BARBARA JEFFERIS, AM
Writer, author's rights advocate
Born - 25 March 1917, Adelaide, SA
Died - 3 Jan 2004, Sydney, NSW
The long haul of a
devotion to writers and their rights
by Nadia Wheatley
A
phrase of Barbara's came into my head the other day:
"I'm in this for the long haul." At the time, I was scrolling through
her listed publications in the Austlit database, crazily attempting to
research in a single day a life which had run for 86 packed years. Here
was a whole literary world, whizzing past my eyes. Barbara Jefferis's
reviews - written for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Weekend
Australian, Meanjin, Southerly and so on - stretched from 1959 to 1996.
Switching to another file, I found the publication dates of reviews of
some of Barbara's own books, including Time of the Unicorn
(1974), One Black Summer (1967), and Half-Angel
(1959). The Times Literary Supplement had run a review of Beloved
Lady in 1956. It was around this point that I seemed to hear
Barbe saying in my ear: "I'm in this for the long haul."
The first time she said this to me was shortly after I
became a colleague of hers, on the committee of management of the
Australian Society of Authors (ASA). That was in 1990, and we were
talking about kicking off a campaign for educational lending right.
Barbara had been part of the campaign for public lending right, which
the ASA had run from 1966 until its successful conclusion in 1974. (The
PLR scheme, funded by the Federal Government, compensates authors for
the royalty income they lose through the availability of their books in
the public library system.) Indeed, Barbara had been on the ASA
management committee since the society's founding year of 1963, and she
had been its first woman president (1973 to 1975). She had been part of
the struggle to establish the Copyright Agency Ltd, and she had written
what I always think of as the bible on Australian book contracts. And
now here she was, preparing for what she knew would be a long and
tedious campaign of lobbying to persuade the Government to extend the
principle of lending right to include books in educational libraries.
Although I met Barbara through the ASA, my friendship
with her really came about when she interviewed me for a book she was
researching on the topic of women writers whose mothers had died when
they were children. That may seem an odd sort of a category. Yet to
Barbara and me, it held a deep fascination, because we were both in it.
Barbara came from a clever and interesting Adelaide
family. Dr James Jefferis, her paternal grandfather, was a
Congregational minister as well as a philosopher and natural scientist.
Her father, Tarlton Jefferis, was one of Australia's leading analytical
chemists. He was in England, working as an adviser to the munitions
industry, when his wife Lucy (nee Smythe) gave birth to their second
child, Barbara, in March 1917.
One of the most significant things in Barbara's life
happened six months later, although she was too young to know about it.
The death of her mother, and the empty space which it left, had a
profound effect. Her father, devastated by the loss, remained in
England, and through her early years Barbara lived with her maternal
grandfather, who was a widower. When she was three, he died, and she
went to live with her father's mother. This grandmother "always had two
or three or so of her 40-odd grandchildren staying with her". While
this meant the little girl still didn't have anyone to give her
undivided love, it was probably through having lots of cousins that
Barbara acquired her huge sociability. ("All my books," she said in an
interview for the National Library, "have been about communication
between people.")
It was also at this time that the writing began. "Even
as a child," she once noted, "I was determined to be a writer, although
I hadn't a very clear idea what that meant. When I was very small I had
a slightly younger cousin who always wanted to hear stories, and for
some reason I used to write them ... I rather think it was because a
story wasn't a story until it was written down."
I think something else was operating here, beyond the
fact of a story-telling talent exhibiting itself early. After all,
making up a story is a way of creating a little world over which one
has control. This can be very emotionally satisfying for someone in the
sort of pillar-to-post childhood which Barbara was having. Just as
important, by writing the story down, you can stop it from changing
unexpectedly.
Barbara's story began to change again when she was about
eight. Her father, finally back from England, was employed at
Roseworthy Agricultural College, and Barbe first experienced country
life when she went to live with him. She acquired her own horse,
Poppet, which she adored. (In later life, she would always have animals
- especially Siamese cats, which she bred professionally.) Barbara also
initially loved having as a stepmother the beautiful music teacher whom
Tarlton Jefferis married. Soon, however, the relationship stopped
working, and Barbe was sent to boarding school, which she loathed.
At this point, her amazing resilience began to reveal
itself. Barbara threw herself into sport - playing tennis, in
particular (she played a weekly game until a few years ago).
Fortunately, the school had a good library, which Barbara "read right
through about six or seven times". She made friends, and in her final
year became head prefect. As she grew older, the problems at home began
to resolve themselves, and Barbara's interest in life on the land came
from holidays spent on her father's farm at Willunga. Throughout this
whole time, however, her main commitment was to being a writer.
On leaving school, she went to Adelaide University,
where in her second year she had the satisfaction of winning the
Jefferis Memorial Medal for Philosophy - named in honour of the
grandfather whom she had never met. Yet she was becoming impatient. At
22, it seemed to her that "my life was going by and I wasn't doing any
writing". So in 1939 she left university, moved to Sydney, and obtained
work as a journalist on The Daily News.
