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

by Hal Porter

  I recall Miss Harvey, distended and pink as a cabbage rose. She lets us sing ‘Abie, my boy’ and ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’ as we march into the classroom, and is often as funny as Louise Fazenda in the silent films. Half-hidden, however, beneath the petals of pink frivolity and funny-bone behaviour, are steel-bright disciplinary thorns that force us to discipline ourselves to rule unsmudged red ink lines (for it is the era of red ink and the red pencil), to recite with elocutionary panache ‘The Slave’s Dream’, and to fill in with greasy coloured crayons those elaborately difficult shapes, the maps of Tasmania, Canada and Ireland. She involves us in no dog-in-the-manger sex instruction, no trumped-up commerce between wise child and sullied adult. We children tell parents and teachers nothing unfit for them to hear. They are prudently equally mum. We do not bore and confuse each other by trumping reality with small half-truths.

  In Grade Six, we meet Mr. Daniel Samuel Treagus who possesses the showier disciplinary arts of Satan as whom he is as ferociously handsome, limber and shapely, from his sharply pointed widow’s peak and circumflex eyebrows of charred black to his sharply pointed boots. ‘You wr-r-r-r-iggling wor-r-r-rms,’ he brays metallically. ‘If the gr-r-r-reat angel Gabriel himself. . . nay, if the Lo-r-r-r-rd Himself stood on this platform, you’d defy Him. But you’ll not defy me. Not me! Oh, never, never, never-r-r-r!’ He knows we know he knows that, under his brimstone gaze and demoniac flourishings, we will not defy a caterpillar. How we parse for him! And swim! No mere television image of terror he—he hypnotizes us with ringing human noise, a dashing blackboard manner, his stinging leather strap, and the intensity with which, fully clothed, hatted, booted, he paces the river-bank, bearing a pole from the tip of which, on rope and leather belt, there strains fish-like a flailing one of us boys, a dog-paddling nine-or-ten-year-old. There is no mixed bathing. Among his little men, Mr. Treagus raves like Ezekiel, back and forth, back and forth, on the buffalo grass, terrifying kingfisher and platypus and us, sweating, patient, feared and trusted.

  What else do we learn besides swimming and parsing and ‘The Slave’s Dream’?

  By heart—curious, sad expression—we learn a million useful uselessnesses: the countries of the British Empire on which the sun never sets, ‘Daffodils’, the rivers of North America, the products of India, the dates of kings and battles and executions and broken treaties. We sing ‘God bless the Prince of Wales’. We draw sprays of pittosporum, and flower-pots lying on their sides by wooden cubes. We chip-carve teapot-stands and bread-boards. When we read The Boer and his Horse, the girls cry, and the boys swallow the tops of their windpipes; when we read Three Men in a Boat, the boys laugh themselves flaccid, while the girls pick their noses disdainfully or decorate with red pencil scrolls what they have already written in purple ink in their copies of Geoffrey Hamlyn:

  Black is the raven,

  Black is the rook,

  Black is the one

  Who steals this book.

  Every Friday morning, our copy-books are given out to us. With steel nibs, in ink watered down to duck-egg blue, we prophetically write, thin upstrokes, firm downstrokes, Procrastination is the thief of time, Look before you leap, Pride goes before a fall and All that glisters is not gold.

  Time, at least, makes that ink no paler.

  Mother’s father dies long before I am born; I am six months old when her mother dies by either, and probably certainly, the bite of a venomous garden-spider, or by being poisoned, as I once overhear some aunts maliciously suggesting, by another aunt.

  Grandfather and Grandmother Ruff act out their lives and proceed to their graves in a past that is forced to do without me, and therefore without my opinions. Since my opinions are largely formed by observation, I am unable to have any on my unobservable maternal grandparents. I must take them on trust from Mother’s lips. I cannot make them smaller or meaner, nor entertain any mental reservations about them. Consequently, they remain tall for ever, standing distant and dramatic on the horizon of time. Their ancestors take on something of the same monolithic quality, the same legendary air.

