My third poem and drawings project with Paul was the ‘Witches’ Houses’. I was fascinated by the eight ‘Witches’ Houses’ at the eastern end of Johnston Street, Annandale, a group of large houses built in a variety of styles, some of them twins with steeples like witches’ hats, dating back to the nineteenth century. One or two had become derelict. I found they were built by John Young, a speculator and builder who was a pioneer in the use of concrete. Paul and I did another poem and drawings for the Herald. It was a rough-and-ready piece:
In Johnston Street the mighty derelict ghosts of your dream still linger On concrete foundations like marzipan that will rub away with a finger. Eight elephantine sisters looming grey against the sky. Curtains stream from an open window like a shattered eye, Pigeons like messengers of death roost on a cold damp sill, Newspapers rot in basement rooms, palm trees are never still…
I used one of the ‘Witches’ Houses’ to play a practical joke on Shelley Rose, Paul’s girlfriend and the muse for his paintings at that time. An animated and generous girl, Shelley had to tolerate (with good humour and some frustration) competition from his other models.
One night after a dinner party at Paul’s Mosman house, I suggested we go later that night to a party at one of the witches’ houses. The address I wrote down was a derelict house. I had already placed a series of candles on each landing. As soon as the meal was over, I went ahead to Johnston Street and lit the candles. I welcomed the dinner party guests at the front door, and we began climbing the stairs. The railing had gone and the ghostly light of the candles on each landing ensured no-one fell down the central stairwell. Shelley was becoming increasingly apprehensive and sceptical. As we climbed the stairs, there was no sound of music or voices, just eerie silence. We reached the top landing. There was a candle on the floor in a cavernous emptiness, its flame flickering in wind blowing through a smashed window.
Shelley said ‘So, where’s this party Geoffrey?’ I lit up my face from below with an electric torch, contorting it in a ghastly grin. Shelley screamed.
Paul often praised a younger artist friend who worked as a labourer during the day and painted at night. Salvatore Zofrea grew up in a house with an earth floor in the Calabrian town of Borgia. The baby of the family, he became the only migrant child in Balgowlah Primary School. His parents, neither of whom could read or write, encouraged him to become an artist. When we eventually met in 1967, Salvatore was twenty-one, and invited me to call on him at his parents’ Seaforth house. He began painting my portrait in his tiny studio, a dark lean-to at the back of the house. He did two very quick, large portraits with Prussian blue backgrounds in the style of Chaim Soutine.
I was now used to having my portrait painted. By the time Salvatore had finished his two portraits we had become friends. As usual, this was the point of the exercise for both of us. He later discarded these two early works. Salvatore was painting his drunken bride series from his Calabrian childhood, bravura expressionist works with inky blues and brilliant primary colours. He was someone I often turned to when my marriage with Sally broke up.
I was dissatisfied with my poem-portrait of Norman Lindsay, but I had written a more satisfactory poem-portrait about Maurice O’Shea, the famous vigneron who was Garry Shead’s uncle. (I wrote the poem after hearing Garry’s recording of a broadcast in which John Thompson interviewed O’Shea’s friends after his death.)
I admired the work of Lloyd Rees more than any other Australian artist. I found Rees’s number in the telephone book and called him, saying I would like to write a poem about him. I told Charlie Willcox, the solicitor I was working for. Charlie was Rees’s solicitor and slightly apprehensive about my project.
I went about my Rees poem like a portrait painter, interviewing him in his studio one evening, and taking notes as we talked. Many of the works he was exhibiting then were sketches of San Gimignano. We discussed his work methods there: sketching in the olive groves in the morning, lunch, then a doze on the terrace of his hotel. San Gimignano became the locus of the poem.
There is a risk a ‘poem-portrait’ will become hagiography. I had a sudden intuition – the doze on the terrace after lunch. This allowed a tone shift from a major to a minor key – with a dream-interlude and hints of San Gimignano’s violent past as Rees is dozing – then a return to a major key at the end when he wakes up. The descent into the underworld in Virgil’s Georgic on bees was my model. (The O’Shea poem has a not dissimilar structure, with O’Shea’s lung cancer being introduced halfway through the poem. Wikipedia claims O’Shea did not smoke. The O’Shea of my poems smokes and Garry Shead has a photograph of his uncle with a cigarette trailing from the side of his mouth. He assures me it has not been Photoshopped.)
