by Jill Roe
But — ah! Nemesis — for the most part the press was only interested in one question: was she really Brent of Bin Bin? It was thought she probably was; but while she was alive Miles had resolutely refused to acknowledge it. Now that she was gone, no one could say for sure. The issue was not finally laid to rest until 1966, when the Mitchell Library released her correspondence with Mary Fullerton. And with that, as Miles had predicted, Brent ceased to be interesting. Reviewers found it difficult to find anything positive to say about the posthumous Brent volumes and the accolades never came. It was too late for most readers to care about the pastoral age.2
Probate of Miles’s will was granted on 14 January 1955, and her last and best-kept secret, the literary prize for which she had been preserving her capital all along, became public knowledge. Most of her estate, valued at £8922, was dedicated to it. According to Colin Roderick, literary critics were astonished. Such personal beneficence was unprecedented. However, the Sydney Morning Herald noted she was a prize-winner herself, having twice won the Prior Prize. Once her estate was cleared for distribution and her intentions regarding the literary prize were translated into practicable terms, the judges nominated in her will — the Mitchell Librarian, Beatrice Davis, Ian Mudie, Colin Roderick (whose early enthusiasm for Brent presumably overrode all other considerations in Miles’s mind), and her accountant, George Williams — were able to begin work. They honoured her by extending the name of the prize from the Franklin to the Miles Franklin Award. First awarded to Patrick White for Voss, published in London in 1957, and presented in Sydney in April the following year by Robert Gordon Menzies, Prime Minister of Australia, with Dr Evatt, leader of the Federal Opposition, in attendance, it was initially worth £500. Average weekly earnings for men in New South Wales at that time were around £15; for women £11.3
The terms of the award are of considerable biographical significance. In accordance with clause 6 of Miles’s will, the prize is awarded to the author of ‘the Novel for the year which is of the highest literary merit and which must present Australian Life in any of its phases’; and if, in the opinion of the judges, in any year no novel is deemed worthy of the prize, it may be awarded to the author of ‘a play for either stage Radio or Television or such other medium as may develop but not for farce or musical comedy’. There is also a sub-clause to protect standards: if no entry is deemed to be of sufficient merit, no award need be made, a situation that has occurred several times. Unlike the Pulitzer Prize in the United States, and some other comparable awards, there are no national eligibility criteria. These terms encapsulate Miles’s two great hopes in later life: that Australian writers would be encouraged in their endeavours, and that Australia would become a significant field in world literature. However, debate about an entry written by a non-Australian and published outside Australia has yet to occur.4
At the time of her death, Miles was a well-known writer. Although the only title available under her own name was the English edition of All That Swagger, there were other relatively recent titles and four still to come, two by Brent and two by Miles. In addition, Angus & Robertson published a new Australian edition of All That Swagger in 1956. On that basis, her reputation seemed set to live on. But would it?
Meanjin editor Clem Christesen had always been interested in Miles Franklin. Recognising that the time was ripe for a re-evaluation, in April 1955 Christesen commissioned Marjorie Barnard to write an article for Meanjin on Miles’s life and work. Marjorie, who seems never to have realised just how much Miles disliked her, welcomed the opportunity. Her article was the first recognisably modern assessment of Miles’s work. The opening sentence reads: ‘Miles Franklin was a legend in her own lifetime — which is not always a healthy thing for a writer.’ For Barnard, Old Blastus of Bandicoot — a title last reissued in the wartime Pocket Library edition of 1945 — was the touchstone, not because it was the best of the novels but because ‘it was the palette from which they were painted’. This now seems untenable; but Barnard was of her time too, and her historically informed approach was valuable, if perhaps a little patronising. She concluded it was probably unnecessary to evaluate Miles’s work as literature: ‘The books are there to be read. They are a record of Miles herself, her warmth, her humour, her idiosyncratic mind. They are an index to a period and tribute to the earth she loved.’5
Barnard’s approach carried over to her critical biography Miles Franklin, the first book-length study, published in 1967 and still valuable as literary analysis, though largely superseded as a source of biographical information, having been written prior to the release of the Franklin Papers. Marjorie, who had not been satisfied with her Meanjin article and declined Christesen’s invitation to review Childhood at Brindabella, fearing she would not be able to treat it fairly, found the larger task uncongenial (‘it was folly to undertake it’). Although it was in other respects not comparable with Colin Roderick’s iconoclastic work, Miles Franklin: Her Brilliant Career, published in 1982, well after the release of the papers though without acknowledgement to them, both works now seem like winding-up statements by the succeeding generation: whereas Barnard sought to elucidate the legend, Roderick tried to demolish it. (No doubt Roderick was shocked to discover from her papers what Miles really thought of him.) Miles, who once remarked that the thought of biography added a new dimension to her fear of death, would have recognised the ironies.6
