by Jill Roe
Amid so much international activity, Miles did not forget Hartley Grattan. He had been busy with his New Deal work — he was employed as research editor with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in 1934–35 — but not out of touch with Australia, thanks in good part to Miles, who was still confident that he was what Australia needed: ‘Sometimes a fresh mind is the miracle necessary to focus things,’ she had written encouragingly on 25 June 1935.61
On 16 September 1936 Grattan cabled that he had been successful with his Carnegie grant application to study contemporary Australia and would be leaving New York for Sydney on 4 November, travelling via London, where he would seek to penetrate ‘the British curtain’ that surrounded Australia by meeting significant Left-wing intellectuals such as Harold Laski and Beatrice and Sidney Webb. When he arrived in Sydney on the Narkunda on Christmas Eve, Miles was there on the dock to meet him, heading a motley literary delegation, along with P. R. Stephensen. Grattan, it turned out, would often need support, both emotional and intellectual. He was on his own, homesick at first and not easily able to meet people his own age, especially women — a situation Miles met with one of her most memorable bons mots, that the Australian scene was unnecessarily cluttered with men. Nor did Australians at first accord Grattan the status due to a Carnegie Fellow. The dapper, soft-spoken New York intellectual and writer was being put right all the time by Australian loudmouths and pomposities. He was prickly, said Miles, and outspoken (which she enjoyed). Inevitably he found much to criticise: the poor quality of information available in the press about America and the absence of American studies in the universities, for example; and, once he had surveyed the scene by study and extensive travel, the limitations of Australian foreign and economic policies. Criticism caused upset, as when he dismissed the idea that hope for Australia lay with the inland and deplored the effects of agricultural protection. After travelling in Queensland he said the standard of comfort in Australia was low compared with America. On the other hand, he genuinely liked and cared about Australia, and his lectures and broadcasts went over well. He also established an important niche for himself in Australian cultural history by his recognition of Australian writers. Supporting him so staunchly over the next two years was probably one of the best things Miles Franklin ever did for her fellow writers.62
He helped her too. Besides encouraging her work, he supported her literary projects, such as a reissue of Louis Stone’s Jonah and the shaping of a response to the Cape abridgment of Such Is Life, which appeared in 1937. More importantly, in due course he helped Miles to think clearly about political trends. Grattan’s views were a world away from those of Stephensen. Having previously done his best for Inky’s literary enterprises in New York, he soon rejected Stephensen’s larrikin chauvinism, arguing against isolationist policies as unrealistic and deploring racism: Stephensen’s lurch to the Right was, he said, ‘deeply offensive’. Although he could not free Miles from the contradictions of Australia First, he saved her from a deeper descent into the Stephensen mire. When he left, with ‘an incredible mass of material’, on 5 September 1938, Miles Franklin was one of the last he talked to before departure, ‘as you were one of the first’, he noted gratefully.63
On one issue, though, she needed no help: the abdication of Edward VIII. On 3 December 1936 the British press broke its silence on King Edward VIII’s intention to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. The news shook the Empire. ‘Hands off our King’, one placard protested. But Miles was not in doubt. If, as she wrote to Edward Bridle the next day, there was anything in it, the king should control himself: ‘It may be all froth, but if it is not, I think an old man of his age [he was born in 1894] might have held his emotions in the crisis in European affairs.’ Later she told Mollye Menken that Australian workmen had a point when they said they had to give up their lives for the king and he could not give up a blooming tart to save his people. Most men had to give up their tarts, they added.64
Odd as it may seem, the contradictions that Miles Franklin had been compelled by circumstance to live with since returning to Australia increased throughout 1936. The success of All That Swagger restored her name and recast her reputation as an Australian writer among the reading public; it encouraged her in her work, especially in the hope that Brent might yet finish his series, as she replied to friends who suggested that now might be the time to come clean; and it strengthened promising literary associations, such as with Frank Clune and Jean Devanny. She was even mentioned in parliament as ‘one of our most brilliant writers’. But her family brought her to despair. ‘Petty nonentities all they can do is criticize each other and I am a special mark. I wonder how I came to be one of such relatives. Nothing in common — no discernible spiritual or mental likeness with anyone but my father and grandfather Franklin and Grandma Lampe and Aunt Sara[h],’ she wrote in her pocket diary on 28 September. Nor did the next generation show any sign of comprehension. Her schoolboy nephew Jack said she would make someone a splendid wife: ‘You could keep house so well and write books in your spare time.’65
Christmas Day 1936 merely emphasised the paradoxical situation. There were eight for dinner that day, with both her mother and Miss Gillespie to be put to bed after. Susannah’s condition was such that it was only a matter of time, and Miss Gillespie, now aged eighty herself, reported another death in Goulburn. ‘Altogether a depressing Christmas,’ sighed Miles. How nice then to go into town a few days later to meet Horatio Nelson Smith of inner London days at the Hotel Australia, and to collect some reviews and a cheque from the Bulletin office.
