What a fascinating novel 'The
Women in Black' turned out to be - and with an even more fascinating back story
to its author. I was aware of the Text Publishing reprinting of Australian
classics and had read reviews of Madeleine St John’s 1993 novel when it was
re-released – but it took me a while to get to read this little gem. The
introduction alone is worth reading. Written by St John’s old Sydney Uni
classmate Bruce Beresford, it gives an insight into those halcyon days of my old
alumni; St John and Beresford studied with Germaine Greer, Clive James and
Robert Hughes, among others. Beresford described the North Shore girl as quirky
and full of interesting energy: “Tiny and with rusty-red hair, she always
reminded me of a sparrow with her darting movements, her beak-like nose, her
inquisitive eyes.’ St John eventually lived in London and latish in life, wrote
four novels, of which ‘The Women in Black’ was critically well received and a hit
with readers. She was an eccentric by all description and sounded thoroughly
charming.
The novel, at its superficial
level, is very sweet. The characters are treated with absolute tenderness, and
the end note is positive and generous towards the women at its centre. At a
deeper level, the novel is a dig at the mores of 1950s Australia, especially
issues of women and education, career and marriage. The plot is centred on a
small group of women working in what is clearly David Jones in Elizabeth St,
Sydney. As a veteran of Myers and David Jones, in my university days, I loved
the satirical analysis of the division between the departments: the always
snooty designer ware, the dolled up perfume counter girls, the worker bees in
the less glamorous departments. Nothing has changed. The main character Leslie,
or Lisa, as she has decided to call herself – a much more sophisticated name –
has taken a summer job at the department store. And we see metamorphosis beyond
the name change. Lisa is clever, but fairly plain and unworldly. As St John
notes of Lisa’s school days: “Her only cronies seemed to be two other girls
similarly outside fashion: a very fat girl and another who suffered from
eczema: girls for whom there seemed everything to be done, but nothing which
might be: girls who must find their way through the maze as best they might.”
Lisa’s world is opened up when
she is taken under Magda’s wing: Magda is a ‘continental’, Hungarian, and works
in the designer gowns section. She likes Lisa, sees she is clever and starts a
makeover, both dressing Lisa up but also introducing her to the ‘migrant’
experience. At a party held in Magda’s fabulous Elizabeth Bay apartment, she is
generous in her gregarious European way, so foreign to the three veg and meat
Lisa: “’Now for some food’, she cried, rubbing her hands together as she
approached the table. ‘What has he bought for us? Come Lisa and sit, and help
yourself please. I will cut some bread. Do you like rye bread? This is very
good. Then you have what you like with it, cheese – various kinds all here on
this plate, ham yes, liverwurst, that sausage is good or try this salami, then
I see he has made us a salad as well – you must eat some of that, it is good
for you. Stefan, pour me a glass of wine, I beg you’.
The crux of Lisa’s story is her
hope to persuade her father to allow her to go to University. Her working class
parents are a metaphoric picture of the evolving women’s movement in Australia:
her father thinks going to uni will make Lisa ‘get ahead of herself’ but her
mother is blissfully proud of her ‘scholar’ daughter, and sees her daughter’s
achievements as the fulfillment of lost dreams. However, Lisa’s entrance to uni
rests on her father’s signature on the enrolment form. She is powerless to make
her own decision. St John’s novel is a reminder of how far we have come in so
little time.
The secondary characters, Patty
and Fay, have more prosaic futures but also illustrate interesting dilemmas for
the sixties. Fay is almost ‘on the shelf’ in her thirties, and St John (herself
unmarried) paints an insightful and poignant picture of a girl making mistakes
over and over again: “Fay’s heart sank. She had been meeting these men, or
others resembling them in every important particular, throughout her adult
life. She had eaten their dinners, drunk gin-and-limes at their expense, and
she had danced in their arms; she had fought off, and sometimes submitted to,
their love making. She had travelled this particular road to its bitter and now
dusty end and her heart now failed her but to decline this evening’s engagement
had been a thing impossible.”
Patty is married to an
unresponsive boof-head, very much the embodiment of the old school Australian
yob. He disappears one night and Patty faces abandonment. Her anger is acute
and St John gives her a voice, where in reality, she surely would have suffered
in silence: ‘Oh the bastard, Patty was thinking, the bastard. The selfish,
selfish bugger, leaving me to cope like this; who does he think I am?’. The couple goes through change as well,
perhaps not satisfactorily fleshed out by St John, but interesting nonetheless.
‘The Women in Black’ is truly a
pleasure to read; a nostalgic snapshot of a distant Australia but an important reminder
of feminist issues only recently addressed, if not completely resolved.
*This review is part of the Australian Womens Writers Challenge 2014
