A Sand Archive

by Gregory Day

  Five minutes later – I can’t remember which of us suggested it – we were sitting down together at the end of the large old wool-classing table in the cafe on James Street for lunch.

  Despite the vast difference in our age, as we ordered our sandwiches I remember being acutely conscious of the similarity between us. I could spend weeks, months, a whole decade with people my own age and have nothing to say whatsoever, but here, with this man a good forty years older than myself, I knew I could talk, and listen, for hours.

  But hours it was not to be; instead, just one hour, due to the parameters of my lunch break. As we’d already begun talking on the street about gentrification and change, and because it was implicit in our writings – and, specifically, those of each other’s writings that each of us had read – that we both had thought quite a lot about these things, no preamble or scene-setting seemed necessary. There was no need to establish common ground. We talked on the subject as if we had been having such a conversation for years.

  I had a sense that day of FB as not only stimulating and friendly but as a man wherein a wide universe of reading had been digested and then applied to the intimate details and textures of a local region. To a certain extent I suppose I was still confusing the book with its author, the publication with the man, which could explain why it took me by surprise when he began to recount, as a particularly interesting example of gentrification, a story not about Geelong or the Great Ocean Road, not even about Melbourne or even Australia, but about a little-known island in the Seine, the Île Seguin.

  As our sandwiches were delivered FB began to tell me how the English artist JMW Turner had made a sketch of this D-shaped Parisian island in the early 1800s, when it was connected to both the Sèvres and Boulogne-Billancourt banks of the Seine by charming wooden bridges. FB explained how back then Sèvres and Boulogne-Billancourt were villages in their own right, though they were now suburbs of Paris. At the time Turner sketched it the island was owned by an industrialist and was used as a large-scale tanning factory. The industrialist’s name was Seguin, hence the island’s name. After the First World War the island was bought from Seguin by a man named Louis Renault, who had prospered during the war and already ran automobile factories on both the Sèvres and Boulogne-Billancourt banks. Through the tumultuous decades of the twentieth century, Renault’s factory on the Île Seguin grew to become the largest in Europe. Its buildings covered nearly every square metre of the island and by the 1960s some ten thousand workers would cross the now-concrete bridges from either bank in first light to clock on for their day’s work.

  Eventually, however – and this was the pertinent point about gentrification that had triggered FB’s recounting – Renault built other, more modern factories on sites in the French and Spanish countryside and the pre-automation equipment of the Île Seguin factory became obsolete. The factory eventually ceased operations and a huge and expensive clean-up of the asbestos buildings and the contaminated soil got underway. The architect Jean Nouvel, after fighting unsuccessfully to have the factory buildings preserved as a cultural heritage site, finally proposed to turn the island into an eco-arts hub. The D-shape site of Seguin’s tannery and Louis Renault’s toxic but iconic factory was now to become, FB told me, an island of concert halls, studios, galleries and exhibition spaces. There would also be a grand indoor garden, enclosed in glass, and the entire complex was tipped to become a home for media and entertainment companies.

  Perhaps, as I had when reading his book on the Great Ocean Road, I sensed something in FB’s Parisian anecdote that drew me in further. I know this myself as a writer: if you give up all the information too quickly, the reader becomes bored and has no reason to keep turning the pages. Likewise, there was something in the way FB told the story of Île Seguin that had me leaning in closer and closer, leaving my sandwich untouched. Was it the look in his eyes when he ever so briefly mentioned the factory’s significance in the momentous demonstrations of 1968? Was it his faraway look as he recounted one historical stage of the story being buried by the next? Or was it nothing so concrete or visible but, rather, something that had been absorbed into his being and therefore into his telling, a charged undercurrent of his experience?

  In truth, I didn’t have the equipment – intuitive, intellectual or otherwise – to understand the mysterious energy that was acting upon me. All I knew was that after we’d paid the bill and said our farewells I went back to the shop in a very different mood.

