Requiem with Yellow Butterflies

by James Halford

  Judith Wright holidayed regularly at Boreen Point in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland from 1953 until Jack McKinney’s death in 1966. Many of her poems from this particularly tense period of the Cold War express fear of atomic extinction from the perspective of a new parent:

  Bombs ripen on the leafless tree

  under which the children play.

  And there my darling all alone

  dances in the spying day.3

  We were feeling a bit like that over the summer of 2017, with the Trump inauguration shortly after our daughter’s birth, a new round of nuclear brinksmanship on the Korean peninsula, and R’s ecologist colleagues publishing a paper most weeks on how quickly the planet is cooking. To make matters worse, South-East Queensland sweltered in the mid-to high thirties from November through March. We were lucky to be able to retreat to my parents’ breezy lakeside weekender a couple of hours north of Brisbane. Re-reading Wright’s Cooloola poems from The Gateway (1953) to The Other Half (1966) over that long, hot Queensland summer, it was hard not to hear echoes of our own anxious times. Wright’s lyrics from the shore of Lake Cootharaba are powerfully infused with what the contemporary Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht calls solastalgia, the distress caused by negative changes in the home environment.4 These poems find local correlates – sand mining, and deforestation at Cooloola during Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s reign – for a planetary-scale ecological crisis that was then only beginning to be understood.

  Nowadays, Boreen Point has a population of about 300, which swells during the spring sailing regatta and the summer holidays. There is money here, half an hour’s drive from the upscale beach resort at Noosa Heads. But it expresses itself in a sleepy, unshowy way. Up the hillside, eccentric timber houses of two and three storeys jostle for the best lake view. Built up high to guard against flooding, they all look vaguely like stranded boats. And, indeed, catamarans and canoes are drawn up on many lawns in front of lush gardens of bromelias and ferns. The streets have quaint, bucolic names: Orchard Avenue, Vista Street. Most locals are past retirement age: aside from a couple of tradies taking advantage of the cheap rent, anyone under fifty is on holiday. Everybody is white.

  My parents’ lakeside house is a 1940s Queenslander built with local cedar from the sawmill days before the national park. It’s painted to match the blues and greys of the lake by changing light, and it’s furnished with my maternal grandfather’s things. Like the house, the Parker dining set is a postwar classic: a dark hardwood table and sturdy black vinyl-covered chairs. The CD collection is all Naxos classics and Yankee jazz bands from the 1930s and 1940s.

  When Al died, Mum and Dad put the modest inheritance towards a deposit on the house. I inherited his bad posture and social awkwardness. I’m drafting this slouched at the mahogany writing desk where he used to keep journals and letters from his old air-force buddies.

  ‘Melaleuca’, the little yellow cottage Judith and Jack once owned, is a couple of blocks up the hill from Mum and Dad’s place. Though still occupied, it looks rather forlorn: the tin letterbox rusted; the once-pink terrace faded grey, cracking at the edges; the concrete plaster facade half hidden behind the banksia bush where green rosella hop from twig to twig.

  In the spring of 1953, when Meredith was four, the couple left their home on Mount Tamborine and drove north for the Noosa Lakes, hunting wildflowers. In the hinterland, they stumbled on ‘a little village of nine or ten houses and a general store’, as Judith wrote in her autobiography, ‘all delectably perched on a lake shore above a pink and white sandstone cliff’.5 Most of the residents were fishermen or timber workers in those days, but one local man of fortune was building cheap holiday cottages. His method was to construct a house frame of sawmill timber and dig a trench around it, using the dug-out sand to build the cement walls. The couple put down a deposit on one of the prototypes, then ‘scratched and scraped and sold and blackmailed the Bank for an overdraught’.6

  That ‘light-filled concrete house’ became their refuge for many years. With no electricity and no sealed roads, it was a perfect retreat for two writers: ‘Solid, warm, and comforting…the blue of the lake shone through its windows.’7 It was there on the shores of Lake Cootharaba that little Meredith learned to swim and many of the best poems of Judith Wright’s middle career were written.

  Who’d have thought a house made of sand could outlive its occupants.

