by Jo-Anne Reid
Jo first came across “this wonderful book” when it was chosen as ‘The Great Festival Book Read’ by the organisers of her local Writers’ and Readers’ Festival in Bathurst, NSW in 2016.
To tell the truth, I had never heard of Mena Calthorpe when Jenny announced her book as the ‘Read’, and what I felt as the very dullness of her name made me reluctant even to pick it up. Mena Calthorpe. Mena Calthorpe? Mena Calthorpe? My ignorance was embarrassing. Why was this Australian author so unknown to me? What a dull-sounding title, too. Why couldn’t we be reading someone more famous? If we were to have a classic Australian female author, what about Miles Franklin? Katharine Susannah Pritchard? Dorothy Hewett? They were much more interesting names. And all of them were noted in Bill Holloway’s October 9 post on ‘third generation’ writing from the 1920s to 1950s. But so was Mena Calthorpe.
The small photo of the author on the cover is not flattering in a 21st century way. It’s harsh, and Ms Calthorpe looks like an unassuming, no-nonsense schoolteacher, shop assistant, or someone’s secretary – which in fact is exactly what she was: a hardworking, working-class woman. She begins the novel with this description:
Miss Merton came to the Dyehouse one windy afternoon when smoke from the railway-yards drifted darkly over Macdonaldtown. […] The skirt that swirled around her legs was neat and unpretentious. Her hair was smoothed, parted in the centre, and she wore a bun – not the kind of thing that one could call a chignon, but a plain, neat, bun, firmly pinned at the nape of her neck. […] She held a paper in her hand and was looking for a job.
Bill’s piece talks about this novel as an example of social realism, “which depicts the harshness of working life in order to critique the forces giving rise to it, [and] aims to reveal tensions between an oppressive, hegemonic force, and its victims”. He’s clearly heard of her – and so has the wonderful Brona, whose 2020 report on The Dyehouse gave me such pleasure when I read it. This is a splendid review, and it adds so much to a reading of the book that I won’t try to improve on it here. She’s found a map of the inner west area of Sydney that Calthorpe calls ‘Macdonaldtown’; she’s found a photo of King Street, Newtown from the 1950s which shows the real factory chimneys nearby (the dyehouse could well be one of them); and she’s included Sali Herman’s 1950 painting ‘Women of Paddington’, which captures the feeling of Sydney’s working-class slum areas before they were gentrified.
She, and I, agree with Bill’s categorisation. In depicting the tensions and inequities that (con)strain the lives of the working class in industrial capitalism, The Dyehouse is strongly critical, proto-feminist, unashamedly socialist, and yet – I’m looking for the right words – ultimately kind, sympathetic, and full of respect for the characters who populate this story.
Calthorpe is much kinder to her characters than was one of the other writers that Bill cites, Kylie Tennant, in another book I have written about for this blog: Tiburon. Tennant’s social realism is acerbic, it’s uncompromising, and its disparaging humour makes our resulting distaste for some of her characters feel almost voyeuristic. Tennant was barely out of her teens – passionate and uncompromising in her politics – when she wrote that book, set in a rural town during the Depression, and she was not much older when she wrote The Battlers, set in the same working-class areas of inner Sydney as Calthorpe’s putatively ‘fictional’ Macdonaldtown. Tennant’s youthful certainty, her clarity of perception, and her sense of the ‘atrociousness’ of middle-class values produces a powerful vision. She wanted to shock us with her portrayal of the indignities that workers suffered. It seems to me, in contrast, that Calthorpe wants to make us respect their humanity and the dignity of their work.
And I think she succeeds superbly. Calthorpe also makes us more uncomfortable than Tennant in the end, more aware of our own complicity in so much social injustice, because she is sympathetic, understanding, and – like Miss Merton – “well into middle age” when she wrote this book. She has lived the life she is writing about and is aware of the complexity of all of us, as individuals. She brings this understanding to her characters, and for me, this is the strength of the writing, and of the story. It is clear that The Dyehouse does not ‘idealize the Worker’ as socialist realism aims to do. Although Calthorpe was, as Bill explains, a member of the Communist Party of Australia in the 1930s, Fiona McFarland tells us that she had to resign from the Party – quite pragmatically – because she couldn’t afford to pay for the postage needed to send out communications from the branch. One of the fascinating things about this book is that, although it was well (if not fulsomely) received here in Australia, it was translated twice for publication behind the Iron Curtain. Yet ‘Mena Calthorpeova’ (author of the Czech translation) does not tell an epic tale – she tells us a tale of who we were as working-class Australians in the fifties and reminds us of how much things have – or seem to have – changed since that time. Her obituary notes that The Dyehouse was considered “a powerful little working-class novel” by a Herald reviewer at the time, “while other critics noted its themes of gentle humanity and the dignity of labour”.
