‘The Red Cross,’ he intoned, ‘were surprised to received our requisition. They said it cast grave doubt on the moral tone of Stalag Luft Three.’
‘What,’ I asked, ‘happened?’
‘I rose up without incident fifty feet into the calm night air, at which point my ingenious contraption caught fire, cascaded slowly back to earth, crashed into the compound and set it alight. The Germans were very annoyed. Five days in solitary, mate, no joke.’
‘What,’ I asked after clearing my throat, ‘was your second escape?’
‘Ah, I noted that the Germans, being an efficient race, piped all their shit into what amounted to petrol tankers and drove it away. I formed the opinion that they wouldn’t search the shit, so I got in it.’
‘You got in the shit?’
‘Ye-es. And after a few miles down the track, at a rest stop, I got out again. And went on my way rejoicing.’
‘Ah.’ I struggled momentarily to regain my breath. ‘And how did they get … wind … of your identity?’
‘It wasn’t like that. I had a wash, secured some stolen clothes and made my way to Cologne.’
‘To Cologne?’
‘Ye-es. And I’d never been to Cologne before, and I determined to see the Cathedral. I was observed acting suspiciously on a tram and – do you know, Ellis – I was arrested on the steps of Cologne Cathedral by a mere bloody constable? I thought I’d die of shame.’
Francis was a great accumulator and his lordly, ribbing mode of speech was a Wodehouse-like accumulation and compendium, I have decided, of all the institutions that had briefly held him: Oxford, the RAAF, the Anglican communion, the many private schools from which he was expelled. The result – magniloquent, mischievous, pertinent, probing, shrewd, judgemental and kindly – was Mozartian in its complexity and inner melody. His conversation – almost totally unrecorded alas, unlike that of his eighteenth-century equivalent Dr Johnson – was a great unending organ suite to which Toynbee, Churchill, Keynes, his masters, would have been pleased to append their names.
Paradoxically, though, he did not aspire to literature or art, or bohemian creativity, but to fact. He wrestled ever with the real and physical world – as carpenter, gardener, mechanic, chef, pilot of a hundred and thirty-four different sorts of aeroplane, unofficial ombudsman of the Department of Civil Aviation, mover and shaker in the Church of England (and for eighteen years publisher and magniloquent leader–writer of its gadfly organ, The Anglican), master of nine or ten languages (including Canton Chinese, German, Russian, Indonesian) – and in a great measure subdued it or fought it to a draw. He read little fiction but much history, comparing and reordering all that happened through its many opalescent variations until he had it clear. Equally at home in ancient and Maoist China, medieval and Stalinist Muscovy and Britain between the wars (he had corresponded with Eden, Attlee and Philby and personally knew Churchill – ‘Here comes young James, trailing clouds of trouble’), he was till his life’s end building and stocking bookshelves that groaned with foreign office documents, encyclopaedias and fat, grammatical, argumentative tomes, yet his pedantic interventions into conversation were somehow always a delight and his searches through the OED and Fowler’s for the derivations of words like some latter-day quest for the Nile, and he knew more than one mere lifetime seems to justify. I asked him once about nuclear physics, and he explained it to me.
The quality of his wit – a formidable Tory levity that resembled that of both Evelyn Waugh and, in his cafe conversation, his fellow Australian private-school iconoclast Barry Humphries – was most like that of his Canberra Grammar schoolmate Gough Whitlam, whom he persuaded to enter politics and who eventually, as prime minister, retrieved him from China. Both impersonated God Almighty taking shore leave on the mere planet Earth, and both, I suppose, failed in their chosen realms of mischief through being unable to take their own talent seriously. Both, too, were trapped inside their studies and their enormous brains.
‘Gough, you see,’ Francis once said, ‘lives on the pure plane of history. To him the infighting in the Roman senate at the time of the Gracchi business is as vivid as yesterday’s caucus meeting; and with those of his colleagues who do not share this transcendental vision, he can grow at times a trifle impatient.’
He delighted in ritual – Russian Orthodox, High Anglican – and in high music, Mozart especially, with Beethoven a near second. Imprisoned in China, blind and starving, he got through each day by promising to play to himself – in his mind – one Beethoven symphony at five p.m. precisely and made himself wait for it. His discipline and patience verged on the monkish and, indeed, the saintly.
This is the aspect that Francis’s many thousand friends find it most difficult to convey to others: his complete, unenvious magnanimity and unstinting capacity to help without ceasing all who sought his comfort. To us his many clownish interventions into history – flying to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, feigning an assassination attempt (with an egg-timer) on LBJ, publishing with a quartet of Anglican bishops the obscene organ Oz and going into the dock on its behalf – were, like his tall hat and majestic Rolls Royce and dawn services and hair-raising aerobatics (once in a light plane containing most of the federal cabinet), but the incidental, gaudy icing on the man we knew, a true friend, a patient boon companion, an everpresent help in time of trouble.
