Notes
- Ruth Ford, in her article on Monte Punshon, notes that while Punshon ‘had “come out” (been interviewed in the gay press and appeared on TV)’ (p. 119) at the age of 103 she ‘did not use the label lesbian, she had an identity and a sense of herself as different, arising from her same sex love’ (p. 120). Ford Ruth Speculating on Scrapbooks, Sex and Desire: issues in lesbian history Australian Historical Studies 1996 111 126
- Derrida Jacques Archive Fever: a Freudian impression trans. Eric Prenowitz, University of Chicago Press Chicago 1996 36
- Halberstam Judith Female Masculinity Duke University Press Durham 1998 50
- Sheila Jeffreys, in an essay titled, ‘Does It Matter If they Did It?’ describes evidence as one of the central problems of lesbian history. What exactly would constitute ‘evidence’ of lesbian desire, behaviour or relationships? Jeffreys Sheila Does It Matter If They Did It? Not A Passing Phase: reclaiming lesbians in history 1840-1985 Lesbian History Group The Women's Press London 1989 19 28
- The Lesbian History Sourcebook: love and sex between women in Britain from 1780 to 1970 Oram Alison Turnbull AnnMarie Routledge New York 2001 2
- Bennett Judith The L-word in Women's History (Unpublished paper, October 1990( Lesbian Subjects: a feminist studies reader Vicinus Martha Indiana University Press Bloomington 1996 2
- Halberstam, Female Masculinity, pp. 111-141
- Terry Jennifer Theorizing Deviant Historiography Differences 1991 3 2 55
- Treby Ivor C The Michael Field Catalogue: a book of lists De Blackland Press London 1998 65
- Frye Marilyn The Politics of Reality: essays in feminist The Crossing Press New York 1983 172
- Letters of Vance and Nettie Palmer 1915-1963 Smith Vivian National Library of Australia Canberra 1991 first pubublished 1977 See also Modjeska Drusilla Australian women writers, 1925-1945 Angus & Robertson Sydney 1991 in which she discusses Nettie's submergence under Vance's reputation and emphasises the important role Nettie played in promoting Australian women's writing during this period.
- See Keene's Judith biographical essay, Aileen Palmer's Coming of Age Crossing the Boundaries: feminisms and the critique of knowledges Caine Barbara Pringle Rosemary Allen &Unwin Sydney 1988 and Inglis Amirah Australians in the Spanish Civil War Allen &Unwin. Sydney 1987
- I use this term as it is the way Palmer and her family describe her illness. In a letter to Katharine Susannah Prichard dated 1969, Helen Palmer writes, ‘Yes, some of the doctors call it schizophrenia; others simply describe it as a manic-depressive condition; others admit that the terms overlap so much and the whole field is so little understood that labels mean little’. Helen Palmer Papers, NLA MS 6083, Box 2, Folder 5, Letter dated 5 July 1969.
- I am aware that in my selection of documents from the collection, I am involved in constructing an archive within an archive and this raises two interlinking questions: first, where does the archive start and finish? Is the archive everything in Aileen Palmer's collection, or the body of writing unified by reference to her signature, although dispersed throughout other collections, of whose existence I am unaware? I use ‘signature’ in this context to refer to Derrida's second modality of signature ‘as a set of idiomatic marks that a signer might leave by accident or intention in his product’ quoted in Grosz Elizabeth Space, Time and Perversion: the politics of bodies Allen & Unwin Sydney 1995 For instance, Dr Judith Keene (History Department, University of Sydney) informed me of the existence of the Saffin Collection at the State Library of Victoria, which contains material relating to Palmer's civil war experiences ’; personal communication, September 1998.
- Waldby Catherine Feminism and Method Transitions: new Australian feminisms Caine Barbara Pringle Rosemary Allen & Unwin St Leonards 1995 17
- NLA MS 6759, Box 1, Folder 1, letter dated 4 April 1964.
- Hamilton Ian Keepers of the Flame: literary estates and the rise of biography Pimlico London 1993 viii
- Faderman Lillian Surpassing the Love of Men: romantic friendship and love between women from the renaissance to the present William Morrow New York 1985 first published 1981 and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (1985) The Female World of Love and Ritual: relations between women in nineteenth-century America, in Disorderly Conduct: visions of gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A Knopf).
- For a range of views on this ‘debate’, see Cook Blanche Wiesen The Historical Denial of Lesbianism Radical History Review 1979 20 60 65 Martin Sylvia ‘These Walls of Flesh’: the problem of the body in the romantic friendship/lesbianism debate Historical Reflections 1994 20 243 266 Newton Esther The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: RadclyffeHall and the new woman Signs 1984 9 Martha Vicinus (1993) ‘They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong’: the historical roots of the modern lesbian identity’, in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale &David M. Halperin (Eds) The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, pp. 432-452 (New York: Routledge).
