Leeward

by Geoffrey Lehmann

  I was a teenager. We were playing a group ball game on the beach at Camp Cove. Bruce, who was approaching sixty and silver-haired, threw a tennis ball to me, straight and hard. It almost hurt. It felt like a message. Although Pixie was my friend, I wanted to be his friend also. Bruce’s income from full-time work sustained the family. The honeymoon meal, where Pixie had been provocateur and victim, was an ambiguous story. When they rescued the drowning man together, she felt – more intensely than she had ever felt – that she and Bruce were man and wife. She would have drowned happily with him. As she swam towards the drunken man, she heard imaginary voices cry out not to touch him. Then Bruce came swimming towards them, bringing a life-belt. That was why she hit the water first. Before diving in, Bruce had the good sense to get a life-belt.

  Not many living people have been portrayed on screen by Hugh Grant, as Richard Neville was in the 1991 television film The Trials of Oz, which dealt with the obscenity trials surrounding Oz, the satirical magazine he edited with Richard Walsh and Martin Sharp. I first met Richard in Lorenzini’s bar and coffee shop in 1962 when he was editor of the University of New South Wales student newspaper Tharunka. He was sunny, optimistic and without malice: unusual traits for someone planning to start a satirical magazine.

  The first Australian issue of Oz appeared on April Fools’ Day 1963. Its second issue a month later had Robert Hughes satirising Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marchers (‘Bob Hughes Covers the Big Campaign’) and my critique, ‘Harry Seidler’s Functional Ugliness’. It began:

  Like an upended hammer-head shark against the horizon at dusk, the Blues Point Tower hits the northward bound commuter in the eyes after a busy day at the office.

  As soon as I saw Seidler’s later office towers I changed my mind. My daughter Julia, an architect, admires the geometrical simplicity of his forms.

  I did not publish in Oz again but I enjoyed Richard Neville’s parties. Unlike Push parties, there was always dancing. Side 1 of the Ray Charles in Person album was played, and played again and again. To my surprise I found I could dance the twist. Disjointed pivoting, shifting from foot to foot, where frenzy counted more than finesse, suited my temperament. (Despite my sister’s encouragement I was never able to learn the jazz waltz, quickstep or foxtrot.)

  A house on Sydney’s northern peninsula looking out over a surf beach was a venue for some of these parties. The owner, a small, pretty woman, was a few years older than us and had a son at primary school. She once stood at the door and greeted us, wearing her son’s school tie and white shirt hanging loose over his school shorts.

  I imagined Christopher Brennan’s ghost stepping out of his poem ‘The Wanderer’ (where he roamed the Newport coastline sixty years earlier) and stumbling upon one of these parties:

  Chris Brennan at Newport 1965

  Battered sou-wester streaming rain, legs aching From tramping lonely roads by echoing beaches, Half-blind from the smudged countryside of night Your ghost with soggy shoes comes stumbling towards Loudspeakers, floodlit lawns and smoking flambeaux. Your meerschaum’s glow announces you are here. Your great alcoholic bulk with bloodshot eyes Surveys the couples necking in the grass, Food scraps on paper plates, young people dancing, Their reflections moving in a plate-glass window, Sucks on your pipe and vanishes leaving A layer of smoke among the oleanders.

  In 1963 my win in a poetry competition was written up by the Daily Mirror in a small story. The headline was ‘POETRY WITH A TWIST’ and was followed by a subheading ‘Dancer in a poet’s corner’. I was photographed with a wholesome smile, dark suit and spotted tie, holding a briefcase and doing the twist on my parents’ front garden path, on the way to work. I was cashing in on the dancing skills I had learned at Richard Neville’s parties.

  Roland Robinson, then in his fifties, was the senior poet at a reading in Hyde Park associated with the prize. He complained to me he was just a simple man and not a smooth talker like people with university degrees (such as mine). But I observed that when we were interviewed for radio, Roland had a ready answer for every question and took hold of the microphone like a media professional. I floundered when asked, ‘Why do you write poetry?’

