Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  Piano lessons begun at Brindabella continued at Thornford, and in June 1894 Stella Franklin gained an impressive 95 per cent for theory in the Trinity College (London) examinations conducted in Goulburn Town Hall, though she attained only a bare pass from the Sydney College of Music in early 1896. It may be significant that whereas in 1894 Miles sat as a pupil of Percy Hollis, a professional music teacher in Goulburn, in 1896 she was entered by Miss Gillespie. (In Cockatoos, a similarly humiliating result for Ignez Milford is explained by the alteration of her mark by a rival teacher.) In later life, Miles would recall that her great ambition when young was to become a singer, and the stage had had its appeal too.21

  There was plenty to stimulate those dreams in 1890s Goulburn. The organ music at the cathedrals was inspiring, and the Liedertafel’s concerts were of a good standard under Percy Hollis. Moreover, Goulburn was a convenient stopover on the main Sydney–Melbourne rail route for entertainers of all stripes, and in the later 1890s the young folk from Thornford would have seen some of them, as did those portrayed in Cockatoos. However — and this would be elaborated in the suffrage novel Some Everyday Folk and Dawn — in real life acting was beyond the pale for respectable girls. Even a musical career was an impossible dream, as lamented in Cockatoos and elsewhere.22

  Yet, as Stella really knew, the very concept of a career was outside the frame for most girls of the period, especially ordinary country girls: brilliant careers were the preserve of men. What really lay ahead was marriage. As a recent study of the construction of girlhood in English fiction suggests, a young girl’s consciousness of growing up was differently shaped from that of boys, not by fear of failure or mortality but by the prospect of marriage. The lesson from literature was that the successful girl would internalise and transcend the contradictions involved in learning ‘womanly conduct’ — between girlish freedom and marital constraints — and fit into a place ‘already prepared for her’. The contradictions were even more marked for Australian girls, reared in greater freedom, and then caught in the contracting economy and demographics of the 1890s.23

  Since Stella Franklin did so well at school, she should surely have gone on to higher studies, as Charles Blyth hoped she would. Instead she became a farm hand.

  How had it come to this? The answer is to be found in an austere entry dated ‘Feb. 95’ in Susannah Franklin’s notebook: ‘got separator’. This means John Franklin had become a dairyman. His dream of livestock trading was over. What is more, financial records show that he had to borrow to purchase the separator. But it promised cream for sale, probably to the recently established Thornford Butter Factory, and a small regular income of about fifteen shillings a week — and, since cows must be brought in, fed and milked twice daily for most of the year, it meant an unremitting regimen for his family, made worse by the extended drought of the mid-1890s. Under the circumstances there was not the slightest chance of further education for the eldest of his six children, even if it had been contemplated.24

  A year later John Franklin went into voluntary bankruptcy. On 25 March 1896 a notice appeared on the gate leading to ‘Stillwater’ announcing that all the farm and household equipment (including the separator) would be sold by public auction on site the following week. The final date of sequestration was 19 August 1896, and it was not until 24 August 1897 that John Franklin obtained a certificate of release.25

  Many small selectors failed in the terrible slump of the 1890s, but the humiliation for Susannah would have been intense. Her family rallied, providing neighbours with the means to purchase and return household goods, and John’s brother George took over the lease and paid the rent on the land. So despite everything the family stayed put and had a roof over its head, with a few cows, hens and a garden, but it was the end of John Franklin as a landholder.26 Aged forty-eight, he became a day labourer. At the end of that terrible year, he was working by the week on fencing at ‘Longfield’, the Baxter property next door. The following year he was hunting for gold reefs at Brindabella.27

  It was from her father that Miles Franklin imbibed political, as well as religious and poetical, values. The contempt for ‘spouters’ (politicians) noted by Blyth in her letters to him, and the view expressed in My Brilliant Career that ‘there should be a law’ to prevent poverty came directly from her father’s radical political circles in Goulburn and the pages of the Penny Post. The Post was an ardent supporter of Henry George, the American advocate of a single tax on land as the solution to the then highly conspicuous problem of poverty and wealth. As well, in 1894 John Franklin hosted election meetings at Bangalore for his local member of parliament, E. W. O’Sullivan, who advocated protection of local industries, state investment in public works, and votes for women.28

  From Susannah Franklin’s point of view, the end of her eldest’s schooling was a godsend. With five younger children and a herd of cows to milk by hand, the work was endless. Susannah Franklin was not unsupportive of her clever daughter, but inevitably the demands of home and husband were draining.

