Houses of course are not homes. Tell that to real estate agents whose advertisements spruik the wonderful homes, warm family homes, large entertaining homes, comfortable established homes (they really mean gardens) for sale. No, they aren’t homes, they are houses, they need people living in them to become homes. I once virtually sold the house I am living in now because, I believe, the people inspecting it thought it was really a home and the dwellers therein lived a happy life. We were vaguely in the market for a bigger house, we’d talked to an agent, told her not to advertise ours yet, but I failed to notice that she’d done so; we were busy having people for Sunday lunch. The garden was full of friends drinking wine, talking, laughing, the kitchen was piled with dirty plates and left-over food on every surface, and a mob of children had every toy and object my kids owned—cars, dolls, trains, Lego, ribbons, blocks, books, balls, board games—ceremoniously parading along all the passages and through all the rooms, a long and bizarre procession looping its surreal way in figures of eight all over the house. They were having a marvellous time, laughing, talking at the tops of their voices. I was appalled when one of them came out into the garden to tell me the agent and prospective customers had arrived, and so was the agent when she saw the mess. I left her to it. Prospective buyers picking their way through the melee. Later that evening she came back to say they had made a very good offer.
Now it was time for the family to be appalled. The agent was even angrier when we said we didn’t want to sell it, that advertising the house had been her idea and we wouldn’t dream of letting it go until we found something we liked better, and we’d given up hope of that and were going to stay and extend.
Of course we’d broken every rule in the house agents’ canon. But it worked, as a selling device. The buyers liked the life in the house, they thought they could buy that life and that happiness, that fun, along with the bricks and wood. And maybe, since they were capable of recognising it, they would have been capable of creating it for themselves. Who knows? We stayed, and extended (Overcapitalising! snorted the agent) and continued to make it our home. As I do; forty-five years I have lived here now, and have no plans for leaving; I haven’t got it right yet. I keep working on it, most recently paving part of the garden, since we can’t water lawns any more. And I’ve bought a glass-fronted bookcase cupboard, to shut up the precious things from all my open shelves, so my granddaughter will be able crawl around and not do damage.
The thing about house museums is that it is often difficult to get any sense of the home they were for the people who lived in them. But in Mallarmé’s you could. The sense was evanescent, but real. There were various objects, a clock, a sideboard, mirrors, china, that had belonged to him. You could stand at the window with its old warped glass and look at the river flowing past and for a moment be Mallarmé watching this same river, which of course Heraclitus would say is not the same river, and yet it is the same. You could walk in the lush green garden and catch the pleasure he took in it. He was a very domestic person, Mallarmé. He delighted in the textures and fabrics of daily life, and at one stage edited a fashion magazine which he saw as part of the one great poem, the Great Work, it was his role in life to write—‘the Book…there’s only one, unwittingly attempted by anyone who writes…’
I decided I should read his poems, not just a first line on a postcard.
They are hard work because though you can understand the nouns and verbs as words it is not always easy to see how they fit together, how they make sense. The syntax escapes you. I bought an Oxford edition of his poems, in French and with a translation in English that is faithful to the metre and the rhyme but not always to the poetry; you need to read them like Impressionist poems with surreal qualities, with the senses rather than the intellect, not always easy since translation is inclined to present as an intellectual activity.
Mallarmé’s ‘Brise marine’ is a poem which invokes domestic delights, but in a context of running away from them. The second line begins with the phrase ‘O to escape’—in French the word is ‘to flee’. Migratory birds appear again; he has the sense of them being drunk in their desire to be among unknown spray and skies. Nothing can hold his heart which is steeped in the sea. And yet how he invokes those nothings that cannot hold him: not the ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes, nor the desolate luminosity of his lamp, not the blank paper guarded by its whiteness, not even the young wife suckling her child. No, he is going to depart for ‘une exotique nature’. The steamer is a ship of some ambiguity; its masts seem to invite storms, be buckled by winds, cast away in shipwrecks: lost, without masts; he repeats it, without masts, sans mâts, sans mâts, it is a despairing cry. But, he finishes, O my heart, listen to the sailors singing.
