Let me first thank you for meeting with me last Thursday to discuss your mother’s work. Further to our conversation, we have set a tentative date for publication of The Poems of Veda Gray of 8 May next year. I attach the intended contents list for your perusal. Where untitled, poems are identified by their first lines. We are planning to include 316 of the 410 you originally sent us. This will include all from her original book in their intended form.

I reiterate that we feel very grateful to you for allowing us to publish your mother’s work—it is daring and experimental and casts new light on mid-century modernism. I understand too that this project brings up difficult memories for you and appreciate your preparedness to assist.

In response to your question re readership: there is currently a genuine excitement occurring in feminist scholarship and art curation, and a renewed interest in overlooked works of female authorship. Certainly, we will use this broadening interest to our advantage in marketing.

Further to the poetry, your mother’s letters to her sister, as we discussed, are a piece of literature in their own right. We have communicated our thanks to the estate of Matilda Bryant for bequesting these, but await your opinion before proceeding with publishing plans on that account.

As requested, I now forward this correspondence from your mother to her sister in as close to its original chronology as possible. I hope you find her letters as vivid and interesting as we have.

Yours truly,

JULIA GRAHAM-HAMMOND

Bacchae Publishing

Carlton

Melbourne

EXTRACTED LETTERS FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE OF VEDA GRAY (FERRUGIA) AND MATILDA BRYANT, 1961-62

10 NOVEMBER 1961

Dear Tilde,

Have just come inside from bright sunshine in the backyard, tomato plants covered in green baubles, beginnings of a ‘kitchen garden’ evident in fronds of dill and mint (such a hardy wanderer once it gets going!)—all of which sounds idyllic had I not, wheeling up to come in, nearly garrotted myself on the washing line. (One hardly conceives how the accumulation of wet white flannels turns the whole apparatus into a death trap.)

At least now we are in spring, things will dry (clothes, mud &c). Owen is always dirty, but having quickly learned the futility of washing dirty articles only to have them soiled again within minutes, I am no longer applying myself fastidiously to that particular treadmill. A little freedom is good for children (apparently) but they have too much of it here, where a park, if it springs up by order of a civic authority, is immediately transformed into a battleground with stones, sticks, slate or firecrackers.