Draft: Traces of a Feminist Protest: Kylie Tennant’s novel Tell Morning This Published 2014 Citation: Michell,D, 2014,Traces of a feminist protest: Kylie Tennant's novel Tell Morning This, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, Victoria, pp. 193-208 Dee Michell I like to imagine Irene McGarty, the central character in Kylie Tennant’s novel Tell Morning This, as a woman in her eighties and honoured guest on 16th November, 2009 at Parliament House, Canberra. Feted by both former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and erstwhile leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, at the historic Apology to Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants, she would have been recognised at last, not as a “problematic hero” (Sunderland 1979), but as a heroic survivor of a deeply problematic Child Protection System (CPS). “Finally,” she would say with tears rolling down her cheeks, “finally they are waking up to the fact that the Government failed. The Government wasn’t any better a parent than some of those children were taken from. I never thought I’d live to see the day.” Sadly, Kylie Tennant (1912-1988) did not live to see the day and, to my knowledge, nor has anyone yet made a connection between her 1967 novel and that significant Apology more than forty years later. In this chapter I aim to redress this situation and argue that Tell Morning This can be read as containing the traces of a feminist protest against the NSW CPS, despite Tennant being renowned for her solidarity with working class people but not for her feminism, and even though she has left no statement saying she was objecting to the NSW CPS in her papers or autobiography. Nonetheless, there are crumbs of evidence scattered throughout these and the novel which I have gathered together to demonstrate this was her intention. I begin by exploring something of the background to Tell Morning This, and then discuss the three reasons for reading the book as a feminist protest. These are: that Tennant examines State care from the perspective of girls in the CPS, that Tennant is supportive of State girls’ non-normative sexual behaviour and family arrangements; and that Tennant’s critique of the NSW CSP aligns well with a later successful, overtly feminist and passionate campaign which led to the closure of the Parramatta Girls Home and Hay Gaol in the mid-1970s. Background Kylie Tennant’s credentials as a social critic and advocate of the poor are well established. Born into a middle class family in Manly, NSW, Tennant’s interest in the suffering caused by poverty was initially aroused by childhood tours of Sydney slum areas on the way to church with her family (Tennant 1986). Believing in the educative power of fiction to change “the climate of opinion” (Grant 2012), Tennant later employed ethnographic research to engage with the actual lives of poor and working class people in order to cultivate what became a finely honed “sociological imagination” which she then, not unusually for a novelist (Mills 1959; Matthews 1975), deployed in order to expose oppressive social structures. A popular writer with those she wrote about, the gritty social realism of her novels meant Tennant’s writing was often, and to her displeasure, compared with that of Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck. Initially Tell Morning This was inspired by friends of Tennant and her husband, school principal Lewis Rodd. At the time the couple were based in coastal Laurieton, 365km north of Sydney and often spent time with fellow Peace Pledge Union members who talked about their gaol experiences as conscientious objectors, and of young girls detained for consorting and cohabiting with American servicemen. It is these parallel stories, set in Sydney during 1943 and written between 1944 and 1945, which form the basis of Tell Morning This: David Aumbry is an upper middle class medical student, a privileged young man, gaoled for refusing to serve in the army as directed, and Rene McGarty is an ‘illegitimate’ fifteen year old fugitive Ward of the NSW State incarcerated in a girls’ home when caught living with an American serviceman, and subsequently gaoled for participating in riots at that home. In taking up the issue of American servicemen ‘hooking up’ with Australian girls and women, Tennant need not have focused her research efforts on female State Wards. The widespread popularity of American men and concerns about lax sexual standards created something of a moral panic during WWII across Australia as well as in Canada and Britain, as a number of feminist historians have written. Tennant’s contemporary, Australian writer George Johnston, even included an account of a middle class woman socialising with Americans in his semi-autobiographical book, My Brother Jack (1964). Because of the centrality of Rene McGarty in the story, along with Marie West, another State Ward who features but does not have relationships with American