Home Truth

by HarperCollins Publishers

  Henry James wrote: ‘It is art that makes life.’

  I am reading and writing again. There are times when I am living again. As I read, my mind wanders off just like it used to do, and I find myself in the rough and tumble of the imagination. What a relief to find I still can go there. And the familiar process brings such consolation. How I love the surprises to be found, the wonder of a mind released from all restraints. I feel properly alive again, and it doesn’t matter that it won’t last; it is enough to know the lolloping mind hasn’t deserted me forever.

  Each night I go outside and stand in the chill night. I no longer search in the dark for a face, a voice, an embrace—I look up into vast space and wonder what is out there, feel the temptation and danger of unknown and uncertain possibilities. Back inside I sit at the end of the couch and reach for my books. I am reading Barenboim’s A Life in Music; his passion, and he’s such a passionate man, becomes my passion. And Philip Fisher’s Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences to understand better the texture of being alive. And Thomas Mann’s magisterial Buddenbrooks. I hover over the books and then select the novel. I am two thirds of the way through: how it pulls me along, how it pulls me away from myself. I settle into the couch and read my way home.

  All unattributed poetry by Dorothy Porter. Taken from Crete (Hyland House, 1996), Akhenaten (Hyland House, 1998) and The Bee Hut (Black Inc, 2009).

  Who Trespass Against Us Michael McGirr

  One Saturday afternoon in March, our four-year-old girl, Clare, announces that she is going to leave home. She wants to live in a palace where people are only allowed to wear pink clothes. She doesn’t mind if Mummy comes to visit as long as she wears pink.

  ‘What about Daddy?’

  Before she can answer, there is a knock at the door and our neighbour pops his head in. We don’t see Len very often. He plays in a blues and roots band by night and is a signwriter by day. His work has been struggling in what everyone calls the economic downturn; people start businesses with big signs and close them down with little ones. A closing sale might even appear as a Texta message on a piece of cardboard. Signwriters need people who want to draw attention to themselves so the last six months have been tough for Len. Nobody wants to advertise defeat.

  Len has something he wants us to see so we put the kettle on. It is the first cool weekend of the year and we feel like survivors after a summer of frightening heat, one in which the fires of the previous month have made us grateful for a place to stay home and listen to a neighbour. Jacob, Clare’s twin brother, is terrified of the gas jet under the kettle and runs to hide; he thinks it is a bushfire. We are unsettled by this as we did all we could to protect the children from images of the fires.

  Years ago, Len was employed in television, at one stage working on the set of Carson’s Law, an Australian soap opera made in the 1980s and set in the 1920s, starring Lorraine Bayly as a female lawyer standing up to the blokes. From what little I recall, it was a decent enough show. The item Len wants to show us is something he salvaged from the set as it was about to be consigned to the dump. Len’s souvenir is a loose-leaf folder of correspondence from 1934 addressed to the Special Collector at the Camberwell Council. It isn’t hard to see why the TV producers would find such an item handy to help set the scene of an old-fashioned legal practice; nor is it difficult to see why it would be disposed of afterwards. Its beige cardboard cover is hardly a thing of beauty.

  The contents are something else entirely. They are the stories of people who could not afford to pay their rates, pleading for clemency from the council. These days, Camberwell is a by-word for respectability, a leafy eastern suburb of Melbourne, a place with a lot of neat hedges. In 1934, it was different. Each original letter is attached to a carbon copy of a poker-faced reply from the relevant council official.

  Most correspondents offer to pay some small amount toward their debt. One is from a clergyman whose stipend has been cut by 55 per cent but who won’t desert his parish. Another is from a carpenter whose letterhead says that he is the inventor of the ‘Rose’ flyproof window:

  I have had a very rough time the last three or four years, having lost everything. I have been sleeping in the shed for the last three winters, but I am determined I won’t give in. I am fighting against great odds with a lifetime handicap. I will not touch sustenance and am determined to win off my own bat.

