IN RETROSPECT, MY TRAVELLING DAYS were like gipsy caravans moving sometimes languorously through fields of flowers and sometimes in whirlwinds which could sweep me off at any time to any land where I cared to go. Poor people rarely have the opportunity to travel like that. There was one thing that favoured me: I was, and still am, a chronic asthmatic and it seemed to me that as I got no pay for my long periods away from work when I was in hospital I may as well have long periods away when I was well and could earn money by travelling.
I have travelled to ninety-seven countries, and only in more recent years could I truly afford to do this. In those earlier days I just made up my mind that I had to see and be part of an event, or had to stand on a rare spot on earth, and I would fix the date, make plans and organise my household, arrange with a bank for money to be held to keep things running at home, get a passport, and then begin to scrape up the money for my ticket. My first long journey was to Japan in the 1950s. I had to go.
I was bitter about Japan, bitter in all ways and of all things Japanese. It wasn’t just the loss of the four boys whose childhood and young adulthood was part of mine. No, it wasn’t because two of those boys had been murdered when they were prisoners on Ambon Island. And it wasn’t because the other two boys had died in Japanese POW camps. What I was bitter about I never knew. I never analysed it. I only knew I was bitter and I had to get rid of it.
I booked a berth in a six-berth cabin aft in a Dutch passenger ship. It was the cheapest berth on the cheapest ship afloat, and after booking I began to work on getting the money to pay for it. It wasn’t just the cost of the trip, but there was the cost of keeping my home establishment going in Hobart. The children were at two different schools, one primary, one secondary, each school miles apart from the other, but each school uniform having white shirts – which meant ten white shirts to be laundered each week, apart from the myriad other clothing that children had now begun to need. It was a far cry from the ‘play clothes’ we had known as children. No more hand-me-downs or clothes with patches: now children were beginning their march for freedom. Up until now I had made all my children’s clothes and my own. (Incidentally, if you’ve never tried getting the fly right in a pair of boy’s trousers before the days of zips you’ve never known total frustration. Those bloody button holes!) Clothes were so very expensive in the shops and now I had less money than ever.
With only two weeks before the ship was to sail, a friend, Margo Roe, then Senior Lecturer in History at Hobart University, turned up with a great big bag of materials she had ‘always intended to make into dresses’. I sewed and sewed, and by the time I was to leave I could pack quite a few reasonable outfits, as well as a surprise dress for Cathy who was to spend a three-week holiday with Mum in Victoria.
Our ship lay for two weeks in Hong Kong harbour and I lived on shore at the newly built Mandarin Hotel, as a guest of the management. All I did to earn this was to write a letter to the Hong Kong Tourist Bureau asking for information and any help it could give me. I enclosed with my short letter copies of two recent feature articles that had been published in Walkabout, a well known Australian magazine in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, I was offered a week’s accommodation in the Mandarin Hotel which was then the finest hotel in the world. Also I was to have a car and chauffeur.
It was the period when the colony was going through one of its worst water shortages. There had been no reporting of this in Australian papers. I wrote of the sights on the long waterfront where a cyclone had wrecked the always-poor shelters of the destitute and sunk much of the maritime shipping. Every second day there were queues of people stretching over a mile as they waited to get water from the one water stand that operated on that day. Mothers left children in the queue for hours, returning when their turn at the water was near. Little kids sat nitting one another’s hair, cracking the nits between their fingernails as they waited. A very old lady tottered back down the line humping on her back a plastic bag filled with water. Police told me it was difficult for people to find anything to cart water in. ‘They are poor. Look at the sampans. The small belongings in there are all they ever own.’
I came upon a middle-aged man holding on to the only post left standing of his on-shore living hut. He smiled and gave the international shrug ‘that’s life’. He couldn’t leave the site as someone worse off than he would take the post, the one thing he now owned. It was a dismal, sad sight.
Although I had free accommodation, car and driver for the week, I did need money so I wired Otto Olsen, editor of the magazine People (not to be confused with the later sex journal of that name). More swiftly than I could have imagined, he wired ‘How much do you need? Can supply immediately.’
I made that driver work for his money. It was all wonderfully strange to me. Suzanne, a young New Zealand girl who was travelling on the ship, accompanied me most days, going back to the ship to sleep at nights. We two went to the New Territories – not the tourist area it is now, but then a fiercely held place where tourists were not welcome. The people abhorred cameras, believing the image would steal their soul. Suzanne held her camera up to photograph a narrow alley way and a tall woman swooped on her, grabbed the camera and belted it about the young girl’s head and when that didn’t smash it she shattered it on the side of the wall. My big Linhof Technica was well closed up and not likely to be recognised as a camera, but we retired smartly.
That was a strange day: because Suzanne was upset over the camera incident we went back to Hong Kong and she went to the ship to rest. I went up the steps of the Mandarin Hotel and the huge Sikhs who manned the door swung them back and smilingly asked had madame had a nice day? Actually, madame was going to finish with a surprisingly nice day. The hotel social hostess was waiting for me. She had been instructed to ask a table of ‘interesting’ women to lunch and would I come? ‘It is for the young Duchess of Kent whose husband, a soldier, is doing his military time on the island. Will you come?’ Why not? ‘No frills. She is very sensible.’ And she was, as were her companions. And the big meal stood me in good stead until the free breakfast next morning.