  My Brilliant Career reproduces and elaborates on some of the domestic conflicts, and others are depicted in Cockatoos, where the capable but unhappy Dot Saunders cannot stand young Ignez’s constant thumping on the piano, and an irretrievable clash occurs between Dot and the younger Freda, who aspires to be a writer. Like Stella Franklin, neither Ignez or Freda showed any sign of settling down in the traditional way; and like her, both Sybylla and Ignez rejected entirely eligible suitors.29

  Apparently an effort was made to get Stella Franklin into teaching around this time. In June 1896 glowing testimonials as to her suitability were written by the Reverend Williams and E. W. O’Sullivan, and a notification allowing her to sit for a competitive examination for pupil-teachers in Goulburn in July, despite being over the age limit of sixteen, survives in her papers. No record survives of the outcome, but subsequent events suggest she did sit the exam and passed.30

  Stuck at ‘Stillwater’ her education was not leading anywhere, and no Svengali appeared to liberate her musical talents. But she could write. Miss Gillespie had noticed it: ‘She’s very good at compositions,’ she told her teacher friend Eliza Kellett, with whom she shared weekends in Goulburn. ‘I’ve been encouraging her to write stories. I think she has quite a talent for it.’ Just as the young Olive Schreiner was drafting stories in the remote Eastern Cape Colony in the 1870s with only local libraries and a few town friends to rely on, so twenty years later on another edge of the Empire, with the help of Miss Gillespie and the cultural resources of 1890s Goulburn, Stella Miles Franklin tentatively embarked on a literary career.31

  Various dates have been given to mark its beginning, not least by Miles Franklin herself. Sometimes, like Sybylla, she said she began writing aged thirteen; that is, in 1892–93. Elsewhere she claimed she was writing about ‘lords and ladies’ even earlier, aged twelve, and that she won a prize for an essay on punctuality at that age. As she had a good memory, this may well be true. The essay on punctuality does not survive in her papers, but she certainly won prizes for school essays around then. However, sustained literary work appears to date from 1895–96, when she was sixteen. My Brilliant Career was not begun until 20 September 1898, when she was eighteen, though many people, including her young relative Ruby Bridle, thought it was started earlier, probably because by the time they knew her Miles had been understating her age for years.32

  Given that in many ways she was turning out to be an archetypal Australian girl of the period (who was thought to be bolder and freer than her British counterpart), it seems only right that like many other early women writers, Catherine Helen Spence and Mary Gilmore, for example, Miles Franklin made her debut in the newspaper press. Her report on the Thornford School picnic in the Penny Post on 26 March 1896 was a good start, even if, when ex-journalist Charles Blyth caught up with it, he had kindly advice to offer on the overuse of linking words such as ‘after’, for example. (Miles used it six times in the article.)33

  Nothing furth
er seems to have appeared until 1901, though over time her output of topical writings would be quite substantial. Indeed, from 1896 until at least the 1920s, a career in journalism was always a possibility, even as a supplement to an always meagre income; and Miles’s experience in the genre is highly relevant to her approach to literature. But the scope for a woman to succeed in journalism was limited, and it was to literature that she aspired.34

  The discipline of reportage is not evident in three early manuscripts: ‘A Pair of New Chums’, dated 5 May 1896; ‘For Sale to the Highest Bidder’, dated 8 June 1896; and ‘Within a Footstep of the Goal; An Australian Story’, dated August 1896. The latter two are signed with the ornate and unrevealing but truthful ‘S. M. S. Miles Franklin’, the first recorded use of the name Miles. None attained publication, and the full text survives for only one, an unsigned manuscript of ‘A Pair of New Chums’, an ‘Australian tale’ written for the Amykos short story competition in mid-1896 that won her a book prize. It was, she later recalled, her first attempt at a short story, and one can see why the judges thought well of it. It takes two young men up the country for Christmas at Jinningningama Station in the year of the great Shearers’ Strike, and the priggish one receives his comeuppance on a camping trip arranged for that purpose. It is a conventional tale, but suitable as exotica, and has the bonus of mentioning Bin Bin Station — Bin Bin East and Bin Bin West are referred to in My Brilliant Career and the placename later served to locate Miles Franklin’s most successful pseudonym, ‘Brent of Bin Bin’. It also contains descriptive passages that read like an early version of All That Swagger. The address given on the back of the manuscript is ‘Miss Gillespie, Public School, Thornford, near Goulburn’.35

