Miles died when I was barely a teenager but I knew Dymphna well into my adult years. She wrote warm letters to us from Russia where she and Norman, her Communist partner, lived in a writers’ retreat. When she came back to Australia, we shared some happy occasions and one not so happy when I sat beside her hospital bed after she suffered a devastating stroke. As far as she was concerned there were only three Dymphnas in the world worth acknowledging – she was Dymphna I, her niece was Dymphna II and I was Dymphna III. Like my parents, she made it clear she hoped I’d be a writer. They all expected me to carry on the tradition they had worked so hard to establish. This could have been Miles Franklin’s intention, too, in bestowing her intimate name Stella on me. Just to keep me reminded of this, Dymphna Cusack inscribed one of her books: To Dymphna III, the coming generation of literary Dymphnas.
I went along with this expectation at first. I wrote a short novel, One-Eye Williams, when I was at primary school and illustrated it, too, though I have not the slightest ability for drawing. As I had no personal experience of boys at that stage, I leaned heavily on books I had recently read – adventures starring unattractive sub-adolescent English schoolboys in glasses. (Why didn’t I think of Harry Potter?) I was egged on by my father who enthusiastically typed up my handwritten manuscript and then included himself as co-author.
As a young child, there was no doubt in my mind that I was part of a literary production line. My father’s first children’s book was published when I was two – a milestone of which I was unaware, though I was posed for a photograph on the front lawn, peering at a copy as if I was an amazingly precocious reader.
In his oral history for the National Library of Australia, Leslie described how surprised he was with this aspect of his career.
It had never occurred to me to try to write a children’s book until I acquired some children of my own. When my elder daughter, Megan, was three Coralie and I went off to the Barrier Reef on a long-desired holiday. We had been invited to join a party led by Frank McNeill, curator of marine invertebrates at the Australia Museum and an acknowledged authority in his field. I absorbed not only the charm and colour and visions of teeming sea life but its factual background through colleagues from the Museum who shared the trip.
Coming back home I found Megan eager to know every detail about the fertile and enchanting life of the Reef so I began to tell her a story of a little boy, no bigger than his mother’s big toe, who got himself by hook or by crook to ‘Sunshine Island’. He had all sorts of adventures with the animals, fishes and birds there – the green turtle, the whale, the crabs and coral fishes, the trochus shell, Miss Nautilus, the spider shell, bêche-de-mer and the octopus who blacked out Mr Crab’s party. The villain of the piece was Mr Shark. Megan liked the story so much that I wrote it out and submitted it for publication. The artist Walter Cunningham made the most delightful drawings, creating a loveable character. When the book was published it sold 40,000 copies. The Digit Dick jigsaw puzzles and a board game called Digit Dick’s Walkabout helped the popularity and soon there wasn’t a copy to be had. I couldn’t even get one myself.
A sequel, Digit Dick and the Tasmanian Devil, was written for my second daughter, Dymphna. About the same time Gecko the Lizard Who Lost His Tail was published and also very successful. My relationship and collaboration with the illustrator of these books, Walter Cunningham, was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
In my first twelve years, my father brought out ten more titles. No wonder I was badged as Leslie Rees’s daughter. All my contemporaries were growing up with his books. Teachers read them out in class. Excerpts would appear in the New South Wales Department of Education’s School Magazine. At my school, Neutral Bay Public, my father was lionised. Miss Clifford, our headmistress, adored him. ‘Mr Rees is such a darling!’ she cooed as I delivered an inscribed copy of the latest title. She immediately sent back a thank you with an invitation for him to address an assembly. During Book Week he traipsed round schools making appearances like a member of some children’s literature aristocracy.
Meanwhile Coralie Clarke Rees was exercising her own literary skills.