  On Grandfather Ruff’s side, I see the wide-shouldered Protestant shadows of forefather landowners falling through snow-cold air upon the high, brilliantly green fields of valley farms. Their actions are seasonal, and devoted to animals and their needs, rather than personal, and devoted to their own frivolous or moral needs. They are earnestly on the go to an orchestra of cow-bells and rich lowings more than to the clink of wine-glasses or church-bells. They are little interested in learning that they are the victims of God because they are engrossed in not being caught napping, and made the victims of glaciers, spoiled cheese or making hay in a rain-storm. Money is grown as carefully, and is as carefully picked and hung away, as onions are.

  On Grandmother Ruff’s side, I see shadows less broad of shoulder, taller and lither shadows inhabiting a world in which money is treated with dangerous indifference. It is there, like mercury in a thermometer on which one turns one’s back, and goes to Colnaghi’s to order treasures not ever to be paid for. One day it is there measuring the footmen, the coachman, the grapes in the glasshouse, and the exact place on the social graph. The next day the bulb cracks; the mercury runs and rolls away in minute beads no effort can recapture.

  Grandmother Ruff, fag-end of this faded-out and empty-pocketed aristocracy and, to judge by daguerreotypes, an ardent-eyed beauty, marries Grandfather Ruff, an escapee to Australia from the Sonderlund War of 1847, in Melbourne’s then fashionable suburb of Brighton. They take up land in Gippsland, at Sale.

  Sale, forty miles west of Bairnsdale, is, in my boyhood, a provincial cathedral city set smack-flat on grassy vast plains, cow-ridden and sheep-blotched, perpetually curry-combed by winds from every quarter, and decorated with park-like areas of bush. It is here, in 1889, youngest after-thought daughter of a spawning of eight children, that Mother is born. Father’s parents being as prolific as Mother’s, my boyhood is well-provided, not only with ancestral aunts and uncles but also with the husband-uncles and aunt-wives they marry, for all of them are attracted by the fulfilments and hazards of the double bed rather than the exhilarations and omissions of bachelordom or spinsterhood. Since most of these couples are also copiously productive, cousins of all ages congest this stage of my life; braggart striplings with deeply-dented, silver-grey felt hats tilted back on their teak-brown napes, chatterbox young women in fuji silk dresses as striped as the Kodak girl’s, skiting boys in sou’-westers of drill, head-tossing girls in ribbed battle-ship-grey stockings, and frilly Indiarubber babies like tempestuous Queen Victorias with bonnets awry.

  In this tribal ant-heap, most of the more devil-may-care or forthright members are of Mother’s family. It is easy to spot, in these Ruff aunts and uncles and Ruff-descended cousins, a similar rowdy insouciance to Mother’s, a similar warmth and febrile intensity, a vivacity bordering on vulgar uproar which does not, however, coarsen them, and leaves their inner delicacy unspoilt and their tenderer hearts private to secrecy. Since many of the Ruffs have stuck to the district, and are a mere forty miles away, there are many chances to visit them and enjoy them and watch them. Watch I must for, though I have maximum esprit de corps, the fatal seed to breed the writer—that plant all ears and Argus eyes—has already taken root, and cannot yet be controlled. However much I abandon myself to the lunatic goings-on of children, to the stitch-giving hullabaloo and the blinding and deafening excitement I love, one, at least, of the Argus eyes never blinks, one ear never fails to pick up the sentence that is a ray of light showing up the swindle of appearances and the falsity of logical conclusions. Then, and to this day, however happily I am jostling and being jostled on the jammed highway, nearby watching, the cool one stands, burdened and in the shade: the umbrella, the bundle and I.

  Mother’s second eldest brother and his family, whom we from Bairnsdale visit most, live in Grandfather Ruff’s pioneer house where he and Grandmother die, where nearly all my Ruff uncles and aunts are born, where Mother i
s born, where Mother is married with waxen orange-blossoms in her hair, and departs for the honeymoon in Ballarat wearing a costume of violet material on March the Twenty-second, 1910. On March the Twenty-second, nineteen years later, she is to leave the earth for her honeymoon in nowhere with all women’s final bridegroom.