- Sahli Nancy Smashing: women's relationships before the Fall Chrysalis 1979 17
- Vicinus Martha Independent Women: work and community for single women 1850-1920 University of Chicago Press Chicago 1985
- Rosemary Auchmuty (1989) You're a Dyke, Angela! Elsie J. Oxenham and the Rise and Fall of the Schoolgirl Story, in Lesbian History Group, Not a Passing Phase, pp. 119-140; and Inness Sherrie A. Intimate Communities : representation and social transformation in women's college fiction, 1895-1910 Bowling Green State University Popular Press Bowling Green 1995
- Doan Laura Fashioning Sapphism: the origins of a modern English lesbian culture Columbia University Press New York 2001
- On the different educational contexts of Australia, Britain and the USA, see Mackinnon Alison Love and Freedom: professional women and the reshaping of personal life Cambridge University Press. Cambridge 1997 For the University of Melbourne specifically, see Kelly Farley Degrees of Liberation: a short history of women in the University of Melbourne The Women Graduates Centenary Committee of the University of Melbourne. Melbourne 1985
- She was enrolled in French, German and French literature, graduating in1934. Personal communication with Dr Cecily Close, 1 May 1998; Melbourne University Archives, Aileen Palmer, student registration details.
- The last line before the missing pages reads, ‘I have been coming back to life as I wrote this. There can be escape: I must remain and live’ (p. 68). The last pages also contain similar ideas and Aileen has quoted at length some one she refers to as K[atherine] M[ansfield] whose letters she copied in 1930, ‘about the time I was beginning to be dead’. This is an underlying theme in the diary which is juxtaposed with finding the ‘mob’ and coming back to life. My own desire to know what was in these pages revolves around the notion that there once was something to be known and to think about the process by which this absence was created by a taking away, but also paradoxically an addition; inserting in the form of an absence/silence, a way to read the diary itself. There are also pages which are not numbered, usually copies of poems or annotations beside the main text, and in the centre of the diary a double-page chart (‘table of qualities’) with the names of the mob members and other women at the top of the page and a mark out of ten against a list of forty ‘qualities’. For the purposes of reference, I have given these pages a letter following the page number which precedes it/them – 54a and b.
- These women were not part of the ‘mob’ but seem to have been either students or teachers at PLC (Presbyterian Ladies College), East Melbourne, where AP had been a student from 1929 to 1931 (PLC Archive, Aileen Palmer's student registration details). While AP does refer to many women in this diary, it is clear from the way she uses the term ‘mob’ to designate a specific group of women that not all the women referred to were ‘mob’ members. There seems to have been a core group of eight women who constituted the ‘mob’, including Palmer herself. The clubhouse or ‘clubbus’ which AP refers to in the diary was the name for the student union, which contained men's and women's rooms (not residential) for students to meet, though as Diana Dyson, who was at Melbourne University in 1938, recalls, until the building of the new union in 1937, the ‘sexes were strictly segregated’. In under graduate life in the years since 1917 Dow Hume Hutchison Publishing Group Melbourne 1983
- NLA MS 6759, Box 6, Folder 42, 1932 Diary, p. 1. In this first entry, AP relates how ‘Nellie asked if I kept a diary: what's she driving at? I decided Iwould’ (p. 2).
- In my original reading of the diary, I assumed Gn was Gr[eta]; however, after a personal communication with Dr Jill Golden (Flinders University), it seems likely that Gn was an in-joke referring to Nellie, which played on the silent Gin middle English.
- 1932 diary, p. 59.
- Ibid., p. 66.
- In my first readings of the diary I was obsessed with finding out what the code could be; how much of this code was particular to Palmer's ‘mob’ and how much of it was a reflection of idioms current at Melbourne University in this period. I consulted Farrago, Hotcha ’; The Students Ballyhoo Magazine and the Melbourne University Magazine looking for any indication that these words might have had a general currency on campus in the 1930s, with no success, until I realised that my attitude was the problem. I had to accept that I would not be able to crack the code and that, while I could infer meanings from the context in which they were used, I would never ‘know for sure’.
- 1932 diary, p. 77, ‘The day I was collected has never been diarised, & probably never will be’. In her second entry of the diary AP refers to the most ‘eventful’ day since the shop [university] started, the two events being‘1. Going to St Joan with Alexia … 2. being collected ’; unexpected and hil orbil arifying [unclear]’ (1932 diary, NLA MS 6759, Box 6, folder 42, p. 4). The ‘shop’ was the name students gave to Melbourne University, as Geoffrey Hutton, who was a student at the same time as AP recalls: “The shop” was a place you went into every day to attend lectures and tutorials, swot for exams and hope to take home a degree’, in More Memories of Melbourne University Undergraduate Life in the Years since1919 Dow Hume Hutchison Publishing Group Melbourne 1985
- ‘Table of qualities’, pp. 54a and b. This is a double page in the centre of the diary which has been ruled as a table, with certain qualities such as charm, looks, courage, intellect, imagination, manners, social poise, jealousy, self restraint and affectation, among others, listed down the left-hand side and names of mob members at the top going from left to right. Each quality has a mark out of ten listed against each name.
