1

I MET MY GREAT-UNCLE Noel, my grandmother’s brother, for the second time in March 2011, the year before I moved to Brisbane. We met at my Auntie Jean’s seventieth birthday party, in a penthouse apartment overlooking Rainbow Bay. For years, Jean had rented this penthouse for two weeks over Christmas, staying there with her children – my cousins – and grandchildren. For years, my mother had rented an apartment in the same building, sometimes on the same floor, staying there with whichever of her children were in the country at the time. We spent our mornings at the beach and our afternoons in the bright and breezy penthouse, eating and drinking and laughing a lot while we stared out at the sea and the hazy summer sky, and all the way up the coast to Surfers, shimmering, surreal, in the distance. This was before Jean remarried her ex-husband; she and my mother were both divorced. They were the best of times.

My grandmother used to stay there with us, too. In the years after she died she was with us still, in the sayings and habits we inherited from her – by accident or on purpose – and in the traditions we continued in her honour. If anyone received a wearable gift we would all chant ‘Try on! Try on!’ until they acquiesced. We kept putting mango in our champagne. The Christmas after her death we all gave each other a ‘funny’, a joke gift. The laughter that year was genuine and free-flowing, but it was tinged with sadness too. It was a strange kind of sadness; we didn’t miss her, exactly – her sickness had made her even more tyrannical and she’d been harder and harder to deal with – but I think we felt sad for her, regretful for her, and for the life she lived, or didn’t live, especially towards the end.

My aunt’s seventieth was a surprise party. We all gathered in that penthouse apartment wearing red, her favourite colour. While we waited for the guest of honour to arrive, my mother swanned around the room, drinking champagne on an empty stomach and introducing me to family friends and relatives I either hadn’t met before or hadn’t seen in years. I was my mother’s daughter, they assured me, over and over again. I smiled and nodded and accepted their praise, attempting to be gracious, while my mother stood beside me beaming, as though she’d won a prize. Eventually, seeking a reprieve, I sat on the couch next to Noel. I introduced myself and asked him about an upcoming fishing trip I’d heard him mention. I didn’t ask him about his sister, though I desperately wanted to. When my mother spotted me talking to him, she pranced over to us.

‘Uncle Noel,’ she implored in her childlike way, ‘who do you think Melissa looks like?’ She nodded her head in my direction then looked hopefully back at him.

Noel studied me for a moment, as though seeing me for the first time. Then quietly, with a measure of grit in his voice, as though he could only just bring himself to say it, he said, ‘She looks like Joan.’

I was thirty-eight at the time. The same age, I realised later, as my grandmother had been when things had soured between them.

I call Noel, finally, ten months after moving to Brisbane. It’s a Monday night in early December 2012, the day before summer’s first scorcher. The phone rings and rings. I have been warned by my aunt that he only answers at particular times. In the early evening, when he is watching the news, is supposed to be a good time. Eventually, he answers.

‘Is that Noel?’ I say. He says yes. ‘It’s Melissa, Jill’s daughter – I met you last year at Jean’s seventieth.’

‘You’re Jean’s daughter?’

‘No, Jill’s daughter, Jean’s niece. We spoke at Jean’s seventieth. Do you know who I am? I want to make sure you know who you’re talking to.’

‘I know you,’ he says dryly. ‘You look just like your mother.’

I tell him I’ve recently moved to Brisbane and that I want to get in touch with all the family I never knew, to find out more about them. He tells me that his wife, Elaine, has dementia and has been in a home for the past three years. I tell him I’m sorry to hear that. I tell him I’d like to visit and suggest the following Thursday. He says he’ll be there but to call before I come, just to make sure. I say I will.

I call him Thursday morning at around 8 a.m. I say I’ll come about ten, bring morning tea. He says not to bother. I say I’ll bring it anyway.

He lives in Brisbane’s northern suburbs, in Trout Road, which is funny, given how much he loves fishing. I soon discover he is obsessed by it, that he could talk about it for hours. The house sits squarely in the middle of a large grassy block. There is no verandah and not a single tree. Venetian blinds are drawn down over the windows. As I approach I notice that the front door is slightly ajar. He’s left it open for me. I can see him sitting in the lounge room, a metre away from the television, eyes closed. There’s a stick lying next to him on the floor. I assume it is a walking stick but he stands up without using it and later I discover it is his remote control.

He invites me in and we go into the kitchen. He puts the kettle on and makes tea from scratch, in a beautiful china teapot. I cut up the apple and walnut pastry I’ve brought. I ask him later how long he’s lived in the house. At first he said 1992, but I quickly realise he thought I’d asked about his LandCruiser. He’s lived in the house for fifty-five years. For a time it was the only house on the street; you could barely see another building – it was just bush for miles and miles. ‘I should have forgone the house and lived in a caravan, used the money to buy up the land,’ he says in that deadpan tone that is fast becoming familiar. I wonder what it says about him that he’s stayed so long, seen so much change take place around him, yet never planted a single flower or tree, not even a hardy perennial shrub.

