In Australia, women and children are placed in the one category: the weaklings. ‘Be careful of the weaklings; show some consideration for the women and children.’
In Poland, historically, people have not been so fussy. The women and children can be murdered along with the men; there is no discrimination.
In the past, Australia, so I am told, was a much more progressive place. Here, social reforms happened before anywhere else. Australia was out in front, leading the world. Now, it seems like the Australians won’t do a damned thing unless it has been tried out and adopted somewhere else. At a certain time, the Australians became scared, timid. This is a terrible shame.
But let me say this. It is 1958, 1959, 1960. Most of what I know about the Australians is what is easy to see. Lots of things, I don’t see, don’t understand. And this I say now is true, I think: what we don’t know is much greater than what we do. In what we don’t know, the poetry lives.
Robert tells me, ‘So critical of Australia, Vera! So critical of Australia when you first came here!’
What I did not know was this: that in 1958, 1959, 1960, a thousand people – more, a hundred thousand, and more still, a million people – were about to open their mouths and say things that had never been heard before in Australia. And they would not be polite in what they said. Many would be women and there would be none of the weakling in what they demanded.
What I am grumbling about in 1960 will barely exist in 1970, and will be extinct in 1980. I came here a few years before Australia became the most interesting place on earth. I could not see that it would ever happen. Robert, I confess my ignorance, and my egotism. You want me to avoid alienating readers by complaining ‘endlessly’ (your word) about the terylene dresses, by patronising the poor, cheerful, childlike Australians. Okay. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I’ve become a Catholic in my repentance. Can that be an end of it?
I meet a Jewish businessman somewhere, at a gathering of Jews, let’s say. Jan and I are always invited to these gatherings (what the gathering was about, God knows – supporting Israel, maybe) so that the men can enjoy my legs and study my figure. Better if they were attracted to my polemic, but let’s be honest – when a man has a choice between studying a woman’s legs and figure or listening to her talk politics, he will always choose the flesh. He’s chatting with me, this fellow, and he mentions that he has a business making jewellery.
What was his name? It started with ‘Y’. Maybe Yulker, Yelkan, something like that. The first letter was ‘Y’.
Yeitsman, was that it?
No, Vulcan! – it was Vulcan. The name erupts now in my memory. Vulcan, and his business was Vulcan Jewellery.
I say, ‘You make jewellery? I know how to do that. Give me a job.’
It happens to be true that I know how to make jewellery. When I was studying journalism in Warsaw, they took us to the state television station and taught us everything to do with performance – painting sets, applying make-up, fashioning costume jewellery. It was as if they thought that theatre and journalism were the same thing. And in Poland, news broadcasting and theatre were more or less the same thing: everything scripted to reflect credit on the government, and also to glorify the Soviet Union.
‘I know how to make jewellery. Give me a job.’
And Vulcan tells me, ‘Wasowski, here’s what we do. I provide the materials. I provide the finished piece of jewellery for you to imitate. Maybe you add a little bit of yourself, that’s okay. You start tomorrow.’
Making jewellery at home in our apartment becomes my next job.
Jan, by this time, is no longer working at General Motors; he’s found another job, in the credit department of the Myer Emporium in the middle of Melbourne, a huge department store built by a Jewish immigrant decades ago. Jan has gone from hammering away in a big happy gang of working-class men to facilitating the survival of capitalism by dispensing credit for whitegoods and television sets. He sees the irony.
Me, I’ve turned my training as a journalist to the manufacture of costume jewellery. I see the irony, too. It’s a very ironical time. I sit at a table in the apartment with my tools and materials arranged before me: three pairs of pliers, one with a very fine nose; tweezers; silver wire; glass; glue. I think, ‘It’s come to this, Werunia – you’re a cottage industry.’ I could be in medieval Europe, with the same equipment, the same materials.
