Requiem with Yellow Butterflies

by James Halford

  Leonard’s father began his time in South America working on the railway in Mendoza, at the foot of the Andes in north-west Argentina, until he and nearly 6000 others were fired for going on strike. After returning briefly to Buenos Aires, William set out in search of his fortune. In Paraguay, on his way north to look for diamonds in Brazil, he found a wife instead. He had met Mary Ann’s brother Tom in Asunción and was invited to celebrate Christmas at New Australia. The eligible bachelors of the British community in Paraguay often visited the colony in those days, in the hope of meeting single women. ‘It was a lively thing,’ Leonard said. The colonists put on theatrical productions, poetry recitals and dances, often accompanied by Paraguayan harp music. William and Mary Ann Barton met at one such gathering.

  Leonard’s older sister Aileen was born in Paraguay in 1917, but the family soon left for good. William was called to serve in the First World War, but only made it as far as Rosario in Argentina. ‘The armistice got him,’ said Leonard. His father returned to railway work, first in Rosario and later in Victoria, Buenos Aires province, where Leonard was born in 1926.

  While Leonard only ever heard of New Australia through the stories of his grandmother and mother, his sister Aileen visited the former colony as a child. William and Mary Ann took Aileen to meet her grandfather at three years old, during a period of civil war in Paraguay. One night, Thomas O’Donnell saw troops approaching the colony. He hid his daughter and granddaughter under the bed, lowered all the alcohol down the well, and waited. When the soldiers arrived, they sacked his store, stole his cattle and tied him to a tree. By the time the Bartons departed the next day, all that remained was a box of matches and a sack of flour. It took Aileen and her parents six months to escape Paraguay and return home.

  ‘There’s a young Australian journalist here and I’m spilling all the dirt on the family,’ Leonard told his older sister over the phone. Aileen Barton was in her nineties and lived in Buenos Aires but remained in regular contact with her younger brother. She didn’t want to talk to me about the colony. ‘She thinks it’s shameful,’ Leonard said. What did he think? Was New Australia really such a failure? Australian writers like Gavin Souter and Anne Whitehead have given the short-lived experiment near mythic status. ‘Australia does not have many legends,’ wrote Souter,

  but those it does have are all concerned with people who took their chances against great odds, and failed: Eureka, Cooper’s Creek, Glenrowan and Gallipoli. The odds against Utopia were also great, none greater, and it seemed to me that New Australia and Cosme might be added to the list.7

  Leonard was less sympathetic towards his ancestors’ project. ‘Absolutely it was a failure…They had a silly philosophy: if you were a schoolteacher you worked as a cobbler.’

  His biography and political opinions showed little trace of his Irish grandfather’s radicalism. After completing his military service in the 1940s, he was in textiles for some years. In the 1950s, he worked with British American Tobacco in Buenos Aires. Later, he would go into business keeping beehives. His own children and grandchildren spoke English, but hesitantly, as a second language, and had not inherited the ‘religion’ of Britishness. The closest Leonard came to socialism was a vague disapproval of the materialism of the younger generation. Nevertheless, while he was conservative in many of his views, I had the sense he was much too independent-minded, too much of a peculiar person, to adhere to any consistent ideology. ‘I don’t have much time for idealists,’ he said, ‘not at my age, but I think it’s for the young people to be idealistic.’

  Not long after returning from Paraguay, I visited the reading room of the John Oxley Library, which looks towards Brisbane city from the southern riverbank. With its shabby, outmoded skyscrapers and jacarandas in bloom beside the slow-moving brown water, my hometown now reminded me of subtropical river towns I’d visited in northern Argentina, like Rosario and Posadas. At the library, I skimmed through a near complete set of Cosme Monthly, the little journal published out of the second, longer-lived Australian colony in Paraguay between December 1894 and December 1900. Printed on rough yellow paper, it was distributed in England and Australia in the hope of gaining ‘sufficiency of membership’ for the struggling settlement.

