Alarums and Excursions: Fictions, Fallacies and Fancies

For women to enter academe meant breaching university fortifications and man-made protocols prioritising male scholars, male scholarship, and male areas of interest and endeavour. Women might study engineering – as did the small number enrolled in the 1930s at the University of Western Australia (UWA) – yet would they be elevated to tutor positions in the faculty, much less to professorships or even associate professorships or lecturer posts. Similarly with the humanities. Despite these being more likely to be seen as ‘women’s interest’ areas (so women might – just might – be considered?), academic posts were rarely filled by women, whatever their qualifications, credentials and merit. Yet women made sure women’s history and herstory was told – not through texts that prioritised and mostly limited history to male exploits, as if women made no history and herstory was a matter for women’s diaries and letters, reminiscences and unpublished memoirs. The occasional non-fiction volume relating herstory was passed by the gatekeepers, as with Bessie Rischbieth’s March of Australian Women, published in 1964 by Petersen Brokensha, a West Australia-based publisher that had a number of women (as well as men) on their list from the 1950s through to early 1980s. Nevertheless it was in fiction writing that women excelled through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, telling the stories of real women’s lives. Alert publishers recognised the lucrative market for marketing women’s novels, with women as novelists incorporating into their fiction what they knew. Kylie Tennant and Dymphna Cusack, Florence James and Stella Miles Franklin, Marjorie Barnard and Florence Eldershaw (writing also as M. Barnard Eldershaw), captured readers’ imagination with their stories of women’s lives lived extravagantly, miserably, in poverty or splendour, in factory work or field work, grappling with unwanted pregnancy, faced with childcare challenges and always, always in need of an income. Earlier Ada Cambridge, Rosa Praed, Marie Bjelke-Petersen and Henry Handel Richardson wrote women’s lives. Katharine Susannah Prichard and Ruth Park’s novels gained solid readerships. Dorothy Hewett met with acclaim when her Bobbin Up recounted the daily drudgery and companionship of women in factory work, based in her own foray into work as a machinist, whilst Eve Langley wrote fiction based in the fact of her work (often in her sister’s company) in the onion fields and picking orchards. Women did not allow discriminatory notions of excellence and scholarship to cut them out of recording their history and herstory. Fiction followed the equal pay campaign with a driven intensity.