Daddy, We Hardly Knew You

by Germaine Greer

  In all the cemeteries I visited in this demented pilgrimage I saw the initial invasion re-enacted as the flowers planted on the graves escaped through the railings and took off. In Maldon cemetery, where two separate Greer strains are buried, some of the bereaved had planted spindly little cypresses inside the ornamental railings of their family plots. The people who planted them are long gone and buried otherwheres, but the cypresses have grown to giant proportions, until they have burst the railings, and shattered the head-stones. The dead lie crushed under vast grey roots each bigger than a full-grown man, bearing up an enormous column of grey wood twenty-five feet in girth. In other plots the headstones and the railings have disappeared under a mountain of brambles, on which the dog rose blooms for a day or two in spring. Oleanders twenty feet across feed on the rare organic material furnished by human hair and bone. Scented geraniums, grown hard and odourless, have seeded themselves for miles. I have found their descendants growing behind the ocean dunes at Sydenham inlet.

  Along the road to Cooma grow spires of vivid blue Viper’s Bugloss, more spectacular here than ever it is in Europe, where it is only found in wild places clutching the scree. Most Australians think it is a native, but they should know from the very density with which it grows, crowding out all competing vegetation, that it is an invader. In Australia, Viper’s Bugloss grows more compact, and brighter green, with many more florets on the stem. The flowers are always blue with red stamens, instead of budding pink and turning blue, as they do in Europe. Alongside the tracts of Echium vulgare, you can see tall spires of Verbascum phoenicium, and Verbascum thapsiformis, both the same unnatural height, with new spathes appearing among the ruins of old ones, because they never die down properly and lose their old vegetation. In that same upland pasture country you can find sea-holly, and thistles, miles and miles of thistles, which graziers are obliged by law to eradicate, but the struggle is unequal. The pastoral industry staggers from crisis to crisis, unable to concern itself with minor details like the loss of thousands of cleared hectares to bulrushes and noxious weeds.

  The story is an old one. ‘To clear this land,’ wrote a Quaker settler in Tasmania in 1887, ‘that is, to ring the large trees, fell the small ones and burn off the scrub and sow it with grass seed, cost altogether about three pounds per acre, but if the burn off is successful, sufficient is realised from the first crop of grass seed, when cut and threshed, to pay the expenses of the clearing. But it is many years before the ground is anything like clear as the large trees will stand when rung thirty or forty years and in fact the settlers do not want to see them fall, as they take up so much room when lying on the ground and they will not burn until they are rotten and the labour of splitting them up is too great unless there is a market for the wood close at hand and means of getting the wood to it.’

  The more energetic settlers destroyed the stumps of felled trees with gunpowder. ‘A hole is bored with a two inch auger about four feet into the stump and into this about two pounds of powder are poured and this in exploding rends the stumps to pieces.’ The others simply ring-barked them and left them standing till they fell, and then burnt them more or less. The results of these techniques can be seen all over Australia, where tree trunks and jagged stumps litter the degraded grasslands, long since given over to brambles and bulrushes.

  The process was well advanced when our Quaker observer (who married a Greer from Ulster) was building his home in Tasmania in the 1870s. ‘The sweet briar is a great trouble here. W.S. says it costs him a hundred pounds a year rooting it up. The cattle eat the hips and drop the seeds all over the field and they spring up everywhere. They generally wait until they are well-grown and then pass a chain around the bush and put a yoke of oxen to it and drag it bodily out of the ground.’ In the prime pasture land of the Derwent Valley, farmers are now using herbicides and 245T to get rid of the weeds. All along the roadsides writhe scorched hawthorns and dog-roses, interspersed with clumps of fennel, swollen into gross yellow crozier shapes by the action of the poison.

