I DREADED RETURNING TO Australia. I’d run away. Blown up my life. Lost face. I wasn’t even sure I would live here again. Somewhere along the way, I’d decided that I would be more use to my family, and everyone else, if I made an independent life for myself in another place. I’d come back not because I was needed—I assuredly was not—but because my daughter was having an exhibition of her lovely, meditative artwork at a city gallery late in 2008.
I intended to return to Jordan in the New Year, to help where I could with children in the refugee camps, and otherwise make myself useful there, returning to Australia for short visits. I’d heard stories in Jordan of Australian women who stayed for years, becoming indispensable. One was a doctor, working with village babies born with heart defects. Another was a nun who vanished into Syria near the Lebanese border helping the poor. I thought of tracking them down and persuading them to let me tell their stories. There was not much more a former publisher could do.
The tenants were still in the house; happily, I heard. So I avoided that part of town and camped in other people’s spare rooms once again—staying with generous women friends who were living alone with considerable style and flair. I had returned to a world peopled almost entirely by women, or so it seemed to me. Few couples among my friends had survived, and those who had steered clear. Or maybe it was I who avoided them—envious that their marriages had survived, shocked by how needy I still felt.
The GFC had knocked a large hole in incautiously invested superannuation like mine, and so had all my independent travel. Taking a leaf out of Carmen’s formidable budgeting, I made myself a spreadsheet, trying to recall 5-year-old details of household expenditure, to estimate how long I could last if I went on renting the house and living outside Australia. I’d lost track of how much the basics cost; everything seemed to have gone up, gouging was on the rise.
Lodgers and reverse mortgaging were the obvious solutions, said London friends, who often had a lodger or two, people who worked in the city but lived in the country, inhabiting a converted attic or a back bedroom, going home on the train at weekends. Unlikely to be the pattern in Melbourne. In any case I could find no sign of reverse mortgaging being offered by Australian banks, and the one financial adviser someone sent me to produced a graph to show how rapidly a reverse mortgage on the house would be devoured by me. He thought I was nuts.
I intended to keep moving, hoping next to join a small group that was setting up a children’s library in Gaza, such as Raghda Butros and Rabeea Al Nasser had done in Ruwwad, in places where there were no books, just photocopies of old textbooks. I had some Australian children’s stories donated by my friend Julia Taylor at Five Mile Press—a fine little series called Feelings: When I’m feeling Angry/Happy/Jealous/Sad/Kind?, which I planned to give to Rabeea to translate for children when we visited Gaza. After that, I would stay on for a while to help with her children’s reading program at Ruwwad, approaching Australian publishers to donate children’s books, subsidise their translation and have them printed. I would try to find an Australian donor to ship them free of charge and ask agents to waive charges. Having them translated was no problem—the Arabic writers I spoke to in Melbourne were happy to help, and money to pay them properly could be found. But any mention of a Middle East destination, and publishers and distributors backed off, suggesting I try over there.
Then, on 27 December, Israel launched its largest, bloodiest punitive attack since the Six Day War, targeting Hamas bases and the police headquarters on the Gaza Strip with twenty-two days of constant bombardment. The international media was forbidden to witness the carnage. Foreign aid was heavily restricted, the Red Cross and the UN forced to leave. The librarians’ visit could not go ahead, and I was back to following the news on Al Jazeera, which was all bad.
So was meeting my husband in the Botanic Gardens and, soon afterwards, having a solicitor inform me that he wanted to divide up ‘the assets’—one of his despised weasel words now being applied to thousands of books and CDs; old-fashioned, shabby furniture; a few good pictures painted by friends; and boxes of old files in a storage bin. A friend found me a solicitor. I didn’t want a divorce; just a proper arrangement between two people, with much shared history and grown-up children, who still cared for each other. Presumably everything would have to be sold. The books and the stuff in storage would have to be sorted.
He was up and away, in huge demand. His American Journeys had been out for months to great reviews, and now the media of course wanted his take on US politics—and there he was, holding forth on morning radio or The Minefield or Late Night Live or Q&A. I kept catching myself falling for his mind all over again, relishing his political analysis, laughing at his drollery; yes, missing him. I had not, it seemed, moved on enough. I’d run away, but now had a failed book and a failed marriage to deal with. Like finding black ooze beneath your feet when you thought you were floating free.
I spent a lot of time that summer grimly walking the streets of Melbourne, avoiding people, going to films, sitting in parks, feeling trapped and sad. It was ferociously hot, the air dangerously dry, dead birds and possums in the lanes, and spare beds at a premium. Emergency warnings cut across the news, outer suburban and country people being advised to take their pets and hand luggage and stay with friends.
I felt in the way staying where I was, so I borrowed some camping gear from one of my sons and drove up the Princes Highway to southern New South Wales to a tent in a beautiful garden on a friend’s hillside near the sea. I woke on 7 February to the news of fires raging throughout Victoria, after the highest number of days with temperatures of more than 43 degrees since records began. There was an immense death toll and terrible destruction. But I shocked myself by responding as if through the wrong end of a telescope: at the money coming in from poor countries, the royal visitors and weeping politicians—railing in my heart for the Palestinians in Gaza whose faces we were not allowed to see.
I rebooked my tickets to Jordan for mid-March, and offered my services to the City Library for a refugee reading program. Then I put the word out for a student who could teach me some Arabic, so I could speak with the children in the Ruwwad library when I returned. So I could learn how to say: Where I come from, there have been very bad fires. Many people have lost their houses and many are dead. But they would know that. The kangaroos and koalas with bandaged feet would have been on television. Many of these children would have family in Gaza.
