A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  During our early years, our father was churning out books. Between bringing out new children’s book titles, he was preoccupied with producing several on Australian drama. But it was the series about what he called ‘the natural indigenous creature life of our continent’ that cemented his reputation. After the success of the early Digit Dick books, he was asked by his publisher to produce a new work, not of fantasy but based on the authentic life cycles of animals within their own environment, so that children, increasingly receding into urban lifestyles, might develop a richer and more compassionate relationship with the natural world.

  When Shy the Platypus was published, a book my father described as ‘a biography of a platypus from its own point of view’, it opened his eyes to a world of possibilities, not only literary. ‘The whole Australian ecology came under my continuing gaze,’ he later recounted.

  I learned the habits of scrubby mountain wallaroos and euros, of rock wallabies, of red kangaroos of the inland plains with their blue flyer mates by their sides. I learned of different snakes and goannas and crocodiles, of many birds from our eight hundred species, birds of the lakes and swamps, high trees and open skies. I learned of other furred creatures both familiar and rare, ringtailed possums and phalangers, bilbies and numbats, rat kangaroos and upside-down flying foxes and of Tasmanian devils. The potential of this great wealth of natural endowment seemed endless.

  This rapture for the Australian environment and its wildlife became what he called his ‘intoxicating faith’.

  But dedication was also required. For each of the books there was research, months of it. As all the writing and background work had to be done on the weekend, we were often taken along to zoos, nature reserves and natural history museums. Without even realising it, Megan and I were drinking in not only a deep and continuing delight in the natural world but also the imperatives of conservation, a message embedded in the Rees nature stories.

  My father’s enthusiasm for the process of writing his children’s books was contagious and so a cooperative effort in the family. He said in interviews that Megan and I, as small children, were his initial inspiration, and we were certainly his first readers as he’d try out various drafts to gauge our responses. My sister recalled him reading her Mates of the Kurlalong on Sundays after he’d written his two or three thousand words for the day. If you happened to be the designate taking in a tray of food or cup of tea and biscuit to him on his writing day, he’d pause over the typewriter and persuade you to stop and hear the latest sentences. The names of his characters were also discussed with us and he would gravely consider our feedback.

  When the National Library of Australia produced a heritage edition of Shy the Platypus in 2012, Jackie French (who launched the book) asked me in our on-stage conversation whether I was ever jealous of the characters in my father’s children’s books. Jealous? An incongruous concept. The characters, particularly those that reappeared in a series like the Digit Dick titles, were as much a legitimate part of the family as we were. The main characters of the animal biographies like Kurri Kurri the Kookaburra or Sarli the Turtle were too. They were part of the family lexicon, indivisible from the fabric of day-to-day living, slipping in and out of conversations by name without any need for additional explanation. Because of the way our parents included us in their writing process, we shared in the development, the progress of each of the works so that its final success was a triumph we all celebrated. (The occasional failure was not discussed.)

  We were involved in the steps to publication, too. Our opinion would be sought on the roughs of illustrations and we were always lined up to read the proofs. If we picked up a mistake, the going rate was sixpence. Megan always scored more handsomely on this task as she was definitely the superior speller. However, I had other discernments. I once found an egregious error – the gender of a subsidiary character changed halfway through the story. For uncovering this blunder, I received 2/-, unthinkable riches when one considers that most of my indulgences at the time – rainbow balls or a threepenny ice cream – only cost a fraction of that figure. On one memorable occasion, Dad arranged for us to leave school early so he could take us to see one of his books rolling off the presses at the John Sands printing house.

  All the book writing and production were sidelines to my father’s daily occupation: drama. We had opportunities to taste that, too. When we were quite young our parents offered us up for a season in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Metropolitan Theatre, one of Sydney’s small semi-professional theatres. Our father had to spend evenings at the Mitchell Library doing research for the first volume of his history of Australian drama, so he would drop us at the theatre, go off to the library and pick us up after the performance. I was cast as Peaseblossom, first of the four fairies in Queen Titania’s train. It did not take me long to determine that the footlights were not for me. I have spent the rest of my life relishing the theatre but only from the other side of the curtain.

  We also often went into the ABC studios in Sydney. As well as mentoring writers, editing plays and arranging the programs for national radio, Dad enjoyed producing radio dramas, choosing only the choicest scripts, sometimes a new work but often classics like Greek tragedies in modern translations, Shaw’s plays or Shakespeare’s. He had a firm commitment to the educative role of the ABC and made sure that important plays from the world’s great writers were available to the listening audience. Because of the relatively low cost of radio compared with stage production, he could present plays that most people would never have the opportunity to see, choosing lesser-known works such as Shakespeare’s history plays, the social-conscience plays of Ibsen, or verse dramas such as TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. Alongside the international fare, he commissioned a steady diet of new Australian plays specially written for radio. He considered them as good as any written in other parts of the world.

