Not long after the wedding, Edna and Max left Australia on their honeymoon. Their first stop was Papua New Guinea. A photograph of that summer at the beginning of their honeymoon shows the couple on the verandah of a prefab house. Edna sits on the railing in a white safari outfit and boots, her legs swinging. Dark circular sunglasses obscure her eyes, but her mouth is determinedly jaunty as it clamps down on her cigarette. With her sketchbook under one arm, she is clearly either returning or just setting out. Max, on the other hand, sits back in the shade, reclining in a wicker chair. He has a book open on his lap, his bare, scarred legs stretched before him.
Edna spent her days out in the fields of Papua New Guinea or on the tiny front verandah of the house they had on the university’s campus, working on preliminary sketches for the Bomana series, the triptych of sprawling cemetery landscapes now housed in the Australian War Memorial’s collection. The shift in brushwork across the three pieces tracks Edna’s awareness of the process of her own – and Max’s – memory-making.
During the time that Edna and Max spent in Papua New Guinea, bodies were still being dug up and moved from the battle sites along the treacherous Kokoda Track to be reinterred in the Bomana cemetery, nineteen kilometres north of Port Moresby. In fact, the cemetery continued to receive the bodies of Australian soldiers from their shallow holes on the track for years. In total, 3,824 bodies were finally buried in the equally spaced graves – of those, 699 were unidentified.
The Biographer
I couldn’t do what Victoria wanted me to do. I couldn’t leave the arrest alone. Looking back, I think I wanted to own a part of Edna. I wanted to show Victoria that I knew Edna, that I understood her mother better than she did herself. Edna was from my world, from the Geelong of the factories and pubs, the Geelong of the flats.
I went to the University of Melbourne Archives and ordered up the records of the meetings held by the protest group Women Against Rape. One of the women listed on the agenda – Adina Turner – was also in the phone book. Pulling the thread made me feel powerful.
I called Adina. We met up on her lunchbreak in the hot concrete and glass of the CBD. I recognised her. She was short, powerfully built, breasts strapped in under her suit, wide-spaced eyes. She had been in Joe’s graduating class at the University of Melbourne. Joe and I hadn’t known her well – we’d avoided the ‘women’s room lesbos’, as Joe called them. Joe said their armpit hair looked like they were packing sweaty spaghetti, and we joked that they spent their days looking at their vaginas with mirrors.
‘How is Joe?’ she asked. ‘He still at Kleiner and McCoy?’
‘We got divorced.’
‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.’
‘No, everything is fine. It happens, you know. When you get married young.’
‘Sure. Sure. Well, I’m glad you guys are still friends. He was a nice guy.’
Adina was working as a lawyer at one of the big construction firms. She told me that she had been involved in every year of the protest marches, as part of WAR’s organising committee. She didn’t remember Edna, though.
Then I called Leslie, Edna’s friend and lawyer. I hadn’t thought to call her earlier. Leslie had refused to talk to me so many times, and I didn’t expect her to change now.
I told her about the Australia Remembers campaign, and I asked her straight out: ‘Do you know if Edna was ever arrested for anything? Just in case.’
There was a silence on the other end of the phone line. Then Leslie said, ‘We should talk.’
Leslie was based at the University of Melbourne.
On the afternoon I went to meet her, the university’s grounds were deserted. Huge expanses of concrete shimmered in the late summer heat. Stepping into the shadowed bluestone walkways of the law school was a relief. In the first courtyard, I caught a glimpse of my ghost posing with Joe in front of the gardenias. He held his degree in damp hands. I stood beside him. So proud; the award could have been mine.
Inside the law school, institutional carpet. Blessed air conditioning. Wooden benches pushed against walls. Despite the heat outside, Leslie was wearing black pants, a black shirt. Her hair was cut short and slick around her bony head. She sat on the front of her desk as if she was a child.
‘Have you ever stopped to think that Max might be right?’ she asked. ‘That Edna really would not have wanted this?’
‘Because of the arrest?’
