THE HOUSES OF my family, on both sides, have always burned down. At least one or two in every generation, going back as far as I could see. Down to the ground they burned, leaving scorch marks on rocks in the Hebrides; singed cypresses and burned fruit trees in the Strathbogies; threatening neighbours’ fences in inner Melbourne, when my father’s family’s small weatherboard house caught fire when he was young. A few years before that, in south-eastern Tasmania, a weatherboard house attached to an apple-drying factory caught fire while my mother’s family were at the pictures. My childhood house in the foothills of the Dandenongs, the house I visit in dreams, had a near miss when a back room burned down. Then, during the Ash Wednesday fires, after a summer holiday with a man not yet my husband, his daughter and my youngest son, our fibro shack at the beach exploded.
This is what often happens to the flimsy houses of crofters, to poor farmers and immigrants everywhere. But listing them here gives me pause. My house in inner Melbourne is probably the first house in my family with walls so thick that it can’t burn down, but it is surely tempting fate to say so.
On my desk is a half brick, handmade and rust-coloured, the surfaces pitted and the edges worn smooth. I picked it up long ago from a mound of burned timbers and bricks half buried in jonquils, on flat land beside the creek in the hill country near Euroa, in what used to be Gooram Gooram Gong. Sometimes, heading north up the Hume, I turn off and drive very slowly along unmade roads, with the car windows down so I can sniff the air, searching as if the ghosts of the old place will surely show themselves. I am deep in a fantasy of buying a few acres of what could hardly be called ancestral land, where my great-great-grandfather selected his first block in 1870, land that flooded every winter, good for grazing.
My reticent father, shy in the way his eldest son would be, amid the big-hearted teasing and constant story-telling and letter-writing of my mother’s family, would describe his summer holidays at the farm in the 1920s. How he and Angus, his younger brother, were taken first on the tram from his parents’ weatherboard cottage in Windsor, to Spencer Street, to catch the Albury train stopping all stations to Euroa. His memories were of rabbiting, and swimming in waterholes and fishing for yabbies in Polly McGinty’s weir, and bunking in with his cousins under mosquito nets in back bedrooms, or in Boer War canvas tents when the house was full. He sometimes described the mealtimes there, when silence fell and grace was said, and the old order was uppermost.
And I can imagine the labour of his grandmother and the unmarried aunts in the cookhouse he described, separated from the main house, where the wood stove was kept stoked all year except when bushfires threatened, and that smoked if the wind was coming from the wrong direction. The Coolgardie safe hung by the cookhouse door to catch the breezes, its hessian walls kept damp with water from the tray on its roof.
There were fruit trees in the paddock next to the house, whose slab walls and bark roof were still there in the 1920s, beneath the new weatherboards and roofing iron and striped wallpaper in the sitting room. The vegetable garden stretched down to the creek, where the boys would be sent to bucket water into the trenches before supper, and to wash their hands in the enamel bowl near the back door, sloshing the soapy water over the climbing roses and geraniums.
My father might have written his name in tiny letters behind his bunk bed, so he could find it when he came again, and know he belonged to Woodville, Gooram Gooram Gong near Euroa, in the Strathbogie granite ranges—in the winter mists, so like the Cuillins on Skye his great-grandfather remembered sailing away from—a 13-year-old Highland boy among his kin.
What is this dream of kin, of belonging, I find myself falling into? Selling up, leaving the city which makes me sad, which has become clogged with black SUVs and gleaming Mercedes in my absence, building a little place for myself in the Strathbogies. I imagine small children feeding the chickens, friends coming to stay, a vegetable patch, jonquils, fruit trees. I put my name down with an estate agent in Euroa for land, 10 acres or more, I say firmly, with good fences and buildings suitable for conversion, so permits won’t be needed. Then I drive back to Melbourne, in a dream: visions of a wide veranda and wire doors, a long table for family and friends, and a small guest house.
Solitude I know I can handle. There are days when I crave it. Others when only sociability, and live music or a film will do. Of course, family and friends will come, I tell myself, but not so often and Extreme Loneliness will set in again. Then I hear a program about wildfires in south-eastern Australia, and the Strathbogie Ranges are identified as the most fire-prone area on earth.
Another fantasy punctured.
Obviously, I should move into a smaller house. Everyone tells me so. Real estate agents send me Christmas cards and offer valuations. Friends tell me to look in Collingwood, in Brunswick, in Thornbury. Nothing is affordable. Nothing new has enough room for even drastically culled bookshelves and pictures. I need ground and a garden I can plant myself. I dream of chooks. I dream of kin. I head up the Hume again to a favourite couple, my former brother-in-law and his partner, who are good to me and make me laugh. We talk music and politics. I return home with a box of vegetables, a bottle of their olive oil, and many quinces, which turn dark red in the oven.
