Discussion Leaders: Gillian Polack

NOTE: This is an archive of our 2002 website. For current information, please see our updated site for 2003.

by Patricia Clarke
Talk given to ACT Regional Studies Network
Woden Library, 11 December 2001

I was a journalist for many years so when I left full-time employment it was natural to me to turn to researching and writing books. As I’d always been very interested in history particularly the history of women, that’s where I started researching. Since then I’ve followed two strands in my writing, first, the field of women’s letters and diaries and, second, the strand that grew out of my experience in journalism which led to biographies of women writers.

As many of you, who’ve researched your own family would know, researching women’s lives can be difficult and it’s certainly different from researching men’s lives. Records about men are much more accessible. There’s Hansard or shire or council records for public figures, newspapers reports, lists of squatters, country and city directories, lists of professionals- lawyers, doctors - then there are advertisements for tradespeople–builders and so on. In tracing women it’s usually not worth looking at these sorts of records. Yet writing about women’s lives is very important–it adds a dimension to our view of history often missing in past historical writing.

Researching women may appear to be difficult but there are some very rich sources and it’s these I’ve used in writing books. Many women left behind letters and diaries that give a unique and valuable insight into the way of life in past centuries. The importance of letters and diaries is their immediacy, the direct glimpses they give of life as it was lived in the past. Generally, women’s letters and diaries portray not worldly achievements, but things such as the subtleties of family relationships, personal adjustments to the challenges of pioneering life, the drudgery of repetitive house and farm work, and the dangers and problems of childbirth and childraising.

These records were so little valued in the past that they were often thrown away or lost. Now we realise that the relatively few that have been preserved are more interesting and revealing than many of the more formal records of the past.

The first challenge is to find these letters and diaries. I came across the letters that led to my first book in an unexpected way. I’d always been interested in the elusive story of one of my great-grandmothers. She was left a widow in Adelaide in 1870 with little or no money. I was struck by her plight and wondered how she could have supported her children, in an age when there were no widows’ pensions or other Government support. So I began to research the work that was available to women in 19^th century Australia. Although this didn’t lead me to an answer to my great-grandmother’s predicament, it led me to the letters of a group of governesses who’d migrated to Australia in the 1860s and 1870s in search of employment. Reading these letters, I realised that while only I was interested in my great grandmother’s plight, the story of these governesses had the potential to unfold something of the immigration experience, to disclose the limited opportunities open to women seeking employment, and to throw some light on the lives of working women in Australia at that time.

I found these letters on microfilm at the National Library. These governesses who’d migrated to the Australian colonies and other British colonies in the 1860s and 1870s, were financed by the London-based Female Middle Class Emigration Society, and they wrote letters to the Society when they repaid their loans. As I read these letters, I found they contained intriguing personal stories overlain with fresh perceptions on Australian colonial society. Here in their own words were the experiences of women who had come alone to a new world where the values they brought with them about their social position, their expectations of marriage and an ordered class system were turned upside down. What emerges from the best of the letters is a new look at life in colonial Australia as well as a fascinating glimpse at the attitudes and prejudices of the type of British middle-class women, many quite desperate for employment, who migrated under this scheme.

There were some success stories but there were at least as many who suffered great hardship and degradation. They’d decided to leave Britain because there were so few opportunities for educated women to obtain employment and they’d been misled into believing that governesses were in great demand in the colonies. Instead they entered a buyer’s market where there were always more governesses seeking employment than there were jobs. During times of economic depression, quite widespread after the boom of the gold-rushes in the 1850s, the market dried up almost completely. This situation was exacerbated by moves towards the introduction of free state education in one colony after another.

There’s another aspect to the stories of these governesses. They were class-conscious women with deeply ingrained ideas of status and this made at least some of them very inflexible about the jobs they would take. These attitudes made the success of some, at least, unlikely. They regarded themselves as ladies but they found it difficult to see ladylike qualities in a colonial woman who may have been doing the family washing or preparing the meals - in effect breaking all the rules that applied in England regarding what was genteel and ladylike behaviour.

