by Mark Mordue
Despite Frank Cave’s high public profile and relatively glamorous career, he had a secret: Frank was not the man he claimed to be. His extended family would learn through Imogen (née Chambers) that ‘Cave’ was not the real family name. By then Poppa had established himself as such a towering and acidic figure they were all simply too afraid to ask him for the truth. Only after he passed away did anyone dare attempt a genealogy. This project was comically referred to as ‘The Lost Caves’. A group effort finally unearthed the true family name: Landvoigt.
Although he had fought in the First World War under his own name and on the side of the British, growing anti-German feeling during the build-up to the Second World War convinced Frank Landvoigt that a change of moniker was a good idea. ‘Landvoigt’ was not just German, it was Prussian in origin, carrying all the aristocratic and military connotations of that kingdom. ‘Cave’ was Frank’s English mother’s maiden name. There is speculation that Frank’s decision was also taken in belated reaction to his father, who walked out on the family when Frank was just a boy. He is known to have been using his mother’s maiden name in varied circumstances well before it was changed by deed poll in 1940. In any case, it was then that a sign went up over the doors of the car yard he opened in Melbourne, and ‘Frank Cave’ was officially born.13
Nick Cave recalls staying with Poppa and ‘using a wind-up stereo to listen to all his old 78s. There was a song he had, called “Can I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister?” It was this hard-luck narrative of a guy who has had his wife and kid stolen away from him by a handsome stranger he took into his home. And how he’s wandering now, looking for them, telling people his sad story wherever he goes.’ Nick sings a fragment of the song in a cracking, old-timey voice, ‘“May I sleep in your barn tonight, Mister? It’s cold lying out on the ground.”’
A traditional country ballad, this song has been covered by everyone from America’s Hank Thompson to Australia’s Slim Dusty, the provenance blurred by the various interpretations and accompanying claims of authorship. The lyrics are underlined by an eerie suggestion that the wandering stranger might well be the one who stole away the woman and child he laments as lost to him. ‘It’s a bit of a stretch,’ Nick says, ‘but when I think about how often I listened to it, it probably sowed the idea somewhere in my head for “Song of Joy” on Murder Ballads.’
Frank Cave would prove fertile territory in other ways, forming the basis for the ‘granddad’ figure in the closing section of The Death of Bunny Munro. ‘Poppa had a wind-up mechanical bird like that grandfather character in that book has. A what-do-you-call-it? An automaton? It used to fascinate me,’ Cave says. ‘He used to go, “Don’t break that thing!” every time I went near it. He even dressed the same way as the character does in my novel, except Poppa’s fly wasn’t always undone. That’s an important difference.
‘I remember how Poppa would sit there in his chair with a whisky; his bald head like a big skull. I also remember how I had done this painting while I was at Caulfield Grammar School, just a picture of an old guy with a skull-like head. It was called “The Voice”. Very obviously influenced by Edvard Munch. But, coincidentally, it did look a lot like Poppa sitting there. Every time we knew he was coming round Mum and Dad had to take the painting off the living-room wall and hide it.’
Nick laughs. ‘He was a real old cunt. But I liked him. I actually always remember Poppa smiling when I was a kid. He was quite the practical joker when he was younger, or so I heard. Drove his car all the way up the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne for fun. Another time a friend left him his car and went away north for a holiday. Poppa disassembled it and took it piece by piece into his friend’s bedroom where he reassembled the whole car. I used to hear those kinda stories about him . . . It was only after Mrs Cave died that he got angry and nasty. I remember him being quite sweet when she was alive.
‘A big story in the family is when Mum and Dad went to visit Poppa in Melbourne – they were still living in Wangaratta at the time – about a year after his wife had died [in 196614]. They hadn’t seen him for a while and thought it would be nice to go pay him a surprise visit. Cheer him up. Anyway, they drove all the way down to Melbourne to see how he was, and when they knocked on the door he opened it and shouted, “Piss off!” And shut the door again in their faces. Yeah, Poppa was a real old cunt.’
Dawn Cave’s family lineage casts its own light and shadow on the Nick Cave story. Her father, Edward Cooper Treadwell, ran a printing business and published a racing paper, The Sporting Judge, and served as an alderman on Melbourne City Council. Her mother, Florence Kench, was an English immigrant who arrived in Australia in 1911 at the age of sixteen without much education. She went to work at 30 York Street, St Kilda, keeping house for Treadwell, his mortally ill wife and their five children.
Treadwell lost his wife, Mary Jane15, in 1917, then his eldest son, Edward Junior – who died in 1918 at age twenty-one in a propeller-blade accident on a British airstrip during the last days of the First World War – and finally his eldest daughter, Maisie (May Jane), from peritonitis in 1919. By strange coincidence they all died in September, which Edward Treadmill would refer to ever after as ‘my bad month’. He still had two younger daughters, Ruby and Alice, to look after, as well as his older boy, Frank, out in the world. By this stage Florence had ceased working for them and been employed by others, but in the circumstances she was recalled to the house where her services were required full-time. Treadwell, almost inevitably, fell in love with and proposed to his young housekeeper. Florence and Edward married in 1922 and had two more daughters, Gwendolyn in 1923 and Dawn in 1926.
After so much tragedy, one would imagine Edward Treadwell to be a rather distant and melancholy figure, but Dawn Cave describes him as a personality of great determination, always able to talk about the family members he had lost and yet never overwhelmed by sadness. Nick caught hints from his mother that her father ‘enjoyed a drink or two at the Council meetings when he was an alderman. He’d take all the leftover cakes and stuff them in his pockets and bring them home for the kids. All these smashed-up cakes falling out of his pockets.’ Dawn Cave says, ‘My father was a very strong man. I think that’s why I lived in that St Kilda house with him and Mum till Colin and I got married.’16 The loss of such a warm and charming character in 1950 was keenly felt. The cause of death was pneumonia, but Edward Treadwell had suffered for quite a while, says Dawn, ‘blind for several years, and in his latter years bedridden completely’.17 Though a relatively young widow, Florence stayed on at the home and never remarried.
Julie Cave, Dawn’s youngest child, recalls how she and Nick would stay with Grandma Treadwell during their school holidays in the 1960s – and what a great adventure it was. The big old house had been divided into flats by then, and a changing retinue of boarders, part of a great European influx of migrants into St Kilda, provided the children with many colourful characters to observe. ‘We just loved visiting her,’ Julie says. ‘Grandma would vamp away at the piano playing songs she picked up by ear listening to the phonograph and the radio.’18
An otherwise tiny and quiet woman, Florence would come alive at the keys, continuing to belt out her favourite song, The Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’, in rousing fashion well into her eighties. ‘That’s where Nick really first learned the piano,’ Julie Cave insists, ‘the way Grandma did it. I see it in the way he moves his hands and how it sounds, and feels. He still plays like Grandma now. She would have loved it.’19
Nick is surprised to hear the description. ‘Julie said that, did she? It’s awful, that left-hand thing I used to do,’ he says, beating a barrel-house rhythm out on an imaginary keyboard in the air beside him. ‘I don’t play like that anymore,’ he emphasises. ‘Mum’s sister, Auntie Gwen, who I absolutely adore and love, floored me once, scarred me for life, with something she said in relation to all this,’ he laughs. ‘I was just eleven. Just chording stuff out on the piano. I couldn’t play that well. We were all around the piano si
nging songs and taking turns to play something. My turn. And I’d hardly got going before Gwen said, “Oh, get off, you’re just vamping.” Every time I hear that word come up in association with my playing I still get a chill. It suggests you don’t know what you are doing, that you’re just faking it. Vamping!
‘Actually, I got very distressed about my grandmother’s hands when I was a kid. Her fingers were bent almost at right angles. Literally. She did play beautifully, almost any song by ear, but her fingers . . .’ Nick shakes his head as he pictures them, making a snapping gesture across each of his own fingers. ‘I told Mum I didn’t want to play piano because I was so afraid my fingers would go like Grandma’s. I was really scared. “I don’t want to have fingers like Grandma.” That’s when Mum told me, “She got them scrubbing floors, Nicholas.”’20
Before becoming a librarian, Dawn studied violin for a year at the Conservatory of Music in Melbourne. ‘I was never that good,’ she says dismissively. ‘They told me to go do an Arts degree.’21
Dawn Treadwell would receive her BA in 1949, the same year that Colin Cave completed his BA Dip Ed and they became engaged. An ailing Edward Treadwell would die just a few months after their engagement party in December. Colin and Dawn would eventually marry in 1951, and then move westward into the state’s interior, following a series of country town appointments to advance Colin Cave’s career. Though only a junior teacher, Colin had a vision that was more far-reaching than that of most young men his age.
For a pregnant young woman with two boys in primary school, Warracknabeal proved to be a very lonely place in the late 1950s. ‘People were very self-contained up there. They didn’t welcome us into their arms,’ says Dawn. ‘I think we were regarded as oddities. And it was a fact we weren’t there for life,’ she admits, straining to be fair, before adding, ‘The Vicar of Warracknabeal told us later that people like us were referred to as “birds of passage”. That’s what the locals called us. “Birds of passage.”’22 More than fifty years on from the experience, she repeats what could sound like a pretty phrase with distinct acidity.
As well as teaching English and mathematics at the high school, Colin Cave immediately set about establishing a theatre group in the town. According to the stories Nick heard, ‘I think they thought he was a weirdo, putting on plays and things like some overeducated homo.’ Remarkably, by September 1957 the Warracknabeal Dramatic Society was not only in existence – less than a year after his arrival – it was staging a Colin Cave–produced and directed version of Rope23 for the locals. Colin had also entered the play into a regional theatrical festival in Ballarat, some 230 kilometres away, a good four hours’ drive on an outback highway at the time.
Dawn was by now heavily pregnant with Nick. ‘But I was always late [before],’ she says, referring to her two previous sons’ births. ‘The weekend they were to take the play to Ballarat was looming and it was the same weekend I was due. We had this old Peugeot station wagon; it was the only car that could take the coffin-like chest that the body was put in as part of the play. Colin went to our doctor and said, “What shall I do?” The doctor said, “Colin, what do you consider more important?” Colin went to Ballarat.
‘Anyway, I had Nick very early on [the] Sunday morning. Ballarat to Warracknabeal is quite a trek. Colin packed everything in the play up and headed back as fast as he could. He came in late looking terribly anxious. Fortunately he made it in time. But he wasn’t present at Nick’s birth. Fathers weren’t allowed to stay in the delivery room in those days.’
Dawn still gets people with an interest in astrology asking her the exact time of Nick’s arrival. ‘I can’t remember,’ she says with a wave of her hand. ‘But some people are very persistent. I just make up a time, it keeps them happy.’24
‘As a little boy, Nick loved to talk. He loved to engage you in a conversation. He was a little chatterer,’ Dawn says. ‘Everyone seemed to love Nick, those big eyes of his looking up at you. When we visited Melbourne, Nick would sleep in Grandma’s [Florence Treadwell’s] room, and she’d say she’d see him there in the cot when she woke up, just standing there, looking at her with those eyes of his.
‘They’d have these long conversations just lying there at night when he got a little older. Anything he admired, she gave it to him. The only things he said he really wanted were this wooden chest, which she used to tell him he could have after she died, and a huge leather-bound Bible. He must have been around eight when he showed an interest in her Bible. Anyway, she let him have it and he put a family tree in the front in great big kids’ handwriting and completely defaced it.
‘I was only asking him this last weekend if he could remember much of his life in Warracknabeal. He said something about when he was three and trying to climb a fence to look at chooks and he cut his head open. And that’s about it. But it was a good childhood in Warracknabeal, and Wangaratta after that. Nick would just wander out the door and up the street sometimes and someone would bring him back. That’s life in a country town. It’s a great way for children to grow up.
