The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  The work on preparing the paintings selected for the catalogue continued. Each painting left Victoria’s shed looking vulnerable, unsure of itself. When it returned from the framers, under glass, it was art.

  The last paintings were too big to fit in the back of the Falcon or Victoria’s BMW. I organised a courier with a truck to pick them up and bring them back to Victoria’s house. On the evening they were delivered, Victoria and I sat on her back porch, drinking champagne out of the teacups I kept piled up on my fold-out desk.

  As we sat watching dusk fall over the bay, Victoria and I talked about men, the way women do. As a way of talking about ourselves. Showing little triumphs, little bruises.

  I told Victoria bits and pieces about my marriage to Joe. She told me about a man who had asked her to marry him, then changed his mind a week later.

  She said: ‘My own parents set the bar so high. Their marriage was a true marriage, a marriage of minds, you know? I haven’t found that yet. I haven’t found someone who would support me the way Dad supported Mum.’

  ‘Give me some examples.’

  ‘Well, he just saw her. Their travels together, their adventures. He let her travel, he let her do anything she wanted. It was amazing. That’s the sort of relationship I want. I can’t find anyone who lives up to it.’

  She didn’t look at me as she spoke. She looked out over the bay. And I knew then what I had known for months: that Victoria didn’t believe the story of her parents’ perfect marriage, but she wanted to. I felt sorry for her. And I felt scared. Because I wanted to believe it too.

  We stayed drinking and talking as the lights turned on in Geelong below us, piling bottles up on Victoria’s blonde-wood table.

  When I got home to my mother’s dark house down in the flatlands, I stumbled going up the ladder to my room, hit my chin on the rungs and bit my lip.

  We sent enquiries to exhibition spaces, drafted articles for art magazines and newspapers and journals across the country.

  On weekends in Victoria’s shed, as the light lengthened into late spring, I spread old photographs on the floor, and we went through them one by one, picking out the images that had the right ‘feel’. This one for galleries, that one for museums, this one for a women’s magazine, that one for a newspaper’s weekend section.

  Edna the adventurer, Edna the wife, Edna the mother.

  Edna in her Land Army uniform, leaning on a huge tractor wheel with a cigarette in her mouth, skirt belted high on her tiny waist.

  Edna in PNG, on the front porch of a house, hands on her hips and squinting at the camera, with Max sitting shirtless on the steps below her.

  Edna on the patio of a house in France, her back to the photographer, standing in front of an easel. Barefoot. Paint-splattered overalls. Bottle of wine.

  ‘I like this one,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Victoria, hardly glancing at it.

  ‘People will be drawn to the fact she spent time in France, you know. The cultural cringe. It makes her seem more like a real artist if we talk about France.’

  ‘I just don’t like that photo. It’s blurry.’

  I turned to her as she sat, shuffling the photographs. I said gently, ‘It must have been hard for you, with your mum gone that long, a whole year. And Percy gone too.’

  Victoria didn’t look up at me, just raised an eyebrow. ‘To tell the truth, I hardly even remember it. It was my first year in primary school, I was busy, you know. Friends, parties, starting netball and tennis, flute lessons. I spent a lot of time with Granny Nel.’

  She made her five-year-old self sound like a hardened socialite.

  ‘Here we go,’ she said, holding up a photo of Edna in the doorway of the Sorrento studio, Victoria leaning against her, ten years old and leggy, her hair in long plaits. ‘This one looks great.’

  The Land Army. The Women’s Wars. The Home Front. Memory Keepers. Memorialist. Bearing Witness. Keeping the Flame Alive. I still find our notes sometimes, scattered through old boxes of papers. I see my handwriting side by side with Victoria’s, and I remember that we were almost friends. I wonder what would have happened, if I had chosen her instead.

  In late October, with Remembrance Day around the corner, Victoria hired a professional photographer to come and document Edna’s entire catalogue. He’d been at school with Percy and Victoria, a Geelong Grammar boy. He wore all black and had a pretentious moustache. His peppery aftershave made me sneeze.

