Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

  ‘What about the sandfly bites,’ he’d complain. ‘I notice they never mention sandflies. And they never mention me backache, either. Oh well, it’s my back. Can’t expect the general public to take an interest in that, I s’pose. And sandflies are bad for business – the tourist business.’

  Or again: ‘What’s ’e up to in the papers, that artist bloke you know? I bet that last cyclone did ’im a bit of damage. Knocked the old bugger flat, I’d reckon. Serves ’im right! Any news about that in the Coo-rier-Mail? Wouldn’ want t’ miss the latest episode. Not f’ quids!’

  When there really was nothing he became playfully or half-seriously concerned.

  ‘That artist friend of yours – you know, the hermit. Must’ve kicked the bucket. Not a word about ’im in the papers these days. Must’ve given up the ghost. No wonder, that sort of life!’

  His position as public bagman, poor bugger and self-created outcast was all the more ironic in that the works he produced, in the new affluence and scramble for ‘hedges against inflation’, were worth several thousand dollars apiece. He was the real thing, everyone knew it now (crazy, of course, but what can you expect? – even in Australia), and I was the lawyer who for some unfathomable reason had been made custodian and doorkeeper to it all: to a storehouse of fragile, unpredictable, spasmodically brilliant occasions at which traffic accidents, small wars, marriages, deaths, perverse gropings and slashings and assaults were so thickly covered with earth and blood that they became desirable backdrops to suburban dinner parties and international conference halls in multi-storeyed office blocks. Sheets of cardboard that had once been the sides of cartons containing condensed milk or corned beef, or mixing-machines or refrigerators, had come now to contain forests or the sea. Collectors everywhere were hungry to acquire them. Museum directors dreamed of hauling them into houses of culture in all the capital cities of the land. Frank Harland’s lone encounters with himself, with newspaper events, and with house-paints that might equally have gone onto a migrant’s terrace or the feature wall of a unit, could be seen now to proclaim a people’s newly discovered identity in a place it scarcely knew existed, and whose actual presence, like the old coot who had created it, might in the natural state have evoked a fastidious pooh!

  Only rarely was I instructed to bring visitors – people who had been recommended by his gallery in the south, some of them distinguished, nearly all of them from overseas.

  They were difficult occasions. The visitors, always too formally attired for an excursion into the scrub across a swamp that after the lightest rain could be soft and mucky underfoot, were invariably exasperated long before we arrived at the slope below the camp; by heat, by sweat, by swarms of tiny insects. The business of first calling to Frank across a buffering space in which flies danced and bigger insects zigged and zoomed, while with eyes averted, a stick-like figure, he stood side-on to the occasion, unwilling to emerge, was not always made up for by the talk that followed and the impatience he showed at having people poke about among his ‘things’.

  He would assume a resentful stance, audibly whingeing, and in an attempt to divert them from what they had plainly come for would offer wonders of the most banal sort, an ant-trail, a chrysalis, in the hope they would believe it was ‘significant’. Or he would lead them off Indian-file to look at ‘views’, bits of nondescript scrub that might have been anywhere, all sticks and tatters, that they studied with puzzled frowns and wondered about later – they were so drab.

  He would make tea, in a billy of course, and the visitors drank it in the open, perched on rocks under the blackboys and shifting as the sun shifted or when attacked by ants.

  Worst of all were the times when he was unable, at the last moment, to emerge at all. He would stand at first sighting with a pained expression, grim, tormented; then with a vague gesture of apology he would take to his heels and go rabbiting barefoot through the scrub; or, abandoning the camp before we had even reached it, would be holed up somewhere watching, all impatience for us to quit.

  Once, with a flare of his old humour, or out of malice (the visitor was a Melbourne art critic), he left as the only remnant of his presence a large and shakily printed notice: DIG.

  If the distinguished critic had been alone he might have spread a handkerchief I think, and got down on his knees. He was never quite convinced that by insisting it was a joke, a Frank Harland special, I hadn’t deprived him of a unique and private gift. He settled in the end for the notice itself; which the artist had raised from worthlessness with a flamboyant signature.

  Frank Harland had at last, as my Aunt Roo would have put it, got somewhere. He had gone to earth.

