In the morning, after that dinner with the women, the men were surly. Our meal had shamed them, it seemed, and there was the matter of the tuna; there were many men who had not had any. The women looked as they always looked; I heard them laughing in the cookhouse. One of the men called up to them and the laughing stopped, a lull, then the talk began again. Grahame, after his bad night, said the dinner had been a mistake. Maybe it was, an inappropriate feminism, but, Hey, listen to what I learned, it changes things. Another legend, David said, not taking what I had to say seriously, charmed, he said, by my response. You’re such a writer – as if my way of seeing was all imagination, and therefore lesser. It was a Greenwich Mean Time situation, and in response anger flared in me. Furious, I walked to the edge of the village to calm down, and was about ready to turn back when David joined me. As we looked over to ridges he was to cross, I told him again what Lila had said. It’s not sentiment, I said, and if we are serious about the arts of this place, we need to comprehend what it means – as you should know, I added; an intended barb. To David’s credit, he nodded, his face serious this time. I think he took it in, and that when he said he was sorry, it’d been a tense morning, it was not a sop – or not only – to a woman he felt responsible for. Was I sure, he wanted to know, that I was okay to stay in the village without him? If I had any doubts, he’d call off the visit to the high villages. No, I said. Of course you must go.
While David and the men travelling with him made their noisy preparations for the journey, I retreated to the cookhouse where the women were feeding the children. I leaned against the smoky wall and the thought that came to me was of Sophie and how we used to walk between the high tide and the low, and that was hard enough to judge, a wave catching us, the sand hard beneath our feet, then giving way to unexpected sinking. Land on one side, ocean on the other, and Sophie and me picking our way along the tiny strip where they cross each day. Here, the strip between the overlap could narrow and vanish, and then again it could widen out, a broad horizon, which is how I’d felt that evening with the women. Something had happened that night, and it had changed how the women were with me, and how I could be with them, just there, a presence they need not perform for.
Pauline went with David and the men, up to the village where her children were. I was sorry to see her go, a surge of anxiety; with Pauline I felt safe, in every way safe, and she was going. Had I made the wrong call, staying here in this village so close to Náapa? The short answer is that I hadn’t. They were good days, those next days in that first village, excellent days; without them I would have understood even less. It took walking the forest with Dapene; it took sitting and watching as the women painted; it took just being, alongside the women, part of their days. As to Pauline, there she was when we climbed up to the village where we were to meet David, arriving in time to see him stride in with his boots and gaiters. There she was, waiting by the gate: strong, safe Pauline. It would be churlish to complain of the climb Grahame and I made, a mere four hours, taken slowly with Thompson setting the pace. If my legs were trembling when we arrived at the gate to the village, there was no stopping to rest them – for there was my namesake, Dursula, with a barkcloth skirt and a headdress for me to wear; in photos I look ridiculous with an ugly blue singlet beneath the festoons of necklaces. But when we went through the gate led by Pauline, dancers were pouring in, drums beating, women singing.
One afternoon Pauline came to sit with me on the covered platform where I’d fallen asleep. The rain had started, blowing in from the valley. It was cold. We sat looking into the rain, and I unzipped my sleeping bag, spreading it over us both, very good, and asked her how it had gone in the high villages. She liked it up there, she said, and she liked a man up there. Just a little, maybe. She was the only woman who’d admitted to liking Popondetta, let alone a man; the others would shake their heads and laugh, hands to their faces. Pauline found the town interesting. If you know what to do, it’s okay, she said. She doesn’t mind the shame of being a bush kanaka, she’s a strong Ömie woman. She prefers it here in the villages, but the town is good too. She goes to the market, takes vegetables from her garden, women from the government houses buy them. She saves the money for school fees. She has many children, and an old husband. Her face tells me what she thinks of him. No good, I say, you’re young yet. She laughs. A young man, she says, yes she’d like a young man, but that means babies. And trouble? I ask. Big trouble, she says, and laughed. Did I have a husband? Once I had a husband, not any more, I say. But, yes, there is a man. His name is Jeremy. When I go back to Port Moresby, he’ll be there to meet me. We were going to go to a place near the salt water. Why does he not come here? I didn’t have an answer. The walk had put him off, and the time away, and a son who was not well; he’d meet me for the last two weeks, that was enough. And my husband, Pauline wants to know. Where is he? It was long ago, I say. I was young yet. Did he die? No, we divorced. He divorced? No, me too. A woman can divorce a man? Send him finish? She is astonished. They sit down good, and you go? Really? Some men get violent and beat the woman, I say, sometimes a woman is killed. Pauline is not surprised. But mostly it is okay. More divorces come from women than men in our world, I say. She is impressed. Sister-friend.
