It was Sydney that returned me to anxiety: Jeremy, the book, the Ömie. Actually, the fortunes of the art – though they were costing David a lot, a responsibility I was all too willing to let him keep from me – kept moving well, better than we could have imagined. Three exhibitions – the two in Sydney, another in Perth – was an achievement in five years from a halt-start. It was David who did it. I was there, but it was David who knew the world of business and of selling. Was it like this in advertising? I’d ask, curious, never having given those skills – that industry – much credence. Rather the contrary. Back in radical student days we’d scoffed at those who sold things that weren’t needed to people who couldn’t afford them – and wouldn’t have thought to want them if it weren’t for these slick advertisements. Yes, David said, some of it is the same. You have to know how to get the interest started, how to follow up, how to make a deal. But it also wasn’t the same, and not only because it was art we were promoting. When he’d sold the company, it wasn’t because he was disenchanted with advertising – which, he’d say, can have its own ethical framework for the accounts it takes on – but with the way the corporate world was going. A Labor man of an earlier era, businessman though he was, he despised the elevation of profit above all else. There’d been complaints from the accountants, I remember him saying, that he provided food for anyone working in the office, many of them young people who were saving to buy a house, or had small children. Not lavish food: good bread, cheeses and jams, fruit, tomatoes, decent coffee. That can’t have been a reason for getting out, but it stuck with me, this story from David’s past. He was a man who thought about what people working for him needed, a man with a sense of exchange, a recognition, in this case, of the hours put in. Quite Melanesian really. It had never surprised me that he had loved the Pacific, Oceania, its islands, its exuberant cultures, and the art he’d immersed himself in. I could see it met something in him that hadn’t found a place in Australia. A kind of antithesis to advertising. Although, yes, it did take skills learned in the industry he’d left. It also took his determination that whatever happened with the nioge, it would be in the interests of Ömie, not of someone else’s profit. Having money, I came to see, meant that in his negotiations he could withhold it as well as bestow its benefits.
But skill alone wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for the quality of the cloth. Critics and curators were quick to see its significance, and by 2009 it had been acquired by the state galleries in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia as well as the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. So by the time Pauline and Dapene arrived in Sydney, Ömie art was beginning to be known, there was a buzz, a small buzz, but enough that the omens were good for The Wisdom of the Mountain exhibition that was to open at the National Gallery of Victoria that November. It would be the gallery’s first major exhibition of contemporary Papua New Guinean art, and was given a premier space at the St Kilda Road gallery. As well as being in Sydney for the exhibition at Annandale Galleries, Pauline and Dapene were here that July to be filmed painting as part of the supplementary material for the NGV’s exhibition. It was a significant undertaking, with two curators and a cameraman flying up from Melbourne. Alban had brought dyes in small jars; Dapene and Pauline spread mats on the floor, unfolded the beaten cloth, sharpened their painting sticks, and dressed as proud Ömie women sang as they worked.68
While they were in town, there wasn’t time to worry about the sticking point I’d come to with the book that wasn’t yet called The Mountain. And Jeremy rallied in support, if not of me then of the visitors. He’d enjoyed being in the fjord villages, playing football with the boys, sitting with the old men, smoking his pipe on the beach, giving everyone, including spluttering children, a puff. Of all the people who have been to the village with me, his was among the most immediate and intuitive response. It was reciprocated. Though he only ever went there twice, people continue to ask after him, and there is now a small namesake Jeremy running around. Also a Drusilla, much the same age, a shy girl who is pulled forward to sit beside me, poor child, for yet more photographs. Jeremy found a similar ease with the Ömie who visited Sydney. He’d taken Andrew and Michael for drives around town, caught the ferry with them, visited galleries and the Opera House. He gave them sausages and ice cream in his leafy garden. And so it was when Pauline and Dapene were here. He came to the gallery for the filming; he cooked more sausages. Janet Laurence and Jo Bertini also came to the gallery, and Jeremy took Alban to the museum while I took Pauline and Dapene to Janet and Jo’s studios. At Jo’s they drew on paper with wax crayons; at Janet’s they looked at her images of trees and forests on glass, partly concealed by pours, those veils of paint. As they touched and looked, and looked again, walking round the studio with Janet, I watched – the only one of us who didn’t use her hands as they used theirs. I saw a connection between them – for all that was different, hugely different – which I did not share. If Janet had been in the village, Dapene wouldn’t have had to tell her that the cloth, it knows.
Does the page also know?
When the writing goes well, as it has, largely, with this book, I think perhaps it does. But with the draft of the book I was still calling ‘the PNG book’ when Pauline and Dapene visited, the page seemed as unknowing as I was. Or else the book and its problems were trapped inside my head and there was no movement through the hand to the page. I was watching myself, the sternest of the critics, some kind of internal post-colonial border policewoman. How could I, a white woman, write of Melanesia without appropriating, or projecting, or sentimentalising, or mistranslating the un-translatable? If I wrote black characters would I get them wrong? If I didn’t, would I be rendering them part of an exotic background as colonial writers – and too many since – have done, ‘a distorting lens’ as the writer and critic Regis Stella has written, not only to the way Melanesians are understood by readers outside, but a distorting lens onto their own perceptions of themselves and their culture?69 Despite everything I’d learned through the lives of women, everything I’d written and stood for, when it came to the vexed issue of race and the legacy of a colonial order that had first been under the control of England, and then Australia, I’d boxed myself into the binary opposition of either/or – same or different, like or unlike, their culture or ours – shrinking the ground between.
