Mining Modjeska’s archive with Dr Bernadette Brennan

Barbara Lemon: Okay, I think we're all set. Good evening and welcome to the National Library of Australia here on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. I'm Barbara Lemon, I'm a Director of Curatorial and Collection Research for Commissioned Collections in the Library's Collection Branch.  

I'll begin by acknowledging Australia's First Nations Peoples as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of this land. I give my respect to Elders past and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.  

So this evening we're going to hear from Dr Bernadette Brennan, a 2024 National Library of Australia Fellow with her presentation on "Mining Modjeska's Archive." So for those who don't know, our Fellowship Program supports researchers to make intensive use of the National Library's rich collections through residencies of three months. The fellowships are made possible by generous philanthropic support, and Bernadette's fellowship has been supported by the Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman Trust.  

Dr Bernadette Brennan is a Biographer, Critic, and Researcher of Contemporary Australian writing. She's the author of a number of publications including a monograph on Brian Castro and two edited collections, "Just words: Australian Authors Writing for Justice" and "Ethical Investigations: Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics." In 2017, she published her award-winning literary biography, “A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work." Her most recent book, "Leaping into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears," was shortlisted for the 2022 New South Wales Premier's Douglas Stewart Award and won the MaGarey medal for biography, the National Biography Award and The Age Book of the Year for Nonfiction.  

So today, Bernadette will present her early research findings from the Library's extensive and varied collections of manuscripts, papers, and published works in writing a literary biography of Drusilla Modjeska, one of Australia's most significant women writers. Please join me in welcoming Dr Bernadette Brennan. 

Bernadette Brennan: Thanks Barbara for that introduction. And I too would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of this land on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, and I pay my respects to their Elders, past and present and to any First Nations people here tonight or watching online in the audience at some point in the future.  

I've had the privilege of working here in the archives thanks, as you've heard to the Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman trust, And I'm very grateful for Eva Kollsman's generosity and imagination in establishing a fellowship that supports and promotes Australian writing. And for the staff at the NLA who have not only selected me, but also the way they've administered this fellowship and it's allowed such incredibly important deep research time for me. And I thank particularly, Sharyn O'Brien and Simone Lark for the consideration and care they extend to all the fellows here. And also to my co-fellows who have been here over the different months I've been here and to most of the staff, particularly this last week when I've been really quite ill and they've all been worrying and giving me things for my laryngitis. So let's hope that I can get through this 50 minutes okay. Thank you to the audience for being here tonight, a cold winters Canberra night that's above and beyond.  

Some time ago, I was asked to come up with an image that might entice people to attend or watch this talk, hence, this photograph. I discovered it in one of Drusilla Modjeska's diaries, it's of Helen Garner painting Drusilla's nails. It was taken in the early 1990s when they shared a house in Enmore, and when I came across it, like so much to do with these two and their long complex relationship, I laughed out loud. I was up there in the special reading room and it was another one of these sort of, oh, and I thought, okay, maybe that's the kind of image that might get people in. When I asked each of them if I could use it, they chorused, ‘Yes, have fun with it.’ Helen Garner suggested that I title the talk, "The Nail Salon." I fear that that title maybe, as the one I gave it, also some months ago, when I was deep in a quandary about how I was gonna possibly talk about what I was reading in the archives.  

As preparation for this talk, I read Leon Edel's "Writing Lives: Principia Biographica" was published in 1984 and I'd never read it before. In that book, Edel says, ‘Let us imagine...’ Oh, I've messed that up completely. I obviously decided not to give you that slide. Edel says, ‘Let us imagine the great table of biography upon which is piled high books and papers, certificates of birth and death, genealogies, photos of deeds, letters, letters filled with rationalisations and subterfuges, exaggerations, wishful thinking, deliberate falsehoods, elaborate politenesses. And then testimonials, photographs, manuscripts, diaries, notebooks, bank checks, newspaper clippings, a great chaotic mess of materials, all of which will make the way into the mind and heart of the person who has gathered it.’ I have been immersed in just such things.  

Edel also notes that a biographer works in mosaic, translating fragments of life into a sequence of words. I'm yet to comprehend the magnitude or full import of what I have found in Modjeska's embargoed archive, and I still have dozens of interviews to complete. So the painstakingly slow, difficult and occasionally wondrous process of shaping that chaotic, shifting mess of materials into a story is some way off.  

A more appropriate title for this talk I think, is the "Biographers Table." I'm going to select a few things off that table. Fragments of letters, diaries and manuscripts, and the occasional photograph. I'm gonna give them a little bit of attention and then I'm gonna put them back down. I hope in doing so, to offer you a glimpse of what it's like in a living writer's archive for myself as a researcher, but also for what I find in that archive. 

When faced with the task of writing the biography of her friend Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf is reputed to have asked ‘How, how can one make a life out of six cardboard boxes full of Taylor's bills, love letters and old picture postcards?’ In a notebook with material for what became "Poppy," the fictional biography of her mother, Drusilla Modjeska wrote and I quote, ‘How can you piece together a life from fragments, pieces of paper strewn across one study's floor?’ Fortunately for us readers each found a way.  