The next morning the sun returned. Women were hanging more barkcloth on the lines Andrew had strung across the dance ground at this next village. The iconography was different, the designs looser, the cloth paler so that the dyes seemed stronger, the yellow more yellow, the black a dark smouldery blue-black. There was work to do: Grahame’s camera; my notebook; David’s tape measure. Across the valley, the bare rock of the peaks was visible above the forest. The ancestors had come from a stream up there, Lila told us. A man and a woman. The woman did not have a birth canal until the man cut one for her. In exchange she cut the first bark and beat the first cloth for him. Babies and art. Our mountain, our clans, our art.
This was a story that could be told. Other stories, Lila would say, or Dapene, did not want to be told. As we worked, measuring and documenting the cloth, Andrew translating for David, Naomi or Michael whispering for me, the talk went back and forth as we waited for Lila or Dapene to say, Yes, okay, or No, not this story, not this cloth. David thought we should write down everything; we didn’t have to use it, but the record would be there, and if need be we could. But I didn’t, not with Lila’s sharp eye on me, and anyway, without the translation, I couldn’t. Not exactly the method of an historian or an anthropologist; a start, no more. There was the camera to testify to the complex beauty of an art that five years later would be exhibited as The Wisdom of the Mountain at the National Gallery of Victoria. But that was way ahead. Right then, before we left, there was a crescendo of events as the village filled with people coming in from the high villages. They had come to dance to the mountain on the night of the full moon, beginning at dusk with everyone on the dance ground – old men, new mothers with their babies, small children, everyone – until dawn when only a few strong men were still dancing to the exacting rhythm of the drum – and Pauline, strong Ömie woman Pauline. The essence of that night, as magical as the Popondetta night had been threatening, worked its way into my novel The Mountain, an experience I gave to Jericho, a character who exists only there, and was never anywhere near the mountain, for all that he remains a presence, palpable to me, and I hope to readers. No, David, Grahame and I were the outsiders that night for a dance that took its own rhythm and shape, disregarding us. We might as well have not been there, which was part of the power of the experience, for all the attention we’d receive when it came time for the feast that had steamed all day in long earth ovens: pig and stringy chickens, pumpkins, yams, sweet potato. And again the next day when the duvahe gathered for the meeting that would decide the fate of the cloth and Andrew’s bisnis.
I wrote about that meeting for the NGV catalogue, and when I showed it to David he said it was another fairytale; not that it hadn’t happened, but that I credited the duvahe with a decision that was, m
ore accurately, an agreement.57 And in a way he was right; it was his decision – not theirs, not Andrew’s – that had put everything in train. And it’s true the outcome was never seriously in doubt. I knew that from the groups of men gathered around David and Andrew, and from the cookhouse, where the talk was of school fees and warm clothes, men no longer going to Popondetta and coming back angry. Sometimes the women got beaten. The duvahe would stop the beating, but the men would be shamed, and sometimes they’d return to town and then there’d be no husband.
On the afternoon of the meeting of the duvahe, the dance ground filled with anticipation, all the dancers, everyone, there, children leaning on the steps to the house where the duvahe, dressed in splendour, had assembled. Yes, the duvahe said, David could take the cloth, Andrew could start his business. The news was carried out to the crowd. Children on the steps leaped in excitement, and were hushed by their fathers. Yes, the cloth could leave Ömie, but there were conditions. The duvahe were to approve every cloth that went, and they would say which must not go. They would say which custom story could be told, and who was to translate. Outside, we could hear excitement rippling through the crowd. Inside, Andrew had more to say. Was he demurring? No one translated. Lila was sharp. One of the men held up his hand. Andrew became quiet. A murmur through the crowd outside.
