5 - Adelaide Around 1935: Stories of Herself When Young

Summary

Three women writers who grew up in Adelaide in the 1920s and 30s later published autobiographical novels based on that experience—Nancy Cato's Marigold (1992), Geraldine Halls's This is my friend's chair (1995) and Nene Gare's A House with Verandahs (1980) and Kent Town (1996). They write the Adelaide of this period into existence—its city shops, dance halls and cinemas, its suburban homes and schools. At the same time, they offer accounts of the class-differentiated experiences and aspirations of young girls growing up between the two world wars.

Nancy Cato was born in 1917 and lived in Adelaide until she was fifty. Nene Gare, two years younger, left for Perth when she was twenty and never returned, whereas Geraldine Halls (also born in 1919) left Adelaide at the same time and lived abroad for 30 years, returning to spend the last decades of her life here. All three are looking back at their girlhoods, decades later. What impressions of Adelaide around 1935 do their novels provide? What perspectives are attributable to class differences in their families of origin? How much correspondence is there between the youthful dreams each attributes to her protagonist and the life the writer actually led?

The title of this chapter alludes to Joy Hooton's ground-breaking study of Australian women's autobiographies, Stories of Myself When Young (1990), which in turn took its title from Henry Handel Richardson's memoir Myself When Young.