The Autobiography of My Father

by Martin Edmond

  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY FATHER

  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY FATHER

  Martin Edmond

  AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY PRESS

  The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts.

  — William Carlos Williams

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Note

  The Caves

  The Six Foot Track

  On The Black Range

  All That Charm Of Face And Voice

  Underground

  The Island

  Rakiura

  A Conversation

  129 Main Street

  The Acheron

  The Mountain

  Ohakune

  The Draft Summary

  Subsequent Notes

  Fragments And Dreams

  After Therapy

  Going

  The Sea

  Copyright

  Note

  My father’s recall of detail of the past, particularly dates, is sometimes inaccurate. I have chosen not to correct these errors. However, some of his remarks have been excised on legal advice. They refer to people in Upper Hutt whose activities he felt contributed to the loss of his job. I regret that the law in this case protects those I would rather see exposed.

  THE CAVES

  The Six Foot Track

  The first journey is from Katoomba in the Blue Mountains to Jenolan Caves. We walked. Just Colleen and me. It’s about forty kilometres and it took three days. There used to be a bridle path called the Six Foot Track and the current route follows this most of the way. We really weren’t prepared. It was November and hot and we had packs on our backs. We had been advised to carry water and so had also two three-litre plastic juice bottles. I’d boiled the water. It was sweet, with just a hint of apple. And it became clear by about lunch time on the first day that there was not enough of it.

  The taxi we took from the station dropped us off at the Explorer’s Tree at ten on a fine, hazy morning. From the edge of the plateau it is a rapid descent into the valley below. You walk a thousand feet down a very steep track, through bush and fern, past Bonnie Doon Falls to Nellie’s Glen. Trickles of water ran over mossy stones. Brown and yellow butterflies danced in shafts of vertical sunlight. There were places where the original sandstone culverts, a hundred years old, still survive. The kneecap I injured twenty years ago was soon feeling the strain of the pack on my back, so my whole leg trembled when my full weight came down on it. And Col, with her dicky ankle bone which mutated as she drove across Europe into the clouds of Chernobyl gas in 1986, felt similarly tentative. But we were both excited to be setting out at last.

  We hit the floor just as the heat of the day did and walked through the furnace dust of the Megalong Valley for the rest of the morning. This part is farmland and infested with dung flies. You piggy-back them, or they ride on your hat and raid the corners of your mouth and eyes for moisture. I remember them on the back of your checked sports coat, the one with the leather buttons, when you visited me in Chippendale in 1982. How they worried you. You batted at them with your hands and complained as if at a personal insult. Well, they were much worse out there, believe me.

  But it was quiet and we didn’t see a living soul and since we were still quite fresh, it was lovely to stretch out and swing along the road. The blue bush and orange crumbling bluffs lay along the horizon on either hand under a pale sky. We took our first stop at a ford where there had once been a town with a store and a school. Now it was only farm paddocks and the foundations of gone buildings. The horses wore strange, white, fringed masks, for the flies I think, and Col waded across the creek to give one of them an apple, while I wet my face and hair in the water.

  We left the valley floor then and walked through rolling country, up hill and down dale, towards the old graveyard where we thought we’d lunch. We never found it, but sat instead under a tree at the edge of a plantation and ate our spinach salad before continuing on into the afternoon. There was no shade now, just heat and dust and the brown road twisting up to the stockyards and over and down and then up again. Our packs were pulling down our backs, our legs were leaden and sore, the water we drank didn’t seem to be enough to replace the quantities of sweat pouring off us. Plus one of the bottles had sprung a leak. A strange contradiction loomed here, because it isn’t as if this is a desert. There are rivers. It’s just that you’re not supposed to drink from them. Sewage, or run-off from the farms, or giardiasis or ….

  About mid afternoon we finally left the farmland behind and entered a grassy, open, wooded country tending down to the valley of the Cox’s River. Here is the last remaining section of the original bridle path and it was possible to imagine riding leisurely through the light and shade of the eucalypts in Edwardian dress, on your way to the caves. We were eager now for a glimpse of the river and at last it came, silver through the grey-green trees. We shrugged off our packs, our socks and shoes, most of our clothes and skittered across hot, white sand between enormous boulders towards the water. Then we saw them: the criss-cross scribble pattern of snake tracks in the sand. It was a veritable snake pit. And they swim as well. We had our sticks and our snake-bite kit but we are city people now and felt pale and vulnerable, between the lethal sun rays stabbing down through ozone-depleted air and the secret world of poisonous reptiles we had entered. One track led directly to a black triangular crevice in a rock. Walking past only a metre or so away on my bare feet, I felt rather than saw snake eyes in the darkness.

  Col just dangled her legs in the river but I immersed my whole body in the cold, black water flowing swiftly past and over huge, round rocks until I felt the chill banish the accumulated heat of the day’s walk from my bones. But I still wouldn’t drink it and I still felt parched and dry inside, a rage of thirst.

