Hunger Town

by Wendy Scarfe

  Already a number of well-known and highly respected women, such as Nettie Palmer, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Jean Devanny, were interested in writing articles or sharing their novels to serialise. She hoped that I might be willing to contribute the occasional cartoon but also some drawings of women, particularly those affected by the depression. She felt that my cartoons showed a deep compassion for those suffering women and any drawings I could contribute on this theme would add to the strength and message of Women Today. She understood that I was doubtless in much demand, but sincerely hoped that I might find the time to join them in their new enterprise. I read the letter several times.

  I had never thought of myself as being much in demand although I worked hard every day, regularly walking to the Port Institute and searching the newspapers for ideas so that I might keep up with the politics of the day and comment on their bitter outcomes. In the face of draconian government cuts to spending on the unemployed I was working now on a cartoon of Sir Otto Niemeyer, head of the Bank of England. I drew him at the Melbourne conference offering the Prime Minister, state premiers and treasurers a minute slice of Christmas pudding with my caption: Have an Empire Christmas pudding.

  I hoped my audience were sophisticated enough to recall the Empire Marketing Board’s slogan to persuade the British to buy Canadian flour, Indian spices, and Australian dried fruit. And I hoped that they could see that Niemeyer’s pressure on the Australian government would leave the poor with a very minute slice of the pudding.

  I loved my work but it involved hours of planning and then drawing the cartoon and a considerable amount of time in matching the drawing to an appropriate brief and biting comment. Frequently I offered up a silent thank you to Joe Pulham, who had educated me through books. There was a fund of material in literary references and a wealth of learning about words and language. I always worked with a large dictionary beside me, and a Thesaurus, a bible for shades of meaning, for catching the exact word I needed.

  And then, of course, there were my time-wasting failures. Sometimes what I envisaged in my head didn’t work out on paper and no matter how I tried I inevitably threw it in the dustbin. Perhaps the figures weren’t right; I had failed in a caricature of the face; or the pen lines were clumsy; or the ink had run and despite constant scraping left a nasty smudge on the page. Technically it was unforgiving work and I had dozens of incomplete experimental sketches before I settled on a final drawing—and even then something could so easily go wrong.

  Mrs King’s letter was fishing. It was not clear how many drawings she wanted or how often nor, most importantly, whether she could pay me. I was flattered to be in the company of such women as Nettie Palmer. The communists spoke of her and her husband Vance with bated breath. But doubtless they had more money than I had. They could afford to make a life’s work of their ideas. But I had to support three families.

  Together we had decided that Harry should make a regular donation to the Communist Party because I now understood that this was a part of his self-importance and his beliefs, not only in the comrades, but his own work as a member. But we could not both afford to make that sacrifice.

  It wouldn’t be difficult for me to send a couple of my drawings of women at the soup kitchen. My press overflowed with drawings I had made that weren’t cartoons although frequently I would use one of them. I lifted a couple out and laid them on the table. They would surely suit. This was clearly a left-wing magazine, although Mrs King had made no point of this.

  I could send them. It was pleasing to be sought after.

  I was still holding them in my hand when Harry came in. He looked over my shoulder. ‘Poor Mrs Gill. We tried to save her from eviction months ago. I was so angry, Jude. She sat on the one remaining kitchen chair they left her, her apron over her face, and wept, and her children, all four of them, stood around her howling also. I resolved then that the way our present society runs is shit.’

  ‘She never came to the hulk with other homeless women. Do you know where she went, Harry?’

  He shook his head. ‘I think her sister may have come. We passed around the hat but none of us had much to put in it. Reminded me of that Henry Lawson story about the mate who always passes around the hat to help everyone. And I thought it good to be kind but kindness needs to be a political way of life to really help. I hope the communists will be kind, Jude.’

  ‘Yes, I hope so, too,’ I said.

  I put the drawings back in the press. I didn’t think that my kindness need extend to a gift to the Forward Press.