Fortunately for me, while Modjeska's archive does contain hundreds of love letters and old picture postcards, as well as school reports and a contested speeding fine, though no tailor's bills, she has amassed over decades much valuable material. I did not set out to write Modjeska's biography.  

A few years ago, when I was deep in the writing phase of the biography of Gillian Mears, I was asked if I'd be interested in doing a short book, 40,000 words on a living Australian writer, a book that would include a Paris Review style interview would deal solely with the author's published work and would be accessible to a general readership. It sounded like the perfect transitional project. I thought this is exactly what I wanna do, and I opted to write about Modjeska's work. “Poppy” affected me greatly when I first read it on publication in 1990, and I had subsequently read and responded powerfully to all of Modjeska's books and essays, and I wanted to understand why. When I suggested the book to Modjeska, she was pleased, but insisted that I could not write about her work without writing about her life. ‘You've written so much about it yourself,’ I counted. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘There's too much. I have been unable to say.’  

She opened a cupboard that held boxes of diaries yet to be deposited here at the NLA. ‘Would you like to have a look at these and think about it?’ She asked. I piled them in the boot of my car and off I went. By the time I arrived home, she had texted, would I be interested in a collection of letters written to her father almost weekly from New Guinea between 1968 and 1971. Now that was getting interesting.  

It had always intrigued me how this middle-class girl from Hampshire, two years out of English girls schools and newly married, could so easily take off to New Guinea with her young anthropologist husband and embrace the life lived between Port Moresby and the Highlands where she had no electricity, running water, access to healthcare or command of the local language. She and her husband arrived in Port Moresby in April 1968. In July that year, she enrolled in a BA at the University of Papua and New Guinea, then in its second year of degree teaching. As she explained in one of those letters to her father, the history she was learning was fascinating. This was sent on the 1st of July 1968. ‘It is a course on Asia and Western Dominance and quite a substantial part of it is the West through Asian eyes. It is concentrating on Japan, China, and Southeast Asia. It is very different from school history, which never showed the other side of Empire. And it is especially interesting as the class consists mainly of Papuans who will be the leaders of the country as it becomes independent. All the courses are aimed to help these people understand the problems of developing countries and see the solutions and difficulties of similar countries.’  

In those early years, the UPNG was staffed mainly, but not exclusively by highly experienced Australians. Modjeska enrolled in history in a department headed by Professor Ken Inglis, who had come from the ANU. In a notebook, she described the experience. ‘My fellow students, many of them well into their 20s, so long had they been waiting, knew that it would be the task of their generation to take the country to independence. History had an immediacy that was palpable in every tutorial. For me, colonialism took on a new resonance. I had a great uncle who'd served in the Indian Civil Service and spoke only of Empire, and it was in Port Moresby that I first read Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Conrad James Baldwin, as well as a European tradition I had not encountered in England [unlear], my education had begun. They were shining years.’  

If we jump ahead to 2004 and Modjeska is working with the gallerist and collector David Baker and was one of the first outsiders to visit the Omie in the PNG Highlands and she's been instrumental in gaining international appreciation of an interest in their barkcloth art. In 2011, she co-founded SEAM, S-E-A-M, which stands for Sustain Education Art Melanesia. It's a foundation to support literacy in remote PNG communities. Information and photographs of and about these people and experiences is in her archive. In her Seymour lecture: “The Informed Imagination”, delivered here at the NLA in 2013, Modjeska stated that her years in PNG from 1968 to 71 changed almost everything about her life.  

Modjeska has since given me hundreds of photographs, which document the Omie and their barkcloth art. In time, they too will be added to the archive here. You can see some of them there, of the women making the art. Many of the photographs were digitised to produce a video of art and ceremony at the base of Mount Lamington that formed the centrepiece of the Omie Barkcloth exhibition held at the University of Sydney's Chau Chak Wing Museum last year. And that exhibition is now closed, but I've put the website, the link up on this slide because you can still actually see something about the exhibition and see some of the art if you're interested.  

As I sat in the semi-darkness surrounded by towering and stunning barkcloth and watched this film, I turned to the diminutive white haired Modjeska sitting beside me and marvelled at the trajectory of her life. It is that trajectory I have traced through the archive and I can affirm that it definitely warrants a biography.  

This is the second time I've worked in an embargoed archive here at the National Library. 10 years ago, I spent some anonymous time in the old special reading room working in Helen Garner's archive, and I have to say, it was thrilling. It was absolutely thrilling. At that time, I also found invaluable material in the archives of Axel Clark and Hilary McPhee. I think somewhere in my book, but maybe it was through a text I quoted Garner telling me, that having visited the Library to discuss future deposits, she said she liked to think of the archives whispering to each other. It's a glorious thought and in my experience, they do. They really do. Our writers, public intellectuals, artists and creatives are often friends or at the least members of the same milieu. So there are always letters, collaborations, love affairs and fallouts, which compel the researcher to follow rhizomic connections and conversations.  

For a few weeks this year, there were four biographers working here, Melanie Duckworth on Christobel Mattingley, Eleanor Hogan on Eleanor Witcombe and Susan Wyndham on Elizabeth Harrower. It was wonderful to share the unfolding life stories that we were discovering, the four of us, it was really quite a blast. More particularly, Susan Wyndham and I encountered and shared several letters and comments by or about our chosen subjects in the various boxes we were exploring. And Modjeska's archives have sent me searching again to those of Hilary McPhee and Axel Clark, and to those of Murray Bail, Dorothy Green, Barbara Mobbs, Ken Inglis, Hank Nelson, and Randolph Stow. 

