Art & Life

Philip Jones

Art & Life

Philip Jo n e s

Art & Life

A S u e H i n e s B o ok

A l l e n & U n w in

Dedicated to Bruce Grant and Joan Grant b o t h s e p a r a t e l y a n d t o g e t h e r. A n d t o A F.

First published in 2004 Copyright text © Philip Jones 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given remuneration to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. A Sue Hines Book Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication entry: Jones, Philip, 1932– . Art & life. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 1 74114 003 X. 1. Jones, Philip, 1932– . 2. Jones, Philip, 1932– – Friends and associates. 3. Artists – Victoria – Biography. 4. Artists, Australian – 20th century – Biography. I. Title. 709.2 This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Designed & typeset by Ruth Grüner Edited by Caroline Williamson Index by Fay Donlevy Printed in Australia by Ligare 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents

ONE

They Call It History 1

The Beautiful Surprising Years 8

TWO

Small Stamps of Memory 32

THREE

My Hyperbolic Heart 49

FOUR

Endless Beautiful Memory 52

FIVE

Clean Articulate Love 59

six

We Are Making Country 66

seven eight

The Other Side of the Sky 78

nine

When Promises Were Kept 88

ten eleven twelve

Part of the Game 104

The Cold Mirror Between 123 Frail Colours, Brave Promises 148

thirteen

Faces like Little Hearts 174

fourteen

The Wordless Sea 185

fifteen

The Noises of Our Human Being 211 Older than Yesterday 217

sixteen

seventeen

Sadness May Cover the Hour 237

eighteen

Partings That Never Part 247

nineteen

There Are Knives About 251

twenty twenty-one

twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five

From the Margins 227

Hear the Echoes Returning 260 Day Caught by the Dark 270 Of Course There Is No Home 273 How Time Tames Things 284

Now, Old Enough, I Find I Know 288

Afterword 295 Acknowledgements 299 Credits 300 Bibliography 302 Index 304

A l l A u s t ra l i a n s a r e a n a r c h i s t s a t h e a r t . — H a r o l d S t e wa r t , 1 9 8 9

ONE They Call It History

on this autobiographical memoir with a sense of diffidence. I am not myself a person of outstanding achievement. I have, however, known many of the creative people of my time and country. In historical terms I am able to compare the world of the mid-twentieth century—the Depression, the war and the social revolution of the 1960s— with postmodernism and contemporary life in Australia. I can reflect on an Australia which was in the process of acquiring a cultural identity, on a society that embraced a late flowering of modernity in art and literature: a movement which took its place in the wider world. I matured before the age of the franchised imagination; before a plethora of art was subsumed into lifestyle; before the trappings of an aggressively material, upwardly mobile society; before globalisation neutralised our national identity. Not that I look back on pastures green. There were no good old days. At the beginning of the new millennium we live I HAVE WORKED

2

Art & Life

in a fairer, more democratic and more just society. Thank God for political correctness, I say, which I interpret as a belated, though very Australian, attempt at a fair go for groups of people hitherto downtrodden. Women, children, Aborigines, gays, foreigners and those physically and mentally afflicted are among those who suffered in the rigidly conventional, morally hidebound, cruel society of the past. Reform always comes at a price. We now inhabit an homogenised world. To use an old-fashioned metaphor: this world could be described (as was wool from the sheep’s back) as FAQ, or fair average quality. My introduction to the creative life of my country came about through a close friendship with John and Sunday Reed and their involvement with artists, writers and composers. John and Sunday Reed purchased Heide in 1934 and affectionately named it after the nearby township of Heidelberg. Once an idyllic refuge of inspiration for artists and intellectuals, it is now the Museum of Modern Art. The Reeds became my surrogate parents. I was thirty years younger than them and am one of the last remaining witnesses to their lives. The myth of Heide has now reached legendary, sometimes lurid proportions. It is seen as a lost world of bohemianism, glamour and sexual incestuousness. It is frequently in the news. Nancy Underhill’s Letters of John Reed has sold well. A feature film portraying the events of the 1940s at Heide is under way. Two TV production houses are working on docu-dramas. If, while recording the achievements of Heide, I can correct some of the false mythology which has developed around it, then writing this book will have been justified. In addition, it will go some way towards repaying an incalculable debt of gratitude which I owe to John and Sunday Reed.

they call it history

3

‘The Heide feud’, ran the banner headline of the feature page in the Australian newspaper on Friday 3 November 1995. ‘A bitchy brawl has broken out over the home where John and Sunday Reed nurtured the talents of some of our finest artists’, wrote the arts journalist Susan McCulloch. ‘The property, says Philip Jones, who has known it intimately for more than forty years, has never looked better. But for Jones the garden’s beauty is only a painful reminder of his loss. For according to Jones he should be the house’s permanent resident. Instead he has been refused entry. And the saga of why he has unfolds like a story of old.’ This report, accompanied by several photographs of Heide and of me, covered the best part of a page. Essentially McCulloch’s investigation was favourable to me although, quite properly, all parties to the dispute were interviewed. It was the first of many press reports on the dramatic events at Heide, which took place at a time when its history was entering Australia’s cultural consciousness. Ironically John and Sunday were ignored—actually despised by many—when they were alive. They received no honours or decorations or doctorates and little praise for their seminal influence on art and literature. Nor, in their modesty, did they expect reward. They were seen, particularly by the social and art establishments, as difficult at best and obstructionist at worst. It is no exaggeration to say they were hated by some. They survived out of their devotion to each other and a certain sustenance—inadequate though it might have been—from a group of devoted friends which included myself. To me they were people of heroic proportions. Old Heide farmhouse had been left to Barrie Reid—poet, editor and my long-term partner—and myself until the second of us died. After the deaths of the Reeds we became estranged

4

Art & Life

and I, at his request, allowed him to live there alone. Thus, it was argued, I had forfeited my right to possession. In short, I was to be penalised for a selfless gesture. When Barrie died on 6 August 1995 nobody told me. He had introduced me to Heide, and was my intimate friend for twenty-seven years. Yet nobody rang to tell me of his death and I remained ignorant until (prompted by a friend) I read an obituary published in the Age two days later. Barrie had removed himself from me and most of his old friends during the last years of his life. Six years after his death I hosted a wake for our mutual friend, the visual poet Ruth Cowen. ‘Half angel, half devil’, was her description of Barrie when we last talked on the day she died. But—like many people—his destructive characteristics were accentuated with age and illness, and his mischievous acts were exacerbated by those with vested interests intent on keeping the property from me. He ended his life as keeper of the flame in a shrine devoted to the memory of the Reeds. Now the house is an official shrine with an entry fee of $15. It was formally opened in December 2001 by the Federal Minister for the Arts and Sport, the SirLes-Patterson-like Rod Kemp. Security guards were on hand to exclude undesirables like artists and dogs. Twin baby girls belonging to Peter Hobb—who had lived for a decade with the Reeds—were deemed inappropriate guests. I had left at Heide furniture, books, paintings, letters and a lifetime of memorabilia. Most of my personal belongings had vanished before I finally entered the house. A major Danila Vassilieff sculpture had vanished. John Reed’s antique desk had gone, as had tens of thousands of dollars worth of old china. And yet. I opened the top drawer of Barrie’s desk. There were photographs of me, my letters to him when I knew

they call it history

5

he was dying; there were personal memorabilia of our long friendship all carefully gathered together—and this little cache was at the top of his most private papers. Seven years after his death and twenty years after our separation, I still dream of reconciliation. Barrie orchestrated a campaign to disinherit me, yet publicly I have always defended him. I wrote his obituary for the Australian which appeared on the day of his funeral. It impressed some. ‘A loving, moving portrait’, a correspondent of the Australian wrote; but it scandalised others, because I had painted him warts and all. I felt I had earned the right. On the day of the publication of my obituary, the ABC Radio National arts presenter David Marr tried to interview me on ‘the art of obituary writing’. I have never carried a mobile phone and could not be reached, but was duly flattered. I was also, as they say, humbled, since it was the first obituary I had written. It was just as well I didn’t agree to do the interview—I was distressed and would not have been too coherent. It does seem appropriate that Barrie launched me on a new career in late middle age. He had introduced me to the prospect of writing, and in a sense I owe him everything. He was also, partly at least, responsible for the fact that when he died I had no home, capital or income. Barrie’s funeral was, from all accounts, a shambolic affair. Quasi-humorous shouts from the audience. Ugh. His Queensland sisters, Ronah and Coral, were present. They were unfazed, according to the poet Anne Reid Fairbairn, by the content of my obituary, but distressed because I had attributed his birthplace to the town of Murgon in southern Queensland. This was part of his fantasy, so it seems, of a grazing background. His father, he claimed, was a freethinking iconoclast, a one-time grazier who retired early in

6

Art & Life

life. In fact, Barrie was a Brisbane boy and son of a newsagent. Two weeks later the editor of the Murgon/Kingaroy District newspaper telephoned to ask for more information. The local historian could not trace any Reid who had lived in the district. A further fantasy was his claim of kinship with Australia’s second prime minister, Sir George Reid. His mother had died when he was a baby. His two sisters were, to him, a bit of a disappointment. Later, at the Heide wake, Anne Fairbairn (who is, indubitably, the grand-daughter of Sir George) found on the wall above his bed a series of portraits of her family. She and Barrie had met when he published her poems in the leftish literary magazine Overland. On the day of his funeral they were to have met, and she was determined to explore the supposed familial relationship. Two years later it was necessary for me to explain his complexities again after an Overland poet, Kathy Hunt, paid a visit to Heide to meet the editor she had revered from afar. She was disillusioned and wrote a satirical piece for the Australian’s Review of Books, describing him as pretentious, humourless and a minor poet. I refuted all this, yet there was a thread of truth in her account. It was what Barrie had become rather than his essential being. One of the things Kathy Hunt satirised was Barrie’s constant reference to Sidney Nolan—a kind of name-dropping—and since Nolan had ended his friendship with the Reeds in the cruellest possible way I thought this was outrageous. In my letter to the Review I did, however, emphasise Barrie’s dynamic contribution to Australian culture, and told the story of his early friendship with Nolan. Barrie had, as a teenager, taken Nolan to Fraser Island on the south Queensland coast. Barrie was one of few Australians at the time to know the astonishing

they call it history

7

story of the convict Eliza Fraser, who was shipwrecked on the island, gave birth to a child and lived with the Aborigines. As a result of this visit Nolan produced a magnificent series of paintings which, in turn, influenced Patrick White to write his fine historical novel, A Fringe of Leaves. I only ever met Nolan once. It was in Paris in October 1964 when I accompanied his original ‘Kelly’ series to the Qantas Gallery in Paris. ‘Sid’ was all charm, a quality acknowledged by all who knew him. As an artist he was a genius: as a human being something of a psychopath. In the late 1960s Sydney Nolan published a lavish book of illustrated poems entitled The Paradise Poems. One line he wrote about Sunday Reed was, ‘fortified by a noon whisky, I entered her tired, old plumbing’. Sidney Nolan’s malevolence was not limited to Sunday. After his public feud with Patrick White, he painted a series of pictures depicting White’s lover Manoly Lascaris as half pig, half man. His viciousness rebounded on to him. Even those who had reason to loathe White for his rudeness were shocked by Nolan’s attack on the saintly Lascaris. Unlike Sidney Nolan, John and Sunday lacked guile. They were innocents who chose their friends more for a perceived quality of heart than for their talent or intelligence. The expatriate writer Charles Osborne (a close friend of Barrie’s and mine) has accused them of wishing to ‘possess one’s soul’. He was wrong. In the final analysis they were capable of selfabnegation, of resignation. They gave far more to me than I gave to them. Twenty years after their deaths I feel guilt from my insouciant acceptance of their love and care and, as I do of Barrie, dream of them constantly.

TWO The Beautiful S u r p r i s i n g Ye a r s

both English. My mother Bessie Shaw came from the beautiful Lake District of Cumberland (now Cumbria) and my father, Frederick Jones, from Sheppertonon-Thames, Surrey, a village south-west of London, birthplace of the British film industry. They were both remarkable people in their own way, especially for their time and place. My father arrived in Melbourne in 1911. His mother, Emily (nee) de Groot, had dispatched him, aged fifteen, to what she considered to be the colonies, hoping to cash in on the patronage of a millionaire uncle, one John de Groot of Stanhope Street, Malvern. A branch of the de Groots, people of means, emigrated from the Netherlands to England in the mid-nineteenth century. John de Groot had made a fortune in the Australian gold rush, lost it in the land crash of the 1890s, and recovered it through the establishment of profitable railway refreshment rooms at Bendigo, Castlemaine, Seymour and other key railway junctions. MY PARENTS WERE

t he beautiful surprising years

9

Fred was an independent boy who did not wish to live a life beholden to his uncle. He took off for Pyramid Hill where he worked on a farm. He was worked hard and fed poorly, and recalled craving porridge rather than sausages for breakfast. In 1917 he joined the Australian army, served in the trenches of France and survived. He kept a diary which I have in my possession. It is well written, if unimaginative. After the armistice he returned temporarily to his mother’s home in Shepperton. Fred and his younger brother Phil received minimal education, notwithstanding that they were intelligent and their mother moderately wealthy. My Welsh grandfather Jones is a mystery man. Emily said little about him. It is thought he was a master builder. ‘It was my fault he died’, she admitted. ‘I sent him out rent collecting, not realising he had pneumonia’. If I ever did know, I now cannot recall his given name. ‘He was the one I loved’, Grandma told me, but she said that to all the grandchildren, who were the progeny of three husbands. My grandfather was the second husband. She had been divorced since the 1890s and widowed early in the twentieth century.

October 2002 I am with my cousin, the mezzo-contralto Sylvia Clarke, daughter of my cousin Peter Clarke (a Shaw) on the Maltese island of Gozo. Drinks with the Courts—John and Joyce— who are ‘staying on’, upper-class, British expatriates. Joyce took one look at me. ‘You’re Welsh,’ she cried, ‘admit it!’ I told her of my obscure paternal grandfather. She ran off and returned with a Welsh flag which she presented to me. Actually I should qualify this. I think I look Dutch. If I travel on KLM airline, the crew address me in that language.

10

Art & Life

My father’s favoured younger half-sister and -brother, Dora and John Bird, received what today would be called an elitist education. They attended the Italia Conti School of Drama in London, which also provided a liberal secondary education. Dora, particularly, was talented as an actress, and starred on stage and screen, playing Little Willy in the great Victorian melodrama East Lynne. She also danced in Pavlova’s chorus for a London season. From time to time she performed Fokine’s The Dying Swan. Dora married the great silent and early talkies film-director, Walter Summers—a seminal influence in his time, and a moody, alcoholic genius who made fifty films prior to the Second World War. Edmund Jones and I lunch at the Florentino Bistro in Melbourne. Edmund, only child of my uncle Phil, is my ‘double’ cousin—his mother Jenny was my mother’s sister—and has lived in London for most of his adult life. He is in Australia on a nostalgic visit after being afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. Edmund seems surprised that I have such vivid memories of his father. He has almost none at all. I tell him that Phil was the pick of the family—extremely handsome and much nicer to me than my own father. Edmund is also too young to remember the time when he lived with his parents on Swan Island, close to the heads of Port Phillip Bay. A little train took residents and visitors across a causeway from Queenscliff, through bushland, and from house to house. Swan Island was a paradise inhabited by poisonous adders—actually tiger snakes. People killed them and hung them over tree branches. Uncle Phil—co-opted from the RAN—was in charge of the island, on which subterranean explosive material was stored. Fire—particularly summer

t he beautiful surprising years

11

bushfires in the holiday period when we visited—was a constant fear: the entire island could have exploded, taking Queenscliff and neighbouring villages with it. One day the alarms went off—there was an interconnected loud bell which rang in each house—and all residents were evacuated into the sea. I remember the incident vividly but was not frightened. If the adults thought we might all be blown up they hid their anxiety effectively. Sometimes we holidayed at the Country Women’s Association guest house on Half Moon Bay at Black Rock. Before the fall of Singapore a family named Gurney came to Melbourne on furlough from Malaya. Mr Gurney was headmaster of a secondary school in Kuala Lumpur. Mrs Gurney had (through a mutual friend) an introduction to my mother, and I remember visiting them in a furnished house in Beaumaris. While we ate lunch, a Chinese amah moved around the table wiping our mouths with a damp cloth. The Gurneys returned to KL and perished after the Japanese invasion. A 1948 memory surfaces: The Irish actor Anew McMaster brought his Shakespearean company to my home town, Kerang. At supper after the performance my father said to Mac, ‘I don’t suppose you know my sister Dora Summers?’ McMaster burst into impassioned tears. ‘I loved her for years.’ This was the day I determined to become an actor. When I told Edmund of his father’s good looks he recalled the day he first met Walter Summers at—like me—the fish café at Hounslow, west London, where he lived upstairs. Walter roared, ‘You’re not handsome like your father’.

12

Art & Life 1989

I attended the last Christmas party of the publishers McPhee Gribble. A man of my own age approached me and said, ‘You are Philip Jones, the boy from Kerang.’ It was John Howcroft and we had been at primary school together. We had not met, we thought, for fifty years. John had married Libby, Di Gribble’s sister. He turned out to be a kind of chronicler of Kerang life in the Dylan Thomas tradition, and there seemed to be no detail of my family’s life or character, or indeed of myself, of which he was unaware. I hung my head with shame when he reminded me of the wartime quiz nights. They were held in the town hall—I think fortnightly—and the primary object was to raise money for what was known as the war effort. People sang, some played musical instruments, and stand-up comics performed routines of varying quality. But the main thing was the quiz, which was compered with great panache by a local barber. My parents possessed an endless fund of general knowledge. (Can Barry Jones possibly be related to us? He once jokingly referred to me as his brother.) My mother and father knew virtually all the answers and would leap to their feet— sometimes singly and sometimes together—before anyone else in the audience had so much as assimilated the question. A correct answer earned you two shillings, I think. We shamelessly collected a heap of money between us. When they had scored sufficiently they told me the answers and pushed me to my feet. It was all deeply humiliating and sometimes I refused to accompany them to these entertainments. I was both proud of and embarrassed by my mother’s fund of information. Only she would know that Joyce Kilmer (author of ‘Poems are made by fools like me but only God can

t he beautiful surprising years

13

make a tree’ was a man. Or, indeed, that Shirley was originally a male name now made popular by Shirley Temple. I knew that Percy Grainger did not compose the hackneyed piece ‘Country Gardens’ which every child (including myself) was forced to play on the piano. ‘Why don’t they say arranged by Percy Grainger,’ mother fumed. ‘He adapted an old English melody to the modern idiom.’ She was sardonic about the ubiquitous baby girl Shirleys inspired by the four-year-old film star, in the way that sophisticates of today are amused by Wayne and Cheryl. I learned from Mother that the longest word in the English language was antidisestablishmentarianism. I knew the wonders of the world both ancient and modern. Although my formal education was sketchy I learned an enormous amount from my parents. I did well at primary school—which I commenced aged four—and came top of the class (or second to a girl named Denise) every year. When I told my mother something I had learned she would invariably say, ‘Well it wasn’t quite like that . . .’ Mother mimicked accents. The barber who acted as compere for the quizzes promoted his business as Three Cheers (Chairs) and No Waiting. Today at the end of the ABC TV 7.30 Report when Kerry O’Brien (and others) sign off I find myself muttering their pronunciation, ‘W’ool be back tomorrow night at the same time.’ An enormous trauma in my family followed the loss of HMAS Sydney on 19 November 1941, taking with it my uncle Philip. He was fifty-two, and had attained officer rank. I was ten at the time and Edmund, six. Sydney was sunk by the German raider Kormoran in the Indian Ocean 300 miles west of Carnarvon, Western Australia, a few days before Japan entered the war. Kormoran masqueraded as a merchant

14

Art & Life

ship while carrying heavy armament, and in this guise had sunk eleven allied merchant ships in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. There were no survivors from Sydney but a few from Kormoran, which also sank after return fire from Sydney. The strategic implications of the rumoured presence of a Japanese submarine just prior to Pearl Harbor kept the Sydney in the news for weeks and exacerbated my family’s grief.

April 2003 Edmund has sent me correspondence between my parents and his mother after we heard of the loss of HMAS Sydney, and the horror of it all has returned. He writes, ‘While at a reconciliation function for relatives of survivors from Sydney and Kormoran I danced with Kormoran captain’s widow. My mother would have been appalled.’ I introduced Edmund to my London friend Leo Cooper, who published Michael Montgomery’s Who Sank the Sydney? and he put Edmund in touch with its author and other military theorists. My psychotherapist came up with the interesting theory that my remote father’s closest human relationship was with his brother. If this is correct he must have suffered terrible silent grief. I was dimly aware of this at the time but men of his generation did not speak of such things. Before the Jones boys emigrated to Australia in 1919, their mother Emily encouraged them to appear in films, although neither of them wanted to be an actor. It was not difficult to get work, as silent movies were being produced all around Shepperton-on-Thames, and Emily always had her eye on money. Fred was unimpressed and longed for Australia. He

t he beautiful surprising years

15

had fallen in love with Kerang, a burgeoning town eighty miles north-west of Bendigo. His sole ambition was to open a business in this town, following the example of Sidney Myer who started by hawking in Bendigo, and eventually conquered Bourke Street, Melbourne with one of the largest stores in the world. He returned to Australia after a year or so, but he never achieved anything like the success of Sidney Myer.

September 2003 An email from Pamela Warrender who is the daughter of Sir Norman Myer. (He was the Russian nephew of Sidney and took over the emporium after his uncle Sidney died prematurely.) Will I help with her memoirs? Well yes, if I can find time after working on my own. Pamela wished—from early childhood—to take what she saw as her rightful place heading Myer. Vested interests kept her out, mainly because she was a woman. She and I have often talked about the history of Myer, and I wish my father was still alive so I could tell him about it. Pamela married into ancient British aristocracy. Is that some sort of consolation prize? Fred eventually opened a delicatessen with all sorts of exotic foods country people could not hitherto buy. In 1926 he visited his family in England and, returning in 1927, met Bessie Shaw on board ship. My mother was one of a large family which included six girls. Her father, Frank Shaw, a mining engineer, married a well-educated young woman named Jane Wayles. (How could one not use this name in fiction? I have.) My grandfather plunged to his death while inspecting a diamond mine in South

16

Art & Life

Africa. It is believed he suffered a heart attack, and ever since there has been family talk of ‘the Shaw heart’. Jane Shaw was left with eight young children. There was no widow’s pension and she took in dressmaking to keep the family. Emigration to Australia seemed to be the only answer and the entire family moved, two or three at a time, after the end of the Great War. There were only two sons in this family and they were indubitably working class, with jobs in Geelong factories. The girls, intelligent, witty, sardonic, aspired and mostly succeeded to the middle class (they would have maintained that they always were middle class) and worked as governesses on Western District properties. The boys’ accents were regional—the girls’ very upper class: more so, of course, than those of their mistresses. These aunts were skilled with the needle and possessed great taste. They dressed my sister Nan (two-and-a-half years older than me) and myself like fashion plates. I discovered that this was okay for a little girl in a bush town but not for a little boy. When I was five my paternal grandmother Emily Bird visited us. She was a sweet-natured Edwardian lady and constantly gave me presents. Despite my mother’s origins in the north of England her accent was ‘Oxford’; her deep contralto cadences were reminiscent of Dame Sybil Thorndike, with whom I later acted. Given the strong theatrical influences from both parents, is it any wonder I thought of nothing other than a career on stage, screen and radio? The gentlefolk of Kerang did not know what to make of my mother; nor she them. On the one hand she was obviously a ‘lady’—more so than many of those with greater pretensions. On the other hand she worked in a shop. The bank managers

t he beautiful surprising years

17

and the prosperous but socially conservative farmers constituted local society. There was no rural aristocracy like that of the Western District. My mother mocked the bank people for their pretensions. She despised them for using their cleaning allowance, not to pay a local woman suffering the 1930s Depression but for their own profit. She had a kind of derisive wit and I recall her Barry-Humphries-like satirisations of people and their manners and mores. Ladies who crooked their little finger when sipping tea. The ubiquitous sponge cake. Dahlias the size of dinner plates. Women who talked of their ailments while playing bridge. People who passed you in the street and said, ‘Good night’, rather than ‘Good evening’. She was wary of Presbyterians, who, she believed, got away with unbridled capitalist greed while making Jews their scapegoat. I remember her saying after some fundraising garden party, ‘Mrs P. (the wife of a bank manager!) turned up with her usual half-dozen pikelets.’ Incidentally Mr P. as a lay preacher fulminated against gambling. It was therefore highly embarrassing when he won a lottery. She was sardonic rather than cruel in these observations and they were kept strictly within the family. Looking back now, I can see a kind of collective unconscious at work. Her attention to human foibles would have preceded Barry Humphries’ early public performances by a decade or perhaps longer. Both my parents became fervent socialists. We went so far as subscribing to the Victorian Communist Party newspaper, the Guardian.

18

Art & Life September 2002

I wrote a story about the general manager of a major bank. His daughter, in a eulogy, told the story of how her father kept the cleaning allowance and made her do the work. It was, she implied, only what any sensibly ambitious banking couple would do. Another strike against my family was that we (even though my sister and I were native born—and indeed my father had arrived as a teenager) were English. And despite ties with the empire and an absurd reverence for royalty among many of the people of Kerang, we were the first to cop a kind of prejudice. It was a sort of love–hate I suppose. Today when I run into people I knew as a child, they stress how ‘wonderful’ my parents were. I certainly do not recall that admiration at the time. We did, however, know a range of interesting people in and around Kerang: Italians, Greeks, Chinese and at least one Aborigine, Mrs Jacky Boss, who lived with numerous children on the banks of the Loddon River. There was also a Jewish couple. I cannot recall their name but the wife was a sister of Victoria’s first female QC, Joan Rosanove. I should stress that this multi-cultural society was well established decades before the great migration program initiated by Labor immigration minister Arthur Calwell after the Second World War. The ancestors of our Italian neighbours had arrived in the 1880s. The Lamaros ran a café cum soda fountain cum greengrocery. Carmel Lamaro was from the Aeolian Islands, north of Sicily. She was a woman of great wit and possessed prodigious energy. She raised seven children, including Kathleen, whose path would cross mine many years later. She cooked, day

t he beautiful surprising years

19

and night, the food country people demanded at that time: thin, overdone steaks served with chips, shredded lettuce and beetroot; fish and chips, of course; and pies which Carmel made herself, as she did ice-cream. Backstage she prepared Italian cuisine: minestrone, roasted aubergines, spaghetti bolognese, but also her own speciality, spaghetti with cauliflower and garlic which was redolent of rich, fruity virgin olive oil. Spaghetti aglio e olio is now my favourite pasta. I still read that crap about how as late as the 1970s you could only buy olive oil in a chemist shop. This was the 1930s! Perhaps the Lamaros bought it from a grower and supplied us as well. From a very early age I ate with the Lamaros as often as I did at home, and this early influence resulted in a life-long love of food. My own mother was not all that much interested in cooking, but she used excellent ingredients, and I was grown up before I realised there was any sort of steak other than fillet, which she called undercut. Meat was always grilled over the hot coals of our wood stove, until mother eventually acquired a slow-combustion Aga. As quite a small child I developed a curious reputation. When we ate out (never in Kerang, but in Melbourne and Geelong) my decision on what was best on the menu was invariably followed by my elders. ‘Phil always knows’, my mother would say. I loved eating out and still do. One of my earliest memories is of a traumatic experience I suffered when aged four. The doctor had said my tonsils must be removed. It was fashionable to remove tonsils and adenoids at the time. An appointment was made at the local Bush Nursing Hospital and my mother walked me there. She had not told me what was about to happen. She had a kind of phobia about things medical, and illness was never

20

Art & Life

mentioned. When I complained of growing pains in my legs (they were quite excruciating) my mother said there was no such complaint and it was all in my imagination. When we reached the hospital for my operation a ‘rough nurse’ (so described by my mother) grabbed me, hurled me onto an operating table and jammed a chloroform mask over my face. My screams could be heard all over town; I suppose I thought she was killing me. Thereafter I was terrified of white rooms, and if we entered one I would not allow the door to be closed. It also left me with severe claustrophobia and a concomitant dread of doctors. Fortunately I have enjoyed good health, and sixty-six years passed before I again entered hospital as a patient. It was a minor operation for Dupuytren’s hand contractions, but I had to be sedated with 10 mg of Valium and even more while the operation was performed (at my insistence) under a local anaesthetic. My mother blamed herself for not preparing me for my first visit to hospital and lived with the guilt for the rest of her life. I tell this story in an objective as well as subjective sense in that it illustrates a lack of consideration for a child unthinkable in today’s world. Surely today the rough nurse would be sacked. It was a common occurrence in those days for parents to openly discuss their child’s supposed lack of beauty. ‘Isn’t she plain?’ one mother would say to another in front of her girl child. In the middle of the 1930s Depression my parents—to save expense—let our house and large garden and we moved behind the shop. Due to the war and subsequent housing shortage, which protected the tenant, it was twelve years before we moved back. I have few memories of my older sister Nan when we were very young. Because of our cramped quarters, she was packed off to boarding school, the Hermitage (now Geelong

t he beautiful surprising years

21

Grammar) at an early age, and myself, in due course, to Trinity Grammar in Melbourne. Looking back on my bush town upbringing I now realise that—despite the chauvinism of small communities—they do produce a tolerance which is difficult to achieve in large cities. People have to get along together in a situation where it is impossible to live in a ghetto. One common manifestation of prejudice against the Italians was for a waspish greengrocer to exhibit a sign saying SHOP HERE BEFORE THE DAY GOES. I suppose it was fairly innocuous. Today the WASP would be before a court, and rightly so. When war was declared those of Italian descent were forced to relinquish their firearms. Late one night, in the middle of Victoria Street, the policeman in charge formally divested Joe Lamaro of a rifle. Everyone knew and nobody cared that Joe had several more guns with which to shoot duck.

September 2001 Poor darling old labrador Charlie died a few weeks ago aged fourteen. I contacted the Labrador Society, who put me on to a Kerang couple who breed labradors as gun dogs. They offered me a dog named Gus (I renamed him Gusto) who hated guns and retrieving ducks. I thought if I could rescue myself from Kerang the least I could do was rescue a dog from the same place. Kerang was situated in a low-rainfall area but town water was drawn from the Loddon River. We had two cold water kitchen taps, using fresh water from our own tank for drinking and cooking and mains water for everything else. Most people had

22

Art & Life

a pleasant shady garden, and trees, both native and exotic, lined the streets. Summers were hot and winters, cold. The early war years (1939–43) were also times of severe drought during which we experienced terrible dust storms. One, which became known as ‘the black-out’, was ferocious in its intensity. At that time, 1943, I had just entered the local high school. From early morning we could see this huge, black mushroom cloud which covered the northern and western sky. At three in the afternoon it moved over the town and bright day became the darkest of dark nights. For the first half-hour there was eerie silence, then a gale shrieked. A few fundamentalist Christians thought the end of the world was nigh. We were all nervous; nobody had ever experienced anything like this before. It was much more frightening than a thunderstorm. Eventually the wind abated, the sky returned and the air was cold. I wrote an account of the black-out and sent it to the Argonauts’ Club on ABC radio. It was read on air and I received a blue certificate of merit. My ship number was Aspasia 32. Barry Humphries jokes his was Hernia 1. Soon after the war ended Australian National Airlines (ANA) started an air service between Kerang and Melbourne. We didn’t have a car and the train took all day, so we always flew. Two friends of mine—brothers, and slightly younger than me—took this plane, a Stinson, from Essendon Airport after the summer holidays. It crashed at Redesdale near Kyneton, twenty minutes into the flight. It was a terrible trauma, not only for me but for the town at large. The newspapers were full of it, including descriptions of charred bodies. One wing had fallen off and sliced off the tail. I was left with a fear of flying which lasted some decades. My childhood days, although I felt out of place, were

t he beautiful surprising years

23

not unhappy. There were warm, dreamy, peppercorn days. We all rode bicycles and visited friends on nearby farms for lavish afternoon teas. My parents were nominally Church of England, never quite believing in God (like most Anglicans?). As a little girl Nan was once sent to Sunday school. When asked what she had learned she replied, ‘about Maisie’. Further investigation revealed Maisie was really Moses. Never again for either of us. When I was about twelve a new parson preached a sermon on how early English Christians poured molten lead from Norman churches on marauding infidels. His tone of voice indicated full approval, and that was the end of Christianity and its earthly representatives for me—I hope for life. As an adult, visiting Hobart, I ran into the priest. He was now a bishop. In later life the writer Barry Hill told me—with some pride—that a good friend had become a bishop. I replied that I’d had a gutful of bishops by the time I was sixteen. There was a terrible scandal in the Presbyterian Church when the elders stood up at the end of a service and publicly demanded the resignation of their minister. This astonishing drama reverberated through the town. Whatever could have been the reason? I never did find out, it was all hushed up. Some sort of sexual offence?

1999 I contributed to a ‘Faith’ column in a newspaper, arguing that reason, not God, was our salvation; and that any improvement in recent years of the morality of Christians had come from the humanist movement rather than the Church’s own traditions. I got sheaves of hate mail. I felt this essay was a tribute to my father, who constantly stressed the appalling history of

24

Art & Life

institutionalised Christianity with its inquisitions, crusades and—particularly of course in England—its social injustice. Today (I know because of the funerals I attend) the following words have been excised from an Anglican hymn: ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high or lowly and ordered their estate.’ As I grew up my relationship with my father deteriorated. He was loving to us as babies and as small children but could not cope with us as we grew up. I suffered more than my sister because I was not growing up to be the kind of man he would like to have been. He was not matey, he was not practical, he could not play sport, but he resented the fact that I resembled him in most of these attributes. I overheard from my bedroom a row when I was about twelve. My father, apparently, had said I was not a normal boy. My mother screamed, ‘Of course he is not a normal boy because he does not have a normal father.’ My father was, quite literally, friendless. Not even Joe Lamaro next door was a friend. Quite why, I am not sure. He was a good conversationalist and liked to talk to people. Fortunately I did not inherit this curious inhibition, although I would not describe myself as gregarious.

22 June 2003 A letter arrives from Edmund in London enclosing photographs and copies of letters from my mother to his. I had asked him for records since I had lost memorabilia in a house fire and at Heide. We had just arrived in London (1953) and my aunt Jenny had written to say that four people had commented that my father was appallingly rude to me. Edmund said he had

t he beautiful surprising years

25

hesitated to send it in case I found it hurtful. I was glad he had. My mother’s letter, eloquent as I would have expected, but revealing greater psychological acumen than I remembered, spoke of his cruelty as an ‘insanity in wishing to hurt those closest to him’. She recounted her conversations with my aunt Dora Summers who had told her that her husband Walter had treated his son similarly, and how Jeremy ‘hated’ his father. Bessie said that Fred had taken this in and had been much nicer to me (and to her) since he learned all this. Strangely I cannot remember any of this at that particular time. I had inured myself against him years earlier. I never hated my father. Have I repressed hatred? I suppose I excised him from my feelings. Now I feel he had a hard time from what became a matriarchal extended family. He was neurotic, no doubt about it, but I don’t think, essentially, a cold man. My mother could have handled him better. To this day I cannot comprehend their feelings for each other; whether there was love between them. In those days happiness in marriage was not regarded as essential. When I went as a boarder to Trinity Grammar School I found that the middle-class boys of Kew and Hawthorn had, socially, led more sheltered lives than I had. They thought foreigners were funny and they had never met an Aborigine (despite their urban presence just across the Yarra River). The river was a great divide. The ladies of Kew and Hawthorn would go over to Abbotsford and Collingwood to do good work among the poor. The Boroondara kindergarten received a lot of attention and was surrounded by quite horrific slums. I caught a glimpse of this world accompanying Nan, who worked there while studying at the Kindergarten Training College. The post-war rise in living standards was yet to come.

26

Art & Life

I remember a group of us from Trinity once going on an excursion to a glass factory at Spotswood. An unkempt worker clocked out after a hard day’s work and one boy said to another, ‘Is that your father, Barrington major?’ They all howled with laughter and I was truly shocked by their snobbery. In addition I didn’t think that they or their parents—insofar as I had observed them—had much class themselves. I felt different to most of these boys—both inferior and superior. Many possessed a kind of smug confidence. Trinity proved to be pretty much a disaster for me and probably I for them. My first year started badly when I arrived at the school with my mother a few days before enrolment. When we rang the bell of the administration centre at Henty House an unimpressive little man appeared. It was the headmaster, Alfred Bright, who spoke with an English north country accent. My mother simply did not believe that he could possibly be the headmaster. She was inclined to be tactless in manner and the headmaster got the message. When I tell people this story today they are amazed at the implied snobbishness that they believe existed in another century. I don’t believe this story denotes an upper-class attitude on my mother’s part. It may indicate a certain snobbishness in me in that I recall vividly a fairly trivial incident. My mother’s assumption was reasonable at that time and she would have accepted the accent had Bright (one might say by name but not by nature) shown any wit or warmth. He showed us over Roberts House, a Victorian pile where I was to board. He ushered us into an elegant drawing room on the ground floor which housed a Bechstein grand piano. ‘This is where Philip will practise at 6.30 each morning.’ Mother wandered around admiring the furniture, parquetry flooring, Persian rugs, marble fireplace and French windows.

t he beautiful surprising years

27

‘School Council meetings are held here,’ intoned the Head. Mother wasn’t listening. She pinched the fabric of a Victorian grandfather chair. ‘Pity to cover a genuine antique with cheap duck,’ she muttered. The Head shot back, ‘Philip will wear shoes and socks, not sandals, when school commences.’ My sister Nan, who would be a Stalinist if Uncle Joe were still alive, is, like most lefties, an accurate definer of social mores. When told this story she commented, ‘If Phil had gone to Geelong Grammar they would not have worried what he wore on his feet.’ Certainly Trinity was suburban by comparison. Actually I would have done much better to have stayed at the local high school, which was one of the few in the Victorian countryside to go through to matriculation. The masters at Trinity were mostly decrepit, so old they had been born in the Victorian era and were Dickensian in manner. The classics master named Price died a week after school started. He was never replaced. I might well have responded to Greek and Latin. One or two of the masters were terrifying in their frenzied wrath. ‘Bull’ Hughes who taught mathematics would scream with rage at the mildest misdemeanour of any boy. I remember the veins in his neck which would throb when he was angry. The deputy headmaster was a man named J. J. Leppitt who was both neurotic and sadistic. One day I was sitting in a common room reading when a maid came in to do some cleaning. Being well brought up I engaged her in polite conversation. Leppitt came into the room, ordered the maid out, and turned to me shouting, ‘If I ever catch you talking to a maid again, you’ll be expelled.’ I thought he was quite mad. Why should I not talk to the maid? I still do not know whether this violent admonition had to do with class or sex. Perhaps both? If I, myself, was some sort of snob, I certainly found its manifestation in him to be incomprehensible.

28

Art & Life

Writing this memoir is a salutary, if belated, lesson about myself. I now realise that I am anarchic by nature. I simply could not see why—and still do not—I should study anything that held no interest for me. English, yes, of course. Modern European history and the Congress of Vienna: what was the point? I am vitally interested in it now, but not then. I was quite interested in economics and commercial principles. Social studies I found banal. There was no school library, but there was the Kew Municipal Library from which I used to borrow books. I read well for my age: never children’s books. Eve Curie’s biography of her physicist mother Marie Curie, the novels of Martin Boyd (who had also attended Trinity), Daisy Bates’s The Passing of the Aborigines, Somerset Maugham, Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant, Brideshead Revisited, Ernestine Hill’s My Love Must Wait. I think the first novel I read, commenced when I was about eight, was Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son. I read it over and over again and learned all about life. I refused to play any sort of sport, although I did swim. I refused to join the cadets on principle. I have to say there was no coercion from the teachers or bullying from fellow students. I was simply given up as a hopeless case and left alone to dream my dreams. I made one good friend in Michael Craig, future international hockey player, poet, philosopher and businessman, and have retained the friendship until this day. Michael, unlike me, excelled in everything he did. A respite from school was at the home of a friend of my mother, Mrs Ada Waddell, who lived in a fairly grand house close to school on the corner of Barkers Road and Denmark Street (it is still there). Mrs Waddell was something of a grande dame, who employed a cook and maid named Lily, and I would visit for civilised conversation and excellent food. Lily

t he beautiful surprising years

29

wore traditional black and white, and had gnarled hands with only three fingers on one. She produced the most wonderful food of a traditional kind, and I particularly remember her creamy macaroni cheese. I was intrigued because I never actually saw her in action. I would walk through the kitchen and Lily would be sitting at the table drinking a cup of tea. A quarter of an hour later she would trundle a food trolley into the drawing room with all this wonderful food which my hostess and I would eat in front of a blazing fire. Mrs Waddell was outraged when I told her there were no fires or heating of any sort at school. Furthermore we were forced to take cold showers throughout winter. She wrote to her friend the Archbishop of Melbourne, who sent the letter on to Alfred Bright. The Head wrote to my mother (who knew nothing about any of this) saying that heating would only increase my propensity to catch colds. Finally I escaped without even sitting for the leaving exams. I got a job in a Kerang bank, started a local amateur dramatic society, and saved up for London and a life in the theatre. There were a few enlightened Kerang and district locals who befriended us: they included the future prime minister John Gorton and his mother-in-law, Grace Brown, from Bangor, Maine, USA, who became a kind of surrogate grandmother to me. ‘My son Arthur’, Grace Brown told my parents, ‘is a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.’ She was full of pride. Interesting, considering that Arthur Brown and John Gorton were best friends at Brasenose College, Oxford, in the mid-1930s and that Arthur introduced John to the eighteenyear-old Bettina. In 2002 I wrote a file obituary for Sir John, retired prime minister, for a London newspaper. Jolly John had remarried at eighty-one, after Bettina’s untimely death in 1983.

30

Art & Life

When he died a year or so later I amended the text slightly and told the story of the communist Arthur Brown. Not even Gorton’s official biographer, Ian Hancock, knew that one. Despite my predilection for only studying subjects of intrinsic interest to me, I believe I am, or at least have become, a natural researcher. I think a talent for writing obituaries has something to do with a fictional sensibility. I discovered for instance that Gorton had twice crashed planes for no apparent reason. Had he been drinking? Did he have a death wish? He was an unrepentant boozer and full of charm.

18 July 2003 Lunched at the Melbourne Club with the architect and writer Neil Clerehan, that lovely old journo Keith Dunstan, and landscape architect David Wilkinson. I wrote in my piece for the Times that when—as prime minister—Gorton had revealed himself as not representing the vested interests of the Liberal Party and its traditional supporters from big business, he was shunned by many club members. Times have changed. In the library were copies of the leftish literary magazine Overland. Unlike my father I did not feel at home in Kerang. It is only in retrospect that I realise how good a place it was to spend a childhood. I was born on 14 March 1932 and left—with my parents—in 1951 for London. My parents, my sister Nan, and her Bulgarian husband, Nickolai (Nick) Nickoloff and their children commuted several times between Kerang and England before, in 1960, settling finally in London. During their wandering years they were equally at home in exclusive

t he beautiful surprising years

31

St John’s Wood or Maida Vale—where they leased huge houses financed by paying guests—and the remote, semi-arid countryside which constituted Kerang and district. My poor father, hopelessly outnumbered, resigned himself to living his final years in the land of his birth. He never wanted to leave his peaceful, if slightly dull, Australian rural environment. I alone of my immediate past family decided to live in Australia. I suppose I have made fifty or so trips to the UK, continental Europe and the USA, but could never live anywhere other than Melbourne. In journalism it provides the background to my accounts of people and events. Culturally and socially I know it like the back of my hand. My Sydney-centric editors have told me that Melbourne is a secret city and that I am useful to them in knowing who is who and what is what. As Nancy Underhill has noted in her Letters of John Reed, my visits overseas, particularly to London, have enabled me to follow the careers of the various artists and intellectuals nurtured by Heide in their early creative years.

THREE Small Stamps of Memory

for England when I was aged nineteen, in December 1951, travelling tourist class. My parents had their own cabin and I shared with five others. It was not quite the cheapest fare—at least I was above water and had a porthole. Fellow passengers on the Orient liner, the Orion, included two outstanding ‘new Australians’, both teachers, but distinguished also in the fight against Hitler’s fascism. They were John Ponder and Ruth Blatt, both of whom made an enormous impression on me. Since I had effectively dropped out of formal education I was anxious to absorb knowledge from whatever good sources were available. I have always managed to find such friends—and still do. I was lucky to have encountered John and Ruth, who remained friends until they died. John Ponder, classics master at Geelong Grammar School, had been parachuted into Greece to fight as a guerrilla with communist insurgents. He worked with them to sabotage the WE SET SAIL

small stamps of memory

33

incursion of the Italian army from north to south. In the event it took the Italians a long time to reach Athens and the port of Piraeus. Actually it was my father who discovered John as they paced the deck in the early mornings. John was then aged forty-two, patrician of appearance and seemingly haughty; but he possessed a particular friendliness endemic to certain members of the British upper class. I was reminded of my sister’s observation and wondered how different my schooling might have been had I gone to Geelong—as was originally intended—rather than Trinity. Ponder’s story is movingly told in his beautifully written Patriots and Scoundrels. He was a much-loved and infinitely human sage, a man of deep cultivation who encouraged his students to make music, write poetry and grow plants. John, all his life, appeared to be a man both single and singular. When I met him he had recently married, although it took us as far as the Indian Ocean to find this out. One day my mother announced, ‘Mr Ponder is not a bachelor, he is not Mr Chips, I have met his wife Marjorie and baby daughter who is two months old.’ Marjorie Ponder was twenty years younger and had been the assistant matron at Geelong. She was very pretty, regarded as flighty, and the school was stunned when this crusty bachelor and Marjorie announced their engagement. She had won the White Wings flour bake-off competition in the Women’s Weekly and the prize was a trip to England. John secured an exchange job at the Highgate School in London. One of his friends was the prominent actor Michael Hordern (off to play at Stratford-upon-Avon) who lent the Ponders his elegant house close to the school. I visited them there and recall that John was not happy. He had become an Australian and

34

Art & Life

was mocked by the students. John was slightly anti-Semitic and this didn’t help a teaching situation where many of the boys were Jewish. Almost half a century later John, alone once again, still seemed bemused and rather detached from his family of four children. Marjorie had taken off decades earlier. He spoke as if his family had constituted an amusing, incongruous, and isolated period of his life. He told me that he and Marjorie had fought constantly and each child represented a reconciliation. He cropped up in my life at intervals over the years. He became a customer of my bookshop in the 1960s when he taught in the library school of RMIT. He once arranged for me to lecture a class on bookselling. Later I would visit him at his bookbinding shop at the Melbourne Meat Market. Then, at the very end of his life, I visited him—still working—at his little flat in Maldon. From time to time I drove him to lunch with friends Maria Prendergast and John Loder at Glenluce near Castlemaine. In 1933 Ruth Blatt was imprisoned in Frankfurt for treason against the Third Reich. She had been caught—after a tip off from her first husband—smuggling propaganda leaflets worn under her clothing on her return from England. She endured beatings and starvation and was isolated in solitary confinement after attempting to politicise her fellow female prisoners, who had mostly been incarcerated for abortion or prostitution. She limped for the rest of her life after being beaten around the legs. Ruth spent her days in jail making artificial flowers. A gay English friend, a man named Kenneth Dean, came to Frankfurt to plead for her release. She was his fiancée, he told the prison authorities, and he would take this nuisance off their hands, escort her back to England and marry her. The appeal failed.

small stamps of memory

35

Ruth was released days before Britain declared war on Germany. Like many European Jews escaping from Hitler she fled to Shanghai. She stowed away, ticketless, at Genoa. In Shanghai she married again, and she and Max Blatt stayed there until the end of the Pacific War. Her story has been told by the historian Antonia Finnane in Far from Where?, an oral history account of the European Jews who arrived in the Northern Territory from China in a leaky tub in 1947. It is interesting to note that these boat people received a tumultuous welcome from the people of Darwin. The locals took them into their homes. Ruth, probably the most articulate of them, allowed herself to be interviewed by the press and radio although strictly forbidden to do so. The Australian Women’s Weekly published a feature on her. Ruth was soon employed to teach French and German at the Elsternwick branch of the Methodist Ladies College in Melbourne. This was something of a culture shock both to the school and her. She would talk about sex in an entirely frank manner in a way not widely accepted in Australia for at least another thirty years. She was the product of a German feminist liberation movement prior to the rise of Hitler. Her friends in London included the poet Stephen Spender and a group of British activists opposing the Nazi regime. Ruth would supply information which led to questions being asked in the Houses of Lords and Commons. She gave me Spender’s autobiography, World Within Worlds, which made a deep impression on me. I still think it is one of the best autobiographies I have ever read. Max Blatt had been a member of the Polish intellectual, socialist organisation known as the Bund. Max had no particular training or formal education, but worked at odd jobs and essentially relied on Ruth as the breadwinner. They shared

36

Art & Life

a pleasant house in North Caulfield with fellow Shanghai refugees, the pianist Robert Kohner and his businesswoman wife, Peta. Ruth, it seems, made a deep impression on the Methodist Ladies College principal, Dr Woods. She could not produce papers proving her credentials but he trusted her, and she proved to be an inspired teacher whose students consistently passed external examinations. After she had been there a month or two a teacher approached her in the staff common room. ‘Dr Blatt,’ she said shyly, ‘other staff members have deputed me to speak to you. We want to tell you that although you are a foreigner you are very nice and we are all fond of you.’ Ruth went out of my life for several decades until my friend Joan Grant (who is an Asian specialist) launched Far from Where? in the history department at Melbourne University in 1999. Antonia Finnane gave me Ruth’s telephone number and I found her in a nursing home in Caulfield, now aged ninetythree (though she told me she was ninety-one). She was fine physically but her mind was fading. She hated the nursing home. ‘Full of Yiddishers,’ she told me, ‘so ignorant, and they make no effort to speak or read English. None of them have ever read a book.’ Ruth felt herself to be German rather than Jewish. Later I was told by so-called friends that she was anti-Semitic and her crusade against Hitler was fuelled by her own fantasies and selfaggrandisement. I came to the conclusion that this was bitchy nonsense and my view is supported by the author Anna Funder (the daughter of a former student), who produced a fascinating radio feature on Ruth and her adventures, which was broadcast on ABC Radio National at the beginning of 2001. Ruth in old age was desperately lonely, and for two years prior to her death I took her out for lunch each Sunday.

small stamps of memory

37

Gradually her mind slipped further and further away, but she recalled her childhood and particularly her brother Oscar Koplowitz, academic and poet and intimate of the great German novelist Thomas Mann. When war broke out Oscar escaped to America with his partner Dieter, the son of a proNazi Lutheran minister. Oscar—the genius of the family, Ruth maintained—arranged for the Mann family to emigrate to America. Oscar became Professor of German at various midwestern universities, and he and Dieter were much loved when they lived on campus. When Dieter died from a congenital illness in his fifties Oscar was heartbroken. ‘He then associated with undesirable men,’ Ruth told me. Oscar died from AIDS aged in his early sixties. Ruth Blatt died peacefully in her sleep aged ninety-six. An incident has remained in my mind all these years. When we went ashore at Colombo we were mobbed by beggars who looked ill and undernourished. My mother cried and gave away all her spare change. Ruth said crossly, ‘Oh Betty’, (we had got into the habit of calling my mother Betty because she hated Bessie), ‘stop crying, there is nothing you can do to really help these people.’ I suppose not, but my mother decided that Ruth was a bit hard. We arrived at Tilbury Dock on a cold winter morning in January 1952. Mail was delivered to the ship and we read it over breakfast. I saw tears stream down my mother’s cheeks. (She cried a lot, a characteristic I have inherited.) The letter was from my aunt Jenny Jones to say that their young brother Jack Shaw had died of a heart attack aged forty-two. We were met by Dora Summers, and I was delighted to find that my dour father possessed such an elegant and stylish sister. She was also warm and friendly; however, her children Jeremy and Jill told me later that this was only because she

38

Art & Life

imagined all Australians to be filthy rich and she was hoping for generous support from my father. It was my first encounter with that peculiarly English species known as distressed gentlefolk: I was to meet many more such poignant characters as I settled into the old country. I have to report that I was charmed by my once famous aunt despite the terrible things I was told about her. I was blessed with a fair degree of beginner’s luck in London. Within weeks I had a job at the Q Theatre near Kew Gardens, in west London. I worked partly front of house but also backstage, and played bits and pieces. The theatre was run by the De Leon family, independent theatrical entrepreneurs, as a shop window for the West End, and there was usually a known star or two in each fortnightly production. The Australian actor Lloyd Lamble often appeared and was very friendly and full of kind advice for this tyro actor. Joan Collins, already a star at eighteen, played in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. I used to drink coffee with her at rehearsal breaks. I remember her as being nice and chatty. I first met the actress Irene Handl at the Q and renewed the friendship in Melbourne fifteen years later when I launched her novel, The Sioux, at Eastend Booksellers. Early on at the Q, I formed the habit of lunching on Kew Green. I would cross the bridge, pass the famous gardens, look up at the pagoda, and there on the other side of the Green was this little café called the Spider’s Web. On the first day I hesitated in the doorway until the plainest yet grandest woman I have ever met called to me, ‘Do come in, we’re very poor, but do come in.’ She had great character and, in time, I became very fond of her. She was Christina, Lady Austin, the wife of a retired Indian state governor and London police chief Sir Tom, and she had opened the café to provide work for her ‘poor’ and ‘distressed’

small stamps of memory

39

friends. In the course of time I visited their various homes and—with the exception of a former Hungarian countess— I don’t think any were really poor. Tom and Christina Austin, for instance, lived rent-free in an elegant Queen Anne graceand-favour house in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace. Christina was one of Britain’s first woman doctors and practised in India when representing the Crown with Sir Tom. The chef was a down-to-earth Yorkshire woman, Mrs Rhodes, who was quite unimpressed by these faded grandees. She once said to Christina, ‘You might have a tiiiiitle, boot you’re no laaady.’ Mrs Rhodes was too good a cook to be sacked. The food, given the austerities of the time, was quite delicious. I once went to a party at the Austins’ grace-and-favour pad and met the brilliant actor Derek Godfrey—destined, it was said, to become one of Britain’s greatest stage stars. I renewed our friendship when he toured Australia with the Royal Shakespeare Company, starring with Anthony Quayle and Diana Wynyard. Derek had the looks and talent of an Olivier (to whom he was often compared) but died before he quite reached the top. One crony of Christina’s, Mrs Cyril Herron, whose first name I never knew, was the sister of the poet Humbert Wolfe. She was very coquettish and wore low-cut dresses and strings of pearls. She flirted with me outrageously and taught me to farewell her in French with à tout à l’heure. At times I worked only during the day at the Q. I joined the Questors Theatre at nearby suburban Ealing. This was one of the most prestigious amateur theatres in London and it ran training courses for those who aspired to serious noncommercial theatre. Its director was an earnest man named Alfred Emmett, by day a tea merchant in the City of London. Alfred and most of those associated with Questors despised

