There are no beloved historic objects in our family.
There is no family home.
HELEN GARNER, ‘A SCRAPBOOK, AN ALBUM’ (1993)
In ‘Writing Home’, the opening essay in The Feel of Steel, Garner ponders her father’s insistence that he never had any attachment to material possessions, or the many houses in which he lived. Has this dismissal informed her own lack of a sense of home? At the time in which the essay is set, Garner is living with her third husband, Murray Bail, in Sydney. To understand what the concept of home might mean, she will have to confront her earliest memories. She is wary. Walking the streets of the ‘beautiful’ but ‘foreign’ city, she is assaulted by unbidden memories of her family’s Ocean Grove house, before being ‘yanked’ back to the house of her birth in Geelong. Her language is filled with menace and fear. Fragmentary memories ‘sneak up’ and ‘stab’ her. Was she once the favoured child, held fast and loved? Do her parents remember that time? She daren’t ask, for the answers may prove painful.
The issue of a favourite child is also addressed in an earlier essay. In ‘A Scrapbook, An Album’, first published in 1993, Garner interviews her four younger sisters, mapping their ferocious love for, and complex relationships with, each other. When the discussion veers towards their parents Garner attempts to refocus it back on their relationships as sisters. ‘We are women,’ she writes, ‘who have always been fighting our father’. Garner’s extended battle with her father has been one of the defining features of her adult life, and a central drama of her writing. She credits this struggle with both shaping and distorting her character. Garner’s father rejected her for many years. They reconciled three years before he died, yet Garner continues to assert that her behaviour warranted such rejection.
Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. Wartime Geelong was a provincial, conservative town. Garner’s parents, Bruce and Gwen Ford (née Gadsden), were middle-class, respectable folk. Bruce was complex and contradictory. He was ‘a vivid, obstreperous character’; an ‘impatient, rivalrous, scornful’ man who dominated his timid, depressive wife and bullied his children. Neither parent had much formal education or interest in the arts, though Gwen’s mother was an accomplished pianist and instilled in her a love of classical music. Bruce ‘never read a book’. He left school at fifteen and began his working life as a wool classer, eventually becoming a wool merchant. Gwen, a primary-school physical education teacher, worked for only six months before marrying and becoming a mother to five daughters and a son. Helen was her first child.
From 1948 until 1952 the family lived on The Terrace at Ocean Grove, a coastal town south-west of Melbourne. In ‘Sad Grove by the Ocean’, Garner narrates select memories of the place, but resists probing her past too deeply: ‘If I poked even one rational hole in the thick skin of that closed-off world, who knows what would come squirting out.’ In her forties she returned to Ocean Grove, perceiving only ugliness and a sense of personal desolation. The door of her old family home was open but she made no attempt to enter: ‘Why would I go in? It’s just an ugly old house. If I went in my father would shout, “Shut the flaming door!” and my mother would say, “Go outside.”’
Parental responses of anger and dismissal were, according to Garner, the chorus of her childhood. She believes that her father loved her dearly, but that he could not negotiate their relationship when she became a teenager. Even before tensions about sexuality arose, the young Helen’s literary interests and constant reading were a point of contention. ‘Go outside.’ ‘Get your nose out of that book.’ Indeed, as a university student in 1965 working in Geelong during term holidays, Helen wrote excitedly to her friend Axel Clark about coming to stay with his family in Canberra. She could ‘get away from bookshop drudgery and parental disapproval, and be able to go to the library or read every day without being accused of bludging’.
Garner’s memories of childhood are contradictory. She insists that being the eldest child marked and formed her. Through psychoanalysis, she later came to realise that she felt that her position in the family was usurped with each new sibling. She knows that there must have been a baby in the house for most years of her childhood, but she cannot remember ever changing a nappy or looking after a baby. Rather, she remembers retreating from the noise of the house to lose herself in books. On the other hand, she also remembers a happy childhood always playing with a gang of siblings. Ocean Grove was a place of barbecues, Frank Sinatra records, Film Fun comics and being sunburnt at the beach. It was at Ocean Grove that Helen rigged up a bucket to tip water on her father as he came through the gate from work. From her hiding spot she saw him laugh with shock and delight.
