by Ryan O'Neill
Washington, exhausted by years of toil, decided in 1946 to hire an editor to look after his increasingly profitable romance line, which included Sheilas in Love, Nurse Sheila Romances and Spicy Sheila True Confessions. In June he arranged to meet with J.R. Hardacre, a frequent contributor to romance pulps, to offer him the position. Washington was stunned to find that Hardacre was the pen name of an attractive young woman, Joyce Reith. Though conscious that Washington’s novels, stories and editorials were full of references to the weakness and helplessness of the female sex, Reith accepted the offered role. Washington proposed marriage to Reith numerous times throughout 1947 and 1948, but it was only when Reith’s father was forced to declare bankruptcy after losing his uninsured bookshop in Newtown to a mysterious fire that she finally accepted. Washington and Reith married in June 1948, the same month that sales of Reith’s romance pulps exceeded, for the first time, those of Washington’s science-fiction magazines. After the wedding Washington gifted his father-in-law a substantial amount of money to clear his debts, an act of generosity memorialised in editorials in Fountainhead pulps.
The birth of the couple’s son Galt in March 1949 inspired Washington to establish a new line of pulps, led by the flagship Stupendous Bubba Stories, to cater for the postwar baby boom. The romance and baby pulps, expertly edited and marketed by Joyce Washington, were to continue until the mid-1950s, and by that time were all that was keeping Fountainhead Press solvent. In 1956 it became clear to Rand Washington that the Australian pulp market was dying, and he reluctantly sold his company to Kookaburra Books for fifteen thousand pounds. Washington used the money to fund a new literary magazine called Quarter, modelled on American slicks such as the Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s. Though initially apolitical, before long Washington’s vituperative editorials alienated left-leaning writers, who organised a boycott of the magazine. By the end of its first year Quarter had published essays by Washington denouncing poet Matilda Young’s “bleeding-heart Bolshevism”, as well as articles and opinion pieces by prominent conservative writers, including historian Edward Gayle, who took over editorship of the journal in 1960.
A few more Cor and Yellos novels appeared in the final years of the 1950s, but Washington was to complain in the letters pages of the few remaining SF pulps that it was becoming increasingly difficult to get his work into print. He blamed a “shadowy Aboriginal cabal in the publishing world” for the commercial failure of Slave Girls of Cor (1959). A book review by Guy Strong in Overground had called the novel “a farrago of sexy violence and violent sex, embodying all of our country’s darkest impulses”. Conservative commentators for the Antipodean and Quarter leapt to Washington’s defence, with Edward Gayle arguing that the Cor novels were “a unique attempt to create a mythology for this great country, which has never had one”, but an embittered Washington never completed another Cor story. Instead he turned his attention to nonfiction, penning a number of “tongue-in-cheek” travel books, including I Got the Wog in Greece (1962) and Dago A-Go-Go (1964), the popularity of which only increased after it was revealed Washington had never set foot in the countries he wrote so scathingly about.
Washington spent two years researching his next project, an exposé of organised religion. Profits in Prophets: How to Make a Million from Founding Your Own Faith was published in July 1968, to modest sales. He had long become inured to critical scorn, but the commercial failure of Profits in Prophets wounded Washington. At the beginning of August 1969, he told his wife that he needed some time alone and travelled to Uluru, where he spent days clambering up and down the sacred Aboriginal site. On his last night there, camping under the stars, he claimed to have experienced a vision of a “Universal Galactic Controller” who existed outside our space-time continuum, and who had chosen Washington to spread his “Transvoidist Gospell” [sic]. The Gospell was found by Washington, neatly typed on foolscap paper, under a rock near his camp site. When Washington returned from Uluru, he wasted no time in spreading the Gospell, publishing pamphlets at his own expense and writing a long Transvoidist manifesto, which he insisted appear in Quarter; this brought about the resignation of the journal’s editor.
Many derided Washington’s conversion, paralleling exactly as it did the instructions he had given in Profits in Prophets. Yet Transvoidism proved popular among the jaded Sydney elite in the dying days of the 1960s. Washington purchased a large property in the Barrington Tops near Gloucester in rural New South Wales, and by April 1970 his movement had attracted over a hundred followers, including the son of a media baron, the wife of a state parliamentarian, and dozens of writers and artists. Transvoidism’s doctrines were shrouded in mystery, but it was rumoured that by following its commandments, those faithful who attained the “fifth level” would be gifted eternal life. Only the most generous of adherents were initiated past the second level; Washington’s wife, Joyce, had reached the first level before being killed in a car accident in May 1970. Her death, Washington told his followers, was a punishment visited on her for her lack of faith in the Universal Galactic Controller.
