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Hobby Forum Index » Arts - Books - Reviews » REVIEW: Bluestocking in Patagonia by Anne Whitehead
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| Ann Skea |
 Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2003 5:19 pm |
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TITLE: Bluestocking in Patagonia
AUTHOR: Anne Whitehead
PUBLISHER: Profile Trade (July 2003)
ISBN: 1 86197 504 X PRICE: A$ 35.00 (hardback) 312 pages
Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com)
In 1895, at the age of thirty, Mary Cameron travelled from Australia by mail
boat, paddle-steamer, steam-train and on horseback to join the fledgling
communal settlement called 'New Australia' in a remote region of Paraguay. It
was a brave trip for a lone woman to make but Mary came from good Scottish
pioneering stock; she had grown up on country properties in New South Wales,
and had been taught by her father to be independent. Nevertheless, her
experiences in Paraguay and Patagonia over the next six years would have tested
even the strongest of women to the limits.
Mary arrived in Paraguay young, single and idealistic: she left as a married
woman and a mother, in poor health, much wiser about the ways of the world but
still idealistic, outspoken and determined. In A Bluestocking in Patagonia,
Anne Whitehead has followed Mary's footsteps, has listened to her voice in
letters, diaries and poems and has found historical records and stories linked
to her life in South America. She also knows much about the people Mary would
have lived amongst and the sort of society she would have experienced at that
time. This book is a fascinating synthesis of all this, and it is an unusual
book.
Blue Stocking in Patagonia is as much a modern travel book as it is a biography
of Mary Gilmore. It refers to Chatwin and Theroux and their accounts of
Patagonia (some of which the locals now contest); it skims over South American
social history, legend and story; and it provides a rich background and a
valuable picture of the world Mary encountered and of her experiences during
that busy six years of her life.
Mary Gilmore, as the advertising material for this book says, is an Australian
icon. She is better known in Australia for her poetry than for her social views
and activism, and there is a prize-winning portrait of her by William Dobell
which hangs in the National Gallery of New South Wales and which is has been
the subject of controversy ever since it was painted in 1944 (although Mary,
herself, approved of it). This portrait appears as a shadowy background to the
image of Mary which now graces the Australian $10 note. All of this makes her
seem formidable. And, in many ways, she was.
She was born Mary Cameron in Goulburn, NSW, in 1865. In 1895, already a
published writer and an activist for workers' rights, she left Australia to
join the idealistic and already troubled new society at Cosme Station in
Paraguay, and in 1897 she married William Gilmore. All her life she was a
writer, an outspoken political commentator and activist, and a poet. Her most
famous poem, one which caught the public attention and was even set to music,
was 'No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest', which she wrote in 1940 when Australia
was under threat of invasion by the Japanese. In 1937 she was made a Dame of
the British Empire for her services to Australian Literature, and when she died
in Sydney at the age of 97 she was given a State funeral. She was an advocate
of women's rights who thought the title 'Bluestocking' "repulsive" but her
first biographer, William H. Wilde, considered that most people (the men, at
least) would have thought her "a radical bluestocking" and " a somewhat
daunting person".
The great value of Anne Whitehead's book is that it shows Mary to have been as
human and as vulnerable as any other woman. Whilst in South America Mary gave
birth to her first child in a rented cottage in a strange town, alone with a
drunken midwife. She wrote poignant, loving and sometimes desperate letters to
Will during their frequent work-enforced separations. And she struggled alone
to look after her ailing son whilst she herself was suffering from repeated,
debilitating bouts of diarrhea for which the doctors could find no remedy. Not
surprisingly, she was often depressed. But her courage, and her determination
to do any job which would bring in money so that the family could return to
Australia, saw her through.
There are other very human stories about Mary in this book. The poet, Henry
Lawson, fell in love with her at first sight (so he told Mary) but Mary
rejected his proposal of marriage, noting in her diary "a curious immaturity"
in him - like a "sappy twig". Her engagement to a man who had preceded her to
Paraguay, fell through disastrously even before she arrived there, and the
length of white muslin wedding-dress material which she had packed in her trunk
remained uncut until she married Will Gilmore two-years later. Other glimpses
of Mary as a wife and mother, mostly through Mary's own writings, show her to
have been a woman of her times and to have shared some of the prejudices and
the racism of those times. But Mary was never bound by social conventions and
her experiences during those years in South America made her more determined
than ever to fight for the rights of the ordinary worker, something she did for
the rest of her life.
Anne Whitehead is an excellent story-teller, a well-informed scholar and, like
Mary, an intrepid traveller. I found her accounts of her own travels in South
Americas equally as interesting as her glimpses of Mary's life. And I would
recommend this book to anyone who enjoys good travel-writing, whether they have
heard of Mary Gilmore before or not.
*******************************************************************************
**
Copyright © Ann Skea 2003
http://ann.skea.com
Ted Hughes' Pages http://ann.skea.com/THHome
Ted Hughes: Poetry and Magic: 'The Path of The Tower' now online. |
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