RESTLESS DOLLY MAUNDER

Kate Grenville is an Australian internationally acclaimed and prize winning writer. She has published fifteen books, the most recent being Restless Dolly Maunder which traces the character and experiences of her maternal grandmother. Beginning on the land in the late nineteenth century, her journey covers urban and rural NSW and Queensland, the good years of the early twentieth century, the war years, the depression. A family who mirrored many families – striving to rise above rural poverty into the urban middle class while loss, both financial and personal, took their toll. To discuss her new novel, Kate Grenville addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 28 August 2023.

RESTLESS DOLLY MAUNDER

KATE GRENVILLE

It’s wonderful to be here again. I have been here several times talking, and several times as an audience. The last time I was here was to hear my father talk about his book. He was a complicated man. In his youth, he was a communist – in fact, he was a Trotskyite revolutionary. But Dad did that classic journey from one side of politics to the other, and in his later years he was extremely conservative. He was here to launch a book of his memoirs about his days as Trotskyite revolutionary. He was around 92 at the time; he was a frail, old man then. Gerard had very kindly set up a comfortable chair and so on, but Dad said, “No, I don’t need any of that.” So, he stood up, only slightly tottering, and he gave his speech. But at the end of it, Bob Gould – who used to run the left bookshop in Newtown – stood up from the back and heckled him – perhaps half in joke, and Dad  – who’d had his share of hecklers when he used to speak at the Domain – relished the chance to engage in debate!

I’ve mined my family for many of my books. This is because my mother was fabulously aware of the place of an ordinary family like ours in the big history of things. She wrote down, in her own memoirs, a whole lot of stuff about our family, going right back to our convict ancestor, Solomon Wiseman. My book, The Secret River, takes its inspiration from Solomon Wiseman in many ways. Sarah Thornhill is about Solomon Wiseman’s daughter. One Life, my mother’s story, is obviously about my mother. And this book is about my grandmother. Someone said to me the other day, “You’ll have to start on the men next. What about your father?” But, of course, he’s already got there first. Dad was a good writer, and he was also a good son-in-law. My grandmother, Dolly Maunder, came to live with us when I was about six, and Dad was unfailingly courteous to this old lady living with us. Not every son-in-law would be as nice as Dad was to Dolly.

The thing about grannies is that they’re supposed to be warm, cosy, cuddly people, a bit overweight, in a big flowery apron, coming at you with a plate of scones. My grandmother was a skinny, twig-like, stern, cranky old thing. She was the absolute opposite of the stereotype. In the time that I’ve been writing this book and talking about it, I’ve been amazed at how many people have said to me, “Oh, my granny was cranky too!” So, in every talk that I give, I ask for a show of hands. How many people in this room had grandmothers who were cranky rather than the scone-proferring stereotype? Quite a few. So, I think we need to do something about the stereotype of grannies, and somewhat broaden the picture of what they can be.

I knew quite a lot about Mum through her memoirs and, through her, I knew a lot about my grandmother, because my grandmother had a big effect on my mother’s life. Mum always thought her mother didn’t love her. The stories she told about Grandma were of a cold, bullying, even slightly unhinged woman. But when I became a grandmother – which happened about three years ago – I found myself starting to think differently about Grandma. I thought, she didn’t emerge out of the womb as a cranky bully. Something made her that way – so what was it?  I start every book with a question, and the question for this book was “What made that woman become the difficult and probably unhappy person that she was at the end of her life?”

One of the reasons can be found in where and when she was born, and in what sort of social milieu. I thought I’d read a little extract to give you the impression of what her beginning was. She was born in 1881, in Currabubula, which is a tiny town near Tamworth in NSW:

As soon as she could walk, she knew she wanted to be outside, moving. The house was too dark, too small, smelling of stale wood smoke and dogs. It was outside she wanted. The horizon shaped by the perfect cone of Duri Mountain on one side and the high ragged outcrop of Terrible Billy on the other. Outside, and moving round. The sky above you and the dirt under your feet, and always the shape of the land against the sky like a familiar face.

***

They were six miles out of Currabubula, three dusty streets and a pub. She was five before she saw a town. Tamworth was twenty miles away and the Maunders didn’t have much call to go there.

