It wasn’t true, but I believed it, as I believed all bedtime stories, and perhaps therefore it was true, in a way. It might not have helped the breathing, but it soothed the panic. Then, and subsequently, it was the only treatment the doctor offered: a palliative until the wheezing eased. The most profound bliss—or at least profound contentment—I knew as a child was the aftermath of asthma attacks. Was pleasure merely the absence of pain? The air I freely inhaled might have been an intoxicant, a euphoriant; I sucked at it deeply. By association, perhaps, the books that I read, or that my parents read to me during my convalescence, could never be anything but blissful.
My father was a teacher at Minlaton High School, his first posting; Mum had been teaching at the King George Whiting Capital of the World—Port Stansbury, thirty miles away—but had given up teaching when she married, as was then mandatory. They were billeted on the Tonkins’ farm for the first few years of their marriage, and the first year of my life, then moved across into that tiny, spartan shack a stone’s throw away.
But I anachronise. It didn’t seem tiny at the time. Nor did its fittings—woodstove, kerosene heater, kerosene kitchen primus—seem spartan. To an infant it was a vast and sufficient universe. There was no fridge in the early years—a Kool-Safe dripped water down its hessian sides to cool the meat and milk and butter, evaporatively. Water was hand-pumped into a ceiling storage tank for household use; hot water for the kitchen had to be boiled on the stove; there was a kerosene bath-heater; wood was chopped on a block in the backyard to boil the laundry copper each Monday. Hard, cracked yellow cakes of Velvet laundry soap were used to wash the clothes; a handwringer squeezed them dry; and the brightest jewels I knew were cubes of Reckitt’s Blue.
‘To make the linen white,’ my mother explained nonsensically.
Monday was Laundry Day in the whole world. Tuesday was Ironing Day: two big Mrs Potts irons sat on the stovetop, heavy as bricks, one warming up while the other was in use. Wednesday was Cleaning Day, but Thursday—Baking Day—was best: helping sift flour into the mixing bowl, measuring in the sugar and butter cubes, licking the beaters, sampling the Mixed Dried Fruit, sometimes with those other bright jewels, red glacé cherries or green angelica, among them. Friday was Shopping Day, Saturday was Tennis or Golf Day, Sunday was the Sabbath.
Church was the centre of all social life. My great-grandfather Goldsworthy was a Cornish blacksmith and Wesleyan preacher; in the days when there were a dozen competing Methodist churches in the copper-mining town of Moonta—fifty miles to the north—his had belonged to the Primitive schism. Our family Methodism had eased a little by our time. The kernel of truth in the old joke—Why don’t Methodists fuck standing up? Because it might lead to dancing—had been watered down; dancing was permitted, and there was plenty of singing. There was even opera. Both my parents were accomplished pianists: they produced and performed two Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in Minlaton during those years. I don’t remember The Gondoliers—I was still in a bassinette—but I remember, during rehearsals for The Mikado, sitting under the piano as my mother pounded through her accompaniment. I remember also the beauty of the Japanese costumes and hand-painted paper fans—more bright jewels—and the art teachers who congregated in our house to put on the finishing touches.
And here, for the first time, a Proustian olfactory sensation among the visual: the pungent acetone smell of the glue—Tarzan’s Grip—that was used to stick the paper fans to their wooden ribs. Glue is something else I have always loved inhaling, although the bliss is associative, and mnemonic, rather than chemical.
In the strict weekly calendar, every night was Reading Night. My dad was a very good teacher of Latin, which was just what the barley farmers needed. He taught me to read when I was three—in English—mainly by reciting a book called Ant and Bee. Words also were as vivid as jewels, I soon discovered; I loved the sharp, sticky look of them, even before they accumulated meaning. They might have been ants and bees themselves, small prickly insects crawling over the page. They lodged in the memory like burred prickles. There was no school library then—there wasn’t even a town Institute library. We relied on the Country Lending Library in Adelaide, which posted out great parcels of books every month or so. The one I loved most was a French story—The Happy Lion by Louise Fatio. The Happy Lion lived in a provincial zoo in the middle of a kind of French Minlaton, and every morning the citizens would walk past on their way to work or school and say: ‘Bonjour, Happy Lion.’
