by Jill Roe
‘There is no chink or gleam of anything hopeful for me,’ she reflected on 9 January. ‘I struggle like a fly in tar.’ As ever, the imperative was her writing. There was a broadcast on Rose Scott in January, Miles’s ‘Johanna versus Hennessy’ play was on the go, and she had begun an anti-war play, ‘The Dead Must Not Return’, after Christmas.15
Written as the Korean War escalated, the play is strongly critical of the human cost of war. Again, it was the (admittedly faint) prospect of a prize that kept Miles at her typewriter. She entered her anti-war play in the annual Herald literary competition in May but had no luck (no one won the first prize of £2000). A few weeks later, she submitted both the Johanna play, under the title ‘Models for Molly’, and ‘The Dead Must Not Return’ to the Commonwealth Jubilee Stage Play Competition (first prize £500), the first play forwarded in her own name, the second as ‘O. Niblat’, but again with no success.16
Even in her later years, Miles Franklin seems always to have been peering hopefully through the footlights, watching plays and trying to write them. ‘The Australian theatre is a burning interest to me,’ she wrote to a new acquaintance, Eleanor Witcombe, in April 1951. When young Eleanor, who later wrote the script for the screen version of My Brilliant Career, invited Miles to a matinée of the Children’s National Theatre at St James’ Hall in April, she took ‘a child friend’ and thoroughly enjoyed herself; and she was much interested in a play by the newspaper proprietor Warwick Fairfax entitled A Victorian Marriage later in the year. Although she thought it flawed, she was sufficiently stimulated by reminders of her mother’s generation to write him an encouraging note afterwards. Likewise, she kept in touch with Ric Throssell in case he needed help in submitting plays to competitions, and she was thrilled by news of the success of Sumner Locke Elliott on Broadway in October with a show called Buy Me Blue Ribbons. (It didn’t last long though, Sumner responded from New York.)17
Miles saw Lysistrata, the great Greek anti-war comedy, whose sentiments she agreed with entirely, at the New Theatre in 1951, and there are many comments on the latest broadcasts and shows in her diaries and letters. She dismissed T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party as warmed-up Noël Coward with a dash of stale psychoanalysis and a bit of blasphemy (though she had been admiring of his earlier Murder in the Cathedral, performed in the Sydney Town Hall in 1948 with Camilla Wedgwood leading the chorus), and privately deemed Musette Morell’s Webs of our Weaving odious due to a ‘male point of view’.18
Eleanor Witcombe and others, such as the forthright Melbourne writer Jean Campbell, were among those to whom, with customary tenacity, Miles turned in the early 1950s seeking outlets for her theatrical work. She was disturbed, however, by the reported prevalence of homosexuality among actors, including Sumner Locke Elliott. It was a subject she found shocking and depressing, and mostly beyond her range, though there had been rumours of goings-on at a long-ago camp at Thornford, she recalled.19
Among the literary prizes offered for the Commonwealth Jubilee was one for a non-fiction prose work, worth £1000. In March 1951, soon after the prizes were announced, Miles began to revise ‘my essay’ (her Perth lectures). This involved much more work in the Mitchell Library, where, according to the Bulletin, she seemed to live these days. One day in May she found Tom Inglis Moore there writing an essay for the non-fiction prize, covering much the same ground. He seemed keen to see her work, but there was no way she would allow that. Moore’s work would be so orthodox it would be bound to win, she muttered into her diary, and she was not going to supply ideas as usual, ‘only to be overlooked and denigrated by my [word illegible] and inferiors’. Even though the writing felt like ‘walking up a hill of sand’, by the end of September it was done.20
According to a surviving brochure, she sent it to the Jubilee competition as ‘Bunyip’ on 26 September 1951 under the title ‘Notes on Australian Writing’. When the awards were announced in February 1952, no first prize was awarded, but Tom Inglis Moore’s manuscript, ‘The Australian Mirror — Social Patterns in Australian Literature’, shared second place with the Perth writer J. K. Ewers. There was no mention of Miles’s entry in the press, just the usual return of her manuscript.21
