by Jill Roe
After the effort of collaboration, Miles collapsed with a bad attack of pleurisy in the second half of June 1939. There was also bad news for Brent from Blackwood that Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang could not be published ‘at this time’. On a positive note, Miles had also seen Pioneers on Parade through the press while working on the Furphy manuscript, having finished with the text of the sesquicentennial satire in early March. Authors’ copies arrived on 4 July. Miles immediately sent one to Prime Minister Menzies, with a note, duly acknowledged by him, expressing the hope that Australia would be a site of citizenship, not military vassalage.13
Reactions to Pioneers on Parade were mixed. The Bulletin was kind; Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw promptly telegraphed congratulations (‘helpless with mirth’); and the West Australian writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman wrote to record her enjoyment. What probably stung was the opinion of the English critic St John Ervine: ‘If you continue to write smarty-smart novels like Pioneers on Parade, you will soon cease to be worthy of any person’s serious notice.’ It reminded Miles of the reception of My Brilliant Career, except that she quite enjoyed the fuss this time. The basic problem was one of timing. When Pioneers on Parade appeared, the war clouds were thickening, and imperial values were again in the ascendant. Any suggestion of disloyalty was frowned upon; and book sales stalled.14
Miles returned to the task of publishing Mary Fullerton’s poems. On the afternoon of 2 September, Miles Franklin had joined the FAW’s annual pilgrimage to Henry Lawson’s statue near Mrs Macquarie’s Chair in Sydney’s Outer Domain. On the way back to the city centre, she enjoyed talking to old Billy Miller (also known as Linklater), who had once worked for P. S. Watson and his brothers up north, and then fell in with Tom Inglis Moore, the writer and critic who had stood in as president of the FAW in 1934 and was still with the Sydney Morning Herald. Moore had agreed to help edit a volume of Mary’s poems and write a preface, to which Miles would add something on the human side, she told Mary, and although he was more interested in Pioneers on Parade at the time, Miles was nursing him: ‘I think he is my best bet.’15
The pair began meeting over afternoon tea at the Hotel Metropole, Sydney in December to select the most suitable from among some 350 poems Miles had lovingly collected and typed for consideration over the preceding seven years. A harmonious collaboration ensued, testimony to Moore’s affable personality. By August 1940, the preface had been finalised and Moore was in the army. Delayed further by the exigencies of war, Moles Do So Little with their Privacy by ‘E’ was published by Angus & Robertson in 1942. (It seems that only Miles knew the identity of ‘E’, the nearest Mary Eliza Fullerton could bring herself to a signature, and that Miles did not reveal it until after Mary’s death in 1946.)16
During the year Miles made some interesting new friends, such as the exuberant bushman and Aboriginal rights advocate Michael Sawtell and botanist and curator Richard Baker, who presented her with a waratahpatterned cup and saucer designed by Lulu Shorter for the English china manufacturer Doulton. Miles developed a custom of offering her ‘waratah cup’ to special guests who, as they became more conscious of the honour, were nervous about dropping it.17
As 1939 drew to an end, Miles was busy with the Furphy project Mark II. And on 3 January 1940 Miles banked her first CLF (Commonwealth Literary Fellowship) cheque, worth almost £5 a week for six months. This, along with her share of the rent from two shops in Willoughby, inherited from Susannah, meant she was better off materially than she had been for years. As well, her resentful attitude to ‘the same old war’ was being challenged, especially by Mary Fullerton. Fullerton had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and as she explained to Miles in a letter dated 15 January 1940, her feelings were quite different from what they had been in 1914– 18: whereas the previous war had seemed a sordid territorial or trade shindig, it was clear the world now faced ‘a foul philosophy and the time having come, [that] it is now in action’; ‘the Hitler crowd’ would lead to enslavement. Their ‘Chosen People’ attitude, especially towards Jews, was worse than contemptible. Thus, although Fullerton felt that democracy needed reshaping, ‘the first and immediate [task] must be the overthrow of Nazism’.18
