Leeward

by Geoffrey Lehmann

  On the day my mother turned seventy-three and Sally’s mother turned fifty-eight, we were married by Charl Buttsworth in the Lindfield house, late in the afternoon. I was in a dark lounge suit and Seirian had become Sally again, and wore the white Mexican dress for the first and last time – after that it became a tainted garment. We did the catering ourselves. Eighty or so guests overflowed from our main living room, all our family members, aunts and uncles, Stephen Wilson as best man, my senior partner Charlie Willcox and his wife Mary, Paul Delprat, Charles and Barbara Blackman, and the painter John Firth-Smith, who volunteered to walk among the guests taking photographs. Several guests quietly remarked to each other that this was a marriage that was not going to last.

  Les Murray later wrote a seven-part poem for us: ‘Toward the Imminent Days’:

  … And I think of your wedding, I make it shine among

  trees …

  … an incredibly high

  hymeneal piping makes my wineglass sing –

  … recalling your abundant house, the dancing,

  your shovelled cake rich as the history of Calabria.

  The singing wine glass may have been a reference to a dinner party where Les saw Adrian Heber do his imitation of a glass harmonica with a wineglass. The poem’s last line is:

  For your wedding, I wish you the frequent image of farms.

  Within a couple of years of the marriage, farms became a frequent image in my poetry. Dating back to my schoolboy love affair with Virgil’s Georgics I had an incoherent plan to write pastoral poems. Hearing Ross McInerney’s observations and stories, I decided to write poems through his voice. These turned out to be very different from monologues I had written in the voices of historical figures. I had to keep my language plain. The words appearing on the page were disconcerting – more laconic than I had imagined. But this new, dry voice was liberating. ‘Unpoetical’ subjects could be made into poetry.

  I saved up my first dozen typed poems in Ross’s voice for a couple of months before I gave them to him (through Sally). I felt they were an intrusion into his life. I half expected a negative response. But he seemed happy (Sally told me) to have become my muse.

  In 1978 when I published Ross’ Poems, by then seventy-five poems, Sally and I were divorced. The cover illustration was an etching by Sally: ‘Peter’s Land’. Photographs of people from Ross’s life were interspersed through the text – Mr Long seated at a camp fire, hand resting on a rifle, and later as an older man squatting and holding up a cycad by the round ball of its root, like a large pineapple. I did not anticipate then I would be writing poems through Ross’s voice until his death in 2010, adding, deleting and revising.

  There were more than 100 poems when the final selection, now named Spring Forest, was published in 2014. Ross continued to see batches of these poems not long after they were written. Not all the stories in the poems were his. He never commented except to say they ‘bring back old times’. As a teller of stories himself, I believe he appreciated that a poem could be ‘true’ although not literally true. He never pointed out inaccuracies.

  The first Spring Forest poem has a line: ‘And I chose the name “Spring Forest”.’ In the mid-1990s Ross and I were interviewed at ‘Spring Forest’ for a Poetica radio program. To my surprise Ross told the ABC’s Mike Ladd that he had always been embarrassed by the name of his property. ‘Spring Forest’ was the name chosen by the previous owner, a schoolmaster called Hickey. I am relieved I did not know this. Ross cared about loss of biodiversity as much as he cared about people. The vanishing ‘Spring Forest’ of the poems became a metaphor for that loss.

  Ross was a practical conservationist. He had ‘Spring Forest’ declared a wildlife reserve. At night he went out shooting the feral cats that decimated wildlife. He had killed hundreds of them, he said. I started a poem about this catalogue of dead cats and realised real facts did not always translate into poems.

  A couple of weeks before his death I visited Ross at ‘Weeroona’ the hospice in Cowra where he was ill with lung cancer. It took a while for our conversation to get started. Ross had become quite animated by the time his next-door neighbour, a farmer, arrived. ‘I want to introduce you to Geoff ’, he told his visitor. Referring to his daughter, he said: ‘When Sally was at university, she rang up one day and said is it all right if I bring up a friend next week end. I thought it would be another girl friend, but it was Geoff. I was really surprised. (Laughter.) He and David Campbell were my favourite Australian poets.’

