When the Lyrebird Calls

by Kim Kane

Madeleine gazed at the ring on her finger, the little hands clasped strong in solidarity.

  ‘Emily Wilding Davison, an Englishwoman, ran in front of the King’s horse at a derby carrying flags in these very colours under her coat, you know,’ said Mum Crum. ‘She ran in front of a horse . . . and died for the vote.’ Mum Crum looked thoughtful. ‘We didn’t have to be so extreme here, as we got the vote sooner. Maybe that’s why there’s still so much for us to improve.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Madeleine.

  ‘As my mother used to say, everyone thought Australian women got the vote early because we were a young country with our own rules, like New Zealand, which just got in before us – but really it was messier than that. In Western Australia, men gave women the vote only when they thought women were more likely to keep them in power. And we weren’t so quick anyway – the great majority of Aboriginal people couldn’t vote in Australian elections until the sixties. Criminal.’

  Madeleine studied the cardboard box; it was shallower than it should have been. She peered more closely, and then lifted up a thin board that had been dividing the top of the box from the bottom. Beneath lay thirty little compartments, filled with small metal letters and punctuation marks on long pins, all jumbled up like a box of assorted chocolates.

  ‘Letterpress blocks!’ said Madeleine. ‘From the printer!’

  ‘So they are, clever girl,’ said Mum Crum. ‘Aren’t they terrific?’

  It felt so strange but also glorious, sharing this with her grandmother. Like trading lunches over a century.

  ‘Didn’t your mother have other sisters?’ Madeleine asked.

  ‘Two – Imogen and Beatrice. Beatrice married an earl and went to live in England. That’s the fancy side of the family. Imogen was a nurse in World War One, and then came home and married. Mummy always said she baked a mean teacake.’

  Madeleine smiled. ‘And what about Elfriede?’ she said, although she was almost too scared to ask. ‘Was there an Elfriede in the family?’

  ‘Not in the family, darling, but it is the name of this cottage. How did you know to ask that?’

  Madeleine frowned. ‘But this is Elf Cottage.’

  ‘Elf-riede. Go and have a look at the front – I just haven’t finished painting the name yet. We always called it Elf Cottage as kids too. There was some sort of kerfuffle about it and Mummy never used its full name. Ahh, there is so much to do! Let’s borrow a ladder later today and finish painting outside.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Madeleine wondering what on earth that meant. Had Mr Williamson named the cottage after Elfriede? Out of sentimentality? Had Elfriede come back? She’d probably never know.

  Madeleine looked at herself in the small mirror above the fireplace. ‘I’m going to have a shower before we start painting. I feel grotty.’ One hundred years’ worth of dust was sitting in her pores.

  Mum Crum hugged Madeleine and rubbed her arm. ‘Feel those muscles! I do love a strong, capable body.’ She ran her fingers up Madeleine’s back and through her hair, and then smiled. ‘Your hair’s starting to get a curl to it. My curls only kicked in at fourteen, and now look at them!’

  Mum Crum left the room, her frizzy Maggi Noodle ponytail puffing out behind her.

  After her shower, Madeleine sat on the couch in the sitting room with the box of letters on her lap and her laptop by her side. She ran the sharp alphabet pins through her fingers. Gert and Aunt Hen would never have guessed just how easy publishing would become – proper books printed out just one copy at a time; endless blogs about endless subjects and news sites online; everything broadcast on social media and shot all over the world. Anyone could do it. Even a schoolgirl like Tavi Gevinson.

  Madeleine lined some of the letters up on a cushion.

  Anyone could have a voice.

  The thing about effecting change, thought Madeleine, was that you got used to being able to achieve some things by working hard – hitting the middle stump in cricket once you’d bowled enough balls, for example. Only then you realised that there were also things you could never change.

  You might never manage to make your parents drink each other in over the tops of their teacups; never get them to kiss in the shadows of a hidden hollow, or even get them to simply look at each other nicely and say hello. And if you got jammed in the past, you mightn’t always be able to get back, no matter how many clairvoyants were around.

