The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  He had been the young man whose disruption of the meeting of the Educational Workers Association had been so noticeable a year before. He had decided to go back in a year’s time and claim me. I had been in Melbourne all that year and strangely enough I strolled into the fated meeting. He was full of good advice, offering help in my university studies. From that time, much to the anguish of my established suitor, Rodd went wherever I was. He became the secretary of the Labour Education League and I was press secretary.

  I had to find a better paying job than freelancing for the yellow press. Just as they were offering me a staff job and announced they were sending me out on police rounds I quit and took a job at a big advertising agency that Professor Martin found me. This meant that I had to transfer to a night course and drop honours psychology. My established suitor was very happy about this because he thought it would mean I would see less of that pernicious fellow, Rodd.

  I explained sadly to Roddy that there had been a sad misunderstanding between myself and my editors, over a certain assignment. They had been on the track of a Macquarie Street specialist who had been telling patients they had syphilis and treating them for it when all they were suffering from was an attack of nerves, or guilt. Would I, the editor asked, present myself as a patient and trap this scoundrel? ‘You bet I would,’ I said enthusiastically. I had once gone to a doctor because I had painful acne and asked if I had ‘sigh-phillis’. He assured me I had not. ‘But you can catch it from public lavatories,’ I argued. The gruesome posters in public lavatories on Circular Quay set out in sinister detail the horrors of venereal disease. I had been warned by my mother when a child never to use public lavatories. This warning had been passed down from mother to daughter ever since the first settler landed, when public hygiene was non-existent.

  The angry objections of my established suitor — of whose jealousy and conformity I was beginning to tire — caused me to seek another interview with my editors. I was wondering, I told them, ‘whether it would be a drawback on this latest job that I am virgo intacta? A friend of mine tells me it would.’ The editors were dumbfounded. They had never for a minute dreamt I had such a drawback and immediately told me I had lost the assignment. I was very dejected. I confided to Roddy that I had once again beer found unworthy — and why.

  ‘The fools!’ he exploded. ‘Didn’t they realise that you were idea to catch this fraud?’ He seemed to me the only person who had any common sense. I beamed on him. Here, I thought, was the only man for my money.

  Unfortunately he was being shipped away to the farthest school in the state the Office of Education could find for him: Coonabarabran — which means in Aboriginal ‘where the cows sit down’. They didn’t give him any notice. They just told him to report there. They could do that in those days. Head Office had found out that the man who was conducting the campaign to have flag-saluting in the school abolished was L.C. Rodd. It was a campaign that was causing a lot of trouble and of course it lapsed when Roddy was removed. In Coonabarabran he immediately caused trouble with the local Returned Soldiers League by convincing the headmaster that children must not be marched in a body to the Anzac Day celebrations. The returned soldiers began petitioning for his removal. Fifty years later children are still saluting the Flag in public schools and when Roddy became a headmaster he had to do it too. By that time he had mellowed a little. They never saluted flags at my private school and I didn’t see why they had to do it in public schools. But we agreed later, after I married him, that it was too trivial a piece of jingoism to bother about.

  My difficulties in paying my university fees — I was supposed to earn enough to pay them myself — really seemed a blank wall. I would never make enough to pay my way to America. Also I had discovered that working all day and attending university at night was wearing me down. Roddy had done it but he was exceptional. It had ruined his health and given him the racking headaches that edged him towards a nervous breakdown. He was talking, in a veiled way, about a friend of his who wanted to commit suicide. I convinced him that his friend — himself in disguise — was mistaken about thinking favourably of suicide.

  He kept telling me of the notable people of history who had committed suicide — Marx, for instance. ‘Marx was an old man,’ I countered. He brought up a number of young men. I told him to forget it. Anyone weak enough to commit suicide was making a big mistake. If the future seemed so dim he should change it. If he was overworked he should fix that. As one of the world’s great loafers I was in a position to advise loafing, sunbaking and rest.

  This robust philosophy seemed to cheer him a little and we went off to feed the university goats which were kept for experimental purposes. They waited for us every night for leftover scraps of meat pies on which we dined. Roddy always paid for me which I thought noble of him. I never had any money.

