by Susan Duncan
The front page begins:
INVENTORY AND VALUATION
(For Insurance Purposes)
of
HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE
APPOINTMENTS AND EFFECTS
Contained throughout the residence
'TARRANGURA'
LOVETT-BAY
VIA CHURCH POINT
The property of
MISS DOROTHEA MACKELLAR
Under instructions from
THE TRUSTEES EXECUTORS & AGENCY COMPANY
LIMITED, 1
BLIGH STREET. SYDNEY
JAMES R. LAWSON PTY LTD
Valuers and Licensed Auctioneers
234/6 CASTLEREAGH STREET
SYDNEY
9th June, 1953
It is typed on an old Remington in the Times New Roman typeface, the kind I used when I was a cadet journalist on the Sun News Pictorial in Melbourne. The machines were heavy and black with round keys rimmed in cool steel. Words always came out mottled because the ribbon was used over and over and wore out unevenly.
The paper carriage, when you flicked the steel arm at the end, slid back with a satisfying thump followed by the sound of a bell. Thump! Ping! Thump! Ping! Two more lines done. One paragraph per sheet. And a final full stop banged with such relief it punched a hole in the paper big enough to let daylight through. Then all the pages of a story were clipped together loosely enough to fan and slipped into the copy box. From there, it took on a life of its own. Corrected, subbed, given a headline, typeset . . . until the words came fully alive on the page of the newspaper the next day. Printed and therefore part of posterity. I had no idea, then, of the responsibility of it all – how much trust is involved when someone gives you his or her life story.
The name of the house is spelled wrongly – 'Tarrangura' – on the inventory and valuation document. The typist was probably unable to read the handwritten notes of the valuer who also signed it. His writing is almost illegible, if his signature is anything to go by. And Lovett Bay has been given a hyphen, Lovett-Bay, perhaps to make it sound grandiose. People were big on hyphens, and grandiosity in general, in the fifties.
The list begins with the Living Room. In a quiet way, it reveals much about the poet. There is a 'Library of General Literature comprising some 500 Volumes', valued at a whopping two hundred pounds. A 'Mah Jong set in Blackwood Case' (eight pounds). A 'Fumed Oak Small Writing Desk fitted 1 Drawer' (four pounds). 'A Remington No. 10" Standard Typewriter' (seventeen pounds ten shillings). There was an ' "Orchestrola" Cabinet Talking Machine and Quantity Classical Records' (fifteen pounds), too, as well as dining chairs, a 'Brazillian [sic] Rosewood Circular Dining Table with Pillar Support and Shaped Base with Carved Lion Paw Feet' (thirty-one pounds) and various chairs, blue willow pattern china, electroplated silver trays and two Australian cigarette boxes.
Books, clearly, were a passion. Adrienne, the Buddhist nun, told me Mackellar once tried to give her a complete, signed set of Joseph Conrad's work. 'I was touched by the offer but I turned it down,' Adrienne said. 'Taking gifts from vulnerable people is somehow ghoulish. I wanted no part of it.'
I told her, then, about another of George Bennett's stories.
'After Miss Mackellar died,' he said, 'the trustees for the estate hired about ten schoolkids to pack up the house. Cheap labour, I suppose. But they had no idea what they were doing and were rough as guts. Threw stuff into tea-chests, breaking the spines of books and tearing pages. They had a bonfire going, too, near where the generator was kept at the back of the house. They burned photographs without understanding they were part of history. Her papers, too. It's impossible to guess what went up in smoke. Nothing personal seemed to have any value to them. Only crockery, silver, paintings and ornaments. All the furniture was left in the house, though. Probably because it was too difficult to carry down the hill to a barge. It was auctioned with the house.
'Those books were precious, you know. They were first editions, signed by the authors. All with a bookplate on the front page. "Dorothea Mackellar", it said. So you always knew where to return a book. It broke my heart to see them ruined. Books were so expensive.'
'Why didn't you rescue some of them?' I asked. Because I knew if I'd been there, I would have grabbed the lot without the slightest qualm.
'Oh no,' he replied, quite shocked. 'That would have been stealing.'
'You could have asked if you could have them,' I said, still upset at the waste.
'Things have to be given, not asked for or taken,' he insisted, as if there could be no other way.
