Little was written about Sophie Corrie before William Brooks took over publishing her guide to fruit preserving in 1902.[1] The book was now promoted more aggressively, in the Sydney Stock and Station Journal, a newspaper published and printed by Brooks, and by then Sophie was already well known within certain circles as winner of many prizes, and as a judge, at country agricultural shows. The first detailed account of her life and achievements appears in the Brisbane Courier in 1903, based on a personal interview conducted while Sophie was visiting Brisbane.[2] The anonymous author describes how the widowed Sophie ‘took up a selection in the Mittagong district … and commenced clearing it, doing a good portion of the work with her own hands, the children assisting her with the cutting of the timber’. This account records that she cultivated the first two acres herself, ‘with a hoe as her only farming implement!’ and then went on to plant all the trees in her orchard with her own hands. Although she eventually had five acres under fruit trees, for the first ten years the family lived on the proceeds of the crops she grew and the poultry and pigs she reared. She also claims to have never employed any labour on the farm other than ‘some children’ who helped to harvest the crops of peas. The article also notes that her youngest son, Broughton Corrie, has a farm adjoining his mother’s and ‘is well known as one of the most up-to-date farmers in the district’.
This picture of Sophie as ‘a woman of grit and determination’, the description of her endeavours and the emphasis on her hard work and self-reliance, forms the basis of the reports that follow. Few of the subsequent newspaper articles appear to be based on first-hand information consequently Sophie’s story is not always accurately reported, embellished by journalists to suit their own purposes and/or manipulated by Sophie herself to only reveal as much of her personal story as she thought appropriate or necessary.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph in 1904, having met Sophie at the Royal Show, ‘Una’ (Laura Bogue Luffman) repeats the same claims regarding the clearing of the land but rounds out the story with some additional, quite specific information.[3] Sophie is quoted as saying that she had been left a widow with ‘a small income of £30 per annum’ and began to earn her living by keeping a boarding house. She then took up a free selection near Mittagong, paying the £10 deposit and when she had complied with the requirements of the Land Act she was able to take possession of 40 acres of virgin bush on the payment of £2 per year.[4] She claims the family lived a healthy, happy life in an old hut until a house was built. ‘Someone’ gave her a present of young fruit trees, which she planted with her own hands, and she grew crops between the rows to provide an income until the orchard started bearing. Apart from employing a man to plough once a year she did everything else herself. Eventually there were 12 acres under cultivation – 5 under oats and 7 as a vegetable garden. Now, at 71, she claimed to be ‘resting’ having ‘handed over a good cottage and 400 acres’ to her youngest son, with whom she was living.
Both these accounts were published before Sophie sold her holdings at Colo Vale in 1906 and travelled overseas. By the time she returned to Australia in 1908 the women’s movement had gained momentum. Women voted in New South Wales for the first in 1903 and there was now much talk of expanded roles for women. Although she was no spring chicken Sophie’s story fitted the popular image of ‘The Australian Girl’ –equal to the men around her, practical, independent, energetic and unconventional; someone able to accommodate herself to altered circumstances and treat every difficulty as an incentive.[5] In particular, the Women’s Liberal League were advocating training for women in agriculture.[6] More than ever Sophie represented an exemplar of the successful independent female agriculturalist, in addition she could now claim to have travelled the world alone. It was for these reasons that Mrs Salmon chose to include her in the series of eminent women (see Part One) .
