Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  ‘Your eyeballs will turn yellow,’ he threatened.

  ‘I don’t care. As long as I can stare with them.’

  Staring was my favourite thing. I was capable of standing outside a fruitshop and staring dreamily at the grapes – red jewels and black jewels, little brown grapes, long green and round white frosted. I had never known such varieties existed.

  The coffee shops were full of diverting people, artists, actors, producers, model girls groomed to enamel smoothness. They all had their hair up in the front and down at the back, and stood with one hip forward, maybe to make themselves look narrower. Poor things, like the rest of us they wore austerity garments with tight hems and mighty Joan Crawford shoulders.

  ‘Why does every girl look carrot-shaped?’ wondered my husband.

  ‘Blame Mr Dedman!’

  John Dedman, Minister for War Organisation of Industry, was the joke figure of the Battle for Australia. He had great power. Being allowed to make decisions on his own, he took on some of the mythos of Hitler. Certainly he made high-comedy judgments. Pillows were stuffed with grain huskings instead of kapok; dry cleaners were forbidden the cleaning of evening dresses or dinner jackets. He forbade pink icing on birthday cakes, and ‘banned Santa Claus’ by suggesting that Christmas be forgotten one year. Hotels were allotted a quota of beer. As the cry ‘Beer’s on!’ often electrified the city from 4 to 6 p.m. some catastrophic guzzling took place. I shall not forget the rows and rows of men outside hotels, returning to the gutter what they had taken aboard in the pub.

  Mr Dedman was also responsible for monstering clothing manufacturers into using a painful minimum of fabric for women’s garments. We all developed an obsessive yearning for pleats and flares, but didn’t get them.

  There I was sitting in the Kardomah in my short tight skirt which I feared might show my tail-end as twin Christmas puddings. From the number of wolf whistles I got, it probably did, much to my chagrin. In those primitive days there was no popular interest in buttocks. They were for sitting on, to spare one’s bones.

  There I was, rhapsodising over the coffee, when a woman of distinction entered. She was very old, large, with a craggy face, and a hat the dog had brought home. She was accompanied by a slight, small young man, dark and sardonic.

  ‘I know him!’ I hissed. ‘That’s Douglas Stewart. He’s a poet, and he’s from New Zealand.’

  ‘And I know her,’ whispered D’Arcy. ‘That’s Dame Mary Gilmore, and she’s from Australia.’

  ‘Why was she made a Dame?’

  ‘She writes. Poems. Journalism. Memoirs.’

  She was unlike anyone else, drawing all eyes, tall, of monumental build still, though she was in her late seventies. Her face was alert, lively and rustic. She could never have been a beauty. She reminded me of Eleanor Roosevelt, and like Mrs Roosevelt, had a pair of wondrous eyes, dark auburn brown, as her hair was in her youth. In every respect she gave an impression of power.

  ‘She’s like a pioneer woman,’ I said, ‘who hewed out a home in some place no one has ever heard of.’

  And indeed, when at last I became a friend of Dame Mary, almost her first words to me were, ‘One day when I was cutting down a tree in Patagonia …’

  As we watched, she fished in a bag that was half shopping basket and half brief case, and came up with a pot of jam, which she gave to Mr Stewart. I thought this mystery delightful. I noticed then that she was not drinking coffee, but had asked for hot water for a small teapot which had also come forth from the carryall. As I learned later, she always drank maté.

  This powerful figure was in no way like the little mouse person she appeared to be in her nineties, though interiorly she was no mouse. However, that is the period of her life that most living people remember.

  She lived at 99 Darlinghurst Road, King’s Cross, and was there for all the years I knew her, which were fourteen. But she wrote to me for years before that.

  Writing to my mother, I mentioned another famous person with whom I had done an interview to sell to the Auckland Star.

  ‘Her name is Rosaleen Norton, and she’s a New Zealander, too, and everyone seems to have heard of her. I’m just so lucky to have met her.’

  Whoever had made Miss Norton known to me obviously had not mentioned that she was reputedly a Satanist, and that her fame rose largely from the obscenity of her paintings. The obscenity would seem marginal today, but Roie Norton had many trials, both legal and personal, because of them.

  In those times Roie was not the queer person with electrified hair, teepee eyebrows and teeth apparently filed to sharp points, who hung around dubious bars in later years. She was pale and ill-fed, with a thready comeliness. Unable to make a living with her art, she often worked as a painter’s model in the schools, and her sexless body, undershot jaw, and large hazy eyes are probably to be seen in many an amateur work.

  She lived in the poorest circumstances, in a dank room, once a Victorian kitchen, on the garden side of another noble mansion broken up into flatlets and studios. The twilit room was crowded with canvases and painting paraphernalia. I saw an unmade rough bunk in one corner, and against a wall a small altar, unadorned but scattered with crumbs.

  ‘For the mice,’ she told me.

  Though she had never seen me before, she lent me her scrapbooks.

  ‘Bring them back when you’re ready,’ she said, carelessly generous. This trait was, I have heard, characteristic of her.

  In fact D’Arcy took them back, and returned to me looking like a man who’d had a severe shock.

  ‘Crikey, she scared me!’

  He would never tell me what had happened. Maybe she had come on to him. Or maybe he was more sensitive to witches than I was. I had no bad reactions at all.

  In later years, when she was celebrated as the Witch of King’s Cross, a monster of depravity, magistrates revelled in admonishment, as they are wont to do. I attended one obscenity trial and recall a skinny old vulture, shooting his bald head in and out of his gown as if it were feathers, pouring forth the kind of vituperation that seems to come only from the committedly self-righteous. I felt a great deal sicker about the magistrate than I did about the painting which seemed to me to be as peculiarly lifeless as most of Rosaleen’s work. But perhaps Satanism is not about life anyway.

  She was undoubtedly involved with the earthshaking downfall of Sir Eugene Goossens in 1956. Sydney’s cultural circles were shattered; lionhunting hostesses fled in all directions like frightened hens when it was revealed that the revered conductor, and indeed builder of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, had been arrested for importing a huge amount of pornographic film and appurtenances such as masks, dildoes, and ‘certain unnameable objects’.

  As well as being patriarch of a brilliant family, and an internationally acclaimed musician, Goossens was a sober, distinguished personality. None of us could believe that he was a card-carrying member of Roie Norton’s King’s Cross coven, which was said to number nearly three hundred.

  ‘But what do they do?’

  Very soon everyone knew what they did, for the coven had been penetrated by a mole, a newspaper crime reporter. It was he who tipped off Customs officials that Sir Eugene’s baggage would be worth examination when he flew back from Europe.

  Few friends remained to Goossens. You could hear the rooster crowing thrice all over Sydney. A dishonoured man, he returned to Europe, and died a few years later, a waste of a great talent.

  Rosaleen Norton never veered from her path. What the true inwardness of this woman was we do not know. But she must have been resolute. For Satan, if indeed she acknowledged him as master, never gifted her with riches or power or genius. Many years later, not long before she died unrepentant and unconverted in the care of the Sisters who conduct the Hospice for the Dying in Darlinghurst, I saw her stumbling along a street in King’s Cross. I looked at the doughy old face that seemed to be painted on chicken-skin, and remembered that day long before when I came through her overgrown garden towards a symbol-pa
inted door, and was assailed by a gander that scorched out of the shrubbery like a missile. That fierce creature was not to be beaten off. He pecked, used his whole head and neck as a weapon, whacked with his powerful wings. He was a watch-gander, I suppose.

  Fortunately Rosaleen appeared, said a word or two, and he lay down on the grass with his neck stretched out like a dead swan’s. I saw that she was one of those people with rapport with animals.

  ‘He dreams wonderful dreams,’ she said, and indeed I think that bird, even in his unnatural position, was asleep.

  ‘Do you like snakes?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve never been close to one, so I don’t know.’

  ‘One lives near the old rockery. I give him water.’

  She poured water into a declivity where a rock had fallen away, and after a while a slim brown snake with a pink belly trickled out. It had a neat head crowned by a broken yellow band.

  ‘What a beautiful creature!’

  ‘Speak quietly, they hear by vibration. They are shy, precise beings, very clean and skilful.’

  ‘Skilful?’

  ‘At living.’

  We had already made a vow that one day we would earn our living at writing. But in the meantime as directed by Manpower, D’Arcy laboured at Central Station, and I worked as a mail sorter at the long-demolished Darlinghurst post office in William Street. The post-office maps were an education to me, for Sydney was then a city of innumerable lanes, dead ends, lost squares and ‘jump-ups’ or flights of stairs bordered by houses. But within two months the Manpower Authority transferred D’Arcy to the shearing circuit. He was not a shearer, but had often travelled with his father, a woolclasser, and done one or the other of the hundred jobs around a woolshed.

  ‘First stop’s Moree, and what do you think, Beres has applied for the same circuit.’

  So for many months we three travelled around from the Queensland border to the Victorian. When the boys worked at distant sheds, I lived in tiny peppertree towns, where the main street is called Main Street. In all these places, and often far outside them, I worked as a fruit picker, opal noodler (picking over mullock dumps, like a hen, looking for crumbs of ‘colour’), a hotel kitchenhand, a shearers’ cook, a taxidriver’s secretary and book-keeper, and an offsider to a Chinese chef on a wealthy station almost as big as an English county.

  All the time I wrote, children’s fantasies mostly, nothing about my environment at all. I was erecting a frail psychological shelter from which I could peep surreptitiously at the kingly spaciousness to which I had come.

  For all was awesome to me – the mighty-winged wedge-tailed eagles playing in the blinding noon sky, hooking their talons together and tumbling head over tail a thousand metres towards earth, disengaging at the last moment and spiralling up and up to do it again. The drumming of wallabies across wide claypans; however near, these footfalls always sounded muffled and distant, like a knock-knocking in the hills. The astonishing spa bore at Moree, which feeds swimming baths to which I went every night in my Moree time – unstoppable, unchangeable water punching out of a pipe wider than my arm, clouded with steam, a fierce 41° celsius. For almost a century the bore has delivered more than thirteen million litres daily without a pump. Healing for skin and arthritic ailments, the water comes from a long way under the earth’s skin, and tastes like it, bitter, alkaline and volcanic.

  One night I heard a strange singing note, echoed and reechoed, across the huge stillness, and I asked the woman with whom I was boarding what it was. Was it a bird?

  ‘It’s the Koori women calling to each other,’ she said. ‘They can speak across such distances!’

  The Kooris lived mostly in ‘camps’ – shanty towns outside the settlements. My landlady did sewing and mending for the womenfolk, who had no sewing machines. One day when she was going out she said, ‘There’s a parcel of children’s clothing there. Will you give it to the lady with dark eyes when she calls?’

  How pleasing! Instead of the clumsy, ugly word aborigine, she called them the people of the dark eyes. And what eyes they are, like black water, with eyelashes thick and sweeping as a doe’s.

  On the pastoral plains, fenced with stony hills ruffed with bush, smelling of cracked riverbeds and diminishing waterholes, the air was so clear I could see twice as far as I could in the cities.

  D’Arcy Niland tells it best: ‘In the morning … it was like walking through a house of glass. Then the sun came up like a dog to the whistle.’

  When we returned to Sydney we found that the housing shortage had escalated to a famine. We could find nothing at all to rent. Then D’Arcy remembered Mrs Cardy, who lived in Surry Hills. This is how we had come to live in Devonshire Street, seven months after my arrival in Australia.

  • 3 •

  ‘So you’re going to be writers,’ said Mrs Cardy on that first day. She was impressed by the typewriter, and D’Arcy’s several suitcases bound with rope and containing loads of manuscripts. He also had every letter, in its original envelope, that anyone had ever written to him from the time he was six and became aware that he was born to be a packrat.

  I had the small suitcase I had brought from New Zealand and an insignificant folder of published work.

  ‘And what will you be writing?’ asked our landlady.

  ‘Everything.’

  D’Arcy Niland and I had many arguments over writing, but one thing we agreed upon was that if we wanted to make a living from writing we would have to be versatile. Everyone said a writer couldn’t make an apprentice’s wage in Australia.

  ‘Who is this everyone?’ asked D’Arcy.

