by Meg Stewart
‘All right,’ I said.
I grabbed the painting and walked out, with no intention of going back. I should have known better. It wasn’t a commercial-looking portrait, it didn’t look like the cover of a Women’s Weekly, and the delicate colours would probably have been difficult to reproduce.
Who cares? I thought. At least I had my integrity.
Friends reported back to me that the editor couldn’t understand my behaviour – I had brought in this beautiful watercolour and then stormed off in a huff when he proposed some minor alterations. They said he wanted me to bring the portrait back in so that something could be worked out. But there was no way I or my painting would ever be in his office again.
Although I had been exhibiting now since 1934 and my paintings had started to sell, I couldn’t have lived or paid the rent on what I made. But it was heartening to receive some recognition. I had the additional thrill during this period of having Howard Hinton, the collector, buy several of my pictures.
The day before any exhibition opened, the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales went through the show to see if they wanted to purchase a painting. Then neatly moustached, bespectacled Howard Hinton quietly made his selection. Having Howard Hinton buy a painting was a real honour; it meant you had arrived as an artist or were about to arrive. He acquired ten of my works, in all, between 1933 and 1944, for the Armidale Teachers’ Collection, which is now part of the New England Regional Art Museum (and another was donated anonymously, as well).
The Sydney Mail reproduced a painting I did of Norman’s model Michael dressed in a top hat and frilled shirt, which was also prestige of a kind. On the same page there was a write-up of a circus painting of mine. The picture was called Elephants in Woolloomooloo; strictly speaking, it should have been Elephants at the Back of Oxford Street.
Behind Buckingham’s store in Oxford Street was a big open space where every year Wirth’s Circus put up its tent. I had been a circus fan since I saw my first circus in Yass and whenever the circus came to town I painted it. Every day for weeks I went there sketching.
At the entrance of the main tent was a sort of zoo; people could look at the animals in their cages before the show. I was drawing the lions and one of them kept roaring its head off. I wondered what was wrong. Then one of the four Wirth girls came back from shopping in town.
‘What’s the matter, Prince?’ she asked.
Prince was missing Miss Wirth; that’s what the matter had been. He stopped complaining the moment she spoke. Miss Wirth went over to the cage and scolded him affectionately through the bars. Prince didn’t exactly purr, but he did behave like the family’s favourite cat greeting a long-lost owner.
The biggest excitement of these years was my exhibition, my own ‘one-man’ exhibition, as it was called. I was twelve months preparing for it. I worked very hard because I wanted to show Beatrice McCaughey I had not been wasting her money. I did far more paintings than the thirty-three that were finally hung. Most of them were of flowers such as petunias, nasturtiums, cyclamen, rhododendrons and Japanese magnolias. The flowers themselves had come mainly from Mick Blunden’s garden at Kurrajong. My portrait of her was also included, as well as one of Mary Frost, who was now my brother King’s wife.
My exhibition opened on 8 June 1938 at Rubery Bennett’s gallery on the corner of Hunter and George streets. It was a gala occasion for me. Mum was there, with Mollie, Hilda Townshend, Mick Blunden, Beatrice McCaughey and Aunt Mary Carter. P. J. Waterhouse, a trustee of the Gallery and the brother of Professor Waterhouse, a camellia expert, gave the speech.
I had a tiny catalogue, like a miniature book, with a painting called Chinese Dolls reproduced inside. In the painting two of the Chinese dolls I used to buy in Campbell Street were propped against a greeny-blue Chinese porcelain vase containing orange and red dahlias.
Beatrice McCaughey really made that first exhibition a success. As if she hadn’t done enough for me already, she bought about half the paintings as presents for her friends. Harry Ervin, the collector, also bought two paintings. This same year the National Gallery of New South Wales (as the Art Gallery of New South Wales was then known) purchased my painting Oriental Harmony. It really was an exciting time in my life.
