by Helen Trinca
The Octopus struck back, making a pact to write regularly for each other and to swap their pieces for peer review. It was a short-lived experiment that included a joint poem, one line each. But the girls took their studies seriously. They didn’t skip lectures. Sue remembered regular meetings in each other’s homes to talk about their academic work.11
But for both sexes, university was life-changing. Mungo found university liberating. ‘It didn’t matter which schools you had been to, whether you had been a prefect or not,’ he recalled.12 Richard Walsh and his friend Peter Grose, later a journalist, advertising executive, publisher and writer, also signed up for Honi Soit, gathering their courage and bursting into the office to offer their services. ‘It seemed like a citadel,’ Richard recalled. He and Peter were allowed to stay, working alongside the Octopus girls who had signed up as subs. ‘It was fabulous, we went to Honi Soit every day. It was a great thing to do—and of course it was good to be with the girls.’13
Madeleine found university more inclusive than Queenwood. ‘This is what it is all about,’ she told Jonette Jarvis when the younger girl attended a SUDS performance. ‘Don’t worry if you don’t fit in at school, you will fit in here.’14
There was no bar on campus so the Honi set drank at the Forest Lodge pub on the other side of Parramatta Road, where Clive James held court at his own table. Sue McGowan was stunned one day when he announced: ‘What is meant by the word, intellectuals? It’s us!’15
At the Forest Lodge, the young men and women plotted the next theatrical production and worked out where the party would be on Saturday night. They discovered Vadim’s, just off the main strip of Kings Cross, virtually the only late-night eating spot in Sydney. They drank wine from teapots to avoid the police and gawked at the city’s intellectual class, among them Harry Kippax, the legendary theatre critic from the Sydney Morning Herald, who would repair there as the curtain came down to write his review in leisurely fashion, calling it in to the copytakers for the morning edition.
Madeleine and her friends spent hours in Manning House, drinking bad coffee and styling themselves as pre-Raphaelites. They were mad about Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde and they didn’t mind being labelled beatniks. Madeleine was becoming confident in her new style and identity. One day, in the city, she ran into former Queenwood classmate Angela Wills. Angela was dressed for the office while Madeleine was sporting a dark dirndl skirt, black stockings and an oversized black jumper. She was off to a coffee shop in Rowe Street, a popular 1950s Sydney laneway that offered a taste of the alternative life.16
Sometimes the men circled the women at Manning House in the mating rituals of the time, often more in hope than deed. ‘A great many of us were from single-sex schools and the reason why we could not sleep with the girls was not the lack of the pill but inexperience,’ Mungo said. ‘There was no great women’s lib push, but it would be unfair to say they were regarded as nothing more than objects of seduction.’17
In 1959, the Octopus girls were still only seventeen—this was before New South Wales added an extra year of high school. While some were keen to lose their virginity, they lived at a time when it was difficult to avoid pregnancy. You had to know which doctor would prescribe the pill or you risked a shotgun wedding, adoption or a dangerous illegal abortion. Keeping a child as a single mother was almost unheard of.
Winton Higgins, later a lawyer and academic, was one of Madeleine’s best friends. Their relationship was platonic but Madeleine’s intellect and personality thrilled Higgins. He had known few girls growing up. To Winton, Madeleine, with her French background, love of literature and individual style, represented ‘Life with a capital L’.18
The freshers watched French movies and competed to recommend the latest novel. In this febrile atmosphere, Madeleine was intellectually able, but she was overlooked by the leading men on campus. Clive James recalled those days: ‘I had absolutely no idea she was such a writing talent…she was a writer, a real one. But at that stage she hadn’t written anything, so perhaps we can forgive ourselves for not spotting that there was a genius in our midst.’19 Bruce Beresford was a close friend in later years, but in 1959 he didn’t pay her much attention. Like almost everyone else, he was in love with Danne Emerson.
