THERE’S AN EVOCATIVE scene in the big-screen adaptation of Kathleen Tynan’s novel Agatha when Vanessa Redgrave as Agatha Christie and Helen Morse as her new bestie Evelyn Crawley, languish in a steam room at Harrogate’s Royal Baths in 1926.
In this tranquil, white-tiled, female-only space, the conversation between two fictitious women (Agatha is at that point pretending to be Teresa Neele of Capetown, South Africa; Evelyn is an entirely made-up character) drifts from ageing to the changeability of men.
Evelyn confesses to being very choosy with her lovers, a concept that Teresa is slightly shocked about and attempts to counter with a rather limp argument for faithfulness.
“It hardly seems worth it,” Evelyn replies. “That’s why choosing’s important. We can’t just let things happen to us.”
Up to this point in the film, director Michael Apted (1941-2021) and story writer Kathleen Tynan (1937-1995) had played reasonably fair with the facts, exploring significant gaps between the dots about the infamous disappearance of Agatha Christie (1890-1976).
Her disintegrating marriage, her car crash in Surrey followed by a night train to Yorkshire’s spa town Harrogate, her adoption of a new persona: these are all known facts.
The rest of Agatha (1979) could only be described as a masterclass in how to get away with portrayals of real-life people, or a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when you try.
Unarguably, the time was right. The ‘Queen of Crime’ had died in early 1976 when her cult was at its peak. Her posthumously released autobiography made no mention of her disappearance, but Tynan’s book Agatha: The Agatha Christie Mystery (1978), with its pitch of “an imaginary solution to an authentic mystery”, captured the interest of American and British film producers.
CINEMA’S CHRISTIES: Timothy Dalton and Vanessa Redgrave.
Agatha’s exposition beautifully portrays a collapsing marriage in the home counties between the wars. Timothy Dalton drives the scenes as the well-mannered but hardline Archie, the jaded husband who ignites the hidden survival instinct in Redgrave’s crumbling Agatha.
But American Gumshoe Wally Stanton (Dustin Hoffman in full flight) sniffs out a story in the ruins of the marriage, and as the tension rises, Timothy West’s pragmatic police detective delivers the cynicism that underpins the massive manhunt for the crime writer when she goes missing.
By the midpoint, Historic Harrogate serves up all the flavour of the Roaring Twenties, a decade that had been recaptured so exquisitely and profitably on film throughout the Seventies.
Tynan’s vision for Agatha was bold, yet her book and the subsequent film have been largely forgotten, something only devoted Christie fans love to hate-watch.
Woman in Crisis
Film critic Vincent Canby of TheNew York Times made allowances for Agatha “given the few verifiable facts of the case”.
“The result is a handsome, rudder-less sort of movie that isn’t quite a mystery story, not quite a love story and certainly not a biography,” he wrote, concluding that the production felt “unfinished”, “aimless” and “pleasantly endurable”.
Pauline Kael of The New Yorker saw “the oddness of genius” in Redgrave’s portrayal, but believed the production team, “haven’t come up with enough for their sorrowful, swanlike lady to do.”
It wasn’t until 2020, in a broad-ranging article Re-writing the Past, Autobiography and Celebrity in Agatha by academic Sarah Street, that we got a thorough examination of what happened to Tynan’s story when it was committed to film.
Street concluded that Tynan’s adaptation of her own novel had a “sympathetic premise” towards Agatha Christie, but unearthed a movie production she described as “torturous”.
“Apart from exploiting intense public interest in Christie, the film involved conflict between other celebrities and professionals who in their different ways struggled to make sense of this puzzling event in Christie’s life,” Street wrote.
Given access to transatlantic film production archives, she was able to examine correspondence between key creatives, tussling over the narrative.
In a 1977 letter to Apted during hurried, late-stage rewrites, Tynan described the characters of Evelyn and Wally as catalysts for the personal growth of Agatha Christie, a “woman in crisis”.
In recent years, much has been written about the mental health struggles of Agatha Christie in the 1920s. But in the 1970s, Kathleen Tynan was one of the first writers to suggest the author’s flight to Harrogate played out a desire for reinvention.
Evelyn Crawley was the emotional guide Tynan gave her, through a reckoning that had been intended to play out in the hands of women.
