Loving Daughters by Olga Masters

With her first book, the short story collection The Home Girls, Olga Masters has made her ‘own’ a particularly neglected area of Australian life and a special way of seeing it. She also became an award winner in the 1983 NBC Awards for Australian Literature. Now, with her first novel, Loving Daughters she confirms the impression that a unique voice and an important one has joined the ranks of our major storytellers. Her territory is confined to the lives of ordinary country-folk in the period between the wars, in the present work the period around the early 1920s and the place a small farming township on the south coast of New South Wales. In this isolated, rural setting, Masters creates a microcosm where people’s lives are circumscribed by social codes which dictate how people should behave towards each other, and declares their relative prestige both within the family and the larger community. The Reverend Colin Edwards, on his way to visit Enid and Una Herbert, the eligible and attractive sisters who have caught his eye, passes the Hickeys’ paddocks: A Hickey was riding by the fence next to the road and Edwards bobbed his head so that his hat brim bounced a couple of times. That was good enough. The Hickeys were Catholics. On another occasion, now in pursuit of Una, the younger sister, the girls’ Aunt Violet amuses herself by tantalising the hapless Edwards: ‘You have missed Miss Herbert,’ Violet said. ‘I think she would have liked to have seen you.’ Miss Herbert the elder, or Miss Herbert the younger? These people were ignorant of the etiquette of using the Christian name of sisters other than the eldest. He might have expected that! He looked expectantly on Violet’s fingers gently tapping her chair arms but they gave nothing away. ‘I was Candelo,’ Edwards said. ‘Meeting the Archdeacon there.’ ‘Is he in good health?’ said Violet, who had seen him but once in her life. ‘Very good health,’ Edwards said, fighting a desire to have him terminally ill. Though life is conducted decorously and with surface serenity, what Masters reveals is that the human passions bum at least as intensely as they are thought to do in more fashionable or exotic backgrounds. She writes of love, jealousy, frustrations, innocence, possessiveness, hope, and disappointment, with all their unpredictable consequences. Masters’ real concern lies in the observation of human behaviour to reveal an ironic distance between the factual, i.e. what is said and what is done, and the actual, i.e. what is meant and what is felt. Her characters are drawn with an eye that finds their errors of judgement, their lack of self-understanding and their attempts to realise their dreams, simultaneously forgivable and pitiable. Each of them is in pursuit of a romantic ideal which cannot ever be achieved, human frailty being what it is and life remaining stubbornly unpredictable. This comedy of manners in a microcosm written with warm-hearted wit and an irony which exposes but does not reprove has some deliciously satirical portraits of incidental characters like, for example, Mrs Ena Grant, who was asked back to the house after the funeral of the infant Small Henry’s mother: Mrs Ena Grant, still in a glow of satisfaction on being asked back to the house, was making a good meal to save on tea, and should Cecil Grant call in before returning to Bega (he was a cousin on her husband’s side) there would be no need to offer food after this ... What would become of the child? Henry, by the mantelpiece, seemed to be handling his grief well, talking to a former girlfriend Lila Johnstone, now betrothed to one of the Power boys. Henry seemed already to have shaken off responsibility for the child, judging by his habit of lifting his shoulders now and again, and giving a lot of attention to the cigarette between his fingers. Ena could not see him taking the child back to Sydney to his mother’s relatives ... As soon as she decently could she would ask, but it seemed safe to assume the child would stay with Violet. If passed over to Enid and Una that would put a spoke in their wheel, dressing to kill as they did and off to the Bega races and the Sydney Show and anything worthwhile at Candela and Pambula. Ena with her hand temporarily empty of food picked like a small brown dusty bird at the crumbs in her saucer, and inhaled a new smell from the kitchen which was doubtless another cake, slipped into the oven since the meal started. They were a capable pair, the Herbert girls, no denying it, but she wouldn’t want their grocery bill, thank you very much! … ‘I don’t mind if I do!’ she said when Enid came by with the new cake. Trying not to· eat too fast she looked the company over. The novel wryly demonstrates the vanity of human wishes as each of the three central characters dreams of some sentimental idealisation of marriage and domestic bliss. These dreams, like so many of the dreams of the young and unsophisticated the world over, are unrealisable because unrealistic; yet we sympathise with the dreamers for they are the optimists, glad to be alive even though that may mean surviving disappointment or learning to compromise. Enid, Una, and the Rev. Edwards are all of marriageable age; all confuse the burgeoning of physical desire with love and marriage, the last two being, of course, inseparable. This provides Masters with a landscape of the human heart, the material for social satire of an exceptionally subtle and humane kind. She writes with a style of deceptive simplicity and with a disarming wit which might well deceive the unwary into pursuing the plot while overlooking the style. For it is not the plot, which is slight, that is important; it is the characters and their reactions to events and each other which grip the imagination. Above all, it is in the manner of its telling that Loving Daughters achieves its position in the front rank of this year’s crop of novels.

Mary Lord

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