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Recently, a package from England arrived at my post office box, addressed to me in an unfamiliar hand. I opened it with curiosity to find a bundle of poems on loose sheets of paper, some in typescript, some handwritten neatly in ink, others scrawled in pencil. This hand was familiar. The accompanying letter from Mabel Singleton's granddaughter, Valerie, identified the bundle as poems that she had found while going through her father's papers, most written for him by 'Auntie Mary', Mary Fullerton. Valerie thought I might like to see them and then pass them on to the Mitchell Library.1
I started researching the papers2 of Australian poet, Mary Fullerton (1868-1946) in the early 1990s for my PhD and later published Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin in 2001. The many unpublished poems I found in the archive written for Mabel Singleton - Mary's friend and fellow activist in the Women's Political Association in Melbourne in the early 1900s - revealed a love story that began in 1909 and continued until Mary's death in England in 1946. Letters in the Miles Franklin Papers filled in much of the domestic detail of their lives as Mary and Miles were writer colleagues and Miles lived with Mary and Mabel in London for over a year in the 1930s. The letters between the three women span nearly three decades.
Mabel and Mary brought up Mabel's son, Denis, who was born in 1911 in Melbourne to a much older husband who, in mysterious circumstances alluded to in the poems in the Fullerton archive, banished mother and child to his country house on Mount Dandenong soon after the birth. Robert Singleton died at the age of seventy-three when Denis was just three years old, after changing his will and virtually disinheriting his estranged wife. Mary Fullerton's love poems indicate that she was very much influenced by the writings of Utopian socialist and sexologist, Edward Carpenter, and that she saw herself as a member of the 'intermediate sex', an advance guard in the process of evolution. Her beautiful friend Mabel, younger than Mary by eleven years, was 'the woman soul': the perfect homogenic woman and mother whose destiny and that of her son lay with Mary, who would be...