Autobiography of My Mother

by Meg Stewart

  For our honeymoon, we went to the Duckmaloi River, near Bathurst, New South Wales. Doug planned to fish for trout; I would sketch. We drove – Doug had borrowed a car from someone at the Bulletin. As we approached the wild, hilly Duckmaloi country, I thought I was having double vision with the heat. If I looked out of the car window, the hills seemed to be moving. The hills were alive with rabbits. It was a rabbit plague.

  The boarding house was run by hospitable people called Richards. We were to spend many summers to come with them. The mother and daughter were the most wonderful cooks. I was immediately won over by their cat, which used to catch a rabbit every day for his dinner – it wouldn’t have been too hard that first summer – then come into the kitchen for a cup of tea. He drank his tea from a saucer with milk and sugar.

  It was one of the hottest Decembers on record, far too hot for me to go sketching, so I stayed at the house engrossed in Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony which Doug had brought along for himself. One day it was so hot that even Doug retreated from the river. The coolest spot we found was under the house, along with the fowls that had also taken refuge there.

  I had seen snakes in the country before, but never as many as I saw that year at Duckmaloi. Brown and tiger snakes in the paddocks, black snakes down by the river banks or swimming effortlessly across the stream. Even up at the house we had to keep a watchful eye.

  On a rare cooler day, I went down to paint the river. Warily I surveyed the single tussock on the bank and peered at the surrounding stubble. Not a sign of a snake. I was about to drop my rubber painting cushion down on the tussock when an enormous red-bellied black snake uncurled itself. You couldn’t believe that such a long snake could be so tightly wound up as to be invisible. I fled screaming and the snake made off rapidly in the opposite direction. The snake was as frightened as I was, I think.

  I also learned the alarming lesson that Jersey bulls jump fences. I had ventured out painting alone. No sooner had I carefully put down my rubber cushion by a paddock side and begun work than down the road a Jersey bull came trotting, followed by a man on horseback and a couple of dogs. Man on horseback or not, I wasn’t taking any chances with a bull. Trout fishermen aren’t the only ones whose ears are attuned for a bull bellow; bulls are also the bane of landscape artists.

  Paints and paper left where they were, I scrambled over the paddock fence. ‘Better to be sure than sorry,’ I reassured myself. Glancing back at the road, I saw to my horror the bull leap neatly across the fence. The man on horseback was singing out and cracking his whip, but the bull took not the slightest notice.

  I clambered back to the other side of the fence. The bull followed suit.

  My heart was beating faster than ever, but this time the man caught up with the bull and drove him off up the road, to my infinite relief. I collapsed beside my paints to recover.

  Despite the heat, the snakes and the bull, I began to discover the advantages of being the wife of a fisherman and a poet. As well as joys like fresh rainbow trout for breakfast, I loved the wonder of the countryside. I saw my first echidna at Duckmaloi; I watched spellbound as the spiky ball dug itself out of sight in a few minutes. I admired a sparrow hawk which sat poised on a branch regarding us, and scanned the bush for the brilliant flash of parrots’ wings. In a hole in the ground that was covered with grass I found a skylark’s nest with three brown speckled eggs in it. I also combed clumps of grass for singing, jet-black cicadas. At Easter, on our next trip, I found little nodding greenhood orchids with a rare red stripe.

  Over the years I’ve collected other treasures, like the eagles’ feathers I put in with a bunch of wildflowers, bentwing swift moths to take home and paint in still lifes, lichen-patterned granite boulders, coloured river stones, rippling tea-tree driftwood branches.

  All this and painting, too. No meals to get, no shopping, no housework; just sheets of pure white paper, some sable brushes and my tubes of watercolour. Trout fishing holidays have been a treat. I still have a gold and green Easter painting I did of the willows at Duckmaloi, which Doug loved.

  In Sydney after the honeymoon, I moved into Larbert with Doug. Mrs Connelly, the dainty, diminutive Irish landlady with beautifully waved hair, offered Doug a larger flat now he was a married man. The new flat was on the third floor, quite luxurious with a separate bedroom and a little sitting room.

