Evaluations of the Work of Beatrice Grimshaw
Evaluations of the Work of Beatrice Grimshaw
by Academic Analysts
(Note: Webpage in preparation)
Several academicians have taken an interest in Beatrice Grimshaw's works from a number of different angles. Six articles by five authors are presented on this webpage -- without critical review! The most recent article by McCotter is particularly noteworthy for the six excellent photos of Beatrice -- and one of her grave -- that it contains. All six articles can be viewed as PDF files from this webpage. Some of the articles have been converted to text that has been included in the webpage.
Click here to go the main webpage on Beatrice Grimshaw.
New...
McCotter, Clare, 2006, Islanders, tourists and psychosis: doing time in Beatrice Grimshaw's travel brochures: Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, v 4, p 1-18.
Click here...
McCotter, Clare, 2006, Nurses, fairytales, cannibals: constructing a nationalist narrative in Beatrice Grimshaw's Papuan landscapes: Irish Feminist Review, v 2, p 125-139
Click here...
McCotter, Clare, 2006, Seduction and resistance, baptism and "glassy metaphorics": Beatrice Grimshaw's journeys on Papua's great rivers: Hecate, v 32, p 81-97.
Click here...
McCotter, Clare, 2007, Maintaining a wide margin: the boat as home in Beatrice Grimshaw's travel writing. In Marguerite Helmers and Tilar Mazzeo, eds., The traveling and writing self: London, Cambridge Scholar's Press, p. 97-115.
Click here...
McCotter, Clare, 2007, Woman traveler/colonial tourist: deconstucting the great divide in Beatrice Grimshaw's travel writing: Irish Studies Review, v 15, p 481-506.
Click here...
McCotter, Clare, 2007, Bodies of De/composition: leprosy and tattooing in Beatrice Grimshaw's fiction and travel writing: Hecate, v 33, p 81-106.
Click here...
McCotter, Clare, 2007, The geometry of innocence flesh on the bone: Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, v 5, p 106-127.
Click here...
Contents:
 | Webpage Credits |
None yet.
| Laracy and Laracy, 1977 |
Laracy, Eugenie, and Hugh Laracy, 1977, Beatrice Grimshaw: Pride and Prejudice in Papua: The Journal of Pacific History, v. 12, no. 3 (1977), p. 154-175.
Click here for article on Beatrice Grimshaw by Laracy and Laracy, 1977
| Susan Gardner, 1987 |
Gardner, Susan, 1987, A "'vert to Australianism": Beatrice Grimshaw and the Bicentenary: Hecate. St. Lucia, vol. 13, no. 2 (November 30, 1987), p. 31.
Click here for article on Beatrice Grimshaw by Gardner, 1987
A "'vert to Australianism": Beatrice Grimshaw and the Bicentenary
Gardner, Susan.
Copyright Hecate Press, English Department Nov 30, 1987
Cloona[gh] House, Dunmurry, Co. Antrim, Ireland, Nov. 1979. "One Sunday morning, while on me way to mass/I met a bloody Orangeman and killed him for his pass/I killed him for his pass me boys and sent his soul to hell/and when he came back he had a strange tale to tell..."
What, the four of us are wondering, are we doing here? "Here" is a pleasant Irish country home, which would seem a miniature Versailles were it not for the helicopter pad. For this pleasant Irish country home is the residence of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in Northern Ireland. Apart from his titles and the many initials after his name, General Sir xxxxx, KCGB, OBE, shall be nameless; so shall his wife, Lady X. The aide-de-camp must also be anonymous, though I can hardly forget someone who bolts out of the official car before me, in case snipers attack us from the trees. I am here simply because Beatrice Grimshaw was born here. But she didn't live here long, since her father's spending finally caught up with his drinking, and the family were disposessed when she was only seven. I don't, by any means, want to write one of those ghastly biographical pieces verifying, as one of my thesis supervisors used to put it, every time the subject pissed against a barn door (something which she, in any event, would have found hard to do). But she carried a picture of this home with her all her life. It is now over 100 years after her birth, and nearly 30 years after her death, but one of the few possessions, when she died in a public hospital and was buried in a pauper's grave, was a photograph of this house.
The General and his wife profess absolute delight that I invade their Sunday morning privacy. Of course I could never have got here without a security check which extended as far as Australia. "So she wrote books?" Lady General is asking, presiding over the tea-pot. "Yes, 40, more or less." "And was Irish?" she helpfully pursues. "Yes -- I mean, no -- I mean, well, she described herself as a `convert' to Australianism. She was also a convert to Catholicism." "Typically Irish, in other words", Lady X suggests mournfully. "Of course, I don't mean this critically, but aren't the Irish the most unusual people? So difficult to converse with! All they seem to care about is race, history, religion or politics!" The conversation seems headed straight towards disaster, as Sir General unexpectedly remarks that she must be thinking of her second-cousin several times removed, Declan, so boringly described, from time to time, by the BBC, as a notable patriot and statesman. The tedious remote cousin Declan, it seems, is a T.D. ("what we British would call an M.P.", the valiant aide-de-camp whispers to me) in the Dail ("what we would call Parliament") in Dublin. If worse could possibly follow, it does, since it appears that Declan, whom they would all like to forget, has a brother called Donal, also a T.D. But I am fascinated since, finally, the conversation looks like taking off the ground. If these two representatives of Empire are embarrassed by Declan and Donal, how much blarney the latter two must have to practise, in order to explain away their relationship, however, tenuous, to the Commander of what they no doubt call the "four counties"! ("But we don't talk about Lady X's relatives", the aide advises.) Since this excruciating morning has already been littered, virtually to extinction, with that helpful expression: "Quite", I am at a loss for words, but a General's wife can, fortunately, smooth over any conversation. Relentlessly she continues: "At least the Irish are the most wonderful craftspeople, aren't they? Which reminds me -- I'm about to go to the silver market -- you will excuse me, won't you? Or would you like to come along? Perhaps you, too, often need silver Christening mugs at the last moment when a friend -- ". I swallow my tea, if not my astonishment: "But this is Sunday morning in Belfast! All anybody is allowed to do is go to church! If there is a more lugubrious place than this, besides little South African dorps, on a Sunday morning, I'd like to know -- or rather, I wouldn't." "Oh, it's quite illegal", she admits, and her husband the General -- who, I have discovered, never uses money, dials a phone, or drives a car -- adjusts her mink stole. "We officers' wives have organized it. It takes place at the end of the military airstrip, should you like to join us later." Later! What insanity ever got me here now? How can I escape, especially since I am now abandoned to the General and the aide-de-camp? But the General is no fool; deprived of Lady X, he, too, can keep a totally irrelevant conversation going. "Speaking of craftsmanship", he adds, "what do you think of our décor? Wonderful, what? Amazing, what those Ceylonese can do with brass." I agree that the Ceylonese did a most amazing job beating out a portrait of his pet poodle in brass. I agree that yes, I would like to visit the few bedrooms (a dozen, more or less), the totally boring ground floor (innumerable morning, drawing and music rooms, not to mention a library), the medieval, so to speak, kitchens (immense, extending underground). I agree (remembering the uproarious evening before, at a Provisional IRA pub) that Irish social life is not exactly standard (was that my camera confiscated? Was I carried out singing "The Bold Fenian Men"? The answer, alas, to both questions, is affirmative). By now, I think, I would agree that the earth is flat. I would agree that Orange is Green, and Green is Orange. Fortunately, I need agree to none of these heresies. I simply agree that the life of a military man must indeed have its trials -- when the Irish aren't trying to assassinate you, you have to go to memorial services at -- he breaks off at this point (thank God) to ask the aide-de-camp just where the memorial service will be this coming week, and should he or should he not wear his sword, and which war will it be about, anyway? "St Paul's, sir", says the ever-useful aide. "I've already booked your flight to London. No sword. The 1939-45 war, sir." Again, I am speechless. This General -- but what else should I expect, given his profession? -- dates history according to wars. "Patriotism is not enough", says Edith Cavell in my head, as she is shot to death in what Sir General would no doubt call the 1914-1918 war. How would he describe his current posting: "the 800-years war?" I contemplate assassination (we are, after all, in Ireland) -- imagine the British general being felled by a brass poodle! I gulp the dregs of my tea and thank him. Not at all, he says, it most certainly was a diversion from trying to subdue the Irish. For the last time, I agree -- it must be difficult, all through the 19th century Ireland required a larger British garrison than India! Neither he nor the aide-de-camp believe me. We cross the helicopter pad, the Versailles garden, and find our Welsh chauffeur again. He may or may not be a Welsh Nationalist; he does, however, point to a map and asks me, "Where are you next going, if I may be asking, is it green or orange?" To his considerable relief, as I point out one of the most exclusive suburbs of Belfast, where collateral descendants of my subject live, the area is orange. We aren't likely to be bombed en route. I take one last glance at that beautiful house -- "a gentleman's residence in what we would now call a stockbroker belt", one Irish politician told me. And I realize that, with a background like this, there was no other place for Beatrice Grimshaw except Papua, and no other death than that unmarked grave in the paupers' section of the Roman Catholic portion of the cemetery in Bathurst, New South Wales.
"They are leaving old Ireland/for afar distant strand/They are leaving old Ireland, no longer can stay/and thousands are sailing, are sailing away..."
Understanding Beatrice Grimshaw's personality is a task that only a psychoanalyst could welcome. She was born in Ireland, listed herself as "English" on ships' manifests, and requested a pension from the Commonwealth Literary Fund on the grounds that she was an Australian author. For nearly ten years she edited a magazine in Dublin which, she tirelessly reminded its readers, was apolitical and nonsectarian. Had she carried off this feat, it most certainly would have been the only such magazine in Ireland.
However, a weekly that commented endlessly on the relations between Ireland and England was hardly above politics nor, since it often commented on church events, beyond religion. She was born into a Church of Ireland family, and turned Catholic after she escaped from home. She believed all women should marry and have children, but she did neither. She was explicitly antifeminist, but wrote hundreds of column inches giving practical advice on anything from emigration to the Anglo-Parisian system of dress-making, while regularly interviewing women in what were, for the 1890s, rather unusual jobs. If women were by nature domestic, her own concept of domesticity must have been vast, since she gave orders to Alfred Deakin on how to colonize Papua, run northern Australia, and gain control over the New Hebrides and New Caledonia, as if the Pacific Ocean were a family pond. She prided herself that, "As a Catholic, I am glad to say that I have been able to make a literary success without using the easy lures of sensual plot and coarse treatment",(1) and deplored almost every book by the 1890s New Women that Virago is re-issuing. Yet nearly every one of her novels, from the very first, features at least one murder. One short story is the intriguing account of a group of deserted white people devouring each other. The female hero of her own favourite of her books, When the Red Gods Call, is nearly boiled to death in a cannibal pot. My favourite of her heroes, the "half-caste" Queen Vaiti, considers murder, sadistic sexuality, near-incest, and witchcraft all in a day's work.
Grimshaw was so close to the Lieutenant-Governor of Papua, Sir Hubert Murray, that people could be pardoned for thinking, as some did, that their relationship was more than close; even contemporary newspaper photographs show her virtually living in Government House. He certainly was taken with her, since after knowing her only a day or two he wrote to his brother, the famous Classicist and later pillar of the League of Nations, Gilbert Murray:
I have staying with me Miss Beatrice Grimshaw, a lady journalist...for the London Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. She is an extremely nice woman, clever and interesting and not a bit superior; also she is Irish, Catholic and Fenian -- if she were also Australian, there would be nothing more to be desired.(2)
But although many of her plots involve consequences of bigamy, this was not an instance where she could live what she wrote, since Murray had -- in succession, needless to say -- two wives, and she, if flimsy evidence can be believed, was in love with the Government Tax Collector (surely not everyone's idea of a lover; Malinowski in fact called the inoffensive William Little "the Governor's pimp"). A North Queensland Labor journal stigmatized her, with some truth, a "capitalist hireling", but she told the Commonwealth Literary Fund she had always been a staunch supporter of Labor's policies towards Papua. All told, then, I'm glad not to have to account for her, but only (!) for her activities concerning Australia and the Pacific in a crucial year, 1907; crucial because she produced three important books then. Just like her, two of them are not what they seem, for these innocent-appearing travelogues are deliberately commissioned and artfully crafted class pleading for colonial settler nationalism.