Danne was the adored beauty from a Catholic girls’ school let loose, first on the Newman Society on campus and then later on the Honi Soit set. Tall and beautiful with a natural sexual magnetism, Danne could easily have been the model for Gillian Selkirk, the mistress in Madeleine’s 1996 novel, A Pure Clear Light. Among those who longed for her that year was a young Bob Ellis. Much later, he would write that she was ‘beautiful, blonde, international, proud and doomed’.20
Madeleine, known now as Maddy, may have been somewhat less sought after, but Richard Walsh noted her high sexual energy.21 She had a crush on Chester and later on Charles Manning, a close friend of Colleen. And she made no secret of her determination to ‘have sex’.22
But it was on stage that Madeleine shone, surprising everyone by being cast in a lead role in the University Revue in May. The show was called Dead Centre, with skits by Clive James among others, and Madeleine’s appearance as Lolita in ‘The True Story of Lolita Montez’, a piece written by Chester and John (later Katherine) Cummings, became part of Octopus lore.23
Madeleine was not the only Octopus member who made it into the revue that year. It was unheard of for freshers to get parts, yet in 1959 Marilyn Taylor was also in the show, appearing in four different guises. Marilyn had arrived on campus with the express purpose of joining SUDS and becoming an actor. Colleen Olliffe had nursed a similar ambition and would later score serious acting parts on campus. Some of the Octopus members toiled behind the scenes for Dead Centre. Libby Smith did costumes; Sue McGowan was on makeup. Madeleine was not a natural actor, although she had inherited the St John gift of mimicry. But she saw herself as something of a femme fatale, even if she was buried in a duffel jacket and oversized jumpers. The role of Lolita Montez appealed to those fantasies, and she adored the vintage dress she wore on stage. She also appeared as Nancy Mitford in another skit and as a shopper in a third. Madeleine was doing well.
In September of that first year, most of the Octopus were involved in Victoriana, the music-hall-style entertainment organised by Pam Threthowan. Pam had brought the idea with her from the UK and produced it as a SUDS fundraiser in 1959. It eventually spread off campus to the North Shore and the city. Maddy, Colleen, Marilyn and Sue as well as Helen Goldstein, Libby Smith and Judy MacGregor-Smith, who were also Octopus members, were all part of the scene.24
Libby spent her fresher year boarding at a Salvation Army hostel in South Dowling Street, Surry Hills, and Madeleine took her under her wing. ‘She was very generous and kind,’ Libby recalled. ‘She had a strong impact on my life. Everyone else was city and I was country. I had never been exposed to the plummy accents, the domestic standards.’25 Madeleine saw herself as Libby’s teacher and guide, intent on schooling her in the right style, the right food, and the right table settings. The kindness was real, but Madeleine was also tricky. As the Octopus girls spread out on the tables in the Manning House cafe, Madeleine occasionally sighed: ‘I like Colleen and Libby best because they are always the nicest to me.’26
At the end of first year, Libby and Jane Iliff gravitated to the more political group, the Sydney Push. Madeleine was more cautious. Years later she wrote to her cousin, Antony Minchin:
Oh, and, The Push. Oh God, the big P. I used to get glimpses of them around Syd Univ; they scared the wits out of me, with their combination of Total Self-Assurance verging on love, & air of being thoroughly unwashed, not to say Filthy & basic thoroughgoing cynicism I can see that the whole package would’ve been irresistible to a girl with a bit of Spirit but I, e.g. wasn’t.27
Libby soon had a boyfriend, Albie Thoms, who would go on to become a radical filmmaker. And Jane horrified her parents by moving in with her boyfriend. Madeleine’s gang was branching out and she was being left behi
nd. Marilyn knew that Maddy, despite her social self-confidence and outspoken manner, was sometimes unhappy about not being pretty and not having a boyfriend. Clive James recalled that she ‘wasn’t your average soubrette…She wore a lot of psychic armour, obviously feeling she was being got at’.28 By then her circle knew about her ‘wicked stepmother’ and the mother whom she idealised. Madeleine’s story of abandonment and loss set her apart. It became her calling card and invariably engendered sympathy. No one who met her throughout her adult years was left in doubt about the childhood trauma she had suffered.
