by Jill Roe
Three years is a long time to keep writing with nothing to show for it (as noted, ‘Not The Tale Begun’/Prelude to Waking dates from late 1925, and Up The Country, the first volume to be published, did not appear until late 1928). ‘God help me through this year,’ Miles prayed in her diary on 4 January 1928. With the new year, however, came sad news: the sudden death in Melbourne of Nancy Lister Watson. Miles was shattered by the loss of her generous, trusted friend, who had characteristically allowed Miles to use her address as part of William Blake’s smokescreen. Miles now turned to her old teacher, Miss Gillespie, nominating her residence, nearby at 45 Hudson Street, Hurstville, as the address of Brent of Bin Bin’s agent. It was from there, on 6 February 1928, as William Blake, that she returned the proofs of Up the Country to Blackwood, appending a chronological chart showing the sequence of the four volumes already drafted; and it was to Miss Gillespie’s address that the publisher replied encouragingly about Ten Creeks Run, and then wrote that publication of Up the Country would be delayed until the northern autumn, due to the poor state of the book trade.14
On 8 February 1928, two days after despatching the proofs of Up the Country to Blackwood, Miles caught the overnight train for Cooma and beyond, travelling by motor coach to the old gold town of Kiandra the following afternoon. There she was collected by her Uncle Fred Lampe and his wife, Eliza, and taken to Gooandra, on the long plain to the north, over which she had first travelled as a three-month-old infant.15
The daily round in the high country was not very restful, nor even companionable — ‘Am I never to be with anyone who understands?’ she cried mid-stay — but wonderfully exhilarating. ‘I love the bush,’ she would write to Mary Fullerton. One day she was taken to Canberra. On another she rode with Uncle Fred Lampe towards Tantangara, on the edge of what is now Kosciuszko National Park, with its awe-inspiring southern vistas. There were old sites to visit and a sports day at Rules Point. Inevitably, Miles began another story. As she wrote in a long-overdue letter to Kate Baker praising Such Is Life, she had such a lot of stories in her head craving expression — if only she could find peace and quiet.16
The story, begun ‘near Kiandra’, was Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang. Back in Sydney in May, she typed her story up for the Bulletin novel competition. Also entered in carbon copy was Brent’s Up the Country, then in press. Apart from the competition judges, no one saw Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang for almost thirty years. Miles herself did not live to see it in print, and by that time the intellectual milieu that generated it had passed away. But Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang is nonetheless the novel of her return to Australia, and should be read as such.17
Miles was once more beset by sleeplessness and anxiety. It was during this period that a friend of Miss Gillespie, the Adelong-born Will Carter, a near-retirement bush teacher and prolific contributor of ‘Australianities’ to country newspapers, turned up at Miss Gillespie’s ‘to spy on me’, according to Miles (and later fall in love with her, a futile thing to do). More ominously, it gradually became clear that her mother, now aged seventy-eight, was suffering from encroaching senility, and that with her father’s increasing frailty, Miles must reconcile herself to the roles of charwoman and nurse, at least for the time being, keeping away from people due to ‘limitations of strength’. Mary Fullerton’s letters provided her with ‘some refuge and comfort’.18
To preserve her privacy, with the help of her father’s old Penrith associate Dan Clyne, now a state parliamentarian, she obtained a post-office box in the city, and soon after she decided she must find somewhere quiet to write. Probably a generous bequest of £200 from Nancy Lister Watson made it possible.19
On 23 October 1928 Miles set up office in Hurstville’s Council House, about one and a half kilometres from Grey Street. It felt like bliss, and from then on, insomnia was less of a problem. For one thing, walking is a recognised antidote. For another, she had somewhere to sleep in the daytime as well as to work without interruption. And Miss Gillespie’s residence — the business address for Brent of Bin Bin — was conveniently en route.20
