A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  While growing up I had a number of sojourns in Young. I always felt very at home there because my mother and Blanche were so alike – not in appearance but in personality. They had grown up on opposite sides of Australia so they didn’t meet until my parents came back from London and settled in Sydney. Once they did meet, these two granddaughters of the feisty Anna Wilhelmina Schlinke (who ran down the streets of Tanunda in her petticoats and shocked the little German-speaking Barossa Valley town by marrying an Englishman), found that they had more in common than their genes.

  Both vibrant, expressive and ‘vaguely contemporaneous’, as my mother would say (Blanche was older by several years), the two women quickly developed a delicious friendship and rapport, a talent particular to women when they find their passions and values reflected in another. There was distance separating them as well as busy lives so their friendship was largely expressed in writing. Using their shared delight in language and characteristically self-deprecating humour, letters beginning Dear One or My Love and brimful of spicy revelations encrusted in their equally baroque handwriting flew back and forth between 9 Shellcove Road, Neutral Bay, and 12 Boorowa Street, Young. Whenever I retrieved one of these missives from our letterbox, I would deliver it to my mother with the solemn announcement: ‘There’s a letter from My Love.’ My mother would drop everything, swipe the envelope from my hand and immediately disappear into some private space to devour its contents.

  The two cousins had grown up not only separated by a continent but with very different influences. Blanche came from a prestigious medical background. Her father, Dr Guy Prior, had made his name in psychiatric medicine as superintendent of first Ryde and then Parramatta mental hospitals in Sydney. Blanche’s mother, Blanche Clarke, had trained as a nurse in Adelaide and travelled to the Western Australian goldfields in the 1890s, caring for prospectors in a tent hospital during the typhoid epidemic. She’d gone on to nurse in Fiji and was engaged four times – all to doctors. She was reputedly a beautiful young woman with ‘topaz eyes’. My mother’s father, Guildford (the younger brother of Blanche’s mother), also left the family homeland in the Barossa Valley of South Australia and travelled to Western Australia to find work and later settle.

  On my visit to the country in 1951 there was no need to interrupt my education: I went off to Young public school with my cousin Rose. For the second time in my schooling, I had a man teacher. This one I found unpleasant. He used a long ruler to whack children who misbehaved. He didn’t whack me because, as he sneered in front of the class, my uncle was the town doctor (he had also been the mayor). A whack would have been preferable to exclusion.

  At the age of eleven my whole vision of school and domestic life was extended by staying in a home that was also a busy medical practice, riding a bike to school, and coming home at lunchtime to a formal hot dinner, my uncle sitting sternly at the head of the table in a white coat. The rousing final chords of Blue Hills were our signal to be back on the bikes and up the hill to school for the afternoon. This was as far removed from the battering typewriters and haphazard mealtimes of Shellcove as one could imagine!

  When I was thirteen, my parents went adventuring across the Indian Ocean, to Cocos Island, Mauritius and South Africa, then up the east coast of Africa to Zanzibar and Mombasa, then on to Europe. They could easily have disappeared off the face of the earth but I had faith and waited patiently for the blue aerogrammes that intermittently brought tightly written accounts of their adventures. Their travel book Westward from Cocos was the outcome of the first part of their journey.

  For this absence, there were no kindly relatives available or willing. Some indeed were openly critical of the whole plan, particularly the leaving of two vulnerable teenagers for nearly nine months. Separate living arrangements were made for each of us. As we were both at North Sydney Girls’ High, my parents reasoned we could see each other at school. I was to board at the Villa Peculia, a rambling sandstone house at Hunters Hill with a chaotic garden going right down to the Parramatta River, a couple of recalcitrant goats expected to keep the undergrowth manageable.