Mary Frederika Salmon was herself an independent woman, working as a journalist, regularly contributing to the daily and weekly press, specialising in articles on prominent personages and the early history of Sydney. Salmon had been a teacher and sometime English mistress at Springfield College, which might explain her inclusion of Lady Murray in her list of eminent women. It is perhaps no accident that her article about Sophie Corrie also coincided with the publication of the fifth edition of The Art of Canning.[7]
Mrs Salmon based her article on an interview with her subject but presented a somewhat romanticised and exaggerated image that laid great emphasis on Sophie’s pioneering spirit, claiming that ‘[f]or 30 years this indefatigable woman worked to convert a bare, unprofitable free selection into a productive, well-cultivated farm.’ Salmon described Bargo Brush/Colo Vale as lonely and wild when Sophie and her children moved there, 8 miles from the nearest school or church in Mittagong, and still the haunt of bushrangers. Salmon has the family living ‘in a slab and bark hut in an uncleared paddock’ and Sophie doing all the work herself, felling trees, grubbing out roots and planting all the fruit trees since there were no funds to hire labour.[8] Most importantly Sophie set a fine example to the local community: ‘It is by such self-reliant people, women as well as men, that every settlement here has come into existence’. Salmon then goes on to frame Sophie as not just a pioneer but the heroine of the district. There is no mention of a boarding house or of Sophie’s wider family connections.
Sophie appears to have been so impressed with this panegyric and the recognition she was receiving that she arranged to have Salmon’s article, and two others about her life, printed in a booklet by her publisher, William Brooks.[9] (It is likely that Brooks circulated this along with review copies of the fifth edition of The Art of Canning, published in 1909.)
The first of these additional contributions was a paragraph from the Stock and Station Journal announcing her appointment as the first woman member of the New South Wales Chamber of Agriculture. The other adds more detail about her family history. Although Salmon claimed that Sophie was Australian born, of Australian parents and spent her childhood in a house at the corner of Philip and Hunter Streets, this article, reproduced from the Wide Bay Times, offers a contradictory story. In this version Sophie’s parents arrived in Sydney Cove in 1819/20. Her father is described as a keen sportsman who took up land near Wollongong before the difficulties of getting supplies from Sydney and the prospect of famine convinced him to move to Manly Beach (Curl Curl Lagoon) where, the writer implies, he established an orchard. While it seems Sophie may not have made a secret of her connection to the Wheeler family, she was clearly unconcerned about the discrepancies in these two accounts.[10]
Subsequent articles, including an interview which appeared in the August 1909 edition of New Idea, unashamedly repeated verbatim paragraphs already published, stressing Sophie’s independent spirit and how she represented ‘a splendid example of what one woman can achieve’, was a notable pioneer, ‘practically the first Australian woman to go on the land’ and ‘one of the grandest women Australia has produced’, but providing no more detail about her family background.[11]
When Sophie died, on 28 September 1913, newspapers across the country carried the news, but the reports of her life were not without some controversy.[12] The Sydney Morning Herald published another piece by Mary Salmon, repeating the story she had told before.[13] In the same issue, a few pages further on, another paragraph from an anonymous author claimed that Sophie had been born at the Blue Bell Hotel in Hunter Street and had lived for many years in Strawberry Hills.[14] This article was clearly written by someone who knew something of Sophie’s family history, including the connection to the Iredales and Brennands, but was the first and only mention of the Blue Bell Hotel and the family connection to Surry Hills.
Sophie’s daughter, Edith, felt duty bound to write to the Herald to correct Mrs Salmon. [15] She pointed out that Sophie had not been left without means, rather she had an inheritance from her father’s estate. While admitting that her mother was ‘a stoic with an interesting personality’ she insisted that Mrs Salmon had ‘a wrong conception of my mother’s capabilities’ maintaining that Sophie’s ‘usefulness centred in woman’s arts’. Just what Edith meant by this is not altogether clear, but it seems she either felt that Mrs Salmon had overstated her mother’s achievements or did not appreciate the picture of Sophie as a manual worker. Given that previous renditions of Sophie’s story had also emphasised her performance of physical work, Edith had left it a bit late to complain.