The original casting for this glamorous, independent character also became apparent in the details unearthed by Street: Julie Christie, who pulled out of the film due to illness. Helen Morse deftly stepped in, but late screenplay rewrites supplanted Evelyn with Wally in the film’s second half. The gumshoe becomes the wayward crime writer’s love interest, something Tynan never intended, according to her archived correspondence.
The major consequence was the unravelling of the feminist thread in Agatha. There’s a trace of it in that steam room conversation, when Evelyn encourages Agatha about not letting things just happen to her. Like a moment of insight in a fever dream, it feels as close to the emotional truth as anything.
Hang onto it when you watch this problematic but gripping film, to make sense of what Agatha does next.
The second stop in a series of literary excursions examines how one of the world oldest cave systems inspired a crime novel…
THE WAY TO Jenolan Caves within the Blue Mountains National Park of New South Wales has always been long and winding. The Burra Burra clan group of the Gundungurra nation, the region’s Indigenous custodians, tell a Dreamtime story of ancient spirits journeying there via the waterways and valleys. European settlers descended the steep ridges on foot and horseback from the 1830s, and visitors have traversed a variety of precarious access roads ever since.
The approach gives you plenty of time to cast off the everyday world. As a casual tour guide between 2008 and 2012, I used the inspiring commute to ponder the extensive stories of the place.
Like many trainees before me, I’d gleaned the local tales from my more experienced peers. It didn’t take long to realise that the job had granted me rare access to a unique oral history, although my journalistic experience told me it was a paradoxically flawed mish-mash based on limited primary evidence.
Almost instantly I felt there was a novel in this massive well of storytelling, and to find it I eventually decided to cut through Jenolan’s tourist tales to recreate a time when the caves sat on the edge of the colonial frontier. A place that settlers viewed with suspicion, not wonder, very often through a lens of faith.
What drove me were the stories few wanted to talk about, particularly First Nations peoples’ connection to the region; the cattle farmers who gradually occupied the same countryside; the Wesleyan Methodist community of the nearby region once known as Fish River Creek, now Oberon, and the role of women in early cave exploration.
Crime was never far from the colonial experience. The massacres and random killings of Aboriginal people and reprisals against settlers are now referred to as the Frontier Wars. The occupation of the land was not possible without the importation of convicts to build roads and towns, a mounted police force to impose British law, and Christian missionaries to uphold ethical standards.
Long before I embarked on a first draft, I interviewed Gundungurra elder Aunty Sharyn Halls at Echo Point in Katoomba, listening to her share knowledge about the pathways and waterways used by her ancestors between the Oberon region and the Southern Highlands. It helped me to understand how different the approaches to the caves were in the 19th century, and that new perspective encouraged me to question everything we think we know about Jenolan.
Errors and Conundrums
Jenolan’s oral tradition tells stories of two early female explorers. The more recent was Catherine (‘Katie’) Webb (1861-1941), daughter of a local businessman and visitor to Jenolan in its Victorian heyday.
Women visiting Jenolan in the 1800s.
Katie’s 1881 discovery of the chamber that bears her name in the Chifley Cave took place at a time when women were regularly photographed in caving attire. But another woman whose exploration pre-dated Katie’s by two decades hangs barely visible in the Stygian gloom.
I first heard about Jane Falls while on a training tour of the Lucas Cave. She sometimes rates a mention when Jenolan guides interpret the soaring Cathedral Chamber into which the first European explorers stumbled in January 1860. Some will tell you she assisted in that expedition, while others credit her with the discovery at an earlier date.
A person known as ‘J. Falls’ was mentioned in the letter written by George Whiting to the Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal about that expedition. This could be Irish emigrant and Oberon resident Jane Falls (1829-1911), or her mother Jane Falls née Nelson (1802-1893). It could also be Jane’s brother James Falls (1834-1911) or his twin George Falls (1834-1867) recorded with the wrong initial, because when it comes to giving credit for cave discoveries, Jenolan is full of errors and conundrums.
