There was one film, in particular, that impressed me, a made-for-television movie called The Plumber, directed by Peter Weir. It was unlike all the other Australian movies I had seen in that it took no advantage whatsoever of Australia’s panoramic potential. It was the story of a graduate student in anthropology, who spends all her time alone in a tiny high-rise apartment, studying videotapes and photographs of Melanesian men. Her husband is a young, ambitious doctor who spends all his time at the lab and seems not to be paying very much attention to what is going on at home. One day there’s a knock on the apartment door and a big guy with a lot of curly black hair is standing in the hallway. He’s wearing blue jeans and a utility belt hung with tools that bounce against his hip. “I’m the plumber,” he says. And she says, “What plumber?” And he says, “I’m here to check the plumbing.” And she says, “I didn’t call for anyone to check the plumbing.” And he says, “It’s just a routine thing.” And she hesitates a second and then she says, “OK,” and lets him in.
The fact that Voss was an inane guidebook for someone going to live in late-twentieth-century urban Australia, or that The Plumber was more about class warfare than transgressive sex, had no effect whatsoever on my enthusiasm. Nor did the fact that virtually every other American or Canadian graduate student I met, and a fair few of the Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians, was also writing about explorers. It was as though we had all found copies of the same novel and were all giddy with the excitement of traveling to a place from which, we imagined romantically, we might never return.
Our professors, who were, of course, Australians, viewed us with varying degrees of humor and contempt, as did most of the Australian students, who were bent on deconstructing the colonial system in which they considered themselves mired. But, as I had been trying to explain to my chairman, we were all just working from experience. We, who came from elsewhere, were drawn to stories about other people who had come from someplace else. They, who had always been there, were completely uninterested in the idea of discovery. They had other things to think about, like, for instance, getting away.
It was sometimes frustrating to be so out of sync with the general tenor of the department, but I was lucky in that the thesis advisor assigned to me was a poet. A good-natured bon vivant with a shock of wiry gray hair, he was quite unconcerned by the seeming naïveté of my approach. “Don’t fret,” he would say cheerfully, “all dissertations are autobiographical.”
Perhaps this is more true in Australia, where graduate school is conducted on the English model, in a manner quite unlike that in the States. My degree was “by thesis only” and I had no obligation either to take any classes or to pass any exams. This left me entirely free to determine my own course of study and, since I was comparatively unsupervised, I ranged all over the map.
I filled my study carrel and my bibliographies with books that had almost nothing in common with one another. They were not bound by period, or genre, or discipline; they were not written by the same sort of people, or at the same time, or even under circumstances that were remotely similar. There were seventeenth-century Dutch travelogues, French anthropological classics, British pulp fiction from between the wars, and contemporary Australian novels. True, they had a certain geographic logic, but one could hardly make a thesis out of that—Everything Ever Written About a Certain Place? No, what appealed to me about these books was something I found difficult to explain, much less to justify academically, though I thought it had something to do with what Conrad, in one of his last essays, called “the great spirit of the realities of the story.”
A lot of the titles I liked began with a preposition suggesting movement—On the Wool Track, Towards New Holland, Under Tropic Skies—or named a body of water—The Blue Lagoon, The Spanish Lake, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea. I liked the panoramic feel of The Peopling of the British Peripheries or The Fate of Adventure in the Western World, and the intimacy of A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term or Letters from the Field. Sometimes, when I was stuck somewhere, I would arrange them into little poems:
The Fateful Voyage of the St. Jean Baptiste
Men Against the Sea
The Enchafèd Flood, The Fatal Shore
Leaves of the Banyan Tree.
Or I might make lists of alliterative titles—South Sea Supercargo, Travelers and Travel Liars—or titles of only one word—Victory, Tracks, Typee. What I liked was the enormous sense of possibility, a sense not only of what had actually happened, but of what had almost happened, what might have happened, what might still happen to someone, namely me.
I would set myself up in my favorite spot in the university library, an armchair on the second floor with a view across the tops of the plane trees to a range of smoky blue hills in the east, and think about the adventures that had brought these books into being. I thought about the explorer Charles Sturt, who rode into the searing heart of Australia with a whaleboat in pieces that he planned to launch upon an inland sea. Or poor Burke and Wills, who walked all the way from Adelaide to the Gulf of Carpentaria and almost all the way back. I envisioned clouds of pink galahs, glittering white salt pans, basins strewn with rust-colored rocks. All of Australia seemed laid out before me, and beyond Australia, the Pacific, the islands, and the sea.
My friends all thought I was ridiculous, though in an endearing sort of way. “You’re such a dag,” they would say to me when I showed them my maps with the routes of the explorers plotted in several colors of ink. But I don’t think any of them appreciated how seriously I felt about it or how profoundly—especially once I had come back from New Zealand—my scholarship was entangled with my life.