Sophie’s old friend of fifty years, Amelia Pemell, also saw fit to write to the Sydney Morning Herald alarmed that some of the statements in the press concerning Sophie could ‘detract from the high opinion the public has formed of her noble character and wonderful life’.[16] She leapt to the defence. Sophie was, she claimed, born at the top of Hunter Street but certainly not in an inn. Both women were staunch supporters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and Pemell claimed that Sophie’s parents were ‘as bitter against the drink’ as Sophie was herself. To suggest, as Edith had done, that Sophie was ‘not without means’ was also a great mistake. Pemell argued that Edith was too young to have known ‘the terrible straits through which her mother had to pass’ to make a home for her children. Further she all but accused Edith of wanting to tarnish her mother’s memory – ‘it is a great pity that anything should be written that would make people believe what Mrs Corrie told of her terrible hardships (although she did not tell the half of them) was untrue’. As to the assertion that Sophie had inherited from her father’s estate, Pemell conceded that Sophie did own land, ‘quite a considerable portion, at what is now known as North Manly’ but it had not yet been sold and was consequently ‘of very little use to her’. Amelia Pemell concluded, ‘it makes us very angry when we see things are being written or said that will make outsiders think less instead of more of this truly noble woman, who did not sink under circumstance that might well have crushed her, but who overcame all difficulties, to the astonishment of everyone’.
Edith, aged 8 when her father died and who had lived with her mother until she married John Dymock in 1889, could hardly be called an outsider, but clearly the facts of her mother’s life, were not entirely consistent with the story Sophie had imparted to her friends and possibly the one Sophie herself wished to establish. Mrs Salmon justified what she had written on just that basis: ‘whatever I have said about her was fully approved by her.’[17]
Although the Wheeler’s were ardent Methodists, and despite Miss Pemell’s insistence to the contrary, even if Sophie was not born at the Blue Bell, she at least spent some of her youth in and around public houses. Amelia Pemell claimed to have known Sophie for 50 years, even so they were probably not acquainted until after Sophie was married, by which time her family no longer had any interest in the Strawberry Hills Hotel. It is unlikely that Sophie would have mentioned the connection to Pemell since they may have met through their common enthusiasm for the temperance movement. Similarly, Pemell may not have been aware that Sophie inherited money from her father’s estate. Although Sophie had mentioned that she was in receipt of some income in her interview with ‘Una’ printed in the Daily Telegraph this detail was not widely repeated. As the information printed in the booklet which included Mary Salmon’s article attests, Sophie did not necessarily make a secret of her connection to the Wheeler family in the Dee Why area, but she may not have elaborated on this relationship. Her daughter Maud had married her Wheeler cousin, James in 1887, which suggests the family had remained in contact after Sophie moved to Colo Vale and, presumably, she had ongoing dealings with the Wheelers. Maud divorced her husband in 1906 on the grounds of adultery which makes it likely that Sophie’s connection with this branch of the family soured after that.
Sophie’s reputation as a pioneer is a combination of the romantic image of the dutiful wife and the feminist ideal of the independent woman. Sophie did not entirely fit the stereotypical image of the loyal pioneer woman who went into the wilderness with her husband and sacrificed her own interests to support his endeavours and raise a family. Several tellings of her story emphasise she did have to endure her share of loneliness and inconvenience, and she did share with the ‘angel of the bush’ the virtues of hard work, self-sufficiency, and forbearance, but she was no silent heroine. Nonetheless it was the fact that she had faced ‘terrible straits’ and refused to ‘sink under circumstances that might well have crushed her’ which Amelia Pemell held as her defining virtues, and Mary Salmon celebrated.
For the feminist writer Laura Bogue Luffman (‘Una’) on the other hand Sophie represented self-determination and the control and autonomy women could achieve for themselves through work. Most importantly Sophie attained her independence by capitalising on essentially feminine, domestic skills. Sophie’s story fitted with the feminist idealism and national pride of the early years of the twentieth century.
