Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  Lovely Ruby Ho from Hong Kong came to live with the children and me – and stayed eight years.

  Mr Stanley Gurney of Adamsfield, Tasmania – the only hermit I ever knew, although he denied the description.

  Before Lake Pedder in Tasmania’s south-west was flooded, a group of friends went to bid farewell to this enchanted, doomed piece of earth. Here, artist Max Angus prepares to take up his brushes.

  We flew into Lake Pedder and walked out. We were a weary lot at night and ate huge meals before turning in early. Clockwise from left: me, Tricia Giles (obscured), Max Angus, Frank Bolt, Geoffrey Tyson (standing), an unknown bushwalker, Olegas Truchanas, another unknown bushwalker and Leslie Greener.

  Roland Robinson at Mataranka in 1960, on our trip around Australia.

  I have many good friends in the Kimberley but none better than head stockman Gerry Ash.

  Since the 1960s I have travelled to the Kimberley annually. In that time I have worked on four large properties to relieve owners in need of a holiday. Now the Kimberley is simply my home in the winter months.

  In 1961 I went on a long trip with Kimberley cattlemen, musterers and the women who cooked for them.

  Publishers helped me from my first days of writing. Here the poet Ian Mudie launches my book Moonbird People in 1965.

  Peerless company – on uninhabited Babel Island in Bass Strait with Tas Drysdale (to my far right), Dom Serventy (to my right) and a bird catcher in 1967.

  At the age of 75 Dad brought this tree down to size to fit the kitchen stove using only maul, wedges and a cross-cut saw. But by his mid-eighties he knew he was done for.

  My parents, Birdie and Albert, on their golden wedding anniversary in 1969.

  Kathleen and I help Mum and Dad celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary in 1979.

  Our family parties are always great fun as everyone, young and old, joins in. Mum and Dad’s diamond wedding anniversary, 1979.

  My travels have taken me to ninety-seven countries. On my first trip to Japan in the 1950s I went on to Hong Kong and into the New Territories. These Hakau people were photographed near the Chinese border.

  On the Isle of Irishman in 1972, collecting material for Heart of Exile.

  In 1982 my publisher’s Christmas gift was a cartoon by the designer Tom Kurema. It showed me wearing a digger’s hat (The Anzacs), driving a railway engine (Folklore of the Australian Railwaymen) and accompanied by a sheep (The Shearers).

  In 1986 I worked with the BBC on the documentary ‘Australia Will Be There’. This meant climbing the Kokoda trail, assisted by this man, Luther.

  Edward Dunlop spent much of his last ten years at my home and we travelled overseas three times to old haunts. In 1987 we were on the infamous Burma-Thailand Railway with Blue Butterworth, Edward’s former batman.

  Birdie’s children: Albert and John Atkins, Kathleen Bradley and me.

  E.E. Dunlop – ‘Weary’, as some call him – was, to me, Edward and a good mate. Here we are pictured at a breakfast in 1993; Clive James is to my left.

  The Road to Samarkand

  IN RETROSPECT, MY TRAVELLING DAYS were like gipsy caravans moving sometimes languorously through fields of flowers and sometimes in whirlwinds which could sweep me off at any time to any land where I cared to go. Poor people rarely have the opportunity to travel like that. There was one thing that favoured me: I was, and still am, a chronic asthmatic and it seemed to me that as I got no pay for my long periods away from work when I was in hospital I may as well have long periods away when I was well and could earn money by travelling.

  I have travelled to ninety-seven countries, and only in more recent years could I truly afford to do this. In those earlier days I just made up my mind that I had to see and be part of an event, or had to stand on a rare spot on earth, and I would fix the date, make plans and organise my household, arrange with a bank for money to be held to keep things running at home, get a passport, and then begin to scrape up the money for my ticket. My first long journey was to Japan in the 1950s. I had to go.

  I was bitter about Japan, bitter in all ways and of all things Japanese. It wasn’t just the loss of the four boys whose childhood and young adulthood was part of mine. No, it wasn’t because two of those boys had been murdered when they were prisoners on Ambon Island. And it wasn’t because the other two boys had died in Japanese POW camps. What I was bitter about I never knew. I never analysed it. I only knew I was bitter and I had to get rid of it.

  I booked a berth in a six-berth cabin aft in a Dutch passenger ship. It was the cheapest berth on the cheapest ship afloat, and after booking I began to work on getting the money to pay for it. It wasn’t just the cost of the trip, but there was the cost of keeping my home establishment going in Hobart. The children were at two different schools, one primary, one secondary, each school miles apart from the other, but each school uniform having white shirts – which meant ten white shirts to be laundered each week, apart from the myriad other clothing that children had now begun to need. It was a far cry from the ‘play clothes’ we had known as children. No more hand-me-downs or clothes with patches: now children were beginning their march for freedom. Up until now I had made all my children’s clothes and my own. (Incidentally, if you’ve never tried getting the fly right in a pair of boy’s trousers before the days of zips you’ve never known total frustration. Those bloody button holes!) Clothes were so very expensive in the shops and now I had less money than ever.

  With only two weeks before the ship was to sail, a friend, Margo Roe, then Senior Lecturer in History at Hobart University, turned up with a great big bag of materials she had ‘always intended to make into dresses’. I sewed and sewed, and by the time I was to leave I could pack quite a few reasonable outfits, as well as a surprise dress for Cathy who was to spend a three-week holiday with Mum in Victoria.

  Our ship lay for two weeks in Hong Kong harbour and I lived on shore at the newly built Mandarin Hotel, as a guest of the management. All I did to earn this was to write a letter to the Hong Kong Tourist Bureau asking for information and any help it could give me. I enclosed with my short letter copies of two recent feature articles that had been published in Walkabout, a well known Australian magazine in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, I was offered a week’s accommodation in the Mandarin Hotel which was then the finest hotel in the world. Also I was to have a car and chauffeur.

  It was the period when the colony was going through one of its worst water shortages. There had been no reporting of this in Australian papers. I wrote of the sights on the long waterfront where a cyclone had wrecked the always-poor shelters of the destitute and sunk much of the maritime shipping. Every second day there were queues of people stretching over a mile as they waited to get water from the one water stand that operated on that day. Mothers left children in the queue for hours, returning when their turn at the water was near. Little kids sat nitting one another’s hair, cracking the nits between their fingernails as they waited. A very old lady tottered back down the line humping on her back a plastic bag filled with water. Police told me it was difficult for people to find anything to cart water in. ‘They are poor. Look at the sampans. The small belongings in there are all they ever own.’

  I came upon a middle-aged man holding on to the only post left standing of his on-shore living hut. He smiled and gave the international shrug ‘that’s life’. He couldn’t leave the site as someone worse off than he would take the post, the one thing he now owned. It was a dismal, sad sight.

  Although I had free accommodation, car and driver for the week, I did need money so I wired Otto Olsen, editor of the magazine People (not to be confused with the later sex journal of that name). More swiftly than I could have imagined, he wired ‘How much do you need? Can supply immediately.’

  I made that driver work for his money. It was all wonderfully strange to me. Suzanne, a young New Zealand girl who was travelling on the ship, accompanied me most days, going back to the ship to sleep at nights. We two went to the Ne
w Territories – not the tourist area it is now, but then a fiercely held place where tourists were not welcome. The people abhorred cameras, believing the image would steal their soul. Suzanne held her camera up to photograph a narrow alley way and a tall woman swooped on her, grabbed the camera and belted it about the young girl’s head and when that didn’t smash it she shattered it on the side of the wall. My big Linhof Technica was well closed up and not likely to be recognised as a camera, but we retired smartly.

  That was a strange day: because Suzanne was upset over the camera incident we went back to Hong Kong and she went to the ship to rest. I went up the steps of the Mandarin Hotel and the huge Sikhs who manned the door swung them back and smilingly asked had madame had a nice day? Actually, madame was going to finish with a surprisingly nice day. The hotel social hostess was waiting for me. She had been instructed to ask a table of ‘interesting’ women to lunch and would I come? ‘It is for the young Duchess of Kent whose husband, a soldier, is doing his military time on the island. Will you come?’ Why not? ‘No frills. She is very sensible.’ And she was, as were her companions. And the big meal stood me in good stead until the free breakfast next morning.

  When I left Hobart, Madame Meiders had been in the house, as well as Ruby Ho (Ho Ting Ngor) who lived with us for eight years while studying at the University of Hobart. Ruby had written to her mother that I would be in Hong Kong and the mother replied that she would greet me if I cared to call. When I had left Hobart to join the ship to Hong Kong, Madame and my children came in the car to see me off but Ruby had come on the back of a motor bike, with her Australian boyfriend revving up and passing us at intervals and beeping his horn while Ruby waved a big bunch of flowers non-stop, as if we were all off to a wedding.

  The meeting at Ruby’s home in Hong Kong was arranged by phone by the hotel hostess. ‘She will not speak English,’ the Chinese hotel hostess said. ‘Of course, she speaks it fluently if she wishes, as she owns much land on the waterfront, but she greatly respects her position and scorns the English language.’

  Mrs Ho greeted me regally. I tried several times to start a conversation, and Ruby’s sister translated for the mother who said or did nothing with any visible sign – until I said, ‘Please tell your mother Ruby has learned to cook.’ The girl didn’t acknowledge my request so I said once again, ‘Ruby can cook quite well and is very proud of doing this.’ At last the girl decided she must deliver the message. The terrifying lady didn’t meet any eye, but somehow a muscle moved ever so slightly away as if she were alone.

  I left Hong Kong for Japan when the week was up. Japan was still smarting, still beaten. Rebuilding was going on, done by armies of women in total black, even to the rags over their heads. I didn’t get from Japan what I wanted: Peace. Instead I saw the ex-soldiers begging on the streets, their pathetic little army caps held out in parchment-thin hands. There is no glory for a loser – particularly in Japan – and I just wanted to get away home. I was bewildered and sad.

  Nor was I overjoyed with the behaviour of the Australians on board the ship. When the ship tied up at Yokohama the little sin-wagons were lined up ready – and the requisite number of men who had asked for this convenience were also lined up on the rails, ready. Their wives were there to farewell them with ‘Now don’t you be a naughty boy, dad’. And the next morning back came the ‘naughty boys’, giving the pretty little Japanese girls a fatherly kiss and their small change (the fee proper having been paid before they left the ship). And the mums on deck were joking and teasing, and Suzanne and I had to believe that these women, through ignorance, stupidity or lack of interest, did not know what it was all about.

  But the ship’s surgeon did. Suzanne and I dined at the captain’s table in First Class by invitation throughout most of that trip, even though we were only able to pay for a berth in a six-berth cabin. ‘We’ll dance tonight,’ said the old surgeon who had been to sea for nearly forty years and knew it all. ‘I’ll be too busy in a few days to do anything but clean out this lot.’ He knew to the day when the disease would present. ‘And sometimes it wears a steel helmet,’ he said. ‘I can’t do much about that.’

  It wasn’t AIDS in those days, merely VD, but it wasn’t the act or the disease that seemed to both of us to be so disgusting: it was the pretence that it was alright to be ‘naughty’ when away from home.

  I didn’t return to Japan for more than twenty years, and then I flew there on a diplomatic visa.

  * * *

  Dad may have been a quiet man but he had an apt turn of phrase when he did speak. ‘Things turn up if you are always ready on the starting block’ he would say. Things have turned up often for me and given me the chance to go on or do something more interesting, exciting, even sometimes, unique. Some people prefer a steady, stable life in the one place, some even live in the one house from birth to death. That they live full, contented lives is a mystery to me even when I contemplate two of my oldest, dearest friends who have so lived. Some say it is my roving childhood that made me like this, some say it is my ‘blood’ (ahem!), but I don’t care what the cause is – I just fit happily, or furiously, into movement and change.

  In 1969 a great thing ‘turned up’ for me. I was offered, through the funding of the Myer Foundation Fellowship, the unique and pioneer position in Australia of Manuscripts Field Officer in Victoria. It was a position that had no blueprint until I drew it. I was to travel throughout the State of Victoria and attempt to discover documents historical, rare, or of value to future scholars. If possible, I was to attempt to encourage the owners of these papers to present them (via the back of my government station-wagon and sometimes through the loan of the State Museum’s truck), under legal conditions, to the State Library. Here the documents would be protected and be available for bonafide scholars of the future.

  When I prepared to settle in Melbourne in 1970 to take up the fellowship I knew no one except the actor, Brian James, whom I had met when he came to Hobart with the play The Odd Couple. I had two concerns about living in Melbourne: How would I get to work? Where would I live? I’d never lived in a city – well, there was Hobart, but even then I was either up on the mountain or living on the outskirts. I wrote to Brian and the reply was immediate: he found me a tiny apartment in the heart of the city from where I could walk to work.

  An apartment all to myself! It was too good to be true and, of course, as anyone who has had children will know, that was indeed the case. Within twelve months the children had left Tasmania and were dropping in for a bed, a meal, a yarn, or a button to be sewn on. But I couldn’t complain. At first I’d spent my weekends flying back and forth to Tasmania to see the children. One night in Melbourne, out at dinner with Geoffrey Serle and Ian Turner, one of the wives (after listening to me talking about ‘the children’) asked me their ages. ‘Twenty-two and twenty-five’ I said, and as the words came out I realised, ‘My God! They’ve grown up. They’ve gone. They’ve been bearing up with me. They’re nice. They’re mothering me now.’

  It was a moment each parent knows, or should know. But you can’t step up to them and comment, you dance around a bit and make yourself unavailable – even for sewing on buttons. Let their lovers do that for a change; let them pick up their own dirty socks.

  But it isn’t fair, is it? Mother Nature, that dirty old trickster, makes us nurturers, makes us think we adore waiting on our children, loving and caring for them, giving the best of our energy while they grow and thrive. Then suddenly, overnight, we are to disappear, step into a big hole, get out of their lives. And no tears mind you, not even a bow as you quietly, secretly creep out. It says a lot for mothers that we do this, generation on generation.

  A party had been arranged for me to be introduced to prominent Victorians as I would be spending the year attempting (and succeeding!) in divesting them of their private papers for deposit in the State Library of Victoria. I was brought into the midst of a group of men and I found myself shaking hands with Edward Dunlop. ‘Are you from one of th
e Western District families?’ I was asked by one of the men, referring to the so-called leaders of society and politics from that area. ‘No!’ said Edward, ‘she can’t be – she’s too good-looking for that!’

  Year after year Edward came to my house on Sunday mornings after he had been to church (Presbyterian) and he brought a bottle of wine, swinging it in his hand for the neighbours to see and smile at. He would wave the bottle on high as if it were a trophy.

  The night before he died Edward phoned me asking me to do two things for him. I said I’d take responsibility for one but not the other. He then said ‘You never bend,’ and I said ‘But you’ve admired me for it’. His secretary of many years, who knew him as a good secretary knows her employer, called me on the phone and transferred me to Edward’s phone. ‘He’s asking for you and I think he’s most terribly ill,’ she said. ‘His voice, it is going.’ And it was. That slow country voice that he could use to become a great teller of stories or ribaldry that would have shocked the many ladies who admired him as a saint.

  But he was no saint. He was a very ordinary man who did as many another ordinary man or woman has done, rose to great vision when there was a need for it and few ready to go for it. If EED was a hero, he is in great company because there have been many a man and woman his equal.

  I wear his hat, what he called his priest’s hat because it was black. His monogram is stamped inside, EED. I’m told the hat looks great on me and I’m glad it keeps me warm. When he died I was asked if I would like a keepsake of my old friend and I said ‘only the hat’.