Tag: Australian Women's History

A Writer’s Prayer – Ethel Turner.

At the outset, I warned you that I was going to expand your understanding of Ethel Turner, the English-Australian author of Seven Little Australians. Moreover, I might also have mentioned that I’m still reading her books as we go. So, I’m on a steep learning curve and a thrilling adventure, while also trying to nut out these posts. Life wasn’t meant to be easy, but it can be delightful!

At this point, I’m going to interrupt my own thoughts, and ask you how often do you read a book and find that the author has unwittingly expressed the innermost desires of your heart? They know you in a way that is so intimate and personal, that they couldn’t know you any better if they hopped inside your boots, put on your skin and merged with your heart and mind and became you? It doesn’t happen very often, does it? Yet, I keep having these moments where Ethel Turner knows me to the very deepest core of my being, and then some. I’ve shared a few of these moments already. However, while I was reading Three Little Maids, I found another.

I guess, in a way, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I have been writing seriously personally and professionally to some extent for years. I self-published an anthology of poetry back in 1992 called Locked Inside An Inner Labyrinth. I gave a solo reading in Paris at the Shakespeare Bookshop a few months later. However, since then, all’s been quiet on the publishing front. Of course, I want to have a book published. Indeed, multiple books. However, to have a book published, you first have to write it, and that’s my problem.

Anyway, I haven’t been above praying for this to come about, and recently after submitting my entry for the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition, I had a heartfelt prayer for my story to win.

Indeed, it was that very week that I read Dolly’s equally impassioned prayer and I felt Ethel Turner had known me long before I was even born.

However, before I launch into her prayer, I’d better set the scene.

Three Little Maids was published in 1900. At this point, Ethel Turner had been married to Herbert Curlewis for six years and their daughter, Jean, was two years old. It has been said that elements of Three Little Maids are autobiographical, and that Phyl represents her older sister, Lillian; Dorothy or “Dolly” is herself and “Weenie” represents her younger half-sister, Jeannie “Rose”. The book is divided into two halves: Part I: Play Days and Part II: Scribbling Days. When the book starts out Phyl is ten, Dolly is eight and I don’t think an age is given for Weenie, but she could be five. By the end of the novel, the two older girls have left school and in real life, Ethel Turner was 24 when Seven Little Australians was published.

So, we’re well and truly into scribbling days and onto the second last chapter, when Dolly has received a very exciting letter. Barely able to speak through the excitement, she puffs:

“I’ve-I’ve-I’ve ___” she said, and excitement grasped her throat again, and she merely laughed and choked. Someone shook her again.”I’ve-written a b-book,” she said, thus urged.” 1.

We turn a few pages and then we come to the scene where Ethel Turner expressed the deepest, innermost cries of my heart:

“One night,” Dolly said, in the same low tone,” I felt I must do something. I felt I couldn’t just go on doing little things always,-staying at home and helping, and going to dances, and playing tennis. I used to think I should like to go as a missionary, – not to China, of course, only somewhere here where people were very poor and miserable. But that night I didn’t seem to want anything but to write books that people would love to read, and that might do them some good.”

“Well?” said Phyl, for Dolly had paused and was looking with glowing eyes at the happy sky.

“I just prayed, Phyl. It seemed so simple. God had said all things were possible to faith, – that we were to Ask, and we should receive, that all things whatsoever we should ask in prayer, believing, we should receive. He didn’t say we were to stop to consider if the thing we asked seemed impossible. He just said all things whatsoever. And I prayed, Phyl, that I might write books. All my life seemed to go in the prayer. And everything was – wonderful. I was kneeling by the window, and the sky seemed to bend down all around me, it was so warm and close. We have never known just what it is to have an own, Father, Phyl but I knew that night. And I prayed and prayed, and I knew. He was answering me. Of, Phyl, if you could have seen the stars, –  so large and kind!” 2.