The first wave of Australian feminists have been characterised as exponents of ‘expediency feminism’ that is they did not challenge the status quo, espousing ‘only a limited and practical critique of the inflexible division of the spheres by sex’. While they believed that women had an equal right to the franchise they also believed in traditional family values and few had any problem reconciling a woman’s right to individual fulfillment with an entrenched belief in the importance of the domestic sphere. [18] Luffman for example believed that ‘every home is a mint for coming character’ and argued for raising the status of domestic work so that it would no longer be regarded as ‘ungenteel’.[19] Sophie herself strongly supported female suffrage while not losing sight of traditional family values. In the introduction to The Art Of Canning she states she wished to inspire the readers of her book to regard the industry of the home ‘as one demanding and deserving intelligent interest’.
Mrs Luffman was an active supporter of the Women’s Liberal League which, under the leadership of Hilma Molyneux Parkes, advocated for a range of feminist issues. Luffman used her column in the Daily Telegraph to promote the causes of the League, and her interview with Sophie was one of a series she wrote on women in agriculture.[20] Making agricultural training available to women had been part of the League’s platform since its inception but, not all agricultural pursuits were thought to be ideal for women, only activities like gardening and growing flowers and fruit, jam making, bee keeping and poultry farming, ‘la petite culture’ were considered to be entirely suitable. [21] Sophie, the unassuming little grey haired lady, was an example to all those who argued that women were unsuited to hard work or that manual labour was unwomanly and unbecoming, but neither had she strayed beyond the boundaries of what was acceptable by establishing an orchard and making jam. Luffman continued to use Sophie as an illustration of what could be achieved and argued how much easier her life would have been if she had been trained, as the battle for a horticultural college for women continued.[22]
The real Sophie Corrie
Just how well-known Sophie was in her lifetime is open to question. How many people beyond those associated with agricultural shows and with an interest in horticulture, were aware of her is hard to gauge. If it is true that 12,000 copies of her book on the art of canning were in circulation by 1913 this would suggest her expertise was sought after. However, this is a small number in comparison to print runs for more comprehensive works on cookery such as Mrs Wicken’s Kingswood Cookery Book. In this case Angus and Robertson printed 10,000 copies per edition. Notwithstanding The Art of Canning remains noteworthy because of its early date and because it is perhaps the first cookbook published in Australia to concentrate on only one aspect of culinary practise.
The evidence suggests that Sophie, particularly in her later years as she gained a public persona, may have been coy about her background and her circumstances. She was more forthcoming about her personal history in the interviews she gave before 1906 than she was when she returned from overseas. The detailed account produced by ‘Una’ was not repeated in other newspapers.[23] Extended family connections, and sources of income other than the profits from her agricultural efforts, did not fit well with the image of Sophie as an independent woman, reliant on her own resources and industry which may have made her reluctant to mention them. It is equally possible that the few journalists who interviewed her, rather than those who simply repeated material already published, chose to only include the details they thought relevant to the story they wanted to tell. Nonetheless the facts of Sophie’s life in no way detract from her reputation as a hard worker and ‘a woman of grit and determination’. It would be hard not to be impressed by her achievements, her business acumen, and her successful land dealings, although whether her achievements qualify her as an eminent Australian is debatable. Few people today, with the exception of those interested in old cookery books, are likely to have heard of Sophie Corrie, but her book is not her only legacy. Corrie Road in North Manly and Corrie Road at Alpine, near Colo Vale are named in her honour. The suburb of Wheeler Heights, Wheeler Street in Narrabeen, and Brumby Street in Surry Hills also bear testimony to the story of the Wheeler family in Sydney.
[1] Sophie Corrie, The Art of Canning, Bottling and Preserving of Fruits (Sydney: William Brooks & Co., 1902)
[2] The Brisbane Courier, 31 August 1903, p. 7, ‘An Australian Woman Farmer’. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article19217186
[3] This was one of a series of articles about ‘Women in Agriculture’. Daily Telegraph, 7 April 1904, p. 5 ‘Women in Agriculture. An Object Lesson’, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article237823368.
[4] For description of Robertson Land Acts see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertson_Land_Acts. Anyone taking up land was required to fence the area and to live on their selection.
