by Ryan O'Neill
In 1909 Tiller was thirty-five. He had made and lost fortunes, all his books were in at least their tenth printing, and he enjoyed a literary reputation that eclipsed even Henry Lawson’s. Yet he was despondent. He could not risk telling anyone his secret, and for years he had been considering a return to England, even going so far as to book passage on more than one occasion. Yet each time something forestalled his departure, whether the loss of another thousand pounds at the racetrack, or the appearance of another attractive maid to be bedded. He had written nothing since Concerning Our Homestead in 1904 when he was approached by the theatre producer Percy Runyon to dramatise On Our Homestead. Although Tiller was sick of Pa and Pete, he accepted the commission. He excitedly told Runyon of his conviction that the Tiller family could be used to explore other, more serious, facets of human existence.
The original script of the play, which took Tiller three years to write, contained the requisite clowning of the short stories, and the most famous stage direction in Australian drama: [Exit, pursued by a cow]. It was also on occasion discomfortingly gloomy. At the end of the first act, Pa, after being boxed around the ears by a kangaroo, sits in the middle of the stage and sobs, while Pete stands beside him muttering, “Nothin’ to be done.” More troubling was the play’s final curtain, which left the two men lost in the bush, unable to find their way home. (Samuel Beckett’s debt to Tiller’s play is discussed in depth in Peter Darkbloom’s 1954 article “Waiting for Pa and Pete”.) The opening-night audience on 28 June 1914 was confounded by these serious interludes, and Runyon cut them for the play’s second night, without informing Tiller. The inebriated author was ejected from the theatre after screaming abuse from his balcony while the audience laughed at Pa’s antics.
In 1915, On Our Homestead was adapted into a 22-minute motion picture, again produced by Runyon, with whom Tiller was no longer on speaking terms. Retitled as Pa and Pete on the Farm, it was only the second motion picture to be produced in Australia. The film, like the play, was wholeheartedly embraced by a public distressed by the outbreak of war and longing for a return to simpler, more innocent times. Tiller himself claimed never to have seen the film, now lost, though his 1915 journal obliquely records a visit to the Alhambra theatre on 16 May of that year. The single word underneath this entry in Tiller’s handwriting has been interpreted by literary historians as either “Bullocks!” – a reference to the climactic stampede scene in the film – or “Bollocks!”
During the war years Tiller published only one short-story collection, Off Our Homestead (1917), which saw Pa and Pete travel to Sydney, “the big smoke”, to collect a bequest from a dead great-uncle. Through sheer guilelessness the pair is tricked out of all their money, which after many adventures they recover with interest, before returning home in triumph. Tiller had wanted to write about the city for years, and shuffled Pa and Pete off to the side in a number of the stories in order to more fully develop other characters in an urban environment. This decision perhaps explains why sales of Off Our Homestead were disappointing, though the reviews continued to resemble panegyrics. Henry Lawson, again unimpressed by Tiller’s writing, confided in a letter to A.G. Stephens in November 1917 his belief that:
The Pa and Pete stories have become a sacred cow in Australian literature, and a cash cow for Tiller. I am no friend of his, but a few of the stories in this book prove the man can write, though he has squandered his talents so far entirely in low comedy. I fear he will only stop producing his bloody awful Homestead books when the English language runs out of prepositions.
Lawson was perhaps the only reader in the country to detect the contempt and self-loathing that lay behind Tiller’s prose. “Australia may love Pa and Pete,” he once remarked to Sydney Steele, “but I’m damn sure Tiller hates them.”
