Jessica Anderson - Early Life

Early Life

Jessica Anderson was born Jessica Margaret Queale in Gayndah, Queensland on the 25th of September, 1916 to Charles James Queale and Alice Queale (née Hibbert).

Anderson’s father, Charles Queale (1867-1933), was the youngest of a large Irish family, and the only one of his siblings to be born in Australia. Upon their arrival in Queensland, the Queales set up residence at Gayndah in a house to which Anderson fleetingly refers in Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories as “the Old Barn”. Coming from a family of farmers, Charles Queale acquired a veterinarian’s certificate and took up a position in the Department of Agriculture and Stock.

Anderson’s mother, Alice Queale (1879-1968), was born in England, and emigrated to Queensland with her family at the age of three. The daughter of a Church of England music teacher, she had learnt the violin as a child and sometimes played for her family as an adult. Before marrying, Alice worked in the public service and joined the Queensland labour movement, in which she met Anderson’s father, Charles. Staunch Anglicans, Alice’s family disapproved of her marriage to Charles, and for the rest of her life Alice’s mother refused to see Charles or any of Alice’s children.

Jessica was the youngest of four children; her elder siblings were Alan Lindsay Queale (1908-1982), Vida Joan Queale (1910-1954), and Patricia Queale. While each features to some extent in her semi-autobiographical work, Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories, Anderson’s relationship with her brother, Alan (Neal in the memoirs), who was eight years her senior, is the least developed in the collection. Indeed, Anderson stated in one interview that for many years, she and her brother “lived in different channels of the same family,” and that it was only during the later years of his life, when they were the last surviving members of their immediate family that they grew close. Alan Queale rose to some renown in his own right as a prolific archivist, mostly of Australiana and artefacts of Queensland’s history, and many of his collections remain in the State Library of Queensland and the National Library of Australia. Beyond the brief glimpses afforded by Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories, little is known about Anderson’s relationships with her two sister, Joan and Patricia. Her eldest Sister, Joan, died in her early forties, when Anderson was in her thirties, tragically leaving behind several young children. Her other sister, Patricia, also died of cancer some years later. Anderson writes very affectionately of her sisters.

For the benefit of their children’s schooling, the Queale family moved from Gayndah to the Brisbane suburb of Annerley when Anderson was five years old. Anderson’s father, Charles, somewhat begrudgingly left his father’s “meagre acres” and took up a job in an office in Brisbane’s CBD, from which “he instructed others how to farm, how to treat disease in stock and crops, but still longed to return to farming himself.”

For the remainder of Anderson’s childhood, the Queale’s lived at 56 Villa Street, in a house abutting Yeronga Park. On the opposite side of the park was Yeronga State School, the school at which Anderson began her formal education. In spite of its reputation as one of the best state schools in Queensland at the time, Yeronga State School rapidly became a site of dread and frustration for Anderson, who suffered from a speech impediment that caused strife for her in the classroom. Anderson’s speech impediment (as well as her occasional flirtations with truancy) became such a hindrance to her education that her parents decided that she was to be home-schooled by her mother for a year, while attending weekly speech therapy sessions in the city. In spite of these efforts, Anderson’s slight stammer was to stay with her for the rest of her life; several observers commented that the impediment lent her speech a careful and deliberate air. Following her primary school education, Anderson attended high school at Brisbane State High School. Upon graduation, she attended Brisbane Technical College Art School.

Anderson’s father died when she was just sixteen. Suffering from chronic bronchitis and emphysema, and having survived diphtheria and typhoid fever, her father’s illness is a pall that hangs over many of the tales in Stories from the Warm Zone, and his death was undoubtedly a “bitter blow” to the young girl and her siblings.

Anderson appeared to have a complicated relationship with Brisbane, a city “where brutality and gentleness rested so easily side by side.” Although she believed 1920s Brisbane to be quite parochial, she stated that it wasn’t “altogether narrow and rigid.” She took the well-thumbed copies of the great Russian novels in Brisbane’s public libraries as evidence of the presence of many frustrated people in Brisbane; “people with aspiration beyond their society.” Herself a victim of the stifling social expectations of the old colonial town, she has stated that she “would have like to be an architect, but it seemed at the time absolutely impossible for a girl to be an architect, especially in Brisbane.”