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9594138

Title
Item 47: Miles Franklin pocket diary, 2 January - 14 September 1954
Call number
MLMSS 364/Box 2/Item 47
Level of description
item
Date

2 January - 14 September 1954
Type of material
Textual Records
Reference code
9594138
Physical Description
0.02 metres of textual material (1 volume) - manuscript - 9.5 x 6.0 cm
Collection history
This diary was missing from the main collection bequeathed to the Library by Miles Franklin in 1954 and remained with the extended family until it was re-discovered in 2018.
Scope and Content
A small, red pocket diary recording the last year of Miles Franklin's life.

Daily entries detail the ongoing tension in her life between domestic life and caring for others, her writing, a need for recognition and the urge to create a legacy to help other authors. "One wearies of always pulling up stream without acceptance, let alone returns of a material nature," she writes on 6 January 1954, after struggling with her anti-war play, 'The Dead must not Return'.

Franklin remains engaged in the outside world, going to the Mitchell Library to read, visiting an exhibition of Aboriginal art, seeing the Archibald Prize, reading other authors including Judah Waten's 'The Unbending', and visiting a Harry Seidler designed home (might as well be "a fish in a bowl" she writes of the "glass houses on stilts").

She mentions going to Permanent Trustees on 16 February [which managed her will, and set up the literary prize carrying her name].

Between streams of visiting well-wishers and loving family, she struggles to clean sheets, mop floors, preserve figs, and buy and prepare food daily, in the era before modern whitegoods. "Interruptions all day, so was unable to open proofs... I struggled through - lay down in misery of exhaustion till A. & Delys came at 5 & cooked dinner," she writes on April 16. "My heart thumping horribly."

As she becomes sicker and the weather colder, Franklin says her lungs feel like they have "iron bands" around them, and she bemoans a lack of the American style heating that she had enjoyed overseas. Life in crude, unheated Australian houses was purgatory: "Only comfortable place in winter in Australian houses is in bed."

She receives telephone calls and visits from Australian writers - Frank Hardy, Inky Stephenson and Catherine Elliott-Mackay - and pushes on with completing the proofs of her book 'Cockatoos' which "finished me completely". "The struggle to keep going is painful" Franklin writes in June.

From 20 June onwards, the entries change from ink to pencil. Between 27 June to 8 August, most of the pages are left blank.

Written in pencil just five days before her death on 19 September 1954, her final words recorded in the diary are “Went to Eastwood by ambulance to be X-rayed. Ordeal too much for me. Day of distress and twitching. Returned to bed.”
Name
Permanent Trustee Co. Ltd.
Subject
Authors, Australian--20th century--Diaries.
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