by Jill Roe
In February Miles had been startled to hear of the death of a girlhood friend, Tossie O’Sullivan. Now in June the losses came thick and fast, and while they were to be expected, no easier to bear for that. Wonderful Aunt Annie Franklin — she who could clean up the North-West Frontier while running Brindabella homestead — died at Queanbeyan on 5 June. A week later on 12 June Miss Gillespie, to whom the first edition of Old Blastus of Bandicoot had been dedicated, followed her. Miles did not tell her mother. Then three days later, in the early hours of 15 June, Susannah Franklin’s time came.81
‘You will be alone in this barn,’ Susannah had said in her harsh way shortly before her death. Even Aunt Lena had moved to a residential on the North Shore a few years before. But with Jack and Norman coming and going, and with so much support from family and friends, was that the main point? What was? Miles had spent the years of her homecoming, in some ways her best years, caring for her mother, and now she was gone. The loss was very real, and it is not difficult even now to empathise with the grief, guilt and anxiety which threatened to overwhelm her. Alice Henry and Mary Fullerton both wrote wise letters, and as Mary said, ‘You have nothing to reproach yourself with,’ which was true. Even so it took several months for Miles to regain her equilibrium. To Hartley Grattan’s mother she wrote, apropos of his impending return to America, that she understood Mrs Grattan’s impatience to see him again, and of her own desolation after her mother’s death:
I, who have been round the world so often, more than understand. At every port my mother always had a letter waiting for me, whether it was the Pacific or the other route . . . But there will never again be anyone thus to care about my homecomings or going. Mother passed away last month and if I stop to remember the desolation, I am all to pieces. For eleven years I have never had Mother off my heart day and night and with her going everything seems to have ended for me too. I feel that I am old — prefer to get the ugly chore of death over now rather than later. I must just sheer away from the emptiness & be passive.82
This bleak letter was written from her Uncle Gus Lampe’s property at Peak Hill. The cook there had hurt her hand so Miles went up to help out. She stayed for a month, from 12 July until 9 August, and when her aunt and cousin Metta both fell ill, she took on the washing and cleaning as well as the cooking. It filled the time, she wrote to Nettie Palmer, but ‘depression supervenes and I’m so far down I don’t want to come back to life’.83
But she did. Back in Sydney, perspective gradually returned. ‘To say I grieve is unanalytical,’ she wrote to Kate Baker in October. ‘It is merely that the preoccupation and strain was so great for years that I was not strong enough to weather Mother’s dissolution . . . However, it doesn’t matter.’84
That bespeaks acceptance. Yet Miles Franklin had felt for a time that her own life was over. ‘Don’t let your grief and exhaustion turn into an inferiority complex,’ Alice Henry warned. The contrast between Miles’s cheerful public persona and the depressed tone of much of her private writings raises the possibility of a depressive illness. However, the explanation may lie simply in the lack of real intimacy in her life.85
Some things lie too deep for documentation. Maybe it was implicit in Susannah Franklin’s last barb about being left alone that, despite Mary Fullerton’s reassurance, Miles did feel she had something to reproach herself with. It would be surprising if her mother had not in some way goaded her for remaining unmarried. Susannah quite possibly implied that for all the fuss that had been made of Miles, she was a failure as a daughter, especially an eldest daughter, and what is more, the only daughter to survive.