  ‘For Sale to the Highest Bidder’ is a total contrast. Set in the West End of London, it deals with the forced marriage of eighteen-year-old Desdemona Gawler to a wealthy bachelor aged seventy-three. The manuscript is annotated at page 77 ‘incomplete’ in the author’s hand, as if, perhaps, she was worn out by the time the heroine says no at the altar. More of a foretaste of later work is the also incomplete manuscript ‘Within a Footstep of the Goal’, dated August 1896 (that fatal month for the Franklin family when John Franklin was declared bankrupt). Here something more like experience is in evidence, in that it tells how an old-fashioned bush girl with a gift for love and service wins over the Sydney sophisticates with whom she has come to stay.

  A quickening correspondence between Stella Franklin and Charles Blyth in 1896 suggests that Stella had secretly written a tale or a novel, and sent it to Angus & Robertson, Sydney’s leading publisher, to no avail.36 Blyth had suspected as much, and was most sympathetic, ‘really sorry that after your brain labour, purchase secretly of stationery and burning of midnight oil, your work did not pass from manuscript into type’. But, he went on, she should persevere; many writers suffered such setbacks. One day she would take her place in Australian literature, he assured her.37

  From this, it seems clear that Miles Franklin had written her first novel well before June 1896. For a long time all that was known of this work was Penny Post editor Thomas J. Hebblewhite’s recollection of a manuscript Miss Gillespie once brought him to read, and the letter he wrote to its author after he had done so. As he recalled:

  I do not know how many years ago it is since Miss Gillespie, then in charge of the little public school at Thornford, came one Saturday morning into the office with a parcel of manuscript. She said one of her girl pupils had written it, and would I please look it over. It was a story of the London West End, conventional in character and treatment, but well put together for a bush girl in her early teens. I wrote to the young aspirant and pointed out kindly how she could not possibly of her own self know anything of high life in London, and encouraged her to write the things she knew best, the life she understood, and the scenes and people that were familiar to her.38

  In the letter of 8 September 1896, beginning ‘Dear Miss Franklin’, Hebblewhite advised the young writer to study the classics and pay attention to style, urging her to leave the unfamiliar world of lords and ladies behind and concentrate on ‘the soul and meaning of things which are at hand’. As examples of close observation, he recommended the New England sketches of American writer Miss Wilkins and ‘the marvellous rural pictures’ of Richard Jefferies, a British naturalist who died in 1887. ‘For those who can voice fittingly the life that lies about us there is always an appreciative audience,’ he sagely observed.39

  What, then, was this manuscript? Hebblewhite does not say, and Miles Franklin never did. However, a likely answer is not far to seek. Tucked away in the Franklin Papers, near the end of an otherwise chronological sequence of mostly unpublished manuscripts, is the fair copy in Stella Miles Franklin’s youthful hand of a substantial novel about ‘lords and ladies’. The novel is entitled ‘Lord Dunleve’s Ward’, by ‘S. M. S. F.’, and Miss Gillespie’s name is inscribed on the title page, with her Thornford address.40

  Written in lined notebooks bound into two volumes, ‘Lord Dunleve’s Ward’ is a major piece of juvenilia, well over 100,000 words in length. Lynn Milne, in a first study of the text, concludes that it almost certainly is the manuscript in question, and she suggests that although it is not all set in London’s West End, Hebblewhite’s advice with regard to style and construction fits it ‘like Cinderella’s glass slipper’. Hebblewhite thought ‘the writing [gave] evidence of literary ability, though naturally untrained and inclined to run into the diffusive’.41

  Whatever her literary prospects, Stella Franklin had already been overtaken by events. In the spring of 1896, she was returned to Talbingo. Uncle Gus Lampe met her at Cootamundra, and they picked up an aunt at Gundagai en route. What she did during those months is unknown; however, it has been claimed by Lois Adam, a granddaughter of Susannah’s cousin Emma Kinred of Tumut, that Stella fell in love with an (unnamed) young man, who became the basis of Harold Beecham, Sybylla’s rejected suitor in My Brilliant Career. Other sources indicate that he was a young cousin of Susannah Franklin, Herbert (Bertie) Wilkinson, of nearby ‘Yallowin’, and that he and his older brother Phillip probably served as models for Harold Beecham.42

