The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  Last year I went to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. I had expected dusty old weapons and dioramas of heroism. Instead, I found a curatorial work of inspired brilliance and grandeur, and a chapter of my mother’s life that I had never before bothered to fit into the history of the twentieth century. At the desk I told the attendant the name of my uncle Noel, Mum’s favourite younger brother, who was killed in the Second World War. To us she rarely spoke of him. Dad, a wool trader, was in a reserved occupation; was the war a touchy subject? But when Dad was very old, he told me that Mum had been devastated by her brother’s death. She never got over it; he was ‘like her twin’.

  The man at the war museum turned to a computer, pressed a few keys, and handed me two sheets of paper. Flight-Sergeant. Aerial Gunner RAAF. Cause of death: Flying Battle. Lancaster crashed at Hollenstein, Germany, while returning from a raid over Brunswick on 12–13 August 1944, killing all crew members. At last I registered the dates. I had to sit down. He must have been barely twenty. When my mother got the news that his plane had crashed, I would have been a toddler of eighteen months, and my sister an infant, five weeks old. How could she have mothered us, staggering under such a blow? In her old age Mum said to me, ‘Marie was a very thin and hungry baby – always crying and wanting more.’

  Once, while my mother was staying a weekend with me, a man I was having an affair with came to see me. He behaved sweetly towards her, questioned her about her life. He asked about her childhood and her family. How had the news of her brother’s death in the war come to her: by phone, or was there a letter? She seemed astonished that someone should be interested in her. When he left, she turned to me and said, ‘He’s nice.’ ‘He’s the love of my life, Mum,’ I burst out, shocking myself, ‘but he’s married.’ I suppose I thought she would disapprove. But she cried, ‘Oh!’ She leapt off her chair and threw her arms around me. She said, ‘Just wait.’

  From what life experience, from what instinct she drew this spontaneous advice I have no idea.

  She got on well with all the men in my life, and they liked her. She continued to have warm feelings for them, and they for her, years after they and I had wrecked everything and gone our separate ways.

  For my work, on tram stops, in planes, in courts, I’m not afraid to question any stranger. But I never sat my mother down and pressed her about the past, about her life before me, before our father.

  One evening she and Dad and I came out of a restaurant. The street was empty of traffic for a mile in each direction. I stepped confidently off the kerb but she seized the tail of my jacket and pulled me back. ‘We’ll cross at the lights. I’m a very. Law-abiding. Person.’

  My mother was good at sewing. When I was five or so she made me a pair of pyjamas on her Singer machine. I refused to wear them because they had frills on the bottom. She pleaded with me. She told me that if I wore the pyjamas, fairies would come and they would like me because of the frills. I did not care about the fairies. Even at that age I sensed the guilty power my refusal gave me.

  It seemed to me, as a child, that our mother was hopeless at giving birthday parties. The cakes she made weren’t right. The decorations and games somehow missed the mark. Other kids’ mothers knew how to do a party right but Mum didn’t. Instead of her plain cupcakes with icing, I secretly thought, she should have made those cakes with whipped cream and little tilted wings on top that other girls’ mothers presented. It was a very strong sense I had, that there was something she did not get. All my adult life I despised myself for my disloyalty. It did not comfort me to learn that all children felt their mothers to be socially lacking in some crucial way. But one day when she was old and we were talking about motherhood, she said with a casual little laugh, ‘I was never any good at giving kids’ parties. I somehow never had the knack.’

  She used to wear hats that pained me. Shy little round beige felt hats with narrow brims. Perhaps one was green. And she stood with her feet close together, in sensible shoes.

  Oh, if only she would walk in here now.

  She must have been only in her late thirties when she developed a gum disease and had to have all her teeth extracted. If she had gone to a Melbourne dentist, instead of remaining loyal to the doddery old fellow who treated our family in Geelong, a less drastic treatment might have been found. Not only did he pull out all her teeth, he whacked the false ones in over her bleeding gums. She came home and sat by the fire, hunched in her dressing gown, eyes down, holding a hanky to her mouth. We did not know how to comfort her. We tiptoed around her, whispering, going about our business. Thirty years later, at home on my own one night, I saw on SBS a movie called Germany, Pale Mother in which a woman in wartime had all her teeth removed as a cure for her neurasthenic state. I sat breathless on the couch while the dentist in his white coat yanked out her teeth and dropped them one by one with a clang into a metal dish.

