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Gender and race relations in Elizabeth O''Conner''s northern homesteads.

Article Excerpt
CHARACTERISTIC of 'the dire years of political and social conservatism' (Sheridan 158) which followed World War II was a desire, an aspect of the mentality of Fortress Australia, to reformulate and reaffirm the conservative values of the frontier for a new generation of readers. In this essay I explore Elizabeth O'Conner's seven books, published between 1958 and 1980, as works which functioned ideologically to implement this purpose. Deeply integrated into white Australian culture, and drawing on a wide range of literary influences, O'Conner's writings straddle the divide between so-called serious and popular writing. Less successful with the literary and academic establishments than with the reading public, and talented professional writing rather than profoundly original, they repay attention as exemplifications of national discourses in their era.

Representations of the homestead are the focus for such discourses in O'Conner's oeuvre. While the treatment of homestead life in earlier Australian writing is complex, O'Conner's can be defined initially in relation to a few obvious parameters: middle-class rather than aristocratic; dealing with the solidities of marriage rather than the uncertainties of courtship; and focusing on feminised, domesticated spaces rather than locations for transient male exchanges and departures. An assumption of Aboriginal inferiority is a fundamental support of the hierarchy within the microcosm of Australian social arrangements represented in O'Conner's homesteads. Additionally, they are contextualised within an outdoor masculine world of work, and function as sites through which or within which patrilineage is reasserted. Ultimately impregnable, homesteads operate in these twentieth-century literary texts much as they had operated in rural politics since the beginnings of settlement: as centres for preserving class and racial distinctions. They control disruptive elements inside their bounds, and disarm or repel those outside. Thus they address the disorderly possibilities of landscape and the weather, of wandering and wanderers, while endorsing the subordinate status of women and non-European races.

Elizabeth O'Conner (Barbara McNamara) was born in 1913 and died at Atherton in May 2000. Spanning the century, her life exemplifies aspects of white women's experience in rural and regional Australia. After growing up on her father's sheep station at Dunedoo in central-western New South Wales and at Katoomba, O'Conner came in 1943 or 1944 to 'Forest Home' cattle station on the Gilbert River as the manager's wife. She continued in this role for sixteen years, raising four children. As a comic recreation of station life in the Gulf, her first book Steak for Breakfast was widely acclaimed on publication in 1958, and reprinted into the 1980s. The opening chapter recounts the first-person narrator's tearful arrival, after a long car journey occupied in soothing her fractious first baby, at a homestead fictionalised as 'Silver Ridge'. On the model of narratives like Mrs Gunn's We of the Never-Never, Bess gradually comes to terms with the deprivations and tensions of remote existence, and wins acceptance in the community. In portraying the homestead, the central location throughout, as a conditional matriarchy in which the focus is on female feeling and experience, O'Conner advanced a northern tradition of female pioneering literature first made public in 1951-52, when Rachel Henning's letters (1853-1883) were printed in the Sydney Bulletin. (1) Although the narrator's husband is nominally the Boss of the homestead hierarchy, he is usually absent or distracted by outdoor work, so that the Missus rules as his subaltern. Bess's dedication to the vocations of wife and mother is vindicated at the race meeting that concludes Steak for Breakfast, when the Boss suddenly assumes prominence in a traditional masculine frontier role by winning on a favourite horse. Bess is sidelined while tending her (by now) three small children. Her anxiety for her husband's safety is alleviated only at his moment of triumph, as the narrative finally reassures its readers as to the rectitude and felicity of marital and family conventions.

An effect of the uncontested gender roles, allied with the cheerful tone of O'Conner's autobiographical writing, is nevertheless to transform the traditional narrative of the muster yard and droving camp into a celebration of an isolated domesticity. In this she departed from the literary example provided by her father, Eric Lowe, whose four novels, published between 1938 and 1951 and set in rural New South Wales, represent the homestead overwhelmingly as a site for masculine-interaction. The narrator's good will and generosity as she learns to manage her complicated household are fundamental to the appeal of Steak for Breakfast, while the opening rendition of a family outing to a distant cinema in A Second Helping--a sequel published in 1969--confirms O'Conner's gift for lively description and light-hearted, sometimes ironic, humour. Such festive endorsements of a domesticity upheld under exceptional difficulties partly explain the success of these books, in an era when suburban Australians were intent on enjoying to the full, following war-time upheavals, the advantages of stable home life and increasing prosperity. O'Conner's success with readers is further explained by the romantic virtuosity of her stories. This quality becomes obvious when they are compared with other women's less literary accounts of homestead life in the same period and region, such as Thelma Martel's contributions to A Christmas Card in April. (2)

The only resistance of O'Conner's narrator to her household roles is as reader and author, a feature which supports...