He’d had a tragic life. Convinced at an early age that God was an orderly fellow, he formed the opinion that if there was gold or silver or diamonds or oil at a certain longitude and latitude in the northern hemisphere, there would also be gold or silver or diamonds or oil at the parallel latitude and longitude in the southern hemisphere. And if this latitude and longitude were somewhere in Australia, there he would go and dig. He’d work for four or five years as a travelling salesman and save up twenty or thirty thousand pounds and then, with bulldozers and steam shovels and derricks, would tear apart some unsuspecting mountain. Curiously, however, all of his mining ventures would follow a similar pattern. He would be within three feet of the gold or diamonds or whatever and someone would betray him. He’d be taken to court and forbidden to dig on that land ever again. There was never any question in his mind, of course, that he was looking in the right place. Betrayal, it was, betrayal that always ruined him at the very last moment.
I went up with him one year to dig for diamonds at Gilgai in the New England mountains. ‘Just think,’ he’d say, ‘on any turn of the shovel there could be diamonds, acres of diamonds!’ His partner in this venture – apart from Dad who’d put up a mere five thousand pounds – was a Dutchman by the name of Jerry. Eventually Jerry, too, betrayed him, drove him off the lease, and six months after Uncle Col died, Jerry found diamonds, acres of diamonds. Well, not exactly acres, but enough to keep him in luxurious ease for the rest of his days.
Uncle Col was one of those men of enormous personal charm and enormous wayward intellect who would, with a proper education, have done great things in the world. It’s because of the waste of such men – many of them part of my blood and part of my end of the country – that I will remain a socialist, whatever wealth I accumulate, until the day I die.
*
Twilight in Fingal, and the sea’s rim twinkled with Christmas beetles, blue-green as opals, meandering down in evening warmth to die within smell of the sea. Some animals lead such literary lives, I thought: the silkworm, the stag, the elephant, so rounded, so complete, there must be some Keats at the root of the universe, some Lewis Carroll perhaps. The skyscrapered profile of Surfers Paradise breathed like a ghost on the northern horizon. There, too, creatures had come in the last mauve hours of their appointed span to die by the sea. Is each and every one of them gone forever, I wondered, and all they learnt and unlearnt, believed and remembered in all their days? It seems a terrible waste of DNA … I must think further on these things.
The Inessential Ellis (first published in Nation Review, 1977)
LETTER TO ANNABEL, 1956
WRITTEN AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN ON BEHALF OF LEYLAND MINTER
2 Crescent Street,
Lismore, N.S.W.
16-9-1956
Dear Annabel,
I write this strictly as an intermediory [sic] between you and one Mr. Leyland Minter. The old flatterer possesses the misconception that my literary prowess is exorbitant and therefore more suitable for forwarding his gratification. So, to use a modern idiom, here goes.
You are the first female with whom he has made so close a contact as I have heard you did. The subsequent excuse (as he has undoubtedly related to you) for not residing beside you when the frequent opportunities to do so arose, was that he promised his mother that he would not deign to sit next to an eligible member of the opposite sex until he attains the ripe old age of – heaven help us – sixteen. You could possibly get around this by sitting on his knee, but he disagrees to even this so I am afraid you shall have to discover another method or just wait for a couple of years. Bad show.
At this juncture I might make a suggestion that you write him a letter on the abovementioned topic and get a regular correspondence going. I’m reasonably certain he’ll reciprocate in the manner befitting. His address is Ballina Road, Goonellabah. Enquire about his grass collection or something pertaining thereto, just to get the ball rotating.
Incidentally, you may as well enclose in the epistle the response to the $64 question – do you like him, or Myron? For sanity’s sake don’t say both or there’ll be a third world war. Just give the yes or no.
Furthermore. There arises out of the mists a rather good idea originated by Leyland himself. This concerns your attendance at Junior Camp at Lennox Head. This, I perceive, would be an extremely suitable arrangement. Five whole days (and nights) to see each other. Think about it. You may as well put that in your letter too. Save stamps that way.
Well, I think my epistle is completed to my satisfaction anyhow. I shall only be scalped, stabbed and boiled in oil if I put kisses at the end. So I won’t. Farewell m’gel.