  The house and its surroundings arouse me to the fact of the continuity of family flesh more persuasively than does the presence of my cousins in the flesh. The bricks on the veranda floor are abraded and blurred by the feet of boys, younger than I, who are now bald and grey-moustached uncles, by the soles of little girls—lean Aunt Sophia, pigeon-plump Aunt Bertha, talkative Aunt Rosa Bona, my own mother Ida—who now have little or bigger girls of their own. Here is the wide open fireplace, with its kettle-hook hanging down on a great chain, before which Mother and Father are married. Here still remain a knife-box, a salmon-kettle, a rosewood tea-caddy, a shabby pie-crust table, millefiori doorhandles and silver muffineers; simple domestic treasures which travelled by sailing-ship from the Old World, and by bullock-waggon along the convict-made road from Port Albert to Sale, frangible and fragile enough inanimates that the death of those who bought them or inherited them animates more than the possessions of the living. These lifeless things, by outliving their owners, speak to me clearly of and for my grandparents; the large oil-paintings of sugar-sweet rustic Switzerland reveal Grandfather’s sentimentality, for nothing but a Teutonic sentimentality can have stirred him into lugging these wistful atrocities across oceans, and along rugged roads, into raw Gippsland. Family report says nothing of his looking upon them as a more sordid investment. ‘Grandfather loved them,’ is said still, in the twenties, of Grandfather who died in the 1890’s, a three-bottle man returning sozzled from a Masonic dinner, and thrown from his horse at his own gate. Grandmother’s dressing-case with its worn crested-silver and etched-glass contents, its scissors and hooks and bodkins and tweezers and stilettos, its phials and brushes and combs and tiny flasks, reveals to me, more than Mother’s accounts of it, Grandmother’s fastidiousness. It suggests too that she yearned to keep a portable memento of the showier ancestry time has winnowed away, a fragment remaining for my avid and nauseatingly soulful attention after she herself has been winnowed away by spider or aunt.

  In 1921, the acres surrounding the early colonial house of rosiest brick have not been subdivided, and much of the nineteenth century past is there for my entertainment and refreshment, a nostalgic tourist in my own piddling inheritance: the well overhung by the pomegranate tree beneath which Mother sat holding Charlotte the doll while Great-uncle Tom died in Sierra Leone; the long hedge of hawthorn, boxthorn, quince and elm trees; the pump; the Black Hamburgh grape-vine grown from a cutting of the Hampton Court monster; the oaks grown from two Richmond Gardens acorns; the lofty William Bon Chretien pear tree from which six-year-old tomboy Mother falls, unharmed, unjarred even, and laughing, after a descent that jars almost to cessation the hearts of onlookers; the great-great-great-grandchildren of the bantam rooster that, in the Ruff’s humble saga, immortalizes itself and little-girl-Mother by leaping into the hanging-down back-flap of her broderie-anglaise-edged drawers as she comes out of the lavatory which is also still there still swaddled in jasmine and mandevillia.

  The old-fashioned garden and farmyard, with something of everything, is pure picture-book, and a child’s paradise: bantams, turkeys, geese, ducks, Guinea fowl, Rhode Island Reds, beehives, cows, lambs, dogs, cats, a parrot, a cockatoo, a tame one-legged magpie, haystacks, fruit-trees, a sun-flower-paddock, a maize-paddock, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, strawberry beds, clumps of bamboo, lavender, guelder rose, a row of elders, primroses, peonies, snail-flower creeper, bleeding heart, and ten kinds of violets.

  It is easy to see where Mother’s delight in growing things has been fostered, a practical delight she has handed down to my two sisters and me.

  Indeed, so deep is my pleasure in the work of the garden that, if there be a dimension after death in which grieving for the loss of the world of senses is possible, I shall grieve for no person however once agonizingly desired and passionately beloved, for no emotional adventure however uplifting, for no success however warming, no infamy however exhilarating, for nothing half so much as I shall grieve for the loss of the earth itself, the soil, the seeds, the plants, the very weeds. What this preference implies I do not know, and can only wildly guess. It is a love almost overriding my love of the words that could express that love. It is a less demanding love than the love of words which are more treacherous than plants, more corrupting than picotees, harder to control than a rosemary hedge.

  It is difficult enough for me, an unmistakable Australian, albeit of the Awstralian rather than the Osstralian variety, to convey in words to other Australians the exact temper of the clan gatherings at Sale, gatherings of no importance, unrecorded because unrecordable, forgotten before begun, proof of nothing that cannot be unproved, and which, allowing for family verve and offhand solidarity, can be nothing else in the world but Australian. It is much more difficult and almost impossible to entrap this temper in a net of words for non-Australians because it is compounded of the most complex, double-sided and deceiving, and maybe even deceitful, elements. The unwritten rules of behaviour are infinite in number, finely shaded, and subtle to the last fraction of a degree. They are not to be broken. If broken, the rules of forgiveness leading to re-establishment are equally of air and iron. I learn these rules with rather less ease than my contemporaries because, in the back streets of my being, a duel is developing and increasing in fervour between my instinct which knows why something is so, and my hen-pecking intelligence which wishes to analyse why something is so.

