by Jill Roe
To be helped by yet another famous writer, who was handsome and as yet unmarried, must have been tremendously exciting. A few days later, most likely at the Bulletin office, she met A. G. Stephens, who gave her a copy of his book, Oblation, signed also by artist Norman Lindsay, and a book of poems by Will Ogilvie entitled Fair Girls and Gray Horses. Of these men only Stephens was to prove a lasting friend. Norman Lindsay, especially, was too inclined to see Miles simply as an attractive bush girl, though to be fair, when My Brilliant Career appeared they had all welcomed a woman’s voice in the great project of shaping a national literary culture.52
Perhaps it was at this time that Miles first attended one of Rose Scott’s famous Friday soirées. As she remembered the occasion many years later, librarian Margaret Windeyer was co-opted to collect her from Mrs Wesche’s at Double Bay. Other delightful events included a picnic on the harbour with her father’s political associate E. W. O’Sullivan and his family, who were always hospitable to Miles and supportive, and the boxer Larry Foley, deemed an ideal man. She also met Rose Scott’s cousin, the library benefactor David Scott Mitchell, and heard Amy Castles sing in the Town Hall.53
The important outcome of her trip lay not with the publishers but in personal relations. She and Paterson were delighted with one another. She wished she had a recording of his voice, and he wished she were back in his flat to read his words and sing and play the piano to him, inviting her to visit again. They both had other motives, professional and literary, but a strong mutual attraction is obvious in the correspondence even now.54
In the draft of a letter (now filed at the end of her Lawson correspondence and difficult to decipher), she asks, ‘Dear Sir [Paterson], Have you been doing anything desperate lately?’ and goes on in playful mode: ‘I nearly married since my return. Was so sick of myself & everything about ink that I nearly gave in at last.’55
On 31 May 1902, Paterson left on an imperialistic assignment in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). Apparently he had suggested Miles might like to come too. He was probably just flirting with her but Miles found the prospect exciting. With no idea of what was really going on in the islands, she replied she would have loved to go, fantasising about dressing up as his valet and wondering whether he would be a good boss; but it was impossible. The surviving evidence says more about their literary than their emotional relationship. Paterson wanted her to collaborate with him on a sporting yarn that needed human interest, or, as expressed by George Robertson whose idea it was, some ‘blood and tears’. She, on the other hand, wanted Paterson to improve her poems, by adding ‘a little more grammar and rhythm’. Later they might do a dictionary together, she added.56
She knew that Paterson was off on another Pacific trip on 26 August, to Fiji. He had again invited her, adding that his sister could come too; but the ship’s manager had objected to ‘lugging two women around’, so neither of them could go, to Miles’s considerable disappointment. What actually passed between them, and exactly when, or even if, they got together before he left for Fiji, is undocumented. Whatever it was, their fling was over.57
Who dropped whom? Quite possibly it was Miles. Paterson’s sister Jessie, who had done her best to help the collaboration along, regretted it hadn’t come off, believing that the two could have rectified each other’s deficiencies, but there would always be trouble ‘if one is subordinate’. And did it come to a marriage proposal, as is often assumed? The evidence is inconclusive. Letters written at the time suggest that — at least in Miles’s mind — Paterson made advances. Her sister Linda, for example, wrote, ‘I always thought you might have him.’ Paterson’s feelings, on the other hand, are almost impossible to pin down. Sometimes he seemed puzzled by her and in general was less deeply involved. Plainly Miles did not know how to deal with him: he was ‘the most sophisticated man that ever attempted to woo me sexually,’ she later reflected. Charlie Graham, now engaged to Linda and surprised to be remembered when Miles was among her ‘society friends’, declined to help Miles ascertain (presumably from local sources, since Paterson grew up near Yass), what sort of man he really was, ‘if he be a cad or a man’, but said it was correct to have refused him. And when Miles confided in the Lawsons, back from London and living at Manly, their marriage in a fragile state, Bertha replied that she guessed the problem had been Paterson, and that she was thankful Miles had rejected him: ‘He did not want your love but your brains.’ In December, Miles repaid the £5 Paterson had lent her for her fare to Sydney; by which time he was engaged to be married to Alice Walker, a grazier’s daughter at Tenterfield.58
