Issue 18. 17 November 2008 - UWA Staff - The University of Western ...

Escape to France
through words
by Sally-Ann Jones
What do you do as an Australian
woman interested in women’s
writing, who has had a long love
affair with France, and who has
an Honorary Fellowship in
European Languages and
Studies?
If you’re Dr Rosemary Lancaster
(pictured below), you write a book
entitled Je Suis Australienne –
Remarkable Women in France, 1880 –
1945. Published by UWA Press, the
book tells the stories of several diverse
Australian women travellers.
“They’re heroic, individual and
unusual. Some are bohemian. Some,
like the nurses, were thrust by their
vocation into an alien environment,”
Dr Lancaster said. She added that the
most time-consuming aspect of
preparing the book was fi nding
women who were not only interesting
enough, but who had written
extensively enough for her to be able
to mine their letters and diaries and, in
some cases, their novels and and
autobiographies.
Much of the material was gathered
from the Australian War Memorial and
the National Library of Australia. And
Dr Lancaster travelled to France and
Britain to photograph some of the
places where her women worked and
trained. She was also able to
illustrate her six chapters with a
photo of a handwritten diary entry of
one of her subjects and the paintings
of another.
Sixteen year-old Daisy White, who
travelled to a Parisian fi nishing school
from her father’s New South Wales
station in the 1880s, is the subject of
the fi rst chapter of the book which, in
its chronological examination of the
women’s lives, is also a record of the
evolution of women’s travel.
Daisy’s diaries, kept in the
National Library had not
been looked at for over
a century until they
were discovered in 2001
by a French scholar.
Dr Lancaster viewed
the original manuscript
and encountered a
young woman who
immersed herself in French
poetry, literature and theatre only to
die of fever in Brisbane at the age of
32. Dr Lancaster subsequently
discovered that Daisy had become a
medical doctor.
A Tasmanian novelist, whose
pseudonym was Tasma, and who
worked as a journalist for “The
Australasian” newspaper is the focus
of the next chapter. She was in Paris
during the decadent Belle Epoque and
wrote of the music halls when they
were at their height. Eight nurses who
cared for their patients in Somme
military nursing stations and whose
letters tell of their regard for their
charges are the
subject of the third chapter.
Stella Bowen, an artist who became
the offi cial Australian artist of the
Second World War, comes next.
“Stella Bowen is the woman I like
most,” Dr Lancaster said. “She
suffered humiliation at the hands of her
philandering lover, Ford Maddox Ford,
had a daughter by him and was a
good mother. She didn’t have much
money but she did have a lot of grit.
She was determined to be an artist,
no matter what.”
The novelist Christina Stead, who
worked as a secretary for a troubled
Paris bank after the Wall Street crash
and who wrote about the bank as a
metaphor for a Europe plagued by the
rise of fascism, is the next chapter’s
subject. The last is devoted to Nancy
Wake, the Resistance fi ghter who
trained as a secret agent.
Dr Lancaster’s next project is a book
about the poet Rene Char and his
interactions with and responses to
artists, from those who created
prehistoric cave paintings to fi gures
such as Picasso and Dali.
And then she plans to write about
women who visited the Riviera –
women like Katherine Mansfi eld, the
celebrity chefs of their day Elizabeth
David and Julia Child, and the writers
Collette and Francoise Sagan.
The University of Western Australia UWA NEWS 17 November 2008 11