by Graeme Leith
They did it magnificently. In the Kingower gloaming they laboured up the sloping plank propelled by the little catherine wheels on their sides, with their dear little guns banging and spouting flame before them as they entered the dark void of the interior, all guns blazing. The denouement was dramatic to say the least. The whole structure emitted a roar, a sheet of flame erupted from the doorway and within seconds a huge pillar of fire leapt 8 metres into the air, taking the roof with it. With a loud and satisfying crackling the inferno took hold and the dunny burned to the ground, its demise toasted by us with Great Western’s finest. Unfortunately, I had failed to inform my neighbours, Dawn and John Sendy, some 300 metres away across the vineyard, of the impending incineration and John, inspecting his cabbages for grubs by torchlight, was surprised and perturbed to see a column of flame ascend skywards from our house. But when he raced over he was relieved, and joined in the celebration.
Triumph
In September 1984, the Royal Melbourne Show was anticipated with much excitement, for our entries had been made and the bottles sent down weeks before. As always, the doors at the J.V. Plummer Hall were opened at 8.30 a.m. and the winemakers (for only winemakers could get tickets in those days) rushed in and headed for the table where the bottles of the winner of the Jimmy Watson Trophy, announced the night before at the show dinner, were displayed. After tasting that, the ranks then thinned out and spread to the other tables, eagerly scanning the results book for medals, and beginning the task of comparing one’s own wine to others, particularly the winners, in earnest.
I was not there at opening time; it would have meant getting up at about 4.30 a.m. at Kingower and I didn’t need to do that for I was planning to drive back the same day. It was my first time there. I received my results booklet upon presentation of my ticket and searched for the appropriate table—Victorian shiraz blends, 1982 and older—and, after some searching, found it. Feelings of dread fought with bright optimism in my soul as I took the book to the appropriate table.
There were dozens and dozens of bottles in a serried double line along the trestle table and then, and only then, did I look at the book, starting hopefully at the bronzes, but it wasn’t there. Did I dare look at the silvers, or should I go through the also-rans, the ones that had failed to get bronze? To hell with it, I looked at the top: Trophy, Maltby of Anakie. Next one down, Passing Clouds of Kingower. Oh, God in Heaven! We had won a gold medal with our first show entry!
I hurried away down the stairs to ring Sue and Ondine but there was someone in the phone box—John Glaetzer, master winemaker for Wolf Blass. The door was open to let out the cigarette smoke as he reeled off a list of medals to Wolf in Adelaide. David Fyffe from Yarra Burn and Domenic Portet from Taltarni were outside, near the phone box, having a cigarette and a bit of a giggle.
I congratulated David on his trophy in ‘Victorian wines of cabernet sauvignon 1982 and older’, which I had noticed on the way down, and asked them what the joke was. ‘That’s what we’re laughing about,’ responded David. ‘Before I sent the wine off to the show, I tasted a bottle and it was like capsicums. I thought I had better not send off a wine with such a peculiar flavour, but I’d paid my entry fee so I did send it, and it’s won the bloody trophy!’ The capsicum flavour was unusual then, for not many people were planting cabernet in cooler areas like the Yarra Valley.
Sue, of course, could hardly believe the news when I delivered it to her. I went back to the hall, tasted several wines, including the Maltby wine—it deserved the trophy. I finished up at the ‘Champagne Style’ class, filled a tasting glass and drank it. Then I called into a couple of shops to tell of our good news and show them the results book, and drove home to celebrate and share my euphoria.
But now we were in a situation of having established an excellent credential, with no wine to follow up—a marketing disaster in anybody’s terms. The 1983–84 season had been good to everybody and I had an idea that if I could purchase some quality grapes from elsewhere to make more wine, an extra batch, I might be able to combine it with our 1983 crop to make a blend, and to that end I was soon looking at other vineyards. I met the Willersdorfs at Carisbrook and the Jacksons at Harcourt and arranged the purchase of grapes from them for the coming vintage. We had to take advantage of that gold medal and strike while the iron was hot, so we needed another $100,000 or so going through the books.
