‘Like Disneyland,’ remarked the judge, with glorious dark dignity, from the bench. It was very hard not to love him then.
And so it went on. The gung-ho pilots who flew through atomic clouds one minute after the explosion to see if the plane fell apart. The canister of nuclear waste, which, dropped overboard, refused to sink and was riddled with machine-gun bullet holes till it did so and probably lies on the ocean bottom exuding to this day. The lower ranks who, it was felt, wouldn’t understand the technical reasons for the safety precautions, and so weren’t told any. Bare-chested they shovelled up Satan’s brew, and twenty years later, though who can tell, they began to have these symptoms.
‘Inherent in the notion of class,’ I wrote in my diary, ‘is the belief that some people are expendable. Inherent in the notion of empire is the belief that some people are even more expendable than Cockneys.’
On the last day in England, Lord Penney had said the plutonium yield at Hiroshima had been rather disappointing. They had hoped for a great deal more. He had watched the bombing of Nagasaki, alongside Group Captain Cheshire, but had seemed on the whole a rather nice man. ‘Go easy on the old feller,’ said the judge that lunchtime in sympathy with his broken posterity, ‘there’s no point making him bleed.’
‘Thank you, Lord Penney,’ he said at the end, ‘your ordeal is over.’
‘Yes, it has been rather an ordeal,’ said the old man, shuffling away.
Foregathered in a garage in Marla Bore – a red-dust, pub-crawling scab on the flat horizon, which lacked, the judge said, only Clint Eastwood to make it perfectly cinematic – the Royal Commission came towards me amid tiny remorseless flies. Geoff Eames, the tanned, handsome, blue-eyed counsel for the Aborigines, said even less flash garages awaited future hearings and promised a warm and numerous welcome from the flies at Wallatinna.
That day’s witnesses told of the Black Mist, an oily rolling incubus that overwhelmed the Mulgas and camps and homesteads and left a greasy black residue, and a heritage in its witnesses of scaly skin, eye and stomach and bowel ailments down succeeding decades – ‘I looked like I’d rolled in a fire,’ said one – and sores in the hair and face and arms that recur even now.
One, Yami Lester, had gone slowly blind and, out of the extremity of his darkness, had become a linguist, and a translator, and an ambassador and a hero of his people. The last thing he had seen through a window was the moon going down. The judge remarked how handsome he was and said it was a pity he couldn’t see the light on his face. He was led off, hands on the shoulders of his keeper, like a character in Beckett, one more broken and yet triumphant innocent, never that innocent again.
Much drinking took place that night, and a six-hour poker game, among jaded lawyers and journalists trying to repress the enormous images of the day. An agitated young interviewer from 2JJJ challenged local bar-flies on the question of vasectomy and narrowly escaped with his life. All of us were haunted by the serenity of Yami Lester, and another witness, Lallie Lennon, whose life in the wake of the Black Mist – with squalling scabby children, moving half-despairing from town to town, giving birth to others in the bush, seeking jobs, losing them, watching the children’s anguish with a recurring post-atomic disease, and coping, coping somehow – rivalled that of Mother Courage. And yet, from these people there was no complaint. They put no bombs in letterboxes. They gunned down few nuclear scientists on courthouse steps. They carried their lives, like a great boulder on their backs, down all their days with fatalism and self-help and unstinted fellowship. We thought on these things and our failings as former Christians, and civilised men, and drank, and drank some more.
At the next place, Wallatinna, an alcohol-free black polis requiring passes to enter, hundreds of dusty Aborigines sat watching out of earshot with earnest Rodin faces while the judge, enthroned on a woolsack in a tin shed, cheerfully threatened with contempt of court a dog that urinated on a chair leg, then saved with a shouted plea the life of a darting lizard threatened by a witness’s rock. The evidence that day, drawn from the witnesses by Eames and the mild, bearded Andrew Collett, grew in the mind like science fiction: First there were the two bangs. We thought it was the Great Water Snake, loudly digging holes, as was his custom. We wore no clothes in that old time. And then the Poilu, the Black Mist, rolling, oily, sticky, like black frost, came. Very wide, it was, low on the ground, above the tops of the trees, and climbing, its top reddish and glowing, and casting multiple shadows. And then there was the diarrhoea, and sore eyes, and Yami’s blindness, and the deaths of which we cannot speak because of the old taboo. And there were those of us who saw the grey cloud, mushroom-shaped, between the trees far off. Mine eyes have seen those eyes that now in blindness remember the glory of the coming of the end. We had not been warned of its coming because we hid from the searching planes.
