The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  Victoria laughed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course not. Mum, arrested? I love that. Why?’

  I told her about the article.

  ‘It’s not her,’ she said, definitively.

  ‘It’s hard to see from the photo,’ I admitted, ‘but the name gives it away – it’s her.’

  ‘Then there must have been some sort of confusion – it would have been a mistake.’

  ‘Can you ask your dad?’

  ‘He’s not … he doesn’t want to talk to me right now. He’s not answering my phone calls.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Victoria.’

  ‘No, it’s ridiculous. Don’t be sorry. Dad will come around, I know it. He loved Mum. He would have wanted this for her. Look, I’m telling you: Mum wasn’t arrested for anything. I would have known. I was what … eighteen then or something? Just drop it. Dead end.’

  After we hung up, I sat in Mum’s empty kitchen, staring at the fridge as it muttered and whirred. The front of the fridge was covered in the newspaper articles I had written about Edna. The muddy reproductions of Bomana, Smoko and Poppies were beautiful, even in their dulled colours.

  Mum had stuck them up there. I’d come down one morning to find them, pinned to the battered old fridge like school projects. Recently, Mum had started asking me questions about the book. About Edna’s life, about Imelda and the early days of nursing. Instead of disappearing into the television every night, we had begun to sit at the kitchen table once in a while, looking at sketchbooks, touching the past gently.

  I wondered if the War Memorial would still want Edna if they suspected she had been involved in the WAR marches. Would Edna become the darling of the Australia Remembers campaign if she’d also been arrested on the steps of the Shine of Remembrance?

  No. I felt sure that the answer was no.

  Edna was the strong, pristine woman of the Land Army, the unsung war hero, the patriotic wife and mother.

  Edna the arrested protester with the word ‘rape’ drifting above her like a bad odour.

  I had to clear it up. I began making calls.

  I phoned everyone I had interviewed. I sat on the telephone in the cramped front hall at Mum’s house, my feet propped on the ladder up to my attic. I called the women from the Geelong Contemporary Arts Society, I called the Whitedales, I called Edna’s friends in Sorrento.

  I didn’t tell them about the article. I asked them ‘follow-up’ questions, probing about her life in the early 1980s. Did anything out of the ordinary happen? I posed the question as political: ‘Was Edna ever involved in politics? What were her causes?’

  Most of them said no. Edna didn’t have time for that sort of thing. Edna didn’t like crowds. One told me that she had worked briefly for the cat shelter.

  I even called Nel Cranmer. She didn’t pick up the phone. I was getting tired of holding things in. I left a message on her machine. I simply asked. ‘Was Edna arrested in 1983?’

  EDNA: A LIFE

  Edna placed John Whitedale in the Kildare Children’s Home in 1948. Margaret was still reeling after the deaths of both Frank and Imelda in such quick succession, and no-one else on Dent Street had the means to support another child. John’s admission card to the home – the only record of his time there – listed his mother as: Imelda Whitedale, deceased. Once again, Edna played with time to get her way: John was recorded as being a year younger than he really was.

  Without John to look after, Edna could begin working for her sister’s former benefactor, Nel Cranmer. At first, it was an arrangement that suited both women well. Edna desperately needed the money and, a few months before, the national wage board had set the rate for female domestic staff at 75 per cent of the male wage to encourage women into a dying class relationship – much higher than the 54 per cent standard.

  For Nel, employing Edna in her household began as a way to honour Imelda, who Nel had always been so fond of. It’s possible Nel was also lonely for young company, although she would not have admitted it; her only son, Max, who had been badly injured in PNG, was off studying in England. In Edna, Nel found someone into whom she could pour her need to help others.

  It didn’t take long for Nel to discover Edna’s talent. An amateur painter herself, Nel had won a series of artistic prizes for her landscapes before marrying Pop Cranmer, and was a well-known patron of the arts. She became fascinated by Edna’s skill and drive.

