Miles Franklin: A Short Biography

MAP

Map by Laurie Whiddon, Map Illustrations

DEDICATION

To the memory of my grandmothers,

Elizabeth Norman Heath and Anna Elizabeth Roe,

Australian girls of the period

CONTENTS

Map

Dedication

Letter from S.M. Franklin to Angus & Robertson, 1894

Prologue

PART I — AUSTRALIA: 1879–1906

1   Childhood at Brindabella: 1879–1889

2   Near Goulburn: 1890–1898

3   From Possum Gully to Penrith: 1899–1902

4   With Penrith as a Base: 1903–1906

PART II — AMERICA: 1906–1915

5   Among the ‘Murkans’: 1906–1911

6   The Net of Circumstance: 1911–1915

PART III — ENGLAND & AUSTRALIA: 1915–1932

7   Pack Up Your Troubles: 1915–1918

8   At the Heart of the Empire: 1918–1923

9   To Be a Pilgrim: 1923–1927

10 Enter Brent of Bin Bin: 1927–1932

PART IV — AUSTRALIA: 1933–1954

11 ‘As a Natural Fact’: 1933–1938

12 Maintaining Our Best Traditions: 1939–1945

13 The Waratah Cup: 1946–1950

14 ‘Shall I Pull Through?’: 1951–1954

Afterlife

APPENDICES

Principal Published Writings of Miles Franklin

Commemorative Awards and Their Winners

Brief Guide to Main and Frequently Cited Sources and Titles of General Significance

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Publisher’s Note

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

LETTER FROM S.M. FRANKLIN TO ANGUS & ROBERTSON, 1894

PROLOGUE

On Sunday 1 June 1879, a young woman set off from Brindabella Station in the high country of southern New South Wales to ride to Talbingo, some fifty kilometres south-west as the crow flies. Susannah Margaret Eleanor Franklin, née Lampe, wife of John Maurice Franklin, co-occupant of Brindabella Station, was over four months pregnant and she was going to her mother’s place before winter set in to give birth to her first child.

For reasons unknown, possibly to do with the weather, Susannah took the less direct northern route to Talbingo, following a bridle track westward over the Fiery Range through Argamalong to Lacmalac, east of the township of Tumut, turning south thereabouts for Talbingo, where, at the junction of Jounama Creek and the Tumut River, her redoubtable mother, Sarah Lampe, oversaw a considerable estate. On her journey, Susannah passed through some of the most mountainous terrain in Australia, so rugged it had only ever been lightly touched upon by the Indigenous Ngunawal and Ngarigo peoples. It is not recorded whether she was accompanied.

In the manner of the day, Susannah rode side-saddle, attired in a fashionably tight riding habit, and it is said that her sure-footed horse, ‘Lord Byron’ — the same horse that had borne her from Talbingo to the fastness of Brindabella as a bride less than a year before — was up to the girth in snow for miles.

On Wednesday 4 June she arrived at Talbingo and four months later, on 14 October 1879, she gave birth to a daughter. Seven weeks after that, on 6 December 1879, at All Saints’ Church of England, Tumut, the baby was baptised Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin.

This impressive name captured much of the child’s diverse Australian inheritance dating back to 1788. Stella’s mother, Susannah, was the great-granddaughter of English convicts Edward Miles (a First Fleeter) and his wife, Susannah, who arrived in Sydney in 1803. Their native-born daughter Martha, who married an emancipist, William Bridle, was Susannah Franklin’s grandmother, and her mother was their firstborn daughter, Sarah, who married Oltmann Lampe. Oltmann was the younger son of a small landholder near Bremen, Germany, who emigrated in the 1840s and in 1866 took over Talbingo Station.

John Franklin was a younger son of Irish immigrants of the 1830s, Joseph Franklin and his wife, Mary (known as Maria). A native-born bushman, John Franklin had a touch of poetry in his make-up. Perhaps the name Stella, meaning star, was his idea.

Mother and daughter left Talbingo for Brindabella the following January, when the last of the snowdrifts had melted, according to Miles Franklin’s memoir Childhood at Brindabella. They travelled ‘over the daisied plains, by the sparkling rivulets’, probably eastward over Talbingo Mountain, turning north near Yarrangobilly up the gullies to Brindabella. This time Susannah was definitely accompanied, by one of her brothers, William Augustus Lampe, who bore the sometimes noisy infant — always called Stella by her family — before him on a purple pillow strapped to the saddle.

Nothing now survives of old Talbingo. The Lampe homestead site was submerged in 1968 under Jounama Pondage, part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, which today waters much of inland Australia. A fingerpost pointing mid-pond indicates the spot. But a new Talbingo has been established uphill, and in 1979 residents built a memorial to mark the centenary of the birth of Susannah and John Franklin’s daughter. Much of the terrain traversed by Susannah a century before is now part of Kosciuszko National Park, an area of great natural beauty that lies between the Australian Capital Territory and the Victorian border and encompasses well over half a million hectares.

