Leslie’s mother struggled to put food on the table. At one stage she managed by renting a ‘run shop’. The family lived in the back while she flew into the shop when the bell rang to serve those who needed to ‘run to the shop’ for daily necessities. She never had a home of her own. All Leslie’s brothers had to work as soon as they were able. They were just teenagers. Then World War I broke out and they enlisted. One was only sixteen. Averil, the only girl, had to leave school at thirteen so she could look after the unexpected baby Leslie.
It was a sacrifice my father spent the rest of his life trying to repay.
3
Mod and Tin Pot Alley
Leslie and Coralie went to the same secondary school, ‘Mod’, as Perth Modern School was affectionately known. Coralie explained:
It was then a very up-to-date secondary school to which you had to win an entrance by scholarship […] which I did and Leslie did too. But he was two years ahead of me all through our secondary education at this co-ed school and he was not one of the senior boys with whom I fell in love. I was absolutely unaware of his existence and he was with mine.
Perth Modern School is still Western Australia’s only fully academically selective co-educational high school. As it was in my parents’ day, the entrance process is by exam, now managed by the GAT (gifted and talented) state education program. In its history of over a hundred years the school has produced a galaxy of alumni who have made their names in the world, including Labor prime minister Bob Hawke and two senior Liberals: leader of the opposition Billy Snedden and Paul Hasluck, who later became governor-general.
Leslie described it as ‘a good school that could have been better’. Whatever the school’s failings, a number of his contemporaries made significant contributions in fields as varied as ornithology, biochemistry and agricultural science. He counted among his high school friends three who became professors, and one vice-chancellor. Nugget Coombs, his lifelong buddy, was also a student at Mod and went on to become governor of the Commonwealth and Reserve banks and economic advisor to successive prime ministers. More importantly, as far as my father was concerned, Nugget involved himself in cultural projects and was committed to the advancement of Indigenous Australians when few in positions of influence took any interest.
When asked to contribute to the school magazine, The Sphinx, teenager Leslie prophetically came up with a piece titled ‘How to Write a Book’. He was beginning to excel at manipulating the language just as Coralie was, though she put her efforts into poetry. In her final year she co-edited The Sphinx and in her Leaving exam was awarded the English and history exhibition at the University of Western Australia. The scholarship paid for books and expenses and her parents were able to keep her at home, which meant she could do her degree as a full-time student.
On the other hand, Leslie, after finishing school – the first among his siblings to have had that opportunity – would have loved to spend all day at the university indulging his new passions for literature, philosophy, economics and the history of fine arts. But he had to earn a living while he studied. He began his career as a cadet journalist on The West Australian, Perth’s only daily paper, and worked his way up to being its art and drama critic. It took him five years as a part-time student and full-time journalist to complete his degree.
From the challenges of his own experience Leslie formed the view that being a full-time student is an absolute luxury. When my sister and I began our university studies, our father made it clear to us that if we enjoyed that privilege and flunked our exams, we would be reduced to part-time study. The rule was invoked. For Megan it was after her second year at Sydney University when she had been diverted from her studies, partly by her love life but mainly by her devotion to the student newspaper Honi Soit (the following year she became a cadet journalist on The Sydney Morning Herald). For me it was after my first year at New England University at which I had – according to my father – ‘majored in extra-curricular activities’. I was brought home to continue my studies under the parental eye and roof.
It was likely, if not inevitable, that Coralie Clarke and Leslie Rees would meet at UWA because in the 1920s very few people, particularly women, had the benefit of a university education. The university had not long been established and was still in temporary premises, which Coralie described as ‘a collection of tin sheds quite close to the city, in Irwin Street, Perth’. There were only about three hundred students in all. To them it was known as Tin Pot Alley. Both Coralie and Leslie were on the Guild of Undergraduates, which was comprised mostly of men. Interestingly – perhaps typically – my mother and father each recorded quite different accounts of how they met.
