by Gregory Day
‘I’d like to investigate the potential of marram grass.’
‘I see. To what end?’
‘To stabilise the dunes.’
‘Grass, you say.’
‘Yes, grass. But not just any grass. Ammophila arenaria. Marram grass.’
Gibbon leant back in his chair. He actually chuckled sarcastically. ‘Yes, well, I’m better on tarmac, macadam, bitumen, you know. Grass is a little out of my ken, shall we say.’
FB was instantly bored by this reaction. Intriguingly, he noted in his diary that he felt ‘a very familiar native creature roll up inside me’. He nearly shut his eyes and began to curl up along with it, but instead fixed his gaze on Gibbon’s livid shaving mishaps. He hoped that that might annoy him further. Get him excitable as a way of saving FB from sleep.
‘So,’ Gibbon puffed into the silence.
FB kept his eyes on the isosceles of cuts. ‘I think if we want durable solutions out there,’ he began, ‘short of building another Bailey bridge, we could do worse than to investigate marram grass.’
He’d only mentioned the Bailey bridge in jest but as soon as he had he regretted it. The Bailey bridge had been developed during the war as a portable lightweight means of crossing otherwise impassable ravines, and Gibbon’s whole world had been shaped by the war.
‘Mmm,’ Gibbon said, placing the pipe back between his lips. ‘We could have done with a couple more of those Baileys up in Moresby. For the time being at least it’s gotta be more effective than grass.’
There, FB thought. From angry to happy in twenty seconds. The ‘gotta’ was proof.
He hated the way Gibbon’s ignorance kept governing these situations. It was as if somehow, by using the comparison, FB was proposing they build a bridge out of grass.
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t think so.’
‘You wouldn’t think so. Is that right?’
‘It is. Grass in this instance could hold the dunes into a more permanent shape, a little like a skeleton. It could alleviate the drift problem at Eastern View and, by building up the dunes, protect the low cliffs on the long beach road from being so exposed to wearaway and weather.’
‘Sounds unlikely. A proven piece of engineering on the other hand . . .’
‘Yes, it’s obvious.’
‘I’m sorry, Herschell?’
‘It’s obvious. By that I mean it’s visible, the bridge, it’s there for all to see. Problem solved. Complainants placated. Whereas the grass would act more in harmony with the conditions – like a skeleton, as I say.’
FB stared again at the three shaving cuts.
‘A grass skeleton, you say?’
‘Well, yes. But that’s only one analogy. Another is to think of it as a reinforcement. As in a concrete slab. A firm foundation to match the surrounding stone.’
Gibbon’s face took on a querulous cast. FB wondered if he was confused. Shifting his gaze to look into his superior’s eyes, he saw stains in the whites, tobacco, cloudy. The dullness of those eyes confirmed the absurdity of the prospect. A huge great eyesore bolted onto Mr Lane’s beautiful long beach road. FB groaned internally. It was not necessarily a case of a single problematic culvert; it could well be a case of ongoing and unpredictable camber. It felt like a big mistake to have introduced the bridge into the equation at all.
‘Well then,’ Gibbon concluded, puffing hands-free again on the pipe and tidying up his papers. ‘Plenty to consider then. Perhaps I’ll get Warren to look into the costings of a Bailey bridge, as well as some barrier work at Eastern View.’
According to FB’s diary Keith Warren was a local optician. He was also the Barrabool Shire treasurer. He had fought with Gibbon in Northern Africa during the war. So FB demurred, rather bitterly. There was no getting round the old veterans club. He left the office, without even leaving his notes for Gibbon to peruse.
3
Velocities
The answer to why FB had decided to camp out on the long beach road was the same as why he began to spend both days of all his other weekends going back and forth to the big Melbourne libraries on the train.
The entry for ‘Mary’ in the sixteenth edition of A Catholic Dictionary – published by Routledge and Kegan Paul from Broadway House in London in 1960, and revised throughout by members of the staff of St John’s Seminary, Wonersh – runs to many pages. It follows on from the entry for ‘Martyrology’ and is followed by the entry for ‘Mass’. This book has a blood-red dust jacket, behind which are bluey-green boards. The lettering on the dust jacket is white. On the endpaper at the front of the book FB has written something in blue ink and then rubbed it out emphatically in the same. That is most unusual to see in any of his books – it is the single instance of such a defacing – yet some of the letters he has scribbled over are still distinguishable.