  But there were things you could change: little changes, little bits at a time. Like Aunt Hen and her magazine. Or Percy and his whistle. As Mum Crum had said, you always had a choice, and suddenly Madeleine could see that this choice had never been so easy.

  Madeleine wouldn’t be able to control the whole world, but there were things of her own that she could change. And she would.

  Madeleine pulled out her laptop and started an email to Nandi.

  Would you like to start a blog? A sports blog for girls . . . Wriggly Girls? We can ask questions like: Why isn’t Ellyse Perry a household name; who else plays two sports at a world-class level? How can we get more women’s sport on TV? How can we ever be any good if we have to spend all our practice time working at Bunnings to pay the gas bill? I’m going to start writing my first post now! If you join me, we’ll finally have an actual use for all those Wisden cricket stats we’ve memorised.

  She hit ‘send’, put down her laptop and grinned. Behind her, the juicer whizzed – solid, spinachy, certain. She was back with Mum Crum, and somehow she’d muddle through.

  Ninety-five per cent of change was in the actual doing. Madeleine would not just be a gumnut on the sea; she’d have her shot at doing something, changing something, something of her own.

  With Nandi.

  And all from the couch.

  The acknowledgements for my books always seem to run almost as long as the novels themselves, but there is a team behind any work, particularly an historical one. With love and thanks to the following people:

  • Lisa Gorton, Elizabeth Glickfeld, Alice Kelly, Christine Hinwood, Andrew McDonald, Rebecca Lim and Fiona Wood, who read the full manuscript at various stages and provided encouragement and astute feedback.

  • Sofie Laguna, who, despite her work and parenting commitments, read the novel quickly and provided such a generous and utterly joyful pull-quote.

  • Clare Renner, Olga Lorenzo and my co-students at RMIT, who provided feedback on sections of the novel in the very early days.

  • Antoni Jach and his wonderful Master Class II, which gave me confidence at the very time I was bogged in twins and had abandoned all hope.

  • The Australia Council for the Arts, and Readings Foundation – thank you for your support as I wrote this.

  • Pippa Masson, Fiona Inglis, Marie Campbell and also Bella Pearson, who loved the idea for this story from the outset and made me think it could work.

  • Elise Jones, Eva Mills and Hilary Reynolds at Allen & Unwin, for the extraordinary attention you give, for the complete investment you have and for your willingness to be brutal with a red pen. There is no gilding, and I am always exceptionally grateful for your professionalism, intelligence and honesty.

  The decision to write an Aboriginal character, particularly a nineteenth-century Aboriginal male, was not a decision I took lightly, but in a novel that deals with suffrage I believed, and still believe, the greater error would have been to exclude the Aboriginal part of the suffrage narrative. In making that decision, I am exceptionally grateful for the help I have had from a number of people, including:

  • Aunty Joy Murphy and the Wandoon Estate Aboriginal Corporation, for their permission to reference cultural material in the story – and for so generously taking the time to consider this work.

  • Lisa Fuller, for her specific advice on the novel, which was always smart, always nuanced, and for being so very giving with her time.

  • Yolanda Walker-Finette and her mum, Esmai Manahan, for their speedy, ever-patient and thoughtful answers to my questions.

  • Corand
errk, where I was privileged to attend the performance of the La Mama play Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country by Giordano Nanni and Andrea James on country on a perfect February evening in 2016.

  • Dr Felicity Jensz, who introduced me to Coranderrk and suggested that with its history of political agitation, it might just be the perfect place for the character of Percy to have been raised.

  In addition, thanks to the following professionals who also gave their time so generously to assist with this novel. Any mistakes are mine. Thanks to:

  • Dr Andrew Hurley and Dr Shelley Marshall for their help with some historical fact-finding.

  • My sister-in-law, Eva Lüers, for help with the German.

  • The Gisborne Mount Macedon Historical Society Inc.

  • Mrs Janet Davies and the PLC Melbourne Archive; your assistance is gratefully acknowledged.

  • Gabrielle Wang and Rebecca Lim, together with the Museum of Chinese Australian History in Melbourne, for their illuminating discussions and information on Chinese early settlement in Australia.