On 10 November Miles called in to her old teacher’s residence to collect a parcel. It contained six copies of Up the Country, one of which she straightaway sent to the Prime Minister, Stanley Bruce; another, from Brent of Bin Bin, went to Mary Gilmore. Mary had recently declared the expatriate writer Dorothy Cottrell a genius for her novel The Singing Gold. Was Up the Country the work of a genius or a geniass, Brent asked provocatively. There is no record of a response. A few days before, as William Blake, Miles wrote to Blackwood urging the firm to fend off inquiries about the identity of Brent of Bin Bin: ‘I am most desirous of preserving my “nonentity” for twelve months at least. It will be more interesting than details in these days when the public is bored as to authors’ braces and actresses’ hair washes etc; besides it will give me quiet, which I must have to live.’21
Dust cover of the first edition of Up the Country (1928). (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Miles Franklin Printed Book Collection, No. 175)
Fortunately, Miles already had her Hurstville retreat in place when on 14 December 1928 Susannah Franklin installed a wireless at Grey Street. On 23 December, in the quiet of her office, she put the final touches to Ten Creeks Run, and on Christmas Eve she despatched a copy of the typescript to the New York publisher Harper.22
When Aunt Lena handed her niece the issue of the Bulletin for 2 January 1929, she had not noticed anything unusual. Miles saw it immediately. There, on page 5 in a column headed ‘An Australian Classic’, was an enthusiastic review of Up the Country by Brent of Bin Bin. It was not Brent’s first review — numerous short and sometimes bemused notices had appeared in the British press late in 1928, and the Sydney journal Country Life had been quick to applaud a notable chronicle — but the Bulletin was the first to celebrate literary achievement, comparing the method of narration to that of Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts. The anonymous reviewer passed quickly from the question of Brent’s identity to his ‘smiling knowledge of Australian country folk’. ‘In this book,’ the review continued, ‘Australia’s countenance beams’; and although Brent was said to have no style as understood in literary cliques, the book was deemed true to life and to contain some of the most tender writing in Australian literature. In the death by drowning of Bert Poole’s betrothed, the beautiful young Emily Mazere, in the Mungee Fish Pool, ‘the prose sings’. Yet as Lady Byles would remark with some surprise, most reviewers missed the woman’s voice in Up the Country.23
Miles was triumphant, straightaway sending a copy of the review to Blackwood, and to Mary Fullerton. To Blackwood, as W. Blake, she wrote that hiding under a pen-name was after all an advantage for publicity, and urged that the other volumes be published quickly. To Fullerton she expressed relief, on two grounds. Firstly, that she was ‘completely under cover for the start . . . To be in the limelight now would kill me, I know,’ she wrote. ‘I feel like some cowering exhausted animal in an inadequate cover which cannot last long.’ Mary must stand firm and hide her. Secondly, although she had entered Up the Country in the Bulletin competition in 1928, no one had noticed it; it had not even made the commended list. She didn’t care to have it said that she had no style, and the Bulletin had gone down in her esteem, but she wasn’t going to argue. It had done her proud: ‘When I came out as a girl I found myself famous overnight because of the Bulletin, and now, coming back as an old woman, I find them “discerning” me immediately again.’24
Mary Fullerton, observing from afar the success of women writers such as Katharine Susannah Prichard, exulted that they would soon be ‘top dogs’ in Australia. The close literary friendship between the two women which had been developing since 1924 was cemented at this time. The flow of letters from 1927 to Fullerton’s death in 1946, approaching 600 preserved in the Franklin Papers (the largest single correspondence), is remarkable not only as a friendship but also as a professional partnership. It reveals two bush intellectuals who were also vulnerable women navi
gating the quickening, multi-directional tides of an emergent Australian literature. Miles’s success encouraged them both. Who was Martin Mills (Martin Boyd) and how good was his Melbourne saga The Montforts, they asked each other. And what about the phenomenon of Henry Handel Richardson, who had to date published two acclaimed volumes of her magnum opus The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, with a third imminent, of whom very little was known? (Even Nettie Palmer was unaware until 1928 that ‘H. H. R.’ was a woman.) As for the hazards facing women writers in the 1920s, events like the censorship of Radclyffe Hall’s taboo-busting but grimly determinist lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928 were a warning to keep to the higher ground. ‘Yours also a pilgrim,’ Mary once signed off.25