Why, then, did it hurt so much to return and gaze at Ocean Grove? Was it simply the landscape? Was it because on leaving that house the family returned to Retreat Road in Geelong and the laughter lessened? Was that the last house where Helen could sneak alone into her cubby and read and write by candlelight? Or was this, when she was between the ages of six and ten, the last time Helen felt that she truly belonged at home?
In 1960 an unworldly Helen Ford was the head prefect and dux of The Hermitage, a prestigious Anglican school for girls in Geelong. In the humorous and poignant essay ‘At Nine Darling Street’, she recounts her frumpish prudery and social inadequacy at a school dance in the big city of Melbourne. Yet the next year, aged nineteen, she arrived at the University of Melbourne and was catapulted into the intellectual, sexual and social revolutions it had to offer. ‘Fordie’, as her close friends called her, enrolled in English and French. By her own admission, she was an unimpressive student, rarely attending tutorials and never keeping up with the prescribed reading. She lived on campus at Janet Clarke Hall, the first residential college in Australia for women students. It required every applicant to sit an external exam in homecraft. Helen revelled in the heady freedom. Her circle of friends and lovers included architecture students who introduced her to American writers, so while she may not have been reading George Eliot and Milton in preparation for class, she was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
Helen forged an abiding friendship with Axel Clark, son of the historian Manning Clark, who was also enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts and was living at the neighbouring Trinity College. When she returned to her parents’ house during term breaks she wrote to Axel every few days. In January 1963, she complained: ‘Gosh I’m sick of being so far away from all my people. I think I have stopped considering my family as “my people”.’ She supposed Axel to be more at ease in Canberra because his parents were ‘in close touch with university life’ and noted: ‘There is such a tremendous gap between my parents’ interests and my own that there is no hope of bridging it. It hurts to notice that my father bores me and I bore him.’
Helen’s early letters to Axel are about relationships, drunken parties, common friends, student poverty, dreams and difficult family dynamics. Elements of these letters, by virtue of their author’s age and experience, are banal and repetitious. Yet these letters also demonstrate Helen’s inquiring imagination and her hunger for ideas about life and writing. Interwoven with gossip about friends, lovers and marriage proposals, are enthusiastic discussions of literature, particularly poetry. She cites Eliot, Yeats, Brennan, Slessor, Blake, Keats, Browning, Shakespearean sonnets; she appreciates the brilliance of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on Immortality’; she admits to weeping through King Lear and at the conclusion of Antony and Cleopatra; she is ‘tremendously impressed’ by Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and loves Hardy’s Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure. While reading Jude, she signs off as Susanna Florence Mary Bridehead. Once she remarks: ‘no, I’m not like Sue Bridehead, but I understand her!—and I am like her in that passage about wanting to captivate and then when it is done, being too frightened to know what to do next.’
The similarities do not end there. The headstrong, well-read Sue Bridehead wants to find a new way of living as a sexual, independent woman in the late nineteenth century, a way that does not involve marriage. Marriage kills true love and intimacy, both of which involve so much more than simply sexual relations. Sue has ‘tight-strained nerves’, she speaks her mind, and ‘everything she did seemed to have its source in feeling. An exciting thought would make her walk ahead so fast that he could hardly keep up with her; and her sensitiveness on some points was such that it might have been misread as vanity.’ Like Helen, Sue wants to be loved more than she can love herself. Her father casts her out of the family home because he believes her to be morally lax. When tragedy strikes, late in the novel, Sue returns to her Anglican faith. She punishes herself harshly as a means of expiating her sense of shame: ‘I cannot humiliate myself too much. I should like to prick myself all over with pins and bleed out the badness that’s in me!’ Shame and disgust are familiar words in Garner’s lexicon. They are experienced by all the female protagonists in her fiction and by the narrators of her nonfiction.