After the relative financial failure of Off Our Homestead Tiller resolved never to write another Pa and Pete story. It was the last collection of original Tiller family stories to be published for seven years, and the last of his work to be published by Allenby & Godwin. Now in his forties, Tiller had lost interest in the pastimes that used to occupy him, although he went through the motions of gambling and managing his investments, as badly as ever. He was lonely; despite offering outrageously high wages, he could persuade only old women to work in his household, due to his reputation as a rake. Always an impressive drinker of beer, at this time he moved on to spirits, and by the end of 1919 he was finishing a bottle of whisky a day. Only a looming bankruptcy obliged him to write more Homestead stories. In 1924 Tiller submitted what he swore would be the last of the Tiller family collections, Outwith Our Homestead, to his new publisher, Kookaburra Books. The stories marked a departure in style for Tiller. Slapstick was all but absent and an elegiac tone had replaced the usual archly humorous one. The caricatures of Pa, Pete, Norm and Ma even became, at odd moments, human. The final story in the collection was the infamous “He Leadeth Me Beside the Still Waters”. Tiller’s publishers begged him to amend this story, or even cut it from the collection altogether, but he refused, believing, correctly, that it was the best thing he had ever written. “He Leadeth Me Beside the Still Waters” sees the Tiller family leave the homestead in their rusty old Ford to spend a day by the creek. Pa disturbs a hive of bees, but by some miracle they don’t sting him, and instead he is able to help himself to their honey. In the meantime, Pete confides to Norm his intention to leave their selection the next day to seek his fortune in the city. Pete decides to go for a last swim in the creek, and Pa, Ma and Norm watch as he shimmies up a nearby tree and dives headfirst into the water. He does not re-emerge. Pa and Norm wade into the creek and drag out Pete’s lifeless body. The story ends with Pa cradling his dead son, whispering the twenty-third psalm into his ear.
The public hysteria following the death of Pete in “He Leadeth Me Beside the Still Waters” is comparable only to that which followed the demise of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem” (1893). Fourteen people in Sydney and twenty-eight in Melbourne were hospitalised with nervous prostration in the week after the book’s release, and a mock funeral held for Pete Tiller in Brisbane reportedly drew a crowd of 2000 mourners. Within a short time grief turned to anger, and the letter columns of newspapers were flooded with correspondence condemning Tiller for his cruelty and heartlessness. Pa and Pete clubs were formed across the country, and countless petitions arrived at Kookaburra Books demanding that Pete be brought back to life.
For a time, Tiller was moved by the public’s outpouring of emotion for the character he had created, but as the months passed and the furore refused to die down, it wearied him. The Pa and Pete clubs were encouraging boycotts of all his other Homestead books, and Tiller’s one remaining pleasure, his twenty-mile daily constitutionals around Sydney, had to be curtailed because librarians, booksellers and prostitutes would shout obscenities at him as he passed. Within a month, his royalties were reduced to almost nothing, and within two months the little money he had saved had disappeared. Finally, in a terse letter to the Bulletin published on 6 December 1924, Tiller announced a new, and this time absolutely final, Tiller family book, Return to Our Homestead, in which, he promised, he would resurrect Pete.
Tiller wrote Return to Our Homestead in six drunken days at the end of December. The first story in the collection, “He Maketh Me to Lie Down in Green Pastures”, is a direct continuation of “He Leadeth Me Beside the Still Waters”. As Pa mumbles over Pete’s body, his son jumps up from his arms and crows, “Wot a larf!” He had been shamming all along. The remainder of the story, and the other stories in the collection, were clumsy pastiches of previous Pa and Pete adventures. What little life Tiller had breathed into the characters in Outwith Our Homestead had dissipated. Pete’s only function was to play cruel practical jokes on the rest of his family, constantly braying his catchphrase, while Pa was sadistically pricked, gored, scratched and bitten by the local flora and fauna as Ma looked on, shaking her head and laughing. Retur
n to Our Homestead became the third-highest-selling book in the series.
Pa and Pete’s Wireless Showcase Hour debuted in 1926 and was to run on Sydney’s Radio 5XC for the next three decades. Eager to recoup the financial losses of the previous year, Tiller had agreed to work as a consultant on the show, spending an hour each week with the writers dispensing advice on how to portray his creations. The first eleven months of broadcasts were faithful adaptations of the Tiller family stories, but after these were used up the show degenerated into a parade of bad jokes and clumsy, crude double entendres, as demonstrated in the following exchange from the 15 November 1926 broadcast:
PA: Where’s your mum, Pete?
