Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

What had I done? I went to leave the platform but Mr Morley held me back. He asked the audience why they had laughed and he didn’t look surprised when all but me pronounced ‘Glamis’ correctly. ‘Why did you pronounce “Glamis” in that manner?’ he asked me. ‘I read it in a book,’ I replied. ‘Have you seen this play on a stage? Heard anyone pronounce these words?’ ‘No.’ ‘Who told you to read this play?’ ‘No one. I found it and I liked the story. So I read it.’

  Robert Morley faced the audience and intoned: ‘She liked it. She found it. She read it. Does anyone of us in this building so love literature as to have first read Shakespeare without having been told to? Without being forced to? And know it by heart?’ There was a shamed silence and I crept back to my seat.

  I wrote my first book in partnership with the husband of my friend Hans Maree at their home ‘Lonah’. Hans was a folk artist who became my closest friend, until we both escaped from Tasmania some years later. Her husband, Piet, owned a publishing house in Holland. The book was a sort of descriptive, historical thing that was to carry advertising. For an additional sum I volunteered to get the advertising. I had no experience in this field but I was still young and keen and game for anything. I went up and down the north-west coast by train and visited business houses – from little shops to big companies – and in two weeks captured all the advertising we needed. I wouldn’t do it again, but it taught me that every adventure opens up a little more of life.

  When I began writing books I had, of course, no idea about how to go about getting them placed with a publisher. I looked along the bookshelves in the Ulverstone library and saw the name, Ure Smith. I liked that, so I posted my manuscript of Hear The Train Blow to Ure Smith in Sydney. The following week Sam Ure Smith replied – could I come to Sydney, fare enclosed. What a stroke of luck! I had, with all my ignorance, struck gold: the best and kindest publisher one could have. I knew nothing about publishers, publishing, the history or, more importantly, the stance and reputation of publishing houses. There was no one in the society where I lived who discussed literature. When I met Sam Ure Smith my delight bubbled out and with it my need to talk. ‘Go on doing what you’ve been doing, don’t let anyone talk you out of it.’ And I did just that. For years there were nights when I’d have to wait until the children were in bed and settled down – only then could I write uninterrupted. I still write at night, many times switching off the electric light and continuing to write in the light of day. I don’t do so well in daylight as I do at night, when all is silent and I am alone with my story.

  The children’s father hated my working – he saw it as defiance on my part. It wasn’t. I did what I did because it was what I wanted to do. The children were happy and well cared for and I could see no reason to spend my days sitting down with women in the village, drinking tea and complaining about life. In the end, he just sort of accepted it.

  Hans Maree was, of course, more sophisticated, as was her husband, and appreciated that if I had a talent then I must exercise it. Hans and I once left our children in the care of her mother, Mrs Gregorius, at ‘Lonah’ and took off on a train journey down the north-west coast of Tasmania (there were no roads there in those days). There were no other passengers on the trip to Zeehan and the guard promptly said ‘Hop up into the van with me, love, because there’s a heater there.’ Like all West Coasters, he had lived there forever, and Hans and I were both great listeners and ‘nudgers’ any time the man drew breath. He knew this rare strip of earth and leant out of his window and pulled in pieces of trees and creepers we’d never known existed, as the tiny engine on the three-foot gauge wobbled and shook its way southwards, pushing through the ancient forest.

  Further down, the engine slowed and a blast from its whistle sent birds shuddering away from us as two Davy Crockett prototypes pushed their way through thickets of growth. Both wore possum-skin hats, as much for the warmth as for the fact that they had no other head covering in this wild, wet area. Their occupation was hunting possums. Any kangaroos? ‘Lord luv us no, they wouldn’t be able to push through the bloody undergrowth if you’ll pardon the expression.’ But the two men had done so. Hans did beautiful wood-turning and was surprised and charmed with the splendid timber. ‘Oh gawd, you ain’t seen nothing’ one of the men said. ‘You hang on a bit’ he told the train driver and, turning to Hans said, ‘Come to our camp’ and off he went with Hans in tow. She was a magnificent woman, she had exhibited her art work in Europe, was cultured and beautiful, yet she didn’t hesitate and in a second had disappeared, swallowed up by the vastness where the sun never touched the forest floor.