  [2]

  Whenever I had a commission from Frank, but also occasionally when I simply wanted to relax over a good cup of tea, and more and more often over the years as the free and easy atmosphere of the place drew me, I would call in on the household at Dutton Park, Tam’s house of students.

  Tam was a natural homemaker, and the changes in the place, and in Tam himself, delighted me. His kitchen with its battered pots and pans, and its recipe books all dog-eared on a shelf, was a pleasant place to sit for an hour or two in the late afternoon.

  Students drifted in and out, calling down the hallway or coming in barefoot to get mugs of tea, and Tam made faces behind them that said, ‘Tell you later – more strife!’ These youths and their girls were his family. He nagged, spoiled, bullied them; he subjected them to bouts of the sulks and fits of temper, then later, to make amends, made them special treats; he cleaned, cooked, listened to their complaints, took up their causes, followed them on demos. Once when I was there they were engaged in preparing banners for a march. The yard below, which a previous generation had cleared and planted with sunflowers, was draped with huge monosyllabic directives, OUT NOW, and Frank’s verandah, where Tam’s Maoists slept, was vivid again with dribbles of paint.

  ‘It’s goin’ great,’ Tam told me as he shuffled backwards and forwards bearing tea. ‘It’ll be big, this one, I hope you’re all set to bail us out. Y’ know,’ he said reflectively, ‘I didn’ think I would at first, but I really love demos! On’y right now I got a pudding to make, you can help me.’ He took out his mixing bowls. ‘D’ you realise Phil, some a’ these kids had never even heard of Golden Syrup pudding till I made it for them? All they know, most of ’em, is hamburgers and Smiths Crisps, with you-know-what to follow – I won’t say it in case the place is bugged.’ He held a thumb and forefinger close to his lips and sucked. ‘I dunno sometimes what I’ve got myself mixed up in, except that I am.

  ‘On’y I never go down you-know-where – under the house. It’s funny that, it used to be where I went to – you know, sulk. It was so womb-like.’ He gave me a shy look and giggled. He had picked up from his young friends their habit of easy self-analysis. ‘Well, I don’t need that any more, I’ve grown out of it. An’ t’ tell the real truth, I’d be scared. It was a terrible, terrible thing, that. Terrible! I’ll never get over it. If it wasn’t for these youngsters taking up so much of my time, making such demands, and making the house – you know, so noisy, I couldn’ stand it, I’d get out.’

  I also visited Tam, since the household was often in trouble, when either he or one of his friends had need of the law.

  Tam had begun to be a well-known figure at marches. Soft, fattish, furious, he rejected with contempt the chiacking of the pot-bellied loungers round the doors of pubs and the taunts of women shoppers with umbrellas, who told him he ought to be ashamed of himself at his age, making a disturbance and being part of a rabble.

  ‘They’re the ones who ought to be ashamed,’ he would tell me passionately. ‘What difference does it make how old I am? Right is right. I give it to ’em, don’t you worry. Old bludgers! Silly old bags! I can give as good as I get. I’m not so soft!’

  Several times on these marches he was arrested, and it was during one of his spells in the watch house, among
a group of students, that he found his brother Pearsall, in an adjoining cell full of derelicts, drunks and half-caste youths in boxer shorts and torn and bloodied singlets.

  ‘It was a shock, Phil, I can’t tell you. I couldn’ believe it at first. My heart – it just dropped right into me boots. There I was on one side of the bars, with my lot, and there was poor Pearse. He pretended not to know who I was at first – as if I was the one who’d changed. Then he cried like a baby. Terrible! It was terrible! Thank heavens it wasn’t Frank who found him like that. He’d been sleeping rough, in building sites and bus shelters an’ that, he looked awful. You know – hair all down over his shoulders and nails like – like animal claws. He was sick as well. These derros injure themselves and don’t even know they’ve done it. He was all raw scabs. He looked so old. And you know he was the youngest of us, Pearse. Can’t hardly be fifty. I kept saying to myself, thank heavens Frank can’t see him! You mustn’t tell him, Phil. I can look after Pearse, I always could, I know how to handle him. Frank’s had enough.’

