Linda and Evan met playing tennis. Both considered it time to get married; each saw the other as fitting the bill. (There was probably more to it than this; Linda’s account was, by the time I heard it, jaundiced.)
Within a year they had married, moved into a flat and had a baby girl. Linda brought nothing into the marital home but a suitcase of clothes. No small pieces of furniture; no kitchen things, sewing box or trousseau. Evan’s mother always made a show of being puzzled by Linda. She gave the newlyweds old saucepans and pillowcases from her own cupboards. Evan deliberated over the ideal television set and refrigerator. On the weekends, he made improvements to the flat and helped elderly neighbours carry things upstairs.
Linda was always proud of Evan’s mind: sharp and focused; the mind of a mathematician. In another country, another family, he might have been a professor of physics. But as this was Australia, and his family lacked an academic tradition, he had left school at fifteen to become an apprentice radar technician. By the time he met Linda, he was progressing well. Eventually, he supposed, he’d be earning an executive salary. One day, Linda imagined, they’d have a two-storey house with a swimming pool.
But this is not what happened. Flicking through the back pages of the Melbourne Age, Linda saw an advertisement for an Experimental Officer Class 3. This officer was required to work at a tracking station on the north coast of Western Australia. The position required experience in ‘telemetry, tracking systems &c’, but beyond that the description of duties was rather vague. When he read the advertisement himself, Evan understood they were looking for a man with general abilities, someone who could lend himself to whatever needed to be done, electronically speaking. He began to compose his application immediately.
As we drank our Emu Bitter and ate Jatz biscuits, I studied him the way I often studied people I considered to be (unlike myself) ‘normal’. Life for Evan Johnson was not a mystery but something to be enjoyed, simply and cleanly, like a game of cricket. I envied this. I wanted it. And yet I didn’t want it.
I took a bottle of homemade grappa to that dinner party at the Johnsons’. The bottle had been pressed into my hands by my new Italian friends, the Mastroiannis, who grew bananas and vegetables on the banks of the river. Until then, my existence in Port Badminton had been somewhat lonely and starved. I was sleeping at the Port Hotel and working by day from my base at the agricultural research station. I was gathering insects, studying them under the microscope. I typed my reports on an ancient Underwood.
In my breaks, I read Horne’s Lucky Country and, for a complete change of pace, dipped into Apollinaire’s Alcools. I was – have always been – happy in my own company. I would have been quite content to see out my research project in this manner if it were not for the food at the hotel. It was awful: a burnt steak and fried onions, or burnt sausages and fried onions, or burnt lamb chops and fried onions. On a good day, there might be ragged boiled cabbage and a dab of mashed potato on the plate. But worse than the food was the entire lack of it if you missed the narrow window in which it was served. Once the cook had left for the day, the kitchen was closed, and that was that. And there was nowhere else to buy dinner. If it was a weeknight and it was after 5 pm, you were on your own.
So I was grateful when Marco Mastroianni called me away from the base of a banana plant to invite me to a family feast. I accepted the invitation like the starving man that I was. I ate like a wolf, which pleased the womenfolk, and then we spent a vino-soaked evening discussing politics. We all radiated bombast. Everything we saw, everything that someone said, became an excuse for a story or a song. The newborn litter of puppies in the corner led me to mention Rabelais’ anticipation of the science of pheromones: he’d found that a smear of the excretion of a bitch on heat could, by itself, attract a horde of male dogs. The Mastroiannis loved this. They talked about hunting for birds, tiny Italian birds, cooking and eating them. There were no more birds in Italy because they’d all been eaten. Not one left? No! Not one bird! Translocated to Australia, they were experimenting with the galah and the little corella. I told them I loved birds.
‘As much as insects?’
‘More than insects.’
I was only allowed to leave by promising to come back soon. As I left, we shook our fists. Down with Imperialismo! Up with Socialismo!
The hotel cook discovered my infidelity. He seemed to want me back.