  Within a year, Nel had established a ‘studio’ for Edna in the garden shed of the house at Eastern Beach, where Edna could work on her day off. She began to parade Edna through the wealthy homes of Geelong, ‘commissioning’ portraits.

  Despite Nel’s generosity, the transitioning relationship between Edna and the Cranmers was not an easy one. Nel felt very strongly that she owned Edna; that by discovering her, she had created her. None of the supportive dialogue that Edna had enjoyed with Imelda existed between servant and patron: Nel had very strict ideas about form, and expected her opinions to be heard.

  There was also the complication of money. Edna needed the money to support her mother and John. But her real dream was to build up savings that she could use to support herself if she got a place at the National Gallery School in Melbourne.

  Nel insisted, however, that Edna give away for free the paintings she completed of the Geelong society women who Nel brought to her studio. In Nel’s mind, Edna was still a student. Nel had purchased the materials, and the women had donated their precious time as models.

  Edna, eager for the studio space and the paints, at first agreed to the arrangement, but it quickly soured their relationship. Her studio, in the grounds at the back of the house, was not a private space; instead, she was permanently open for business, for people visiting the Cranmers to drop by and peer at her, have their portraits rapidly sketched. Edna frequently described herself during this period as ‘a show pony’. And while she chafed at the constraints Nel Cranmer imposed on her, she could not escape.

  Back home in her mother’s cottage in Whitedale territory, Edna continued working in the front room. She sat up late into the night in the miasma of fumes, doggedly scraping her canvases back. For the rest of the year, she returned again and again to the images of John as a child, drawing and re-drawing the infant, and Imelda. Imelda’s death pushed Edna, week after week, into her first non-figurative works in her sketchbooks, dark dreamscapes of remorse.

  Despite her ever-present guilt over giving up John, neither he nor the other Whitedales remember Edna visiting the Kildare Children’s Home that year. Margaret, however, went once a month, to check in on him and take small packages of food to the matrons.

  By the end of the year, Edna had moved into the narrow servants’ quarters at the Cranmers’ house on Geelong’s Eastern Beach, and Margaret had adopted John. Removed from the children’s home, he displaced Edna on Dent Street.

  The Biographer

  Victoria did not come to the house to tell me that we were part of the Australia Remembers campaign. There was no champagne, no celebration. Just a message on the answering machine.

  ‘Mum is in,’ her voice said. ‘Call Lisa about it – she wants to talk to you. But also: what did you say to Gran about the damned arrest thing? I told you, there was no arrest, okay? Would you just leave it alone?’

  Lisa told me that Edna’s work had been selected to be part of the promotional materials for the Australia Remembers campaign.

  And there was more. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs was trying to organise extra funds for an exhibition called Women in War that would tour twelve cities and towns across the country: Melbourne, Castlemaine, Ballarat, Adelaide, Brisbane and beyond. They wanted to come to Geelong, in order to view Edna’s collection in person once more, this time with a larger group.

  There was even talk of a medal of some sort for the Land Army or the VAD. An Edna Whitedale image, they said, could be perfect. One of the women kneeling in the fields for the Land Army, or for the VAD, one of Imelda in uniform, holding John in her arms.

 
I knew the piece they meant. A small, detailed gouache. Imelda standing in her nurse’s uniform on the edge of the desert, John on her hip. The boy’s arms are slung around Imelda’s neck, his head buried in her shoulder. Imelda’s uniform is starched and pressed, its edges sharp and clean. She squints against the light, her face calm, determined. Strong. The desert is luminous. There is a single tree on the horizon line. Edna had painted it in the 1980s, and I had often wondered if the tree was meant to be the one that killed Imelda, the one they’d hit when they’d veered off the road.

  The piece belonged to John Whitedale.

  ‘I don’t think we can use that image of the nurse and the child,’ I told Lisa. ‘Technically, it was left to John Whitedale in Edna’s will.’