- Appears to be the name of another woman whom Dorothy (possibly) collected, as Palmer writes in a diary entry, ‘Secombe, [Nancy] Trangmar the night before; and she [Dorothy] “consolidated” me!’ 1932 diary, p. 51.
- 1932 diary, p. 47.
- ‘Mob’ culture encouraged an appreciation of Beethoven, Shelley, the writing of Henry Handel Richardson (Richardson's The Getting of Wisdom is a classic of Australian literature set in a girls’ school at the end of the nineteenth century) and someone referred to only as K[atherine] M[ansfield] as well as a love of trees!
- 1932 diary, p. 36. Palmer refers to this again: ‘It [diary] gives the Mob from the wrong angle. To be at all adequate, it should have an account of my being collected, which at the time I didn’t feel equal to writing, and should give a better idea of our conversations, of the Lit. life and Phil. life of the Mob’ (p. 47.)
- 1932 diary, p. 66.
- Ibid., p. 16.
- Ibid., p. 27.
- Ibid., p. 29a.
- Ibid., p. 51.
- Vicinus Martha Lesbian History: all theory and no facts or all facts and no theory? Radical History Review 1994 60 59 59
- 1932 diary, p. 23.
- Ibid., p. 6.
- The term ‘collect’ is used several times in a similar way (although in the context of a heterosexual relationship) in Ruth Adams's 1938 novel set in a girls’ school, I’m Not Complaining: ‘Then he offered, very handsomely, to promise not to see her again as I took such a conventional view of the situation. I told him he could collect the entire Hunt family as far as I was concerned, because it was lover's farewell for us’. Adam Ruth I'm Not Complaining Virago, 1983 London 1938 I am indebted to Dr Bronwyn Levy (University of Queensland) for drawing my attention to this reference.
- 1932 diary, p. 29a.
- Ibid., p. 30.
- ‘We are also excessively concerned with knowing-for-sure. Lesbian History has always been characterised by a “not knowing’ that could be its defining core”. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian History’, p. 57.
- Ibid., p. 58.
- Gilmore Leigh Autobiographics: a feminist theory of women's self representation Cornell University Press Ithaca 1994
- I Know My Own Heart: the diaries of Anne Lister, 1791-1840 Whitbread Helena Virago London 1988 See also Donoghue Emma Passions between Women: British lesbian culture 1668-1801 Scarlett Press London 1993 Terry Castle provides a much-needed background to the questions raised by the ‘discovery’ and decoding of Lister's diaries by Whitbread, which revolved around whether they were a hoax ’; due to the explicit sexual language used and Whitbread's ‘failure to describe the “crypt hand” in which the erotic parts of the diary were written ’; or the way the code was ultimately deciphered’ (p. 243). Even more interesting is Castle's lengthy quotation from an article published in 1958 by Phyllis M. Ramsden which used the diaries but which had this to say about the code: ‘The presence of the “crypt”-alphabet may have deterred some prospective readers in the past, for it is natural to assume that the secret passages are of some special significance and must be deciphered at all costs. Fortunately this is not the case. With very few exceptions the passages in “crypt”- alphabet are of no historical interest whatsoever’ (p. 243). For Castle, this example reveals the ‘perennial ghosting of the lesbian’ in modern culture ’; I think it also highlights the ways in which the writing of history is so dependent on the ‘positionality’ of the reader/interpreter. Terry Castle (1993) The Apparitional Lesbian: female homosexuality and modern culture (New York: Columbia University Press).
- Elizabeth A. Grosz (1995) Rethinking Queer Subjectivity, in Space, Time and Perversion, pp. 207-227.
- Ibid.
- Sedgwick Kosofsky Eve Epistemology of the Closet University of California Press (Berkeley 1990 44 45 While I find this comment highlights the implicit assumptions in most histories of sexualities about what constitutes ‘homosexuality’ which I read as ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ now ’; I am aware, as Terry Castle argues, that ‘there is an important sense in which the subject of lesbianism simply does not occur to her [Sedgwick]. Castle (1993) ‘A Polemical Introduction’, in The Apparitional Lesbian, p. 13. On the issue of definition of ‘lesbian’, see Butler Judith Imitation and Gender Insubordination Women, Knowledge and Reality: explorations in feminist philosophy subordination Garry Ann Pearsall Marilyn Routledge New York 1996 371 387 In opposition to Butler, see Castle, A Polemical Introduction, pp. 14-15.
- NLA, MS 6759, Box 5, folders 35-41.
- NLA MS 6759, Box 7, Folder 48 contains several chapters of ‘20th Century Pilgrim’, only one is dated 7 April 1948.
- Michel foucault What is an Author? Michel Foucault: language, counter-memory, practice – selected essays and interviews Bouchard Donald F. Basil Blackwell. Oxford 1977 129
- NLA MS 6759, Box 5, Series 4, Folder 36, untitled manuscript of ‘Pilgrim's Way’, dated June 1963, three pages plain quarto paper.
- Dever Maryanne Reading Other People's Mail Archives and Manuscripts 1996 24 116 129
- NLA MS 6759, Box 4, Folder 32, undated card from ‘Deb’ to AP.
- NLA MS 6759, Box 4, Folder 32. Letter? on two A4 lined pages numbered as 1/2 and also as 38/9 which seems to correspond to other loose pages of writing in this series of numbers.
- The alteration of names in ‘Pilgrim's Way’ may reflect the fact that many of these people were well-known Australian cultural figures.
- Summarising definitions of ‘the letter’ for the 1986 special issue of Yale French Studies, editor Charles Porter makes the following comment: ‘Such “no addressee” or “no addresser” letters are doubtless rather rare; the typical letter remains a private communication between two persons’. Porter Charles A Foreword Yale French Studies: Men/Women of Letters 1986 71 2 2
- Possibly Deborah Jordan, an Australian academic who has written on Nettie Palmer. I am grateful to Maryanne Dever for drawing my attention to this possibility.
- This seems to me to be an example of what Foucault calls the ‘author function’: ‘If an individual is not an author, what are we to make of those things he has written or said, left among his papers or communicated to others?’ Foucault, What is an Author? p. 118.
- NLA MS 6083, Box 2, Folder 1, letter HP to VP & NP dated 25 May, p. 1. This letter is undated by year, but I think it is possible to assume it is 1958 given a comment Helen makes ‘about ten years being a fair time to give a trial to the first method [of dealing with Aileen's illness]’, p. 3.
- The burning of Palmer's papers is highly suggestive and echoes Estelle B. Freedman's comments, on discovering that Miriam Van Walters had burnt letters from Geraldine Thompson, that this ‘provided a smoking gun, of sorts, to explain the absence of evidence documenting the intimacy of the Van Walters’;Thompson relationship’. Freedman Estelle B ‘The Burning of Letters Continues’: elusive identities and the historical construction of sexuality Journal of Women's History 1998 9 4 182 182
- NLA MS 6083, Box 25, Folder 1, Restricted material, undated manuscript titled ‘Day of the Voyager’ This writing has a note on the front page which reads ‘To Simon’, but it is found in Helen Palmer's Restricted collection. It is possible that Aileen sent this to Helen or that it was in fact sent to Simon, if such a person existed, and was thus forwarded to Helen.
- Keene, Aileen Palmer's Coming of Age, p. 186.
- Ibid.
- NLA MS 6083, Box 25, Restricted Folder 2, Letter dated 29 July 1959, KSP to HP.
- Meaghan Morris (1992) I Don't Really Like Biography, in S. Magarey, Caroline Guerin & Paula Hamilton (Eds) Australian Feminist Studies, Special Issue – Writing Lives: feminist biography and autobiography, 16, p. 13-23.
- Carolyn steedman Women's Biography and Autobiography: forms of history, histories of form From My Guy to Sci-Fi: genre and women's writing in the postmodern world Pandora Press London 1989
- NLA MS 6759, Box 6, Folder 45, 1940 Diary, p. 2.
- Ibid., p. 11.
- 1945 Diary, entry dated 20 May.
- NLA MS 6759, Box 1, Folder 8, Airgraph letter from AP to VP, dated 2 March 1945.
- NLA MS 6759, Box 5, Series 4, Folder 36, draft chapter 42, ‘Darling Hearts’, ‘Pilgrim's Way’
- Frank Dalby Davison collection, NLA MS 1945, Box 1, Series 1, Folder 6,1945/1/797-8, letter dated 18 May 1947.
- NLA MS 6759, Box 5, Series 4, Folder 40, undated, three handwritten pages, titled ‘Novel cont.’
- Lewis Reina The Death of the Author and the Resurrection of the Dyke New Lesbian Criticism: literary and cultural readings Columbia University Press New York 1992 17 32
- Mark cousins The Practice of Historical Investigation, in Derek Attridge, Geoff Benn Post-structuralism and the Question of History Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1987 131
- Scott Wallach Joan Experience Women, Autobiography, Theory: a reader Smith Sidonie Watson Julia University of Wisconsin Press Madison 1998 66