by Biff Ward
The courtyard of The Flats was a huge area, 60 or 70 yards square. It was impacted dirt, a kind of scrabbly surface, not conducive to sitting on but custom-made for many games. Hop, Skip and Jump or Eight Sticks could involve ten kids and last most of an afternoon. Best of all were the bike games we played there with our school friends—bike hockey, bike soccer and bike basketball. They all involved much skidding and yelling amid a fluid determination of rules and scoring. If any of us had heard of volleyball, we would no doubt have played a bike version of that.
For the children, it was a kind of communal living in the very best sense. For the mothers, struggling on scholarship incomes and patterns of ’50s suburban isolation, it was probably a mixed experience, having to keep up appearances while in such close proximity to others. For the fathers, there was the pressure of providing on a scholarship coupled with the imperative to discipline yourself and produce the Great Work, the thesis that would open doors. But all benefited from the freedom of the kids—outside we were occupied and the mothers could see and hear what was going on from their kitchen sinks.
Canberra then was a country town of 27,000 people with the old Parliament House, the War Memorial and the university plonked among the grassland of recently resumed sheep paddocks. The sleek black cars of diplomats with their distinctive blue numberplates glided about the curving streets lined with gum trees dotted by red and lime-green parrots. Tourists would wave us down on our bikes and ask for directions.
The Molonglo River lazed through the centre, curving around the river-flat dotted with cows below where the National Library now stands. There was one bridge, a two-lane wooden structure forty-two feet above the water. When I was at high school, I remember standing astride my bike with a bunch of other students in pouring rain, willing the flooded river to rise another two feet, more to participate in the drama of the landscape than to claim that we couldn’t get to school.
Roads swooped down to fords and there were swimming holes with willows weeping into water you could drink. Dirt roads began on the edge of the suburbs and snaked their way through farms to other rivers and bigger swimming holes in the Murrumbidgee. We rode wherever we wanted to go, threw our bikes on the grass and then picked them up when we were ready to move on. For decades after, it was that dreamy, outdoor daytime world that I remembered—poling about under the willow trees on the rafts we made from the giant wooden cotton-reels left behind the gasworks near Kingston and building bonfires from branches and tyres and wooden fruit boxes that we dragged home with ropes tied to our bikes and piled up in a stook.
The inside world, the life of our family, I kept sequestered in a dingy corner of my mind, the place of secrets. We had no words for talking about Mum’s strangeness, and the things she had done in Sydney had congealed into one large secret. There was also the Communism, knowing it was not safe to speak of it anywhere. And Dad’s ogling woman-obsession, a daily factor in our lives, was unmentionable.
Yet sometimes one of the secrets sneaked out and spilled over. Like the time when, feeling very clever, we showed Mum and Dad how to cross the river near our rafts so they could get to a paddock where mushrooms sat like white plates in the lush grass. And how, as we were picking them with a friend of ours, some delusion of Mum’s burst forth, and she began to throw mushrooms at Dad and yell obscenities. We stood in the wet clover and watched Dad’s heart crack a little further and then trailed after them as he bundled her back to the car.
SIX
Brittle
The PhD business of thesis-writing introduced us to a new lexicon: research, topic, drafts, footnotes and supervisor. Dad was gone all day at the university and then at his desk every night in the corner of the living room. On weekends, he would do the food shop with Mum (he thought she’d mess it up) and chop wood if it was winter or toil in the veggie patch if it was summer. As soon as lunch was over, he was back at his desk.
He wrote first drafts in longhand and then edited in red, the school-teacher habit transferred to his own composition. He then moved to his typewriter, a tiny high machine called a Smith Corona, an exact sister of which is held by the War Memorial as part of the World War One collection. Mark and I used to say, Look, there’s Dad’s typewriter! in those radiant days when we could drop our bikes at the steps of that institution and wander the corridors in our bare feet. Halfway through the PhD, he upgraded to a Remington, a much flatter and friendlier affair.