40

Art & Life

the professional theatre as both trivial and decadent. I could see their point, and perhaps the seeds for my eventual rejection of the theatre were sown at Questors. The British theatre was in the doldrums until rescued a decade or so later by playwrights such as John Osborne and Harold Pinter and, in particular, by the intellectual influence of the critic Kenneth Tynan. I, however, wanted a foot in both camps, although the thought of working in an office by day and acting at night did not appeal to me. Alfred Emmett was into Stanislavski, but in the most curious, cerebral way of endless discussion and analysis. He did not seem capable of applying theory to practice but I got a kick out of arguing with him. One playwright, Christopher Fry, who enjoyed considerable West End success, also wrote for Questors, as did T. S. Eliot who, I think, was a board member. I remember seeing the great poet mooching through the shadows one evening. I said, ‘Good evening, Mr Eliot,’ but he did not reply. The Q Theatre closed down for the summer and after a break with my parents in hot, green Devon, I got a job backstage at the nearby Richmond Repertory Theatre. Both my theatres were conveniently close to our comfortable rented house on the border between smartish Twickenham and down-at-heel Hounslow. Heathrow, a couple of miles away, was a small airport surrounded by green fields. We found the once-famous uncle-by-marriage, the pioneering film director Walter Summers, living over a fish shop right there in Hounslow. He and Dora had been separated for decades. Gone was the wealth, the private plane, the grand houses, the respect due to an innovator of a wonderful new dramatic art form. He had introduced one of England’s greatest actors, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, to silent

small stamps of memory

41

movies. He was ebullient, marvellous company, and instructed me, in a much more practical way than Alfred Emmett, in the theories of Stanislavski. I had in fact already read the great My Life in Art, back in Kerang, but Uncle Walter brought it all to life for me. I remember he told me that he could cry at will if he thought of the death of his favourite dog. It was hard, gruelling work as an assistant stage manager for weekly rep. I also played small roles. But was I cut out to be an actor? I was beginning to harbour doubts. I was a bit gawky, unco-ordinated on stage, but had a good voice. Should I audition for BBC radio drama? I lacked the confidence. I first saw TV at Grandmother Emily’s cottage in Shepperton. Despite working mostly in the evenings I took in about fifty West End plays. Britain made a deep impression—not always favourable— in ways other than the theatre. I was surprised by the overt anti-Semitism one heard, literally in the streets. He is a Jew, or she is a Jewess was said with heavy, hissing, scornful emphasis. I had never encountered this in Australia. Even in our remote town we were aware of the cultivation and civilisation that those Jewish refugees had brought to our society. I was also surprised by the British admiration for the Germans and their detestation of the French. I was amazed by the insularity of the Brits who (like the nice boys of Kew and Hawthorn) had never seen a coloured person (perhaps other than black American servicemen during the war?). My eccentric cousin Jill Summers thought that Africans lived in trees! It must have come from a teasing story told by her parents after filming in Timbuctoo. All this of course was to change within a decade or so when colonisation came home, literally, to roost. The Brits are decent people and it does not surprise me that political correctness (in relation to respect for

42

Art & Life

minorities) is seen as more extreme there than elsewhere in the world. The swing of the pendulum, as they say. I was delighted by the helpfulness of Londoners. They went out of their way to direct one when lost, very often before being asked. They did not live up to their reputation for reserve, and I was told that the traditional English reticence evaporated in the war when people shared bomb shelters. Australians then were reserved and extremely shy when meeting strangers. Not so now and I suppose it is due to the influence of migrants and the general loosening up of a small society. This is one of the great changes I have noted in the Aussie personality. King George VI died soon after I arrived in England. Cousin Jeremy and I (he wearing a black armband) stood at a railway cutting in Hertfordshire as the train bearing his body rushed through from Sandringham to London. Jeremy wept. Sentimental though I am by nature it meant nothing to me. We were natural republicans even then. My parents and I went to Windsor to witness the funeral proceedings. My mother—given her love of history—was in seventh heaven. Heads of State from all over Europe and the Commonwealth wandered around unprotected. Uncle Joe Stalin in a bad mood could have blown up the leadership of almost the entire world! The four royal dukes marched behind the coffin: Edward Windsor (returning temporarily from exile), Henry Gloucester (our boozy ex–governor-general, known to the Mayor of Fitzroy as the ‘red hot’ dill), Prince Philip of Edinburgh and the youthful Kent. My mother made extensive diary notes and on returning to Kerang gave an address to the Country Women’s Association. When she described the dukes—especially Windsor—as looking rather ordinary, she got into terrible trouble with the loyal royalist locals.

small stamps of memory

43

November 2003 I am in Windsor and stayed last night at Sir Christopher Wren’s Old House Hotel overlooking the River Thames and the town of Eton. I used to meet Mother here when flying in from Australia or New York. It is twenty minutes’ drive from Heathrow. Yesterday I arrived from Malta after interviewing the prime minister and leader of the opposition on their country’s controversial accession to the European Union. In the morning I walked up High Street to that looming monolith of a seemingly impregnable (not so, it caught fire recently) castle. Stephanie Cole (who played a lead in Jeremy’s Tenko) is starring at the Theatre Royal. I recalled the day of the King George VI funeral. While the service took place in St George’s Chapel, a sergeant patrolled a group of army cadets outside the chapel. He bawled, ‘Stand easy.’ They did. ‘Turn left.’ Half of them turned left and half turned right. He then yelled, ‘You fucking lot of stupid cunts.’ The onlookers pretended they hadn’t heard. I don’t think Mother told the CWA ladies back in Kerang. Early on in our London sojourn my parents and I joined the Victoria League. Looking back I suppose it seems odd that my parents should not find joining a club that reeked of God, Queen, Empire and the Conservative Party somewhat anachronistic. At 38 Chesham Place, in the heart of Belgravia, one could relish the comforts and facilities (I did not realise this until later in life) of the most exclusive club. I think the only requirement was that one be a member of the Commonwealth and sufficiently solvent to pay an annual joining fee of, I think, one pound sterling. When I was not involved in the theatre I always dined there and, as a family, we lunched there

44

Art & Life

each Sunday. How it was financed I have no idea. Victoria League House became in more recent years the retirement headquarters of Margaret Thatcher. I saw a good deal of Jeremy and Jill Summers, who had been brought up with upper-class privilege in class-conscious England. Not that they were in any way snobbish. Yet I felt their lives and education had, like those of the boys of Trinity Grammar, circumscribed their responses to the world, and that my childhood, in an Australian bush town, had in some ways been more enlightened than theirs. Jeremy was struggling as a third assistant film director with a hierarchy aware of the eccentricities rather than the genius of his father. He married young to a most charming but strong young woman, Shirley, whom he met in the Welwyn Garden City (a film and TV town) library. He has been the most loving husband and father despite lacking any background in how to construct a happy family. I continued the friendship in Australia where the Summers family lived for a year while Jeremy directed the TV series Riptide. I introduced them to the new-wave film-makers Tim Burstall and Patrick and Rosemary Ryan while the film 2000 Weeks was in production, and I think the association was fruitful for both parties. Jill Summers was quite different. For want of a better word she was a natural bohemian, cynical but vulnerable; she never married but lived and loved freely. She worked for BBC TV makeup and eventually headed a staff of 120. When I first knew her she was one of the few inhabitants of inner-city Soho, where she lived in a crummy flat three floors above a wholesale greengrocer. I found it all wildly exciting and would gladly have moved in with her. There was a coffin-shaped bath in the kitchen. One day I helped her paint her bedroom. When I criticised the

small stamps of memory

45

colour she replied, ‘My dear colonial cousin, you have about as much colour sense as a fly up my arse!’ I was shocked.

November 2003 Staying in London with Sylvia and Stuart. Left from Wimbledon Common to spend a day with the Summerses in their pretty sixteenth-century house, Hyde Cottage, Lensford, in rural Hertfordshire. It was our first meeting in several decades and I wanted to borrow photos and reminisce with Jeremy about my first visit to England. I also wanted to refresh my knowledge of his parents, who had influenced my ambitions as a child long before I ever met them. It took just twenty minutes by train from Kings Cross Station and Jeremy met me at the station. The Summerses have a large garden and look out over a farm. Jeremy, my age, has recently retired from his last job directing, for several years, the successful TV series Brookside in Liverpool. Jeremy is tolerant in his recall of his parents and tells stories, amusing and touching, about them both. But above all he loved our little Edwardian grandmother. He scarcely knew his father, who left the family when he was still a little boy. Walter was only fifty-six when I knew him and his film career had finished at the age of forty-three. He was a hero (and awarded the Military Cross) in the First World War. He made fifty films—many successful both artistically and at the box office. I had forgotten their names. The best known are: Bolibar (1928), Suspense (1930), Trapped in a Submarine (1932), Timbuctoo (1933) and The Dark Eyes of London (1939). As a kid in Kerang I saw his The House Opposite, in which Jeremy and Jill played small

46

Art & Life

roles. He has recently been honoured in London with his own film festival. I was wrong to think he had not adapted well to the talkies. He had a hard time in the Second World War and, after, was superseded by people like Anthony Asquith, who had stayed in cushy, protected jobs making morale-enhancing war movies. Jeremy has seen receipts for Walter’s income during the 1930s when he earned £2000 per week. None of this went into property. After Walter dumped his family they were, from time to time, homeless. Dora and the children would turn up on someone’s doorstep with suitcases begging for asylum. Dora did it all with the enormous charm I remember so well. Jeremy was taken from his top public (in the traditional sense) school, Bedford, when all the money ran out. I once again observed the devotion between Jeremy and Shirley. From time to time they held hands. Jeremy pays tribute to Shirley for making (saving?) his life. They are close to their four highly successful children. It was a happy day. Jeremy drove me to the station as the sun set beneath a Constable sky.

1990 After selecting books in a New York warehouse (a final and unsuccessful foray into library supply) I flew overnight to London, arriving at Gatwick Airport early in the morning. I rented a car and drove out onto the M25 (around Greater London) en route, eventually, to Gloucestershire. Then I saw a sign to Hampton Court, whose Tudor splendour I recalled. I remembered the Austins and Derek Godfrey, and my father’s old home. Jill, I knew, was living in grandmother Emily’s

small stamps of memory

47

house, and on the spur of the moment I decided to visit her there. I had not seen her since 1952. Shepperton, a bustling village, looked much the same after forty years. What was Grandma’s address? Never mind, I was confident I could find the house. I left the car in the railway station car-park and walked along High Street. Then I came to the street, Glebeland Gardens. I recognised the pretty brick cottage—no. 26. It was 11 a.m. when I knocked on the door. Silence. Then I heard a booming, theatrical voice. ‘Who is it?’ I told her who. ‘Cousin Philip from Awstralia? Wait.’ I waited. I heard the movement of furniture and the door opened a crack, hampered by carpet. ‘You’ve caught me at a bad time,’ she intoned, ‘my favourite cat died last night. Do come in.’ There she was, this little elderly lady, still in her dressinggown, living in unimaginable squalor. We were surrounded by dogs and cats. The stench was overpowering. Oven trays lined with torn-up newspaper were everywhere and full of shit. The stench was overpowering. Walls had been knocked out. One room led to another. In the modernised bathroom a tea-chest covered the lavatory. The bath was full of junk. The staircase was jammed with antique furniture. I offered to bury the cat. ‘Thank you, but the vet will take her away. You are honoured, I have allowed nobody inside my house for years. Now I will make you a cup of tea.’ No! I felt I was about to vomit. I told her I would take her to lunch, I would fetch the car and return in half an hour, and she replied, ‘Oh lovely.’ Jill scrubbed up well and directed me to the best pub in town. She was a delightful, if outlandish, companion. Her life had failed, she told me. Her only ambition ever was to be a great actress (I had not known this) and she had ended up in make-up. Did I know of the local poet, Thomas Love

48

Art & Life

Peacock? Yes? She seemed surprised, as if TLP were quite unknown outside Shepperton. ‘My final aim in life is to reestablish his reputation.’ Her monologue was a word-salad. ‘I felt sorry for your father. Poor Fred, totally dominated by Bessie and Nan. My parents were monsters but I loved our grandmother. I trade in antiques.’ She was like a talking head from Alan Bennett’s BBC TV series. I gave her a big hug and kissed her goodbye and was surprised that she didn’t smell. I never saw her again. She died from cancer two years later. Jeremy told me the most upsetting thing after her death was going to the house (he had not been permitted in for years) and witnessing the conditions in which his sister had lived. There were rotting bodies of dogs and cats. After a year my parents announced their intention of returning to Australia. I lacked the financial resources and, I suppose, the ambition to continue a theatrical career in London, and decided to accompany them. I am always happy to return home after even just a fortnight around the world.

FOUR My Hyperbolic Heart

we left, the fog of the century came down. It was comparable—although really much worse—to the Kerang mallee black-out, except that it lasted for three days. This black, greasy pall of sooty smog got into your hair, clothing, nose, mouth and lungs. You would come home looking (as people actually said in those days) ‘like a nigger’. You could only just see a streetlight if you stood directly beneath it. Hundreds died of respiratory complaints. Coal fires were banned in London thereafter. It remains one of my worst images of London. Another memory is the foul stink when passing (even in a bus) a fish and chip shop. At Tilbury Dock we boarded the Oronsay, on a cold winter morning, much like the day of our arrival. At our luncheon table sat two beautiful women. One of them, tall, with an aristocratic demeanour and fair English rose-petal skin, wept as she farewelled her lover, a handsome, dark-haired upperclass Englishman. Later she told me her name was Anthea. A WEEK BEFORE

50

Art & Life

Her voice was low and thrilling. She was off to Melbourne to visit her brother. Soon she would return to marry her beloved. She did not. She married, instead, Steve Martin, who came from what is known as a ‘good’ Melbourne family. Half a century later we still fling our arms around each other when we meet. The other woman was a stunning blonde. Small (why do they always say ‘petite’?), beautifully formed, blue eyed, she spoke precise English with a slightly German accent. If there were any good-looking blokes on board I certainly did not have eyes for them. Celia Hornung remained close to me for thirty-five years. For the time being, and for some time in the future, I was in love with her. She was ten years older than me and infinitely more sophisticated. A femme fatale, a woman of the world but also, curiously, a bluestocking. As a little girl she was presented to Hitler as the perfect Aryan child. He never knew she was Jewish! Celia was a poet, and also what we now call a groupie. Writers were her speciality. She had been the mistress of the German novelist Robert Neumann and of the black American writer Richard Wright. Neumann she met in Berlin and Wright, in Paris. She had joined the American occupation army after the war and later worked for Henry Kissinger. He, apparently, was one of the few men who were sexually unmoved by Celia. She was also bisexual and had affairs with women, although emotionally she was focussed on men. Celia loathed the idea of going to Australia but her passion had driven her. By chance she had met a businessman by the name of Bill Sanders. He was a Viennese Jew by origin, and his partner had made off with the business’s funds. Bill banished himself to Australia. His wife and children were already

my hyperbolic heart

51

living in Melbourne. Although he was neither an intellectual nor writer Celia was hopelessly, helplessly in love with him. Bill, who was a lovely man, made a fortune from Red Tulip chocolates. He died in his early sixties from a heart attack, leaving Celia devastated. She has mourned him ever since. Celia was a terrible snob and loathed travelling tourist class. My mother hated her, partly for her snobbishness and partly because she flirted with me constantly. We would lie sunbaking on the deck and she would caress the golden hairs on my thighs. On New Year’s Eve, eight hours from Fremantle, we attended an officer’s party in first class. I walked her back to her cabin and begged her to allow me to make love to her. No, she said, we had left it too late. In five days she would be with Sanders. She possessed a kind of Teutonic arrogance and could be very cruel. The day before we arrived in Melbourne she told me I would never amount to anything. I was shattered and can still recall my humiliation, which lasted for a long time.

FIVE Endless Beautiful Memory

arriving in Melbourne I was recruited by Frank Thring’s Arrow Theatre company to tour Victoria for the Council of Adult Education. I can’t remember how I got this job. I think someone dropped out and, since mine was a small part, having missed rehearsals did not matter. I was not at all happy on this tour of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, but at least it was fairly well paid work. One delight was the actress Sheila Florance, but most of the cast were bitchy and superficial. All the male members were gay and the sexual intrigues and jealousies were infinite. Two actresses—and friends—were Fenella Maguire and Marcella Burgoyne. Somebody quipped, ‘Who is the fella, Marcella or Fenella?’ By sheer coincidence I celebrated my twenty-first birthday in Kerang and my parents and sister gave a drinks party for the cast and local friends. One hot Sunday, still on tour, I rang Celia’s flat in St WITHIN DAYS OF

endless beautiful memory

53

Kilda. Someone told me she had returned to England. I was heartbroken. As soon as I returned to Melbourne I auditioned for radio drama. There were two major independent production companies in Melbourne—Crawfords and Australasian Radio Productions—as well as the ABC. Curiously I got more work from the commercial people. I was cast regularly as the juvenile lead, a strange term then used for both sexes in stage and radio casting. This usually entailed a romantic role and I was good at love scenes. I was also cast as gentlemanly men of action and leadership, including Prince Philip. I was adept—as we all had to be—at making sense of a script on a first reading. Economics ruled out the prolonged use of a studio and subsequent payment for actors’ and technicians’ time. We rarely had more than one rehearsal and this was as much for accurate timing as the interpretation of character. Occasionally we would record without prior knowledge of the script, and this was known as ‘flying’ it. Some otherwise very fine actors simply couldn’t cope with an instant performance, and this ruled them out entirely from radio. I can’t remember what we were paid, but certainly on the basis of working time I did better in radio acting then than I do now researching and as a journalist. Scripts were variable in quality—most, but not all, were trashy. The journalist and Asian commentator Osmar White wrote marvellous stuff with locations in such exotic places as Afghanistan and West Irian. Of course one became more skilled the more one worked, and since most of the dramas were of a serial nature one knew what sort of a role one was playing. My casting was a bit limited because I was not good at dialects or roles outside my age range. I always, as they say, played myself. In those days my English accent and baritone voice were great assets.

54

Art & Life

I had, of course, inherited these qualities from my parents. I am embarrassed when people (still) tell me I have a beautiful voice. It sounds rather phoney when I hear it on record and I wish I weren’t stuck with it. It has often been said that Australian radio actors were the best in the world and I think this is a fair claim. Certainly those who left for London had no trouble working for BBC sound radio. Beverley Dunn (still one of the best actresses in the country) was told by a BBC director that she possessed ‘a brine [brown] voice’. The big female stars of radio were Patricia Kennedy, Marcia Hart, Lorna Forbes, Beverley Dunn, Elizabeth Wing and Agnes Dobson. The male stars were Keith Eden, Richard Davies, Douglas Kelly, John Morgan and Brian James. I was not in this league. Others came and went. We were supplemented from time to time by British actors—in town for a season with J. C. Williamson’s or Garnett Carroll—such as Robert Morley, Roger Livesey and Ursula Jeans. They were guest stars and we were their support. Sometimes (unless they had worked for BBC radio) their microphone technique left much to be desired. Sybil Thorndike played the Medea for the ABC and worked metres away from the microphone. Today there is hardly any drama on ABC radio. I do not know why, because it would be an inexpensive form of program for an organisation strapped for cash. Radio was a strange world which gave a living to many once ambitious actors. There was little other work available and it was really better to go to, rather than return from, London. Most of the men and a few of the women drank too much. I remember working for Australasian Radio Productions in two serials: Peter and Paula (I was Peter) and Esther and I (I was I). Halfway through recording four episodes the director

endless beautiful memory

55

would announce a ‘tea break’. This was a euphemism for booze, and we would go across Spencer Street to the pub (still there and looking exactly the same). I would have one drink and the others (all much older than me and top stars), four or five. Dicky Davies and Doug Kelly were ferocious drinkers and Kelly was belligerent when drunk. There was also a semi-dero actor named Cliff Cowley who walked with crutches and sometimes slept in the nearest telephone box to the studio, to which he was called early in the morning. If Cliff didn’t like the way you were interpreting your part he might threaten you with a crutch. Somehow they got through their performances. Dicky Davies was murdered, it was rumoured, by a rough trade trick he had picked up somewhere. Some came to a sticky end. So might I have done had I not been developing another, more wholesome, life. Since I did not earn quite enough money from radio, I worked from time to time as a proofreader at the Age. Here I met two people: Stephen Murray-Smith and Bruce Grant. Bruce Grant had recently returned from London where he had been European correspondent for the Age and was now (among other duties) their theatre critic. I wrote him a note regarding some theatre production and he came to the reading room to meet me. He was extremely handsome in addition to being remarkably talented across a spectrum of intellectual and artistic activities. He went on to a distinguished career as journalist, diplomat, academic and novelist. Our friendship has grown over the decades and it is partly due to his influence that I became a writer. Most jobs were easy to pick up in the early 1950s and I came and went from the reading room. I did a bit of work at the New Theatre where a good friend, playwright Bob

56

Art & Life

Herbert, directed. I suppose it was a Communist Party front. From time to time they did excellent productions. The plays of Howard Fast and Arthur Miller, the inevitable Thunder Rock by Robert Ardrey and, of course, Reedy River (‘Click go the shears boys, click, click, click’) written by the administrator of Actor’s Equity, Dick Diamond. One very fine actor was John Gray who later (with Lloyd Lamble and Peter Finch) was successful in London. Playwright Oriel Gray—previously married to John Gray—was around and about. She was not dour like the other lefty ladies and was awaiting her big chance.

July 2003 Oriel Gray has died. In 1955 her play The Torrents jointly won the Playwrights’ Advisory Board prize together with Ray Lawler’s The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Oriel’s bad luck began with her second husband John Hepworth losing the only script in a Melbourne bar. It was rescued from a rubbish bin by an enterprising barmaid! The Doll, as everyone is aware, changed the face of Australian drama. The competition was too great. Torrents sank, almost without a trace. Oriel was too avant-garde. You just didn’t write about feminism or the environment in the 1950s. I also worked at the National Theatre, Eastern Hill, run by the retired singer Gertrude Johnston, who had been a protégé of Dame Nellie Melba. Ray Lawler was one of the directors and cast me in his pantomime Ginger Meggs. I played Mr Meggs, the late June Brown was Mrs Meggs, Ray played Ginger, Kathy Reed was Ginger’s girlfriend Minnie, Harry Starling

endless beautiful memory

57

was Cuthbert, Reg Dell was Tiger Kelly, Lewis Fiander was a circus clown and Agnes Fulton was Akela the Cub leader. We all sang and danced in an amateurish way, but the play was well written, witty and quite sophisticated in its own way. Even the culturally snobby Celia (who had returned to Melbourne) enjoyed it. Ray Lawler himself has disowned it and destroyed the script. Within a year he had achieved fame as the author of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll which, as everyone has said, hailed the renaissance of a truly Australian theatre. Later The Doll was acclaimed in the West End and on Broadway. Ray told me a lovely true story. He was still living with his parents in Footscray and he travelled up and down carrying (like the good working-class boy he was supposed to be) a Gladstone bag containing the tools of his trade. Late one afternoon he was returning home and jumped onto a train at Spencer Street just as it moved off. He tripped and sprawled over the floor and the bag flew open, emptying its contents. He crawled around picking up pieces of stage make-up and then sat down not daring to look at anyone. One worker held out his horny hand and said, ‘Look sonny, ya forgot ya powder puff’. My closest actor friend was the highly erudite Agnes Dobson. There seemed to be nothing she hadn’t read and she possessed a truly scholarly knowledge of comparative religions. If we had spent a morning recording together at Crawfords we would lunch at the Café Society at the top of Bourke Street.

58

Art & Life June 2003

Journalist Keith Dunstan has written a lovely and loving obituary of the singer Glenda Raymond whom he knew well. Glenda married the producer Hector Crawford. What Keith doesn’t say is that she was a Kerang girl whose surname was really Ryan. It was said at the time that Hector considered Ryan to be too Irish Catholic a name for a talented singer on the way up. It mattered in those days. In the event Glenda returned from a brilliant career in London to marry Hector and they lived happily ever after. When I taxed Keith with this he gave me his oriental look. For some reason Glenda wanted to forget this time of her life but I think the Kerang locals were hurt. The Café Society was civilised, relatively inexpensive and clubby. The food was good, simple Italian, to which—as I have recounted—I had been introduced at an early age. There was no restriction on wine at lunch-time but liquor had to be off the table by eight at night. It was not unusual in those halcyon days for lunch to merge into dinner. Agnes and I were often joined by Professor (of history) Brian Fitzpatrick. The conversation was good and I was continuing my protracted education in a cosmopolitan and congenial atmosphere. Around nine one evening Brian got up to go to the lavatory. He took several steps in the right direction then undid his fly and peed there and then. Owner and maître d’, Reno Codognotto, saw him and screamed at his waiters who rushed with white table cloths to wrap him up. Brian was not flashing, he simply thought he had arrived at the lavatory. Reno was surprisingly tolerant, although he insisted that in future Brian must be accompanied by his wife, Professor Kathleen Fitzpatrick.

SIX Clean Articulate Love

radically when I met Barrie. I was harbouring further doubts about a theatrical career and wondered if I should acquire a proper education and follow some respectable career. Writing never occurred to me and I suppose if I have any serious regrets about the development of what has otherwise been a rather wonderful life then this is it. On the other hand . . . ? I met Barrie in the autumn of 1954. He was sitting at his desk in the enquiry room of the Public Library (now the State Library of Victoria), and I asked him what possibilities there were for work as a librarian. This man was fair, blue eyed, unobtrusively good-looking and perhaps five years my senior. He did not make a strong impression on me but was friendly, rather grave, and precise in his instructions. Lacking educational qualifications I would be eligible, he told me, only for the general (as opposed to the professional) staff. I should write a letter of application to the chief librarian, Austin McCallum. MY LIFE CHANGED

60

Art & Life

I am an impetuous person and promptly disregarded this thoughtful advice. Outside the library I telephoned Mr McCallum. What a casual world it then was. The chief answered his own phone and asked when I could come for an interview. Now, I suggested, I am outside the library. Within minutes I saw him in his office. Two weeks later I received a letter at my shared flat in Toorak. Mr McCallum would very much like me to work for his library. When could I start? I rejected his kind offer. I had another good role in a radio serial and really quite enjoyed proofreading in the evenings. I suppose my tentative foray into a more ‘intellectual’ world was really a search for an identity undernourished by play-acting. One evening I took a sickie from proofreading when asked to attend a rare recording session in the evening. At around 10 p.m. I took the Toorak tram home and there was Barrie in the middle smoking section, on his way home from work. He was reading the New Statesman, but was happy to fold it up and talk to me. We got off at the same stop at the end of Toorak village. Would I care to come to his place in Hill Street for a coffee? Of course. He had a bed-sitting room in a charming if dilapidated farmhouse said to be the oldest residence in Toorak. Arthur Boyd ceramic tiles hung on the walls. As we talked—over a bottle of whisky—I recognised him to be a man of immense cultivation, erudition and creative drive. I’m not sure what he made of me. He must have thought me crass and ignorant, and he was definitely unimpressed by my work as an actor. He rather despised the theatre. As for radio serials? I suppose I really agreed with him. On the other hand I did give him some indication that I was not another dumb theatrical. (Today it is different, all actors seem to be, or want to be, intellectuals.) I was, after

clean articulate love

61

all, reasonably well read for a twenty-three-year-old. He told me he was a poet and editor outside library hours. I told him I knew a poet named Celia Hornung and quoted her verse. Barrie was intrigued. She had sent poems to the literary magazine of which he was an editor, and he had been impressed by the unusual talent of this mysterious new contributor. I told him she was stunningly beautiful and I was possibly in love with her. ‘Well . . . ?’ Barrie frowned. Celia, I said (with the strong implication that I agreed with her), believed there was absolutely no culture in Australia. Suddenly Barrie became very angry. He told me that he (unlike poor me) was fifth-generation Australian: ‘Culture is where you find it, or make it’, he snapped. So I knew Stephen Murray-Smith and was quite matey with him? Well Murray-Smith was a ‘typical’ academic and, of course, a communist. While Barrie made it plain that he was left-wing, there was no doubt he believed that to be a communist in this day and age was a disgrace to anyone of moral integrity. That my parents had subscribed to the Communist Party newspaper in the wartime 1940s did seem to be acceptable. In due course I discovered that the Heide world had entered an uneasy, although not entirely unfriendly, alliance with the Party and certain individual communists. I suppose (to put it very simply) that at a time when it was conceivable the Western world might become communist, John and Sunday (and other like-minded people) took the view that a civilised participation might ameliorate the revolutionary excesses of a doctrinaire Party line. At about three in the morning Barrie (rather nervously) asked me to stay the night. I was enormously attracted to him and readily agreed. The rest, as they say, is history. This

62

Art & Life

meeting led to a relationship which changed my life and lasted for nearly three decades. Ern Malley’s Journal was the defiant title given to a literary magazine jointly edited by Barrie, John Reed and Max Harris. I became an assistant to Barrie, who could best be described as the managing editor. Barrie mostly worked in the evenings, so when I was not acting on radio my daytime hours were free for this stimulating task. John, Max, Sidney Nolan and Sunday had edited the remarkable avant-garde magazine Angry Penguins from 1940 to 1946. It had been financed by John and Sunday, as was a book publishing house named Reed & Harris. I did already know something of the Ern Malley scandal. It was much publicised at the time I was at school. Poems had arrived from one Ethel Malley telling the editors that she had found her recently deceased brother Ern’s work when sorting through his belongings. Did they possess literary merit? Max was primarily responsible for poetry; yes, indeed, he replied, and asked for more. He was knocked out by their spontaneity, originality and surreal imagery and convinced he had found a genius. Ethel Malley sent more poems and Angry Penguins published a special edition in the late Ern’s honour. One poem, ‘The Arabian Tree’, inspired Nolan to paint one of his finest works which was given the same title, and this was used to illustrate the cover of the special edition. In due course this beautiful painting hung in my living room after the establishment of my bookshop. Thirty years later Sunday confessed to me that, due to an unevenness in quality, she had harboured certain doubts about the authenticity of the Ern Malley poems. It has been said—and this may well be true—that Sunday Reed was the most perceptive of the Heide group.

clean articulate love

63

The true story was revealed in a Sydney newspaper. The poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart claimed to have concocted the poems on a quiet rainy day in Victoria Barracks, St Kilda Road, Melbourne. The two men had taken random quotes from a variety of sources and strung them together with their own contributions. One of the sources was a scientific paper on mosquito infestation. McAuley and Stewart were traditionalists, and had perpetrated the hoax in order to expose what they believed to be the pretensions and vacuity of modern poetry. It is interesting to note that they also damned the work of the Spanish revolutionary Garcia Lorca and much of the Anglo-American school including Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot. The Angry Penguins group, and particularly Barrie, who was then still living in Brisbane, were unrepentant. The distinguished British art historian, Sir Herbert Read, and T. S. Eliot were among those who cabled support for the quality of the poems, as did the American novelist Henry Miller, already a contributor to Penguins.

1990 Visiting Big Sur, on the Californian coast, I met Henry Miller’s closest friend Emil White, now aged ninety, and presiding over the Henry Miller Museum and Library. ‘Where do you come from?’ he asked when I walked in. I replied with a quote from an Ern Malley poem, ‘And we are the angry penguins of the night.’ Emil was delighted. ‘You’re Australian,’ he shouted. ‘Ern Malley is the greatest poet of the twentieth century.’ Emil told me that it was he who sent the cable in Miller’s name. ‘Henry knew nothing about poetry,’ he told me.

64

Art & Life

The Ern Malley scandal affected Barrie and his life profoundly. He offered his work to no-one. He did, however, publish very long poems in Ern Malley’s Journal, and these, I think, were the best he ever wrote. Since his death I have written about the significance of these works, particularly in the Australian’s Review of Books. Perhaps the fact that the ‘test’ publication of Barrie’s poems in his own magazine failed to elicit a favourable critical response exacerbated his timidity which remained until the last decade of his life. Ern Malley’s Journal, generally, was rubbished by the literary critics, and dismissed as a re-hash of dubious modernism. I think Max was uneasy with his role as a joint editor. Barrie (perhaps wrongly) had no reservations about Ern Malley. He believed that the claims the poems were written in one afternoon were lies. He offered to debate the merit and poetic meanings line by line, but nobody took up his suggestion. It is generally believed, and I concur, that McAuley and Stewart composed—at least for the most part—poems of quality despite themselves. Their actions had released their own stifled imaginative processes. They were hoist, as it were, on their own petard.

November 2003, London I was sitting in the Chelsea Arts Club waiting for an interview with the Australian author and duchess (of Hamilton and Brandon) Jill Hamilton, when I saw the Independent’s obituary of the writer Elisabeth Lambert Oritz. It was also in the Times. I rang Andrew McKie at the Telegraph and told him I knew a lot about this lady that the London journos did not. They wrote her off as purely a cookery writer. Andrew readily agreed

clean articulate love

65

to take a piece from me and I wrote it as soon as I arrived home a few days later. She was the Sydney representative for Angry Penguins during the war years and played an integral role in the Ern Malley affair. Like Barrie she strongly believed in the quality of the poems and defended the integrity of Max Harris, Nolan, John and Sunday, and Barrie in her journalism. She also arranged for their publication in London and New York. In his excellent account of the Malley saga, Michael Heyward quotes a letter from Liz to John Reed. (Some lines purportedly came from a drainage report.) ‘It isn’t everyone who can toss off a paeon of fine flavour. And “borrow-pits”. What a beautiful word. Whatever made Stewart/McAuley think a misquito unpoetic?’ Although I continued to act in radio and proofread at night, my life now revolved around Barrie, and almost all his interests— intellectual and artistic—became mine. I had come home and had arrived at precisely the right time to become involved in the world of painting. I had known almost nothing until now. Suddenly I was surrounded by the works (both paintings and sculptures) of Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Charles Blackman, Laurence Hope, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester and Ian Sime. Eventually I was accepted into the astonishing world of John and Sunday Reed at Heide.

SEVEN We A r e M a k i n g Country

Brisbane boy who had lived in Melbourne for about four years when I first met him in 1954. He had been a founding member of the Barjai group of writers and artists, who had published a literary magazine of that name. Barjai was the Aboriginal word for meeting place for youth. Co-editor was the poet Lawrence Collinson. Brisbane had thrown up—as provincial centres sometimes do—a ferment of cultural energy. Others in the group were writers Charles Osborne, Barbara Blackman, Cecel Knopke (who later changed his name to Edward Segmund), Vida Horne (née Lahey) and Thea Astley, historian Louis Green and artists Laurence Hope and Charles Blackman. The rather older poet Judith Wright played the role of matron to this disparate collection of (self-styled) ‘creative youth’. These youngsters were highly rebellious against conformist Brisbane society. A man might be arrested on a trumped up charge just for wearing a pink shirt or suede BARRIE WAS A

we are making country

67

shoes; a woman shunned if thought to be sexually immoral. The Barjai group was genuinely avant-garde and attracted the attention of John and Sunday Reed in distant Melbourne. The Reeds paid a visit to Brisbane. Barrie was swept off his feet by them, and almost immediately resolved to move to Melbourne. Others, including Collinson, Knopke, Hope, the Blackmans and Horne, followed him. The Heide group (including Sidney Nolan and Max Harris) were particularly interested in the poems of l’enfant Baudelaire (as they called him), Barrie G. Reid. In Brisbane Barrie lived in an intimate relationship with Charles Osborne. Together they opened the Ballad Bookshop in Queen Street, Brisbane, which Charles ran while Barrie worked at the State Library. When I arrived on the scene Barrie was mourning the loss of Charles who—not at all impressed with Barrie’s close connection with Heide, which he regarded as an incestuous hot-house—left him to live and work as an actor in London. Today, as a musicologist and sometime government arts administrator, Charles is an influential expatriate and in some ways more British than the British. I was a willing recipient of all this cultural history, as I was of Barrie’s (slightly exaggerated) past. Above all Barrie was a proud Australian. I think perhaps I had never met one before—at least in the cultural rather than xenophobic sense—and I, with my nouveau-Australian family background, felt somewhat inadequate. I was, however, receptive to assuming a truly Australian identity (I think my parents had, to the extent that they were able, sown the seeds), and I had become aware of cultural changes in Australia that were making this possible. In retrospect I find it strange that the brilliant expatriates—Barry Humphries and the journalist

68

Art & Life

Christopher Hitchens, perhaps Germaine Greer—all more gifted than myself, who fled (mostly) to London in the 1950s, could not recognise this. Newcomers like Georges and Mirka Mora certainly did, and they were cultivated Parisians. Barrie and I moved into a rather dingy flat in a decayed Victorian gold-rush, wedding-cake mansion named Chastleton, in Chastleton Avenue, Toorak, just around the corner from Barrie’s former residence in the old farmhouse. We were joined there by a young painter named Leslie Stack and we three lived more or less communally. Leslie had no job, Barrie was underpaid and I, with my two jobs, covered most of our expenses. Early in 1955 a news paragraph in the Age announced that four of Britain’s greatest actors were about to tour Australia in two new plays written by London’s top commercial playwright, Terence Rattigan. The plays were Separate Tables and The Sleeping Prince. The stars were wife and husband Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir Lewis Casson, and husband and wife Sir Ralph Richardson and Miss Meriel Forbes. These greats needed a supporting Australian cast. There were no agents then, at least not in Melbourne. Apply to director Lionel Harris, care of producer and sole owner of the Princess Theatre, Mr Garnett Carroll. The company would play in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney for a contracted six months. I discussed the question with Barrie. Should I apply? He thought it was a good idea. I wonder now if he needed a rest from me. My reservation was, of course, leaving Barrie and my new and exciting Melbourne life. On the other hand, one third of the half-year was to be spent in Melbourne. Lionel Harris seemed taken with me and I was tentatively cast as the young doctor in Separate Tables. Harris did not believe in auditions. He claimed to know intuitively if anyone could act or not. We, the stars and supporting cast, sat in a semi-circle on the

we are making country

69

stage of the baroque Princess Theatre. I had lots of dialogue with Dame Sybil who gave me approving smiles as if she liked the way I was reading my lines. What a help was radio experience! Others stumbled through, nervous in the presence of the great. I was not at all nervous. In the event I did not get the part because I looked too young to be a doctor and a married one at that. Harry Starling played the part and did a good job, and I understudied him. We had worked together in Ginger Meggs. I probably should have bowed out, because I became totally bored over the ensuing months. Nevertheless I enjoyed visiting Perth and, even more, Sydney. The radio production people were very understanding. I was written out of three serials while in Perth and Sydney, and then back in when I returned to Melbourne with my stage career over forever. While we played the Melbourne season, an outstanding Contemporary Arts Society exhibition was planned for display in the glass-roomed showcase of Preston Motors in Russell Street. I was sufficiently bold as to ask Sir Ralph if he would open it and he agreed. The exhibition was literally a crowd-stopper. The newspapers were full of this extraordinary collection of modern art in full view of passers-by. It contained Boyds, Tuckers, Hesters, Williamses, Blackmans, Frenches, Percevals et al. Sir Ralph was clearly ill at ease with modern art and spoke for forty-five seconds. Had the Richardsons invested rather less money than they paid for a nightly supper at the Windsor Hotel they would have made a killing in years to come, not to mention acquiring Australian art which was to be acclaimed in London. Of the four stars, I—and I think other Australian cast members—preferred the least famous of them, Meriel Forbes. She was more democratic than the others—we never addressed

70

Art & Life

her as Lady Richardson, as she had asked us to call her by her nickname Mu. For the others it was full titles. Sir Ralph scarcely acknowledged us. Sir Lewis was remote, almost doddery. If Dame Sybil was a touch more friendly one felt it came from a spirit of noblesse oblige. I was offended, not on my own behalf, but because she ignored her talented Australian contemporaries such as Winifred Green and Lorna Forbes, fine actresses in their own right. One interesting Australian cast member was Jacqueline Kott, later married to Judge Gordon Samuels, who became governor of New South Wales in the mid-1990s.

Ja n u a r y 2 0 0 0 I visited John Sumner, founding director of the Melbourne Theatre Company in 1953. We recalled the opening of the Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown, Sydney, in September 1956. John had come from Melbourne to act as production manager. What I didn’t know—or had forgotten—was that the lighting system in this old theatre had failed at 4 p.m. on opening night and we nearly didn’t go on at all. ABC television covered the event outside, where crowds gathered as if for a royal visit. It was the ABC’s first on-location telecast. I told John that my strongest recollection of the night was the post-performance grand reception held—so it was said—to launch the renaissance of the Australian theatre. We Australian members of the cast were not invited. At least five of us played substantial supporting roles: Lorna Forbes, Winifred Green, Lily Moore, Harry Starling and June Collis. Rather than this ephemeral trash from London, the plays which should have opened the Australian Elizabethan Theatre

we are making country

71

Trust were The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and Oriel Gray’s The Torrents. Today of course it would not happen. Why did we not gate-crash that grand reception? Well, we knew our place in those days.

2002 On a visit to Sydney I met for the first time in all these years my old friend Jacqueline Kott, by now first lady of New South Wales. I reminded her of the incident of the party and she passed it on to the governor. Gordon Samuels happened to be addressing students at the National Institute of Dramatic Art later that week and told my story to a group of incredulous trainee actors and directors. Later I wrote to Jacquie, ‘Here is a picture of Mu playing the showgirl at age forty-two. How young that seems to us now. I do see you as a first lady— if that is not too American a term for one who represents the monarch—you were so much more sophisticated than the rest of us—the stars did not faze you one jot.’ (Actually nor did they me; I had met too many in London.) ‘They were not particularly happy days for me (despite Harry Starling’s attentions) but then I was not really dedicated. Lily Moore told reporters she had been seven years longer on the stage (mostly music hall) than Dame Sybil. Winifred Green (who was a lady playing a Lady) did not speak to Lily who was “common”. Winifred drank sparkling burgundy when it was de trop. June Collis was a sex-pot who wed a professor who turned out to be gay. Sybil recited a James McAuley ode to the old theatre and said it (i.e. the ode) reminded her of John Betjeman. (Not Ern Malley!) With nostalgic affection. P.’ I did have a life outside the theatre during the Sydney

72

Art & Life

season. Barrie had introduced me to the librarian John Simkin who lived with the musicologist and writer James Murdoch. John and Jamie had a flat at Glamis Hall, a handsome colonial Victorian house at the bottom of Wilde Street, Potts Point. They were conveniently close to the naval base, and sailors from all over the world would pop in for rest and recreation! Jamie and John were joyously gay at a time when most homosexuals felt guilty and afraid. I stayed with them until I found a room of my own perched on top of a terrace house in Palmer Street, Woolloomooloo. Kings Cross was marvellous in those days. It was often compared to London’s Soho, but it had (and still does have to an extent) an exciting, truly urban residential character, which succeeds in being peculiarly Australian while thumbing its nose at the suburbs. I loved it then and still do, and I try to ignore the sordid bits. Jamie in turn introduced me to Nadine Amadio, then aged twenty-two, and married to jazz man Ray Price. Thus began a long friendship with this blonde beauty. Facially she was like a more human Greta Garbo. Nadine came from a family whose musical involvement went back several generations. Her great-aunt was the singer Florence Austral. I also met other members of the Amadio family: flautist Uncle John, accompanist to Madame Melba, who (I reminded him) had come to Kerang on tour when I was a schoolboy, and the wickedly handsome uncle, flautist Neville, who aroused suspicion (unfounded) for wearing pink ties. Later Nadine and Jamie Murdoch, who loved each other in a platonic way—from childhood to old age—became, through Barrie and myself, part of the Heide circle. Nadine and Ray lived in a weatherboard house in the hills behind Newport Beach, and I would visit with Jamie and John on Sundays. Nadine and Ray separated but remained good

we are making country

73

friends. Ray (an innocent and gentle man) died too soon. Nadine went on to become a music critic, author, photographer, script writer and film-maker. Nearly half a century on we telephone each other and talk for hours at a time. When the Sydney season ended I did not take up an option to tour New Zealand, but happily returned to Melbourne to embrace a very different world. When Barrie’s father died he received a small inheritance which, combined with my regular income, enabled us to afford more salubrious accommodation. We eventually found a large upstairs maisonette at 57 Darling Street, South Yarra. Below us was one other flat, and we were surrounded by a large garden. We also had a swimming pool, which was rare in those days. Our neighbours lacked interest in either the pool or garden, both of which were left entirely to us. He was the retired medical director of the Australian Medical Association. I rather liked her, she was a racy, gin-drinking old lady. One day Mrs X put a note addressed to me under our front door. It read, ‘Dear Philip, I think it only fair to tell you that all your conversations upstairs are clearly audible to us down here. I myself am quite amused, but although his nibs is a medical man he is often shocked.’ I was slightly disconcerted because our talk was uninhibited to say the least. Much of it was scatological. We were appallingly arrogant—ahead of our time in a frank expression of our (bi)sexuality and general mode of life—and we despised suburbia. I do believe that the generation born since, let’s say the mid-1970s, has revived our tradition, although—despite AIDS—they are more promiscuous than we ever were. We were, though, different in our attitude to sex to the Heide group, a generation behind us. John and Sunday, in

74

Art & Life

particular, believed that ‘love’ should accompany a sexual relationship. We saw no such necessity. Affection, friendship perhaps, but not necessarily love. We felt that there was nothing shameful with pure lust, and our attitude caused a certain friction in our relationship with the Reeds. Over the years some artists and writers accepted into the Heide circle—I am thinking particularly of Albert Tucker, Neil Douglas and John Sinclair—have, when interviewed by the media, spoken in hyperbolic terms of their greedy response to Heide hospitality. I am embarrassed by their almost childish acceptance of rich fare. I can still hear Bert Tucker’s sonorous voice, ‘And the spoon stood up in the cream.’ He repeated that line ad nauseam. My initial (and indeed subsequent) impressions are of a different order. Although the Reeds did, on occasions, indulge us lavishly, I recall the almost Spartan, although aesthetic, simplicity of their way of life. Darling Street was the first home in which I entertained friends. The abstract painters Ian and Dawn Sime were visitors, and Laurence Hope—who was usually homeless— came to stay. I joined the Contemporary Arts Society, and it was within this group of artists and lay people that I found friends who remained with me for life. The psychologist and dance therapist Denis Kelynack (introduced by Barrie’s scientist friend Jim Davenport) visited us from Sydney and eventually decided to live in Melbourne. He moved in with us and for a time we all lived closely. He was much more sophisticated than the rest of us and more worldly, yet withal a man of extraordinary grace and human sympathy.

we are making country

75

July 2003 If one attends a party, or some semi-public function, with Denis—particularly in South Yarra or Toorak—he is mobbed as if he were a film star. I believe these counts and countesses of Toorak (to use Barrie’s expression) appreciate Denis for his charm, of which he possesses an abundance, rather than his deeper qualities of character and spirit. In his eulogy for the art collector Elizabeth Summons, he quaintly described her as ‘upper-class’. I wouldn’t have thought so—whatever that means in 2003. Rex Reid, the Australian dancer, choreographer and teacher, lived nearby and visited frequently. He had lost his European ballet company in Egypt when Colonel Nasser staged his coup in 1956. Rex and his business partner and devoted friend, the Georgian princess Natasha Kirsta, had been friends of King Farouk, which put them on bad terms with Nasser. The company was given asylum in the Canadian Embassy until they left as deck passengers on a ferry to Athens, and then on to Paris before coming to Australia. Rex arrived in Melbourne first and Natasha followed some months later. Rex brought her to Darling Street directly from the ship. She was a small, vital woman with shiny black hair and a milky white complexion. Unlike many ballet people she was in touch with all the arts. She was particularly impressed with Barrie because he had read Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, a novel only recently published in Europe and known by few there or here. Since she had come directly from Paris I asked her if she had known James Baldwin, an American expatriate. ‘He brought

76

Art & Life

his little sisters to my ballet school,’ she replied. Curiously she didn’t know he was a famous writer. Natasha had known everyone, and although sometimes one doubted her stories, subsequent evidence usually supported her claims. One exception might have been the Queen of Romania. ‘Darling, she died in my arms.’ She claimed to have been at the Gare du Nord in 1939 to farewell Dr and Mrs Sigmund Freud and their daughter Anna to their refuge in England. Of course she might well have read all about it in the history books—it has been well documented. She once told me that she studied medicine with a view to becoming a psychoanalyst. Natasha was Vera Stravinsky’s cousin and through her I met Igor Stravinsky when he and Vera came to Melbourne. My only recollection is of his tiny feet encased in black shiny patent leather shoes. Eventually (cautious as usual) we introduced Natasha to John and Sunday and Georges and Mirka Mora, and gradually she accepted Australia as her home. Like many Europeans secure in their values she never denigrated Australia or its culture. ‘I love Australia,’ she often said. She never quite mastered the English language and would use double negatives like, ‘I don’t know nothing.’ I introduced her to the artist John Perceval of whom she asked, ‘And when do you next expose?’ Natasha might have been part of the avant-garde but she was also a royalist. At the National Gallery of Victoria she was presented to the Queen ‘and her beautiful children’. There was a certain woman of the ballet she knew and disliked who was created a Dame. When I informed Natasha of this royal honour she replied imperiously, ‘Her Majesty was ill advised.’ There was a pause and then she said, ‘That woman would push up the arse without even soap.’ I said, ‘I beg your

we are making country

77

pardon’, and she replied, ‘That is an old Georgian expression for an insensitive person.’ I know the Dame in question and Natasha was assuredly wrong in her character assessment. Natasha—although I think never a dancer—worked out daily at the barre. She would startle people, particularly men, by taking their hand and saying, ‘Feel my thigh darling. All muscle! Not like that [another famous Dame of the ballet] whose flesh drapes down from her bones like curtains.’ Natasha Kirsta was the subject for my first foray into journalism. When she died in 1982 I wrote an appreciation of her. I got a substantial amount of fan mail from people who had loved (and feared) her and my little effort inspired Christopher Sexton to write—and publish—a full-scale biography of the great Anglo-Australian choreographer Dame Peggy van Praagh. John Reed asked us if we would put up the Sydney artist Bob Dickerson and his family while he exhibited Bob’s work at the Gallery of Contemporary Art (the precursor to the Museum of Modern Art where I later worked). John was one of the first people to recognise Dickerson, whose uncompromising images did not then impress chi-chi Sydney taste. They were a nice easy-going family but did not wish to eat our meals—they consumed nothing other than fish and chips and coke. I was reminded of Hyacinth’s in-laws in Keeping up Appearances, which implies of course that we were pretentious snobs like Mrs Bucket.

EIGHT The Other Side of the Sky

arrived in Australia in 1951. Georges, businessman, and Mirka, artist, were, as many have emphasised, the most influential post-war migrants in terms of civilised living. They galvanised the art scene. It should be said—and they were the first to admit it—that it was a two-way street. They discovered here a creative energy in stark contrast to the debilitated Europe they left behind. They were people of intellect. They were good to look at and, above all, they were warm and generous by nature. They never demeaned their country of adoption or compared Melbourne unfavourably to the cultural ambience provided by an ancient city like Paris. What more could one ask of a migrant? Philippe, born in Paris, was then a little boy. William was born in Melbourne in 1955 and Tiriel (the son not of Georges, but of artist Don Laycock) a decade later. The Moras lived—held court one might say—in a large, THE MORA FAMILY

the other side of the sky

79

ground-floor studio flat at 9 Collins Street, Melbourne. I (along with everyone I knew in Melbourne) adored this family as a whole, but I had a particularly close, warm friendship with Georges.

