Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  It is true that, in her arresting tales of pioneer Australia, she often placed herself as character when the calendar proves she could not have been so. I don’t think this was lying, nor was it fantasising in the usual sense. Perhaps her imagination was so detailed, so vivid, that as she grew older she was not able to ask herself: ‘Was I there, or is this something I heard from old men yarning around the campfire?’ There is no record of this personal misplacement in earlier years, so far as I have read. I confess that D’Arcy and I often played ‘Dame Mary and Captain Cook in Tahiti’, or ‘Dame Mary and Captain Phillip at the Arrival of the First Fleet’.

  ‘I’m telling you right this minute, Arthur, my boy, that Botany Bay is unsuitable for a settlement.’

  ‘I have my orders from Admiralty, ma’am.’

  ‘Confound them for fools! Can’t you see the swamp? Think of the mosquitoes, the fevers, the difficulty of drainage!’

  ‘I should be obliged, ma’am, if you would take yourself off into the next century.’

  Oh, she was a wondrous old woman, so full of vitality, fun and originality even in her extreme old age, that I was ashamed to tell her that in the middle of my life I had found myself in a dark wood.

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ she inquired almost gaily, pouring me a mug full of maté tea, stuff that tasted like cobwebs and a particularly noxious lichen, but which had some kind of stimulating effect on the blood vessels in the brain. So she said.

  ‘It will go, my girl,’ she said. ‘Hold your horses and don’t do anything desperate. Though I did.’

  She said no more because of the arrival of a visitor, but I believe she referred to that period of her life between 1903 and 1911, obviously entrapped and frustrated years on and off Will Gilmore’s family property in Casterton, Victoria. There she tried to be one of those pioneering housewives she so admired, but though she succeeded, her deprived intellect was tormented beyond bearing. A woman who knew her during those lonely years when Will was away all week shearing or scrub-cutting, wrote: ‘She would put her arms around the trunk of a gum tree, still warm from the heat of the day. That warmth was the only response in that desolate place to her loneliness and desolation …’

  Reading that, I remembered how I had often done the same thing during my first two homesick years in Australia, leaning against the warm and moving tree, the silky, barkless red gum, full of life and benevolence.

  From Casterton, Mary Gilmore left for Sydney, to take up a position on The Worker. Will Gilmore and his brother went to Queensland where he lived for the rest of his life. The marriage, it seems, was effectively ended. But that was the kind of desperate action I did not want for myself.

  Dame Mary’s visitor in that sunset hour was not as old as she but appeared venerable. Soon they were lost in conversation, the old weather-wizard Inigo Jones and she, while I called forth all my cryptic abilities and melted into the stacks of books and papers in the corner. What did they speak about? I cannot recall. All that afternoon and gathering dusk left with me was the awareness that I was a silent onlooker of history, perhaps not significant history, but still part of the continental story. Here were two ancient people, Dame Mary’s voice still deep and melodious, Inigo Jones’s a little thready. Talking about winds that no longer blew since tall buildings came to Australia, lightning striking down and upwards on the ironstone plains, the sunspots that were the weather wizard’s lifework? I do not know. This is speculation.

  But I remember night falling, and a neon light somewhere in Darlinghurst Road throwing jellybean colours over that crowded, amazing, spellbound little room, now yellow, now red, a trembling blue.

  Having temporarily forgotten the selva oscura, the dark wood, I went home bemused, emerging blinking into our bright and noisy house.

  ‘Dinner’s ready,’ said my husband. ‘And I’ve made a sponge cake for afters. But you’ll have to give me a hand lifting it out of the oven.’

  • 4 •

  Some time during D’Arcy’s absence on the Shiralee field research, a quaint couple came to the kitchen door. Everyone came to the kitchen door, as the front door, encaverned within a porch over four metres deep, was obscured by wisteria and jasmine headstrong with summer and neglect.

  ‘We knew you were here, and we want to know you,’ said the tall old gentleman, seventy-seven if he was a day. ‘I’m Will Lawson. And this,’ pointing to the dimpled butterball beside him, ‘is Mrs Lawson.’

