by Meg Stewart
Michael O’Dwyer had his own farm; mostly stones and heather, with a few black Kerry cattle. Ireland was still a poor country. He invited us to afternoon tea. For the occasion he wore his best clothes and hat. Ceremoniously he prepared our afternoon tea, toast and bacon grilled over the open peat fire.
In return we invited him to dinner at Mrs Fitzgerald’s. He impressed Doug with his infinite capacity for glassfuls of neat whiskey followed by porter. They seemed to have no visible effect on him. Sneem was surrounded by the blue hills of Kerry, dotted with old grey houses, which I painted. A few kilometres away on the coast was Kenmare where the Irish left in their thousands for the New World. Straight into sailing ships they went, paying £10 for passage money, their belongings wrapped in a handkerchief. Big handkerchiefs they must have been.
Strangely, the low-lying hills and little white villages of Kerry reminded me of the country between Bowning and Cootamundra in New South Wales; I could see why the Irish fitted so easily into that part of Australia.
We spent a week in Kerry before heading north again through Limerick and Galway to look for the Coens in Tuam.
Tuam was only a day’s drive from Kerry. At the crossroads in the centre of the town was a Celtic cross erected in the eleventh century. We arrived at about six o’clock in the evening, drove up the main street and parked outside a food shop. I had thought Tuam would be a small village, but it was quite a size, about as large as Goulburn. I had no idea where or how we were going to locate the Coens.
I sent Doug to ask at the hotel if anyone knew of any Coens living thereabouts while I walked along the main street for about a quarter of a mile, then turned off down a side street. None of the shops was open, but eventually I came across a chemist who was still trading. I went in and asked him if he knew any Coens. He paused for a moment and thought.
‘I used to have a Mary Coen work for me,’ he answered. ‘She’s married now to a man called Dempsey and lives in the High Street.’
This was the main street from which I had come so I retraced my steps and looked for the Dempseys’ house number that the chemist had given me. We had parked our car outside her very house; Mrs Dempsey lived behind the food shop. I rang the doorbell.
The brown-haired woman who answered was Mary Dempsey née Coen. She could hardly speak for excitement when I explained who we were. There and then she invited us to dinner.
The Coens, she told us, actually lived a few miles outside Tuam in a village spelled ‘Cloonemore’ but pronounced more like ‘Curramore’. This was the place my father had written about in his honeymoon diary. After dinner Mary Dempsey drove us out to Cloonemore to meet a snowy-haired old man, my father’s cousin, who had a farm there with a trout stream running through it.
The excitement at this reunion was even more intense. We were overwhelmed with Coens of all ages and sizes; some brown-haired, some red-haired. Sadly we could only spend one night with them, for we had to leave early the next morning to catch the boat to Glasgow.
Our trip abroad was nearly over. Going back to Ireland and meeting my family had been wonderful. I understood where I had come from and felt very close to Michael O’Dwyer and all those Coens. But I missed our raw new home, the space and light of Australia.
‘’Ow are you, mate?’ Sitting on the back steps the day after we arrived back, the laconic pan man paused in mid-dash and flashed a smile at us. This was the best welcome I could have had; I knew I was really back in Australia.
Our feline family had grown. The black stray, christened Mrs Tiddles by the English couple who had rented the house in our absence, had produced kittens and they had kept us one, a tabby with an M-shaped marking on his forehead. In true British fashion, the couple called the kitten Monte. I affectionately dubbed him Monte Bello. Two Italian brothers who were building a house on the block of land next door were also fond of cats. One morning, Monte and I were inspecting the work in progress.
‘And how is Bella Vista?’ they tenderly greeted Monte Bello.
More and more cats arrived. Mrs Tiddles and Monte Bello were joined by Mrs Tiddles’s snow-white kitten Snowball. Then there was the fragile Mink who arrived a kitten waif on the front doorstep, another stray, a battered old tom called Dusty who was followed by the one-eyed reprobate Black Jack and his two daughters, Wild and Tame. The Tonkinese Fang was a Paddington pedigree who retired to salubrious St Ives and had a playmate named Ginger. Ginger belonged to someone else but he loved Fang so desperately he deserted his own perfectly pleasant home for ours and refused ever to go back.