  So for a time, as well as his ‘youngsters’, Tam had his brother Pearsall to care for, a terrible man. Violent, unpredictable, he scrounged money from the students and stole and sold their books, he moped, raged, attacked people, and had once a fortnight at least to be bailed out of the watch house after being picked up in one of the parks. Tam was infinitely patient with him. But at last, on one of these drinking bouts, he disappeared altogether and could not be traced. For three nights Tam and I roamed the railway yards with their abandoned carriages, and all the dark places of the city, searching for him and making enquiries of foul-mouthed, foul-smelling bundles who might have seen him somewhere or been with him earlier that night or the day or night before, and who looked at us, when they did not start up all claws, out of a distance like the gap between species.

  It was a grim business, that progress from Albert Park, round the swamplands along Gilchrist Avenue and the golf links, through bare dark churchyards in the Valley, across the river to South Brisbane. There were vagrants everywhere, either alone or in groups under the trees.

  ‘People don’t know about this, Phil, or they wouldn’ let it happen. You’ve got to have one of your own, and see him go down, or you don’t even know it’s there. You just walk past. You don’t know it exists.’

  Tam stood on the pavement in his worn overcoat and moaned.

  ‘And there’s so many! The place is full of them. Why doesn’t somebody do something? It makes me so wild I could just punch someone, anyone! How does it happen? No, I shouldn’ say that. I know how it happens. It’s so easy. Take me home, Phil, it’s no good looking any more. We won’t find him here. He’s gone somewhere right under.’

  He raised his head and looked at me.

  ‘You won’t believe this, Phil, because you only saw him in his bad days, when he wasn’t himself, but he was that sweet-natured, Pearse, when he was a little kid. He had the nicest nature of any of us, you ask Frank. No, you mustn’t do that! But it’s true. An’ he was clever as well, when he was little. It’d kill Frank to see this.’

  So it was that my Aunt Roo had occasion to challenge me, one evening, about my reputation.

  ‘I believe you act for radicals,’ she complained. ‘Like that Tam Harland. I told you ages ago, pet, those people are no good. Even if he is so famous, that other one!’

  ‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Auntie! Tam Harland isn’t a radical.’

  ‘Well he acts like one, I’ve seen his name in the papers. Resisting arrest! I don’t know how you can do it, knowing what your poor father would think. Those people are concerned with nothing but pulling the world down, they’re never satisfied. And in a country like this, where we have everything! I don’t know what’s got into you, Phil. Don’t you believe in order? It doesn’t make sense. Everything’s crazy. I’ve lived too long.’

  This light-hearted conversation – for my aunt had no real concern with public issues – took place not in her mock-Tudor house on Hamilton Heights but on the lawn of a genuine Georgian house in Sydney, under a pole where every morning at eight a flag was run up by a boy in a white jacket, and a jetty with a capstan at the end, and a clean white railing, carried the rights of private ownership far out into the bay.

  A rose light was touching the scrub of the headlands opposite and air still warm from the day’s heat danced in across garden beds planted thick with day-lilies in every colour of rust. We were in deckchairs drinking tea. Quick, red-breasted bulbuls were in the trees, bobbing their crested heads and squabbling or trilling. On the terrace behind us two girls from a hire-service agency were laying a buffet table. I had turned my chair out of the sun to watch them. They shook out, one after the other, four damask cloths, very stiff and shiny, smoothed them at the corners so that they fell in rounded folds, then laid out plates and cutlery. They were engaged while they did it in some sort of argument that demanded pauses in the work in which one of them, several times over, was led to stop, consider, and lift her shoulders in a shrug. At last the darker and more vocal of the two carried out through the French doors a table decoration, an epergne with green lily-shaped trumpets. When it was settled dead-centre (which the blonde girl judged) and all the little baskets had been hung, the trumpets were filled with delphiniums, and the baskets with pink and white rosebuds.

  The blonde girl, in a kind of dream, stood admiring it. With her hands clasped before her and her head tilted, she had the look of a solemn votary. The other, flinging some word across her shoulder that made the blonde girl protest, stepped boldly to the terrace balustrade, and stretching her body in an easy, athletic way that made her uniform the flimsiest disguise, took a breath of the view – that is how I saw it: the harbour, the virgin shore, the far-off suntouched towers – entirely fabulous at that distance – of the first city, and the iron arc of the Bridge.

  Aunt Roo too had got somewhere. She had got to Vaucluse.

