Introduction by Jenna Mead.
'Caroline Leakey, writing as Oliné Keese, published her first and only novel, The Broad Arrow, in 1859. It tells the story of Maida Gwynnham, a young middleclass woman lured into committing a forgery by her deceitful lover, Captain Norwell, and then wrongly convicted of infanticide. The novel’s title describes the arrow that was stamped onto government property, including the clothes worn by convicts — a symbol of shame and incarceration. With its ‘fallen woman’ protagonist, its gothic undertones and its exploration of the social and moral implications of the penal system, this little-known novel gives an insight into a significant chapter of Australian history from a uniquely female perspective.' (Publication summary)
19th-Century Australian Travel Writing
English writer and poet Caroline Woolmer Leakey (1827-1881) moved to Van Diemen’s Land at the age of twenty. She relocated with the intention of assisting a married sister there who was reluctant to entrust her children to convict nurses. Although Leakey spent most of her time living in Hobart, she stayed one year at Port Arthur with friends. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that one year after arriving in Tasmania a fever and a hip complaint rendered her an invalid for the next five years and she turned to the writing of poetry for solace. Bishop Francis Nixon and his wife encouraged her to publish her poems, and her doctor J.W. Agnew sent copies of her work to the Mercury (unknown to Leakey). She published her travel narrative The Broad Arrow in 1859 under the pseudonym Oliné Keese. Written in the style of a moralistic novel, the work detailed Maida Gwynnham's life in England and Van Diemen's Land, and described Hobart Town, Port Arthur and society in the colony. The Broad Arrow was reprinted numerous times, signifying its popularity.
'Paradoxically, Australian nationalist accounts have tended to slight the earliest Australian literature by white settlers from the nineteenth century. This chapter surveys the literary history of this period, examining writers such as Oliné Keese, Ada Cambridge, Henry Kingsley, Rosa Praed, and Catherine Helen Spence. Drawing connections between these writers and the transnational Anglophone literary world centering on Great Britain and the United States, this chapter takes a comparative perspective that at once acknowledges the peripheral standing of these Australian texts and argues for their relevance to the history of the novel in English.' (Publication abstract)
'This critical edition of The Broad Arrow: Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, A Lifer, produced by Jenna Mead, is a comprehensive study of the material and textual form of the well-known colonial Australian narrative written by Caroline Woolmer Leakey under the pseudonym Oliné Keese. In many ways this edition is an extension of Mead’s extant and significant work on Leakey’s life, body, and editorial and authorial practice through The Broad Arrow. While some of these conclusions are reiterated in this critical edition of Leakey’s novel, Mead offers significant new insights that push histories of colonial Australian literary practices and cultures in new directions and offers a nuanced understanding of the interplay of genres in colonial Australian fiction. To this end, Mead offers scholars and enthusiasts of colonial Australian fiction a rare opportunity: to read – and thus probably to rediscover – The Broad Arrow in conversation with all its known versions.' (Introduction)
'Rachael Weaver has alerted us to the racial violence of colonial short stories, and notes that "[m]any novels also show graphic instances of frontier violence as part of larger and more wide ranging narratives" (fn 1, 33). One sub-genre of the novel form that does this is the carceral novel, such as Caroline Leakey's 'The Broad Arrow' (1859) and Marcus Clarke's 'For the Term of His Natural Life' (1874), which depict the explicit violence of the penal system through convict protagonists. This essay shows that violence abounds in colonial fiction not only in genres that make it explicit, but also where it is embedded - in novels usually categorised in the realist-romance genres (Giles; Dalziell; Thomson). often analysed in terms of gendered inequity (Harris), class relations (Thomson), and colonial representations of "national" identity (Allen; Spender; Gelder and WEAVER), novels by a number of major female novelists from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War are revisited here through the lens of their treatment and performance of violence.' (Publication abstract)
'This critical edition of The Broad Arrow: Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, A Lifer, produced by Jenna Mead, is a comprehensive study of the material and textual form of the well-known colonial Australian narrative written by Caroline Woolmer Leakey under the pseudonym Oliné Keese. In many ways this edition is an extension of Mead’s extant and significant work on Leakey’s life, body, and editorial and authorial practice through The Broad Arrow. While some of these conclusions are reiterated in this critical edition of Leakey’s novel, Mead offers significant new insights that push histories of colonial Australian literary practices and cultures in new directions and offers a nuanced understanding of the interplay of genres in colonial Australian fiction. To this end, Mead offers scholars and enthusiasts of colonial Australian fiction a rare opportunity: to read – and thus probably to rediscover – The Broad Arrow in conversation with all its known versions.' (Introduction)
