In this edition of the Coachbuilder’s Column, I’m wanting a couple of recent articles on two very different subjects – on international politics by former Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull – and a literary article published by the State Library of Victoria concerning a new publication about the life of Australian author, Miles Franklin.
- FROM AUSTRALIAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS MONTHLY – VOICES FROM ASIA: AFA Monthly [12/3/2025] – Voices from Asia – ‘What Albanese should do about Trump’ by Malcolm Turnbull
Every day Australians’ news is dominated by Donald Trump, and every day we are reminded that the United States, under his leadership, is no longer committed to the values that our nations used to share.
Australians used to fret that the United States would not come to our aid in times of peril. We have always gone to great lengths to remind the Americans of what compliant allies we have been, joining them in every war – even the most ill-conceived, like Vietnam and Iraq.
But now the United States has a president who does not even pretend to care about alliances. He has threatened to pull out of NATO; he has threatened a NATO ally, Denmark, with sanctions if it does not hand over Greenland; and he has bullied and threatened Canada, a neighbour, calling on it to become the fifty-first American state.
Trump has always admired Russian president Vladimir Putin. I saw that up close when I was in their company at G20 meetings. But now he has, effectively, switched sides and is doing everything he can to force Ukraine to submit to Russian domination. He humiliated Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on 28 February, then suspended both military supplies to and intelligence sharing with Ukraine. In doing so, he made it much easier for Putin to kill Ukrainians and much harder for Ukrainians to fight back.
Trump believes might is right: that American power should be used not to protect ideals such as democracy but simply to extort the best possible deal for itself. The more dependent a country is on the United States, the greater the opportunity for exploitation – as Ukraine, Canada and Denmark can each attest.
What has been the response of our leaders? In a chorus of bipartisan gaslighting, we are assured that nothing has changed and the US alliance is as strong as ever. Behind the scenes it’s not much better: the consensus decision within government appears to be to hide under the doona, try not to attract the attention of this thin-skinned and vindictive president, and hope that in four years there is a return to normalcy.
In 2016 Donald Trump did not expect to win and was not prepared to govern. He filled key posts with qualified people, such as Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense, who sought to steer him towards more conventional policies. This time he is surrounded by people chosen for their loyalty and who share his ‘MAGA’ vision. Moreover, he now controls the Republican Party. There is no reason to assume that at the end of Trump’s second term (assuming he does not try to run for a third), the system will snap back to a conventional style of administration.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, to his credit, has said he is open to Australian troops participating in a peacekeeping force in Ukraine, expressing solidarity with the European initiative led by British prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron. This at least represents a subtle divergence from Trump – which is more than can be said for Opposition leader Peter Dutton.
But neither has acknowledged that Trump’s dramatic foreign-policy shifts have real implications for Australia and raise big questions.
How should we defend ourselves if we cannot rely on the Americans?
How should we advance our national interests in a ‘might is right’ world in which the United States’ foreign policy seems more aligned with Russia’s than with ours or our allies’?
How can we best support friends and allies such as Canada when they are threatened and bullied?
What are we to do with AUKUS? What is our plan B if, or when, the promised submarines do not turn up?
In short, how do we stand up for Australia?
Throughout his time in office, Albanese has been ultra-cautious – an approach that, coupled with his often, underwhelming advocacy, has created the impression that he is weak. To project strength, he needs to have something to say that shows Australia will not be bullied. What should he do?
First, he should stop the gaslighting. He doesn’t have to criticise Trump or try to change him. But he should at least acknowledge what all of us can see: the United States is no longer committed to its allies, or to our foundational values of democracy and the rule of law. The United States no longer shares our commitment to the international rules-based order, which ensures that the strong cannot simply do as they wish while the weak suffer.
Second, we need to review every aspect of our alliance with the Americans, and in particular AUKUS. Like the Europeans, we must start to make ourselves self-reliant. Albanese should make it clear that we must prepare to defend this country by ourselves. While we can always hope that the United States and other allies will come to our aid, we cannot assume they will. We should invest more in our defence, focusing on capabilities built in Australia; if that is impossible, we should at least ensure we have absolute sovereign control over them. In other words, they must be deployable without any other country’s consent.
The government’s claim that the AUKUS submarines (if they ever appear) will be entirely sovereign assets is not credible. The much less complex F-16s operated by Ukraine have been, effectively, disabled by Trump’s withdrawal of technical and intelligence support. Even the United Kingdom’s nuclear fleet, and nuclear deterrent, cannot be operated without US concurrence.
