Nance’s father, Bert, about 1908. ‘Dad was very flashy in his young days. Mum once told me he always had to have the best horse on the place and he kept her in kid gloves. That would be Dad’s idea of being up with them. He’d have no idea that that was just being silly.’
Frank (left) and Nance, about 1914. ‘Frank and I were great mates, but one night when the 1914 war was on we were fighting and I said, Well I’m glad I’m not a boy, you’ll have to go and fight in the war! He was very angry and said bugger and I—horrible prig that I must have been—told on him and he got into trouble.’
The Wahroonga grocery. ‘Dad often told the story of the rich people around Wahroonga, driving down in their horse and carriage looking for sugar and that kind of thing, and he’d butter himself up to them. He had a nice manner, they thought he was wonderful.’
Reproduced courtesy of the Ku-ring-gai Historical Society.
Max, Nance and Frank, about 1924. ‘Newtown in those days was regarded as an unsavoury quarter as Mum expressed it so I was too delicate to go to a day school there. I was at the convent and used to come home to Newtown in the holidays.’
Nance and Frank, about 1923. ‘Frank and I were boarded out in Temora. He was luckier than I was: he stayed with a very nice woman, the local photographer. But for me they were awful years.’
Nance, front row, third from right, St George Girls’ High School, 1925. ‘I went to many different schools, but in the desert of waste amidst the busy craze to make money I had eighteen months at a magnificent school. Everything that mattered I learned there.’
The Russells of the Caledonian, 1927: Nance, Max, Bert, Dolly, unknown. ‘It was the first freehold hotel they’d bought. They mortgaged everything to buy it. So many lives were changed by that decision. Most people don’t have those choices, but my parents had made money by buying and selling hotels in a boom time when it was easy if you had the courage to try. Nothing had gone wrong in the last ten years and they thought it was all their own clever doing.’
The backyard at the Cally, 1927. From left: Frank, Bert, unknown, Nance, unknown. ‘Frank had already made it clear that he would have nothing to do with the hotel. Of course Dad and Mum should have bought a property instead of a hotel, that they could have all worked together.’
Peel River, 1927. From left: Frank, Esme, Nance, Una, Max, unknown, Bert.
Tamworth, 1929. From left: Max, Nance, unknown, Maggie Glendon, Frank. ‘It was my first encounter with a lot of boys and I liked it. They made a fuss of me because I had come from Sydney and I suppose seemed exotic. Sixty or seventy years ago, you just talked to boys, that was about it. If they kissed you, that was going really a long way.’
Dolly, 1929. ‘My mother had a power over us all that I still find hard to understand. She was not a woman of rational mind at all. She used to get into these fearful rages. I think she was always a little bit funny. Dad always said there was streak of it in the Wisemans.’
Nance at the Enmore Pharmacy, 1930. ‘Pharmacy was seven days a week and a fortnight’s holiday a year. It was absolute slavery. I can’t tell you how much I hated it. But when I dared to voice a very mild and nervous complaint I was quickly reminded how lucky I was—after all, I had a job.’
Materia Medica, 1931: students and instructors.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Sydney Archives (G3/224/1854).
On the Hawkesbury, 1931: Nance on right, Meg Naughton centre. ‘Some of us from the hostel would go out together on a Sunday—it didn’t cost you anything, only your fare. But I had to watch the time because I’d have to be back in the shop at six o’clock.’
Nance in clothes swapped with Rete and Molly, 1932. ‘It was the very depths of the Depression, and getting dressed up probably meant putting another pair of shoes on. Clothes were something you couldn’t think about. If you started to feel you wanted clothes you got a bit downhearted.’
At Bondi Beach, about 1938. ‘I could have married Wal, or Jake. I was considering both but without really loving them.’
Nance at Manly with her apprentice, 1936.
Leaving Certificate class, Fort Street Boys’ High 1932.
Kenneth Grenville Gee at far left of front row.
NANCE with one of her admirers, 1939.
Sergeant Walter Maxwell Russell, 1940. ‘When the war started, Max joined the Army and went to the Middle East. There was all that business with Crete and he was wounded there. Then he got typhoid. We thought he was going to die.’
Bombardier Frank Alexander Russell, 1940. ‘Mum made Frank feel terrible about not being at the war. He was still here and Max was going to die. So he joined up. If it hadn’t been for her, he wouldn’t have gone to the war.
Captain Charles Gledhill, 1941. ‘As usual, telling someone what to do.’
Ken, Nance and Christopher, 1941.
Nance and Christopher, 1942.
Stephen and Christopher at Mona Vale Beach, about 1946.
Frank’s last message, 1944.
‘In his will—clever man—Frank left the farm to Dad. He was clever enough to realise that Mum would go and sell it. Dad worked hard and put all he could into it. If Frank had come back it would have been to a good property.’
At the Mad Half Mile, 1944. Dolly and Christopher third from left, Ken holding Stephen. ‘It was quite a little community down at Mona Vale. It was only a little area and I think everybody knew everybody else’s business. I didn’t realise it at the time, but looking back I think they probably did.’
