The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  ‘That’s tough,’ I said.

  ‘And then there were the other problems,’ Jennifer said, putting the kettle on. ‘You want a cuppa?’

  ‘What problems?’

  ‘Well, the kids. Imelda taking on John, adopting him. That was a burden. That meant she never found a man – she would have, mind you, if she hadn’t died, even with the kid. And then Edna having her kids so late? She was in her mid thirties when she had Victoria.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem so late.’

  ‘She’d been married fifteen years! And Max wanted kids if ever a man did. Everything would have been easier for Edna if she’d just gone ahead and had those kids younger, got them out of the way. By the time Victoria and Percy came along, Edna was too old. Her life was all set up without them – she kept wanting to travel. It’s easier to have kids when you’re young. You don’t know any better, you just make space for them. You have kids?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, you’ll see when you do.’

  ‘But Edna was very devoted to her kids, wasn’t she? Max said that Edna even stopped exhibiting so that she could focus on the family.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jennifer. ‘After she’d applied for Vietnam, after she got her trip to France. She didn’t need to go there to “settle” John back with his real mum; John was a grown-up. She just wanted to paint.’

  I flipped through the sparse notes Victoria had given me.

  ‘That was 1968, 1969. John’s mother was a friend of Imelda’s?’

  ‘That’s right. Celine someone.’ Jennifer shook her head. ‘Say what you will about Edna, it’s not like she ever really abandoned her kids. Not like that Celine. I never could have done that to one of mine.’

  The kettle began to squeal. Jennifer rose.

  ‘I always thought Max told them not to choose her for Vietnam, you know.’

  ‘Not to what?’

  ‘Not to choose her to be the war artist.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just the way Edna talked about it once. Might be wrong. And I tell you, I’d understand if he did. Still, Max and Edna worked it out. And he just worshipped the ground she walked on. Open up those albums if you want.’

  I opened the album in front of me. Imelda stared out from behind the protective plastic film. She was in her nurse’s uniform, leaning back against the stone facades of Dent Street. She must have been only nineteen or so – her white nurse’s cap, crisp pinafore, unsmiling, staring into the camera lens with intense, dark eyes.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  War was brewing as Imelda finished her training in the Geelong Kitchener Memorial in the winter of 1939. Not everyone knew it was coming: newspapers reported daily that Europe wouldn’t be foolish enough to start another Great War, or that all seemed peaceful in Germany, in England. But Imelda had grown up with the horrors of the First World War hammered into her by Frank Whitedale’s vocal pacifism. She saw the signs. She knew that if she stayed in Australia, it could take her years to join one of the official nursing services. Always sure of her own duty and destiny, Imelda took matters into her own hands.

  In July 1939 a ‘tourist’ passage to England in a cramped, windowless cabin shared with six strangers on one of the great liners that docked at Port Melbourne cost forty-eight pounds. A vast, unreachable amount for Imelda Whitedale. Not so for her patrons Nel and Pop Cranmer. When Imelda announced her desire to travel to England and join the British Red Cross, she went to ask Nel for her support. Nel agreed.

  Nel’s role in funding Imelda’s trip to England only came to light in 1992, during the research for this biography. In July 1939, when Frank and Margaret discovered their eldest daughter was gone, they marched up and down Dent Street, furious and heartbroken, demanding to know who had helped Imelda pay for her passage.

  For Edna, Imelda’s desertion was devastating. Imelda had been her mother figure, and those around Edna at the time remember how hard she took it, retreating into her sketchbooks, refusing to engage with the rest of the family. She was often discovered to be absent from school – she’d run away, catching the bus from Geelong station to Queenscliff to walk the edge of the Swan Bay, alone, lost in thought.

  The Biographer

  Geelong was not created by a rising tide: it was created by flash floods, a white rush, a gold rush, floods that came roaring and rushing in through the heads of Port Phillip Bay. When the first floods were over, the shape of the land and its people had changed. The Wadawarrung people were driven into the streets and the missions. Wool princes and robber barons set up on the hills and bluffs. The rest of us were deposited in the flatlands.

  The house where Victoria now lived, the first one that Max bought Edna after their marriage, was up on the hill in the suburb of Newtown, where the houses drip with cast iron and slate. Down below, it’s corrugated iron and asbestos. From Victoria’s nature strip, I could see the roofs of Geelong spreading out at my feet, the undulating blue of the Corio Bay, its mouth opening onto the darker blue of Port Phillip, the spindly smoke stacks of the oil refinery and the superphosphate plant.

  A matted rug stitched with the word HOME lay on the doorstep. I rang the doorbell.

  Letting me in, Victoria took me through her house. It felt eerily like her parents’ place on the opposite peninsula. Blonde wood, tall windows, dead sticks, trophy wall. This time netball trophies, mostly balls and hoops, occasionally a woman in a puffed-out skirt.

  In the open-plan kitchen, one of Edna’s paintings hung on the wall over the dining table, a sweeping vista of Corio Bay with a distortedly large Victorian house perched over Geelong’s Eastern Beach. Tiny shards of people walked the Esplanade. Black swans swooped in the white sky.

  ‘I like this one,’ I said.

  ‘That’s Gran’s house down on Eastern Beach, where Mum and Dad met. You’ll go there when we talk to Nel. Mum liked painting houses. She did a few of them as gifts for people, on and off. Sold some on commission too, in the 1950s, I think. She thought houses were like people. Extra layers of skin, you know. Hiding but expressing the people inside.’

  ‘The first painting I saw of hers was a painting of a house. One with a big bottlebrush tree out the front. There’s a heap of paintings of that place. Number 27. Do you know the ones I’m talking about?’

  ‘Yeah, those ones aren’t so good. I left most of them in Sorrento. Not worth it. I just tried to take what I thought we’d need.’

  ‘Whose house is it? She painted so many versions of it.’

  ‘No idea. I wondered too. But the paintings aren’t my favourites.’

  Victoria walked me through the back door, ushered me across her neat rose garden. Her shed was bigger than a double garage – huge, wooden, windowless. It smelled of neglect. She flicked on the light switch. Only half of the fluorescent tubes shuddered into life.

  ‘I’ll fix that,’ she said. She saw my face, and laughed. ‘I’m going to make this nice here, I promise. You can let yourself in through the side gate when I’m at work. I’ll show you where I hide the keys.’ She walked up and down the long space, turning on the lamps and heaters she had set up.

  ‘I told you this was once the stables, didn’t I? I moved into this house after uni, when I got back from Sydney. But this could have been Mum’s studio, if they’d stayed longer. It’s quite charming, actually.’

  Edna’s paintings and sketchbooks were stacked haphazardly against every wall. I paced up and down, trying to see if the movers had managed to keep them in anything close to the order I’d left them in at Edna’s studio on the other side of the bay. Victoria saw what I was doing.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’ve already put them back in order. I really do think you’re going to be cosy in here. And you can go to Sorrento to look at the big canvases if you need.’

  ‘Should I just keep my key?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But if you don’t mind, don’t go over there too often. And maybe don’t park on the street out the front of it
.’ She sighed. ‘Honestly, part of the reason I wanted to move things over here is to give Dad a bit of distance from us, not be too on his mind. He’ll come around eventually – he just misses her, that’s all. This feels a little painful to him.’

  I thought of what Jennifer had said about Max blocking Edna’s application to Vietnam. But bringing it up with Victoria felt uncomfortable. I hadn’t told her about Percy, why start with this? Later, I told myself. I’ll mention it if it comes up again. I don’t need to get involved in family politics for a little monograph no-one will read but her. But it didn’t come up again. Not until we were in too deep, and everything was already so complicated that we couldn’t back out.

  Victoria gestured at the folding plastic table she had placed in the middle of the space for me to use as a desk. ‘I’ll get a better desk. I’ll put a rug down too, get better lighting. You make yourself completely at home. You can use the kettle in the kitchen for tea – there’s milk, a toaster if you need.’

  We stood together in the middle of the space, staring at the stacked paintings.

  ‘Do you ever think of sending them to galleries?’ I asked.

  She paused, said softly, ‘All the time.’ Then she went to the paintings, began pulling off their protective swaddlings of bubble wrap.

  The first one she uncovered was one of the nurse paintings: an empty street of worker’s cottages at night with the nurses’ white caps floating along the sidewalks.

  ‘That’s part of why I need you to write this. I want to be able to justify going to galleries, somehow. Mum never had any luck with them in the 1960s, and then … you know. I just need to bolster myself first. Get myself in order. Myself, but everyone else as well. Dad. Percy. Gran.’

  ‘I could write a couple of short articles. Magazines. Newspapers. Try to get some coverage of her work.’

  ‘Anything we can do will be amazing,’ Victoria said. ‘Honestly, I think of it as all connected, all these moving pieces.’

  After Victoria went back into the house, I pulled one of the oil heaters over to the folding table. Then I sat down and spread out my notes in the semi-darkness. The fluorescents flickered and hummed.

  I thought of Edna’s light-filled, high-ceilinged studio where the sun lay across the spills of paint. Then I got to work, double-checking that the paintings were all back in order again.

  That evening, before I left, I asked Victoria about the letters that we’d gone to find at Margaret Whitedale’s house, the ones that Max had taken to store, but she was evasive.

  ‘I’ll ask Dad once he’s calmed down about it all,’ she said.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  As her older sister walked through the empty, waiting hospital camps that ringed England’s capital in the European summer of 1939 before war had even broken out, back in Australia nine-year-old Edna prepared to attend the Herald Exhibition of Contemporary French and British Art.

  The exhibition burst into the country at a moment when everything in Edna’s world was changing. Since Imelda’s departure, Frank Whitedale had begun to struggle with waves of depression and anxiety. The tightly controlled, responsible man of Edna’s childhood was fraying at the edges. The other Whitedales remember Imelda’s leaving as the act that triggered Frank’s obsession with the news. He bought every newspaper, listened to the radio constantly, attended every cinema broadcast he could and sat on the front steps of Dent Street late into the night, talking to anyone who would listen about the progression of events in Europe.

  Everything that summer was heavy with portent and symbolism, as if the smallest thing could tip the world’s scales one way or the other, towards peace or war.

  For the organisers of the Herald Exhibition, the 217 works of art floating their way across the treacherous oceans on the RMS Strathnaver carried far more than stretches of canvas and blots of paint. The art on board represented hope. Culture and memory were the last, delicate membranes protecting the world from violence, and in the paintings Australians wished to see proof that the culture and memory were strong enough to withstand the gathering conflict.

  ‘Gallipoli had given us one kind of maturity,’ argued the sponsor of the exhibition, newspaper mogul Keith Murdoch. ‘A great Herald Exhibition of Contemporary French and British art would give us another kind of maturity.’

  By the time the exhibition had reached Melbourne, however, any hope that the culture and memory of the last war could protect against another was lost. On 3 September 1939, Australia entered the Second World War. In her sketchbook that day, Edna drew her sister, over and over. She traced the photograph of the family sitting out the front of the Black Swan Carpets factory, Imelda’s hands hovering, the white nurse’s cap perched on her head.

  In Melbourne, Murdoch had originally intended that the exhibition be housed in the National Gallery of Victoria. The gallery’s board of directors, however, took one look at the work and informed Murdoch that it was not ‘European’ after all, and that ‘the work of degenerates and perverts’ was not to be housed in an Australian public institution.