Washington’s commitment to Transvoidism was tested by the return of his son, Galt, after fighting with the Australian Defence Force in Vietnam. Galt had stepped on a landmine in Hoi An and lost both legs and his left arm. Shortly before news of his son’s injuries reached Australia, Washington had delivered a sermon claiming that the Universal Galactic Controller had bestowed miraculous powers on him, including the ability to cure cancer and to regrow damaged organs and tissue. With Galt’s arrival at the compound in late 1972, Washington’s disciples became increasingly insistent that he exhibit these powers. Washington put off the demonstration throughout 1973, claiming the Universal Galactic Controller did not like to be tested. His prevarication caused at least seventy followers to abandon Transvoidism.
Finally, on 6 February 1974, Washington announced he would perform a regeneration ceremony the next morning. That night all thirty of Washington’s remaining disciples were struck down with severe stomach pains and diarrhoea. At first insisting that this was a sign of the Universal Galactic Controller’s wrath, Washington eventually admitted to having doctored the evening meal with laxatives. He was arrested on 7 March 1974 and charged with reckless endangerment. Washington famously claimed he told the police, “They were giving me the shits, so I returned the favour.” Transcripts of Washington’s police interviews, however, do not include this statement; only his pleas to be released, and his attempts to blame the spirit of his dead wife for the doping, are recorded.
Washington was sentenced to three months in prison. After his release he returned to Gloucester, where Galt was still living. Legal action initiated by his former acolytes had almost bankrupted him and he was forced to sell his property in the Barrington Tops, yet he managed to hold on to Quarter. He toyed with writing another Cor novel, provisionally titled Bad Trip on Cor, but nothing came of it. Despite announcing the beginning or completion of half a dozen novels over the course of the rest of the decade, Washington published nothing, instead living off his son’s disability and army pensions. It was not until 1982 that the short story “The Van[qu]ished”, universally considered to be Washington’s best work, appeared in the February issue of the shortlived but influential Australian science-fiction journal Up Above, Down Under. The story follows the experiences of a soldier in a future war fighting against a race of technologically advanced aliens. In the midst of battle, the soldier is bathed in an intense ray of red light; for a moment he thinks that he has been killed, but to his surprise he is uninjured. It is only weeks later, while on leave on Earth, that the terrible effects of the weapon become apparent. Parts of the soldier start to phase out of reality: first his left leg, then two days later his right, then one of his arms. As he waits for the rest of his body to vanish, the soldier’s only comfort is memories of his mother. But she too has phased out of existence. She is dead. The story ends in the middle of a sentence; the soldier has disappeared.
“The Van[qu]is
hed” was a radical departure for Washington. It was the first time he had employed a first-person narrator, and his habitual leaden prose style had become translucent, deploying a complex structure, original metaphors and powerful symbolism. The story was unbearably moving, and critics even detected hints of homoeroticism in the description of the men in the narrator’s unit. It has been suggested that the theme of the story, and its new-found subtlety and sensitivity, was Washington’s reaction to the horrific injuries his son suffered in Vietnam. This theory, however, is undercut by Washington’s private letters to Edward Gayle written around the time of the short story’s composition, in which he describes his son as a “mewling, mollycoddled, limp-wristed mummy’s boy, who should have lost his head along with his legs”. “The Van[qu]ished” was selected for inclusion in The Best Australian Science Fiction 1982 and subsequently won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story.
