Leeward

by Geoffrey Lehmann

  Jack Blight’s life history was unusual for a poet: he was an accountant at a sawmill where he was a part owner, then a pur-chasing officer for a hospital. Jack became a regular at my house on visits to his Sydney publisher Beatrice Davis (or ‘Beetriss’ as he always called her). We would have breakfast, then catch the train: Jack to see ‘Beetriss’ and I to work at my small law firm.

  Jack, who was pink-faced with silver hair, chubby but trim, was in awe of Beatrice, and also half in love, I suspect. Still beautiful in her sixties, Beatrice was dainty and small, and may not have been aware of her nickname ‘the pocket Venus’. She was as tough as she was small. Her greeting for friends at parties in her double-decker cream house in the P & O style at Folly Point was to blow a kiss and say ‘Consider yourself kissed’. I doubt whether Jack was given this flirtatious greeting when he called at her home office.

  Douglas Stewart (at Angus & Robertson) had published Jack’s two extraordinary volumes of sea-sonnets. There are only so many sea-sonnets a poet can write. In his late fifties Jack decided to make a change. He told me: ‘You should end a line with words like “the” or “a” … That’s what poets are doing now.’ Rhyme and metre were old hat. Unlike David Campbell, Jack’s attempt to renovate his style was not a success, as he began writing poems that were obscure and inconsequential.

  Beatrice published Jack’s later poetry. If she ever sat down and read these books with any degree of attention, she would have hated them. She relied on Douglas Stewart for advice. Stewart almost certainly did not like them, but must have championed Jack out of loyalty. Stewart would no doubt have been of the view that Jack had an outstanding body of work and it was not his role to tell Jack how to write. (Les Murray did not feel constrained in this way when, as poetry editor for Angus & Robertson, he rejected Stewart’s final book of verse.)

  ‘You and I should have a joint book launch’, Jack suggested to me one day. ‘I know a very good-looking young man. We could invite him along. Good-looking people at a book launch mean the newspapers will to take photographs. We might get into the social pages.’

  Jack was a delightful house guest, scrupulously clean, and always keen to do the washing up. Perhaps because he had lived much of his life in Maryborough, a country town, with his wife and daughters, Jack liked visiting Kings Cross when he was in Sydney, vicariously enjoying its bohemian wickedness. He had some tangled story about the police at Kings Cross. It made no sense. ‘You know’, Jack said, ‘There’s all this skin flying around in the air up at the Cross. You can see it!’ Every day, he explained, we are each losing thousands of skin cells and they are in the air – particularly at Kings Cross.

  Jack was convinced he had been identified as a national security risk because he was a campaigning conservationist (like his friend Judith Wright, with whom he used to speak on the phone). There was a cylindrical junction box for telephone lines on the corner of his street. He once saw technicians crouching and adjusting wires and was sure this was to tap his phone.

  The secret ballot or ‘Australian ballot’ originated in South Australia in 1856. Many older Australians took pride in concealing their political allegiances. As a child, when I asked my father how he voted, he used to say, ‘Son, it’s a secret ballot. I don’t tell anyone who I vote for.’

  This attitude may have affected our poets. Apart from a burst of political poetry in the 1890s, for much of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth there was not much political poetry written in Australia. Coming to terms with the strange Australian landscape – so different from the cultivated landscape of their European ancestors – preoccupied our poets, as it did our painters, from Streeton and Roberts to Nolan and Arthur Boyd, and after them William Robinson. Reacting against this in the 1960s, Vincent Buckley railed against landscape poets and what he called ‘wattle-gilding’, and introduced religion and politics into his poetry.

  ‘Emperor Mao and the Sparrows’, written when I was eighteen, is the only political poem I have cared to preserve. Through poor judgment I let myself to be lured into writing political poems. I had a poetic exchange with Bruce Dawe about the Vietnam War, which was written up in the Australian. I was probably the only Australian poet supporting Australian involvement. Dawe was in the Royal Australian Air Force at the time and published anti-war poems; two of them, ‘Homecoming’ and ‘Phantasms of Evening’, have become classics. Dawe’s poems were beyond poli-tics; mine were tendentious.

