by Bill Holloway

In Australia in the 1890s suffragism, the New Woman movement, rising nationalism, the optimism of leading the world in social and political reform, all crashed up against the misogyny of our emerging self image to produce a vibrant feminist literature (which men worked very hard over the next 60 or 70 years to erase).

HM Green, in his seminal History of Australian Literature divides what I’ve labelled Generation 1 into two periods, 1788-1850 and 1850-1890 (basically 1. letters and diaries; 2. English novels written in Aust.). He heads his account of this next ‘generation’ Third Period 1890-1923, “Self-conscious Nationalism”.

“In Australia the spirit of the nineties and early nineteen-hundreds… took the form, in the literary as in the social and political worlds, of a fervent democratic nationalism: it was based upon a broad social consciousness, a feeling of mutual relationship, that found its most characteristic expression in Lawson’s doctrine of mateship.” HM Green

The Bulletin magazine, from its founding in Sydney in 1880 was soon at the heart of Australian literature – fervently nationalist, racist and misogynist, centred on the idea of white men, singly and as ‘mates’, conquering the Bush.

As Russell Ward spells out in The Australian Legend (1958), the Bulletin‘s editorial policies, the writers it featured – Lawson, Paterson, Rudd, Furphy – gave rise to the enduring myth of Australianness, the ‘Lone Hand’: male, anti-authoritarian, resourceful, at home in the Outback. Then, just as peak-Bulletin began its decline, Australia entered the Great War and war correspondents led by Keith Murdoch and CEW Bean upgraded the Legend to include the Anzacs, brave soldiers, independent of their officers (and with incompetent British generals standing in for their natural enemy, the squatter).

And so for more than a hundred years this has been the archetypal Australian, the image our largely conformist, suburban society has had of itself, reinforced by conservative politicians, the press, and up until the 1970s, a mostly male literary academic establishment.

The women who began writing in this period, had the same affinity for the Bush as their brothers – and in fact one name for the writing of this period is Bush Realism, an intense effort to portray Bush life in all its details, paralleled in the art world by Australia’s contribution to Impressionism, the Heidelberg School.

The best/best known writers of this second generation were:
Louisa Lawson (1848-1920)
Barbara Baynton (1857-1929)
Mary Gaunt (1861-1942)
Louise Mack (1870-1935)
Ethel Turner (1870-1958)
Jeannie Gunn (1870-1961)
Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946)
Mary Grant Bruce (1878-1958)
Miles Franklin (1879-1954)

Generation 1 authors who wrote through this period also reflected its influence, particularly Rosa Praed, Lady Bridget in the Never Never Land (1915) and Catherine Martin, The Incredible Journey (1923).

Men’s freedom to go off prospecting and droving, or to carve farms out of virgin bush depended largely on the women who maintained their homes and raised their children. Louisa Lawson got sick of her husband being always away and left him and their bush block in central NSW to go and live in Sydney where she could support herself. Her lived experience, and story telling, informs the writing of Henry, her son. ‘The Drover’s Wife’ is her story, and surely the decline of his wife, ‘Possum’ in the Joe Wilson stories, culminating in ‘Water them Geraniums’ reflects Henry’s understanding of his mother’s experience.

Likewise, Steele Rudd, in Starting the Selection (1899), acknowledges that women were doing it tough: “I often wonder how the women stood it the first few years, and I can remember how Mother, when she was alone, used to sit on a log where the lane is now and cry for hours.”

Louisa Lawson’s writing was concentrated around The Dawn, the newspaper for women she published from 1888-1905. However, in 1889 she was commissioned by the Boston Woman’s Journal to write an essay under the heading ‘The Australian Bush-Woman’.

… for hasty purposes, my colonial sisters may be roughly sorted into three heaps – city women, country women and bush-women, and it is of the last I will write; for it is of their grim, lonely, patient lives I know, their honest, hard-worked, silent, almost masculine lives.

Bush-women she says may be all day in the saddle alongside the men, then doing “what little had to be done in the house on her return… It would not anyhow be much more than making a ‘damper’ in a tin dish and putting it in the ashes.”

For by bush-women I mean … the wives of boundary-riders, shepherds, ‘cockatoo’ settlers in the far ‘back country’; women who share almost on equal terms with men the rough life and the isolation which belong to civilization’s utmost fringe.