Halfway to Maralinga, the judge’s light plane began to emit a troubling flapping noise. ‘Go on or back?’ asked the pilot. ‘On,’ said the judge heroically, knowing they were halfway there. Over Maralinga airport the motor was coughing. Emerging from a hairy landing, the judge said to the press, ‘Well, you’ve got your story of the day: McClelland Nearly Killed.’ Just get the name right, that’s all. McClelland with a d.’
Peter McClellan, his young, swift, pipe-sucking prosecutor, had been lately getting on his wick. Jim’s excoriation of Thatcher, Peter said, had compromised the Commission’s objectivity. Jim rounded on the young man’s sheltered lawyer’s life. Young lawyers please not Jim’s old age. Apprentice wine-tasters, he thought, was a fair description.
All converged outside Maralinga township – a small army base with no flies and no ants, but many richly tinted screeching cockatoos, and a widely unemphasised danger, I thought, of terminal radiation – at a place called Never Never. Here, amid hundreds of ute-born Aborigines and their nose-running, pot-bellied children and frisking dogs, Jim under a blue plastic shelter heard the worst story of all: of Edie Millipuddy, camping with her husband in the bomb crater itself, being captured by men in white uniforms, forcibly washed down, miscarrying twice, and losing her husband, who, to prove to the soldiers he knew English, sang, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’ And how the soldiers shot their beloved, irradiated hunting dogs.
Some parts of the story, the miscarriage and afterwards, were communicated to Jim in secret session, with Edie’s women friends giving her comfort, and prompting with giggles and nudges her reminiscence of a story they knew by heart, already an old legend. Jim called those women the best in the world, unstinting comforters, inextinguishable friends.
We’re marching, I thought in the words of the song, to the Never Never, down a long white road, a road that has no end. How much these people had to teach us, and always had, and we have not listened. Perhaps these hearings would give their lessons fair audience. Loyalty. Acceptance. The hunger for love. If Jim had his way, they would. But the future darkened round his whitening head, the Fieldsian wisdom faded in the black, approaching mist and the world – he knew as an odds-on certainty – was coming to an end.
Letters to the Future
(first published in Sydney Morning Herald, May 1985)
ON BURNING DOWN, MARCH 1993
In the months that followed our fire, on the edge of sleep, a waking dream would rise up to taunt me – the flames, the rushing, the shouting, my nakedness, the tangled hose, the hour-long wait for the firemen’s water to flow. This time, I thought, this time it’ll be different, I’ll get the hose untangled, I’ll get the photos out, the videotapes, the diaries. And soon I’d be fully awake again, and I’d know there was no way back, no erasing rescue, no resurrection out of the ash and wind of so much that was loved.
Fire moves very quickly and its angry, mythic, animal ferocity is real as it leaps like a tiger from trees to palm fronds to roof to house like a sentient awesome beast that has made up its mind. And I tugged and tugged at the tangled hose – left so not by us but by a Christmas lodger – and att
acked with a feeble trickle, thumb over nozzle, what might (only might) for ninety seconds, no more, have been contained. And the house filled up with smoke, and then there was the getting out of the children, the dog and cat – we forgot the white mice and the neighbour’s budgie. The goldfish in the heat-broken tank were already dead. And the unbelief, and the coughing and shrieking and running about made us forget, somehow, the precious albums of photos and the videotapes in the room beside the one already alight. The purpose of life is to remember, a character in the movie I’d just finished had said, and I called it to mind as, everywhere that night in firelight, memory was going, going, gone. And we got to the house next door and, on the verandah balefully drinking their magnum champagne, watched all our past go up into the sky.
