My Tongue is My Own: A Life of Gwen Harwood

A Life of Gwen Harwood

Ann-Marie Priest

• Publisher: La Trobe University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781760642341
• eBook ISBN:
  9781743822319
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

A masterful portrait of a major Australian writer, her incandescent poetry and her battles to be heard in a male-dominated literary establishment.

Winner of the 2023 National Biography Award

The first biography of Gwen Harwood (1920–1995), one of Australia's most significant and distinctive poets.

Harwood is renowned for her brilliance, but loved for her humour, rebellion and mischief. A public figure by the end of her life, she was always deeply protective of her privacy, and even now, some twenty-six years after her death, little is known of the experiences that gave rise to her extraordinary poems. This book follows Harwood from her childhood in 1920s Brisbane to her final years in Hobart in the 1990s. It traces how a lively, sardonic and determined young woman built a career in the conservative 1950s, blasting her way into the patriarchal strongholds of Australian poetry.

Harwood refused to be bound by convention, 'liberating' herself, to use her word, before women's lib existed. Yet she also struggled for much of her life to combine marriage and motherhood with her creative ambitions. In this sense, she is a twentieth-century everywoman. She is also a unique and powerful presence in Australian literary history, a poet who challenged orthodoxies and spoke in a remarkable range of voices.

This illuminating, moving biography reveals a deeply passionate figure both at odds with her time and deeply of it, and reclaims and celebrates this important Australian writer.

'Gwen Harwood, that excellent poet and critic, deserves a sympathetic and lively biography. Ann-Marie Priest, to her credit, has just written that book.' —Ann Blainey, winner of 2009 National Biography Award

'Read this meticulous biography with Harwood's poetry in hand, and chase down every poem that Priest cites.' —The Sydney Morning Herald

'Ann-Marie Priest has captured completely the sprite-like nature of one of Australia's finest poets… Through these pages, the great poet feels so alive.' — Judges comments, National Biography Award

Part I:
1920–1945

1

Once I Lived Like the Gods

George the 5th, Rex Imp., F.D.,

Ruled an empire wide and free,

When the angels flew to earth

Hymning GWENDOLINA’S birth;

1920 was the date:

Queensland the enraptured state.

Gwen Harwood, Postcard to A.D. Hope, 1963

WHEN GWEN HARWOOD WAS IN HER MID-FIFTIES, SHE sent some childhood photos to a younger poet who had recently become her lover. In one, a jubilant three-year-old sits astride a beautifully carved and painted rocking horse in the dusty yard of her family’s war-service cottage in country Mitchelton, just north of Brisbane. Barelegged and barefoot, in a short gingham dress, head an unruly mass of curls, she beams at the camera, utterly at home, radiating joyful self-satisfaction. Out of focus behind her is a large, leafy tree, perhaps an orange or lemon tree, alongside some distant, grainy structures that may be a barn and some chook sheds.

On the back of the photo, the adult Gwen scrawled a three-stanza ditty in which she described her childhood self, with characteristic glee, as about to ‘take a ride’ up ‘the gullies of Parnassus’ – legendary Grecian home of the Muses, and thus of poetry, music, literature and learning. But for now, she is ‘secure among the shining / orange trees’, happy and free. It is a vision of sheer effortless being: ‘artless, thoughtless, unrepining / Gwendoline goes rocking on.’¹

This was how she liked to think of her early childhood: as a time of untrammelled joy, when she had as yet nothing to long for and nothing to regret. Even so, she was aware that this was only one way of looking at it.² From the perspective of her later exile from Queensland, her time at Mitchelton was a rural idyll: little Gwendoline among the chookies, doted upon by mother, father and maternal grandmother, poor but happy in the ‘land wherein the citrons bloom’.³ But with only a slight twist of the lens, Mitchelton becomes a sinister place, ‘half Gothic, half biblical’,⁴ where poverty dragged at war-blighted families, kind Granny slaughtered the ducks and chickens for the pot, and the boys next door threatened little Gwendoline with a knife.