Third, Albanese should accelerate our advocacy for our values and interests with like-minded middle countries such as the United Kingdom, Japan and Indonesia. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership is a good model. But we have to stop seeing our relationships as a series of spokes leading to the hub of Washington DC; rather, they should be a mesh of alignments, especially in our region. That was my agenda as prime minister, but regrettably Scott Morrison reversed this and made Australia far more dependent on America, right at the time it was becoming less dependable. Albanese, fearing a political wedge on national security, adopted Morrison’s policies.
Will a more independent Australia offend the United States? Will it result in tariffs, or in scornful social media blasts and patronising lectures from J.D. Vance? Well, it might. But what’s the alternative? Trump has made it very clear that the more dependent and vulnerable you are, the more he will exploit you. He is not an altruist. His slogan is ‘America First’.
Above all we need to have an open and honest conversation about these issues. Right now, too many Australians – and not just politicians – are biting their tongues for fear of incurring the wrath of Trump.
Immediately following an interview I gave on Bloomberg on Tuesday, Trump posted on Truth Social that I was weak and ineffectual and didn’t know anything about China – among other disparaging comments. He was apparently upset that I had made the obvious point that Trump’s chaotic bullying style of government creates an opportunity for China to be the reverse – consistent where he is erratic, respectful where he is abusive, constructive where he is combative. This would be a change from the approach that China took in the first Trump administration and would cause many countries which are not as closely aligned to the US as Australia is to move closer to China.
This may be regarded as a penetrating glimpse of the obvious and is something I have said many times before, but Trump apparently saw it and fired back his personal abuse. That was surprising, but less surprising than the reaction from NewsCorp whose publications promptly said I had, by daring to speak my mind, torpedoed any exemption from steel and aluminium tariffs. It was disappointing to see the ABC taking the same line, effectively asking me why I didn’t self-censor for fear of offending the thin-skinned President.
It’s time for our leaders, and all of us, to put Australia first.
[Malcolm Turnbull was Prime Minister of Australia from 2015 to 2018].
- From The Conversation: Books & Ideas, 14th March 2025
Friday essay: Miles Franklin’s other brilliant career – her year as an undercover servant [by Kerrie Davies – Senior Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney], published 14th March 2025
In the Miles Franklin archive in the State Library of New South Wales there are two brown, cloth-bound volumes, titled, “When I was Mary-Anne, A Slavey”. The thick, handwritten pages are amended with glued paper inserts copied from the missing diary the author of My Brilliant Career kept for roughly a year between April 1903 and April 1904. In an accompanying summary, on which Franklin based her 1904 letter to the Bulletin about the experience, she wrote:
Some people wonder what domestic servants have to complain about […] No one could understand the depth of the silent feud between mistress and maid without, in their own person, testing the matter …
There is a picture of Franklin in the archive too, dressed in her “get up”: a black-and-white tunic and apron, with a lacy parlour cap pinned atop her piled-up brunette hair. The photograph, taken in a studio in Melbourne, is captioned “yr little mary-anne”. She beckons you into her impersonation.
Along with the letters Franklin wrote or received during the year, the summary and photo authenticate her little known upstairs–downstairs experiment in Sydney and Melbourne, which she details in the manuscript. She cooked in flammable kitchens, plunged her hands into steaming washing up, and swept the dust that scattered behind her employers’ shoes.
In today’s Instagram culture, it is improbable that a celebrity like Franklin could work incognito and not be recognised. But this was the Edwardian era of the early 1900s, when a photograph was a special occasion and names were known more widely than faces. Franklin loved that a lady she’d once met at a government reception unknowingly flung her coat at her when she opened the door, and that she stoked the fire while guests discussed My Brilliant Career.
Aged 21, Franklin dazzled Australia with her debut novel. Published in 1901, My Brilliant Career inspired young women to write to her about their own frustrations and dreams. She denied her novel was autobiographical, to little effect. She was compared to novelist Charlotte Bronte and to Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian–Parisian teen artist who declared in her memoir, “I am my own heroine”.
Despite Franklin’s later fervent wish that My Brilliant Career’s heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, would be forgotten, the book endured. It became a feminist literary classic, and in 1979 a film, produced by Margaret Fink and directed by Gillian Armstrong. Today, her cultural touchstone continues with her bequest of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and recent stage adaptations of My Brilliant Career. The Stella literary prize is named in her honour, after her first given name, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin.
Franklin’s iconic success is, however, misleading. Like many authors, she experienced fame and acclaim, but minimal royalties, in part due to an unfair contract for colonial authors with her Edinburgh publisher, William Blackwood and Sons. Books were also a luxury during the punishing Federation drought, which lasted from 1895 to 1902.
