The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  ‘I wish,’ she wrote, jokingly, ‘that he had called us something else. What were we? Farmers, salt of the earth. So I could have felt more proud of myself. Two and a half years in the dirt and I never picked any spuds, darn it! Do they think that we were all poor and Irish? Pea-pickers! They should have called us pea-pickers. But so it goes, and mostly of course we are simply grateful. It is over. Nothing else is important. Call us what they will. It no longer matters. Now it is simply time to remember, so as not to repeat.’

  Almost two hundred ‘girls’ aged between fifteen and fifty lived and worked at the rambling AWLA training farm in Victoria’s northern agricultural heartlands, learning to be flax assessors, cattle musterers and crop specialists.

  Thanks to the foresight of the women Edna drew, many of the beautiful watercolours known as the Training the Land Army series are still in the possession of their original owners.

  The things that alienated Edna from her peers at the Girls’ School in Geelong made her a favourite in the hardworking, no-nonsense atmosphere of the training farm. Edna continued to use her art as a form of currency, in the same way as she had with the soldiers on Geelong’s Eastern Beach. The older women of the AWLA welcomed Edna’s constant sketching, were even protective of it, carving out time from the lunchbreaks and smokos for Edna to make quick scenes.

  In 1992, eighty-three-year-old Judith Quinn remembered Edna fondly for her beauty, her talent and her sardonic humour. Quinn, who had worked as a flax assessor at the training farm, still owned a small Whitedale pencil portrait that had hung in a teak frame above her mantelpiece in her weatherboard home in Footscray since the war. In the portrait, Quinn kneels over a pair of disembodied feet, removing their shoes. The women’s bodies often became too stiff to undress themselves.

  Edna had been at the camp for a few weeks when the sickness hit. That night, Quinn remembers that Edna was at her seat in the mess hall, still working on her sketches, when the first women emerged from their tents and made their dash to the makeshift trough toilets they had dug along the edge of the camp. Edna noted it in the margins of her sketchbook, a small trail of running women, their standard-issue sheets flapping like mad wings. Within an hour, the women were too weak to stand. Edna’s sketches show them lying on the ground, lamps lit, mouths near the pits as they are joined by others – first ten, then twenty, then more. Playing nurse, as she had years ago with Imelda, she notes the times they emerged, trying to track and record their sickness.

  There was no refrigeration at the training camp. In garlands around the sketches, Edna placed limp cabbages, crawling flies. Like everyone else, in the close heat of the summer she assumed the sickness was food poisoning.

  By morning, Edna was also gravely ill. When a cart arrived from Ballarat, there were more patients than could fit into its rough wooden tray. A second cart was sent, and then a third. One hundred and fifty-four women in the camp fell ill. Not everyone recovered – a few women were eventually discharged from the AWLA for health reasons, and one died.

  Years later, an investigation revealed that it was not the limp food that made the women ill: it was bromide poisoning. Bromide, thought to be a safe, mild sedative, was sprinkled on the meals to control women’s ‘sexual urges’. In the weeks leading up to the mysterious illness, the managers running the training farm had begun to worry about ‘crushing’. When relationships were discovered between women, couples were quietly broken up and moved to separate farms.

  Quinn, recounting her memories of the farm, recalled a water-colour Edna painted that made a particular ‘stir’: of Maude, a trainer, and her student Stella.

  Like Edna, Maude was learning to muster cattle before being sent to one of the distant stations. Unlike Edna, she was already an accomplished horsewoman, and stayed behind on the training farm for a second season to teach.

  While the final watercolour of Maude and Stella has been lost, we do still have the preliminary sketches Edna made for the piece as she tried to capture the movements of the two women during training. In the sketches, Maude sits astride a large draughthorse, one arm firmly around the waist of the woman in front of her – Stella – who has just dropped the reins, her expression half fright, half delight. Stella is enjoying the moment, the fear and the circling horse below her, but Maude’s stern face and gripping legs show she knows they are in danger as she reaches around her student to grab the reins once more.

