by Helen Garner
‘All that has no meaning,’ said a non-reader who had come to swim her twenty lengths. ‘Everyone’s the same down here, even the punks, once they get their clothes off.’
There is no leveller like a public swimming pool, particularly at four-thirty every afternoon when the sun is lowering, and the boss emerges from the store room with a great white hose lashing in his hands and commences his silent, inexorable progress round the concrete edges of the pool and up the high steps, driving before him with the powerful stream of water all grit, paper scraps, dead insects, icy-pole sticks and sundazed people. It’s the expulsion from paradise: there is no appeal. People leap to their feet, seize their pathetic belongings, and flee like lost souls before the blast.
The beauty of the Fitzroy baths is of an especially Melburnian kind: not thrusting itself forward, but modest, idiosyncratic, secret almost, needing to be imagined, sought out, discovered through familiarity. Bill Decis’s passion for the pool goes deeper than the simple proprietorial loyalty of the bloke in charge. It’s water that fascinates him. He has hundreds of Polaroid photographs of the pool in all weathers, at all times of day, undisturbed by bodies: glassy and pale at dawn, criss-crossed at noon by moving strings of light and shadow. The emotion provoked in him by this volume of water and all it signifies is not an indulgent, modern feeling. It is something altogether harsher and more old-fashioned—a bracing, steadfast sort of love.
1981
A Day at the Show
YOU HAVE TO be careful these days at the Royal Melbourne Show. Take a wrong turning, get too far from the animals, and you could start to feel extremely ill, harangued on all sides by sellers of useless plastic rubbish, poisonous food, low-grade toys, tickets for rides that belong at Luna Park, computers which read your palm for two bucks and give you the same result as the person next to you, thousands of stuffed pink panthers hanging by the neck, show bags which cost two dollars ninety and contain a couple of melting chocolate bars and more plastic.
But on a soft morning at the Showgrounds, after one of those dry, mild spring nights when your head has been too light for the pillow, you can still pick up the stabbing sweetness of the blossoming pittosporum trees, sharp enough to pierce the stink of frying fat.
In the great corrugated iron sheds with their green roofs and white woodwork, the light is benign. Human footsteps and voices are muffled by straw. There is a strong but pleasant perfume of excrement and dust. A family sits on camp chairs around a horse’s stall, drinking tea and passing from hand to hand a thick album of the horse’s photographs. In another stall, harmoniously silent, stand three living creatures: a grey mare and two old men wearing hats. One man is holding the animal’s head while the other, balancing on a wooden box at her side, patiently plaits a red ribbon into her mane.
At the end of a row of stalls is a little booth for a human to sleep in. The door is open. The bed takes up most of the space inside. On a table stand a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, a packet of McAlpine’s plain flour and a bag of parrot food. The parrot is perched in a cage on the wall outside the booth. All around pours in the gentle, pale light of the spring day.
In this lovely light, the flesh of resting cattle is mighty in the straw. Inanimate objects take on a serene significance: three pairs of boots, worn, polished, soft, lined up on a feed bag; a woman’s flowery scarf, with the knot still in it, hung on a stall door.
A young girl squats down with an old towel in her hand and buffs the hooves of her palomino. She leads it into the open air. Sunlight transmogrifies on the horse’s perfect hide into a radiant hum of cream and copper.
In the sheep shed, whose occupants are engaged elsewhere, a wall of illuminated glass cases contains mounds of prize-winning wool. Language is not yet dead in a land where these are the criteria for the judging of fleeces: ‘Trueness to type. Length. Soundness. Handle. Colour or bloom. Character. Density. Evenness. Yield.’
The Arts and Crafts Hall opens into a pageant of minor horrors: men’s khaki cotton fishing hats have been decorated with monstrous embroidery. They are clotted with brightly coloured patterns of stitching which must have made many a husband bite his lip and dream of poison or divorce. People pass briskly in front of the cake decorating, much of which is garish or over-complicated, a form of showing-off.
But at the back of the hall the classic fare is on display: cakes, scones, bread. The flat cases cannot contain their delicate odour. The simplicity of conception and display is breathtaking. Women hover over them, fall into reverie. Their voices grow dreamy. ‘How on earth can they judge?’ murmurs one, half to her friend, half to herself. ‘They’re beautiful.’
