The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’m looking at a ghost. That’s what I felt when Victoria sent me the first photos.’

  ‘A ghost?’

  ‘Well, I mean: like it already belongs in history, you know? She was in the Land Army, right?’

  ‘Yep, and there are heaps of paintings, sketches of that. Heaps. She applied to be an official artist to Vietnam too.’

  ‘I know Max, Vicky’s dad. He’s a vet, right? I think that was what happened to his legs? He was one of the loudest yellers at sports days in high school. It used to drive Vicky completely mad.’

  ‘You were in the same year as her?’

  ‘A few years younger. Young enough to be totally in love with Percy Cranmer when we all went to see the boys play. He was so handsome before he broke his nose.’

  ‘This is Edna in uniform.’ I pulled out a photo of Edna in full AWLA uniform, leaning on a tractor, smoking.

  ‘Huh,’ said Lisa, putting an oily finger on the photograph. ‘Pretty gorgeous too.’

  She paused, then asked: ‘But she was a family woman, right? I mean, I know she was lovely, she was Vicky’s mum, but she … what was her back story?’

  ‘She married young. Stayed with Max her whole life. They supported a war orphan, John, who Edna’s sister adopted in London, before they had their own kids. Before – and after – children she travelled to paint war-related scenes, including to Papua New Guinea, and to France, to paint the poppies. There’s lots of war threads, connections. Like your pencils.’

  Lisa nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘How big is this campaign thing the Department is planning?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re not sure yet,’ said Lisa. ‘Early days. But let me tell you: it helps that Vicky has said she’ll license the images for free.’

  ‘Does it have a name?’

  ‘Australia Remembers,’ said Lisa. ‘It’s a commemoration celebration. It’s about memory.’

  The restaurant swirled with the smell of pho, and as I went to eat the chillies burned my mouth.

  Edna’s paintings and I made it into the snaking corridors under the hill.

  From department to department, Lisa by my side, I projected transparencies.

  The colours lit up the conference rooms. The Ships #2 pulling through the heads of Port Phillip Bay. My Sister’s Fields, the floating wings of the nurses’ hats over the bombed-out streets of London. The Bomana triptych, each panel shifting forward in time under the faraway banking of clouds over the dark jungle.

  The men from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs stared at fifteen-year-old Edna projected in grey and black on the wall, leaning against a tractor, cigarette in mouth, arms crossed under her breasts. Then Lisa switched off the projector, and Edna snapped out of existence.

  ‘This will really connect with women of my generation,’ Lisa said. ‘Women and girls of all generations. This is a really great Australian story, of dedication, you know, and how long someone’s memory of war lasts. I’m telling you. Edna Cranmer is perfect.’

  The next day, Lisa called me at the hotel to tell me that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs wanted to see a selection of Edna’s paintings ‘in the flesh’.

  ‘You and Victoria choose what you think will be best, okay?’ she said. ‘Send them up with an outline of your monograph. Choose a couple that really show women’s roles, how they looked after things on the home front. Ones with mothers and families will work well, too.’

  As I got back on the bus to Melbourne, plans were already underway to dig up the body of an unknown Australian soldier from the cemetery near Villiers-Brettoneux in France.

  Officials didn’t know how many graves they would have to sift through before they found a full skeleton, but they were determined. The body would be flown back to Australia and reburied in the War Memorial’s Hall of Memory on Remembrance Day of November 1993. The reburial would mark the beginning of the carnival of commemoration – it would give Australia a heart, they said. Crumbling memorials would be rebuilt; planes sent screaming overhead; Australian flags printed by the shipload in China.

  But I didn’t know any of that yet.

  From the bus, I watched the land roll by, and slept fitfully.

  In Melbourne I walked from the bus depot to Spencer Street Station, and caught the train south, to Geelong. The night sped by on the other side of the windows – the shadowy reaches of the You Yangs, the flicker of orange light at truck stops and farms huddled against the Princes Highway. My face in the dark glass was pasty and tired.