At the end of that year, something else happened. A young New Zealand poet, Douglas Stewart, came to my punch party at 38A Pitt Street. Someone brought him along. He was dark and dramatic-looking with a smouldering quality. We were introduced, but the young poet didn’t say much; I wasn’t even sure if he enjoyed the party. He was living at an old boarding house down on the water at Potts Point and looked to me as if he needed to be asked home for a good feed. He was so thin. The young poet was going home to New Zealand for Christmas the next day – that much I did find out, but that was about all.
Six weeks passed and suddenly he was back on my doorstep at 38A Pitt Street almost the moment after he stepped off the boat from New Zealand.
NINE
GETTING THROUGH THE WAR
Doug made a set at me right from the start. He was not quite twenty-six and had just been appointed assistant editor of the ‘Red Page’, the literary section of the Bulletin magazine. His second book of poems was about to be published in London and he was working on a poetic drama, a verse play for radio about Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic. He had also, it transpired, been engaged to a girl back in New Zealand, but the engagement had been broken off on his recent visit home.
I had never met such a dark, intense young man. Doug startled me by suggesting marriage almost as soon as we started going out. I was shocked; in fact, I burst into tears. I had always been terrified that marriage would interfere with my being an artist. It was about another five years before we made it to the altar, but we were constantly together from the moment he arrived back in Sydney. Without knowing what particular rhyme scheme or rhythm was used in a poem, poetry was precious to me. Through Doug, I started to meet more poets and writers. From being purely involved in the art scene, I became familiar with Sydney’s literary world.
One of my most vivid early memories of Doug’s friends is of the day I surprised him and Ron McCuaig with the Queensland blue swimmer crabs. Ron was a poet and fellow-worker on the Bulletin. The staff were supposed to work on Saturday mornings. Ron and Doug would put in a token appearance, then disappear next door to the pub, later perhaps making their way up to the Assembly, the Smith’s Weekly pub, for a drink with Kenneth Mackenzie or Ken Slessor.
This Saturday morning after the usual few rounds, Doug and Ron decided they would have a feast and bought themselves a huge parcel of crabs. The meal was already in progress when I knocked on the door of Doug’s flat; he had moved from the boarding house by now.
The smell almost knocked me down as I came in.
‘What on earth are you eating?’ I asked, trying to make out the gruesome spread on the table. Bits of shell were scattered everywhere.
‘Those crabs are off,’ I said.
Mutely the pair of them stared at me, horror-struck, then down at the litter of crabs. Still speechless, Doug looked at Ron, Ron looked at Doug and their eyes turned back to me.
Suddenly Doug grabbed the lot off the table, wrapped it in newspaper, tore down the hall, threw it in the incinerator chute and rushed into the bathroom.
Doug and Ron had noticed the smell too, but they were trying to kid each other that the crabs were all right.
Ron McCuaig was tall and slim. His constant characteristic was an unending chuckle. If Ron said something funny, which he frequently did, he would be the first to laugh and the last to stop, long after everyone else had finished. Shortly after the incident of the crabs, I was invited to dinner with Ron and his wife Beryl in their flat at Parsley Bay. Beryl, a small blue-eyed, mischievous, pretty woman, was pregnant. She cooked us one of her excellent roast dinners, and afterwards we played bridge. Beryl was as quick-witted and sharp as Ron; they were an amusing and entertaining duo.
That night I heard the story ab
out the time they lived in Macleay Street, Kings Cross. Beryl had an ancient dog to which she was very attached. Every night Beryl took the dog for a walk.
A frumpily dressed woman stepped up to Beryl during one of their strolls. ‘If that’s your dog,’ the woman said, ‘it’s a disgrace. By the look of the animal, it should be put down.’
Beryl glared at her.
‘People might say the same of you,’ she retorted.
We loved the McCuaigs. Another night at Parsley Bay, Beryl, although by now heavily pregnant, insisted at the end of the evening on walking right up to the bus stop with us, quite a climb. Early the next morning she was rushed to hospital at Rose Bay and later in the day their first son John was born.
Doug’s other great friend was the poet and novelist Kenneth Mackenzie. Mackenzie worked on Smith’s Weekly doing film reviews when Ron was writing for the Wireless Weekly. The editors of the two papers, without consulting anyone, decided to swap the two writers around. Mackenzie ended up on the Wireless Weekly and Ron McCuaig was bundled off to be funny at Smith’s. Ron moved on to the Bulletin; Mackenzie stayed with the Wireless Weekly.