  We held many small dinner parties at Larbert. Tall, sandy Francis Webb ate with us once, and I couldn’t get over how serious he was for such a young man.

  Larbert ran from Crick Avenue through to Greenknowe Avenue and our flat faced Greenknowe Avenue. A tomcat used to appear on the pavement below, asking for food. ‘Greenknowe Tom’ we christened him. Every night I fed him out of our window. I threw the meat three floors down; he never missed a meal.

  When I first started living at Larbert I was intrigued by how you saw life through the windows of the flats nearby. The blinds in the flats were often half-drawn so that you couldn’t see a person’s head. All that was visible was an anonymous portion of anatomy reaching from their neck to just below their pyjama cord. In the morning I would watch a portion of body with an arm attached pour itself a glass of water. Next the arm would squeeze some orange juice into three glasses, then it would vanish. Later the arm would come back and make a pot of tea, before disappearing again. This performance was repeated again and again, to my continuing fascination.

  I was also surprised by the number of canaries in cages you could see in the windows of flats six or seven storeys up. In other windows people had neat rows of plants in small pots.

  The Cross itself was enchanting, full of fruit and flower shops which delighted me. The atmosphere was friendly and we often strolled at night. In hot weather we used to walk down past Kincoppal to the little park at the bottom of Elizabeth Bay and watch the harbour. I remember painting a lovely white yacht there one summer’s evening.

  Our favourite restaurant, Lindy’s, made delicious lemon and chocolate meringue pies. It was hard to resist indulging in Lindy’s meringue. Lindy was a refugee who had come out from Europe before the war. He vigilantly supervised the running of his restaurant and was never off the premises. But Lindy met an awful fate.

  ‘Have you heard the news about Lindy?’ Gladys Connelly greeted me one morning as I opened the front door of the flat. Gladys was one of our landlady’s two very large grown-up daughters who lived at Larbert.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘It would make you go to church on Sundays,’ Gladys pronounced ominously.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, startled.

  Gladys recounted the sad story. Lindy’s kitchen was in the basement. A small lift in which the food came up and down ran between the restaurant and the kitchen. We often saw Lindy anxiously peering down the shaft, checking the working apparatus, we supposed. This night Lindy was looking in the column when the lift fell down on his head. That was the end of Lindy. Gladys was right. It was enough to make you go to church on Sundays.

  Beatrice McCaughey had given me a sum of money as a wedding present and with it we bought a tiny dark green secondhand Ford Prefect. Until we rented a garage, Doug used to park the car on the corner of Greenknowe Avenue where the post office is, which was a block of vacant land.

  The little car made a big difference to our lives. Now we could go painting or exploring at will. We liked beaches, most of all Warriewood, especially in winter. Unbuilt on, unspoilt, steep sandstone headlands protected a swirl of white foaming surf. We had to clamber down to the sand on foot.

  Once, Claudia Forbes-Woodgate and a friend saw me perched precariously halfway up the Warriewood cliff. I was looking intently down at the water and every so often I put something down on a sheet of paper in front of me.

  Both being artists they were intrigued by this. This was before Claudia and I had met but the friend thought she recognised me and climbed up the cliff for a closer inspection.

  ‘That’s Margaret Coen,’ she reported to Claud
ia, ‘and she’s trying to do a wave.’

  The wave worked out well; Howard Hinton bought it for his Armidale collection. Years later when we moved to St Ives, I met Claudia properly. We exhibited together at the Watercolour Institute and the Royal Art and became close friends.

  Beatrice McCaughey was also involved with the most unusual visitors I ever had at 12 Bridge Street. Grandma Coen’s sister, the nun, who was by now very old, wrote me a letter asking if the nuns could come and see my pictures. I thought she meant two nuns – herself and one other. I wrote back agreeing and a time was made for their visit.

  The day I was expecting the nuns Beatrice rang up and wanted to see me. I dutifully took myself round to the Hotel Australia. After having had just a couple of gins with her – Beatrice was rather partial to gins by now – I managed to escape. The nuns were due at two-thirty. It was two o’clock when I began rushing back to the studio. As I came flying down Bridge Street I saw what looked like a black cloud rolling down the hill from George Street and disappearing into number 12.