I sent Rees my poem-portrait of him not long after it was written. I received this reply:
Dear Geoffrey Lehmann
Just a simple ‘thank you’ is all I can send in acknowledgment of your wonderful tribute. The poem deeply moved my wife and myself.
As to the publication – of course you must go ahead – but you may not want to wait until the ‘Retrospective’, which won’t be until August next year.
Your visit to us with your charming friend Sally gave us much pleasure and we hope we will meet again before long.
Sincerely, Lloyd Rees
‘The Painter in Italy: For Lloyd Rees’ was published across two pages in The Bulletin. When Sally McInerney and I married the following year, Rees and his wife Marjory were guests and they gave us a drawing of the walls of San Gimignano.
The poem’s dream interlude and descent into darkness were apt in a way I did not appreciate at the time. Charlie Willcox had told me that when Lloyd was courting Marjory after his first wife’s death, he was on anti-depressants. Marjory used to swap the anti-depressants in his pocket for placebos as they went on walks. Very late in his life, when Marjory began suffering from dementia, Lloyd went into another deep depression.
In 1961 Les Murray and I co-edited Arna, the annual journal of Sydney University’s Arts Faculty. In 1962 we co-edited Hermes, the annual Sydney University journal. Les arranged both editor-ships. Like many editors of university magazines, we essentially printed whatever came our way. We had no disagreements. I commissioned the artwork for both magazines.
I admired the left wing printers and publishers Edwards & Shaw. I had been impressed by their production (with red and purple end papers) of A. D. Hope’s sexually explicit first book of poems The Wandering Islands (his best and most remarkable book). This was an era when printers and publishers had to worry about obscenity. Their printing works, in a small nineteenth century sandstone building, one of a row in Sussex Street, occupied a basement at the bottom of a staircase, that was more like a ladder. I called in and introduced myself.
Dick Edwards, a tall serious man, agreed to print Arna. He was the printer (also a poet, although I discovered this only many years later). Not long afterwards, I met Rod Shaw. He was the artist and designer. A more ebullient man, with a slapdash air, he had merry pink cheeks and silvery curly hair. Dick and Rod began working together in 1939. In 1983 they held a closing-down party at their printing works and I stepped down the ladder-like staircase for the last time.
I proofread the galleys for Arna and cut and pasted them up into pages. I later arranged for Edwards & Shaw to print Hermes and again did the proofreading and pasting up. This association continued when Edwards & Shaw printed Les’s and my first book of poetry The Ilex Tree in 1965. With both magazines and the book, I made the final choices, with Les’s agreement.
One Friday afternoon in about 1961, I headed north with Les and his friend Greg O’Hara in Greg’s Land Rover. At Hexham Les insisted we stop at the Oak Milk Bar, a large establishment with uniformed female employees. Just back from the milk bar there was a white-painted dairy factory and a red neon sign, OAK, above the three-storey tower. Oak was owned by a co-operative of dairy farmers. We were there not just for a milkshake.
At about midnight we arri
ved at Bunyah and his father’s unpainted, rough-hewn shack in a valley, perched on the edge of a small slope. Cecil Murray, a short barrel-chested, red-cheeked man, greeted us warmly with his megaphone voice. He may have brewed us a pot of tea. Les and I later remarked on how similar our fathers were. Bigger in the chest than my father, Cecil was about the same build. Both viewed their sons with a laissez-faire scepticism.
Lighting was from kerosene lamps. Cecil insisted we boys bed down promptly and get to sleep before him. His snoring could be heard half a mile away down the valley, he said, and told the story of the man who came to build his new milking shed and was kept awake all night by Cecil’s snoring.
Next day Les led us across paddocks that had been the Murrays’ for generations, (but not Cecil’s, who had been dispossessed by family machinations and was his brother’s tenant, Les told us). At the top of a hill we looked across the landscape from a summit spattered with brown-yellow cow pats. Parcel after parcel of the Murrays’ land, Les explained, had been lost through gambling and alcohol. Les was descended from the Murrays of Atholl, he told us. He used to muse about how many family members stood between him and the dukedom.
