There’s been a lot in the media recently around sexism and equality, rights and fairness. Many of these instances are visibly being played out right now in state and federal parliaments, and some are being played out in other sectors as well. It’s like we are being directed to look at equality in the workplace and in our environment, and to ask – Hang on, is that right? Is it fair?

An area where there’s a bright spotlight on inequality is women’s sport. Looking through the annals of Australian history (and even world history), we see the right to play and to be acknowledged as sports women – especially in the traditionally ‘manly’ sports – has been a long and hard-fought battle. If we consider women’s sport in the broader context of women’s rights, it tells an interesting story.

My book Bowl the Maidens Over: Our First Women Cricketers was released in June 2021. It’s a book that details the struggles and criticism the women cricketers endured in 1874 when they played a competitive game in Bendigo, Victoria as a charity match to support the local hospital and asylum.

I didn’t realise at the time of writing, but the book is a reflection of women’s sport as it stands today – where women are ridiculed, undervalued and questioned for their contributions. There is still inequality when it comes to opportunities to play, renumeration, and game coverage in the media. Although, it is great to see more and more organisations advocating for equality.

Although, not everyone in the world is moving forward at the same pace. Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban government recently announced earlier this month that Afghan women would not be allowed to play sports.

Mr Ahmadullah Wasiq, the deputy head of the Taliban’s cultural commission, made the following statements:
I don’t think women will be allowed to play cricket because it is not necessary that women should play cricket.
In cricket, they might face a situation where their face and body will not be covered. Islam does not allow women to be seen like this.

For context, twenty-five female cricketers were awarded contracts by Afghanistan’s Cricket Board in November last year. Afghanistan also has a women’s soccer and football team, although reports have said many female players are now fleeing to other counties or in hiding, fearful for their lives.

Have we progressed?

In the late 1800s, the lady players encountered the following responses to the cricket match:
Unseemly exhibition
Unfeminine
Frisky matrons and forward spinsters

And…

A display of feminine vanity, frivolity and coquetry, inspired by the greed of admiration and of notoriety, and speciously disguised in the cloak of Heaven-born charity?

In 1874, where the women where ridiculed and encouraged not to return to the field – even though they did in 1875 – there was little to support them other than their local community. The wrath had come strongly from neighbouring regions, and most definitely from several of the Melbourne papers. Outside of Victoria in the other Australian states and around the world, the game was reported favourably, and not with criticism. But, no organisation stepped in to support, and each state had well-established cricketing organisations at this time. For example, English cricket teams (men’s) had already travelled to Australia to play.

In Australia in 2021, however, things are different.

Cricket Australia released the following statement on 9 September:
Driving the growth of women’s cricket globally is incredibly important to Cricket Australia. Our vision for cricket is that it is a sport for all and we support the game unequivocally for women at every level.
If recent media reports that women’s cricket will not be supported in Afghanistan are substantiated, Cricket Australia would have no alternative but to not host Afghanistan for the proposed Test Match due to be played in Hobart.
We thank the Australian and Tasmanian Governments for their support on this important issue.

To which the Australian Cricketers’ Association replied:
The ACA unequivocally endorses Cricket Australia’s statement on the upcoming Test Match against Afghanistan.
What is happening now in Afghanistan is a human rights issue that transcends the game of cricket.

And there it is. A human rights issue. That’s exactly what it was in 1874 as well.

Hamid Shinwari, CEO Afghanistan Cricket Board, posted a press release on his Facebook page stating the loss of the test could impact the continuation of cricket (for the men) in Afghanistan if other countries decided to follow Cricket Australia’s example. There was no mention of the effect stopping the women’s team from playing would have on the women. The point, it seems, has been ultimately lost because the women in this scenario are unimportant.
Here we are, in some parts of the world, replicating behaviours from the 1800s, with men deciding how women use their bodies, and if it’s okay or not to be using them for sport. This is really not okay. Women, just as men, have a right to choose.

We are lucky in Australia. Organisations are trying to change things and are making a stand on human rights issues. There’s still a way to go in lots of sectors and things may not be perfect, but there are a lot of people working to make them better – women and men – and I’m pretty thankful for that.

