To read Barbara Hanrahan is to be made innocent, if also obscene
Author Laura Elizabeth Woollett reflects on the legacy of Barbara Hanrahan in a new essay published as the foreword to a new edition of Hanrahan’s 1974 novel Sea Green.
I first read Barbara Hanrahan’s Sea Green alongside Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, another novel about white Australian women seeking their destiny in London. Although Sea Green was published in 1974, six years before Transit, Hanrahan was eight years younger and grew up working class in Adelaide, a half-world away from Hazzard’s well-to-do North Shore. It shows.
Hanrahan’s autofictional heroine is unlike Hazzard’s ethereal, self-possessed, upwardly mobile Caroline Bell. Young artist Virginia’s colonial cringe is harder to shake, her romantic notions easier to mock. While Caro resembles a Pre-Raphaelite painting in earnest, Virginia sits sweating and freckling under a nectarine tree and thinks how difficult it is “to be something goitrous from Rossetti in a heatwave”. In London, Virginia has nothing to do with British high society, only other expats and parties where people line up for pasties and tomato sauce. She has bad sex, bodily functions, and sentimental feelings about her mother’s ceramic frogs. She cannot reject her provinciality outright, because it’s part of her gaze, her awe, in a city where even the dog turds on the pavement have aesthetic potential.
This is the almost-Swinging London of Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone; premarital sex happens here, yet seldom without shame or consequence. It is also a timelessly alienating cosmopolis, a place where fertility is troublesome and inequity casually observable. As much as I thought of Hazzard, Drabble and Doris Lessing while reading Sea Green, I also thought of the contemporary heroines of Saba Sams, Naoise Dolan and Laura McPhee-Browne, negotiating the softness of their bodies amid the harshness of city life.
Sea Green is still sometimes vexingly a novel of its times. In her tumultuous six-week voyage from Adelaide to London, Virginia encounters people and places that were formerly merely abstractions to her, much as Hanrahan did when she left her hometown in the early 1960s. Virginia may scorn the “nice ladies” who thank their stars that they “live in White Australia”, the Englishmen who hurl ethnic slurs in Suez, yet she also unironically refers to Singaporeans as “fragile dolls” and blithely others the bodies and attire of South Asian women. She opposes apartheid and cringes over the word choices of a white South African, yet can only think “it was different from Australia” when she sees Black Londoners, projecting rapacity onto the gazes of the Black men she passes in the street. For all her bohemian aspirations, Virginia is parochial, and arguably Hanrahan is too. The bluntness that defines her style and humour also clangs like a Glenelg tram.
"Like Plath, Hanrahan knows what it is to have a body, to pleasure in it, and also to feel supremely alienated from it."
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Reading Sea Green, I thought most of all of Sylvia Plath, another contemporary of Hanrahan’s who chose England over the New World. While Plath’s work has rightly been subject to recent post-colonial critique, she remains a poet laureate of feminine psychic-bodily conflict. Like Plath, Hanrahan knows what it is to have a body, to pleasure in it, and also to feel supremely alienated from it. Her descriptions of physicality – human and bestial – are both grotesque and elegiac. I won’t be able to shake Virginia’s assessment of a lover’s body, “dully pink and white like a grubby fondant kept too long in someone’s pocket”, nor that poor, “obscene” pregnant cat with her “pulsating pink anus” and “pink nipple studs”. I won’t be able to forget her Eraserhead-like dream of a deformed baby, birthed by her not-really-friend Kate.
It became fashionable sometime in the mid 2010s to refer to the grand theme of ‘female friendship’. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, whose English translations attracted international acclaim during this time, are often cited as the urtext of this theme. The implication being, firstly, that friendships between women are rarer or qualitatively different from male or mixed-gender friendships, and secondly, that female friendships have been neglected by a canon that assumes women’s most important ties to be romantic or familial – even that women are too shallow or competitive to form meaningful platonic connections.
A new edition of Sea Green will be published by new independent South Australian publisher Pink Shorts Press. Photo: Bri Hammond / Supplied
It may be pedantic to find fault with the term – when I read books like Ferrante’s, have even aspired to write them – but I do. Partly because of how clinical it sounds, how freighted with gendered baggage, how disqualifying – ‘female’ seeming to denote something abstruse, contrary to the good-natured simplicity of ‘friendship’. Partly due to the discomfort of being marketed to; when a blurb touts themes of ‘female friendship’, this is a slightly less clumsy way of saying, this book passes the Bechdel test, which is a way of saying, this book will appeal specifically to women. Partly because the term strikes me as an attempt to put a chaste, convivial face on all manner of fascinatingly fishy things. Things that I relish in Ferrante, and Plath, and Hanrahan. Lust. Ressentiment. Shame. Alienation.