  †

  There is certainly a way in which I can see Mr Lane’s building of his ‘long beach road’ as the start of a gentrification process which continues today along our home coast. Except Mr Lane, of course, unlike the twenty-first-century construction companies undertaking the renovation of Île Seguin, didn’t have to clean up decades of asbestos to get his road underway. CJ Lane was – to use that rather loaded English term – a gentleman, and there was nothing at all gentrified about the kangaroo that disappeared down the hole and saved the life of the milk-truck driver back in 1951. Lane’s road could not, as yet, be completely divorced from the decidedly ungentrified environment around it. And this is the challenge still for so many contemporary Bouvards and Pécuchets hell-bent on experiencing the health- and life-affirming properties of the sea. The French environmental historian Alain Corbin describes the discovery of the sea’s allure amongst the industrial middle classes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as reflecting a view of the sea as both ‘the enchantment of the watery mirror and the source of profound certainty’. But, as the kangaroo found out in 1951, there was no ‘profound certainty’ about a road being built beside a powerful ocean, or if there was it could only be achieved through a temporal illusion akin to that created by the sea itself, or Corbin’s ‘watery mirror’. In truth, a littoral environment is a realm of such fluency that the solidities and illusions of ocean and shore can never be successfully divided. Right here on the seam, in the briny domain where kangaroos are known to wet their club-like tails in the surf, every animal would already have understood that. Until, that is, Mr Lane decided to build his road.

  †

  The one other significant conversation I had with FB happened closer to home – here, in the yard of my mother’s house in Split Point. Unbeknown to me he had a great friend called Anna Neilson, whose house sits only a small distance from my mother’s, behind two impressive ficifolia trees on the bank of the river. I knew Anna from the thereabouts – a tall stately woman slowly walking her dog in the dusk. I had often noticed too a stylish vintage car parked on the verge beside her house and garden, but had never put two and two together. Having had lunch with FB in the cafe in Geelong, however, I was now more alert to the convergences, and not long after that lunch I bumped into the two of them walking along the riverbank with Anna’s dog.

  Behind them as we met I could see the Renault Ondine parked on the grassy verge. The penny dropped. That of course was FB’s car, the two of them were companions. Not even a minute had passed in our friendly conversation before, having summed all this up, I began to relish the prospect of having more to do with them both in the future.

  Only a couple of days later, while working away in the sunroom of my mother’s house, I heard voices in the yard outside. I looked up to see FB and Anna Nielson coming along the driveway.

  We had an amiable chat, though interspersed with tentative pauses and somewhat nervous silences. FB had mentioned to me over lunch at the cafe that he was finally putting together a record of the technical and historical articles he had written for local publications over the years. Leaving aside his one book, The Great Ocean Road: Dune Stabilisation and Other Engineering Difficulties, the list ran to quite a number of pages and the task of compiling it would have taken quite a bit of time. When he mentioned the daunting task to me in the cafe I had encouraged him to continue, and now he and Anna were dropping by to give me a copy of the end result.

  From what I now know in retrospe
ct, and from what I have gleaned from fishing through the archive of all his professional papers, personal journals and diaries which were deposited at the university after his death, and from what I have also gathered from talking to other people who knew him, and from piecing together my own reflections from the memories of our few brief meetings before his death, I realise now that such a personal visit from FB Herschell was rare. The idea, also, that he would come around to ‘show off’, as it were, his own accomplishments, was almost completely out of character. Perhaps if I’d lived in Geelong like him he would have rung first. Perhaps it was only because we were here in the more relaxed atmosphere of the small coastal town that it felt easier for him to just drop by unannounced. Whatever the case, I now realise that, given FB’s shyness, the feeling I had of being honoured by this unexpected turn of events was well founded. In truth, I didn’t know the half of it.