1992 Philippe asked me to speak at Georges’s memorial service, which was held at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in the Domain. He died from a brain tumour about a year after the removal of a melanoma. The restaurateur Tony Bilson came from Sydney and also eulogised, as did the painter John Brack (who didn’t seem to know whose funeral he was attending). As I spoke I almost choked with grief. Both Tony and I had consumed a stiff vodka at ten in the morning. For decades Georges and I lunched each Monday. He would advise me on how best to deal with the problems of business, and we would discuss politics and the state of the arts. He was nearly twenty years older than me, although younger than John and Sunday, and much more savvy than they were with the ways of the wicked world. My relationship with him lacked the dramatic tension which was to be a characteristic of my relationship with the Reeds. Friday night parties at the Moras’ were spectacular. Visiting celebrities from the performing arts would arrive between eleven and midnight. Over the years I met Melvyn Douglas, Robert Helpmann, Katharine Hepburn, Hepzibah Menuhin, Maurice Chevalier, Stanley Kramer and Anthony Perkins. Alan Wynn, then Melbourne’s leading cardiologist, fell desperately in love with Mirka. He was married to the Ballet

80

Art & Life

Rambert’s former principal dancer, Sally Gilmour. The affair is detailed in Mirka’s autobiography Virtuous but Wicked. As I recall Mirka does not tell of her ultimate rejection of Alan and how, in a state of depression, he turned to Georges for comfort. Georges told me that he advised Alan that women are fickle. Perhaps the two men joined in the chorus of that haunting duet ‘In the Depths of the Temple’ from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers. Georges would have sung the baritone role. The eventual separation of Georges and Mirka was, I think, a never-healing tragedy in the life of each of them. Marriages and relationships (hetero or homo) were rarely shattered by our liberated stance. The prospect of sexual experimentation was an aphrodisiac, but we tended to be faithful to our partners in our own fashion. One-night stands (mostly on Fridays) were common, and the bounds of gender preference were frequently crossed. I enjoyed a short but quite wildly passionate affair with the super-stud, hyper-masculine, womanising artist Jon Molvig. I asked him how he would cope if I told people. He said he would knock my fucking block off. His biographer (Betty Churcher, then director of the National Gallery of Australia) did not seem to know of his homosexual yearnings. I met her at a dinner at home with the Bilsons about twenty years after his death from kidney disease. I told her about his bisexuality, and she seemed shocked. Another male lover of Molvig’s was the expatriate novelist Randolph (Mick) Stowe. Molvig was a kind of Errol Flynn, an insatiable bisexual. Dawn Sime (Westbrook) had many lovers. Afterwards she would ask her partner if he had ever slept with a man. Most would bluster denial. Not so a coldly attractive—ambitious, now renowned—psychiatrist. ‘Yes, just once,’ he yawned, ‘and it was such a bore.’ Recently I was told by a mutual friend, a

the other side of the sky

81

woman, that he had been actively bisexual all his life. Dawn eventually married Eric Westbrook and lived happily ever after. The three Mora boys only intermittently attended the Jolimont primary school. At the end of one year Willie got ten out of ten for every subject. His teacher reported, ‘Very gratifying but could do better.’ Willie and Mirka once took a bath together. Little Willie sat facing her. ‘Mama you are a clown,’ he said, ‘You have two eyes, a nose and a moustache.’ Mirka giggled with delight when she told me this story. When Tiriel was three Mirka took him to a matinee performance of Swan Lake starring Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev. They sat in the front row. Tiriel enacted a running commentary on what he observed on stage. ‘I can see that man’s dickie,’ (Nureyev) and, ‘I’d like to sleep with that mummy’ (Fonteyn). It must have been the only occasion when the Royal Ballet played to an audience rocking with laughter. Of the three Mora sons Philippe is the one to whom I am close. He is a film writer, director and producer and an artist to boot. After several other marriages, he and his wife Pamela have lived for twenty-five years in a Spanish-mission-type apartment on Havenhurst Drive, off the strip in Hollywood. I have visited them many times over this period and am fond of Pamela, who is that rare creature, a third-generation Los Angelean. Her grandfather had orange groves where the highrise buildings of Wilshire Boulevard now stand. I once lunched with her father and he and she told me stories of the early film industry which reminded me of what I knew about its British origins in my father’s village. Philippe produced and directed two unique films in the early 1970s. They were Swastika and Brother Can You Spare a

82

Art & Life

Dime? Swastika dealt with the rise of Hitler and incorporated home movies filmed by Eva Braun. Brother concerned itself with the American Great Depression of the 1930s. Essentially they were montages of film clips from old newsreels. Philippe created these movies totally. Meticulous research and hundreds of hours of editing went into them. At the time of their release in the States I was visiting America several times a year to buy stock for the bookshop. Philippe’s name was up in lights on billboards and cinemas all over the country. I felt so proud of this friend I had known as a little kid. Later Philippe directed a fine film based on Margaret Carnegie’s book Mad Dog Morgan. Another good film, Death of a Soldier, was based on the wartime story of the American serial killer Leonski, who murdered several Melbourne women walking home from work under the supposedly protective security of the ‘brown-out’.

April 2000 I received a call from Philippe in Melbourne. He had written a script about life at Heide in the 1940s. It was entitled When We Were Modern. Excellent title! The Reeds, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, John Perceval, John Sinclair, baby Sweeney, even Barrie (who came to Heide a bit later) were all in it. Would I read it? I would, of course, be delighted, and invited him to lunch. He brought with him the actor Sandy Gutman—aka Austen Tayshus—who struck me as some kind of theatrical genius possessing a quality akin to that of Barry Humphries. Yet I cannot define Sandy’s special talent and have heard little of him in these last three years. There and then Sandy did an amusing imitation of my posh voice.

the other side of the sky

83

Philippe left the Heide script with me and I read it from cover to cover twice in one afternoon. I was appalled. It seemed to me to exhibit a total lack of understanding of the ethos of Heide. His characterisations were overdrawn and the quality of his dialogue banal. Since the Reeds died, I have often found it necessary to correct certain myths that have developed around their lives and actions. That they were licentious upper-class bohemians. That they were concerned with art to the detriment of people. That they selfishly used their friends and, in return for their generous hospitality, demanded your very being. Philippe did not speak to me for three years after receiving my comments. To my great relief Mirka made it up between us, and in June 2002 Philippe came to see me and we had a good conversation. He agreed with a lot of what I had said.

June 2003 Spending a couple of days in Los Angeles, after participating in an obituarists’ conference in New Mexico, I took a taxi to the Moras’ apartment. Philippe was in Melbourne but Pamela greeted me warmly. We had not met for ages. Son Georges was almost grown up. Pamela wanted to live in Australia, preferably on a vineyard on the Mornington Peninsula. Los Angeles pollution was vile, worse than it had ever been, and they wanted to get out. The Moras’ first café was situated at 183 Exhibition Street, in the heart of the city’s theatreland. The walls were painted by Ian and Dawn Sime. John and Sunday loaned paintings. I first met the almost incongruous figure (within this urban

84

Art & Life

and urbane context) of the late Neil Douglas at the Mirka Café. Mirka writes in her memoirs, ‘Neil, potter and painter, friend of the Percevals and John and Sunday, would come to the Mirka Café. He was an earthman personified; when you saw him you would feel the love of the country, the same as the Aboriginal people make you feel, that love of the land and its mysteries.’ The Mirka Café served its coffee in beautiful John Perceval ceramic mugs. We would drink it with sticky rum baba. There was a limited lunch and dinner menu; most of all I remember rare, cold roast beef which was served with thick Mirka-made mayonnaise rather than hollandaise or bearnaise sauce. Neil was a raw-boned Scot who had helped John and Sunday develop the Heide garden in the 1930s. At the time I met him he lived with his wife Vivvie, a chemist with the Country Roads Board, and three young children, on his mother’s property at Bayswater, then more or less rural. I once spent a weekend there and slept in the attic of a hobgoblin cottage where a tree branch extended into the sleeping area. The Douglases lived close to nature—wove their own clothes, ate strictly vegetarian food, drank herbal tea and smoked lavender cigarettes. They were precursors of the backto-the-earth hippies who became fashionable a decade later. Neil, like many creative people of this time, was original in his mode of living and set the pattern for future trendies. He was a competent landscape artist and a gardener of inspired genius. Bayswater (which belonged to his mother) was an ‘English’ garden which he described as ‘useful, tame and ordered, and yet everywhere a tumultuous tangle of tumbling richness. When I return from the city I can smell my home from half a mile away’. Now Bayswater is semi-industrial, a wasteland of warehouses.

the other side of the sky

85

In 1960 his marriage to Vivvie ended and Neil established the Bend of Islands commune at Kangaroo Ground where he lived with his common-law wife, Abigail Heathcote. Barrie and I often visited them from Greenhill, twenty minutes’ drive away. Neil lived his last year in Dimboola near his beloved Little Desert with its carpet of wildflowers. Desert scenes are his best paintings. As part of the process of introducing me to the Reeds, Barrie nominated me as secretary of the Contemporary Arts Society. Carried by the rank and file. Through this connection I was beginning to develop a relationship with John Reed, even if Sunday was still remote. I think I was frightened of Sunday. There was a formidable quality about her, and she was deaf which didn’t help a tentative friendship. Barrie and John Reed were joint lay (i.e. non-artist) vice-presidents. I realised I was a kind of front man for Barrie and John. Barrie, I was beginning to learn, was a consummate politician, a talent he deployed to great effect in developing an extensive public lending library service for the State of Victoria. The Contemporary Arts Society was a necessary political force in those days. Its active existence today (it still exists as a legal entity) would be absurd. Then, modern art was derided, joked about, unsaleable. The National Gallery of Victoria (until the advent of a vital new director, Eric Westbrook, in 1956) ignored it. Artists were at best defensive and at worst depressed. This did not, however, inhibit vigorous productivity and there was a kind of optimism which kept us (artists and lay people) all striving for acceptance. As in any political movement ideological factions abounded. In the Contemporary Arts Society there were two principal strands: the figurative artists and their supporters,

86

Art & Life

and the abstract artists and theirs. Christopher Heathcote refers to these divisions as ‘the figs’ and ‘the abs’. I’m pretty sure no such nomenclature was current at the time. Someone has spun Christopher a tale and also over-emphasised the antagonism between the two groups. Like the Labor Party in a crisis, the factions formed a common front against the enemy. True, Professor Bernard Smith started the ‘Antipodean Manifesto’ promoting the figurative artists and deriding the abstractionists. It sank, if one can express it thus, before it rose, and Smith—despite his current assertions that it was one of his most important actions—really made a fool of himself. Even many on his own side thought it absurd that this academic should dictate to artists how and what they should paint. Figurative artist and ex-professional pugilist Bob Dickerson was heard to say aggressively, ‘I’m not anti-anything.’ John Reed summed it up nicely when he said he had always believed that a manifesto promoted the vanguard rather than the rearguard. Smith’s actions were a continuation of the tactics of the communists in the war years when the Party attempted, unsuccessfully, to take over the Contemporary Arts Society. A decade or so after the ‘Manifesto’—in an extraordinary volte-face—Professor Smith was pushing the New York abstractionists! If, dear reader, you find all this controversy faintly ludicrous, I can assure you it was all deadly serious at the time. The artist Charles Blackman and his writer wife, Barbara, who was almost blind, lived in an old coach-house at the back of a mansion in leafy Chrystobel Crescent in the genteel suburb of Hawthorn. Here Barrie would hold poetry readings. One day he read a poem by the American expatriate Ezra Pound. One line referred to ‘fucked women and fat leopards’. There

the other side of the sky

87

was a commotion even in our advanced milieu. I suppose it was the male chauvinism implied. Pound, a major influence on modern poetry, was a fascist, imprisoned after the war by the Americans. On the corner of Chrystobel Crescent and Glenferrie Road was the Smith family and their picture-framing business. There were two brothers, Martin and Gray. Gray, artist and poet, married Joy Hester. Martin was married to a lovely, sweetnatured woman named Rosie. Tragically he died of cancer in his forties. Joy Hester also died of cancer at about the same age. Old Mrs Smith who ran the shop drank a flagon of sherry each day. John and Sunday supported her (as they did so many others) in her old age. Enough. I am digressing.

NINE When Promises We r e K e p t

wrote to John Reed, ‘I admire your uncompromising stand, your integrity and even your occasional naivety. Never in my life has anybody or anything had such an influence, such a decisive influence as you and Sunday. I am in a way what you made me and I am proud of it.’ I wish I had said that to them. Since I was younger and more impressionable than Georges, those qualities he extolled made an even greater impact on me than they did on him. John and Sunday were viewed by their families as traitors to their class. Both came from extremely wealthy, established pioneering families. The Reeds were early settlers in northern Tasmania, acquired extensive grazing properties and owned their own sailing ships. They lived in vast, rural mansions. John’s siblings were Dick (a grazier), Margaret (a doctor, who lived her adult life in Cambridge, England), Coralie (later Mrs Agnew), Barbara (who married Sir Don von Bibra who was knighted for community services to the midlands of Tasmania) GEORGES MORA ONCE

when promises were kept

89

and Cynthia (who married Sidney Nolan). John was sent as a little boy to board in the preparatory grades of Cheltenham College, an English ‘public’ school. With the advent of the First World War he returned home to attend Geelong Grammar on Corio Bay—then known as the Eton of Australia. For university he went back to England, to Caius College, Cambridge, where he read law. Sunday was born into Australia’s best-known and—for a century at least—greatest mercantile dynasty, the Baillieu family. She was the daughter of Arthur and Ethel and sister of Darren and Everard (businessmen) and King (who died as a young man). When Sunday met John she had recently endured a disastrous marriage to an American gold-digger named Leonard Quinn. The Baillieu family influence secured an annulment to this marriage, and Sunday was free to marry John on 13 January 1932 in St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne. It has never been clear to me—and by temperament neither of them favoured dwelling on the past—how the Reeds became, not only passionately interested in the arts, but active participants in the development of an Australian culture. The family background, favoured though it might be, was unpromising. None of the Reeds (with the exception of sister Cynthia) or the Baillieus were in any way ‘cultivated’. Nor, it seems, had either John or Sunday evinced strong artistic interests in early childhood; but they were a symbiotic couple, and it appears that some catalytic process took place which found expression in creative art. In addition they were (and this was most unusual in an upper-class, worldly elite) fiercely nationalistic in their Australian identity. Although they were international in outlook, it was what was happening here that most interested them. This Australianism was, I think, a powerful motivation for Barrie’s involvement with them.

90

Art & Life

It also helps to explain my attraction to all three, as I was slouching towards an Australian identity. The Reeds’ early married years were not without conflict. To put it simply, Sunday was highly sexed and John was not. Sunday had passionate affairs with several men, notably with the artist, architect and diplomat Sam Atyeo and with Sidney Nolan. After her death I met Atyeo and loathed him. My views on Sir Sidney I have already stated. Perhaps—because there was never any question of her leaving John—Sunday instinctively recognised that these men were unworthy of her. John was hurt, I think, but accepted these affairs with resigned equanimity. Barrie took his time in introducing me to Heide (as distinct from meeting John and Sunday out and about). I think, also, they were cautious in their response to me. The fact that— fairly quickly—I had become an integral part of Barrie’s life did not necessarily endear me to them, at least in the short term. In addition there was Leslie Stack, an artist who was part of Barrie’s intimate life, and who also had to be introduced to Heide. Not that Barrie ever explained all these permutations to the Reeds; but we implicitly followed their dictum that jealousy was an ignoble emotion. Besides we were all more reticent in those days and did not articulate our feelings in the manner of young people today. Leslie and I were a bit wary in the beginning but generally accepted and liked each other. We were, I suppose, a kind of happy ménage à trois, although I don’t think any of us defined our relationship in these terms. Leslie was powerfully attracted to women. In 1960 he left Australia to live in London.

when promises were kept

91

June 1978 It was my last day in London staying with my parents in St John’s Wood, before returning home. I had not contacted Leslie, since on previous visits I had found him unfriendly, if not hostile. Anti-Australian, anti–John and Sunday, and scornful of Barrie. Now he was married and had two small daughters. On an impulse I rang him, realising that it was not so much me he was against, but who and what I represented. A sleepy voice answered the phone. It was Suzannah, his wife. I introduced myself and asked for Leslie. She told me he had died two days earlier. He had suicided. I went to see Suzannah in Hampstead. I liked her very much and felt that if anyone could have saved Leslie it was her. He had taken pills and booze, and then had gassed himself in his car. He had tried to make a living dealing in art. This had failed. He had purchased a series of art catalogues of historical significance and was waiting for a sale to the National Gallery of Australia, and the deal was foundering. On my return I was able to help expedite this sale, and Suzannah and the children benefited considerably. I was very moved by this death—it was the first of many. That evening I had to telephone Barrie and John and Sunday with this terrible news. Discussing his death with his occasional lover Ninette Lyon on my next visit to Paris, she said that Leslie was ‘sick in his soul’. He longed for style and riches and would speak grandly of ‘my tailor’ and ‘my wine merchant’. It was a fantasy rather than a vulgarity. My connection with Heide began with short visits for afternoon tea on Sundays. These would have commenced in 1957.

92

Art & Life

Sometimes Barrie and I would go alone, sometimes all three of us. This pattern continued for a couple of years until a closer friendship was forged, when I commenced working with John full-time at the Gallery of Contemporary Art. I did not see much of Sweeney at this time. He was boarding at Geelong Grammar and very adolescent. He had, from all accounts, been a beautiful, original, poetic child. Later he became a most charming man and I was always fond of him. At this stage I did not find him interesting. Perhaps the fault was mine. I do not relate well to schoolboys and girls. The fact that my own schooldays were so unsatisfactory may well have something to do with this. I recall him arriving home from holidays in an army cadet’s uniform and I said something caustic about cold-war cadet troops. John took me to task for this. As (partly) a Shaw I tended to speak my mind and this made Barrie nervous. I was surprised, I suppose, that John and Sunday did not object to Sweeney being a cadet and certainly the whole concept was opposed by the Labor Party which they supported. John did give me some explanation but I cannot recall what it was. As John’s published letters reveal, many letters went to the school complaining about all sorts of things ranging from unhealthy food to the extracurricular needs of a talented child. Curiously (as John acknowledges) Sweeney was not a reader and perhaps he was not taken seriously as a boy whose artistic and intellectual side needed to be nurtured. John and Sunday, I thought, were the most beautiful couple I had ever seen. Sunday was blonde and blue eyed with the characteristic Baillieu jaw. John had black wavy hair and blue eyes and was also strong jawed. He was actually quite short but in some curious way one thought of him as tall. There was

when promises were kept

93

a physical likeness between the pair, as if they were distant cousins. They needed people around them, preferably living with them. They required stimulation and craved the involvement of others in their lives. Does this imply some lacuna in their relationship? It is only since their deaths that I have pondered this question. Sunday, particularly, longed to be involved in some meaningful project. Over the twenty-five or so years I knew them, Barrie and I frequently left our various flats and houses and moved into Heide for weeks, sometimes months on end. The following account of life at Heide is drawn not only from those early years, but from the two-and-a-half decades that I knew them. Sunday was difficult, no doubt about it. Infinitely generous and loving herself, she demanded commitment—the highest standard of behaviour, of emotional integrity, sensitivity and intellectual honesty—from her ‘family’. It was difficult to measure up to all this, and we often let her down. Left to himself John was more tolerant, but often became Sunday’s spokesman. Jamie Murdoch was blunt in his assessment. ‘Sunday makes the bullets and John fires them.’ I would not express it so crudely, but I have never forgotten those remarks made forty years ago. The Reeds were influenced by the British novelist D. H. Lawrence, who believed that life should be governed by the wisdom of the ‘blood’ rather than the cold cerebral processes of the brain. Sunday would flare up—almost always at breakfast time—over something she was not happy about. It could be a personal inadequacy of mine. It could be a rejection of some compromise. It could be a supposed error by David

94

Art & Life

McGlashan, architect of their grand, ultra-modern house Heide 2. Sunday was so clear-headed early in the morning, and her perceptions both accurate and devastating. Yet after an outburst or attack she was forgiving if she thought she had hurt one’s feelings. Sunday once told the artist and writer Jean Langley Sinclair that while she, Sunday, forgave the failings of her friends, nobody ever forgave hers. I believe she was justified in this complaint. Barrie often speculated that the history of Heide and the multifarious activities enacted therein might have been different had Sunday breakfasted alone in her room. There was no such possibility. She needed the forum of the breakfast table to air her concerns for the day, after burdensome thoughts during the night. In any case she believed that eating—even drinking a cup of tea—in bed was slothful. She spoke of the ‘long journey’ she travelled through the night. I think she never slept soundly and didn’t dream so much as free-associate on a semi-conscious level. She was plagued with anxiety which John could—to a degree—alleviate merely by his presence. I think she sensed and appreciated my understanding of her phobias. Anxiety was also intrinsic to my nature. John and Barrie both possessed nerves of steel. I believe Barrie never understood her fearful nature (or mine for that matter), and sometimes John, when he was preoccupied with worldly affairs, temporarily neglected her. Neglect is not the right word and I feel I should in some way qualify this apparent criticism. The manner of Sidney Nolan’s departure from Heide in 1947 was the cruellest blow of Sunday’s life. Her pain was exacerbated by his subsequent betrayal of them—his refusal to answer letters or to continue any sort of communication

when promises were kept

95

between them. There is little doubt that his behaviour was fuelled by Cynthia, who came to hate both John and Sunday. In her autobiographical novel Daddy Sowed a Wind, Cynthia portrays a sister–brother relationship based on herself and John as incestuous. Communications from Nolan’s solicitors rather than personal letters would arrive, demanding rather than requesting the return of paintings. Such cold demands—after a loving and mutually creative relationship for a decade—were distressing to both Sunday and John. Finally almost all works were returned to Nolan other than the original Kellys which Sunday gave to the National Gallery of Australia. She went through agony whenever John packed paintings to be dispatched to Nolan. Sidney Nolan’s break with Heide is labyrinthine in its emotional complexity. There is no doubt that Nolan loved Sunday and, at least in the early days, she him. John also claimed to love Nolan but his affection contained no sexual element. Nancy Underhill reports that among all the people she questioned nobody ever thought of John as having homosexual feelings. I agree with that estimation. I believe Nolan’s feelings for Sunday were genuine, although his love might have been fuelled by a certain avarice. Early on in my relationship with Barrie he told me he thought Sunday was ‘greedy’ in her emotional demands. She was brought up as a princess who could have anything she wished. If this makes her sound like a selfish bitch (as some people have maintained), it is, in my opinion, a superficial analysis of her personality. She craved love, which she reciprocated in more than equal measure. The simplest thing to say is that she refused to leave John for Nolan. I think Nolan finally traded in love for ambition. Marrying the super-managerial Cynthia served two purposes:

96

Art & Life

the advancement of his career and a kind of revenge against John. On a deeper psychological level it is interesting to note that twice Sidney Nolan married the sister of his closest male friend. The second was Mary, sister of Arthur Boyd. Some say the marriage of Nolan and Cynthia was never sexually consummated. A year after Sidney Nolan left, John and Sunday travelled to Europe taking Sweeney to see his ‘father’, Bert Tucker, in Paris. (Sweeney’s real father was Billy Hyde, a jazz drummer.) John thought, also, that a year in Europe would provide a distraction from Sunday’s grief. Perhaps it did, but I recall her telling me of their time in Rome. I am, of course, paraphrasing from memory. ‘We would be walking along a street and John would say, “Wait there Sun, that’s the shop where you can get food for a picnic lunch.” Then he’d dash over the road, dodging the traffic. I was rooted to the spot in panic because I thought he would never return, be hit by a car, or disappear in the crowds never to be found again.’ Today I suppose we would call this a panic attack. If life at Heide was demanding, it was also enriching and exhilarating. This unpretentious farmhouse and the garden surrounding it was a place of rare beauty. There was always a feeling of energy and creativity, and both John and Sunday were strong and healthy. Paintings were rarely hung, but propped about the house and constantly moved around. Works of art assumed the role of living things. Artists came and went, but the most constant were, in the 1940s, Sidney Nolan, Bert Tucker, Joy Hester (then married to Bert) and later Gray Smith (Joy’s second husband). In the 1950s the Heide visitors included John and Mary Perceval, Charles and Barbara Blackman, Ian and Dawn Sime and Fred Williams.

when promises were kept

97

16 October 2003 I have just returned from Heide old house after participating in an ABC Radio National program chaired by Michael Cathcart. The program was divided into two parts to be broadcast separately. Cathcart is impressive—highly articulate, erudite and a natural performer. There were three other panellists: Juliana Engberg, director of ACCA (the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art) and an ex-curator at Heide; Stephanie Holt, described as a cultural historian (she once edited the literary journal Meanjin); and Jarred Rawlin who runs a commercial gallery. All three are heavily into cultural theory. I did not acquit myself well. Whatever criticisms I might have of the PoMo generation, they do possess an off-the-cuff ability to theatricalise with good effect. I need a script and am not good at extemporising. I did, however, get stuck into Juliana—and not for the first time. Cathcart was amused. Engberg is seen as the guru. She has long propounded a theory—and a belittling one at that—of the limiting influence of John and Sunday. That they ‘pushed’ the artist towards the creation of myth. That they despised abstract art. They were guilty of neither. They would have considered any such coercion to be presumptuous. I spoke of the Reeds’ support for the abstract artist Sam Atyeo in the 1930s and of Ian Sime in the 1950s, and of John’s refusal to back Bernard Smith’s absurd ‘Antipodean Manifesto’. My three colleagues were confident in their cultural theories. The accepted wisdom is that we are in the last stages of postmodernism and all three agreed with that judgment. How do they know? They produced no evidence.

98

Art & Life

I am sounding and feeling a bit sour. So much crap goes unchallenged. Cultural theory sans culture. Why was there not an artist on the panel? From being an aural rather than a visual person I learned to see, to properly look at things—all things, not just paintings— as if for the first time. If a room at Heide was to be repainted we would all join in selecting the colour. Every piece of furniture—china, kitchen utensils, towels, linen, blankets— were carefully considered. Domestic objects had to measure up to a high aesthetic standard. The dining-room table was bleached and scrubbed. The furniture was comfortable but simple. The china was exquisite in design and usually antique, yet breakages were not fussed over. Nothing was ever stored away. The kitchen, sunroom and dining room were floored with light fawn vitreous tiles imported from Belgium. You could not buy such flooring in Australia when the Reeds renovated their farmhouse in the early 1930s. The blinds and curtains were white, pale fawn or pale blue. The kitchen walls were white and Mary Boyd’s tiles on a cat theme surrounded the original kitchen stove. The sunroom (where we ate breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea) was sunny yellow. Yellow was always the most difficult colour to get right. It still is for me. There were constant minor changes to the interior of Heide 1. It was in a permanent state of renewal. Heide was, as John would say, organic. The kitchen, sunroom and dining-room windows looked out to the ‘heart’ garden, designated as such because it was the centre of ten hectares of cultivation. Flowers in vases never adorned the house, but one looked out to them from every window. At night all blinds and curtains were drawn and the interior withdrew from the dark, outside world. Sunday,

when promises were kept

99

particularly, had a strong feeling of division between inside and outside, especially at night. Conversation over dinner followed on from breakfast but was usually more relaxed. In the early days we would plan the future of the Contemporary Arts Society and the Museum of Modern Art, then Heide 2. Towards the end we talked over negotiations with the state government for the eventual takeover of the property. Finally, when John and Barrie both developed cancer, we spoke of the future of those who would remain. Usually we would eat on our laps in the library, which was also the main living room. From the beginning, in 1956, we watched television. Curiously Heide had no radio, but we all thought that TV was the medium of the future and could not be ignored. (It might now, of course, be said that we were misguided in this view.) An aesthetic of food was something else I learned from them. The fare was elegantly simple, and I usually prepared it when Barrie and I were in residence. Sunday was vegetarian, but not crankily so in relation to others. She respected the fact that Barrie simply had to eat meat. The Reeds had been on the Hay diet since the late 1930s. You did not combine proteins and carbohydrates in the same meal. I have always found this to be a good principle. One feels bloated after eating quantities of meat with potatoes. Much of the produce came from the garden. Breakfast consisted of freshly squeezed orange juice, an egg boiled or poached, and toast. Lunch was milk, cheese and an apple. Dinner might be an omelette, a green salad or, in season, a globe artichoke or asparagus from the garden. For flesh-eaters I would grill fillet steaks or roast a chicken. John and Sunday never drank during the day, but before dinner they’d have

100

Art & Life

one strong whisky and soda. It was never called Scotch. We usually did not drink wine with dinner other than on special occasions. After dinner Sunday would smoke one or two cigarettes: never during the day. We always drank excellent, fragrantly strong coffee flavoured with that sticky, almost black sugar which seems now to have disappeared from the supermarket shelves. There was always a dog around, and over the years I knew three: Bonzo, a golden spaniel; Gogo, an old English sheepdog; and Barjai, an Australian cattle dog, named after Barrie’s original literary magazine. Cats varied in number and included two or three Siamese. Since about 1968 I have always had a labrador, and naturally when I stayed at Heide I would be accompanied by Nick or Charlies 1 or 2. Heide was open house to close friends who could drop in, uninvited, at night and stay for an informal meal. Essentially John and Sunday spent their days in the garden. They worked constantly and were scarcely ever ill. Although both were slight in build they could lift and carry heavy weights. I have already described their exceptional good looks. It was a fact that everyone but themselves acknowledged. It was not something they ever thought about; they were entirely lacking in vanity. In the garden they worked both together and separately. After lunch John would write while Sunday rested. I never ceased to be amazed at how much activity filled their lives. They had little—and sometimes no—domestic or gardening help. Sunday washed and ironed and cooked and cleaned. John planted hundreds of trees. They drove off to nurseries in search of rare herbs and plants. They visited elderly Baillieu retainers. They took cats to the vet. When one died Sunday was inconsolable. They read voraciously. Sunday

when promises were kept

101

listened to contemporary music. They visited galleries and artists’ studios. From the early 1960s weekends were spent at the Aspendale beach house with the Mora family living next door. Sometimes twenty or more would come to dinner. If I wasn’t there to help, John and Sunday did all the work themselves. They never seemed to tire. Their thoughtful kindness was infinite. In his autobiography Giving It Away, Charles Osborne wrote with measured scorn, ‘The official party line was that they were virtual saints’. To me and to many others they were. A good example of their thoughtful generosity (which was repeated with many other friends) was the love, practical friendship, and essential material assistance they gave to John and Mary Perceval. When Mary and the children left John to live in London, the Reeds wrote regular letters of support. The first, to Mary on board ship, describes Perceval’s desolation at the parting. They took him to Williamstown to take one last look at the ship as it sailed down Port Phillip Bay. John showed them where he had painted the ravishing Williamstown paintings. They found a café which served tea and scones and then took him home to Canterbury. ‘There seemed little else we could do for him’, John wrote to Mary. Perceval—after almost drinking himself to death—spent ten years in Larundel Psychiatric Hospital, and John and Sunday visited him regularly. Sunday could not sleep at night when she thought of his emotional suffering. For twelve years they corresponded with Mary, who lived on a small farm in Wales known as the Ruthland. One last, long, and intimate letter from John to Mary in 1976 refers to Cynthia’s and Leslie Stack’s suicides. Sunday offers to pay for well-rotted cow manure for Mary’s rose garden.

102

Art & Life

Mary’s last letter to Sunday describes her as the most important person in her life. A week later Sidney Nolan moved in and all correspondence from Wales ceased. How does one forgive such betrayal?

Ja n u a r y 2 0 0 2 As I drove through the heartbreakingly beautiful countryside of Herefordshire and Wales to meet Lady Nolan at the Rodd, all this sad history preoccupied me. Here I was writing an article for a glossy magazine on Sidney Nolan’s bequest to Britain. Should I be doing this? I got hopelessly lost and arrived at the village of Presteigne an hour and a half late for lunch with Mary. At the top of the hill which led down to the Rodd I stopped and fortified myself with a double vodka. Mary greeted me warmly and I found it impossible not to respond in kind. Yet I was irritated by her constant references to ‘Siddie’ and what a wonderful man he was; about his vital contribution to European (not just British!) art; how Siddie was Australia’s greatest cultural ambassador of all time. Then I felt mean. Mary has led a tremendously difficult life. If she now finds identity in the role of the widow, it would be churlish, cruel perhaps, to deny her this comfort. We ate sandwiches and drank wine before touring the property. We talked of other things—of her Melbourne past, of her uncle, the novelist Martin Boyd. I told her of her brother David Boyd’s new-found friendship (David is now pushing eighty) with my friend Nadine Amadio. If John and Sunday were paragons of virtue, did they not have faults? Yes, in their inflexibility and their ability to antagonise

when promises were kept

103

people. It was as if they could not help themselves. John was seen to be abrasive. A letter from him (whether to an individual or the press) invariably meant trouble. Eric Westbrook (the former Director of the National Gallery of Victoria) is a good example. If Eric tried to steer the Melbourne gallery towards modern art, John found fault. If Eric appeared to ignore modern art John also found fault. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. I believe they were poor judges of character and in that sense unworldly. As Georges Mora said, ‘naïve’. They trusted the wrong people, concurrently expecting too much of the world and of their friends. They could not understand that other people led more casual, insouciant lives, and were not as idealistically committed as they were themselves. A great triumph of their lives was the legacy they left after their deaths: Heide as a national institution of art. In his last years John wrote that he had failed in everything he had ever attempted. It is sad he felt such disappointment. He and Sunday helped change the cultural climate of their country.

TEN Pa r t o f t h e G a m e

John Reed appointed me as assistant director of the Museum of Modern Art of Australia, in Tavistock Place, Melbourne—known as MOMA. This marked the end of acting for me, and I retired without regret, as I felt I had embarked on a new and exciting career. I had no formal qualifications for this job and my appointment would be unthinkable in today’s competitive and highly professional workplace. Nevertheless untrained people filled the breach in many professions in those days, operating out of some sort of intuitive energy—a gut response to the job at hand. The education explosion is a phenomenon of our time with far-reaching (and not always beneficial) consequences for our society and culture. Certainly I had no aesthetic control over museum policy. My education in art came from John, Sunday and Barrie (although in retrospect I realise that Barrie was only one jump ahead of me) and some of the artists themselves—in particular from the most articulate of them, the late Ian Sime. He was a figure of major importance—an abstract artist of depth and power, with IN APRIL 1958

part of the game

105

an intellect to match his talent. He was then married to Dawn (née Sloggett, subsequently Westbrook) Sime. They influenced each other profoundly, as if they painted in tandem. Some friends (and critics) were adamant in their assertion that Dawn was the more talented, but I felt—and still do—that she followed rather than led, and that Ian was a genius of sorts. A certain aggressive arrogance was part of his personality and this alienated people; otherwise he might have become a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement of New York, where he later lived. But by this time he was reacting to the development of art as a commodity: no bad thing of course, but in his rejection of the commercial market he churned out fairly meaningless pot-boilers which he sold for $25. My job at MOMA was essentially managerial and this involved public relations. I must say I complemented John in this area. I suppose the purity of his character was inimical to PR. Our building had been a warehouse and overlooked Flinders Street and the railway tracks. I sat in an open office at the entrance to our premises on the second floor and would usually greet people as they arrived. John was hidden away next door in the second of our top-floor galleries. We shared a secretary for typing letters but I mostly worked on my own. Today some people tell me they would arrive in trepidation of running into John or—worse still—Sunday. Eric Westbrook has told me that Sunday once gave him a look of ‘pure hatred’. After all these years I am still trying to come to terms with the antagonism which existed between the Reeds and almost the entire Australian art establishment. One reason for the Reeds’ paranoia—although I am not sure that is the right word—was the philistine rejection of the artists they sponsored. Even Westbrook was one step behind. They were, of course, proved triumphantly correct in the course of time

106

Art & Life

and I doubt that they ever made a serious error of judgment in matters pertaining to art. With characteristic generosity John and Sunday donated almost their entire collection of 160 paintings, sculptures and drawings to the embryo museum. It consisted of forty-six Sidney Nolans, thirteen Arthur Boyds, ten Albert Tuckers, fifteen Joy Hesters, four John Percevals, five Fred Williamses, three Bob Dickersons and six Charles Blackmans. Also represented were Ian Fairweather, James Gleeson, John Brack and Jon Molvig. Incredibly, no state gallery at this time possessed a Tucker in its permanent collection. MOMA was formally opened in 1958 by the recently retired Dr H. V. Evatt (who we called Judgy), a long-time friend of the Reeds. He had been the founding president of the United Nations and was almost solely responsible for its (broadly) democratic structure, which gave voice to small nations as against the superpowers. Over the next few years I got to know Evatt and his wife Mary Alice, who frequently visited the Museum on trips to Melbourne. They were sweet-natured people, complex and simple at the same time. They were art collectors, and purchased Australian works as well as the school of Paris, including Modigliani and Picasso. Bernard Smith had recently launched his ‘Antipodean Manifesto’ in defence of figurative art, and the Evatts were bemused. I remember Judgy saying, ‘Art is necessarily abstract, what’s all the fuss about?’ He spoke through his nose with an accent you could cut with a knife. He was perpetually rumpled and physically unattractive. Mary Alice was blonde, motherly, slightly suburban, yet sophisticated at the same time. She was an artist.

part of the game

107

September 2002 An exhibition of Mary Alice Evatt’s paintings is currently on view at Heide. I attended the opening—by Felicity St John Moore—out of a sense of history and a certain affectionate nostalgia rather than from any particular interest in Mary Alice’s work. Felicity, an art historian who produced a definitive survey of the work of Danila Vassilieff, is sometimes known as Velocity—a tribute to her energy. She is married to my favourite right-wing propagandist, Des Moore, head of the Institute for Private Enterprise. Felicity and Des power-walk around the Botanical Gardens tan-track, striding with prodigious energy past Gusto and myself. Since much of our collection had never been viewed in Sydney, we arranged an exhibition at the David Jones Gallery. John accompanied the paintings and sculptures and hung them himself. I remember him telephoning Sunday and telling her how splendid the collection looked in this unfamiliar setting. (Why is it that modern paintings sometimes look better in older rather than contemporary buildings?) The following day the Sydney Morning Herald art critic Wallace Thornton condemned the paintings: trashed them, we might say today. He described the collection as typically Melbourne ‘hillbilly’. John was blissfully unconcerned about this critical denigration, other than for the poor publicity accorded our new venture. The artists thus defamed formed the vanguard of the Australian modern movement. The collection also contained Adrian Lawlor, Sam Atyeo, Moya Dyring, Mary Boyd (Nolan), Josl Bergner, Noel Counihan, Danila Vassilieff, John Yule, H. Dearing, Laurence Hope, Jean Langley, Len Crawford, Ian Sime, Dawn Sime,

108

Art & Life

Gray Smith, George Johnson, Mirka Mora and Peter Burns. Subsequently we added to the collection from almost every one of our changing exhibitions. Our interior space at Tavistock Place was designed by the artist, architect and engineer Peter Burns. The interior walls were bluestone. Peter had them painted white and hung metal frames in front which made hanging and re-arranging pictures simple. The rough timber floor was covered with dark grey, heavy hair-cord matting. The ceiling was painted dark blue and spotlights appeared to be suspended in space. The office walls were made from rectilinear shapes of clear and coloured plastic, resembling the paintings of Mondrian. Peter, although less famous than many of the Heide artists, was, and is, at the forefront of the avant-garde.

May 2003 Today, aged eighty-one, Peter Burns is still working and is to be honoured by a retrospective exhibition at MOMA in 2004. His curator has asked me and I have agreed to write an appreciation of his overall contribution to the modern movement. It was thought necessary for us to have support from the old establishment, and the following gentlemen agreed to be our patrons: the Hon. Mr Justice John Vincent Barry (of the Supreme Court of Victoria), Sir Warwick Fairfax (Chairman of John Fairfax Ltd, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald), Kym Bonython (South Australian landed ‘aristocrat’, jazz man, art dealer and racing car driver) and Gerard Noall (Chairman of the Melbourne Stock Exchange). Part of my duties was to act as secretary to the MOMA

part of the game

109

council. The chairman was Kurt Geiger, owner of the quality department store Hicks Atkinson. Vice-chairman was Georges Mora. Other members included Professor of Law Zelman Cowen (later Sir Zelman and governor-general), businessmen R. L. Montgomery, Sir Frank Richardson and Rod (later Sir Rod) Carnegie, Dick Seddon (chair of BP Australia), Bernard Dowd (chief of Hickory Corsets and chair of the Miss Australia quest), Dick Austin (diplomat and hero of Changi prison camp), architects Guilford Bell (a classical modernist of outstanding achievement) and Barry Patten, textile designer Frances Burke (the only woman member), Bill Shmith (a lawyer from Mallesons, our legal adviser, and probably the best non-arts person on the council), Dr Alan Wynn, Ian Sime (as a representative of artists—it was he who had found the building in the first place) and Barrie. Other than the several members involved in art (John, Georges Mora, Alan Wynn and Barrie), this was a timid, half-hearted group of business and professional bigwigs. They seemed ill at ease with the whole idea of a museum devoted to modern art. In the context of managing the affairs of a public museum, so unbusinesslike were they that one wondered how on earth they had achieved success in their own fields. An exception was Bernard Dowd who was regarded by some establishment members (Austin, Bell and Carnegie) as ‘common’. I liked him very much. He would give grand money-raising functions—particularly for the Miss Australia quest (ah, how times have changed!)—in his Toorak mansion, Whernside. This large domestic residence was run like a boutique hotel, as it would now be called. Dick Austin, pretty as a picture, hardly opened his mouth in two or three years of meetings (after all he was a spy for Australia in Indonesia and one-time deputy director of ASIS).

110

Art & Life

Neither did the patrician Guilford Bell. Nor did the future tycoon Sir Rod. Why did we not appoint his mother—the art collector and writer, the dynamic Margaret—instead? Dick Seddon spoke only to be negative. I retain a vivid memory of him pontificating (whenever John produced a new project for discussion), ‘We simply haven’t got the money,’ with a kind of pugnacious emphasis on every syllable. One of my first tasks was to assist in the publication of our initial catalogue, Modern Australian Art: A Melbourne Collection, based on John and Sunday’s gift. Barrie was the editor and wrote a fine introduction. Works by each artist were reproduced, accompanied by a critical statement. I wrote an appreciation of Len Crawford. Reading this publication forty-five years later I am not ashamed of what I wrote, which, I think, stands up well when compared to the commentaries of professionals such as Eric Westbrook (Director of the National Gallery of Victoria) Alan McCulloch (art critic of the Herald) and even John and Barrie. I was, after all, a novice in the world of art and had never written anything other than a letter. Len Crawford’s inspiration derives from music, and his paintings are, he says, essentially his own translations from an aural to a visual art form. He is a non-objective painter who uses his rich and beautiful colours with a freedom which stems from his musical reference: unhampered by symbolism, the shape of his painting follows the tide of his response to sound and its echo in paint. This release, arising as it does out of a transmutation from a musical abstraction to a plastic reality, could prove dangerous to a lesser talent than Crawford’s: but in his best work, however diverse in colour and complex in form, there is an aesthetic achievement

part of the game

111

which finds contact with an immediate visual response. For despite the genesis of his inspiration, our response to Crawford’s work is always direct. Our feeling is one of excitement which contains its own satisfaction. We are excited and we are satisfied because in these paintings there exists a harmony arising out of a perfect fusion of form and content—the essential unity of all art.

It is interesting to note that Len Crawford, although important in our art history, has never been prominent as a painter. Then again, no Australian abstract artist ever has. With the help of Zara Holt (later Dame Zara Bate, but then wife of the the federal treasurer, subsequently prime minister, Harold Holt), I set up a fundraising women’s council. It was chaired by Elizabeth Summons, who became my friend and who for a while worked effectively on our behalf. Later (as many of our council members did) she went on to become associated with the much more respectable National Gallery of Victoria, then planning its new (monstrous in my opinion) building on St Kilda Road. Its director Eric Westbrook did well out of our pioneering efforts. We provided the springboard not only for a revivified National Gallery of Victoria—including the more recent Federation Square devoted to Australian art—but also the Museum of Modern Art at Heide. As an indication of a revolution in the manners and mores of Australian society over the last four decades, here is the formal presentation of the women’s council members as listed in Modern Australian Art: ‘Mrs John Summons (Chairman), Mrs Ruth McNicoll (Secretary), Mrs Robert Dulieu, Mrs Charles Lane, Mrs Harold Holt, Mrs E. W. Tipping [wife of journalist Bill], Mrs J. Chester Guest, Mrs Roy Grounds, Mrs

112

Art & Life

John Casson, Miss Edith Kirwan, Mrs Lex Davison, Mrs John Baillieu, Mrs Gerard Osborne, Mrs Kurt Geiger.’ It was a line-up of Melbourne society of the time—not one Ms and only one Miss. What became of these women? They were more dynamic than the male-dominated governing council. Ruth McNicoll (who was also for a time on our staff) opened her own commercial gallery, as did Violet (aka Peta) Dulieu. Zara Holt continued her fashion business and acted as the wife of the prime minister when she had a moment to spare. Marjorie Tipping became a distinguished historical writer (like many women, she came into her own after the death of her husband). Edith Kirwan became a computer whiz. Ollie Geiger pursued her business interests. Separated from her husband she died tragically, hanging herself from the chandelier in the elegant Georgian Geiger house in Kooyong Road, Toorak. Zara Holt was plumpish, pretty and warm hearted. She was also generous in spirit and with cash. I came to like and respect her. (Is it not ironic that I, a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, have known and respected [well, up to a point] two Liberal prime ministers and their wives?) In his memoirs Sir Paul Hasluck describes Zara Holt as ‘vulgar’. I believe this view came from his stuffy wife, Alexandra. I found Zara Holt highly intelligent, co-operative, irreverent, and possessing a genuine feeling for modern art. She spent almost no time as a consort to her political husband and would have been a fish out of water with the blue-rinse Liberal Party women. Occasionally in press interviews she patronised these worthies. She would tell reporters, ‘These good women do such marvellous, marvellous work, I feel I should not interfere in all the good things they are doing for the Party.’

part of the game

113

Zara Holt expressed an interest in buying an abstract painting by one of our exhibitors, Peter Kaiser. His show was over and he took his huge works back to the mansion known as Ripponlea, then his mother-in-law’s home. Peter and his wife Pat asked Zara and myself to lunch to do the deal in a civilised manner. Zara arrived in a ministerial limousine. I recall sipping champagne and eating oysters, lobster and rare fillet of beef at a shaded table by the pool. The ministerial chauffeur waited four hours to escort the wife of the treasurer back to her business. There was little investigative journalism in those days. In the event Zara bought two paintings. Even John was amused and congratulated me on a good day’s work. An initial fund-raising activity was a performance by Barry Humphries in the vast drawing room of the Holt residence in St George’s Road, Toorak. At the end of the show a champagne supper was served. I inadvertently kicked over a small table on which rested half-a-dozen glasses. I’m slightly embarrassed to tell this story. The textile designer Frances Burke was standing next to me and I said, ‘Really Frances, you are careless.’ Later she accused me of mocking her in the drawing rooms of Toorak. But no—unlike my dear friend Denis Kelynack—the drawing rooms of Toorak were not for me or me for them. Incidentally Barry Humphries, in his memoirs, Myself As Me, analyses this early phase of his art when society people loved to despise Edna and others of his suburban caricatures. He says that this kind of snobbery galvanised him into satirising those rich and successful beings who rise in the world through ambitious ruthlessness, and Edna became one of these.

114

Art & Life November 2002

I attended a function at Melbourne’s Savage Club. It was organised by the Ian Potter Gallery people, and my editor friend Michael Warner invited me to accompany him. I was interested because it presented an aspect of Melbourne life I knew nothing of. We were addressed by a board member and head of its art committee. Marjorie Tipping was there. She was a much nicer person than the tough Toorak women. Marjorie came from Hawthorn. Hawthorn? Where is that? the Toorak ladies might have asked. We talked of her work and of old times. It was good to see her.

14 March 2002 Maria Prendergast and John Loder have given a luncheon for my seventieth birthday. Eric Westbrook, now aged eighty, is present. Dawn died two years ago, and frail Eric lives alone in their elegant stone house set on a hill out of town. Eric told me that ‘malign’ forces had worked against any attempt he and John Reed had made to become friends. In my speech I acknowledged that Eric had had a hard time from John. Eric was touched. Kathleen Lamaro Tobin—now a mother of eight, dedicated church worker and the most Christian person I know—(also present) wants to give a lunch for Eric (who exists somehow on Meals on Wheels) and will invite me. Strange how the most disparate friends in one’s life come together. Kathleen, a bit younger than me, was the Italian girl next door when I was a child in Kerang.

part of the game

115

After MOMA had more or less successfully survived the first couple of years Zara and I persuaded Harold Holt to convene a meeting of twenty-five prominent businessmen, on the understanding they would be asked to donate on-going funds to subsidise the museum. I arranged an informal luncheon of chicken sandwiches and white wine. ‘How much do I ask of them?’ the federal treasurer asked in preliminary discussions, and we suggested £1000 per annum for three years. Harold Holt was, I think, vastly relieved. This was peanuts to what he had expected. Sunday, who hated the business world but was (due to her Baillieu background) aware of the psychology inherent in the capitalist mind, poured scorn on the modesty of our begging. She, rightly, regarded us as a bunch of amateurs whom the tycoons would view with contempt. She also predicted that the high flyers of commerce on our council would turn out to be duds. She was spot on. Not that MOMA (later the Museum of Modern Art and Design) was an unmitigated disaster. Far from it. We changed the face of modern art in Australia. We showed the work of Fred Williams, Mirka Mora, Charles Blackman and Arthur Boyd, and the ceramics of David Boyd and his wife Hermia Lloyd-Jones. We staged the first Melbourne assemblage of the Annandale Imitation Realists—the ground-breaking pop art of Mike Brown, Ross Crothall and Colin Lancely. We held Bob Dickerson’s and Elwyn Lynn’s first Melbourne show. We imported calligraphic art from Japan and abstract expressionism from Spain. We brought in hand-decorated porcelain from Picasso’s studio at Vallauris, France. We mounted an exhibition of David Moore’s photography and displayed contemporary design in household objects. We showed the sculptures of Danila Vassilieff. We did all this on a shoestring budget. John worked for nothing, I for £18 per

116

Art & Life

week. The women’s council pressed strongly for an exhibition of William Dobell. John resisted—since he did not view Dobell as a modernist—but eventually agreed. It proved to be a minor blockbuster; attendances were ten times the average. Curiously for a gallery not primarily concerned with sales, we did establish a watershed for art prices in this country. In 1960 MOMA paid for Albert Tucker’s return to Australia. He brought with him a substantial collection of paintings as part of a series John entitled ‘Antipodean Heads’. The top-selling Australian artist within Australia (Sidney Nolan fetched higher prices in England) was Arthur Boyd. Bert insisted on higher prices than Arthur and succeeded in getting them. I first met the art collector Margaret Carnegie (mother of Rod) at this time. If I remember correctly she purchased two major Tuckers. I suppose she was—in her acquisition of modern art—the only serious rival to the Reeds; not that they or she would have thought in such terms. She sold most of it in 1971. Had she waited a few more years she would have doubled her money. She later went on to become a successful author exploring Australian rural history, and wrote Mad Dog Morgan, from which Philippe Mora made a film starring Dennis Hopper as the New South Wales bushranger. Barrie and I once stayed the night with Douglas and Margaret Carnegie at their Holbrook (New South Wales) cattle property, Kildrummie, en route to Sydney. There were paintings everywhere, even in the bull-shed.

part of the game

117

August 2002 Margaret Carnegie’s funeral at Scots Church, Collins Street, Melbourne. The minister (who was actually the moderator of the Presbyterian Church and who spoke with a broad Scottish accent) knew absolutely nothing about Margaret and gracefully acknowledged my appraisal of her life. At the end of Mary Baillieu’s funeral at Christ Church, South Yarra, in December 1998, Everard (Sunday’s brother) literally pushed the vicar out of the way and thanked him, ‘for allowing us to use your church for this celebration of Mary’s life’. Perhaps Everard was annoyed because the vicar noted that this congregation represented a large slice of Australia’s entrenched wealth. He took this heaven-sent opportunity to spruik for donations for stained-glass windows. And why not? I never really warmed to Bert Tucker, nor he to me, but I did, with certain reservations, respect him and over the years we had good conversations. As a young man it was part of my job to look after him and chaperon him around Melbourne when he first returned. He was rather pompous and not a little vain and very peeved that young artists refused to address him as Mr Tucker! Naturally I was on the side of the young artists. The paintings Tucker exhibited in this first exhibition back in Australia were images of huge hatchet-faced, cut-jawed outback men superimposed on a spinifex desert. I recall John Perceval saying, ‘Bert knows he’s onto a good thing after Nolan’s big success with outback paintings; but at least Siddie’s been there. Bert’s never been further than Wangaratta’. I managed to find Bert a studio flat at 9 Collins Street above the Moras and remember him fixing mirrors to the walls around

118

Art & Life

his bed. He was quite frank in explaining that the purpose was for voyeuristic sex. His attitude to sex was equivocal and some people (in particular Georges Mora) believed that he hated and feared women. Certainly his portraits of Sunday Reed and Cynthia Nolan would suggest this. During the war he stalked the streets of St Kilda, half fascinated, half repelled by the legions of prostitutes out to ensnare American troops. It is said that he berated these women for their immorality but I have no way of knowing if this is true. An American soldier had murdered three Melbourne women and Tucker’s reflection on these tragedies resulted in a series of remarkable paintings he called images of modern evil. They remain among his best works and are surrealistic in character. One painting depicts a garish yellow and green tram preceded by a creature half beast and half man. Bert was cuckolded by several women. Joy Hester went off with the passionate Gray Smith and Bert fled to Europe and further unhappy liaisons. I think he did not find love until well into middle age, when he married Barbara Bilcock.

November 2001 Janine Burke is in terrible trouble. She is on the board of MOMA at Heide and the chairman and council members are demanding her resignation. Her crime is that she has criticised Albert Tucker’s late paintings. Tucker’s trustees, which include his dealer Lauraine Diggins and Barbara Tucker, have threatened to withdraw his bequest to Heide—his personal collection, consisting predominantly of his own works. At first she did hand in her resignation. I advised her to

part of the game

119

withdraw it. She cannot be summarily dismissed. How can the Heide board in all conscience censor free speech and succumb to threats? The chairman, Ken Fletcher, rang me (as he did others who supported Janine) and talked for forty minutes. He was persuasive but I would not give way. I then organised a press campaign on Janine’s behalf, and the charming little ferret, Melbourne arts correspondent Georgina Safe, gave us front page of the Australian. Peter Hobb wrote a good letter to the Age stating that the Reeds also regarded the late Tuckers as virtually worthless. In retrospect I think the decline of Tucker’s talent set in with ‘Antipodean Heads’. I now believe John recognised this at the time but after MOMA paid his fare he could not comment publicly or privately, let alone cancel the show.