  The settlers soon realised that in inadvertently bringing with them thistles and ragwort they had made a serious mistake. As mile after mile of the land they had toiled to clear was taken over by thistles, the government brought in the Eradication of Thistles Act. A few years later, ragwort, Senecio jacobea, was declared a thistle in the meaning of the act. Then brambles were added to the list of noxious weeds, then prickly pear, which spread over 60,000 acres of arable land in Queensland alone. If the settlers had been in search of Lebensraum, the opportunist plants had far more capacity for exploiting it. In Europe, intensive farming can keep any weed from disrupting the ecological balance, but in Australia farms in order to be profitable have to be many times bigger than the average European smallholding. The weeds fought back. Most of the families who took up selections on Australia eventually abandoned them. If they were not defeated by noxious weeds, indigenous insects, and animal diseases, they were finally unable to mechanise or to tool up to modern hygiene and quality-control requirements.

  No nation of independent farmers ever existed in Australia, despite policies of giving farming leases to virtually all who asked for them, returned soldiers, free settlers, new migrants. My Danish, Swiss-Italian and Irish ancestors were driven like most of the settlers by land hunger, but none of them remained on the land for more than a generation. Where they farmed abandoned fences hang in disrepair. Old sheep pens sag under tons of brambles. Felled trees lie higgledy-piggledy and tree stumps stand like tombstones. Between them grow acres of thistles and ragwort. Old fruit trees have turned to thickets of sterile branches choked with dead wood. The roses have escaped from the flower garden and turned to dog-roses growing in murderous thorn-bursts up and down the abandoned pastures.

  More St John’s Wort grows in the mountains near Beechworth than in all of England. The light shade of the eucalyptus woods and the frost protection they provide constitute an ideal environment. In Europe it grows in clumps in abandoned farmland and as an occasional in woods, but in Victoria it grows as a carpet, miles and miles of rusty yellow under the trees. By Christmas its flowering period is already over, but no natives overwhelm its spent flower heads, for all the nutrient in the fragile soil has gone to produce their brief blaze. There is no point in walking in these woods, for here there is nothing but St John’s Wort to see. In Europe St John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum) is a welcome thing, a useful medicinal for man and beast. In Italy cows used to be given a nosegay of St John’s Wort and garlic to eat at the feast of St John to clear their blood. Perhaps the early settlers brought it with them as a useful herb, not knowing that the aborigine pharmacopeia was at least as sophisticated as their own. When it became dominant their medicinal became poisonous.

  Some of the farmers say that the opportunists do well for the first few years, but they overload the ecology and quickly exhaust the soil. As suddenly as they appear, they disappear. They might of course say the same about themselves. Australia used to live on the sheep’s back, but sheep ate out the grasslands, whether produced by clearing scrub and forest, or natural. They nibbled away the groundcover and their hard pointed feet compacted the earth. The wind and the rain did the rest. Even today, sheep farmers run too many sheep to the acre, but costs of manpower, equipment and transport are high. The Australian shearer is the fastest and cuts the closest in the world, but his price, a mere $110 per hundred, is too high. The wool-growers are experimenting with a protein which administered in the right amount will make the sheep’s fleeces fall off.

  Nobody cares, least of all the grazier, if the shearer becomes extinct. There is no way of life to defend; the shearer himself was an itinerant worker who lived in a town when he was not on the wool-track. The most important consideration in Australia is to keep the profit margin wide enough to support the grazier’s lifestyle. The shearer’s job demands massive strength, endurance and skill, but the combination cannot earn him what the lessee of the land, who may spend less time on his estate than the shea
rer does, considers to be his just reward. Even if he manages to make the shearer redundant, it is unlikely that the grazier can continue to live in the old way off his wool cheque, educating his children in private schools and travelling abroad whenever he wishes. The Minister for Commerce, Industry and Development says that the independent graziers are a luxury. Like it or not, they will eventually have to sell out to big business. Corporate farming will manage far vaster tracts of land and will be able to move the sheep population in a more rational manner so that no area is degraded or eaten out. This could mean that the white man is learning the wisdom of the aborigine use of the land, but he will be able to make only limited use of his new understanding. Even if he were to acquire a taste for goanna meat and witchetty grubs, or anything else that Australia produces naturally (besides seafood) the white man could not live off them, because, like the Viper’s Bugloss and the St John’s Wort, he is too prolific and too greedy. When the corporate farmers seed their pasture, they will seed it with European and American trefoils, and they will not herd emus but sheep.

