Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  Menzies came back from the window, sat down and turned his attention to papers on his desk, indicating with a finger that they were both dismissed. She followed the Treasurer out of the office, and in the corridor he went one way and she the other without speaking.

  She went directly to her office and called Overall. ‘John, get your bulldozers down in the riverbed tomorrow and begin digging the lake,’ she said and described what had happened. He had not heard that the money had been struck out behind their backs. She said, ‘I have learned, today, a lesson: what can be struck out of a budget can then be struck back in; and can also probably be struck out again.’

  As she came to work next morning, the roaring bulldozers were at the riverbank.

  There was another odd encounter with the Prime Minister over the question of the lake.

  It was on one of those rare occasions she was invited in with the boys, who were having a stimulated anteroom conversation – stimulated by the Prime Minister’s famous martinis; she’d had a sherry – when the Minister for Interior suggested, in an obsequious way, that the lake should be named Lake Menzies. Menzies had replied, ‘Gordon, that’s a characteristically pleasing thought on your part, but the lake is not going to be named after me. Remember the designer of this city and creator of the whole dream of the lake?’ The minister had not seemed to be sure to which creator the Prime Minister was referring. Menzies went on, ‘I want the lake to be called Lake Burley Griffin.’

  She thought it could be called Lake Marion and Walter, but she held her tongue. In fact, she had rather warmed to the name Lake Marion. Plenty of other things could be named for Walter.

  Menzies had often said in her presence that he never wanted a suburb named after him. She sometimes thought this a ploy to be remembered forever as the modest Prime Minister. She privately considered it a futile ploy.

  When she had heard the Prime Minister refer to the lake as Lake Burley Griffin, it didn’t sound right. Surely it should be Lake Walter Burley Griffin?

  She puzzled quietly about this, and next day rang Judith at the Memorials and Naming Committee and asked what it had recommended. Judith said, ‘Lake Griffin.’

  Edith asked whether Griffin had been known as Burley Griffin.

  Judith said firmly, ‘No. Burley is his middle name. He was not known by that name. He was called Walt. And he signed W. B. Griffin. To call it Lake Burley Griffin is an anomaly. Or, to put it more bluntly, a foolish error.’

  An anomaly. So, there were already anomalies creeping into Canberra, the most carefully planned of cities.

  It hadn’t been gazetted. It was not too late for this to be corrected.

  She gathered her nerve and grabbed a moment with the Prime Minister in the corridor. She told him that Lake ‘Burley Griffin’ was an anomaly.

  With stately irritation, he said, ‘Then we have an anomaly. It is to be called Lake Burley Griffin. It is sonorous, Berry, sonorous. “Upon famous Parnassus, or the sonorous Shore.” ’

  He walked on, leaving her stranded in the corridor on a classical quotation.

  And that was that. It was to be called Lake Burley Griffin – not Lake Griffin. The anomaly was decreed.

  As for ‘famous Parnassus’, she thought only of beloved Paris and the louche cafés of Montparnasse, and for a moment wished she was there writing verse.

  She had a chair in the second row at the opening of the lake.

  She looked out at the three square miles of water and its two splendid bridges, and in her mind she saw sailing craft, boaters, punters, canoeists and rowers who would eventually enliven the lake with lines of white wake and their rhythmic, muscular bodies.

  The city was growing up into a handsome young woman. The lake was her gleaming hair and her smooth skin. And her shapeliness. Edith’s mind suggested another metaphor: the lake was the vase; the city’s handsome buildings, the flowers. The vase and the flower were a unity – neither flower nor vase. They formed a singular ornament. She wished she had passed a note on this to the Prime Minister for his speech.

  The filling of the lake had been painfully slow. After the lake was dug, a year passed and it did not fill. Mosquitoes did breed in ugly ponds. And then the drought broke, the rains fell, and the lake filled in days. It was like the creation of the world.

  As the heavy rains dramatically fell, a beautiful lake appeared, and she had watched the lucerne paddocks, the rabbits and the sheep slowly vanish, and then the old golf course. The lake did not divide the city into two; the lake embraced the new city into an accord.

  One day the Prime Minister said to her, as they looked at the lake together, ‘When I remember how every penny spent on Canberra used to be grudged – how many arguments I’d had in travelling from state to state to get this – it delights me, Berry. Australia’s capital has now become an object of pride and pleasure.’

  Not always, she thought, but yes, he had become the great champion of the vision.

  He added, ‘It’s an important city doing important things in the national interest.’

  She agreed, but said, ‘What I like about it – for all its importance and its scheming – is that it still has a bush soul. Living here, we can all still see the bush from which we come.’

  At the opening of the lake, she laughed with the rest when the Prime Minister paused in his speech, looked away, obviously considering his words, and then looked up and said, ‘I don’t think you can declare a lake “open”.’

  As she sat there and watched the Prime Minister ‘open’ the lake, she thought that her work for Canberra was over. She had never chosen Canberra as a life mission – it had chosen her. It had been a stop-gap while she waited in line for something from the Department of External affairs, which had never come.

