Washerwoman's Dream Read online

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s note

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1 Growing Up in Lambeth

  Chapter 2 School Days

  Chapter 3 The Poverty Trap

  Chapter 4 Saying Goodbye to England

  Chapter 5 All at Sea

  Chapter 6 Wild Cattle Country

  Chapter 7 End of Childhood

  Chapter 8 The Looking Glass

  Chapter 9 The Skivvy

  Chapter 10 Homecoming

  Chapter 11 Falling in Love

  PART TWO

  Chapter 12 The German Connection

  Chapter 13 Household Drudge

  Chapter 14 The Break-up

  Chapter 15 The Fugitive

  Chapter 16 Sanctuary

  PART THREE

  Chapter 17 Falling in Love Again

  Chapter 18 Trackless Wastes

  Chapter 19 The Parting

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 20 The Road to Mecca

  Chapter 21 Through the Land of Abraham

  Chapter 22 Journey into Danger

  Chapter 23 More Trouble for Bebe Zatoon

  Chapter 24 In the Palace of the Khalifat

  PART FIVE

  Chapter 25 The Invitation

  Chapter 26 Bebe Zatoon En Route to Afghanistan

  Chapter 27 Secret Mission

  Chapter 28 Mother of Sons

  Chapter 29 Reconciliation

  PART SIX

  Chapter 30 Return of the Washerwoman

  Afterword

  Glossary

  Works by Winifred Steger

  A Conversation with Hilarie Lindsay

  Questions for Reading Groups

  About the Author

  Bibliography

  To Philip Lindsay, for his unfailing support

  … suddenly from deep within my head

  the images appear

  like moving pictures on a screen.

  Strange places never been;

  strange faces never seen.

  Others I never thought to see again:

  father and mother, sister and brother.

  And stretching forth my hand

  I feel their living presence in the room.

  Until I wake.

  The same sharp pain returns,

  the sense of loss

  that makes the hot tears burn.

  I sleep again.

  Once more in dreams my restless spirit

  journeys deep into the country of the mind,

  as if in constant search some truth I’ll find,

  some secret door that unlocked will reveal

  which of the two lives that I live is real.

  The Country of the Mind,

  Hilarie Lindsay

  One of the hardest punishments is to be thrown into the world with aspirations and dreams that cannot be fulfilled for want of education …

  I received only a few weeks’ schooling. Ignorant and alone I lived in a world of make-believe.

  Winifred Steger

  Winifred the Washerwoman [Mrs Winifred Stegar], a sketch by Pat Harvey.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank all those who helped me with material for this book, especially Nancy Flannery (née Robinson), who preserved the Winifred Steger manuscripts; Stella Guthrie, who taped interviews with Winifred Steger from the late 1970s until just before Winifred’s death in 1981, and, like Nancy, allowed me full access to this material.

  Thanks also to the Steger family, Elizabeth Guy, Lynnie Plate, Jose Petrick, John Dallwitz, Horrie Simpson, Rae Sexton, Helen Baker, the late Margaret Potts, Dr Cedric Gregory, Sister Rose Barnes, John Rawsthorn, R.M. Williams, R.K. Bailey, Rene Pezy, Roy Luke, Shirley MacPherson, the late Ian Wood, Susanne Gervay, Moya Simons, Vashti Farrer and Natalie Scott from the Hughenden Gargoyles, Dr Patricia Gaut and those who listened, Professor Elizabeth Webby, my supervisor at Sydney University while I worked on my doctoral thesis; my editor, Julia Styles, my agent, Selwa Anthony, and the many others who answered my letters, sent me photographs and other material and generally shared my enthusiasm for Winifred Steger.

