The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  We packed it. ‘The only thing I’m sorry for is that we didn’t have your mother playing the organ,’ Roddy mused. We got Tuckiar off. There was such an uproar that they turned that no doubt murderous savage back into his native desert.

  * * *

  When we moved to Canowindra in 1933 the Parent carefully cut out a notice that the Bulletin was offering a prize for a novel — the S.H. Prior Memorial Prize — and posted through to me. He wrote on it: ‘Get cracking.’

  This struck Roddy as an excellent idea. I began typing Tiburon which had in it all that I had seen and observed of conditions of the unemployed in Canowindra and Coonabarabran, and on the many walks I had taken through the mid-west.

  The Parent appeared again when we were comfortable with a large fire in our bedroom at the Canowindra Hotel in mid-winter. He pleaded with Roddy that he should lend me to go with him on one of his ghastly journeys. Everyone had refused — wisely — to go with him. He had a pain in his back and could hardly drive, so he said. He had a large pink kidney plaster over the pain which he insisted on showing us. The Parent could do a better job of pleading than almost anyone else I have ever heard. ‘Oh, go on,’ Roddy persuaded me. ‘You can’t let the poor old Parent drive on his own.’

  I found myself heading across the Black Soil Plains, saying ‘What’s that clicking noise?’ It turned out to be the wheel chains. There was the One Tree Plain — we were stranded for days at Hay with the roads impassable. We were lost at a place called Gunbah after chanting ‘The roads get good beyond Gunbah’ as the locals had told us. Gunbah was a derelict shack and an overturned road sign.

  My duties consisted of calming the Parent when he had hysterics or fell into a panic, and waiting outside in the car while he interviewed the local blacksmith. The Parent would then stroll out and say ‘Take a letter’, which I would do in my peculiar shorthand, typing it out that night and posting it off. All the Parent did was sign it without reading it. As a result telegrams were following him around the west telling him to come to Melbourne. He had been firing in reports showing that the supply of corrugated iron all round the back parts of the country was controlled by one monopolist firm. So the Parent and I drove to Melbourne where he could not find any place to park the car. I hopped out and interviewed the cop on point duty, found a garage for the car, found a hotel, calmed the Parent’s hysterics and shipped myself home. He recovered his nerve and bullied his directors, outfaced the monopolist and returned to Sydney with trails of glory — telling everyone what a lousy driver I was: ‘never missed a puddle or a pot-hole’.

  During the war I went with him on another horror trip. My job was to light the gasburner to start the car — which was a very explosive effort — while the Parent stalled the car, found out someone had stolen the petrol, worried about the charcoal, stalled again on Brown’s mountain and nearly backed over the edge of a cliff, had hysterics while I packed rocks under the back wheel at the top of the precipice. He complained of my snoring when we had to share a room in a boarding house. I never heard him snoring as I was too exhausted; I was asleep. I had snarled at him for taking a second cream cake — when there were two little children watching him who had not had any. ‘Don’t know whatcha mean,’ the Parent mumbled. Of course, he had not noticed he was taking the last and only cream cake. He did it automaticaly, without thinking.

  We bickered our way across New South Wales or exercised remarkable seething restraint. ‘Anybody else I’ve brought with me,’ the Parent mused, ‘has gone home half way, or burst into tears; somehow you never do.’

  Roddy meanwhile would be cosily ensconsed in our hotel in Canowindra writing his thesis on the Causes of the First World War or the Uses of Psychoanalysis in Education. Persuading me to go away with the Parent gave him great stretches of tranquillity; likewise drawing a map of rough stretches of country I had never walked over. ‘Crookwell,’ he suggested. ‘You’ve never been to Crookwell!’ I walked from Canowindra to Crookwell cross-country, arriving in a snowstorm.