Helen squandered opportunities for rigorous undergraduate study because she was young, egocentric and irresponsible. She failed third year, and achieved only a third-class honours degree. Her sense of academic inadequacy fuelled her early insecurities about becoming a writer. It has often placed her on a defensive footing when challenged about the subject matter of her work, whether that be domestic relationships or a father’s murder of his children. Crucially, it feeds into her sense of inferiority when faced with academic or legal authority.
Garner submitted two theses for her honours degree. For French she wrote on the work of the mediaeval poet François Villon, for English, Christopher Brennan. With self-deprecating humour she has recounted how in the 1990s she ran into an academic who had taught English at Melbourne University thirty years earlier. The academic had said she’d recently gone back to re-read Garner’s final thesis on Brennan and observed that it showed no evidence whatsoever of any early talent. It was interesting, therefore, to discover—particularly given Inga Clendinnen’s attack on Garner’s methodology in Joe Cinque’s Consolation—the following account of an undergraduate history essay, written to Axel in August 1963: ‘I got a beaut comment on my Modern A essay on Voltaire and the Calas case. I went to see Mrs Clendinnen…She had written on it: “A clear and intelligent argument, well-supported. You have an eye for the telling quotation.”’
When I told Garner about this letter she was taken aback. She did not remember being taught by Clendinnen, and was gratified that she had written a good essay: ‘My memories of university work are of nothing but failure and incapacity & shame and crippling silence in tutes. The idea that I ever even wrote “an argument”, let alone that anyone commented on it, favourably or otherwise, provokes utter astonishment and disbelief.’ Perhaps she was energised by the topic: the philosophic and moral questions raised by Voltaire’s account of a controversial trial that resulted in a young man’s father being put to death after a questionable verdict of murder.
Letters from ‘Fordie’ are scattered throughout Axel Clark’s papers in the National Library of Australia archives. Altogether 188 of them survive, sent largely between 1962 and 1967, and 1985 and 1986. Garner was surprised when I told her about these letters. She wondered why Axel had kept them. After I suggested that perhaps he knew that one day she would be a successful writer she replied:
I am suddenly remembering that I once showed Axel a short story I’d written. The first one I ever wrote. I didn’t even know what a ‘short story’ was. I don’t know if I’d ever read one. Though I must have read Dubliners, I suppose. And I certainly wouldn’t have dreamt that anything I wrote might be ‘published’, whatever that was. This must have been in maybe 1964 or ’5…Axel read it right there at the table, returned the pages to order, looked at me with a calm face, and stuck up his thumb. I don’t remember him saying anything. Just that thumbs-up gesture. That would have been the first comment anyone ever gave me on my ‘writing’ as distinct from a letter or an essay.
Axel graduated with first-class honours in English in 1965 and enrolled in a Master of Arts at the University of Sydney. Helen’s letters to him continued unabated, though it seems Axel was a less frequent correspondent.
By 1966, Helen was teaching English and French at Werribee High School. She was back living with her parents in Geelong. Bruce Ford’s once bright and charming personality had given way to an ‘unpredictable possessiveness…brutal rudeness, scorn and erratic acts of cruelty’. In 1966 his overbearing control became untenable for Helen. He read her letters from Axel, and from two other young men. He insulted the correspondents, confiscated the letters and a packet of the Pill, and attempted to show some letters to one lad’s parents. The intrusion and betrayal were too intimate. Helen left home the next day. She described her father’s ‘vengeful rage’ to Axel, concluding: ‘I think he is going to forbid the little kids to see me.’
So began a prolonged period of estrangement.
*
In The Poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard explores how we inhabit imaginatively the intimate spaces of our childhood home. The house, according to Bachelard, ‘is our first universe’, a dynamic space where thoughts, memories and dreams coalesce. Bachelard insists that a great many of our memories find refuge in our houses’ cellars, garrets, ‘nooks and corridors’, and that ‘all our lives we come back to them in daydreams’. He suggests that psychoanalysts should pay more attention to the ‘localization of our memories’, a methodology he defines as topoanalysis. ‘Topoanalysis’, as an auxillary of psychoanalysis, ‘would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives’, he explains.
Perhaps Garner’s resistance to re-entering the childhood house where she was told to go outside reflects the continuing wound of her exile from the family. Two decades later she wrote that she ‘can’t understand why it hurts so much to look at Ocean Grove’, and that the events of childhood ‘have a hard shell of inevitability over them [that] resist historical explanation’, so there is no point in asking why they happened. With Bachelard in mind, we might ask what happens to a child in a family that owns no ‘beloved historical objects’, who has no family home? Does that child grow up to insist, as Garner does, that she is ‘hopeless at history, the past is a kind of blank—even my own and I forget everything’? Does she conduct, again and again, a topoanalysis of intimate spaces? Does she enter her sisters’ bedrooms and kitchens armed with a tape recorder?
In ‘A Scrapbook, An Album’, the middle sister tells the story of two Papuan missionaries who visited the family home and who were impressed by her material sacrifice in coming to work with them. She replies: ‘Yes, but in that house I have not learnt what I need to know.’ In the bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms and corridors of the large, communal houses in Melbourne’s Carlton or Fitzroy, or the spare room of a later house, Garner seeks what she needs to know. In these works, she fashions new configurations of family. In different ways, they all narrate tales of fraught belonging and painful rejection.
When I suggested to Garner that Bachelard’s approach might illuminate how houses operate in her work as ‘image, symbol, site and space’, she told me about visiting her sister Marie, ten days before her death in 2003, and finding her drawing the houses of their childhood. Garner retrieved her diary from that time and began to read it aloud. She stopped. ‘I think I had better photocopy these pages for you,’ she said. They read:
Marie had been trying to draw up floor plans of houses our family had lived in…She’d put in little drawings of important scenes taking place in one house or another: Mum huddling by the fire at Retreat Rd after she’d had all her teeth pulled out; Dad standing in the doorway of our bedroom at The Terrace in 1953, holding a newspaper & announcing in sombre tones, ‘THE KING—IS DEAD.’ Her memory of Strachan Ave was vestigial—an L-shaped block with a mother & a father on the doorstep & two children, she & I, lying in parallel single beds & wearing brown knitted pixie bonnets b/c we had mumps. I sat down with the clipboard on my knee & slaved away trying to reproduce my own memories of the houses. They seemed architecturally more accurate but totally lacked her sense of atavistic drama.
Our conversation swerved to David Malouf’s 12 Edmondstone Street, Garner’s favourite among Malouf’s books because it seems ‘so true’. In 12 Edmondstone Street the child narrator rediscovers and maps the spaces of his childhood house, which is also the house of his body, the house of wonder, desire and sexual discovery. The hero of the piece is the burglar, reimagined by the boy as someone, like a writer, who can see unexpected ‘threads between things’ and is unafraid to penetrate the most intimate spaces.
In August 1966 Helen moved into a single room, with a kitchenette in one corner and a fireplace in the other, at 870 Swanston Street, Carlton. The following year she travelled to England, where she became reacquainted with Bill Garner, whom she had met at university. Together they travelled through parts of Europe and Ireland. In Dublin, Helen bought an 1818 edition of Montaigne’s essays for one shilling and sat down to read it where ‘Wilde and Swift and Berkeley had trodden’. On returning to England, she secured a teaching position at St Angela’s Ursuline School in East London.
Helen and Bill returned to Melbourne in 1968. In the summer, they married. Bruce Ford attempted to stop the wedding by informing the Anglican Minister that Helen was not a virgin. He then forbade any family members to attend. Helen’s mother and her sister Linda defied him. Bill began his Master of Arts in political philosophy at Monash University and was a part-time tutor in philosophy at Melbourne University. He and Helen moved into Kerr Street, Fitzroy, offsetting their rent by sharing with two others. Friends remember a house full of people and parties. In September 1969 Helen gave birth to their daughter, Alice. She continued to be largely estranged from her parents. Her mother, under Bruce’s veto, did not come to the hospital.
Nineteen sixty-eight is the year most associated with youth rebellion and student protest, particularly in Paris and Chicago. Anti-Vietnam protests were escalating in Australia and illicit drugs were becoming more freely available but the country remained firmly under conservative rule and conservative values. Perhaps in choosing to marry at that time Garner displayed that she was more of the head prefect than the immoral radical her father believed her to be. Perhaps it was just the times. The publisher Hilary McPhee was married in her third year of university aged twenty-one, the writer Drusilla Modjeska married at twenty and the playwright David Williamson at twenty-three. But within three years Garner’s marriage was over. Bill moved into the Tower, an overcrowded space of frenetic sexual and creative activity behind the Pram Factory in Carlton. Helen and Alice moved to Falconer Street, Fitzroy North, ‘the Monkey Grip house’.
Undoubtedly, one great attraction of marriage for Garner was the opportunity to form a new family. In 2002 Charlotte Wood interviewed a number of women writers about their attitudes to marriage and changing their surnames. Garner explained that through marriage she sought to overcome some of the painful clashes with her father, and achieve a sense of belonging to another family. She told Wood that she happily surrendered the name Ford: ‘I was rather keen to get away from that name because it was very much connected to my way of being when I was a student, mostly sexually, which I look back on with some dismay.’ She has never contemplated reverting to her maiden name: ‘I feel that Ford was my child name, and then my really stupid, self-destructive youth name. Garner is my grown-up name.’
Bill and Helen married at about the same time as the La Mama Group, soon to be known as the Australian Performing Group (APG), was becoming established at the Pram Factory. It was a heady time. A rollcall of those involved includes many leading playwrights, directors, actors and administrators of Australian theatre and television. Bill became immersed in the performance scene. As Garner later commented: ‘I was one of the La Mama widows. I was married to Bill Garner and we had a baby and everything was going swimmingly, then La Mama started up…He went up to La Mama and basically never came back.’
For all its supposed egalitarian ethos, the group at the Pram Factory was a tense, factional clique. Garner remembers feeling ‘left out and lonely’: ‘It was a closed group. You couldn’t even be involved in their social life.’ She was part of the APG women’s collective, which spent months in consciousness-raising workshops before writing and producing Betty Can Jump, an experimental feminist theatre piece. Betty Can Jump dramatised how it felt to be a woman from convict times through to the seventies. It played to packed houses for seven weeks in November and December 1971. The production caused ructions within the male-dominated APG and added to escalating tensions within the group. In the 1994 documentary on the Pram Factory, Garner noted that Betty Can Jump coincided with the break-up of her marriage and she was ‘pretty angry’. By way of shorthand, she suggested that any complaint about one’s personal fate was viewed by the leftist men at the APG as a kind of ‘bourgeois individualism’.
This production, and the audience responses to it, helped to shape Garner’s early writing. In the 1972 winter issue of dissent: a radical quarterly, she published an extended piece on the process and performance of Betty Can Jump. She wrote of the difficulty in ‘wrestling with our feelings and experiences’ and trying to ‘mould them into theatrical form’. This need to find the right shape or form persists throughout Garner’s oeuvre. Prior to opening night, the women performed for the men of the APG. It was, according to Garner, a hollow, humiliating experience. Their personal statements appeared ‘facile and self-indulgent’. Things that the women felt profoundly in rehearsals were somehow lost in translation to the stage. The men, untouched by the performance, made no response whatsoever. Total silence. Garner was ashamed to realise that, despite months of workshops, the actors’ first concern had been to impress men and gain their approval.
Through the ensuing weeks of performance, she learned about the capacity of diary entries to capture mood and experience. She discovered that brevity and structure were powerful tools of communication. Garner also appreciated the need for women to record their experiences or risk remaining forever silenced. Some nights the female performers were subjected to grotesque sexual heckling from men in the audience, but women watching the show felt a shock of recognition. These responses confirmed for Garner that women’s interior experiences were valid and needed to be articulated.