Bungan Beach, painted by Weaver Hawkins, 1946.
Dolly, 1947. ‘When I started the pharmacy, Mum promised to stay. She’d always be there, look after the children, do everything. But I hardly had the pharmacy going a few months when she said, Oh no, I can’t stay here!’
Nance with Stephen, Christopher and neighbours, and the longed-for bricks, 1947.
‘Clem Seale lived nearby—he was an artist on one of the papers and did a pen and ink drawing of the house—I think he only charged something like ten pounds, and that reluctantly.’
The Sun newspaper, 1947. ‘They took a photo of me on the roof—they wanted me to show that all you had to do was nail it. They didn’t say how hard the nailing was, though!’
Reproduced courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales.
Ken, Nance, Stephen and Christopher on the verandah of the new house, 1948.
Nance with her assistant in the Balgowlah pharmacy, 1954.
Nance, on left, with a friend in the city, 1958.
Uluru, 1959. Nance on right, Bill Harney centre.
1965: Nance’s first travel beyond Australia, aged fifty-three.
BA (Hons), University of Sydney, 1968.
Nance aged eighty-four.
POSTSCRIPT
ONE OF my earliest memories is of watching my mother in a white coat weighing babies on the scales near the door of her second pharmacy. The shop was always busy. I’d sit on the floor behind the counter and get through most of a packet of barley sugar before she had time to notice. She’d be weighing the babies, typing up the labels for medicine bottles, going out the back to grind something in the mortar, inspecting someone’s rash, putting the thermometer in someone’s mouth.
I was born at Mona Vale in 1950, the year Ken became a Crown Prosecutor. Nance was thirty-eight. Two years later, when Christopher was eleven and Stephen was nine, the family moved to North Sydney, closer to the city, where the good high schools were. A year or two later Nance saw the opportunity to start a pharmacy in the new shopping centre at North Balgowlah.
It lasted longer than the one at Newport had, about two years. Again it was the lack of child care that beat her. She had a partner, a young man who was supposed to take over from her at two o’clock so she could pick me up from school. At first he got there on time but after a while he became unreliable. I remember the days she was late. The teacher would have to wait with me at the school gate. Everyone else would have gone home and the playground would have a frightening
empty look. The teacher would be cranky. Over my head I’d hear her sigh and complain to another teacher, Mrs Gee’s late again. I’d be swallowing back the tears. One terrible afternoon it grew so late that I had to be taken into the staff room, full of cigarette smoke and unwelcoming faces.
There was no after-school care in 1955 because mothers weren’t thought of as people who went out to work. Actually, quite a few did. But, no matter how many of them there were, they were somehow exceptions. Nothing was made easy for them and they had to make whatever improvised arrangements they could. For Nance the difficulties were compounded by the fact that the business was hers and its success or failure was up to her.
In the end she sold the pharmacy. She never let me see how much she regretted having to do it. It’s only now that I can imagine what a narrowing of her life it was, to turn from being a successful businesswoman back to home duties.
Still, she threw herself into being an at-home mother. She helped us with our homework, made us practise the piano, sewed most of our clothes, organised birthday parties for us. She played hostess for Ken’s colleagues at cocktail parties and dinners, learning new ways of cooking from Oh, for a French Wife! which among other things explained that it was the CO2 and the volatile oils in a martini that made it work. That appealed to the pharmacist in her.
As a mother she was energetic, loving, bossy, sometimes embarrassing. She made us wear hats and zinc cream decades before melanoma was a word everyone knew. Made us eat Vogel’s bread when it was still an eccentric little brick that came in a cellophane wrapper with a picture of ancient but healthy Dr Vogel. Our dentist was a heavily accented Viennese man whose family had been in the death camps. Dr Raubitschek didn’t have an assistant, so my mother would stand beside the chair mixing up the old-fashioned mercury amalgam on a little glass block. She’d take off her wedding ring first, and I remember the pleasure she took in explaining the chemistry that caused mercury to destroy gold.
When I was nine she went on a tour, organised by a group of pharmacists, to what was then called Ayer’s Rock. Central Australia wasn’t a place many tourists went to in 1959. It was hard to get to, the conditions were primitive, and most Australians couldn’t see why you’d bother. They’d rather go to London.
It was a trip that changed her thinking about the place she called home.
She’d been proud of being fifth-generation Australian, but in the Centre she saw people who were five-hundredth- or five-thousandth-generation Australian. In the country towns where she’d grown up there’d been people of Aboriginal descent all around her, but this was the first time she’d been aware of Indigenous people living on their traditional country, speaking their own languages.
Bill Harney, the ranger at the Rock, told the group his version of some Aboriginal stories about the place. That cleft in the Rock was the place where the Great Earth Mother had struck it with her digging stick, he said. Nance looked where he was pointing and saw the water seeping down the rock. That was the very water that the Great Earth Mother had brought forth. It wasn’t just a story. It was a reality still written on the landscape.
