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The writer and journalist Marie Louise Hamilton Mack (Louise Mack) was born on 10 October 1870 in Hobart Town, Tasmania, the daughter of Rev. Hans Hamilton Mack (c 1831 - 1890), a Wesleyan (Methodist) minister from Downpatrick, Ireland, and from his wife Jemima (James) Mack (1841 - 1930), mother of thirteen children. Louise, the oldest girl, was recorded as Mary Louisa.
Tasmania is an isolated island state, close to the southern coast of Australia, known for its vast areas of wilderness and rugged terrain, most of which are within parks and reserves. On the Tasman Peninsula is Port Arthur, a 19th-century penal colony that is now an open-air museum.
Her father migrated to New South Wales, Australia, before 1854, the year in which he became a Wesleyan minister. He married Jemima in 1859 in Sydney. His ministry took the family from the Sydney circuits to Tasmania (they arrived on 18 March 1870 on board the Southern Cross); to South Australia; Morpeth, near Newcastle and Windsor.
Early journalism
In 1882, after three years of traveling, the family settled in Sydney. The sisters were educated by their mother and a governess. Louise was enrolled at Sydney Girls’ High School, where she and her friend Ethel Turner edited rival newspapers. Mack’s Girls High School Gazette, edited by Louise, cost sixpence, and carried advertisements.
Ethel and her sister, Lilian, created Iris magazine when Mack’s Girls High School Gazette rejected Ethel’s contributions. Despite this, they were good friends. Ethel Turner would write the classic novel Seven Little Australians and become a successful novelist.
In 1888, at the age of eighteen, Louise, as she was then known, was already a governess and was determined to be a writer. She submitted poetry and stories to the Sydney Bulletin, where J. F. Archibald, as well as the influential literary editor A. G. Stephens, encouraged her to publish in the periodical. She started writing poetry and articles regularly.
Her mother, Jemima James, was born in February 1841 in County Armagh, Ireland. She was the daughter of Benjamin James and an unknown mother. She migrated to New South Wales, Australia, before 1859. She married Hans Mack in 1859 in Sydney.
According to writer Nancy Phelan, author of the book The Romantic Lives of Louise Mack (1991), Louie was not involved with the early women's movement “other than writing stories for feminist magazines.” Mack knew that women were often domestic slaves, but because her parents were intellectuals like her, “she never considered herself an inferior writer just because she was a woman.”
Her father had a serious heart problem. Hoping to improve his health, he traveled to England and, realizing he was getting worse, returned home. The heart disease, however, was so advanced that all medicines were useless, and he died on November 4, 1890. With her husband's death, the Wesleyan circuit demanded that Jemima vacate the church-owned mansion intended for the next minister. At least eight of the children and young people still lived at home. Fortunately, Jemima's father had left a trust fund for the children's education and enough money to buy a dilapidated wooden house.
Busy life in Sydney
Louise or Louie, as she was known to her closest acquaintances, reveled in the male world of bohemian Sydney in the 1890s, mixing easily with journalists, editors, poor poets, and eccentric artists. As a professional journalist, Louise frequently attended not only parties, but also concerts and theatrical performances, art exhibitions and literary gatherings.
Her 1895 series, In an Australian City, caused a disagreement with Ethel Turner because Mack wrote about her friends and acquaintances without sufficiently disguising them—as she did in her first novel The World is Round (London, 1896). Her lively school novels Teens (1897) and Girls Together (1898), both published by Angus & Robertson, found avid readers.
Failed marriage
On 8 January 1896 she married John Percy (Jack) Creed, a Dublin lawyer, but they had no children. Unfortunately, he drank and was an unsatisfactory husband. Little is known about Percy except that he was a lecturer on English literature at the University Extension Lectures and was a fan of Robert Browning, an English poet and playwright.
Perhaps it was their mutual love of poetry that brought them together. He was described, in the introduction to one of these lectures, as having “established himself favorably in the spheres of cultured life of the metropolis.” He was later secretary of the Law Institute. In the same year, Louise's first novel, The World is Round, was published in London.