But a contemporary reviewer of one of these books, From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands, complained that the reader is whisked off to Fiji in the first three pages without knowing why the author is going there. I may not be able to present a convincing biographical portrait of Grimshaw, but at least I can explain how she got there -- and I don't mean the obvious answer, "by boat"! This task is much easier, for if one looks at what is known of Grimshaw before 1907, one fact stares the researcher in the face -- almost everything written about her, in the most irreproachable compendia and encyclopedias, is inaccurate to some degree. It is much easier to explain what Grimshaw was not than what she was.
And, for those who like certainties, there is one overwhelming one in this story -- Beatrice Grimshaw would have welcomed the Bicentenary with open arms. Nettie Palmer, reviewing Grimshaw's work, reluctantly conceded her the status of Australian author since Grimshaw wrote about Australasia. The situation is, however, more complex. Just as one needn't be born in Australia to be an Australian author, it doesn't suffice to be born there to become one. But Beatrice Grimshaw was an Australian author, and she deserves to be known as one. Indeed, for a literary sociologist the more interesting question might be, not "Was she or was she not Australian?", but, rather, "Why does hardly anyone know about her?"
For, at the peak of her career -- in the 1930s -- Grimshaw was one of the world's best-selling authors. Even during the Depression, an AmeriCan magazine paid her $1000 for one short story. When she died in July 1953, obituaries in cities as far flung as Belfast, London, Manchester, New York, Bathurst (NSW, where she died), and Sydney testified to her career as a wanderer and a writer, whose multi-faceted career encompassed much of the British Empire, from its oldest colony (Ireland), to its newest (British New Guinea).(3)
Exaggerated and romanticised tributes ("Ulsterwoman who Braved Headhunters; Her Life Was Story of Courage"; "A Woman...Among Sharks, Alligators and Hostile Natives"; "Explorer, Tobacco Grower, Novelist. Beatrice Grimshaw's Remarkable Career";(4) even James A. Michener's slighting of her as "Queen of Gush" in Return to Paradise) -- all indicate her once widespread popularity. To give only one example of the contemporary reception of her fiction, Grimshaw's first Papuan novel, When the Red Gods Call(1911), was issued in a dozen different editions, half-a-dozen translations and nearly as many serialisations, over a period of two decades.
Yet little is known about her now. All her books are out of print (except, ironically, the Black Heritage Library's facsimile reprint of In the Strange South Seas). Moreover, even the most basic literary and biographical data available are incorrect. Henry Boylan's Dictionary of Irish Biography (1978) gives her birthdate as 1880; it was 1870. It sends her to Papua a year before The Times and the Sydney Morning Herald despatched her there, and claims that From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands was commissioned by the Australian government, whereas none of these islands was ever under Australian political control. Finally, it gives Red Gods an incorrect date (1910), which is when The New New Guinea was published, Red Gods appearing a year later. The Victoria College [Belfast] Centenary Book (1959), besides altering Pacific geography with the thoroughness of an earthquake or a tidal wave (Pearl Harbour becoming Papua's capital), adds ten novels to her bibliography, mistakenly dates several, and invents one more. Francis West's biographical entry for the Encyclopedia of Papua New Guinea is slight and represents only cursory research.(5)
These problems are minor, however, compared to those raised by the public image which Grimshaw deliberately created for herself; paradoxical as it might seem, she was a reclusive personality who stopped at nothing to get publicity. But, as I have discussed in another context, the florid legend that she fabricated was, like much of her writing, camouflage. Occasionally, however, it backfired; she, of all people, should have known what the mass-popular press of the 1920s could do with "cannibal stories", for instance. During one of her triumphant returns to London, her interviewer wrote that "Cinema stars and even professional boxers had to take a back seat for the moment."(6) By the time the Adelaide Register reprinted whatever Grimshaw was allegedly saying, the captions read: "Among Cannibals. Miss Grimshaw's Story. Where Husbands Eat Their Wives. Not an Explorer. Cannibalism Rampant. Tortured Prisoners. Ten Thousand in Unknown Valley. Unhappy Women".(7) Perhaps she learned something from this experience, since the Australian Prime Minister demanded an explanation -- this was hardly the picture of Australia's showpiece colony that he was trying to disseminate. I could give many more examples of Grimshaw's image-making, but I think the photographs accompanying this article illustrate my point better than anything else: either nothing is known about Grimshaw, or much is. The enacted public biography, while often exuding a funereal respectability, just as often annoys by its distastefulness.(8)
In any event, recapitulating Grimshaw's career hardly requires the hyperbole of self-advertisement, Evening News interviews, and obituaries. Given her onetime influence, and best-selling popularity, such recapitulation should hardly be necessary. But before discussing her Australian allegiance, it has to be seen in the context of her other activities and affiliations.
Grimshaw's earliest-known journalistic effort ("In the Far North", Bedford College Magazine 1981) is description for potential tourists of Portrush, an Atlantic resort on the coast of her native Antrim. It shows her trying her hand at a genre which financed her early travels throughout the Pacific. There, following the footsteps of two of her favourite authors, Louis Becke and Robert Louis Stevenson, she described the "beach" and "port" communities of Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, the Cook Islands and Tahiti for passengers of the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand.
But her intensive writing apprenticeship began in the circles of social and sporting journalism in Dublin from 1891-99. Beginning as an occasional contributor to the Irish Cyclist in 1891, she eventually became its sub-editor, while also working as a staff writer (from Oct. 1893) and editor (1895-99) of its sister publication, The Social Review (hereafter TSR).
Apart from occasional devotional poetry(9), the Irish Cyclist and TSR were the forcing bed of her talent. Under a variety of pseudonyms, and almost single-handedly from week to week, she turned out imitations of Kipling's poetry, as well as pastiches of the florid prose of "decadents" such as Richard Le Gallienne. One can hardly think of a genre she did not practise during those years: short stories, topical comment, book reviews, dramatic criticism, "dialogues up to date", "telephone talks", career advice for women, interviews, bicycling tours, and two serialised novels, one of which, "A Fool of Forty", I rediscovered during my research in Ireland.
For four years after 1899, Grimshaw combined free-lance journalism with work as a tour organiser and emigration promoter for Irish and British steamship companies, catering for English pleasures while profiting from Irish distress. Armed with free steamship passes and newspaper and magazine commissions, Grimshaw first reached the Pacific in 1903. In addition to the tourist description mentioned above, she began to contribute political journalism to the [London] Daily Graphic. In 1907 she published her third novel, Vaiti of the Islands, as well as her first booklength travelogues, In the Strange South Seas and From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands.
The latter's covert promotion of European interests in Fiji, and anti-English, pro-Australian argument concerning the New Hebrides, attracted the attention of the Australian Liberal Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin. In 1908, overriding objections in the Federal Parliament that she might not be the only or the best person, he commissioned Grimshaw to write settlement and investment pamphlets for Australia's recently acquired territory of Papua (formerly British New Guinea). A flood of leaflets and nearly two dozen articles culminated in the officially sponsored The New New Guinea (1910).
Her agent's prediction that short stories with Papuan settings would enjoy considerable success in the U.S. and English markets, however, prompted Grimshaw to return to fiction. When the Red Gods Call inaugurated a series of novels, 16 taking place in Papua or the Mandated Territory of New Guinea and 9 in the Pacific Islands, with a further 10 volumes of short stories and occasional non-fiction, including Catholic mission promotion pamphlets. In 1928, "The Adorable Outcast" ("Australia's second colossal motion picture",(10) which is to say the second produced by Australasian Films, Ltd.), was tenuously based on her 1922 novel, Conn of the Coral Seas. I wonder if anyone remembers its "world premiere" at the Brisbane Tivoli, where the Nine Royal Samoans gave the film a "magnificent atmospheric prologue!" "Against such a background", exclaimed the distribution publicity, "is woven the romance of Luya, a beautiful, untamed little pagan, whom missionaries prayed for, and blackbirders preyed on!" For once Grimshaw's story writing abilities were surpassed, for there is no Luya in Conn, and Grimshaw found herself in the unique position of explaining to readers of the Papuan Courier that her work hardly dealt with the themes of the film, such as "miscegenation", black-birding, "untamed little pagans", and so on.
From 1907-34 Grimshaw lived in Papua, interrupting her isolation with several round-the-world tours and visits to her London publishers: both were opportunities for public lectures and radio broadcasts. Following a final trip to England in 1934-35, Grimshaw retired in 1936 to Bathurst, New South Wales. Although nearly 70, she taught journalism by correspondence and continued to write, although her originally innovative forms degenerated. Reportage, no longer based on experience, became rehash. Grimshaw paid a young man posted in Papua to correspond with her so that she could maintain her well-earned reputation for accuracy in `background'. Adventure romances initially inspired by the pioneering frontier lapsed into wartime thrillers. Grimshaw's serials, mechanically repeating the picaresque exploits of her first Pacific hero, Vaiti, appeared in the Australian Women's Weekly.
Grimshaw's career thus described a narrowing spiral. Once her writings were favourably compared with the work of her contemporaries such as Joseph Conrad, Bret Harte, Mary Kingsley and Robert Louis Stevenson. And so my description comes full circle, for today her work (actually only a misleading portion, usually her three early travel books and selective portions of her fiction, most often When the Red Gods Call or the blatantly racist White Savage Simon) is dismissed.
In "Beatrice Grimshaw: Pride and Prejudice in Papua", Eugenie and Hugh Laracy summarize Grimshaw's early Pacific career as propaganda for commercial and settler interests. In her non-fiction, indeed, Grimshaw spoke with many tongues. She could be the voice of church, state, and business; self-styled "unofficial publicity officer" for Sir Hubert Murray, mouthpiece, echo, recorder, "roving commissioner", teller of tales...The Laracys quote from From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands and In the Strange South Seas as if the books had only "two clear-cut objectives"
The first was to entertain and divert armchair travellers. The second was to promote European enterprise: tourism in Polynesia and settlement in Melanesia. Underlying these, however, is another theme, a racialist one...Her attitude towards the islanders, ranging from patronizing to disgusted, was one of the present age would damn, but which a school of thought fashionable earlier in the century rationalized in terms of...social Darwinism.(11)
These two books cannot be so easily amalgamated, however. In modulation (hence, in implied and/or actual readership), they vary considerably. Grimshaw herself seems to have recognized some fundamental division when regathering and recombining her material. From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands and In the Strange South Seas resulted from the same journey (the two books were first published in January and October of 1907 respectively). But Grimshaw published them in reverse order: From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands records and reorders material from the second half of her trip. (From now on, I shall refer to these texts as FCI and SSS.)
The two books differ markedly in tone, purpose, and attitude. If one scrutinizes the portrayal of race relations, the depiction of Pacific Islanders, (although it relies on evolutionary theory to account for social division and hierarchy, is far more benign in SSS than it would be for a long time in Grimshaw's work again. The reasons for such discrepancies are readily understandable once one knows each book's publishing history; each is an elaboration of articles originally commissioned for different purposes.
Grimshaw's first Pacific years (1904-1907) saw, in addition to the three books published in 1907, the production of nearly 30 articles. These included a nine-part series in the Daily Graphic (January 1905), and a nine-part series about the New Hebrides in the Sydney Morning Herald (25 November 1905-3 March 1906). Vaiti of the Islands was serialised in both Pearson's Magazine and the Sydney Morning Herald (2 June-28 July 1906).(12)
Yet Grimshaw probably wrote even more at this time. A sequel to the first Vaiti stories, Queen Vaiti, was serialised, but not released in book form until 1908, when Pearson's published it in Britain, and not until 1920 in Australia, when the New South Wales Bookstall issued it as a paperback. If one trusts internal evidence, many parts of Conn of the Coral Seas were probably written at this time as well (although the serialisation did not appear in the Grand Magazine until October 1921-April 1922), for certain passages hardly differ from the New Hebridean chapters of FCI.
If one idly turns the pages of FCI and SSS(or, for that matter, the later New New Guinea), it soon becomes obvious that they are neither the armchair travel nor the amateur ethnology that booksellers today, misled by the books' bulk, gold lettering, and attractive `Native' women portrayed on the covers, classify them as. My own copy of The New New Guinea was purchased from a leading Dublin antiquarian bookseller who was unaware that Grimshaw had been "Irish". The text had been taken apart by previous owners (to decorate their home with its many photographs, the bookseller suggested) and then carefully reassembled. But it was not longer the same book, since comments had also been scrawled in it. This may serve as an emblem of my method here, which is to deconstruct the apparently compact unity of these books.
