Autobiography of My Mother

by Meg Stewart

  The little nun and I became great friends and I often visited her with jars of honeycomb. One day when I arrived, she was extremely agitated. ‘You know the dear old nun who did our cooking?’ she said. ‘We’ve had to send her away to a hospital.’

  ‘Why, what happened?’ I said, expecting to hear about an accident or a heart attack.

  ‘Well, she was getting forgetful, but the other night she made us a steamed pudding. We like steamed pudding, you know; it’s a bit of a treat.’ What in the world was this leading to? I wondered.

  ‘The currants were very sharp, we thought, as we took the first mouthful,’ my friend went on. ‘Instead of putting currants in the pudding, she had emptied a box of tacks into it, and that’s why the currants were sharp. It’s very sad, but we were really quite frightened for her. The only thing we could do was send her somewhere they can look after her.’

  My nun was in tears by the end of the tale. I kept a straight face and consoled her as best I could, trying not to think of the nuns sitting around the refectory table with mouths full of tacks until I was out of her company and could smile in safety.

  Other characters round the Quay I knew so well by sight that they seemed like old friends. A pensioner couple, probably in their eighties, used to sit in Macquarie Place. Early in the evenings I used to see them, a small man and a small woman approaching each other from opposite directions. He always carried a brown suitcase like a school case and she had a shopping bag. They would sit down on a bench together. The man would take out a parcel from the brown case and the women would produce a package from her bag. His had bread and butter, hers usually hard-boiled eggs or occasionally slices of cold meat. Solemnly they shared the food out. The meagre repast over, they talked animatedly for a while, then went their separate ways into the night. Their rendezvous were so regular, the couple were like clockwork figures. I loved to speculate what their story might be.

  Then there were the cat women. City strays appeared by the score from the Quay’s back lanes. It was more in the 1940s that I became friends with Mrs Bultitude and Mrs Royston, who fed the cats in Macquarie Place. A third old lady fed more cats up behind the Conservatorium, but I wasn’t on speaking terms with her.

  Mrs Bultitude was a big woman, Mrs Royston was skinny and scraggy. Mrs Royston had seen her fill of life, I felt. Mrs Bultitude was worried because Mrs Royston didn’t believe in God. She had tried to convert her, but without success. Mrs Bultitude lived at Kensington and made a most circuitous journey into the city to feed the cats. Kensington via Redfern was her daily route. She bought cheap cats’ meat at Redfern, chopped up and ready to dispense.

  Mrs Royston lived in a room at Phillip Street and fed the cats rabbit innards which she bought from the pie shop at the Quay. She was furious about the cats at the Conservatorium. ‘The most dreadful tomcats live up there,’ she said. ‘They rape the kittens.’ A rape victim was hidden in her room. Poor cat, she was practically a kitten herself, with kittens of her own. ‘She’s only a child, dear.’ Mrs Royston couldn’t forgive the tomcats. ‘Only a child.’

  Cat and kittens were secreted in Mrs Royston’s bed. Her landlady wouldn’t allow cats on the premises, but what could Mrs Royston do? The tomcats would attack the kittens as soon as look at them, and they had to be rescued.

  Mrs Royston’s face was dead white, her hair dyed blonde and straw-coloured. No matter what time of night I went past Macquarie Place, I would see her face glimmering palely like moonlight among the Moreton Bay fig trees. Bedecked in dilapidated finery, she would sit all night in Macquarie Place. It was too hot, she said, in her little Phillip Street room to sleep on summer nights.

  Mrs Royston’s wardrobe was extensive. She wore embroidered evening dresses with a feather boa or rhinestones. I remember seeing her elbow deep in a basin of blood sorting rabbits’ insides. She looked as if she were wearing long red evening gloves to match her ensemble. The cats thought she was wonderful. Macquarie Place was full of them, mewing around Mrs Royston as they waited for their rabbit. The Lands Department next to Macquarie Place had a fat ginger cat that must have belonged to the caretaker. Every night the ginger cat arrived for its share of food, along with the waifs.

  Sometimes late at night Mrs Royston roamed the Quay. One hot summer’s night she met a man who had just missed the last ferry to Neutral Bay. Mrs Royston struck up a conversation with him because he had ‘such nice socks, dear. You can always tell a gentleman by his socks.’ I don’t know what she could see of his socks in the middle of the night at Circular Quay, but Mrs Royston invited her new-found gentleman friend up to her room in Phillip Street for a cup of tea.

  ‘He must have been lonely?’ I asked.

  ‘Lonely, dear?’ Mrs Royston replied. ‘Lonely, dear? He was desperate.’ So might Mrs Royston have been.

  EIGHT

  A POCKET VENUS

  I hadn’t seen Norman Lindsay since 1930. After the drama of Redheap being banned, more fuss erupted around his etching called Self Portait when it was published in Art in Australia at the end of that year. The etching summed up how Norman was feeling about previous attacks on his work. It showed a handcuffed man crouched beneath a naked amorous couple, oblivious to his desperate situation; while all around other naked figures revelled lecherously. The next year, after the police raided Art in Australia’s offices and seized copies of the magazine, Norman and Rose fled to America, then on to England, to get away from it all.

  Now he was back, busy setting up the Endeavour Press to publish Australian novels. I met him in the street outside the Wentworth hotel where he was staying for a few days. Norman always stayed at the Wentworth when he was in town.

  Now that we were back in contact our friendship really took off. He asked me if I knew of any studios available because he wanted to start painting from the model again. Up at Springwood he was restricted, he could only have the model to stay for two or three days. If he had a studio in town he could have the models call every day and embark on a series of large oil paintings he had planned.

  George Duncan had gone off to try his luck in England. Alison had stayed behind and kept the studios on alone. But they were such a devoted couple that Alison couldn’t bear being away from George. At the end of 1933, after her show at the Macquarie Galleries, she was about to join him in London. ‘Number 12 Bridge Street’s vacant,’ I told Norman.

  I took him round and introduced him to Alison, who arranged for Norman to take over the studio as soon as she left. So in 1934 Norman Lindsay became the new tenant at 12 Bridge Street.

  Numbers 8 and 12 Bridge Street were both dark brown, three-storeyed buildings. Number 12 had a big solid carved front door that opened onto a wide cedar staircase. The studio on the second floor was next to Isa Lorrimer’s rooms. Isa was a petite redhead who taught children dance and ballet. She lived in one room and had another fitted out as a dance studio, complete with mirrors and practice bars.

  Stella Kidgell lived on the third floor. She was a draughtswoman with the Lands Department, the only one, I think. Various old ladies had previously lived in the building, including an artist who was the aunt of the poet David Campbell. A steep ladder like a ship’s ladder led from the third floor onto the roof, and as the buildings adjoined each other, once on the roof one could have walked the length of Bridge Street.

  At the top of Bridge Street was a piece of vacant land with a few trees growing on it. One year there was a plague of case moths. The case moths hung off the trees in their little bags like flowers. An extraordinary sight, city trees blooming. But their flowering was brief. The moths hatched and the trees were ruined. I’ve never forgotten the sight; it all happened so rapidly.

  The studio was actually two rooms. Alison and George hadn’t officially lived there, but Norman did. He worked and slept in the huge, high-ceilinged front room, and used the back room for storing materials, easels, canvasses, drapes for the models. The bathroom he shared with Isa Lorrimer was out on the landing.

  The front room
had a tiny stove hidden behind a screen Norman made. It was the tiniest stove I ever saw, about a foot square, with a griller on top, and more jets below which could be used like an oven, even to cook roast beef.

  The plywood screen was painted with enamels and had a rich lacquered appearance. Female forms swirled around it; at the bottom was a figure, lotus-positioned like the statue in the courtyard at Springwood, while a vermilion-saronged and turbanned black woman presided at the screen’s top. There were bookcases along one wall, with cupboards underneath to hold drawings. Norman’s bed was in another corner of the room. He slept on a couch with boxes in the bottom, a divan, really. His bedclothes were kept neatly folded in one of the drawers and I never saw any sign of a bed when I arrived at the studio in the morning.