Although in recent years the desert may have supplanted the mountains in Australian iconography, the high country still has the power to sustain and uplift the human spirit. For Susannah and John Franklin’s daughter it became a special place. ‘No other spot has ever replaced the hold on my affections or imagination of my birthplace,’ she states in the opening lines of Childhood at Brindabella. Any account of the life of the spirited individual known to history as Miles Franklin must start in this beautiful place, and end there too. What lies between is a remarkable story, especially for an Australian girl of the period.

PART I

AUSTRALIA

1879–1906

1

CHILDHOOD AT BRINDABELLA: 1879‒1889

I was not the least suprised when your book came before the public and I often told my frends of a wonderful child I met in the bush with a grate force of character and would some day be heard of.¹

The childhoods of writers vary greatly, but they often contain books and solitude. Brindabella, Stella Franklin’s first real home, was an even more out of the way place than Talbingo, her birthplace, which is pleasantly situated upstream from Tumut on the Tumut River, along today’s Snowy Mountains Highway. By contrast, Brindabella is tucked away in an isolated valley in the Great Dividing Range at the northernmost end of the Australian Alps, through which runs the still-sparkling Goodradigbee River on its way north to join the Murrumbidgee. In today’s terms, Brindabella is about halfway cross-country between Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory and the New South Wales town of Tumut, which dates from the 1820s. However, this remote setting at the edge of Empire was far from solitary, as the mature Miles Franklin recalled in the posthumously published Childhood at Brindabella and portrayed in her most enjoyable pastoral novel, the prize-winning All That Swagger.²

The homestead at Brindabella Station, where Stella Miles Franklin began her schooling; from an oil painting by her tutor, Charles A. Blyth, c. 1898. (National Library of Australia, Pictorial Collection, R 8957)

The name Brindabella is said to go back to Aboriginal times and mean ‘two kangaroo rats’. According to All That Swagger, the valley was a stopover for Aboriginal people making their way south annually to feast on bogong moths, and preliminary feasting occurred there. Some sources refer to a less benign environment than the one Miles Franklin evokes, describing fierce clashes with the first squatters, of whom her paternal grandfather, Joseph Franklin, was one; others tell of inter-tribal conflict. Whatever the truth, it was a special place. Miles Franklin was fortunate in her childhood, and she knew it. When the family left the mountains for more cramped circumstances on the Goulburn Plains in April 1889, it was like an ‘exit from Eden’.³

It seems somewhat astonishing that shortly after mother and newborn daughter arrived at Brindabella, the family set off for a brief visit to the great city of Sydney, some 240 miles (386 kilometres) to the north-east. As recorded by Susannah Franklin, ‘We all went to Sydney International Exhibition February 1880’, probably by train from Queanbeyan, over the range to the east of Brindabella. They returned to Brindabella in mid-March. This adventure could not have impinged significantly on Stella Miles Franklin, but it is a sign of connectedness with the wider world, and an earnest of things to come.⁴

Bush-bred Susannah Franklin had high expectations of her first-born. Herself an eldest daughter, Susannah had been ‘stiffly governessed’ at the original Lampe homestead, ‘Wambrook’, west of Cooma, and was thoroughly grounded in the domestic arts and feminine accomplishments. From the age of fifteen when Susannah’s family moved to Talbingo until her marriage to John Franklin thirteen years later, she was the mainstay of her mother’s household. The difficulty that arose for Susannah with the onset of motherhood was that whereas she was a well-regulated and rather humourless person, her daughter Stella was, in her own words, possessed of ‘an uninhibited ego’, and a lively sense of humour.⁵

The relationship between Stella Franklin and her father seems to have been less challenging. In their early years daughters often idolise their fathers, and it is not until puberty that the relationship becomes problematic. So it was for Stella and John Franklin. Very little contemporary evidence survives, but there are many later literary references. The portrait of Richard Melvyn, the unsuccessful selector-cum-horsedealer with a weakness for the drink in My Brilliant Career, is the best-known instance.

That fierce portrayal in what Miles Franklin always insisted was an adolescent work was regretted by some at the time and has been contested by relatives since. Miles’s younger sister Linda felt she had been ‘pretty hot on . . . poor father’, and her aunt Helena (Lena) Lampe felt sorry for him being used as material ‘for a not very creditable character’. It seems clear the young writer was not only mortified at the too-close identification of her characters by some locals, but also at pains to correct the impression that Melvyn resembled her father. Responding to a letter from an admirer of My Brilliant Career in 1902, Miles described him as an indulgent father, of the ‘Man from Snowy River’ type; and in the late glow of Childhood at Brindabella she recalled him as ‘irresistible’, ‘proud of his capable young wife and full of good humour’.⁶

