The property slid into disarray while he went off droving and boozing for months at a time, leaving her and their babies without protection. The theme of a weakened and dependent person alone at night in a flimsy bush dwelling, which occurs again and again in Baynton’s work, surely originates here.
By the time Frater had seduced and impregnated Barbara’s young niece Sarah, who had come to help her with the children, the iron had entered Barbara’s soul. In 1889 she blasted her way out of the marriage, keeping custody of their three children. Her divorce, according to Hackforth-Jones, was ‘the four-hundred-and-fifty-first of the colony’. Throughout her life Barbara liked to deliver a terse piece of advice to her daughter Penelope: ‘If you make yourself a doormat, don’t be surprised if you’re walked on.’
Poor Sarah’s fate enacted this bitter wisdom. She toiled on in wretched poverty, bearing more and more children to the ever-unreliable Frater, until soon after the birth of the ninth she fell into despair, and died in a Sydney mental hospital.
Meanwhile, Barbara shook the dust of the bush from her feet and lit out for Sydney. She was engaged as a housekeeper in pleasant Woollahra by the res-pected Dr Thomas Baynton, a widower of more than twice her age. Barbara had learnt from her former mother-in-law how to conduct herself among educated people. Within a year, and the day after her divorce from Frater was finalised, she and the doctor were married.
Though only in her early thirties, she had experi-enced enough affront, desolation and rage to fuel a lifetime’s literary output. Now, sharing an orderly urban life with a man she loved and respected, she could begin to write.
It irked her that some of her contemporaries were starting to romanticise, or to present in comic form, what she knew as the grinding slog and suffering of people who worked the land. She would make it her business to show the truth.
No one in Australia would publish Bush Studies, so she took it to London, where she met the usual insults dealt out to colonials; she even contemplated burning the manuscript and going home. But at last, in 1902, the book appeared in both London and Sydney. A. G. Stephens, who had first run her work in the Bulletin, opined annoyingly that the stories offered ‘a perverse picture of our sunny, light-hearted, careless land’; but Baynton had many admiring reviews, and felt at last established.
Nothing else that Baynton published packs the raw punch of Bush Studies. Her novel, Human Toll, contains powerful and sensitive passages, but I am one of those who find her obsession with phonetic dialogue frustrating and fatiguing. Her natural form is the short story. Her poetry, I’m afraid, is terrible.
But what a woman! When her dear Dr Baynton died, she inherited and sensibly invested a comfortable fortune. In London during World War I she was a generous host to many a lost Australian serviceman on leave. She fought her way up the social ladder in the most marvellous and increasingly hilarious way. Her third husband was a baron who had converted to Islam and was offered the vacant throne of Albania. To Barbara’s great disappointment he refused it. The marriage lasted barely a year.
By now, though certain good friends never gave up on her, she seemed stuck in the role of the perverse dowager in jewels and long white gloves, known for her jealousy, bursts of wild rage and equally violent remorse. She returned to Melbourne and took up residence next door to her daughter. Her historian son-in-law had the sense of humour and strength of character to keep the matriarch in line. Her grandchildren she thrilled by writing and reading aloud to them cautionary tales ‘of human unpleasantness and folly’. These stories were never published, and when at the age of seventy-two the champagne-drinking old termagant died, her faithful daughter, who loved her, threw them into the fire.
To
Helen McMillen
of Sydney
New South Wales
A DREAMER
A SWIRL of wet leaves from the night-hidden trees decorating the little station beat against the closed doors of the carriages. The porter hurried along holding his blear-eyed lantern to the different windows, and calling the name of the township in language peculiar to porters. There was only one ticket to collect.
Passengers from far up-country towns have importance from their rarity. He turned his lantern full on this one, as he took her ticket. She looked at him too, and listened to the sound of his voice, as he spoke to the guard.
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