Both versions were true. Gwen’s childhood was safe, happy and full of small joys: the doves in the barn, so tame she could hold them; her parents singing spirited duets at the piano after tea; the creek lined with ‘yellow and blue flowering trees’ that ran through the flat fields of the rural settlement. It was also full of terrors. An intensely imaginative child, Gwen was capable not only of great delight but also of great dread. She was haunted by the ‘small horrors’ pictured in Little Buttercup’s Picture Book, a Victorian children’s annual that belonged to her grandmother, and terrified by the ‘gorilla-like monsters’ in Norman Lindsay’s World War I recruitment posters, secreted in a trunk under the house, who ‘threatened women and children in kitchens like ours’.⁵ Such images were delightfully thrilling by day, but she was their helpless prey at night when they took on flesh and came ‘step by evil step through the shadows’ to her bed.⁶ Tormented by nightmares, she ‘could not bear / to see the sun go down’.⁷

In interviews and essays, the adult Gwen preferred to focus on the idyllic aspects of her childhood. ‘At my public readings I always paint my childhood as radiant & unclouded,’ she told a friend when she was in her early fifties, ‘as in extreme old age I shall probably paint this [troubled] period of my life.’⁸ This was partly strategic; by depicting her childhood as unproblematic, she could stymie any critics who might seek to draw dark inferences about her from her poems.⁹ But she also took profound pleasure in revisiting, recreating, the happiness of her childhood. She drew sustenance from savouring and celebrating past joys. In old age, she would mildly satirise her own tendency to see the past through a golden veil, joking that she suffered from ‘chronic morbid nostalgia’ and telling one interviewer that she was ‘nostalgic even for five minutes ago’.¹⁰ But her attachment to the past was more than nostalgia. All her life, she would believe that moments of beauty, pleasure and human connection, no matter how fleeting, had a life-transforming power. Not only could they lift her for an instant from the drudgery of daily life, but they could also become a talisman against future darkness.

This belief had its roots in her earliest experiences. Her first memories were of her beloved Grandmother Maud adjuring her to remember things.¹¹ ‘She would show me “a phenomenon” – an odd-shaped cloud, a root growing through a bracelet she had lost in the garden and found again – and say “Now remember this, you won’t see such a thing again”.’¹² The most impressive of all the things young Gwennie was urged to store in her memory was a total eclipse of the sun, an occasion she was later able to date precisely to a Thursday afternoon in September 1922, when she was two years old: ‘I can remember my Granny holding me up and saying now look, look, you must remember this, it may not happen again in your lifetime. And I did remember it, I can remember the apocalyptic light and the glimpse of the corona through smoked glass, and the birds all going to rest.’¹³

Gwen Foster with grandmother Maud Jaggard (left) and glamorous ‘aunts’, her namesake Gwendoline Stenlake (right) and Clarice Stenlake, in Mitchelton, 1921

Grandmother Maud found joy and wonder in the everyday – ‘a carrot constricted by a curtain ring it had grown through, a piece of firewood with worm-holes spelling MUM’¹⁴ – and she passed that capacity on to Gwen. This was the quality her friend Tony would describe as an ‘intense and special power of delight’. All her life she found myriad sources of enchantment in daily life – particularly in time spent with those she loved. After her death, one friend would describe, with some bemusement, her ability to take a simple experience, ‘a day, an afternoon, an hour’ they had spent together, and bathe it in ‘so radiant an aura of fond recollection that you stood astonished at the transfiguration of the scene and your part in it’.¹⁵ To Gwen, such heightened experiences were the truth of life, ‘those moments when we wake / alive from the sleep of time’.¹⁶ The memory of them was necessary sustenance when life fell disastrously short of glorious. As she put it in ‘The Double Image’, ‘heart remembers, lives / on nothing, if need be, until it wakes again / tasting joy it cannot name’. The last two lines of ‘An die Parzen’, by the German Romantic Friedrich Hölderlin, would become her mantra, referred to often in her letters: ‘Einmal / lebt’ ich wie Götter, und mehr bedarfs nicht (‘Once I lived like the gods, and nothing more is needed’). She would recite this to herself in times of misery as in times of rapture¹⁷ and even put the lines in an early poem: ‘Once in a shadowless time we lived / as gods might live . . .’¹⁸ Her purest delight, and the most sustaining – in retrospect, at least – belonged to the ‘unrepining’ days of earliest childhood.