servicemen, and other characters, like Henrietta Aumbry and Nonni Farrell, who either work within the State care system or are seeking to reform it, it seems Tennant used Tell Morning This more as an opportunity to explore the hierarchical nature of the NSW CPS and protest the treatment of impoverished young girls caught up in it, than she did to examine the moral panic around American servicemen. Her remonstrance about national service for young men and their experience of prison is important in the narrative too, but she could have chosen to explore another form of conscription if that was to be the major theme, since during the war (usually poor and working class) girls from the age of 16 were drafted into essential employment (Summers, 1975). Instead, Tennant directed her commentary about work toward the situation of 15 year old State Ward, Rene McGarty, for whom being compelled by the State to take up paid employment was a minor concern. Comprehensive research, a political purpose in writing, and authenticity marks all of Tennant’s work, and Tell Morning This is no exception (Tennant 1986; Grant 2005). Tennant’s research in inner Sydney included working in a jam factory and a girl’s home run by a Christian Socialist friend, press articles about riots at the Parramatta Girls Home, correspondence with former inmates in order to decode prison jargon, and letters from prison reformers anxious she write her narrative and support their work. She also orchestrated to be arrested and thrown in Parramatta Gaol for a week. To her astonishment, Tennant found that authorities would not allow her as a middle class woman to spend any time in prison, but when she dressed up as advised by a prostitute, loitered, and gave a policeman a bit of cheek, she was quickly flung inside (Tennant 1986). After completion, Tell Morning This was pared back and published in 1953 as the Joyful Condemned, partly because of post-war paper shortages. Tennant’s “author’s note” at the beginning of the 1967 full version says she is republishing the story at the behest of friends, perhaps in response to the growing opposition in Australia to conscription and the Vietnam War. She also hints at the book being a protest but is not clear as to whether this is against national service or the treatment of girls in State care. Since she likens herself to the biblical prophet Ezekiel who “railed against the society of Israel for their failure to promote a just society in which such manifest needs as poverty, deprivations and sickness were not attended to” (Dickey 1980), she is probably opposing both. Despite Tennant’s belief in the power of fiction to change “the climate of opinion”, however, with this republication she seems to feel like an “impotent individual” (Djuric 2011), expecting her story to be read by what she calls the “no-doubt indifferent”. For the most part, national and international reviews for both The Joyful Condemned and Tell Morning This must have reinforced Tennant’s concern about the lack of interest in her subject matter. Reviewers ignored the story of conscription and conscientious objection, and disregarded any problems highlighted about the NSW CPS, the latter despite focusing on the character of Rene and the ‘underbelly’ nature of the narrative. Tucked away in Tennant’s papers at the National Library, though, is evidence that at least one reviewer understood some of Tennant’s critique. On 19th November 1955, Western Australian psychologist and ABC broadcaster, Erica Underwood, sent Tennant a copy of the script she had prepared for the ‘Women’s Session’ program she shared with Catherine King. The script juxtaposes The Joyful Condemned with John Bowlby’s Child Care and the Growth of Love, also published in 1953. World renowned for his challenge to the institutional care of children, Bowlby was commissioned in 1949 by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to investigate the mental health of homeless children in post war Europe. Child Care and the Growth of Love was the outcome and, based on Bowlby’s analysis of the deleterious effect of early childhood neglect on the mental health of adolescents, Underwood connects Rene’s recalcitrance to her environment. Academic critiques of Tennant’s body of work, however, largely appear not to have recognised her negative evaluation of the NSW CPS. Critics include the literary (Auchterlonie 1953; Osborne, 2009) and the feminist (Modjeska, 1981; Summers, 2002), and there are also analyses of Tennant’s treatment of specific topics, for instance, abortion (Moore 1996; Moore 2001). Tell Morning This is amongst other novels constructing women’s war time freedom around sexuality (Featherstone 2005), and The Joyful Condemned is included in William Hatherell’s (2007) explorations of Australian ‘home front’ novels. Yet none of these analyses observe how the story Tennant told about State girls resonated with relevant histories such as that by Margaret Barbalet (1983) and the more