Jill Roe - Miles Franklin

Winner 2009 Queensland Premiers Literary Awards, History Book Award

Winner 2010 South Australian Premiers Prize for Non-fiction

Winner 2010 Australian Historical Association Magarey Medal for Biography

Jill Roes handling of Stella Miles herself is compassionate and sympathetic in spirit, yet quietly measured and just

Australian Historical Association

Roes mighty biography of a woman who was pivotal to the culture during a formative period of Australian literary life is meticulous and welcome

Hilary McPhee, The Australian

a long-awaited and splendidly breezy blockbuster biography of the indefatigable, self-inventing and campaigning author of My Brilliant Career

Richard Holmes, Australian Book Review

JILL ROE, AO, FASSA, was Professor Emerita in the Department of Modern History at Macquarie University, Sydney. She wrote numerous papers on Miles Franklins life and work. Her edited selection of Miles Franklins letters, My Congenials, appeared in 1993, and A Gregarious Culture: Topical Writings of Miles Franklin (with Margaret Bettison) in 2001.

The original edition of this biography, Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography, was published in 2008. In 2009, it won the Queensland Premiers Literary Award and in 2010 it received both the South Australian Premiers Prize for Non-fiction and the Australian Historical Associations Magarey Medal for Biography.

Professor Roe passed away January 2017 at the age of 76. In 2014, the Jill Roe Prize was inaugurated in her honour.

The writing of this project was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

First published in Australia in 2008

Second edition published in 2010

This edition published in 2018

by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

ABN 36 009 913 517

harpercollins.com.au

Copyright Jill Roe 2008

The right of Jill Roe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Front cover image of Miles Franklin (c. 1901) courtesy State Library of New South Wales [P1 / 595]

Internal illustrations reproduced with permission of the State Library of New South Wales. Where images are held in more than one collection, acknowledgement has been made according to where the reproduction was originally obtained.

To the memory of my grandmothers,

Elizabeth Norman Heath and Anna Elizabeth Roe,

Australian girls of the period

Map by Laurie Whiddon, Map Illustrations

O n Sunday 1 June 1879, a young woman set off from Brindabella Station in the high country of southern New South Wales to ride to Talbingo, some fifty kilometres south-west as the crow flies. Susannah Margaret Eleanor Franklin, ne Lampe, wife of John Maurice Franklin, co-occupant of Brindabella Station, was over four months pregnant and she was going to her mothers place before winter set in to give birth to her first child.

For reasons unknown, possibly to do with the weather, Susannah took the less direct northern route to Talbingo, following a bridle track westward over the Fiery Range through Argamalong to Lacmalac, east of the township of Tumut, turning south thereabouts for Talbingo, where, at the junction of Jounama Creek and the Tumut River, her redoubtable mother, Sarah Lampe, oversaw a considerable estate. On her journey, Susannah passed through some of the most mountainous terrain in Australia, so rugged it had only ever been lightly touched upon by the Indigenous Ngunawal and Ngarigo peoples. It is not recorded whether she was accompanied.

In the manner of the day, Susannah rode side-saddle, attired in a fashionably tight riding habit, and it is said that her sure-footed horse, Lord Byron the same horse that had borne her from Talbingo to the fastness of Brindabella as a bride less than a year before was up to the girth in snow for miles.

On Wednesday 4 June she arrived at Talbingo and four months later, on 14 October 1879, she gave birth to a daughter. Seven weeks after that, on 6 December 1879, at All Saints Church of England, Tumut, the baby was baptised Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin.

This impressive name captured much of the childs diverse Australian inheritance dating back to 1788. Stellas mother, Susannah, was the great-granddaughter of English convicts Edward Miles (a First Fleeter) and his wife, Susannah, who arrived in Sydney in 1803. Their native-born daughter Martha, who married an emancipist, William Bridle, was Susannah Franklins grandmother, and her mother was their firstborn daughter, Sarah, who married Oltmann Lampe. Oltmann was the younger son of a small landholder near Bremen, Germany, who emigrated in the 1840s and in 1866 took over Talbingo Station.

John Franklin was a younger son of Irish immigrants of the 1830s, Joseph Franklin and his wife, Mary (known as Maria). A native-born bushman, John Franklin had a touch of poetry in his make-up. Perhaps the name Stella, meaning star, was his idea.

Mother and daughter left Talbingo for Brindabella the following January, when the last of the snowdrifts had melted, according to Miles Franklins memoir Childhood at Brindabella. They travelled over the daisied plains, by the sparkling rivulets, probably eastward over Talbingo Mountain, turning north near Yarrangobilly up the gullies to Brindabella. This time Susannah was definitely accompanied, by one of her brothers, William Augustus Lampe, who bore the sometimes noisy infant always called Stella by her family before him on a purple pillow strapped to the saddle.

Nothing now survives of old Talbingo. The Lampe homestead site was submerged in 1968 under Jounama Pondage, part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, which today waters much of inland Australia. A fingerpost pointing mid-pond indicates the spot. But a new Talbingo has been established uphill, and in 1979 residents built a memorial to mark the centenary of the birth of Susannah and John Franklins daughter. Much of the terrain traversed by Susannah a century before is now part of Kosciuszko National Park, an area of great natural beauty that lies between the Australian Capital Territory and the Victorian border and encompasses well over half a million hectares.