Neither sister smiles in the photograph. They lean in against each other. On the windowsill behind them is a glass bottle with a careful arrangement of desert grasses and sticks – the beginnings of the obsessive ‘flower’ collecting that Edna was famous for among her family and friends.
As the months stretched into a year, the sisters settled into their new life together. People who visited their modest home on the outskirts of Alice Springs remembered it as a place of peace and solitude.
On the back of the photograph, which they sent south to their anxious mother, Imelda wrote in a looping script: Eddy-Fox, Johnny and I looking miserable in the heat when we are happier than Larry, whoever Larry is. Alice Springs, Christmas, 1947.
Edna’s most famous portrait of Imelda, Imelda after the War, began as a charcoal sketch in the summer of 1947, and many of the themes Edna later explores in her Nurses series find their first iterations in those hot, dusty months in Alice Springs.
The final oils for Nurses were not completed until the early 1970s, after Edna returned to Australia from France. Holed up in the studio that Max built her in the Sorrento hills, Edna threw herself into the most prolific period of her working life.
Watercolours and acrylics can be used on the spur of the moment, but in an oil, layer on layer, the work involves decisions at every point. Oil paintings are built; there is no fluid burst into being. The canvas must be stretched, sized with rabbit-skin glue and water to protect it from the oil. Next, the surface of the canvas is evened with a gesso ground: chalk, more rabbit-skin glue, oil. The final underlayer consists of an imprimatur: a veiling wash of sheer colour, or a grisaille, a monochromatic underpainting that painters call the ‘dead colour’, an underworld beneath the bright image the naked eye perceives.
The degree of planning that must go into an oil requires the artist to think long term; use the wrong drying oil and the paint will yellow, crack and darken, ruining the work beneath. Edna experimented with every form of drying oil she could get her hands on over her career – from pale poppyseed, for its brilliant whites, to slow-drying walnut oil, with its delicate texture, and, of course, ubiquitous linseed. Her resulting skill in the medium has meant that her paintings age differently, depending on her intent. Whether an Edna Cranmer cracks, darkens or holds its colours, you can be sure that it does so with the artist’s blessing.
Imelda after the War is as vibrant and bright today as it was when Edna rendered the crude charcoal work into oil in 1971. In the artist’s typical style, it looks like a traditional portrait with a single subject at first, but on closer viewing contains many people, all posed in relation to the central figure.
In the centre of the work, Imelda sits near an open window in the sisters’ hut. Edna often liked to put her subject’s entire body in the frame, a stylistic decision that was nearly unheard of at the time – portraits were expected to have the subject seated, feet invisible below the line of the frame.
Imelda’s feet, down in the cool dark base of the painting, are encased in her sensible nurse’s shoes, her legs in stockings. She wears the skirt of her nurse’s uniform. On her lap rests the peaked white Nightingale hat of the war years, like a folded bird, the same hat that appears as a trope in the Bomana triptych and the rest of the Nurses series from the 1970s, floating at times like Man Ray’s lips in the sky, or winking between the dark trees. In the place of the nurse’s shirt Imelda wears a man’s singlet, and no bra, her breasts hollow and high under the careworn fabric, her arms sinewy, weathered hands loose in her lap beside the crisp white hat. She is stiff-backed next to the open window, her elongated neck reminiscent of the swans of the sisters’ childhood, as she stares out over the red dirt. The light coming in through the window spreads over her cheeks and mouth, but doesn’t reach past her breasts.
With Imelda’s haunted expression and body dominating the portrait, the viewer does not at first register the three spaces in the painting: the outside world, the hut’s interior, and the small snatch of reflected life in the lower right-hand corner of the painting.
The window acts as a second frame, looking out on yet another portrait, suggesting that Imelda is the observer and painter of the desert world outside. In the distance, a small scrap of a child in a bright yellow bonnet bends over the red dirt, his hands grappling with something – a lizard or a snake.