After my first month here, I met up with Sam Twyford-Moore in Sydney, who happens to be sitting up the back tonight. Hi, Sam. Sam is working on a biography of Sylvia Lawson. Once back in Canberra, Sylvia's name kept cropping up in the archive. Both she and Modjeska were biographers of as sort and had many discussions about the scope and purpose of their craft. Lawson had published "The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship" in 1983. Having originally intended to write a group biography, then narrowed it down to writing a biography of the bulletin's founding editor, JF Archibald, she found herself far more interested in the work he facilitated, the voices he promoted, and the broader social and political questions his story raised. What the bulletin achieved was to Lawson's mind such an important story, it made a definitive biography. They're her words, a definitive biography of its individual editor, neither possible nor relevant. She insisted that the life story which she tells with its attendant gaps and absences, was simply a way into other subject matter, other stories, and henceforth, positioned herself as an anti-biographer. And at this point, I'm not entirely convinced that there are any other kinds.  

As an interesting aside, affirming my idea of rhizomic connections, Lawson dedicated “The Archibald Paradox” to Julian Thomas with a note, "In memory of George Munster," a European intellectual who chose journalism in Australia. It was Munster who having read Modjeska's PhD, contacted her and said he would work with her to turn that doctoral thesis into what became, "Exiles at Home," her first published book. In 1990, Lawson and Modjeska were invited to appear together on a panel titled, "Self and Context" organised by the ANU's Humanities Research Centre. There in the archive was the proposed programme. These were the suggested questions for discussion. ‘Does concentration upon the shape and course of an individual life lead us to underestimate the social and political context in which such lives are lived? Should biography properly aspire to the condition of social history? What are the political implications of choosing to concentrate upon individuals rather than upon the social forces that help to shape their lives? What problems arise, what advantages emerge, as we attempt to trace the lives of a group of friends, or associates, or similarly-circumstanced people, or to subordinate life history to social history?’ Essential questions and ones I bear in mind as I work.  

Modjeska replied that she would love to participate, but not be tied to group biography. “Exiles at Home” had been a form of group biography, but by 1990, she was in a very different imaginative space. She wanted to talk about various strategies around biography: fiction, history, psychoanalysis. Sylvia and I talk about these things often, she wrote:’ When asked if she had any suggestions for a title, she replied that given she would be appearing with Sylvia Lawson, how about against biography and for it?’ There's more to that suggestion than a simple binary.  

The core of Modjeska's understanding of her task as a writer, and though, I suspect she would never accept the title as a public intellectual, is to elucidate the inextricable connections between the individual and communal life. She cites Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," as the exemplar of such a project.  

Modjeska's imagination is shaped indeed nourished by her understanding of historical and political forces, particularly as they have operated to repress and control women's independence and creativity. She insists that the writing of an individual life must also be the writing of history, context and power. Look, for example, at one of the opening sentences of “Poppy”. These really have gone out of order. This is actually not my fault, I have to say because they were perfect on my laptop. Okay, well, that doesn't seem even to be here. I'll read you the sentence from one of the opening sentences of “Poppy”. ‘Poppy was born to China in 1924, less than a month after Zenoviev's letter urging revolution was published in the British press, sealing the fate of Ramsey McDonald's first labour government and sending Jack, her father to London to celebrate a victory that meant more than the birth of her daughter.’  

Who knows what we're gonna get next? It's a lottery here. Modjeska insists that she's who she is, because of her intense relationships with a handful of Australian women writers, one of whom is Helen Garner. Yet well before Garner, there were the women she met in the early '70s here in Canberra, while she was completing her undergraduate history degree at the ANU: Beth Ward, Sarah Dowse, Marion Halligan. Their consciousness raising meetings, most often held at Sarah Dowse's house because she had children who needed care, were fundamental and Modjeska beginning to discover who she was as a woman. She was also friends with Mirabel Fitzgerald and was supported by Val Baker and Daphne Golan. And I imagine there's people here tonight who knew or have known these people.  

When she moved to Sydney in the late '70s to undertake a PhD, she shared a house with Marianne Jacker and Annie Bickford. She was part of a writing group with Jen Mccamish and Carol Deegan. She joined the collective that ran Elsie, the Women's Refuge and others that produced the feminist magazines, "Refractory Girl" and "Mabel." Let's see what's coming up. There's Mabel.  

‘We stood on Glebe Point Road in our dungarees selling issues for 20 cents, convinced that we would change the world,’ she tells me. In the archive, small diaries, record details of Marxist meetings, consciousness raising weekends, women's liberation seminars, and much more. And there are letters, so many letters from women at the forefront of the Women's liberation movement.  

I mention these snippets to show that Modjeska's story is also a story among other things of the nascent days of the University of Papua and New Guinea, of the ANU in the early '70s, of feminist movements in Australia and tangentially in Britain. And that's just in the first decade after she left the UK.  