  For days, the shed looked like a film set, with great rolls of white backing paper and hot lights set up; Edna’s work glowing.

  On the day he photographed the late 1960s, I perched on my folding desk and watched as the years of 1966 and 1967 built up, Edna’s preparatory paintings for Vietnam, the ones she made as she waited to hear back from the Art Committee at the Australian War Memorial about whether or not they would select her as an official war artist.

  When 1967 ended, the year of reflection began: paintings of Imelda and the first nurses series. Then 1968 ended and a whole year disappeared. The only break in the chain.

  In the five minutes it took for the photographer to re-wrap the last 1968 framed painting in its cellophane sheath and set the next painting up on the easel, we’d moved to 1970.

  Edna’s style changed completely. The real folded in upon the real: space shifted. The colours blazed. Abstraction lurked at the edges of her images – the waters of Swan Bay dissolving into shards, the clouds over the Princes Highway becoming shifting grey miasmas.

  I didn’t understand that year. But I thought the past was just out there, waiting to be uncovered. And that all I had to do was keep asking, and searching, and I would understand.

  On the afternoon that the photographer finished, he left his invoice in an unsealed envelope next to Victoria’s telephone in the front hall. I opened it up. It cost thousands. It cost her twice as much as she was paying me that month.

  I stood there, staring at the numbers. Then I went back out to the shed and sat surrounded by the paintings, telling myself it was okay, that it would all shake out in the end.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  The Australian Women’s Land Army was the most physical job, and perhaps Edna was drawn to it because she saw it as the ‘hardest’ of the women’s uniformed services, the one that would distance her the most from the image of herself that the girls at school had created for her, of Edna the faux-posh working-class girl claiming to have artistic talents, tempting the soldiers on the beach, disgraced in the local papers, expelled, unclean, suspect, embodied. The daughter of the weak, broken man who Edna used to be proud of, but who now chased the enlisting Whitedales down the street, beseeching his nephews to come home.

  Unlike the women’s services attached to the military, the Australian Women’s Land Army began as a loose coalition of women’s organisations – the Girl Guides, the Country Women’s Association and others – who recognised, long before the government officials did, that rural Australia was collapsing under the strain of departing workers.

  Knowing what the loss of the agricultural industry would mean to Australia at war, the women’s organisations took matters into their own hands, sending members out into the fields and off to cattle stations, where they were protected from the harsh Australian sun and the frequent advances of the remaining men by whatever uniforms they could muster.

  Edna was not alone in assuming that the Australian Women’s Land Army was an official service when she enrolled in May 1943. By then, the AWLA had all the trappings of the other women’s services. The federal government had stepped in to take control of the loosely arranged coalition, issuing standard uniforms and establishing recruitment procedures. Recruiting posters plastered across the cities and countryside showed the AWLA standing shoulder to perfectly pressed shoulder with the other uniformed women’s services: the Australian Women’s Army Service, the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force and the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service.

  It seemed only a matter of ti
me before the AWLA was designated as an official service; the war ministers in Canberra had recommended it be done, Cabinet had endorsed their recommendations, and the new regulations governing the AWLA were being passed from committee to committee.

  Edna was still four months shy of turning fourteen: her faked birth certificate claimed she was fifteen. Once she presented herself at the enlisting station in Geelong and signed her name on the dotted line she was tied to the AWLA, official service or not. A year earlier, the federal government had established the national Manpower Directorate to ensure Australia could keep up with wartime production. Every industry and service was tightly controlled: no-one could leave a job or a position without permission from the Directorate. Identity cards were printed in rumbling factories, hands locked to harvests, lists of reserved occupations published.

  To travel outside of Victoria by train, all passengers had to pass through Melbourne, as Edna would have: Melbourne marked the furthest from home she had ever been.

  Departing from Spencer Street Station, she was moving forward into the unknown. She sketched wildly as she sat squeezed in the crowd of other uniforms, the metal carriages taking them north, hour after hour under the empty, drought-lit skies. There were no signs on the stations they passed. If the Japanese broke through the Brisbane line, they would come down across the country. Why show them the way?

