The Watcher on the Cast - Iron Balcony - an Australian Autobiography

by Hal Porter

  Fecundity! Plenty! Abundance!

  Abundance has its shades.

  At the end of the block, opposite The Common, and next to the abandoned Chinese joss-house, lives the Adams family whose design of private existence is so public and so different from my family’s that I find it startling, outrageous and sometimes disgusting but, all in all, fascinating. There are never as many Adams children as there appear to be, and I recall only eight by name when I could, without torture, confidently have sworn to twice as many. Perhaps this multiplication is caused by their noise, their weasel-like dartings from place to place, and mostly by the fact that many of them seem about the same age, and strongly resemble each other. They are all knobbly at the joints and bony in between them, they are all knock-kneed, with gipsy-ish cheekbones, flat noses, long flexible mouths set in tide-lines of grime, unwinking beer-coloured eyes completely encircled by pink whites, and netted in wrinkles as though they are middle-aged. Boys and girls alike have spiky dust-brown hair in which burrs, chaff and streaks of jam or tomato sauce stick, and remain sticking, for days. One or other is always shaven-headed because of lice. Granules like dried honey infest the corners of their eyes and the roots of their lashes. As all we country children do in summer, they go barefooted, revealing long tarsier-like toes. In the colder months, when we others wear boots, they wear sandshoes that smell of feet. Their names strike me as glamorous and romantic, particularly the double names of the girls which are always used in full: Ghristobel Veronica, Rosalie Marigold, Geraldine Emily and Melba Florabelle. The boys’ names are Winton, Aubrey, Selwyn and Maximilian.

  I am fully although astoundedly aware, from over-hearing Mother and Father, that Mr. Adams earns more money than Father, and therefore understand their possession of many things my parents very clearly express themselves as being too poor to afford. I observe, cold-eyed, that the Adams tribe places no value on domestic customs and rites of behaviour I regard it as almost criminal to scant. In short: there is no fish-and-chip shop in the Bairnsdale of the nineteen-twenties, otherwise the Adamses would undoubtedly be fish-and-chip people. They have fish-and-chip manners.

  On two occasions I somehow witness them at table. They do not wash before eating. There is no table-cloth, not even a newspaper one, and no table-napkins. On each occasion there is the same centre-piece, indubitably permanent, of bottles of tomato sauce, jars of sulphur-yellow pickles, tins of treacle, and condensed milk, tins of jam with the lids jagged open and prised up by a tin-opener. All these vessels bleed and dribble on the greasy table. I know, from the conversations of the Adams children, that frankfurters, saveloys, sardines, bananas, garishly iced pastry-cook cakes, fresh bread and crumpets, are their favourite and most usual foods.

  I see them feasting on black puddings, kola tonic and vanilla slices, champing loudly and quickly with their decayed teeth, giving no attention at all to any one of the many technicalities of eating Mother considers paramount. Knives are licked, mouths and noses wiped on sleeves, crusts are not eaten but thrown to the floor for the several dogs.

  Mrs. Adams, whom the older children call Ma and the younger Mumma, is put out by none of this. She is a taller but no plumper prophecy of what Christobel Veronica and the other girls will grow to, flatter of nose, spikier of hair, with the same unwinking eyes. As aitchless as her children she behaves as they do, dropping crusts lovingly to the dogs, slurping nigger-brown tea from a saucer, straining across the table to stab a knife into a tin of jam, and coating a slice of bread held flat on the palm of her left hand with the glutinous dollops of purple goo thus dug out. Her behaviour, more valid and impressing than her children’s because she is a Mrs. and a mother, shows me that there is an acceptable though different sort of family order, a different set of rules, a different conception of what is abundance.

  The Adams idea of abundance is expressed in the five bicycles they own, in the several tricycles rusting with the rusting pilchard tins and Hornby railway lines and disintegrating go-carts among the shoulder-high weeds of the backyard, in the pianola and the stacks of unravelling pianola rolls, in the harmonium with its decayed teeth, the three banjos, the gramophone with its toffee-coloured convolvulusshaped horn which seems repeatedly to wheeze out only

  Harry Lauder singing ‘Roamin’ in the gloamin’’ though there are deposits of records tossed like quoits in corners, on to pantry shelves, on to and under sofas.

