A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  ‘It’s me, Dad.’

  He stared at me wonderingly. I picked up his good hand and held it tenderly against my cheek. I probed gently: ‘What’s my name, Dad? Come on, you know me.’

  Then I insisted: ‘Dad, you do know who I am.’

  He kept gazing at me intently, his mouth puckering like a purse, trying to shape a sound, a name, an image. His concentration was immense. His whole face was straining and his eyes burning into my own.

  At last, with a triumphant breath, he brought forth an explosive sound. ‘D…D…darling!’ he shot out. A lopsided smile of triumph followed. His head fell back on the pillows and his eyes half-closed. Depleted utterly.

  Whether he realised it was me or whether he was seeing his beloved Coral waiting for him I’ll never know. For that was the last recognisable sound he ever made.

  Epilogue

  After my mother died, I wanted to write her story. I wanted to record her literary and personal legacy but, more deeply, to keep her alive to assuage the ache of my grief.

  When I told my father I intended to write her biography, he asked, a trifle peevishly, ‘What about me? Aren’t you going to write my story, too?’

  I responded with all the indignant hauteur a thirty-year-old can muster. ‘But Dad, you can write your own!’

  Which indeed he did.

  Through my adult years, my father would occasionally bring to my attention that he was counting on me to keep the literary fires burning. I must admit to being somewhat stung when I found, towards the end of an oral history recorded in Western Australia, that he had spoken about me in what I could only interpret as a tone of grave disappointment. ‘We always hoped she’d be a writer,’ he revealed, adding, ‘She teaches English,’ as if that was perhaps a shameful alternative. However, that was in 1981, before my career had really taken off. And he did go on to describe me as ‘a considerable reader’ and said, ‘She’s one of the people I can really discuss literature with. We have great old talks on poetry and so forth.’

  After my father died on 10 August 2000, my life took yet another direction. I was besieged by that mountain of paper. Right next to my worktable stands an imposing glass-doored bookcase, a heavy piece of oak furniture I bought after my father’s death to house my parents’ published works, their many titles and editions. But it is the messy boxes under the table and stacked up the walls that closet much of their unpublished work, as well as the letters which were never intended for publication, letters which were to reveal to me so much about them, their eager aspirations, their idealism and the realities that failed to puncture it, their passion for each other and for becoming writers.

  So overwhelming did I find the range and complexity of my bequest that I was tempted to call in an archivist to help sort it all out. But I could not envisage letting a stranger poke about in such a private sphere.

  I was sunk in a deep pool of sadness at my father’s passing. He had been my only parent for half my lifetime. What I missed most was that I could no longer discuss literary matters with him. I had grown used to being part of an intensely literary family. The written word was my parents’ joyous and abiding focus, throughout their lives a continuing frame of reference. Most of their friends and associates were writers too. Such was the rich fabric of their life, a life I had absorbed and breathed as naturally as air.

  Now I was surrounded by their ghosts. In a room of my own (a luxury my mother never achieved), I explored options, ways to creatively refashion the chaos of my paper inheritance. And there was that other longing, housed in me so long, to breathe new life into the generous-spirited, staunch-hearted Coralie, the beautiful and talented woman who had shown so much resilience. Most precious to me among her papers were her handwritten letters from the time before I was born. Into these she had freely poured so much of her inner life, her desires, her plans, her fears, allowing me to see her in a different light: like a familiar, separate and unassailable.

  Nearly three decades had passed since I had told my father I wanted to write her story. But while my father lived, my writing about her had not been possible. In his eyes, she was more his than mine. He was the custodian of her secrets, written and unwritten, and he did not offer me the key. Because of his restraint about matters that touched the heart, my father would only talk about her briefly and objectively, or in some throwaway remark, like, ‘A very clever girl, your mum’ – as if I didn’t know. It was almost as though, after she left us, the pain was too much for him. He kept her and all her precious detail locked deep inside himself.

  But it was my turn now.

  ~

  My parents’ passion for the literary life flavoured the daily pattern of my first two decades, imposed its constraints and poured upon me rays of illumination. The fertile interchanges of a creative and intellectual hothouse stood in counterpoint to the drab discipline of the everyday plod: the endless daily work of bringing ideas and experiences into a concrete form. But I was ambivalent about being a writer. I knew I could make that choice. I’ve always delighted in the writing process: the way one can shuffle words around in a sentence to alter the finer shades of meaning, the struggle to find le mot juste, the exact word that encapsulates a particular thought or concept. There’s an exhilaration in exploiting the deep riches of the English language, stretching it to suit purpose and genre. But did I want my life to be a pale imitation of my parents’? Did I want to be endlessly compared? Besides, I harboured no illusions about the literary life. Miles Franklin, right at the end of her days, wrote in a letter to Pixie O’Harris, ‘why do we go on? Writing is an affliction worse than TB [tuberculosis] for TB can be cured.’