When I left Hobart, Madame Meiders had been in the house, as well as Ruby Ho (Ho Ting Ngor) who lived with us for eight years while studying at the University of Hobart. Ruby had written to her mother that I would be in Hong Kong and the mother replied that she would greet me if I cared to call. When I had left Hobart to join the ship to Hong Kong, Madame and my children came in the car to see me off but Ruby had come on the back of a motor bike, with her Australian boyfriend revving up and passing us at intervals and beeping his horn while Ruby waved a big bunch of flowers non-stop, as if we were all off to a wedding.
The meeting at Ruby’s home in Hong Kong was arranged by phone by the hotel hostess. ‘She will not speak English,’ the Chinese hotel hostess said. ‘Of course, she speaks it fluently if she wishes, as she owns much land on the waterfront, but she greatly respects her position and scorns the English language.’
Mrs Ho greeted me regally. I tried several times to start a conversation, and Ruby’s sister translated for the mother who said or did nothing with any visible sign – until I said, ‘Please tell your mother Ruby has learned to cook.’ The girl didn’t acknowledge my request so I said once again, ‘Ruby can cook quite well and is very proud of doing this.’ At last the girl decided she must deliver the message. The terrifying lady didn’t meet any eye, but somehow a muscle moved ever so slightly away as if she were alone.
I left Hong Kong for Japan when the week was up. Japan was still smarting, still beaten. Rebuilding was going on, done by armies of women in total black, even to the rags over their heads. I didn’t get from Japan what I wanted: Peace. Instead I saw the ex-soldiers begging on the streets, their pathetic little army caps held out in parchment-thin hands. There is no glory for a loser – particularly in Japan – and I just wanted to get away home. I was bewildered and sad.
Nor was I overjoyed with the behaviour of the Australians on board the ship. When the ship tied up at Yokohama the little sin-wagons were lined up ready – and the requisite number of men who had asked for this convenience were also lined up on the rails, ready. Their wives were there to farewell them with ‘Now don’t you be a naughty boy, dad’. And the next morning back came the ‘naughty boys’, giving the pretty little Japanese girls a fatherly kiss and their small change (the fee proper having been paid before they left the ship). And the mums on deck were joking and teasing, and Suzanne and I had to believe that these women, through ignorance, stupidity or lack of interest, did not know what it was all about.
But the ship’s surgeon did. Suzanne and I dined at the captain’s table in First Class by invitation throughout most of that trip, even though we were only able to pay for a berth in a six-berth cabin. ‘We’ll dance tonight,’ said the old surgeon who had been to sea for nearly forty years and knew it all. ‘I’ll be too busy in a few days to do anything but clean out this lot.’ He knew to the day when the disease would present. ‘And sometimes it wears a steel helmet,’ he said. ‘I can’t do much about that.’
It wasn’t AIDS in those days, merely VD, but it wasn’t the act or the disease that seemed to both of us to be so disgusting: it was the pretence that it was alright to be ‘naughty’ when away from home.
I didn’t return to Japan for more than twenty years, and then I flew there on a diplomatic visa.
* * *
Dad may have been a quiet man but he had an apt turn of phrase when he did speak. ‘Things turn up if you are always ready on the starting block’ he would say. Things have turned up often for me and given me the chance to go on or do something more interesting, exciting, even sometimes, unique. Some people prefer a steady, stable life in the one place, some even live in the one house from birth to death. That they live full, contented lives is a mystery to me even when I contemplate two of my oldest, dearest friends who have so lived. Some say it is my roving childhood that made me like this, some say it is my ‘blood’ (ahem!), but I don’t care what the cause is – I just fit happily, or furiously, into movement and change.
In 1969 a great thing ‘turned up’ for me. I was offered, through the funding of the Myer Foundation Fellowship, the unique and pioneer position in Australia of Manuscripts Field Officer in Victoria. It was a position that had no blueprint until I drew it. I was to travel throughout the State of Victoria and attempt to discover documents historical, rare, or of value to future scholars. If possible, I was to attempt to encourage the owners of these papers to present them (via the back of my government station-wagon and sometimes through the loan of the State Museum’s truck), under legal conditions, to the State Library. Here the documents would be protected and be available for bonafide scholars of the future.
When I prepared to settle in Melbourne in 1970 to take up the fellowship I knew no one except the actor, Brian James, whom I had met when he came to Hobart with the play The Odd Couple. I had two concerns about living in Melbourne: How would I get to work? Where would I live? I’d never lived in a city – well, there was Hobart, but even then I was either up on the mountain or living on the outskirts. I wrote to Brian and the reply was immediate: he found me a tiny apartment in the heart of the city from where I could walk to work.
An apartment all to myself! It was too good to be true and, of course, as anyone who has had children will know, that was indeed the case. Within twelve months the children had left Tasmania and were dropping in for a bed, a meal, a yarn, or a button to be sewn on. But I couldn’t complain. At first I’d spent my weekends flying back and forth to Tasmania to see the children. One night in Melbourne, out at dinner with Geoffrey Serle and Ian Turner, one of the wives (after listening to me talking about ‘the children’) asked me their ages. ‘Twenty-two and twenty-five’ I said, and as the words came out I realised, ‘My God! They’ve grown up. They’ve gone. They’ve been bearing up with me. They’re nice. They’re mothering me now.’
It was a moment each parent knows, or should know. But you can’t step up to them and comment, you dance around a bit and make yourself unavailable – even for sewing on buttons. Let their lovers do that for a change; let them pick up their own dirty socks.
