Philobiblon

I was walking through the Morvan hills in Burgundy yesterday, as pretty well in the middle of nowhere as you can be in Europe. So while there might have been trickling streams, an ash forest, an undergrowth of holly, not “hop scrub”, and really nothing very much at all reminiscent of Australia, I still found myself reciting The Man From Snowy River (Banjo Paterson’s great coming-of-age poem), and then rollicking my way tunelessly through Wild Rover. (Lucky there really was no one within coo-ee.)

But then I got to thinking about the content of these, and why these two tales – one of a boy becoming a respected man, the other of a man who’s been sowing his wild oats coming back into the fold – are the two that have stuck with me, nearly word-perfect, from childhood. And about the fact that both of the central characters are male.

Banjo Paterson of course is the quintessential poet of male Australian mateship; I know far less well many others of his poems, and the romance of humans overcoming natural adversity might be more than a little to blame for my first degree being in agricultural science. (That and the fact I was 17 when I decided to do it.)

But then I tried to think of similar songs or poems about women overcoming adversity, about girls becoming successful women, about straying women returning to the mainstream successfully, and I couldn’t think of any.

I used to be able to recite Little Boy Lost (from dreadful elocution lessons when I was supposed to be being taught to speak “ladylike”), which has a weeping and wailing mother, and … well when it comes to traditional culture, what I learnt in my youth and stuck with me, for brave, resolute, daring, successful women, I drew a total blank.

(With the generalised exception of pony club books – a staple of my pre-teen years, and perhaps the attraction of those has something to do with the fact that girls in them are allowed to do dangerous things, to get hurt, to struggle, persevere, and triumph – not something common in other genres.)

Other than that my childish heroes were rugby league players – they were the only admired people I knew about, and my dreams were – so extraordinarily – of footballing glory (still unrealisable for the girls of today).

Yet I can think of historical female characters who’d make great bases for such a literary project. Women who hid their sex to go off and fight in wars; the biblical Judith, who killed Holofernes (but if you think of most of the depictions of her they’re not exactly positive); pioneer women of the American West … the list could go on and on, and yet somehow none of this really seems to have inspired the songs and poems that have lasted in popular culture.

So I wondered how different it is today. As my office would tell you, pop culture isn’t exactly my special subject. I thought of Lara Croft, not that I know much about her, but she seems to be a genuinely heroic female character. And after that I drew a blank.

So I wondered. Are girls today growing up (anywhere in the world) offered equivalent female coming of age tales to The Man from Snowy River? Are they offered tales of women who went off the rails, had a roaring good time, then got it back together again? (And I’m talking here primarily about pre-teens, when so much character-forming is done.) Will they be remembering them 30 years later?