Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  From time to time she would ‘give up a day to letters’ to distant congenials. Many nearer home benefited also; for example, Matron Prichard from Macedonian days, now retired. Likewise, ‘a busy day on the phone’ was confirmation of connectedness with the local literary scene. Although she now kept a low profile in the FAW, Miles accepted a coronation medal in June 1953 and she was pleased to make a little speech at Dame Mary Gilmore’s eighty-eighth birthday in August. Age brings its rapprochements, apparently (though not with younger rivals, as per a diary entry noting having seen Marjorie Barnard in the Mitchell Library looking old and fat).64

  It takes a certain kind of courage to stay the course with a project like the ‘essay’ at Miles’s time of life. Sometimes she called it ‘fortitude’. Occasionally she had recourse to ‘character’. However, if any one quality comes through strongly at this time, it is surely perseverance, the moral value Charles Blyth stressed in the schoolroom at Brindabella long ago. Today it would probably be called self-discipline. ‘To finish the ms. is all at present,’ Miles wrote to Rex Ingamells on 9 September 1953.65

  Favourable reviews of Ten Creeks Run had appeared at the beginning of 1953, with ‘D. S.’ (Douglas Stewart) in the Bulletin concluding, despite reservations, that it was a beautiful but muddled classic. ‘D. E.’ (John Edward Webb) of the Sydney Morning Herald was more or less in agreement: ‘Ten Creeks Run . . . has plenty of faults, but it improves as it progresses, till, at the end, the reader is left with sharp memories of real and virile people, spirited horses, and some of the loveliest scenery in Australia.’66

  With Back to Bool Bool and Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang still in the print queue, she could not yet admit to being Brent. Once there had been economic grounds for a separate identity. Now Miles hoped for proper recognition for Brent and vindication of her own early promise. Scarcely anyone now doubted her authorship. In his review of Ten Creeks Run, ‘D. S.’ simply said that in the absence of a denial from Miss Franklin, it was a reasonable assumption that she and Brent were one. But she needed all six volumes in print, and she still believed, maybe correctly, that the mystery ensured publishers’ attention and kept up sales. Certainly Angus & Robertson scrupulously adhered to her wishes, as had Blackwood before and maintained sales as well, with author royalties from the three Brent books on sale amounting to almost £42 in 1953, mainly from the latest volume, Ten Creeks Run (almost £27). Prelude to Waking was still selling — fifty-five copies in 1953 — resulting in three guineas, and Up the Country rather more (186 copies earned her over £11). It was a bonus when Angus & Robertson forwarded £32 in royalties to Miss Miles Franklin from George Allen & Unwin (UK) for the English edition of All That Swagger and she earned five guineas for its serialisation on rural radio.67

  In 1954 Australia was experiencing ‘queen fever’. On 2 February the young Elizabeth II arrived in Sydney for a two-month tour of Australia, departing Fremantle on 1 April. Miles was one of the few to take a dim view of the royal tour, which she regarded as a backward step for Australia — though she did watch the royal yacht Gothic enter Sydney Harbour from the balcony of a friend of Pixie’s at Watsons Bay, ‘a beautiful sight’ according to Pixie. Thanks to a local tradesman who told her about the route she also caught a glimpse of ‘the living icon’ when the royal entourage passed through the southern suburbs. The rest she saw at the newsreels, being too weak to stand in the hot streets with a million other Sydneysiders.68

  The royal visit reminded Miles of Inky Stephensen and how he had pointed out two decades earlier that, technically speaking, when the Statute of Westminster was passed by the United Kingdom parliament in 1931, the English monarch became the monarch of Australia. Evidently it was now a reality: ‘Twenty years behind the times and six months ahead of the crowd’ is the way to triumph in the modern world, she observed tartly. The immediate politics amused her even more: ‘Looked at from the angle of power politics, I chuckle to note that as an icon Elizabeth out-glittered all others. The RCs gave in and whooped too, as they astutely recognised here a bulwark against communism or any other advanced ism.’ The tour was a phenomenal success, with men bowing low and women enjoying the spectacle, especially the clothes. Miles commented to Dymphna Cusack, it was quite something to see a ‘young female exalted’.69