But it isn’t fair, is it? Mother Nature, that dirty old trickster, makes us nurturers, makes us think we adore waiting on our children, loving and caring for them, giving the best of our energy while they grow and thrive. Then suddenly, overnight, we are to disappear, step into a big hole, get out of their lives. And no tears mind you, not even a bow as you quietly, secretly creep out. It says a lot for mothers that we do this, generation on generation.
A party had been arranged for me to be introduced to prominent Victorians as I would be spending the year attempting (and succeeding!) in divesting them of their private papers for deposit in the State Library of Victoria. I was brought into the midst of a group of men and I found myself shaking hands with Edward Dunlop. ‘Are you from one of the Western District families?’ I was asked by one of the men, referring to the so-called leaders of society and politics from that area. ‘No!’ said Edward, ‘she can’t be – she’s too good-looking for that!’
Year after year Edward came to my house on Sunday mornings after he had been to church (Presbyterian) and he brought a bottle of wine, swinging it in his hand for the neighbours to see and smile at. He would wave the bottle on high as if it were a trophy.
The night before he died Edward phoned me asking me to do two things for him. I said I’d take responsibility for one but not the other. He then said ‘You never bend,’ and I said ‘But you’ve admired me for it’. His secretary of many years, who knew him as a good secretary knows her employer, called me on the phone and transferred me to Edward’s phone. ‘He’s asking for you and I think he’s most terribly ill,’ she said. ‘His voice, it is going.’ And it was. That slow country voice that he could use to become a great teller of stories or ribaldry that would have shocked the many ladies who admired him as a saint.
But he was no saint. He was a very ordinary man who did as many another ordinary man or woman has done, rose to great vision when there was a need for it and few ready to go for it. If EED was a hero, he is in great company because there have been many a man and woman his equal.
I wear his hat, what he called his priest’s hat because it was black. His monogram is stamped inside, EED. I’m told the hat looks great on me and I’m glad it keeps me warm. When he died I was asked if I would like a keepsake of my old friend and I said ‘only the hat’.
* * *
There has never been much time in my life to socialise with the writing world, but the little socialising I’ve done has been warm and pleasant. The first group I got to know was that affable bunch of men of the Melbourne Bread and Cheese Club, chaired by Johnny Moir. One met a lot of great people at John’s home in Bridge Road, Richmond. There was a little booze, a little food, and much laughter. There were always several Fulbright exchange students from the USA, visiting literati and authors from far and wide. I met Katharine Susannah Prichard here, the Aboriginal artist, Albert Namatjira, Professor Morris (‘Mossie’) Miller, and lovely Olaf Ruhen.
There was good companionship, but I couldn’t remember everyone. There was one letter, for instance:
Dear Pat,
To hell with double spacing. It’s single space for you – and like it. That’s all you deserve after leaning against Moir’s doorway one night, with a bloke on a motor bike waiting for you and with a tilt of the head, saying at me, ‘He could have been interesting, if only I had the time to find out.’
‘Hmm,’ thought I to myself at the time. ‘She’d get a helluva shock if she had.’ Still, I must admit men are inclined to kid themselves a bit. Okay, okay, keep calm, MORE than a bit. Does that satisfy you? Just because the poor guy that shared your little wooden hut with you a few nights while you dunked yourself at night in and out of the ocean – just because that poor guy couldn’t take a trick with you – you think men are all the same. Me, I knew that all along.
Actually this letter is solely written to talk about myself but best to say how pleased Jack was to get your letter and how he liked your breezy style. Come to think of it, I’m not sure he said breezy. Might have been full blown.
(Sadly, I didn’t remember the writer when the letter arrived!)
The reference to the wooden hut was funny, though when the episode occurred I had been furious. I’d been commissioned to do a feature on the mutton birds of the Furneaux Islands and was ferried across to Long Island late at night. I washed in the sea, rolled out my sleeping bag, when in came the photographer. ‘Where’s your sleeping bag?’ I asked. ‘One will do us,’ he said. ‘No it won’t,’ said I, and without any bravado or hesitation I told him the truth: ‘You try anything funny and every fisherman or seaman around these islands will deal with you.’ And, as if on cue, up from the shore climbed Jimmy Sholto Douglas and the Aboriginal, Eric Maynard, carrying a mattress from their boat. ‘For Mrs Pat,’ Jimmy said, in as ominous a tone as his lovely voice could manage. ‘Yair,’ said Eric to the photographer, ‘you heard.’
When John Kinmont Moir died, the Melbourne Age carried an obituary: ‘Co-founder and President of the Melbourne Bread and Cheese Club and one of the foremost authorities on Australiana.’ Moir had donated his large library of Australian literature to the Public Library of Victoria and the Chairman of the Trustees stated that ‘Mr Moir was one of the best friends Australian literature ever had.’ He certainly was a good friend to me.
Friday night at Moir’s house was when everybody turned up, but the great night was Sunday night. Then it was not ‘open house’ but just an exclusive few would be invited – usually three – and there would be toast and tea in front of the fire. James (Jim) McAuley was there once and we laughed at the Ern Malley furore.
Perhaps the loveliest man to meet in Melbourne was A.A. (Arthur) Phillips. Arthur and I were walking along Toorak Road one day, at the expensive end. ‘Do you know’ said this now-aged man, ‘Here there is everything man could buy and nothing he needs.’ Arthur had edited my story ‘Hot Eyes’ and from the time it was published in Summer’s Tales he called me ‘Hot Eyes’ – and I didn’t mind at all.