[5] Sydney Morning Herald (hereafter SMH), 20 November 1907, p. 5 ‘The Australian Girl’. See also SMH, 5 December 1906, p. 5, ‘The Australian Woman’.
[6] For advocating for women in agriculture and their admission to the agricultural college see Daily Telegraph, 17 May 1906, p. 9; Evening News, 8 October 1908, p. 5. Examples of successful women farmers, see Australian Star, 12 September 1908, p. 9. Daily Telegraph, 6 May 1909, p. 4, re Girls Realm Exhibition and need for education.
[7] For Mary Salmon, https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A1470. SMH, 8 January 1937, p. 17. Similarly, the interview with ‘Una’ published in the Daily Telegraph in 1904 also coincided with the publication of the fourth edition. Salmon's article on Sophie,
[8] Later accounts have Sophie and her family living in a tent before the hut is built, Northern Star (Lismore), 28 April 1913, p.4; Maryborough Chronicle, Wide Bay and Burnett Advertiser, 4 October 1913, p. 6; Daily Telegraph, 1 October 1913, p. 15.
[9] Sophie Corrie, Eminent Women in Australia (Sydney: William Brooks, 1909?). https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/74VveqMEAKeX. All these articles mention that Sophie has not long returned from an overseas trip, that fact and the date of the article in ATCJ suggests a publication date of late 1908/ early 1909.
[10] The original article in the Wide Bay Times has not been cited but this information is repeated in Telegraph (Brisbane) 4 May 1912, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article175233036. Sophie abridged her life story many times. In 1898 she has fond remembrance of the family living at Strawberry Hills, The Methodist, 12 November 1898, p. 7.
[11] Ellie Russel, ‘A Woman Pioneer. How to Win a Living from the Soil,’ New Idea, 6 August 1909, pp. 618–9
[12] For obituaries see Daily Telegraph, 1 October 1913, p. 11, SMH, 1 October 1913, p. 11; Maryborough Chronicle, Wide Bay and Burnett Advertiser, 4 October 1913, p. 6. Register (Adelaide), 11 November 1913, p. 8; Daily Herald (Adelaide), 2 October 1913, p. 4.
[13] SMH, 1 October 1913, p. 7.
[14] SMH, 1 October 1913, p. 11. Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton) 1 October 1913, p. 6 also mentions that the Wheelers were an old Strawberry Hills family, associated with the Iredales and the Brennands.
[15] SMH, 8 October 1913, p. 7.
[16] SMH, 15 October 1913, p. 7.
[17] SMH, 15 October 1913, p. 7
[18] For expediency feminism see Judith Allen, ‘The “feminisms” of the early women’s movement 1850–1920’, Refractory Girl 17 (1979), pp. 10–16.
[19] DT, 13 June 1904, p. 7.
[20] Daily Telegraph, 1 April 1904, p. 3, ‘A visit to the Royal Show’; 7 April 1904, p. 5 ‘Women in Agriculture. An Object Lesson’; 16 April 1904, p. 15, ‘A poultry farm’; 2 May 1904, p. 3, ‘Strawberry culture’; 11 May 1904, p. 5 “‘Were they desirable immigrants?’, Italian settlers at New Italy.”
[21] See SMH, 10 December 1903, p. 8 ‘Liberal Union Congress’. ‘la petite culture’ Daily Telegraph, 14 October 1899, p. 5 ‘Women and agriculture’. There was also the argument that horticulture rather than agriculture was appropriate for women, since most horticulture was done by hand, see Daily Telegraph, 12 June 1913, p. 13.
[22] Daily Telegraph, 25 June 1913, p. 15, ‘Women in rural industries’.
[23] The fact that Sophie was in receipt of £30 per annum was repeated in Northern Star (Lismore), 16 April 1904, p. 10 and the Armidale Chronicle, 16 April 1904, p. 8; and The Sun 28 February 1909, p. 6.