There's a Woman in the House: a 1950s journey

By Lyn Jordan, Uki: Nadroj Press, 2002, 142 pages, paperback, . Reviewed by Joanna Besley in the April 2004 issue.

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There's a Woman in the House: A 1950s Journey has something of the character of a treasured family possession such as a photo album or home movie. It is a collection of writings by Lyn Jordan who began writing as a freelance journalist when living as a young married woman on construction sites in rural Victoria and went on to work as a teacher, educator and examiner of HSC and VCE English for over twenty years. Lyn was also mother to six children and the collection was assembled and edited by one of her daughters, Deborah Jordan (with Sarah Paddle), with research assistance from several grand daughters. Partly a personal tribute to Lyn, the book is clearly a labour of love. But this is not to underestimate its value also as a social and historical document. The collection is a skilful blending of the personal and the social -- its structure and editorial content frames Lyn's writings in such a way that this individual woman's life and experience is conveyed within the broader context of Australian everyday cultures of the mid twentieth century.

Lyn's vivid impressions and capturing of life in mid-century, makeshift settlements associated with dam construction and other infrastructure projects are just the kind of 'lived experience' that is often so difficult for historians and other researchers to track down. She recounts the rhythm of life in towns dominated by the hooters and alarms of industrial shift work, the struggles and pleasures in establishing homes and gardens in temporary towns, the excitement in the establishment of permanent buildings and then the novelty of dismantling, of 'the township that went away'. She describes in fascinating detail the houses of the construction township of the Upper Yarra Dam being moved away: '(B)ut it always looks like a small miracle to me to see the house split open like the shell of an oyster, and there, looking absurdly stagy and unreal are the walls that once sheltered you, and used to seem so foursquare'. As well as describing life in the towns, especially for women and children, Lyn's writings from this time also reflect the postwar faith in technical expertise and infrastructure projects in forging a modern Australia.

Lyn's writings are arranged chronologically and through this, the reader shares in her life journey as a woman and her particular consciousness about being a mother, wife and grandmother. She writes about naming babies, childhood illnesses, family holidays, the 'philosophy of knitting' and 'maths for mums'. Despite the domestic content of much of her writing, Lyn was always motivated by a desire to contribute to the public sphere. Many of her stories were published in newspapers and popular magazines and broadcast on ABC radio. They present personal insights and observations in a way that speaks directly to the experiences of other women, often in a very amusing way. 'There's always talk about children who are repressed by their parents when young -- but what we're just burning to know is can it really happen? And how, oh how is it done?' This particular story 'How Do You Repress a Child? - A Plea for Information', written in the early 1950s, demonstrates the contemporary currency of psychological discourses but also how ordinary people were able to absorb and process these discourses of analysis and advice into their own lives in often playful ways.

The reader is constantly struck by Lyn's vitality and energy. It's not just that she could write eloquently and with insight but that she actually did write, that she wrote consistently amid the intensity of her domestic life. (Her daughter does comment, however, that her diaries and a number of her manuscripts were overlaid by children's crayon drawings.) Her writings show how Lyn, no doubt like many other women who were so busy in the home in the 1950s and 60s, needed to make sense of her experiences and put them into a broader context than the contemporary discourses of domesticity allowed. As Lyn wrote so beautifully in her notebook of 1962:

Sometimes, only to take a pen in the hand to write -- starting with present sensations -- thoughts tumble, questions emerge, comparisons, tangents beckon, pages fill. Formless incoherent but standing like a child full of stolen fruit awaiting discipline, innocent and not altogether to be wanted..,

Citation

• Joanna Besley. 'Review: There's a Woman in the House: a 1950s journey by Lyn Jordan' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), April 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• When Lyn Jordan married an engineer, and moved to the bush, she began writing as a freelance journalist. Like other young wives on construction sites, however, and despite having all modern conveniences, she finds herself immersed in child-rearing and domesticity.
  
  This entralling collection of writings, selected by her daughter, paints women's lives from the 1950s - an insider's view. Lyn Jordan discovers that being surrounded by young children in the bush, then the suburbs of Melbourne, leads to a different journey of the spirit.
  
  Further Details:
  
  Email nadroj@cy.com.au
  
  Website http://nadroj.biz