Sometimes he asked me if I wanted to help and if I had no friends around, I stood beside his chair and read out, in carefully measured gobbets, whatever he was typing up. Mostly it was ballads, a song which illustrated a point he was making. I loved those times, leaning against his chair, watching his long, square-edged fingers, the two on each hand that he used for typing, watching closely so I could time the next phrase to keep his fingers going, a seamless transfer from my voice to his page. I knew he loved it too.
One time Mum burst in and told him to let me go, her eyes all staring. He shouted at her that she was mad and to go away but the mood was gone and I went outside.
He put on a party and people flooded in to meet guests from Melbourne, some people who were involved with ballads. There was a singer-woman with curly black hair and I could tell that she was tough, that she was making her own way through the world, a rare sight in that ’50s decade.
As she came in, I heard Dad crow triumphantly, Meet my second wife!
I was on my way to my room but I swung back to watch. I wanted to glare but she didn’t turn towards me. She looked people in the eye while Dad beamed. What did they think, any of them, what did they feel, about my mother skulking in the kitchen two yards across the hall? Why didn’t the whole flat implode in shame?
His disdain was her humiliation. The woman-business gnarled me up every time I saw it but I trusted everything else about him.
He surprised Mark and me one Saturday afternoon when he appeared outside on the lawn and started walking. He was not a walker, not even in the bush. His interest there was romantic and academic, not practical or physical. So Mark and I sparkled at the sight: Dad coming out to play.
No, he said, shaking his head. No, I’m thinking.
He proceeded to walk slowly up and down the slope of lawn, head bent, hands behind: a pantomime of a man in thought. He was there quite a while. I just happened to look up, happened to raise my eyes from our ball game at the precise moment that he stopped, mid-pace, reared his head back, threw his arm up beside his face with open mouth and a finger flung towards the sky and then, head down, galloped inside.
I have wondered which thought I saw that day. Perhaps this sentence from The Legend, one of my favourites: There have been ‘knights of the road’ in England and bandits in America and elsewhere; but in nineteenth-century Australia bushranging was so widespread, and so strongly supported by public sympathy, that it amounted to a leading national institution.
I love the rolling rhythm of this splendid sentence with its wry humour.
I saw him walking to think on other days, but I only saw the epiphanous moment that one time. His work pattern was similar to how he’d been in Sydney with the difference that there was even more urgency in it. He felt he really had something to say—he was driven by passion.
At the same time, he had to cope with more and more outbursts from Mum. One night Mark and I were sitting on the sofa in front of the fire, homework on knees, Dad at his desk in the corner, when Mum rushed into the room and threw a piece of paper into the flames. I can’t have this! she muttered.
Jesus! What are you doing? Dad leapt from his chair to the hearth.
It’s your cheque! he cried.
Yes. I can’t have it, she said.
Oh, God, he moaned. Get out. Go to the kitchen.
Mark and I hadn’t moved, hadn’t twitched while this happened immediately in front of our feet.
I’m sorry, darlings, Dad sighed as he moved back to his desk.
In his letters for 1954, there’s an account of Mum’s
brief employment saga with the National Library where she had landed a stacking job. She resigned after a week and then asked for the job back; they gave it to her and she resigned again; the next day she changed her mind; Dad listened to her ups and downs and roundabouts for weeks and tried to help. I presume he got them to re-issue that pay cheque. She tore another one to confetti.
He struggled with money during the PhD years—a family of four on a scholarship with Mum burning cheques and not able to stay in a job. He used to look at us appraisingly and say, As long as you have fruit and milk every day, you’ll be okay.
When summer came, we made the first of our epic car journeys to Adelaide. A week to get there, a week to get back, four weeks for seeing relatives: Dad had a plan. He bought ground-sheets (a slip of thin waterproof for each of us to lie on) and expanded our range of pannikins from picnicking to making whole meals. He instructed Mum to roll four single blankets tightly and said we’d make pillows out of folded clothes.