September 2002 Sadly Ken Fletcher has been killed in a car accident. I attended his funeral and wrote his obituary acknowledging my differences with him over Janine Burke and the Albert Tucker estate. I wrote that Fletcher was a man of ‘exquisite courtesy’. Because the circumstances were unusual I showed my text to the family prior to publication. They were happy with what I wrote. It is a curious phenomenon of Australian art that almost all major painters emanated (if they did not remain there) from Melbourne. The ‘Rebels and Precursors’ period (Richard Haese’s term) of the magnificent Melbourne painting of the 1940s was the vanguard of Australian art and is now recognised internationally.

120

Art & Life

By comparison Sydney art has traditionally been decorative to the point of chi-chi. A group of artists lived in a Victorian mansion in Woollahra named Merioola. We used to refer to them as the Merioo-la-la group. In my opinion Sydney art has always been and still is meretricious. Russell Drysdale is little more than a caricaturist, Lloyd Rees two hundred years too late (after Turner) and Brett Whiteley (God rest his tortured soul) an overblown poseur both in art and life. John Olsen is a little better but still vastly overrated. After working at MOMA for four years I realised that the organisation was doomed. I resigned in favour of a job with the educational publishers Longmans Green & Co., but continued in an honorary capacity as secretary to the council. John stayed on for a further two years. The indefatigable Pamela (the Hon. Mrs Simon Warrender to use the strict formalities of the time) replaced Kurt Geiger as chair. She worked enormously hard for two or three years but came up against the same destructive forces that had driven John and myself out. She moved the museum (which she renamed the Museum of Modern Art and Design of Australia) to the Ball & Welch department store in Flinders Street, where it was administered by Roger James. This signified the beginning of the end, and MOMADA was wound up in 1965. The Heide collection was returned to the Reeds. Works of art acquired during the lifetime of the museum were stored at the National Gallery of Victoria. Sixteen years later the dream became reality and most of the collection passed to Heide Park and Art Gallery, now the Museum of Modern Art at Heide. At the time I commenced working for MOMA, John and Sunday bought a romantic, 1860s farmhouse on a two-hectare

part of the game

121

property situated on Diamond Creek at St Andrews, about fifty kilometres north-east of Melbourne, for Barrie, Leslie Stack and me. We commuted to the city each day, and the drive took about an hour and a quarter. Leslie did not stay long before sailing for London and a career as an art dealer. I felt sad at his departure but maintained the friendship over many visits to London. Barrie was greatly distressed. Leslie had said to him, ‘You take the oxygen from my air.’ Our country property was named Greenhill. The house was half timber and half hand-made brick of the most beautiful apricot colour. There were six main rooms and an exposed semi-basement. There was no electricity, and we learned to fill and trim the wicks of kerosene lamps on a daily basis. The lavatory was an external country dunny and water trickled to the kitchen and make-shift bathroom from two tanks. The galvanised iron roof leaked and the house generally was ramshackle but we always thought of it as our real home and—over seventeen years—made many improvements to the house and land. It was a cool house in summer, and warm in winter after we lit huge fires in the living and dining rooms. Barrie gardened and I planted trees and eventually acquired a good knowledge of natives, particularly eucalypts and acacias. We excavated an elliptical dam halfway down the slope to the creek, and this served as a swimming pool. At weekends we entertained our friends and helped nurture the talents of writers and artists. It never occurred to me that I might also be a writer of sorts. By coincidence, the painter and sculptor Danila Vassilieff died the day before we were due to move. On Saturday John rang to tell me this sad news. Danila, the powerful White Russian Cossack, had collapsed from a heart attack while

122

Art & Life

resting on the library sofa and had died in Sunday’s arms. He left his very limited estate (including works of art) to MOMA and this included a car. I was the only one of us with a driver’s licence and John offered me the car. We had planned to travel up and down by bus and train. Danila’s death at the age of sixty was an enormous loss for contemporary art in Australia. He was the biggest single influence on the modern movement: in particular on Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker who absorbed—as if by osmosis—the turn-of-the-century European visual art movement. A military career which included fighting against the Red Army seems an unlikely background for an artist, but Vassilieff, something of a renegade (as all artists are) fled to Brazil and then Australia where he painted and sculpted for the rest of his life. Danila married the academic, literary critic and then communist Elizabeth Sutton, but the union did not last. White and Red’s relationship was stormy. Danila (like John and Sunday) was ambivalent about the communists and blew the whistle on them when the Party tried to stack the Contemporary Arts Society with the purpose of dictating art policy and fostering only social realist art. Elizabeth—although a wealthy woman in her own right due to her inheritance from the Sutton music stores—challenged Danila’s will. John settled out of court, and I lost the car. It was useful while it lasted, but eventually Barrie bought a car and by then I had full use of a company vehicle.

ELEVEN The Cold Mirror Between

contemporary vernacular, and if this is not too pretentious a phrase, I was head-hunted by Longmans. Or did the idea come from my friend the poet Don Maynard who had left Longmans to work with another publisher? There was no application on my part and no references requested or supplied. I was not even questioned about my educational qualifications—or lack thereof. Yet an important part of my brief was to talk to university academics and primary and secondary school teachers about Longmans’ texts. A kind of soft sell was the order of the day and amounted to little more than handing out a complimentary copy. In addition I was to search for new titles suitable for the Longmans Australian list. I worked almost totally on my own and my territory covered Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. I found it possible to master the bare essentials of what might have been, hitherto, an unknown subject—say physics— TO USE THE

124

Art & Life

to make certain I would not appear to be totally ignorant when talking to a specialist in that field. In retrospect I can see that this was all fine training for my subsequent career in writing obituaries of people who had worked in arcane fields outside my range of knowledge. My contacts, particularly in the worlds of art, literature and theatre, but also in the broader society, proved invaluable. I commissioned John Reed to edit several small books on various aspects of Australian art, and these sold well both locally and in the UK. As part of the same series I got Robin Boyd to do modern architecture and Dame Peggy van Praagh, the Australian Ballet. While visiting Adelaide I met Paquita, Lady Mawson, who had written an unpublished biography of her late husband, the geologist and Antarctic explorer, Sir Douglas. In Perth I commissioned the Angry Penguins novelist, short fiction writer, teacher and university lecturer Peter Cowan to edit a volume of short stories from Australian writers. It was entitled Short Story Landscape and sold well in the UK. Longmans Australia had been set up by a formidable woman named Enid Moodie-Heddle. This stalwart exschoolteacher sold herself to the British publishing house while on a visit to London. For decades Enid lugged books around schools all over the country. She adapted British texts to the local market, particularly anthologies of poetry, and included Australian verse. Eventually she published purely Australian textbooks, some of which found a market back in Britain. Miss Heddle was extremely masculine and lived with Miss Muriel Horlock, the headmistress of a private girls school. The Misses Heddle and Horlock belonged to that band of strong, single, capable women—many of them lesbian—who somehow survived in the professions and in business before

the cold mirror between

125

women were more or less liberated. I admired such women enormously for their capabilities. Frequently they cared for an aged parent in addition to the demands of a rigorous profession. I use the past tense because I think they are a dying breed. (Would a publisher accept a book from me entitled In Praise of Spinsters?) These admirable women were part of the cultural and intellectual landscape when I was young. London eventually sent out an administrative manager named Dick Bush. He and Enid loathed each other and spoke only through their respective secretaries. Enid was not much of a businesswoman in the conventional sense and before Dick arrived would go through agonies trying to balance the figures to send to London. It didn’t really matter; she was hugely successful in what she published and made a packet for the firm. When Sir John Newsom, guru of British education, head of the Nuffield Foundation and newly appointed UK managing director, first came to Melbourne he dubbed Enid ‘Miss Heady-Muddle’. Sir John himself turned out to be of dubious benefit to this oldest family publishing house of all. A stimulating life opened up for me as I travelled extensively around the country, and this enabled me to meet a number of people whom until then I knew only by name and reputation. In Adelaide I saw a great deal of Max and Von Harris, both of whom provided the most marvellously stimulating company and who entertained me often at their beautiful honey-coloured bluestone house in Kensington. Max’s bookshop was named after his business partner and acolyte Mary Martin and was situated on the first floor of a modern office block on the corner of Grenfell Street and da Costa Place. It was a large square room, which in shelving resembled a public lending library. Max sat at the entrance,

126

Art & Life

behind a typewriter and a cash register. He greeted customers on the way in and took their money on the way out. In between he wrote poems, journalism, polemic, book reviews for Mary’s Own Paper (MOP) and whatever else took his fancy. He had an extraordinary ability to concentrate on intellectual activity with a simultaneous involvement in the day-to-day commercial activity going on around him. Max was also a wizard businessman. He was really the first Australian bookseller to trade in discount books on a large scale. On his visits to Melbourne and Sydney (and later London and New York) he would visit publishers’ warehouses, and purchase for next to nothing the remains of editions of significant literature. These he sold at a vast profit. The remainders were not, as is usual, isolated in one area, but shelved alongside newly published stock, if possible by the same author. It was a clever marketing strategy, as a customer would buy an author’s new book feeling that she had saved money by purchasing the remaindered copy. The bulk of sales were mail-order from book buyers around the country and abroad. MOP was a purchasing list which reviewed new stock and boasted a subscription of tens of thousands. Von Harris and a loyal assistant named Herbert ran this vital aspect of the business from a large store-room at the back of the shop. Max Harris (like Barrie) had been deeply affected by the Ern Malley hoax: Max, of course, even more so, because it was he who had been duped. To add insult to injury he had been charged and fined in the Supreme Court of South Australia for publishing obscene verse. Max seemed to be ashamed of the whole affair and rarely spoke of it. Subsequent to the scandal he shed any hint of personal nonconformity by dressing in a pin-stripe suit and

the cold mirror between

127

carrying a silver-topped cane. Max was darkly handsome in appearance and was described by the writer Hal Porter as resembling ‘a Lebanese confectionery vendor’—and indeed Lebanon was where his forebears came from. Porter was not a nice man. At the time of our first meeting Max co-edited a literary magazine with a most charming and intelligent woman named Rosemary Wighton. With Max’s new academicism it was entitled Australian Letters. He commissioned me to write an appreciation of the British poet Alan Riddell (then living in Australia). It was my second foray into commentary on artistic matters. Max’s new formality was exemplified in the correspondence pages of the journal, in which letters always began with the salutation (sometimes added within the office) ‘Sir and Madam’. Max himself was a fine poet and is underrated in Australian literary history. His love poems were particularly moving. I remember vividly his Girl with Eyes like Dying Flowers, an ode to Mary Boyd (Perceval, Nolan) with whom he was in love when he lived and worked in Melbourne. He also wrote an experimental novel named The Vegetative Eye which was illustrated by Sidney Nolan and published by Reed & Harris. It is high time that this avant-garde literature of the 1940s by Max and others became better known. Max became a slightly eccentric public figure and chaired a national ABC television program, The Critics, which covered the performing arts, literature, painting and just about anything else going on around the country. Barrie joined the panel as did Stephen Murray-Smith and Jean Battersby. Others came and went. The journalist Joan Gillison, mother of my friend Annie, added a touch of class. She was modest, not dogmatically over-opinionated like the others.

128

Art & Life

I did not much appreciate The Critics, or the constant ideological battle between Barrie and Stephen Murray-Smith. Both powerful personalities, they tended to dominate the discussions. Barrie took the view of absolute freedom for the artist and Stephen argued the artist’s obligation to the betterment of society. I thought this was all old-hat 1940s polemic and I made my criticisms known to Barrie. It caused a certain tension between us. He thought I was putting him down and he loved the idea of being a TV star which, to an extent, these cultural commentators had become. Max (who acted as a kind of reconciling force between Barrie and Stephen) wrote a weekly column of varying quality for the Australian from the beginning of its publication in Canberra, June 1964, and this continued for over twenty years. In time—that is, off the TV screen—Barrie and Stephen moved from their extreme philosophic positions. Stephen appointed Barrie as poetry editor of his Overland magazine. (Stephen, however, remained sniffy about modern poetry, comparing it to ‘dentistry’—a discipline only of interest to other practitioners.) I think John Reed felt that Max had sold out, or had ceased to be any sort of leader for the avant-garde. In the Angry Penguins days, John once referred to Max as ‘the nearest thing to genius we have in this country’. He and Sunday did not, however, lose their affection for Max nor Max and Von for them. The Harrises made a great deal of money out of their book business and toured the world extensively. Their favourite places, Max told me, were Bali and Bolivia. They lived in England for several years and ran an organic farm in Sussex managed by their daughter Samela. My last meeting with Max was at an all-afternoon lunch

the cold mirror between

129

at the lovely Willows restaurant on North Terrace, Adelaide, in 1982. Barrie and I had flown over to farewell Natasha Kirsta, now aged ninety-two and dying. The writer Geoffrey Dutton, distinguished of looks and lineage—then a close friend and collaborator of Max—was also present. Max’s enthusiasm and charm were undiminished. He was running yet another bookshop near his home in Kensington. He was still publishing his poems. After a winey lunch we demolished a bottle of calvados. Max was driven home in a Rolls Royce by his chauffeur. Geoffrey drove 100 kilometres to Anlaby, the ancestral property, a fact he revealed in his fine but much maligned autobiography Out in the Open. Sadly these two old friends were estranged in their final years. Why does this happen so often? Frances Burke and Maie Casey, Sunday and Nolan, Max and Geoffrey, and Barrie and myself. When Geoffrey published this controversial memoir, Max said it was all a load of opinionated rubbish. I thought that on the whole it was a remarkably good book, unfairly reviewed, mainly because Geoffrey had ceased to play Mr Nice Guy. Certainly he was cruel to his wife of four decades, Nene, saying there never had been love between them. I did not believe his assertion. Geoffrey was forced to leave his home state because of the resultant animosity towards him. I believe that Australians do not relish unmasking secrets of the heart. We are a discreet rather than a passionate people and Geoffrey committed the unpardonable sin of revelation. The critics were embarrassed and could not get beyond the sexual indiscretions he so freely recounted. Actually this is a minor aspect in a significant and very substantial work. I believe it is the best thing he ever wrote. As Patrick White observed, Geoffrey mostly frittered away his fine literary talent on hack work.

130

Art & Life

Von Harris lives on, partly crippled by a degenerative spinal disease. We telephone each other from time to time and talk for hours on end. Ultra-respectable Adelaide. The city of churches. South Australia, the only Australian state colonised totally by free settlers. You could see gentility in the faces in the street. Apart from Aborigines everyone looks proudly—if modestly— middle class. This, of course, was before the industrial growth of the northern suburbs. Exquisite houses surround the central square mile. What goes on in the salubrious suburbs of Norwood, North Adelaide, Malvern, Burnside and Kensington? Our novelists are not interested. Our playwrights couldn’t care less. Adelaide also contained what was then known as ‘the establishment’. This power group devolved from leading families which included the Elders, Barr Smiths, Downers, Duttons and Brays. The hub of the establishment was the Adelaide Club. People outside the establishment spoke of it in hushed tones. It was a force both sinister and glamorous and possessed a mystique unique in the wider Australian social hierarchy. Like the aristocracy of England, the South Australian establishment spawned a wider family of entrenched wealth and influence. I got to know some of them quite well. Sexual unorthodoxy was accepted long before the future premier Don Dunstan became the first attorney-general to legalise homosexual acts between men. Prominent in this established but unconventional stratum of local society were a scientist and his wife who were into group sex. My friend Ruth Cowen, an old friend of the wife, accompanied me on one visit to Adelaide. She was to stay with the couple. It was a hot summer Saturday evening. We were

the cold mirror between

131

greeted at the front door by the naked wife and taken directly to a bedroom where a trio (two women and hubby) were propped up in a big bed. Later we dined on exquisite food in a Japanese garden. A stream ran through the property and we sat with our feet resting in cool water. The wife habitually referred to Adelaide as if it were the Verdi opera—Adel-Aida. The wife’s brother, a high-ranking officer in the permanent army, was gay and everyone knew except the army. (Perhaps even them. The world at that time was full of blind eyes.) On visits to Japan, brother and sister visited gay bath-houses as a couple. The city’s leading theatrical director, married with a family, fell in love with most of his male leads, and had affairs with some. On a street level Hindley was the place of action. Bisexual Greeks (mostly married) slept with up-and-coming businessmen yet thought of themselves as faithful to their wives. Male and female prostitutes touted for business. Commercial travellers took their tricks, whether girls or boys, back to their own club in Bank Street. No questions asked. Yet it all looked so respectable and bore no resemblance to Kings Cross, St Kilda, The Valley in Brisbane or Roe Street in Perth. Ruth Cowen was the daughter of a prominent Melbourne cardiologist and educated at the exclusive Clyde school for girls at Mount Macedon. She was a natural rebel and had gone to live and work in Paris where she contracted polio. She was flown home and, against all prognostications, learned to walk again. I met her after she had graduated from a library school conducted by Barrie and had joined his staff at the State Library. She was an imposing woman with raven black hair and she walked slowly with two sticks. Later she became a

132

Art & Life

leading exponent of visual poetry and achieved national and international success. My special mate was the young journalist Peter Ward, who was also the best-looking male poet in Australia. He knew the ropes and was fiercely Adelaidian as were all my local friends. When Max Harris discovered Wardy the locals raised their eyebrows, but the relationship was entirely platonic. Max was indubitably straight. The Golden Door was our restaurant and everyone we knew went there. One night Peter Ward drank ten martinis and ate one oyster. On another occasion he and I walked along Hindley Street where we ran into Hal Porter who flung his arms around me and kissed me. Peter pretended to be so shocked he did not speak to me for a year. I maintained that this was very unfair since I had not kissed back. Peter came out eventually. Hal a decade or two later. At that time Peter had an official girlfriend named Penelope Coffey whom Max referred to as ‘the lovely Nescafe’. It was in Adelaide that I first met the historian Ian Turner. He then lived in North Adelaide with his second wife Ann (née Barnard of the Sydney push). On the occasion of the kiss Hal was staying with them and invited me to meet them. Later they became close friends of mine and Barrie’s when they came to live in Melbourne and Ian was professor of history at Monash. On Saturday nights in Adelaide I would attend the Turners’ quite wonderful parties. One constant guest was Margaret Ward, headmistresses of a girls technical school who very much looked the part. She never moved from her favourite chair where she sat knitting (Madame Defarge). She conceived a passion for Hal Porter (as did many women) who promised her that when she retired they would marry and live together in Ballarat.

the cold mirror between

133

Hal did spend his final years in that fine, historic town, but his love was no longer for Margaret but for a married man. The passion was mutual. Further details are supplied in Mary Lord’s biography of Porter. On Sundays I would drive to Port Elliott to lunch with Stefan and Joan Heysen and their charming kids. They lived in a stone house on lush pastures overlooking the ocean, where they ran dairy cattle. Stefan was the son of the famous landscape painter Hans. I had been introduced to them by John and Sunday despite the fact that the Reeds’ and Heysens’ taste in art did not coincide. None of this mattered; the Reeds and the Heysens got to know each other through Siamese cats. Stefan and Joan were immensely kind and hospitable, but were then leading rather isolated lives. They loved company. Joan cooked some of the best food I have ever eaten and I regret that I cannot recall just what it was: traditional I think. She had attended Invergowrie in Melbourne, a kind of finishing school for well-bred gels established in colonial Victoria—or perhaps a kind of French polish for the rougher daughters of the nouveaux riches. Lady Mawson had me to dinner once or twice. She lived in a ravishing Italianate house at Crafers in the Adelaide hills. I think everyone I knew lived in a beautiful house whether they had money or not. There seem to be tens of thousands of such residences in Adelaide and they are still dirt cheap by comparison with Sydney and Melbourne. Paquita Mawson (née Delprat—her father was the first geologist at Broken Hill) was a kindly grande dame. I was working in London when Longmans published her biography of her husband, which I had commissioned. When she arrived for the launch at 48 Grosvenor Street the Brits were astonished. Could Australia have produced this Amazonian woman of eccentric, yet aristocratic bearing?

134

Art & Life

Sometimes I lunched with John Bray, then a barrister, later chief justice of South Australia and, in retirement, chancellor of the University of Adelaide. Although a member of the seemingly ubiquitous establishment, he was a rebel and preferred the Sports to the Adelaide Club. He would sometimes turn up at louche parties, sit in a corner and observe the goings on, smiling sweetly in his shy way. Late one night while chief justice he walked home across Hurtle Square. A group of Aborigines offered him a swig from a flagon and, as a gentleman, he accepted. They said they were from a remote settlement near the Northern Territory border. What were the police like in Adelaide? He told them not as bad as they used to be. And the magistrates and judges in the courts? Just be careful, brothers, and you’ll be okay, he told them. John Bray came out in retirement. Even Peter Ward was astonished. Wardy and his partner Dimitri Theodoratis took John to Greece—he had hardly ever been out of the country. Late one night in a café John asked Peter to ask a waiter if he would spend the night with him. The waiter agreed. Next morning at breakfast Peter asked John how it had gone. ‘He just fell asleep,’ John reported sadly. The right-wing journalist and editor (and one-time speech writer for John Howard) Christopher Pearson claims to have had an affair with Bray. I asked John about it. ‘Once in 1976,’ he told me. As an eastern states man I felt astonishingly isolated in Perth. It was, as they constantly said in those days, ‘the most isolated white city in the world’. It took most of the day to fly there from Melbourne via Adelaide in a creaky old piston-engined DC6B aircraft which groaned as it flew. I once sat next to a businessman who was continuing on to what was then Salisbury, Rhodesia, in a similar plane. He maintained that

the cold mirror between

135

such aircraft were unsafe flying over vast stretches of water. There was no newspaper worth reading in Perth. The West Australian was not a patch on its Melbourne counterpart, the Sun News-Pictorial. The Australian did not yet exist and the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald took a week to arrive. The city in 1962 had scarcely changed since my theatrical visit seven years previously. It was very different from the burgeoning capital we know today. I think I have never seen a city so radically different. There is scarcely an original building left on St George’s Terrace. I do not altogether disapprove of this. There was little Victorian architecture of merit and the modern skyscrapers seem to me to be generally of a higher standard than Sydney or Melbourne. Nor was (or is) there much interesting suburban domestic architecture to compare with Victorian Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney or Brisbane, or Georgian Tasmania. There were a couple of oases in the form of hotels: The Palace (on the Terrace) and The Esplanade (on the Esplanade). These were gems of colonial architecture where the managements encouraged a civility of behaviour found otherwise only in an exclusive club. Gentlemen (and perhaps a few ladies) poured their own whiskies. The cuisine was good Anglo-Australian. Mosquito nets draped the beds, and verandahs were reminiscent of first-class decking on an ocean liner. Culture? Civilisation, as always, is where you find it, and I made friends. It was not until the Western Australian minerals boom that galleries and theatre complexes flourished as they had in other states. I took a furnished flat in a Mount Street high-rise block which overlooked the home, garden and commercial gallery belonging to Rose Skinner and her husband Joe. Rose and I had, understandably, known of each other, although I think we had not actually met before.

136

Art & Life

Rose and Joe were infinitely kind and hospitable to me and I remember dining with them many times both alone and when they entertained others. The Skinner Gallery was comparable to the Australian Galleries in Melbourne and the Clune Gallery in Sydney, then Australia’s leading modern art dealers, and Rose exchanged exhibitions with them. I was relieved to find that Rose felt sympathetic to John and Sunday. So many people did not and would say horrible things about them, quite insensitive to my own feelings for them. This is still the case twenty-two years after their deaths and it never ceases to distress me. What impressed me then, and still does today, is Western Australia’s intrinsically regional culture: provincialism, if one can use that word, at its best. I cannot discern any comparable regional arts movement in any other state or region of Australia. In 1996 Bruce Grant published The Budd Family, a novel of social, economic and political change before and after the Second World War. It is partly based on his own life and family in Perth and the wheat belt of Western Australia about 300 kilometres inland. This book has been shamefully neglected, as have so many other significant works of art created in Australia. Back in 1962 Robert Juniper was painting semi-abstract landscapes in quite a different style to the abstractionists and landscape artists of the eastern states. I got to know him through the course of my work when he was senior arts master at the Hale School. Peter Cowan’s spare prose seemed to mirror the flat landscape. Randolph Stowe was one I did not know but who was already writing fiction which was distinctively Western Australian in its (mostly) rural character. Nor did I meet Dorothy Hewett (until later when Barrie and I often had her to stay at Greenhill), although I was aware of her presence.

the cold mirror between

137

I did meet one of Dorothy’s academic colleagues, John Barnes, at the University of Western Australia, who had written fine critical essays on the work of Peter Cowan. Another academic I met at the university, and at dinner parties with the Skinners, was, professor of English at the university, Allan Edwards, who had bought scores of Sidney Nolan paintings for the university collection. I recall my distress at his antipathy to John Reed. He had never met John but had been influenced by Sidney Nolan who had already begun his campaign to denigrate, if not destroy, the Reeds. Incidentally Perth was the first city in Australia to stage an arts festival. It arose out of a university summer school program devised, in 1953, by Fred Alexander, professor of history. By 1962 it had moved out of the university to the city at large. Unfortunately I was never witness to it as I could not visit Perth during the academic break. I first met the artist Moya Dyring (previously married to Sam Atyeo) with the Skinners in Perth. Moya was plump, pretty, warm and friendly and (despite living in Paris for thirty years or more) almost aggressively Australian. She was here to show her paintings. She told me she was delighted to meet me because I was a friend of John and Sunday for whom she held loving memories. I was always relieved to find a positive response to them. We made a happy connection and she suggested I stay with her if I ever came to Paris. I accepted this kind invitation two years later. Barrie had suggested that I should visit a woman friend of Hal Porter, Mary Lord. She then lived with her husband, army psychologist Bob Salas, in an outer suburb. There were three young children who took up most of her time but she was exuberant, blonde and pretty and giggled a lot. Later she distinguished herself as an academic, writer, journalist,

138

Art & Life

and Porter’s biographer. In addition she helped care for the indigent novelist, Christina Stead, in her old age. (If it is not an intrusion in my narrative I should like to say that I think Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children is Australia’s greatest novel ever: superior to anything Patrick White wrote. On the other hand she cannot match White’s astonishing body of fine work.) Tasmania was (and to a lesser extent still is) one of the world’s best-kept secrets: its landscape, coastline and the Georgian heritage of its early buildings make it unique in Australia and rare anywhere in the wider world. I felt a different sort of isolation there—as if I was lost in time, history and perhaps place. Living in Launceston was the ex–matinee idol Max Oldaker, recently returned from London where he had starred in opera, musical comedy and Gilbert & Sullivan. His career began in London in the 1930s where he sang Walther in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger under Sir John Barbirolli. He also played the juvenile lead in the premiere of Noel Coward’s Operette and he won the Arnold Bax Prize at the Royal Academy of Music. Despite his athletic good looks and considerable fame, Max was totally devoid of the ego one associates with stars of stage and screen. He was a refreshingly pure, simple and kind man, without being in any way dull; he was full of wit and charm. He had relinquished a grand career to return home and care for his aged parents shortly after taking over Rex Harrison’s role in My Fair Lady. This was a selfless gesture because the London critics were unanimous in declaring his performance far superior to that of Harrison, and he was receiving tremendous media attention. I was introduced to him by Charles Osborne who subsequently wrote his biography.

the cold mirror between

139

One evening I had arranged to drive Max to Fitzpatrick’s Inn to a dinner given for Ruth Cowen and me by one of the owners, Miss Myra Fitzpatrick. The inn was at historic Westbury, twenty miles west. When I arrived at Max’s house in John Street the front door was open, a glass of champagne waiting and Max sitting at his grand piano. He serenaded me with a song Noel Coward had written for him. It was all very innocent and part of his sweet charm. He continued with other ballads while we drank champagne and consequently arrived late for dinner. Miss Myra was very cross, but Ruth, who was holidaying at the inn, was delighted when I told her this story. Max Oldaker directed amateur theatre groups with as much care as he would a distinguished cast of stars in the West End or on Broadway. When it was possible to leave his parents, he toured in musical theatre and revues around Australia. In Sydney he co-starred in Bill Orr’s Phillip Street Theatre revues with Ruth Cracknell, Barry Humphries, June Salter and Gordon Chater. In his foreword to Charles’s biography of Max, Barry Humphries recounts Max’s advice on maintaining a smile during repeated curtain calls. ‘Noel taught me,’ Max told his fellow stars, ‘all you do is mouth, “silly cunts, silly cunts,” it works like a charm.’ And so, apparently, it did. Max’s big wartime show was The Desert Song. He was adored by colleagues and fans. For decades a woman sat in the same dress circle seat at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne. She was there every night when Max appeared. Prior to the performance a dozen red roses would arrive signed by, ‘Your Fan’. Somehow he learned where she sat and his final bow was always to her. They never met. Three years later he played the flamboyant actor in the lead of Half a Sixpence (a musical based on H. G. Wells’s

140

Art & Life

novel Kipps) at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne. At this time I saw him on a daily basis, as I did (at the same time) Irene Handl, who was playing at the Comedy. I have a distinct recollection of Max coming into the bookshop, engaging me in general conversation, then saying cheerfully, ‘You know I have a dicky heart and could go at any time’. In Launceston Max introduced me to his protégé, the composer Peter Sculthorpe, who then worked part-time in his father’s gunshop in Brisbane Street. When he was not working in showbiz Max was a writer and I recall him showing me a series of essays on Australian composers which had been commissioned by Charles Osborne as editor of the London Magazine. Sculthorpe, of course, was the first of them. Max’s closest friend was Mary Fisher who ran one of Australia’s best small bookshops, situated in the Quadrant, Launceston. Mary was another stalwart spinster. She was a woman of great erudition, kindness and generosity. She would have been described at the time as ‘mannish’, and this was evident in her dress and demeanour. In those days there was no hint of opprobrium in this epithet. She was a big woman, plain of feature and wore her white hair cropped and slicked back over her head. She was, I suppose, in her late sixties, but nobody thought of her as an old dyke. Mary was state president of the Girl Guides Association. When she dined at Government House she always sat next to the governor and was provided with her own little tankard of whisky because she did not drink wine. I think Mary was virginal. She lived with Nannie, a woman cousin, who kept house for her. Max would try to draw her out. Did she love women? ‘Yes, but you know . . . I never . . . and I’m too old for all that now.’ On Saturday, when the shop closed, she would join Max and me in the bar of the Brisbane

the cold mirror between

141

Hotel. I recall going through Longmans’ general list with her and the very literary Max helping her place an order. Max died from heart failure, aged sixty-four, in 1972. He outlived his ninety-two-year-old father by one year. Fitzpatrick’s Inn acted as a kind of social focus for many of my Tasmanian friends, and it proved convenient for me to stay there, as it was equidistant from Launceston and the major towns of the north-west, Devonport and Burnie. Mary Fisher lived on a property nearby and John Reed’s older brother Dick and his wife Lesley ran cattle at nearby Hagley. Westbury, a charming village straight out of eighteenthcentury England, was very much on the tourist map and many visitors passed through after arriving at Devonport on the ferry from Melbourne. The inn was constructed in about 1800 and was owned and managed by three elderly Catholic spinster sisters (more spinsters!) after their only brother had died as a young man. Front of house, the maîtresse d’ was the plumply flamboyant Myra who wore hats entwined with ostrich feathers and décolleté dresses. When a coach or rented car arrived at the inn Myra would scrutinise the occupants. If they did not measure up to her expectations she would tell them that the house was full. There was also Miss Genevieve, and another nun-like sister named Cora, who ran the kitchen and a garden which provided fresh produce. The hotel was the epitome of shabby elegance and chocka-block full of genuine antiques. There were four-poster beds and the bathrooms were carpeted in the English style. When the State Liquor Board revoked, on an obscure technicality, the Fitzpatrick’s licence to run a bar, Myra simply closed the bar door and clients came through the porticoed entrance. Over several decades she was never prosecuted. She had a penchant

142

Art & Life

for stars and (like everyone) worshipped Max Oldaker. I doubt that she read much but she had great respect for writers. She was catholic in her tastes as well as her religion, and numbered Morris West and Frank Hardy as her special friends. Hal Porter was a drinking partner when he lived in Tasmania. She once said to me, ‘Please don’t tell my sisters that I drink’. They went to bed early but I think they were aware of Myra’s proclivity—not that it prevented her from working hard. Ruth Cowen twice spent her annual holidays at Fitzpatrick’s, choosing the time to coincide with my visits. She was given a room on the ground floor wing and spent most of her time propped up in bed, her door open on to the garden. Here she received a constant stream of visitors and was pampered by all three sisters, who were more than happy to wait on her hand and foot. Today it would cost thousands for a hotel guest to be accommodated in splendour and showered with such luxury. Then, anyone on a modest income could afford it and we all just took it for granted.

31 December 2001 Ruth died last night. She was finally forced to enter a high-care nursing home after spending some months in the pulmonary centre at the Austin Hospital. It was nearly fifty years since she had contracted polio while living in Paris. The fact that she survived so long is a tribute to her astonishing will to live. She had a strong heart both literally and figuratively. Almost everything else had by now packed up. She chose the location of her final home partly because of its proximity to my flat. I visited her several times a week, often walking Charlie and then Gusto, taking the dogs in with

the cold mirror between

143

me. Since she loved food I would always take her a little snack of something I had prepared in my kitchen. Yesterday afternoon Gusto and I arrived to discover that her doctor was with her. Ruth had said that should she develop pneumonia once more it was to take its course untreated. When the doctor emerged she told me that it was most likely that Ruth did not have long to live. She was not conscious but I sat with her for a long time. Finally I had to go but I returned in the evening. I held her hand while she died peacefully—she had been terrified that she would not—at 12.05 a.m. on New Year’s Day. The nursing home would not allow her to remain there during the night, and after consulting her next-of-kin and power of attorney I arranged for a funeral parlour to take away the body.

6 J a n u a r y 2 0 0 2 — Tw e l f t h N i g h t Ruth always observed this feast day and I held a wake for about fifty friends in my flat. She had asked me to do this— she did not want a funeral—and for me to speak. She also demanded a coffin-shaped cake with pink icing. Her niece Ailsa organised this. Some of the elderly lady librarians were startled but everyone accepted a piece. In my eulogy I spoke of her importance as a visual poet. Her work was painstakingly exquisite. She wore her heart on her sleeve and this literal image was the subject for several of her works. Ruth never wished to marry or have children. She was a romantic who loved to fall in love, providing she did not have to live with him. She loved lovers, preferably outside marriage. Her intellect was formidable, if indiscriminate. She could

144

Art & Life

analyse political polemic, post-modernist text, morality and ethics or art. She was a fantasist in the best sense of the word. She was an unashamed anthropomorphist who would debate matters of great pith and moment with her favourite teddybear, and she would take him into her confidence. She was one of the most extraordinary people I have known. In Hobart I met up with the historian Louis Green, his wife Nita and their young children, Karen (later married to leader of the opposition Neil Batt) and Martin. The Greens lived in the historic Battery Point area and I lodged in a guest-house nearby. Louis had been part of the Brisbane Barjai circle of ‘creative youth’. Late afternoon I would join a group of people in the lounge bar of the lovely old Hadley’s Hotel in the heart of town. They included the poet Vivian Smith (who, I think, still lives in Hobart), ABC radio producer Philip Koch, and his brother, the future novelist Christopher Koch. I have not kept up a friendship with any of this group and wonder (as one always does) whether they remember me. I certainly remember them and recall stimulating conversations. Christopher’s novel The Year of Living Dangerously made a fine film starring Mel Gibson. His latest historical novel Out of Ireland has been acclaimed by everyone from Frank Devine to Phillip Adams. It is, perhaps, a sign of those times that there were no female members of that Hadley’s Hotel group. In Hobart there was a young woman novelist of outstanding talent. She was then working as a waitress in a restaurant and her name is Helen Hodgman. She was the wife of theatre director Roger Hodgman (later of the Melbourne Theatre Company). Her novellas broke new ground as she dealt with incest and transvestism—not to mention the far more respectable crime

the cold mirror between

145

of murder—in a compellingly Gothic style. I read her books, Blue Sky and Jack & Jill with rapt attention, usually at one sitting. In Hadley’s Hotel I underwent the most extraordinary experience of instantaneous love. Nothing comparable to this lightning, frightening passion has struck me before or since. Nor would I want it to. Yet it would not be accurate to define my feelings as lustful. I was standing at the reception desk when a man dashed in to say he had no booking—a taxi was waiting in the traffic outside and did they have a room? Yes they did. How do I describe this vision? Tall, blonde, tanned. What clichés! I stayed at the desk until he returned with luggage. Tanned is the wrong word. This guy would not lie idle in the sun. He was obviously a man of the land who spent most of his time outdoors. His hands were large—those of a peasant—but his face and demeanour were aristocratic. I became insensible, I suppose swoon is the only possible word. I swooned. The man went to his room. Ruth Cowen had moved from Fitzpatrick’s down to Hobart. We dined together every night and this was her last night before returning to Melbourne and work. If she thought my behaviour was odd she said nothing. She wanted an early night. I would see her off in a taxi to the airport at 9 a.m. I returned to Hadley’s and the man sat alone at the bar. I sat next to him and engaged him in conversation. Yes, he was from Gippsland, Victoria. Married with several children. We talked on. He was interested in Georgian architecture and this was why he was holidaying (alone) in Tasmania. He seemed to have read everything. He had travelled extensively throughout Europe and had a passion for all things Gothic.

146

Art & Life

When the bar closed we had coffee and further drinks in his little suite. At about 2 a.m. he asked with rather formal courtesy if I would dine with him the following night. He obviously wished me to leave and I did. The following day was (thank God) busy and I tried hard to control my agitation. That evening dinner lasted for hours although neither of us ate very much. We talked endlessly. We both drank too much. We retired to his suite, talked more, drank more. Finally I said I should go and he said, ‘Yes’. We kissed a chaste goodnight. The next morning, around ten, I returned to Hadley’s. He had gone, and although I was shocked I was not surprised. It was Thursday and I finished my work in Tasmania on the following day. I knew intuitively where he had gone. On Friday night I drove north to Fitzpatrick’s Inn. Miss Myra met me in the hall, gave me a knowing look and said, ‘Your friend is here.’ So commenced a fractured, fraught relationship which probably caused us both more grief than satisfaction. Yes, he returned my affections but . . . We met in Melbourne and I visited him and his family from time to time. Then he wrote and said we should not meet again. We did not for a year until just before I left Australia for four months work in London. When I returned we did see each other and over time finally settled into comfortable friendship. Naturally I told Barrie of this passion. John and Sunday were aware of it and met and liked this man. Barrie was disconcerted because he did not believe anyone else could or would ever replace him. Essentially he was right; I would never have left Barrie. I think such wild passions are not uncommon among persons already committed. This is the theme of

the cold mirror between

147

Noel Coward’s play and film Brief Encounter. A respectable suburban married woman has a chance encounter with a man on a railway station. Their love is mutual although it hardly amounts to an affair. Finally they decide not to meet again. The play ends with the husband somewhat enigmatically thanking his wife for coming back to him. Barrie, out of some kind of pique, commenced an affair with an extremely handsome and very macho (although we did not say macho in those days) young man who was essentially straight. Paradoxically, he was more besotted with Barrie than Barrie with him. Not content with the boy, Barrie also got off with the boy’s equally beautiful girlfriend. He went around boasting that he was on with the most beautiful boy and the most beautiful girl in Melbourne (although nobody says ‘on with’ any more). This was more or less true. Word got back to Sunday, who was horrified by such an egotistical view of love relationships.

TWELVE F ra i l C o l o u r s , B ra v e P r o m i s e s

WHEN SIR JOHN NEWSOM , the managing director of Longmans

in London, visited Australia early in 1964, I asked if he would give me a job in head office for three months. He agreed and I left Australia at the beginning of October of that year. On the way to London I stopped in Paris in order to represent our Museum of Modern Art at the exhibition of Sidney Nolan’s ‘Ned Kelly’ paintings, at the Qantas Gallery. These were the original Kelly paintings which Nolan had painted at Heide and given to Sunday. They had already been acclaimed after a showing at the Qantas Gallery in London, and this exposure of some of Nolan’s best work represented a major advance in his international career. Nolan had vetoed the attendance of John Reed, Georges Mora and Barrie Reid, in that order. There seemed to be no end to his rejection of anyone associated with Heide. It was quite proper for me to represent the museum, as I was still secretary to the governing council and it was too late for

frail colours, brave promises

149

Nolan to veto me. In any case we were not, in my case, asking Qantas for my fare or expenses. I carried with me a letter from John to Nolan which was the first communication between the two men in fifteen years. This was the only occasion on which I met our greatest artist, and certainly he set out to charm me. This is the letter I delivered to Sidney Nolan: 12 October 1964 Dear Nolan, Pamela tells me how moved you were when you first saw your Kellys again, and this, at least, brings a warm feeling to my heart. I am glad you have had this experience, and that the exhibition itself went so well and was happily received in London and has helped to fill in what has always been to me such a sad gap in the image of your work given by the Thames & Hudson book. If this had to be done at the sacrifice of what I think was my own natural right to accompany the paintings, perhaps that does not matter very much in the long run; but I have come to regret the decision which brought this about and think it was a mistaken one, though I participated in it at the time. I also gather from Pamela that you want to ‘forget (obliterate) the past’ and that you are very ‘bitter’ about our holding some of your paintings: in fact it seems your attitude approaches an implication that we have stolen them. Naturally this is something I am not happy about, and in the circumstances feel justified in a little private bitterness of my own; but at the moment what I want to do is to clarify those circumstances themselves. To do this it is necessary to go back a long way into the

150

Art & Life

past, which I, at any rate remember, and, in remembering it feel indignant at the role you are trying to make history assign to us, as is all too plain, for instance, in Charles Osborne’s disgraceful misrepresentation of history in Airways. This history started, as you well know, in my office way back in 1938, the date on which your career as a painter really began. At that stage, as you will remember, you were convinced of your genius, but perhaps of little else, certainly not of its direction; and it was at this time that you found one person, and then two, who not only confirmed your genius, I know none of us ever liked that word very much, but also its direction. You also found, and gave love. Within a year you came to live at Heide, and from then till you married Cynthia eight years later your life and ours were inextricably interwoven in a pattern of complete mutuality and intimacy. Each made his own contribution to the life we all led together, and your paintings were part of your contribution, even though you said Sunday painted them as much as you did. These paintings became in their own way as much a part of the total life we lived as Sunday’s cooking, as the trees I planted, as the books we all read and which were added to the library, and a hundred other things we all contributed. It may be some confirmation of this that you said all your paintings were for Sunday, and I am quite sure you did not think of them otherwise. They were created with her in a sense which is almost literal, and it is certain that without her, without your life at Heide, a great many of them would never have been painted. What we each contributed to the life we all led became part of that life. Do you think you contributed more than anyone else? Or do you think that in making a completely

frail colours, brave promises

151

ruthless decision of your own as to how you would break our lives together, you were entitled to re-arbitrate the terms of our shared years? In asking this I do not in any way ignore your own suffering at the time. As far as I am concerned your paintings have always remained a part of my own living reality, as you have, and I want to make it quite clear that, if Sunday’s loving selfsacrificing heart had not overruled me, you would never have got a single one of your paintings on the basis of the cold inhuman attitude you adopted, though it seems organically natural that some of your paintings should always remain with me. After you left us you wrote—the only letter you have written—that, after taking what we wanted we should return your paintings to you; referring to them as being ‘in your possession’. It was the letter of a stranger we did not know, assuming a situation quite foreign to us and far too unreal for us to cope with. Some years later you got Bryan Robertson to write saying you wanted paintings for an exhibition. Naturally we asked for some word from you, but of course got none. Later again you got the British Council to write requesting the return of the painting you had ‘loaned’ to us. At this stage Sunday’s heart could no longer cope with the strain you were imposing on it. To oppose her thoughts would only have been to add to the torture you were already inflicting, and though I knew what her suffering would be when the painting went—and to which you seemed indifferent—finally I agreed with her to send them. The actual packing of the paintings took many weeks, and I would rather not talk about that; but it is true that one result of what took place at that time is that not all the

152

Art & Life

listed paintings were sent, and it seems that it is our holding of these very few paintings—perhaps seven or eight, and the slates, which somehow were not coped with, which you say is the cause of your bitterness. At this moment I am, in fact, not actually sure which paintings you do refer to, but perhaps you will write and tell me and this might lead to the clarification of the whole position. If the numbers you indicated to Bob Hughes, or so he said, are any criterion, then you certainly must be under some very strange delusion, which had better be resolved. Though it is not too late now it would have been much better if you had made your complaint at the time. I remember Bert saying that when you opened the cases you were disappointed at the quality of your early work, but there was no reference to shortage; nor, so far as I know, have you ever made any reference to Sunday’s amazing generosity of spirit which enabled her to part with many treasures which were part of her own flesh and blood. In all these years your attitude to us has been that of an executioner. There has been no need to cut off our heads—you who so feelingly painted Auschwitz—you have attempted to achieve the same and by more sophisticated means: silence, refusal to communicate, denial by implication, innuendo and the ostracism of mutual friends, no matter how close they had been to you. And of course your final touch in vetoing Barrie and myself as Museum representatives with the Kellys in London. Fortunately I have a certain tough resilience, which once served you well. It is a pity this letter has had to answer bitterness with bitterness and suffering with suffering, but it is better that it should be a real letter, and I will end with equal reality. My feeling for you remains fundamentally the same as

frail colours, brave promises

153

ever, just as is my feeling for your painting. This may be hard to explain: perhaps you came into my life too late for me to be able to change: perhaps the experiences I have shared with you have been too deep to eradicate; but I should say that with this goes a profound consciousness of my own inadequacies and of the suffering, both Sunday’s and yours, for which they were in part responsible. It seems to me, however, that in the face of your attitude I can do little more about this and that the next move is up to you, and that your personality, I nearly said ‘soul’, is the ultimate loser in the present situation: that your ‘strength’ is really ‘the ball in your neck’—your weakness. The whole purpose of this letter is then to be unreservedly candid about my own thoughts, both bad and good, and to say finally that I come out on the positive side and always move to meet you. What I ask is that you should do the same: from then on we all take our chances, but at least with the knowledge that we have moved towards life, not away from it. All I resist is your cruelty to Sun: is there anything to be gained by this? We want to live in peace with you—and with Cynthia. Do write to me.

Nolan did not reply and the two men never communicated again. It has to be said that the Kelly paintings scarcely caused a ripple in the art establishments of Paris. The critic for the leftleaning daily Le Monde classified the work as ‘social realist’. Nolan would have been thrilled. I have already touched on the resentment that many artists felt when dictated to by the apparatchiks of the Communist Party. Directly after the opening

154

Art & Life

Nolan retreated to the safety of Cynthia and London, and I never saw him again. The next time Charles Osborne met Cynthia Nolan she demanded to know who was this Philip Jones. I attended the gallery each day and counted the takings for the lavish catalogue. Few people came. It was a strange experience viewing these allegorical landscapes in such an exotic environment as central Paris. They looked wistful, not belonging—as do native Australian plants in any other country. Leslie Stack arrived from London on the day of the opening, and on the following day introduced me to his part-time lover, a fascinating woman named Ninette Lyon. Thus began a friendship which lasted until her death in 1994. Matthew Perceval and Sweeney Reed came with Leslie, and we all stayed with Ninette and her husband Peter Lyon in their spacious flat in Montparnasse. Ninette was an artist and journalist, and she and Peter could be described as ‘Le Tout Paris’ (or as an exclusive section of the population with cultural and social influence). Ninette had been involved in a ménage à trois with Roland Penrose (head of the Institute for Contemporary Art in London—where Leslie worked) and his wife, the beautiful American war photographer, Lee Miller. Lee suffered from depression (after horrific and harrowing experiences reporting the war and—afterwards—the concentration camps) and pays tribute in her memoirs to Ninette for keeping her alive. When Lee thought of suicide she did not act on this fantasy because her longing for Ninette’s exquisite cooking mitigated her nervous depression. This seems to me to be an eminently practical (and very French) life-saving action, and one which would certainly help keep me going if the pain of living became intolerable. There was an undercurrent of drama in the Lyon apartment.

frail colours, brave promises

155

Ninette made it clear she was more attracted to me than to Leslie and this enraged him to such an extent he stormed off back to London. I did not replace Leslie as her lover, but fifteen years on I introduced her to the Australian painter and sculptor, the late Joel Elenberg, with whom she had a short but exquisite affair. Ninette and I spent a day with the photographer and artist Man Ray. It was his wooden coat-hanger sculpture period, and they hung like mobiles (Calder-style mobiles, not telephones) from the ceilings of a rather cramped little house near the Pére Lachaise cemetery. Man was vital, extrovert, and still very American after decades in Paris. Twenty years later, when he was dying—and his eccentric wife Juliet incapable of looking after him properly—Ninette took over. Later I was able to put Georges Mora in touch with the widow, thereby obviating the need for an intermediate dealer for Man Ray’s works. Georges subsequently exhibited a collection of limited photographic prints in Australia. Matthew Perceval brought a novice nun back to the Lyon flat, and Peter and Ninette were very impressed. His mother, Mary Nolan, was much amused when I told her this story. Sweeney lacked his customary, ebullient cheerfulness. Paris represented a traumatic incident in his life, when, aged seven, he was separated from his ‘father’, Bert Tucker. I had been given an introduction to an expatriate Australian woman with the improbable name of Madge Tivey-Faucon. M. Faucon was her French husband. She ran an art gallery in La Rue de Penthievre next door to Proust’s favourite bathhouse, and had recently exhibited the paintings and pottery of David and Hermia Boyd. Madge Tivey had an interesting history. She had worked for years as principal private secretary to the young Prince

156

Art & Life

Rainier of Monaco. Later she became secretary to Princess Grace, née Miss Kelly from Philadelphia. The two women did not get on and eventually Madge retired by mutual consent. Madge considered the Kellys (need I add that I am no longer writing about Nolan’s paintings?) to be vulgar Americans and in her memoirs patronised Princess Grace. She also did a hatchet job on Grace’s parents, and describes Mr Kelly setting up a post office within the palace to sell the special commemorative Monaco stamp—at a hundred times its value—to his rich American cronies. Such was the rage of the Rainiers that Madge was deprived of her citizenship and rendered stateless. Despite her rather grand past associations Madge was an unpretentious, friendly little woman. ‘You look so much like my nephew Christopher Muir,’ she told me. Naturally this endeared me to her as Christopher (ABC television drama director) was considered to be one of the best-looking men in Melbourne. Madge wanted to know where I came from. I told her Melbourne. Now be more specific, she commanded. Where in Melbourne? I told her I was born and raised in a little town called Kerang. ‘Oh, my God,’ she cried, and clutched her head, ‘So was I. My father was the first doctor there.’ I told her my father had arrived in the town in 1911. Did she remember him? Yes she did. A week or so later she wrote to me in London. It was the middle of the night and she couldn’t sleep. She had been dreaming about Kerang. She longed to return. The following year my parents visited her and she and my father talked for hours. Present was the handsome Christopher, then living with my friend, the journalist Annie Gillison. Another renewed friendship was with Moya Dyring who lived in an apartment on the Île Saint Louis. She had been there since the 1930s and paid the most minimal rent. It was

frail colours, brave promises

157

the very heart—one might call it the still quiet centre—of Paris. The flat now houses Australian artists working in Paris and is administered by the Australia Council. My last call in Paris was to the Australian ambassador, Sir Ronald Walker, who gave me short shrift and handed me on to a cultural attaché. In my arrogance I thought that I could do a much better job than this callow young man who looked after Australian cultural affairs.

April 2003 Jinx has lost an appeal. Mary is already back at the Rodd and I telephoned to congratulate her. I do hope the affair is at its end. So, in due course, to London and my job in publishing. It was my first visit in twelve years. Gone was the grimy smog and the stink of fish and chip shops. The bomb sites were capped with indifferent architecture, like teeth in a holey mouth. This was, however, swinging London, and it seemed that half of all Australian artists were in town. Carnaby Street in Soho and the Kings Road in Chelsea were the places to be. Have I already written about Klaus and Gertie Anschel? I think not. They were my friends from the old days of the Moras at 9 Collins Street: a handsome couple, cultivated in that particularly Viennese Jewish manner. Their business in Melbourne had been the Little Nut Shop, which stocked exquisite hand-made chocolates and petit fours before you could buy such things anywhere. Here the Anschells were in the very heart of the Kings Road, with a shop and gallery selling modern jewellery, glass and prints.