I’ve always loved writing poetry. A little of it had been published but not a lot of it had been written: there are special things which need to be said in poetry and special emotions. In 1944 my younger brother Max, an airman in the Second World War, was killed in Canada as he was about to go on operations over Germany. Hearing the news had great impact on me, the personal grief and what it meant, the whole feeling about the war at that time, young men dying needlessly. Losing Max was just our particular loss. Thousands of people were having losses like this. Thousands of mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, wives and girlfriends were grieving. Max had stayed with us in Sydney before sailing off to Canada. I was the eldest of six, he was the youngest and there was such a bond between us. I felt keenly for my mother. She’d loved us all but for him, her last born, I felt she had a special love. Max was only 22 when he was killed. The night I heard the news, I sat up all night by the window at Shellcove. I couldn’t sleep at all. I just sat there looking out on the harbour and gradually as the dawn started to break, I began to write this elegy, a long poem called Silent His Wings which was published as a book a year or two later.
Morning dawns, silver, silent, bare
Empty the sea, empty the sky
And in our hearts black bottomless despair.
He was too young to die, too taut with the thrill of living
Others are ripe for death’s iron glove to maul
Without our giving him,
So tall, so lithe, so gay, so full of love.
Despite the continuous weight of domestic life, Coralie pushed ahead with a range of projects. Her talent was versatile. She could, and did, write in whatever genre she could see possibilities.
One of my earliest memories is sitting on the floor between her feet under the table, the typewriter over my head clattering away.
From the time the children were young I kept up as much freelance writing and broadcasting as I could. I reviewed novels. I wrote a series for the ABC on current topics using a sort of fictional dialogue. As a broadcaster, I did a lot of talks for the ABC Women’s Session and regularly anchored the sessions myself. I wrote and broadcast on literary subjects, on travel, on whatever was of interest at the time. I also wrote short stories and had some of them published in magazines and journals.
While Les was bringing out what equated to one new book a year, he was also pouring his energies into drama, overseeing a steady diet of radio plays and serials for an ABC national audience that was fast developing a taste for them. Households all over the country were being organised around their daily dose of Gwen Meredith’s serial The Lawsons, the precursor to Blue Hills. Just like we now look forward to our favourite television series, families would gather around the wireless for a regular treat – a broadcast play or the next sequel of a drama, packed with familiar characters.
To allow for the prodigious flow of words emanating from our household, my parents had to negotiate a way of supporting each other’s writing time – not to mention getting a turn at their shared typewriter, which balanced on a rickety camping table at the far end of their bedroom. My father explained their arrangement:
For many years we had a system whereby Coralie had Saturday for her writing and I took over the household and children. Sunday was my day at the typewriter. This was quite a satisfactory modus operandi. Coralie would stay working in our bedroom study for 10 or 15 hours – I don’t know how she did it. We’d ferry in trays of food. My method of working was in bursts. I’d think it out and I could write 1,000 words quickly in rough form. Then I’d say to the kids: ‘Come on, we’re going for a walk – or a swim’ and start to breathe outside. I always found it very necessary to get out in the open air.
As small children, we became very aware of this regimen. Weekends were our parent
s’ work time and we knew not to interrupt the one holed up behind a closed door. It did not occur to me at the time but on reflection it is clear our parents were decidedly unconventional. In the 1940s and 1950s they continually challenged aspects of the widespread conservatism. On our mother’s writing day, our father would get stuck into the chores. He used to hang out and bring in the weekly wash and fold the clothes. He always ironed his own shirts. He was not a cook but was quick at producing simple and nutritious snacks: bread and cheese, salads and fruit. After dinner during the week, he would often volunteer to wash up (relieving Megan and me) so he could listen to particular broadcasts through the kitchen wireless speaker.
My parents did not subscribe to the Anglophile diet of meat and overcooked veg that most families ate nightly. Probably influenced by Bernard Shaw’s vegetarianism, with which his longevity and vigour were widely credited, both my parents placed importance on healthy eating and my father on exercise. Wholemeal bread was specially ordered from the shop; cakes, sweet biscuits and lollies were only for special occasions. Rather than the Northern Hemisphere tradition of a hot carnivorous Christmas feast (‘the boar’s head in hand bear I’) for which someone female had to spend hours in the kitchen, they invented the Shellcove version of Christmas Day, which was largely spent relaxing by the pool en famille, with a mid-afternoon cold meal of salads and the treats of tinned sockeye salmon and asparagus spears, followed by various sweet indulgences.