  This was an astonishing piece of information – he had read my poetry before we met. This was why he had been so tolerant about the Spring Forest poems.

  After our wedding, Sally and I drove north for a second time in the grey VW beetle to escape the Sydney winter. In Brisbane we stayed with David Malouf at his parents’ house in Hamilton, a two-storey brick house looking out over the Brisbane River, lyrically recalled in his poem ‘An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton’.

  After Brisbane we drove further north. It was about three in the morning, I was asleep in the front seat of the car and Sally was driving. We were passing through desolate country, yellow clay on either side of the road. I woke up just as a gigantic bird rose up in front of the car and seemed to fly away – an emu. This bird became the title of my second anthology of Australian comic verse, The Flight of the Emu.

  On our drive back to Sydney we stayed overnight with Judith Wright at ‘Calanthe’ on Mount Tamborine. Her house sat on an acre, young macrozamias with cones like pineapples growing next to the front veranda, and a large field of jonquils in her back garden.

  Judith took us on a tour of the plateau. Speaking in the parade-ground voice of the partly deaf she pointed to the erect and blackened trunks of macrozamias scattered along an escarpment, recording scorch marks from ancient fires. They could be thousands of years old, she said. (I suspect she was showing us the group of plants that inspired her poem ‘The Cycads’.) She led us into the rainforest and identified strangler figs and giant stinging trees. A strange booming call echoed through the forest, like a man shouting through his hands from far away. The wompoo fruit dove, Judith explained in her voice that was also like a shout.

  Judith told us at dinner that night that she had decided to have no more children after the birth of her daughter Meredith. She felt it was wrong to bring children into a world that had the atom bomb.

  It was a sobering thought to accompany us as we drove away next morning. Judith’s pessimism was different from James McAuley’s, which differed again from Slessor’s – but all three suffered from an almost disabling pessimism.

  After not much longer than a week in Queensland, Sally and I were back in Sydney, in a marriage only one of us wanted. We had a large group of friends. We rarely quarrelled. We shared many things: when I was looking for material for Comic Australian Verse we sat together at night in the State Library; she also photographed many of the paintings for Australian Primitive Painters, the book I wrote with Charles Blackman.

  Sally painted small, playful designs on old bits of furniture. At first I did not realise she was a gifted draftsman. She began making etchings. Bruce Beaver wrote a poem for her, ‘Three Etchings by Sally McInerney’, which ends: ‘Vista of Mt Morris … the distance softened hill/ visionary available./ There your spirit found its home,/ reachable, unreachable.’

  There was a girl I had gone out with a couple of times, not long before I met Sally. I witnessed her passport application. She returned to Australia a few months after I married Sally, and sent a Christmas card. She may not have been unreachable. I realised I had made a mistake.

  Our friends had graduated from the large anonymous after-the-Pub parties of our early twenties. As soon as we moved into the Lindfield house, Sally and I began holding dinner parties. One of our frequent guests was Adrian Heber. Adrian was in the tradition of Baron Münchhausen, composing his fantasies like musical compositions. Some imaginary events occurred to him and he constructed a narrative to tell to his friends. Or
some real events were embroidered and became so bizarre he could have had little intention to deceive. He might occasionally ask for small amounts of money. But he did not invent elaborate explanations to obtain a loan.

  I got to know Adrian through the Push. In the early days of our friendship I gave him a lift after a night at the pub. He was living in an upstairs flat in Louisa Road, Balmain and invited me in for a drink. When he unlocked the door, the room was bare even by Push standards: a bed, a table and one chair. That was all: no books, just bare walls and floorboards and a few implements to eat and drink with. Adrian possibly offered me the chair and sat on the bed and we drank some Scotch. The empty room reverberated as we spoke. I did not stay long.