Among the plaudits in the Australian press in the early months of 1929 came an especially significant one by Nettie Palmer in the Brisbane Courier. More than verisimilitude, Palmer wrote, Brent of Bin Bin had achieved ‘something like communicable delight in fine memories’. Here, she said, was a novel that met the call for books about pioneering that were not just struggles with drought, but a record of ‘some of the dignified, complex lives of the prouder kind of pioneer’. She was particularly impressed by the characterisation of Bert Poole: ‘If Brent of Bin Bin had done nothing more than render the personality of Bert Poole and make him credible, this book would have been worth writing.’ But, she went on, a man is incomplete without his environment, and what Brent had successfully essayed was a kind of ecology. Nor did Palmer miss the book’s contemporary thrust, pointing out that to see the characters as old-fashioned was to look through the wrong end of the telescope: they might wear crinolines, ‘but their hearts and speech are young, contemporary’.26
No wonder Miles Franklin came to see Nettie Palmer as her preferred candidate for a founding chair in Australian literature. Her review showed ‘the deepest understanding’. She was especially happy with the phrase ‘communicable delight’, and in due course as Brent of Bin Bin, c/– Blackwood, Edinburgh, she responded to ‘Dear, delightful Nettie Palmer, (Mrs)’. In the first of a handful of early letters from Brent of Bin Bin to Nettie written between 1929 and 1932, Miles further outlined Brent’s approach to writing. The letter explained that the book attempted to convey the atmosphere and unique qualities of the Australian landscape, ‘which are spiritual breath to me’, and that the author had found a way to detail the subtleties of Australian life based on old pioneer yarning techniques.27
There had already been a good deal of speculation about Brent of Bin Bin. The address given in the Author’s Note to Up the Country was ‘Brent of Bin Bin, S[eat]. 9, Reading Room, British Museum’, which suggested an expatriate. In mid-March, attending a meeting of the ‘Literary Fellowship’ (probably the FAW) with Eva O’Sullivan, Miles heard the matter discussed, and letters came to her from friends conveying the gossip in London: from Mary Fullerton, for example, that Kathleen Ussher had guessed Brent was Miles Franklin. In April 1929 the Bulletin reported that Brent of Bin Bin had written to the Victorian writer Bernard Cronin congratulating him on a serial in the Bulletin about dairy farming in Gippsland, adding that Brent had so far succeeded in preserving his anonymity despite numerous efforts to get behind it.28
Undoubtedly many people knew the truth — family, friends in London — but out of loyalty or simple kindness no one gave her secret away. Ruby Bridle, daughter of Miles’s cousin Annie May Bridle, née Franklin, said that when the Brent books came out she and her family knew who wrote them but were never game to say: ‘they were full of stories we’d been brought up on’. Winnie Stephensen, the long-suffering wife of nationalist publisher P. R. ‘Inky’ Stephensen, who had been cared for in Melbourne by Nancy Lister Watson when young and first met Miles in America, had only to read a few pages to encounter an anecdote she had heard P. S. Watson tell Miles many times in London. And it could well have been Kate Baker who arranged for an excerpt from Up the Country by Brent of Bin Bin to appear in the Victorian Education Department’s School Paper in September 1929. Even so, it seems clear that only a few London friends — Mollye Menken, Lady Byles and Mary Fullerton — could have been absolutely certain that Miles was Brent.29
Mrs Robins almost exposed the secret of Brent’s identity by cabling congratulations to Miles on her great book (which Miles had sent to her). ‘Please keep absolutely secret or all ruined financially,’ Miles cabled back. A letter followed, explaining that if the public suspected she had anything to do with it, it would finish her. Hopefully no one at the post office had noticed the cable’s contents. ‘No one in Australia has been confided in.’ Nor would they be. Miles was vigilant. When she heard there was a rumour going around Melbourne that she wrote the Brent of Bin Bin books, she telegraphed Elsie Belle Champion to correct the impression. Charles Peters, the manager of Robertson & Mullens bookshop, who had made the connection in his weekly book program on radio 3LO, subsequently retracted his remarks, as he explained to Miles in an apologetic letter.30