Home is a long time gathering me in. Some thread that used to bind me here has frayed. Someone tells me they’d heard that I have joined the Arab street. I guess I have in a way. I feel myself privileged beyond belief when I look at the fate of others.
I hate the hard-heartedness of our country’s politics, the affluence, the waste, our suspicion of Muslims, of difference, of race. I try to tone down my rage but without a Makarrata and still not a republic, I lecture anyone who’ll listen about how the two must happen.
I visit another favourite couple with a house in Tasmania, in the bush overlooking the South Channel, just on the edge of Kettering, where my mother’s parents settled after World War I.
There’s a photo of my grandmother in 1920 on Palm Beach, with her two small children, her hair in a turban, smoking a cigarette in a long holder and laughing at the crowd of small boys—‘ruffians’, she called them—who have gathered to stare. She would wait three months for a boat to take them on to Hobart, to join the husband she hadn’t seen for more than a year and who lingers in family mythology as demanding to know on arrival if she has been faithful to him. Reasonable question, I should have thought, looking at photographs of her as she was when he preceded her on his doctor’s recommendation ‘for the sake of his health’ to visit his family’s investments in apple orchards and drying factories in Tasmania’s Huon Valley.
My grandfather, only known as W.R.A. or Arthur, was mildly tubercular, much older, evidently adoring but more conventional than his young wife. She knew nothing of Tasmania, except that her husband’s doctor had said the climate was good for weak lungs. Over breakfast in Cheshire, as World War I ground on, Arthur had shown her the ads in The Times for investment in the Apple Isle; the blacks were long gone, Tasmania was ‘trouble free’, they said. He chose Kettering, opposite Bruny Island, as the place to bring his family, some distance from his brothers’ enterprises in the Huon Valley. His ashes are interred on a hillside in the Kettering cemetery.
What did they know then of the place’s genocidal past? Probably enough, after a short time of finding middens on the beach and hearing the silence in the bush, to shudder, and pray sometimes for the ghosts of the Brune people, and of Truganini in particular. She had spent her last years alone, first at nearby Oyster Cove, and then in the home of a Mrs Dandridge, 30 kilometres away in Hobart, where she died. In 1922, at Kettering’s one-teacher school, my mother was told firmly there were no Aborigines anymore, that they had all died out. The Risdon Massacre in 1804, when soldiers came upon a crowd of Oyster Cove people hunting kangaroos, was never mentioned. Nor were the children told that Truganini had been taken with forty-seven survivors of her people of the northeast, to the abandoned convict station, just a short walk through the bush from Kettering. Henry Kendall’s poem ‘The Last of His Tribe’ was in the school reader, but not read aloud in the Kettering school in the 1920s. Truganini’s skeleton was still on display in the Hobart Museum in the late 1940s, when I was a child. My grandmother advised me not to linger or I’d have bad dreams, but told me nothing more.
My mother shuddered and would certainly have prayed. My grandmother probably preferred not to think about what had befallen almost the entire population of Tasmanian Aboriginals, although if told, she would have admired how Truganini joined three others to become bushrangers in Gippsland.
My father’s family, at Gooram Gooram Gong in Victoria, would have known much more. In the late 1850s, Angus McPhee and his son John worked off the cost of their passage, then headed northeast to the vast Seven Creeks Estate in the Strathbogies. Just twenty years earlier, a few kilometres to the north, at the Winding Swamp on the Broken River, shepherds and assigned convicts were droving flocks of sheep and cattle south from Goulburn in New South Wales, for William Pitt Faithfull. They were heading for the rich grazing pastures towards Port Phillip when a group of Pangerang warriors attacked, killing eight shepherds and scattering the stock into the bush. The reprisals, known as Faithfull’s Massacre, went on for many months. The settlers of the district rose up and slaughtered the Pangerang, men, women and children, and burned their bodies. Few Aboriginals were ever seen again around the Strathbogies.
Did the farmers and their children wonder who built the intricate fishtraps along the waterways near the Gooram Falls, or what the massive systems of stone walls near Euroa were for? But they were soon overgrown with blackberries. Then it was Ned Kelly country, which divided the district like nothing else, my father said. My Scots Presbyterian ancestors were very likely firmly on the side of the law.