On New Year’s Day 1937, despite feeling exhausted from lack of sleep, Miles tapped out letters to far friends, among them the distinguished New Dealer Harold Ickes in Washington, Margery Currey in New York, and Agnes Nestor and Dr Young in Chicago. She had plenty of news: the arrival of Hartley Grattan, the departure of the Griffins for India, an imminent visit by Emma Pischel and other members of her family, and her success with All That Swagger. And, as she told Dr Young, there was ‘always the telephone and door bell and a continual stream of people who thought that writing was a way of shirking my womanly duty’, with her mother ‘always restless and disintegrating’.66
A short time later, came the news of the death of Walter Burley Griffin in India: ‘Desolation.’ She wrote a tribute to Griffin for the Bulletin and applied herself to her work. Soon after sending a play of postwar identity muddle, No Family (previously Act 1 of ‘Claud’s Wife’) to Angus & Robertson for inclusion in Best Australian One-Act Plays (1937) — the only one of her plays to achieve publication during her lifetime — she began revising the manuscript of Cockatoos, and in April turned to corrections for a third edition of All That Swagger (they were not incorporated).67
The long-awaited abridgment of Such Is Life, purportedly by Vance Palmer (actually by Nettie and their daughter Aileen, though this was not known until much later), appeared in May. From her earlier encounter with the English publisher Jonathan Cape, Miles had feared the worst, and here it was — to her mind not so much an abridgment as a humourless mutilation of the noble text, apparently to attract English readers. Immediately she embarked on an insistent campaign to counteract its impact, with articles of her own and increased pressure on Joseph Furphy’s ‘gallant standard bearer’, Kate Baker. Whereas previously she had supported Baker’s efforts to republish Furphy’s works, now Miles urged Baker to write something, and renewed her offer to help with a biography.68
About this time Miles avoided what she considered a major embarrassment. On 24 April 1937, she received a telegram from the office of the Governor-General, and on inquiry found she was summoned to attend upon the Official and Military Secretary at Government House in Sydney two days later. There she learned that in his coronation year His Majesty King George VI wished to confer upon her the Order of the British Empire. Miles was mortified, recalling how this award was despised during the Great War (and mocked long afterwards as ‘Other Buggers’ Efforts’) — but also becaus
e she was being offered such a lowly honour when that ‘slipshod’ poet Mary Gilmore had recently been made a dame. Then and there Miles declined the honour, and — as may be inferred from a lengthy account of the incident in her literary notebook — was rather disappointed when the official insisted the whole thing must remain confidential.69
Frank Clune provided a welcome diversion. A recent arrival on the literary scene with the rollicking autobiography Try Anything Once, Clune subsequently published over sixty books in a variety of popular genres, mostly travel and historical volumes. It was doubtless the sweep of All That Swagger which drew him to Miles Franklin in 1936. He was not everyone’s cup of tea, but Miles told Freda Barrymore he was a dear, and despite an age difference of almost twenty years, their writerly agendas were not that different. ‘We don’t want stories of snoopy sex written by anaemic lounge lizards and pub crawlers. Action is the password of these pages, this is reading for men with red blood in their veins,’ Clune once asserted. Miles certainly agreed on the first point, and if she did not write for red-blooded men, she undoubtedly preferred ‘real men’ like Stephensen and Clune. When in mid-1937 Clune determined she should accompany him and his wife, Thelma, on a research trip around the Central West of New South Wales, and then, soon after, on another to Central Australia, she was delighted. (The current home help, Mrs Wilkinson, was able to look after her mother, with Miles’s cousin Ruby Brydon for backup.)70