A friend suggested Sahar, a clever student who came to Australia in 2001, with her parents and a younger sister, leaving behind her two older brothers in Saddam’s Iraq. Only gradually did she tell me her familiar, shameful story. Sahar and her family, and everyone else on board, had jumped into the sea when the boat they were on began breaking up, the navy vessel Tampa standing by. The family were taken first to Nauru; then eventually to the Maribyrnong Detention Centre, where Sahar was allowed to attend school, but always in a locked van with an armed guard accompanying her.
‘I made no friends at school,’ she said. ‘I was full of shame. But it made me stronger.’ And she told me of the kindness of many people she met while in detention. Her fortitude and generosity of spirit were inspiring, and it was I who was ashamed.
Now she helped me choose some children’s books for village libraries in the West Bank and Gaza. Choosing books for children in other cultures is fraught with sensitivities. Sahar told me that books about dogs and pigs are never given to children. Indeed, it is rude to mention either animal at mealtimes. But parents teach young children how to be kind and how to forgive, as the Qur’an insists on. Her father encouraged Sahar to read widely. The phrases and sentences she taught me I would use when I returned with some Australian books for Rabeea. I told Sahar about leaving behind, for Rabeea’s House of Tales and Music, the ukulele I never learned to play. And how, perhaps, I would be able to start a little conversation about bushfires and koalas with burned paws, and kangaroos swimming in the sea.
I returned to Cortona in April, just days before the earthquake struck L’Aquila in the Abruzzo, and again was watching coverage of a huge catastrophe, the 28,000 made homeless, the more than 300 killed, the crews digging out bodies. The Italians didn’t weep on camera like Australians now did. Except for one young man in his underpants, dug out from the rubble after twelve hours, and whose dry sobs went around the world, Italians in L’Aquila turned away from the camera to weep—or the camera turned aside to leave them their dignity. Even Berlusconi could not politicise their catastrophe, or so it seemed to me. Maybe it had something to do with Catholicism, fatalism; generation after generation in small towns and villages stoically rebuilding in this beautiful, dangerous part of the Apennines, where the terremoto is always expected.
I was starting to face packing up the apartment, shipping a box of books and papers to Australia, where I would have to start again. I thought about sponsoring a refugee once I was back home and living alone in a house that would be too large.
Lyndall’s English friends had befriended Akram Ali, a young Hazara Afghani man, while he did his A levels, then studied at Oxford Brookes, where he excelled. He was obliged to return to Afghanistan to help a family member, which would be dangerous for him and also mean he couldn’t return to England. He sometimes stayed in Lyndall’s tower; sometimes in Bologna, where the clergy let them sleep. He showed me footage on Facebook of the poetry group he had started with the refugees in the Duomo. The next time he came to Cortona to help me with my computer, archiving files I needed to keep, he asked if I would please help him come to Australia to study. I told him I would make enquiries at universities later in the year, when I was home again.
The children’s library Rabeea wanted to show me was in Beidha, near Little Petra, where Bedouin families like those I encountered with Ruda on that long climb had all been rehoused from the caves of Petra.
I took my books for the children, and saw that the Swedish Anna Lindh Foundation had stocked the schoolhouse library with classic children’s stories in Arabic translation. There was Ali Baba, which I saw from the book’s prelims had gone from a classic Arabic tale into Swedish, and back into Arabic again. I wished I knew enough to follow the differences.
The Bedouin mothers came with their children and stayed on for reading lessons for themselves. Rabeea had everyone sitting in front of her on the mats as she read, her lovely, expressive voice making them all laugh and groan along with the drama of the stories: Aladdin, and a Finnish story about Moomintrolls, magic and snow. It sometimes snows heavily in Beidha, the mothers told me. They helped me write the Arabic alphabet on the whiteboard and laughed at my efforts.
I showed my large coloured photographs of the bushfires in Victoria, and remembered that Sahar told me there is no word for hillsides covered in bush. The smoke and the burned-out cars, and helicopters dousing the fires, got the most response from the children and their mothers: The war, the same.
In May 2009, I was staying with Teresa again. I was trying to find the right people to talk to about freighting Australian children’s books in translation into the refugee camps. I wished I could ask Sidi Hassan, who would know immediately who to speak to and would help me make it happen. Then I planned to take myself to Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Carmen had arranged for me to join PalFest, the second Palestinian Festival of Literature, with a group of mainly British writers and performers. PalFest was led by Ahdaf Soueif, whose novel, In the Eye of the Sun, about a woman growing up between Cairo and England in the 1960s and 1970s, I much admired.
Before I left Amman, I visited the researcher Adiba Mango, whose baby son, Ghassan, was then eight months old. Adiba had not heard of the stalling of the book, nor of my banishment, and was aghast at what had happened. She offered to send a letter from me to Prince Hassan, via her father, to find out if he’d see me before I flew home to Australia. She suggested also sending him several of the pieces I had written about Ruwwad and a recent visit to Dubai. This I did, hoping when I was back from the West Bank, I would be able to call on him and Princess Sarvath, and clear up whatever damage had been done. It was her father, Dr Mango, who wanted the Prince to sound like a prince, so I had only a very small surge of hope that he might listen to Adiba. But when I returned, there was no invitation, nothing.
Teresa’s driver, Walem Sallah, collected me at eight-thirty the next morning, and we drove through the Jordan Valley to the Allenby Crossing. Friendly chaos on Jordan’s side: no apparent systems; piles of passports; officials at windows, taking all the time in the world. No one lost it, even though it was Friday and the last tourist bus had to fill before midday. Then we headed off, through several checkpoints, to the large Israeli Crossing, where there were hundreds waiting. The Palestinians were processed elsewhere, and foreigners were quizzed: Why here, who do you know, where are you staying? Why Ramallah, why Bethlehem, why Hebron, why are you going back to Jordan? I said I was joining a tour of writers from London, who would arrive tomorrow night. I showed the name of Ahdaf Soueif, the group leader. The woman took my passport and did not come back.
