by Anne Manne
At the racetrack the game of hope was maintained by consolation myths about why a horse had not won. These consolation myths went first from jockey to trainer and then from trainer to owner. They were frequently so preposterous and inventive that they left me bursting with laughter. (The fact that I sparkled happily when a horse lost at the prospect of a new Myth of Defeat did not go down well with the trainer—it was part of a strapper’s code of loyalty to be profoundly downcast after losing.) After leading the failed neddy back, the trainer was regaled: ‘We wuz in the money for sure, ya know, odds on, then this clod hit us’, or ‘That fuckin’ arsehole cut us orrf’ (the runner of a rival but also slightly failed trainer), or ‘We wuz goin’ like a winner till the last turn—honest—then the turn was a bit tight and he just sorta tripped and lost ten lengths’. Interestingly, these dastardly acts all allegedly occurred in the back straight where even the many binoculars trained upon the horses had trouble reaching agreement as to what was happening. These inherently implausible, repetitive consolation myths were accepted meekly by the trainer every time, a man who in all other matters was the opposite of gullible.
Equally meek were the owners who accepted a new series of consolation myths from the trainer. If flying clods figured largely in the jockey’s tale of woe, the clod of a jockey who didn’t follow instructions was the central figure of the trainer’s Myth of Defeat delivered to the owner. That no instructions on earth could have shifted that no-hoper’s rump (as Eliza Doolittle once put it, rather less delicately) was neither here nor there. The key to it all was to keep hope alive; to maintain a belief in The Possibility. In this way, by the time a very average neddy, with no prospect whatever of winning, arrived home after a particularly dismal performance it was likely to have a spectacular ‘could’ve-been-champion’ reputation.
Bill was a widower farmer who looked after one of my horses. He had a large cattle and dairy property in the mountains, near where I had rented a cottage during university days. In a grumbling but kindly way Bill agreed to let me agist my horse there, while I commuted back and forth from university. The truth was he was rather pleased, as he put it, to ‘have a bit of company now and again’. His wife had died some years earlier.
His property was a glorious piece of land. Below the house was a 100-acre paddock where Joe spent his days. It was a huge, lush river flat, with grass in spring at least a metre high. It was bounded by the river on one side, and a stand of tall, glorious mountain ash trees on the other. Each trunk was at least a metre wide. On the other side of the road was the main farm. A long, dirt drive with a grassy verge in the middle, ruts on either side, worn away over time by cars and trucks, led the way to an old 1950s cream brick veneer house. Inside there was a chintz sofa and chairs, faded floral carpets, and a television flickering in the corner all day, just visible from the dark kitchen where a huge old kettle simmered permanently on a slow combustion stove. A white laminex table stood in the middle of the room, while the walls and mantelpiece held reminders of his wife’s absence: empty Fowlers preserving jars for fruit and jam on top of the cupboards, and empty biscuit and cake tins. Bill moved in the kitchen uneasily, thick fingers calloused by farm work reaching awkwardly for the old teapot, apologising for the absence of homemade biscuits, promising me that one day he would make me his wife’s fruitcake.
Outside were the cattle yards and dairy, jersey cows usually crowding around, gently lowing in the wintertime, up to their hocks in foul, manured mud, waiting to be fed and milked. Beyond the house, the hill swept up and up and up, so steeply that it seemed to be a part of the sky, disappearing into an ethereal mist. I often took Joe up for a ride there, sometimes arriving unplanned, forgetting my saddle and riding bareback with an old bridle of Bill’s. In winter it was exhilarating to gallop up the steep crest, then rest and gallop some more. It took an hour or so to get to the very top, but it was worth it. From the summit of Bill’s land you could see a vast distance along the Great Dividing Range, all the way to the Mount Baw Baw Mountains with their misty draperies hanging in between. On a summer’s day it was hard, hot work, getting to the top, walking steadily, pausing to listen to the harsh cries of galahs and my horse’s lungs rasping roughly in and out as he caught his breath. Wedge-tailed eagles hovered over the valley, circling in long, slow arcs before swooping down with savage force on a hapless rabbit. At the very top, sprawled out on the grass, I could watch the white clouds slip dreamily by, listening to the sounds of Joe snatching greedily at the clover, indifferent to the view.
Bill’s attitude to the environment and animals was instrumental and unsentimental. He was fatalistic about the fact that horses and cattle got fat in summer and thin in winter. He was amazed by my insistence that Joe, a turned-out horse only ridden occasionally, be fed expensive grains in winter. Bill was gruffly affectionate to his work dogs. Once when I arrived, however, I was horrified to discover that one of his tethered bitches had had a stillbirth days before, and one of the dead pups was still lying there next to her. He buried it when he saw my distress but couldn’t really understand it.
