I was to receive 2/6 for a local item, 5 shillings for a State item, and the rare one, a national story, earned me 10 shillings. I phoned in an average of three items a week, but when the split in the Labor Party came in 1953-54 this leapt up considerably. The State Labor Party’s annual meeting was to be held in Ulverstone at Paddy Bourke’s Hotel. I knew and liked Paddy, and he was one of the few people in those most stringently limiting days for women who noted my rising success and my increasingly long absences from the town. Paddy guessed I might soon be in a position to clear out permanently.
To tempt me to stay, this solid man coaxed me to do the local reporting of the Labor Party conference. He taught me how interesting, vicious and dirty politics could be. He reminded me that my Grandfather had walked home to Gippsland from Queensland in the 1890s when the squatters locked out the union shearers. ‘You must do this’ Paddy said. So I did. I phoned the ABC, they said they were sending up a reporter and he would do the reporting, I would do the stories and features. And I loved every hour of it, on my toes all day grabbing stories, national radio phoning to ask for interviews with politicans; there were the long nights drinking at the pub when rumours – and sometimes even the truth – would be exposed.
The Labor Party was splitting. Eric Reece, the Tasmanian Labor Premier who had always visited my home in Ulverstone, asked me to drive him to Devonport: ‘I have to talk to George Cole.’ George was going DLP, the new Democratic Labor Party that would eventually keep Labor out of parliament for many years. My few years of writing features for the top magazines of the day stood me in good stead, but politics was not an exercise I admired or wanted to be part of. So this foray ended at the time of the momentous split, and my days in the little seaside town were ending too.
The Argonauts
THE ‘ARGONAUTS’ SAILED INTO MY life at the little seaside town of Ulverstone while I had one toddler at my knee and another in the womb and all the time in the world, when women were expected to do nothing, think nothing, and indeed had nothing but housework to do. And in this breathing space I got my introduction to education.
The impact of the ‘Argonauts’ children’s session was great. Previously there had not been a specifically children’s show on ABC, but that wasn’t what launched the ‘Argonauts’ and kept it afloat. There was a great variety of interests discussed, serials for young as well as older children, a running correspondence that some children used for years, but I don’t believe any of this was enough to blow the ‘Argonauts’ across the oceans that many another ship has foundered in. I think it was the conscious belief that children needed and wanted a quality product.
The ‘Argonauts’ took its name from the Argo, the mythical ship rowed by Jason and his men in their search for the Golden Fleece. Each Argonaut – any child who joined this radio club – was given the name of a classical figure. So many joined that they ran short of names and had to add numbers. A very short time was given to the history of the ancient legends, but they so gripped the imagination of the listening children that to this day you can come upon men and women who promptly say ‘Oh, I was Athene 41’, or ‘I was Ulysses 23’. Painters, singers, musicians, writers – all were catered for. Thousands sent samples of their work. Ida Elizabeth Jenkins led the ‘rowers’, along with ‘Mac’ and ‘young Jimmy’ and they all lacked the condescension that, until then, had been meted out to children in such shows. The children were named on air only by their ship and number as a ‘rower’. The original Argo had had a fine crew, and nothing in the history of radio or television in Australia has had the quality and the impact that the ‘Argonauts’ had.
I was doubly riveted because I had read ‘stacks of books you couldn’t jump over’ (as the Ulverstone librarian said), and to actually hear the characters in these books being spoken about as men and women who could have lived on our planet blew my brain into top gear. I read and read and read and read. When the baby girl arrived she was named Cathy Danae – Cathy from Wuthering Heights and Danae from Greek mythology. As I suckled her I read, as I had with Michael Julian three years before. Now he said ‘That naughty man won’t chain Danae to the rock, will he?’ and brandished the iron poker beside the open fire like a little Trojan warrior. These were the most contented, happiest years of my life. Cathy, from the beginning, had a time clock that set off its alarm at 4 am regularly every morning in the chill of a bitter Tasmanian winter. I’d change her, talking and singing nonsense songs all the time to coax her to quieten so as not to waken her father. Then I’d light the wood-fire stove in the kitchen, make a pot of tea on the hob, and with a blanket around me pull up a chair and settle her on my lap. And with her tugging away at me in that fashion that babies have I would contentedly drink my tea and read. And then I began to write.
I always wrote, even when I had had only a slate to write on. Sometimes it seems to me unreal, a dream, that I got to do what I always wanted to do. Few have that luck. Sometimes I think it is someone else doing it. No. Something else. I work hard, not only for the long hours I have done since I first began to write, but even when I am ill I have pen and paper brought to the hospital and if my body is not too clogged with pain or pain killers I get some words down. I’ve been driven since birth.
I remember Mum came on me at the kitchen table writing on our little tablet of paper. ‘What are you doing with that pad?’ ‘I’m writing a story about the man who came to our school today.’ ‘I don’t care about the man who came to the school, just don’t waste good paper.’ And I had the pad taken from me, and rightly so. These things cost money and we were just ‘hanging on’. Words failed to match the speed I desired. I scrawled everywhere except on or in our house – I had great respect for railway property!
Telling stories and folklore had been a part of our household from birth. All of us could tell a story well – except Kathleen. She was happy to be reading Peg’s Papers, True Romance and any other such literature that came her way, surreptitiously of course. She was a humdinger at concealment and was rarely caught out. Even then she went searching amongst her friends for more such magazines as soon as the razor strop was replaced on the wash-house wall and her current reading matter burnt. A thesis writer may find an interesting paper in comparing the difference in the reading material of two girls brought up together, each with the same lack of opportunity, yet each reading different, diametrically opposed material. And why not? It’s what suits your needs in life that should be the only arbiter of our taste, and particularly what suits our thoughts.
I loathed Freud, adored Kant as if he had written just for me alone. Then there arrived a book in the local Ulverstone library which included the letter written to the Sydney Morning Herald in 1890 by a Sydney Presbyterian minister referring to the death of Father Damien Parer who had gone to live on Molokai Island (Hawaii) to minister to the lepers, and the reply by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Reverend Dr Hyde had implied that Father Parer’s love for a woman leper should negate the public sentiments of affection and admiration being given this man who had given his life for others. Stevenson’s reply was majestic. Surely no one after reading this letter, I thought, could ever again be so misguided.
People were, of course, but I had learnt a lesson of tolerance and love in that intolerant, strangely convoluted and cruel tag-end of many centuries of using ‘love’ as a weapon. For the first time I began to relate to cause and effect.
I turned on the wireless every afternoon, and as I listened with my small son to Jimmy, Elizabeth, Mac and the rest of the crew of the ‘Argonauts’, stories that would delight my own son tumbled out of my head. I rushed to the piano and began to play ‘train music’. Michael immediately began chuffing and whoop-whooping around the dining-room table – and so ‘Pufftah’ was given the green flag and sent on his way. It was a simple story of an engine that picked up its train as it went: a freight train, and a lion from Sydney Zoo (he couldn’t speak our language), a passenger coach that left the rails and went overland whenever he smelt bananas in Brisbane,
a cattle truck that ran amok in Darwin, and so on. It was funny, it made kids laugh. The lion ate hay. ‘Lions don’t eat hay’ said the adults; ‘don’t be silly’ said the little kids whose imagination had not yet been crippled by education.
The local librarian, working in a room as big as a bedroom, was interested in me because I kept asking for books I had read about in Books and Bookmen (which took two months to come out from England). I owe her. Eventually she was ordering up to three books a week for me from the State Library in Hobart. Some I chose, many she chose for me. She said no one else asked her to order such number of books to be sent from the city. She was excited to have ‘real’ work. Sometimes she led me to works I’d not known of. Well, of course I didn’t know of much except for the books in that wartime ever-travelling armed services library – which was surprisingly varied, carrying all of Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Howard Spring, All Quiet on the Western Front, even Mein Kampf. The ‘Jeeves’ books were tattered with wear but, surprisingly, so were philosophical works.
I wrote the story line of ‘Pufftah’, the script, the theme song and music for beginning and end of each episode, as well as the music and songs for the whole of the eight episodes that constituted each series. I’d never known anyone who wrote, knew very few who read books, and knew no one who had done anything as audacious as to write a letter to the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission).
For each episode I received three guineas (£3/3/0, for which, in fact, there was no single coin. A guinea was a very gentlemanly term in those days.) The ABC’s reply arrived only two weeks after I’d sent my first two episodes up to Sydney. (The librarian at Ulverstone had phoned Hobart to see if anyone in the State Library knew how to go about such matters, and by the greatest fluke in my career someone did know that is was usual to send only a short example of the work.)
We – the pregnant me and my toddler, Michael – were on the front verandah carving animals from potatoes, carrots and white turnips while waiting for the mailman. Mum, Dad, and Phyllis wrote to me constantly to help ‘keep my pecker up’. The scene is one each of us has in our memory box, we do nothing to hold it, the moment has registered itself, is indelible. The scent of crushed nasturtium leaves brings it back to me as nasturtiums clambered all over the little front garden. (The garden remained, as all my gardens have to this day, harmonious, rambling, a joyous refuge where flowers and trees are not tortured into the shape mankind is usually made to conform to and, by extension, makes all things do so.)
Michael’s little feet stirred the cream and tangerine flowers as he scampered off the verandah to meet the postie at the gate and came back brandishing a letter above his head. ‘Big’ he said. I read it, and shouted aloud ‘They’ve bought “Pufftah”! Oh Michael! They’ve bought “Pufftah”!’ Cathy was a fine, healthy foetus or she would have vacated the womb on the instant. She always seems to me to have been my talisman of good fortune.
‘They’ve bought “Pufftah”!’ Michael shouted, leaning on my knee, laughing and leaping as if he too knew the whole impact and import of the letter. ‘They’ve bought “Pufftah”!’ he said in wonder, as I laughed and hugged him. To this day, it is a family saying when something good happens, even if I have the rare success with my cooking – They’ve bought “Pufftah”!’ as a sort of Hurrah! Miracles do happen! The ABC bought three serials from me, Radio 3DB bought two: all for children under seven.
I was asked for more when ‘Pufftah’ ended. I wrote ‘The Silver Jacket’ because Michael, by the time he was four years’ old, was a fisherman. He fished in the Leven River near our home and brought in fish as often as not. ‘Do fish have babies?’ he asked in the forthright way kids have when they expect a forthright answer. ‘Yes’ I said, and hoped he didn’t ask for more because I didn’t know how fish had babies. I’d seen bubbles come up from where he caught fish on his line, but for all I knew it could have been fish farting.
So, back to my librarian who sent off to Hobart and within a week she had a book on fish which explained their life, habits and spawning. It was too academic for me to explain directly to a child, so I immediately found names for fishes running out of my finger-tips and Michael was asking ‘And what next? Why don’t they drown down there under the water? Why can’t he have a silver colour like the big fish?’ Oh God: it was back to the librarian again.
When the series of ‘The Silver Jacket’ was running the librarian said to me, ‘I think the way you treated the spawning in such detail was splendid. No beating around the bush, children don’t like being fobbed off. Congratulations.’ That woman helped me more than she could know. No one else mentioned my writing to me. I thought Ulverstone had become a mean little town, but Ida Elizabeth Jenkins, when I told her about it in a letter, quickly wrote back: ‘They may not know how to address you now you are a national figure. It isn’t easy for people outside their own realm to realise their friend or acquaintance is still the same girl she was before her name was mentioned every night on national radio.’ The friendships remained and all seemed the same as ever but – the locals never mentioned my work.
In 1952 a letter came to me at Ulverstone, headed Victorian State School No.3805. The only good teacher I had had during my wandering childhood had written to me and ‘the years rolled back’. He had driven back to Waaia ‘for old time’s sake’ and:
I must admit that my chest puffed with pride when I read that my prediction of your ability with the pen had come true. There are so many things, which, predicted, remain as predictions only, that it is a real incentive to find that there still exist those who can by their own efforts bring out what is inside. Congratulations, little Dreamer, and may you continue to dream your way to the highest rungs of the literary ladder. (So, I didn’t whack you for dreaming, did I? Why should I when your dreams were so well placed.)
He remembered my childhood playmate, Kevin Young:
Some six years ago, Kevin Young called to see me at Rye. He was studying medicine, and had retained that charm of manner he had when a boy. Two pupils, therefore, from Waaia have given me a thrill. That is very good when it is considered that there were only eighteen pupils in that school.
Perhaps one of the best moments of a teacher’s life is to find that his work has succeeded. It has always been my belief that no measure of success or failure can be gauged until the pupils have taken their place in life. So, I had great Pleasure (with a capital P) when I called in to Waaia yesterday and read your charming letter. A little girl ‘dressed in a gown of blue brocade’ (remember?), a little girl who went to a little bush school remembers her teacher after fourteen years. No wonder the old fossil is pleased, and so he sits down at the same old typewriter which ticked out the Magazine in 1937, and says ‘Many thanks, very best wishes, and remember me to your father and mother.’
Yours sincerely
Gus Schmidt
I was embarrassed that the thick-spectacled librarian might learn how very little education I had had. ‘But’ she said, ‘You embarrass me with your learning.’ I dared not tell her I felt, and still in a way feel, totally uneducated. Leaving school – a one-teacher bush school – when you are thirteen years of age can scarcely be called an education, no matter how well read or travelled you become. Yet, for all that, I have never wanted to go to university. I like to study and listen and then make up my own mind.
In between times I was writing short stories, some for the English magazine Argosy – such a coincidence that the title was related to the ‘Argonauts’. There were plenty of outlets for short stories in those days, providing they were good enough. I wrote two short stories about boxing – my Father and his Father had both been interested in amateur boxing and Dad had quite happily let me trot along with him to the few bouts held in the bush. Invariably I had believed the man throwing a flurry of punches would win but no, Dad said such men merely knock themselves out while their opponent used his skill to wear him down.
Dad had known Ambrose Palmer, one of the greatest boxers Austra
lia produced. ‘He humped his bluey all the way to Sydney in the bad days. No one deserved the titles he won more than Ambrose.’
Such experiences added to the knowledge I believe every writer must have – you must know as much about mankind as you possibly can learn. To be narrow in interests, to assume some part of mankind is less worthy of your study than another, is to narrow your view to a pin-point. There are few with the erudition and rare scholarship to carry that quality. Can man read Kirkegard and Kant alone? Does he not wish to know how the rest of his world faces up to each day?
My lack of formal education never worried me, perhaps because I was going too fast to know I was uneducated. The Council of Adult Education in Melbourne advertised a Summer School dealing with, if I remember it rightly, Acting and Theatre. Mum helped me make a dress and cut my hair, and on one of our rare trips to Melbourne I managed to attend the sessions, conducted by Robert Morley, the British actor.
The class was bouncing along with enthusiasm when he asked us to come on stage, one by one. I was last in the line. He asked me to read, but I hadn’t brought a book so I spoke: Macbeth. We’d been told to be brief. ‘Glamis and Cawdor’ I said, but no one heard ‘Cawdor’, they were too busy shouting with laughter at my pronunciation of ‘Glamis’.
Goodbye Girlie Page 11