Yours sincerely,
Robert Ellis
alias ‘Mouse(y)’
CHRISTMAS IN FINGAL
The beachside hut with cicadas dinning, moths round the porch light, the soft gulp of bullfrogs, less of them now this year, in the muggy lagoon. The rusting motorboat up on the trailer, like a T-Rex on its hind legs in moonlight. Three caravans – two on the front lawn, one by the gate – drawn up as if for battle. The quiet rumble of a marital quarrel from the master bedroom. Girls on the concrete verandah, drinking beer with their boyfriends and shrieking with laughter. Some things changing, most things the same.
For fifty-one years it’s been like this for me – for a week, three weeks in Fingal, near Tweed Heads – on a block of land Dad bought for ten pounds in 1946, and built a concrete shack on it with his old coalmining mates out of concrete blocks and fibro, extending its dodgy structure over the decades to its present ugly, chunky, homey adequacy. And there we would all meet, for days or weeks – Auntie Jean, Auntie Glad, Auntie Min, Auntie Edna, Uncle Cedric, Uncle Claude, Mum and Dad’s old mates from the 1930s and before. And Gran. And Granfa. Way, way back. Cricket in the front yard. Cricket on the radio. Inflated rubber Surfoplanes on the always unpatrolled surf beach. Political arguments, philosophical, sectarian …
Christmas holidays are what Australians have, I’ve always thought, instead of psychoanalysis. You have time to meet – and confront – the people who have shaped you, and space and summer heat enough to go walking with them by a forest or a roaring beach and to talk – or shout – things out. You get it said, for one more year at least. And you see time moving clearly. The little girl on your shoulders one year is soon, very soon, sitting out on the stone fence with a boyfriend under starlight. Old Mrs Hare’s daughter Gladys very soon looks exactly like her, and like her, very soon, is gone to the crematorium. Christmas at Fingal for all my folk who have been there is like a kind of a recurring medieval village, restored once a year, like Brigadoon – the good place of love and quarrel and abiding loyalty from which we are all exiles. The big, entangling family that on other days is no longer there.
The rituals have changed down the years. Grace is no longer said over Christmas dinner. Church is attended by only the few. No more do the kids put carrots on the roof for Santa’s reindeer that slowly clog the drains down the years. Beach cricket is rarely played now, and never by the twenty or thirty men and women from neighbouring fibro houses. But some traditions remain. We started up the Christmas beer-tasting twenty-four years ago, and it occupies most of Christmas afternoon, with labels covered and twenty or thirty brands, many foreign, some Australian, and – from the many participants – a mark out of ten, as the cicadas din and the day darkens. By some mysterious process Heineken usually wins, though aberrantly one year it was XXXX Gold. It occurs in thoughtful silence and most sleep deeply afterwards on deck chairs and lawns and caravan bunks. It is highly ritualised, like Holy Communion, and pretty pointless, I guess, but we need these wordless communions more and more as the metropolitan century forces us further and further apart, and the distances between us have now grown so great.
The world until my lifetime was never like that. It was fifty miles across, and your tribe, your blood group, your friendships were contained. And the harvest festivals – Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas – ha
d meaning, and the faces round the table had your nose and surname. And there were always babies and always old people in the household, and accustomed songs and prayers at their comings and goings. And it’s all fading now. And we’re the post-human race, really. Except in those great, warm time-capsules that are Spain and Ireland and the African tribal places where the drums beat and the singing soars to the moon and the toasts drunk and the prayers rising touch the heart of the tribe with magic … Australia is not like that, and, in its white phase, it never was.
And yet what we do now is important. Babies mix with octogenarians at Christmas at least, and games are invented, legends recounted, tall tales passed on, added to. The kids talk of exploits out alone on the lagoon and of the secret inlet known to them as Murdering Ponds. Bits of slang and catchphrase and nickname grow into private language. We are no longer a tribe, but we are a kind of memory of a tribe, this once a year. And we rove our sacred sites, and treasure them – the Fingal lighthouse, the Fingal causeway, like upturned loaves of black bread lashed by the sea, the Aboriginal midden, the Aboriginal graveyard, the blue metal quarry once, in my mother’s lifetime, a series of caves, the sandy boat bay by the Tweed. And the yabby hunts by lantern light and the long night hours fishing off the squat, rocky headland in the sea spray under a full moon take on, in our memory, the stony strength of folk verse. These are our yesterdays. This is our story. This is who we are. An Aboriginal friend of mine, Gary Williams, comes from the area, and he looked up at a mountain once and said, ‘Must be some old-time stories about that place.’ I feel that too, and, if they are not known, I feel the need to make the stories happen, and live, and be told.