I must admit that I’ve wondered whether praying to get this elusive book of mine published, was worthy of prayer. It wasn’t as materialistic as asking for a Porsche (or in my case a restored Kombi). It also wasn’t asking God to strike down my enemies, which really doesn’t sit well with values like loving your neighbour or forgiving your enemy seventy times seven. However, Ethel Turner has unwittingly legitimised my prayer, and she even suggested that a book might even be able to “do good”. That writing a book isn’t just pure self-indulgence.

Moreover, and I think this is something Ethel Turner does really well and it particularly stands out in her Sunbeams columns in the Sun newspaper. She understands, empathises with and has compassion for people from all walks of life. In her own life, she has known poverty and desperate struggle. She lost her father as an infant, and her step-feather when she was eight. However, on the 28th March, 1930 her beloved daughter Jean died of tuberculosis, and this is what saw her stop writing novels altogether.

So, is it any wonder that I like the thousands of children who have flocked to Ethel Turner throughout the years, would also find a kindred spirit in her? A soul mate? Indeed, perhaps the greatest thing of all the greatest thing of all….hope?!!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what I have called: “A Writer’s Prayer”. I wonder if you also relate to it? In that case, I say a silent prayer for you, and if you could spare a few prayers for my illusive book and the competition entry I’d also be grateful. It’s not easy being a writer, and not adding oneself to the dreaded waste paper bin!

Many thanks and best wishes,

Rowena Curtin

PS The illustrations in this post came from my grandfather’s German Bible, which was a 21st birthday present from his grandfather, Heinrich August Haebich of Hahndorf in South Australia. He was a blacksmith, while my grandfather was a Lutheran pastor. We had the Bible on the altar at our wedding, and I’d scanned some of the etchings into the order of service.

  1. Ethel Turner: Three Little Maids, Ward Locke & Co., London, p. 296.

2. Ibid. pp 302-303

Madeleine Board / Honey – Another Author in the Turner Family

Welcome back to Tea With Ethel Turner. I apologise if you feel I’m taking the slow road to China here. I’m expecting things to speed up soon. However, I’m trying to sort out the biographical details of Ethel Turner’s early life. Given there’s the death of her father, her mother’s re-marriage, the addition of a half-sister, death of the step-father, emigration to Australia, her mother’s third marriage, the birth of a half-brother…it can get a bit messy and detail is required. After all, it’s hard to paint an authentic portrait when you gloss over all the details. They can also red pen existing biographies of Ethel Turner.

It is well-known that Ethel Turner’s older sister Lillian was her literary partner in crime, and also published books although less successfully than her younger sister. It is also well-known that Ethel Turner’s much-loved daughter, Jean, was also published and showing literary promise when she tragically died of tuberculosis when she was thirty. Lillian’s son also had literary flair. However, what I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere is that Ethel Turner’s step-niece, Madeleine Board, was a moderately successful author, who also had a steady stream of contributions published over the years. So, this raises the question of whether there was more than just a genetic writer’s gene at play in the Turner clan.

Lucy “Madeleine” Board was born in 1886 to parents Lucy Turner and Thomas Board, an accountant. She had an older brother, Thomas (1885) and a younger sister, Gladys (1891). As I mentioned in my previous post, Lucy Turner was Ethel’s step-sister who accompanied the family out to Australia. So, she has no genetic relationship to Ethel Turner and older sister Lillian, although she is a half-sister to Jeanie Rose, the youngest of the “three little maids”.

It appears that Madeleine’s literary efforts were first recognised in 1901 when she was awarded a Highly Commended in a writing competition in the Sun newspaper. She was 15 at the time and attending Paddington Superior Public School (which Ethel Turner had also attended by the way) 1. On the 20th September, 1903 Madeleine won First Prize, Senior Division, Political Essay Competition ; subject, Sir Edmund Barton in the Sunday Times 2. On Sunday 13th November, 1904 she had a small essay published in the Sunday Times about the nature of conceit 3. She also had a number of good short stories published, including: “An Artist’s Picture” which won 1st prize in a Sunday Times story writing competition in 1905 4. In 1906, she was awarded a Gold Medal for her essay: “The Greatest Need of New South Wales”, which she saw as increased population, but along restricted lines 5.  In 1924, Madeleine married William Henry Honey. In 1926, she had a children’s book: Little Boo accepted by Ward, Lock and Co., who published Seven Little Australians. It’s hard to be sure of all her titles, and she wrote as both Madeleine Board and Madeleine Honey. However, I’ve also found: Secrets of River Valley and Diana.

