My father loved to be among people, a fact that made his years alone at Baringhup so very hard. He enjoyed going to Melbourne, especially to the Victoria Market where he savoured the bustle. If there were so many people that you had always to rub shoulders, then so much the better. He would talk for hours to various stallholders.
To escape his ‘prison’ he talked of returning to Yugoslavia when the communist regime collapsed. In 1981 he went, but on his return to Australia he complained about the rudeness, verging on brutality, of many of the people and their actual lack of concern for their neighbours despite their readiness to talk and to put food and slivovitz on the table for visitors. He thought services were appalling and spent a miserable night waiting to be attended in a hospital in which patients lay on sheets smeared with other people’s faeces. His experience of Yugoslavia gave him a renewed appreciation of life in Australia, but he still longed, and longed all his life, for the European conviviality he knew as a young man, even in Germany, and with his friends and relatives in Melbourne.
During the sixties and early seventies, my father more or less recovered from his illness, but he was permanently changed by it. He never again troubled about his dress. During the week he wore only his overalls and generally would shave only once a week, on weekends. His face had long ago lost its youthful softness and as it reflected his character accurately he became even more handsome. As always, he wore his cut-down slipper-shoes. His detestation of superficialities extended not only to his appearances, but also to decorations and furnishings in the house.
This was a kind of puritanism, but it was not, as puritanism often is, small-minded or mean-spirited. I believe this was because his sense of what mattered did not come from conversion to a doctrine of any sort. All his life he had a strong sense of moral reality and with it a belief in the connection between goodness and simplicity. These became austere when he confronted despair and terror in his madness.
People argue about whether suffering ennobles. There is another and different thought, which is that only suffering makes one wise. Of course, people can suffer the most horrific experiences and emerge even more superficial than they were before. Some kinds of wisdom, however—the kinds that show themselves not only in thoughts, but in the integrity of an authoritatively lived life—are given only to those who have suffered deep and long. His affliction gave authority to much of what my father said, gave power to his language, rich in peasant imagery, and spared his harsh moral judgment from any tinge of moralism in the pejorative sense of that term which implies an ever-present readiness to point the finger at others and to turn one’s back on them.
In one way, my father was a fierce moralist. Not about the big and controversial issues of the day, but about simple moral requirements such as honesty and concern for one’s neighbour. If he thought you were a liar or a cheat or had acted unkindly, then he would say so to you without a trace of euphemism. But there was never anything in his judgment which implied you should be shunned by decent people. Though fierce and uncompromising, his judgments were not what we now call ‘judgmental’.
Even his most severe judgments were made in many tones. If he called you an incorrigible liar he might do it angrily, scathingly, sorrowfully or, strange as it might sound, matter-of-factly, but never in a tone that suggested he would turn his back on you. You were always welcome at his table, to eat and more importantly to talk; always to talk. But he believed that it was essential to decent conversation that one not pretend to virtues one did not possess—as essential as being truthful about one’s identity. Only then could conversation be true to its deeper potentialities and do its humanising work of opening up the possibilities of authentic human disclosure.
Not that my father’s conversations were always intense. He enjoyed talking about anything that would not of itself—because of its deceit or meanness—foreclose the possibilities of something more serious. He regarded talk of business matters as properly restricted to working days, and for a time he prohibited it in his home on Sundays. He enjoyed gossip and would talk about anything that engaged with the ordinary dramas and follies of life in its variety. The ingenuity that had fuelled his paranoia also informed his wit, which was often mischievous and nourished by natural imagery.
He became a familiar figure in Maryborough, but few people would have seen him shaven or wearing anything other than overalls. He had little respect for the town’s luminaries—the doctors, solicitors, businessmen or councillors. The council especially provoked his scornful anger because he saw in so many of its actions the vices he most detested: dishonesty and arrogant self-importance. On one occasion he went to the council chambers with his chainsaw and banged it on the bench declaring that he might cut off the heads of all the councillors, with one exception. He achieved his purpose which was to persuade the council to rescind an order demanding he remove his goats from the vacant block of land he had bought to build the house for Lydia. They knew he was only half joking. Their nervousness over his intentions was probably increased by the fact that a horror film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was popular at the time.
Often the unhappy people who were at the receiving end of his lashings struck me as torn between two responses. They were tempted to condescend to this foreigner, in his overalls, unshaven and speaking a broken English. But the intensity of his eyes, the sheer integrity of his demeanour, and the unquestionable authority of a man whose history and reputation they knew, would not allow them to do so. The simplicity of his moral convictions, that you not tell lies, that you not take money for shabby goods, that you not try to cover up a shoddy job, allowed for no controversy, and they knew these values were embodied in his life and work. Sometimes, to be confronted by him was like being confronted by a Biblical prophet, someone whose fierce purity made him transparent to the reality of the values he professed.
The impressiveness of his character was largely a consequence of its transformation by the terrors of his illness which left him with no patience for superficialities. His sense of what was superficial, however, was far from incontestable. He would have found incomprehensible Oscar Wilde’s remark that only shallow people fail to be impressed by appearances. Wilde meant that much of what we call the surface of things in fact goes deep. Though my father had made many beautiful objects, his pleasure in being able to make them was curiously detached from an appreciation of their beauty. His interest in beautiful things others had made lacked almost entirely an aesthetic component. He was interested in the craftsmanship, but not in the beauty achieved by it. My father had no real sense of how beauty in architecture, artefacts, manners, speech or style of eating, for example, could grace our lives. He associated concern for these things with a desire for prestige, a desire to set oneself apart and look down on others. He came across many examples of such concern for status, but he was unable to see beyond them to what they corrupted.
By the same token, I doubt that Wilde would have understood my father or appreciated his virtues. And it is doubtful that my father could have been as impressive as he was if he had appreciated Wilde’s point. One can appreciate both in thought, but I doubt that both can be lived with the kind of integrity with which my father lived his values. The cost of living one of them fully, authentically and passionately, is either ignorance or repression. My father’s Old Testament integrity was partly a function of his blindness.
As a young man it was hard for me to understand that fact and my failure to do so, together with those aspects of my father’s illness that tried everyone’s patience, sometimes caused us to quarrel. His character and illness and my youth occasionally combined explosively. The ferocity of his temper ignited mine. Once he hit me, knocking me to the floor. I rose in a blind rage and went for him. Milka intercepted me and when I pushed her aside she fell against the hot stove. I came to my senses when I saw what I had done to her.
My father and I were both shaken by this episode. He told me that if we could not agree, then perhaps we should not see each other, but
we should part amicably. I thought about it, but then realised it was an absurd proposition. I loved him too deeply and knew that after what we had shared at Frogmore, no quarrel could estrange us. I sometimes cursed this realisation for it had the effect of frustrating the natural development of my anger to a point where I would at least contemplate not seeing him again.
On one occasion, when I came home for Christmas, we quarrelled within minutes of my arrival. I drove back to Melbourne at such speed that my car became airborne when I hit a level crossing. When I reached Melbourne I realised that I must either break with my father or return to Maryborough, it being a serious matter for me to refuse to come for Christmas. I ruled out the former, so I drove back, again at high speed in order to get there before midnight. When I arrived my father asked where I had been. I told him that I had been to Melbourne. Incredulous that I could have been to Melbourne and back in such a short time, he berated me for driving like a lunatic. If I had not bitten my tongue and said nothing we would have quarrelled and I would have driven back to Melbourne again.
My father’s strength of character had much to do with his recovery, but it could not have been only due to that. Stability in character goes hand-in-hand with a capacity for steady judgment which insanity undermines. The terror of insanity lies mainly in the fact that one cannot overcome or even properly confront it through any direct application of thought and will, and so one feels desperately helpless. Often the will can only be exercised indirectly, supported by medicines or by psychotherapy, but the resolve to persist in these supports is itself constantly undermined. And often one cannot rely on one’s mind because that too has been at least partially lost to the illness. My father recognised this when he said, ‘There is no sickness worse than mental sickness.’
In his defence of the content of his paranoid fantasies and of their reality, my father displayed great ingenuity, and I knew that there was no point in trying to reason with him, for he was not in any ordinary sense merely or even radically mistaken. He was out of touch with reality in a way that defied rational or factual correction, by himself or by others, and the intermittent realisation of that terrified him. To help him through his illness his strength of character needed the right kind of nurturing to function, and that, I believe, was given to him by the relative stability of his life with Milka.
It mattered to that stability that she and I got on as well as we did. My father often remarked on it and it gratified him greatly. Even though he knew I had shown no hostility to Lydia or later to her mother, he feared that once he actually lived as man and wife with another woman I would resent her just on account of that. He was quite mistaken for I warmed to Milka more or less from the first day she arrived. She had a girlish innocence and a vivacity that charmed many who met her. But mostly I was impressed by how she bore my father’s illness and how hard she worked with him.
She was always open and affectionate with me, without ever pressing her claims as a stepmother, and was grateful for whatever acknowledgment I accorded her in this regard. Generous to me and my friends, she always welcomed me and them, glad of our presence in the house. I thought my father immensely lucky to have her, and often thought he was foolish in his insensitivity to her desire for small luxuries in the house and that he should dress a little more respectably. When she went on her first trip to Yugoslavia, I was worried that she would not return.
It grieved them that they could not have children. When it became clear that it was impossible for Milka to conceive, they sought to adopt a child. They were refused on the grounds of age, but I assume that it had as much to do with my father’s history of mental illness. It was an understandable refusal, but a regrettable one. He loved children and would have made a fine father to them, as he had been to me. His pleasure in them was an expression of his love of all living things and their regeneration. When my former wife, Margaret, met him for the first time, his words to her after greeting her were, ‘Look out the window. The cats have kittens and the dogs have pups. The goats have kids and the hens have chickens. Everything breeds around here except my son.’
