Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  She found a meeting under the auspices of Australia First noisy, and slipped away when the bawling got too much: ‘Reds or pinks or “rightists”, all showed their ignorance,’ reads the day’s diary entry.37

  At the next meeting on 10 December, when Stephensen spoke against conscription, her verdict was much the same: ‘Noisy meeting, abuse and counter-abuse & little intelligence displayed.’ The noise was only to be expected, since between the two meetings Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor; Britain and Australia had (separately) declared war on Japan; and the Japanese had invaded Guam. What Miles Franklin feared was war on Australian soil. On Boxing Day 1941, reading Eleanor Dark’s historical novel The Timeless Land, then enjoying success in America, she commented on Dark’s treatment of the Aborigines: ‘If Australia escapes desolation and devastation, we must make amends to the remnants of the blacks.’ On New Year’s Day 1942, when she could hear the thud of training guns at Liverpool, she hoped for the best: ‘May it never be more or nearer.’ And after a hot day on 13 January, longing to hear rain on the roof, she wrote, with mounting anxiety: ‘May we never awake to . . . shrapnel.’ When the Japanese landed in Borneo, that seemed ever more likely, and Miles’s tension was palpable.38

  Suddenly, sadly, on 24 January 1942, Norman Rankin Franklin died at the Pacific Private Hospital, Brighton-le-Sands, aged fifty-five, due to heart failure. The doctors were right after all. At some time later, Miles went back to her recording of the early diagnosis to add, in grief and guilt, ‘If only I had known he was really so ill.’ Now she was the only one left of the seven children of John and Susannah Franklin, and all she had for consolation was young Jack. It was something that the Lampe relatives rallied, and to hear from Alice Henry, now unable to write her own letters, who understood from personal experience the blow rendered by loss of a brother.39

  Letters to American friends indicate that Miles Franklin had no idea of what was coming to the Australia Firsters. She was at Adyar Hall on 19 February for what turned out to be Australia First’s last meeting, when what the Sydney Morning Herald described as a minor riot occurred, and enraged wharfies, aiming (according to the unionist Tom Nelson) to wind up the pro-Japanese movement and beat P. R. Stephensen up — though they did not stop him speaking at length afterwards.40

  From the vivid account preserved in the Mudie Papers in Adelaide, it seems clear that Miles was present for the whole meeting, but not, as has been asserted, on the platform or hustled away when the police came. Despite occasional assertions to the contrary, Miles had played no part in the formation of Australia First. It was an unholy alliance between Adela Pankhurst Walsh and P. R. Stephensen forged in mid-October 1941, Stephensen’s hand having been to some extent forced by Walsh.

  Miles did not attend its rowdy inaugural public meeting in November, or any other meeting that month. Nor did she join Australia First subsequently, though she attended public meetings and, as is now obvious (as perhaps it was not then), she sailed close to the wind by continuing association with its leaders. Moreover, although she was a long-time subscriber to the Publicist, even writing to owner-editor W. J. Miles that the July 1941 issue was ‘great’, she never wrote for the journal. As she later told Ian Mudie, ‘I did not join the AF movement for the same reason that I did not accept Mr Miles’s invitation to write for him, that is because I was at variance with his views,’ meaning his rabid misogyny.

  W. J. Miles had once shouted her down at the Yabber Club, an informal gathering of Stephensen and his associates at the Shalimar Café in the city, and even without W. J. — he died in January 1942 — the AFM platform was anti-woman. ‘To me the position to be accorded women in any political movement is always a sure test of that movement’s democracy,’ she said to Mudie.41

  Because she was a woman Miles Franklin was tangential to the Australia Firsters; and although their concerns overlapped with hers, hers was an apparently old-fashioned evolutionary nationalism, which had room for Britain and America as well as Australia, whereas they were narrower, modernistic, anti-democratic, and looking for the main chance. Not for the first time, Miles Franklin experienced a clash between feminism and nationalism, this time involving different understandings of nationalism as well.42