Louise Zedda-Sampson is a Melbourne-based writer, researcher and award-nominated editor. Her debut non-fiction book, Bowl the Maidens Over: Our First Women’s Cricketers, recounts the story of Australia’s first women’s cricketers. Her non-fiction has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and magazines, her fiction in anthologies and online.

You can find out more about Louise at www.louisezeddasampson.com.au

References
‘An update on the proposed Test match against Afghanistan’, Cricket Australia, Twitter, 9 Sept 2021, viewed 15 Sept 2021, https://twitter.com/CricketAus/status/1435784792679747587/photo/1
‘Statement on proposed Afghanistan Test.’, Australian Cricketers’ Association, Twitter, 9 Sept 2021, viewed 15 Sept 2021, https://twitter.com/ACA_Players/status/1435799947983478788/photo/1
‘Press Release’, Hamid Shinwari, Facebook, 10 Sept 2021, viewed 18 Sept 2021, https://m.facebook.com/hshinwari/posts/10160020846388714?comment_id=10160020853878714&notif_ref=m_beeper

The post It’s just not cricket – a woman’s right to choose appeared first on Pamela Hart.

Or, should I say a reimagining of A Christmas Carol, with Barbie telling the story to her younger sister – but in this version, it is about a vain, selfish singer in Victorian London who is causing hardship to those she employs (she runs a theatre as well as being a singing star). Mostly particularly, to her best friend the costume designer.

Now, I have to admit, I was not keen to watch this film. I have never been a Barbie girl, nor lived in a Barbie world. And, as an author, my blood chilled to think of one of my books being remade over in Barbie’s image.

And yet… as I watched it, I found myself noticing something unusual. All the big speaking roles in this movie are female. All of them. There’s a notional love interest for the best friend. There’s a few lines said by the juggler at the theatre, and another couple of lines from the director of an orphanage. Every other word spoken (including by the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future) were said by women or girls. Try to remember the last time you watched a movie like that. It was probably Steel Magnolias (1989).

Female-driven movies are vanishingly rare, and even in those women rarely speak more than 60% of the dialogue, according to a large analysis of Hollywood movies. A film with 95% of the dialogue by women? Not happening in Hollywood, but alive and well in Barbieland.

And who are the main characters in this film? Two women with successful careers, running their own businesses (in Christmas Future, when the singer is abandoned and in poverty due to her hardheartedness, the best friend has become an acclaimed designer).

The singer, of course, has been brought up to believe ‘in a selfish world, only the selfish succeed’, by her aunt (the replacement for Jacob Morley), and repudiating this certainly plays into a ‘be a good girl’ script. But then, so does Scrooge’s redemption.
The centrality of female friendship to a happy life was the subsidiary theme.

Barbie movies are very popular.

It makes me wonder about this coming generation of girls. The ones who grew up on Elsa’s defiant acceptance of her power in Frozen. Talk to an average five-to-ten year old – they want to be Elsa, not Anna, the bumbling, endearing ‘main character’. They want to be the one with power.

And the overt messages of Frozen? Don’t reject loving advances from your sister (as in Do you want to build a snowman?). Things go badly when you try to please other people by not being yourself. Don’t be afraid of your own power – as long as it’s wielded with love, it’s great!

These girls, pushed into being pinker than any generation before, are also being served up with role models I would have killed for as a child.

So, would Dickens have liked the Barbie version of A Christmas Carol? I doubt it. But I suspect his three daughters would have loved it!

The post Dickens meets Barbie appeared first on Pamela Hart.

Elaine says:

While I’d be the first person to tell you that most people in my period of interest, the later Middle Ages, were illiterate, one of the cool things I discovered during the research for my  Dark Apostle series, is the wealth of medical knowledge being shared through texts.  (I wrote a blog entry entitled “Books Must be Banned” railing against the vast number of books that appear in pseudo-medieval fantasies, but I digress. . .)

