My father visited me one evening in my bedroom. He told me about Archie’s insult and said darkly: ‘Archie has been the trouble all my life’. My father recited a list of instances where an unknown person had dobbed him in. North Sydney Council had got the strange idea his flats were an illegal boarding house. The Adelaide Steamship Company somehow heard my father had used some of their paint on a roof. Then there was the big income tax assessment, when the Tax Office was told about my father’s watch repairs. Archie was a gossip, he was jealous. He knew all my father’s little secrets and he was the unknown dobber.
I did not know what to say. A week or so later I was present at the denouement. My father and I were at Number Fifty-three. Archie turned up, wanting help with a little job.
‘Get out you mongrel’, my father said. Archie asked what was wrong. My father said Archie knew, and Archie said he did not. ‘The thing you said about my brother’, my father said. ‘I’m almost blind. I can’t help what I say,’ Archie pleaded. ‘Oh yes, you can’, my father snarled. ‘Get out.’ My father rushed at Archie, pushing him back up the stone steps. ‘Watch out, my glasses’, Archie called out, retreating up the backyard. My father was panting: ‘What about how Harry Edmonds killed his wife?’ This was one of Archie’s choicer speculations.
Once he was safely on the street, Archie shouted back: ‘Your brother did die of malnutrition. And what’s more you went and burned his will.’
I had not been my father’s solicitor when he administered Carl’s estate, but I now began looking after his affairs, negotiating with estate agents and developers. Gradually his protected tenants died or left, and were replaced by tenants who signed what were known as 5A leases that did not give protection. The buildings were becoming run down and many flatettes were empty.
Old man Leitner had moved out from ‘Ivanhoe’ with his daughter and grandson. He was a protected tenant but did not ask my father for any money. His son Freddie, also a protected tenant, with a wife and child, stayed on in their half of the cottage, paying rent, I believed, in the hope of getting a payment from my father. I suspected they owned another house. One day I arrived at ‘Ivanhoe’ with a friend and a locksmith, to seal off old Leitner’s part of the house. Juliana, whom I had admired when I was a child, was working at a sewing machine, in the hallway in old Leitner’s section of the house. I asked her to move the machine, which she did. We then bolted the door which separated the two halves of the house – this door had not existed when I lived there as a child, and the Leitners themselves had installed it. My friend and his girlfriend moved into old Leitner’s part of the house and within days Freddie and his family had gone.
They still continued paying rent. I carried out a purchasers index search and found the address of the house Freddie had bought. Accompanied by a process server, I personally served a notice to quit on him at his new address. We issued ejectment proceedings for the other half of ‘Ivanhoe’. I had subpoenaed the Registrar General’s volume and folio to establish that Freddie owned another house. I also had to prove he lived there.
On the morning of the hearing, Freddie’s solicitor was delayed. The magistrate asked if Freddie wanted to proceed in his absence. Freddie worked for a debt collection agency and was not shy about being in court. He was incensed with me. He said, ‘Yes’. He wanted to go straight into the witness box. After being sworn in, he turned angrily to me and asked why I had insulted him by serving proceedings on him in his house, before his family. The magistrate and I exchanged glances. In his first sentence Freddie had made all the necessary admissions. When the solicitor arrived shortly afterwards, the magistrate advised him the case was already over.
My father sat quietly at the back of the court. He did not express any emotion after the hearing had ended. I drove him down to his houses and went into the city where I worked. He now had prostate cancer. When my mother told Diana and me about the cancer, she implied he did not know. I cannot imagine his doctors did not tell him. But the secrecy meant we did not talk about it.
A nerve in my father’s left arm became infected in 1966, and he was back in hospital, or ‘the betting agency’ as he called it in his delirium. This time Archie was not a visitor. The problem was, my father explained, Iris gave him two pills, there were lottery numbers on the wrappings, he reversed the numbers, ‘then I saw these two things and knew I was done for’. There were three big discs beneath his back, long-playing records, ‘everything here just goes around and around. I’ve got to get out of here.’ He was seeing ‘black molecules’ and they were putting his knees in refrigerators. When he came home, he went back to his routine of visiting the McMahons Point houses.