recent Federal Senate Inquiry Forgotten Australians (2004). Tennant may well have set out to condemn the heavy handed treatment of those, like David Aumbry, who committed the crime of “thinking differently” (Tennant 1967). But the book becomes about Rene McGarty, as reviewers did rightly observe. Therefore Tell Morning This serves as a powerful critique of the State ‘care’ system because Tennant connects the lives of Rene, Marie West and other State girls to the exploitative, misogynist, patriarchal and autocratic circumstances in which they find themselves. From the standpoint of State girls Tell Morning This explores the lived experience of State girls, and feminist standpoint theory aims to generate knowledge from the perspective of women’s lives, particularly those women without social and economic privilege. Tennant’s novel can, therefore, be seen as in the vanguard of what is now a long standing, influential and respected tradition of feminist research. Feminist standpoint theory originated in the 1980s as a method of inquiry used by second wave feminists exploring relationships between knowledge and power in order to discover the social from the standpoint of marginalised women. When those from disadvantaged groups speak “from their experiences of subordination, they produce knowledge that does not exist in dominant discourses” (Smith cited by Ramazanoglu 2002), knowledge which Tennant hoped would change “the climate of opinion.” Standpoint theory thus allows oppressed groups to critique powerful institutions and reveal the power relations previously concealed. Since much of Tell Morning This is written from the perspective of State girls, and of women attempting to improve the NSW CSP, the book can therefore be read as a feminist critique of that system. Set in the inner suburbs of Sydney in 1943, Tell Morning This opens with 15 year old Irene (Rene) McGarty, a homeless fugitive, ruminating on her life spent in what is now called out of home care. Indeed, Rene has experienced all forms of out of home care available then and now – informal kinship and foster care, as well as the formal State system as a Ward in foster care and a variety of children’s’ homes. Inspired by the beauty of storm clouds rolling in on a sunny afternoon, Rene is determined to “be a better girl,” to stay away from both fights and alcohol. Temporarily housed in a friend’s flat after having run away from her most recent foster care placement, for Rene this small basement bedsit is a sanctuary; the girl takes pride in having a place of her own, even if it is only for two months. She keeps the room tidy and clean, and has posters on the wall of American movie stars, mostly men. It is no accident Rene is living in a basement at the opening of the story. Tennant uses physical location to indicate social status in her work, and Rene is the lowest of the low, living in the basement of a slum neighbourhood. By contrast the middle upper class characters live on hilly outlooks with views over Sydney harbour. Tennant thus demonstrates she was keenly aware of the social stigma attached to and low status of State girls long in advance of Margaret Barbalet’s Far From a Low Gutter Girl (1983). Another strategy Tennant uses to highlight social stigma is to have verbal abuse often hurled at the girls; she even has the worthy David Aumbry thinking of Rene as “a vulgar, hard, gutterbred slut.” For State girls this leaves them with a general sense of unworthiness and Rene can only dream about David Aumbry. Despite the mutual attraction between the characters, a relationship is unattainable because of their vastly different social locations. Rene meets Marie West for the first time when she is visiting her grandmother McGarty who lives in daughter May Clipman’s boarding house. Rene smelt gas, forced her way into the bedroom where 17 year old Marie was lying in bed with her recently born baby, and then “dashed across the room and flung up the window so hard that yet another pane of May’s valuable glass shattered on the ashphalt below”. The teenager was immediately blamed for wantonly breaking this window by May and Grandma, as State kids are often blamed, but Rene ignores them, and organises to take Marie back to her tiny flat where she shares her frugal food supplies and cares for the baby girl. Marie is also a fugitive, having refused to follow through with a plan to give up her baby girl for adoption. The story then follows the tribulations of Rene and Marie as Marie is taken in by the Aumbry family and enabled to keep her baby, while Rene is apprehended and placed in a girls’ Home, Petworth, as punishment for absconding. Rene also serves time in prison as a penalty for participating in a riot at Petworth, and it is in prison that she finally meets her mother, Terry Lago. Although Tennant is affectionate and sympathetic toward the characters of Rene and Marie, she does not idealise them. After a number of encounters with uncaring and exploitative