  See a crowd of us herded together for morning tea on some occasion—the Sale Show, say—which has brought eight or nine adults, and twice as many children, together at the old house. The men wear their best watch-chains, their opal tiepins, A.I.F. badges and Sunday suits of hand-tailored navy-blue twill or pepper-and-salt Donegal Tweed. They wear these, and stiff collars too, although the temperature is ninety-nine in the shade. The triangles of coloured silk handkerchiefs, largely Paisley, protrude from their breast-pockets. Boots squeak. On the back veranda, the old cedar table seemingly as large as a tennis court is halfcovered (the men’s’ half) by their panamas or high-crowned, deep-valleyed felt hats.

  ‘Hurry up with that bloody tea, you bloody women,’ the uncles shout. ‘Stop your bloody gossiping, and hurry bloody up!’ This means many things: that women are merely wives, that the men want their tea, that they recognize that the women are working while the men are idle, that they politely acknowledge this fact, that each husband is saying to all the other women what he would only say to his wife if the other wives were not there.

  Next to the men’s hats, the women’s handbags and new gloves, beige or white, are laid out with the girls’ new beige or dove-grey gloves. No female of them would consider appearing ungloved in really public public. They all wear new dresses that smell new. It is still early enough in the day for these garments to be merely on them, rather than that they have settled into the dresses. The women’s hats, with imperceptively quivering, semi-transparent brims, bear bunches of gleaming artificial cherries, clinking glassy grapes with a talc-like bloom, or coffee-saucer velvet pansies. The girls’ hats are ringed with linen forget-me-nots or pink silk rosebuds. Bangles, aquamarine brooches, and necklaces of amber abound. Everyone is on superlative and high-flying behaviour, which translates into the fact that there is a considered holiday truce in any current feud, and that certain dangerous truths are, this day, to be circumspectly skirted. There is an uproar of chiacking.

  ‘Shut up, you great lazy beasts,’ the aunts cry back to the uncles. ‘Who’s robbing this coach, anyway? Just be patient, you hulking buggers.’ Crying out thus, the aunts do not slacken their gossiping with other aunts, and do not halt their busy hands for a second.

  In the midst of what appears a typhoon of angry insult and savage cruelty, the b
oys stand rigidly upright, too clean and too silent, with comb-marks in their hair. They would like to be wrestling or spitting or grabbing each other by the balls, not for fun but to startle the engrossed and selfish adults. The girls titter spuriously at each other, touch each other’s mother-of-pearl buttons, and show each other the lace-trimmed handkerchiefs pinned with miniature gilt safety-pins to their velvet bodices, or more fashionably stuck through their rolled-gold bangles.

  When tea is poured, ‘Christ all bloody mighty!’ shouts Uncle X, pointing with a huge segment of walnut-knobbed chocolate sponge, through the gabble, at Uncle Y’s shimmering tie. ‘Jesus bloody Christ, look at it, will you! Look at the poor bloody bastard’s tie! No, no, don’t look! She’ll blind you. ’

  Uncle X is thus telling Uncle Y and everyone what Uncle Y and everyone know—that he is more than happy to see his favourite bloke again, and that he likes the tie very much.

  ‘Take no notice of the silly bugger, Y,’ says Aunt X. ‘It’s sheer jealousy. He’s only jealous!’

  She is making it clear to any aunt who, later, could take it upon herself to think—and say—otherwise, that she has no part at all, albeit harmless her husband’s attack, and that she sides as a sympathetic woman with the attacked albeit unharmed.

  ‘It’s a lovely tie,’ squeals Aunt Z, entering the field to compliment Aunt Y tangentially, for Aunt Y, she knows, has bought Y’s tie. ‘Lovely! It goes with your suit beautifully. Perfect combination. Perfect taste. Don’t take a scrap of notice of the silly bugger. Jealousy, that’s all. Pure, unadulterated jealousy!’