Mackenzie was a silver-tongued, charming Adonis. He and Doug used to drink round town together. Mackenzie always carried a little suitcase with him but in those days we were unaware of the bottle of claret it contained. On weekends he took home a gallon of claret, which shocked even Doug, who did his share of drinking with the Bulletin boys. But it took us a long time to realise how much Mackenzie was drinking. In the early days he was in fine form and the demons that tormented him so much later were kept well hidden.
It was actually Mackenzie who took Doug over to 12 Bridge Street and presented him to Norman. The friendship between Doug and Norman developed gradually, stemming from Norman’s admiration of Doug’s writing and enthusiasm for Australian literature and Doug’s awe of Norman’s painting.
Doug would drop over to the studio at about lunchtime, and soon became, in his words, ‘quite accustomed to sitting down and having lunch with a nude model not more than three feet away, passing me the ham sandwiches’. Ostensibly he came to visit me, but often he was quickly immersed in conversation with Norman. Norman loved talking to Doug, discussing at length his current preoccupations or pet discoveries such as John Tierney’s short stories.
Mum, on the other hand, was not initially impressed with my new boyfriend.
Like most mothers, Mum was consumed with curiosity. She kept pressing me to bring Doug out to the flat so she could meet him. Doug, equally adamant, refused to be dragged into the family circle.
‘You must come to dinner one Sunday evening,’ I pleaded. ‘Mum keeps asking who this “Douglas” is.’ Doug resisted resolutely. But at last he gave in, still with a great show of reluctance.
The evening was not a success. Doug fortified himself well beforehand. He sat silently on the edge of the couch while I chattered on brightly. Mum couldn’t get a word out of him. She tried and tried again, but conversation with Doug was like trying to get water out of a dry sponge. I alternated between wishing he would say something, anything, and hoping he wouldn’t fall off the couch.
It was a grim evening for everybody, not an auspicious beginning, but Mum came round to him. Doug’s poems in the Bulletin won her over. She cut them out and made them into a scrapbook. The poet’s tongue triumphed in print.
Mum invited him to dinner a second time. A special butcher’s shop in town called Woolf’s sold hare. Mum thought that Doug, being a New Zealander, would appreciate this, and bought a hare in honour of his visit. Unfortunately, she didn’t realise until she opened the parcel at home that the hare was still in its fur. She had to set to and skin it, not a task she relished. Mum certainly did her best for my poet.
Doug was terribly, terribly thin; I think he lived on nervous energy. He wrote Fire on the Snow the first year we were together. During the day he worked in at the Bulletin; at night, sometimes all night, he worked on the play.
In 1939 his mother, whom he adored, died. He was so upset at the news. I didn’t know what to do. In the end we went up to the Observatory Hill and I did a watercolour of him half-lying on the grass, reading in an effort to escape his grief.
After Potts Point he had moved into a flat at Double Bay, on the Rose Bay side of New South Head Road. Buses and trams going past up the hill made it noisy while he was trying to think. It wasn’t the writing that took so much out of him, but the preparation, the intense effort of working it up beforehand, exhausted him. I don’t know how he did it. Such concentration.
I worried about him. Working as hard as he did, Doug very much needed looking after. He needed someone to prepare meals for him and to make sure he ate them.
After he had a bad bout of flu that laid him really low, Doug’s sister Helen, whom the family called Micky, came over from New Zealand and stayed with him, which helped. Just before war broke out, Micky went home and Doug moved to the Cross. He rented a flat on the first floor of a squarish red brick building called Larbert, off Macleay Street, in a quiet leafy cul-de-sac at the end of Crick Avenue. This was the flat where I surprised Doug and Ron with the blue swimmers. It was what you called a bedsitter, a room with a bed at one end, a table in the ‘dinette’ at the other end; off to the side was a little bathroom. The saving grace of the flat was that the dinette looked straight out on a poplar tree. Later on Doug celebrated the poplar tree in a poem.