Inside the hut, in the far-right corner of the painting, is the edge of a mirror. In the mirror, a hand and a brush: Edna, the darkened observer, cut out of the new relationship between her sister and the child John. By placing Imelda’s head in the frame with the child, Edna suggests that the connection between mother and adopted son is one of the mind, whereas the darkened body and flesh in the hut is the space she shares with her sister, a space that they can no longer talk about.
Despite the fact that Edna was wary of the adopted child, and that she so clearly painted him in this 1971 portrait as Imelda’s responsibility, it was Edna who became the child’s primary carer in the months following her arrival in Alice Springs.
Imelda was constantly on call, and her small nurse’s salary had to stretch across both sisters and the child. Page after page of Edna’s sketchbooks show John in the background of her still-life studies – crying, sleeping. Edna took him with her on her sketching missions all over town, past military bases already falling apart, down deserted rows of houses, to the dry creek bed of the Todd River where he played in the red dust with the Aboriginal children who came in and out of town with their families.
One of Edna’s favourite places to escape the heat was the cinema that had been built for the forces. With its cavernous, abandoned interior, she could close the doors on the baking day and let the toddler roam the aisles while she worked.
The Biographer
I hardly saw Victoria over the next few weeks as we waited to hear back from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. It was already late summer. Nearly a year had passed since Anna-Marie and I sat together in the cafe on Lygon Street, discussing the housewife Edna Cranmer and her daughter’s vanity project. I kept telling myself that it was time to step back from the project. Tie it up. Move on.
But the void on the other side of the biography was barrelling towards me. After the biography was finished, I had no plan. Looking through Edna’s life had not helped me decide what to do with my own. I did not understand why she worked so hard, or how she could do it without recognition, without any need for an audience. All I knew was that I was not as good as her. I wasn’t as determined. I was not stubborn enough. I did not love enough. I wasn’t full enough as a person.
I told myself I had everything I needed to finish the biography. The last thing I did was go to the State Library to look over some control dates. Using control dates was a research method recommended to me by a real biographer Anna-Marie had put me in touch with. Choose a couple, he said, then just go to the library and pull those days for every year or month that your subject was alive. It will give you a snapshot of the world they lived in.
Given Edna’s life and work, it had seemed natural to use the days before and after Anzac Day as the control. In the library, I pulled microfilms of newspapers of the week around 25 April across the span of Edna’s entire life from the silent metal tombs in the reading room: sixty-one squat black spools. I piled them up next to the microfilm machines, loaded each reel, flicked on the light, and the past appeared on the translucent screen.
I had never looked closely at Anzac Day. In my house, growing up, we did not mention it, did not talk about it. Vietnam vets did not march on Anzac Day back then. The whole thing disgusted my dad. After he died, Mum would take us out of Geelong every Anzac weekend, to go camping on the Barwon River. Now I wonder if she did it to avoid the media circus.
Hour after hour, day after day, the tiny newsprint spun forward in time under my hands while my back grew stiff, and my neck clenched and ached. I leaned into the light box, trying to stay focused on the shifting stories. Sometimes days would repeat themselves, over
and over; nearly an entire spool would go past before I realised that I had been stuck on the same Tuesday afternoon edition in 1951 for forty minutes. Fight it as you might, after the first few hours in front of that glowing projection it is almost impossible not to fall into a daze. Whiz, gaze, whiz, change, whiz – waiting for time to go past.
One morning, I slid the spool of Monday, 26 April 1983, onto the hard metal prongs of the microfilm reader. Around me, the reading room bustled and hummed.
I scrolled over the front page of The Age. Protests across the nation. Flicked to the second page. It was the name in the caption that snagged my eyes first: Imelda Delacroix.
I stopped turning. In the photograph, a woman was climbing into a police van, hands shackled behind her back, huge black sunglasses covering the half of her face that was visible to the observer.