More importantly, perhaps, for the development of his daughter as a writer, John Franklin was of a philosophic and poetic cast of mind, even though his education, at the Reverend Cartwright’s church-school, Collector, had been limited. Miles believed that this was due to his having been left alone for long periods in the bush when young: ‘He retained his sense of wonder.’ He also developed advanced political views and was capable of a well-argued letter to the press.⁷

Nothing now remains of the slab house with its roof of mountain ash shingles built by John Franklin for his wife and family at Brindabella except a pile of blackened stones — possibly the remains of a chimney — on a rise in the valley about a mile south of the main homestead, where John’s older brother, Thomas, resided with his growing family. A charming watercolour of the house by Brindabella tutor Charles Blyth survives, and Miles gives an affectionate account of the house in Childhood at Brindabella, especially the garden of roses and sweet william, lilies and honeysuckle, with a lilac tree, poplars and a picket fence, on ground laboriously prepared by her father, and still partly identifiable sixty years later. In due course she would be given her own patch and a tulip bulb to plant.⁸

Outside the house lay the wonders of Brindabella Station, a vast, wild domain of mostly leased land. Its exact extent is now difficult to determine, due to the ever increasing complexities of colonial land legislation and the uses the Franklins and others made of it through purchase, grazing licences and scrub leases over time. But the figure of 16,000 acres (6500 hectares) is mentioned in the 1860s, and there were still some 3000 hectares attached in 1979. It probably reached its greatest extent in the early twentieth century. When it was sold in 1928 the run covered almost 29,000 acres (11,700 hectares), though very little of it was freehold.⁹

Miles Franklin was brought up to appreciate the natural world, not to fear it, nor the people in it: ‘I was without fear of horses, cattle, dogs or men,’ was how she would put it. Once, with an uncle’s whip in hand, she successfully urged a bullock team forward, ‘a stupendous moment’, recalled as a first exercise in power. The ease she felt was no doubt mostly due to early familiarity and to her parents’ attitudes, but also to the fact that even as a very small child she was already something of a prodigy and accustomed to being the centre of attention. Moreover, there was no shortage of people to watch out for her. Many more ‘hands’ were needed in the country in those days, and there were men everywhere. In 1885, there were still as many as fifty-eight people living on Brindabella, and the two remaining Franklin brothers, Thomas and John, ran considerable stock on and beyond the 1500 acres (600 hectares) they actually owned: some forty-five horses, 650 cattle, and an estimated 31,750 sheep. The portrayal of the young Clare Margaret, ‘the pride of the station’, in All That Swagger, conforms closely to Miles’s own recollection of that gone-forever pastoral age, when women were scarce and young women were placed on pedestals:

Little Clare Margaret . . . held court with station hands, squatters, drovers, remittance men and relatives in her kingdom of eucalypts . . . At three, and four, and five, there were males slaving for recognition, and opportunities for mischief were illimitable.¹⁰

By the time she was capable of enjoying such personal freedom, the merry mountain child had several siblings, all born at Talbingo, as she had been; and she always journeyed there with her mother on these occasions. The first trip was for six months in 1881, for the birth of Ida Lampe Franklin (known as Linda) on 12 September, shortly before Stella’s second birthday; the second between August and December 1883 for the birth of Mervyn Gladstone Franklin on 3 October 1883 (Miles’s favourite brother, who caught typhoid fever and died in 1900); the third in early 1885 for the birth of Una Vernon Franklin (who died at Brindabella that same year, aged six months, and was buried there in a bush grave). The last of these birthing trips occurred in 1886, when her longest-lived brother, Norman Rankin Franklin, was born at Talbingo on 26 September 1886. Subsequent Franklin children — there were to be two, Hume Talmage (‘Tal’) and Laurel — were born at home.¹¹

Talbingo was bigger and better established, a more comfortable environment. There a stable matriarchal order prevailed. Sarah Lampe had been widowed since 1875, when Oltmann Lampe’s years of increasing helplessness following a bush injury ended, and thereafter she ran the property with great and much admired acumen. Tiny Stella was surrounded by young aunts and uncles who found her frank curiosity amusing and treated her as a pet. Her strongly evangelical and greatly revered grandmother was not deceived, however, especially when Stella refused to participate in standard religious observances (which Sarah Lampe conducted herself in the absence of clergy): this was a ‘froward’ child.¹²

‘Froward’ is an old word, but a good one. According to the Macquarie Dictionary it dates back to medieval times, and the meanings given are ‘perverse; wilfully contrary; refractory; not easily managed’. When her baby sister Una died on 11 September 1885, according to Miles she saw her mother cry for the first time. She realised then that it was a solemn occasion, and though told not to, followed the men to the burial site.¹³