The use of initials instead of full names was common on hand-engraved memorials and in newspaper typesetting. Catherine ‘Katie’ Webb’s 1881 discovery resulted in her name being inscribed on an early plaque (now long gone) as ‘C. Webb’ in a list of ‘before-mentioned gentlemen’, her sister sister Selena among them, recorded as ‘S. Webb.’
But in 1995, according to what became known as the Historical Inscriptions Project (kept by Jenolan Caves Historical And Preservation Society), a full hand-written signature of Jane Falls was discovered in Jenolan’s Elder Cave, dated February 27, 1854. It’s a long way from the Cathedral Chamber in the Lucas Cave, but it’s one of the earliest names inscribed in the entire Jenolan system.
The obvious way to clear up the matter is to fact-check George Whiting’s claim that he and fellow explorer Nicholas Irwin were the first to enter the Lucas Cave. That’s problematic, because when an official plaque about cave discoverers was dedicated in the Grand Arch in the 1920s, neither man got a mention.
Photographs of this event reveal a well-attended ceremony on February 23, 1929. A clock on the rock wall pinpoints the solemn moment, just after three in the afternoon, when first in the line of dignitaries gazing up at the plaque was eminent explorer and geologist Sir Edgeworth David.
TROUBLING MEMORIAL Unveiling of a plaque by Sir Edgeworth David, to commemorate the discoveries of various caves, February 23, 1929 (Photographer: Sam Hood)
The plaque credits N. Wilson, G. Whalan and G. Falls with the co-discovery of the Lucas Cave in 1858, and is still pondered over by cave visitors today. But its veracity was challenged in the NSW papers for a few years after its dedication, and six decades later someone who knew Jenolan better than most made a judgment about it.
In his paper and subsequent book The Men of Jenolan Caves 1838-1964 (1987) speleologist and former Jenolan guide Basil Ralston was quick to reject the plaque in favour of George Whiting’s 1860 letter to the editor.
Whiting’s letter is nothing if not detailed. It reads like he was discrediting another claim when he described he and Nicholas Irwin finding the way in a “… pristine state, unbroken and undilapidated; not the slightest trace or vestige of human being ever having set foot there.”
But that was never the only doorway into the mountain.
Suspended between contradictory oral histories, citizen journalism and widespread speculation, the story of exactly who discovered Jenolan’s Lucas Cave sometime in the late 1850s remains an open case. Jane Falls’ role most certainly cannot be ruled out, but if she was involved, many more questions hang in the air.
Small Obfuscations
Further research on Whiting and Irwin only makes things murkier.
The George Whiting who wrote to the papers about his 1860 exploration party is extremely elusive in the records. Some of what we think we know about him comes from a letter that historian Ward Llewellyn Havard wrote to the The Sydney Morning Herald in 1934, with an aside describing Whiting as “tutor to Charles Whalan’s children”.
Early Oberon settlers Charles Whalan (1811-1885) and his brother James (1806–1854) happened across the caves in the 1830s. Elizabeth Whalan (1810-1899), married to Charles in 1836, was said to be the first white woman in the region.
The couple’s homestead Glyndwr became a popular base for expeditions to visit the underworld. They had many children and there are a few colonial-era George Whitings who could have educated them.
The closest candidate is George Robert Whiting (1834-1922), whose obituary locates the Oxford-born settler on the Turon River during the Gold Rush of the 1850s, not far from the Whalan family at Oberon. His later role as a teacher at Sydney’s ‘ragged school’ for destitute children suggests he had tutoring experience.
Explorer Nicholas Irwin is even sketchier because his name began to get mis-spelled at an indeterminate time, possibly in George Whiting’s 1860 letter that describes “Irwin” as “an old experienced guide”. Yet Charles Whalan’s son Alfred wrote to the Lithgow Mercury in 1899 describing the same man as “Urwin” and calling him Whalan’s “servant” who accompanied his master to the caves on an exploration in the early 1840s.
Report on the trial of Nicholas Urwin (British Library)
Nicholas Urwin (1808-1899) was in fact a former convict sentenced to hard labour in the burgeoning colony, but he was no petty thief. He was a lifer, transported to NSW after avoiding the noose. His crime: the rape of Mary Dodds, aged 77, in Country Durham in 1835.
Little wonder that his name never ended up on any plaque at Jenolan.
