by Ryan O'Neill
Using the royalties from his memoir, and donations solicited from patrons in Sydney, ruhtrA launched a new avant-garde literary magazine, Words, Words, Words, in June 1974. In the first issue he published his Kangaroulipo manifesto, calling for more formal and thematic experimentation in Australian writing and the abandonment of the dry realism of the past. Although Words, Words, Words was advertised as a bimonthly publication, it appeared only twice a year in 1974 and 1975, and once in 1976. Each issue featured a long, provocative editorial by ruhtrA and a chapter from his work in progress, Repression: A Novel Written Under Constraint. The lengthy composition of this book was no doubt due to ruhtrA’s typing it out with his nose while confined in a straitjacket for six hours a day. As well as his own work, ruhtrA published short stories by Murray Bail, Frank Moorhouse and Peter Carey, and poetry by Matilda Young, Anna Couani and others. His plan to serialise Frederick Stratford’s The Prodigious Gatsby (1925) was foiled by copyright lawyers. The critical reaction to Words, Words, Words was hostile, especially after the third issue, in which ruhtrA parodied Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style with a series of ninety-nine photographs featuring ruhtrA himself performing push-ups, jumping jacks and other calisthenics while dressed in a variety of outfits, from 1920s flapper to renaissance courtier. Words, Words, Words came to be seen as a vanity project, with literary critic Peter Crawley memorably rechristening it in the Sydney Review as Turds, Turds, Turds.
The journal’s feeble sales and tepid critical reception were undoubtedly factors in ruhtrA’s turning to narcotics in the mid-1970s. Within a few months, his drug use was no longer an inspiration but an addiction. In 1975 he published Lines of Coke, a collection of fifty sonnets, each written under the influence of cocaine. That same month, ruhtrA held the first meeting of Kangaroulipo on Australian soil, at a bar in Pyrmont. His speech, in which he dismissed Australian literature as “the acne on the greasy skin of an adolescent country”, received a standing ovation from the assembled writers, who were mostly unpublished. ruhtrA expanded on this theme in the editorial of the final issue of Words, Words, Words in February 1976. For nine pages he excoriated the Australian poetry establishment and personally insulted several major figures from both the conservative and experimental sides of the poetry wars.
ruhtrA’s attack achieved the near impossible: it united the poetry world, against him. Apart from the denunciations that appeared in newspapers and literary journals, ruhtrA also received more than fifty death threats, in both free and regular verse. Fearing for his life, ruhtrA demanded to be placed under police protection. When this was refused, he employed four members of the local Hell’s Angels chapter to act as his personal bodyguards until the row had blown over. For months ruhtrA and his “Avant Guard” appeared at book launches and poetry readings in Sydney, their very presence a provocation to those present. The bikies also accompanied ruhtrA to court when he was sued for breach of copyright for his sexually explicit experimental novel The Coming of the Harlequins, which New Dimensions had published in January 1976. ruhtrA lost the court case and had to pay two thousand dollars plus costs to Helen Harkaway, the writer whose novel he was found to have copied. This meant he was unable to pay the bikies the money he owed them, and ruhtrA was later hospitalised with two broken legs after being attacked by four supposedly unknown assailants.
Although he made a full recovery, the experience left ruthrA addicted to painkillers, which he supplemented with cannabis and cocaine, leading to ever more erratic behaviour. ruhtrA justified his drug use by claiming that he was working on a new project, an adaptation of his earlier Lines of Coke into novel form, in which every chapter was to be composed under the influence of a different drug or alcoholic drink. Only two chapters were written, “Absinthe”, published in Meanjin in May 1978, and “Speed”, which appeared in the short-lived counterculture magazine Groovy! in January 1979. By the end of the decade, ruhtrA had ceased attending meetings of Kangaroulipo, and in June 1980 he was deposed from his post as “eternal president” of the group. Kangaroulipo held two more meetings before disappearing for good. ruhtrA, ostensibly researching for the “Whisky” chapter of his book, was too drunk to notice.