  Her Canberra work had been helping to shape the land and the water, the streets and buildings of the city – with a little help from the Griffins and a lot of squabbling architects and planners.

  Making uranium safe and useful was her mission now, but she was going to keep an eye on the city.

  Some of her dreams for Canberra had come right, and the rest would come right in time. Fingers crossed. All children could walk safely to school on their own, or ride a bike or a horse. On waking, everyone would see the sky and the sun when they looked out their window and would never live in the shadow of tall buildings. Toilets would be indoors and separated from the bathroom. The houses would not have front fences but become part of the street park, and all neighbours and passing people would say hello as you hosed the front garden – maybe low hedges could be allowed. Paths to the front door would curve; would not be a dull straight line from street to door. The back garden would be for the privacy of the householders to do as they pleased. People would be encouraged to eat out more, instead of each family eating alone every night hunched over a quarrelsome table. In the local cafés, people would come to know each other and draw up their chairs and chat about things that mattered.

  Every neighbourhood would have a shopping square surrounded by a park, and would have a meeting hall and a tavern for drinking coffee or a bottle of wine with nuts at the end of the day. There would be public squares – piazzas – where young people could be diverted from ‘the mischievousness and folly natural to their age, and under handsome porticos may spend the heat of the day and be mutually serviceable to one and another’, as the Italian Leon Battista Alberti urged in the 1400s. She had read this out to Gibson and anyone else who would listen at the Congress.

  Animals and children would be everywhere and allowed into cafés.

  Everyone would be in a permanent conversation about the Canberra dream, including those who did not live in Canberra. Canberra was the only city in Australia that was everyone’s business. Already, everyone had an opinion about it. Through argument, everyone would help make it.

  And people would travel to work together, swiftly and colourfully and cheerfully, in the smart trams and buses of the city – the best in the world. And on the brightly painted buses a
nd tram cars, on some days, there would be a surprise – a famous person shaking hands; a renowned singer singing; a champion sportsman signing autographs – and there would be poetry and jokes on placards in the cars, and roving musicians.

  And the lake ferries would be the same – gaily painted and be-flagged on special occasions – taking people to and from work from lakeside ports. The lake would echo with music played by roving musicians or by the employees themselves on their way home in the evenings – accordions, flutes, recorders, guitars. Not too loudly. And not tin whistles; she had no fondness for the tin whistle.

  Or did people want their transport to be quiet? The New Yorker magazine was campaigning against the broadcasting of radio in public places such as railway stations. She supposed she would have to allow that some people would drive motorcars to work, and on car wirelesses supplied by the Broadcasting Commission they would listen to symphony music, or the best music of the day, or to news and talk by the best minds of the world.

  The city would be governed and owned in a cooperative and communal fashion. On some nights, people would go to exhibitions and lectures, and talk of serious matters – art, literature and science – in a jolly way.

  Canberra would be a social laboratory and would try out all sorts of ideas for good living and would lead the country. There would be no private health, law or education – all would be fairly available to all citizens as a right, and to all children free of charge. The best doctors, lawyers and schools would not be available only to the rich. There would be, as the Prime Minister had said, no ‘forgotten people’.

  She was not sure what to do with Griffin’s idea of a capitol building above that of parliament on Capitol Hill, the highest point on the plain. He had not spelled it out, but he had wanted a place where the citizens could meet and from which the elected representatives could ‘hear the roar of the crowd’. She saw it as a pantheon – a place of continuous conference on all matters – which would be used for permanent, ongoing evening classes. It would be a magnificent centre for citizens to study and research on democracy, on Australian history. Although it was all something of a mystery to her, she thought that it would be a good idea to study the history of the Aboriginals. She had recently learned that Aboriginals had lived around Canberra before white settlement. Perhaps there was more to be known about the Aboriginals – apart from, that is, what was known by the anthropologists. She had never learned anything about all this. There could be a permanent and continuous series of courses for adult learning at all levels, and research both professional and non-professional would be done by all those interested. Every so often, every Australian would be eligible for travel and accommodation, living expenses, grants to take courses or engage in research, whether it be to study gardening or stamp collecting. It should be a place where every citizen had a chance to do some serious thinking about those things that bothered them.

  And working hours should never be so arduous that they made people too tired to do the other things citizens should value after work. She thought that even the eight-hour day was perhaps too long.

  Thus, the capitol-on-the-hill above the parliament would give thoughtful citizens oversight to the parliament, and be a source of unusual and fresh advice for it.

  Her first great revelation about the city had been that it was the national memory, but she now thought – because of all that would be stored there in museums and other places – that it would be a place for the citizens to ask questions.

  Instead of grumbling about the fine and unusual – distinctive – roads, they should be curious about why they were planned like that. Then the road should be asked to speak.

  She had arrived at the insight that Canberra would have to serve two types of citizens – those who were its residents and all those Australians who would visit it many times. It was a city to live in and a city to visit and study. And a place of physical achievement. The sports – she mustn’t forget the sports.

