Kylie Tennant

Clip 2: The Battlers

Taken from the documentary Kylie Tennant (1986)

Original title classification not known – this clip chosen to be G

Curator’s clip description

Kylie Tennant talks about researching and writing her third novel The Battlers.

Curator’s notes

The Battlers was published in 1941 by Gollancz in London. It received international accolades and the American press compared it to John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Tennant began researching the book in 1938. At that time Rodd was teaching at Dulwich Hill Public School and Tennant and Rodd were living in a small house in the inner Sydney suburb.

Tennant got hold of a horse and buggy and took to the roads of southern and western New South Wales, in order to experience firsthand the effects of the Depression on the country’s rural underprivileged. Gone from Sydney for months and regularly sending letters (now held in the National Library) home to Rodd, Tennant travelled alone in her buggy, camping with swagmen and destitute families and standing in line for work along with the many dispossessed by the collapsed rural economy.

The Battlers was awarded the SH Prior Memorial Prize in 1940 (which Tennant had earlier won for Tiburon in 1935) and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1941.

Adrienne Parr, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This clip shows an interview with Australian writer Kylie Tennant, filmed in a bush setting. Tennant describes her research for her book The Battlers (1941), which included taking to the road in a horse and cart to experience first-hand the lives of the unemployed during the Great Depression. She goes on to describe the difficulties she faced in commencing the writing and the response from sections of the media to its publication. A black-and-white photograph of Tennant from the period is included.

Educational value points

Kylie Tennant (1912–88) is one of Australia’s most significant women writers. Her work was published in the 1930s between the First World War and the Great Depression. Almost all of the major Australian women writers of the 1930s and 40s were influenced by both feminism and socialism. Katherine Susannah Prichard (1883–1969) had been a founder-member of the Communist Party. Eleanor Dark, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw, Dymphna Cusack and Kylie Tennant were all involved in the Movement Against War and Fascism and in the Fellowship of Australian Writers, both of which were Communist Party front organisations. Many of them also belonged to the Realist Writers’ Groups, also established by the Communist Party.

Kylie Tennant’s approach to writing reflected her journalistic concern to ‘get good copy’. For her this meant that she had to experience the life of her characters. To achieve this she took to the roads for three months in 1938 to find out about the lives of men, women and children dispossessed by the Great Depression. In this endeavour she has been compared with John Steinbeck (1902–68) and George Orwell (1903–50), both of whom experienced living among the socially disadvantaged and who drew upon this experience in their writing.

The Battlers was Tennant’s third novel and was published in 1941. It won for her the SH Prior Memorial Prize (1940) and the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society (1941). Tennant’s distinctive voice brought compassion and humour to the story of Snow, a drifter, Dancy, a tough young woman, and the crowd they move among as they travel the roads looking for work in country New South Wales in the 1930s. The novel was positively received by critics and the public in Australia and overseas. Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney also faithfully reproduced the effect of the Great Depression on individuals and groups.

The word ‘battler’ gained its Australian connotations through Henry Lawson in When the Billy Boils (1896). Tennant used the term in her novel to describe those who ‘did it tough’. The phrase ‘little Aussie battler’ has since become enshrined in the language. Prime Minister John Howard brought the word ‘battlers’, the title of Tennant’s novel, into modern prominence. Claiming to represent the interests of this constituency he explained his understanding of ‘battlers’, on the anniversary of his 30th year in parliament, as ‘I normally mean, but it’s not an exclusive definition, the battler is somebody who finds in life that they have to work hard for everything they get’ (www.theage.com.au).

Kylie Tennant maintained a successful career for 50 years, publishing 22 books in several genres. She wrote her first novel (Tiburon, 1935) at age 22 and thereafter worked as a journalist, barmaid, publicity officer, union organiser, reviewer and lecturer as well as writer. Fearless determination seems to have characterised her life. She married Lewis Rodd, a union activist, in 1932 while setting out to walk from Sydney to Brisbane. Her early novels were all based on her experiences of living and working among the underprivileged, sometimes for months at a time. She even went to jail for a week in the interests of research.

Dymphna Cusack (1902–81), another Australian writer who had much in common with Tennant, is referred to in the clip. Both women examined social issues of the time by writing about the lives of ordinary people. Cusack’s first published novel, Jungfrau (1936), referred to by Tennant, took second place to Tennant’s first novel, Tiberon, in the Bulletin’s SH Prior Novel competition. Its subject matter, an exploration of women’s sexuality and aspirations, provoked controversy. Her novel Come in Spinner (1951), which she co-wrote with Florence James, exposed the subculture of prostitution and gambling in Sydney during the Second World War.