Interesting and valuable as these letters are, they’re an extreme example of a more general problem – that most 19^th century letters and diaries, that have survived, were written by middle and upper class women.

This was brought home to me when I was researching Life Lines, a book of women’s letters and diaries from the arrival of the First Fleet to 1840, that I did with Dale Spender. Researching the convict section for Life Lines, I discovered few letters and no diaries written by the 23,000 women convicts transported to New South Wales and Tasmania. Illiteracy was part, but not all, of the problem. For those who couldn’t write, not being able to contact their families and friends, sometimes even small children left behind was an added punishment. A surprising number, however, were literate – over a quarter of the women who arrived on the First Fleet, and who married within the next two years, were able to write their names in the marriage register.

For those who could write there were other problems. Paper was expensive and scarce, mails were infrequent and unreliable. Until the introduction of the penny post in 1840, postage was expensive and determined by the distance and the letter size. One way to economise was to cross write – write first across the sheet then turn it at right angles and write over the page again. These letters were difficult to write and read and the difficulties are enormously increased when they have to be researched on microfilm, as some of you may know.

Even when all obstacles were overcome, letters from convicts and from working class women were usually sent to poorer families who were often forced by economic circumstances to move from place to place and in the process throw out letters. It’s not surprising that few have survived.

For middle class and upper class women, writing letters and diaries was both part of women’s work and an art that was part of the genteel world they’d left behind, part of their literary inheritance. Letters were often written to be read aloud and to be passed around among relatives and friends. They could be adventure stories in which the authors cast themselves as heroines. At the same time as they kept people at home informed and maintained relationships, they were shaping their ideas of themselves. Explaining to family and friends the extraordinary situations in which they found themselves and the demands made on them helped them to adjust to a very different life.

Often months went by before there was the opportunity to send letters, so they were added to over a period of weeks or months becoming serial letters, often indistinguishable from diaries. Many diaries from this period are daily records rather than private records of inner thoughts.

The keeping of diaries is a subject in itself. Some of you are probably familiar with the diaries kept by Mary Braidwood Mowle who lived on the Limestone Plains (now Canberra) in the years around 1850. I used these diaries in my second book A Colonial Woman: The Life and Times of Mary Braidwood Mowle. This book went into several editions after it was first published in 1986 and it was recently republished, after being out of print for some years, an example of the importance readers place on these authentic records of the past.

Mary Mowle was brought up as the privileged daughter of a large landowner, Dr Thomas Braidwood Wilson, after whose property Braidwood was named. But she was left a penniless orphan when her father committed suicide when he faced ruin during the depression of the early 1840s. At 17, she married Stewart Mowle, a young man of ‘good family’, as such people used to be described, but without inherited means or property.

They went to live in a bark hut at Mannus near Tumbarumba taking with them, incongruously, a piano and dinner set, both of which inevitably tumbled off the dray on a mountain slope. Then they moved to a house on the Limestone Plains on land which now takes in the site of Parliament House. Their house, known as Klensendorlffe’s, was behind what is now the Albert Hall.

To read Mary Mowle’s diary entries is to realise that keeping this diary fulfilled a deep emotional need - that hovering around the bare facts she records are feelings of fury and frustration, despair, pride and resilience. She described her chief solace as playing the piano but it’s obvious that keeping a diary was at least as important as an emotional solace. Her diary is interesting from many other aspects, as one example, her style of writing. She was capable of remarkably direct expressions, for instance, she described the minister at St John’s as a ‘regular ninny’ and the settlers on the Limestone Plains as ‘yahoos’ but when she returned to Braidwood to visit the graves of her mother and father on a hill above the town, she recorded this deeply emotional event in a heightened literary style.

There are equally moving comments when the family moved to Eden. Mary Mowle’s diary is the most intimate glimpse we have of life in the mid-19^th century in a small but important seaport. And that applies, too, to her Limestone Plains diary. It’s possible to re-create from her diaries a picture of ordinary life a century and a half ago, long before Canberra was thought of as the site for the National Capital, or before there was an Australian nation.