Among the many emotions Miles struggled with after her mother’s death was a feeling of ‘financial helplessness’. Susannah had long managed the family finances, and although Miles was careful and persistent about her writing income, she knew she lacked her mother’s skill with money. Susannah had long been a termagant (Dymphna Cusack’s word), and her death could be seen as a relief, but Miles could not allow herself those comforting clichés. Susannah Franklin’s death left her, an ageing woman, alone and insecure in a harsh and moralistic world. She wrote to Alice Henry in October that except for her nephew Jack coming home at nights — he had left school and was employed by the Permanent Trustee Company in the city and living at Carlton with his aunt — she would be tempted to shut the door and lie down to starve to death.86
‘In Australia,’ Miles once said, ‘you have to be a self-starter.’ After Susannah Franklin’s death, she did not feel up to creative work, but on her return from Peak Hill she finished typing Pioneers on Parade and prepared it for submission to publishers. Towards the end of the year she managed to review the poems of the vintner and ex-Anzac Harley Matthews, an associate of Inky Stephensen, and gave a broadcast or two. Then she had a bright idea. One of the reviews she had written earlier in the year was of The Life Story of Joseph Furphy, by Furphy’s nephew Edward Pescott. The subject had been on her mind ever since the lamentable Palmer abridgment of Such Is Life, and Pescott’s brief account merely drew attention to the need for a proper study. Suddenly she knew what to do. ‘An idea has just come to me,’ she wrote to Kate Baker in late October. Why didn’t Baker come to stay for a few months at no cost, and together they could get Baker’s Furphy material into shape? The next Bulletin Prize would be for biography. Was it not a grand idea? Baker replied that she lived frugally — it transpired that she had only 28 shillings a week to live on — and it would be an adventure for them both. The letters flashed back and forth throughout November, and to avoid attracting attention it was agreed that they would say that Baker was collecting data in Sydney.87
By 8 December 1938 the seventy-seven-year-old Kate Baker and her boxes were ensconced in the spare room at 26 Grey Street. The boxes contained ‘a magnificent lot of things’, but as it soon emerged poor Baker was quite deaf, and to Miles’s mind a real amateur when it came to literary work. In consequence, things did not turn out as either of them envisaged. But at least Miles had a preoccupation to replace Susannah, and an important new project for when she returned from her annual summer break.88
After the ‘virtual holocaust’ of deaths in the first half of 1938 came lesser losses in the second, with the departure for America of Grattan on 5 September and of the widowed Marion Mahony Griffin in November, her Castlecrag friends weeping at the dock as the ship drew out. Miles saw them both off. Her emotional sustenance was now coming mainly through her remarkable correspondence (Dymphna Cusack, who saw it at this time, said it was neatly filed in boot- and hat-boxes, where Miles could find items in a trice), and she was effectively re-Australianised, as the Furphy project further signified. On a day-to-day basis she could call on new associates and a new generation of relatives, notably Gus Lampe’s daughters, Thelma and Phillis, and the Bridle sisters, Ruby and Leslie, with whom she was about to go riding in Cotter River country — she practised astride a chair beforehand. Best of all, she was buoyed by the admiration and friendship of younger women writers like Cusack.
The young writers admired Miles Franklin for her tenacity. Yet there was more than tenacity. They admired — or, like Marjorie Barnard, vaguely resented — her unique blend of cosmopolitanism and nationalism, that experience of the world which gave her some ineffable authority at FAW meetings. Miles Franklin’s position as an Australian nationalist by the end of the 1930s has sometimes been misunderstood, not unreasonably, given the excesses of the cultural nationalists and Australia Firsters with whom she associated in Sydney. In fact, her outlook was much the same as that of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who once said that you can’t be a good internationalist if you don’t love your own country. When challenged by the spluttery Chicagoan Leonora Pease who, until the Anschluss of March 1938, lived in Vienna, Miles hastened to set straight her views on ‘pacificism’ and nationalism, explaining that she still repudiated all talk of wars — ‘There is always one last war to end war’ — and as for nationalism, ‘I so love my own land that I know how to be at o
ne with other people’s love of their lands . . . I think I love the Americans best of all peoples that I know. In England I love the things that men have made, the food for the intellect, the art treasures, the social contacts possible, and in Australia it is the continent itself.’89