  The play productions used top professional actors and were broadcast live nationally, being up to two hours long, depending on the work. And much preparation went into them. If not written for radio, they first had to be adapted. This task would be handed out to a freelance writer. Then, after my father as drama editor had approved it, the script would be sent to the typing pool (a group of glamorous women with racehorse typing speeds) to be typed and then roneoed off on foolscap paper. The ABC producer would then appoint a cast of actors and arrange several full rehearsals. At performance time, the producer would sit in the control room with a soundproof glass wall separating him from the cast standing around the mike in the studio. He used hand signals to cue in different roles, or for silence while music was used. The sound effects man sat next to him in the control room using a turntable to fade in music or other recorded effects. If we were invited, we sat there too and did not breathe a word.

  Besides their entertainment role, radio dramas had another important function: they provided an income stream for writers and actors. Most people of literary ambition produced material for radio, even if they went on to be novelists, like Ruth Park, or poets, like Douglas Stewart, or academics, like Coral Lansbury, mother of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. She was one of my father’s protégés. He privately considered her a stunning woman and declared her gifted as a writer.

  I suppose I took for granted the interesting nature of my father’s job. He explained to me when I was quite young that he counted himself lucky as he loved his work. It came as a shock to me when I went out into the wider world to find how many people have no choice but to struggle through their days in dangerous, repetitive or boring occupations. I’d grown up instilled with the notion that it’s the nature of the work that counts, not what it provides. The ethos was if you can spend your days in work that excites, fulfils or pleasantly extends, you’ve found gold.

  But even gold had its disadvantages. When my mother said, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are to have your own room. I have to share mine with Leslie Rees,’ I did not appreciate why a certa
in venom crept into her tone. No doubt she was seething with the frustration of not having any personal space – let alone ‘a room of one’s own’. My parents’ bedroom was not only where they slept and dressed but where, apart from occasional incursions onto the dining room table, they did all their literary production. As my mother worked from home, the bedroom had to function as her office as well. It was from here that she organised all the complex itineraries and correspondence for their outback expeditions.

  I can’t help smiling when I see a photo of some writer, posed in their study beside a desk of glowing timber, the background an impressive wall of volumes in matching bookcases. I think of my parents, the old Remington their only technology, the dressing table and any other flat surface strewn with papers. It was just a bedroom, but light flooded in. A bay of three large windows with ledges deep enough to sit on looked out over Shellcove and gave it a sense of space. There was a double bed, a painted wardrobe for my mother’s clothes, a lowboy for my father’s. (Whenever my father had a disappointment with a literary project, he worked out his angst by repainting the furniture.) The floor was carpeted with brown Feltex, thin in places, the holes covered over with ‘druggets’, cheap fringed rugs of a coarse material.

  My bedroom was opposite my parents’ room so I could hear the murmur of their voices, even when their door was closed. I found this comforting, as I was frightened of the dark. When going to bed I would plead, ‘Don’t close the door.’ My parents would leave their door open to humour me but my father would often get up quietly in the morning and firmly shut their door – even lock it. Why was that, I wondered? He was an early riser, my mother an inveterate night owl. She used to say, ‘We’re like ships that pass in the night.’ Small children think they own their parents. Parents quickly discover that small children are the best method of contraception. Sometimes one just has to lock the door.

  My room was oddly shaped with high ceilings, dingy despite having three windows with wide timbered ledges. The biggest window looked out onto the courtyard where I used to play hopscotch. A holland blind had to be drawn on this vista otherwise anyone who came to the front door could see right in. The side window overlooked a narrow shadowy path down to the waterfront. There was a small casement window with a triangular ledge that my father converted into bookshelves.

  The flat had several built-in cupboards and I had one in my room. I found it cavernous and scary. Even now that wardrobe lurks in my subconscious. I would always open it carefully, fearful of what I might find. Whenever a brown dusty moth the size of my hand flew out into my face, I’d panic. I’d yell, ‘There’s a dirty butterfly in my room!’ and refuse to go back until someone captured the moth and put it outside.

  Beside my bed was a door that had six glass panes covered with the sticky opaque paper used in the war to prevent glass from shattering in a bomb blast. I spent untold hours trying to prise off little strips of that material to let chinks of comforting light from the dining room shine through. This door was never opened. On the other side of it were high wobbly piles of Meanjin, Southerly and Walkabout, the journals my parents subscribed to and for which they sometimes wrote articles.

  I spent my first twenty years in that room and, though I haven’t been into it since the mid-1960s, it is frequently the setting of my dreams.

  It seemed to me, and still seems, that my father had an equable temperament, a sunny nature that made loving him easy. But a child never sees the parent as a whole, instead drawing conclusions from aspects of his or her own relationship, so the result can be markedly different for other members of the family. My father must have had his darker side because at one stage, after they had been married over twenty years, my mother dubbed him ‘Heathcliffe’, a final ‘e’ added to Bronte’s noir hero to no doubt give an extra dimension of Gothic gloom. As a lifelong devotee of Wuthering Heights, I fail to see any likeness of Heathcliff’s dark and restless passions in my buoyant male parent. But my mother would have known. She would have chosen this title with her usual perspicacity.

