Travelling to Tomorrow: The Modern Women Who Sparked Australia’s Romance With America by Yves Rees

Author:Yves Rees
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Published: 2024-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Alice Caporn’s words should always be taken with a grain of salt. She was an ambitious hustler, a one-woman health empire who made questionable statements on the daily. She declared herself immune to all disease. She boasted she’d live to a hundred. She denounced potatoes as unfit for human consumption and promised to rid the world of infantile paralysis. Alice was, in other words, hardly a reliable narrator of her own existence. But amid the murk of half-truths and outright fabulation, she got one thing right: the infamous nudist Alice Caporn was indeed Australian. A child of South Australia, she was born Alice White in 1875, in the Barossa town of Angaston. Although by 1933 she’d lived over a decade in the United States, the health guru maintained her antipodean identity. She was the ‘food specialist of Australia’, a 50-something ‘Australian girl’.

Back in Australia, Alice was no one special. For the first four decades of her existence, she’d lived a quiet and unremarkable life. Not yet a health entrepreneur, there was little to suggest that outraged headlines or notoriety lay in her future. After a Barossa childhood, she’d worked as a nurse in the Western Australian mining towns of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. In 1904, aged 29, Alice married Henry Caporn and soon after discovered Christian Science. Established in 1879, Christian Science was a new church founded by American woman Mary Baker Eddy. Like the larger New Thought movement, Eddy’s church emphasised the power of thought and focused on spiritual and physical healing. From the 1890s, when Christian Science arrived in Australia, it won over many progressive women, including feminists Vida Goldstein and Miles Franklin.

Caporn was one of these converts. She fell hook, line and sinker. More than her husband, Christian Science was her great love. So, in 1917, she made a big decision. That winter, with World War I still raging, Caporn ditched Henry and sailed to the United States. At the age of 42, Caporn made a new home in Boston, the headquarters of the Christian Science faith. Although she arrived knowing no one, Alice immediately felt among friends. She understood the United States as a fellow bastion of the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’. ‘It is not difficult for me to foster affection for this great Nation, which is akin to us,’ Alice wrote. ‘I have a real love for Americans and have felt entirely at home here from the moment I landed.’

Once settled in Boston, Caporn worked as a nurse within the Christian Science community. She also penned Awake! Christian Scientists, a 1921 polemic that challenged the church’s governance in the aftermath of Eddy’s death in 1910. Over 250 pages, Alice warned Christian Science had been infected with ‘the canker worm of Romanism, in other words, ECCLESTICAL DESPOTISM’. This diatribe was the first inkling that Alice was not afraid to question authority or disrupt the status quo. From that point onwards, she would revel in ruffling feathers. Unafraid of conflict, Alice was forever painting herself as a misunderstood prophet, a martyr ahead of her time.

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