The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  Doffie Tennant in WRAN uniform with her mother

  Kylie with her cat and the Laurieton school’s kangaroo (Vic Johnson/Associated Newspapers)

  The portrait of Kylie was painted by Eric Saunders for the Archibald Prize of 1941 (Vic Johnson/Associated Newspapers)

  The school at Laurieton. Kylie is waving to Roddy from the residence fence (Vic Johnson/Associated Newspapers)

  Kylie on Diamond Head with her dog Binkie (Vic Johnson/Associated Newspapers)

  Kylie Tennant photographed in 1950 (Vic Johnson/Associated Newspapers)

  Kylie with Ernie Metcalfe, who appeared in The Honey Flow and featured in The Man on the Headland (John Fairfax & Sons)

  Kylie with Benison around 1951

  A bee yard on top of the Great Divide which Kylie visited with her new baby Bim while collecting material for The Honey Flow

  The Rodd family in Hunters Hill. Benison is ten and Bim is five

  At a picnic in 1953 after moving to Hunters Hill — Kylie is holding Bim and Benison is second from the right

  Kylie with a group of schoolchildren putting on one of her plays, Lady Dorothy and the Pirates

  Roddy in the playground of Hunters Hill Primary School one break-up day in the 1960s

  Kylie Tennant with Judah Waten (left) and Ian Mudie at the Adelaide Festival of Arts

  Xavier Herbert said he’d always wanted a lioness to ride on the back of his motor-bike and Kylie didn’t dare refuse (John Fairfax & Sons)

  Kylie on the set of the TV series Ride On Stranger

  Benison in her teens

  Bim in St Andrew’s uniform

  A portrait of Bim by Benison in 1975

  The parent in his nineties

  Kylie Tennant (A. T. Bolton)

  In Sydney I had taken along a few friends to a meeting and I asked the speaker what, when the revolution came, would be done with the intellectuals. They can find a desert island,’ he replied.

  We know what happened to the intellectuals in China. Completely disillusioned by this conference of what were supposed to be the policymakers of the organisation on which I had set my hopes of social change, I returned to the Canowindra Hotel, ready to tell Roddy that he was right and that the Communist Party were a niggling set of has-beens, who would not do more than split the working-class movement and sabotage Labor because they weren’t willing to do more than ‘use’ people. They would not co-operate unless they could take charge and they didn’t have anything useful to offer. Their slavishness to Russia, their die-hard ‘That’s-the-Party-line’ made them as rusted as old fence wire.

  Roddy was in bed with bronchitis. He had also fallen in love with a very beautiful girl who was not in love with him. I was so sorry for him that if I could have given him this girl on a plate I would have done so. She was a lovely girl, gentle, feminine — entirely different from me. I didn’t in the least blame Roddy for falling in love with her. There are so many different kinds of love and I knew from earlier experience that there is hellish suffering in this kind.

  Roddy took sick leave and we went to Sydney where a telegram reached us to say that Tiburon had won the Prior Memorial Prize. Roddy revived; and this gave me more good cheer than the actual prize. I had been so very anxious about him. We went to Belmont and put up at a hotel on the lake front that the Parent had discovered. Roddy completely recovered from his bronchitis and his passion. My joy knew no bounds. He was his old confident, good-humoured personality again.

  I smashed the gears of the car on our way to Sydney for the holidays and Roddy was able to stay at Blackheath at one of his favourite hotels while the gears were fixed. By the time we reached Canowindra again I had taught myself to drive. When I smashed the gears coming down a steep hill from Lithgow to the Cox’s River I asked: ‘Do we jump or do we go on to the bottom? The brakes have failed.’ ‘Let her go,’ Roddy said calmly. ‘I’ve been down Surry Hills in a billy-cart.’ We managed to smack the car into a post and stop it above a little cliff. We then poured water on the smoking brakes from a teacup. It’s a wonder we weren’t killed because neither of us knew anything about cars.

