The Perils of Being Yourself
Seventy one year old Bee Miles' husky smoker's voice booms through the corridors of the Little Sister of the Poor in Randwick in August 1973.
"It takes a man or a woman of great moral courage - a man or a woman almost unique - to dare to take the risk of being himself or herself all the time, never posing, acting or affecting."
I, and fellow filmmaker Jan Sharpe, are talking with Sydney's most famous eccentric. With our tape-deck switched to 'record', Bee's delivery of answers to our questions is that of a Shakespearean actor projecting well-rehearsed lines to audience members at the back of the theatre.
"It is a dangerous business being yourself. I know of nothing more certain to provoke the almost always false epithet 'mad' or to deprive that man or woman of his or her liberty."
The deprivation of Bee's liberty began in the 1920s when her father committed her to a 'lunatic asylum' for behaving in public in ways he deemed unseemly for a young woman at the time.
In the Mitchell Library Jan and I had located a diary record Bee kept of her 'madhouse' experiences in the 1920s, entitled 'Prelude to Freedom'. In it she writes about the fraught relationship she had with her father, hinting at incestuous undercurrents between them, but providing no details. Jan and I wanted to know more, if Bee was prepared to open up to us more than she had to previous media enquiries regarding her father. Perhaps her love/hate relationship with him held a clue to the radical change in her behaviour that occurred in her late teens?
It was during her turbulent teens that Bee began to refuse to conform to society's conventions, mores and moral values. She was, to use her own words, 'a tenant of the city and student of life' - not caring at all for appearances, clothes, money, social position, fashions, traditions or what people thought of her.
Jan and I, hoping to make a documentary about Bee's life, were curious to know more about it - from her point of view as opposed to that of the many press reports about her, now that she had 'retired' from being an 'eccentric atheist' and was being cared for by devout Catholic nuns.
We had located Bee's on-the-road travel diaries also, read them, and were convinced that there was much more to her than the 'eccentric' tag that had been applied to her. We were not disappointed. Bee filled in for us many of the gaps that existed in the public's knowledge of her - revealing herself to be an intelligent, well-read, complex, contrary and often contradictory woman who could not be summed up with any one-word label - either 'mad' or 'eccentric'. This became apparent to us just minutes into our first visit when we discovered that Bee, a devout atheist and long-time critic of religious dogma, loved the nuns caring for her, and that they loved her - even when she tried to convert them to atheism.
Bee was born in 1902 into a wealthy North Shore family. She was educated at Abbotsleigh, an exclusive private school, where she was considered a brilliant pupil, completing her Leaving Certificate with first class honours in English.
She studied English and philosophy for a year at Sydney University but did not sit for her exams as a result of a bout of encephalitis lethargica that could easily have killed her, as it did more than a million infected with the disease worldwide. Bee survived, but her behaviour in public became even more outrageous than it had been before. Some said this was because she had studied too hard at university, and others that the encephalitis was the cause of her 'eccentricity'.
After learning shorthand and typing, spending a short time at a kindergarten training college and making a few unsuccessful attempts to hold a job, Bee 'dropped out', spending her time 'just mooning around and going to the library'.
It was her 'mooning around' that first brought Bee public notoriety. She would ride around Sydney on her bicycle, hanging on to the backs of cars and trams, jump onto the bumper bars and bonnets of moving cars for a free ride, leap on and off moving trams, and swim far out beyond the line of breakers at Bondi with a sheath knife in her belt to stab sharks. She once rode 100 miles to Newcastle on the front bumper bar of a car.
When we asked her why she did those things Bea replied:
"Just for a bit of excitement. I think the youth of the country should live a little toughly, dangerously, exhilaratingly and simply. Living thus, they are ready for anything that's coming - wars, political upheavals, strikes, accidents, disease, jail and finally death. Since the world is so beastly and life is so short we are all justified in having as much fun and excitement as possible providing we do not hurt anyone else physically, I specify physically because people's mental hurt, as a rule, is not, should not and cannot be our business."
At the age of 21 Bee was declared insane, though successive psychiatrists over the years could not provide a diagnosis of the nature of her illness. Despite several escapes and recaptures, she was forcibly detained in mental hospitals for three and a half years. She told Jan and I that her father was responsible:
"When I was 18 he hated me so much that he wanted me locked up ... he tried to drive me mad. He'd go around with a paper and pencil and write down in a book everything that he thought about me was mad. Such a person is insane himself. My father had a fixation on me; he was incestuous; mother had to stop him doing things in the house. He hated me for three reasons: because I did not think he was an intellectual genius, and I'd ceased to admire and respect him; because I wouldn't offer myself to him, and because he was frightfully jealous because I was more intelligent, better educated, and had a great deal more intellectual and moral courage."