In London last year, I interviewed Lynne Segal about the feminist collective she established in the late '70s at her house in Islington, where she still lives, that turned no women away if she needed accommodation and continues to operate as a collective household. Modjeska stayed many times and it there in 1975 that she met Marsha Rowe, a founding member of “Spare Rib”, a feminist magazine that sold at newsstands.  

Here, I wanna give just one indication as to the essential nature of the archive. Rowe and Modjeska remember things differently, but either Modjeska asked to interview Dora Russell, Bertrand Russell's wife from 1921 to 1935, or Rowe invited her to do so. In any case, Modjeska spent an afternoon with Dora Russell, then 80 at her home in Cornwall. She writes about the encounter in her essay, in an essay which appears in her collection “Time pieces” which was published in 2002. Noting cursorily, how the couple's political commitment to the idea that new ways of raising children and new freedoms within intimate and family life imploded. She admits that quote, ‘Perhaps, because it would've had repercussions in my own life, which was mired in similar issues of infidelity and intimacy. There's nothing I wrote to suggest that I understood the more destructive elements of her story.’ I tried to access that issue of “Spare Rib” at the British Library, but a cyber attack rendered that impossible. It was extraordinary that cyber attack. Fortunately, the relevant issue was here at the NLA. It turns out that just over one page was given to that interview and it was edited down to fit that space by Modjeska.  

Marsha Rowe explained to me as we sat across from each other at her Norwich dining table that they had so little money at “Spare Rib”, they taped over the interview cassette as they had for many other vital interviews conducted at the time. ‘There was no further record,’ she said. She regrets that decision to this day. I had all, but despaired of finding anything more about it until there in the archive, 20 pages of single-spaced typed transcript of the interview. Absolute gold. I actually just got goosebumps when I just got to that moment 'cause it's one of those aha moments when you're sitting up in the reading room and you find this and you think, no way, here it is, this is gold.  

So let's have a quick look at this biographer's table, shall we? And let's start with the letters. A vital source for biographers, but one that comes with a few caveats. The first is that they're addressed to an audience, so they're not as unmediated as some give credit for. Remember Edel's line and I quote again, ‘Letters filled with rationalisations and subterfuges, exaggerations, wishful thinking, deliberate falsehoods, elaborate politenesses.’ I have read plenty of those over my years of research.  

The second caveat, which has become increasingly of interest to me is that they can be like diaries, very much of their time, fired off and forgotten. I don't wish to discuss the folders of letters to and from Modjeska's lovers, letters that I diligently read and took notes on for weeks. There's an awful lot of them. Only to realise that the bearing they have on the story of her writing life is possibly not as significant as I first thought. It may be because my subject's still living and I can discuss these issues with her. But I'm wondering now, how important are the outpourings of passion and heartbreak, 50 years, 30 years, 20 years on? Do they ultimately become part of the gaps and absences that Sylvia Lawson identified as being necessary when one needs to talk about the work? And I don't have the answer to that yet, but it's a really interesting thing to think about.  

Modjeska was a prolific letter writer beginning from the age of six when she was sent as a weekly border to Danes Hill, a private school five miles from the family home in Oakley, Hampshire. Many of those letters are in the archive or will be. Now, there's no doubt that her experience in New Guinea altered the course of her life. But the other, and I would say primary event that changed almost everything about her life was her mother's psychic collapse and admission into Holloway Sanatorium in 1959. 13-year-old Drusilla was sent to board full-time at Sherborne, an expensive private girls boarding school, which she hated and has written a somewhat fictionalised version of in the “Winterbourne” published in “The Orchard”. Her letters from that time register her homesickness and distress. Recently we were discussing what I call her central childhood wound. ‘When did it begin, do you think? At Sherborne? She asked. ‘No.’ I replied, ‘Danes Hill?’ ‘But I love Danes Hill," she retorted. ‘And anyway, everyone was sent to weekly boarding.’ I remain unconvinced.  

Here is a passage of just one letter. ‘Darling Mummy, thank you so much for the comics. They're just what I want. I saw daddy today and I asked him to take me home, but he wouldn't because he didn't want Jane and Anna to get chickenpox. I am most terribly homesick. I'm trying so hard to be brave, but it is so difficult and when I cry or even when I want to cry, I feel so missed and rotten...’ There's an awful lot of those letters in the archive. Interestingly, the tone and language of this letter will be replicated again and again over the coming decade when the safety of her family home is utterly lost.  

I mentioned the many letters from feminist writers and activists, and they offer a more personal history of the movement, but also in my notes I've written, ‘it is kind of dizzying reading these letters with all the upheavals and negotiations in personal relationships. They were all only just scraping by financially. They were doing good and important work, but so tortured thrashing around, finding out who they were, how to live fully.’ It's something I've coming across again and again when I've now worked on Helen Garner's work and now Drusilla Modjeska's work, a generation of women in the 70s who lived big and important lives, but were really quite tormented in their private lives. Anyway, they're now all in their late 70s and they say, ‘oh, we're beyond that. That's all hormones and we're gone from that’. It's all fine, so that's good.  