  Most writers state their position in plain language:

  I am sorry about the arrears of rates etc but it is a matter of impossibility to raise any money on a Mallee farm on which we are abiding. The last four years we have worked for nothing…

  Another says:

  I regret to say that owing to my husband being out of employment, and the fact that I have no means of earning anything whatever at present…My position is that I am unable to get sufficient to cover food necessities.

  Many of them speak of medical bills which the ratepayers are also battling to pay:

  My wife has again been taken ill and I have had to scrape together every penny to cover the expenses therewith after she has been treated unsuccessfully…

  I cannot possibly pay you any money as I have got my wife in the Greenvale Sanatorium and I am finding it very hard to find a few shillings to send to keep her there…

  A large number of ratepayers offer simply to hand over the title to their land in order to discharge their debt:

  I cannot do anything in the matter at the present time; I am penniless, my son is only sixteen years and has only done 4 months work up-to-date, and has, into the bargain, met with a big accident to the hand and is attending the Alfred Hospital. I myself am a diabetic, with heart trouble (incurable) and my income is about 18 shillings a week, so it is no use my attempting to promise anything. You will just simply have to take the block of land. I was taken down in buying it, being a widow I had no one to advise me. Sorry to cause all this trouble.

  Owing to the depression, drop in wages and general financial stringency I find myself absolutely unable to pay this amount at present. I have had this property up for sale in the hands of a number of estate agents but I cannot give it away.

  Dear Sir Find enclosed cheque for 10% being portion of rates due…This is the best I can do as I told you in my last letter that my wife has been very ill. She has been in bed for the last three months and has just been transferred to Hospital. If this is not acceptable to you you will have to take the action you suggest and I will have to place my case in the hands of the court and let them decide.

  The scruffy-looking volume contains scores of similar stories. It may be that few of the authors were right at the bottom of the social pile. After all, they were writing as owners, not renters, and some of the letters concern vacant land which was perhaps bought for investment purposes rather than as a place to live. The handwriting is nearly always immaculate and the manners of much of the prose are impeccable. Yet there is both grief and dignity underwriting these pages. One after another, they tell a poignant story about the tenuous nature of ownership, especially of homes. Even the stories themselves, as humanly compelling as they are, would have been lost except that the council, having no further use for them, passed them on to a soap opera which, having no further use for them, happily saw them go off with our neighbour. There is a fragility in all of this, a reminder that a toehold in history is often bought by luck. A lot of the paper on which the stories are written is so light that it is almost transparent.

  But the signatures at the foot of the letters are not fragile. They are strong and proud, often taking as much space as the body of the letter. They too are an act of possession. They suggest that someone is at home in his or her own story or at least in possession of it.

  After Len goes home to his side of the fence, Benny, our six-year-old son, spreads out some paper. He too has something special to show us. He has been going to school for about four weeks now and he wants us to see that he can write his own name. He uses black crayon. First he produces a B
. Then an E with the prongs pointing the wrong way but it doesn’t matter. They look better like that. Now he is stuck. He looks up at me.

  ‘Daddy, do the mountains come next?’

  I am a bit confused until I realise he is asking about the letter N which he has learned is shaped like a mountain.

  ‘Yes, Benny, the mountains come next.’

  ‘Good. I thought so.’

  Work continues until Benny’s name spills across the page and onto the kitchen table of his home. He looks at me, full of his achievement. This is a fine moment in both our lives. It is wonderful to be at home on a Saturday afternoon to see your son write his name for the first time on his own and know that he will do this little thing as a sign of himself in countless times and places in the mountains ahead.

  When I was Benny’s age, we went without fail every Saturday for lunch at Sunray, 247 Ernest Street, North Sydney, two doors from what was then the new freeway, which, as our family told it, had been forced to take a swerve to miss the old house. Sunray was not just Dad’s childhood home, it was his childhood. The freeway might have swept away half the Cammeray Golf Course as well as the St Malo Private Hospital but it didn’t dare lay a finger on Sunray. The house came to an even less glamorous end only a few years later, in the early 1970s, when it was demolished to make way not for an apartment tower but for the garden of an apartment tower. An enormous blue spruce tree that had stood in front of Sunray was transported in the jaws of a bulldozer up the Pacific Highway and planted in the garden of a retirement centre in Waitara.