No doubt because Leslie was a working journalist, after three years he was appointed honorary editor of the university journal, a prospect he embraced with enthusiasm. The Black Swan was a substantial hard-backed publication that came out three times a year containing poetry, stories, sketches and articles of general interest.
He wrote about meeting Coralie in the chapter of his autobiography entitled ‘Black Swan, Blonde Editress and a New Prospect’:
Coralie Clarke was appointed as assistant editor without my knowledge. I hadn’t so far met her but did when I called a meeting of the new Black Swan staff. And in walked a blonde young woman of eighteen or so, with lively figure and an anticipatory smile, a broad brow and wide-set large greeny-grey eyes. I was a bit scared of her at first: she was a scholarship winner, so I’d heard, top of the State in English and History at Matriculation level. With her masses of curly hair and bright looks she was obviously a student personality.
My mother, in her oral history recorded for the National Library of Australia in 1968, described their meeting in a far less reverential tone:
Of course being interested in literature, it was only a short step to being interested in drama. I joined the Dramatic Society and in my second year was offered a part in a comedy, The Whole Town’s Talking, which we were putting on at the Assembly Hall, the only venue in Perth to stage an amateur play. I played the lead, Mary Westlake, my leading man Paul Hasluck, then a fellow student. Plays given by the University Dramatic Society were seriously reviewed in those days.
The critic from The West Australian, the major newspaper in Perth, was always sent along and usually wrote about three-quarters of a column analysing the play and performance in great detail. After the first night, the notice came out the next day and, what surprised and delighted me, I got a rave notice about my performance. I was just walking on air and could see myself with my name in lights on Shaftesbury Avenue in the West End. The following day I was at university in the gravel quadrangle and a young man stopped me and said hello. I didn’t know him, didn’t know his name, but he said, ‘I saw you in the play last night.’
I said ‘Oh well’ … After all a lot of people saw the play last night and I’d been having a great morning after being presented with flowers the night before. This young man looked at me rather critically and said, ‘Yes, I liked your performance. Did you like what I wrote about you in The West Australian?’
I’m afraid I dropped the brick of all time. ‘Did you write that notice?’ I questioned. ‘I thought a real critic wrote it.’
So that was how Leslie Rees and I met.
4
The Dawn of Women’s Rights
Coralie was born in 1908 – the very time when women were questioning their place in society, and their options. Suffrage had been achieved – in Australia at least – but would it in fact change anything? Would women be brave enough to step out of their gendered roles and expand their expectations? Would they still have to choose between marriage and children or being ‘an old maid’ with a career?
Women writers were exploring these issues in their stories. In the first year of the new century, Stella Miles Franklin’s first novel, ironically titled My Brilliant Career, presented the feisty Sybylla Melvyn grappling with ‘the
rubbishing conventionalities which are the curse of her sex’. Sybylla wanted to be a writer and on those grounds felt it imperative to turn down the hand of a man liberally endowed ‘with virile fascination’, even though he offered her, as part of the matrimonial package, a study and ‘a truckload of writing gear’.
The Lone Hand, a monthly illustrated journal set up in Sydney as a sister publication to The Bulletin, solicited stories, poetry, articles and illustrations from the public. My Morocco-bound volume of this remarkable journal is a compendium of all the issues for that year (published by Angus & Robertson in 1907 and inscribed inside the flyleaf in pencil: Exceedingly Scarce) and contains absolute treasures. Interleaved between full-page advertisements of items no longer imagined, stories by Henry Lawson and poems by Bernard O’Dowd and Hugh McCrae, ‘decorations’ by Hans Heysen, and Norman Lindsay’s ink drawings of maidens with bosoms carelessly exposed, is a thin sprinkling of contributions by women. Not only the stories and articles but the illustrations themselves hold the mirror up to the times and expose the way male contributors thought about women and how women envisaged themselves. Some items show women comfortable in their age-old domestic roles, but at least one writer, Grace Palotta (also an actress) explores ‘the new breed of Australian women’.
