YOU HAVE TO be careful these days at the Royal Melbourne Show. Take a wrong turning, get too far from the animals, and you could start to feel extremely ill, harangued on all sides by sellers of useless plastic rubbish, poisonous food, low-grade toys, tickets for rides that belong at Luna Park, computers which read your palm for two bucks and give you the same result as the person next to you, thousands of stuffed pink panthers hanging by the neck, show bags which cost two dollars ninety and contain a couple of melting chocolate bars and more plastic.
But on a soft morning at the Showgrounds, after one of those dry, mild spring nights when your head has been too light for the pillow, you can still pick up the stabbing sweetness of the blossoming pittosporum trees, sharp enough to pierce the stink of frying fat.
In the great corrugated iron sheds with their green roofs and white woodwork, the light is benign. Human footsteps and voices are muffled by straw. There is a strong but pleasant perfume of excrement and dust. A family sits on camp chairs around a horse’s stall, drinking tea and passing from hand to hand a thick album of the horse’s photographs. In another stall, harmoniously silent, stand three living creatures: a grey mare and two old men wearing hats. One man is holding the animal’s head while the other, balancing on a wooden box at her side, patiently plaits a red ribbon into her mane.
At the end of a row of stalls is a little booth for a human to sleep in. The door is open. The bed takes up most of the space inside. On a table stand a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, a packet of McAlpine’s plain flour and a bag of parrot food. The parrot is perched in a cage on the wall outside the booth. All around pours in the gentle, pale light of the spring day.
In this lovely light, the flesh of resting cattle is mighty in the straw. Inanimate objects take on a serene significance: three pairs of boots, worn, polished, soft, lined up on a feed bag; a woman’s flowery scarf, with the knot still in it, hung on a stall door.
A young girl squats down with an old towel in her hand and buffs the hooves of her palomino. She leads it into the open air. Sunlight transmogrifies on the horse’s perfect hide into a radiant hum of cream and copper.
In the sheep shed, whose occupants are engaged elsewhere, a wall of illuminated glass cases contains mounds of prize-winning wool. Language is not yet dead in a land where these are the criteria for the judging of fleeces: ‘Trueness to type. Length. Soundness. Handle. Colour or bloom. Character. Density. Evenness. Yield.’
The Arts and Crafts Hall opens into a pageant of minor horrors: men’s khaki cotton fishing hats have been decorated with monstrous embroidery. They are clotted with brightly coloured patterns of stitching which must have made many a husband bite his lip and dream of poison or divorce. People pass briskly in front of the cake decorating, much of which is garish or over-complicated, a form of showing-off.
But at the back of the hall the classic fare is on display: cakes, scones, bread. The flat cases cannot contain their delicate odour. The simplicity of conception and display is breathtaking. Women hover over them, fall into reverie. Their voices grow dreamy. ‘How on earth can they judge?’ murmurs one, half to her friend, half to herself. ‘They’re beautiful.’
‘They look a lovely scone,’ says her friend, less given to ecstasy. ‘And they’ve already been there a week.’
The plain cakes are transcendental in their directness. ‘Plain’s the hardest thing to do well,’ says a woman in gloves. ‘You can’t hide behind anything.’ And the sponges! What is preventing these miracles from levitating? Before them we spontaneously observe a two-minute silence. The woman in gloves draws a long, quivering sigh. ‘An old lady from Ballarat,’ she whispers, ‘once told me that the best sponges are made with swans’ eggs. From Lake Wendouree. But it’s illegal.’
Years ago there used to be a whole wall of preserves, jams and marmalades at the Show, back-lit like an underwater scene from some weird opera. Gone now, shrunk to a couple of small glass cases. But the bottles and jars inside still have the power to fill the pilgrims’ eyes with tears. ‘Shred or Exhibition Marmalade,’ say the labels, in beautiful old-fashioned handwriting. ‘Shooting Stars.’
In what blissful realm does Miss E. Alexander, does R. G. Pywell dwell? What golden paddocks lie beyond their morning window panes? In what paradise kitchens, on what chopping boards of bewitched timber do they fashion the loose knots and spirals of grapefruit peel which hang suspended so sparing, so exquisitely judged, in the ethereal element of their marmalade? What patience, what intellectual serenity guides these women’s hands? In their light-filled jars, craft soars into art. The humble is exalted into the sublime.
1981
Postscript
Everyone at my place thought this piece was hopelessly purple. Several days after it appeared in the Age, I received a letter, care of the paper, from one of the marmalade champions. The prize winner was pleased that I had admired the winning works, but wanted to tell me something: ‘I don’t see paddocks. I live in a flat in Altona, and all I can see out my kitchen window is the gasometer.’ The letter was signed Ron G. Pywell. I sent back a squashed but respectful reply.
One evening a week later someone knocked at our front door. On the mat stood a plumpish man in his thirties, with short dark hair and a shy face. It was R. G. Pywell. He was holding in his arms a supermarket carton containing half a dozen jars of his handiwork. He presented the box to me with grave formality, declined an invitation to come in, hopped into his Holden and drove away.
I carried the box into the kitchen. At the sight of what was in it, my family stopped laughing. We arranged the jars on a special shelf. Sometimes we would move them to the windowsill so we could gaze at them against the light while we washed up. Our reverence for the marmalade was such that I don’t remember ever doing anything so gross as eating it.