3 January 2025
I acknowledge the original custodians of these lands. The people of the rivers and the hills have walked these lands for thousands of years and have given us a deep and rich storytelling tradition. I pay my respect to the elders of the past and present and to any First Nations people who may be here this evening.
I am honoured to be able to address you today, on this special occasion, about the relics of Lake View. As you may know, there has been a boom in biographies that think through the subjects’ lives via material objects preserved in writers house museums – one of these is The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (2015) by Deborah Lutz which I read recently. Writers’ objects can be sources of fascination for people who are curious about the writer’s life and their creative process.
As Nicola Watson argues in The Author’s Effects, house museums are typically made up of a miscellany of things with variable claims to authenticity, which is a matter of how close they are to the author’s life and work.[1] House-museums can provide a location for the storage and display of untethered items which can be arranged in ways that make sense of the author’s biography. Due to the peripatetic nature of the Richardsons’ lives and their financial challenges, and world travels, it was impossible to retain all of their possessions, but we do have some handed down by HHR herself (via Olga Roncoroni) Even so, they have passed through different hands.
Alongside the authentic relics, there are many objects in Lake View which have been donated to approximate the household things which were once here. (There’s a long list of donors in the original Henry Handel Richardson Memorial booklet produced by the National Trust) One no longer existing item is the tea set which Andrew Gilmour’s family owned after the Richardson’s departure – apparently it used to be children’s plaything and didn’t survive. Another item he mentioned was a map which was given to another family for safe keeping and has lost contact with the house.
Olga Roncoroni has provided a detailed account of HHR’s routine when her husband was still alive. After a cup of tea she bathed at 7.30am then returned to bed for breakfast at 8 am. She never joined the family until after her working hours were over. By 9am. She was dressed, and went down to the kitchen to arrange meals for the day. Her study had been cleaned while she breakfasted; the flowers arranged; her trayful of pencils sharpened by her husband and placed on the writing-table. By 9.30 she had shut her study door (and the specially made sound-proof door outside it) and heaven help anyone who intruded or disturbed her before 12.30 or 1p.m. She had a system of house-telephones installed, which linked up to her bedroom and study with the housekeeper-secretary-companion’s room on the ground floor, and with the kitchen. At about 11a.m. a small cup of Mocha coffee with cream and a dash of fruit were taken up to her. But the tray was put into the study silently, and, unless spoken to, the bearer returned) without banging the door!’) H.H. worked at the current book until about midday; then wrote letters, and cheques to settle household accounts.[2] (There more details about her daily routine but I will leave it there!)
Nettie Palmer recalled that she usually sat down at her study-desk at 9.30 and took up her well-sharpened pencil form a dozen on her tray, and worked until lunchtime, when she would hand the result, either pages or sentences to ‘Miss R’ (Olga Roncoroni) for typing out.[3]
Palmer reflects on HHR’s unique qualities and her fascination with her: ‘so much of my life has been spent watching writers at work…but what makes up the special nature of this writer, H.H.R?’[4] One of the qualities she discerned was her utter dedication. Palmer quotes HHR directly: ‘But I love every moment at my desk. How else could I have kept on writing all these years, getting nothing for it but starvation-fees and obscurity’[5]
Palmer makes the point that HHR was fortunate to be in a position to write for its own sake rather than needing to make a living, or to write works to order like many other jobbing writers. She was able to arrange things to suit her particular personality (for example she didn’t like being in large groups of people and hated noise while working). Even so there were many interruptions to her work which are detailed in her letters, notably ill health and the bombing raids by aircraft around Hastings during WWII.
Given HHR’s dedication to preserving a sense of stable domesticity, despite threats and interruptions, she spent a lot of time with these items even if she didn’t use them everyday. Relics which are associated with the writing of an author are perhaps the most resonant, such as the desk. The desk is usually a key part of the recreation of the scene of writing in the author’s house-museum. HHR’s pedestal writing desk is central to the display in one of the rooms at Lake View. In Myself when Young, she describes the purchase of her first ‘real’ writing-table from her ‘puny dress- allowance’: ‘The one I chose cost only a little over three pounds, but it was well-made and not unsightly, and had certainly been built to last. For the next ten years it went everywhere with me, journeying to and fro on the continent and eventually landing back in England. Both Maurice Guest and The Getting of Wisdom were written at it.’[6] She regarded it as an old friend which she didn’t want to part with.
A larger desk on which she wrote the famous Fortunes of Richard Mahony trilogy is at the Atheneum, donated by her great-niece Angela Neustatter after spending a long period in storage. The Varityper typewriter used to be there until it was taken to the State Library of Victoria for safekeeping. It was recently on display in Canberra for an exhibition titled ‘The True History of the Irish in Australia: Not Just Ned’. The Varityper is a later variation of the Hammond, according to the typewriter expert at the Literary Minded blog.[7]
Author’s writing instruments, like pens and typewriters and now laptops, have a high rating on the spectrum of literary value. HHR’s copper pencil tray and prism paperweight are associated with the writing process. HHR’s husband would sharpen her pencils for her. There was a lot of work done around her to keep the writing going. The brass topped onyx inkwell draws our attention to older modes of writing with ink, which was no doubt how she wrote many of her letters.
The black dress was worn by HHR in her last professional photograph in 1945. It was sent to Melbourne in early 2023 and was frozen by the National trust to prevent insect damage (along with a cross stitch sampler) The dress had been stored in a drawer and had been affected by humidity in the building. This famous garment may return for the Esoterica exhibition in future.