  Harry spent the afternoon digging up a plot of soil in the backyard. It didn’t look particularly fertile—a lot of sand and gravel—and probably wouldn’t grow the vegetables he planned. While he worked I penned a careful and, I hoped, tactful letter to Mrs King. Yes, I was interested in her magazine, and flattered. I crossed that out and put ‘honoured’ to be included. I was delighted that my work pleased her and that she judged it worthy of inclusion. Could she, please, be a little more specific about the terms for using my work? How many drawings might she require and at what intervals? And did she, as yet, have any thoughts about an appropriate payment?

  I told her how much I was paid by the Workers’ Weekly. There was not much point in trying to wrap that up in euphemistic words. Payment was payment and that was all there was to it. I added that I would be most interested to see any published copies of the magazine.

  It was an opportunity and I hoped that I had not closed the door on it. I felt guilty that I was becoming mean and mercenary. After all, these women were trying to do something worthwhile. But I looked at our meagre bank balance and the few shillings in my purse; only an idle dream our 200 pounds would last two years. I looked at the calendar to anxiously assess when I might hope to receive some payment from the Workers’ Weekly and Spearhead. When it came it would be little enough.

  Harry had lost part of his small but regular income when the silent films became talkies. We all went to the Ozone Theatre to see the first of them and were amazed to hear voices emerge from the screen. But Harry’s excitement was tempered by gloom. ‘Nothing I can do about it, Judith. The writing’s on the wall for all of us who played the piano for the silent movies. It’s very hard on you.’

  ‘It’s not your fault, Harry,’ I consoled him as stoutly as I could.

  But he was miserable. ‘It’s not fair. It’s like the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Every time some new piece of technology is introduced into the workplace a few profit and the poor suffer.’

  There was not much I could say. The pity of it was that most of the musicians who played for the silent films were anonymous. They were always there. But they might have been the chairs or other furnishings. No one took any notice of them as workers and in the excitement of the new no one noticed that they had disappeared. I wondered how many other people felt worthless and unappreciated because their jobs had vanished without notice.

  The little cartoon I sent to the Sun News Pictorial was accepted. I had drawn a theatre with a talkie film and the ghost-like apparition of a musician departing down the centre aisle. An actor from the talkie looks out. He peers across the audience and asks: Is someone unhappy with our performance?

  The editor wrote me a brief but personal note. ‘Dear Miss Larson, This is a sad state of affairs. You might be keen to know that the celebrated Sir Bernard Heinze is giving a special concert for musicians now unemployed by the theatres.’

  I hadn’t told him about Harry but perhaps he guessed that in this instance my work was intensely personal.

  I didn’t show Harry the letter from Mrs King. I knew that his instant reaction would be that I must accept. If my work were published by the Forward Press then it would be for the good of the cause. Sometimes his generous impulses were a burden to me. He admired my cartoons and drawings but I knew that, despite often watching my labour, he still had a tendency to discount the effort it cost me.

  I complained of this to Miss Marie but she only shrugged. ‘It
is the same all over, ma pauvre, every country, so many think the same, the labour of the arts is not real work, and we should always be willing to give not sell our endeavours. Now if I were a bricklayer or a wharf labourer …’

  ‘You don’t look the part but you’d have a union.’

  ‘And then people would pay me?’

  ‘It wouldn’t do you much good these days to belong to a union,’ I said sourly.

  ‘No, Judith. Not even bricklayers or wharf labourers these days. What chance musicians and artists?’

  Sometimes when Harry went to his meetings with the young unemployed workers, I visited my parents to share their evening meal. My father had picked up irregular work on a shell-grit ketch. My mother now worked at the soup kitchen only one day a week. The poor of the Port still needed its help but a younger group of women had taken over.

  Mrs Danley’s broken arm had taken months to heal and she had been forced to let go the reins. The new group of women had their own way of organising the kitchen. Without Mrs Danley, Ailsa Thornhill was lost. My mother often felt that she was by-passed and given only the housekeeping jobs of peeling vegetables and washing up. She could no longer enjoy the warmth of serving the women and chatting with them.