The last arrivals were a family of four, a mother and three kittens, wild to the point of being feral. Patiently we caught them in a possum trap borrowed from a neighbour and took them to be desexed. The vet shook his head doubtfully. We might tame the kittens, he said, never the mother. But having secured a home for her offspring, the mother cat quietly dropped dead under a bush in the garden.
The three matching kittens looked like shadows of each other. Spotty, Princess and Buffy knew a good thing when they were on it and they have succumbed without hesitation to the comforts of home. Daily they escort me around the garden, weaving about my feet so they almost trip me, delighted at being alive and being pets (and also at being fed).
Our L-shaped brick bungalow was cramped when we first moved in but we managed. If he was at home, Doug wrote in the bedroom and would lock himself in immediately after breakfast. I would scurry around frantically beforehand to get the room in order; after breakfast I had to move like lightning to beat him in. Once ensconced, he remained there, intermittently clacking on the typewriter until lunchtime, while I painted in the lounge room.
On Tuesday mornings I gave art lessons. Eight to ten women crowded into the lounge room with their easels and drew for the morning. One pupil, Pat Betar, provided a series of mouth-watering cakes for morning tea. My pupils started trying to outdo each other’s culinary skills. Tuesday mornings became more a cake class than a painting lesson. Pat Betar still makes me a wonderful Christmas pudding every year. I enjoyed those classes and made a lot of dear friends.
Things soon became much more spacious at St Ives. After a few years we built on a long room at the front of the house with large windows looking out on the garden. This became my studio. One half of it, at least; the other half served as a new lounge room. There was much more room for painting class now and, more importantly, my painting area could be left undisturbed. The rest of the household, as well as any visitors who arrived, were under strict instructions not to venture there. Doug or Meg could bring me a cup of tea but that was it.
Eventually Doug also had his own work room overlooking the garden, so we were safely separated in working hours. It was here many years later he finished his last book, a diary of the garden. He was quite sick with emphysema at the time – how sick we didn’t realise – and found using the keys on the typewriter he’d had for years too much of an effort. Instead he wrote the garden diary by hand. But that is jumping ahead.
Living at St Ives meant we had fewer informal callers than in the Bulletin studio days. We relied on a smaller circle of close friends: Rosemary Dobson and her husband Alec Bolton who lived nearby at Gordon, Beatrice Davis, Ken Slessor, solemn in his bow tie, with the slightest twinkle hidden in his pale blue eyes. We spent long, happy evenings with Nancy Keesing and her husband Mark Hertzberg. There was the occasional flying visit from the ever-handsome, ever-charming, ever-outrageous David Campbell.
Perhaps our most memorable dinner party was the John Betjeman night.
Norman Williams, the British Council representative in Australia who had become a friend, invited us to a reception for the English poet John Betjeman. Betjeman was supposed to be mad about insects, so I went down to the garden and dug out an extremely glossy, beautiful centipede as a present for him.
The centipede was put in a jar wrapped up in fancy paper. I tied a ribbon round the neck in a bow, like a proper present, and handed him the jar at the reception. Betjeman was delighted with
his present. The size of the centipede astonished him; I think it quite terrified him.
Betjeman had a big wide smile and an effusive, warm personality. He won over everyone at the reception, including Doug, particularly since he had carefully read a few of Doug’s works.
Going home in the car, Doug groaned. ‘God, what have I done?’ he said.
‘What have you done?’ I asked.
‘Invited Betjeman to dinner,’ he replied.
I nearly groaned myself. Our house wasn’t suited for entertaining on a grand scale.
‘Betjeman wants to meet R. D. FitzGerald and Ken Slessor,’ Doug announced as if that settled it. There were to be no doubts about the dinner.
I had a week’s grace. Nancy and Mark were coming; about ten people in all. I started desperately casting my mind over menus. What on earth would I cook?
