Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Australian bohemianism had its start in Melbourne, with the flâneur Marcus Clarke attracting such bons vivants as Queen Victoria’s son who visited the city’s artistic haunts in 1896. Many artists and writers and illustrators moved to Sydney after the 1890’s depression, partly as a result of the decision of the New South Wales Art Gallery to encourage the purchase of local art. Its chairman was Ridge’s instructor, Julian Ashton. As head and founder of the Sydney Art School, Ashton taught plein-air techniques in the impressionist tradition, supporting and promoting Australian artists who had been damned by European critics for rendering their subjects in harsh lighting—the light they saw, not the light in France as painted by the Impressionists, nor that of the luminists working in the Hudson River Valley. A photograph of a white-haired Ashton looking much like Thomas Eakins: high forehead, thin nose, short mustache, shows him in the out-of-doors, leaning back from the easel in a suit coat, with two Victorian women alert to his critique and, amid the bristling Australian foliage, an enormous St. Bernard sitting at their feet, perhaps the subject of the painting. The son of an American and grandson of an Italian count, Ashton proclaimed the Wildean dictum: “The artist must be content to live for art and for art’s sake only.” He was also quoted as saying: “I think women artists have the artistic taste and the appreciation of beauty in them to a greater extent than the men,” suggesting that he would be an encouraging mentor to Ridge.

  He shared a penchant with Eakins for using live models, and there is a photograph of him poking a cane toward a male model clothed in briefs. Writing about the practice, contemporary George Augustus Taylor tries to be chaste with regard to the female models, but his descriptions betray him: a “dimly lit room,” “draped with dark velvet,” “a high priestess,” in a “brilliant spotlight,” “her flesh glistening.” An Ashton drawing in pencil of a beseeching female nude model fills a page in Ridge’s autograph book—perhaps it is Ridge? It is known that she modeled for the school, a practice she continued in America.

  The Sydney Art School houses no record of Ridge’s artistic output. Only a few sketches exist in her file at Smith College. They include a very nice unsigned pen-and-ink of an older woman seated with clasped hands, hair parted down the middle, her black jacket labeled “Sunday” (perhaps her mother in her Sunday best?) and what appears to be a self-portrait made much later in Mexico in the 1930s that looks very much like Ridge’s photos—wide-eyed in the way that the model tends to look under self-scrutiny, cheekbones gaunt from hard travel. The close-up of an eye on the back of a sketch of a Mexican church is probably the result of a bored moment in that same journey. Also in the collection is a pen-and-ink drawing of her good friend Evelyn Scott, her hand a little too big but neatly done. All of the pictures are strictly naturalistic, she makes no experiments in perspective, color, or shape, although by the time the Scott portrait was made, Léger and Picasso and Modigliani had illustrated Broom, the magazine Ridge helped edit. This lack of interest in modernism is not too surprising since Julian Ashton, being more conservative than the conservative British, denigrated it in the visual arts. Ridge seemed to have mostly given up her artistic practice shortly after arriving in New York, perhaps because of the cost of art supplies. Even while writing poetry, she was sometimes reduced to writing on scraps of paper with a pencil.

  Many of the Australian visual artists who signed Ridge’s autograph book between 1904 and 1905 became prominent. Ruby Winkler was a cartoonist and early fantasy illustrator who eventually traveled to the U.S. and published two children’s books. Henry George Julius, “Harry,” a graphic designer, cartoonist, printmaker, illustrator, and animator, whose autograph is a chorus line of “characters” with bowler hats and walking sticks captioned “Friends of Julius,” founded a successful ad agency with Sydney Smith, another signer. Together they also began the influential periodical, Art in Australia. One-eyed Mick Paul, “a renowned Kings Cross Bohemian and drunk,” left Ridge a lively sketch of “a satyr,” and became a professional cartoonist. Howard Ashton, Julian’s son, who trained at his father’s art school but took up journalism and collected the cicadas for the Australian Museum, sketched a subtle watercolor landscape. Nelle Rodd, who “painted with a strong virility as one would not expect to find in a woman artist,” became a founding member of the Society of Women Painters in 1910 but died shortly thereafter. Her sketch shows a woman in bed with covers up to her neck.

