by Ian Wedde
So what had I forgotten? I got off the plane in Rockhampton which is not the place I love but close to it, and I had the taste of that river in my mouth. I couldn’t tell if it was the water we tasted the day we went for a swim a month ago or the water we drank copiously about sixty years ago. You said something clever like, time doesn’t flow it just waits for the present to make room, and I think you may be on to something, not quite sure what.
Anyway, thanks to that watery taste I went looking for the stuff Ruth had stashed before she took off to Amman. That was a long time ago and I’d forgotten or chosen to forget about her stuff until the watery thing happened. The stuff is in a beaten-up cabin trunk with brass trims and locks that was connected to the ancestral voyage. Thank Christ the trunk is impregnable, as my house is not, being at the lower end of the market and prone to all kinds of boring bugs as well as what we locals call the swelter. Ever since I moved here after Helen died the trunk has been what I put things on top of and then throw away once I’ve forgotten why I needed them.
Having now opened my very own Pandora’s Box I find that the trunk and most of what’s in it came from Ruth’s and my mum Greta, and some of it must have come originally from Greta’s mother Catharina, the one you thought you remembered as being scary and chic, though I have to point out that’s unlikely given you were about three when she died, and yes I am working it all out, never too late. I suspect Ruth planned to write something about our mob one day and was collecting or at least looking after things. I never wanted to open the trunk after she was killed but now I do, thanks to that river. The stuff in the trunk is quite orderly, as was dear Ruth, and includes some of her work folders and copies of some books including Hannah Arendt of course. But mostly it’s old stuff.
So now against my better judgement I’ve embarked on a project and will be sending you items of interest once I’ve had a look at them. You can send them back if you like, or give them to your kids if they’re interested, I don’t care who has them. My granddaughter Lizzie and her bloke John and their bub who live here with me while they get sorted had a look but I could see they were being polite. That doesn’t matter, so over to you cobber.
That said, Lizzie is a smart kid with what get called ‘organisational skills’. She’s doing some study of her own and is helping to put the old stuff including me in order. So here’s a sample of what she’s getting sorted. If you want the bit with me in it you’ll have to come over.
The sample is an old pamphlet thing I think was written by a woman connected to the Wolf Bloch you flushed out of the woodwork or should I say gravestone, otherwise why would it be among these family relics. I’m not sure I get the bit where ‘our Van will call around in the morning with the milk, and fire at short range’, maybe you can unpack it for me, feels as though something’s lost in translation. I quite like ‘groping human brain’ and ‘moulding the plastic minds’. Also in the trunk are some, ahem, rather interesting diaries written by one Frederick Wenczel, Great-grandmother Josephina’s son if I remember the reunion account, also a pretty far-out cosmological text by the same Fred, a complex chap it would seem. I’ll send this on once I’ve had a proper look at it. There’s quite a lot more where this came from, tell me to stop if you don’t want it. If so it can stay in the trunk where it’s been all these years and no doubt go to the tip about the time I do.
With love from your happy to be Second Cousin
Frank
Vanguard Tract No. 13 1901
An Appeal to Women
FOR THE VAN
By Comrade Theodora Bloch
Published by Social-Democratic Vanguard,
80A Queen St., Brisbane
WHEN READ, PASS ON
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Every great cause has had its devoted women workers, so to women this appeal for the Ark of the Vanguard – our Van – is written. The text of the appeal is the brief chronicle of the Vanguard.
The Vanguard exists to firmly point out that if we, the workers, grafted sheepskins on our backs, the rich would shear us twice a year, and to teach that we can, by banding together and becoming stronger and wiser, use the shears on the rich instead, until all alike share the earth and its fruits.
This lesson of Co-operation the Vanguard has scattered over the State in 60,000 leaflets, and if one of these messengers has brought light to some groping human brain, we have not lived in vain.