  What happened next we do not know, but Susannah Franklin’s record of family events states that Stella went to Tumut for a visit over Christmas 1896, then on 8 January 1897, she was dropped into a career as a governess to the children of her Uncle George and Aunt Margaret Franklin, who were by then quite substantial landholders in the parish of Jeir, between Murrumbateman and the Murrumbidgee River. The work was intolerable. ‘My poor child,’ began Charles Blyth, as he attempted to pass on his own experience of teaching bush children and to reassure her that no experience was wasted, so long as she hung onto her literary aspirations. ‘Keep a diary,’ he suggested, and sent her Jane Eyre to read, which she enjoyed. Since her mother and several siblings came to stay in April, her living conditions could not have been as bad as those portrayed for Sybylla in My Brilliant Career and its film adaptation.43

  By mid-year she was back at Thornford. Evidently she had already sat a pupil-teacher exam: when Miss Gillespie took sick in mid-July, she requested that Stella be allowed to take over for a week, stating that she had passed an examination towards teacher qualification and had some teaching experience. The request was approved by an inspector, who noted that the school would not be closed, as Miss Gillespie had asked Miss Franklin, an ex-pupil and teacher, to take over her duties.44

  In Miles Franklin’s eighteenth year, she and her mother took a trip to Sydney for Susannah to see a doctor. During that trip, lasting about a fortnight, they attended a concert in Sydney Town Hall. The program survives in Stella’s scrapbook.

  She revisited Brindabella for the first time since the family’s departure in 1889. This time she found her cousin Don, her childhood tormentor, a charming caballero with whom she could easily hold her own. And then on 20 September 1898 she began to write another novel. Six months later, on 25 March 1899, it was done, and on 30
March 1899, accompanied by one of Miles Franklin’s most famous and oft-reproduced letters, headed ‘Bangalore, Goulburn, NSW’, the manuscript went off to Angus & Robertson in Sydney:

  Dear Sirs

  Herewith a yarn which I have written entitled ‘My Brilliant(?) Career’. I would take it very kindly if you would read it & state whether or not it is fit for publication.

  Nothing great has been attempted. Merely a few pictures of Australian life with a little of that mythical commodity love, thrown in for the benefit of young readers (always keeping in mind should there be readers of any age).

  There will be no mistakes in geography, scenery or climate as I write from fact not fancy. The heroine, who tells the story, is a study from life and illustrates the misery of being born out of one’s sphere.

  Awaiting reply

  Faithfully Yrs

  S. M. S. Miles Franklin45

  Purportedly written from ‘Possum Gully, near Goulburn, NSW’ by its heroine, Sybylla Penelope Melvyn, My Brilliant Career is addressed to ‘My dear fellow Australians’. It tells the story of the down-in-the-world selector’s daughter who prefers a career to marriage. To curb her rebellious spirit she is sent up country to stay at her maternal grandmother’s property, ‘Caddagat’. There she experiences a more cultured and sophisticated way of life, and meets a suitable marriage partner, the handsome, though taciturn, squatter Harold Beecham. But she cannot bring herself to marry him, though he makes every effort to allay her doubts and even endures a long secret engagement. Meanwhile, she is obliged to take up governessing with the M’Swat family at Barney’s Gap to help pay off family debt, a sobering experience. The story ends where it began, with Sybylla back at drought-stricken ‘Possum Gully’.

  The film of My Brilliant Career ends with Sybylla Melvyn leaning on a gate, staring into the distance, having posted her manuscript to publisher William Blackwood in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is not how the book ends, nor was 1899 the end of Stella Franklin’s life ‘near Goulburn’; but scriptwriter Eleanor Witcombe knew her trade and her author too, and the film’s finale tacitly acknowledges the book’s ultimate publication and success. In the book things are not so clear. Sybylla asks herself, ‘Why do I write?’ and she worries that she will not get a hearing because she is ‘only an unnecessary, little, bush commoner, only a — woman’. But, she reminds herself, she is also a proud Australian, so, with the great sun ‘sinking in the west, grinning and winking knowingly’, she concludes: ‘With much love and good wishes to all — Good night! Good-bye. AMEN.’46