After winning the Hugo, Washington signed a contract with Tor to write three Ace Star Specials. The first of these, A Kaleidoscope of Rockets (1984), was a postmodern deconstruction of Golden Age SF, while the second, The Sorceress of the Dawn (1986), was an inventive fantasy novel that intelligently explored complex questions of race and sexuality. Both books received excellent, if bewildered, reviews from critics who had long dismissed the writer as a racist hack, and gave Washington his second Hugo and his first Nebula Award. The Cor series was meanwhile enjoying a new surge of popularity with disaffected youth in South America, and in 1988 the entire saga was translated and published by Black and White, a right-wing Argentinean publishing house, with introductions by the Guatemalan science-fiction writer Gustavo Borda. Washington’s reputation soared, at least in South America, and he was invited to contribute stories and essays to a number of the continent’s ultraconservative literary magazines, including The Fourth Reich and History and Thought. Before embarking on the third novel, Washington busied himself on a number of other projects. These included his long-promised autobiography, The Last Shot, co-written with Galt, and opinion pieces, usually protesting against multiculturalism and feminism, which appeared sporadically in the Antipodean newspaper.
The Last Shot was left unfinished. On 14 May 1989 Washington suffered a stroke which left him permanently paralysed, mute and completely dependent on his son. Providentially, Galt had been given full control over Washington’s literary estate just the week before. Quarter, which had seen sales decline for years, was sold to News Limited; the proceeds were used to modify Washington’s house, including the purchase and installation of a chair lift. Galt also hired a full-time nurse, Alan Pieburn, to help him look after the old man.
The years after Washington’s stroke saw Galt emerge from his father’s shadow. In 1990 he brought out his first novel with New Dimensions, How Time Cries, which tells of a son’s desperate attempts to use time travel to prevent the death of his mother. The novel was dedicated to the memory of Galt’s own mother, Joyce Washington. In style, tone, the themes it examined and the skill with which it examined them the novel was eerily reminiscent of his father’s two late works, A Kaleidoscope of Rockets and The Sorceress of the Dawn, and like those two novels it was nominated for, and won, the Hugo and Nebula Awards. In early 1996, Galt founded the “Rand Washington Trust”, a charitable organisation that uses the considerable royalties from the Cor series to fund various progressive causes, from campaigning for gay marriage and Aboriginal land rights to providing legal representation for asylum seekers.
After his stroke, Washington, frail and confined to a wheelchair, became a fixture at demonstrations for social justice throughout Australia, always accompanied by his son and Alan Pieburn. In January 2000 all three flew to the Netherlands, where same-sex marriage had recently been legalised, and Rand Washington served as the best man at his son’s wedding to Pieburn. Although he could not speak, Washington’s emotions were displayed in the tears he shed throughout the ceremony.
Rand Washington died on 24 February 2000 while riding on a float at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. In accordance with his will, he was buried in Gloucester beside his wife, Joyce, with a copy of Whiteman of Cor in his coffin.
Matilda Young, August 1947
(1899–1975)
Iambic feet can dance in high heels too.
From “Poet in a Dress” (1939)
MATILDA LEANDER YOUNG, POET, FEMINIST AND AUSTRALIA’S first Nobel laureate, was born in the Brisbane suburb of Oxley on 10 October 1899, the only child of James Young, a Methodist minister, and his wife, Clarissa. James Young was an Oxford graduate who had published a volume of poetry in England in 1872, the same year he immigrated to Australia. Young was a bookish, affectionate man who was held in high esteem by his congregation, and he loved his “Tilda” dearly, reading her poems by Robert Browning and William Wordsworth every night before she went to sleep. In turn, Matilda idolised her father, whose death from influenza in 1906, after ministering to a woman dying from the disease, deeply affected her. “I thought all men were like my father,” she wrote in her autobiography She’ll Be Right (1975), “but I learned too late that no man was.” After James Young’s death Matilda read and memorised his favourite poems. Writing also helped distract her from her grief, and she composed odes in the style of John Keats as well as a humorous mock epic, “The Koaliad”, none of which survive.