Some practical stuff followed, about the travelling ‘Van’ of socialist texts and its fundraising efforts, as well as the bit Frank had enjoyed, promising that ‘our Van will call around in the morning with the milk, and fire at short range’. This alarming metaphor followed closely a rather contradictory one promising that the Van ‘will travel over the State, leaving a blessed stream of Fraternalism in its wake’. Though not wanting to overcook her instinctive pedantry, Beth wondered if the effortful strains of metaphor were the product of an English-as-a-second-language over-exertion? The ghost-voice of her remote German several-times-removed Bloch great-aunt?
Socialism is for women a living, inspiring religion. Women in the past have done much for creeds that taught sex-slavery, and ‘contentment in that state of life to which we are called.’ Our religion, Socialism, teaches that EQUALITY IS THE ONLY MORAL RELATION BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN, that wrong must be attacked at the roots, and that by working for the progress of all, each woman will best be helped.
The doctrine of slavery and contentment, judged by its result, is its own condemnation. The great majority of us are at present household drudges and factory and shop wage-slaves, deeply grateful, in the fierce light of competition, to be allowed to toil for bare shelter, food, and clothing, until we marry, when we sink deeper into the economic pit, and become straws in the gale.
She put the old document aside for a moment. How easy it was to scoff about ‘straws in the gale’ in ‘the economic pit’ when what she was reading in the layer of text just beneath the surface of the printed page was the voice and presence of a determined woman who had probably been a political refugee, who had grappled with a new language and with an unfamiliar country and culture.
A bride, in our station of life, ought always to be congratulated with reservations. A single woman in a factory or at service can at least ascend one rung of the industrial ladder by co-operating with her fellow workers to form a Union to fix wages and prices, but a woman who marries under present conditions, when the dependence of a wife does not inspire a man with courage at a trade crisis but impels to submission, sets a period to her own emancipation and rivets her own fetters upon the daughters she brings into the world.
These grinding conditions are artificial, and CAN BE ALTERED if women will cease accentuating them by burying their talents under a cloud of domestic duties, and in a tangle of commonplace conversation. To be a good housewife is not the ideal status of womanhood, for domesticity means subjection, and the contented household drudge is only queen of the kitchen.
Now it was the rungs, fetters, clouds and tangles that moved her, as if she was with the woman whose voice so insistently lifted itself to the surface of the page and even from it, so that she could hear this Theodora Bloch, this ghost who was probably the sister of that other ghost called Wolf, author of the thumping poem about the Paris Commune, who had flickered into spectral life on the screen of her laptop that night back in National Park when she’d overheard Frank in the next room talking to his dead wife Helen before going out to sit with the yelping dog and look at the moon!
The brain has no sex, and there is no need for us to remain silent during an intelligent discussion, or make a foolish contribution to it, if we will but read and think a little. Co-operative kitchens and laundries are coming fast, and with few domestic duties to attend to, and better still, few to talk about, women in the homes will simply have to get out of the body to think, and then they will radiate like the tail of a comet.
Or perhaps Frank and his pooch were looking at the tails of comets!
And then in the next paragraph she encountered the Germanish ‘stress and storm of life’ and knew who she was listening to, and wished she could have been talking to, and was perhaps almost talking to, across the collapsed space of more than a century. And then:
Charlotte Stetson points out that physically woman belongs to a tall, vigorous, beautiful animal species capable of great and varied exertion, but that, through artificial delicacy, we have so far degenerated that we are now the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food. Happily this reproach does not apply so much to our own class, but to the idle rich women, for women wage-earners comprise over one-fifth of the adult population of this continent.
It would be interesting to ask Theodora to expand a bit on what she meant by ‘our own class’ and how the Queensland inflection of that differed from its German counterpart in, what, Bismarck’s Germany?