Finally, there was just me, and three others going to Ramallah from Jerusalem. All the booths started to be closed for Shabbat, which starts at sundown. The army officer interrogated me again, a blank paper in front of him. He went away. What is wrong? I asked. Why are you here? he asked. Four hours later, I was the second-last to leave, before a poor Palestinian family trying to visit their invalid mother in Ramallah. I was not permitted to wait for them and share a taxi.
My night and a day alone in the Old City of Jerusalem before the group arrived were spent first in the courtyard of the Christ Church Guest House, where the boy on reception was too devout to smile. I was reading Karen Armstrong’s Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, and a lovely Farrar Straus edition of the work of Palestinian poet laureate Mahmoud Darwish. That evening, I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, site of the Crucifixion and the holy tomb of Jesus, where there was truly an odour of sanctity. Praying devotees were kissing stones, weeping, praying aloud, and moved briskly along. A young Moroccan volunteer took my hand, and led me through passageways to the Armenian church and the Syrian church, which were, he said, more beautiful. Simply lit, unadorned Romanesque arches loomed out of the dark. The air was thick with other people’s prayers, and I watched couples filming each other kissing the stone of Abnegation, or was it Mortification? I remembered Prince Hassan’s story about the Palestinian Muslim family, the Nusseibehs, who have been custodians of the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre since 634.
The next morning, the rampart walk had been closed, so the golden dome of the Al-Aqsa mosque could only be seen from the Mount of Olives outside the gates. Saturday security, said the guard, who let me stand on the step near the gate and take photographs through the bars. The Davidson archaeological site was huge and meticulous, and so was the scaffolding and the hoarding advertising a vast hospice being built overlooking the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism. The streets were thronged with Orthodox men in big hats and sateen coats, and families of scarfed women and girls in long skirts, small boys in white shirts holding their fathers’ hands.
Security measures the day I visited the mosque meant that I could enter through the small barred gate but men under fifty and women under forty-five could not. There were groups of armed police in the grounds. I stood inside the silver domed Al-Aqsa mosque, the holiest site in Islam after Mecca, where a Palestinian assassin gunned down Jordan’s King Abdullah I in 1951, and Prince Hussein was saved by a medal pinned to his chest. The King and his grandsons would sometimes ride on horseback the 75 kilometres from Amman, to attend Friday prayers at the mosque.
Everything Sidi Hassan had told me about the deliberate erosion of Muslim faith in the course of the book was being played out here in the new buildings and legislation. The Arab quarter is very much smaller than it used to be, he said. ‘The Israelis simply took over Jerusalem and nobody stopped them.’ Rumours abounded that the Greek Orthodox Church was selling up its real estate.
Why is God such a divisive force? Why is there no recognition of the shared history, the common roots, the human soul in torment reaching out as best it can? Why the need to win, exclude, lord it over, kill and maim and reduce to rubble? I was trying not to hate this place, which made me feel both privileged and bereft.
Tensions were great in the Old City in May 2009, but perhaps they always are. Hatred was palpable. I wandered through the ancient quarters, astounded by the hoardings advertising holiday complexes being built for American Christian evangelicals. I joined the crowds visiting the Friends of Zion Museum proclaiming the continuous occupation of Palestinian lands since biblical times. My English guidebook spoke only of Greater Israel. I saw young boys throwing stones at an old couple, from the top of a wall in the Arab quarter. I saw conservatively dressed women from the settlements marshalling their large families through the fruit markets, and a woman stall holder spitting after them.
Then the festival’s packed opening night at the Palestinian National Theatre in East Jerusalem was raided by heavily armed Israeli police and shut down. Already the moral weight of PalFest’s first visit the year before had made itself felt. Writers were not welcome here—seeing the West Bank for themselves, visiting the towns and universities, speaking to students, reading and performing at night, alongside Palestinian artists, reaffirming Edward Said’s the power of culture over the culture of power. The opening event had to be relocated to the nearby courtyard of the French consulate-general.
Walking there, Carmen mentioned that she had been reprimanded for finagling my joining the group in Jerusalem. The young administrator who accepted my booking had also been reprimanded. All I could do was leave or keep going. I didn’t offer to go back to Amman. I offered to pay more and call it a donation.
Hilarious and horrible, as we travelled through a divided landscape of checkpoints and watchtowers; of Banksy murals; and the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, who had died the year before, graffitied on the Separation Wall near the Qalandia checkpoint separating Jerusalem from Ramallah. Free Marwan Barghouti was everywhere. And When one lives with oppression to revolt is a duty. Nobody spoke to me on the bus, and Carmen and I soon started snapping at each other.
After a day or two, there was a thaw. Suheir Hammad, Henning Mankell, Claire Messud and Khalid Abdullah, brilliant performers all, were friendly. Adhaf Soueif and Jeremy Harding were also. They quizzed me about Kevin Rudd’s government’s apology to the Stolen Generation in February the previous year, and whether Australian reparations to the Indigenous people would ever be made. I thought not, unless the High Court found a way to honour the Mabo and Wik decisions of the 1990s, or the British government joined with ours to confront its country’s role in the killings, its violent appropriation of the sovereignty of an ancient land. Here, in the West Bank, the argument was writ large.
In Ramallah, the group visited the house of writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh. His Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, had just been published. Shehadeh described six walks taken during the past forty years, through the terraced hillsides and verdant valleys of Palestine, now dangerous and almost impassable because of roads and walls, the hilltop settlements severing the landscape as far as the eye could see. He led us through the fields to a beautiful small stone house opening onto terraced olive groves.
Shehadeh’s book is a powerful meditation, melancholy and realistic, accepting some things as immutable—a perspective I badly needed, not only for the next few days, when we visited Bethlehem and the University of Hebron. Students quizzed us, eager to know where we’d come from, and what it looks like. Could we help them to study there? They told us how long it took them to get to class through the checkpoints, and how only a scholarship, a permit and a passport, almost unattainable, would allow them to leave Palestine to do further study. Our guide, Mohammed, who worked part time, studying English literature and semantics at Birzeit University, showed us his 360-page textbook, on his very small phone.
