Georgia Blain has published four novels: Closed for Winter, Candelo, The Blind Eye and Names for Nothingness. Two of her novels have been optioned for feature films, including Closed for Winter, which went into production as Elise in 2007. She has been published in Australia and overseas, with her work appearing in publications such as Granta and The Independent Magazine.
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Births Deaths Marriages
ePub ISBN 9781742743981
Kindle ISBN 9781742743998
A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
First published by Vintage in 2008
Copyright © Georgia Blain, 2008
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.
Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Blain, Georgia.
Births deaths marriages.
978 1 74166 748 6 (pbk.)
Blain, Georgia.
Authors, Australian – 20th century – Biography.
A823.3
Cover photograph courtesy of the author
Cover design by Gayna Murphy, Greendot Design
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Imprint Page
Acknowledgements
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
STRANGE TIMES
SARDINES
THE GERMAINE TAPE
NO GOING BACK
SIXTEEN
GETTING IN THE BOAT
THE STORY MY MOTHER TELLS ME
THE OUTSIDE COUNTRY
THE FINAL ANALYSIS
CLOSE TO THE BONE
TOP DOG
WRITING ABOUT US
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN (2)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are a number of people who helped in writing this book. In particular, I’d like to thank Jane Gleeson-White, Susan Hampton, Debbie Lee and Drusilla Modjeska, who advised me on earlier drafts. My agent, Fiona Inglis, was a wonderful support, and Ali Lavau, Nikki Christer and Sophie Ambrose were an important part of the last stages. I also received invaluable assistance in the form of a scholarship from the University of Western Sydney and an Australian Postgraduate Award.
Writing this collection took some years, and during this time I published the following individual pieces: ‘Strange Times’, published as ‘Mao Comes to Sydney’ in Granta 95: Loved Ones; ‘The Germaine Tape’, in Granta 70: Australia; ‘The Story My Mother Tells Me’, in Griffith Review 10: Family Politics and also in A Revealed Life, ABC Books; ‘The Outside Country’, Independent Magazine, UK, 2000; ‘The Final Analysis’, Independent Magazine, UK, 2001; ‘Writing About Us’, Best Australian Essays, Black Inc, 2006. Thank you to the editors who advised on those drafts.
When you write about your own life, you inevitably write about the lives of other people you have known. I have changed some names to try to give privacy to certain people who appear in this collection. This is not possible for those who are closest to me – Anne, Andrew and Odessa. I know becoming part of a book hasn’t been entirely easy, and I am extraordinarily grateful to them for letting me do what I do.
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
YESTERDAY, I SAW THE HOUSE IN WHICH I GREW UP advertised for sale. An old sandstone house, set well back off the street, it is surrounded by green lawn, camellias and roses, all bordered by a dry stone wall. The area was once mixed, a Sydney suburb that people with money were discovering. It is now simply wealthy, a place where lawyers and bankers bring up their families; the hushed streets stretching along a peninsula that has a river on each side. Although the house looked the same as I remembered it, the advertising copy told me how much it had changed. Extensively renovated over the last thirty years, it now had a conservatory, a library, an indoor heated pool and a temperature-controlled wine cellar.
‘Look,’ I told my daughter, Odessa, and I pointed to the picture in the paper.
She leant over my shoulder. ‘It’s big,’ she said, clearly impressed by the size of the place. ‘Where did you sleep?’ she asked.
I showed her. Off the landing between the first and second storeys, I could lie in my bed and look out across the dark green tops of the trees moving with a gentle rhythm beneath the evening sky.
I pointed out each of the rooms to her, remembering small details as I did so: the striped wallpaper in the lounge, the brown vinyl beanbags and seagrass matting in the sunroom, the batik wall hanging in the dining room; random images that had remained from childhood, some as clear as if I were still standing in front of them, others less certain in their definition.
‘And this was where my mother worked,’ I said, touching the window in the photograph.
Wedged between the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom, it was the smallest room in the house, only just big enough to fit her desk, her chair and, above her, a set of built-in bookshelves. She painted the walls a glossy chocolate to give it some presence, despite the fact that it was unfashionable. The single window, framed by bright orange curtains, looked out over the garden. When it was warm, she kept it open, the milky sweetness of the camellias mingling with the stale smell of cigarettes. This was where she wrote, the typewriter keys clattering in intense bursts, followed by the sulphurous flare of a match as she lit another Kool Menthol, sat back and read over what she had just written.
I looked at the advertisement again.
‘Did you like it there?’ Odessa asked.
I did, although I was aware of how inadequate my words were. It was the place where I grew up, and as such it was more than simply a collection of rooms. To ask me if I’d liked it there was to ask me if I’d liked my childhood and, as anyone who has been asked that question would know, there’s no simple answer.