  I am not so much appalled as roused to wonder by seeing nothing in what I think is its right place: bicycles in the passage, fancy dress costumes and crutchless bloomers hanging on the backs of kitchen chairs, a sodden pillow and a doll’s perambulator in the gully-trap, an iron saucepan containing the ashes of some long-ago-charred Irish Stew holding open the front door, playing-cards in the lavatory, penny dreadfuls, kitten-decorated chocolate-boxes and stone ginger-beer bottles everywhere.

  The bedrooms really disconcert me. When I leave mine in the morning I do not enter it again until I am going to bed. It is a place I should not want to be in during the day. By training I regard a bedroom, then as now, as a spotless, uncluttered place to sleep in. The bedrooms of the Adams boys are junk-shop places to fight in, play in, store things in. Their unmade beds are littered with stamp albums, caramel papers, cigarette-cards and popguns. I am as astounded by a canary in a cage in one bedroom as I am by the presence of rabbit-traps, Meccano derricks, bicycle-chains, boxing-gloves, an enamel plate half-filled with a failure of toffee, and an unemptied chamber-pot in which float apple-cores.

  I am more startled, though I affect a form of polite deafness and blindness to it, by the almost formal litany of insult, tongue-poking-out (sharp white tongues) and ugly-face-making that goes on between Mrs. Adams and her children. I am used to the much less waspish form of bickering exchange, hearty and over-masculine, of my country uncles, and know that affection inspires it, and their matching adulthoods ratify it. It is clear too that Mrs. Adams and her children, bitterly screeching at each other ‘Greediguts!’ and ‘Shut up, bum-face!’ and ‘Stinkpot!’ and ‘Youse is all barmy as bandicoots!’ love each other, and regard their performances as conventional enough. Nevertheless, I am uneasy at this treatment of and by a parent, and am more uneasy because it is not something I am accidentally overhearing and seeing but something they do not consider caring if I see.

  I am startled, too, that the Adams children and their dogs and dirt, and any neighbour children and their dogs and dirt, have the run of the whole house, including the parental bedroom, and the use, at any odd time, without asking permission, of anything in the house—slices of bread-and-dripping, tins of condensed milk, the pianola, anything at all.

  I am most startled by their friendly habit of offering to let me have a bite or a suck from something they have already bitten or sucked—a pear, a piece of peppermint rock, a cheese sandwich, an aniseed ball. My nausea at the thought of accepting the offer is difficult to obscure even by a polite evasion of lies. Neither my stomach nor I has the moral strength to repay their insulting gesture of bonhomie with an insulting gesture of sacrifice. The nausea is caused partly by an inborn fastidiousness, partly by family training, but there is a cause so revolting that, whenever I am subject of one of these offers to share, I need to escape quickly from the Adams circle until I carelessly forget the cause. The Adams boys blow their noses not with handkerchiefs but their fingers. They use the same fingers, not paper, to wipe themselves.

  Although horrified when I first see them do this, and then rub the brown from their fingers on to the public lavatory wall, I instantly accept it as one more difference between me (and people like me) and others not like me (and people like me). Twenty years later, as a schoolmaster at a wealthy private school in Adelaide, I see dozens of these unmistakable brown streaks on the white-tiled walls of the lavatory cubicles. Since lavatory-paper, hot-and-cold wash-basins, soap and towels are laid on in the lavatory-block, the excremental score-sheet indicates addiction to an unusual delight. Facing the assembled school at morning prayers I w
onder which expensive schoolboy fingers holding the hymn-books are the same pens as the fingers of Maximilian and Aubrey and Selwyn and Winton.

  Winton is also the first and only person I ever see write a dirty jingle behind a lavatory door.. One would think, writes Winton, as thousands have written before him, with all this wit, that Shakespeare had come here to shit.