family members, corrupt police officers and officious Child Welfare workers, the latter leading to the loss of her accommodation, Rene relapses and begins using alcohol to stop from having to think about her future; rather than anguish over her lack of security and safety. She makes the best of things by partying with her mates and American servicemen because she then feels happy. In this way Tennant does not present Rene as unable to “control her bodily desires” (Elliott 2005), but instead gives Rene logical reasons for choosing alcohol, reasons which resonate with other care leaver accounts of their experiences (Owen 1996; Senate Inquiry 2004; Gargula 2010; Gargula 2011). Marie West’s despair at the prospect of losing her baby is particularly poignant in the context of the recent Senate Inquiry into forced adoptions (Forced Adoptions Report 2012). Initially Marie went along with the planned adoption, but found it impossible to relinquish her newly born infant, despite being terrified about the consequences given it meant she was now a homeless fugitive. At various points in the story, however, Tennant has Marie in considerable conflict. On the one hand Marie desperately wants to keep her baby and is protective of her, but sometimes she finds the demands too much, to the point of seriously considering surrendering her child to the Department of Moral Rehabilitation which has charge over State girls and those deemed to be in ‘moral danger.’ Tennant’s sympathies with the plight of the girls are also revealed by the story of rejection Rene had experienced by the tender age of fifteen years. As others were later to convey to the 2004 Senate Inquiry, she was never taken seriously when she tells “All about her old drunken grandma chasing her with an axe, and the matron of the Home she was in twisting her arm, and how at a convent she’d been in they beat her with leather belts the nuns have round their waists”. Her family is “a file of papers at Head Office. I belong to the Department...” she says sadly. Generations of her family have passed through the Department including her uncle, Hector McGarty, and her mother, Terry Largo, wrongly convicted for murder. In the absence of any ‘traditional’ family, Rene and other State wards develop family-like bonds between each other, aware as they are of the “fragility of all human connections in the face of danger” (Herman 1992). Tennant’s usual method of storytelling is to force the reader into the multiple perspectives of a plethora of characters, but the central ones in Tell Morning This are Rene and Marie. She was, therefore, giving “a voice to those who usually go unnoticed” (Cossy 2011), a key feature of feminist standpoint research. In doing so she revealed the humanity and courage of teenage girls caught up in an inhumane system. Resisting social norms for State girls In her now classic analysis of the origins of sexism in Australia, Anne Summers (1975) probed the dichotomous stereotypes of women as ‘damned whores’ and ‘God’s police’. According to Summers, during the first fifty years of colonialisation all women in Australia were regarded as whores, a stigmatised low status conferred on female convicts who were often transported specifically to serve the sexual needs of men, and which was also transposed to other female immigrants. Carolyn Chisholm (1808-1877), who regarded “wives and little children” as ‘God’s police’ was a key Sydney figure involved in the reconfiguration of the penal colony into a respectable society via the establishment of the English middle class model of nuclear family. Concerned about the plight of single women, Chisholm made it her life’s work to improve their situation and the moral standards of the colony by creating opportunities for both employment and marriage. Chisholm was also involved, along with John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878), in the selection of respectable working class British families who were encouraged to migrate to Australia at a time when the separate spheres ideology was taking hold in Western countries. By 1880 the stereotype of women as ‘God’s police’ was well established and all women were expected to eschew sexuality prior to marriage, get married, and then remain faithful while undertaking the unpaid work of caring for homes, husbands and children. First wave feminists entrenched this stereotype and it was left to second wave feminists from the 1970s to challenge the bifurcated and unrealistic view of Australian women as either morally superior to men or whores if they refused to conform. World War II did, however, provide a brief space for women to lead a more full and free life. Women were actively recruited for the armed services and paid work previously done by men, volunteered for much unpaid work, and “were literally swept off their feet by the Americans who treated them to dating and courtship rituals which were practically unheard of in Australia” (Summers 1975). Although