But there’s no need to sing songs from South Pacific to pacify the workforce. I can play Bach, Rachmaninov or Mozart on the record player. The December sun comes through the windows. This is a type of happiness. I can be a communist here. I might hum the ‘Internationale’ if I wish to – but I don’t. Or I might reflect on the federal election the Australians have just transacted, an election in which I had the opportunity to vote for the CPA, the Communist Party of Australia – but didn’t.
It was the first truly democratic election I have ever witnessed. The Australians support two political parties, mostly. One calls itself the Liberal Party and is led by a big, white-haired individual by the name of Menzies, who worships the Queen of England and is also a devotee of the insane sport of cricket. His life is divided entirely between the Queen and cricket. He has no other interests in the world, does not keep a mistress, has, in fact, no interest in sex (so I am informed) but can be roused to passion now and again by the communists of Australia, who barely exist. His party is made up of hidebound reactionaries who have bad sex lives, keep small, yapping dogs and experience difficulty going to the toilet – constipation, the abiding health issue of conservative politicians, poor digestion. The Australians like him, many of them. They vote for him, so it seems. In the best newspaper of Melbourne, the Age, they say he has been prime minister for five hundred years. He has a friend in another reactionary party that supports him: McEwen – I can’t pronounce his name – a crook if ever I saw one, the sort we see a lot of in Poland with an appetite for pulling the fingernails from the hands of enemies.
The other big party is for workers, the Labor Party, socialist in its way, led by a man by the name of Calwell, who wears mismatched socks and the broad neckties you see on party apparatchiks in Warsaw. It is difficult to feel inspired by him. He looks like the sort of folksy fellow who mixes his peas with his mashed potato when he sits down to dinner and takes a fried egg sandwich to work smothered in tomato sauce.
In this election, Menzies is out of favour. The Australians scare themselves to death by almost voting in this Calwell of the mismatched socks.
I voted for him, God help me. It was a very, very peaceful election; there were no reports of anyone shot or lynched, no bombs, and there was a masterful acceptance speech by Sir Robert, who understands theatre so much better than Calwell.
And yet, and yet … well, what can I say? Not in the least interesting. Not in the least.
PICTURE SECTION
My mother as a young woman in Lvov. A bland face, not much to be read in it, but then (inset) a lifetime later, the whole world.
After the war, a big group of Jewish kids in a sort of kibbutz, at Eschwege, near Kassel in Germany. No more Nazis, and good riddance. I’m in the picture.
You can find me. Use your wits. Viktor’s there, too.
At the University of Warsaw, in 1951; I’m on the left. The girl behind looks like a lady wrestler who is about to put my friend and me in a stranglehold.
We’re jumping ahead. It’s Werunia in the Melbourne sunshine, 1958. Say what you like about Melbourne in 1958, but the sunshine was fabulous.
In Sopot, Poland, 1954: same sun but not as bright.
In Warsaw, 1953. What on earth am I doing? Adjusting a hairpin, maybe.
With Viktor in Warsaw, 1952. I am pregnant, or possibly about to get pregnant once the photographer leaves.
A studio shot, taken in Warsaw. Not sure about the hat.
In Warsaw in 1964, with Jan, that lovely man.
With Jan again, this time in Melbourne, 1980. Must we use this picture?
We
both look as if we’ve been smoking dope for ten hours.
Marek, my son, at our St Kilda apartment in 1963. He smiled all the time as a kid. He adored Australia.
Marek as a grown man, at New Brighton, north of Byron Bay. He was earning his living making and playing shakuhachi flutes at this time. He was masterful on the instrument.
Pani, my grandson, 1992. Me, a grandmother? Absurd. But deeply enjoyable.
In my office at the ABC. This Day Tonight had just commenced. Halcyon days.
In the Loch Street house, St Kilda, supremely relaxed beneath Mirka’s fresco painted on the wall in our bedroom.
With a particularly handsome young friend in Athens, 1974. Lucky girl, Werunia.