  Ridge had to depend on Emma or her extended family to look after Keith while she worked, but she made good use of whatever child-free time she had, publishing more poems in Australia than she had in New Zealand. These were more gold-mining bush ballads, a few vaudevillian light poems, and poems of sad romance, both public and private, all of them written in iambic pentameter. Many of them appeared in the Sydney Bulletin, no mean feat since it received a thousand submissions a week as the leading journal in the country. New Zealand scholar and poet Michele Leggott writes that “Ridge’s practice is as good as that of her Bulletin peers.” Its contributors were often fellow bohemians. Christopher Brennan, for example, had shown his indifference to authority by “rolling stones down the floor when he disliked a lecturer, wearing an academic gown hung about with jam-tins and horseshoes.” Using the language of the streets and the shearing sheds to mock those in authority, the Bulletin’s bohemian writers created a picture of romanticized bush life that appealed to the middle class and earned it a circulation of 80,000 subscribers by 1900. It also paid. “For pecuniary and other reasons, the Bulletin had first call on almost every Australian writer,” according to critic H.M. Green.

  While still living in New Zealand, Ridge collected her poems into a manuscript entitled Verses and then offered it to A. G. Stephens sometime between 1902 and 1905, when he was then the most important publisher of poetry in Australia. He was also editor of the “Red Page,” a column featuring literature and criticism in the Bulletin. He would run 23 poems from Ridge’s Verses in the magazine, over a quarter of the manuscript, before she left for America. Stephens was the man to know, he was “the strongest single force in the shaping of Australian literature.” His colleague, the illustrator and novelist Norman Lindsay, said that his “head, thrown back, the jutting beard, the resolute walk and the expanded chest” concealed an artistic temperament that was extremely sensitive. He had his meat cut up before it was sent to his room so he could eat it one-handed, without taking his eyes away from his book. Solidly built, blue-eyed, and handsome, he wore an open-necked shirt with rolled up sleeves and wrote in purple ink with a confident hand. Seven years older than Ridge, he was especially fond of the wild married Louise Mack, the only woman he ever published in his series. “It was said that all the men at the Bulletin were in love with her,” writes Mack’s biographer and niece Nancy Phelan, “she had a great deal of Irish charm.” Like Ridge, Mack was also determined to break free of female convention. The heroine in her first novel, The World is Round, gives a devastating assessment of her best friend’s writing:

  I hate your stories. Why do you always give your girls golden fluffy hair, and sweet ripe, scarlet lips? And no brains. I’d make them as bald as the woman before she used Barry’s Tricopherus, and as white about the lips as if they had eaten a barrel-load of starch, but when they spoke I would make them say something smart, and to the point something worth saying, and worth listening to, not a string of empty meaningless frippery.

  Lola’s mentors, Stephens and Ashton, often socialized together, and both attended Mack’s farewell party in 1901 when she left for Europe. Perhaps Stephens saw Ridge as her replacement. Whatever his opinion of her as a woman, he didn’t have a very high regard of most New Zealand writing. “Maorilanders, [New Zealanders] when they come to do things with their heads, the things are usually tame and uninspiring,” he writes in the Bulletin in 1900. Ridge began to mix locales in her poetry, and when she organized the poems into the collection, she deleted “Maoriland,” an alternate name for New Zealand, from the title of the first poem she had publis
hed in the Bulletin. However, Stephens took her work seriously, and inserted revisions into her typescript of Verses, and included her in two lists of Australasian writers. “It is tempting to think that Stephens backed off [from publishing Verses] because Lola was too junior to be worth a book in 1905, rather than because her poetry was insufficiently Australian in its markings,” Leggott hypothesizes. Perhaps the man was distracted. Stephens became a literary agent a year after Ridge arrived. When that occupation failed, he emigrated to “uninspiring” New Zealand and wrote for a Wellington newspaper. Ridge last submitted revisions to him in 1905. A year later he left or was pushed from his Bulletin column and lost much of his power.