Miles Franklin now had entrée to the best circles, and in later life would recall ‘fairy days’ trotting around with Miss Scott. They went to Parliament House, where Miles sat on the front bench of the Legislative Council with eminent member Sir Normand MacLaurin, and to see Miss Louisa Macdonald, first principal of Women’s College at the University of Sydney. At Miss Scott’s soirées she met leading writers, such as E. J. Brady and Roderic Quinn, and the Minister of Justice, B. R. Wise. She also encountered significant women such as feminist Dr Mary Booth and Florence Earle Hooper, teacher and writer; maybe also Margaret Hodge and Harriet Newcomb, doughty Empire feminists who established Shirley, a progressive girls’ school just up the road from Miss Scott’s at Woollahra. People were ‘charmed with this gifted young lady’, and Scott wrote a six-stanza poem to her ‘Dear little girl’. The poem, and some of the great names, are to be seen in Miles’s ‘writing album’, an Edwardian autograph book given to her by Rose Scott (and known as ‘the waratah book’ in the 1940s).59
Back home she focused on ‘On the Outside Track’, the novel begun in late 1901, some time after copies of My Brilliant Career arrived. Its title may have been a tribute to Lawson, whose poem ‘The Outside Track’ appeared in 1896 — ‘For my heart’s away on the Outside Track/On the track of the steerage push’ (meaning the cheapest fare on a ship) — and to his 1900 short story collection entitled On the Track. Oddly enough, On the Track begins with a vignette of a ‘bad girl’, who had ‘the most glorious voice of all’ and was as spirited as Miles Franklin’s heroines of the period.60
Pinker received the manuscript of ‘On the Outside Track’ in late November 1902. In the covering letter Miles stressed that there should be ‘no “toning”, as I have taken great pains to express the [Boer] war fever as it actually was [Miles’s underlining]’ — a plausible selling point six months after the execution of ‘Breaker’ Morant in Pretoria — and that her own ‘peculiar view of things’ was grounded in colonial experience. No doubt it was, but it told against her when it came to publication, and the note she wrote directly to Blackwood requesting an advance in the event of acceptance so that she could get away somewhere ‘until the fuss about it dies down’ was premature. Blackwood promptly rejected the manuscript and when Pinker tried the newer English publishing house Duckworth, the reader — English man of letters and supporter of Henry Lawson, Edward Garnett — reported that although there had been a ‘dark brilliancy’ to My Brilliant Career, ‘On The Outside Track’ was ‘impossible’:
As it stands the MS is a very curious illustration of the fact that good matter, or good literary material, is one thing — & that good style is quite another thing. The style of ‘The Outside Track’ is very very bad . . . We feel, we know that with a little more sense & more modesty, [the authoress] could have made a good novel . . . But . . . she takes no pains with her expression; she is only desperately anxious to throw her thoughts & feelings at the reader’s head.61
Meanwhile, Miles had begun ‘The End of My Career’. It was written in just four weeks, and submitted in part to George Robertson even before that. It was to be taken, she told him, as a satirical skit on things ‘in jinril’ (an instance of Miles Franklin’s frequent use of now quaint-sounding colloquialisms) and as a ‘takeoff sequel’ to My Brilliant Career. She thought it would be a hoot to have two books come out at once, one (‘On the Outside Track’) by Miles Franklin and this one by Syby
lla Melvyn. Neither did. Indeed, neither was heard of again until the 1940s, by which time both were much changed, by Miles Franklin herself.
Back at ‘Possum Gully’, the drought had worsened. The locals gloomily reflected that they would soon be driven off the land and have to take government jobs. In fact, Christmas 1902 was the Franklin family’s last at ‘Stillwater’. In a matter of months they were packed and off to Penrith, leaving ‘Possum Gully’ for good.