  Artistically, Edna envisioned herself transforming into a bush painter during her time away with the Land Army. Like the Heidelberg School before her, she would be working en plein air, with all its strengthening, purifying associations, not in the hot boxes of the changing sheds, drawing fast to try to capture the bodies of the boys before they were sent off to the front, enclosed by the slats, waiting to be discovered.

  The ‘new Edna’ located in the rough Australian outback would be able to toil in the dry earth, feed the faraway troops, and prove her dedication to land and country. She could be in every way different from the Edna who had come before.

  The Biographer

  A week before Remembrance Day in early November 1992, the first of the press coverage that Victoria and I had worked on placing came out: a double-spread in the Geelong Advertiser.

  I walked down to Ng’s Milk Bar at the end of Mum’s street the morning that the articles ran. I bought up every copy Mr Ng had. I remember standing on the pavement, my arms full of newspapers, dancing on the spot to shake the adrenaline out of my legs. I felt as if I was perched on top of the diving platform at Eastern Beach, as if I had just pressed up, my toes leaving the wooden slats, with the sparkling summer water stretched out ahead of me.

  Back home, I sat with the kitchen door open onto the scraggly backyard and carefully clipped articles, piling them in a neat stack. Within a year, the whole state would have begun to dry up, dry out, twelve years of drought descending, but that day I remember as the last of the wet. The air smelled of turned earth.

  Geelong at War, bawled the headlines over a muddy reproduction of Edna’s Racecourse, the training tents set up in neat rows across the field, the boys with their scuffed knees watching from the sidelines. Below, the editors had chosen a smaller photo, of Smoko, a reworked 1961 oil of an earlier charcoal. A mother with a pram, standing on the platform of Geelong Station while a train full of uniformed troops pulled out of the station. Cigarettes rained down on her from an open train window. She was smiling, holding out a hand towards the train. In the distance, people gathered at the end of the platform, watching.

  The article was about Edna’s time with the Australian Women’s Land Army. Edna as a brilliant recluse, a deliberate cipher, a patriot and a mother. ‘Edna Cranmer was a true Anzac,’ I had written. ‘Fiercely loyal to her husband, Max, throughout his health challenges, a longstanding legacy from his injuries in the Second World War, Edna dedicated the last two decades of her life to preserving the experiences and memories of those who worked on the land, even when the rest of Australia was forgetting. Her incredible body of work was only discovered after her death.’

  The article was burly, blood and bones thrown out into the bay to attract sharks. After I had clipped each one, I put it in an envelope with a typed letter signed by both Victoria and myself. I addressed the envelopes to galleries and collectors. I licked stamp after stamp, stuck them down. The Age was going to run another article the following Sunday and, once they had, we would seal each envelope, send it off.

  Victoria phoned me, triumphant. ‘It’s great,’ she said. ‘The article is so great. Are you free tomorrow? Gran finally wants to talk. I told her about The Age article coming out next week. She’ll want her name in it! She was Mum’s first real patron after all. I’ll take time off work.’

  ‘I can do this alone, Victoria, it’s fine.’

  ‘No, don’t worry. I want to be there.’

  ‘It might even be easier for her without you – she might be able to open up more.’

  ‘About what? Don’t be weird.’ I could feel Victoria smiling on the other end of the phone. ‘I’m her favourite. She can never say no forever, not to me.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll meet you there.’

  The Falcon was back from its repairs. It looked prettier and shinier than ever. I drove over to Eastern Beach. The summer weather of the day before had disappeared in another rainstorm, winter sweeping back through the headlands for one last snap at the peninsula, sucking the lemon and gold of spring from the air.

  There was beauty in our city.

  The hill above Eastern Beach was our Paris, our Rome. The Cranmer place and its grounds occupied an entire corner block on the highest point of the Esplanade. Hedges obscured the view of the lower parts of the house from stickybeaks on the street. I sat in the car, blasting the heating and staring up at the dark wrought-iron balconies of Nel Cranmer’s house.