  I spent the interval on the footplate with the driver and fireman and learnt the peccadilloes and peculiarities of driving in mountainous land where tunnels and carved-away cliffs were unknown. I was already gathering folklore and I filled in my time well until Hans came back in view, pushing her way through a maze of blueberries. The men were laden with long logs of nine varieties of wood. ‘Aw, that’s nuthin. She ain’t seen the blackwood, the celery pine, the Tasmanian h’ash.’ His mate edged in, ‘She ain’t seen nothin until she sees the huon pine. Golden it is.’ Like all true outback men who live and work in total isolation, these men had a speech unlike any other and the written word cannot convey it.

  Then we went on to Tullah. Until the early 1960s there was no access to Tullah except by a little two-foot gauge rail line, and the railway engine was called ‘Wee Georgie Wood’. Wee Georgie was named after a music-hall singer, and when Hans and I got to Tullah there were still posters in the Mechanics Institute for ‘East Lynne’ which had been performed there in 1912. You could almost hear a honky-tonk piano tinkling away.

  We couldn’t stay this time. Wee Georgie Wood huffed and puffed and threatened many times to run off the track – a thing we later learned was quite common. ‘Actually, whenever she feels the urge’ her driver said. When Wee Georgie stopped for water we two women would help haul the buckets up from the little creek down below the bridge.

  When we reached Zeehan the railway men helped get Hans’ car off the flat-top truck of the train and pointed the way in the blackness of night to a hotel in this once-booming town of silver lead. We went in, coo-ed, but there was no sound. No lights. We listened, we could hear the footfalls of a man’s boots. It was the engine driver. ‘Thought youse might be a couple of city slickers’ (city slickers, from Ulverstone?), and he brought matches and candles and said, ‘Take your pick of the rooms.’ ‘Are they all empty?’ ‘Every one.’

  By daylight we were downstairs, our sleeping bags rolled and packed away, when a lady came to ask us to breakfast. ‘There’s nowhere to get a meal now, but once we were famous like the American movies. I’m Lil.’ Staying with Lil was a helicopter pilot who worked for a mining company down in the southern area. While a hairy man took Hans off for yet more rare timbers, I went off for the first time in a helicopter which taxied down the main street of Zeehan a little after daybreak. After a long time of looking down on the unbroken vista of tree-tops the pilot roared ‘Want to go down?’ Sure I wanted to go down, but I hadn’t thought of climbing down a rope ladder! The pilot held the chopper steady while three of us slid down a rope and had lunch in the small clearing the company had scraped out of this terrible tangled growth that grew thirty feet in height. The blowflies were so thick that the men threw a sheet of mesh over me. Men sat eating with one hand and waving the other frantically, grabbing flies by the handful off the food. In all my years in the bush I never saw anything to equal this revolting battle.

  There was no reason for me to take that trip, but that was often the case – I got to places and came home without a thought of danger of any kind. When the helicopter landed at Zeehan that night Hans was waiting for me. ‘Squeeze in most tightly’ she said as she motioned me to her tiny car. Well yes, I would have to do that as she now had the boot open with timber sticking out and more timber in the car, leaving so little space that I must sit on part of the driver’s seat.

  We went to Straha
n, a tiny port and I was invited to take a trip up the Gordon River with piners, the men who for almost a century had gone up-river and harvested the huon pine. When they began casting the lines off a young woman came running down the wharf and threw sheets and blankets on deck. ‘If I’d known a woman was going to be on board I’d have made them make it more comfortable,’ she called to me. I was mystified. Not until dusk began to fall did I ask what time we’d be going back and they answered ‘In a week or two’.