  Ridge claimed to have left behind all her early work, but a copy of her manuscript was archived at the Mitchell Library in Australia where it was bound with the work of bush balladeer John Shaw Neilson, who became one of the country’s finest lyric poets. She also left a typescript with her cousin John E.M. Penfold. Sixty years later, this copy was found with his descendants in Australia but only the poems that did not appear in the Mitchell version were duplicated before the manuscript was lost again. She also republished several of the poems from the collection in America after she arrived, so she must have had her own copy and used it as a bridge between Australia and the U.S., the way she used her New Zealand work to establish herself in Australia.

  The best poems in the Verses manuscript are Ridge’s bush ballads, a genre that arose from Australian sheepherders’ songs. Banjo Paterson had just published “Waltzing Matilda,” the ballad that quickly became the unofficial Australian national anthem. Primarily oral, bush ballads had only been in print for around ten years, and compilations had become very popular. They promoted an idyll of preindustrialization, new nationalism, and worker’s rights. Like Paterson’s “Waltzing Matilda,” about an itinerant worker who commits suicide after being caught stealing a sheep, Ridge’s ballads frequently concern the trials of the New Zealand workers, in particular gold mining and class conflicts.

  “It’s the gas mates! Where’s the Tommy?

  Cut those moka bushes here—

  Beat the air in, swirl ’em round—”

  “Now let down a lighted candle:

  Steady boy! The air is clear,”

  And they wound him under ground. (Verses 58)

  Class conflict and industrial exploitation, the communal feeling between workers, the coming proletariat revolution were common topics for all the bohemians who wrote for the Bulletin and other pro-labor publications in Australia. More than a hundred of these magazines and newspapers for the working man were established in Australia between 1870 and 1899. That the effete, city-living bohemians published these rough-and-tumble ballads must have seemed ironic, although not in the case of Ridge, who was raised in the bush with the egalitarian principles of the New Zealand miners. Other bohemians found the topics congenial to their principles and the rising feeling for social justice. The accomplished artist Emily Letitia Paul, a student of Julian Ashton and mother of one of Ridge’s fellow students, gave up art for politics and became a leading speaker for the Socialist Party. One of Stephens’s authors, Bernard O’Dowd—a correspondent of Whitman’s—became a political activist and a founding member of the Victorian Socialist Party, and called for “the poetry of purpose.” His second wife Marie Pitt worked as a poet-activist and, according to her husband, “criticised the press, the Church and the State.” In her 1911 essay, “Women in Art and Literature,” she wrote that women were educated to be “a community of marionettes, a race of mental and moral geldings, spayed by the knife of Respectability.” She, like Ridge, grew up in the bush.

  The extremely popular working-class poet Henry Lawson (1867-1922) was a committed socialist who “contributed his talents to progressive reform groups and the wider labor movement,” and wrote realistic fiction and poetry as a result of reporting jobs in the outback and other assignments that showed him “the unromantic side of the country.” His rise as a writer revealed how “social art” could pull even someone like Ridge without ties to the upper class through the ranks of the radicals into wide literary recognition. Like many of the male bohemians, Lawson’s progressive political sympathies had no place for women. He quarreled often with his formidable mother Louisa, who published and edited Dawn, a proto-feminist magazine, for seventeen years. She did, however, bring out his first book of poems. At the time, women in Australia were just beginning to find their voice in matters of gender politics, particularly of sexuality. Like the Victorian sentimentalists who used the imagery of flowers to convey a secret language of eroticism, Ridge often wrote her early poems from the point of view of an erotically inclined female, and continued the practice throughout her career, although less tied to botanical imagery. Sometimes editors removed stanzas or particularly suggestive phrases in her work. For example, the Bulletin published “The Bush” one stanza short, but included winds that “fondle with the maiden Bush/Who sways & quivers in their close embrace.” Ridge’s Verses manuscript contains the excised stanza:

