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Following in famous footsteps – Farewell from the Blue Mountains

Blue Mountains

Blue Mountains

Lilianfels and Norman (magic pudding) Lindsay

On my last Sunday in Australia I make my way to Sydney Central train station. After an hour’s journey on a rickety old train full of graffiti, as well as hikers with rucksacks eager to get to the mountain trails and cliff walks of the World Heritage listed Blue Mountains National Park, I get out at Springwood. I feel a rush of cold air but it’s wonderfully fresh. I am grateful for the gloves I have carried all around Australia, unused until now. Suddenly it is winter, strange in May.

No wonder so many Victorian travellers came here thinking a blast of mountain air would cure them of all manner of ailments especially Tuberculosis or consumption as it was then called. Nowadays, the place to stay is Lilianfels, a luxury spa hotel owned for a decade or so by a Japanese group but originally the home of Irish born Sir Frederick Darley, Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Justice of New South Wales (NSW).  Sir Frederick and Lady Darley came here with their family in 1888, bought some land in the neighbourhood of Katoomba for “the erection and completion of a high class cottage.” They certainly achieved that, although the cottage could not deliver the hoped for cure for their beloved daughter Lillian. She died on April 21, 1889 aged 22 and the house was named in her memory with the word ‘fels’, a high rock in German, added to indicate the surrounding area. Sir Frederick sold the property in 1908 and the house went through a variety of owners after that.

Nonetheles  Lilianfels, with its broad sweeping driveway so typical of hill station estates, evidently remained a popular Blue Mountains resort. According to one early 20th century advertisement it was a “charming guest house of historic interest, sunny yet sheltered. It immediately overlooks majestic cliffs and has a clear and uninterrupted vista of the Jamieson and Kanimba Valleys. Lilianfels is not modern,” the advert continues, “the site was chosen and the quaint old fashioned residence built by Chief Justice Sir Frederick Darley over a century ago and there he entertained royalty on several occasions.” Queen Mary visited in 1901 and, twenty years later, her son then Prince of Wales, later Edward 8th and later still Duke of Windsor (about whom I have spent so much time talking in Australia this month) went there.  Edward came as part of his 1920 tour, intended to proclaim to the Dominions that, in spite of the recent Bolshevik massacre, the British monarchy was safe in the hands of this handsome charmer. During his brief stopover, Edward, a keen gardener, found time to present Ranger McKay with a long service medal in the grounds of Lilianfels as he admired the glorious landscaping of the park.

I long to go back here not only for some serious trekking in the valley of the Three Sisters mountain peaks but to ramble around another Springwood estate, the home of the artist and writer Norman Lindsay (1879- 1969) and his muse and wife, Rose Soady. They moved to the Blue Mountains in 1911 hoping to cure Lindsay’s presumed tuberculosis. The property where he lived and worked for nearly 60 years, called Springwood, is now owned by the National Trust of Australia and the original sandstone cottage, which Lindsay and Rose extended and embellished to suit the growing needs of their family- (daughters Jane and Honey were born in 1920 and 1922) – now houses a gallery for the permanent exhibition of his work. Several of his cement sculptures still decorate the magnificent 42 acre garden with some now cast in bronze to preserve them. Lindsay wrote his classic Australian Children’s story, The Magic Pudding, in response to a wager:  he believed that children were more interested in food than in fairies and he was evidently right. The Magic Pudding may not be his most significant artistic creation but it has never been out of print.

New Zealand Women

Photography by Bev Short part of her All Woman exhibition

Photography by Bev Short part of her All Woman exhibition

In 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote. After two decades of campaigning by women such as the Liverpool-born Kate Sheppard, who was also a temperance campaigner, politicians believed that empowering all women in this way might have a positive effect on morality in politics or even controlling men’s drinking habits. It was another twenty five years before Britain gave its female population – and then only those over 30 – the right to vote.

