The Everlasting Secret Family

by Frank Moorhouse

  Next morning, as I was going to breakfast, I stopped a Malaysian college student in the hallway and asked him if he knew Dirk Hansen, the student who usually occupied the room I was in.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Oh he’s a real old guy.”

  “How old—thirty, forty?”

  “Really old, a mature-age student.”

  “As old as me?”

  He looked at me, laughed nervously, realising that he may have been tactless, “Yes, as old as you, maybe older slightly.”

  It was the Dirk who was in the letters. Dirk of the letters was the student in whose bed I now slept.

  “Is that all, sir?”

  “Yes, thanks. Thank you.”

  SOME BACKGROUND TO DIRK’S LETTERS

  Why the Dutch Airforce was in Australia

  Members and planes of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army Air Force came to Australia in 1942 fleeing from the Japanese. A squadron of Mitchell bombers known as the 18 Squadron worked within the RAAF mainly out of Batchelor in the Northern Territory (where Pieter was stationed). RAAF personnel served with the Dutch but the stricter standards of discipline and hygiene kept by the Dutch led to disagreements and bitterness between them. Many Australians asked for transfers from the Dutch and their Mitchell bombers.

  The Mitchell Bomber

  A medium bomber named after William “Billy” Mitchell, an American pioneer of aerial warfare. Mitchell, who died in 1936, advocated separation of the airforce from the army and foresaw the use of strategic bombing and mass airborne use of troops and the decline in naval status. These views made him unpopular with naval and army hierarchy and he was eventually court-martialled for expressing public criticism of his superiors. He was suspended, at the rank of Brigadier General, in 1926 and resigned. By the time of the Second World War he was seen as a farsighted and outstanding military thinker and the bomber was named after him. The Mitchell bombers used by the Dutch in Australia were eventually given to the Indonesians and were used against the Timorese in the recent fighting.

  The Broome Incident

  For a time in 1942 Broome was the entry port for European refugees from Southeast Asia. During one fortnight 8000 people were landed there. In March 1942, nine Japanese Zeroes came in at 500 feet and strafed the aerodrome and harbour for a quarter of an hour, destroying twenty-four aircraft including a fleet of flying boats and killing seventy people. The allied pilots at Broome had been warned that this could happen and had been told always to have their planes off the ground by daylight. The pilots had considered attack too unlikely.

  C.E.M. Joad

  Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, born in 1891, was a philosophy lecturer, wrote books and was known as a radio personality. He was a pacifist and agnostic and strenuously advocated these positions until 1940 when he became, surprisingly, a propagandist for the war effort and a public Christian. He was educated at Blundell’s where he was head boy of the Classic Sixth. He went to Oxford where he was known as a buffoon. He eventually became head of the Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. Among other positions which he publicly advocated were the abolition of all censorship, the sterilisation of the “feeble minded”, the right to walk on agricultural land, the banning of motor cars. He studiously cultivated an interest in food and drink after being criticised as “unworldly” and he thought women poor conversationalists because they could not take ideas “lightly or casually”.

  Toc H

  A non-denominational Christian organisation begun in the First World War to give relaxation to the troops. It was begun by the Rev. “Tubby” Clayton, an Australian, and the Rev. Newell Talbot. The name came from a club, at first called Talbot House and then Toe H, which was the signaller code for the letters “T” and “H”. Tubby Clayton took the idea into civilian life after the war and the organisation interested itself in libraries for children, toys for poor children, and created the first blood transfusion service in Australia. Toe H invented the “lazy letter” for soldiers, which required only the crossing out of the inapplicable line, so “I will/will not be home on leave”, “I have/have not received your letter”. Tubby Clayton loved dogs and Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts gave him permission to call his cocker spaniel “Smuts”. When Smuts, the dog, was killed by a truck the Queen Mother summoned Tubby Clayton and presented him with a golden cocker named Bill. Tubby Clayton hoped that Toc H would eventually be as great as scouting.

  Man the Unknown

  This book was written by Alexis Carrel (1873—1944) in 1935 and became a world-wide bestseller and a much discussed book. Carrel was a French surgeon and biologist, and winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine after devising a method of suturing blood vessels which laid the ground work for organ transplanting and made blood transfusions possible (and saved Pieter’s life). He was also internationally known for having kept human tissue alive artificially for thirty years—the tissue, in fact, was kept living after Carrel died. The book Man the Unknown was a work of social theory. In it he advocated rule by an intelligent elite which would supervise the mental health of the world and correct errors made by democratic systems. He believed in euthanasia and extermination of the “feeble minded” and criminals by gas. With the fall of France to the Nazis he worked as Director of a Foundation for the Study of Human Relations under the Vichy government financed by the Nazis. He was accused of collaboration and of advocating the elimination of the biologically unfit but died and was never brought to trial. His book was attacked in the thirties by feminists for giving an inferior status to women.

  An American Tea

  A small fete held by churches in the forties and fifties. The principle was “to bring a gift and buy a gift”.