12
MAINTAINING OUR BEST TRADITIONS: 1939‒1945
Culture will survive war.1
On the evening of Sunday 3 September 1939, walking along Pitt Street with Louis Esson after a reading of Leslie Rees’ play Lalor of Eureka by the New Theatre League, Miles Franklin saw a late news poster declaring that Britain and France were at war with Germany. At first she assumed that it was ‘the same old war’, but well before the supposedly impregnable British naval base at Singapore fell to the Japanese on 15 February 1942, she understood that it was a ‘new war’. The ‘new war’ for Australians, the war in the Pacific, lasted until the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945. It was to be a long war. Reluctantly at first, but with increasing clarity of mind following the Battle of Britain in the northern summer of 1940 and dissociation from the Australia First movement thereafter, Miles rose to the occasion. She was too old to sign up as a cook again, but still resolute against armchair warriors. This time she found her métier in what she described as ‘maintaining our best traditions’. Indeed, the Furphy project ensured she was well placed to perceive the relationship between culture and society at a time of total war.2
Like most thoughtful people, Miles had long been anxious about the war clouds gathering over Europe. She hung on to her pacificist views as long as she could. Letters written in 1939, particularly to the Fullerton– Singleton household in London, show her to have been on the one hand deeply mistrustful of the appeasers, and on the other, resolutely antiwar. She thought, rightly, that the British governing classes feared Russia more than Germany: ‘The only ally for England is Russia but the British Fascists and their hankerers like Chamberlain and all that privileged crowd would rather risk losing all than giving in to the possibility of such an experiment in democracy.’ She was therefore ‘more than thankful’ for Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, which showed, she averred, that Charlotte Perkins Gilman was right, that war was the madness of men.3
When the Australian High Commissioner in London, Stanley Bruce, reported on 24 January 1939 that the Chamberlain–Hitler meeting in 1938 had saved the world from war, Miles was just back from a three-week camping holiday in the upper Cotter region over the New Year with Ivy Maxwell and her husband, Jack, and Ivy’s nieces Ruby and Leslie Bridle. Box Brownie camera images of Miles in jodhpurs with her young cousins on top of a mountain, and sitting in a stream in her swimming costume, have survived.4
She returned to Sydney by train on 15 January, arriving home just before midnight. It took two days to get through her mail, and with Kate Baker in residence as well as her nephew Jack, Miles had three people to cook and clean for most of the time. Baker, now aged seventy-eight, a pensioner, stone deaf and unable to afford an ear trumpet or to lipread, was in for her own purgatory: ‘Collaboration at best is not a happy thing,’ Baker confessed to a friend when safely back in Melbourne after five months’ absence. Given Baker’s dedication to the memory of Joseph Furphy and her assiduous promotion of his reputation since her retirement from teaching in 1912, also the year of Furphy’s death, her literal and grammatical approach to the project, and a self-effacing — perhaps somewhat passive — personality, it is hardly surprising that Miles’s energetic, even commanding style at first upset and then overwhelmed her. As Furphy’s biographer John Barnes has said, a falling-out was probably inevitable.5
The collaboration began unequally, but then came a bombshell. Miles’s diary entry for the last day of January reads: ‘Got A. Stewart’s letter with disclosures about KB [Kate Baker], Leonie and Joe.’ Annie Stewart was Furphy’s younger sister, and Leonie his wife. The disclosure pertained not only to an unhappy marriage, but also to an unfortunate incident when the young Kate Baker wrote an impassioned letter to Furphy. According to John Barnes’ later biography, no improprieties occurred, and Miles responded to Annie Stewart wisely. In her Preface to their book on Furphy she simply noted: ‘The time is not yet ripe for a definitive biography of Joseph Furphy.’6
Over the next three months, Miles worked hard on the Furphy project. In retrospect she said, and she was right, that it was a terrific piece of work under the circumstances. Problems of collaboration notwithstanding, she managed in that short time to produce the draft of a biography which, in published form, was to be for fifty years the best available reference on this ‘bush Hamlet’.7
