Olga Masters (1919–1986)

In prosperous, comfortable, complacent 21st century Australia, it’s somewhat chastening to read this first novel from Olga Masters (1919-1986). Set in a small farming community south of Sydney after The Great War, it’s a window on a different kind of life, one where there would be no bread on the table if a woman did not bake it every second day or so, and no hot water for tea if she did not light and tend the fire for the stove. A life where women made all their clothes themselves and the household linen too. A life so pinched with poverty that the Reverend Colin Edwards struggles to mask his anxiety about the cost of a phone call, and feels wasteful over the cost of a stamp when a letter home to his mother in England is merely one page long.

It’s also a life that is strictly gendered. If the shortage of men during the war created new opportunities for women, those opportunities had mostly contracted afterwards although Rachel still runs the post office. For Jack Herbert’s daughters Enid and Una, the future is either marriage and motherhood, or spinsterhood. (The word ‘spinster’ itself has gone out of contemporary usage!) Jack (see a Sensational Snippet featuring Jack here) feels no compunction in wishing a life of spinsterhood for Enid because she is the better housekeeper and since the death of his wife Nellie, he wants Enid to keep making the pickles and jams and have dinner on the table when he wants it, as if by instinct. Olga Masters does not shy from suggesting that, ominously, he is also attracted to Enid in other ways.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2015/02/14/loving-daughters-by-olga-masters/… (more)

Olga Masters (1919-1986) was a late bloomer who began her career at 63 and died just six short years later. As Geordie Williamson says in the introduction to this collection of short stories, she began writing long before that, but her reputation rests on the body of work which begins with The Home Girls in 1982 and concludes with the unfinished collection called The Rose Fancier published posthumously in 1988. She wrote just two novels, Loving Daughters (1984) and Amy’s Children (1987) (see my review) and also a series of connected short stories published as A Long Time Dying in 1985.

The Years That Made Us, a recent ABC TV documentary by her son Chris Masters, featured film of Olga Masters, and that reminded me how much I admire her writing. The way she captures the inner world of women is superb. Short stories are not really my preferred form of fiction but I read most of the ones in this collection and enjoyed them.

To see a sample from the story The Done Thing, please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/08/03/se...… (more)

This collection of short stories by Australian Olga Masters left me very frustrated. I didn't care for the way many of them started by throwing the reader into the middle of the story, and I cared even less for the abrupt, unresolved endings (the stories just stopped, as if the writer had fallen asleep at her desk). Worse still was the overall tone and subject matter. Nearly every story involved child or wife beating, intended, I suppose, the show how tough life was for people trying to scrape a living in small towns and the outback. I just can't get into a father beating his son bloody at the dinner table while all his wife does is offer him brownies in an attempt to distract him, and one of the daughters keeps throwing out more suggestions for why her brother needs to be beaten to ramp up the violence. I got about 2/3 through this one and just couldn't take any more.… (more)

A warm, gritty novel set in Australia around World War II about a young mother who loves her children but also needs to earn money and have a life of her own.

Amy was married when she was seventeen. She was three months pregnant. Four years later her husband left her and the three daughters she had borne. When she returned to her parents, her mother thought she still looked no older than her four-year-old daughter. Leaving the girls in her mother’s care, Amy went to Sydney, found a job, and slowly made a life for herself. She thought about her girls and felt their loss, but she was not prepared for first one and then another of them to join her in Sydney so they could attend high school. The tense dynamics between the mother and the daughters are the heart of this excellent story. So is the community of working-class women in which Amy is embedded.
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