Unfortunately sales of Up the Country were not yet to Blackwood’s satisfaction, especially in the home (that is, British) market, where after eight months a mere 307 copies had been sold, as compared with 918 on the colonial market. But it was hoped sales would improve, and in due course a modest annual royalty payment of £22 19s made its tortuous way to Miles via Mary Fullerton. While Brent regretted that the publisher was not making a profit, he felt sure Back to Bool Bool was superior to the previous volumes.31
In a letter to Mrs Robins, Miles reflected fiercely on her loneliness:
Australia is the unique place to study the common man . . . A special condition creates him. There is first a small community . . . Then there is our isolation . . . [but with] imperialism to dictate what we shall think and sterilise originality of mind, and every one of any note . . . drawn off to London . . .[t]he result is the highest community of common people in the world. Also they are the richest per capita, I am sure.32
Despite, or maybe because of, her isolation, Miles Franklin took a close interest in international affairs and literary trends, devouring the magazines forwarded by far-off friends and emphasising the need for modernity in Australian literature, lamenting also the worn-out character of women’s politics in Sydney in one of numerous letters to Alice Henry in California. She was disgusted by Adela Pankhurst Walsh’s rantings (Adela had emigrated to Australia in 1914 and moved far from her radical roots).33
Although Brent’s books had good reviews, literary life in Sydney was limited, even claustrophobic. It was hard to maintain the fiction of Brent, though without it she felt all would be lost. If exposed prior to completion of the saga, she would lose momentum and face, and — by now it was an article of faith — sales.
Ten Creeks Run appeared in late April. This time the dedication read:
To
My Father and Mother
With due recognition of their
valiant share in the life depicted.
And this time Brent gave his address as ‘New South Wales’. Once more there was speculation about his identity, with the Launceston Courier and then the Advertiser in Adelaide declaring categorically that Brent was Miss Miles Franklin — to which the West Australian replied that she had officially denied it. Meanwhile, Mary Fullerton had reacted instantly with vehement congratulations. Subsequently she did much to advance Miles’s cause, including, in a comment on the London literary scene entitled ‘A Note on Australian Writers: Some Women and an Unknown’ in Melbourne’s Table Talk, highlighting Brent’s work (‘magnificent stuff’) and speculating that Brent was a woman (although ‘Brent and his publishers lie low’). Australian women writers, she reported, were doing well in London; Australian writing was being treated with respect by critics for the first time; and the rising popularity of long novels was ‘good for Australia’.34
Between April and August 1930 numerous notices and reviews appeared, first in Britain and then in Australia, beginning with the London Daily Telegraph on 1 April: ‘one of those rare narratives that recapture t
he very essence, sap, savour and force of the old days they set out to describe’. Brent had passed the ‘second book’ test with flying colours. Nettie Palmer stated simply that Ten Creeks Run was ‘a landmark in Australian literature’. Nettie also recognised that in the sudden flowering of the Australian novel of which the Brent books were part there was hardly a glance at Aboriginal life except by Katharine Susannah Prichard (though there are some references in the saga; for instance, Milly is sickened by Red Jimmy’s tales of ‘shootin’ the blacks’ in Queensland).35
By July Miles was writing, ‘I must get away. Feel I shall die of mental starvation.’ Apparently her parents were now strongly anti-Labor. In New South Wales in 1930, unemployment was high and the populist Premier Jack Lang led an anti-deflationary Labor government from October 1930 until his dismissal in May 1932. Like Lady Byles, Miles probably believed that ‘Inherently, truly we are all Labour — we cannot be anything else.’ Miles had delighted in George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism — though fearing isolation might have relegated her to the ranks of ‘Victorian and prewar drivellers’ — and she understood that Labor could only go so far before capital reasserted itself. The strong Catholic orientation of New South Wales Labor in the 1920s made her antipathetic, but she supported Labor in 1930, and again in 1939, when the lawyer Clive Evatt became the Labor member for Hurstville.36