Miles’s objective, it may be recalled, was the 1939 Prior Prize. On 5 June, a fortnight or so after Baker’s departure, she and her friend, the bank manager and Australia First supporter S. B. Hooper, dropped the typescript, entitled ‘Who Was Joseph Furphy?’ (by ‘Glow-worm’) into the Bulletin office for judging. Hooper had a high opinion of it. ‘Hope he is right,’ muttered Miles. The next she heard of the biographical essay, as it was originally described, was from fellow writer Frank Dalby Davison, the FAW president in 1936–37, and, as Bulletin reviewer, a prize assessor, who remarked that someone had sent in ‘a damn good book on Furphy’. The judges, however, awarded the prize to journalist-historian M. H. Ellis, for a mammoth biography of Governor Macquarie. Miles tried to reassure Kate that no one could have won against such a project, especially as Ellis was on the Bulletin staff. But Ken Prior, editor of the Bulletin and a trustee of the award, was not satisfied, and sent Ellis’s manuscript to Ida Leeson at the Mitchell Library as an authority on the subject. After a fortnight’s examination, Ida declared the work undocumented and full of inaccuracies, ‘altogether in an unfinished condition’, Miles reported to Mary Fullerton. So the judges were required to meet again and ‘Who Was Joseph Furphy?’ was elevated from ‘highly commended’ to first place, with a rider that entry No. 62 (the Ellis manuscript) would have won had it been fully documented and the references checked.8
Ellis was remarkably good about this. Miles was immensely relieved. Replying to congratulations from Jean Devanny, both personally and on behalf of the Communist Party of Australia, Miles wrote: ‘I am glad for KB’s sake . . . Otherwise she would have thought that my design and handling of the material which she has so devotedly collected, was at fault.’ To Kate Baker she wrote simply, ‘I am so glad, for your sake,’ adding, ‘our work has been recognized to some extent,’ and, since Prior wanted to publish as soon as possible, they would need to ‘spring off our tails like good kangaroos with the finishings-up’. But something went wrong and the essay did not appear in book form until published by Angus & Robertson in 1944. Pretty soon Miles was complaining that Baker thought the manuscript was perfect and did not want any changes. Still, she generously sent Kate £5 from her advance for Pioneers on Parade, and much later, anonymously, more money. They shared the Prior Prize of £100 equally.9
Miles was not so sensitive about the next phase of the Furphy project. As early as 27 August 1939 in a letter to Kate she referred to ‘my book’, and in the original the word ‘my’ is underlined by hand, evidently Kate’s. A few days later, commending Kate for further work on a proposed Furphy memorial at Kyneton, north-west of Melbourne, Miles wrote, ‘my biography will have to be my contribution to memorials’. Despite numerous assertions to the contrary, and careful acknowledgement of Kate’s input on the title page of the eventual publication, Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and his Book ‘By Miles Franklin, in association with Kate Baker’, Miles was much more than a midwife.10
In the letter to Baker of 27 August, Miles told Baker that the struggle to get the biography to its present state had exhausted her and she would need a small grant to finish it. Once again her work for writers stood her in good stead. The first Commonwealth Literary Fellowships were awarded in 1939, largely due to pressure from the FAW, and she was among the beneficiaries. As announced in December, she was granted a six-month fellowship worth £125 ‘to complete a biography of Josep
h Furphy’. The seriousness of her commitment to the project is evident in the volumes of research material and correspondence generated and preserved in the Franklin Papers. Just as Miles’s friendship with Grattan had a supervisory quality, her collaboration with Kate Baker served to rescue historic material which might otherwise have been lost or dispersed. The ‘Furphy adventure’ had been brought, she assured Baker, to triumphant fruition.11
They were fortunate to get so much done before the war, Miles reflected. Later, paper shortages and other factors would hold up publication indefinitely. It was also timely. Interest in Furphy’s work had been slowly rising since World War I, when the devoted Baker oversaw a reissue of Such Is Life and put together an edition of his poems. The legend of Joseph Furphy assumed a whole new significance in World War II, when Furphy, ‘part bushman, part dreamer’, seemed to many the archetypal common man, iconic, an answer to ‘What are we fighting for?’. Miles had not anticipated that when she first thought of the project in 1938, nor perhaps even in 1939 when working on it, but the 1944 book dedication reads ‘For Australia’, and the volume ends on a rousing note:
Few things are more potent than song or story in relating peoples to their soil and in crystalling natural aspirations, a function which expands into the announcement of international understanding. For forty years Such Is Life has had significance in the developing Australian way of life. Through his shining faith in the future of his country and his courageous brief for the brotherhood of man Furphy remains a force in Australia’s contribution to all freedom-demanding people’s concept of New Orders.12