Cyril Pearl and Paddy (his wife) were part of the breezy literary crowd in those days. He it was who wrote about Sydney in The Girl with the Swansdown Seat. Years later, I saw him in Dublin in the research room in the magnificent old library and whispered to him, ‘This is almost as good as having your own Swansdown Seat’ and he, Paddy and I broke the forbidding silence of the ancients with laughter. For a time Cyril was editor of Australia Magazine, the first magazine of its type in this country, and he often commissioned me to write for it.
My work as Manuscripts Officer was a natural extension of the folklore work I had started in Tasmania. I had begun tape-recording reminiscences in 1962 with no particular subject in mind. All that motivated me was the painful knowledge that we had already lost so much of the history of our race of people. I was alerted by Mary Gilmore who wrote, ‘Ours are ours.’ She was referring to the vast influx of migrants who had rushed to Australia since the end of the Second World War, but already I had seen so many of the things of my childhood change – and with the change, expunged as though they had never been. Many of my early tapes (on a great big heavy machine like an old-time portable gramophone) I gave to the interviewees, in the hope that their children would care for them and hand them on to future generations. I soon learned that that was wrong: folklore is apt to leap a generation, sometimes two or more generations, with no member of the family caring where they came from or what their forebears did.
My work in Victoria was meant to be tracking down documents of historical importance, but I often found that the people who had just one document of interest also had vast, unwritten memories which were of just as much importance. I began to work seriously in the field after I was awarded a Literature Board Fellowship in 1972 which allowed me to travel to Ireland. There, in the folk archives, is a great mass of material about Irish emigrants to Australia that would have been lost had it not been for the Guinness company which assisted in financing the work. The discovery stirred me greatly. ‘Why don’t we, our nation, preserve the documents and words of our people?’ From that time on I have climbed many ladders into attics and ceilings, into the scaffolding above shearing sheds, into old hotels, magnificent homes, tiny houses, and boxes under the house. Many times I have had to shower immediately I finished the search, and once I got into a bath fully clothed and soaked myself and undressed there after a long night in a grand old home with dead mice, living mice, and insects for company. Even my hair stank – but if you are going to worry about that you should never take up this kind of work.
One of my close friends is Beverly Dunn, the actress, well known to TV fans in her roles in long-playing drama series and for her work in hundreds of plays. One day she was dusting her library and came on a large bundle of correspondence she had kept over our twenty-five year friendship. ‘It may nudge your memory’ she said, dumping a big parcel on my table. Cards and letters galore sprang out. Most of the correspondence sprang from my travels in the outback or overseas. Sometimes I couldn’t recall the event I had written about: ‘Welcome Home! O rolling pin thrower; sleeping lizard racer; seal adulator-ess!’ But I could certainly remember the 1972 trip which had prompted the following letter:
Cathy [who had come to Ireland with me] and I went to Sissinghurst in Kent with a loving Australian friend, Sybil Irving. A warm day of gentle breezes and we like three little girls on a picnic. It was a laughing day. We got a train to the wrong station, paid too much for a taxi, and so on … There was a test match at Lords, England versus Australia, and I was anxious to know the state of play. Sybil asked the Station Master ‘Who is winning?’ ‘We are,’ the Englishman replied. In her most elegant diction Sybil asked, ‘Who are WE?’
The book I had come to Ireland to write was Heart of Exile, though I had to return often before it was completed. Each day I spent six hours at the National Library studying eleven great tea-chest sized crates of letters and diaries that had been written from Australia to Ireland in the 1840s and 1850s. It was the most exciting book I have written, both the labour and the result.
Ireland beguiles me as it has generations of travellers; it is small enough to give you the feel of its long generations and the poetry. Cathy and I once walked from Cork to Donegal in the balmy Irish summer, with a stopover at Galway University to do a short course of Anglo-Irish literature. She is a trained nurse and worked at various Irish hospitals to earn the money to make the journey with young friends to Iran, Afghanistan and India, driving in through the Khyber Pass.
I learned what a joy it was to travel with a different age group from my own, and had the opportunity, rare for most mothers, to watch my adult child perform so adventurously and well so far from home. A few years later we set off together once again, this time to Sri Lanka. My son, Michael, accompanied me on a trip to China and once again, I counted myself lucky to have the company of my adult child.
Irish talk is lively, amusing, and sometimes chilling. In 1972 when ‘The Troubles’ broke out again in Northern Ireland one heard many stories. Contraceptives are banned in Ireland, but I liked the story about the huge number of condoms smuggled in by the English pharmaceutical firm, Boots. ‘The very best, smooth rubber,’ the advertisement said, ‘Factory tested’ – thus making them a more satisfactory casing for home-made bombs than the Hong Kong balloons which had been used up to that time.
I travelled to Northern Ireland – Belfast – many times for research as three of the seven Irish exiles I was studying (Protestant rebels of 1848) were from Newry over the border. I travelled on Thursdays because there was an excursion ticket on that day. Many businessmen travelled up and back for the day and it was said you were less likely to be searched by the British troops as you crossed the border on that day.