***

In Dolly’s childhood there was Before Willie and After Willie. He was killed off a horse one morning, leaned down from the saddle to open the gate, the same way he’d done a hundred times, but the horse was fresh and bucked and threw him against the gate post, and then trampled him, trampled his head with clumsy, great iron hooves. The blood balled on the dust, glittering in the early sun, Dolly ran out with the rest and saw, and the flies coming to it as quickly as if they’d been waiting.

***

In all the years after Willie, Dolly never saw her mother smile, only go about the endless tasks, banging open the stove door to throw in more wood and clanging it shut as if to punish it.

***

Thomas Maunder had been brought out from London as a poor Cockney boy to work on the huge sheep run near Curra called Goonoo Goonoo. It gave him a special bitter satisfaction to go over and over the story of his humiliations there…. He told over the hurts like jewels, turning them in his memory so they flashed with his anger. But he’d worked hard, boasted that in his younger days he’d held the shearing record in the area, 222 sheep in a single day with the blades, and finally got his own place where they were now: Forest Farm.

Dolly never saw anything soft in her father, when he came in from the paddocks he filled the kitchen: massive, solid, a great rock. Sat at the head of the table, his big rough hands flat on the wood, waiting for his tea to be put down in front of him, and woe be tide if it wasn’t ready when he was.

***

Now and again though, at the end of a long day of shearing or getting the hay in, there’d be moments of rough warmth between the father and his sons. They’d all gone together at some mountain of work and beaten it, and one of them would say something over the stew that made the others laugh, something that had happened in the shearing shed or the paddock. But it was only for the pleasure of the men. They weren’t going to explain the joke to the women.

Girls were of no account, you learned that early on. Good enough to make the bread and milk the cow and, later on, you’d look after the children. But no woman was ever going to be part of the real business of the world.

That’s the shorthand answer to my question about why Grandma was cranky: she was born the wrong gender, at the wrong time, in the wrong social class. Her life would have been like her mother’s, banging the stove door open, heaving the washing around, and endless children – except that an amazing thing happened. The year after Dolly was born, the men in Macquarie Street who ran things passed a law that said every child, between 5 and 14, had to go to school. Education was to be free, secular and most importantly, compulsory. Dolly’s father would have depended on his children for their labour; quite young children make good shepherds. But Dolly got those few years of education because of the men in Macquarie Street. That meant that later, when she and her husband were on a farm that failed, they had just enough education to leave the farm and go into business.

The first business they had was a little grocery shop in Wahroonga. I’ve often driven there and tried to work out which of those funny little facades it might be. But Dolly could see that you could do better than a tiny little grocery shop in Wahroonga. She started a boarding house.  She ran the boarding house while her husband kept the shop going – double the income. And then they went into pubs. Like many people of their generation, they saw that buying and selling pubs, especially in the country, was a way to get something that would never have ever come to them otherwise – capital. They could have just started a business and have the income from it, but what Dolly could see is that, if you bought and sold, bought and sold, you would get lumps of capital each time. She was the ultimate entrepreneur. Thanks to her drive and intelligence, and restless urge to always find a greener field, she was the one who made sure that they made a lot of money. Which I might add, they lost in the Depression.

That meant that Dolly – who had grown up in this narrow, constricted little world – suddenly, because of the miracle of education, could get out. She could escape. Otherwise, she would have been condemned to a life – as every woman of her generation was – of incredible injustice, just because you were a woman. You weren’t allowed to do anything interesting. You weren’t even allowed to wear clothes that you could move freely in. Education and her own temperament saved her from that.

What’s more, she could see that her own daughter could do even better.  What had saved her life was business, so she was going to make sure that her daughter also had that kind of opportunity. They had a difficult relationship; I can see that Dolly must have been a difficult mother. Sometimes a mother has to do something that’s unpopular, and Dolly certainly did. My mother wanted to be a teacher; she loved poetry, art and the creative side of life.  But Dolly more or less bullied her into training as a pharmacist instead.

Why?  There were two great traumas in Dolly’s life. One of them – well, I won’t spoil the surprise if you read the book. It’s to do with her husband and a locked tin trunk.  The other was what happened to her the day she left school in 1895, at fourteen.   Grandma wanted to be a teacher because it was pretty much the only option then for a woman who wanted what we’d now call a career.   She went home from school on that last day and said to her father, “I want to apply to be a pupil-teacher.” Her father slapped his hand on the table and said, “Over my dead body any daughter of mine goes out to work.” It would shame him. People would think he couldn’t earn enough to keep his family.

