The Queen of Bohemia, by Dulcie Deamer

I can’t remember exactly how I came across this book, but it was almost certainly the serendipitous result of extensive WILFing (for those unfamiliar with the term, I believe it amounts to aimless web surfing; the letters stand for What Was I Looking For?). At any rate, I’m glad to have discovered Dulcie Deamer, whose autobiographical The Queen of Bohemia offers a refreshingly frank take on the genre as well as a fascinating insight into the bohemian subculture of 1920s Sydney. 

Dulcie Deamer - novelist, journalist, thespian and free spirit - may only have been crowned “Empress of the Holy Bohemian Empire” when she was well into her thirties; but her youthful rise to fame is no less interesting than the heyday that takes up most of the book. Born in Christchurch in 1890, the daughter of a retiring doctor and his vivacious wife, Dulcie’s childhood was one of threadbare respectability: the family, while not wealthy, nevertheless managed to provide two precocious daughters with a sophisticated home education. Deamer’s disarmingly honest description of her early confrontation with “religious mystery” - an encounter with a vague, spiritual presence at the bottom of the garden - is described with characteristic no-nonsense candour. She is well aware of readers’ expectations for Freudian digressions, yet she refuses to satisfy the modern hunger for sordid revelations:  

“Despite such a promising start I didn’t rendezvous with any furtive local lads in the ti-tree thickets. What? - no experimenting a la Freud? How abnormal! Doesn’t such a deviate know what an autobiography is for these days? 

…The dull and long outmoded truth is that I was a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, frequently falling in love with fictional heroes, with whom the scruffy village boys had as much in common as a water buffalo with a racehorse. My sister and I referred to them as ‘country turnips’.” 

Encouraged into theatrical pursuits by her mother, Dulcie went on to spend much of her adolescence barnstorming with a melodrama troupe across New Zealand. An early marriage to stage-struck theatre manager Albert Goldie led to a fourteen-year world tour that took in three visits to America, three to England, and three to France, plus excursions to India, South Africa, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and the South Sea Islands. In a fortunate twist of fate, she and Albert had originally tried reserve a berth on the Titanic: the ship being fully booked, they were forced to sail to New York a week earlier, on the Olympic. 

Nowhere is Deamer’s wry style put to better use than when she describes a trip to China: 

“My outstanding memory…is of the Canton execution ground, with skulls, and heads, fresh and not so fresh, lying around. A huge, beaming Chinaman, the executioner, demonstrated with a butcher’s cleaver how he practised his profession…By this time, I was pregnant. It hadn’t made the slightest difference. Morning sickness or any other qualms were simply not written in my book of words. I suppose, to be regarded as a decent, expectant young woman with normal sensitivity, I should have had to be led aside from the execution ground to vomit; that’s if my partner had been criminal enough to take me there. And when my eldest son was born he didn’t have a severed head as a birthmark. He was, and remained, a healthy, balanced child.” 

By this time, Deamer had already authored several published poetry, plays and stories, and was beginning to develop the exotic, sensual novels that would make her name in New York and London as well as back home. These included the gorgeously titled The Suttee of Safa: A Hindoo Romance and In The Beginning: Six Studies of the Stone Age. Deamer’s fascination with stone age society was to remain a lifelong obsession. 

Having found themselves in America at the outbreak at of First World War - it was then that, in Deamer’s words, “I learned at first-hand what a kindergarten and emotion-ridden nation the United States was” - Dulcie and Albert returned to Australia during the final denouement. By this point, Sydney was ripe for celebration: in the aftermath of a devastating war, Australians were quick to claim  “our share of the lovely, irrational, general conviction that everything was now going to be good-oh… It was a universal mood which had never occurred before and which will never, can never, occur again. Overall events since then have disillusioned every last one of us.” 

Dulcie Deamer was already 32 and mother to six children (two died early) by the time she donned the infamously risqué, “never-to-be-dead-and-buried” leopard skin at the 1923 Artists’ Ball - the first of many fancy dress events to host Sydney’s vibrant community of artists, actors, scribblers, and bon viveurs. Deamer’s account of the inclusive, positive nature of these gatherings is impressively wholesome: 

“There were no poseurs or ‘rebels’ in those days. If you were shabby and makeshift you grinned and bore it, and your pals gave you anything they could spare, and bought you a drink…Those who rollicked and frolicked didn’t tear things to pieces, wreck furniture and stoush each other - they were not vandals, sadists and drug-takers…Among all the folk of every sort that my exceedingly expansive circle contacted only a single individual was spoken of, sotto voce, as ‘taking drugs’. ‘Poor mutt’ was the verdict. Nobody copied him.” 

Although she was by this point the toast of the town, Deamer’s existence as a freelance journalist in a humble King’s Cross bedsit remained hand-to-mouth (she and Albert had separated shortly after their return to Australia, by which point Deamer’s children were being raised by their grandmother). A makeshift Christmas celebration consisted of reheated baked rabbit, sausages and tinned peas: but Deamer and her circle seem never to have succumbed to self-pity, instead celebrating their exceptional lifestyle with the foundation of the group I Leici, Letterati, Conoscenti e Lunatici (The Happy, Literary, Wise and Mad). It certainly proved an inspiring antidote to poverty. 

“It was amazing how little, how slightly, true bohemians age,” writes Deamer toward the end of her remarkable account. By the time of her death in 1972, Dulcie Deamer was reconciled to her children and sister (Dorothea had embraced Catholicism as a young woman; Dulcie herself was later admitted to the Little Sisters of the Poor home in Randwick) and widely regarded as one of the leading lights of Sydney’s Golden Age. As Peter Kirkpatrick observes in his Introduction, “Her life was Dulcie Deamer’s finest work of art.” The Queen of Bohemia is a humourous, stylish and witty account of that life in Dulcie’s own words.  

 The Queen of Bohemia; Dulcie Deamer, University of Queensland Press 1998, 174 pp. ISBN 0-7022-2726-9