  As one rubs shoulders with the world, one rubs shoulders with how many Wintons, how many executants of graffiti? The walls of the world are marked by their secretly done writings, their naive bawdinesses and self-taught pornographies, their agonizing sexual lonelinesses, their exaggerated advertisements of unmentionable delights, their wistful or boastful invitations to fleshly ecstasy, their heartbreakingly bestial, or pathetic, or inaccurate illustrations of the very sources of life itself, of life and unfulfilment and agony. Do men, I wonder, as they scratch with a pencil on the walls of the lavatory outside the Guildhall in Royal Windsor, under the Accademia Bridge in Venice, in the Melbourne Botanical Gardens and the Hibeya Gardens of Tokyo, draw their own organs, circumcised or uncircumcised, big-balled or little-balled, when they illustrate thus their need and dream and dirty human-ness?

  In watching the Adams family I learn earlier what I might otherwise not have learned until much later. They are first samples to me, unhygienic habits apart, of the sort of Australian I am to meet many of. Their accent is that of the lowest English working-class of the early nineteenth century. Whatever amendments time and place and the acquisition of material things make, the accent is defiantly preserved. Wealth cannot taint it nor education undo it. It is preserved as much by university professors, schoolteachers, politicians, non-conformist clergyman, business magnates and the owners of thousands of acres as by the wealthy Australian working-class itself.

  It is an ineradicable and perverse accent, signal at once of the possible strengths and certified weaknesses of the Australian character, an accent indicating, on the one hand, laziness, vicious sentimentality, self-pity, genteelism, selfsatisfaction and lack of self-discipline, on the other, intentions to nobility, unstinted Good Samaritanism, powerful and Puritanical stubbornness, courageous foolhardiness and a brazenly sardonic independence of outlook. These attitudes, this accent, belong to millions living in barbarian’s luxury at the heart of many-faceted abundance.

  The passion I still have for the prolific aspects of nature develops to its height during these years, and is unlikely to diminish. It is a passion not to be defended.

  I am never so passionately aware of the power of the earth and the lavishness of it as on Gippsland midsummer days. Before eleven in the morning the bees are staggering drunk in the madonna lilies. The endless safaris of ants pass each other scarcely speaking. Out and out beyond the town’s rim of orchards and asparagus fields and maize crops and pumpkin paddocks, thousands of acres of peroxided grasses shimmer and surge at the bases of an infinity of ring-barked trees pale and lustrous as aluminium. The rotating shadows of the rotating tin louvres of windmills do not cut one swathe in the grassy pelt of fragile tassels, bobbles, plumes and maces. Out and farther out, beyond the Golgotha of the slaughter-yards, lies the cemetery like a spilling of shapes in marzipan, the cemetery and its abundant dead boxed down under the freesias and sparaxis and periwinkle and briers and gorse more abundant than they.

  The song and the poem I learn in Kensington kindergarten days truly prophesy the development of the legend of Gallipoli and the Anzacs. The one connection I have with this mystifying and exclusive procedure of war and Gallipoli lies in my Teddy Bear, and the destruction by Turks or Huns or Kaiser Bill of Uncle Arthur Abernethy. An orphan adopted to be a farm-boy by Mother’s father, Grandfather Ruff, Uncle Arthur Abernethy is far more famous to me for giving the Teddy Bear than for giving his life for his country. There is no one alive, I think, except myself, who remembers that Arthur Abernethy was knock-kneed and skinny, had unruly double-crowned hair, and is a dead Anzac. Because it is talked of and taught about so much in Bairnsdale I become aware that the Anzac legend, while duller in the telling and over in a flash, is more lasting, more stickable, than showier other Great War legends: Mata Hari, the Angels of Mons, Kitchener and Jellicoe, the Rose of No-man’s Land, Allied soldier corpses being boiled down to make soap (or is it soup?) for Hun soldiers. These other tales excite me more, but the growth of the Anzac legend bears them down, thickening as it does to a sarsaparilla-like creeper twining its way through the undergrowth of earlier less nationally glorious legends about convicts, coach-robberies, bushrangers, Captain Moonlight, gold and aborigines.