4
WITH PENRITH AS A BASE: 1903‒1906
Miss Franklin . . . has got into the habit of writing books.1
In all probability the Franklins were driven off the land by the great drought that settled over much of Australia from the mid-1890s to 1903. John Franklin’s tenure at Thornford had always been precarious, and the drought had affected southern New South Wales severely, with 1902 the worst year of all for men like him. He had survived the crisis of 1896 with the help of his brother George, and it rained at Bangalore in the spring of 1902, but presumably it was insufficient to restore his fortunes. A report from nearby Currawang six months later stated that even the fittest would not survive unless weather conditions changed.2
The decision to move to Penrith had been made by mid-January 1903, and on 18 March John Franklin, Stella, Norman and Tal set off by buggy, sulky and spring dray, leaving Susannah and the youngest child, eleven-year-old Laurel, to follow by train. It was good fun, according to a postcard Stella wrote to Linda from a camp between Marulan and Moss Vale, with good grass and lots of fish: ‘wish you were here’. Four days later, on Sunday 22 March, they arrived at their new home, ‘Chesterfield’, about two miles north of Penrith, in the Lambridge area off the Castlereagh road. Susannah and Laurel arrived the next day.3
‘Chesterfield’ is a grand name, and the small brick house with a return verandah looks attractive enough in photos — the house was demolished in the 1980s, with only a peppertree left to mark the spot — but some floors were made of dirt, the location close to the river meant a plague of mosquitoes, and there were spiders everywhere. It took the family two days to clear the place out. And the holding was small, amounting to only forty-seven acres (19 hectares).4
Penrith is an old town by Australian standards. Its site was known by 1789, and European settlement dates to the 1820s or even earlier. With the coming of the rail in the 1860s, it became an important town on the line over the Blue Mountains to the west, with agriculture and horticulture the main local industries. By the beginning of the twentieth century, with a population of some 4000, it was also a well-established pleasure resort, due to the fine-flowing Nepean (Upper Hawkesbury) River and its fertile valley.5
How exactly John Maurice Franklin proposed to support his family at Penrith is not clear, or even why he chose Penrith. He appears on the 1903 electoral roll as a farmer (along with his wife and eldest daughter, both listed as engaged in ‘domestic duties’), and an advertisement in the Nepean Times for a clearing-out sale at ‘Chesterfield Farm’ prior to his arrival indicates the land was leased.6
Such a small holding could hardly have sufficed, especially for a man for whom farming was never the main endeavour, much less horticulture (although he was always a keen gardener). Later, in association with Labor League activist Dan Clyne, he took up auctioneering, but the business did not last long, a mere six months from April to September 1906. Miles recalled Clyne, a railway worker born at Bathurst who became Speaker of the New South Wales Parliament in the 1940s, as having lived with them for a year, ‘while he and my father tried a business’; and Clyne, who became a staunch friend of the family and of Miles Franklin, in turn recalled her father as ‘a Keen Political Student’.7
It was in the political sphere that John Maurice Franklin did best at Penrith, though his success was short-lived. In February 1904, less than a year after arriving in the district, he was elected unopposed to represent Castlereagh ward on the Penrith Municipal Council. As Alderman Franklin, he performed his duties with due diligence until poor health in 1905 and business failure in 1906 overwhelmed him, though it was not until September 1907 that he was obliged to resign. During those years in Penrith he was also a supporter of the Women’s Political and Educational League, formed by Rose Scott to encourage newly enfranchised women to back the ‘non-party’ cause.8
For Miles, who turned twenty-four in 1903, Penrith served as a base in the unending quest for a vocation. Having failed so far to produce a successor to My Brilliant Career, she now embarked on something completely different: participant investigation of domestic service. This was an enterprising move, in line with contemporary concern about ‘the servant question’, and had encouraging literary exemplars: Israel Zangwill’s 1893 novel Merely Mary Ann became a play in 1903, and the year before American journalist Elizabeth Banks was said to have made a ‘considerable profit’ from her book on ‘Maryanning’, as domestic service was generally known by the later nineteenth century. No doubt Miles thought she could do something similar.