  Hans was a magnet and people flocked to her with rare wood, they loved her. And I had gathered enough folklore, local tales and myths to keep me busy. We returned to Ulverstone and our children, though later we were each to leave at different times, neither of us knowing where we would end up and we lost one another for many years. We both altered our surnames back to our free state – me to Adam-Smith, Hans to Gregorius – and, of course, we had many different addresses. Years later I received a communique from Red Cross International – and we two old friends were reunited. She flew to Melbourne to see me, I flew to Holland to see her, and our friendship had not altered at all. We travelled around Holland in springtime to galleries and music recitals, orchestral and chamber music, and old churches. She was as imaginatively innovative as ever and as strong as an ox: ‘Oh Patsy, do not say that. An ox is not a thing to say!’ She had bought a small traditional farmlet and had her weaving gear in her house. It was a lovely little place with beds let into the walls in the way of little historic homes in that area. On a second visit with her several years later, she had built – alone – an upstairs section with two bedrooms and, with help, an outdoors weaving room for her students. But eventually, to my joy, she returned to Australia and remains here.

  * * *

  I had lived a lifetime of wide open spaces: ‘land, lots of land and the starry skies above’ as the Americans had sung during the war. But now I was earthbound, pegged out like a sacrifice, I thought dramatically. I was told ‘You are bound by the law, and the church, to come to bed with me,’ I asked the priest and he said yes, that was right, and added that I should go home and ‘stop being silly’. I said bugger the law and bugger the church, and he told me I was damned for eternity – and as if a great trumpet was blown I heard a terrified scream: it was my baby in the pram outside the door. A nun had put her big, black-bonneted head in the pram to talk to the child and the blacking out of daylight had been frightening. I always felt terribly sorry for that nun, she only wanted to kiss a baby. But I ignored her apologies. I lifted the baby out on to my hip and with the other hand pushed the pram and ran away home, down the road away from all churches.

  I was getting myself into a lot of trouble with my ‘in-laws’ (isn’t that a fearsome title?). The police sergeant of the town had asked me if I could care for an eleven-year-old girl for a long weekend. The girl’s mother was being sent down to Hobart to gaol for drunkenness and other ‘womanly’ crimes and the sergeant couldn’t get the child accommodated over the holiday period.

  I put the child in the bath and her hair came up shining like golden fairy floss. For me, with my black hair, I thought it was the most desirable feature a girl could have. The child stank and Velvet soap seemed to be the shot. And she didn’t mind these ministrations. She loved the bathroom, she loved my two kids, and loved the toys and books and a bed of her own. Two of my women friends helped me to get a supply of clothes for her. And I got her into school. She had somehow fallen through the net because the convent school thought she was at the State school, and the State school thought she was at the convent school. When my mother-in-law eventually heard about this child in my home she was ‘disgusted’ and demanded that the police send her away. The young girl cried, I cried, the kids cried, but I never heard of her again, and thereafter I was constantly being given lectures on keeping myself ‘nice’.

  Thinking back, I don’t believe these things worried me for long. I was too busy. I was into everything. I was a member of the local drama group playing leading roles; secretary of the Red Cross Ball (‘Raven-haired Pat in elegant gown and shoulder-length gloves’ as the local paper reported, without noting that both the gown and the arms-length gloves were made by me, the gloves from fly-net and the dress from cheap curtain material dyed blue in the wood-fire copper).

  I was president of the Mothers’ Club and attended and addressed the State conference in Hobart. I had children’s birthday parties, all home-made cooking of course, and fun – except for one day when five-year-old twins grabbed the big pavlova cake and dived underneath the low divan and we couldn’t get them to come out but heard a noise, not so much of eating sounds but more like snuffling food down like pigs in mud. By the time they surfaced they were throwing up all over my polished wood floors.

  The energy of youth is a thing we never forget and the surge of it remains in your memory. We, he and I, and his aged father, made a long concrete path down to the front gate one day, and on the next we built a huge concrete verandah and the four steps leading up to it. The old man looked after the crude concrete mixer, I ran the wheelbarrow of heavy, wet mixture down to where the third party looked after the task of spreading the concrete – and that was hard, measuring and getting it boxed in evenly while I ran back the barrow for more mixture. The following day, young though I was, my legs were so sore I could scarcely move them.

  I put a sealed bottle under the steps and in this I placed a penny coin, a half-penny, a threepence and sixpence, along with a note giving names and ages of the family – and now there is nothing to say a mother and her two children ever lived and laughed there. A fire-brigade building is now on the site but I reckon that no fireman will ever work so hard as did an old man, a young woman, and a soldier who had been away at war for six years.

  It was the last great task I did for that house that had given me the pleasure of designing it and the delights of the children laughing in it. Like most things that have dragged on too long, the end came suddenly, and badly.

  * * *

  As my writing of features for national magazines progressed, I was being asked more and more often whether I could get illustrations to go with these stories. Well, mostly I was in places that hadn’t been photographed. I had the good fortune – once again good fortune was my companion in life – to be in Devonport, the next town to Ulverstone on the north coast of the island, and went into the chemist shop. During the course of conversation the chemist said, ‘You’re the writer of all these great features, aren’t you?’ He said, ‘It’s a wonder you don’t illustrate them, they’re such exciting stories that it would be great to let people on the mainland and elsewhere know what the remarkable stories you tell have to show.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘my mother was great with a Box Brownie.’ He promptly asked me why I wasn’t illustrating Hear The Train Blow with my mother’s snapshots and I answered, feeling quite silly, that I had never thought of it. As a hobby, this chemist had been photographing birds since he was young and had a rare collection, much of which had taken hours and days to set up his cameras for one rare shot. Without thinking I asked ‘Will you teach me?’ He asked ‘Have you got a camera?’ and I said ‘No’, so he said I should buy a good one – I would need a good one to cover the good stories I would write.

  I returned to his shop a week later and asked ‘How much would I need to buy a good camera?’ He promptly said he had been thinking about it all through the week and had decided I had to make up my mind to either have a Box Brownie, which would make me a reasonable amateur photographer as my Mother had been, or to get the very best on the market. The ‘very best’ turned out to be a Linhof Technica, which used cut film 4 inches by 5 inches a sheet. This camera cost over £500 in the early 1950s, and he said ‘It’s that or the Box Brownie’, so I agreed that was it.

  The chemist said he would buy it in through his shop, and I could pay it off. I said, ‘No, I never book anything unless I can pay it at the time of delivery.’ I told him I would have the money within a month, and I did. I wrote till my hands nearly fell of
f, and I wrote a letter to the wonderful editor, Otto Olsen in Sydney, and told him what I was doing. He paid me for the features I sent and gave me an advance on the next five features. And the day I got that letter from him, I got on the train at Ulverstone as soon as the children went to school, went to Devonport and the chemist had the camera waiting for me. It was a very exciting time, and he was able to take an ingenue such as me and teach me to become proficient in the art of photography. As well, he insisted that I must learn to develop and print my own films.

  This became one of the great joys of my life. I could never have imagined such pleasure in work as developing and printing my own photographs brought me.

  Because of the type of film that went with the camera, the already cut sheet of film had to be loaded in complete darkness. The merest gleam of light would ruin this film, so to load it meant always finding somewhere that was totally and entirely dark. An added difficulty was that I could only take a certain number of loaded films away with me because of their sheer weight and size. Each sheet of cut film arrived in its own covering and had to be loaded, not into the camera, but into a sheath which took some time and care. The two sheaths were pulled out, one for the front and one for the back, loaded with film, and then the totally blacked-out sheet was pushed across it, the other side was loaded the same way. Invariably you would see your best shots when you were well down on loaded film, and would then have to work like an angel to make sure every shot counted, although, paying as much as one did for the film, one always tried for the best shot anyway. I tried to get by with as little weight as possible: twenty of these laden sheath holders which, of course, meant I was carrying forty shots, then extra boxes of the cut film in case I ran out, and then the great camera itself.

  My mentor in Devonport taught me that lots of attachments were not necessary and, if I shot well, I would need only one more attachment to this camera and that would be a very good flash unit. In those days, a flash was a heavy thing, it had its own big battery and, of course, one carried extra batteries. The flash was 6 inches in diameter and then there was the flash bulb. These flash bulbs, for some reason, were more likely to flash if you licked the top of the globe – I’ve no idea why, but it was a habit we all had in those days, giving a flick of the tongue on the top of the globe.