Beatrice Grimshaw - how to write about her life

“In memory of Beatrice Ethel Grimshaw” begins the inscription on a gravestone erected in 2017 in the Catholic section of the large cemetery in Bathhurst, New South Wales.  “Travel Writer, Publicist, Author, Businesswoman and Plantation Manager in Papua.” It was a Saturday afternoon on a long weekend in winter. I was standing at her grave with a kindly man from the local family history group who met me in order that I didn’t get lost in this mini-necropolis of old Australia.

 We are a long way from Papua, which had been her home for more than thirty years, even longer from our shared homeland of Ireland.

 I was here in the faint hope of tidings from the woman underneath about how to present her life. I wasn’t getting any.

 Once among the world’s best-selling writers, Beatrice Grimshaw had lain here without any marker for more than sixty years. When she died in 1953, she left no money that would have enabled a headstone to be purchased. She had no money to leave. For all her acclaim earlier in life, her biographer writes that she had just enough in later years to pay the electricity to warm the kettle for a daily cup of tea.

 Sixty years later, she was having a minor after-life, named as one of the ‘Pillars of Bathurst’ in an attractive piece of public art down by the river in this town with a haunted colonial feel. And this gravestone, erected in 2017.

 Diana Gleadhill, another Irish writer exploring her life, the family history group and distant relatives had banded together to pay for the stone. It was black in colour with grey speckles and moulded from a discarded bench that once commemorated the life of Australia’s post-war Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, whose own grave was not that far away.

 At the ceremony, a priest offered prayers for the repose of her soul. The local Irish bar-restaurant provided the catering. The floral arrangement included frangipani and hibiscus, blooms of Papua.

 I have thought so much about Beatrice Grimshaw over the last months that it sometimes feels she lives in my head. I admire how she charted her own path, her doughtiness, her refusal to conform. I enjoyed many of her escapist potboilers set in Papua and elsewhere in the islands of the South Seas. They brought to mind happy childhood Sunday afternoons reading in my bedroom. She could be a perceptive and amusing writer betimes poking fun at herself, emotionally stunted Irish men, and the foibles and quirks of the colonial class. And I despaired at the tragic, penurious loneliness of her death. She is a cautioning of the jeopardies inherent in trying to lead a singular life.

 But as I read her novels and other books, I often could not like all of her. Her racism seems so visceral, so gleeful, so gratuitous that I wondered what motivated her.

 I have a copy of one her non-fiction books ‘New New Guinea’ (1911) beside me as I write. A former Prime Minister of Australia, Alfred Deakin commissioned her to write the book, part of a project to entice settlers to come to Papua.

 The book is diverting, zesty but one cannot look away from the fact that everyone she encounters who is not white is demeaned. Some examples. When she visits the village of Hanuabada in Port Moresby she writes about the “wrinkled hippopotamus like skin” of the old women she meets. She gives the name ‘Willie’ to a man she meets in a village on the Purari river. “He answered to it like a dog”, she writes and recounts how she and her companions laugh when ‘Willie’ scoops out jam from a jar and rubs it into his hair. The white characters in her novels have names, histories and speak in paragraphs. The ‘natives’ rarely do.  

 I have been to both these places. I have friends  in both these places.  I flinch as I read these words.

 Beatrice is one of the three characters I am structuring my new book around, using their lives as a way of comparing past with present in the islands of Melanesia. I have travelled to many of the places she lived, got stuck in many of the same rivers she ran aground. I read some of her work in Papua New Guinea’s National Library, underneath the official picture of a former Governor-General dressed in regalia resembling that of a British royal at a military parade. The colonial period casts a shadow in Papua New Guinea.

 There’s an easy-ish academic way to frame/understand Beatrice’s racialism. She was part of a tradition of imperial literature. (The late Bougainville writer Regis Tove Stella has written a insightful book about the subject). But, at the level of her as an individual, what motivated her to write down these sorts of words? To sell books? To curry favour? She lived in towns and nooks of Papua for more than thirty years, a long time to spend with people one does not like.

 This would be an easier book to write if focused just on the rip-roaring adventure story dimension of her life.  

 But, in this month which showed more than ever just how many unfinished reckonings with the colonial past remain, I know I must address her derogatory attitudes and their impacts.  Few historical figures comply with contemporary values. Simply expunging her racism won’t correct wrongs or help learn from the past. But how to address it? How to incorporate it within a rounded appraising of her life? My thinking is still fluid as to how to do so.