Les took delight in setting the bark of paperbark trees on fire. Burning off was good for the health of the land, he insisted. On one of our walks he took a rifle. He fired at a couple of brown hawks riding a thermal, high up. He fired a second time and missed again. Back at his father’s house he shot a parrot – at short range, I noticed. (I was a city boy, busily making silent judgments about a country boy who had lived here all his life.)
Les’s speech became self-consciously Australian when speaking to petrol station attendants – he dropped his g’s and called them ‘mate’. (When I visited Les in his two side-by-side houses in Bunyah in 2015 – our friendship had been in abeyance for about thirty years – I heard him speaking in this countrified way again. It had become his normal speech.)
Les (and I) never joined the table of intellectuals at Manning House where Bob Hughes, Chester and Clive James sat. Clive James was an early fan of Murray’s poetry. But Les knew he was not one of them. Les was unusual at that time in detecting a tension between the educated left and working-class people, people from the bush like him. More than fifty years later his resentment of the Manning House intellectuals still lingered. On my 2015 visit to Bunyah the late Robert Hughes, without being named, was briefly alluded to. Speaking to his wife Valerie, Les said, ‘What’s-his-name, that fellow who used to ignore you? What was his name?’
Surrounded by students at a table in the Manning House cafeteria, Les assumed the laughing and cackling role of court jester. Most of us were undergoing male adolescent depression. For Les this was more than a phase. Even the farm at Bunyah became unwelcoming when he failed Arts I. But his father was a forgiving man. On one of his trips home, Les was sitting alone in a paddock when he saw his father advancing across the grass, with an impish grin and playing a fiddle: ‘Cheer up, Leslie, my boy’.
Members of the Newman Society outnumbered Protestants two to one at the Manning House table where Les presided. They were welcoming, and interested in logical argument. My friendships with them continued. In 1960, my first year as an articled clerk, I did not finish my rounds (filing documents in courts and at the Land Titles Office) until well after 2 pm. I then joined a group of slightly older Catholic (or ex-Catholic) intellectuals who met for lunch in a bar at the Hotel Metropole. By the time I got there everyone had eaten, but many lingered on: the journalist Dick Hall, Father Ed Campion, Bob Vermeesch (a solicitor) and Brian Johns. In 1976 two of these friendships were to play a fateful role in my life.
I was among the large number of friends attending the 1962 wedding of Les and Valerie at Our Lady of Dolours, Chatswood, but not one of a much smaller contingent attending the wedding reception. I was not one of Les’s boon companions, the Army of Four Colonels.
‘Halt and Turn’, a poem about his marriage to Valerie, does not appear in Les’s Collected Poems, but it is one of his finest. We included it in our 1962 issue of Hermes. Les describes himself as a wanderer ‘driven … past house and light’ until the snow stops. It is a way ‘beyond weariness’ that brings him ‘home to your hearth’. Valerie literally saved Les’s life. Without her, he may not have survived very far into his forties.
Not long after their marriage I called in on them in their few rooms in a large dilapidated Glebe Point house. They were desperately poor but Les was optimistic. He suggested we walk down to the waterfront. We found a rowing boat tied up to the shore. With an insouciance I could not match, Les stepped in and I followed.
He took hold of the oars, assuming I was a city boy who knew nothing about boats. As he clumsily pulled, jerking the boat this way and that, he accepted my suggestion that I take over. We rowed out to a deserted hulk and climbed up the side. We roamed the decks peering in through portholes and exploring dank corridors, watched over by curved ventilator heads. The ship was suffused with a peach-coloured rust that matched the late afternoon sky reflected in Rozelle Bay. Les was in his most companionable guise, the informative host.
In 1963 Les and Valerie moved to Canberra, where Les took up a position as translator with the Australian National University. A few weeks later their first child was born. I stayed with them on weekends when courting Livija Strauts.
