It’s driven by a contained, contemptuous rage that no woman of spirit can fail to recognise, or to share.

Baynton was born a decade before Henry Lawson, but by the time she began to publish he was already a famous writer. Determined as she was to write from deep within a woman’s point of view, in her best work she can leave him sounding almost sentimental. Yes, Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ is a great story. We tremble for the hard-working, faithful, level-headed mother. We shed tears for her gutsy little son, for the brave dog, for the ‘sickly daylight’ that breaks over the bush. The story is what people nowadays call ‘iconic’. We can safely admire it. We no longer even need to read it: everyone knows what it stands for.

But Baynton’s bush wife inhabits a different uni-verse. Weakened by her absent husband’s cold mockery, she is not fighting for her family. No bushcraft, no weary stoicism can save her from sexual attack. She is lost out there in shrieking, existential abandonment. Her tale is never going to be an icon. It is too hair-raising, too hysterical—too close to women’s craziest and most abject suffering.

Like any writer, she is not always at her best. Her sentences can strike the modern ear as clogged and heavy-handed, like Victorian interior decoration. You can feel her sometimes putting on side, striking writerly poses, indulging in misty poeticisms: betimes, she says, or ’twas a dingo; her heart smote her, or ever and ever she smiled. On the other hand, her desire to convey Australian speech leads her into passages of dialogue so manically phonetic that the only way to traverse them is to read them aloud, when they reveal her superb ear—but at what cost! I long to take the pencil to these extravaganzas, to drag her into my own century and hit her anachronistically over the head with Elmore Leonard’s dictum: ‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’

But, my God, when she hits her straps she can lay down a muscular story.

She drew out the saw, spat on her hands, and with the axe began weakening the inclining side of the tree.

Long and steadily and in secret the worm had been busy in the heart. Suddenly the axe blade sank softly, the tree’s wounded edges closed on it like a vice. There was a ‘settling’ quiver on its top branches, which the woman heard and understood. The man, encouraged by the sounds of the axe, had returned with an armful of sticks for the billy. He shouted gleefully, ‘It’s fallin’, look out.’

But she waited to free the axe.

With a shivering groan the tree fell, and as she sprang aside, a thick worm-eaten branch snapped at a joint and silently she went down under it.

(‘Squeaker’s Mate’)

 

At their height, her dry, sinewy sentences stride forward powered by simple verbs. She knows how to break off at a breathless moment. Her understanding of dogs and their meaning is heart-rendingly fine. She is familiar with labour, fear and abandonment. She knows the landscape, with its bleak terrors and its occasional beauties. She has observed with a merciless eye the dull stupidity and squalor that poverty brings. She is not going to gussy it up.

Between Two Worlds, the enthralling biography of Baynton written by her great-granddaughter Penne Hackforth-Jones, makes it clear that the six stories in Bush Studies, the core of her small output, draw directly on the first half of her life.

She was born Barbara Lawrence in 1857, the seventh of eight children, at Scone in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where her immigrant father was a timber-worker and coffin-maker. She seems to have been a strange, short-sighted, grittily emotional girl, a passionate reader of the few books she could get hold of, and possessed by confused fantasies of escape and adventure.

As a teenager she answered an advertisement for an up-country housekeeper. After a gruelling train trip to the property on the north-western plains of New South Wales, the naïve girl was coarsely challenged, humiliated and sent packing. A few years later, in her early twenties, with little more than her hard-won literacy and numeracy to recommend her, she was hired as a governess by the Fraters, a Scottish grazing family of impressive style but varying fortunes, whose glamorous son she soon married.

Set up by his disapproving father near Coonamble on the Castlereagh River, the handsome horseman Alex Frater soon showed his true colours. He drank, he gambled, he flirted with girls fresher and prettier than his clever, over-worked, furious wife.