The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.

  The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.

  Kylie Tennant was the author of nine novels, plus short stories, plays, journalism, criticism and biography as well as much writing for children. She is noted for her social realist studies of urban and rural working-class life from the 1930s, that began with Tiburon (1935), and included Foveaux (1939), named after a street in the slums of Surry Hills.

  Her working life encompassed such jobs as barmaid, reviewer, church sister and publicist for the ABC. Seeking to be true to the society she observed, she took to the road with itinerant workers in the worst years of the Depression, and went so far as to spend a week in gaol for the sake of research.

  Tennant was born in Manly, New South Wales, in 1912 and died in 1988. She was awarded the Order of Australia in 1980.

  HOUSE of BOOKS

  The Missing Heir

  The autobiography of

  KYLIE TENNANT

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

  First published by the Macmillan Company of Australia,

  Melbourne, in 1986

  Copyright © Kylie Tennant 1986

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 432 6 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 74343 091 0 (ebook)

  Su Tung-p’o

  Families, when a child is born

  Want it to be intelligent.

  I, through intelligence

  Having wrecked my whole life,

  Only hope the baby will prove

  Ignorant and stupid.

  Then he will crown a tranquil life

  By becoming a Cabinet Minister.

  On the birth of his son: A.D. 1036-1101

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  1. The Missing Heir

  2. ‘God Sends the Wind’

  3. The Infant Phenomenon

  4. How to Smash Up a Career

  5. The Firebrands

  6. GPO Box 2000

  7. The Duellist

  8. The Glugs of Gosh

  9. I Come to Murder Mountain

  Appendix: A Bibliography of the Works of Kylie Tennant

  Notes on Chapters 1, 3 and 6

  Index

  Author’s Note

  The reader is indebted to my cousin Hector McLean for the lack of dates in this book. Hector could always come up with an alternative and was so very exact I decided not to be.

  The reader is also indebted to the academic, whose name I have forgotten, who visited us when my husband was dying and went away with the clipping books my brother-in-law John Rodd had kept, dating publications of my novels in England and America by the book reviews. (This, no doubt, is a nemesis for all the belongings of other people I have lost in my time.) It was about six years ago that the PhD writer went off with my records promising to post them back. When I die he may sell them for a nice sum.

  1. The Missing Heir

  ‘The older I am the more I dream of my childhood,’ the Parent said just before he died. He was nearly ninety-five. ‘I’m riding out with my father to hunt rabbits. It’s so vivid I can hear the creak of the Old Man’s saddle, as he rides just ahead of me. When we came on any rabbits the first thing he did was to make sure I was safe behind a tree. “Where is Tommy?” “Where are you, my boy?” Of course, by the time he had fussed around making sure I didn’t get shot by accident, the rabbits were long gone.’

  Grandfather (T. Hately) Tennant was a doctor. He had begun his career as a Presbyterian missionary to China and decided that what the Chinese needed was not so much spiritual salvation as medicine. He returned to Edinburgh and discarded his Greek and theology for a scalpel. He never went to China but was in America for a time. The Parent will have it that the ‘Old Man’ came out to Australia with Lord Carrington ‘as part of his suite’. He was probably a ship’s doctor in 1870, a refugee from the Glasgow smog. After his marriage he went from Ballina to Tenterfield with a side excursion to Sydney with a weak chest and ended up as medical officer in Hillston. These far-stretching plains provided — for coronal enquiry — many not-so-fresh samples of people who had ‘done a perish’. ‘Body-snatching was very rough in those days,’ a cheerful undertaker once told me when I visited Hay. From one such unsavoury remnant Dr Tennant contracted a septic infection and knew he had only days to live. He betook himself to the barber to have his hair and beard trimmed.

  ‘I look like an old crow,’ he said disgustedly. ‘It will be a big funeral and I’m not going to have them all peering into my coffin to see me like this.’ It was one of the biggest funerals ever seen in those desolate parts.

  But the Parent preferred to remember the Old Man in his glory, a bewhiskered monarch of medicine: ‘He’d drive up to the hospital with me in the carriage and the coachman on the box. He always wore his top hat — he kept his stethoscope in it. And there would be all the hospital staff drawn up on the steps to greet him, from the Matron down.’ This great spectacle impressed the doctor’s son. He felt himself a child of rare promise. When they travelled in Cobb & Co.’s coach he was allowed to hold the reins. ‘Even as a baby,’ he announced, ‘I was a King Baby.’ There is indeed a photograph of the Parent in a lace christening robe looking uncommonly like a small sucking pig.

  The boy was told that he was the head of the Tennant Clan in Scotland. After the doctor’s death — and a queer episode in which the coachman Cracky (who had followed his friend the doctor all over the world) got drunk as, I gathered, he often did, and the house burnt down — the widow, her two young daughters and little Tommy beat a retreat to her relatives in Sydney.