‘They look a lovely scone,’ says her friend, less given to ecstasy. ‘And they’ve already been there a week.’
The plain cakes are transcendental in their directness. ‘Plain’s the hardest thing to do well,’ says a woman in gloves. ‘You can’t hide behind anything.’ And the sponges! What is preventing these miracles from levitating? Before them we spontaneously observe a two-minute silence. The woman in gloves draws a long, quivering sigh. ‘An old lady from Ballarat,’ she whispers, ‘once told me that the best sponges are made with swans’ eggs. From Lake Wendouree. But it’s illegal.’
Years ago there used to be a whole wall of preserves, jams and marmalades at the Show, back-lit like an underwater scene from some weird opera. Gone now, shrunk to a couple of small glass cases. But the bottles and jars inside still have the power to fill the pilgrims’ eyes with tears. ‘Shred or Exhibition Marmalade,’ say the labels, in beautiful old-fashioned handwriting. ‘Shooting Stars.’
In what blissful realm does Miss E. Alexander, does R. G. Pywell dwell? What golden paddocks lie beyond their morning window panes? In what paradise kitchens, on what chopping boards of bewitched timber do they fashion the loose knots and spirals of grapefruit peel which hang suspended so sparing, so exquisitely judged, in the ethereal element of their marmalade? What patience, what intellectual serenity guides these women’s hands? In their light-filled jars, craft soars into art. The humble is exalted into the sublime.
1981
Postscript
Everyone at my place thought this piece was hopelessly purple. Several days after it appeared in the Age, I received a letter, care of the paper, from one of the marmalade champions. The prize winner was pleased that I had admired the winning works, but wanted to tell me something: ‘I don’t see paddocks. I live in a flat in Altona, and all I can see out my kitchen window is the gasometer.’ The letter was signed Ron G. Pywell. I sent back a squashed but respectful reply.
One evening a week later someone knocked at our front door. On the mat stood a plumpish man in his thirties, with short dark hair and a shy face. It was R. G. Pywell. He was holding in his arms a supermarket carton containing half a dozen jars of his handiwork. He presented the box to me with grave formality, declined an invitation to come in, hopped into his Holden and drove away.
I carried the box into the kitchen. At the sight of what was in it, my family stopped laughing. We arranged the jars on a special shelf. Sometimes we would move them to the windowsill so we could gaze at them against the light while we washed up. Our reverence for the marmalade was such that I don’t remember ever doing anything so gross as eating it.
Five Train Trips
The Age once asked me to spend a week taking
day-trips by train out of Melbourne. I wrote
about what entertained me or made me laugh:
The mostly people talking, and landscapes.
SPENCER STREET STATION, MONDAY 8.15 A.M. TO BALLARAT AND SOVEREIGN HILL.
It is going to be a very hot day. The train slides out of Spencer Street. Outside in the passageway I hear a child and a woman.
‘Here’s a toilet.’
‘Sit down, Stephen.’
‘But I need to go to the toilet.’
‘Sit down, Stephen.’
‘But I need to go to the toilet.’
‘Well you just wait until I
go, because…’ We travel over flat plains. I see bunches of gums, yellow grass, thistles, the daisy head of a still windmill, cypresses, power pylons in pairs vanishing into a thin mist which the sun has not yet dispersed.
In Ballarat it’s already a scorcher. A bus is waiting at the station to take people to Sovereign Hill, the reconstruction of the gold rush days. Everybody but me is in a family. I am attracting suspicious looks.
Sovereign Hill is slick, but the girls who work there wear little white linen caps, and the men high collars, and I see a girl go striding down Main Street in a pink dress with flounces and petticoats, head up and arms swinging. I feel silly going on the horse-drawn carriage by myself, but I go anyway. The sun is so bright that we are all squinting, and the grimace could be taken for a smile.