It was summer and I knew the night would be hot. By some saving grace, the meal suddenly came to me. Avocados filled with trout for the entree (avocados were still a rarity then), chicken in aspic for the main course, with a special potato salad recipe I had learned as a child in Yass, for which mashed potatoes are moulded and chilled until they can be sliced like a cake. For dessert, I filled a pawpaw with cut-up pineapple pieces and the pineapple halves with strawberries Romanoff.
The dessert evolved from two sources. The recipe for the strawberries came from a book called The Garrulous Gourmet by William Wallace Irwin, who was an American food writer in Paris in the 1940s. The macédoine of fruit was inspired by another book, Those Rich and Great Ones. This was written in the 1930s by the famous French chef Henri Charpentier. Henri cooked for the likes of Sarah Bernhardt and the Prince of Wales in both Paris and the south of France, before opening a restaurant in New York. The combination of the two recipes looked suitably tropical and exotic, I felt.
There was no way I could fit everyone around our small cedar table. Nancy lent me some extra chairs and small side tables so we sat around the room, each at our own table.
The night was hot, the cicadas were drumming, the food was set out and ready. The guests had arrived, all except the guest of honour. We waited and waited. Doubt drifted into the house with the night-sweet perfume of the purple buddleia. Betjeman wasn’t coming, we suspected in our hearts.
But a car pulled up and the awkward silence turned to an expectant hush. Betjeman came walking up the front path.
An enormous garden spider had spun its web diagonally across the front porch between the lassiandra flowers and the front door. Betjeman stopped dead in front of the web, mesmerised by the spider. ‘The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!’ he exclaimed. ‘But aren’t you terrified that this monster from the jungle will invade the house?’
‘Oh, no, it’s harmless,’ I said. ‘It may look alarming hanging up there, but it’s quite harmless. Spiders that live underground are the dangerous ones.’
Betjeman lingered a few minutes more, admiring the monster from the jungle, then he joined the party. The room exploded into talk and it never ceased all night.
The poets were in great good humour and voice. One discussion I remember particularly was Slessor talking animatedly about Tennyson, Doug being eloquent about Browning, while FitzGerald boomed out Longfellow. Betjeman sent an appreciative letter from England thanking me for the dinner and making brief reference to the spider.
Later I picked up a copy of Vogue Australia, with a lengthy account of the dinner party – and the spider. Finally I saw an English Vogue in which Betjeman described a strange antipodean dinner party in a suburban bungalow guarded by a giant spider the size of a hand’s span.
It had been a fairly large spider, but not as large as that.
The same summer we had two cyclonic storms and the spider, now christened John Betjeman, survived them both, to my surprise. But not long afterwards I went out in the morning and John Betjeman had met the fate of many a garden spider. He was lying on the ground with his tummy picked open. I put him in a bottle in the sideboard; he’s been there ever since.
Then there were other unforgettable, special nights when Ken Slessor entertained us in his Chatswood establishment.
Ken meticulously prepared and presented the dinners himself; avocados again, filled with chilled consommé, superb rare roast beef, and afterwards, always port and walnuts. The polished furniture gleamed in the soft light like Ken’s own face beaming as he recalled and recounted anecdote after anecdote.
The verandah was full of aquariums belonging to his son Paul. The light shone through the tanks so the front room was lit by gleaming goldfish while the glittering lights of the city and beyond to the western suburbs lit up the back windows. We sat, caught in conversation, between two walls of golden light.
During our early years at St Ives I painted steadily. In 1958 I had an exhibition down at Canberra in what was described as a ‘new gallery space’, actually a disused army tin shed. It was the middle of winter and the weather was freezing; organising and hanging the show was far from comfortable. However, the exhibition was opened by the historian and scholar Archbishop Eris O’Brien, a gracious, humorous soul who lent some semblance of style to the occasion and soothed away other irritations. He was interested in painting and I gave him a couple of watercolour lessons in return for his opening the show. The next year, I had another exhibition at the Forum Club in Sydney.
