by Bill Holloway

The years from the 1920s to the 1950s which encompass the third generation of Australian writing, saw the Depression, WWII, and the beginning of the end of Australia as a white picket fence British enclave. Nearly all of our best writers from this period were women, and a large number of their protagonists were fiercely independent.

White Australians were still (are still) clustered in a few cities on the arable fringes of a seemingly hostile continent. We sent out explorers – Ion Idriess, Frank Clune, Ernestine Hill – to remind us just how hostile, how other, the Dead Centre really was, and their writing was tremendously popular, but the Literary writers of this generation began to write the stories of ordinary men and women in the cities.

Aboriginal Australians had their own myth, or rather we had a myth about them, that they were out there in the desert and that they were dying out. This comes up in Idriess and Hill and most particularly of course in Daisy Bates’ The Passing of the Aborigines (1938). But for the first time Aboriginal characters were pictured sympathetically and at length in fiction, most notably by Eleanor Dark, KS Prichard and Xavier Herbert.

Reflecting to some extent trends from overseas, Generation 3 had three reasonably distinct schools of writing: Modernism, Social Realism, and Bush Realism.

Modernism: The Modernist Period in English Literature occupied the years from shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where in the past they were often heartily discouraged.  … [A] central preoccupation of Modernism is with the inner self and consciousness. In contrast to the Romantic world view, the Modernist cares rather little for Nature, Being, or the overarching structures of history. Instead of progress and growth, the Modernist intelligentsia sees decay and a growing alienation of the individual. The machinery of modern society is perceived as impersonal, capitalist, and antagonistic to the artistic impulse. (The Literature Network).

I have written elsewhere that one of the first great works heralding the Modernist era is Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life (1903), which ironically was read in Australia, up to its republication in 1944, as Bush Realism. So that the writer generally credited with introducing Modernism to Australian writing is Eleanor Dark, beginning with Prelude to Christopher (1934), from whence it gradually permeated all literary writing.

Our greatest early Modernist is undoubtedly Christina Stead, who in the years 1930-35 was in the crowd around Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., which in 1922 had published James Joyce’s Ulysses. I am sure Australian writers read her, but she was kept out of Australia by anti Communist sentiment until the 1960s.

Other Modernists were Zora Cross, Lesbia Harford and Elizabeth Harrower. Thea Astley, who is the same age as Harrower, wrote in the Modernist style, following Patrick White, but I have always regarded her as fourth generation (1960s-80s) because her subject matter is so clearly post-colonial.

Eve Langley, to whom I will devote a post next month, wrote as a Modernist, but consciously harked back to the Bush themes of the previous generation.

Social Realism: Realism began in France in the middle of the C19th as a reaction to Romanticism. The idea was to picture life ‘warts and all’, eg. Zola. This led to Social Realism, in the first half of the C20th, which depicts the harshness of working life in order to critique the forces giving rise to it, “Social Realism aims to reveal tensions between an oppressive, hegemonic force, and its victims” (wiki). By contrast Socialist Realism, which was the mandated style for Communists around the same time, idealizes the (post-Revolution) Worker.

Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883-1969) was a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia in 1921 and remained a member for the rest of her life. She worked to organise unemployed workers and founded left-wing women’s groups. Her first novel, The Pioneers (1915) fits perfectly in the Bush Realism/Pioneering category below, but, while rarely leaving the bush, the subject matter of her writing moved on to labourers, mine workers and in a couple of cases, Aboriginal women used and misused by white men. Working Bullocks (1926) is as close as she gets to pure Socialist Realism and Intimate Strangers (1939) is her one fling at Modernism.

During the Depression, Communism and the overthrow of Capitalism must have seemed like the only rational way forward. Kylie Tennant, Jean Devanny and, after the War, Dorothy Hewett and Mena Calthorpe were all members of the CPA, at least for a while. Their novels, respectively The Battlers (1940), Sugar Heaven (1936), Bobbin’ Up (1959) and The Dyehouse (1961) all portray the struggles of workers, and in particular, working class women.