The first trip, over nine days from 18 to 26 May, took them in Clune’s Pontiac through Goulburn to Canberra and Yass, on to the inland towns of Cowra, Temora and Grenfell, and back to Sydney via Katoomba. Highlights along the way included being photographed at the Henry Lawson Memorial obelisk at Grenfell and lunch with the French-born squatter and fellow writer Paul Wenz on his property at Nanima.71
The second trip lasted five weeks, from 8 June to 9 July. To Carrie Whelan in California — her last letter before Carrie’s death later in the year — Miles wrote when she got back to Sydney:
I have had a wonderful change. I was hardly strong enough, or rather was too fatigued when I went away for the hard travelling but the relief from the care of my mother and being confined in such an enervating circle was wonderful. I went with two friends, a Mr and Mrs Clune, by car to Adelaide . . . [there] we flew to the centre of Australia and then went to the geographic centre . . . Look at the map. In all, 3000 miles by car and 2000 by plane. It was a lovely 10 passenger Lockheed Electra and we saw the red heart of Australia and the bed of Lake Eyre and the MacDonnell Ranges — colours ravishing like your Grand Canyon, Colorado stretches, only of course flat.72
They returned via the south-east of Australia and the Great Ocean Road, through Geelong (where Miles called on Dr De Garis of Ostrovo days), Ballarat and Melbourne.
Miles and Frank Clune usually advised the local press in advance of their coming. Clune told the Adelaide Advertiser he was collecting material for two books: a travel book dealing with the Murrumbidgee and a historical romance in collaboration with Miss Miles Franklin, said to be ‘a young New South Wales authoress’. (How this must have amused Miles, then going on fifty-eight.) In Melbourne, he told the press he was on the trail of two explorers, Sturt and Stuart, with Miss Franklin helping him, which is probably more like it. Speaking on her own behalf, Miles said she was collecting material for a book on the lower Murrumbidgee, which, given its role in All That Swagger, is plausible, though nothing seems to have come of it.73
A fine series of photos of their travels survives in the Franklin Papers, mostly featuring Miles as a prop. This, she told the Adelaide Advertiser, was the only drawback to the whole trip: ‘Due to Mr Clune’s insatiable interest in every bushranger’s tomb and monument within miles of the track, I had to be photographed beside each one. I look like a corpse of the bushranger come to life and felt that at least to give beauty to his photographs Mr Clune should have asked a film star to accompany him.’ In fact, she usually has a big smile, as when standing by an abandoned water cart in the Riverina. There she is in photo after photo with her lisle stockings, lace-up shoes and a trilby, in the same suit every time, possibly because she hadn’t any other.74
The trip to the interior was her first by aeroplane: ‘I loved it. I was at home here as some pilgrim reaching the goal.’ It was also an adventure, and an exposure to new facets of Australian life, such as she delighted to see Xavier Herbert encompass in Capricornia and was always urging other writers to attempt. At Oodnadatta she met Afghans and visited an Aboriginal camp; somewhere near Alice Springs, at the famed bushman Bob Buck’s camp, she sat on a camel; and when they reached Central Mount Stuart, she let out a lusty cooee. Back in Adelaide, Miles and Clune told the press that the ‘dead heart’ was a misnomer; and on 29 June they earned a handy six guineas for an interview on the ABC.
