Miles Franklin: My Brilliant Career_1.

PREFACE.

A few months before I left Australia I got a letter from the bush signed "Miles Franklin", saying that the writer had written a novel, but knew nothing of editors and publishers, and asking me to read and advise.

Something about the letter, which was written in a strong original hand, attracted me, so I sent for the MS., and one dull afternoon I started to read it.

I hadn't read three pages when I saw what you will no doubt see at once--that the story had been written by a girl.

And as I went on I saw that the work was Australian--born of the bush.

I don't know about the girlishly emotional parts of the book--I leave that to girl readers to judge; but the descriptions of bush life and scenery came startlingly painfully real to me, and I know that, as far as they are concerned, the book is true to Australia--the truest I ever read.

I wrote to Miles Franklin, and she confessed that she was a girl. I saw her before leaving Sydney. She is just a little bush girl, barely twenty-one yet, and has scarcely ever been out of the bush in her life.

She has lived her book,and I feel proud of it for the sake of the country I came from, where people toil and bake and suffer and are kind; where every second sun-burnt bushman is a sympathetic humorist, with the sadness of the bush deep in his eyes and a brave grin for the worst of times, and where every third bushman is a poet, with a big heart that keeps his pockets empty.

HENRY LAWSON, England, April 1901.

INTRODUCTION.

Possum Gully, near Goulburn,N.S. Wales, Australia, 1st March, 1899.

MY DEAR FELLOW AUSTRALIANS.

Just a few lines to tell you that this story is all about myself--for no other purpose do I write it.

I make no apologies for being egotistical.

In this particular I attempt an improvement on other autobiographies. Other autobiographies weary one with excuses for their egotism.

What matters it to you if I am egotistical? What matters it to you though it should matter that I am egotistical?

This is not a romance--I have too often faced the music of life to the
tune of hardship to waste time in snivelling and gushing over fancies and
dreams; neither is it a novel, but simply a yarn--a _real_ yarn.

Oh! as real, as really real--provided life itself is anything beyond a heartless
little chimera--it is as real in its weariness and bitter heartache as the tall gum-trees, among which I first saw the light, are real in their stateliness and substantiality.

My sphere in life is not congenial to me. Oh, how I hate this living death which has swallowed all my teens, which is greedily devouring my youth, which will sap my prime, and in which my old age, if I am cursed with any, will be worn away!

As my life creeps on for ever through the long toil-laden days with its agonizing monotony, narrowness, and absolute uncongeniality, how my spirit frets and champs its unbreakable fetters--all in vain!

SPECIAL NOTICE

You can dive into this story head first as it were. Do not fear encountering such trash as descriptions of beautiful sunsets and whisperings of wind.

We (999 out of every 1000) can see nought in sunsets save as signs and tokens whether we may expect rain on the morrow or the contrary, so we will leave such vain and foolish imagining to those poets and painters--poor fools! Let us rejoice that we are not of their temperament!

Better be born a slave than a poet, better be born a black, better be born a cripple!

For a poet must be companionless--alone! - fearfully alone in the midst of his fellows whom he loves.

Alone because his soul is as far above common mortals as common mortals are above monkeys.

There is no plot in this story, because there has been none in my life or in any other life which has come under my notice.

I am one of a class,the individuals of which have not time for plots in their life, but have all they can do to get their work done without indulging in such a luxury.