There were dozens of improvised weekend lunches at the Blackmans’ Paddington Street house, extending into the early evening with twenty or so of us sitting around a long table. A high point would be a voice calling out, ‘The Wildgeese have arrived!’ as a veterinarian, named Wildgoose, and his wife, appeared in the doorway. I don’t remember who it was – perhaps Barbara – delighted in making this announcement.
Barbara’s blindness was like a theme in a minor key we were conscious of during these lunches. It was present in Charles’s paintings of female figures, and his intense awareness of light and darkness. Barbara had strong views about particular paintings, standing very close and scrutinising the work minutely.
It was a complicated household for the children – Auguste, Christabel and Barnaby. At one large party Christabel danced protectively with her mother. The Blackmans went to an afternoon gathering at the Hunter’s Hill house of my friends Tony and Anne Gallagher. Barnaby, then about six years old, ran down the hallway calling out, ‘Mummy and Daddy, the taxi man’s here’, worried perhaps that his parents were never going to leave.
Auguste and Christabel were students at a matriculation school which was closing down. The head teacher and his partner – another teacher – had become friends of the Blackmans and often read to Barbara. They were keen for the school to continue. Charles and Barbara found a large nineteenth century stone house on a hill in Balmain, overlooking Snails Bay as a possible site. They were ready to exchange contracts when I was phoned by the estate agent and told the house was being taken off the market for a couple of days to allow someone else to buy it.
The school did not yet have a name. I was concerned about the economics. It would be a continuing source of stress and would distract Charles from his art. I telephoned Charles: ‘I think I can get this house for you, but do you really want to buy it?’ After a moment’s pause, he replied, ‘Yes’. We both knew Barbara had her heart set on it. Charles was being very selfless.
I knew the other buyer. I phoned the agent: ‘The Blackmans are cash buyers and I don’t think you can be sure your other buyer will get finance. The Blackmans are interested in another property and will go ahead with your vendor only if contracts are exchanged today!’ A few minutes later I received a surprised phone call from the vendor’s solicitor and within half an hour was exchanging contracts at his office. He was tapping his fingers on his thigh. The new school got a new name: Chiron College.
Each year was touch and go financially. Eventually the school closed down when our chairman, James Murdoch, who headed the Australian Music Centre, warned us we ran the risk of trading while insolvent. We had about eighty enrolments at the start of the academic year, and were seven or eight students short of breaking even.
One of our board meetings at the Australian Music Centre’s Circular Quay premises coincided with the afternoon the Whitlam government was dismissed. We listened to the radio news with excited disbelief as across the water the sun faded on the sails of the Opera House. During the election, Charles did not participate in ‘Artists for Labor’ and cut one of his paintings into two equal sections, which he donated to each of the parties.
My poem ‘Roses’ was ‘commissioned’ by Barbara for a ‘Rose Evening’. I remembered my schoolboy obsession and set the poem in a landscape devastated by war. The draft I read out that night was very second-rate. It was just a poem for a party. Over the next forty years I expanded and revised it.
When I wrote a book with Charles about Australian primitive painters, we went in his chauffeured Mercedes for our interview with Irvine Homer, one of our artists. This was my first time in such a car. Charles apologised for the air-conditioning. He couldn’t travel with the windows open, he said. It affected his ears. I was touched by Charles’s apologetic explanation. His parents were working class. In the early 1970s Australians were still egalitarian. It was embarrassing to have air-conditioning in one’s car. Ten years later such displays of affluence had stopped being embarrassing.
The Harbour Bridge has a high barrier where there was once just a low steel balustrade separating the two railway lines from the road traffic lanes. I had a recurrent dream that I was standing on this balustrade at night, the trains passing within inches of my back as cars were speeding past my feet.
My grey VW beetle had several design faults: tubeless tyres (a tyre went flat about every six months); the rear engine (the extra weight in the back made the car spin around when braking abruptly); and the lack of a fuel gauge. One winter night Sally and I were driving over the Harbour Bridge with a friend in the back. Halfway across, the car stopped. We were out of petrol. After a minute or so our friend got out of the car, hailed a taxi and waved goodbye with an apologetic shrug.
