Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  * * *

  There has never been much time in my life to socialise with the writing world, but the little socialising I’ve done has been warm and pleasant. The first group I got to know was that affable bunch of men of the Melbourne Bread and Cheese Club, chaired by Johnny Moir. One met a lot of great people at John’s home in Bridge Road, Richmond. There was a little booze, a little food, and much laughter. There were always several Fulbright exchange students from the USA, visiting literati and authors from far and wide. I met Katharine Susannah Prichard here, the Aboriginal artist, Albert Namatjira, Professor Morris (‘Mossie’) Miller, and lovely Olaf Ruhen.

  There was good companionship, but I couldn’t remember everyone. There was one letter, for instance:

  Dear Pat,

  To hell with double spacing. It’s single space for you – and like it. That’s all you deserve after leaning against Moir’s doorway one night, with a bloke on a motor bike waiting for you and with a tilt of the head, saying at me, ‘He could have been interesting, if only I had the time to find out.’

  ‘Hmm,’ thought I to myself at the time. ‘She’d get a helluva shock if she had.’ Still, I must admit men are inclined to kid themselves a bit. Okay, okay, keep calm, MORE than a bit. Does that satisfy you? Just because the poor guy that shared your little wooden hut with you a few nights while you dunked yourself at night in and out of the ocean – just because that poor guy couldn’t take a trick with you – you think men are all the same. Me, I knew that all along.

  Actually this letter is solely written to talk about myself but best to say how pleased Jack was to get your letter and how he liked your breezy style. Come to think of it, I’m not sure he said breezy. Might have been full blown.

  (Sadly, I didn’t remember the writer when the letter arrived!)

  The reference to the wooden hut was funny, though when the episode occurred I had been furious. I’d been commissioned to do a feature on the mutton birds of the Furneaux Islands and was ferried across to Long Island late at night. I washed in the sea, rolled out my sleeping bag, when in came the photographer. ‘Where’s your sleeping bag?’ I asked. ‘One will do us,’ he said. ‘No it won’t,’ said I, and without any bravado or hesitation I told him the truth: ‘You try anything funny and every fisherman or seaman around these islands will deal with you.’ And, as if on cue, up from the shore climbed Jimmy Sholto Douglas and the Aboriginal, Eric Maynard, carrying a mattress from their boat. ‘For Mrs Pat,’ Jimmy said, in as ominous a tone as his lovely voice could manage. ‘Yair,’ said Eric to the photographer, ‘you heard.’

  When John Kinmont Moir died, the Melbourne Age carried an obituary: ‘Co-founder and President of the Melbourne Bread and Cheese Club and one of the foremost authorities on Australiana.’ Moir had donated his large library of Australian literature to the Public Library of Victoria and the Chairman of the Trustees stated that ‘Mr Moir was one of the best friends Australian literature ever had.’ He certainly was a good friend to me.

  Friday night at Moir’s house was when everybody turned up, but the great night was Sunday night. Then it was not ‘open house’ but just an exclusive few would be invited – usually three – and there would be toast and tea in front of the fire. James (Jim) McAuley was there once and we laughed at the Ern Malley furore.

  Perhaps the loveliest man to meet in Melbourne was A.A. (Arthur) Phillips. Arthur and I were walking along Toorak Road one day, at the expensive end. ‘Do you know’ said this now-aged man, ‘Here there is everything man could buy and nothing he needs.’ Arthur had edited my story ‘Hot Eyes’ and from the time it was published in Summer’s Tales he called me ‘Hot Eyes’ – and I didn’t mind at all.

  Cyril Pearl and Paddy (his wife) were part of the breezy literary crowd in those days. He it was who wrote about Sydney in The Girl with the Swansdown Seat. Years later, I saw him in Dublin in the research room in the magnificent old library and whispered to him, ‘This is almost as good as having your own Swansdown Seat’ and he, Paddy and I broke the forbidding silence of the ancients with laughter. For a time Cyril was editor of Australia Magazine, the first magazine of its type in this country, and he often commissioned me to write for it.

  My work as Manuscripts Officer was a natural extension of the folklore work I had started in Tasmania. I had begun tape-recording reminiscences in 1962 with no particular subject in mind. All that motivated me was the painful knowledge that we had already lost so much of the history of our race of people. I was alerted by Mary Gilmore who wrote, ‘Ours are ours.’ She was referring to the vast influx of migrants who had rushed to Australia since the end of the Second World War, but already I had seen so many of the things of my childhood change – and with the change, expunged as though they had never been. Many of my early tapes (on a great big heavy machine like an old-time portable gramophone) I gave to the interviewees, in the hope that their children would care for them and hand them on to future generations. I soon learned that that was wrong: folklore is apt to leap a generation, sometimes two or more generations, with no member of the family caring where they came from or what their forebears did.

