Foreword  written by Michael Chesterman

The genesis and nature of Should 

In the Introduction to Should and in passages near the end (these sections are included in the abridged version), Colleen explained why she wanted towards the end of the 1980s to take a break from paid employment and engage in creative writing. This had been an activity of great importance to her while at school. She had written a number of poems, one of which won first prize in a state-wide competition. She had also written some short stories. 

 

But she had abandoned creative writing during her undergraduate years. I don’t need to explain her reasons for doing this. In Should, she has explained them eloquently.

 

In 1990, she accordingly applied to do an MA course in Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). In her application, she proposed as an account of the experiences of homeless people in Australia as the topic for a dissertation. Her reason for choosing this topic was that she had recently completed a major evaluation for the Commonwealth Government of its program for helping homeless people to find shelter. She had also carried out short research projects on specific government services, such as women’s refuges and shelters for homeless children and runaways. She felt she was well known to workers in the field and also could talk to homeless people themselves.

 

She soon decided, however, to substitute her own early life for homelessness as the topic of a thesis. According to a draft of a subsequent conference paper of hers called ‘Running Away’ (I found it only recently in a box of her old papers), this is what prompted her to make this change:

 

I was, however, quite disturbed to meet my co-students. Twelve women, six men. Three of the men were poets. Right. The other men were writing detective stories or thrillers. Right. The women were all writing short stories or novels which whirled their way through stories of other women, old and young, with snatches of poetry and rich descriptions. I was overwhelmed and full of yearning. Because once I had written like this. When I was young, when I scribbled into the night: poems, stories, plays, winning prizes for them as well, within the school and from state wide competitions. Until I went to University.

In our first semester, we had an informal reading night in the Loft. I couldn't disturb the creative atmosphere by reading statistics on homelessness. Instead I read a short speech I had written for the 100th anniversary party of Sydney University Dramatic Society. It did not reveal a lot about me, nor indeed a lot about people of my generation at university. But it did attempt, elusively, allusively, to remember and analyse, from where I am now, a shared past. And people listened.

Amanda Lohrey did more than listen. She said to me, "Why aren't you basing your project on this? There really should be more from women of your generation, the personal stories, the autobiographies. There are so many stories of men." I could tell from the sense of excitement stirring within me that this was exactly what I wanted to hear, permission to cease writing the public word, precise analyses, lists of proposals for change for which I had become so well known.

As many readers of this will know, Amanda Lohrey, who was then a tutor in Creative Writing at UTS, is a highly regarded Australian novelist. 

 

It is only through reading this passage recently that I have come to understand why Colleen ended the section of her thesis headed ‘Acknowledgments’ with the following sentence: ‘And I would never have begun this project if some feminist students from Sydney University Dramatic Society had not insisted that I speak for my generation at the 100th Birthday Dinner’.  

 

Having done some introductory coursework, she went on to write Should as the main component of a thesis that she submitted in 1995 for the degree of Doctor of Creative Arts at UTS. This degree was conferred on her in 1997. The examiners had been very enthusiastic about the thesis as a whole, using phrases such as ‘very enjoyable’, ‘much to admire and honour’, ‘a very interesting and illuminative narrative’ and ‘a vivid picture of youthful energy’. 

 

Significantly, another phrase used by an examiner was ‘an important, original and long-overdue document of social and personal female history’. Colleen in fact wanted the memoir to be understood not just as the story of her early life, but also as representative, to some extent, of the early lives of other females similarly placed. 

 

In addition to Should, the thesis contained a summary of a great deal of research that she had conducted, showing amongst other things that many of the experiences described in it were in fact common for girls and young women whom had been born into a lower middle class Australian household in or about the 1940s. 

 

This dual purpose being pursued in Should provides an explanation for the narrative technique that Colleen adopted. The work is not presented as a straightforward autobiography. In the Introduction, she described it as ‘a reverie, somewhere between memory and story-telling’. There is therefore no simple account of recollections by a person called ‘I’. Instead, Colleen created a girl like herself whose life she fictionalised. The character representing her is called Pam. 

 

All other people featuring in the memoir also have fictional names, including her mother May (‘Nita’), father Joe (‘Frank’), and younger brother Greg (‘Brian’). In addition, some of the characters are not based on a single individual whom she knew, but are composites of two more people. 

 

In addition, a number of the events described may not have actually happened. She said this herself towards the end of the Introduction, adding ‘Many friends have said of me that I never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.’

 

There are however some short passages where she describes and comments on certain events and situations in her life, without any fictionalisation. In the thesis, these passages were in italics, which I have retained.

Colleen tried for some years to get Should published. The readers to whom a number of publishers sent it for consideration praised it a great deal. But publishers were particularly cautious at that time and none of them was prepared to take on a book of this nature by an unknown author. All that has occurred by way of publication is the inclusion of two revised sections in an anthology of short stories called Pulling Up the Blind. This was published in 1997 by a group (including Colleen herself) calling itself The Company of Writers.