Franklin could have married. Her grandmother took every opportunity to remind her she was expected to wed. “Have you found anyone you like better than yourself?” she archly asked.
Instead, she disappeared into undercover journalism.
Franklin was likely inspired by the “gonzo” women journalists known as “girl stunt reporters”, who disrupted male-dominated journalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
To prove their journalistic chops, they risked their safety and health to go undercover and expose factory exploitation and illegal abortion clinics. Most famously, New York reporter Nellie Bly feigned hysteria to gain admission to the city’s public women’s mental health institution for ten days in 1887. Their stories captivated audiences, as much as their daring.
American journalist Elizabeth Banks transported the trend to London, where she worked as a servant, leaving her poodle, Judge, with a friend. Her reports in “In Cap and Apron” for the Weekly Sun caused a sensation, and Banks’ memoir Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl was reviewed in Australia in late 1902 and early 1903.
Apart from Catherine Hay Thomson’s investigation of Kew Asylum and Melbourne Hospital in 1886, the “stunt girl reporter” only noticeably appeared in Australia in 1903.
That year, the fledgling New Idea magazine published a series of undercover articles, including about experiences such as working in a tobacco factory and applying for domestic service at an employment agency. Unlike Franklin, the New Idea journalist stopped there, while Franklin spent a full, gruelling year as a servant.
The “servant question” was an ideal local investigation. The newly federated Australia was growing due to the wool industry – “on the sheep’s back”. But in the cities, factories were an alternative engine for young women’s employment rather than domestic service. Fretting “mistresses” complained about the dearth of remaining girls available.
Servants retorted that if they were treated better, perhaps they would stay. One suggested scandalously that mistresses should give references about how they treat servants to prospective hires, pre-dating contemporary suggestions that owners and agencies should prove their fitness as landlords to tenants.
The debate around “the servant question” exposed Australia’s myth of equality. Franklin’s family was no exception. While drought drove her parents off their farm, Stillwater, to a plot in Penrith (then a rural town outside Sydney), they were cultured and educated. Franklin’s wealthy grandmother ran a station in the Snowy Mountains, on which Franklin based the elegant homestead, Caddagat, in My Brilliant Career. A governess or nurse was acceptable, she wrote in her accompanying summary to her manuscript, but “a servant raised considerable horror among my circle”.
Franklin was undeterred. As well as a new writing project, she needed money and a roof if she wanted to live in the city rather than at home. Suffragette Rose Scott, who called Franklin her “spirit child”, invited her to stay. But while Franklin appreciated the support, at times Rose was suffocating.
Revealing the independent streak that would define her life, Franklin wrote, “it was imperative I get work to sustain myself”.
Franklin’s real servant pseudonym was “Sarah Frankling”, a play on her middle name and her surname. “Mary-Anne”, at the time a well known slang name for servants, was only used for the manuscript, to hide identities.
Franklin’s live-in domestic servant positions included kitchen maid, parlour maid and “general” servant. She worked in a terrace she dubbed a “cubby house”, an upmarket boarding house, a harbourside villa, a wealthy merchant home, and mansions in Sydney and Melbourne. Franklin stayed a maximum of two months at each post for a year in total, after which she planned to write.
Senator and High Court judge Richard Edward O’Connor and his large family were her most high-profile employer. Their mansion, Keston, which is close to the prime minister’s Sydney residence, Kirribilli House, and the boarding house around the corner survive, as does the terrace, near Bronte in the city’s eastern suburbs. All are now apartment buildings.
In the manuscript, Franklin recounts that she rapidly lost weight and felt her spirit become “suppressed” by the monotony and tiring nature of servant work. Depending on the number of staff and her duties, she hand-rolled heavy, wet clothes through a washing mangle; served pre-breakfast tea and toast in bed, which she thought was an obscene indulgence; cooked and served full hot breakfasts and dinners daily; waited on guests in the boarding house’s dining room, nicknamed “the zoo”; cleaned the guest rooms and parlours; and helped at high-society balls. She kept fires burning in winter and sweated through heavy housework and cooking in summer.
The hours were brutal. She usually woke at dawn, and only finished after the evening dinners were served, or if she was a kitchen maid, after she cleaned the mess away. Not all her employers offered a luxurious whole afternoon off per week. She worked through burns sustained on the job, and was brought to tears by a mistress who ordered her to change her carefully arranged hair. The house’s Irish cook opined that the mistress was threatened by Franklin’s “toy figure” and “fairy face”.