Madeleine Honey died in 1942. She didn’t seem to warrant an obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald. Just these few lines from her husband in the hatches, matches and despatches:

HONEY.-April 19, 1942, at a private hospital, Lucy Madeleine, the beloved wife of W. H. Honey, of Edgecliff 6.

I hope my efforts compensate for that in a way. Moreover, I’m sure she would’ve been chuffed if she’d been alive to see this advertisement for “Books of the Week” listing her Secrets of River Valley one down from a Biggle’s book, even if it was for a bookshop out in Broken Hill.

Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW : 1888 – 1954), Saturday 18 October 1947, page 6

However, before I head off, in the wider interests of Australian literature, I should mention that Madeleine’s husband, William Henry Honey, was also a successful published writer. Of particular interest, he wrote and illustrated Yoonecarra, which was published by Beacon Press. As I haven’t read it, I’ll defer to a review published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday 22 February 1936:

“Hiawatha” has provided Mr. W. H. Honey with the verse-form, and more than one suggestion , for his narrative-descriptive poem. “Yoonecarra.” He may, in fact, be regarded as one of the most successful of Longfellow’s imitators. This poem tells the story of Yoonecarra chief of the ancient Kamilaroi tribe, who dwelt:

In a valley of luxuriance,

Wheie the lazy Gwydir wandered.

Slowly flowing to the sea-coast;

Where the maidenhair and tree-fern

Graced the river side with beauty . . .

In dreams he heard a ghostly challenge to leave his people and journey to the home of his ancestor and preserver, “Great Balame, king of heaven.” When almost In despair he reached this far country, and was welcomed, but had to return once more to see his tribe, before being translated to the other sphere altogether. His solitary adventuring offers Mr. Honey great opportunities for describing native customs, opportunities of which he fully and effectively takes advantage. There are, naturally, allegorical and didactic suggestions in the narrative, but they are not obtruded. With all this fresh material, however, the phrasing is conventional and rather commonplace. That defect contrasts strongly with the heroic atmosphere, too. The drawings, apparently, by the author, are skilfully done, while the whole publication, in an elaborate form with tinted paper, large type, and many incidental designs, is the product of a private local press, the Beacon. Everything has been done to ensure that the poem shall be read easily and pleasantly. (W. H. Honey, “Yoonpcarra,” Beacon Press.) 7.

Children’s book written by William Honey

So, it appears William Honey could warrant his own post. However, you might need to call on his ghost. After all, I am supposed to be having tea with Ethel Turner. That’s where I started out. Now, after three months of hard lockdown, I’m happy to have tea with anyone from a distance. I’m usually left having cups of tea with the dog. He’s usually glued to my lap with the keyboard teetering precariously across his back.

For your interest, I’m going to post a couple of Madeleine Board’s short stories, and then I’ll return to Ethel Turner and her family’s arrival in Australia. I really enjoyed these stories, and felt they ought to be shared- even if it meant me deviating off course yet again!

Thank you for joining me. It’s time for me to reboil the kettle.

Best wishes,

Rowena Curtin

Sources

  1. Sunday Times (Sydney, NSW : 1895 – 1930), Sunday 27 October 1901, page 11

2. Sunday Times (Sydney, NSW : 1895 – 1930), Sunday 20 September 1903, p 9.

3. Sunday Times (Sydney, NSW : 1895 – 1930), Sunday 13 November 1904, p 7.

4. Sunday Times (Sydney, NSW : 1895 – 1930), Sunday 30 July 1905, page 7

5. Sunday Times (Sydney, NSW : 1895 – 1930), Sunday 27 May 1906, page 7

6. Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954), Monday 20 April 1942, page 10

7. Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954), Saturday 22 February 1936, page 12

     

Ethel Turner’s Rainbow Poem.

“Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.”

Lord Byron

As I delve further into Ethel Turner, I am starting to wonder why I didn’t have tea with a one-book wonder instead. How could I possibly hope to fathom such a prolific writer when it could well take me more than a lifetime to read all her works, let along provide any meaningful analysis? However, lockdown does strange things to the mind and the soul. So, here I am back here having tea with Ethel Turner again.

For Seven Little Australians’ fans, these opening posts at Tea With Ethel Turner might seem a bit random, and you’re anxious for me to get to the point. However, as I said at the outset, I’m wanting to present the full diversity of Ethel’s writing and to explore both her writing and her back story in depth. so, for those of you like me who thought you knew Ethel Turner, you might need to reconsider.

Anyway, today while we’re sipping tea, I’m going to share what I call “Ethel’s Rainbow Poem”, If?, which appeared in the Mirror on the 13th October, 1917:

IF?

Ethel Turner.

Oh, if that rainbow up there just for a moment would reach

Through the wet slopes of the air here where I stand on the beach.

Here, where the waves wash the strand, swing itself lovingly low,

Let me catch fast with one hand, climb its frail rigging, and go! 1.

I have to admit I love rainbows, and have been known to go rainbow chasing with my kids and the camera in the car. Rainbows are like pure magic painted across a stormy sky as the sun comes out and hits that magic sweet spot, diffracting the light. Who hasn’t wasn’t to grab hold of a rainbow in one way or another and go for a magical ride? I’ve never thought of climbing a rainbow before, and it’s also been quite a few years since I’ve gone looking for the leprechaun’s magic pot of gold. However, that hasn’t stopped me from trying to capture rainbows forever in 6 x 4. while climbing onto a rainbow might be pure fantasy, it’s one of the few ways Climbing a rainbow is the only way any of us cut-off Australians are going to make it overseas at the moment. Escaping into a world of fantasy also has obvious appeal, and even more so for anyone reading it in 1917 during the horrors of the Great War when there were absolutely no certainties about when it was all going to end.

As it turned out, the lines above were actually only a fragment of a much longer poem:

Right in the midst of WWI, Ethel had her beautiful poem: If? published

However, at this point, I’d like to share what I call her “Rainbow Poem”. It’s absolutely magnificent, and more than likely was named after Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem of the same name. So, without any further mad ramblings and distraction, here it is:

This was actually a fragment of a much larger poem:

Oh, If That Rainbow Up There

Oh, if that rainbow up there,
Spanning the sky past the hill,
Slenderly, tenderly fair
Shining with colours that thrill,
Oh, if that rainbow up there,
Just for a moment could reach
Through the wet slope of the air
Here where I stand on the beach!

Here where the waves wash the strand,

Swing itself lovingly low,
Let me catch fast with one hand,
Climb its frail rigging and go.
Climb its frail rigging and go?
Where is its haven of rest?
Out in the gleam and the glow
Of the blood-red waves of the West?

Or where the isles of the dawn
Lie on an amethyst sea,

Does it drift, pale and forlorn,
Ghost of the glory I see?
Is there, ah, is there a land
Such as the Icelanders say,
Or past the West’s ruddy strand
Or on the edge of the day,

Some undiscovered clime
Seen through a cloud’s sudden rift,
Where all the rainbows of Time
Slowly and silently drift?
Some happy port of a sea
Never a world’s sail has made,
Where till the earth shadows flee
Never a rainbow may fade.

Oh, if that rainbow up there,
Just for a moment would reach,
Through the wet slope of the air
Here where I stand on the beach.
Here where the waves wash the strand
Swing itself lovingly low,
Let me catch fast with one hand,
Climb its frail rigging and go!