So, no surprise then that the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in Wellington has just opened a striking exhibition of photographs called All Woman * by another British immigrant, Bev Short, a Plymouth-born mother of two daughters, who came here ten years ago and says her aim is to create a debate about what it means to be a real woman today.

Her exhibition was opened by Melissa Clark Reynolds, once an impoverished, teenage single mother who struggled to finish her education, became a millionaire aged 35, and now works as an entrepreneur, philanthropist and climate awareness evangelist. It features women as disparate as a tattoo artist, sheep shearer, violinist, lance corporal in the NZ infantry, fire fighter, electrician, orthopaedic surgeon and a former Miss Zealand, mostly in unexpected poses not necessarily related to their work.

According to an introduction from Helen Clark, New Zealand’s first female Prime Minister who served from 1999 to 1980 and is currently administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, the UN’s third highest position:  “The show is a celebration of Kiwi women in the 21st century, some of whom … are redefining our idea of family and society, while others are making New Zealand proud on the international stage.” In 2006 Forbes Magazine ranked Clark 20th most powerful woman in the world yet few people outside New Zealand have heard of her.

Bev Short said the most shocking thing she discovered while working on the exhibition was the high incidence of domestic violence – against women and children. “I think that says something about the men in this society and it’s not just lower socio-economic groups or non-whites.”

Among the most powerful images is former international equestrian Catriona Williams, who represented New Zealand until she fell from her horse aged 30 in 2001 leaving her a tetraplegic. Yet instead of picturing her in a wheelchair, Short has her fully made up, with jewellery, wearing a magnificent red ball gown lying on a white sheet, her beautiful face radiating courage to her audience. “My ambition is to be able to dance with my husband once more,” she says. On the adjacent wall is Barbara Kendall, a retired windsurfing gold medallist now a motivational speaker, posed with curlers in her hair,  a phone in one hand, iron in the other, laptop open and child’s dress on the ironing board… a portrayal of multi-tasking with universal resonance for women.

*****

New Zealand is also famous for having relatively more book buyers per capita than any other country and this week The Forrests, the eagerly awaited novel by prize winning New Zealand author, Emily Perkins, was published and immediately needed to reprint.  The Forrests  has already been tipped as a likely winner of the Man Booker prize – at least by the Hay Festival where she is coming to speak in June. The last New Zealander to win the then Booker prize was another woman, Keri Hulme,  in 1985 with The Bone People .Perkins, who after living for eleven  years in London now teaches creative writing at Auckland University, is following in a powerful tradition of female New Zealand writers from Katherine Mansfield,  who  believed that power, freedom and independence were more exciting than love, to Janet Frame  (Angel at my Table)  and my own favourite, Margaret Mahy, whose brilliantly imaginative Lion in the Meadow I read night after night to my children .

Birthplace of Katherine Mansfield

Birthplace of Katherine Mansfield

Apparently this is precisely what Rudyard Kipling predicted when he came to New Zealand on a brief visit in 1891, according to his biographer, the New Zealand-based writer Harry Ricketts. Ricketts discovered a short story Kipling then wrote for the New Zealand Herald in which his narrator says, thinking of the future of Colonial literature, “Hark to the women now. They tell the old story well.”

*****

I am here to give a series of lectures about American women who shocked the British establishment including Wallis Simpson, Jennie Churchill and the so called Dollar Princesses, women who married into the British aristocracy trading money for titles. These women did not have careers and were often at the mercy of their parents who used them for their own social advantage. Katherine  Mansfield, born in 1888, certainly shocked the establishment. She wrote to friends of how she loathed the idea of  marriage as “The idea of sitting and waiting for a husband is absolutely revolting and it really is the attitude of a great many girls…” Perkins told me that although Mansfield and Frame were a major influence on her writing, “I see New Zealand’s female literature in the 21st century as a constellation rather than a linear tradition. It has opened up dramatically in the last twenty years.”

Anne Sebba is the author of That Woman A Life of Wallis Simpson (Phoenix £7.99)