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9. Mary Gilmore

Chosen by:
Associate Professor Jennifer Strauss,
School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts

Gilmore, Mary, Dame, 1865-1962.

The Worker Cook Book was a spin-off from Mary Gilmore’s Women’s Page in The Worker, the official journal of the Australian Workers Union. After returning from the failed utopian experiment of Colonia Cosme in Paraguay, Gilmore spent several years living with her husband and small child on the impoverished farm owned by her parents-in-law near Casterton in western Victoria.  Determined to be a model wife and mother, she nonetheless missed the life of writing and political engagement she had known in Sydney in the 1890s. The Women’s Page, which she proposed to the Worker editor in 1907, offered reconciliation between her hunger to write and her sense of duty: she would extend family obligations into public life, and in educating women to support socialism make Australia a better place for women and children, and hence ultimately for mankind.  Women needed knowledge, she argued, but it had to be made interesting to them ‘and if cookery recipes, health notes, flannel stitching, etc., will unlock the door of interest, by all means let us have them.’  Accordingly, from inception in January 1908 to closure in 1931, the Page offered a characteristic mix of radical politics and domestic cosiness.

The cookery and household hints section was extremely popular, as evidenced by letters received by Gilmore, many of which are preserved in the National Library of Australia Gilmore papers (MS 727 Series One) – mainly because of her economical habit of writing her poems on the reverse side of such letters. In the poem ‘My Scattered Flock’ she commemorates the diversity of correspondents to the Page:

The Cook Book, ‘compiled from the Tried Recipes of Thrifty Housekeepers’, was intended to dispel culinary ignorance in working class households. Modestly produced and priced at one shilling for paperback and two for hardback, its cover illustration is an idealised version of Australian domesticity, with its comely and mature housewife, tidy kitchen, and windows opening on one side to the backyard hen house and on the other to the open fields of pastoral Australia. If the scope of the recipes was ‘governed by the average needs of the average home’, they suggest that average women in 1914 were expected to have a more extensive repertoire than their twentieth century counterparts.  Stewed Tripe, Turnip Pie and Lamingtons certainly figure, but so do Roast Turkey, Lentil Fritters and Scalloped Lobster. 

In terms of publishing success, the Cook Book outranked any of Gilmore’s volumes of verse, the re-issue of 1915 carrying the proud boast ‘Tenth Thousand’.  Fortunately, the extensive collection of Gilmore material in the Rare Books Library allows access to her poetry and her collections of prose reminiscences as well as to her work as an educator in practical housewifery.

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