  One of the assumptions underlying the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the First Fleet as a ‘Bi-centennial’ or Australia’s birthday is that it was fortunate for the island continent that British people attended to its exploitation. ‘If we hadn’t settled,’ the revellers snarl, ‘someone else would have. Whaddyareckon would have happened to this country if the Chinese or the Indians had taken it over?’ It is a curious fact that the ‘Afghans’ who ran the camel trains that kept the outback settlers alive, who were mostly Pathans, survived in the deserts where well-equipped explorers died, because they lived as equals with Aborigines and learned from them. They developed a cuisine which used native plants, and adapted aborigine technology in the finding and preparation of food. And they endured the same obloquy as the Aborigines. If their descendants had flourished, multiplied and become dominant, Australia might have developed a completely distinct ecology and economy, producing new foodstuffs for the vast Asian market, instead of the beef, and wool, and uranium that have been extracted at such cost.

  Nemesis

  But the Absolute Truth is so large, and human opinion so small, that the latter cannot get away altogether, however eccentric its course may be; indeed the more elongated the orbit of Error, the greater chance of its being swallowed up by the scorching Truth, on its return trip.

  ‘TOM COLLINS’, SUCH IS LIFE

  You might be excused for thinking that with all this wandering around gazing at wildflowers and trees and ruminating—I’d say meditating but the word has been debased—I was getting nowhere. I think now that I was paying my last respects to my father’s lie. The five-thousand-mile funeral procession from Brisbane to Melbourne to Alice Springs, to Perth and back to Sydney, was extremely costly. When I fetched up in the spare room in Margaret’s house, with the usual mug of gardenias and forget-me-nots and Cecil Brunner roses on the night table, and my godson’s drawings and photographs on the walls, I knew that if Reg Greer had been a Greer I would have found him. I thought that was all I knew, even though my goddaughter liked to tease me by calling me Greeney. I had kept an eye on the Greeneys; I knew exactly where to find them in the record, but I refused to look. It was time for the women whose eyes are terrible to take a hand.

  The letter from my father’s old secretary came out of the blue. Seeing as Joyce had worked for my father before I was born, I was surprised to recognise her name. The primal elder intervened; her letter disappeared. (I put it down to the primal elder’s mischief that as I roamed the outback I had lost two rolls of film, three pairs of glasses, all my photographs of my father, and my copy of my parents’ wedding certificate, and that the copies of documents that I mailed back to England took five months to arrive.) I found Joyce in the telephone directory.

  Since my arrival in Sydney the weather had been boisterous and unpredictable. As I set off for Elizabeth Bay Road the sky lay on my head like an army blanket. The air smelt used and spent. The car’s air-conditioning blew cold on my arms and legs, filmed with uneasy sweat. I turned it off and opened the window. Still the sweat ran into my eyes.

  I figured that I knew Joyce’s name from my parents’ conversations, probably because she had scaled the highest pinnacle of female aspiration and become an international air-hostess. She is still a pretty lady, dressed for her visitor that day in a black sleeveless top and a pleated white skirt printed with spidery black scribbles. Although she has not quite got used to her new hip, she wore high heels and a long necklace of huge blood-red beads. She had the wine ready chilled, although it was tea-time. I’d been playing Scrabble with Ruthy and Margaret and Hannah, and drinking the champagne left over from my birthday party. The last thing I fancied was more wine, but I could see that she was looking forward to it, so I took some too. Besides, she was a little bit nervous, and I didn’t want to play Torquemada.

  Joyce wanted me to get the feeling of the way it was in Daddy’s office in Newspaper House, with its art deco woodwork. The secretary sat inside a sort of balustrade with a swing door. Inside were the small office where Gerry Bednall sat doing his crosswords, and trying to ignore the horseplay outside, and Daddy’s larger office, with the books of art nudes in the desk drawer, and what seemed to me as a little girl an enormous expanse of green carpet.

  ‘No, I don’t think he had a car,’ said Joyce, ‘He lived so close you see, just there in Hotham Street. The man who had the job before him was English. I suppose I thought your father was English too. The reps were a bunch of characters; they’d all troop off to coffee in the morning, all except Gerry. He was a nice man but he wasn’t part of the coffee clatters. All the reps’d go off for coffee together at eleven, and they’d make jokes about whatever story was in the news. Then your father’d come back into the office and he’d have made up a whole series of Confucius say jokes. They were all the rage then, Confucius say, you know?