  My sax-playing sister, a professional, came over last winter with her ukulele and a Johnny Cash CD. She sings in the eighty-voice Melbourne Mass Gospel Choir, but is highly sceptical of all things religious. She wanted me to listen to ‘Wayfaring Stranger’. All I knew was that it is an old song of weariness, of sin; of the longing to cross over Jordan.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s only got a couple of chords. We can learn it in five minutes.’

  I got my uke down off the shelf. We tuned up. Yes, it was easy, the music part.

  ‘Listen to that harmonium-playing,’ she said. ‘It’s exemplary.’

  But the lyrics.

  I know dark clouds will gather round me,

  I know my way is hard and steep.

  But beauteous fields arise before me,

  Where God’s redeemed their vigils keep.

  I’m going there to see my mother.

  She said she’d meet me when I come.

  I’m just going over Jordan.

  I’m just going over home.

  I said nothing, just worked at getting the strum right. That night, after she’d left, I played along with Johnny Cash for a long time. I could hardly get the words out, but his voice, weary and cracked, gave the song a majesty that still welcomed the humble chords of a ukulele.

  My mother was a natural athlete: neat, small and graceful. I was hopeless at sport of any kind. All I wanted to do was read and write. At fourteen I got my first typewriter, my grandmother’s reconditioned Smith Corona portable. Mum asked me to type out the results of the Point Lonsdale Golf Club ladies’ tournament, to be reported in the Geelong Advertiser. Perhaps she was trying to interest me in what she cared about, or was simply looking for something we could do together. At the time I took it at face value: my first typing job. We toiled together at the kitchen table after tea. She dictated, and I clattered away at my beautiful oil-scented machine, on the quarto paper of which we had bought a ream at Griffiths Bookstore. She did not lose her temper at my mistakes. I felt important and useful. We were pleased with each other when the job was done. Two mornings later we stood shoulder to shoulder, looking down proudly at the newspaper’s inky columns.

  I must have been about twelve when the insight came to me that my mother’s entire life was divided into compartments. None of them was any longer than the number of hours between one meal and the next. She was on a short leash. I don’t recall thinking that this would be my fate, or resolving to avoid it. All I remember is the picture of her life, and the speechless desolation that filled me.

  Mrs Thatcher has told one of her interviewers that she had nothing to say to her mother after she reached the age of fifteen. Such a sad, blunt confession it seems, and yet not a few of us could make it. The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.

  -HILARY MANTEL

  The quietly mighty Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu tells story after story of adult children breaking away from their parents. His characters rarely cry or raise their voices. Their emotions are expressed in tiny signs and chang
es of position. A father looks down at his glass. A mother folds her hands, or draws a handkerchief from her sleeve. These subtle movements call up in me surges of excruciating sympathy for my parents, for the hurt, helpless, angry love they must have felt as they watched me smash my way out of their protection.

  In Dad’s house I found a little photo of him and Mum in their twenties, sitting on the front step of their first house. Between them lay a long-eared black dog, a spaniel. Dad said his name was Ned. I did not remember our ever having had a pet. I asked if the dog had died before I was born. ‘Ah no. I had to get rid of him. Mum wouldn’t let him inside. Because of her brand-new mushroom-pink carpet.’ He laughed, and shrugged. ‘I put an ad in the paper. A lady came round and took him. She tied his lead to the carrier of her bike and pedalled away. I thought he might have looked back, but he never even turned his head.’