  Miles was not well when she visited the Archibald Prize exhibition with Pixie O’Harris and fellow writer Myrtle Rose White in the second week of February, and she had to forgo the Easter Show for the first time since her return to Sydney in late 1932. Soon she was not strong enough to do her own shopping. Her condition puzzled her; on 8 March, she told J. K. Moir that all the bounce and boasting had gone. Maybe it was a virus, or even anaemia? ‘I simply can’t make myself go,’ she wrote to Winifred Stephensen on 1 May, and the same day to Moir she said she seemed to have a chill, citing the family adage that women don’t die of hearts and admonishing Moir to take care of himself. She also told Moir she had many things she wanted to finish: in particular she had still to ensure the publication of her ‘essay’ after the rejections by Constable and Oxford in Melbourne.70

  On 13 April, with a general election scheduled for 29 May, a Russian embassy official (and Soviet spy), Vladimir Petrov, defected to Australia, and his wife soon after, under dramatic circumstances. Like most people Miles was taken aback, but was not without a timely response: ‘It would seem that the Lord is on the side of Mr Menzies, first the bonanza of the Queen’s visitation, now the spy melodrama,’ she wrote to Mary Alice Evatt. Sure enough, Mr Menzies defeated Dr Evatt in the election, and Australian politics were cast in a conservative mould lasting to 1972. Whether Miles voted informal as she was thinking of doing is unknown, but she made her feelings known about the election campaign, saying it was a sorry exposé of Australia’s satellite position and of tenth-rate politicians. What was needed against the satellite comforters were some good old roosters like Sir Henry Parkes, she declared.71

  There was no evading the ‘bungy heart’ though. According to a note Miles wrote to the Howarths, she was already ‘out of action’ on 26 May and could not say if she would improve or not. The following week, in the last of the several thousand personal letters preserved (mostly as carbon copies) in her files, addressed to ‘My dearest Magdalen’ (Dalloz) and completed on 4 June, she confessed she had reached her allotted span, but was unsure if it was the end or if she should struggle to go on. One letter was all she could manage to type in a day, she admitted. Nonetheless, having previously asked Magdalen about a copy of Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, she now wanted Harper’s American College Dictionary (Magdalen sent it, and in good time).72

  ‘This cold is dreadful — my heart literally won’t go,’ Miles wrote to Delys Cross on 9 June. On Sunday 20 June, Miles’s cousin Joan Lampe in Wagga Wagga wrote, in response to a letter from her the previous week that does not survive: ‘I am sorry to hear you are not feeling well.’73

  That same day, or possibly the next, Miles suffered a heart attack. When Aunt Lena made a routine phone call to Carlton on 22 June, she was shocked to hear that Miles was ill in bed with a doctor in attendance. Writing the next day, Lena expressed the hope that her niece was not in too much pain, and that the doctor was treating the case properly, adding brightly, ‘Cheer up dear: they can do so much for the heart now.’74

  Delys Cross was the only person in a position to give an on-the-spot account of the situation (and even she was not there when the attack occurred). In a letter to Katharine Susannah Prichard dated ‘Sunday’ (almost certainly 27 June), she reported that ‘Early last week she [Miles] had a severe heart attack, preceded by a tummy upset and vomiting. She was alone, eventually managed to phone dr.’ How much time elapsed before Miles was able to call the doctor is unclear, but according to a later letter from Miles to Dymphna Cusack, ‘the doctor came after 48 hours and relieved me with morphine’.75

  Delys had been concerned when her calls to Carlton went unanswered, but she kept trying, and in due course got through to the doc
tor, who was visiting Miles on a daily basis. The next morning she went to Grey Street, where, as she told Katharine Susannah Prichard, she found Miles very low, very tired, and able to eat very little. The doctor wanted to send Miles to hospital, but she did not want to go and Delys persuaded him to allow her to nurse Miles at home. At least once that first week Delys nursed her through the night. Florence Knox took over on the weekend, and it was arranged that Glen Mills Fox would come to help at nights subsequently. Others such as the Lampe cousins were also willing to help, but unable to leave their families overnight.76

  After a week Miles picked up a little. This meant she could worry about her ‘essay’. On 28 June she sent an urgent (typed) note to Beatrice Davis, saying that she lacked the strength to do more and wanted it out now, ‘ahead of the rush’: ‘I’m conscious of a faulty offering but it is my testament and I am one of the few remaining with a personal knowledge of some of the period — with a vivid memory of the effects of the development of Aus. writing.’ In a shaky hand she added, ‘This is all I can do.’ A covering letter from Delys explained that it was essential that Miles have mental and physical rest, and that she was drugged to keep her mind still, but that she really needed to see Beatrice and to get the manuscript fixed up: ‘if you could reassure her about publication it would mean so much — life itself’. Beatrice collected it on 30 June.77

