8

MONSTERS NOT MEN

‘To ladies who would be writers, he says, “Marry a man with money, and then lay in a supply of typewriter paper and begin work on your masterpiece.”’

– H. L. Mencken’s ‘Advice to Young Authors’, The Triad, 1 April 1925

In Australia, 1930 dawned dark and grew darker. Weak markets for primary products weakened further; slack conditions for employment continued slackening, forcing the jobless onto Melbourne’s streets in April. In May, the annual loss to national income was put at £50 million; in June, the annual loss to share values was estimated at £100 million. It was not only the challenging nature of his art that restricted sales at Justus Jorgensen’s July exhibition to £130. The Athenaeum was crowded for the opening, by Florence Austral and John Amadio. Mervyn Skipper provided a stentorian review of the works, Colahan a witty evening address about realism in art. But nobody was buying – there was no longer the money to be had.

When Colahan hosted his peers at Pangloss afterwards, Lena mourned: ‘I thought what tragedy sat round that little table in intellect and talent, the best Australia can produce, but not a penny between them; living in a world of misunderstanding and lack of sympathy.’ Not a penny was an exaggeration; their prospects, though, were clouded. Under the pall of his impending divorce, Colahan faced losing his home and custody of his son. Mollie, Lena noted, ‘was there as usual, worried over sex and her position as his mistress’. But she had also taken a considerable step. Having been ‘discontented’ at Milton Street, as her mother would delicately put it, she had found a ‘quiet place’: a furnished room in a small private hotel in Collins Place.

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own had reached Australia late the previous year. If Mollie read it, she would have identified with Woolf’s statement that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ – this was precisely her intent. She was devoting her evenings after work to writing a novel: sometimes, she told Lena Skipper, she fell asleep over its pages. Older friends reported losing touch with her in this period. Mollie had little spare time and certainly no spare money: to assuage her mother’s misgivings, she was continuing to send 30s a week home in lieu of rent. But nor could she go on emulating Jane Austen, whom Woolf recalled as writing in her sitting room and covering her work with blotting paper in the event of interruption. ‘There must be freedom and there must be peace,’ insisted Woolf. ‘Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn.’ Mollie would surely have agreed.

Of the novel, next to nothing is known. Colahan never read it. Fritz Hart recalled Mollie commencing at least two works of fiction, abandoning a first, which he thought showed ‘very considerable promise’ but ‘was not working out too satisfactorily’, in favour of a second, ‘which she thought would find greater favour with publishers’ but which she ‘kept entirely to herself’. Betty Davies remembered similarly that Mollie ‘would let nobody see this thing’, and that the only person to read any was Lena Skipper, who cluelessly picked up and perused the manuscript one day to the author’s intense irritation: ‘Mollie could have killed her.’ Confusingly, however, Lena referred to ‘someone … who read a little’, who reported the characters as ‘too hard and inhuman, in fact Monsters’. In that sense, at least, the manuscript lived up to the title, which is all of it that survives: Monsters Not Men.

In setting verse aside for fiction, Mollie was ahead of an emerging curve. Between 1917 and 1927, twenty-seven novels and eighty-seven volumes of verse were published in Australia; from 1928 to 1939, the ratio was virtually reversed, 106 versus fifty-seven. Half of these were by women, granting them a share of cultural life unmatched in any other art form. Quite right too, thought Vance Palmer. In ‘Women and the Novel’ in The Bulletin in July 1926, he had argued encouragingly that the novel was particularly suited to the female mind. Women, he claimed, had a natural eye for detail, an affinity with stories and a ‘gift for loose, flowing narrative’; writing a novel seemed ‘as easy to almost any literate woman as making a dress’.