I juggled my duties as an articled clerk with joining some early morning coffee drinkers who met near Circular Quay. Our convener was Geoff Mill, who had a public relations firm, and was author of The Malady of Creeping Flowers and Other Poems. The patriarch of our half dozen coffee drinkers was Walter Stone, the founder of Wentworth Press and a strong Labor man like Geoff. In late 1962 I approached Walter to publish a book of the poetry of Murray, Brian Jenkins and myself – our provisional title A Hatching of Goslings. When Walter could not get a grant from the Commonwealth Literature Fund, Les approached his employer, the Australian National University, to publish our book. In the meantime Les had devised a new title, The Ilex Tree, and Brian had withdrawn from the book.
In September 1965 Les was a delegate at a Commonwealth poetry festival in Cardiff. Just before he left, he told me, Valerie used to gaze up and say: ‘My Leslie is going overseas’.
When it was published towards the end of 1965, The Ilex Tree received a long, favourable review from the English poet and solicitor Roy Fuller in The London Magazine. In his Canberra Times review the poet Ronald McCuaig said he was tempted to compare our book with the Lyrical Ballads of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Kenneth Slessor’s review in the Daily Telegraph described us as ‘two young men whose writing is so brilliant that it offers an exciting promise for the future…’
Not along after we published The Ilex Tree Les suggested we bring out another joint book. I thought we each had enough material for an individual collection. We were the youngest poets in the new edition of Judith Wright’s A Book of Australian Verse. The goslings had hatched!
The Bulletin commissioned Garry Shead to draw a laurelwreathed cartoon figure of me to accompany my report on a ‘Writers’ Retreat’ at the University of New England at the start of 1967 organised by Derek Whitelock, an English academic. Les and I were among the fifteen younger writers invited. The faculty of older writers included Frank Hardy, Thomas Keneally, Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright, John Manifold and John Thompson. My friendship with the poet John Thompson was to be brief. He died a year and a half later of a ruptured duodenal ulcer, aged sixty-one.
John had put together the collection of live interviews of friends of Maurice O’Shea on which I based my poem. He initiated The Penguin Book of Australian Verse (1958) that later sold 10 000 copies and was the first book to bring modern Australian poetry to public attention. After he got Sir Allen Lane on side, John (an ex-Communist and a man of the left) brought in his right wing friend Kenneth Slessor and the academic RG Howarth as co-editors. John (I think) told me how they went about compiling it. Each editor worked alone and collected the poems he admired, then they met in a la
rge room laying out their favoured poems on the floor. After a debate (or perhaps a couple of debates), that was their selection. This was very different from the long series of discussions Robert Gray and I were to have co-editing our three anthologies.
On one of the nights of the Retreat Les Murray and I were pacing the university cloisters with the Communist novelist Frank Hardy. I had an unreliable baritone voice. I could also sing three or four or even more unreliable notes of countertenor. I began singing the opening bars of the Purcell aria ‘Come, ye sons of art’ in my countertenor, and Les joined me in his countertenor. Frank seemed shocked that young men should sing in soprano voices, but was delighted, and egged us on to sing for Ken Slessor, which we later did.
Frank Hardy had a story about Ken. Frank was having a drink with one of Ken’s drinking mates at the Journalists’ Club. Ken was the club’s president. The man was not surprised when Frank mentioned he was going to a Writer’s Retreat: Frank’s roman à clef Power Without Glory had by then achieved notoriety. Frank added, ‘By the way, Ken’ll be going too’. The man, whom Ken drank with two or three nights a week, had no idea Ken was Australia’s leading poet, and was genuinely surprised. ‘Old Ken, eh? What’ll he be doing there?’ Frank laughed.
My Sydney Harbour childhood was full of Slessorian imagery, without my knowing it. Ever on the prowl for odds and ends, one of the places my father used to take me to was a marine junkyard in either Balmain or Glebe. We would moor at the bottom of a hillside strewn with old anchors, masts, ship’s lights, engines, capstans and bits of brass cascading down to the water’s edge. The owner lived on the site in a large, decrepit Victorian-era house. At high school Slessor’s poem ‘Captain Dobbin’ reminded me of this junkyard of old sea-things – so much so that the owner and Captain Dobbin (who was based on Slessor’s father-in-law) became fused in my mind. Years later I realised there was no marine junkyard around Captain Dobbin’s residence and no connection between the poem and the place of my childhood memory.
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