‘Not the arrest. I don’t know anything about any arrest. But I do know that Edna would have wanted her relationship with Max protected, and she would have wanted Max’s relationship with their children protected.’
‘The arrest might not be a big deal,’ I said. ‘I just want to be sure I know what we’re getting into if we do this government campaign.’
Leslie considered me, her head cocked on her thin neck. ‘Tell me: what have you found out about her application to be a war artist in Vietnam?’
I told her what Jennifer had said on that first day: that she believed Max had blocked Edna’s chances. That I hadn’t been able to get the committee notes. I wasn’t sure how much would be in them. That I had written to the committee members, and Sir William Dargie, but that no-one had responded.
Leslie leaned on the edge of the desk, surrounded by piles of paperwork.
‘Who knows if she would have had a chance at that assignment. I don’t think they would have sent a woman,’ she said. ‘But what if what Jennifer suspected was right? What if Max blocked her application? Called Dargie and told him to throw it out? What would you write then?’
‘I mean, if I had any proof I would include it.’
‘Then you should know: Edna would have hated that. Even if it was true. She wouldn’t have wanted people thinking that Max blocked her career like that. Don’t make her some national symbol, okay? Her work will find its time.’
‘Leslie, this is her time. If we don’t do this now, we wait until what – both kids are dead and the embargo is lifted? That could be fifty years from now. I only came here to check that one question. Was she ever arrested?’
Leslie shook her head.
I kept pushing. ‘If Max did block her application to Vietnam, and she was angry with him … what was France about? Was that a separation?’
‘Edna loved Max,’ Leslie said. ‘She loved him more than anything.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘I don’t think you should be doing this. For Victoria’s sake. For Edna’s family.’
EDNA: A LIFE
When Edna began entering paintings into the national Archibald Prize for portraiture in 1954, Nora Heysen was the only female artist to have won the prize. Also the first official female Australian War Artist, Heysen had been awarded the prize in 1938 for her portrait of the wife of the consul-general of the Netherlands.
In the early years, the portraits Edna entered into the Archibald Prize featured leading figures in the Country Women’s Association. They did not do well. While paintings of female subjects won four out of the first five years of the prize in the early 1920s, between 1927 and 1966 portraits featuring a female subject only won twice, a fact that prompted The Australian Women’s Weekly to start their own rival prize for portraiture, briefly the most financially rewarding in the country.
From 1957 on, Edna became peripherally involved with the Hendley Gallery in Melbourne. She was paying the gallery small amounts to have her works featured in group shows, and while the relationship garnered her few actual sales it did encourage her to change her approach to competitions: every portrait she submitted to the Archibald Prize from 1957 until the end of her relationship with the gallery in 1965 featured a male subject. Unfortunately, there was no covering up her gender, and paintings by women in the Archibald Prize had even less luck than paintings of women.
Then, in 1961, a second female artist won the prize: Judy Cassab for a portrait of her friend and fellow painter Stanislaus Rapotec.
After Cassab won, Edna clipped the headline of an article fro
m The Age and stuck it into her sketchbook: Archibald to Woman. She left out the rest of the article, which quoted the senior vice-president of the Art Gallery of New South Wales saying that the entries were of a lower quality than the year before. Cassab told the reporter she was ‘completely flabbergasted. I just can’t believe that I have won it. Especially being a woman.’
Commentators were astounded that Cassab had broken the Archibald mould by painting her subject standing, hands in mid-gesture instead of in repose. The win might have given Edna hope, or, more likely, annoyed her. Cassab’s work showed her subjects against the wild backdrops of their interior worlds, abstract and fey. Edna, at the time, was obsessed with the ‘actual, the concrete’.
In the 1960s, the men of art, letters and science who artists chose as subjects for the Archibald portraits carried all the cultural weight and imagined identity of the nation Australia was struggling to build: the walls of every exhibition were hung with serious, unsmiling men painted against a dark background so that they stood or sat without context on the canvas, floating in front of the viewer. Archibald’s peers would have been hard pressed to find anything ‘offensively Australian’ about the paintings or their subjects – they were sober, sombre and mostly dull.