But I learned that was not always the case. My attache case and handbag were grabbed and, when I unwisely tried to hang on, the soldier just tossed the contents of both down the corridor and no one made any effort to help as I crawled around the floor, trying to retrieve my loose cash, pens, note books as well as the loose foolscap pages that had fluttered all over the place. The catch on my attache case was broken and I was unsure what to do. ‘You needn’t have done that. I would have opened it if you’d asked me.’ And that was a mistake. ‘Australian! Bloody Australia getting into it now!’ Two soldiers began to imitate my Australian accent, laughing. The Irish didn’t laugh: they looked out the window, they had seen it all before. But when I got off the train at Belfast one traveller and then another came to me asking if I was ‘alright’ and whether they could help fix the broken catch.
Another time I missed the return train and had to stay the night, without money. It was my own fault. I always left the Public Records Office giving myself over half an hour to walk to the station, but this day I heard an enormous ‘bang’ between me and the station. Two ‘Pigs’ (small armoured vehicles) raced by. I began to run but it was winter and the snow had been pounded into ice so I kept falling over. I got wet through – my overcoat, hem of my dress, gloves, stockings and all – and was trying to get along quicker by going hand-over-hand along the railing when I was grabbed and shoved into a passenger bus that was already over-full. The light was going fast and I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t understand a word that was being said – the Northern Ireland workingclass accent is as difficult for us to understand as our accent is to them. No one spoke to me, not even the driver. At intervals another body was pushed in, caught up like me and grabbed ‘just in case’. At least, I supposed that was why we had been nabbed. The windows became fogged up and men and women were smoking. I tried not to think of anything but held my attache case hard against my chest with my arms wrapped round it. I was damned if I was going to let my hard-won research be stolen for the sake of the case.
Suddenly, quietly, with little fuss except for the astonishingly fruity cursing you can hear any day in Belfast, everyone except me got off and disappeared in a flash. I sat down on the floor. I didn’t know where we were. It was pitch dark outside. The driver roared at me. I moved toward him and he made a push at me. I grabbed the rail near his seat and shouted ‘Europa!’. God knows why I remembered the name of that hotel. It was the five-star hotel of Belfast that had been bombed recently and the repairs and alterations were said to have made it the safest place in the city. ‘Europa!’ I screamed every time the driver kicked and yelled at me. He kept shouting but apart from a lot of ‘fecking!’ I couldn’t understand a word of it. Then, suddenly he braked, the door opened, and he shouted ‘Europa!’ ‘Where?’ I yelled while he began to kick me again. ‘Where?’ He pointed down the deserted, black street and I fell out.
It would look fine for me to say that I stood up to this well, but the truth is I have never been so desolate, cold and terrified as when I heard his bloody bus rumbling off – no lights, I don’t know why, perhaps because of the curfew. I began to try to hurry down the street but when I got to the first corner there were still only rows of houses built flat onto the footpath. I banged on a door and no one answered, but I had heard voices before I knocked. I called out very loudly and a woman spoke, as if she had her lips to the keyhole. ‘Who are you?’ Irish, but softer than most Belfast speakers. I told her I was lost, could she give me directions to the Europa Hotel. Quickly, clearly she did so, then told me to walk on the gutter side of the footpath, not to creep along in the shadows of the houses as I had been doing. And she said not another word. I felt that my lone footsteps on this locked and shuttered street had been observed from the moment I had been pushed out of the bus.
I was only two streets from the Europa. A British soldier at the guard house frisked me lightly, then a British woman soldier did it more thoroughly, and I could go inside. I must have been a grubby sight: wet right through, covered in mud and dirt from my falls when skating along the ice and from squatting on the floor of the unlovely bus. At the reception desk the staff made no comment about my appearance but asked me how would I pay. Pay? Hell, I had only my now-useless day ticket back to Dublin and my scholarship didn’t run to extravagance. Then I remembered an old friend who lived in Dublin. Dr Brendan O’Brien is a descendant of the Irish kings and to give his name was a bit of an over-kill, but I felt better for having such a friend at such a time. The porter took me up to my room and took elaborate care explaining fire drill if an ‘alarm’ sounded. No one bothered to ask if I had any luggage and I had a feeling that this little adventure of mine was a quite frequent occurrence in this city. Without breakfast, I boarded the train the next day and at Dublin, since I no longer had a current ticket, I made a dash through the gate past the porter. It seemed such a neat exercise I could have been doing it all my life and should never need to buy a railway ticket again.
In all the trips I made to the English-ruled Northern Ireland I had only one other mishap and again, that was entirely my own fault. I took a photograph in Derry. It was not long after Bloody Sunday when thirteen Irish men had been shot during a peace demonstration. The English had painted on their tanks ‘British 13, Irish nil’. Feeling on both sides was violent. The photograph I took was of a mock-up of a body hanging by the neck from an archway, the legend around the neck read ‘Fuck the Pope’. That endeavour cost me a perfectly good camera and a very hard kick to my spleen, which does demonstrate that when a country is at war, or even in distress, one should not intrude. There is something cruelly indecent in probing or peering at a society wrapped in a tragedy that is four hundred years’ old.
And then there is the lighter side of research, such as the day in the Dublin Public Records Office when for hours I had been reading colourless, unyieldingly dull material about a trial. It was a rape charge, and right in the middle of proceedings the judge pulled up the accused and snapped, ‘What did you say the young lady had in her hand?’ ‘Me Parnell, sir’ replied the accused. ‘Your WHAT?’ I nearly rolled off my hard library seat. Parnell, of course, was the Protestant Irish hero who fell in love with the married Catholic woman, Kitty O’Shea, and not only lost his seat in the British parliament but lost all respectability in the community, as did Kitty. And now, what had been ‘me John Thomas’ to Englishmen had become in Ireland ‘me Parnell.’
