No Place for a Woman

by Mayse Young, Gabrielle Dalton

Pine Creek publican Mayse Young was a legend by the age of twenty. In the Northern Territory of the thirties and forties she reared seven children. She was also "mum" to hundreds of stockmen, miners and drifters for whom her hotel was the best drinking hole on the track. Here, Mayse Young writes herself into Australian legend.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Australia, Autobiography

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Ghyslaine]

The first half of the book was a really interesting description of pioneering days in Australia. But halfway through , the writing style began to bother me. The short descriptions of things happening in a few years were a bit random for my liking. I was shocked by how the writer tells about the way children were taken from their Aboriginal mothers: so much better for them for now they had an education. I can't believe she didn't place any other comments to this and it was written in 1991. This really spoiled the book for me.

[Brian]

I first visited Pine Creek in 2013, and the Northern Territory when i was 63. I loved Pine Creek at first site. I can't say what it is about the place: it's a lovely little town whose glory days are well past, obviously doing it tough today, but putting on a brave face for the passing public. Imagine my surprise when I started reading No Place for a Woman to find that it centred around this lady's life in Pine Creek. She arrived there in 1929 when she was 16 and her parents bought the hotel. The book is a real 'warts and all' description of life for these pioneers: living in tents, forging their own roads to travel across the continent, working as women in business, success, tragedy. All that a full and fulfilled life can throw at you. Don't for one second think it's just about this one small town; these rugged people moved around in the Territory and down into South Australia as circumstances dictated. At every turn in her life, in every town and city they struggled to survive in, you are right there with her. And even though I was in all of these places some 83 years later, it so well written, so full of life, that I felt as if I was there with them.

[Barbara]

Mayse’s life was certainly not dull! This memoir offers the reader an engaging overview of her life from a childhood spent on the road with an itinerant father, to her life as a successful publican in the Northern Territory. Excerpts from the journal that Mayse began writing in girlhood, add perspective to this delightful memoir.
For Mayse and her siblings, formal schooling was almost non-existent with their nomadic life spent camping in remote areas along the route of the railway line that her father was helping to build. Her mother was her teacher and role model. From her parents, she not only learned practical skills for camp life but how to respond to and deal with adversity, hardship and loss.
When Mayse was 16 years old, her parents took on the Pine Creek Hotel, on the Stuart Highway in the Northern Territory. Thus began a settled period for the family as they built the business and became part of a close community, with Mayse learning new skills which she used later in her life.
Marriage to her charming Joe, led to an itinerant camping life again for a number of years. With the bombing of Darwin in WWW1, the 1957 floods in Katherine, Joe’s various failed ventures, Cyclone Tracey, and personal tragedies, life seemed to be a constant picking up of pieces and starting from scratch.
The courage, resilience, patience, generosity and good humour of Mayse and her mother inspired and encouraged others. This memoir will inspire anyone who reads it.

[Ruth Hosford]

We spent a morning in Pine Creek on our travels round the Northern Territory earlier this year and while we sat and enjoyed a cold beer and some lunch I read all about Mayse Young and her family in the restaurant. I made a note to get her book and am so glad I did. It’s a wonderful account of her early family life and the itinerant life they led in the outback while her father was a workman on the new railways being laid. After marrying she ran the Katherine and Pine Creek Hotels. Her descriptions of the Japanese attacks on Darwin, the flood in Katherine and Cyclone Tracy in Darwin are very vivid. She portrays the landscape of the NT so well and it’s a remarkably well told story by a remarkable woman who deserves all the admiration she acquired in her lifetime. I’m so glad to have read this story of a very full life.

[Patsy Bourke]

This work is a collaborative autobiography with a biographer Helen Dalton. Mayse Young was born in 1912 to a fettler father which necessitated very basic living in tents as the family travelled to wherever the work was available. For the first 15 years of Mayse's life, this was in Far North QLD, then somehow this family with stated limited resources was able to travel over 3,000km south to Port Augusta - in what then would have been very rough tracks rather than roads, and then head north another 5,000+ kilometres to end up in Pine Creek in the Northern Territory. There are photos in the book taken as part of this trek which in those days would have been very rare, so knowing how these were possible would be interesting.

Such a journey now would be considerable, but in the late 1920's it is difficult to understand how this was possible. There are some very interesting descriptions of life lived hard in basic conditions and some prevailing attitudes of isolated communities of the time. Some parts of the earlier story are quite detailed and later parts have significant gaps. It is easy to read and at times quite fantastical but it does represent a time and place in Australian life and folklore.

[Dragonladymoi]

This was an amazing book based on Mayse Young’s life. The history of the pioneers to the Territory and the rigours of life in those days were so incredible. A really interesting and entertaining read.

[Kylie]

What a beautifully written book with such warmth and joy for tough times.

[Kristjan Wager]

The book gives an interesting view into life in outback Australia before WWIi, but in the end the book fails because of the writing ability of the authors

[A.B. Shepherd]

So this is the autobiography of Mayse (pronounced Maisie) Young. She's a very well-known historical figure in the Northern Territory of Australia where she and her family operated several hotels/pubs throughout the 20th century.

This book tells of her childhood years roughing it, growing up in bush tents following her father around the country as he worked the railroads before they bought their first hotel, and goes all the way up through hurricane Tracey which leveled Darwin in the 70s.

It's not the best written book I've ever read, but it is chock full of everything that makes Australia a great country; local color, slang terms, interesting characters and stories and she lays it all bare. It also contains some very cool old photos.

If you want a taste of Australia in the early to mid 1900s this book is for you.