  Australia First was not really illegal or disloyal, though it looked like it. With the fall of Singapore four days before the meeting and the bombing of Darwin that morning, Stephensen’s timing was disastrous. Although he was correct that the fall of Singapore heralded the end of the British Empire in the Far East — Australia’s Near North — it did not mean that his fellow Australians were ready for a national liberation movement on authoritarian lines; and but for an intelligence conspiracy in Perth purporting to document Australia First plans to aid the invading Japanese, his movement might have disappeared. Indeed, it had begun to fizzle out in early March. Yet, acting on a secret intelligence report, New South Wales police rounded up thirteen bemused Australia First men on the night of 9–10 March and took them to Liverpool internment camp (plus another the next day). Most were released by September, but Stephensen was interned for the duration of the war, though no charges were ever laid.43

  When Miles heard Stephensen had been arrested, she commented in her pocket diary, ‘no wonder’, adding, ‘I always said I cd not have anything to do with his politics.’ She had known ‘dangerous days’ in America during the previous war, and urged a distressed Ian Mudie to stay calm. Later, as the dust began to settle, she put it in a nutshell for Hartley Grattan: ‘We have had a Quisling scare in a small way.’44

  The people Miles Franklin felt sorry for were poor Hooper, aged seventy-two, and Winnie Stephensen, who had contracted tuberculosis some months earlier, also Harley Matthews, an occasional contributor to the Publicist. She did what she could for them. ‘Believe me,’ she assured Mudie on 21 April, ‘I am quietly doing what I can towards maintaining our best traditions, even in war time.’ However, her efforts behind the scenes did not extend to Stephensen, who later accused her of not doing enough for him. When she was approached by a Stephensen defence committee in June, she declined to appear on his behalf, on the grounds that he would implicate her in his politics as she believed he had done before. She even lost patience with Winnie for a time.45

  It was literature, not politics, that mattered most to Miles. Towards the end of 1941, she was contacted by Clem Christesen, founder and editor of the new Meanjin Papers, then based in Brisbane, inviting her to contribute. ‘When is your deadline?’ she replied in mid-1942. However, she was too late for the proposed short piece on ‘the importance of Australian writers at the present juncture’.

  Later Miles had something for Christesen. On 5 September 1942, she delivered the annual Lawson oration in the Domain, and then over radio station 2FC. She voiced her fears that an Australian identity might not survive the war. (The Americans had arrived in Australia, and the Japanese were on the Kokoda Track, making for Port Moresby.) The Lawson oration reads well, and is of particular interest today for its recollection of the quickening of a nativist culture in the 1890s, and the pleasure it gave the young at seeing their own idiom in print: ‘Due to Lawson and his colleagues . . . were the gums, the bush, the creek: gully and spur and sideling: the paddock, the stockyard, the sliprails. We were on the track, and burning off down in the gully; hobble chains and camp were jingling to a tune.’ Lawson was a hero to them, ‘glamorous with success’, and moreover of ‘exceptional physical beauty’. Christesen received the text in November, and it appeared in the Christmas issue of Meanjin Papers. Already an early contributor to Sydney’s Southerly, in Meanjin Papers Miles found her cultural home. She was a valued if sometimes prickly contributor to both journals from time to time thereafter.46

  When Alice Henry first heard of Miles Franklin’s determination to get Mary Fullerton’s poems published back in 1933, she dismissed the project as impossible. Nine years later, Mary Fullerton was a frail seventy-four-year-old living under the flight path of the Luftwaffe and still not prepared to attach he
r name to her work; but it was published, thanks to Miles’s tenacity and the support of Ida Leeson, who helped with proofreading (‘She thinks I am “E”,’ said Miles), and in time for Mary to see the volume. On 5 November 1942 the Angus & Robertson editor Beatrice Davis rang Miles to say that Moles Do So Little with their Privacy by ‘E’, with Miles’s Explanatory Note and Tom Inglis Moore’s Preface, had been published. A couple of days earlier, in a letter documenting her efforts, Miles had written to Fullerton: ‘I grin, I grin,’ and then, ‘I gloat, I gloat.’ Douglas Stewart immediately offered to support a second volume, which Miles had already advised CLF administrator H. S. Temby was possible. The Bulletin welcomed ‘E’ as a fresh voice.47

