Philobiblon

I mentioned I’d been reading The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson, the pen-name of Ethel, described in the blurb as “recognised as one of the greatest novels in the English language”.

I think that is not an unfair description, yet I’d never previously heard of it, the text having never featured on any school curricula that I know of. The length of the work – originally published in three volumes – more than 800 dense-packed pages in my Angus and Robertson 1983 edition – undoubtedly tells against it, but it is eminently readable, finely observed, and surprisingly feminist.

Although the story, put simply, is the account of the life of the title character, its central figure is really his wife Mary. He is a bright but wayward figure – irresponsible, reckless and unsettled – while she is the one that holds both the text and their fictional lives together. Her female friends and relations are also more real than the male, and acutely aware of the restrictions of their gender.

“Mary had a glimpse into depths that were closed to her menkind. Just to be married! It meant that solace of woman who was getting on in years – the plain gold band on the ring finger. It meant no longer being shut out from the great Society of Matrons; no longer needing to look the other way were certain subjects alluded to; or pretending not to notice the nods and winks, the silently mouthed words that went on behind your back. It was all very well when you were young; when your very youth and innocence made up for it: as you grew older, it turned to a downright mortification – like that of going in to dinner after the bride of 18.” (p.445)

Tilly: “A figure for all the soft sawder that’s talked about marriage. The long and the short of it is, marriage is sent to try us women, and for nothin’ on earth besides.” (p. 685)

That might sum up Mary’s life. As the novel finishes she, having been one of Australia’s ladies of society, is reduced to being a postmistress in an outback town, slaving to maintain her gentility, and particularly that of her children, against all odds.

* The Oxford DNB tells me that an Australian woman, Florrie Forde [Flora May Augustus Flanagan} was the music hall performer who made ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ THE song for British troops.
“Forde was one of the few women to launch her own touring revue company, Flo and Co. (which included Chesney Allen), and for thirty-six summers she performed on the Isle of Man … Her likeness appears on the sign of the Bull and Bush, Hampstead, which also boasts a Florrie Forde bar.” (Have to try that one out.)

* More power to the web: Southeast Asia in the Ming Reign Chronicles (14th-17th Centuries): An English-language translation of Ming shi-lu references to Southeast Asia.

* I buy organic food whenever I can chiefly because I think it is a form of farming that ought to be encouraged, but this rather good wrap-up suggests there are also genuine health benefits. (This link may only work for a few days.)

* American history is not my territory, but an email pointed me to this interesting site about Los Adaes, “the capital of the Province of Texas for 41 years. Los Adaes was a place of rare cooperation among the Spanish, the French, and the Caddo Indians”.

* She was the “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation”, but what happened to Kate Millett?

Early Australian history is usually told as a male-dominated story, and it is remarkable how often this is a story of male failure – Burke and Wills et al. The women who do appear are usually painted in lurid colours as prostitutes and slatterns, or as the odd lonely, isolated “lady”, having a thoroughly miserable time of it.

Yet I’ve just read a collection of (mostly) success stories in which women undertake amazing feats and complete them with aplomb.

Just imagine the journey of Annie Caldwell, an Irishwoman who arrived in Adelaide as a free settler with her husband Matthew in 1841 with almost nothing. They both laboured to earn enough to take a lease on a small farm at Gumeracha, near Adelaide, but the land was poor and the rainfall scant. Matthew died in 1856, leaving Annie pregnant with their eighth child.

She decided to move to NSW in 1864, selling “everything except five horses, some cattle, Lassie the dog and a tilted wagon – similar to covered wagons in America”.

They took eight weeks to cover the 900km trek to Albury and they took up land near Holbrook (one of my old stamping grounds, where to my knowledge there is no memorial to her – although there should be!), where they selected a block in her oldest son’s name.

One of the children said: “How hard we all did work! Mother seemed able to turn her hand to any sort of man’s work after her ten years as sole manageress.” The farm did well and Annie died aged 69, surrounded by her family. (p. 15-17)

This book is A Wealth of Women: Australian Women’s Lives from 1788 to the Present, by Alison Alexander, which takes a fascinating, anecdotal approach to the topic, drawing heavily on the “History Search” by the Office of the Status of Women of 2000, which collected oral histories and much of the work of family historians.

The latter, it seems to me, is a much underutilised resource. No doubt it has its technical limits – but many family stories – particularly women’s stories – are now being recorded that should not be lost again.

The success that many female convicts made of life in Australia is an element that comes out again and again. Little has been written on this until recently, since this was until the 1980s regarded as a “stain” rather than the badge of honour that it is today. There’s for example Mary Smallshaw, a Welsh silk throwster transported for theft in 1818. She married first the clerk of the Tasmanian magistrate’s court, then, after bearing him a daughter, the magistrate himself, and her descendants were “respectable society”. (p. 6)

Although there were ladies made thoroughly miserable by the conditions. I particularly liked the one horrified at having to drink out of handless cups, and by the lack of visiting cards — if you visited someone who was out a piece of chalk was left near the door so you could record your presence on it!

And others were trapped with feckless males. The tale of Matilda Wallace, whose husband moved them from Mt Gambier (South Australia) to Mount Murchison, where he tried in a desultory why to open a shop, to Queensland, then spent the next decade roaming those areas, seldom more than six months in one spot. Two babies died young, and when her fifth was due she went to “civilisation” in Menindee – still the back of beyond.

It is story that reminds me of the mammoth tome I have just finished, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, by (Henry Handel) Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson.

Back in Australia after 10 years away, I’m struck by how there seem to be no new male television news personalities. One of the first things I saw was George Negus presenting SBS’s Dateline, then there’s Andrew Denton doing celebrity interviews. There are so many tributes (or not) to the arts of the plastic surgeon and the wigmaker.

Of course all the women have changed – anyone visibly over 40 and on TV being strictly forbidden.