Brenda Niall - Friends and Rivals: Four Great Australian Writers: Barbara Baynton, Ethel Turner, Nettie Palmer, Henry Handel Richardson

Four Australian women writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesa time when stories of bush heroism and mateship abounded, a time when a writing career might be an elusive thing for a woman.

Friends and Rivals is a vivid and engaging account of the intersecting and entwined lives of Ethel Turner, author of the much loved Seven Little Australians, Barbara Baynton, who wrote of the harshness of bush life, Nettie Palmer, essayist and critic, and Henry Handel Richardson, of The Getting of Wisdom and The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney fame.

Brenda Niall illuminates a fascinating time in Australias literary history and brings to life the remarkable women who made it so.

All over the country, brooding on squatters verandahs, or mooning in selectors huts, so A. G. Stephens wrote in the Bulletin in 1901, there are scattered here and there hundreds of lively, dreamy Australian girls whose queer uncomprehended ambitions are the despair of the household. They yearn, they aspire for they know not what

Thats a revealing insight into the thinking of Australias most influential literary critic of the time. It assumes that to dream and aspire is in the nature of women, and that they do their yearning in the outback, the real Australia. Stephens was paying tribute to Miles Franklin, whose first novel, My Brilliant Career, with its rural setting, had just been published. Yet he knew several women writers who didnt spend time in brooding or mooning. They just got on with it. He was on friendly terms with Ethel Turner whose dazzling success in 1894, with her first novel Seven Little Australians, had London publishers competing to add her to their lists. She had six more novels to her credit by 1901 and a very healthy bank balance. Stephens also knew Barbara Baynton, whose first published story had appeared in the Bulletin in 1896. She too was purposeful, with no time for dreaming in deckchairs.

Sydney-based, as were Turner and Baynton, A. G. Stephens knew the literary scene; he knew that the city, rather than the outback of squatters and selectors, was the place where most writers lived and did their work. Many of the men got together in Sydney and elsewhere to drink, share their troubles, weigh their chances of publication, read one anothers work, which more often than not was about the bushthe real Australia as they called it. For women it was different. They were not welcome among the bards and bohemians and because their material and outlook tended to be different from those of the men, they were often left on the margins of the story of Australian literature.

For all of them, men or women, the essential mark of success was publication in London. George Robertson, founder of Angus & Robertson of Sydney was publishing in a small way from the late 1880s, but prestige as well as sales depended on a London imprint. There was a price to pay. Ethel Turner, who caught the attention of Ward Lock & Bowden of London with Seven Little Australians, had to accept editorial decisions made with a British readership in mind. She wasnt asked; she was told, by sea mail, what was being done to her manuscript. Barbara Baynton won brief recognition when Bush Studies was published in London in 1902, but her work was a misfit in both hemispheres, forgotten until the 1980s, when the womens movement discovered a dissenting voice.

Even in recent years, when Australian literary history was being written, Ethel Turner didnt win full recognition of her talents. She had written for children and that didnt count. One incident comes to mind. In 1987, I was teaching Australia Literature courses in the Monash University English Department. I had an agitated phone call from the senior editor of The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. He and his committee of five other scholars had commissioned thirty-four articles for this major bicentennial project. It was a revisionist work, designed to enlarge the traditional map of our literary scene, and it was nearly ready.

Sorry, my colleague said, sounding embarrassed, were sorry, we forgot Kiddylit. Could you write us a chapter? We havent much time. I was irritated by Kiddylit, but I did it, just in time for the deadline. This meant that Ethel Turner was given a place in the New History but treated separately from the serious authors who wrote for adults. In this garden of Australian literature, there was a sandpit for childrens writers.

Writing to Turner in 1895, A. B. (Banjo) Paterson compared the success of Seven Little Australians with his own acclaim for The Man from Snowy River. I think we have struck a lucky time when no one has done much for a long while & the feeling in favour of Australia is growing.

The 1890s has been seen as a turning point in Australian literature, with the Bulletin, the Bushmans Bible, its voice. Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson emerged as its prophets in that decade. More confident of truth to contemporary life than tales of convicts and bushrangers, Lawson and Paterson played games with one another as negative and positive in their representation of the bush. Yet for both, the bush was the essential Australia. Hell or heaven, it defined an emerging nation, and mateship was its essential value. In their fiction, mateship holds the male world together, and so long as women play their useful, necessary, subservient roles, Australian society can be seen as coherent. But mateship is the antithesis of individualism. When women question or confront their destiny, cracks appear. And within the two decades from 1894 to 1914, several women writers were asking questions.

Ethel Turners long, successful career as a writer for children, and for flappers, as she described young girls on the brink of adulthood, may appear as a purposeful, book-a-year business. Nothing in it to shock or disturb her readers, or the parents and teachers who were always on the lookout for impropriety. Yet in her first and most famous creation, Seven Little Australians, Turner broke the mould with a subversive heroine, Judy Woolcot.

When Turner first sought publication, she chose the Bulletin, where she rejoiced at an acceptance from A. G. Stephens. Her friend Barbara Baynton started her literary career in the same way. These two women, nearly two decades apart in age, met in Sydney in the 1890s. Bayntons Bulletin story of 1896, The Tramp (retitled The Chosen Vessel) and its successors, published in her Bush Studies in 1902, confronted the bush legend with a blend of brutal realism and gothic horror. It is a direct challenge to Lawsons The Drovers Wife. Bayntons best-known story, Squeakers Mate, demolishes the notion of loyal mateship.

Unlike the prolific Turner, with her early success, Baynton published little and late. Her energies went into survival, followed by money-making and social advancement. Daughter of a bush carpenter, governess, mother of three, deserted wife, Baynton set about reinventing herself. Divorced from her first husband, she made two more marriages. She inherited wealth from her second husband, moved to London on his death, and acquired a title by marrying an impoverished peer, the Lord Headley who became her third husband. Disappointed in Headley, who annoyed her by refusing an offer of the Crown of Albania, she agreed to a divorce and came back to Australia, where she lived until her death in 1929. The outrageous Barbara Baynton seems an unlikely friend for Ethel Turner, whose life in Sydney with her husband Judge Herbert Curlewis and their two children was a model of suburban propriety. Yet the women were close, as their correspondence shows. Ethel was brave enough to lecture Barbara on materialism.