The delicate Queen Anne silver cream jug, dating from 1795, has an interesting story attached to it, since it was returned by Dame Pattie Menzies (along with the paperweight) There are newspaper articles on display about this on display inside Lake View. [8] The wife of Sir Robert Menzies made a trip to Lake View in April 1990 and ‘reluctantly passed on’ two of Richardson’s artefacts that had been given by the Mayor of Hastings more than 25 years earlier. One of these was a 20-sided glass prism paperweight that had apparently been used daily by HHR. [9] Dame Pattie said ‘I think this jug has had a happy life and I say goodbye to it with much sorrow. ‘Of course I never used it, it would be a crime to put cream in it.’[10]
There’s uncertainty about the authenticity of the ouja board but it speaks of her spiritualism, inherited from her father Walter Lindesay Richardson. According to the National Trust website, the Ouija board on display at Lake View, where H.H.R. spent part of her girlhood, is not original but is similar to the one she more than likely used. H.H.R. spoke regularly with her husband, the academic John George Robertson, and read him her manuscripts to gauge his response from the ‘other side’; a poignant connection that was maintained long after death. HHR would use her ouja board with her housekeeper Irene Stumpp – they would site – according to Roncoroni, with their hands on the indicator, for a period every day. They contacted an entity known as ‘Abada’ which spelled out its name.[11] This spirits was known to throw objects and furniture around the ‘Westfield’ house in Lyme Regis at odd hours – and once threaded wool around, scaring the pets.
We often had great commotions in the way of knocks and bangs & movements of the furniture. We got so used to it that we hardly took any notice of it at the end. If it happened late at night I’d get up & expostulate over the banisters down to the scullery (empty), where the chief disturbances took place.[12]
The square cut glass ash tray speaks of her daily habits, notably smoking, which was more common then than now. Newspaper man Brian Penton had a series of conversations with HHR at her house in Primrose Hill from 1931-33 and he remarked that ‘she sat smoking with one foot on the fender, slightly huddled up in a black velvet coat as though cold, and leaning sideways on the
arm of her chair towards the fire.’[13] And later he notes, that she was listening with her usual vague, still frown, a cigarette posed in a ficketty way between her fingers, her lips
puckered up, staring into the fire.[14] These observations ended up in an illustrated essay that was published in the Sydney Daily Telegraph on 30 March 1946, a few days after her death.
There’s a charcoal sketch of a bust by Serbian artist Sava Botzaris christened by HHR as ‘The Hooded Cobra’. He was a Serbian artist whose other literary sitters included Walter de la Mare, James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw. In a letter to Mary Kernot: ’I laughed at your horror over Sava’s bust. It does look rather fearsome. I only saw the thing in plaster; & didn’t altogether dislike it. We used to go up of an evening (all but my husband, who took one glance at it & fled) to where it stood in an empty room & walk round it & discuss it (while S. was working on it); & it really did not seem so abhorrent when considered in the round. As a profile, it had its points.’[15]
These objects, including the bust, might be regarded as ‘eye witnesses’ to HHR’s life, but they also lend authenticity to the house where she lived briefly as a child – they aid in the consecration of it as a memorial space. They have all returned from the Northern Hemisphere, albeit at different times, emphasising the distance she travelled from her childhood home (although she talked a lot about Australian literature in her letters to friends and had an extensive library of Australian books).
By studying the relics, we might be able to discern aspects of HHR’s personality, when she not able to speak to us directly anymore – in other words, they can act as metonymic stand-ins for the author’s presence. We know that she was into Spiritualism from the ouja board and we feel the force of her connection with her writing through her desk, pencil tray and paperweight and her elegance and good taste through the Queen Anne milk jug. The stylish dress gives us an impression of her slight bodily form and the ash tray speaks of her smoking habit. Meanwhile the bust (or the sketch of it) tells of her fame, albeit within certain rarified circles.
Over time, people have fetishised and revered these objects precisely because they remain while the author is absent. Their curation in the house museum allows us to imagine the magic of the writing process. All these items have been through different processes of valuation and periods of stasis and are now on display or being cared for behind closed doors, so to speak. If it wasn’t for Olga Roncoroni being such a careful and thoughtful executor, and the support of the Neustatter family and the HHR project led by Clive Probyn and the custodianship of volunteers at Lake View some of these surviving things may have been overlooked and/or discarded. Instead of becoming rubbish, which was a faint possibility, they are now treasured relics on display in Chiltern,
[1] Nicola J. Watson, The Authors Effects: On Author’s Effects, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 117.
[2] Olga Roncoroni, Henry Handel Richardson: Some Personal Impressions, 74.
[3] Nettie Palmer, ‘July 26, 1935’ Henry Handel Richardson: Some Personal Impressions, edited by Edna Purdie and Olga Roncoroni, Sydney: Angus & Robertson 1957: 49.
[4] Palmer, 51.
[5] Palmer, 52.
[6] HHR, Myself When Young (with foreword by Edna Purdie) William Heinemann 1948 (1964 edition): 126-127.
[7] https://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2011/05/varityper-typewriter-and-irish-in.html
[8] Shelli-Anne Couch, ‘Pieces of history find their home’ 28 April 1990 (newspaper clipping from Lake View – name missing)
[9] ‘Pieces of history’
[10] ‘Pieces of history’
[11] Roncoroni, 89.
[12] Michael Ackland, Henry Handel Richardson: A Life Cambridge University Press, 2004: 215.
[13] Patrick Buckridge, ‘A Neglected Interview between Henry Handel Richardson and Brian Penton 1931-33’ Australian Literary Studies vol. 18, no. 3, 1998: 254.
[14] Penton interview, 261.
[15] HHR letter to Mary Kernot, 18 May 1937: 215.