Five minutes with author Cathy Perkins

Posted on 10 March, 2020

Australian poet and journalist Zora Cross caused a sensation in 1917 with her book Songs of Love and Life.

Here was a young woman who looked like a Sunday school teacher, celebrating sexual passion in a provocative series of sonnets.

She was hailed as a genius, and many expected her to endure as a household name alongside Shakespeare and Rossetti. But her fame didn’t last and Cathy Perkins has asked the question why, in her beguiling biography, The Shelf Life of Zora Cross.

Ahead of Cathy’s in conversation with historian Mark McKenna at Muse on Sunday 15 March, we took five minutes with Cathy to find out more about Zora.

How did you discover Zora Cross?

It was a serendipitous discovery about 10 years ago. I’d recently started my job as an editor at the State Library of NSW after working in the book industry.

I was putting together an exhibition display on Australian publishing, and needed to check a reference in a book of letters to and from the legendary publisher George Robertson. So I took the old wooden lift down to the library’s basement storage area and sat on the concrete floor reading the book.

I came across a set of letters surrounding the publication of book called Songs of Love and Life by Zora Cross in 1917. I’d never heard of the book or its author but it was clear that Zora had been a literary sensation.

What’s the best fact you found out about her?

She was the first Australian woman to publish a book of erotic poetry.

Songs of Love and Life was ground-breaking because Zora was writing about sex from a woman’s point of view, at a time when women weren’t supposed to have, let alone express, active sexual desire.

At 27, when the book came out, she’d already led an unconventional life, and felt she had nothing to lose in speaking out for ‘all women’ on this subject. So she could write, “I give myself to you, to do whate’er / You will with what is yours”.

How remarkable was she for her time?

In her personal life, she didn’t show any shame at not conforming to society’s expectations.

She was married in her early 20s but refused to live with her husband, and she supported herself as writer when it was unusual for a woman to write full-time and raise children.

Her ambition to write was the driving force in her life, and she pursued it for many decades when women were expected to live through others.

What impact did she make on Australia’s literary landscape?

Zora Cross was part of the literary scene from childhood, when she began writing to a newspaper’s children’s page, edited by the famous author Ethel Turner.

She later came into contact with key literary figures of the time—Henry Lawson, Norman Lindsay (who refused to illustrate Songs of Love and Life because he believed women couldn’t write love poetry), the poet and activist Mary Gilmore and others.

Her acclaimed elegy for her brother Jack, who died in the First World War, has endured for its strong anti-war stance and emphasis on a woman’s grief.

And she made a lasting impact by interviewing about 40 of her fellow women writers in the late 1920s and early 30s and writing profiles of them for a popular magazine—she created a biographical trace for many writers who would otherwise have been forgotten.

Cathy Perkins. Photo by Joy Lai.

Why has she slipped from our historical consciousness?

I ask myself that all the time! The style of her poetry went out of fashion in the mid 20th century. Though she also wrote novels, they didn’t endure like the work of Eleanor Dark, Katharine Susannah Prichard and a few other women novelists.

Because she was best known for her erotic poetry, her work was later seen as frivolous, even though she was arguing that women shouldn’t be cut off from expressing all aspects of life.

She wrote about sex, sent reckless letters to powerful literary men, and had unconventional relationships, so she didn’t fit the mould of the ‘heroic’ woman we tend to celebrate in history.

What are you reading? What’s on your TBR pile?

I’ve just finished the biographer Sylvia Martin’s beautiful memoir Sky Swimming. Sylvia has written three books about unconventional women in history, and she uses the same well-honed biographical techniques to tell her own story.

A couple of recent historical novels have used Zora Cross’s life and work as source material, and I enjoyed Melanie Myers Meet me at Lennon’s, which is set in Brisbane during the Second World War and partly draws on Zora’s novel This Hectic Age for wartime atmosphere.

And I’m looking forward to picking up Julian Leatherdale’s Death in the Ladies’ Goddess Club because Zora Cross was an influence on the lead character and also appears as herself in the novel.

Catch Cathy in conversation with historian Mark McKenna at Muse on Sunday 15 March. Click here for all the info.