Ethel Turner

Lockdown, and most importantly as a vulnerable person, hasn’t been easy. During this time, I also found comfort knowing that Ethel had gone through the Spanish Flu and the Great War and come out the other side. Not only that, through her books she has given us a window into that world, and her children’s columns no doubt helped our young Australians grapple with the incomprehensible.

Source

  1. Mirror (Sydney, NSW : 1917 – 1919), Saturday 13 October 1917, page 8

Welcome To Tea With Ethel Turner!

In so many ways, Australian author Ethel Turner needs no introduction. Yet, at the same time, as generation follows generation, a reminder is usually in order.

However, that is only partly why I am here.

Although Ethel Turner is best known for her iconic first novel: Seven Little Australians, she was so much more. That is what I’m aspiring to share and discuss here at Tea With Ethel Turner. Moreover, I want to assure you, this is not a one person job either. Indeed, it’s rather daunting researching and being so incredibly inspired by the author of 40 novels, diaries, children’s columns, poems, newspapers. There is no end to Ethel’s writings. She was incredibly prolific, and the quality of her work was sustained throughout her life, at least from what I’ve read so far.

I found myself revisiting Ethel Turner via quite an oblique route during the current Sydney covid lockdown, which began on the 26th June, 2021. I have been spending the best part of the last two years since the 2019 bushfire crisis and the subsequent covid pandemic researching and writing up the biographies of Australian soldiers initially serving in France, but then I later went backwards in time to Gallipoli. That was all inspired by the school history Europe trip our son was due to go on last year. He was due to commemorate ANZAC Day at the dawn service at Villers Bretonneux and I wanted him to know about our family members who served there. Needless to say, my research project rapidly expanded, and that our son’s trip was cancelled.

Fast-forwarding through to 2021, I came across this letter addressed to Ethel Turner’s Sunbeam’s page:

A NURSE

“When I grow up I would like to be a nurse, so that I could look after poor sick people. If there happened to be another war I would go and look after the wounded soldiers. My daddy died of wounds at Gallipoli, where there were not enough nurses to look after the soldiers. I would love to wear the nice clean uniform of a nurse, and be in the children’s hospital amongst the little sick babies, as I love babies, and I don’t like to hear them crying. When I see the returned nurses with their badges I feel sure I am going to be one. I hope little girls will want to be the same so that there will be enough nurses for the poor soldiers if any more wars begin.

— Souvenir Prize and Blue “Sun” Card to Brenda Taylor (9), Greenock, Piper-street, Leichhardt — a little girl gallant enough, after her loss, to want to continue in the footsteps of her heroic father[1].”

This was where I decided to take what I thought would be a short break from Gallipoli to explore the Sunbeams, and also re-read Seven Little Australians. Since then, I’ve been clicking away on eBay and anxiously awaiting my Ethel Turners to arrive in the post. So far I’ve also read The Family At Misrule, and The Cub is lined up alongside Captain Cub, Three Little Maids and I’ve currently studying Philippa Poole’s compilation: The Diaries of Ethel Turner and A.T. Yarwood’s biography From A Chair In The Sun. I’m being very patient because I’m sorely tempted to order Mother Meg so I can complete the Woolcot trilogy. However, I haven’t just bought these books to look pretty on the shelf. I want to understand Ethel Turner as a writer. What created her? What inspired her? Who was she and what did she mean to the readers of her books and children’s columns?

While I have just started out on this journey, albeit in a rather obsessed books and all manner, I would like to paint a portrait of an Ethel Turner who was a philosopher and educator as much as an author. She created worlds and decided which characters lived and died most famously in Seven Little Australians where the much loved Judy suddenly dies, and in the sequel where Baby and Meg also stare death in the face and I won’t spoil the story by saying anything more. Ethel Turner also wrote through the depression of the 1890’s, the horrors of the Great War. Moreover, she stopped writing novels in 1930 following the death of her adored daughter, Jean Curlewis. Ethel Turner had also faced death with her own tragedies losing her father when she was two, and her step-father when she was eight. Life wasn’t meant to be easy, but did it have to be that hard?