* * *
My folklore work had resulted in my collecting a large amount of material from the old Diggers who had fought in the First World War. I mounted an exhibition about the Anzacs in Melbourne’s Public Library which brought in more people on the opening day than had ever attended any of the other exhibitions which had been held there. The vast and complex concept of The Anzacs book began to take shape in my mind and, for a number of years, the writing of it took over my life and pushed my other writing projects into the background. As I wrote to Beverly:
18 January 1977: It’s three years since I began THE BOOK [The Anzacs]. It takes all my waking hours and, as you know, it is 4.30 am regularly except for the loving times when good friends like you startle me out to dinner. I’ve got to get it to the publisher now. Stuck at it all last Friday night and went to bed 9 am to noon Saturday then at it again until 3.45 Monday morning when it was done, all 661 pages of it. I’m happy about it. Perhaps some other writer could do it as well – but I feel none better. The old men and women have been terrific, not only giving me beautifully rich material but enthusing me with their frankness and desire for the truth to be told.
Took it to Nelsons at midday, Monday – they near collapsed with the size of it. ‘Three books in one!’ Barney Rivers said – and then lunched me at Lazars until 4 pm. But it will take longer than that to unbind me. I’m tense in every fibre. My walk is jittery and I have pins and needles in finger tips and toes. My stomach is all of a twist, has been for months. But it’s done now. The baby has to battle alone now. Do wish me luck in the printing m’dear. I can now say to the surgeon: ‘Do your damnedest. I’m ready now.’
The Anzacs hardly needed luck. It ran alone to best-seller lists for over a year, and still sells.
One of the reviews of The Anzacs better describes the book than I can now do. Written by John Larkin of the Melbourne Age, it was headed ‘Real People in a Real War’:
Something extraordinary happens as Patsy Adam-Smith pares away the Anzac myths, all that Union Jack and King and Country drivel inflicted on generations of school kids.
You’ve only read a few chapters before you realise that the reality – the truth Patsy Adam-Smith has lovingly and stylishly stitched into a superb book – is nobler than the myths.
Take Simpson and his donkey. The authorised school version, the municipal sculptor’s version, depicts this saintly figure, serene, eyes raised above the petty horizons of mortals. Patsy Adam-Smith’s Simpson is no less heroic. But he is also a wild colonial spirit. He swears; he loves a stoush. ‘You couldn’t see anything for blood and snots flying…’ he writes rapturously about a fight at sea. He’s fond of his mum and stray dogs; he misspells terribly; he has humped a swag and been skint. He was heroic in Shrapnel Gully. But, above all, he is flawed and real.
Mythology gives us a saint we admired but could not comprehend. Patsy Adam-Smith gives us a bloke we might have known and liked … and who was as much a hero as the saint.
And it is this flavour of the book. It is about real people and the real war, the greatest ritual sacrifice of the young by the old, the innocent by the corrupt, in history. It is not about generals, strutting and thinking of posterity, or the chess world of strategy and diplomacy.
No, the hero is a bloke who walked out of a shearing shed, joined up to fight for a cause he did not understand, for a monarch he had never seen, for – God help us – a ‘mother’ country where he was not born … and fought and endured and died with a bravery and stoicism that in these soft days seems unreal. Actually, the hero is hundreds of such men. Patsy Adam-Smith has read nearly 8000 diaries and letters and interviews with many of the survivors, and she skilfully lets them tell the story.
And this is perhaps the book’s great power, this first person in the trench. A soldier crouching in the bone-strewn slime of Flanders has no time for affectation; … like Simpson, he is real.
They can make you weep, these diaries, when they suddenly run out, or when the author interposes a line like: ‘Perhaps now we could walk day by day with him, for there is only a little time to go.’ There is often a poetic quality. ‘… I saw an Australian and a Turk who had run each other through with their bayonets … their arms must have encircled each other … they had been in that sad embrace for at least a week.’ There’s she’ll-be-right optimism: ‘One old chap when he was dying kept saying: “Stop the bleeding boys, and I’ll get back home to the missus and kids.”’
In one sense it is the technique of the New Journalism, the non-fiction novel: let people tell it their way; leave the omissions, the wrong tenses, the vernacular, for they are the things that make it authentic.
Patsy Adam-Smith writes with polish and clarity; she never departs from her aim of letting the men tell it themselves. She is sympathetic when interposing her own conclusions, but never cowed by the Anzac ghosts she has grown up with. And, apart from its inspired use of photographs and captions, this book is an exquisite piece of engineering and editing; a lesser writer would have been overwhelmed by the weight of research.
And Patsy Adam-Smith deserves a special place – not just for getting it right but for doing so with so much style and so much heart.
In 1977 the Literature Board of the Australia Council, in partnership with the Department of Foreign Affairs, invited me to visit the USSR on the first government-to-government cultural exchange of writers between the two countries. Three Australian writers were invited: Barbara Jefferis, the novelist, David Williamson, the playwright, and me. We each knew we could raise a laugh in a tight corner – and what more do travellers need to know of each other? The exchange had its origins back in the days when Geoffrey Blainey was chairman of the Literature Board and it had now materialised in the form of an invitation from the Writers’ Union of the USSR.
