‘And my parents were made unhappy by extreme poverty they didn’t need to suffer. And whenever they wanted to do something, Grandfather would veto it. And then my mother died from a number of miscarriages, a series of them.’
This death was not as I remembered it, though, because of a late-coming ambulance. No, he said. The story, he heard later on, was different.
‘He did ring up and he got the doctor. Only in those days the doctor wanted to be told what he wanted the ambulance for. And Dad couldn’t tell him. He sort of … jammed up, and just kept repeating, “She’s having a bad turn.” Because he knew he was on a telephone line overheard by the biggest gossip in the district. He didn’t want to let private business out. My Aboriginal cousin Vicki said lots of Aboriginal people die that way all the time. They don’t know how to address the white authority figure.’
And so the ambulance came too late, and so she died, and after that, ‘Dad was wreckage. He felt himself responsible for the death of his brother and of his wife. Everything was accursed that he put his hand to. And if you tried to reproduce, the victim would surely die.’
Motherless, and beset, and harried by a now depressive dad, Les boarded weekdays for a while in Taree and, at school, fat, underinstructed and lonely, was tested every day by ‘a bunch of girls who told me I was worthless and unfashionable and hopeless and useless’ – in those words, and others. Sometimes one would come up to him and pretend to like him, and then run away giggling to the others, screaming with laughter. This treatment was constant, he recalls.
He’d go home on weekends, and his dad would be in tears – ‘He didn’t want to be in a world that Mum wasn’t in, especially not happy in it’ – and he’d come back on Mondays, to another chapter of his persecution.
I ask what Murray was reading in those years. ‘The library,’ he says. All books other than science and engineering. ‘I wish a new book would come out,’ he says. ‘I think I’ve read them all.’ Five thousand new books come out a week in London, I protest. ‘Yeah, but I’ve read all the earlier versions.’
We leave the cafe, and walk up slowly to a rumoured Chinese restaurant half a mile up the hill. We talk of his gift for languages, and his decision to be, in his thirties, ‘a poet, not a linguist’, and I ask what the Aboriginal dialects of his district, which he has written in, mean to him. ‘Sorrow, in some ways,’ he responds, ‘that so much human thought, and so on, can gradually fade away. I mean, Gathang is probably irrecoverable by now, not enough people speaking it, no real live speakers anymore.’ His brother-in-law did a dictionary and grammar of the Gulpangira language, just to the north of his region, around Kempsey, and ‘people can speak it if they want to, and they do, but mostly only on ceremonial occasions.’
We keep walking uphill, asking directions. His vast bulk slows, and his will flags, and we opt instead for a Parisian restaurant across the road. I ask how many Aboriginal languages there are now. ‘They reckon there’s about thirty, in good health, out of about two hundred and sixty.’ He gives his familiar cackle. ‘A contrast with New Guinea, which has eight hundred languages, most of which are quite lively. Now that’s a score. That’s a score.’
I buy beer, he disdains it: ‘I gotta drive home.’ He wishes his dad had done what he promised, buy him an Alexandria tenement in 1957 for seven hundred pounds; he could have stayed there now if he had, stayed overnight; but his dad had this habit, he said, of ‘almost’ giving him things. ‘I thought of getting you such and such,’ he’d say, ‘but then I thought better of it.’ If he had bought then, I reflected, I’d never have met Les; had another life entirely.
We order some soup, and I ask about the Aboriginal massacres, how many there were, how many died, and he says nobody knows. ‘We haven’t even heard all the Aboriginal evidence yet; but by now a lot of that would be legend, would be … misremembered. How many of them were massacres, how many of them were people dying of starvation because their food supply had broken down … How many of them put the white man’s baby alongside a tree for him to find when he was riding along, hoping he would adopt it. That happened too.’ A man who lived up the road from him was one of the babies, one of the lucky ones.
The past is never over, it isn’t even past.
It’s never even past. He has two daughters in Melbourne who don’t talk to each other, a son in Sydney he’s fallen out with whose son just had his bar mitzvah, and Alexander, autistic, now thirty-six, who lives with him, and, ‘Oh, he talks. He talks. But he doesn’t chat.’ His wife, Val, after a bad knee operation, is in John Hunter hospital perpetually getting fixed, and ‘I want my wife back,’ he growls, like an aggrieved little boy. ‘I want her back.’
We talk of dead friends, the Enigma machine, the stammer of George VI, his coming literary travels in China, Britain, New York, the tooth he lost in New York, his friendship with Ted Hughes. We avoid politics, though he curses Abbott for overruling him and giving a prize to the Flannery book, ‘which he hadn’t read’, for some fool reason. His diabetes is … okay, he says. He still stabs himself cackling through his dusty jeans with a well-worn hypodermic every morning, but he fell down unconscious in Melbourne a week ago. ‘I was out for only a quarter of a second, and I injured my bum, and I was messed about in hospital, and I shouldn’t hold it against Melbourne, I know, but I’m old, and I’m inclined to.’
He knows almost everything, and remains, in my experience, the best conversationalist since Dr Johnson, for what it’s worth, and … there he is. We drive back in my car to his car outside the boutique hotel. He has difficulty squeezing out of mine, less getting into his. ‘See you,’ he says, and gives a wave and drives away.