  Victoria was late. Five minutes turned into ten. A squall blew over, spattering rain on the metal roof. The car windows fogged until I was alone in my own, breathless world. The Falcon felt different after coming back from the shop. It had been fixed, but it wasn’t quite itself anymore. For the first time in years, my loneliness soured. I couldn’t wait – I had to get out of the car.

  Clutching at my bag full of research notes, I pushed open the iron gate and hurried down the uneven path. On the ornate porch, I pressed the bell. It rang faintly somewhere deep inside the house.

  After a long pause, a Filipino woman in a shell-pink nurse’s uniform opened the door. Behind her crisp, institutional outline the house was dark.

  ‘You must be the biographer,’ she said in the upbeat voice of someone who works with the sick. ‘Come on. She hates it when people are late.’

  The front hall was cavernous, the floor tiled in intricate swirling patterns. Paintings hung on every available inch of wall space, climbing into the ceiling’s shadows, separated only by thin roads of flocked red wallpaper. A wide staircase led to the upper levels of the house, thickly carpeted, the dark wooden banister carved with climbing roses.

  The nurse gestured to where I should hang my coat, and even though I was chilled I took it off obediently and put it on the stand.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said. Then she was gone.

  Alone in the hall, I scanned the paintings in the gloom. There was a portrait by Sir William Dargie, behemoth of the respectable art world. Its frame was heavy and covered in darkened gold leaf. Inside its boundaries, a man with wide blue eyes was seated in front of a brown wash.

  A light-filled Gruner landscape was crammed in between portraits, off-white clouds banking in the filtered sky. The son of a Norwegian bailiff and an Irishwoman, Gruner’s mother Mary Ann took him to the school of the prestigious Sydney teacher Julian Ashton when he was just twelve years old. Gruner died the year Edna went to the Herald Exhibition.

  In pride of place hung a Frederick McCubbin, with the stippled glow of his brushwork.

  I wondered what the child Edna felt, walking into the Cranmer household for the first time, seeing McCubbin’s soft green and pink bushsc
ape hanging in a home instead of in the wide, echoing halls of the Geelong Art Gallery.

  Had these paintings been here on the morning Victoria had told me about, when Edna was caught in the bushes, waiting for a glimpse of Imelda? Had she seen them as Lady Nel Cranmer led her down the hallway for tea before sending her home?

  The nurse returned. As we walked down the hallway, I asked her if she knew if there were any Edna Cranmers in the house.

  ‘A family member?’

  ‘Paintings by Nel’s daughter-in-law.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. So many paintings.’

  When the nurse threw open the door at the end of the passageway and pushed me into the light, I was almost blinded. I stood on the threshold, feeling the humid, clammy air.

  Glass ceilings and walls gave way onto the overcast spring sky. As my sight adjusted, I saw that the entire back of the house was a conservatory – ferns hung from the glass roof, vines fought for space against the walls, orchids reached up from pots and trailed from baskets. The floor was tiled in pearly white. In the middle of it all, on a chaise longue, sat Nel Cranmer, composed in a perfectly pressed pantsuit with a long, pink string of pearls looped around her sagging neck.

  The nurse closed the door behind me with a click. We were alone together.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  At the end of her first month of picking peas in northern Victoria, Edna went to the farmer she was working for to collect her wages only to learn that it wasn’t his place to pay her. The AWLA, he told her sternly, would pay her when she picked up her next assignment from their office in Ballarat.

  It took her a couple of days to make her way back to the AWLA representative in the wooden quiet of the Country Women’s Association hall. The chagrined AWLA rep told Edna that it was, in fact, the farmer’s job to pay her after all. In a letter to her cousin Jennifer Whitedale, Edna writes: ‘At least I will know for next time! It won’t happen again. All the times are lean, and I am more organised than most with my pencils and my shoes and my charm, don’t forget my charm.’