  Roddy, for the next holiday period, had an ambitious plan to drive across to Weston, a town on the coal fields, to visit the Rev. Alfred Clint with whom he had been corresponding. As soon as we met him it was the beginning of a friendship that lasted all our lives.

  We arrived at the large grim rectory — almost empty of furniture — and Alf gave us a bed. He had unfailing good humour and even those who detested his politics immediately they saw him responded to him as friends. For instance the Parent who was, to say the least, no socialist, as soon as he met Alf when later we visited Patonga Beach, insisted on giving him a tie that once belonged to the Duke of Windsor. ‘You could raffle it,’ he suggested. He showed him a huge pair of drawers once owned by Queen Victoria and a handkerchief from some royal trove which friends had given him in England. ‘No use giving them to Kylie,’ he confided lugubriously. ‘When I showed her that handkerchief she blew her nose on it.’ I had not, I only snuffled it; but he never forgot this act of lèse-majesté. He regarded those garments with reverence. Alf accepted the tie of the Duke of Windsor with warm thanks and the Parent glowed. I don’t know if Alf ever raffled it on behalf of his Aboriginal co-operatives but I can’t imagine the tough miners Alf mingled with over a beer being enthusiastic.

  The graceful way Alf dealt with the Parent should have made me ashamed of myself, my own intolerance.

  Roddy and Alf for the rest of our lives made common cause. They wrote to each other, for Alf was a great letter-writer. When I accompanied him later on journeys to see his co-ops at Lockhart and Moa Island he would sit up at night after a gruelling day, tirelessly answering letters until the small hours. He had supporters in very strange places. He never lost a friend.

  When he was old and dying he continued to work at a pace that would have killed any other man years before. I gave my last copy of the book I wrote about Alf and the Aboriginal co-operatives — Speak You So Gently — to the matron of the Glebe hospital who was so splendid to Alf when he was dying. He had been going around with cancer for some years, I think. On the way to Tranby — the Co-operative College for Aborigines, which was just around the corner — he collapsed on the doorstep of her hospital and she didn’t think he would last the night. Because he was Alf he was sitting up in bed writing letters and enjoying a joke when I went to see him. ‘Kylie!’ he said. I remembered when he had come up seventy-five miles to Cliff View Orchard when Roddy was dying to celebrate mass by his bedside. He must have been ill even then but he told no one.

  ‘Well, comrade, I have everything teed up,’ he said, when I saw him in Glebe hospital. ‘I’ve had the last rites, made my will, arranged for the cheapest funeral and now I’m all ready. Guess who came in yesterday? The good old archbishop. We were students together and he once said, “Never mind, Alf, it isn’t Greek that counts in the long run.” Well, he’d put off his trip to Europe for a day so he could see me. And just before him …’ I knew we were coming to the joke as Alf told me how a huge stout man had come tiptoeing in. He was the most powerful man in the Trades and Labor Council.

  ‘“Anything I can do for you, Alf?” he said.’ Alf imitated the hushed tones of one visiting a death bed.

  ‘Yes,’ Alf said, ‘I’ve got the money for the fare of one of my Aboriginal delegates to the International Labor Conference in France and I want the fare for the second delegate.’

  ‘Leave it to me, Alf,’ this chap said. ‘We’ll take round the hat at stop-work meetings and there’s so many of them we’ll have the fare in no time.’

  I went to see Alf again a few days later and the matron said: ‘He has a couple of trade union leaders with him.’

  ‘Well, I won’t go in.’

  ‘Oh yes, do. He said you were to go in when you came. They’re only drinking whisky.’ But I sat in the hall until the two men came out. ‘Should Alf be drinking whisky?’ I asked the matron.

 
‘It doesn’t make any difference now,’ she said.

  ‘I had a drink poured out for you.’ He indicated a glass of whisky. It was ten o’clock in the morning and it is not my habit — particularly when I am driving — to drink whisky. Alf had a thimbleful for himself. ‘Cheers!’ I said. ‘Have fun in the next world if there is one.’ On the way out I passed Alf’s sister Lilian with an armful of papers. Alf was still ordering his few belongings for his mother and sister, the co-operatives, the delegation to Europe. He died that night.