In the earlier Middle Ages, when the first universities devoted to medicine arose at Paris and Salerno, study depended largely on texts from the Roman era, most notably those of Galen.  Galen brought us the theory of the four humors, and based his anatomies on pig dissections.  So he’s perhaps not the most reliable of sources.  Still, the educated practitioners of the day, the Physicians who ruled at the universities, thought so highly of Galen that, if a patient on the operating table had anatomical deviations from Galen’s observations, it was the patient who was presumed to be deficient (perhaps because the patient was human, rather than porcine).

In the Muslim world, medical practice progressed far beyond Galen, with frequent improvements in technique, like moving from cauterization of wounds to the use of ligature to control bleeding.  The prophet Mohammed has great respect for physicians, which carried through into a wider societal interest in teaching medicine and sharing medical knowledge. This tradition began to influence European practice during and after the Crusades, when European nobles first exposed themselves to Islamic culture of the time, and translations of Classical texts began to return to Europe.

Prior to the fourteenth century, most medical texts appeared in Latin, but after this time a variety of works appeared in the vernacular, including illustrations to aid the reader in reproducing complex operations.   For this explosion of knowledge, and its dispersal, we must thank not the lofty physicians, but the surgeons. Regarded as mere craftsmen for their more hands-on approach and real-world knowledge, surgeons often kept records of their operations and corresponded with their counterparts about the practice of their art.

Many established surgeons wrote treatises about particular treatments and injuries, as well as manuals of general surgery, in particular to offer access to medical education for those who could not afford the services of a higher class of surgical professional. These works reveal a variety of practices and operations, including intimate examinations, probing of injuries, and multiple treatment approaches. Henri de Mondeville (1260-1320), surgeon to Phillip the Fair and later a professor of anatomy at Montpellier, even addresses cosmetic surgery of the breast and face.

Contrary to the image of the medieval surgeon as eager to cut or burn, these medical texts reveal a humanitarian and often minimalist approach to surgery and wound care. De Mondeville advocated cleanliness and the avoidance of pus (claimed by some physicians to be a sign of healing–“a laudable pus”) in accordance with the practice of Hippocrates. Arnold of Villanova listed four considerations before performing any operation, most notably, what good reasons require the surgery, and whether it is both necessary and feasible. Guy de Chauliac, surgeon to Pope Clement VI, maintained both himself and his noble patron through the plague years of 1347-50, by use of a practical approach to hygiene and limiting interactions with others. The texts were widely distributed and often quoted one another, revealing a lively network of surgeons across Europe building upon one another’s work.

Treatises on specialized operations and common conditions—like cataracts—proved especially popular and passed from hand to hand (or hand to scribe) across Europe.

My series, The Dark Apostle, which continues this month with volume 4, Elisha Mancer, owes a debt in particular to the works of Ambroise Pare (from whom I also take my name), a 16^th century French barber-surgeon who wrote treatises with medical and surgical advice, as well as a memoir of his experiences in battle.  I honor this medieval tradition of sharing medical knowledge and hope it enhances the adventure and intrigue of my fantasy novels.

Want to know more?  For sample chapters, historical research and some nifty extras, like a scroll-over image describing the medical tools on the cover of Elisha Barber, visit www.TheDarkApostle.com/books
E. C. Ambrose blogs about the intersections between fantasy and history at http://ecambrose.wordpress.com/
https://twitter.com/ecambrose

You can buy volume one, Elisha Barber here:
Indiebound
Barnes & Noble
Amazon

The post Hitting the Books: Medical Texts of the Middle Ages appeared first on Pamela Hart.

That’s so far away from the era of my own books that I was fascinated by the kind of research Wendy has had to do for the book – I know it’s taken her a very long time to get to the point where she felt she could write it.  Very kindly, she’s written about that process for this blog.

I asked her: What are the pleasures and pitfalls of researching such a long-ago era?

Wendy:

Although this is a very different era to the one you’ve specialised in, there’s the same joy of discovering not just new facts, but new questions – and of course questions are always the start of a story. I think the main difference is that the farther back you go, the fewer answers there are – at least, fewer firm, factual answers. That makes fiction both easier, and harder.