  There is nothing explicitly sexual about the sketch, but not long after Edna completed the full watercolour, Quinn remembers that the two women left unexpectedly, and soon after the camp fell sick.

  Edna, already skeletal from her months in the long picking rows, must have had an uncomfortable journey rattling along in the cart to Ballarat hospital, clutching her bag of sketchbooks to her heaving guts.

  The Biographer

  In Canberra that summer, dry winds swept dust through the empty streets and across the surface of the artificial lake at the centre of the city.

  In the mornings, I caught the bus along the edge of the lake to the War Memorial. The timetables were such that I could not arrive at opening time; only half an hour late, or half an hour early. Waiting for the Hall of Memory to open, I sat on the slabs of the steps and looked out over the long stretch of Anzac Parade, listening to the cicadas and sweating as the heat rose. Beyond the parade with its hulking statues, the lake reflected an overcast sky. Parliament House crouched on the shore opposite me, its white spear the only break in the bushy skyline.

  The War Memorial was built to face the Australian parliament, the balance of politics and history meant as a reminder. From where I sat on those hot mornings, the distant government buildings looked sterile and other-worldly. I couldn’t see any movement in its desolate forecourts, but things were happening under the hill across the lake. Someone new was taking over the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Civilians were slowly trickling out of power, military men stepping in to take their places.

  Inside the memorial courtyard I ran my fingers across the grey water of the pond. I touched the limp silk poppies stuck into the walls, dashes of colour on row after row of tiny bronze name plaques – 102,000 dead, but there were more; men like my father, men like Edna’s father, Frank Whitedale, long deaths, uncounted. When the buses full of school groups began turning off Constitution Avenue and rolling up the parade, I left the courtyard’s open skies and let the corridors suck me down into the belly of the building. Behind me, the clamour of the arriving children was lost in the sounds of the displays – the bellow of tank fire, the rattle of guns.

  The past wasn’t going anywhere, but in the records room at the War Memorial everyone was in a hurry. Old men thumped the service desk and demanded attention. Women in cable knits panicked over the rolling files. History was tended by an army of volunteers, all of them scurrying through the basements of ephemera, cataloguing the rapidly accumulating days. I found them comical back then. Now, I understand. That the past is ever present, and always malleable. That you have to get to it first; that they were right to rush.

  The pimply young man at the information desk told me that, yes, there were records of the Art Committee’s meetings during the Vietnam War, and Edna might have been mentioned in them. But I couldn’t see them. For the first thirty years following a conflict, he told me haughtily, everything was closed. No public access.

  He must have been just out of uni. I asked about Max’s records from the Second World War.

  ‘We’ll have to read over everything first,’ he said. ‘You can’t just have this stuff immediately. It might take days, depending on how many files there are that you want to see.’

  I could tell he enjoyed saying no to me. ‘Are you worried the Japanese will make it past Darwin?’ I asked.

  ‘Some of this is highly classified,’ the pimply young man said, shooing me away.

  When I left the archives and galleries each evening, the city was breathing out the heat of the day. I sat in a bar on London Circuit, pretending to watch
the various sports that played out on the screens over my head.

  I turned thirty in Canberra. Sitting in that bar, beneath images of cricket and golf; the screwed-up faces of tennis players; the dogs racing under lights. But, really, that night I was watching the men around me. They were in suits, or shorts and singlets, fleshy and slick, or rough with hair. They laughed loudly. I had nothing to give them. I remember thinking: I’m not young anymore. I was terrified, and relieved. A thin membrane separated me from the woman I wanted to be – a skin over my skin.

  Back in the hotel I felt I was swimming in the air conditioning. I stripped down to my underpants and lay on the heavy cotton sheets, eating takeaway felafel and watching television.

  Every second channel on the pay-to-view was pornography. I imagined that the floors above and below me were full, room after room of men, standing at the same televisions, masturbating.