I ask him about the stroke he had earlier in the year. He’s much better, he says, he almost has full function. He goes to the hospital every week and they give him memory tests to do. He tells me the story of how it happened, how he left Brisbane in the morning, heading north to his son’s house in Cairns. How he got to Gladstone about lunchtime and stopped for a feed. How he decided to keep going because he wasn’t tired, and then, before he knew it, he was in Townsville. By then it was 2 a.m. He thought, It’s too late to find somewhere to stay so I’ll just keep on going to Cairns. When he arrived at his son’s house, he got out of the car and keeled over. In the ambulance on the way to Cairns Base Hospital, the medic told him he’d had a stroke. He said something about how he kept veering to the left when he walked. Noel quipped, ‘You would too, mate, if you’d just spent the past twenty-four hours trying to avoid trucks on the other side of the road.’

He is a warm-hearted and thoughtful man, nothing like his sister. But he shares her sense of humour. He points out a sign on the fridge that states: No drinking. No driving. No power tools. He laughs and says, ‘At least I can still have sex.’ It’s too sad to be offensive. He is eighty-five. His wife no longer knows who he is.

I clear a space for us at a table in the lounge room and we sit down with our tea. I tell him again that I want to know more about the family, that I want to hear his stories. He laughs and says there’s not a lot to tell: ‘We’re a lot of battlers.’ I ask him about Gympie. He tells me they lived in a grand Queenslander on a hill near the hospital, and that his father, Jack, worked for Cullinane’s. He tells me how Jack buried his dog – a bulldog – under the house before they left and moved to Brisbane. He segues then to a memory of a couple of Jack Russells he once owned. He says he’d love to have a dog now, but worries it would tie him down.

He tells me about his career, how in 1942 at the age of fourteen he worked for six months as a boilermaker in bombed-out warships, how at one point he was knocked out by the fumes while working alone in the bowels of a ship, and easily could have died. He’s worked hard all his life, he tells me, in tanneries and abattoirs, and buying sheep and lambs at auction in the country and bringing them back to be killed. There was nothing like the satisfaction, he says, of seeing hundreds of animals, the ones he’d selected, going in to get slaughtered. He is a man of his generation. There’s no denying that.

He talks a lot about fishing and crabbing, about the good old days when you could take off from Brisbane on a boat and cruise up to the Gulf, throw out a crab pot and haul it up with fifty muddies inside. The greenies have ruined all that, he says. And the nets. ‘They use barra for bait,’ he tells me, shaking his head. ‘And they only keep the legs and claws. They throw the rest away.’ He tells me about Archer Point, a remote camping spot near Cooktown. He had planned to go there after visiting his son in Cairns. It was his second attempt. On the first visit he’d arrived only to find his fridge didn’t work. This time he wasn’t taking any chances. He’d set up solar panels on the roof of the LandCruiser to power the fridge. He’d filled his caravan with three months’ worth of supplies and set off. There’s a reef just off the point and you can throw a line in off the beach and fish will just walk onto the hook, he tells me.

These stories aren’t what I’ve come for, but I listen with interest – or try to, feeling sorry for him, spending most of his time alone in this hot house. He shows me around his work shed under the house: a bench that he’s made from scratch, all his tools, his fishing rods – about thirty of them in a row – his home-brew collection, the caravan, and the beloved LandCruiser with its rooftop solar panels, none of them of any use to him now. By this stage I’m convinced that he has no idea who I am – he keeps mentioning names and telling stories about people I don’t know. I realise he’s been thinking of another Jean, another seventieth, all along. I could be anyone. I could be a complete stranger who noticed he lived on his own, got his number from the phone book and called pretending to know people he knew. I squirm knowing how vulnerable he is and feel that, in my own way, I am taking advantage of him too. I start offering to take him fishing sometime, and when I say it I believe that I will.

Back inside the house, I insist on doing the washing up. I shout to him in the lounge, something about my father. As I return to the lounge room and join him on the couch he asks me what my father’s name is. I tell him. ‘I don’t think you’ve met him,’ I say, ‘but you would like him. You have a lot in common.’ It occurs to me that this is why my grandmother and my father always got on so well. Perhaps he reminded her of her little brother. It is nearing time for me to leave and the disjunct between who I am and who he thinks I am has become farcical. So I just come out and say it. ‘I’m Jill’s daughter. Joan’s daughter Jill.’ It all clicks. That Jean, that seventieth. He smiles, remembering now, and asks about the family. I mention that I’ll be spending Christmas at my Uncle Stirling’s house. He nods. He approves. He remembers talking to Stirling’s partner at the seventieth, says she is ‘a great bird’.