  My father, near the end of his life, put together a personal notebook about his writing life, subtitling it: Unveiling Further Secrets, Minor Scandals, Conspiracies, Disillusionments, Hazards, Rewards, and Untoward Anecdotes of the Writing and Publishing Mystique.

  In my own life, I didn’t turn my back on the language but I employed it in other ways. My career as an educationist in the disciplines of English and humanities involved some fulfilling work, embedded – as it was – in a philosophy of access and equity. There’s something precious about introducing a class of adults to a beautiful work of literature they never knew existed or helping recent immigrants practise the language skills they will need to get through each day. A particularly rewarding experience was running an outreach class on creative writing for a group of tired middle-aged women. (I was one myself at the time.) I took this class as an extra after a long day at college, driving thirty kilometres to a straggling outer suburb where it was held one night a week over nine weeks in a room at the otherwise dark Baby Health Centre. None of my students had picked up a pencil in years – probably since they escaped from their dreaded schools. But one by one, magic happened as each person discovered confidence and then the joy of expressing thoughts and distilling experiences, sharing parts of themselves that had lain deeply buried for years. One woman even went on to win a poetry competition.

  In the 1980s I was given a brief to design a new core subject for New South Wales TAFE’s tertiary entrance course to replace the traditional subject of English. I came up with Language & Learning Skills, a practical approach to language using the skillset required to get through a post-secondary course of study: writing, oral, research, critical and evaluative skills. The course and the textbook I wrote for it went on being used in colleges across the state for a couple of decades.

  Perhaps my most valuable legacy was in the area of Aboriginal studies. In the 1990s, I was appointed general editor of a complex package in book and CD-ROM format: Indigenous Australians: An Aboriginal community focus. It was designed as an educative tool for any students or adults who in the course of their work needed increased cultural understanding and sensitivity. The teaching and learning handbook I wrote was complemented by a rich resource bank of hundreds of photos, recorded interviews, documents and videos. I sought as m
uch input and advice from Aboriginal educators and community people as possible.

  I learnt during this process that many of my colleagues were of the Stolen Generations and so had been deprived of their own history and culture – even their names, birth dates and parentage in some cases. Some told me of childhoods as servants for wealthy pastoralist families, others grew up on missions without any freedoms at all. They now wanted to fill those deep gullies in their own cultural birthrights. So, with support and ongoing advice from Aboriginal educators, I developed the first Diploma of Aboriginal Studies, aimed specifically at Indigenous students who had been denied their own heritage through the process of dispossession and forced removal.

  After twenty years I retired from TAFE and put my energies into an area that is rarely discussed and widely misunderstood: schizophrenia.

  The youngest of our four children had suffered from this challenging disease since teenage years, resulting in a gruelling learning curve as we grappled with psychiatric hospitals, clinicians and the vastly inadequate resources of mental health services. Intractable psychotic illness brings with it a challenging journey for the whole family and endless anguish for the sufferer, the most painful being social isolation and, for sometimes quite long periods, mandatory detention in a locked ward. I spoke at all sorts of forums, including an international conference on schizophrenia, explaining to this audience of clinicians and brain researchers just exactly what the personal repercussions of this illness are for sufferers and for those who love them. For five years I volunteered my services to an NGO that advocates for families in situations like ours. This led me to retrain as a counsellor and family therapist. I chose to work with women and children escaping family violence and trauma. It was rewarding work for which I had to draw upon everything I had ever learnt.

  Then my sister, Megan Clarke Wintle, died suddenly in February 2016. I was asked by her son Derek to prepare a eulogy on her early life, our twenty years of growing up together at Shellcove. This set me thinking about our experiences as children of writers and how that had affected the course of our adult lives.

  At her funeral service, I acknowledged our true good fortune.

  One of life’s greatest blessings was ours – a ‘golden childhood’ which gave us a strong foundation and shaped the rest of our lives: our directions, our choices, our values. Our parents were a creative team, liberal-minded intellectuals who had the rare capacity of combining their literary ambitions with a balanced and inclusive family life.

  I also talked about the delights of the Rees family language, arising from the fact that all four of us had studied French and Latin for at least five years and completed majors in English language and literature at university.

  What emerged from these learnings and passions was a patois, a complex creole studded with quotations from literature, phrases in French and Latin, names of characters in our father’s books, witty sayings, colourful coinages and our mother’s penchant for a play on words. Throughout our lives, whenever we talked or wrote to each other, Megan and I would revert to this form of exchange. It was something that drew us together and reminded us that though we were very different people, we had a deep well of shared knowledge and experience that we both treasured.

  Then I came to the shadow sides of our upbringing. One was being left with other families for such long periods when our parents went off adventuring. While they were away, we sisters became much closer, clinging together like orphans. Our parents travelled in risky and remote regions by haphazard means of transport. We rarely heard from our travellers. Nor could we contact them should an emergency arise.

