A Fringe of Leaves

Sidney Nolan, Daisy Bates at Ooldea (1950)

“There are conventions in truth as in anything else.”

Plot: Ellen Gluyas, a poor Cornish girl in the 19^th century, makes good when she marries the invalid Mr Austin. Mr and Mrs Austin, the latter now a refined lady, journey to the Australian colonies, where they visit Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and Sydney, taking in the societal landscape. But on the planned journey back home, a shipwreck turns the voyage into a disaster. Ellen tragically suffers a miscarriage on board, but this is only the beginning of her trials. One of the two lifeboats crashes on an island off the coast of what is now Queensland. Everyone is killed except for Ellen. Taken in by the native tribe that killed the men, she is forced to become part of this society, reduced to wearing a fringe of leaves around her waist which conceals her only remaining possession: her wedding ring.

But amidst the clamour and the clangour, Ellen meets a white convict who escaped some time ago and has taken to living with the natives. Now confronted by these two very different types of lifestyle to her own, she is sent on a journey of self-discovery. When at last she is returned to society, Ellen is a figure part-traumatised, part-awakened. Ellen leaves with a merchant for Sydney for the return voyage to England. He too feels transformed from his former English self. Have they lost who they once were? Gained something new and complex? Or are they now lost somewhere in between?

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Editions:

• Jonathan Cape (UK, September 1976, 405pp)
• Viking (US, January 1977, 405pp)
• Penguin (AU 1977, 365pp – reprinted fourteen times in as many years)
• Avon Books (US 1978)
• Gallimard (France 1981, Jean Lambert, Une Ceinture de feuilles)
• Claassen (Kurt Heinrich Hansen, German, 1982, Der Lendenschurz)
• Hear-a-Book (Audiobook, 1983, read by Anne Fraser)
• Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind (Audiobook, 1985, read by Katherine Mundy)
• Vintage (UK 1997)
• Bolinda (Audiobook – read by Deidre Rubenstein, 2019)

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Epigraphs:

‘A perfect Woman, nobly planned,/To warn, to comfort, and command.’. -William Wordsworth

Rat-Wife: Humbly begging pardon – are your worships troubled with any gnawing things in the house?
Almers: Here? No, I don’t think so.
Rat-Wife: If you had, it would be such a pleasure to rid your worships’ house of them.
Rita: Yes, yes, we understand. But we have nothing of the sort here.
-Henrik Ibsen, Little Eyolf

‘If there is some true good in a man, it can only be unknown to himself.’ – Simone Weil

‘Love is your last chance. There is really nothing else on earth to keep you there.’ -Louis Aragon

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History: A Fringe of Leaves is the PW novel with the longest history. Sidney Nolan had painted a series inspired by the real-life figure of Eliza Fraser, which PW saw at an exhibition in the late ‘50s. He discussed these with the artist when they first met in 1958. PW visited Fraser Island, off the coast of Queensland, in 1961 and immediately began a novel, during which he imagined actress Vivien Leigh playing Eliza. However by the start of 1962, with his first Australian play premiering and the second in negotiations, PW became distracted and put the novel aside.

The idea was revived throughout the 1960s when PW considered writing an opera with Benjamin Britten, and then Peter Sculthorpe, centering around Eliza Fraser’s life. This too came to nothing, although Sculthorpe would later use the idea of Eliza in some of his own works. PW continued to see clues in the landscape around him, including on visits to Tasmania and Queensland, that kept the idea alive in his mind. Finally, in 1973, he dug out the manuscript and made some revisions, returning to it properly in January 1974. The difference now, David Marr notes, was that PW had become a social activist and had also worked through many of his earlier literary fascinations of the horror of vulgar, earthy life. As a result, Eliza Fraser took on a very different approach in this revised draft: she discovers herself sexually with the convict Jack, whereas in the early draft he is an ominous figure who can never have a healthy sexual relationship with her. Equally so, Eliza becomes interested and almost fulfilled by her time with the Aboriginal Australians. PW finished the final draft of the novel in September 1975.

Notes: A Fringe of Leaves is considered one of PW’s most accessible novels, divided between the sequences set in colonial Australia, and those set in the still untamed Fraser Island. Although The Vivisector is partly an historical novel, this was the first full “period piece” PW had written since Voss twenty years earlier. He revels in the historical details and psychology of the characters. Many critics have argued that the class interplay is not quite as strong as in some of the other novels, with Ellen’s transformation from working-class Cornish to Cheltenham lady not wholly convincing. But the novel has a quiet, shadowy power that impacts the reader in the long run. 

Much has been written about the interplay of history and fiction here. PW never intended for this to be an historical document. PW complicates the known story of Eliza as “otherwise [it would have] been a mere adventure story into a novel of psychological interest” (Letters 467). As PW liked to say, history and imagination are different. While the colonial parts of the novel are written in a mannered prose typical of historical fiction, time and meaning become less specific in the Fraser Island sections, where a more modernist style encroaches upon the text. Alan Lawson has also written that one of the strengths of the narrative is that Ellen does not “cast off” her 19^th century persona to return to the wilderness, as might be found in a more traditional novel, but – with her new discoveries – she “keeps adding rather than subtracting; nothing is left behind”. The shipwreck may have been the cause of Ellen’s change, but she was shipwrecked long before she stepped on board. Mark Williams associates Ellen with Voss, only her journey toward self-knowledge is not the landscape but rather “across the gulf of class and dialect which demolishes the whole structure of meanings and confidences that constitute ‘civilisation’.”