  The Parent had come to take a dim view of my university studies. I was never home. I had found I could get a lift on the paper truck which came through at four in the morning, or, when the boats stopped at midnight, I caught a boat to Mosman and walked from there. I never minded walking. My resident suitor was an insomniac — but I really wasn’t getting enough sleep. I walked out of my job at the advertising agency after writing a farewell blistering advertisement for the soap powder I was currently supposed to be promoting, telling the manager what he could do with his soap powder which included boiling the promoters in a vat of it in Hell. I came back to the office to pick up some university books I had left and the director tried to persuade me to come back. ‘We sent your advertisement to America, Kylie,’ he told me, ‘and they framed it. They all enjoyed it enormously.’

  I have always been unfair to this large important advertising agency. I was supposed to turn out radio copy for a new cake of soap which was offered with a free pink-edged face-cloth. You had to mention the face-cloth and extol the soap cake in a hundred words and — every advertisement must be worded differently. Try writing, say, twenty advertisements with these conditions. I learnt to scrutinise a sentence and cut out every waste word. I have never since ceased this habit. I learnt to cut — and cut again. Nothing more valuable could have happened to me.

  Professor Martin was very indignant with that company. He vowed he would never send another student there. He found I had for nine months been engaged in advertising soap until it had sent me into a state of revolt. I did not tell him that I was not cut out for an academic career either. I was very popular with the girl students of my year because I had attended one meeting of the Freethinkers Society and got into an argument with the president who had casually announced that now that birth control was possible it had changed the whole economic scene.

  ‘Show me one fool-proof method of birth control,’ I demanded. (This was pretty good from one who was still virgo intacta.)

  He blushed as red as his hair. ‘Well, I understand there are — er — ways,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Tell me one.’

  He couldn’t. The girls, after the meeting, hugged and kissed me. They had hoped something horrid would happen to that young man, who later became a distinguished professor. But the whole tone of Sydney University was so set on turning out academics that, as Professor Martin said, ‘In America this place would only be called a college.’ It depressed him, too.

  I went off to live with my friend Naomi in a converted tramcar with two rooms built on to it, where she was living by herself. Naomi and I were bosom friends and continued so the rest of our lives, through our marriages, children, husbands — one each — and vicissitudes. Naomi was a beautiful, big-built, fiery Bessarabian Jewess, devoted to the Communist Party, who regarded her efforts on their behalf with a disgruntled pessimism. She praised Russia so loudly that she put people off.

  I walked from Coonabarabran to Brisbane the first year I was married for the good reason that Naomi was in Brisbane. She was drawing unemployment relief and I called in to the local police station with her, holding her baby on my lap and sitting on the police station doorstep wh
ile the baby wet me so thoroughly that I had to wring out my skirt. Naomi was trying to convert the enthralled policemen to Communism. She really was very handsome and eloquent, and her paintings weren’t bad at all either. We were on our way to see a fortune-teller who made a hash of the fortunes because I was still holding the baby and had a wedding ring on. That was before I lost it. I lost three wedding rings; the second one Roddy threw under a tram and third I lost peeling an orange over Goodie’s balcony which overhung Sydney Harbour. After that we gave up and I wore no wedding ring for nearly fifty years of marriage.

  Naomi was giving lectures around Sydney in broken English about the glories of Communism. The audiences appreciated her because she was so beautiful. I told her she was a terrible lecturer and our friendship dated from that hour. Not that it cured Naomi.

  You must remember that the Russian Revolution had the same divisive effect on society all over the world that the threat of nuclear war had since World War II. The bomb was dropped in Japan just before my daughter was born. I grew up a political person because there was no way of being anything else if you were born to live between wars and the threat of them. You had either to champion the fusty second-hand sham handed down from England, to its morgaged estate of Australia, the suburban cowardice that rushed to the money trough, the Saturday afternoon tennis, the Sunday surfing, the sport, all the distractions that kept people in neat breeding boxes in long rows of clean streets, or you had to say that, yes, you were in favour of a country where men and women were legally equal, where married teachers were not sacked as a matter of course from their jobs as soon as a depression hit, where marriage and child-bearing were not iron religious obligations ruled by a church openly patriarchal.

