by Jill Roe
By the late 1940s, such assumptions were radically out of step with both national policy (‘populate or perish’) and international demographic concerns, which focused on the problem of feeding an exploding world population, with birth control the only known answer in the long run. To this prescription the Catholic Church was then, as now, opposed. As it happened, the American Cardinal Spellman and ‘some prelate named Sheen’ were also in Sydney in May, for a ‘great Catholic corroboree’, and they made no bones about it: the world’s choice was between Moscow and Rome — so Australian women must fill up their cradles. ‘Catholic prelates never say one uplifting word, nor give any great message to lead mankind . . . but they are astute politicians and in democratic countries will prevail by getting a lot of adherents and then telling them how to vote,’ Miles wrote to Emmy Lawson on 3 June 1948.45
When Beatrice Davis broke her ankle, Miles loyally trekked across the harbour to Cammeray to visit her several times, on one occasion to cook lunch, shelling peas en route. Beatrice was one of the younger women who became important to her in the 1940s. Except for Katharine Susannah Prichard and Jean Devanny, all were born in the first decade of the twentieth century, a generation after Miles: Beatrice Davis, Dymphna Cusack, Florence James, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Glen Mills Fox, Pixie O’Harris, Delys Cross (an FAW member). Their support was quite touching. She was, of course, a strengthener, and they valued her for that. When Come in Spinner was at last published, in London in 1951, it bore a dedication to Miles Franklin. Likewise, Miles did not forget those elders to whom she owed much. One of the last things she did in 1948 was send £5 to J. K. Moir in Melbourne as a New Year’s gift for Kate Baker, in ‘complete secrecy’.46
In late 1947 Angus & Robertson had honoured Miles with a special two-copy edition of All That Swagger printed on rag paper. One copy went to the British Museum, the other to the National Library of Australia, which she and George Ferguson, as representative for the firm, signed for despatch on 16 February 1948. In 1948 Angus & Robertson also published a new popular edition, the seventh since 1936. Now Miles welcomed the paperback revolution:
I find that I’m inclined to shy away from beautifully produced books because so often they are pompous shells and the matter does not live up to them. This feeling has come to me from my childhood when a tattered volume of Aesop was my delight and good works in stuffed-shirt gilt-edged bindings were like those mausoleums that rich nonentities erect over their dead in a vain attempt to be what they are not. And today such a lot of treasure is to be found in paper-covered flimsies while many of the well-produced books are mere lumber.47
Besides the enactment of Australian citizenship (though Australians remained British subjects until the 1980s) and the defeat of the Chifley Labor government by a conservative Liberal-Country Party coalition, which remained in power for the rest of Miles Franklin’s life, 1949 was, for Miles Franklin, the year of Brent, and of John Franklin’s discharge on 21 February — starkly contrasting experiences.
His discharge from RAAF Transport after seven years’ service, six as a pilot, brought him no joy nor his aunt. It was preceded by his now familiar communist taunts and unpredictable behaviour, with cross words when it seemed to Miles he was taking her for granted and would not help around the house: ‘By tolerating him I have not helped him, he only gets worse & thinks he can use me as he likes. It makes me ill to see him drunk and I can’t stand [it] & don’t know what to do.’ He in turn accused her of not doing anything to help him. By year’s end he had yet to make the psychological transition to civilian life. No doubt the thought of returning to clerking with the Permanent Trustees was unappealing, and he could not give up drinking.48
Miles often did not know his whereabouts. When his long-term girlfriend, June Marshall, announced her engagement to someone else, Miles could only agree with her decision. Hearing just before Christmas that he was ill, she contacted one of his maternal cousins, Claire O’Connor, at Chatswood. Claire’s mother, Xenia, who had cared for John Franklin as a child at Ardglen, told Miles that they were taking him in, that they would help him find a job after the holidays, and that he was his handsome, charming self with them. That, wrote Miles in her pocket diary, was like ‘an answer to a prayer’. To Claire’s youngest sister, Enid, to whom John had been close as a boy at Ardglen, she expressed her relief, writing on 23 December that she had often pleaded with him to visit his cousins, but ‘the bright lights of the town were too much for him’:
He needs to be with young people his own age & children & people of congenial pursuits and interests. As he truly says my acquaintances are only a few old writing people. He has nothing in common with them & they cannot be of any use to him. With the love and attention of his own family around him I hope he will recover from the strain of the flying and get a settled job on the ground . . . He had the luck to come through [the war] so must be meant for some good & useful life.49
Brent of Bin Bin’s fortunes had certainly improved.