Dragonfly Song is set in the Minoan Bronze Age world, a decade or so before its final destruction in 1450 BCE. This was a fascinating civilisation, extraordinarily advanced – a favourite example is that they had flushing toilets – that left no written records of its history or culture. The only writing that has been found and deciphered is stocklists or tax accounts. Though I loved knowing that someone had a cow named Blackie! Funny little details like that instantly bring even a list of livestock to life.

But, with nothing to base theories on except material remains, interpretations vary widely. I heard one archaeologist say that her impression of the Minoans was that they were all very beautiful. Hmm. So is everyone from the 20^th and 21st centuries, if our impression is based purely on red carpet photos. I’m equally doubtful that goddess figurines mean that women held all the power.

Still, I have to confess that I first became fascinated with the Minoans after a dream about a white-robed priestess leading a torchlight procession up a mountain. I don’t believe there was any sort of message or accuracy in the dream, but it was the impetus to my reading everything that interlibrary loans could give me on Bronze Age mythology, and the Minoans and Mycenaeans. This reading itself was back in the distant pre-internet period of history.  Of course I wrote about it too, a melodramatic romance that was very nearly, but luckily not, published.

When I returned to the subject twenty-five years later, there was not only a huge amount of new material and revised theories – through the magic of Google, I had access to much of it. An overwhelming amount, much more than I needed. And so, as with any research for any fiction, the difficulty became knowing when to stop. It’s easy to become obsessional and decide that you can’t finish the book until you know exactly how goats were herded in the 15thC BCE. Or exactly how the bulls got from wherever they were to the bull-game court in Knossos. Or which court it was.

The only thing to do is to draw a deep breath and remember that I’m writing fiction. If no one knows the answer for sure, all I can do is to choose the theory that makes sense to me, and if there’s no theory, then work out my own as logically as I can. And sometimes, when I’ve done all that, I still have to choose to change it for the sake of simplicity and story line. So although the Minoans sometimes saluted with a fist to the forehead, and sometimes with a hand on the heart, I chose the hand on the heart. It worked better for my story, and is easier to picture. Did that stop me feeling anxious when I visited the Archaeological Museum and saw the fist-to-forehead statuettes for myself? Of course not. But will readers be happier with one clear thing to picture in such a different world to their own? I hope so. Because in the end, the research is only the start of the story. It builds the world, but characters are formed with our hearts.

The post Dragonfly Song appeared first on Pamela Hart.

But I thought it was worth sharing a bit more of the background – specifically, the material I collected on the prevalence of bigamy in the early 20^th century.

It was very widespread, particularly in the war years, and many cases came to light after the war, when the first husband returned home, or when the second wife turned up on the doorstep unexpectedly.

Here are some examples:

I love that phrase, ‘not the moral courage to tell her’.  I think that sums it up perfectly.  A particular kind of courage is needed in these circumstances, obviously, when a child out of wedlock would damn her in the eyes of everyone she knew.

Look at the story to the right.  You do get the impression he found the whole thing a bit too much for him, don’t you, and thought going to the police was the simplest way out.

There were clearly many more cases which came out of the war.

Thirty-three cases in a week.  Think about that.

Thirty-three.

How often does bigamy come up nowadays? It happens, but usually it’s the result of someone deliberately living a double life.  That did happen during and after WWI, as we can see above, but a different kind of case was also common.

For a working class couple, divorce was pretty much unobtainable.  There were a number of reasons for this.  Firstly, there was no such thing as ‘no-fault’ divorce.  And physical or emotional abuse wasn’t really considered a ‘fault’ – as long as it was the husband doing the abusing.

You had to prove adultery.  And ‘proof’ meant proving it in a court of law.  Which meant that the ‘respondent (the guilty party) couldn’t just get up and admit it.  The person they had committed adultery with (the co-respondent) had to be named.  And there had to be a witness.  Some hotels specialised in providing chambermaids or room service waiters to ‘interrupt’ at a convenient time so they could testify to finding the parties in a compromising situation.

This was so blatant that at least some judges refused to accept the evidence.  And, of course, for the co-respondent to be named (particularly if they themselves were married, as they often were) was a scandal of the deepest hue.  They could literally find themselves cut off from all their friends and relations overnight.