The photo was blurry, bad quality in the first place, then rephotographed for the microfilms. If it wasn’t for the name, she could have been anyone, just a hazy figure. But on the luminous screen in front of me, she looked back over her shoulder, through the shield of the black sunglasses, through the photographer’s lens, through the ink jetted onto the paper and the pattern of light transferred to the microfiche, across a decade.
I felt the unfolding thrill in my stomach, up my spine: You, my body crowed.
I’ve found you, Edna, when I wasn’t even looking.
The full caption at the bottom of the photograph read: Most protesters went quietly. Imelda Delacroix, a retired nurse, said: ‘We are only here to pay our respects.’
What was Edna doing?
I went to the metal cabinets, pulled out every other newspaper from that week in a frenzy: The Argus, Herald Sun, Geelong Advertiser. Even The Canberra Times and Sydney Morning Herald. Then the years before and after: 1981, 1982, 1984.
I didn’t stop for lunch, hardly looked up for hours as the articles flickered by.
Rumours about a group of women applying for the right to march with the servicemen had begun the year before, in the week leading up to Anzac Day in 1981.
I remembered the commotion, but only vaguely. 1981 had been my second summer living in Melbourne. I had just met Joe; I was busy falling in love. We spent the Anzac holiday weekend in a hotel in Torquay, having sex on the expensive sheets and talking about what we wanted our grown-up lives to be like. On the way back to Melbourne he drove the Ford too fast, hugging the sharp edges of the Great Ocean Road. I’d asked him to slow down, and he’d said: ‘You know I’ll always look after you, right?’
The activist group in the newspaper articles called themselves ‘Women Against Rape’: WAR. Their request to join the Anzac Day parade was knocked back in 1981, which wasn’t surprising. At the time, not even female war correspondents were allowed to march alongside their male counterparts. Only the sons and grandsons of returned soldiers could take the places of their dead fathers and grandfathers.
WAR agreed not to try to join in. Instead, they said they would hold a vigil, and lay wreaths at the Shrine of Remembrance. The next day, the government hastily pushed through a traffic ordinance making it an offence to hold private observances or ceremonies along the parade route or near the Shrine.
It seemed dealt with. But on the Sunday of the Anzac march, a dark autumn chill settled over the east of the country. By the end of the day, the cities were alight with arrests and anger.
The following year, hundreds more women gathered to sit in silence on the outside of the barriers along the parades’ routes in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. There were photos of nuns carrying placards; one taken at the Sydney march showed an elderly veteran in uniform, tears streaming down his face, walking along behind a group of young women, holding a photograph of his daughter, who the newspaper reported had been raped and killed by her boyfriend the year before.
In 1981 the letters section of the newspaper had been full of people writing in support of the women; by 1982, opinion was beginning to line up against them. WAR wasn’t alone anymore, either. The gay ex-servicemen’s association was also requesting the right to lay a wreath at the Shrine. Their way was blocked on the white slabs of the stairs by the head of the RSL, Bruce Ruxton.
‘I don’t mind poofters in the march,’ he told the assembled press pack after the ex-servicemen had retreated. ‘But they must march with their units. We didn’t want them to lay a wreath because we didn’t want anything to do with them. We certainly don’t recognise them and they are just another start to the denigration of Anzac Day.’
Below Ruxton, on St Kilda Road, police tore down the women’s ‘Lest We Forget’ banners before the official ceremonies even began.
On Anzac Day in 1983, 175 women were arrested across the country. (‘If one looked at them,’ Ruxton said, ‘I wonder how rape would be possible.’)
And on the front page of The Age, peering back at me, Imelda Delacroix climbed into the back of the police van.
I continued scrolling through the years, right up until Edna died, looking for any other mention of her. Each year that the Women Against Rape protested, the ranks of the official march swelled. In 1981, 16,000 walked; two years later nothing had changed, there had been no more wars, but there were 20,000 on the streets. The protesting women became younger – and angrier.