‘I could extend the dinner hour,’ he said, catching me one day before I went out. ‘If you’re going to be working late.’
But I no longer needed him. For the first time in my life, I was being lionised. The Italians had loosened me up, given me social confidence. One dinner invitation led to another and another; as a single man living in temporary accommodation I was never expected to reciprocate. It was a very good lurk. I was free to reinvent myself. I could shed the bookish caterpillar and become the dashing butterfly. Thank you, la famiglia Mastroianni.
I had stored the bottle of grappa in the bottom drawer of the rickety wardrobe in my hotel room. I took it, now, to the Johnsons to offer as a digestif. But as the story of its provenance – homemade in a makeshift still by Italians on the riverbank – sparked immediate interest, we drank it first as an aperitif, and then through dinner as a table wine, and afterwards with dessert. It was pure rocket fuel.
Drunkenness was instant and thorough. The conversation slid to Linda’s feathered carrots. A tracker wife held one up and said, ‘For heaven’s sake, Linda! How long did it take to do this?’ We looked again at the platter in the centre of the table and saw it with new eyes: the carefully arranged tendrils of celery curling back on themselves; the radishes opening out like little accordions; the wafer-thin, leaf-shaped pieces of carrot notched down the sides to suggest feathers. Their effect stood somewhere between the poignant and the ridiculous. An attack of giggles overtook the table.
Then the conversation swung from hilarity to intimacy. We began to tell our earliest memories, our greatest fears, our deepest secrets. Or ostensibly so. I noticed that people – me included – dredged up fears and secrets that were entertaining but not too close to home. Then it was Linda’s turn.
‘My father is a communist,’ she said. ‘My mother lost her entire family in the war and she’s quite mad.’
This was serious stuff, a tonal shift. There was a moment of silence. I looked at Linda tenderly. I saw that she was a kindred spirit: an outsider overcompensating, in this case by feathering her carrots. And now, because of my grappa, she was about to spoil the image of conformity she had worked so hard to achieve.
I egged her on.
‘Was your family ostracised?’
She paused, sizing up the spirit of the hive. She knew with Donald Horne, that in the narrow shaft of clear bright sunlight of the Australian mind, there was little room for the idea that we might all be bumping around in the shadows. She was willing to step out of the sunlight.
‘Yes,’ said Linda evenly. ‘I was called names at school. Commo. Reffo.’
Then, trying to tell us about a girl with psoriasis sitting alone on the school bench, she burst into tears. She was crying because she had left that poor girl behind when she got her own invitation to play a stupid skipping game. She had not looked back.
And then the others, emboldened to step out of their own narrow shafts of clear bright sunlight, offered shadowy stumblings of their own.
‘School can be such a nasty, nasty place,’ said a tracker wife with feeling. ‘Children can be very cruel. I was called fat.’
Our eyes could not help but lower themselves to her plump midriff.
The confessions continued. Evan Johnson told us he had cried in front of the whole class after being whipped with a cane.
‘Were you ostracised?’ shouted the plump tracker wife.
‘Yes!’ we all cried in unison.
No-one wanted the night to end. Someone suggested a drive out to the One
Mile Jetty. Evan and Linda looked at each other and murmured the name of their sleeping daughter.
‘You go,’ said Evan. ‘I need to get up early in the morning.’
We piled into two cars. Linda drove my black Zephyr. She had admired it, so I passed her the keys. I sat beside her; a tracker couple sat in the back, nursing my guitar.
‘I like the way you toss back your hair,’ the plump wife told Linda. ‘I think you have panache.’
‘Lots of panache in that hair,’ I said, picking up a hank of it and letting it drop.
We walked out on the One Mile Jetty, listening to the waves slapping at the pylons. I slung the strap of my guitar around my neck and provided the occasional strummed accompaniment to our raucous discussions. We went all the way out to the end, where there was an old storage shed, all locked up now. We sat down with our backs against it, looking at the moon and its refracted reflections in the water. We were trackers and scientists. The moon belonged to us.