Tell Morning This was set during this moment of relative freedom for women, it was first published in 1953 at a point of intense reestablishment of the earlier separate spheres nuclear family model. Republication in 1967 occurred when there was increasing unrest amongst women, but the second wave feminist movement, at least in Australia, was still a few years off. Kylie Tennant’s non-moralising attitude toward State girls in Tell Morning This, therefore, is in opposition to mainstream restrictive ideas about women and instead resonates with attitudes of second wave feminists in regard to exploitative men, sexual freedom for women, single parenting and unconventional family formations, and feisty women. Exploitative men and sexual predators abound in the story. All State girls are constantly on the alert to protect themselves from men who believed that any girl who “didn’t understand a bit of fun” should be delivered to the police and locked up. Shortly after she made the decision to be a “better girl”, loyal Rene is persuaded by her Uncle Hector to make short shift of a policeman hanging around in the hotel he managed. While Rene is clearly resourceful and adept in handling hypocritical men – she orchestrates events so the policeman pays her for sex, only to be deprived of his trousers before receiving the ‘product’ –Uncle Hector is all too willing to engage his niece in nefarious activities. Clarrie McGarty, another relative, is also happy to use Rene and other State wards in his black-market operation; the girls enliven parties where McGarty sells the tobacco and alcohol he has earlier stolen from Americans. Tennant is not critical of Rene or any of the girls when they engage in survival sex and/or party with American soldiers. She condemns, however, exploitative landlords charging exorbitant rents which meant that girls and women would need to supplement their income with “mattress work” even after having done dirty and unsatisfying factory work. These were girls and young women who: …were faced with a civilization which insisted that they turn out grimly at set hours and work at set tasks holding no interest for them and paying too little to keep them. With low wages and high living costs, without homes or families at their back, they must remain chaste, offend no legal tradition, suffer no illnesses, be well-dressed, learn a trade, all in a society so broken by contradictions that the painful passage from childhood to womanhood, with its insecurity and sense of shame, was made for them a purgatory. If they exercised attractions that in the East would have brought a high market price, they were ostracized and sent to jail. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to live (Mrs Mike in Tell Morning This). In a critique of the NSW Department of Child Welfare, called by Tennant the Department of Moral Rehabilitation, Tennant contrasts their attitude to unwed mothers with her own. Tennant has the Department representative, Miss Montrose, finally catch up with Marie and berate the girl for her selfishness, telling her that she has “spoiled the baby’s chance of a very good home, and I’m afraid you’ve spoiled the chance of any other baby in that home”. According to the 2004 Senate Inquiry, Tennant’s story of Marie West was not uncommon. “Teenage girls falling pregnant and having their child removed at birth and adopted even though they desperately wished to keep their baby” was a feature of the recent Senate Inquiry into Forced Adoptions (2012), too, although, of course, this practice was not unique to State girls. Tennant shows there was another way, albeit hardly ideal, at a time when governments provided limited funds for single mothers. First Marie is taken into the Aumbry household where she was welcome to stay indefinitely. However, she tires of being dependent on this strange upper middle class family and instead actively seeks out a potential man to support her and her baby. Eventually Marie finds Jake who dotes on her and will change his miscreant ways in order to support mother and, by then, children. Even though throughout the novel Rene scoffs at women who use men as a ‘meal ticket,’ and although marriage and economic dependence were opposed by second wave feminists, in the end and at that time there are two ways for the disreputable to become respectable: for the men it is to make money, and for the women to get married. Rene is a particularly feisty, rebellious and resourceful character, a refractory girl. Tennant was obviously aware of the expectation that State girls would end up doing housework for their ‘betters,’ working in factories, or in other low paid working class occupations. She demonstrated this with the redoubtable Henrietta Aumbry considering Rene for a range such jobs and the later discussion about Rene going to live with the Manusey’s where she would be able to help with the housework and for which she had already been well prepared by the “training in a succession