Delicate issues continued to arise with the Furphy project. Kate Baker was upset when Miles queried her ownership of the copyright on Such Is Life (correctly, as it turned out, as Furphy had ceded it to the Bulletin in 1903). She was even more annoyed by Miles’s Commonwealth Literary Fellowship, which she felt showed lack of recognition of her own contributions and caused her to protest to the CLF. Miles busied herself responding to these matters, to the extent, she recalled many years later, of offering to give the fellowship back, but took heart when Furphy’s nephew and first biographer, Edward Pescott, was encouraging. When Sam and Mattie Furphy, who had been caravanning in Sydney over the summer, invited her to join them on their return trip south in February, she gladly accepted, not only for the break but as an opportunity to check Furphy sites in central Victoria and to clear up misunderstandings in Melbourne if possible.19
But it was, Miles wrote to Dymphna Cusack afterwards, ‘a queer situation’, and she was not after all successful in allaying Baker’s concerns, which extended to demanding the inclusion in the biography of a section written by herself, and recognition as the inspiration for Such Is Life. Since that was untrue and Miles could not reveal all she knew, she could not allay the concerns of Nettie Palmer either. Nettie, like others, had heard only Baker’s side of the story: that her contribution had not been properly acknowledged and her rights were being overridden. It is difficult to know what Miles could have done.20
On 21 August 1940 Miles sent a copy of the completed Furphy manuscript (‘by Miles Franklin’) to the CLF office, along with ‘I Sing My Own Song’ by ‘E’ and a note to the effect that the six-month grant had also enabled her to type up some poems which had been worrying her for years.21
But now the whole focus of her work was changing. Creative writing was being overtaken by a preoccupation with other projects, largely historical. The other reality was that even before the war, Miles had become more than the ‘natural fact’ she had aspired to on her return to Sydney in 1932. She was now a prominent elder. As such she was increasingly called upon to do the things elders must do: to record and reflect, to supervise the young, to support good causes and to speak out on issues of the day.
One cause championed by Eleanor Dark, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw was free speech. As wartime censorship began to bite, writers had reason to protest, and the reluctance of some FAW members to do so made Miles cross. When the police raided the New Theatre for playing Rupert Lockwood’s No Conscription (it was banned after the first performance on 17 May), she signed a protest drafted by Barnard and Eldershaw. It reads in part: ‘Even in these difficult and dangerous times . . . we would deplore any suppression of those civil rights contained in free expression, and most earnestly and respectfully urge our authorities to leave untouched those liberties that are the basis of our life and for whose continuance we are fighting.’22
This was what Miles Franklin meant about maintaining ‘our best traditions’. Civil censorship had been a thorn in the side of the Australian intelligentsia since the 1880s, and a blight on cultural life in the interwar years, when Australians were unable to read James Joyce’s Ulysses, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and many other modern works, most of which Miles had read as a matter of course in London. Military censorship made things worse. On another front, in early 1940, due to her association with Michael Sawtell as well as Stephensen, she also supported the Aboriginal Progressive Association’s campaign for an Aboriginal representative on the recently constituted Aborigines Welfare Board in New South Wales.23
More difficult were her responses to some other war-related issues, notably Japan and refugees. It was unfortunate for Miles Franklin that she maintained her association with the Publicist crowd for so long, out of loyalty perhaps, having learned a lot from Inky and all the while supporting h
is long-suffering and needy wife, Winnie. Miles had ceased to see Inky as a literary saviour and she’d had no time for his patron, W. J. Miles, since 1936 due to his anti-feminism; but she continued to subscribe to the Publicist.
