Would Percy remember me? I had only met him that one time. I looked at myself in the mirror. The sight of my own face was always surprising to me. The woman staring back at me was impassive and stripped back. A grown-up.
I splashed water on my face. Leaving, I made my way back through the crowded, hot house as quickly as I could, avoiding eye contact. On the porch it was quiet and blessedly cool. The babble of the wake subsided. The rain had given way to fog that raced down the street in long streamers.
An old woman stood against the railings, looking out into the shifting shadows. She was short, with powerful, squared shoulders. Her hands were clasped behind her back, and I could see how they had grown in around her wedding ring, jewellery nestled in layers of skin. Her white hair was coiled in a precise knot on top of her head, held in place with a diamond clip that glittered in the half-light. Diamond clips did not belong in West Geelong.
I let the door close softly behind me, desperate to make my escape.
Without turning to face me, she asked, ‘How did you know Margaret?’
‘Victoria invited me,’ I said. ‘I never met Margaret, unfortunately. I’m a writer. I’m working on a project with Victoria.’
Then she did turn. Shrewd blue eyes peered out from a delicate, unsmiling face. ‘You’re the writer, then.’
‘That’s the word on the street. But we haven’t started yet.’
‘Nel Cranmer. Edna’s mother-in-law. You’re younger than I thought you would be. Have you written many books?’
‘Well, not exactly. But I’ve worked with quite a few people to help them get their projects completed. And I studied art history at Melbourne University.’
‘Australian art?’
‘European.’
Nel Cranmer was impassive, a polite wall, and I didn’t tell her about the thousands of words I had written in my thesis on ‘anti-art’, on nonsense over sense, on nothing. Dada. She nodded silently by way of goodbye, and swept past me, back into the house.
Out on the foggy street, I discovered Percy’s sleek blue BMW was pressed up against my Falcon, parking me in. A Geelong Cats sticker was plastered on the car’s back window, next to a drawing of a topless woman with devil horns stuck in her curling blonde hair, thighs splayed, riding an eight ball.
I walked around the cars twice, a sinking feeling in my stomach, then dragged myself back into the heat and the noise of Margaret Whitedale’s wake. Wedged into the corner of the living room next to the pin board, I peered over the jostling heads. The pin board was filling not with photos of Margaret, now, but with photos of football: Margaret and Percy in matching blue-and-white jerseys, standing in front of the entrance to Geelong’s home ground at Kardinia Park. Percy with a trophy clasped over his head.
Finally, Victoria emerged from the kitchen, carrying a glass of white wine. She noticed me and nodded a greeting. I pressed my way through the crowd, told her Percy had parked me in and asked her to grab his keys. I couldn’t talk to Percy myself. I wanted to get away, and think.
Back in the car, I put the heating on full blast and waited, the engine idling.
Victoria came out of the house. I wound down the window, and she leaned in.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to stay a bit longer, get to meet people? You’d be very welcome.’
‘It was a beautiful service, Victoria.’
‘They do make it look as if they actually liked Granny Marg, don’t they?’ She laughed, then fluttered her hand as if she was trying to dispel the noise. ‘I shouldn’t say that. They did.’ She dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but honestly: I take after Dad’s side, that’s for sure. Much more Cranmer in me, much more Nel. The Whitedales are a bit nutty.’
‘I’m sorry to have to leave so early,’ I said. Then repeated, stupidly, ‘It was a beautiful service.’
Percy came down the front steps, waggling a set of keys. For the first time, I saw him properly. Not in half profile as in the church, or obscured by rain. My guts turned liquid. He crouched next to his sister so that his head was level with my car window. Up close, his broken nose made me queasy, lurching to the left of his face.
‘So you’re it,’ he said.
‘I just wanted to pay my respects, not interrupt anything.’
‘Poke around.’
‘Percy!’ protested Victoria.
‘I’m joking! I deal with journalists all the time – you’re fine.’
There was no flicker of recognition in his face, no sign he remembered me.
‘I’m not a journalist –’
‘Victoria says you’re local too. Geelong girl, right?’
‘Exactly,’ said Victoria approvingly, giving me a see, I told you he’d be fine face. ‘That’s why I chose her.’
‘After all those months of knocking people back?’ he teased his sister, then turned to me. ‘The demand to write about Mum, I tell you, it was overwhelming. Booker winners, lining up to scrawl it.’
‘That’s for fiction,’ I told him.
‘What is?’
‘The Booker Prize.’
‘Exactly.’ He grinned.
‘Stop being a dick, Perce.’ Victoria sounded hurt.
Percy reached out to her, the movement looking instinctive – he didn’t break eye contact with me – and put his hand on his younger sister’s arm, gently.
‘Nah,’ he said to me. ‘I’m joking. Sorry. So we should get together for a chat, right? Can you make it to a training session?’
‘For the football?’
‘That’s what I do.’
‘Okay. I’ll have to check my schedule.’
Percy rose and smiled – straight, rich-person teeth.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Looking forward to it.’
He didn’t need to tell me when and where. I was a Geelong girl, after all.
As he got close to the front door it seemed the door would be too small for him. Then he disappeared through it, back into the house.
‘Thanks for coming,’ Victoria said, reaching for my hand through the car window. ‘Sorry about Percy. He’s on edge. That reporter at the funeral. Someone’s been sending the footy club bags of blood and sheep hearts and stuff, calling the boys cowards, you know. It’s terrible.’
‘It must be a lot of pressure.’
‘They’ll make it into the finals this year. I feel it. It’s Percy’s last year – he’s getting old.’
‘Isn’t he my age?’
‘I mean old for football. He’s really quite ancient for football. Look, I was thinking: you’re worried about having enough stuff to work with. Granny has a big stack of letters in there. Do you want them now? We can go back in, put them together so you can start going through them.’
I’d already turned the key in the Falcon’s ignition. ‘I’m not worried,’ I told her. ‘We’ll have enough, with a few interviews and all those sketchbooks and paintings to talk about.’
‘I can grab them quickly, though.’
‘Let’s do it later. I have to get back to Melbourne. Why don’t you just move Percy’s car. I’d love to see the house without people in it, get more of a feel for your mum’s life here. But we can do it when there’s more time, and more space.’
‘Sure,’ said Victoria, smiling at me with her beautiful, straight teeth. ‘Well, I’ll see you soon, right? And we’ll put together the contract and everything?’
‘Sure,’ I told her. ‘Looking forward to it.’
All the way back along the Princes Highway, I told myself that it was fine. Percy hadn’t recognised me and, even if he had, it didn’t matter. I was past all that. I had a job to do.
EDNA: A LIFE
Edna’s young life in the backstreets of West Geelong was shaped by her close relationship with her sister, Imelda. Ten years her senior, Imelda was Edna’s surrogate mother in the hardscrabble suburb. Imelda, who had inherited a mix of their father’s moral certainty and their mother’s drive to excellence, was a brilliant student with a strong sense
of her own purpose. Early on, that purpose was raising her younger sister, Edna.
In a photo taken out the front of the Black Swan Carpets factory in West Geelong, Edna and her family are posed and stiff. Edna sits on the ground, her rangy protectors – Margaret, Frank and adolescent Imelda – standing over her. Imelda is fierce, her hands poised above her younger sister’s head as if in benevolent blessing, or to prevent her from escaping like the dark bird in flight on the sign behind them.
The uneasy line between public and private life in West Geelong reached into every element of Edna’s childhood. In her fifties, Edna would write in a letter to her daughter, Victoria Cranmer, that her childhood in West Geelong was one of ‘public spectacle and private loneliness – the only person I truly had was Imelda. She was my mother, mentor, muse.’
The public spectacle that Edna alludes to in the letter was both emotional and concrete. As the daughter of Frank Whitedale, the brother ‘who did well’, Edna felt she was living under constant scrutiny. At home, Edna’s parents held both her and Imelda to a higher standard than the rest of their cousins, who were mostly boys. Margaret raised her daughters to believe they belonged to a class above their peers. Edna’s life in the narrow row of cheek by jowl cottages on Dent Street unfurled as she was passed from kitchen to kitchen, aunt to aunt, resented and admired in equal measure.
Edna’s private loneliness began in earnest in 1934 when she was enrolled in the Geelong West State School No. 1492 on Lawton Avenue. The primary schools of West Geelong were places of ritual and disease. Inside the great red-brick building, three blocks from the train tracks to Melbourne and four blocks from the cliffs of the western beaches, Edna joined a class of fifty coughing, feverish children.
Without Imelda hovering over her, Edna was alone at school with only her boy cousins for protection, who were too busy fighting and clawing their way through the crowded classrooms to pay attention to her. Beyond Dent Street, the rest of West Geelong regarded the Whitedale sisters as suspect. They were hard to categorise: Whitedales, but foreign, too. Prim and poor, and trying too hard. Their airs made them tall poppies, ready for beheading.
Luckily for Edna, she spent as much time out of school as in it. Her education was haphazard. Each term was a lesson in a different disease, with polio, influenza, measles and mumps sweeping through the tightly packed rooms. With the routine use of penicillin a decade or more away, containment was the only cure. Schools across the district closed without notice, for indeterminate lengths of time. Teachers sent notes home to parents full of instructions on how to deal with the latest outbreak: they were implored to keep their children inside and isolated, to stop visitors from entering their homes.
Whenever she could, Imelda would convince Margaret to send the girls to stay with Frank’s young aunt Enid in the small cottage on the shores of Swan Bay at the very tip of the Bellarine Peninsula, thirty square kilometres of salt marshes and mudflats that heated up in summer to resemble a shallow white mirror. The nearest town was Queenscliff, a small holiday resort of ornate Victorian hotels connected to the mainland by a slender isthmus of sand dunes and a bus that left from Geelong station. The other Whitedale cousins resented the girls’ frequent escapes from Dent Street. Over half a century later, they still remembered how Imelda ‘coddled’ her baby sister, and how Margaret let her girls ‘get away with murder’.
On the bay, far from the angry press of Dent Street and the clack of the factory looms, the sisters spent their days wading through the shallow waters while black swans wheeled overhead. Their great-aunt Enid was the youngest of her generation, not much older than Frank – her husband Martin had been killed on the Western Front in the First World War. A widow, she lived a quiet life with her only son, Douglas, a gentle boy who worked the fishing boats off the point, and in her house the girls were free to do as they pleased.
In these seasons of ‘illness’, the Whitedale sisters discovered their passions: Imelda’s for nursing, and Edna’s for drawing. It was Imelda who began to help Edna create the sketchbooks that later became such an iconic element of Edna’s artistic practice, and that now pose a particular problem for researchers.
Edna’s life is, at once, immaculately documented and strangely mute. There are hundreds of sketchbooks, but very few letters. Until Edna’s papers are released from their embargo, after her husband and children have passed away, the only correspondence available for study are the few letters kept by other family members – Victoria Cranmer, Jennifer Whitedale.
With so few of Edna’s words to rely on, we must turn instead to Edna’s sketchbooks, a vast and winding maze of suggestion and obsession.
Pablo Picasso left behind 175 sketchbooks; Degas is said to have filled thirty-eight during his lifetime. The German artist George Grosz accumulated nearly two hundred. Edna Cranmer’s collection contains 409 sketchbooks. Their sheer volume – not to mention their regimental organisation – is remarkable on its own, and could have gained her a position in the ranks of ‘outsider artists’ had she not skirted the shadows of the official art world for so long.
Edna kept all of her sketchbooks together, considering them a single collection. From their earliest, crude pastiches, the sketchbooks are a work of art in themselves, providing a window into the mind of a complicated and quixotic artist, a woman obsessed with her own failings, driven to see the world and understand its form in every way she could.
The first sketchbook in the collection, titled Swan Bay, 1935 in Imelda’s careful handwriting, is a selection of cut-up newspaper, butcher’s paper and scraps bound with twine. As she does in later sketchbooks, Imelda annotated every one of her little sister’s drawings with suggestions and praise. Edna was rarely creating images from scratch when she sat down to draw as a child. Instead, she drew around and on top of advertisements, and on the blank backs of bills, letters and paper scraps.
In the sketchbooks, Edna and Imelda began to examine – and draw – the illnesses and injuries they came across. One page from 1935 holds a series of sketches, clearly by Imelda, of a crushed snake on the road, its entrails and flattened head. Another shows a stick figure that might be Enid’s son, Douglas, holding a fishing rod. Each part of his body is labelled in Imelda’s hand, a litany of symptoms. Flushed cheeks. Sore throat. Itching. Edna has decorated the page’s border with fish and carefully drawn black swans, long necks reaching curiously in towards the man in the middle.
The powerful black birds and the coruscating light of Swan Bay would find their way into Edna’s sketchbooks again and again over the years. And at the merest flutter of a cough or flushing cheek, Imelda would insist that Edna be yanked from school and quarantined under her watchful eye.
The Biographer
As I drove to Kardinia Park to meet Percy Cranmer I imagined that my mother knew, somehow, that I was back in Geelong. I parked the Falcon in a laneway on the far side of Latrobe Terrace so that there was no chance of her driving by and seeing its bright red shimmer, long nose and squinting headlamps.
It was dusk as I crossed onto the wastelands surrounding the football stadium, the wet ground sucking at my feet. It had been two decades since I last set foot inside Kardinia Park. After Dad died, I avoided the whole stadium area, navigating around its great hulking presence in the middle of town.
He’d died of cancer, but they still draped the Australian flag over his coffin. Afterwards, they’d handed it to Mum, a small neat square. Back home that afternoon I’d drunk Mum’s coffee until my ten-year-old heart wanted to burst out of its chest. When I flipped up the lid of the kitchen bin to slide away a plate of crisped white-bread triangles, I found the flag, staring up at me. Mum always blamed his military service for his death. I imagined that cancer floated around Vietnam like a miasma, drawn deep into the soldiers’ lungs as they lay in the dripping jungle.
There are so many ways to erase the past. You can just stop looking at it. You change its name. Princes Highway, Princes Freeway. Edna Whitedale, Edna Cranmer. Corio Oval to Kardinia
Park, when it moved. Now it’s Simonds Stadium. You can do what Mum did: refuse to talk about any of it.
From the outside, the stadium was silent. On game days, though, it roared. The sound rushed up into the sky: you heard it all over town; tens of thousands of people screaming and sighing and hollering together. Sometimes the strange shape of the stadium meant a single voice could cut through the din.
I passed empty turnstiles, shuttered ticket counters. Seagulls wheeled over the bins. A piercing whistle sliced the evening. A dark tunnel led under the stands to where the light was as bright as day. The evening sky turned black above the floodlit stage of the field. Colours are like that; always shifting in comparison to the violence of the shade they’re standing next to.
Below me, players ran relays between orange cones, the clod flipping up from their spiked boots. Older men paced the perimeter, neon whistles shrilling, yelling orders, brandishing water bottles.
I stood with my hands on the metal railing separating the bleachers from the playing field and thought of Dad: the warmth of his plaid jacket wrapped around me, the forest of legs, the susurrus of loss, pressing my will for the team down into the concrete of the stands, forcing it to course under the metal barrier, into the bodies of the men on the field, my team.
Dad’s favourite player was Polly Farmer: tall, Indigenous, not that punters like my dad who loved him talked about ‘his blood’, as Dad called it delicately. That was for the opposing team to sling and yell about. The ball had exploded from Polly’s hands. His grace under pressure had been legendary. He’d floated across the grass.
Those nights at the football are my only childhood memory of men touching. The brief, smashing collision after the final siren of the fourth quarter when the victorious team went careening into one another, a huge pile of bare male flesh. I have wondered since if that moment of collision is the secret heart of football’s appeal, if the whole stadium isn’t poised there every weekend through the winter, waiting to see the men embrace each other at the end of every match; the relief as they go flying into one another’s arms not with their fists raised but for a few seconds of respite, skin to skin.
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