And I hope I see him again.
The Saturday Paper, February 2015
10.
ON TIME PASSING AND ENDINGS
SUNDAY TOO FAR AWAY
The Sundays of my life
Are all the life I own
When Monday is too close for me to care,
Another view was green
And another road was longer
And friends always waiting somewhere …
The roads I didn’t take I bid them all so long
While Sunday warms my blood and cools my mind
And the dreams I thought were true
Are now moss beneath my footprints
Ten thousand ages behind …
But the nights can get you down
And things won’t stay forgotten
With Sunday too far away …
Lyrics by Bob Ellis, music by Patrick Flynn, 1975
PALM BEACH, JULY 1987
I’d lived for sixteen years round Sydney without knowing Palm Beach, and took maybe six months more to yearn for it, having lived here, moved away and now moved back. I’d like to die here on the hill that overlooks all the altering water and the lighthouse and the golf course and the wharf and the seaplane, feeding in my latter days the selfsame lorikeets I met first in my thirties, since lorikeets too have three score years and ten and they too are creatures of habit that go and come back and know when they are home. They numbered thirty-eight in the good years, clustering and screeching round our verandah, and now, because of our absence, only two – but the two, I hope, are spreading the word that the welfare state is back and our old friends will cluster and bicker as they used to on the verandah that for them, and my children, is a sacred site that draws us in dreams, like a magnet, home.
For years at night a blind possum came to us for apples and pears, somehow surviving his awesome journey by braille up the jungly hill. Sometimes he came in the day, not knowing the difference. My little daughter cried for him and his phlegmatic valour and asked if there was a way to make him see again. We had to tell her there was not, eye transplants for possums being at a distance that even socialism would not bridge.
Our Palm Beach hill offered bandicoots too, and myna birds – none of which, for love or sunflower seed, would recite for me the Gettysburg Address – and a white duck, called Duck, we lo
st to a wedge-tailed eagle and in grief replaced by having children. There were year-round native flowers and everywhere huge aloes that put out sky-high shoots, which we told the children were beanstalks, and a monstera deliciosa that pushed a wall down, and miles of beautiful murderous morning glory, and acres, it seemed, of lantana we would hack at, cursing in vain. Lantana, like Americans, does not seem to understand why it is not welcome and keeps triumphantly arriving anyway …
I stand over the view sometimes, pleased that forty thousand years ago people experienced this same panorama – Lion Island, Barrenjoey, the Hawkesbury mouth, all the way up to Clareville one way, and Woy Woy the other – and drank it in as I do now, deeming it as I do now a sacred site for which, as I do now, they had a particular affinity: thirty-six thousand years before Khufu and Enkidu and Methusaleh, they stood here, moved as I am, and as much at home.
The Inessential Ellis (first published in The Australian, 1988)
SPEECH ON TURNING FIFTY, MAY 1992
The human tendency, I once wrote, is to first discover where the party is, and then contrive a moral reason for being there. And it’s a little distressing, I think, that one or other of these mileposts to the grave must be invoked before we dare – in our classic Anglo-Saxon fashion of deferring pleasure until it is properly earned – to have a gathering like this of what Les Murray once called our Witnesses, people who knew you when you were still young and vulnerable, before the shell formed over you. The party should be easier than that, more Irish, more Italian, more Polynesian, more sudden in its contrivance, less morbid in its excuse. At my present age, I grimly note, Shakespeare had retired, while I feel yet an apprentice, a mere horse-holder outside the great Globe of the world, still taking preliminary notes. I feel a decade has been filched from me somewhere – perhaps by my handsome and mocking gene pool – and I want it back. I do not feel happy to be so placed, between the conception and the last reality, under falling shadows on a high hill under lowering time, with a view of pelicans floating into the blue …
In a play last month at the Playwrights’ Conference it was correctly said that we all start out with love of everyone, and it is only accident and mistiming and bad wording by which that love is dimmed. Be less guilty, therefore, at how much you once felt for those whom – in your aching adolescence and beyond – you met and warmed to. For love is the rule, truly, and only gnawing time and cruel misprision or accident make of it an exception.
I will end, I think, with Hemingway’s marvellous dying fall, planned for the end of the yet unfinished Islands in the Stream, as the hero – bloody and mortally wounded and fleeing in his boat from the coastguards of Cuba, and imagining the life he might still have with his second wife and his two surviving children – remarks to the coming darkness: ‘I wish there was some way of passing on what I’ve learnt though. I was learning fast there at the end. I know now there is no one thing that is true: it is all true.’
The Inessential Ellis
TRUTH AND JUSTICE
It is late at night. Ben Chifley goes back to the study, and the dictaphone. Turns it on.
BEN: And the Labor Party split. Catholic Groupers to the right, Communist sympathisers to the left, and the Langites … weevilling away. Jack Lang made federal parliament, cut me in Kings Hall, was publishing a newspaper, The Century, which he used … to telling effect against me, as I suppose the Lord intended. He moves in mysterious ways.
He walks towards the front area, talks to the audience.