Judges weren’t keen to grant divorces.  Divorce was seen as a threat to the moral order of civilization. Divorce cases caused the judge genuine concern about what would be the least damaging decision.  What the judicial system – and the laws – wanted to avoid was ‘to reward immorality’.

The system was slanted towards the rich, as well.  They often had solicitors who could organise everything for them, including the barrister which you needed in order to even walk into the courtroom.  And it was a full court case, complete with a jury of four. Very intimidating.

For a working class person, the task of finding a lawyer and embarking on a court case may have seemed insurmountable.  The class system was well and truly in place, even in Australia, although here it tended to be based more on money than pedigree.Then there was the cost.  An uncontested divorce – that is, one in which the respondent admitted to the adultery and didn’t object to the divorce happening – cost around £50-60.  The average wage was around £4 for a man, and lower for a woman.

Half a year’s wages, in other words, at a time when ordinary people lived from week to week and rarely managed to save.  And it cost more if the other party objected.

It was easier all round if the two people involved just agreed to go their separate ways.  The woman, if she had no children, usually went back to her maiden name.  If she had children, she pretended to be a widow.

And then they went on, quite often, to form new relationships.  Most of the bigamy cases come about because they failed to tell the new wife or husband about the old one, and they found out – often because the man had stopped paying child support and the old wife objected.  The easiest way for her to get a divorce (and thus an order of alimony for her and the children’s support) was to prove bigamy – then the divorce went through pretty automatically.  Sometimes it seems there is no real animus between the parties.

But there are a couple of cases which are just plain out nasty.  In 1910, there was a man in the USA arrested for ‘marrying’ and stealing from 19 women.  And during WWI, there was an Australian soldier who married eight different women – every time he was posted to a new town, he got married, presumably to avoid the STDs which were rife in the brothels.  And maybe to have someone do his washing… not quite the image of the bronzed Aussie ANZAC soldier, is it?

That case was even mentioned in Parliament and made the international news.
Of course, not only men were bigamists of this type.

But there are other stories, which were far more shocking at the time than some of these.  This one is my favourite:

Isn’t that a nice story?  I’ve tried to find out what happened, without success.  If anyone knows, I’d love to find out the end of the story!

The post Bigamy vs divorce appeared first on Pamela Hart.

She didn’t like teaching, I don’t think.  Later I found out that she was a brilliant and well-educated woman, who should probably have been teaching post-graduates at uni, but there were no Catholic universities in Australia in those days, so she was reduced to teaching us – a group of not-very-enthusiastic 15-year-olds.  I was enthusiastic about English; reading, thinking about it, talking about it:  but not at all about writing essays.

Sr Edmund taught me to write an essay.  Specifically, she taught me to write an essay about Macbeth.  And she taught me by reading my paltry efforts closely, writing detailed comments, and then giving them back to me with the instruction to do it again.

Four times she gave it back.  Five essays I wrote, and only after the fifth effort was she satisfied.

At the time, I complained loudly to my friends and dramatically to my family.  I said it was unfair – she wasn’t making everyone do it over and over again; she was letting other people fail (even at the time, I knew that argument was specious, I knew that she was making me do it again because she believed I could do better); she was a hard marker, too hard, she was mean, she was (insert here whatever complaint you’ve ever made about a teacher).

But I did my five versions.  And slowly (probably more slowly than I’ve ever learnt anything), I learnt to write an essay, rather than a randomly assorted assemblage of facts and opinions.

Sr Edmund was a hell of a teacher.  I never had trouble with essay-writing ever again.

It worries me that I never thanked her (she’s dead now, of course).  Because she didn’t only teach me to write essays.

She taught me to do as many drafts as it takes to get it right.

That’s an invaluable lesson, and it’s one I was thinking about while writing my last blog post about amateur and professional writing.  I’m not saying that I gave every essay I ever wrote my undying, persistent attention.  But it did mean I knew when I was just sloshing something together.  That awareness carried over to fiction writing; that sense of ‘not quite right’ which means you have to do another draft.  And seeing the difference between my first Macbeth essay and my last taught me why the drafts are necessary.