The APG strove to produce Australian theatre true to the Australian vernacular, accents and experience. Garner does something similar in her writing. In Monkey Grip her characters go to the outside ‘dunny’, they ‘spew’ and say ‘fair dinkum’, and they walk and cycle through the recognisable streets and parks of Fitzroy and Carlton. Many of Garner’s friends who feature in the novel enjoyed seeing their lives and suburbs portrayed. A generation later, Christos Tsiolkas remembers the ‘buzz’ he felt as a young man recognising the geography and landscape of Garner’s work, and of seeing his world reflected in a book.
By 1972, Garner was teaching at Fitzroy High School. As she details in ‘Why Does the Women Get All the Pain?’, one springtime afternoon her first-form class on Ancient Greece descended fairly quickly, thanks to the graphically defaced images of Greek athletes in the students’ textbook, into a sex education lesson. Garner invited her students to write down any questions they had. She offered to end the discussion if anyone was uncomfortable, and proceeded to answer with brutal honesty everything these thirteen-year-olds asked.
For a single beat I see the situation from a distance: a kid has just asked his teacher if she sucks cocks. I should be thunderstruck, outraged—but twenty-nine kids are gazing at me, waiting, their faces open and alight. Why lie? They trust me. They want to know the truth.
Garner first published this article anonymously in Digger in November 1972. Digger was a countercultural paper founded by the publisher Phillip Frazer and produced by a collective that included Garner, Bruce Hanford, Ponch Hawkes, Colin Talbot, Garrie Hutchinson, Virginia Fraser and Isabelle Rosemberg. Beatrice Faust, Michael Gawenda, Bobby Sykes, Bob Gould and Frank Moorhouse were some of the contributors. The sixteen-page broadsheet appeared fortnightly and cost 30 cents. Its readership included politically aware young adults, many of whom had grown up reading Frazer’s earlier publications such as Go-Set and Revolution.
The next issue of Digger carried a letter titled ‘Sexual Virtuosity’, in which the writer praised Ms X’s courage and honesty in the classroom, acknowledged that she had treated the students with respect, but argued that in refusing to engage with issues of homosexuality the teacher had probably furthered the sense of alienation for some of the students. Garner, as Ms X, responded. She wrote that she had talked about homosexuality; she had articulated her ‘own uncertain experience of homosexual love’, while feeling out of her depth. Her own experience of a lesbian relationship, she wrote, was ‘emotionally ecstatic but physically puzzling’. The same issue of Digger celebrated Gay Pride Week. Here Garner published a half-page article, ‘Bisexuality: Joining the Middle’, with a prominent by-line. It was not her finest piece of journalism. She was ‘ga-ga with love’ for a woman, she embraced the idea of sex with a woman, ‘but then we never did get it on’, she wrote.
The day after publication an outraged school caretaker challenged Garner in the staffroom. She readily admitted to writing the initial article as Ms X. For two weeks she continued to teach and take her students to the Fitzroy Baths, unaware that the wheels of her demise were in motion. On 7 December, she met with the school principal, was shown his draft report to the Department of Education and, in typical Garner manner, corrected his spelling. She was expecting a slap on the wrist and possible school transfer. Eight days later, she was sacked for using ‘popular four-letter words’ to discuss ‘the male and female sexual organs, and the sexual act’. Garner insisted that she did not realise speaking in this manner was a political act. She was simply being honest.
Maybe. Or maybe not. Even if Garner did not recall the obscenity charges laid against the editors of Oz magazine in Sydney in 1963 and 1964, she would have known about the raid on Oz’s London offices following the 1970 publication of the ‘School Kids Issue’, replete with a cover featuring a stylised lesbian orgy and ‘four-letter words’. In 1971, the Oz editors, Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis, were charged in London with obscenity and conspiring to ‘debauch and corrupt the morals of young children’. Garner may also have been aware of the onstage arrest, in Queensland in 1969, of Norman Staines for saying ‘Fuckin’’ at the conclusion of Alex Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed. In that same year, closer to home, the actors in La Mama’s production of John Romeril’s Whatever Happened to Realism were also charged with obscenity. When police removed them from the theatre to the Carlton police station, a crowd gathered outside the station chanting: ‘Shit, fuck, bum, cunt.’ Language was political.