  When I got home, Mum wasn’t there. As soon as I opened the front door, I was hit with the parched spice of Christmas below the equator. We were two weeks out from the holidays. A Christmas tree was up in the living room.

  I sat on the couch and ate leftover pasta out of Tupperware, watching the tree twinkle. I approached every Christmas with a mixture of dread and excitement. When I was little, we always went to the beach at Queenscliff for Christmas. We’d arrive early to stake out one of the grills in the stretch of park by the pier, laughing because everyone else who arrived had huge families, and we were just three. Dad wasn’t on speaking terms with his family, and Mum hadn’t kept in touch with anyone from the children’s home in Ballarat.

  The other families in the park would shoot us dirty looks because we took up a whole grill, a whole picnic table. ‘But we’re big on the inside,’ Mum would say.

  In the afternoon, I would race with the other kids through the maze of post-lunch swimmers and their chequered towels down by the pier. Christmas was the cool touch of the sand under the pier and the sparkle of the water between the headlands.

  But after Dad died, we stopped going to the beach. Two people at one grill was so much smaller than three. We had Christmas lunch in Geelong, at the restaurant on Fisherman’s Pier, surrounded by other people with nowhere to go.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  By the start of 1946, Edna had outstayed her welcome at Mikelty Station in South Australia, where the men were beginning to return onto the land. She also knew the Australian Women’s Land Army would not be recognised as an official service. And if the service wasn’t officially recognised, she could not enter the National Gallery School under the government-sponsored Commonwealth Retraining Scheme.

  When Imelda wrote to Edna in early June to tell her that she’d taken a position as a remote nurse in Alice Springs, Edna immediately agreed to join her. It had been six years since the sisters had seen each other. Desperate as Edna would have been to be reunited with her older sister again, Imelda was not only Edna’s sister anymore: she was a mother.

  For reasons that still aren’t clear to this day, Imelda had adopted Celine’s son, John, at the end of the war. The child’s father had been absent from the very beginning – and it’s likely a mix of propriety and real need forced the women into the adoption. Celine was unmarried, poor, without support and returning to a country destroyed by war. Imelda was fierce, capable and returning to a country of opportunity and a sprawling, supportive family.

  It can’t have been an easy decision for them. It certainly became a decision that Celine regretted. But however complicated it may have been at the time, by 1946 Imelda had become John’s official guardian. And on their return to Australia, Imelda turned to Edna for support.

  After growing up surrounded by the Whitedale tribe – and witnessing the exhaustion of her adult female relatives – Edna must have been nervous about what it meant to have a toddler in the house. Being responsible for John while Imelda was at work would leave her little time for her art.

  Still, Edna went. From Port Augusta, she caught the train up the dusty tracks of Australia’s Central Desert region.

  Before the war, Alice was a settlement of under 500 people, a repeating station for the Overland Telegraph, the great line of 36,000 posts, pins and insulators that ran from Port Augusta on the south coast through the deserts and under the straits to Java, Singapore, then under the oceans to India, up the Suez, to Malta, Gibraltar
, France and, finally, London.

  The war transformed Alice Springs from an outback station supported by Afghan cameleers to a staging ground in an international conflict. Evacuees poured down from the north, tents and shacks sprung up in the dry riverbeds, government buildings were nailed together, airstrips were laid, 200,000 people came roaring into the expanding town.

  When the war ended, it left behind empty field hospitals and dark cinema screens. The red sand blew in, and with it came the Whitedale sisters.

  The Biographer

  Victoria and I finished packing and wrapping Edna’s paintings for transport to Canberra on an afternoon in late January. A cool change at the end of a heatwave had stripped the warmth from everything.

  ‘None of these paintings are the ones Edna left to John, right?’ I asked, looking over the stiff cardboard shapes stacked against the walls.

  ‘You didn’t think to ask that before we spent two days wrapping them up?’ Victoria was taping the corners still.