  ‘Victoria said it would be fine,’ Lisa assured me.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  The paintings that brought Edna Whitedale and Max Cranmer together are part of the family’s private collection. The preparatory sketches, however, are well documented in Edna’s sketchbooks from the time. And the story of Max and Edna’s growing relationship is lore in the Whitedale family.

  When Max returned from his studies in England in 1950, Nel Cranmer insisted that her son also sit for his portrait, to add to the dining room’s collection. Max’s injuries made it difficult for him to hold a pose. He tried sitting, then leaning against a wall. After an hour, he would be in pain. He would then lie stretched out against the floorboards of the shed. Their son, Percy, recalled his father describing Edna as ‘a lush spider, feeding on my discomfort’. Max Cranmer had never met anyone like Edna Whitedale. They were drawn to each other’s physicality. Her beauty, he would say, was ‘dangerous’.

  They finally found a pose he could maintain – back against the wooden walls of the shed, legs propped out in front of him. Their relative physical positions in that space changed the dynamic drastically. For Max, backed up against a wall, bent out of shape, with Edna crouched in front of him, it did not feel as if he was sitting for a portrait, but as if he was part of something much more intimate.

  From the beginning, the contrast between Max’s physical self and the self he presented to society must have fascinated Edna. The privilege and ease of Max Cranmer – popular and gregarious son, heir, war hero – was in total opposition to his embodied self: the guilty, traumatised survivor whose body carried all the contradictions of the conflict into the new ‘peace’ of the Cold War.

  Once the sketches for the traditional portrait commissioned by Nel Cranmer were completed, Edna persuaded Max to pose for her in a more intimate setting. He drove to Ocean Grove, picking Edna up on the outskirts of Geelong. When they got to the barn on the stretch of Cranmer land that ran along the coast, he stripped off behind the stacked hay.

  None of the first series of intimate sketches have Max’s face in them. Edna drew his legs, his hips, his pelvis. These are her first real male nudes since she was a young girl in the bathing sheds of Geelong, and there is an excitement, a fascination in her line. The models in the life-drawing classes she attended at the Geelong Arts Society since returning from Alice Springs were nearly entirely women: the one occasion a male model was found, he wore body stockings over his genitals.

  When artist and model tired of the inconvenience of the barn, they moved from the open hay sheds of Ocean Grove, with their long views of the ocean, to the confined space of Edna’s worker’s cottage, in Whitedale territory. Max would arrive in the dark back lane behind the Whitedale house in West Geelong late at night, so that no-one on the street could observe him visiting. Inside, he lay sprawled on a cot Edna set up next to her own bed; completely at home placing a naked man on canvas, she appears to have been reluctant placing one on her bed. In the early sketches from these sessions, only Max and the cot come into view.

  Edna sketched, painted and drew Max for decades. They fell in love through the medium of her paint. Long before she touched him, she made him part of her work, and the way that she saw him, in private, changed how he saw himself in the public world.

  The Whitedale family believe that Nel Cranmer blocked Edna’s application to the National Gallery School in 1952. Nel Cranmer herself says that she did not, as do the artists on the board at the time. But it is true that, when Nel discovered what was in the folio that Edna submitted to the National Gallery School, she was furious.

  She sacked Edna from service, and dismissed Margaret from her position at Black Swan Carpets, where she had been ever since the early 1920s. According to the Whitedales, Nel came over to berate Edna at the cottage in West Geelong. Margaret chased Nel Cranmer ‘down the road with a broom while we all cheered’, claims one relative. This particular episode is most likely apocryphal; Margaret was not the sort of woman to chase other women down the road with brooms, and Nel Cranmer not the sort of woman to run. But it illustrates a larger issue: the two families had reached a point of rupture, and the Whitedale ranks closed proudly around Edna and Margaret.

  In Nel’s eyes, the nudes were a betrayal. Removing her son’s uniform in the portrait had taken away Max’s privacy, his protection and his status. She was horrified to think of the Gallery School’s board – her peers – passing her son’s broken body from hand to hand.