  ‘But I know your work, of course I do,’ I cried. ‘Ballads – “round the bend where the pungas grow, I heard an axle groan, The clatter of linch pins knocking slow, in a drowsy monotone”. Of course I know you, and lots more than “Round the Bend”, too.’

  ‘Why, isn’t that nice, Will!’ said the butterball, delighted.

  ‘I’ve always loved ballads,’ I continued. ‘I think I like your sea poems best … “When big winds blew like booming guns”. Great!’

  ‘Blooming guns. You have to remember the narrator’s idiom.’

  ‘I like booming better, though.’

  ‘Don’t correct me, missy.’

  Will Lawson was carved from cross-grained hard-wood, with a face from the British Isles’ past centuries. His personality had been shaped by an often tumultuous life as seaman, journalist, wharfinger, battler and drunkard. He was the son of an Anglican bishop, and ne’er-do-well and runaway though he had been, he was nevertheless a well-educated man with old-fashioned courteous ways.

  ‘I’m not Mrs Will Lawson, you know,’ said the little lady. ‘I’m Mrs Henry Lawson.’

  This was our introduction to the historic ménage of Mr and Mrs Lawson who were, I believe, not lovers in the commonplace sense, but affectionate and mutually dependent friends. They were of great interest and pleasure to us for some years. But D’Arcy, whose first serious reading had been the tales of Henry Lawson, was curious about this forgotten female half of Henry’s brief, unhappy marriage.

  ‘I wonder would Bertha talk to us,’ he said. ‘It’s time she had her say.’

  We obtained Bertha’s permission to construct a documentary provisionally called The Courtship of Henry Lawson for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

  ‘You can check every word,’ we told her, and so she eventually did. Very soon we were invited to morning tea at her tiny Northbridge home.

  ‘Quong Tart was a Chinese who wanted to be a Scotsman. He recited Robert Burns and wore a kilt on St Andrew’s Day.’

  Bertha goes back a long way. She married Henry Lawson in 1896, and says she was nineteen. I don’t believe it. Her mother would have stopped her, the girl being underage, and Mrs McNamara reading Henry like a book. Only later in the story do I find out that Henry wheedled a written consent from Bertha’s mother with his usual convincing lies and false evidence that he’d taken ‘the pledge’.

  ‘Mr MacTart, as he called himself, ran a fashionable tearoom in the Sydney Arcade, and that’s where Harry told me he had made arrangements for us to be married that very afternoon, at a clergyman’s house. Now, what was I wearing?’

  ‘A green dress patterned with red poppies and cream lace-up boots,’ Will prompts tolerantly.

  Bertha’s living room is, without argument, a parlour. Drab Brussels carpet worn to the drabber threads; red rep curtains draped and valanced; glass bookcases that turn the room into a hexagon; dried grasses in urns; a perfect spinney of little tables laden with photographs, porcelain figures, silver boxes, framed letters from Rudyard Kipling, Henry Parkes, S.J. Brady, Billy Hughes.

  She administers tea rather than serves it, daintily, ritually. Hot water in the teacups, rinsed out, cups dried with a soft cloth. The china is fine and floral, sugar in lumps, lemon sliced thin, milk called cream in the English manner. The tea is most likely China, but tastes like mud to me, as I prefer coffee. Will has his in a substantial mug. I take it his hand is beginning to shake a little.

  ‘And then we went home, and Mother had a fit. She called me a lunatic and Harry a waster and didn’t speak to me for months
.’

  The belief that Bertha had gone off her head was almost universal amongst those who knew Henry. Kindly, commonsensible George Robertson, founder of the publishing firm, Angus & Robertson, had done his best to dissuade her, even asking her to spend the weekend at his home in the mountains so that his wife could talk her out of it. He also adds, ‘She had great big hazel eyes, shining with excitement. They were undoubtedly very much in love with each other.’

  For Bertha, girl of a gaslit, hansom-cab Sydney, romantic, impressed by the tall, handsome and already famous writer, love was a natural thing. She knew he was a drunkard, but believed in female folly that with the care, support and adoration only she could give, he would cease being a drunkard. But why did Henry choose young Bertha Bredt, better educated than he, child of a radical, bookish, politically aware family?

  Once I interviewed Tom Mills, in his prime days a top New Zealand journalist, who had invited Henry and Bertha to stay at his home when they fled to Wellington in 1897 to help Henry turn over a new leaf.

  ‘Why did Henry fall for Bertha?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh,’ he said decisively, ‘it was the shape that caught Henry.’

  D’Arcy, when he heard, laughed. ‘Sounds like a music-hall song!’ But it was true that even at seventy-five or -six small round Bertha had an hour-glass shape, probably with the aid of corsets.

  ‘They were fighting like wildcats even while they were with us,’ added Tom Mills. ‘We were glad when they left.’

  Bertha’s efforts to get Henry away from his boozy friends failed entirely. Henry always preferred his boozy friends to family, even his own children. The former, after all, never asked him to take responsibility for anything. The marriage broke up completely in 1903, his children then being five and three, another dead, and the twenty-six-year-old Bertha without any means of support. Much has been written by Henry’s hagiographers of his wife’s cruel hounding of him, and his frequent brief sojourns in Darlinghurst Gaol for defaulting on child maintenance. But it is difficult to see what else she could have done. When the children were older George Robertson gave her a job. She was the first woman book sales representative in Australia.

  It is impossible to discern what indeed Henry Lawson wanted from women; it does not seem to have occurred to him that they wanted, needed, or indeed deserved anything from him. His remarks to George Robertson about ‘the four women I was closely connected with’ are revelatory. Firstly his mother, the indomitable Louisa, ‘a selfish, indolent, mad-tempered woman insanely jealous of my literary success’. Then came Bertha, ‘an insane Prussianised German by birth on both sides, by breeding and by nature’. Of Number Three we know nothing.

  She was possibly his dead infant sister about whom he maundered sentimentally, though it appears his daughter was not given the same attention. Finally he scarifies Isobel Byers, who looked after and supported him for years either as mistress or friend. Isobel is a combination of Louisa and Bertha. ‘They all develop into the Brute. I … was always soft and yielding or good natured and generous.’

  ‘All that was manly in him went into his stories and ballads,’ says D’Arcy, who admires him as a writer. So do I.

  We wrote The Courtship of Henry Lawson with great care, for it was a minor historical document. The ABC had scarcely advertised the broadcast before collectors of Lawsoniana were on our doorstep, and Bertha’s doorstep, either to dispute the script or have us sign affidavits that it was entirely authentic. But these things are authentic only as far as the interviewee is truthful, or can remember the truth.

  Bertha’s voice was on the tape, as well as those of several literary people who were her contemporaries. But somehow it vanished from the ABC’s files. Mislaid, they said, but most likely abstracted and sold or given to a collector.

  We both found Bertha very likeable. She was durable, humorous and kindly. My impression was that, when young, she had probably been a voluptuous little bundle. Still she gave off that indefinable fragrance that attracts men. But her long life had been entirely without scandal.

  Naturally enough, I never mentioned that I knew Mary Gilmore well, for I had heard the long-established rumour that she and Henry Lawson had had an affair, and I did not wish to upset Bertha by mention of Dame Mary’s name. But in the interests of history I must record that Bertha Lawson, on the one occasion she mentioned the older woman, did say that some kind of serious love passage between these two unlikely people had occurred. But I found it, and still find it, hard to believe. The dates are difficult to explain or adapt. And Mary? Plain, large, strongminded, bossy, older than Henry? Exactly the kind of woman of whom he was most afraid and most vilified. My personal opinion is that the ‘love affair’ was one of Henry’s little brags with which he successfully wounded his estranged wife. The tale possibly wounded Mary Gilmore also. But the truth will probably never emerge from the shadows of the long gone past.

  ‘Curious the way she found Will Lawson and took him in,’ I commented.

  In Will Lawson, Bertha had achieved her simple but usually unattainable aim - she had succoured and reformed an alcoholic. Fifteen years or so previously she had found Will Lawson literally in a gutter, ‘bust as an old paper bag,’ as Will said. ‘Sick as a dog.’