158

Art & Life

If you wandered down the road you would always run into someone you knew. David and Hermia Boyd were here, the Melbourne stockbroker cum photographer Harry Youlden, and Castlemaine boy Bob Whitaker, also a photographer, who toured the world, camera in hand, with the Beatles. Brian Epstein, the long-suffering Beatles manager, had fallen in love with him in Melbourne earlier in the year and this helped Bob’s career no end. He is now a farmer in Sussex and has produced the definitive visual record of the heady days of the Beatles. My parents had taken a long lease of a decayed mansion in Maida Vale, an inner suburb of London, as we would say in Australia (the expression, to my knowledge, is used nowhere else in the world and is something of an oxymoron). The mansion was an eccentric and rather ugly Victorian structure, built on a broad crescent. The Freud family lived next door when they arrived from Vienna. The Freuds moved on to their beautiful but soulless Georgian house (now a museum) in Hampstead. My family eventually moved to St John’s Wood. My sister Nan, her Bulgarian husband Nick Nickoloff and their two Australian-born boys, Nicky and Christie, lived with my parents in an extended family. My mother and father took in paying guests. Nan had worked at the bookshop of the department store Whitely’s but was now, after ten years, pregnant. She said she wanted a daughter to look after her in her old age. Elena was born a week after I left London at the end of the year. It was strange seeing my hitherto rural Australian family in this exotic setting. My mother looked after the boys with her customary prodigious energy. Nan rested, a lady-in-waiting, as women tended to do in those days. My father seemed to be on the outer, swamped by boisterous boys and two dominant women. Of course it had always been

frail colours, brave promises

159

thus; but here he seemed lost, and he was not really interested in London and its history and culture. I felt a certain sympathy with him. He read, of all papers, the Daily Express. When asked why he chose this newspaper, he said he wanted to know what the enemy was up to. His mother, Emily Bird, had died aged, I think, ninety-two a year or two before. There had been a terrible break with his sister Dora Bird—I never found out why. The poor woman died of cancer in the home of a friend after rejection by most of her family. The Australian artist Allen David lived in a flat on the ground floor and used the adjacent, light-filled, ballroom as his studio. At night I used the ballroom—which opened out onto a walled garden—as my bedroom. Barry and Roslyn Humphries lived down the road near the canal (Little Venice) and visited Allen from time to time. Barry was still on his way to fame and fortune. In 1958 the pair had spent their wedding night at Greenhill.

14 December 2002 Barry Humphries has published a revised autobiography entitled My Life as Me. Naturally the first thing I did was to check the index. He makes references to John Reed who, he claims, was known as ‘the broken Reed’. It distresses me terribly when people who have benefited from the generosity and, if one must use the word, patronage, of John and Sunday, make unkind remarks about them. John’s letters to Barry are full of admiration and encouragement. He was one of Barry’s earliest supporters and the first purchaser of his Dada works. He and Sunday—who rarely went to the theatre—also attended his stage performances, which then attracted only

160

Art & Life

tiny audiences in the Collins Street Assembly Hall. In the John Reed papers in the State Library of Victoria there are a swag of letters expressing Barry’s admiration and affection for John. Why are so many people—particularly the dreaded expats —so vicious about Heide? Of course Siddie Nolan was partly responsible for it. It is as if John’s morality is too great for lesser mortals to bear. There is not one ill-considered or hurtful remark about anyone in his letters, which span sixty years. My working experience with the then important publishing house of Longmans provided a decisive influence on my future. Yet I did little work in the Mayfair office. Nobody knew quite what to do with me. I was given an office and access to a secretarial pool and wrote a few letters back to the Croydon office. I think I was meant to ‘liaise’ with the Australian headquarters; but this meant little as Australia was pretty much autonomous anyway. I scoured the building looking for friends and to my good fortune chanced on Leo Cooper who then headed the publicity department. We formed an instant friendship which has lasted until this day. He was my chaperon to the heady life of lunches and dinners in literary London: the golden boy, who charmed friends and relations alike. Thirty years later he was to make headlines in the tabloids (repeated, of course, in shocked tones by the broadsheets, particularly the Guardian) for a ten-year affair while married to the novelist Jilly Cooper. Leo’s aunt Barbara Cooper was the trusted personal assistant to the publisher, editor and author John Lehmann. His aunt Lettice Cooper was a fine novelist. Leo was then (after a failed first marriage) courting Jilly, who became one of Britain’s best-selling authors and, eventually, my good friend. The 1960s were the last days of gentlemanly publishing.

frail colours, brave promises

161

It was a fecund decade for new literature in Britain, and I met the marvellous novelists David Storey (later a successful West End playwright), Mary Renault (who wrote both novels based in the ancient Greek world and ground-breaking contemporary fiction with gay themes) and Francis King. Three-hour lunches and parties and dinners at Brown’s Hotel were the order of the day. Sir John loved a party and encouraged a social whirl, and somehow books were published. During the week Newsom lived around the corner from Grosvenor Street in Hay Hill. I recall a cold winter morning when I met him coming into his office around ten. He invited me in for a chat. ‘I wake up early in the morning,’ he told me, ‘and think of death’. He was a staunch Catholic. Between running the County of Hertfordshire education department and joining Longmans he, incongruously, had managed a pub in the East End. He rambled on about this. I think he had had a stiff drink or three. Sir John lent me his smart little town car, a red MG, when he retired to Essex for the weekend. This enabled me to take my parents on trips to the country. Sometimes my mother would pack a picnic. One Sunday we visited the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and then lunched in a beech forest under umbrellas in pouring rain. None of this fazed my now-ageing parents. (He was seventy, she sixty-eight—marginally less than my age at the time of writing, which does not seem old to me at all.) My relationship with my father had now settled into one of equanimity if not intimacy. At Brown’s Hotel I met Gavin Maxwell (author of the bestselling otter books) and the Marsh Arabist Wilfred Thesiger, who first befriended Maxwell, then denounced him as a shonky arriviste. I am not in a position to judge but the general opinion seems to be that Thesiger, who established himself as one of the

162

Art & Life

greatest anthropologists of the twentieth century, was correct. Maxwell had plagiarised (at least in Thesiger’s opinion) his original work on the Marsh Arabs. (Sadly this Gulf area, which sustained a boat-living civilisation for millennia, was monstrously raped by Iraq—with full United States blessing I might add—in the 1980s.)

August 2003 I have read of the deaths of Wilfred Thesiger and the English metaphysical poet Kathleen Raine. She fell in love with Gavin Maxwell who (it is generally believed) was gay. When their celibate relationship ended (so the story went), she cast a spell on him causing the death of his otters, a cancer diagnosis and eventually his death. I also inhabited another world in those halcyon days. Next to Brown’s Hotel in Dover Street was the Institute for Contemporary Art, where Leslie Stack and Sweeney Reed were curating a Joan Miro exhibition. Miro told me that Les and Sweeney knew better how to hang paintings than anyone in England. One night I dined with (Sir) Roland and Lee Penrose, whose house contained more Picassos than I have ever seen in a public gallery. Some years later dozens were stolen when the house was unattended. One very interesting Australian in London was the artist and dealer Alannah Coleman. She had never made it as an important painter but, when attending the National Gallery of Victoria art school of the 1930s, she was a kind of pin-up girl cum muse to a galaxy of stars which included Nolan, Tucker, Hester and Charles Bush. Now she was here in London, and

frail colours, brave promises

163

she and Les and I often lunched together at the ICA café. More than any other Australian, Alannah was responsible for the promotion of Australian art in London. (The British dealer Bryan Robertson and one-time National Gallery director and critic Sir Kenneth Clark were enormously influential.) She staged an Australian exhibition in protest against a boring, academic, official show at the Tate. It was opened by Clark who pronounced it to be ‘the most impressive group show of Australian art ever held in Britain’. Aussie art boomed in the late 1950s and early 1960s and Alannah had great commercial and critical success with the works of Louis James, Tony Underhill, Arthur and David Boyd, Peter Upward and Ron Robertson-Swann. Alannah ran her dealership from an unlikely location in suburban south-west London near the Putney home of the Nolans. She became a part-time lover of Siddie (who didn’t?) and when Cynthia died she was disappointed that he didn’t move in with her. Apparently she had been on some kind of promise for years. I only learned about this in recent times. Like most independent women of her time (and perhaps this is still the case), Alannah didn’t fare too well with husbands and lovers. When she returned to Australia to run Kym Bonython’s gallery in Sydney in the 1970s, I renewed my friendship with her. ‘Australians are not professionals,’ she averred, bitterly. She didn’t stay long before returning to London. Later, she told me that the dreary drive into central London from Heathrow on her return gave her more pleasure than any picturesque view of Sydney Harbour. I returned to Melbourne via New York in January 1965. John Reed had asked me to make contact with Waldo Rasmussen, director of the international program at the Museum of Modern Art. Waldo had written to John exploring the

164

Art & Life

possibility of MOMA Australia showing and touring a major exhibition of American art. ‘Two Decades of American Paintings’ was an exhibition of enormous importance, and when shown in Australia made a decisive impact on our artists. It is no exaggeration to say that it changed the direction of Australian painting—at least temporarily—towards giant abstractions, colour-field, and hard-edged works. Curiously, pop art (it contained Andy Warhol’s early works) did not seem to take on here so readily. We (now MOMADA) lacked the resources to act as entrepreneurs for such a vast show, and John suggested that Rasmussen approach the National Gallery of Victoria. The collection arrived in Melbourne in 1968 and was one of the last big shows to hang in the old National Gallery of Victoria on Swanston Street. It then toured to other state galleries. Although I was tremendously excited by these works, I had reservations about their derivative influence here. Figurative painters forgot about the images which had sustained them for years and hurled themselves into slavish copies of the new masters. The impressionable Patrick McCaughey was delirious with excitement. Impressive though the exhibition was, I saw it as yet another manifestation of our cultural cringe. It is fair to say that many artists (Fred Williams is a good example—and he was the only Australian artist to have staged a solo show at MOMA New York) were not so easily swayed. Those readers interested in the history of the modern movement should consult the lavish catalogue which accompanied the exhibition. The art library of the State Library of Victoria has a copy. The artists included Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Allan d’Arcangelo and Andy Warhol. Until 1968 these were names only in Australia.

frail colours, brave promises

165

Waldo Rasmussen received me in the splendid members lounge of MOMA. Although there was little specific business to discuss we formed an instant friendship which was renewed in Melbourne, and on my subsequent visits to New York. On this first visit he took me to dinner at the (then) grandest restaurant in the city, the Four Seasons. I recall thinking it was not as good as the Florentino in Melbourne or Beppi’s in Sydney. He also introduced me to the great architect Philip Johnson, whose curator escorted me around his art collection. I was, as everyone is on a first visit, knocked out by New York. All the clichés are true. It is the most exciting city in the world, if one judges a city by its energy and its spectacular newness. There are skyscrapers of soaring beauty which one does not find in other cities of the new world. One of my favourites is the General Motors building, which stands in its own little piazza opposite the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Of course not all of New York is new, and much of its charm lies in its layers of history. I stayed at the infamous Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, which is a protected building in its own right. I was as much interested in its literary and artistic associations as in its distinguished architecture. One of the oddest coincidences—if my experience can be interpreted within the absoluteness of coincidence—of my life, occurred in New York. I was lunching in a small restaurant close to MOMA on West 53rd Street prior to my meeting with Waldo Rasmussen. I was handed a menu by a beautiful girl who didn’t quite look like a waitress. Immediately my mind flashed back to a brief meeting, six months previously on a cold misty day in Collins Street, Melbourne. Bruce Grant and his new American wife Joan were temporarily in town on leave from Washington DC, where Bruce was political correspondent for the Age. I told

166

Art & Life

them I would be in New York the following January, and they invited me to visit them in Washington. This meeting lasted perhaps two minutes. All this came back to me as I ordered a sandwich and a glass of wine from the beautiful waitress. And I had been so taken up by New York I had not contacted them. Also I had lost their telephone number. When I finished my meal I asked the waitress if I could use the telephone. The restaurant was empty and she was not busy. How did I call directory? ‘Well, my sister lives in Washington, why don’t I call her and she can find your number.’ Sister? How could I ask if her sister was Joan Grant? But I actually did think that. I said no, I didn’t wish to cause her trouble, and she dialled directory for me. When I asked for Bruce Grant she shrieked ‘that’s my brother-in-law’. Bruce and Joan were equally dumbfounded. I never did visit the Grants in Washington although they were soon back in Melbourne. After a dazzling ten days in this stunning city, I flew on to San Francisco. Once again I was given a John Reed assignment. In his endless quest for Australian cultural links with the world at large, John had written to the Beat poet and bookseller extraordinaire Lawrence Ferlinghetti. John wanted an exchange of art with the west coast of America. There had been no reply to John’s letter which had been despatched the previous May. Ferlinghetti greeted me with friendly warmth and not a little guilt at his failure to respond to John. Oddly, he didn’t seem to know any artists; and if John was aware of a distinctive Californian school of painters, I was not, and still cannot imagine who or what he might have had in mind. I think John (who never visited the USA) did not realise the vast chasm between the east and west coasts, which is as much psychological as geographic.

frail colours, brave promises

167

2001 I am reading John Reed’s published letters. Writing to Peter Cowan in January 1965, John makes reference to Ferlinghetti and my visit to America. ‘Philip is back from a working visit to London and stayed in New York on his way out. It seems to have been a pretty grim experience: no one smiles, no one takes any notice of anyone else and it is unthinkable that anyone should do anything for anyone else. To add to one’s feeling of unease, the city is full of beggars.’ How strange is one’s amnesia. I had excised all this from my memory, and while writing this recollection recalled the favourable aspects of the experience. It is interesting to note that almost nobody from my immediate circle had ever been to America before 1965. Now Australians flock there as much as to Europe. And the beggars? They are not confined to New York and India but exist in every Western city. My first visit to London as a more or less mature adult resulted in the establishment of friendships—including expatriate Australians—which have been maintained over these last thirty-five years. As Nancy Underhill has observed, I served as a link to the London-based Heide expatriates. John and Sunday never revisited Europe after 1949.

Ja n u a r y 2 0 0 1 , E n g l a n d Leo and Jilly are ensconced in the Chantry—dating from the thirteenth century—at Bisley, near Stroud, in Gloucestershire. I arrive at night driving through black, driving rain from my visit to Mary and the Sidney Nolan Trust at the Rodd. Jilly at sixty-five is still beautiful. Parkinson’s disease causes Leo’s

168

Art & Life

hands to shake. All sorts of things are wrong with him: heart, blood pressure, excruciating back pains, swollen ankles and feet. He shuffles around in slippers. Jilly, who loves him more than ever, puts his shoes on each morning. Leo remains witty, thoughtful, kind. He pours me huge whiskies. Tom Rosenthal (distinguished author and art critic) gives me lunch in his eyrie high up above the Haymarket in London’s theatre district. We talk about his forthcoming book—far the most comprehensive so far—on the art of Sir Sidney Nolan OM. Not a biography, he insists: nevertheless it contains 120,000 words of text. Tom has made Australia and Australians his speciality and has already edited two books on Arthur Boyd. We talk of Nolan and Cynthia when they lived on the Thames at Putney. Cynthia, he tells me, was quite frightening in her ambition for money and power. Tom puts together a good cold lunch, all the while parodying Cynthia’s Australian accent. (I wonder about the Aussie accent.) One story concerns her attempt to enlist Lord Rothschild as a patron of Sir Sid.

October 2002, London I lunch again with Tom. Last March I held a reception to celebrate his book at my flat in St Kilda Road. Tom is furious with Janine Burke, who ignored his text when reviewing the book for ABC radio. Two weeks later, back in Melbourne. Janine claims Tom’s book is uncritical and neglects to state that Nolan did no good work after about 1955. This is a bit harsh. Janine is determined and opinionated.

frail colours, brave promises

169

After leaving Rosenthal I dined with Charles Osborne and his partner Ken Thomson at the Groucho Club. I first met Ken when working for Longmans in Perth. I introduced them in Melbourne in 1963. Ken is head of publicity for London’s Channel 4. Charles is—or was—one of Britain’s cultural commissars. For more than half a century he has been one of the most powerful Australians in London. He was for years director of literature for the Arts Council of Great Britain, which influenced the title of his autobiography, Giving It Away (i.e. money). He is about to publish an encyclopaedia of opera. A huge compendium apparently. Incidentally, he decided early in his career never to write a word until the publisher crossed his palms with silver. I have endeavoured to follow his example.

November 1998, London I attended Charles’s seventieth birthday which I described in a feature for the Age. ‘Had a bomb dropped on the gathering, British (and expatriate Australian) culture would have been annihilated.’ One of the hosts, Lord Gowrie, told me that he has a strong sympathy for Charles because they are both ‘outside’ the British establishment: Charles as an Australian, Gowrie as an Irishman. I thought this a bit rich coming from an hereditary peer, one-time member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet and chair of the Arts Council of Great Britain. Actually the peerage comes from his grandfather, the first Lord Gowrie, governorgeneral of Australia from 1936. I told Gray Gowrie about meeting his grandparents when

170

Art & Life

I was a small child. My father was on the board of the Kerang Bush Nursing Hospital when the vice-royals came to town. My parents and I and local dignitaries lined up outside the little hospital. My mother was presented to Lady Gowrie by the shire president. ‘Mrs Jones is . . . is . . . is . . . an Englishwoman,’ he stuttered. Lady Gowrie clasped my mother’s hand. ‘How do you like it here, you poor creature,’ she whispered. Perhaps it was tactless of me to tell this story. Gray Gowrie didn’t like it and told me sharply that his grandparents loved Australia. At Charles’s birthday there were two speeches only: one from publisher John Calder and the other from Charles. Each spoke off the cuff for twenty minutes. It was worth coming halfway around the world just to listen to the confluence of wit and erudition endemic, so it seems, to Britain. Charles, perennially youthful, devilishly handsome (in the 1950s Barbara Blackman raffled him ‘for any purpose legal and painless’, to pay his fare to London), ended his speech with a spirited rendition of ‘The Song of the Laughing Jackass’ by Barry Humphries. There were five stanzas of bushy verse and naive double-entendre such as: The schoolboys frolic so gay and free For they like a laugh, and they often try To join my laugh from my perch on high

And we all joined in the chorus and kaa-kaa-kaa’ed and kookoo-koo’ed. The expats cannot help it. Australia is a joke. One should not be too churlish I suppose. My photographer rushed around taking pictures of the poet laureate embracing Peter Porter, the vaudeville strong woman turned poet Joan Rhodes cradling Ken Thomson in her arms and Martyn Goff and myself talking earnestly. I remember Germaine Greer storming

frail colours, brave promises

171

out after a row with TV presenter Joan Bakewell. I recall being introduced to Norma Major (wife of the then Conservative prime minister John) and finding nothing in common with her.

Ja n u a r y 2 0 0 1 , L o n d o n Darleen Bungy, expatriate Australian writer and authorised biographer of Arthur Boyd, has asked me to lunch. She had interviewed me in Melbourne the previous year. She lives a twenty-minute walk away from my cousins, in a splendid house in a tiny village situated within Wimbledon Common. She is an attractive, warm and intelligent woman of about fifty and has charmed everyone she has interviewed, including Yvonne Boyd. Even the Lady Nolan! Darleen is, nevertheless, a mystery. She says she is not an art person. Her background includes advertising, and editing and writing for architectural magazines. She is extremely knowledgeable about my Australian world, and I think she is unduly modest. If she did not know about art when she commenced her research, she has certainly learned a lot in a short time. She spoke sensitively of my Boyd, Nude Over Ram, and also displayed an intelligent sympathy for the people involved in the Heide (Australian) and London worlds of the 1960s. We really did have a good conversation. She feels strongly about the transitoriness of life because these people she has studied led such vibrant, passionate lives only (relatively) a short time ago. Now most are dead.

172

Art & Life 2001, London

One of the most interesting men in London—certainly to me—is the independent publisher Christopher MacLehose, managing director of the Harvill Press. I first interviewed him in the late 1990s for a feature never published. Since then we always lunch when I am in London. Last year the New Zealand novelist and poet C. K. Stead joined us. MacLehose is a sexy, elegant and imposing Scot. He is six foot six and in his sixties. Some think him eccentric—I do not. He was literary editor of the Scotsman before joining the publishing house William Collins. When Rupert Murdoch absorbed Collins into his global book empire, he enabled Christopher to privatise the previously incorporated Harvill Press. Reading his twice-yearly catalogue one has the compulsion to purchase every book. They are beautifully bound, with high quality paper and print, and are finely illustrated. I arrived at his office in time to study his latest catalogue. Curiously there were no British authors. Translations from contemporary French, German and Japanese fiction and, from Australia, Robert Hughes and Murray Bail. Stead from New Zealand. A postmodern list divided equally between fiction and non-fiction. No country alone, it seems, is any more the centre of a vibrant literary culture. A global village of writers? Authors are anywhere and everywhere. I am trying to persuade him to republish the novels of Martin Boyd and he is showing some interest. We were lunching, Christopher said, at the birthplace of New Labour, a restaurant named Granita. The proprietress, Vicki Lessman, had been a confidante of Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown et al. in the late 1970s. She was a participant in strategy discussions for presenting an alternative

frail colours, brave promises

173

government after nearly two decades of Tory rule. Later Christopher told me that Granita, after meaning so much to many people, closed forever after dinner that evening. Vicki Lessman told no one, gave no explanation and seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth.

thirteen Faces like Little Hearts

Barrie and I lived at Heide. Sunday—to a much greater extent than John—was involved in the construction of Heide 2, the house made of Mount Gambier limestone. In 1981 this structure became the first wing of the Museum of Modern Art at Heide. I use the word ‘structure’ advisedly, as the building straddled, unsuccessfully in my opinion, the functional purposes of residence and public gallery. The architect was David McGlashan who was chosen because of his successful Aspendale beach house. For David, Sunday was both torturer and muse. Entire walls were demolished and rebuilt. David confessed to me that he narrowly avoided a nervous breakdown. The house won a bronze medal from the Victorian chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in 1968 as the best building of the year. By the beginning of 1966 Barrie and I were back at Greenhill. Sweeney had returned from London a new man. FOR MOST OF 1965

faces like little hearts

175

I had told John and Sunday of his great successes in London. That he had gone through a metamorphosis of some kind and had suddenly grown up. Now they saw all this themselves and were delighted. Out of the blue Sunday rang and asked me for dinner. Just you, she insisted, not Barrie, John and I want to talk to you about opening a bookshop. I was tremendously excited, because after London I had become bored with trudging around schools and university departments. Nor did I wish to spend further long periods away in the other states. Also I thought it pretty mean that Longmans Australia should not rescue me from the road and give me a full editorial job. Instead they hired an Oxford graduate from England. In the event they did not even bother to secure him with a contract and he left for another publisher within a year. Longmans Australia was already, and the United Kingdom was soon to follow, on the way out after a grand history of several hundred years. At our first discussion over dinner at Heide, John made martinis and we actually sat at the dining-room table and drank wine with our dinner. Sunday had received an unexpected dividend from her family estate. It was not a huge amount—about $10,000, worth today, I suppose, about $100,000. Sufficient, anyway, we thought, to start a business. Sunday outlined her proposition. I would run the shop on a day-to-day basis. She would assist in ordering stock and generally help define the character of the enterprise. We found ourselves to be in total agreement on what we considered the essential ingredients of running a bookshop of the highest quality. We would follow the burgeoning growth of Australian publishing so that in time—as in, say, New York or London—our stock would unselfconsciously reflect the culture of our time and

176

Art & Life

place. We regarded this principle as the core of the operation. We would promote the avant-garde, and stock significant foreign translations, art books and literary magazines. We hoped to establish a loyal clientele. My first task was to find the right site and both of us only ever thought of the central city. After I resigned from Longmans I prowled around town on foot. It was not long before I came upon what seemed to be the ideal premises. Sunday agreed instantly. It was at 181 Exhibition Street on the west side, halfway between Bourke and Little Bourke streets. The building dated back to 1850 and consisted of a small shop-front, a store-room at the rear and a tiny back yard. Upstairs were the bare bones of a flat which contained a living room, kitchen and two bedrooms. Sunday insisted on a total renovation of both business and living quarters. She was determined to spare no expense, and we engaged David McGlashan—this was now his third commission from the Reeds. His design was sheer delight. The shop had a shiny red ‘plastic’ floor, blue painted hessian walls and blond shelving. It was a little jewel, both in appearance and cost. Similarly, the flat upstairs. Sunday and John donated furniture and we hung paintings by Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and John Perceval. What would we call our bookshop? We considered Dreamtime for its Aboriginal reference. There was then little understanding of Aboriginal culture and we rejected it for that reason and also because it sounded unbusinesslike. The imaginative Sweeney suggested Eastend—referring to the east end of the central city—and we agreed unanimously. As time went on I found Sunday immensely difficult to work with. She, I think, found me inadequate in meeting her high standards, and perhaps ignorant by comparison to her profound literary reference. We would go together to the

faces like little hearts

177

Melbourne warehouses of overseas publishers. In her view most of what we saw was trash. ‘What are we doing here?’ she would ask. Much of the stock was old. After hours traipsing round dusty book repositories we would find no more than a dozen titles we would wish to purchase. Somehow it all became my fault. At night we would pore over new book lists of titles we could import directly from the UK. Where were the new American authors, she wanted to know. In those days they took ages to filter through to the British market. She could not comprehend that even the best publishers produced predominantly fair-average-quality books guaranteed to sell in large quantities; but we were not in the mass market business or, indeed, out for profit. We wished to retain literary integrity, pay our bills, and provide me with a modest salary. In commercial terms the shop started badly. We spent a small fortune on renovating the building both on-stage and off-stage. We bought virtually every in-stock title of Angus & Robertson, which was then Australia’s only substantial publishing house. We thought of this as our obligation. We were able to stock the shop thanks to the liberal credit given by our suppliers. This was about the only thing which was easier then than if one was starting up a book business now. We opened for business on the Wednesday after Easter in April 1966. While I was unpacking the stock and setting up shop, the author Frank Hardy (of Power without Glory fame) came by and made himself known to me. He was staying at the nearby Southern Cross Hotel with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whom he was escorting around Australia, promoting his latest volume of English translations. I had a marvellous idea. Would the great Russian poet formally open Eastend Booksellers? I asked Frank to ask him and Yevgeny agreed.

178

Art & Life

Yevtushenko was all charm at an opening ceremony which included lots of readers and writers. He made a gracious speech in fractured English which was well reported in the press. Barrie was rather rude to our distinguished guest when Yevtushenko failed to condemn the Soviet government for its repression—sometimes jailing—of writers and artists. I thought this insensitive of Barrie, considering his own comfort and safety in Australia, and given the fact that Yevtushenko had to return to the Soviet Union. We had a terrible row about it all. Sunday did not come to the opening. I spent many nights at Heide discussing bookshop policy with both Sunday and John. They were difficult nights and they were often painful for both Sunday and myself. Twenty-five years later a few discriminating people (Barry Hill, Noel Turnbull, Michael Craig and others) tell me I ran a very special bookshop. Sunday obviously found me inadequate, both professionally and personally. Barrie had complex feelings, believing that she was attempting to divide him and me as she had (in his opinion) Leslie and himself. She felt that Barrie had usurped her role. About six months after the shop opened, Sunday withdrew from active participation. She felt that I had robbed her of her dream. That I had made the business ‘mine’ rather than ‘ours’. She could, I suppose, have sacked me and perhaps I deserved it. The Reeds’ good nature prevented them from operating on that impersonal level. In every such conflict—the dispute with Nolan over the ownership of paintings is a good example— Sunday and John eventually gave way. Today I feel shame for my selfishness: for taking their largesse for granted and for the inadequacy of my love. It is, perhaps, a tribute to us all that this rupture did not finally affect our friendship, which endured until their deaths.

faces like little hearts

179

In Nancy Underhill’s notes to Letters of John Reed she describes their disappointment in me. On the other hand she relates this breakdown between us to the general pattern of the Reeds’ lives. What I experienced working with Sunday and John was shared by others, and this does, to an extent, mitigate my guilt. It was Sunday, rather than John, who (I thought) was unreasonable. I had, after all, worked successfully with John at MOMA. He spent enormous psychic energy reconciling Sunday in her difficulties with others, although in the final analysis he always gave her total support. Our first employee at Eastend was the elegant and intelligent Suzy Baldwin, aged twenty, who already had experience in bookselling. She was then married to theatre director David Kendall. Suzy wore—even when sitting at her desk—a bowler hat, and she complemented the style of the shop nicely. Passers-by would see her through the large plate-glass window and enter in a mesmerised state; but she was also literate and mature for her years and I very much enjoyed her company both in a personal and professional sense. Unfortunately she did not stay long but went off to become a model.

10 May 2002 Our roles are reversed. Suzy is obituaries editor for the Sydney Morning Herald and employs me. I have written one or two in the tongue-in-cheek style of London’s Daily Telegraph and Suzy has been kind enough to say she was delighted by them. Naturally I cannot name names before these worthies pass on. Today I flew to Sydney for the day to lunch with Suzy, discuss current projects and talk about old times. It was a

180

Art & Life

lovely meeting. She has aged well. Still attractive, still elegant, she has enjoyed a successful career as an editor. She has handled the magazines Tatler, Vogue and the ABC’s 24 Hours. She has also written a book on female friendship. She has produced two high-flying sons. After two husbands and a long-term relationship she lives alone and enjoys it. We agreed that to live with another person now would require one to fall desperately in love. Even then? Early on in the life of the shop a young man would arrive at lunchtime, perch on the little step-ladder and read book after book. Eventually—as with virtually everyone who entered the shop—I spoke to him. He was David Kewley, aged eighteen, an English boy in Australia in his gap year between Downside public (i.e. private) school and Cambridge. He was working at the car wash over the road. He was tall, dark and—dare I say?—good-looking. What impressed me most about him was that he seemed (at that tender age) entirely grown up. Eventually I gave him a job and found him totally competent in everything he did. David was uncertain about his future after graduation and I told him he must become an educational publisher. He did, and rose and rose to dizzying heights, head-hunted from one major house to another. When, in 2000, he became president of the British Publishers Association I wrote a profile of him for their magazine.

2001 A sad sign of the times. David has been replaced as CEO of Scholastica by a man who had been the UK CEO of McDonald’s food chain.

faces like little hearts

181

October 2003 David returned my call informing him I was visiting England next month. He and Jan would be happy to have me stay for a night or two. They live with their two daughters at Cedar Lodge, in the Oxfordshire village of Steeple Aston. I have stayed in this exquisite house many times. It once belonged to the novelist Iris Murdoch and her husband John Bayley. The Vietnam War dominated intellectual and political life in Melbourne in the mid and late 1960s. President Lyndon Johnson of the USA visited Australia to drum up support for a coalition force. Prime Minister Harold Holt made his famous statement, ‘All the way with LBJ’. Someone threw red paint over the president’s car parked outside the home of Dame Mabel Brookes in Domain Road, South Yarra. Years later I learned that this political agitator was none other than my future friend and business partner Neil Hudson. The flamboyant gay activist Paddy Sayer came from Sydney to support Dr Jim Cairns’s moratoriums and used Eastend as his headquarters. Paddy cruised his car up and down Bourke Street calling through an amplifier for people to join the march. We all did march of course, including my first labrador Nick, who had been adding his own charm to the particular character of Eastend. I particularly recall the first Vietnam march. Jim and Gwen Cairns headed the procession flanked by a couple of Anglican bishops, and Gwen waved and blew kisses to friends in the crowd. Anti-war marches were invariably happy occasions. Of course Jim—an ex-policeman himself—had a good rapport with the cops and there was never any violence.

182

Art & Life December 2000

Gwen Cairns has died and I went off to rural Narre Warren East to talk to Jim about her. Jim’s land was desolate and dry. There were few trees, a minimal—if any—garden and ramshackle sheds almost indistinguishable from the house. Charlie was with me. Nondescript dogs hung around but did not bark and did not respond to friendly Charlie. Jim was standing in an obscure entrance dressed in a tracksuit and looking old and frail. He gave me a faint look of recognition and led me to a long sitting room. Eight ugly, semilounge chairs faced each other four by four. ‘Sit anywhere’, he said. He was twenty-three and a policeman and athlete when he fell in love with Gwen, then named Mrs Froggatt-Tyldesley, mother of two little boys. The husband was an English conman. Jim did not find the name amusing. I think he has no sense of humour at all. Thus began a love affair which was to last sixty-two years. Of course there was his other great love, parliamentary private secretary Juni Morosi (this relationship contributed to the downfall of the Whitlam government), but I didn’t mention her and neither did Jim. I asked him about the attack on him and Gwen by gatecrashers at their home in Hawthorn. This was much publicised at the time. Four thugs repeatedly bashed him with a heavy wooden sculpture. Gwen flung her body over him to protect him and a woman tried to strangle her with her necklace. The attackers were convicted with minimal sentences. It was rumoured that they were from a lunatic fringe of the Democratic Labor Party. Jim said not, just that they were drugged or drunk. He is a kind of Buddhist and will not condemn anyone. Standish Michael Keon, his old rival for the

faces like little hearts

183

seat of Yarra at the time of the Labor Party split in the 1950s, was ‘a great fellow’. I felt a very strong feeling of desolation at Narre Warren. Not just the deaths of Gwen, and previously her son Philip, but a kind of hopelessness to Jim’s life. Even the dogs were depressed. Yet there is no doubt that Jim possessed some kind of nobility. I never took the view that one should harass those who fought in Vietnam. If they went off as idealists fighting for Western democracy they were radicalised by the war experience. Two friends were enlisted: Noel Turnbull, then politically conservative, later a quasi-communist (actually he was fascinated with ideology) and Paul N from rural Victoria. Noel, who served as an officer, was one of my best customers, reading politics, history and fiction in equal quantities. I supplied him with books and corresponded with him all the while he was in Vietnam. Later he worked as private secretary to the state Labor leader Frank Wilkes. He would have been elected to a safe seat and served as minister for the arts, but Wilkes was deposed by John Cain, who won a decisive election victory in 1982. Paul N I picked up as a hitchhiker when returning from selling books to the Seymour Public Library. He was based at Puckapunyal as a military policeman. He was on his way to Melbourne to spend the night with his fiancée. He was blond, good-looking and devastatingly charming. Everyone who knew him responded to the charm. I took him back to Eastend and—since his fiancée (known as Fleur-Baby) was not expecting him anyway—he elected to stay with me. Paul was vastly intrigued by life at Eastend and cherished his affair with me (I was Phil-Baby), which was somehow quite distinct from

184

Art & Life

his relationship with Fleur-Baby, his childhood sweetheart. Typical wartime bisexuality I suppose. Gore Vidal has written about it in numerous essays and in fiction. Naturally Fleur and I met and we became good friends. Paul returned from Vietnam after experiencing quite horrific action as a tank driver. He returned to the country and married Fleur. Before there was time for children Paul died. It was said to be one of those typical farm accidents. Early one morning he was climbing through a fence when his loaded rifle went off. I considered other possibilities. Fleur was griefstricken but stoic and she and I remained friends for some years. Regrettably I lost touch with her. I hope she is happily married again.

FOURTEEN T h e Wo r d l e s s S e a

and psychoanalysts among its customers. Dr Russell Meares (son of the maverick hypnotherapist Ainslie), an academic, and analyst Dr Stan Gold were regular customers. Another was Dr Clara Geroe. I had long been fascinated by psychoanalysis (as had Barrie) and read as much Freud and the neo-Freudians as anyone around. I had indeed explored the possibility of analysis with Clara Geroe and others in the group she had trained including Bill (O. H. D.) Blomfield. There was no Medibank in those days and it was financially impossible to continue, but I enjoyed talking to these people. They seemed to complement the artists and writers I knew. (Incidentally Reed & Harris published the pioneering psychiatrist Reg Ellery’s Schizophrenia: The Cinderella of Psychiatry and his Eyes Left!, on the Soviet Union and the post-war world.) It is an interesting footnote to post-war cultural history that many of the predominantly Jewish psychoanalysts who EASTEND ATTRACTED PSYCHIATRISTS

186

Art & Life

fled from Hitler’s Europe would have preferred to emigrate to Australia rather than the USA. The trouble was that the moribund Australian Medical Association refused to recognise most European medical degrees. These women and men mostly went to New York and Chicago, where they dramatically influenced the culture. Geroe, a Hungarian, was the doyenne of the Melbournebased Institute of Psychoanalysis. She landed in this country bearing glowing references from Freud’s close English friend and official biographer, Dr Ernest Jones, and she battled various authorities before being allowed to practise. With some hauteur she drew the line at studying anatomy and physiology. She was a tiny, stooped woman who looked old before her time. She had a fiery temper and I recall witnessing a blazing row she had with her husband in Pellegrini’s restaurant. She turned up at Eastend soon after I opened to ask if I had stocked James Baldwin’s new novel. Of course I had. She and the other psychs bought well, both in the areas of contemporary literature and new books in their own field. I have to report though that all drew the line at the revolutionary R. D. Laing who first propounded the theory that neurotics—even psychotics—were perfectly ‘normal’ in the sense that their behaviour reflected a reasonable response to a sick society.

2001 I attended Bill Blomfield’s funeral—a totally secular ceremony in Kew’s All Saints Anglican Church. What struck me was the uniformity of this once revolutionary profession. To a man (there were one or two women who retained an individual style) they wore a dark jacket, black slacks, white shirt and drab tie. Each

the wordless sea

187

sported a trim clipped beard and wore hair that was neither too short nor too long. They did not quite look like businessmen, but they lacked any personal, let alone idiosyncratic, taste. Actually they looked like a bunch of undertakers. I think I am something of a Laingian and am not uncritical of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. What I subsequently wrote caused (according to Jocelyn Dunphy, Bill’s free-thinking wife) something of a flutter in the psychoanalytic dovecotes. I wrote, ‘As a therapeutic discipline psychoanalysis is judged by its critics to be cold in its application, masonic in its secrecy and fundamental in its dogma’. Jocelyn said that emails and faxes had flown around the country. Eastend attracted writers as well as readers. One constant visitor was Hal Porter. He would always bring a bottle or two of whisky. He was promiscuous in his gregariousness and usually accompanied by friends, some literate but mostly charming trash. I was fairly tolerant and entertained them all upstairs and down. Hal usually stayed at Lou Richards’ Phoenix Hotel near the Herald & Weekly Times office. Lou, a star footballer for Collingwood, and later sports commentator, had invested his profits in this pub, which became a focal point for various segments of Melbourne society—with a preponderance of Herald journalists. Hal was especially fond of ‘Lulu’ and his wife Edna. He also had a penchant for media people and they for him. For some strange reason Edna always called me ‘Claude’. My father thought it was the funniest name you could possibly call a man. One evening I joined Hal, Lou and that lovely knockabout priest, raconteur and charmer, Father Brosnan. He was the Catholic chaplain at Pentridge and the saviour of souls on death row, equally at home with clerics and crims.

188

Art & Life April 2003

With friend Tony Moran I attended Brosnan’s funeral at St Patrick’s Cathedral. The obituary I wrote had been published. The funeral was spectacular, simply no other word for it, and I was appreciative of a whispered commentary by Tony (an ex-seminarian). There was a congregation (in my estimation) of 1500, more than one hundred priests (I counted them), and all the bishops (fifteen or so) of the state of Victoria. It was very High Church (if that is not too Anglican a phrase) and the piquant smell of incense wafted through the cathedral. I harbour mixed feelings about Hal Porter. There is no doubt that he was entertaining, charming, amusing, witty and generous. Is it an over-simplification to say he was not a nice person? He was fascinating but destructive. Women particularly were attracted to him and almost always suffered for their adoration. He was merciless in his betrayals both in art and life. To a greater extent than most writers, friends were grist to his mill. Barrie and I took him to Heide and Sunday found him fascinating. Thereafter he would drop in at all hours of the day and night, usually drunk, and sometimes with a collection of friends which more often than not included his taxi driver. Hal dedicated the second volume of his autobiography— The Paper Chase—to Sunday. As his biographer, Mary Lord, has pointed out, this was always a sure sign that a relationship had ended. It was a kind of pay-off. Essentially Hal did not like people, indeed he despised them, although he needed them for their quirks, eccentricities and inconsistencies. I launched The Paper Chase in 1966. Ian Turner, by now professor of history at Monash University, was the speaker.

the wordless sea

189

This volume was discursive, interesting, but lacked the brilliant edge of Watcher on the Cast Iron Balcony. The third, The Extra (dedicated to Sunday) was, I think, a failure. Most of his friends were lefty libertarians who assumed that Hal shared their ideals. He did not. He was anti-feminist, anti-Semitic and homophobic in a literal sense. He despised agnostics, atheists, Labor voters, republicans and those he considered to be bohemian. Aborigines were the ‘primitive’ dupes of communists. Communists were intelligent but simpleminded people perverted by the maunderings of a German Jew. He was, himself, Church of England, Country Party and a simple country boy. When asked by a reporter if he believed in God he snapped, ‘Of course not, I’m C of E’. His taste in art stopped with William Dargie. Patrick White was a charlatan. Clichéd though it may be, ‘larger than life’ is a particularly apt description of Hal’s personality. His biographer Mary Lord refers to a day I spent driving him from Adelaide to Melbourne. It is worth reporting in greater detail. Denis Kelynack had joined me in Adelaide for a couple of days shortly before I opened Eastend. Hal was in town and, as usual, staying with Ian and Ann Turner. I was driving back to Melbourne on Sunday and had agreed to take Hal. On Saturday night there was the usual party. Denis and I went to the party and left about midnight. We returned the next morning at about 10 a.m. Hal had not gone to bed. He was eating pancakes— prepared by Ann—washed down with neat whisky. We finally got away about noon. It was a cold winter day and fog was thick over the Adelaide Hills. We three sat in the front as my station wagon was full of books. The pub at Murray Bridge was our first stop. Hal’s half bottle of whisky was not

190

Art & Life

sufficient for the journey. He bought an extra bottle. As we left the town he muttered, ‘Wake me at Ballarat, there’s no scenery until then.’ Would that he had slept. He could not and set up a bar on the open glove box door. Then he began to cry. He had fallen in love with Denis who, he said, looked like the film star ‘Robert MnGumrey’ (Montgomery). Falling in love with a man, of course, did not mean a fellow was a poofter (which he pronounced pooftah). From time to time we would stop on the freezing wind-swept plains for Hal to pee. To try to pee. He could not due to a stricture. This uncomfortable malady did not, however, stop him drinking. He cried all the way to Horsham. His life, he said, contained the elements of tragedy. He had come from Perth where he had fallen in love with Matthew, the four-year-old son of Mary Lord and Bob Salas. He had never been in love ever before. (As an adult Matthew claimed that Hal had sexually molested him as a child. This was duly reported in his mother’s biography and made headlines in the newspapers. It is a measure of a raised consciousness in matters of child abuse, that neither Denis (a psychologist) or myself even considered the possibility that Hal might actually have sexually interfered with a little boy. We still do not know of course. It was an accusation, not a court judgment. I believe Mary Lord should not have included it in her biography.) At Stawell I stopped for fuel. Hal, by now dry-eyed, apparently managed to pee effectively. In the café was a juke box on which he played ‘Baby Face’. The feelings engendered by this sentimental hit of his youth demanded melodramatic expression. With tears streaming down his face he staggered up to a truckie, embraced him and sobbed, ‘You poor, darling, lonely creature, I love you.’ Fortunately the truckie was much

the wordless sea

191

amused by this encounter. Hal had a way with the so-called ordinary Aussie bloke. At two in the morning I delivered him to the New Treasury Hotel in Spring Street. In those days if you could not afford the Windsor, next door, you stayed at the slightly seedy, oldfashioned but comfortable Treasury. The porter took Porter’s bags, accepted his tearful embrace, and escorted him inside. The hotel porter shook hands with me, thanked me for looking after this great man and said, ‘They don’t make them like that any more.’ Then the porter practically carried Porter upstairs to his room. Was Porter a great writer? I think not, despite the generous support of Dame Leonie Kramer who critically promoted Hal to the detriment of Patrick White. Hal did not attempt the great themes and could not comprehend passion or human love at the deepest levels. He could pinpoint, sometimes puncture, a personality as securely as a lepidopterist does a butterfly. He could enter a room sodden drunk and record its atmosphere and its contents years later. He was jealous of, indeed hated, Patrick White who had somehow burst onto the Australian scene as if from nowhere, and swept all before him. Another launching was Irene Handl’s first novel, The Sioux. By sheer coincidence stocks arrived just as Irene opened her show at the Comedy Theatre as the star in Goodnight Mrs Puffin. The Sioux was published by Longmans in London where I first learned about this novel. I first met Irene at the Q theatre twelve years earlier. She had perfected the art of playing cockney charwomen, perhaps helped by her non-English background. She had commenced her theatrical career aged forty-five playing a non-speaking role in the rather trivial

192

Art & Life

comedy George and Margaret. She was, she told interviewers, born to a German father and a French mother. After her mother died she had ‘kept house’ for her father. When he died she was forced to find a career. Some doubt this story. The Sioux concerns a fabulously wealthy Franco-American family whose lives are divided between Paris and New Orleans. Irene had been writing this novel on and off for fifty years! When at last it was finished she gave it to Noel Coward, who read it at one sitting and passed it on to Mark Longman, who read it at one sitting. It was fictional prose of high quality and startling originality. The characters are decadent, incestuous and imperiously aloof from bourgeois values and conventional respectability. Their wealth cocoons them from the ordinary world. It was difficult to reconcile this book with its author. Irene’s off-stage persona varied little from her roles on stage. Her accent was not quite West End. She was pragmatic, matter-of-fact and lacked guile. I saw her daily and became very fond of her. Between performances on matinee days she rested in my flat. There was always a feeling of mystery about her. When I reminded her of our meeting at the Q Theatre in 1952 she denied ever having been there. She spoke of the characters in her book as if they were naughty children. One sybaritic panjandrum drinks nothing but champagne. Not water, wine, tea or coffee. ‘Emil is so pretentious,’ she said, as if he were a living person. The central character is a ten-yearold boy known as the Dauphin, who is desperately ill with leukaemia. In an unpublished draft Irene had the boy die at the end of the book. When she gave it to her sister to read the lady became uncontrollably distressed and begged Irene to allow the boy to live. ‘Just as well,’ Irene said, ‘because the publisher has asked for a sequel.’ She wrote a short sequel with the title The Gold-Tip Pfitzer (the pfitzer is a native New Zealand tree).

the wordless sea

193

I described it to her as a ‘coda’ and she asked what a coda was. Some friends believe that for a couple of decades Irene was a servant to a family on which she based The Sioux. I think this is highly likely. After the show Irene received anyone in her dressing-room. She attracted eccentrics and the down and out and was kind to them. I drove her to Greenhill for lunch. It was a chilling, wet day and the dining-room fire was feeble. She was freezing and said Melbourne was far colder than London. Sunday and John arrived for afternoon tea. Irene jumped to her feet and said to John, ‘Your mother can sit in my chair.’ Sunday did not fare well with actresses. (When I introduced Darlene Johnson she asked, ‘Do you spell your name Sundae?’) At the end of the Melbourne season she took the bus to Adelaide from where she wrote me long letters on a daily basis. Looking back now I suppose she had fallen in love with me. It never occurred to me at the time—I suppose I thought her too old for passion. Busy and careless, I did not reply. As I remember, not once. I have lived with the shame ever since. A couple of years later I rang her while in London. Although she asked me to visit her she was rather cool, and who could blame her? She referred to my house as ‘Spooksville’. In her last years she became UK president of the Elvis Presley Fan Club. I was an insouciant young man in those days and sometimes treated older people appallingly by my neglect. I hope I made up for it later in my life when I cared—sometimes for long periods—for several people who were old, sick and frail. In 1971 I launched the anthology of playground rhymes, Cinderella Dressed in Yella by Ian Turner, June Factor and Wendy Lowenstein. It was a highly attractive publication with an illustrated yellow cover. Although originally published as

194

Art & Life

a scholarly text it became a bestseller in the general trade market. One delightful rhyme was: Half a pound of Mandy Rice [alternatively Randy Mice] And half of Christine Keeler Put ’em together and what have you got? A gorgeous sexy Sheila.

Another launch was Brian Thomson’s anthology of children’s poetry, Once Around the Sun. This also became a bestseller. One young man aged twelve wrote of his ‘long and eerie life’. A long-running battle raged with the censorship laws, then administered by Commonwealth customs. It was assumed that most Australian publications were beyond reproach. If not they were dealt with by state authorities. In Victoria this was the responsibility of chief secretary, Sir Arthur Rylah. Copy invoices for books and magazines imported from the UK were dispatched to the customs department and booksellers were placed on a system of trust. This meant that each bookseller should act as self-censor. Anything suspicious should be held for clearance by an officer who visited once a week. I never censored anything other than International Times. IT was a radical weekly magazine from London. This always had to be kept in store until inspected by customs. There was a big demand for this publication and I had a standing order for twenty copies. I kept them in the store-room pending the arrival of customs. Invariably several copies were missing by the time the officer arrived. They had usually been nicked by friends. I found the officers generally sympathetic, and rather embarrassed by their duties. Since I was regarded

the wordless sea

195

as a maverick there were constant threats that all my imported stocks would be diverted for clearance at the customs office itself before being made available to me. It never happened. Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group (printed locally and defiantly by Penguin) was banned in Victoria for a while because of references to semen. Sir Arthur Rylah announced that he would not wish his teenage daughter to read it. The holier-than-thou Sir Arthur later scandalised Melbourne by deserting his veterinarian wife for a lovely young woman. Even worse rumours circulated after Lady Rylah died in unusual circumstances. Her body was cremated before a post-mortem could be carried out. It was rumoured that she had been murdered. On Sunday 16 December 1968 I was invited to lunch by the Age journalist Ann Gillison. It was a fine hot day and most of us ate and drank in her garden. Fellow guests included journos and television producers. Tony Morphett (scriptwriter and radio and TV presenter) was there, as was Mary Craig (the Age fashion editor), Andrew McKay (Hal Porter’s special friend, Herald columnist—‘the most handsome and best-dressed journalist in Melbourne’, according to Hal) and a couple of hard-boiled police reporters, Jack Darmody and Geoff Clancy. Darmody kept in constant touch with Russell Street police headquarters. Suddenly the news was out. Prime Minister Harold Holt had disappeared into the sea. Within a minute almost all the journos had piled drunkenly (as people did in those days) into their cars and taken off for Portsea. Annie said it was the only time she ever had grog left over after a journos’ party. Holt’s mistress, Marjorie Gillespie, witnessed his body swept ‘like a leaf’ out to sea. Portsea people and (of course) the journalists (not to mention we sophisticates) knew of

196

Art & Life

this relationship but there was never innuendo in the press. Investigative journalism had not yet arrived. When John Gorton succeeded Holt as prime minister I was one of few Australians who knew anything about him. Bruce Grant described him as a right-wing Brasenose (Oxford) roughneck. Due to my childhood memories and my parents’ friendship with the Gortons I did not concur with this point of view. I think subsequent events—despite his buccaneer prime ministership—proved me right. Nor was Gorton uncultured, as has been acknowledged by Gough Whitlam. In a London obituary I wrote, ‘Like many Australian male public figures John Gorton denigrated his own sensitivity. In a speech in parliament as minister for education he said . . . “My idea of culture goes little beyond rootin’, tootin’, son-of-a-gun Western flicks” . . . Moments later he was quoting Ruskin.’ For a short time it seemed that Gorton might de-escalate the war in Vietnam. Political history suggests that his instincts were against Australian involvement but he lacked the power (or will) to oppose the more conservative elements in the coalition. Perhaps jolly John bucked the establishment in a superficial rather than a fundamental manner. I enjoy talking to politicians of all persuasions. Don Dunstan always visited Eastend when in Melbourne: first as leader of the opposition, then premier of South Australia. I usually had a drinks party for him and would ask people he did not already know. A very interesting customer and one who became a rather unlikely friend was the wine merchant and federal Labor member for Yarra, Standish Michael Keon. He had left the party in ‘the split’ of 1955 and was defeated (with help from Liberal Party preferences) by Jim Cairns. He was known as

the wordless sea

197

a firebrand in the old days, touted as the next Labor prime minister, and was said to strike fear into the heart of Bob Menzies. Some praise! He had gentled when I knew him a decade later. He would arrive at about four in the afternoon after a boozy lunch at the Latin Restaurant in Lonsdale Street. The Latin remained a haunt for Catholic intellectuals until its closure in 2002. Standish was an omnivorous reader of biography, politics and international affairs. He was a very closeted gay and would go the grope in a half-lasvicious, half-joking way while saying things like, ‘And how’s the old fellow today?’ It must have been hard for Stan, surrounded by the bigoted fundamentalism which dominated the DLP. Not long before he died he came out—this tough guy actually broke down and cried—to Maria Prendergast, who had known him (through her federal MP father) since she was a child. Sweeney introduced a group of painters and poets who were rather younger than myself. They included poets Shelton Lea and Russell Deeble, painters Trevor Vickers, John Krzynokulski and Asher Bilu and visual poets Alex Selenitsch and Richard Kelly Tipping. I already knew Mike Brown, Les Kossatz and George Baldessin, and these artists and writers were always in and out of the shop. When Waldo Rasmussen arrived in town to stage his ‘Two Decades of American Painting’, I gave a cocktail party for him to meet a group of people, particularly young artists, who were on the way to, rather than at, the top of the official art world. One such guest was Patrick McCaughey, then a lecturer in art at Monash and critic for the Age. Patrick is now Director of British Art at Yale University.