The other families stood in a semi-circle to wave us off, cheering the midget Austin as it shifted its shoulders into position. We chugged out of Canberra and headed due west, hitting dirt just beyond Yass. When we drove up a track to camp by a creek the first night, we saw a dingo leap back from drinking and run over a ridge. Mum was anxious: Dad growled at her. That was the first time I saw her rubbing at her hands. Rubbing them together, rubbing between the fingers, two handfuls of agitated emotion. She did it on and off all evening.
We went to sleep with the sound of that dingo howling to its mates in the distance. Travelling further west, the road widened into a swathe of red where the driver chose which series of dried wheel-ruts to avoid, which smoothness to follow. Mostly, it was just us in that vastitude, so when another vehicle appeared, we waved with enthusiasm. We were as one in our thrall, Dad and Mark and I. Every movement astounded us—kangaroos, wedge-tails, goannas, the mirage of water shimmering on the road, trees skittering in heat on the horizon.
Emus! one of us would point and Dad would slow to stare. Once he stopped and what appeared to be a mother with seventeen chicks surrounded the car—they seemed as captivated as we were.
The third night we camped in the curved bed of a dry billabong and were woken some time after midnight by fat drops of rain. Dad said we’d better move on.
We’ll have breakfast in a café in Hay, he said.
Somewhere in that pre-dawn murk of slippery red dirt, no fences and Dad’s sore eye from where a locust had hit him, we saw a crooked sign-post pointing to the One Tree Plain. We burst into song, what we could remember of ‘Flash Jack from Gundagai’:
I’ve shore at Burrabogie and I’ve shore at Toganmain
I’ve shore at Big Willandra and out on the Coleraine
But before the shearing was over I longed to get back again
Shearing for old Tom Patterson on the One Tree Plain.
We’d been past Toganmain, so there on the edge of the One Tree Plain, it felt as though we’d arrived inside the ballads Dad loved so much. Inside history.
In Adelaide, Mum’s Paradise was still just that: peaches dropping, the swimming hole full and our three boy cousins had a ping-pong table and quoits. We weren’t there long enough.
Most of the time we stayed with Dad’s parents in the bungalow they had retired to, beside the Glenelg tramline. One afternoon Dad took us with him, leaving Mum in her afternoon nap, to a house where there were kids around our age. Their mother stood at the back door with Dad and told us to stay outside, to play together and on no account, absolutely no account, to come into the house. We hung about in some trees and I wondered what was going on inside. Maybe we all did.
They appeared when the sun had dropped quite a way in the afternoon sky, Dad and this woman. He touched her hand as we said goodbye and I saw how her brown eyes flashed at him. Another secret.
Back at the Wayville house that night, when Dad and Mum had gone out and I lay listening to the noises of the summer night through the screen door, I heard a sentence that was not meant for me. Grannie and Grandpa were reading in the living room, silent except for a rustling page now and then.
Suddenly, there was Grandpa’s voice, She’s an odd one, really odd.
Mmmm?
When I helped her wash up, she didn’t say anything. Just walked away.
My mother can be a lot odder than that, I thought. But I was immensely gratified that they knew. It was the only time I ever heard someone other than Dad mention it. And this one remark gave me no idea that he and Grannie knew much more, knew nearly all of it. So even though I heard Grandpa’s one small sentence, I was left still with the impression that what we were living with was so unspeakable that even they, Dad’s beloved parents, did not know any more than that she was a little odd.
The morning we piled into the Austin to leave, Grannie sniffed back her tears and stroked Dad’s arm. Grandpa stood still and straight, his feet firmly planted in the white gravel of their drive, murmuring, Good, sonny, good.
There was no sign that we wouldn’t see him again.
Six months later a telegram brought the news: there’s no hope, Grandpa’s best friend, Dr Piper, had told Grannie. At seventy-two, it was the first time Grandpa had ever been in hospital. Dad was to leave at dawn. That night, he left his desk to play with us, the only time it ever happened. He pushed the sofa back against the bookcase where the hidden books were, so that we could play marbles on the square of burgundy carpet. He stayed there, lying on the floor, lining up his marble, trying to beat Mark, our champion.