  The Villa Peculia was home to two stylish sisters and their teenage children as well as an eclectic mix of people (hence the name of the property). The women rented out rooms in this expansive but fashionably decrepit estate, doubtless to defray the costs of maintaining it. Both proprietors were widowed and in high-profile jobs: one a senior newspaper journalist, the other a publicist. I was aware that each of the sisters had a spectral lover somewhere in the background, too. The other residents were a young couple called Rene and Bob who drove a red MG sports car, and a man called Barney about whom we teenagers knew little. We once discovered him lying on the pavement at Circular Quay in a drunken stupor. This was the first time I had ever seen a person I recognised in such a condition and I was horrified.

  There is no need to go into detail about how the experiences of living at the Villa Peculia for six months broadened the mind of a naive thirteen-year-old, but positive opportunities included learning to sail a VJ skiff on the shark-infested Parramatta River, going for a wild ride in a sports car and having my first hamburger and Coca-Cola ‘spider’ at a milk bar. For my fourteenth birthday, I was escorted to the Borovansky Ballet by a handsome seventeen-year-old, son of the proprietor. For this I was adorned in a borrowed white dress – ballerina-length with a swirling skirt – which the owner had worn to her graduation. I had nothing remotely suitable in my own meagre wardrobe. This was effectively my first date, though whether the boy was dragooned into it by his mother or volunteered, I would never know. Less romantic was my usual afternoon chore of repositioning the uncompromising goats after chasing them through half an acre of perilously inclined shrubbery.

  Of course, during these adventures, I had my moments of self-doubt, a jabbing sense of isolation and intermittent longings for my parents’ return – when there would be small presents from exotic sources, endless excited exchanges and slideshows of my father’s Kodachromes projected onto the lounge room wallpaper, showing us where they’d been and what they’d done. I never doubted they would return and that our life at Shellcove would get back to its own normality. I now see that confidence as my innocence, the essence of childish faith, but also as a measure of how securely we felt we were loved.

  21

  Collaborating: A dicey business

  ‘My idea of living,’ said Leslie Rees, ‘is not to own anything.’

  ‘Spend it all on travel,’ cut in wife Coralie.

  ‘The world as your oyster is much more available if you don’t own anything,’ said Leslie.

  ‘I believe,’ Coralie allowed, ‘in owning a toothbrush.’

  They burst out laughing. It was highly infectious. So was the zest for living that has taken this lively literary pair round the world and up and down the remotest parts of Australia, and produced a spate of books either in collaboration or apart.

  So wrote Kay Keavney in a feature article in The Australian Women’s Weekly. It was 1970. Les and Coralie’s latest travel book, People of the Big Sky Country, had just been published, following the success of Spinifex Walkabout (1953), Westward from Cocos (1956) and Coasts of Cape York (1960). In all these works, they collaborated – a new experience for them as writers and one that Coralie publicly admitted nearly wrecked their marriage. She termed the painful process of working out a way of writing together ‘battling and bashing out a book’.

  On another occasion Coralie explained why collaboration was, for them, such a fraught procedure:

  We had not written a travel book, either of us, neither had we collaborated over anything. We had gone our separate ways while criticising each other and supplying encouragement. However this business of collaboration was a very difficult thing. How do people collaborate?

  We made many false starts, sort of pooling our personalities and writing ‘We did this’ and ‘we did that’ but it didn’t satisfy us because we’re ve
ry different people really, with different outlooks, and after a lot of arguing and quarrelling we came to the conclusion that the only workable way for us to collaborate was to write separate chapters and write them under our own initials so the reader knows who’s writing what. Then you can be really free and frank – you can be personal to the reader.

  Each person would rough out a separate chapter, we would agree on a plan of the book, we would divide up the material, decide who was to tell which. Some experiences Leslie would go off with men and I would stay behind and talk to the women and it would divide naturally.

  The one who wrote each chapter would have to submit to the other for frank criticism before the final draft was made and this was when the sparks would fly. We would be devastatingly frank with each other on each other’s finer points of style.