  In the mineral boom of ’70, when the whole country was on a spree, setting down vast sums or little stockpiled savings against the promise, in parts of the country that no one till then had heard of and few men except blacks had ever seen, of deep, invaluable riches – a late, it might even be last revival, in the breasts of shopkeepers, widows, retired schoolteachers, bank clerks, young marrieds and professors of literature, of a belief that the land was more even than they had imagined, and was preparing now, on cash payment and to men filled with the spirit of adventure, to reveal its final and most precious secrets – in those days that brought overnight fortunes to some and ruin to others, Harry Price, Aunt Roo’s quiet stockbroker, had made a killing: his Poseidon shares went to two hundred and seventy six dollars on the London Exchange.

  He had had tips of course, from people in the know. The deep gods had smiled on him, but a government geologist had smiled first.

  This stroke of good fortune was followed, a week later, by a stroke of the commoner sort, of which he received no notice of all. The deep gods, fickle as ever, had turned away.

  Aunt Roo had been fond of the man, though he had had no talent save for the making of money; she mourned him. But finding herself a widow with an income too large to express itself in a mere country town like Brisbane, she decided to risk all and make a change. She settled at Darling Point, and after a decent period during which there was no unseemly gossip, married a newly bereaved media baron and became the second Lady Ashburn.

  Sir Charles – or Ashes, as I was encouraged to call him – was a cultivated man, a collector of fine arts from Asia and a foundation member of Musica Viva. He was Hungarian. His family had had the milk-run at Eisenstadt, seat of the Esterhazys, a stone’s throw from the birthplace of Joseph Haydn. Arriving in Australia at the start of the war, penniless and without education, he had begun in the hardware business, moved on to agricultural machinery, bought up cheap (in lieu of a bad debt) a couple of dying country papers and a seed catalogue, captured one and then two city daili
es, got a television franchise, supported and then withdrew his support from a government, and was one of the most powerful men of the day.

  He himself had only the simplest tastes – he never drank anything but Carlsberg – but his new lady (unlike the last, a timid and intimidating woman who for as long as anyone had known her had been deaf in five languages) turned out to be a proper hostess. ‘Runnymede’, under Aunt Roo’s management, became the centre of a noisy social scene.

  Aunt Roo’s gatherings were popular because they were open, up-to-date and wonderfully ‘mixed’. Too late into the field to compete with the established hostesses, the Black and White Gang as she called them, who were all anyway the most ferocious snobs, she asked everyone: from High Court judges and the Anglican Archbishop to the young fellows in leather and jeans who worked for American Boys (they were mostly from Whale Beach in fact, or Swan Hill or Moruya, but affected trans-Pacific accents and were butch and crewcut in the Californian style), along with big names in medical research, models, molls, Iron Men who were into alchemy, gay activists, black activists, builders’ labourers, followers of the Ananda Marg, standover men for the bosses who ran the video games and the Oxford Street gay bars and suburban massage parlours, left-wing Laborites from Victoria, rednecked Nationalists from the north, poets who had done time for car theft, former opera tenors who had made a fortune out of the health-food racket or trained greyhounds.

  Style was the thing at these random gatherings, and the high level of display that gave everything here immediate visibility and a hard edge allowed for the widest possible variety of it and the most rapid and radical change. Transformation was commonplace.

  So a young surfing star who read Herman Hesse, a deep-eyed, mild-mannered boy, too self-contained, might catch suddenly in a line of mouth the natural shark-like grimace of a grazier with his eye on office, and perceive something surprising about himself; or in a toss of his sun-bleached curls, the empty-headed coquettishness of a media starlet, and perceive something more surprising still. Or a High Court judge might see himself for a moment as an American Boy, and after chatting up various members of that team of nicely set-up young fellows, alarm the wife of a colleague with the twang he had acquired, and an odd thrusting-forward of his crotch in the loose-fitting evening trousers that suggested jockeys and jeans. Mouths, noses, jaws, ears, breasts had a way here of travelling and transposing themselves. It was part of the new openness, a breakdown in the structure of things that made them relative, flexible. Reality was just as it appeared to be. I recalled what Aunt Roo had once told me: ‘Actors don’t pretend to be other people; they become themselves by finding other people inside them.’ Her genius was for creating occasions where actors, as she defined them, were given scope. I was astonished how clearly, and how early, she had grasped a principle that was at work everywhere now. We had just caught up with her.