  Romano’s

  A well-known, elegant Sydney restaurant of the forties and fifties styled after the London restaurant of the same name. It had a French menu with dancing in the evening to Romano’s orchestra. It was fashionable to be photographed at lunch at Romano’s by the newspapers. Marijke and Pieter, of course, never got there.

  IMOGENE

  CONTINUED

  DANCE OF THE CHAIRS

  Fun and games began the second day, after we had broken into smaller working groups, as distinct from the “plenary”—a reforming victory from the UNESCO conference two years ago but not, thank god, called “self-initiating project groups”. About forty of us, including some from the Third World, some from the Fourth World, and me from Balmain, formed our working group.

  After an initial session we stopped for coffee but upon resuming we found the chairs in the room rearranged. For a while I couldn’t find my conference satchel (a nasty feeling) but we sorted ourselves out in silence among the strayed chairs.

  The discussion leader for the working session, Peter Roy, an academic, some kind of marxist, said that he’d changed the chairs because, “it was too much a confrontation situation the way it was, with speakers out here at the front and you out there. So we changed them to circular formation.”

  Charles cried out. He was a quarterly magazine editor who poked about conferences affecting to hate them. “You might have asked.”

  “Well, the other arrangement was one none of us had agreed upon,” Roy said calmly.

  “I won’t be told how to sit,” Charles said.

  “History was telling you how to sit, friend,” Roy’s woman colleague said, her feet up on the back of an empty chair, eating a chocolate.

  “At least historical convention has some neutrality to it,” Charles said. “I don’t want to be mucked about.”

  He grumphed.

  The session generally was bemused. It looked around at itself.

  Roy’s woman colleague said that the historical arrangement of chairs embodied “feudal concepts”.

  “The only thing these chairs embody,” Charles said, getting some laughs, “is our backsides.”

  “No,” she said, chomping away on her chocolate, “you’re
wrong—they also embody your demeanour. The old arrangement was priest/pulpit, professor and subservient student—all that. There is behavioural direction in the way a room is arranged.”

  “That’s janitorial thinking,” Charles said.

  Roy said that the circular arrangement was “conciliar”. “Well, make up your minds,” Charles said, carrying it through. “One of you says the old arrangement was submissive and one says it’s confrontal.”

  “Let’s stop wasting time,” someone said. “Confrontation is what it’s all about,” Charles said. “You come to a conference to find your enemies.”

  “Let’s get on with it.”

  “And anyhow,” Roy said, not leaving well enough alone, “I reject the status of discussion leader. But yes, let’s get on with the session.”

  “Yes let’s,” someone else called.

  Markham, an increasingly eccentric academic in his early forties, rose up in his ridiculous wide-brimmed black hat and in a voice which could be called Academic Playful said, “Sirs, ladies, good people all, manners alone requireth us to accede to the request of those running the session, to accept graciously with goodwill their preferred arrangement.”

  No one took any notice.

  Charles was arguing with someone over his shoulder. I’d asked Markham about the hat on the way in and he’d told me that he felt it was a way of “fighting the heavy magic of the institutionalised university”. He said he was using the “fool’s magic” against them.

  Roy said, “I won’t act as chairperson either.”

  Babbling talk had broken out.

  “Sirs, good people . . .” Markham tried again.

  “It’s feudal,” Roy’s woman colleague said without looking up.

  Bisi, a flamboyant African attached to the conference as an observer, threw aside his observer status and shouted, “Order!”

  He came into the centre in his kaftan, both hands raised in a placating gesture. “I will chair.”

  “Microphones too,” Roy said, as though remembering things he had meant to say earlier. “Microphones mystify the role . . .”

  “Order!” Bisi said to Roy and Roy stopped. “Is this the topic of this session?” Bisi read out the topic. He made Roy answer yes.

  “Well, let us begin.”

  He’d never have got away with it had he been white. We untangled ourselves and Roy gave his short paper, which was quite good, although he overprotected himself by saying at the beginning and the end of the paper that it was “a workshop paper and not for citation”. Discussion did not return to the matter of the chairs.

  At the lunch break we got up and, as we were moving out, Charles grabbed my arm. “Help me rearrange the chairs.”

  “Oh come on,” I laughed, “let’s go and eat.”

  “No. I’m not going to be made sit like a radical.” “You’re making too much out of it,” I said, “and they’re right.”

  “Crap. I’m not going to let them get away with claiming a superior political consciousness. And they’re reds.” “Reds! Christ, Charles, reds these days means clarets.” “Communists, marxists. Reds.”

  Charles went about rearranging the chairs.

  “Okay, let’s get it done,” I said reluctantly. “I wanted a counter lunch not a counter revolution.”

  The changing of the chairs got a laugh when we came back in the afternoon.

  “At least it proves that the arrangement of the chairs matters to some people,” Roy said, scoring.

  Charles leaned across to me and said, “I don’t like my marxists to have a sense of humour.”

  That was not the end of the chairs.

  That night there was a wine and cheese party and a few of the visitors from the Pacific islands read poems.

  “Thank god, white man,

  You have educated me,

  Filled with your knowledge Almost to the brim,

  But leave me some space Space for my own purposes.”