BEN: And the election came on. I ran up and down the country saying ‘light on the hill’. Menzies said ‘no more petrol rationing’, and ‘stop the Communist beast’. On the day before the election Jack Lang ran a piece that said that I and Lizzie had lent money at interest to grieving widows, whom we then evicted from their houses in the ’30s. There was no time to expose it as a lie. The worst of it was what he said about Lizzie.
He walks slowly back to the kitchen out of the darkened living room, puts the beer glass down, goes to the study, turns on the dictaphone, picks up the microphone. A tinkly piano plays ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.
BEN: We won forty-seven seats … and they won seventy-four. Lang lost his. I kept mine. We lost government. The Korean War started. The economy nose-dived. Menzies proposed to arrest and gaol all Communist Party members … no, that’s not right, every person that two ministers agreed was potentially a Communist Party member, put them in gaol and confiscate their property. Doc Evatt fought him in court and won, and was soon acclaimed as a Communist dupe. I had a heart attack last November, wanted to quit. I was urged by Jim Scullin, fell sergeant of the suicide squad, to stay on. And I did. And we lost the election by a lesser margin, five less seats, in April. And that’s that, I guess.
He fiddles with some papers on the desk, turns the dictaphone back on. On the piano, once more, ‘Moreton Bay’.
BEN: My brother Dick died of a bad heart at fifty-eight a year before the defeat, a few minutes before I got there. I only saw him for three days when he was a baby and I missed … bringing him up. He was shop-assistant and produce manager at Mocklers for forty-three years, a decent, respected, local man. And I miss him still. And my brother Pat who died last June. Only a year ago. We are formed and shaped by the sum total of what we have missed. And lost.
He picks up two pages. Goes back to the phone.
BEN: (into the phone) Edna? Phyllis. (He turns to look out the window.) Yeah, it’s gonna snow, you were right … Phyllis? I’m doing the last bit now but there’s more intervening I’ll bring tomorrow. Right. I’ll bring it round, then pick up Liz. Okay.
He goes back to the study and the dictaphone. Turns it on.
BEN: Okay, Phyllis. This is it. We must never allow the whispered word Communist, or the allure of power, to divert us from our ideals. I could not be called a ‘young radical’, but if I think a thing is worth fighting for, no matter what the penalty is, I will fight for the right, and truth and justice will always prevail. (Pause) That’s my story anyway. See you soon.
He clicks off the dictaphone. Pulls out the plug. Packs it up. Turns out the light in the study.
From the end of A Local Man
THE PENGUIN
SUNDAY, 30 DECEMBER 2007
A little black-and-white forest butcher bird comes every morning to the house in Palm Beach. We give her mincemeat on the windowsill or the top of the door. One of her feet is crippled with a twisted, splayed claw and she can’t hold the meat with one foot and stand on the other while dividing it, so we give it to her in tiny portions. Without us, or a mannerly husband or sibling, she couldn’t eat enough to live on. So if we ever succeed in renting out the house over Christmas, the lessee will have to be someone we trust to feed her, each day, as we do, as we have these five or six years.
She’s very insistent at the window some mornings. I suppose she has chicks to feed. We give her the small bits first for her to eat herself, then a big bit to take home to her children: all by hand. She trusts us. It’s a parable, I suppose, of the welfare state. If she outlives us it won’t be for very long. We call her ‘the Penguin’. If friendship means anything, she’s a friend.
As we near death, I surmise, we feel more keenly the hurt of helpless creatures and less, as a rule, for humans. Like the pianist in Polanski’s Holocaust movie, we step round the corpses we knew in the fullness of life with less and less feeling and care for their stories, as we do now with Benazir, Private Kovko, a million dead (is it?) Iraqis. Age brutalises us. We care less and less for people. But for animals, more.
And So It Went
POEM ON TURNING SEVENTY, MAY 2012
And now this: it is what is most feared.
No ‘No Man’s Land’, no barbed wire and no mud
Between what is, and what now cannot be withstood,
Not Falstaffed, Hamletted or King Leared,
Now this: the question of how long
In brain grown white will stay the song
In memory, in mind, in stirri
ng blood,
How long the blest, the curst, the good,
And all the rainbow hues of right and wrong;
How long, since vision first appeared
To the last swift solemn setting down
Of mask and doublet, sword and wig and crown,
The play now done, the curtain call too brief,
The march of too few friends through autumn leaf
And rain, and jokes twice told, to where
No thought survives, no cloud in air
Looks down on what, no longer there,
Was once a lustful, struggling man, or beast,
No longer influential in the least.
THE SOLDIER’S SONG
By Bob Ellis and Denny Lawrence, music by Chris Neal, from the musical play Neon Street.
In the time that is no more,
When life was three backyards in width,
A cricket game against a garbage can
And a corner grocery store …
It was there, it was there,
It was always there for sure …
There’ll be no going home again,
There’ll be no greeting at the door,
Of a voice you’ve long remembered
And a face you’ve waited for,
For the boys that marched off down the road
In the morning way back then
Never quite came home again,
They never quite came home again,
And the yesterdays come seeking us
In streets that now are bare.
Bob Ellis Page 26