  It was sad, she said, to see Herbie being driven away, his help discouraged, even discarded. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘it is better organised, but I don’t know. It is certainly more regimented.’

  Now there were fewer waifs and strays seeking a bed for a night or two on the hulk. Often, when I visited, there was no one there except my parents and it was like old times. We sat around the galley table after our meal and talked in a desultory fashion. I told them about Mrs King’s letter and my hesitation. They agreed that I should be paid for my work.

  My father growled that the country continued to go to the dogs and that Labor Prime Minister Scullin had been a useless bastard and that, although he crawled to Sir Otto Niemeyer, the workers of Australia wouldn’t be bullied by an imperialist power. He fumed that all the state premiers and treasurers had genuflected to the Bank of England and grovelled that they’d all been bad boys who had spent more than their pocket money. They would have to learn to save—on the backs of the poor, of course.

  ‘The Workers’ Weekly was right, Judith. Scullin is a shit-all labour man. He’s just a lackey of capitalism.’

  I had heard it all often enough from Harry but it rang truer every time I heard it.

  ‘Bloody Thomas Bavin,’ my father said in disgust. ‘Thirty women from women’s organisations all over New South Wales begged him to help the poor and he had the gall to tell them that it would be disastrous if the state accepted responsibility for the unemployed. There’s another cartoon for you, Judith.

  ‘“Nothing ever matters and nothing ever fails

  As long as nothing happens to the bank of New South Wales.”’

  My mother had been quiet during this diatribe. She looked exhausted these days and I worried that she wasn’t well. ‘I suppose, Judith,’ she said with the ghost of a smile, ‘that if we had a peaceful, equitable society you’d be out of a job.’

  I grimaced. ‘Gosh, Mum, that’s an irony. To think that I should be grateful for all this misery.’

  Later in the evening Harry came on his bicycle to collect me and we walked home together through streets fitfully but gently lit by electric lighting. There were always a few people abroad but sometimes when they merged with the shadows as only indistinct shapes I was reminded of my childhood fears of those shadowy creatures that skulked along the wharves and still occasionally haunted my dreams.

  ‘You know, Harry, I often recall a line from Shakespeare that conscience makes cowards of us all. But I always change it to imagination makes cowards of us all.’

  ‘That is if you have imagination, Jude.’

  ‘Everyone has imagination, Harry.’

  He demurred. ‘Some have a lot more than others.’

  ‘And I guess,’ I said, ‘some have a heavier dose of conscience.’

  He held my hand as he always did and we didn’t hurry. The darkness was a soft and private world.

  A month later Jock hammered at my front door. It was mid-morning. I was working as usual and Harry had gone to the Labour Exchange. I ran to answer the urgent summons.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Jock, what is it?’ And then in a panic: ‘There’s been an accident? Harry? My father? My mother is ill?’

  ‘No, Judith,’ he panted, ‘it’s the police. They’re raiding all our premises. They’ve closed down the Port Beacon and confiscated our printing equipment. And now they’re searching the homes of anyone they suspect of being a communist. Have you any stuff that might incriminate you and Harry?’

  ‘Stuff?’ I was bemused. ‘Only my cartoons. Surely not them? This is terrible, Jock. Nothing else?’

  ‘Are you sure? What about newspapers? Books? Letters?’

  I was indignant. ‘But we have freedom of the press.’

  ‘Not any more. They’re activating the 1926 Crimes Act.’

  Frightened, I said, ‘We probably have a few copies of the Workers’ Weekly and Spearhead. My cartoons appear in both. But everyone knows that. I throw out-of-date newspapers into the laundry for fuel for the copper.’

  He pursed his mouth in grim humour. ‘Spearhead! That’ll set them on their toes. They won’t like that. What an irony it’d be to be arrested for the bloody anarchists.’

  ‘I’ll look,’ I said. ‘A parcel came for Harry last night. He said he’d put it in the laundry until he could open it.’