Within hours there were blankets and soup and toys from the neighbours, from people we hardly knew, and rooms for us to sleep in and someone to drive me to town where I launched my comic novel The Hewson Tapes at ten the following morning in a cinder-smudged shirt and borrowed oversized shoes, with three camera crews in prurient attendance. Meanwhile patient volunteers sifted hour by hour through the ash and wreckage, prising apart the charred papers and melted photos, and putting them to be preserved in the RSL freezers.
There is so much goodness in the world, I thought, uncelebrated, kept out of mind till days like this. Where does it hide in the meantime? Where does it go?
We got through the experience, I suppose. The children didn’t go mad or feral after losing everything they loved, though little Tom was told by a girl in the schoolyard, I’m glad your house burnt down, and he didn’t much want to go back to school after that.
We rented a house across the road, and the kids caught the same school bus and our dog Charlie went for the same beach walk, and Max the cat would go by moonlight and sit in the ashes, trying to will the house back into being. I felt the way he did for a while, until, after insurance wrangles, we built a new house over the ashes and could look out at the same view as before. And the charred blue jacarandas, the ones that arched over the Pittwater view, grew back in different shapes and they were a comfort, framing our life as before. Old friends.
The mind has a steel door that, once you have slept, closes out forever so much of the pain. You are first numb, then thankful, thankful nobody died – though Tom remembered the mice and the budgie, and was pensively sad for four or five months. And soon it hardens over into: this too shall pass. And of course it does. A simple foam extinguisher would have fixed it and, of course, we didn’t have one. Or (perhaps) an untangled hose. Or a wind that had blown, however gently, the other way.
It’s all so random. A CD player survived, and some middling jazz records, and two thousand books went. And charcoal drawings and portrait paintings done by Annie in her student days; beautiful things. And the final conversations I had on cassette with my dad when he was dying. And all the videos of all the children’s infancy, and childhood, and a trip to Ireland when they were still quite young, reading poems on Yeats’s tower: I sigh that kiss you / For I must own / That I will miss you /When you have grown.
The idea that these things no longer exist, have gone into air, into thin air, and there were no miraculous exemptions – my pen, I hoped, would come out of the ashes, my Filofax, the Scrooge McDuck doll, but no – made finally firm in my mind the atheism I had toyed with down the years. Randomness. Cruelty. Death. Destruction. Loss of remembered happiness. These were the only certainties. There was, therefore, no God; or no God that cared a damn.
I believe this, but I also believe in quiescent human goodness, that habit in the tribe of healing for the wounded, comfort for the anguished. We will see more of it, I fear, in the many, dreadful bushfire summers yet to come.
Sydney Morning Herald, December 1997
BASTARDS FROM THE BUSH, 1998
We started filming this week at long last a documentary about me and Les Murray cast in the shape of a road film – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in raucous voyage to the end of the night – down tracks winding back to Gundagais and Jerusalems long left but unforgotten, in Sydney, then Yass, then Canberra. In a painter’s studio, a schoolroom, a poolroom, a pub, a street corner, a garish pink convertible, a lakeside park, a suburban footpath, in the office in Parliament House of Kim Beazley and in the Canberra War Memorial.
The director Geoff Burton and I began our first, uncompleted film on Les in 1967 – some landscape shots, a quarrel on location, a postponement, no money for stock, a thirty-year delay – and this will have to do instead, I guess … Les was less controversial back then when we attempted that film, and not yet, as now, world famous. Not yet my best man nor the fierce, combative campaigner for literary grants, the Republic, a new Australian flag and the white-trash North Coast peasantry he long has brandished as his tribe and kin. Not yet the narrow survivor, as he is of late, of a liver abscess, a coma, a weekend of national prayer and the Black Dog of depression he wrote a bleak little book about. Yet he still seems a lot like Les to me: his girth was slimmer in 1959 when I met him first, but his buoyancy, his erudition, his vivid ribaldry and witch’s cackle are much the same. I told him I planned to turn him into a soft toy: you pull a string and it cackles just like Les. He negotiated, quickly, for his percentage, cackling the while …
And so it goes, and goes. Murray, of the living, means perhaps the most of the mates. We did a sequence where he and I drink whisky and stumble fatly about on Parliament steps in afternoon light, and the dialogue went as follows:
ELLIS: This is a terrible day, Murray. (Waves newspaper, doomfully) April 8th, 1998. Even as we speak, Aboriginal land rights are being abolished, just up the hill. (Sits, drinking whisky). At midnight men came ashore with dogs on chains to end a hundred years of union progress. And on top of this Tammy Wynette is eight hours dead!
