32 LISTENER JUNE 1 2019
children. And she got little back, after the
family moved across the Tasman in 1929, for
years of devotion to the Communist Party of
Australia and its general secretary, JB Miles,
with whom she had a long affair.
West Island reveals how appallingly she
was treated by the party. Devanny
is the one Johnson would most
like to have known. “This mad-
dening, oversexed, over-principled
woman. Maybe we wouldn’t have
got on. I wouldn’t have been radi-
cal enough for her. The person I
know who would have absolutely
hated me would have been Eric
Baume. We would have hated each
other.” Baume would have seen
her, she writes, “as a soft pinko
nincompoop with unfortunate
feminist tendencies”.B
aume, born in Auckland,
acquired an impressive range
of nicknames – Eric the Bas-
tard, The Beast – in the course of a
career that began at the New Zea-
land Herald. Later, in Sydney, he
edited papers and became some-
thing of a television celebrity. In
1936, he managed two interviews
in Mexico with an exiled Leon
Trotsky, a scoop, notes Johnson,
that had the Bulletin back home
sniping at Baume’s Jewish heritage,
writing that he’d been granted the
interviews “through the brother-
hood of circumcision”.
Baume was also at times accused
of being an anti-Semite. “He was
invited to Germany after the war,” says
Johnson, “and came back crowing about
how marvellous it was there, forgetting for
a moment about the Holocaust.”
In West Island, he ultimately becomes a
figure of fun. Sent to London as a Europe
correspondent during the war, he set himself
up at the Ritz with black satin sheets and
swaggered around in fake uniforms. “And
wearing the Croix de Guerre,” says Johnson,
“which he’d won gambling. You could be
arrested for wearing medals that you hadn’t
won. Well, he did it all the damned time.”
He was taken up by the Countess of
Oxford. “He got duchessed,” says John-
son, employing the technical term for such
liaisons. “These antipodeans would go to
England and get picked up by some bored
duchess and just fall totally in love with the
English class system.”He also wrote novels that featured some
eye-watering racial bigotry and ignorance.
One is called, unpromisingly, Half-Caste.
“I was astonished to discover that it’s still
available online and it’s listed as ‘clean and
wholesome’.” Dealing with material fromless-enlightened times can be tricky. “I
tell the story in the book about the young
woman who tweeted, ‘Stephanie Johnson
said we should read racist books.’” Johnson
was attending a New Zealand/Australian lit-
erary festival in London. She spoke about
“lost classics” such as Noel Hilliard’s MaoriGirl and Ruth Park’s 1951 The Witch’s Thorn,
arguing that they shouldn’t stay lost, even
if they are flawed. “They did their best,” she
writes in West Island. “We could not say that,
with any conscience, of Eric Baume.”
The book reveals that, among its many
exports to Australia, Aotearoa has
sent a selection of weirdos. “Ha.
It is an odd collection of people,
I am aware of that.” Johnson has
tackled poetry, plays, such fine
novels as The Heart’s Wild Surf and
a couple of erotic novels under
the easily decoded pseudonym,
Lily Woodhouse. The second, The
Sisters’ Lover, available online, is
self-published. Even so, the new
book presented challenges. One
was finding a
publisher before
Otago University
Press came to the
party. West Island
was declared too
Australian for one
New Zealand pub-
lisher, too Kiwi
for an Australian
counterpart. Then
there was the
scope. “It’s like five
biographies, basically. I thought for
a long time, God, you’ve bitten off
more than you can chew.”
The very topic seems to bring
out the Tasmanian devil in Tinker,
the Johnson-Woodhouse dog. The
interview tape is punctuated by her
enthusiastic eruptions when some-
one, or no one, arrives at the door, sending
Johnson flying from her chair: “Oh, God!
Will you be quiet?”
Tinker has the right to a say. She played
her part in the gestation of the book. In
2016, Johnson was selected as writer in resi-
dence at the historic Randell Cottage. Six
months in Wellington. “I had never lived
alone in my entire life. I’d gone from my
family to flatmates to lovers and then mar-
ried with kids.” She was allowed to bring
Tinker with her. “They don’t normally let
you, but she would have pined away. So
would have I.” Tinker, like an early-warning
system, gave her a sense of security. “If I take
my boots off, I can’t really walk very well.
At night, just having her in the cottage, I
felt safe.”
A habitual early riser, she discovered aA new time to write. “It’s dusk. There’s no
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STEPHANIE JOHNSON
“Sometimes I find
myself growing very
impatient with this MeToo movement. I think if
you read some history,you would actually see
we’ve come a long way.You are behaving as if we
are still back in the caves.”Expats all: 1. Painter
Roland Wakelin,
date unknown. 2.
Eric Baume, celebrity
journalist, in the 1950s.- Douglas Stewart in
1937, before working
his passage to England. - Jean Devanny in the
late 1920s. 5. Dulcie
Deamer in her signature
leopard-skin costume
in 1923.
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