  Roland had swept-back black hair (turning grey) and a leonine bearing, reciting his poems in an incantatory voice – like plainsong. He knew them by heart. If he had been a lesser poet, the performance would have been slightly absurd.

  His initially abrasive manner was calculated (perhaps unconsciously) to attract young people. He was childless. He used to tell me it was un-Australian to write poems (as I did) with Roman settings. With a lofty inconsistency, he named his large Alsatian dog Caesar. He came to one of the many parties I held in the Sutherland Street house. There were no chairs. Roland and I were sitting on floorboards I had only recently soaked with the mulberry-coloured stain. He was saying Edward Thomas was the greatest poet (after Shakespeare) in the English language. We should become blood brothers, he suggested, producing a pen-knife and offering to cut his arm and mine, and mingle our blood.

  Roland liked playing tricks on young friends. A few years earlier he took Christopher Koch and Vivian Smith on a hiking trip. The three writers were walking along high cliffs by the sea. Roland was leading the way and suddenly jumped off the cliff. His two young companions edged forward, imagining they had just witnessed the suicide of the leading Jindyworobak poet. Roland was looking up from a lower ledge, and laughing. It was a spot where he had done this before.

  David Campbell and his first wife Bonnie owned a house in Sutherland Street opposite the house I rented. Roland came to a party there with Joan Mas, a tiny, pretty poet with round cheeks and black hair. Joan was putting her arms around Roland’s waist and looking up and saying, ‘You are so beautiful’. Roland tried to disengage, saying, ‘Stop, Joan. Stop.’

  When the party at the Campbells’ broke up, I was standing in the street as Raina Campbell said good night to her father. She lived in the house next to mine. She stared challengingly at her father and slowly said ‘Good night – David ’. I like to think this was the moment encapsulated in a poem of Campbell’s: ‘Mothers and Daughters’, about the subtle daughters who steal their mothers’ beauty and their ‘blue stare/ Of cool surprise’.

  Joan Mas some years later walked into the sea and suicided. Roland was a vain, but decent man. He was grief-stricken and wrote a book, castigating himself, his histrionic Letter to Joan.

  In 1962 I was at a Bayview party not far from the Newport Arms, the hotel of Martin Sharp’s ‘obscene’ poem in Oz: ‘The word flashed round the Arms’. I had worked out a special way of drinking beer from a 750 ml bottle. By not touching the bottle with my lips I could pour the beer into my mouth in an uninterrupted flow. A young painter noticed my bizarre habit and came across the room and introduced himself. He was to be best man at my second wedding, and I was to be his best man twice. He said he would like to paint my portrait.

  When I called on him a few days later, to my surprise it was an address I knew well. A few months earlier I used to park my Studebaker in the evening in Burran Avenue, Balmoral and wait for the girl John Quinlem described as ‘beautiful, proud, and terrifying’. At the end of a painting class, she came up from a studio halfway down a bushy gully. She modelled for classes conducted by ‘an older man, Paul Delprat’, ‘not the whole body, just a hand or a leg’. I had always regarded ‘just a hand or leg’ as a harmless fiction she repeated to her parents. My bigger surprise was that this ‘older man, Paul Delprat’ who I thought must be at least thirty-five, was aged just twenty, two years younger than me. But he was older than her. She had been seventeen.

  Paul lived with his two sisters and his mother Rosalind in a grand Federation house owned by her father, Howard Ashton, artist, entomologist, musician and newspaper editor, who was effectively Paul’s father. The elevated bushland at the northern end of Balmoral Beach where Howard Ashton had his house had been a bohemian haunt nicknamed ‘Poison Point’.

  Like Pixie, Paul did not have much
luck painting my portrait. As he painted, he played LPs belonging to his grandfather – the unaccompanied Bach cello suites, performed by Pablo Casals – in the studio of the house where his mother lived. This had a raised ceiling with skylights around the perimeter. We talked while he laboured to depict his strained and self-conscious subject on a much bigger canvas than Pixie’s. By the time he abandoned it, we had become friends. That was the main point of the exercise on both our parts. I began calling on Paul.