Needing money to fund his drug habit, in November 1980 ruhtrA found work in a second-hand bookshop in Glebe, telling the owner his name was Arthur Robinson; he was still fearful he might encounter a poet he had insulted in his 1976 editorial. Things started to look up for ruhtrA; he cut back on his drinking and joined a methadone program to manage his drug use. He even began a new project, Ed Soysus: An Anagrammatic Novel, in which he intended to repurpose every letter in Frederick Stratford’s Odysseus to create a new work. By 27 February 1981 ruhtrA had written two pages of his new book. When he went into the bookshop that morning, his first task was to clear out a room full of old stock that had been deemed unsellable. The first box he opened contained fifty copies of his own Long Time No See, which had remained unsold for eight years, even at five cents a copy. ruhtrA threw the books into the garbage.
That night ruhtrA went to a party being held by his neighbour, a psychiatrist, where large quantities of a fashionable new drug, MDMA, or ecstacy, were freely available. ruhtrA took three small pills, and in the early hours of the morning was found dead behind the bookshelves, where he had crawled during the night. Georges Perec, then living in Brisbane as writer in residence at the University of Queensland, attended ruhtrA’s funeral, held on 4 March 1981. Also there was ruhtrA’s close friend Frank Moorhouse, who delivered the eulogy, and ruhtrA’s former lover, Kiralee Sutcliffe, now a lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Newcastle. Perec had met Sutcliffe before, in Paris, and after the service asked her what had caused ruhtrA’s death. Sutcliffe told him what she had heard from an acquaintance who had been present when ruhtrA’s body was discovered, but her answer left Perec none the wiser. The Frenchman could not comprehend how someone could die from an overdose of e.
Addison Tiller in Sydney, January 1903
(1874–1929)
“Wot a larf, eh Pa?” howled Pete. “Wot a larf!”
From “The Night We Walloped the Wallabies” (1903)
ADDISON TILLER, RENOWNED DURING HIS LIFETIME AS “THE Chekhov of Coolabah”, was Australia’s most successful short-story writer. Famous for his humorous depiction of bush life in the tremendously popular series of Homestead short stories, Tiller was born Henry Reginald Watkins on Christmas Day 1874 at Tiller Manor, near Bath, England. He came from a prominent local family that had made its fortune from the African slave trade in the eighteenth century, and at the time of Tiller’s birth they owned twelve textile factories in Liverpool. Henry’s mother, Mary, suffered from neurasthenia and was frequently bedridden for months at a time, so the boy spent much of his early life in the company of nannies, governesses and nursemaids. His first literary outpourings were directed to his mother’s maid, Bessie, whom he begged to run away with him in perfectly scanned sonnets. (Henry’s interest in female domestic staff was to become less innocent as he grew older.) With his father, Reginald, often absent in the north on business, Henry whiled away the time after lessons with the head gardener of the family estate, Thomas Boldwood, affectionately known to all as “Pa”, and his young son and assistant, Peter. (Tiller would recall these names years later when writing his first short story, “Hacking out the Homestead”.)
In 1878 Reginald Watkins formed a plan to seek his fortune in Australia. In preparation for their new life, Watkins took an interest for the first time in his son’s education, ordering him to learn all he could about their new country. Accordingly, he purchased Harold Bachman’s Geography and Customs of the Antipodes (1877) and set his son a number of pages to memorise each day. While young Henry enjoyed the sound of the exotic words he found in the book, such as Gabanintha, Toowoomba and Gerringong, he was never able to recall them when asked, which infuriated his father. It is no surprise, then, that by the time the Watkins family departed England in September 1879, Henry already despised his new home.
/> The Watkins family arrived in Sydney in February 1880 and swiftly established their household in a mansion in Potts Point. To Henry’s horror, his father refused to hire a governess, and instead the boy was enrolled in the exclusive Calvin Grammar School, where his English accent and superior airs marked him out for mockery and bullying. Each day after school Henry was pursued from the school gates by a gang of boys, prompting him to learn by heart all the shortcuts and hiding places for three square miles. While retaining his native accent at home, Henry gradually adopted an Australian one at school, which served to mitigate the beatings from his classmates.