Curious the way the same images, the birds, the steamer, the seductive voyage, reappear, in a different context and a different syntax from Brasch’s poem. Both have a sense of casting away an old life, with poignancy in Brasch, with danger in Mallarmé, with promise in both cases. Mallarmé the poet cannot keep from listening to the sailors singing. Mallarmé the man stayed home. He was at home on Tuesdays in his apartment in the rue de Rome; curious phrase, at home. I like to be at home most of the time in a hermit-like way, but here it means so that people may visit you. Most of literary and artistic Paris did, and listened to him hold forth on the nature of poetry.
In his Autobiographie, a letter written in 1885 to Verlaine, at the latter’s request, he admits he travels little, ‘preferring to all that to dwell in an apartment defended by the family, among some few old and dear pieces of furniture with a sheet of paper that is often blank’. A paragraph later he says, ‘I was forgetting my wanderings, undertaken whenever my spirit becomes weary, on the edge of the Seine and the forest of Fontainebleau, in the same place for years: there, I seem to myself quite different, paying attention only to riverboating. I honour the river, which allows whole days to be swallowed up in its waters—without any impression of wasting them, or any shadow of remorse. I’m a simple wanderer in my little mahogany skiff; a furious sailor, proud of his fleet.’
A furious sailor, perhaps, but not the kind that the poet heard singing. His riverboating makes us think of Ratty and Mole mucking about in boats, and there was a pair of true homebodies. Mallarmé was very much at home in his house in the forest of Fontainebleau, by the river; I knew that when I visited, more than a century later. The fleeing, the escaping, is only in the poems.
We came home from Europe that first time in another white boat, this time the Oriana. In the mid sixties it was perhaps the finest of the ocean liners. It ended up as a troopship in the Falklands War. It was fast, solid, elegant. We embarked at Naples and nineteen days later sailed into Sydney. These were palmy days, but it was also the beginning of the end of sea travel. There were some people who were on the ship simply to cruise, they were going from Southampton to Southampton at what seemed to us vast expense. They were of course the future; cruising is all that ocean liners do any more. They don’t go places, they visit, they call in. We, the real travellers, quite despised them, and the feeling was mutual. But we were certain of the authenticity of our role, we were using the ship to get from one place to another, from Europe to Australia; we were going home, or going to make a new home on the other side of the world.
We colonised the sun deck, when the ship sailed into warm climes. When I say we, I mean these passengers who were returning or going to their working lives, for whom this voyage was a holiday as well as a means of travel. Even first class it was cheaper than an aeroplane. There were a number of young women with small children; we had a kind of playgroup going on the deck, under its awning, with soft breezes from the ship’s passage making coolness even in the tropics. You didn’t have to go to the dining room for lunch: a cold buffet was set up on the deck. Of course Lucy had her daily sleeps, which the switchboard monitored; you told them where you were and they sent a steward for you if the baby called out. What luxury it was. I did a lot of reading. Nineteen days was a goo
d length of time: you didn’t get sick of it. There was a library, and Graham could sit there and work; that was luxury too.
We heard no sailors singing, there was no ambiguity about any of the masts. It was a floating hotel, with comfortable routines.
I like to tell the story of sitting at the bar one evening wearing a dress that I had had made by a dressmaker in Alassio on the Italian Riviera where we were living in the granny flat of a grand mansion called Villa Felice. The dress was an Yves St Laurent pattern, and John Olsen who was travelling with his wife and baby patted my knee and said, Splendid dress. But then, I was twenty-six, and when you are twenty-six many dresses are splendid.
The thing about homes is that they have to be made. People say that: she makes her home in Coonabarabran, or Gundagai, or wherever. Once I thought I would make my home in New Zealand, but it didn’t happen. Later I wondered about making it in Newcastle, returning to my origins, near the sea that I didn’t ever think I’d live away from for long. Now I make my home in Canberra. I’ve made it in Paris, and Cambridge, and Sévérac. Very briefly in Adelaide. Where I am obliged or choose to live I make my home.