  When Jørn Utzon was famously sacked as architect of the Sydney Opera House in February 1966, I was reading about it on my way to work and had composed a poem by the time I got off at Wynyard station. It appeared a few days later in the Sydney Morning Herald:

  Opera House Blues

  ‘I’ll build you a white roof, my daughter,

  A flight of sails across the water.’

  ‘Mother, oh mother, alack, alack;

  The roof I see is not white but black.’

  ‘Child, it’s a sight that’s hard to bear.

  A hundred crows have settled there.’

  It has since emerged that Utzon’s dismissal was not just a simple dispute between a creative artist and philistine politician.

  A year or so later the Australian published a ballad I wrote which suggested Harold Holt was a failure as the new Liberal Party prime minister. In this banal piece, which was similar in style to ‘Opera House Blues’, I had him addressing his mother as he was drowning in the ocean at Portsea. Frank Hardy congratulated me when he read it. I was having a drink later that year in an apartment at Woolloomooloo. The news came over the radio that Holt had just drowned at Cheviot Beach, near Portsea. My friends stared at me.

  I was uncomfortable when John Quinlem used to tell me I was the heir of the Sydney Vitalists, the tradition of Norman Lindsay and his short-lived magazine Vision. I enjoyed Lindsay’s concrete nymphs, but there was something preposterous about them.

  Adelaide Writers’ Week, held once every two years, was once Australia’s premier – perhaps only – literary event. I was invited for the first time in 1974. Towards the end of a session, a now forgotten poet came up onstage and told a large audience she had been married to a masturbator. For a moment she misunderstood the roars of laughter and had a look of gratified surprise. The poetry world was becoming factionalised. At an open-air reading I read a poem ‘Five Days Late’, about a girl worrying when she had a late period. There was a loud jeer. It felt like an assault.

  My literary world was becoming a museum – not somewhere I could live. In other ways also, my life was heading towards a crisis. This unravelling began in Adelaide.

  TEN YEARS

  My marriage to Sally was happy – for me. Despite awkward silences between us I was optimistic. I believed in unreciprocated love – I imagined this was how men and women were. I was prepared to try what had failed before in my life, hoping we would succeed, if we were patient.

  I met Sally McInerney at a party in the Carslaw Building at Sydney University soon after the building was completed in 1965. Slightly apprehensive that I would know no-one apart from Ted, the acquaintance who had invited me, I stepped out from the lift into a room of young strangers. A girl introduced herself as Liz Buttsworth and explained we had met at Paul Delprat’s. She led me across the room to meet her friend – she said this girl and I shared an interest in literature. When the party ended, I drove Sally back to Women’s College. She was eighteen years old; six years and six months younger than me. We talked briefly at the main door of the college. We were awkward and distant with each other. I did not make an arrangement to see her again. But I asked for her college telephone number as we said goodnight.

  I telephoned the number a week or so later. The girl who picked up the phone called out Sally’s name. The Women’s College is a large brick building of long verandas with tiled floors. There was a delay of several minutes. I heard footsteps coming back to the phone. Sally was not there. I gave the girl details of a party I was holding at Sutherland Street and I
asked her to pass them on. I did not really expect Sally to come, or ever to see her again.

  I was wearing a Thai silk tie with black and green stripes. Guests were arriving. I opened the door. Sally looked as surprised as I was, and she gave the tie a friendly tug. In the years ahead I looked back on this as a sign. Whenever I wavered, I remembered her hand touching my tie. It was why I married her.

  It was like a happier rerun of an odd encounter in 1960, my first year as an articled clerk. I was intrigued by two elegant, olive-skinned young women, registration clerks. They were almost always together, filing documents in government offices, and wore tailored silk clothes, dark blue or dark violet. Late one afternoon I found myself alone with one of them, going down in a lift in barristers’ chambers. I spoke to her. She reached out and touched my tie. I was dumbfounded. The lift door opened and we walked out, embarrassed, not looking at each other.