What Palmer overlooked, of course, was that dressmaking was the better-paid activity. The local literary market was minuscule, the domestic economy stagnant. ‘The best Australian writer,’ lamented Verse’s Percival Serle, ‘has not a dog’s chance of making a living under present conditions.’ For a woman writer, the predicament was sharper still. Woolf imagined the writer in her cosy nook ideally endowed by £500 a year. Nettie Palmer, productive as she was, earned barely half that; most a fraction of it. The vast majority depended largely on the subsidy of either a marriage, such as Nettie’s to Vance, Eleanor Dark’s to a general practitioner and Katharine Susannah Prichard’s into a successful mercantile family, or a job, Marjorie Clark and Doris Boake Kerr subsisting on office work, Marjorie Barnard as a librarian at Sydney Technical College and Flora Eldershaw as a resident mistress at Presbyterian Ladies’ College Pymble. Seeming to have exhausted the possibilities of the latter, Mollie began toying with the former.

 

Mollie had never appeared the marrying kind. The example of her parents had been no inducement. Cousin William, son of her uncle Peter, had contracted a turbulent marriage to Gladys, at one time duelling in court for custody of their daughter Lavinia. Cousin Jean, daughter of the Blyths in Addison Street, was widowed in July 1930, the death of her 36-year-old husband from a lung infection leaving her with an infant son to raise alone. Mollie had been an eyewitness to the estrangements of the Harts, and maybe also the Webers; she was privy to tensions between the Davies, the Jorgensens, the Farmers, the Lavaters; she had, of course, hurried the Colahan marriage to its ignominious conclusion. So what made her conceive of Colin as a potential husband? Perhaps it was the one way she could secure him from the allurements of Sue Vanderkelen, and ward off her mother’s patronage of Adam Graham. It was also simplifying. There would then be no need for furnished rooms to write in, no need to obscure her features when she posed for Colahan, no need for dodging about in dark corners generally. The inspiration may have been Marriage and Morals, where Bertrand Russell had advocated ‘companionate marriage’, recently popularised by a Colorado jurist, Ben Lindsey: a kind of union devised to stabilise relations between the young who wished for sex but not, at least immediately, children. In the event the partners did not change their minds about children but did change their minds about each other, divorce would require no more than mutual consent. Russell had thought it ‘a step in the right direction’ that would ‘do a great deal of good’, and his wife had written the foreword to Lindsey’s new book. The Companionate Marriage ran an inevitable gauntlet of disapproval, Lindsey being identified by an angry congregation in New York’s Cathedral of John the Divine, beaten and ejected. But where gauntlets were concerned, Mollie was an instinctive runner.

It was easy afterwards to regard Mollie as a woman obsessed in her craving to be Colahan’s bride, who loved too ardently and too desperately. Betty Davies would describe her as having ‘decided he [Colahan] should marry her’, and that ‘no matter how firmly he repulsed her she came back, pleading and cajoling, playing on his vanity, not scrupling to make use of every feminine wile in her considerable range’. But there was a practicality to her ends that eluded Davies, whose writing was underwritten by her wealthy husband. Mollie loved Colin – as she once acknowledged to Lena Skipper, more than he her. Her urgency around marriage, however, was as much about shelter for her work as for herself. She was not like Vi, who would be assigned the family home in the property settlement with her ex-husband, or Sue, whose private income allowed her to paint, and sew, and act as treasurer for the local auxiliary of the Women’s Hospital. Mollie dreamed of a literary career in a country where John Shaw Neilson, whose verses she had so admired, calculated his annual pittance from poetry as ‘six shillings and eightpence’, and where not one woman lived by her pen alone.

