesis that Miles Franklin was really cut out to be a journalist, a possibility sustained during her American years. It seems people other than A. G. Stephens began to think so. For instance, Paterson, now editor of the Evening News, offered to publish any sketches of life in country towns she cared to send, and others said they would have published her work but were unable to pay contributors. The articles also go some way to explaining how she could afford a fare to America, and, since Heney of the Sydney Morning Herald was happy to receive other pieces from her (though wary about how much he would be able to publish), how she imagined she could live there, apart from the old standby, domestic service.36
Still, as the newspaper editor Robert Ross wrote from Broken Hill, ‘to be a gifted Australian in the literary field is to be born to struggle’. Actually, Miles was remarkably productive during these years at Penrith, writing the equivalent of a book a year, and she had found her métier as a social commentator. The problem was that none of the books had been published, and after three strenuous year
s she remained ‘an outsider’ who badly needed a peer group (and a helpful editor), rather than elderly patrons who, like Rose Scott in her last surviving letter to Miles, still thought of her as a little girl. More than that, she was way ahead of her time. While there may be many more women as social commentators in Australia now, they seldom achieve comparable authority with men. How much truer this was a century ago.37
As far back as 1904 the Champion–Goldstein circle in Melbourne had strongly encouraged Miles to try her literary fortunes in America, an idea which had been building in her mind since a reader of My Brilliant Career in 1901 suggested she try the American magazine market. Vida, who in 1902 had attended an international suffrage conference in Washington as Australasian representative and made an impression, was particularly encouraging and supportive.38
In mid-1903 Miles had asked George Robertson about literary agents in America, and by early 1904 all sorts of ideas about escape were swirling around her head. ‘Are you really going to New Zealand?’ asked Sir Francis Suttor, and ‘Why Canada?’ wondered Cara David. By mid-1904, it seems clear she was intent on going to America. In May Aileen Goldstein urged her new friend to get her priorities right — ‘You seem to think if you had a couple of thousand pounds all would be well’ — and suggested that if she did go there she would meet Christian Scientists who had been through similar trying experiences. ‘I have read of many splendid financial demonstrations’ (a Christian Science term, meaning demonstrations of the truth of Christian Science), she added. Two months later Linda assumed it was all happening: ‘When are you going to America?’ she asked.39
Miles Franklin set sail from Sydney for San Francisco on RMS Ventura on Monday 9 April 1906, alone and unchaperoned. It was a bold thing to do, but not as bold as it might seem. Sydney was, after all, a long-established Pacific port. And although it was still unusual for young women to travel unchaperoned, her mother approved: ‘Did I tell you about going to the USA?’ Miles asked friend and fellow writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman in 1950. ‘As soon as I began to agitate Mother understood. She said she had always longed to do likewise, but had married.’ She also had Vida Goldstein’s assurance of a feminist network when she got there, and the possibility of sending articles back to the Herald.40