... Over her first twenty years in Australia, Jolley struggled to find access to its literary-cultural infrastructure, and then across nearly three decades her work freely circulated throughout its distributive mechanisms and she became a central figure in its “conversation.” ...

The Shape of a Writing Career

In 1959, at the age of 36, Elizabeth Jolley migrated from Scotland to Australia on the Pacific and Orient liner Orion. She was accompanied by her husband, who came to take up the position of Head Librarian at the University of Western Australia, by three young children, and by shipping containers full of the furnishings of family life. Among these felt-possessions were Jolley's as-yet unpublished writings: a dozen children's stories; several short stories, some, like “A Hedge of Rosemary,” to be rewritten and published in Australia during the mid sixties; a still unpublished novel, first titled A Question of Innocence (in a play on Anthony Powell's A Question of Upbringing [1951]) and later revised as Eleanor Page; and a manuscript in several notebooks titled The Feast of Life that in her early years in Perth became two manuscripts called George's Wife and The Feast of Life, precursors to the trilogy she published in the late eighties and early nineties (My Father's Moon, Cabin Fever and The Georges' Wife). The inclusion of all these manuscripts in shipping containers marks the persistent desire of an immigrant wife and mother to be something else as well, to be a writer.

Writing and “being a writer” are not the same. When Jolley arrived in Western Australia, she had not yet found access to what Robert Dessaix, in Speaking Their Minds: Intellectuals and the Public Culture in Australia, calls the “intellectual infrastructure” of professional writing. Such an infrastructure entails industries related to publishing, grant-giving, awards, and writers' residencies; distributive mechanisms related to the media, school syllabi, university reading lists, academic conferences, and scholarly journals; and, finally, being part of a culture's “conversation” through taking part in associations, readings, festivals, media interviews, literary judging panels, and the like. Over her first twenty years in Australia, Jolley struggled to find access to its literary-cultural infrastructure, and then across nearly three decades her work freely circulated throughout its distributive mechanisms and she became a central figure in its “conversation.”

In an interview with Jennifer Ellison, Jolley remarked that “publishing is a business.”

In A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Cultural Politics of a Literary Career, David Carter makes a similar point when he defines a career in writing as what emerges through the writing and the business of a writing life. One way to see the point made by both Jolley and Carter is through Elizabeth Jolley: A Bibliography - 1965-2007. Read one way, the Bibliography records one person's achievement; read another, the trajectory of Elizabeth Jolley's career emerges from the pages of the Bibliography as a micro-history of cultural politics in Australia over more than four decades.