  • Dominic and Marie Romeo, authors of The Constant Renovators, for their help on historical homes in the Mount Macedon area.

  • The State Library of Victoria, not only for giving me access to its collection but also for advice on the binding of periodicals and small presses.

  • Mark Bau, for his expertise on Victorian trains and railway timetables.

  • Celine Kiernan, for her help with Cook’s Irish slang.

  • Ruby Alpitsis and Gabriel Chan, who have set the soundtrack to this novel and, together with Annabel Orr, provided good counsel and medical information.

  • Nandi Segbedzi, for her specific help on the Nandi character in this novel, and darling Gilbert, just because.

  • Meg Dalling, with whom I first started thinking about women’s suffrage and its implications for democracy as we undertook our honours legal thesis; and all the other strong women with whom we went through university, bloody feminists all.

  This novel has taken so long to write, and I undertook a considerable amount of research over the years as I tried to work out what the story would be. This is in no way a conclusive bibliography, but I would like to acknowledge the following works that have informed this novel and might be of interest to those readers seeking further information:

  • Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle?, by Audrey Oldfield, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

  • Utopia Girls: How Women Won the Vote, a documentary directed by Jasmin Tarasin, produced by Lucy McClaren and Alex West, written by Dr Clare Wright and Alex West, Renegade Films, 2011.

  • Coranderrk website, coranderrk.com.

  • Coranderrk, We Will Show the Country, by Giordano Nanni and Andrea James, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2013.

  • Minutes of Evidence website, www.minutesofevidence.com.au, for further information on Coranderrk.

  • ‘Guidelines for the Ethical Publishing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Authors and Research from Those Communities’, Aboriginal Studies Press, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), 2015, aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/docs/asp/ethical-publishing-guidelines.pdf.

  • AIATSIS’s ‘My Voice for My Country’ online exhibition, aiatsis.gov.au/myvoicemycountry – for a history of Indigenous suffrage in Australia.

  • AustralianElectoralCommissionwebsite,www.aec.gov.au–© Australian Electoral Commission 2016, for some useful resources and background on suffrage.

  • The Constitution: The Document that Created the Nation, by Scott Brodie, Trocadero Publishing, 2011.

  • ‘Marvellous Mimic’ clip from David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds series, www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Superb_Lyrebird#p004hgk8, for a brief introduction to the wonderful performances of the appropriately named superb lyrebird.

  To my grandmother, Nen, who is a wonderful storyteller and who taught me that the most important gift you can give a child to help them cope with life’s curveballs is a sense of humour.

  To my mum, who had Joyce Stevens’s ‘Because We’re Women’ on a poster next to the stove and who has provided meals, kid-sitting and historical feedback on this novel. And to my dad, who tolerated it.

  To Peter, Ben, Madeleine, George and Edgar, who, to be perfectly frank, prevented me from writing this novel for so long, but in the end did everything they could to support me. With love and thanks.

  Finally, as a writer, I am first and foremost a reader. I would therefore like to acknowledge the children’s writers who have come before me, particularly Ruth Park, whose extraordinary novel Playing Beatie Bow continues to haunt readers today. This work, together with a number of other time-slip novels, gave me a love of history and my childhood a feeling of infinite possibility.

  Kim Kane was born in London in a bed bequeathed by Wordsworth for ‘. . . a writer, a dancer or a poet’. Despite this auspicious beginning, she went on to practise law. Her picture book Family Forest was shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Awards, and The Vegetable Ark and Esther’s Rainbow were both CBCA Notable Books. Her junior fiction novel Pip: The Story of Olive won the Barbara Ramsden Award and was shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) and Speech Pathology Australia Book of the Year Awards. Kim’s young adult thriller Cry Blue Murder, co-written with Marion Roberts, was shortlisted for the Inky Awards and the Davitt Awards and was highly commended in the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. She has also written a junior fiction series called Ginger Green, Play Date Queen. Kim lives with her family in Melbourne. She writes whenever and wherever she can.