Harland's Half Acre

by David Malouf

  Jacky covered her face with her hands and began to laugh.

  ‘Here Auntie,’ I said, ‘we’ll take you into the other room. You remember Jacky, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said brightly. ‘How are you keeping, dear?’ Then with a moan: ‘We don’t have to have that other one, do we Phil – the Wizard of Oz? Some of these people are such freaks you wouldn’t know what to make of them, nobody would.’

  We went through into the larger and more formal sitting room and sat at the far end of it under a standard lamp. The voices of the others seemed far off. There was a view through Norfolk pines to the wide, glittering floor of the harbour where ships were at anchor, solid black, and a late ferry moved, visible only as lopsided windows in the dark. Aunt Connie, looking very frail when she sat, with the flannel nightie drawn about her and her feet in fluffy slip-ons, fell asleep, her head lolling, her jaw shakily ajar.

  Widowed now for nearly seven years, she lived in a nursing home at New Farm, but every six months or so Aunt Roo brought her to Sydney, just for a change.

  Suddenly, waking, she jerked upright, glanced about quickly to see if anyone had noticed her lapse and said: ‘What did you say, dear? Did you say something?’ She regarded us both as if we were about to provide her, like a child, with some special treat; she sat back, waiting for us to explain why we had brought her here in the middle of the night and were standing before her so solemn and intent.

  It occurred to me then that I had never in my life actually sat down and talked to her. She was the one in the family to whom no one ever listened. It had always been so. What impressed me was how little she had changed in all the years I had known her – how under the deep changes she had always been, as she was now, entirely herself, entirely uninteresting. It was, in its way, a kind of triumph.

  I leaned forward and laid my hand on hers. ‘Are you all right, Auntie?’

  She smiled sweetly.

  Outside, the rest of the party were crowding into the tele­vision room for the late-night news, which would include a replay of the opening of Frank’s exhibition, and of course the interview with Frank Harland’s father. The old man had been settled in a leather armchair to see himself on TV. The rest stood respectfully about him or leaned in corners against the walls. He would see himself break down and cry, this time in front of thousands.

  ‘Phil dear.’

  ‘Yes Aunt Connie?’

  ‘I’m a little bit worried about your Uncle Jack. He won’t know where I’ve got to – I wasn’t expecting all this, it’s a surprise party. Could you just slip into the bedroom and tell him – tell him –’

  She frowned, and looking at the deep hollow of the nightgown between her knees, its trough of shadow, drew back and began plucking angrily at the fluff of her sleeve.

  ‘Phil,’ she said severely as if we had outstayed a welcome in her house, ‘I think I’d like to have a rest now. Could you and Miss – could you put the light out and leave me? I want to think something over. Something has come up. I have to think about it.’

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course. You just go on to bed dear and I’ll bring you in a nice cup of –’

  She looked startled and clamped her jaw shut, pressing her lips together so that all their vertical lines showed. She sewed her mouth up.

  I put out the light and she sat then slumped in her chair against the velvet dark, great swathes of moonlit water with the green light of the ferry far out chugging in to the shore. Behind us, the voices of the telecast. Seen through an open door, its metallic light fell on a tabletop and the arm of a leather chair where Clem Harland, that grand old man, was watching himself weep on TV, and wept.

  Suddenly Aunt Connie called to us from the other side of the room. She sounded alarmed. But when I stepped towards her she was smiling, her wispy hair lit up against the glass.

  ‘I just wanted to say, dear, isn’t this a lovely party? I’m glad they asked me, aren’t you?’

  And in that moment something remarkable happened. The depression that had been over me all day, which I had first felt in the gallery, in front of Frank’s pictures, all their raw edges squared off behind frames, fell from me. I too felt lightheaded, light­hearted. And it had to do, I thought, with the small lost person at the window, so unsure of herself and which house she was in, which life, but happy for a moment to be there, and offering, out of long years, nothing more than this – a bundle of bones and nerve in a flannel nightie under a cloud of hair. I would have gone to her then and tried to show something of what I felt, how important at this moment, and after so long, her ordinary presence was to me, but she had already slipped into some other dream.

  ‘You go to bed, love, I’ll be with you in a minute. I’ve got this –’

  She frowned. Then the small duty she had felt pressing, some minor untidiness she had meant to clear up, or rite that had still to be enacted, was forgotten. Her brow cleared. She looked up and laughed.

  ‘Go on and enjoy yourself, you two, I’m happy just sitting. It’s such a lovely party. I’m glad they asked me, aren’t you?’

  Afterword

  In August 1982, with Child’s Play just published and Fly Away Peter to be released at the end of the year, I was ‘between books’ as I thought of it and decided to do what the Italians do: I let my house at Campagnatico in Southern Tuscany and fled to the mountains, to Merano in Alto Adige, formerly the South Tyrol, and spent the month hiking in the high alpine valleys. I had no new project in view; I was waiting for something to turn up. Not anxiously as yet, but with an eye open for what might appear. It was in this mood that on my way home again I stopped overnight at my friend Carlo Olivieri’s apartment in Florence, and coming down next morning saw a book lying face-down on a coffee table. It was by an Australian scholar I had met at a conference two years before: Margaret Walters’ The Nude Male. I turned it over and read the following:

  The family had been well-to-do but their fortunes had declined . . . Michelangelo, a second son, was put out to nurse with the wife of a local stone-cutter. He may have stayed there for some time . . . His father, Ludovico, was a difficult man, weak and bullying …

  Michelangelo’s art was to support, not just his father but his brothers as well, all through their lives and he never stopped telling them so. But the myth of the family’s nobility was almost as persistent as his pride in his art . . . In a sense he remained enslaved to the family all his life, never breaking free of the tight unit in which he plays resentful child and father and mother all at once. Worrying like a mother about their health, he nags his brothers to work harder and show proper respect for their father, he sends them money, buys property for them, accuses them of exploiting him. After his father and brothers died, he transferred the whole complex bundle of emotions – love, anxiety, irritation – to his nephew.

