Kate Grenville - One life: my mothers story

SHORTLISTED, NON-FICTION AWARD, INDIE BOOK AWARDS 2016

This story of resilience, persistence and a mothers enduring love will resonate across generations. GOOD READING

A deeply personal document, it captures the life of an extraordinary woman ahead of her time. GUARDIAN, BEST AUSTRALIAN BOOKS OF 2015

The writing glides, egoless, through this one life that adapted to the massive changes of a centuryI closed the book with regret. MONTHLY

A gift to countless readers who will recognise their own experience, or their mothers experience, in these pages. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Compellingvery moving. SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

Social history written with the storytelling skill of a novelist. AUSTRALIAN

[Grenvilles mother] was something special, a quiet but determined trailblazer, but she also embodied her eraImpeccably written. AUSTRALIAN WOMENS WEEKLY

Also by Kate Grenville

FICTION

Bearded Ladies

Lilians Story

Dreamhouse

Joan Makes History

Dark Places

The Idea of Perfection

The Secret River

The Lieutenant

Sarah Thornhill

NON-FICTION

The Writing Book

Making Stories (with Sue Woolfe)

Writing from Start to Finish

Searching for the Secret River

Kate Grenvilles bestselling novel The Secret River received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. It was adapted into an award-winning stage play and an ABC television miniseries. Grenvilles other novels include Sarah Thornhill, The Lieutenant and The Idea of Perfection, which won the Orange Prize. She lives in Sydney.

KATEGRENVILLE.COM

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Copyright Kate Grenville 2015

The moral right of Kate Grenville to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in 2015 by The Text Publishing Company

This edition published in 2016

Book design by W. H. Chong

All photographs courtesy of the author, except where noted

Typeset in Golden Cockerel ITC by J & M Typesetting

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Author: Grenville, Kate, 1950

Title: One life : my mothers story / by Kate Grenville.

ISBN: 9781925240962 (paperback)

ISBN: 9781925095050 (ebook)

Subjects: Gee, Nance. MothersAustraliaBiography.

WomenAustraliaBiography. Women pharmacistsAustraliaBiography.

Dewey Number: 306.8743092

For Stephen and in memory of Christopher with my love

NANCES FAMILY TREE

PROLOGUE

AFTER MY mother died in 2002 it took me a few years to get out all the papers shed left and look through them. I was afraid it would be a mournful thing to do, but the first exercise book I opened spoke to me as if she was beside me, the warmth and humour of her voice alive still: I have often thought about writing a bookpeople do it all the timeit cant be that hard. Up till now Ive never had the time or the right pencil but now that I have one foot in the grave its time to get on with it. I opened another. There was her workmanlike handwriting saying: There must be a way of writing a storyIm going to try this time to write it backwards.

My mothers many hopeful starts all petered out after a few pages. What she left was a mass of fragments. They often began with the stories about her forebears that shed heard from her mother. Others were about her childhood. Most were about her adult life, up to her mid-forties. They taper away after that, perhaps because by then she felt less need to look back and try to understand.

She often quoted Socrates famous maxim: The unexamined life is not worth living. That terse judgment stayed with her all her life, shaping her actions and consoling her when things seemed bleak. Her sense of the past and the great sweeps of change shed seen made her want to record, and to do more than recordto work out how her own individual life was part of the wider world. That was the urge behind the rich patchwork of fragments I was reading.

My mother wasnt the sort of person biographies are usually written about. She wasnt famous, had no public life beyond one letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald, did nothing that would ever make the history books. Just the same, I think her story is worth telling.

Not many voices like hers are heard. People of her social classshe was the daughter of a rural working-class couple who became pub-keepershardly ever left any record of what they felt and thought and did. They often believed their lives werent important enough to write down, and in many cases they lacked the literacy and the leisure time to do so. As a result, our picture of the past is skewed towards the top lot. Their written documents are the basis for our histories, the nice things they owned fill our museums, their sonnets and novels shape our imaginations. In the bits and pieces of my mothers written memories, I had a first-hand account of a world largely left out of those histories and museums and about which no sonnets, as far as I know, have been written.

Yet her story represents that of a generation of people whose lives were unimaginably different from the lives of every generation of their families before them. When my mother was born, Australia and New Zealand were the only countries in the world where women had the vote. Free universal education stopped at primary school. Very few women worked outside the home. Only a handful of working-class children went to high school. Even fewer went to university or had professional training. Of those, hardly any were women. Even when they did work for wages, women were paid half a mans salary. There was no organised child care. The only reliable form of contraception was abstinence.

By the time my mothers children were growing up, all that had changed. Two world wars, an economic depression, and a series of social revolutions had changed the lives of hundreds of millions all over the world. Many families would know stories like my mothers about their parents and grandparents. Her story is unusual in some ways, but in other ways its the archetypal twentieth-century story of the coming of a new world of choices and self-determination.

When Nance talked about her life, she often started five generations before she was born. The point of her story was that it was part of a bigger one.

Solomon Wiseman, her great-great-grandfather, arrived in Australia in 1806. An illiterate lighterman on the Thames, hed been caught stealing timber and, along with his wife and young son, was transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. He quickly got his freedom and took up land, as the euphemism goes, on the Hawkesbury River. Theres nothing in the record about exactly how he took up that land from the Darug people, but the chances are that he was part of the wave of settler violence against the original Australians.