What he has written runs to four short lines. I can make out the word ‘Above’, which is the last word of the first line, but nothing else until the last line where I think it says ‘S.W-S.S.W.’ as in ‘South-West – South-South-West.’
So, ‘Above’, and then ‘S.W. – S.S.W.’ Why on earth he would have made the rare gesture of furiously penning over this script is mysterious, as it does not seem to constitute either a confession or a blasphemy. One possibility is that his mother did it for him. The rubbing out. But why would she? Would scrawling meteorological marginalia into a Catholic dictionary be sufficiently blasphemous that she would further deface the pages with such messy rubbing-out? It wasn’t even a Bible, after all. All I can think of is this. Perhaps, having endured the early death of her husband and then the precocious development of her quite brilliant son, she wanted him to change his shape no more. To hold him back. To stabilise him, preferably through piety. It seems, though, that he had an irresistible longing to swim out through the waves. To look back at himself from within the meteorological coordinates of unconditional love.
†
And so he nut-nut-nutted it out. First of all, the ambitiousness, even the folly, of building a road in a dune environment, and then the potential aesthetic and functional beauty of it. If it could be made sound.
Truth was, in a semi-diagrammatic representation to scale of the root system of marram grass he saw a future. The way its venous roots delved, the grass itself only a small part of the plant, secured by hidden things, fastening fingers, splaying and plummeting through the vertical dune. There was not enough information in the libraries, though, and what there was was not necessarily applicable to an Australian situation. He did read that in the early days of the colony Ammophila arenaria had been trialled at Port Fairy. But what would be the point of planting the wrong type, and finding it to be as superfluous as Gibbon’s Bailey bridge? And what of hydraulics, transpiration, pore space, dune travel and form? Dunes were like all scientific problems: they moved. Just when you thought you had the parameters defined, they shifted. Like time. Water. He also read how on the Atlantic seaboard of France a movement of ‘about 30ft a year has been observed with local advances of up to 80ft’. This sentence struck him like a tide. A massive movement. He felt something likewise shift inside him.
†
The night before he travelled to see the chief engineer at Port Fairy he sat over tea with his mother, pretending to listen. She reached across the table, put her hand on his, when she realised he wasn’t. He sprung back into the field of her tenderness, as pliable as a pomaderris strand to the shape of her needs.
She fought with what he knew, the way he dressed himself up before he left the house in the morning: the houndstooth suit, the Surrey tie, the brogues and hat. No-one else they knew dressed like that. No son of anyone she knew went so far in his presentation as that. FB would go on the train to Melbourne – studying, he said – and come back with a loud bag from Buckley’s department store or whatnot. She’d let him in on her distress, she’d bother him, or after the
fact tell him how difficult he made things for her. Like that one day when, as she was coming through the streets of Geelong, down the Moorabool Street hill towards the bay, and happened to see him crossing the street, most likely on his lunch hour, it had occurred to her that he looked notorious. Like someone from another family. Or someone whose dress betrayed no family at all! The image had stuck. The son she dreamt of most nights, the son she shared the house with, the son who liked mash and sesame snaps, strolled through the sea-and-wool town like a stranger. Normally she might have quickened her step to catch him up. But that time on Moorabool she stopped, turned aslant, back into the crowning southerly. Hoping he wouldn’t see her. She wouldn’t have known what to say.
‘Promise me you’ll not miss mass down there,’ she is saying now, in the smell of lamb fat and peas, tightening her grip on his hand where it rests beside the butter dish.
He smiles at her. ‘Of course not, Mum. I’ll bring you a written report.’
His facetiousness is comforting to her. But she pulls a stern face. ‘You would not be at work in the church, Francis. One cannot “report” and “pray” at the same time.’
‘No,’ he says, frowning. ‘You’re quite right. So I’ll report back on what I see in the hotel in the evening. As a way of keeping myself out of the mischief.’
She rolled droll eyes, took her hand off his, content now that she had regained his attention.
He continued to smile, naturally happy to have pleased her.