Yet after being granted a ticket of leave in 1845 and a conditional pardon in 1853, Urwin could be said to have attained something of an unconditional pardon in 1870 when Annie Mary Wild agreed to marry him. They produced twelve children prior to his death at Peelwood, aged over 90.
There can be no doubt the Whalans knew of Urwin’s crime. A convict’s record stayed with them through each transition towards their freedom. We know more about convicts than we ever could about many free settlers, simply because a description of their appearance may have been required had they escaped or reoffended, something it appears Nicholas Urwin never did.
George Whiting might have altered the spelling of Urwin’s name to Irwin as a means of disguising a known sex offender in much the same way as a convict could be construed as a “servant”; or a female explorer concealed by recording her initial only. Once again, small obfuscations resulted in huge ramifications for Jenolan’s view of itself and its history.
Female Gaze
Jane Falls’s story probably got a bit lost in Jenolan’s oral tradition for the most obvious of reasons: According to obituaries, she lived in the Oberon district from the 1850s until her death in 1911, but for the bulk of that time she went by her married name Jane Eaton.
After her husband William’s death in 1874, she emerged in reports about her wool and hops growing operations, and while her mother Jane was eulogised as fervently devout in 1893, Jane Eaton was remembered in 1911 as ‘well respected’ without any religious fanfare. Her grave remains unmarked in Oberon’s Old Methodist Cemetery and her progeny occupied the region for another century.
Unlike the stories of Katie Webb there is little detail, however mythical, about the cave explorations of Jane Falls. Faced with recreating what she might have achieved, I was left to imagination.
A dose of allegory allowed my early drafts to take shape. I was inspired by the classical Greek legend of Eros and Psyche. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India was another influence, and I took a leaf out of a powerful modern Australian myth: Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Psyche in the Underworld, 1865, by Eugène-Ernest Hillemacher(NGV)
Psyche is sent to the Underworld; Lindsay’s schoolgirls disappear into a monolith, and Forster’s Adela Quested confronts her hypocrisy in a cave. But just as interesting is what happens above ground, when half-truths take flight.
While mentions in a few newspaper reports and signatures on cave walls give scant evidence for a larger tale about Jane Falls, accepting the limitations freed me to explore what it would take for an unmarried, female, Irish émigré living in a devout Methodist community to participate in the discovery of an Australian cave in the mid-Victorian period; and why she would leave so few traces of her achievements.
If the rather abstract figures of George Whiting and Nicholas Irwin warrant a place in the interpretation of Jenolan Caves, then so too do Jane Falls, Katie Webb, and the generations of women who hosted its visitors, from Elizabeth Whalan and Lucinda Wilson to Barbara Chisholm of Caves House. Writers such as Margaret Isabella Stevenson and Agatha Christie also recorded their cave tours in detail and give a female gaze to Jenolan that is often lacking.
Border land of Error
The Methodism running through Jenolan’s settler history led me to research the teachings and principals of cleric John Wesley (1703-1791).
James Colwell’s Illustrated History of Methodism in Australia (1904) outlines the mission to assist the Aboriginal population of Bathurst, which was declining in the wake of the Bathurst War fought in 1824 between the Indigenous Wiradjuri nation and the British militia. It also paints a troubled picture of the Bathurst and Fish River Methodist circuits between 1849 and 1852.
The Reverend John Pemell reported, “the Circuit was low in piety, for there had been a fourth year’s appointment against which the people protested. Great discord existed,” and detailed the abandonment of congregations as a result of the NSW Gold Rush.
Methodist support for Aboriginal people eventually became less of a priority than the survival of diminishing congregations. Many historians describe the broader Methodist mission to support Indigenous people as a failure.
Yet early European settlers thrived on it, and Philippa Gemmell-Smith in her 2004 Thematic History of Oberon Shire directed me to Pemell’s mention about the construction of a sod-walled chapel at Jenolan Caves in 1851.
Illustration from The Circuit Rider.
This apparently pre-dates other buildings at the caves. If it had been raised in the Jenolan valley this soil-constructed chapel was likely washed away by floods years ago. Its disappearance speaks to the broader vanishment of 19th century circuit riders who engaged in “field preaching” and tent revivals, which seemed more of a tradition on the American frontier.