Madeleine was still under her father’s financial control, but she was trying to carve out a life separate from Ted and Val and Colette. During the swot vac before the university exams, Madeleine chose not to study at home. Instead she joined other Octopus girls in a house at Avalon on Sydney’s northern beaches, enjoying a holiday atmosphere as they revised their first year of university work. When the exams were over, the Octopus joined Mungo MacCallum and others in an Angry Penguins–style prank in the Australian Women’s Weekly, posing as members of the ‘Students’ Progress Association’ who were ‘proud to be squares’. Madeleine smiled coyly for the camera, along with her friends.29
In February the following year they were back on campus. The Sydney Morning Herald published a series of photos about events being held at the university for Orientation Week. There they all are, with the assurance of students heading into second year—Madeleine and Marilyn and Jane and Sue and Helen dutifully helping Clive James prepare a special issue of Honi Soit for a new group of freshers.30
Late in her life, Madeleine was bitter about her university experience. She said she had arrived on campus thinking it was an institution devoted to the truth but had been badly let down.31 She overlooked the happy times on stage or gathered around the tables in Manning House. Friends’ recollections show a more complex and varied experience.
Madeleine’s novels do not touch on campus life, and in 2004 when she recorded several hours of tape about these early years she scarcely mentioned her time at Sydney University. She forgot the joy of that first, brilliant year when she threw off her duffel coat and took to the boards as Lolita Montez.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Adrift in Castlecrag
By early 1960, Ted and Val were living in their dream home overlooking magnificent Chowder Bay on Sydney Harbour. They took out a hefty mortgage to pay the £16,000 for Vino del Mar, a Spanish mission-style mansion built in 1936 for a Swedish sea captain.1 Designed by the Sydney architect Alan Stafford after he returned to Australia from California, 30a Morella Road, Clifton Gardens, had a touch of Beverly Hills glamour, with its high ceilings, heavy timber work, wrought-iron chandeliers, stone-flagged terrace and manicured gardens running down to the harbour. There was even a maid’s quarters at the back. The craftsmanship was superb, but it was a derivative building, light years away from the innovation that drove design at Castlecrag.
Moving to Clifton Gardens drew a line under Ted’s first marriage and family. Val had suffered three miscarriages since Oliver’s birth, but was now pregnant with the couple’s second child, Edward, who would be born in September. And there would be a third son, Patrick, in 1963. Ted’s second family would grow up in Vino del Mar, but he gave Madeleine, aged just eighteen, her marching orders at the end of 1959, not long after her first-year university exams.2 He felt he had no choice given the tensions between Madeleine and Val. He offered Madeleine a regular allowance to live away from home, but Madeleine was distraught; once again she believed her father was rejecting her. She and Tina Date had composed a ditty:
We’re moving our house of strife
To Mosman to start a new life
I’ll drown Madeleine as soon as I can
And kill off Colette with a knife.3
Now it was coming true. Madeleine dashed out of the Balmoral flat and ran through the dark to Pom Jarvis. She lacked the confidence to search for digs in Sydney. She was witty, not worldly—in her own words nothing less than a ‘blithering idiot’.4 Madeleine was unhappy at home and she wanted new experiences, but the outside world filled her with trepidation. Later, when Pom tackled Val and Ted about the decision, Val replied, ‘That girl made me lose three babies.’5
Madeleine turned to Edmund and Lorna Harvey in Castlecrag. Lorna wanted to help but had two teenage children and could not see her way clear to taking Madeleine in.6 Friedel Souhami came to the rescue. Her husband had recently died and her only child Renate had left home. Friedel welcomed the company and she was happy to do Ted a favour by looking out for his daughter. She still felt a little guilty that on the night before Sylvette died she had not responded to her invitation to call by.
Madeleine moved back to a suburb filled with memories and a secure group of adults whom she had known since her childhood. It was a family of sorts, and she found support again from older women—Pom, Lorna, Friedel, and her aunts Margaret Minchin and Pat Buckeridge, who lived just streets away. The Souhami house at 14 The Parapet delighted Madeleine. It was built from sandstone that had been quarried in the area. Inside, a huge fireplace dominated the living area and the Bauhaus furniture that the Souhamis had brought with them from Europe before the war looked perfect.