  The day before, Beatrice had sent ‘the smallest note’ to say that corrections to the family tree for Cockatoos were being made according to Miles’s instructions, and publication would not be much delayed. A file note in Beatrice’s hand records that Miles was sent an advance copy on 12 July. Later, Miles wrote a note (undated) in pencil to ‘George’, probably Ferguson, thanking him for getting the book out, adding in a trembling hand: ‘this is the first time I have attempted anything and it has winded me’. Whether she was well enough to read it is not known, but she certainly saw Stewart Howard’s ‘shallow’ review in the Sun-Herald later in July, and possibly also the Bulletin’s sympathetic response in early September.78

  Delys Cross nursed Miles at Carlton for a fortnight with scarcely a break: ‘I never leave her at all,’ she wrote to Beatrice Davis. But the drugs upset Miles’s stomach, and her condition worsened. ‘Miles has been very ill since approximately the beginning of July,’ Delys later told Henrietta Drake-Brockman. Rex Ingamells recalled visiting her on 8 July and that Miles told him ‘in a matter-of-fact way’ that she was dying but he couldn’t believe her. As soon as she was strong enough to be moved, she was taken by ambulance to her cousin Thelma Perryman’s place at Beecroft.79

  ‘Jounama’, the Perrymans’ house on Murray Road, Beecroft, occupied a large corner block amid what was still largely bushland, and the trees and birds in the garden gradually had a soothing effect on the invalid. However, the effort of getting up for even two hours daily in mid-August was almost too much for her. On 24 August, in a letter to Beatrice Davis, she wrote, ‘I feel no hope of return to even weak normality.’ A few days later she wrote again, still anxious about her ‘essay’: perhaps Beatrice should post it back for one more look; perhaps it should be burned if she did not recover. Her last letter to Delys Cross dated 30 August was annotated in pencil, ‘Dear Delys, I don’t think I’ll ever see you again.’80

  In an undated letter to Marjorie Pizer marked by her ‘one of the last letters from Miles Franklin’, she was still struggling to get through a newspaper, but a new literary magazine which had come her way delighted her: ‘I will subscribe to Overland if I live.’ In a subsequent letter to Marjorie, annotated ‘Last letter from Miles’ and postmarked 2 September she expressed interest in a Henry Lawson letter which Marjorie had apparently sent, and recalled her embarrassment at the flattering way the great men of her youth had responded to her. The next day she wrote to Pixie O’Harris assuring her that the manuscript of ‘I Remember’ was safe in her cousin’s deed box, though the essay on novels had priority.81

  These are probably the last letters she ever wrote. They make poignant, even powerful reading today. To Marjorie Pizer, she wrote of a haunting sense of failure: ‘I have never gained self-confidence & my writing fills me with a sense of tortured failure. Critics don’t see the underside or innerness of what I attempt.’ To Pixie O’Harris, she sent a strong message for peace: ‘The human race has reached such a crisis in politics & science that to survive we must abandon the idea of war’.82

  She had told Pixie that Beatrice would come and see her about the ‘essay’, if she was well enough. Beatrice indeed recalled visiting several times. She found Miles sitting on the verandah in the afternoon, able to talk brightly. Nancy Keesing had checked some references in the ‘essay’, Beatrice had edited the manuscript, and Miles was trying to work through it. There was talk of publication by Angus & Robertson later in the year.83

  When Delys Cross was finally allowed to visit Miles on Monday 13 September, she found her propped up in the big four-poster bed that had been her grandmother’s, in a room looking out to a garden full of spring flowers. As she reported to Katharine Susannah Prichard, Miles seemed weak but content.84

  Pixie O’Harris agreed. She had been told by Miles there was no need to visit. But she did, and later wrote an account of it:

  I found her sitting on a wide verandah surrounded by the greenery of a beautiful bush garden. I had never seen her so relaxed. When she tried to walk it was agony to watch and not help her; but I had learned never to offer help — it hurt her independent spirit. When I kissed her goodbye, we both knew it was for the last time. She told me so, and I showed her that I understood. But I would not grieve then; I could only think of her finding peace at last.85

  Suddenly Miles’s condition worsened. A day after Delys's visit, Miles went by ambulance to Eastwood for an X-ray. Two days later, on Thursday 16 September, she was in Seacombe Private Hospital, Drummoyne, for an operation to remove fluid from her lungs. At first it seemed a success. It is said she recognised relatives the next day and was about to leave, when another heart attack occurred. She collapsed and never regained consciousness.86

