In her biography of Ida Leeson, Sylvia Martin produces not only a compelling account of the life of this intriguing woman but—equally importantly—she extends the contemplation of writing lesbian history she began in Passionate Friends (2001), her study of the interlinked lives of Miles Franklin, Mary Fullerton and Mabel Singleton. Those outside the field of Australian literature and those whose research has never taken them into the fine institution that is Sydney's Mitchell Library may not recognise the name Ida Leeson. Leeson was the first woman to head the Mitchell Library, which she did from 1932 to 1946, and she played a critically important role in shaping the collections upon which so many of us have since drawn our research on Australian literature and history. As we learn, Leeson's appointment to this position was thought highly controversial, if not scandalous at the time. Newspaper headlines proclaimed with horror: ‘Woman Likely to be Appointed'. Sylvia Martin amply demonstrates this through her analysis of this pivotal episode, Leeson's life and career can tell us much about the struggles of earlier generations of women graduates in the professions, about the class and gender politics of professional advancement in this period and about the crucial role played by particular individuals in the formation of the nation's great cultural institutions. And yet, Martin also makes the point that, in the decades after she left the Mitchell and her former colleagues in turn retired, the ‘memory of [Leeson's] reign there was gradually lost…No memorial to her had ever been set up; even her personnel file had somehow disappeared'. Without this timely biography, ironically Leeson might well have been lost to Australian cultural history, the very field she did so much to support in its early phases.

Leeson was in many respects an unlikely candidate for such a pioneering appointment in what was to become a leading cultural institution in this nation. As Martin stresses in her subtitle ‘Not a Blue-Stocking Lady', Leeson did not have the middleclass background that distinguished several of the other contenders for the same post. While she was an honours graduate of the University of Sydney, the academic success that provided the foundation for Leeson's distinguished career was extremely hard won. The daughter of a carpenter from the then working class suburb of Leichhardt, Leeson was anything but a typical blue-stocking intellectual and relied on fierce determination and scholarships to take her first to Sydney Girls' High School and then to university where she studied history. And while the stereotypes would suggest that the life story of a librarian—even a distinguished one—might border on the tedious and unexciting, Leeson is in fact a fascinating figure. The photo of her in her characteristically severe tailored suit marching across the cover of the book provides the first indication that she was a woman to be reckoned with. She is also a woman who presents the biographer with particular challenges. In this subtle and perceptive exploration, Martin shows us the way Leeson—despite her profession as a librarian—is someone who defies easy categorization. As she observes early on, ‘what a conundrum is Ida Leeson herself: a woman who looked like a man (was even mistaken for one on occasions) rising to a position in the Australian library world that had previously only been held by men, in a profession that is culturally inscribed as feminine'.

Starting work at the Public Library of New South Wales as a twenty-one year old graduate, Leeson soon began her upward journey through the library ranks. She learned cataloguing from Christopher Brennan (‘his cataloguing, though brilliant, was a bit uneven'). Brennan is only one of the many literary luminaries who have walk-on parts in her life story; others include Miles Franklin, Marjorie Barnard and Henry Lawson. Leeson moved on from the Public Library to the formidable task of organizing and cataloguing David Scott Mitchell's magnificent collection of books and other archival treasures of Australia and the Pacific (‘the Mitchell bequest'). But perhaps the most exciting moment professionally is when Leeson's sleuthing while on leave in the UK in 1927 leads to the identification of the missing (and presumed lost) third volume of Matthew Flinders' logbook in the Public Record Office there. This great find sits awkwardly against the venal politics that attended her appointment as Mitchell Librarian only a few years later.

 

Equally interesting is Leeson's life outside the Mitchell. For example, at the same time as she was pursuing her career as a librarian, she was also—for a time—joining Walter and Marion Burley Griffin in their experimental social (and architectural) community in Castlecrag and the photos included in the book contain one of Leeson sitting hunched over an electric hand-lamp that she was holding to provide lighting for players in a production in the amphitheatre the Griffins had built in Castlecrag. And in an era when marriage and motherhood were still considered the most appropriate goals for women of any class, Leeson again defied convention by pursuing her professional ambitions and by forming a life-long intimate partnership with another woman, Florence Birch. Most confounding, however, is that fact that while Leeson had an obvious professional investment in the preservation of the nation's documentary history, she was less assiduous when it came to her preserving the documentary traces of her own history: she left no personal papers and one can only speculate as to the complex motivations that led to this situation. While Martin is more than alert to the vexed nature of ‘evidence' in the writing of lesbian history, it must nevertheless have been frustrating to have had so little to work with here. In her chapter ‘Ida and Florence' she describes the profound impact on her writing of her first sighting of a striking early studio portrait of the pair (c. 1910). This image—reproduced in the book—sits suggestively at one end of the span of their relationship and, at the other, Martin offers Nancy Phelan's recollection of meeting up with Leeson shortly after Florence Birch's death. Phelan tells of how: ‘She looked absolutely frightful. She was sort of a pale yellow…And I said, “How are you, Ida?” And she said, “Bleeding inside”'.

 

Throughout, Martin is alert to the need to weigh her sources and source material carefully, conscious that more than one story or interpretation may be struggling to emerge from her material. This is never more apparent than in the chapter ‘The Spinster's Bloomers' where she interrogates the multiple meanings that might attach to the oft-related story of Leeson's ‘mythical underwear': the almost certainly apocryphal account various people—most particularly ‘historian, dream weaver and storyteller' Manning Clark—gave of glimpsing Leeson's knee length bloomers and colourful garters. In this chapter, Martin meticulously unpacks the complex sets of prejudices and preoccupations that fostered this ‘curious story that circulates among people who knew Ida Leeson'. She concludes that the story—which is filled with dodgy dates and other factually questionable elements—is little more than ‘a male fantasy': not the sexy kind, but ‘nonetheless sexual'. Indeed, Martin reads the bloomer story as symptomatic of the anxiety produced among men by women such as Leeson who challenge the heterosexual economy by their androngyny. This chapter was one that Martin always knew would be provocative, but its inclusion shows her to be both a daring and subtle scholar

 

Although this book is very much Leeson's story, there is no escaping the fact that this biography is also the story of a city. The Mitchell Library has since its inception provided a focal point for Sydney's reading and writing communities and, just as Leeson's career is inextricably linked to key periods in the Library's development, so too the Library sits as an index of that city's intellectual and cultural growth. It is this blending of a study of a single life and career with an effective mapping of the history of both an institution and a city that is Martin's particular achievement in this biography. And it also probably accounts for the number of readers who have commented (favourably) on this book as ‘a Sydney story'. And story-telling is one of Martin's strong suits. She opens with a singular episode in 1935 when Leeson, in Tahiti examining early European records, found herself seated at a café adjacent to the Hollywood film director, Frank Lloyd, who was completing shooting Mutiny on the Bounty starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable. She overheard Lloyd lamenting to a companion that, despite his best efforts, he had not been able to locate and view Captain William Bligh's logs which he felt would have added ‘greater authentication' to his film script. ‘To both men's surprise', Martin tells us, ‘a little white-haired lady at the next table…leans over and says “I know where they are”.' Martin threads signal episodes such as this one into a compelling story of Leeson's hard work and ingenuity, often against a background of professional rivalry, prejudice and intrigue. This is a very satisfying and shapely biography and one that makes readers look forward to Martin's next project.

 

 

Maryanne Dever is the Director of Women's Studies and Gender Research at Monash Univerwity. She has published widely on earlier twentieth century Australian women's writing.