
During Bill @Australian Legend’s Gen 4 Reading Week, both he and Lisa posted about anthologies that fitted the week/gen in question. I also have an anthology that I had looked into for the week, but unlike Lisa, I only had time to read one of the stories in the collection and ran out of time to post something meaningful.
However I have been wanting to create a post for this particular anthology to put into my Australiana tab on the menu. They have inspired me to put this together now.
The Penguin Anthology of Australian Women’s Writing edited by Dale Spender (1988) made its way onto my bookshelves back in April last year. I discovered it tucked away on the Literature shelf in the second hand bookshop attached to Gleebooks in Blackheath.
Dale Spender’s Acknowledgements and Introduction were fascinating on several accounts. I enjoy the many connections within Australia literary circles. Spender thanks Debra Adelaide who was one of the major researchers on this book. Adelaide went on to edit her own anthologies of Australian writers Women Writers: A Bibliographic Guide (1988) and A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (2008) as well as several novels and short stories. Spender marvels that Adelaide included 450 women authors in her Bibliographic Guide, not because she is surprised to see so many, but that so many have fallen away from mainstream view due to ‘their refusal to conform to the masculine image‘.
Right from the early days of the new settlement in NSW, women were writing, but their concerns and issues were different to the men and ‘they were even writing about the men in a way that men rarely wrote about themselves‘. Mateship, from a female perspective was not always the positive thing it was for the men. Romanticising the bush legends and outback stories was not something the women writers felt obliged to engage in. They tended to deal with the realities of isolation, child birth, fear and the lack of agency in their own lives.
She sees the early letter and journal writing by these women as expressions of ‘migrant literature‘ and even a form of therapy – women far from home, in exile, trying to make sense of this new experience and ‘make sense of their new selves and their new lives‘. Their writing revealed the struggle to reconcile the values of ‘the old country‘ with those found in the new.
As the new colony grew, not all of these new values were an issue. In fact, many of the women coming to Australia in the 19th century embraced the freedom and independence this new life could provide. Marriage and child bearing were often criticized or shown to be detrimental to women. Female writers showed that it was the women who paid the higher price for making a mistake in picking the wrong kind of husband.
One aspect of life that many of these women referred to time and again was the exploitation of the Aborigines, especially the black women by the white men. Spender claims that white women did not fear Aboriginal women or wish to subdue them. They were not the ‘enemy‘. It was the power imbalance between men and women that created the problems. It was ‘co-existence rather than conflict’, humanity rather than inhumanity and the strength that could be gained from shared experiences that most women writer’s were seeking.
At the time, these female voices were usually writing alone and isolated and they were often ridiculed by the established male writers. Spender hopes that by collecting them together that it makes it possible to see that these women writers were not in fact isolated examples of female rebellion, but part of a long line of continuous experience of women authors raising ‘their voices against female subordination.’
The collection includes letters, diaries, journals, short stories and chapter extracts from larger works. Many of the early works can now be found on Project Gutenberg or Gutenberg Australia, but I have been having trouble finding the books by some of the Gen 4 authors in this list.
Author | Title | Birth/death |
---|---|---|
Margaret Catchpole | Letters | 1762-1819 |
Elizabeth Macarthur | Letters | 1769-1850 |
Georgiana McCrae | Journal | 1804-1890 |
Louisa Anne Meredith | My Home in Tasmania During a Residency of Nine Years | 1812-1895 |
Catherine Helen Spence | Afloat or Ashore | 1825-1910 |
Ellen Clacy | A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia 1852-1853 | 1830-1901 |
Mary Fortune | Kirsty Oglevie | 1833-1911 |
Ada Cambridge | A Girl’s Ideal | 1844-1926 |
Louisa Lawson | Editorials from The Dawn | 1848-1920 |
Jessie Couvreur (Tasma) | An Old Time Episode in Tasmania | 1848-1897 |
Rosa Praed | My Australian Girlhood | 1851-1935 |
Catherine Langloh Parker | Australian Legendary Tales | 1885-1940 |
Barbara Baynton | Squeaker’s Mate | 1857-1929 |
Mary Gaunt | Dick Stanesby’s Hutkeeper | 1861-1942 |
Mary Gilmore | Letters | 1864-1962 |
Henry Handel Richardson | The Bathe: A Grotesque | 1870-1946 |
Ethel Turner | Diaries | 1872-1958 |