There are also letters from Dorothy Green, Eleanor Dark, Marjorie Barnard, Elizabeth Jolley, and a fascinating letter from Christina Stead dated 26th of June 1980, at the time she's living at University house in ANU. Let's see if it comes up. It does, this is the second page. To the avidly feminist Modjeska, whose doctorate was devoted to championing Australian women writers. Christina Stead writes, ‘I think Dorothy Green is a better one to talk to about we women's writing. I do not like any kind of apartheid, especially in the Republic of Letters in which I strongly believe. And do not think that women's writing should be separated from men's. At the Adelaide Festival, they had a session of women writers. Think of the rawe, if there had been a special session for men writers’ with an exclamation mark. ‘That alone shows up the absurdity of this concern. Women have never been underprivileged in writing. An editor takes a good manuscript without caring who wrote it, and women have had good education and freedom from wage slavery, at least in the middle and upper classes for centuries, for ages. Let us put it that their creative efforts have, for the most part, gone in the direction intended by nature in their sex.’ And I'm just gonna leave that one there.  

The most voluminous, the longest running, and the most hilarious are letters, postcards, and later emails from Helen Garner. While they may never be published, I will be forever grateful for having read them. And for anyone who was in the special reading room, listening to me giggle, sorry. But they really were that good. There is rightly advice commenting on each other's manuscripts, and there is a 40-year conversation about writing, art, independence and love. Remembering Woolf's comment about a few old picture postcards I chose this postcard to show tonight because it demonstrates the nature of Garner's friendship and support. She's written this postcard from Adelaide Airport, having been up in the centre. ‘Dearest Lady M...’ Which is what she often called Drusilla, Lady M. ‘A quick note between flights to tell you that I just met a woman on the plane who when I mentioned your name, seized my arm and said, I loved that book. I heard about it from a friend of mine who's been living in the desert with the Aborigines for 14 years. She'd had a difficult time with her mother and she told me she'd read “Poppy” several times. She said that there were things in that that made the tears stream on her cheeks. I thought you should know this immediately, if not sooner. And she said she'd given to at least four of her friends a copy each. I loved everything about it. This book is one that people love and treasure. Much love, H.’ And beneath, Drusilla has written in the diary, ‘What would I do without the wondrous HG?’  

I haven't shown you any other diary entries tonight because the diaries are embargoed. But it is interesting just there even to note that what Drusilla does again and again is tape in the important letters and the important postcards that she wants to keep and they're all kept in her diaries. And because we’re Canberra, I wanna show this telegram from Manning Clark, sent on the publication of “Exiles at Home”. Simply reads, ‘Long life to the child of your heart.’  

Next on the biographer's table, diaries. Is there anything more valuable? One school of thought says that since a diary is not written for an audience, it has the status of invaluable resource material. With a diary, the biographer has access to unmediated thoughts, and that is very, very true. But how often does a diarist record the exciting happy times as against the frustrations hurt and woundedness? When I wrote the blurb for this talk and mentioned quote, ‘the perennial questions about ethics and biography,’ I was wrestling with my research. Day after day, I was immersed in diaries that described destructive love affairs, psychic pain and illness. It was distressing to read entries that had the potential to undermine my sense of Modjeska as the strong, intelligent and productive feminist writer she appeared to be at the time. But also, given that it was so long ago, why on earth was I down in the muck of it all now? My mood plummeted and alarmingly, I began to dread the archive. And then a friend of mine said to me, ‘You know, you get to this stage every time.’ And I sort of thought, ‘Oh yes, maybe, but I had forgotten that.’ I think you do forget these things, but I really was beginning to dread it. Then while powering up and down at Manuka Pool, it came to me that the real-time emotions I was absorbing and trying to wade through were largely forgotten by Modjeska. And even at the time, there were kind of background noise to the work that she was publishing. I didn't need to reinvest them with the meaning they no longer held and possibly, did not hold at the time.  

I reread a passage from an essay titled, "A Handbook of Rare Vegetables" published in 1987 in which the eye of the piece discusses trying to write a mother's biography. I'm now terrified every time I touch this, oh. ‘I took the diaries, the letters, my share of the books back to the London flat I was sharing with Thomas, and I watched the spring come in surrounded by pieces of a jigsaw I couldn't begin to put together. As I waited, Thomas and I drifted apart while assuring each other that we were not. Hardly noticing that disintegration, I puzzled over the note of rising hysteria in her letters and in mine while she was in hospital and I was in school, a hysteria that clashed against the reassurances, the kindnesses on every side.’ It was just that bit ‘hardly noticing that disintegration’ that stood out for me. And I thought, that's my key to understanding what's going on here.  

For Modjeska, it is always the work that takes primacy. It is the work that brought me here to research, and it is the published work that will inform and structure the biography. It's something I always do with writers. It is their published work that deserves to get that credit and to get that, for showing, if you like. My feeling at the moment is that I'll largely sideline these lovers and the destabilisation they wrote unless and until they become necessary. And they may well do when I get into the writing stage, but at the moment, I've pushed them to the side.  

This is neither the time nor place for me to discuss Modjeska's embargoed archives in any further detail other than to say that those diaries evolve over the decades from what Modjeska recognised in 1981 as, and I quote, ‘a catalogue of misery and defeat.’ To vast historical documents where personal reflections sit alongside photographs, reviews, correspondence, newspaper clippings, and programmes for opera and performance, valuable indeed. And I've just given you a photo of one diary there, and that goes from December 1990 to June 1991. So sometimes when, I haven't got time tonight to talk about time in the archive, but sometime when you're in the archive and you're working through something this big and you think, ‘oh, really, this is still going on in your life, and then you think, oh, it's only five weeks later, we're still going through this’. So that's I thought a great one to show you.  