Yet in the twenty-first century there are few of us, Papuan or Australian, tribal or globalised, who stand on just one ground. For Dapene in her sixties, who’d only twice been down to Popondetta, Sydney – with its escalators and obese people, its homeless men on the streets with no family, no village to go to – was incomprehensibly strange. From her point of view this world of ours was as ‘other’ – and a great deal more savage – than anything a resident of Sydney would encounter in Ömie. But it was not so strange for Alban, a younger man, who’d done several years of school in Popondetta and knew Port Moresby. He was an explorer, an anthropologist in our world, talking to the bus driver who took him round the bus at the end of the route (one stop from my house), accompanying the postman round the block, questioning everyone, taking dozens of photos with his digital camera. Pauline was somewhere in between. She didn’t like the shopping mall, but she liked the local hardware store, where she stocked up on scissors and wooden spoons to take back to her village.
On the first morning of filming for the NGV, I could see something was wrong. There we were at Annandale Galleries, Dapene and Pauline dressed in nioge and feathers, Alban in his headdress, everything in place, and yet every time Pauline’s cloth touched Dapene’s, Dapene would push her, and it, away. The cameraman wanted them to work closely together; he wanted their cloth to touch, to overlap, but Dapene wasn’t having it. When I called for a break, the cameraman – who was French and dramatic – wouldn’t hear of it. I tried again, with no success. Even David was waved aside. Dapene continued to pull her cloth away from Pauline, and when at last David insisted we stop and Pauline reluctantly stood up, it was clear what the pro
blem was. Her period had started. I took her downstairs to the bathroom, shot round to the chemist, and arrived back at the gallery to find Alban and Dapene adamant that Pauline must stay away from the barkcloth, and therefore from the filming. There was even a suggestion that any of the nioge on the wall that Pauline had touched, some with red stickers, some going to major galleries, should be taken down. I left that one to David and the curators – destruction was averted – and took Pauline to my house, where we could be secluded from men. We closed the door, turned on the heater and settled in. Dapene would return to sleep in David’s much larger house.
The next morning, while the filming was continuing at the gallery and I was expecting a quiet day of seclusion, Pauline asked if, instead of staying indoors, we could take a ferry out on the salt water. Sure, I said, but there’ll be men on it. She shrugged. Were there more pads? Would there be toilets? With the answer to both being yes, we took the ferry to Circular Quay and walked through the Botanic Gardens – relatively secluded, I thought – until we were hungry. When I suggested that we go home, she asked if we could stay in town, eat in a shop, look at the tall buildings. Sure, I said again; we were close to the art gallery, we could have lunch there, but there’d be men eating as well. She smiled. They don’t know, she said. And of course they didn’t. She was a sufficiently modern woman to judge that it was the sensitivities of men that caused the fear of contamination she already doubted. We had lunch in the café and then a long afternoon, much of it in the Indigenous gallery, where she was particularly interested in Kitty Kantilla, looking closely at the mark of her paint stick. At the Sydney Museum we stopped to see the pillars and poles that make up the courtyard sculpture of Fiona Foley and Janet Laurence’s Edge of the Trees. We walked around the poles, some made from sandstone, some from steel, some of grainy timber from a demolished colonial warehouse. Pauline put her hands on them, taking in their texture, walking slowly, feeling each one, stopping with her ear to the whispered sound of the Eora language that comes from a recording set into one of them. Twenty-nine poles. Twenty-nine clans of the Eora people. She liked that. Where are they now, these old people? Another hard question. Or perhaps not; all too simple with the city buildings rising above us. The analogy she drew was with the palm-oil plantations around Popondetta, the impoverished villages, lost land, people living on the edge of the town where rice and tinned fish were considered a feast. Ground. It was all a matter of ground.
The next day Pauline declared her period over and we returned to the gallery and the filming – to no ill effect. The only person who knew what was in the bag she carried was me; that day I was indeed sister-friend.