The captions and chapter headings reveal a rather unusual amalgamation of romanticism and practicality, sometimes in one term. "An Imperial Wonderland" yokes politics and idyll. "How It All Came True", "Days in Dreamland", "The Fairy Islets" and a "Chance for Robinson Crusoe" co-exist in SSS with "Servant Problem Again", "Food and Fruits of the Country", "What about the Missionary?" and "All about Guano" -- the latter about as down to earth as one can descend.
FCI similarly oscillates between, on the one hand, conventions of gothic romanticism ("Garden of the Swiss Family Robinson", "The City of a Dream", "The Fairy Fortress", "A Native Princess", "The Mysterious Islands", "A Stronghold of Savagery", "The Bluebeard Chamber") and, on the other hand, advice for settlers and investors: ("How the Colony is Governed", "Trade of the Islands", "A Splendid Timber Country", "On a Coffee Plantation", and "The Returned Labour Trouble").
Messages of two different orders are thus encapsulated: an Eden requiring little labour (by whites) can yield profit and satisfy every childhood dream. As one reviewer aptly put it, Grimshaw's Utopias have a mint. Certainly, for her, they did.(13)
FCI and SSS do have common features, the most obvious being the themes for which they are rightfully criticised today: both are, to a limited extent, about Pacific Islanders, but not for them. Grimshaw (and many others) believed that Polynesians and Melanesians were not only dying out but, unlikely as it seems, welcomed their supersession by a "fitter" race. Although Grimshaw dwelt briefly amongst various Island communities, she remained capable of ethnocentric statements of extraordinary insensitivity; for example, the assertion (astonishing from someone who adored "singsings" and dancing, and never hesitated to desecrate an indigenous place of worship to carry off "idols", if she could get away with it) that Polynesians lacked poetry. It is symptomatic, too, that Grimshaw often compared islanders to figures in a pantomime who, of course, are silent. Her advice to intending travellers that they should "snapshot" "the" native, indicates that most Islanders, true to their traditional beliefs, didn't wish to be photographed at all.
Idologically(14) FCI and SSS legitimate "protection"/control over Islanders, alienation of their land, incentives to settlers, and importing indentured labour, while deploring protective tariffs against Island products. Both books, therefore, seek to facilitate the development of intensive capitalist agriculture in a hitherto subsistence economy. Both are striking examples of class pleading, but cast in a form that conceals class interests, as statistics alternate with idyllic descriptions. Grimshaw simultaneously celebrated unspoiled nature and encouraged its despoliation: Arcadia would necessarily be devastated by the globetrotters, investors, speculators and settlers who heeded her advice.
Yet, as contemporary reviewers noted, these books are not as alike as they might seem. FCI was touted as a "book of the week" in the Publisher and Bookseller. The Athenaeum, while praising Grimshaw's "power of lively narrative and...real ability to describe", dismissed her as "not a safe guide" to the New Hebrides because of her "prehistoric", "amazing, cock-and-bull attitudes". The Outlook concluded that "After reading Mrs [sic.] Grimshaw we can think of Fiji as a possible place to settle in, and of the New Hebrides as just the home for all those members of European society who would never be missed". The Saturday Review honed in on FCI's unabashed racism: "[T]he author might speak with more discrimination; indeed, her cheerful attitude [about violating `native' taboos],...is typical of the worst type of British globe-trotter".(15) Wittingly or not, the New York Saturday Review of Books(16) discerned Grimshaw's covert intentions:
If the Fiji Islands were in the hands of promoters; if they were being exploited by a land company; or if a steamship line were booming its tourist patronage, no better prospectus could be obtained...According to the author, Fiji is a land of unlimited possibilities, as well as a kind of earthly paradise.(16)
The instrumentality of FCI was, then, noticed. But the personal import of SSS gave the book such drawing power that reviewers tumbled over one another in emulation of Grimshaw's own enchanted, enchanting style. It is small wonder that, seeking a similar commission to attract investment and settlement to the North of Australia, Grimshaw later loaned a copy of this book to Alfred Deakin, and promised him a scrapbook with nearly 100 favourable reviews. For here the needs of writer and readers for release into a timeless paradise were matched. Implicitly SSS was saying, Et ego in Arcadia...whilst omitting the memento mori. Archetypal yearnings were being touched, meeting an almost hypnotized response. The main difference between the two books is that FCI is effective, SSS affective.
The Daily Chronicle (in a two-thirds column review), described SSS thus:
Whoever reads this book will surely be a little smitten with Miss Grimshaw's passion for the radiant islands...[and share the sentiments of Grimshaw's Cingalese steward on one of her schooners]: Oh my God, I plenty wish I stopping there, I no wanting any heaven then!(17)
But it was left to the Manchester Guardian to interpret more politically the significance of Grimshaw's writing:
Of course the islands are in their decadence. The warriors have become dying labourers and the women have lost their arts...The tourist, who corrupts a nation more quickly than material wealth by making the inhabitants a generation of flunkeys, insolent and servile at the same time, is now finishing what the merchant seaman and the `missi' began. In a very few years, especially if many Englishmen obey the call of Miss Grimshaw, who urges them to emigrate, so that we may lie in the sun while the bananas drop into our mouths, the islands...will be like Peru after a generation of the Spaniards...The native music...will be tuned to the pitch of the Sydney music-hall. The heroes of old time will be forgotten; and the modern hero, such as Miss Grimshaw saw, will die of guano dust at 10 shillings a week, on Malden Island...(18)
Most politically noteworthy, however, was the serious attention given to SSS by the Tory Unionist Morning Post. For 13 years, in and out of office as Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin had been "Our Special Correspondent", "Our Sydney Correspondent", and "An Australian Correspondent". As "Australian Correspondent", Deakin had written about the New Hebrides: "[They were] ours by right...Once the Islands are Anglised in spirit and Australianised in their immediate relations, the designs of those who seek to make them an appanage of New Caledonia will be defeated."(19) This review (several columns long and warranting attention by itself, as it was not in the usual Thursday review of new books) was unsigned. But I suspect that Deakin, Richard Jebb (a vociferous exponent of colonial nationalism) or Fabian Ware must have written it, preferring anonymity to hide direct intervention:
[T]o be barred from the South Sea Islands when they are made to glow as they do in these pages is a punishment which surely there were no crime to fit. The writing is elegant; virility, elegance, conciseness, wit, and not a few touches of pathos contributing to the delight of the reader. What, according to Miss Grimshaw, must inevitably be denied to `any combination of coloured grease' on canvas is here achieved in print, and there is not a chapter which may be missed without loss. It is difficult to resist the temptation to quote largely...[T]hough [the book] takes the form of the romance of travel, and is picturesque and vastly entertaining from cover to cover, there is conveyed in it a wealth of information, correcting many false impressions given by those who have not seen with their own eyes and yet have written.(20)
But why is the represented world of FCI savage, and that of SSS only "strange"? At times one feels these are the works of two different authors. Any answer must address the differing interests the two books served when initially written in article form.
There is no evidence to contradict Grimshaw's statements in the Daily Graphic articles, the sub-text of SSS: "It is the aim of the present series to bring into communication...the would-be settler and the might-be-settled land", (Daily Graphic, January 1905); "I have set forth to tell something of Britain of the South Seas, and such as it is, my say has been said" (the last words of SSS).
SSS is the tale of Grimshaw's first Pacific wanderings, a term designating the absence of a fixed course or goal, a "circular tour" as Grimshaw sometimes said. The Kipling quotation on the first page indicates the nature of her "objective", for she was like Tennyson's Ulysses, content to push ever onwards "Till the anchor rattled down on stranger shores",(21) with no Ithaca in sight. Since the travels in this book were confined to the charming Eastern and Central Pacific, and involved collecting information for tourists as well as for settlers, the book is singularly free of the racism disfiguring Grimshaw's other work. In SSS Grimshaw was free, after years of unremitting work, to take her time. Often she had to, preferring the chaotic arrival of unpredictable schooners to the scheduled steamers. The first three pages of SSS are an impassioned evocation of Wanderlust, and the word "call" (with its associate cry) appears no less than 10 times. The first chapter shows Grimshaw tasting the fei, a prosaic enough cooking banana, but said to cast a spell (therefore, "fey"), obliging the traveller to return. None of these connotations are coincidental, for Grimshaw was describing how an apparent vacation was turning into a vocation. And one would search in vain for a Going Home in her oeuvre. After a loving description of a "house by the shore" in Rarotonga -- on the margins of sea and land, settlement and wandering, nature and culture -- Grimshaw inserts one of her skilful Kipling imitations clearly foreshadowing her future. She might visit "the cold grey Northern countries where money grows", but she would never again live there.
(Windows blurred with beating mud, grey London roaring by in the rain; haggard faces, and murky summer, and the snake of custom clipping stranglingly about the free man's throat -- O Island wanderer, back in the weary North, does your seabird's heart fly swift from these to those, and sicken for the lands where you must go no more?(22)
There would be no Going Home, simply because Grimshaw was realising that she had come home. One of the most stable and obsessive of her symbols, as we have seen, was her birthplace, Cloonagh House, with its connotations of inheritance, entitlement, birthright. From the implications she let slip, one would think it was an Anglo-Irish estate rather than a downwardly-mobile merchant's house which was eventually bought by Belfast's only Jewish Lord Mayor, Otto Jaffe. By the time Grimshaw arrived in the Pacific, her family had been dispossessed for some time. Is it any surprise, then, that SSS has no less than six photographs and lengthy descriptions of dwelings, many of them belonging to Pacific royalty? Or that Grimshaw spends some pages purportedly amused -- but I think, impressed -- by the ways in which South Sea Islanders sought to place her in their social hierarchies? For once, this queenly figure (she was nearly six feet tall) didn't have to achieve status. A quasi-royal position (due, as she saw it, to such qualities as race and height, rather than character) was ascribed to her. All she had to do was be, at a time when her own family in Ireland was dramatically losing caste.
The inevitable question: `Where was my husband?' followed by: `Why had I not got one?'...was put by almost every new-comer...An unmarried woman who had money of her own, who wandered about alone, who held office in no village...this was decidedly a puzzle to...folk whose own women all marry at about fourteen. They had seen white women travelling with their husbands, but never one who had ventured from Beritania all alone!
There was evidently some difficulty...in `placing' me according to Samoan etiquette, which is both complex and peculiar. A white woman with her husband presents no difficulty, since the `faa Samoa' always gives the superior honour to the man...In my case, the question was solved...by classing me as a female chief! I was...officially considered as a man...and the young chiefs of the district came almost every evening to call...sitting in formal rows, and conversing...in a well-bred, gracious manner oddly reminiscent of a London drawing-room. The women did not visit me officially.(23)
Grimshaw, in other words, was doing what she loved most -- writing -- and spending her free time among people whose appearance and social organization commanded her astonished respect (as she had commanded theirs). A sense of release is almost palpable as one reads SSS. For the first time in years her writing is relaxed, rather than exhaustedly haranguing (by the time she finished with Dublin, she had written Yeats off as a "gifted young extremist"!). It is difficult not to like the implied author, who delights in climbing cross-trees, taking the wheel, listening to sailors' stories...Probably for the first time in her life, after her father's financial collapse, she was freed from the Calvinist conviction that failure to work was a sin; no one in Samoa, she felt, would have known what she was talking about, when she referred to industrialised working time.
Time is simply wiped out. One discovers, all of a sudden, that one has been groaning under an unbearable and unnecessary tyranny all one's life...Why do people rush to catch trains and omnibuses, and hasten to make and keep appointments, and have meals at rigidly fixed times, whether they are hungry or not? These are the things that make life short...
The Samoan does what he wants, when he wishes, and if he does not wish a thing, does not do it at all. According to the theology of our youthful days, he ought in consequence to become a fiend in human shape;...but he is the most amiable creature on earth's round ball. Angry voices, loud tones even, are never heard in a Samoan house. Husbands never come home drunk...and ill use their wives; wives never nag at their husbands; no one screams at children, or snaps at house-mates and neighbours...There is...no striking ground for ill-temper or peevishness; and amiability and courtesy reign supreme. The Samoan has his faults...but they are slight indeed with the faults of the ordinary European.(24)
I sense, then, in SSS, a woman released, if not necessarily liberated. For problems such as confusion about the mandates of gender, or nationality, have hardly been resolved; they have been magically abolished. Emigration, it seemed, was emancipation.
