ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

There is a moment (at 6:10) in Michael Cathcart’s interview with Bronwen Hickman, the biographer of Mary Gaunt (1861-1942), when he mentions that the biography derives from Hickman’s Master’s thesis – and then apologises because, he said, he’d been asked not to mention that, ‘because publishers like to pretend that master’s theses don’t become books’.  This is presumably because of a concern that potential readers might think the book would be too academic – and I can certainly think of some theses-turned-books that are.  But I’m going to mention the book’s origins too, because Mary Gaunt, Independent Colonial Woman is a superb example of extensive research being turned into a highly readable, unputdownable biography.  Bronwen Hickman is a born writer and the book is a model for other biographers to follow.  It’s in the same league as Brenda Niall’s biographies.

As you will know if you read my post about Mary Gaunt’s articles in Australia’s First Century 1788-1888, (Facsimiles from Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia), I discovered Mary Gaunt via Bill at The Australian Legend hosting a ‘week’ devoted to the first generation of Australian women writers.  It was only from poking around on the internet that I discovered how interesting this woman was, and more importantly that there was a biography about her.  It was Michael Cathcart’s interview that made the bio irresistible, and I found a copy at Bayside Library.

Mary Gaunt was such an amazing woman!  Despite a mother more interested in the proprieties, Mary was one of the first women to attend the University of Melbourne, starting (but not completing) an arts degree.  She was ferociously independent and she wanted to earn her own living as a writer instead of getting married.  And that was just as well, because when she eventually did fall in love and marry, her husband shortly afterwards died of an appalling brain disease, and she had to support herself.  She took herself off to London and wrote articles and stories drawing on her life in the colony, and then – in an era when women did not travel alone – she took herself off to Africa and to China and to Jamaica and wrote books and articles about that.  She was incredibly entrepreneurial, and although her travels relied to some extent on introductions and a middle-class way of getting about, she was brave too.

Yes, as I noted in my previous post, Gaunt was a product of her times.  She was racist and patronising about people of colour, and having eschewed marriage for herself, she wrote novels with romantic happy endings.  But she also wrote travel articles that illuminated issues like Chinese foot binding, and her novels treat some serious themes like men being press-ganged into naval service, and slavery in Jamaica.  She was also not afraid to offend: she wrote about unmarried liaisons and about plantation owners fathering light-skinned sons by their slaves.

Her adventurous life did not end well.  She was caught behind the lines during WW2 and had to flee her home in Italy for France but became trapped there under the German Occupation, dependant on an allowance from the US Vice-Consul because she could not access her English bank accounts.  Elderly by then, and frail, she died in 1942, leaving an extraordinary legacy of works: twenty-six books – novels, history and travel books.  But until the advent of electronic resources like Project Gutenberg, and a reprint of Kirkham’s Find in 1988,  most of them were unavailable to modern readers, apart from incomplete sets in the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne and the State Library of Victoria.  So I was luckier than I knew, to find Gaunt’s writing in Australia’s First Century 1788-1888.

PS I was disappointed to find that although Hickmen says that Mary Gaunt’s name was added to the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2002, I couldn’t find it with a search on their website.  In fact, I couldn’t see any women from the literary community there, not even Di Gribble or Germaine Greer. If it weren’t for Wikipedia, (which is always vulnerable to interference) there appears to be no online record of these women’s’ presence on the Honour Roll.  Which makes me wonder, what is the point of it?

Author: Bronwen Hickman
Title: Mary Gaunt, Independent Colonial Woman
Publisher: Melbourne Books, 2014
ISBN: 9781922129369
Source: Bayside Library

Available from Fishpond: Mary Gaunt – Independent Colonial Woman