We are no longer there.
Beyond the summer night I know
Faces on another shore,
Under moon and under palm trees,
Eyes that see the sky no more,
For the boys that marched off down the road
To the overwhelming day,
Marched off and lost their way …
I was young, I wasn’t happy,
But I knew the boy I was.
I will never know the man.
He died there,
He died there
For the cause …
There’ll be no going home again.
There’ll be no family Christmas tree,
And no gathering of the children
Of the man who should be me …
There’ll be no going home again.
There’ll be no greeting at the door
Of the home folk who were waiting there,
Were once, and are no more …
Neon Street
TIME WILL TELL
I’m having more tests today. My blood count has gone up and my liver count may be getting dangerous. If it can’t be turned around I may have weeks to live. It’s probably worthwhile assessing where things are at politically.
Morgan, the accurate one, has Labor on 50.5 and either tied or winning narrowly. Turnbull’s apparent contempt for Morrison and his repudiation of the need for a surplus, ever, and his retention of Abbott’s worst policies, and Abbott taking credit for them, show how poor a politician he is and how little control he has of the rabble underneath him.
There has to be scandal of sorts – or a stuff-up – three times a week. Is this enough to put Shorten over the line? Perhaps. Perhaps. It were good if there were a Nauru scandal that engulfed Dutton, or Morrison. Or Brandis’s office for letting Man Monis through the wire. There is a ‘mad dog’ thing about Turnbull. His need to be too clever by half.
If I live till July 2nd, I may see the end of him. Time will tell.
From the blog Bob Ellis Tabletalk, 22 March 2016
GOOD FRIDAY
Rachel Kohn’s Easter show had its usual waking gentleness – how Christianity is about forgiveness, foot-washing and communal rejoicing and nothing to do with the burning down of the castles of the capitalists – and as enjoyable in its usual way. And it seems to me there is no point in this religion at all. It starts, like infancy, with a sense of obligation to our betters, and goes from there. It starts with our need to pay back. And what do we owe for being here? And if this is our obligation, what does it mean?
Further questions on this might be asked in the course of the day.
Final post on the blog Bob Ellis Tabletalk,
Good Friday, 25 March 2016
AFTERWORD
Dear Annie,
This is too hard. I’ve written sonnets and songs and speeches to you, but this is too hard. In forty-four years I’ve not thought of this letter to you, the sort you do before the euthanasia drug kicks in, and it’s too hard.
On my mind are the ghosts of the children miscarried and the faces of those that survived. We should have started sooner, but we would never have had the ones we know, just others with their names. But more, but more, for sure. The six or eight we thought of. How incorrect we were. A bigger Christmas dinner. More daughter-dramas. More music round the table.
This is too hard. We lived as some of us did in those years, openly, taking other sexual friends, always after four days returning, that was the rule, to our shared address. Travelling apart overseas, finding always in London, in Canada, in New York, in Bali, in your phrase, someone to play with. You nearly left me for Patrick Cook, I you for Susie Anthony, and as late as our wedding morning the shakedown was in dispute. But I guess wedding mornings are always like that. The Whitlam adventure had ended two weeks before. And so it went. My best man, Les Murray, thanked all those who had come, he said, at such inconvenience from the late 1950s. And the wedding saw us onto the Halvorsen yacht where I engendered our son Jack, and when we came back three days later the wedding was still on our lawn, red-eyed and argumentative and wrestling for empty flagons over the water view.
And Jack’s caesarean coming, strangling in his fluid, about to be brain-damaged by ambient filth, was preceded by a near fist fight outside the operating theatre between two doctors called MacBeth and McBride, the latter having booked it for an abortion before he went off and played golf. The former, MacBeth, who won the contest, got the room, and from his mother’s womb untimely ripped our son, and ‘Hello little Jack,’ I said as I saw him sleeping, blood on his forehead, in the humidicrib coming down the hallway. In another half-hour he could have been brain-damaged. ‘Good baby,’ said MacBeth, ‘big baby.’ And all those songs he has written since, and the orchestra pieces, and the novels, and all those pubs he has sung in, and the special fish meals cooked, were, like Waterloo, a near-run thing.
And I think how it was when, after that, we did not have sex for a while, suddenly knowing how enormous a thing it was to joust in jest with the engendering, with the making, of one more taxpayer. It was no jest, anymore. And when again we made love, suddenly, there was Jenny, fifteen months younger than Jack, an utter surprise, a puppeteer now, a musician, a dramatist, a film director. And then the miscarriages. Three, was it? Four? And then Tom, the juggler and nanotechnologist. We should have started sooner. But we are where we are.