But I also make it, temporarily and in a kind of proxy, or perhaps it is through an alter ego, in reading and writing. Reading Mallarmé, or Janet Frame, or Brasch, I take up temporary home. As I take up residence for a while in books I write. The writer as migratory bird is a lovely image, because the bird is at home in more than one place. And think how skilful he is—he manages to have two summers; his difficult voyage is rewarded with warmth at both ends. And one way at least celebrated by bells. I’ve occasionally managed two winters in a year which I quite liked at the time. Sometimes the writer’s migration is a factual one, sometimes it is in her imagination. Every new piece of writing is a departure, with an arrival who knows where? To be made a home.
No Poet’s Song Matthew Condon
I have known it all my life—the large, dull, rectangular granite obelisk that marks the exact location at which explorer and NSW Surveyor-General of Lands, John Oxley, set foot on the northern bank of the Brisbane River in 1824 and proclaimed a settlement site. This was the white birthplace of my city, the Caucasian holy ground, and although I had never actually stood before the obelisk, it has always been there for me, somehow, like an unremarkable freckle on the body.
Of sharper relief in the mind’s eye is Oxley himself, just in his early thirties and a devout Christian. His black and white profile—a miniature portrait rendered by an artist unknown—is as familiar to generations of Brisbane children as the A-flat of the City Hall clock chimes, or the feel of summer bitumen heat through the soles of school shoes.
Oxley, it seems, wasn’t the most popular subject of colonial artists. The one image of him I remember from textbooks in the 1960s remains the perpetual reproduction. In the picture he appears almost boyish with his full bottom lip and helmet of pitch-black hair, tufted up in a lick above his forehead. On the left side of his face he has a long, thinning sideburn that hints at a lad straining towards manhood. His left eye looks both sleepy and watchful. Overall, though, he appears to be a good boy. It’s nice to have a good boy as the father of your hometown.
As for the obelisk, it is possibly the most unimaginative foundation stone of any city in the western world: a great two-and-a-half-metre-high lump of grey rock, lazily chiselled and almost entirely featureless. Its back is turned to the river, its front to the North Quay sector of the CBD. Aesthetically, the obelisk says little more than ‘X marks the spot’, a marker in a forgotten children’s fairy story. Screwed into the rock is a plaque that reads: Here John Oxley Landing to Look for Water Discovered the Site of this City. 28th September 1824.
The idea for the obelisk was conceived in 1924 as part of the official Brisbane Centenary celebrations—a moment, according to local chroniclers, temporarily flush with civic pride and affection for the past. It was purchased with leftover money from a State Government fund set up as part of the Centenary celebrations and its commemoration of John Oxley discovering the city. Other monies went into establishing the John Oxley Library.
A beautiful book produced to mark the occasion—the Brisbane Centenary Official Historical Souvenir—opens with an epic poem commissioned for the party. ‘The Brisbane River—Oxley’s Coming, 1823’ was written by local laureate Emily Bulcock (sister of novelist Vance Palmer), who penned much commemorative rhyming verse in the 1920s and 30s. Curiously, the work elucidates Oxley’s first journey up the river in 1823, rather than his second visit the following year, which resulted in the chosen site of the future city. Still, it gives Bulcock the opportunity to exploit the frisson of first contact, to see Brisbane—this Eden—through foreign eyes, and her lyrical narrative swings between the plunder of Paradise and the glory of a built civilisation.
Our lovely stream has fired no poet’s song;
And though long centuries have seen her flow
Her age old past to silence doth belong
Ere Oxley came a hundred years ago.
Bulcock writes of the ‘great white chief’ seeking a stream, storming ‘this Arcady’ and spoiling ‘the dream’. When Oxley arrives, ‘the wild bird of Freedom fled away’. Then, suddenly, there is ‘a sweet young city laughing in the sun’.
