Australian Reissues

Press, Issue 31095, 25 June 1966, Page 4

Australian Reissues

My Brilliant Career. By Miles Franklin. Angus and Robertson. 232 pp. Bush Studies. By Barbara Baynton. Angus and Robertson. 140 pp.

“My Brilliant Career,” originally published in 1901, when the author was still, in Henry Lawson’s words, “just a little bush girl, barely twenty-one yet,” was Miles Franklin’s first novel, and the one which established her as a promising Australian novelist. Yet, despite the enthusiasm with which the book was received, the author forbade its republication until ten years after her death. It was not the quality of the novel that displeased her, but the fact that the autobiographical nature of its material, which she herself had drawn attention to in the introduction of the first edition, had led some people—outraged relatives in particular —to identify fiction too closely with fact. One is reminded of Jessie Chamber’s complaint that D. H. Lawrence had misrepresented the true nature of their relationship in “Sons and Lovers.” In the case of Lawrence’s novel, autobiographical fact has been rearranged and transformed for the purpose of his theme, and clearly the same holds true for “My Brilliant Career.” One can, of course, understand the dismay which her Victorian relations must have felt on reading the novel, for it attacks many of the proprieties and beliefs held sacred by their generation. Sybylla Melvyn is a precocious and intensely ambitious young girl growing up in the stifling isolation of a backblocks bush settlement. Very much aware of herself and of the conflict between the ambitions of her emerging personality and the restraints imposed upon her “womanly condition” by her elders, she is constantly seething with rebellion. At the same time she hungers for love and affection, which, when it is offered

to her by the rich but rather dull Harold Beecham, she feels bound to reject for an uncertain freedom.

Despite weaknesses in the episodic plot, and a lack of breadth in the portrayal of the other characters, “My Brilliant Career” remains, after sixty years, a delightfully fresh work, well worth reprinting. Another Australian classic now reprinted after a lapse of many years, is “Bush Studies,” a collection of six stories by Barbara Baynton, which was first published in 1902. Apart from two later stories not included here, and a not very successful novel, Mrs Baynton published no other prose in her lifetime. (She died in 1929). “Bush Studies” thus remains a solitary achievement of considerable power and technical assurance. The stories are for the most part works of stark realism, with a vein of obsessive violence running through them which borders on the grotesque. Mrs Baynton writes chiefly about the Australian peasant farmer of the dry outbacks; and the life she depicts is a squalid, soul-destroying one, where the harshness of the environment diminishes a man’s humanity to the point where even his dog knows more about the meaning of loyalty. In “My Brilliant Career,” Miles Franklin also writes vividly of the Australian peasant in her account of life at Possum’s Gully and the portrait of the McSwats of Barney’s Gap. But her indignation has none of the bitterness of these stories—a bitterness which penetrates even the two humorous pieces of the collection. But it is the obsessive terror and feeling of claustrophobic isolation that one remembers about Mrs Baynton’s stories—“ Squeaker’s Mate,” for instance, which is dominated by a pathetic yet terrifying crippled woman; and “Scrawny ’And” and “The Chosen Vessel,” with their recurring image of a lonely figure besieged in a bush hut. And they impress by the skill with which the nightmare element is prevented from degenerating, as it so easily could, into melodrama.