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  Stella Miles Franklin was born in the Australian bush in 1879. By the age of twenty, Miles Franklin had completed her first novel, My Brilliant Career. After it was rejected by local publishers, she sent it to Henry Lawson, who called it ‘the first great Australian novel’. He wrote a preface for it and helped her to get it published in Britain in 1901. The sequel, My Career Goes Bung, was written in 1900 but was not published until 1946, considered too audacious and perhaps too revealing of its creator’s own persona for publication.

  Miles’ early success gave her entree to literary and socialist circles in Sydney and Melbourne. By 1906 she decided to travel overseas, and went to work for the women’s labour movement in Chicago. In 1915 she relocated to London and worked for various feminist and progressive causes, all the while continuing to write. A prolific author of plays as well as novels and archetypal bush stories, she often submitted work under pseudonyms that she guarded fiercely all her life. In the 1930s she returned to Australia and determined to take up the cause of Australian writing and writers. Her endowment of the Miles Franklin literary award not only surprised all who knew her, but founded an Australian literary institution that remains our most prestigious.

  HOUSE of BOOKS

  MILES FRANKLIN

  My Brilliant Career

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

  First published in Scotland by William Blackwood and Sons 1901

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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  ISBN 978 1 74331 241 4 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 74269 944 8 (ebook)

  Contents

  MY BRILLIANT CAREER

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE. I Remember, I Remember

  CHAPTER TWO. An Introduction to Possum Gully

  CHAPTER THREE. A Lifeless Life

  CHAPTER FOUR. A Career Which Soon Careered to an End

  CHAPTER FIVE. Disjointed Sketches and Grumbles

  CHAPTER SIX. Revolt

  CHAPTER SEVEN. Was E’er a Rose Without Its Thorn?

  CHAPTER EIGHT. Possum Gully Left Behind. Hurrah! Hurrah!

  CHAPTER NINE. Aunt Helen’s Recipe

  CHAPTER TEN. Everard Grey

  CHAPTER ELEVEN. Yah!

  CHAPTER TWELVE. One Grand Passion

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN. He

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN. Principally Letters

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN. When the Heart Is Young

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN. When Fortune Smiles

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. Idylls of Youth

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. As Short as I Wish Had Been the Majority of Sermons to Which I Have Been Forced to Give Ear

  CHAPTER NINETEEN. The Ninth of November 1896

  CHAPTER TWENTY. Same Yarn—Continued

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE. My Unladylike Behavior Again

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO. Sweet Seventeen

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE. Ah, For One Hour of Burning Love, ’Tis Worth an Age of Cold Respect!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR. Thou Knowest Not What a Day May Bring Forth

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE. Because?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX. Boast Not Thyself of Tomorrow

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN. My Journey

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT. To Life

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE. To Life—Continued

  CHAPTER THIRTY. Where Ignorance Is Bliss, ’Tis Folly to Be Wise

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE. Mr. M’Swat and I Have a Bust-up

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO. Ta-Ta to Barney’s Gap

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE. Back at Possum Gully

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR. But Absent Friends Are Soon Forgot

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE. The Third of December 1898

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX. Once Upon a Time, When the Days Were Long and Hot

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN. He That Despiseth Little Things, Shall Fall Little by Little

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT. A Tale That Is Told and a Day That Is Done

  Preface

  A few months before I left Australia I got a letter from the bush signed “Miles Franklin,” saying that the writer had written a novel, but knew nothing of editors and publishers, and asking me to read and advise. Something about the letter, which was written in a strong original hand, attracted me, so I sent for the MS, and one dull afternoon I started to read it. I hadn’t read three pages when I saw what you will no doubt see at once—that the story had been written by a girl. And as I went on I saw that the work was Australian—born of the bush. I don’t know about the girlishly emotional parts of the book—I leave that to girl readers to judge; but the descriptions of bush life and scenery came startlingly, painfully real to me, and I know that, as far as they are concerned, the book is true to Australia—the truest I ever read. I wrote to Miles Franklin, and she confessed that she was a girl. I saw her before leaving Sydney. She is just a little bush girl, barely twenty-one yet, and has scarcely ever been out of the bush in her life. She has lived her book, and I feel proud of it for the sake of the country I came from, where people toil and bake and suffer and are kind; where every second sun-burnt bushman is a sympathetic humorist, with the sadness of the bush deep in his eyes and a brave grin for the worst of times, and where every third bushman is a poet, with a big heart that keeps his pockets empty.

  —HENRY LAWSON

  England, April 1901

  Introduction

  Possum Gully, near Goulburn,

  N.S. Wales, Australia, 1st March, 1899

  MY DEAR FELLOW AUSTRALIANS,

  Just a few lines to tell you that this story is all about myself—for no other purpose do I write it.