  The nuns had arrived half an hour early. They were clustered blackly round the door of the studio by the time I’d climbed the stairs. Not two nuns. Nine nuns. The shades of Venus and Apollo, to say nothing of Bacchus, must have been in a state at such a visitation, I wrote in an account of the afternoon that I sent up to Norman. Anyway, I let the nuns in. There was no time to open the windows or clean my teeth to get rid of the perfume of gin. However, it all seemed to be going quite well until one took a deep ecstatic breath and said, ‘You can tell it’s a studio, smell the turps.’

  I immediately flung the widows wide open. She took another deep breath and repeated that she loved the smell of turps and paint. I replied that I did too. But some people find it oppressive, I added. Then I offered her a chair to sit on because I didn’t want her fainting on me. Somehow she missed the chair and ended up on the floor.

  ‘I can assure you I have not been to a public house on the way,’ she proceeded to announce.

  No, but I have, I felt like replying. The afternoon passed relatively smoothly after that. The nuns duly departed. I hardly had time to heave a sigh of relief before Beatrice arrived with nine boxes of beautiful chocolates and nine bouquets of flowers for my visitors. Beatrice and I had to jump into a taxi and chase the nuns out to Enmore where they were staying.

  At the time it was like being in the middle of a mad dream. Afterwards my only fear, as I concluded in my letter to Norman, was that the nuns would pass the word on about the flowers and chocolates, and start calling on the studio en masse.

  I didn’t stop painting for a minute after I was married. I kept the studio on. When I wasn’t painting landscapes on car excursions with Doug, I worked on my usual flower pieces. I used to get exasperated in summer when I had to keep doing variations of roses and lilies. Apart from those two flowers, often all I seemed to be able to find at florists were zinnias, zinnias, zinnias, which I couldn’t come at because they reminded me of the rather formal flower painting of an artist called Albert Sherman. I used to long for April when the flowers would improve. Spring flowers with delicate forms and colour were what I found most appealing.

  In 1946 I had a show at the Centennial Galleries in Brisbane. The war had stopped me having more solo exhibitions before that. I didn’t go up to Brisbane because travelling was so expensive, but the show almost sold out and the relayed accounts of its success were thrilling, to say nothing of the financial remuneration.

  Norman wrote a very flattering introduction for the catalogue in which he talked about the ‘full brush’ method of watercolour painting, when ‘a brush is loaded with water and pigment’. There were twenty-one watercolours of flowers and seven watercolour landscapes, as well as seven oil flower studies and one landscape in oils called Near Duckmaloi. My painting of the yacht at Elizabeth Bay was included, and another was again titled From Merle’s Garden in tribute to Mick Blunden’s Kurrajong retreat and her generosity with flowers.

  The following year, to Doug’s and my great delight, I was pregnant. We dearly wanted children.

  No morning sickness, not a pain or an ache. The nine months passed without a hitch and only in the last few weeks did my feet start to swell. They were so swollen that I had to buy a pair of men’s shoes. John Fountain from the Bulletin got them afterwards; nice blue suede shoes, they were.

  I amused my doctor. About a month before the birth was due, I called in for my routine check-up, carrying a shopping basket with a bottle of milk and a few other things.

  ‘You’re off home now, are you?’ he asked kindly as I stood up to leave.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I replied. ‘Actually, I’m on my way in to the studio. I have a painting to finish.’

  We decided to move out of Larbert and live at the studio. Crick Avenue was up three floors; a long way to carry a baby and baby things. Bridge Street had two flights of stairs which was an improvement and the front room was enormous. We had much more space.

  We organised ourselves into the studio just before Christmas. The baby was due at the beginning of January. Almost the last morning at the Cross we woke up very early. It was intolerably hot and breathless so we drove down to Bondi and walked along the beach. The beach at that hour is at its best. The water and walk revived me and I’ve never forgotten them.