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When, in the opening pages of Sea Green, Virginia specifies of Kate, “we are not really friends”, she is not only casting shade on her travel companion, but flying the flag of her alienation. This alienation is all the more significant for being couched in intimacy. The young women are a protean first-person plural, Virginia and Kate, alone together in the belly of the (Italian) beast that is the ship transporting them to a nebulous Northern Hemisphere future. As well as an art school, they share bunk beds (Kate is on top, of course), a time-warped regime (noon-rising, ravioli for breakfast), the impunity of young white Australian bodies roasting in limbo, in a time before sunscreen. Their proximity challenges decorum. Kate – “shameless, brazen, feminine Kate” – openly picks her nose, squeezes blackheads and inserts tampons in Virginia’s presence.
"Hanrahan may have lived as a heterosexual woman, but she does not shy from the possibility that the bond between two women may be complicated by sexuality – and I don’t just mean in a we want the same men way."
Under our beta-female narrator’s gaze, Kate’s nudity is the stuff of art, both women’s artistic training irrelevant. Virginia gallantly fetches Kate’s martinis and lights her cigarettes, unless there is a suitor around to do so instead. Their conversations aren’t worth reporting (sorry, Alison Bechdel). Virginia’s voyeurism is too erotically charged to be merely painterly, her social submission too pleasure-tinged to be truly submissive. We are not really friends. Queerness is the unnamed spectre haunting their non-friendship. “Disliking her isn’t so inconvenient,” Virginia tells herself, after both acquire maritime lovers. Hanrahan may have lived as a heterosexual woman, but she does not shy from the possibility that the bond between two women may be complicated by sexuality – and I don’t just mean in a we want the same men way.
Transactional and transitory as Virginia and Kate’s companionship is, there is solidarity, of a kind. If the ship is a “coiled animal”, Virginia and Kate are animals within it, and of the same species. They too gleam with artifice (eye gloss, zippers, even a “false coil of hair” that hangs from their cabin’s doorknob) while also pulsing with life. Like the ship, they move towards prefixed destinations: Singapore, Suez, Naples, desire, release, disappointment. Or perhaps the ship is an island with its own uncanny climate, “governed by sun and moon above, air-conditioning and electric light below”, making Virginia and Kate lost girls, playing dress-ups while hoping to never join the ranks of the early risers whom they scorn.
Childhood in Sea Green is a contested realm, as is home. On the one hand, Virginia is on the lam. She craves vistas and experiences beyond Adelaide and the lonely triad of her family unit. Suffering the “intermittent warfare” of her artistically frustrated father (“a sensitive plant that early withered”) and materialistic mother, Virginia’s childhood is defined by isolation, as is her own artistic gestation. “I never felt a prison wasn’t natural,” Virginia reflects, and a few breaths later, assuming the distance of a third-person other, “Virginia became an artist – alone.” Entering the animal, washing up on the island, Virginia relinquishes “the burden of identity” along with her ticket. The solitary girl-cum-artist is a dead weight, Kate a surrogate sister, offering a second childhood where sketchpads gather dust and only the rituals of beauty matter.
Still, much like the quarrelling voices of Virginia’s parents, “the past with its familiar allure” wars with the new. “I see the table set for three” – Virginia, biro in hand, is drawn again and again back to the trappings of suburbia. There’s a tidal quality to time and identity in Sea Green – past/present, introspection/impressionism, I/we/Virginia, continuously ebbing and flowing. As readers, we are always at sea, even once ‘The Sea’ becomes ‘The City’. We cannot locate Virginia easily because she cannot locate herself. If Sea Green has a grand theme, it’s dislocation, not friendship.
Virginia is strange. So is Hanrahan. Their dislocated concern with conformity – to gender, to fashion, to middle-class nicety – yields humour, paranoia and peculiar beauty. Their observations of clothing are often so rapturously detailed as to be funny. At times, Hanrahan’s sentences have a non-sequitur quality, reminiscent of the derailed thinking of schizophrenia. A bit of soap in a sexual predator’s bath is “like the sun … always between his legs”. What does this mean? That the man thinks the sun shines from his behind? That the space between his legs is so dismal that it obscures all the light in the world? There’s a logic here, but it’s disorderly, associative. It is, like the upside-down rules of Wonderland, or the lithographs and woodcuts that Hanrahan is best known for, both childlike and existentially troubling.
To read Sea Green is to be confronted by the raw forces of carnality, terror and meaninglessness, and in the same instant be reminded of an enduring innocence. To read Hanrahan is to be made innocent, if also obscene.
This essay appears in a new edition of Sea Green by Barabra Hanrahan (Pink Shorts Press 2025), available from March 5
Laura Elizabeth Woollett is a Perth-born, Melbourne-based author and critic. Her fourth book, West Girls, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize.