BOOK REVIEW
Olga Masters was born in 1919 and was a late bloomer to her literary career which began at the age of 63, although she began writing long before that.
She died just six short years later, in 1986 but her reputation rests on the body of work which begins with The Home Girls.
I read this collection of short stories as part of our book club picks for 2025, at the end of some the stories I simply had to put the book down, needing time and space to absorb the dynamics of a story, or the machinations of various characters, along with the reality of rural Australia in all their brutality.
Between the publication of The Home Girls in 1982 and her death, Olga Masters was acclaimed as one of Australia’s finest writers, with her short stories distinguished by their acute observation of human behaviour, and drew comparison with the finest exponents of the form.
The Home Girls has short staccato sentences, its existence is brutish and isolation of one kind or another the norm.
The suggestion of repressed emotion is everywhere, the mood is sombre, and the irony heavy in its insistence on humankind’s impulsive brutality, the writing is sharp, direct and each word is used to drive home the story.
Settings range from rural to suburbia, but these are all families that are dysfunctional through violence, depression, alcoholism, and power, but for all the bleakness there are moments of light and hope.
Set in the mid-20th century, these are tales of ordinary people and domestic life, and Olga Masters was a natural storyteller who captured the essence of a character, of life in a small town, the many joys and devastations of life.
The Home Girls is a short disturbing story of two sisters preparing to leave one foster family for another, and they shared a final act of destructive and damaging defiance before they head to their new home.
Another story in the book, The Rages of Mrs Torrens, is about a vibrant, enthusiastic woman who was extreme in her mood swings and full of wrath and rage until eventually medication was prescribed to stabilise her mood swings.
The Done Thing has an interesting twist on the tale of attraction between two married couples with a contrast between the two wives – one educated but insecure called Annie and the practical homemaker Louisa – and there are gentle hints of the attraction between each other’s partners.
The physicality of Masters’ writing is tangible; she has a way of depicting a character’s inner world through their physical actions which for any writer is a rare gift.
Olga Masters captures a time in Australia that was well known but never really discussed.
The quality of her fiction is special, she starts to uncover the nation’s hidden history, a history that has been constructed of our justification of the past, we have all been left short-changed, ignorant, divided and unable to heal.
Her literary talent did not lose value and has passed on to his son author, journalist correspondent Chris Masters whose book Flawed Hero won the 2024 Australian Political Book of the Year Award.
Julie Chessman