Less than a year after Young’s death Clarissa married again, to Matilda’s dismay. Her new stepfather was Aubrey Montague, the manager of a local bank. Matilda did not like Montague, and did not want to take his surname, though she finally relented due to her mother’s tearful entreaties. Shortly after the wedding Matilda was sent off to the Rosewood Academy for Young Ladies, a boarding school, where she continued to write poetry, investigating different forms and metres. She excelled in English, winning her school’s prize for composition each year without fail. Her stepfather discouraged her literary efforts, telling her that men were not attracted to clever girls and that she should put more time into embroidery and the piano. When Matilda returned home for the summer holidays in 1910, Montague forbade her from writing poetry. After she ignored him, he confiscated her writing materials and every scrap of paper in her bedroom. Matilda did not complain, but instead spent her days gathering berries for her mother’s preserves and practising the piano, both activities that Montague approved of. It was only after she had returned to school that her stepfather discovered a 600-line poem written on the wallpaper behind her wardrobe, in an ink Matilda had concocted from the berries. What particularly enraged him was that she had signed the poem “Tilda Young” rather than “Tilda Montague”. When the girl returned home for the Easter holidays, her stepfather thrashed her for defacing his property; she received an extra caning for pointing out that it was her father who had paid for the wallpaper. Montague then made her spend a week pulling up blackberry bushes. Badly scratched and sunburned, Matilda began to experiment with distilling ink using tea-leaves and vinegar, and had soon made enough to write a series of sonnets with a quill on the wooden slats under her mattress. These too were found by Montague, two days before Matilda was to return to school, and the eleven-year-old was beaten again. The next morning her stepfather came across Matilda in the garden shed, where she was sharpening a large knife on a whetstone. The scene that followed was described in She’ll Be Right:
Montague threw open the door of the shed, and asked me what I was about. I told him that since he had taken away everything else from me, I was going to use blood to write my poems. Laughing heartily, he said, “Please, feel free to draw some blood from yourself for your silly rhymes. I doubt you have the courage.”
I looked up at him and replied, “It’s not my blood I’m going to use.”
His face went very white, and he watched me for a long time, as I continued to sharpen the knife. Then he stepped back and gingerly shut the shed door. From then until the day he died, we did not exchange another word.
Matilda Young continued to write poetry throughout her adolescence, and in 1918
she was accepted into the University of Sydney to study English Literature and Music, supporting herself with a modest legacy left to her by her father. In her first week on campus Young spotted a small handwritten sign pinned to the noticeboard outside the English department, advertising a meeting of the university’s Poetry Society that evening. When Young arrived at the venue, a dusty classroom, she found only two others: Jack Sargent, a third-year philosophy student who was also president, treasurer and secretary of the society, and Paul Berryman, like Young a first-year English student. When no one else turned up the three went to a nearby restaurant, where Young and Sargent took turns reciting their own poetry from memory while the shy Berryman looked on. Young was quite taken by the dashing Sargent, impressed by the fact that he had a sonnet recently published in Northerly, Australia’s oldest and most prestigious literary journal. Sargent told her he was from a property near Nyngan, deep in the bush, and held her spellbound with his tales of writing villanelles while mustering stock and repairing fences. Sargent, Berryman and Young continued to meet each week throughout the semester, and presently Sargent and Young fell in love. When Young completed her degree in 1921 they were married, with Berryman serving as best man. The eccentric Sargent made no objection to his wife’s unconventional request that she keep her maiden name.
The couple moved to Newtown, where Young taught piano and Sargent found employment as an English teacher at a local grammar school. In the evenings they would write poetry, good-naturedly criticising each other’s work and making fun of the verse they read in journals and newspapers. This was the happiest time in their marriage, but it was all too brief. Rather than the simple stockman she believed she had wed, Young’s husband was something of a dandy, spending much of the household income on outfits for himself. Sargent’s handsome looks, fashionable clothes and swaggering charisma ensured his prominence in the Sydney poetry scene. He even founded his own school, the Onomatopoets, which flourished for a time in the bohemian city in the 1920s. Sargent was a favourite of the literary patroness Vivian Darkbloom, who gave him small monetary gifts to subsidise his writing, and who bestowed on him the nickname “Fancy Jack”, which everyone but Sargent’s wife came to call him. And yet, despite his fame, Sargent found it difficult to get his work accepted. He submitted over one hundred poems to journals, magazines and newspapers from 1921 to 1923 but only one was published, and that had been heavily revised with his wife’s help. In spite of the unwavering support of Matilda and his friend Berryman, Sargent gradually became soured by failure. In March 1924 he taught a class while intoxicated and was dismissed after vomiting in front of the headmaster. The loss of his job came on the same day that Young learned she was pregnant. Sargent was unwilling to find work, so Young took on more pupils, spending six days a week crisscrossing the city by tram. She hid her wages from her husband to prevent him squandering them on beer, cologne and expensive clothes.