Okay, letters, diaries, photographs. What about the less problematic issue of manuscripts, which are always a central feature in a writer's archive? In Stephanie Bishop's recent novel, "The Anniversary," the protagonist is a writer who at times delves into writer's archives to pour over their manuscripts. This is what Bishop writes, her character. ‘What I find there has often surprised me. On the publicist page, their work appears faultless, which is why I chose to pursue it in the archives. And yet what I have discovered is a mess as good as any I can create, sentences scratched through and rewritten whole sections deleted. Pages illegible with crossings out. After this, I could never again see their books in the same way, or else I preferred the doubleness of the archive, alternate words pinned in the margins or above and below the words on the line so that when I returned to the published version, it seemed thinner somehow, less resonant. Too straightforward... Whatever the reason for the eradication, once you know these alternate versions exist, once you have seen the labour and the crossing out and the rewriting, once you know they are there, the years upon years of drafting and revising, these details ghost the page irremediably.’ Maybe, maybe not.  

Some literary biographers relish pouring over every draft, seeing great value and comparing the scratched out and rewritten. I'm not one of them, although, I did spend a wonderful day last week in Randolph Stow's archive. He has one manuscript for each book he has published, and it was just a delight to just sit there and look through it for the joy of it. It is important to appreciate the labour, the struggle, and at times the editorial suggestions and queries, but the published version is never a lesser work in my imagination.  

This slide shows one of two boxes, 14 folders all up of draughts of “Poppy”. By the time we get to what is labelled the complete final draught, the pages look like this. Yeah, there's still a lot of scratching outs and stepping in. This stage is late in the process of publication, and yet there are still edits to be made on the typescripts, on the page proofs. What I do find interesting is moments like these, and it's a bit faint up there that you can see, but this is a diagram of the possible structure of “Poppy” in one of the diaries. That was the book that in refusing linear progression and resolution, pushed Modjeska to find her voice and a form sufficiently able to bear her narrative. And this page, that shows, demonstrates Modjeska's musing on truths in thinking about how to write the Winterbourne. And there you can see the doodling, which says, ‘truth is complicated, what we believe, in the margins, point of view, two sides, more than two sides by authentic, how authentic? How reliable? Versions that are true moral truths.’ And this next where, she's mulling about “The Orchard” and she suggests ‘Yhe Orchard” might work, ‘determined as much... I can get this to work on this one here, determined as much by what cannot be shared as by that which can’. Something of a theme throughout this project and throughout this talk, I think.  

So in conclusion, I wanna share just an anecdote as a way of threading loosely together these thoughts about manuscripts, rhizomic connections, literary friendships, and the enormous topic of memory that I've mentioned only in passing. After years of crafting “Stravinsky's Lunch”, Modjeska, who is something of a perfectionist, felt let down by the initial edit. Jeremy Steele, her lover at the time, who had considerable scholastic editorial experience offered to step in and take charge of editing and the path to publication. Modjeska accepted gratefully. Before long they're at loggerheads, in her diary, she recorded that Jeremy was removing her active first-person voice from the text, the eye that as she would later explain in that Seymour Lecture she gave, and I quote, ‘could draw together the imagined and the informed, the fictive and the researched.’ It was the eye that allowed Modjeska to reclaim, and I quote, the overlooked and the under recorded lives and work of women.’ It was her eye now being rejected and silenced. She despaired, feeling deeply conflicted, angry, and powerless. Fortunately, Hilary McPhee, who had been her most trusted editor and longtime friend, intervened.  

Jeremy, has since died. When I put the my questions about the events to Modjeska, she replied, and this is a quote, ‘Can't remember that at all, probably just as well.’ I hoped that Hilary McPhee might remember, but I won't be interviewing her until September. In the meantime, I opened her beautifully organised archive and discovered a detailed 5-page handwritten account of the saga. But as you can see there, the bottom of the page, the paper is crumbling. Ah, the archive.  

Being the subject of a biography can be an unsettling journey. It can be unnerving when the biographer knows more about your life than you yourself remember. When a biographer stirs up long, repressed or forgotten passions, cringe-worthy diary entries or love letters, pains, slights, falling out of friendships. They yes, can sometimes facilitate a healing remembrance and reconciliation and almost always revivify wounds once dulled by time and life experience.  

Along we come us biographers or anti-biographers to arrange what we have found into a coherent story. We tell our version of a life, filtered through our imagination and interest and crafted in our style. Hopefully, we bring it off. Hopefully, we understand our subject sufficiently and we do justice to their life and work without trying to pin them down like some observable containable object. I have barely touched on the ethics of my original title. Suffice to say that while I'm grateful to have had access to a substantial archive and other archives, a living subject and dozens of interviewees, I continue to wrestle with crucial questions. How do I perceive truth? What is it that I now know? How much can I ever know? How much do I tell and how do I tell it? Thank you. 

