And What Do You Do Mr. Gable?

by Richard Flanagan

  Novels, on the other hand, remain one of the last places where a single voice can speak the truth, untrammelled by the dictates of power and money, and still be heard across countries and over time. And this is because while books need a small amount of money to be published, they need no money to be written, whereas even a cheap film needs a great deal—several millions of dollars—to be made. In an ever more unfree age, when avenues for the expression of truth are daily closing off all around, this seems a not unimportant distinction, and one that will ensure books have a greater, rather than lesser, role and significance in the new world being born around us.

  Still, when asked why he was writing soap operas following his Nobel Prize, Gabriel García Márquez replied, ‘The medium is an invitation.’ Very occasionally, I chance upon a movie that reminds me that in a situation of adversity, a few film-makers still attempt to craft an answer to their invitation with some worth and honour.

  That they sometimes fail doesn’t worry me.

  ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for,’ as the poet Browning once wrote. Browning is forgotten today, except when wielded as a pistol in yet one more Tarantino-esque standoff. No one reads poetry, and the one art that still has the capacity to reach millions too often works in the opposite direction. Though film’s talk is incessantly and insidiously of the stars, its trajectory, the desired home of so many who work in it, remains the gutter.

  And, that night talking film and drinking wine in that low-lit cutting room with John Scott, how I wished to tell him that I had been accidentally blown from the republic of letters into the strange country of film, and, though there was much to despise in the way of chicanery in the world from which I had come, that I had ruefully realised I would rather live in a republic, however flawed, than in a tyranny, no matter how magnificent.

  But I could feel the undertow of his world, and I could feel that I was becoming a trader of images, and no longer having words, I opened another bottle, filled our glasses, and said nothing.

  Introduction, Richard Flanagan, The Sound of One Hand Clapping:

  the Film Script (2000)

  ‘I HAVE NO WORDS, my darling, to write this letter that you may never read. I am writing it into empty space,’ Nadia Mandelstam wrote in October 1938, the height of Stalin’s Terror, to her husband, the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. He had disappeared into the Soviet Gulag, never to return.

  ‘Remember the good taste of bread,’ she continued, ‘when we got it by a miracle and ate it together. Our happy poverty and the poetry you wrote.’

  Nadia Mandelstam was to remember not only the taste of bread, but committed to memory all of Osip Mandelstam’s poems, carrying in her head what was banned and destroyed and no longer existed in books.

  My own memories of bread are not dramatic, but to me they are beautiful. They begin with my mother, from whom I learnt to make bread as a child, for though breadmaking can be learnt from a book, it is best learnt from someone you love.

  My mother’s family were farming people from Tasmania’s north-west coast and my mother gave to all her children a great, abiding love for her land and its people. But it was a special and peculiar love, a love that was about being part of the earth rather than an observer of it.

  She would sometimes halt our car full of her six children and our grandmother, a woman of no means and innumerable hatboxes, on the side of a new highway cutting that had sliced open the red earth of the Tasmanian north-west coast, a flick-knife of progress slashing the land. After looking furtively up and down the road, she would get out of the boot old fertiliser bags and order us children to fill them with that rich and sweating red earth.

  We would take that dirt all the way back south to our Hobart home, where she would empty it over that part of our backyard wilderness that she decreed would be a vegetable garden, a heroic act of defiance against our suburban plight and domestic dreariness. With her foot she would contemptuously scuff back the surface of some of the sour grey clay of southern Tasmania, and say:

  ‘Soil! Huh! That’s not soil, son!’

  And then she would put her hands, chapped and dry and cracked from incessant housework, into that wet, heavy red soil, and lift it up in front of us as though it were the most exquisite balm, as if it were an offering to God, and say:

  ‘Smell that, son.’

  And we would smell the richness together as she let it fall through her fingers, a shower of red earth, saying:

  ‘Now that’s what I call soil.’

  And as we spread it about, she would tell me stories about her father, who used to plough his red-earthed fields with two draught horses, and about growing up on a small farm that nestled in the green hills that rise up halfway between the blue immensity of Bass Strait and the blue elegance of Mount Roland, and tell me how her father would each morning walk down the three back steps of his wooden cottage and fall to his knees and thank God for such beauty.

  She would tell how she was taught to make bread by her mother on that farm forever myth- ical in my family’s memory; of her mother’s stories of having to walk to other farms when, pre- commercial yeast, the yeast plant by accident died.

  And then we would go back inside because it was time to knock down and knead the bread dough she made every day.

  Earth, flour, dough: all these fell through her knobbly fingers like the life-giving forces they are; she was always half-smeared with flour, a Boadicea of bread-making.

  She would take me with her to Gibson’s old flour mill to get the 25-pound bags of flour fresh as fresh can be, to smell the dusty flour as we smelt the waxy earth, and she would often have me knead the dough while she went about other work in the kitchen, and sometimes talk wistfully of her Uncle Ding, who had worked for a time at the Sorell bakery before the war, and was a master of the one-handed knead, a concept we sometimes tried to emulate to little avail.

