The madness of the flesh that we call love

This is a very fine first novel by Jean Bedford. Her first publication was the collection of short stories, Country Girl Again, published by Sisters Press in 1978. Sister Kate justly deserves to be one of the two bestsellers in Melbourne. The novel traces the life of Kate Kelly, sister of the famous Ned, and opens when Kate is twelve and Edward just returned from a three-year stint in Pentridge. He is shocked and outraged to learn that his brother, Jim, a mere sixteen-year-old, has been arrested for horse stealing and sent to Pentridge also. Ned is nineteen. Kate remarks: And if ever there was a moment when I could say, there, that’s when it happened, that K’.as the point past which there was no going back, it was then, with that fast drawn-in breath of my brother’s, the sag of his body before his stare tightened again to its prison blankness … From this point, the novel moves inexorably to the formation of the Kelly gang, the murder of the police, the dreadful siege at Glenrowan and Ned’s hanging. But from these well-known historical facts, Bedford weaves the story of Kate, and to a lesser extent, her sister Maggie and Mrs Kelly, telling of their loyalty to their men, their daily struggle against poverty, police brutality and harassment, pregnancies and childbirths, informers and curious passers-by. It is the daily grind rather than the large and daring happenings of the gang which gives the novel its poignancy. Bedford tellingly shows the psychological as well as physical harassment of the women as the police search their shanty, destroy the small amount of food they possess, make lascivious approaches to Kate and scorn them all for their filth and poverty of their lives. Kate recalls one of the police raids on their home: I still do not know what they hoped to find … Whatever it was they did not find it in the drums of overturned and broken eggs, or the spilt flour, or the pickled meat slopped out and left seeping into the mud of the floor. Maggie followed them about as they destroyed our food, trying not to cry, forcing herself to beg them to leave us enough to live. To them we were vermin, and our destruction was inevitable. Inevitability is perhaps the keynote of the novel: the inevitable killing of three policemen by the gang, an act which ‘should have been the death of all my hopes then’, Mrs Kelly’s imprisonment on trumped-up police charges, most of all Kate’s doomed relationship with her young lover, Joe Byrne. Yet there are moments, even weeks, of happiness for Kate in her rides with Joe and her brothers, her sensual bliss with Joe in their mountain hideout where she develops her first and greatest addiction, ‘the madness of the flesh that we call love’. Bedford sees Kate’s love for Joe as a sort of madness which grows throughout the novel and is fuelled and constantly reinforced by her witnessing his charred body being photographed after the Glenrowan siege. Kate lapses into unconsciousness for several days. But Bedford resists the temptation to capitalize on the violence and grotesqueness of the siege. We witness it through Kate, and her shocked, muted reaction adequately underlines the horror: I could see that one of them (the bodies) was Joe, but I did not try to go to him as they hauled his corpse over to the station house. It was later that they propped him up and took photographs for the newspapers - then I was taken away and knew nothing for days afterwards. I did not see them bring out the charred trunks of what had been Dan and Steve Hart: … With a nicely ironic touch Bedford, a few pages earlier, has described how Dan is helping Maggie make scones and ‘He burnt his finger, and cursed, and put butter on the blister, saying’ Jesus, nothing hurts as bad as a bum, does it?’. And Maggie laughed and told him he was always a moaner and teased him about the big tough outlaw not being able to stand a little bum like that.’ Part Two of the novel is narrated in the third person; Parts One and Three chiefly by Kate. In this technique, as in the concept of writing the biography of a well-known fictional or historical character, Bedford’s novel recalls Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys creates a biography for Bertha Mason, of Jane Eyre). The third-person narration allows the reader a more dispassionate examination of Kate, and charts her life, her lovers, her abortion and miscarriage, loneliness, gradual descent into alcoholism and laudanum addiction. She eventually marries and bears two children but is constantly and increasingly haunted by the spectre of her young dead lover. Joe becomes indeed the demon lover and by Part Three, when we return to Kate’s perspective, he is more real to her than husband or children. No one understands. When I lay with Bill (the husband) I knew it was only his outer husk in my bed, that somehow Joe had found a way to inhabit Bill’s body and that it was really him I lay with, caressing and kissing, our limbs wound round like tender vines … Now sometimes, I feel that I am waiting, that one day if I concentrate and do not lose faith, I will see him truly, Joe, in his leather breeches and cowboy leggings striding through the misty trees in the morning ... And I believe he comes to me at night now, when I am alone, although I wake in a cold bed. But I wake remembering the pleasure of the darkness, and my skin still glows from the warmth of his young body. Lulled by her gin, Kate spends her nights by the river, waiting and watching for Joe. Bedford’s descriptions of Kate’s descent into fantasy and suicide are haunting, moving, and with no trace of false sentiment. And for me it was a kind of relief when Kate finally followed Joe, his fading, beckoning form as he retreats, melting into the morning fog that rises from the riverbanks, her gin-soaked body finding peace at last, released from her grisly and obsession-haunted world. The real strength, and poignancy, of Sister Kate, lies in Bedford’s depiction of the continuing, everyday misery of the women affected by the Kelly gang’s violent, but short, lives; Mrs Kelly’s abandonment by her sons and Gardiner, Maggie’s isolation with her husband in prison, Kate’s frightening emotional and psychological stasis at Joe’s death. And although Bedford does not spell it out, there are the ongoing consequences through Kate’s children, prenatally drugged with gin and laudanum, emotionally neglected, fated from the womb. I think Sister Kate is a very good novel. I like Bedford’s language, the first-person narrative which echoes the lilting Irish speech of the Kelly’s, her sensitive and sensual descriptions of Kate’s sexual relationship with Joe, the imagery throughout the novel which is based on ‘the sights and sounds and animals .of the Australian bush, the interludes into third person narration which gives a more objective and critical vision of Kate and her exploits. I especially liked the control which Bedford exhibits in her writing when dealing with some of the more horrific aspects of the story. I wonder whether the title is simply a reference to Ned’s sister, or am I perhaps being fanciful in seeing Kate as a sort of secular nun, a sister, tied forever to her ghostly lover, the eternal spouse?

Frances McInherny

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