As the months passed at different employers, fatigue turned to anger, and loneliness to friendships with fellow servants. It is heartening to see a snobby young Franklin mature and change as she rubbed tired elbows with those she previously saw as beneath her status. She cheekily flirted with a lovestruck tradie, just as she traded Shakespearian quips with an intrigued young naval officer staying at the posh boarding house.
When Scott learned Franklin was working as a servant, she chided her for not refusing the conditions as an example to others. However, Franklin knew any insolence or objection meant instant dismissal, ruining her research and current livelihood.
Scott also misread Franklin’s long-term goal – writing the servant book. In her diary, Franklin recorded what she could not say out loud. She cynically noted that “to be sensitive would be unfortunate” for a servant. “The maid must not want for pleasure,” Franklin warned, “because she will have no time to gratify it”. Be presentable but not too pretty, she advised; be polite but not so fancy or fussy to refuse tiny, “ill-aired” servant quarters next to the laundry.
The servant year confirmed her lifelong views of marriage as stifling. Echoing My Brilliant Career, Franklin vented her feminist frustration in the diary entries. She wrote of the terrace’s “Mistress”: “sooth, when a woman of ordinary intelligence gives the whole of her time, brain and energy to the running of a miniature establishment”.
As for the husband, an irritated Franklin wrote that he was “boss of his own backyard and lord of his little suburban dining room”.
Biographies of Miles Franklin have largely followed the traditional “cradle to grave” of her life, in which the critical servant year has been brushed over like a quick sweep of the biographical floor. One of Franklin’s first biographers, Marjorie Barnard, dismissed Mary-Anne as of little interest.
Jill Roe, author of the epic biography Stella Miles Franklin, read the existing Mary-Anne draft manuscript, describing it in her book as Franklin’s “social experiment”. Yet even Roe is succinct about Mary-Anne, compared to other years in Franklin’s eventful life. Roe lists Franklin’s known servant employers, admires her pluck and commiserates over it not being published due to concerns she had defamed her employers. (Franklin’s pseudonyms for her employers were chiffon thin, so easily identifiable.)
There were other intractable problems too with the manuscript, though Franklin may have edited another draft before submitting it for publication. The existing draft is overlong, unwieldy and inconsistent in its point of view. Franklin switches between “I” and later, “Mary-Anne”, as if she fully collapses into her servant life.
Despite her failure to find a publisher for her manuscript, Franklin continued her journalism. She began writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, which suited her fast writing style, and helped her earn money with a pen.
In 1908, Franklin joined the women’s trade union movement and advocated for working women, all the while working on her own novel, writing and resisting the status quo of the Edwardian era. She finally returned to literary acclaim with the award-winning All That Swagger in 1936, a colonial saga of a pioneering family, and another historical series she wrote under the pseudonym “Brent of Bin Bin”.
Upon her death in 1954, tributes reported that “Australian literature lost one of its great figures”.
Franklin’s investigation of the servant question now seems quaint. Appliances have changed from washing mangles and melting iceboxes to sleek stainless steel and glossy white machines that beep and hum in the background.
Yet demand for service remains. “Servants” are still in our lives; they just answer to an app rather than a bell. They clean our houses while we are out, or they are chefs on call who cook meals delivered by mobile waiters on electric bikes and scooters who brave traffic as they dash to door to door. Uber and Dido chauffeurs compete to pick us up from wherever we happen to be.
The exploitation remains, too. At the extreme, the Sri Lankan Embassy in Canberra has been ordered to pay $117,000 in back wages to its domestic servant, paid 90 cents an hour. More broadly, Fair Work last year moved to protect gig workers in the share economy, recognising its endemic lack of rights and risks.
Since Franklin’s Mary-Anne, low-wage service work has been revisited periodically by writers interested in social justice. In 1933, inspired by Jack London, George Orwell chronicled the months he spent impoverished and doing menial jobs in Down and Out in Paris and London.
In 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich published the acclaimed Nickel and Dimed, about working and living on minimum wage. Elisabeth Wynhausen wrote an Australian version, Dirt Cheap: Life at the wrong end of the job market in 2005. Alexandrea J. Ravenelle brought the history full circle in 2019 with her collected stories of 80 gig economy workers in her book, Hustle and Gig. All these authors had similar conclusions to Franklin: low-wage service work is grinding and exploitative.
At its core, the servant question hasn’t changed at all since Franklin’s investigation over a hundred years ago.
Miles Franklin Undercover by Kerrie Davies is published by Allen & Unwin
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