Kathleen Fitzpatrick - Solid Bluestone Foundations: And Other Memories of a Melbourne Girlhood 1908-1928

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S olid
B luestone
F oundations

S olid
B luestone
F oundations

and other memories of a
Melbourne girlhood
19081928

Introduced by

Susan Davies

Kathleen
Fitzpatrick

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

PO Box 278 Carlton South, Victoria 3053, Australia

info@mup.unimelb.edu.au

www.mup.com.au

This edition 1998

First edition, The Macmillan Company of Australia, 1983

Second edition, Penguin Books Australia, 1986

Text Estate of Kathleen Fitzpatrick 1998

Introduction and annotations Susan Davies 1998

Design and typography Melbourne University Press 1998

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.

Designed by Sandra Nobes

Typeset in 12 point Centaur by Melbourne University Press

Printed in Malaysia by SRM Production Services Sdn. Bhd.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing -in-Publication entry

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 19051990.

Solid bluestone foundations: and other memories of a Melbourne girlhood 19081928

Bibliography

Includes biographical index.

ISBN 0 522 84823 0.

1. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 19051990Childhood and youth. 2. HistoriansAustraliaBiography. 3. Melbourne (Vic.)Social life and customs19011945.1. Davies, Susan L. II. Title.

920.72

Contents

Illustrations

Kathleen as a child	between 36 and 37
Hughenden c . 1890
Hughenden early twentieth century
Gertrude Buxton (Mother) in fancy dress
Mary Buxton (Grandma)
J. R. Buxton (Grandpa) at Hughenden
Grandpa in the garden	between 68 and 69
Great-grandparents at Nar Nar Goon
The drawing-room at Hughenden
The billiard-room at Hughenden
Gertrude (Mother)
The Buxton sisters (the Aunts)
Mark Pitt (Kathleens other grandfather)
The second PittBuxton marriage
Astley Buxton (Uncle Ack)	between 100 and 101
John Buxton (Uncle Jack)
John, Lorna and Kathleen
Mother and Father in London, 1914
Mark, Lorna, Kathleen, Kevin and John, 1914
Loreto Convent, Portland	between 132 and 133
Kevin on his deathbed, 1914
The Buxton office in Collins Street
Kathleen, Lorna and John, 1918
Kathleen in theatrical costume, 1922
In front of The Ritz, East Melbourne
The University of Melbourne	facing 164
Bonleigh, the last family home, 1924
Lorna in the garden at Bonleigh	facing 165
John in the morning-room at Bonleigh
Lorna and Kathleen in Durban, 1926	facing 196
Lorna, John and Kathleen on the Nestor, 1926
Kathleen as an undergraduate at Oxford, 1927	facing 197
Kathleens family tree	page xxvii

Introduction

We are all artists in childhood, when, for a little while, we can see the world as real artists see it all their lives, with our own eyes and our own feelings. Then the veils of education, habit and other peoples opinions fall between us and the world and we lose our sharpness of vision and perception. Sometimes memory blows the veils aside for a moment and we see and feel again with the old intensity. (Kathleen Fitzpatrick, 1960)

W ITH THESE WORDS Kathleen Fitzpatrick began a review for the Melbourne Age of Nancy Hales A New England Girlhood , published in Boston and London in 1958. A clipping of the review is among her papers at the University of Melbourne Archives. Kathleen found herself in complete sympathy with the American authors intent. She wrote:

Stern critics may say that Nancy Hale chronicles small beer. But are later anguishes any more real or important than that of a little girl who has lost her only ring, a real gold one with turquoises? Does any adult yearning match the intensity of longing with which a child gazes at a heavenly party pudding for grown-up visitors, knowing that there wont be any left over for her?

Kathleen admired also Nancy Hales method of mingling her past and present in the narrative as she felt them to be mingled in her life. The book made a deep impression, and very likely influenced the way in which, in retirement, she began to record her memories of growing up in Melbourne in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Kathleen Fitzpatricks Solid Bluestone Foundations and Other Memories of a Melbourne Girlhood, 19081928 , was published by Macmillan in Melbourne in 1983, and republished by Penguin in paperback in 1986. The book has been out of print for nearly a decade. This third publication is testimony to the intrinsic interest of the work, the contribution it makes to Australian letters, He, too, went on to write autobiography with encouragement and tips from her.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick had a distinguished career as a historian and literary critic. It spanned more than half a century: from her appointment to a lectureship in the History Department of the University of Melbourne in 1938 to her death in 1990. Nearly half this time she spent in the employ of the university and the other half in active and early retirement from the age of fifty-seven. Over the course of her long career she wrote and edited four major books, several smaller studies, many articles in historical and literary journals as well as in the popular press, and a great many book reviews. In addition she completed an encyclopaedic study of the writings of the American novelist, Henry James, which was never published, to her great sorrow. Kathleen was prone to dwell on failure rather than success, and was incapable of arriving at a true estimate of her lifes work. However, the success of her last bookher book of memoriesbrought pleasure and solace to her last years, as her letters to Manning reveal.

This autobiographical work, Solid Bluestone Foundations and Other Memories of a Melbourne Girlhood, 19081928 , depicts, through the eyes of the child, the family into which she was born; the home of her maternal grandparents, Hughenden, to which she escaped often and joyfully, and which provided the fixed centre of her universe; the migratory habits of her family; her education in many schools and at two universities; and her appointment to her first job. The child grows into a schoolgirl, an adolescent and a young adult. The book is neither fact nor fiction. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick wrote in her Acknowledgements: My youthful impressions were not necessarily the same as those of my relations and my effort has been to record those impressions truthfully rather than to ascertain and record hard facts. How the book came to be written is one issue to be explored; another is the veracity of the tale. The book revealed a great deal about Kathleen Fitzpatrick, which amazed people who knew her well, but there were some aspects of her young adulthood which remained veiled. When memory brings pain, we may not wishor be ableto see and feel again with the old intensity.

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