In 'Prelude to Freedom' she relates the circumstances that led to her being committed:
"Dad appears to be eliminating me from the family. He tried to have me put away a year or so ago but failed because though I was running wild at the time, I had not been in trouble with the police, was not playing around with men and was at home every night. One night, however, he had a bad fright. My mother and elder brother threatened to leave the house unless he stopped beating me. For years he had been treating me brutally and he feared that mother would consult the police on account of his incestuous behaviour towards me. So he told the doctor at the Reception House his own faults, projecting them on to me, and I was declared insane after being asked two questions."
Bee's diary is a fascinating document - not only because of the rays of light it shines on her relationship with her father, but as a record of the appalling state of mental hospitals in the 1920s. Below are some extracts from it:
"On entering (hospital) all our possessions were taken away from us ... I asked one of the doctors whether or not I might be allowed to use my toothbrush and other toilet articles. Why I should have to ask for them is beyond me. However, the doctor said 'yes' and added - "now I hope you'll show yourself worthy of these privileges.' In every mental hospital we patients are treated as criminals and our rights are called privileges.
There is continual talk of disciplining the patients. It is not only my belief but the belief of every man and woman who understands himself, that repression is a cause of insanity. Yet, discipline continues ad nauseum and ad absurdum.
In the hospitals I have been in most of the patients are forced to sit down all day long. It is thus easier for the nurse to keep an eye on them; the nurses' convenience always being the first consideration. One woman has been tied to a seat for at least three months and her buttocks are covered with boils. Another woman has been in a straight-jacket for three years.
The human animal behaves like any other animal when deprived of liberty. Some so-called lower animals scream, some become inert, most fight. It doesn't say anything for the doctors' intelligence that they confine patients in strait-jackets when they are violent.
We read that insane people used to be thrashed; they're not treated any less cruelly now. I saw Watkins (a nurse) strangling Emily the other day, with her fingers, and have seen the grazes on Mattie's throat from the stocking that Taylor twisted around it. We could tell Super(intendant) but what's the use. When the nurse denied it he'd put us down as delusioned.
Some days ago I was concerned with a minor row in the laundry. I was dragged back to the ward by four nurses who ... tried to lock me in a cell. Believing them to be unjust I resisted their efforts for about 10 minutes, at the end of which time, Charge, dripping with perspiration, strangled me unconscious with her fingers."
Bee's defiance of doctors and nurses resulted in her being put in refractory wards with violent patients. She spent her time educating herself with books sent to her by an aunt, Ellie, who was her only regular visitor, but soon became bored and lonely. She wrote in her diary:
"After a year's observation of insanity I have come to the conclusion that I am not insane, and begin to long heartily for my freedom. I feel the loss of my liberty but am happy-natured enough to be able to Beer my imprisonment with reasonable equanimity. Besides, it is a splendid experience. Even though I sometimes bemoan my lot I realise that I am developing my powers of observation every day. I am very resilient, though bashings by nurses, with or without provocation, are frequent."
A few weeks after the death of her mother, of whom she was very fond, Bee, feeling sad and desperate, escaped from hospital and hitch-hiked to Queensland where she was soon picked up by the police. Whilst in Brisbane she was examined by three psychiatrists who declared that she was 'abnormal but not insane. And not fit to be in a mental hospital." Despite their pronouncements Bee was sent back to Sydney, at the insistence of her father, and given 10 days of solitary confinement as punishment.
The doctors moved Bee from ward to ward and hospital to hospital in an attempt to 'cure' her, but to no avail. Bee writes in her diary:
"Today there's some bad news for me. I am to be transferred to another hospital. The reason for this is that the doctors do not feel they are making any headway with me and they wish to give another lot of medicos the opportunity to try and make an impression. The poor halfwits. They say I'm insane but won't admit there's no cure for it. If a person returns to sanity in these hospitals he does so not because of any treatment he has received but as a rule in spite of the doctors and attendants. I feel depressed and weep loudly. I have come to love many of the patients. Still I'd better be philosophic about it because I cannot alter Super's decision. I have been here long enough to realise that the wishes and happiness of the patient are rarely considered. There doesn't seem to be any chance of leaving these places alive. The only change in me is that I am wiser."