  Old Al, to whom we owe the lakeside house, was only a few years younger than Judith Wright. I thought of him often as I re-read her poetry that summer, not so much because of the surface correspondences – both were born between wars, both went deaf as young adults – but because he was the person of her generation to whom I’ve been closest. On reflection, the two seemed to embody contrary impulses in postwar Australia: the desire to change everything; the need to reassert order.

  Meredith McKinney wrote in a memoir of her parents that her memories of the couple were ‘overwhelmingly of them reading together’.8 Like Judith and Jack, Old Al wasn’t physically demonstrative. His poor hearing, a result of the roaring engines of Lancaster bombers, could make him seem withdrawn. But he was affectionate in his stiff, masculine way. I remember a patient ping-pong coach and a clever leg-spin bowler; a cautious, thrifty, round-shouldered old man, who labelled his margarine with a marker in case the expiry date wore off. I was too young to grasp that his need for routine and his odd habits might have something to do with his war service. Some Second World War pilots peed on their plane’s tailwheel for good luck before every sortie or wore the same shoes every flight.9 When they returned to civilian life, they often developed other compulsive behaviours. Even as a boy, I wanted to understand why it was so important for Al’s lunch to be on the table before midday and for the lawn of his villa to be perfectly even.

  I have especially vivid memories of the two of us spending a lot of time together the year before I left for South America, while my parents were overseas. I was his most frequent visitor, aside from the Veterans’ Affairs nurse who came daily to change his bandages around 11. On most occasions, he’d take me for a soggy buffet lunch at the RSL and tell the same three or four terse, elliptical stories about the war. There was always a good deal of technical detail about how to read the instruments in the cockpit, and nothing at all about how it feels to be shot at.

  One day, he felt dizzy before lunch and the nurse put him to bed. Rifling through his things, I uncovered dozens of old journals. I hoped I’d find intense emotions like Meredith McKinney discovered in her mother’s love letters. Finally, I’d know the full story of the New York blonde who gave him his first taste of Coca-Cola in Times Square in 1940; how he felt about the fire-bombing of Dresden; why he read atheist tract after atheist tract, as if to shore up his disbelief.

  I was disappointed. There was nothing in the journals but hundreds of ‘To Do’ lists: ‘buy milk’, ‘pay car insurance’, ‘birthday card for Kath’.

  Serves me right for snooping, I thought, slumping in his armchair and listening to him snore.

  ‘How come you never march on Anzac Day?’ I asked when he woke up.

  ‘Why make a fuss?’ he replied.

  Judith and Jack always made a fuss. They met in Brisbane, in 1944, through the circle around Clem Christesen’s new literary quarterly, Meanjin. The magazine published writers of ‘strong socio-political consciousness’10 who saw the end of the war as an opportunity for progressive social change. Beyond contributing to the journal, they were living that change: she was 29; he was 53 – and married.

  ‘You and I are queer and sinful fish,’ she wrote to him at Easter 1945 from her family’s pastoral property near Armi-dale.11 Like her contemporaries Patrick White and Geoffrey Dutton, Judith Wright hailed from the old squattocracy, a complicated heritage that fed both her intense feeling for the Australian landscape and her distaste for the materialism of Australian society.

  ‘I can feel that nineteenth-century atmosphere,’ Jack replied, ‘and how strange our life would seem by
contrast. We of course are right, but it’s difficult being the only people who are right.’12

  Judith’s father wept when she told him of the relationship. Because Jack’s wife refused divorce, they were unable to marry until years later, in 1962, when no-fault divorce had become legal. And, since his meagre pension was dedicated to the upkeep of his four children, Judith had to take on the role of economic provider.

  ‘I am really an awkward proposition for you to handle,’ he acknowledged in an early letter.13

  But by then, Judith was in love.

  Not long after we met, R told me she was about to go to Mexico for three months.

  ‘I’ll be doing fieldwork in the cloud forest and I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay in touch.’

  We were introduced by a mutual friend in 2009 when we were both postgraduates at the University of Queensland. That first balmy Brisbane night, we talked until dawn on a West End balcony, and woke on our friend’s couch next morning to talk some more.

  While she was away, I wrote her long emails describing my efforts to keep possums out of my shabby studio apartment at St Lucia. Every few days, I’d receive a reply from remote villages in Oaxaca, where she and her volunteers were wading about in gumboots, catching frogs and nipping off their toes above the first knuckle for DNA sequencing in the laboratory. Her life sounded like an adventure I wanted to join. She told me about eating tadpole soup with hospitable Zapotec campesinos, and about hearing a jaguar roar in the bushes beside camp.

  On her first night back in Brisbane, I cooked her dinner and gifted her a yellow ukulele. We were inseparable after that.

  Jack was recovering from a breakdown when he met Judith. He was a First World War pensioner who’d fought in France and still suffered from shellshock. Judith remarked to her biographer Veronica Brady that she could always tell when he was having an attack because ‘he turned pale and sweaty and his eyes would go away’.14 Eking a living from the land during the Depression had wrecked his health, and the outbreak of the second war sent him into a mental spiral that accelerated the breakdown of his first marriage. When he met Judith, he was a self-described ‘pensioner-gardener, hangeron-handyman’15 who lived alone in a shack at Surfers Paradise. On weekends, he visited the Christesens in Brisbane to borrow books from their well-stocked library. Jack was in the process of refashioning himself as a ‘wild philosopher without a degree’.16 He read madly to catch up on all he’d missed and began work on an ambitious treatise which tried to explain the crisis in Western thought that had led to the world wars and the development of nuclear weapons.

  Judith was attracted to his arguments. She, too, felt that there had been ‘a sort of hypertrophy of the intellectual side of Western man at the expense of the feeling side’.17 But she was worldly enough to recognise that his knowledge had been cobbled together. Through her administrative job at the University of Queensland, she provided him with books and articles on the latest developments in physics and contemporary philosophy, which Jack devoured gratefully as he embarked on his epic.

  ‘My Darling we’re going to be very happy and defy the world,’ he wrote to her.18

  ‘I have doubts about this Jack,’ I said to R, laying the collection of their letters on the bed beside me.

  ‘¿Por qué?’

  ‘I understand everyone felt they owed a debt to old soldiers. And I know that women were expected to keep house in those days. But it really seems to me he got the better end of the deal.’

  ‘She was in love with him.’

  ‘I find even his love letters unreadable. Let alone the philosophy. Listen to this…’ I read her a tangled parsing of Hegel he’d sent Judith during one of his manic bursts of reading.

  ‘Well, I don’t claim to understand what he’s talking about, but I’m not a philosopher.’

  ‘Nor am I. But my point is he got to sit there for fifteen years writing his unreadable book, while she typed it for him, paid the bills, became the leading Australian poet of her generation, and did all the housework.’

  I expected her to agree. In fact, I was probably overstating my case to impress her. But she was adamant in her defence of Jack.

  ‘She was in love with him,’ she said again, as if that explained everything.

  R and I soon moved in together on Ryan Street near the river. The UQ Ecology Lab was flush with money in those days and attracted brilliant young people from all over the world. I grew accustomed to Friday night dinners at the Asian places along Hardgrave Road with a dozen or more nationalities at our table. Often, I was the only Australian and found myself cast in the enjoyable role of local expert.

  Soon, she took me to meet her parents in Mexico City. They were friendly, but cautious. Why did this Australian speak Spanish with a thick Argentine accent? How serious was he about their daughter?

  During the same trip, R took me hiking in the Oaxacan sierra near her field sites. For three days, we tramped the high ridge lines of forested hills, watching vultures circle over fields of yellowish maize. Eventually, in a dusty mountain outpost, we came upon a woman no taller than a child, standing in waist-high grass. A wooden pail half-filled with herbs dangled from the crook of her arm. In her free hand, she brandished a scythe. She invited us to her hut and offered to perform a limpia, a cleansing ceremony – for a small fee. She had me strip to my boxer shorts so she could rub my bare chest with coarse, freshly cut herbs dipped in alcohol. She murmured Spanish and Zapotec incantations. She blew on the dampness over my heart until it dried. Her two long plaits were the colour of ashes, but her skin was as smooth as polished stone. When her huge yellow eyes gazed into mine, I felt she intuited things about R and me that we were hiding from ourselves and each other: that our wedding bands were only for the sake of appearances; that we weren’t ready to commit because we were still too unsure of ourselves as individuals to love one another well; that only a painful rupture would teach us how to be together – to risk open dialogue, to listen across languages, to live with difference. But perhaps the chain of impressions I attributed to the woman was no more than a projection of my own fears. Perhaps in her culture the little frown she made as she stared into my face opened onto some other unimaginable hinterland of feeling. Or perhaps, like most fortune tellers, she was simply trying to guess what her customers most wanted to hear. In the end, instead of revealing the hidden truth of our relationship, she merely restoked the woodfire stove with a poker. Turning back to us, she muttered, ‘You and your wife will have a daughter.’