  My mother laboured under my father’s palate, not so much traditional as convict in its simplicity. When they married in 1947 she prepared him meat and four veg, as she had seen so enticingly prepared in Joan Fox’s Launceston boarding house when she had been a young teacher.

  My father grew quieter meal by meal, until several weeks into their marriage he pleaded:

  ‘Helen, this modern cooking is all very fine, but can we just get back to meat and two veg?’

  Still, ascetic though his tastes were, his palate was not to be underestimated. He was no mug when it came to bread, and recognised old bakers’ tricks when a few years ago I left him with a loaf, the leavening of which had been aided with the commercial baker’s friend lecithin. On my next visit I knew he had me when he said he didn’t agree with the spoiling of good bread with rubbery chemicals.

  He taught me how to enjoy bread, with the black pudding he sometimes cooked over the fire for breakfast, or cold muttonbirds and the bread heavily buttered. The smooth comfort of the butter fat, and the gamey stride of the muttonbird fat mingling with the white bread crumbling in your mouth. Or my mother’s apricot jam; great gobs of fruit set in a syrup from heaven atop a thick hunk of bread still warm from the oven.

  Such passions, however, have lately suffered from the affronts of fashion. Bread is under attack from an ever more obese West desperate to reduce its girth. The Atkins Diet, with its constipating contempt for bread, has had such a profound effect on American diets that it has, according to some reports, led to wheat farmers in the US abandoning wheat for new crops.

  What is amusing fad often begets rancorous ideology. An argument is now abroad that man undid himself when he left the hunt for flesh and took to domesticating grain; that the resultant diet destroyed us spiritually and engendered the barbaric exploitation of the modern world that now threatens our very survival.

  Such beefsteak enthusiasms were put with muscular clarity by the American Richard Manning in a highly re
adable essay, ‘The Oil We Eat’, published in Harper’s.

  Man, according to Manning, has for most of his history gathered and hunted. The recent domestication of grains that marks the invention of agriculture has been a ruinous experiment for both humanity and the planet.

  ‘Agriculture was not so much about food,’ Manning writes, ‘as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some people, and those people have been in charge ever since.’

  Ten grievous millennia follow, with all the horrors we are too familiar with to bother listing. In this history, rice, corn and wheat are newly inducted to the annals of infamy to sit alongside such old favourites as Attila the Hun and Joseph Stalin.

  He ends the essay in a poignantly American manner: by shooting an elk grazing on native grasses near his house.

  ‘Food is politics. This being the case, I voted with my weapon of choice. My particular bit of violence, though, is more satisfying, I think, than the rest of the globe’s ordinary political mayhem. I used a rifle to opt out of an insane system.’

  Bread, thankfully, isn’t politics. It’s what people share while suffering politics and what people dream of when politics takes everything from them.

  I suppose wallaby and kangaroo are our elk equivalent, and I like my roo, and I like my wallaby chorizo, but I like it balanced with bread of my own making. For me, it is a simple, wonderful thing. My weapon of choice is a bread bowl, preferably porcelain.

  Why? Because you need something large, and with weight to balance your kneading, and with thermal mass to keep the dough warm.

  But it’s not essential. I have made perfectly good bread using a four-litre ice-cream container, and once, at a shack, a plastic bucket.

  It has taken me many years to realise how few people actually know how to cook bread. Why this trepidation it is hard to say. Even those I have met who are splendid, highly skilful cooks shy from the prospect of baking. And yet nothing could be simpler.

  Reducing bread to its simplest elements will give you the best-tasting bread; for baking is about less, not more. Less rather than more yeast. Less rather than more salt. And no sugar, or raising agents, or, as I read in one recipe, porridge.

  None of these is necessary, and if not as harmful as the white lead once used to whiten the loaves of Regency England, they diminish rather than improve the quality of the bread.

  Into 500g of plain flour stir with a knife one sachet (7g or one teaspoon) of dried yeast. The fresher the flour, generally, the better. Lately, though, I have baked good loaves using an Italian flour, which is odd, given that it must be some months old by the time I get it.

  Make a well in the flour and pour in 300ml of water in which you have dissolved half a teaspoon of salt. The water should be tepid, a vague word that people think means warm, but for the purposes of baking, means not cold. Anything much warmer than not cold runs the risk of killing the yeast.

  Next, plunge your hand in and stir it around slowly like it’s a dough hook. Gradually fold the flour into the water with your circling fingers. As flour varies in the amount of water it will absorb according to type and age, you may need to add more water.

  As the dough forms, aim for an elastic ball with your mix.

  When nearly ready, sprinkle a little, but not too much, olive oil over the ball, and work this in. The dough ought to become as roly-poly and cheeky as a baby’s bum. It shouldn’t feel sludgy or shreddy, but rather should pull cleanly away from the bowl. The dough will feel what it is: alive.

  Cover the dough with a tea towel or cling wrap and leave to rise.

  Dough will rise in a fridge, albeit very slowly, so you don’t need to worry about overheating it. By all means find the bowl a place in the sun or near a heater, but then let it take however long it needs. It will rise.