5
Present Perfect
Summer was coming to an end when Seven arrived in Australia. At the time I was living alone in a three-room flat in a residential neighborhood near the university. Mine was one of four apartments in what had once been a single-family Victorian home, and up until then I had thought it perfectly comfortable. But Seven was over six feet tall and broad in the shoulders. With him in it, my flat suddenly felt tiny. The showerhead was so low he had to stoop to get under it, and if we sat together at the kitchen table, one of us had to leave the room if the other wanted something from the fridge. The chairs were rickety and creaked when he sat on them, and my couch, a cheap affair made entirely of foam rubber, simply collapsed under his weight. There was, however, a nice little balcony, and during the waning days of summer and those first crisp autumn weeks, we often sat with our feet up on the railing and ate grilled octopus and stuffed grape leaves from the Greek takeaway down the road.
We settled in together amazingly quickly, and after a couple of weeks, Seven decided to get a job. He was hired at the first place he applied: a foundry out on the edge of the city where they made cast-iron gratings and veranda lace. It was a large, smoky factory filled with immigrants who all kept to their own ethnic gangs. The Italian Australians warned him about the Greek Australians, who, in turn, told him to keep an eye on the Turks. Seven was the only Maori and he moved easily among them. But it was a far cry from the neat little engineering shop he’d worked in back in New Zealand, where they made bronze and aluminum parts for luxury yachts, and he began to think about doing something different. I, of course, continued to go to school.
But it was a whole new life for me. I started getting up at five to eat breakfast with Seven before he went off to work. It was still dark then and beginning to get cold in the mornings, and we ate large hot breakfasts of porridge and eggs, instead of my usual coffee and a slice of toast. He was home by three in the afternoon, when normally I’d have been at the library. It was not a schedule that any of the other graduate students kept and I began to drift away somewhat from the life of the university.
Then, late that autumn, we decided it was time to find a house. The flat was just not big enough, especially with winter coming and the balcony out of use, and Seven wanted to be closer to the sea. So we left the neighborhood where I had lived ever since coming to
Australia and headed for the beach.
The bayside suburbs were expensive but eventually we found a house we could afford to rent. It was what is quaintly known as a “workingman’s cottage”—three rooms and a hall with a bathroom tacked on at the back and a long, narrow backyard full of weeds. It was deceptively pretty from the outside, with a bit of lace on the veranda and a picket fence all wound about with a pink climbing rose. But, on closer inspection, it was really kind of a wreck. The inside had been recently carpeted and slapped with a coat of chalky gray paint, but otherwise it was almost as basic as it had been in the 1890s—with the addition, perhaps, of electricity and plumbing.
Winters in Melbourne are cold and damp and quite unlike the rest of Australia. The English, who settled the country, replicated the housing they had at home—as unsuitable on one side of the world as it was on the other—and built rows and rows of cold brick houses with inadequate heating and little light. Ours was no exception; although smaller than many, it was as damp and chilly and dark as the best. The only source of heat was a shallow fireplace in the front room, which I used as a study and which, I thought, must once have served as some poor workingwoman’s parlor. The fireplace smoked horribly, and when we moved out, all my books had a brownish tinge, as though they’d been lightly toasted.
The next room, going down the hall, was the bedroom. It was a small room with a single window and a view of the laundry line and the cracked concrete. It had just enough space for a bed, which was pushed up against the wall that it shared with the front room. When the fire had been going all day, you could feel the heat of it in the bricks. Once, when I put my hand on the wall, it felt so hot I thought it might burst into flame, but it did have the advantage of warming the pillows nicely.
At the end of the hall was the third and final room: a combined kitchen, living room, dining room, and bicycle workshop. It was furnished with a kitchen table and four mismatched chairs, the foam rubber couch from the previous apartment, and an ancient, garishly painted refrigerator. At the very back, next to the sink, was the entrance to the bathroom. Obviously an afterthought, it was only half the size of a normal door, and Seven had to turn sideways to go through it. Needless to say, when it rained, the roof of the bathroom leaked.
But we liked it down there by the beach. We could ride our bikes to the market and the water was only a block away. Seven quit his job at the foundry and became a bicycle messenger, riding with a rugged group of Canadians and Australians and New Zealanders. They were a tight-knit tribe, all young and fit, easy to spot as they swooped through the city in their fluorescent green and black Lycra with their radios and their bags.
There was, despite the comparative squalor, a lot that was charming about this life: the tie-dyed T-shirts on the line, the yard-sale crockery, the weeds valiantly struggling up through the cracks. I washed our clothes in a machine that I kept in a lean-to and rolled into the yard when I wanted to use it, filling it with a hose from the kitchen sink. It was unlike any washing machine I’d ever seen: a rectangular tin tub with an agitator on one wall and a wringer on the top. Washing machines with wringers—two rollers through which you feed the clothing in order to squeeze out the excess water—had last been seen in Boston about a decade before I was born, and the first one I ever saw was in Mangonui. It was all somewhat eccentric, but I had a taste for the bohemian life, and, as for Seven, well, I never could make out if he just didn’t notice or if it wasn’t all that different from the way he’d always lived.