  About our method of writing for these travel books. We did find that an excellent way to organise these trips was to discipline ourselves by arranging, in the first place, to write documentary features for the ABC about certain aspects of outback life. That is a help in that it gives you an entrée and an introduction to people. You are semi-official, you have got permission from the ABC to write about the subject and that helps you to get in and get a lot of material. It also disciplines you in that it means while you’re there, you can’t get lackadaisical on the job, you have a commitment to gather material on certain subjects; you must be conscientious about it, you must get the facts, you must meet the people, you must interview them, you’ve got to get that material.

  All that cannot be contained in one broadcast and while you’re on the job you get so much more material that you have what you need for a book as well.

  It is clear from Coralie and Leslie’s adventure writing that they could only have written their books and documentaries of outback adventure by being free, fearless and unencumbered. They had to get to the stories by whatever means were available – trucks, small aircraft, mission boats, even by tractor or on foot. Their method of transport was a central part of their adventure. Commercial options were limited – non-existent in most of the places they wanted to go. ‘Seeing the country through other people’s windscreens’ became their signature explanation. It was a way of being more accessible to meeting people. This was what their readers and audiences demanded – colourful accounts of people and places they themselves would never have a chance to experience.

  Both Coralie and Leslie were unendingly interested in other people, their work, their challenges, their triumphs. Since their journalist days in London when they interviewed some of the century’s literary greats in their own drawing rooms, both had developed the art of question and answer, of showing that necessary mixture of interest and respect while probing into the sensitivities they wanted to explore and which would capture the imaginations of their readership. At the same time, they had the self-assurance and relaxed sophistication not to be daunted by these exchanges but to be natural, gracious and without pretension. Their methods could not be farther removed from the crass, intrusive and combative styles some media interviewers use today.

  As collaborators on books and documentaries about their intrepid adventures, they used those same skills, meeting and talking with people in far-flung locations. Les couldn’t be more delighted than when camping out with Aboriginal men in the Western Desert or being presented with an Indigenous breakfast of baked goanna eggs in the wilds of Cape York. They recorded these accounts in books, articles and documentaries. Our lounge room mantelpiece at Shellcove housed a collection of artefacts they had been given: firesticks, carved emu eggs, samples of different ochres, a woomera. On the wall were original watercolours they had bought from the artists of the Hermannsburg School, the Pareroultja brothers. Staying there in 1949, they had taken a picture of Albert Namatjira with his paintings in a hessian sack at his feet.

  Of particular interest was visiting missions. Using an investigative approach, they talked to missionaries and to the people living there and were not afraid to raise difficult questions about the policies of assimilation that were widely practised. At the time of their second trip to central and northern parts of the continent, there were about fifty missions scattered throughout Queensland, the Northern Territory and northern Western Australia. Mostly run by the welfare arm of church bodies, they were the direct result of the cruel governmental policy of separating children from their families. But missions also housed whole Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities who had been deprived of their country, which was appropriated without their consent to be farmed or mined.

  The process of writing separate chapters gave Coralie and Les the opportunity to exploit their different styles and preoccupations. My father’s forte was narrative writing, a skill he used extensively in his young adult adventure novels like Quokka Island, which were popular books, often chosen for high school reading. Danger Patrol, about the lives of patrol officers in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, was used as a text in all Queensland public schools for a number of years. (I was recently contacted by a former patrol officer who told me the book was the inspiration for him and many of the young men who eventually joined the patrol officer service in Papua New Guinea.) My father’s focus was always on the sensory experiences rather than the emotional ones. He could bring action and atmosphere alive with the use of precise physical detail.