But not so. Up at old Oberon when it was known as Fish River Creek, the Wesleyan circuit saw revivals, conversions and chapel-raising. According to a preacher who knew him, Charles Whalan experienced a conversion to the Methodist faith on the banks of the Saltwater Creek near Glyndwr on his return from a revival at Bathurst in around 1842.
“He was something of a mystic, too. The look into eternity made spiritual things real to him. He had those revelations of the unseen, which only come to those who live in close touch with God. He had dreams and visions, and suggestions which he had no doubt came from God for his guidance; and sometimes perhaps the workings of an active imagination influenced by strong feeling or unconscious bias may have been mistaken for the Divine Voice. There is a border land of error that lies close to the truth, and the step over is taken easily enough and without conscious default.”
This portrait of Charles Whalan by Reverend Matthew Maddern appeared in a comprehensive biography of Whalan in The Methodist in July, 1911, foregrounding Whalan’s work for the Wesleyan faith and leaving his connection to Jenolan as an afterthought.
William ‘California’ Taylor.
Tent revivals were common in frontier communities throughout the 19th century, and visiting American preachers were not uncommon during the Gold Rush. Evangelical missionary William ‘California’ Taylor (1821-1902) hosted revivals throughout regional Australia in the 1860s.
Many Irish Methodists practiced being “slain in the spirit” or falling prostrate in ecstasy during preaching. Wesley himself encountered this form of rapture in his travels, as stated in his journal entry of July 14, 1759:
“In the afternoon, Mr B was constrained, by the multitude of people, to come out of the church, and preach in his own close. Some of those who were here pricked to the heart, were affected in an astonishing manner… One woman tore up the ground with her hands, filling them with dust and with the hard trodden grass, on which I saw her lie, with her hands clinched, as one dead, when the multitude dispersed. Another roared and screamed in a more dreadful agony than ever I heard before… I saw one who lay two or three hours in the open air, and being then carried into the house, continued insensible another hour, as if actually dead. The first sign of life she showed was a rapture of praise intermixed with a small joyous laughter.”
If it seems outlandish to equate such phenomena with Jenolan, consider that Havard also wrote about a young stockman, Luke White, who claimed to have seen the Devil parking his horse-driven coach inside a cavern at Jenolan Caves in the 1830s.
White was a convict transported to NSW for seven years before his release in 1834, after which he took up work with various cattle farmers in the Oberon region, including a stint as an employee of Charles Whalan’s. By 1840, he was before the courts again, charged with cattle theft.
Whalan appeared as a witness, although his association with White dealt him a counter accusation of cattle thievery too, for which he was committed and bailed at the time of giving evidence at White’s trial.
White was found guilty and transported to Norfolk Island, but Whalan found god. His biographer Maddern described this as “the great change” of Whalan’s life, after being “more than careless about the concerns of his soul.”
Maddern was very understanding about his old friend Whalan when he eloquently skated around the man’s mystical beliefs, outlining how his “active imagination” traversed a “border land of error”.
There are perhaps no better terms to define Jenolan Caves as a tourism experience and a subject to research and write about.
Look no deeper than the enduring reminder of White’s hellish vision, remembered to the present day in the name of Jenolan’s enormous daylight cavern: The Devil’s Coach House.
Connecting Dots
My literary journey to Jenolan was enriched by listening to Aunty Sharyn, who gave new perspective to my many years of research about the history of Aboriginal life in the region.
As the manuscript came together, Gundungurra traditional owner Kazan Brown assisted me in depicting Burra Burra history, place and cultural practice. I also relied on aspects of Burra Burra culture at Jenolan Caves that have been shared by the Gundungurra Tribal Council.
My experience of guiding groups along thousands of steps inside the caves was a constant inspiration, considering how the winding caverns bind everyone who enters into a common experience, often filled with wonder yet tinged with anxiety.
The underground settings in my book are based on real caverns, although I have engaged a bit of dramatic license in depicting some of the chambers, and how far the characters reach into the mountain and by which means, considering the novel is set in the early 1850s.
But what can we ever really know with absolute accuracy in Jenolan’s “border land of error” when so many tales have been told and tracks covered?