Malcolm Ellis the historian presided over this opening and Ken Slessor bought two paintings for the Journalists’ Club. The show was made up of paintings on silk. Someone had brought me a roll of silk from Japan and I had started experimenting. For silk, you paint with the brush, not using any pencil, so you must be very sure and accurate about what you’re doing. If you are, the results are nice. The silk paintings have a delicate, almost luminous, ethereal quality. The paint sits on one side of the material. When you hold it up to the light, the back of the painting is quite free from pigment.
Painting on silk, I became so adept with a brush that now I hardly ever draw flower pieces, even on paper. I just paint. Any detailing I need is done with a fine brush. This keeps my watercolours clean, no pencil marks showing anywhere. I do sometimes draw landscapes first, or rather I make an outline with a few strokes, but still with a fine brush, not a pencil.
‘Let the water do it,’ was what Norman taught me about the secret of watercolour. No scrabbling around with a brush in thick paint; watercolours must be painted with plenty of water.
I do enjoy painting. Sometimes, though, it’s terribly hard to get started, despite all that advice I gave about getting to it in the morning after breakfast. Sometimes it’s equally hard to finish a painting. You will get three-quarters there and find your energy petering out, or you simply don’t know what to do next.
Don’t abandon the painting; just go ahead and finish it, is what I’ve learned.
Sometimes I thoroughly enjoy a painting all the way through. I love painting in the high Kosciusko country, with all its accompanying difficulties such as ants and flies. I have to douse myself in insect repellent and wrap up from head to toe in long-sleeved clothing and rugs. I spread a rug on the ground to ward off the ants and put another around my legs for the March flies with their deadly long stingers. Once I can contend with the ants and the flies, once I get started on a painting, I forget about them, except for the odd especially vicious nip from a March fly.
Painting the mountains became a regular summer pilgrimage for me. It grew out of Doug’s trout fishing trips when we stayed at a famous old boarding house called the Creel outside Jindabyne.
I found I had an affinity with the Kosciusko gums and clear mountain air really agrees with me.
I became aware of how attractive the blue of the trees is there. The bush has a lot of blue in it, but particularly this sort of peppermint gum with its pinky-whitish trunk. It took me quite a while to realise their distinct colouring.
While Doug went off fishing, I took myself up the hillsides and painted. My dedication to painting these trees long outlast
ed the now-drowned Creel and other places where we stayed. The best ones are halfway up the mountain; the trees that grow down by the rivers and trout streams are not the same.
Doug and I had a pact. Our holidays were divided into painting and fishing times. Doug organised himself around me and drove me about for the first half of our holiday and on the other half fishing took precedence. I really lived for that summer’s painting in the mountains.
I have painted alpine flowers, too, little silvery grey everlastings, dwarfed mossy heathers and strange black and orange-skinned corroboree frogs so like their namesake. But the Kosciusko road is cut off before the summit and I had to give this up because I couldn’t do the walking.
For the whole of the 1960s and some of the 1970s I concentrated on mixed exhibitions and local shows. I could earn a living from these without the added expense and bother of my own shows. I didn’t have another show of my own until I shared an exhibition with Arthur Murch at the Wagner Gallery, Paddington, in 1977. I have had an exhibition at Wagner’s every year since, except for 1983.
In 1969 I won the Pring Prize for watercolour (part of the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) with a Snowy Mountains painting called Dry Summer. The Daily Telegraph had a report about it, headed: ‘Housewife wins the Pring Prize’. A housewife is certainly not the way I have ever thought of myself! However Hal Missingham, the director of the Art Gallery, described the work as ‘straightforward and lyrical’, which was an improvement.
The Watercolour Institute has remained part of my life since I first exhibited there in 1934. I have been a committee member as well as vice-president. I’ve also maintained my involvement with the Royal Art Society.
Janna Bruce from Rubbo’s class and the Watercolour Institute has stayed my firm friend. Alison and George were also loyal members of the Institute and my close friends until they died. Alison and George remained devoted to each other and to art all their days. George’s longstanding association with the Watercolour Institute added to the bond between us. He died first and Alison asked Lloyd Rees, whom they both admired greatly, to speak at his funeral. Lloyd Rees spoke most movingly about George; only twelve months later he gave another oration, this time for Alison. I don’t think Alison could bear living without George.