  The rival sunbeams their fingers thrust

  Amid her guarded & most secret sweets;

  They steal & nestle on her swelling bust,

  And view unhidden all her chaste retreats. (Verses 8)

  No romance is documented during Ridge’s life in Australia. Michele Leggott calls Ridge’s more autobiographical poems in Verses “romantic agony” with lines like:

  I forgot the pride of lineage,

  I forsook the hope of fame—

  I’d ha’ left the road to heaven

  For the magic of your name. (Verses 13)

  Such sentiments underscore a marriage made up of sacrifice, with her princely family heritage forsaken. Instead of love poems, she writes “Think of Me Not with Sadness” which begins:

  Oh, think of me not with sad thoughts

  bedecked in mourning grey,

  But weave ye a woof about me

  Of colors gold and gay;

  The poem continues with a warning:

  For if I were your own, love,

  We might regret—some day. (Verses 14)

  The partner in the paired poem (“The Man”) answers: “I think of you—not sadly, yet with a half-regret,” an idealized version of what her leaving might have cost her husband. “To an Old Playfellow” follows. The poem recalls a romance between childhood sweethearts that slowly deteriorates.

  But the mistical [sic] pines lean over,

  And their shadows are falling black

  between one on the trampled highway,

  And a chum on an old bush track. (Verses 15)

  Her husband, Peter Webster, could have been the “old playfellow” from Ridge’s youth. Ridge admitted to using real people from her life as characters for her second book of poems, Sun-up and Other Poems: “The small boy Jude—he was one of the real parts of ‘Sun-up’—he who never grew up—‘my darling’ who never was…his face still clear.” “The Parting,” a farewell-to-love poem in Verses, features the well-known Hokitikan glow-worm colony in its sarcasm-touched ending.

  When possums mount on moon-shine bars,

  And glow-worms hidden in the mine,

  Shall leave their caves to mock the stars—

  Oh, then my lips shall meet with thine! (Verses 30)

  Bitterness is the overwhelming trope of her poems about relationships, especially in “The Seed,” placed near the end of the manuscript:

  Oh, waste & bare & barren space!

  Arise ye rank & bitter grasses,

  And heal & cover o’er the place;

  For pain must pass as passion passes. (Verses 52)

  Ridge returned to New Zealand for a brief visit in 1905. Hokitika and its environs must have looked considerably smaller after Sydney’s bustling streets. Was the intent of her return to parade her new cosmopolitan status before the women her character disparaged in the “Story of Ruth?” Or was she there just to collect more funds? Did she hope to drop off her son with her in-laws? Or
did she return to try to persuade her husband to join her in Australia? A man did not follow a woman in that milieu. Besides, he had the gold mine to look after. A January 1905 announcement in the local New Zealand paper amounted to a public declaration of Ridge’s second and final separation from Peter Webster:

  Mrs. Peter Webster, of Kanieri, recently returned from Sydney, where she has been for the last twelve months studying painting in the studio of Julian Ashton, one of the most famous painters in Australia. Mrs. Webster is an artist of much higher than average talent, and the opportunity of such tuition as she has been able to get in Sydney has greatly increased her gift. It is, we understand, her intention to return to Sydney for another lengthy period to perfect herself in all branches of the art.

  It took her a while to extricate herself. In February she was still in Hokitika when a local law clerk, Charles JP Sellers, signed her autograph book with Isabel Learmont, a storekeeper, perhaps his sweetheart since they signed it together. Sellers would have been someone she could have consulted about a possible legal separation. After Ridge left New Zealand for Australia for the second and last time, she never saw her husband again. He knew she had plans to leave for America at some point because he threatened to kill her if she took along their son.