To connect the dots left by history, I re-imagined a fiction of all these lives.
Readers sleuthing after facts will hopefully set themselves free to enjoy my speculation about Jenolan’s discordant year of 1852, and the way the place baffled European settlers who stumbled into the dark, heads full of powerful scripture.
Main image: Souls on the Banks of the Acheron, Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, 1898 (The Belvedere)
WHAT captivating works can writers produce when given a random phrase? This multi-genre collection of 300-word micro stories, penned by the eclectic High Country Writers of the NSW New England region, shows just how far the smallest inspiration can flow. With courage and curiosity, these wordsmiths gathered once a month to read their work and encourage one another, before randomly selecting the next writing trigger. Take the plunge!
The prologue of Diving Into Deep Water
The High Country Writers group is an informal gathering of wordsmiths who started meeting at The Makers Shed, a small corrugated-iron shop at the southern end of the high street of Glen Innes in northern inland New South Wales, in mid-2019.
In 2024, the group moved with that business to a century-old former butcher shop on the New England Highway at Deepwater, at the heart of the traditional lands of the Ngarrabul people.
Participants from Glen Innes, Inverell, Bingara, Grafton, Ashford and Deepwater regularly discussed the art of writing until one member – Anna Russell – suggested the group start to write 300-word responses to a prompt, one word or a short phrase selected at random from the High Country Books shelves in the lounge area where we meet.
This ‘homework’ was then read out to the group at the next session, leading to many wonderful listening experiences for all those within earshot.
Somewhere along the line, High Country Books decided these moments were too good to leave hanging invisible in the air, and offered to publish the work with each writer’s permission.
This collection has been minimally edited, preserving each writer’s response to every prompt (which appear as chapter headings), and their writing style. The 13 prompts appear in order of them being set, but there is no strict order to the 300-word stories within the chapters, I have simply curated them by feel so that readers can enjoy the way the literary responses vary so widely.
The result captures an incredible breadth of storytelling which the writers workshopped into the promotional materials for this collection, sessions that were guided by D’Arcy Lloyd.
High Country Books is delighted that the group developed a title with more than one meaning. Diving Into Deep Water is both a reference to the township where The Makers Shed operates, and the act of creative courage that these writers threw themselves into.
That level of personal bravery is what our artisanal business is all about: creating despite the odds of success, regardless of opinions and in collaboration with like-minded artists.
I thoroughly commend all these stories to you and encourage you to embrace the third meaning of this collection’s title, which is all about you, the reader, experiencing the depths of writers’ imaginations when handed a theme and asked to explore the infinite within such a disciplined word count.
On that note, let me fill you in on the various “rules” of this project and how some were broken, of course!
Any reader counting words will find the odd infraction of the group agreement, but none of the contributors thought this should be cause for any culling.
Not every writer wrote to every prompt. Hey, life gets busy and you can’t do everything! Some wrote more than one response to a prompt. Let’s not discourage them!
Not every prompt was extracted from another piece of writing. Some were specific challenges: to write without using the letter E (‘Sans E’), to pen a short autobiography (‘Memoir’) and the account of someone else, from biological or chosen family (‘Biography’).
Some of the works are part of larger storytelling projects, details of which you’ll find in the author biographies at the back of this book; but the vast majority are standalone pieces.
Between these covers you’ll find multiple genres: crime, horror, historical fiction, humour, fantasy, poetry, experimental fiction and non-fiction. Some may find themes and terms they find offensive, used in historical context or otherwise. There is no content warning apart from this advice: skip any parts you find challenging, but don’t let a little literature scare you!
Thanks to all the participants who contributed their work, and to those who took on leadership roles at key times of this process, facilitating sessions and keeping the project moving along. Kris Nissam and D’Arcy Lloyd put their hands up for proofreading; Brydie O’Shea hosted a session at her beautiful garden, and Deepwater’s Top Pub made our group welcome while The Makers Shed was being renovated.
Big gratitude to all the writers for entrusting their work to an emergent publisher. As an acknowledgement of their contribution, High Country Books at The Makers Shed will donate ten per cent of all sales of Diving Into Deep Water to our region’s Westpac Rescue Helicopter Service, for as long as the title is in print.
Michael Burge Media 