So thank you, Sr Edmund.  I didn’t like you much, but that’s okay – I don’t think you liked me much, either.  But you gave me the gift which proves you were a superlative teacher: a yardstick to measure my own effort and accomplishment against, so that I know when I’m not doing my best.  And as a writer, you gave me an even greater gift: the willingness to redraft as many times as necessary, because I know it’s worth it.

The post Drafts and Sr Edmund appeared first on Pamela Hart.

But you don’t have to do this if all you want to do is have fun with writing.

I respect amateur writers.  I respect anyone who does creative work for the love of it, which is what ‘amateur’ means.  In our culture, somehow it’s okay to be an amateur musician, and play at home for the love of it.  It’s okay to be an amateur photographer, and to share your photos on Pinterest or Tumblr.  It’s okay to be an amateur painter, and to hang your watercolours in your hallway.  But somehow, it’s not okay to be an amateur writer.  Every writer is supposed to be desperately seeking publication.

I teach at the Australian Writers Centre, and I teach everyone from absolute beginners who have never written anything in their lives to people who’ve written several novels and are now trying to find out if they’re any good before they submit them to a publisher.

Mixed in among them are people who, when asked at the beginning of a course, ‘What are you hoping for from this course?’ look embarrassed and apologise because really, they’re there for fun.

Or they want to write their family history for their grandchildren.  Or they want to be better at blogging, just for their friends.  Or they have a yearning to write their own life story, but they don’t necessarily want anyone else to read it.  Or they just simply like playing with words and stories and want to increase their skills, the way an amateur golfer might take a lesson from the golf course pro.

I hate that those people think they should apologise.  I hate an attitude that says that having fun isn’t a good enough reason to play with words, or that private achievement (like writing a family history) isn’t real achievement.

The reason I hate it is that it equates value with being a commodity.  That unless someone else, some stranger, puts money down for something, it’s worthless.  That being without a price tag equals valueless, instead of priceless.

No writer worth their salt – particularly fiction writers – actually write for money.  If they did… well, God help them is all I can say.  The average income from writing around the world is low (well under the poverty line) and falling.

Writers write for all sorts of reasons, but in the end, if love of the process, the storytelling, the struggling with words and the momentary brief euphoria that struggle sometimes brings – if that’s not one of your reasons, you won’t keep writing for long.  There are many easier ways to earn money.

So we’re all amateurs, all the writers, really.  Even JK Rowling, who, if she wrote for money, could have stopped after the fourth Harry Potter – and who certainly didn’t have to become Robert Galbraith to earn a living.  Even EL James, who really didn’t need to write Grey – not only was she a multi-millionaire from the books, but she’s parleyed that into a brand for lingerie, sex toys, you name it.  So why keep writing?

Because nothing else is quite what we’re looking for. Because we’re addicted.

For the love of it.

The post On Amateurs appeared first on Pamela Hart.

But it’s not as easy as you think.

Take Justice Gordon of the Supreme Court of NSW. In 1920, Justice Gordon was in charge of the Divorce Court. I know this because the court lists were published daily in the newspaper. I know when he sat, what cases he heard, what his decisions were in each case, even some of the more sensational stories behind the cases (the days were long gone when every single divorce was described in full in the press, but the juicy stories still got a run).

So, in some ways, I know a lot about him. Then it came time to write the scene where he may, or may not, grant the herione a divorce.

It would be nice, I thought, if I could describe him accurately, so I went looking for an image of him.
1920, I thought. The Supreme Court will have images.   The Law Courts Library will have images. The newspapers will have images.

No. Not one single photo of a man who served on the Supreme Court for almost 20 years.

It’s possible that the National Archives or the State Records Office have one because – brace yourself – the Law Courts Library was only built in the 1970s and doesn’t have anything much before then. They offloaded all the history from the previous library (yes, there was one) onto the State Archives, as it was then.

So I was faced with a dilemma: make up a fictional judge, or make up how Justice Gordon looked. Or, spend several days trawling through the archives (and driving over an hour each way to do it) in order to find a photograph which might not exist, all for a single sentence in one scene.