  The worst of the move was having a refrigerator installed. Our new refrigerator arrived one morning just as Doug and I were having breakfast. The two men who delivered it were very indignant at being expected to carry such a heavy load up two flights of stairs. After ranting at us for non-stop for about five minutes they announced they were taking the fridge away again.

  Doug was furious and told them he was going over to the Bulletin office to arrange for ‘a gang of men’ to help shift it. After another five minutes Doug arrived back with the journalist Phil Dorter and two huge men, whose job was to haul the great rolls of newsprint around. Between the lot of them, amid much grunting and groaning, they managed to move the fridge upwards. Being summer made it even more uncomfortable for them, of course. They had just negotiated the awkward bend in the stairs when the tiny cleaner who worked in the building appeared.

  ‘Don’t you mark them walls,’ she scolded. ‘If you do Mr Parker will shoot the lot of yous.’

  Mr Parker, who owned the building, was the most proper of old gentlemen. He always wore a flower in his buttonhole and, needless to say, would never have dreamed of shooting anyone.

  The studio was much the same as when Norman had been in residence except I had moved in my mirror that I had in my very first studio in Margaret Street. Norman’s bookcases with the boxes underneath for drawings were there; he couldn’t be bothered having them moved up to Springwood. His lacquered screen covered the odd little square-shaped stove. It was years before I had a proper gas stove.

  I bought a round cedar table and a cedar sideboard from an auction shop in William Street, a couple of comfortable chairs which I re-covered, and a set of delicate cedar dining chairs from the auction rooms opposite in Bridge Street. These were a mistake, because the backs were so frail that they broke whenever a male guest leaned back after dinner.

  We weren’t short of company. Doug’s friends from the Bulletin, Ron McCuaig, John Fountain and Phil Dorter, often dropped in for lunch or dinner. Cecil Mann from the Bulletin never came to the studio, but his wife knitted me a beautiful blue and white coat for the baby. Beatrice McCaughey brought a parcel of oysters to celebrate the move. Beryl McCuaig was a frequent visitor who always made me laugh with her quick wit and gossipy anecdotes.

  The first night I spent in the studio, I woke about three in the morning. An incredible clatter was going on, clanging and banging. I couldn’t make out what the noise was; it sounded like a battalion of tanks rolling down the street.

  God, I thought, not another war.

  It was the street cleaners.

  ‘We’ll never be able to stay here,’ I whispered agitatedly to Doug who was now awake too. ‘We can’t
be woken up like this every night.’ I was well and truly alarmed.

  Strangely enough, that was the first and only night the noise of the street cleaners woke or worried me.

  A lane ran down the side of 12 Bridge Street into another lane between Bridge and Dalley streets. Our bedroom windows faced onto this back lane while the front windows opened onto the side lane. More life went on in the lane behind the studio than I ever saw at the Cross. Drunks naturally congregated there, robberies were common, there were bashings and rapes, heterosexual and homosexual.

  As well as harbouring assorted misdeeds, the lanes were great getaway routes for villains. It was possible to go from Bridge Street to Circular Quay via the lanes without entering either Pitt or George streets. The Dalley Street lane led into another lane and so on down to the harbour.

  Our windows overlooked the little lane at the side of the studio. These windows faced the nor’easter so the winter sun came in, making it nice and warm, but there was a sheer drop from all the windows. The thought of that drop and a baby terrified me. So Phil Dorter came over and fixed bars outside the window for me, to my relief.

  Christmas came and went. Doug and I took a showboat trip up Middle Harbour. The ferry shuddered and shook the whole way and we were both convinced the baby was going to be born on the showboat, but the infant stayed put.

  On New Year’s Eve we stayed in the studio and didn’t go up to the Cross for the procession, the first time we missed it in years. It was January.

  Doug had booked a private car to take me to hospital; our own car was garaged out of the city. I don’t know why we didn’t think of calling for an ambulance. Stella Kidgell and Isa Lorrimer said we could use either of their phones when the time came. (There was no phone in the studio.) I painted placidly on. There wasn’t anything else to do. Unlike my hastily purchased wedding dress, this time I had shown some foresight and collected a layette for the baby.