The undemonstrative Gough Whitlam wept at his funeral and so, alone, have most of us. The worst of his death is that where once, while he was alive, there was always a final resort of comfort, and jollity, encouragement, calm and (yes) inspiration there if we wished to use it, all of that is gone now. It is as if an entire civilised continent, with all its temples and libraries and orchestras and rituals and millennial traditions, had sunk overnight into the sea. We shall miss him as no other.
Quadrant, October 1992
ELSIE ELLIS, FEBRUARY 1999
My mother, Elsie, turns eighty-eight this week. She can still walk, on stick and walking frame, and without them, round the old familiarities of the house, the house I grew up in, but she doesn’t leave the house much. She watches television in her bedroom and sleeps, and chats to the nurses who come, early and late, to help her into the shower and whatever it is nurses do. She sometimes cooks for herself, sometimes has Meals on Wheels. Her nephew Barry, now sixty-six, visits for an hour on Friday nights and, on occasion, her grand-daugher Leisa, who lives a hundred kilometres away, with her baby Koah, a nice little fellow with big black eyes, her first great-grandchild.
Her mind is clear. She is in good health now, the best in years, since the chiropractor – the one I’d been urging her to go to for five years – finally fixed her heart fibrillation, and her medication was reduced, and her panic and mental confusion subsided, and she was herself again.
‘Why didn’t you see him five years ago?’ I asked in retrospective frustration. ‘He was there all the time.’
‘I didn’t have time, Robert,’ she said. ‘I’ve been sick.’
All thought of travel, even fifteen kilometres to the chiropractor, scares her now. She might not, she suspects, survive the journey. She talks on the phone to the few friends still living, and to Irene and Bob and Daphne and Phyllis and Hammer and Val, neighbours these fifty years, who drop in. And to Wal Buckley of course. Wal Buckley is very special.
Wal is a neighbouring widower who, about a year after my dad died, began to visit Elsie and run errands for her. A sort of courtship occurred, and he would come up every day, and help with the housework and garden and watch television with her. Soon he became indispensable. When she was ill last, during the fibrillations and panic attacks, he would stay all night, in the spare room, in case she had to be taken, quickly, to hospital. Wal grew up in an orphanage, survived Changi, plays darts at his club and is lean and reclusive, a determined walker.
And Wal six months back was operated on for stomach cancer. And now it seems, though it has not yet turned up in the blood tests, he might have secondaries. Elsie has been hobb
ling down to see Wal at his place, to comfort him and assist his two daughters, who are staying with him. Wal had the hiccups for a whole week this month. I urged her to get him to the chiropractor, who I believed could cure them. She said he wouldn’t survive the journey. The hiccups have now been fixed by a doctor’s drug, and Wal is improving, a little anyway. He eats, hungrily. He is walking up to Elsie’s again, a little frailly. He might not have cancer at all. If he does, it may be the end for Elsie of the companionship and support system that have sustained her through her eighties. She is bound now, I think, to live to at least ninety-five like her grandmother, though her mum and elder sister made only eighty-five, a sister and brother seventy. And what will become of her?
She hates the idea of a nursing home. She enjoys her back garden. She knows her house. Stay in your own house, Else, her long-dead friends would say, as long as you can. She has her photos on the shelves – my dead sister Margaret, my live sister Kay, her children, mine, Dad when young – the crockery cabinet, the original water-colour of lilies in a vase, the lounge room, the verandah extension with its view all over Lismore and the hills beyond. The bars in the bathroom and toilet she holds onto. The Reader’s Digest Condensed Books she has kept for fifty years, The Surprise of Cremona, The City of the Bees. This is her universe. This is where she should live.
It’s not as bad as it might be. She can stay, after plane flights which she doesn’t seem to mind, with me and Annie for three months in Palm Beach, with Kay for three months in Yarrawonga. Irene and Bob have been sleeping overnight during Wal’s illness. A mature-age student might accept free lodging, and look out for her at nights. The story is not over yet.
But the loneliness grows. Jean Wright, whom she’s known since she was three, is eighty-nine, and poorly, and an implacable hundred kilometres away. Jean Rowe is inaccessible, barely even ringable, in Tamworth; phone bills cost so much. My daughter, Jenny, visited her over the holidays. I’ll be there in March. But the void grows.
I’d hoped Wal would see her out – he’s only eighty-two, and determined to maintain his health – but this seems doubtful now. And it’s hard to imagine the mighty change that is coming: death, moving out, the loss for me of the little bedroom of my childhood that I still sleep in when I visit, the same lowboy, the same built-in reading lamp. So much of our life is a fantasy of continuity. Of things being there forever.
I do not want Elsie to die. But her life is dwindling. It is turning into things – mementos, not people – and that’s a pity. Her brain is almost maddeningly, determinedly, clear and curious. There is no comforting censorship by Alzheimer’s of the past, of identity and remembered loss. She remembers everything. She has questions. She needs to know things. I should, I suppose, begin to put on cassette her memories – of World War I, the Depression, the six years Dad was gone in World War II, the move from her mother’s house to Lismore in 1946, the ’50s, the ’60s, the world that changed, for her, from horses-and-sulkies and bikes and paddle steamers and church to colour television and The Midday Show and grandchildren who went to rock festivals instead of church camps and travel overseas. But to do that is admitting she won’t be here long, and I don’t want to do that. I’ll procrastinate as always, because I can’t bear thinking she won’t always be there.