MURRAY: (comfortably) There, there, Robert …
ELLIS: (overlapping) … And what are you going to do about it?
MURRAY: I’ll do something, I’ll do something, but not until they give me my just recognition …
ELLIS: You’ll get your just recognition! I shall make you Poet Laureate!
MURRAY: I don’t want to be Poet Laureate.
ELLIS: (shaking head) The man is insatiable …
You get the drift. I was near forgetting how nice it is to be off again on a gonzo shoot in a silly big pink car – fear and loathing on the road to Gundagai – in perpetual transit from town to town and stuff-up to stuff-up; in vehicles that won’t start or get lost or have their keys untimely locked in their boot; or to lie awake in grimy hotels while black dogs distantly bay or closely pant and whinge; or bellicose coppers chase burglars down the corridor just outside; or to implore in vain with waved fish the curlews to come back, come back, for the lakeside silhouette that is unrepeatable and beautiful and yearningly imagined thereafter; or to watch Kim Beazley’s minder point once again to his watch and cover his eyes while his jovial boss chats breezily on with Murray well into the second hour, beweeping Gettysburg and Gallipoli and the Australian fighting man …
If there are better ways to make a living, please ring me with the information reverse charges at any hour.
So It Goes
A POOL GAME
The pink car is parked outside a pub. The driver, Jack Ellis, sits at a table outside.
ELLIS: (voice over) And we had, like old competitive friends, our biennial game of pool, with the usual references …
Murray and Ellis are at the pool table in the pub.
ELLIS: (voice over) … to that long-loved film The Hustler, and Fast Eddie Felson and Minnesota Fats.
Ellis raises his pool cue.
ELLIS: Play pool, fat man …
Close on balls on the pool table, then on Murray and Ellis.
MURRAY: (meditative) What was the greatest movie of your life, Robert? … Mine was From Here to Eternity. Got me through my awful teenage years. I could recite every word of it at one time.
ELLIS: Mine was He Who Must Die. Th
e story of the Christ. The miracle play. That was what taught me that movies could be an experience like, and better than, life itself. They weren’t just wallpaper in the mind … I think I’ve … felt like that about the movies my whole life …
A pause. Balls clash on the table.
ELLIS: And pool is the great demonstration of the infinitude of human possibility. There is no pool game that resembles any other pool game. And yet there are only fifteen variables. And a few feet. Imagine predicting life itself.
MURRAY: (laughs)… Is that not the eight ball?
ELLIS: (lining up) Yeah, that’s where I am. That’s how good I am, fat man.
From the film script of Bastards from the Bush
ON THE WATERFRONT
APRIL 1998
It was rainy and wind-swept and late and dark when I came there first, and it seemed like a movie in black and white of an earlier chapter of class war and social mutiny: a fire in a barrel still burning in the rain; sausages frying under a grey dripping tent; a tea urn and a generator thudding in the dark; a superannuated caravan with a fridge of soft drinks and a wavery TV; posters and graffiti everywhere – ‘Scabs Suck Maggots Off’. A fair few shouted curses too and weary slogans, ‘MUA, Here to Stay’, and much angry rattling of wire gates – some welding together of gates too, if the truth were known – and burly young men, and older men, open-faced and open-hearted and puzzled, like the parallel young and older men in The Full Monty and Brassed Off. This was a war that was worldwide, and Darling Harbour in April ’98 in the rain but a skirmish. The price of work was falling in 1998, and more of the same to the old tune. Or was it something bigger?
Bob Ellis Page 6