*Ø* Blogmanac September 17, 1902 | Bee Miles, Sydney individualist

I am an atheist, a true thinker and speaker. I cannot stand or endure the priggery, caddery, snobbery, smuggery, hypocrisy, lies, flattery, compliments, praise, jealousy, envy, pretence, conventional speech and behaviour upon which society is based.
Bee Miles, Australian individualist, born on September 17, 1902


Bee (or Bea) Miles (d. December 3, 1973), was a famous eccentric in Sydney, Australia, a town known for its eccentrics – individualists such as Webster (the immensely popular soap-box orator, a genius about whom, sadly, nothing appears to have been published); the Flying Pieman; Rosaleen Norton the Witch of Kings Cross; the Bengal Tiger; William Chidley the natural health fanatic; Dulcie Deamer the Queen of Bohemia; and of course, Sydneytown’s favourite Mister Eternity.

Then there was Bee Miles, who must surely be an immortal Sydneysider. According to contemporary newspaper reports, in pre-World War II Sydney Bee was more widely known than the Prime Minister. From a wealthy North Shore family, at only 12 years of age young Beatrice wore a ‘No Conscription’ badge to school during the contentious conscription referendum in World War I. Later, she was severely marked down for an essay about Gallipoli, which she described as a 'strategical blunder' rather than a 'wonderful war effort'. In this, as in many aspects in her later life, she went quite against the norms of her day.

A strong swimmer, it is said she once swam about a mile from suburban Coogee Beach to Wedding Cake Island with a sheath knife strapped to her leg as protection from the sharks. While Bee was on holidays at Palm Beach, and a young boy went missing in the surf, Bee swam out to look for him even after the lifesavers had given up the search.

Mad House Mystery of Beautiful Sydney Girl
Bee had a love-hate relationship with her father, who was pro-Aboriginal and anti-British, but took on many of his nationalistic ideas and values. At the age of 21, following an illness, she was admitted by her father to Gladesville Mental Hospital. One story says that she escaped the ‘lunatic asylum’, as it was then known, with the help of a Smith’s Weekly tabloid front-page story that campaigned for her release – Mad House Mystery of Beautiful Sydney Girl.

Advocating sexual freedom and rejecting the conservative values of the middle classes, she became one of the bohemians of Sydney, mixing with writers, artists and intellectuals. For many years, she lived in a drain at Rushcutters Bay (an inner-city suburb) and earned her living reciting Shakespeare on the streets, wearing her trademark tennis eye-shade and a sign around her neck announcing her reasonable rates: “Shakespeare sonnets 6d (sixpence), Soliloquy 1/- (one shilling)”. She also carried the psychiatric institution’s declaration of her sanity – a possession very few of us can boast – and one-pound bank notes pinned inside her jacket.

Gentlemen will refrain from smoking
In a Sydney bank, Bee often took delight in enjoying a cigarette beneath a sign that read, “Gentlemen will refrain from smoking”. Bee also frequented public libraries, reportedly reading up to three books a day. Ironically, today her manuscripts are treasured in the State Library of New South Wales from which she was barred in the 1950s, and these include such writings as Dictionary by a Bitch (“Duty: an excuse for showing unwarranted interference in somebody else's business.”), I go on a wild goose chase, and For we are young and free.

Bee was known to despise married men, saying that they were weak, effeminate, and less than real men. Perhaps this conviction was the result of of the end of a long-term relationship she had with a Brian Harper when she was 38, or perhaps the relationship’s demise was caused by the conviction. Perhaps neither.

Queen of the road
This great eccentric is probably best remembered for her addiction to taxi and public transport travel, and more particularly her refusal to pay the fares. However, on one occasion she paid a female cabbie 600 pounds for a 19-day taxi trip to Perth, a distance of some 4,000 km (2,500 mi). After three months studying the wildflowers, she returned to Sydney by sea.

Bee was famous for riding on car running-boards, bonnets and bumper bars and was reputed to have pulled at least one car door off its hinges. (Your almanackist recalls seeing Bee in a Sydney taxi but must report that the doors appeared to be all intact.) She would also ride bicycles and motorcycles through the city in an evening dress. Constantly in trouble with Sydney’s police, she had more than 200 convictions recorded against her: “80 I deserved but 120 were unfair and malicious”. Much of her notoriety also came from her advocacy of free love in a day when such matters shocked many Sydneysiders.

At Bee Miles’s funeral in 1973, her beloved Australian wildflowers were placed on the coffin along with a ribbon reading ‘One who loved Australia’. She requested that the following quotation be inscribed on her monument (in a cemetery located next door to the Cumberland Campus of the University of Sydney) :

Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing that none but fools would keep.
Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene I


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