The houses were almost empty. He was in the cellar of the skinny house when I called on him one weekend. He took hold of a length of rubber hose with his right hand and indicated I was to follow. A pack of dogs had taken up residence in Number Fifty-three’s hallway. Holding up his left arm as though in benediction, he cracked the hose on the tiled floor and we ran at the dogs. One pounded up the stairs and jumped across the back balcony railing into the garden. I tried to slam the front door shut, so they could not get back in. The tongue of the lock jammed against the edge of the door frame. My father licked his finger, wetted the tongue of the lock and the door shut easily.
He needed physical activity. He had recovered most of the strength in his left arm when he hauled a refrigerator up the hill from ‘Ivanhoe’. Then he cleared the growth on this lower level and burned a pile of brushwood. A neighbour was painting the hull of an upturned boat white as ash from my father’s fire blew across. ‘You silly old fool!’ the neighbour called out. Recounting the story my father said, ‘He sold his parents’ flats for just four thousand quid! Who’s the silly old fool?’
A year before his death heavy winter rains were making a roaring sound on the iron roof of the Gordon house, and the lawns were lakes pricked by grass blades. Hunched by a radiator in the dining room, he joked: ‘I’ll have to get on the roof of the boat and bail the tubs out’.
My father lost his last friend when he despatched Archie from his life. An old drunk living in a room in the skinny house fell to his death over the high stone embankment between the upper and lower sides of East Crescent Street. Now my father had lost his last tenant. I doubt it occurred to him that his marriage had made him as isolated as Iris.
In August 1968 the grey plastic phone on the floor of the Sutherland Street house began ringing. It was my mother. She was barely coherent. ‘There are two policemen at the door…’ She kept on repeating this. I could not work out whether the two policemen were still at the door or whether they had come and gone, but she kept on talking about two policemen.
I said, ‘Mother I’m about to serve dinner to some friends. Could you please tell me what you are phoning about?’ I was starting to become angry with her.
‘Your father is dead.’
I asked to speak to Diana. It had been agreed between them my mother should make the phone call. Diana told me his body was at a police station at Millers Point near the south end of the Harbour Bridge. It had been found in the street outside the skinny house, slumped on the footpath.
Later we discovered his glasses sitting on top of an open newspaper in the room where he stayed during the day. This was the upstairs bedroom which my parents and I had shared. It was now full of junk. His heart attack must have begun while he was reading. He took off his glasses, hurried down into the street and collapsed. No-one was with him when he died.
I told my sister I would take my car to the police station and identify the body. I had prepared veal viscayenne and I told my friends and Sally (whom I was yet to marry) to have it without me. After identifying my father, I drove to the Gordon house. My mother became worried, as I had not eaten: ‘There’s a chop here, that was for Leo. Here, you have it.’ I was upset with my mother yet again. It was indecent to eat my father’s chop.
When I saw my father stretched out on a bench in the police station, he was dressed in
his brown suit of Harris tweed with a herringbone pattern, something picked up at auction three or four years earlier. It had become a bit worn. He must have put on the coat before he went down into the street.
We are more than a bundle of attributes in the minds of observers. We have a strong and continuing sense of our own identity, even if it is just an illusion from cells signalling to each other. My father’s was the first dead body I had seen. His strong sense of identity had gone. It was an assembly of dead chemicals. It was not my father.
CONCRETE NYMPHS
Until the 1970s Australia’s writers and artists saw themselves as an embattled, enthusiastic minority. Gregarious and appreciative, many worked outside their chosen art form to survive – as teachers, housewives, booksellers, stenographers, journalists, public servants. They were not competing financially. They wrote or made art for its own sake and welcomed those of us starting out.
Founded in Chicago in 1912 the monthly magazine Poetry once published ‘Portrait of a Lady’ by TS Eliot, then a banker, ‘The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’ by Ezra Pound, a professional bohemian and provocateur, and ‘Apology’ by WC Williams, a medical doctor. If you visit the magazine’s website, you will find most contemporary American poets now survive on grants, teaching creative writing and rotating through academic positions. Poets once used to have jobs.