  Probably ‘E’ was the beneficiary of war, when poetry was in demand. Not only would H. M. Green decide to include ‘E’ in the Angus & Robertson anthology for 1943, but by 1942 Guy Howarth had also published seven poems by ‘E’ in Southerly, and a new friend, Victor Kennedy of the Jindyworobak cultural movement, had shown enthusiasm for the poet’s work.48

  In due course Beatrice Davis would become one of Miles Franklin’s congenials, but when Miles submitted a short story for inclusion in the annual anthology Coast to Coast edited by Beatrice, it was returned as unpublishable. After attending the annual Australian English Association Dinner, Miles confided to her pocket diary that Beatrice and the other speaker on the night, Elisabeth Lambert, were menaces and obstructionists to Australian development. However, no Sydney writer could afford such pique for long; and when, with ‘E’ at last published, Miles managed to face the Furphy manuscript again, it was Beatrice Davis who gave it the go-ahead.49

  From the whirlpool of Washington, Women’s Bureau head Mary Anderson found time to send her a copy of Gladys Boone’s history of the WTUL, which Miles thought dull and colourless, though valuable for its references to Alice Henry. It reminded her of how much of the primary material cited she had written anonymously long ago. Alice Henry was scarcely well enough to share her response. In lieu of another trip to Melbourne, Miles kept writing to her, as Alice’s carer, Isabel Newsham, urged her to do. Time was slipping away from them both. After Jack Franklin achieved his heart’s desire and was accepted by the RAAF in October 1942, he told his aunt that in the event of his being killed he wanted to be buried with his parents. She despaired of this cult of death, brought on, she believed, by male belligerence. And she privately despaired for herself too. ‘There are none to grieve for me, who has grieved so desperately for each as he or she went.’ Her observation that time does not lessen grief, only rounds the memories up and intensifies them, will strike a chord in many.50

  On 14 February 1943, Alice Henry died in Melbourne, aged eighty-five. When Isabel Newsham’s telegram reached Miles, it was no surprise, but it left ‘a great blank’, especially regarding the American years. Miles was a beneficiary of Alice’s estate, but it seems she was never able to express how she felt about her, either personally, professionally or practically because of her links with Melbourne. Subliminally, at least, the older woman had also been a calming influence on her rebellious spirit. This, along with Alice Henry’s own eccentricities, seems to have underlaid Miles’s apparent ambivalence about her ‘Dearest Pops’. When, later in the year, as Alice Henry’s executor, Nettie Palmer asked if Miles would help with a limited-circulation memoir, she could not bring herself to do it: ‘I don’t seem to be able to rise to the job emotionally,’ maybe also in part because the fate of her Furphy book was still undecided.51

  The dangers facing her nephew, now known by his baptismal name, John, made it a relief simply to hear his voice on the phone, a pleasure to provide a meal when he arrived at short notice.

  During January 1943 she had again turned to the Furphy biography. It made her feel awful (‘a dead albatross’), but by 1 April it was done. Then came the business of getting it published. As intimated earlier, it was not to be published by the Bulletin but by Angus & Robertson; and when the paper shortage eased mid-year, Walter Cousins, as director of publishing, seemed agreeable. That meant more ‘finishing touches’. However, the typescript was not to pass by Beatrice Davis’ editorial eye until December. Miles was duly thankful for Beatrice’s ‘toe tracks over my saga’.