  A crime novelist spoke at a conference about the unsuitability of his usual sardonic tone for the war story he was trying to write, ‘about young men with their stomachs torn open who cry all night for their mothers and then die’. An old man told me, after he had had open-heart surgery, that he and a whole ward full of other men his age woke in the dark from hideous nightmares, screaming for their mothers. I have never read or heard of a woman in extremis who called for her mother. It is not possible for me to imagine such a thing. Still, I did hear about a woman of my age who had died in a distant part of the country. Her parents did not go to her funeral. Shocked by this, I asked my mother, ‘Would you go to my funeral, if I died far away?’ She uttered a sharp pant of disbelief. ‘If you died in the Arctic Circle I’d make m’ way there.’

  On my pantry shelf stands a tall storage jar that I salvaged from Dad’s kitchen when we sold his house. It survived the successive demolitions of my mother’s households and, I suspect, of her mind. She has labelled it, in her large, clear hand: Sultanas. Then she has crossed out Sultanas and replaced it with Currants. Then she has crossed out Currants and restored Sultanas. The jar, when I found it, was empty.

  Her ghost is in my body. I have her long narrow feet with low arches. I have her hollow bones, her hysterectomy, her fading eyebrows, her fine grey-brown hair that resists all attempts at drama. My movements are hers when, on a summer morning, I close up the house against the coming scorcher, or in the evening whisk the dry clothes off the line in weightless armfuls that conceal my face.

  In the intermission at Shane Warne: The Musical two smiling strangers approached me. The man introduced himself and his wife. Aside from our parents’ funerals, I had not seen him since we were children.

  ‘I knew you straight away,’ he said, ‘from the other side of the room. You stand exactly like your mother.’

  In my forties, when I lived in Chippendale, I used to walk to work across the big gardens of Sydney University. I walked fast, thinking my thoughts. One morning a young woman passed me, going the other way. She was wearing an op shop blouse from the 1940s, striped, with shoulder pads and tiny pearl buttons. At the sight of it a bolt of ecstasy went through me, an atavistic bliss so powerful that its roots could only have been in early childhood. I wrote my mother a letter. Did she ever have a stripy blouse, rather floppy, when I was little?

  A week later came a curly-edged black-and-white photo. The date pencilled on the back was 1943. A woman in her early twenties stands in a bare backyard, squinting in an unposed way that raises her cheeks and bares her teeth. Her hair is permed and pinned in a Victory Roll. On her flexed left arm sits a wide-browed, unsmiling baby. The child’s right cheek and left hand lean against the stripes of the woman’s rayon blouse.

  The war is not yet over. Her brother is alive. I am six months old. I am still an only child. She is carrying me in her arms. She is strong enough to bear my weight with ease. I trust her. She is my mother, and I am content to rest my head upon her breast.

  My Mother, My Father

  The Old Australia? Oratava Avenue, 1940

  Sybille Smith

  In 1940 we moved to Oratava Avenue in West Pennant Hills. Oratava Avenue was nearly a mile long, with three sharp bends. No streets led out of it. It ended at a barbed wire fence enclosing a forestry reserve – a dead end. In the reserve, dense undergrowth and huge trees with tattered flaps of hanging bark created a gloom in which the constant call of bellbirds seemed like momentary chinks of light.

  Oratava Avenue was scored out of a gentle green slope, so that on one side there was a high grassy bank and on the other a fall to the level of the next paddocks, with an almost continuous buttress of blackberry bushes bearing enough dusty, tight little berries for everyone to get billies full in the summer. It was ‘a dirt road’, just about wide enough for two cars to pass, though this was rarely put to the test as only one family, Stones the plumbers, drove a car. Scanlens had a car but it was ‘on bricks for the duration’, one of many phrases which seemed simply a classification, without particular reference to a war. The milkman came in a high sulky with wooden wheels early in the morning and ladled milk into the tin billy hung over the middle picket of the gate. The baker came later, in a lower sulky with rubber tyres. Where the houses were close together he walked from one to the next with a big shallow basket of white loaves and the horse followed slowly, stopping to wrench up tufts of grass at the side of the road.