Women are slow to realise that it is a fine thing to be a woman. Woman is the emotional sex, and humanity’s highest expression is emotion. To us, as if in acknowledgement of this truth, Nature has given the exalted task of moulding the plastic minds of the future workers of the world. A socialist motherhood, teaching the children to fear no man, to resist tyrants, to despise riches, and to respect only men and women of moral worth, WOULD SOLVE THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM! But, ‘unwitting that we bear the ark of human hopes’, poor mothers cultivate servility in their children towards the children of the rich, and rich mothers teach their children to expect and demand servility from the children of the poor, and out of Servility and Arrogance come un-ending generations of capitalists and captured workers. A thousand luminous sermons could be preached from the text that from an enlightened motherhood will come social salvation. Yet preachers ignore this wondrous theme!
Socialism, then, is the Light in the Darkness leading women out of a maze of confusion, and Vanguard leaflets teach women the gospel of co-operation and sex-equality, and that power degrades both subject and master, and that each is helped by helping all.
There followed an exhortation from the Vanguard asking women ‘to receive this light, and help us to spread it to others through our Van’ which will be ‘a perambulating Vanguard on wheels, a power for good to all struggling, unhappy souls, and a rallying point for all Socialists, slowly, but surely fulfilling its destiny of building up and regenerating human souls.’
We value a good word for the Van from women as much as a small contribution, but we are confident that women will help to grease its wheels when they know that it will carry tidings of hope to brighten the lives of suffering men, women, and children. The seed sown by our Van may fall in stony places at times, but somewhere, sometime, it will take root and flourish.
Van donations received by Van trustees, Comrades ‘Theodora’ and ‘Eznuk’ at 80A Queen Street, Brisbane.
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Printed at the ALERT Office, Maryborough, Q.
There was a deep, hollow space where Noel’s old Brumberger film cases used to be, and though the naked bulb hanging from the beam above the storage racks lit the empty rows their emptiness seemed very dark. The shadow patterns from the shelving made a calligraphy of blocky chevrons and bars. It was crazy to think of this calligraphy as silent, but it was. The old Cherub junk was also conspicuous not by its absence but by its silence.
But of course it was just the silence of the house in which she was alone.
She sat on a crate and poured another glass of Joe’s perfectly adequate Chilean – why was he still defensive about stuff, did he think she was assessing his performance of life? The boys had dismantled the old Cherub rigging with glee while she and Joe peeped into the Brumbergers. No, she hadn’t wanted to look at any of it, what would be the point of that?
Maybe keep just a few special ones?
But what would have made any of them special? Most of the time she wouldn’t even have known where the slides were taken – forests, mountains, beaches, toetoe plumes at sunset, the glitter of moonlight on a lagoon somewhere, a bleak plain strewn with dark basalt slabs of rock, ‘exotic’ locations overseas. She remembered them as objects that had progressively faded into anonymity, though each slide had been fussily indexed.
Noel’s vestiges were in the indexes, not the pictures.
Away they went, the Auckland Museum was taking them, but as a gift with copyright fees attached in case anyone ever wanted to use the things.
You never know, was Joe’s judgement on that. There might be the odd windfall.
They sat outside on the deck while the boys worked out how to secure the mast along the tray of the ute and on to its roof. It was sticking up at the roof end, and overshot the ute’s tray.
They’d figure it out, Joe reckoned. Paulie was pretty handy and Tim would do what Paulie told him to.
They were shouting Fuck! Shit!
‘Sorry, Ma,’ said Joe.
And the music?
He was a bloody natural, Tim. That was half the trouble. He learned without trying, and so didn’t learn to try. ‘Bit like his dad, eh Ma!’
But now it was silent and she’d managed to get herself a bit sloshed.
The slightly wrong language of the pamphlet Frank had sent her with the distant, stilted phantom of German in it – ‘. . . through all the stress and storm of life . . .’! Sturm und Drang and the issue of Goethe’s morbid investment in his Doppelgänger the miserable young Werther had been exultant grist to the mill of sexy radical Professor Schreiber back in the day.
Showing has to be shown! Show that you are showing!
‘Das Zeigen muss gezeigt werden!’