  She was deaf. She had been deaf since a swimming accident in Middle Harbour, when, as a girl, she nearly lost her life. Her husband had, my aunt told me, taken her to seven doctors but none of them could do anything. It was the Parent’s delusion that she had been a seamstress for a fashion house in Woolloomooloo before her marriage but my aunt said she couldn’t sew very well and hated sewing. It was a pathetic return the widow made to her family’s orange orchard at St Ives. The small boy heard the women wailing: ‘Who will take care of little Tommy?’ and from that time onward little Tommy took very good care of himself.

  It was expected that little Tommy would become his uncle’s heir. He remembered the fountain in the
garden, and once took me to gaze pathetically through the wrought-iron gates at the ruined house, the weeds, the slimy dry fountain. Instead of bequeathing this domain to his nephew, Uncle Cates married the widow’s housekeeper. This action the family regarded with horror because the housekeeper was — a Catholic. Naturally she renounced this questionable position on her marriage but it was, my aunt said, ‘always held against her’. ‘They hated Catholics. None of them would have anything to do with Maude.’

  Part of the Parent’s legend — we will not call it family history — concerned this dark shadow of the Roman Catholic Church. A certain Cardinal Curran in Ireland was supposed to have had two girls, nieces, as wards, and their brother who strangely enough later came to Australia as a cardinal. Their name was Moran. One of the girls became a nun and the other was to follow her into the order. However, a young man, a gardener who wooed Miss Moran by leaving posies of flowers on her windowsill, fell in love with her. Naturally they had to come to Australia because he was a Protestant. ‘I think his name was Scarlett,’ the Parent once said vaguely, ‘but they changed it to Cates.’

  In Australia they decided to settle on land beyond what is now Canberra. The delicate Irish girl trudged behind the dray which held her piano and the glass windows for the house they would build on their property at Braidwood.

  When I was later writing a book called The Battlers I took a horse and cart over part of the road they must have followed through the gloomy scrub and I reflected on what the thoughts of the Irish girl must have been on that long-ago slow journey.

  The young gardener had no sooner established himself on his property than all the convict servants ran away to the goldfields. Their employer thought he would try his luck there too. Leaving his wife and children he set off to make his fortune. ‘He came back with the arse out of his pants,’ the Parent stated. Once back in Sydney the family took up land at St Ives, now a suburb but then only bush. Here Cates became a prosperous orange grower and his wife, whom he called ‘Pinky’ from her Irish complexion, had a carriage with white ponies. ‘He worshipped her,’ my aunt told me. ‘In the evening at five o’clock she came out to walk in the gardens and all the paths had to be swept before she did. There was not a leaf underfoot where she walked.’ The family were brought up to a fear and dread of Catholics. When he was dying the husband of the Cardinal’s ward said at the last: ‘Well, the priest didn’t get me.’

  I remember as a child that my father and mother — in all else domestic enemies — were both agreed on the dark cunning of Catholics. Although at one time when N.S. Wales was a penal colony a third of the Australian population was Catholic, from Ireland, the predominance of Protestants continued until possibly World War II. The Labor Party was mistakenly supposed to be, in its origins, influenced by the Catholics. ‘Oh, no, dear,’ my mother would say, ‘They’re frightfully common people.’ In World War I, owing to the troubles in Ireland, Cardinal Mannix and the anti-conscription campaign, there was still extant this feeling, among the middle-class Australians, that the Catholics were up to no good. When I married a man who had meant to be a High Church priest, an Anglo-Catholic, although this was condoned, the idea that I now frequented a church which had incense, confessions and stations of the cross sent a shiver of superstition through my parents which they handsomely disregarded.

  My father did not forget, as a boy, that he was head of the Tennant Clan. Unfortunately, when out picking Christmas bush with his sisters, he fell over a cliff and nearly ended his life. The little girls had to run a long distance for help.

  He had the most expert doctors of the time. ‘And it was all free,’ the Parent would say sunnily, ‘because I was a doctor’s son.’ He liked anything he didn’t have to pay for.

  ‘You can’t tell me it doesn’t come against him,’ my mother would say when the Parent was in full foam in one of his rages. ‘He fell on his head.’

  Be that as it may, his importance as the centre of concern to his mother and sisters, to Aunt Grace, a stewardess on the coastal line who lived with them, and her daughter Eddie, was established in his growing years. He was surrounded by worshipping women. He expected it. Was he not the Heir, the bearer of the Tennant name?

  This did not prevent him, as a boy and later in life, from exercising his accurate memory for detail (alas that I did not inherit it! I need to write everything down in a notebook). And I will insert at this point some reminiscences of the Parent’s boyhood so that you can know the tone of his talk: he could speculate on some meaningless trifle and build it up into significance — for him. As a child I found this habit very boring. He would drag us out in the rain to search for Aboriginal carvings on a rock. He knew when mushrooms would be pushing up on the golf links and insist on going to look for them. He taught us to eat wild currants (very sour) and would, later, stop the car and prowl through graveyards. ‘That’s a very old stone,’ he would say solemnly. ‘That is the year I was born.’ It was 1884 and hideous. He was firmly rooted in the past, his past, in his legend, which was not mine.