  My father seemed amazingly balanced to me, perhaps because of his unremitting positivity. Certainly his mandate ‘Never lose the bump of wonder!’ influenced my own perspective, a glow cast on new experiences or discoveries, whether small or overwhelming. The bump of wonder was his gift, his way of seeing the world. His facility with words let him share that wonder: with readers and listeners, family members and the world at large.

  When I discovered the letters between my parents from 1936, after they came back to Australia, I have to admit a chill went through me as I came across my father’s words:

  Well, look here, if you fear having kids, we simply won’t have any damn kids. They’re not worth it to us. You’re everything and everyone to me and there’s no need for anybody else.

  That’s not the father I knew, the father who welcomed us into his world, treasured us, encouraged us, delighted in our every achievement, who included us in almost every aspect of his life and work, the father who produced more than twenty-five books of children’s literature and became ‘one of Australia’s best loved children’s authors’.

  Still, in a close partnership based not only on reciprocal love and respect but on the sharing of work and passionate interests, the prospect of children might have seemed a threatening intrusion. When he wrote those words, my parents had been tightly bound for six years, living their twenties on the other side of the world in an alien environment. They had become utterly dependent on one another.

  As the unit of ‘Coral & Les’ they were self-sufficient, feeling themselves ‘alone against the world’. But as they both grew in maturity, wisdom and experience, the writing team widened its boundaries to become a family-raising team. And what a loss to the world of children’s literature if that hadn’t come to pass – not to mention the significant fact that I wouldn’t be here to tell their story.

  19

  An Outback Explorer

  Though enjoying all the benefits of their waterfront life at Shellcove, my parents still had itchy feet. It was always their plan to see as much of Australia as possible, but they had been encumbered by small children and the austerity of wartime, not to mention their writing projects. Nonetheless, they managed to get away on their own for short exploratory trips – to Victoria, Tasmania and northern Queensland – gathering material for my father’s children’s books. And of course they’d taken us on that perilous sea journey to the West to show us off to their families.

  Then, in 1946, Coralie’s cousin Blanche passed on to her a precious diary written by Benjamin Clarke, their grandfather. The posts and telegraphs officer of Kapunda in South Australia, Ben Clarke had in 1871 been co-opted to join the party laying the Overland Telegraph Line between Port Augusta and Tennant Creek, 500 kilometres north of Alice Springs. He was officer-in-charge of the first telegraph operators who installed instruments and sent messages along the thin wire line that was pushed, repaired and defended for 3000 kilometres through the very centre of Australia.

  No doubt Blanche had thought their grandfather’s diary would be a source of inspiration for her literary cousin. What she had not foreseen was how significant it would be to both my parents, instigating a new direction for their writing: adventures in remote parts of Australia. Of even wider consequence, the overwhelming open beauty of the outback – the big sky country – would captivate their hearts, energise them and inspire a spate of books, drawing them back again and again over the next twenty years.

  Today the luxurious Ghan overland train crosses Australia from south to north through a still remote and sparsely inhabited landscape. It’s one of the country’s iconic rail journeys. My parents rode its predecessor, the original Ghan – by reputation neither luxurious nor reliable. It used to rattle alongside the old route of the Overland Telegraph Line.

  My mother recorded that journey in a two-page article, ‘Trail of the Overland Telegraph’, featured the following year in The S
ydney Morning Herald’s weekend magazine, accompanied by dramatic pen drawings. Here is an extract:

  My grandfather left Port Augusta at the end of September 1871. When I followed his trail 75 years later his diary lay on my knee. The trains chug beside the OT line almost all the way from Port Augusta to Alice Springs, first beside the Flinders Ranges country which is like a succession of Hans Heysen canvases: sun-splashed rocks and huge dappled gums set against jagged blue untameable peaks. But grandfather Ben Clarke wasted no words on the beauty of this country. He was too busy grappling with practical problems, as his diary records:

  5th Oct: … The back axle of the heavy waggon broke … We had to send back to the nearest blacksmith’s about 50 miles to get it repaired … Camped at a well … water very good.

  13th Oct: … Camped at Blindman spelling horses … Good supply of water in creek. Feed good.

  The telegraph line and the train march through the Lake Eyre basin within sight of Lake Eyre South, its salt-encrusted surface glittering blue with the illusion of water. There is great beauty of colour in this dry, treeless region – terracotta and dusty pink sandhills, and in the hollows between them tufted bushes in pale yellows and sage greys, pastels, greens and browns. But Ben Clarke kept his eye on the job in hand:

  25th Oct: Had some heavy pulling through the sandhills, and had to use extra horses, with heavy waggon.

  7th Nov. Some of the waggon horses getting done up.

  9th Nov. The Peake. Made arrangements for an earth wire being laid in readiness for opening line … horses being shod.

  14th Nov: Left The Peake and went as far as Neales. Mr Kraegen joined the party here …