  So there it was. A subject – the life of an artist – and the outline of a plot: the dynamics within a family and the artist’s complex relations with it across the generations. But what I was especially struck by was Margaret Walters’ reference to property and Michelangelo’s obsession with restoring the family’s fortunes. It connected with something I had already touched on in Fly Away Peter: the distinction, as I saw it, between two very different forms of possession, especially as they relate to place or land. Possession in the legal sense, and the sort of ownership that belongs to mind or spirit; the difference, in Fly Away Peter, between Ashley Crowther’s connection to the land as legal owner and – acquired through long years spent in the observation and recording of its birdlife – Jim Saddler’s more intimate feeling for it as an extension of his own consciousness. What formed in my head, with the subject and plot already settled, was a secondary subject, in which Frank Harland, as a child, would set himself the task of winning back the family’s lost acres and restoring them to the Harland domain. He would keep all the s
cattered pieces of it clearly in his head by making sketches of them, and in the process discover that he was an artist; but also, over time, that art, like life, makes its own demands and has its own mysterious ends. Added to this would be the irony that by the time his boyish project has been achieved, and all the lost acres recovered, there is no family – no continuing line – to restore them to.

  I went back to Campagnatico, and within just a few weeks had a good draft of the first section of the book; Killarney, Stanthorpe and Frank’s Depression years on the road. I had also discovered that if the later part of Frank’s life was to have the same richness of detail as the first, I would need a second point of view: a younger observer, whose experience of South Brisbane in the War Years, of Southport in the later forties, of Brisbane again in the fifties, sixties, seventies and in the early eighties when I was actually writing, might mirror my own. Phil Vernon’s story is of his own life in a very different family, but he is also a witness, at various points, to Frank’s life and becomes increasingly a sharer in the man’s ‘secrets’, and at last the bemused but affectionate caretaker of his legacy.

  It is sometimes assumed that Frank Harland is based on a real artist; Jon Molvig has been one suggestion, Ian Fairweather another.

  Molvig, though he worked in and around Brisbane, is hardly a candidate. I knew little of his work when I was writing the book and nothing of his life. Fairweather’s work I did know, but he was never part of my Brisbane experience, and until Frank found his way to an island in the Bay I had not thought of my man and Fairweather as being connected.

  Fairweather was an upper-middle-class Scot with an Anglo-Indian army background. He trained as an artist in London and his artistic sensibility was formed by the years he spent in China and South-East Asia. He was an internationalist and compulsive mover on. I thought of Frank Harland as essentially home-grown, an adventurous homebody. For the sort of formal/informal training he might have picked up as a draughtsman and painter I had the advice of Jeffrey Smart, a friend and neighbour in nearby Umbria, who had got much the same training a decade later than Frank, and in an equally out-of-the-way place.

  As for Frank Harland’s life as a hermit down the Bay – his easy attitude to his materials may recall Fairweather, but for his deliberate exposure of himself to the elements, his cussedness, his half-humorous fascination with his appearance in the media as a crazy old codger and small-town celebrity, I had other models closer to hand.

  Harland’s Half Acre was published in 1984 by Chatto and Windus in London and by Pantheon (Knopf) in New York. This reprinting after nearly thirty years includes one or two transpositions, a number of brief excisions, for the most part in the interest of tone, and the correction of errors. My thanks to Meredith Curnow at Knopf Australia and to Julian Welch.

  DAVID MALOUF is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including The Great World, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Prix Femina Étranger; Remembering Babylon, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; An Imaginary Life, The Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff, Every Move You Make, his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street and Ransom. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award and Ransom won the Adelaide Festival Literature Award and the Criticos Prize. He was raised in Brisbane and now lives in Sydney.

  Also by David Malouf

  Fiction

  The Complete Stories

  Every Move You Make

  Dream Stuff

  The Conversations at Curlow Creek

  Remembering Babylon

  The Great World

  Antipodes

  Child’s Play

  Fly Away Peter

  An Imaginary Life

  Johnno

  Ransom

  Poetry

  Selected Poems

  Wild Lemons

  First Things Last

  The Year of Foxes and Other Poems

  Neighbours in a Thicket

  Bicycle and Other Poems

  Typewriter Music

  Libretti

  Jane Eyre

  Baa Baa Black Sheep

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engin

  es or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Harland’s Half Acre

  ePub ISBN 9781742758329

  Copyright © David Malouf, 1984

  Afterword copyright © David Malouf, 2013

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A Vintage book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

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  www.randomhouse.com.au

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at http://www.randomhouse.com.au/about/contacts.aspx

  First published by Chatto & Windus, the Hogarth Press, in 1984

  Published by Vintage in 1999

  This revised and updated edition published in 2013

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Malouf, David, 1934–

  Harland’s half acre [electronic resource]/David Malouf.

  ISBN 9781742758329 (ebook)

  A823.3

  Cover photograph: Getty Images/Charles Maraia

  Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  Typesetting and eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia

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