We fought, many times, and I went out the door. But I was always back before sunset. Never let the sun go down on your anger, I used to say.
We love-make still, two or three times a fortnight, in our sixty-eighth year. We write our separate films and plays and books in our separate studios. We fight over money, as always. We curse ourselves for selling the theatre, on whose rent or interest we could now be living well. We feed the visiting lorikeets by day, and the possums by night, and watch old films on the big HD screen and go early to bed.
Nothing in me forebodes that this will end soon. To be seventy these days means roughly what to be thirty was to the Elizabethans. We might get through the next decade, and we might not. But we keep on working.
I love you … more than I can say. But I love almost as much, I think, your dead grandfather, whose money took us to Europe and America in 1968, a good year to go, on a journey that shaped our lives and gave us artistic standards. I owe his money that, and you, who joyfully squandered it on that unknowable adventure with an ingrate who scarcely thanked you for it, as I do now.
I remember the Bedford van we slept in as we travelled Europe, and how it crashed on the day Bobby Kennedy was shot, on our way to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Julius Caesar, and how it was never the same again, and the adventure wound down into bickering, and I nearly lost you.
And oh, what a loss that might have been, my countrymen.
I would have been dead without you, in a drunken car crash or a pub fight back when I drank too much, or an overdose of something, had I gone that way.
You were why I did not, and this is too hard. You are my good music, my saviour, my guiding star. How near-run a thing it was we ever met. You were to go to Europe, to live in Florence and be a painter and I said, ‘Go. No one person is worth Europe.’ And you said, ‘No. I want to be with you.’ I cannot imagine that sacrifice. But here you are. And this is too hard.
You are more than I deserved, and I less than you deserved, and this is too hard.
I toast you anyway, in this your home town, and in your absence, in words you will never see, until, at life’s end, I look up at you and speak them to you, if I can, and say …
Adieu, adieu, remember me.
And this is too hard.
All my long love,
Ellis
‘People of Letters’ event,
Sydney Writers Festival, May 2015
Dear Bob,
Yes, this is too hard. But … okay …
When we first met at the end of August 1966, in a Melbourne winter, I remember thinking of you as ‘the boy with the
wedge-shaped head’. It was because you were so skinny back then that your face narrowed to a pointed chin. And I thought you were about seventeen, though you were twenty-four – I was twenty-three. And you were a production assistant for a daytime women’s program on the ABC and you’d come with an OB [outside broadcast] van to the women’s college where I was a tutor to make a program about women at the university. I was fascinated – not by you then – but by the big OB van. And I hung about and watched the tiny TV screens inside it and how it was all done, hung about so long that you thought I thought I was supposed to be in the program and you put me in it. And I was struck on that day both by your kindness and by your gift for immediate intimacy when talking to someone you’d just met.
And then, two weeks later, you came with the OB van to do a program about the painting school in the old Melbourne art gallery where I was a student as well. John Brack was the head of it, and we all worked at our easels in a large studio while he painted in a room off to the side. And I remember watching from above as you slowly climbed the circular white marble staircase in the scruffy black overcoat that you always wore. And I remember feeling as I watched you … this feels like it.
It took a while for ‘it’ to settle in though. I followed you to Sydney when you got a job on Four Corners, and we lived in a creepy flat in Cremorne, which the neighbours said was haunted after the murder of a girl in 1944, and it probably was. And living together was hard and scary but in all that time I don’t remember that I ever thought I should go back to the safety of Melbourne or ever regretted the life I had given up when I chose not to go to Italy to ‘study painting’, as I vaguely once planned, but to follow a skinny, scruffy, difficult young man to Sydney instead. And it was in part because I was never, I think, that much of a painter. It was always writing for me, really.
I remember one day in John Brack’s studio showing him some poems I had written. He read them and asked me if I’d thought of being a writer instead. After two years with him studying drawing and painting, it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear.
You’d been writing since you were eight, but though I’d been raised on Conrad and others by my English teacher father, I’d always thought writing was something that other people did. A university English course only confirmed that for me. But then you had a week off from Four Corners and went to Bingarra in northern New South Wales and wrote four television plays. And I thought … I can do this too, and in another weekend when you were away I wrote a half-hour television play. The ABC rejected it, but through a friend who worked at the BBC it got picked up for their Armchair Theatre program, then made in Bristol. You and I went there in 1968, and I was shown the studio set the night before it was to be recorded – the places where the people I’d thought up were going to live – and after that I was hooked. On scriptwriting first, but later on the writing of novels, most of them so far for young adults.