We were now alone in the car, surrounded by streams of speeding traffic. The protocol was to stay with the car until a tow-truck came, usually after about thirty minutes. Headlights came up behind us; cars braked and swerved and accelerated past. We sat tensely in the car, buffeted by the slipstream of passing traffic, with no hazard lights, and worried a vehicle would crash into the back. We waited for a break in the traffic, raced across the road-way and climbed onto the low iron lattice fence beside the railway line – perhaps prompted by my recurring dream.
We were now standing on the balustrade, suspended between passing cars and the rail track. Sally was wearing a winter coat and a long white scarf of heavy knitted silk around her neck. As we balanced on the top rail and waited, a train went past, a massive onslaught of steel and wind, just a few feet away. While the succession of carriages thundered past, Sally’s scarf billowed gently towards them. I said nothing to Sally. It happened so suddenly, but I was reminded of Isadora Duncan, the dancer who died in 1927, when her long silk scarf became entangled in the wheels of an open-topped car in which she was riding. I regretted my stupidity. It was a metaphor for our marriage.
My mother’s and Diana’s back flat was smaller than the original house. To equalise the floor space, they had a locked room in our front section, which they used for storage. They had no privacy, with my friends coming and going, and were uncomfortable with Sally. For two years there was an uneasy peace.
We had inherited a small, balding Sicilian gardener from the previous owner. He stood – Sally noticed – with a rubber boot firmly flattening an iris, as I conversed with him in his limited Italian-inflected English. (When I called at his house, his front garden was paved with concrete.) I did the lawns and much of the garden maintenance and I felt entitled to make changes in the garden. The previous owner, June Read, had a row of small dahlias growing in a long, shaded rockery. I replaced them with cinerarias, which I thought were better suited for the filtered sunlight. At first things grew well under my tutelage, in soils June had nourished meticulously. I scattered seeds. Great drifts of cosmos plants sprang up: cerise, pink and white flowers. I grew hollyhocks and an annual sunflower taller than a man. It had one huge flower like a lugubrious clock face.
But as June Read’s presence in the garden faded and her soil nutrients leached away, my cosmos and hollyhocks died and would not come back. Weeds infiltrated lawns and garden beds. I replaced my cinerarias – they were just annuals – with kurume azaleas. Then I dosed the azaleas with chicken manure and they went yellow and died.
My sense of proprietorship was misplaced. One day I planted a frangipani near the front gate. Diana was indignant. I had not consulted her. It would grow and obstruct the path. My erratic gardening style was just one item in a catalogue of incompatibilities. After a couple of years of shared ownership, Diana and I decided to split our jointly owned assets. She and my mother went to live in a house they had found in the next street. We sold the Gordon house and I bought Diana’s half-share in the Lindfield house. We would still regard ourselves as holding everything in trust for our mother, but would have no assets in common.
Charlie still came in several days a week and had his own office, but was not active in the practice. I had also moved the firm into a sma
ller and cheaper suite of rooms in the same building, Boomerang House. ‘Suite’ was too grand a word for my new shoebox offices which never saw daylight and had windows near the bottom of a light well. Charlie’s old offices were airy and sunlit, with worn, but acceptable carpet. There had been a couple of spare rooms, which I abhorred as wasteful. My move, however, was a false economy. I was winning extra clients and extra rooms would have allowed flexibility.
One of the clients I gained was one Charlie had lost. Nearing sixty, my new client spoke in a megaphone voice that made a private conversation difficult. After he got to know me better, we would chat. His first visit to my office had been on a pretext, he told me, supposedly to pick up a document. His real purpose had been to ‘have a scout around’ – to see if he liked me. He had spent his younger days working in his father’s well-known ocean baths, making sure toddlers didn’t drown, running up and down and shouting to young lads, ‘You can’t jump off there’, ‘Put that down’, and so on. ‘That’s how I’ve got my loud voice.’