  I also spoke of another disadvantage to having such multi-talented parents with glittering reputations. Although Megan and I never articulated this, throughout our lives I think we both had a nagging sense of inadequacy. Whatever we achieved, it always seemed mediocre by comparison.

  To me this was especially so in literary matters. Even with several titles published, quite a few articles and one literary prize for my poetry, another for the heritage edition of my father’s most popular title, I’ve never considered calling myself ‘a writer’. Just as one swallow does not make a summer, one book, even two or three, does not make a writer. Or not the concept of ‘being a writer’ that my parents shared with their literary contemporaries. To them and their cohort, the term ‘writer’ was not about how many titles you had on the shelf. The term embraced a unique and passionate lifestyle, a pilgrimage, a vocation that was pursued with total commitment, despite the economic and social inconveniences it brought.

  When Megan died, I had been the manager of my parents’ literary archive for nearly sixteen years but I was now the last of our Rees family. So I was the only person who could record the intimate story of Coral and Les by drawing on firsthand experience. Clearly, there was no option. It was time for me to embrace the literary life and to pick up my pen.

  When I perceive my parents through my daughterly lens, I must admit to admiring how they lived their lives, their professional integrity and the tenacity with which they pursued their literary ambitions. Any niggling ambivalence over the choices they made is outweighed by what was known in our family as ‘fp’ – filial piety, a delicious term used by the Romans, which I scooped up when translating Ovid and Virgil. The word love in English is so tired and overused and covers everything from the object of one’s desire to tomato sauce. Like the four Greek words for different types of love – philia, storge, eros and agape – I like the capacity of filial piety to encapsulate that particular love a child has for a parent, one that has implicit boundaries, that demands respect, that acknowledges the unique place of the parent in the child’s psyche. It is a term that honours the difference between generations and the passing of knowledge, skills and values as part of the essential parental gift.

  I had my father for nearly sixty years, my mother for half that time, but both are equal in that deep place where those we have cherished flit in and out but are never far away.

  Dymphna with the 1970 portrait of her parents, Coralie Clarke Rees and Leslie Rees, by Sydney artist Dora Toovey.

  Acknowledgements

  I’m delighted to be associated with UQP, a publisher with such a long and proud history and I thank Publishing Director Madonna Duffy for embracing A Paper Inheritance the way she has, so letting a light shine on Coralie and Leslie Rees’s place in Australian literary history.

  Other people have contributed their expertise during this book’s long gestation. Caroline Baum read an earlier draft and Patti Miller critiqued some chapters during her ‘True Stories’ course. Both made invaluable suggestions. Kathryn Heyman restored my self-belief as a writer. Jacqueline Kent, herself an accomplished biographer, undertook the delicate task of a structural edit. What could have been a tussle ended in friendship. At the start, UQP Senior Editor Margot Lloyd and I agreed to work happily together. And we have done so.

  I thank my fellow writers of the Lit. Lunch: Francesca, Sharron, Catherine and Amanda who encouraged me out of such a bottomless Slough of Despond that I was ready to give the game away and concentrate on growing vegies. With other valued friends, members of the BT Book Club, I’ve shared many a long lunch on the regular occasions we talk the afternoon away and, at some point, get round to considering other people’s books. I thank my friend Bea for setting up our group many years ago and for our GTs, now on FaceTime.

  In middle age, I contracted an eye disease linked to my mother’s AS. Over the years of working on this book, I’ve been treated by a skilful ophthalmologist for another eye disease: a form of macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in Australia. I thank Dr Jerry Vongphanit for saving my sight and for taking such an interest in my work each time he injects my eyeball with sight-saving medicine. I also thank Dr Stella Rumsey, a GP with literary interests, who checked the details on ankylosing spondylitis.

  I thank two stunning women, my daughters, Christi
ana and Lisa, for their belief in me and for sharing books and laughter; I thank two beaut blokes, my sons, Simon and Damien, for who they are and what I have learnt from them. As little ones my grandchildren, Charlie, Dylan, Saffron, Piper and Natasha, brought the sunshine back into my life. I’m proud of them all, now young adults and navigating their own courses.

  Then there’s David. We’ve travelled the long road, together – though not in each other’s shadow. We’ve shared its twists and turns, disasters and delights. Ever loyal, ever true, he might have complained of reading about the exploits of his parents-in-law, Coral and Les, over and over again. But I don’t remember him doing so. What I never forget is how graciously he always welcomed my mother and father into our home and how he lent his practical skills to help them whenever needed.

  For all the fine people who have sustained my journey, I’m ever grateful.

  Biographical Timeline

  1905

  Leslie Rees (LR) born 28 December, Maylands, Bayswater, WA

  1908

  Coralie Clarke (CC) born 23 October, Perth, WA

  1914–18

  LR attends Subiaco State School

  1919–23

  LR attends Perth Modern School

  1921–25

  CC attends Perth Modern School

  1924

  LR works as a student teacher

  1924–28

  LR attains a Bachelor of Arts, UWA