The Digger collective were waging a war on censorship. The third issue led with Beatrice Faust’s three-page verbal and pictorial study of pornography. The Victorian police raided Digger’s office and served an obscenity writ. Garner’s article about the sex education lesson ran in the sixth issue. It too attracted a writ. A magistrate fined Digger $750 for the pornographic pictures and $500 for Garner’s story. On appeal Judge Martin, of Melbourne’s County Court, found that the pictures were ‘undesirable’ rather than obscene and quashed the fine. He was, however, appalled by Garner’s blatant language and increased that fine to $750.
‘Why Does the Women Get All the Pain?’ is the only one of Garner’s Digger essays to be included in True Stories. It is an extremely important piece, not only because it got her sacked and kickstarted her writing career, but also because it goes some way to explaining her complex responses to institutional power and the academy in The First Stone. Garner knew the worth of her story at the time. She asked Axel if he had read the piece, saying she thought it was ‘a bottler’.
In addition to book and movie reviews, Garner wrote nearly twenty feature articles for Digger. While the paper was defiantly political, Garner’s interest remained largely with the politics of women’s experiences. She highlighted the plight of unmarried pregnant girls in various refuges. She explained methods of contraception. She lamented the lack of female playwrights and roles for women at the Pram Factory. She attended Women’s Electoral Lobby meetings and railed against the male politicians who dominated debate and set the agenda. She explained how collective households work, how the presence of children affects the dynamics of the collective, and how those households fall apart. All of these pieces provided rich groundwork for her future novels. But her heart wasn’t in it. In ‘The Art of the Dumb Question’, she admits that she was ill at ease writing for Digger: ‘Things I wrote then felt false to me. I was bluffing. I secretly knew myself to be hopelessly bourgeois.’ She resigned in September 1974, exhausted and unwell. Diagnosed with hepatitis, she took to her bed and read War and Peace and Isaac Babel’s stories. She ‘howled’ over Lionel Trilling’s suggestion that Babel’s work ‘hinted that one might live in doubt, that one might live by means of a question’.
Garner survived 1975 living on the Supporting Mothers’ Benefit topped up with small contributions from Bill Garner and her parents. With Alice at school, she spent her mornings in the domed Reading Room of the State Library of Victoria shaping her diary into what she thought might become a novel. In the afternoons she read. She also made her one and only acting debut, playing the part of Jo, an obsessive-compulsive speed queen in Bert Deling’s film Pure Shit. Relations with her father remained strained. In April she wrote to Axel that her father’s ‘most peculiar attitude towards sex’ was unchanged. When Garner went to stay at her parents’ beach house in Anglesea, he made a five-hour round trip from his farm in Shelford in order to find out who was with her. He ‘tiptoed’ in unannounced at ten in the morning, only to find her in the bath with Alice. She noted: ‘I am quite sure that my disastrous relationship with my father has a lot to do with the fact that I always fall in love with men a fair bit younger than I am.’ Her current lover, she wrote, was in jail in Bangkok.
Axel had sent her some of his poems. She sent him one of hers in return, remarking ‘all events described are true, unfortunately’:
This is the day the junkies’ child
Drowned in the river, undefiled.
This is the day the junkies said
‘We’ve learned our lesson now he’s dead.’
Out in the kitchen, without a qualm,
I watched him stick it in his arm.
Blood ran back, blood ran down;
I heard him swear, I saw him frown.
I stood leaning against the shelf
And watched my man make love to himself.
This is the day the rain fell down.
I rode my bike across the town.
I rode my bike across the town;
The rain fell down, the rain fell down.
She signed off: ‘My name is Helen.’ She wanted Axel to stop calling her ‘Fordie’.
In the latter half of 1975 Garner turned this poem into the song ‘White Eyes’. Andrew Bell wrote the score. Jane Clifton sang it. It was the first of her songs to be performed by the rock ’n’ roll band Stiletto, made up of Bell, Clifton, Janie Conway, Marnie Sheehan and Eddie van Roosendael.