  What space was left after the day’s knowledge most of us used for wine. I volunteered after the readings to hand around the cheese as a way of having something to do and getting to meet people.

  I made up a joking litany as I took around the cheese. “This cheese I cut with my own hand and this cheese the shining machines of my father made and this cheese from the cows of my brothers who married on to the land made, and this cheese the thieving John Smith hauled to market in the city and I left the land and went to the market and wrote down the prices that the farmers got for the labour of their hands and the fruit of their lands.”

  Harriet, a Maori poet, heard my piece and, taking some cheese, said through a contained smile, “How cleverly you go on but you make fun of our simple verses.”

  “No—it’s true—the cheese is from my home town, my father built the cheese factories. And yes, I was making fun.”

  “And what is it that you’re writing now? On what do you work?”

  “Oh, I’m obsessed at present with what might be called ‘exclusive groups’, people who live a certain way or believe certain things that they don’t want to be made public, don’t want others to know. I think we’re more and more like that.”

  “You think of the Masons?”

  “Well, I suppose that’s what people think of but, oh, revolutionaries, sects, religious sects including some aboriginals. Sexually aberrant clubs and secret societies. Elitist groups like the Camden Group and maybe the Pacific Institute and so on.”

  I realised I was going on too long and that she might not know of these groups.

  “And he lies,” Charles broke in, coming over, stuffing himself with cheese and pointing at me, “about his parents—his father was a professional gambler and his mother ran a literary salon which included Stein and Maddox Ford and others and I don’t understand the bit about taking down the prices that the farmers got ‘for the labour of their hands and the fruit of their lands’.”

  “I was a cadet reporter on market rounds.”

  “Oh.”

  He took a long drink.

  “Oh yes, writers and their ever-touted colourful life as cub reporters. But that’s a passing style—‘dropped out and surfed the east coast for three years, lived in Marrakesh’—that’s the biographical note now.”

  Harriet looked to Charles and then to me and, touching my arm, said softly, “Whoever you are and wherever you come from, you mustn’t use your bright spear against us.” She smiled.

  I wanted to assure her that I did come from a cheese-making family and that I wasn’t playing games with her, but she was lost in the swirl of the party.

  I stood there with a plate of cheese and coloured onions and was hit by a dreadful recollection about cheese and biscuits and aboriginals. It stopped me there, plate in hand. I was at a land rights meeting in a school on the coast and the supper had been prepared by the tribal council. When it came to supper time I was offered biscuits and cheese, took one and was then unable to put it in my mouth. The inhibition was too strong. I had grown up believing blacks were dirty. I had gone on with the conversation there in the school room, holding the biscuit and cheese for some time in my hand, occasionally bringing it to my mouth but unable to let my lips touch it. I had gone eventually to the verandah of the school and thrown the biscuit out into the night.

  I put down my plate of conference savouries, having done my act of service and feeling no virtue.

  The party dwindled.

  The non-drinkers left including, perversely, Cindy, old friend, a heavy drinker who had on the night of the first official party declared that she was having a dry night. Then the light drinkers left, leaving behind unfinished sentences, drifting conversations and the fallen streamers of gaiety, and those of us who stayed on drinking filled the spaces left with louder noise.

  At about 1 a.m. those who remained were men, and the men gathered first into threes and fours, and then grouped towards the centre of the emptied lecture room, which was desecrated by spilled drink and littered with my cheese. Those of us who r
emained were holding out for the unexpected. The diminishing possibility of what? Sexual pleasure was now remote. Going on to “another place” to renew the possibility of the unexpected? The unimaginable experience? Failing all that, I suppose there was alcoholic oblivion with companions. One of the solaces, I suppose.

  Then there were six of us.

  Four whites and two blacks—Bisi, the African, and John Kovave from PNG.

  Then Bisi with a shout said, “Who is the chairman!” and lifted a chair by one hand straight up, holding it by the leg, holding it above his head.

  Without a word spoken, and for no obvious reason, the whites each lifted a chair by the leg and held it above their head. John Kovave followed but I thought he was joining in rather than, as the whites were doing, accepting a challenge.

  It was, as Bisi’s one remark suggested, a joke on the events of the day with the chairs, but it had more to it, something of a contest among drinking men, officers’ mess misbehaviour.

  We stood there facing each other in a rough circle and I thought to myself, I will not be the first to put down this chair. I am tenacious, I am anglo-saxon, and I have an anglo-saxon will.

  We stood there, holding the chairs above our heads.

  Bisi then let out a war cry, yes, a war cry. Swahili maybe.

  Two of the whites began a school football chant, poorly remembered, which listed the wild animals of Australia.

  The chairs still held high with one hand. Drinks now empty.

  Bisi continued the challenge. “I will pour the drinks, gentlemen,” and, holding unwaveringly his chair above him, he put down his glass, picked up an unopened flagon, twisted it open with one hand, breaking the seal with two fingers and, holding the flagon neck with three fingers, deftly poured it into our glasses without any spill.