When the Ömie returned to their mountain, Jeremy and I went for a drink at the Dry Dock Hotel, where we’d had our first date. On the walls were pictures of the working dry dock that had once been across the road, with steep steps down to its base beneath the hulls of the cargo and navy ships, a nether region long gone. I liked those photos and always looked at them; how tidy our lives seemed in comparison, all that history concealed under a park for children to play and dogs to be walked. Jeremy and I were there that evening in an attempt to remind ourselves how we had come together, why it was that we were still, just, sleeping in the same bed. Not often, by then, but enough. And yes, we could connect to our shared England. We could reminisce about the journeys we still made together, our overlapping visits to London, the last one only nine months before, in the summer of 2008, when I was there to greet Amy’s first baby, my great-nephew Sam, the first of a new generation. A glorious, milky moment. Jeremy had joined us for a family holiday at a cousin’s rambling house in the hills behind the coast in the south of France. We had a large, slightly sagging bed overlooking hills covered with olive trees. It was Jeremy who looked on the map and saw that we were not far from where Stella Bowen had visited and painted in the 1920s while still in love with Ford Madox Ford. ‘A landscape full of little, separate accents,’ she wrote in her memoir, with a dry light ‘which hits the ground and reflects upwards, to fill the shadows with a bubble-like iridescence.’70 Stella had caught a tram to shop at the Nice markets. At the end of our family holiday, we drove to Nice along the motorway that skirts the coast with buildings as ugly as any you’ll see in Australia swamping once-small towns. When my family returned to England, Jeremy and I took the train to Genoa, and then to Florence, enjoying each other again, and no, it didn’t matter that I didn’t get up at dawn when he went off to walk the city streets before the crowds. He’d arrive back at our room with the Herald Tribune and we’d go to the place he’d found for breakfast. At the Dry Dock with the racing on the TV screens beside the bar, we could see ourselves in that café in Florence, and in the room in the quirky hotel he’d found, but it was like a film, with little to do with our life shared between two houses up the hill from the pub.
Even that reconciliatory night, we tumbled back into the bitter argument that had arisen between us. No, I couldn’t give up the ground of my writing life; and anyway I was far from convinced that even if I could, and did, it would change anything. It was magical thinking, I’d say, as if I could wave a wand and become a fairy godmother. And there was the question hovering: would it have been different if I’d had children of my own? If I’d been a mother? It was a line of thinking that made me angry – and also defensive, touching as it did that deep-seated cultural notion that a woman who does not have children is lesser, missing something. When the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend had rung some years before to ask me to contribute to a feature called ‘Childless by Choice’, telling me who else was contributing – all women, of course – I’d asked whether he’d thought of inviting some men writers, like David Malouf, perhaps, or David Marr? That’d be radical, I said. He laughed, nicely enough, as if I hadn’t grasped the nature of the issue.71 I rest my case. But I wrote for the column, making the point – as I have so many times in interviews ostensibly about writing and books which inevitably segue to this question – that not being a mother does not leave a woman without close relationships with younger generations. In a world as complex as ours, for a child to have someone else on their side in addition to their parents can often be a benefit, especially, perhaps, someone without their own competing children. It was for me growing up, with Poppy’s friend Gillian a confidante and rock-solid support during my difficult teen years. Poppy said I’d have made an awful mother, and she was probably right. I’m glad I wasn’t tested on it. Given the circumstances of my fortieth birthday I can’t say it was entirely a choice. But for me, as for many other women, it was right. I do not apologise for it. I love being an aunt, I wrote for the Good Weekend, and my life would be unimaginably lesser without Amy and Martha, without Obelia. Jeremy said the article proved his point that I favoured the girls and was tough on boys. What about Oliver? I asked, holding up two fingers close together. We’re like this. That’s because you gang up on us, Jeremy said. On him and his younger son, who was so often living at home, tough for both of them.
Being an aunt, or an aunt figure, is an entirely different matter from the relationship a woman is thrown into with the children of a partner. As an aunt, one is in addition to parents, a rather glorious supplement where there need be no divided loyalty. But that is far from the situation a stepmother finds herself in, caught, often, between the guilt of the father for being divorced in the first place, and the anger of the child, whose hope that the parents’ marriage will be restored is dashed by the presence of this new woman. Accept her and it is a strike against the mother, which only serves to triangulate the situation further. While the child may be far from wanting another mother, the father often enough wants a mother figure to ease what is not easy and shield him from the discomfort of conflict and guilt. I’m not saying it’s always a disaster, for clearly it is not; but I am saying it is structurally difficult. Those who find their way through to an inclusive ease should be saluted. Those who do not, or cannot, should not immediately be blamed. The evil stepmother is
a trope of myth and fairytale, deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness. And it’s not made any easier when the resentment can so readily run the other way. When an adult child who’s out for the first time in weeks comes home unexpectedly, just as the candle has been lit, the wine opened, and turns on the light asking, What’s for dinner? do you say, as Jeremy would, Get yourself a plate. Or do you say, as I would want to, but almost certainly wouldn’t, Why don’t you go and get a pizza? A bad atmosphere; a night slept back to back. In such a situation, it is not a matter simply of who is at fault but something much larger and more difficult.
How easily small incidents return when resentments build. I don’t recall how we reproached each other at the Dry Dock that night, only that we wrangled until the wrangle lost its energy and we eased up on each other, had a meal and talked of other things. We walked to my house, arms together. I made a pot of tea, Jeremy had another glass of wine, amiable again, but as we got ready for bed the argument rekindled. Why did he always have to sleep in my bed? he asked. When was the last time I’d slept in his? When was the last time you washed your sheets? I countered. And so it went, until he put his shoes back on, his jacket, and walked home.
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