Later, as I was writing in my own workroom, I called my mother to tell her I’d seen the house for sale. She answered the phone as she always does, using her full name and not just her first, the greeting of someone in an office, not a home. I could hear the choral music she was listening to playing in the background, punctuated by the sound of her printer, the inkjet grinding slightly as it imprinted the words on each page. She was finishing her speech for a friend’s book launch.
‘Are you done yet?’ my brothers and I used to ask her, hovering in the doorway of her study because this was the place where, despite its size, we frequently found ourselves congregating.
She would wave her hand in the air, signalling that she wanted a few minutes more.
The three of us would groan, slumping against the wall and sliding down to the ground, where we sprawled across the floor and made little pretence of keeping quiet.
‘You said you’d be a second,’ one of us would complain.
‘It’s been ages,’ another would add.
She would stub out her cigarette, a fine plume of smoke still rising as she began to type again, clack, clack, clack, followed by the furious zing of the carriage return. She was on a roll, and oblivious to the protestations of her three children.
She worked in that brown room in the mornings and evenings, preparing her radio program for the next day, or writing her weekly column for an evening paper. It was the 1970s and social change was on the agenda. Listening to Joan Baez or Harry Belafonte, she didn’t confine herself to what was then seen as appropriate for a female journalist: social comings and goings, domestic portraits and stories. She was, and is, a woman who does as she wants. There have been many times when I’ve thought I’ve convinced her to behave in a particular way; from small matters, like hanging a picture in a certain spot, to larger ones, like not taking on a job. She appears to agree with me, and then she goes ahead with the course of action she had always intended. She wanted to write about the changes that were occurring in the world, and she did, tempering these pieces with vignettes of our daily lives. The stories about her children, her husband and life in that sandstone house ran through her political commentary with sufficient frequency to help her tread that fine line between delivering pieces that were expected from a woman, and writing what she wanted.
She has kept most of these columns, each with her photo at the top, and her by-line, ‘Anne Deveson’, in large print. They are clipped and pasted in scrapbooks, neatly stacked in an old trunk in her workroom (a room that is the largest in the house in which she now lives on her own). When I visit her, this is where we invariably end up talking. Sometimes, while I wait for her to finish a telephone call, I open the trunk and read these articles, skipping over her social commentary to the paragraphs about our family, bemused by the blandness of the picture they present; they record events as innocuous as a birthday party, the comic and wise words of one of her children, or perhaps a painful moment in growing up. When I look at similar articles written today, they are not all that different. They may discuss matters such as divorce, death or loss more than they once did, but most of today’s articles are still quick, easily digestible fodder that make no attempt to unpick the complexities, pain and joys of life.
I read sections out loud to her, and she takes the clipping from me, grimacing slightly as she looks closer.
‘Did I really write that?’ She puts it down. ‘I was probably tired,’ she says. ‘It was hard coming up with something new every week.’
I have no doubt it would have been, although at the time I would have had little awareness of the pressure of her job. She was in the paper, on the radio and on television. The fact that she spent a lot of time in her workroom was simply what she did. We didn’t question it. She was a media personality before the term came into existence and it always seemed to be a role she filled with ease.
Under the neatly labelled scrapbooks in the trunk are the double-page magazine spreads that show my mother and her friends at parties and openings. They are like Hollywood glamour shots; richly coloured images of guests clustering together, wearing sixties clothes that now seem fashionable again; bright peacock fabrics, shift dresses that swing, and sharply pressed suits. They raise their martini glasses and lift an eyebrow as they reach for a devil on horseback, or a cracker topped with an oily smoked oyster.
My mother once again takes the clipping from me.
‘God, look at her,’ and she points to a hairdo that is lacquered stiff with spray, the colour an extraordinary blonde. She picks up another of the pictures. ‘He always drank too much,’ and the man in question does seem to lean precariously towards the bosom of the woman opposite him, the olive in his cocktail in danger of slipping out of the glass. Her gaze drifts to herself.
‘You know,’ she tells me, ‘I wasted so much time thinking I was unattractive.’
She was younger than I am now when she wrote her column and when those pictures were taken. It is a strange realisation. When I was a child, she was simply my mother, but now, as I find myself right in the middle, my daughter on one side, and her on the other, I know how limited this view was. I am my mother’s age, I find myself thinking, as though my mother remains locked within a particular bracket of years. And it is only as I slip into this same bracket that I realise how closely I circumscribed her, making her incapable of thinking or feeling beyond the limited orbit of me, the child. But she is there, in those pictures, holding out the microphone as she conducts an interview, smiling as she herself is interviewed, drinking at a cocktail party in a dress that she thinks doesn’t flatter her, maybe flirting, maybe watching her husband flirt, arguing with him in the darkness of the car as they drive home, feeling tired and hungover as she attempts to work the next morning; living a life that stretched out beyond my small reach. And as I try to reassess, I am aware of another presence, right there: my daughter busily closing me within confines similar to those that I once sought for my mother. It is a ceaseless unfolding, the bolt of cloth softly thumping on the table as it is rolled back to reveal more of a pattern that will repeat itself, with minor variations, over and over again.