So began Miles Franklin’s personal turn-of-the-century social experiment. Disguised as ‘Sarah Frankling’ and later ‘Mary-Anne Smith’, she spent a year in service in Sydney and Melbourne, trying as many jobs as possible in order to experience at first-hand the grievances of servants. It was time, she thought, for domestic work to be properly valued, and with material gathered incognito she aimed to cast light on the problem of relations between mistress and servant: ‘No-one could understand the depth of the silent feud between mistress and maid without, in their own person, testing the matter.’9
Miles’s first six months were very hard, even with breaks at Penrith. She was at Penrith in early October, when her youngest sister, Laurel, died from pneumonia. Laurel was ‘bright and clear to the end’, yet there was no respite for Miles. She continued her work and after Christmas went by boat to Melbourne, interim capital of the new Commonwealth of Australia, where she worked for three months.10
Miles’s time there provided her with some life-enhancing associations, thanks to the Book Lover and its circle.11
Henry Hyde Champion and his wife, Elsie Belle Champion, had been among the first to notice My Brilliant Career, and it seems Miles had made contact with them soon after her arrival in Melbourne on New Year’s Day 1904. In February 1904 Henry Champion wrote to Rose Scott that ‘your Stella is having great fun in a variety of ways’, adding that she was now quite fat and laughed at everything. She would soon learn more sense, he opined, and make her way in the world. He found her wonderfully amusing, and had invited others to meet her. The Prime Minister of Australia, Alfred Deakin, regretted that he was unable to accept Champion’s invitation. Bernard Hall, director of the National Gallery of Victoria, took her on a tour of an artist’s studio to gauge the effect of the paintings ‘on one who had seen none’, as she much later recalled. Miles was amazed by her reception: ‘The most exclusive people want to meet me, tho’ I have nothing but Mary-Anne clothes,’ she wrote to the MP’s wife, Mrs O’Sullivan.12
The Champion–Goldstein circle gave Miles Franklin a new kind of encouragement. The women of the group furthered her intellectual development, showering her with books when she left their city. Elsie Belle gave her a copy of Michael Fairless’s The Roadmender, while her younger sister Aileen Goldstein’s gift was Macaulay’s Essays. They also tried to enhance her self-esteem by introducing her to the currently fashionable teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science Church. Aileen especially, but also her mother, Isabella, and eldest sister, Vida, the famous suffragist, were all three recent converts to the faith.13
On 13 April 1904, having been thoroughly lionised by the literary and artistic circles around the Champions and the Goldsteins, Miles was driven in a flower-decorated carriage to the docks, where she received from an unnamed admirer a spray of roses and a card urging ‘little Miles’s to remain innocent and unbroken through life. According to press reports, her passage back to Sydney on the SS Peregrine was courtesy of the management.14
In an
interview — apparently with art critic William Moore — on the eve of her departure from Melbourne she spoke positively about her experiences and did her best to avoid talking about My Brilliant Career, now three years behind her: ‘I like the life,’ she said, ‘. . . if only you could raise the status of servants.’ But she would be leaving that problem to others. ‘At present I am too ambitious to be content with the life of a servant.’ That sounded assured, but when a fellow passenger on the boat coming down had guessed she must be twenty-nine, she had tossed her head and said that was what seasickness did for you; she was only twenty-one (which would have been true had she been born in 1883, as she was soon to claim in Johns’s Notable Australians, first published in 1906). Although women have often lowered their ages, that Miles should start doing so while still in her twenties is unusual, an indication of the value she attached to her image as an Australian bush girl, and suggestive of a need to obscure the fact that she was already past the average age at marriage (then 21.9 years in New South Wales).15
In late December 1903 a most unusual book had appeared. Published by the Bulletin, Such Is Life by ‘Tom Collins’ (Joseph Furphy) was destined to become an Australian classic. Soon after its publication, in February 1904, in all ignorance of her whereabouts, Furphy had written to Miles at Bangalore to introduce himself and to point out the striking coincidences of thought, expression and description he perceived to exist between his book and My Brilliant Career, which he liked very much:
Let me congratulate you on your book. . . . It is marked by a departure from the beaten track . . . Within my own small circle of observation it is widely read and much discussed, finding as good a reception as you could possibly desire. I like the concluding pages better than any Australian writing I have met with.16
