by Ruth Park
Thus the loss of my radio assignment marked a significant turning point, only incidentally related to the disappearance of a small basic income. It was the kind of shake-up I needed.
For twenty-eight years I had been a necessary person to my family.
‘And now what?’ I asked myself.
The twins had returned to Australia in 1970, had their own flat and were earning a precarious living as illustrators. They were independently minded, and, as far as I could see, capable in all ways. The musician also had returned, to be employed in the Music Department of the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The elder pair, though one still lived with me in the doll’s house at Allambie Heights, had long since been supporting themselves.
‘Then what am I here for?’
The answer was: Nothing. Except in the undefined supportive maternal area, I had outgrown my job. I was Mum Emeritus and that was all.
It was an astonishing thought that I had no more family responsibilities. For half a lifetime I had been the housekeeper, the carer, the person who got up in the night to attend to people sick in the froat or the bitch nervously having her first pups. I had wept bitter tears while endeavouring to fulfil a teacher’s command: ‘Please remember that in the school concert the twins will be dressed as frogs.’ No one on earth can truly cope with that bit shaped like a double map of Africa that goes between a frog’s back legs.
Thousands of ordinary Mum memories assailed me. The notes pushed under the loo door – ‘I definately want my cricket pants washed, they are hambugger all over.’ Or: ‘My brothers are pigs, why did you have them? You are truly mean.’
Those days of ceaseless demands had gone. Now I could cut my toenails in peace. I could have long hot baths instead of two-minute showers out of which I jumped at least twice to cope with crashes on the door and cries of: ‘Mum, I left my school socks, paintbrush, baked-bean sandwich, textbook, hair brush in there, I know I did!’
I didn’t have to do anything for anyone. It was an eerie sensation. For a week I felt run down like an old clock. At the same time I was obscurely angry. My old friend, Cyril Hume, the ship modeller, knew the feeling.
‘You’re yawing,’ he said. I was not at all pleased. After looking up the word in the dictionary I felt it did not apply; I was not zigzagging unsteadily, nor had I deviated from my course in a horizontal line. On the contrary I appeared to be standing still, like a liberated slave, not knowing which direction to go.
At that time I was unstable in my Zen practice, and still occasionally lapsed into superstitious customs left over from my youth. As a child I had been much impressed by a neighbour who, faced with a dilemma, closed her eyes and stabbed a finger at a page of the Bible, coming up with a text that inevitably proved to be the right advice.
My Auntie Rose, the one who read Marie Corelli, longed to emulate this wise neighbour, except that she had no Bible. Every time her husband drove her mad for one thing or another, she lamented this fact.
‘Never mind, Rosie lovey, use your cookery book,’ urged her sisters.
With what satisfaction one recalls the expression of simple pleasure on her face when her forefinger came up with, ‘Beat to a stiff froth.’
Hoping for equal luck, I took my chances with Suzuki-roshi’s book. What I drew was this: ‘One thing flows into another and cannot be grasped. Before the rain stops, we hear a bird.’
By now I was sufficiently advanced in Zen kindergarten not to feel that everything a roshi said sounded as if he’d found it in a fortune cookie. I realised that Master Suzuki was drawing my attention to the vital Buddhist concept that nothing is static, all is evolving. Which included myself.
The thing for me to do was to stay tranquil, practise my meditation, put that bitumen stuff on the leaking roof gutter, clip the dogs, and wait quietly until I flowed from being a scriptwriter into being something else.
‘How would you like to write a big book about Sydney?’ asked William Collins’s senior editor, Stephen Dearnley. ‘One of our Companion Guide series? History, geography, information for visitors, stories, everything?’
I was familiar with Collins’s Companion Guides to great cities. Designed for the authentic traveller as well as the armchair variety, they were more literate, more idiosyncratic than the invaluable Fodor handbooks, but just as practical. The reader received transport advice, gallery and museum-opening times, shopping suggestions, shortcuts to save time and feet, as well as hundreds of those playful and amusing anecdotes, scandalous as well as historical, that tell more about the intimate character of a city than a truckload of statistics.
‘I would,’ I replied. ‘Except that …’
‘What?’
‘Are you aware that Sydney is being pulled down? Everywhere along the skyline I see scaffolding.’
‘Well?’
‘In no time this will be an out-of-date guidebook.’
‘When that happens, it will be a history of the way Sydney was in the years before the mid-seventies. A research and reference book.’
Here was an unprofitable thesis for a publisher, not less so for a writer. Still, I could see the value of this curious assignment. The book would be a record, my own story of the Sydney I knew so well, a kind of farewell garland.
For now the idea had come, revolutionary, alarming, that if flowing operated so admirably with regard to work, it might well do the same with location. There was now nothing to stop me from flowing from place to place.
‘Maybe it’s time I went off and lived somewhere else,’ I told my children. I expected pleasant smiles and a casual ‘Good-O, Mum.’ Not so.
‘You’ve rocks in your head.’
‘Mum’s lost her marbles.’
‘Kids opt out, not mothers.’
‘What do you mean, you’re giving us back to ourselves? Who asked you to?’
‘Where are you going to live, anyway?’
‘Maybe an island.’
‘An island?’
‘Shut up now. I won’t be going for a while. I need about twelve months to do the guidebook.’
Islands, islands. An oneiric vision of islands shimmers before most inward eyes, and none of us quite knows why. They are towed into fiction as though they are ornamented rafts, with serpentine palms and savages of epicene beauty, dressed in evergreen leaves. Do we learn anything from savages so depicted, their girlish features, combed hair and bodies far removed from the utilitarian shape of the real people who tear their living from limited land or the indifferent sea?
Perhaps that life on an island, or so the dreamer thinks, is bountiful, and the inhabitants kindly?
‘O, delectable isle!’ cried Edmund Banfield, the Beachcomber, who in the last decade of the nineteenth century began a twenty-five-year love affair with Dunk Island of the Barrier Reef, and wrote his unforgettable Confessions about it. Can one imagine his passionately crying ‘O delectable continent!’ of Australia or any other? Indeed, of Australia, that other besotted islandman, Dr L.P. Jacks, says in his book Among the Idol Makers: ‘It interested me not in the least. It was too big. No castaway twelve years old could be expected to manage such a place.’
Is it this, then? Is an island intimately connected with childhood, and the child’s desire to get away from the damnable surveillance of adults? Perhaps this explains why Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Coral Island and innumerable others in all languages remain basic literature - each one gives valuable pointers on how a twelve year old might manage.
We also, it seems, need our islands to be round. In Elizabeth Riddell’s marvellous poem, the old seaman longs for an island like a big green apple he can hold in his hand. St Columba, coming at last to Lindisfarne, wished to find ‘a little island like a plate, with a spring, birds, and the grace of God’.
Yet islands are most often long skinny bones; rags torn off coasts, crumbs of rock with but a handful of soil in which grows a thornbush. So many are but the tail-ends of mountain ranges, as are the islands of the Whitsunday Passage, marching out
to sea.
It seems to me that islands are symbols of something for which the human psyche longs - unity or completion.
On such things I pondered as I ran about Sydney doing research, and as the days and weeks in the braying, hooting, yowling city went on, I cannot deny that a golden haze of romanticism settled over the idea of islands. I began to yearn for peace, silence, even solitariness. For in those years when Sydney was beginning to pull itself to pieces, the air was full of fearful noise, the sky of dust. Everywhere were boarded-up doomed buildings, Victorian warehouses, colonial godowns, stone and sandstock cottages that had resolutely survived amongst shops, pubs and offices of a later age. And the terrible sound of the rock pick tirelessly pecking away at Sydney’s sandstone foundations was over all.
There was such a sense of impulsive urgency about the obsession for demolition, as though no one had thought about any form of change except destruction. Tear down the old city that was, at base, a European city, full of ups and downs, dogleg lanes and cobbled dens; a narrow-streeted city, eccentric and crowded. Yet it had always been itself, a scallywag, joyfully arrayed in sun and sea, a city born of sorrow and exile but never ashamed of that.
I could see what they were after, the City Fathers and the town planners - something civilised, modern, conformist, the universal utilitarian city you see so often on television, damned by its own dullness.
‘Oh, my poor old girl!’ I used to cry, stepping aside to avoid trucks laden with enormous ironbark beams, black with age and pocked with axe marks. Or I stood behind the barrier and witnessed a stout-set old building collapse in a fury of dust, nothing left standing except the wrought-iron cage of a lift, and half a marble pediment inscribed with the face of Prince Albert.
Thus, in my way, I ran ahead of demolition, never knowing what next would be destined for destruction, but determined to record it.
Nothing replaces field research, even if you’re writing fiction; the image that hits the eyeball is immeasurably more powerful than the one you read about in someone else’s book. Readers recognise this at once. We might, for instance, be studying the Bible or some other classical text, perhaps with a touch of scepticism or cynicism. Suddenly there is some small detail, often irrelevant to the storyline, and we find ourself saying: ‘The writer must have seen that with his own eyes. No one could invent that!’
Many writers build an entire career on the rewriting of other people’s research. Though I resent those who, in this way, mine my own work, especially the Companion Guide to Sydney, I feel they have missed the pleasure of real contact with the human beings who lived the stories, and out of the blisses and tragedies of their own experience, developed the philosophy or the wit.
I cherish old men on park seats, drowsing in the sunlight, washed up on the shores of their lives but not fretting too much about that. They’re most often glad to talk, and to activate their memory I often use a simple ploy.
‘My grandfather used to live in Toxteth Street,’ I say in Glebe; ‘Johnston Street’ in Annandale. (It must be a street with old houses.)
‘Is that so?’
‘His name was Thompson.’ (The name must not be unusual.)
‘You don’t mean old Clarrie Thompson, the jockey?’
‘It could have been.’
This is journalistic fly-fishing. You crack a lure across the water and though you may not come up with Clarrie Thompson, you may get some ribald stuff about going to the Randwick races in a horse buggy with two dozen light ales, a dozen pork pies, and a couple of high-steppers in feathered hats, and seeing the Premier of the time in similar company. Everything that deals with real events or real, preferably historical, people, has to be checked, of course. Old men usually have wonderful memories, but sometimes are shaky on dates.
Old ladies sitting at bus stops are less communicative, looking at you sideways and holding their little mossy purses very tightly in case you’re a weirdie.
Two people assisted me greatly in this immense work of love, Collins’s editor, Stephen Dearnley, English but an ardent lover of Sydney and consequently well-read in her tradition and history, always diffidently offering good suggestions not only of ideas but of places to find them. The other was a library reference officer, Shirley Denson, then of Manly Library, a person with a fantastic stock of Australiana, not on a computer program as such would be today, but in her head. I count such reference officers as people to be prized beyond rubies. But, alas, though professional writers use them constantly, they are rarely thrown a flower.
At last the book was done, and I was satisfied with it. I have always hoped that it is indeed a voice raised in praise of colonial and Victorian Sydney.
About this time I began to wonder what I was going to live on, when I removed to my island. I had never applied for a literary grant, and did not much like the idea, but after much cogitation I did so. For years I had had an idea for a novel floating around in the back of my head - a story about a dwarf and his attitudes towards a world monstrous in its dimensions, but never too big for him. So I applied for a grant and was given it. Grants diminish greatly after taxation, but a careful writer, with no ambition to live opulently, can manage.
‘And besides,’ I told the children, ‘I can live very cheaply on Norfolk Island.’
‘Surely you’re not going to live on Norfolk?’
My decision was disappointing even to myself. I had considered so many islands, up and down the Australian coast, and even as far afield as the outliers of Fiji. The ocean, after all, is speckled with delectable dots of islands, ravishing, secluded and often inconvenient to the point of madness. My desire was for an island refuge both convenient and inconvenient, and so my mind had finally settled on Norfolk Island, only 1600 kilometres from the Queensland coast. A loved friend, long resident on Norfolk, had made a useful comment: ‘If you’re a visitor, the island is not remote,’ she said. ‘But it’s a million miles from anywhere if you live here.’
I had often stayed with this friend, and so already knew the island fairly well. I liked the faded colonial splendours of its tragic early history, and the slow speech of the island women, like waves breaking on a still day. Even its shape pleased me, a soft triangle, little and compact. We knew it was the highest surviving peak of a monstrous volcano, submerged since the Dawn Ages. But any unsuitable protrusions, lava flows and the like, the sea had bitten off long before.
It was like a ship, all alone in the ocean, secure, well-found, never sunk yet, and its pines were ten thousand masts.
It was wonderful for me to know, as well, that only two hundred years before, Norfolk had been a true desert isle, no one living there, no sign of previous occupation, its forests silent as though in a dream. What was its name? Could the island have spoken, I imagine it saying, like God to Moses, ‘I am what I am.’
Secure in selfhood, it did not require a name. Still, mapmakers cannot abide namelessness.
Captain Cook, in 1774, called it Norfolk Isle. Nevertheless, it remains what it is, and no name cast upon it by a wandering British Navy captain alters that.
I had visited Norfolk Island in summer and noted approvingly that it was nowhere near as hot as Sydney. And I had been there in the rainy season, a time of mushrooms, overflowing tanks, and plant growth deliriously green. In between slipping and sliding like a drunken cow on Pompeian red dirt roads, I crouched under hedges, raincoat pockets full of water, and thought how glamorous it was that Norfolk was a trade-wind island. Also I was impressed that this small isle was, after Sydney, the oldest British settlement in the South Pacific.
In sober fact, I was bemused; my reasons for living there had climbed into the realm of fiddle-faddle. I hadn’t an inkling that water-shortage always threatened; or if the ship didn’t arrive with gas cylinders you had nothing to cook with for weeks. That the gentle docile cows, which had the run of the island and the right of way on all roads, were capable of jumping your fence, or proceeding across your cattle stop on their knees and eating everything on the
property, not only vegetables, but fruit trees, shrubs, everything - that the island had been, right from the First Settlement, the helpless victim of every imported insect and plant pest. Fortunately the animal pests had been confined to Norfolk’s small companion islets, Nepean and Phillip, which, though once heavily wooded, were consequently as bald as Martian rocks and much the same colour.
More importantly, if my aim was to experience a season in solitary, to detach from the venal world, it would be difficult to realise. An island community cannot help but be a microcosm of humanity at large, neither better nor worse, though it often seems spectacularly worse because it is always under your eye.
Nevertheless I went there, having sold my collection of Australiana to finance the diabolically complicated move, lived on almost nothing for two years, wrote a great deal, stayed ten years and would be there still if it had not been for an unpredictable illness.
I still dream about it - the seamists drawing saltscapes on the windows; the ferny-tasting water, the rainbows that seemed to be everywhere, high arches, low arches, pillars and wisps. For like all islands this one had particularised showers, phantoms with low hesitant voices that marched across houses, roads, gardens, leaving clearly defined edges.
Now that I live in the locked-up, barred, suspicious city I dream most of all of the marvellous nights, with all the doors and windows open, the sky powdered with stars as with icing sugar, lapping almost to the edge of the verandah, so that after a while illusion took over and all turned upside down, the darkness of the bedroom now the sky, and the bed floating on a phosphorescent sea of immeasurable depth.
For when I could afford it, I built a house on a hill. The island people - Bounty people as the mainlanders call them, though they don’t like it, having no good memories of H.M.S. Bounty and Captain Bligh – the island people said, ‘No, no, you must build your house in the walley. Always!’