  ‘Your father loved to talk, always teasing, and joking and playing silly pranks. They’d egg each other on. Blue Langley, Jim Shave from the Courier Mail… Alec Mackay. You could see Alec Mackay meant to get ahead. Dudley Ward, now he was a delightful man. His family was posh; his mother lived at Cliveden, which was a private hotel at the top of Collins Street. He worked for the Bulletin, younger than the other reps. He got on very well with Reg. Alec Mackay used to have a go at your father. “You’d know all about that, Reg, wouldn’t you?” he’d say. Oh, Reg didn’t like that at all. He’d throw his head back and give you that haughty look. He looked like Basil Rathbone, but that’s before your time. They’d go out to lunch, and then tea in the afternoon and at five o’clock they’d all go over the road for drinks at the Australia.’

  ‘One of his old yoke-fellows told me once that Reg Greer never worked an afternoon in his life.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s quite fair,’ said Joyce. ‘Your father had to chase the agencies up, you know, and send the block of the ad or the matrix off to Spencer Street. And he had to compile a monthly report. He always came back into the office of an afternoon because he was scared there’d have been a call from Adelaide.’

  ‘I thought that job was mostly romancing clients.’

  ‘Well, he had an expense account. He had to lunch the account executive when the new contract was falling due. And he did use it, because I used to have to make up his expenses claims. But it wasn’t a hard job, by any means. The agencies knew they’d have to take space in the Advertiser, and that was all there was to it.

  ‘The reps were always horsing around, but not Mr Bednall. He was a nice man, with beautiful handwriting. I went out to his house and had dinner with his family. They were lovely people, distinguished. All the children did really well. He didn’t get on with your father.’

  Joyce had to get up out of her seat to turn on the fan. She had been swimming and had hurried back to shower and change for my visit. The lowering sky that I brought with me had closed over the little flat like an anaesthetist’s mask. I could see tha
t she was very uncomfortable but I made no reference to it. She was a real working girl, uncomplaining, staunch and straightforward. And there was something she wanted to say to me. As yet I had no inkling what it was.

  ‘Your father was always scared there’d be a call from Lloyd Dumas, Sir Lloyd he was later.’ (I never heard Daddy refer to him as anything else.) ‘Sir Lloyd didn’t smile much. Your father was engaged to your mother then. Your mother used to come into the office sometimes in the late afternoon. She seemed very impressed by the office. All carried away by the glamour. It was quite swish, I suppose. I was getting thirty shillings a week, and the usual wage for that kind of work was a guinea, so it was well paid. That was the hey-day of newspaper advertising and it was quite glamorous. Your mother was always very smartly dressed, wonderful little hats, you know. A milliner, wasn’t she? Very striking. Slim. Tall.’

  ‘And a lot of lipstick.’

  Joyce laughed. ‘A lot of lipstick. I remember your father had to go and take instruction sometimes at the church. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he’d say.’

  Joyce paused, then she said rather hurriedly, ‘Your father was a sensual man.’ For a second I thought she meant an homme moyen sensuel, then I cottoned on. She caught my expression of dawning surprise, and explained, ‘He flirted a lot. Flirted with everyone.’

  ‘Joyce, you mean he made passes.’ Suddenly we were just two working women discussing an employer.

  ‘The Bull women all have big bosoms,’ she said. ‘They were always making references. I just laughed it off, but your father was always brushing past me. I was just a kid. Only sixteen. Wasn’t even allowed to go out at night, unless my father knew where I was going and who with. We usually went out as a family, to movies and live shows. And Dad had explained to us what men were like. We weren’t sheltered or anything. We just weren’t silly. He’d take us to the Tivoli, anywhere, and we’d get the risque jokes and all that. Once or twice I came into the office too quietly and I’d hear your father and his mates talking dirty in his office, and I’d just go out again and come in making a bit more noise. They wouldn’t do it in front of me.’