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

Joan Wise made her fiction debut in the pages of Australia's Bulletin magazine in 1950. A poem of hers had earlier appeared in the same publication, but her arrival as a writer of prose was announced by a series of linked tales, "The Conquest of Emmie" (January), "Poison in the Furrow" (May), and "A Fence for Emma" (August). The stories are a subtly comic triptych about gender politics and hardscrabble bush-farming life in the remote Central Highlands district of Tasmania.We discovered Joan Wise by chance, while trawling the archives during the early stages of editing Deep South: Stories from Tasmania (2012).1 One of our intentions in editing the anthology was to re-present to the contemporary reader a selection of the best Tasmanian stories that had for decades languished unread in back issues of journals and magazines. More than sixty years after the original publication of Wise's stories, they struck us as original, witty, and of remarkable interest to the contemporary reader.Born Joan Boyd in Tasmania in 1912, Wise was educated at St Michael's Collegiate School, a private Anglican girls' school in Hobart, and following her graduation trained as a Mothercraft nurse. At the 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 the farmhouse at "Kinvarra," a substantial sheep- and hop-producing property, combining the 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 life was 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 the Emmie stories, when Wise was thirty-eight years old, might have heralded the 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 the publishing scene fifteen years later, it was 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 the School Magazine (published by the New South Wales Department of Education since 1916) and various anthologies. During the final phase of her career, Wise confided in a letter to an editor at Writers' Radio that she was "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 the period of her life 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 the lack of time she is able to devote to her writing.Wise's biographical profile is remarkably similar to those of the Australian women writers who are the 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 the 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 the 1940s, but either reduced their output or fell silent for the next twenty years" (back cover). "Literature," writes Sheridan, "was a particularly unwelcoming and uncertain profession for women" (5) in the immediate postwar period, the time when Wise was seeking a foothold for her fiction. The "ideologically driven ousting of women from public life" (5), the chauvinism of established literary gatekeepers, the dominance of Cold War politics (in which relatively few women writers participated), and the personal circumstances of individual women-who usually combined "the artistic life with the domestic" (2)-are among the interlocking cultural, social, and political factors that Sheridan offers as an explanation for the partial occlusion of Australian women's writing at that time. …