  In her fireside, sitting-down, story-telling moods, which she can only spare to have with a baby at breast or a crochet-needle in hand, Mother is voluble, sometimes accurately, sometimes inaccurately, about aborigines; tales heard years before in her mother’s fireside, sitting-down, story-telling moods flow easily, well-remembered and word-perfect, from her unpainted lips. Aborgines steal with their toes; aborigines eat living grubs and grilled tiger-snake; aborgines are faithful Men Fridays to explorers and, at the same time, treacherous explorer-killers, cruel to shipwrecked white women, and given to abducting and murdering little pioneer boys of my age, not as edible dainties, but for the fat surrounding their kidneys, this fat being reputedly best to anoint black bodies to a superior glossiness on corroboree nights. It is such debased aborigines who are pursued by Grandfather Ruff slicing about with his cutlass, and shouting out in a German accent, ‘Cut ’em! Slash ’em!’ Or they are hunted down like rabbits, and left to the blowflies. Or they are given lavish supplies of flour and sugar impregnated with poison when they come on their begging visits. Or they are invited en masse to picnics where they are blown up. I get the impression, even today almost ineradicable, of stove-black mothers and fathers, and neatly ranged Little Black Sambos and Topsies, one minute nibbling corned beef sandwiches and sausage rolls, and drinking raspberry vinegar, as they sit on hollow logs packed with gunpowder, the next minute sky-high, with the clouds of crimson smoke raining down legs and arms, and hands holding tumblers, and sandwiches with semi-circular bites in them.

  ‘Come, Josephine, in my flying machine,’ sings Mother softly and naughtily, ‘going up she goes, up she goes. . .

  They are tales abroad too, during my country town boyhood, of the Old World and an un-Australian past, tales from which emerges a curious hierarchy of actual and fictional characters which I do not then have the perception to distinguish one from the other, or realize are not local but imported. As we children of Mitchell Street play chasey or tiggy or hidey on moonlight nights on The Common or in the Tannies, there is the delicious terror of being uncertain whether, behind a clump of boxthorns or in the diabolic shadows of the oaks, crouches Jack-the-Ripper, Bill Sikes, Fagin, Springheel Jack, Sweeney Todd or Mr. Hyde. This villainous pantheon is supplemented by bride-murderers, ghosts, baby-farmers, Captain Webb, Casabianca, General Gordon, Lord Roberts, the guard at Pompeii, and animals such as the Boer’s horse, Llewellyn’s dog and Androcles’ lion.

  Tales we distort for each other, hidden in the long grasses of summer twilight, lead us hopefully to expect, almost to pray for, what we see in the woodcuts and steel engravings of our parents’ or grandparents’ gilt-edged and calf-bound books preserved from the Victorian era: cloudbursts, fireballs, miraculous lightning, auroras, showers of stars and, most popular and titillating of all, the End of the World. The End of the World is often discussed, and calmly enough, even though it be God’s well-advertised and alarming theatrical production with earthquakes and hailstorms and rainbows and tidal waves all happening at once, while graves eject the gesticulating resurrected, and angels cascade down the stairs of air.

  Although these tales and legends are compositions largely of depravity, witless heroism and startling tactics of personality, they possess also a seductive mystery. To us country children some of this mystery infects the outcasts of the town, the eccentrics, naturals, cripples and foreigners. It infects the blackies, swaggies and drunkies. All these are
creatures from whom we keep our distance. Their solitariness shows: instinct, of which we take far more heed than of parents’ prohibitions, warns us that these solitaries are kinds of time-soiled children not to be played with and not to be touched. They are certainly not the sort of manageable adults we cynically allow ourselves to trust without trusting. We can trust these queer ones wholly, for an atmosphere of defenceless amorality emanates from them. We instantly sniff this out for it is our own less visible, less defenceless amorality, and it goads us to eschew pity. Cruelty is safer for us than tolerance, brutal mockery than sympathetic silence. We therefore cruelly mock, either whispering together in hisses to be heard or, if the distance we keep be great enough, crying out at them like mad and sexless hounds. In this we are skilled to the point of professionalism. With faultless malice we have already nicknamed our class-mates and friends—Dopey, Skinny, Fattie, Monkey, Shitty, Stinko, Ferret, Pisser and Twitchy. We have already sharpened our steel voices on each other, packs of boys on packs of girls, packs of one school on packs of another school, packs of screaming State School Protestants on packs of screaming St. Mary’s School Roman Catholics: