The Home Girls

by Olga Masters, Geordie Williamson (Introduction)

The Home Girls is a collection of candid, witty stories about rural and suburban life.

Set in the mid-twentieth century, these are tales of ordinary people and domestic life. Masters was, as the Advertiser remarked, 'a natural storyteller'.

Between the publication of The Home Girls, in 1982, and her death, Olga Masters was acclaimed as one of Australia's finest writers. Her short stories, distinguished by their acute observation of human behaviour, drew comparison with the finest exponents of the form, such as Chekhov.

The stories in this collection:

The Home Girls
The Rages of Mrs Torrens
On the Train
Leaving Home
Passenger to Berrigo
The Done Thing
A Rat in the Building
A Dog that Squeaked
A Young Man's Fancy
The Lang Women
The Snake and Bad Tom
A Poor Winner
Call Me Pinkie
Adams and Barker
Mrs Lister
The Creek Way
The Children Are Coming
A Good Marriage
You'll Like It There
The Sea on a Sunday

Olga Masters was born in Pambula, New South Wales, in 1919. She married at twenty-one and had seven children, working part-time as a journalist, leaving her little opportunity to develop her interest in creative writing until she was in her fifties. In the 1970s Masters wrote a radio play and a stage play, and between 1977 and 1981 she won prizes for her short stories. Her debut, the short-story collection The Home Girls, won a National Book Council Award in 1983. She wrote two novels and three collections of stories, the third of which was published posthumously. Masters died in 1986.

'She can be both tender and funny, and always there is absolute authenticity of detail, a strong sense of time and place, an effortless depiction of personality.' Judges' Report, NBC Awards

textclassics.com.au

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Short Stories, Classics

302 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Olga Masters née Lawler (28 May 1919 – 27 September 1986) was an Australian journalist, novelist and short story writer.

Masters wrote as a journalist for most of her life, and supplemented the family income by writing for local newspapers in the towns she lived in with her husband. On their return to Sydney, she wrote for papers such as The Manly Daily and The Sydney Morning Herald.

While she wanted to write fiction from an early age, she was not published as a writer of fiction until the late 1970s. During this decade she wrote several radio plays, receiving many rejections, but on 29 April 1977, her radio play The Penny Ha-penny Stamp was broadcast. However with the publication of her short story, Call me Pinkie, in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1978, she moved from writing drama to prose fiction. Between 1979 and 1980, she won nine awards for her short stories. She wrote fiction full-time from 1982, after the publication of The Home Girls.

Due to her late start and her relatively early death, Masters' published output is small but her impact was disproportionate in that her style and writings about writing inspired many others to take up the craft.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Mas...)

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Olga Masters (1919-1986) was a late bloomer who began her career at 63 and died just six short years later. As Geordie Williamson says in the introduction to this collection of short stories, she began writing long before that, but her reputation rests on the body of work which begins with The Home Girls in 1982 and concludes with the unfinished collection called The Rose Fancier published posthumously in 1988. She wrote just two novels, Loving Daughters (1984) and Amy’s Children (1987) (see my review) and also a series of connected short stories published as A Long Time Dying in 1985.

The Years That Made Us, a recent ABC TV documentary by her son Chris Masters, featured film of Olga Masters, and that reminded me how much I admire her writing. The way she captures the inner world of women is superb. Short stories are not really my preferred form of fiction but I read most of the ones in this collection and enjoyed them.

To see a sample from the story The Done Thing, please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/08/03/se...

I have my own copy of The Home Girls, published by UQP in 1982 but I borrowed the Text Classics edition from the library because I wanted to read the introduction by Geordie Williamson. I was particularly taken with this summation of her craft:

[Masters'] short stories and novels suggest that passion or violence need not be external, a matter of the public or political, but may be internalised instead - lodged deep within the human heart. Her fictions seem so humble in conception, so soothing in domestic scope, that their ferocity comes as a shock. The classical order of Masters’ literary forms and the tidy language she employs don’t disguise the potential for anarchy in ordinary life. (p. ix)

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quality collection from a writer who bloomed late and left us with a small but remarkable body of work.
Most of the stories deal with life in small country town but, unusually for Australian fiction of the time, are nearly all told from a very feminine perspective. This makes them all the more distinctive, a small country town is one thing to a man, a whole other thing to a woman.
My favorite stories were the two dealing with the life and trials of the McMahon family and their renegade daughter who is desperate to escape the limited possibilities of life in a small town.
Olga Masters deserves a bigger place in our national literary pantheon.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The effect of these stories was so powerful I daren't read more than one at time. Olga Masters sparse prose tells stories of my home state of New South Wales and the towns where my family lived. There is a lot of bad and wrong doing and occasional joy or acute observation.

[Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Olga Masters collection of short stories is brutal. The writing is sharp, direct and each word is used to drive home the story. The settings range from rural to suburbia but these are all families that are dysfunctional, through violence, depression, alcoholism and power. I know some of these people, my Nan would take about the hard men of her family all too willing to use the strap. For all the bleakness there are moments of light and hope.
Masters captures a time in Australia that was well known but never really discussed.