PETE: She’s squatting on Yorkey’s Knob.
PA: I’m going to murder that Yorkey!
This was too much, even for Tiller, but his notes on the scripts were ignored, and he was no longer welcome in the studio. In a fit of rage, Tiller had destroyed the wireless in his home, and so on Saturday nights at eight o’clock, when Pa and Pete’s Wireless Showcase Hour was broadcast, he would stagger drunkenly around the streets of Mascot or Bronte or Leichhardt until he found a house with an open window, and there he would listen as the family inside wept with laughter at the inanities spouted by Pa and Pete. When the sound of Tiller’s mumbling grew loud enough to be noticed, he would be shooed away and move on to another house, and another window. In December 1926 Tiller attempted to enter the home of a family in Ashfield, in order, he said, to kill Pa and Pete, and he was arrested. A nervous breakdown followed, and Tiller was hospitalised for the first half of 1927. The doctors ordered a change of climate and told Tiller he should return to his hometown of Coolabah. The first annual Pa and Pete festival was scheduled to be held there later that year, and Tiller had been invited as guest of honour. Instead, the writer finally decided, at the age of fifty-two, to return to England.
Tiller sailed from Sydney in a first-class cabin in August 1927, remaining at the stern of the ship long after the city had disappeared over the horizon. It was the first time he had left Sydney in forty-seven years. He spent the long, solitary weeks of the voyage talking to himself in a mirror, trying to recapture the English accent he had not used for decades; he introduced himself to the other passengers as Henry Watkins. By the time the ship arrived in England four months later, Tiller had shaved off his beard, disposed of his old clothes, and had the ship’s tailor make him an entirely new wardrobe.
Tiller arrived in London during the coldest winter in sixty years, and was met at the docks by Sydney Steele. Steele and Tiller shared a publisher in Kookaburra Books, who had asked Steele to keep an eye on Tiller. Though the men were contemporaries, and often mentioned in the same breath as Australia’s two finest writers of prose, they had never before met. Steele had been warned about Tiller’s eccentric behaviour, so he showed no surprise when instead of the bearded, ragged ex-sheepshearer he had expected, there stood before him a clean-shaven, immaculately dressed gentleman who spoke in a bizarre half-Cockney, half-Cornish accent and demanded to be addressed as Henry Watkins. Tiller rented a luxurious flat in Mayfair and was looked after by a personal valet and a cook, both of whom he eventually dismissed because they could not understand his accent. Steele was asked to help find a maid from Australia, and after much searching a young woman, originally from Cronulla, was found to serve Tiller.
On a snowy morning in January 1928, Tiller took the train from London to Bath to visit his ancestral home. Steele wanted Tiller’s opinion on his novel, the high modernist Uneasy Lies the Head, and Tiller took the manuscript with him to read on the train. Upon arriving in Bath he spent hours wandering the streets of the city. Tiller Manor was gone; it had been destroyed in a Zeppelin raid during the Great War and the grounds had been sold to the council, which had erected housing for disabled veterans on the site. At the local cemetery Tiller found the grave of Peter Boldwood, the original Pete, who had been killed at Ypres in 1917. The vicar informed him that Thomas Boldwood, Peter’s father, was still alive, and Tiller went to visit him at his great-granddaughter’s house. The 99-year-old Boldwood remembered young Henry Watkins perfectly, but told his visitor that Watkins had died in Sydney in 1891, and there was a letter from Reginald Watkins to prove it. Tiller protested that he was indeed Henry Watkins, but the old man grew querulous. “Liar!” he shouted. “Listen to you. You’re a foreigner.” Tiller was asked to leave by the old man’s great-granddaughter, and as he hurried away he could hear the agitated Boldwood continue to roar, “Bloody foreigner!” Tiller left a cheque for two hundred pounds with the vicar, asking that it be given to the Boldwood family. From Bath he sent a letter to his editor at Kookaburra Books, admitting that leaving Sydney had been the biggest mistake of his life and announcing his desire to return as soon as possible. He had been in England for just over five weeks.