  Miles Franklin died in the early hours of Sunday, 19 September 1954. The death certificate states that the cause of death was (a) coronary occlusion, and (b) chronic myocarditis and pleurisy, with effusion, in lay terms, a heart attack, with heart disease and fluid on the lungs. She was seventy-four years and eleven months old. When Florence Knox saw her body the next day, she wished she could tell her how really beautiful she looked in death, with no lines and her skin so clear, as in girlhood.87

  She was cremated the next day, at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium, after a ceremony at the Eastwood Anglican church conducted by a young minister on furlough from mission work in Kenya, the Reverend Keith Cole. In accordance with Miles’s instructions, there was no public announcement of her death until it was all over, and attendance was confined to immediate family and friends. Present were Helena Lampe, Annie May Bridle, Ruby Brydon, Thelma Perryman, Phillis Moulden, Leslie Annie Bridle, Ruby Franklin Bridle, George Perryman, Jack Moulden, Ruth Horwitz and her daughter Lillaine, and Florence Knox.88

  ‘Nothing broke the drabness of a cold wet day,’ Leslie Bridle recalled, ‘. . . except the young minister.’ He had not known Miles, but he took the trouble to obtain details of her life and work. ‘He spoke of Miles Franklin’s burning love of Australia, of the work of the pioneers she knew and loved, of our country, and when [making reference] to Kenya & Asia, and the millions of Asians at our door . . . asked, “What are you going to do with Miles Franklin’s Australia?” (Poor old Aunt Lena, eighty-seven, and the rest of us not far behind, couldn’t do much, however we were very thrilled that he had grasped the keynote of all Stella’s work).’89

  Reverend Cole concluded by reading the passage from All That Swagger about ‘Australia, the incredible feat’:

  All too swiftly the day ascended and declined. The shadows lengthened from the cropped tussocks pimpling the hillsides. Perfume of wattle bathed approaching evening in del
ight. The bright landscape danced in air translucent and dazzling. The westering sun laying vesper offering on the rim of day, melted sky and mountains into a glory of filtered light and retreated to the core of a continent over which as yet man has no sure dominion. A land of distances, a land dependent upon distances for preservation; a land gorgeously empty and with none of the accumulations of centuries of human occupation; a continent surveyed, fenced, patrolled and policed by the nucleus of a nation analogous to a patriarchal family with unwieldy wealth.

  ‘Australia, the incredible feat!’, he chanted.90

  It was a pity that in what seems to have been a rigid interpretation of crematorium rules the official who arranged the funeral removed the wildflowers placed on the coffin by the Bridle sisters, Ruby and Leslie. The bouquet of ti-tree blossom and blue field flowers they had gathered was a lovely touch.

  Yet in a way it didn’t matter greatly. Miles had made sure her remains would be returned to where they grew. On 2 October, in accordance with her wishes, her ashes were scattered by Pearl Cotterill at Jounama Creek, in sight of the original homestead at Talbingo where she was born.

  AFTERLIFE

  Self-protective to the end, Miles stipulated in her will that no death notice was to be placed in the Sydney press but of course the word was soon out. Many tributes followed, as friends rallied to honour her life and work, and vivid recollections appeared in the literary journals. Beatrice Davis wrote in Southerly of ‘a true Australian’, while in Overland David Martin recalled her as ‘the Bernard Shaw of the Australian Bush’ and Jean Devanny as a wonderful letter writer and ‘the truest of friends’. Florence James, in an obituary for the London Times, spoke of ‘her hatred of shams, and the love of Australia which shines through all her writing’, and ‘O. C. R.’ stated in the Melbourne Age that she had long since earned a lasting place ‘in a company whose prose and verse have imparted to this land a living quality’. To ‘R. J. B.’, writing in Voice, she was one of the most original and vital creative writers Australia had produced. Perhaps the most apposite was Vance Palmer when he wrote in the ABC Weekly that ‘a great deal of light and laughter went out of the world when Miles Franklin died’. ‘To know Miles Franklin well was to love her,’ added Martin, whose critical reflections are still of value. While the twelve contributors to Miles Franklin by Some of her Friends, published by the Bread and Cheese Club in 1955, may have valued her in different ways, their affectionate contributions to the publication bear him out.1