Before we set off for the USSR we learned that we were also to go to Japan for three days. I didn’t care for that: I’d already been there before. Now we were to take part in a seminar and an exhibition of Australian books. It turned out to be like the curate’s egg – good in parts. Ambassador John Menadue did us proud. The books were set up in the embassy and we arrived to lunch with invited writers, publishers, translators and professors of literature. We promenaded through the gardens and I forgot to talk of literature because I was agog with the changes I could see in the country. Affluence, power and confidence had replaced the land I had known more than twenty years before.
Later we answered questions at a seminar, a pretty translator taking notes and reading the whole thing out at the end. David brightened the day for Barbara and me by stating that something was ‘ratshit’. The Australians in the audience laughed: how would the translator handle that? She did well: ‘Of no value, useless.’ A professor who knew David’s work inside out bombarded him with questions; another professor got into holts with me (and later took me to dinner) on the strength of Yoknapatawpha County-type writing in Australia. That was OK because I had been at the university in Mississippi studying Faulkner. In her own impressive way Barbara handled Australian-fiction-today questions.
She and I deserted our playwright companion the following day when he was to show the film of The Removalists at the embassy to Japanese guests. Barbara and I boarded the Bullet, the silver, streaking train and in fifty minutes were 68 miles out in the countryside. ‘My God!’ David greeted us on our late return. ‘I fear I’ve set Australian-Japanese relations back ten years!’ He was sure that the silence which had followed his film showing indicated displeasure, even distaste. ‘Not so,’ Professor Mikio Hiramaku told me later when he visited Australia. ‘It was the colloquialisms. Few Japanese could follow them.’
Before we left Tokyo we strolled down the Ginza which, on Sundays, has been turned into a mall, and David’s height made the day for the Japanese. They pointed at him, laughed, came right up to him and talked of the sight; one lady actually raced over to get her husband from a shop to view the spectacle, and a small boy ran into David’s knee before he realised there was a man on the top of it and he yelled ‘oooaahh!’ as he stretched his neck skywards.
In return I found myself staring at the Japanese. They seemed taller than I remembered them, better looking and more smartly dressed. I had not been back to Japan since 1960. I remembered then seeing armies of women on their hands and knees all through the night beating wooden blocks into the wide pavements, making a new road or a new pathway, with their masters, the men, overseeing their work but, of course, upright! At daybreak you’d hear the clatter-clatter of their wooden clogs as they returned to their homes to do their day’s work and be back on the pavements by sundown.
Then we did the long haul across Siberia. Three hours after our arrival at Moscow airport we were taken to dinner by Yuri Nagibin, whom some of us had met when he visited the Adelaide Arts Festival (and we waited in vain to meet his ex-wife, the excitable and exciting poet, Bella Akhmadulina).
We were weary. The flight to Japan, three busy days there, followed by the long flight across Siberia – and, in the case of at least one of us, copious stone bottles of warm sake – had taken its toll. Barbara, cool and gracious as ever, sat as befits a representative of government, and kicked neither of us under the table when first David spilt a whole glass of red wine and then broke the stem off the glass in putting it back on the table and I, not to be outdone, appeared to act with precision in tossing a full glass of lemonade the length of the table. When a monumental lady had mopped that lot up and we had recovered our aplomb, we ate heartily as all the other writer-members in the Writers’ Union building were doing: olives, lush and black, rye bread, bowls of caviar, cucumber in sour cream, cold meats and tiny spiced sausages, vodka, neat and copious and wines, red and white. One feels replete and content – when in comes the main course: the other was what would be called ‘snacks’. With an ‘Ah my country, it is all for thee’ feeling, we began again.
Next day we were to meet our hosts. The USSR Writers’ Union was housed in the building and grounds used as the Rostov’s home in the film of War and Peace. The graceful circular driveway sweeps up to the steps where fussy old Mr Rostov had scampered down to ask Audrey Hepburn why she was taking the furniture off the escape carts and putting wounded men there instead.
Inside we met the Deputy Chairman of the Foreign Commission of the Writer’s Union, Mr Sheshkin, who sat us down and told us about the Union. It was rather heavy, with a certain feeling from the voice and surroundings that we were to listen and take notes. I am not at my best at such times and refused to lift my pen. We were told that the print run for the average book of poetry was 15 000 and for prose it was 50 000 copies. We did not buy or, indeed, see any of these works in shops and on enquiring we learnt that they were sold out immediately on publication. The Australian Ambassador, Sir James Plimsoll, told me that he went to a shop two hours after opening time to buy a novel he wanted to read on the day it was being published and the work was sold out.
Now, about Russia. There is one hazard to avoid there (I’m damned if I know how you can avoid it but have a go): those mighty, big-bummed, doughty, Brobdignagian keepers of the keys of rooms in Russian pubs. Respect them, do as they shout, for you haven’t a Buckley’s chance against them. These women were positioned on every floor of the hotel, placed at the vantage point on the corner of the floor so they could see from both angles. They were the caretakers of morality.
Our hosts were generous. They took us in hire-drive cars to galleries, ballet, theatre, the circus. They gave each of us 150 roubles for ‘extras’: our accommodation, travel etc. was paid for. We had few chores. We addressed an English-speaking audience at the State Library of Foreign Literature, an unnerving experience as we followed Pablo Neruda, Robert Frost, Richard Aldington and other eminent authors of past years. Seated in the front row were the noted English translators, Oxana Krugerskaya and Alla Petroviskaya.
