 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Bluestocking in Patagonia
By Anne Whitehead
Allen & Unwin $35.00
 This highly recommended book recounts the formative years of Mary Cameron, who, under her married name of Gilmore - which she kept despite separation from an unsuitable husband - would become one of our best-known citizens and come to grace the present Australian $10 note.
Sydney-based writer Anne Whitehead has interwoven her own travels, conducted intelligently, with a telling of how the pursuit of utopian ideals inspired Cameron and 500 other Australians to follow the socialist William Lane to distant South America.
In what now seems the pursuit of an impossible dream, Lane led an initial 200 'brave or foolhardy souls' to found the settlement of 'Nueva Australia' in the year of 1893.
Before a second group even arrived, Lane had expelled three men for breaking the teetotal pledge, then walked out with 63 loyal followers to found a separate settlement, 'Colony Cosme', a collection of mud huts whose inhabitants refused to even field a cricket team against their former comrades.
At the age of 30, Mary left Sydney for Paraguay, farewelled by the writer Henry Lawson, who would become a lifelong friend.
She diarised en route, "I am tired of the gilded chaff of single life and my being craves for more substantial food of married life - even though it be rye bread."
The 'rye' was fellow utopian William Gilmore, a 'quiet and diffident bushman,' whose skills (mostly as a shearer) could not provide security to a wife and, soon enough, a young son.
The family moved later to Patagonia, in southern Argentina, where English and Welsh sheep farmers employed William on their land and Mary to educate their children. Author Whitehead visited this area and provides fascinating interviews with the landowners' successors.
In her spare time Mary wrote, discovering that she did it well.
Times were tough and the weather bleak. In 1902, with spirits broken, the Gilmores embarked on a ship for Australia, via London, where Mary visited Henry Lawson who was aware of her emerging reputation as a poet.
Later the couple separated, although Mary corresponded with her husband for the next 34 years, during which time she became a well-known writer and a famous campaigner for social causes.
Dame (of the British Empire) Mary Gilmore died, aged 97, in 1962, her memory now carried in everyone's purse or pocket through her photo (on the book's cover) and in Dobell's matriarchal portrait, both on the $10 note.
- Thanks to Book Warehouse in Keen Street, Lismore for supporting this column.
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