At the end of the decade, her busy social life and his drinking contributed to the breakdown of the relationship. Certainly, after this period, Mack expressed her support for women's work and the need for them to have their own income.
In 1898 she began writing the Women's Pages, a column in the women's pages of the Sydney Bulletin, under the pen name Gouli-Gouli. This entertaining column was written over eight years by Sappho Smith (Alexina Wildman). Although Ina Wildman died young, her brief career inspired journalists such as Louise Mack and her sister Amy, later editor of the Women’s Page of the Sydney Morning Herald. Contemporary reports refer to her as the Sydney Bulletin's contributing girl.
The beginning in London
When she resigned from the Sydney Bulletin in April 1901, handing her column over to Agnes Conor O’Brien, friends said goodbye to her the day before she left for London. A. G. Stephens and other colleagues presented her with a purse full of gold sovereigns and Stephens drew up a detailed profile of Louise in his Red Page.
In 1901, shortly after she arrived in London without her husband, the Sydney Bulletin published her poems, Dreams in Flower. The newspaper article referred to “her lonely journey.” The fact that no one criticized her for leaving without her husband probably says everything there was to know about their marriage.
Success abroad did not come easily. In London, she lived on the brink of starvation while writing her novel, An Australian Girl in London (1902) which chronicles the plight of a starving writer in search of freelance work. The novel was well received, and Louise was eventually able to establish lasting connections in London's literary sphere.
She ingratiated herself with W. T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, and soon became a regular at soirées and in the Review's columns. Louise also wrote lucrative romantic serials for the newspapers of Alfred Harmsworth, the handsome and ruthless Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe), who hired her as a journalist for the Daily Mail. In 1904 she published another novel, Children of the Sun, set in Sydney.
Suffrage Movement
Her book, An Australian Girl in London, was immensely popular and allowed her to establish herself in London, working for the Evening News and the Daily Mail as a journalist and linked to the Women's Pages of the Sydney Bulletin. But, unlike Australia, in England women still did not have the right to vote and Mack was involved with the local suffrage movement. The Women’s Pages became much more politically charged.
The Suffrage Movement was a broad mobilization to organize women's struggle for the right to suffrage (vote). It occurred in several democratic countries around the world, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Women's suffrage was denied due to a sexist organization of politics that kept political dominance in the hands of men and excluded women based on the prejudiced claim that they were incapable of acting politically.
In England, Mary Wollstonecraft's thinking on gender inequalities had great prominence at the end of the 18th century. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the author wrote that social and political inequality between the sexes was the result of an educational process that differentiated between men and women.
Louise's novels, like most Australian literature of the time, were published in London as there was no Australian publishing industry, including Teens: A Story of Australian School Girls, one of her Australia's first YA novels - Young Adult Fiction. Mack and Turner were among a few writers who presented a vision of Australian youth fundamentally different from European youth and, specifically, English youth: more self-confident, more competent, freer in thought and action.
She had already written many successful serials for Harmsworth Press, later published in book form, a retrograde literary step from which she made a lot of money, spent quickly. She traveled widely, published several popular novels, and from 1904 to 1910 lived in Florence, writing, and then editing the English-language Italian Gazette, before returning to London and resuming her career as a novelist. In 1899, Louise dreamed of joining her Sydney friend “Banjo” Paterson as a war correspondent when the second Boer War broke out.
The Boer Wars
The Boer Wars, or Wars of Liberation in Boer historiography, is the name given to the two conflicts fought between the United Kingdom and the two independent Boer republics, the Orange Free State, and the South African Republic (Transvaal Republic). The two conflicts occurred, respectively, from December 16 1880, to March 23 1881, and from October 11 1899 to May 311902.
The Great War begins
The world, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, was going through the Second Industrial Revolution. Technologies and goods were related to intense imperialism between nations, which guaranteed a consumer market to promote industrialization.
