Amy's Children

 

 

 

 

 

 

OLGA MASTERS
was born in Pambula, on the far south coast of New South Wales, in 1919. Her first job, at seventeen, was at a local newspaper, where the editor encouraged her writing. She married at twenty-one and had seven children, working part-time as a journalist for papers such as the
Sydney Morning Herald
, leaving her little opportunity to develop her interest in writing fiction until she was in her fifties.

In the 1970s Masters wrote a radio play and a stage play, and between 1977 and 1981 she won a series of prizes for her short stories. Her debut collection,
The Home Girls
, won a National Book Council Award in 1983. It was followed by a novel,
Loving Daughters
, which was highly commended for the same award. Her next books, the linked stories
A Long Time Dying
and the novel
Amy's Children
, met with critical acclaim. This brief but highly prolific period ended when Masters died, following a short illness, in 1986. She had been at work on
The Rose Fancier
, a posthumously published collection of stories.

Reporting Home
, a selection of Masters' extensive journalism, was published in 1990. A street in Canberra bears her name.

EVA HORNUNG
lives in South Australia. Writing as Eva Sallis, she won the
Australian
/Vogel and Dobbie awards her first novel,
Hiam
.
Mahjar
won the Steele Rudd Award and
The Marsh Birds
won the Asher Literary Award. Her most recent novel,
Dog Boy
, won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction and, in Sweden, the Stora Ljudbokspriset.

 

 

ALSO BY OLGA MASTERS

 

The Home Girls
(stories)

Loving Daughters

A Long Time Dying
(stories)

Amy's Children

The Rose Fancier
(stories)

 

Non-fiction

Reporting Home
(ed. Deirdre Coleman)

 

 

 

 

textclassics.com.au

textpublishing.com.au

The Text Publishing Company

Swann House

22 William Street

Melbourne Victoria 3000

Australia

Copyright © the estate of Olga Masters 1987

Introduction copyright © Eva Hornung 2013

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published by University of Queensland Press 1987

This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

Cover design by WH Chong

Page design by Text

Typeset by Midland Typesetters

Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

Environmental Management System printer

Primary print ISBN: 9781922147080

Ebook ISBN: 9781922148162

Author: Masters, Olga, 1919–1986.

Title: Amy's children / by Olga Masters; introduced by Eva Hornung.

Series: Text classics.

Dewey Number: A823.3

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONTENTS

 

INTRODUCTION

The Drifter

by Eva Hornung

 

Amy's Children

 

 

 

 

 

 

OLGA Masters believed in the innate goodness of people. Yet her clear-eyed engagement with the failings, mistakes and harm that we do is a touchstone of her writing. Goodness, for Masters, is not a trite or universally shared concept. It has great breadth. To be human is to be good; and to be human is also to be limited, and to do harm to oneself and others. This fraught and tormented goodness underlies her crueller sketches as much as it does her richly developed main characters.

Masters explores in her fiction the lives of the women she observed around her. These women—children, teenagers, mothers, daughters, sisters, spinsters—are the core of her work, more so than her fine portraits of fathers, brothers, sons and lovers. Throughout her novels and stories we sense a keen interest in the lives of ordinary people. Much irony in her writing derives from the interplay between the mores and expectations that hem us in, and our inevitable amoral striving for self-fulfilment. She understood the effect of intellectual poverty in blinding young women to themselves and their world, and late in her life she observed with wry humour:

 

Not only were we naïve by today's standards, but downright ignorant. Jogging was something we did when the butcher was selling sausages without asking for meat coupons. Heroin would have sounded like the name of a bird. We never knew of a child dying of cancer. The pill was taken for constipation. Gay was the way we felt most of the time, even while twenty-two thousand Australian men and women were prisoners of the Japanese.

 

As an ignorant young woman myself, I absorbed the news of Olga Masters' death in 1986 through the gossip of academic corridors. I had no idea she was sixty-seven. I thought of her as a young woman my age, with my own aspirations and literary ambitions, and I avoided reading her. What delight was mine when I finally discovered
The Home Girls
,
A Long Time Dying
,
Loving Daughters
and
Amy's Children
.

