Three Tales for Emmie: Joan Wise’s Forgotten Tasmanian Triptych

Abstract

Joan Wise made her fiction debut in pages of Australia's Bulletin magazine in 1950. poem of hers had earlier appeared in same publication, but her arrival as a writer of prose announced by a series of linked tales, Conquest of (January), Poison in Furrow (May), and A Fence for Emma (August). The stories are a subtly comic triptych about gender politics and hardscrabble bush-farming in remote Central Highlands district of Tasmania.We discovered Joan Wise by chance, while trawling archives during early stages of editing Deep South: Stories from Tasmania (2012).1 One of our intentions in editing anthology to re-present to contemporary reader a selection of best Tasmanian stories that had for decades languished unread in back issues of journals and magazines. More than sixty after original publication of Wise's stories, they struck us as original, witty, and of remarkable interest to contemporary reader.Born Joan Boyd in Tasmania in 1912, Wise educated at St Michael's Collegiate School, a private Anglican girls' school in Hobart, and following her graduation trained as a Mothercraft nurse. At age of twenty, she met and married Archibald (Arch) Wise, a farmer from Plenty, a small town in Tasmania's Derwent Valley. Following her marriage, Wise took over management of farmhouse at Kinvarra, a substantial sheep- and hop-producing property, combining demands of this role with raising three daughters and trying to establish a career as a writer. While Wise's publications span four decades, her writing fragmented and her output sporadic. The first flush of her publishing career came between 1946 and 1950 when she focused on producing poetry and short fiction for an adult audience. The 1950 publication of Emmie stories, when Wise thirty-eight old, might have heralded emergence of a strong new voice in Australian fiction, but immediately following their publication, Wise seems to have disappeared from view. When she reemerged on publishing scene fifteen later, it as an author of children's poetry and fiction. Between 1965 and 1978, Wise produced two children's novels, Trapped on Tasman (1971) and The Silver Fish (1972), as well as numerous shorter works that appeared in School Magazine (published by New South Wales Department of Education since 1916) and various anthologies. During final phase of her career, Wise confided in a letter to an editor at Writers' Radio that she now not able to write for children, although her reasons for this conclusion remain unclear. Her last written works were fragments of autobiographical nonfiction that were never published but possibly intended for radio broadcast. They tell of period of her in which she cared for her husband after he suffered two strokes and-together with her correspondence-paint a picture of a woman torn between concern for her husband and frustration at lack of time she is able to devote to her writing.Wise's biographical profile is remarkably similar to those of Australian writers who are subjects of Susan Sheridan's group biography, Nine Lives. Judith Wright, Thea Astley, Gwen Harwood, Elizabeth Jolley, Amy Witting, Jessica Anderson, Rosemary Dobson, Dorothy Hewett, and Dorothy Auchterlonie Green were all born between 1915 and 1925, and each of them achieved success between mid-1940s and 1970s. Sheridan is interested in why some of them (Jolley, Witting, Anderson) did not publish until middle age and why others (Dobson, Hewett, Green) started strongly as poets in 1940s, but either reduced their output or fell silent for next twenty years (back cover). Literature, writes Sheridan, was a particularly unwelcoming and uncertain profession for women (5) in immediate postwar period, time when Wise seeking a foothold for her fiction. The ideologically driven ousting of from public life (5), chauvinism of established literary gatekeepers, dominance of Cold War politics (in which relatively few writers participated), and personal circumstances of individual women-who usually combined the artistic with domestic (2)-are among interlocking cultural, social, and political factors that Sheridan offers as an explanation for partial occlusion of Australian women's writing at that time. …