  We ran outside and into the laundry. I was fearful. It was only recently that I’d read in the daily papers of Hitler and his thugs shooting down their opponents on the street. My horizons had widened and I had begun to search the newspapers assiduously to glean what I could of European affairs. I experimented with drawing caricatures of Hitler. I had re-borrowed copies of Will Dyson’s cartoons, about the expanding imperialist Germany, and studied them. I had seen that a good cartoon could both foretell and warn of future events and such a warning entered our visual memory and was never forgotten.

  If the brutality in the Port were only a microcosm of the world then I shuddered to look into the future. Was this the outcome of the hysterical anti-Bolshevism in the press, the calls for a private army to defend citizens against us?

  In my anxiety I had started to warn Harry to be careful when he left home for his meetings and he would look at me oddly. ‘I just ride my bicycle, Jude. The roads are pretty quiet at this time of night.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, hugging him, ‘but be careful.’

  ‘What over, Jude?’ He was puzzled.

  I laughed uncomfortably. ‘I don’t really know, Harry. It’s just a feeling.’

  ‘Silly old you,’ he said and kissed the top of my head.

  Jock and I found copies of the Workers’ Weekly and Spearhead lying on the floor. They were torn and covered in dirt marks.

  ‘Do you think the police might take it that I’ve tried to disguise them?’ I felt a little hysterical.

  ‘The parcel, Judith.’ Jock sounded frantic. ‘It has a German postmark.’ He tore the wrappings. ‘My God, copies of Imprecor. The official journal of the Comintern. From Germany but published in English. Have you any more copies in the house?’

  ‘No, I’ve never seen it before. Surely the police won’t know what the Comintern is. They’re pretty dumb.’

  Jock guffawed. ‘Dinna kid yourself, lassie. They’ll know. We must get rid of these. And the Workers’ Weekly and Spearhead.’

  ‘We can burn them.’

  ‘Not enough time. Besides it’d be suspicious. A fire in the middle of the day and no washing?’

  ‘Then I’ll take them to the hulk. My father will help. We can chuck them in the river. You go now. Better you’re not seen here.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but hesitated. ‘Harry wouldn’t like me to leave you alone.’

  ‘Go, Jock. You’re too well known. I’ve got my bicycle
. Harry found me an old second-hand lady’s bike. ’

  Still he lingered. ‘You’ll be OK, Judith?’

  ‘Of course. No one will stop a girl on a bicycle. I’ll put all this stuff in my art bag. Now, for God’s sake, go.’

  He went.

  I grabbed the copies of Imprecor, the Workers’ Weekly and Spearhead, raced about the house, snatched up notes Harry had made, shoved copies of Ten Days That Shook the World, The Iron Heel, The State and Revolution behind some other books at the back of the bookshelf, threw my drawing gear out of my art bag, and stuffed in all the incriminating material. It was bulky but I couldn’t help that. To help conceal it, I put my sketch book on top. With my bag slung across my shoulder I wheeled my bike onto the street and mounted. Lipson Street was busy, cycling on the road difficult and slow. I got off and wheeled my bike along the footpath.

  Two policemen blocked my way. ‘Got something interesting there, miss?’ one of them asked.

  I batted my eyelashes at him, tried to look a little tremulous, and wished I could do it as meltingly as Winnie. If I hadn’t been so scared I would have felt a complete idiot. ‘Really, officer,’ I said, ‘that’s not a nice thing to ask a lady.’

  He blushed. ‘I meant your bag, miss.’

  ‘Well, I hoped that you did … otherwise …’ I left the sentence unfinished.

  He studied me with a puzzled frown, his eyes fixed on the bag. I felt sick.

  Suddenly he said, and his face broke into a grin, ‘Aren’t you the girl that does those cartoons? Remember I asked you out one night.’

  I recognised him and knowing him, however sketchily, made the situation a little less frightening. Relieved, I beamed at him, ‘Of course, I was sorry to refuse.’ I hoped that I didn’t sound too effusive.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if it isn’t too late.’

  I made my left hand obvious.

  ‘Oh,’ he mumbled, seeing my wedding ring. ‘Sorry. You’ve married.’