On location for TDT with Peter Couchman, 1975.
With Hazel, dearest Hazel, comforting me. Why? Because I needed comforting, just as she did, at times.
Christmas at the Lodge, in Canberra, 1990. Bob, PM, being Bob. Pani is in the foreground.
Kerry O’Brien, of course.
With Mary Delahunty in Japan, on a work trip. Mary has been my dear friend for years now. It was on the Japan jaunt that we bonded, as they say.
Twenty years at the ABC. ‘Vera, my dear, accept this plaque in recognition of your loyal service. And Vera, my dear – love your hair.’ With the ABC Chairman, and the General Manager.
My sixtieth birthday party: I am highly delighted about something. Behind me are Peter Ross and Allan Hogan.
With Michael Leunig, 2004. A most loveable man. And witty.
With the beloved Mirka Mora, lunch at Grossi Florentino, 2006. I’m fishing in my bag for a cigarette. I probably had been told by the nicotine nazis that smoking indoors was verboten.
16
ABC
Making costume jewellery for a living, in the way I do, can’t go on forever. It’s like a thousand things in life – for a while, okay, then you’ve had enough.
One fine day, as I’m sitting at my work table with pliers and tweezers, a voice, mine, complains loudly: Werunia, you’re driving me crazy. Do something.
Do something? Do what? Petition the government to employ me as a journalist? I have to show some initiative.
What do you think, Werunia? That the Australians are going to come to your door and say, ‘A thousand apologies, clever Vera, what were we thinking, yes, go to work at the Age’?
I watch television – the ABC only. The other channels, why would you? For children. I watch the news, of course. The man who reads the news each night does a fine job. I could write his news scripts: why not? I have the experience. My English is okay now; I could do it. If not news scripts, something else. Drama scripts; many other things.
I’ve been thinking for weeks, Werunia, show some initiative. What’s the worst that can happen? Maybe the ABC will say, ‘Perhaps not.’ So what? I am thick-skinned.
Actually I’m not. But, Werunia, show some initiative.
I dress myself beautifully, take the tram down Brighton Road to Ripponlea, stroll to Gordon Street, the studios of the ABC in Victoria, and ask the commissioner in my most charming Polish-accented English to see the person, man or woman, who has the power to hire hopeful people like myself who arrive unannounced.
The commissioner, a very courteous chap, says, ‘You are looking for employment?’
‘Yes, I am looking for employment.’
‘In what capacity, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘I do not mind you asking. I am a journalist.’
‘Are you indeed? A journalist? Will you object to taking a seat for a minute or two while I make a call?’
‘I have no objections at all.’
In the foyer, where I wait for the commissioner to make his calls, hang portraits of ABC presenters, all in black and white, as if the fact that television is broadcast in black and white means that the presenters will only be recognisable in monochrome. There are portraits of James Dibble, Michael Charlton, and a woman with a brilliant smile who, I think, hosts a program for small children. There is also a portrait of Talbot Duckmanton, the boss of the whole thing, as far as I know.
Sitting here in the foyer, I feel a type of contentment. Warsaw comes back to me with great force, nostalgia of a sort. The people I knew when I was learning one thing and another at Warsaw Television had a better idea than the party stooges who ran the station of the potential of television. We saw it all at once and completely. We had read 1984 in Polish (in hiding) and we knew that Orwell was right to depict television as a brutish agent of totalitarian manipulation. But we saw, too, that the vigour of the new medium would surely exceed the exploitation that the party stooges imagined. It excited us in the way that a new, adored lover excites you; everything that you knew about arousal soon to be left behind, superceded. Okay, the new lover has a few gross habits that you might be forced to overlook – he picks his nose; he farts unapologetically – but dear God, what he can conjure with his hands, his lips.
