Remembering radical femmes who revealed inconvenient truths
Jacqueline Kent’s latest book celebrates a formidable group of ground-breaking female Australian writers who were both at the forefront of social change and pioneers swimming against the conservative tide.
Much has been written about the lives and creative output of second-wave Australian feminist writers and activists such as Germaine Greer, Anne Summers and Beatrice Faust. However, comparatively little has been published about the lives and works of the generation of women who preceded them.
This relative dearth of critical and biographical information inspired Sydney-based writer Jacqueline Kent’s latest book, Inconvenient Women: Australian Radical Writers 1900-1970.
Until the 1970s, when feminist critics and academics began rescuing women writers from oblivion and obscurity, Australian literary history was assumed to be largely, if not entirely, male dominated. The process whereby feminist researchers have rediscovered and reread women’s writing has undoubtedly transformed Australian literary and cultural history and, to this end, in her study, Kent focuses on the lives and work of seven diverse radical activists and writers.
Author Jacqueline Kent.
The titular “inconvenient women” about whom she writes are feminist journalist, poet and labour movement organiser Mary Gilmore; writer and lifelong Communist Party member Katharine Susannah Prichard; Eleanor Dark, who explored Australian colonisation and the Indigenous people it displaced; Dymphna Cusack, who advocated for social reform and had strong links to labour politics; Ruth Park, whose novel The Harp in the South inspired the NSW Government’s slum clearance programs; Dorothy Hewett, whose novel Bobbin’ Up was one of the few western works translated into Russian during the Soviet era; and prominent Queensland poet, artist, writer and educator Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), who campaigned tirelessly for Indigenous rights, including successful constitutional reform.
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Author Drusilla Modjeska identifies the period Kent writes about, the 1930s and 1940s in particular, as “remarkable years in Australian cultural history”. “Women were producing the best fiction of the period and they were, for the first and indeed only time, a dominant influence in Australian literature,” says Modjeska.
All the women she writes about broke with the past in insisting on their professionalism in a society and a nation that had often excluded the achievements and successes of women
Likewise, Australian academic Maryanne Dever depicts the entire inter-war period as a time of “an almost unprecedented concentration of women writers making contributions to the development of a new national literary and political culture”.
Nonetheless, as Modjeska wrote in her study Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945, and as Kent’s research makes clear, women were exiles in multiple senses. They had to cope with the contradictions of being a writer and a woman. All the women she writes about broke with the past in insisting on their professionalism in a society and a nation that had often excluded the achievements and successes of women. That many of these women achieved as much as they did is substantially due to the support they often gave one another, through personal and activist friendships and relationships, and through the inspiration provided by their written works.
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Katharine Susannah Prichard, for example, began her career as a journalist and, after joining the Communist Party of Australia, became a proficient public speaker. Throughout her life, as befitted a believer in the social responsibility of the artist, she continued to produce articles that confronted social and political issues more directly than she felt she could in her fiction.
In her best-known novel, 1929’s Coonardoo, she crafted the first Australian novel with an Indigenous figure as a main character. Similarly, Eleanor Dark’s 1941 novel The Timeless Land gave emphasis to Indigenous characters’ points-of-view in order to more broadly critique aspects of Australian culture, including the rigid class and race system, the high value placed on the acquisition of property and material wealth and the exploitation of the natural environment.
One of the most interesting threads in this book, which Kent calls “a joint biography, not a work of literary criticism”, runs through her discussion of the social and political conditions that birthed Prichard’s Coonardoo, Dark’s The Timeless Land and the collected works of Indigenous writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal, who was known as Kath Walker before changing her name in 1988.
A member of the Communist Party of Australia, because it was the only political party that had rejected the White Australia Policy, Prichard fought vociferously for land rights and social and racial equality. She was also an integral part of the campaign for the 1967 referendum that made the Federal Government amend the constitution in favour of citizenship for Indigenous Australians.
Noonuccal also made literary history when, in 1964, her book of poetry became the first book by an Indigenous writer published by an Australian press. Interestingly, Kent’s research revealed that one of the people who actively encouraged Noonuccal to write was Mary Gilmore who, at age 94 and a staunch supporter of the White Australia Policy, read her poems and exhorted her to not only publish them but to continue writing. “These belong to the world,” Gilmore told Noonuccal. “Never forget you’re the tool who wrote them.”
Throughout the course of Inconvenient Women, Kent expertly traces the relationships between these women’s lives, work, politics, fiction and nonfiction. Rather than simply seeking to reclaim them for feminism, however, she offers a feminist reading that is a serious political evaluation of their lives and their work.
She further gives a sensitive portrayal of their respective strengths and limitations. So much of their work, particularly in the latter part of the period, involved a passionate critique of love, marriage, motherhood, labour and politics.
Kent’s discourse makes clear the ways in which their day-to-day lives and their personal politics were inextricably interwoven with their creative output. Each of these seven women writers set out, in her own way, to change the world, and this well-researched and engagingly written book makes clear their individual and collective bravery, curiosity and fearlessness.
Inconvenient Women: Australian Radical Writers 1900-1970 by Jacqueline Kent, NewSouth Books, $34.99.