  The paintings repulsed the board of directors, but they fascinated the crowds who descended on the exhibition’s makeshift home in the Melbourne Town Hall. For Edna and Margaret, who travelled all the way to Melbourne for the exhibition, the paintings must have offered a distant glimpse of Imelda. For the thousands of Australians who made the same pilgrimage, the paintings were also messages from the continent whose wars they were once again about to fight. The exhibition was the country’s first ‘blockbuster’. Australia’s population numbered just seven million in 1939, but over 70,000 people saw the Herald Exhibition as it toured the country from Adelaide to Melbourne to Sydney, one in every hundred Australians. On the day Edna and Margaret went to view it – and on every day that it hung on the false dividing walls crammed into the Town Hall’s gloomy interior – three thousand people flowed up the steps and through the shadows, staring into works from the Tate, the Luxembourg and the Louvre, searching for signs from Europe of what to expect in the coming violence.

  Caught in a sea of adults, as the bodies around her surged forward, Edna met the future in an explosion of paint. The colours at the Herald Exhibition astounded her. In her sketchbook, in grey lead, she attempted to describe the mix of palettes, ‘purple all over in the black’. Even as a child, Edna was discriminating, at times cruel. She didn’t like the Braque, and was unmoved by Picasso’s blue and brown Trois Femmes. Her disinterest in abstraction began the day of the Herald Exhibition, an apathy that turned into a burning distaste later in life.

  Edna would grow to hate the ‘blockbuster exhibitions’ that became a mainstay of the Australian gallery landscape as the decades passed, but that first blockbuster left a lasting impression on her. A potent brew of fact and fiction seeped into her as she shuffled through the packed rooms in the temporary gallery, gazing up at images men had painted thousands of miles away.

  The position of the absent artist in that mass of viewers, the texture of impasto, the hot glare of the bulbs in the gloom, the excited babble of the crowds, the way that the stories on the walls showed not only the world as it was seen but also as it was experienced – all of it combined so that Edna came away from the Herald Exhibition of 1939 with the sense that art was of the highest importance to adults and to Australians. Three decades later, when she went to France to spend a year painting, she would revisit those same paintings in their home galleries.

  Not only did the exhibition cement in her a feeling for colour, it linked physicality – Imelda’s absence, the press of bodies, the urgency – with art. She would return often to the exhibition in her childhood in later letters and conversations.

  European galleries were being sacked, artists and dealers fleeing the advancing armies. It was too late for the Herald Exhibition’s sponsor Keith Murdoch to send the paintings back across the oceans – they were already crawling with ships of war. The directors of the big Australian galleries refused to buy the ‘disgusting’ works, despite t
he drastically reduced prices the Europeans were begging to get for their Picassos, Matisses and Cézannes. Instead, the paintings and sculptures of the Herald Exhibition were split up; many of the world’s most famous works of art spent the war years stashed deep inside of dry Australian train tunnels, or sitting in abandoned country houses in the Blue Mountains.

  The Biographer

  I drove up and down the Princes Highway, day after day, the You Yangs leaping up and then disappearing again behind me.

  In the mornings, I went to the interviews Victoria organised for me with the sprawling Whitedale side of the family. In the long, narrow cottages of Dent Street I sat at kitchen tables, drank litres of strong Lipton tea and ate stacks of Arrowroot biscuits. The Whitedale aunts were all eager to talk. Every story began with how much they had liked Edna, how much they’d admired her, and ended in bitterness and slight. She wasn’t very good with people. She wasn’t very good with family. A bit of a snob. But a snob to be occasionally pitied. A snob in a golden cage.

  Before long, the anecdotes would step sideways and become about their own children, their own lives – and Percy.

  Every aunt and uncle talked about Percy as if he was their own child. ‘He’s got real Whitedale blood in him,’ they said fondly. They yarned about picking him up from practice as a child. Percy seemed to have tramped mud across every one of their floors, bled from a sporting injury in each of their houses. Two of them claimed to have been the only adults there on the day he broke his leg at training when he was sixteen – both of them rushed him to hospital in separate cars. (Later, Percy would tell me it was Max who was there that day.)