In 1959, for the first of many radio programs on her life and works to come, John Thompson interviewed various people who had known her about ‘the mysterious Miles Franklin’, but he concluded, rightly, ‘we have not yet heard the last of Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin’. One of the interviewees, George Farwell, referred suggestively to her diaries. The sale of seventy plays and novels, published and unpublished, and numerous manuscripts deemed surplus to archival requirements by her trustees and their advisers to the Sydney book dealer Isidoor Berkelouw in 1960 was an indication of how much there might be; but Miles’s personal papers were embargoed for ten years following her death. Furthermore, her will specified that certain items marked by Miles were to be burned. This was done before the papers were accessioned, but the amount was said to be small and it has never been suggested that anything of importance was lost.7
As Susan Sheridan has shown with respect to My Brilliant Career, Miles’s reputation reached its lowest ebb from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, when modernist values dominated literary criticism. Without immediate family to maintain her name, she could have been forgotten. Inevitably, the number of people who knew Miles personally slowly diminished, though My Brilliant Career was valued by the Left for its class analysis, and many women writers cherished its message, poet Judith Wright for one. When I first read My Brilliant Career as a graduate student in the 1960s it was at the suggestion of radical Australian historian Ian Turner.8
With the revival of interest in feminism in the 1970s, and the appearance of the Margaret Fink-produced film version of My Brilliant Career in 1979, Miles became famous again, and there was a rush to read her books. At least a dozen editions of My Brilliant Career were published over the following decade, not only in Australia but in England, Canada, the United States and South Africa, and in translation in Japan and (later) France. A Braille edition has also been published. My Career Goes Bung was reissued four times in the 1980s, and again in 1990. Even Some Everyday Folk and Dawn was rescued from obscurity in 1986 by Virago (which was subsequently taken over, causing a planned reissue of the first Chicago novel, The Net of Circumstance, to be abandoned).9
Other titles were reissued to coincide with national events. In 1988, the year of Australia’s bicentenary, Pioneers on Parade made an unexpected comeback, published by Angus & Robertson. Likewise, the centenary of Federation in 2001 saw not only a centenary edition of My Brilliant Career published by HarperCollins, but also the first reissue of Joseph Furphy: The Legend of the Man and His Book by Halstead Press.
A snowball effect has been at work in the case of forgotten texts
. The University of Queensland Press, which was quick off the mark in 1981 with On Dearborn Street, languishing in manuscript since World War I, followed with a new edition of Bring the Monkey in 1984. Two plays also re-entered the public domain: the previously unpublished ‘Call Up Your Ghosts’ in a Penguin anthology of Australian women’s writing edited by Dale Spender in 1988; and as recently as 1999, No Family was reprinted in Tremendous Worlds, an anthology of Australian women’s drama from 1890 to the 1960s, edited by Susan Pfisterer and published by Currency Press. Perhaps most surprising was the fleeting reappearance of the 1940s serial ‘The Thorny Rose’ in the Newcastle Herald in 1992, following a passing reference in a play prepared for ABC Radio National by a freelance dramatist, Julia Britton.10
If most of these were, in publishing terms, opportunistic, they also suggest areas of ongoing relevance in the writings of Miles Franklin. At least they have kept her name before the reading public. Meanwhile, a handful of titles have gone from strength to strength. In 1910 Miles withdrew My Brilliant Career from publication, and in her will required that it remain out of print for ten years after her death, probably to protect sales of the posthumous titles. Since 1965, it has been continuously in print, sometimes in tandem with My Career Goes Bung; in 2007 it appeared in Penguin Classics, with an introduction by Sandra M. Gilbert, and an annotated edition was published in Canada. Similarly, Childhood at Brindabella has been reissued every decade since it first appeared in 1963, most recently in 2003 by Sydney publisher Richmond. Angus & Robertson also published All That Swagger four times across the period.11
The obvious failure to carry over was Brent. Brent’s world was irrelevant to the feminist version of Miles, and of little interest otherwise. To date only two titles have been reissued since the 1950s, both in the 1980s — Up the Country in 1984, and Cockatoos in 1989.