  My work in Victoria was meant to be tracking down documents of historical importance, but I often found that the people who had just one document of interest also had vast, unwritten memories which were of just as much importance. I began to work seriously in the field after I was awarded a Literature Board Fellowship in 1972 which allowed me to travel to Ireland. There, in the folk archives, is a great mass of material about Irish emigrants to Australia that would have been lost had it not been for the Guinness company which assisted in financing the work. The discovery stirred me greatly. ‘Why don’t we, our nation, preserve the documents and words of our people?’ From that time on I have climbed many ladders into attics and ceilings, into the scaffolding above shearing sheds, into old hotels, magnificent homes, tiny houses, and boxes under the house. Many times I have had to shower immediately I finished the search, and once I got into a bath fully clothed and soaked myself and undressed there after a long night in a grand old home with dead mice, living mice, and insects for company. Even my hair stank – but if you are going to worry about that you should never take up this kind of work.

  One of my close friends is Beverly Dunn, the actress, well known to TV fans in her roles in long-playing drama series and for her work in hundreds of plays. One day she was dusting her library and came on a large bundle of correspondence she had kept over our twenty-five year friendship. ‘It may nudge your memory’ she said, dumping a big parcel on my table. Cards and letters galore sprang out. Most of the correspondence sprang from my travels in the outback or overseas. Sometimes I couldn’t recall the event I had written about: ‘Welcome Home! O rolling pin thrower; sleeping lizard racer; seal adulator-ess!’ But I could certainly remember the 1972 trip which had prompted the following letter:

  Cathy [who had come to Ireland with me] and I went to Sissinghurst in Kent with a loving Australian friend, Sybil Irving. A warm day of gentle breezes and we like three little girls on a picnic. It was a laughing day. We got a train to the wrong station, paid too much for a taxi, and so on … There was a test match at Lords, England versus Australia, and I was anxious to know the state of play. Sybil asked the Station Master ‘Who is winning?’ ‘We are,’ the Englishman replied. In her most elegant diction Sybil asked, ‘Who are WE?’

  The book I had come to Ireland to write was Heart of Exile, though I had to return often before it was completed. Each day I spent six hours at the National Library studying eleven great tea-chest sized crates of letters and diaries that had been written from Australia to Ireland in the 1840s and 1850s. It was the most exciting book I have written, both the labour and the result.

  Ireland beguiles me as it has generations of travellers; it is small enough to give you the feel of its long generations and the poetry. Cathy and I once walked from Cork to Donegal in the balmy Irish summer, with a stopover at Galway University to do a short course of Anglo-Irish
literature. She is a trained nurse and worked at various Irish hospitals to earn the money to make the journey with young friends to Iran, Afghanistan and India, driving in through the Khyber Pass.

  I learned what a joy it was to travel with a different age group from my own, and had the opportunity, rare for most mothers, to watch my adult child perform so adventurously and well so far from home. A few years later we set off together once again, this time to Sri Lanka. My son, Michael, accompanied me on a trip to China and once again, I counted myself lucky to have the company of my adult child.

  Irish talk is lively, amusing, and sometimes chilling. In 1972 when ‘The Troubles’ broke out again in Northern Ireland one heard many stories. Contraceptives are banned in Ireland, but I liked the story about the huge number of condoms smuggled in by the English pharmaceutical firm, Boots. ‘The very best, smooth rubber,’ the advertisement said, ‘Factory tested’ – thus making them a more satisfactory casing for home-made bombs than the Hong Kong balloons which had been used up to that time.

  I travelled to Northern Ireland – Belfast – many times for research as three of the seven Irish exiles I was studying (Protestant rebels of 1848) were from Newry over the border. I travelled on Thursdays because there was an excursion ticket on that day. Many businessmen travelled up and back for the day and it was said you were less likely to be searched by the British troops as you crossed the border on that day.

  But I learned that was not always the case. My attache case and handbag were grabbed and, when I unwisely tried to hang on, the soldier just tossed the contents of both down the corridor and no one made any effort to help as I crawled around the floor, trying to retrieve my loose cash, pens, note books as well as the loose foolscap pages that had fluttered all over the place. The catch on my attache case was broken and I was unsure what to do. ‘You needn’t have done that. I would have opened it if you’d asked me.’ And that was a mistake. ‘Australian! Bloody Australia getting into it now!’ Two soldiers began to imitate my Australian accent, laughing. The Irish didn’t laugh: they looked out the window, they had seen it all before. But when I got off the train at Belfast one traveller and then another came to me asking if I was ‘alright’ and whether they could help fix the broken catch.

  Another time I missed the return train and had to stay the night, without money. It was my own fault. I always left the Public Records Office giving myself over half an hour to walk to the station, but this day I heard an enormous ‘bang’ between me and the station. Two ‘Pigs’ (small armoured vehicles) raced by. I began to run but it was winter and the snow had been pounded into ice so I kept falling over. I got wet through – my overcoat, hem of my dress, gloves, stockings and all – and was trying to get along quicker by going hand-over-hand along the railing when I was grabbed and shoved into a passenger bus that was already over-full. The light was going fast and I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t understand a word that was being said – the Northern Ireland workingclass accent is as difficult for us to understand as our accent is to them. No one spoke to me, not even the driver. At intervals another body was pushed in, caught up like me and grabbed ‘just in case’. At least, I supposed that was why we had been nabbed. The windows became fogged up and men and women were smoking. I tried not to think of anything but held my attache case hard against my chest with my arms wrapped round it. I was damned if I was going to let my hard-won research be stolen for the sake of the case.

