Stella Miles Franklin by Jill Roe

Author:Jill Roe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780730450276
Publisher: 4th Estate

After the effort of collaboration, Miles collapsed with a bad attack of pleurisy in the second half of June 1939. There was also bad news for Brent from Blackwood that Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang could not be published ‘at this time’. On a positive note, Miles had also seen Pioneers on Parade through the press while working on the Furphy manuscript, having finished with the text of the sesquicentennial satire in early March. Authors’ copies arrived on 4 July. Miles immediately sent one to Prime Minister Menzies, with a note, duly acknowledged by him, expressing the hope that Australia would be a site of citizenship, not military vassalage.14

Reactions to Pioneers on Parade were mixed. However, the Bulletin was kind. ‘It is not one book but two—an amusing skit on Sydney’s social climbers, and a message about the land.’ And the literary world was mainly enthusiastic. Majorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw promptly telegraphed congratulations (‘helpless with mirth’), and the West Australian writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman wrote to record her enjoyment—‘wit is such a rare thing in Australia’—and her envy of Miles’ productivity, reflecting that she was constrained by family and her husband’s official position. She also promised the publisher to review it favourably (‘a laugh on every page’), while the irrepressible Frank Clune told Walter Cousins, the director of publishing at Angus & Robertson, that Pioneers on Parade was a bonzer book by a pair of dinkum Aussie sheilas who knew their onions—‘and their snobs’. Vance Palmer would have liked something less hilarious and more searching, but Miles didn’t mind that. Nor did she mind that it was too much for the conservative Sydney press types known to be after imperial honours; and as for a ‘contemptuous’ Adelaide review, well, what could you expect? What probably did sting was the opinion of the English critic St John Ervine: ‘If you continue to write smarty-smart novels like Pioneers on Parade, you will soon cease to be worthy of any person’s serious notice.’15

It reminded Miles of the reception of My Brilliant Career, except that she quite enjoyed the fuss this time. The basic problem was one of timing. When Pioneers on Parade appeared, the war clouds were thickening, and imperial values were again in the ascendant. Any suggestion of disloyalty was frowned upon; and book sales stalled.

Miles returned to the task of publishing Mary Fullerton’s poems. On the afternoon of 2 September, Miles Franklin had joined the FAW’s annual pilgrimage to Henry Lawson’s statue near Mrs Macquarie’s Chair in Sydney’s Outer Domain. On the way back to the city centre, she enjoyed talking to old Billy Miller (also known as Linklater), who had once worked for P. S. Watson and his brothers up north, and then fell in with Tom Inglis Moore, the writer and critic who had stood in as president of the FAW in 1934 and was still with the Sydney Morning Herald. Moore had agreed to help edit a volume of Mary’s poems and write a preface, to which Miles would

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