In the bookshop a woman in a mobcap, who has just sneaked outside and sprinkled herself with water from a hose, sells me Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies. I go into the Mechanics’ Institute and Free Library to read it. There is a big framed sign on the wall saying SILENCE. People keep tiptoeing in and watching me, as if this lone reader were part of the exhibit. I sit at the long table and read ‘Squeaker’s Mate’, a horrifying story which returns to mind three days later when I go to Bendigo.
On the homeward train I share a compartment with a placid old woman and her three grandchildren. She is telling them about the olden days. ‘Life was different before television.’
‘What did you used to do, Nan?’
‘Talked. Oh…knitted, sewed, listened to the wireless, played cards. Talked.’ She nods at me. ‘This train isn’t gonna stop at Sunshine. They’re meeting us at Sunshine. I should’ve asked. It’s never not stopped at Sunshine. They’re startin’ to be all different, now. Well, I’ll know next time, won’t I. I had a lovely train last time. Man come in, lifted me case down ’n’ everything—but this time no one’s come near us.’
‘It’s not your day, Nan, is it,’ says one of the girls.
‘No, it’s not, is it, love. But something will turn up, won’t it.’
In West Melbourne, behind Festival Hall, the train stops dead. The air-conditioning goes off with the motor. We sit companionably in the silence and the thickening heat. From the next compartment rings out the piercing voice of a young mother pushed past endurance. ‘Shut up, Wayne!’
Nana, the girls and I lower our eyes as if we had witnessed an indiscretion.
‘I’ll make you cry,’ hisses Wayne’s mother.
One of the girls slides me a look. We bite our bottom lips.
‘Not much patience in there,’ says the pacific Nana. ‘Are we movin’?’ she calls to the passing conductor.
‘Soon as we can get the engine out of the way that’s broken down in front of us.’
The girls point out the West Gate Bridge to their little brother, who has just woken up. ‘Bridge,’ he repeats in a stunned tone. Next door Wayne is getting what’s coming to him.
SPENCER STREET STATION, TUESDAY 9.25 A.M. TO WARRNAMBOOL.
Hot. There is a train at the platform but we are not to board. A crowd waits. Some surfies are overseeing the loading of their boards into the luggage van. A railway-man approaches them. ‘Oi. Take all that stuff out. Not goin’ now.’
A woman behind me cackles. ‘Typical railways. “Not goin’ now!” ’
An old man in a brown suit, cloth cap and hearing aid, whose English is poor, tugs shyly at the sleeve of the man driving the luggage trolley. ‘Defective train, sir,’ shouts the driver. ‘Defective train. No good. Bringing another.’
A girl near me squats down against the railing and opens a brand new copy of Anna Karenina. There is no formal explanation of the delay. The train simply moves away from the platform and we’re left standing like shags on a rock. There are not enough seats on the platform. People start to slow-clap. ‘That’s giving them more than they deserve, isn’t it?’ says a man with a beard.
The replacement train, or ‘set’ as they say nowadays, is new. We pull out exactly half an hour late. Our conductor is a jolly, curly-headed fellow with a faint New Zealand accent. ‘If you’ll have your seat reservations ready for me please, and we’ll move through and chat to you all personally. Thank you.’ He is working hard at making the atmosphere in the open-plan carriage like that of a successful party. Without alcohol, of course. Up the front a group of elderly women with Thermos flasks whoops with laughter.
Opposite me sits a blind woman in her late thirties with two girls under ten. They have brought some grapes. I’m starving. The grapes are pale green and sprinkled with tiny drops of water. There are rather a lot of them. The blind woman is sharing them with the children.
I would like to speak to the blind woman. I like the way she deals with the kids. Also she has what looks like a viola in a case on the luggage rack. She is one of those strangers you sometimes see in a public place who have something in their demeanour that makes you want to go up to them and say: ‘Please tell me your life story. Tell me what you know that I don’t.’ She has a long, bony, intelligent-looking face. One of her eyes is ordinary blue; the other is milky. She mustn’t be able to see at all: her daughter leads her to the toilet. ‘The toilets are very smelly,’ I hear her say when she returns.
At Colac people rush the refreshment counter. I get there first. I buy some sandwiches and a Big M, the only drinkable coffee in sight.
‘Mum, what does NO SHIRT, NO SERVICE mean?’ shouts a boy.