Then David spoke, a round of translation, explaining the diagrams. The money would go into the community: half to the business Andrew and the men would run, doing all the work of taking the art to Popondetta, sending it to Australia, a long way. The other half would go into an account for the artists that the women duvahe would have control of. Pauline and another woman would go to Popondetta with the mark of Lila and Dapene, and to give their own signatures. More talk. More details. Pumpkin and yams were carried over from the cookhouse.
It was an exhilarating day, all tensions evaporated into the high, light sky. How could it not be so when Wellington, the duvahe of all Ömie, walked out onto the dance ground and reported the decision, if decision it was. The outcome. For the rest of that day, and into the evening, there was dancing, and Ömie songs, a great swirling excitement.
Pauline took my arm and breathed in. She was clapping. Sister-friend, she said, now I will visit you in your place. Standing there with her, looking into the crowd, I thought: what have we set up? What expectations? Will we meet them? What would Náapa do when they heard of this day? What were we doing here? Should we have left well alone?
I was back on the terrain of anxiety, and as it turned out, with good reason.
11
Jeremy had been at school with my cousin Philip. Six years older than me, Philip could stand on his head and make shapes of animals with his fingers. He’d cheer when my sisters and I walked along the tops of walls and fences. He’d take our hands until we were balanced, and he’d catch us when we fell, which by the time I was twelve I made sure I did, as often as possible, straight into his arms. He’d put me back on the ground, upside down, standing on my head – and then he, too, would be on his head, and we’d look at each other and collapse in a heap. He was glorious, and because he was a cousin and because his father, a close cousin of my father, almost a brother, had been killed in the war, while miraculously Patrick with his thick glasses had not, there was a tragic mystery about him. Long before the wall-walking, head-standing years, I’d dance in praise when he – with his mother and brother – were coming to lunch. So there I was one summer day, dancing on the lawn outside the house, swirling, toes pointing, arms above my head, when Philip, half an hour early, looked over the gate. Don’t stop, he said, as I froze in mid-swirl, my toes square pegs. He wasn’t meant to see the dance, it was just for me, a dance of private joy. The day was ruined. Was it at that lunch, as memory would have it, or another when the grown-ups talked in grave voices? Philip was in some sort of trouble at school, I don’t remember what – smoking maybe, or talking back to a master; such things were serious then. Should Patrick speak to his house-master? Philip was saying nothing, his brother was eating. When my sisters were excused from the table, my mother said why didn’t I go with them and play. As if.
Jeremy and I had been together for several years when a childhood friend turned up in Sydney and we discovered the connection with Philip. Caroline’s father, like Philip’s, had been killed in the war and their widowed mothers had holidayed together with the children. Caroline had been born as the war ended, and when it came to Philip, she too had been entranced. She, Jeremy and I had dinner together in my small flat on the hill above Bondi, and as Caroline and I pondered this early enchantment, Jeremy asked, Was he at Clifton? Yes! The school Jeremy had been to. Philip who? Philip Parsons? Jeremy had recognised him from our talk, our memories, our fascination – which, it transpired, Jeremy had shared. Marginally, he said, careful of his words. Marginally, that was all. No dances of praise, not that kind of smitten; a school boy crush, no more.
That night in my bed Philip was there with us, not as an erotic third but as another blessing; such coincidence, such connection. Jeremy and I had grown up within miles of each other, we knew the names of towns and villages that no one else in Australia knew, or if they did, it was as a name on a map, that’s all. We still couldn’t believe we’d both lived here in this distant land for more than twenty years with no idea of each other’s existence.