‘Israeli planners worked on strangling our inhabited areas and separating them from one another,’ Shehadeh said. Agricultural villages had had their fields expropriated, which had turned the men into construction workers building the concrete walls and settlements on land that once belonged to them. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s 2006 Convergence Plan to form Greater Israel reneged on the commitments made under the 1993 Oslo Agreement, which meant the exercise of sovereignty over the borders was absolute. The settlements, now called ‘developments’, loomed on the hilltops, with all the confidence of permanent occupation.
At the Khalil Sakakini Center in Jenin, Suheir Hammad performed her poetry and her five-part ‘The Gaza Suite’, to accompaniment by musicians from the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. The oud, qanoun, percussion, flute and her voice soared and swelled as darkness fell and I, for one, was profoundly moved. The audience thronged the grounds, the very young sitting high on the walls of the Sakakini Center, everyone beating time to the music.
The next day, we visited Bethlehem and the Aida Camp, with the Banksy murals of the small girl and the soldier, where there were workshops about making political points without polemics. There was a mime by five young girls about finding a backpack on the ground. They played with it, cuddled it, squashed it, wrote all over it; then it exploded and they all fell down.
The rubbish piles, the signs of hopelessness, were everywhere. One of our guides told us firmly that: ‘Some of the Palestinians are complicit in building the wall, which is funded by the Palestinian Authority through Egypt which supplies the concrete. The Palestinians supply the labour.’ The self-righteous questioning from some of us was worse. ‘Why the rubbish piles?’ ‘Why don’t you all start little businesses?’ Why has no one blown up the wall in strategic places?’ ‘Why don’t thousands of you just gather, alert the international media and demand that it is pulled down?’ Answer: poverty, lack of services, cameras, guns, incarcerations. The Palestinians, like indigenous peoples everywhere, like the Jews in the ghettos, are accused of not getting off their butts and helping themselves. We came to gawp, and take photographs and notes, and tell them about our privileged worlds. At the Bethlehem checkpoint, we were allowed, as a concession, to leave our luggage on the bus once it had been inspected; then we had to trudge through long wire mesh tunnels to the other side, past walls graffitied with Jesus Wept for Jerusalem. I thought of mothers carrying small children, pregnant women dragging suitcases, old people on crutches.
The last night of the festival couldn’t be held at the Palestinian National Theatre, as advertised, so the British Council stepped up, and the cultural officer of Fatah and the British consul welcomed us to their high-walled garden. The evening was one of celebration and speeches. I was tired and grumpy. The British speakers congratulated themselves on the power of English literature. That it can be bestowed and is held in high regard was true—students in the Middle East are taught to revere the classics of English literature. I remember my friend Khalid, the late-night baggage handler in Amman; and the hairdresser in one of the large hotels who opened a drawer to show me his copy of Jude the Obscure among the combs and brushes.
But they need support to tell their own stories; to make their own films and have them translated for us to understand, not to create pale imitations. The Canadian M.G. Vassanji and the Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah say much the same. I bought their books, Gurnah’s Desertion and Vassanji’s most recent novel, The Assassin’s Song, to read on the plane. On Sunday, I would be back in Melbourne. Home again.
I returned to Jordan through the Allenby Crossing, where delays were arbitrary and merciless. Nobody was fast-tracked but taxi drivers knew who to bribe to get visitors like me through ahead of Palestinians, who were being interrogated, then kept waiting, then interrogated again. Many of the armed guards were blonde young women and there was no flag of Palestine to be seen.
Soon after I got home, I went to a party where Diana Gribble was standing outside with the smokers, where the best conversations are still to be had. She suggested coffee at Marios the next day, and I assumed we’d do what we had done ever since McPhee Gribble was sold to Penguin—give each other a brisk hug, ask about the children and aged parents, and avoid any talk about what had happened with the company, when I found myself boxed in by the deal and Di could walk away. It was Diana, of course, who broke the taboo at Marios that morning, insisting we stop talking about the children and talk about the end of McPhee Gribble.
At first, we met early in the morning, every Thursday, moving from café to café around Fitzroy, Lygon Street and North Carlton, conscious of the spectacle we were making of ourselves. Two women in their late sixties, weeping and raging and clutching each other’s hands before staggering out into the daylight, white-faced in dark glasses.
Sometimes we’d text each other afterwards, about how we’d nearly thrown up or had to go back to bed, having managed to find the words for how betrayed we felt, how devalued, how utterly helpless once the deal was done. How we’d each blamed the other for not recognising how terrible was the timing of expanding in the teeth of a recession. How what had started with a partnership agreement between two young women who were honour bound to be honest with each other had ended with a corporate buy-out that wiped what we’d done off the map. I had written about it later with Di’s permission, but we had never ever talked about it. High-risk stuff—but splendid in its way. After several months of this, there was nothing more to be said and we settled back into gossip and regular coffees at Marios, just down the road from our last office—a seedy old building that was now a chess club covered in graffiti.
My diary when I returned home was full of building maintenance and doctor’s appointments. The federal government’s Energy Efficient Homes Package had passed me by, but all the light bulbs needed replacing, and I changed power suppliers simply because I liked the smiling young Irishwoman who sold the idea to me. Not so much, an Irishman with the gift of the gab who knocked on my door to tell me the window frames were full of dry rot and urgently needed replacing, by him.
The divorce spluttered on. My assets were disclosed and the myth that I earned vast amounts in Jordan was dispelled. The house by the sea was long gone, and I didn’t query the book advances or the part-owned race horses. The day our divorce was listed, I asked a friend to come with me to the Family Court, because I needed to see it through to the very end.