This is the core of her success in The Dyehouse. When Miss Merton starts working in the dyehouse of Southern Textiles, we meet the large range of people who work there too – from members of the Board to the General Managers, the site manager, the skilled artisan dyers, the office girls, the factory hands, those who watch the vats, and the other labourers – all those who clock on and off every day. Calthorpe does not glorify her Workers – but nor does she caricature her Bosses – and we come to understand the way things work as the manufacturing industry is faced with modernisation and change, from the worker’s standpoint and from the position of management. Everyone is vulnerable. We understand the reasons that the office girls seek the favour of the site manager: we are appalled at his abuse of their innocence and hopes; even while we are made aware of his inadequacy, vulnerability and all too human hunger for the dignity he recognises in his ‘underlings’. We see the Union workers covering for mates checking off at the Bundy clock and we see the Office staff helping ‘manage’ claims for sick days in the filing system – and we come to see how these complexities of working life are parallelled in the nuances of life outside of work.
For me the most sympathetic character is Barney, whose struggle to build a house, a family, and a better life in the bush suburbs, is continually thwarted – by the long train ride he has to take every day in to the city; by the daughter he raised only to see her leave and make her own life in another state; by the almost unbelievable news that his wife Esther has fallen pregnant, just as they were perhaps seeing their struggle starting to diminish. We understand his search for a backyard abortion for Esther, and his struggle to find the money when a workmate is able to help. And we are a little surprised when, having paid the ‘nurse’ in the “mean terrace with the dark and shabby windows, the shabby door”, he finds he can’t go through with it – unknowing that at home, hours away, Esther is suffering a threatened miscarriage:
Dr Peters came to the bed. He stood for a long time looking at her. He remembered passing this cottage years ago, watching the man and woman labouring on its framework. He noticed the neat, sparsely furnished bedroom. ‘You don’t want this baby?’ he said gently. She opened her eyes and looked suddenly into his face. There was no censure. It was a face of compassion and understanding.
When the baby survives, and when it is born much later, and Miss Merton’s own job is threatened by helping cover up Barney’s early knock-off to be able to get to the hospital to see her and his new son, Calthorpe’s description of his detour through Martin Place, to search for hyacinths to bring to Esther, continues to bring me to tears. As the Sydney Morning Herald noted in her 1996 Obituary, Calthorpe’s “outstanding gifts were the ability … to articulate her observations of life’s circumstances and to respond to them”. There’s not much more we, her readers, could ask of her.
Mena Calthorpe
The Dyehouse
first pub. Ure Smith, Sydney, 1961. 320pp
Loved this book. Like you I wondered why we’d never heard of it but Calthorpe itself was a name that caught my attention. There’s a Calthorpe family in Canberra whose house is now a popular house museum. The other interesting thing is that Text chose this novel to be their 100th book in their Classics series which says something about the fact that they thought it was worth making a bit of a fuss about. I guess it stands for what this classic series is about, which is bringing books that have been forgotten back into the public notice. Great to have your post here. Thanks.
Thanks for your comments! Very interesting to hear about the Calthorpe house. It doesn’t feel to me as though her husband’s family would have been house owners, but you never know. I also was intrigued by the special place this book has in the Text Classics series… a kind of ‘promotion’ to make us take note, perhaps? Calthorpe was a teacher before she married, and taught writing later in her life.. I imagine her setting exercises (description using all the senses, for instance?) that would have been great to have experienced. …
I went through Petersham/Alexandria/MacDonaldtown on the bus on my way to the airport on Wednesday, desperately seeking the hint of a factory chimney… I was disappointed, but still excited just to be in the same streets!
Oh no I wasn’t really suggesting she’s the same Calthorpe but more that the name was not unusual to me.
That’s interesting that she taught writing later. I like your imagining how she might have done that.
I have The Dyehouse on my shelves waiting to be read, think I’m going to have to bump it up the list.
Thank you for reminding me what a wonderful story this was and thank you for the shout-out.
As an aside, my parents live in Bathurst, and although I completed my teacher training in Wagga before it was CSU, my teaching days were in Mudgee, so we regularly attended inservices in CSU Bx. We probably know some of the same people 🙂