In London again in mid year, I went every day to my favourite library on earth, the Wellcome, reading up on sex and Eros, eugenics and monstrosities. The library is spacious and quiet; bookish, yet fully digitised. My first call each morning was into the astonishing medical collection, ranging from the beginning of life to its end, celebrating what the Wellcome calls medicine’s huge debt of gratitude to the dead. I often got sidetracked by the collection, the nucleus assembled before World War I, when the ambitions of its American founder were huge, liberal, idiosyncratic. The memento moris and vanitas used to remind the living of the transience of life and to mock the pursuit of luxury had signage both fulsome and touching: The figures represent dead twins from the Yoruba of Nigeria, 1870–1910 who have the highest rates of twin births in the world, where their loss is a great misfortune. The mother commissions figures to memorialise the children, dresses them and keeps them by her bed, performing elaborate rituals on feast days.
The Wellcome feels like an oasis in the Euston Road.
More an echo than an oasis is Bloomsbury, just around the corner from the Wellcome, near SOAS and the London Review Bookshop, a kind of distillation of the literary post-colonial London that gave Diana and me such a hard time in the early days of McPhee Gribble. We were rank outsiders trying to interest English agents and publishers in the authors on our list. Only Carmen at Virago and her close friends agent Deborah Rogers and publisher Liz Calder at Bloomsbury welcomed us and had the wit to see the quality of what we were publishing. For the rest, we were in the way, cutting across the cosy British structures of Commonwealth publishing.
I telephoned I.B. Taurus to see if Hope Against Hope, or whatever the book was now called, had been scheduled. It hadn’t, but for years I kept expecting it to appear, updated and maybe with photographs—there were wonderful pictures in the photograph archives in the Majlis.
Meanwhile, Carmen had agreed to have an operation to fix her excruciating back pain and I said I would stay for a few weeks afterwards to help her, if she would let me. Her friends were pleased. She’s a terrible patient, they laughed, and left me their phone numbers, Deborah ringing me from Wales several times. My family tells me I am a terrible patient too, so I reckoned I could do this. It was the very least I could do, given what Carmen had seen me through.
The trouble started soon after she got home from hospital. I went downstairs first thing and found her moving stools of different heights. I later wrote in my diary: This week has been a nightmare of being here for her, watching her stoicism which borders on the insane. She is not supposed to pick up anything or carry weights over two kilos. The arrangement of stools are so she can lean into the refrigerator and feed Louis, which I could do. I find her dragging pot plants into the middle of the garden, and watering with a heavy hose, which I could do also. But my role is to be an extra limb, an extension of her, to pick up things when she remembers not to, to sort the rubbish, to be in the background.
I survived by swimming every morning in the council pool five minutes away. Then back to Carmen’s, to try to help. I could tell I was driving her nuts. I was sure she longed to have the house to herself and Louis, her beloved elderly Border Terrier. I walked slowly to the shops through the gardens with Louis, and returned to play three terrifying games of Bananagrams every afternoon. A new dictionary had been acquired and a small book called Difficult Words but there was no time to consult them. Carmen raged at the board, at me, at herself. I never won. I drank much wine and cooked supper. She was in terrible pain, but made light of it. We’d watch something on Sky Record. Thank God for Wallander.
After she headed upstairs with Louis, I stayed up very late. The Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks drama was unfolding, with endless trumpeting about the Evil Empire. Murdoch apologised to the family of Milly Dowler, the murdered schoolgirl, whose emails were hacked. There was an extra thick layer of loathing, it seemed to me, because Murdoch is Australian; also whenever Julian Assange’s extradition case was mentioned. He, too, was loathed, when what he had done with WikiLeaks seemed to me to be admirable. I couldn’t wait to go home.
Thank God for novels. I was reading Javier Marías’s A Heart So White, which Raj Pandey gave me when I was last with them in Lewisham, about the betrayals and misconstruings that lie beneath every relationship. So delicately structured, that by the end, the complicity of everyone is, if not laid bare, certainly implied.
On my return from the shops one afternoon, I tried to ring Diana, whose sister had been ill. I left a message. When Kath Hattam rang me back, I had a dreadful sense of foreboding. She told me that Di had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer of the most virulent kind. I had had a premonition after Les died, only four months before, when Di told me she felt as if the cage door were open but she didn’t want to leave. She had nursed Les day and night through his long illness. Now her daughter Anna was nursing Diana, who was already in the midst of aggressive treatment that was making her terribly ill.
Oh, the pull of friendship/love/obligation, and all the layers of my life; how they coalesce at times like these. I must go home. Carmen doesn’t need me. Nor does Diana. But I need them more than either will ever know.
I saw Diana a few days after I got home, when she was temporarily out of hospital, infection free and determined to get to Anna’s wedding to James on 3 September. We spoke of Anna’s adoption as a tiny baby and what my role as her godmother could be next. Diana had promised Anna that she would dance at her wedding and she did.