That night, I had friends to dinner in the overgrown back garden, just to mark the day. Diana Gribble and Les Kossatz; Jan and Helen Senbergs; Katherine Hattam and Jim Morgan—these were couples I had spent much of my adult life with, and greatly missed while I was away. Kath’s artwork was fiercely feminist, supported always by Jim, who wrote books and was her great stalwart. Les and Jan were always artists in competition, but on this night, Jan failed to arrive because he had pranged his car. Helen managed Jan, though he’d dispute that. Jim and Helen often describe themselves as artists’ wives. His novels and her beautiful work with textiles did not get enough time or attention. Les and Di’s house at Narbethong had been wiped out in the bushfires, and he talked about the plaster casts he’d been making of the scorched ground there.
Diana I had known the longest, through thick and thin. She came to see me the next day, and told me that Les was very ill with throat cancer, but they were at Narbethong as much as possible, rebuilding their house. We walked to Les’s studio in Kay Street which was full of his metal-filing-cabinet sculptures, now adorned with snakes and ladders. Diana was distraught. Her marriage to Les was the strongest kind—they had been there for each other at every turn.
Then there was an invitation to a lunch party at the North Fitzroy Star hotel, to which I went reluctantly. Despite its much-praised ambience, this was a place that was full of brambles for me. The Star was where my, now former, husband had long ago persuaded me to marry him. And I did, exchanging marriage vows in front of our families and every friend we had—in order to make it last, we said. Ha.
This day, I was seated next to the formidable Betty Burstall, who had started the renowned La Mama theatre in Carlton, and, slightly desperately, I started a conversation about the diaries of her ex-husband, filmmaker Tim Burstall, which he’d brought to McPhee Gribble’s office years before, for us to read. Tim needed money for his divorce settlement and was hoping we’d plunge in recklessly. Had anyone published them?
‘They are sitting by my bed and I still haven’t read them,’ said Betty. I don’t know that I believed her but I offered to have another look at them. With the help of modernist builder Alistair Knox, the Burstalls and their friends built mudbrick houses, small potteries and studios on the Eltham hillside above the creek. As a document of their era, the life and times of the ‘arties’ and ‘intellectuals’ of Eltham in the early 1950s, I felt the diaries should, at the very least, be deposited for safety in the State Library.
I re-read them, all 924 pages of yellowing typescript, over the next week. Tim, then a young husband and member of the Communist Party, determined to become a writer, undertook to write 500 words a day, producing what he dubbed The Memoirs of a Young Bastard Who Sunbaked and Rooted and Went to Branch Meetings. The diaries were just as evocative and scurrilous as I remembered. I needed a project, and this one meant there would be mudbrick houses to visit, photos to find and friends of the Burstalls to interview. So, I offered to annotate the diaries and to find Betty a publisher.
The project, and Betty herself, became a kind of lifeline for me; reorienting me by immersing me back in the place I knew best. Once or twice a week, I would arrive with my recorder at her Nicholson Street house in inner Melbourne, which she had shared with Tim in the last years of his life when his health was failing. Before that, they’d been apart for some time: Betty leaving in the 1970s to live with a lover in Greece for a few years, having secured the future of La Mama. I brought buns, and Betty made strong coffee, which we drank from Eltham mugs. Her paintings hung on the walls, and photos of Tim were there on the dresser, among her pottery bowls and plates.
Betty didn’t read the diaries, even then. Instead she asked me to read her ‘the hard bits’—about Tim’s constant infidelities; his often harsh assessments of friends; and his long infatuation with a clever young student, Fay Rosefield, now the esteemed poet Fay Zwicky. His unerring ear for cant and pomposity, his ability to mock himself, his turn of phrase, Betty still laughed at, her face alight.
We discussed his conventional English family, who had cut Tim off forever, and Betty’s more relaxed mother, who had taken them in. Tim and Betty had been promising first-year students at Melbourne University in 1944, when Betty became pregnant. She had to drop out, as women always did then. Tim’s parents took out a court order, preventing him from marrying until he was twenty-one. Betty’s mother let the young pair build a bungalow in her backyard. ‘Tim stuck by me and we were very happy,’ Betty said. Then their baby, named Peter, was born prematurely and died after a few days; an emotional catastrophe, she told me, which underpinned their marriage.
My first marriage had started the same way, I told her. Partway through my honours year at university, besotted with the Anglo-Saxons and absorbed in Australian prehistory, I too dropped out because I was pregnant. My baby, christened Peter, after his father, lived for two days.
I think that is why, I told Betty, I tumble into a bottomless black pit in late April every year. Even if I forget the date, I am stricken. You need a grave, she said brusquely. Tim and I had one—and a burial.
I went home and rang the Melbourne Cemetery, which was just up the road, but the Public Burial Ground had not been there for a long time. The woman who answered the phone said, ‘Give Springvale a try.’
Evidently, the hospitals dealt with the small bodies by sending them, in batches, to a general cemetery. There, they were buried, like the poor or those whose identities were unknown, in a public plot; the number, and the name, and that of the person signing the paper kept in a file somewhere.
Women without husbands, young women like me, who left hospital with empty arms, were told nothing. I had left my shell-shocked family’s house and returned the next day to my student flat, looking out on to the kangaroo-like griffins. Peter and I had no words for what had happened, but we began to behave like a married couple. We entertained his brother and his wife, who came from Canberra, and smiling photos of us were taken to send to his parents in London. We went to parties together, and returned home to Peter’s loft. My parents, who also never spoke about what had happened, lent us the money for a bush block of tree ferns and blue hydrangeas in the Dandenongs.