  The early editions, handwritten by hungry people and copied for distribution, abandon William Lane’s lofty style for a frank assessment of the hardships of pioneer life. ‘January 1894: Cash and food both short beginning of month; nearly reached bedrock. Got 1500 lbs beans on credit; ate beans till corn grew.’8 By February 1897, however, the journal has shifted to printed text and Lane’s familiar, fanatical tone returns to the anonymously authored articles: ‘We Germanic peoples come into history as Communists. From our communal villages we drew the strength which broke Rome down.’9 Disillusioned with increasing numbers of colonists abandoning Cosme, Lane resigned as chairman in 1899 and left for Auckland, where he ended his days as a lead writer for the conservative New Zealand Herald. Writing editorials as Tohunga – Maori for prophet – he criticised industrial lawlessness, argued for universal military service, and praised the cause of British imperialism. Lane, in the words of one union-aligned journal, ‘died in the camp of the enemy’.10

  After his departure, the editorship of Cosme Monthly presumably fell to Mary Gilmore, for the writing gains a refreshing feminine perspective and a felicity of style in the later issues. The single most poignant piece of writing about the Australians in Paraguay is an anonymously authored short story, ‘A Cosme Dream’ – surely the work of Gilmore – which was published in Cosme Monthly in March 1898 and, to my knowledge, has never been reprinted. Like the literary Utopias of the prominent socialist writers Edward Bellamy and William Morris which inspired many real-life experiments in the nineteenth century, the story is a dream of an ideal future. It is narrated by a Cosme pioneer who lies down to sleep at the end of a hard day’s labour and is granted a brief vision of the community’s magnificent future:

  Tired and worn with the toil of a hot summer’s day, I lay on my bed, and, as the sun went down, slept. And in my sleep, suns rose and set, moons waxed and waned, and silent seasons passed swift-winged by like cloud shadows on the meadow. And when in my sleep I awoke, the earth had grown older by many years and lay unrolled to my curious eyes like a fairy picture. And as I looked, the sun rose through a golden mist, and his golden beams glinted on cottage roofs, half-hid in groves of orange, palm, and fig. For a village was there spread out on a gentle rise that overlooked wide tree-dotted plains, where the morning mists made the grazing cattle like living shadows. And the village was fair to look upon.11

  Redcliffe

  I build a cairn of words over a silent man.1

  – John Manifold

  What was I doing in Latin America?

  The richest decade in Australian history felt, to me, like a dismal time to be young. In 2006, I’d found myself back from Beijing, house-sitting for my parents in Brisbane’s leafy western suburbs. I was older than my grandfather when he went to war, but only beginning to recognise my luck. Several afternoons a week my ESL teacher friends and I stayed in the city until late. We’d down jug after jug of Tooheys New at O’Malley’s or Jimmy’s on the Mall, or the old Criterion, where Malouf’s Johnno and Dante used to drink. And we’d rage about the state of Howard’s Australia while taking no action to change it: the republic as remote as Kafka’s castle; the refusal to apologise to Indigenous Australians; the demonisation of the unemployed; the mining revenue wasted on welfare for fat rich people with six televisions tuned perennially to Channel Nine; ‘one for Mum, one for Dad, one for the treasurer’; noxious cricketing metaphors poisoning public life; the refusal to sign Kyoto; the dog whistles on race – Hansonism, Cronulla; our obsequious participation in US wars; the cruelty, the sheer cruelty of our little Pacific gulag for boat people.

  All these complaints, though sincere, were mostly a cipher for my self-disgust. I couldn’t forgive myself for being brought up in the suburbs by my two loving parents on the
forested rim of a safe and prosperous subtropical city. For having read too much and lived too little. I didn’t want to read about life anymore; I wanted to go where life was happening. I didn’t want peace and prosperity; I wanted to be cold and uncomfortable. I wanted to wear holes in my shoes, catch fever in unpronounceable places. I wanted to grow a beard, and call my mother from prison, and look like a Dostoevsky villain in the mugshot. I’d been heartbroken twice (I thought). Some good poems had come of it. I was hoping to try again.

  It was high time I left for Latin America.

