Thomas Alexander Browne (6 August 1826 – 11 March 1915) was an Australian writer, who sometimes published under the pseudonym Rolf Boldrewood and best known for his novel Robbery Under Arms.
Biography
Browne was born in London, the eldest child of Captain Sylvester John Brown [sic], a shipmaster formerly of the East India Company, and his wife Elizabeth Angell, née Alexander. His mother was his "earliest admirer and most indulgent critic . . . to whom is chiefly due whatever meed of praise my readers may hereafter vouchsafe" (Dedication Old Melbourne Memories). (Thomas added the 'e' to his surname in the 1860s). After his father's barque Proteus had delivered a cargo of convicts in Hobart, the family settled inSydney in 1831. Sylvester Brown took up whaling and built a stone mansion Enmore which gave its name to the suburb of Sydney [1]. Thomas Browne was sent to W. T. Cape's school at Sydney, and afterwards to Sydney College, when Cape became its headmaster.
When his father moved to Melbourne in 1839, Browne remained at Sydney College as a boarder until 1841 and then was taught by Rev. David Boyd in Melbourne. In 1843, though only 17 years old, Browne took up land near Port Fairy and was there until 1856. He visited England in 1860 and by 1864 had a property in the Riverina. However, bad seasons in 1866 and 1868 compelled Browne to give upsquatting, and in 1871 he became a police magistrate and goldfields commissioner. After living in Sydney a short time, in April 1871 he was appointed a police magistrate at Gulgong and gold commissioner in 1872.
Browne was an experienced justice of the peace, having acted as chairman of the bench of justices at Narrandera, but in his first years at Gulgong, then one of the richest and largest goldfields in New South Wales, his ignorance of mining and the complicated regulations drew criticism of his competence as commissioner. He was persistently attacked by the Gulgong Guardian until in 1873 it published an anonymous letter accusing him of bias and corruption. Its editor was thereupon convicted in Sydney of criminal libel and sentenced to six months gaol. The charges against Browne were disproved, and he won favour with the miners by magnanimously interceding with the judge for a light punishment of his libeller. In 1881 Browne was transferred as magistrate and mining warden to Dubbo and toArmidale in 1884. He moved to Albury as chairman of the Land Licensing Board in 1885, serving there as magistrate and warden from 1887–1895 until retiring to Melbourne. He died on 11 March 1915 and was buried in Brighton cemetery.
Literary career
Browne spent around twenty-five years as a squatter and about the same time as a government official, but his third career as author extended over forty years. In 1865, while recovering from a riding accident, he wrote two articles on pastoral life in Australia for the Cornhill Magazine, and he also began to contribute articles and serial stories to the Australian weeklies.[2] One of these, Ups and Downs: a Story of Australian Life, was published in book form in London in 1878. It was well reviewed but attracted little notice. It was re-issued as The Squatter's Dream in 1890.
In 1884 Old Melbourne Memories, a book of reminiscences of the eighteen-forties was published at Melbourne, "by Rolf Boldrewood, author of My Run Home, The Squatter's Dream and Robbery Under Arms". These had appeared in the Sydney Town and Country Journal and the Sydney Mail, but only The Squatter's Dream had been published in book form and then under the title of Ups and Downs. In 1888 Robbery Under Arms appeared in three volumes and its merits were immediately recognized. Several editions were printed before the close of the century. At the beginning of this novel the narrator, Dick Marsden, is awaiting execution for crimes committed whilst he was a bushranger. He goes on to tell the story of his life and loves and his association with the notorious Captain Starlight. Some of the events in the book are based on actual incidents carried out by contemporary bushrangers like Daniel Morgan, Ben Hall, Frank Gardiner, James Alpin McPherson and John Gilbert. Robbery under Arms has, remained popular since its first publication in 1888; the novel was filmed in 1907, 1920 and 1957. A television series was made in 1985. The novel has also been serialised on radio in both Australia and Britain.
Browne married Margaret Maria (daughter of W. E. Riley and granddaughter of Alexander Riley) in 1860 who survived him with two sons and five daughters, one of whom, "Rose Boldrewood", published a novel The Complications at Collaroi in 1911. Mrs Browne was the author of The Flower Garden in Australia, published in 1893.
Named in his honour, the 'Rolf Boldrewood Literary Awards' are awarded annually by the Macquarie Regional Library.[3]
Bibliography
Novels
- My Run Home (1874)
- The Squatter's Dream: A Story of Australian Life (1875) [aka Ups and Downs : A Story of Australian Life]
- A Colonial Reformer (1876)
- Babes in the Bush (1877) [aka An Australian Squire]
- Robbery Under Arms (1882)
- The Sealskin Coat (1884-1885) [aka The Sealskin Mantle]
- The Crooked Stick, or, Pollie's Probation (1885) [aka The Final Choice, or, Pollie's Probation]
- The Sphinx of Eaglehawk: A Tale of Old Bendigo (1887)
- A Sydney-Side Saxon (1888)
- Nevermore (1889-90)
- The Miner's Right : A Tale of the Australian Goldfields (1890)
- A Modern Buccaneer (1894)
- Plain Living: A Bush Idyll (1898)
- War to the Knife', or Tangata Maori (1899)
- The Ghost-Camp, or, The Avengers (1902)
- The Last Chance: A Tale of the Golden West (1905)
Stella Franklin
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, known as Miles Franklin (14 October 1879 – 19 September 1954) was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, self-published in 1901. While she wrote throughout her life, her other major literary success, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936.
She was committed to the development of a uniquely Australian form of literature, and she actively pursued this goal by supporting writers, literary journals, and writers' organisations. She has had a long-lasting impact on Australian literary life through her endowment of a major literary award known as the Miles Franklin Award.
