Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

  ‘Phil. Phil!’

  It was Jeff.

  It had happened while I was looking away, back or ahead – anyway, out across the Bay from a great height.

  What is it, Jeff’s eyes were asking. What’s happened?

  I shook my head. He sank back on his haunches.

  So it had come at last and would be in all the afternoon papers, a national event. Harland. You didn’t need to add the Christian name; that was for friends. Harland. A single household word, evoking the whole story of his having set himself apart, of his choosing to live rough, ‘down there’, at the very moment when the rest of the continent, the bigger island, was moving deeper in behind a wall of thirty-storey tower blocks and the columns of figures they stood for, into the dazzling light of bathroom tiles and stainless-steel towel racks, Waterford glass, Christofle tableware. ‘Look, that painter bloke –’ His death would be commented on, and the works, now that there was to be no more of them, would move into a new price range, a new constellation.

  I had been there when it happened – or almost there. So had Jeff. Yes I was there. No there was nothing, the usual mess. What else would you expect?

  I heard Frank’s laughter. ‘So now there’s nothing left of me but the pong.’

  And the pictures, the marvellous pictures.

  Our shadow was dancing in over the river-mouth, its intricate system of channels and islands dense with mangroves, all their gothic roots exposed by the tide. Pelicans crowded the mud-banks. Small ships, each with its tumbling sea-wake and an airy wake of gulls, were making their way, not blindly, as you could see from so high up, through the maze of narrow openings into the Bay.

  We sat one on each side of him, as I had sat with him the night Gerald died, and when I got up had felt, as my body moved on ahead, that twenty years had passed.

  And now they really had passed, and I was just where I thought I’d be.

  [5]

  The Harland retrospective was to be a national festival, something more now than one man’s life works, so many stations on the way of Frank Harland’s progress from a remote hamlet in Southern Queensland, all sunstruck roofs and stumps in burnt paddocks, to wherever he had at last got to; so many occasions of stooping over a bench, always of the same kind and knocked up by his own hands out of firewood or fruit cases, in the Pier Pictures at Southport, in a boatshed at Cooktown, in the corner of someone’s verandah at Yeppoon, an abandoned greenkeeper’s cottage at Maryborough, a verandah studio at West End. More too than the visions behind eyes rubbed red after sandgrits or salt had got in them that insisted on the particulate graininess of things.

  Seeing the pictures unpacked from their cases and hung at last in the big white-walled rooms, I was astonished by their number, by how much space he had covered in the fifty years of his working life, how many square yards of canvas, sheets of newsprint, sides of cartons and strips of board; and what sweeps of the imagination he had made that had carried his intense encounters with a few square inches of the world into a dimension that could no longer be named or fixed at a particular latitude, Cooktown or Yeppoon or Dornoch Terrace, or in any decade.

  He had never been anywhere much. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t a question of geography. He had been where the event, as it happened, took him. The pictures were stepping stones. Set in a continuous line, they might stretch all the way back to the house at Killarney. You could follow them and find there the lean, intense youth I had so often imagined from his recollection of those early years and from the child I had sometimes glimpsed in Frank himself – a skinny, sandy-headed kid with freckles, hunched over a kitchen table among his sleeping brothers, sketching a head or the play of lamplight on cloth while his father’s voice led him out across paddocks in the dark.

  But that would get you no further in the end than any other view of him, since the pictures, however you laid them out and whatever allowance you made for gaps (for many of the pictures were still missing), made a line that could not be followed to any known place of beginning or any known beginner.

  I had seen as much of Frank over the years as anyone, and might have claimed to have been present at the real occasion of some of his most powerful achievements. The ‘Two Fates’, when I saw it unpacked, made such a deep impression on me that I could barely speak. It seemed to me to express now just what I had most understood and loved in my Aunt Ollie, and in Della. It was a coincidence of vision or feeling that I had known before – on those occcasions when, standing before the little landscape in my parents’ bedroom at Southport, I had wondered how it was that a picture made by another man in another time and place, and of another landscape, could speak so deeply for what I felt in this one.

  I knew enough now to expect no explanation. The thing was a mystery. I paid this much respect to the Frank I knew: I recognised a faculty in him that nothing in the way of intelligence or observation or even sympathy on my part, however deep, would reveal to me. To admit that was to acknowledge the man’s uniqueness; but also my own. I had sat in the same light with him in which some of these works came into being and had watched the action of his hand. But all that did was increase the mystery. I was there. It was not like this. Now it is.

  But if I had been a privileged witness to so much of the work, and a sharer in some of his secrets, there was still more to surprise me on these walls than I expected, and nothing to confirm a cosy familiarity. Some of the early pictures were like nothing I had ever seen him do.

  In one a spare, priest-like figure, in what looked like a Ned Kelly helmet made of gauze, was officiating at an altar among golden trunks, out of which he conjured up clouds (was it?) that were made up of a million tiny molecules, a syllabary of living breath. The hands made motions in space: the clouds rose out of the earth. They rose through the branches of trees. They sat on the skyline like a becalmed flat-bottomed fleet.

  It was called ‘Prospero I’, though the painter himself had not named it, and was used to prefigure a series of pictures that I did recognise because I had seen Frank do them: abstracts for which he had had only numbers. I associated them with his wild bees, since I first saw the pictures on the day he took me to see the swarm. We lugged home a kerosene-tin of dark bush-honey, and then he took out the first of the set, showed me what he had been doing, and laid down the preliminary strokes of what here bore the title ‘Prospero III’.

  So much of it was like that. Impossible to imagine from outside where any of these images had been before he found and set them down – the made things among the things of natural or accidental growth. They were part of another nature, not only his: rock samples or chunks of mineral torn up from the floors of dried-up seas, branches of a hitherto unrecorded flora or skeletons of its fauna, great chipped tablets that told, in an unknown language, of struggles, triumphs, defeats, rites of passage, common loss; the history of a different star. I could have wept. Not only for the power of individual pictures and the joy of seeing again paintings that recalled to me odd moments in Frank’s company and the echo, distinctly caught, of his voice; but for the immense distance I felt between the man I had known and the dweller on that star, whose loneliness I had barely touched and had understood only as I translated it into my own terms. The distance was immeasurable.

  Their gathering now in a clean, well-lighted place made the paintings even harder to read. Carefully arranged by experts to illustrate a line of development, a phase, or the variation over decades of a theme, they falsified the truth by creating a pattern that was too orderly, too whole. Mess, that was what was missing, and it was essential – the mess that was continuous, beyond the edge of cardboard or paper, untidy scrub stripping in tatters or being torn at by beaks or carted off in parcels by ants; newsprint still wet with events – all that he had sopped up out of tins and out of his own head once the lid was off, and smeared on with a finger or knife-blade, or allowed to drip and puddle as he dealt at arm’s length with the spurt and flow o
f things.

  I turned away. I did not want, in this public place, to stand back and observe that picture from the Kunsthalle in Wiesbaden, his ‘Untitled 14’, which had been Frank’s tribute in red to Knack and Edna, his sharing of their fate.

  I made quickly for the far-off exit, but was arrested by a group of early pictures that was, the experts told us, of only documentary interest: apprentice work from the artist’s youth. It was the fragmentary set of landscapes to which our own picture belonged, a dozen variations, alike but sharply different, in blue and green.

  They were evocations of Killarney. I saw that now. Not perhaps of the place itself but of some idea of it, some ideal, that might have been the same idea that was in the head of the original Harlands, Frank’s forebears, when they named it for a place in Ireland they had never set eyes on but felt for because their parents had. Could any of them be identified, I wondered, as a parcel of actual land, a potato field or cow paddock, Pint Pot Creek Farm or Warlock’s Spinney, for which I held the deeds in my Brisbane office? – notes for the achievement, over long years, of a dream that Frank himself had seen the folly of before he even stopped buying up the last piece of it, and which would be inherited now, as his will directed, by Tam, by Pearsall if he could be found, by his father.

  I thought of my own landscape with its break of light on the horizon (it would be mine if it ever turned up again, I too stood at the end of a line) and decided I had seen enough. I would take the rest on trust: all those fragments of blue-green, green-gold forest, and the skyscrapers of the Pacific climbing up, up, then tumbling in a wreck of stars.

  [6]

  The party, by Aunt Roo’s standards, was a small one, got up like those late-night affairs of so many years ago on the spur of the moment, out of a reluctance she always felt, when she saw people kissing goodbye or lingering around cloakrooms, to let an occasion end. When I heard someone arriving and went out to see who it was, a line of a dozen cars was winding up the drive, slowed to funeral pace by Aunt Roo in the Daimler. She was bringing a couple of art dealers from Melbourne and a girl in castoffs from Tempe Tip, who had dived into the back seat at the last moment and was Hector McPhail’s girlfriend or stepdaughter or niece; Hector was so pissed, she told them, that she wouldn’t drive with him. ‘Hello, Phil,’ he said, stumbling up the long steps in a crumpled white suit. He stopped dead before me, and the rest of the formula hung unspoken between us; he giggled at the gap. Then he said very soberly: ‘Hello, mate. We’re the party for Frank’s wake.’

  Below, on the gravel, people were climbing out of cars, the women lifting the hems of their skirts and looking dazzled as they came up the steps to the lighted facade, the men calling from car to car with parking instructions. Doors slammed. One man in a dinner suit ran off into the dark and stood against a cypress to piss.

  ‘Sorry pet,’ Aunt Roo whispered as she hurried on into the house, ‘it just happened. You know how it is.’

  Within minutes she had summoned up drinks, music, a grumpy maid, and had us gathered in the back sitting room. A former conservatory, it opened on to the terrace, and was bare save for a Steinway and some lifesized woollen sculptures, four of which, drunkenly asprawl, sat at a nursery table drinking from knitted cups, while two more, passionately entangled, stared into one another’s purl and plain eyeballs on the floor.

  The couple from Melbourne were the Munts. Arthur Munt, a big man, wore a blue boilersuit, his wife pigtails, a pinafore, a blouse with leg-o’-mutton sleeves and banded red-and-white stockings.

  Suddenly there was a commotion in the hall. More arrivals. It was Jim Dalton the television interviewer. People crowded forward to see him lead in an old fellow who had caused a sensation at the gallery and whom everyone now wanted to meet.

  ‘That man,’ Mrs Munt informed me, ‘is extraordinary, I saw him at the gallery. He’s Frank Harland’s father and he’s eighty-six years old. You should hear him talk! I’ve never heard anything like it – that sort of eloquence, these days. And that old fake Frank used to pretend he was a boy from the sticks! That man is magnificent.’

  The magnificent Clem Harland, in a new suit and with a big spotted handkerchief in his breast pocket, looked very pleased with himself. It was more than twenty years since I had last seen him. He didn’t look a day older. He had the sort of smooth, baby-like features that life does not touch, and stood now – vacant, expectant, his grey hair tingling you felt with electricity – ready to make the most of everything – the eats, the drink – and already casting about for a receptive ear.

  ‘He talked on TV,’ Mrs Munt told me in a whisper, ‘and afterwards as well. Someone, thank God, had the foresight to get it on tape. We should be recording all these old people. Look,’ she said even lower, ‘there’s that Hector McPhail. He looks dreadful. If he keeps on jigging about like that he’ll have a heart attack. Serve him right!’

  Jacky slipped in from the garden, nodded briskly to Mrs Munt, and turning aside, whispered: ‘Have you seen Frank Harland’s father? He was at the gallery. He told us how Harland liked his bread pudding – on the wet side – then burst into tears. He’s a stunner. They’re all crazy about him.’

  It was at this point, when the party was already in full swing, that a disturbance occurred out on the terrace and everyone’s attention was drawn. A woman in a flannel nightie had appeared there and was in vigorous argument with others. Observing a couple who were out admiring the view, she had stepped through the French windows and challenged them, demanding who they were, how they had got into the house, and what, at that time of the night, they thought they were doing.

  ‘This is the residence of Lady Ashburn,’ she told them grandly, ‘you’re trespassing. I’m in charge here. Lady Ashburn’s out. You’d better leave before she gets back or I’ll be in the pooh.’

  But seeing, when she followed their gaze, that her sister was there after all and that some sort of party was in progress, she changed her tack.

  ‘Good evening,’ she told Arthur Munt, since despite the boilersuit he appeared not to be a burglar, ‘I’m Lady Ashburn’s sister. From Brisbane. Do you happen to have seen my husband Jack? He’s a very tall man. He’s wearing –’

  Her memory got hooked on the word. Looking down at her own state of undress, she frowned and acknowledged a second error. ‘Fools!’ she muttered and stalked off.

  She came to a halt in the very centre of the room, and finding herself surrounded by strangers, she clasped her nightie to her in a clenched fist, and screwing her eyes shut simply stood, in the belief perhaps that when she opened them again all these people would have vanished and she would be back again in her own bed.

  I touched her elbow. ‘Aunt Connie.’

  The eyes snapped open.

  ‘Oh, Phil dear, it’s you. I’m so relieved! I was asleep, but I woke up feeling peckish so I went out to the kitchen – you know your Aunt Roo always has such delicious things in the fridge – only titbits, nothing really substantial, but the very best. Then I heard the voices. Is it a celebration?’

  ‘It’s people who’ve been to an exhibition, Auntie. Frank Harland.’

  ‘What?’

  She was deaf. I had to repeat the name so loud that it must have sounded, in the silence, like the announcement of his imminent return.

  ‘Oh, him,’ she said with disgust. ‘Is he here? One of your father’s lame ducks, Phil,’ and with a little laugh she turned to explain it to Mrs Munt. ‘My mother couldn’t stand the sight of him. We used to call him the iceman, Roo and I, because of Ollie. There was this iceman who courted – well it’s complicated, you wouldn’t understand. It would take too long. Huh,’ she said, ‘Frank Harland! I wonder what happened to him?’

  It was for her a name from thirty years back at Southport, not the happiest time of her life. She was astonished after so long, and here in Sydney, to have it crop up again. A bad sign. Better to shut up and say no more.
/>   ‘Oh but go on,’ Mrs Munt was urging, ‘this is fascinating! It’s just what I was saying a moment ago. These old people –’

  But Aunt Roo had come up, unflustered, solicitous. ‘Connie pet, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes Roo, thank you, I was hungry that’s all. I got up to see what was in the fridge. I found – well, I don’t remember what, but it was very nice. Is that all right?’

  ‘Of course pet. I’ll get them to bring you something more.’

  ‘No thank you. But I am glad I found Phil. I don’t know any of these other people. I was a bit . . . You didn’t tell me there would be a party. I thought I was in the wrong house.’

  ‘Sorry sweet, I would have if I’d known. But it was – you know – spur of the moment.’

  ‘Did you know Frank Harland too?’ Mrs Munt demanded.

  But Aunt Roo had already moved away, and Aunt Connie, taking my elbow and drawing me down towards her, whispered aloud: ‘Who is that woman, Phil?’ She seemed especially disturbed by the grey pigtails and the pinafore. As if what they brought back was some bigger girl who had tormented her at school. ‘Why does she keep talking about that awful man? Is she senile?’