Kingdom of the Eucalypts: Everything You Wanted To Know About Miles Franklin

Stella Sarah Miles Franklin is one of Australia’s most famous writers and feminists, about whom we know almost nothing.

That is about to change when the Kingdom of the Eucalypts opens on the 30th October at the Bondi Pavilion. 

Based on Franklin’s diary entries, Kingdom of the Eucalypts is presented by Moira Blumenthal Productions.

Written by Alice Spigelman, the play examines a little known interwar period of Franklin’s life when she has returned to Australia after time in the UK and The USA seeking to replicate the success of her book My Brilliant Career, first published in 1901.

“In 1901 this girl from the country goes off to see the world, she goes to London and Chicago and she works with the suffragettes and the trade union movement, and she was looking all over the world for inspiration,” Beth Daly, who plays the older Miles, said.

“She never gave up, even after her first book was such a success, her next book wasn’t published for 30 years and she kept on the path.”

The setting between the wars was at a time when Australian intellectuals were struggling with finding a pathway in the new world order, they often trod a fine line between fascism and communism.

The connections, family, and relationships of Miles Franklin

Trapped at home looking after her mother, Kingdom of the Eucalypts examines Miles’ relationship with Percy ‘Inky’ Stephensen, an intellectual and publisher whom Miles hopes will resurrect her own once brilliant career.

Stephensen founded the Australia First Movement after becoming disillusioned with communism during the Moscow Trials of 1936.

Before that he had been involved in establishing a number of publishing companies, including Endeavour Press with Norman Lindsay.

Stephensen was a man of dubious political connections and he kept changing his mind as to whether he was a communist, a socialist and in the end he decided that fascism was the way to go,” Moira Blumenthal said.

“Miles hung onto him only because he was a publisher.

“They were using each other basically, and this is one of the relationships and the politics explored in the production.”

As Miles’ career is floundering, so is her relationship with her mother.

“She (mother) is an extremely disappointed woman,” Alice Livingstone, Susannah Franklin, said.

“She had come from wealth and now the family had lost it and they are now poor, and Miles has never fulfilled what she wanted.

“She wanted her to get married and lead a comfortable life, (but) she also bitterly resents how the family were portrayed in ‘My Brilliant Career’.”

The backstory of the life of Miles Franklin is as interesting as any of the seventeen books that she wrote during her long life, and will make this production a must see event.

Kingdom of the Eucalypts also features Sarah Greenwood as the young Miles, James Coetzee as Franklin’s would-be love interest, Lloyd-Alison Young as Inky Stephensen and Timothy Daly as dramaturg.

Kingdom of the Eucalypts

Where: Bondi Pavilion
When: 30 Oct to 17 Nov
Tickets: Humanitix