There has never been a public school at Brindabella, and at least until the end of the nineteenth century education was a matter of private tuition. About this time, probably late 1885, Thomas and Annie Franklin employed Charles Auchinvole Blyth as resident tutor for their then four children, and Stella was expected to join her cousins at the homestead under Mr Blyth as soon as possible. As things turned out, that was in 1887. This may seem rather late, since she was by then seven years old; but a good part of the previous year had been spent at Talbingo for the birth of her brother Norman. As recorded by her mother, ‘Stella went to school to Mr Blyth 1 January 1887, got her second front teeth the same year.’¹⁴

Like a good Victorian, Blyth insisted on the importance of perseverance. Things might come more easily to the cleverest people, but everyone has to try. Learning is lifelong, and people don’t value things they learn easily.¹⁵

At Brindabella, the classroom was situated on the verandah behind the post office, and the pupils sat each side of a table under a window with Mr Blyth. Teaching in the country, where more exciting activities than reading and writing lie just outside the schoolroom door, could be a dispiriting calling, even for highly conscientious teachers such as Charles Blyth, who prepared lessons in advance despite his small number of pupils and always acknowledged their individual differences.¹⁶

Stella particularly enjoyed Friday afternoon poetry classes, when they read Scottish border ballads (though the boys had to be bribed with adventure serials such as ‘Sinbad the Sailor’).¹⁷

Looking back on the years she spent with him between 1887 and early 1889, Blyth would summarise Stella’s abilities in the following way:

I always felt you would progress educationally for you have not only the ability but the desire to do so, and the energy to persevere with your studies; besides a love of reading, which I consider essential to success in that way. I regret to say I have not found the latter a distinct trait in the majority of my pupils hereaway.¹⁸

By her own account Stella learned other important lessons in Charles Blyth’s schoolroom, about interaction with peers and her place in the wider world. She soon realised that small boys often enjoy teasing girls. When she complained about her cousin Don’s ways, her mother’s advice was to rise above the teasing, as girls have done from time immemorial.¹⁹

An area of some later importance to Stella in which Mr Blyth was unable to instruct his charges was music. Boys did not learn music in his day, he reflected ruefully. But girls were expected to, and musical skills were highly prized in the bush. Moreover, music was one of the few fields in which Australian girls might respectably aspire to a career. Unfortunately for Stella, neither of her parents was particularly musical.²⁰ Yet Stella Franklin was not to be bereft of an essential accomplishment. A broken-down prospector called Hopkins, said to have once been a distinguished musician, sometimes played Susannah’s piano, and from time to time a piano teacher was employed at Brindabella Station. By 1889, aged nine, Stella had learned the rudiments of the keyboard.²¹ The Franklin family left Brindabella for good on Tuesday 30 April 1889. There is no hint of this prospect in Stella’s only known letter of that year, a spritely effort written on 2 February to her Aunt Metta, all about calves and chickens and flowers and ‘the blight’ that was afflicting family members. She mentions that her father had been away to vote and inquires about Grandma Lampe’s trip to Melbourne to see the 1888 Exhibition, mentioning also that Mr Blyth had been to say goodbye (because he wished to consult a doctor, not because of the family’s looming departure from Brindabella). Perhaps she was unaware of tension between the Franklin brothers that seems to have developed earlier, or perhaps the move, still some three months away, had yet to impinge — although that seems unlikely since, according to cousin Annie May’s daughters, Ruby and Leslie, Grandma Lampe had long been urging it on the grounds that Brindabella was too isolated if the children became ill and for the sake of their education.²²

The family were barely settled into their new home near Goulburn in time for the birth of Hume Talmage Franklin on 3 July 1889. Grandma Lampe arrived for the event with Linda, who had been staying at Talbingo. Afterwards, in response to impassioned pleas, Stella was allowed to return to Talbingo with her grandmother. There is a vivid account of the trip by train and buggy in Childhood at Brindabella, and the child’s delight at her return gives the memoir its dramatic tension. Although at first the place seemed smaller than when she had last been there, it was late winter when she arrived and it soon came to life again with the arrival of spring.²³

On 14 October 1889, at Talbingo, Stella turned ten. She was now ‘a big girl’, who did her own hair and would soon wear gloves. Problems began to arise. Some would be easily remedied, her weakness at sewing, for example (though the Bridle sisters thought a surviving sampler of 1890 was probably her only bit of fancywork). Others proved more difficult. With a new baby in a new district, things were doubtless stressful for Susannah at the time, so Stella had been allowed the trip back to Talbingo as long as she kept up her lessons. This she did, more or less dutifully, working alone on the verandah. But before long there was no one able to guide her more advanced studies, nor even her music practice. And as the girl rebelled against restraints — was it really the will of God that she should stay inside? — so Grandma Lampe found aspects of her behaviour cause for concern, reproaching her from time to time for ‘running about like a gypsy’, and for being ‘idle like a boy’.²⁴

Stella’s last days at Talbingo brought a memorable aesthetic experience, the sight of a splendid black snake sunning itself by a creek in the hills:

A big black snake lay full-length at his ease beside the water in the thin fringe of maidenhair ferns that were sprouting after winter retreat. The creature’s forked tongue flickered rapidly in and out, his new skin gleamed blue-black with peacock tints, a little of his underside was showing like blended scarlet and pomegranate. I stood a fascinated moment . . . The experience was not startling, merely surprising.²⁵

Given the fear with which most settlers regarded snakes, and the skill and expedition with which they killed them, the child’s response is indeed surprising. Even more so is the fact that the image of the snake in that spot stayed with her for thirty years:

As I have sat in some great congress in one of the major cities, or in a famous concert hall, or eaten green almonds on a terrace in Turin in the early morning, or worked amid the din of the Krupp guns on an Eastern battle front, or watched the albatrosses in stormy weather off Cape Agulhas, or have been falling asleep in an attic in Bloomsbury, that snake has still been stretched in the ferns beside the creek, motionless except for the darting tongue.²⁶

As observed in Marjorie Barnard’s early biography of Miles Franklin, this memory of an ineffable moment brings us to the threshold of the unknown in human experience. Barnard interpreted it as Miles Franklin’s first artistic experience and wondered how many more like it occurred in her childhood. Around such insights may be discerned a vague penumbra, suggestive of usually overlooked religious beliefs, or more accurately an aspiration to them, as in Miles’s wonderfully cryptic remark that it takes a greater mind to find God than to lose him. The bush had transcendental powers for her as a child, as for her father and grandfather before her, and she often uses religious language to describe its impact. Of that final immersion in Talbingo in late 1889, she wrote, ‘Heaven could be no more magical and mystical than unspoiled Australia.’²⁷

2

NEAR GOULBURN: 1890‒1898

Remember me to Goulburn, drowsing lazily in its dreamy graceful hollow in the blue distance.¹

When Stella Miles Franklin first saw the site of her new home in the district of Bangalore to the south of Goulburn, she was disappointed by its low contours and scrubby aspect. But the new environment and the novel experience of state schooling soon absorbed her. Although the coming years would often be grim for the Franklin family, and grimmer still for their fictional counterparts in My Brilliant Career, the place had its own appeal, and it was near Goulburn, a sizable colonial city of almost 11,000 people.²

For John Franklin the new locale represented a bid for freedom. After serious disputes with his brother Thomas, he had, by his own account, ‘visited different places to find a suitable place to take my wife and family’; and on 11 April 1889, at the Goulburn Land Office, he selected on conditional purchase a block of 160 acres (65 hectares) in the parish of Tarago, County Argyle, midway between Goulburn and the smaller southern settlement at Collector on the northern edge of Lake George, where he had been educated. He later added a further 434 acres (176 hectares) by taking out leases on two adjacent blocks, confirmed in the Goulburn Land Court in January 1890 and duly certified five years later. With one John Mather he also purchased a further parcel of mainly freehold land from a neighbour, W. J. Neely, his share being recorded by Susannah as 320 acres (129 hectares), making 914 acres (370 hectares) in all, near enough to the 1000 acres mentioned in My Brilliant Career. His aim was not to become a farmer, as some contemporary documents have it, but a trader in livestock at Goulburn, an occupation for which the years spent on the horse and cattle runs in the mountains further south seemed to equip him, without loss of status.³

Of the six-roomed house John Franklin built on the hillside of the newly purchased block, only archaeological evidence survives. A cairn halfway up the hill, erected in 1971 by the then owners, the Frazer family, to mark the spot where ‘Miles Franklin lived and wrote her first book’, as the plaque added by the local historical society puts it, commands a view through brittle gums towards a series of lagoons, but the Franklin house itself was situated some metres further up on a slight plateau, now a grass and rubble clearing. Recently relocated lines of foundation and their corner posts, and the probable outline of the separate kitchen, appear to correlate well with extant photographs. These show a typical late nineteenth-century Australian bush house built of weatherboard with a corrugated iron roof and a long low front verandah. A couple of semi-domesticated shrubs still survive nearby, and further uphill again, in a crevice created by run-off, is what may have been a domestic water catchment.⁴

Altogether the new house cost £400, a considerable sum at that time. The expenditure represented John Franklin’s commitment to the new life and the wellbeing of his wife. ‘Dear old Father always wanted to give Mother of the best,’ his eldest daughter wrote fondly, recalling especially a fine kitchen, which had ‘smooth slab walls and a vast hearth with a colonial oven at one side, then an advance on the camp ovens of the neighbours’. It even had a proper ceiling, unlike most kitchens of the day; and the house itself, with its back and front doors and storerooms, was boarded with soft white pine throughout, including the front verandah ends, ‘a great extravagance everyone thought’ and ‘as dainty as a band box’, Miles added, noting that her family always lived ‘housily and socially above our income’.⁵

