Miles Franklin - Childhood At Brindabella: My First Ten Years

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Travelling Light by Robyn Davidson

The Red Chief by Ion Idriess

The Desert Column by Ion Idriess

Flynn of the Inland by Ion Idriess

Follow My Dust by Arthur Upfield

The Great Australian Loneliness by Ernestine Hill

Selected Writings by Margaret Preston

Aphorisms by Margaret Preston

The Secret of Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin was born in 1879 on the grazing property, Talbingo near Tumut in New South Wales and spent the first ten formative years of her life at Brindabella where her family owned a station. Brindabella is in the Monaro region of NSW and had a great influence on her life and work.

My Brilliant Career was published in l901 when she was just 22 years old. She did not make a living from writing, trying a career in nursing, and then as a housemaid in both Sydney and Melbourne. She began writing as a freelance journalist for the Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald before leaving for the USA in 1906 and then to England in 1915. She returned to Australia in 1932 and settled in Sydney.

Her novels include Bring the Monkey (1933), All That Swagger (1936), Pioneers on Parade (1939) with Dymphna Cusack and My Career Goes Bung (1946)

Miles Franklin died in 1954. In her will she established Australias major annual literary award, The Miles Franklin Award.

This edition published by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay 2017

First published in Australia by Angus & Robertson in 1963 Paperback editions 1974,1979

Reprinted 1980, 1981

Eden paperback edition 1987 Reprinted 1989, 1992

Published in Australia with Richmond Ventures Limited 2003

1963 Miles Franklin Estate, 2017

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 as amended, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or communicated in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, whether in existence at the date of publication or yet to be invented without prior written permission. All inquiries should be addressed to the publisher:

ETT Imprint,
PO Box R1906,
Royal Exchange NSW 1225
Australia

Cover: E. Phillips Fox, Dolly, Daughter of Hammond Clegg, Esq. Oil, 1896. NGV.

ISBN 978-0-6480963-2-0 (ebook)

ISBN 978-0-6480963-3-7 (paper)

MILES FRANKLIN wrote this delightful autobiography in 1952-1953. She was unable to arrange for publication before her death in 1954 and the MS. came to Angus and Robertson Ltd from her executors, the Permanent Trustee Co. Ltd of New South Wales.

With the MS. she left two papers explaining how she came to write it. The first was a letter which apparently she intended to post with the MS. to Pixie OHarris, but never got around to doing it; and the other, also explaining Pixie OHarriss part in the affair, might have been intended as a draft for a foreword, but rather reads as if she jotted it down hastily just as a method of getting herself started on the book. It seems clear from these papers that she had intended to dedicate the autobiography to Pixie OHarris, and this note should be taken as fulfilling her wishes in that respect The story told in the papers is simply that the well-known writer of Australian childrens books, Pixie OHarris (in private life Mrs Bruce Pratt), had urged Miles Franklin to write something of the same kind herself. Miles Franklin felt she couldnt do that; but she did feel she could describe her own childhood; and she wanted very much to do so, partly because, as she says in her first chapter, No other spot has ever replaced the hold on my affections of my birthplace, partly because she had been reading some unhappy memoirs of childhood and wanted to show that those years could be, as hers were, supremely happy. In the foreword, dated 14th August 1952, she wrote:

A moment ago Pixie called me to the telephone to exhort me to do a childrens story. I rebelled: I loathe childrens stories. My mother sedulously kept them from me because she herself as a child had suffered so from the sorrow and fates of the children in them: such horrors as Little Red Ridinghood being eaten by a wolf, and the two little ones that had to be covered by the birds when they died lost somewhere, and Jack and the Bean Stalk with the gruesome slitting of the Giants stomachs! They were a fantasy of horrors with their starving match-girls and lost children. We had no starving match-girls, and a lost child called out the countryside for a hundred miles to the rescue.

But, she added:

For a long time I have been intending to write down earliest memories to discover how many I retain clear-cut before my memory is too moth-eaten. I meant to do this as a diary for myself alone, as sailors in the doldrums erect full-rigged ships in bottles just because the mind is an instrument that sanity cannot leave idle. I must find some kind of exercise for a mind unused except on chores or with the triffle-traffle of housewives.

What a shy wild creature Miles Franklin was, for all her out-spokenness! -slight, breathless, her quick utterances flying away from her like birds, and her brown eyes, even while they sparkled with vivacity, glancing this way and that all the time like birds on the watch for a hawk. She suffered, so she says in this book, agonies of stage-fright in her public appearances. It is typical of the reticence which is said to have fallen upon her after the publication of her first novel, and its mixed reception from friends, relatives, critics and the public, that even in the present book, which is straightforward autobiography, she changed all the place-names and named most of the people only by their initials Aunt A. and Mrs MG.. Even her father, in one fantastic outburst of reticence (a phrase Miles Franklin might have liked) is called, when a guest speaks to him at the dinner table, not Franklin and he could hardly have been anybody else but F.

Thereby Miles Franklin presented her publishers with a problem. Would it be fair to her to try to identify the places and people? To a certain extent she herself answered the question

She is always careful in the MS. to use the invented place-name Gool Gool for the town where she sometimes stayed with relatives (students of the Brent of Bin Bin novels will notice the similarity with Bool Bool in that sequence). But apparently she did not have a privately-taken photograph of Gool Gool and in the illustrations which she pasted into the MS. of the autobiography she included a coloured postcard of the town, on which is clearly printed the caption, The Poplars, Tumut. So Gool Gool, on the authors own admission, is Tumut, New South Wales.

This may have been a slip; and if so it is an amusing one. But it is clear when she calls her father F. (which in the context must stand for Franklin, not Father) that she was not seeking any deep concealment of the places and people in this book; and on the whole, since she was certainly not out to attack or injure anybody but to write about them all with affection, it seemed fair to attempt an identification. This was made possible by the help of Miss Ruby Franklin Bridle of Sydney, a cousin of Miles Franklin, and a list of places and people is accordingly printed as an appendix in this book. A few stray remittance men and similar characters have been left, however, under the pseudonyms or in the anonymity which Miles Franklin would have wished for them. It is worth observing, since the place-names are so confusing in all the Miles Franklin and Brent of Bin Bin novels, that Ajinby, her grandmothers house in which Miles Franklin was born and in which she spent some of her happiest days, was really Talbingo station, at Talbingo, New South Wales; and Bobilla, where Miles Franklins parents lived during most of the period covered by this book, was an invented name for Brindabella station, at Brindabella, not far from the present city of Canberra. Stillwater, correctly named in the book, the property to which her parents moved from Brindabella, was at Thornford, near Goulburn, New South Wales.