  It was incredibly difficult to resume clothes, socks, shoes, pack and walk on the next kilometre or so to the river crossing and the camping ground, but we did. Negotiating the shallow, swift-flowing rapids I felt as if every cell in my body was crying out for water and looked in disbelief at the river running by. I felt like Tantalus in the old story, the water retreating when he bent to drink. We made camp on the other side, boiled the billy and had a cup of tea, then another, and another, and later ate stew beside our tent as evening fell around us and flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos screeched in the she-oaks.

  And all that day the promised south-westerly change sighed intermittently into our toiling faces. There were cool exhalations of wind every twenty minutes or so, a slow drift of cirrus up the sky-blue sky, a hazy thickening in the western air. As we had our after-dinner chocolate and drank brandy from tin mugs we could hear it soughing in the trees like giant’s breath, talking about tomorrow’s journey on.

  Next morning the prospect of some nameless sickness in the water seemed less to be feared than another day’s torture of thirst, so after we packed up I filled one of our bottles from the river – not the Cox’s, which we had been specifically told not to drink, but from Murdering Creek, a small tributary that joins it at the camping ground. And then we set off.

  We left the river, the birds, the grass, the shade, instantly behind and, accompanied again by hundreds of flies, struggled up a bare, rocky road in the percussive heat. This day was one of the hardest I have known. My lungs are in good shape since I stopped smoking, and I swim and I walk a lot and so on, but this was something else. The pack on my back felt like it was full of bricks and my legs were so stiff and sore from the day before they hardly worked any more. And having to carry water as well was just too much. I wanted to jettison something, but what? We couldn’t lose the tent or the food or the water
; we’d only brought one change of clothes and what if the weather broke? The thing was, we had to cross a range of hills and then climb up another. We thought, from the absurdly sketchy tourist map we carried, that we had to go up a thousand feet, down a thousand, up a thousand. It wasn’t until we got to Jenolan and looked at a proper map that we realised it wasn’t feet, it was metres! A thousand metres! In a way, it’s just as well we didn’t know: it probably would have killed us.

  Over the first hill we found a little narrow valley with a creek running along it. It was cooler and damper there, pleasant in some ways, but weedy and with cow shit on the track, though we didn’t see any cows. This valley runs into another, at right angles, with another creek flowing down to join the one we were following. At the ford above the junction of Alum and Little Creeks, we surprised a water dragon – three feet of ancient reptile motionless on a round boulder. There was a moment of complete stillness before it slithered away out of sight and we crossed and decided to stop for lunch. Leaving our things at the ford, we waded ten metres or so upstream where there were some big rocks and perched on one of them to eat our bread and cheese and avocado and salami. By now I was drinking from the creek as if my life depended on it. I waited all day for signs of sickness, but they didn’t come. There was only the bloated feeling of a belly full of water.

  We filled our bottles here – which was just as well since it was twenty-four hours before we found another source – and continued on. It was a vicious climb up a twisty road to a summit which seemed always to be around the next bend. And the next. And the next. The number of times we persuaded ourselves that one more turn would show us the top! It was as cruel as life. There were times when I could do nothing but stumble along, head down, watching Col’s feet plodding onwards and upwards, using her energy as a means of keeping going. She told me later that she occupied herself with a detailed plan of the course of action she would follow should I fall down and break my leg! How she would handle the various possible different kinds of fractures – greenstick, simple, compound. How she would make me comfortable before setting off to get help. It was the kind of situation where if we had lost the good feeling between us, we could have lost everything. But we didn’t. We helped each other. And finally, we did get to the top.

  Here three roads met. To our left, a track along the ridge ran east into the Kanangra Boyd National Park and far away in that direction was the sea. To our right, another track wound along the spine of the Black Range towards Kia Ora Hill, Mount Inspiration and the descent to the Caves. Then there was the Six Foot Track, now dust under our feet behind us. And the giant wind still sighed from the south-west, its intervals shorter, its exhalations longer and stronger, drying the sweat on our faces as we walked into it along the top of the Black Range.

  This was the best time we had. On either hand, black-trunked spindly trees fell away into hidden valleys and through their branches we could see glimpses of the sky, now paling towards evening. It was cool after the fierce heat of the climb; the wind dispersed some of the flies that had been with us all day, and anyway, now the farmland was far behind, there were fewer of them. The track was easy, undulating only slightly up and down as we walked along the ridge and all we were really doing was looking for a place to stay the night. When we heard a rustle in the bush we dropped our packs and went to look. With its spines rattling and its little hedgehog face hidden in a rotten log, was an echidna. They are monotremes, egg-laying mammals like the platypus. It was the first one either of us had seen.

  We camped in a clearing which had been used before, about ten metres off the track to the left. Three logs lying flat made seats around a small fireplace. There was a patch of springy grass to pitch the tent over. The setting sun cast yellow spokes of light through the trees and the luminous sky faded to pastel pinks and greens in a circle all around us.

