Currawong Manor
Page 1
About Currawong Manor
Currawongs appearing at the manor in vast numbers had come to portend one thing . . . death was on its way.
When photographer Elizabeth Thorrington is invited to document the history of Currawong Manor for a book, she is keen to investigate a mystery from years before: the disappearance of her grandfather, the notorious artist Rupert Partridge, and the deaths of his wife, Doris, and daughter, Shalimar. For decades, locals have speculated whether it was a terrible tragedy or a double murder, but the shocking truth of what happened at the manor that day has remained a secret.
Relocating to the manor, Elizabeth interviews Ginger Lawson, one of Rupert’s life models from the forties, and Dolly Shaw, the daughter of the enigmatic ‘dollmaker’ who seems to have been protected by the Partridge family. Elizabeth is sure the two women know what happened all those years ago, but neither will share their truths unconditionally. And in the surrounding Owlbone Woods, a haunting presence still lurks, waiting for the currawongs to gather . . .
An evocative tale set in the spectacular Blue Mountains, Currawong Manor is a mystery of art, truth and the ripple effects of death and deception.
Contents
Cover
About Currawong Manor
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue – Secrets
Chapter 1 – Funeral of a Flower
Chapter 2 – Smoke and Flames
Chapter 3 – Aspiration and Desire
Chapter 4 – The Devil’s Flower
Chapter 5 – Truth and Beauty
Chapter 6 – The Frosts Return
Chapter 7 – Through the Blue Door
Chapter 8 – Bones of the Lost Boys
Chapter 9 – The Flowers of the Towers
Chapter 10 – The Imperfections of Light
Chapter 11 – Ducks and Swans
Chapter 12 – The Blood Market
Chapter 13 – Melancholy Monday
Chapter 14 – Roots of Evil and the Winter Witch
Chapter 15 – The Land of Goodies
Chapter 16 – A Visit from Ma
Chapter 17 – Gum Tree Ghosts
Chapter 18 – Trollop
Chapter 19 – Dinner at Mount Olympus
Chapter 20 – Invisible Moths and Secret Tides
Chapter 21 – Trespassers
Chapter 22 – Death in the Mirror
Chapter 23 – At the Flicks
Chapter 24 – Circus
Chapter 25 – Death’s Garden
Chapter 26 – The Wrong Path
Chapter 27 – Tea with a White Rabbit
Chapter 28 – How Does Your Garden Grow?
Chapter 29 – Death at Mermaid Glen
Chapter 30 – Dolly’s Story
Chapter 31 – Woman’s Mouth to Woman’s Ear
Chapter 32 – The Angry Ghosts
Chapter 33 – The Peppermint Tree
Chapter 34 – Some Sunny Day
Chapter 35 – The Mother of Beauty
Acknowledgements
About Josephine Pennicott
Also by Josephine Pennicott
Copyright Page
For David,
who brings light, strength
and wisdom to my story.
The path always led to you.
Do you know what you’re talking about? The war isn’t something over there, in Europe. It’s here in this room. There’s blood everywhere, all round us, on everything, on us. Can’t you smell it?
—Norman Lindsay
Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
—Wallace Stevens
Prologue
Secrets
Mount Bellwood, Blue Mountains, November 1945
The bush kept its secrets well.
In Currawong Manor’s wild fairytale garden, a statue of a naked goddess, Diana, stood dreamlike, enclosed in the mountain mist. Shadows lengthened as evening crept upon the manor. Diana’s stone body was draped in roses, the yellow-cream, palest pink malmaisons, and crimson mutabilis David Austin petals, all fading in the dusk to an indistinguishable muddy brown. She held her bow and arrow to the sky, proudly guarding her stone folly, her empty eye sockets challenging the stars with detachment. Carved native marsupials and dingoes at her base appeared to be listening to a stray dog’s cries from the woods. The moon was in its dark phase. A dangerous time to be about, some of the old ones at the nearby village of Mount Bellwood might have said. Bush creatures stirred, preparing for the night’s hunting as birds began their twilight calls. A flock of brightly coloured rosellas swooped across the garden in a dramatic flash of green, blue and scarlet.