  When the great revolution for which the brave Russian people fought and died was taken over by a beaurocracy fatally tyrannical, to make Russia an ideological prison-camp, this was a tragic accident of history that was hidden from the rest of the world until its ugliness became inescapable.

  The disillusion of the failed revolutionary generation of the 1930s all over the world was part of me. Bart De Light’s The Conquest of Violence became a textbook for me later. I rediscovered the ancient but never-failing messages of Christianity embedded in the New Testament; not the histories of Semitic tribes and their wars or the interpolations of mad millennialists but the instruction never to give evil power or, as Ghandi put it, to oppose with love — if possible but to oppose anyway: never to let tyranny, meanness or cruelty succeed. I was not fatally committed to any one set of convictions or ideology, even non-violent resistance. This all-questioning attitude made me equally unwelcome to confreres or opponents. I was, they said, ‘a devil to argue’. I would argue either side of a question quite happily without being committed. But show me a situation where people were being ill-treated by usurped power and I was into the struggle like some very active, astute little pest. I became convinced that you could change the climate of opinion even in Australia, that apathetic second-rate country, half asleep, full of decent people who did not read, and that it was to be my job to help change the climate of opinion on which society — as we know it — floats along.

  I decided that I would turn Naomi’s — or rather her brother Yoshel’s — little holding at East Hills into a farm and we began planting corn and keeping poultry. Brother Yoshel had a number of cheap little plots at East Hills. I always had a large streak of peasant in me and whenever possible I would immediately begin to plant. I could also cure people with my hands and Naomi taught me massage. She was a convinced nudist and at our East Hills holding I soon recovered my strength and health. I can still see dear Mary Gilmore, sitting on a chair beside the furrows while we planted, with a scarf wrapped round her hat. She approved of me and Naomi. The Parent contributed free wire-netting for the fowl run which an admirer set up for us, hewing down huge trees for fence posts and nearly killing himself. Naomi encouraged the admirers in and I got rid of them for her. She said young men got on her nerves. She was a real puritan at base. Before I came she had had one man she was really in love with and some months after I set up the farm she discovered she was pregnant. I met her in the city and heard the bad news.

  ‘Never mind,’ I consoled her. ‘I’ll shout you a banana milk shake.’ Over the banana milk shake I swiftly adjusted my plans — as I was accustomed to doing. I would take Naomi home to my mother and I would go off with another friend of mine who wanted to observe bird swamps up the North Coast. If I didn’t go off with this girl and write about bird-observing, I pointed out to Naomi, my father would want to find me a job in a city office.

  I established Naomi in a shed at the bottom of our yard at Hillside. It had originally been built at the Parent’s behest when it dawned on him that the females of his family would be ideal cheap labour. He was interested in a company that sold Reflecto, a mixture of fuller’s earth for polishing silver. He moved large sacks of Reflecto into this shed and I was expected to pack it at two shillings a gross. My sister and mother refused to have anything to do with it so the shed became mine. I used it as a study and fitted it up with a couch, armchairs and anything my mother threw out. It made a dear little study. Naomi, who hated living in suburban houses, was very happy there, awaiting the birth of her daughter. Luckily my mother was very fond of her.

  Just before I was ready to start for the northern swamps I received a letter from Roddy in Coonabarabran. ‘This is the greenest place outside Ireland,’ he wrote. ‘Why not call in on your way north?’ This suited me quite well. It would fill in the time until my bird-watching friend was ready. Naomi had talked to some reporter who had used my proposed trip to fill his column.

  I had, before Roddy was sent off to Coonabarabran, told him that I intended to take a long walk and needed to buy some trousers. In those days slacks for women were not sold yet and jeans were still in the far future. Roddy accompanied me down to Paddy’s Market one night after lectures and was measured by the man on the clothing stall. ‘What size is he?’ I asked. ‘A four.’ ‘And what size would I be?’ He measured me with his eye. ‘You’d be a perfect four, miss.’ ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Wrap those trousers up.’ I could always get shirts, a coat and a felt hat — the uniform for the road. These would not show the dirt of campfires. I had a knapsack and my sister’s ski-ing boots. These managed to rip the skin off my feet so it was fortunate I took a pair of sandshoes with me. I wore the sandshoes more than I did the boots. Later I’d start out in the boots to walk a hundred miles or so and end up in the sandshoes. I hated to be licked but I finally threw those damned boots away. I can only pass on the wisdom of the road, if anyone is still walking it: look after your feet.