Fire on the Snow was performed on ABC radio in 1941 to enormous acclaim. It started off a chain reaction; suddenly everyone was writing verse plays. Fire on the Snow also achieved international recognition. It was broadcast in England on the BBC and in most other English-speaking countries, as well as being translated into Icelandic and German. These were exciting times, but Doug didn’t relax. On the dinette table overlooking the poplar he began furiously typing a new play about the Kelly gang.
He was even thinner than before. ‘No rhubarb, vinegar or alcohol,’ said the doctor, who had diagnosed an ulcer. Rhubarb and vinegar were hardly a sacrifice: alcohol was more of a struggle, but Doug obeyed orders and didn’t drink. He lived on lightly steamed fish, boiled eggs and the occasional omelette. I used to finish work in the studio then come up to Crick Avenue and cook for him.
I remember, too, Doug having trouble with a toothache. That was a bit of an ordeal for all concerned. A dramatic poet with a toothache is a terrible thing, is all I’ll say.
Ned Kelly was finished the same year as Fire on the Snow was performed. Although it was a stage play it was first performed on radio in 1942, and was submitted to an ABC open competition for plays, which it won. In 1942 Doug also wrote The Golden Lover, which won an ABC prize for verse plays at the end of that year. Several other verse plays were written and discarded by Doug as not being up to standard, or at least, his standards, before Shipwreck was finished in 1945. He really worked non-stop those years. The dinette table in Crick Avenue certainly gave good service.
Throughout the 1930s, we had had a sense of foreboding. It was impossible to ignore the newsreels of Hitler and his men goose-stepping and Mussolini in his high-heeled boots, his chest blazing with medals, puffing himself up like ‘the bullfrog of the Pontine Marshes’ as they called him. Yet when war broke out we were still not prepared, we couldn’t believe it.
Doug and Ron McCuaig went on a pub crawl to let off steam. They didn’t really know what else to do. This was just before Doug’s ulcer was discovered. They met at the Mansions Hotel, a posh white building on the way down to Rushcutters Bay and a well-known gathering place. Doug and Ron drank their way in and out of every pub from there to Double Bay.
War was awful.
For a while everybody said it was a phony war, that it would be over in three months. Three months passed and when the Battle for Britain began, everybody knew the war wasn’t going to end for a long time and that it was going to be very nasty.
The artists and writers we knew loathed the war. It had a devastating effect on their lives and careers. My f
riends from Circular Quay, like Alison and George who had so carefully saved up to study overseas, returned home. Arthur Murch was stranded in Switzerland. He was travelling with the artist Wallace Thornton and his wife. The three spent six weeks camping in their car in the snow near Geneva and were consequently suspected of being spies. At one stage, to pay for food the villagers bought them, Arthur painted a portrait of a local boy. As I understood it, he did two paintings – one for family and one that he kept. Many years later I bought Head of a Swiss Boy, the one he kept and brought back to Australia, at an art auction in Sydney.
Doug’s friend Mackenzie was conscripted in the army in 1942. His uniform never seemed to fit him properly; he looked misplaced and miserable. He was eventually sent off to guard the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp at Cowra. He was there in 1944 when the Japanese broke out and he wrote a novel about it which Angus & Robertson were going to publish. But a commanding officer at Cowra was also an Angus & Robertson author, a best-selling one; pressure was exerted and Mackenzie’s book withdrawn from publication in Australia. Life in the army, and the sad fate of his book, I think, broke Mackenzie, and started him drinking so heavily.
Norman himself moved out of the studio as soon as war was declared. In 1940 Rose, her younger daughter, Honey, and Honey’s then husband, Bruce Glad, went off to America with a collection of Norman’s work because Rose felt it would be safer there. Norman and his other daughter, Jane, who was starting off as a writer, returned to Springwood to look after the house. This was not all bad. While the studio did seem strangely empty without the spark of his presence, the good thing was I now became the custodian of 12 Bridge Street. My only regret about leaving 38A Pitt Street was that I had to abandon my red cedar shelving because it wouldn’t fit into Norman’s studio.