  But I misunderstood the meaning of Sally’s gesture. She had been given my telephone message. She was an eighteen-year-old country girl finding her way across the city at night. It took two bus trips to get to Paddington from Sydney University. Then she had to find her way to a steep street of 200 almost identical terrace houses. At last she came to the house number noted on her piece of paper. She knocked, a door opened, and there were lights and a person she recognised. As she touched my tie, she let out a small laugh of relief. I was someone welcoming her in from the dark.

  We began seeing each other several times each week. We sat chatting with Salvatore Zofrea on the front veranda of his parents’ house at Seaforth. He made us strong black coffee. In a small back shed he was preparing his ‘Drunken Bride’ exhibition. We called on Paul Delprat in his house and studio of glass and sandstock brick columns near Balmoral beach. We went to dinner parties given by John Buttsworth, Liz’s brother, in his large old house in Balmain, nicknamed the ‘Balmain Embassy’, with its large untidy garden. John shared the house with friends – they were the ‘ambassadors’ – and in winter there were fires in an old fireplace and we played ridiculous word games.

  Sally talked about her childhood: growing up on a farm in the central west. At first there was just a tent, then a house of three rooms, no kitchen or bathroom, and no running water or electricity. She used to climb a silver poplar to watch for her mother’s return from toilet trips among the bushes. She lay in bed at night listening to her mother move about the house. Until she was ten or twelve years old she had not seen herself in a mirror.

  We were walking along a street. I had a camera and suggested we stop so I could take her photograph. Each time as I brought her into focus, she moved away. Eventually she stopped, half-hiding in a climbing fig with fleshy fruit and leaves. In the photograph she is camouflaged by the leaves and smiling.

  Sally and I had been seeing each other for some months when we set out after work from the Domain parking station in my grey VW. We had packed a few clothes and my sleeping bag for a weekend at her parents’ farm.

  It was the first of many 4-hour journeys I came to dread and love with a kind of heartburn: the wastelands beside the Windsor road, the sign ‘Adult Dolls $34’ on the veranda of a rundown fibro house on a large bare block, the giant rearing fibreglass horse outside a hotel, the airport at Richmond (lit up at night with lines of blue lights for landing planes), the ascent up Kurrajong Hill in second gear, the relief when we reached the plateau of apple orchards and forests. The views across the uninhabited valleys of the Blue Mountains, the winding descent down the Great Dividing Range; the sulphur smell of coal fires from miners’ houses as we passed through cold Lithgow; then the power station at Wallerawang, lit up at night and emitting steam, like Blake’s satanic mills; the stop at the midpoint of the journey for coffee dissolved in scalding milk at Mt Lambie’s isolated hilltop service station; then Bathurst (populous and genteel), Blayney (railway lines and meat works), Carcoar (a quaint nineteenth century jewel), red-brick Mandurama (tenuously prosperous), Lyndhurst (a scattering of dilapidated shacks) and finally Cowra.

  One morning we drove along a byway out of Bathurst, curious where it might take us, and passed a white nineteenth century cottage set back among a multi-coloured army of velvety hollyhocks. Just outside Bathurst we used to pass a grand, secluded house in a valley, from where Sally’s ancestress eloped during Queen Victoria’s reign. Driving back from Cowra and approaching Lithgow one afternoon we noticed a large drift of snow some distance from the road, the first ever sighting of snow for both of us. ‘Let’s stop’, she said. We would have had to walk across a couple of paddocks and I kept on driving.

  Our first journey had an expectation not yet dulled by later repetitions. We observed the ritual coffee stop at Mt Lambie, stepping into the cold night air from the car, tramping across the forecourt and through a swing door into the heated air of the dining area. As we drove into Cowra a light rain was falling. The windscreen wipers were working rapidly, and the headlights were lighting up the black mirror of the road and a landscape of incan-descent green grass. I have an image of an older man in a yellow raincoat at the edge of the town, waving at the traffic, instructing us where to go. I could not understand why he was there – a momentary phantom as we drove on.