  My parents were on sabbatical in Hong Kong that year, and my younger brother was on exchange in Kobe. If this was my milieu, by what right did I feel enraged? The absence of a clear cause only made it worse. Early each weekday, I caught the bus to Spring Hill, where I taught English to refugees and new migrants at a private college run by a robust, floral-bloused former school principal, who insisted our adult students refer to her as ‘Mrs Sheridan’. Mrs Sheridan once confiscated a bilingual dictionary from a 70-year-old Chinese grandmother – new to my class and to the country – who didn’t speak enough English to understand dictionaries were banned. Mrs Sheridan insisted teachers prepare lessons alone in their classrooms rather than fraternise in the staffroom.

  ‘What is this? A union meeting?’ she used to say, upon catching two colleagues conversing in the hall. She and her husband were generous and prominent donors to the Liberal Party. It was no coincidence, my colleagues said, that our school was the only private provider of language courses in Queensland to have a contract with the federal Immigration Department. Our students hailed from all corners of the earth, the youngest in their late teens, the oldest in their eighties. Most of the Europeans, Asians and South Americans had married Australians or were skilled migrants. They were older, worldlier and better educated than I was, with my Bachelor of Arts and dodgy English teaching certificate from China. They could see I was out of my depth with the refugee students and tried to help by suggesting activities and outings. Sometimes, kicking a football under the fig trees by the Brisbane River with those taciturn, unsmiling boys from Sudan, Eritrea, Burundi and the Congo, it was possible to imagine we’d arrived at a place beyond history. But in the classroom shattering stories came out at unexpected moments, not just from the Africans, but also from the Iraqis and Afghanis, who’d fled lands Australia had recently helped invade and was still occupying. Once, I set the intermediate class an innocuous exercise: ‘Write ten sentences in the simple past tense. Underline the verb.’ That night, marking the responses by lamplight in the cavernous silence of my parents’ home, I encountered the phrase ‘Bomb killed my mother, father, brother, sister, uncle.’

  In the evenings, I cooked huge pastas and curries to last me for three or four days, and stayed up late, sampling my father’s liquor cabinet, sometimes mapping curriculums and course plans I was unqualified to write, more often composing short stories that were always set in Beijing or Ulaanbaatar, never in Brisbane. I struggled to sleep and would drift off listening to the news from Iraq on the BBC World Service. By the mid-2000s, most of the school and university friends with whom I’d marched against the war were overseas or in the larger southern capitals. But I was back in Brisbane, the war was still going, and John Howard would be Prime Minister forever.

  My maternal grandfather was my only family in Queensland that year. I always called him Al, an informal habit acquired from Mum. Every couple of weekends, I’d drive out to visit him on the Redcliffe peninsula, 40 minutes north of the city. We’d stroll the waterfront near the memorial for the original Moreton Bay penal colony and eat chocolate ice-cream, watching waves gently lapping the sand. Back in his two-bedroom villa, we’d crank Chopin or Sinatra so loud he didn’t need his hearing aid. His house was decorated with my grandmother’s old oil paintings of pastoral Victoria, competent imitations of the Heidelberg School. He liked to take down the dusty old atlas from his bookshelves – the USSR still marked in threatening crimson – to trace for me the route of the ship that took him to Europe in 1940. His one journey abroad. I knew even then that I ought to write the story of his childhood and war service: a record of his memories that wouldn’t die with him. But it didn’t seem urgent when I was 23. I was more interested in showing him the trip I was going to make in the new year when I’d saved enough money: 1200 kilometres across South America, from the Pacific coast of Ecuador to the Argentine River Plate.

  ‘Why do you want to go there?’ Al asked.

  ‘I just do.’

  Though he was a life-long Labor voter, I didn’t think he’d approve of my interest in the new Latin American socialism, the plan to see for myself the countries of the so-called pink tide. And he certainly wouldn’t have understood if I’d told him I wanted to learn Spanish so I could read García Márquez in the original.

  In August, as the weather was warming up, one of my Beijing stories won a local literary award with prize money of a couple of thousand dollars. On seeing my picture in the Courier Mail, Mrs Sheridan called me to her office.