The other strand of my writing sprang from my background in journalism. When I first entered journalism, it was still very much a male profession. It was difficult for women to get jobs as journalists and when they did, most were employed on the women’s pages. But, when women did get jobs as journalists they were paid the same rate as men, at a time when, for instance, women teachers and public servants were paid only a percentage of men’s wages. All these aspects made the beginning of women’s journalism an interesting historical subject to research.

My initial research into women writers and journalists in the 19^th century was published as Pen Portraits in 1988. When I began this research not a great deal had been done in this field. It involved much detective work following elusive leads, to unearth women’s contributions to newspapers and periodicals, particularly as much of their writing had been much published anonymously or under pseudonyms. In the course of this research I discovered some previously unknown or barely known early women journalists. I also documented the quite common overlap of the writing of fiction and factual material by women.

Some of the better-known women writers, for instance, Ada Cambridge, Tasma and Rosa Praed, achieved publication in book form without much trouble, usually through English publishers. The lesser known writers discovered that the more accessible outlets for their fiction were newspapers and periodicals, particularly if they were able to satisfy the insatiable demand for serials. It was the age of serials (the soap operas of the day). In England the next episode of Charles Dickens’ latest serial was awaited eagerly. When serial reading was at its height many newspapers and periodicals ran three or four simultaneously. This was a great opportunity for Australian writers particularly for women who had few other opportunities for making money.

In the 1880s a few women were appointed to full–time positions on newspapers and periodicals or began their own papers, notably Louisa Lawson with the Dawn and Maybanke Wolstenholme with a A Woman’s Voice.

Writing Pen Portraits made me aware of the stories of many women writers and this led to my writing biographies of three women whose stories are tied to the development of feminism and the emergence of women from domesticity.

The first was a biography of Louisa Atkinson, Pioneer Writer. The Life of Louisa Atkinson, Novelist, Journalist, Naturalist, published in 1990. Louisa Atkinson was the first Australian-born woman novelist, a noted naturalist and illustrator, and one of our earliest women journalists. Her first novel, Gertrude, the Emigrant, was published in 1857. Her monthly nature column, ‘A Voice from the Country’ began in the Sydney Morning Herald on 1 March 1860. It was a very popular series through which readers gained a new appreciation of the native plants, birds and animals, she discovered around the Kurrajong area of the Blue Mountains and near her birthplace, Sutton Forest, on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. Although she had no formal scientific training, Louisa Atkinson became an expert botanist and several plants were named after her. She was well ahead of her era in advocating the preservation of native vegetation.

I had a very intriguing problem in researching Louisa Atkinson. I needed to find out, because of his effect on her early life, all I could about her step-father, George Bruce Barton. Barton was an unstable alcoholic – Louisa’s mother eventually fled from him, with her children, after repeated violent episodes. I could find no record of Barton’s death and many other avenues failed to uncover any trace of his life after he left the Atkinson estate, Oldbury at Sutton Forest.

I knew that Barton had been called to Sydney in 1836 to appear as the principal witness against convicts charged with murder at Oldbury, but had been too drunk to give evidence, leading to the acquittal of those accused. One of these accused, John Lynch, subsequently committed a series of extraordinarily brutal murders, near Razorback Mountain, for which he was convicted and hanged. Judge Sir Roger Therry in his Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Residence in New South Wales and Victoria, made clear his opinion that Barton’s failure to give evidence against Lynch was responsible for the subsequent murders.

Therry ended his obervations with the statement that ten years later he had presided at the trial of this witness for murder. I searched, in vain, ten years later for any reference to Barton’s trial. But then I found a listing of persons tried on capital charges 1840-1859. In this way I discovered in the New South Wales Parliamentary Papers that Barton had been tried for murder in Bathurst in 1854 – 18, not 10, years later. He was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to two years gaol. From there it was easy to find, in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Bathurst Free Press, the lengthy reports of the case which revealed a great deal about Barton’s life and character.