He was the one, in any case, who had what it took to make living like this fun. Take, for instance, the way he fixed the doorbell. Early on, we discovered that the doorbell on our cottage didn’t ring and that, if we were out back, which we mostly were, we couldn’t hear anyone knocking. So Seven decided to make us a doorbell out of a block of wood, a toy motor, a bicycle bell, two bamboo skewers, three corks, a pair of paper clips, and two keys.
The contraption, which was mounted on a wooden crate in the kitchen, was wired to the buzzer at the front door. When someone pushed the buzzer, it made the motor turn. Stuck upright on the motor was one of the bamboo skewers to which the second skewer was perpendicularly affixed by means of a cork. On either end of the crosspiece was another cork, from which dangled a paper clip hung with a key. A bicycle bell was mounted next to the motor and, as the motor turned and the skewers rotated, the keys swung around and hit the bell. Ding, ding, ding, ding.
I later learned that they have a name for this in New Zealand: it’s called a “number eight fencing wire approach” and refers to a particularly versatile gauge of wire—the kind you might use to tie up your muffler if it happened to come loose on a bumpy road, the kind that, in a rural country, you can easily enough lay your hands on if you don’t mind snipping out a section of some farmer’s fence. New Zealanders pride themselves on “Kiwi ingenuity” and a “do-it-yourself approach to life. It’s no doubt an attitude born of isolation; one can easily imagine how important it might have been in the days when replacement parts and special materials had to come all the way from England by ship.
But I thought it was a Maori thing and had even heard (though it may be apocryphal) that one of New Zealand’s prime ministers had once joked: “What would the Maori do without number eight wire?” It was, as I understood it, an admiring if somewhat backhanded remark that combined a fond affection for Maori ingenuity with the vaguely racist suggestion that Maoris were not too particular about whose wire they used. But it made sense to me that the people in New Zealand who had the least would be the best at making do. And even though I, too, came from a family in which this sort of creativity was highly valued—my father had once fixed a car with the button from a baby’s jacket—I’d never met anyone more ingenious than Seven in this respect. He was not only a tremendous scavenger, always finding whatever he needed in the junk that other people threw away; he was expert at thinking outside the box. In fact, as time went on, I began to wonder if he ever thought inside it.
There was a lot about this new life that I found fascinating, and I threw myself into it, not quite forsaking the old but, from the point of view of my colleagues at the university, more or less disappearing from view. I was still enrolled and receiving a stipend, however, and eventually I had to resurface. “Maybe you could call it fieldwork,” I suggested, when I finally fronted up to my supervisor.
I wasn’t entirely joking. Part of what I loved about Seven was how utterly different he was from me. This was not just a matter of looks or background or even what one might call worldview. It was deeper than that, I thought, maybe older. The Maori author Patricia Grace once wrote that “there’s a way the older people have of telling a story, a way where the beginning is not the beginning, the end is not the end. It starts from the centre and moves away from there in such widening circles that you don’t know how you will finally arrive at a point of understanding, which becomes itself another core, a new centre.” I often felt like this about Seven when he tried to tell a story or give an account of something he knew; it was as though he told it inside out or explained it starting in the middle. His narratives, like his ingenuity, seemed part and parcel of a larger sensibility, the logic of which twisted and turned like a set of French curves or the coils and branches of a Maori carving.
He had a lot of weird ideas—some good, some bad, but all unexpected. He was a great believer in conspiracies and was inclined to see the hand of an unknown agency in any kind of unexplained event (and even in some that were not so difficult to account for). He was deeply suspicious of official explanations, a fact that I attributed to his general mistrust of authority figures—who, as he pointed out, had never been particularly on his side—but perfectly willing to countenance supernatural possibilities.
Maoris are famously leery of the dead and I could never get Seven to wander around old graveyards with me to look at the stones. His views on the subject were not clearly formulated; he couldn’t explain it, it was just a feeling he had. But he did tell me once about a
time when he’d woken in the middle of the night with a powerful sensation that something was clinging to his back. He tried to shake it off, but no matter what he did, it held on to him. The next morning he learned that a friend of his had died during the night. “That’s what it was,” he told me. “It was Pete, paying me a visit.”
Now, I myself am a rationalist. I have never believed in ghosts or extrasensory perception or that the earth etchings in the Peruvian desert were left there by beings from another world. And while, for the most part, I appreciated Seven’s open-mindedness, there were times when his willingness to countenance outlandish explanations drove me quite mad. “How can I listen to you?” I would say. “You think that Earth has been visited by aliens!” His response to these outbursts was so mild, however, that anyone observing us would certainly have concluded that he was the reasonable one.
Once, when we were having one of these conversations, I accused him of being superstitious.
“No, I’m not,” he said calmly.
“Yes you are. You believe in UFOs.”
“Are you going to tell me that there is no other intelligent life in the universe?”
“No,” I countered. “There probably is intelligent life somewhere in the universe. I just don’t think it’s been here. You watch those programs about unexplained phenomena, you get visited by the dead.”
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All Page 6