  On her part, Edna was devastated by Nel’s reaction to her work and by the rejection by the board of the National Gallery School. Ever since she had walked under the hot lights of the Herald Exhibition when she was ten years old, she had been preparing for her entry to the school. Edna had been sure that the National Gallery would accept her; in December 1951, she had even put down a considerable slice of her savings to reserve a small room in a respectable boarding house shared by other female artists in Melbourne’s Little Italy.

  Not only did Edna lose her dream of attending the National Gallery School, she also lost her patron. Whatever differences she’d had with Nel Cranmer, Nel had recognised her talent, had supported her, had bought her paints and space and time.

  In a fragment of a letter Edna kept and stuck in her sketchbook next to one of the nudes, Nel writes: I trusted you, and you warped his image and gave it back to me as a nightmare of the man he once was. My son is a war hero. He deserves dignity, not ridicule.

  Today, it’s easy to think of Nel’s reaction as overheated – but Nel knew the power that art had to affect people’s lives. In 1943, she had watched closely as the painter William Dobell won the national Archibald Prize for portraiture, wreaking havoc on his own life and that of his subject and dear friend, Joshua Smith.

  Dobell’s modernist painting of Smith broke with two decades of staid academic and tonal realism. On the canvas, Smith was distorted: head skinny, body bulging. When Dobell won, Australia was thrown into a fury of controversy and recriminations. The press was full of enraged editorial: the morning after the announcement, Smith’s parents called Dobell and begged him to withdraw the painting from the prize. Smith himself refused to talk to his former friend. Two artists from the Royal Art Society, Joseph Wolinski and Mary Edwards, brought a legal action against Dobell and the selection committee in an attempt to overturn the award, claiming that Dobell’s painting was ‘not a portrait but a caricature’.

  The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1944, in the midst of war, where the long-time director of the National Gallery of Victoria, J.S. McDonald – who had also prevented the hanging of Murdoch’s Herald exhibition in 1939 – argued that portraiture was a style, that it obeyed rules, and had to be ‘a balanced likeness of an actual person’.

  The court case was dismissed, but Dobell had a nervous breakdown. The painting permanently destroyed his relationship with his friend Joshua Smith. Near the end of his life, Smith told an interviewer that Dobell’s portrait was ‘a curse, a phantom that haunts me. It has torn at me every day of my life. I’ve tried to bury it inside me in the hope it would die, but it never does.’

  Max Cranmer’s reaction to the paintings Edna submitted in her application to the National Gallery School was complicated. Caught up in the
bohemian freedom of the work, Max had felt the paintings as a release. He both loved and hated them. In the face of his mother’s fury, however, he withdrew his support for Edna displaying them. The early Max paintings became the first of many that Edna would decide should be put aside until the right time to exhibit them came along, a thread that connects the summer of 1952 with her eventual complete withdrawal from the Australian art scene in 1970.

  The fallout from the fight over the National Gallery School damaged Nel and Edna’s relationship, but it didn’t sway Edna and Max. Just as they would in the years to come, the external buffers and winds of their families and the world only made them hold more tightly together. In 1953, the couple eloped to Sydney, where they were quietly married.

  The first thing Edna did after marrying Max was to organise for the eleven-year-old John Whitedale to be enrolled in one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the country. Max’s money provided Edna with a way out of her cycle of guilt with John – for the next seven years, John boarded at Geelong Grammar, spending only his summers with Margaret Whitedale on Dent Street.

  The money and the marriage came at a time that changed the trajectory of Edna’s life in more ways than one. Only during the writing of this biography was it revealed that John’s mother, Celine, began contacting Margaret that same year, asking after her son. While Margaret’s decision not to tell anyone about Celine’s requests for contact seems cruel to us in hindsight, in 1953 it made sense to her. John felt like Margaret’s own relative. He was only eleven years old, spoke no French, and had virtually no memory of his biological mother, a woman whose existence he knew of only in theory. Moreover, now he had a benefactor who was funding his attendance at one of the most expensive Australian boarding schools.