At least Miles could no longer complain that none of her books was in print. Apart from the copies of Sydney Royal she held, and My Career Goes Bung, in November she learned of an impending reissue by the British publishing firm George Allen & Unwin of All That Swagger, the eighth edition. And the entire Brent series was appearing. Angus & Robertson reprinted Prelude to Waking in early 1951, the first print run of 1204 copies having sold out by December 1950, a pleasing situation, suggesting that readers were curious about the previously unpublished work, regardless of the reviews. By the end of 1951, Miles had earned almost £87 in royalties from it, and another £55 in royalties came with Up the Country, republished mid-year.22
When the author’s copies of Up the Country arrived on 2 June, Miles could not at first face Beatrice Davis because the cover made her feel sick: it showed a grotesque collection of characters ‘from Snake Gully and I can’t make any of them fit the book’. (‘Snake Gully’ was the home of Steele Rudd’s Dad and Dave in the then popular radio serial.) The ‘romantic Zulu’, as Mary Fullerton had dubbed the image of an Aborigine that appeared on the cover of the first edition of Up the Country in 1927, seemed grand by comparison.23
Beatrice was apologetic and promised the firm would do better for the next volume, Ten Creeks Run, which was almost ready for printing (Beatrice had received the typescript from Miles on 29 June). Beatrice also reassured Miles that all six Brent volumes would appear as fast as she could manage, and in that respect she was as good as her word, even if it was not quite fast enough for Miles to see them all.24
When earlier in the year Dymphna Cusack had asked why Miles didn’t come out as Brent (‘You don’t have to answer that’), Miles claimed that once people knew the truth about a pseudonymous work they lost interest. This now seems doubtful, especially a generation after Brent’s debut. But she wasn’t risking it. That queer mix of ebullience and lack of confidence was by now a fixed character trait. So a new round of reviews and speculation had to be endured, while her ‘essay’, which she described as an ‘autobiography’ of the novel in Australia, kept her busy. The new edition of Up the Country was well received. The Bulletin said it was unmistakably authentic, and written with the breath of life — though not a work of art.25
In Sydney, people were used to Miles’s secretive behaviour and valued her nonetheless. She was a speaker at the annual ‘Eng. Ass.’ dinner in November, where the recently arrived Fulbright scholar Bruce Sutherland, a literature professor from Pennsylvania State University, was the main speaker. In December she was invited to attend the ceremony at Waverley cemetery for the unveiling of a memorial on the poet Rod Quinn’s grave. She was even admitted to the international writers’ organisation PEN in 1951, despite past smears as a communist sympathiser. Irene Greenwood’s Christmas greeting from Perth in 1951 conveys something of the affection she now commanded: ‘To dear, brilliant, clever and courageous Miles’.26
On 20 February 1952 Miles flew to Melbourne and stayed there until 8 March, when she left for Sydney on the Riverina Express. The trip had been mooted for several months, and although it was true that it made a nice break and Miles wanted to see old friends, there was another purpose. This time she stayed with the twice-divorced bon vivant bibliophile John Kinmont Moir, who resided at the back of a disused pawnbroker’s shop capable of housing his vast Australiana collection, at 474 Bridge Road in the inner suburb of Richmond. Miles wanted Moir to read the early chapters of her ‘essay’. The trouble was that ‘J. K.’, as she usually called him — an accountant with the department store Bon Marché by day — was a great one for conviviality. So lively was it at Bridge Road, with literary and other visitors night after night, she mostly felt utterly worn out before he was free to discuss her work. When Nettie Palmer made her go to the doctor, it cost three guineas to hea
r what she already knew: that she was not as strong as she used to be and should take things easier.27
Certainly she was not as strong as Kate Baker, still tripping around town aged ninety on nothing more than a cup of tea in the morning, but she was much better than the surviving Goldstein sisters, who now seemed really old. At eighty, Elsie Belle Champion still went to work at Mullen’s Bookshop, part-time however; and Aileen Goldstein obviously suffered from arthritis, though not admitting it. The Fullerton sisters, getting on one another’s nerves in the suburbs, reminded her once more of the tribulations of her friend Mary.28