They were duly harvested and so began my peregrinations around the countryside towing trailers full of grapes, comforted by the thought that we could have a continuity of wine, and save ourselves from some financial embarrassment.
Things happened in 1984, not all of them good, but the Carisbrook and Harcourt wines were great, showing an elegance and a high natural acidity not characteristic of the Kingower fruit, and I used both of them for years afterwards to add to the complexity and acidity of the Passing Clouds wines. I stopped using the Jackson Harcourt fruit when it became easier for them to sell to Blackjack, which had set up next door, and a few bad years at Carisbrook saw that crop fall away dramatically. The Willesdorfs had sold the property and it was hard for the new owner to run it from a distance. When my brother Robin later bought the vineyard we used fruit from it again as well as made the wine for his label, Rainbow’s End.
Another ending, another beginning
Meanwhile things had changed again domestically. Ondine had completed her HSC at her beloved Princes Hill High School. She was a spectacular girl. We were great mates and she had become the person I loved and admired most in the world. She was now working in Melbourne at a job Ann Polis had helped her get at APSTE, and one of the greatest joys of my life was to have lunch with her there.
I lived vicariously through Ondine then. She would tell me of films and plays that she had seen, and the books that she had read, and we would discuss these things until her lunch hour had flown. I could not be there on weekends because of the tyranny of the cellar door at Kingower.
In 1984 she helped me after work at the Victorian Winemakers Exhibition at the Victoria Hotel in Melbourne, and was delighted to be part of Passing Clouds. She always believed in us, and that is probably why she (almost) always uncomplainingly put up with life in a sub-standard house while she lived at Kingower. It was never considered a sub-standard household, though; and although Sue was partially crippled with her muscular disease, she showed her characteristic sense of humour, intelligence and style that won the respect and admiration of youngsters. The house was always host to many children, local and from Melbourne; some cried when the time came to go home.
Sue and I were as enthusiastic as ever about Passing Clouds and there was never any talk of giving up. But something was missing in our relationship and it was in 1984 that Sue returned to Melbourne to live at her house at 28 Carlton Street again, taking work with Sally Milner on This Australia magazine, while I kept myself busy courting Julien, an old friend from trout-fishing and La Mama days, and Ondine’s then landlady at her house in Brunswick.
I used to visit Ondine there and have occasional meals, often cooked by me, with them both, and eventually a romance developed between Julien and me. We married in October 1984. She came to live at Kingower in the expectation that I would semi-retire and move to Daylesford, where I had always planned to retire.
Sue and I had built a lifestyle and a business that she loved and I was effectively taking it away from her. I had let her down, badly. Of course, she didn’t know then that she was to return to Passing Clouds, in 1989, and nor did I. So I was exceptionally fortunate when she did come back as kindred spirit, true friend and business partner, and I could share again her generosity of spirit, her intellect, and her inimitable sense of humour, while she relieved me of many of the tedious tasks essential to the running of a small winery business.
But this was later. Right then, in 1984, things were tough and about to get a lot tougher. But of course I didn’t know that then, either . . .
7
Ondine, my daughter
On C
hristmas Day 1984, Julien and I were busy with cooking, me with some winemaking, while Ondine, her brother Sebastian and their new-found cousin, Marilyn, set about decorating the tasting room—for Ondine had determined that it was to be transformed into a banquet hall, so of course it was. Marilyn, the daughter of my brother Greg, had been in adoptive care almost since birth. They made contact eighteen years later, and there was never any doubt that she was a Leith: her mannerisms and speech characteristics bore an uncanny similarity to our sister Carolyn’s, although of course they’d never met; she was almost a clone of Carolyn. Within half an hour of meeting, Sebastian, Ondine and Marilyn were chatting excitedly like long lost friends, Sebastian and Marilyn reciting together the Monty Python scripts which for some reason they had independently memorised. It was an eerie experience, and a pleasant one.