Nor could he understand when I gasped over the place’s beauty. He just shrugged and looked around with blank eyes, saying: ‘Oh, it’s pretty enough, I suppose. Awful cold in winter, but. Lonely, too.’ Another time I arrived to find that he had chopped down the superb mountain ash trees. He thought nothing of it; they shaded the grass too much and there was more fodder without them. I was beside myself with an anguish he couldn’t understand, running up and down the road, waving my arms and wringing my hands, wailing over their loss. ‘Bill, why, why?’ We stared at each other, aghast, mouths wide open, both bewildered. He was embarrassed, not for doing it, but at my judgement of him, and for a long time unease hung between us. For a long time I didn’t come.
As time went on, however, I kept thinking of how much my criticism had pained him and felt remorseful. I realised that if I found his place enchanting, for Bill it seemed to carry the kinds of emotions engulfing those explorers who set out with so much hope of discovering a new England, wet and green and soft and yielding. Instead, after an arduous journey, full of suffering, they climbed yet another barren summit and found nothing on the other side to sustain a life, or they finally reached the shore of an inland lake only to find that it was salty. They bestowed Australian place names which were more than descriptions of a landscape of shivering bleakness and loneliness: Mount Despair, Mount Misery and Mount Disappointment. Those names spoke to the endpoint of another kind of journey; they were metaphors for a life where someone had long ago crested adulthood, only to find a bleak plain stretching out, on and on, on and on, filled with unassuageable longing.
Bill was lonely, in a loneliness without remedy. It seemed deeper than anything I had ever encountered in the city. There is loneliness there too, of course, but it is also true that just around the corner in the city always seems a new prospect, a different person, another possibility. But the country, for all that we describe it with clichés of community, can also be a fearfully lonely place. Bill’s wife had died quite early, of cancer. He seemed to have little contact with other people, except for a few farmers and especially a gay couple who were neighbours, who for some strange reason had come out here to manage a dairy. There was plenty of bigotry directed at gays in those times, even more than now. Nonetheless, there was no sign of that in Bill and he was grateful for their visits as they quite often popped over for a cup of tea and a bit of advice on dairy farming, being new to the game. The town was tiny, a few kilometres away, thin ribbons of smoke from the fireplaces threading their way into the sky and suggesting people, but the little hamlet seemed more taunting than comforting. Bill rarely had anything much to do with the townspeople. He was always incredibly pleased to see me, and even more pleased when I brought some friends, when I turned up to check on or ride my horse.
Some time after the mountain ash tree incident, I was with a crowd of friends, squashed into a car too small for our number, coming back from the
snow. I wanted to detour off track and pop in to see Bill, and check on Joe. I hadn’t been up for a while. I’d said a few months back that if I came up we might drop in on our way past. As we wound our way up the long dirt driveway, we saw him come lumbering up, almost running, craning his neck to see if there was anybody there.
The whole car, a moment before bubbling with talk and laughter, suddenly fell silent. We went inside for a cup of tea, although none of us wanted to. He brought out a tin with a fruitcake he had made according to his dead wife’s recipe. As it crumbled in our hands, we realised he had been making this cake each week, in the hope that we might come. We stared at it, appalled. Appalled at his loneliness, at our carelessness, at the disparity in power, at the bitter fact that his cup was empty whilst ours runneth over. Our chance visit meant nothing to us. It meant a great deal to him.
When I think of loneliness, an image of Bill’s face flashes up before me, his ruddy features looming out of the gathering dusk, intense, straining to see, his face full of hope.
This birth of this book was more painful and slower than most—it was written during a very difficult time in my life, where a seemingly never ending series of problems threatened to capsize the enterprise. Those challenges made me especially grateful to Louise Adler and Foong Ling Kong not only for the persistence they showed pursuing me in a long publishing courtship, and the pleasure of their company in many sparkling lunches, but above all for their unfailing courtesy, patience and kindness throughout my time of troubles, qualities maintained alongside their continued belief that the final book would be worth having. Louise, brimming with life, ideas and energy, always making life seem a lighter thing, has been exceptionally generous to me. Foong Ling, whose calmness is like a balm to the soul of a flustered author, has proved a delicate reader and skilful editor, and the book is the better for her work. I am honoured to call both of them friends.
I count myself very lucky to have Mary Cunnane as an agent. A friend had introduced me to her as a brilliant agent, but also saying she knew how much I would like Mary. She was right. I have come to deeply value Mary for her entirely unrancorous candour, her capacity to be interesting on and interested in absolutely everything, her sharpness and shrewdness about all aspects of writing, but most of all for her warmth, generosity and the word she would most value—kindness.
Thanks, too, to my sisters who shared the life and times from which these stories came, whose determinedly resourceful and cheerful qualities mean that either of them might have borne the middle name Resilience. I am grateful to my mother for the remarkable courage and fortitude she showed in making a go of things when we settled in that country town all those years ago.
Thanks too, to my beloved daughters who always help me keep in sight what is most important in life, and who despite being terrifyingly good readers, remained staunchly loyal in their eagerness to read the finished product. Most deeply, without my husband Rob, whose love and steady, unshakeable faith in my writing has been such a source of nourishment and strength when my own confidence has faltered, this book would never have been written. Rob is one of the great encouragers in life. His capacity to be deeply generous to others no matter what he is going through, never fails to move me. To him, as always, my deepest love and gratitude.