Additionally, very little was known about what happened to Eliza on the island, and for that matter the lives of the original inhabitants of Fraser Island whose culture was almost entirely vanquished. PW had to invent most of these details from his imagination. There are still some elements drawn from life: Cheltenham, where Eliza and her husband live, is where PW went to school; Nora is based on the Irish maids who looked after Lulworth, since PW’s mother would not hire Australians.

In the 1960s and 1970s, PW makes it clear that he had a few novels he wished to complete before the death which he expected to come any year now. Fringe seems to be the last of these “original” concepts, after which any further work was an added bonus. His next novel, The Twyborn Affair (1979), would be a kind of personal reckoning, while his largely incomplete efforts during the 1980s reflect the ideas that gnawed at his mind in old age.

Sales: The UK print run of 25,000 reflects PW’s growing stature in the Commonwealth. In the US, Viking’s jacket was one of PW’s least favourites, with its unfortunate use of African tribespeople and huts on the cover. Around this time PW seemed to lose his once fierce interest in the US market. Interestingly, Hudder & Smith note that the US edition was a photolithographic reprint of the UK, rather than working from a separate manuscript. This seems unusual, and was certainly not established practice. It perhaps further reflects the challenges Viking felt when marketing this very Australian author as Anglo and American cultures grew further apart in terms of style and substance during the late 20th century.

Nevertheless, in light of PW’s Nobel win (which had seen most of his novels reissued on both sides of the Atlantic), the novel was heavily reviewed. With its accessible subject matter (on the surface), A Fringe of Leaves also had a great run in paperback over the years. The sales may have been helped by the near simultaneous release of a film, Eliza Fraser. Completely unconnected to PW’s novel, this was the most expensive movie made in Australia to that time, starring Susannah York and with a screenplay by David Williamson. With a poster tagline of “A tall tale of a naughty lady”, this was a sex romp far removed from PW’s conception!

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Reviews:

• Julian Barnes, New Statesman 10/9/1976
• Randolph Stow, TLS, 10/9/1976
• Spectator, 11/9/1976
• L.V. Kepert, SMH, 12/9/1976
• Observer, 12/9/1976
• David Pryce-Jones, Sunday Times 12/9/76
• Maurice Dunlevy, Canberra Times 25/9/1976
• Katharine England, Advertiser, 25/9/1976
• Thomas Shapcott, Australian 25/9/1976
• Elizabeth Perkins, LiNQ 5.2 (1976)
• John McLaren, Overland 65 (1976)
• P.T. Plowman, A Less Tortuous Patrick White, Bulletin 25/9/1976:
  • “Though the writing is less tortuous than usual, White still seems to be straining painfully to convey some revelation that never quite arrives.”
• John Douglas Pringle, SMH 25/9/1976:
  • “The novel is not wholly successful… But the part of the book which describes the shipwreck, the voyage to the island, and Mrs Roxburgh’s life with the Aborigines is brilliantly imagined and executed… It also seems warmer in his attitude to life and less repelled by the physical side of the human condition. Sex, defecation, even sickness and death are accepted as natural and normal.”
• P. Vansittart, London Magazine 16.5 (1976)
• Listener, 30/9/1976
• Books & Bookmen, October 1976
• A.A. Phillips, The Age, 9/10/1976
• David Rowbotham, Courier-Mail 16/10/1976
• Dorothy Green, Nation Review, 22-28 October 1976
• Kirkus Reviews 1/11/1976:
  • “White, usually the obdurate realist, has paradoxically gentled the horrific experience of Mrs. Fraser through Ellen and achieved a compassionate as well as an astonishing story.”
• Leonie Kramer, A Woman’s Life and Love, Quadrant 20.11 (Nov 1976) [with reply by Suzanne Edgar in Quadrant 21.10, which led to another piece by Kramer, Patrick White’s Kind of Woman, Quadrant 21.11 (Nov 1977) ]
• G.J. Soete, Library Journal, 1/12/1976
• Guardian, 2/1/1977
• New York Times, 18/1/1977
• Robbie Macauley, NY Times Book Review 20/1/1977
• P.S. Prescott, Newsweek 24/1/1977
• Evan S. Connell, Harper’s, February 1977
• D. Flower, Hudson Review 30 (1977)
• Wall Street Journal, 3/3/1977
• Antioch Review, Spring 1977
• George Steiner, New Yorker 23/5/1977
• Swanee Review 85, July 1977

Quotes:

“The occupants of the carriage were rolled on into the deepening afternoon, and finally, like minor actors who have spoken a prologue, took themselves off into the wings.” (24)

“It seemed to Mrs Roxburgh that the whole of her uneventful life had been spent listening to men telling stories, and smiling to encourage them.” (156)

Adaptations:

A 17-minute choral piece by Brian Howard, “A Fringe of Leaves”, was commissioned by Musica Viva Australia as part of the official opening of the Melbourne Concert Hall (now Hamer Hall) in 1982. The piece was dedicated to Patrick White and one assumes takes its inspiration from the text.

Also published in 1976: David Ireland, The Glass Canoe; Gerald Murnane, A Lifetime on Clouds; Alex Haley, Roots: The Sage of an American Family; Gore Vidal, 1876.

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