The tired looks of a few days before gone from their faces, the players step from their cars — from the bright sun shower of streamers and coloured tape — into the pillared shade at the entrance to the Town Hall. One by one they gather, a team, before disappearing up the wide, marble steps and into the Town Hall itself. For those few moments that they are gone from view, the street is silent, the flags in the office windows cease fluttering, the streamers pause in mid-fall, and everything is still as the eyes of the crowd turn to the balcony. Slowness falls upon them all. The ticker-tape floats on invisible currents as if it will never touch ground. Heads, arms and hands are at various phases of beginning and completing impossibly drawn-out gestures, and the very sound of the day is delayed on lazy summer waves out beyond the city. This slowness that is falling upon them, this clearing in the cluttered rush of the day, opens for inspection the passing moment, and, while the hands of the Town Hall clock slow to a crawl, for all the world resisting time itself, Michael is held in its thrall.
Then it is gone, this glimpse of slowness, of the moment, and when the players emerge from the shadows of the building it seems to Michael that they are less human and more distant than at any other time that summer. Their eyes are alight, their faces shine all along the wide, grey balcony. They are, indeed, the ones who have been lifted up and swept away from their streets and towns and into that pure world of speed and rhythm and action. With their smiles that speak of faraway lands, they wave to the crowds below on the street, to the crowds hanging from the windows of the Manchester Unity opposite the Town Hall, and even, for all Michael knows, to the crowds they can’t see out there in the suburban depths of the city, where, at this moment, the room that was once Michael’s is being cleansed, the grandmother he barely knew having been removed from the house. These farewell waves may, for all he knows, extend that far.
Green city trams jingle their bells as they pass through the narrow strip of the street the police have cleared; the cars that follow sound their horns and a part of the crowd beside Michael is suddenly singing.
Will ye nay come back again?
He didn’t notice when they started, or if they started at once or if one voice only had started them off and they all became a spontaneous chorus. But the crowd and their song, the jingling trams and car horns, fill the street and float upwards to the pale-blue summer sky. And all of it is music, an accompaniment to this song, its words drifting through the air and echoing down the deserted, honeycomb network of cool, dark arcades that lie behind the city’s streets.
Will ye nay come back again?
It is an old song, or it must be an old song, for Michael has never heard it before. But the crowd knows it, and they are singing loudly, unreservedly and unself-consciously in perfect unison. And it occurs to Michael that he has never heard singing in these streets before, let alone singing such as this. And it further occurs to him that these people have never in their lives sung like this, that some part of each of them has waited a lifetime just for this moment when they could release themselves into song and sing like they have never sung before. To be seen singing old songs in public places is not the usual practice of these people. Michael knows this with absolute certainty, because, at the age of sixteen, he may not know many things, but he knows his city and he knows the people who live in it. Today they have found their voice and they have found their song — this brooding, Scottish-sounding thing about coming back again. They will remember, each of them, on some dull distant day given over to remembering, the day they found their voice, found their song and sang it without restraint. And while they are singing, the waving hand of Wesley Winfield Hall stops, and he leans towards that part of the crowd from which the song is rising, and he listens as if hearing the ghosts of his Scottish past singing back to him across the years. And for a moment, the same song flows through them all like the same blood.
Amid the lines of jingling-jangling trams, the hooting cars, the singing, the streamers and shredded strips of newspaper and magazines that are falling from the sky, everybody is waving. It is a way of speaking. The singing, the waving, the just being here — it’s all a way of speaking. And as Michael raises his arm he knows he is not just waving goodbye to the figures on the balcony of the Town Hall, but the whole summer — this summer and all the summers, all the years, months, days and hours he spent chasing speed but never catching it. In the end this is as close as he gets. Staring up with the crowd and waving goodbye to the world that he could once have imagined as his, if only and if only and if only.
Yet even as he waves, he knows it’s all right. And he doesn’t know where this feeling of it being all right comes from. But it’s there, whether in the singing, the song, or the city itself that is now so wonderfully strange. For he has been close to it all afternoon, he has seen it and brushed with it, this world of speed, and now, at last, he can let it go. And besides, he’s happy to be part of this crowd, who, along with their best clothes, have brought the best of themselves.
The usual, quiet rhythms of the Old Wheat Road prevail. The newsagent waves to the chemist as he carries the evening papers into the shop. The bicycle repair shop owner, the butcher and the greengrocer are all inside their shops and the twilight commerce of the suburb goes on unseen. Only Nat, the barber, leaning against the lollipop stick at the front of his shop, a tailor-made cigarette wedged into his peanut teeth, is out to catch the changing colours of the street.
The carnival has come and gone, its music — those Saturday-night xylophones, tin drums and island voices — already fading. The street is closing back in on itself, and the procession that day, like the whole of the summer, will soon be remembered like a party at which everybody went slightly mad for a short time and about which everybody feels slightly silly afterwards.