FCI, however, has a different tale to tell. Its racist arguments legitimate the alienation of land and the exacting of "native" labour, if necessary by force, particularly in the New Hebrides. Prefiguring the nastiness pervading The New New Guinea, many passages in FCI make for tasteless, offensive reading.
I do not think that the most fervent advocate of the rights of the natural man could uphold the claims of the untamed New Hebridean to the freedom of his forefathers, or sentimentalise...over the `noble wild man' domoed to bow beneath the yoke of an oppressive civilisation. The New Hebridean, in his native state, is neither more nor less than a murderous, filthy, and unhappy brute. Tamed, cleaned, restrained from slaying his acquaintances either wholesale or retail, and allowed to live his life in peace on his own bit of ground, he is a passable poor relation of the Maori or Zulu (179-80).
[T]he truth, or half the truth, about...these savages can never be told. Any book which depicted them...as they are would be fit for nothing but to be burned at the hands of the common hangman. Darker spots upon the surface of the earth than Malekula there cannot be; worse friends in or out of it than most of the natives not the wildest imaginations of madhouses could picture. And there description must cease!(25)
Almost all Islanders have names in SSS, whereas they are usually described by insulting sobriquets -- intended to amuse, no doubt! -- in FCI, such as "Mrs. Frizzyhead", "Mrs. Flatface", and "Mrs Blackleg". Why was Grimshaw who, I shall argue, later, was not as racist as such passages would make one believe, writing like this?
Part of any answer must be found in the material factors which Grimshaw herself never ignored. It is likely that Grimshaw's claim in her letter of 1 October 1908 to Deakin is exaggerated: "His Excellency Sir Everard im Thurn informed me, when I visited Fiji early in 1907, that I had done much to develop the place, and he had no doubt the recent advance was largely owing to my work". The Colonial Secretary's files in the Archives of the Western Pacific suggest a different story. Grimshaw appears to have requested an honorarium of between 40 and 50 pounds from the Fijian Government to write a book that would be a general advertisement for the colony. She wanted the Government's imprimatur, and this im Thurn refused. On 3 July 1905 he wrote to the Colonial Secretary:
I am fully aware that Miss Grimshaw can write her impressions very cleverly and attractively; but in a handbook to be scattered broadcast with the Government imprimatur to Canadians and others it is absolutely essential that the information...should be something more than the impressions of a traveller however gifted.(26)
Grimshaw's application was supported by businessmen from the Suva and Levuka Chambers of Commerce and the Planters' Association. Hugh Laracy suggests that they may have helped to finance her Fijian activities. Certainly Grimshaw's articles about Fiji and the consequent book are an unambiguous expression of European settler interests. The tone becomes more irritable and strident as the "lady traveller" makes her way through rough country; "wasteland" from a European agricultural viewpoint.
Grimshaw had arrived in Fiji during a time of socio-economic transition described by Caroline Ralston as a change from "beach" to "port":
With the advent of a planter community...many foreigners became vitally concerned in island policies. The planters' prerequisites -- security of land tenure, the continued availability of land for sale, and an adequate supply of cheap labour -- often brought them, and other foreigners with property interests, into direct conflict with island governments and their rights.
One of the results, Ralston comments, was the development of unpleasant, if not obnoxious, settler ideologies concerning land and labour.
[N]ew attitudes had infiltrated into the towns and precedents had been set that were to expand into an established expatriate philosophy and outlook when the planters entered the community.(27)
In other words, FCI's semi-sponsorship was by groups who, left to themselves, wrote letters to the editor advocating lynching if the "native" population would not be coerced into wage labour. Grimshaw, however, although not always noted for her decorum or good taste, had developed her own ideas about advocating causes: hide them. As she later outlined her method to Deakin, when proposing to attract settlers to the north of Australia, "It is bad management on someone's part, if a commission does become known. I do not think my Fiji book had any `commission' "flavour" (Ltr., 1 Oct. 1908). "I can certainly get settlers for the North of Australia; the place attracts myself very strongly, which makes it more likely that I shall do my best work in writing about it (separate ltr. of 1 Oct. 1908). "Special interest of adventure" would he"most valuable" because "practical matter will want all the lightening it can get" (first cited, ltr. of 1 Oct. 1908). "Literary art" -- which, incidentally, required leisure, therefore money -- would remove any "commissioned" flavour.
But the New Hebrides complicated Grimshaw's purposes. She was beginning to side with Australian Pacific policy and wanted neither of the interested governments (England or France) to annex them. In 1906, the secret Anglo-French Commission had reached a decision of "divided rule" from which the New Hebrides still suffer -- a decision made without consulting Australia. In 1907 the Imperial Premiers' Conference in London rejected the proposed formation of an Imperial Secretariat composed of representatives from the self-governing Dominions (seen by Britain as an attempt to wrest control from the Colonial Office).
Given Grimshaw's complicated Irish background, it comes as no wonder to find that, when she first wrote to Deakin on 25 Jan. 1908, she was offering her services to Australian political interests. Concerning the New Hebrides and New Caledonia, she flattered and advised.
I believe...it is your desire to see the interests of Australia fully safe-guarded...and I know that you have the reputation of seeing further ahead than most -- indeed, than many of your contemporaries.
Having seen something like the beginning of the contest over these islands, and heard practically all that has gone on since, I am most anxious to be of use to the Australian side in any way that I can...
I should, however, be very glad of any advice that you can give me as to the points...of importance to impress on the public mind. I am acting as occasional correspondent (by special arrangement) for The Times, and I have active and intelligent agents in London, also in Sydney, who place anything I may send them in the most effective manner. In fact, when I need it, I have a very satisfactory system of disseminating any desired information of impression widely through the press of the world, not necessarily under my own signature.
If you can give me your view about the present aspect of the New Hebrides question, and what you most wish to see done, I will do my best to assist the end that may seem...best for Australian interests.
FCI is, nonetheless, Grimshaw's most "English" book, even referring to her "English skin". Her shift from an Imperial to a colonial loyalty was only beginning when it was written, and it could have been awkward to dissociate herself from her stated admiration of Sir Everard im Thurn's policies. But the anomalous status of the New Hebrides (described by Grimshaw as a combination of Alsatia and Arcadia), which belonged to "no one" (Grimshaw would not have considered the New Hebrideans to be the owners of their own land) demanded a strong case for annexation by some government. The relative cultural pluralism of SSS had hardened into a rigid polarisation by the time Grimshaw's New Hebridean travels were over. Thus, the book most influenced by political interests, FCI, was published first and voiced ideologies far more blatant and disgusting than SSS. It remained in Grimshaw's interest, even after FCI was published, to reiterate in articles such pleasantries as "So the tangle drags on, and the reign of terror continues unabated" (which nationalities, after all, had instigated the "tangle", and might not the New Hebrideans have considered that they were living under a reign of terror?) But legitimation of foreign control required debasement of New Hebrideans, and Grimshaw accomplished this with typical thoroughness, in both reportage and fiction.
Having considered, to a degree at least, the political and material factors conditioning SSS and FCI, I should like to speculate about these books' personal significance for Grimshaw. She seems to have slammed them together in a few months between (more or less) July 1906 -- by which time she was back in Ireland for the first time since early 1904 -- and early 1907, when FCI (unashamedly assembled in large part from earlier Sydney Morning Herald articles) appeared. During this time her mother died (6 November 1905), as did her father (16 March 1907). FCI is dedicated to her father Nicholas Grimshaw -- the only book out of nearly 40 which Grimshaw dedicated to anyone. But I doubt this was an act of devotion. Expiation, rather. For, after her brief return to Ireland, Grimshaw had clearly decided to "cross the Line" for good -- to forsake her people and her father's house, as she told a friend years later. James Hammerton observes: "The constricting power of gentility was inseparable from the net of patriarchal security, and it is not fanciful to suggest that the death of a father or the loss of family fortune which forced daughters to leave home might have increased women's scope for independence and action."(28)
A bereavement, in other words, could be enabling, and by 1907 there was nothing left in the way of family obligations to keep Grimshaw in Ireland. Like many other women travellers of her time, Grimshaw was freed by death in the family (and a respectable, responsible, stay-at-home married sister). Forever, now, she could heed the compelling motivation of her life -- a craving for strange places. What Dorothy Middleton (Victorian Lady Travellers) has observed in general applied to Grimshaw in particular:
Travel was an individual gesture of the housebound, man-dominated Victorian woman. Trained from birth to an almost impossible ideal of womanly submission and self-discipline, of obligation to class and devotion to religion, she had need of an emotional as well as of an intellectual outlet. This she found, often late in life, in travel, and...was able to enjoy a freedom of action unthinkable at home.
If any generalization is possible..., [such women] did not travel to find romance -- not the romance...of a love affair...[T]hey loved their relations and friends but they also loved to escape, to be themselves under foreign skies with no personal demands and obligatory duties -- heaven forbid that a devoted sister should join them in the South Seas or the affairs of a favourite niece detain them in London!(29)
Grimshaw's mandate to propagandize, then, resulted from a long pre-existent urge to travel. Since by then she came from a family no longer of means, she could best fulfil this desire by allying herself with forces of capitalist and imperialist expansion. The titles of travel books and articles at the time (including Grimshaw's own "A Lady in Far Fiji", and many other of that ilk) indicate that the reading public for travel books expected a gender-specific point of view, whether trivial, marginal, or specially privileged. The traditional conventions of travel literature, as Catherine Barnes Stevenson explains, were male and therefore cast in the form of a quest romance.(30) These authors used (and virtually exhausted) the metaphor of the land-as-woman.(31)
A quest assumes an objective, and the conventional male emplotment of the hero's journey is linear, purposeful. Thus, although Dan Vogel's categories(32) for the various forms of such writing provide useful discriminations -- journey, wandering, quest, pilgrimage, odyssey, and going forth -- none of these categories seems to have been developed with female travel narratives in mind. In male quest literature, of course, a faraway princess is sought (as in Grimshaw's novel, My Lady Far-A way, and her frequent references to the "princesse lointaine" motif). But when a woman authored her own quest, as Grimshaw did, understanding her situation is complicated, because it is not culturally validated.
Contemporary women had many motivations for travel, as Joanna Trollope noted in Britannia's Daughters.(33) These range between the "damned whore" and "God's police" stereotypes and include governesses, nurses, vice-reines, botanists, butterfly hunters, trail-blazers, explorers, camp followers, prostitutes, missionaries, actresses and, as with Grimshaw, journalists. But although women had many motivations for travel, they found it difficult to force their gender experience into the pre-existing, hegemonic forms. As Susan Greenstein understands, it could not be "adequately described in the adventurer's vocabulary of the central tradition."
[T]he African pastoral is distinguished by the ease with which any white man can achieve dominance...This...is reflected in the literature of imperialism, whose central conventions and recurrent motifs interpret as a test of manhood, the encounter between a passive, if often malignant, continent, and the adventurers who penetrate it...In these romances and adventure tales, historical reality and cultural myths about the experiences men have are reinforced by one another....
[But] to suggest a few of [the transformations wrought by women]: while women, too, embellish[ed] the myth of Africa as `heart of darkness' or archetypal female principle, they also provide the metaphor of the `garden which must be cultivated', and the figure of the `outsider as guest'...[T]o be in Africa at all women travellers had to free themselves from their own colonized situations, while female settlers responded to the influence of frontier life, which fostered a kind of independence less acceptable in England.(34)
Women began to try their pens with styles suiting their own subjects: in their most primitive forms, these tended to be "loose, accretive and epistolary."(35) Stevenson thus enables us to understand why Grimshaw's narratives, amongst many others, seem plotless (not only for the political reasons I have given, which forced Grimshaw to pretend she was simply describing holidays, but because she was in search of a style).
[W]omen's travel narratives tend to be `generic hybrid[s]...subjective autobiography superimposed on a travelogue'...Men...write formal, distilled autobiographies in which the primary concern is an objective evaluation of the significance of the whole life (or journey). Women...impose no overarching design on their lives or travels. Women tend to record, to surrender to experience; men to judge, to schematize experience.