This was our time. Our time. Yes, television was invented decades earlier, but real broadcast television with a full schedule of shows only got into the homes of the people after the war. On Polish television, State Television, there was a great deal of nonsense: carefully curated news and current affairs, of course, but also ludicrous comedies (Papa arrives home from work only to find that Mama has accidentally locked the family dog in the refrigerator, some such craziness), children’s shows hosted by a clown with a big red nose, soap operas slanted toward socialist realism (Wladyslaw, the factory foreman, goes to Moscow to learn more about spiggots or something and falls in love with the Russian spiggot genius, Dunya, but responsibly returns to Kraków, with blueprints for a new super-spiggot). All of that silliness. We saw what it could be, and we were right, if not in Poland then in America, in England, Scandinavia. Do you think we wanted Beckett and Pinter twenty-four hours a day? No. We wanted Checkerboard, and Four Corners. We wanted Aunty Jack. We imagined original dramas, whole series that gave to the filmed script the liberty of the novel, such productions as those that Krzysztof Kieslowski was one day to provide with his Decalogue stories, and what American television would give us in such dramas as Deadwood, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad. It came. Not on this day in 1959 when I sit on a couch in the foyer of Gordon Street with my legs on show, but it came.
The commissioner has concluded his conversation on the telephone. He calls me to the desk.
‘I should have asked before,’ he says. ‘Is there anyone in particular you wish to speak to?’
‘The boss.’
‘Do you have experience in anything other than journalism, by any chance?’
‘Sure. In drama.’
‘In drama. Good. You should perhaps see Henry Cuthbertson, the head of drama.’
‘I would be happy to see Henry Cuthbertson.’
‘Mr Cuthbertson is at the Lonsdale Street studios. Not here at Gordon Street. Do you think you could take yourself round to Lonsdale Street?’
I say, ‘Sure.’
And off I go, down to the tram stop and into Melbourne.
Oh, I am full of confidence. This is destiny, or something distantly related to destiny. Or not destiny at all, but just initiative. But maybe initiative is destiny, part of its process. Werunia, who cares? Just be charming to Henry Cuthbertson.
But Henry Cuthbertson, when I meet him an hour later, is the one who does all the charming. He is a handsome man, with one of those trained acting voices that are never heard outside cinemas and theatres anywhere in the world other than on the BBC in England and on the ABC in Australia. Voices of this sort, invariably male, could make the reading aloud of an omelette recipe sound seductive and inspiring.
Seated in his office, he faces me and says, ‘May I call you Vera? I dislike formality. Please call me Henry. Your résumé is impressive, I must say. You appear to have had your fingers in an extraordinary variety of pies. But Miss Wasowski’ – he knew to pronounce the ‘W’s as ‘V’s – ‘Vera, I don’t know if we can accommodate you in Drama. And ye
t, I have a suggestion. I’m going to send you back to Gordon Street to meet our Ada Jacobi, a wonderful woman, in charge of make-up, and from Poland, like you. What I’m anticipating is this: that you think of coming to work for us in make-up, pending Ada’s approval. Tell me what you think.’
What did I think? After listening to his gorgeous voice, enjoying his gorgeous manners? He could have told me that he wanted me to empty the ashtrays in Gordon Street and I would have felt flattered.
I return by tram to Gordon Street to meet my compatriot, Ada Jacobi. Henry has phoned ahead. Ada is very like me in certain ways; she has a theatrical background. I sit in a chair in the make-up studio, with Ada in another chair, leaning towards me. She is studying my own make-up, and appears to be impressed. We talk in Polish and in English.
After a half hour of chatter about politics, theatre and television in Poland, she says, ‘You come and work for the ABC. Of course in makeup, but who knows? Other chances will come your way. Positions come up. They like to recruit inside the tribe.’
I’m back on the tram for the fourth time that day. And you know, it’s a beautiful day, it’s the Australian spring. Along Brighton Road, the London Planes are coming into leaf. I get off at Carlisle Street and walk down to Fitzroy Street, my soul singing.
Vera Page 15