  He had come to the end of his buccaneering life, his health was ruined, and he had no hope. Bertha gave him a home, fed him properly, and kept him sober. On a closed-in back verandah of Bertha’s Northbridge home he had a spartan bed, a table supporting a dinosaur of a standard typewriter, files lining the walls. There he happily wrote his ballads, and books about the old whaling days in which he had a special interest. He was a man completed.

  Their contentment with their mutually supportive life was pleasant to see. A memory that always makes me smile is this. One morning I called unexpectedly, and found Bertha sitting on the verandah and Will absorbedly curling her hair with a wooden clothes-peg.

  Henry died in 1922, Bertha two years after we met her; Will lingered a little, and died in 1957. To the literary world, which had given Henry a State funeral, Bertha was nothing more than a memorandum, faint and half-erased, of a bygone age.

  Will, I fancy, had gladly gone ‘where big winds blow like booming guns …’

  Don’t you correct me, missy.

  Now, all this time we were looking for a house, finding a house and moving in, establishing the older children in new schools, buying uniforms, checking bus routes, writing excited and thankful letters to my family in Auckland about this spacious new home that looked over Manly, picked up the sea winds, and had a large well-fenced back lawn where the little ones could play safely.

  All this time too, D’Arcy was writing The Shiralee. Half the night the typewriter rattled away, its machine-gun-like bursts interspersed with dead silences. During one of these I crept in with a cup of tea, and saw him staring at the darkened window. I knew what he was doing, in his mind throwing threads up into the air like a spider, hoping to snare a word, a sentence; or dropping them down into the subconscious, trolling for he knew not what.

  Over his shoulder I read:

  A town that clutched the hem of a mountain, a damp town that smelled of wet sawdust and sopping trees. Wintry lights, blurred by mist into heads of thistledown, marked it like a backcountry airstrip in the darkness of rain and forest.

  At the camp men were touchy and spoiling for a fight. Blow your nose and they’d get the notion you were slinging off.

  As I read a line was added. ‘Get away out of there, you redheaded rat. You hear?’

  He finished the book and retyped it.

  ‘Now for Angus & Robertson’s.’

  It was rejected.

  ‘What reason this time?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have sufficient sale to warrant publication. God, Tiger, I really thought I’d hit it this time.’

  He was deeply dejected.

  ‘And when I was coming out through the shop I saw a new book of woeful poems by old Jim So and So. If that sells 150 copies it’ll be a miracle. Wha
t did she mean, wouldn’t have sufficient sale?’

  ‘In my opinion it’s great. Don’t waste time whinging. Airmail it to Michael Joseph.’

  But D’Arcy repined. He had his heart set on a success with A & R.

  The publishing firm to which I refer was not the present establishment, but the original house, rich in property and bookshops, owning its own printery, and as a publisher by far the most powerful in Australasia, perhaps even south of the equator.

  Blooming out of an antiquarian bookshop, it had produced its first book in 1888 to celebrate the centenary of British settlement. By the turn of the century the firm was already honoured not only for its steadfast support of indigenous Australian writing, hitherto lost in a welter of colonialism, but for the remarkable co-founder, plainspoken, honest, expert businessman George Robertson.

  It is difficult to describe with what panting desire we young writers looked upon A & R. There were other publishers in Australia, certainly, but either they were frail and struggling, with no powers of distribution, or the far-flung non-autonomous colonial offices of British publishers who felt it necessary to establish a Raj-like presence in the outposts of Empire. Angus & Robertson were different; self-ruling, independent, wealthy. We approached the old bookshop at 89 Castlereagh Street with awe and pleasure, and if we had already had a book published with the thistle and waratah imprint, a certain proud possessiveness.

  The publishing offices were on the floor above, a warren of little cells filled with snowdrifts of paper, clouds of cigarette smoke, and dregs of coffee in styroform cups. But we didn’t look for opulence. The fact that the entire building had once been a coach-house, that George Robertson had lived where the editorial offices were now lent a romantic air. A & R had come out of the fresh green colonial days, and the history of those vigorous joyous times was all around us.