Shortly after her arrival at the new hospital Bee writes:
"This is my worst experience of mental hospitals in my three years of imprisonment. I have not been treated to any treatment more stupid or crueller. The Superintendent is ignorant, conceited and self-satisfied. I am put to bed as soon as I arrive. I am neither ill nor tired but Super says he wishes to observe me. This treatment does not fail to irritate me and I refuse to knuckle under to it. I find it impossible to remain idle in bed; so I walk about in the dormitory, for which insubordination I am put in a straight-jacket and into a cell. Super has said I have had too much of my own way; and that I'm not going to have it any more and that he firmly intends to discipline me. He refuses to allow me to read ... He says I have been reading literature too heavy for me ... He meant, of course, that it was too heavy for him, and was obviously jealous. 'Prejudices' by Mencken is my choice but the intellectual fellow says I should read Beeu Geste."
Shortly afterwards, Bee escaped again and this time enlisted the aid of Smith's Weekly, which published her incarceration story on the front page under the title, "Madhouse Mystery of Beautiful Sydney Girl". A scandal ensued which resulted in Bee's release, and a promise made by her father to provide her with a small allowance that would enable her to live away from home. Soon afterwards, the doctor who had declared Bee insane was asked to resign from Reception House for giving another patient an incomplete and improper examination.
From her release from mental asylums until her early sixties, Bee became famous in Sydney for her street recitals of favourite passages from Shakespeare. Around her neck she carried a sign that read, "Shakespeare Poetry & Prose Recited, Rational Talks on Many Subjects 3/- 2/- 1/- 6 d' (Three, two and one shillings, and six pence).
Bee became even more famous as a result of her belief, which she expressed in action, that all public transport should be free. She would wait at traffic lights, and when the lights turned red would leap into the stationary cab and get a free ride to wherever the cab was going. Some taxi-drivers were amused; others drove her to the nearest police station, and one tried unsuccessfully to remove her from the cab by throwing three buckets of cold water over her. Only a foolish driver would attempt to use force to get Bee out of his cab. Those who did, risked having their door ripped off its hinges, as happened a couple of times. For 35 years Bee also rode free on busses, trams and trains:
"All the conductors gave me rides for two reasons - one, I wasn't bad to look at and two because I wasn't a snob. I'd talk to them."
Bee did pay her fare on a couple of occasions. Once, when she went to Tasmania by taxi for a holiday, and when she paid taxi driver Sylvia Markham $600 to drive her to Perth and back to collect flowers for the Sydney herbarium. Amongst Bee's many passions was a love for botany and the beauty of the Australian bush.
Whilst in cabs or on street corners Bee would express her views on society loudly to anybody who would listen:
"When I am annoyed by stupidity, conceit, insincerity, affectation, swinishness and childishness I've got a tongue like the bite of a taipan."
Bee's tendency to hijack taxis and tell people precisely what she thought brought her, inevitably, into conflict with the police, who regularly charged her with offensive behaviour and offensive language. Not once, though, did they manage to convict her on a criminal charge.
Bee claimed that she was victimised by the police because they couldn't make her leave the city; couldn't get her on a criminal, vice or drunk charge; couldn't convict her of vagrancy because she had a small income, and couldn't get an honest doctor to declare her insane.
In all, Bee was charged 195 times. She could not afford a lawyer and so often defended herself in court. Despite her rhetorical skills she rarely got off:
"What can you do against superior cunning. The police are practiced liars. I am not. I might have got off several times ... but they won't listen to you unless you have a lawyer."
Bee's longest jail sentence was four and a half months "for swinging on a car door." Needless to say, Bee did not have a very high opinion of the legal system:
"Magistrates, judges and juries are anti-social because they deliberately and with malice aforethought, commit men and women to a system which they know will only make them worse."
Bee's appearances in court were always entertaining. Exasperated magistrates would make deals with her. When fined five pounds for fare evasion on a tram in 1954 Bee asked for 'time to pay'. The magistrate agreed, with a sigh and a smile - on condition that Bee promised to pay her tram fares for the next month. Bee agreed to the conditions. When she appeared in court again a couple of weeks later the magistrate said: "Well Miss Miles, I thought you promised me that you would pay your fares for a month." "Yes," said Bee quickly, but that was for trams, not busses."
In another court appearance Bee pleaded not guilty to travelling on a train without paying her fare. When asked why she had not bought a ticket she replied that she had not bought one because there were no notices around the station saying that tickets must be bought.
When the police suggested that Bee should undergo a mental survey - "She's clearly anti-social" - Bee replied: "Listen to him. I'm not anti-social. I'm only anti the existing social order."