Our parents had not owned a car since I was a baby. They used to joke that they could not afford to keep both it and me – so they decided on me. My mother once said in a press interview that writers should not own cars as they would be tempted to go out when they should be getting on with their writing. Instead there were regular afternoon walks. Our father would take us along the bush path of the Cremorne Reserve, and sometimes round the point as far as Mosman Bay, sometimes even to Sirius Cove. There, we would comb through the harbour flotsam and jetsam which would usually deliver up an old tennis ball and a slat from a wooden packing case, perfect for a game of beach cricket.
If our parents were otherwise occupied, we had plenty of liberty to follow our own pursuits. As long as we had tidied our rooms on the weekend, we were free to go off by ourselves, up to the swings on Kurraba Point, down by the waterfront, or, if invited, to the home of one of our friends. Our parents would eagerly give permission to any reasonable request, only too happy for us to be out of their hair for an hour or two – preferably more – so they could get on with their real preoccupation: writing.
16
My First and Second Mothers
Photos of me taken by my father with a Kodak Box Brownie reveal a skinny nut-brown will-o’-the-wisp, barefoot and peering out with round sombre grey eyes from under a mop of light-brown hair. The writer D’Arcy Niland described me as ‘the elfin Dymphna’. I was nine years old and it was the time that my mother began coming home late from town, for what seemed weeks on end.
‘Town’ was the Sydney CBD. All it took was an eleven-minute ferry ride from Kurraba Wharf to Circular Quay and then a ten-minute ride up George Street in a green and yellow tram. ‘Town’ was where my mother went when she went out. In town she broadcast at the ABC studios, met with publishers, shopped at the department stores – Farmer’s, David Jones and Mark Foy’s – socialised with her women friends, withdrew money from the Commonwealth Bank in Martin Place to pay the household accounts, and did whatever other business or entertainment her life required. When my mother went to town, she would always be formally dressed in thoughtfully toned fabrics: a frock or suit, jaunty or elegant hat, gloved hands clutching a leather handbag, nylon stockinged legs in high heels. ‘Our legs have been admired for fifty years,’ she assured me conspiratorially when I got legs myself worthy of a few admiring glances.
Mostly, my mother would go to town during the day when we were at school – but sometimes she would say, as we skipped out the door in the morning, always running late for the tram, ‘I might not be home this afternoon – I’ll leave the key out.’ Such warnings would fill me with a heavy dread I carried around all day. I hated to go home from school knowing I would not have my familiar comforts. When I rang the bell on the heavy front door I expected it to be opened by my mother’s smiling face and welcoming kiss. Then the ritual of afternoon tea at the kitchen table: a slice of Big Sister fruit cake and a glass of Milo. If my own big sister was not with me (from the time I was in Year Three she was at a different school) I had to let myself in by taking the key from its secret hiding place. I would creep in and the flat would seem full of echoey silences and threatening shadows. I would go into each room by turn, looking behind the doors and under the beds, even in the wardrobes, gloomy built-in cupboards big enough to hide an assailant. Then would begin the long miserable wait for my mother’s return. Every half hour I would go round the corner to Kurraba Wharf. I’d skip down the long stairway between the angophoras to meet each ferry as it pulled into the wharf. If she was there I’d greet her with a cheery, ‘Hello, Mummy. I’ve come to carry your shopping home.’ I thought that was sure to please her.
Then a mysterious change in this patterning took place. For some weeks, my mother was home late every day of the week. What’s more, when she came home, instead of gathering us up with her warmth and enthusiasm, she went straight to her bedroom. Weak and ashen faced, she undressed out of her town clothes, carefully put them away in the wardrobe and then climbed into bed. ‘Make me a cup of tea, darling,’ she would request and then lie back wanly on her pillows. I had never seen my mother like this. I was mystified. After a while she would say: ‘You’ll have to start getting the dinner so something will be ready when Daddy gets home. Go and start by shelling the peas.’
