sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

Queensland. Here my grandfather is born. When the gold runs out she puts her foot down and they
settle, running a sheep farm and later administering the local post office as well. They see many
events that occur in Australia’s history – the failed Utopian socialist settlements in Paraguay, the
1891 shearer’s strike (a critical moment in labour relations in Australia) – and eventually become
respected members of the local community of Pratten.
In 1908 she takes her youngest son on a trip to see “the old country”. She finds that the watch
trade isn’t what it used to be, that many of her family had died in epidemics, and witnesses one of
the largest demonstrations in Hyde Park by the suffragettes. She had left this country as a young
adult and returned to see herself as a fully‐realised individual, enjoying the vote for women since
1901 and with many achievements behind her. I am sure she would have wondered what she would
have become had she stayed. She had created herself in her own way on the taula rassa that she had
forged by leaving back in 1859. This is the mother that created the child – my grandfather.
The question remains: why write Big Liz’s biography? In comparison with her son who had an
active public life – there are records of his military actions and movements; there are the Hansard
records of his speeches in parliament; newspaper archives provide documentary evidence of public
appearances; as well as diaries he kept when he travelled to England and Ireland with his mother or
during WW1 – I have no written record by his mother.
Because information about women is hard to come by, it is particularly difficult to write a
woman’s biography. If women’s lives were not considered important at that time, then careful
records were not kept. However, other areas opened up. In Liz’s biography there is material that had
been hitherto invisible under older disciplines – the British obsession with records provides the path
she took from London to Australia, the oral history within the family filled gaps, while her own
attempts to rewrite her past blurred the trail. Modesty, a virtue urged upon women, is a further
impediment for biographers. A “virtuous” woman is likely to neither catalogue nor store a record of
her accomplishments. She told her children and grandchildren of the family and wealth that she had
left as well as creating what I believe to be the fiction that she had gone out to Australia to be with
the man she loved – Hugh Humphries. We have to compare her actions in relation to the morals of
the time. Leaving her family, marrying an older man for support or security on the frontier, having
children out of wedlock, running her own business – all need to be compared with the contemporary
concept of virtue. Her rewriting her history – smoothing over the more scandalous parts – allows her
to become the “grande Damme”, or respected member of her community later in life.
Nor is the destruction of records by family, often women folk, conducive for biography.
Lives are fragmented by forces acting upon them; education, social aspiration, migration
economics, politics and moral forces. The result is that generational memories are built up, both
creating and redefining the life that is lived. Memories are vagrant. They might begin with the
younger generation questioning the older, or responding to social pressures at the time to smooth
our family histories in an attempt to create the memories we want. There is a complex historical
reality, which is my task as the biographer to reconstruct, and the collective memory embodied in
family story, myth, that I must use as material for the biography.
In my family there are examples of family members excising records from documents, rewriting
diaries to correct the spelling and grammar to hide the lack of education, or the denial of deathbed
confessions. Liz herself recreated her life story. Further, in writing Big Liz’s biography I am revealing
much about myself. In writing this biography I am thinking back through lives that prefigure and
encircle my own. No matter how hard we resist or censor the past or memories as we create the
biography we still are shaped by the time that we live in. My secrets are not the same as those of
earlier generations – nor are they so dangerous. Further, gender divides determine the gravity of the
secrets. If I had sown wild oats as a male, it would not have had the same repercussions as if I had
been the female in the encounter. Big Liz’s actions and sexual liberties are at opposites with the
social role of women at the time in Australia, which in Anne Summers’s terms were as “God’s police”
or “Dammed Whores” 1 . The question for me as a biographer is which secrets are potent, or set
barriers between myself and others, particularly my family, and which ones are negotiable, flexible,