Life and career[edit]
Franklin was born at Talbingo, New South Wales, and grew up in the Brindabella Valley on a property called Brindabella Station.[1] She was the eldest child of Australian-born parents, John Maurice Franklin and Susannah Margaret Eleanor Franklin, née Lampe,[2] who was the great-granddaughter of Edward Miles (or Moyle) who had arrived with the First Fleet in the Scarborough with a seven years sentence for theft.[3] Her family was a member of thesquattocracy. She was educated at home until 1889 when she attended Thornford Public[1]During this period she was encouraged in her writing by her teacher, Mary Gillespie (1856–1938) and Tom Hebblewhite (1857–1923) editor of the local Goulburn newspaper.[4]
Her best known novel, My Brilliant Career, tells the story of an irrepressible teenage girl, Sybylla Melvyn, growing to womanhood in rural New South Wales. It was published in 1901 with the support of Australian writer, Henry Lawson.[5] After its publication, Franklin tried a career in nursing, and then as a housemaid in Sydney and Melbourne. Whilst doing this she contributed pieces to The Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald under the pseudonyms "An Old Bachelor" and "Vernacular." During this period she wrote My Career Goes Bung in which Sybylla encounters the Sydney literary set, but it was not released to the public until 1946.
In the United States and England[edit]
Return to Australia[edit]
In 1906, Franklin moved to the US and undertook secretarial work for Alice Henry, another Australian, at the National Women's Trade Union League in Chicago, and co-edited the league's magazine, Life and Labor. Her years in the US are reflected in On Dearborn Street(not published until 1981), a love story that uses American slang in a manner not dissimilar to the early work of Dashiell Hammett. Also while in America she wrote Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909), the story of a small-town Australian family, which uses purple prose for deliberate comic effect. She suffered regular bouts of ill health and entered a sanatorium for a period in 1912[4] In 1915, she travelled to England and worked as a cook and earned some money from journalism.[4] In March 1917 Franklin volunteered for war work in the Ostrovo Unit of the Scottish Women's Hospitals during the Serbian campaigns of 1917–18. She served as a cook in a 200-bed tent hospital attached to the Serbian army near Lake Ostrovo in Macedonia Greece from July 1917 to February 1918.[4] From 1919 to 1926 Franklin worked as Secretary with the National Housing and Town Planning Association in London. She organised a women's international housing convention in 1924.[7] Her life in England in the 1920s gave rise to Bring the Monkey (1933), a satire on the English country house mystery novel. Unfortunately the book was a literary and commercial failure.
Franklin resettled in Australia in 1932 after the death of her father in 1931. During that decade she wrote several historical novels of the Australian bush, although most of these were published under the pseudonym "Brent of Bin Bin". New South Wales State Librarian, Dagmar Schmidmaier, said "Miles increasingly feared that nothing she wrote matched the success of My Brilliant Career and resorted to writing under different names, including the bizarre pseudonym Brent of Bin Bin, to protect herself from poor reviews."[8] However, All That Swagger was published under her own name in 1936.
Throughout her life, Franklin actively supported literature in Australia. She joined the Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1933 and the Sydney P.E.N. Club in 1935. She encouraged young writers such as Jean Devanny, Sumner Locke Elliottand Ric Throssell and she supported the new literary journals, Meanjin and Southerly.[5] Miles entertained literary figures at her home in Carlton, NSW. An autograph book known as Miles Franklin's Waratah Book held by the State Library of NSW was used for autographs and inscriptions. Guests were encouraged to drink tea from the Waratah Cup[9] and to write in the Waratah Book.[10]
Collaborations[edit]
Miles Franklin engaged in a number of literary collaborations throughout her life. In addition to co-editing the journal Life and Labor with Alice Henry in the US, she also wrote Pioneers on Parade in collaboration Dymphna Cusack[12] and Joseph Furphy (1944) "in painful collaboration with Kate Baker".[5] Previously, in 1939, she and Baker had won the Prior Memorial prize for an essay on Furphy.[5]
Dever writes that the letters between Dymphna Cusack and Miles Franklin that are published in Yarn Spinners "provide a see-sawing commentary on the delicate art of literary collaboration".[13]
While Miles Franklin had many suitors, she never married. She died on 19 September 1954, aged 74 and her ashes were scattered in Jounama Creek, Talbingo close to where she was born.[4]
Legacy[edit]
In her will she made a bequest for her estate to establish an annual literary award known as The Miles Franklin Award. The first winner was Patrick White with Voss in 1957.
The Canberra suburb of Franklin and the nearby primary school Miles Franklin Primary School are named in her honour. The school holds an annual writing competition in her memory. During her lifetime Miles Franklin donated several items to the Mitchell Library. Manuscript material was presented over the period 1937–1942. The various drafts of "Pioneers on Parade" were presented in 1940. She bequeathed her printed books collection, correspondence and notes as well as the poems of Mary Fullerton[14]
A revival of interest in Franklin occurred in the wake of the Australian New Wave film My Brilliant Career (1979), which won several international awards.
In 2014, Google Doodle celebrates her 135th birthday.[15]
Awards[edit]
- 1936: S. H. Prior Memorial Prize awarded by The Bulletin for All that Swagger
- 1939: S. H. Prior Memorial Prize for Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and His Book
Selected works[edit]
Novels[edit]
- My Brilliant Career (1901)
- Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909)
- Old Blastus of Bandicoot (1931)
- Bring the Monkey (1933)
- All That Swagger (1936)
- Pioneers on Parade (1939) – with Dymphna Cusack
- My Career Goes Bung (1946)
- On Dearborn Street (1981)