My father usually burst through the door at 6.30 or 6.45 pm, rarely earlier or later. This was because, after his day’s work at the ABC office, he and his Drama and Features Department colleagues had a nightly meeting ‘in Studio 19’. This non-existent studio was code for their time to talk together over a drink and chew over the day’s problems. After a beer or two, Les would leave the discussion and stride down Pitt Street to Circular Quay, then hop on the Neutral Bay ferry. By the time he was home, he was ravenous. So, under my mother’s instructions from her bed, I would start to prepare whatever we were having for dinner by cutting up or peeling vegetables. When my father arrived, he would go straight in to see her, his face full of concern. Then, together with my sister, we would get dinner on the table and take a morsel in to my mother on a tray.
By whatever strength and skills Coralie acknowledged and coped with the full implications of her diagnosis – that she had a rare and incurable degenerative disease that would eventually affect every aspect of her life – she appeared not to let it disrupt or impinge on her lifestyle and relationships. I did not understand until years later the reason for her regular trips to town and her sick, exhausted returns: she had been enduring a program of radiation therapy on her lower spine and pelvis, intended to stop her disease. This treatment, which fried all her reproductive organs and whatever else lay in its path, was supposedly successful in four out of five cases. For my mother it made not a whit of difference.
It seems incredible that when my mother’s condition was eventually diagnosed as ankylosing spondylitis (also known as AS), little connection was made to the fact that her own mother, Sylvia Clarke, had suffered an acute attack of rheumatoid arthritis in her late twenties. It had left her hands and feet severely affected, the joints of her fingers and toes misshapen and enlarged, the digits themselves lying at an oblique angle. Sylvia’s upper spine was also permanently damaged so that she had a marked curvature. As in AS, once the disease had ravaged the joints there was less pain from inflammation but the joints had lost flexibility and their function was, to some degree, impaired. While my indomitable grandmother could no longer play the piano with her damaged hands, she went on cooking and caring for her large family, was famously hospitable and
also an invincible correspondent, not only penning reams of long detailed letters but also transcribing them. When my mother sent letters to her family from London and later Sydney, Sylvia would copy them out word for word by hand and send them around the more far-flung members of the tribe to keep them in the loop.
No doubt my grandmother’s attitude of seeming to disregard physical impediments set an example for her eldest daughter. At forty-one, my mother’s beauty was in full bloom. Her waves of fine blonde hair crowned a wide brow. Her deep-set grey eyes shone with intelligence, her full mouth and spontaneous smile always ready to dazzle. At her full height she was five feet six inches (one hundred and sixty-eight centimetres) with a strong frame. But as the effects of her spinal disease increased, she became shorter and shorter, further and further physically reduced. Strangely, I failed to notice this or any of the challenges that ravaged her wellbeing. Throughout my growing years, I never regarded my mother as ill or impaired in any way. This was easy; although her body was deteriorating, her spirit – her essential self – remained unassailable.
My mother’s ready warmth and empathy, her easy ability to make a quick connection by giving her listener absolute engagement, her wit and fiery intellect, her love of language and wordplay: these were all part of who she was and what made her my mother. From a child’s viewpoint, she had the sort of personal strength that you didn’t mess with, commanding and forthright, but also a ready vulnerability that could reduce her to tears. When she castigated me for a serious misdemeanour – most memorably for being light-fingered with the housekeeping purse – she was so moved at my tears of remorse that she’d taken me on her lap and cried with me. But generally, the tears that rolled down her cheeks were from laughter. Laughter was ever-present: laughter and an unselfconscious physical connectedness. Her radiant warmth combined with her beauty, vivacity, intelligence and wit made her a positively alluring woman.
A Paper Inheritance Page 15