But there would be no such report from the Stump Hotel in Port Fairy. In his diary entries for the visit of July 1966, which was conducted chiefly to inspect the reported success of pioneering marram grass plantings on the dunes between the town and the volcanic crater of Tower Hill, he notes how empty the hotel is every night, how boring the barman, how ‘rugged’ the food. He reads James Clarence Mangan, Behan’s Confession of an Irish Rebel, and a crisp book by a young poet from the north, Seamus Heaney. All Irish fare, in keeping with the pub’s atmosphere. It is the title of the young poet’s book that has most attracted him. Death of a Naturalist. In his research he has discovered that Port Fairy used to be called Belfast, a long time ago, before the marram grass was planted to save the town from sand and before the squelchy native pastures were drained dry by nostalgia.
†
FB imagined those ‘local advances of up to 80ft’ in France were not trifling things and an unexpected conversation on the golf links at Port Fairy confirmed the fact. Despite his tweeds he could not much play golf, knew not a mashie from a niblick, but enjoyed occasional success with a seven-iron. On the eighth green on the Tuesday of his visit, in the vicinity of the dune hummock which he and his two playing partners – Pat Considine, the chief engineer of Moyne Shire, and his golf-mad wife Noreen – had been discussing throughout the round, FB mentioned these shifting dunes of France in relation to the local movement (much less significant since the marram grass) of the dunes as outlined by Considine.
‘That fits,’ Noreen Considine remarked, as she employed the plumb-bob method to line up her putt. FB had already noted in his diary how taken he was by the chief engineer’s wife’s interest in her husband’s work. She had much to offer, it seems, as they made their way around the course in unusually pleasant winter weather, and now, with a better memory for details than her husband, she recalled as she stood over her putt how, in the course of Pat’s investigations into the dune problem for the farmers of the district, he had discovered that the mecca for the study and research of such things – i.e. sand dunes – was indeed in France. Paris, France.
Noreen holed her putt, the sound of the gutta-percha rattling around in the ceramic dish was music to her ears. She beamed, FB noted.
Then, on the short walk to the ninth tee, Pat Considine offered this sage advice: ‘Yairs, well, what Nor says does ring a bell. I remember this much: there’s bugger-all work been done on the subject in Australia. But that’s why you’re down here, isn’t it, Herschell? What we’ve done here in the Moyne is ground-breaking.’
‘If you’ll excuse his pun,’ said Noreen, before teeing off in her tight, yet well-fitting, clothes. Having holed the putt, it was her honour.
†
An aside. Noreen Considine most likely would have been considerably older than FB, who himself was in his mid-twenties at the time, but I do sense in his scribbled entries for 12 July 1966 the hint of an attraction. A little reminiscent of the proportions of visible to hidden sections of the marram grass physiognomy FB was in Port Fairy to study, I have the feeling that the anecdote of how Noreen Considine came to inform FB that France – indeed Paris, France – was the world leader in sand dune research was merely, if you like, the green strand above the rhizome. One thing at least is certain: Noreen Considine could have had no idea how significant that small piece of information she gave FB would turn out to be.
†
Visiting the dying is invariably an awful business, but sometimes not visiting the dying can be worse. One day, on a break from my writing, I was walking alone by the river near home when a friend of mine, who teaches art in Geelong, told me the news. It was approximately three weeks after my conversation with Anna Nielson at the intersection of Myers and Gheringhap. I didn’t know Francis Herschell well; I had no reason to be so upset. But I was.
Perhaps sensing my distress, my friend left me to walk on my own by the river. As soon as he was gone I felt the strangest sensation. I saw in my mind a white luminescence, in something like the shape of a lizard’s tail, tapering off and voiding the very air as I walked through it. It was as if a creature-shaped vacuum was continually opening up behind me as I moved.
To shake this sensation off I went and sat on an old sawn-off pine tree stump. The river, narrow, with reeds, was brown. The luminescent lizard tail disappeared as I sat down. And then a sentence from the French novelist Nathalie Sarraute came into my thoughts:
Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps.