Currawongs with black wings, clawed feet and sharp hooked beaks had been descending on the towers of the manor all day, their lyrical cries ceasing abruptly as they landed. They roosted in a grave, united silence, casting an ominous shadow over the tragic day. The birds had roosted on the towers ever since the manor was built in 1855. Over the years the Mount Bellwood locals had embellished the fact of the birds roosting at the Ruins (as the manor was known) with fantastical speculations – according to these stories, currawongs in vast numbers predicted only one dreaded visitor to the Ruins: death was on its way.
A woman’s scream came from the manor, a chilling sound repeated several times. Indecipherable cries spiked the air. A door opened and the woman emerged, running. She wore a red silk dress and wrap. Shrieking in grief, she fled into the waiting darkness of nearby Owlbone Woods while the birds sat in their eerie, connected silence.
It was a story the train driver, Henry Kelly, was to repeat many times over to anyone who cared to listen. He was on a late run of the Sydney to Lithgow train. He had just had a refreshments stop at Blackheath, and was on his way through Mount Bellwood. As the train came alongside the dark shadow of Owlbone Woods, a woman appeared suddenly out of heavy fog and ran onto the tracks. In a few eternal seconds he registered her white face, mouth open and screaming – a nightmare face with what looked like a red sheet blowing around her. Her final, horrified expression haunted his waking and sleeping moments ever after, her arms reaching out as if she could, through some miracle, push the train away. Even in his nineties, Henry would shake when he recounted the story. Killing Doris Partridge had been the bane of him. He began drinking to try to forget what he had seen, but every night he still woke up bathed in sweat, crying out in terror. And it was all because of that bastard, Rupert Partridge. A man who wrecked so many lives. The ‘devil of Australian art’ he was nicknamed, and an apt term it had proven to be.
It was a weird and sorry business, everyone agreed. Why Rupert had gone missing, or most probably killed himself, over his beautiful little Shalimar, no one ever knew. Rupert’s body had never been found to provide a welcome hint to the mystery. But things had always been strange at Currawong Manor. If folk were wise, they would keep well away from the house and Owlbone Woods – that was what Henry Kelly tried to warn people in his alcohol-fuelled rants, but most of those he harangued couldn’t make head or tail of what the crazy old man was saying. And eventually his children placed him in Katoomba Nursing Home, where his dreams continued, although the medications helped to soothe him somewhat.
Truth, legends, lies and broken dreams – once woven together, they were as impossible to separate or disentangle as mountain mist. But some mysteries and secrets are best left undisturbed. The bush creatures understood that ancient truth.
Night was soft and wise. It wound itself around Diana with her impassive stone face, and embraced the bone-white gum trees. Like ghost sentries the trees stood forever guarding the land, its stories and dreaming impregnating their skinny trunks, their shaggy bark peeling
away in rough layers like human skin, exposing their immaculate, virgin, hidden, glowing core, the colour of bone.
The bush kept its secrets well.
1
Funeral of a Flower
Mount Bellwood, Blue Mountains, May 2000
Elizabeth watched the crowd of strangers huddled outside Mount Bellwood’s St Rita’s stone church. She was reluctant to exchange the comfort of her friend’s silver Volvo for the heavy rain outside. And despite privately chiding herself, she was also feeling nervous about meeting the people at the service. One person in particular – Ginger Lawson.
‘What a beautiful little church,’ Fleur said. ‘Spot anyone you know among all those umbrellas?’
Elizabeth scanned the mostly black-clad crowd at St Rita’s open wooden doors, feeling grateful that Fleur had rescheduled her hectic weekend to bring her up to the mountains and accompany her to the funeral of a woman neither of them had met. Kitty Collins had been one of the three famous women known as the Flowers – the scandalous trio of life models that Elizabeth’s artist grandfather, Rupert Partridge, had painted in the 1940s. Today, Kitty was being cremated.