Angus & Robertson became interested in the Brent books after World War II. In late 1946 the firm contacted Blackwood with a proposal to purchase the copyright on the three published volumes for £50 a title; and on 6 January 1947 the publishing director, Walter Cousins, wrote to Miles directly, indicating that he would like to speak with her about ‘the Bin Bin series’. Since by now most people in the book trade in Sydney believed she was at least Brent’s agent, this is not as surprising as it may sound, but Miles kept up the charade.
However, on 17 September 1948, Miles visited Beatrice Davis at Cammeray. Her pocket diary records, Beatrice ‘gave me a letter for Brent’. Beginning ‘Dear Sir’, it reads in part:
We should be glad to discuss with you the rights to publication of your novels Up the Country, Ten Creeks Run and Back to Bool Bool, which apparently are not being kept in print. Recognizing their importance to the Australian literary scene, we feel they should be available to the public; and we should be proud to become Brent of Bin Bin’s publisher. It has been suggested that there are also further works, as yet unpublished; and it would naturally interest us to see any such manuscripts.50
Despite this much-desired development, Miles hesitated. She had several smaller projects to finish. There were sketches and short stories to get off and a broadcast to record for the ABC. In January 1949, having heard Jean Batt, a lecturer in French at the University of Tasmania, say on radio that women had not yet made the grade in the arts, she was driven to reply. ‘Women Haven’t Yet Made The Grade — But Which Grade?’ appeared in the ABC Weekly a few months later. There she wrote, ‘Feminism is an experiment unnaturally based. Feminism merely attempts to free women to an equality with men in men’s physical and mental pursuits’, as if she had recanted on long-held principles. But the original text has a concluding sentence which makes all the difference: ‘As a beginning of woman’s emancipation the female ego must first be fully released.’51
On 17 March 1949, Miles lunched at the Queen Victoria Club with Beatrice Davis, ‘& we fixed up the matter of BBB’. Beatrice was the soul of tact, and Miles overcame her misgivings about the amount of work involved. A few weeks later, on 11 April, having checked the Blackwood agreement, she went to Glen Mills Fox’s flat and typed a letter to Beatrice from Brent, with a covering note written under her own name the next day beginning, ‘Here goes.’ Nonetheless, in her diary she remained anxious — ‘I have hesitated & quibbled, and on the brink, wish I hadn’t jumped into this’ — and vague about Brent: ‘If only it could have been completed when Mary Fullerton was alive. However,’ she went on quasi-dutifully, ‘I must gather up the ends.’52
On 19 May Beatrice Davis wrote a formal letter on behalf of Angus & Robertson to Miles Franklin as Brent of Bin Bin’s representative, stating that the firm would bring out all six Brent novels, and thanking her for a copy of the agreement with Blackwood, a page of which survives on Angus & Robertson’s files, with a mark next to the clause stating that the right to publish the work would revert to the autho
r if the publisher declined to reprint. The publisher would respect Brent’s wish to remain anonymous, Beatrice told Miles. The first two volumes, Prelude to Waking (as it was now called) and Up the Country, were scheduled for publication in 1950.53
Beatrice’s overture of 1948 amounted to a coming together of the optimism of Walter Cousins (who envisaged the firm as the leading player in Australian publishing after World War II), the unquenchable zeal of Colin Roderick for Australian historical fiction, and Beatrice Davis’s determination that Angus & Robertson should remain ‘the literary hub of Australia’. It was Beatrice who finally overcame the obstacles to republication; years later she divulged that the agreement finally reached was that all the volumes would be published in the order Miles specified, the unpublished ones sight unseen — a brave undertaking which from Miles’s point of view ensured the publication of Prelude to Waking. In addition to Beatrice Davis’s close personal association with Miles, and her persuasive powers within the firm, there was perhaps also a sentimental factor at work: Angus & Robertson’s rejection of My Brilliant Career would in effect be remedied. (They had also declined to publish ‘On the Outside Track’/My Career Goes Bung and several other titles, but those rejections were not so significant.) That four editions of All That Swagger had appeared under the firm’s imprint since it was first published by Angus & Robertson in 1940, with a fifth to come in 1949, may also have been significant.54