Marriage, of course, was far from Colahan’s thoughts. His decree absolute was still to be granted. Mollie was first and foremost a foil. Publicly, Colahan referred to her as his ‘Sergeant-Major’. At a party at Eaglemont, Mollie’s insistence that everyone keep quiet while her lover held forth on art led indirectly to his nearly trading blows with Table Talk artist Frederick Ward. Privately, Colahan was less available. After all, there was Sue, gracile and sympathetic. One confused and confusing night in September, Mollie rang the Skippers to invite Mervyn to dinner. Mervyn said he already had plans to dine in town with his wife, but that Mollie was welcome to join them; Mollie, at last perhaps leery of Lena, declined. But when the Skippers arrived at the Italian Club, Mollie was in the company of what Lena called ‘a young man with eyes like a bookie’s clerk’. A somewhat uneasy foursome ensued. When Mervyn and Lena left, they ran into Colahan and Sue ‘both looking like gay young fauns walking down the street’. The Skippers nudged them in the direction of another cafe lest they ‘run into the Sergeant-Major with her man’.

Not long after, the open road beckoned. Colahan was destined to lose Pangloss but still owned Cunégonde, and it occurred to him that there might be a market for his works in Adelaide. Percy Leason decided to hitch a ride – Belle was pregnant, somewhat gloomily, with their sixth child. Packing provisions and paintings for an exhibition organised by Mervyn Skipper’s brother, they held a farewell party. Pervaded by a sense that this might be the last big gathering chez Colahan, it went off. Mollie and Sue cooked – ‘very nice eats’, said Lena. But the alcohol drained fast as the atmosphere grew wilder and noisier, requiring Mervyn to drop Colahan, Leason and John Farmer at a notorious source of late-night alcohol, Stokes Hotel on Beaconsfield Parade. Since the death of his erstwhile partner, Squizzy Taylor, Henry Stokes had been Melbourne’s kingpin of two-up and sly grog, and it happened that the artists arrived just ahead of a police raiding party. Leason and Farmer dashed into a toilet cubicle, closing the door behind them; Colahan came up with the story that his friends were staying in the hotel and that he had followed them into the gents to finish an argument. In the event, the police ignored them, although the story made for a breathless retelling when the trio were reunited with Skipper after he had made his umpteenth circle of the block.

Colahan and Leason were away almost the whole of October, taking ten days over their leisurely outward leg through Ballarat, Beaufort and Hamilton with regular stops for relaxation and repair, stopping one radiator leak with paint rags. By night they feasted on Colahan’s favourite curry, of garlic sausages, dates, bananas, bacon, onion and apples, and also spent an evening with the Heysens at their property in Ambleside. Results of the exhibition at the Society of Arts Gallery on North Terrace, however, were commensurate with neither Colahan’s effort nor his reputation. Fifteen hundred visitors came; not one of the forty paintings was sold. He delivered a lecture on ‘The Nature of Realism in Painting’ with typical éclat, as ‘Magpie’ of The Observer reported: ‘He took us through art with a breath-taking swoop like … well, I haven’t tried the scenic railway, and the big dipper, but from descriptions I believe it must be something like that.’ Yet the Art Gallery of South Australia ignored the show, despite Colahan significantly reducing his prices. The experience was costly and chastening. And in his absence, Mollie seems to have moved on in her thinking.

 

The hint comes in Colahan’s 1969 interview with Westbrook. Colahan related that Mollie had, in his words, been ‘trying to make our relation more closer tied’ prior to the exhibition, even though he had ‘no intention of doing so’. And although ‘the liaison renewed itself more or less in the old way’ on his return, Mollie appears to have thrown down a challenge: ‘She made no effort to conceal, in fact, rather affiched [flaunted] that, during my absence, she had sought consolation.’ Colahan, he claimed, was mainly intrigued as to who Mollie might ‘go for’, as a counter to his intelligence: ‘And I said: “Now, who would she get hold of? I know, a muscle man.” That was just a thing that flashed into my head.’ The reference to Clarence Weber is unmistakable, for Colahan elsewhere describes the man as ‘a very flashy socialite gymnastic teacher, very much in society, you know, champion swimmer and all this sort of thing’.

