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Apr. 14th, 2008 12:00 pmIt's barely lunchtime and I've already lived a whole day. I've done a bunch of research and made a curious personal discovery and spoken to a close friend who has suddenly appeared in Canberra. I have advice from my publisher (forwarded from another writer who is an archaeologist - thank you kindly, other writer!) on how to clean my skulls.
This advice makes me realise that - not only shall I not clean them in the sink - I shall leave them until my patio is a bit more private (long story) and the weather is a bit warmer and then do the whole thing outside. Until that day they shall hide in my bandbox, I think, so they're easily found but not able to startle stray guests.
If any horror writer friend wants the experience of cleaning skulls, I can lend them to you, along with the intructions. Those instructions made sense of why George/Yorick (who lived under my bed when I was studying archaeology because my closet was in my sister's room and my sister refused to have skeletons in her closet) had a lovely green growth round the legs.
I didn't mean this post to be about skulls. I meant it to be about Gwen Swinburne.
She wrote an important textbook for the study of Australian history and it's been in print for about 90 years. Her father was the bod who pressured and fundraised and did all sorts of other useful civic things and not only got Swinburne Tech* (now Swinburne University of Technology) named after him, but its written down as one of the good and great of the land. He died in 1928. I don't know when his daughter died. Despite the fact that she wrote the textbook that shaped a great deal of the way we see our history, she doesn't merit an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
I don't know when Gwen died, but I know I met her.
It was part of the good deed thing that Girl Guides are supposed to do. We were all assigned elderly and frail people and helped them for a week or two. I was told that I was being given a woman who lived round the corner from me. She had a book on the Australian flag and maybe I would be interested?
I was. I was already in love with the book.
She told me about how she wrote it and I sorted drawers and things for her. She didn't explain what was in the drawers. I have used the fact that she wasn't public about her personal history in a piece of fiction.
Back then I attributed it to all the wrong reasons. How could a 1970s teen know the difference between a nineteenth century mind and her own? There was a genuinely different feel to a woman's privacy in the previous century. It influenced life choices in a rather spectacular way.
When I was not much older I talked to various elderly relatives about it and not only discovered the differences, but also discovered that they are often peculiar to an Anglo background. This alerted me to some fo the differences in behaviour in different branches of my own family. I use my cousin Linda to explain it all. Linda kept much of her life very, very private, even from family. Other relatives hung out mild amounts of dirty linen. Part of this was generational, part of it was gendered and part of this was influenced by other cultural stuff.
It helped me realise why my family was so different from other Jewish families.
Anyhow, I only discovered today that the author of the famous flag book beloved by Australian Girl Guides in the 1970s was someone of note, because society still doesn't note her, by and large. In the seventies I had a copy of her book and I got quite excited about it in her presence. We didn't just talk about her book, though. We talked a bit about history (and she might be a factor in my rebelling against my science family and wanting to do history) and a lot about books in general.
I've always had a love of nineteenth century ficiton, so somehow our talk turned to Alcott and her ilk. Gwen Swinburne told me that her favourite scene from that grup of books and writers was someone descending a staircase for her first adult something (ball?). I can't remember the name of the book or its author, but I would recognise if I read it in the original edition, because I went straight home and found a copy and read the whole thing, and to this day I remember wehre on the page that scene starts - I read those two pages over and over and over again, because I was so fascinated by its fascination. The rest of the bok, alas, didn't really inspire me.
Retrospectively, I rather suspect that Gwen Swinburne was being nice to teens rather than teens being nice to her. I was expecting housework and got gentle sorting, which makes me suspect she was getting home help. She was frail.
Her interior was a tad unmemorable for a girl my age. I remember that the kitchen felt nice and fresh and that the closed cabinets fascinated me. She was kind, but not deeply communicative, like her decor.
I need to find out more about her. I already had a copy of her book on the Australian flag and her other book is out of copyright, which makes no sense. It was written in the early twentieth century, to be sure, but I thought it was author's life plus fifty years? Unless she sold the book to the publisher holus bolus?
So many questions, and most of them are because she was female - we only have easy answers for her father.