Happy birthday, Mum. Keep well. I’ll see you soon.
So It Goes
DON DUNSTAN, FEBRUARY 1999
The days continue, and you are not here.
The icebergs melt, the deserts grow, and where are you
To show us all a clear way through,
To strive, to seek, to find, and go past fear.
The days continue, and you are not here.
We list what we remember, and we mark it well –
The rings, the wok, the cookbook, the white safari suit,
The day the sea declined to swamp Glenelg
Because you stood your ground like King Canute,
The brief, rare hour of love that was Adele.
We list what we remember, and we mark it well.
Your death-day lengthens, and you do not pass.
The Shakespeare nights, the Norwood fairs, Italian feasts, Greek dancing,
The feared Queen’s Counsel, speech austere and lancing,
The Fiji half-breed, it was said, who went his bumptious way,
The pink shorts in a parliament of grey
(We know you now, but who were they?)
The snob-school rebel who betrayed his class.
Your death-day lengthens, and you do not pass.
We list what we can list, but space forbids.
The multiculture, meals on wheels, the gay and union rights,
The festivals and oysters and wine drunk late at nights,
A conversation city, where all new thought delights,
A destination city, to live and raise your kids.
We list what we can list, but space forbids.
We see you astride the elephant, then falling off,
Or reading Ogden Nash in a lion’s cage,
Conspiring brave new worlds with Mick and Gough,
Planning not for a year but for an age,
Denying lusts like those of Murphy’s bull,
Gardening, weight-lifting, living to the full,
Playing late Beethoven in a rage,
The buccaneer, the artist and the toff,
The dandy-maestro-warrior with an unearned smoker’s cough,
A Prospero still writing his last page.
We see you astride the elephant, then falling off.
And here we are, dear Don, though you are not,
With no way left for you to speak or hear,
While serving in your restaurant, or playing a sonata,
Or boning up on Tennyson, or a Land Rights Charter,
Or cooking up a storm with Maggie Beer,
Or growling how on refugees John Howard lost the plot,
Or planning one more film with Peter Weir,
Or telling of the future, and marshalling the data
Of what henceforth mankind must know and hear
To strive, to seek, to find, and go past fear.
The days continue, and you are not here.
Previously unpublished
WEDDING POEM FOR MIKE AND SASHA RANN, 2007
JULY 2007
It was a wedding in the rain in July in a park, and, to my surprise, I was the preacher. The male celebrant merely introduced me and, live on television, hunched and spectacled, while Mike and Sasha nervously attended, having not read or vetted it yet, I said, to the microphone:
Love had in youth … is what occurs.
Love reached in middle age, that final his and hers,
Surviving youth’s worst burnings, from its ash
Brings forth a couple seared and calm as Mike and Sash.
In theatre and in parliament they’ve paid their dues,
In stage-fright, shaky sets and bad reviews,
They’ve stayed up late to read the worst of news,
They’ve stumbled entering, they’ve muffed their cues,
They’ve seen the moments of their greatness flicker,
Heard critics wonder if they had the ticker,
They’ve kept their smiles firm-fixed while ratings fell,
They’ve both done Theatresports, they’ve been through hell,
And in that worst of times, at last, they met,
Had first encounters they would not forget,
Reached understandings of the I and Thou
Whereto, wherefrom, and no, not now,
And in that joyous healing that is love
Soothed much that they’d been lately dreaming of,
And in fresh rousing fondness found the way
To make this solemn truth, this pledge today.
Love reached in middle age, I think, knows much
Of sweetness in the greeting and the touch,
Of how to say good morning, oh my dear,
To say ‘I thank b
right heaven you are here,’
To meet that glance across the room, and know
That there is nowhere else you’d rather go
But home with this one perfect mate
Who is at once one’s vision and one’s fate.
But they need no instruction in their bliss.
I’d say just one thing, comrades, and it’s this:
No greater love was known by maid or man
Than by this tardy coupling, Sasha and Mike Rann.
And afterwards Bob Hawke came up near tears, with Blanche beside him more composed, and wanted a copy. And he’s been gregariously affable round me ever since. Which means, I guess, that well-targeted rhymed verse is, or can be, as influential in politics as it was in the days of Good Queen Bess and Walter Raleigh. I have always written farewell verses (Life will be barren/Without our Karen) to departing staff in Bob Carr’s office, and they often said it meant a lot to them. And Gough Whitlam much admired, he said, my rhyme of ‘Greiner’ and ‘vagina’. By what odd feints and quirks and stratagems we make our way in the world.
And So It Went
THE BAKHTIYARIS, 2002
Bob Ellis Page 24