Then he told me that 'Miss Mackellar' often cooked a pot of soup or stew for the doctor who lived down the hill, carrying it to him in her finest blue and white china tureens.
'Dr Fraser, that was his name, well, he never returned a dish or even a plate,' George said, as though it was a form of theft.
'Legend has it that he was in love with her.'
'It was the other way around, if you ask me. But he wasn't interested.'
His wife, Thelma, disappeared into another room for a few minutes and returned carrying a small stack of thick, mildewed parchment tied together with black cotton tape threaded through roughly punched holes.
CALENDAR
For
1927
For Doctor Fraser
From Dorothea Mackellar.
There were five neatly typed pages in red and black ink with the days of the month and a collection of sayings that began in January with:' "True happiness never flows into a man but always out of him. Heaven itself is more internal than external." NEWMAN'
' "Love is the net of truth,"' Mackellar typed for February. ' "Love is the noose of God." Arabian Proverb.'
Like a child's school project, there were cut-out pictures of ancient Greek and Roman statues and marble reliefs stuck on every page.
'All fairly deep and gloomy stuff,' I suggested to George and Thelma as I read more sayings from Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Florence Nightingale, Shelley and Walt Whitman. 'How did you come by it?'
'It was left in the doctor's house along with the crockery after he retired and stopped coming to Lovett Bay,' George explained.
'What made you keep it?' I asked, curious, because it had no real value.
'I took care of the house and property for Miss Mackellar after she was too old and ill to spend much time at Lovett Bay. So it was a link with the past.'
When I told Adrienne the story about the reckless damage of valuable books a few years later, a tear trickled down her pale cheek. 'Oh, how I wish I'd accepted the gift. First edition Conrads. Signed. Gifted to Dorothea Mackellar. A part of history.'
'Do you know why Conrad gave her the books?'
'They were friends,' Adrienne explained. 'Good friends. She spent a lot of time with him and his wife when she visited England. Miss Mackellar had a way with older men, I think. They liked her mind and her conversation. She didn't play flirty games with them. Which would have appealed to someone like Conrad. They had Australia in common, too. Conrad came here many times when he belonged to the British Merchant Navy.'
And passion, I think. Conrad wrote about emotion until you felt the words in your heart. Mackellar channelled her passion into poetry, the only option for a woman who was closely chaperoned until she reached her thirties.
I flick through the rest of the inventory and stop at the contents for bedroom number one – her bedroom, which is where Bob and I now sleep. I read the list closely, intrigued, unable to stop myself from comparing now and then.
BEDROOM NO. 1
Pair Cotton Curtains and Fittings 1. 10. 0
Mirzapore Handwoven Carpet Square, about 9' × 7'6 12. 10. 0
Walnut Oval Chess Top Table on Tripod Legs with Plate Glass Overtop 7. 7. 0
Pine Towel Rail and China Slop Bucket 1. 12. 6
Camphorwood Chest with Lift Top and Brass Handles 10. 10. 0
Rectangular Wall Mirror in English Lacquer Frame, decorated in the Chinese Taste 7. 10. 0
Camphorwo
od portable Chest with Escritoire and 4 drawers 30. 0. 0
Lacquer Small Tea Caddy 2. 12. 6
Pottery Jug Shape Vase and Pottery Jug and Basin 2. 0. 0
Walnut Finish Rocking Chair and Bedroom Chair with Cane Seats 5. 0. 0
Victorian Dressing Table in Mahogany with Oval Swing Mirror and Drawer to Frieze 21. 0. 0
Carlton Ware Covered Box, Silver Photo Frame and Hand Mirror 2. 15. 0
Walnut Davenport Writing Desk with Slope Top and Under Platforms 10. 10. 0
Engraving 'The Reading Magdalan' 2. 2. 0
Water Colour 'Trees' by Enid Cambridge 8. 8. 0
Lithograph 'Shags' by A.B. Webb 1. 11. 6
Coloured Aquatint Cloud Study 1. 11. 6
Large Coloured Print 'The Birth of Venus' 4. 4. 0
Coloured Print 'The Angel' 2. 2. 0
So much is essentially the same as it is now. Chairs, paintings, carpets, cotton curtains. Then it strikes me. There's no bed. And only one set of curtains in a two-window room.