After school, Henry was expected to spend three hours a night with his father, learning the ropes of his importing business. In the little free time left to him, the boy roamed Sydney, friendless and alone. For years he was homesick for the elegant terraces and spas of Bath. Sydney seemed to him a shabby, uncouth place, its inhabitants vulgar and dirty. His abstemiousness did not, however, deter him from consorting with local prostitutes, and by the age of sixteen he was constantly making excuses to escape his father’s presence. Actually, Henry was carrying on simultaneous affairs under his father’s roof: with his mother’s maid and with the scullery maid, both of whom he made pregnant in early 1891. When his father was informed of the women’s condition, he sent them away with a month’s salary. His son he disowned and disinherited with immediate effect, and the young man found himself out on the streets with nothing but the clothes on his back and twenty pounds his mother had wrung into his hands as they parted.
Henry Watkins had dabbled in poetry all his life, and naturally his first thought was to make a living with his pen. After letting the most expensive suite at the Russell Hotel, he dashed off ten poems in the classical mode, including “Ode to a Lorikeet” and the mock epic “An English Swain in the Antipodes”. While confident his work was of a standard to appear in London’s Strand or Edinburgh’s Blackwood’s, Watkins was unwilling to wait the months such an acceptance would require. Instead, he sent his effusions to the Australian journals whose titles had caught his eye on newsstands: the Western Star, the Cattleman and the Southern Cross. To his astonishment, his poems were rejected. Watkins had been reckless with his savings, fully expecting to earn ready cash from his versifying, and within a month the money his mother had given him was spent. When he skulked back to the family home in an attempt to solicit more from her, Watkins’s father coldly informed him that his mother had died the week before, no doubt from a broken heart. The two men would not speak again.
With the last of his savings, Watkins purchased as many back issues of the Bulletin, the Stockman’s Journal and Lone Hand as he could find. Having been asked to leave the Russell Hotel due to non-payment of his bill, Watkins found a miserably damp basement room in Surry Hills, paying five days of rent in advance. He spent three of these days reading the journals from cover to cover, occasionally nibbling on a page or two in an attempt to stave off hunger pangs. The vernacular poetry of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson was beyond him, he realised, and instead he concentrated on the short fiction. He surmised that the stories most popular with editors and readers concerned the lives of ordinary, working Australians in the bush, told in a sentimental, humorous style. Watkins knew little of ordinary life, nothing about work, and had never been to the bush, but on the morning of 5 April 1891, after three hours of furious scribbling, he produced his first short story. “Hacking Out the Homestead” introduced the characters of Pa and Ma and their sons Pete and Norm as they left the city to build a shack on their new selection in the bush. Although elements of the story were clumsy, and some of its details manifestly inaccurate (Watkins believed a jumbuck to be a kind of parrot), it is remarkable how quickly he settled on the formula that would make his fortune. There was humour, if of a primitive kind, as Pa was kicked by a cow into the local creek, and then kicked again into a pile of manure, and at the climax of the story kicked once more into a bed of thistles. But there was also pathos, as the crude cabin the family had toiled for a week to build fell down around them at the first breath of wind. The characters could not be mistaken for anything other than Australian, if only for the number of times they said “strewth” and “fair dinkum”. Moreover, the setting was positively crowded with gum trees, creeks, wallabies, possums and kangaroos. Watkins signed the story “Addison Tiller”, borrowing the first name from his favourite English essayist and the second from his ancestral home in Bath.
Unable to afford postage, Watkins walked for miles in the pouring rain to the offices of the Western Star, on the way exchanging his worn but still fashionable suit for the faded, dirty clothes of a loafer. There, he handed his story to Jim Taylor, editor of the journal. From Taylor’s editorials, Watkins knew he was no lover of the English, and so he was careful to speak to him in a broad Australian accent, brusquely demanding to be allowed to dry himself by the fire before departing. Taylor made no objection, retreating to his office with Watkins’s story. As Watkins was about to leave, Taylor came running out and embraced him. “Addison, my boy,” he cried, “you have the gum of the eucalyptus running through your veins!” When Taylor asked where Watkins hailed from, the young Englishman replied, “Coolabah”; it was the one place he could recall from Bachman’s Geography and Customs of the Antipodes. Taylor offered to buy “Hacking Out the Homestead” on the spot and any other stories of a similar kind. Henry Watkins left the offices of the Western Star as Addison Tiller, with ten shillings in cash and a contract for a further eleven short stories.