  I had never seen pornography before, moving in colour in front of me. I lay on the bed, with my hand over my underpants. There were no men, only the screen, only chunks of meat. I became the man, while the women panted and moaned.

  After that, I stopped turning the television on in the evenings – and hung a towel over it so that I could forget it was there.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  The national scandal over the work of the poet Ern Malley obsessed Australia in the winter weeks of June 1944, and found its way into Edna’s sketchbooks too. Through her time recovering in a ward of the Ballarat hospital, and then recuperating in the home of a local Country Women’s Association member who was also on the board of the Ballarat Art Gallery, Edna followed the Ern Malley furore with minute attention, carefully clipping articles, photos and poems and fixing them into her sketchbook.

  The story, as Edna first understood it, went as follows:

  Born into a working-class family in Liverpool in 1918, Ern Malley crossed the oceans to Australia with his family as a child. Orphaned at fifteen, he became an auto mechanic, an insurance salesman, a watch repairman. When he was diagnosed with Graves’ disease in 1943 he moved in with his sister Ethel Malley. Despite everything Ethel did to try to save him, he died a few months later in her bleak Sydney flat.

  It was Ethel, cleaning out her brother’s room after his death, who found his tightly wrapped sets of poems, written in secret, full of the black swans of Edna’s childhood and the haunting imagery of half-understood worlds.

  Ethel Malley immediately submitted her brother’s unpublished poetry to the Angry Penguins journal. By the time Ern Malley’s work came to the radical modernist group founded in Adelaide, two of the three original founders – Donald Kerr and Paul Pfeiffer – had already been killed in the war. The surviving founder, twenty-three-year-old Max Harris, was given refuge by the now-iconic artistic duo John and Sunday Reed on their farm Heide outside Melbourne, today the home of Australia’s Museum of Modern Art.

  It took a year for Harris to get the journal ready to print. Paper was scarce, printing and publishing complicated beyond belief during the wartime period. When the poems were finally published, in June 1944 – as Edna lay in the cramped wards in Ballarat – they catalysed the Australian art world.

  Fragmentary, lucid, bizarre, Malley’s poems were full of disconnected images and strange leaps of imagination. Loved or loathed, his work was a lightning rod. The Angry Penguins journal was impounded for obscenity, and Harris put on trial.

  Malley was young, untrained and working-class, and in his life and work Edna recognised a ghostly reflection of her own. Moreover, to Edna, given her longing for her sister, Ethel Malley became Imelda, the virtuous, selfless sibling, whose unconditional love held the power to change everything.

  If Edna died, she might have romantically imagined that her sketchbooks would go to Imelda, who after all began them, and who would in turn make Edna’s visions of the world famous, just as Ethel had done for Ern when she submitted her brother’s work to the Angry Penguins journal.

  A detailed sketch completed during Edna’s time in Ballarat shows her and Imelda walking out into the still waters of the tidal estuaries at Swan Bay, where they had played as children. In the margins of the sketch, Edna transcribed Malley’s poem ‘Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495’:

  I had read in books that art is not easy

  But no one warned that the wind repeats

  In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still

  the black swan of trespass on alien waters.

  By July 1944, the truth was out: Ern Malley was not one man but two. Not dead after all, but very alive. The men behind the Ern Malley scam, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, were employees of the shadowy Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, a military ‘think tank’ with links to intelligence organisations.

  Both men had been involved in Sydney’s prewar bohemian arts scene. They saw themselves as defenders of early modernism, as soldiers in the battle against the decadence and confusion of surrealism and abstract expressionism. Wanting to entrap Harris, McAuley and Stewart created poems that they considered deliberately bad, nonsense pastiches of everything they hated most. If Harris could pick the poetry for what it was – random trash – then he would prove that he had a method for approaching what McAuley and Stewart saw as the madness of the modernist scene, lacking taste or rules. If Harris failed to realise the poems were fakes, he would be disgraced.

  The hoax became international news, and the Angry Penguins were excoriated by the press. For a while. But Malley’s work had a staying power that no-one expected, and would continue to echo through painting, theatre and literature across the continent and over the generations.