Except that something is still there that wasn’t before. The rhythms of the street have returned and life goes on as if nothing has happened, but something has. Michael can’t point to it, or touch it or picture it, but it’s there. Something happened over the summer, and everybody knows it happened. And no matter how much they try to return to the ordinary rhythms and rituals of the street, there will always be a trace of something left over that wasn’t there before. Because of this they will always be haunted by the knowledge that, for a while, they were just that bit better than they thought they were.
And the light, slanting across the shopfronts and rooftops, piercing the venetian blinds of all the lounge rooms beyond the street, is a different light. It is part of the something that is still there and which won’t go away. For Michael, standing at the top of the Old Wheat Road, with the flour mill and the railway station just behind him, there will always be a trace of this summer left behind. Something you can’t point to or touch or neatly frame. But it’s there all right, and once it’s been it doesn’t go away; this vague, nagging feeling that we all just might be a bit better than we thought we were.
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features included in a new section…
About the author
Meet the Author
Life at a Glance
Off the Shelf
About the Book
The Inspiration
The Critical Eye
Read on
Find Out More
About the Author
Meet the Author
Steven Carroll
‘[STEVEN] CARROLL … has the happy knack of being able to hint obliquely at situations and events of some magnitude, thereby endowing the mundane with a curious but convincing urgency’ Andrew Riemer, The Age
Steven Carroll was born in the suburbs of Melbourne and grew up in suburban Glenroy, which had recently expanded in the post-war housing boom. ‘I lived for cricket when I was a kid … I used to play cricket in the mornings and the afternoons, and I think a lot of kids did, but I stopped playing some time when I was about seventeen or eighteen.’
He was educated at La Trobe University and taught English in high schools before playing in rock ba
nds in the 1970s and being ‘saved by theatre’ in the 1980s. After leaving the Melbourne music scene, he wrote plays and later became the theatre critic for Melbourne’s Sunday Age. He found his true calling in prose, with his debut novel Remember Me, Jimmy James being published in 1992, after being picked up by publisher Hilary McPhee, who recognised in Steven Carroll something very special. The book was highly regarded by the critics: The Age gave it a special mention in their Book of the Year feature.
Carroll was lauded as having a fresh, vibrant voice and for his ability to show us in his prose what it meant to be Australian. After two more novels, Carroll returned to writing about the Australian urban landscape in 2001 with The Art of the Engine Driver, the first of a trilogy of loosely connected stories set in the 50s, 60s and early 70s, continuing with The Gift of Speed and The Time We Have Taken. Shortlisted for the 2002 Miles Franklin Award, The Art of the Engine Driver was read on ABC radio; was a set text both for Melbourne University and the CAE summer program; and a film version, produced by Mark Joffe with a screenplay by Matt Cameron, is in pre-production. The Art of the Engine Driver has also been published in France and Germany and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina 2005.
‘Carroll was lauded as having a fresh, vibrant voice for his ability to show us what it meant to be Australian in his prose’
The Gift Of Speed — a quintessentially Australian story of a boy, a suburb and a summer of cricket and dreams — was published in 2004 and was highly commended in the 2005 Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Awards, the FAW Christina Stead Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2005 Miles Franklin Award.
The final novel in the trilogy, The Time We Have Taken, was published in 2007. This is a story of intersecting lives in the year 1970, during the centenary celebration of a suburb. It is both a meditation on the rhythms of suburban life and a luminous exploration of public and private reckoning during a time of radical change. Again, in 2008, Carroll was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, and this time he proved triumphant. The judging panel described Carroll’s novel as a ‘poised, philosophically profound exploration … a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives.’ On winning the award, Steven commented, ‘It’s a tremendous thrill but it’s also daunting to be joining a long list of authors whom you’ve either studied or admired for years. The Miles Franklin comes with the gravitas of a whole literary tradition, and you feel the weight almost instantly.’ And as for the prize money, Carroll plans to buy his old guitar back: ‘I had one of those pivotal moments in my late twenties when I sold my Rickenbacker for an electric typewriter … So I just might be making a trip down to Chapel Street, to a certain music store to pick out the old guitar, get the axe back.’
‘The Miles Franklin comes with the gravitas of a whole literary tradition, and you feel the weight almost instantly’
The Time We Have Taken earned Carroll further international recognition as winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, South East Asia and South Pacific Region. The book was also shortlisted for the 2007 Age Book of the Year Award (Fiction) and the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction.
He gave up a lecturing post at RMIT in the late 90s in order to write full time and lives in Brunswick in Melbourne with his partner, also a writer, and their child.
Have You Read…?
The Art of the Engine Driver
On a hot summer’s night in the 1950s, the old and the new, diesel and steam, town and country all collide — and nobody will be left unaffected.
As a passenger train leaves Spencer Street Station on its haul to Sydney, a family of three — Vic, Rita and their son Michael — are off to a party. George Bedser has invited the whole neighbourhood to celebrate the engagement of his daughter.
Vic is an engine driver with dreams of being like his hero Paddy Ryan and becoming the master of the smooth ride.