This ideal world was interrupted when the keeper left a gate open, and the Happy Lion decided to go for a walk in the town to visit his friends. All hell broke loose as instead of greeting him, the locals fled screaming at first sight. The puzzled lion sat down in the street to mull this over. ‘This must be the way people behave when they are not at the zoo,’ he thought to himself, which was my first lesson in irony, if one that escaped me at the time.
Our front gate was always open, and the happy cub, me, was always off walking around. Or was I Francois, the zoo-keeper’s son, and the animals I met on my adventures were the lions? They were often unhappy. Chooks were beheaded in the backyard. Brown snakes were deliberately run over on roads. Terrified sheep were shoved into Mr Tonkin’s sheep-dip and up again, half-drowned. A harmless blue-tongue lizard, caught with an egg in the chook-shed—its angry, gaping mouth and cobalt tongue as vivid as any Reckitt’s Blue—had my father’s spade put through it as though it were a tiger snake.
There were no pet dogs. All the dogs were working dogs. Kelpies, kelpie crosses, the odd blue heeler. The Tonkins had border collies. Dogs were treated as unsentimentally as shearers, if given better cuts of meat: basic lodging, work from dawn to dusk, left to their own devices the rest of the time.
My pets were books, and within one of those big, square pets I found another pet, an imaginary pet. My mother read The Poky Little Puppy aloud to me, repeatedly, and the story of that rebellious little puppy, and the hypnotic rhythms and rhetorical repetitions of the prose—of that prose—were as memorable as the nursery rhymes I can still recite by heart. Poetry had rhythm and rhyme and assonance and other burrs that made it stick fast in the brain, but prose also could lodge. Five little puppies dug a hole under the fence one morning and went for a walk in the wide, wide world…
2. Adelaide
At the end of Grade One the wide world got much, much wider; we moved to The City for four years. There was only one City that anyone had heard of—Adelaide, a far-off magical place, always spoken of in hushed tones, and always apparently spelled with a capital—along with other fabled lands such as Disneyland, Oz, Heaven—but I didn’t like it much. The Beaumont children had not yet disappeared into their historical oubliette, but there were plenty of pre-Beaumont restrictions—no lifts in cars with strangers, come straight home after school. No dessert ever, unless puppies never dig holes under this fence again. There was none of the freedom of the bush.
My mother was happy; she liked the new, small, neat brick box with its gas stove, and hot and cold running water—amazing luxuries, which mattered not a jot to me. There were other occasional pleasures which remain in my mind in a sort of mental Upper Case, as befits magical things: Tram Rides—The City was still latticed with trams—The Zoo, and The Koala Farm. There was The Show, and its attendant joys: Show-Bags, Ghost-Trains, Ferris-Wheels. There was The Museum, especially its crypt-like Egyptian Room, stuffed with mummies, sarcophagi, mysteriously inscribed tablets, and other graveyard loot. That slightly musty, slightly sinister Egyptian Room is part of every South Australian child’s imagination.
The Airport was another important attraction. It was a Sacred Site to my grandfather, Australia’s first bikie, and a worshipper of all things mechanical. He liked to visit the airport at least once a week. The high point of these visits was to climb to the balcony and watch the propeller blades splutter to life, one after the other, on the old Electras and DC6s and Viscounts. Long before the days of glue-sniffing, he loved to inhale the aroma of burned kero
sene; so did I—it was a smell that had gone missing from my life since leaving the bush. Grandpa was also a great fan of the Melbourne Express, which he would take me to watch each night as it thundered through one or another local level crossing.
‘Feel the suction!’ he would shout, as we stood perilously close to the tracks. At his most inspired, he would race the express to the next crossing, passing just in front of the onrushing locomotive as the signals clanged terrifyingly.
