Not just now, and not during the dark hours of the night, but on the Monday morning, when the doors of the factory will remain closed, this world will have changed. Outside in the sleeping suburb, the machinists and staff who, for most of their working lives, drove and walked to Webster’s Engineering, will not go to the factory any more. The clerks, accountants, and foremen will not go any more. Nor will Mrs Webster. And, within weeks, the red-brick monument to another age and its cast-iron nameplate will come tumbling down. She eyes the portrait. We dragged the Age into being with heat and molten metal and giant machines and tiny objects that meant nothing by themselves until they became part of a greater whole — we did that. We changed the world around us; now the world around us has changed and us with it. Made us the past and turned the faith that fired our factories into a set of quaint, old-fashioned beliefs.
You knew all this, and that’s why you chose to go, to go while we could still call it our age. To go while those great machines of ours still pressed metal and tin and whatever came their way into the shape and face of our age. To go while we still had it in us to shape the times, before the times shaped us and gave the world a different face. That noise, that incessant hammering, those feet that marched to and from the factory floor, those hands that grasped the levers that crushed the scrap — that was us. But it’s not us any more.
She rises from the chair, whisky in hand — her step betraying the slightest hint of unsteadiness — and paces slowly about the room. Already, it has the look and smell of rooms that belong to other times, old times. These trophies (tennis, from the days when she first laid eyes on Webster and saw in his eyes and his actions the utter, unquestioned conviction that his time was upon him), these books (which she has read, but which Webster, a browser not a reader, only ever flicked through), these framed photographs that captured their days, will soon have the dust of History upon them. And while there are those who are content, at a certain stage of life, to let the dust settle on their days, Mrs Webster is not one. And she never will be. As she finishes the whisky, she notes the unsettling thrill that comes of stepping out of your Age and into the uncertainty of a time that doesn’t yet know what it is.
Part Five
Envoi
50.
The Time We Have Taken
The time we have taken is no more or less than it takes for a dreamer to roll over in bed and wake from the dream. No more or less time than it takes for a suburb to be born and grow, for its streets and footpaths to be scooped out of the paddocks of old farms and wild thistle country. No more or less time than it takes for a factory to appear, flourish and fall into decline because time has moved on. No more or less time than it takes for a summer to come and go, or for a comet to pass across a suburban sky, looking as if it were standing still, frozen up there in the stars, when, in fact, it is moving at infinite speed. The time we have taken amounts to no more or less than that.
Michael is currently sleeping in his room; the street below is still and dark. He has gone to sleep with Madeleine on his mind, but in the moment before he wakes, in the first light of the summer’s morning, he will once again be walking down the old street. Eleven or twelve, he will always be walking down the old street and wearing his best summer shirt with the button-down collars that he had forgotten all about until this dream retrieved it, his father just ahead with his ear turned to the sound of a distant engine, and his mother beside him in a floral dress that is just a bit too good for the old street. The sky will glow the colour of ripe peach and they will, all three, be pausing at a vacant paddock, staring at the gently swaying khaki grass. And they will stand like this forever, because the dream will always hold them just so. It will take them in. No one will move or speak. And there will be no fates to be met because nobody is going anywhere, everybody safe and forever as they are inside the dream. It will be so clear and true that he will enter it and live it, as he did then when he walked the same street as a child.
And while his son sleeps, travelling towards the luminescent moment of that dream, Vic sits, long into the night, on his doorstep overlooking the town, driving again, his freshly shaven, clean cheek turned to the sea breeze, at his most alert and alive, his most complete, wanting for nothing. Let us leave him exactly as he is now, seated on his doorstep, but in the cabin again of one of those dirty, filthy engines that he complained about all his life, without which he was lost. Let us leave him as he was, as he now is and will always be, an engine driver. His head leaning out of the cabin window, cheek to the wind, the engine’s big wheels beneath him, turning, spinning through the night, its headlamp, like the light in his eyes, bright and strong enough to see clear into the next morning.
And Rita, unable to sleep, places the remnants of the old life into boxes. The remnants of that glorious shot at living — photographs, letters, and an old cigarette lighter that still flames — all packed away. Boxes that already have the look of boxes that will never be opened again. And while Rita sees this, there is also a Rita who registers the secret thrill of knowing that when the house is behind her and she steps out into the street for the last time, she will also be stepping into whatever it is that lies before her as well. And that very uncertainty will be a beginning, because the ‘us’ that lived there is now ‘them’.
When everything is settled, when everyone has gone their separate ways and finally stop long enough one day to glance back, one day when slowness is upon us and time allows the view, the question we will ask is the question that will nag us again and again: did we hear the music of the years? Did we see the fiddler’s hand, bowing it higher and higher through days emblazoned with wonder, or were we looking away?