*Swinburne the educational institution had a bunch of name changes. My favourite is when they cleverly called it Swinburne Higher Institute of Technology. They proudly put the acronym on the biggest building. That set of letters came down very quickly. My father photographed them before they came down, I suspect, but I don't know where Mum keeps his slides so I can't find it for you.
This advice makes me realise that - not only shall I not clean them in the sink - I shall leave them until my patio is a bit more private (long story) and the weather is a bit warmer and then do the whole thing outside. Until that day they shall hide in my bandbox, I think, so they're easily found but not able to startle stray guests.
If any horror writer friend wants the experience of cleaning skulls, I can lend them to you, along with the intructions. Those instructions made sense of why George/Yorick (who lived under my bed when I was studying archaeology because my closet was in my sister's room and my sister refused to have skeletons in her closet) had a lovely green growth round the legs.
I didn't mean this post to be about skulls. I meant it to be about Gwen Swinburne.
She wrote an important textbook for the study of Australian history and it's been in print for about 90 years. Her father was the bod who pressured and fundraised and did all sorts of other useful civic things and not only got Swinburne Tech* (now Swinburne University of Technology) named after him, but its written down as one of the good and great of the land. He died in 1928. I don't know when his daughter died. Despite the fact that she wrote the textbook that shaped a great deal of the way we see our history, she doesn't merit an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
I don't know when Gwen died, but I know I met her.
It was part of the good deed thing that Girl Guides are supposed to do. We were all assigned elderly and frail people and helped them for a week or two. I was told that I was being given a woman who lived round the corner from me. She had a book on the Australian flag and maybe I would be interested?
I was. I was already in love with the book.
She told me about how she wrote it and I sorted drawers and things for her. She didn't explain what was in the drawers. I have used the fact that she wasn't public about her personal history in a piece of fiction.
Back then I attributed it to all the wrong reasons. How could a 1970s teen know the difference between a nineteenth century mind and her own? There was a genuinely different feel to a woman's privacy in the previous century. It influenced life choices in a rather spectacular way.
When I was not much older I talked to various elderly relatives about it and not only discovered the differences, but also discovered that they are often peculiar to an Anglo background. This alerted me to some fo the differences in behaviour in different branches of my own family. I use my cousin Linda to explain it all. Linda kept much of her life very, very private, even from family. Other relatives hung out mild amounts of dirty linen. Part of this was generational, part of it was gendered and part of this was influenced by other cultural stuff.
It helped me realise why my family was so different from other Jewish families.
Anyhow, I only discovered today that the author of the famous flag book beloved by Australian Girl Guides in the 1970s was someone of note, because society still doesn't note her, by and large. In the seventies I had a copy of her book and I got quite excited about it in her presence. We didn't just talk about her book, though. We talked a bit about history (and she might be a factor in my rebelling against my science family and wanting to do history) and a lot about books in general.
I've always had a love of nineteenth century ficiton, so somehow our talk turned to Alcott and her ilk. Gwen Swinburne told me that her favourite scene from that grup of books and writers was someone descending a staircase for her first adult something (ball?). I can't remember the name of the book or its author, but I would recognise if I read it in the original edition, because I went straight home and found a copy and read the whole thing, and to this day I remember wehre on the page that scene starts - I read those two pages over and over and over again, because I was so fascinated by its fascination. The rest of the bok, alas, didn't really inspire me.
Retrospectively, I rather suspect that Gwen Swinburne was being nice to teens rather than teens being nice to her. I was expecting housework and got gentle sorting, which makes me suspect she was getting home help. She was frail.
Her interior was a tad unmemorable for a girl my age. I remember that the kitchen felt nice and fresh and that the closed cabinets fascinated me. She was kind, but not deeply communicative, like her decor.
I need to find out more about her. I already had a copy of her book on the Australian flag and her other book is out of copyright, which makes no sense. It was written in the early twentieth century, to be sure, but I thought it was author's life plus fifty years? Unless she sold the book to the publisher holus bolus?
So many questions, and most of them are because she was female - we only have easy answers for her father.
*Swinburne the educational institution had a bunch of name changes. My favourite is when they cleverly called it Swinburne Higher Institute of Technology. They proudly put the acronym on the biggest building. That set of letters came down very quickly. My father photographed them before they came down, I suspect, but I don't know where Mum keeps his slides so I can't find it for you.