2002 (1984), 230 p.
If you were to rely on the 'Australian Bush canon' penned by male writers (Lawson, Furphy, Paterson) etc. you'd think that there were no women in the Australian bush at all. That's not true of course, but until Barbara Baynton wrote her Bush Studies, they were largely invisible in the 'bush legend' genre. Historian Lucy Frost, whose books mainly deal with lost and abandoned women and children in 19th century Australia, presents the letters and diaries of a selection of women who emigrated to Australia between the 1840s and 1880s. The women she features are not well-known, but in many ways they are the stuff of legend.
The way that she has arranged these women within her chapters is interesting. The first chapter starts with letters written home after the sea-voyage from Britain to Australia. She starts with a long letter written by Anna Cook to her mother in 1883 which brims with Anna's own enthusiasm and positivity. Blessed with a constitution immune to sea-sickness, Anna depicts shipboard life as a small village, with plenty of food, and a conscientious captain and doctor. This is very different from the journey described by Ellen Moger who travelled to Australia in 1840, losing three of her four children on a trip that claimed the lives of thirty passengers and, one suspects, her own sanity as well. No doubt striking dread into the recipient, Moger starts her letter "I have very melancholy accounts to give" and it certainly is a sad epistle that follows. Frost has reversed the chronological order of these two letters, perhaps reluctant to start with such a pessimistic account, but in doing so loses any sense of improvement in ship conditions over the forty-three years that separate them.
Her second chapter deals with just one woman, Louisa Clifton, who travelled as a 25 year old with her parents and multiple siblings to Australind, near Bunbury. She had chosen her mother over her suitor and was disappointed in love, but one senses - but cannot know because the letters cease- that she will find love again. I was sorry that Frost did not give more history of the Australind settlement, which was established on Wakefieldian principles but was plagued by indecision over where it should be established, and failed within a few years.
The third chapter, which was my favourite, featured Annie Baxter (later Annie Baxter Daubin) whose diary commenced in 1834 as a 17-year-old bride, joining her 20-year-old husband Lieut Andrew Baxter for Van Diemen's Land. They left VDL for 'Yesabba', a pastoral run in the Macleay River valley in NSW. Frost concentrates on the period 1843-4, when their marriage has soured, partially because of husband's affair with a 'lubra', and then because he discovered in the pages of Annie's diary her passion for Commissioner of Crown Lands, Robert Massie. Because he destroyed pages of the diary, we do not know exactly the nature of their relationship, but she certainly rebuffed his attempts to re-establish marital relations, fearful that she would fall pregnant. Her journal is gossipy and lively, emphasizing the importance of the social life, limited though it might be, amongst other settler families in the district. I'm rather excited to find that I already have Lucy Frost's A Face in the Glass: The Journal and Life of Annie Baxter Dawbin sitting unread on my bookshelves.
Penelope Selby wrote a series of letters to her extended family back in England between 1840 and 1851. Her strong Protestant faith sustained her through a series of stillbirths, with her final child living only a few hours, which was perhaps even more heartbreaking. She formed a strong friendship with her neighbour Mrs Dawson, whose demise she seemed to predict regularly every letter, but ironically it was Mrs Selby who was to die suddenly after a fall from a horse.
These single-subject chapters are followed by a chapter drawing on the correspondence of four women who came to Australia to work as governesses under the auspices of the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society. These are mostly dissatisfied letters, with only Louisa Geoghegan expressing any enthusiasm for this new life. The snippy letter from the Society's patron in Australia, Mrs a'Beckett, makes it quite clear that she is not going to meet these women at the wharf, or help them to find a position, and the high costs of the boarding house funded by the Society provided little assistance to women if they could not find a position immediately.
Ann Williams (1882) and Lucy Jones (1883) both wrote diaries of their travel from one part of Australia to another- and what an ordeal inter- and intra-state travel was for women, expected to wash and cook as their drays took them through rough country, with young children to care for. Sarah Davenport also wrote in her memoirs of her travel across bush, with her feckless cabinet-maker husband who seemed incapable of doing the two things she really wanted: to gain a paying job, and to bring back her daughter who was separated from them.
We read this book for my CAE bookgroup, and I was interested to see what the others thought of it. I am drawn to primary sources (especially by those written by women) in small colonial societies, but this repository of letters, diaries and memoirs do not form a shaped narrative and resist a tidy ending. Letters and diaries just stopped; once their pen stopped writing, Frost can only turn to biographical details of locations, births, deaths and marriages. We all enjoyed it, with an admiration for the matter-of-factness with which they dealt with circumstances over which they had little control, and the sheer courage needed to embark on a journey to the other side of the globe, with so few certainties.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: CAE bookgroups.
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