  The visit didn’t last long. I didn’t even have a chance to offer them both a cup of tea. Standing there on the small terrace leading off the sunroom, FB produced a document from the folds of his jacket. I took only a cursory glance at its pages before expressing my admiration at the list of works. Anna made some jokes about having to use a crowbar to get FB to come by and drop it off. After all, she said, what was the point of going to all the trouble of compiling the bibliography if you weren’t going to make people aware of its existence? Well yes, that’s right, I agreed emphatically.

  FB stood by, smiling sheepishly. Despite his years his face still contained the impish energy of a boy. I could sense his discomfort at his achievements becoming momentarily the centre of attention, but I was also in no doubt as to the powerful sense he had of himself. He gave off the feeling, which I also have, that although we may go to endless amounts of trouble with our passions and work, and although we become proud of our accomplishments and consider them useful, in the end none of it really matters. Everything – the mind, the heart, the roads, buildings and bridges, the music, the libraries and the bookshops, not to mention the books themselves – will all be washed away in the end. Our rock will simply roll back to the bottom of the hill.

  Nonetheless we speak, write, build, pave, compose. We go on, as Samuel Beckett would say. We go on. This was a phlegmatic truth that the man who came around to my mother’s house that day well understood. It was in fact a downright existential truth that helped make his quiet life worth living.

  FB and Anna Neilson’s visit was so brief that the sunroom door was opened but never closed, the tea never made. But after I had walked them out to the gate I went back into the sunroom and stood with his document in my hands. The FB Herschell bibliography came in the form of a thin stapled booklet, printed on high-quality paper and, in keeping with FB’s ‘light under a bushel’ approach to his own achievements, it was not called a bibliography but a ‘checklist’. A humble checklist.

  The booklet, however, ran to twenty-five full pages. It included all FB’s articles published in local publications between 1959 and 2010. I noticed on the first facing page that it had been ‘typed by Anna Nielson’.

  †

  During this period I was only ever working at the bookshop in Geelong two days a week. The rest of the time I was at home writing. Three months after FB and Anna’s visit, while walking from where I parked my car at Kardinia Park football ground to the bookshop in James Street, I bumped into Anna Neilson again, this time at the intersection of Myers and Gheringhap streets. I was standing in the median strip waiting to cross over and continue down the slope past the mossy slates of St Giles and on to the shop, when the lights changed and she pulled up in her car.

  We were surprised to see each other outside the gentle context of Split Point, me standing there in the middle of the raw grid of Geelong streets, she firmly on a mission behind the wheel of the car. We managed to have a brief conversation before the lights changed again.

  It was a rainy day; I didn’t have my umbrella up but Anna’s windscreen wipers were on and she wound down her window to speak.

  She was on her way to the hospital to see FB she said, with a regretful but nevertheless warm smile. Is he sick? I asked, surprised. She winced. Yes, she said, nodding. He’s dying.

  The lights would change again quickly and she would have to continue on her way. We both knew it was not the place for further discussion. But anyway, I didn’t know what to say, it came as such a shock.

  Of course I had no reason to expect to have been notified about his condition, but nevertheless Anna reacted as if apologetic. Did she think FB himself would have told me? Did she think I’d heard it on some local grapevine? Didn’t the whole world know, after all, that FB Herschell, the man who drove the vintage French car around Geelong and the surrounding coast; the man who would quote Hélène Cixous in the original to the seagulls on the shore at the end of Moorabool Street – avec une suele larme on peut pleurer le monde – the man who as a grief-stricken boy contemplated diving into the swagman’s billy while playing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ on the violin for his cousins, didn’t the whole world know he was dying?

  It seemed not. Through the car window I could see Anna looked momentarily confused. And then the lights did change, she winced again, we waved, and her eyes turned to the road ahead. The hospital was only two blocks further along. She was nearly there. Nothing, after all, is that far from anything else in a city the size of Geelong.