  I was sorry that my farm project had come to such an abrupt halt. I had enjoyed our evenings; with my feet up on the bathtub while Naomi read to me from Thus Spake Zarathustra for which she had an unlikely fondness. It was very popular at the time before it became a kind of bible for the Nazis. I had my doubts about Nietszche, but was willing to pick out the good bits and ignore the rest. Naomi’s views and mine did not always correspond. Her Communist friends struck me as a mixed bunch, far too superior and narrow in their opinions. They thought us extreme in our individualism. Nor did I share her enthusiasm for Russia and, considering that Naomi’s whole family had either been massacred or escaped to Harbin, I wondered at it. Her surviving relatives had been imprisoned in Harbin and vanished. Yoshel sent her a ticket to come to Australia — but the boat left from Shanghai. How she ever made it from Harbin to Shanghai was quite an epic. She begged her way. All the way through China. It was just like Yoshel to do something like that. He was crazy as a coot and expected her to get to Australia somehow without a cent. Before I left the farm I had dealt Yoshel two hefty smacks in the face for speaking disparaging words about Naomi. I felt if anyone had dealt with him more often thus when he was younger it would have done him good. My reaction really stunned him. Naomi’s rabbi father must have been too lenient with him. His reputation in his native village was
that he was possessed of a devil. He made a lot of money in Australia.

  My poor Parent was, by this time, quite resigned. He even drove me to the foot of the Blue Mountains when I set off on my six-hundred-mile walk to Coonabarabran. Six hundred miles always seemed to me just a good distance. The car ride gave the Parent the opportunity for one more recitative, prophecying my doom. My murdered body would be found, he felt, before very long. Turning off south, he presented me with ten shillings to take me on my way. I went off whistling cheerfully.

  I took a train part of the way up the mountains and sunset saw me tramping down from Mount Victoria, passing two bona fide tramps from whom I asked the way to the nearest water. ‘There’s a dam,’ they advised, ‘on your left just at the foot there.’ I took a side road to the dam but found it disgustingly muddy so I continued on, overtaking my tramps again. ‘Do you mind,’ I asked, ‘if I camp with you tonight, as it is my first night out?’ They didn’t mind so I found the Lett River and went for a swim, overtaking them again on the river bank where they had lit a fire. They were horrified at the weight of my pack, and wanted to know what the hell I had in it. ‘You don’t need the fry-pan. And the potatoes are just dead weight. What do you want with a book?’ I was firm about the book. It was Thomson and Geddes’ The Evolution of Sex, which I had lifted from the remains of Grandfather Tennant’s library at Artarmon. The Evolution of Sex is a book I still respect. It had observations on melanism which I felt were valid insights and the work on metabolism should be better known. One of those solid, worthy, respectable studies.

  These pleasant tramps, unemployed and on their way to Orange, sat up giving me good advice about picking up tins for cooking from any rubbish dump and never carrying any more weight than I had to. We rolled ourselves up in our blankets and bid each other ‘Good-night’. In the morning, after a hearty breakfast, we said ‘Good luck’ to each other and they went on to Orange and I took what I thought was a short-cut to Lithgow where I intended to jump a train. I wished to know all I could find out about the men on the track and their ways of getting about. My feet were already giving me trouble and I was happy to accept a lift from two youths in a sulky. They had been rabbiting and kicked out a kangaroo dog so I could ride up Bell’s Mountain, trudging, themselves, beside the sulky. In the town they passed the headquarters of the local unemployed who were on strike against the meagre dole payments. My two new friends responded to the chiacking of the groups of men outside the hall and asked if I would care to come on to their farm. I thanked them for the lift but refused, and set out on foot through Bowenfels where, under a glorious pink hedge of hawthorn, I again painfully removed my confounded boots.