If Mollie did seek ‘consolation’ from Weber, in order to inflame Colahan’s jealousy, it can only have been briefly: press reports indicate that Weber was also in Adelaide most of that month. So the conjecture about Weber must remain just that. Yet the broader inference is that in Colahan’s absence, and around her twenty-fifth birthday on 14 October, Mollie had taken stock of her prospects, and was casting round for alternatives. By now she was back home. It was never going to work. She was ever short of money, time, respite. At this rate, Monsters Not Men would never get written. At the start of November, Mollie visited another old confidant, her former mentor George Browne. Mollie asked advice about ‘lodging an application for three months’ leave of absence in order to try her hand at journalistic work’. If all went well, Mollie said, she would take it up full time.

Mollie was thinking ahead, for she talked to others of heading to the United Kingdom – for writers a well-trodden route. Australia’s outstanding female novelists, Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead, were all expatriates: Stead’s For Love Alone would centre on the intellectual frustrations of a creative young woman bored by school teaching, who quits Australia for fear of being ‘forgotten by the world and drying up in the chalk dust’. In April, Mollie as a member had probably attended the Society of Australian Authors’ farewell of the zesty Myra Morris, shortly to ship for London: Morris, whose serial ‘Enchantment’ in the Australian Woman’s Mirror had just been well received, enjoyed an affair with the captain of the Jervis Bay on the way. In May, Mollie had seen the last of her old admirer Hubert Clifford, who was leaving for London on the Largs Bay never to return: he was being followed by his intended, Marie Phelan, whom he had not long met. In slightly different circumstances, Mollie could have featured in either or even both of these adventures.

Adventuress: Myra Morris

At other times, the future seemed almost close enough to touch. More exciting than Phar Lap winning the 1930 Melbourne Cup was joining Colahan that evening at the Essons’ Victorian villa on Chrystobel Crescent, Hawthorn. This prestigious invitation had come through Hilda Esson’s boss and Colahan’s friend Dr John Dale, with the poet Bernard O’Dowd, his partner Marie Pitt, and Nettie Palmer in attendance. Nettie, in fact, warmed instantly to Mollie, thinking she looked ‘eager and girlish in her tight red jumper that went so well with her slim athletic figure and olive face’.

Neuritis had cost Louis Esson, once the lion of Australian drama, his roar. He now wrote little, and spoke slowly in his high-pitched cockney twang. But the creator of The Time is Not Yet Ripe and The Drovers was perhaps the realest ‘writer’ that Mollie had yet met, his study musty with the smell of old books, including facsimile first editions of Elizabethan dramatists. The conversation ricocheted between art, literature and politics, Colahan free with his anecdotes and asperities, particularly about Betty Davies’ former lover Frank Russell – now The Herald’s London correspondent, Russell had just followed unctuous profiles of Hoover, Hindenburg, the Pope and others with a fawning appraisal of Mussolini.

The world was so big. And London: somehow it seemed the centre of everything. The Colahans and the Essons had lived there; Vance Palmer, like Hubert Clifford and Myra Morris, was there now; Meldrum, despite being virtually penniless, was desperate not to return to Australia and ‘be once more chained up in that convict settlement’. Yet Mollie also read her Bulletin, where Mervyn Skipper was praising Clarice Beckett’s latest exhibition for its uniquely Australian vision, its scorn for ‘conventions which earlier artists had brought from Europe’, and where Nettie Palmer was lamenting the conga line of creators departing Australia, their losses a ‘sort of national artistic and literary suicide’. So much to think on; so much to decide. Nettie watched Mollie appreciatively, noting her quiet eagerness to be part of things: ‘Half worried about a paint stain on her flaring black silk shirt, half glad it was paint, not domestic grease. Listening to the talk about pictures with a still alertness as if she had escaped from a suburban background into an exciting new world. Now life begins! This is what I’ve been looking for!’ Such youth, such optimism – perhaps a brilliant young writer in the making. But the permissibility of such feelings would seem shortly to drain away. A week later Melbourne was convulsed by a savage murder.