  I wrote Tiburon in the bedroom Roddy and I shared at the Canowindra Hotel, looking out on the backyard and the wheat silos of the railway. The places that went to the making of my Warning Hill were the travellers on the Timor Road by the Castlereagh in Coonabarabran, the camp across the river on the Gunnedah Road where we had our old farmhouse, ‘The Travellers Rest’, where the travellers came to ask for food and water or a paddock for the horse. It had a well that never ran dry, although one time when Goodie and her daughter Yuki came to stay a small boy went down it and reported that something had died in it. All we could do was boil the water. There was always feed and shade in our small orchard or under the great white flowering cedar tree in the backyard.

  At Canowindra the travellers’ camps were on the stock route about a mile out on the Eugowra Road. I just fused the two towns together in Tiburon.

  If the unemployed committee was upset at my making friends with the constable, our friends on the school staff did not care to meet the men who swept the streets. I was to be seen on any street corner handing out our paper the Bush Worker, produced in the hotel bedroom and distributed free.

  Many of the rural workers looked to the harvesting season as their only hope of work in the year. The men living in the town would be likelier to get work before the ‘travellers’ who were not known to the farmers, but all of them knew that the struggling farmers felt the men should be glad to work for anything or nothing. The men did not see it that way. If they got work the police would cut them off the dole and there were endless formalities to getting on again. You had to be a petitioner to the police who were inclined to be lordly about letting a man get dole.

  The lady I called in Tiburon ‘Mrs Mulver’ succeeded in getting her family off the track. She took her five children to the police station and spread them out on the steps. The Bush Workers Committee had written to the Chief Secretary about her case but the local sergeant brushed the answer aside, saying that he was ‘running this show, not the Chief Secretary’. Mrs Mulver told him to put the five children in gaol and he could feed them. The thought of the Mulver children in his neat gaol was too much for the sergeant. Mrs Mulver got the dole for them and herself but her husband was told to get back on the track.

  In a tattered copy of the Bush Worker of 22 November 1934 you can read the case of a man offered ‘five shillings a day and feed yourself’ by a farmer who suggested, ‘You can get the dole on top of it and the police will wink their eye.’ They wouldn’t, of course. The Bush Workers Committee was asking a minimum wage of eleven shillings a day and ‘find yourself’ or two pounds ten a week and ‘found’. Any small victory in one district, Molong or Eugowra, was published in the news-sheet in an attempt to raise the wage elsewhere, but by the end of 1935 it was usually no higher than eight shillings a day and find yourself, and the hours often exceeded sixty a week.

  Whenever there was a deputation from the unemployed, the ‘relief workers’, or the Bush Workers Committee, I was on it. As secretary to the Bush Workers, Roddy would write to the Chief Secretary about some case or other and the Department would ask the sergeant to explain. The sergeant would look out of his peaceful door at the blue hills and there in the foreground would be another deputation streaming up to the police station. The sergeant would order the deputation out and they would have to go because he could cut them off the dole; but their press secretary (me) would stay and when the sergent thumped the table, I thumped it too — a fierce, thin she-cat, the poor sergeant thought.

  I would go over to the School of Arts to read a copy of the Bulletin free. There might or might not be one of my stories in it. The first S.H. Prior Memorial Prize offered £100 for a novel — big money in those days. Tiburon was written in four months. It was clean-typed — there was only one copy — on the back of writingpad paper. By the time a telegram came asking the author to call at the Bulletin office I had almost forgotten about it.

  The reason Tiburon won the prize was probably that the judges, Tom Mutch, Guy
Moore, Camden Morrisby, Stewart Howard and Cecil Mann, remarked on the strain in it, curiously reminiscent of the Lawson of the 1890s. This was not deliberate or contrived. Perhaps the circumstances of the rural workers of the 1890s were similar to those of the 1930s. One person who did not care for the tone of the book was Ken Prior, editor of the Bulletin, who told me as I autographed his copy that Tiburon was ‘a bad advertisement for Australia’. In those days, perhaps in these days also, writing was considered a branch of publicity — national publicity, if you like. Tiburon suggested that something had gone wrong somewhere and that was not the impression a patriot would wish to give in the shining circles of omnipotence in London.