The late Victorian bourgeois women who "crossed the Line" were venturing into new, creative space within which some discovered and tested themselves. (Since she was writing imperialist propaganda, Grimshaw didn't say much about her personal transformation, but she did let a few details slip: "There is nothing like travel in rough countries for teaching you your deficiencies...I could write Latin verses, but I couldn't make bread -- I could embroider with silk on canvas, but I didn't know how to grease my boots properly..."(36)
The experiences and writings of women like Grimshaw put many male concepts into question. They rarely experienced travelling as exile. Dozens of colonial women writers expressed what Isak Dinesen celebrated most pithily concerning her farm in Kenya -- "Here I am, where I ought to be"(37) -- a comment uncannily echoed by Willa Cather after her family moved to Red Cloud. There she was, "where she wanted to be, where she ought to be."(38) Such women, having the heady experience of determining their own lives, felt like exiles back at "home". Like Grimshaw, they immediately repacked their trunks. At home they might seem, at best, eccentric spinsters, "intellectually and experientially excluded from the world of politics". Overseas, they might discover themselves, as Grimshaw did, "at the center of intense political activity."(39) Virginia Woolf, in Three Guineas, derided the characteristics of "home" which might well spur a woman to leave:
Our country throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. `Our' country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. `Our' country denies me the means of protecting myself, forces me to pay others a very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, that Air Raid precautions are written on the wall. Therefore, if you insist on fighting to protect me, let it be understood...that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to protect myself or my country. For...in fact, as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.(40) (Emphasis mine.)
Grimshaw would not have accepted the feminist aspects of this declaration. In most respects, Grimshaw remained after her own "voyage out" what she had been before -- a woman, a woman with an ambiguous relationship to her class and her country, a woman in desperate need of work. The latter she found, not only in her efficiently accomplished "roving commissions", but in a renewed impulse -- after 10 years -- to write fiction.
Yet, before briefly describing what it meant to her to be "a `vert to Australianism", I think it high time to address the issue I have evaded thus far, however often I have alluded to it: Grimshaw's racism. This was no simple entity; as ideology and behaviour it changed considerably over time. It presents a number of special interests, in that it originated in an analogous form of discrimination -- gender -- and was nurtured in the struggle for Irish nationhood. Although never straight-forwardly pro-female or pro-Irish (hence the absurdity of Murray calling her a "Fenian"; one's imagination boggles at Grimshaw gun-running), Grimshaw was initially sympathetic to both "Questions". Her ancestors were from Lancashire, but she referred flatly to the British as "the race we do not love."(41) Everyone who has written about her, myself included, has written her off as a racist colonial writer, but that conclusion now seems to me far too easy. It is more interesting to ask, not whether Grimshaw was racist (although how she was is another question), but whether and how white women's racism has differed from white men's.
In Pacific historiography it has usually been assumed that, during transitions from frontier to settlement, the establishment of European family life ended free and easy liaisons between European men and indigenous women (whether such relationships were indeed "free and easy" is another question). With their increasing numbers, European women and children are held responsible for social distance, "Black Perils", punitive measures of segregation and other forms of social control.
Such type-casting of white women as victims or villains in inter-racial sexual drama has not gone unchallenged, however. One early concern of American feminism in the 1960s was to delineate motivations and characteristics of white female racism, and its modulations by class. Later, as feminist political thinking matured, particularly under pressure from American feminists of colour, the popular and persuasive analogy between sexism and racism began to be prised open. Much 1970s thinking made the error of equating an analogy with identity. The literature of the women's liberation movement initially made many a "woman as nigger" comparison to "prove" that discriminations against women (of all races) and Blacks (of both sexes) were more than simply alike. Since (the implied argument ran), their social subordination sprang from the same source (white patriarchy), all women and all Blacks must also have the same interests and objectives. However, the status of these groups was not structurally identical. Rather, the similarity lay in rationales for keeping all women and Black males in their respective, `inferior' places vis-a-vis white males.
The analogy was, however, seductive. Two major literary-critical consequences were that Ellen Moers' Literary Women and Tillie Olsen's Silences associated the beginnings of "women's writing" with "anti-slavery" causes. (It must be kept in mind that they were discussing the first 300 years or so of professional writing by white, middle-class women in Western Europe and America.)
[O]ne of the most characteristic strains in literature written by women...is conscience, concern with human beings in their time -- from the first novel in our language, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. that first by anyone against slavery.(42)
This identification of a "tradition" stems from a belief that the pervasive, systematic oppression of nearly all women because of their sexual-reproductive differences from white men predisposes them to sympathy with other groups whose physical visibility also serves as an index for discrimination. It is certainly the case that some white women (albeit differing in age, nationality, class, and what, individually, they made of such preconditions) perceived resemblances between the ways they and colonised peoples were imagined and treated by white males. Some did translate an emotional/ethical identification with the colonized into political action. The bourgeois American women's movements, in both the 19th and 20th centuries, began with such identification and affiliation. In various colonial-class societies, white women have prominently contributed to literary dissidence or resistance against racial opression; Olsen gives an impressive listing.
Yet, if colonialist women's socio-structural ambiguity (oppressors by race and class, subordinated by gender) was, and continues to be, conducive to protest, it has also fostered complicity. For their roles as reproducers and legitimators of the colonial body politic have also been striking; perhaps because societies, depending on women's continuing gender subjection to ensure the reproduction and socialization of the next generation, offered them an inflated spurious, derivative caste superiority (based on colour, which, here, I'm assuming to be white, but these observations could apply to any racist society). Thus the Society of Authors, at its 1897 annual dinner, celebrated Flora Annie Steele, doyenne of Anglo-Indian romance. Sir John Lubbock claimed that her books "had done much to increase our understanding of India, and therefore to promote the maintenance of our rule in that country (Applause)". [Emphasis mine].(43)
Grimshaw's writing in fact challenges stereotypes of "the" colonial woman writer as either friend or enemy of "the" native. Any ideology, of course, is a kaleidoscope of contradictions, a confusing mixture of "truth" and "falsehood", and her racism was no exception. It does, however, become more comprehensible, if not forgivable, once one understands how it flowed from her experiences of her "Irish" nationality and female gender. When she arrived in the Pacific, most of the ingredients of her racial beliefs arrived with her. Sometimes they hardened. Sometimes they relaxed. Most importantly, her racism was not static; she was not consistently the simplistic boor many have assumed her to be. Since her present reputation is that of a self-assured racist for whom stereotypes afforded a world-view and descriptive stock-in-trade, I shall stress the fluidity and uncertainity of Grimshaw's character typing in 1890s Ireland, and 1920s Papua.
During the six years that Grimshaw wrote most of The Social Review's book reviews, the magazine gave "Irish" books high priority and, frequently, acidly criticized the writings of outsiders about Ireland. Significantly for any discussion of Grimshaw's later Australian identification, being born in Ireland was not seen as a prerequisite for being an "Irish" writer. Spenser's colonizing venture was seen as a case in point; TSR included him in an Irish canon by referring to him as "the last Irish poet of renown". "True Hibernicism", according to the magazine in 1896, was "an elusive quality".(44) But it could be attained by people of non-Irish origin who were willing to labour to acquire "not only a knowledge, but a true sympathy with, Ireland and its people". In effect, then, TSR was debating, under Grimshaw's editorship, double-binds challenging colonial and post-colonial writers generally. Can an exotic become a native? How is one to steer among insular, parochial, regional, national and metropolitan identifications and loyalties?
But TSR never questioned that a unitary "Irish character" (by which it meant "peasant") existed. Perhaps influenced by her classical education, Grimshaw often resorted to typological characterization, producing some Theophrastean-like petty misers, "Society men", and lady cyclists. Nonetheless, TSR consistently deplored stage Irishry, for instance. "Whether an English audience would recognize the Irishman in a play [without] a red nose, a rolling eye, a bottle, and a glass, and the most villainously impossible of accents, is a matter for grave doubt", "Maev" noted caustically as early as 1895. But the fact that Paddy or Roseen was being caricatured did not disturb her; her objection was that it was done badly, with no ear for dialect, by foreigners. When insisting, "It is quite time...our neighbours should be brought to the knowledge that the English language...can be heard to perfect advantage in many parts of Ireland; and we certainly do not require...lessons from the mighty Babylon with regard to our speech", TSR was consenting to linguistic colonization. Grimshaw's Papuan fiction later unequivocally endorsed the colonial administration's policy of replacing other lingue franche with English. In Guinea Gold (1912) an intrepid Irishwoman, a "cannibal driver", builds an enclosure within which "natives" are forbidden to speak their home languages. This is uncannily reminiscent of the early English attempts to enforce spatial and linguistic segregation between the "old English" of Dublin and the Irish "natives" who lived literally "beyond the Pale".
But it is hard to know what Grimshaw meant by referring to an "excellent type of Irish peasant woman". Is it shorthand? A reduction? An average? A simplification? A generalization so loose as to be meaningless? What casual or conditioning relationships were implied when Grimshaw/"Maev" tossed off simple connectives in a phrase such as "the race and the life and habits" of the Irish?
These questions, however, are anachronistic. Little in Grimshaw's education (or anyone else's) before Max Weber's conceptualization of ideal types, would have inclined her to sociological classification and discrimination. But the very air hummed with the assumption that physical traits expressed moral capacities. Her publishers, Mecredy and Kyle, issued "popular pamphlets" including one on physiognomy, and an early Grimshaw essay, "The Prophecy of a Face", "reads off" a person's future from his physical appearance.
Even without the presuppositions of popularised science, however, Grimshaw would probably have adopted the technique of implied physical and moral equivalence for, to a degree, this is almost every writer's tool. At this formative stage of her career, Grimshaw used "type", "class", "rank" and "race". When "race" enters her vocabulary, deterministic overtones appear, but not consistently, for when she used "class", she usually conceived of it very rigidly: class-belonging could only result from birth, inherited breeding. (One of the most intriguing facets of her "conversion" to "Australianism" was that -- shades of "socialism without doctrines"! -- she thought Australia classless.) Yet her autobiographical sketch, "The Decent Poor", and reviews of several proletarian novels, show an awareness of upward and downward mobility.
Gender, however, was the conundrum of Grimshaw's life. A male/female dichotomy was, for her, the primordial model of difference. She conceived of this distinction as absolute, allowing for no overlap and the expression of no more than two, antagonistic viewpoints. In this she may have been no different from anyone today:
The recognition of one's sex, and therefore of the male-female dualism which is the first cognitive step a human being makes, is the basic pattern according to which all creatures and natural phenomena are classified, the first ordering principle, the first process of abstraction when observing the world, the first distinct experience of oneself.(45)
However, even if the recognition of gendered identity is the first model for classification, this opposition need not be seen as hierarchical. But it is unlikely to be, since children are born into a world of patriarchal discourse in which "male" and "female" are hardly equivalent. In her early writing, Grimshaw accepted this notion of difference as a chasm or schism: her female characters were fated, while her male characters exercised freedom of choice. A rhetorical consequence of being unable to regard gender difference as a spectrum or continuum is a symbolism based on contrasts and absolutes. Retrospectively, it is clear that Grimshaw was a prisoner of the science of her time, when endocrine hormones, for example, had yet to be discovered. Confusing consequence (an unequal socio-sexual division of labour) with "cause" (biological difference), predisposed her towards origins as total explanations. Hence the recurrence of words such as "roots" and "bedrock" in her polemical writing.
Another sequence of her thinking concerning gender was her conceptualization of the relationship between Ireland and England. As she phrased it, as usual, in a review of Kipling,
England and Ireland, indeed, occupy very much the same position as the typical man and woman. The former is strong and virile, not easily impressed with either the thoughts or the pains of others, and on that account all the more able to cut his way straight to success.... The work of the world, the business of the world, the money of the world are in his hands, and, consequently, the power also; and...he cannot understand why the weaker, more emotional...creature at his side should not be contented with the crumbs that fall from his table.(46)
Thus the subordination of women to men in the family and in society gave Grimshaw telling analogies for class and colonial power relations. A significant number of her plots revolve around a triangle. Rivalry is usually between a "Celt" and a "Saxon" for a woman often associated with an island home: "The `Roisin Ruadh'", "Carry Me Out to Sea", When the Red Gods Call and Red Bob of the Bismarcks are only a few. Portraying a conquered land and people as female is a familiar trope of colonial fiction. But when Grimshaw used it, she was drawing on experience as well as convention. George Moore's A Drama in Muslin (1887), exactly contemporaneous with Grimshaw's adolescence, compares the Land War with sexual antagonism and barter, contending that both colonialism and male-female relations are property and power contexts. The Land League itself was recognized as "Nothing less than the strongest native revolt for over two hundred years, [which] sought to disrupt the bases of the Cromwellian settlement and of British rule".(47)
When Grimshaw later dealt with race, she was acquainted with Darwin's and Spencer's works too well to ignore evolutionary theory. Nor could anyone who used to drink tea with Malinowski ignore developments in contemporary anthropology altogether. But her white characters are usually Lamarckians who, in one generation, can acquire and transmit new hereditary characteristics. Black characters develop at a leaden pace.