A fish leaped out of the water, its silver flank catching the moonlight. We sang the following moon-related songs:
Moon River
That’s Amore
and
By the Light of the Silvery Moon.
The next morning, of course, I felt like hell. I wondered who he was, this new Harry Baumgarten. What on earth was he up to? Did I like him? The thin notes of the chiming wedgebill penetrated my skull: Did ya get drunk? Did ya get drunk?
‘Yes, indeed I did,’ I replied.
At the Johnsons’ dinner party I’d expressed an interest in going out to visit one of the twin islands that lay just off the coast. Linda offered to help: one of the Johnsons’ neighbours worked on a prawning trawler that would soon be departing.
And so it was that I was able to roam over a small uninhabited island, enjoying the solitude, seeking out birds, taking notes in a small leather-bound notebook with a short stub of a pencil sharpened occasionally with a penknife. I set up a microphone in a bit of wind-swept scrub, learning how to use my new recording equipment. Wind was a problem, so I spent time experimenting with windbreaks and fashioning windsocks.
I gathered driftwood and gnarled grey twigs to make a fire on the beach. I ate sardine sandwiches on stale bread. I swung my billy through the air three times, arm completely outstretched. As I did so, I imagined looking down on myself, a tiny figure:
A man
alone on a small island in the Indian Ocean
swings his right arm around like a windmill
observed by seagulls.
I was thinking of Apollinaire:
Tranquil bird
lower your second eyelid
I wanted to consult my copy of Alcools but I hadn’t been able to find it for days. Where was it?
At dusk, I was bitten by sandflies; maddened by them. After dinner, I sat on a dune and looked out over the sea at welling lines of luminous phosphorescence.
Dish: Over.
Galah: Is that it? Anything more?
Dish: Ants.
Galah: Hold the ants. Roger.
‘Yes, big cyclone, Lucky!’ says Lizzie. ‘Let’s get you home, snug as a bug in a rug.’
Emergency vehicles are cruising the streets with loudhailers. We’re being told to GO INSIDE. Lizzie does not pick up speed. We head for home in our usual languorous manner, hair and feathers ruffled by the wind.
***
‘That entomologist is also interested in birds,’ says Linda to Marjorie the morning after the dinner party. ‘He’d love to go out and look at the seabirds on the islands. Do you think he could go out on Kevin’s boat?’
Linda wants to impress Harry, and Marj wants to impress Linda. Kevin is ambushed by these desires as soon as he gets home that evening.
Marjorie says: ‘That insect man is also interested in birds. He wants to go out to the islands on your boat. Do you think you could line it up?’
Kevin doesn’t like lining things up.
‘What does he want to go out to the islands for?’
‘To look at the birds.’
‘What does he want to look at birds for?’
‘To study them.’
‘I thought he was an insect man.’
‘He is, but he also studies birds.’
‘What does he want to study birds for?’
‘I don’t know – he records them, he’s got a tape recorder.’
‘One of them reel-to-reel what’s-its-names, is it?’
‘How would I know? You’ll see it if he goes out on the boat.’
Thus enticed, Kevin lines it up with his boss and the big day duly arrives.
Harry arrives at the Kellys with an army surplus backpack slung over one shoulder. He waits for Kevin near my cage, having a cigarette, tapping ashes discreetly into an old cooking pot planted out with nasturtiums. I have an opportunity to study Harry Baumgarten from head to toe. Unexpectedly, he does the same in return.
Harry Baumgarten looks deeply into my pink eyes, then casts his own brown eyes over my rosy breast. I flush and turn my face to one side and raise my pale white-pink crest so that he can see it to best advantage. I fan out a long wing, showing the deep colour of the underside. He keeps looking at me steadily, so that I feel undressed by him, de-feathered. He can see all the way down to the contours of my naked skin, to the touching thinness of my neck. He sees my airy, lightweight bones, made for flying. He does not attempt to make me dance or sing. Afterwards, he stands slowly, throwing me a last appreciative glance.