Tiller made his way back to London the next day with a raging fever. He fainted on the train, and in the confusion his luggage, and the only copy of Steele’s novel, went missing. He was taken home insensible with a bad chest cold that quickly developed into pneumonia. The best doctors in Harley Street were called in to examine him; all ordered complete bed rest for at least six months. Ill, forlorn and yearning for Sydney, on 3 March 1928 Tiller asked his maid to bring him paper and pen, and began to write. Sydney Steele, who remained on friendly terms with Tiller despite the devastating loss of Uneasy Lies the Head, assumed he was working on more Pa and Pete stories, but he was wrong. The Lotus-Eater was Tiller’s last book, and his only novel. A radiant, poetic Bildungsroman, the novel tells the story of Simon Buller, a callow young Englishman exiled to Australia by his wealthy but emotionally stunted family. At first contemptuous of his new home and its inhabitants, Buller learns to love Sydney, and eventually his selfishness and greed are transfigured by the city into something approaching redemption. The novel’s crystalline prose, complex, shifting point of view and indelibly evoked setting found many admirers in England when it appeared in 1934. T.S. Eliot wrote, “The Lotus-Eater is to Sydney as Mr Joyce’s Ulysses is to Dublin,” while E.M. Forster claimed that on long winter evenings he would read the novel to warm himself from its pages. The Lotus-Eater remained in print in Great Britain until after the Second World War, and was eventually reprinted as part of the Penguin English Library in 1993.
In the months he was confined to bed, recuperating and working on The Lotus-Eater, Tiller spent hundreds of pounds on maps, drawings and books about Sydney, though most of the astoundingly detailed descriptions in the novel were drawn directly from memory. On one occasion Steele visited Tiller and found him, so he thought, asleep with his manuscript spread out on the bed. But as Steele turned to leave, Tiller spoke, his eyes closed: “Wait a moment. I’m standing on the corner of George Street. I’m just crossing the road. Oh, it’s the harbour! My God, what a sight!” Transfixed, Steele listened as Tiller roamed in imagination through the city he so loved. Steele traced Tiller’s progress on a map, and when he gently corrected Tiller on some minor detail, the bedridden writer insisted that the map was wrong, as indeed turned out to be the case. One day Steele encountered Tiller’s maid in the hall. Knowing Tiller’s reputation, he expressed his wonder that she was still in his employ. The maid was puzzled: “Why would I leave?” she told Steele. “He’s a nice old gent. He just asks me to read to him, that’s all. For hours and hours I read the newspaper and things. He don’t care. He says he just wants to hear my accent.”
Writing for long hours each day, against his doctor’s advice, Tiller completed the manuscript of The Lotus-Eater in early August 1928, dispatching it to his editor at Kookaburra Books with the scribbled note, “To hell with Pa and Pete – this is fair dinkum!” Though Tiller’s publishers were initially reluctant to allow The Lotus-Eater to be published under the pen name of “Henry Watkins”, they eventually agreed upon the condition that Tiller write another Pa and Pete book after he returned to Sydney. “I care not,” Tiller recorded in his journal. “I would write nothing but the word
s Pa and Pete for the rest of my life if it means seeing The Lotus-Eater in print.”
The Lotus-Eater was published in Sydney in February 1929. Tiller’s wishes were honoured and his double identity remained a secret. Kookaburra Books poured money into an expensive advertising campaign, and even offered customers a discount on the next Pa and Pete book if they bought The Lotus-Eater. Sadly, the advertisements had little effect. The Lotus-Eater by Henry Watkins had sold just seventy-three copies by the end of April. Most of the print run was remaindered, and the novel was never reprinted in Australia. The book was reviewed only once, by Paul Berryman in the Bulletin, as