It is child's play to plunder Grimshaw's fiction for its racism and sexism, as I set out to do some years ago. At that time, not yet having found her agent's records in London, I had no idea of her colossal contemporary influence. Most scholars assume it was considerable, but confined to Papua and Australia; to the contrary, she had an immense readership in Britain and the States. Thus, historians of race relations are fully entitled to take her retrograde views seriously. General publics do not, after all, customarily read the latest anthropological theory, if for no other reason than it is not usually available to them. But they do read thrillers from the corner news agent or drugstore, at the railway station or the airport -- and that is where Grimshaw sold. This is why Lois Whitney investigated:
the fictional best-sellers, the cheap tracts, the popular poems...I wanted to see what the history of ideas...would look like if it were written, not in terms of what...philosophers actually said, but...of what the public thought they said -- a far different matter, but equally important, since it is only after ideas reach the public that they become a real social force.(48)
Which is another way of wording Marx's dictum that theory can only become a social force once it reaches the masses. In that case, Grimshaw was a class agent indeed. Evans, Saunders and Cronin, noted the "key interpretive role" of "the daily newspaper and weekly or monthly journal, as well as the pamphlet, the colonial travel-book or novel, and the political speech" -- all of them genres Grimshaw popularized. They stated:
[P]opular colonial writings formed an intermediate intellectual stage and forum between imported European theories about race relations and the colonists' actual interaction with these `lower forms' of man...Sophisticated theories supported rougher stereotypes with very little apparent contradiction.(49)
Grimshaw stands arraigned, then, in the dock of history. But what, precisely, is the charge? After all, she also wrote, in an address to the Royal Colonial Institute (now the Royal Commonwealth Society) in 1922:
It is in the last degree unfair and incorrect to represent the Papuan native as a howling fiend, intent only on devouring the white settler, or driving him out of the country...[A]n intelligent people, with considerable strength of character, and much ability in a mechanical direction, are going to go on living, side by side, with a gradually growing population of whites...[T]he Papuan is going to have time and opportunity to develop his possibilities, and become as competent a craftsman and as able a planter as he has it in him to be...It will be a long time before he develops executive ability of any kind. But he is already a trader of no small keenness, and his mechanical tastes surprise everyone who has had to do with him as a workman...[A]fter all, the Papuan was not created to charm us, or to keep his country as a perpetual museum of Stone Age weapons and customs for our amusement...I have said little of what may be the ultimate future of this strange, hard-charactered race, with its destiny in the melting-pot and its brain still undeveloped, though developing at a rate that seems almost miraculous to those who know the earlier days of the country...But whatever it may be, the destinies of the coloured and the white in Papua must run side-by-side.(50)
No one could call this declaration, by today's standards, enlightened. Given Grimshaw's background, however, it represents considerable development since the days when she allowed herself to be pictured with cartoons of cannibals licking their (human) chops. But what does anachronistic judgment of this colonist's manifesto accomplish, besides to exonerate us? I have tried to explain, if not to expiate, Grimshaw's racism by showing some of its components: her always-already confused thinking about gender factors which influenced her early Pacific travel writing. Grimshaw was a writer of mass-popular fiction in `White Australia', and she thought she knew what her market wanted to hear: thus she also pandered to Yellow Peril fears and managed to insult nearly every nationality inhabiting Thursday Island. On occasion she was anti-Semitic. One of the most ironic vindications of her later claim to be an Australian writer is that she was reproducing an outlook which so many at the time shared, often because they had no choice if they wished to be published (The Bulletin interfered, virtually to the point of rewriting, in manuscripts by Katherine Susannah Prichard and Vance Palmer, for instance, a process which its editors referred to as "white-washing"!). I hope to have shown, then, that Grimshaw's racism was as pragmatic and, in its horrid way, sincere, as it was deplorable, and that its expression varied considerably depending on her medium and channel as well as her audience. Any other approach can only be descriptive.
Papua, however, for all Grimshaw's pontificating, was not her final destination: Australia was. As early as 1910, her fiction -- as with many writers, far more revealing than their commentary -- expressed what she thought about it. The novel, Nobody's Island, is the usual silly combination of bigamy (unwitting), divorce (disallowed), pregnancy (unexpected), treasure hunting (immensely successful), murder...It is also, however, a rumination abut class, and turns the metaphor of land-as-woman inside-out with the character of Ben Slade, presumably inspired by the West Australian, William Little. Slade has "no profession, no people".(51) When he falls in love with (and, of course, saves from the hangman) the aristocratic Edith, she must disown her Englishness (she describes herself as a "'vert to Australianism").(52) This includes rejecting inherited, unearned income, for Slade can't imagine being anyone's tenant. She must learn to be self-sufficient: "[Y]ou're waking up when you begin to see that making your own bread and meat and potatoes and housing and clothing, is the only way for a man to be a decent human being." She abandons her quotation-crammed, over-precise, snobbery-ridden speech, since her Australian husband declares: "[T]he English language was made for me, and not I for the English language". Like many of Grimshaw's Australian heroes, he reades Shakespeare for fun, but places no great value on a formal education: "Have you decided...that a college education is not -- always -- indispensable?...Also that a man is not an unclean beast if he doesn't use the shibboleth, and call it `varsity"? By this time Edith, watching her husband superintending a cooking-fire outdoors, would probably agree to anything he says, for he is everything her nasty, overbred, English first husband was not:
He was more than ever the son of Earth tonight, skin burned as brown as the trunks of the forest trees, hair and beard grown furry as brown moss, eyes brown-yellow like the eyes of beasts and birds. He was handsome, as always, and, as always, seemed not to know, or, if he knew, not to care. Edith, who knew every line of her own beauty,...was always impressed by this unconsciousness of her `brown man's'. It seemed, now, almost as if a piece of the landscape had got up and sat itself down beside her.(53)
Bathurst, New South Wales, several years later.
I have written to the local paper, and received a gratifying number of replies and invitations, considering that Grimshaw has been dead for over two decades. I drink innumerable cups of tea with elderly women who describe Grimshaw as having been "straight out of Cranford". I wish this had been true, for then she would have died in a community of women -- or, to put the blunt truth I discover rather differently -- in a more congenial community of women. Since my research has led me to places neither she nor I would normally frequent, I am not too surprised to find myself having another conversation, this time with the Governor of the Bathurst Prison. It leads nowhere, for nothing in his records confirms that Grimshaw moved to Bathurst because one of her brothers was in prison there. Yet one of her novels describes the interior of that prison in such detail, one wonders...Some of the more obvious people to interview would be the doctor who attended her in her last illness, and her priest. The former is readily available; the latter has been dead for some time, and, I discover, carried out the act that is every researcher's horror -- gave most of her belongings to the Salvation Army and sold the rest, so that she could receive a proper burial. Since Grimshaw wrote an autobiography which some people read in manuscript, and is reputed to have sent a tin trunk of papers to a relative in Port Moresby during the 50s, this is enough to make me weep. What eventually does, however, is something else. I start with the doctor's surgery -- that, at least, is not an unfamiliar environment! But I don't remember ever in my life having spent a morning with a Monumental Mason.
He remembered himself as an idealistic young doctor scarcely out of medical training. He remembered the old woman. For some time, he knew, she had been dying -- one could hardly call it "wasting away", for she was enormous -- of incipent insulin shock. What he didn't know, till after she died, was that every time he visited her and accepted a cup of tea, it meant that she could not drink anything warm again that day. All she could afford was enough fuel to heat one drink. Then she went completely off the rails, and that was when he, and the parish priest, and an ambulance found her wandering, at twilight, along a New South Wales country road, screaming such obscenities that, once she was in the public, poor section of the hospital, he had felt obliged to put her -- under restraint. The last he saw of her alive, she was shouting venomous remarks at the other patients in the women's ward, and accused him of having put her in a brothel.
Only one of her fictional characters might be able to think of something appropriate to say, so he returns to the subject of her desperate poverty. She had sold her house -- initially a convict barracks, then an inn -- the site of which I have already visited. It is in ruins. Things got worse after her brother, for whom she had been keeping house, died. World War II had not only destroyed stocks of her books, but bombed the few properties she had remaining in the British Isles. Apparently her dissolute father had bequeathed her shares in Welsh collieries which, as strategic locations, were destroyed by the Germans. So she approached a body called the Commonwealth Literary Fund -- do I know anything about it? I do; I have read her case at the Australian Archives. Unlike most things she wrote, it doesn't make for pleasant reading, for it was not like her to beg. Nor did it get her anywhere. When, after months of negotiating, the Fund awarded her a pension of a pound a week in recognition of her "services to Australian literature", she turned it down. "One pound a week is of no use to anyone", she replied.
"And yet", the doctor muses, "at least she, too, could have had a cup of tea."
I feel as if we are in one of her suspense stories, only this time it is my turn to introduce the conversation-stopper. "She may have died thinking she was poor", I say, "but she wasn't. She may have been the richest woman in Bathurst, without knowing it. Several weeks before, her youngest sister Nichola, who lived at a house called `Cloona', in Devon, died. She left Beatrice more than six thousand pounds."
Dr. X has decided that a medicinal brandy would do him no harm, and me a great deal of good. "Who on earth was Nichola?" he asks. "What was their agreement?"
"Typically Victorian", I explain. "Imagine a large Victorian family, with two surviving brothers and four surviving sisters. The sisters are Maud, a chronic invalid on a sofa, Emma, who becomes a Post-Impressionist in Paris -- a kind of poor person's Gwen John -- Beatrice, and Nichola, named for their dissolute father. Maud marries a physician who runs a private sanitorium, and wastes away there for decades, whist Nichola does the housekeeping -- yes, it is rather sinister, isn't it? Maud finally dies, and from everything you tell me, I would suspect she had diabetes too, since she was blind, and Beatrice gave her, unconditionally, the copyright to The Terrible Island, a best-seller with a number of blind characters in it. Maud conveniently passed away, and Nichola promptly married her dead sister's husband -- her brother-in-law. Surely there's a law against that somewhere, or was? They must have thought so, since they went to New Guinea to marry, with Beatrice's blessing. Then the two sisters made a pact: whoever died first would leave whatever she had to the other. Dr. Sinclair hardly needed more money; he had an income of his own, plus his first wife, Maud's. Beatrice had nothing to leave. But Nichola died first -- by a few weeks only -- and if only probate acted quicker! Beatrice would have inherited six thousand pounds; moreover, she might not have died at all, then, since she could have afforded warmth, and medical care."
Nothing, as is said, can kill a conversation like death, and this conversation would seem to be terminally ill. Especially since I am crying at the thought of this woman having, in effect, starved and frozen to death, in New South Wales, in 1953. "She was hardly the first or the last", Dr. X comments drily, but this is cold comfort! Now, however, fortified by his wee medicinal drop, Dr. X has an idea. Surely I would like to meet someone who knew Beatrice before she became so dotty? Or course. Well, then, I should meet B., who could explain about Beatrice's ring, since he wears it all the time.
"What!"
("For a gold ring he placed on her finger/Saving `Love, bear you this in your mind/If ever I should sail from old Ireland/You'll mind I'm not keeping you behind.")
"Yes, that boring ring. She would take about it. She gave it to B. -- well, no, not exactly, to his mother, once she knew she was dying, but the mother got killed, along with all her children but B., in a car accident -- B., of all people survived! The family dyslexic! He would survive!"
I'm not paying a great deal of attention, mainly because I have heard about this ring from so many people; even read about it; but never truly believed in Grimshaw's reputed romance.
"Oh, it was simply trash. She wore it always, though. Apparently it was from someone in Papua. Once she knew she was dying, as I told you, she gave it to B's mother. At that time she was living at B.'s mother's pub -- the Royal Hotel, I expect you've seen it. Across the road from the Shamrock."