  I drove down again to Sydney to read the lesson at his funeral with Mavis Cribb, who had made one of the trips to Lockhardt River with me to witness the establishment of the first Aboriginal co-operative. Norman Bushman, another of Alf’s team, was fussing around looking for a copy of ‘The Red Flag’ to be sung at Alf’s funeral. He didn’t find one and I forgot to tell him it was an old hymn, ‘O Tannenbaum’. The church of Christ Church St Laurence was crowded with Alf’s supporters and the boys and girls from Alf’s Co-operative College. How many years Alf had gone round begging for scholarships for Aborigines to come from far mission stations to that college! The money from Speak You So Gently went for scholarships. Roddy always claimed that if he himself died first I ought to marry Alf but both of us would have regarded such a proposition with embarrassed horror. I knew the girl Alf was in love with but, of course, both of them had to work too hard at their separate vocations. Alf had his mother, his sister, his nephew and the co-operative movement, so he was never lonely.

  I have seen him pacing up and down the shingle in the moonlight outside the but we were sharing in a tiny settlement where you had a ladder to prevent sea-going crocodiles coming into the hut and I knew it was hitting him but I never said anything. He worked — how he worked! — and he enjoyed every humorous tiny episode. His was a good life and, because he took no notice of pain and was perfectly disciplined, he died as a Christian should, not bothering about whether there was a next world or not, but prepared with goodwill and loving kindness to accept whatever was sent.

  * * *

  Now that Roddy had done what all schoolteachers were expected to do — his three years ‘country service’ — he was transferred back to the city, to a suburban boys’ school at Dulwich Hill, with a large wise headmaster with whom Roddy worked devotedly, an all-male staff, and boys who appreciated good teaching. Years later we would be walking down a street and some huge man would loom up on a street corner, worshipfully.

  ‘Don’t you remember me, sir? You taught me, sir!’ And Roddy, screwing his eyes up, would say: ‘Ah yes! You’re Simmons (or it might be Jones or Brown). At Dulwich Hill, wasn’t it?’ And pause to enquire what Simmons was doing now. You could tell that being taught by Roddy had provided him with some contact that would endure all his life.

  It is not often that a boy or girl meets an inspiring teacher. There are good teachers, and the great ruck who go through their duties, but a brilliant teacher, really interested in each separate child, is as rare as royalty. Roddy was happy at Dulwich Hill; he liked to teach. He could immerse himself in the affairs of the Teachers’ Federation which was breaking the grip the headmasters had always had on it. Later, he distanced himself from the Teachers’ Federation as he felt his old friends were going too far to the left. He didn’t like power groups of any kind.

  Standing on the steps of the post office in Martin Place soon after our return I began thinking aloud about what Roddy had told me of his childhood in Surry Hills, a suburb that had been sinking into a slum. I would like, I said, to write about what makes a slum, what economic forces deprive people of decent living conditions, what had become of the places Roddy knew that had now sunk into an indifferent squalor. We began to move from one small flat or room to another in the inner city.

  I made valuable contacts with the Child Welfare Department whose inspectors took me about. When I was told of some more than usually filthy slum I went to live in it and Roddy went home to Paddington to enjoy the company of his mother and brother. As a teacher he could not live in places where the lice or bedbugs were too prevalent.

  One evening he was talking about some important Federation matter to his buddy Sam Lewis at the Windsor Street front gate when I trudged up. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked accusingly. I was supposed to be living in some foul hole. My mother-in-law’s prim terrace house was a palace to it. ‘Came to get a bath,’ I mumbled. Actually I had come to see him.

  You must understand that in the thirties nobody wanted to know about living conditions or sub-standard housing. The inner city slums had been sinking into ever-greater decreptitude. The Australian Broadcasting Commission invited me to come in and consult on some literary program they were arranging.

  ‘What would you really like to talk about, Miss Tennant?’ the director asked genially.