The lands once selected by John Franklin have long since been subsumed within larger properties, and the ‘Stillwater’ site is now inaccessible, except by permission of the owners. However, a good general idea of Stella’s girlhood environs can be obtained from approximately midway along the Thornford road, which links the Federal Highway with what is now a back road from Goulburn to Currawang. From there, looking due south towards Telegraph Hill, the main features present themselves: spare and undulating uplands, reedy valleys with seasonal lagoons, and overhead the high, bright skies of a typical continental climate zone.⁶

The address given by John Maurice Franklin for land records in Goulburn in 1890, and as his place of residence on the electoral rolls of democratic New South Wales, was Bangalore. Originally a farm site, Bangalore is now known as Komungla, and the earlier name survives only on topographical maps which pinpoint Bangalore Creek and the Bangalore trig station. Always a sleepy locale, the tiny nineteenth-century community may have been the subject of Stella’s earliest journalistic writings. The sharp comments in some unattributed pieces in the Goulburn Evening Penny Post in the early 1890s sound like hers — and it was from Bangalore that she despatched the manuscript of My Brilliant Career.⁷

My Brilliant Career itself describes Bangalore’s location. In the novel, the heroine’s father, Richard Melvyn, believes ‘Possum Gully’ will be ideal for stock trading: ‘only seventeen miles from a city like Goulburn, with splendid roads, mail thrice weekly and a railway platform only eight miles away, why man, my fortune is made!’ Today there are still a few buildings at Bangalore/Komungla, and a small overgrown cemetery nearby contains the grave of the namesake of the heroine of My Brilliant Career, native-born Penelope Sybilla Macauley, a dairy farmer’s wife who died of pneumonia on 15 July 1899, aged forty-seven. John Franklin was a witness at the burial.⁸

The Franklins had arrived at ‘Stillwater’ on 7 May 1889. From then on, we may imagine them traversing the bridle tracks east to the rail to despatch and receive goods and otherwise link up with the wider world, or travelling to the siding on the more roundabout dirt road running through the locality of Thornford, a mile or so north of ‘Stillwater’. Another route to the wider world lay to the west, over the windy high plain to the Goulburn–Collector road, then through Yarra, the nearest postal town. Probably the road to Goulburn was best from Bangalore, but the way through Yarra was more direct and better for riding.⁹

‘Stillwater’ was one of twelve households in the Thornford district.¹⁰ Having so many neighbours close by was a new experience and a mixed blessing for young Stella, though probably less so than for her mother. Flinch as she might at the neighbourly calls and the friendly small talk of matrons from surrounding small farms whom she could not help looking down upon, even Susannah sometimes found it handy when stores ran out; and the proximity of numerous large families enhanced the natural exuberance of the Franklin children.¹¹

Three of Stella’s siblings were now of school age, but it is unclear which of the few local schools they attended. However, we know a new school was built in 1890 south of Thornford and that Stella was enrolled there on her return from Talbingo.¹² Miss Gillespie was the teacher-in-charge.¹³

No roads went by the new school. But there was a stock route and the school was convenient, especially for the Franklin children, who now had a considerably shorter daily trek than they’d had to Brindabella homestead, less than a mile up the valley from ‘Stillwater’. Miss Gillespie, who boarded with local families during the week and spent her weekends in Goulburn, sometimes drove to school in her horse-and-buggy. There was plenty of room for horses on the hillside site, the location of which is still identifiable from the Thornford road, thanks to the stock route and tree plantings of a century or so ago.¹⁴

At Thornford Public School Stella Franklin obtained an elementary education, which was at that time compulsory in New South Wales to age fourteen, when grade 7 was normally reached, but might be extended to grade 9, by which time pupils would be aged fifteen or sixteen. Exactly how long she spent at the school is now uncertain, but it seems she left in 1894.¹⁵

Thornford School was a positive experience for Stella Franklin. Enrolments increased to over fifty children in the mid-1890s and the school environment improved. A school garden was established — Stella had a flowerbed from the beginning — and over 100 trees were planted, so that soon the school perimeter was ringed with shade. When the school fence collapsed, Miss Gillespie and the boys built another (to keep out the rabbits). They also built a bush shed, and Miss Gillespie procured an apiary ‘for the benefit of scholars’. Best of all, Miss Gillespie held a school picnic every year, during which the prizes were awarded by local dignitaries, and hundreds of people from all over the district came. Trees were planted annually on Arbor Day.¹⁶

Responding to a letter from his ex-pupil on 4 October 1890, Charles Blyth was pleased to think that she now had a chance to show ‘what a smart little girl you are’. He urged her to make the most of her chances, and hoped that, having impressed the school inspector, she would continue to acquire and retain knowledge. This she did. She became one of the stars at Thornford Public.