On 14 June 1940, the day France fell and Britain stood alone against the Nazis, Stephensen wrote to Miles as follows: ‘Great changes are coming, as the entire bluff of “Democratic” Plutocracy is called in Europe by the desperate “Have Nots”! The German victories reveal culpable inefficiency [of] Britain. Australia must stand alone — our best friends will be the Japanese.’24
Inky Stephensen’s just-quoted words express his muddled transition from far Left to far Right; and his anti-Semitism became more pronounced. Miles did not know what to think of this either. Responding to Nettie Palmer’s concern about anti-fascist refugees, she was unable to sympathise much, on the grounds that many refugees in the Sydney suburbs seemed to be quite rich, and some were underselling local labour, while her Chicago experience had been that immigrant men, once settled, opposed votes for women. It worried her that Jewish teachings reduced intermingling with gentiles to ‘miscegenation’. ‘Can you give me an answer to these problems?’ she asked Nettie. In that same letter to Nettie Palmer, she said far worse: that she was sick of the paranoid slaughter of all the blue-eyed, fair-haired youth, German or British, and of the Islamic and Mongol hordes ‘breeding and breeding’.25
On 19 August Miles Franklin was in the Mitchell Library consulting G. B. Barton’s Literature in New South Wales and Desmond Byrne’s Australian Writers. She was preparing a paper on literature for a conference on culture in wartime to be held in the rooms of the FAW at 38 Clarence Street on 1 September, and sponsored by the Central Cultural Council, which had been formed in 1937 ‘to facilitate harmony of effort between organizations interested in the cultural development of Australia’. Miles had a fine time at this inspiring event, held at the height of the Battle of Britain. It went from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and attracted an overflowing crowd in the evening, concluding with anti-censorship motions. During the day speakers included W. J. Cleary, chairman of the ABC; Doris Fitton, actor and proprietor of the Independent Theatre; Frank Dalby Davison; and Dymphna Cusack. In the evening, the prominent lawyer A. B. Piddington, KC, and Justice Evatt spoke.26
Miles had prepared her talk on literature well. ‘Literature is the articulate soul of a nation,’ she began. ‘While our youth is sacrificing life itself to preserve our liberty . . . it is imperative for those who cannot serve in that way, humbly and industriously to do their share by protecting and enlarging our culture right here and now.’
Miles had five suggestions for the protection and enlargement of an Australian literature: first and foremost she focused on freedom of expression, and then on public libraries, state support for writers and publishers, public broadcasting (‘a tremendous opportunity’), and cooperative publishing to encourage young writers. ‘Do you think,’ she concluded challengingly, ‘that a vigorous, hardy, vocal, free people like ourselves has not enough internal fizz to brew a virile literature?’ The conference resolved that censorship had gone too far, and that accredited cultural bodies should be consulted in order to maintain the important distinction between military censorship and censorship of opinion.27
Controls on the press had been imposed in May. The Communist Party was banned in June. Miles was among the ‘liberty-loving citizens of Australia’ who protested against the seizure of Left Book Club property in July; and another speech on ‘Our Constitutional Rights’ was apparently made in support of protest against the banning of the Australian Youth Council in August. These occurrences may have stimulated contact between Miles and Katharine Susannah Prichard in 1940, when Miles encouraged her to apply for a literary fellowship. Prichard, a leading communist writer, responded that she didn’t think she would find favour. Standing up for Katharine would become an important aspect of Miles’s ‘maintaining our best traditions’. ‘For the present we try to keep the way open for freedom and constitutional civil rights,’ she wrote to Mrs Robins in Florida. Or as she said in a radio talk at that time, ‘Knitting is not enough’.28
Meanwhile, possibly inspired by a new friend, Welsh-born Pixie O’Harris, a successful children’s artist-writer, Miles was working on a children’s story about the Sydney Royal Easter Show. In October she dropped her manuscript off at Angus & Robertson. (It was eventually published by Shakespeare Head in 1947.) To Noël Coward, in town on a morale-boosting visit in November, she sent a copy of Pioneers on Parade.29
In December 1940, after FAW committee meetings, reading a play by Marguerite Dale (‘my debut as an actress’), a prize-giving at Dr Booth’s domestic science college at Kirribilli (‘rivetting on the [nearby Harbour] Bridge made the whole show inaudible’), enduring Xavier Herbert’s monomaniacal telephone calls (‘I got a cushion to put under my elbows’), and lecturing on Furphy at the FAW, she noted on 31 December: ‘Spent the last day of this year quite alone.’30
She would soon be spending even more time on her own. Her brother Norman was never well again after suffering a coronary occlusion in May 1941, though Miles thought he mostly looked healthy enough afterwards. Then, shortly after Australia was placed on a war footing on 17 June 1941, her nephew Jack was called up — he entered the Ingleburn camp two days later to serve as a driver in the Transport Division — and he too became seriously ill, with pleurisy and pneumonia. Miles herself recorded sore throats, dizziness, toothache, the old heart trouble, stomach pains and more (at one point she feared a growth on the brain) as afflictions, while she struggled to cope with her ailing menfolk, and to rise above their indifference.31
Some six deaths in 1941, including that of Banjo Paterson in February, caused her to think about her own death. In her diary on 10 August she wrote: ‘If I directed the courage it is taking to go on living to facing the fact of dying, perhaps I cd go in peace.’ But ‘I wanted first to straighten my papers & Mss.,’ she continued. Then, ‘Why don’t I simply burn them all and be done with the futile struggle?’ Fortunately — and typically — she went to an FAW meeting instead, where she chaired a lecture by H. M. Green on Mary Gilmore.32
Miles’s miseries for the most part reflect a writer’s response to the human condition. She thought she was super-sensitive, and hence felt things very deeply. But her ability to express what she felt uninhibitedly gave immense pleasure to her friends, and later to readers of her published letters and diaries, where she also recorded the brighter moments.