 

On Monday 10 November 1930, two unemployed youths, in search of some goldfinch hatchlings for which they had found a buyer, stopped at a derelict house on Wheatley Road, Ormond, to use the lavatory. Inside they stumbled on a female body, covered by a coat. The hands were folded across her breast. Her bloomers were heavily soiled. A gag made from her singlet was tied around the back of her head. They fled, returning with police.

Eleven-year-old Mena Griffiths, one of a family of twelve stretched thin by unemployment, had been strangled to death. On Saturday afternoon Mena had been approached by a short, middle-aged man in a blue suit while playing with her younger sisters by the joy wheel in Fawkner Park, a large common between Punt and St Kilda roads. He gave the other girls a penny each, and offered Mena ten shillings if she would run an errand for him. No concern was felt at home until Mena failed to return for the evening meal; a police search ensued. A widow told detectives she had seen a man and a girl on a bus on Commercial Road just before 5 p.m.: ‘The child seemed very worried and agitated and made a remark that “she must be home by 8 o’clock”. And the man replied, “That will be all right. You will have a good feed and return by car.”’ The widow thought she saw them get off then board a bus for Ormond. Investigators immediately intuited a suspect. All they had to do was find him.

Raw memories remained of the rape and strangulation of twelve-year-old Alma Tirtschke in the city’s grim Gun Alley, for which Colin Ross had been hanged in April 1922. Police had taken careful note of similar offenders since, such as Robert James McMahon. A year after Ross’s execution, McMahon, working as a truck driver and boarding in Essendon, was arrested for the ‘carnal knowledge’ of a thirteen-year-old in Buckley Park. According to Detective Henry Carey, McMahon smartly copped to the crime: ‘I am relieved this has happened. I was just on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I do not know what came over me to do such a thing … It could have been worse. Had the girl died I’d have been a second Colin Ross.’ McMahon denied the confession and pleaded not guilty. It was an era in which such disputes tended to resolve only one way. In November 1923, McMahon was sentenced to seven years and to two twelve-stroke lashings in the first four months of his incarceration.

Incarceration disagreed with McMahon. According to a Criminal Investigation Branch file note: ‘We were informed that when McMahon was in gaol for a similar offence he had stated that when he was released he would commit a similar offence that would be “worse than the Colin Ross case”.’ It then happened that he had been released from Geelong Prison on 17 October 1930 and had been seen in the vicinity of Fawkner Park soon after, and also that Detective Carey was among the pursuers of Mena Griffiths’ killer. Mena’s sisters and others described the kidnapper as a dishevelled figure with lank hair, greasy clothes and rotten teeth: it certainly sounded like someone who had done time. In fact, McMahon was innocent, even if his excuse strained credulity: on 22 October, he had started walking to Sydney. The affidavit he later swore is a rugged artefact of life on the road during the Depression: camping by roadsides, hitching rides on trucks, picking up casual jobs, cadging baths in hotels to remove the day’s grime. On the weekend of Mena Griffiths’ death, McMahon obtained a lift into the country town of Leeton with an orchardist, attended a salvage sale, tried selling a fan he had picked up on the roadside, and conversed with some cubs playing cricket on a parade ground (‘I wished their little organisation the best of luck. They said “thank you” and they walked away again’). A week later, by now in Temora, he was recognised in the post office from a police bulletin, and arrested for vagrancy. Detectives Carey and James Bruce undertook a 1080 km round trip in a police Daimler – ‘at speeds averaging 30 mph [about 50 km/h]’, Truth reported excitedly – to fetch him.

Yet under rigorous questioning, McMahon’s denials remained steadfast. More importantly, eyewitnesses failed to recognise him in a line-up. While unable to keep him, and forced to cover his train fare back to Temora so he could resume his broken journey, the police still harboured deep suspicions – indeed, they were far from done with their seedy suspect. But by the time McMahon had left the city the second time, the public were reeling from a murder still more violent, more mysterious and more shocking.