  I am grateful for the assistance of the staff from the following institutions in Australia: the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria; the John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland; the Mortlock Library, State Library of South Australia; the Toowoomba Library; the Australian Archives, South Australia; the South Australian Archives; the Australian Genealogical Society; the National Library; the Queensland State Archives; the Toowoomba Family History Society; the Dalby Family History Society; the Roma and District Family History Society; Fisher Library, University of Sydney; the Morven Historical Museum; the Mt Horrocks Historical Society; the Chinchilla Historical Society; the Alice Springs Library; the Public Library of Port Augusta; the archives of the Presbyterian Church, Queensland; the archives of the Alice Springs Hospital; the Country Women’s Association, South Australia; the South Australian Theosophical Society; Oodnadatta Hospital and Health Services; the Islamic Society of South Australia; the Sydney Morning Herald; ‘Australia All Over’ (ABC Radio); and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (South Australia), State Heritage Branch.

  I also acknowledge the assistance of the following institutions in Great Britain: the Genealogical Society; the Minet Library, Lambeth; the Public Records Office, Kew; the Public Records Office, Chancery Lane; St Catherine’s House; the Greater London Records Office; and the British Library.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  On 1 November 1929 the Register (South Australia) published ‘A Page from Winifred’s Indian Diary’. It is probable that Winifred Steger kept a diary at other times but, if so, I did not have access to it. There were no diaries among the Steger papers in the Mortlock Library.

  The spelling of Arabic words in English is approximate. There is no one correct spelling universally accepted by all official sources. I have tried to use the spelling most familiar to English speaking readers.

  Foreign language words not listed in the Macquarie Dictionary Third Edition have been printed in italics and definitions are provided in the Glossary at the back of the book.

  INTRODUCTION

  I first met Winifred Steger when she was coming to the end of her long journey, a journey that was to span almost a century. In 1973 I had seen her interviewed on This Day Tonight (ABC TV), when the paperback version of her book about her trip to Mecca, Always Bells: Life with Ali, was published. She was asked what she would say to younger writers; ‘Grow mentally,’ she replied. Her story captured my imagination and, as president of the Society of Women Writers (SWW), I wrote to congratulate her and to invite her to become a special member of the Society. Winifred accepted the invitation and we began to correspond.

  At the time I had developed a special interest in Australian women writers because so many complained of difficulty in being published, or even writing. In 1971 I had written a letter to the newspapers in Australia, as well as the New York and London Times, inviting women writers who had experienced difficulty in getting published to write to me. In the first month I received four hundred letters and they continued to pour in, until I was overwhelmed by what I had started. The letters, some written by relatives, confirmed what I had suspected. Women spoke of outright opposition from husbands and male relatives, to the extent of being forbidden to write under their married name. Others spoke of lack of education, isolation, domestic work that consumed all their time and energy, and the problem of finding money for postage to send their work out. There was a feeling of deep frustration.

  Out of all the women writers I encountered in my research it wa
s Winifred Steger who impressed me the most. It was her indomitable spirit, her refusal to bow to old age, and the fact that she was still writing and could express herself so lucidly, that captured my imagination. I had no idea of the full story of her life, but one of her letters gave me a tantalising glimpse.

  Dear Lady,

  Today you wrote with your spirit and I felt it and somehow when I came to the signature ‘affectionately’ my eyes dimmed. It was a touch from some Never Never Land. This emotional life grows strange fancies. I am a relic, I suppose, of the old Victorian days. It would have been easier had I some Silver Trumpeter. I am, briefly, just an aged woman of ninety-four [born in 1882, Winifred was in fact ninety-one] who since I could first write my letters have had a simple compulsion to write.

  Maybe I was a writer in a past life and maybe shall be a better one in the next one. At least I hope to have the sophisticated education that editors desire now. I feel dimly that I have a message but don’t know what it is … and there you have the odd, complicated character that I know myself to be.

  My first real effort at writing was when I was fifteen. Shaw Fitchett of London brought out his new magazine called Life. A traveller on Cobb & Co … lost it on a lonely bush road. I found it. Reading it was marvellous. Something within me said, You too can write, so get to it. With pencil and paper I sat down and wrote ‘The Adventures of a Bee and a Blue Bag’. Oh, yes, frightfully crude. A couple of months later came a cheque for one pound and my story in the next issue, entitled ‘From a Rough Diamond’. And urging me to write again. Wildly excited I wrote another and this time added a title and it was printed.