198

Art & Life October 2003

Patrick has published his autobiographical memoir The Bright Shapes and the True Names and gives an interesting account of this party. He recalls me preparing two huge pitchers of martinis. ‘Most of the young artists of promise were there’, he wrote. ‘The martinis and the presence of the man from MOMA gave us an absurd but palpable feeling of the big time. We were but a step away from the centre of things.’ ‘Two Decades of American Painting’ virtually changed the face of art in Australia—at least for a few dreary years. Patrick wrote in the Age that ‘These are the greatest modern paintings we’ve seen since the Second World War’. Patrick is an ebullient enthusiast, sometimes lacking discrimination. It is always nice to run into him. Eastend was in some ways like a club. A constant visitor was my old schoolfriend Michael Craig. Michael was in those days a practising physiotherapist and would visit the shop in the late afternoon en route to lecturing at the Lincoln Institute. He would inspect the stock, make his purchases and go upstairs to rest. When he rose I would make him strong coffee to fortify him through his night’s work. He had three young children to support. Michael was, and is, a Renaissance man. Barrie published his poetry in Overland magazine. He is also a philosopher and, latterly, no mean businessman. He has the flair of a natural artist and can construct a poem rather in the way that Picasso or Nolan or Cocteau would capture a drawing as if from the air. After seeing the black on black paintings of Ad

the wordless sea

199

Reinhardt he composed a concrete noir, a kind of grid-shaped visual poem which sat very nicely on the page of Overland. Over his coffee one evening he wrote a limerick for me. There were once some bookseller’s bones In a hard-back edition called Jones, This best-seller’s lovers Were lost in the covers But not in the style of Grand Meaulnes

The French writer Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes was the brilliant novel we all read at that time. Fournier’s hero was hopelessly in love with his girlfriend. The writer Barry Hill was an early customer. He was then a student of psychology at Melbourne University. His darkhaired, blue-eyed good looks combined with talent made him an attractive figure. He was then very shy and modest to a fault. His literary tastes coincided with mine and after reading British review publications he would recommend certain books and authors. He and I became close friends and remained so for about thirty years. In some undefined and certainly unexpressed way we were involved in a kind of love relationship. I saw him through three wives and various girlfriends but relationships seemed to become more difficult as he grew older. Barry was and is a writer and intellectual of power and has made an important contribution to the cultural life of this country. McPhee Gribble was the publisher of his novels. Fiction, as he later acknowledged, was not his forte. He was, and is, essentially a poet/philosopher and deeply concerned

200

Art & Life

with the complex issues facing indigenous Australia. He has a kind of romantic fascination with religion and believes himself to be a Buddhist. Jane Williams worked for me for several years. She was an idiosyncratic, wayward yet generous woman who had been physically beautiful when young. Hard living and a certain masochistic streak eventually destroyed her physical attractions. She was a Castlemaine girl and her father (who owned the local woollen mill—the biggest employer in the town) had been the mayor. She was a lesbian in the days when gay women (apart from the ambiguous ‘spinsters’) were (apart from an enclave like the Lyceum Club) socially unacceptable. After university Jane was employed for years by the textile designer (and member of MOMA council) Frances Burke. Frances was Melbourne’s token lesbian. She was chic, stylish and almost out. Maie (who eventually became Lady Casey, wife of the governor-general, Lord Casey) was her best friend and this gave her great cachet. Frances’s business folded in the 1960s, Jane needed work, and I gave her a job. She was very literate, occasionally wrote poetry and was popular with the customers. I was able to leave her in charge of the shop and this enabled me to get out into the libraries of schools and public libraries. It would be a mistake to assume that life at Eastend consisted only of an exciting social and cultural life centred around literature, art, politics and friendship. We could never afford to purchase sufficient stock to make a truly viable business. Expensive art books and those of esoteric interest would sit on the shelves for years at a time. Barrie and I continued to live upstairs during the week and at Greenhill at weekends. Our friendship with John and Sunday resumed and they came into the shop regularly.

the wordless sea

201

On the point of bankruptcy Eastend was saved in an unforeseen and somewhat ironic way. One Saturday morning a casually dressed man came into the shop and asked if I knew of the existence of a certain book. Who was its publisher? I knew it well as it happened to be a Longmans textbook. On Monday morning the man returned dressed in an army officer’s uniform. He identified himself as Captain Wolfie Fladun, of the army educational corps, St Kilda Road Barracks. Wolfie, unhappy with his current book supplier, had decided to approach a number of bookshops with his test question and I was the only person who knew the answer. Would I be willing to supply his division with large quantities of textbooks? This whole operation was extremely easy. Almost all the books were readily obtainable from local warehouses. Wolfie presented me with his orders, I passed them on to the suppliers and stocks would arrive for collection by army carriers. I made one-third profit on all transactions. It would be unthinkable today, as the publishers would supply direct. Wolfie was unfazed by the anti-Vietnam stance of the shop. He simply chose to ignore the front window full of radical posters and the shop full of long-haired hippies, pacifist poets, bearded beatniks, assorted artists and salubrious psychiatrists. From time to time he would telephone and snap, ‘Five hundred assorted paperback fiction. You choose.’ Naturally I made it all as subversive as possible. Nothing was ever returned. Never was there any complaint. Was I fostering anarchy and rebellion? I hope so. This lucrative army business dwindled after three years. The only solution seemed to be further institutional selling. This was hard, back-breaking work. I would pack and load ten to twenty cartons of books—especially chosen from the local warehouses—and lug them into public libraries, schools

202

Art & Life

and colleges. These sales did keep me in business but I had little time or energy left for new literature. Sometimes I tried employing people for outside selling and it was always a disaster. Nobody had my tenacity, but of course I had a vested interest in making it work. By 1972 even institutional selling could not keep the wolf—or more frightening, the bailiff—from the door. (Might I say that for a time Wolfie kept the wolf from the door?) My trade debts totalled $95,000, a tremendous sum in those days. A policeman would arrive with a court order from a supplier demanding instant payment. He would accompany me to the bank. Would the bank give me more credit? There was always the threat of the police detaining me. The bank always did cash the cheque and I got further and further into debt. I was well aware of the tremendous expansion of paperback publishing in the United States and I reasoned that if I could find an American wholesaler willing to supply I could import titles which were unavailable on the British market. Australian libraries had (and still do have) an insatiable appetite for books which deal with life matters and self-help: books written by experts for the intelligent layman; books of instruction in crafts; self-help psychological and physical manuals; cookbooks and guides to sexual technique. How to play every imaginable kind of sport. Massage, reike, Buddhism. How to climb mountains, abseiling, child rearing, chess skills—the range is endless. Surely I would find a supplier at the American Bookselling Association trade fair? Our dollar was worth US$1.20, which would make the books inexpensive here. I would pay off my debts and more. And I did, aided by a bonus yet unknown to me. With—in retrospect—breathtaking self-confidence, I bought an around-the-world air ticket. A travel agent gave me credit

the wordless sea

203

and I went via London to see family and friends. The American Booksellers Association annual trade fair was held in the vast Shoreham Hotel in Washington DC in May 1972. Because of reciprocal arrangements with the Brits I knew US publishers would not supply me. Ah, but there were at least twenty wholesalers who were bound by no such convention. I went through them one by one and eventually found the Millers, Irwin and Judy, who have remained my friends for all these years. The Millers’ warehouse was a half-hour drive from Boston, at Holbrook, off the freeway en route to Cape Cod. Thus began a love affair with New England, and on subsequent purchasing trips I took a few days off to drive around these beautiful parts. Later Barrie accompanied me on two such trips. The A&A book inventory was vast and I would work all day choosing titles. I simply piled the books I wanted into totes which were wheeled away, invoiced and packed. Irwin demanded no credit references. I was frank with him regarding my existing debts and he invested in me with total trust. When I had completed my orgy of buying I flew to New York on my way home. I stayed once again at the Chelsea Hotel. While sipping a pre-dinner cocktail in the bar I got into conversation with a permanent resident of the hotel. ‘Terrible floods in Australia,’ she told me. I asked her where, but she could not remember. ‘Sydney maybe, Mel-bourne . . .?’ I arrived home to find an urgent message from the State Library of Queensland. The Brisbane River had flooded and risen to the second floor of the Grey Street book warehouse containing stock for country libraries. By chance I had previously discussed book supply with the acquisitions officer. Would I supply one million dollars worth of replacement stock? I did and repaid all my debts.

204

Art & Life

Sadly Eastend closed its doors in 1973. For the following fourteen years I ran a successful business solely devoted to selling books to public libraries. In time I supplied libraries right around the country. Reluctantly I turned myself into a businessman pure and simple. It lacked the roller-coaster excitement of the little bookshop days, but at least kept Barrie and myself in the state to which we had become accustomed. Eastend Bookshop had been seven years of constant struggle. Public libraries in Melbourne and Victoria generally had responded well to my American stock and I gradually extended the business to New South Wales and Queensland. In time I worked out of a shop-front—further up Exhibition Street at number 309—again with a flat for Barrie and myself upstairs. I did not open the door to the public as this would have resulted in unprofitable distraction. Sydney became a second home, and trade with public libraries expanded there more rapidly than in Melbourne. The municipal financial years of the various states varied throughout the year and this diversification made it convenient for me to trade with New South Wales and Queensland at the most appropriate times. Jane Williams ran the office while I travelled. I kept a car in Sydney and for weeks at a time would fly up on Monday night and return late Friday afternoon. My headquarters were the faded old Beauregarde Hotel in Billyard Avenue, Elizabeth Bay, whose grounds stretched down to the harbour. For what now seems a peppercorn rent I took a suite on the garden level, and many acquisitions librarians visited me there to select stock. Most of them seemed to appreciate this charming, if somewhat eccentric, environment and some became good

the wordless sea

205

friends. I particularly remember Norah Hinchen at North Sydney (who also served on the NSW Library Council with Dulcie Stretton), her husband John Flint at Chatswood, Sarah Walters at City of Sydney and Dianne Cormack at Lindfield. Sometimes I would give librarians a picnic lunch or take them out to a restaurant. The house next door belonged to the same management, and sometimes I lived and conducted business there in what had been the home of the poet Kenneth Slessor. If librarians could not visit me I went to them and so got to know Sydney in all its complexity. If what I describe sounds like an easy cop, it was not. Books are heavy, and I packed and unpacked them and lugged them up and down steps both at the Beauregarde and into the libraries. I’m sure I expended at least as much physical energy as the much-maligned wharf labourer before the advent of containerisation. Fortunately I am strong and I never seriously harmed my back. I think my present good health may be due, in part, to those years of hard manual work. Barrie had been appointed to the Literature Board of the Australia Council and usually joined me for dinner after attending meetings in the Council’s North Sydney offices. I assisted him in reading manuscripts from fledgling writers hoping for grants. I read part of Albert Facey’s autobiography A Fortunate Life in manuscript and confirmed Barrie’s estimation of its worth, so I suppose he and I were to some extent responsible for fostering an Australian literary classic. I also read Jack Rivers and Me, submitted for the Australian/Vogel award by the (supposed) young novelist Paul Radley. He won, and published several more novels, equally good, but twenty years later (after the scandal and hoax of Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper—an execrable book in my opinion, but one that won the Miles

206

Art & Life

Franklin Prize) revealed that all his books had been written by his newsagent uncle. This did not, of course, affect the quality of the writing but was sad for both uncle and nephew, more particularly the uncle. Why cannot there be a prize for old first novelists? I would enter like a shot. I saw a lot of Jim Davenport and Alan Oldfield during these years. They were generally viewed as the most dynamic gay couple in Sydney. Jim, who grew up with Barrie in wartime Brisbane, was an eminent plant physiologist with the CSIRO. He was chairman of ANZAAS and a member of the federal visual arts board. Alan was an artist with a considerable reputation. In the evenings in Sydney I dined at one or another of those few excellent restaurants which were precursors to Australia’s culinary revolution. In those days there were more good restaurants in Sydney than in Melbourne. They included Primo’s, Eliza’s, Le Café Nouveau, the Salad Bowl (later La Causerie) and the various Bilson establishments, all of them in inner Sydney but none, unlike Melbourne, in the central business district. Other than Primo’s they were not expensive. Glamorous Sydney had attracted various of my friends away from stolid, solid Melbourne. Tony Bilson was one. Dulcie Stretton, who had virtually run the Council of Adult Education in Victoria, now conducted her own convention business from a terrace house in Glenmore Road, Paddington. In Melbourne she had helped Barrie set up the National Book Council and became its chair. She was also the national president of the Library Promotions Council. The infinitely capable Dulcie was soon to establish herself as a magnet for Sydney’s cultural life. I saw her frequently, and also her beautiful daughter Andrea, who subsequently played starring roles on SBS radio and ABC television cultural programs.

the wordless sea

207

There was much criticism of her star status, particularly from envious colleagues. In true ABC style, once she had served their purpose they dumped her. One of Dulcie’s many extracurricular activities was that of chairing the Library Board of New South Wales. After she received a CBE at Government House I accompanied her and a group of other recipients, including the writer and editor Nancy Keesing, on a harbour luncheon cruise. I remember Nancy telling me (in shocked tones) that in New York my long lost friend, a poet, was living in a relationship à trois with a married couple. ‘He’s the meat in the sandwich’, she hissed. I laughed when she told me the New York couple were millionaires and replied that it was probably every poet’s dream come true. Later I told Dulcie (who was a Liberal) that I was sorry Greiner lost the state election since she would, assuredly, have become Dame Dulcie in time.

28 June 2001 Andrea Stretton rang to say that Dulcie has died peacefully after suffering a brain tumour. She had been ill for a couple of years, living at Shorncliffe, north of Brisbane, with her son John, a single father; she helped care for her grandson. Her entire family was with her. Naturally I wrote her obituary. One of Dulcie’s attributes was to treat everyone, regardless of rank, with equal consideration. I rang Sir Zelman Cowen. (Should I address him as Zelman or Sir Zelman? When he was a professor I simply called him Zelman. I think I did both.) Cowen told me an amusing story illustrating Dulcie’s egalitarianism and I related this in my piece.

208

Art & Life

When I was governor-general, I was invited to address a gathering at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra. It was the 500th anniversary of the birth of Thomas More and I was to speak of his life and times. On our arrival at the Great Hall my wife and I were delighted to find our good friend Dulcie in charge of proceedings. A buffet supper was provided and we were awaiting dessert. Dulcie tapped my arm and whispered confidentially, ‘The kitchen staff is having problems and the pear belle hélène is not yet ready to be served. Would you mind awfully delaying your speech?’ I’m afraid I pulled rank. ‘No,’ I declared, ‘the ice-cream can wilt as far as I am concerned, Sir Thomas More cannot wait.’

Tony and his new (to me) wife, Gay Bilson, opened their first restaurant in 1973, Tony’s Bon Gout, in George Street, near Central Station where—from a kitchen more suited to a small flat—they cooked meals for up to seventy people. Gay also came from Melbourne. She possessed a redoubtable intellect and a steely integrity and read omnivorously. I don’t know how she found the time—I think she possessed boundless energy and required little sleep. She had been a contemporary and friend of Germaine Greer at Melbourne University and was a passionate feminist. I had not met her before and we started off badly. She and Tony joined me at my table very late after finishing in the kitchen. Almost the first thing I said to Gay was that Tony looked exhausted and she must look after him. All hell broke loose! She launched into a tirade while I lamely attempted to defend myself. She was right to admonish me and we did, eventually, become good friends. Later the Bilsons moved north to Berowra Waters which

the wordless sea

209

overlooked the wide, labyrinthine reaches of the Hawkesbury River. One drove to a certain point on the water before being ferried across to the restaurant by its own craft. Sadly their marriage ended. Gay continued at Berowra and Tony went into partnership with Leon Fink at Kinsela’s in Oxford Street—a kind of antipodean version of a French brasserie along the lines of La Coupole or Les Deux Magots in Paris. Le Café Nouveau was owned and run by Patric and Chrissie Juillet and situated in the old Anglican vicarage on the corner of Oxford Street and Moore Park Road. In some ways Patric had the edge on the Bilsons (and other Australians) in that he brought a long French family tradition to his kitchen and restaurant management. Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris were among a clientele of writers, artists and actors. I dined there one night with the expatriates poet Peter Porter and novelist and journalist Jill Neville. When Jill told me she was staying at Manly, ‘opposite the rising sun’, I asked if the Rising Sun was a pub and she snapped, ‘That is just what I would expect an Australian to ask’. Peter is a charming man, but expatriates as a breed—ugh! On Fridays I always lunched at Le Café and bartered, with Patric, crime novels and thrillers for my weekly account. Eventually he and Chrissie split up and Patric ran away to Hollywood with the actor Wendy Hughes. For a time he became a producer but now lives in rural Ireland. Chrissie went off to Vanuatu and met and married the wickedly handsome Jean-Claude Wané. Together they run a luncheon café in Bourke Street, Redfern. On my nowinfrequent (and usually—because of the dog—one-day) visits to Sydney I always lunch there, taking the opportunity to meet my ever-changing Sydney newspaper editors. Chrissie is a genius in assembling delicious, healthy, mostly cold

210

Art & Life

food, eminently suitable for the warm Sydney climate. JeanClaude is moody and sometimes disappears silently behind the espresso machine. I am always relieved when he gives me a sweet smile. La Causerie was owned and run by a Hungarian countess, Yolande Teleki, who had married the son of the pre-war prime minister. When Teleki senior lost office and the successive government backed Hitler he suicided. Yolande, as a young wife, heard the shot and found his body. The food was of French influence which, at least in the early days, she mostly cooked herself. I found her utterly fascinating and formidably intelligent although I’m not sure that I actually liked her. Others thought her overbearing, which I suppose she was. She was wooed by a customer, a Swiss aristocrat named de Salis, married him, and metamorphosed from a countess into a baroness. When Tony Bilson and ex-Melbourne millionaire Leon Fink opened Kinsela’s in a renovated funeral parlour in Taylor Square I dined there every night. It was like a club for creative people and I might join writer Frank Moorhouse, film producer Margaret Fink (wife, then ex-wife of Leon) or the larrikin art dealer Ray Hughes. On Friday afternoon I would fly home to Melbourne, usually dine with Barrie at the Society, and then drive to Greenhill with him. At weekends we continued to entertain. Looking back I don’t quite know how I coped with this gruelling schedule. In those days I had a ton of energy.

FIFTEEN The Noises of Our Human Being

was another destination for selling books. I would start at the top and work down the coast calling at public libraries en route. On one visit I took Barrie with me. Although a native Queenslander he had never been further north than Gympie. One Sunday we visited Thea Astley and her husband Jack Gregson at their home in a tropical garden at Barron Falls, near Kuranda, in the mountainous hinterland of Cairns. Thea had been a member of the old Brisbane Barjai magazine group. She came from a conventionally respectable, bourgeois, Catholic family. When, in the 1940s, she wanted to go to university her father demanded—as a condition for paying her fees—that she renounce her circle of Barjai friends, who were artists, writers, actors, gays, bohemians, proponents of free love and so on. (Barrie once had an old-fashioned landlady while temporarily living in a Sydney bed-sit. Late one night the good woman FAR NORTH QUEENSLAND

212

Art & Life

arrived in the room unannounced. Barrie recorded part of her harangue in a poem thus: ‘Writers, actors and artists, youse call yourselves. I know youse for what you are, prostitutes, pimps and poofters, and the police have been called for.’) Thea relinquished her friends as her father had instructed and now, forty-three years later, Barrie demanded an explanation. Jack looked embarrassed. Thea covered her face with her hands. ‘It was a shocking thing to do’, continued Barrie relentlessly, and Thea moaned softly. I changed the subject by quoting from Anne Baxter’s autobiographical Intermission, an account of the Hollywood film star’s Australian days on a cattle property around 1960. Baxter had wanted to make a film based on Thea’s novel A Descant of Gossips and Patrick White arranged a luncheon for the two women to meet. Thea told us that nothing ever came of it. She claims to have had a tough time critically. This is something of an exaggeration since she has won the Miles Franklin Fiction Award four times—more than any other author. She has not, however, been nominated for the Booker or other overseas prizes. On the drive back to Cairns we passed Aboriginal families living in tin shanties on the side of the road. This would have been in 1975. Is it still like that?

April 2002 Another matriarch of Australian literature, Dorothy Hewett, has died, and I wrote her obituary for the Guardian. They liked what I had written but wanted me to expand my ideas on Western Australian culture. They also added more from their own investigations on the internet—despite the fact that

t h e noises of our human being

213

she is unknown in England. I was a bit ashamed of myself. I must learn to surf the net. I am constantly impressed with the meticulous editing and research my London editors display. There is nothing like it in the newspapers of this country, where editors are forced to take on obituaries after completing what are considered more important tasks. In the circumstances they do a good job. We were not close friends but I remember in some detail Dorothy’s visit to Greenhill in 1977. Barrie was off on his first library-sponsored trip overseas and I had Dorothy all to myself over Easter. There was a poetry festival at Montsalvat and I ferried her there and back and cooked gargantuan meals because she loved food. She was wonderful company and told me a lot about herself and her early life in Perth. She was a member of the Communist Party and also a good middle-class girl. She told me that liberated women of her generation were not only ‘as scarce as hens’ teeth, but kicked in the crotch for it’. Later she used that exact phrase in her autobiography, Wild Card. The Party and bourgeois Perth society were equally bigoted. Society shunned her for her communism and for having had abortions. The Commos ordered her out of university and into a factory to see how ‘real’ people lived and worked. From this experience came Bobbin Up, a minor classic in social-realist fiction. It was translated into Russian and various Eastern European languages, and when Dorothy went to the Soviet Union she was treated as an honoured guest. Although it was a decade before she left the Party she could even then see the flaws. One poem contains the lines: In the years of Stalin I came to Russia

214

Art & Life And saw flowers growing Out of the blinkers of my eyes.

When I knew her, Dorothy was married to Merv Lilley, onetime wharf labourer, now writer, a gentle giant of a man who tolerated her infidelities. Her lovers included Ian Turner to whom (he told me) she caused grief. Dorothy and Merv moved from Perth to Sydney in 1974 to further her career as a playwright. I rather took the view that her art suffered as a result. Her best works—including that fine play The Man from Muckinupin—reflect a provincial sensibility of the best kind. Dorothy related her remote province to the world at large. The right-wing journalist Padraic P. McGuinness chose Dorothy’s death to write a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald on the moral equivalence of communism and fascism. Why, he argued, should the followers of the first be constantly forgiven and supporters of Nazi Germany reviled? Each system, he maintained, was equally brutal. This theme has been argued by Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens in the UK. McGuinness compares Dorothy with—of all people—the propagandist fascist German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl. I despair of conservative intellectuals. Are they stupid as well as inhumane? The philosophical basis to communism is the brotherhood of man. A deeply moral view influenced by Christian teaching. The philosophical core of Nazism was based on the premise that one class of person was inherently superior to another. The fact that communism was betrayed in practice by Stalin and other monsters is altogether another question. You can judge Dorothy and others as naïve in taking so long to wake up, but you cannot question their idealism. To compare a naïve young woman such as Dorothy to Riefenstahl, an active

t h e noises of our human being

215

proponent of Hitler’s fascism, is both absurd and cruel. Two or three years after our first visit. Barrie and I went north again. It was after Barrie had developed Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and he was convalescing after the removal of his spleen. We visited Green Island, out from Cairns, and Dunk Island, opposite Mission Beach north of Townsville. Green Island is tiny. You can walk around it in ten minutes. Barrie had always been intrigued by it because Nolan had painted it. John and Sunday had also loved it. I knew it from the paintings of the Belgian-born primitive Henri Bastin, whom we had exhibited at MOMA. Cliché though it may be, Green Island is like an exquisite jewel. A ferry from Cairns takes about half an hour. It is protected by the Great Barrier Reef, otherwise it might be swamped by a giant wave. There are no roads and no vehicles. Paths of brown, crumbly leaf mould meander through the jungle. I am no particular lover of the tropics, but even I was enchanted. We stayed a couple of days in simple motel-style accommodation before driving south to Townsville (I did business on the way) and took an eight-seat aircraft to Dunk. Dunk Island was settled by the writer E. J. Banfield in association with the Hopkins family, into which clan Ruth Cowen’s sister Peg had married. I was unimpressed. It was beautiful in its own way, but I loathe lying in the sun, although I did enjoy walks up through a shady jungle to a look-out peak. The accommodation was luxurious but the food indifferent. Barrie and I witnessed frozen fish being shipped in! Barrie enjoyed it, and since it was obviously doing him good I was happy to extend our visit by a few days. When we returned to Townsville we visited the very hospitable Hopkins and related Pearce families and caught

216

Art & Life

up with Ruth who was staying for her annual holiday. Ruth floated around in a swimming pool with a pool-sitter cum lifesaver at hand to prevent any possible drowning. One local visitor to a luncheon we attended made a remark—or series of remarks—which was to become familiar to me over numerous visits to north Queensland. The exchange goes like this. ‘What do you think of it up here?’ You, of course, are meant to drool, to sigh with pleasure at all its glory, so you do your best. Then they say, ‘It’s different, not like down south, isn’t it?’ South does not necessarily mean New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria or Tasmania. South stops a little north of Brisbane. I refused to play this game and replied, ‘Oh you poor things, putting up with the terrible heat and the Bjelke Petersen police state, how can you bear it?’ Barrie was not amused and told me I had been ill mannered.

SIXTEEN O l d e r t h a n Ye s t e r d a y

Greenhill, St Andrews. Indeed, for the time being Barrie and I lacked the advantages of a city flat. When I was not interstate selling or overseas buying, we commuted each day to Melbourne—he to the State Library and I to an office in Lonsdale Street. Incredibly—considering our time-consuming careers—we did a great deal of entertaining. Greenhill was open house, mostly to artists, writers and assorted intellectuals, but also to practically anyone who needed a home or refuge. I suppose we instinctively took our cue from John and Sunday, and any largesse we received from them we passed on to a wider world. Peter Hobb first appeared as a six- or seven-year-old child in the late 1950s. There he was, this strange kid on the doorstop, almost tongue-tied with shyness yet still determined, asking if he could see our ‘photos’. What he meant of course was paintings. The house was never locked. We would come LIFE CONTINUED AT

218

Art & Life

home in the early evening, light lamps, move about the house, hear a stir, and there would be little Peter staring at a painting. He would also devour art books. When asked his favourite painter he replied ‘Mr Picasso’. Peter lived with his parents in a cottage opposite. He was the last child of a couple who had already raised adult children. Mrs Hobb was, I think, illiterate. Mr Hobb was employed as a gardener by the Heidelberg City Council. Peter drew and painted from a very early age, yet his work could never have been described as ‘child art’. If his images were derivative—and what artist is not dependent on the images of those before him?—they were filtered through a creative imagination all his own. He was not popular with adult artists. The painter and sculptor Les Kossatz belittled his talent, and so did others. I believe this denigration arose from a kind of jealousy. This kid was too big for his boots. What might he produce in ten or fifteen years’ time? When Peter was about twenty, he went to live with John and Sunday for the last decade of their lives. He helped in the garden and became their curator and (like us in the early days) surrogate son. He also attended the National Gallery of Victoria (now Victorian College of the Arts) art school. I believe that after their deaths he grieved more than any of us. He went through a bad time—nervous breakdowns, near alcoholism and disastrous affairs with married women. Today Peter lives a happy, productive life on the Peninsula. He is married to (if I might be permitted the cliché) a wonderful woman, Deborah, and is the father of bouncy twins Katrin and Emily. Who ever would have believed it? Deborah studies and works as a nurse and Peter looks after his daughters, paints seascapes in the contemporary idiom and (like his father) is an

older than yesterday

219

inspired gardener: most of their vegetarian produce is homegrown. His knowledge of the modern movement, music as well as the visual arts, is global in its scope and encyclopaedic in its detail. His erudition is far more extensive than that of any professor of fine art I have met (and believe me I have met a few). Peter, unlike the academics, actually looks at the art before he theorises. The Hobb family are principal heirs to my estate, such as it is. Les Kossatz turned up at Greenhill early in his career. He had married a fellow student, Jenni, and Barrie and I loaned them our house at a time we were living in town. Les was possessed of a driving ambition, and was clearly a major talent. He was part of a group of tough, aggressively heterosexual male artists which included George Baldessin and Jan Senbergs. Tragically, George, who also lived in St Andrews, was killed in a car smash in 1978.

June 1999 On the occasion of a posthumous exhibition of Baldesssin’s paintings, etchings and aquatints at the Australian Galleries, I wrote an essay entitled ‘The Last of the Moderns’ and covered all three artists. The theme of my piece was that these three artists—whose talent was evident at an early age—were almost the last exponents of the Australian modern movement in the visual arts. The work of all three is well known and I do not propose to describe or analyse it here. One responded with immediacy to their work and to their personalities. One simply knew that they produced major art in the tradition of Nolan, Boyd, Hester and Williams. As I have noted before, the art of today does not move one

220

Art & Life

in the same manner. There is plenty of it—indeed too much— but it is of fair average quality and related more to interior decoration than aesthetic achievement. Les Kossatz, a Methodist Sunday school teacher, was as a young man as pretty as a porcelain figurine. This fragility masked a determined aggression. He was as ruthless with his women as he was in pursuit of his career. If these observations seem to damn him that is not my intention. I’ve always liked him in a personal sense quite apart from my appreciation of his talent. Those traits were no more extreme in him than in most successful artists. Les painted a kind of cut-out sculptured image of our dining room. Light—like waves of water—rushes through a window onto a round cedar table. This work is contained in the MOMA collection at Heide, and my heart misses a beat whenever I see it. Talking of painters who exchanged religion for art, Peter Burns tells an amusing story of a party he held when living with his mother in Edgecombe Street, Kew. Arthur Boyd, John Perceval and Charles Blackman were present and they were all a bit drunk. Myrtle Burns, who was a most tolerant elderly lady, answered the front door to an earnest young man. Failing to notice his religious tracts she assumed him to be a friend of Peter’s, and ushered him into the party. It proved to be the artistic birth of one of Australia’s best-known painters, Robert Jacks, who thereafter relinquished God for art. Bob Jacks was one of the funniest men I have known. Sadly, when he married well (and was accepted into Government House) he curbed his witty tongue. (I could write reams on the scandals I have learned on the doings at Victorian Government House. Sadly my publishers and

older than yesterday

221

I might be up on charges of libel were I to reveal all I know.) The artist Russell Drever with his then wife Alda, became very close to us. The marriage did not last after Alda became infatuated with a man old enough to be her father. Russell and his second wife Jacquie—cook, gardener and a talented amateur artist—are still good friends of mine, but sadly I have lost contact with Alda. Russell raised their two children who turned against Alda, and I often wonder how she has coped with this tragedy, which must be a mother’s nightmare. Another regular visitor was the poet Shelton Lea. I have known many unconventional people but no one who stood outside society quite as he did. He was one of six children adopted into the chocolate-manufacturing Lea family. Shelton was propelled by anarchic, romantic compulsion. He was extremely handsome in the classical manner and his physique was akin to that of Michelangelo’s David. He had no idea of his origins. He looked exotic and Barrie and I had always fantasised a Central European gypsy background with a bit of Greek thrown in. One of his lovers researched his background and found it to be Welsh. Greenhill stood at a T-intersection. Opposite was a little general store run by a woman named Mrs Tanter. She had a son named Richard who was attending Eltham High and who was vastly intelligent. Through his school and university days he visited us regularly, sometimes helping in the garden. In his own way he was quite as special as Peter Hobb. Now he is Professor of International Relations at the University of Kyoto and an expert on Japan’s relationship with both North and South Korea. How odd that these two men could spring from such seemingly barren soil. Was it Thoreau who believed you could discover the world in your own back yard? Were Barrie and

222

Art & Life

I influential in their development? Certainly so with Peter. I don’t know about Richard, but it would be nice to think so. Adrian Rawlins came to stay from time to time. He was a poet, actor, radio man, concert manager and devotee of an Indian spiritual leader, Meher Baba. For international celebrities as diverse as Bob Dylan, Dame Edith Sitwell, Sal Mineo, Little Richard and Daniel Barenboim, Adrian was the Australian they knew best. When beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti arrived from San Francisco in the middle of the night, Adrian was at the airport to meet him. I think I introduced them by correspondence. Adrian was something of a genius as an entrepreneur and almost solely responsible for the success, both in Britain and internationally, of Cleo Laine and, by extension, her husband John Dankworth. It is said that Adrian seduced many straight young men by taking them to the bed in which Bob Dylan had slept. Many people complained that given a chance Adrian would stay in their homes for months on end. We never had that problem, as he required the city to nourish his groupie, mostly late-night, socialising. He did not drive, and St Andrews was too distant for him to use in the long term. When I chauffeured him around Melbourne he would plead with me to let him out for five minutes’ spiritual communion in any place of worship we happened to be passing. One favourite was St Francis’ Church in Lonsdale Street. Another was the Synagogue at the bottom of Toorak Road, or at various Islamic temples—it made no difference. ‘God is everyone, don’t ever forget that, Philip,’ he would tell me sternly. He did not approve of my agnosticism but I respected his wacky faith. In, I think, 1975, the famous US west coast poet Robert Duncan came to Australia for readings. Naturally his visit was managed by Adrian. One Sunday night they were free,

older than yesterday

223

and I gave a dinner for Duncan and a dozen or so poets who were cock-a-hoop to meet him. In the event I detested Duncan who was arrogant, supercilious and treated me like a chef cum butler. Curiously—though beatnik he might once have been—he was dressed in a well-cut lounge suit and wore a conservative tie, and this properly disconcerted the casual Aussie poets. After I cooked and served a vast buffet dinner we adjourned to the large living room where Barrie had built a huge fire. At this stage Barrie took over as MC for a poetry recital and I reclined on the floor exhausted by my efforts in feeding and watering all these people. Various people read including Eric Beach. Judy Jacques, I think, sang a haunting ballad. Then Barrie, Shelton Lea and ΠO, before our visitor intoned, ‘I will now read a Duncan’. In the middle of a long poem I nodded off and snored loudly. I was nudged awake by the literary agent Caroline Edgerton. Everyone was shocked, including Adrian, but Barrie was amused because he didn’t like Duncan either. The following day I looked him up in The Diaries of Anais Nin (they had been bestsellers at Eastend). In her opinion Duncan was the most arrogant and self-centred man she had ever known. Adrian died on 12 September 2001 after developing a lymphoma. The shock of September 11 resulted in his entering hospital and a rapid descent into death. Naturally I wrote his obituary. He is, I hope, safe in the arms of Baba. I first met Marie Davison in about 1970. Her husband was Frank Dalby Davison whose best-known novels are Dusty (the story of a dog) and Man-Shy (the story of a heifer). Hal Porter

224

Art & Life

was staying at Greenhill, and he and I encountered Frank in the Hurstbridge grainstore. Frank asked us back to the farm at Arthur’s Creek where Marie served tea and home-made cakes. This was my only meeting with Frank, a legendary literary figure since my schooldays and far beyond. I recall a trenchant review of Man-Shy in an old Angry Penguins magazine where John Reed describes Davison’s relationship with animals as anthropomorphic. I myself could never come to grips with Frank’s fiction. No two Australian writers could have been more dissimilar in character than Davison and Porter. Frank’s life and work were steeped in the bush and in man’s relationship to the working animal. Hal was an eccentric dandy who—despite his rural background—dissected the complexities of urban sophistication. Yet each respected the work of the other. In this country (perhaps in all countries?) writers huddle together for support. Frank told us he had almost completed his magnum opus: a gargantuan novel of heroic proportions with—this time—an urban (Sydney) setting in which he explored human relationships in a sexual context. (The White Thorntree was published as a limited edition by the National Press and flopped commercially and critically.) About a year after this meeting Frank died from lung cancer. Some months after his death I ran into Marie at a local party and she became one of our closest friends. She was a beautiful woman, then aged about sixty, and wore flamboyant, colourful clothes, most of which she made herself. I have become acutely aware that I describe almost every woman who became my friend as ‘beautiful’. The fact is—and this would be borne out by other observers—that most of them were. A successful author such as Frank Dalby Davison

older than yesterday

225

would expect, and be expected by his peers, to marry a highly attractive woman. Women who achieved eminence in their own right were also invariably beautiful. They were the other side of the coin—married or unmarried—to the masculine, and mostly plain, ‘spinsters’. Physical beauty in a woman seemed to be a necessary prerogative of the time. I think this has changed as a result of feminism and perhaps such gender analyses as Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. After Frank died Marie believed (so she told me) that she would lead an isolated life as nobody would be interested in the grieving widow of a famous writer. She was wrong. I, for one, found her intensely interesting. She was strong, sensitive and intelligent. She continued to run the twenty-hectare property on which she bred cattle. She was very well read and recognised the genius of Patrick White early on, while the bushie literary brigade which surrounded her (Vance and Nettie Palmer would have been exceptions) still viewed him with deep suspicion. She was a Sydney girl, born and raised at Rockdale. Her name was Edna until Frank made her change it to Marie, a contraction of the Queensland cattle town of Mareeba. She had been a professional ballroom dancer, and toured New South Wales with a partner demonstrating and teaching such exotic steps as the tango; but she had grown up with a reverence for writers and met Frank at a meeting of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. Their love was instantaneous and mutual. Frank brought her to Melbourne and they bought their little property—Folding Hills—which would provide financial sustenance for an indigent writer but still be close to town. The city-bred, strong-willed and capable Marie re-created herself as a farmer, a farmer’s wife and secretary to her man. She always referred to her husband as ‘my man’. She typed

226

Art & Life

several drafts of the 300,000-word Thorntree. As Frank’s health deteriorated she took over the farm. I think I helped give Marie a life after Frank. She was gregarious and loved company and I introduced her to lots of young people who appreciated her wit and wisdom. She was a constant visitor to my parties, and would respond with her own quite lavish dinners, when she cooked delicious oldfashioned country food. She lived frugally and I loaned—and gave—her books from my Eastend stock. She read, I believe, more widely after Frank died. She never left Australia but she knew what went on around the world.

August 2002 Marie has died in a nursing home at Diamond Creek. Sadly I was estranged from her after Barrie and I separated. She took his side and seemed to think that I had let him down in some way. I think she was the only one of our mutual friends who took this position. When (after some years of our not seeing each other) she entered the nursing home I was tempted to visit her, and was told by a mutual friend she would be pleased to see me. I did not do so because my time was taken up with two other elderly friends, Ruth Cowen and Ruth Blatt, and visiting Diamond Creek seemed too much for me. Now, when it is too late, of course I am sorry. I did not write her obituary but Peter Darby (who had researched Frank’s life for a PhD thesis) did a good job for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.

SEVENTEE N From the Margins

election of the Labor Government in 1972, Gough Whitlam appointed Bruce Grant as high commissioner to India. He and Joan invited me to stay at any time and I made several visits before the dismissal of the Labor government in 1975. On my first visit I came out of the (then) primitive Delhi Airport to find a uniformed Indian chauffeur holding a placard reading ‘Philip Jones for the Australian High Commission’. I had, of course, expected to take a taxi. The driver turned out to be a dignified Sikh named Sadar Singh. It was a stiflingly hot day when I stepped into the back of a white Mercedes buzzing with air-conditioning vents. A European woman, young middle-aged, was already seated in the car. She did not acknowledge my presence. ‘Did you arrive on my flight?’ I asked her. I thought perhaps it was she rather than I who justified an official car. ‘No,’ she replied curtly. The culture shock resulting from my first impressions of SOON AFTER THE

228

Art & Life

India was immense. Cows, bicycles, people, people, people were everywhere: dust, stench, withered trees and oleander. For a time I ignored my uncommunicative fellow-passenger. Finally I asked her who she was. ‘I am secretary to the High Commissioner,’ she muttered. Obviously she had been sent to greet me and resented the task. This annoyed me because if she had been dispatched to represent her boss she should have performed her job with grace. ‘Do trams still run in Victoria Parade?’ she asked languidly. ‘How long since you were in Melbourne?’ I asked. ‘Four years,’ she replied. I ignored her and she me for the rest of the journey. A certain folie de grandeur affects some members of the diplomatic community, particularly those of fairly humble status. It was late afternoon and their Excellencies were hosting a reception. I recall being presented to the Chinese Chargé d’Affaires. Through an interpreter I learned that a full embassy would only be established when China−India relations had improved. India was pro-Soviet. I got several small glimpses into the world of international diplomacy and found it all very intriguing. The chief justice of India was present. I talked to a man from Koondrook, near Kerang, who knew my parents. He was part of an agricultural advisory team assisting farmers with the economical use of water. The military attaché and his wife had stepped straight out of Toorak. The Australian High Commission residence was long and low and could have been designed by the fashionable Australian, coolly modern architect of the 1930s, Harold Desbrowe Annear. The administrative offices were housed in a separate, quite large office building within the compound. In the residence a spacious reception hall was replete with Australian art. A fine John Perceval tangled garden landscape

from the margins

229

hung above a white sofa. Glass walls overlooked a long lawn which stretched to a pond. Eucalypts and acacias mingled with jungle plants to form a screen around the compound. I was warned to beware of stray cobras which might cross my path. Bruce and Joan enjoyed the posting but neither would have dreamed of becoming professional long-term diplomats. I learned from a Canberra source that Bruce’s dispatches to Canberra were ‘model’ documents. Both took lessons in Hindi and entered actively into the Indian arts scene. Bruce also organised a reciprocal cultural exchange program between Australia and India. I recall, on I think my second visit in 1974, Bruce returning to the residence late in the evening. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, he informed us, had declared an emergency. It was only later that I learned of the resulting upheaval all over the country. New Delhi itself seeemed to be the still, quiet centre. Years later I read Bruce’s marvellous portrait of India, Gods and Politicians. It is both scholarly and pictorial in its remarkable evocation of the feel and smell of the country.

Ja n u a r y 2 0 0 3 I have read the manuscript of Bruce’s latest novel, The India Lover. The book opens with a late afternoon reception at the Australian High Commission and continues with a description of the garden and pond. The theme of the story is an Australian woman’s involvement with India, reflected in a love affair with a poet-cum-revolutionary member of the High Commission staff. The time is the emergency of the early 1970s. It is a fine, highly original novel, but Bruce is experiencing difficulty in placing it. No one seems to know what to make of it,

230

Art & Life

including Australia’s leading literary agent. One editor from an Australian university press wrote a quite incomprehensible report on it. Professors of government and diplomacy are not supposed to write novels. I have spoken to Christopher MacLehose and sent him Bruce’s CV and a description of the book. Christopher has agreed to read the manuscript and Bruce is making a few editorial amendments suggested by me. It just could be the right book for Harvill’s classy if idiosyncratic list. Meals at the Australian High Commission were traditionally British in character. Roasts and cauliflower cheese and caramel custards were standard fare. Most of the staff had been there for years. Sadar Singh had worked for many High Commissions and claimed to have driven on every road in the subcontinent. I felt the strong presence of Lord Casey, minister for external affairs (during the Menzies Government) and wartime governor (for the British) of Bengal (now Bangladesh). Indeed one bedroom was designated as Lord Casey’s room. It had pleased m’Lord to look out over the vegetable garden. I remember Sadar Singh driving us—Joan, sons David and Ben, and myself—on a sight-seeing tour of the city, old and new. After inspecting the Red Fort, the house of parliament and the presidential palace, we drove into the maelstrom of the old city. Sadar Singh, handsome and avuncular, would not let us out of his sight. We were not to give money to beggars, he said sternly, and I was puzzled by his apparent lack of compassion. Ben Grant was six at the time. He was a bubbly personality, always laughing and full of knowledge. One day he and I took a bicycle rickshaw to the home of Pandit Nehru (father of Indira Gandhi), the first prime minister after independence.

from the margins

231

Ben gave me a guided tour and I was astonished to discover that this little boy could know so much.

February 2003 I attended Ben’s cabaret performance of Ben(t) at La Mama in Carlton. The multi-talented Ben, now thirty-five, is a graduate of the National Institute of Dramatic Art and an actor, writer, composer and musician. Ben is gay and this little one-man play dramatises a coming-out experience on a return trip to India as an adult. I flew on to Rome and then to Pisa where I was met by the artist Joel Elenberg, then in residence at Arthur Boyd’s villa at Palaia, situated in an axis between Florence, Lucca and Pisa. Joel lived in the house while working at the nearby marble centre at Carrara. Arthur’s house was fairly primitive in those early days. It was freezing cold and we slept on mattresses in front of a big fire after dining extraordinarily well at a plain, inexpensive restaurant in the nearest provincial town. We breakfasted in the village, and Joel always tossed down a cognac with his coffee, which he called a skitch. I could not have hoped for a more delightful companion and guide. Also he was good to look at in a lean and hungry manner. We both responded to the white marbled Pisa trilogy of tower, baptistery and campanile, so much lovelier than the liquorice-allsorts equivalent in Florence. Joel was iconoclastic in his responses to Renaissance art, declaring that much of the Uffizi was shit. He would zoom along the halls, then stop before a quite miraculous work and gaze with the adoration of the magi.

232

Art & Life

We drove to Rome singing (at Joel’s insistence) Christian hymns. I knew the words, which intrigued his Jewish curiosity. He was full of intellectual energy and enthusiasm. We parked outside the town hall on the Via del Corso where the car remained for almost a week without receiving a ticket. We stayed at the Hotel d’Inghilterra off the Via Condotti and spent hours at the l’antico Caffè Greco, always sitting at the marble table which had belonged to the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. We attended every gallery and museum in town, and took in a performance of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (my favourite opera). One cold day I caught a glimpse of the Australian artist Justin O’Brien in the Via Condotti. He was carrying, for some reason, a blue cushion. I pointed him out to Joel, who immediately rushed up to him and shook his hand. Justin looked old and rheumy-eyed and was I think nonplussed by Joel’s exuberance. Less than a year later I ran into Joel and his wife Anna while shopping in Lygon Street, Carlton. He had recently returned and was suffering severe pain in the chest due, he said, to muscle strain after playing soccer at Carrara. That afternoon he was X-rayed at the Austin Hospital where they found a lymphoma the size of a pear. Joel left Anna and Melbourne to live with Brett and Wendy Whiteley at Lavender Bay in Sydney. Radiotherapy shrank the tumour and chemotherapy halted its growth for a while. I visited him in hospital. Seated by his bed and holding his hand was his Sydney girlfriend, a woman who looked uncannily like Anna. He died on Sanur Beach in Bali in 1980, surrounded by friends—the Whiteleys, the current mistress, a former lover, the actor Jennifer Clare, wife Anna and daughter Zahava. Anna and Zahava wrapped up his body and brought him home. He was thirty-two.

from the margins

233

During the 1970s I travelled twice yearly to Boston and New York to purchase books. I would then go on to London, and sometimes to Paris, Rome and Athens. Business was good, the Australian dollar strong and tourism had not yet become mass market. Early on in these visits I met the expatriate Australian novelist, playwright, TV and film scripter and one-time actor, Sumner Locke Elliott. I cannot recall who introduced us, but he and I rather took to each other and we remained good friends until his death about fifteen years later. At the time we met I think he had only written Careful He Might Hear You and Some Doves and Pythons. Both had sold well in the bookshop. He lived in a very simple flat in a brownstone house on East 63rd Street and had been there almost from the time he had arrived in New York in the late 1940s. Sumner (together with Gore Vidal and Paddy Chayevsky) had pioneered the techniques of television drama. He had made a modest fortune from this, and after a successful decade, deliberately eschewed its commercialism in favour of writing novels. He had also had a play, Buy Me Blue Ribbons, accepted by a major Broadway management. Years later I found a copy in the Yarra Glen op shop. It was rather trivial compared to his fiction. One night Sumner took me to the great theatrical restaurant Sardi’s for dinner. I arrived a bit late and was escorted to his table by no less than two maîtres d’. All through our dinner, theatrical people (of a certain age) came to our table to pay homage to Sumner. They said things like, ‘Where have you been daaaarling’. I got the impression that few knew he had become a distinguished novelist. At the beginning of the meal Sumner said rather piously,

234

Art & Life

‘My doctor allows me one drink a day’. It turned out to be a martini in a glass the size of a small goldfish bowl. It contained a good third of a bottle of gin. Curiously for someone involved with the theatre, Sumner was ambivalent about his homosexuality. For most of his life he felt uneasy about it and didn’t form a lasting relationship until very late on. As a young man in Sydney he was in love with his best friend, a straight actor named Howard Craven. This was never consummated and Craven did not learn of Sumner’s passion until thirty years later. At about the time I first met Sumner (he would have been about sixty-five), he met a fellow writer, a widowed grandfather named Whitfield Cook. Thus began a love affair which lasted until his death. Whit was rich and provided Sumner with luxuries he had denied himself most of his life. Barrie and I were both devoted to Sumner’s fiction. His novels fall into two categories. The nostalgic Australian stories, notably Careful He Might Hear You and Water Under the Bridge, make highly enjoyable reading. Both have been filmed and were successful at the box office. His ear for the Australian vernacular of the time was very good. They are not, in my opinion, works of literary art as are the ‘American’ novels. His creation of complex, sensitive, waspish New England Americans is superb. He is particularly brilliant in his portrayal of women. Probably his best novel is Signs of Life which traces an American family through five generations of women. My extended family now lived in a three-floored apartment above a shop in the middle of the swanky St John’s Wood High Street. They always liked a good address. There were rooms to spare everywhere. Mother took in paying guests—

from the margins

235

mostly Australian visitors—and became a kind of unofficial (but highly knowledgeable) guide to London. She was still full of energy, and brought up her grandchildren on top of everything else, but my father was fading and I noticed a distinct deterioration on each visit. I felt deeply sorry for my father. It seemed he had lived an unfulfilled sort of life, and he was swamped by all these people. He was deaf, doddery and inclined to rages, shouting at my mother that she was a bitch. I tried to talk to him and was sad because now I had left it too late. During one of these 1970s visits he had experienced some illness and had been taken to an old person’s rest home in Bournemouth for recuperation. Mother and I visited him there. A few days later I made up my mind to get a train down to Bournemouth to visit him—or perhaps rent a car and take him for a drive. I cancelled it when someone asked me to lunch at the Café Royal. Like most old people he did have his good days. I remember sitting on a sofa in a living room overlooking the street on a hot summer day. An election was coming up. It was probably Margaret Thatcher’s second victory in 1983; her constituency was the adjoining seat of Finchley. I looked down to see my father accosted by a well-dressed gentleman who said, ‘I trust you will be voting Conservative, Sir?’ (Marylebone was safe Conservative.) My father replied, ‘No, certainly not’, and when the Tory spruiker asked him why he said, ‘Because you Tories have no humanity’. I was proud of him. Politically, my sister Nan followed her friend Kate, the dowager Lady Lucan (mother of the infamous Lord who murdered his children’s nanny) as president of the Westminster branch of the Labour Party. On the last occasion I saw my parents I gave a drinks party for my London-based Australian friends as well as for true

236

Art & Life

Londoners. It was quite a large gathering. Who was there? I can’t remember everyone. Expatriate Elizabeth Salter (for years secretary to Edith Sitwell, then biographer and novelist), artist Laurence Hope and wife Wendy, Martyn Goff and partner Rubio Lindros, Charles Osborne and Ken Thomson, my cousins the Summerses, Melbourne art dealer Marianne Baillieu whom I had run into by chance in Brown’s Hotel. I provided Australian champagne which flowed rather too freely. Laurence Hope passed out on my mother’s bed. Wendy was equally drunk. Laurence attempted to drive home and someone took his car keys. Punches were thrown in High Street. The police arrived. Mayhem! When I apologised to Mother, she replied coolly, ‘It was a very nice party up to a certain point—let’s forget about the end bit’. Father sat in a corner looking bemused. As one does of a febrile cocktail party I recall snatches of conversation. Elizabeth Salter (who reminded me that she was a scion of ‘an establishment’ South Australian family) spoke familiarly of ‘Joanie’ (Joan Sutherland) and her intimacy with Noel Coward and his lover Coley (which she pronounced Curley). Lucy Danby from St Andrews was there, squawking in her Californian voice, ‘She [i.e. my mother] can’t get into her own bedroom.’ Nan and Nick ran a restaurant called the Flamingo in nearby Willesden. Nick was chef and Nan maîtresse d’. It served simple, civilised food and I always enjoyed eating there.

EIGHTEEN Sadness May Cover the Hour

had characterised my life for at least two decades began to disintegrate in the late 1970s. Greenhill burned down. Sweeney suicided. My parents died. Barrie developed Hodgkin’s lymphoma and John Reed was diagnosed with bowel cancer. Partly as a result of continued misfortune and partly from the effects of serious influenza which affected her nervous system, Sunday suffered a pathological level of anxiety. THE STABILITY WHICH

In March 1978 Peter Ward and Dimitri Theodoratis asked us to stay with them during the Adelaide Festival. Peter was then head of the South Australian bureau of the Australian newspaper. Dimitri, a Rhodean Greek and Peter’s long-time partner, ran his own highly concentrated market-garden in an inner suburb and sold his produce in the Adelaide central market. Chief justice and poet John Bray lived in the adjoining house to Peter and Dimitri, and this was where Barrie and I planned to stay.