  The model’s throne was in the centre of the room, with various other chairs scattered around. Norman was always very keen on home-made chairs. The large windows down one side let in plenty of light. Often Norman allowed Hilda and me to draw the model with him; sometimes Dora Jarret came and the three of us would be drawing away while Norman painted. His son Ray also dropped in to draw. They were great days.

  When you knocked on the door Norman would answer, his eyes sparkling with pleasure.

  ‘Come in and have a cup of tea,’ he would say. The tea would be already made and his palette laid out.

  Norman was in his mid fifties when he moved into the studio, frail-looking but relentless as far as work was concerned. He liked to start at ten; it upset him if the model was late. He would be ready, waiting and charged up at ten. Wasted time made him angry.

  Sunburned models also annoyed him. If a model had been sunbaking and came in with contrasting white and brown skin he would do a drawing and send her away. You couldn’t paint skin that wasn’t all of a piece, he said. It’s true – any artist finds it difficult to paint a banded model.

  Norman hated interruptions. He would rush to answer a knock on the door, brush in one hand, palette in the other. ‘Sorry, old man, I’m working,’ he would say and shut the door in the caller’s face.

  He stopped only briefly for a light lunch, then worked on until about three-thirty or four. Afterwards Hilda and I would clean his brushes and tidy up the studio. We didn’t mind doing this work for him; in fact we loved doing it. I also did any shopping Norman needed. Hilda, Norman and I sometimes strolled down to inspect the ships in the harbour, down George Street, round the Quay, Norman talking non-stop, up Pitt Street and back to the studio for a reviving cup of tea.

  Norman taught both of us an enormous amount; Hilda about oils, myself about watercolour. He showed me in detail his own special method of putting down a wash and how to improve my technique. He criticised my paintings constructively and I came away feeling elated, believing I might really be an artist.

  1934 was a good year as far as my own work was concerned. I had just turned twenty-five when, for the first time, I had four paintings, Red Cannas, Gloxinias, The White Jug and Delphiniums, accepted by the Australian Watercolour Institute. A reviewer in the Bulletin wrote that my Red Cannas was the best flower study in the show. Among the other artists exhibiting that year were Norman Lindsay, Rubbo, whose study of an old man was called An Old Buffer this time, Grace Cossington Smith and a very young Donald Friend.

  The next year I had six paintings hung and Ray Lindsay sung my praises in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Margaret Coen’s flower paintings strike a distinctly original note, with the freshness of their handling and the confidence with which she tackles the most brilliant colour arrangements.’ Very flattering.

  That same year I also had a watercolour called Camellias, priced at six guineas, in the Society of Artists annual exhibition, which included a travelling exhibition of paintings by famous French artists such as Matisse, Dufy, Pissarro and Monet.

  Towards the end of the afternoon at the studio, visitors arrived. I usually came over about this time if I hadn’t been drawing at the studio during the day. I first met Norman’s brother Percy in the studio. Percy in his spotless white was charming and gentlemanly. He won everyone’s heart. The brothers were similar in appearance and mannerisms, particularly the rapid way they spoke, but Percy was stronger-looking and far more easygoing. Beaming, full of good humour and stories, he was always relaxed.

  The Bulletin offices were just around the corner from Bridge Street at 252 George Street. The literary Bulletin boys would appear for a cup of tea. Norman never drank; alcohol disagreed with him, he said. Norman’s flame burned too bright, I think, for him to need extra stimulants. A cup of tea and talk would light up his eyes as fast as any alcohol.

  Everyone was writing a novel in those days, it seemed. I would stay spellbound listening to the talk until six and could hardly bear to leave. Norman had boundless enthusiasm for new projects. Words spilled out of him; he loved encouraging any artistic endeavour.

  Brian Penton was a late afternoon regular, a slight figure with black hair and very black, wicked eyes; his malicious, lively expression marked a wit as black as his eyes. He had already written his sardonic historical novel, Landtakers, and was beginning a second, The Inheritors.

  Brian was keen that the Endeavour Press would succeed because he was fed up with his career in journalism and wanted to become a full-time writer. But when The Inheritors was finished, it didn’t have the impact of Landtakers. He accepted the editorship of the Telegraph and the large salary and yacht that went with it. There were no more novels from Brian and the slim young man became the corpulent figure Dobell painted years later. But it was the slender young man, the passionate talker with the flashing eyes, who entertained us in the afternoons at 12 Bridge Street.

