by Ruth Park
‘I like the outside toilet,’ confided my elder son. ‘You can read the door.’
The outside toilet, stuck on an exterior wall like a bug, was of later date, and afforded an interesting glimpse into Victorian Australian, for its door was plastered with catalogue pages from Lasseter & Co, a huge firm which vanished about the time of Gallipoli. Lightning Streak rabbit poison drops ’em dead on the spot, boasted the advertisements. Other goods were Safety Rocking Horses and Tin-lined Wedding-cake Boxes, and, amazingly for that time, equipment for muzzle-loading guns such as Wad Punches, Brass Worms and Nipple Keys.
The tail of a sacred snake vanished under the toilet and beneath the house itself, for the golden rock was richly engraved with pictures of whales, hammerhead sharks, wallabies and lizards. In the concavities under the house, sculpted by wind and rain, were dim paintings of human beings, one the faded figure of a man with no mouth and a hat shaped like an ice-cream cone. Traces of black and yellow ochre were still discernible.
Under the clothes-line were strange round deposits of concrete, very old and crumbly, so we chiselled them out, revealing shallow holes where aboriginal women had ground grass seed, wild grains and nuts. And later, in the tumbling masses of unpruned azaleas at the foot of the rock, I found prehistoric pestles of a harder stone, possibly granite, and found that the carefully chipped and ground finger-grooves and thumb-holes fitted my own fingers as they had fitted those of the dark-eyed women of ten thousand years before.
The haunted room was the original drawing room, commanding a southern view of Sydney. A splendid hexagonal room it was, its noble bay looking out over trees, roofs and harbour, even down upon the deck of the Bridge. For the Old Manse was as high as a watchtower, and must have been even more so when there was still dense bush down to the shores of Neutral Bay, where foreign ships were once anchored until their papers were examined.
Surveying the night city from the bay window was like staring into the middle of the galaxy, planetary systems and nebulae, comets and stardust that flowed in uneven spangled streams along the major streets.
Whenever she saw it open, Anne stealthily closed the door of that room.
‘Are you shutting something in?’ I inquired.
‘I don’t want it to look out at me.’
She would not enter that room, and neither would the other children, though it was empty of all but an old sofa and a few boxes, and thus good to play in.
D’Arcy did not notice anything odd at all, so we didn’t tell him. In the bay he set up a makeshift desk, an old door resting on two boxes, and at night, and in half-hour periods sandwiched amongst our renovating jobs, he wrote The Big Smoke, a story set back a little in time.
I want to do right by Sydney. They’re dismantling the old girl already, just look at all the scaffolding everywhere. Of course, that’s the way of things, towns grow, like everything else. But I want to do a true picture of Sydney as she was when I first saw her, a leaky old ship, half-foundering, heading out of the colonial era, and not sure of where she was going. Rags and tatters of Empire still fluttering from her masts …
This scribbled note I found amongst his papers years later: The Big Smoke meant more to him than just a novel, I think. He attacked it furiously; the manuscript shows little sign of revision. He was able to work fairly consistently because of the advent of Tice, houseman and handyperson. Tice took on most of the jobs around the house that D’Arcy had been accustomed to doing. Though with us only six or seven months, this farouche character, who came into our life in response to an advertisement for a cleaner, was one destined for a certain immortality in Australian literature.
Tice was thirtyish, lean as a rail, with a nutmeg face and a sideways, flaring glance. I did not like meeting it head on, as when I did I felt I had collided with something.
‘Gee, I don’t know about him!’ I muttered to my husband.
‘He’s all right. He’s a returned soldier. Give him a go.’
Tice’s first remark was, ‘Christ, what a dump!’
Nevertheless he made it a clean dump, working with speechless intensity. He refused tea or coffee or any lunch, often departing suddenly, returning next day as silent as ever but with a thunderous hangover, to resume window-washing or paint-scrubbing where he had left off.
‘You want I should clear up the garden a bit, missus?’
‘Yes, please, Mr Tice.’
‘I ain’t no mister.’
The only time he showed humour was when he called out to me as I typed in our bedroom: ‘You there, missus? There’s a robin redbreast at the kitchen door.’
Obeying this irresistible summons, I found at our back door the eminent Dr Eris O’Brien, the scholar and historian, who was then stationed at the Neutral Bay church. He was, I think, in spite of his fame in intellectual circles, a somewhat shy and modest man, perhaps lonely, as many of the priestly intellectual are.
‘I believe we are both bookish people,’ he said, ‘so I thought I should make myself known to you. And offer you the run of my library if that would interest you at all.’
So began a formal but rewarding friendship, which ended only when he was appointed Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn. As a parting gift he gave me a little old book, printed with archaic long S’s, Comte de la Perouse’s account of his Pacific voyages.
‘An indelicate fellow, I fear. I hope it will not offend you.’
In the far future when I was forced to sell it, I discovered that his gift was very valuable indeed. He was a noted book collector.
So The Big Smoke was finished, and submitted for the Commonwealth Jubilee literary competition. And Tice went on turning up intermittently, silently. One boiling hot day as he cut overgrowth in the bottom garden, he took off his shirt, revealing a back so monstrously scarred I could scarcely bear to tell D’Arcy of my horror.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘Japanese prison camp. He was whipped with barbed wire.’
‘He told you?’
‘I asked. Not a man who confides much. Drinks away his bad memories. Probably sensible thing to do.’
We did not learn if Tice’s nightmarish memories ever left him. One day he did not return to the Old Manse. I thought he might have ended his life somewhere, but D’Arcy scoffed.
‘Not him. Tough as stringybark. He’ll survive. I’m going to use him. I have this idea for another novel, no title as yet, about a wandering man, a seasonal worker, who takes over the care of his kid, not for love but for revenge. A tough unforgiving man with a hard leather face, like Tice. Yeah, he’ll do.’
The Big Smoke behind him, his worries about his family temporarily relieved, D’Arcy began to look like his old self. No longer did he rub his chest, or find himself unable to sleep. In those times we did not know about the relationship of stress to heart and other ailments; we did not know that coffee or indeed any caffeine-laden beverage should be avoided, nor that smoking is positively jeopardous. We had scarcely heard of cholesterol.
We would not, anyway, have associated stress with overwork. In our view we led the freelance writer’s common life, compelled to grab what jobs we could, to deliver the finished work no matter what it cost us in sleep or energy.
In the month in which D’Arcy was notified that The Big Smoke had won second prize in the Commonwealth Jubilee Competition – he also won the short-story section with ‘Dadda Jumped Over Two Elephants’, and was awarded a special prize for ‘A Girl I Knew Once’ – I see we had an average output. I wrote eight episodes of a children’s serial for the ABC. For this I had apparently already written forty-six episodes, but my memory is silent on this point. I had submitted the novel The Witch’s Thorn to all three of my publishers and been overjoyed that it was accepted. So somewhere amidst the care of children, the writing of scripts, and floor and wall repairing I had written that difficult story. D’Arcy had submitted the weekly material for a newsletter he did for a New Zealand magazine, and had had accepted four short stories. The account book does not record work written, b
ut accepted or rejected, with comments and payment. I had also written and had accepted two funny articles for a women’s magazine’s Christmas issue.
Delighted by the Jubilee prize and the comments of the judges, D’Arcy hastened to submit The Big Smoke to Angus & Robertson. It was rejected.
‘Damn it, why? What does “not really the sort of book we care to publish” mean? Isn’t that what they said to you about The Harp in the South, and then it sold like salted peanuts and earned them big profits? What’s the matter with those people? I’ll show them.’
‘How?’
‘I’ll write another novel, that’s what. No, hang about. I don’t suppose we could afford it. I could write a dozen short stories in the time I’d spend labouring over another clunker.’
This was true. Immediate or near immediate payment was still vital to us. Though my books were selling well, advances were small, and tax and the debilitating provisional tax reduced my income grievously. In the US, The Witch’s Thorn was a Book Society Choice, mysteriously marketed under the slogan ‘a wonderful story about people unlike us’. But although it was thrilling to read that so many copies were sold per day, the royalty statements told the same old story – a large sum at the top, and a smallish one at the bottom.
‘You could apply for a grant from the Commonwealth Literary Fund.’
‘Hey, hey, my Tiger. We don’t believe in grants!’
That was so. We sincerely believed that patriarchal handouts from the State created a dependent, money-grubbing mindset amongst practitioners of the Arts. This puritanical, but bang-on-target attitude rose from our occasional visits to Fellowship of Australian Writers’ meetings. There, alas, though the atmosphere was outspokenly Communist or possibly Fabian Socialist, one heard a continuous cranky mutter about the undeserving layabouts who had landed grants, and the sacred old pillars of literary Australiana who had not.
There we also heard a bold man boast about not turning in one line of the mighty work for which he had been given a grant.
‘What a parasite!’ fumed D’Arcy. ‘A no-hoper like that gives writers a bad name.’
‘If you did apply for a grant you could specify that it’s for travel expenses. For the Tice story.’
‘Well – I wonder.’
He applied for the grant, the only one he ever did apply for, and in due course a government cheque for £500 arrived, accompanied by a generous letter from Vance Palmer, a respected elderly writer who headed the awarding committee.
‘I wish you had applied for more substantial funding,’ ran this letter. ‘No young writer is worthier.’
‘Crikey, how’s that?’
Like most young writers we were either indifferent to or merely tolerant of older writers; nevertheless Vance Palmer’s kindly, non-patronising words acted on my husband like a shot of adrenalin. He emitted showers of invisible sparks.
‘Do you think you could manage here alone for a fortnight?’
‘Why?’
‘I ought to run over the route, the shearing circuit that Macauley follows.’
I must have gazed blankly, for he said, ‘For The Shiralee, the new novel. Macauley’s the Tice character. Good name, isn’t it?’
‘Is this the wanderer story, about the man with the little child?’
‘Of course it is. Her name’s Buster. She looks the way Anne did when she was three or four. I’m mad to write it. Do you think you could cope without breaking a bone? What’s programmed for the next week?’
‘That new series for the Children’s Session – The Muddleheaded Wombat. The ABC wants eight scripts so they can get ahead with their recording.’
‘Oh, you’ll knock those over with no trouble,’ he said sunnily. ‘Right then, suppose I go tomorrow?’
Both of us knew how much easier life was with two adults in the house. It was the Old Manse’s doubling as a business office that was the problem. Luckily we had been able to site the phone where it could be answered promptly and professionally with no background noise from children scrapping, saucepans boiling over, or the inhuman row of a little boy with a fish hook in his thumb.
It should be said that even without the great array of household appliances common today, housekeeping in the 1950s and 1960s was in the main, easier. There were deliveries. If I organised domestic supplies properly, we could easily withstand a fortnight’s siege.
It was plain to me that D’Arcy wanted to get away at once to do his research because he could then return and begin that book he was on fire to do. I could not mistake the creative energy that had seized him; he was like a volcano ready to blow its head off. I knew the feeling well. Wanting to write may well be a sensation felt in the ankles; wanting to write some specific thing is peremptory, urgent, almost obsessional. All novels have their optimum time of writing, and any experienced writer (and probably editors) can discern if another man’s book was written while his blood fizzed, or whether it was cranked out, sentence by sentence, however skilfully, by means of technique and dogged intent.
Three days later, with all five children sick with chickenpox, I again pondered bitterly the question of which one of us it was who usually carried the shiralee, which I now understood meant burden, though perhaps a necessary burden. This aptly described each one of my itching, blazing-hot, miserable children. By day I anointed them with bicarbonate of soda; by night I shot out of a delirious sleep to answer the dread call, ‘Quick, I’m sick in the froat!’ In between times I wrote The Muddleheaded Wombat, carefully tailored to the talents of three contract actors, on the kitchen table, where I could hear the imperious summons of both phone and sufferers.
My second sight did not let me know that Wombat, so precariously begun, would run for many years, proving the foundation of our family finances, particularly after D’Arcy’s sudden death, when all funds were frozen for more than a year.
If it had, I might have felt less depressed. For whether it was the chickenpox, the sleepless nights, or the forlorn atmosphere of the Old Manse, I felt very dark and dull of spirit. Perhaps lacking the sound of D’Arcy’s busy typewriter, his skylarking and beaming good temper, I had time to think.
As I sat at the kitchen table, half worked-out storylines of Wombat all around me, I experienced a terrible consciousness of futility. For what was it all about? It seemed that from my earliest years I had been running, always catching up on something – often breathless, often with a stitch in my side. It was true I had had, as the world saw it, considerable success. Yet, was the struggle worth it? And I pondered, as I often pondered, Chaucer’s words in his ‘Parliament of Fowles’. True, he spoke of the nature of love, but his words can be applied to many aspects of human endeavour. I applied them to writing.
The life so short, the craft so long to learn;
The assay so sharp, so hard the conquering:
The dreadful joy …
After so many years of hard running, I acknowledged I did not get from my life much that was satisfying. I was the maintenance officer for a reasonably large family, the multiple responsibilities not begrudged but in fact carried out more as a true and caring friend than a motherly person, whatever that may be.
I was also an industrious and dedicated writer, not a novelist, not a playwright, not a journalist, but all three. A writer.
In front of me were probably twenty or thirty years of similar experience. The children’s infant problems would evolve into adolescent problems, then into adult problems. Difficulties with editors had already been converted into difficulties with film and television producers.
‘I need another dimension,’ I thought, ‘but what is it?’
This disquieting and deeply melancholy feeling may have been what is today termed burn-out, when the validity of what one is doing is in question.
On the other hand it could denote entrapment of my mind in the vast religious and ethical error of constructiveness - that all life is nothing more or less than a storyline, a linear plot moving onwards, onwards, towards The End, which w
ill prove either satisfactory or otherwise. Satisfactory, if they want it to sell. This variety of time-travelling is not programmed by culture into all races, but it is a part of our own, thereby robbing us of awareness of the moment.
But perhaps I was merely worn threadbare with lack of sleep, which affects the mind in many inventive ways.
‘Why don’t you go and see old Mary?’ asked D’Arcy. ‘You always come back from a visit sparking on every plug. And I’ll cook dinner and see to the kids.’
By this time I knew Dame Mary Gilmore very well, for we had corresponded and occasionally met for eight or nine years. On the other hand, I didn’t know her at all; such is the way of things with human beings.
Though she was the first woman in the British Empire to be made a Dame for her literary work, a good portion of the bookish establishment in Australia said it was a crying shame and she should not have had the honour. For what had she done? A couple of books of balladic verse, another two collections of essays, twenty-three years of running the women’s section of The Worker. A dozen other people had done more.
But Dame Mary was a nonpareil; she could not be compared with other writers. True, she was a commentator rather than a historian, a singer rather than a poet. But she said things, she thought of her own accord. Almost never did one get from her the echo of some other mind. She wrote many thousands of letters on the small letter paper that was headed: 2 Claremont, 99 Darlinghurst Rd, King’s Cross. Thousands and thousands, many to her ‘swans’, of whom I was one. She never referred to us as geese though most of us were. And every letter contains a referred glitter from an eager, independent, never-darkened mind, always expressed idiosyncratically, often gloriously. The Mitchell Library has, I am told, incredible files of these little letters, and my simple question would be – if she were not a rare person why did we, the recipients, keep them all these years?
The 1950s, with their shameful political battles, the disruption of the Labor Party, the rise of boldly venal, cynical selfseekers in trade unions and the Party itself must have been painful to this woman, then in her late eighties, an old Labor woman, and, more than that, the kind of idealistic Socialist who went off to Paraguay to create a New Australia. But she never mentioned politics to me.