Guess which I picked? So the Justice Gordon I describe is pretty ‘generic judge’, because I didn’t want to insult any of the real Justice Gordon’s descendants.

But it goes to show how hard it can be to get the details right.

Another example: where did people go to vote in the 1920 NSW election? It was held in March. I found out how you got on the electoral roll (via the police, would you believe?) I know who stood, who was elected, what electorate my character is voting in; I’ve even figured out the weird system by which five people were elected to represent the same electorate. It was quite an education, to realise how much our electoral system had evolved in the first part of the 20^th century.

But I could find no evidence of where the voting was held in my specific area. I resorted to calling my father who, at 92, wasn’t born at this point but I figured that if things were done the same way in the late 20s and 30s as they are now, they were probably done the same way in 1920. He said it was just as it is now, at the local schools.

Then I found a local paper from 20^th March, 1920 (election day) – not from my area, which did not have a local paper at that point that I could find, but from Parramatta – and there, on the front page, was a list of all the polling places around the area. Local schools and church halls! So I could be reasonably sure it would be the same for my character.

So my polling station will be the local school. I haven’t yet decided whether there will be a fundraising stall with cakes and toffees outside… but surely that tradition sprang up on the instant, as soon as polling places existed? Lamingtons are universal, after all…

But the real problem with research is the great stuff you find that you can’t use. Alas, my characters will not see this extravaganza (at least in this novel):

The post When research lets you down appeared first on Pamela Hart.

Now, one of them I know I won’t write within any reasonable time. This is it:

http://www.pascalbonenfant.com/18c/newgatecalendar/mary_frith_otherwise_moll_cutpurse.html

Moll Cutpurse. Great name, great story. And in a week which was dominated by the ‘Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair’ story, fascinating in the insight it gives to the life of a transgender person in the 17^th century. Am I the person to tell this story? Probably not. I couldn’t be more cis-gendered if I tried. Nor more hetero. (Cis-gendered means you identify with the gender of the body you were born with.)

But what a character! (Now, a confession. When I find a character like this, with a story I know I’m unlikely to write, I tuck the impression I have of them into a particular space in my head. Someday, I’ll need a larger than life character for a story, and out will come Moll Cutpurse. When I write a story where my characters need to find a fence in order to recover stolen property, for example…. there she’ll be, behind a desk in her man’s clothes, possibly picking her teeth with a knife…)

The other two stories are different, and interesting in entirely different ways, although they both start out the same.

This is the first one:

Mona West

Three girls missing. Two named Mona. Two surnamed Drury. Oh, the possibilities that conjures up! Serial killer; someone killing off everyone who might inherit something important; mistaken identity, incompetent kidnapper, etc., etc….

I had to find out what happened. Mona West was a ‘socialite’: that is, a young woman of means. So her disappearance was followed avidly by the newspapers, as you would expect, and I followed it through about 50 newspaper reports.

Two things happened: there were lots of false reports of people seeing her. Port Macquarie, the Blue Mountains… and one report of a young woman being forcibly restrained by a man and woman on a street in Randwick. When the man who saw this went up to see if he could help her, the man put his hand in his pocket and threatened to shoot him. He immediately went to the police, but they had left by the time the police got there… the shopkeeper identified them, the police went to their flat nearby, but they had done a moonlight flit…

White Slavery (sex trafficking) did happen – only a few weeks later, a man was arrested in Sydney for advertising for a secretary to take on a round-the-world cruise…

Was Mona trafficked?

The other thing which happened was that her mother died three months after her disappearance, of influenza complicated by grief… and then, the story dies. Nothing. Did it just drop off the public radar, or was Mona found in such degrading circumstances that the police agreed to hush it up? (Remember, her family was rich.)

What of the other two girls? Well, one of them, the other Mona, just 18, was found in the city in a hotel with one of her girl friends. They refused to say why they were there and were hoicked off back home. A budding lesbian relationship? Or two girls out for a good time on the town? We shall never know.