As well, when in Adelaide, Miles went to the state archives and read Catherine Helen Spence’s unpublished novel ‘Handfasted’. With the assistance of Spence’s niece Lucy Spence Morice, she brought precious manuscript material back to Sydney, gladly received by her friend Ida Leeson, the Mitchell Librarian. Spence became another of Miles’s causes — ‘Australia’s greatest woman’, she declared — and she gave a talk on Spence’s writings later in the year.75
The immediate task to be faced once back in Sydney, however, was the sketch of Rose Scott (now regarded as an important early study) for the forthcoming sesquicentenary gift book, a task requiring interviews as well as library researches. There was also further revision of the Cockatoos manuscript to be done.76
Friends continued to warn Miles against Stephensen’s lurch to the Right, not only the Left-leaning Grattan, whose lectures on fascism and the prospects for neutrality in the event of war, as well as other political advice, she found helpful, but also Mary Fullerton, who deplored the coarseness of the Publicist, and Lucy Spence Morice, who, like Fullerton, felt that Inky’s Australianism was ‘too vehement’. But Miles could not yet see this, nor the signs of anti-Semitism, which she claimed to have missed until pointed out by Grattan. After hearing a visiting Canadian-Scot on the need to forget England, and go back as far as Aboriginal Australians to ‘find our separate selves’, Miles wrote to Fullerton that she agreed, not because she did not love England — she did — but because it was time to do ‘something of our own’, the political dimension to this position being that it was ‘dreadful’ that the New World should be dragged into European wars and suffer their tribalism. In her view, as part of the desired new moral standard, small nations off the beaten track should stand out for peace.77
Was it on the edge of the Government House fishpond at a morning tea party given by the Governor of New South Wales, Lord Wakehurst, and his wife, Lady Margaret, on 1 February 1938, or was it two days later on the manicured lawns of Admiralty House at an afternoon garden party hosted by the Governor-General of Australia, Lord Gowrie, and his wife, Lady Zara, that Miles Franklin and Dymphna Cusack first thought of writing a satire on the sesquicentenary of New South Wales? The first event was a reception to mark the opening of a Women’s International Conference associated with the sesquicentenary, the second to farewell the delegates — none of whom, Miles noted, represented working women. Both she and Dymphna, disgusted by the servility on display, determined not to curtsey when their turn came. From Miles’s diaries, it seems clear the project was first mooted on the lawns of Admiralty House. But Dymphna always thought it was at the edge of the fishpond at Government House that the aptly named collaboration Pioneers on Parade had its genesis, and hers is the better story, the substance of which rings true. As Dymphna recalled in 1977, the two writers were sitting muttering over their soggy sandwiches and lukewarm lemonade — suitable for a women’s event, part of a token conference — when Miles had an inspiration. She poured the lemonade into the pond and said, ‘Why don’t we write a book about it?’78
Most of the writing of Pioneers on Parade was done in the months immediately after the sesquicentenary and, it seems clear, Miles was the major contr
ibutor. Dymphna wrote chapters of sharp Sydney material at the beginning, while the subsequent undoing of sesquicentenary ‘celebrities’ at ‘Pine Grove’ (Grandma Brankston’s property at Marulan), the acid asides about the state of international affairs, and the romantic convict- and pioneer-endorsing twist to the plot are all Miles, as must surely be the flight to Charleville to achieve a resolution, which comes with the unexpected arrival there by air of the shameless Lady Lucinda Cravenburn. Arriving back in Sydney, Lady Lucinda facilitates the marriage of her long-neglected daughter, the over-indulged and otherwise useless Lady Lucy, to the besotted ‘Little Willie’ Brankston, and by playing the maternal card overrides Grandma Brankston’s previously immovable objection, an obstinate reverse pride in the pioneer family’s hitherto unknown convict origins which precluded association with past persecutors. Along the way, the youth of Sydney get a lesson in proper values, and everyone rejects imperial honours. In Pioneers on Parade, headed ‘For Australians Only’, self-respecting values triumph over ‘the silly Sesqui’, and some very funny scenes are concocted. Not that all readers thought so: the reviews which followed publication by Angus & Robertson in July 1939 were mixed, and the eminent Shavian St John Ervine warned Miles not to waste her talent in future.79
Dymphna and Miles had met as early as 1935. Between 1938 and Miles’s death in 1954, they exchanged well over 200 letters. In 1935, Miles recorded her enjoyment of Cusack’s play Red Sky at Night, and Cusack recalled Miles delivering her Eleanor Dark review at the FAW. Cusack also recalled that, unlike herself, Miles was a good committee woman, evident in her work in the first half of 1938 on the FAW executive for a scheme for subsidising both the writing of ‘worthwhile books’ and a Chair in Australian Literature. (When it was said there were no suitable men to fill the Chair, Miles responded that there were two women, naming Nettie Palmer and Flora Eldershaw, clearly a revolutionary suggestion. ‘Australia is positively Troglodytic on the woman question,’ she sighed to Nettie.)80