  We carry Vera down to the strand to admire the iridescent green plumage of the ducks. Nice to think of little Meredith McKinney ‘running ecstatically’19 into the same calm, brown waters.

  A little distance off, her Australian and Mexican grandparents are paddling the big red canoe with her aunt alongside in the kayak, translating. It’s lovely to see them enjoying each other’s company. Vera’s abuelos flew thousands of kilometres to be in Australia for her birth, only to sweat through the hottest Queensland summer in memory. They spent much of it in the kitchen of our cramped rental house in East Brisbane with the oven and stove cranked. When not stocking the deep freezer with hand-made corn tortillas and spicy chipotle creations for us to eat after they’d left, they took long walks around Brisbane’s mostly treeless inner south. Often, they returned from Woolloongabba, Coorparoo or Stones Corner laden with heavy shopping bags when the sun blazed overhead.

  One especially hot day, we had to take Vera’s abuelo to the emergency ward with chest pains.

  ‘His heart’s fine,’ said the doctor. ‘But we’re going to have to get some electrolytes into him. He’s severely dehydrated.’

  Back in the stuffy little kitchen, we decided they’d worked enough. It was time to get out of the city.

  ‘Why don’t we all go to the lake?’ suggested my parents. ‘There’s enough space for everyone.’

  Squatting in the sugar-fine sand, I dangle Vera’s feet in the cool shallows.

  From the end of the wooden pier we g
aze across the lake’s choppy brown water. This whole sweep of beaches, dunes, mangroves, swamps, woodlands and waterways – from Tin Can Bay down to Noosa – is named after the coastal sand cypress.20 Sometimes the sea breeze in the branches sings the name of the country: Coo-loo-la.

  There were probably fewer than 1000 Aboriginal people here before 1788. The early British weren’t impressed. ‘Nothing…can well be imagined more barren than this peninsula,’ wrote Matthew Flinders in 1802.21 Infertile, sandy soils have kept the human population down, but Cooloola teems with other forms of life: king parrots, black cockatoos and the red-backed fairy wren that once brought the sun’s fire to earth; echidnas, bandicoots and flying foxes; dugong, ghost crabs and bream; eucalypts, goat’s foot vine and the phaius orchid of Judith Wright’s lyric:

  For whose eyes – for whose eyes

  does this blind being weave

  sand’s poverty, water’s sour,

  the white and black of the hour

  into the image I hold

  and cannot understand?22

  Over the eastern shoreline looms the largest vegetated dune system in the world, which has served as a navigational aid for generations of watercraft: bark canoes, colonial sloops, pleasure sailors’ catamarans and fishermen’s tin runabouts. From its source in the mountains, the tea-coloured black waters of the Noosa River meander slowly south through a chain of six saltwater lakes: Cooloola, Como, Cootharaba, Cooroibah, Doonella and Weyba.

  Cootharaba, our lake, is the largest – about 10 kilometres long and 5 kilometres wide. In Gubbi Gubbi, the name means place of trees whose wood makes sturdy clubs. Down by the pier is a stone monument to Eliza Fraser, the shipwrecked white woman who survived with local Indigenous people for several months in 1836, before being ‘rescued’ from the lake’s northern shores by the convict Graham. This local legend inspired sensational nineteenth-century newspaper reports, and later Patrick White’s novel A Fringe of Leaves. Fraser’s belief that the Indigenous people – who fed and treated her with traditional medicine – had kidnapped rather than rescued her, fitted her European contemporaries’ prejudices and preconceptions. The incident increased hostility and mistrust on both sides of the Queensland frontier, and paved the way for the violent dispossession that followed.23