Book Review

Jean Devanny and Miles Franklin shared a passion for literature, and a deeply felt commitment to social justice. Their lives were linked by their engagement with Australia’s literary and political milieux during the 1930s and through to the 1950s, but also by a friendship which flourished through correspondence and provided each with mental and emotional support.	1
In some ways, they made an odd couple. Devanny was a working class activist who came to Australia from New Zealand in 1929 and joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) with the impact of a force ten gale. She was an ardent internationalist, and her novels – particularly Sugar Heaven, her 1936 novel based on a canecutters’ strike – reflected the socialist realist agenda of the CPA during the 1930s. Franklin, on the other hand, came from a pastoralist family, and her literary love was Australia. She was foremost among those writers in the 1930s and 1940s who promoted the ideal of a distinctively Australian culture expressed through literature, and much of her work in this area – including broadcasts, public lectures and even lobbying letters to public servants – is captured in Roe and Bettison’s collection.	2
These explorations of their lives and writing reflect the differences between the two women, but also their points of commonality. Carole Ferrier’s biography of Jean Devanny is an intimate study of her life told through the voices of those who knew her and through her own writing. Described by writer Marjorie Barnard as ‘amazing altogether, of an impenetrable innocence, as brave as a lion, and no brains’, Devanny emerges as larger than life. Born into a poor miner’s family and wed to a working class man at 17, she embraced causes ranging from women’s rights and eugenics through to natural history and, above all, the working class whose interests she championed.	3
The pivotal point in Devanny’s life – and of this narrative – was her expulsion from the Communist Party in 1941. The reasons were never fully explained to her, but revolved around her challenging sexual double standards she saw operating among male Communists. The expulsion occurred during the brief period when the CPA was illegal, and very little documentary evidence of this episode remains, but Ferrier has skilfully drawn together an array of oral histories, correspondence and Devanny’s own writings which illuminate the human and political drama around her case. In so doing, she explores many of the tensions between class and sexual politics operating within the CPA at this time. Her narrative also illuminates the precarious position occupied by writers and artists in the Party, who were constantly viewed with suspicion as ‘petit bourgeois’ or ‘bohemian’. Devanny herself noted that as a writer she was viewed as ‘unreliable’ despite her proletarian background.	4
Ferrier’s biography is the culmination of more than 20 years of research, drawing on Devanny’s novels, reportage, personal correspondence, political speeches and articles, and the views of many who knew her and worked with her. In her afterword, Ferrier writes of her desire ‘to write history that gave authority to many silenced voices’, describing Jean Devanny as a ‘[text] produced by many biographers’. Oddly enough, the voice that is missing – or at least muted – is Ferrier’s. She rarely challenges her sources, and she frequently replaces critical analysis with ironic juxtapositions. For example, she uses the anecdotes of his contemporaries and newspaper accounts of his domestic life to reveal the sexual double standards of J.B. Miles, the General Secretary of the CPA and Devanny’s lover who failed to support her when she was accused of promiscuous behaviour.	5
Through such devices, she avoids imposing the values and understandings of a later generation on the idealistic project in which her subjects were engaged. It is a project with which she identifies, paraphrasing Marx in her afterword:	6
Jean Devanny offers itself to socialists now, for what may be gained from it. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past may risk repeating them, but we can also draw inspiration from other often heroic struggles of those who have gone before, and wonder what might work again in the future (p. 316)
However, there are points in this engrossing narrative where the reader may crave a little more analysis or background. For example, Ferrier reports in detail Devanny’s poignant correspondence with the Communist-dominated Australasian Book Society in the 1950s, where she is clearly trying to assert her literary legacy and her view of the role of literature within the Communist Party. This suggests much about the cultural politics of the times, but the reader is left largely to draw their own conclusions.
Admiration for their subject is also evident in Roe and Bettison’s carefully annotated selection of the ‘occasional’ writings of Miles Franklin, which starts with her report of a school picnic published in the Goulburn Evening Penny Post in 1896, when she was 16, and concludes with a letter attacking the provincialism of Australian cultural thinking, published in the Sydney Morning Herald months before her death in 1954. This is a marvellous collection, which reveals the versatility of Franklin’s pen, but also her dogged commitment to pursuing the causes she cared about. Like Devanny, she was imbued with a deep sense of social justice. Of particular interest to labour historians is the collection of Franklin’s journalism and correspondence from the US between 1906 and 1915, where she ‘studied the industrial question’ and became General Secretary of the National Women’s Trade Union League of America. These pieces not only reveal something of the conditions of women workers in American cities at the time, and the preoccupations of the trade union movement, but also capture the exhilaration Franklin felt through her engagement with these causes.	7
This collection operates as a companion piece to Franklin’s own life story. Pieces are organised chronologically and divided into sections, which reflect the preoccupations of her life. Her nationalism becomes increasingly evident in her writings during and after World War I, whether arguing the case for Australian culture or extolling the virtues of Australian exports to Europe. By the 1930s, she had returned to Australia where she took up the cudgels for Australian literature. Whereas Devanny focused on writing for and by the proletariat, for Franklin writers were proletarians, Australian literature being ‘the work of the poorest paid class of workers’ (quoted in Roe & Bettison, pp. 134-138). Much of her later work was devoted to promoting Australian literature and nurturing its readership, and lobbying for practical and financial support for writers and the publishing industry.	8
This collection highlights the largely unsung value of topical writings – journalism, letters, reportage, and notes of speeches, largely ephemeral in nature – as offering a kind of mirror onto their times. Whereas most Australians would recognise Franklin’s achievement as the author of My Brilliant Career, these writings suggest something of her contemporary significance as a force for change within her own society. Ferrier’s biography of Jean Devanny, by exposing and exploring the richness of Devanny’s writing across a wide range of topics, elicits a similar recognition for her subject. Both books bring together a rich vein of previously unpublished material that offers fresh insights for labour and cultural historians, but both also invite us to view their subjects in a new and fascinating light.	9
National Tertiary Education Union, Melbourne JULIE WELLS

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