‘No. He’s the philosopher,’ said my father, pointing to me. ‘I’m an astronomer.’
He went on to explain that while he studied the heavens, I had no talent for it. It was late at night in the mid-eighties and he was entertaining, in the kitchen of his home in Maryborough, four or five middle-aged hippies who lived in the old Catholic church in Carisbrook, eight kilometres from Maryborough. One of them had remarked that my father and I were related as senior and junior philosophers. He was a relatively serious painter while the others sought alternative ways of living.They thought my father lived, to some degree, the life they aspired to and they enjoyed his conversation whose style and content they assimilated to their rebellion against more conventional ways of living. Mistakenly, they took him for a kindred spirit.
My father met them after his cows broke into their property and ate their sapling fruit trees. He built them chicken-wire cages and for this they allowed him to graze his cows on their land during a drought. They responded to my father with the delighted double mindedness with which some Australians discovered multiculturalism They responded to his charisma, admired his skills and his peasant know-how, but their tone of voice and the ease with which they touched him and comported themselves in his home betrayed the qualification that it was, after all, peasant know-how. They were also intemperately fond of his homemade slivovitz.
His remark about philosophers and astronomers, and the circumstances in which he made it, showed two important things about this stage of his life. He still studied the moon, the stars and the clouds, looking for patterns that would reveal meaning to him. But the light-hearted way he referred to his superstitions revealed that they no longer tormented him even though they often furnished the basis for predictions of serious events, such as someone’s illness or death. His firm belief that he could predict events did not engage seriously with his feelings, except insofar as he often felt it to be a curse. What went deep with him was his response when the events he predicted came to pass, his pained fatalistic acceptance of them rather than the fact that he predicted them.
The circumstances of his remarks were also an indication of his changed status in the community, partly because of the respect accorded to his strength of character, and partly because attitudes to New Australians had changed. That change had many dimensions and was, as I have remarked, not always free from condescension in the very people who sang its praises. My father noted this, but he and Milka were nonetheless glad of the change, recognising its generosity, and the same distinctively Australian decency that he had known in many of the people he met when he lived at Frogmore.
By now my father had retired from his ironwork. He spent most of his time in his vegetable garden, or on his land outside Carisbrook, caring for his animals. He was slightly diminished by his retirement. His demeanour was less self-assured, almost imperceptibly so, but sufficiently to allow the hippies from Carisbrook to feel free with him in their manners, and physically to touch him, in ways that struck him and me as insolent. Only two years before they would not have dared.
He was a superb worker but never a good businessman, so he became increasingly vulnerable to the shabby and often ruthless business practices which became notorious in the eighties. Most things became more expensive at the same time that their quality declined. He complained that steel was too often not properly tempered and that the quality of tools had declined while their price had risen. Shoddy workmanship or manufacturing angered him but he was particularly dismayed at the difficulty he had in getting anyone to accept responsibility for it. Although his pleasure in his work was undiminished, he became increasingly disillusioned with business and eventually gave it up.
Even before he did this, he and Milka had many animals. For a time they had twenty or so cows which Milka hoped would produce profitable calves, but they bought them at the beginning of a severe drought in the early eighties and, af
ter spending many months cutting hay, they sold them. After they paid for the truck to take the cows to market in Castlemaine, they had enough profit to buy a carton of cigarettes. It was a heartbreaking time, when farmers shot their sheep and cattle in large pits because they could not feed them and because they would incur substantial losses if they paid their transport to market.
When they had rid themselves of the burden of their cows, they turned their energies to cutting grass for their goats. My father and Milka sometimes went to Castlemaine market, and there they saw a goat with a broken leg. They took pity on it and brought it home to care for it. When the goat recovered, my father again felt sorry for it, believing it to be lonely, and therefore bought it a mate. That is how it started. Soon he and Milka had thirty goats from whom they received no material benefit. Occasionally my father killed one and ate it, and he milked some, but he almost always gave the milk to the dogs. The goats were often ill and vet fees took a sizeable portion of his and Milka’s small income. When the drought came, my father knew the goats would starve unless he could get hay for them. He could not afford to buy the quantities he needed, so with a scythe and with Milka to help load the trailer he cut it himself.
He cut grass on the roadside, clearing the area between the roads and the fences literally for miles. In the summer sun, the work was exhausting and dangerous because of snakes which my father killed in large numbers over the years. He cut and then, with Milka, loaded the trailer, day after day, week after week. A farmer in the area told me, ‘I can work. I know it. But nothing like that.’ Alone one day, my father collapsed with pain in his chest and along his left arm. When he regained consciousness he went to the Maryborough hospital where he was told he was dehydrated. He said that the doctor who examined him did not even check his heart.
Romulus, My Father Page 12