Every second-hand book tells two stories. The first is the story of the text. The second is the story that the book tells.
A few months ago, I bought a box of pre-war poetry books from a second-hand dealer who couldn’t sell them on the internet. ‘Detective books do better,’ he said, ‘and mysteries.’
One of the books was Poems Old and New, published in 1945 by the Brisbane Catholic poet, Paul Grano. Inside the front cover was a carbon copy typewritten manuscript poem called Gilded Day, by Margaret Compton Saunders. It was a pleasant enough work of its type, about feeling sad on a sunny day. At the bottom of the poem were the words ‘June Saunders, Ipswich’.
Inside the back cover of the book was another manuscript poem, this time in pencil. It was by Paul Grano himself and was entitled To a Young Poet Drowned—in memoriam June Saunders. Two weeks later, I chanced upon a book of verse by another minor poet, The Singing Tree published in 1941 by Paula Fitzgerald. The first poem in the book was a sonnet called Grief—to June Saunders.
At that point I really had no choice but to try to discover her story. Fortunately, enough information exists about June Saunders in the John Oxley Library, the Queensland State Library, the University of Queensland Fryer Library and a number of private archives to piece together a picture of her life. She was a schoolteacher, poet, broadcaster, children’s writer, actor and a member of both Brisbane’s Catholic intelligentsia and its left-wing fringe. She was 22 when she died—washed off the rocks at Stradbroke Island, on New Year’s Day, 1939.
What we know of her life shows us a world that for talented young women was at once more limited and more open than it is now. What we don’t know of her story leaves a lot of tantalising questions unanswered.
June Saunders was born Margaret Compton Saunders at Ipswich, Queensland on 3 June 1916. I don’t know why she was called June, but I suspect it was for the corny reason that she was born in June and her mother was named May. She was raised a Catholic (though in a letter she notes ‘Dad, by the way, is not a Catholic’), but was educated in the secular environment of Ipswich Girls State School and Ipswich Girls Grammar School. She shone at Ipswich Girls Grammar, editing her form’s section