of Departmental Homes [which] had left her with a guilt complex concerning dirt”. Rene, however, rebelled against these ideas. She was not interested in being a domestic servant, after all, “what girl of any spirit wants to spend the best years of her life massaging the face of some other woman’s linoleum”. Nor did she plan to return to factory work where previously she had gotten “steel filings under her nails” and was aware this might lead to blood poisoning. Rene’s refusal to be co-opted into the limited array of future work opportunities presented by her ‘betters’ marks the girl as a trouble maker, but Tennant had similarly resisted her father’s intentions for her work life and clearly sympathises with the teenager. Thus Tennant does not present Rene and Marie as “docile, repentant, and redeemable” (Elliott 2005) as middle class women writers of a previous generation had done. Instead, her treatment of them as feisty, rebellious and resourceful, even though often victimised by men, is more in keeping with ideas from the second wave feminist movement. Alignment with Bessie Guthrie’s feminist campaign The girls in Tennant’s story are quick-witted and resilient in their attempts to survive a mad system. Instead of criticising them, Tennant is harshly condemnatory of those who work in the NSW CPS, members of the middle class making a living out of the misery of poor families– the Vultures, Rene calls them. Both the Salvation Army and the Roman Catholic church come under fire for their role in doing “the Department’s work for nothing,” for procuring child labourers for their homes and laundries from the Children’s Court, and because these Christian organisations as so comfortably arrogant in their respective positions of power they do not bother to participate in Nonni Farrell’s conference to reform the CPS. Tennant is particularly scathing of ‘The Department’ which is destructive of workers and ‘clients’: All Head office was full of officers like spiders wrapped in their webs pulling in the bodies and leaving them just empty shells of forms tied up in cobweb in a dusty corner. ‘The Department’ is largely run by incompetent personnel who take pride in generations of a family have coming under their control. Those who seek to make changes, like the character Nonni Farrell and her Department of Moral Rehabilitation Reform Society, face intense opposition, and whenever there were disturbances in ‘The Department’ run Petworth, the one requirement of the most senior officials was to avoid all adverse publicity. Rene is eventually apprehended and sent to Petworth. Petworth, according to Tennant’s notes, is based on Parramatta Girls Home and is a large girls’ home known colloquially as ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ run by the Department and housing those “nobody wanted”. Discipline is harsh: “Just stand over a girl and make her scrub the same patch of floor again and again, then walk across it with muddy shoes and make her scrub it again. That soon takes the starch out of her,” sums up one employee’s attitude and approach. Girls who rioted at Petworth then had to serve three months in an overcrowded women’s prison as Rene did. This prison would have been modelled on Parramatta Gaol where Tennant had organised to be incarcerated for a week and from within which she was threatened with further detention in a lunatic asylum, the fate of Rene’s mother’s Terry Largo. Dr Haulthorpe orders Terry to be confined in a mental asylum just as her fifteen year sentence for a crime she did not commit is about to conclude. He does this in retaliation because Terry refuses to answer his questions, questions he needs responses for in order to write his memoirs. Tennant’s attitude toward the Department of Moral Rehabilitation, Petworth and the imprisonment of girls resembles that of feminist activist and child welfare reformer, Bessie Guthry (1905-1977). There is no evidence the women were friends, or even knew of each other although it is highly likely Guthry, an avid reader, was aware of Kylie Tennant who had become one of Australia’s most prominent writers from the time she published her first book, Tiburon, which won the 1935 S. H. Prior Memorial Prize. The two women also had friends in common particularly amongst the Sydney writer’s network with which Guthrie was well acquainted as a publisher. Indeed, Dorothy Auchterlonie (1915-1991), one of the writers published by Guthrie’s Viking Press (1939-1943), critiqued Tennant’s work as part of her crusade to foster Australian literature. As well, there are aspects of Tennant’s narrative which are similar to Guthrie’s life and anti-CPS campaign: Guthrie was raised and educated by feminist aunts, like the character of David Aumbry; from the 1950s Guthrie opened her house to State and other young girls who were victims of domestic violence etc, just as Nonni Farrell organises the Aumbry family home, Coombe House, to become a shelter for unwed mothers and