Minnie by Marianne van Velzen

Author:Marianne van Velzen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Elizabeth George edited a page in the Adelaide Chronicle from 1923 until 1937. It was called ‘Of Interest to Women’ but later became known as ‘Woman’s World’. It was a popular page, where women could exchange recipes, ideas, treatments for maladies or just gossip. Many women who braved the loneliness of the Australian interior wrote to George, and one of those writers in particular caught her attention: a woman whose letters were signed ‘Puggy of the North’.

The first time Puggy wrote, she described her thrill at having been able to make soap. Having accumulated several tins of mutton fat, at a time when the neighbouring sheep had had plenty of feed and grown fatter, Puggy had read an article in the Chronicle about making soap. It was a fairly simple procedure and her soap had turned out wonderfully well. She wrote to the Chronicle thanking Ruth Allman, who had supplied the recipe. ‘I’d like her to know that there is one “bushie” in the north who regards her with great awe and admiration,’ Puggy wrote.

Puggy also wrote about herself and her life in Coober Pedy—about the challenges, such as having to gallop over the gibbers after a wind had blown the lid of her saucepan away, and also about the great pleasure that her life in the remote outback brought her.

Elizabeth George immediately noticed that this woman could write. Her letter was entertaining and far more skilfully composed than most she received. George asked her to please write again, and Puggy did. She described Christmas time at Coober Pedy, and the diggers—those who had earned enough to take a holiday, and those who had not and were forced to stay. Of the latter, she wrote: ‘Disgustedly they view their own particular opal claim, which should have yielded enough for a holiday—but didn’t.’

Puggy was the pseudonym Minnie used when she wrote to the ‘Woman’s World’ page, and she did so a number of times. A year later, Minnie, with the support of Elizabeth George, wrote a fully illustrated article for the Chronicle titled ‘Tourist Time at Coober Pedy’.

By then Minnie herself had become the subject of headlines. The story of a London typist trading the office for the opal fields, and living underground in a strange town called Coober Pedy, had become fodder for journalists looking for a good story.

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