  ‘We ought to be hanging on to a bright young fellow like you. We’re making you permanent.’

  It was the last offer of permanent employment I’d receive for a decade – everything, from then on, would be temporary. Al was delighted with the news.

  ‘A permanent position!’ he roared over the music when I told him that weekend. ‘Congratulations!’

  He poured us two glasses of flat ginger beer and proposed a toast. ‘To full-time work.’

  ‘I turned it down. I told them I’m quitting.’

  ‘What? Why did you do that? I thought you liked it.’

  He switched off the music. The ceiling fan whirred and the old wooden clock ticked and my grandfather wore a look of utter incomprehension, like the time I’d tried to explain the Internet.

  ‘I like the students,’ I said. ‘But I hate my boss.’

  ‘Well, have you at least got another job lined up?’

  ‘No, I’ve got a plane ticket to South America in the new year.’

  The oldest of six, Al had quit high school at 15 when his father died belatedly from being gassed during the First World War. He supported his siblings and mother as a clerk at the gas and fuel company in Melbourne until joining the air force in the Second World War, and afterwards returned to the same company, where he remained for 25 years. My grandfather knew what Dresden looked like from above as it burned, and how it feels to be 20 years a widower. But the pleasure of throwing in a job just because you didn’t like it was beyond him.

  ‘What will you do in South America?’

  ‘I don’t really know. I’m going to study Spanish and read a lot. I guess I’ll keep a journal on all the long bus trips.’

  The ticket was already booked, the trip justified in my mind. I wasn’t abandoning him. Mum and Dad would be back to keep him company by the time I left. His health was good and his mind was sharp. Writing the story of his war service could wait. There was no reason to believe he wouldn’t be able to tell it when I came home: not if you were 23 and had never lost anyone.

  Old Peak, Young Peak

  I remembered the fields and stones, the squares and churches, the streams where I had been happy.1

  – José María Arguedas

  ‘Jimmy! You made it,’ Dad said, bursting into our suite on the eighth floor of the Lima Radisson. He let the door swing closed behind him, laid his laptop to one side, and enfolded me in a bear hug. The bristles of his beard pricked my cheek. As always, he seemed enormous to me: broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, overpowering. Perhaps his hair was a little greyer than when I last saw him, six months before, his beard a little whiter at the centre. He pulled back, clasping me by the shoulders, looking me up and down.

  ‘You’ve lost weight, you skinny bugger.’

  I saw in the floor-to-ceiling mirror that he was right. My 30th birthday present to myself, during the year R and I were separated, was a six-month backpacking odyssey through Spain and Central America
between work contracts. I stopped replying to her emails in Salamanca, where I was supposed to be studying Spanish literature at the university. Instead, some classmates and I rented a black BMW and drove to Seville, the roof and windows open, screaming verses from Rubén Darío that Profesor Antonio had made us memorise: ‘youth, divine treasure / now you are going never to return’.2 With the trip about to end, I’d decided that it marked the conclusion of my career as a solo traveller. Too much drinking and not enough exercise had turned me into an inferior copy of Dad: the same wavy hair and square jaw, but gaunt, pale and round-shouldered.

  ‘We’ll have to fatten you up with those giant guinea pigs they eat here,’ he said, hanging his jacket in the closet.

  ‘How was your keynote?’

  He rolled his eyes and groaned. ‘They changed the venue at the last minute. Half the crowd went to the wrong place. The other half didn’t speak English.’

  Dad swished across the thick carpet in his socks and threw open the curtains. We were in the tallest building on the block, looking down on the gated barrio of Miraflores, all luxury hotels and flash restaurants behind high fences. I’d read somewhere that the function centre down the street, now hosting the seventh World Congress of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies, had been bombed by Maoist guerillas in the early 1990s. Today, security guards patrolled the neighbourhood, and cameras surveyed the streets. Sky and city were an unvariegated grey. ‘Donkey’s belly grey’, Limeños call it. A few blocks further west, cliffs fell away to a stony beach pounded by breakers. The Pacific. My ocean. Home lay that way.