Kevin Kelly appears, winding a long piece of rope, looping from elbow to hand, elbow to hand. I am feeling strangely peaceful, whole. I have been seen.
Harry is soon on the deck of the trawler, enjoying the open sea.
Kevin and the other deckhands are working around the boat; Harry is observing, taking a keen interest, asking a lot of questions. No-one minds. In fact, the crew is more than happy to have him. Kevin is proud of his connection to Harry, the pest man and birdwatcher, or entomologist and ornithologist, if you want to use the correct lingo, which Kevin does, after practising a couple of times in his head. The men show Harry over the boat, watching him take it all in. Eventually, they assemble down in the hold, around Harry’s khaki army surplus backpack. Harry carefully unwraps his new microphone and Tesla tape recorder. He names the birds he is aiming for.
The crew nods as if they, too, were interested in birds.
Kevin asks Harry how much he paid for the recording equipment, and whistles softly when Harry tells him.
Everyone gazes at the things on the table, enjoying the expensive sight of them. One of the crew would like to set it all going, sing a couple of songs, have them played back. He imagines everyone gathered around the microphone singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ in four-part harmony, but he doesn’t have the confidence to suggest it. He watches regretfully as Harry carefully puts everything away.
Then Harry, feeling on top of the world, gets the things out again, and says, ‘Let’s record ourselves for posterity! This marvellous moment, upon this marvellous boat, on this marvellous day! Which one of you gentlemen would like to go first?’
Buoyed by this enthusiasm, the crew member steps forward to the mic. He sings, low and beautiful, Swing low, sweet chariot, just as he imagined he would.
He sings the whole song, all the verses, with the entomologist singing harmonies.
The others watch and listen, rapt. As soon the last note sounds, Kevin prances over to the mic with a song he sometimes sings in the shower. It’s about an Indian brave and his sweetheart facing each other over a raging river. Kevin knows a fair bit of it by heart. All the men, stone cold sober as they are, join in the chorus:
Running Bear loved Little White Dove
With a love as big as the sky
Running Bear loved Little White Dove
With a
love that couldn’t die!
Actually, the singing never occurred. It flashed through the minds of the crew members as they looked at Harry’s recording equipment. They watched him pack it away again, and said nothing.
They approach the first island at Hospital Point, skimming over darting fish.
‘I’ve heard that these islands were prison hospitals for Aborigines,’ says Harry Baumgarten. ‘One island for men, one for women.’
‘It was some sort of leper colony,’ Kevin confirms. He would like to offer more information but he knows no more about it than that. Then he remembers something he’d heard as a boy. ‘Some tried to escape but they were eaten by sharks.’
Harry hops out of the dinghy in thigh-deep water, holding his pack and sandals over his head, and makes his way onto dry land. He stands on the shore, his wet shorts clinging to his thighs, watching as the fishing boat motors away. The crew watches Harry as he recedes into the distance. Another boat, coming through in the opposite direction, will pick him up in two days’ time. Once Harry is off the boat, they miss him, although none would mention this.
Linda leaves Jo at Marjorie’s house and drives away, luxuriating in a personal autonomy she has not known for years. She is twenty-four years old and free; as free as a married woman can be in a small town with watchful eyes. She has a purse with a bit of money in it – not much, it is true – and a car with petrol in it. For an hour or two, she can go anywhere she likes.
She decides to go for a solo drive to Pelican Point. She drives over the causeway and down the dirt track, knowing this will be noticed, knowing someone will say, ‘Oh, I saw you yesterday, you were going out along the causeway,’ and there will be a pause while that person waits for an explanation, not because they are suspicious, necessarily, but because they are just chatting and this is something to chat about. Linda stops the car on the hard ground behind the dune that serves as a car park for beachgoers and sits there for a minute, replaying scenes from the dinner party. She gets out and takes herself for a midweek walk along the beach. There is nobody else about, except for a large pelican.
The Lucky Galah Page 9