  The Bulletin generously added another £50 to the prize money as payment for serialisation. This serial of Tiburon was illustrated by Norman Lindsay and he never did forgive the author. What I said about the illustrations — for instance, that he could not draw a kiss without making it look like a rape — was pretty unforgiveable. ‘You’re worse than Louis Stone!’ Lindsay burst out. ‘I thought when I did the cover for Jonah I had found the man who carped the most. You beat him hollow!’ But imagine showing a countryman wearing a bowler hat! Norman claimed he lived in the country and they wore bowler hats there. He lived in Springwood, almost a suburb of Sydney. Norman Lindsay simply had too much personality to be an illustrator of anyone else’s work; he swamped it with Norman Lindsay.

  We had bought a secondhand car, a 1923 Overland, which was called ‘The Grey Nurse’ because it was grey and you had to nurse it. When Bob Kelly, the president of the Bush Workers, no longer wanted to be a hawker the car reverted to us. There came the day when the sergeant gazing out his doorway saw the press secretary of the Bush Workers approaching his door. He was pleased that I was only applying for a driver’s licence. He hastened to send the constable out with me and, beaming, he asked when they returned, ‘Well, how did she go?’ He was already filling in the licence. ‘She needs a bit more practice,’ the constable said. His face was pale. Neither the sergeant nor the constable dared refuse the licence. Visions of correspondence unending rose before them. There was a general feeling that if something unfortunate should happen, it might very possibly be considered a blessed release.

  Some years later the author of Tiburon met a resident of Canowindra who demanded to know why she had never gone back there. ‘Don’t they still think I should be run out of town?’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ he said. ‘They’d roll out the red carpet for you.’ How strange that is!

  In Canowindra Roddy fought a victorious battle against the post office whose postmaster had decided to confiscate some magazines and books sent up by my brother-in-law. I think one was by Harold Laski and the other by Palme Dutt but I can’t remember. Neither was on any banned list. Roddy was magnificent when pointing out infringements by departments. The campaign ended with two high officials coming up to apologise and nothing else went missing in the post.

  Roddy’s intelligent headmaster at Canowindra had been replaced by a red-faced bad-tempered returned soldier. He accused my husband of corrupting the morals of the girls in the literature class to whom he had lent my copy of Precious Bane by Mary Webb, a beautiful piece of writing he had given me before we were married.

  In the thirties in New South Wales the hostility to what was seen as the dictation of overseas owners, banks and companies in the ownership of Australian resources confronted the deep devotion to traditions of Empire.

  An ominous sign was the rise of the New Guard in country towns and the cities. You were considered either Fascist or Red, depending on who was talking. The old apathy had gone. From the Depression up to World War II, Labor, much of it Roman Catholic and traditional, was considered Red and unfit to govern people. Nice people worried about the prospect of their comforts vanishing should there be a change of government. With the war, when Labor came to power this worry had given place to the necessity of uniting Australians against the Japanese and this could not happen without a Labor Government. But all through the worsening thirties the cleavage in attitudes had hardened.

  I was to the left of the Communist Party. My detestation of violence took the form of a demand for action to improve conditions now. Coming from a suburban background from Sydney, the conditions under which the country poor and the itinerant workers lived struck me as astonishing. They were accepted by those who lived under them because they had always been like that.

  When I walked twenty-five miles to interview the Shire Council and plead for a water tank to be placed beside a shed on the stock route where the travelling workers camped, the Shire clerk demanded: ‘What’s wrong with drinking the creek water? I’ve drunk it.’

  ‘There’s a dead horse in it,’ I told him. He seemed to think people should draw their water from above the dead horse, but I got my water tank. Their astonishment that anyone, particularly a young woman, a schoolteacher’s wife living in a hotel, should be concerned with the conditions under which ‘bagmen’ lived was extreme. The explanation was that I was a Red. I could be seen on street-corner distributing a news-sheet published by the Unemployed Workers movement and the Bush Worker, for which we were responsible, surveying conditions and urging a rise in the wage of harvesters. We got this sheet out on a flatbed in our hotel room and printer’s ink on the counterpane was something dear Mrs Goddard, who did the housekeeping, was complaining about. I had made friends with the young policeman who so frequently met me arguing with people over this news-sheet, and Roddy and I were very relieved when his sergeant forbade him to speak to us. He was so lonely I invited him to come on one of our weekend picnics, but the school staff thought him uncouth, and our Unemployed Workers League reproached me for friendliness to the Enemy.

