The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  ‘Do we know each other?’

  ‘I visited you last year. About the artist, Edna Cranmer – she did the paintings of your house. I left you with an envelope of photographs, do you remember?’

  ‘Was there something else? I told you: I didn’t know her.’

  ‘But you did know Imelda Whitedale. And you knew Celine Delacroix.’

  We stood in a silence that dragged out, opened up. Years fell between us. Then he slammed his door closed, turned the lock. The hall light went off. I put my face to the glass on the side of the door, but he had stepped into another room, a room with no window for me to see through.

  Immy moved on my chest, mewling softly. I walked home through Geelong’s quiet streets, where everything was normal and dim.

  There were times I was scared of Immy, later on.

  When he was a toddler, and we had finally moved into the house in the suburb of Leopold on Geelong’s outskirts, I analysed his every move, sure that violence could skip through generations, was weaving its way into his beautiful fat toddler flesh, making him a monster. It was irrational; it was ridiculous. But he screamed with a rage that seemed to pull the whole of the state in through his tiny lungs. I’d call Mum, tell her something was wrong with him. Then I’d cry myself to sleep.

  I was always broke. I trawled the shelves of op-shops and the discarded cardboard boxes left behind at local school fetes for Immy’s motley collection of toys and companions. His favourite game was ‘Lunch’, a long competition over food made of air. Immy would set his chosen players up across from one another: always the same four. The green soldier, the robot, the battered Barbie and the smooth porcelain pig with roses painted on its rump.

  Together, we enacted his complicated comedies of manners and punishments. ‘Pass the milk,’ Immy would command.

  When my robot spilled it, he would shout: ‘Naughty! Bad robot. See what you did?’

  Immy’s cranky displays of toddler morality delighted me. I did not chastise him. I laughed along, shook the robot, the Barbie, told each lump of plastic it was bad, too.

  Immy gave my mother and me someone else to worry about.

  And slowly, over the years, she told Immy the story of her life, and I told her mine. We became big again. But that all came later.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  Just as with any story, the meaning we take from a life depends on where we choose to end it.

  Edna Cranmer died of a heart attack on 10 September 1991.

  During that year’s football season, Max and Edna had crossed the bay to watch Percy train every few weeks. Percy had suffered a bad hamstring injury the year before, and both parents were anxious about his recovery, not altogether trusting that Percy or the club were taking enough care. Max, still a generous club supporter, spent the evening training sessions sitting down on the boundary line and talking with the coaches. Edna, wrapped in blankets, sat up in the bleachers with her pencils and small paint box, sketching the young men who raced back and forth across the lurid green grass of the oval.

  The sketches from that last training are skilled and delicate, the players’ bodies shown in all their half-naked vulnerability.

  After the training Edna and Max went down to the Eastern sea baths for a walk before spending the night at Nel Cranmer’s. The heart attack came as Edna was parking in the lot beyond the children’s baths. Max, on his sticks, got Edna out of the car, then left her on the ground, found the nearest payphone, and called for an ambulance. Edna died before the ambulance arrived. She was only sixty-one years old.

  If we end Edna’s life story there, we have a woman whose life was dedicated to bearing witness to the experiences of her family and those around her, whose incredible talent went unseen.

  But the story of Edna’s life does not end with her death.

  The Biographer

  In August 1994, I went to Canberra for the launch of the Australia Remembers campaign. I left Immy at home with Mum – it was the first time I had been away from him. My breasts ached and leaked for two days.

  Edna’s work was touring the country as part of the Women in War exhibition, from Geelong to Ballarat, Sydney to Brisbane. Petitions were starting to circulate for Anzac Day to become Australia’s official ‘national day’. The next year, at the height of the campaign, the Anzac Day marches would grow to the biggest they had been in decades.

  We did not stand together, Victoria, Percy and I.

  The hall smelled of closed windows and carpet dust. On the projector screen above Prime Minister Keating’s head, Edna’s Bomana triptych – the sweeping cemeteries of Papua New Guinea – shifted gently in the whirr of the air conditioning.

  ‘It has often been said,’ the prime minister intoned, ‘that the best means of ensuring peace is to acknowledge history as it was. A country can never really be sure of its future until it is aware of its past.’

  I clapped along with everyone else.

  Epilogue

  I was twenty-nine when I went looking for Edna’s life as if it was finished, when I picked up the velvet bag with her slowly exhaling head.

  I have been carrying it now for two decades, waiting for Max to die. And then he did. Six months ago, ninety-four years old. Victoria found him on the path leading up to Edna’s studio – felled by a stroke.

  And so now I am free. It is a strange kind of freedom. The paintings of Celine’s rape are about to be exhibited for the first time. And the full biography of Edna’s life – including her year in France and the complicated nature of her relationship with Max and with John Whitedale – can be released.

  There have been no advance copies for review. I know the scandal it will cause.