In 1963, a year that Edna unsuccessfully entered five portraits for consideration, she must have been baffled and amused by the portrait that won the prize: a dappled oil in muddy lavenders and browns of her old nemesis James McAuley, co-creator of the poet Ern Malley.
Then came 1964, when, after years of entries, Edna was finally selected for the Archibald Prize exhibition. The painting that got her in was of Pop Cranmer; the family on both sides were delighted. Traditionally framed, it was a large, detailed work that showed Pop sitting in the library of their house on Eastern Beach, surrounded by his walls of art and books. Instead of placing him on a wash of background colour, Edna includes the ephemera of her father-in-law’s life. Above him hangs the family portrait that features his son Max in uniform before the war, signalling the Cranmers’ proud military past. There are other paintings on the walls behind him too, windows within windows onto the sort of man Pop Cranmer considered himself to be. One of them shows a landscape of the rolling fields out near Torquay that had made the Cranmer family their first wool fortunes, the hills stripped back and pastoral. Edna’s quirks still appear in the work: one of Pop Cranmer’s trouser cuffs is slightly raised to show a tiny patch of skin.
Victoria was born in November 1964, completing Max and Edna’s family unit. Percy and Victoria were both easy, healthy babies, and Max was delighted. John Whitedale seemed settled in Max’s beach-side shack in Sorrento, and was nearing the end of his apprenticeship with the carpenter J.G. Morris. Edna’s professional and family lives finally seemed to be stable.
The combination of the grandchildren and the Archibald success also marked a warming between Nel and Edna. To Edna’s pleasure, Nel offered to buy the portrait and donate it to the Geelong Gallery’s collection.
The Cranmers’ initial jubilation, however, soon turned to embarrassment. On 23 January 1965, the selection committee announced that, for the first time in the exhibition’s history, they were not awarding a prize. ‘After careful consideration,’ the director wrote, ‘the trustees have unanimously decided not to award the prize for 1964, as they felt no submitted entry was worthy of the award.’
The lack of award was humiliating for Edna. Awards imply hierarchy – everyone can imagine that they have come a near second. But the lack of award carried a clear message: none of the paintings was considered any good. It came as a terrible blow.
The Archibald exhibition might have been where Sir William Dargie first saw Edna’s work. A former official war artist in the Second World War and the recipient of eight Archibald Prizes, Dargie was an advisor to the artistic selection committee at the Australian War Memorial. When Dargie was asked to put together a list of potential war artists for Vietnam, Edna was the only woman on it.
Her inclusion on the list marked the beginning of a tumultuous period that ended with her complete withdrawal from the Australian arts scene.
The first Australian troops had been sent to Vietnam as advisors in 1962 at the request of the United States. Three years later, they were followed by a full battalion of combat troops; by 1965 it was clear to the government and the War Memorial that it was time to send an official war artist too.
It was vitally important that the Australian war artist to Vietnam be a realist. ‘We have to insist,’ wrote William Lancaster, the director of the War Memorial, ‘that the subject matter of the pictures must be recognisable by the average human being.’
In the mid 1960s, however, realists were in short supply. Australia had turned its back on Europe for artistic inspiration. The nation was deep in the thralls of American abstraction – the second blockbuster to hit the Australian shores and take the big galleries by storm was about to open in Melbourne. Two Decades of American Painting featured works by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and the then virtually unknown Cy Twombly. And when the National Gallery of Victoria opened in its brand-new building on St Kilda Road towards the end of the decade, the very first exhibition held in the space was The Field, featuring seventy-four colour field paintings by forty artists, again predominantly from the USA. (Ironically, the Australian painters closest to figurative work at the time – if not realism – were the Antipodeans, the former Angry Penguins, the very radicals that the established art world had decried just two decades before.)
