Bee Miles: Australia's famous bohemian rebel, and the untold story behind the legend
by Rose Ellis
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Sydney has always had a peculiar talent for manufacturing
legends, then slowly forgetting what made them legendary in the first place.
Some become tourist attractions, others become cautionary tales. Some end up immortalised in pub conversations, half-remembered anecdotes and faded news clippings.
And others, like Bee Miles, achieve the
distinction of becoming part of the city's mythology while remaining
stubbornly, tantalisingly difficult to understand, especially in hindsight.
Having lived in Kings Cross for forty-five years on and off and spending a goodly portion of that time reading biographies of Sydney's yesteryear rogues, outcasts, dreamers, eccentrics, criminals, socialites and assorted free-range lunatics, I was surprised to discover this was one story I had somehow never got around to.
Bee Miles had always occupied that curious space:
familiar enough to be known by most, yet somehow still elusive.
This biography therefore arrived not merely as the story of Bee herself, but as another instalment in my ongoing search for the deeper history of the city I have called home for most of my adult life.
This is not one of those Sydney biographies stitched together from colourful recollections, news cuttings and the odd embellished tale that improves with each retelling.
The author has performed the sort of research that sends lesser writers running for sunlight. The scholarship is exhaustive, documentation meticulous, and sourcing substantial enough to satisfy the most demanding academic.
At times I found myself admiring the footnotes as
much as the prose.
I confess that for the first five chapters I was vaguely uncertain
whether I was reading a biography or attending an unusually engaging doctoral
seminar.
Ellis is determined that we understand the social, political, medical and cultural machinery of this age, before introducing us to the woman who spent much of her life gleefully jamming a spanner into it.
There
are discussions of social attitudes, psychiatric theories, gender expectations
and institutional structures. All perfectly sensible and relevant.
I occasionally caught myself getting impatient: 'Yes,
yes ... undoubtedly important but where, pray, is Bee?'
Then comes Chapter Six, and the book takes flight.
The historical scaffolding falls into place and Bee bursts centre stage with the force of a summer storm rolling in across Sydney Harbour. The contextual foundations that initially felt a touch dry suddenly reveal their purpose.
We are not simply observing a madwoman wandering city streets,
but a collision between an extraordinary individual and an era that possessed scant
tolerance for such personae.
From that point I was engrossed.
What emerges is a portrait of a woman way more complex than
the caricature frozen in popular lore.
Born into a privileged North Shore family, acutely intelligent, voraciously well-read and fiercely independent, Bee seemed destined from a young age to have difficulties with any institution convinced it knew what was best for her.
She loved literature, possessed an astonishing
memory and famously recited Shakespeare by heart. She recreationally challenged
authority figures, whilst refusing to accept conventional expectations around
class, behaviour and womanhood.
In another age she might have become an academic, public
intellectual or celebrated cultural critic. Instead she became Bee Miles. That
transformation forms the heart of Ellis's book.
One of the biography's strengths is its willingness to look
beyond the mythology. Familiar stories remain: free tram rides, public
confrontations, Shakespearean recitations, outraged officials, bemused police
and ceaseless friction with authority.
Yet Ellis poses a more difficult question. What happens when
society encounters someone who just refuses to fit?
Not in a romantic or literary sense, as a charming anecdote.
But in practical terms. Who pays the price? The answer, increasingly, was Bee
herself.
Throughout the biography Ellis examines Bee's encounters
with psychiatric institutions, hospitals, courts and authorities. What becomes
painfully clear is that many of those charged with helping her seemed keener to
pigeonhole her.
Particularly illuminating is Ellis's discussion of Bee's childhood illness, encephalitis lethargica, back then called 'sleeping sickness'.
The possibility that this condition left lasting consequences introduces a new dimension to Bee's story. Behaviour that was once dismissed as eccentricity, madness or wilful defiance may have been influenced by factors that neither Bee nor those around her understood.
What impressed me throughout was Ellis's refusal to reduce
her subject to a single explanation. Bee is never presented merely as a victim,
rebel or patient. She remains gloriously, frustratingly, stubbornly human.
Another notable aspect of this book is its distinctly
feminist perspective. It would perhaps be difficult to write honestly about Bee
Miles without confronting the reality that much of society's bewilderment
stemmed from the simple fact that she was a woman who refused to behave
according to script.
Ellis questions whether such behaviours by a man would have
attracted the same scrutiny, diagnosis and institutional intervention. And fair
enough.
As a lifelong gay ally of the sisterhood, I found this
approach neither surprising nor inappropriate. A more heterocentric male reader
may feel as if he's walked into a discussion mid-progress — the gendered lens
through which the story is told is unmistakable in these contextual early
chapters.
The book's most powerful achievement may be its treatment of
homelessness.
Local history romanticises Bee's later years, her image of
free-spirited detachment from material concerns fitting snugly within the Sydney
mythos. This, Ellis suggests, is misleading.
What instead emerges is a more troubling chronicle of
housing insecurity, social ostracism and institutional failure. The bohemian of
popular imagination gives way to a vulnerable and ageing woman struggling
against powers beyond her command.
The mythology is not destroyed but humanised, with truth
more affecting than legend. Rather than adding layers, Ellis peels away the
folklore.
The result is a Bee Miles both larger and smaller than the
myth. Larger because we see the courage, cunning and doggedness to live as she
did. Smaller because we see the cost, loneliness and vulnerability that legend neatly
omits.
Sydney has never lacked colourful characters, it has
produced them in industrial magnitudes. What it has often lacked is the
patience to understand them while alive.
Reading this was a reminder that cities tend to celebrate
their eccentrics only once they have ceased causing trouble. Bee Miles spent
much of her life being admired, ridiculed, institutionalised, patronised,
feared, exploited and misunderstood by the town that now claims her as one of
its folk heroes.
That contradiction lies at the heart of Bee's story and
Sydney's.
In rescuing Bee from the realm of anecdote and returning her
to history, Rose Ellis has produced something more valuable than a flamboyant biography.
She has written a thoughtful social history of twentieth-century Australia and
an empathetic reassessment of one of its most misunderstood women.
Not a bad rap for someone most remember as a bohemian who
quoted Shakespeare and dodged tram fares.
A superb biography that rewards patience, challenges assumptions and transforms a proverbial Sydney legend into something richer, stranger and more touching