I still can’t bring myself to ask about his sister, so I ask him instead whether his father Jack served in the war. Noel shakes his head – he doesn’t think so. He points out a sterling-silver serving tray that Jack’s father, William, had won at a show in Ludlow in 1913, a prize for champion ten head of cattle. I think of Noel and his time buying sheep, and the backbreaking work in the tannery, preparing the hides, scrubbing them down and tawing them, a process that involves soaking the hides in aluminium salts, stacking them up and leaving them to dry.

He says William was a squire. I’m not sure what this even means, but the fact that he’s mentioned it means something, as though the family hasn’t always been battlers, that they were once something better, of a higher class. It makes me picture a farmer walking around a lush green field in England, wearing britches, boots and a hat. He’s surveying his land, feeling proud, a sense of ownership. He hasn’t had to work to get what he’s got; it’s just his. I wonder if this is how Noel thinks of William. ‘Isn’t that funny,’ I say to him, ‘that he worked with animals too.’ Noel laughs. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘perhaps there’s something in that, perhaps I inherited that.’

We are sitting on the couch and it is hot. There is a fan nearby but it’s not on. At one point I ask if he would like to put the fan on. He says no, so I don’t. I have so many questions still to ask, but I have to go. I tell him I will come back in a couple of weeks, just before Christmas. I’ll bring my cousin’s dog.

I do go back again but not for another six months, and I do not bring the dog. We sit at his kitchen table, eating a toasted sandwich and a fruitcake that he baked using only dried fruit, tea and flour, while he retells the stories he told me before, as well as some new ones. He tells me he saw my grandfather shortly before he died; they were staying in the same pub in Roma. ‘I had quite a yarn to him,’ Noel says. He pauses as though reflecting, perhaps trying to recall what they yarned about. But if anything comes to mind, he doesn’t share it with me. When I press for details he tells me, ‘He was a likeable sort of a bloke … but he was a larrikin just the same.’ I sense in his tone a finality, as if to say that’s all that needs to be said about that.

So I move on, asking him if he knows anything about how Joan and Stirling met. He has no idea. I ask how their parents felt about the match. He says, ‘They would have been happy to get rid of her.’ We both laugh. I ask him what she was like when she was young. ‘Oh, she was quite nice.’ Was she always pig-headed? ‘Yes, that was her main fault.’ I ask him whether he thinks she was spoiled. He doesn’t hear me properly the first time so I repeat the question, then rephrase, asking how his parents treated her, whether they gave her everything she wanted. His answer is obtuse. Either he has misheard me or hasn’t wanted to hear. ‘I never had any problem with my parents,’ he tells me.

He was still living at home when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She must have been sick for some time. He tells me he would ride his bike home from work each day, arrive a little after five and put on the evening meal. By the time he had got the tea on, his Dad would have arrived home on the tram. They’d all have tea together and then Noel would do the dishes and go to bed. ‘I did that for five or six years,’ he says ruefully. ‘No wonder I got married.’

He talks a lot about his father, Jack, showing me photos that were taken on a three-week fishing trip in Tin Can Bay sometime in the early 1930s. In one photo, Noel – who says he was around six years old at the time – stands square to the camera, barefoot, with his pants rolled up to the knees, and his head cocked to one side. He isn’t smiling, not really, but it would appear that this is the point. Jack stands behind him, burly in his fishing gear – sleeves and pants rolled up, feet bare. He, too, stands square to the camera, one foot behind the other, hands placed delicately on his hips and pipe in mouth, wearing an odd-looking hat: no front brim, just two small flaps at the side. I look more closely and realise that he’s simply rolled the front and side brims under. He’s got bandages on his foot and left forefinger, fishing injuries perhaps, or cuts from oysters.

I ask Noel about his sister. He says she wasn’t there. I’m thinking she must have been there – he insists his mother was – but I do not press. I ask instead whether Jack liked to tell jokes, whether he was a storyteller. When he finally hears the question, Noel says, ‘Yes, he was a funny man. Actually, he died laughing.’ And so he tells me the story of his father’s death, of a heart attack in 1958, when he was sixty-seven. Jack was at the family holiday shack on Bribie Island, where he was living at the time, building a garage with a couple of mates. They’d finished for the day and he was telling them a joke, and ‘the next thing he went clunk. He died laughing.’ Noel added, with a wistful air: ‘He was a wonderful old man.’ He doesn’t know what the joke was. I ask him whether he spent much time at the Bribie house, thinking of all the fishing he might have done while he was there. He tells me he would have bought it but he couldn’t afford to – he’d only just built the house we are sitting in now.

How simple it all would have been, how different, had Jack Herbert not remarried the year before his death, or had he not died intestate.