  ‘I mean, I just assumed …’

  ‘Actually. One of them might be. The one with Imelda in the desert, probably. Mum’s will said anything with John or Celine in it was his, and you can sort of see him in the distance, that toddler figure.’

  ‘And it’s okay for us to send it off without his permission?’

  She shrugged. ‘I mean, we’ve tried to contact him for months, right?’ She stood back, staring at our work. ‘He used to call for our birthdays,’ she said. ‘Back when we were teenagers. Honestly, it was a relief when he stopped. It was always so stilted.’

  We retreated into the house and sat at Victoria’s dining-room table under Edna’s great, swooping painting of Corio Bay. Victoria opened a bottle of champagne. The cork popped out of the bottleneck.

  ‘Nothing has happened yet,’ I told her. ‘It might take them a while to make a decision.’

  She ignored me.

  ‘I feel like it’s starting though, you know?’

  I could hear the wetness in her throat.

  ‘The day after Mum died – have I told you this? – the day after she died, I went to Granny Nel’s. I was sitting in the backyard, looking at that shed where she used to paint when she was Granny’s maid. Painting, and painting, and painting. And staring at that shed just made me see Mum differently, all of a sudden. All those year living on Dent Street, and then in that falling-down shed, and then in the stables, and then the studio Dad built her. Her painting used to drive me crazy, it took her away from us so much, you know. And for what? No-one saw it. It wasn’t like she was successful so … and then she died, and I realised that I still had something of her. I wanted a mum who was easier, you know? More like other people’s mums. But this makes it worthwhile. I did it – she’ll have a legacy.’

  ‘Have you told Max yet?’

  ‘No. But don’t worry. He’ll come around when he knows it’s the War Memorial, not some gallery. We just need to tell her story right.’

  I should have asked Victoria: which story?

  Which story are we telling about your mother? The undiscovered genius, who fought for recognition and then hid herself away when it all became too much? The faithful female observer, documenting the lives of the men who sacrificed themselves for our country? The suburban housewife with a hidden life, standing in for wives and mothers everywhere? The untrained illustrator obsessed with the death around her? What you made her, how you changed her – am I allowed to tell that story?

  But I did not.

  Instead, we sat and planned and plotted.

  If we got into the Australia Remembers campaign, everything would change. We would be on a timeline. The campaign launched the next year. We would need the biography to be out by then. We faced each other across Victoria’s wood table, and made decisions. We counted days, and weeks.

  After we’d finished the champagne, Victoria stood up. She looked wilted – not her sharp, professional self. Her hair was coming out of its tight ponytail, floating around her face in wisps. Her mascara had run a little, giving her soft dark pads under her eyes.

  ‘I should give you a painting,’ she said.

  I felt a rush of excitement, of gratitude.

  ‘No, you don’t have to –’

  But she cut me off. ‘Of course I do. It’s what Mum would have wanted. Here. Come with me.’

  I followed her out into the cool darkness of the garden, back to the shed. She flicked on the lights, and the paintings sprang up around us, their reds and umbers, ceruleans and whites bright under the track lighting. One of them was about to be mine.

  I knew what I wanted. I wanted a Corio Bay. I wanted one of the landscapes, like the one that Victoria had in her kitchen. Big and open and uncomplicated by people. I would put it over my bed. I could already see myself, waking in the morning, staring out over the cool grey waters of the Corio. The painting would be a reminder to me, of a lifetime of patience. Of how beautiful the world could be if you just kept on working. Victoria went all the way to the back of the shed, disappearing into one of the old stalls.

  When she came out of the stalls, she was carrying something medium-sized, unframed – I could see the wooden backing frame and the white stretch of the canvas. She seemed suddenly nervous.

  ‘This one,’ she said. She stepped onto the carpets in my work area, turned the canvas around. ‘Ta-da!’

  It was one of the paintings of number 27. Not as bland as the first one I’d seen. The sky was large and luminous. But underneath those smooth brushstrokes, the house crouched in the centre of the canvas. It was still bad, queasy. The bottlebrush tree seemed out of place, the perspective skewed ever so slightly, as if it was forcing its way out of the pavement.

