In this blog biographer Tessa Morris-Suzuki shares her research and insight into the life of Ethel May Punshon, an extraordinary woman whose 106-year life crossed many boundaries.

Ethel May Punshon (1882‒1989) – known to all her friends as Monte – was an extraordinary woman whose 106-year life crossed many boundaries. I embarked on writing her biography (A Secretive Century: Monte Punshon’s Australia, published this year by Melbourne University Publishing) above all because she played an important part in the relationship between Australia and Japan. She travelled through Japan and Korea in the late 1920s and after her return took courses in the Japanese language. She worked as a warden in Tatura Internment Camp, where Japanese civilians were interned during World War II, and later hosted Japanese and other Asian exchange students who came to Australia in the 1970s, becoming a kind of grassroots ambassador between the two countries.

A PIONEERING LIFE

The more I explored her story, though, the more I became aware of the multiple other ways in which Monte was a social pioneer. Above all, I came to feel that her life provides a fascinating window through which to view some of the important but less well-known aspects of the social transformations which reshaped Australian life over the century from the 1880s to the 1980s.

Monte Punshon was a very early broadcaster in the first days of Australian radio, had a passionate affair with another woman in the 1910s and 1920s, and (as well as being a warden at Tatura internment camp during the Pacific War) worked in Bonegilla and Somers Camps – the centres where many of the post-World War II wave migrants from Europe were accommodated; in her 70s, she went to teach in a school in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu); in her 80s, she returned to Tokyo and taught English there for several months; and at the age of 103 she publicly came out as a lesbian, much to the horror of the rabidly homophobic Queensland Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who had just appointed her as an honorary ambassador for Brisbane’s EXPO 88.

THE BACKROADS OF HISTORY

Monte wrote a memoir of her own, which was published in 1987, and of course I drew heavily on this when writing the book; but I was also able to use birth, death and marriage records now readily available on the Internet, a wealth of newspaper cuttings in databases such at the National Library’s Trove, and archival material in places like the State Library of Victoria. This helped to correct some mistakes which Monte herself had made, and to fill in blanks in the story which arose partly because there were elements of her life that she wanted to conceal from readers, and partly because there were aspects of her family’s story which had been concealed from her. She lived, indeed, in a secretive century.

The aim of the biography, though, was not simply to correct or fill in blanks, but also to consider what Monte’s life tells us about wider historical trends. She was a witness to many of the crucial events of modern Australian history, but her path through life was not a march between the great milestones that have dominated national memory; rather, it was a circuitous journey through the backroads of history. One particular pleasure of exploring that life was that Monte ‘introduced’ me to many other remarkable women in the fields of the arts and teaching whose stories have been obscured.

FORGOTTEN WOMEN OF THE AUSTRALIAN THEATRE

By the time she was in her teens in the late 1890s, Monte Punshon was nurturing a secret ambition to become an actor – but for a respectable middle-class young woman in the 1890s and 1900s, that was considered out of the question. She was persuaded instead to pursue a teaching career. In the 1910s, though, she found a creative way of fulfilling at least part of her own ambitions, while still meeting parental expectations, by becoming a teacher with children’s traveling theatre groups (which were a rather curious though very popular feature of the Australian cultural life of the day).

The women she worked with in the children’s theatre included a number of talented female artists and directors: women like Jennie Brenan (1877‒1864), who, as well as being a ballet teacher, also choreographed the major theatrical spectaculars which the impresario J. C. Williamson staged in the early twentieth century. These events attracted huge audiences, and it was Brenan’s choreography of Williamson’s all-singing, all-dancing pantomimes and light operas which most delighted the public. Although J. C. Williamson remains a famous name in Australian theatre history, Jennie Brenan’s pioneering choreography remains largely forgotten.

Forgotten women also emerged from Monte’s adventures in the theatre at the time of the First World War. During the war years, the inflow of touring troupes from Europe and North America almost ceased, and the void was filled by flourishing locally grown semi-professional theatrical performances, often put on to raise money for war effort causes. This enabled Monte to overcome opposition to her acting ambitions by presenting them as acts of patriotism. In this way, she was able to take starring roles in plays by Australian writers including Euphemia Coulson Davidson (1874‒1936) who, with her husband John Davidson created a theatre in their Oakleigh home, which they envisaged as a prototype Australian National Theatre.

Davidson was fascinated by Aboriginal oral traditions, believing that they could provide a national mythology for the newly federated Australia, and she used these as the basis for some of the plays which she wrote under male pseudonyms. It should be said that many of these works bore only rather scant resemblance to any real Indigenous oral traditions, and Euphemia Davidson seems to have acquired them at third or fourth hand. In the context of the time, treating Aboriginal stories as a significant element of Australian literary culture was in itself quite radical.

In 1924, when Monte Punshon was given an opportunity to make a series of brief radio programs, she chose to use Euphemia Davidson’s versions of Aboriginal legends as the material for her broadcasts, thus becoming one of the first people to broadcast Australian radio programs with content connected (however tenuously) to Indigenous culture.

A CONTINUING JOURNEY

Monte’s life reminds us how far Australia has come in its transformation into a more diverse, multicultural, open and outward looking society. But it also reminds us of the reverses that have been faced along the way, and of the lacunae that remain in our memories of the country’s social and cultural history. So much more remains to be discovered about the women who shaped the cultural worlds of twentieth century Australia.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki is a professor emerita in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. In addition to A Secretive Century, her recent publications include Japan’s Living Politics (2020), On the Frontiers of History (2020) and two historical novels (The Searcher, 2019 and The Lantern Boats, 2021). She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

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