  Sunray was furnished with myths and stories and cedar. It spread itself over a full acre between Ernest Street and Moodie Street, and included a tennis court, beyond which there was a fountain and a small orchard and a garage and finally a separate office up the back where my grandfather Greg McGirr had once conducted business. By the time I entered this world, the fountain was overgrown and the fruit was left to rot on the trees. The place spoke of a world which had passed but which was still warm in the grave.

  My grandfather had owned a lot of hotels, mainly in regional areas. Yet in the 1920s, as a member of state parliament and cabinet minister, Greg McGirr had spoken up in favour of prohibition, a position which, like much about him, defies explanation. Greg McGirr senior enjoyed an audience. The Australian Dictionary of Biography says that he ‘adopted an ebullient, populist style, tending to be overbearing and insensitive with sledge-hammer eloquence’. It also describes him as ‘good company’ but suggests that he was less than diligent in pursuing his parliamentary duties. He was nicknamed ‘Mother McGirr’ for introducing child endowment and he was leader of the Labor Party for a brief but rocky period until he was replaced by JT Lang, who didn’t like him very much. He finally left Labor in 1925 to form the Young Australia Party, which never reached adulthood. McGirr lost his seat and spent time stoking up his considerable business interests, riding his luck up and down. He didn’t mind a punt. Family lore says that his first tilt at money came in the wake of a fire in a jam factory. McGirr bought the burned jam, added chemicals of some dire description, and sold the formula as a poison for vermin, called ‘Rabo’. It was a curious enterprise for a qualified pharmacist to dabble in deadly substances but he knew in his bones that rats would like burned jam. He lost money on other occasions but those stories had been either forgotten or tucked away by the time I came on the scene.

  Sunray had a firm hand in shaping my father, also called Greg, the seventh child and youngest son of the pubowning prohibitionist and pest-poisoning pharmacist. Sunray was integral to the identity of Dad’s family and to his sense of who he was; it filled his imagination. The building was a sprawling Victorian mansion with a dining room that could seat eighteen leaving still plenty of room for those standing to get around with the drinks. The kitchen, on the other hand, was small, so much so that the fridge was forced out into the corridor next to the bell which shook the establishment whenever the phone rang. A grandfather clock used to swing in the hall, interrupting itself every quarter of an hour to resentfully intone the passage of yet more time. The washhouse and laundry were separate, out the back where there was no electricity to support any of the luxuries of which my grandmother, Rachel, was suspicious. When Dad turned up with a radio in his truck, his mother thought such indulgence was almost sinful. Dad thought it was a good way to keep in touch with the races.

  Sunray was magnificent but nobody ever thought of it as comfortable. You could get lost in the place and I think that is what happened to Dad. There were eight children living there and a pool of adults. Dad’s older sister, Clarinda, had died in Parkes before dad was born, a tragedy which helped precipitate the family’s move to the city. The house in Parkes was called Sunrise. It is still there. So is the fountain they built in that dry place and dedicated to Clarinda before they came away and brought their sadness to North Sydney.

  My venerable aunt Nona, the ninth and youngest of the family, often used to speak about the lack of privacy at Sunray. This seems strange given how many nooks and crannies it had where you could hide. What she meant was that the only phone was on the landing of the main staircase and the house was built such that the landing was a stage. Everybody could listen to Nona’s phone calls as if they were a serial on the wireless. (Dad always called radio ‘the wireless’ until Mum bought him a transistor.) Nona was a diva on the phone. I can recall an occasion on which she returned to the table only twenty minutes after answering a call; everyone was amazed she could be so brief. She explained that it was a wrong number.