At first, I had tried to return to the solitude of the dark little carrel in the Baillieu Library, with its reading light and bookstand holding the facsimile of the Lindisfarne Gospels that had so consumed me. But after a few weeks of putting on white gloves and turning the heavy pages, pretending to focus and hoping to see again what I’d been so excited by the year before—the glimpses of paganism in an early Christian monk’s illuminations—I walked away.
Then Peter and I went on a cargo boat to Basra in the Persian Gulf—where we saw the Ma’dan people poling their boats through the reeds in the Shatt al-Arab.
A generous friend, impatient with my sadness, gave me a puppy, which I should have refused, knowing this would curtail my travels and limit my options. I was not yet ready to settle in one place. My book about women’s bodies was coming back to life, now that the Burstall diaries were almost done, and I was planning a visit to London, to the Wellcome Collection, the next year.
In the meantime, though, Diana also spurred me on to try to find out what happened to Peter William. There was no death certificate, no record of his burial at the church where my mother used to worship. The kindly priest I telephoned sent me his blessings and emailed that Your baby’s soul was taken into the church when he was baptized but his body was not in hallowed ground there.
While my baby didn’t have a death certificate, he had two numbers against his name. He was No. 21761 in the Registry of Baptisms at St Agnes Anglican Church; and No. 295597 on his burial file for public grave No. 34, H Section E, at Springvale. On 1 May 1964, his body was bundled up ‘along with a lot of other bodies’; my father, the ‘authorising person’.
My baby had lived for two days and there was a baptism. My mother’s parish priest went to the hospital, at her request, to christen him Peter William. Then I sat by his humidicrib and stroked his little red limbs, and he gripped my finger, and I watched his eyelids flutter, and his chest go up and down. I sat by him for all of one day and late into the night, until I was wheeled away into a room on my own and given a pill to make me sleep. Sometime later, I was awoken by the light of a torch on my face and the sister-in-charge telling me my baby had died. You could never have looked after him, she said. It was for the best. And I will remember forever the heavy thud of the door as it shut in the dark behind her.
Diana suggested I contact Shurlee Swain, who had written about the history of childbirth, to get the name of a support group for women who have lost babies, through stillbirths and neonatal deaths. I went to several Sands meetings, where women spoke of loneliness and the deep silences that fell around their babies’ deaths, many of them a long time ago. I eventually spoke about Peter William, with two of the women holding my hands.
Later, they showed me photos of the public burial ground at Springvale, and described the working bees organised years before by another Betty, whose surname no one could recall. She had been determined to have the ground at Springvale swept clear of rubbish, weeded and turned into a place that might offer some comfort to visitors. She persuaded Springvale’s management to position in the shrubbery a large rock on which small plaques could be displayed. The Sands women told me how to find it.
I drove out there on 26 April, and became totally lost and frantic. I was about to give up when I found the place, not far from the neatly mown grass and recently turned sods of the children’s memorial garden, with its sad toys and plastic windmills. The small copse of gum trees and she-oaks behind the rock was very beautiful. I sat on a log and watched a pair of green parrots dive beneath the trees.
Then I read the names and dates on the plaques; so many sad little stories. And that evening, a kind woman from Sands rang to see if I was okay. Yes, I think I am.
When my daughter-in-law Jodie had baby Angus in January 2010, Sophie and I walked together down the street where I live to the hospital. The name Angus runs through each generation, from the Angus McPhee who brought his family from Skye in 1853, to my black-haired grandson. My heart sang when I saw the little boy with my son’s bright eyes, and his shock of thick black hair like his mother’s and my father’s, and when I saw Sophie holding him.
Sophie, after her final year of school, had proposed that she live in one of my spare rooms the next year, suggesting that, when I travel again, as I must, two of her friends would move in. They were already sharing the puppy training and walking, which had been their idea.
They spurred me on to have a party, offering to do all the work. A reckless sociability took us over, and seventy people were invited, including lots of Sophie’s friends. Two of the boys greeted people formally at the front door, taking their coats and handing them a glass of something. Sophie had made dozens of tiny quiches from her mother’s recipe. Eventually, we went outside, where her school friends Rosie and Alex performed—Rosie with her lovely voice, its perfect pitch, and Alex on the guitar—sitting on the steps up to the shed, among the yellow roses.
Sharing the house with Sophie and her nearly 19-year-old friends was a challenge. For them, as well as for me. They all worked part time in cafés and bars, and pleased me by cooking enthusiastically in my old-fashioned kitchen. When our time in the house coincided, which wasn’t often, as they worked most nights, we ate together. On the flip side, the front door crashed shut in the small hours and the old windows shook. The electricity, gas and water bills soared. I left them, with large exclamation marks, lying on the kitchen table, with notes about shorter showers, which I imagined no one read. But they did read books, most of them, so the talk was sometimes of Cloudstreet and Monkey Grip. Of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.
Some of them were now studying music; others, international relations and politics. They were Greens supporters, and Sophie started to volunteer to help with campaigns in the run-up to the federal election in August 2010. She suggested the house as a venue for a meeting where Adam Bandt answered questions from her generation about how the Greens would handle the issues that were most important to them: the climate crisis and tertiary student debt, in particular. The house started to sprout Greens posters in the windows.
I was ambivalent about the Greens’ effectiveness, after attending a couple of meetings and seeing what sounded to me like US-style political sloganising at work. But I heard Sophie speaking at a Greens function and changed my vote. I’d missed so much of the Australian political drama of the past five years, Julia Gillard having only recently ousted Kevin Rudd, but election day at the local primary school welded me back on. The long queues of voters from everywhere, the young families from the Flats voting for the first time, the volunteers, the translators. Compulsory voting is a precious thing—and nobody round here took it lightly. When the Greens ended up with the balance of power and Julia Gillard was left having to fight off Tony Abbott, I felt absurdly culpable.