'Which bedroom would you think of as number one?' I ask Bob when we're sitting down to dinner. Outside the evening is black. The wind still gusts in short, sharp bursts, growing stronger. It will be a fierce night.
'Ours,' he replies without hesitation.
Can't be, I think. 'Nope!'
The fire flickers, alive and warm. Wood fizzes tunelessly with burning sap. Norah Jones sings hauntingly, asking us to come away with her. There's a pot of lamb stew on the table, made with cinnamon, cloves and tomato. Dried figs on top. Quince works well, too.
'So why don't you think our bedroom is number one?' he asks, sipping a glass of red wine.
'Because bedroom number one has two windows and there is only one set of curtains listed on the inventory. It must be the room at the kitchen end of the house.'
'Do you want to put money on it?'
I am suddenly wary. Bob never bets unless he knows the outcome. I've missed something. Would Mackellar have put curtains on one window and not on another? Unlikely.
'I only bet on horses,' I reply primly.
'So what's really the secret with the bedroom?' I ask Bob grumpily over morning tea the next day. 'How come you're so sure it's bedroom number one?'
'Still don't want to put money on it?'
'You're too strutty. You know something.'
He picks up his tea, takes my hand and leads me along the hallway.
Inside the bedroom, he puts down his mug and opens the wardrobe door on the right side – my side – and slides my untidily hung clothes tightly to one end. Inside, in huge blue lettering on panels of wood, the carpenter has written: 'Return to cupboard in bedroom number one'. The carpenter's name is there too: 'J.G. Taylor, Lovett's Wharf Pittwater'. I must look in that cupboard almost every day, searching for a shirt, jacket, trousers. And yet I've never noticed the large, looping handwriting.
'Ok, right. But! How come there's no bed on the inventory?'
'Beats me,' he shrugs, grabbing his tea and walking back to the kitchen.
'That's it, beats me? Nothing else to add, Einstein?' For some reason, I'm cranky. Not noticing details until it's too late is an old, bad habit of mine.
In the kitchen, I remind him about the missing set of curtains. He takes my hand again, saying nothing. We go into the courtyard at the back of the house, stepping around little hills of spongy green moss that creep along the flagstones like a living carpet.
'Barbara's camellia pots need turning,' I point out as we pass them. On the side where the sun doesn't reach, the branches are almost bare.
'Have to move them soon, anyway. Getting too big to fit under the eaves,' Bob says.
We round the corner where the old water tank used to be, and stand back to study the wall.
'See that?' He points at brickwork that is different from the rest, smoother and more lightly rendered. 'This whole area has been altered at some time. Perhaps the only window here in Mackellar's day belonged to the bathroom. When the bathroom was eventually split in two to make an ensuite, the original window was bricked in. A new bathroom window was built closer to the corner of the wall, leaving space for a second to be added to the bedroom. And that,' he finishes, 'is the best I can do?' He says it like a fanfare after a drum roll.
'Did you study every inch of this house when you bought it?'
'Just about.'
'Why?'
'Barbara wanted to know all the details so she could record them. It was her passion, really. She had me under the house, on the roof, scratching around the bush. To her, it was history. And she didn't want it to be lost.'
'Do you think anyone but us will ever care?'
'What does it matter?'
It does matter, I think, because when the past is destroyed, knowledge disappears with it and then we're free to invent anything that suits us. Regardless of the facts. When, later, we get a leak in the bathroom wall it bleeds through into the bedroom closet, rotting the panel with the carpenter's name on it. Bob fixes the leak and replaces the timber. And a small piece of history is gone in a flash. Never, ever to be restored.
***
Bob uses bedroom number two as his office. The closet is full of stationery, boxes of files, a couple of wet-weather jackets hanging neatly. The furniture – bookcases, a long narrow table he uses as a desk, a battered Chinese sideboard – is a mishmash of shelving and timberwork that fulfil a purpose, regardless of how it looks. With Bob, function comes first.
On the walls he has an aerial photograph of Lovett Bay taken after the 1994 fires changed the landscape forever, and some old, slightly rude pen-and-ink drawings of New York City I'd stored for years. Would Mackellar be shocked by images of breasts, bodies and penises amongst the skyscrapers?