The house, the yard on summer nights, the passionfruit vine where the spider indifferently spun its web, the street that started bare and filled overnight with weatherboard box houses and gardens that bloomed while you watched, the open farm land that hovered for a few years between town and country, the dances, the songs, the tennis, the cricket, the coming and going back from station, work, school and home, throughout the years that saw a suburb born — that, that exotic tribe, was us. And the time we have taken, our moment.
P.S.
Ideas, interviews & features included in a new section…
About the author
Meet the Author
Life at a Glance
The Interview
About the book
The Critical Eye
The Review
Discussion Questions
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 bands 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.
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.
‘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 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 Gift of Speed
In 1960 the West Indies arrive in Australia, bringing with them a carnival of music, colour and possibility. Michael, who is sixteen, is enthralled. If, like his heroes, he has the gift of speed, he will move beyond his suburb into the great world…
And yet, as his summer unfolds, Michael realises that there are other ways to live. When the calypso chorus accompanying Frank Worrell and his team fades, Michael has learnt many things…about his parents, his suburb, a girl called Kathleen Marsden, and about himself.
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
The Interview
Steven Carroll: When I started The Art of the Engine Driver I thought it would just be one book, but by the time I’d finished I realised there was a lot more in there. And there’s tremendous pleasure in going intensely into a small area because the area that the book deals with or dwells in is a rectangle about a mile and a half long and about a half-mile wide, but not only was there enough for one book but enough for three.
‘I thought it would just be one book, but by the time I’d finished I realised there was a lot more in there’
Rhiannon Brown: All the characters in your book, Steven — Rita, Madeleine, Michael, Vic, Mrs Webster — they all seem as if they’re very familiar to you. Are these based on people in your own life?
Steven Carroll: You can’t walk away from a lot of biographical elements in the books. My father was an engine driver and we did grow up in a suburb like the one described in the book. For him it was through engine driving, through action, that he achieved significance, and also a sense of aesthetics entering his daily life through the art of engine driving.
Rhiannon Brown: What do you mean, the aesthetics?
Steven Carroll: Just the sense of pleasure that doing something in an artistic way gives somebody. And it can come accidentally into people’s lives, in isolated moments, something being executed as perfectly as it can be, and that comes along from time to time. Vic had that in his job. I remember when my dad used to talk about engine driving with his friends, his fellow drivers, and they would talk about it in aesthetic terms, they would talk about the artistic touches and the characteristic touches of fellow drivers, how they could do such-and-such, and how they did such-and-such and ‘I wonder how they do it?’ But none of them would ever tell, they all kept their secrets, and Dad had his secrets when he drove too. It was his job, it actually gave him a sense of meaning. And for Vic, it’s a very similar thing.
I suppose in The Art of the Engine Driver there is more of a biographical element in it, but as the books progressed it became less and less so. So with The Gift of Speed I didn’t feel like I was actually dealing with the original models. I developed them to the extent that they started losing their faces, and by the time I actually got to part three they just felt like characters and it was actually quite liberating.
‘I suppose in The Art of the Engine Driver there is more of a
biographical element in it, but as the books progressed it became less and less so’
There is something quite good and urgent in being able to take something, a subject like I did in The Art of the Engine Driver and feel it was at your fingertips but there was also something far more satisfying in actually moving on through The Gift of Speed and The Time We Have Taken to the point where you actually feel you’re dealing with inventions and I didn’t feel like I was restricted by what I might have known, and that’s very important because the whole task of fiction to me is not to replicate reality but to reinvent it.
Rhiannon Brown: Where Vic, the character based on your father, the engine driver, was very prominent in the beginning of the novels, it’s in the third novel where we have Michael who is playing a bigger role. Let’s talk a little bit about the idea of ordinariness because Michael falls in love with a woman called Madeleine and says, ‘The gift of Madeleine was a kind of blessed ordinariness, a sense of being connected like everybody else was.’ In some sense I get the feeling that in your books you’re chasing the idea of the ordinary and wishing to transform it. Would that be right?
‘the whole task of fiction to me is not to replicate reality but to reinvent it’
Steven Carroll: See, nothing is ordinary really. In some ways, what’s happening in these books is the exhilaration of actually taking very ordinary things like a suburb, like the people in the suburb, and the people who would regard their day-to-day lives as being humdrum stuff, the exhilaration of taking that very ordinariness and attempting to transform it into something that actually transcends the way they see themselves. In lots of ways the characters miss those transcendent moments, and that’s the kind of sadness of them in lots of ways. They’re in a constant state of yearning and longing, but that’s why the books are written in the present tense, that the characters miss those transcendent moments but the book is actually in the moment, and the reader, through reading the book in the present tense does not miss the moments, hopefully.
The Time We Have Taken Page 24