Industry also had a great war focus, which generated the well-known armed peace, where all countries had potential weapons associated with previously devised war plans. In the same period, there was a strong wave of nationalism throughout Europe, which created an idea of strengthening one nation at the expense of weakening others.
With these factors, many tensions arose between some countries due to the unresolved issues of the Berlin Conference and the old rivalries between France and Germany or Russia and England. The Berlin Conference, also known as the West African Conference or Congo Conference, was held in Berlin from 15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885, marking European collaboration in the partition and territorial division of Africa.
Furthermore, the French developed anti-German sentiment after the Franco-Prussian War, as they lost the territories of Alsace and Lorraine, an essential region in the nation's economy. There was a fear that possible catastrophic attacks were imminent. All that was missing was a trigger.
The trigger came when Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, contrary to the wishes of the Russians and Serbs. To justify the annexation, the heirs of the Austrian throne went to Saravejo, where the murder of two Austrians took place: Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sofia Maria Josefina Albina de Chotek, Countess of Chotkov and Wognin. Archduke was more precisely the rank of members of the Austrian imperial family and the imperial family of the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburgs.
Assassination of the Archduke of Austria in Sarajevo. The trigger of the Great War.
As a result, in 1914, there was a succession of attacks and defenses between countries, each protecting a member of its alliance. Thus, the Great World War broke out, which only came to be known as World War I after the advent of World War II.
Even before the war, there were already secret alliances prepared for war. The Triple Entente, an anti-German union that brought together the nations of England, France, and Russia. At the end of the war, in 1917, the United States was also part of the composition of this war alliance. On the other side was the Triple Alliance, which contained representatives from Germany, Austria, and Italy, which later abandoned the Triple Alliance and joined the Triple Entente.
War correspondent
When Britain declared war on Germany for violating a peace treaty by invading Belgium, Louise was sent to Belgium by Lord Northcliffe in August 1914 as part of a team of war correspondents to report on German atrocities. The German Kaiser immediately declared that any captured correspondents would be treated as spies.
The team was sent back to England, where Louise immediately gave up the lease on her flat, packed two trunks, her favorite books, the manuscript of her latest novel, a typewriter and the appointment letter signed by Lord Northcliffe and returned. to Belgium. She traveled via German lines to Brussels, Louvain, and Antwerp, whilst reporting for the Evening News and the Daily Mail. She was the first female war correspondent.
Louise based herself in Antwerp, which was still free, and visited several cities destroyed by the Germans. The inability to take her stories to England, however, gave her the idea to stay and write her experiences in a book; the proceeds of which could raise money to help refugees. German soldiers entered Antwerp on October 10, the day she turned forty-four.
With two other correspondents (one of them Australian Frank Fox, an Australian-born journalist, soldier, writer, and activist who had lived in Britain since 1909) she took shelter from the expected bombing in the basement of a hotel. At the risk of being shot as a spy, she pretended to be a hotel housekeeper, Belgian and mute, so as not to arouse suspicion as she had a strong Australian accent that would inevitably attract attention.
In silence, she cut sandwiches for German soldiers in one of Antwerp's restaurants. Her account of her final days on the Western Front cannot be confirmed. In fact, fellow Australian war correspondent Frank Fox recalls he leaving Belgium along with the other reporters.
A woman's experiences in the Great War
With the help of several patriots and with a false passport, she was taken to neutral Holland and then to London. Her eyewitness account of the German invasion of Antwerp and her adventures are chronicled in the book A Woman's Experiences in the Great War, published in 1915. The book was described by her sister Amy, who edited the manuscript, as “a mixture of sensational journalism and sentimental patriotism.”
The book reveals how Louise was the last journalist left in Antwerp after everyone else fled: “The whole city was mine. I seemed to be the only living thing left... The ghosts of five hundred thousand people floated before my vision.”
It was a bestseller and had its veracity confirmed by several sources. It even served as a reference for a Royal Commission into German atrocities. She donated most of her royalties to Red Cross refugee aid.