  ‘Once a policeman, never a man,’ the president of the Unemployed Workers, Bob Kelly, assured me gravely. I was always crossing invisible boundaries, of class and tradition. I trod hotfoot over everybody’s preconceptions and the pitying contempt for my ignorance only equalled the tolerance with which everyone regarded my ineptitude. They were perfectly right, of course. What they did not recognise was that I was writing Tiburon which gave as accurate an account as I could manage of rural conditions at the time. My indiscriminate friendliness was, of course, a weak overhang from the Christian Science in which I had been raised. I was completely fearless because it never occurred to me that there was any occasion to be afraid. Later I walked unscathed through thieves, murderers, savages, still being friendly to them, and I never found it fail.

  I had completed Tiburon — Roddy typed it — and it was posted off, when I was invited to attend a Communist conference at Lithgow. I went off very proudly with Bob Kelly, in the car we had bought so that Bob could do some hawking. He had given that up to sell vegetables. Roddy said that we could cover our travelling expenses by hawking so Bob and I sold cabbages from door to door all the way. Bob and his nice wife and charming children lived in a deserted shop which had closed down. Roddy and I were still living at the hotel. Any money we got we put in a jar on the mantel-piece after our rent was paid. One of the maids was inclined to help herself from this trove. That trip to Lithgow was one of the coldest I have ever experienced. We camped overnight at Bathurst in a shelter shed and in the morning emptied a chunk of ice out of the billy. Bob marvelled at my resistance.

  ‘I’ve been two nights in a shell hole on the Western Front,’ he told me, ‘sharing it with a dead German, but it wasn’t as cold as this.’

  I think that Bob wasn’t as well fed as I was. When he reached Lithgow he got drunk and was lying out on the concrete when some unfeeling person threw a bucket of water over him. He got pneumonia and when we got back I had to explain to his wife who was, naturally, poor girl, very upset.

  Going to that Communist conference was the best thing that could have happened to me. I discovered how ineffectual they were. This was not for want of self-sacrifice or hard work but they had not changed since the nineteenth century and were devoted to reading little pamphlets
written in an excruciating style and as savourless as chewing sawdust. Holy Russia dictated what they thought. At this conference they held a dance and I discovered, to my surprise, that I was the only woman delegate. The wives were relegated to preparing supper. At the conference a delegate from the Arms Factory complained that his name had been printed on the program. He was supposed to be strictly under wraps.

  Where I really got into hot water was when the inner politbureau or council of notables gathered to investigate me. I had given them a run-down on the whole state of the agricultural and pastoral society of western New South Wales and they wanted to know where I got this information. I told them how I had gathered correspondents from towns all over that area, writing to any contacts, enquiring what conditions were like for our Unemployed Workers news-sheets. I received a furious note across the table from Tom Ensfield: ‘Don’t you know that I am in charge of rural policy and that any information must come through me?’ He sat across the table glaring at me. That set of stone faces decided to suspend me. I was a suspicious character. In fact, they didn’t know what to make of me. I thumped the table. ‘I resign,’ I said.

  I have never forgotten the answer. ‘You can’t resign, comrade. You either become inactive and are expelled or you are expelled.’

  ‘Well, I resign,’ I yelled. They then had in Bob Kelly, shambling red-eyed from getting drunk, and enlisted him as a Communist member. And then they had the gall to ask me to take up the collection round the hall on the last night because people would give more to a woman. I was the only woman there. I went off seething. Talk about snobbery! Just because my father worked for a capitalist firm and I had been brought up middle-class I was unacceptable! Bob Kelly, unshaven, with no grammar, they recognised and smiled on. I liked old Bob but nobody could actually think of him as one of our great brains.