During the 1960s about five or six volumes of poetry appeared each year in Australia. More novels were published, but not so many that a new novelist was overlooked. I read the reviews of Christopher Koch’s and Randolph Stow’s first novels, both published in 1958. They were greeted with excitement as new ‘poetic’ novels.
Of the few commercial galleries, Sydney’s oldest was the Macquarie Galleries. As a young law clerk I peered through the glass door at dusk, after the gallery was closed, and in the half-light saw some luminous Lloyd Rees landscapes. (Rees was once a guest at a Writers and Artists meeting and was quizzed relentlessly by a young art dealer about his views on Australian artists. Rees was invariably complimentary about other artists, except for a comment that ‘Norman Lindsay’s oils are too oily’.)
The Hungry Horse Gallery was above a restaurant of the same name in a modest white-painted Victorian-era building on a Paddington street corner. There is a photograph of the Hungry Horse artists, a flamboyant group of abstract expressionists and figurative painters, looking down from the long cast iron balcony railing above the restaurant. One of them is Robert Hughes.
Older writers were generous. I was eighteen or nineteen when a poet I had never met and whose work I admired phoned my parents’ house and invited me to dinner. Rosemary Dobson and her husband Alec Bolton also lived at Gordon. While we had our meal, her children played or read picture books nearby.
In my early twenties I became a regular book reviewer for The Bulletin. Every couple of weeks the literary editor Charles Higham posted me a book or two, and I sent my review back within the next fortnight. I was not fussy. I read every page of every book. Most were by overseas authors and few were worth keeping. I usually sold my review copies to second-hand booksellers.
Although I received dozens of rejection slips I had no difficulty in getting poems published. It was closing time at the Royal George, we were exiting onto the footpath. Among the stream of faces I was introduced to a girl who said, ‘You must be the poet’s son’. She looked at me, slightly incredulous, when I corrected her.
Ruth Hansman introduced me to Pixie O’Harris, the children’s artist and author. During my late teens I regularly went by train and bus to her house at Parsley Bay, a trip of about ninety minutes, bringing a swimming costume and perhaps some new poems to leave with her. I always phoned before I set out. I once made my phone call when I was at a public phone box a block away from her house. I arrived five minutes later, much to her surprise. I was childishly delighted with my trick.
Pixie had become a celebrity. On weekends her house was filled with artists and friends. As I came down the front path past garden beds decorated with brightly coloured plastic flowers – Pixie liked colour but could not be bothered growing real flowers – I used to think, ‘Ah, one of her actor friends is here’ when I heard an unusually resonant male or female voice booming across the garden.
At Christmas the Pratts’ house (her husband was Bruce Pratt) overflowed with Christmas cards on mantelpieces, the tops of cupboards, picture rails, any unoccupied surface. There were literally hundreds of cards, far too many to reply to. So she had a rule which she let all her friends and well-wishers know about: she sent no Christmas cards to anyone.
I came into Pixie’s life as her intense friendship with the Australian poet Ray Mathew was coming to an end, and he was about to leave Australia permanently. She had three daughters and talked about Ray often, like a long-lost son. Fairies had been the stock-in-trade of her illustrated books and hospital murals. They were becoming passé and she was trying her hand at painting landscapes. We had been friends for just a few months when she did a portrait of me in oils. It has a strained, posed look. Neither of us liked it. Much later she did a much freer, small watercolour sketch.
Born Rona Olive Harris, the daughter of a Welsh artist, her parents were always calling out ‘Behave yourself, Rona! … Come here, Rona!’ and she came to detest her given name. She became ‘Pixie’ because of her pranks on the ship when the family migrated to Australia in 1920. Hearing this story, I formed a picture of a young child skylarking with passengers and sailors. She was then an attractive, solidly-built late teenager who had already exhibited drawings in Wales, aged fourteen. In Australia she began signing herself Pixie O. Harris. One day through a printer’s error this became ‘Pixie O’Harris’. This preposterous mix of Irish and Welsh caught her fancy. Her sister, also an artist, became O’Harris as well.