  His family and wide circle of friends became my friends (and clients when I acquired a small law firm). I have a small stack of letterheads Paul printed up when he had just left school: ‘J Sne-vets Tweeds Gardenologists’. He and his school mates thought they might make extra money doing odd gardening jobs.

  Helped by his architect friend Harold Johnston, Paul began building a two-storey house halfway down his mother’s hillside in a rude Palladian style with windows set between square columns of sandstock brick. With a view across the gully, it looked like a toy Greek temple. The smell of linseed oil and turps was irresisti-ble to Paul’s constant visitors. His nudes tantalised the young men and encouraged the young women to compete with the girls on his walls.

  Paul and I decided to combine our skills. I would write a poem and he would do some linked drawings. The first of our subjects was Norman Lindsay.

  Paul Delprat’s great-grandfather, Julian Ashton, introduced Norman Lindsay to Rose, who became Lindsay’s second wife. Through his grandfather, Howard Ashton, Paul had become a friend of Lindsay’s. Both old men, Howard Ashton and Lindsay, despite their different painting styles, were united in their hatred of modern art, an idée fixe Paul handled with amused tolerance. In 1967 Paul suggested we drive up to visit Lindsay, then in his late eighties, at Springwood in the Blue Mountains.

  At the end of a road, set in landscaped grounds, Lindsay’s single-storey stone house had wide verandas and white Ionic columns as veranda posts. In the gardens there were concrete statues of naked nymphs and a fountain. Lindsay was already getting his house ready to turn into a museum. He was standing on the veranda in white shirt and baggy cotton trousers to welcome us, alone in the large deserted house, like a stage set:

  Smiling and frail as balsa, nose light as a wing, Expectant in the shadow of the veranda, gentle As watercolour or some summer ghost who mocks The sunlight, frisking airily under boiling noons, We saw you, sniffing shade from pines and coral-trees…

  This was how I described him in a poem published in the Sydney Morning Herald a fortnight later, with drawings by Paul.

  Norman invited us to have afternoon tea at a table in the spacious white kitchen. He was pottering about, boiling the kettle and fetching cups and saucers. He found out I was a poet and became excited when I mentioned Douglas Stewart.

  ‘When the Asiatics were about to invade Australia’, he told us, ‘Robert Menzies held a meeting of prominent Australians. We had to decide what to do. He didn’t want to leave it just to the politicians. I was representing the arts. They were talking about the Brisbane line. [The proposal was to sacrifice northern Australia to the Japanese above a line running through Brisbane.] I told them the Japs would never be able to invade Australia. The Gods wouldn’t allow it. We had a secret weapon, a Shakespeare in our midst. Douglas Stewart. While we had Douglas Stewart, the Gods would protect Australia.’

  Not long afterwards I began to tell Stewart about this conversation. ‘Not that again’, he said and shook his head, visibly upset.

  My poem in the SMH had a line:

  ‘He’s making skin out of paint,’ a small boy once exclaimed.

  Norman Lindsay wrote a letter of appreciation and added a PS.

  This afterthought arrived to me just as I was about to close this letter. What the small boy of five said was ‘He’s making skin out of paint’. Flesh is a word beyond the vocabulary of a small boy … Transferred to the act of oil painting, making skin out of paint, especially the skin of a girl’s body, is a technical profundity which leaves the artist muttering ‘It can’t be done.’ I’ve never convinced myself yet that I have caught the silvery shimmer of high light on a young girl’s breast. Ask Paul what he thinks about this infernal test of virtuosity the Gods have imposed on a few pigments extracted from coloured earths.

  I included ‘The Journey to Springwood’ in a volume I brought out the following year. I have not included it in any later selection. A mixture of genius and ratbag, Norman was an almost impossible subject for a serious poem – like the light on a girl’s breast. I was unable to get the balance right.

  In 1969 I was quickly reading through every issue of The Bulletin from its first publication date in 1880. This was for a collection of Australian comic verse I was preparing. I came across a story about Lindsay which prompted me to write a piece of light verse, which I don’t think I got around to typing up:

  Norman Lindsay and the 1924 Bushfire

  When the bush at Springwood crackles like gunfire

  And the scrub is burning with relish and zest,

  Norman Lindsay doesn’t twitch a muscle

  And orders a cask or two of the best.