  The Ern Malley affair, as it would come to be known, had a deep impact on Edna as she recovered from her illness in Ballarat. She had loved the poems immediately, and was horrified to discover they were ‘fakes’.

  The affair and its aftermath bled into a personal tragedy much more real and immediate. On 3 August 1944, as Edna was getting ready to leave Ballarat and return home to Geelong for her father’s birthday, he drowned in a boating accident on the shallow, muddy waters of Swan Bay.

  Frank had been visiting his aunt Enid at her home in Queenscliff late on the morning of his death. When Frank left his aunt’s house, he went straight to the Esplanade Hotel and began drinking. In the late afternoon, he was seen on the small jetty stretching out into Swan Bay, climbing unsteadily into the family’s dinghy with a bottle of liquor.

  At the time, the Whitedale family maintained publicly that Frank’s death was a tragic accident. But in the decades since, it has come to be accepted as likely that Frank committed suicide. The local papers carried no obituary, only a funeral notice announcing that Frank Whitedale would be buried in the local cemetery.

  Edna travelled south by train to Geelong for the funeral. She stopped drawing; for the first time since she was six, a gap appears in her sketchbooks.

  She did not stay long in Geelong. Within the month, she was back on the metal tracks to Melbourne. From Melbourne, Manpower sent her west, into the state of South Australia, where the sea pinches up towards the parched central deserts. Two hundred kilometres north of Port Augusta, Mikelty Station stretched out along the banks of Lake Torrens’ ephemeral salt flats. Edna spent the rest of the war mustering cattle in ochre country, where the silence was as immense as the light that stretched across the red earth.

  The Biographer

  Victoria’s friend Lisa McNab had shiny white teeth, smooth armpits and long legs. She walked expertly on high black heels. She drove me to a Vietnamese restaurant in the middle of Canberra for lunch, and when we sat down she shook the heels off under the table with a sigh of relief.

  ‘The wonderful thing about wars,’ she said over lunch, dunking her chopsticks in the oily soup, ‘is that no-one realises: war is everywhere. It touches, and it touches. That’s what I want people to remember while we do this campaign. That women were a part of it too. Open your handbag.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Open your purse,
I’ll show you.’

  I put my purse on the table top, feeling panicky. It was a small bag in dark green leather, with a silky black synthetic lining. I knew exactly what was inside it. My wallet, my notebook, a pencil, a wadded fist of toilet paper that held the last tampon of my bloody period, which had ended that morning. (There had been no rubbish bin in the unisex toilet next to the Records Room.) And a long snaking tear packet of condoms. I had only just bought them. The fleshy contents of my body and its desperate longings were in the bag.

  ‘Go on,’ urged Lisa.

  ‘I’m sorry, I mean, I’d rather talk about the actual work …’

  ‘Okay, okay, got a pencil in there?’

  I rustled around in the bag, found one.

  Lisa held the pencil up, squinted at it. ‘I know these ones. Stole it from the Records Room at the War Memorial, didn’t you? Don’t worry, I won’t squeal.’ She pointed it at me. ‘Lead came from war. The wars of the English Crown. Graphite. For wad, you know. Lined the moulds of the cannonballs. And then the wooden pencil, that comes from the next war. Napoleon. The English blockaded the French and the French generals couldn’t get their English pencils like they were used to. Conte, he mixes graphite with clay, slaps it in some wood, and there you have it. War gave us the first way to scratch, then the first wooden pencil, you know. That’s what I mean. It’s everywhere, when you know where to look, the history of our wars. Connections. Connections.’

  ‘I’ve got some more of her paintings here …’

  I lay the photographs of Edna’s large cemetery triptychs – Poppies, Bomana – out across the cheap plastic table. Next to them, I arranged the clippings of the articles Victoria and I had placed in newspapers in the lead-up to Remembrance Day.

  Lisa let out a long whistle of air through her teeth.