238

Art & Life

I left Melbourne late afternoon with the intention of selling books to the Wimmera Regional Library en route. Barrie was to fly over the following day. I stayed the night at a Horsham motel. For some reason, I can’t remember why, I wanted to speak to Barrie before he left and was frustrated to find the Greenhill number out of order. For some reason I was apprehensive and didn’t sleep much that night. At 8.30 on the following morning in the library I was handed a note. Ring John Reed immediately. John told me that Greenhill had burned down the previous day. The drive back to Melbourne was horrible. I had lost my home, and I couldn’t begin to think what else had gone. Letters, books, records, memorabilia. Works of art. A whole stack of paintings the artist Andrew Southall had stored in one of our spare rooms and several paintings on loan from Dawn Sime. And where were we to live? At this time there was no city flat. The car suddenly came to a halt in the outer suburbs because I had forgotten to refuel. The day was hot and dusty and I walked a long, long way in search of petrol. I was in despair. I thought about Barrie and some terrible intuition informed me that this disaster would portend the end of our relationship. In addition I was filled with a foreboding that the fire was just the beginning of a series of disasters. I was right on both counts. I became aware of the appalling stench after I drove through Hurstbridge. There were ten kilometres still to go. I found Barrie picking his way through the charred mess. The timber section of the house which faced the road had totally gone. I had spent a good deal of money renovating this section of the house to provide a new bedroom. It was also the area where Southall’s and Sime’s paintings had been stored. Sheets of galvanised

sadness may cover the hour

239

roof iron lay strewn on a deep pile of ash. The hand-made brick walls at the back remained and this gave the appearance of an acropolis in mourning for dead spirits. The house had smouldered throughout the day until a neighbour raised the alarm and the fire-brigade arrived. Charlie the labrador (the first), who had been cared for by a neighbour, had disappeared. A week later I found him in nearby Panton Hill. Barrie had learned about the fire from a telephone message he received when he called into my office after work in the late afternoon. When the alarm was raised almost all the local people arrived to rescue what they could. The surrealism of it all was demonstrated by Jilly Cooper who published a dramatic account in—of all places—a London newspaper. ‘People were wrapping up drinking glasses when somebody rushed in shouting, “Get the Nolan, get the Nolan”’, she wrote. John and Sunday had loaned us a Nolan landscape. Now they suggested we sell it to help build a new house. We stayed for a few days in Sweeney’s flat (he and his family had moved to Fitzroy) at Heide 2. Then, in their characteristically generous way, John and Sunday gave us their beach house at Aspendale for as long as it took to build another house. They also gave us money. Despite the sale of the Nolan painting it was necessary to take out a housing loan. I recall Barrie and me sitting in the manager’s office of the then Commercial Bank of Australia, a historic building (now protected by the National Trust) on the corner of Exhibition and Collins streets. The manager had brought in his accountant to deal with titles and securities. When this accountant learned that two men were borrowing money to build a house in which to live together, he was flabbergasted (today we would say gobsmacked). He was not in any way offensive but simply could not comprehend the

240

Art & Life

situation and stuttered, ‘So you, you . . . are taking out this loan together.’ The manager snapped, ‘Look just shut up and get on with the paperwork.’ Later that year John Reed had an operation for cancer of the upper bowel. There were ‘spots’ of malignancy in the liver which were removed; but the prognosis was generally good, and the stoic in John enabled him to come through it all psychologically intact. Not so Sunday, and for her worse was to come. Barrie and I settled comfortably into the beach house, with Georges Mora (now separated from Mirka) as our neighbour living alone next door. It was a great pleasure—and comfort for me—to have him there as a neighbour. At weekends we entertained as we always had. John and Sunday visited regularly. We would leave Aspendale for the city at 8 a.m. each weekday. It was difficult to get Barrie out of bed in the mornings and he complained of constant fatigue. I have a clear memory of glancing at his face while I drove the car and suddenly reaching the conclusion that something was seriously wrong. He had had numerous medical examinations and blood tests which revealed no abnormality. One hot summer morning as we drove to work—we always travelled the slightly longer coast road rather than the Nepean Highway—Barrie yelled ‘Stop!’ He had seen a newspaper billboard which read FOOTY PROF DIES. I bought the paper. It was, of course, our dear friend Ian Turner. He had been playing cricket on Erith Island (in Bass Strait) when he collapsed and died instantly from a heart attack. Ian, one-time communist (by now Labor centre and a keen Clyde Holding and Gough Whitlam supporter), gave an annual lecture on football at Monash University. He was much

sadness may cover the hour

241

loved around Melbourne and seemed to know everyone— sportsmen and women, academics of course, artists, labourers and politicians. His football, naturally, was Australian Rules and he wrote a book on its local history and its derivation from British rugby. Ian’s funeral was attended by thousands of fans. He had recently separated from Ann and was now married to town planner Leonie Sandercock. Two ex-wives, the widow and assorted lovers eulogised. (I have observed this phenomenon of significant others at various funerals of great but unconventional men. Usually the women know each other and—at least in death—are tolerant of the grief of the others. At Cliff Pugh’s funeral, however, one woman unknown to the others marched up to the front when all had spoken and told the gathering that she was his last part-time lover. I think most people were sceptical, but I knew she was telling the truth as I had met them together by chance in an obscure country restaurant and (when the woman was out of earshot) Cliff whispered, ‘Don’t tell anyone!’) Back at Ian Turner’s Richmond house, Gough Whitlam expressed his surprise at the appearance (re-appearance?) of all these ladies, and said to no-one in particular, ‘It has never occurred to me to have a lover other than Margaret’. Eventually we left Aspendale except for weekends, and I leased an inexpensive shop and upstairs flat—this time at 309 Exhibition Street. The shop-front was not open to the public but served as a showroom and packing area for public library supply. Barrie was now complaining of overwhelming fatigue which was a further reason to stay in town during the week since it was only a three-minute walk to the State Library. He looked terrible, his face was drawn and he suffered night

242

Art & Life

sweats. He had a swelling at the top of his chest. A further battery of medical tests revealed nothing and the swelling was dismissed as fatty tissue. One night I got a telephone call from my mother in London. My father had died in hospital after suffering bladder cancer. She was calm and controlled but wished my sister (who was holidaying in Bulgaria) were there. It was difficult to get in touch with Nan who was in a remote part of the country. Should I come for the funeral? I asked her. No, she did not think funerals were important, she would look forward to a visit from me soon. A week later my nephew Nicky rang to say my mother had died suddenly from a heart attack. My sister was still uncontactable and learned of both deaths at Heathrow on her return. My mother was eighty-one and father eighty-four. I did not go for the double funeral. On top of other worries the business was once more suffering a crisis. Library sales, due to increased competition, were decreasing. In addition—and now aged forty-six—I was, for the first time in my life, responsible (solely responsible as Barrie had no income to spare) for a mortgage. After the stressful business day I had taken to attending a city gymnasium. It was interesting in terms of its clientele. A knighted high court judge, a mining magnate, a Peter MacCallum oncologist (who later gave me informal advice on Barrie’s illness), one or two state pollies and a Graham somebody who had been accorded the title of Mr Universe. Most significantly I met my future business partner and good friend Neil Hudson. He was then secretary to the academic union for tertiary colleges (VICSEC). He wished to leave the union, and I offered him a job, and eventually a partnership. He was then thirty-four and unattached. With my

sadness may cover the hour

243

world seemingly crumbling around me, his friendship, energy and business acumen (he was a Bachelor of Commerce) were vital to the continuing operation of the business. Largely due to Neil’s efforts, Eastend Library Supply once more flourished. Barrie liked him, as did John and Sunday. One evening Barrie, Neil and I dined together at the back of the shop. Barrie always went to bed at about 8 p.m. Neil and I were going to the theatre. Tonight Barrie complained of pains in the upper chest. Neil went off alone and I, fearing a heart attack, drove Barrie two blocks to emergency at the Queen Victoria Hospital. It was a Friday night and he spent the weekend in intensive care. It was not his heart. A diagnostic physician discovered Hodgkin’s disease (now known as Hodgkin’s lymphoma). Joy Hester had lived with it for thirteen years and Barrie felt a romantic affinity. As with John, Barrie’s prognosis was good. Chemo as well as radiotherapy was prescribed. Over the following months Barrie seemed to return from the dead. The improvement in his general appearance was phenomenal. Yet looking after him took up a lot of my working time and I could not have coped without the super-efficient Neil virtually running the business single-handed. One night after Barrie and I had eaten out we returned to find a message to ring John Reed urgently. John Sinclair, the Herald music critic, answered the phone. Sweeney had suicided. John and Sunday were with Sweeney’s wife Pamela and their two sons Danila and Mischka at her mother’s home in Camberwell. Barrie and I drove to Heide, arriving a few minutes before John and Sunday returned. Sunday was rigid, catatonic and deathly pale. She, almost literally, could not speak. John was, as usual, calm and in control. The Carlton police

244

Art & Life

had telephoned to report that Jan Senbergs had discovered Sweeney’s body after breaking into Les Kossatz’s studio. John had already identified his body. Sweeney had been dead for five days after taking an overdose of Nembutal. Sweeney and Pamela had separated, and Les had given Sweeney his studio while overseas. The following day Jan Senbergs let me into the studio and I took away Sweeney’s things. The stench was appalling. At his funeral Sweeney’s putative father, Albert Tucker, was distraught. Barrie read a eulogy but there was no formal service, religious or secular. Apart from his family a handful of Sweeney’s friends were present. In fifteen minutes it was all over, and John took Sunday back to Heide to prevent anyone speaking to her. Bert told us that Sweeney had left him a letter in which he had spoken of ‘black holes’. Barrie, rather brashly I thought, asked to see the letter but Bert said it was ‘too intimate’. Later Bert told me that Sweeney’s suicide had been ‘an heroic gesture’: that Sweeney had recognised in himself destructive, even murderous, impulses, and that he had killed himself rather than inflict damage on others, particularly John and Sunday. I never witnessed the dark, traumatised aspect of Sweeney’s nature, although I knew that when Joy Hester, his biological mother, was dying, he had (apparently unfeelingly) rejected her. His closest friend was the poet Russell Deeble, who was the last person to see him alive. Russell told Sunday that Sweeney went to his death calmly and without anxiety. She was not consoled: indeed this information seemed to anger her. I remember Sweeney for his generosity and practical help when I was sad or in trouble. He buried my first labrador, Nick. Whenever I recall his memory with mutual friends

sadness may cover the hour

245

they tell me similar stories. Sweeney was, essentially, a lonely man. What moved me most was that five days passed before anyone realised he was gone. He left his sons Danila and Mischka. Pamela then married a farmer cum teacher named Ian McIntosh. I only met him once or twice but he seemed like a very nice man and certainly was a good stepfather to the two boys.

22 February 2003 Today at Heide I joined a panel of three, including Les Kossatz and Alex Selenitsch, to discuss Sweeney’s life in a personal sense as well as his contribution to art. Now he is as much part of the Heide legend as John and Sunday, his mother Joy Hester, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker. I think we three complemented each other. Les spoke of Sweeney as an art dealer: how he had broken all the rules of convention yet had proved a wizard salesman. His sense of grandeur, his unreliability with money, his penchant for bargaining, his use of charm in business dealings. I spoke of the exquisite poetry of his work, his excellent taste, his fine aesthetic, his personal kindness and generosity. Alex, his cocreator in a fine work called Horizon—commissioned by Ruth Cowen—spoke of their artistic collaboration. Alex also spoke of how, towards the end, he had relinquished a life of power in the world of art to become a humble student at the Victorian College of the Arts. The others also spoke of that dark side of his nature which I never witnessed. The result of losing one mother for another? The loss of identity?

246

Art & Life

Barrie bore his illness with amazing fortitude. He underwent two major operations: the first to remove the swollen lymph tissue in his upper chest, and the second to extract his spleen. Why, I never found out. His surgeon was a formidable but kind and sympathetic woman, Dame Joyce Daws. Barrie wrote a poem inspired by her, linking the title with the machinations of a pantomime dame. She told me that she had lived with a woman doctor who had died of cancer and that she understood my situation. Throughout this year of death and disaster, the building of our new house continued. Alex Selenitsch designed us a rather ‘sophisticated’ mud-brick house which, I think, broke the mould of the rather clichéd rough, rustic, Alistair Knox– inspired houses which had become fashionable around Eltham and the rural areas north-east of Melbourne. Working with Alex had been a great pleasure for us both and also acted as a kind of therapy and creative endeavour for Barrie, now released from full-time employment. It was a long, low house with a greeny-bronze Indian tiled floor. It lay further down the slope from ‘the ruin’, was parallel to the road, and long windows looked out on the elliptical dam (which we preferred to call a lake) and the Diamond Creek. There was one small room tucked away from the views, a kind of withdrawing room. It served both as library and intimate sitting room and here we ate our dinners and watched TV at night. John and Sunday visited for afternoon tea every Sunday. On one of their last visits they told us they had left us the old Heide house until the second of us died. Our present house was a success in every way. As events transpired I was to spend little time there.

NINETEEN Pa r t i n g s T h a t N e v e r Pa r t

IT IS NOT EASY —even

after the passing of two decades—to write of their deaths. Outwardly John seemed in good health and was physically as energetic as he had always been. I got in touch with the Sydney-based Dr Kalinikos who believed that massive doses of vitamin C could cure advanced cancer. Sunday wished he would try it but John was adamant; he simply didn’t believe the extravagant claims. He and Sunday continued to work together in the garden and this activity—as it had all her life—calmed her more than anything else. John kept up his voluminous correspondence. Indeed, knowing his likely fate, he wrote more letters than usual. They were not, any more, letters to the papers, but to friends and relations he was unlikely to meet again. He wrote frequently to his grazier brother Dick, now retired to Launceston. Dick had received correspondence from the Scottish Euthanasia Society. On Saturday mornings Richard Haese came to interview

248

Art & Life

them for his joint biography. Sunday usually found some excuse not to attend these meetings. Both were intrigued that Haese never looked at paintings when he visited them. He had written the definitive text on the modern movement but, like most academics, was more interested in the various philosophies behind the works rather than in the art itself. Twenty-two years after their deaths the biography has not appeared. Early in November 1981 Georges Mora visited Heide to say farewell before leaving for his annual visit to Europe. After tea Sunday left Georges and John together and Georges assumed he would not see John again. Constant visitors were two doctors, John and Diana Starr (later Fraser). John was a sympathetic physician and both were good friends. Towards the end of November Barrie moved into Heide while I stayed at the flat in town. On the last Friday in November he rang and asked me to come to Heide that night. I arrived at about seven in the evening. We gathered in the library and ate the usual vegetarian meal which had been prepared by Peter Hobb. John ate a tomato sandwich. Sunday had nothing. She was unusually calm. There was no drama or formal farewell but conversation was stilted and I recall that we talked—of all things—of the black population of Boston. John said he couldn’t take much more of the pain he felt and he put his hand on the upper part of his stomach. At about eight he said matter-of-factly, ‘Time to put my pyjamas on’. He smiled at Peter and me and left the room. Peter and I left and stayed the night at Greenhill. When we returned the following morning solicitor Peter Bremer and John Starr were there. Barrie told me that John had died ‘like a Roman soldier’. His final words to Sunday were, ‘Darling you have made my life.’

partings that nev er part

249

Barrie and I spent the weekend phoning friends from a meticulously prepared list left by John. We held a small, secular funeral at Springvale and his body was cremated. Barrie read a eulogy. We spent the following ten days at Heide with Sunday and Peter Hobb. The heat wave was over and the weather cool and damp. A fire blazed constantly in the library. My most painful memory is of the early mornings. Sunday would sleep (with the aid of a pill) fairly well but wake at about seven. John was not there. Where was he? She would jump out of bed and run down the hall looking for him. Then consciousness would surface and she would remember he was dead. We took her out for trips to the country. One day we went to Greenhill. I asked Denis Kelynack and we all had lunch. Sunday remembered Denis’s friend Mub, now an Italian countess. Sunday had spent one term at St Catherine’s before her parents appointed a private tutor for the rest of her schooling. Mub, who was older, had instructed Sunday in the facts of life. Sunday said that after she had learned the basic facts she had discovered Marie Stopes’s guide to female sexual pleasure, Married Love, in her mother’s hat box. I said I had found my mother’s copy covered with brown paper and hidden away and we all laughed. One day we visited the artist and writer Jean Sinclair at her flat on the beach at Carrum. Sunday and Jean had a minor quarrel, as they sometimes did. Somehow that little spat indicated to me that Sunday’s life could go on without John. I was wrong. She died ten days after John. Again Barrie was present but not Peter or myself. Beside her bed were Browning’s poems and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. We did not insert a funeral notice, and as with John few people attended. Sunday’s brother Everard Baillieu and his

250

Art & Life

wife Mary were there. Jean Sinclair was late and tearful. Barrie once again read a eulogy. Everard and Mary had brought a bottle of cheap brandy and a fruit cake and, in the crematorium car park, Everard made a little speech as next of kin. This was, of course, accurate in a technical sense, but I had thought of Barrie, Peter, Jean and myself as next of kin. John and Sunday had gone. I was aged forty-nine and my life was to change irrevocably.

TWENTY There Are Knives About

to live and work at Heide. Barrie and I now had access to no less than four homes—Greenhill, Heide, the Exhibition Street flat and Aspendale. This plenitude of residences had a negative effect on me and contributed to my feelings of loss rather than assuaged them. We continued to live for the time being at Greenhill. Barrie, recently granted early retirement from the public service, identified strongly with Heide and seemed to relish his role as a grand seigneur. He spent several days a week there in order—he said—to see that the garden was properly cared for. Apart from Peter there was a full-time gardener kept on—and paid for by the estate—for a year. In the midst of his terrible grief, Peter resented Barrie’s attitude to him. Barrie, he said, was treating him like a servant. With John and Sunday he had been family. Just days after Sunday’s death Barrie launched an attack on Peter, criticising something he had done, or not done, in the PETER HOBB CONTINUED

252

Art & Life

garden. Barrie said, ‘This is all mine now and you will do what I tell you to do’. Peter said he was holding a spade at the time and fought an almost uncontrollable impulse to hit Barrie on the head. I only learned of this twenty years later. Peter was drinking heavily and taking anti-depressants and spent a few days in the Austin Hospital. On his return home he went off his pills and alcohol cold-turkey and suffered dreadful withdrawal symptoms. The phone rang after he had suffered a particularly debilitating vomiting attack. It was Sunday’s sister-in-law who snapped, ‘You’re not taking care of Barrett, don’t you know how ill he has been?’ When I told this society lady that Peter was suffering a nervous breakdown, she replied, ‘We could all suffer a nervous breakdown. Sometimes I wake up in the morning in an absolute panic wondering if I have sufficient food in the house for a dinner party that evening’. Barrie was flattered by the attention showered on him by these worldly relations of Sunday. The friendship was not to last; Barrie unintentionally offended Sunday’s brother by stating publicly that she was a rebel against her family. Certainly Barrie was suffering too. Chemotherapy alternated with radiotherapy for a year or more. He was stoic in coping with the effects of his treatment but increasingly difficult to live with. He would refer bitterly to my own good health as if it were something he despised. When the therapy ended his oncologist told him he was likely to remain in remission for some years. Against all odds he lived for another thirteen. The Eastend business was expanding and the twice-yearly buying trips had continued. Neil had gone to New York during the time I cared for Barrie. Now it was my turn, and I took Barrie along with me. The trip was fraught with tension between us. We stopped off in California and drove up the coast from

there are knives about

253

Los Angeles to Big Sur. Barrie would not allow himself to respond to the magic of this beautiful coastline. I was trying to kill him, he claimed, by reckless driving. He hated San Francisco—couldn’t think what all the fuss was about. In New York we stayed a couple of nights at the luxurious Plaza Hotel. I thought its outré splendour would amuse Barrie before we moved into a rent-free flat in East Village provided by our book suppliers. The room was not big enough. Why had I not reserved a larger room? I introduced him to Sumner Locke Elliott: this meeting was a great success, with the ever-modest Sumner paying homage to Barrie’s talents as a poet, editor and man of artistic and literary affairs. Barrie’s morale and general view of the world improved the longer we remained in America. We called on the AngloAustralian, now American, poet and journalist Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz. She had been a wartime lover of the American writer Harry Roskolenko and had also been involved with Angry Penguins. After the war she followed Harry to New York where the affair continued before (and also, I believe, after) her marriage to Cesar Ortiz, the Mexican head of radio at the UN. Liz was a legendary beauty—blonde, sophisticated, witty and erudite. At twenty-one she entertained the Sydney Push, including the poet Ken Slessor and the influential professor of philosophy John Anderson. She held court in a flat in Elizabeth Bay House (now owned by the National Trust and open to the public), where Harry lived with her while stationed as a marine in Sydney. Thirty years later Harry published a memoir of his time with Liz in Overland magazine. As an American officer he had unlimited access to liquor, then in short supply in Australia.

254

Art & Life

On the night before he left for New Guinea (and both chose to believe he would be killed) they ate a farewell dinner à deux. Both were drunk and maudlin. They discussed the eternal verities. When does love begin? When does it end? Liz raised her glass and toasted Harry. ‘When the bottle’s bloody empty, pet.’ Barrie had always retained romantic feelings for Liz. With her husband, she received us in their apartment high above Park Avenue. Liz opened the door (looking in late middle age like a voluptuous Mae West). Barrie flung his arms around her and cried (as they do in Victorian novels) ‘I’ve always loved you’. I could see her husband bristling behind her. He hardly spoke to Barrie all the time we were there, obviously believing that here was yet another old lover. We moved from the Plaza to the Greenwich Village flat which belonged to my book supplier. Barrie spent his days exploring the neighbourhood while I worked. Harry Roskolenko lived nearby at Westbeth, a huge apartment building let out at cheap rents by the New York city authorities to writers and artists. I always saw him when in New York, and on this occasion we took him to a Creole restaurant on Hudson Street. He was in a bad way after an operation for prostate cancer, and was very depressed. He had also undergone a painful temperature-raising treatment in an alternative clinic. By a curious coincidence he had run into Adele Koh, Don Dunstan’s second wife, who was also suffering from cancer. They had good conversations and cheered each other up, but this controversial therapy did neither of them any good. Harry’s grandparents had fled the pogroms in the 1850s to settle in New York’s lower east side. Harry wrote a history of the area which became a standard text. He was an integral

there are knives about

255

figure in the vibrant wartime literary movement both in Australia and America—John Reed paid him a retainer as Angry Penguins’ New York agent. To younger generations he was an obscure figure. There was one exception. I introduced him to another and younger Harry—Harold Kraushar, an executive of Bookazine. This man was (highly unusual for a commercial book supplier) very literate. The first thing Harold said was, ‘You’re the famous author’, and this was the most wonderful moralebooster for Harry R. For a time the two men became good friends but finally fell out due to Harry’s jealousy of Harold’s girlfriends. ‘He can do it and I can’t,’ Harry said bitterly. Barrie had always possessed a curious need for illness. Over the years I must have rung his office hundreds of times to say he would not be in that day, or would not be in until the afternoon. He ran his library department as if it were his own business. He was so good at his job—which essentially consisted of liaising between the state’s municipalities and the appropriate state government department—that he got away with the most unconventional working pattern, but he actually worked very hard. Now he had cancer a new pattern emerged. When he was in remission, as he was now with me in New York, he would develop another affliction which was almost certainly psychosomatic. One Sunday morning he crawled out of bed and said his lower back was so excruciatingly painful he could not walk. I would have to find him a doctor. I rang various book people who lived in the area and they all told me to take him to St Vincent’s emergency. Barrie refused—a doctor must come to him. I made further calls to a New York woman I had met in Melbourne. She knew her way round. Two doctors would

256

Art & Life

telephone me: one a young orthopaedic surgeon, the other an elderly retiree. The orthopaedics man rang to tell me he would fly his own plane from Boston! We settled for the retiree who lived further up Manhattan. He arrived, this doddery old man, carrying his medical instruments in a brown paper bag (less likely to be mugged and robbed, he told us). After examining Barrie he fished out a huge injection and told him to slip down his pyjama pants. The old doctor’s hands were shaking and I had to look the other way. I don’t know if it was the injection or Barrie’s psyche, but he ceased to complain about his back. The old doctor refused a fee, he was only too happy to oblige a traveller in distress. Barrie was anxious to explore literary New England so we took a bus to Boston and rented a car. We stayed at the Harvard Motor Inn at Cambridge, which had been my resting place in my earlier days of book buying from Irwin Miller. I knew the area well and we visited my old haunts which included the historic town of Concord. This is Thoreau country with Walden Pond, and we went for long walks around the pond and visited his cottage. We went into Boston proper several times, and one day lunched with Philip McNiff, chief of the Boston Public Library. Barrie and I had met him in Australia and I had, for several years, been given an open-ended contract to supply the BPL with Australian books. I had an annual budget of US$50,000 and made the selection myself. Irwin Miller’s wholesale book distribution business had failed, and he was now distributing high quality cards, calendars, diaries and general art material to book and gift shops in the beautiful villages of New Hampshire, Rhode

there are knives about

257

Island, Vermont and Maine. Irwin was then in and around Damarascotta in Maine and we drove up there to meet him. The coastline was marvellous—rugged and rocky with long estuaries stretching in from the ocean. Barrie relaxed, ceased attacking me and really enjoyed himself. He liked Irwin and thanked him for being so good to me over the years we had traded together. He was delighted when Irwin confessed that he would only consent to do business with nice people in the prettiest villages. He told Irwin he was in remission from cancer and Irwin told us that his son David was in remission from leukaemia. We flew home via Los Angeles, saw the Hollywood Moras, and drove out across a lunar landscape to what is literally an oasis, Palm Springs. I drove into an old-established and rather grand hotel and when I stopped at the entrance a tanned, handsome, sports-clothed young man, who was really a hotel porter, said, ‘Hi guys, allow me to take care of your car.’ All this entranced Barrie—particularly the ‘Hi guys’, which apparently he had not heard before. I commenced this account of our American trip by describing it as fraught with tension. Yet in recalling it in greater detail, we certainly enjoyed many moments together. It marked, nevertheless, the beginning of the end of our relationship and remains etched in my mind for that reason. Barrie made his announcement after our return from the funeral of Alan Swinburne. He no longer wished to live with me. At least he said we should separate for six months. (Is this not a common obfuscation when one partner in a longstanding relationship wishes to end it permanently? It is called letting you down ‘gently’.) All this he shouted at me from the

258

Art & Life

other side of the Eastend showroom. (Eastend had by now purchased a terrace house at 13 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy.) It had become clear to me already—at a wake we held in the pub over the road—that Alan’s death had affected him deeply. It was not, I think, grief for Alan but an intimation of his own mortality. Alan was one of Australia’s most extraordinary personalities. He was as infamous as he was famous. His background was grand; he was the only child of an industrialist of considerable wealth. He was a flamboyant homosexual who dared to speak the names of his passionate loves even while still at school. Any Melbourne person (or, for that matter, anyone from anywhere else in the country) of any sophistication was aware of his existence. If one chose not to know him, that was another question. I was not close to him until towards the end of his life when, by contrast to his wild days, he had transformed himself into a saint-like person. This metamorphosis of character was, he claimed, due to acceptance of Buddhist philosophy. Yet there was another trigger to Barrie’s ultimatum. He had been offered the Order of Australia some weeks before we left for America. He had always opposed public honours and asked if I thought he should accept. Knowing how important public recognition had become for him, I said yes. I asked him why he had been offered this honour and he told me that it was for services to the arts. He did not show me the citation (if that is the correct word) and I did not ask to see it. I said I would give a drinks party on the day of the announcement (Australia Day 1983) and asked him to draw up a guest list. When he gave it to me I was astonished to find it contained 150 names. There were people we scarcely knew. Many were among those he once would have scornfully described as ‘the counts and countesses of Toorak’.

there are knives about

259

I spoke rather sharply telling him I could not afford such a party, apart from the fact that these numbers would not fit into the flat above Eastend. I asked for a modified list which was not forthcoming. I then culled his list and sent out the invitations. It seemed that Barrie was devastated after he believed I had given up on the reception to honour his Order of Australia. Stephen Murray-Smith had told him of his and Nita’s invitation and invited both of us to dinner afterwards at the Society. On the day of the party the newspapers announced that Barrett Reid had been awarded the Order of Australia for ‘services to librarianship’. There had not been one librarian on his guest list. At 8 a.m. I got on the phone and invited those librarians who had assisted him in his pioneering work of establishing a major network of public libraries. I did not go to the dinner and pleaded illness to the Murray-Smiths. I spent the following year living alone at Heide and Barrie occupied our home at St Andrews. Eventually he asked if I would allow him to live alone at Heide. I agreed. In terms of John’s and Sunday’s wills (which were identical) we had inherited the house jointly for life. Charlie (the first labrador named Charlie) lived with Barrie and I had a kind of custody. He would come to me at weekends when I was not travelling interstate on business. For a time we remained friends. Then he changed the locks on the doors so I could not—as had been agreed—live in the house while he travelled. Finally it was I who ended all contact.

TWENTY-ON E Hear the Echoes Returning

of June 1987, after more than twenty years in the business, I effectively ended my life as a bookseller. I was fifty-four and in excellent health. But despite a settlement from Neil Hudson, who was continuing the business that exists to this day, I still needed to earn a living. Due to a certain impracticality in my character I never gave thought to the obvious fact that all my material needs had been met by the business. Now I was on my own, and getting out meant a big reduction in income. Why did I do it? I needed a change from what had become a chore. Supplying books to public libraries had become a souldestroying, routine, mechanical business. So exhausted was I by the end of the day that I was too tired to read a book! As an adjunct to book supply we were importing high quality art cards, calendars and diaries which we sold to bookshops and gift shops. We had found these products in the Greenwich Village shops which surrounded the Bookazine warehouse. AT THE END

hear the echoes returning

261

The inspiration actually came from Barrie, who had had time to explore the area while I was working. I retained some of these lines and wholesaled them around the country. I was, essentially, following in the footstops of my original Boston book supplier, Irwin Miller. He was a good businessman, I reasoned, and this would be an excellent way to earn a living in a manner less arduous than lugging books around. I had, for several years, owned a half-hectare of land overlooking the Yarra Valley and now was ready again to commission Alex Selenitsch to design a house, this time for me alone. Needless to say it was to be modest in scale and cost compared to the phoenix of Greenhill 2. Despite the fact that I was the sole provider for repayment of the mortgage, the property was in Barrie’s name and he gave me nothing from the proceeds. I have acknowledged my impracticality. I was also naive. It simply never occurred to me to insist on my name being party to the title. I believe that Barrie felt he could get away with this exploitation of me since the moral example of John and Sunday no longer influenced our lives. It may be of interest to relate a story behind the initial purchase of this land. A year or two earlier I visited England during Eastend’s short summer break. I paid for the land the day before I left. On my second day in London I visited Martyn Goff’s bookshop, specialising in biography and autobiography, situated in the refurbished Covent Garden complex. It was managed by his partner Rubio Lindros. Downstairs was a kind of cloakroom and a few shelves of supposedly unimportant sale books which—since the area was unattended—could be spared if shop-lifted.

262

Art & Life

Almost without conscious thought of what I was selecting I took down a book. It was Martin Boyd’s first autobiography, A Single Flame (Cresset Press, 1939). At least in Australia it was a collector’s item. The price was 75p. I opened it at random and read, ‘I remember Yarra Glen and the Christmas Hills as a place of perpetual sunlight—sunlight on the distant hills, filtering through the vines and nectarine trees. The country was beautiful in itself, and my imagination clothed it with poetic significance. More than this, the landscape and the friendly people, though delightful, were merely the prelude to a world that for me was full of hope.’ I took this as an omen, and Boyd’s lyrical description of my beautiful surroundings enraptured me and filled me with a sense of sublime optimism. (I am borrowing the romantic language of Uncle Martin.) John and Sunday had gone forever. Barrie had removed himself physically and spiritually, but, I felt, I still had a future in this silvan landscape. In the event the following six years became the worst of times. I believe the beauty of my surroundings saved my sanity. I moved into my tiny grey-stained timber and glass house in the autumn of 1990. It was situated on the final ridge of the range and overlooked the vineyards of the Yarra Valley. The village of Yarra Glen was just out of sight, a little to the south below. The garden area I had cleared and tiered to several levels, which were connected by broad steps I constructed myself. The view was spectacular but not overpowering. A deep, broad, almost constantly green basin stretched perhaps twenty kilometres to the north-east. One could see as far as the cobalt blue mountain ranges known as the Black Spur. One peak was conical like Mount Fuji. Early most mornings a white mist

hear the echoes returning

263

hung below. My environment was totally rural, yet a pleasant fifty-minute drive to central Melbourne. A bob-cat operator dug two depressions on the first and second levels, and these little lakes filled quickly after moderate rain. On the edge of the first level—directly in front of the house—I constructed a deep, rich and loamy garden bed. I used bulldozed topsoil and grew herbs and lavender which I interspersed with native cottage plants. Native vines masked ugly clay cliff faces. I put in all sorts of eucalypts and acacias and most survived. Inside the house the floor was laid with the same bronzyred and green Indian tiles used in Greenhill 2. Long, pale fawn blinds screened the glass walls. Essentially the cottage consisted of one large room which included an interior alcove and fireplace. Once again I had a withdrawing area and an external vista. Over the mantle hung the painting I have loved more than any other, Arthur Boyd’s magnificent Nude over Ram. It was six feet square. A white, nude, arced female figure with flaming red hair hovers over moonlit, white water. It is, I believe, the best of the 1963 ‘Hunters and Lovers’ series and a far greater work than any of the much-vaunted, overpraised and overpriced, ‘Black Man and His Bride’ series. This painting was not then owned by me—later it became part of my settlement—but it was mine for my lifetime. Although none of the Boyd family ever became an intimate friend, my life has been touched by various of its members. As a fourteen-year-old schoolboy at Trinity Grammar School— Martin Boyd’s old school—I read his fictional masterpiece Lucinda Brayford and was deeply moved by this story of an Anglo-Australian family, as I have been to a greater or lesser extent by each of his subsequent novels, variable though they

264

Art & Life

are in quality. I became, as an adult, profoundly Australian (unlike most of the Boyds who pay a kind of lip service to Australia), and the novels of Martin Boyd and Patrick White mean more to me than Proust or Tolstoy. I would not argue their literary merit relative to the French and Russian masters. That is beside the point. Next to the Boyd I hung another moonlit painting, Gray Smith’s Rider at Night. Its qualities, aesthetic and tonal, stood up well to the Boyd. Gray is a much-underrated artist. Feminists, rightly, have taken up the cause of his wife Joy Hester, but John and Sunday believed equally in the talents of both and regarded each as complementary to the other. I found the Smith—along with several others—buckling and weather-damaged in the shed at Heide. One of these paintings, as I write, now hangs in my kitchen in St Kilda Road. It excites more comment than any other work in my possession. A wide-benched kitchen ran across the main room at Yarra Glen. My bedroom was divided by a wall which did not quite reach the high ceiling. Very much a one-person house—but people often stayed and slept on an elegant blue sofa-bed given to me by Marie Davison. A bathroom and little store-room cum laundry formed a separate section. I wrote (and still do) at a long, narrow table I had designed for the northern wall. It and I looked out over the upper pond and the rough track which ended in the Kinglake National Park. The fine art stationery-importing business, which I started immediately after leaving Eastend, began well but diminished with the onset of the economic downturn of the late 1980s (the recession, it was said by Paul Keating, that we had to have). Eventually—not long after I moved into my new house—I went out of business, still holding vast quantities

hear the echoes returning

265

of unreturnable stock on which I had paid substantial and irrecoverable duty. My next venture, with its repercussions on my own psyche, rapidly became a living nightmare. A decade and more later it distresses me to detail these events. With Neil’s blessing—it had been five years since I sold my partnership—I went back into the library supply business. My new business partner, who had worked for a prestigious international firm, found the demands of a small enterprise overwhelming. When we finally shut up shop, he lost a good deal of money and my house was sold by the bank for less than the amount owing on the mortage. One wet, cold morning I woke up feeling so hopeless I contemplated drinking a bottle of whisky. Somehow I roused myself from my misery, showered, dressed, breakfasted, sat down in front of my old portable typewriter and began to write a novel. I had not thought of myself as a writer or artist of any sort. When the publisher Hilary McPhee asked why I had left writing till so late in life, I replied that having known authors and artists, some famous, had led to a kind of inhibition on my part. I saw myself as an appreciator rather than a creator. The loss of income and assets, after a life of comfortable prosperity, was devastating. It certainly caused me fearful anxiety and this was exacerbated by a couple of overseas trips I made on behalf of my doomed business venture. In the meantime I was visiting a psychotherapist, and thus began a long if slow healing process. In May 1992 I attended the American Booksellers’ Association convention in Las Vegas with the hope of picking up material to wholesale in Australia. I then went on to New York to purchase from a book wholesaler, and finally to the

266

Art & Life

UK where it seemed that a library supply business might take over my ailing company. The whole venture was a disaster both in terms of my health and of my business. The temperature in Las Vegas was 48°C and my room at the Circus Circus Hotel inadequately air-conditioned. One had to walk across vast, prison-like, asphalt compounds to reach barrack-like buildings housing the suites. There was not a tree or blade of grass in this Godforsaken town. I would stand in the blazing sun, my head aching, waiting for the shuttle bus to the convention centre. I tried—and failed—to pick up agencies. In the evenings it was impossible to escape the racket of gaming machines. The centre of town was one giant labyrinth of gambling: one vast, seemingly contiguous building, which attempted to avoid the need to step out into that hell on earth. There was no quiet little bar, coffee shop or restaurant. I could not sleep, despite pills. In New York, inhibited by credit restrictions, I was able to make only the most modest purchases—not anywhere near sufficient to sustain a viable business. I stayed at the then reasonably priced Algonquin Hotel situated in mid-town Manhattan. Here—as I had been a severe claustrophobe from early childhood—I was thankful that it was not necessary for me to use an elevator. Still I could not sleep. One night in desperation I rang the psychotherapist and asked how many sleeping pills were safe. I think he was furious. It was six in the morning in Melbourne. He said four, but take them through the day as well. Nothing worked. Somehow I got through book purchasing but then was unable to fly out for another day. I wandered around Manhattan in a daze and drank excessively to calm my nerves. I could not concentrate on

hear the echoes returning

267

visiting a gallery or reading or doing anything productive. There was something wrong with my lips and mouth which was later diagnosed as chickenpox. How could I have contracted it? I blamed the sheets at the Circus Circus Hotel. Later I fictionalised this unhappy time. I arrived early one morning in England at Gatwick Airport, a total wreck. Obviously picking up my rental car was out of the question. I took a taxi to the pretty village of Mayfield in Kent. (This cost a fortune. It had seemed no distance at all when I drove there on a previous visit.) I booked into the inn and went to bed, but by now was suffering side-effects from too heavy a dose of my tranquillising drug—which produced quite the opposite effect—and I found myself dozing, then leaping out of bed in a somnambulant frenzy. Sister Nan came down and escorted me up to London by train. The Kewleys were in Greece and I stayed at their house in Kentish Town and gradually recovered. The following week I drove to Leeds. The executives had vetoed an involvement in an Australian library supply company. I came home defeated. I suffered several such relatively short nervous breakdowns in those years, though this was the worst. They were so painful— far, far worse than physical pain—that I cannot comprehend how anyone can suffer such an ordeal for months, even years, on end and go on living. Finally, however supportive your friends are and, indeed, how skilled your therapist is, you have somehow to cure yourself. Michael Craig has suffered intermittent depression all his life. He tells me the only amelioration is work. I believe he is right although I am victim to anxiety rather than depression. I had started writing after having therapy. For three days

268

Art & Life

a week I free-associated in the classical Freudian manner. Driving home after a session I would ponder the words and phrases I had used. Then I became interested in the use and definition of language in a way I had not experienced before. The craft of writing, I discovered, lies in harnessing a stream of consciousness which can then be shaped into a literary form. I started writing in 1990 and have not stopped. I feel distinctly uneasy if—metaphorically—I do not put pen to paper—even for one day. I have lost time to make up. I have never, seriously, suffered writer’s block. In the early days when the going was tough I would sit down and, if necessary, write gibberish until order emerged from chaos. My feeling for language is, I believe, inherited from my mother. My style has been influenced by John Reed and, to a lesser extent, Barrie. And yet John (in his published letters) consistently denigrates his own literary ability, and Barrie thought of himself as a poet rather than prose stylist. He has, however, written superb prose—most notably his essay on the Reeds published in the Hayward Gallery London Angry Penguins exhibition catalogue of 1988. Despite my battle to keep body and soul together I did have times of intense happiness in my rural environment. A neighbour, Peg Tinsley, living in her mud-brick house at the end of the track, became a good friend and we visited each other, at least briefly, most days. She was, and is, a woman of wit and style and we supported each other in (for her as well as me) troubled times. The Sussexes, Marianne, an artist, and Ron, a retired professor of French, were cultivated neighbours who lived along the track in a charming house which reflected the passions of both of them. The Grand Hotel—which is very grand indeed—in Yarra Glen became my watering hole. When Nan (who does not

hear the echoes returning

269

appreciate the necessity for work) arrived from London to stay for some months, the Grand Hotel proprietors, John and Ann Lithgow, gave me a little room in which to write because working at home had become an impossibility. I entertained friends frequently, both local and from Melbourne. Charlie the second and I went for long rambles through the bush. Our favourite walk was a narrow track down into the valley, and the tough but exhilarating climb back to the top. On fine days we would have a picnic lunch, often on the banks of the incongruously named ‘Lake Windermere’, pretty as any Monet waterlily painting, situated directly opposite my cottage. Windermere was a 140-year-old property that still had the remains of croquet lawns. Once a guest house, it had been destroyed by fire almost a century ago, but roses still grew wild and in August golden daffodils cascaded down the green sloping sward between the walled gardens and the lake. Finally the bank sold the house and I left in April 1996. I was helped by Peter Hobb. Charlie squeezed into the last corner of the tail-gate. Good neighbour Peg kissed me farewell. I took one last look at the template of Ruth Cowen’s heart-shaped tears, which laced the top of the concrete tank, downed a stiff whisky and drove off, guiding a pantechnicon across the back tracks of south-central Victoria. Ten kilometres along the romantic Butterman’s Track we passed Greenhill. I drove slowly around the land, which was flanked by sixty river red gums I had planted decades earlier. Farmer friend Ken Sharrock and I had dug them out of an island in the Goulburn River. I wept as far as the Hume Highway.

TWENTY-TW O Day Caught by the Dark

is the only person I have known who can be compared with John and Sunday in her concern for and generosity to others. She and her husband, John Loder, have both suffered ill health since childhood, and this early affliction seems to have spurred them on to a creative life and a generous compassion for others. Due to Maria’s intervention I lived for three months in her friend’s country house at Macedon. It was a freezing winter on the mountain but the house was well heated. Charlie and I took long rambling walks around this antipodean reproduction of an English county. At the gates of almost every grand estate was the sign HAZCHEM, and I thought what a nice name that was for a country property. What would Robin Boyd have said? Mount Macedon brought back happy memories of a holiday when I was a small child. The country had been in the grip of an infantile paralysis (polio) epidemic: the relative isolation MY FRIEND MARIA PRENDERGAST

day caught by the dark

271

of Macedon was thought to be safer than Melbourne, and I think my red-haired mother was delighted to substitute the mountains for the beach. I was pleased to see that the rambling guest house (then called the Bungalow) was still there, and although now a private house, looking much the same. I recalled a day when the spinster sisters who ran the guest house provided us with a picnic lunch to take to the memorial cross at the top of the mountain. I have a distinct memory of my mother asking when the hamper would be ready and one of the women replying, ‘It’s ready when you are’. Aged six it seemed to me that this was astonishingly clever repartee. I loved adult talk. At Macedon I continued to write fiction. When I went to Melbourne, usually for a couple of days a week, I stayed with my friend Jack Ward. I supplemented a pension by distributing Maria’s annual Arts Diary and by selling Eastend children’s books into private schools. I frequently visited Maria and John at Glenluce and met new and interesting people at their lunches and dinners. Sometimes they would give a lunch for a hundred or more. They were extraordinarily well organised and worked well and seemingly effortlessly together. They employed minimal help and sometimes none at all. They lived forty-five minutes’ drive away, and if I went for dinner I usually stayed the night. This was how I got to know John Ponder in his last years. I had no direct link with Barrie but was aware that his condition was deteriorating and realised intuitively that his life was coming to an end. This feeling was confirmed by Nadine Amadio who flew down from Sydney to farewell him. I was really broken up when she told me that Barrie had said the cancer had metastasised to his lungs and brain. He had said, ‘It’s not the lungs, it’s the brain. What am I without my mind?’

272

Art & Life

An Age journalist interviewed him at the Austin Hospital. I never found out precisely why he was there, because his condition was beyond treatment. He was in a large, open, public ward which he would have hated. He raved on about how important he was. She should not have published her almost full-page piece in the Age. She also played a recorded interview with him on her ABC program. I never heard it but Charles Osborne told me it should not have been broadcast. In the last few months I wrote Barrie several letters, as if we were not estranged but, for some reason, necessarily separated at opposite ends of the earth. He did not reply, nor did I expect him to; but these were the letters I found when I entered the house three years after his death, with photographs of me bundled together in the top draw of his desk. Two weeks before he died I wrote his obituary. I learned of his death from Joan Grant, who rang me early one Monday morning. His friend, the poet Michael Dugan, had written an obituary for him in the Age. He had died a little after midnight the previous Sunday, 6 August, and nobody had bothered to tell me.

TWENTY-THR E E Of Course There Is No Home

I FELT A mixture of grief and relief. His life had become insupportable. I telephoned Sunday’s trustee and asked for the keys to Heide. I was refused entry. The house, he informed me, had been ‘sealed’. My obituary was published in the Australian on the day of his funeral. It moved some and scandalised others. Thus began my new career. It does not surprise me that it started with Barrie. The most significant aspects of my life always did. Maria Prendergast’s concern for my welfare seemed limitless. It was only possible for me to stay at Macedon for three months. Ah, but another house had become available outside the village of Newstead, about twenty kilometres from Castlemaine. It belonged to John Loder’s former wife Elizabeth, who lived mainly in Melbourne. The trustees of Barrie’s estate and Sunday’s estate were (on Barrie’s instructions) deliberately interlocked and all were obdurate in refusing me entry to the old Heide house. My

274

Art & Life

legal advice was that if I could somehow break into Heide with Sunday’s will at hand it would be difficult for the police to evict me. Fighter though I am (it would be more accurate to say fighter I have become), I could not bring myself to do this. My situation seemed hopeless until Henry von Bibra, lawyer and mediator, took on my case on a pro bono basis. He was, of course, introduced by Maria. Henry was John Reed’s nephew, and I think was strongly motivated to ensure that John’s wishes were respected. I drove Henry to distraction. He thought of me as a loose cannon. I would fire off faxes to various parties to the dispute which (true though they might have been) could have been construed as libellous. I did achieve at least one important victory on my own behalf. A supreme court appeals judge was both a member of the Heide board and a trustee to Sunday’s estate. Since Sunday had left me her home until my death and the Heide board was denying her bequest, there existed a clear conflict of interest. I visited the judge in his elegant chambers with the express purpose of pointing this out to him. To his credit he picked up the phone and resigned the trusteeship before I left his office. The good judge was replaced by solicitor Bill Forrest, who was determined to make up his own mind and not be pushed around by anyone. After almost interminable effort expended by Henry, assisted by the fair-minded reasonableness of Bill Forrest, we warring parties agreed upon a settlement. Aged sixty-four, in 1996 I embarked on a new career as a freelance journalist. I packed away my fiction and moved back to Melbourne determined to become a chronicler of the lives of the recently departed. Since I had known a lot of

of course there is n o home

275

people of achievement considerably older than myself, they were falling off the tree at an alarming rate. I seemed to be the right person at the right time, as obituaries increasingly gained space in the daily press. This new development in Australian and overseas newspapers has been chronicled by the Adelaide academic Nigel Starck, who views it as the most important journalistic development in half a century. Starck’s thesis is entitled Revival of a Dying Art. After I had become the most prolific obituarist in Australia Nigel interviewed me for this thesis. Subsequently we became good friends. He achieved a certain fame after his keynote address to the Great Obituarists’ International Convention in New Mexico in 2002. The New Yorker turned the journalistic and literary eyes of the world on Nigel and on the conference after the magazine published an amusing five-page article on the conference by Mark Singer. I was fortunate in finding an inexpensive little flat in an old St Kilda Road block situated directly opposite the Toorak Road junction. The flat actually faced Queens Lane, a kind of delivery conduit serving both St Kilda and Queens Roads. The postcode was Melbourne 3004, and I was pleased to eschew a suburban address. I am neither a South Yarra nor an Albert Park type, and like the urbanity, even the high rise, of 3004. The block is partly commercial and partly residential. After four years I moved into a very large front flat overlooking St Kilda Road. Then I was able to house my furniture, together with other pieces I finally inherited from Heide. I can easily accommodate a hundred people for drinks and thirty or so for a buffet meal, and it gives me pleasure to entertain as I have done most of my life. One of my early obituaries was of the artist Rosemary Ryan. I had first met her, and her film producer husband

276

Art & Life

Patrick, with Alan Swinburne. Pat was the very proud nephew of Irish peers and one of Australia’s baronesses, Maie, Lady Casey. Rosemary was a kind of playful snob, but her satire was obliquely directed against the privileged class to which she belonged. After Pat’s death she lived close to me in South Yarra and was one of the first locals to welcome me back from the bush. ‘Thank God you’ve returned to SE2.’ (This was the traditional postcode for Toorak so it was rather stretching the boundaries to include me.) In any case it was thirty-five years since I had lived in the general area. I have not spent my short if intense writing career dealing solely with the lives of those recently departed. Once I started in journalism all sorts of other opportunities opened up. When I returned to Melbourne I established a pattern of walking Charlie through the grounds of Melbourne University, swimming at the Beaurepaire pool and breakfasting at the Blue Zone café attached to the union building. While swimming I met a guy with the improbable name of Simon Northeast. Here was a man who entered the practice of law with the express purpose of subverting its evasions, corruption and punitive sentencing. He and I concocted a little story about his life and work which was published in one of the weekend magazines. It was headed by a colour picture of a bewigged Simon driving his motorbike up to Government House, where he received a citation from the Law Institute for his pro bono work. I have been extremely fortunate in knowing Henry von Bibra and Simon Northeast, whose expertise on my behalf has been remarkable. Not so any other solicitor I have ever employed. The incompetence I have encountered is breathtaking. If my travel agents screwed up one-tenth of the time

of course there is n o home

277

one prestigious firm I know does, they would be out of business and I in Patagonia. If doctors made such endless, relentless mistakes most of their patients would die. I made two good friends at the Blue Zone café and we are still breakfasting together after five years. James Hale, fifty-ish, is in charge of computers for the arts faculty. Michael Warner, forty-ish, is in charge of its publications. Both are cognisant of this postmodern world and its sometimes baffling culture, and I rely on them to keep me abreast of the fascinating times in which we live. At an opening at Willie Mora’s gallery I met a phenomenal fellow, Dr Mike Georgeff, descendant of Bulgarian gypsies and one of Australia’s most distinguished intellects. The Bulletin in a feature, ‘50 Top Human Assets’, described him as ‘a world leader who passed up fame and fortune in Silicon Valley to drag Australia kicking and screaming into the modern world’. Mike, who presents himself with dramatic intensity, told me of his family background. The gypsy element was strong. His father Nick, a doctor, rejected the company of professional colleagues and the bourgeoisie in favour of crims. Mike told me he was off to chair the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence in London and Sofia. He had never been to Bulgaria before and regretted his lack of knowledge of that country. I told him of my ‘Bulgarian’ sister and her unusual knowledge of the country’s history and culture, and he asked if he might visit her in London en route to Sofia. They spent several hours together, and I think each learned something from the other. Since I am still completing my education, artificial intelligence has presented an enormous challenge. I interviewed Mike over a splendid lunch which commenced with martinis.