‘Well, the men have to wear a shirt.’
‘But what does NO SERVICE mean?’
The mother is queuing too hard to answer.
By the time I get up the nerve to intrude on the blind woman with a version of my fantasised request, there is only half an hour left till Warrnambool. She does not seem to find my approach peculiar. She is the kind of person who gets straight to the point. ‘I’ve had a very eventful life,’ she begins, and we both burst out laughing. At Warrnambool an old man meets her. She is going to Mt Gambier. We say goodbye, our conversation barely begun, and he leads her away.
Warrnambool is inert under a powerful, dull heat. I walk to the beach, which is lined with a long row of fraying pines like half-eaten fish stood stiffly on their noses. Some are no more than a skeleton with a tail. A great deal of old-fashioned sand-castle building is going on. ‘Want me to bury you up to your neck?’ says a girl to her brother.
The hot afternoon rolls along slowly. I daren’t lie down on my towel lest I fall asleep and miss the train. I keep going into the water to wake myself up.
The train home is on time, but only the first-class air-conditioning is working, so the jolly conductor moves all the economy passengers into first. Good on him. ‘It’s a bit of a bone of contention with me,’ he says, ‘that people pay top dollar for seats and don’t get proper facilities.’
A dumpy, unhappy-looking girl has a ticket for the window seat I have casually dropped into. I move, but her mother gives me a dirty look as she installs the teenager and kisses her goodbye. All the way to Melbourne the girl reads True Romance comics and eats chocolate. She never glances at me or gives the slightest sign that she has noticed my presence. She has two kinds of movements: confident when turning pages or arranging possessions, furtive when breaking off another piece of gummy chocolate and sliding it into her mouth. For some reason I am sure she is going to be a nurse. I hope I never wake up and find her dull, miserable face beside my bed.
On the way home I see into people’s backyards. I see a baby in a wooden playpen. Two empty canvas chairs side by side under a laden fruit tree. A woman in a faded apron hosing her vegetables. Three white chooks and a black cat on a carpet of pine needles.
Through the entrance arch of an old railway station I see a fine leafy avenue, a child on a blue bicycle riding away down the dusty road.
The hills, if I can call them that, are very distant and low. The dry grass is so thick as to appear mattress-like; it would hold you up if you rolled on it.
It is getting dark. We come into Mel
bourne from the west. The refinery is sprinkled with lights. In the next compartment a woman says to her companion, ‘Let’s get fish and chips and sit on the beach.’
SPENCER STREET STATION, WEDNESDAY 8.25 A.M. TO BAIRNSDALE.
The best part of each day is the long, fast tram ride along the cemetery in Lygon Street at eight o’clock in the morning. The green blinds are down on the east side of the tram, but sun pours through its open doorways, making it a tube of light and air. Women on their way to work sit in relaxed postures, feet planted apart, their thin cotton skirts fluttering in the wind. Over the cemetery fence the white grass blurs between the flat faces of the headstones.
Heading east today, into Gippsland. I find myself a spot in economy, where the old-fashioned dogboxes are nicely proportioned and lined with timber, and there are curved metal luggage racks and slatted shutters. Today’s conductor is very young and anxious, with a new moustache. He settles in for a yarn. Behind him is some graffiti I’m glad he can’t see: LEGALISE GUNJA AND SMACK. I look out the window and a hedge slides past, clipped into the legend BUNYIP SCHOOL. A young couple with a baby in a bassinette gets on. The woman has JUNKIE tattooed on her upper arm.
Cattle stand belly-deep in a dam. Two kids on new Lilos float on a creek. A tent is pitched under a bridge.
The trip to Bairnsdale takes four and a half hours. My return booking is on a train that leaves twenty-five minutes after I arrive. There is no cafe at the station. I step out on to the street and look around. I spy the Grand Terminus Hotel a couple of hundred yards along the road. I walk briskly towards it in the battering heat. I order a gin and tonic, and drink half of it in one of those anonymous modernised pub lounges with black shiny chairs and bare brick walls and muzak. Three hippies with backpacks are fooling around in the corner. The boy pops a paper bag. ‘Oooh, Rick,’ cry the two girls.