Throughout her life, Bee often shocked people by completely ignoring conventions and refusing to accept society's definitions of right and wrong:
"As far as I can see right is what we like and wrong is what we don't like."
She started smoking at 20, at a time when it was not considered 'nice' for women to smoke in public:
"One day I was smoking in public and a woman said to me, 'Would you put out your cigarette, I have my little niece with me.' Apart from politely and loudly blasting her, I took no notice. A man said to me - 'God didn't teach women to smoke.' Apart from politely and loudly inquiring whether or not God had taught men to smoke and telling him to go to hell, I took no notice."
Bee did not believe in the custom of buying a ticket when she went to the cinema. She would march straight into the cinema, light up a cigarette and let the audience and management know in a loud voice what she thought of the program: 'Rats.' 'Take it off.' 'Don't kiss with your mouth open you dirty swine.'
We asked Bee if she enjoyed being outrageous. She replied that she never set out to be outrageous; that she simply did what was natural for her to do - give way to her 'harmless impulses'.
"If people are shocked it is because they are vulgarians."
It did not worry her at all that many people thought she was mad:
"The average man who says I am mad proves himself commonplace - because it is the commonplace man's way to proclaim his intellect and moral superiority. The truth is he just can't understand me ... actually I'm probably the sanest person in this city. I've worked out a philosophy of living and I've stuck to it. I'm happy because I live the life I want to. I never get depressed; there's nothing in my life to make me depressed."
Bee's formula for happiness included avoiding envy, greed, jealousy, malice, snobbery and vindictiveness; cutting possessions to a minimum; drinking only when thirsty and then only milk, water or soda water; eating only when hungry. She laughed to show feelings of amusement or pleasure and not at the predicament of others. She scorned appearances, money, social position, manners, fashion and most tradition. She lived in accordance with nature - toughly, dangerously, excitingly, exhilaratingly and simply.
Bee believed that most people live out their lives in a state of quiet desperation and misery. In the 1930s she wrote in her diary:
"Most people are miserable most of the time and when they see something full of happiness and beauty in living they feel more miserable by comparison, and the extra misery makes them want to kill it or put it out of sight. A man once told me that there are people in Sydney who would like to see me dead. I know one. If not beautiful I yet find great happiness in living."
Bee's view of mankind was extremely pessimistic:
"I don't think you can change the nature of man. I think he's a swine and remains a swine. The average man is hypocritical, lying, unintelligent, malicious, vindictive, envious and inferiority-complexed. He is afraid of both hearing and speaking the truth."
Bee added that the average man (especially if educated) had ...
"... the ability to repress any of his desires that the law or psychologists tell him are wrong ... for all his faults, however, the average man can frequently be very good company and very good fun."
By 1939 Bee had been arrested so many times and was so well known she found it impossible to find anywhere to live. Consequently she began to sleep out, and over the next 20 years slept in parks, a stormwater canal at Rushcutters Bay, underneath schools and in the porches of St. James church and Christchurch St. Laurence. Bee was very grateful to the rector of St. James:
"He's a very decent chap for a Christian."
The stormwater canal in Rushcutters Bay Park was one of Bee's favourite residences because the police did not harass her there as they did when she slept in Belmore Park.
She told us proudly that in all the years she was sleeping out she was treated with respect by the many drunks she came into contact with:
"One night I was sleeping on the porch of Christchurch St. Laurence and a man came and started to molest me. I said, 'You're not going to molest old Bee Miles, are you?' He said, 'Are you Bee Miles?' I said, 'Yes.' And he shook hands with me."
After a year on the porch of Christchurch St. Lawrence, Bee was given a key to the church so that she could come and go as she liked. She slept on the floor of the laundry for seven years and refused all offers of a bed. For some time she bathed daily at Dobsons - a public bathing house - but as she grew older she began to bathe less and less and did not take kindly to suggestions that she should have more than one bath every three months.
By the early 60s the combined effect of age, diabetes and a hard life made it difficult for Bee to live with the degree of independence she was accustomed to. Friends tried to get her into several homes for the aged but only the Little Sisters of the Poor would accept her.
When Jan and I first met Bee, one of the nuns warned us that Bee could be very blunt as a result of her 'going original' when she was at university. 'Original' struck us as a much better label than either 'mad' or 'eccentric' to apply to Bee.
Bee was happy to have us visit her, and delighted to talk about her life. She told us that The Little Sisters was the happiest home she had had since she was 14:
"I wouldn't live anywhere else. They've been absolutely bonza to me."