Thornford school and its pupils, with Miss Gillespie, c. 1893; Stella Franklin is fifth from left, back row, and her sister Linda is tenth from left, middle row. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, PX*D250/1, No. 2)

Even so, her schooling had a great many gaps. She was well grounded in botany but her knowledge of science and physiology is another matter. Like many Australian girls in times past, the heroines of her early novels were unafraid of men but terrified by sex, and often feared that a kiss was enough to cause pregnancy. This ignorance may surprise the modern reader, now unfamiliar with rural codes of respectability, and considering the then superabundance of males in rural Australia, where, as Miles Franklin once tartly observed, ‘every girl who had four limbs and reasonable features lived in a state of siege from the age of fourteen until she capitulated’. No doubt strange practices sometimes occurred in the paddocks, and there probably was some indecent exposure by station hands, but socially speaking, competition for female favours rendered the males more circumspect, and being in ‘a state of siege’ strengthened the cult of respectability for females. Silence on such topics was the norm.¹⁷

The most striking feature of Miles Franklin’s intellectual development during her girlhood (adolescence was not then an established concept) was her voracious appetite for the latest novels. How she responded to Charles Blyth’s request that she send ‘particulars of the books you read’ is unknown, but his replies, discussing the works of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray and other nineteenth-century favourites, are indicative, and doubtless helped shape her taste, which under the additional influence of Miss Gillespie soon ran ahead of his to include the most controversial novels of the 1890s — du Maurier’s Trilby and George Moore’s even more daring Esther Waters.¹⁸

Miss Gillespie was then boarding with the Franklins, and it was she who brought Trilby into the house. ‘It was not considered reading for a young girl, but it could not have escaped me,’ Miles Franklin recalled. In fact, she doted on the story of young British artists in 1890s Paris and the wicked Svengali who captures their model, Trilby, and by hypnotic means makes her a famous singer: ‘what intensity, what poignancy of enjoyment, what glamour!’ Fifty years on, she still felt it retained its ‘infinite seduction’.¹⁹

Many years later, Miles Franklin recorded that the novels she read between the ages of thirteen and twenty remained her favourites. The list included not only the nineteenth-century classics Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, but also The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner, a more recent and controversial work in which the bleak farm on the South African veldt undercuts the heroic image of the imperial frontier, and the rebellious heroine, Lyndall, dies in childbirth.

Whatever the schoolgirl may have gleaned from the reading of romantic novels, she was unprepared for the advances of the local boys. Some never openly declared themselves: an undated 1890s Christmas card simply says ‘from a boy you do not know whose heart beats true to you’. Others were unable to refrain. By the age of fourteen, Stella had already had a suitor who claimed to have loved her for two years but was now leaving with the cattle, since his presence was so obviously distasteful to her. Perhaps he was the prototype for the elderly suitor lampooned in the sketch ‘Gossip by the Way’. The jaunty response to unwanted suitors in My Brilliant Career, that they should send their love to her father, who would put it in a bottle for the Science Museum in Goulburn (he once donated a centipede in spirits to the museum), seems in retrospect to prefigure Miles Franklin’s final stance, that romantic love was illogical and human sexual energy was far in excess of all needs for propagating the species. But that was much later. Looking back, she described herself during her second decade as ‘bewildered and tormented and rebellious’.²⁰

Piano lessons begun at Brindabella continued at Thornford, and in June 1894 Stella Franklin gained an impressive 95 per cent for theory in the Trinity College (London) examinations conducted in Goulburn Town Hall, though she attained only a bare pass from the Sydney College of Music in early 1896. It may be significant that whereas in 1894 Miles sat as a pupil of Percy Hollis, a professional music teacher in Goulburn, in 1896 she was entered by Miss Gillespie. (In Cockatoos, a similarly humiliating result for Ignez Milford is explained by the alteration of her mark by a rival teacher.) In later life, Miles would recall that her great ambition when young was to become a singer, and the stage had had its appeal too.²¹

There was plenty to stimulate those dreams in 1890s Goulburn. The organ music at the cathedrals was inspiring, and the Liedertafel’s concerts were of a good standard under Percy Hollis. Moreover, Goulburn was a convenient stopover on the main Sydney–Melbourne rail route for entertainers of all stripes, and in the later 1890s the young folk from Thornford would have seen some of them, as did those portrayed in Cockatoos. However — and this would be elaborated in the suffrage novel Some Everyday Folk and Dawn — in real life acting was beyond the pale for respectable girls. Even a musical career was an impossible dream, as lamented in Cockatoos and elsewhere.²²

Yet, as Stella really knew, the very concept of a career was outside the frame for most girls of the period, especially ordinary country girls: brilliant careers were the preserve of men. What really lay ahead was marriage. As a recent study of the construction of girlhood in English fiction suggests, a young girl’s consciousness of growing up was differently shaped from that of boys, not by fear of failure or mortality but by the prospect of marriage. The lesson from literature was that the successful girl would internalise and transcend the contradictions involved in learning ‘womanly conduct’ — between girlish freedom and marital constraints — and fit into a place ‘already prepared for her’. The contradictions were even more marked for Australian girls, reared in greater freedom, and then caught in the contracting economy and demographics of the 1890s.²³

Since Stella Franklin did so well at school, she should surely have gone on to higher studies, as Charles Blyth hoped she would. Instead she became a farm hand.