And round her, as around Jerusalem,
The circle of the mountains God has set;
Wherein she sparkles, a half-polished gem,
We scarce have wakened to her beauty yet.
Inside the commemorative souvenir is a further account of Oxley’s second journey and the discovery of the settlement site. It notes that Oxley visited the future site of Customs House; however, ‘the first centre of activity…was a little further up the river, and it was close to the position of the Victoria Bridge (near North Quay)—there the chief buildings of the settlement soon began to arise’.
It goes on to congratulate Oxley for his site choice. ‘The river has everything to do with the enduring permanence, growth and prosperity of the city, and it would be a bold man who would deny the prescience, or was it fate, which led Oxley, on his second choice, to fix upon the peninsula which is Brisbane.’
And in the 1924 book—perhaps inspired by Ms Bulcock’s effusiveness—there is wild poetic flourish in the prose. ‘The river always was, and is, a thing of beauty and a joy; one could almost wish that we were pagans, so that we might, as the Romans did, erect statues in appreciation of our river God.’
Jerusalem. The Romans. River gods. The great classical allusions hardly match the stolid lump of surviving granite in Oxley’s name. In those Roaring 20s and Depression 30s days of shovel-nosed trams and fewer cars, the obelisk quite possibly attracted the historically curious with its little skirt of low cast-iron fencing. Frank Hurley, the legendary photographer/explorer/mythologiser, seemed to find it worthy of his lens. In his restless meanderings across the country after World War Two, when he produced endless postcards and souvenir booklets for the major capital cities of Australia, he snapped a well-dressed young couple before the obelisk, standing stiffly and reading the plaque in the early afternoon. They look attired for the theatre, he in his baggy suit, and she in long skirt, mohair short-sleeved top and headscarf.
One recent winter day I too decide to stand on the exact location where Oxley scrambled ashore and founded Brisbane. To get to the obelisk, you must head up Makerston Street from Roma Street until you strike the T-junction with one of the city’s busiest peak hour thoroughfares—also called North Quay. Here, several lanes of traffic feed in from Coronation Drive and Hale Street in the west and funnel traffic either into the CBD or onto the Riverside Expressway heading south. For pedestrians, it is a dead zone of sterile apartment buildings and a police credit union. There is little human traffic here, for the stretch of bitumen fronting the obelisk has been left stranded by the expressway. It is one of those eerie corners of a city that feels to have died. The obelisk itself is halfhidden under a stand of pollution-filthy trees and hemmed in by a steel safety barri
er.
Here John Oxley Landing to Look for Water Discovered the Site of this City. What are we to make of this simple, unpunctuated sentence? To a schoolboy it would present as straightforward and logical. But today it seems worded to suggest that the discovery was somehow accidental. That young Oxley stumbled upon the settlement site. He lands, looking for water, before discovering. It makes the discovery sound incidental. A surprise. Not a decision from a visionary, however wet behind the ears.
And there is something else about the iron-forged declaration. The wording seems clumsy, unconfident. There is a tremor of hesitancy about it. Perhaps it’s just the absence of the commas. Perhaps the memorial plaque author is attempting to be in Oxley’s head, a century after the explorer, with water at the forefront of the Surveyor-General’s mind. Water was a priority, but weren’t there other considerations—geography, river access, timber, Indigenous inhabitants? Perhaps the author—a public servant, a member of the local historical society—was under duress with just the parameter space of the plaque with which to work. Still, something doesn’t feel right about it.
At the rear of the dreary granite block is an old brick pipe outlet, and from it pushes a steady stream of water down to a small inlet of large rocks and river mud. From the city’s riverside bicycle and running track it is possible to look up, after decent rainfall, and see water cascade from this outlet. Was it this, a clearly visible stream of fresh water, which lured Oxley to shore? The geography of landfall here would hardly have changed since 1824. While the elevated Riverside Expressway may have steered traffic around the CBD, it has also rendered the riverbank below a no-man’s-land, a time warp, a slice of Brisbane city topography almost prehistoric with its small-eared mangroves and silty mud.
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