  I was an unloved and neglected child left to battle alone. My first experience with real people [was] when at ten years I was put with outsiders to work at sixpence a week, later rising to a full half-a-crown. My only joy was in writing on paper scraps from the ends of books, or the back of envelopes.

  Years, marriage, children, troubles and hardships, need I go on? Till finally I went disguised as a Turkish woman to the forbidden lands of Mecca. I loved my Moslem and insisted on going also and he so loved me that he consented. It’s all so long ago.

  Returning to Australia, I had met Annie Besant in India, so was asked to speak in [the] Adelaide Theosophical Hall. Which I did two Sundays running. The reporter came [the] second Sunday and after our return to cameleer life I was asked to write for the Register.

  Then Ali died and the fight was mine. I took out a hawker’s license and toured the far north cattle properties. Then a history of punctured tyres, broken parts, shortage of water etc etc … I left the north after running various Government messes during the War. I bought a little place near Clare and again more writing. From serials I started novels. Three I gave free to Clare newspapers, 80,000 word jobs. Took three years to finish publishing them.

  May I add that the criticisms of Always Bells were magnificent. Of my journey to Mecca the book tells. I feel as if I could put another cushion on the chair and write another dozen novels straight off … I’m not dead yet and have fourteen unwanted novels in the box. Give me another hundred years and I might have them accepted, as it is the God of Fire will have a glorious glowing feast. Anyway why worry. I believe in reincarnation and when I come back I mean to paint this old firmament in black shades of printer’s ink.

  As our correspondence continued I discovered that Winifred had another identity as Winifred the Washerwoman, a pseudonym she continued to use long after she had ceased to be a washerwoman, to thumb her nose at the world. If the world despised the washerwoman engaged in honest toil, did it also despise Winifred the Washerwoman, the writer behind the warm and witty articles that engaged readers for many years in the Register and Chronicle in South Australia and the Sun in Victoria?

  In 1976 I travelled to Adelaide to launch a branch of the Society of Women Writers (SWW) and invited Winifred to attend the meeting. I recall a sprightly woman in a blue dress, wearing a white wig. She was surprised to discover that I was much younger than she had imagined. ‘I was thinking we could have collaborated,’ she said. It was our only meeting.

  Later, I tried to find a publisher for her novels, without success. When she threatened to burn them I contacted the staff at the National Library who offered to buy them. But that was not to be. Winifred had only one ambition — to see them in print.

  Eventually Winifred’s letters ceased and I had no idea of what happened to her, though she stayed in my mind. By this time my life had moved on. Then in 1992 I began a Master of Philosophy degree at Sydney University. Initially I intended to use the material I had collected on women writers as the basis for my thesis. However, Winifred soon began to take over and I realised my thesis was, in fact, a biography of her extraordinary life. My one difficulty was that I had nothing but her letters and a few tear sheets she had sent me of her three serials which had been published in the Clare’s Northern Argus.

  In 1993 I wrote to Helen Baker, a member of the SWW in Adelaide, to see if she knew what had happened to Winifred. She referred me to Stella Guthrie who had interviewed Winifred for Rural ABC Radio, recording interviews with the old writer until just before her death in 1981.

  Like many who met Winifred, Stella had fallen in love with her and she offered to lend me the tapes on the proviso that I speak to Winifred’s daughter, Pansy, first. From Pansy I confirmed that the trip to Mecca had really happened and that as a small child she had accompanied her mother. But, apart from a few anecdotes, she could tell me very little. ‘Mother was a very private person. She did not talk about her past,’ she said. This was something I was to hear repeated many times by other relatives.