We took the food and wine over there and had as good a Christmas dinner as it was possible to have—good food, good wine, much laughter and much love, ending the night with Ondine and I having one of our mock arguments in part-Italian, part-English and part-laughter; we both so much liked to act. When we’d cleared up the dishes and taken them over to the house, I returned and turned the lights off in the tasting room, not knowing that the light was soon to go from my life.
On Boxing Day we all spent time together. It was planned to be the last meeting of Sebastian and Ondine for some time, for Seb had gained his agricultural diploma and was heading off to New South Wales to commence work as a jackaroo, the next step on his career path.
Oni and I went through the script of a play she was rehearsing—she had been selected to attend a drama group in Adelaide—and she encouraged me to audition for some commercial voice-overs, she having gained some extra experience and money from doing such work after her day job over the preceding weeks. ‘With your voice, Poon, you’ll get plenty of work,’ she said.
We had time, too, to make rough plans for her approaching twenty-first birthday party on 21 May, to be held in the Passing Clouds tasting room. There were to be tents hired for people to sleep in, music provided by musical friends, a performance put on by her acting friends, and a bonfire. And she was going to organise her mother, Vosje, to be there if I thought that I could handle it. It was a happy family day, with Ondine having already exchanged presents with Sue in Carlton.
Ondine’s car had been sideswiped while it was parked outside Julien’s house, and was immobilised. I was contemplating lending her our spare family car, for her imminent visit to Rod Parker’s mother who lived at Guerilla Bay on the New South Wales coast south of Sydney. She planned to take presents to her sister, Abigail, and spend some happy days in the sun with Abi and the others.
In the meantime, Ondine’s boyfriend of some years, David Jones, rang. His hand had been injured in an accident at work and was seriously stitched up. He was therefore off work for at least a week, but could drive Ondine to Geurilla Bay. It had been arranged that he would spend Christmas and Boxing Day with his family and friends in Melbourne, come to Kingower to collect Ondine, then proceed to Geurilla Bay in the afternoon of the 27th, choosing to drive through the night and have a sleep along the way.
I had not seen much of David in the preceding years, for I would contact Ondine by telephone or see her alone at one of our lunches and she would, naturally, spend most of her spare time with him and her other friends in Melbourne; weekends usually saw me at the tasting room at Kingower selling wine. However, one night I stayed in Melbourne after a Passing Clouds wine sales event and the next morning I went for a run, as I often did. Ondine was living at Clifton Hill then, about 3 kilometres away, so I decided to pay her a surprise visit. As I jogged around the corner I recognised David’s car outside the house where she was lodging. Was he staying there and was he sleeping with my sixteen-year-old daughter? Confused and, I have to confess, angry, I went into the house and approached her room and opened the door. Before me, asleep, with a shaft of sunlight playing on their faces, were two beautiful young people, as I would have imagined Romeo and Juliet before it all went wrong. I gently closed the door and left the house, adjusting my morality as I jogged away.
As planned, David arrived in the mid-afternoon of 27 December and we sat around outside the tasting room, chatting, joking and taking photographs. I had a few glasses of wine and observed that David did not have any alcoholic drink. Before they left he proudly showed me the work he and his mates had done on his ute. It really was a great restoration job and I admired it. Just before they left it occurred to me that if they wanted a sleep along the way, they could pull up at some secluded spot below a tree and sleep in the back of the ute beneath the benevolent stars as I had so often done. So I threw a mattress into the back of the ute and they headed off under the beautiful china blue sky and apricot-tinged clouds that preceded a Kingower sunset.
The next afternoon, on 28 December, Rod Parker rang to inform me that Ondine and David had not arrived at Geurilla Bay, and should they be worried? Yes, they should be worried. We should all be worried. And fearful. For there was no way they would have failed to meet a deadline without contacting us. We decided to leave things for another night before contacting the police—after all, if the police knew anything they would have alerted us.