In her short story, ‘A Woman’s Way’, the heroine is described as ‘rich, lovely, with all the charm of woman and the brain of man’ though in the illustration she looks like Boadicea in evening dress. Rose is endowed with a generous inheritance (pounds rather than paper) and vows to turn away a line-up of suitors in favour of the Cause of Women. Despite this intention, she briefly lays aside her political activism to marry Otto, a de-titled Austrian prince who has fallen on hard times. She wins a seat in Parliament, but her success spells problems for their marriage as Otto finds her work personally ‘degrading’. (‘I want a wife, a mother, not a Member of Parliament.’) Rose presses on with her career but is miserable and lonely. When Otto is injured in a mine accident somewhere outback, Rose uses her newfound skills and authority to arrange medical assistance and rushes to his side. As his life hangs in the balance, in a plaintive voice he asks when she’ll be going back to her work in Parliament. She decides, at that moment, to give it all away and nurse her man back to health.
When I first read that story forty years ago, I found the ending pathetic, disappointing – Rose had caved in. Reading it now, I see Rose’s dilemma as prescient. By solving one problem, women have created another, which often involves agonising choices: choices that my mother had to make, that I’ve had to make and that my daughters are still confronting, too.
In the early twentieth century, females in Australia were a minority. In Western Australia there was an even greater imbalance, due to the gold rushes of the 1890s in Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie. This was how both my parents’ families came to be in the west. My grandmother Sylvia’s father had quit his newspaper job in Melbourne to try his luck on the goldfields, leaving his wife and six children without financial support. She used to tell me how, when a letter came from their father, her mother would shake it first to see if there was a sovereign or two inside to keep food on the table. My Rees grandfather also left his wife and five children with his parents, in Lebrina, Tasmania, and made his way to Western Australia perhaps with the same intention, though he managed to land a teaching job instead. Breadwinners from all over the country were deserting their dependants in the hope of making it rich. Most eventually brought their families over to settle, despite not ever getting within sniffing distance of a gold nugget.
However, minority status did not stop the groundswell of the women’s movement. The Women’s Service Guilds of Western Australia (WSG) grew into a powerful voice of advocacy with branches all over Perth, and one south in Albany. They called their journal The Dawn, inspired by Louisa Lawson’s feminist paper of the same name, which she had produced from 1888 to 1905 using her own printing press in Sydney. It had been the first Australian magazine to target women’s advancement, so the West Australian first-wavers probably thought it right and proper to inherit the title. In 1929 The Dawn (by implication: of women’s rights) became a monthly magazine, at first circulated only among members, but later expanded to a national and international readership.
Coralie had recently graduated and was looking for a full-time job as a journalist at the same time as the WSG was looking for someone with writing experience to be their full-time ‘editor’ – which meant being their writer, manager, distributor and publicist as well. Though she was conscious of the women’s movement and sympathised with its aims, Coralie was not an activist. She was more driven by the challenge of stretching her creative and literary muscles and, in the limited job market of Perth, this was the opportunity that presented itself. Her referee was Professor Walter Murdoch, under whom she had studied at UWA. In a letter to Coralie, he revealed that he was sending his reference with a note to the woman who would have the deciding voice. He added:
I hope you get the position since you seem to desire it. I have seen copies of the DAWN and must confess I have not been impressed.
But perhaps you could reform it.
And reform the paper she did. In her book about feminists of the first wave, Dianne Davidson described the contribution of Coralie Clarke’s time at the helm:
During her editorship, she injected some much needed polish into the layout and journalistic style of the Dawn, giving it a snappier and more professional look. She also concentrated more on informative articles and from the time she commenced working on the paper such articles gradually replaced much of the inspirational material so prominent in the 1920s.
As editor, Coralie made sure The Dawn was neither parochial in outlook nor dreary in content. She gave it a new subtitle: A monthly journal containing news of progressive movements effecting social welfare in the Australian Commonwealth and other countries.
