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NLA News - home August 2004 Volume XIV Number 11
Marjorie Barnard: Writer, Historian, Reluctant Librarian

Elizabeth Nelson rejoices at the revived interest in this dedicated writer’s work

A gelatin silver photograph on resin-coated paper of a 'Portrait of Author Flora Sydney Eldershaw  c.1915' A gelatin silver photograph on fibre-based paper of a 'Portrait of Marjorie Barnard  c.1935'

Portrait of Author Flora Sydney Eldershaw  c.1915
gelatin silver photograph on resin-coated paper; 16.0 x 21.0 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an12004673

Unknown photographer
Portrait of Marjorie Barnard  c.1935
gelatin silver photograph on fibre-based paper; 16.0 x 21.0 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an12004638

I began to write as soon as I could hold a pen,’ said Marjorie Barnard in an oral history interview recorded for the National Library in 1966. ‘I used to despair that I would ever write quickly enough to get down my thoughts.’ This born writer, who died in 1987 having published little for the last 20 years of her life, seemed at one stage to have been all but forgotten. Towards the end of her life, however, there was a revival of interest sparked by the greater scholarly attention paid to women writers of the period between the two World Wars, particularly in the now classic text Exiles at Home, by Drusilla Modjeska. Fortunately the renewed interest in Barnard has not waned since her death. It is now realised that she is a fascinating literary and cultural figure, and resources at the National Library, including many of her letters to other writers, can help us trace her career and influence.

Marjorie Barnard was born in Sydney in 1897, the only child of an unhappy marriage between an accountant and ‘a lady’. Educated by a governess until the age of 10, she later attended Sydney Girls’ High School before enrolling at Sydney University where she studied history under the famous Professor George Arnold Wood. Wood’s influence remained with Barnard for the rest of her life. ‘He made of me what I still am,’ she said in 1966. ‘He gave my mind a bent towards history which I have never straightened out.’ For her part, Barnard was a brilliant if modest student (the day Wood told her she was the best student he had ever had she ‘nearly fainted’) who, on graduating in 1920, was awarded first class honours, the University Medal, and a graduate place at Oxford.

A black & white photograph of 'Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark (left) in 1948 in Western Australia'
Unknown photographer
Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark (left)
in 1948 in Western Australia
Pictures Collection, Neg. 1802

Barnard’s father, with whom she never got on, refused to let her leave the country, and so she had to turn down the Oxford place. She was at a loss as to what to do next. Feeling that the obvious option, teaching, was not for her, Barnard became a librarian. She seems to have found little satisfaction in this occupation, which she pursued on and off for many years. (The best she could find to say of it in the oral history interview was that it didn’t actually put her off books.) Her true vocation was, however, about to be realised.

In her first year at Sydney University she met Flora Eldershaw, a fellow student. ‘She had ambitions to write,’ said Barnard, ‘and we used to talk about the books we would write, and it occurred to us that it would be much more fun to write together’. In 1928 they saw an advertisement in The Bulletin seeking entries for a competition for a first novel, and decided the time was right. A House Is Built, a historical novel, was entered under the pseudonym of
M. Barnard Eldershaw and, to the astonishment of both Flora and Marjorie, was joint winner with Katharine Susannah Pritchard’s Coonardoo. In addition to its success in Australia, the novel received international attention, including a favourable review by Arnold Bennett in the Evening Standard. After that ‘we felt ourselves to be writers’, said Barnard, and they immediately began work on another M. Barnard Eldershaw novel.

Green Memory was published in 1931. Barnard continued to work as a librarian while cramming her writing into evenings and weekends. But the strain began to tell. ‘I’ve had some sort of nervous breakdown,’ she wrote to Nettie Palmer in 1935. ‘I always thought that I could never live by writing but I find I can’t live without it.’ Accepting a small allowance from her father, she left her job and became, at last, a full-time writer.

Frontispiece and title page reproduced from Macquarie’s World by Marjorie Barnard, with decorations by Frank Medworth ([Sydney]: Australian Limited Editions Society, 1941)
Frontispiece and title page reproduced from Macquarie’s World
by Marjorie Barnard, with decorations by Frank Medworth
([Sydney]: Australian Limited Editions Society, 1941)

The gamble paid off handsomely. The years between 1935 and 1940 were the most productive of Barnard’s life. Between 1936 and 1939 M. Barnard Eldershaw published two more novels, The Glasshouse (1936) and Plaque with Laurel (1937), three historical studies focusing on aspects of life in early colonial Australia, and a pioneering collection of literary criticism, Essays in Australian Fiction.