  She thought it was a human desire not to be forgotten, to be recognised. To have one’s existence recorded and recognised by others was, in her theological opinion, the only way to eternal life. And the city would do that for all our names and our histories and the histories of our families – how we arrived here and what we had done before we came here and what we had done after we had come here.

  The city would be our Chartres Cathedral, only more: Chartres tells only the bible stories: this capitol would tell everyone’s story. Everyone’s name would be here; everyone’s life experience would be here.

  She had read that art museums, libraries and ancient architecture were not only an exposure to artworks of the past, they were also the gifts of dead artists to the living human community – gifts of innovation and excellence of thought and aspirations of beauty. They were the dead speaking to us through the very best that the human species could create. The dead speak to us this way – not through ouija boards or phoney spiritualism or the so-called voice of God.

  This city would be the place where we would be led to contemplate ourselves.

  The whole city – not only the capitol-on-the-hill of which she dreamed – would be a philosophical centre.

  She was glad that – as a start – Canberra now had the School of Anatomy, the War Memorial and the National University, and of course the magnificent Shine Dome for the Academy of Science. She loved thinking of it as the Martian Embassy; Mr T had named it thus.

  And when it was decided that a mistake had been made in the planning of the city, they could pull it down and start again – bad buildings could be pulled down, wrong roads dug up. They would try again: self-criticism and self-correction. Some of the city would be temporary, but the temporary could have elegance.

  As Mr Maybeck had said, a city such as Canberra was an ‘incremental experiment’ – things taken away; things added; things altered. To plan and arrange our living in our world was a higher human impulse than the building of the slums of industrial England. Planning was human. The first questions humans asked themselves were: how close together should we live? Where should we put our excrement?

  But she was well aware of the difficulties of defining a wish. And, as with hope, a wish was not a plan. A plan was only the beginning of a creation, not its fixed conclusion.

  She was roused from her city dreaming by the clapping as the lake was formally opened and the music of the military band struck up.

  As she looked out at the placid new lake, she knew that if she had anything to do with it, all this would come about.

  Living Without Love

  Her fifth essay on nuclear issues had appeared in Search. She prophesied that the world would have to think very hard about what to do with nuclear waste matter as more nuclear power plants were built and when, ultimately, nuclear weapons were all decommissioned. She argued that sending it off into space or into the sun where it would be consumed involved the risk of catastrophic launch failure. She also applied her rule about taking an action when the consequences were completely unknown and breathtaking in their scale of execution. Likewise, with the other proposal of seabed burial, where submarines would deposit canisters of nuclear waste in subduction faults, which would carry the waste downward toward the earth’s mantle. She said that other ways would have to be found.

  As promised by the Prime Minister, she was sent to the General Conference of the IAEA as an observer. There she had met a couple of faces from the League days, but although she had plenty to say, as an observer she was not expected to speak. She gave some of the delegates off-prints of her Search essays.

  She was at times consulted by newspapers and asked to speak on the radio, and she gave a paper at the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, although when it was scheduled for the Sunday morning of the conference she had to accept that her status was not rated that highly.

  Each year, she taught an evening course in a program of adult education courses, which the Richters and others had convinced the National Unive
rsity to start. Uranium had gone sour commercially. All the expectations of new export income from uranium came to nothing. Other countries had discovered uranium; there was a glut. Rum Jungle had made no money. But the possibility of an A-bomb war was still feared. Children were reported to be having nightmares about falling bombs and mushroom clouds.

  She had not heard from Frederick and nor had she heard from Janice, but this did not pain her. Frederick, she suspected, would eventually contact her again. She occasionally pondered her relationship with Janice, and what it had ever meant to either of them – whether recruitment of her had always motivated Janice or whether there had been an emotional bond. If the latter, why had Janice extinguished these emotions? And why had she, Edith, not expressed them more unambiguously? And if she had? What then?

  All gone now.

  She had come to realise that with Richard and the boys she lived in a house of males. She found it interesting when she maintained a role as, say, a friendly and well-meaning sociologist, which was the happier description of the distance between her and them.

  She had grown up with a brother and knew some of the rites and habits of men, but there had always been her mother – the other female – as an ally; someone with whom she could share laughter about them. Emily was something of a wise ally, but could not engage in any study of the more complicated intricacies of men. And Edith’s intimate knowledge of Ambrose and Robert, as well as of some of the casual sexual encounters along the way, had given her understandings of male strangeness. She realised that it was women who engaged with men in intimacy and in sexual life – that most men did not know much about other men, except Mr T and his friends. This gave women a unique and deep knowledge of men, more than men could ever have of their own sex. She supposed, in reverse, it could be argued that men, too, had a unique knowledge of women, although she had never found that they took much trouble to give any depth to their study. But still, both sexes tended to wrap their confusions, ignorances and incompatibilities in folk sayings: ‘Who knows what women want?’ And: ‘Men! Can’t live with them; can’t live without them.’