By June Miles had still not begun work on the volumes, having been held up by a bad cold. Mid-winter, she was shivering and suffering the ignominy of chilblains, not experienced since London, so that it was not until late July that she was ready to make a start on ‘Merlin of the Empiah’ (Prelude to Waking), a work that seems to have undergone many revisions (last known as ‘Prelude to Romance’). But incredibly she could not find the manuscript, ‘a great blow’: it was ‘irreplaceable and years of thought gone’, she lamented. Strenuous searches having failed to locate the lost manuscript, she was obliged to turn to the already published volumes, Up the Country and Ten Creeks Run — and, reluctantly, her income tax. A few days later, however, to her great relief, she found ‘Merlin of the Empiah’ on a shelf in her bedroom, ‘where I had tidily placed it. I can tackle the tax or anything now.’55
It took Miles six weeks to revise Up the Country, Ten Creeks Run and the manuscript of ‘Merlin of the Empiah’. On 25 August the text of Prelude to Waking, as Miles was now calling it, was finally passed to Beatrice Davis, and the book Marjorie Barnard felt should never have been published was on its way to print. Like most authors Miles felt anxious, hopeless even; and when nothing had happened by October, she began pressing for a publication date. When the two women met again in December, Miles was reassured to find that the editing had scarcely changed a thing, and to hear that the book would go to the printer in January. After revising proofs in May 1950, Miles finally received printed copies of the book in September.56
On 14 October 1949 Miles turned seventy, although for public consumption she was four years younger, 1883 being the year of birth she maintained (intermittently) in Who’s Who in Australia. Apparently, at this time the idea of Miles Franklin delivering Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF) lectures at the University of Western Australia was first raised. There had been talk of her visiting Perth for several years, as there had been of her going to Queensland to stay with Jean Devanny. She had also been invited to Hobart to deliver CLF lectures before but had declined, fearing the winter winds of Australia’s southernmost state capital. Apparently some time in 1949, when she was in the eastern states, Henrietta Drake-Brockman sounded Miles out on behalf of Professor Allan Edwards of the university’s English Department; and having ascertained that she was not averse to the idea, Edwards wrote with an informal invitation on 16 January 1950.57
For once Miles would be adequately paid. Under the CLF scheme, inaugurated in 1940 at the instigation of the FAW (but now a thing of the past), universities were granted a small subsidy to sponsor a series of public lectures on Australian literature by a practitioner of their choosing, with the money to go to the lecturer as a fee and to cover travel costs. In this case, for an ‘Eastern Stater’ of eminence, the subsidy would be £150.58
Although it was not until April that Miles heard from the vice-chancellor of the university, Dr George Currie, that she had been appointed as Special Lecturer in Australian Literature for 1950, by then all the arrangements had been made with Edwards, and she had already done a good deal of work. In fact she began on 18 January, immediately on hearing from Edwards for the first time: ‘I should enjoy making a survey of Australian writing,’ she responded. A few weeks later, on 4 February, having been assured that Perth winters were milder than the Riviera’s, she told Edwards she found the project irresistible, and had dived into her subject, ‘Australian Writing from the First Fleet to the Atom Bomb’.59
If the outline sent to Edwards in June for publicity purposes is a reliable guide to what she actually said, the lectures were good value. She began reading old novels, mostly in the Mitchell Library, and sorting through what at first felt like ‘a tangled skein’, writing and typing the lectures one by one until she had eight prepared, ready in good time for her departure for Perth on 26 June. Edwards had asked for ten lectures, but she did not feel up to so many, nor to additional lectures for the Adult Education Board, as he had suggested.60
John Franklin’s summer sojourn with his maternal relatives, which had seemed so promising, ended in the same old way. By mid-January they had had enough. In their view shock treatment was the only answer. Miles still longed to rescue him, despite the abusive phone calls and late-night visits which began again, and the signs of deterioration which had led his maternal Aunt Xenia Edwards to contact Alcoholics Anonymous in February.61
After a number of crises, John was admitted to Callan Park. He blamed Miles for the electroconvulsive therapy with which he was treated for schizophrenia.
