Abstract
It is perhaps ironic that the first Australian Literary Award would be initiated and funded by an Australian woman writer of remarkable élan, and the first recipient of the award would be the dominant and redoubtable Australian male author Patrick White. Miles Franklin (1879–1954) maybe regarded as Australia’s first feminist woman writer, a pioneering figure, who not only broke the silence but also pushed against the boundaries and borders not without controversy in many cases. Spanning more than a century of activist writing Miles Franklin, Katherine Susannah Pritchard, Jean Devanny, Eleanor Dark and Germaine Greer can be assessed as intrepid voices of Australian women’s writing. Remarkable too is their commitment to and disenchantment with Marxist ideology as supporters and members of the Australian Communist Party.
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Notes
- 1.
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Macgibbon and Kee Ltd, 1970), 1.
- 2.
Odette Kelada, “Skating on Thin Paper a Journey in the Guise of a Twentieth Century Australian Woman Writer” in Journal of the Department of English. Jharna Sanyal and Sanjukta Dasgupta (ed), (Special Issue: New Literatures in English Vol xxx II Nos 1&2 2005–2006), 12.
- 3.
Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career (London: Angus & Robertson, 1986), V.
- 4.
Miles Franklin, ibid, v.
- 5.
Miles Franklin, ibid, v.
- 6.
Bertha Lawson, My Henry Lawson, (Sydney: F. Johnson, 1943),19.
- 7.
Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career, ix.
- 8.
Miles Franklin, ibid, 27.
- 9.
Miles Franklin, ibid, 21.
- 10.
Miles Franklin, ibid, 17.
- 11.
Miles Franklin, ibid, 144.
- 12.
Mathew Ray Miles Franklin: Australian Writers and Their Work (Melbourne: Landsdowne Press, 1963), 12.
- 13.
Drusilla Modjeska, Exiles at Home Women Writers 1925–1945 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1981, this edition 2001), 156.
- 14.
Marjorie Barnard Miles Franklin (New York: Twayne Publishers Inc, 1967), 178.
- 15.
Why I am a Communist, (Sydney: Current Book Distributors, 1956), 1–16.
- 16.
- 17.
Katharine Susannah Prichard, Coonardoo (Sydney: Angus & Robertson Classics, 2002), V.
- 18.
Prichard, ibid, (xxi).
- 19.
H. Drake-Brockman, Katharine Susannah Prichard Australian Writers and Their Work (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1967), 25.
- 20.
Jean Devanny, Romantic Revolutionary (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999), 23.
- 21.
Jean Devanny, ibid, 37.
- 22.
Jean Devanny, Sugar Heaven (Victoria: Vulgar Press, 2002), 10.
- 23.
Carson, Susan. “Surveillance and Slander: Eleanor Dark in the 1940s and 1950s” in Hecate vol 27, no 1, 32–43. (Brisbane: University of Queensland Publication, 2001), 3.
- 24.
Barbara Brooks, and Judith Clark, Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life (Sydney: Macmillan, 1998), 76.
- 25.
Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career, 87.
- 26.
Interview by David Leser October 2008.
http://davidleser.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Germaine-Greer.pdf
- 27.
David Leser, ibid., 1.
- 28.
Germaine Greer, White Fella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood (London: Profile Books, 2004).
- 29.
- 30.
Ann Hale and Mary Hawkins, Eggs Not Sex: The Functionalism of Germaine Greer Anthropology Today, vol. 1, no. 2 (April 1985), 21–23. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain.
- 31.
Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman. (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 5.
- 32.
Greer, The Female Eunuch, 93.
- 33.
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Dasgupta, S. (2017). From Miles Franklin to Germaine Greer: Writing as Activism. In: Das, D., Dasgupta, S. (eds) Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50400-1_6
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