  This is what he wrote later, after years of experience:

  Versatility is the greatest asset of the freelance. He was born to be a writer, not born to be a writer of some specialised type of literature. He was, perhaps, born to write that specialised type best, but if he is going to make a living he will have to cultivate versatility. Investigate the history of those who, from the beginning, wrote exactly what they wanted to write, and you will find in the background a grant, a patron, or a sucker. The latter two are hard to find nowadays, and the first provides too fertile a field for discrimination.

  So we worked, early and late, and at everything that came our way. We submitted story outlines to radio stations and had them stolen; ideas for articles and fictions to newspapers and magazines. Sometimes the person on the other end said, ‘Yes, wouldn’t mind looking at that’ and we fired ahead and wrote whatever it was and had it turned down.

  ‘Still working?’ Mrs Cardy would say, taking off her church hat and looking amazed.

  ‘Yes, the darned thing won’t come out.’

  ‘Come out of where?’

  But who can say?

  We lived for the postman’s twice daily round. The faint chirp of his whistle as he turned the corner from Crown Street made our blood fizz.

  ‘Alight somewhere, will you, you two?’ demanded Mrs Cardy. ‘Running back and forth to the door - you give me the willies.’

  But there was always the chance of an acceptance, or a thin thrilling letter containing a cheque, even if a meagre one.

  The postman must have hated us and all those thick, heavy envelopes he had to carry. One morning, nine such letters fell through the slit in the door. Woebegone we watched. Nine! Then the flap banged up, a reddish nose poked through and a voice bawled, ‘Fair go, willya?’

  We went back to our work like the man in the Lost Chord, weary and ill at ease. And often if there wasn’t a letter from home I wept privately in the dunny, because I didn’t want D’Arcy to know how much I fretted about my father, my good friend Mera, whose heart condition had at last been diagnosed. Now he often suffered severe angina. The impossibility of my seeing him, even of receiving frequent news, gnawed at my heart. Sometimes I received four letters at once, held up for lack of transport, and several times for random censorship. I always tore open the one with the latest date, trembling in case there was bad news.

  ‘You are e
ver in my heart, though seas divide,’ says a long-ago emigrant song, and that was the way it was with my father and me. He wrote to me almost every week until he died, not mentioning the war, or his health, or the thundercloud of Japanese invasion that hung over the Pacific, but how the old cat was faring, the great crop of plums on the yellowgage tree, and the latest chat about the aunts and uncles. And always something specifically New Zealand - ‘the tuis are back in the flaxbush’ or ‘I heard the shining cuckoo yesterday, but saw not a speckle of him.’

  D’Arcy had no idea of what my father meant to me. He, who later was to write one of the great novels of fatherhood, The Shiralee, at that time could not comprehend my love and anxiety for an ageing man who had once opened for me the world of knowledge, shown me that stories must be stories; shaped, I suppose, my idea of a man. He had had none of that experience.

  ‘But you must have some feeling for your father,’ I said. In his perplexed gaze I read none of the expected things one sees in the eyes of children of men who, for one reason or another, cannot stand up under the responsibilities of fatherhood. No regret or deprivation, anger or resentment. He was merely thinking the question over.

  ‘You have to make the best of a bloke like Dad,’ he said at last.

  Frank Niland’s younger girl, a kindly, rosy child of thirteen, crying in Mrs Cardy’s kitchen after she had been drunkenly abused for something not her fault, wiped off her tears and said, ‘I try to offer him up, but it’s real hard.’

  Offer him up! That ancient Catholic phrase that means far more than the words say - accept the will of God, agree that you will suffer cheerfully this pain, problem, deprivation, if God wishes it. A richly generous phrase, possibly Irish, and one totally maddening to the person offered up. My mother-in-law offered me up, and told me so, so I know.

  My mother wrote too, trying to hide her anxiety. When I told her I was to have a baby she went on as if I were a chambermaid seduced by the bad Lord Byron. She was a great worrier, a loving woman with the empathy of an angel, so I kept from her many aspects of my life - anything at all that would cause her to fret, speculate, live on the rack that is so often the bed of the parent with an absent child.