At the bottom of the trunk are the most intriguing images. These are the Women’s Weekly family portraits that were taken on the verandah of our house, and I lay them out to look at all of us together.
My older brother, Jonathan, stands with his head tilted to one side, his eyes squinting. The tilt was, my mother has explained, a result of the stroke he had at birth, leaving his left side weaker than his right; a weakness that reappeared whenever he was tired or stressed. In the family pictures, he nearly always leans in towards my mother. He was unconfident and awkward, and from about twelve years old, often in trouble. It was small misdemeanours at first – shoplifting, smoking and drinking – until, when he was about seventeen, none of us could ignore the fact that we were dealing with something more than just a difficult phase.
I am next to my father. A compliant child, I knew how to keep his temper at bay. I have my long blonde hair neatly brushed and tied back with a ribbon. I am wearing a favourite dress and I smile brightly, hoping I’m making us look just like the family in my mother’s articles. My father stands close to me. His eyes are focused on the garden path, as if he would like to sweep clear the leaves that have blown across while the photo was being set up. His hand is resting on our family dog, his knuckles visible as he attempts to restrain her from coming too close and ruining his slacks with a fine layer of her white hair. Standing on his other side, my mother looks directly at the camera, her smile professional, but warm. At her feet, my younger brother, Joshua, plays with a small wooden truck. His hair is in ringlets and he wears terry towelling shorts that would always fall down; too young to know the strangeness of participating in this image, he is the most unaware of the camera, although even he wouldn’t have been unaware of our family dynamics.
There is an age, now, to those pictures of my childhood. Each time I look at them I see the life that exists beyond the borders, staining our smiles, our postures, or the angle at which one of us inclines towards the other. But could a stranger hold up one of those prints and catch a glimpse of us as we really were, should they care to look closely? I have picked up old snapshots in markets, discarded photographs in discarded albums, and I’ve tried to imagine what the people in them were like, tried to see beyond the obvious. Eventually the pictures I have of Odessa, of my new family, will also be tinted with age, teasing portraits of people that once existed. They will become relics of a past, ready to be thrown out with all the other remnants of a life that has been and gone.
The articles my mother wrote in her small brown workroom were like snapshots, presenting a tailored version of who we were not diss
imilar to the pictures that sometimes accompanied them. But gradually these stories also changed. The vignettes in her earlier newspaper columns began to make way for something new; a different account of our family life, one that incorporated so much of what lay beneath the surface. Because, when he was about seventeen, Jonathan was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and it became very difficult for my mother to write about us in the way she once had.
However, when I try to recall the past, I find it is those older clippings, and the photos that go with them, rather than her later work, that reminds me most strongly of the child I was, fervently longing for the life my mother portrayed in her articles. I hoped those stories would hide the truth of our family from others. The problem was, although I knew they did not accurately reflect who we were, I thought they did reflect the way in which everyone else lived, and my consciousness of what I perceived to be a huge difference between us and those other families was acute. My father’s obsession with order, his moods; my parents’ fights and, later, my brother’s illness marked us out, in my mind, as strange. Families like the one she wrote about did exist (or so I thought), but we weren’t one of them.
It wasn’t until years later that I realised the obvious – the difference between us and that mythical normal family I was certain existed, was in fact the fiction. There was no standard against which we could measure ourselves. The ordinary that we hold up for public viewing can always be mined to reveal layers of the extraordinary. Most lives hold countless stories, with each capable of being told in so many different ways. We take snapshots, occasions that are marked and others that are more everyday – birthdays, weddings, a child playing in the garden with a friend – and on the surface these images do little more than record that instant in a way we’d like to remember it; an image of a happy moment. We all have photo albums filled with such pictures, and they provide a record of one layer of our lives, but there is always so much more, and it swims, shimmering beneath the surface, glittering with all the inherent contradictions of who we are, the changes that time brings, the very elusiveness of a life slipping through our fingers. As I pause to look at my life now (and I do so more often than I used to), I see everything from the place where I now stand, right in the middle, a generation on each side. But of course, I can never remain still, and all that I find will change as I keep moving, treading on the heels of those in front of me, while those behind keep right on my tail.
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