To his medical relief, I have recovered. "Indeed, we might as well be in Belfast with the Orange and the Green -- segregated, the Irish pub on one side of the road, the Brits" (he deplores my Irish usage and accent) -- "on the other. So B. is still alive?"
He toys with a surgical diagram, before answering carefully, "Yes he is. You might find him difficult, though. The family cretin, you know."
"Yes", I answer cheerfully, as if every family has a cretin. "I know. How do I find him?"
"At the RSL Club", he replies, looking at his watch. "Ah, it's Friday, they'll have mixed prawns. Women are not, of course, allowed in the main bar, but I suppose I can coerce B. into the Ladies' Bar -- but are you sure you want to go there?"
"Try and stop me."
So here we are again, militaristic as ever. What would the Gen. and his Lady think, living in Cloonagh House, should they see me here? The place stinks, like most Australian pubs; when will people start vomiting, and when will the vomit be sluiced out? This being, of course, the ladies' bar, the place smells of babies' urine; and maidenhair plants (how appropriate!) are wilting all over the show. And now I must meet B., who, apparently, is mentally defective...
I nearly pass out. Not because he is mentally defective. His hands tremble a bit, and his head seems large for his body, but he speaks perfectly intelligible English, whilst we murder the prawns before us. It is when I accept one from his fingers that I nearly pass out. In Grimshaw's novels, I could do so easily, but this is real life, Bathurst, not Papua, so the merciful option of oblivion is not available.
"That ring!"
"Yes", says the family idiot/imbecile/dyslexic peaceably. "This is the ring Doctor was talking about."
I know -- how could I not? How people used to snigger at it! Papuan gold; therefore coppery. PAPUA was superimposed on it, but it was so old, the U had fallen to pieces, so it now reads: PAPLA. Oh yes, many witnesses have said. She always wore that ring. Some silly story -- what was it? Oh, he fell off his horse in India. No, darling, said another, not at all. You know what those spinsters are like. She said it was an officer who went to his death storming the trenches in World War I. Poor fat old thing. Can you ever imagine her having a lover? Although she did write those torrid, romantic stories.
To my intense irritation, Dr. X, whom I otherwise like very much, has had a pint or two, or three and is roaring along with the rest of the RSL Club. "Indeed", he is belching slightly, "if you knew how many of my women -- spinster -- patients talk about a fiance dead in Flanders!" To my horror, I find I am also shouting, but no one at the RSL on a Friday night is likely to notice a foreign woman making a spectacle of herself. "You Australians", I scream, as if no other nationality did so, "fondly erect War Memorials in every little godforsaken town! Lovers plot assignations there! Well, then, besides remembering Gallipoli, as you so obsessively do, and that murderer, `Breaker' Morant,(54) why not remember the Battle of the Somme? When, one summer morning, in July, 1916, 19,000 men were killed -- in a single day -- and 60,000 were `casualties'. Do you think for a moment those men were without women? Perhaps they didn't all have the sweethearts you have such fun deriding, but they must have had mothers, wives, daughters, nieces, cousins...Frankly, as people always say when they are about to say something obnoxious, I think you're being obnoxious, both of you! No one will know the `truth', I suppose, about the relationship between Beatrice Grimshaw and the government tax collector. But I do know one thing -- when he died, she raised money by public subscription for his grave, and donated the first five pounds herself. So stop sneering at her affair! Especially when I can tell you exactly how she described him."
Researchers are expected to be polite and patient. This tirade of mine was neither; moreover, it contained far more passion than the pacifism it professed. So I would not be surprised if these two nice men, who have done nothing worse than enjoy their Friday evening up till my peroration, decided that, after all, a game of darts is in order. Instead, they listen with what Beatrice would no doubt have called `bated breath' to what I know of the relationship with William Little. It concerns one of Grimshaw's notable lapses of taste, when, in a series ("My Life among South Sea Cannibals") for Northcliffe's scandal-mongering Evening News, Grimshaw broadcast a mysterious "romance in eleven lines" to an audience of several millions. We have already seen Malinowski's sarcastic description of what was an enduring, triangular friendship among Grimshaw, Little, and Murray, who was by no means above favouring his friends with government posts, perks or stipends. Thus Little's rather unromantic metamorphosis from spokesman for Papuan miners to the British Royal Commission concerning New Guinea in 1906, to tax collector. He was one of Grimshaw's earliest friends in Papua and, if Grimshaw is to be believed, after more than a decade's friendship, he proposed, only to die of a mysterious tropical ailment on the eve of his putative wedding. This is how she described him to her British audience in 1922:
The miners...were a strange, hard, lonely race...who ran surprising risks without apparently being aware of the fact, and who became...utterly callous to death or danger. To myself they were always courteous and kind and the soul of hospitality. All classes were represented among them, and many nations, Australians predominating.
They were, and are, perhaps the bravest of men in the world. I have reason to know, for only the death that ever `stalks at noonday' throughout the wonderful, heart-holding land of Papua, and carries away her very best and bravest, prevented me from joining those mining camps for life as the wife of the finest man and most daring miner-explorer Papua has ever known, the late `Billy' Little.(55)
A photograph of Little, that "great New Guinea explorer", accompanied this revelation.(56)
When I have finished, Billy -- who, I have decided, may be what is popularly called `learning disabled' but strikes me as no fool -- takes off William Little's ring and says simply, "It's yours now." "But -- but -- you can't do that -- ". "Why not?" he asks peaceably. "It was hers; then my mother's; then the coroner gave it to me, so I think I have the right to give it to whoever I like." For a moment I wonder if this is a bizarre proposal of marriage but, fortunately, every woman's dream come true is not happening. "She loved Papua", he is ruminating, "and from everything you say, you did, too. Also, you seem to have cared for her." "Not really", I object. "I never even met her! And I have a feeling that if we had met, we might not even have liked each other! I've just been trying to understand her." "Try it on", he suggests. It promptly falls off and gets lost amongst the prawns. Beatrice Grimshaw was, after all, nearly six feet tall. Two weeks later in Brisbane a jeweller tells me he cannot make it more than three sizes smaller without destroying it. Even then, it falls off my largest finger. Fortunately, I have a `keeper' for this `keeper'. If we move back in time to Ireland, the scene shifts to Dublin, where I am attending the local variant of the famous History Workshops. It is Halloween, and I am devouring a barmbrack straight out of Dubliners. I bite something indigestible, and remember with horror an encounter with an Australian beer bottle, which demolished one of my front teeth, to the amusement of my students, and the profit of my dentist. But this time, no one profits but me, for I have bitten into the ring hidden in the barmbrack. Unlike Beatrice's ring, it really is trash, since it is brass. It is just the size to keep me from, for example, inadvertently flushing Beatrice's ring down the toilet.
"Some die by the glenside, some died with a Stranger/And wise men have told us, their cause was a failure.../I went on my way, God be praised that I met her.../Sure, I'll be glad, and I'll never forget her..."
Bathurst Cemetery. What a necropolis! I think of all the graveyards I have visited during the course of my research, and smile as I think how many people think literary research is conducted in libraries. In Ireland, I located Grimshaw's great-grandfather's grave -- not because I have a passion for graves, but because this earlier Nicholas Grimshaw is buried in Carnmoney district, an area where an agrarian secret society, the "Hearts of Steel", flourished in the 18th century. I have located her brother Ramsay's florid masonic memorial in nearby Oberon, and suspect Grimshaw impoverished herself even more to pay for that piece of grotesquerie. I think back to Port Moresby, where I found William Little's grave. It was the wet season, and I fought my way through knee-high, sharp grass. Horrid, newer graves of Christianized Papuans surrounded me, photographs of the dead smiling benignly underneath their plastic covers in the drowning tropical rain. I found an enormous headstone, the inscription almost effaced, but I could make it out. Whatever the relationship between this woman and that man -- the governor's protegee, the governor's pimp -- the epitaph reads blamelessly about a Brave Pioneer and a True Friend.
"What?" says the Monumental Mason, the last in my cast of characters, and perhaps the least-expected. I may not ordinarily drink tea with generals, or stronger stuff with `terrorists,' or nothing whatsoever with prison governors, but this is even more strange. This is not the 20th century. I have somehow wandered into a 19th century script, or perhaps some edifying painting, portraying a mournful couple in a graveyard: entitled "The Redemption", perhaps? However, the Monumental Mason, who offers me the last in this endless string of cups of tea, regards it as the height of normality to live in a cemetery, and speaks affectionately of the dead as if he knew them all personally. He certainly knows their whereabouts! No, not heaven or hell, where they are buried. "But this may be difficult", I explain, gratefully accepting the tea, for it is a cold, sodden, dark, rainy day in Bathurst, and I remember how many of those days Beatrice Grimshaw must have endured, with only enough money to..."You see", I continue, "her grave is not marked. I have every reason to believe there is not a headstone." "Oh that", he says, stroking his cat. "Nothing simpler, if you can tell me her name, and when she died. It would help too, if you had any idea which section of the cemetery she is buried in." "The paupers. Roman Catholic." "Right!" He begins burying his nose in some antiquated ledgers.
"We'll find her!" "No, please! Just the site of her grave! I don't think I could face a ghost just now!" "Quite so", he agrees soothingly. "Cemeteries are rather upsetting places, what? Anyway, the details..." "I take a deep breath. "Beatrice Ethel Grimshaw. July 1953." Some minutes later, we find the site, having wandered through what the Monumental Mason no doubt thinks of as streets, lanes, alleys. He is quite satisfied that this is the grave. I am not satisfied, however, remembering all those which she, as a true neo-Victorian, decorated. For there is, as I thought, no grave to decorate. Just a plot of grass, gone to seed. I therefore perform one of the most uncharacteristic acts of my life, and ask the Monumental Mason if would carve a modest headstone? I have just had a windfall of scholarship money, so --
"But of course!" he replies. "Only why should you pay for it, when the Bathurst Municipality will?"
I am so grateful, for she should not be here, all alone, all unidentified. The only difficulty the Monumental Mason -- I sense his hands itching to begin chiselling marble -- can think of, if that since I am not a relative, and there are no descendants, how are we to know how the inscription should read?
But that's easy. I didn't spend all those hours in Somerset House reading wills for nothing. All we need do is describe her as she described herself.
BEATRICE GRIMSHAW
Born Ireland, 1870. Died Australia, 1953.
Novelist.
So why don't I start driving back to Brisbane, instead of sitting on a most uncomfortable marble bench, in the rain? What else am I supposed to do? Tear off my hair and weave a mourning ring for her? Why can't I get back into the 20th century? Because I sense that Grimshaw requires something else. Since the rain is turning into a downpour, I flee to the nearest shelter -- a tree weeping over a lugubrious tombstone, where an angel is bewailing all sorts of worthy people, proclaiming the usual pieties about resurrection and life everlasting. What twaddle, I think, finding a dry patch underneath the willow. But then I realize; indeed, how could anyone surrounded by thousands of stone angels not realize? The tombstones all round are engraved with superstitious nonsense about crucifixions. A crucifixion, I remember, is followed by a resurrection. "I could never forget her name", an elderly female interviewee in Dublin says, "because I loved her stories." Nor is she the only one. Many people are only too glad to talk about her, because they remembered her stories. But it is not the memories of octogenarians that interest me so much as the reactions of my Papuan students. They scarcely noticed Grimshaw's racism -- stale news to them in a colonial writer! What they honed in upon immediately was her love for their country, and they devoured her books. So now I know exactly what to do. I hope Beatrice, wherever she may be, enjoys her tombstone; but I know what is more important, leap into my car, and start off on a journey that takes me to Brisbane, Sydney, Belfast, London, anywhere. Anywhere I can bedevil a publisher. Anywhere I can get some of her work re-published. I simply hope, since this journey began in Belfast and ended in Bathurst, that her best stories will be re-published in Australia. Then, I think, she will rest in peace.
NOTES
This paper is for the late Professor E. R. R. Green, Institute of Irish Studies, and for Prof. James Grimshaw and his wife, Dr. Grimshaw, Chemistry Dept., Queen's University of Belfast.
(1). Dictionary of Catholic Authors, 294.
(2). F. West, ed., Selected Letters of Hubert Murray (Melbourne: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), 47.