  †

  It is hard in the internet era for people to comprehend the lag that used to exist between the emergence of new cultural trends in Europe or America and their arrival here in Australia. For instance, people speak of the counterculture of the 1960s as a global phenomenon that transformed the world from the prim materialism of the postwar era to the open-house experimentation associated with Andy Warhol, Wilhelm Reich and the Beatles. But in Australia the ’60s actually happened in the 1970s, and in some ways it was only our direct involvement in the Vietnam War that saved us from missing the cultural revolution altogether.

  One can easily imagine then, as FB camped on the long beach road between Anglesea and the Split Point cliffs in 1966, that the days of CJ Lane and the building of his private road some forty years before in the 1920s would have seemed far more local and familiar than Warhol’s pop art or the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

  The conversation of an anachronistic era, the delay in the cultural current, was everywhere set fast around the young CRB engineer. And no-one represented it better than Gibbon, his immediate supervisor.

  As FB’s fascination with the enigmas of sand – its changeability, its slow and granular accumulation, its propensity to shift and slump whilst all the while growing heavier, deeper and higher – began to evolve, rather than support him in his new train of research, Gibbon attempted to block FB at every turn. At best his encouragement was grudging.

  When FB reported to Gibbon’s office after his ruminations on the problems of the long beach road and at Eastern View, he found Gibbon with his face to the light of the window over McKillop Street, smoking his pipe. If Gibbon had been able to peer into the leather satchel FB had placed on his desk, he would have found, alongside Salisbury’s Downs and Dunes, Baudelaire’s journals and FB’s notes on the problems of the road, a small slender hardback copy of Rimbaud’s Poems of the Damned, translated by Jacques Le Clercq and published by the Peter Pauper Press in New York, with illustrations by Stanley Wyatt. Since he’d returned from camping out on the long beach road FB had had this handy pocket edition tucked safely away in the interior pocket of his Harris tweed. He wore it close to his heart, even as he attempted to intuit the hydrological memory of the dunes and the pros and cons of introducing marram grass to stabilise the sand.

  On the slope of the hill angels twirl their

  woolen robes in grasslands of steel and of

  emerald. Meadows of flames leap up to the

  crown of the hillock. On the left the leaf-mold

 
of the ridge is trampled underfoot by all the

  murderers and battles that ever were, and here

  all disastrous tumults describe their appointed

  curves.

  Gibbon squeaked a blue cumulus of burning shag out the corner of his mouth and made sure to paste a cast of authority over his countenance as he turned his face back into the room.

  ‘So,’ he intoned. ‘What do you think now that you’ve boiled your billy on the problem stretch?’

  ‘I think the dunes will never be still,’ was young Francis Herschell’s reply.

  Gibbon cupped the pipe in his hand. Breathed out his nose. ‘That’s not news,’ he said.

  It wasn’t. What was news, however, was that Gibbon had three shaving cuts on his asbestos-grey jaw, each emitting a virulent anger into the room. The cuts were in an isosceles shape, FB noted, the Euler line of which was livid.

  ‘We’re actually looking at two very different situations,’ FB offered. ‘One quite clearly involves a problem with the mobilisation of sand but the other may well be a problem that the sand itself can fix. And given all the miles of coastline that fall within our remit, on the Bellarine, even the bay, I’d like to do some more general study on the subject.’

  Gibbon grimaced. ‘You are not here, Herschell, to tell me what you’d “like to do”; you’re here to tell me how we’re gonna fix the road. Any clues?’

  Gibbon’s ‘gonna’, his slight tip towards the vernacular, was evidence that he was already, within a minute of FB’s coming through his office door, in the vicinity of his personal boiling point. FB understood that these ‘gonnas’ and ‘wannas’ only surfaced at the extremes of his boss’s moods: either happy, as in ‘you wanna go to the pub?’ or, more often, angry, as in ‘we’re gonna fix the road’. On this occasion, FB was surprised he hadn’t thrown in a ‘bloody’ for good measure.