I warn you that this blog will not be written in any great sequence, and will jump around a bit. For better or worse, that’s the way my mind works and thankfully I can categorize my posts into some kind of order as I go.

Lastly, let me introduce myself. My name is Rowena Curtin. I have considered myself a writer since I was about ten and writing stories at Galston Public School in Sydney’s Hills District. I went on to attend Pymble Ladies’ College where I also studied Speech and Drama. That was how I first came across Seven Little Australians, when I was about 12, and I had to memorise and recite a passage of dialogue from the book. Being an all-girls’ school, Ethel Turner was very popular although I don’t remember the death of Judy, which might suggest I hadn’t actually read the whole book. During high school, I wrote anguished poetry about unrequited love, which I surreptitiously shared via notes in class. Thank goodness they weren’t intercepted. I attended the University of Sydney 1988-1991. I graduated with Honours in History, looking at the arrival of Modernist art and literature in Australia, but I had also studied Australian Literature and Australian Women’s History. During my time at Sydney University, I was president of the Sydney Writers’ Society, Inkpot for two years performed my poetry on campus, at Gleebooks, Chippendale’s Reasonably Good Cafe and various festivals.

Performing at the Shakespeare Bookshop August 1992

In 1992, I finally managed to escape to Europe where I went backpacking for a year. One of the highlights was spending a month in Paris which included a solo poetry reading at the famous Shakespeare Bookshop then owned by it’s legendary eccentric proprietor, George Whitman. I returned to Australia and put poetry on the shelf to pursue a career in marketing. This trajectory was only altered by an acute, life-threatening auto-immune disease and while I was in hospital, my husband brought in my laptop and I started writing seriously again. While exploring writing for children myself, I moved onto biography and historic research. I have also been producing what I guess is a reasonably successful blog at Beyond the Flow: https://beyondtheflow.wordpress.com/ I am also married with two teenagers and three dogs. Our house is the personification of “Misrule”.

Lastly, I am also viewing Ethel Turner through a different lens. My father is actually one of seven children himself. So, I have some familiarity of what it is to come from a large family. Moreover, my dad’s youngest sibling is only ten years older than me. So, I sort of tacked onto the end of the original family in a way, and unlike my younger cousins have crystal clear memories of the family home.

This photo was taken of my grandmother in the Australian Embassy in Washington in 1948.

However, the parallels with my dad’s family don’t end there. My father’s mother was international concert pianist, Eunice Gardiner. How she managed to have seven little Australians and still continue her career, has been a personal quest. As a fifteen year old, Eunice won the Vicars Travelling Scholarship and a year later after much fundraising, she left to take up a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London with her mother as chaperone. In 1940, they returned to Australia during the London Blitz with Eunice under contract to tour with the ABC under the famous English conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham. In December, Eunice married my grandfather with a miniature grand piano on their wedding cake. Eunice speaks confidently in the press about continuing her career after marriage, which she stuck to despite her brother’s doubts. After the war was over, she spent a year in New York and Canada leaving the three boys at home. The eldest were sent to boarding school in Bowral while my Dad aged three remained at home with Dad, Gran and a housekeeper.

My grandmother on the right with her mother on the left who was every bit the wing beneath her wings.

After returning to family life, Australian Consolidated Press sent Eunice to cover the Festival of Britain and the opening of Festival Hall in 1951. She told me how she loved having a doorman and a bit of luxury over there and (reading between the lines) a break from being Mum. By this stage, there were four young boys at home. No doubt, in common with Ethel Turner, my grandmother struggled with juggling her almighty talent and passion for music with the love of her family. It was never an easy balance. She loved both passionately.

I don’t know where my cups of tea with Ethel Turner will take me. Moreover, I don’t know where they will take you either. However, just looking at the very shallow depths I’ve dipped into so far, we can only be changed. Changed for the much better as well.

I look forward to sharing this exhilarating journey with you!

Best wishes,

Rowena Curtin

Sources:

[1] Sun (Sydney, NSW : 1910 – 1954), Sunday 30 July 1922, page 2