After the funeral, Fleur was going to drive Elizabeth to Currawong Manor, where the Flowers had once lived with the Partridges. Elizabeth was to take up residence there while photographing the manor itself and Ginger Lawson; with Kitty’s tragic end and Wanda suffering from dementia in a Sydney nursing home, Ginger was the last surviving Flower. To photograph one of her grandfather’s muses at his old home was a dream come true for Elizabeth.
A couple of months ago, she had been contacted by Holly Shaw, the current owner of Currawong Manor, inviting her, as Rupert’s granddaughter and an accomplished professional photographic artist herself, to apply for a residency to be the photographer for a lavish coffee-table book that had been commissioned on Rupert’s life models. The publishers were apparently inspired by renewed public interest in the life models of another famous Blue Mountains painter, Norman Lindsay, as depicted in the movie Sirens. (Indeed, when she’d rung Elizabeth out of the blue on that day two months ago, Holly had joked, ‘The main appeal of Norman’s story was Elle Macpherson’s breasts, but ours has a real-life mystery and breasts!’) Titled Flowers of the Ruins, the book was to feature photographs, journals, letters and articles about the three young women who had posed for Rupert in the years and months before the deaths of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Shalimar, and his wife, Doris, in 1945. Two other writers had covered the topic before – one of them Kitty herself – but their books were now out of print. For the first time, too, Ginger Lawson would give her version of life at the manor and the events before the tragic deaths. To Elizabeth’s surprise, Holly told her that Ginger had been the one to suggest that Elizabeth might like to apply to be the official photographer for the project. Up until then, Elizabeth had had no idea that Ginger knew of her existence.
When Holly rang back a few weeks later to tell her that her application had been successful, Elizabeth thought it was the best thing to happen to her for months. Although her work – the distinctive mysterious, dreamlike photographs taken with ‘Linda’, an antique camera passed down from her grandfather – was found in galleries around the country and she had been noted in an influential American art journal as the next Australian artist to watch, since her most recent exhibition and book she had been pilloried by a leading art critic as well as church and community groups, accused of everything from child pornography to being a publicity-seeking ghoul. The exhibition and book, titled The Flesh Bridge, featured not only nudes of young children and the elderly but also images of dead bodies at the morgue. Unsurprisingly, it was the images of the corpses that had attracted the most passionate response from the media and public. Some found the work too disturbing, disgusting and macabre; others enthused over the poetic, honest beauty in the photographs.
‘Are you okay, Liz?’ Fleur’s voice brought Elizabeth back to the present and the rain drumming on the roof. ‘I hope you’ve decided to closet yourself away up here for the right reasons,’ Fleur said bluntly. ‘You’re not simply trying to escape Lois’s embarrassment over The Flesh Bridge publicity?’
Elizabeth groaned at the reminder. ‘You know how my mother hates anything macabre or controversial in my photos. She sees it as some sort of link to Rupert’s work. She doesn’t want to know about anything to do with what happened at Currawong Manor in the 1940s.’ Rupert Partridge was a skeleton in the firmly locked family closet, and Lois would become enraged whenever her daughter showed any interest in him, accusing her of ‘raking up the sordid past’. Elizabeth’s father, Michael, was also forbidden to discuss Lois’s family history, and being an introverted man he was happy to oblige.
‘Liz, I know Lois is so proud of your work and all you’ve achieved,’ Fleur said softly. ‘She’s told me many times over the years how talented you are. It’s just difficult for her to express her emotions because of her upbringing.’ She hesitated before continuing. ‘I imagine I already know the answer, but is she planning on attending today?’
‘Of course Mum isn’t coming. And if she thinks I’m so talented, why doesn’t she show more interest in my work?’ Elizabeth retorted.
Her mother had been furious when she found out that Elizabeth was going to Kitty’s funeral. ‘I’ll be staying up there anyway,’ Elizabeth had argued. ‘And I’ve been granted permission to photograph the reception – it’s an important moment for the book. The death of one of Rupert’s Flowers is a major story.’
‘The death of one of the bloody Flowers is not a major story!’ her mother had scoffed. ‘Only in the deluded mind of a narcissist like Ginger Lawson, who thinks the whole country cares that she spent a few months posing nude for some third-rate artist. Don’t give me that look, Elizabeth! I couldn’t give a hoot that he was my father – not that he had any right to the title. He was a third-rate artist and I won’t pretend otherwise to make you happy. Nobody cares about Rupert Partridge apart from you, Ginger, and Holly what’s-her-name, who has more money than sense or taste and is obsessed by arty mysteries.’