Freed from the wage slavery she had found so oppressive, Barnard threw herself into the literary life of pre-World War II Sydney. She wrote to Nettie Palmer that she and Flora Eldershaw had set up house in Potts Point in a small flat with a ‘barred and viewless window’. In another letter to Palmer she wrote that ‘we are trying to manage a weekly party, every Wednesday’. She knew everybody it seems, from Miles Franklin and Katharine Susannah Pritchard to Eleanor Dark and Lloyd Ross. Many of the leading literary and cultural figures of the day made their way to the little flat for ‘oceans of talk and savouries’. Xavier Herbert was a houseguest who arrived with a pound of butter and a toilet roll to see him through the weekend. (‘He was a practical man,’ said Barnard). Others she met in the course of her work with the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW).

A black & white photograph of 'Portrait of Nettie Palmer  1943'
Portrait of Nettie Palmer  1943
b&w negative; 7.7 x 10.0 cm
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-an24083588 

It was at about this time that she and Eldershaw formed a close relationship with the writer Frank Dalby Davison. Known as ‘the triumvirate’, they were for a time the leading lights of FAW. Davison became Barnard’s lover following the breakdown of his first marriage. Barnard acknowledged late in life that she had been in love with Davison but said that, as the child of an unhappy marriage, she had not wanted to marry and had never regretted her decision. Davison eventually married someone else and he and Barnard lost touch for many years.

Barnard found herself swept up in the political climate engendered by the rise of fascism in the 1930s. She had always seen herself as a ‘nineteenth century liberal’, individualistic, not aligned with any political party. As war approached, she abandoned the detachment of which she had once been so proud. She joined the pacifist Peace Pledge Union. She edited a collection of essays in defence of freedom (which was never published). She wrote a political pamphlet, The Case for the Future, which was banned by the censor. ‘Curious’, she wrote bitterly to Eleanor Dark, ‘that people who have been staunchly democratic all their lives should now have come to look upon our liberties as some sort of handicap which “ought” to be “sacrificed” for “the time being”’.

A gelatin silver photograph on fibre-based paper of a '[Portrait of Eleanor Dark]  1945' by Olive Cotton
Olive Cotton (b.1911)
[Portrait of Eleanor Dark]  1945
gelatin silver photograph on fibre-
based paper; 40.0 x 31.0 cm
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-an9070735

In 1943 Barnard published a volume of short stories, The Persimmon Tree and Other Stories, under her own name. During the war she also wrote one last novel with Flora Eldershaw, the apocalyptic Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Published in 1947, it, too, was the victim of political censorship. ‘It was just murdered,’ said Barnard. ‘I was heartbroken.’ The novel was poorly received, misunderstood, and left Barnard and Eldershaw too dispirited to write any more fiction. Flora Eldershaw died in 1956.

After the debacle with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Barnard concentrated on writing history. Barnard had, as she notes in the oral history interview, a ‘deep feeling for Australia, and an intense interest in the history’ because it  ‘was thrown clear, thrown clear of Europe, thrown clear of all the old world and the things that happened there’. Barnard saw writing history as a creative art and she brought to it the same imaginative resources that she brought to writing fiction. When researching Macquarie’s World she visited Tasmania where she met a very old man whose father had, as a young boy, come to the island when Macquarie was governor. Barnard describes a strange feeling of having ‘touched the period with [her] hand’ and recounts in her oral history interview how, although she did not use directly what the man had told her, it caught hold of her imagination and influenced the way in which the book was written.

A gelatin silver photograph of a 'Portrait of Marjorie Barnard, Point Clare  1983' by Alec Bolton. Courtesy of Rosemary Dobson Bolton
Alec Bolton (1926–1996)
Portrait of Marjorie Barnard, Point Clare  1983
1 of 5 gelatin silver photographs;
21.5 x 16.5 cm
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-an14515257-1
Courtesy of Rosemary Dobson Bolton

In addition to her historical work, Barnard wrote Miles Franklin, a critical study of her old friend. Published in 1967, this was her last book. In 1981 she made a public appearance to launch Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles at Home. This seminal work, which contains an extended analysis of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Modjeska described it as one of the most underrated novels of its period) brought to public notice the careers of Barnard and many of her half-forgotten literary peers. In 1983 Barnard won the Patrick White Literary Award. In the same year Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was reissued, uncut, by Virago. The Persimmon Tree and Other Stories was reprinted in 1985, also by Virago, its famously enigmatic title story finding a new generation of readers to puzzle and please. In 1995 Plaque with Laurel was reprinted, along with some of M. Barnard Eldershaw’s essays and reviews, and a selection of Barnard’s letters.

Marjorie Barnard was a major figure in Australian letters. The National Library, through the Barnard letters it holds in the manuscript collections of Vance and Nettie Palmer, Eleanor Dark, Frank Dalby Davison and others and through its oral history collection, will enable scholars to pursue the continuing interest in her life and writing.

ELIZABETH NELSON is a freelance writer based in Canberra

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