‘Not a patch on his old man’ was Charlie’s verdict when he noticed I had regained a client he had lost. That may have been why Charlie lost him as a client.
Charlie told me a story. As well as the baths, the father owned a cake icing business. He decided to set up his son (my new client) in this business and gave him a strict schedule to follow. Every Friday when he took the orders for the week, he was to go to the Protestant shops first and leave the Catholics to the end of the day. At the Catholic shop, they would want to share a drink with him. He couldn’t go to the Protestant shops smelling of alcohol. Perhaps he was tired of his father’s bossiness and the Catholic shop was the logical starting point. That was where the son began his first Friday round of the shops – and it was the end of the cake icing business.
The son survived the cake icing disaster. He was appreciated by his mother and daughter whom he also sent to me as clients. I learned that intelligence comes in many shapes. I stopped believing in the intelligentsia. My clients’ clarity and eloquence were surprising. A young man getting a divorce said with some vehemence, ‘I can’t see the point of sex’. Then added, ‘I haven’t a live sperm in my body’.
Charlie was pernickety and demanding when he was active in the firm. In retirement he was patient and uncritical throughout all my mistakes. Not long after we moved to our new office his beloved wife Mary died of a brain tumour. Its progress was swift. When he was not with her, he sat in his small office talking to doctors and nurses on the phone, tears in his eyes, his voice breaking. After her death, he did not know how to go about simple household tasks. His children had to tell him: ‘Dad, you don’t iron socks’.
I enjoyed my work. We all worked hard and got on well. But once my regular secretary was on holiday and I had a temporary secretary. I was eating a cut lunch in my small office during the lunch hour, and I heard her telephoning her husband – a solicitor: ‘This place is a little sweat shop!’, she said.
My real existence, I believed, was in the Lindfield house, writing poetry and being a husband and father. My legal work in the city was a pastime. I was about to discover that this cavalier approach was a mistake.
When two people marry, there is often a realignment of friendships, and a new person becomes a particular friend of the marriage. This was so for us with David Malouf. We sometimes had dinner at his apartment in Abbotsford, looking out over the Parramatta River. The smell of chocolate wafted at night across the bay from a nearby Nestlé factory and I envied his ability to cook crème caramels.
David’s fiction reflects a personal empathy and selflessness. Once I was acting for him on the purchase of part of an old orange orchard. An adjoining block, I thought, was a better buy. I pointed this out to him. He may have sensed I was interested in this block and insisted on staying with the land he had chosen. I bought the other block for Sally.
As well as new friendships, the marriage brought new responsibilities. Towards the end of 1970, when we had been married for more than a year, Sally told me she was pregnant. She became defensive. Didn’t I want a child? I denied this. I said I was glad. Whatever emotion I felt, I knew our actions now had consequences.
When Julia was a baby, I replaced the VW beetle (the ‘Dodgem Car’) with a pale green Kombi Van that I called ‘Bulk’ after the BLK of its numberplate. It had only a driver’s seat and front passenger’s seat and for the back I bought some second-hand bench seats advertised in a newspaper. I must have been preparing for an influx of children. In a short time we had three.
My plant-collector daemon may also have wanted a van to pick up trees from plant nurseries. Some banana palms were on sale. I planted them along the front fence and in a year or so the whole front garden was becoming a banana palm jungle. I toyed with a new name for the house: ‘Banana Castle’ – we had been considering ‘Wombat’. I had to axe the banana palms back over a year of weekends, sectioning the oozing trunks into chunks for the garbage bin, and gouging out suckers with a mattock.
I fell in love with our first-born, Julia, when she was a few weeks old. I was surprised at the intensity of my feeling. Baby car seats were not yet standard and I placed her, about three months old, wrapped in a pale woollen blanket in a white plastic wicker basket at the rear of the van. I was driving down the Pacific Highway, when the Kombi Van’s rear hatch door flew up. In the rear vision mirror I saw a line of traffic banked up and Julia’s basket poised at the back, perilously, so a jolt or sudden acceleration might dislodge it onto the road. I stopped slowly. I got out, pushed the basket well forward against the back bench and firmly shut the rear door.
We were wheeling her (about four months old) in a pram through a large discount store, buying cheap baby clothes. Each time we passed under a fluorescent light, her eyes followed the light.
Another small child, a few months older, was at Pixie O’Harris’s house. I noticed a look of enormous relief on Julia’s face – relief, I sensed, to discover another person almost as small as herself in a world where adults were giants.
When she was a bit more than six months old, I was carrying her in my arms at a party. She reached out to touch a small stuffed bird on a perch. Her look of expectation changed to shock. Her face screwed up and between sobs I heard her say, ‘Deadie birdie’ – her first words, if she did actually say this. ‘Deadie birdie’ became a family legend. A few years later she was in tears when she found a dead bird in the garden. Her younger brother and sister mocked her, calling out: ‘Deadie birdie, deadie birdie.’
She had started crawling and was sitting in plastic pilchers. We were looking at a picture book. I turned over a page. She flinched with horror and burst out crying when she saw a picture of a giant rainbow snake.
She could now totter down the hall on two legs. Standing at the front door and looking out at the rain, she sighed: ‘Obab’.
A year later her mother was in the final weeks of the next pregnancy. Julia and I were in a doctor’s reception room and Sally was with the doctor. Julia stepped up to the receptionist’s desk. Using her newly acquired skill of speaking in a sentence, she conveyed an urgent message: ‘I-want-to-see-the-doctor’. She coined her own term for farts: ‘bottom puffs’.
Julia was a ‘horizon-hunter’. I imagined taking her to a disused aerodrome, where she could run as far as she liked and come running back when she felt like it. I was on the veranda of the Blackmans’ St Albans house, at an afternoon party. Julia took off and had gone a long way off through long grass. I had to interrupt a conversation with Charles and take off after her. I noticed the dismay on Charles’s face, mixed with relief: this was not something he would have to worry about again. (He didn’t know it but he was to have three more children with two more wives.)
There is a photograph of my second child, John, six months old, lying in an oval rattan washing basket and looking up with wistful contentment. One day he disappeared from the house. He had crawled around to the front garden and was gazing up at a ‘Titian’ pillar rose, cove
red with dozens of raspberry pink flowers.
We had a wire fence built to stop this happening again.
I became adept at changing babies’ nappies, feeding them from bottles and burping them against my shoulder. I carried them out into the night air when they could not sleep, rocking them in my arms under a large jacaranda tree. Once or twice I allowed exasperation to get the better of me, and I angrily shook Julia. Sally’s going away was merely a theoretical possibility, not something I worried about, but I sensed an urgent need to be involved in my children’s lives.
Agnes’s Walker Street house was zoned as a commercial site. Late in the afternoon, and now without Leo, I used to call in to see her. I sat with her on her raised brick paved terrace, looking down at her trees and bamboo gone wild, and her lawn where the stream had been filled in. Otto, she said, had been pressing her to give him a power of attorney and make a will. Her brother Carl had died intestate. That had worked out well, she pointed out: ‘Wills cause problems’. (Meaning her mother’s will). One day she told me, ‘The title deed has gone’. I explained I would obtain a replacement.
In winter we sat around a table in her kitchen, a comfortable warm room with an old Bakelite radio – the only room of her house I ever saw. She had a table lamp with a wooden base and a white ceramic shade with a blue landscape of hills, pines and a windmill by a lake. I knew she slept somewhere in her semiderelict house, but was unsure where.
Agnes had turned ninety and was too frail to live alone. After phone calls between family members, Agnes moved in with Ursula, May’s eldest daughter, in Ben Boyd Road, Neutral Bay. Ursula was my first cousin and in her late sixties. She had been caring for her oldest son since infancy. Billy had ‘water on the brain’ from childhood meningitis, could drool just a few words, and was completely dependent on his mother for everything When she was bringing up her three sons, Ursula fossicked for food after dark in the large bins outside supermarkets.
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