As the neighbours walk to the party, we are drawn into the lives of a bully, a drunk, a restless girl and a young boy forced to grow up before he is ready.
The Art of the Engine Driver is a luminous and evocative tale of ordinary suburban lives, told with an extraordinary power.
‘A luminous and evocative tale of ordinary suburban lives, told with an extraordinary power’
Life at a Glance
BORN
1949, Melbourne
EDUCATED
English and history at La Trobe University
MARRIED
Lives with his partner and son
CAREER
High school English teacher; musician; playwright; theatre reviewer; journalist; lecturer; novelist; taxi driver.
NOVELS
Remember Me, Jimmy James
(1992)
Momoko
(1994)
The Love Song of Lucy McBride
(1998)
The Art of the Engine Driver
(2001)
The Gift of Speed
(2004)
The Time We Have Taken
(2007)
AWARDS AND HONOURS
The Art of the Engine Driver:
• Shortlisted for the 2002 Miles Franklin Literary Award
• Shortlisted for the Prix Femina 2005
• Shortlisted for the Prix des Lectrices d’Elle 2006
The Gift of Speed:
• Shortlisted for the 2005 Miles Franklin Literary Award
• Highly Commended in the 2005 Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Awards
• Highly Commended in the 2005 FAW Christina Stead Award for Fiction
The Time We Have Taken:
• Winner of the 2008 Miles Franklin Literary Award
• Winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, South East Asia and South Pacific Region
• Shortlisted for the 2007 Age Book of the Year Award (Fiction)
• Shortlisted for the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction
Off the Shelf
I ENJOY READING in bed. It’s a nice way to ease into sleep. There’s something soporific about the act of reading in bed.
I’m re-reading a book I read many years ago, Le Grand Meaulnes, by French author Alain-Fournier. The book is set in the 1890s in the Cher district of France, a beautiful story of lost domains, lost love and village life. It’s one of those examples of the proposition that there is nothing so universal as the intensely regional. It covers so much, but if you mapped its territory it would only be a few square kilometres. Sadly, the world he captures in his writing, like the author himself, was blown away by World War I.
‘I’m re-reading a book I read many years ago, Le Grand Meaulnes, by French author Alain-Fournier’
Then I went on and read his biography, The Land Without A Name: Alain-Fournier and His World, by Robert Gibson. It’s wonderful. Gibson has the novelist’s touch — imaginatively re-creating Fournier’s life and putting Le Grand Meaulnes in context.
I’m also halfway through Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence in Sweden, which is a series of letters she wrote while travelling around Scandinavia in 1795. Basically, it’s memoir in letter form. I started reading it after I read Sidetracks: Exploration of a Romantic Biographer, by Richard Holmes.
Another book by the bed is The World at Night, by Alan Furst. It’s set in Paris in 1940 during the first year of the occupation, a convincing picture of the city in what must have been a bizarre and frightening time.
I usually read two books at a time. Most of the time I finish every book I start. Last year I read Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald. I didn’t like it much; a bit cold, but it had the authority of a book that ought to be finished.
‘I usually read two books at a time. Most of the time I finish every book I start’
There’s also the ongoing process of reading [Marcel] Proust. It’s taken me about two years and I’m up to Guermantes Way, Vol. 3. It’
s not something that can be rushed.
Steven Carroll
About the Book
The Inspiration
BEFORE HE BEGAN WRITING The Art of the Engine Driver, the first novel featuring the characters of Michael, Vic and Rita, Steven Carroll had a dream. He dreamed he was a child walking with his parents along his boyhood street in suburban Glenroy, on the edge of Melbourne. They were on their way to a neighbourhood party. When he woke he began to wonder whether it was possible to write a novel about the sensations of growing up in the new Australian suburbs in the Menzies era.
‘the ordinary things can sometimes bring some sense of the sublime into life’
There are other parallels with his own life in the novels. ‘My dad,’ Carroll says, ‘was an engine driver and I grew up with lots of descriptions of engine driving. He trained in steam and graduated to diesel. The drivers were so proud of what they did. They talked about it as writers might talk about writing. It was admirable. It gave their lives integrity and meaning.’ Although he admits he draws heavily on childhood memories of his father in the two novels, he is quick to add that the character certainly went its own way. ‘The aim of writing is not to replicate reality but to reinvent it,’ he says.
‘I started writing The Gift of Speed during the Tampa crisis, when I was really, really angry with the whole country. I thought I would write a really angry book. But I found that in going back to this particular summer of 1960–61, which was an iconic summer, I was discovering us at our best, as distinct from our worst. It occurred to me that it was through cricket that our whole society actually opened up. There were half a million people in the street to say goodbye to the West Indies side in a time of the White Australia Policy and when Aborigines couldn’t even vote. It’s true to say, “They were the West Indies, they were going back anyway”, but the thing is we didn’t have to react the way we did … and I find it hard to imagine it happening now…
The Gift of Speed Page 21
