Thu Apr 10 2025

Journalist Kerrie Davies with the story of how novelist Miles Franklin went undercover as a maid for a year, in Sydney and Melbourne's wealthy houses, well before gonzo journalists became household names. The real-life story of novelist Stella Maria Miles Franklin had an unexpected chapter after publishing My Brilliant Career. In 1903, Miles became a 'girl stunt reporter' by going undercover as a servant. For a year, she lived as a maid in Sydney and Melbourne's wealthy houses and wrote about the humiliations and drudgery in the daily lives of servant girls, or 'slaveys'. During her experiment she hand-rolled heavy, wet clothes through a washing mangle; served her employers pre-breakfast tea and toast in bed, which she thought was an obscene indulgence; she cleaned guest rooms and parlours; helped at high-society balls and kept fires burning in winter. The manuscript Miles wrote about this year pre-dated George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London by three decades, yet it...