  Of course, as Les often confessed, at heart he was still a boy who was always on the lookout for adventure. Sometimes my mother thought he pushed his luck too far, such as when he went down into the throat of a recently erupted volcano with a vulcanologist in Papua New Guinea. He had a few close encounters, once on Cocos Island being chased by a school of sharks when searching for crayfish on a distant reef, another when he was carried out by a rip on a deserted Queensland beach. On that occasion, his life was saved by George Landen Dann, the playwright whom he was visiting at the time. But the trip on a mission boat in the shark- and crocodile-infested Gulf of Carpentaria waters with the Bishop of Carpentaria was perhaps the closest shave; though, as Les was honest enough to admit, it provided excellent material for their travel books.

  In 1957, Coralie and Leslie set off to explore Carpentaria, pursuing their interest in the missions that were dotted about both sides of Cape York. After some weeks Coralie had flown home as Les was joining a party travelling down the Gulf of Carpentaria by boat to take supplies to Mapoon, Weipa, Aurukun, Mitchell and Edward River missions and to allow the Anglican bishop to tour this part of his far-flung diocese. (They had been warned in a letter from the bishop that the trip would not be appropriate for Mrs Rees ‘as there is no proper toilet facility and little privacy’.) The Anglicans’ own boat was out of commission so the Reliance, a sturdy if basic seventeen-metre two-masted ketch, was borrowed from the Presbyterians. On board were a local crew, a skipper new to the boat, an engineer called Flag, an Aboriginal woman and her baby catching a ride home to Mitchell River, an Anglican priest and the bishop.

  This extract is from a chapter that appeared in two different travel books, Coasts of Cape York and People of the Big Sky Country.

  Mission Boat in Peril – LR

  The morning wore on. Although the seas were high and the winds strong from the inevitable south-east, the winter sunshine was soothing and we all sat about on boxes on the edge of the hatch cover. Just after eleven o’clock, Flag Ayre pricked his ears, jumped up and ran to the stern of the ship, calling Horace of the crew to follow him. He disappeared down the steps leading into the hold, where the twenty tons of cargo were lying thick-piled.

  The rest of us took little notice until suddenly a mass of lifebelts was thrown up on the deck from below. Flag’s head appeared, demanding of Horace, ‘Is that enough to go round?’ The words hardly registered with us at first, then the Bishop turned to Father Sutherland.

  ‘You heard what he said?’

  ‘He said, “Is that enough to go round?”’

  ‘Lifebelts,’ I sa
id. ‘Lifebelts.’

  The idea gradually clarified. Something must be wrong. But what? Nothing that was discernible to the three landlubbers. Flag had gone below again: now he was back. His movements were quick and economical.

  ‘She’s filling up!’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said the Bishop.

  ‘The water’s rising. She’s filling up.’

  ‘Is it dangerous?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. Did you hear a noise?’ We hadn’t. ‘Well, the propeller shaft has parted in the middle. There’s a gap of nine inches. Propeller can’t turn. If it can’t turn, it can’t push us along.’

  We looked around the horizon.

  ‘We don’t seem to be moving forward,’ Father Sutherland remarked.

  ‘And yet,’ said the Bishop, ‘the engine’s running.’

  ‘The engine’s OK,’ said Flag Ayre. ‘It’s the shaft that joins the engine to the propeller. Like a broken axle in a car. Like a man with a broken back. What’s more the shock of the fracture has pushed the stern end of the shaft through the gland backward and that’s our real trouble, the gland has opened up.’

  ‘That’s right … and the water is coming in.’

  ‘Fast?’

  ‘Slowly, but it won’t take long to flood a ship of this size. Not with all that cargo sitting on it.’

  ‘What can we do?’ said the Bishop.

  ‘Find a pump. Must be one somewhere.’ Flag called, ‘Hey Horace, where pump?’

  A voice came up from below. ‘Pump on deck. Near wheelhouse.’

  Father Sutherland found it. ‘Hand pump. Fixed in the deck.’

  Flag yelled from the stern. ‘Try it.’

  I joined Father Sutherland. We lifted and dropped the handle of the pump, vigorously, many times. Only a dry metallic sound issued.

  Flag called to the crew. ‘Better get those two dinghies over the side.’