When the War Memorial contacted Edna in February 1966 to see if she was interested in being considered for the position of war artist, Edna must have felt an incredible conflict over the possibility of getting the position and leaving her young children behind. Percy was just four, and Victoria only two. Max and Edna had bought the house in Sorrento to give themselves some distance from their overbearing families, but it also meant that if Edna was offered the position in Vietnam, Max would have been alone with the children while she was away. John Whitedale, twenty-three years old, was still living in Edna and Max’s beach shack on the Sorrento foreshore and could potentially have helped Max a little, but otherwise Max and Edna were anxious about what would happen to the children if Edna should be selected.
And Edna badly wanted to be selected. In the months leading up to the War Memorial’s Selection Committee decision, she completed sketchbook after sketchbook of background drawings and research. She cut hundreds of articles and images from print publications. Some of the images are glued down carefully, clipped and slipped between the pages. In between the charcoal jungles and the swing of helicopter blades, Edna includes Polaroids: streetscapes outside their house on the Sorrento cliffs; an empty winter beach, the curled shells of Percy’s and Victoria’s backs crouched in the distance.
Her sketches of the family’s daily lives – the children, Max – were mostly kept in separate sketchbooks to her preparations for the official war artist position. When she does sketch out of place – Victoria in the bath between pages of jungle foliage; a young soldier climbing into a truck next to the night-time emptiness of St Kilda’s Esplanade – the scenes look eerie and deliberate to the viewer. The young body of the boy-child on the beach, the clipped body of a man-child in the jungle.
Edna travelled to Canberra to meet with the committee. Seeing her off at the bus station, her friend Leslie Clarke recalled her determination and hope. ‘Edna saw herself as linked to Imelda’s mission; she saw herself as a healer, as someone who could bear witness. The War Memorial posting was a chance for her to document something that was very important to her.’
The other artists who made Dargie’s list alongside Edna were television set-painters and ‘pure’ portrait artists. In Canberra, after a day of interviews and deliberations, the Australian War Memorial announced that they were appointing the artists Ray Crooke and Bruce Fletcher, the latter of whom Dargie describes in his notes as: ‘a competent artist … quite a masculine character and rathe
r determined.’
Edna returned home to the house in Sorrento, crushed. She had been so close to something that would have tied her not only to the world of work, but back to Imelda, to her father, to her nation.
Then came the death in Vietnam of Private Errol Noack in May 1966. Noack’s parents begged to be left alone in their grief after the loss of their only child, but the country could not resist. The media camped outside their house. Anger ran high. Protests began. In August, Australians fought at the bloody battle of Long Tan. Public perception of the war began to shift as more and more young men died and the uncanny lottery barrel of the national conscription rolled over on national television.
In December, artist Ray Crooke told The Canberra Times that he was not interested in painting ‘guns, tanks, and general heroics’. He pulled out of the position of official war artist. When Edna heard they were reconsidering the remaining artists on the list she was elated, sure that the position would come to her.
The War Memorial went back to their list. Edna sketched obsessively that Christmas, already taking on the job of documenting the wars. In her sketchbooks she drew the first occasion of the notorious ‘birthday ballot’. Conscription had been introduced two years earlier, but it wasn’t until Harold Holt began to increase troops that the grizzly ‘birthday ballot’ was needed. In one of Edna’s sketchbooks, there is a charcoal work of the televised lottery. The National Service Scheme required that every man, on his twentieth birthday, register with the Department of Labour and National Service. Twice a year, on national television, a lottery barrel full of 365 days was spun. Hosts in suits with blow-dried hair reached into the barrel, pulled out five marbles, and thousands of twenty-year-olds were conscripted for two years of active service, and three years of reserve. Ultimately 19,000 of them would serve in Vietnam.
The artists the War Memorial sent to Vietnam were given jungle warfare training, and were expected to fight if they had to. In the Second World War, Nora Heysen had been stationed in active battle areas, but not armed. However, Australia’s war artists to Vietnam would be carrying guns, and the idea of women carrying guns made everyone nervous. In the Second World War, the Department of Defence had even banned the supply of ammunition to female rifle-club members, reasoning that men would feel ‘slighted if women were allowed to co-operate in the defence of the country’.
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