  I was feeling unreal and elated. Cowra was behind us, we were across the Lachlan River, and had turned off the highway onto the Boorowa road. Our destination was close, but still another 25 kilometres. We drove down a row of tall eucalypts, each commemorating a local soldier, then past the obscure bulk of a feed mill looming in the night, and paddock after paddock, and patches of scrub, and a tiny hamlet, Morongla, then more paddocks and trees and fences. My foot left the accelerator as we came to the final turn-off from tar onto a road of red clay, ruts glistening from rain, and banked-up soil on both sides; phalaris grass, seed heads bending with drops of water. We were driving through optical illusions, the two headlight beams and shadows in constant motion. I was wondering how I would locate this turn-off if I drove up here alone. There was a small bush school on the left just beyond the turn-off, Sally told me. If I saw that, I would know I had gone too far.

  It was around midnight. The gate to ‘Spring Forest’ may have been open. I was about to learn about farm gates and their etiquette – shut gates must be re-shut, open gates stay open. The gates were of metal piping and wire, and closed with a wire loop that snugged onto a large iron hook on the gatepost. When a gate sagged with age, some loops became necklaces of wire. As we drove up the slope of compacted clay and small stones to the farm house hidden behind silver poplars, blank headlights of derelict vehicles, driven by Sally’s father until they were beyond repair, stared back. A black and yellow dog, Joe, was barking and running about on the veranda, where Ross, Sally’s father slept.

  As we parked near an athel tree he came out carrying a hurricane lantern. Ross McInerney was a tall, handsome man with a pencil moustache, who spoke in a muffled voice. Sally’s mother, Olive Cotton, seven years older than Ross, was anxiously offering hot drinks.

  My first impression, beyond a screen of silver poplars, was the wide front veranda with a curved galvanised iron roof running the full width of the weatherboard house’s two rooms, cane chairs and farm implements scattered along the veranda, and the narrow bed where Ross slept.

  I had been warned there was no running water, electricity, sewerage, bathroom or kitchen, and no outside toilet, though there was a telephone. Washing up was done in the main room in a plastic dish with hot water boiled in a kettle that hung over the fire in the brick fireplace. This room was lit by a pressure lamp and had a small Lance Solomon harbour scene in oils on one of the cream weatherboard walls – acquired, I assumed, by Olive when she shared a photographic studio in the late 1930s with her first husband Max Dupain. The surface craquelure of the painting had become encrusted with smoke from the fire. The room had a warm, lived-in feel, with a bookcase and books about birds – Ross was a keen bird watcher – a settee, a small table and a car seat from an old Morris with a sheepskin draped over it – Ross
’s favourite armchair.

  A doorway from the main room opened into the second room, Olive’s bedroom (and also Sally’s when she stayed), which visitors rarely entered. Olive’s black upright piano with elaborately carved decorations stood by the door in this room and was never played. A kerosene refrigerator glowed in a friendly way through the night on a small back veranda, which led to an added-on galvanised iron room for Peter, Sally’s brother.

  Balanced on his haunches, Ross liked to squat on the edge of the front veranda in riding boots, drawing on his pipe and staring into the night. A white Cherokee rose climbed against the old brick chimney. It was a house a poet could love and a housewife hate.

  ‘Spring Forest’ was not much more than 500 acres (200 ha), some paddocks and a lot of rocky, bushy scrub. Ross’s choicest land was a lush paddock across the public road from the house, next to a creek that had permanent water. He ran a few retired horses on it. The land was there for the horses, not people. Olive, unlike Ross, rarely expressed her opinion. When she expressed warmth, it was through placatory gestures such as ‘Rossie … a cup of tea?’

  I slept on the settee. Next morning, Joe started barking, surprised by a man-monster as I stood up in my sleeping bag. We drove into Cowra and walked down a long echoing corridor of a 1920s building, deserted on a Saturday morning. We were hit by the smell of chemicals as we opened the door into Olive’s small studio. I noticed a few photographs from earlier decades, such as ‘Tea cup ballet’, but Olive was then unknown as an ‘art’ photographer. I was depressed by the display of weddings and children – girls with ribbons in their hair, bright-eyed toddlers – so much effort for such meagre rewards.