I did not ask myself why those mysterious words of Sarraute’s had come to me like that. The spontaneous appearance of phrases I have read in books is something I am used to. Nevertheless, I must have read those words, what, maybe three years before? As I sat on the pine stump it was as if the silent brownness of the river had closed up the strangely luminous vacuum and replaced it with the liquid facticity and cadence of words.
Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps.
I started to retrace my steps. Why had I not gone to visit the old man in the hospital as I intended? I had been busy, sure, but not like a prime minister. I had been frightened, yes, but is that what had stopped me going to see him? I doubted it. Perhaps I felt deep down that it wasn’t appropriate, he being so private, he and Anna Neilson too, and that I would have been intruding? And yet Anna’s smile at the intersection of Myers and Gheringhap streets was so warm that it made me feel almost as if I could be part of their inner circle. The inner circle of his dying.
This feeling, I believe now, was because of what FB and I shared, even as we were only getting to know each other. Perhaps for my generation in Australia it has been easier to live the examined life, easier at least to find friends who would be excited by Proust’s theatrophone, or Marguerite Duras’s honesty, or the creative experiments of Georges Perec and Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo). But when FB was young, especially in Geelong, that wasn’t such an easy task. His penchant for aesthetic engineering, for roads, bridges, aqueducts and the solving of structural problems, was solid stuff that could be easily understood and explained, talked about at the pub, at the nineteenth hole, in the grandstand of the football ground. But Malraux, Camus, Baudelaire and de Beauvoir, Sartre, Piper, Betjeman, Claude Simon and James Joyce, Sylvia Beach and Barbara Hepworth, Francis Webb and JB Priestley, Grazia Deledda, Primo and Carlo Levi, Gwen Harwood and Paul Celan, Apollinaire and Gide and Flaubert and Radiguet and
Pagnol and Julien Gracq . . . all these names that I have seen on his shelves and amongst the notes, diaries and journals of his archive, the sound of their words, their phrases and rhythms and insights, had to be carried around alone, almost like one’s own most private thoughts. Perhaps, at a pinch, he could have explained his British influences: John Piper designed the stained glass for Coventry Cathedral, after all, bomb-ravaged Coventry Cathedral, which almost made him a digger; and Betjeman was the Queen’s poet, the laureate, so he was a Commonwealth edifice, a Menzies man of sorts; then there was the Irish bent: the Wilde and Yeats, the AE and Flann O’Brien – well we were all half Irish, weren’t we? But the French stuff, the experimentation, the art for art’s sake, that was harder to explain. If FB had’ve pricked the surface of Pat Considine’s opinions he would have discovered a quiet but nevertheless unmistakable disappointment that the repository for the study of sand dunes was in France. They were a weak, mincing, effeminate and cowardly lot, the French. The war had proven it. Gibbon of the CRB would have concurred. Capitulated to the Nazis, they did, handed over the keys to Notre-Dame without blinking. Deserters, collaborators, thieves, not to be trusted. Their only claim to fame was pastry, or, at a push, style, but wasn’t style how you behaved in a crisis? In the end, when it had really mattered, they had proven they had no style. Just lopsided hats and long breadsticks.
Such views persist, though like so much these days they sit as repressed ballast in Australia’s prosperous ship. On deck we move about freely, take in the scenery, the music, the madeleines and the Armagnac. We can agree openly, even in a pub, with Jean Baudrillard when he says that the whole arc of western culture was geared to arrive at a moment when all our material desires – clothing, architecture, sex, art, cinema, cuisine, travel, sport, education – would be satisfied, and that we reached that moment some years ago but did not realise it, so that now we are merely continuing in the automatic pursuit of the very things we already have. In FB’s prime years though, in the years when he was beginning to think about sand, theories such as that were only spoken of in enclaves that he did not frequent. And anyway, it was not so easy for him to insert such things into conversation with so many other thoughts-interests-ingredients swirling around like grains of sand in his head. Would they settle one day? Would the gales stop and allow his thoughts to take a simple form and outline? Would those thoughts then become the internal hummock that quells the wild sea? He didn’t know, but in truth he may have doubted it, at least for as long as he lived with his mum and she needed him. And so he lived on, reading, thinking, accumulating, questing if not in his body then through his interests, far, far from the single-fronted house in Milipi Avenue where he and his mother did the nightly crossword.