So, all those years later when she bullied her daughter into doing pharmacy, it was for my mother’s own good. For Dolly’s generation, if a woman wanted to be something other than a home-maker, her only options were nursing or teaching.  She could see that for her daughter’s generation there were more – and maybe better – options.  First of all, there was no marriage bar in pharmacy; you didn’t have to leave when you got married, which in teaching a woman had to. Secondly, you didn’t have to work for someone else, as an employee without much power.  You could have your own business, run your life the way you wanted. Later on, Mum had two very successful pharmacy business, and the financial independence that went with that.

On the way to that happy ending, Dolly and my mother had a very difficult relationship. But it also had its moments of warmth. What I was always trying to do was to look behind Mum’s idea of her mother. Mum had a stereotype of her mother as an unloving person. I had a feeling that there was more to it than that, something more complicated. In writing this book, I was trying to find it. There are scenes in the book where Dolly and her daughter have moments of closeness, including one I’ll read now. It’s based on a scene in Mum’s memoirs, and I used it to try and get into the psychology of this otherwise unreadable old woman. The first hotel they had was called The Crown, in Camden.  It’s still there and looking rather nice these days.

Next door to The Crown, there was a hall with a roller skating rink. Frank and Nance were heading off there one day with their sixpences when Nance suddenly turned back to Dolly and said, Come on Mum! Come with us! I dare you!

Cheeky, but apprehensive too. Dolly knew in a flare of understanding that it was just how she’d watched her own mother and father, that mix of love and fear…

… She wasn’t going to strap on skates but she went in with them and leaned on the rail to watch. … There they were, coming round, Frank and Nance hand in hand. She smiled at them through the crowd and saw Nance’s face light up with a sudden surprised smile back.

She waited. There was some kind of chance being offered, some breaking of the habit between her and her daughter, and after a time Nance skated over.

Frank’s with Clive and the others, she said, and she didn’t need to say, They don’t want a girl with them.

She took off her skates and they went out into the cool under the trees. The afternoon sun was slanting across so there was a long wobbly line of fence drawn in shadow on the grass, and for once a companionable feeling between mother and daughter.

Want a pear, Mum? Nance asked.

She didn’t wait for Dolly to answer, was shimmying up the old tree like a monkey, Dolly could see her brown legs all the way up to her bloomers. Opened her mouth to say, Get down this minute, Nance, there you are showing the world your bloomers! But shut it again. That was what you were supposed to say, to stop a girl doing anything lively. But if Nance wanted to climb the tree and get her mother a pear, well, what was wrong with a girl’s legs?

They stood there together with the pear juice running down their chins, a big smudge on Nance’s face where pear juice and dirt had stuck.

***

She’s got plenty of go in her, Dolly thought, and for once she felt tender towards this difficult girl. Still, there was a rueful edge to the tenderness. Here the child was, happy in her skin, no idea of what was ahead of her, the battles ahead of any girl. Could she protect her? Give her the armour she’d need? Nothing in her own life showed her what a mother might do for a daughter. She’d have to make it up as she went along.

Like most of us, Dolly got it right as a mother sometimes and got it wrong sometimes. I know that Mum climbed that pear tree outside The Crown in Camden and got the pear – I didn’t make that up, it was in the memoirs.  And I knew what Mum thought about it – she treasured that rare moment of closeness.  But what I didn’t know was Dolly’s side of that moment.  What did she think or feel –  not just about that moment, but about any of the injustices or delights of her life? I had to imagine all that, which is why this is called a novel.

Doing that – mixing it up between fact and fiction – is something you have to do, if you want to tell  the story of people like Dolly, born in a poor family with minimal education, who didn’t leave any written record of themselves. It was only wealthier people – men and women –  who had the leisure and education to sit down and write their memoirs, or letters, or journals. Yet the people from Dolly’s background were the majority.   That can give us quite a skewed image of the past, and leave out the bulk of the population and their lives.

