‘This was my lifework,’ she had said. ‘Its fulfilment my reward. I desire no other.’
Miss Baker had been so thrilled when she and Franklin had won the S. H. Prior Memorial Prize for their co-authored book manuscript ‘Who Was Joseph Furphy?’ And now it looked like Franklin would rewrite their work and take all the credit.
‘I’ll write to the papers after breakfast,’ Edith decides. ‘It’s the least I can do.’
‘Perhaps Miss Baker will write your biography instead now?’ suggests James.
Edith does not respond. She picks up the tray of boiled eggs cooling in their eggcups.
‘The echidnas need their breakfast,’ she says and heads out to the garden.
KATE BAKER WAS a schoolteacher, who lived a frugal life on her meagre pay, but devoted all her time, considerable energy and the little funds she had to promoting the great works of her friends. Roy Duncan describes her as ‘the patron without financial standing, whose only enduring capacity to foster Australian literature lay in the fibre of her own heart and soul’. Furphy was her life’s work, but she was a tireless supporter of Australian writing and writers generally – particularly those she felt were ignored or forgotten.
It was Stella Miles Franklin who encouraged Baker to complete her biography of Furphy. Lawson’s ‘little bush girl’ had met the old bullock driver, at his request, in Melbourne in 1905 when the two newly published authors were both striving to write in an authentically Australian voice. Franklin, at 22, was struggling with the sudden fame of My Brilliant Career, while the 66-year-old Furphy was seeking to gain a broader audience. It was here that Furphy introduced his friend Kate Baker to Franklin.
After Furphy’s death it was Baker who battled to keep his work in print, not always successfully. When Such Is Life was published in England it was heavily abridged. Franklin was horrified by the result. She declared to Baker that British publishers would ‘accept nothing Australian unless the Australianism was extracted, or of the colonial variety tempered to English idea of what it shd be’.
Baker and Franklin worked together on the Furphy biography at Franklin’s home in Sydney, a collaboration that was ‘painful’ for both. Franklin complained of Baker’s ‘illusion that she created Furphy’ and her ‘mania’. At 78, Baker was deaf and an exacting taskmaster, unwilling to approach her subject objectively. She felt that Franklin did not acknowledge her contribution and ‘complained of the “stab” she received at Franklin’s hand and the emotional strain’.
Despite winning the Prior award for their manuscript, the book needed more work. Franklin applied for the literature grant to support her. The resulting biography of ‘our bush Hamlet’, Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and His Book, was published in 1944, by Miles Franklin ‘in association with Kate Baker’.
Notwithstanding their difficulties, Franklin admired the older woman’s astonishing devotion and dedication to the cause of Australian literature, a dedication she herself would continue.
‘A triumph, 91 next month, and still going about by herself and tripping down steps in a half light without holding the side rail,’ Franklin said.
How often women devote their efforts to promoting the works of others. Joseph Furphy’s classic and distinctively Australian tale, Such Is Life, regularly features on lists of the best, and favourite, Australian books. Would Furphy’s famous work be remembered, or even have been written or published, were it not for Baker’s enthusiastic support and promotion?
The history of literature is littered with such tales of posthumous promotion. How well would Percy Shelley be remembered if his wife Mary had not stubbornly insisted on publishing his poetry after his death, in the face of fierce opposition from his father? Or Byron’s poetry, for that matter, which Mary Shelley painstakingly transcribed in ‘fair copy’ for publication.
In 1937, Baker was awarded an Order of the British Empire for her services to Australian literature.
‘May I give myself the pleasure of telling you how proud we are of you and the real honor you have so deservedly won,’ Edith wrote to her. ‘It is a wonderful thing to be able to do what you have done for Aust. Literature.
‘As a warm supporter of my sex,’ she added, with double underlining for emphasis, ‘I am so proud that it is on one of us that the honor falls.’
Baker was fifteen years older than Edith so I don’t think they met through teacher training or in schools, but they both knew Frank Tate. It could have been through other literary connections, though – C. J. Dennis, the Lindsays or Vance and Nettie Palmer, perhaps.
By 1942, Baker had compiled a manuscript of short essays on important figures in Australian literature.
‘She has written around a few chosen literary notables a story of Australian literature,’ wrote Alfred Foster in the preface, ‘and does it in such a way as to make us ashamed that we are not more thoroughly acquainted with that literature; not only ashamed but dismayed that we have neglected so much of such value for so long.’
Precious few of those literary notables are familiar today. Her list reads like a lament to lost Australian literature: Ada Cambridge, Victor Kennedy, Marie E. J. Pitt, Joseph Furphy, Alice Henry, John Shaw Neilson. The neglect continues.
The third entry on her list is Edith Coleman.
‘I do not know a writer whose word and phrase more beautifully and more accurately fit the thought,’ declared Baker about Edith.
Baker’s work was never published, but the draft manuscript remains in the National Library archives. It is not a work of literature. She was, after all, a compiler, not a creative writer. But it is an invaluable and rare resource for so many figures of Australian literature whom history has all but forgotten. Without it, much of Edith’s early history – recollections of her family and childhood – would have been lost.
Writing has long been one of the few respectable careers open to