Barbara Lemon: Thank you so much, Bernadette, that truly immersive and generous tour through the Modjeska Archive. We do happily have a little bit of time for questions. There are two roaming mics which we just ask you to use for the benefit of people online. If you wouldn't mind raising your hand, if you have a question, perhaps I can kick us off with one about, oh, Kim? No, no, no, go ahead, Kim. There's a mic just coming for you. 

Kim: Thank you so much. That was just wonderful and I've got several, but I'll just start with one and then maybe, we'll see how the evening is. But you ended off with that very powerful statement that so much of what will be produced will be influenced by your viewing of everything, your life. And so I guess to an extent, are you answering your own question in the way that you will write it, in that perhaps being transparent all the way through about that will be a way to share that insight as you go. And in thinking about that, I wanted to know whether you'd read, and I'm sure you probably have, but Janet Malcolm's, "Silent Woman," on Sylvia Plath, because that really is a theme of that book. 

Bernadette Brennan: Absolutely. 

Kim: And whether that might be a way into answering your question and perhaps just link to that. And Christina Stead, Hazel Rowley's book on Christina Stead. 

Bernadette Brennan: That's right. 

Kim: That also might help you answer those questions. 

Bernadette Brennan: Thank you. Yes, I've read both of those. In fact, the Malcolm I go back to again and again because he just talk about mining archives, you think the mining that particular book of Janet Malcolm's. At the moment, I don't know how I'll write this, but it's starting and I'm just finishing tomorrow in the archive here. And as I say, I've still got some interviews to go, but it's almost at that point, the exciting point when it starts to form as I'm walking along the street or swimming in the pool and you think, ‘oh, that's where I'm gonna go with this’.  

I'm just acutely aware because this is the second time I've written about a living subject who is a friend. And you wanna talk about red flags, there are red flags everywhere here about this project. But I'll answer it by going back to, for example, when I sent Helen Garner the manuscript for the book I wrote about her because her archive was embargoed, she was my first reader. And I'd said, on the 30th of June or whatever, I'll send you the manuscript. And I put it in the post thinking, that's great, I'll have on a Thursday night thinking, that's great, I'll have a nice relaxed, you know, weekend. And no, Australia Post delivered it Friday morning. So off it goes. So, and I knew that Helen would react the way she did, which was, ‘look, I've got it. Okay, I'm just gonna read a bit. Okay, I know you're worried, you know, I haven't read much, I'm a bit tired’. I know what's going on here. And then she said, ‘No, no, it's all too much. It's all too much, I can't do this.’ And I'd said to her, ‘This is my version of you.’ And then two days later, she wrote to me and said, ‘You got me. I'm profoundly humbled. You've really seen me in this way...’ And whatever, and I said, ‘Yes, I knew that this would be confronting to you.’ Because what happens is the biographer comes and reads decades and decades of your intimate life and your work and then this work as the story and then it's presented to say, this is your life.  

So I don't know how I'll write this one. Hopefully, it'll be something different again. I think I like to write my books with respect to the subject's style, as in with Garner, she was a genre crosser, with me, as she went across all sorts of different boundaries. With Modjeska, she's a scholar and she's a thinker. So it might go that way, I don't know. But I just think more and more it's so incredibly important for biographers to appreciate the ethics of their subject and not to drown that subject in their own subjectivity. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, up the back. 

Audience member 1: Thanks so much, Bernadette. That was wonderful. One thing that I really appreciated in what you were saying was when you spoke about the effect on you of reading some of the things that Drusilla had written and how you would hang on to your sense of her as a rational, you know, an independent-minded, you know, feminist and so on. And I thought that was really, really interesting issue, you know, presumably in writing a biography. So I just wondered if you could expand on that and also just the role of emotions, that is Modjeska's emotions. It was fascinating what you said about they don't matter to her anymore or she can't remember them, but do they matter, you know, to a biographer, to readers and in what way do they matter? Yeah, and and the whole boarding school experience. I'm reading Andrew Motions memoir, he's a poet and something that keeps coming up recently, someone was talking about Orwell, British boarding schools, you know, as a kind of horrific, forgive me if someone here, you know, loved their boarding school, but kind of imperialistic, militaristic separation of children from home. Even if the home was unhappy, it was at least theirs. And that's what I find fascinating. So obviously, that affected a huge number of people, including Drusilla Modjeska. Anyway, so that's a few different things. 

Bernadette Brennan: Yeah, I'll come back to the emotions. But just on that point about the boarding schools, of course, Drusilla's father was also sent to boarding school at the age of seven. And there's a real issue there with him not being able to show emotion, even though he may feel it. There is a letter in the archive, you'll get all these letters in the archive of people who write in, you know, loved your book, loved your book, did this. And a man wrote in and said, you know, ‘Dear Drusilla, if that even is your name, you know, I really enjoyed your book.’ And it was “Poppy” and it was about, no, it was “The Orchard” and it was about going to boarding school in England and how drastic that was for him. And she obviously wrote back because he has then written a seven-page letter to her, in which he says, reading, I'm 70 something, and he said, ‘For the first time in my life I've cried reading your book, you've allowed me to cry. And it was the damage done to me at English boarding schools.’ And they then have a to and fro conversation and I've got goosebumps again. That was one of those days in the archive you read and think, yeah, I'm really glad I'm here. This is really powerful stuff.  