  In addition to lending me the tapes, Stella referred me to Nancy Robinson of Nadjuri Press. From Nancy I discovered that Winifred’s manuscripts had not been burned on her death. Winifred had given them to Nancy in the hope of publication and they were kept in the Mortlock Library, South Australia, for safe keeping. Nancy gave me permission to research them. They were in ten cartons and I began work immediately.

  As soon as I transcribed the Guthrie tapes I discovered the first of Winifred’s lies. The story told in Always Bells, about the author being found under a rosebush in China and raised first by Buddhist priests and then by nuns, was a falsehood. She had, in fact, been born in Lambeth, England, and she and her father had migrated to Queensland.

  I was to discover the reason for this deception when I read the correspondence between Winifred and Beatrice Davis of publishers Angus & Robertson. While Winifred was living on a poultry farm in Alice Springs after World War II she rewrote the story of her trip to Mecca, which had been published as a serial in the South Australian Register, and entered it in a novel writing competition run by the Adelaide Advertiser, under the title With Ibn Saud to Mecca. Though it did not win, one of the judges mentioned it to Beatrice Davis who wrote to Winifred asking to see a copy of the manuscript. At the same time the Advertiser offered to publish it as a serial. Eager to publish it as a book Winifred accepted the offer from Angus & Robertson. It was published as an autobiography. Once the lie about her childhood and marriage to Ali, whom she claimed she had met in China before migrating to Australia, was published, Winifred was stuck with it. It was the story she told to those who met her after the publication of the book, a story she repeated in interviews with the media.

  Hoping to find some relatives of the Steger family I advertised in the Sydney Morning Herald, but without success. My first breakthrough came when I found some early copies of the Register at the Mitchell Library. These contained the serial she had written on Mecca under the title of ‘Arabian Days: the Wanderings of Winifred the Washerwoman’, with the by-line Bebe Hadjana Karum Bux. I wrote to Winifred’s daughter to find out if Karum Bux was her father and received a reply from her daughter asking me not to write to her mother again, as she had told me all she knew.

  I knew from the Guthrie tapes that Winifred had written a series called ‘Star Dust and Soap Bubbles’ for the Register and that sh
e had also used the pseudonym Sapphire Bill. I travelled to Adelaide and spent days looking through the microfiche until I found first ‘Star Dust and Soap Bubbles’ and then ‘The Tales of Sapphire Bill’, both running as weekly serials. I also researched in the State Library of Victoria and found that the ‘Star Dust and Soap Bubbles’ stories had been syndicated. I was unsuccessful in finding them in the Courier-Mail where Winifred claimed also to have published, but I have no doubt that they are there somewhere. Without dates it is almost impossible to locate them.

  My second breakthrough came when a friend found out that Winifred’s maiden name was Oaten and I was able to get her birth certificate.

  From this I learned that her father was Wilfred Oaten, son of a schoolmaster from Bath. Her mother was Louisa Dennis, whose address was given as 97 Tradescant Street, Lambeth. I went to England and found the house, one of a row of terraces which is still standing. I looked for a nearby school where Winifred may have had her early education and found Wyvil Road School on the other side of South Lambeth Road, about a five-minute walk from Tradescant Street. I was unable to verify that Winifred had been a pupil there as there are no records of this school in the archives of the Public Records Office in London. I could find no evidence of Winifred having attended school in Australia, though the Jondaryan School records seem to have disappeared. I believe Winifred’s claim that the only schooling she had was in England is true.

  From the Guthrie tapes I discovered that after migrating to Australia Winifred had lived on the Darling Downs, Queensland, with her father. I wrote a letter to the Dalby Historical Society and received a letter back telling me about her marriage to Charles Steger and the birth of two sons. It was some time before I discovered that there had been two later children from the marriage.

  I found no mention of Wilfred Oaten and his daughter in the immigration records in the Greater London Records Office or in the Queensland State Library, though there I found details of the arrival of Wilfred’s brother, William, and his wife, Lydia, in 1882. I did, however, find details of two land orders Wilfred Oaten received.