  At the end of the First World War, the entire population of Australia numbered five million. Now, over one million people visit the War Memorial every year. Hundreds of millions of dollars pour through its halls. The government will spend over 470 million on the Anzac centenary alone.

  With each year that more money washes into the memory trade, Edna’s paintings become more important, the colours become brighter, the images closer.

  Every weekend paper will want a piece of me. Biographers are often lumped in with journalists who write about ‘life’, but I’ve never liked the Sunday morning gossip breed. I might be a graverobber – they are burglars and breakers of trust.

  I am nervous. No, I am scared. I have been trying to work out my defence.

  I went through her life and I did what we all do: I tried to make some sense out of the chaos of the days and the weeks and the months.

  I did not create Edna Cranmer, I curated her. I told one possible version of the many lives she may have led. That is all any of us can do.

  I tell myself: all storytelling is selective. Australians are better than most at it. Every nation is a scandal of selection.

  I tell myself: when I started Edna’s life, I still thought of each person as singular, as describable from a distance. I didn’t see that we are all intersections, that we become who we are at our points of contact, a great pulsing web. That each life is lived against the edges of the next. That drawing a line doesn’t separate spaces; it shows you where they are connected.

  I tell myself: no matter what happens, no matter what they say, I will know that my life has been more than this story. My life has been layer upon layer. Edna would appreciate it, the picture beneath the painting, the light on the dark, the scumbling.

  Just as I have every morning for the past week, this morning I rose before dawn to drive out through Geelong.

  Past Eastern Beach, past the park on the headlands, where light was beginning to stream in through the tall eucalypts. Past the saltpans, past the industrial district, out into the fields, to the very end of the Bellarine Peninsula, the estuary at Swan Bay.

  It wasn’t even six and already the only cool air was low on the waterline, with the fizz of rising skimmers and mosquitoes.

  Far off in the shallow waters crouched the hump of the Department of Defence’s Swan
Island Training Centre, connected to the mainland by a long, low bridge.

  After half an hour of walking along the muddy shore, I saw movement in the shifting expanse of light: the gates rising, a matte black vehicle slipping silently across the water.

  It was very still.

  A flock of swans lifted off the bay, running their feet along the mirrored surface, gaining height.

  The invisible velvet sack that carries Edna’s life nuzzles at my legs. I am ready to open it.

  Acknowledgements

  Edna Cranmer and her biographer are fictions. But I am indebted to the works of art, history, and generosity that influenced their ‘lives’.

  The artists Clarice Beckett, Vanessa Bell, Stella Bowen, Penleigh Boyd, Leonora Carrington, Grace Cossington Smith, Nora Heysen, Sidney Nolan and Ben Quilty. Ern Malley, whoever and wherever you are. Bruce Pascoe, whose definition of Balla Wein is quoted in the opening and on pages 13 to 14. The writings and histories of C.E.W. Bean, Kate Darian-Smith, Sue Hardisty, Robert Hughes, Ken Inglis, Eve Langley, Hermione Lee, Drusilla Modjeska, Brenda Niall and Catherine Speck. The people whose continuous work makes many great Australian institutions possible, and especially the Geelong Gallery, the National Wool Museum, the Geelong Regional Libraries and the Queenscliff Library Branch. The Geelong Historical Society. And, of course, the Australian War Memorial. The Australia Council for the Arts, and Creative Victoria. The Australian National University Summer Research Program.

  Mary Hoyle, for her wisdom, generosity and hospitality. The Lenneberg-Westendorf family. Todd, KT, Megsy, and 3Scan. The Bukiet Family. Jamie Emerick. The ladies of danger: Xaris Miller, Emily Maguire, Florence Riviere, Jasmine-Kim Westendorf. My Margarido family: Elizabeth, Lou, Peretz and Matthew, Fifi and Wes, the evil twins and the wolf-boy. Kelly Koumalatsos, whose strength has welcomed me and taught me.

  The best early readers anyone could hope for: Ronnie Scott and Josephine Rowe. Brenda Niall and Carrie Tiffany, for their advice and blessings.

  My publisher and editor Aviva Tuffield, a truly impressive advocate for Australian stories; proofreader Julia Carlomagno; and the whole team at Black Inc. Any biscuit tins are my own responsibility. My partner, Anselm Levskaya, for his endless kindness. My first reader and favourite writer, Kirsty Murray.

  This book is dedicated to the Murrays. To the Murray women elders. Caroline and Joy. The force of nature and art that is Julia Murray. My brothers and co-conspirators, Billy Murray and Elwyn Murray.

  And, above all else, to my father, John Murray, whose love of the coast I carry with me wherever I go. To Oakdene, Geelong and the Bellarine, land that I am always discovering, histories and presents that are so much bigger and more complicated than I can ever imagine. This book mentions some of the wars that have formed Australia; there are many more.