Come on, son, he’d say, let’s have another game.
He didn’t look at his desk once though I kept expecting him to.
His father died while he was playing with us. Now that I’ve read the letters that Dad wrote to his father all through his twenties and thirties, I realise he must have felt as though he’d lost the anchor in his life. Not that he ever conveyed that to us. He was our rock and we didn’t, of course, stop to think about who might be backing him up.
Just as Fred and his Christianity were causal in Dad’s left-wing politics, so it could also be argued that Fred was pivotal in Dad’s peripatetic journey into Australian history. In an Oral History interview at the National Library in 1986, Dad said: What made me interested in . . . Australian history . . . was very likely partly a simple reaction against my upbringing. Every bloody Sunday afternoon in those days my father would take me down for afternoon tea with my aunts—his elder sisters—who still remembered England [Fred came out with them when he was a toddler of three] . . . and the conversation drove me up the wall, I was bored out of my bloody mind and had to sit for hours and hours every Sunday hearing these bloody old people (as they seemed to me) talking away about England and home and the dear old country and how superior it was in every way to this brittle place they’d come to live in . . . they also talked endlessly and equally about the importance . . . of being well bred and rich, and establishment families—endless talk about who married whom . . . and implicit in all of it the deferential attitude to the rich and celebrated . . .
I love—and am caught up short every time I read it—the word ‘brittle’, conjuring as it does the sound of dry gum leaves crunching underfoot in sapping heat and the way he’s used it to encapsulate everything that was disliked about Australia by his forebears: this brittle place they’d come to live in. (I have wondered if he actually said ‘brutal’ and have listened with my ear against the speaker to the taped version, over and over, trying to pick the vowel. ‘Brutal’ would be more like him, absolute rather than poetic, but it seems the archive will carry the day: brittle it is.)
I can hear in this childhood memory of his aunts the genesis of the theory of The Legend: that ‘real’ Australians have very different attitudes, or like to think they do, from late nineteenth-century British notions of propriety such as those transmuted into the upstanding middle-class Adelaide of his parents.
As with the day I watched him sharpen the pencil, Fred was extreme in
some of his practices. The top right-hand drawer of his desk housed envelopes and stamps and each time they moved to a new school, he took the measurement of the drawer of the new desk, took to his woodwork tools and made compartments, custom-tooled sections for storing envelopes of different sizes and the container of stamps. Dad replicated this practice, though the sections he made were approximate rather than precise. I inherited Dad’s desk and I find comfort in the sections that he made because I too have always kept envelopes and stamps in the top right-hand drawer of whatever desk I am using. In this tradition, a desk without a set of drawers on the right is not a desk at all.
After Fred’s death, Dad brought home a more concrete legacy: Fred’s clothes. He began to wear suits to work rather than the sports jackets common to academia in the 1950s. I didn’t really notice at the time, but there are several documented comments from colleagues about his extraordinary apparel, as a struggling student, in these finely tailored three-piece outfits. Later, when he was applying for jobs at universities all over the country, several referees refer to his appearance as a quality which might earn him a lectureship. I can only deduce from this that it was more than hand-me-down clothes: it was also his big presence, charisma perhaps, a confidence which his privileged background enabled him to carry off with panache.
While Dad was away for Fred’s funeral, I looked at the hidden books. Mum was having her afternoon nap: I was alone and furtive. On my knees, bending over to the bottom shelf, I pulled out three books. I peered into the space and there they were, a second row in the dark. I pulled out more until the whole row was revealed. There were twelve, fifteen, twenty books—all large with dark covers. I read the gold print of the titles, intending to remember.
Dad as a PhD student, dressed in one of his father’s three-piece suits
A few years later when we moved to Armidale there were no longer any hidden books because the need to hide them had receded in lock-step with the power of Joe McCarthy in the distant USA. I couldn’t even tell which books they were because the titles had slid away again. When I was eighteen I asked him, What were those books that used to be hidden?
