Jessica Anderson - Life As A Commercial Writer

Life As A Commercial Writer

In 1935, at the age of 18, Anderson left her Brisbane home to live in Sydney. Despite the fact that she spent her childhood in Queensland, she stated in interviews that she felt more affinity with Sydney, the city where she was to spend the bulk of her adult life. There she subsisted on wages from a number of sources, including a slide-painting job, and a job designing electric signs, where she was able to make use of her art school training, and later from work in shops and factories. She and her friends lived at Potts Point in “big seedy decaying mansions with gardens running right down to the harbour.” In a city still recovering from the ravages of The Great Depression, life for Anderson was not altogether easy: “Times were very hard,” she recalled; “People were poor, but very free. We had a good life.”

As Anderson remained throughout her life evasive about the details of her life as a commercial writer, it is not known when she began writing commercially under pseudonyms, what those pseudonyms were, or, indeed, how much she wrote. She revealed only that she began writing for magazines and newspapers out of commercial necessity, and rarely under her own name. Although she achieved success later in this field, she sometimes stated that, as her writing improved, her pieces were more frequently turned down for publication. In her thirties, she began to write for commercial radio. Beginning with half-hour slots, Anderson gradually became interested in the technique of crafting radio plays, and began submitting some of her better work to the ABC under her own name. She later ascribed her fondness for writing the expansive dialogue in her novels to her early experience writing radio plays.

It was in Sydney that Anderson met her first husband, Ross McGill, with whom she lived for three years before their marriage in 1940. Anderson described McGill as “a commercial artist who longed to be a painter.” Tragically, nearly all of his works were destroyed in a fire, and Anderson was left with only a few drawings of his that he had given to a mutual friend, who then generously shared them with Anderson.

Anderson and McGill temporarily relocated to London in 1937. There, Anderson found employment that she described as “donkey work”: she did research for a magazine named Townsman, and worked as a typist. Meanwhile, her husband, McGill, worked as a layout artist for Lever Brothers Agency, while continuing to paint in his spare time. While some critics have proffered this stint in England as evidence of the semi-autobiographical nature of Tirra Lirra by the River, Anderson rejected such claims, asserting that, while all of her characters had something of her in them, none were entirely autobiographical.

In 1940, Anderson and McGill returned to Sydney. During the war, Anderson worked as a seasonal fruit picker in the Australian Women's Land Army. She gave birth to her first and only child, Laura Jones (née McGill) in 1946. Jones now works as a film and television screenwriter in Australia.