  Brian came into the studio once and saw some studies for one of Norman’s big paintings, Don Juan or The Amazons.

  ‘Good heavens, Norman, you’re painting Australian girls at last,’ he exclaimed. Like many others, Brian thought that because Norman’s settings were fanciful, the women in his compositions weren’t real either, that the women Norman painted were figments of his imagination. Norman’s women were all very much alive and real.

  At Rubbo’s soon after I left school, I first heard of a model posing for Norman Lindsay. A model named Peggy used to pose for Rubbo’s class. Michael Arlen’s book The Green Hat – a romantic satire set in post-war London – had taken the town by storm. Peggy intrigued us innocents by always appearing in an enormous green hat similar to the one worn by the woman in the story.

  Rubbo was irate one day because Peggy was late for posing. She was due at ten, finally she arrived at half past eleven.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Rubbo raged.

  Peggy told him she had been up at Springwood posing for Norman Lindsay. Coming down on the train, Peggy said, her green hat blew off. She had to get off at the next stop to retrieve it, hence her lateness. That was my introduction to Norman’s models.

  At Rubbo’s I also met the red-haired and creamy-skinned Doreen Hubble. Doreen was a treat to draw after my struggling for six weeks at a time with ancient male models such as Petit. Doreen posed for everyone: Thea Proctor, Victor Mann and the Society of Women Artists who met once a week in the Queen Victoria Building and who tastefully swathed her in tulle. She posed for us at Alison and George’s sketch club and also for Norman up at Springwood.

  Norman was not the only artist in Australia who painted the nude. A woman artist, Janet Agnes Cumbrae Stewart, did magnificent pastel nudes and of course Julian Ashton had painted the famous nudes that hung in the marbled bar of what used to be the old Adams Hotel in Pitt Street, a favourite bohemian hangout. A Melbourne artist, Charles Wheeler, also made his reputation painting nudes, but Norman said he cheated, since he only did back views.

  Norman attributed his artistic inheritance to his grandfather Williams. Grandpa Williams was a Wesleyan missionary in Fiji who wrote and illustrated a book about Fiji. He drew the landscape and the women without any missionary qualms or scruples. Grandpa Williams’s Fijian women were never overdressed.

/>   When he was about five, Norman was taken to the Ballarat Art Gallery where he was shown a painting, Ajax and Cassandra, by an artist named Solomon J. Solomon. Ajax and Cassandra deeply impressed the slight blue-eyed boy who stared up at the massive painted canvas – Ajax striding ahead with the flimsily draped Cassandra held high in his arms. Norman started drawing the nude after he saw that painting. He began at the age of five, and I don’t think he ever stopped.

  I knew all the models from the Royal Art and the different sketch clubs so when Norman took the studio in town I arranged for them to come in and pose for him. I didn’t have the telephone on at 38A Pitt Street; if Norman was in a hurry for a model, I just went out to her home and fetched her. The models were so familiar to us, we were like members of a big family.

  Rita was, of course, Norman’s favourite and most famous model of this period. ‘Buttery-coloured’ he called Rita’s skin tones. Rita’s father was Chinese, her mother Spanish. Rita said he made her feel like the Queen of Sheba sitting on the dais surrounded by luxurious drapes. I didn’t introduce Norman to Rita; she was posing at Joe Hollaway’s sketch club and someone brought her round from there. However, I was at the studio the first time Norman drew her. She came with her mother.

  Rita’s mother liked to meet the artists for whom her daughter posed. The mother was just as beautiful as the daughter: older and a little careworn, but beautiful. I’ve always regretted that I didn’t ask Rita’s mother if I could draw her that day.

  Rita of the Nineties is one of Norman’s most famous paintings of Rita. Rita remembers Norman taking her up to Henderson’s in Pitt Street to buy the material for the dress; this was during the war and he had saved up his food coupons to pay for it. Henderson’s store was well known for its speciality dress materials. Norman chose plum-coloured taffeta with enough for a matching hat. Rita later wore the dress to an Artists’ Ball, the one to which Percy Lindsay came as a Roman in a toga.