Of all the forgotten writers I’ve researched, Edna Davies proved by far the most difficult. Even AustLit had nothing on her besides a list of a few works, but she intrigued me so I soldiered on. This post, like most of my recent Forgotten Writers posts, a revision, with a little bit of added information, of the one I posted there.

Edna Davies

So, for my AWW post I started at the end, where we get some facts. Her death was reported on 26 December 1952 in the Family Notices section of The Pioneer (from Yorketown, South Australia). It said she was 56 years old, which suggests she was born in 1896. The notice gives her name as Edna Irene, identifies her parents, and names her siblings as Daisy, Keith and Jack (deceased).

There are two other entries for her in the newspaper in December. On 12 December, a brief article announced that ‘Miss Edna Davies, “Pioneer” representative and correspondent, has been absent for some weeks because of ill health, and is at present in hospital, where she may have to spend some time yet’. They identify someone who will gather news, and add that “until Miss Davies’ return to Minlaton, advertisements, or payment of accounts, should be sent direct to the Pioneer Office”, which suggests she had an administrative role. They conclude this announcement, by saying that ‘The weekly feature “Comments on the News” (Written by Miss Davies) will, we regret, have to be temporarily suspended”, which confirms her writing contribution.

On 26 December, the same day the death notice appeared, they published a brief obituary. Here it is in full:

Press and Radio Correspondent Dies
Yorke Peninsula generally will feel the loss of Miss Edna Davies, of Minlaton who died in an Adelaide Hospital on Monday. Miss Davies, whose name is particularly familiar to readers of “The Pioneer,” has served many years as Southern and Central Yorke Peninsula’s chief correspondent for radio stations, provincial and metropolitan newspapers. People in many Peninsula towns will miss the friendly weekly phone calls she used to make in her search for news about the doings of local organisations and people. Her articles, as well as her Peninsula news items, have been of great value and interest, and we join her brother and sister and our readers in mourning her sudden demise.

So, it’s likely that she was born in Minlaton, central Yorke Peninsula, which is about 30 kms north of Yorketown, the home of her employer The Pioneer. Indeed, on 20 March 1926, a brief article appeared in The Pioneer, headed “Minlaton. Farewell to Miss Edna Davies”. The article describes an event that was held at the Minlaton Institute “to bid farewell to Miss Edna Davies and Mr. Jack Davies” (presumably the brother mentioned in the death notice.) They were leaving for London. (Indeed, according to Adelaide’s The Register, they left on 20 March). There were “eulogistic addresses” and “a useful cheque” was handed to Miss Davies. What does this tell us? Not a lot, but we can glean some information. She was around 30 years old, and seemingly not married. She was known in the community, at least enough for her departure to be reported on, albeit social news was more common at the time. It also tells us – from the headline – that it was she, not her brother, who was most known.  

Since writing my AWW post, I have done more research, and have discovered something about why she was known in the community. For example, Adelaide’s Observer (3 November 1923), writing on the Central Yorke’s Peninsula Agricultural Society’s annual show, observed that “the show committee provided the dinner … under the able management of Miss Edna Davies … Things worked smoothly in this department”. The article also praises the work of the Society’s secretary, Mr D.M.S. Davies, Edna’s father.

Anyhow, back to her chronology, three months after the report of her going to London, Moonta’s The People’s Weekly (12 June 1926) writes about the Minlaton Literary Society’s fourth annual musical and elocutionary competitions, advising that entries go to “secretary (Miss Edna Davies)”. This must have been a clerical error because, from the many newspaper reports under her by-line – and headed “Travel” or “Our London Letter” – it’s clear that she was in England by June 1926, then through 1927 and probably into early 1928. It’s possible that some of the articles dated later in 1928 were written back home.

Certainly, on 31 May 1929, there is a report in The Pioneer of the Minlaton Institute Literary Society’s seventh annual musical and elocutionary competitions and once again entries were to go to secretary Edna Davies. She probably was back on the job then. From this time, there are more articles, stories and columns – including her “Comments on the News” – by her South Australian papers. Together they build up a picture of who she was, and what she thought about life – local, national and international.

One that captured my attention was written from England, and published in The Pioneer on 6 January 1928. She starts by saying she hadn’t been doing much sightseeing so was “short of material” for her London Letter. So, she writes about some reading she’s doing about Australia, including a book by Mr Fraser. From what she says, I believe the book was Australia: The making of a nation (1911/12) by Scottish travel writer John Foster Fraser. Chapter 19 is tilted “A White Australia”. Fraser, a man of his times, understands the desire for a “white Australia”, but asks this:

What will Australian people say when the question is put to them, “As you are not developing this region [the great uninhabited north], what right have you to prohibit other people from developing it? It was not your land in the first instance. You obtained it by conquest that was peaceful. What can you do to resist conquest by force of arms? Who are you to say to the world, Let other peoples crowd together and be hungry owing to congestion of population, live cramped and struggling lives, but we, although doing practically nothing to develop our own resources, do not want anybody else to come in and develop the resources of a part of the world not given to us but given to the human race?'”

Davies is taken with this question and asks, “Have we all studied the pros and cons of the question carefully, so that should it be wanted, we can without hesitation give a carefully thought out decision after viewing the question from all sides. Looking back through history we see that no nation has ever come into, or held its own, without fighting for it, so why should we be an exception”. Her thinking – and Foster’s thinking – is not our thinking, but that she took the issue up and was published tells us something about her and the times. Neither of course consider that “little” line of Foster’s that “It was not your land in the first instance”.

Another randomly chosen example of her thinking comes from 20 June 1952, when she writes in her column “Comments on the News”:

READING about a press conference Mr. Menzies had recently in London this thought struck me — “What much wider outlook British pressmen seem to have than do their colleagues in Australia.”
And that’s a bad thing for Australia. Because if pressmen haven’t a wide outlook how can the public, who depend on them for news of the outside world, be expected to have one.

She slates it to the “old problem” of Australia’s geographic isolation, suggesting that “we are so isolated from other places that it it [sic] hard to realise that their welfare and their doings are important to us”.

AustLit lists 5 stories by her, and AWW lists 12 short stories in Stories from online archives (11 from the 1930s and 1 from the 1940s), but these are just a few of many short stories by her that were published in South Australian newspapers, and The Bulletin. I shared one of The Bulletin stories in my AWW post. Titled “Scrub”, it’s perfect “Bulletin-fare”, with its story of a woman who cannot get over a childhood nightmarish experience in the bush, and an intriguing take on lost-child-in-the-bush tradition in Australian culture.

Edna Davies turned out to be another example of an independent woman who seems to have made a career for herself in journalism and writing.

Sources

Edna Davies, “Scrub“, The Bulletin, Vol. 56 No. 2906 (23 Oct 1935)

All other sources are linked in the article.