The Penguin Anthology of Australian Women’s Writing #AWWanthology

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.