  I make no apologies for being egotistical. In this particular I attempt an improvement on other autobiographies. Other autobiographies weary one with excuses for their egotism. What matters it to you if I am egotistical? What matters it to you, though it should matter, that I am egotistical?

  This is not a romance—I have too often faced the music of life to the tune of hardship to waste time in snivelling and gushing over fancies and dreams; neither is it a novel, but simply a yarn—a real yarn. Oh! As real, as really real—provided life itself is anything beyond a heartless little chimera—it is as real in its weariness and bitter heartache as the tall gum trees,
among which I first saw the light, are real in their stateliness and substantiality.

  My sphere in life is not congenial to me. Oh, how I hate this living death which has swallowed all my teens, which is greedily devouring my youth, which will sap my prime, and in which my old age, if I am cursed with any, will be worn away! As my life creeps on forever through the long toil-laden days with its agonizing monotony, narrowness, and absolute uncongeniality, how my spirit frets and champs its unbreakable fetters—all in vain!

  SPECIAL NOTICE

  You can dive into this story headfirst as it were. Do not fear encountering such trash as descriptions of beautiful sunsets and whisperings of wind. We (999 out of every 1,000) can see naught in sunsets save as signs and tokens whether we may expect rain on the morrow or the contrary, so we will leave such vain and foolish imagining to those poets and painters—poor fools! Let us rejoice that we are not of their temperament!

  Better be born a slave than a poet, better be born a black, better be born a cripple! For a poet must be companionless—alone! Fearfully alone in the midst of his fellows whom he loves. Alone because his soul is as far above common mortals as common mortals are above monkeys.

  There is no plot in this story, because there has been none in my life or in any other life which has come under my notice. I am one of a class, the individuals of which have not time for plots in their life, but have all they can do to get their work done without indulging in such a luxury.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I Remember, I Remember

  “Boo, hoo! Ow, ow; Oh! Oh! Me’ll die. Boo, hoo. The pain, the pain! Boo, hoo!”

  “Come, come, now. Daddy’s little mate isn’t going to turn Turk like that, is she? I’ll put some fat out of the dinner bag on it, and tie it up in my hanky. Don’t cry anymore now. Hush, you must not cry! You’ll make old Dart buck if you kick up a row like that.”

  That is my first recollection of life. I was barely three. I can remember the majestic gum trees surrounding us, the sun glinting on their straight white trunks, and falling on the gurgling fern-banked stream, which disappeared beneath a steep, scrubby hill on our left. It was an hour past noon on a long clear summer day. We were on a distant part of the run, where my father had come to deposit salt. He had left home early in the dewy morning, carrying me in front of him on a little brown pillow which my mother had made for the purpose. We had put the lumps of rock salt in the troughs on the other side of the creek. The stringybark roof of the salt shed which protected the troughs from rain peeped out picturesquely from the musk and peppercorn shrubs by which it was densely surrounded, and was visible from where we lunched. I refilled the quart pot in which we had boiled our tea with water from the creek, Father doused our fire out with it, and then tied the quart to the D of his saddle with a piece of green hide. The green-hide bags in which the salt had been carried were hanging on the hooks of the pack saddle which encumbered the bay pack horse. Father’s saddle and the brown pillow were on Dart, the big gray horse on which he generally carried me, and we were on the point of making tracks for home.

  Preparatory to starting, Father was muzzling the dogs which had just finished what lunch we had left. This process, to which the dogs strongly objected, was rendered necessary by a cogent reason. Father had brought his strychnine flask with him that day, and in hopes of causing the death of a few dingoes, had put strong doses of its contents in several dead beasts which we had come across.

  Whilst the dogs were being muzzled, I busied myself in plucking ferns and flowers. This disturbed a big black snake which was curled at the butt of a tree fern.

  “Bitey! bitey!” I yelled, and Father came to my rescue, dispatching the reptile with his stock whip. He had been smoking, and dropped his pipe on the ferns. I picked it up, and the glowing embers which fell from it burnt my dirty little fat fists. Hence the noise with which my story commences.

  In all probability it was the burning of my fingers which so indelibly impressed the incident on my infantile mind. My father was accustomed to take me with him, but that is the only jaunt at that date which I remember, and that is all I remember of it. We were twelve miles from home, but how we reached there I do not know.

  My father was a swell in those days—held Bruggabrong, Bin Bin East, and Bin Bin West, which three stations totaled close to 200,000 acres. Father was admitted into swelldom merely by right of his position. His pedigree included nothing beyond a grandfather. My mother, however, was a full-fledged aristocrat. She was one of the Bossiers of Caddagat, who numbered among their ancestry one of the depraved old pirates who pillaged England with William the Conqueror.