Regular features were introduced: ‘Women from Other Lands’, ‘Social Welfare and Political Topics’, ‘Our Gallery of Women’, and ‘Reports from Abroad’. There was plenty of stimulating material for the readership – mostly middle-class educated women who were engaged in political or social reforms or were sympathetic to their aims. Coralie’s initiatives widened the scope and circulation of the journal.
Her time on The Dawn sowed the seeds of a lifelong belief in equality for women. The term ‘feminism’ was not widely used but its implications were born, its foundations laid. Coralie was not a tub-thumper, but she incorporated the ideals of the women’s movement into the way she lived her life.
As a young adult cut off from the rest of the world in the isolated small city of Perth, my mother had no way of knowing that across the hemispheres in London, Virginia Woolf had just published A Room of One’s Own. Woolf argued that every woman writer should have economic independence and a room of her own – preferably with a lockable door – and then she would have the freedom and time to give voice and shape to her ideas. Given these conditions, female writers would at least equal, if not eclipse, the output of their male rivals in both quality and quantity.
At twenty-one years of age, Coralie was desperate to achieve financial independence. She longed to extend her creative output and to forge ahead with the career of her choice. At that stage of her life she was not interested in marriage. However, her resolve would be seriously challenged when she was drawn not to a lapsed royal but to a drama critic – one who shared her dreams of becoming a successful writer.
~
I first wrote about Coralie Clarke editing The Dawn in the 1970s for a seminar at Macquarie University called ‘Women in History’. The second wave of feminism was raging in Australia and with a mother like mine it was inevitable I would be an ardent ‘women’s libber’. Little did I guess what I would discover decades later, buried in my paper inheritance: the carbon copy of a typed letter my mother had sent when working in London, a mere two or three years after her time on The Dawn. The lett
er was addressed to Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in Tavistock Square, London, from my parents’ digs in Randolph Gardens, and it was dated (inadequately) ‘Nov. 11’.
Dear Mrs Woolf
I am an Australian journalist, at present engaged on a series of interviews with outstanding women writers, and I should very much appreciate the privilege of a short talk with you sometime soon.
I admire your work very much, and the ideas expressed in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ interest me particularly.
Hoping for the pleasure and honour of meeting you,
Yours very truly,
Coralie Clarke Rees B.A.
Coralie had folded the copy of the letter in half and on the back and for six accompanying pages, she wrote notes in ink on what she had gleaned from reading A Room of One’s Own. She was obviously lit up with what she had found in Woolf’s text, the arguments and the choice quotations from literature that showed how women had been publicly demeaned over the centuries and kept in society’s lowliest ranks. These notes were her preparation for the interview she hoped would eventuate and the article she would write. She also picked up some salient details about Woolf herself, helpful background for a conversation. Coralie noted that Virginia ‘apparently likes good food and wine and cigarettes’. On the challenges of Modernist poetry Woolf had said ‘one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines’. (She obviously preferred a good rhyming couplet.) Coralie also made a point of writing down that Virginia received an unexpected legacy from an aunt at the same time as she got the vote ‘but she regarded the vote as more important’.
My mother always displayed an unyielding belief in women’s innate strength and limitless potential. And there is no doubt she was adamant about the basic doctrine: equality. Equality of personal worth, of opportunity, equality in relationship, in responsibility. When she took my father’s name on marriage, she insisted that he took hers. They both became ‘Clarke Rees’, though this did not last. As my father once explained, when they collaborated, there were too many names to fit on the spine of a book. My mother was a realist. She appreciated the males in her circle despite her observation: ‘Men come and go in your life – your women friends are always there for you.’ Neither was she cynical about marriage: she valued hers but not in a sentimental way. She once described her relationship with my father as ‘Two OPs warring for supremacy’ and warned that, since my chosen mate was also an OP (outstanding personality), I might expect the same. She also cautioned us: ‘You don’t get it all in one package – neither does your partner.’
A Paper Inheritance Page 3