Friedel was excellent company for a young woman: she spoke openly of contraception and sex, and her independence impressed Madeleine and the friends she sometimes brought home from university. When Libby Smith visited she was struck by Friedel’s strength: the older German woman was a powerful role model for the wide-eyed teenager.7 Friedel was a good cook—her Russian Salad was renowned throughout the Crag. ‘For thirty people’, the handwritten recipe went, ‘take sixteen pieces of potato, eight pieces of beetroot, six herring, four apples…’ Four nights a week, Friedel was home late from her job at the Berlitz language school and Madeleine went over to the Harveys’ to watch television with Didy and Antony.
Madeleine spoke openly to friends about her sense of rejection. Winton Higgins was sure that Ted was paying her to stay away.8 But Madeleine still visited Ted and Val at Clifton Gardens and enjoyed being part of an extended and privileged family that was listed in Debrett’s. She seemed immensely proud of being the daughter of a barrister, while still dismissing her stepmother.
Left at home in Clifton Gardens, fifteen-year-old Colette began to clash badly with her father. Ted had directed most of his anger at Madeleine, but now he turned to Colette, who found his wrath ‘crashing down’ on her. Colette was upset at the transformation in her father. Ted had been different before Sylvette’s death—he was warm and playful. ‘The local children used to jump on his stomach; he used to give us aeroplane rides,’ she recalled. Now he was severe: ‘What’s your grievance, girl?’ ‘Where’s your gratitude, girl?’ ‘Look me in the eye, girl!’ Colette dreamed of dying her hair red and escaping to a country town and a job at Woolworths.9
Ted and Val held regular play readings in the house where the raised entrance hall and sunken living room created a stage and auditorium. Ted was passionate about literature and the arts and had loved being around artists at Merioola and Castlecrag. Clifton Gardens was far from bohemian, and the play readings were an effort to pursue those interests in a more suburban setting. Ted was thrilled by classical music, turning it up to full volume at weekends.10
Sometimes Madeleine used Vino del Mar for an evening of the occult with the Octopus girls. Val and Ted welcomed the group but left them alone to experiment with contacting the supernatural using a Ouija board.11
On campus, the Octopus girls had a lot of fun. In May 1960, Madeleine performed in Armand Salacrou’s The Plate Breaker. Richard Wherrett, who would go on to be the founding director of the Sydney Theatre Company, played the stagehand. In July and August, Madeleine had a role when the other campus theatre group, the Players, staged the e. e. cummings surrealist play him, directed by Ken Horler, another student who would go on to be an important director. Colleen Olliffe featured alongside John Bell; Sue McGowan was on makeup; Richard Wal
sh was business manager.12 Madeleine demonstrated strong physical presence on stage: in one role she had to stand and do nothing. A reviewer noted that she did so with verve and aplomb!13
Madeleine was acquiring some notoriety, swanning into lectures draped in layers of clothing and wearing oversized sunglasses. One day she took on Gerry Wilkes, the colourful professor of English who had a strong following among the undergraduates. They enjoyed his lectures, which were punctuated by quotes from poems such as Louis MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’:
It’s no go the Yogi-Man, it’s no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.14
But this day, it was Madeleine who received the plaudits. She arrived late and was ordered out by an angry Wilkes. She refused to leave. He insisted, then slowly left the podium and walked up the stairs as if to remove her physically from her seat. There were howls of disapproval and Wilkes was left looking foolish as Madeleine held her ground.
By now some of the Octopus girls were going their separate ways. Sue McGowan and Mungo MacCallum were lovers, and Danne Emerson and Bruce Beresford were among the most glamorous of the couples on campus. Madeleine was ready for a boyfriend. And he came in the shape of Christopher Tillam, a second-year student who lived at St Paul’s College. Chris had noticed Madeleine around campus even though the ‘Paulines’ traditionally held themselves slightly apart.
It was at a party in the Vaucluse flat of John Fenton-Smith that the arty mob from SUDS and Honi Soit encountered the St Paul’s men. It was the end of 1960, just after exams. Madeleine, at close quarters, was intense: Chris recalled much later that she had been a ‘fierce kisser’ that night. Madeleine knew Chris had a girlfriend but, as the party ended, she announced, ‘I’ll be your holiday girl.’ Within days, she had arranged to meet Chris again, inviting him to her Cargher grandparents’ flat, which was close to where he was staying with his mother for the university break.