Outside, on the steps of the Wesley Anne pub, Julia falters. She is really quite drunk. Her heels are too high and she is probably due for a new glasses prescription. She needs my arm around her, I realise. So I put it there and steady her, and help her not just down the steps but up the skinny by-lane to the car park. ‘Lovely man,’ she says to me tenderly. The Poems of Veda Gray is falling from her hand. I retrieve it and try to stash it in her handbag amongst the lipsticks and biros and sunglasses with broken arms. She fobs me off. She’s not worried about Veda right now. I put Veda in the back pocket of my trousers.

She strokes my face with the palm of her hand, her torso enfolded within mine as I guide her along the concrete and then out along the bluestone cobbles.

‘Lovely, lovely man,’ she says, ‘You’re my lovely lovely man, Owen.’

Australian poet Gwen Harwood

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In 1961, Australian poet Gwen Harwood, tired of being rejected or paid less than male poets by literary editors, published a hoax poem in the Bulletin, which spelled out FUCK ALL EDITORS when read acrostically. The scandal made newspaper headlines. Harwood wrote that, in the aftermath, ‘[S]omeone I thought a friend said … “I thought no woman would ever use that word,” and made it clear I was cut off from decent motherhood …’ (Letter to Tony Riddell R 24.8.61).

Harwood went on to become one of Australia’s most-feted poets.

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Acknowledgements

There are some people I need to thank: firstly, my wonderful editor and publisher, Jo Case, whose belief and conviction in this book has been so important to me; my agent Jenny Darling who stuck with me through the thick and the very very thin; my readers—Deborah Crabtree, Gerard Elson, Jan Robinson, Lianne Broadbent, Angela Howard, Harry Howard, Johanna Preston and Liz Preston. Thanks to Lara Telford for the ikebana education and the loaned books. Thanks to Janine Burke and Christos Tsiolkas for reading this novel prior to publication and for their kind and generous words. And, for encouragement and enthusiasm: Peter Salmon and Robert Sessions. Finally, Greta and Sukey, for teaching me to be a mother and a woman and a writer all at the same time.

I also thank the Australia Council for the Arts for funding the writing of Bad Art Mother through a new work grant.

An early version of ‘Milk’ was published in the Griffith Review in 2010.

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