  When Sally and I married, Adrian and the painter Salvatore Zofrea were among the guests. Afterwards accounts drifted back about ‘what an objectionable person that Salvatore Zofrea is’. I discovered Adrian had introduced himself to the guests as Salvatore (whom he did not know and while Salvatore was in the room) and told them what a marvellous artist he was. He carried this impersonation off with my secretary (who was Italian). Salvatore was born in Calabria, and Adrian sang ‘Il Calabrese’ along with Pina, although he was not a student of Italian, as far as I am aware.

  Mostly he was harmless. In about 1970 he said to me ‘I went to a marvellous party at Meredith Burgmann’s last weekend. I enjoyed myself so much, I tried to set the house on fire.’ I said in a reproving tone of voice, ‘Adrian, my mother owns that house’.

  In appearance Adrian was not unlike the British actor Kenneth More: wholesome and slightly plump, usually wearing a tweed sports coat and tweed cap. Robert Gray remembers him holding his cap and wringing it, while he talked, as though it was a wet swimming costume.

  Adrian sometimes used me as a referee for jobs. I was uneasy during these phone calls. One was from an Anglican boys’ school asking if he was a suitable night watchman. I was able to say he had worked for some years as a security guard. That seemed to satisfy the school bursar and much to my relief he hung up. Adrian had also worked in a brewery and at the Glebe morgue. For many years he was a proofreader with the Government Printing Office.

  One day he phoned me when he was the voice on the public address system at Grace Bros department store on Broadway. In the middle of our conversation he put down the phone. I heard his voice echoing back from several loudspeakers: ‘Little Margaret has lost her mother. She is here at the desk on the ground floor. Will little Margaret’s mother please come and get her. She is waiting for you.’ If Adrian is to be believed, on his last day as the voice of Grace Bros, ten minutes before the store was due to close, he announced over the public address system: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, there is absolutely no need to panic. A lion has escaped in the store. There is no need to panic. Yes, a lion has escaped in the store. Please proceed through the doors onto the street in an orderly manner. A lion has escaped in the store…’

  In retrospect Adrian’s long history of employment seems remarkable. His younger clone would now be unemployable.

  A group of us agreed to meet for dinner at Chez Napo-leon, a restaurant in Oxford Street. We had to wait outside in a queue. When we sat down and the order was being taken, Adrian announced he was going to eat two meals as he had two jobs. The waiter was nonplussed when Adrian ordered two entrées that were to be served at the same time, followed by two main courses also to be served at the same time. Eventually the waiter understood. When his two entrées arrived, Adrian folded his linen napkin up under his chin like a bib and tucked in. He started off in the same way when his two main courses arrived, but about halfway through his second main course he asked could anyone help him out. I accepted.

  When the waiter came to our table to get the order for dessert, Adrian shook his head: ‘No dessert for me. I’m on a diet.’

  Adrian paid for his four courses and contributed generously to the tip. As we left the restaurant he turned to us with a happy smile: ‘I think they like me there.’

  He claimed to be an old boy of St Peter’s College Adelaide, an exclusive Anglican school. One of his carefully memorised set pieces was ‘the Defenestration of St Peter’s’. All I can remember is the portentous title, borrowed from ‘the Defenestration of Prague’ in 1618. I sometimes invited a friend who was an actual St Peter’s old boy to dinner parties when I invited Adrian. I’d meanly say to Adrian, ‘You remember Colin, he’s also an old boy of St Peter’s.’

  I often played a recording of Mozart’s adagio and rondo for glass harmonica at dinner parties. To show how a glass harmonica was played, Adrian was in the habit of running his finger along the edge of his wine glass to make it sing.

  Adrian claimed to be related to Bishop Heber, author of the hymn ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains…’ At one of these singing wine glass dinners, Adrian announced to the seated guests: ‘Theology is the queen of the sciences.’ Me: ‘What sort of queen, Adrian?’

  My remark was quite unfair. Adrian was rarely seen with a girlfriend, but was attracted to women – too attracted when he lost control of himself. A leering, sideways look as he narrowed his eyes was unnerving for women. Even his male friends sometimes found him unnerving. At a large evening party at my Lindfield house, I stepped into the small front sunroom. Adrian was sitting by himself on a couch, rocking back and forth with silent laughter. For almost ten minutes I stood watching him with alarm. Should I get a doctor? He suddenly stopped, his face relaxed, and he stood up, saying, ‘Ah that’s better’.