‘Miles Franklin Visits Us’ ran the headline of a welcoming article by an Argus journalist, Freda Irving; it was Miles’s first trip to Melbourne for almost a decade. Irving found her a challenge: ‘You need cerebrations at the rate of an express train to keep up with her darting, inquisitive brain, her quick wit, and her ready tongue.’ As usual, Miles was unwilling to talk about herself, asserting that she never wrote anything now, and it was the future of writing that interested her. She mentioned Kylie Tennant, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Henrietta Drake-Brockman from among the established writers, and from the world of poetry, the Lyre-Bird Writers, a publishing co-operative recently established by some young Sydney poets. We must, she said, ‘put ourselves in’ to the world’s literature. In the accompanying photograph, she smiles widely (a horrible close-up, she noted privately). The text states that, having avoided the camera on arrival, ‘Her happy nature got the better of her.’29
The list of people calling at Bridge Road when Miles Franklin was there reads like a literary who’s who of 1950s Melbourne: among them the critic Arthur Phillips, author in 1950 of the famous phrase ‘the cultural cringe’, who had once chided Miles (to her amusement) for ‘wooziness’ in a broadcast.30
Moir was an excellent cook as well as a generous host, and despite a foot injury, he cooked some agreeable meals for Miles and one of the honorary lady associates of his all-male literary Bread and Cheese Club, Everill Venman. He must have found some time to look at her essay too, as he praised the quality of research, and in coming months made many helpful factual comments on the text.31
The week before Miles left Melbourne, P. R. Stephensen had written inviting her to stop over at his post-incarceration abode at Lower Bethanga, an old mining town east of Albury, where he now made a living ghost-writing for Frank Clune. The visit proved a delight. P. R. was still a very angry man, with even more reactionary political views, but he greeted her warmly. The long-suffering Winifred was as brave as ever, and a wonderful homemaker. At Bethanga Miles was thrilled to meet the widowed Tina Mitchell, one of the Coles from Run-o’-Waters near Goulburn, who remembered Miles as a girl riding a black show mare called ‘Muriel’ and the racing stallion ‘Lord Clive’, and had on her walls a photograph of another horse, once owned by Charlie Graham, which Miles had ridden when young.32
A quaint photograph taken outdoors at the time of the visit of big, besuited Stephensen standing with his right arm around tiny Miles Franklin — in a spotted dress with a light-coloured belt, Mary Jane shoes and a net-brimmed hat, holding long white gloves — is as good an expression of rapprochement as any. To Moir she wrote: ‘P R and Winnie were wonderful to me — not a bit changed from the early days of our meeting in London.’33
After Albury her train passed through her old stamping grounds. Once past Marulan, Miles glimpsed the homesteads she had written about in Pioneers on Parade, and the great rocks nearby, forever associated in her mind with her old acquaintance the Sydney University geologist Professor Edgeworth David. By nine that evening she was back in Carlton, and very aware of loneliness after the crowded days in Melbourne.
Miles with P. R. Stephensen at Bethanga, in north-eastern Victoria, 1952. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, PX*D250/1, No. 162)
Miles now occupied herself largely with her ‘essay’. An article on Fergus Hume’s classic thriller of 1880s Melbourne, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, published by the Bulletin in December, was a by-product of her research. There were also the demands of Angus & Robertson’s Brent publication program to meet, with Ten Creeks Run set to appear midyear. Thankfully this volume appeared with an unobjectionable cover, a line drawing of two horsemen against a mountain backdrop.34
In August 1952 the ever loving Pixie O’Harris exhorted Miles to write about her childhood. Although at first loath to do so, feeling it was ‘too happy’ for the taste of most readers, the proposal suited Miles’s mood following the publication of her first memory of Queanbeyan in Donald McLean’s Easy English for Young Australians in 1951, and her recent traverse of the country by train; and visitors such as Morton McDonald from Uriarra days stimulated her memory. Pixie was so delighted with what her friend first wrote, she demanded more. ‘Pixie’s demand’, completed in January 1953, became the autobiographical memoir originally entitled ‘My First Ten Years’, which Miles always meant to dedicate to Pixie, and was published posthumously by Angus & Robertson as Childhood at Brindabella: My First Ten Years in 1963.35