We had met in December 1996, two months after my fiftieth birthday, a little more than a year since Patrick’s death. We were set up in the most discreet way, and neither of us had any idea until long afterwards. We were invited to a dinner by our mutual friend, the journalist and writer Anne Deveson, who sat us opposite each other at the end of her long, narrow table. Jeremy was just back from two months in England. I was recently back from a month in the Kimberley with a friend whose birthday was within ten days of mine. So I had been camping out by waterholes on the Drysdale Plateau while Jeremy was visiting the graves of his parents in an English churchyard at the village of Bramley – one of thousands of villages in southern England. Bramley! Exactly where my maternal grandmother is buried. Our mothers had shopped in the same market town, we knew the name of the same butcher; we took our Christmas book tokens to the same branch of W. H. Smith. His parents retired to a village so close to the house with the walls I walked along with Philip to catch me that I could have ridden there on my pony. Imagine! Who else, these last twenty years, had understood what it meant to be born in that particular there and live in this particular here. It was as if a light switched on and we could see each other in our childhood houses; we knew the names of the trees in the woods, the rivers that meandered through the villages, the station where we caught the train to London. We’d both spent more hours than anyone could want waiting for connections at Reading Station; we both knew the strong and bitter tea from the platform kiosk.
The week after the dinner at Anne’s, we met for a drink at the Dry Dock Hotel in Balmain, and later, when we’d return for an anniversary drink, Jeremy would say there should be a blue plaque to mark the occasion. We’d talked about England, and the split between a past there and a present here. It was a split that, to him, had always been burdensome, and to me had become, I thought, merely a condition of life. Yet at the Dry Dock that night I felt something shift in me, some submerged longing make itself known. As we talked around each other, I could tell from his eyes, the flick of his hair, that he was drawn to me, and also afraid. That old familiar vulnerability. Patrick, I suppose. Who better to hear our vulnerabilities than those who know them best? I’m not going to be hurt again, he said, a warning even as he took my hand. Goodnight, I said, as I got into the car and rolled down the window. He put his arms on the roof and leaned in towards me, put his hand on my head. Your hair, he said.
On New Year’s Eve 1996, we were back at Anne’s house in East Balmain. At the start of the party, when there were hours to go before the clock struck midnight, we’d talked of Thomas Hardy, a writer who’d deeply influenced Jeremy, and about whom he’d written and publis
hed. He was disappointed, I think – or maybe surprised, given that I was English and had been at school in Hardy’s Dorset – that I hadn’t read more of him, and nothing for years. Maybe it was that I’d read Tess of the d’Urbervilles too young, I said, describing to him the afternoon I finished it, aged thirteen, standing at the edge of the tennis courts at school. I was barely able to breathe, unable to watch the match, wanting only to bow my head to the ground as Angel Clare does on the final page of the novel as he heard the clocks strike eight that terrible morning, and watched the black flag run up the tall staff on the tower of the prison – a ‘blot on the city’s beauty’ (a city I knew well) – that told him Tess had been hanged. Jeremy looked at me long and hard. Yes, he said. You were too young. I don’t remember much else of the evening before we all poured out into the street to watch the fireworks over the bridge. He’s a good man, Anne said as we embraced for the New Year. Afterwards, in the early hours of the morning, we walked back to Jeremy’s house in Birchgrove where my car was parked. As we walked, hands together, we talked about the comma; as we cut through the park at Mort Bay, we stopped for a tentative first kiss on the grass that covers where the dry dock once was.
The comma. That cracked up his sons, both of them at home, one at university, the other in his last year at school. How good to be fifty, we said to each other, with the children more or less grown, an age when they were more fun than trouble. These next years will be ours, we said − those first easy summers of picnics and reading in the garden, those first winters by the fire burning in the grate of his rambling weatherboard house filled with books and furniture from England. And we said it again at the Adelaide Writers’ Week a few years later, in 2002, when we stood at the edge of the river, the noise of a publisher’s party billowing out behind us. Our good fortune, oh, it was boundless; it might have come late, but it had come, and there we were, still in our prime, congratulating ourselves, watching the boats on the river, and raising our glasses to others who came out to escape the noise of the party.
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