  ‘I’m telling you this, my father would say, ‘because Fred Smith was my cousin.’ (My father believed that it branded his tales as true if he could say he was related to one of those in it.) ‘At least, Fred Smith and I had the same aunt — Aunt Emily Sandy.

  ‘The Sandys built the big house, Verata, on the Cowan Creek Road — Norfolk Island pines, ballrooms, fountains. I roller-skated in the ballroom. They lived like the plutocrats of old. My grandfather had bought practically the whole of St Ives for a pound an acre. He grew flowers, acres of violets; and that’s how my father met my mother, because the young men from the city would ride into the country at the weekend along the bush roads through the orchards. Now, at weekends, you can see swarms of cars going out bumper to bumper along the North Shore track that they took.

  ‘It was all orange orchards around Chatswood. In the early days, the convict timber-getters cut immense trees on the ridges of North Shore, and the timber mills on the Lane Cove River would turn out weatherboard for houses and slabs and shingles for roofs. They were a tough crowd — in with all the bushrangers. But then there were only enormous stumps; and respectability set in.

  ‘The only convict I knew when I was a boy was a splendid old chap. He said he had been sent out for dressing up as a woman and going to a show for a lark. His family are all doctors and professionals today.

  ‘Jenkins had a huge orchard and ran the steamer Nellie, which took the fruit and vegetables down the Lane Cove River, calling in for cornflower from Clifford Love’s mill. When I was a boy we used to fish off the wharf. The big flathead appreciated the pollution from the flour mills and the prawns liked the mucky mud. I was washing my feet one day on the Nellie’s wharf when I saw the engineer from the flour mill jumping about on the high ground and waving his arms. He could see this monster shark only feet away from me. As I threw myself back, the wash from the shark went all over me. That shark killed a young fellow swimming there two days later.

  ‘The district was isolated, but it was being opened up. About that time Verata was cut up into scores of little farms. The Sandys had made a lot of money importing bananas from Fiji. They used to ripen them in a honeycomb of tunnels under the old Queen Victoria markets. Turn them yellow with little gas jets.

  ‘Willoughby was the big centre for the North Shore, but the roads were being put through as the big Chatswood estate was opened up. Anyone who couldn’t get a job would be stone-breaking for the roads. You’d get a bag and sit on it with two or three little hammers and make heaps of rocks all the same size. You were paid by the yard.

  ‘We had to walk four or five miles to school at Chatswood, and would wait for Anthony Hordern’s van to hang on underneath. But the place was too far out for most people. They had to drive to Milson’s Point to the passenger ferry — sometimes they raced each other — and a vehicular ferry there took them across. Old Blind Freddy sat on the wharf for years with his concertina, and when he heard the ferry coming he’d sta
rt up. You’ve heard people say, “Even Blind Freddy could see that”? It was a favourite saying of Ben Chifley in Parliament, when I knew him.

  ‘Tell you how isolated it was at Chatswood — a friend of my uncle’s in the city could read his paper in the morning, fold it up, address it neatly and put it in the post. Uncle would be reading it that evening. At Roseville, there was Archibald’s, Pymble’s orchards at Pymble, my grandfather, Cates, and the Sandys at St Ives.

  ‘Well, Fred Smith, my cousin at the time the Boer War broke out, was a tall, gangling cove. He was eighteen and couldn’t get a job so he enlisted. He was in the Australian Bushmen, and you had to be able to ride with those feathers in your hat. It was only the second military contingent ever to leave Australia. My uncle was in the first one to the Sudan. He was in the camel corps, and they rode two to a camel. The cove hanging on behind him was killed by a dirty big spear. They were Dervishes in those parts, followers of the Mad Mahdi. Our men and the camels would be chasing the Dervishes, then they would camp for the night, and in the morning when they set off they would find that the Dervishes had sneaked round behind them and were creeping up, spearing them from the rear.

  ‘Anyway, when the Boer War broke out and Fred Smith enlisted, you wouldn’t believe the money that was collected for widows and orphans of those who went from our district. I was in the Chatswood School Cadet Corps and we were all out begging, “Please give a penny, sir, for the soldiers’ orphans.” We had a verse to recite.

  ‘And when it was all over there weren’t any widows or orphans. Fred was the only one killed. He was shot at Bloemfontein, and he hadn’t any time to provide any widows and orphans. He was only eighteen. I think there was another chap died of fever later. What were they to do with all that money? There was only one name on the war memorial fountain when they put it up — F.V. Smith.