Sometimes Sophie and her friends invited me to their gigs, so I went to live performances nearby at the Evelyn in Brunswick Street and the Wesley Anne in Northcote, feeling like an ancient crone. But there were parents and other grey heads present and we shared our pleasure that these young performers were really, really good. I remembered how much I love watching talented young musicians work.
By December 2010 in Tunisia, the Arab Spring had begun. Demands for régime change and democratic elections spread rapidly through North Africa and the Middle East. By February, hopes were raised sky high when the Egyptians toppled the dictator Hosni Mubarak, ousted after thirty years. Social media was the driver; the activists were mainly the young and the unions. The US and Europe didn’t get it at first, unable to acknowledge that they had been supporting the tyrant because of their alignment with Israel’s interests. Tahrir Square became the peaceful centre of something that seemed unstoppable, as significant a moment as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Al Jazeera reported that Gaza would be liberated next. Monarchies and dictatorships would surely be replaced by democratically elected parliaments.
Then the Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, was overthrown by a coup d’état, pro-Morsi protestors were violently suppressed, and the army started firing on the students and unionists in Tahrir Square. In Jordan, King Abdullah dissolved parliament four times before the year was over and the demonstrations ceased. Al Jazeera reported that the Arab Winter had set in.
In Dara’a in Syria, in March 2011, six boys were reported for painting anti-government slogans; a week later, protestors were fired on; then, in April, a sit-in in Homs, in the south of the country, was brutally suppressed. The south had had five years of the worst drought on record. The escalation of civil war throughout the country was rapid and horrifying. Hospitals were targeted, apartment blocks gutted. The authoritarian Bashar al-Assad régime, once seen as a force for modernisation and eventual democratic reform, used chemical weapons against its own people.
I telephoned universities, seeking permission for Akram Ali to come to Melbourne to study. RMIT told me they would recognise his qualifications for admission to a first-year course. I would sponsor him and he could stay in the house for as long as he needed to. He was still in Italy, about to leave for Kabul. I rang the Australian embassy in Rome, and the woman on the other end told me firmly there was no way to help Akram, since he was Afghani and we were at war with Afghanistan. That he was Hazara made no difference; he was an enemy alien, this young poet who wanted to study, an asylum seeker who wanted to return to his country when he had obtained some qualifications. There was no category that I could find to put him in that would help him. If he flew in without a permit, he would be arrested. He would then go into detention. I should have found this out before I raised his hopes.
We kept in touch. He went back to Afghanistan, then somehow managed to return to Italy. Then I stopped hearing from him. A few years ago, Lyndall told me she had heard that he was to marry an Italian girl.
I offered to help out with a Housing Commission after-school reading program for children from South Sudan. The boys rushed in, pushing the girls out of the way, and grabbed the fruit we helpers had cut up for them. Because the girls held back, we would always make two large platters of watermelon and bananas. The girls were better readers than the boys and their writing was painfully neat. They grouped together and found quiet spots away from the boys’ rough-housing.
The mothers, sometimes the grandmothers, who all knew each other, came to collect the children; fathers did so rarely, because they were seeking work. One man, from Egypt, who ran the program, told me how hard it was to bring up teenage sons in Australia. Everywhere you look, there is no modesty, he said. I looked anew at the advertising hoardings in Johnston Street, and the clothes women were wearing on Brunswick Street, whatever the weather. He was right. Modest dressing was difficult to find. A great deal of flesh was visible. Even the word ‘modest’ had fallen out of use.
When Drusilla Modjeska suggested I go with her to Port Moresby, and on to Collingwood Bay on the north-east coast of Papua New Guinea, I was pleased. Her novel The Mountain was almost done. She had sent the manuscript to Russell Soaba, a Papua New Guinean poet and a writer of stories, who Drusilla had known for many years. She had based one of the novel’s main characters, Milton, on him, and had invited Russell to the resort we were staying at in Collingwood Bay, so they could go through it together.
It was essential to her that he felt okay about her ‘appropriation’—that bludgeoning word for trying to reflect in English another culture. I recognised her ambivalence. Whatever is intended when writing about another culture, your code is always there, your lens an acquired one. Drusilla’s book, which I had read in draft, I thought remarkable, as the first big novel revealing aspects of PNG to the outside world.
I was also curious to see if the Ruwwad model of philanthropy, for young people wishing to continue their studies beyond their village schooling, might work there. The villages on the coast and in the mountains had started their own versions of ecotourism, which Drusilla had seen evolve over many visits. Her idea was for a small education fund, coming out of Australia, which would need to meet AusAID criteria for PNG. Her determination was impressive and infectious.
On our first evening in Moresby, we had dinner with Drusilla’s friends Ros and Mekere Morauta, who was then leader of the opposition. Ros is a warm and funny woman who knows how things work in PNG.
Those in government were doing deals all the time with the mining companies and the loggers, and giving nothing much back to the people. Loggers were bribing their way into the villages and denuding the forests. PNG was working through post-colonial chaos and corruption, which Mekere had been actively campaigning against. Vote buying was rife.
Maternal deaths had doubled in the past decade, Ros told us. Electricity came and went in the barrios. The very rich lived in their compounds, and had yachts and private planes. There were parallels with the Middle East in the way people spoke of endemic corruption and the government always letting them down. Yet, despite the country having massive natural resources, such as liquefied petroleum gas, the people of PNG were very much poorer than the Jordanians.
We flew over the mountains to fiord country and Collingwood Bay, beautiful beyond anything I’d imagined. There we were in a kind of sad paradise—a ‘lodge’ that was run on what looked like rather benign lines, with links to the villages over the mountains to the east, and where people like us paid 150 kina a night for ‘a village experience’.
Drusilla’s book was in its last stages, and she needed to show it to some people and speak to others when she had used local events and settings, however tangentially. She knew people there from previous visits, and had constructed characters from some of them. She had been to Collingwood Bay many times before with an art dealer, a man who scattered largesse, sometimes to ‘the wrong families’, and there was a sense from some of the people we encountered that she was expected to continue his way of doing things.
