AUSTRALIA IN THREE BOOKS
Essay. Published in Meanjin 84.1, Autumn 2025.
Self portrait as Helen Garner.
There are certain things I grew up knowing so intimately that I never recall having learned them. One of the deepest of these, the oldest, is the idea that to express too much emotion, to be too much, is a problem. To be, as a male teacher of mine once described, ‘at the edge of your emotions’ is to be gauche, embarrassing. I associate this state—of excess of feeling—with recoil from those around me: my mother rolling her eyes; my schoolmates turning their backs, clicking together like Lego away from me.
So I behaved. I was, generally, an appallingly well-behaved child, and so naturally—inexorably—I was transfixed by naughty girls in books. Not bad, you understand, or cruel, but the sort of girls who knew when to toe the line, and when to nudge it. Who prioritised mischief over elegance, and vitality over grace. Who let themselves tantrum and rage, creating emotional havoc and then just letting that havoc be.
I think it was probably Judy’s fault.
I have sobbed over many a book in my life, but Seven Little Australians was the first. The novel was published in 1894 and written by Ethel Turner, then only 23. As a young reader, it was the first time I had encountered fiction set in Australia. I was taken from the first page. Turner’s authorial voice carried the kind of British joviality I adored from Enid Blyton’s boarding school novels, but it was set within a world whose sensorial qualities I knew deeply: the harsh crack of an East Coast summer, the tang of eucalyptus in the air, snakes rustling in the long grass and cows calling out their grievances.
Seven Little Australians might feature all the siblings included in the title, but at its heart, it is about two sisters: sixteen-year-old Meg and thirteen-year-old Judy. Meg’s tale is one of suppression. Her moulding throughout the book is towards a state of passive, normative femininity, towards quiet acceptance, of both circumstance and the vagaries of men.
But Judy! Dark-eyed, freckled, curled hair a knotted mass on her head, barely sustaining a battered hat, dashing about ‘with quicksilver instead of blood in [her] veins . . . without doubt she was the worst of the seven, probably because she was the cleverest’. Judy leads the children into chaos, time and again. She argues with authority. She is bolshy, passionate. She is deeply, profoundly alive.
I loved her refusal to behave, her bravery, her absurd loyalty, her willingness to disregard the limits of her physical body. Early in the book, when the children are trying to mollify their aggrieved father, most of them study quietly or sew. Not Judy. Her father finds her in the yard, wielding an enormous scythe, mowing the lawn. Little reaper, black-stockinged and bold-faced. She leaps beyond the boundaries of childhood, of femininity. She exceeds categories, violates schemas.
And so, of course, it is Judy who must die.
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Full piece in print and online at Meanjin.