Edith Lyttleton | Why Mollie Wouldn’t | 1874-1945 |
Mollie Skinner | The Witch of Wellaway | 1876-1955 |
Mary Grant Bruce | How I Became A Writer & Overtime For Wives | 1878-1958 |
Miles Franklin & Dymphna Cusack | Call Up Your Ghosts | 1879-1954 & 1902-1981 |
Katharine Susannah Prichard | Brumby Innes & The Cooboo | 1883-1969 |
Nettie Palmer | Fourteen Years | 1885-1964 |
Marjorie Barnard | Habit | 1897-1987 |
Eleanor Dark | Sweet and Low | 1901-1985 |
Dorothy Cottrell | Cabbage Roses | 1902-1957 |
Christina Stead | A Writer’s Friends | 1902-1983 |
Sarah Campion | Mo Burdekin | 1906-2002 |
Kylie Tennant | Speak You So Gently & The Face of Despair | 1912-1988 |
Nancy Cato | The Olive Stealers | 1917-2000 |
Faith Bandler | Wacvie | 1918-2015 |
Nene Gare | A Good Job | 1919-1994 |
Olga Masters | The Home Girls | 1919-1986 |
Oriel Gray | The Torrents | 1920-2003 |
Antigone Kefala | Sunday Lunch | 1935- |
Germaine Greer | The Female Eunich | 1939- |
- Lisa | The Best Penguin Australian Short Stories, edited by Mary Lord | 2000
- Bill | The Babe is Wise: Contemporary Stories by Australian Women, editors Lyn Harwood, Bruce Pascoe & Paula White | 1987
- Best Australian Short Stories Paperback | Douglas and Beatrice Davis: Stewart | 1975
- Women Writers: A Bibliographic Guide | Debra Adelaide | 1988
- Australian Literature: An Anthology of Writing from the Land Down Under | edited by Phyllis Fahrie Edelson | 1993
- The Penguin Book of 19th Century Australian Literature | edited by Michael Ackland | 1993
- The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories | Michael Wilding | 1995
- A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century | edited by Debra Adelaide | 2008
- A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900 | edited by Nicholas Birns | 2010
- The Best Australian Stories: A Ten-Year Collection | edited by Black Inc | 2011
- Something Special, Something Rare: Outstanding short stories by Australian women | edited by Black Inc | 2015
- This post was written on the traditional land of the Wangal clan, one of the 29 clans of the Eora Nation within the Sydney basin. This Reading Life acknowledges that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are this land’s first storytellers.
A useful contribution to Bill’s list. I’m pleased to say that I’ve heard of or read nearly all of them, thanks to Bill’s earlier ‘weeks’ and various bookish books that cover the history of Australian women’s writing.
But Oriel Gray surprised me until I looked for her at Goodreads. One of the editions of The Torrents is subtitled ‘Current Theatre Series’ so I’m assuming its a play. She has five titles, of which the only to have a book description is ‘Lawson’ (it’s about L’s characters) but I think we can guess from ‘Exit Left: Memoirs Of A Scarlet Woman’ that she might have been an actor?
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KSP’s Brumby Innes is a play too (and I thought The Cooboo was too, but it’s a short story), written when she was at Turee Creek station writing Coonardoo.
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Yes, I know Brumby Innes through doing a course at the Vic Arts Centre (with Mairi Neil, she wrote it up on here). Brumby Innes is the precursor of that horrible man in Coonardoo.
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That’s great to have all this background info before I tackle the stories.
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The Franklin/Cusack item is also a play.
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That’s got some great stories. Was it published under the imprint Penguin hired Spender for – Penguin Australian Womens Library?
I’ve read quite a few of the authors. If there was one story I’d recommend its HHR’s The Bathe: A Grotesque which I’m pretty sure is from her Cuffy Mahony anthology. And if there’s one I really want to read it’s Faith Bandler’s Wacvie which I assume is an excerpt.
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It doesn’t appear to be, I could only find Penguin Book Australia inside and out.
The Wacvie extract was the one story I did read this past week. It was tantalising to have the boyhood chapter and no more.
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What an undertaking: well done! Do you know about this resource? There might be others available online there or, if you can find copies, you could contribute them to the depository over time as a volunteer. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/
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I didn’t know about that particular depository, thanks Marcie. A quick scan didn’t reveal any Australian names, but I did spot a few names that I am keen to read more about.
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A great find. Miles Franklin’s “My Brilliant Career” was one of those life-changing reads for me.
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