I was largely free of asthma—there were no barley fields nearby—but there were books. Television had arrived in The City, and a few friends had sets. But not us. We would never have television. Instead of a black and white screen, there were the coloured screens of books. I could borrow them now in person, from the Children’s Lending Library on North Terrace, so it was less a Lucky Dip. My favourite was an Arabian Nights compendium for children. My Scheherazade was my mother, and one of those stories she told me had very tenacious brain-burrs: the story of a genie corked inside a bottle at the bottom of the sea. At the end of the first year of imprisonment the genie vows to shower rubies and emeralds on anyone who will set him free. At the end of the second, gold and silver. By the end of the third year (or seventh, or thirteenth—the numbers in stories are always prime numbers) he vows to kill whomever sets him free. I thought the story the most absurd thing I had ever heard but it stuck in my mind and stayed there, itching. Its absurdity fascinated me—surely because it had a metaphoric power that spoke to deeper parts of me. Years later, my first novel was shortlisted for a prize called the Miles Franklin Award. My then-publisher rang me a few days before the final announcement of the winner, and said he had good intelligence that I’d won, and was sending me an air ticket to Sydney. Write a speech, he suggested. I didn’t write a speech, but I was chuffed. The next day he rang back with an apology. Oops, wrong intelligence; the vote was 3–2 against you. Then I wrote the speech. It went something like: ‘I know my novel has faults, but I didn’t think it was quite bad enough to win the Miles Franklin Award…’
At that moment, under the emotional pressure of wounded narcissism, the Arabian Nights story came back to me. For the first time I began consciously to understand its bitter metaphoric kernel, although of course even as a child some deeper, darker part of me had always understood, even as I puzzled at it. Of course it’s a story of human bitterness; of that long, sad dreaming whose song-lines can be tracked through countless other stories and other cultures, from Aesop’s fox and his sour grapes, to the folk-wisdom of such phrases as ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’. Like all archetypal stories it tells us things about ourselves even if we don’t want to hear them. It told me things about myself I was too young and self-centred to hear.
I knew it by heart long before I knew it by head; it’s been an important lesson in my own search for the deep stories within my own stories.
3. Penola
At the end of Grade Five Dad was posted back to the bush as inaugural Headmaster of a new High School; my mum was posted back to another letterbox of a house, slightly larger than our Minlaton shack but with the same woodstove and kero primus and no hot water. Water was pumped into the roof again by hand—my job now—and the bath-water was heated with wood-chips.
On our arrival she sat on the edge of the bath and wept.
‘Mum’s a bit tired,’ Dad said, and took my brother and me out for white pudding and sauce on toast at the Golden Fleece service station. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t filled with joy. Once again we were living on the very edge of town—this time lush green pastures full of fat dairy cattle and thick-woolled merinos—and I was off the city leash.
The house might not be much bigger, but the rest of the world also seemed to be growing in scale with me; the stunted acacias and stringy-barks and bonsai mulga scrub of Minlaton had become the giant red and white gums of Penola.
We had a giant windmill in our backyard; the entire region—the southeast corner of South Australia—was little more than a great porous limestone slab floating on an underground sea of artesian water. The whole world down here was a vivid green. If South Australia was the driest state in the driest continent, this was an improbably wet corner.
The parcels of books began arriving from the Country Lending Library again—on the train this time, not the bus—big anonymous brown paper parcels tied up in string, as if they were confidential rubber goods. I didn’t like the lack of choice; I had got used to choosing my own books; I wanted to make my own discoveries. These titles chosen by others—Emil and the Detectives, The Hobbit—now seemed childish and sissy to me.
My new library was the town Dump; my best friend and I visited it at least monthly to make withdrawals, none of which were ever returned. Our favourite discoveries were tatty, water-damaged or food-stained sci-fi paperbacks, or copies of Man magazine with its no-nipples, no-beaver pre-porn. The stinking clay shelves of the Dump yielded up Bradbury and Verne and Van Vogt and Asimov. What we liked about those science-fictions was their freedom of inquiry. The stories were a species of what philosophers now like to call thought experiments.
Since I had been six or seven, whenever adults asked me what I was Going To Do When I Grew Up (a compulsory, almost daily question, along with the perennial How Old Are You? and How is School Going?) I had mysteriously answered ‘Author’. The mystery was as much mine as theirs—I have no idea where it came from. My love of reading? The reverence my parents felt for books and their magical improving qualities? But I liked reading, not writing. And the authors of those books were never mentioned; authors were seen on the page, but not heard of. No glamour seemed to be attached to the job. Celebrity glamour was the exclusive provenance of the royal family, the emerging royalty of Hollywood, and Test cricketers.