How had it come to this? The answer is to be found in an austere entry dated ‘Feb. 95’ in Susannah Franklin’s notebook: ‘got separator’. This means John Franklin had become a dairyman. His dream of livestock trading was over. What is more, financial records show that he had to borrow to purchase the separator. But it promised cream for sale, probably to the recently established Thornford Butter Factory, and a small regular income of about fifteen shillings a week — and, since cows must be brought in, fed and milked twice daily for most of the year, it meant an unremitting regimen for his family, made worse by the extended drought of the mid-1890s. Under the circumstances there was not the slightest chance of further education for the eldest of his six children, even if it had been contemplated.²⁴

A year later John Franklin went into voluntary bankruptcy. On 25 March 1896 a notice appeared on the gate leading to ‘Stillwater’ announcing that all the farm and household equipment (including the separator) would be sold by public auction on site the following week. The final date of sequestration was 19 August 1896, and it was not until 24 August 1897 that John Franklin obtained a certificate of release.²⁵

Many small selectors failed in the terrible slump of the 1890s, but the humiliation for Susannah would have been intense. Her family rallied, providing neighbours with the means to purchase and return household goods, and John’s brother George took over the lease and paid the rent on the land. So despite everything the family stayed put and had a roof over its head, with a few cows, hens and a garden, but it was the end of John Franklin as a landholder.²⁶ Aged forty-eight, he became a day labourer. At the end of that terrible year, he was working by the week on fencing at ‘Longfield’, the Baxter property next door. The following year he was hunting for gold reefs at Brindabella.²⁷

It was from her father that Miles Franklin imbibed political, as well as religious and poetical, values. The contempt for ‘spouters’ (politicians) noted by Blyth in her letters to him, and the view expressed in My Brilliant Career that ‘there should be a law’ to prevent poverty came directly from her father’s radical political circles in Goulburn and the pages of the Penny Post. The Post was an ardent supporter of Henry George, the American advocate of a single tax on land as the solution to the then highly conspicuous problem of poverty and wealth. As well, in 1894 John Franklin hosted election meetings at Bangalore for his local member of parliament, E. W. O’Sullivan, who advocated protection of local industries, state investment in public works, and votes for women.²⁸

From Susannah Franklin’s point of view, the end of her eldest’s schooling was a godsend. With five younger children and a herd of cows to milk by hand, the work was endless. Susannah Franklin was not unsupportive of her clever daughter, but inevitably the demands of home and husband were draining.

My Brilliant Career reproduces and elaborates on some of the domestic conflicts, and others are depicted in Cockatoos, where the capable but unhappy Dot Saunders cannot stand young Ignez’s constant thumping on the piano, and an irretrievable clash occurs between Dot and the younger Freda, who aspires to be a writer. Like Stella Franklin, neither Ignez or Freda showed any sign of settling down in the traditional way; and like her, both Sybylla and Ignez rejected entirely eligible suitors.²⁹

Apparently an effort was made to get Stella Franklin into teaching around this time. In June 1896 glowing testimonials as to her suitability were written by the Reverend Williams and E. W. O’Sullivan, and a notification allowing her to sit for a competitive examination for pupil-teachers in Goulburn in July, despite being over the age limit of sixteen, survives in her papers. No record survives of the outcome, but subsequent events suggest she did sit the exam and passed.³⁰

Stuck at ‘Stillwater’ her education was not leading anywhere, and no Svengali appeared to liberate her musical talents. But she could write. Miss Gillespie had noticed it: ‘She’s very good at compositions,’ she told her teacher friend Eliza Kellett, with whom she shared weekends in Goulburn. ‘I’ve been encouraging her to write stories. I think she has quite a talent for it.’ Just as the young Olive Schreiner was drafting stories in the remote Eastern Cape Colony in the 1870s with only local libraries and a few town friends to rely on, so twenty years later on another edge of the Empire, with the help of Miss Gillespie and the cultural resources of 1890s Goulburn, Stella Miles Franklin tentatively embarked on a literary career.³¹

Various dates have been given to mark its beginning, not least by Miles Franklin herself. Sometimes, like Sybylla, she said she began writing aged thirteen; that is, in 1892–93. Elsewhere she claimed she was writing about ‘lords and ladies’ even earlier, aged twelve, and that she won a prize for an essay on punctuality at that age. As she had a good memory, this may well be true. The essay on punctuality does not survive in her papers, but she certainly won prizes for school essays around then. However, sustained literary work appears to date from 1895–96, when she was sixteen. My Brilliant Career was not begun until 20 September 1898, when she was eighteen, though many people, including her young relative Ruby Bridle, thought it was started earlier, probably because by the time they knew her Miles had been understating her age for years.³²