  Although her book was not published in time for the centenary of Furphy’s birth (on 26 September 1943), she contributed a broadcast on the ABC in August; Clem Christesen wanted something for Meanjin; and another tribute, written at the behest of Katharine Susannah Prichard, appeared in September in the Communist Review. Miles also sent a statement to a tree-planting ceremony in Melbourne to be read by Nettie Palmer. These occasional pieces seem repetitious now, but at the time they had a stirring effect. The article for the Communist Review, entitled ‘Joseph Furphy, Democrat and Australian Patriot’, concluded: ‘Furphy . . . kept his shining faith in his fellow men and in the future which Australians could win for themselves and for the world.’52

  Speaking ‘over the air’ and writing about other people’s work represented Miles’s contribution to the war effort, and broadcasting paid handsomely; but as Jean Devanny said, what about her own writing? A pocket diary entry for 2 May 1943 reads: ‘Can’t write. Must just turn to chores till I end. Nothing to hope for now’; and to Frank Ryland, met at FAW meetings, she confided: ‘I have lost heart as the old bushmen used to say of a horse. Bullocks, dear souls, never lost heart.’53

  She still had her weekly round of housework and hospitality, by now second nature and a kind of discipline, tending to the chooks and her astoundingly productive garden, with its yield of potatoes (among other vegetables), plums, guavas and lemons, and flowers too, like the sunflowers planted by her father and still blooming abundantly. She began to note what she cooked for visitors. The meals were usually quite substantial. On one occasion, for example, her nephew was given a hot dinner consisting of roast lamb and mint sauce with butter beans, potatoes and cold beetroot, then stewed peaches with raspberry jelly and junket. When she went into town, Miles would often take home-grown produce for friends — eggs and plums and the like — to supplement rationing. She also took gifts of food when seeing them off on trains and ships.54

  During these years, Miles got to know and like numerous younger people active on the cultural scene in Sydney and Melbourne. Among them were the poets Muir Holburn and Marjorie Pizer. Anarchist poet Harry Hooton was surprised to find her ‘young intellectually’, and a different kind of feminist, highly evolved; he thought her a ‘man-woman’, but gender proud. Victorian-born Glen Mills Fox, a journalist active in the FAW and first wife of the communist journalist Len Fox, latched on immediately to — as she later addressed her — ‘The One & Only Great & International Miles’.55

  There was also a responsiveness to the world in Miles. She was incurably political. She remained in touch with Harold Ickes (how many other Australians were in personal communication with a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet, one wonders); with Mary Anderson, head of the United States Women’s Bureau until mid-1944; and with Anderson’s friend Elisabeth Christman, still soldiering on with the Women’s Trade Union League; and with the Robinses in Florida. She responded, too, to the resurgence of feminism in 1943, attending various conferences, including the first Women’s Charter conference in November, one of two hundred women representing ninety-one organisations who agreed on a set of resolutions concerning the position of women in postwar Australia. She also contributed to the new journal of the United Associations of Women, the Australian Women’s Digest, edited by Vivienne Newson — as it happened, a Goulburn girl of the next generation. Her first piece was a page on Rose Scott for the second issue, and she joined the editorial board in 1944.56

  On 30 October Miles received copies of the Furphy biography ‘at last’, she recorded in her pocket diary. She immediately sent a copy to Mary Fullerton. However, as is often the case when authors see copies of their work for the first time, the euphoria was short-lived. On closer inspection, she found that the bibliography had been omitted, a ghastly sl
ip — ‘It made me feel sick put me in a class where MB [Marjorie Barnard] would have a right to sneer at me as an illiterate,’ and likely to upset her informants as well — but soon remedied, as the publisher was persuaded to paste the necessary page into copies of the book. By then Kate Baker had seen the book and discovered some slips, and also read a critical review in the Bulletin which complained about evasion and ‘scrappiness’. However, Miles managed to reassure her, and Kate had a share of the royalties. In general, apart from the Bulletin review and that of the poet A. D. Hope (who gave credit for industry but stressed lack of critical skills), the reviews were positive. The response of the Melbourne Argus was glowing — ‘the first complete authentic account of Furphy and his work’ — despite what it saw as an overemphasis on Kate Baker and some ‘inept’ literary comparisons. The Palmers, it seems, maintained a patrician silence. Maybe they were just too busy to comment, as Nettie’s mother died at this time and Vance was working in the Commonwealth Public Service.57