Miles also had a new poet to enthuse over: Adelaide-born Ian Mudie. Gregarious and egalitarian, with an intense love of the land and its inhabitants and fiercely critical of the Europeans’ treatment of Aborigines and the environment, Ian Mayelston Mudie and his passionately nationalistic poems were just about ideal as far as Miles was concerned. In an early letter, she wrote that his first collection, Corroboree to the Sun, intoxicated her, and that he had gone ‘farther than any of us in capturing the spirit of Australia’, thus foreshadowing the view that Mudie embodied much of the traditional version of Australian identity. He probably embodied Miles’s idea of masculinity as well. More than thirty years his senior, she delighted in the tall, wiry South Australian, an occasional bush worker. His poetic career, which dated from 1931, showed promise through the Publicist in 1937 and developed further via the Jindyworobak poetry movement (founded in Adelaide by Rex Ingamells in 1938 to promote ‘environmental values’), really took off in the 1940s with Miles’s support and tutelage. A difference to emerge between them (which did not undermine their lifelong friendship, due to their shared passion for an Australian literature) was that whereas he would be elected to the executive of the Australia First Movement (AFM), as constituted in Sydney in October 1941, she did not even join it.33
Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviety Union, Miles attended a Sydney Congress for Friendship and Aid to the Soviet Union. There were over 2000 delegates from nearly 600 organisations. First day was in Sydney Town Hall and the second in the
Leichhardt Stadium.34
On that occasion Miles Franklin did not speak. But on 8 November, some two months later, with Moscow besieged, the New South Wales Aid Russia Committee sponsored a second cultural conference. This time she did speak, as chair of the afternoon session on women and children in Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and then as opening speaker of the evening session. Her speech, entitled ‘Literature and Drama’, reminded listeners that they were lucky to be meeting in comfort and sanity, not huddled in cellars in fear of their lives or bludgeoned into concentration camps. She sought to clarify the value of culture in a world at war, intimating that postwar culture would have to be on a new basis, of brotherhood and equality, and asserting that cultural advance came from experiments in living, such as were being conducted on a grand scale by the Soviet Union, embracing not only workers but women and children. Turning to Soviet culture, she stressed the importance and value of open communications. Her talk ended on an impassioned note: ‘I should like to say God help the USSR and help them to save from total destruction their vast social experiment on which the hopes of the world are set, give them unity, faith and strength to repair it and to extend and develop its best features.’ There is a final fervent plea: ‘May Australia be saved from the final horror of invasion.’35
Running through all Miles Franklin’s talks on culture and war is the golden thread of free speech. Hence she avoided a parting of the ways with P. R. Stephensen, even though he now advocated only ‘legitimate’ speech. Nonetheless, the political distance between them was widening. Whereas Stephensen had been opposed to the FAW since before the war (due to what he believed to be communist influence in its ranks) Miles was more active in it than ever. In 1941, she joined other members of the FAW in the formation of a Civil Defence League and became one of its patrons. Her friends included several communists and communist sympathisers: Eleanor Dark, Katharine Susannah Prichard (in Sydney in October–November as part of a lecture tour of the eastern states for the Australia–Soviet Friendship Society, and looking frail), and Jean Devanny, the self-styled ‘Red Menace’, now living in Queensland, unwell, and threatening to visit. On no account would Miles compromise these friendships because of political circumstances. At the FAW, she chaired two meetings late in the year for literary critic Camden Morrisby on Brent of Bin Bin (one wit said the real question was who wrote the books by Miles Franklin), and another for Norman Haire, the eminent sexologist (Miles found him creepy).36