  As we had the night before, we worked incessantly just to do the necessary things before dark: pitch the tent, gather wood, light the fire, cook dinner, eat dinner then, at last, relax. This time we smoked a joint, was it? or a pipe? with our brandy and chocolate after the pasta. And felt the awesomeness of untrammelled wilderness stretching miles in every direction. The loneliness of being alone up there. And the comfort of it, to be alone with each other up there, watching the circle of light change into a circle of stars. We didn’t sit up for long, we were too tired. Getting into her sleeping bag, Col was stung on the toe by a red ant, so there was a brief diversion while she expressed her indignation and we hunted it out. Then we realised the wind, whose strong frequent breaths were now bending the tops of trees above us, was also fanning the dying fire and spreading showers of sparks along the ground. I got up to damp it down again.

  Standing there in the dark circle of trees, I heard a crackling in the undergrowth and every hair on my head stood up on end. Then came, regular as a heart beat – crunch – crunch – crunch – the footsteps. An instant later I realised it was just a kangaroo hopping away, and relaxed. Because I’d thought it was a human, and that was what scared me. Not the animals, the humans.

  I killed the fire, climbed back into the tent and lay down to sleep. But sleep did not come. And this is what I started out to say. All of this is just the preamble. And I’m sorry to have gone on at such length with the tedious details of the journey, but it was the only way I knew how to get to the point. The point of me lying awake all night in the middle of nowhere, listening to the wind and thinking of you.

  On The Black Range

  It takes time to get used to a death. The way a life, when it ends, instantly assumes the shape it will always have. The way a whole human memory, with all its store of images and events and words and faces, is suddenly, shockingly, gone to nothing. Or into only what other people can recall of its contents, an infinitesimal amount. The last few times I sat with you, you wandered endlessly through your own memory, recalling the names of people you had known. Mostly kids you had taught over the years. Who they married, where they lived, how many children they had, what work they did, their private or not so private tragedies or triumphs. That vast storehouse of memories, gone. Only you knew who they all were. Like the father of a family much larger than our nuclear one, it was as if your attention was some kind of talisman, some guarantee of safety, some assurance of the essential, intentional rightness of the lives they were trying to lead. And although I say that your concern was for the many lives you had nurtured, the tears I am pushing back as I write are really for myself. You. Gone. Who always looked after me, watched over me. It takes time, time to get used to it.

  The last time I talked to you was on the telephone ten days before the stroke that killed you. About six weeks after your seventieth birthday, the last time I saw you. Strange this phrase, the last time … the last time I saw you was in your room at Arbour House, the old people’s home where you spent your final four months. I was going to catch a bus back to Wellington, a plane back to Sydney. Your room was so tiny that when I sat on the bed facing you sitting in the only chair, our knees touched. Beside and under the chair were piles of books. I remember a library copy of Michael King’s Moriori which I coveted and you promised to buy for me. There were cartons of fruit juice stacked beneath the bed and in the wardrobe, because you’d given up alcohol, packets of Fisherman’s Friends which you sucked incessantly for the emphysema, two radios, one by the bed and one by the chair, your glasses, your glasses case, the yellow plastic mug for your false teeth in the clutter on the desk, a TV, a wall heater on a thermostat clicking on and off, a small window with an imitation lace curtain. Your whole life had come down to this. There was barely space to turn around.

  You gave me a plastic bag full of empty Disprin and Panadol packets to dump in the rubbish. You got people to smuggle them in past the staff, who were trying to restrict your intake of painkillers. You took them for the headaches, which no one, it seems, ever connected with the stroke that was coming to take you away. You thought it was the constipation that gave you headaches. I
used to say it was probably the painkillers that gave you constipation. You didn’t think that was very likely. We went round and round like that.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to give me a hug?’ I said and you smiled in that sweet, slightly shamefaced way you had and we hugged. And then I went, glancing back and seeing you through the window, waving, turning away, already thinking, next time.

  A few weeks later I talked to you on the phone and everything was the same as usual. I always told you things, just like now. I said how we’d been to Jenolan Caves and were planning to go again except this time we would walk in. You recalled taking me as a boy to the Waitomo Caves. I couldn’t remember anything about it and still can’t. You told me all the family news, how everyone was, you kept tabs on that and I always rang you to catch up because I knew I’d get an honest account of what was really happening. Even though you’d been estranged for twenty years and separated for ten, I could still find out from you how my mother was, which saved me having to ring her too.

  Near the end of the conversation, you sounded strange so I asked what was wrong? There was a pause and then you explained. You’d just had returned to you your copy of the first volume of my mother’s autobiography, which you hadn’t really read before. You’d picked it up and looked through it this time. What had upset you was her account of the death of a friend of yours, Bill Wilson, in the war. She had the circumstances wrong. She wrote that he died in Fiji, but he was in fact lost in a Catalina somewhere off the Solomon Islands. That bothered you, because all she needed to have done was to check with you and you would have told her. And there it was, wrong and in print, for all time. I don’t remember what I said. I think I just tried to smooth it over. What was done was done, that kind of thing.