Masters wrote later in life, after raising seven children. She worked as a journalist from the age of fifteen and went on to write a column for the
Sydney Morning Herald
. In 1982 she published her first book, the short-story collection
The Home Girls
(it too is now a Text Classic), having won several awards for her stories.
Amy's Children
was published in 1987, not long after Masters' death from cancer.

She did not publish many works, but in a sense they were a lifetime in the making. Her son the renowned journalist Chris Masters has said that Masters' career began ‘not when her first book was published, but when she started taking an interest in her neighbours'. He describes growing up ‘in a house full of words', serving, with his brothers and sisters, ‘an apprenticeship in storytelling'.

In his words, Olga Masters had the ‘ability to get people to talk', a ‘genuine curiosity'. Her style, sharp and translucent to great depths, offers us a fresh, sometimes startling understanding of everyday lives. She is as crisp and deft in dealing with child-hatred, incestuous desires, violence and our most suppressed motivations as with sibling rivalry, envy and love. This is part of the charm of these books.

 

Amy's Children
is, in my view, the finest of them: polished, subtle and sustained, a rich portrait of inner-Sydney life. This classic Australian novel gives unique insight into wartime Australia, a period that is now the stuff of national myth and legend. However,
Amy's Children
is not merely about that time, or any time: as with all enduring works, it has the specific tactile connection with its world that makes the past live on in the present.

The novel is light and spiky; witty, wry and compassionate. We experience the small lives of its characters without judgement, yet with a keen awareness of how repelled we might have been by them had the book invited us to activate rather than circumvent our prejudices. Amy herself does much for which she would have been condemned, then and now. At the beginning of the story she leaves for the big city, abandoning her three children, which the title highlights as the action that defines the book.

She denies her eldest, Kathleen, a parental relationship; resents the intrusion of her children's needs and demands on her independent life; rejects and is rejected by her youngest daughter; and then embraces in hope and mysterious maternal feelings an impending arrival. All along, Amy, with an innocent animal selfishness, struggles for tiny and heartfelt material joys, little achievements in independence or lifestyle. Times are hard, and just making do is fraught with pitfalls. There is no room for the children she had while still barely out of childhood herself.

 

‘Whatever's that?' Daphne cried, coming down the hall. The little drawers answered her, running eagerly out and back as Peter tipped them. He laughed and set the chest down and stood back to admire it.

‘Was it alright to buy it, Aunty Daph?' Amy asked, pleased with their faces.

In her bedroom Amy set it against the wall opposite the foot of her bed. Admiring it she backed until she sat on the bed.

Daphne was in the doorway. ‘More for a little girl's room. But lovely.'

Amy was about to tip the contents of her suitcase, in which she stored her underwear, onto her bed to transfer them to the drawers. Instead she went with bowed head and put her fingers into the open parts of the plaited cane that made a frame for the mirror. They did not easily fit but the fingers of Kathleen and Patricia would have. She turned away and smoothed the bed where she sat. Someday I'll have them with me, she thought, and it's a good idea to start getting some things together.

 

Amy abandons her children, yet genuinely loves them, intermittently. She holds us—holds our empathy—regardless. Despite all her attempts to find firm footing and the furniture of a secure life, she drifts at the mercy of her circumstances, subject to the whims and pressures of her employer, her eldest daughter, her aunt, her two dreadful lodgers, and most of all her emotions and slowly maturing womanhood.

This drifting quality in Amy's motivations is for me the novel's most poignant element. She falls in love with her cousin; she finds her oily boss repellent, but ends up attracted to him. Her three daughters barely register in her thoughts, except as guilt, until they present themselves and make demands. Her life is precarious, derailed by the slightest pressure one way or another, at the mercy of her own inchoate feelings; yet she holds herself with a hope and naïve pride that make her compelling.