I got up very early the first morning, and sat in a rotunda looking out over the fiord, where children from far-off villages were canoeing to the primary school; two to each canoe, paddling towards the dock below. The light on the steep hillsides changed constantly. It was so beautiful, I was astonished.
Evie, a young skin diver, took us snorkelling in the fiord. We went around the point and out into the main channel, to look at coral and the brilliantly coloured fish—as the children headed home in their canoes and the mists came and went over the mountains.
Russell Soaba, looking like a PNG version of David Malouf, arrived at the resort, and immediately declared that he ‘loved Milton’, and that he wished he, too, were still in the first half of his life. He was gentle, political, delighted Drusilla’s book had been written from ‘her side of the mountain’. He now wanted to write from ‘his side’—which he told us a lot about over the next few days, when we walked up to the villages.
Then he and Drusilla sat on the wide veranda of the lodge, going through the manuscript, making small corrections for accuracy and language. The most substantial seemed to have been about the role of mothers and grandmothers, and its larger meaning. Drusilla had an old woman dismissing the character Rika with a word meaning Go. Russell insisted it should be a howl of Mother, which Rika had failed to be, and would distress her to the end. ‘Like a fissure in the mountain,’ he said. Russell, a poet, thought in symbols—or so it seemed to me.
We next visited the villages above the mangrove swamps, and stayed in guest houses made of bamboo poles and canes, where lines of light played on the straw mats and where sleeping under mosquito nets was easy. There was a feast to celebrate Drusilla coming back again. Babies had been named for her nieces who had visited the villages with her. Drusilla knew the families’ stories and they honoured her for it.
A few people in the villages had shortwave radio and news of the Arab Spring had reached them. ‘Why would the rulers of Egypt shoot their own people?’ some of the men wanted to know. I found myself trying to explain how the uprising was spreading; drawing a map of Cairo, Tunisia and Libya, with a stick in the sand on the top of one of the ridges.
The Middle East was imploding along the lines Sidi Hassan predicted. By April 2011, there were more than 27 million Facebook users throughout the Middle East, and nine out of ten Egyptians used social media to organise polls and raise awareness of issues. In PNG, the wireless towers were already being installed across the mountains and the talk was about all the good things the internet could do for the remote schools, but some of the women told us they worried about social media: that there would be more people spying on each other, more violence, more divorce.
In Orotuaba, one of the villages we climbed to, Barbara, a small woman with a lined face and a big smile, wanted to know why I was wearing several rings on both my hands when she had none. Good question. I gave her my wedding ring, which I had been wearing on my right hand, for no particular reason.
Drusilla Modjeska and Lyndall Passerini have much in common, it occurred to me. Both wear shabby khaki cotton hats when they swim in the sea or the mineral springs, which makes me laugh. Both are English and eccentric with it, despite many years living elsewhere. Both are self-deprecating, political, absurdly uncertain, and expert networkers without realising it, determined to prevail. I wish they knew each other.
The divorce was done. My ring was gone. My ex-husband and I had dinner once in a while, and it was easier. We shared the dogs sometimes, my young Lola wrestling with old Morry.
A friend helped me clear out the battered boxes full of my papers and file copies of books McPhee Gribble had published, which were in a Fort Knox storage bin. I re-labelled everything for sorting later and piled them into the shed.
Then a young architect who lives in the same street came riding by on her bicycle. I told her of an idea I had had in PNG that was starting to take root, for a tiny guest house if I could find some money by selling my papers.
It is May and I pick Carmen up at the airport, where she has flown in from the Sydney Writers’ Festival and the brouhaha of the Man Booker, the judging panel of which she has resigned from in protest at the prize being awarded to Philip Roth. I am shocked to see her limping towards me, with terrible back and leg pain. No complaining, of course, nothing but her great funny fortitude and self-mockery. I feel a huge rush of affection. This woman saved me five years ago, when I landed on her with my broken heart, battered pride and misery, after my mother’s death and my husband’s dumping. In her house, her big heart saved me. And having her here in mine is full circle.
She is in the shabby little spare bedroom, which I’ve tricked up as best I can: new bed, new mirror, new hanging of my daughter’s pictures, and my best rug from Damascus. She is here to see her family and to start researching her next book. But first, painkillers and a big sleep, then a cab to an ABC radio interview with Ramona Koval on The Book Show, about her resignation in protest at Roth’s inevitable scooping of the pool. I listen at home and can tell the two women don’t get on.
My former husband has asked to see me, in a grim voice that makes me think of a rickety little rope bridge being thrown across a chasm. I expect bad news. I expect him to cancel. I don’t want him to run into Carmen, so I meet him in the café on the corner, which, at eleven in the morning, is full of young mothers and prams.
He immediately tells me he is having a baby in September, with a woman the same age as his daughter. He smiles at one of the toddlers playing nearby and I surprise myself by a rush of wanting him to have a son. He needs a son. He has been a good stepfather to mine. We walk back to the house and sit on the stairs, and I laugh and laugh and can’t stop. Luckily, Carmen has left for the country.
Later, she holds me together with her fury and disdain. I want to do this well but it feels like a total annihilation. Which, of course, it is. I am back in the mire. Some of my friends rant about irresponsibility, children growing up without a father; others, like Diana, who is in deep mourning after Les’s death, are gobsmacked but gentler. A woman I know only slightly, shouts across to me in crowded Marios one morning, ‘What do you think about the baby?’ I don’t know what I think, except that I find it in me to wish them well.
Next, I drive up the Hume to visit my brother’s family and also my former brother-in-law. We do not talk about the baby. I listen all the way there and back to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which says it all—an old man writing an account of his life, and the love of his young wife and his joy at a baby. So, that must be enough.