Mackellar had opulent, silver and blue tapestry curtains and Mirzapore rugs in this room. What would it cost today, for a handwoven Mirzapore rug? Where's Mirzapore anyway? India, probably, but I look it up on the internet. Bengal, India, on the west bank of the Houghly River. But there's nothing about carpets. What does a Mirzapore carpet look like? I ring the Mona Vale Library. They're amazingly kind and helpful but can't find any references beyond the name of a town. I call a rug dealer. 'Maybe,' she says, 'you'll find it in a book about dhurries.' Her words open a new door and in the end the Mona Vale Library finds a rare book in the Sydney Library and arranges a loan although I am not allowed to remove it from the building. It reveals a family fled Iran for undisclosed reasons and settled in Mirzapore in the early 1800s. To earn a living, they began making carpets in traditional Persian designs.
Much later, visiting Pia again, I wander into a rug shop in Bangalow and ask the owner, Milton Cater, if he knows anything about them.
'Yes, of course,' he says, correcting my pronunciation (Meerzapore, not Murzapore). 'It was part of British India, then. Carpets from that area sort of took over from Axminster. They were mass-produced for the middle-classes. Like Ikea. Now the area is known as Bhadohi and there's a booming carpet industry there.'
'Blue and gold?' I ask.
'Known for red carpets back then, actually. With a bit of gold. Blue would have been unusual.'
'Thanks,' I tell him.
'Happy to help. You've got to keep contributing to knowledge. That's what life's all about.'
I add: 'It's stupid, really, but I assumed that the rugs would be rare because the woman who owned the house was enormously wealthy.'
'Yeah, lots of people make that mistake. That's why knowledge saves you.'
In Mackellar's day, bedroom number two also had a linen press, washstand, a couple of small tables and chairs, and a bed with a wire base and kapok mattress and pillows. Knick-knacks included an iron candlestick, a pair of 'art' plastic bookends and a copper inkstand. The mention of 'kapok bedding' brings back memories of holidays with my grandmother. Bedding so soft it felt like floating on clouds. Horsehair mattresses, too. Warmer, on wintry nights in country Victoria than any electric blanket.
A copper inkstand. I count the years si
nce I sat at a wooden desk with a white pottery inkwell nestled in a hole in one corner, in a little state school at Bonegilla Migrant Camp . . . nearly fifty! Half a century! And yet I can still remember the tinny smell of the ink, and going home with stained fingers. I remember, too, when a new, royal blue ink replaced the old greenish-black and it seemed so beautiful we kids fought over it because there wasn't enough to go around.
We sang 'God Save the Queen' with our right hands over our heart every Monday morning in those days. I adored our teacher, whose name I cannot bring to mind, although I recall she had beautiful long blonde hair and wore very bright red lipstick and fluffy sweaters. And she was incredibly kind. Sometimes, I would knock on the door of her hut after school and she'd let me in for a while. She'd cook frankfurts on a bar radiator and we'd slam them between two slices of bread with a bucket of tomato sauce. Then she'd walk me home.
After a year, she married one of the ex-army blokes and moved into a hut a stone's throw from ours.
'She'll be so close, Mum,' I said, happily.
'You're not to go over there,' my mother instructed me. 'She's newly married.'
Unable to understand what marriage had to do with anything, I ignored my mother and knocked on the door three or four times a day after school, and on Saturdays and Sundays. Until she got completely exasperated one afternoon and told me firmly to go home immediately! I felt utterly betrayed and abandoned.
'You'll understand one day,' my mother told me. 'Nobody loves a pest.'
Which didn't help the hurt at all.
***
There are now two bathrooms, instead of one, in Tarrangaua. The smaller of them connects to the main bedroom. The third owner of the house, Eric Sime, an architect, told us he rebuilt one of the hallway cupboards so he could find space for the second bathroom. Originally, he said, each end of the hallway had mirror-image cupboards.
The kitchen is located at the western end of the house. It is an L-shaped room with three tall, paned windows overlooking Lovett Bay. Now, it's painted pale green with white wall tiles and a white ceiling. A faux Tiffany lamp hangs from the ceiling in green, pink and red and a glass-paned door leads onto the verandah where we keep a table and some comfy old cane chairs.