We were naturally curious as to why Bee, a confirmed atheist, was living in a Catholic nursing home:
"I'm being nursed by Catholics because I've got diabetes, arthritis and there aren't any atheist nursing homes. There aren't enough atheists in Sydney to run one."
Bee had forgotten most of the 60 Shakespearean passages she used to be able to quote verbatim, with stage directions, but could still remember a few of her favourites like the speech by Parolles in All's Well that Ends Well, which showed that there was no value in virginity whatsoever - ''tis too cold a companion; away with it'. She was reading Hegel and Kant during the time we were visiting her but confessed to finding both philosophers "too metaphysical for my liking." Her favourite authors were Mencken, Shakespeare, Swift, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Voltaire.
Whilst living at the Little Sisters, Bee would go for a drive around Sydney every Thursday in a cab. By this time she had given up her war on taxi-drivers, and paid her fare. Her driver, John Beynon, told me that Bee used to have frequent talks in the Home with Cardinal Gilroy whom she addressed as 'sweetie' and that when the pope was in Australia a few years earlier, and visited the Little Sisters, the Mother Superior, afraid that Bee might confront him on his religious beliefs, tricked Bee into going for a drive in the taxi that day.
Bee said that she never made friends during her life, although she was very well disposed towards people:
"It's better that I fly alone in this life. I prefer and have to fly alone."
Consequently, she had few boyfriends:
"I've never had anyone fall desperately in love with me, and I hate men who fall desperately in love with women."
Despite this, Bee admitted that she did fall in love with a man once:
"But it was purely physical, nothing more."
She believed in marriage with certain qualifications:
"It's a good institution. If you can stand loneliness, don't get married. If you can't endure loneliness, get married."
We asked Bee is she was lonely:
"Yes, I've been lonely since I was 17. I didn't enjoy it but I had to put up with it. I knew nothing else."
She added that it didn't matter because she had plenty of mental resources to keep her happy. She considered loneliness essential:
"... because I cannot stand, cannot endure, the priggery, cadgery, snobbery, smuggery, hypocrisy, lies, flattery, jealousy, envy, pretence, conventional and artificial behaviour upon which society is based."
Bee seemed to enjoy the loneliness that isolated her from a society that she basically disliked.
She believed that most men and women were highly unintelligent. I asked her what she meant by intelligence.
"The mark of an intelligent man is his ability to discover objective truths through reason; his ability to keep an open and unbiased mind; his ability to avoid believing statements based on insufficient or unreliable evidence; his ability to distinguish between knowledge, belief and faith; his ability to prevent himself judging by appearances and by his emotions; his ability to observe faithfully and his ability to comprehend and appreciate behaviours, experiences, ideas and standards other than his own."
Bee was not interested, at first, in a documentary being made about her, that she wished to live out her life in obscurity:
"I've never advertised myself. I don't want and never have wanted to be known. Whatever I've done, and believe me I've done plenty, I've done purely and simply for fun, and that's the motive of the highly intelligent woman for being unconventional in public - for fun. Only people with a sense of inferiority want to be known."
Bee summed up her life thus:
"I have had a very hard, cruel, good, full life. The hardness and the cruelness have made me frightfully cynical, which is all to the good; and the goodness and fullness have prevented me from becoming in any way neurotic. I have no neuroses."
Was there any hope for the world that she viewed so pessimistically:
"There is no cure for the major ills of the world because our intellect's declining and the white races, anyway, are degenerating. We're all better off dead."
We asked what she thought of death:
"I'm not afraid to die. When it comes it will be the end. I don't believe there will be anything after."
Quoting Shakespeare she added:
"Reason thus with life - if I do lose thee I do lose a thing that none but fools would keep."
Bee changed her mind about having a documentary made about her, but on 3rd December 1973 she died, before we could start filming.
One of her wishes was to have a band play Australian songs at her funeral. Her wish was granted. The band played Waltzing Matilda, Advance Australia Fair and Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport. Draped over her coffin was a ribbon she had requested with the words "One who loved Australia" written on it.
Bernard Hessling, a lifelong friend of Bee's, provided the most apt description of her:
"Whatever she got up to is less odd than most religious dogma and more logical than the strange habits we lesser mortals practice merely in order to conform ... She suffered more from sanity than madness."
It is the nun's description of Bee as a young woman 'going original' that, for me, best sums up the extraordinary, singular woman I had the privilege to get to know, a little, in the early years of my life.
James Ricketson
3rd December 2023
PS If you, Dear Reader, want to find out more about Bee, Rose Ellis has written a wonderful book about her entitled Bee Miles, published by Allen & Unwin.