My next biography was Tasma, published by Allen & Unwin in 1994. Tasma was the pseudonym of novelist, journalist and lecturer, Jessie Couvreur. When her first novel Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill, set in post-goldrush Melbourne, was published in London in 1889 it was hailed as the book of the season. But Tasma was also remarkable for her other careers as lecturer and journalist.

Before she left Australia to live in Europe in 1879, she’d begun contributing to annuals, newspapers and periodicals, particularly the Australasian. In Europe she also found another unusual career - as a lecturer – something almost unknown for a woman. Although she had to psych herself up before each appearance, she gave lectures - in French - all over Belgium and France, on the geography, history, industries, culture, and social progress of Australia. During a speaking tour of Belgium in 1881, as reports of her speeches appeared in the press, interest developed to a crescendo. In Antwerp, 1200 people attended her lecture and she received a telegram inviting her to an audience with King Leopold in Brussels. Her lectures were so highly regarded she was made an Officer of the Academy by the French Government, an award given rarely to foreigners and even more rarely to women.

After visiting Australia and gaining a divorce from her first husband Charles Fraser – another unusual feature of her life as in that year, 1883, only a handful of divorces were granted - she married Auguste Couvreur, a distinguished Belgian journalist and statesman who was Vice President of the Belgian Chamber of Representatives. After Couvreur’s death in 1894, Tasma was appointed Brussels correspondent of the London Times in his place. This was an extremely prestigious, demanding and unusual position for a woman. She was so successful, Holland was added to her territory.

My next subject was Rosa Praed, born in 1851 on a station on the Logan River in what was to become Queensland but was then the Moreton Bay District of New South Wales. She’s a relatively unknown writer now, but in her heyday in England in the 1880s and 1890s she was a famous novelist, the first Australian-born writer to achieve a significant international reputation.

Two years ago Melbourne University Press published my biography of Rosa Praed, Rosa! Rosa! The major part of this book necessarily concentrated on the two-thirds or more of her life she spent in England. But it was the first 24 years of her life in colonial Queensland that provided the inspiration for nearly half of her literary output of 45 books.

I now have a Literature Board Fellowship to research and write about Rosa Praed’s Queensland, the colonial world she created in her Australian novels. It’s the only re-creation of nineteenth century Australian society, in such complete form and with such richness and diversity - with the possible exception of the very different world of Henry Handel Richardson’s Victoria.

She named this fictional colonial world Leichhardt’s Land. Leichhardt’s Town was the capital, the west was the Leura and innumerable small towns and localities had their fictional names, some very easy to identify—Kangaroo Point was Emu Point and Rockhampton was sometimes Stonehampton. All of them were recognisably Queensland in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Rosa Praed’s Queensland was formed by her family background, her social conditioning as a woman, and her acute observation of political events, social conventions, the Australian landscape and race relations during the first 24 years of her life. After she left Australia in 1876, she refuelled this vision during her long novel-writing career in England, seeking and obtaining specific information from sources such as family correspondence and reminiscences, copies of Hansards, and newspapers.

Her novels raise all sorts of questions about colonial society - the relationship between the sexes, the influence of British attitudes, the development of an Australian character, the impact of the landscape, frontier wars, labour conflicts, the beginning of the Labour Party, race relations, political issues, squatter society and vice-regal representatives, to such specialised subjects as lost children, euthanasia, divorce, gold rushes, shipwrecks and a host of others.

In June I spent a month in Queensland, mostly in the area west from Rockhampton and Townsville out to Hughenden, Winton and Longreach. My main purpose was to visit some stations, particularly Aberfoyle and Bulliwallah. Rosa Praed used these stations as settings for some of her most successful novels, particularly Mrs Tregaskiss published in 1895, Opal Fire in 1906 and Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land in 1915, although they’re places she never saw. Her sister Lizzie Jardine lived at Aberfoyle station in country north of Aramac and south of Torrens Creek and her brother, Tom Murray-Prior, lived east over the Great Dividing Range at Bulliwallah, between Clermont and Charters Towers. Other brothers worked at these properties at various times.

