Purple Prose

Introduction – Liz Byrski and Rachel Robertson

The Things I Cannot Say – Natasha Lester

Maiden Aunts – Liz Byrski

Blue Meat and Purple Language – Toni Jordan

Into the Whipstick – Anne Manne

Velvet – Rachel Robertson

‘Is a Magnificent Story': Interviews with Pigeon Fanciers – Sarah Drummond

Do You See What I See? – Tracy Farr

Mary – Lucy Dougan

The Trouble with Purple – Annamaria Weldon

The Red and the Blue: Confessions of an (Unlikely) Dockers Fan – Deborah Hunn

The Two Loves – Lily Chan

Purple Impressions – Rosemary Stevens

Bruised – Jacqueline Wright

My Descent into Purple – Hanifa Deen

Towards Metamorphosis – Amanda Curtin

Notes and References

Contributors

‘Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation …'

Laurence Sterne,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Purple Prose
began with a conversation between two friends over a cup of tea in Liz's herb-scented courtyard. One of us – Rachel – wanted to write about purple, but she couldn't think how to do it. She didn't think she could write a whole book about the colour. Then Liz suggested an anthology of women writing about purple, and we agreed that this could work and was something we wanted to do. We both have our own histories and associations with purple, but an important one was purple as a feminist colour and this was why we envisaged a book by women.

We went away to do some research on purple and found that it was just as interesting as we suspected. Culturally, purple is associated with many different things across different cultures, including penitence, mourning, harmony, royalty, feminism, women's suffrage, lesbian, gay and transgender rights, wealth, healing, and spirituality.

There are a surprising number of purple flowers, vegetables, insects and animals. Creatures like the Indian purple frog, the purple heron, the purple queenfish and the purple sea urchin are all actually purple. There are purple minerals too: amethyst, porphyry, lavender chalcedony, lepidolite, purple jade, lavender jasper, purpurite, tanzanite. There is even a rare purple mineral first identified in Australia. Stichtite, a magnesium, chromium
carbonate-hydroxide, was discovered in Australia in 1891 and named in 1910.

Tyrian purple is a dye extracted from a mollusc found on the shores of the ancient city of Tyre in Phoenicia around the time of the Minoan civilisation. The difficulty of extracting the dye and the number of molluscs required meant that only rich people could use the dye, thus creating a connection between wealth or royalty and purple. The Chinese developed a synthetic purple barium copper silicate pigment, known as Han purple, as early as 1045 BCE and used it to colour beads, pottery, ceramics and wall paintings until the end of the Han Dynasty. More recently, the synthetic organic chemical dye, mauveine, was discovered by accident by Dr William Henry Perkin in 1856 while he was trying to make quinine.

In scientific terms, purple, unlike violet, is not one of the colours of the visible spectrum. Because it does not have its own wavelength of light, it is called a non-spectral colour. In colour theory, purple is a colour existing between violet and red (excluding violet and red themselves). But nowadays, violet, indigo, lilac and all other shades between red and blue are generally called purple. In discussing our anthology inspired by purple, we decided not to be constrained by specific varieties of or associations to the colour, but to give ourselves a free rein.

Once we had our theme, we had another conversation in another garden, this time over coffee with Georgia Richter, publisher and editor at Fremantle Press. We were delighted that Georgia was enthusiastic about our project. We approached some of our favourite women writers and asked them to contribute a piece of memoir or a personal essay inspired by purple. The writers we contacted were all people whose work we knew and admired and who we guessed would in some way respond to the idea of writing about the colour. The writers are diverse in age, background and life paths but still, we worried that we might receive lots of pieces about purple as a feminist and suffragette colour or about the book
The Color Purple
by Alice Walker.

Our worries were unnecessary. What was astounding to us was the diversity of responses to a single writing prompt. The way each woman approached the task and the way her personal life and purple intersect is remarkably different, and equally fascinating. But there are some themes that emerge from the collection. First there is the theme of transformation – how we change and how we struggle to change. We start the collection with a work that demonstrates the interwoven complexities of gender and identity, of change and continuity. We end the book with a very different exploration of transformation, the metamorphosis that occurs with experience and reflection.