In retrospect, 1981 was an annus mirabilis in the afterlife of Miles Franklin, with related literary scholarship dating back to the 1970s appearing in print. Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles at Home, a study of Australian women writers from the 1920s to the 1940s, allotted Miles ‘A Chapter of Her Own’; and Verna Coleman examined her American years in a sound monograph, Miles Franklin in America: Her (Unknown) Brilliant Career. Since then, a boom in biography, including collective biography, has been significant for the maintenance of Miles’s name, with more and more of her mentors and congenials restored to the cultural mainstream, often with extensive reference to Miles and her papers.12
Despite changing critical values, there was a surge of interest in the life and work of Miles Franklin in the last quarter of the twentieth century that survived into the twenty-first. There has been an ongoing sense that somehow Miles still matters. As more women have entered the public sphere and taken on a larger role in the cultural industries, not only as readers and writers but also as publishers and curators, Miles has become the all-purpose Australian girl, still brilliant a century on. Important new primary sources have also become widely available. In the early 1980s the late Dorothy A. Hayes succeeded in transcribing Miles’s daily diary entries for the years 1926–36 from her obscure shorthand; and much of the new information regarding Brent of Bin Bin has been drawn from Blackwood’s Brent of Bin Bin publishing file and the Berkelouw manuscript collection, both acquired by the State Library of New South Wales in the 1990s.13
The centenary of Federation in 2001 was to prove a second high point in Miles’s afterlife. She was among those listed as a ‘national achiever’, along with Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson; and My Brilliant Career was nominated as one of the books ‘that tell us who we are and what Australia is’.14
‘If ever a soul should go marching on, it is Miles Franklin’s. It must, and it will,’ wrote Rex Ingamells in the Bread and Cheese Club tribute organised by J. K. Moir. It has. Some people assume she (or maybe he) is still alive. Yet just as writers’ reputations often languish after death until rediscovered by a new generation — aided and abetted by literary scholarship — so it is inevitable that reputations will fluctuate over time. In Miles’s case there have always been detractors of her work, and from time to time her personality has rubbed people up the wrong way. In the 1990s there was also controversy over the Miles Franklin Award, most notably the so-called Demidenko affair in 1995, when the winner misrepresented her identity, and another writer, Frank Moorhouse, charged that his work had been wrongly excluded in 1994.15
The long view is still in the making. Her most recently reprinted book is My Brilliant Career, which remains the only one to be adapted for film, despite the popularity of historical drama in recent decades. Many of the issues with which she engaged in her work have either lost their appeal — All That Swagger became dated and has disappeared since 1990, despite its filmic possibilities — or have yet to be taken up in a systematic way by literary critics and others, as in the case of her liberalism and environmentalism, and her attitudes to Empire and race. Meanwhile, many readers find it increasingly difficult to understand why Sybylla Melvyn chose not to marry Harry Beecham but to have a career instead. Perhaps most have found the contrast between her creator’s public and private selves puzzling. But in fact it is these mysteries that have elevated both My Brilliant Career and Miles Franklin above the ordinary. Had My Brilliant Career ended conventionally with a happy marriage, it would have all the more quickly become a period piece; and had Miles Franklin not created Brent of Bin Bin and hidden her rather extravagant hopes for the future of Australian literature, she may have remained a minor writer in the histories.
As more is known of Miles’s life and work, the basis of the paradoxical quality of her creativity is becoming clearer. With limited resources when young, and only My Brilliant Career as a bargaining chip with publishers later, she was always on the defensive, creatively speaking; and there were no emeritus writer awards in her day to assuage her mounting sense of failure towards the end. Friends such as Katharine Susannah Prichard tried to reassure her; but few if any really understood the contradictions that caused her unhappiness, and in later life sometimes led to harsh judgements of younger and apparently more successful colleagues.16
David Martin, with the insight of an outsider, probably came nearest when he wrote at the time of Miles’s death that her position was a tragic one, though there was an optimistic driving force in her work: ‘Her wit, insight and genius alienated her from her own class, at the same time as her outlook in many ways bound her to it. Both in time and place she was caught in a contradiction from which she had never quite the strength to escape.’17
Thirty years later, in his autobiography My Strange Friend, he reflected on her work:
In the best of her Miles Franklin novels appear women who, as artists or reformers, fight to break free of their background, but the struggle is broken-backed, affection hems it in. These women fail because they are too close to their roots, which are sunk in the soil of the bush where the battle cannot be waged and won. It is a collective and national dilemma, twice sad because the afflicted do not know their affliction.18
To represent the psychological dynamic in another way, women who wish for independence and employment must break into male citadels, which is never an easy or simple thing to do; and the effort has consequences for the individual who tries. As expressed by the philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff in The Sex of Knowing, such a woman is ‘caught up in a network of representations of the self, of empowerment and inhibitions, which weigh heavily on thought’. And that weight is surely why Miles Franklin seemed ‘as paradoxical as a platypus’, as P. R. Stephensen put it, and the reason too for what she once confessed was her ‘far-flung deviousness’.19
If that rings true, it is also true that the old bush culture with its stress on character and self-reliance and a sense of humour stood her in good stead; and for the most part her background and the networks created by first-wave feminism sufficed to carry her through to something approximating the literary career she always aspired to. Though in personal terms the price was high — afte
r her sister Linda’s death, she never knew real intimacy and she was seldom happy or content — the richness of her experiences along the way placed her at the forefront of aspiration and achievement among Australian girls of the day, and her example is still encouraging.
Ultimately, and rightly so, it is through her own words that we can best recapture the bright intelligence and irrepressible spirit of Miles Franklin. Though her private life was troubled, and her inner conflicts remained forever unresolved, she persevered and her optimism still shines, if variably, through her books and topical writings, and in her letters and diaries.
Miles effectively ensured her afterlife with her two great bequests: the 124 volumes of personal papers and forty-one volumes of literary manuscripts left to the State Library of New South Wales (recently supplemented by the Berkelouw and Blackwood purchases) and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. These bequests ensure her continuing participation in Australian life and culture. The papers are far from exhausted; and the prize now has the standing of an antipodean Booker or Pulitzer. Which bits of her own writing will appeal at any given time is a crystal ball issue, but it seems probable that as the historical significance of her life is more widely appreciated, so too will be her work. Hopefully more of it will be published too. As the Fulbright scholar Bruce Sutherland recognised in his last letter to her — dated 3 September 1954, so she may just have seen it — she was ‘a vital spark’.20