Other fiction at the same time, notably Tennant’s Ride on Stranger (1943), Come in Spinner (1951) by Cusack & James, and Caddie (1953) each tell the stories of independent working women on low wages in inner Sydney, and the fatal consequences of backyard abortions. Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948) describes more generally inner city slum living.

Bush Realism/Pioneering: Looking back from the 1970s, historians John Hirst and Judith Godden recognized that the myth of the independent bushman had been ameliorated by the general adoption of a Pioneer myth, where families carve productive farmland out of unwelcoming bush; a myth which incidentally asserts their right to be seen as the creators, and therefore the valid owners, of their land.

Although it is sometimes argued that women are absent here also, Jemima Mowbray (‘Examining the Myth of the Pioneer Woman’, 2006) shows that during the Centenary and Sesqui-centenary celebrations of the 1930s women actively asserted their place in the opening up of the Australian bush to settlement. While Mowbray agrees with Godden that ‘the middle-class virtue of domesticity is the primary virtue celebrated within the Pioneer Woman myth’, she also emphasizes that popular representations of pioneer women show that they, as much as the men, were forced to overcome the loneliness and hardships of pioneering.

Miles Franklin claimed that she and Steele Rudd were the founders of this school, most notably with her All That Swagger (1936), though she also wrote Pioneers on Parade (1939) with Dymphna Cusack, a spoof on women organising for the NSW Sesqui-centenary, and after her death in 1954 it was revealed she was the author behind the Brent of Bin Bin pioneering sagas.

Australian Literature will no doubt always include an element of bush/pioneer writing to a greater proportion than warranted by our 80% suburban population. I might include here, from this period, Mollie Skinner, The Boy in the Bush, with DH Lawrence (1924); M Barnard Eldershaw, A House is Built (1929); Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930); Myrtle Rose White, No Roads Go By (1932); Mary Durack, Kings in Grass Castles (1959); Nene Gare,The Fringe Dwellers (1961).

The Independent Woman: My favourite heroine from this period is Shannon in Ride on Stranger which has a cast of independent women, Shannon, Beryl, Lucy Rossingale, Aunt Edith, all childless, mostly unmarried, and all, except sometimes for Shannon, financially self-supporting.

Similarly, Come In Spinner  tells the stories of three women, Claire, Guinea, and Deb, who are co-workers in the beauty salon of an exclusive Sydney hotel during WWII. Guinea is independent in the modern sense of choosing who she sleeps with, but only Deb’s friend Dr Dallas McIntyre is truly independent in the sense of actively opposing marriage in favour of pursuing her profession.

Women’s writing of the 1940s and 50s became increasingly concerned with the (related!) problems of sex and abortion, setting the scene for modern, post-sexual revolution fiction. Caddie (1953), published anonymously but written by Catherine Edmonds (1900-1960), who was for a time housekeeper to Cusack and James while they were writing Come in Spinner, is the lightly fictionalized autobiography of a young woman, deserted by her husband with two children to support during the Depression. Caddie spends much time fighting off unwanted attentions. In one scene her landlord enters her bedroom, ‘“Get out of here!” I shouted. He only laughed, “You women make too much of these things. What’s it for, anyway?’” (1953, p.132). Her girlfriend, Josie, has a miscarriage induced by an old woman with “a piece of wire” leading Caddie to muse:

I shuddered to think of all the unfortunate girls who must have lost their lives rather than face the cruel criticism and unjust treatment that would be their lot if they had an illegitimate child. Not only their reputation that suffers, but their chance of earning a decent living.

As a single mother, Caddie struggles to find carers for her young children while she is working and for a time puts them in church-run homes where she is permitted to visit them for just one hour each week. Caddie is one of only a few works to deal with the single mother problem, though Miles Franklin has a shot at addressing it in Old Blastus of Bandicoot (1931).