  ‘Slums,’ I said. Somehow the notion of the program dropped. It was not mentioned again. If I had been willing to talk on the motivation of lago or modern literature, my welcome would have been assured. I was too busy, filling notebooks and trudging around with Child Welfare inspectors. I had jobs ranging from social worker to barmaid.

  Foveaux, my second book, was sent off to England. Tiburon I had found was rejected there because it had already been published in Australia and ‘the cream skimmed off the market’. Gollancz rescued Foveaux after two years when it drifted neglected. Publishers put their coffee cups on it and forgot it. When Gollancz published Foveaux there was some complaint about the multiplicity of characters but nobody questioned the conditions I described.

  By this time Roddy and I were living in pleasanter conditions and giving our time to the Christian Socialist Movement. Alf Clint, when he visited England, had been impressed by Conrad Noel, the leader there of the Christian Socialists. The movement in England is well documented. In Australia people are only now beginning to enquire about it.

  We were living in a boarding house on the shore of Sydney Harbour at MacMahon’s Point when my old friend Jimmy Hall, who had been the office boy when the ABC was new, visited us. He was now some official or functionary of the ABC and he made an impassioned speech on the necessity of trying to prevent war. Roddy always bore him a grudge because once we had founded the Australian Peace Pledge Union, Jimmy went off to New Zealand, leaving all the organising to Roddy. Typical ABC,’ Roddy growled.

  I was much amused recently when an ABC television documentary crew persuaded me to show them the places I had lived in. I was explaining that we came to live in McElhone Place because it was considered one of the worst slums in Sydney. The TV crew and myself were standing on the corner of McElhone Place when a young man with green hair in a Mohican cut came up to us and pointed out with pride the plaque which had been presented to McElhone Place for being the best kept street in the municipality. Every house was shining with paint and pride and was wreathed in greenery, window-boxes, flowering plants. On these doorsteps, now shining, had sat my poor drunken neighbours while we talked together. On Saturday morning a man who sold phenol to get rid of bedbugs used to wheel up his stock in trade. The house we lived in had two rooms downstairs and one above where the bugs lived. I did not bother them after the day when I went up to poison them and a mother bug gathered her young behind her and dared me with furiously waving antennae. I admired that bug and respected her. So I left her and the hundreds in the cracks and we slept downstairs.

  The Christian Socialist Movement in Sydney was centred on Christ Church St Laurence where the Reverend John Hope held sway. He was a type of medieval churchman, a big handsome man with great spiritual powers. He also had a lovable set of whims and kinks. Roddy was rector’s warden of the church for many years and John Hope told me that when Roddy had a nervous breakdown and had to retire he was obliged to hire a new secretary and get a second assistant priest to replace him.

  I remember him coming out to Hunters Hill some years later with a brass gadget which highly delighted him. This toy, he explained, was one of those psychometer measures. It sw
ung to the right if you were pointing it at a live person and it swung the opposite way over the photograph of a dead person. He went around swinging it at us all and arrived at last at me.

  ‘Let me measure your aura,’ he said cheerfully. I don’t know why I did it. I caused his gadget to swing the wrong way. I was officially dead.

  He looked at me in exasperation. ‘Women!’ he exploded. It was rather mean of me. I had this static electricity and couldn’t wear watches. John Hope was a little suspicious of women on principle. He was celibate. This, I think, in his youth had been a challenge to many a spirited woman. Roddy had early fallen under his influence and the Rev. Hope knew I had snatched his promising young man from the very steps of the monastery. He became reconciled to me in time. He once preached a sermon and was saying from the pulpit darkly: ‘These instincts, my dear people.’ (A phrase I stole and used in Tantavallon.)

  At the church door I enquired with a glint in my eye: ‘Just what instincts were you referring to, Father Hope?’ He pretended he hadn’t heard me. We had to go round to the church social and I said to his off-sider, Father Bradley: ‘Look at your boss avoiding me.’ Father Bradley, with an evil grin, caught Father Hope by the sleeve. ‘Mrs Rodd would like to discuss your sermon with you,’ he mentioned.