  Each house was close to the road on five barbed-wire-fenced acres, the smallest subdivision allowed in this area, which was called The Green Belt, intended to stem the spread of the grey city and the red-brick suburbs. There were five houses on our side, the low side, and six on the other. Being a dead end, it was more like a village than a street. Everybody knew most of what there was to know about everybody else, and had opinions to cover what they didn’t know. The people at the top end knew the most, as they saw all the comings and goings, and the people at the bottom end seemed to have the strongest opinions – Mr Davis on the high side, who was very religious and said ‘in the name of the Lord’ at the end of every sentence, and Mr Mitchell on the low side, who said ‘bloody’ a couple of times in every sentence. One day Mr Davis was calling his little son, who refused to come because he was frightened of a goose on the path. Mr Davis said, ‘Daniel, come to your father in the name of the Lord.’ Mr Mitchell said, ‘Hit the bloody goose over the head with a shovel and he’ll bloody well come.’

  We could not have seemed stranger if we had landed from another planet. Officially we were Enemy Aliens, having to report to the police once a week and not allowed to own a radio. In actuality we were treated with amused or detached interest and matter-of-fact helpfulness, respect of equals for something different but not therefore worse, or better. My father came from a family which for over two hundred years had farmed land in what was then Silesia. His English was good and he was immediately absorbed into the intricacies and stratifications of local interaction. He was instinctively matter-of-fact or appreciative, confident or deprecating as the context required, could wait and listen and come in just at the right moment with a remark or casual suggestion – a sense for tone and timing which, if not innate, is more difficult to acquire than the entire grammar of a foreign language. He was known to everybody as ‘Joe’ (his name was Josef Gottwald) and occasionally referred to as ‘Doc’, as if his doctorate had become a decontextualised but casually preserved memento. My mother’s doctorate disappeared completely and she became Mrs Cottswold, accepted and liked not because she blended into the local scene but for her openness, humour and unselfconscious eagerness to learn. ‘Sister, you got my bloody sympathy,’ said Mr Mitchell when he was teaching her to milk the cow. He said it to the cow.

  My grandmother, whose English had plateaued at the level of orders to porters, neither fitted nor adapted, but by her considerable force of personality and authoritative custodianship of the standards of another place and time, established herself as local representative of an unknown but unquestionable Culture. She had trained as a pianist and graduated as dux of the Vienna conservatorium, receiving the prize of a b
aby grand piano donated annually by the piano manufacturing firm Bösendorfer. This piano now stood in, in fact filled, the main room of the weatherboard cottage. She was known as Madame Frolitsh (her name was Else Fröhlich) and she gave piano lessons and occasional recitals for the Red Cross and the Presbyterian church fund. She played for four and often six hours a day, and her music was a physical part of the environment of Oratava Avenue, where passers-by were accustomed to walking through an area of music, impetuous but precise gusts of Chopin polonaises and Schubert impromptus, just as they were accustomed to walking through an area of shade at the Stones’ gate or to being courteously approached by the two Airedales who always lay outside Harrington’s. ‘I never minded hearing Madame play her piano,’ Mr Davis said to me many years later, and that phrasing captures the uneffusive and solidly grounded tolerance of Oratava Avenue.

  There were no street numbers. You lived Up The Road or Down The Road. Our house was the third on the left, weatherboard with a corrugated iron roof. A short path overhung by old bushes of yellow ivy roses and yellow buddleia sloped to the front door, which, like most front doors in Oratava Avenue, had no lock. It opened into a verandah enclosed in diagonal lattice, which was where I slept, and that opened into a living room which contained the piano and two sofas, on which my parents slept. On the two walls that formed a corner behind the piano were two matching black-framed prints, one a life-size head of Bach looking magisterial in an elaborately tiered wig and one of Beethoven looking tormented with writhing hair. Over the fireplace was an oil painting in an ornate gilt frame, a boy returning home at sunset with a cart pulled by two white oxen and met outside the thatched farmhouse by a small flock of welcoming geese. Under it on the mantelpiece was a plaster kookaburra on a tree stump that I won at the hoopla stall at the Castle Hill gymkhana. The door to my grandmother’s room was on one side, and, opposite, a door into the kitchen. Part of the kitchen had been screened off to form a bathroom.