  Adrian had many dinner party stories, some of them oft repeated. Sometimes I would start telling one of Adrian’s stories for him, and when I had a detail wrong he quickly corrected me and continued the story himself. I do not think I ever met the mysterious Hill, who was his accomplice in many of these stories, though I knew Hill’s two sisters. I always imagined Hill as solidly built like Adrian. Perhaps he was quite different. I remember one of Adrian’s dinner table stories almost verbatim:

  Hill and I were invited to a retreat in a Catholic monastery. You know what these retreats are like – enormous quantities of food. [Adrian laughs gently and leers around the table at the prospect of all this food.] The monks eat like sparrows when they’re by themselves, and they really put on a feast when they’ve guests, and it gives them a good excuse to eat a lot as well.

  So Hill and I had just completed this enormous lunch and decided to go for a stroll. To recover from the meal. We were walking along a railway line. And it occurred to us to test an old saying. If you put your ear to the line, you can hear a train coming from a long way off. So Hill and I did just that. We both bent over and put an ear to the line. And we did hear a train. In fact it was right on top of us! We were almost killed! [Adrian throws his head back open-mouthed, then wipes the sweat off his forehead. He sweated a lot.]

  We jumped back and rolled down the embankment. When we got to the bottom, we were all covered in grass. We had to pick ourselves up and get rid of all the grass.

  Now after an experience like that, what do you feel like? [He sits up straight with a serious, questioning look.] A cup of tea. And a cup of tea there was! [A triumphant smile at all the dinner guests]

  Adrian once held a party for forty or so people at the Mosman house where he was staying with a friend. A woman in her late twenties innocently told us she and Adrian had been at school together – at Lithgow State High School! We were all childishly delighted that Adrian had been found out. How could he have made such a blunder, inviting an old school friend? We did not let on to Adrian that we knew. I think we underestimated him. He did not care if we knew he was not a St Peter’s old boy. His stories were just entertainments.

  Thirty years later I saw Adrian from a car window. He did not see me, as I pointed him out to my daughter-in-law Manami. Hunched over and dour, he had on his standard tweed sports coat, and was walking along Ross Street, Glebe away from the university. He was then on an invalid pension and living in a Housing Commission flat.

  He died in his flat a few weeks
later. No-one was in the habit of visiting him. As the rent was debited automatically against his bank account, and this was refreshed every fortnight by his pension, several months went by before his body was discovered. By this time he was unrecognisable. The body remained for weeks in the morgue, awaiting formal identification – the same morgue where he had been an attendant. He was eventually identified from dental records.

  Twenty years earlier in his Balmain days Adrian arrived at his local pub dressed as a nun, in full regalia. The husband and wife proprietors were good Catholics and banned Adrian from the premises for life. Adrian had become more subdued in later life. His wake was held at his usual watering hole in Glebe – the publican providing free drink and food in honour of Adrian’s memory.

  Few women (apart from Sally) were at the wake. A friend mentioned to me regretfully he believed Adrian may have died a virgin. I assured him this was not so. Adrian was too much of a gentleman to talk about his relationships with women. I knew of a woman who had been his lover once or twice and told her female friends: ‘He’s quite a doer’.

  Around the time of our marriage, we became part of Charles and Barbara Blackman’s circle of friends and I later became their solicitor. Charles and Barbara (in particular Barbara) created a Parisian-style salon: there were painters ( John Coburn and his wife Barbara); a composer (Peter Sculthorpe); broadcasters and journalists (Gerry Stone and the tall, aristocratic Guy Morri-son); a builder (Halifax Hayes, who renovated the many Blackman houses); a quietly-spoken physicist (Ian Bassett, and his wife Janet); and writers ( Judith Wright, who would not have enjoyed Sydney’s party-going, but corresponded with Barbara and was a thunderous offstage presence in Barbara’s conversation).