Pixie was once a household name rivalling May Gibbs. She had only a brief stint at the Julian Ashton Art School and was largely self-taught. Before they could graduate to live models, the Ashton students had to draw skulls for an entire term. Pausing to examine one of Pixie’s skulls – it had a fairy flying out of the eye socket – the elderly Julian Ashton was dismissive. ‘Mr Ashton’, Pixie replied, ‘Just because you don’t see fairies, doesn’t mean other people don’t see them’.
If she had been exposed to a few years of rigorous criticism in an art school she may have become more self-critical. She has been criticised for garish colours and too much detail. In one of her large colour illustrations of marine objects, an exquisitely drawn spider shell is lost in the clutter. Her true métier was pen-and-ink drawings. She gave me some of these when she and Bruce moved from the Parsley Bay house to a flat: a weeping hippopotamus, and a Chinese girl with sharp fingernails riding on the back of a swimming turtle.
But she could not restrain her ebullience. As a child she frightened her parents by painting eyes on her eyelids and pretending to sleep with her eyes open. She had a life-long leg injury from trying to climb on a horse in the surf; and she and her husband Bruce were awarded medals for diving off a ferry one night to save a drowning man. They saw his face lit up by the lights of the ferry and she hit the water first (being heavier than Bruce, she claimed). As she swam towards the drowning man she was disgusted when he breathed whisky on her.
Publicity was her lifeblood. She needed frequent newspaper mentions to keep her name before the public. I used to phone her to read my many poems. I was straining her generosity and we agreed some would have a dedication to her. I affixed the dedication to lighter, shorter pieces, but had no luck getting these published.
Eventually, I published a poem dedicated to her. A young Irishman was one of her regular visitors. After he had left one afternoon, she laughed about how he used to take his sandals off, stretch out in an armchair and say: ‘Don’t you think I have beautiful feet?’ A few weeks later I showed her a poem about two swans at sunset floating in a windless moat, unable to touch, and ‘haunted/ By their image in the other’s eye’. I said it was about this young man. T
o my surprise, Pixie exclaimed, ‘That’s me! That’s my poem.’ I was embarrassed by her ‘That’s me!’ The poem was not about an ebullient person like Pixie. But she understood herself better than I did. Her ebullience was narcissistic. When I published ‘The Two Swans’ some years later in a book of my poems, it had a dedication: ‘For Pixie O’Harris’.
I introduced Pixie to my friends. She became particularly fond of Stephen Wilson. She opened my friend Paul Delprat’s first exhibition. After her launch speech, she was reciting Longfellow’s ‘The Village Blacksmith’ to a small group clustered around her. ‘Under a spreading chestnut tree/ The village smithy stands…’ she began, then stumbled at the second verse: ‘His something something is long and black…’ and gave up as I started laughing. She had a streak of ladylike ribaldry. I forgot about her gaffe, but years later she reminded me: ‘Now don’t you go telling people how I muddled up the Longfellow poem’.
At the Chuck Wagon Bistro after Paul’s exhibition, I suggested Pixie try frogs’ legs as an appetiser. She had just eaten her frogs’ legs with evident pleasure when she turned pale. She had just overheard they were frogs’ legs. ‘Oh dear, I feel ill’, she turned to me with a look of horror. ‘I thought you were joking.’
In the 1970s I used to visit Pixie with my young children. Julia, as a child, loved her warmth, the pretence there were fairies in the garden, the nooks and crannies of the house: ‘there were so many things to interest a child, the wooden staircase, shells on boxes, she was so welcoming to us’.
When Pixie said of ‘The Two Swans’, ‘That’s me!’ she may have been thinking of her marriage. She married when people married young and did not necessarily know much about the other person. Marriage was final. They were trapped like the two swans. When Pixie and Bruce sat down for their first evening meal on their honeymoon, she was twenty-four. They discussed the menu. Each announced broadly similar choices. But Pixie was worried about being a burden on Bruce. So she suggested something a little less expensive for herself. She was surprised when Bruce said he would order something more expensive. She suggested something even less expensive for herself. Bruce announced a yet more expensive choice for himself. Eventually Pixie chose the cheapest item, probably sandwiches. She wondered who this man was. ‘It poisoned our marriage’, she told me. She did not understand their meal was a line in a budget Bruce was determined to spend.
Leeward Page 23