  Be aware that draughts, not cold, kill yeast. Often bowls of bread dough are put in a warm spot also subject to a draught or breeze, and the aspiring baker cannot understand why the dough has failed to rise.

  Once risen, either start the second kneading, or punch it down and leave it to rise again, comforted in the knowledge that the longer the rise the better the baked loaf will taste. I like leaving mine overnight and the difference in quality between a four-hour and sixteen-hour rise is startling.

  There are many different kneading techniques, but as my grandmother used to tell my elder sister with a gravel of exasperation in her voice—‘Stretch the dough, Mary, don’t bash it to death.’

  Kneading is all about stretching and lengthening the dough. It’s not about beating as with a cake, or ‘keeping it light’ as with scones. Push the base of your palm into the ball of dough and stretch it out as far as it will go. At the end of the stretch, roll the remainder of the ball to the extended end; quarter turn the dough, and stretch the dough again, and so on, until you have a lovely elastic ball.

  Knowing when dough is kneaded is most important. If you are not sure, then it’s not ready. But suddenly it will develop a spring and tautness and sheen around its skin, and you will know that this is what bread dough should look and feel like.

  Shape the loaf as you will, or place in a tin. Leave, covered with a tea towel, to rise a second time.

  While writing a novel in Tuscany I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of a baker, Sandro, the fourth and last generation of his family to be the bakers of the small village of Donnini. I was invited to his birthday party where, after a sumptuous and never-ending series of courses, Sandro sang opera and nineteenth-century chamber music to his friends, dressed for the occasion in a suit like Pavarotti.

  In his bakery he showed me the large arch where his forefathers’ wood-fired oven used to sit before he replaced it with an electric oven.

  His staple was one of the simplest and most delightful of breads, pane Toscana, or Tuscan bread, which is made with only yeast, water and flour, but without salt. The resulting loaves have a great balance of lightness and substance, a lovely crumb, and the lack of salt creates an odd sweetness of taste.

  Perhaps conditioned by generations of cake cooking, we tend to put our bread in ovens too cool and not leave them there long enough. Unlike a cake, full of sugar and shortening, bread will bake a long time before it burns, and good bread needs to bake a long time.

  These days, following the example of Sandro, who replicates the dying fall of a wood-fired oven by starting his baking with intense heat then dropping the temperature, I preheat my oven to 300°C, then place the loaf in, along with a cake tin of hot water. The resulting steam humidifies the oven and helps create a crisper crust.

  After five minutes I turn the oven down to 220°C and then keep my eye on the loaf, letting it bake a further 35 minutes.

  But all ovens vary. Keep an eye on the bread, and shape your times to your oven and the size of your loaves.

  Once cooked, leave to cool for at least an hour. The longer the loaf is left uncut and able to continue slowly cooking the better.

  But whenever the loaf is put on the table, few foods will produce such joy in others as when bread appears. A new aroma of delight and fresh memories rise with every slice, and all things—stories, friends and family, food and love and lives—are for a short time as they ought to be: one.

  ‘When people ask what I do,’ Sandro told me, ‘I tell them I have the most beautiful job in the world. I say: I bake bread.’

  The Age

  4 October 2005

  BOOKS BEGIN FOR ME in very simple ways. Sometimes it’s just a picture in which I sense is hidden an entire universe of meaning. When I was about twenty I was poking through a catastrophe of colonial paintings at the back of a Hobart museum with an art curator when I came upon a simple watercolour. I thought it was very beautiful and inexplicably moving. It was a picture of a small Aboriginal girl in a beautiful red silk dress bound with a black velvet band.

  It
’s Mathinna, the curator told me. And he told me the story.

  Mathinna was one of the few Aboriginals to have survived the horrors of the Black War in Van Diemen’s Land. In 1841, at the age of six, she was adopted by the governor of Van Diemen’s Land, a famous Arctic explorer called Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane. She became a black princess, an experiment to show that savages could be raised by education to the level of Europeans. But the experiment failed and she became a sort of exotic pet for the governor and his wife.

  When Franklin was recalled to London in 1843, the Franklins abandoned their adopted daughter, dumping her at an orphanage. Subsequently, Mathinna descended into the sorry life of a fringe dweller, caught between grog and prostitution, between a white world that despised her and a despairing black world she despised. At seventeen she was found dead, drowned in a puddle.

  And having told me this, the curator detached the old oval frame from the painting.

  Look at this, he said.

  Cut off at the ankles by the frame were two dark, shoeless feet. Embarrassed by her not wearing shoes, the Franklins had cut Mathinna off at the ankles.

  That picture remained with me. More than anything else, those two bare feet haunted me. I’d think about that pretty little girl who wouldn’t wear shoes. Years later I spent time in the Kimberley bush with tribal Aboriginals who told me how shoes blinded you from the earth and life, how everything rose up through your feet. And I thought there was a story in those bare feet and that picture, a beautiful story.

  But though I tried, I couldn’t write that story. Why that was, I can’t say. Stories need some leaven, something that takes you into their heart, something that tells you what the blood of that tale is for you. Without that blood moving through it and its teller, the story cannot live.