John Hinde, whom Barbara had known from childhood, was
working on the same newspaper. That same year, they were married. The
newlyweds were advised by the paper's editor to keep the new status of
their relationship a secret, because married women were often "put off"
the job. Over the next few years, Barbara moved on to the Telegraph and
Women's Weekly, landing up at Pix. By the time the
couple's daughter, Rosalind, was born in 1944, Hinde was overseas, as
an ABC war correspondent.
Barbara took on the role of mothering with passion, wit,
and the kind of focused energy which she applied to everything. Even
writing was put aside until Roz went to kindergarten. Then Barbara
began to research and write radio plays and dramatised documentaries on
scientific as well as historical subjects. In this postwar period, the
ABC's drama and features department was producing high-quality material
written by talented authors which included Ruth Park, D'Arcy Niland,
Diana and Mungo MacCallum, Charmian Clift, George Johnston, Colin
Simpson and Hinde. These writers saw each other socially as well as
professionally.
In 1953, Barbara decided to enter the lucrative Sydney
Morning Herald prize, given annually for an unpublished
novel. In three weeks, she produced Contango Day,
which was co-winner of that year's award. In this novel we see the
first of Barbara's empowered female heroes (they could not be called
heroines). After being declined by Angus & Robertson, Contango
Day came out in Britain and America in 1954. This set the
pattern of her novels being far better known overseas than in
Australia. As well as being published in Britain and the US, her books
were translated into a number of Asian and European languages.
After six more novels came The Tall One,
published in Australia, Britain and America in 1977. The hero of this
medieval story is unusually tall (as the title suggests) and her
height is the objective correlative of her strength. By the last page
this 18-year-old single mother is a free woman (rather than a bonded
serf) and she has money, a cottage and land. She is off to market to
buy "a good five-shilling pig, all my own". In that final phrase, we
surely hear an echo of Virginia Woolf's famous injunction that a woman
writer needs a room of her own.
While this was Barbara's last novel, it was by no means
her last published piece of writing. In 1980, there was somewhat of a
flurry in the literary world when The
Bulletin published Barbara's
version of The Drover's Wife. Commenting
satirically on the portraits drawn previously by Henry Lawson, Russell
Drysdale, Murray Bail and Frank Moorhouse, this particular "wife" was
the first to tell the story in her own voice, and from the point of
view of the woman at the centre of the tale.
Barbara again put her hand to Australian women's history
in the biography of three generations of talented and resolute women, Three
of a Kind (published in 1982). In 1986, Barbara was
made a member of the Order of
Australia for services to literature. In 1995, she was recognised with
an Emeritus Award of the Australia Council. Yet this was by no
means the end of the long haul. In
2001, when Barbara suffered a stroke, she was still on the committee of
management of the ASA, and she was rewriting the society's guide to
book contracts.
Barbara lived a literary life so all-encompassing that
it is difficult to imagine there being room for anything else. Yet
Barbe gave time and attention to friendship. When I moved house a few
years ago, she trekked across Sydney to bring me a bottle of wine and a
pot plant. If she was good at friendship, she was clearly great at
day-to-day companionship. Barbara Jefferis and John Hinde had -
unusually among literary couples - a happy marriage. At her death it
had lasted 64 years.
Meanwhile, as Barbara Hinde, she had an entire other
existence as the "grande dame of the cat fancy" (as one of her fellow
fanciers described it). For over four decades, she held positions such
as president of the Siamese Cat Society and chairwoman of the Royal
Agricultural Society's Cat Control Consultative Committee.
Her work for authors has been extremely important, not
just to her colleagues, but to our whole society. Copyright . . .
public lending right . . . educational lending right . . . somehow the
words tend to sound worthy but dull. They do not have the emotional
ring of, for example, human rights, civil rights or women's
rights. Yet if a society is to have those more universal
rights,
a precondition is the right of authors, not just to write and publish
their opinions freely, but to gain a decent living from their writing.
This is particularly important in a country with a small
book-buying population and a language which is shared with two other
huge countries. After all, if Australian authors cannot live by their
real work, they have to do other jobs, and so they are not able to do
the writing which is necessary to enable Australians to read about
themselves, both in fiction and non-fiction. Without this chance of
reading our own stories, our society cannot properly reflect and grow.
Barbara herself, of course, often put her own real work
aside so that of fellow authors could write with greater security, both
economic and legal. Tom Keneally recently said to me that Barbara's
"generosity was enormous". That is no exaggeration. Yet Barbara's
enormous and generous legacy is not just to her fellow writers. The
effect of a large body of empowered authors spreads invisibly outwards,
like a kind of beneficial virus, into the whole social and political
fabric.
Whether or not Australians have read her books or even
heard of Barbara Jefferis, we are all the richer for her resilience,
her indefatigable energy, and the particular long haul which she put
in.
Nadia Wheatley is the author of The
Life and Myth of Charmian Clift.
References / Links
Sydney Morning
Herald, 24 Jan. 2004
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/01/23/1074732602894.html
AustLit
http://www.austlit.edu.au/run?ex=ShowAgent&agentId=A%2BM-