For fifty years we have come here. For forty-five of those years Mrs Phillips ran the fibro store, and then she sold it and moved on. Jenners, the milkbar on the Chinderah road, was always Jenners, but now no more. But the trees are the same, the deep salt-water well, the ribbit-ribbit of the local frogs, the rosella parrots, now in their fifties, which we know by sight and greet as old friends. The five-mile beach to Cudgen stretches in a creamy crescent ahead of us now as then, and my children walk it as I did, in adventure, in triumph, to an unknown place. These things matter. They are the country and landscape of our mind. If we were Irish, there would be great Yeats-like poems to Fingal causeway under the sea surge. We celebrate these things less, but we feel them too, and we are reminded by them. No-one writes much of how intensely things are felt in childhood – Dickens in David Copperfield’s first pages had done it best – and how a single smell, honeysuckle, woodsmoke, can bring back so much, as if in action replay, of what was for so long dormant, locked up in the brain. Christmas with the family performs that unlocking, and so much is unleashed, and talked of with wonder, and known anew.
But much else, by now, is fading too, things once always here. The rock fishing and yabbying, now my father Keith is dead, doesn’t happen much any more, and the motorboat rests on the uptilted trailer. We don’t go to the Carols by Candlelight in Tweed Heads, finding virgin birth and followed stars and bearded caliphs with gifts for the infant child less likely in these latter days of godless republican stirrings. And the increasingly electronic nature of the gifts on Christmas morning – the computer games, kaboom, kaboom, the little vrooming cars with aerials – don’t feel much like things left by a old, white-bearded, plum-cheeked man in a flying sleigh, as the old wooden toys, carved and sturdy with round unmoving eyes, used to. The endless videotapes of Schwarzenegger and Jim Carrey and Beavis and Butthead erode conversation. The youngsters get restless, and go out more and more with their boyfriends to find some dancing.
And yet, like psychoanalysis, it somehow serves its purpose. How many divorces have been headed off in this fortnight every year I can only guess. How many careers come to focus in the mind looking out at sandhills and more sandhills in moonlight. How many books read, conversations had in boats or splashing waves that have changed a life. How much poetic sense made in old age out of long eventless years that might seem otherwise shapeless, pointless, wasted. How much comfort had from returning, merely returning, to places you knew and tasted and loved and roved when you were young. This is Fingal. This is Christmas. This is home.
Courier Mail, December 1997
2.
GROWING UP
SEEKING WORK: LETTER TO A PROSPECTIVE EDITOR, 1963
Dear Sir,
My name is Bob Ellis, I’m an ex-editor of honi soit. I have been writing seriously for three years and making no money. Enclosed please find one genuine contribution and some samples of what I can do. In your organisation my competition, I realise, is fierce; but maybe the occasional article on film from me might be worthy of some space. I write on other things too: but not often or very well. Your perusal, sir, would be much appreciated – also your advice. I remain
Yours faithfully,
Bob Ellis
NOSTRADAMUS MEMORIES
I guess, looking back, that the growing up I had in an Australian country town in the ’40s and ’50s, and in a city university in the ’60s, was like many another, but at the time it felt special and peculiar and strange and sad, and the yearning after things foregone was immense. As a Seventh Day Adventist, keeping Saturday holy, I missed playing cricket on Saturday mornings and the matinees on Saturday afternoons, with the Blackhawk serials and the rolled Jaffas and the chiackings and the girls. I missed the school dances, too, because they were a sin. Girls therefore to me seemed doubly mysterious, and the girls I glimpsed at the church camps and the youth camps – playing softball, swimming, diving, singing in the choirs – an ungraspable enormity. I had to keep myself pure for them, according to the Church, and I really wanted to do that – to arrive doubly virgin on a great shining bridal night that angels flew over rejoicing, with a radiant girl beneath me, whose face, whose beautiful heavenly face, I never quite saw in the daydream that came and came again.