The emotions are, I think, very, very interesting. So I used the word thrilling when I was talking about the Garner one. That was in the early days. And a lot of her archive here are process journals. And they're not her intimate private journal, she keeps a couple at once. And I wrote an article that was published in the Archive Journal in London about the emotion of working on her work for “This House of Grief” in her office, not in the National Library with the materials that she was using to write that very dark book. And my chapter that I wrote on that book was very dark indeed. And it was the only thing I had to revise. I had to really think about this and think, ‘oh, that was because my emotions were plummeting’.  

Gillian Mears was a very difficult story and she was so terribly, terribly ill and nearly died so many different ways. And there came a point in her archive when I just had to leave it. And I actually, it sounds a bit drastic. I went to Iceland and swam in pools all the way around Iceland for eight days. It was, you know, I used some points 'cause my husband was gonna work over there. But it was that sort of extreme need to break this, to clear my head for the darkness.  

So yeah, the emotion does get you, and the emotion this time was more hurt, hurt for the subject, hurt for the 30-year-old or the 20-year-old, or the 40-year-old. And also a kind of frustration of, ‘oh, for goodness sake, can't you see that this is what's happening?’ But at the same time, you're publishing the most extraordinary intellectual, comprehensive thinking work. So this dissonance going on.  

But yeah, the emotion on the researcher is huge and it's great. I mean, in the end, it's how you empathise, it's how you work out, how you're gonna tell the story. And also for me, for example, at the end of my Gillian Mear's book, I cried when I wrote that ending, and I've heard a lot of readers did too. And so they should is sort of what I felt. I thought she deserved that. Yeah, oh, thanks. But yeah, so emotion, I'm all for it. As long as it's controlled in my perspective for writing, but it doesn't, yeah. 

Barbara Lemon: Got time for one more. 

Bernadette Brennan: Yep. 

Audience member 2: I'm interested in what it's like to work in an embargoed archive and what that means for your work? I don't know how much of the archive is embargoed- 

Bernadette Brennan: All of it. 

Audience member 2: All of it. So for me, I think that would drive me crazy to read and work all the way through all of that, and then presumably not to be able to publish it. So I'm just wondering, you said that you'd originally been interested in a different kind of work on Modjeska, and do you think that's what makes it possible for you to do it that way? 

Bernadette Brennan: No, actually, I think what makes it possible for me to do it this way is that Modjeska herself is a biographer. And for example, when I did Helen Garner's, I didn't offer her veto over the manuscript. She didn't ask for it. But if there was anything that she wanted changed or removed, I was prepared to do that. And there was only two instances of very short things, which were, she said, ‘that's unkind’ to X and Y, it wasn't about herself that she said. And I said, ‘okay, fair enough, it doesn't change the story’. It may come when I write this, maybe there's something that Drusilla won't like, but I think as a scholar herself, she probably will appreciate that this is the biography you've written and she's trusted me to write it. So I can use the material, but I can't go out and talk about it to everybody now. I can't tell you what's in those diaries, for example, until I've cleared it with her that, if I can do that.  

So just one little example, one day she said to me, this is at her house in Sydney. ‘Oh, I found this box of photos. I really shouldn't show you, but the biographer in me really does have to show you.’ And so she pulled out a photo and it's a terrible photo. It's a photo of her parents, herself and her sister Jane, she thinks that possibly a wedding, her father's in morning suit. And she says, ‘Look at this photo, nobody's happy in this photo.’ But Drusilla is unrecognisable, now she's probably about 16 or 17. She looks like she's about 30 in a buttoned up suit and a pillbox hat and gloves and glasses and this sort of dower girl. And she says, ‘This is what I would've been if I'd stayed in England.’ And two years later, there's a photo of her on a small plane in PNG wearing a miniskirt. And she says, now, ‘oh, you know, stupid of me, I didn't understand the culture,’ but this long flowing hair, this languid sensual being. And I'm saying,’ wow, that's a big change in that two years.’ And so we have a laugh about that and I said, ‘I think the photo has to go in the book.’ And she says, ‘I think it probably does.’ But we'll see when we get to that stage.  

So I think I can write it because I think I can trust her as a scholar and a biographer to understand the need to tell certain things to produce a story that makes coherent sense. 

Barbara Lemon: Just out of time. 

Bernadette Brennan: Okay. Thank you very much for coming and for listening. 

Barbara Lemon: Thank you so very much for that, Bernadette and I'm glad you finished on that note 'cause I think my question would've been about being the biographer of a biographer that's also an autobiographer and an anti-biographer, quite challenging.  

I do have just a couple of very quick messages before we close to let you know that our next fellowship lecture will be "Tracing Aviatrix Archives," delivered by 2024 National Library Creative Arts Fellow, Dr Jo Langdon. That's on Thursday, the 4th of July at 12:30. And Dr Langdon will discuss the research she's been undertaking into the lives and records of Australian women pilots and how she will represent this in new works of poetry.  

Our website is the place where you can find recordings of other recent talks and performances from our fellows. These are also available on the Library's YouTube channel. That's it. So thank you for attending and please join me once again in sincere thanks to Dr Bernadette Brennan for a really wonderful talk.