Out there away from the towns and cities there was no escaping the reality that Australia had belonged to the Indigenous people, and in some sense it always would. Every rock and every seep of water had its story, like a title deed. Then men and women like her forebears had come in and taken it all for themselves. In 1959 that wasn’t something people talked about, but from then on whenever our family went for a picnic to some glorious bit of bush she’d look around and say, This must have been paradise for the Aborigines before we came along. It was her way of acknowledging what she’d learned in the Centre, and of trying to make us aware of it too.
She wrote a piece about her trip, planning to send it to a magazine. Among her papers there are several drafts in which you can sense her trying to process an experience too deep to be immediately understood. There’s no final copy and it was never published. Going to the Centre had been a life-changing experience, but not one that she could find the right words for.
She brought back a few souvenirs: a small piece of the Rock, a rough boomerang that she’d seen return to the hand of the man who’d thrown it, a matchbox full of red dirt, and a book of ‘Dreamtime Stories’ retold for children. She was upset that I found those stories dull. Now I see that she was trying to share what she’d experienced.
Years later she and I were clearing out a cupboard and came across the piece of Uluru, a small shard of rough red stone that seemed still warm from the sun. We both knew it should go back to where it belonged. We didn’t go so far as to return it to Uluru, but we went out to the bush and laid it on the ground under a tree. I often think of it there, under rain and sun, the mark of two people blundering towards some kind of understanding.
Dolly came to live with us for good when I was about five. I remember her as a thin, cranky, frightening old woman. I never saw her smile.
Her years of smoking finally caught up with her and at the end of 1959 she died. The complicated relationship Nance had always had with her—part war, part love, all longing—was caught in the inscription she chose for her mother’s plaque. It was just one word: PAX. Peace, of course. Under that, like a note so deep only some ears might hear it, was the idea of truce and, behind that, forgiveness.
Bert went on living alone at Green Hills into his eighties. Then one day he was out in the paddock and the sheep he was holding was struck by lightning. The sheep more or less evaporated and Bert was knocked unconscious. When he came to, he went inside and made a cup of tea. Ken joked that even the Almighty couldn’t finish him off, but it was a sign that the old man couldn’t go on forever at the farm.
When he came to live with us, one of the things he brought with him was the pair of sheep shears that had made him, in his young days, a gun shearer. He brought them out one day to show me: dull grey metal, all one piece, oiled and wrapped in a bit of cloth. His huge hands effortlessly closed and opened the blades. When I tried, even using both hands, the sprung steel was too strong for me. I couldn’t imagine how you’d bend over a sheep, lock it between your knees, and slice those blades through the fleece for hour after hour.
Dolly and Bert were as strange to me as if they were from another planet. They made my mother strange to me too. This scary old woman and this big rough old man were her mother and father, but there was no way to put my Latin-using, poetry-quoting mother together with these old people with their foreign ways.
Nance had just turned fifty when she started an arts degree, majoring in French and Italian. At first the university course was for the sake of the study itself. She’d given herself a home-made education in English literature. Now, with old age and death around the corner, she wanted to discover the mighty works of human understanding that lay locked behind other languages. She was looking for a way to find meaning. Not in God and the carrot-and-stick of the afterlife, but in grasping the hand of another spirit who’d travelled the same path. Death was still at the end of that path. But, through art, you died having had full consciousness of your life.
Her first assignment in French was to write a one-page essay, L’histoire de ma vie. She told me she laughed aloud when the lecturer wrote the title on the blackboard and everyone turned to look at this old woman laughing at the idea of putting her fifty years on one page. Her essay came back embroidered all over with remarks in tiny red writing. ‘Environ is based on a pleonastic and slovenly use of about: if you say about five it is idle to add or six, because six is about five.’ She was ready to give up, thought she’d left it too late to learn. Then she realised the young girl next to her was in tears. Her essay was almost hidden under the mass of scornful little red words. Nance pushed her own paper along so the girl could see. Nice new red pen, she said. He wanted to get his money’s worth.
I’ve still got some of her French and Italian texts in which, against all the rules she’d been taught, she wrote in the margins. Le Lac: new attitude towards Nature. Ne
w element is movement, flowing H2O. Her thumbed copy of Les Fleurs du mal is thick with her comments. Beside those famous lines Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté she’s written: Here as opposed to there reign disorder, ugliness, poverty, restlessness and pain. Poet has to suffer but his words will live on.
In Molière she found a grittier, wittier fellowship. When one of Molière’s self-deluding characters—a would-be writer—says modestly that he hopes his style is fine enough, she recognised another writer closer to home. Her note here is in the tiniest writing, as if her husband might overhear: Yes, very happy picture of a proud author.
In the same way that she’d memorised Keats and Shakespeare and made them her own, she learned by heart the famous opening of Dante’s Inferno:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
(In the middle of the journey of our life,
I found myself in a dark wood,
where the straight path was lost.)
Of all the writers she studied, Proust spoke to her most personally. Here was a dying man, racing against illness to get his great work done, because in the shadow cast by mortality he had to confront the biggest question of all, the same one she’d dimly grasped the night she’d decided not to step in front of the Enmore tram. His answer was that if life was the wound, art was its healer, because art was the wound shared.
One Life Page 18