others; Guthrie became a vociferous campaigner against the NSW child welfare system, as Nonni Farrell is; and Guthrie had long battled against “Christian profiteering from the poor” (Bellamy 1996), an idea taken up in Tell Morning This too. However, the dates do not quite match up, as Guthrie’s campaigns began in the 1950s after Tennant had completed Tell Morning This, and so it is not possible to conclude she was a significant influence on Tennant. Whether the influence was of Guthrie on Tennant, or Tennant on Guthrie, or whether the resemblances are entirely coincidental, Tennant’s story is very similar in tone to that of Bessie Guthrie’s feminist campaign. Both women were staunch advocates of State girls and opposed to ‘the System’, gathering their evidence against it at the grassroots. Both also offered alternatives to girls being forced to adopt their children, and shelter for the homeless and violated – at least as an idea by Tennant, but more practically by Guthrie. Both were vehemently critical of religious and other organisations that profligately profit from the poor. And both were keenly aware of the dominance by men in the broader Australian society as well as in the CPS. In the end, however, Guthrie’s enlistment of the Sydney Women’s Liberation Group and their use of public demonstrations to protest against the brutal treatment of girls in Parramatta and the Hay Gaol (Bellamy 1996; Djuric 2011) did more to change “the climate of opinion” than Tennant’s book, although Tell Morning This may well have contributed to the change. Conclusion With the above I have set out my reasons for reading Telling Morning This as containing the traces of a feminist protest against the NSW CPS. In the beginning it appears Tennant set off to investigate the conscription of young men and the attraction of young women to American servicemen. However, her book hovers around the fate of Rene McGarty in particular as well as a number of other State girls, including Marie West who is refusing to relinquish her baby. Therefore an exploration of the NSW CPS is more central to the novel than the sub-themes of the draft and American men. Moreover, Tennant has explored the CPS from the perspective of the girls and reformer Nonni Farrell, she refuses to moralise about the girls’ ‘choices’ when it comes to sexual liaisons and frequency of those, and she celebrates their feistiness. At the same time she is critical of the Department for its opposite, repressive approach. Tennant’s critique of the NSW CPS, therefore, aligns comfortably with that of feminist Bessie Guthrie who campaigned fruitfully with members of the Sydney Women’s Liberation Group for the closure of Parramatta Girls Home and Hay Gaol. While it appears that Guthrie was the more successful in challenging the NSW Government over their treatment of girls in State ‘care’ with her direct action and street protests, Kylie Tennant also deserves recognition for her efforts in at least trying to change “the climate of opinion”. Many women who attended the 2009 Federal Government Apology are likely to at least feel comforted in knowing she cared. Further Reading Bellamy, S. (n.d.). Guthrie, Bessie Jean Thompson (1905–1977). (C. o. National, Producer) Retrieved September 17, 2012, from Australian Dictionary of Biography: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/guthrie-bessie-jean-thompson-10382 Commonwealth of Australia Senate Inquiry (2004). Forgotten Australians. a report on Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children. Canberra: Senate Community Affairs References Committee. Djuric, B. (2011). Abandon All Hope. A history of Parramatta Girls Industrial School Perth: Chargan My Book Publisher Pty Ltd. Grant, J. (2005). Kylie Tennant: a life. Canberra: National Library of Australia. Giles, M. (2001). Invisible Thread. London: Virago Press. Tennant, K. (1953). The Joyful Condemned. London: MacMillan. Tennant, K. (1967). Tell Morning This. Sydney: Angus & Roberston Ltd. Tennant, K. (1986). The missing heir : the autobiography of Kylie Tennant. South Melbourne: Macmillan. Acknowledgements A special thanks goes to the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender at the University of Adelaide for providing funding for this project, and to Clare Bartholomaeus for her impeccable research. Thanks also go to attendees at the Discipline of Gender Studies & Social Analysis, University of Adelaide, seminar at which I presented at an early version of the work. Feedback from participants at the Memory: Trace, Place, Identity Public History Conference, 26-27 September 2013 was invaluable. I am also grateful for Tony Tonkin’s comments on early drafts and for his assistance with taking images of Kylie Tennant’s papers at the National Library. Notes on Contributors Dee Michell is Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Gender Studies & Social Analysis (GSSA) at the University of Adelaide. 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