‘He was always easy to have around the house, and very affectionate – he still is very affectionate now. When I had Julie and she was a baby and I was bathing her, he would never wander off and play then. He’d just sit there patiently, wanting to have a conversation. “God, I wish he’d shut up, I just need to think for a minute!” – I’d feel that way sometimes, he’d chatter so much. But Nick would sort of demand your answer. Later, when he was growing up and a teenager, there’d be family arguments and you’d think it was all over, but Nick always had to have the last word. You’d think it was finished and done and Nick had a way of just saying one more thing, even as you were leaving the room. And then of course it would start up again. Colin found it very hard to take.’25
Down by the River
WANGARATTA
1959–70
‘One of the many things I regret about writing And the Ass Saw the Angel was that I didn’t set it in Australia. It could just as easily be set in Wangaratta rather than an imaginary part of the American South. I don’t know why I didn’t do that. I wish I had. For sure that book comes from growing up in the country, from living a life in country Australia. It’s not from listening to murder ballads. The river was the sacred place of my childhood and everything happened down there.
‘On the edge of the river there’s willow trees, just like it says in “Sad Waters”. The plaiting of the willow vines – that happened. So, a song like “Sad Waters” is a remembrance of that childhood scenario. The tree roots all torn out of the ground. The river was fucking muddy too, not one of these glistening, glacial waters people imagine. You never knew what terrible things you might be swimming towards. We used to jump off the railway bridge into the river – there was only one place where you could jump off safely, between these two pylons where we knew it was deep enough; pretty exhilarating stuff as the trains were coming.
‘People look at these things as academic exercises, like I am just sitting around listening to country and blues songs. As if there’s no life experience behind them. And it’s just not true. I’m not sure, though, about the line in “Sad Waters” about the carp darting about. I always thought carp were little fish. But when I was shown one recently it turns out they are these great big, ugly motherfuckers,’ Cave says, holding out his hands in horror to indicate their size. Then he shrugs his shoulders and laughs. ‘Anyway, the thing is, I always have a very strong visual idea of where the songs that I write are set. And invariably it is in a small town and that town is Wangaratta. But it’s a mythical version, not an actual version.’
When the Cave family arrived in Wangaratta towards the end of 1959, the population hovered at close to 14,000 people.1 Compared to Warracknabeal, where Nick was born, it was a veritable metropolis, almost five times larger and experiencing what regional historians would describe as ‘a cultural flowering’, driven by an influx of European migrants labouring in the increasingly successful vineyards and the recently
opened Bruck Textiles factory.
The flour mill and its pale silos towered over a railway line that made ‘Wang’, as the locals called it, an important rural link between Melbourne and Sydney. Wool prices were good and sheep farms were numerous in the valley. Cattle were still being herded through Phillipson Street towards the saleyards well into the late 1960s. Wang’s abattoir was an economic mainstay, its presence marked by a stench that wafted over the new suburbs across the railway tracks on the western side of town. A smell of blood and bone would ooze out like clockwork towards the end of each working day.
It was a pretty town nonetheless, poised at the junction of the Ovens and King rivers, which flow down from the Victorian Alps, their cold waters gathering farm soil from the banks and darkening on their journey. The rivers, the railway tracks and the French Gothic architecture of the Holy Trinity Cathedral dominated the town’s heart, vaguely conjuring the postcard atmosphere of an inviting French village transplanted into the broad-brimmed, knockabout Australian outback. Built of granite taken from the nearby Warby Ranges, the Anglican cathedral would take on a warm, almost pinkish glow in the afternoon sunlight.2
Wangaratta’s name reputedly stemmed from a local Aboriginal word that meant ‘nesting place for cormorants’. Appropriate, then, that ‘birds of passage’, as the Vicar of Warracknabeal had so disparagingly described the Caves, should find it an ideal place to settle. They’d already moved from Melbourne to the far-western Victorian towns of Hamilton and then Warracknabeal to advance Colin Cave’s teaching career. But they had never felt much sense of welcome in those tight little communities. Wang was different from the start.