(3). To refer to Ireland as England's oldest colony is a convention requiring slight modification; the Isle of Man may be regarded as the first. Although I refer loosely to 19th century Ireland as a colony, this is a usage which Grimshaw's family, at that stage of Ulster's development, would probably have rejected. Nonetheless, eight centuries of British dominion over Ireland provided Great Britain with a training -- and battle-ground for conquering other alien lands. That my preference in regarding Grimshaw's background as colonized is not wholly fanciful, may be supported by the Guardian Weekly which entitled its leader "A Foreign Land", and commented in its opening paragraph: Anyone accustomed to wandering round the...Third World would find little in Ulster that is unfamiliar. Guerrillas, suspended democracy, armies and gunmen on the streets, unthinkable behavior in prisons, questionable and questioned frontiers, squalid housing, grinding poverty, indifferent multinationals, once vibrant economies in visible decline...The uniqueness of Northern Ireland is that it lies, not south of the equator, but just off the shores of Britain. (24 Feb 1980, p. 4)
(4). Telegraph [Belfast], (1 July 1953); Daily News and Leader [London], (3 Sept. 1912), 9; Sydney Morning Herald Women's Supplement (13 Feb. 1939).
(5). Brian Cleeve's Dictionary of Irish Writers -- Fiction (1966), in addition to the incorrect birthdate (one of the easier matters to verify in a biography studded with tantalising gaps) reiterates an oft-repeated, but nonetheless misleading, claim that Grimshaw was the first white woman to penetrate several areas of Borneo and New Guinea. This feat may have its source in the 1922 Australian or the 1928 British Who's Who ("the first white woman to ascend the notorious Sepik and the Fly River", p. 1242). Such claims presumably emanate in part from authors themselves, or from their agents. Grimshaw's quasi-autobiographical Isles of Adventure (1930), the last travel book she wrote, lends partial credence to these claims. But she makes it clear, for instance that she was the first white woman to accompany parties of missionaries and Government officials or Papuan police to these remote areas.
(6). Francis Grierson, "Beatrice Grimshaw", Bookman 62 (1922), 123.
(7). Adelaide Register (4 July 1922).
(8). Fuller description of Grimshaw's "ideal biographical legend" may be found in my Ph.D. dissertation, "For Love and Money: Beatrice Grimshaw's Passage to Papua", Rhodes University, 1986.
(9). See, for example, "To Myself", Irish Monthly (1983), 654.
(10). Film Weekly [Sydney] (21 June 1928), 4.
(11). Journal of Pacific History 12 (1977), 161.
(12). I would like to thank Eileen Dwyer, Archivist for John Fairfax and Sons, for helping me to speculate how influential Grimshaw's articles for the Sydney Morning Herald may have been. The paper's average daily circulation in 1905 was 75, 225; in 1906, 77, 766; 1907, 80, 208; 1908, 87, 966; 1909, 93, 733; 1910, 97, 208; 1911, 103, 641. Grimshaw wrote for the Herald for most of her career, but these are the important years when her Pacific reportage, When the Red Gods Call, and Vaiti of the Islands were published. These pre-World War I figures were not audited, but obtained from an old office ledger.
(13). FCI was handsomely published and liberally advertised by its first publisher, Eveleigh Nash, who paid forty pounds advance on 15% royalties for British book rights. It went into an American edition in the same year, as well as Bell's Colonial Editions of Standard Works. A popular edition at about one shilling was published by Nelson in 1916, with rights for the United Kingdom, the British Islands, Colonies and Dependencies excluding Canada, and an advance for Grimshaw of 30 pounds. A school edition may also have been published. Nelson acquired the rights to publish one in 1918 for an outright fee of 30 pounds which was paid to Grimshaw on 3 Oct. 1919. Perhaps the book's chauvinism had kept its appeal alive during WWI; the political interests it served may well have led to its being deemed suitable as a set-book.
Later in the year SSS was published by Hutchinson, whose interest in colonial editions was so great that he travelled around the world three times and met "every" book-seller in the "Colonies" ("A Chat with Mr. G. Thompson Hutchinson", Publishers' Circular 1905, 51-52). It became a bestseller immediately, according to the Daily Chronicle ("Best-sellers, Oct. 1907, 3). By Dec. 1911 the Spectator advertised it in a one shilling Net Library of Standard Copyright Books. It was also issued in Nelson's "Popular Libraries for the Holidays. The Most Famous Books of Biography and Travel" (Publishers' Circular, July 1911). Hutchinson then published a "cheaper edition" (omitting the photographs), again for one shilling. SSS was also published in the States by Lippincott, at $3.50 net.
(14). Since "ideology" is a notoriously slippery concept, I shall use John Plamenatz' practical-functional definition throughout:
[F]or beliefs to be ideological...they must be shared by a group of people...must concern matters important to the group, and must...serve to hold it together or to justify activities and attitudes characteristic of its members...[T]rue beliefs can also be functional in these ways. What makes beliefs ideological...is their constituting a system of beliefs which is...accepted regardless of whether or not its constituent beliefs satisfy the criteria of truth (Ideology, London: Macmillan, 1971, 31).
(15). Publisher and Bookseller (2 Feb. 1907); Athaneum (12 FCeb. 1907), 133; Outlook (3 Aug. 1907), 150; Saturday Review (24 Aug. 1907), 240-41.
(16). New York Saturday Review of Books (11 Jan. 1908), 21.
(17). Daily Chronicle (10 Oct. 1907), 3.
(18). Manchester Guardian (21 Oct. 1907), 5.
(19). Quoted in La Nauze, Vol. II, 441.
(20). Morning Post (9 Oct. 1907), 5.
(21). Kipling, quoted on p. 1.
(22). SSS, 114.
(23). SSS, 310-11. Susan Greenstein notes in "Sarah Lee: the Woman Traveller and the Literature of Empire" (in Dorsey et al., Design and Intent in African Literature, 143): "To the people they met, women like Sarah Lee and Mary Kingsley...were simultaneously less than female (unhusbanded) and honorary males". Catherine Barnes Stevenson (Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa) further comments that "the sexually ambiguous position" occupied by women "[g]ranted the license to behave like men at moments when `typically' female conduct would have been not only ludicrous, but dangerous..." She understands however, why women like Grimshaw, however much they enjoyed their honorary male status overseas, anxiously sought to prove to the public at home that they had remained "self-consciously female in appearance and behavior" (4-5). It was one thing to "Cross the Line" by boat; quite another to transgress gender norms back `home'.
(24). SSS, 321.
(25). FCI, 222.
(26). My thanks are due to Hugh Laracy for checking the Colonial Secretary's papers. Item CSO 2880/1905 is a minute dated 3 July 1905, in which Grimshaw states that 40 pounds would suffice her to write a book as a "a general advertisement for the colony". She then resorts to a threat, however diplomatically put, that she is on the point of leaving Fiji, but would stay if the 40 pounds were granted. She further points out that the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand had paid 50 pounds for her writings about Tonga, Samoa and Fiji. Laracy notes that Grimshaw's memorandum was apparently submitted to the Colonial Secretary by representatives of commercial interests in Fiji. The negative reply which was sent to three of them, once filed at 2846/05, has been lost. Laracy suggests that the interests underwriting FCI were the Suva Chamber of Commerce, the Planters' Association, and the Levuka Chamber of Commerce. Grimshaw was not a liar, but she certainly did exaggerate, so her later statement to Deakin that im Thurn was pleased with her work about Fiji may be viewed as true, but in retrospect. Grimshaw's correspondence with Deakin may be found in the following depositories: Ltr. to Alfred Deakin, 1 Oct. 1908, Natl. Library of Australia, Ms. 1540/2157-9, "Correspondence concerning Hubert Murray"; Ltr. to Alfred Deakin, 1 Oct. 1908, Natl. Library of Australia, Ms. 1540/15/2419; Ltr. to Alfred Deakin, 1 Oct. 1908, Australian Archives, CRS Al (Dept. of Home and Territories, Correspondence files, annual single number series, 1903-1908.
(27). Caroline Ralston, Grass Huts and Warehouses: Pacific Beach Communities of the Nineteenth Century (Canberra: ANU Press, 1977) 165-166, 193.
(28). J. Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Femae Emigration, 1830-1914 (Croom Helm, 1979), 192.
(29). Dorothy Middleton Victoria Lady Travellers (Carole) 3-4, 9-10.
(30). C.B. Stevenson Victoria Women Travel Writers in Africa (Boston: Twayne English Authors Series, 1982).
(31). See Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975).
(32). D. Vogel "A Lexicon Rhetoricae for `Journey' Literature", College English 36 (1974), 184-9.
(33). J. Trollope, Britannia's Daughters (London: Hutchinson, 1983).
(34). S. Greenstein, "Sarah Lee: The Woman Traveller and the Literature of Empire", in David Dorsey, et al., Design and Intent in African Literature (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1981), 134, 143.
(35). Stevenson, 9, 9-10.
(36). FCI, 66.
(37). I. Dinesen, Out Of Africa, [1937] (Penguin, 1981), 342.
(38). W. Howarth, "The Country of Willa Cather", National Geographic 162, (1982), 81.
(39). Stevenson, II.
(40). V. Woolf, Three Guineas [1938] (Penguin, 1981) 125.
(41). "Maev" wrote, reviewing Kipling's "The Song of the English", that "the English nature" could possess "real greatness and strength", but this would appear to be damning with faint praise, since she immediately followed with a reference to "our passionate resentment at its long-standing cruelty and neglect towards ourselves...". Her conclusion is a typical piece of juggling: "`[T]he Song of the English" is a useful reminder...of the really admirable qualities possessed by the race we do not love" (TSR, 23 Jan. 1897; 81).
(42). T. Olsen, Silences, 42.
(43). The Author (1 March 1897), 258.
(44). Review of E. Rentoul Esler's The Wardlaws, TSR (6 June 1896), 890.
(45). Gisela Breitling, "Speech, Silence and the Discourse of Art. On Conventions of Speech and Feminine Consciousness", in G. Ecker, ed., Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women's Press, 1985), 169-70.
(46). "Maev", rev. of The Seven Seas, TSR (23 Jan. 1897), 81-2.
(47). C. Cruise O'Brien, States of Ireland (Cananda, 1974), 47.
(48). L. Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (NY: Octagon, 1965), 2.
(49). R. Evans, K. Saunders and C. Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination: Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (Sydney: ANZ, 1975), 15.
(50). "Papua and the Western Pacific", United Empire: The Royal Colonial Inst. Journal 13, 524-5.
(51). Nobody's Island (1917), 265. Mark Plummer, in The Sands of Oro, is "of no class at all that one could define, and no particular occupation, unless -- Yes, of course, he had discovered rivers, and found mountain ranges...[But] who were his people? Probably absolutely nobody" (1924; 28).
(52). Nobody's Island, 233.
(53). Nobody's Island, 73, 233, 75, 202.
(54). See Susan Gardner, et al., Critical Arts Monograph 1, "Breaker Morant". (Centre for Cultural Studies, Univ. of Natal, Durban). Sold out, but available on request from the Director, Prof. Keyan G. Tomaselli, Univ. of Natal, King Geo. Vth Ave., 4001 Durban, South Africa.
(55). "In a South Sea Goldrush", (17 May 1922), n.p.
(56). For an obituary concerning Little, see the Papuan Courier, 29 Oct. 1920. The contributed "appreciation" in the adjoining column sounds very like Grimshaw.
Photograph (Painting of Whitehouse, the Irish Grimshaws)
Indexing (document details)
Subjects:
Discrimination, Human relations, International, Interpersonal communication, Journalism, Journalists, Literature, Personal relationships, Prejudice, Racism, Reporters, Women
Locations:
Australia
Author(s):
Gardner, Susan
Document types:
Feature
Document features:
Photograph
Publication title:
Hecate. St. Lucia: Nov 30, 1987. Vol. 13, Iss. 2; pg. 31
Source type:
Periodical
ISSN:
03114198
ProQuest document ID:
915346211
Text Word Count
18767
Document URL:
http://proquest.umi.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/pqdlink?did=915346211&sid=1&Fmt=3&clientId=48776&RQT=309&VName=PQD
| Julie Evans, 1993 |
Evans, J., 1993, Beatrice Grimshaw and
Click here for article on Beatrice Grimshaw by Evans, 1993
Julie Evans apparently authored a dissertation and subsequently published an article6 - in 1993 - on the significance of Beatrice's work, particularly as it relates to colonialism and feminism. The article is shown below.