The only place I could sleep with a phone close to my ear was the tasting room, so Julien and I made up a bed there to spend the tortured night, hoping against hope that a call would come. But none came.
For years Ondine and I had been able to communicate telepathically in some way. I had always been able to will her to telephone me, and soon after she would ring: ‘Okay, Poon, you got me, what’s going on?’ After she went missing I had delayed trying to make contact with her in my mind, fearing the worst. Then that night I tried, but there was no response. Poor Julien, lying beside me. I screamed and shrieked far worse than any wounded beast, for I knew Ondine was dead.
In the morning, after consultation with Rod, we called the police. They treated the matter seriously and were soon checking motels and caravan parks between Melbourne and Sydney, but to no avail. How can two people and a vehicle disappear from the face of the earth?
I had only one possible solution. We had discussed various routes to Geurilla Bay and I had mentioned the road through Corryong and over the Snowy Mountains through Kiandra and Cooma, then down the Brown Mountain to the coast. David had not seemed keen on the idea, but it was just possible that Ondine had persuaded him to adopt her father’s suggestion, for she and Sebastian had been camping with me some years previously in that magnificent country. If this was so, it was possible they had run off the road and their vehicle was lying, like many others from times past, in some crevasse invisible from the road.
I had contacts up that way, Ian and Juliet, winemakers who had established a vineyard at Tumbarumba below those mountains, and I turned to them for help. I needed an aeroplane to search those mountain roads. Juliet organised a plane and a spotter, but they called back with a negative result. Larry Hewitt, a friend of a friend of Julien’s, had a small elderly Cessna aeroplane that he kept at the airport at Khancoban. He was there on holiday and generously offered to fly me above those precipitous mountains in search of the wrecked vehicle.
Then our old friend and lodger at Julien’s house, James Jenkinson, offered to accompany me to the mountains and we set off on the seven-hour trip in my car—the car I could have loaned Ondine to drive herself to Geurilla Bay.
At Albury we stopped for fuel, and after paying I returned to the car with a packet of cigarettes. ‘You don’t smoke,’ said James.
‘Yes, but I used to, and right now I think I need the consolations of Madam Nicotine again.’
We camped in the Recreation Hall at Khancoban, which the local policeman had considerately arranged for us. I remember the revelry of a New Year’s Eve party being held in the hall, in bizarre contrast to the desolation in my soul. I knew that Ondine was dead, but there was a remote possibility that David was alive. In any case, their whereabouts had to be resolved
.
The next morning James drove me to the airstrip to meet up with Larry and his Cessna. We took off and began our search. The little aeroplane was perfect for the job, being slow and manoeuvrable, and Larry and I spent many hours flying above those lonely roads where we spotted several old wrecked cars lying in inaccessible gullies, but not the restored green Holden ute.
After two loads of fuel we had exhausted our options and I returned to the Recreation Hall, to meet up with Rod Parker and his partner Cheryl. They had driven there, over Brown Mountain, searching from the road for signs of a vehicular misadventure. They, like me, had nothing else to do but clutch at straws. With the aid of the policeman, I began ringing police of higher and higher rank, seeking help. I was convinced that Ondine and David’s bodies were somewhere out there in the mountains and that they could be found. I was obsessed and becoming deranged, maintaining that I would hire helicopters until my funds were exhausted.
Then, at five-thirty the next morning, the policeman arrived at our temporary lodgings and took me aside. ‘I’ve got some terrible news for you, mate.’
‘Yes,’ I responded. ‘They’re dead. What happened?’
With sensitivity and compassion he told me that the bodies of Ondine and David had been found in David’s ute, which had been dumped in Kings Cross in Sydney; their bodies were only discovered when somebody tried to steal the tonneau cover.
It was necessary for me to go to the morgue and identify Ondine’s body. David’s uncle had flown from Melbourne to identify him. James dropped me at the airstrip at Khancoban for the flight to Albury airport, once again provided by the generosity of Larry, and took the car back to Melbourne. Rod and Cheryl departed. The wheel had turned full circle.