  Nona was married from Sunray in 1952 at the age of eighteen: she was in love with a wonderful man called Peter, who had returned from the occupying forces in Japan. But I do wonder if the prospect of a private phone helped to seal the deal. Nona’s wedding photos were taken in the bay window of the drawing room. It was not a lounge room. People didn’t lounge much at Sunray.

  By the time I got to know Sunray, it had been frozen in time for what felt like years. My grandmother, Rachel, had gone to live in a tiny room at the Ben Boyd Nursing Home while the house held its breath. She was a small woman who smelled of talc, or talcum powder as we called it when we were buying it as a present and getting it wrapped in lavender tissue paper. It was only talc when you used it yourself. Rachel sat wrapped in shawls in a chair. Years later I saw a picture of her among the first female graduates of the University of Sydney and could not believe it was the same woman. Nor did she look like the woman who stood up to the gossips in church when they objected to a known prostitute in the pews. ‘Well, it’s one hour in the week she’s doing no harm,’ she said. (It was probably more than an hour by the time they got through all the appeals for money.) Nor did my grandmother look at all like any person who could have been born as Rachel Rittenburg Miller, a Catholic from a Jewish background. She was the only grandparent I knew and I always thought of the chair in the window at Ben Boyd as her home, not Sunray. Sunray was Dad’s place.

  Every Saturday, Katie Sweeney, an Irishwoman, came over to Sunray from her cottage in Elizabeth Street, Zetland. Katie had a tight bun and always said ‘for heaven’s sake’, no matter if the news was good or bad. She brought with her a shopping jeep into which she put her arm like she was drawing the winning number in a lottery. Instead, she would produce a bloody grenade of butcher’s paper which would unravel to produce the week’s kidney, the price of which was often announced as proof of the proposition that things were not the same as they used to be. Sunray itself was proof of the proposition but I never saw Katie get beyond the kitchen except perhaps to the back porch where a coal scuttle sat indignant that the family had decided to cook with gas. Katie didn’t cook lunch. She did lunch: a steak and kidney pudding with the pastry crisp on top but soft as quilted dumplings on the inside. She used an upturned egg cup to support the great gothic structure of this pastry, with buttresses twisted out of any left-over bits to make a fan shape over the roof. Katie once told me that Dad had always used this particular egg cup when he was
a boy the same age as I was, the same age as Benny now is. She knew my dad better than I did and longer and had sent him off to school and then to Hawkesbury Agricultural College and then to a farm down at Harden and then to marriage all with a belly full of steak and kidney produced from a small room in a big house.

  After the pudding came cake. Always a sponge cake, so light that you’d wonder where in Katie’s dour world she had found the idea for it. There was cream, whipped with a hand beater which she hung into the bowl like an outboard motor and powered with her elbows, wiping her hands on her apron when her mission was accomplished. The washing up was taken to the scullery where an ancient hot water system had prostate problems and made sure nothing happened fast.

  After lunch, we children were set free for a while. My brother always wanted to play cricket on the tennis court where there was a pavilion with lantana growing through the failing floorboards and over the wrought iron seats. A net had been left out to rot over the years; the place felt as though it had been abandoned before the final set. There was also a roller at one end where long grass had taken it captive. My brother never went anywhere without a tennis ball; if you need to play cricket on a tennis court at least it’s the right sort of equipment. But I was more an indoors sort of person and Joe was left to devise games he could play on his own as I went upstairs. I can’t recall what I actually did there. Snooping mostly. Sometimes my younger sister was with me. The house was full of fascinating bits and pieces, especially the playroom at the back where there were toys left over from the childhood of my aunts. Among them were model prams and porcelain dolls whose eyes moved when you laid them down. Collectors would drool over them now; once upon a time kids did the drooling. There was also a rocking horse. I can recall on one occasion peering out the back window, which overlooked the tennis court, to see my brother had freed the roller and was preparing a wicket for the test match I wouldn’t play with him. Dad’s bedroom was not far from the playroom; his blankets and pillow were still on the bed, his clothes brush, carved in the shape of a funny man, was still on the dresser, an album of cigarette cards from 1934 was on the bedside table.