♦ ♦ ♦

Gwen’s father was English and her mother Australian, a distinction that led to a continuous, teasing rivalry between them as to which culture was superior. ‘England had Shakespeare, the Empire, the King James Bible, snow’, Gwen would write, while ‘Australia had a decent climate and equality’.¹⁹ Gwen herself was in no doubt that she was Australian, the latest in ‘a line of independent, energetic Australian women’. Before her mother, Agnes, came Agnes’s mother, Maud Jaggard, and grandmother, Matilda Markwell, both of whom Gwen knew well. They were ‘marvellous models’:

These women weren’t all like each other, they were totally different in their beliefs, and their abilities, and their gifts. And their inclinations. The thing they had in common was their independence, and their feeling that . . . there was a great deal of simple happiness in the world, and people shouldn’t keep you from it.²⁰

Of the three, Grandmother Maud was the most significant in Gwen’s mind. A few months after Gwen was born, Maud moved in with her daughter and son-in-law, and to Gwen, it was Maud, not Agnes, who brought her up. ‘My mother, beautiful & selfish, always seemed to be out playing tennis or visiting or bossing committees or arranging parties,’ she told a friend. ‘Granny had endless time for me.’²¹ In her fifties, Gwen wrote four stories about her childhood – attempts at an autobiography she never completed.²² In each, Maud is the central figure: brisk, calm, efficient, taking charge in every situation, sought after throughout the fledgling community for practical aid as much as for tea and gossip. She is strict with her granddaughter and does not hesitate to smack her if she is naughty. But she is also kind and humorous, and takes evident pleasure in the little girl’s company. After Maud’s death, Gwen would tell a friend that she and her grandmother had ‘a deep understanding that the difference in our ages did not diminish at all’.²³ It was Granny who understood her night terrors and did what she could to help her feel safe.²⁴ Granny was also the one who recited poetry to her before she was old enough to read.²⁵ The sentimental Victorian verse Maud favoured, along with the thunderous rhythms of the King James Bible, was the music that first ‘tuned’ Little Gwendoline’s ear ‘to metre’.²⁶

Maud Jaggard was only forty-one when her granddaughter was born. She had lost her husband, William Jaggard, some six years earlier, when they were living in the small city of Rockhampton in central Queensland. Eighteen years older than his wife, Willy was headmaster at Crescent Lagoon School when he died suddenly of heart failure at fifty-two, just before World War I. Agnes, their only child, was then sixteen, a scholarship student at Rockhampton Girls Grammar School. While Agnes completed her Senior Certificate and went on to take up a teaching post at the newly established Mount Morgan High School, some forty kilometres south-west of Rockhampton, Maud threw herself into the war effort. She helped to establish the Soldiers’ Rest and Recreation Rooms on Bolsover Street, providing meals and wholesome entertainment to servicemen passing through Rockhampton, and was soon running the place.

She was a very capable woman. The eldest of eleven children, Maud grew up on a property outside Alpha in Central West Queensland. Her father, Richard Markwell (‘a splendid horseman over timber’), bred and trained racehorses, and the family were comfortably off.²⁷ Maud could turn her hand to anything, from tending farm animals and managing a household to setting up a charity.²⁸ Forthright and assured, excelling in ‘sharp repartee’,²⁹ she could also be fierce. One evening, Gwen was out with Maud in the sulky when they came across a man ‘bothering’ a woman on the side of the ride. Maud struck him with the horsewhip. She was ‘never . . . afraid of anything’.³⁰

Agnes was as redoubtable as her mother. According to family folklore, she once shot a crocodile in Rockhampton’s Fitzroy River and claimed its skin as a trophy.³¹ She was a clever student, a champion tennis player and a talented pianist with a ‘vibrant personality’.³² During the war, she helped her mother at the Rest and Recreation Rooms when she could, playing at informal concerts, making sandwiches and raising funds. When the Rooms became the headquarters of the local recruiting office, she got to know the newly arrived recruitment sergeant, twenty-eight-year-old Joseph Foster.

Agnes Jaggard and Joseph Foster, Rockhampton, 1918

Joe had emigrated to Melbourne with his younger brother, Bill, in 1913. Some two years later, he joined the Australian Army and went to the Middle East as an orderly on a hospital ship. By mid-1916, he was back in Melbourne with a medical discharge,³³ and as Bill had also been invalided out of the army, he and Joe decided to go north to work as recruiters on the show circuit. The ‘notable Foster brothers’ quickly gai...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: 1920–1945
• Part II: 1946–1969
• Part III: 1970–1995
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Sources
• Notes
• Image Credits
• Index
• Back Cover