It’s quite an adventure reaching these properties, even now. To get to Aberfoyle, for instance, was a drive of some three or four hours over a rough track, in parts overgrown with high grass, over corrugations and rocky crossings, through innumerable gates and over one dry creek bed four miles wide, following a mud map and directions such as ‘stick to the dingo fence until you come to a gate… ,’ and so on. The track took us over the Great Dividing Range and skirting the often dry salt lake, Lake Buchanan. Fortunately the station we set out from lent us a two-way radio in case we got lost.

In the novels and short stories Rosa Praed set in this area of huge distances and frequent drought, that she named the Leura, she raised many subjects important in the history of Queensland - for example, the 1890s shearers strikes, a major event in two novels, Aboriginal/European conflicts, children lost in the bush, gold rushes and tropical illnesses.

Between Aberfoyle and Bulliwallah lies Lake Buchanan, the scene of several tragedies of lost children in her novels and short stories. Peter Pierce has described Australia as ‘The Country of Lost Children’. For Rosa Praed, her fictional Leura was the country of lost children. She heard about Lake Buchanan from her brother Morres who described a horseback ride he made from Aberfoyle to Bulliwallah skirting the Lake. She also read in her sister’s letters of Morres’s involvement in the true story of the child of a fencer on Uanda, a neighbouring station to Aberfoyle, lost in the bush and eventually found dead.

Another subject which appears in Rosa Praed’s novel Opal Fire and which I’ve been researching is the incidence and treatment of leprosy and the paranoia it caused in 19^th century Queensland, particularly its association with the arrival of Chinese in large numbers during the Palmer River gold rushes. These goldrushes and the loss of the passenger ship, the Quetta, are other events that feature in one or other of Praed’s novels.

Rosa Praed’s writing on Aboriginal people and events on the Aboriginal/European frontier is an important aspect of her autobiographical and fictional writing. As a child she’d lived at Hawkwood station over the Auburn Range from Hornet Bank where, in 1857, eleven Europeans were killed by Aboriginal people. Rosa’s father, Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior, organised the early retaliation against the Yiman people, later taken over by the Native Police, which resulted in their virtual elimination. Some estimates are of 500 killed.

While travelling in western Queensland I tried to contact any descendants of Aboriginal people who were in the area in the 19^th century, but none remains. I did get some photos of some who worked at Bulliwallah in the early part of the 20^th century, but by then most of those remaining had been rounded up and sent to Cherbourg, Palm Island and other government settlements. The whole area is dotted with scenes of Aboriginal massacres, from Murdering Lagoon, at St Ann’s north of Bulliwallah, Mailman’s Gorge, east of Aramac, a lagoon at the southern end of Aberfoyle, to Skull Creek and Battle Hole further west.

I’ve touched on just a few aspects of Rosa Praed’s Queensland novels. Her colonial world is limited, in the sense that it’s a middle-class, squatter world, in which, for instance, workers appear as ‘characters’ rather than as central figures. Nevertheless, in her novels and autobiographies, there’s a great panorama of colonial life. Her books are a remarkable treasure, a representation of colonial life in Queensland more encompassing than any other single source.

Despite all the reinforcement she received from family letters and other sources, her memory, her imagination and her continued emotional involvement were the major contributors to her writing on Australia. Australia remained vivid to her all her life. She wrote:

"I have never felt either English or Irish though nearly all my life has been spent in the British Isles. Always have I had the sensation of being an alien…& have in my fancy borne the stamp of the Bush…I never see a gum tree…without being seized by an untranslatable emotion. I never smell the pungent aromatic scent which for twenty-three years was as the breath of my nostrils, without being carried back to the old vivid world, so much more real than this in which most things have happened to me."