Probably Miles Franklin’s best-loved book, Childhood at Brindabella is certainly her most accessible. She said she wanted to see how much she could recall ‘clear-cut, before my memory is too moth-eaten’. Like many autobiographers, she began with her first recollection, of her red nightgown and a lighted candle on the verandah at Brindabella (which, as if by force of habit, she thinly disguised as ‘Bobilla’), when she was ten months old. She ends with the decisive departure from ‘Ajinby’/Talbingo, aged ten, in a chapter entitled ‘Exit from Eden’. In between, in more or less chronological order, comes a series of stories, among them of her being bald and staying up late in infancy, of driving bullocks at Brindabella as a little girl, and of being too small and naive as a child to defend herself at a Sunday school picnic at ‘Gool Gool’/Tumut. There are also recollections of some unusual bush characters, among them Great-uncle George Bridle, a photographer; the gentle ‘Uncle Hil’ (William Hilder); and his wife, Aunt Aggie (née Franklin). Miles’s parents, and especially Grandma Lampe — ‘Grandma was God’ — are the crucial characters, apart from herself — a ‘prodigy and a pet’ among indulgent elders but often at a loss with other more worldly children. Written simply in the first person, her story of childhood in an enchanted world unfolds beguilingly and ends, inevitably, with the loss of innocence and ease.36
Though few have written so well about it, many children from remote or deprived circumstances have come similarly to understand their strengths and weaknesses in later life. She concludes:
Goodbye, young thing, perhaps as much a mirage as a reality. Go back into the box of imagination and memory where you belong with those rare people who have retired to that baffling country — the past, lost forever except in these frail inconsequential stories.
Farewell happy childhood!
One of the first things Miles did after she returned from Melbourne was to send John Kinmont Moir money to purchase a radiator for Kate Baker, who had mentioned in passing that she was cold in the mornings. Moir thought this quixotic, but obliged. Miles in turn thought Moir’s work habits quite mad, and for fear of losing this new-found literary brother, another dedicated male cultural nationalist and an expert on Australiana, urged him to slow down. The letters between them now flowed thick and fast. Of the nearly 200 letters they exchanged between 1940 and 1954, over sixty were written in 1952, mostly on literary points, but also on literary politics, tense at the time.
Miles worried more than ever about her health. It seemed, she recorded on 16 April, that she was deteriorating rapidly. She was often tired during the day and too much typing or heavy shopping or steep stairs caused her limbs to seize up. A cardiogram in February had revealed no apparent irregularity, so presumably it was not arteriosclerosis that caused her to fall a couple of times in the house: ‘must be nervous,’ she concluded glumly, refusing to take pills for dizziness. She ceased taking her temperature daily, as she had been doing since the beginning
of the year — but then bought a new thermometer in May; and colds came in the winter to alarm her. Somehow, she wrote to Ian Mudie, she never felt quite well after Perth, but it was no good ‘hypochondriacking’ about it.37
Jean Devanny urged her to come to sunny Queensland, but somehow she never got there. Perhaps she was wise to conserve her strength for another visit from Jean, which would eventuate in early 1953, and John Kinmont Moir’s friend Everill Venman was already threatening to land on her. Since sleeplessness still plagued her, especially when she thought of her nephew John, the prospect of guests made her feel weak. By now Miles Franklin believed she had ‘a bent heart’, caused by a longstanding curvature of the spine ‘which puts the heart in a bent position,’ she explained to Les Woolacott.38
Friends kept watch, the Crosses in Caringbah especially. Arthur fixed the roof and taps, and Delys did some of the ironing. One day Miles came home to find a box of food on the verandah, thanks to Arthur, chef de cuisine (baking) at Sydney Technical College. Another day the lawns had been mowed. Joe Salter helped too, despite personal tragedy when his wife, Lorna, suffered a stillbirth (Miles noted grimly that her analysis of marriage had yet to be proved wrong). Allan Dalziel was usually too tired to do more than talk, but he kept her up to date with political events (even if his views on women seemed pre-1914).
The value of her neighbours’ support can hardly be overestimated. Sometimes she went to shows in the city with them, to the Borovansky Ballet at the Empire Theatre with Mrs Bennett in April, for instance, and to hear Elena Nikolaidi sing at the Town Hall with May Smales, Mrs Fogden’s daughter, in mid-June. When her neighbour Harry Andresen died suddenly, she recalled that he had stood by her when Norman died, and again when John was raving in the street. And when the Fogdens moved up-market to Castle Street, Blakehurst, in September, she wept.39