Except for a silver-plated teapot engraved by her friends when she left Gunnedah, and a red velvet jacket, Dolly left nothing behind. When I look at the sleeves of that garment, it’s like an object from another world.  There’s no way any modern person could get into it. My feeling was, our grandmothers and grandfathers look like another species in those old photographs, trussed up in those impossible clothes. They look like another species, but they weren’t – they surely can’t have been that different from us. Human beings are shaped by the culture they’re born in, but beyond that there are basic human impulses and feelings.  Some of them, at least, must have felt – as we would in the same situation – that life was so unjust, so frustrating.

Dolly’s story represents the story of hundreds of thousands of women like her whose lives were transformed after the 1880 Public Instruction Act. After centuries of women being denied education on the grounds that “they’ll just get married and have children”, by 1900, a few doors were just starting to creak open for women. The first few women were fighting their way to university, fighting their way into a few of the professions. Reliable contraception was just starting to happen, at least for women with a bit of money, so they didn’t have to go on having child after child if they also wanted something else from life. Dolly, and all the other women like her in that generation, got in there and elbowed those doors wider open.  It gave them more choices and freedom, and it opened the way for their daughters to have even more choices and freedoms.

In writing about Dolly, I had the stories from my mother, I had the teapot and the jacket, and I also had everything that research can offer.  I found her in Trove; any of you who have done family stories would have found  that wonderful resource.  I found a newspaper article there about a local dance in Currabubula, and there she was –  the bloke who wrote the article described her frock: “Miss Dolly Maunder, who was attired in a white flowered silk, trimmed with white silk lace and blush roses.” Suddenly my grandmother became alive. There she was, a young woman in a white flowered silk frock, trimmed with white silk lace. She’d thought about what to wear, probably made the dress, picked out the lace, would have been delighted to have her name in the newspaper.

When she and her husband moved from the farm to the grocery shop in Wahroonga, I was very exercised in my mind about what the difference would have been. Did they, for example, have reticulated water in Wahroonga in 1918? Did they have gas? Did they have long drops in the backyard or how did they get rid of their excrement? The Wahroonga Library gave me the information that, yes, she would have had running water and a gas stove. That would have been an incredible freedom for a woman who, up until then, if you wanted as much as a cup of tea, you would have had to clean the ashes out of the stove, find some kindling, make sure someone had sawn and split the firewood, then go out and pump the water out of the tank and bring it back into the kitchen in a bucket. Now, at the turn of a switch and a flick of the match, she could have that cup of tea. For the first time, there wasn’t a long drop in the backyard, there was a poor unfortunate man – the dunny man – who came around to the outside toilet a couple of times a week.  For threepence a week, he’d empty one pan and replace it with a clean one. Details like that made my grandmother’s life very real, very much something you could see and feel and experience.

Trying to reconstruct her life, I felt a bit like those scientists who try to reintroduce almost extinct species into a particular ecosystem. They take some little creature away, they breed it up, and then they come back and let it out. It sticks its nose out of the bag and then shoots off into the bushes to add its life to the landscape it belongs to. I felt I was doing something a bit similar that with my grandmother and her whole generation of women. They’re an important part of the ecosystem of the past, yet – in terms of what we know about their lives –  they’re almost extinct.

I have one vivid memory of my grandmother. I was about six, and she had come to live with us. I was playing in the backyard and Grandma came out of the granny flat where she lived and stood over me. I remember this seemingly incredibly tall, thin, threatening, frowning person. She looked down at me and she said, “Do you love me, Kathy?” I can only say I was a child who had been reared to be truthful. I looked up at this rather alarming person and I said “No”.

I wish I had that moment back. I couldn’t say, “Yes, Grandma, I love you”, because that wouldn’t be true. But now I would say, “Grandma, you’re a strong, resilient, powerful woman. I admire you. I honour you, and I thank you for the fact that you kept pushing those doors open so that my mother had a better life than you did and I, in turn, have an even better life than my mother.” If I could speak to Mum, in answer to that poignant question that she asked me once – “Why did my mother never love me?” – I’d say, “It mightn’t have felt as if she did, but your mother did love you, in the deepest way. She gave you the tools so that you could make a better life for yourself than the one she’d had.”

We regret the past, don’t we? But I urge all of you to write memoirs, as Mum did – that way, the reality of the past doesn’t completely vanish.