It took place on a clear blue day at the beginning of September 2011. I dragged myself there; needing a husband, I suppose. Going to big things alone was still hard. And this would be very hard indeed, for everyone. A map of so many lives.
The wedding was at Christ Church, South Yarra, where Diana and Jack were married long ago, and Anna was baptised with me holding her. The order of service, which Diana chose, was traditional and very beautiful. First, the processional with a trumpet voluntary, then ‘Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven’, then the reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments …, then the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians: Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal … And on and on—a loving tribute to the future, with the minister not shirking ‘the difficult time to come’. The church was full of James’s and Anna’s friends and family, Di’s and Jack’s friends, and some of mine from a long time ago.
Then we all walked to a pavilion in the Botanic Gardens, for an evening of great happiness, short speeches and dancing to a mix of music selected by Di’s nieces and 1960s rock and roll. Buddy Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ and ‘That’ll Be the Day’ had us all out of our seats. Diana danced and saw it through to 11 p.m., when the young couple left; Anna, creamy and beautiful, and so very happy with her James. It was precisely what she had wanted to give those two: a celebration of the future to come that she wouldn’t be in.
Then she was dying, and dying well, with jokes and cigarettes in the sun, and concern for Anna and for her friends. I sat with her for several short visits after the wedding, and we talked more about Anna and babies, and godmothers. Her family was protecting her, the palliative nurses were coming: Anna in charge; James there, calmly fixing a TV. She was very tired by the time I rose to go, but she took me downstairs to Les’s studio, which had all his tools laid out and his crazy-brave sculptures of filing cabinets bulging with dusty pages ballooning bile, and great crisscrossed arms attempting to hold everything together.
Late that same evening, I watched Sophie and Alex hula-hooping in the dark out on the street, with hoops that flashed pink and green: Alex leaping and whooping as he ran, Sophie, a strong houri figure, keeping her hoop turning and turning.
Before Sophie moved out to a tiny Carlton workers’ cottage with Em, one of her friends, they helped me carry my fiction collection downstairs. For the first time, I discarded ruthlessly books I don’t read or need anymore, many kept since the early 1970s out of a vague sense of the need to support local literature. I read the first paragraph or two and knew immediately if I would want to re-read them. Some of the books were still very much alive for me; others unreadable, their pages yellowed and fragile, their spines broken. English and American novels were always printed on better paper than Australian publishers had access to. My fear was that the copies of those books that haven’t been reissued somewhere else in the world would soon be turning to dust. Still, culling was good for me.
Raj Pandey’s son Nishad came to visit me one day from Kolkata, where he plays guitar in a famous group, Kendrika. I told him I was wondering how I might start to share my house and about the advice I was getting from friends. Some said I should share with writers—a very bad idea; others recommended a small publishing outfit. Somone from there had been in touch, but seemed surprised that I would need to charge a modest rent. I’d been hoping for African dressmakers, some of whose work I had seen displayed in a nearby gallery: lovely clothes and intricate patchworks. I imagined their sewing machines humming, their scissors snipping peacefully on long tables upstairs during the day. But then I heard they had found themselves a base a few blocks away.
The attic is a long room that runs the width of the house, with windows framing huge skies, freshly painted white walls, a sky-blue floor, and my Syrian mats. This, and two small rooms and a bathroom on the floor below, would be offered for as little rent as I could manage. Nishad didn’t need a room, as he was heading back to play in Kolkata and tour in South-east Asia, but he nipped upstairs to have a look. He took his time, then came down and said it would be perfect for musicians. The walls are very thick, the floors are wood and, except for the attic, the ceilings are high.
Most of my friends seemed startled that I would be sharing my kitchen and clothes line, and told me they couldn’t stand underpants left on the line for days or dishes in the sink. The underpants gave me pause. In Cortona, the washing would go out the window on retractable lines. In London, nothing was hung outside for long and my friends all had drying cupboards. So I bought a second washing machine, clothes horses, and plastic spiders to hang over the upstairs bath.
Someone told me about a Sydney cellist, Mee Na Lojewski, who was coming to Melbourne to do a professional performance course and fellowship at ANAM, the national music academy housed in the South Melbourne Town Hall. I pictured her playing her cello in the attic, looking up at the wild skies, but manouvering a fragile instrument up and down a stepladder would be hazardous for a cellist. Mee Na chose a different room and suggested another young woman for the attic. Georgia Ioakimidis-MacDougall, a French horn player and part-time psychology student also in her last year of study, arrived the next day.
And my life with the lodgers began.