Police apparently knew who had the third girl, Rose Drury, who lived in an decidedly down market area. They warned that if whoever had her didn’t give her up, there would be prosecutions – which looks as though she was working in a brothel, or had absconded with a man who was pimping her out.

And then there was the third story. Janet McGregor. Due to the Mona West story, any missing girl became news in the months following, and Janet was one of them. She contacted the newspaper and said, (with some asperity, one suspects) that ‘when she left home she did so knowing that her eldest brother was fully aware of her actions. She took a position at a city office, and has been engaged at the place ever since.’

So. Three stories of three very different women.

Who is most likely to turn up in one of my books? Janet McGregor, by a nose. Yes, Mona West’s story is intrinsically more interesting, and Moll Cutpurse is a fabulous character, but Janet… Janet appeals to me. Why did she tell only her eldest brother? Some problem with her parents, presumably. Why didn’t the brother contradict the stories which were printed? What was he afraid of? Because Janet didn’t go to the police, either. She went to the newspaper office, to try to get the stories stopped. It’s an odd little story, and when there are oddities, there is space for the novelist’s imagination.

On the other hand, since I’m thinking about writing a book with the main character as an early police woman, Mona West’s sister would be a great character – driven by the desire to find out what had happened to her, driven by her mother’s death, driven by her own understanding of how uncertain and precarious life is (unlike the attitudes of her friends, as privileged as they are).  A society girl becoming a police officer at that time?  Great situation.

Maybe Mona West’s sister and Janet McGregor will meet one day. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The post More Research Serendipities appeared first on Pamela Hart.

Overall, it’s astonishing the number of times I have pulled a piece of information out of some back corner of my mind and had a class member say, ‘How do you know all this stuff?’

Well, here’s my confession:

I’m addicted to research.

It’s not because I write historical fiction – in fact, it’s more the other way around. I write historical fiction because I love researching.

There is so much good stuff out there – little shiny facts that glitter when you come across them, as if they’re trying to catch your attention… and then lead to another fact, and another, and pretty soon you’re down the rabbithole and in a totally different place to where you thought you were going.

And it’s all good.

Yes, it’s all good. Even information you never think will come in handy for anything – it will, sometime. Somewhere. Even if it’s in someone else’s story.

But even if it doesn’t, research has its own rewards.

This week I was reading the Sydney Morning Herald editions for the first couple of weeks of February, 1920, which is where my current book, The War Bride, has got up to. And I found this:

Bush Week.

For those of you who are not Australians, there is an old saying here, ‘What d’you think it is, Bush Week?’ That saying implies that you are ‘trying one on’ – that is, asking too much, trying to trick someone, wanting something unreasonable.   I’d wondered, in a vague kind of way, what Bush Week was, but I’d always assumed it was fictitious, like the Black Stump.
But no. Bush Week was real. Of course, I had to find out more, so I did. Apparently Bush Week was an annual event (first one, as you can see, in 1920) when country districts did displays in the Town Hall and elsewhere in the city, stores devoted window displays to country products and areas, and there were lectures, concerts at the Conservatorium of Music, and a parade!  I suppose, as the Royal Easter Show gained popularity, Bush Week was rolled into that and disappeared.  This is the kind of exhibit the country districts put on now:

I haven’t been able to find any images of the ones in 1920, but give me time…

It’s easy to see how the saying came about, with all the bushies in town for the week. No doubt some shopkeepers took advantage of them and charged them higher prices. No doubt some hoteliers ‘tried it on’ in the matter of accommodation charges. So to ask ‘What d’you think it is, Bush Week?’ was to show that you were no country bumpkin*, out on the spree for the first time. There were no flies on you, mate. You hadn’t come down in the last shower. You were smart as a whip, you were.
You see why I love research? There’s a whole story in that one phrase, ‘Bush Week’.

* the word ‘bumpkin’ entered the language in 1570 as ‘bunkin’ or ‘bumking’, which despite its looks, didn’t have anything to do with anything crude. It was from the Dutch and meant to imply a short, stout fellow (it’s probably the root as boomken, a short boom on a sailing ship).

The post Research junkie appeared first on Pamela Hart.