In Penola that vague, inexplicable ambition first took more definite shape. While I was eleven and twelve I wrote eleven or twelve science-fiction novels in a kind of competition with my best friend, who wrote a similar number, or perhaps one more. He won most of our competitions. Our ‘novels’ were always exactly one school exercise book thick, and concerned us and our wider group of friends cavorting around the galaxy, less philosophical thought experiments than cowboys and Indians in outer space.
There were other treasures to be found in the archives of the Dump. I remember vividly the day we found a copy of Mad magazine there; its irreverence and dark humour—Don Martin Department, Spy vs Spy—was a revelation. The magazine might have fallen from heaven rather than been dug from the sulphurous earth. At eleven years of age we began producing our own monthly magazine of cartoons and satire with the highly original title of ‘Insane’. Since the only caricature I could recognisably draw was of the Prime Minister—Bob Menzies—one entire issue was filled with a series of cartoons called ‘How To Disguise Your Menzies’. We drew Menzies in a range of moustaches, beards, hats, and dark glasses; we drew Menzies as a shearer, a cop, an old man, a villain; we drew Menzies as—yes—a woman (the word drag was a verb that meant to race) and, clairvoyantly, we even drew Menzies as a Chinese emperor, although he had not yet been christened Ming.
The only genre I didn’t dabble in was poetry. Or so I thought, until a recent literary lunch held in the dining room of the Royal Oak hotel in Penola. I had just published a novel set in the town, in the year 1964, with some scenes in that very room. It was fun to read that chapter to my audience. After the MC presented me with a tin of tar and some feathers for bringing the name of the town into disrepute, questions were taken from the audience. A man my age jumped to his feet and said he had brought his wife’s autograph book with him. He claimed I had written a love poem to her in it, in 1964, and could he read it aloud.
It went like this:
Saveloys are red,
Frankfurters are yellow.
Sugar is sweet
And so are you.
Freud might have something to say about it, he suggested—but I think it owed more to Mad magazine.
4. Kadina
&n
bsp; Teachers were a nomad species in those days, yanking up their shallow roots every two or three years. Sometimes the single women stayed, replenishing the gene pool; the men and their families moved on, climbing the promotion ladder. A week before the first day of my second year at Penola High a telegram arrived instructing my father to be in another town and another school, four hundred miles away, in a week. Within days, our yurt was folded and we were moving back to the Yorke Peninsula: to Kadina, another former Cornish copper-mining town ten miles from Moonta, one-time Copper Capital of the World.
Mum was pleased—a high-ceilinged stone house, gas water-heater in the bathroom, electric stove—but for a long time I was a loner, missing my best friend. I also missed the swamps and forests of the Southeast. This might be the brown, brown grass of home, of my first home, but I had grown to prefer the green.
The Kadina town dump was always on fire; its literary treasures, as in ancient Alexandria, lost to me. I lost myself instead in the school library, the first I had known. I read science non-fiction now; under its instruction the thought experiments of science-fiction became actual chemical experiments. I fitted out the back shed as a laboratory and in that dark magical cave made various involuntary attempts on my life. I read Scientific American from cover to cover each month in the school library. I liked the glossy beautiful illustrations, yes—science-porn—but I also read it for the articles. I especially loved the segment called ‘Amateur Scientist’ which contained actual recipes. I anaesthetised myself by distilling ether, and poisoned myself by distilling the most beautiful of all elements: bromine, which is a kind of translucent, purple-brown mercury. At various times I spilled all known concentrated acids on myself, burned my hands with various molten concoctions, peered into exploding test tubes and damaged my eyes. I made my own fireworks, and later my own solid-fuel rockets—the fuel was Amateur Scientist’s mix of zinc dust and sulphur, bought from Kennett’s Hardware store—in which I launched highly trained beetles into very shallow orbit: a couple of hundred feet. I tried to parachute them back to earth, but this was a luxury: even when the chutes failed to open, which was always, the entire crew of beetles would crawl happily out of the wreckage. At harvest time the Yorke Peninsula was still the Asthma Capital of the World, but these days my brother suffered more than me. My infrequent attacks were always my own doing: toxic fumes in the shed—or once, memorably, when I fumigated the entire house with sulphur dioxide.
Home Truth Page 8