Miles was now worried about going to Perth. The doctors’ advice was for her to go, that they’d keep him at the hospital, where he would be helped to act as an adult, with jobs around the place.62
On a Sunday visit in late May, when, far from showing any appreciation of the clean clothes and cigarettes Miles had brought him, John Franklin told his aunt he hated her, that he never wanted to see her again, and that she had never done a thing to help him. ‘I endured it when he was drunk,’ she wrote, ‘but he is stone sober now and deadly.’
Possibly at John’s insistence, but more likely out of self-protection, she began to organise his papers so that Glen Mills Fox could act as his contact when he was released. John called on her on 23 June, after his release and shortly before Miles left for Perth. The news made Miles feel queer, especially as she heard he had been drinking, just as she had predicted. But he did not harass her, and she was able to concentrate on her packing for Perth.63
The lectures were scheduled for delivery twice weekly on Monday and Wednesday evenings in the arts lecture theatre at the university, and Miles managed the first four before her voice gave out. The rest were postponed, on doctor’s orders. After the ordeal of the fourth lecture, Joseph Furphy’s only daughter, Sylvia Pallot, removed Miles from her noisy hotel and nursed her at her home in nearby Nedlands. Miles recovered enough to resume on 24 July, ‘with my congregation halved’. In all, as anticipated she gave eight lectures, the last on 2 August, when, according to an article by Henrietta Drake-Brockman commissioned at the time, she concluded by simply folding her hands, and saying with a diffident smile, ‘That is all.’64
The faithful enjoyed what she had to say, with many questions and much talk after the later lectures. Notes made at the time indicate that the lectures began with the earliest attempts by Europeans at the novel in Australia and ‘our first novels of tonnage’, moved towards contemporary novels by younger writers, and concluded with a challenging question: ‘What next?’ Along the way she covered Robbery under Arms by Rolf Boldrewood and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara
Morison; the 1890s; the new century from Furphy’s Such Is Life to Anzac writing; a period of hibernation (in which Henry Handel Richardson was placed); and Aborigines as a theme in novels. The West Australian said the lectures were some of the most brilliant delivered at the university, remarking also on the lecturer’s challenging and witty approach, while the two students who interviewed her afterwards — the future historian Geoffrey Bolton was one, Lila Hanson the other — declared that the university had been well served by an ‘interesting and stimulating series of lectures’.65
Miles Franklin could hardly complain about lack of attention during those last weeks in Perth. She could not thank the Pallot family enough: ‘You retrieved me from disaster and defeat.’ Sylvia’s husband, Victor, became her chauffeur, and took her to see Furphy’s grave. One night they all went to an Australian film night at Shell House, where Miles was given a picture of Furphy to take home and met D. H. Lawrence’s collaborator, Mollie Skinner, and the broadcaster Irene Greenwood. Miles evidently took to Irene, who afterwards annotated her own copy of All That Swagger, ‘Your book and mine, Miles Franklin, August 1950’.66
Miles earned a little from broadcasts too. There had been an interview with Henrietta soon after her arrival for the ABC ‘Women’s Session’, for which she was paid two guineas; and on 25 July she was heard on the ‘WA Parade’ program, the four-minute interview earning her another guinea, the same amount received for appearing a second time on the ‘Women’s Session’ on the day of her departure. What or whether she was paid for an interview with Irene Greenwood as ‘Woman of the Week’, which played on commercial radio after she left is not known, but since Irene was a fierce feminist, perhaps she was. There would also be an article on Australian theatre for the West Australian, which earned her 33s 9d when it appeared in September.67