The bush-woman is thin, wiry, flat-chested and sunburned. She could be nothing else, living as she does.

… she will tramp five miles with a heavy child on her hip, do a day’s washing, and tramp back again at night. She works harder than a man. You may see her with her sons putting up a fence, or with the shearers, whistling and working as well as any.

There is one thing the bush-woman hates – it is discipline. The word sounds to her like ‘jail’.

In those remote and isolated spots, man is king and force is ruler. There is no law, no public opinion to interfere. The wife is at the man’s mercy. She must bear what ills he chooses to put upon her and her helplessness in his hands only seems to educe the beast in him.

Louisa concludes that all of the bush-woman’s hopes reside in her daughters – “now wherever a dozen children can be got together there is a school.” The girls surpass the boys, besides, the men always “have the drink washing away their prospects.” These girls, “quick, capable and active … will give us a race of splendid women, fit to obtain what their mothers never dreamed of – women’s rights.”

Louisa’s vision is remarkably similar, no doubt because of its inherent truth, to that of Barbara Baynton, another woman who spent her early married years imprisoned on an isolated back-block, and for whom separation (and ultimately, divorce) was the only escape possible.

Baynton wrote short stories for the Bulletin collected as Bush Studies (1902. Republished as Cobbers with the addition of a couple of war stories in 1917) and one novel, Human Toll (1907). Her vision of women’s life in the Bush was bleak, perhaps best stated in ‘The Chosen Vessel’ the story of a woman alone at home terrorised by a swagman:

More than once she thought of taking her baby and going to her husband. But in the past, when she had dared to speak of the dangers to which her loneliness exposed her, he had taunted and sneered at her. “Needn’t flatter yerself,” he had told her, “nobody ‘ud want to run away with yew.”

It all ends badly.

Of the other authors listed above, Mary Gaunt’s writing advocated employment (before or instead of marriage) for women; and Louise Mack lived a fiercely independent life. Henry Handel Richardson was the best writer of this generation, and probably gay. But except for the autofictional The Getting of Wisdom (1910) this was not reflected in her writing.

Miles Franklin gets a ‘chapter of her own’ next week.

Mary Gaunt grew up in Victorian goldfields towns, where her father was a judge.She was one of two women admitted to study at Melbourne University when it first accepted women in 1881. She wrote six novels of which the best known is Kirkham’s Find (1897) which “celebrates the advantages of the unmarried state for women and criticizes their poor educational and work opportunities”, quoting Dale Spender who praises Gaunt for her “feisty, feminist fiction”. She married but was widowed early and spent much of the rest of her life travelling, writing accounts of her time in West Africa, the West Indies, and Asia, especially China.

Louise Mack, who attended Sydney Girls High in the same class as Ethel Turner (and says the Turner sisters ripped off her school newsletter), went on to be an adventurous Independent Woman in her own right. She ‘became a regular contributor to the Bulletin in the late 1880s’; published her first novel, The World is Round in 1896; she ‘wrote many successful serials, later published in book form’; she ‘travelled widely, published several popular novels, and for six years lived at Florence, editing the Italian Gazette in 1904-07′; ‘in 1914 Louise managed to get to Belgium as the first woman war correspondent… Her eye-witness account of the German invasion of Antwerp and her adventures—A Woman’s Experiences in the Great War—was published in 1915′. (ADB)

She returned home in 1916, giving lectures around Australia and the Pacific, and continued to write. ‘These years were very difficult for Louise but she met misfortune with her usual courage and vitality, working as a freelance journalist and publishing two more novels’. She died ‘possessionless’ in 1935.

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see also:
Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (The Australian Legend)
Louisa Lawson vs Kaye Schaffer (The Australian Legend)
Squeaker’s Mate vs Water them Geraniums (The Australian Legend)
Louise Mack, Teens and Girls Together (AWWC/Whispering Gums)
Mary Gaunt, Kirkham’s Find (The Australian Legend)
Mary Gaunt, her life, 1 (AWWC/Bronas Books)
Mary Gaunt, her life, 2 (AWWC/Bronas Books)
Mary Gaunt, Alone in West Africa (extract)