As media historian Jeannine Baker commented, Mack's claim to have been the last war correspondent to leave Antwerp was “as important to a journalist as having been the first to arrive.”
The post-war journalist
When she returned to Australia in 1916 on board the troopship/hospital Malawa, Louise was warmly received and gave a series of lectures on her war experiences and wrote frequently for The Sydney Morning Herald, the Sydney Bulletin and other newspapers and magazines. A tireless traveler, she toured the country for two years, speaking about the war. With her talks, she raised money for the Australian Red Cross. She became a traveling lecturer or lecturer until the 1930s.
After her adventures in Belgium, she realized she could build a lucrative career as a teacher. Her vivid imagination and narrative skills as a journalist and author of light fiction endeared herself to small-town audiences. In retrospect, her personal crusade can also be seen yet another facet of Northcliffe's successful anti-German propaganda campaign. Filled with atrocity stories, this new mass journalism was politically useful in boosting military enlistment.
As a Queanbeyan newspaper reported in 1918: “This is Miss Louise Mack, the beautiful and charming lady who has thrilled packed houses all over Australia with her wonderful recital: ‘What I Saw in the War’.” Her lectures were almost certainly embellished versions of the truth, becoming increasingly sensationalized with each new audience. Historian Jeannine Baker argues that it is for this very reason that Louise Mack has not yet been adequately studied for her role in Australian military and media history.
Yet despite the sensationalism, despite the embellishment, at the heart of Louise's experiences is the especially important contribution she made to the achievements of women in journalism. Reporting her death in 1935, the Sydney Morning Herald had this to say: “Her work will live after her.” Unable to find permanent work as a journalist after the war, Mack traveled the Pacific on educational lectures.
Literary works
Mack wrote more than fifteen novels and a memoir of some of her war experiences, as well as poetry, short stories, and journalism. Her younger sister, Amy Eleanor Mack, was also a children's book writer, journalist, and editor.
Novels:
The World is Round (1896)
Teens: A Story of Australian School Girls (1897)
Girls Together (1898)
An Australian Girl in London (1902)
Children of the Sun (1904)
The Red Rose of a Summer (1909)
Theodora's Husband (1909)
In a White Palace (1910)
The Romance of a Woman of Thirty (1911)
Wife to Peter (1911)
Attraction (1913)
The Marriage of Edward (1913)
The House of Daffodils (1914)
The Music Makers: the love story of a woman composer (1914)
Teens Triumphant (1933)
Maiden's Prayer (1934)
Poetry collection:
Dreams in Flower (1901)
Individual poems:
Manly Lagoon (1893)
Of a Wild White Bird (1895)
An Easter Song (1897)
Before Exile (1901)
To Sydney (1901)
Autobiography:
A Woman's Experiences in the Great War (1915)
Second marriage
On a fundraising trip to New Zealand, she met Allen Illingworth Leyland, an ANZAC captain from New Zealand who was invalided out after lung damage from gas attacks, and who worked for the Red Cross. She was in her early forties, and he was in his early twenties. They had similar tastes in books, music, and art, and soon began a relationship. But she believed that she was still legally married to Jack. They moved in together and later moved to Melbourne. Louise kept the relationship a secret from her family.
In 1924, she learned of Jack's death. She obtained a copy of the death certificate and discovered that he had died ten years earlier. Louise and Allen were married on 1 September 1924 in Melbourne. After her mother passed away in 1930, Louise took Allen to Sydney and introduced him to her sisters. They then moved to Mosman, from where she wrote a series of humorous but helpful articles for the Australian Women's Weekly entitled Louise Mack Advises and published her last two novels.
Sadly, Allen died in 1932. That war still hurt people. Heartbroken, Louise Mack passed away from a stroke on November 23, 1935, in Mosman, New South Wales. She was just 65 years old. As she was penniless, her equally well-known author sisters, Amy Harrison, and Gertrude Mack, paid for her cremation at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium.
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