Travel, through time and space, features in many of these works. Family stories, memory and forgetting emerge as women explore their roles as mothers, sisters, daughters and grand-daughters. Wisps of purple fabric rustle through the book in the probing of women's relationships with other family members. Several contributors reflect purple's connection to spirituality and others its strong link with loss. There are stories about childhood, about gender, and about ageing. Passions like football, art and pigeon-racing are also explored in this book. Contributors investigate the way we see the world and the way we write about this.

A year on from our initial conversation, we sat again with cups of tea, this time by Rachel's fish pond, and we read the fifteen contributions that make up this book. Apart from the colour purple, we recognised that each of these works is about how we make our lives into stories and how that makes our lives richer. Our conversation with each other has become a wider conversation with all our writers and, we hope, our readers.

Our final conversation is about the title. We originally used the working title of
Purple Prose
as a sort of joke, referring to over-elaborate or ornate writing. But one of the contributors alerts us to the fact that the phrase ‘purple language' has been used to refer also to highly colourful swearing. We like the transgressive (and Shandyesque playfulness) of calling women's writing purple in
this way, so we decide to stick with
Purple Prose
. We hope readers will embrace the energy, the colour, and the stories to be found in this book.

‘Bless you, my darling, and remember you are always in the heart – oh tucked so close there is no chance of escape – of your sister.'

Katherine Mansfield,
Collected Letters

My favourite book as a girl was Louisa May Alcott's
Little Women
. I loved Amy March. In fact, I wanted to be Amy with her curly blonde hair, blue eyes, artistic temperament, delusions of grandeur and a house full of sisters.

On the cover of my thirty-five-year-old copy of
Little Women
, Amy is wearing a purple dress picked out with white polka dots, and a purple bonnet trimmed with white lace. Her sister Beth is also in purple, although her dress is more demure and covered with a housewifely apron. Purple in all its shades follows the sisters throughout the book; the slippers Beth embroiders for Mr Laurence are deep purple, Amy bequeaths Mr Laurence her purple box with looking glass when she writes out her will, Meg yearns for a violet silk dress, and Jo's shabby poplin dress that she wears to the ball is deep maroon. It's no wonder that when I think of purple, I think of
Little Women
. And when I think of
Little Women
, I think of sisters.

On weekends, from the time I was around six to the time I was eleven, my sister and I used to play with our dolls. We concocted elaborate games for our ratty collection of plastic children to participate in. One of our favourite games was hospitals. My sister
and I were the doctors, the dolls were the patients.

In an old indigo-covered school exercise book we wrote lengthy descriptions of invented diseases, accompanied by illustrations showing the manifestation of each disease in all its putrid glory. We gave the illnesses names like the deadly Gangalknee Virus and the frightening Amoebic Pustitis, which made one's throat swell to a point that the patient suffocated and died in a breathless purple fit. Each day of the weekend, my sister and I would walk down the rows of beds in our makeshift hospital. We examined each doll with our plastic tweezers, applied fraying bandages, consulted our diagnostic manual, treated those who could be saved and sighed over those who couldn't.

Our dolls would all recover or be resurrected by four o' clock Sunday because that was when pack-up time commenced. Even now, 4.00 pm on a Sunday still carries with it a sense of loss, of playtime prematurely shut down, of an exchange of the possibilities of imagination for the realities of homework, dinner and hair-washing. I always thought my sister felt the same as I about both the games and their cessation until she brutally announced, a couple of weeks after she started high school, that she didn't want to play with dolls any more. I was shocked. It had never occurred to me that doll-playing wasn't a lifetime's work. That the carefully drawn diagrams of disease would be left in a desk to yellow and fade, that the dolls would sit gathering dust in their hair until they were tossed away, too well-loved to be given to the poor.

It was the first time I felt bewildered by my sister's behaviour. It was the first time I felt absence as palpable, defined not just by what wasn't there – the camaraderie of playing together in our childish hospital – but also by what was there: a new person, a sister I was unacquainted with. Prior to that, we'd been exactly as I imagined sisters to be. We played together like Beth and Amy in
Little Women
with their own worn-out dolls. We fought together like Jo and Amy, except our battles were less devilish, consisting only of slapping one another until we both began to cry, rather than
burning manuscripts. We talked together about the complexities of the world – was God really everywhere, even in our mouths? – like Jo and Meg do after a night out dancing. We even had matching clothes and possessions, either because we both liked the same things or because it was easier for adults to assume that we did when they were buying for us.