But now she was talking to herself. Or to the ghosts of language, or the ghosty author of the pamphlet whose voice had so unexpectedly moved her, or the ghosty photographs that haunted the storage rack’s empty space with its ghosty calligraphy, or the ghost of Professor Schreiber whose grinning relish of exact English pro-nun-ci-ation had been funny and sexy, and wouldn’t he have loved Vanguard Tract No. 13 1901! That laugh, at once gleeful and a bit vindictive and scornful.
The box labelled ‘Treasures’ containing some of her favourite Frank letters from the distant past was in the dark space behind where the Brumbergers had been. The Brumberger barricades! The top of the box was covered in dust and cobwebs – leave it to daytime, she’d come back down with the vacuum cleaner.
The boys when they were younger used to play Ghostbusters down here with torches and the vacuum cleaner hose. Noel would come down and do his mouahhhahah routine – it didn’t scare the kids after the first time but he kept on doing it anyway, dear old ghost, and the kids quite liked pretending to get spooked if it made him happy. He had a three-hole ski-mask balaclava, you could see his grin in it, and the way his eyes crinkled.
Catharina
Papa Hein was being a pirate with his pencil between his teeth like a dagger. Oh yes, the Moors in their boat with a fierce painted devil’s head on the front were approaching! The devil’s head was biting at the waves! There were tigers walking up and down on the deck waiting to eat the captives! Could Catharina write ‘tiger’ or ‘pirate’? Here was the pencil. Oh yes of course he should wipe it first. He could do that on his beard, was that good enough? And now perhaps she could draw pictures of them? In English?
Pictures in English, Catharina wanted to know, teasing Papa Hein.
But what was the use of learning words like ‘tiger’ and ‘pirate’, Mutti asked as she walked past.
Ah, but there would always be pirates and tigers in the world, Papa Hein said as he snatched Wolf away from Mutti’s skirt, and wolves, mad wolves!
Grrr, went Wolf, trying to bite Papa Hein’s arm. He already had a mouthful of big sharp teeth.
But now Papa Hein had to go to work, he had to protect the city from pirates coming in to the harbour!
Take care of your mother, he told Catharina in very careful English. And t
his wild animal. This. Wild. Animal.
(Dieses wilde Tier!)
He whispered the German but went Shhh!
He handed the mad Wolf to Catharina and went out, quickly closing the kitchen door to keep the room warm. Then the front door banged, that was his way. There was a storm outside, a cold draught came in under the kitchen door and made the stove puff smoke.
He hadn’t filled the coal scuttle, Mutti complained. Could Catharina go out the back and get some? The bread was only just in the oven, but she had to go to work at Mrs Sanderson’s, it was ‘her Saturday’.
There was ‘mending’ to do, she said in a sarcastic tone.
And take the loaves out in thirty minutes, tip them out of the tins. And keep the fireguard in front of the stove!
But of course Catharina knew how to do that, and also that the big black spiders in the coal bin were harmless, but she wouldn’t tell Wolf they were, she’d say she hit one with the ash shovel, see? – she’d squashed one of those stinky yellow autumn berries by the back door – see the poison?
And speak English. With Wolf. Because.
But of course, Mutti, she knew to do that as well. He was already able to say that he didn’t like his soup because it was dis-gus-ting.
A word Papa Hein had taught him.
Today they were having split pea soup with a ham bone in it, and some of the fresh bread once it had cooled (Wolf wasn’t allowed to break a piece off early).
The-butter-in-Wellington-is-nice. Say it.
Not boo-tter – auf diese Weise, bah-ter.
Bah-ter.
Then Mutti would come home.
After supper they were reading The Swiss Family Robinson in English. Wolf would try to turn the pages to look at the pictures of the boys with their several guns. Mutti got it from the library on Wakefield Steet that Papa Hein said was too expensive.
And so was the language.
The language too expensive?
Nobody talks like that around here. ‘After a moment of reflection, I perceived that I had better come at once to the determination of carrying him across my shoulders . . .’!