The neighbours were pleased, because the sounds now coming from the house were very fine indeed. Georgia’s French horn pealed out across the rooftops from the attic. Her friend Callum G’Froerer stayed sometimes and played several kinds of trumpets, and improvised with others in a Brunswick Street shopfront. Georgia, a vegan, cooked many trays of biscuits for Callum’s gigs.
Mee Na’s cello I heard when I sat on the stairs, which I started doing often. Other musicians soon revealed themselves to be living nearby. A harpist, a pianist and a trumpeter. And many others visited.
The talk around the kitchen table, where we sometimes met, was the best kind. About composition, technique and discipline, about auditions, about the habits of double bass players and visiting conductors. So much gossip, so much hilarity. So much about the music world I was getting to know: how difficult it is, how much it depends on philanthropy. And, crucially, that players of brass and strings are very different species, and don’t talk much to each other. When Georgia went to Berlin with Callum, Mee Na’s friend Nicholas Waters, a young violinist I had met and heard play often at ANAM, would ask if he could move in. But that was another year away.
It was midwinter and the Brodsky Quartet was here from the UK, revisiting the cycle of Shostakovich’s string quartets composed between 1938 and 1974. ANAM announced a long weekend of music in early July in the South Melbourne Town Hall, where the Brodskys would play all fifteen quartets with the best string students. Each Brodsky player would be rehearsing and performing with three students; four quartets would be played by the Brodskys alone; and one quartet would be played by an ANAM group alone. There were masterclasses where I went to hear them speak about the quartets, and about the once-enlightened city of Manchester, and how it had provided schoolchildren with the best available instruments.
The opening quartet, on a Friday afternoon in July, began with flashes of lightning and a violent thunderstorm. The first transparent movements, written after the birth of Shostakovich’s son, were almost drowned out by claps of thunder. The weather outside gradually calmed for the Brodskys playing the confident overture of Quartet No. 2 in A Major, which gave way to a prayerful recitative. The weekend was a musical feast—far better than a Ring Cycle, someone said at interval—and it surely was, perhaps because of the intimate revelations of Shostakovich’s quartets against the backdrop of Soviet history. But also because of the proximity we had to great musicians and their interaction with talented students.
The audience was engrossed, exhilarated, deeply moved. On the last evening, the Ninth in E Flat Major was played by four ANAM students: Mee Na Lojewski on cello, Caroline Hopson and Nicholas Waters on violin, and William Clark on the viola. It was an extraordinary display of skill and energy and, in the end, felicitude. The audience stood and cheered.
The following year, Nicholas will have moved into the house; a new ensemble, to be called Affinity Quartet, will be well on its way; and my small courtyard, full of borrowed chairs, will become the venue for several of Affinity’s early concerts. And when the quartet goes to Europe and England, Carmen will invite Mee Na and Nick to stay in her attic.
A joker in the office once described me as ‘much married’, and we all laughed. I have three grown-up children from my first two marriages. I have one stepdaughter from my third, and longest, marriage; and two grandchildren: one grown-up granddaughter, and one small boy, both the children of my eldest son, the HEMS paramedic. My other two children have no marriages or children, although my daughter has stepsons of her own with the partner she has been with for a long time. My youngest son is showing all the signs of never settling, always surfing.
Stepchildren and half siblings, godmother, stepmother and grandmother, are fluid categories selected for simplicity. I sometimes use ‘niece’ and ‘nephew’; even call myself a ‘great-aunt’ sometimes. Whatever the legalities, ancestry seems to me to depend more on love and point of view than on bloodlines.
I want to be tough, resilient, fearless and feared a little, and sometimes called ma’am. Asked for advice. Ruling the roost, if there is one. The roost these days is an old house I share with much younger people, where I spend time sending texts not leaving notes, organising repairs, walking the dog and punching cushions, hiding my face when it’s sad—in case everyone bolts.
No, not a matriarch by any definition. A woman who blames herself for much. And dreams of houses where she wanders from room to room, finding lost friends and former husbands, and babies.
There is a place I go to often these days, where the sky is so huge you could die in it, where the grasses bend with the wind, and birds screech warnings that I am near. There is a tree angled to the path, a giant rivergum once split almost in two by a tempest, made stronger by a great bulging scar between the divided trunks.
One morning, when trees were being earmarked for removal for a freeway, I approached the giant rivergum from a different path and saw ahead massive piles of sawdust, woodchips and fallen branches. Sickened, in panic, I ran, John Shaw Neilson’s words pounding through my brain. The tree that has the cripple’s heart, will know the cripple’s song—but there it was like a galleon, my Loving Tree, its prow turned northwards into the prevailing winds.
Oh, happy day.