Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
mour. It was like that of Bret Harte’s version of Aesop’s Fables, which she gave to a
friend for Christmas: 52 it had an edge, albeit a fairly blunt one. One of her favourite
jokes was against herself, and she told it often. She arrived at a meeting to find that
she had not been notified of several earlier meetings. She complained that she ‘did
not want to be merely an ornamental member’ of that Board. Its chairman replied,
‘Oh, Miss Spence, no one would ever accuse you of being that.’ She was laughing
before he realized what he had said. As she left, she encountered the chairman’s business
partner and, chuckling, told him of the faux pas. ‘Looking at her very gravely,
he said at the end of the recital, “Well, Miss Spence, I am surprised. I really thought
Charlie had more tact.” 53
Her humour, her deep concern and generosity, her courage, and her formidable
energy, were the qualities which made her impact so strong. Even people who found
her a nuisance admired her: C. C. Kingston, whom she regarded as spineless and
whom she badgered with telegrams during the 1895 Premiers’ Conference in Tasmania,
treated her with goodhumoured courtesy and appointed her a member of
the government’s Destitute Board. 54 At one meeting of the board, its members were
discussing how to punish some of the inhabitants of the Destitute Asylum. They had
been allowed out to witness a public function and had returned very much the worse
for the hospitality they had met with on their peregrinations. ‘Miss Spence stood
up for them stoutly. “Poor old things! What harm did it do once in a way!” ’ 55 Such
qualities won her many friends, though – partly because she was so single-minded
about her work – few very close ones.
She had, her autobiography suggests, a particularly warm and supportive relationship
with her mother. She recorded her mother’s pleasure in her earnings as a
governess, her mother’s acceptance of the parting of their paths over religion, and offered
tribute to her mother’s sound judgment, accurate observation and kind heart.
As the unmarried daughter who remained at home to look after her mother, Catherine
participated in the realisation of Helen Brodie’s 40-year-old dream – to design
the house that she would live in – not in Scotland, but in Trinity Street, College
Town in Adelaide. A substantial house of about 12 rooms with huge windows looking
out onto the lawns, and trees, it was probably considered comfortable but unpretentious
when it was built. And that house, to which they moved in 1870, included
a little study in which Spence could work, delighting in being with her books and
pigeon holes with her ‘dear old mother sitting with her knitting on her rocking chair
at the low window’. She treasured her mother’s memory of the social changes she had
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