You and I fought, of course, in all these long years since that wintry August, but there was only one time, a bad time, after our house burnt down one night – leaving you wearing only a sheet like a Roman toga and us with a saxophone that someone later stole – a time when everything was hard. And you and I were fighting in the car one night with the three kids in the back seat, and you got out and I drove on. And I said to Jack, who was then fifteen, ‘I can’t stand this anymore.’ And he said, ‘Yes, you can.’ And I thought he’s right, I can. And he grew up to work in dispute resolution, along with being a novelist and other things, and you and I went on to the point where we are now, where we spend nearly every day together – much more time together than most married couples have over the years – and rarely have any serious fights. And I’m so glad that we stuck out that rougher time in order to get here, to the deep peace of these present years, in our early seventies.
But being in our early seventies means the question of how long and what next and when … when will it end? Jack said to me when he was five, ‘I’ll look after you when you get small again’, and I know he will, and I know that Jenny and Tom will too – and I think it was the best thing you and I ever did, engendering the three of them – then Jack finding Alice and our little grandson Remy following on. And I know they will indeed look after whichever one of us is left.
Your mother lived to be ninety-four with a clear, angry mind, and I suspect you will, and maybe I will too, though that brings its own fears as well. And as the odd name slips away from us both, I know that loss of memory and the functions of the mind are the thing we probably both fear most. But so far we seem to be holding together and writing as we always have. And there is no clear indication of which one of us will go first, though all the gathered evidence of the world is that one of us will.
But what I know is that I have loved you for the greater part of my life and that now, perhaps more than ever, I love you still. And if I’m the one to remain, I know how empty the world would seem without you, knowing I would never see you again, and I find that knowledge daily hard to bear.
But while it lasts we are here, and we still have the lunches and dinners we have always had on the verandah – dinners where, as the light fades, the possums come down from the jacaranda tree for the pieces of apple you feed them every night, often a mother and a new baby whom you say need looking after. And so you go on feeding them apples each night while the baby grows up and there’s a new mother and a new baby and yet more possums hammering around on the tin roof at night. And, as you’d say, so it goes.
And so this is it, my letter to you. Too hard, too hard. But I’ll say it again: that I’ve loved you for the greater part of my life and that I expect to go on loving you for as long as I have memory and breath.
My long love to you,
Annie
‘People of Letters’ event,
Sydney Writers Festival, May 2015
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Anne Brooksbank and Black Inc. would like to thank Don Watson and Penguin Random House for permission to reproduce the two quotes from Death Sentence; and Noel Pearson for permission to reproduce parts of his speech at Gough Whitlam’s funeral in 2015. Anne would like to thank Penguin Books and, in particular, Bob Sessions for his unfailing support of Bob over many, many years.
Many of the pieces in Bob Ellis: In His Own Words have previously appeared or been collected in the following books:
The Things We Did Last Summer: An Election Journal, William Collins, 1983
Two Weeks in Another Country: A Journal of the 1983 British Elections, William Collins, 1983
Letters to the Future, Methuen Haynes, 1987
The Inessential Ellis, Harper Collins, 1992
Goodbye Jerusalem: Night Thoughts of a Labor Outsider, Random House, 1997
So It Goes: Essays, Broadcasts, Speeches 1987–1999, Penguin, 2000
Goodbye Babylon: Further Journeys in Time and Politics, Penguin, 2002
A Local Man, by Bob Ellis and Robin McLachlin, Currency Press, 2005
And So It Went: Night Thoughts in a Year of Change, Penguin, 2009
One Hundred Days of Summer: How We Got To Where We Are, Penguin, 2010
Suddenly, Last Winter: An Election Diary, Penguin, 2010
Women of Letters, Penguin, 2011
Anne would also like to express her thanks to Black Inc. for conceiving and carrying through the idea for this book; to publisher Aviva Tuffield for her warm and generous support and for the remarkable job she has done in bringing it together quickly in the wake of Bob’s death on 3 April 2016; and, most especially, to her children, Jack, Jenny and Tom, for their loving help and care through this difficult time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob Ellis is the author of twenty-two books, including So It Goes, Goodbye Babylon, Night Thoughts in Time of War, One Hundred Days of Summer and the bestselling First Abolish the Customer. He co-authored the musical play The Legend of King O’Malley, the television miniseries The True Believers, and the Ben Chifley play A Local Man. He co-wrote the classic feature films Newsfront, Fa
tty Finn, Man of Flowers and Goodbye Paradise, and wrote and directed Unfinished Business and The Nostradamus Kid. He had a long and close involvement with politics, and observed and wrote about many election campaigns in Australia, the UK and the US. He wrote speeches for Kim Beazley, Bob Carr, Mike Rann, Nathan Rees among others. He also wrote many film reviews, songs and poems. Bob died on 3 April 2016.
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