I sat back from the light box. Edna – Imelda Delacroix – had not appeared in any other year; there was only that one photo, a photo of someone who could have been anyone, who I wouldn’t even have recognised if it hadn’t been for the name. I slotted each reel of microfilm back into its case, returned them to their metal cabinets.
Not one person who I had interviewed over the past year had mentioned an arrest. Not the great sprawling tribe of Whitedales in their kitchens, living rooms and backyards. Not Nel in her grand house over Eastern Beach, or the women who had raised babies with Edna, or the people who had taken her art classes up and down the peninsulas. Or Victoria, who after all would have been in her mid teens, old enough to read papers in the cloistered halls of Geelong Grammar.
The only reel left on the desk in front of me was The Age, 26 April 1983. I picked it back up, slipped it onto the spool, and projected Edna’s half-obscured face onto the light box again. We stared at each other for a long time through the dusty silence of the reading room.
EDNA: A LIFE
On 27 December 1947, Imelda was driving Edna and John back to Alice Springs after a camping and sketching trip in the surrounding desert. An hour out of town, she hit a slide of loose sand, lost control of the car, and slammed into a ghost gum. She was killed on impact. Both Edna and John survived largely uninjured.
Clutching, Edna’s 1973 watercolour landscape, depicts the trip Edna took home from Alice Springs with her mother, Margaret, and the five-year-old John Whitedale after Imelda’s funeral in early 1948.
The canvas is huge – the train at its far left side tiny. Painted from above, dark green and slithering like a tiny snake in the long red land, it seems impossible to the viewer that such a small thing could ever cross such a vast space.
For Edna, Imelda’s death marked the true end of the war. She considered herself as one of the many tens of thousands returning home slowly across the country, not knowing, any longer, where that home was or what it meant. She’d been ten when the war began. By eighteen, she’d made the sketches that would one day turn into her landscapes of Australia’s vast interior.
In the final iteration of Clutching, the train bisecting the canvas can be seen as representing the present. Like she does in many of her works from the 1970s, in Clutching Edna collapses time in upon itself. To the west of the line lies Ooraminna, Bundooma, Oodnadatta and the thousand salty kilometres of Lake Eyre’s flats, shards and dots in the fluctuating ochres of the desert. Across the top of the canvas – walking through past, present and future – is a procession of Aboriginal people on foot, setting out on the long ochre pilgrimage that once took tribes thousands of miles in search of treasured pigments. To the west of the train line stretches the land
scape of past and future wars; the vast 122,000 square kilometres of Woomera’s nuclear test site are flecks of metallic pigment wedged into the soft umber undulations of the desert.
The Biographer
When the State Library closed, I headed for Spencer Street Station. While I waited for the train, I stood in a phone box and dialled The Age. The receptionist confirmed that the journalist Alice Seaton still worked there. I was patched through to her. She picked up straight away.
‘I think about that day a lot,’ she said when I asked her about the reporting. ‘It was over a decade ago though, wasn’t it?’
‘1983.’
‘Huh. It’s funny what stands out.’
‘Do you remember the woman in the photo?’
‘What was her name?’
‘Imelda. Imelda Delacroix.’ I described Edna.
‘Is that French?’ she asked. ‘It’s pretty. Let me think.’
The reporter’s memories of the day were all of her own attempts to resist arrest, of the crowds cramming in around her as she struggled against the police cordons, waving her press pass.
‘If you were a woman in that area of town, they assumed you were part of the protest.’
‘So it might have been a mistake, with Imelda Delacroix?’
‘She was young?’
‘Older, middle-aged.’
‘I just don’t know. If you were a young woman, sure. But an older woman? That might have been the year they stopped coming, unless they were radical. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.’
When I got back to Geelong, I called Victoria immediately. It was the first time I had spoken to her in a month. Her voice was light, and I matched it, pretending we were fine, that we were still close, still in it together. It’s a difficult topic to slip into conversation casually: by the way, was your mother ever arrested? So I simply asked.
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