It was all pretty wrong – mixed up too with the Women’s Weekly images of brides and fiancées and girls next door and the girls in the comic books that I bought and hoarded on the side verandah, like Betty and Veronica out of the Archie series and Mandrake’s assistant Narda and Sheena the jungle queen. So that when I finally kissed a girl, and bumped up against her teeth, and registered the rubbery thickness of her lips and the hot grasp of her hand as we walked together by the farm fence afterwards – she was taller than me and flat-chested and gawky, but she was terrific and game, and her even gamer sister got shotgun wed at fifteen – it was all too weighty and physical somehow. We weren’t creatures made of mist that met in painters’ compositions under slanting columns of holy light. We were more like the wrestlers of football scrums, and it was all much messier, and hotter. It is better to marry, Saint Paul remarked, than to burn, and I began to know what that burning meant. Wet dreams started, and always before the girl in the dream undressed they ended. These were girls I never knew in life, often with ordinary faces, a different one each time, as if in a queue of marital candidates. And I woke sticky in a sort of wondering, astonished shame …
At about thirteen I became involved in a neighbourhood a bike ride away from my own – in Oakley Avenue, East Lismore – where there were lots of kids in neighbouring wood-and-fibro houses. They put on a street festival, and I took part in it, writing playlets and acting in them and organising a garage cinema that featured my 8mm Dekko silent projector. A girl in the street became my obsession. I wrote her letters, hung about in the vacant lot behind her house, sometimes at night looking up at her lighted window, cultivated her family, played Scrabble with her and her sisters, dreamt of kissing her and worse. One of my fantasies was to have her pose nude for me, on a rock above Minyon Falls, and do a sculpture of her in clay.
I somehow took her to a matinee – ‘Be good children, won’t you,’ her mother said – held her hand, didn’t dare any more. At one point a mock wedding was contrived for us by the leering neighbourhood kids. She turned up in a lace curtain wedding dress, I in an ironed suit,
but I felt a fool and angrily disrupted the ceremony. I feel a fool still, remembering it. Soon, perhaps because of it, she chose another boy. I still remember watching her running in a relay race at school after this, watching her bobbing breasts and hating the world. Her breasts were considerable, and she had clear, grey, remarkable eyes and dust-brown skin. She was later elected North Coast Banana Queen, and rightly so …
That year at Seventh Day Adventist Camp there occurred the events that, in The Nostradamus Kid, a little fantasticated, were dramatised with as much emotional truth as I could muster. There was an English girl, Ruth, whose moustachioed father was an Adventist minister, and whose sister Ngaere was equally beautiful – beautiful English skins, both of them, and a shared serene look – and dreamingly, longingly, incompetently, stupidly I sought her love. I probably would have settled for her sister, so much in love with love I was that year, at fourteen, knowing little of what it was. I lurked round tents, wrote letters, her father read the letters, I was warned off, came back … One night I walked twenty miles, walked all night, to stand outside the beachside house she was in, reciting ‘The Ancient Mariner’ to keep my courage up. She came to the window, looked out, didn’t see me …
Summers fled, and the autumns. Girls came and went at Lismore High School, oft thought of, never had. The having of them, the kissing, the feeling up – upstairs outside, 2; upstairs inside, 4; and so on – were the privilege of the big athletic sports jocks, and I was a weed, a swot, an eccentric, acceptable as a schoolyard clown but never as a date. I asked a few girls out and was each time refused, and suppurated inside. Many schoolmates, meanwhile, were beginning to have actual sex, breaking their ducks, getting on with it. One of them, Roy Masters – later a famed football coach and media star – ran away from home after being caught in a state of erect undress by his mother, Olga Masters, with a game, bold girl from across the street. He stayed in my room for a while, furious and frightened, until my mother, moving decisively, was able to negotiate a peace with Olga, the always formidable Olga. Roy talked of running away altogether, leaving school, abandoning his college career and everything else for the sake of this girl, striking out into the free air. I didn’t understand this and I said so, but from my spirited virgin perspective how could I …
Bob Ellis Page 3