Then we were off on the Red Arrow to Leningrad (as it was called then). I do have to boast (and after all, I’ve travelled more train-miles than most Australian backsides), the pride of the USSR railway system could not compare with the dolce far niente of Queensland’s long, slow shunt into yesterday. There were no WCs in the cabins, dirty (even to grey) rags were used to wipe floors, then the samovar and then flapped to frighten one away back to one’s own seat. There was no shower on the train, no tea or service of any kind from the time we boarded at Moscow until an hour before we reached Leningrad, when we were given a cup of tea. For much of the time we were entertained by David singing ‘My Funny Valentine’, a sort of hung-over effect from our last few hours in Moscow when he’d danced with a Russian lady who had held him Moscow-style – very close. She was very tall and that was necessary if one was to dance very close with a man who was 6 foot 7 inches high. Barbara and I were afraid that if we danced with him the buckle of his belt would scratch our foreheads.
It rained in Leningrad as if the Second Flood was due, but even that couldn’t hide the legendary beauty of the place. We spent a day at Petrodverets, the most enchanting old Summer Palace, wandering the grounds which had fountains cascading and gilded statuary lining the waterways to the sea. There, across the water, live the Finns, a race superior even to the Russians in putting away their liquor. And this led to yet another petit embarrassment for David. We had stopped to have a beer at one of the convenient beer kiosks on the street (why can’t we have beer kiosks in Australia like wee tobacco shops, where a thirsty passer-by can have a quick, cold beer?) and the lady dispenser took exception to David, the gentle giant. She shouted (so we learnt from our translator) that it was ‘because of Finns like him coming over the border to drink that people say Russians drink too much!’ Well, well – as our translator, Anatole, said returning to the car with David. I banged my drinking mug down on the counter, presented the shouting lady with the two-finger salute, and ran like hell in case the gargantuan blonde took after me.
At Petrodverets, Anatole met his match with one of the mighty keepers of the keys. He was attempting to get us into a gallery at the head of a queue and told the big lady we had come from far away, from Australia, and that we were writers. ‘So what!’ this admirable Amazon shrugged. ‘I am a member of the Russian Architects’ Union!’ I loved her for that.
We had heard that one needs to be a hero to drink in Georgia, but the sunshine and the balmy air of the land undid us and heroes we became. Here we went to the famous Georgian brandy distillery and emptied our glasses into a crystal bowl on the fruit- and biscuit-covered table as we tasted one, two … six brandies. And then the toast. Always they toast in the USSR, anything up to a dozen toasts at a meal. We three agreed we were bumble-footed about this but occasionally we hit the right note. The toastmaster, Tamadah, was a tyrant. ‘Bottoms up!’ he cried in the Georgian equivalent and valiantly we upheld our country’s honour in brandy, vodka, Georgian wine, and the local cha-cha (or is it tzcha-tzcha?) that reminded me too terribly of Irish potheen.
Once again we were at the airport in the wee small hours. Uzbekistan was fabulous; its capital, Tashkent, had treasures, but Samarkand… well! The markets, both here and in Tashkent, were a joy – very like eastern markets anywhere except that there were no beggars and everything was clean. Our Uzbek guide, Alisher, as gentle as a girl, took my hand and held it out to a stallholder; the man placed a vine leaf on my palm and piled it high with the golden flesh of peeled figs and Alisher fed them to me with his slender fingers. (Note for D. H. Lawrence: you’d have slipped your trolley here. I did.)
David was suddenly accosted by a tribal-costumed, merry-faced lady stallholder. She held up three fingers, struggled for English, and said, ‘Three metres?’ His height. ‘No,’ said David, charmed like a little boy at her merry approach, ‘two metres’, and held up two fingers. The lady scampered back to the other gaily caparisoned women and held up her fingers and waved and greeted David when he next passed.
Having a guide who travelled with us meant that language was no problem, except for the vernacular. While Anatole may have had his problems getting over to us the subtleties of a Russian joke, there were times when we too had our difficulties. In Samarkand a pretty, scholarly lady guided us through the 15th century observatory of Ulugbek. Nearby she showed us the ruins of the 15th century building that the beautiful Bibi-Khanym had had erected to surprise her husband, Tamurlane, on his return from conquering India. The legend was that the architect fell deeply in love with Bibi-Khanym and refused to complete the building unless he was allowed one kiss. Bibi, anxious to see the roof-beam raised, said ‘Da, but only on my cheek and through my hand’. The lover approached, Bibi placed her hand upon her cheek and he kissed the palm, but his passion was so strong that his kiss burnt through her hand and branded her cheek. A sort of medieval love-bite resulted which Tamurlane recognised as swiftly as any returning husband would, and the architect fled on wings to Persia. At dinner that night David attempted to relate the story to our interpreter, Anatole. ‘There was this Bibi Khanym you see, and this architect got the hots for her …’ ‘What is “the hots”?’ asked our faithful guide.
Later, in Georgia, Datar, our companion who spoke Georgian and French but no English, suddenly learnt, from God knows where, a line that enchanted him. After a lunch in a country restaurant where we sat on low stools and ate a sort of soda loaf, borsch and greens with, as ever in Georgia, much local wine, Datar skipped with glee to David and cried, ‘You are drunk as skunt’. We quietly corrected the final consonant, and for the rest of our days in Georgia, Datar told anyone who would hearken that David was ‘drunk as skunk’.
Our leaving was warm and sad. As all travellers learn when touching a little of another world, if we exercise sympathy, patience and love, a journey becomes an entrancing field in which, perhaps, even the most erudite may learn something.