278

Art & Life

He possesses (in Evelyn Waugh’s words) a ccccc-reamy charm. He has a PhD in aeronautical engineering from the Imperial College in London. Chance has been the great thing in Mike’s life. He became fascinated with philosophy after purchasing a battered paperback by Ludwig Wittgenstein at South Kensington tube station. As a consequence he studied sociolinguistic philosophy. He met and married his wife Diana and they returned to Australia. He ‘fell’ into artificial intelligence at a Canberra conference in 1975. A highly influential group of the world’s top computer specialists, engineers, philosophers and linguists attended and his various disciplines coalesced in a common focus. NASA headhunted him and he worked at Stanford University on the prevention of unforeseen accidents associated with space-shuttle missions. John Button (as industries minister) visited Mike at Stanford and persuaded him to return home after a decade in the USA to head the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute in Melbourne. I wrote a long article on him but nobody wanted it! Is he the most intelligent person I have ever met? I have not yet come to grips with his mind. The gypsy charm and fey fantasy are altogether another thing, however. He told me, ‘My father relished the company of thieves. My elder daughter is a stand-up magician. My sweet Sophia, aged seven, is, in true Georgeffian tradition, a natural gypsy. Sophia likes nothing better than to sit under a tree musing over life, love and philosophy and indulging in cryptic fantasy.’ For some reason the AAII in Melbourne closed and the Georgeffs are back at Stanford. I miss my new friend.

of course there is n o home

279

Friday 17 October 2003 Today I attended Jim Cairns’s State funeral. It was held in, of all places, St John’s, Toorak. Apparently the vicar had been a keen supporter in the moratorium days. Outside the church an elegantly suited man tapped me on the shoulder. It was Mike Georgeff, returned from America. Labor turned out in force for Jim. The exception was the loner Keating. Gough and Margaret (taller than ever—are not people supposed to shrink as they age?), Bob without Blanche (he looks quite different these days, shifty!). The service was orthodox Christian which seemed odd for Jim. Tom Uren delivered the principal eulogy in a fine, charming, characteristically old-Labor manner. I took exception, however, to his references to Juni Morosi. He portrayed her as a kind of siren who had entrapped an innocent man and destroyed him politically. Juni, needless to say, was not present. (Did Tom mark optional cuts in his script?) ‘He just wouldn’t listen to what people told him about her,’ Tom said. It was the old male chauvinist trick of blaming the woman. In my estimation Cairns, Whitlam, et al. selfdestructed due to political incompetence. Living in the middle of Melbourne full time has meant a more active social life, particularly with friends who live nearby. The past seven years have been full of quiet event and hard work. What have I regretted? I miss my little house at Yarra Glen and the beautiful misty valley below and the black-blue mountains across the valley. I have become much closer to Jack Ward, whom I have known for forty years. He is a man of shining integrity

280

Art & Life

and has an interesting history. He was born and bred in Williamstown—that Melbourne suburb which truly treasures its own identity—and which produces men and women of achievement. In the 1930s he worked in the peace movement with Christians and communists, and became a conscientious objector. Jack has worked—slaved, one might say—on reclaiming land at Hurstbridge. Over two decades he has planted natives on a fairly barren hillside and has given the reservation to the Nillumbik (ex-Eltham) Shire. There will never be a building on this land but people may tread lightly over its surface. I have created a fictional character from Jack. He becomes the only really sane person in the novel. He has read it and is not entirely displeased. One day early on in January 2002, my friend Joan Grant came to lunch. Three days later Bruce telephoned to tell me that she was desperately ill with meningococcal infection, unconscious, and on every support system available at the Alfred Hospital— heart, lungs and kidneys. I felt breathless with shock, as if I had been hit in the stomach. Bruce said the health department wished to speak to me and gave me their number. Five minutes later John Button rang (Bruce and Joan had divorced, remained friends, and now Joan and John are an item) also to tell me about Joan. He had been prescribed the same antibiotic—administered intravenously to Joan—and had turned bright yellow. ‘Even my tears are yellow,’ he told me. Joan was holding her own. Dear Joan, incredibly—perhaps I should say typically— made a total recovery. Henry von Bibra finally secured me a settlement from Heide.

of course there is n o home

281

I received a modest sum of money and the Perceval and Boyd paintings. This relieved a lot of pressure and enabled me to pay debts and to set up my present commodious flat. Henry sent me an invitation to his launch of Viola Tait’s history of Australian pantomime, Dames, Principal Boys and All That, held in the upstairs lobby of Her Majesty’s Theatre. It was the sort of invitation which I would not have been able to accept had I lived in the country but living in town made such occasions possible. This party must have represented Australia’s biggest offstage theatrical event for decades. I secured a glass of real champagne and struggled through about three hundred people (of all ages and sexes) towards the dais at the far end. There was Henry (sporting a huge bow tie), Googie Withers and John McCallum, Lady Tait and Dames Elisabeth Murdoch and Margaret Scott Denton. There was also—dare I say it— waiting in the wings, a real pantomime Dame out of retirement and ready to perform. Henry was a polished chairman and took the opportunity to promote his cause: the restoration of all five of Melbourne’s nineteenth-century theatres. Mike Walsh (who owns Her Majesty’s) apologised for the unseasonable heat (it was April) and informed us that behind the interior wall, in the auditorium and onstage and backstage, was rubble awaiting reconstruction. To turn on the air-conditioners would, he believed, have us all dead next week with legionnaire’s disease: there was much hilarity among the audience. I must say theatricals (like trade unionists) make the best speeches. Quite unlike Heide events with their pomposity, interminable, boring harangues and their tedious acknowledgement of who donated the wine etc. Maggie Denton launched the book with a well-researched

282

Art & Life

appreciation of the history of Aussie panto. John McCallum spoke of his working days in administration with Frank Tait and told tales about the great stars. When Gladys Moncrieff was discharged from hospital after suffering a broken ankle, she was met by the press as if she were a royal personage. The following day the Sun News-Pictorial ran a banner headline: GLADYS MONCRIEFF’S CRUTCH GAILY DECORATED WITH GARDENIAS. Dame Nellie Melba made her first and last appearances in this theatre. When farewelling her audience she proclaimed, ‘I don’t like this rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney. When I return to my native land I like to have a foot in each city’. Whereupon there came an agonised cry from the audience. ‘My God, I live in Albury’. The speeches were followed by a performance from the pantomime dame and her son Dick Whittington (played, of course, by a girl). It was all very British bawdy. ‘Mother, your socks have fallen down’, to which Mother replies, ‘It’s not me socks, it’s me undies. Did I tell you I was going upstairs in a charabanc [an open-topped double-decker bus] and the conductor said, “Pretty ’airy up there, Mum.” I replied, “Wha’ you expeck, fevvers?”’ The audience rocked. Dame Elisabeth squirmed, unamused like Queen Victoria. The ninety-two-year-old Viola Tait made an extemporary speech and told us, ‘This is the happiest day of my life’. Within a year I wrote her obituary. We happily endured the heat and airlessness for an hour and a half until a woman standing close to me executed a good old-fashioned faint. We picked her up and Googie graciously offered her chair. Then Googie threw her powerful voice over three hundred people to the bar. ‘A lady has fainted, please may we have a glass of water?’ It was handed from person

of course there is n o home

283

to person until it reached Googie, who administered it to the woman in distress. Henry had his first drink for the evening and looked flushed with well-earned success. Many people, myself included, headed for the stairs. Dame Elisabeth hobbled through the crowds occasionally pausing to acknowledge friends. I helped her downstairs. Outside on the street she rested on a seat while waiting for her chauffeur. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she sighed. It was, as Sandy Stone might say, a thoroughly nice night’s entertainment.

TWENTY-FO U R H o w T i m e Ta m e s Things

IN JUNE 2000 the London dealer Angela Neville sold my Arthur

Boyd, Nude over Ram. It didn’t fetch a great price. It will be worth millions when I am dead and gone. The Melbourne University temporary appointments board provided me with two civil—and civilised—engineering students, and they helped me create a pleasant living environment from a dank, depressing mess in my new apartment. The boys flew around ripping up mouldy carpet and removing crazy concertina doors which divided the rooms. They did everything that a skilled tradesman would do. Because I pay a very reasonable rent the agents expected me to cover the cost of all renovations, even creating a kitchen from scratch. Another friend and neighbour is Rachelle King, who possesses a characteristically Jewish creativity. Her prototypical knitting is represented in the National Gallery of Victoria and other public collections. She makes a living from creating exquisite

how time tames things

285

garments designed for the rich and famous. I inherited from Ruth Cowen a ravishing pullover Rachelle designed with a kaleidoscope theme (one of Ruth’s fascinations). It hangs in my study as a work of art. Rachelle is less influenced by prevailing fashion than anyone I have ever known. She knows precisely what she likes in art, literature, film, television and theatre, and this has nothing to do with established reputation. Sometimes we agree, but if not she produces the most cogent reasons for her opinions and is always most convincing. When I tell her how Jewish she is, she professes not to know what I mean. In the early days of his career Barrie and I got to know the playwright David Williamson. We first met him with Ian Turner—always a cultural facilitator—who believed he had discovered a great contemporary social commentator. David, he believed, could show Australians who and what we are with sharp, penetrative and caustic wit. Williamson, who started with the small experimental Carlton theatres, La Mama and the Pram Factory in the 1960s, progressed to considerable commercial success with national tours for the J. C. Williamson network. Several of his plays reached London, although they met with less critical acclaim than he had enjoyed back home. Films were made from The Club and Don’s Party, and this introduced his work to a mass market. In the late 1970s I recall seeing What If You Died Tomorrow and believing it was a fine, original and perceptive play. After that it seems the rot set in. In 2001 Jack Ward and I went to see Up For Grabs. After twenty minutes or so Jack wanted to leave. I said no, we must see it out. I was not bored but, sadly, this was a comedy without depth of characterisation or truth in its philosophical implications.

286

Art & Life

The story concerns a group of people involved in an arcane psychological game-playing ritual prior to the $2 million sale of a Brett Whiteley painting. The cast of characters consists of the dealer, possible purchasers, a couple of art advisers and— for want of a more meaningful description because he serves no useful purpose—a husband. All are cynical beyond belief. One character, a corporation art adviser, is supposed to be the cynical one, but since they are all tarred with the same brush any dramatic emphasis between them is obscured. Watching Up For Grabs I came to the conclusion that Williamson had pushed his art into the dramatic equivalent of cartoon. Director Gail Edwards seemed to recognise this. She has the cast for the most part standing rigidly to attention like cardboard cut-outs. What a gift to Williamson is the mobile phone. The characters either declaim to the audience or talk on the phone to a character, just visible, but sitting in darkness on another section of a mobile stage. It is mostly monologue. Has Williamson capitalised on his weakness for dialogue? His characters do not connect. (A playwright who can’t write dialogue? Well, his friend and mine, Cliff Pugh, was a colourblind painter.) My general hypothesis—as if David knew what certain members of his audience might say—was challenged by his program notes. He is not, he claims, a caricaturist, but a satirist. He believes, God bless him, that he creates well-rounded characters! Good and bad is mixed in them, and finally, because he is an optimist, his characters’ goodness is paramount. Why does any of this matter? I think it does in terms of the wider culture. Williamson purports to be a serious writer. He wishes to read laudatory essays by intellectual critics while being chauffeured to the bank. Williamson is a knockabout, populist crowd-pleaser. Fair enough, but there is a certain

how time tames things

287

affectation in his work and in other Australian imaginative writing. Entertainment as such—what is known as ‘good theatre’—is seen as infra dig. Williamson is desperate for his work to be received as high art. Manifestly it is not. He could be described as the Jilly Cooper of Australian drama. Yet Jilly in her unpretentious way writes with more serious intent. Indeed, I have argued—with present-day literary standards all over the shop—her suitability for inclusion in the Booker Prize. I discussed all this with Bruce Grant who says the trouble with Williamson is his annual grab for the latest buzz theme. He does not give himself time to reflect, Bruce says, for his art to mature. He is on the latest commercial bandwagon and is as materialistic as any of his horrible characters. I was interested in Michael Warner’s views. He enjoyed Up For Grabs. At his age (just forty) he exemplifies my proposition that one can enjoy Williamson without investing his art with undue cultural significance. If we denigrate his art for what it is not, Michael argues, then this is a reflection on us rather than him. Perhaps, but that is not what Williamson yearns for, and the absence of—generally—serious response exacerbates his bitterness and, subsequently, his artistic failure. But then Michael, happily for him, does not carry the baggage of my generation: our disappointment at the disintegration of a once significant artist.

TWENTY-FI V E N o w, O l d E n o u g h , I Find I Know

my rather belated profession as an obituary writer, I have become aware, and highly critical, of hagiography in some writers. A good example is Ray Monks’ biography of Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. It is also evident in the ABC TV series, Australian Dynasties. In my opinion hagiography demeans its subject. I told the truth (as I saw it—and with appropriate evidence) in Barrie’s obituary and this sent me on a path I have endeavoured to follow ever since. I would not write about a person for whom I did not hold a considerable amount of respect. SINCE TAKING UP

When Katharine Hepburn died in 2003 the world’s media showered her with uncritical praise. She was treated as though she had been an unassailable goddess. I wrote letters of protest to the newspapers. I might as well have attacked the Virgin Mary or (as Barry Humphries might say) somebody’s aunty. In my letters I acknowledged, indeed paid tribute to,

n o w, old enough, i find i know

289

Hepburn’s qualities of mind, body and spirit. I went on to declare that these rare attributes did little to redeem her lack of talent. ‘Katharine Hepburn’, I stated, ‘could not act for toffee.’ I am not in the habit of making extreme claims without due evidence. Hepburn had no respect for the art of acting. It ‘is the most minor of gifts’, she told a journalist. ‘Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four’. I recalled Dorothy Parker’s famous aphorism: ‘Miss Hepburn ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B’. All hell broke loose. Every talkback radio program took it up. I remained silent and let them battle it out. There were furious letters to the Age. People do not argue well. All correspondents referred to those qualities to which I had originally paid tribute. They said I underestimated her talent. Yet not one of them produced evidence of any kind. A friend of Jack Ward accused me of ‘insensitivity’. My answer to that is that I would only attack those established figures who are mindlessly accepted by the public and over-hyped by an uncritical media. In 2002 I took a call from Suzy Baldwin (she of the bowler hat) to say she was looking for hard-hitting, irreverent file obituaries, in the style of the London Daily Telegraph. Did I, Suzy asked, have anyone in mind for a file piece? Preferably someone old. I did. I was hopping mad with the portrait painter Sir William Dargie who, aged ninety, had recently appeared on television decrying the influence of public gallery curators. These people, he complained indignantly, were trying to dictate the direction of present-day art. A bit rich, I thought, for one who for half a century promoted (as a teacher) or funded (as

290

Art & Life

an arts bureaucrat) only the realist work of which he was himself a practitioner. He caused untold misery to talented contemporary artists. ‘A good portrait painter never paints character’, he said. Dargie assiduously cultivated the conservative art establishment of the 1940s and 1950s. He pursued friendships with the board members of the various state galleries—reactionaries to a man. (There were no women members despite a multitude of women artists.) He sucked up to Prime Minister Menzies. He won the Archibald Prize eight times in all and six times in ten years. His work was wooden and lifeless, and his success due to outrageous cronyism which bordered on corruption. I amused myself by reporting on his relationship with Hal Porter. ‘He changed my life and I changed his,’ Dargie said. I wrote, ‘Dargie was a straight up and down, plump and plain traditionalist; Porter was a handsome, theatrical, homosexual writer of baroque prose and poetry, known at that time as Susie. It would be interesting to know more about this lifeenhancing relationship, but each man went to the grave closely guarding his secrets.’ Dargie died about a year later. At Nigel Starck’s suggestion—almost at his insistence, he is a master of cajolery—I attended the fifth Great Obituarists’ International Convention in June 2003 in Las Vegas, New Mexico. (This was not the gambling joint in which I suffered my nervous breakdown.) In the meantime he put me in touch with the convenor, a woman named Carolyn Gilbert. Bill Jansz had described this lady in the New Yorker as, ‘a composite of my high school English teachers—a neatly groomed 61-yearold woman with big glasses, wavy auburn hair, a pearly North Texan drawl and a howdy-do affability’. Carolyn asked me to participate and to send her a curriculum vitae. With two such

n o w, old enough, i find i know

291

stars running the show how could I resist her kind invitation? My travel agent secured me a round-the-world air ticket at a rock bottom price and I took off for London—or, to be more precise, for my usual sojourn at Stourhead, Wiltshire. I reached the Spread Eagle Inn in fine form at about noon having—as is my wont—driven slowly through dreamy westcountry villages. How long was it since I was here in summer? Ages. The sun shone, everything sparkled and the smell of honeysuckle hung in the air. Jet lag I may have avoided, but a cheval mirror in my room revealed a crumpled tracksuit, an incipient beard which made me look like an ancient freedom fighter, and hair like a collapsed haystack. I was desperate for a drink and for food. Should I go down the way I was? After all, nobody knew me here. I looked at myself again. No, it wouldn’t do, even among the scruffy English. So I showered, shaved and changed into fresh light clothing. After ordering a strong drink in the saloon bar, I stood in front of a board listing luncheon specials. Then I heard a shriek and a woman leaped up and flung her arms around me. I was smothered. Who could it be? It was Fran Awcock, who had just announced her retirement as state librarian. She was there with husband Chris and had, at that very moment, said to their (newly met) English lunching companions, ‘And our friend Philip is always talking about Stourhead and said we must come here’. It was a lovely welcome. Perfectly timed by them and me, and I shed my fatigue with good food, wine and company. I had thought the Awcocks were in France and they thought I was in Melbourne. After a couple of days I went on to the Coopers’. The night of my arrival Jilly was off to the Cheltenham Book Festival to discuss with Joanna Trollope their legitimacy as

292

Art & Life

popular novelists. Early the next morning (before Leo and Jilly were up) I walked to the village newsagency and bought the Independent and the Guardian. To my delight Jilly had got major publicity and beautiful pictures in both. She was chuffed because usually the Guardian either bitches about or patronises her. I went on to London to stay with the cousins at Wimbledon and—on my only weekday in London—lunched with Martyn Goff. In 2004 the Americans are eligible to compete in the Booker Prize: a radical departure, so I asked Martyn to please keep me on the invitation list. In Los Angeles I met Neil Hudson and his daughter Camille, present for the American Booksellers’ Association annual convention. We were all booked in at our favourite Del Capri Hotel in Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood. It was a meeting redolent with memory for Neil and me, as we often stayed there when book buying in the early days of our business partnership. The journey to the village in New Mexico took almost all day. I had to fly to Albuquerque via Phoenix, changing planes on the way, and then took a rent-a-car for the last 200 kilometres. And I hadn’t driven on the wrong side of the road for at least ten years. Nige said he couldn’t possibly do it, and neither, said Neil, could he. I was fairly confident. For a totally non-mechanical person I am curiously relaxed behind the wheel of a car. As I set out on the winding freeway I thought of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda who had left Europe for a possible life in Australia. I also thought of Lawrence’s influence on the Heide group. Australia hadn’t worked out for Lawrence, although he did write the fine novel Kangaroo in a matter of weeks. Lawrence and Frieda had then come on here to an artists’

n o w, old enough, i find i know

293

colony near the capital Santa Fe. So had Patrick White in the 1950s. Las Vegas was a ramshackle town. Nige described it as like Port Augusta although not as big or busy. There was a pretty, shady park in the centre and there was the handsome, Victorian red-brick hotel named rather incongruously the Plaza. It was five in the afternoon and I was precisely on time to drink cocktails with the world’s obituary elite. Nige introduced me to Carolyn. I understood her immediately because she reminded me of Dulcie Stretton. Everyone was dressed casually except a pin-stripe suited gent wearing—here in cowboy country—a towering stetson. (They say in Texas, the higher the stetson the fewer the cattle.) It was a kind of double incongruity. It turned out to be Andrew McKie—the wizard obituaries editor (aged a mere thirty-four) of the London Daily Telegraph. When I told him that, apart from the hat, he looked quintessentially Mayfair he replied, ‘Not Mayfair, Soohoo’. He spoke with a Mayfair accent which overlay a cute, slightly Scottish brogue. Certainly I was glad I went to New Mexico but in other ways I felt slightly conned. I swiftly came to the conclusion that American journalism paid less respect to the art of the obituarist than do the Brits or we Australians. The Americans dominated the proceedings by sheer numbers and were exceedingly pleased with themselves. I took part in a panel with Steve Miller, the obituaries editor of the newly established quality broadsheet, the New York Sun, and Alana Baranick of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Carolyn had asked us to talk about ‘sticky issues’ in obituary writing since 9/11. With me it had not been a defining moment. Steve had escaped from his office in the south tower after the north tower was hit. Later when we talked about it

294

Art & Life

he described how he and his colleagues calmly walked down the stairs from the forty-second floor. I found it strange talking to an actual participant. He was very matter-of-fact about it all. He walked home to Brooklyn to assure his wife and baby daughter that he was still alive. I don’t know that any of us stuck too closely to our brief. Steve unashamedly (and why not?) publicised his newspaper which is hoping to rival the New York Times. Alana, a protagonist of the sentimental style of obituary, read us a nice piece about a schoolteacher, ‘whose warm smile lit up a room and made others smile back’. Mindful of my instruction on sticky issues, I said I had written a file obituary on a prominent politician who, I discovered in my research, had sailed close to the wind in illegal activity, not to mention conflict of interest. On the other hand he had done much for his country. Moreover, I knew and (despite everything) liked this gentleman. Should I reveal his dark side? At question time nobody proffered any useful advice, but I was asked how I had dealt with the Bali bombing victims. I had not dealt with it at all, of course, but at least I was able to tell them that major Australian newspapers had covered—in brief—all known victims. What made the conference enjoyable for me were the two Britishers, Tim Bullamore of the Times and Andrew McKie. Tim and I had worked together and spoken often on the phone. These two were true professionals and spoke with great wit and intelligence. Will I go next year? Perhaps. Tim Bullamore is a Liberal Democratic council member of the City of Bath. He has persuaded Carolyn to hold the 2005 conference there. I will certainly attend that one. A half hour’s drive from Stourhead!

Afterword Philip Jones has written his own obituary for publication at home and abroad. His publishers considered it a suitable coda for his autobiography. They also assure the reader that their esteemed author is still very much alive, that he is sound of mind, refreshed (after completing this book) of spirit and as healthy as a young septuagenarian can reasonably expect.

Philip D. E. Jones Born 14 March 1932– Philip Jones commenced his autobiography, Art & Life, with a quotation from his bête noire, Harold Stewart, the man known as the bottom half of Ern Malley. It was, ‘All Australians are anarchists at heart’. Jones’s life was haphazard, no doubt about it. Little was planned ahead. This relative lack of vulgar ambition possessed negative as well as positive characteristics. On the one hand, it decelerated his intellectual maturity; on the other, it granted him a spontaneity that enabled him to grasp opportunities as they presented themselves throughout his life. His anarchic qualities stemmed from childhood, and all his life he regretted the lost opportunities

296

Art & Life

of formal education. He sometimes compensated for this lacuna by paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, ‘My mind has not been contaminated by education’. He also liked to mock academics. Jones’s mother was a Shaw from the north of England who claimed to be related to George Bernard Shaw. She based this kinship on the fact that they both had red hair. The Shaws were distressed, toffee-voiced gentlefolk, and his mother and aunts bequeathed him a certain ineradicable snobbery. Yet class awareness was a matter of amusement rather than conviction. When he told friends he far preferred a witty charwoman to a dull duchess he was fully cognizant of the fact that he was using language and imagery unacceptable in Australia. The Shaws were inclined to be tactless and Jones inherited this unfortunate trait. Paradoxically his socialist principles (which were ingrained in him at an early age by both parents) were powerfully held: fundamentally he believed that everyone was or should be equal. He was always on the side of the workers and single-mindedly supported strikers, convinced always of the justice of their cause. Jones was hopelessly impractical in certain ways and this seemed to be inherent, certainly on his father’s side. An aunt recalled him at age four trying to put on a jumper upside down, inside out and back to front. He was a sentimental and affectionate man. He was a good and loyal friend but sometimes guilty of appalling insensitivity towards those he loved. He recorded several such incidents in his memoirs and his guilt is manifest. Jones told many friends that his life had been marred by anxiety. This affliction came, apparently, from both sides of his family. On (rare) occasions it crippled his life. Otherwise

afterword

297

he was always the cheerful optimist and this appreciation of the marvels of the world remained with him all his life. Another confession was that he battled chronic laziness. He compensated for this by—sometimes—ferocious work, and he habitually allied himself to hard-working achievers. He believed, perhaps naively, he would be energised by these dynamic spirits. At times he was. As a matter of principle he was fiercely anti-religious, while holding the deepest respect for certain individual Christians. Generally though he was most moved by the morality of the old, idealistic commos of his youth. (It should be said that he hated the Americanisation of our language and would never say ‘commie’.) Materially he was generous to a fault, sometimes to his own detriment. He was easily bored and could not tolerate people he considered to be dull. Conversely he was more than usually appreciative of the talents and fine qualities of others. It is a tradition in obituarial writing to say ‘he was not the marrying kind’. Yet he was deeply moved by happy marriages or, for that matter, any lasting and loving union, and enjoyed one such relationship for nearly thirty years. He liked people to be beautiful in looks but considered this to be rather undemocratic in spirit. Like most people he was a mass of contradictions. It can be fairly said that he tried to give more to the world than he took. He drank too much and took this to be the result of his Celtic/Dutch background and temperament. At age seventy he was told by his doctors that his liver was in remarkably good shape. The cause of his death is unknown but is believed to be cardio-vascular in origin.

298

Art & Life

Note from the publisher to be printed after the death of Philip Jones: It is believed that Philip Jones sent this self-obituary to the Guardian in London who guaranteed publication. He also sent it to the Washington Post (where he was known because of his association with the International Society of Obituarists). They were interested (in an abridged form) because Americans like to read of the lives of nonentities. Besides, Australians are popular right now since the tragic loss of 15,000 troops in the war against North Korea. Suzy Baldwin of the Sydney Morning Herald read it and said, ‘I’ll certainly publish it, although since I’ve known him longer than anyone I am aware there’s a lot he is not revealing about himself. I’m sure I’ll have to be really persuasive to have it published in the Age. On the other hand, it is a very Melbourne story.’

299

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following friends, relations and colleagues for sharing their memories, photographs, opinions and corrections specifically for this book and also for their generous friendship: Peter Hobb who knows more about Heide than almost anyone. Also Nadine Amadio, Fran and Chris Awcock, Suzy Baldwin, Tony and Gay Bilson, Janine Burke, Peter and Mary Burns, Leo and Jilly Cooper, Michael Craig, Sylvia Clarke, Neil Clerehan, Russell Drever, Helen Elliott, James Hale, Yvonne Harris, Barry Hill, Neil Hudson, Edmund Jones, David Kewley and Jan Maulden, Denis Kelynack, Rachelle King, Ramona Koval, Philippe Mora, Mirka Mora, Susan McCulloch, Simon Northeast, Nan Nikolova, Mary Nolan, Nita Murray-Smith, Alan Oldfield, Charles Osborne and Ken Thomson, Maria Prendergast, Andrea Stretton, Jean Langley Sinclair, Alex Selenitsch, Ken Sharrock, Jeremy and Shirley Summers, John Sumner, Nigel Starck, Dimitri Theodoratis, Peg Tinsley,

Henry von Bibra,

Kathleen Tobin, Peter Ward and Michael Warner. Rob Spinks—a new friend—gave me a computer which transformed my life. And to the memory of my parents, to John, Sunday and Barrie, and to the late Georges Mora, Ruth Cowen, John Perceval, Jill Summers, Leslie Stack, Stephen Murray Smith, Ian Turner, Neil Douglas, Jim Davenport, John Howcroft, Jenny Jones, Max Harris, Sumner Locke Elliott, Harry Roskolenko, Dulcie Stretton and Marie Dalby Davison. My publisher at Allen & Unwin, Sue Hines, my editors Andrea McNamara and Caroline Williamson, and editorial assistant Megan Doyle have made it all as easy as possible. And to Mirka Mora as one of the last of the few. P. J.

300

Picture Credits ENDPAPERS: from the John and Sunday Reed papers,

PA 00/11, Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria PAGE (ii): full page photograph of Philip Jones

by Nadine Amadio

I l l u s t ra t e d s e c t i o n PAGE 1: from the author’s private collection PAGE 2: from the author’s private collection PAGE 3: from the John and Sunday Reed papers, PA 00/11,

Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria PAGE 4: from the John and Sunday Reed papers PAGE 5: from the John and Sunday Reed papers PAGE 6: from the John and Sunday Reed papers,

photograph of Heide II by Wolfgang Sievers PAGE 7: from the John and Sunday Reed papers,

photograph by Nadine Amadio PAGE 8: from the John and Sunday Reed papers (top),

from the author’s private collection (bottom)

301

Chapter title credits All chapter titles are lines from Barrett Reid’s collection of poetry Making Country, published by Angus & Robertson in 1995. CHAPTER 1: from ‘A long look out’, page 1 CHAPTER 2: from ‘Sailing’, page 85 CHAPTER 3: from ‘At Gournea’, page 29 CHAPTER 4: from ‘Regarding You’, page 101 CHAPTER 5: from ‘Sailing’, page 85 CHAPTER 6: from ‘Kibbutz’, page 51 CHAPTER 7: from ‘Making Country’, page 46 CHAPTER 8: from ‘Recognition’, page 63 CHAPTER 9: from ‘Kibbutz’, page 51 CHAPTER 10: from ‘Hard Lines, page 73 CHAPTER 11: from ‘Regarding You’, page 101 CHAPTER 12: from ‘At Gournea’, page 29 CHAPTER 13: from ‘Songs of Innocence’, page 19 CHAPTER 14: from ‘Headland’, page 22 CHAPTER 15: from ‘Nothing’, page 58 CHAPTER 16: from ‘Tear Time Apart’, page 74 CHAPTER 17: from ‘A Long Look Out’, page 1 CHAPTER 18: from ‘Sometimes’, page 95 CHAPTER 19: from ‘Homage to Picasso’, page 117 CHAPTER 20: from ‘Sketches From a Laparotomy’, page 7 CHAPTER 21: from ‘Nothing’, page 58 CHAPTER 22: from ‘Caught’, page 104 CHAPTER 23: from ‘The Oracle’, page 12 CHAPTER 24: from ‘What the Young Don’t Need to Know’, page 35 CHAPTER 25: from ‘Mermaids, page 112

302

B i b l i o g ra p hy Adams, Brian, Sidney Nolan: Such is Life, a biography (Hutchinson: Melbourne, 1987) Baxter, Anne, Intermission: A True Story (Putnam, 1976) Dutton, Geoffrey, Out in the Open: an Autobiography (UQP, 1994) Finnane, Antonia, Far From Where? Jewish Journeys from Shanghai to Australia (Melbourne University Press, 1999) Grant, Bruce, Gods and Politicians (Penguin, 1982) Haese, Richard, Rebels and Precursors (Penguin, 1980) Hancock, Ian, John Gorton: He Did It His Way (Hodder, 2002) Handl, Irene, The Gold Tip Pfitzer (Knopf, 1986) Handl, Irene, The Sioux (Knopf, 1985) Heathcote, Christopher, A Quiet Revolution (Text, 1995) Hewett, Dorothy, Wild Card (Penguin, 1990) Humphries, Barry, My Life As Me (Viking, 2003) Hunt, Kathy, article on Barrie Reid, Australian Review of Books, 1999 Jones, Philip, Barrie Reed obituary, The Australian, 1995 Jones, Philip, Letter about Barrie Reid in response to Kathy Hunt’s article, Australian Review of Books, 1999 Locke-Elliott, Sumner, Careful He Might Hear You (Pan Macmillan Australia, 1963) Locke-Elliott, Sumner, Some Doves and Pythons (Gollancz London, 1966) Lord, Mary, Hal Porter: Man of Many Parts (Random House, 1993) McCaughey, Patrick, The Bright Shapes and the True Names (Text, 2003) McCulloch, Susan, ‘The Heide Feud’, The Australian, 3 November 1995 McAlpine, Lord (Alistair), Once a Jolly Bagman (Orion, 1997)

303

McAlpine, Lord (Alistair), From Bagman to Swagman: Tales of Broome, the North-West and Other Australian Adventures (Allen & Unwin, 2000) Mora, Mirka, Virtuous but Wicked (Penguin, 2000) Nolan, Cynthia, Daddy Sowed a Wind (Reed and Harris, 1946) Osborne, Charles, Max Oldaker: Last of the Matinee Idols (Michael O’Mara, 1988) Osborne, Charles, Giving It Away (Secker & Warburg, 1986) Ponder, John, Patriots and Scoundrels (Hyland House, 1997) Porter, Hal, The Watcher on the Cast Iron Balcony (UQP, 1963) Porter, Hal, Paper Chase (UQP, 1985) Porter, Hal, The Extra (Thomas Nelson, 1975) Reid, Barrett, ‘Making it New in Australia: Some Notes on Sunday and John Reed’, in ‘Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s’, exhibition catalogue (Hayward Gallery, London, 1988) Reid, Barrett (ed.), Modern Australian Art: A Melbourne Collection (MOMA, 1958) Tait, Viola, Dames, Principal Boys and All That (Macmillan Australia, 2001) Thomson, Brian, (ed), Once Around the Sun Turner, Ian, Factor, June and Loewenstein, Wendy, Cinderella Dressed in Yella (Heinemann, 1969) Underhill, Nancy, and Reid, Barrett, Letters of John Reed: Defining Australian Cultural Life 1920–1981 (Penguin, 2001)

304

Index Adelaide 130–4, 237 Agnew, Coralie (née Reed) 88 Alexander, Fred 137 Amadio John 72 Amadio, Nadine 72–3, 102, 271 Amadio, Neville 72 America 165–6, 233, 252–7, 293–4 Angry Penguins 62–4, 65, 126, 253, 255 Anschel, Klaus & Gertie 157 Asquith, Anthony 46 Astley, Thea 66, 211, 212 Atyeo, Sam 90, 97, 107, 137 Austin, Christina (Lady) 38–9 Austin, Dick 109 Austin, Sir Tom 38–9 Austral, Florence 72 Awcock, Fran 291 Baillieu, Arthur & Ethel 89 Baillieu, Darren, Everard & King 89, 117, 249–50 Baillieu, Marianne 236 Baillieu, Mary 117 Baillieu, Mrs John 112 Bakewell, Joan 170–1 Baldessin, George 197, 219 Baldwin, Suzy 179–80, 289, 299 Barnes, John 137 Barry, John Vincent 108 Battersby, Jean 127 Bergner, Josl 107 Bilcock, Barbara 118 Bilson, Gay 208–9 Bilson, Tony 79, 80, 206, 208–9, 210 Bilu, Asher 197 Bird, John 10

Blackman, Barbara 66, 86, 96, 170 Blackman, Charles 65, 66, 67, 69, 86, 96, 106, 115, 220 Blatt, Max 35–6 Blatt, Ruth 32, 34–7, 226 Blomfield, Bill 185, 186 Bonython, Kym 108, 163 Boss, Mrs Jacky 18 Boyd, Arthur 60, 65, 96, 106, 115, 116, 122, 163, 168, 171, 176, 219, 220, 231, 263, 264, 284 Boyd, David 102, 115, 155, 158, 163 Boyd, Martin 28, 102, 172, 262, 263–4 Boyd, Mary (née Nolan) 96, 98, 102–3, 107, 127, 156 Boyd, Robin 124, 270 Brack, John 79, 106 Bray, John 134, 237 Bright, Alfred 26–7, 29 Brookes, Dame Mabel 181 Brosnan, Father 187–8 Brown, Arthur 29, 30 Brown, Grace 29 Brown, June 56 Brown, Mike 115, 197 Bungy, Darleen 171 Burgoyne, Marcella 52 Burke, Frances 109, 113, 129, 200 Burke, Janine 118–19, 168 Burns, Myrtle 220 Burns, Peter 108, 220 Burstall, Tim 44 Cain, John 183 Cairns, Jim & Gwen 181–3, 196, 279

305 Carnegie, Margaret 82, 110, 116, 117 Carnegie, Rod 109, 110 Carroll, Garnett 54, 68 Casey, Maie (Lady) 129, 200, 276 Casson, Mrs John 111–12 Casson, Sir Lewis 68, 69 Cathcart, Michael 97 Chastleton, Toorak 68 Chater, Gordon 139 Churcher, Betty 80 Clare, Jennifer 232 Clark, Sir Kenneth 163 Clarke, Peter 9 Clarke, Sylvia 9 Clerehan, Neil 30 Codognotto, Reno 58 Coffey, Penelope 132 Cole, Stephanie 43 Coleman, Alannah 162–3 Collins, Joan 38 Collinson, Lawrence 66, 67 Collis, June 70, 71 Contemporary Art Society 74, 85–6, 99, 122 Cook, Whitfield 234 Cooper, Barbara 160 Cooper, Jilly 160, 167–8, 239, 287, 291–2 Cooper, Leo 14, 160, 167–8, 291–2 Cooper, Lettice 160 Cormack, Dianne 205 Counihan, Noel 107 Court, John & Joyce 9 Cowan, Peter 124, 136, 137, 167 Coward, Noel 138, 139, 147, 192, 296 Cowen, Ruth 4, 130–2, 139, 142–4, 145, 215–16, 226, 245, 269, 285 Cowen, Sir Zelman 109, 207–8

Cowley, Cliff 55 Cracknell, Ruth 139 Craig, Mary 195 Craig, Michael 28, 178, 198–9, 267 Craven, Howard 234 Crawford, Hector 53, 58 Crawford, Len 107, 110–11 Crothall, Ross 115 d’Arcangelo, Antonio 164 Danby, Lucy 236 Darby, Peter 226 Dargie, Sir William 289–90 Darmody, Jack 195 Davenport, Jim 74, 206 David, Allen 159 Davies, Richard 54, 55 Davison, Frank Dalby 223–6 Davison, Marie 223–6, 264 Davison, Mrs Lex 112 Daws, Dame Joyce 246 de Groot, John 8 de Kooning, Willem 164 Dean, Kenneth 34 Dearing, H. 107 Deeble, Russell 197, 244 Dell, Reg 57 Demidenko, Helen 205–6 Denton, Dame Margaret Scott 281–2 Diamond, Dick 56 Dickerson, Bob 77, 86, 106, 115 Diggins, Lauraine 118 Dobell, Sir William 116 Dobson, Agnes 54, 57, 58 Douglas, Neil 74, 83–5 Douglas, Vivvie 84–5 Dowd, Bernard 109 Drever, Alda 221 Drysdale, Russell 120 Dulieu, Violet (Peta) 111, 112 Duncan, Robert 222–3

306 Dunn, Beverley 54 Dunphy, Jocelyn 187 Dunstan, Don 130, 196, 254 Dunstan, Keith 30, 58 Dutton, Geoffrey 129, 130 Dutton, Nene 129 Dyring, Moya 107, 137, 156–7 Eastend bookshop 34, 62, 82 , 175–9, 185, 187, 194–5, 197, 198–204 Eden, Keith 54 Edgerton, Caroline 223 Edwards, Professor Allan 137 Elenberg, Anna 232 Elenberg, Joel 155, 231–2 Elenberg, Zahava 232 Eliot, T. S. 40 Elliott, Sumner Locke 232–4, 253 Emmett, Alfred 39–40, 41 Engberg, Juliana 97 England 30–1, 32–48, 157–63, 167–73, 234–6 Epstein, Brian 158 Ern Malley hoax 62–4, 65, 126 Evatt, H. V. & Mary Alice 106–7 Facey, Albert 205 Factor, June 193 Fairbairn, Anne Reid 5, 6 Fairfax, Sir Warwick 108 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 166–7, 222 Fiander, Lewis 57 Finch, Peter 56 Fink, Leon 209, 210 Fink, Margaret 210 Finnane, Antonia 36 Fisher, Mary 140, 141 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen 58 Fitzpatrick, Myra 139, 141–2, 146 Fitzpatrick, Professor Brian 58 Fladun, Capt Wolfie 201–2 Fletcher, Ken 119 Flint, John 205

Florance, Sheila 52 Forbes, Lorna 54, 70 Forbes, Meriel 68, 69–70 Forrest, Bill 274 Frankenthaler, Helen 164 Fry, Christopher 40 Fulton, Agnes 57 Funder, Anna 36 Geiger, Kurt 109, 120 Geiger, Ollie 112 Georgeff, Mike 277–8, 279 Geroe, Dr Clara 185–6 Gillespie, Marjorie 195–6 Gillison, Annie 127, 156, 195 Gillison, Joan 127 Gilmour, Sally 79–80 Gleeson, James 106 Godfrey, Derek 39, 46 Goff, Martyn 170, 236, 261, 292 Gold, Dr Stan 185 Gorton, Sir John 29–30, 196 Gowrie, Gray (Lord) 169–70 Grant, Ben 230–1 Grant, Bruce 55, 136, 165–6, 196, 227–30, 280, 287 Grant, Joan 36, 165–6, 227–9, 230, 272, 280 Gray, John 56 Gray, Oriel 56, 71 Green, Louis & Nita 66, 144 Green, Winifred 70, 71 Greenhill 120–1, 217–19, 221, 237–9, 269 Greer, Germaine 67–8, 170–1, 208 Gregson, Jack 211, 212 Grounds, Mrs Roy 111 Guest, Mrs J. Chester 111 Gurney family 11 Gutman, Sandy 82 Haese, Richard 247–8 Hale, James 277 Hancock, Ian 30

307 Handl, Irene 38, 140, 191–3 Hardy, Frank 142, 177 Harris, Lionel 68 Harris, Max 62, 64, 67, 125–9, 132 Harris, Von 125, 126, 128, 130 Hart, Marcia 54 Hasluck, Sir Paul & Alexandra 112 Hawke, Bob 279 Heathcote, Abigail 85 Heathcote, Christopher 86 Heide 84 after Reeds 3–5, 246, 250–2, 259, 273–4 circle 2, 67, 72, 73–4, 82, 96, 245 ‘feud’ 3–5 life at 65, 74, 82–3, 96–102 Heide 2 99, 174, 175 Hepburn, Katharine 79, 288–9 Hepworth, John 56 Herbert, Bob 55–6 Herron, Mrs Cyril 39 Hester, Joy 65, 83, 87, 96, 106, 118, 162, 219, 243, 244, 245, 264 Hewett, Dorothy 136, 212–15 Heysen, Stefan & Joan 133 Hill, Barry 23, 178, 199–200 Hinchen, Norah 205 Hitchens, Christopher 67–8, 214 Hobb, Peter 4, 119, 217–19, 221– 2, 248, 249, 250, 251–2, 269 Hodgman, Helen 144–5 Hodgman, Roger 144 Holt, Harold 115, 181, 195–6 Holt, Stephanie 87 Holt, Zara 111, 112–13, 115 Hope, Laurence & Wendy 65, 66, 67, 74, 107, 236 Hordern, Michael 33

Horlock, Muriel 124–5 Horne, Vida (née Lahey) 66, 67 Hornung, Celia 50, 52–3, 57, 61 Howcroft, John 12 Hudson, Neil 181, 242–3, 252, 260, 265, 292 Hughes, ‘Bull’ 27 Hughes, Ray 210 Hughes, Wendy 209 Humphries, Barry 17, 22, 67–8, 82, 113, 139, 159–60, 170, 288 Humphries, Roslyn 159 Hunt, Kathy 6 Hyde, Billy 96 India 227–9 Italy 231–2 Jacks, Robert 220 James, Brian 54 James, Louis 163 James, Roger 120 Jeans, Ursula 54 Johnson, Darlene 193 Johnson, George 108 Johnson, Philip 165 Johnston, Gertrude 56 Jones, Bessie (née Shaw) 8, 15, 16–17, 12–13, 19, 24–5, 26–7, 37, 42, 43, 51, 158, 161, 170, 234–6, 237, 242, 297 Jones, Edmund 10, 11, 13, 14, 24–5 Jones, Emily (née de Groot) 8, 9, 16, 41, 159 Jones, Frederick 8–9, 12–13, 14– 15, 23–4, 25, 30, 31, 33, 158–9, 161, 170, 235, 236, 237, 242 Jones, Jenny 10, 24, 37 Jones, Phil 9, 10, 13–14 Juillet, Patric & Chrissie 209–10 Juniper, Robert 136 Kaiser, Peter & Pat 113 Keesing, Nancy 207

308 Kelly, Douglas 54, 55 Kelly, Grace 155–6 Kelynack, Denis 74–5, 113, 189– 90, 249 Kemp, Rod 4 Kendall, David 179 Kennedy, Patricia 54 Keon, Standish Michael 182, 196–7 Kerang 12–15, 16–23, 24, 29, 30, 58, 114, 156, 169–70 Kewley, David & Jan 180–1, 267 King, Francis 161 King, Rachelle 285–6 Kirsta, Princess Natasha 75–7, 129 Kirwan, Edith 112 Knopke, Cecel 66, 67 Koch, Christopher 144 Koch, Philip 144 Kohner, Peta 36 Kohner, Robert 36 Koplowitz, Oscar 37 Kossatz, Les 197, 218, 219, 220, 244, 245 Kott, Jacqueline 70, 71 Kramer, Dame Leonie 191 Kraushar, Harold 255 Lamaro, Carmel 18, 19 Lamaro, Joe 18, 21, 24 Lamaro, Kathleen 18 Lamble, Lloyd 38, 56 Lancely, Colin 115 Lane, Mrs Charles 111 Langley, Jean 107 Lascaris, Manoly 7, 209 Lawler, Ray 56–7 Lawlor, Adrian 107 Lawrence, D. H. 292 Laycock, Don 78 Lea, Shelton 197, 221, 223 Lehmann, John 160 Leppitt, J. J. 27

Lilley, Merv 214 Lindros, Rubio 236, 261 Lithgow, John & Ann 269 Livesey, Roger 54 Lloyd-Jones, Hermia 115 Loder, John 34, 114, 270, 271, 273 Longmans 123–5, 148, 160, 175 Lord, Mary 137–8, 188, 189, 190 Lowenstein, Wendy 193 Lynn, Elwyn 115 Lyon, Ninette 91, 154–5 Lyon, Peter 154–5 McAuley, James 63, 64, 71 McCallum, Austin 59, 60 McCallum, John 281, 282 McCaughey, Patrick 164, 197–8 McCulloch, Alan 110 McCulloch, Susan 3 Macedon 270–1 McGlashan, David 93–4, 174, 176 McGuinness, Padraic P. 214 McKay, Andrew 195 MacLehose, Christopher 172–3, 230 McMaster, Anew 11 McNicoll, Ruth 111, 112 McNiff, Philip 256 McPhee, Hilary 265 Maguire, Fenella 52 Major, Norma 171 Marr, David 5 Martin, Anthea 49–50 Martin, Mary 125–6 Martin, Steve 50 Mawson, Paquita (Lady) 124, 133 Maxwell, Gavin 161–2 Maynard, Don 123 Meares, Dr Ainslie 185 Meares, Dr Russell 185 Melba, Dame Nellie 282 Miller, Henry 63

309 Miller, Irwin & Judy 203, 256–7, 261 Miller, Lee 154 Molvig, Jon 80, 106 Moncrieff, Gladys 282 Montgomery, R. L. 109 Moodie-Heddle, Enid 124–5 Moore, David 115 Moore, Des 107 Moore, Felicity St John 107 Moore, Lily 70, 71 Moorhouse, Frank 210 Mora, Georges 68, 76, 78–9, 80, 88, 103, 109, 118, 148, 155, 240, 248 Mora, Mirka 68, 76, 79–80, 81, 83–4, 108, 115, 240 Mora, Pamela 81, 83 Mora, Philippe 78, 79, 81–3, 116 Mora, Tiriel 78, 81 Mora, William 78, 81, 277 Morgan, John 54 Morley, Robert 54 Morosi, Juni 182, 279 Morphett, Tony 195 Muir, Christopher 156 Murdoch, Dame Elisabeth 281, 282, 283, 288 Murdoch, James 72–3, 93 Murdoch, Rupert 172 Murray-Smith, Stephen 55, 61, 127–8, 259 Museum of Modern Art of Australia (MOMA) 77, 104–13, 115–16, 120, 148, 220 Myer, Sir Norman 15 Myer, Sidney 15 Neville, Jill 209 Newsom, Sir John 125, 148, 161 Nickoloff, Nan (née Jones) 16, 20–1, 23, 24, 25, 27, 30–1, 158, 235, 236, 242, 267, 268–9, 277

Nickoloff, Nick 30–1 Noall, Gerard 108 Nolan, Cynthia (née Reed) 89, 95–6, 101, 118, 150, 154, 163, 168, 171 Nolan, Sir Sidney 6–7, 62, 65, 67, 83, 89, 90, 94–6, 102, 106, 116, 117, 122, 127, 137, 148, 149, 153, 160, 162, 163, 167, 168, 176, 198, 215, 219, 239, 245 Northeast, Simon 276–7 O’Brien, Justin 232 obituary writing 5, 29–30, 212– 13, 288–90, 292–4 Oldaker, Max 138–41, 142 Oldfield, Alan 206 Olsen, John 120 Ortiz, Elisabeth Lambert 64–5, 253–4 Osborne, Charles 7, 66, 67, 101, 138, 140, 150, 154, 169, 170, 236, 272 Osborne, John 40 Osborne, Mrs Gerard 112 Paris 148–57 Patten, Barry 109 Pearson, Christopher 134 Penrose, Sir Roland 154, 162 Perceval, John 65, 76, 83, 84, 96, 101, 106, 117, 176, 220, 228, 281 Perceval, Mary 96, 101–2 Perceval, Matthew 154, 155 Perth 134–8, 213 Pinter, Harold 40 Pollock, Jackson 164 Ponder, John 32–4, 271 Ponder, Marjorie 33, 34 Porter, Hal 127, 132–3, 137, 138, 142, 187, 188–91, 195, 223–4, 290 Porter, Peter 170, 209

310 Pound, Ezra 186–7 Prendergast, Maria 34, 114, 197, 270, 271, 273, 274 Price, Ray 72 Pugh, Clifton 241, 286 Quayle, Anthony 39 Queensland 211–12, 215–16 Quinn, Leonard 89 Radley, Paul 205–6 Raine, Kathleen 162 Rasmussen, Waldo 163, 164, 165, 197 Rawlin, Jarred 97 Rawlins, Adrian 222 Ray, Man 155 Raymond, Glenda 58 Reed & Harris 62 Reed, Dick 89, 141, 246 Reed, John 9, 62, 77, 87, 88–9, 91–2, 114, 124, 164, 166–7, 174–5, 235, 237, 240, 266–9 and MOMA 104–8, 115–16, 120 and Nolan 148–53 personality 93, 94, 95, 102–3, 105, 176–7, 179 Reed, John & Sunday 7, 87, 133, 215, 217, 218, 239 and art world 67, 77, 103, 105– 6, 107, 118–19, 264 criticism of 83, 97, 103, 105, 136, 137, 159–60 relationship 74, 89–90, 98–101, 174, 246–8 and Sweeney 174–5, 243–4 Reed, Kathy 56 Reed, Margaret 89 Reed, Sunday (née Baillieu) 9, 88–9, 174, 237, 240, 248–9 and bookshop 175–9 and Nolan 6, 90, 94–6

personality 62, 93–4, 98–101, 102–3, 105, 115, 147, 193, 236 Reed, Sweeney 82, 92, 96, 154, 155, 162, 174–5, 176, 197, 237, 239, 243–5 Rees, Lloyd 120 Reid, Barrie (Barrett) 110, 127–8, 148, 178, 205, 211–12, 213, 215–16, 254, 261 and Greenhill 121, 174, 210, 238 and Heide 3–7, 65, 74, 89, 90, 248–9, 250, 252, 259, 273 illness 237, 241–3, 246, 252, 255–6, 271–3 poetry 86, 128 relationship 66–8, 146–7, 238, 239–40, 252–3, 257–9, 271–2 Reid, Coral & Ronah 5 Reid, Sir George 6 Reid, Rex 75 Renault, Mary 161 Rhodes, Joan 170 Richards, Lou & Edna 187 Richardson, Sir Frank 109 Richardson, Sir Ralph 68, 69, 70 Riddell, Alan 127 Robertson, Bryan 151, 163 Robertson-Swann, Ron 163 Rosanove, Joan 18 Rosenthal, Tom 168 Roskolenko, Harry 253, 254–5 Rothko, Mark 164 Ryan, Patrick & Rosemary 44, 275–6 Rylah, Sir Arthur 194, 195 Safe, Georgina 119 Salas, Bob 137, 190 Salter, Elizabeth 236 Salter, June 139 Samuels, Gordon 70, 71 Sandercock, Leonie 241

311 Sanders, Bill 50–1 Savage Club 114 Sayer, Paddy 181 Sculthorpe, Peter 140 Seddon, Dick 109, 110 Selenitsch, Alex 197, 245, 246, 261 Senbergs, Jan 219, 244 Sharrock, Ken 269 Shaw, Frank 15–16 Shaw, Jane (née Wayles) 15, 16 Shmith, Bill 109 Sime, Dawn 74, 80, 83, 96, 105, 107, 238 Sime, Ian 65, 74, 83, 96, 97, 104– 5, 107, 109 Simkin, John 72 Sinclair, Jean Langley 94, 249, 250 Sinclair, John 74, 82, 243 Singh, Sadar 227, 230 Skinner, Rose & Joe 135–6, 137 Smith, Bernard 86, 97, 106 Smith, Gray 87, 96, 108, 118, 264 Smith, Martin 87 Smith, Rosie 87 Smith, Vivian 144 Southall, Andrew 238 Spender, Stephen 35 Stack, Leslie 68, 90–1, 101, 121, 154–5, 162, 163 Stack, Suzannah 91 Starck, Nigel 275, 290, 292, 293 Starling, Harry 56–7, 69, 70, 71 Starr, John & Diana 248 Stead, C. K. 172 Stead, Christina 138 Stewart, Harold 63, 64, 296 Storey, David 161 Stowe, Randolph 136 Stravinsky, Igor & Vera 76 Stretton, Andrea 206–7

Stretton, Dulcie 205, 206–8, 293 Summers, Dora (née Bird) 10, 25, 37–8, 40, 45, 46, 159 Summers, Jeremy 25, 37–8, 42, 44, 45–6, 48 Summers, Jill 37–8, 41, 44–5, 46–8 Summers, Shirley 44 Summers, Walter 10, 11, 25, 40–1, 45–6 Summons, Elizabeth 75, 111 Sumner, John 70 Sussex, Marianne & Ron 268 Sutton, Elizabeth 122 Swinburne, Alan 257–8, 276 Sydney 120, 204–5, 206–10 Tait, Viola 281, 282 Tanter, Richard 221, 222 Tasmania 138–42, 144–6 Teleki, Yolande 210 Theodoratis, Dimitri 134, 237 Thesiger, Wilfred 161–2 Thomson, Brian 194 Thomson, Ken 169, 170, 236 Thorndike, Dame Sybil 16, 54, 68, 69, 70, 71 Thornton, Wallace 107 Thring, Frank 52 Tinsley, Peg 268 Tipping, Marjorie 111, 112, 114 Tipping, Richard Kelly 197 Tivey-Faucon, Madge 155–7 Tobin, Kathleen Lamaro 114 Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm 40–1 Trinity Grammar School 21, 25–9 Tucker, Albert 65, 74, 82, 96, 106, 116, 117–18, 119, 122, 155, 162, 244, 245 Tucker, Barbara 118 Turnbull, Noel 178, 183 Turner, Ann (née Barnard) 132, 189, 241

312 Turner, Ian 132, 188, 189, 193, 214, 240–1, 285 Tynan, Kenneth 40 Underhill, Nancy 2, 31, 95, 167, 179 Underhill, Tony 163 Upward, Peter 163 Uren, Tom 279 van Praagh, Dame Peggy 124 Vassilieff, Danila 4, 107, 115, 121–2 Vickers, Trevor 197 von Bibra, Don & Barbara 88 von Bibra, Henry 274, 276, 280–1, 283 Waddell, Ada 28–9 Walker, Sir Ronald 157 Ward, Jack 271, 279–80, 285, 289 Ward, Margaret 132–3 Ward, Peter 132, 134, 237 Warhol, Andy 164 Warner, Michael 114, 277, 287 Warrender, Pamela 15, 120 West, Morris 142 Westbrook, Dawn 114 Westbrook, Eric 80–1, 85, 103, 105, 110, 111, 114

Whitaker, Bob 158 White, Emil 63 White, Osmar 53 White, Patrick 7, 129, 138, 189, 191, 209, 212, 225, 264, 293 Whiteley, Brett 120, 232, 286 Whitlam, Gough 196, 227, 240, 241, 279 Wighton, Rosemary 127 Wilkes, Frank 183 Wilkinson, David 30 Williams, Fred 96, 106, 115, 164, 219 Williams, Jane 200, 204 Williamson, David 285–7 Wing, Elizabeth 54 Withers, Googie 281, 282–3 Woods, Dr 36 Wright, Judith 66 Wynn, Alan 79–80, 109 Wynyard, Diana 39 Yarra Glen 261–4, 268–9, 279 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny 177–8 Youlden, Harry 158 Yule, John 107