‘Mum, when are you going to let the past go?’ Elizabeth had said. ‘My grandfather may have vanished and abandoned you, but that doesn’t make him a third-rate artist! You’re blind to the burgeoning interest in his work.’
But nothing Elizabeth ever said about Rupert made any difference to her mother. The tirade had continued with Lois nagging Elizabeth about putting her career first by travelling so much on assignments while her biological clock was ticking away at thirty-three. And now Elizabeth was letting her down again by accepting the residency at the manor. It made Elizabeth feel like severing all contact with her mother. At least in the mountains there would be a respite from this endless sniping.
Now, seeing Fleur’s dismayed expression, Elizabeth went on more gently, ‘I really do appreciate you giving me a lift. Stop fretting about why I’m staying at Currawong Manor. How do you know it’s not just because of Nick Cash? I’ve always had a thing for a man in leather.’ Elizabeth had been excited to discover that Nick Cash was contracted to work on Flowers of the Ruins with her. Now a true-crime writer with an interest in famous Australian crimes of the 1930s and forties, in the seventies he had played in one of Australia’s favourite bands.
‘Yes, I’m worried about leaving you up in the mountains with him,’ Fleur said teasingly. ‘He does have a reputation as a bit of a player.’
‘You’re as bad as Lois.’ Elizabeth grimaced. ‘I can handle myself with Nick Cash.’
‘Can you see him?’ Fleur asked, peering out through the windscreen again. The funeral guests were blurred flashes of black in the grey half-light of the wintry afternoon, shaking their umbrellas as they entered the church.
‘He won’t be there – he’s arriving later tonight,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Apparently there was some event he had to attend in Melbourne today.’
‘Are you still upset about not meeting Kitty?’ Fleur asked, and Elizabeth shook her head quic
kly. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ Fleur said, seeing through her. ‘You couldn’t possibly have known the poor woman was about to die, and you had so much going on with the show and those bloody reviews.’
Ever since Holly had telephoned last week with the news of the old woman’s death, Elizabeth had been berating herself for not seizing the opportunity to meet Kitty when she’d had the chance. A few weeks before, Kitty had contacted her unexpectedly, saying she wanted to discuss ‘with Rupert’s granddaughter’ something of ‘great importance’; at the time, distracted by the venomous response to her exhibition, Elizabeth had barely been able to eat or sleep, and she had put off the elderly woman, a decision she now bitterly regretted. With Kitty’s death, another link to her grandfather had been irrevocably snuffed out. Now, mindful of the fragile connections between present and past, she was looking forward to finally meeting Ginger and collaborating on the book.
‘Let it go, Liz,’ Fleur persisted. ‘Kitty probably didn’t have anything new to tell you. Anyway, you’re never going to know now, so forget about it.’
‘It’s just a bit distressing to think that the beautiful blonde who Rupert once delighted in painting and photographing should end up dying in a backpacker’s hostel in Katoomba,’ Elizabeth said gloomily.
‘Nobody gets out of here alive,’ Fleur pointed out. ‘And Kitty had a good innings, unlike Shalimar Partridge . . .’
Elizabeth was often surprised by how many people remembered the Partridge case. It seemed to be almost as entrenched in the Australian psyche as the Graeme Thorne murder or the disappearance of the Beaumont children. Even people with little interest in art had a hazy recollection of the name Rupert Partridge, though their notions tended to be sensationalist and often muddled; over the years, she’d been asked: ‘Wasn’t he the devil worshipper who vanished in the bush?’, ‘Didn’t he have orgies with nude models?’ and ‘Wasn’t he in Sirens with Elle Macpherson?’ Still, some people retained a vague knowledge of some of Rupert’s more controversial paintings, such as Trollop, Pigs of War or Bones of the Flower Men, though he was more often confused with Lindsay, a Blue Mountains contemporary.