The academics were outnumbered by about seven to one even if we don’t count the Masters family who turned out in force. Practising writers, some very well known, others not so widely read as yet, occupied the field and they had much more in common than literary ability and ambition. More than half of the academics were male. The audience was more homogenous although, considering the Latin, root of this word, perhaps it’s the wrong one, but I’m sure you know what I mean. To return to the non-academics, they were all women and all on the downhill side of fifty. They had come from various parts of the country to honour their heroine, herself a late starter, a mother of seven, who began her ‘serious’ writing career in her late fifties after raising her family and keeping her writing hand in with part-time journalism. To these women Olga was and will continue to be an inspiration, unarguable proof that it’s never too late to begin. They had come also for the half-day panel discussion on ‘Women, Creativity, and Aging’, a topic in which, understandably, they had an intense interest.

Guests of honour at the conference and members of the discussion panel were the eminent poets, Rosemary Dobson and Gwen Harwood, the novelist, Jessica Anderson, none of whom will mind, I am sure, if I mention that they are safely past the first flush of youth; Barbara Giles, the poet and children’s novelist, herself a late starter and no spring chicken, and me – a very late starter and the baby of the group although this is hardly a cause for pride. Each panel member talked about her experience as a writer, her attitude to her work, the ease and/or difficulty she encountered in having work published and the particular circumstances a woman writer has to deal with.

It seems that women poets have an advantage over those who write fiction not simply because, as you might think, poems are usually shorter than stories or novels, but because poems are largely composed in the mind first and written down later. Gwen Harwood claimed that ideas and images for poems can come to her when her hands are busy with other things like, for example, ‘making the cumquat marmalade for which I am justly renowned in West Hobart’. On the other hand, the writer of fiction or creative prose needs undisturbed time and a room of her own for which she often has to wait until the children move out.

It became increasingly obvious that the late start of women writers like Olga Masters and perhaps Elizabeth Jolley too was not as rare a phenomenon as might be supposed. The women writers at the conference were immensely cheered to find so many others like themselves making a determined effort to fulfil a lifelong ambition when most men are giving serious thought to retirement. What they were looking for was the confidence to continue and reassurance that creativity and old age are not mutually exclusive. Both were to be found not only in the formal sessions but more so in the modestly confided successes exchanged over coffee breaks.

A more interesting reason put forward to account for the late flowering of many women writers was that, because they draw their material from the close confines of the domestic world in which they spend most of their lives, they often delay or defer writing out of a sensitivity to the feelings of people near to them who might be hurt or offended. An otherwise very sensible woman told me in confidence that there was much she wanted to write but could not because her husband would be profoundly upset if she did. She is a successful writer of books for children who ‘hopes eventually to write short stories and novels for adults’. I heard similar stories from a number of them and, while this shows an admirable tenderness for the feelings of others, one wishes that they might muster some of that intellectual toughness necessary to the telling of unpalatable truths. One can only speculate about the riches they thus deny our literary culture.

As to the academic papers, they were, like the curate’s egg, good in parts. I heard most of them, though not all and, of those I heard, some could have been spared without appreciable loss. Brian Matthews spoke eloquently, as ever, mainly concentrating on the sexual implications of Loving Daughters. He drew our attention to Masters’s gift for obliquity in preference to direct statement particularly in connection with the relationships between the sexes including not merely pairs of lovers but implied pairings between parents and children. From a safe distance and in retrospect, I’m not sure that I agree with his contention that Masters’s Loving Daughters is, among other things, ‘a celebration of human sexuality’, ‘celebration’ being the word I’d quarrel with. Nor do I find the handbag groupings of characters into ‘life affirming’ and ‘life denying’ categories especially helpful in dealing with characters who are, on the whole, passive and accepting yet making the best of things. Even so, his case was well-argued and its presentation entertaining earning him an enthusiastic reception from an audience most of whom would have been hearing academic criticism for the first time.

Bruce Bennett earned Brownie points for his illuminating comparisons between Olga Masters’s work and that of fellow Westralian, Elizabeth Jolley, pointing out that Masters writes from the inside of her world as one who belongs in it while Jolley, an emigrant to Australia, writes from outside of characters who don’t belong, are rootless and unsettled. Both his and Matthews’s papers had that most desirable of all effects, that of sending the listeners back to reread the authors discussed with renewed interest and, one hopes, with increased pleasure.

All the papers I heard dealt with recurring themes and/or patterns of imagery in Masters’s work leading one wit to comment that we might now expect a spate of PhDs on ‘Eyes and Thighs in the work of Olga Masters’ which would be funny if it weren’t so probable. Several of the papers were, to say the least, misguided and, to say the most, near parodies of elucidatory criticism. There is some possibility that the conference papers will be published in which case those of you who care can judge for yourselves.

Olga Masters intended to write a book for each of her seven children and was in preparation of her fifth when she died after a brief illness of a brain-tumour. She had said ‘my children are my best books’. Sadly too, she told her eldest child, Roy, when she was dying ‘my books caused this’, meaning the tumour believing that she had pushed herself too hard too fast. Her fifth book, The Rose Fancier, was published a few days before the conference where it was much in demand. This, her last short story collection, was reviewed in the July edition of ABR and will not be discussed here.

However, a sixth book, the play Poor Man’s Castle, was published by Currency Press to coincide with the Conference during which it received its first professional production, as I mentioned earlier. The play is in two acts and ends so indecisively and precipitately that one would not be blamed for thinking that Masters, at some time, had a third act in mind. It is as well she did not bother. Not to put too fine, a point on it, the play is a stinker. It belongs to that genre known as ‘kitchen sink’ and concerns a family of thoroughly dislikeable people (if we except the Mongoloid son, Johnnycake). There is much quarrelling and shouting, a rifle is brandished about by one character or another and fired a few times without anyone being hit, a son who left home returns and a daughter threatens to leave home but doesn’t. Father is obviously having an affair with the young pregnant girl in the downstairs flat and Mum is equally obviously turning a blind eye. All this becomes clear early in the play which is not without its improbabilities in the plot department.

The problem is that neither plot nor characters develop much after the first part of Act One, the characters are uninteresting and it is impossible to care about what happens to them. The publication of this fizzer does nothing to advance Olga Masters’s reputation and it is to be regretted that it was, not left to lie among her papers for the diligent researcher to muse over. Not everything that a great writer writes is great.

This, admittedly harsh, judgement of Poor Man’s Castle is made in full recognition of the energy and enthusiasm accorded the script by a talented and hard-working cast whose best efforts could not disguise a ‘turkey’ enlivened though it was with Masters’s utterly convincing dialogue.

Notwithstanding, the conference was a huge success due in no small part to the organizing ability of Bill McGaw of the University of Wollongong and to the scholarly interest of Dorothy Jones of the same university in the works of Olga Masters and to her friendship with Olga and the Masters family in general. I don’t know who had the idea of directing the conference toward the general topic of ‘Women, Creativity, and Aging’ but it was inspired and a further guarantee of success. A suggestion from the floor for those who might think of holding similar conferences in the future is that, had she been there, Olga would have enjoyed herself enormously and also been enormously proud of the recognition given her. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to do the same for another writer while she is still alive to enjoy it?