“Hacking Out the Homestead” was a great success with readers of the Western Star, as were the Tiller family stories that appeared in each issue of the magazine for the next year, all describing the travails of Pa and Pete, Norm and Ma with the same blend of farce and poignancy. These dozen Homestead stories appeared at a propitious time for the newly born Addison Tiller. Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson’s Bulletin dispute had ignited a national debate about the bush. Tiller’s work was singled out by Paterson in a stanza of his poem addressed to Lawson, “In Defence of the Bush”:
But you found the bush was dismal and a land of no delight
Did you chance to hear a chorus in the shearers’ huts at night?
Did they not meet you with the welcome of a lordly country seat?
It’s not in your precious city you’ll find men like Pa or Pete.
Lawson’s response, “The City Bushman”, was more ambivalent about Tiller’s creations:
Yes, I heard the shearers singing “William Reilly” out of tune,
Saw ’em fighting round a shanty on a Sunday afternoon,
Pa and Pete I never saw, and that’s a shame, it’s true,
But then that pair’s as likely as a talking kangaroo.
Despite Lawson’s criticism, the Bulletin debate helped establish Tiller as an important and authentic voice of the bush. Plans were made to collect his stories, and in November 1892 On Our Homestead was published by Allenby & Godwin, the country’s most successful and respected publisher. The book sold out in a week and went through a further nine printings in the next year. Tiller’s collection was a publishing sensation to rival Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) and Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1874). Both Tiller and his publisher were keen to capitalise on their success, and more short-story collections followed: Around Our Homestead (1893), Beyond Our Homestead (1895), Behind Our Homestead (1897), Towards Our Homestead (1898) and Athwart Our Homestead (1900). Each of these Homestead books rigidly stuck to the established formula, and was received with great enthusiasm by the public and critics alike. An anonymous 1901 article in the Bulletin, believed to be by J.F. Archibald, acclaimed Tiller as Australia’s national short-story writer; Archibald also later coined Tiller’s famous nickname, “The Chekhov of Coolabah”.
Tiller enjoyed staggering royalties from the very beginning of his writing career, but his prodigious spending on clothes and alcohol, as well as the large sums he used to pay off the hou
semaids he seduced and abandoned, meant he was always short of money. His finances were not helped by his uncanny ability to invest in stocks and shares that proved to be worthless. Two of the stories in Opposite Our Homestead (1903) were written as a crowd of furious creditors were pounding on the doors of his Brighton home, and Concerning Our Homestead (1904) was dedicated to “My long-suffering tailor”. If pressed by a particularly irate landlord or cuckolded husband, Tiller would apply to his publisher for an advance on his next book, claiming the need to “go bush”. These month-long “walkabouts” were largely spent in the brothels and opium dens of Kings Cross. Though Tiller was thirty by the publication of his eighth book about bush life, he had never been further west than Parramatta.
From his first appearance in print, Tiller took great pains to obscure “Henry Watkins” and preserve the fiction of “Addison Tiller”, aware of the disgrace and ruin that would follow if the public were to learn he was an English gentleman. He grew a thick beard, had his Byronic mane of dark hair shorn, dressed like a tramp and avoided all the old haunts where he might be recognised. Fearful of reverting in a moment of forgetfulness to his English accent, he relinquished it entirely. The death of his father in 1899 removed the final link with his old life, and he realised he would no longer have to worry about his true identity being uncovered. In the bars and pubs of Sydney, Tiller would encounter men who claimed they had known him in the goldfields, and throughout the 1890s he found himself fighting breach of promise suits from women he had never met, who lived in towns out west he had never visited. Though Tiller was a sociable man, he would often leave the parties thrown in his honour after an hour or so, to spend the rest of the night walking around Sydney alone. His knowledge of the city was encyclopaedic, but from time to time, to burnish his reputation, he would stop a stranger in the street, explaining he was a simple bushman who had lost his way, and ask them for help in finding the offices of the Western Star.