Ernestine Hill - My Love Must Wait

Recorded history often avoids the less glorious aspects of its great achievers, but Australian history is full of sad stories. One of its saddest must surely be that of Matthew Flinders. The public remembers the navigator, explorer, cartographer, and the person who gave Australia its name. Popular enduring images of Flinders include his friendship with George Bass, their adventures in the Tom Thumb , his cat Trim. From an obscure Lincolnshire family, Flinders went to sea at the age of 16, sailed with Captain Bligh, took command of his own ship at 26, circumnavigated and mapped the continent, survived shipwreck and the numerous other disasters and hardships of a life at sea. If all that wasnt enough for one short lifetime, Flinders was unfairly imprisoned and in exile for six years, and only lived briefly with his wife of ten years before dying far too young, at the age of 40 the day before his magnificent lifes work saw publication.

Yet these last are the details we tend to forget. The author Ernestine Hill was probably the first to reach into the sadness of Matthew Flinderss life, and she crafted a story of immense tenderness and appeal, a book which has been one of the great successes of Australian publishing. My Love Must Wait first appeared amid wartime austerity in late 1941, but its initial print run of 3000 quickly sold out. Subsequent reprints also sold out and despite apparent paper shortages and other production problems due to the war, it was reprinted regularly until the end of that decade, achieving record sales for an Australian novel. Then in the 1960s it saw renewed success with several paperback editions, as well as overseas publications and translations.

Aside from this, and her other popular titles, Ernestine Hills own story was not such a triumphant one. In many ways hers was also a sad and unusual life and she certainly seemed to have a hunger for travel and adventure that possibly matched Flinderss. She was born in 1899 in Rockhampton, Queensland, and died at the age of 73 in 1972. There is little information about Hills life, and she liked it that way. A short feature on her written by Mary Durack was published in 1952 in Walkabout , one of the magazines for which Hill regularly wrote in her capacity as a freelance journalist. Duracks image of Hill is vivid: a slim dark girl in a wideawake straw hat and with no luggage but a small suitcase, a thin swag and a typewriter who first appeared on the verandah of the Duracks Ivanhoe station in 1930. And it was no exaggeration: Hill travelled very light, for decades taking the bare necessities and her portable typewriter. Sometimes she was accompanied by trunks of her voluminous notes and manuscripts, at other times she lodged these at temporary headquarters along her journeys across the country.