  I looked up at Victoria, confused, but she was still smiling, so I did too. Realising, as I reached out and took the canvas from her, that somewhere between the kitchen and the shed she had changed her mind. That she hadn’t been able to give me something we both loved.

  ‘These ones are interesting to you, right?’ she said, and I heard the defensiveness in her voice.

  ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘Thank you so much, Victoria.’

  We stood there, awkwardly.

  Then I said, ‘I thought you left all these over in the Sorrento studio.’

  ‘I brought this one because I think the sky is just so lovely. It’s definitely the best. Don’t you think?’

  If I had to pinpoint when we began to fall apart, this would be it. But of course, nothing happens from one instant to the next. Events build up over time.

  We went to the pub for another bottle – not champagne, this time, but sweet sparkling white that swam like rot in my head. We sat in the dim light, under the rows of televisions softly burring tennis matches.

  At some point, leaning against the bar, I said that if the Australian War Memorial was going to happen, maybe we could sell the biography to a publisher before it was done and I could go to France and finish the research there.

  ‘It adds another angle,’ I said. ‘I could visit the village where Edna was living with Percy and John. I could find John, maybe even Celine. We might need the extra material. It might be worth it.’

  Victoria looked at me blearily. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I was going to take that trip with Mum. I already told you that.’

  ‘I didn’t mean …’

  ‘It’s fine, but no, okay? I mean, I’d like to do that one day.’

  ‘Okay. Of course. Of course.’

  I walked home from the pub to clear my head.

  On the cooling streets, the tarmac congealed into new shapes. A choppy wind came up from the south, carrying with it the bite of Antarctica.

  Down at the sea baths on Eastern Beach, the foreshore was deserted: the rusty grates of the changing rooms bolted shut, the snack stand shuttered, the shallow salty waters of the children’s baths drained in preparation for the weekend.

  Edna once drew herself as a set of paper dolls, folded out sequentially, a long chain flapping behind her in the wind.
As I stood on the furthest edge of the silky grey planks, I felt like that: a set of unfolding women and girls. But my selves weren’t sequential. They were all jumbled up. I was the woman lying in the narrow bed in the bluestone house in Carlton. I was the woman backed up against the hallway wall while Joe cried and screamed. I was the girl standing in clouds of white tulle in the Treasury Gardens and promising to serve and obey him. I was the girl walking through the streets of Geelong in my slumpy school uniform. I was the kid sitting in the attic of the house, staring out over the flatlands and smoking my first joint.

  Now, when I go down to Eastern Beach, my paper dolls unfold all the way out into Corio Bay, flapping over the dark waves.

  Do I like my thirty-year-old self from that night with Victoria, the drunk one leaning against the railings? Not really, I have to confess. I can’t trust her. She is too petulant and shy, too scared to decide what she wants from her life. I prefer my older selves. My thirty-seven-year-old self, who is sitting on the edge of the kids’ pool, watching her son plunge in and out of the salt water. My self today.

  The choices I made after I had Immy were not always good ones. But they were the best I could do. And I am proud of that.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  A photograph taken in 1947 shows Edna standing next to Imelda on the slumped steps of a weatherboard at the edge of the desert. The sisters had been in Alice Springs for eleven months. Edna, seventeen years old, has short-cropped hair that has exploded into curls. She is a Hollywood bombshell in tattered trousers tied up with a piece of rope. She holds one hand over her head to block the sun, and squints into the lens. A loosely rolled cigarette is clamped between her bared teeth.

  Next to Edna, Imelda at twenty-eight looks fragile and worn. She wears a pair of overalls and flat nurse’s shoes, a straw hat pushed back on her head. Spider’s webs of fatigue are sketched around her eyes. It had taken Imelda eight months to travel from Paris to Melbourne, and even a year later she does not seem recovered. Four-year-old John holds on to Imelda’s leg, burying his face in her thigh.