  Cinders are falling on the statues,

  Smoke drifts across the curving drive.

  Norman quietly pulls out some brushes,

  As the casks, the icy casks arrive.

  The casks, the icy casks roll up

  To the broad, low sandstone house on the rise,

  The concrete nymphs and satyrs snicker

  As thirsting firefighters swarm like flies.

  Pub are deserted, school is empty.

  It’s a race to Norman’s to splutter and choke.

  Drinkers with keen noses smell

  The beer from miles off through the smoke.

  The ladies in their flappers’ dresses

  Form bees to fetch the fighters beer.

  With bags and sticks the heroes fight

  While Bacchus smiles with a ghostly leer.

  Outside the burning logs are crashing,

  But Norman fiddles with some paint

  Sketches a wave in water-colour

  And sea-nymphs calling green and faint.

  Paul’s and my second poem and drawings project was ‘The Pearl King’. I was intrigued by Colin Wall, a man with a long ginger beard who styled himself ‘The Pearl King’. He sat behind the counter of his small shop in the city, wearing a white shirt and tie, thickset and with a shiny pate. Rethreading some beads or pearls, he sometimes looked up at the passers-by, his kind blue eyes enlarged by his glasses. I introduced myself and presented a poem I had written about him.

  He sat for a drawing by Paul and the poem and drawing were printed again in the Saturday Herald. Colin was delighted with the publicity and became a friend. My sister gave him one or two small jewellery repair jobs.

  He had a weekend shop in an underground mall at Manly, the southernmost of Sydney’s northern beaches. The local lads there tried to play practical jokes on him, but Colin was watchful and quick on his feet. This region is often referred to as Manly Warringah and he styled himself as ‘Colin Malcolm Wall of Manly Warringah’. He loved the initials ‘MW’.

  He sponsored a ‘Motor Wisely’ campaign. He insisted: ‘It’s not just a publicity stunt – that’s what people accuse me of – it’s a genu-ine [‘genu-ine’ to rhyme with ‘wine’] safety campaign.’ He loved all word games and could talk word games in his quiet, persistent and pedantic voice for at least 15 minutes. (I always excused myself after 15 minutes.)

  Colin had been a wrestler in the Australian Navy. In Japan with the occupation forces after World War II he became interested in cultured pearls. He patented a device (he said) which irradiated live pearl shells with multiple infrared rays from different angles creating a small grain of charcoal at a focal point in the shell. This could become a pearl – a natural pearl formed by the bivalve itself (if the radiation had not killed it) and not a cultured pearl formed around a foreign object artificially inserted. Colin delighted in
fine distinctions like this.

  He had a friend who owned a barber’s shop. One day a colour photograph appeared in the friend’s shop window: Colin wearing a golden MW crown, with a caption, ‘King Colin Barbarossa with his famous 18" growth of natural wavy beard’.

  Before I knew him, he had a substantial jewellery business with employees. One of his main customers failed, bankrupting Colin as well. He allowed his ‘famous’ long ginger beard to be shaved off for money at a country show. This was not Colin’s first experience of hardship. Growing up in the Great Depression he used to watch his father eating a boiled egg at breakfast, while Colin ate the egg white in the small cap from the top of his father’s egg when it was cracked open. The man of the house needed calories to go out and earn the family’s bread. One morning Colin was given a whole boiled egg in an egg cup. When he cracked it open, it was hollow. His father had tipped his own egg upside down.

  Colin was devoted to his short plump wife Elaine and their children. They were church-goers. I did some small legal jobs for him and drafted his will. I sometimes talked to him at the end of the day when he locked up his little shop. Before he left, he put on his suit coat and a black felt hat – by then wearing hats was old-fashioned and unusual. I was catching a train to Lindfield, and Colin a bus to Forestville where he lived. As we briefly walked along Wynyard concourse, Colin with his black hat, dark suit and expansive ginger beard could have been mistaken for a rabbi.