  “Dick” Melvyn was as renowned for hospitality as joviality, and our comfortable, wide-verandaed, irregularly built slab house in its sheltered nook amid the Timlinbilly Ranges was ever full to overflowing. Doctors, lawyers, squatters, commercial travelers, bankers, journalists, tourists, and men of all kinds and classes crowded our well-spread board; but seldom a female face, except Mother’s, was to be seen there, Bruggabrong being a very out-of-the-way place.

  I was both the terror and the amusement of the station. Old boundary riders and drovers inquire after me with interest to this day.

  I knew everyone’s business, and was ever in danger of publishing it at an inopportune moment.

  In flowery language, selected from slang used by the station hands, and long words picked up from our visitors, I propounded unanswerable questions which brought blushes to the cheeks of even tough old wine-bibbers.

  Nothing would induce me to show more respect to an appraiser of the runs than to a boundary rider, or to a clergyman than a drover. I am the same to this day. My organ of veneration must be flatter than a pancake, because to venerate a person simply for his position I never did or will. To me the Prince of Wales will be no more than a shearer, unless when I meet him he displays some personality apart from his princeship—otherwise he can go hang.

  Authentic record of the date when first I had a horse to myself has not been kept, but it must have been early, as at eight I was fit to ride anything on the place. Side-saddle, man-saddle, no-saddle, or astride were all the same to me. I rode among the musterers as gamely as any of the big sunburnt bushmen.

  My mother remonstrated, opined I would be a great unwomanly tomboy. My father poohed the idea.

  “Let her alone, Lucy,” he said, “let her alone. The rubbishing conventionalities which are the curse of her sex will bother her soon enough. Let her alone!”

  So, smiling and saying, “She should have been a boy,” my mother let me alone, and I rode, and in comparison to my size made as much noise with my stock whip as anyone. Accidents had no power over me, I came unscathed out of droves of them.

  Fear I knew not. Did a drunken tramp happen to kick up a row, I was always the first to confront him, and, from my majestic and roly-poly height of two feet six inches, demand what he wanted.

  A digging started near us and was worked by a score of two dark-browed sons of Italy. They made Mother nervous, and she averred they were not to be trusted, but I liked and trusted them. They carried me on their broad shoulders, stuffed me with lollies, and made a general pet of me. Without the quiver of a nerve I swung down their deepest shafts in the big bucket on the end of a rope attached to a rough windlass, which brought up the miners and the mullock.

  My brothers and sisters contracted mumps, measles, scarlatina, and whooping cough. I rolled in the bed with them yet came off scot-free. I romped with dogs, climbed trees after birds’ nests, drove the bullocks in the dray under the instructions of Ben, our bullocky, and always accompanied my father when he went swimming in the clear mountain shrub-lined stream which ran deep and lone among the weird gullies, thickly carpeted with maidenhair and numberless other species of ferns.

  My mother shook her head over me and trembled for my future, but Father seemed to consider me nothing unusual. He was my hero, confidant, encyclopedia, mate, and even my religion till I was ten. Since then I have been religionless.
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  Richard Melvyn, you were a fine fellow in those days! A kind and indulgent parent, a chivalrous husband, a capital host, a man full of ambition and gentlemanliness.

  Amid these scenes, and the refinements and pleasures of Caddagat, which lies a hundred miles or so farther Riverinawards, I spent the first years of my childhood.

  CHAPTER TWO

  An Introduction to Possum Gully

  I was nearly nine summers old when my father conceived the idea that he was wasting his talents by keeping them rolled up in the small napkin of an out-of-the-way place like Bruggabrong and the Bin Bin stations. Therefore he determined to take up his residence in a locality where he would have more scope for his ability.

  When giving his reason for moving to my mother, he put the matter before her thus: The price of cattle and horses had fallen so of late years that it was impossible to make much of a living by breeding them. Sheep were the only profitable article to have nowadays, and it would be impossible to run them on Bruggabrong or either of the Bin Bins. The dingoes would work havoc among them in no time, and what they left the duffers would soon dispose of. As for bringing police into the matter, it would be worse than useless. They could not run the offenders to earth, and their efforts to do so would bring down upon their employer the wrath of the duffers. Result, all the fences on the station would be fired for a dead certainty, and the destruction of more than a hundred miles of heavy log fencing on rough country like Bruggabrong was no picnic to contemplate.

  This was the feasible light in which Father shaded his desire to leave. The fact of the matter was that the heartless harridan, discontent, had laid her claw-like hand upon him. His guests were ever assuring him he was buried and wasted in Timlinbilly’s gullies. A man of his intelligence, coupled with his wonderful experience among stock, would, they averred, make a name and fortune for himself dealing or auctioneering if he only liked to try. Richard Melvyn began to think so too, and desired to try. He did try.