  Suddenly, quietly, with little fuss except for the astonishingly fruity cursing you can hear any day in Belfast, everyone except me got off and disappeared in a flash. I sat down on the floor. I didn’t know where we were. It was pitch dark outside. The driver roared at me. I moved toward him and he made a push at me. I grabbed the rail near his seat and shouted ‘Europa!’. God knows why I remembered the name of that hotel. It was the five-star hotel of Belfast that had been bombed recently and the repairs and alterations were said to have made it the safest place in the city. ‘Europa!’ I screamed every time the driver kicked and yelled at me. He kept shouting but apart from a lot of ‘fecking!’ I couldn’t understand a word of it. Then, suddenly he braked, the door opened, and he shouted ‘Europa!’ ‘Where?’ I yelled while he began to kick me again. ‘Where?’ He pointed down the deserted, black street and I fell out.

  It would look fine for me to say that I stood up to this well, but the truth is I have never been so desolate, cold and terrified as when I heard his bloody bus rumbling off – no lights, I don’t know why, perhaps because of the curfew. I began to try to hurry down the street but when I got to the first corner there were still only rows of houses built flat onto the footpath. I banged on a door and no one answered, but I had heard voices before I knocked. I called out very loudly and a woman spoke, as if she had her lips to the keyhole. ‘Who are you?’ Irish, but softer than most Belfast speakers. I told her I was lost, could she give me directions to the Europa Hotel. Quickly, clearly she did so, then told me to walk on the gutter side of the footpath, not to creep along in the shadows of the houses as I had been doing. And she said not another word. I felt that my lone footsteps on this locked and shuttered street had been observed from the moment I had been pushed out of the bus.

  I was only two streets from the Europa. A British soldier at the guard house frisked me lightly, then a British woman soldier did it more thoroughly, and I could go inside. I must have been a grubby sight: wet right through, covered in mud and dirt from my falls when skating along the ice and from squatting on the floor of the unlovely bus. At the reception desk the staff made no comment about my appearance but asked me how would I pay. Pay? Hell, I had only my now-useless day ticket back to Dublin and my scholarship didn’t run to extravagance. Then I remembered an old friend who lived in Dublin. Dr Brendan O’Brien is a descendant of the Irish kings and to give his name was a bit of an over-kill, but I felt better for having such a friend at such a time. The porter took me up to my room and took elaborate care explaining fire drill if an ‘alarm’ sounded. No one bothered to ask if I had any luggage and I had a feeling that this little adventure of mine was a quite frequent occurrence in this city. Without breakfast, I boarded the train the next day and at Dublin, since I no longer had a current ticket, I made a dash through the gate past the porter. It seemed such a neat exercise I could have been doing it all my life and should never need to buy a railway ticket again.

  In all the trips I made to the English-ruled Northern Ireland I had only one other mishap and again, that was entirely my own fault. I took a photograph in Derry. It was not long after Bloody Sunday when thirteen Irish men had been shot during a peace demonstration. The English had painted on their tanks ‘British 13, Irish nil’. Feeling on both sides was violent. The photograph I took was of a mock-up of a body hanging by the neck from an archway, the legend around the neck read ‘Fuck the Pope’. That endeavour cost me a perfectly good camera and a very hard kick to my spleen, which does demonstrate that when a country is at war, or even in distress, one should not intrude. There is something cruelly indecent in probing or peering at a society wrapped in a tragedy that is four hundred years’ old.

  And then there is the lighter side of research, such as the day in the Dublin Public Records Office when for hours I had been reading colourless, unyieldingly dull material about a trial. It was a rape charge, and right in the middle of proceedings the judge pulled up the accused and snapped, ‘What did you say the young lady had in her hand?’ ‘Me Parnell, sir’ replied the accused. ‘Your WHAT?’ I nearly rolled off my hard library seat. Parnell, of course, was the Protestant Irish hero who fell in love with the married Catholic woman, Kitty O’Shea, and not only lost his seat in the British parliament but lost all respectability in the community, as did Kitty. And now, what had been ‘me John Thomas’ to Englishmen had become in Ireland ‘me Parnell.’

  * * *

  My folklore work had resulted in my collecting a large amount of material from the old Diggers who had fought in the First World War. I mounted a
n exhibition about the Anzacs in Melbourne’s Public Library which brought in more people on the opening day than had ever attended any of the other exhibitions which had been held there. The vast and complex concept of The Anzacs book began to take shape in my mind and, for a number of years, the writing of it took over my life and pushed my other writing projects into the background. As I wrote to Beverly:

  18 January 1977: It’s three years since I began THE BOOK [The Anzacs]. It takes all my waking hours and, as you know, it is 4.30 am regularly except for the loving times when good friends like you startle me out to dinner. I’ve got to get it to the publisher now. Stuck at it all last Friday night and went to bed 9 am to noon Saturday then at it again until 3.45 Monday morning when it was done, all 661 pages of it. I’m happy about it. Perhaps some other writer could do it as well – but I feel none better. The old men and women have been terrific, not only giving me beautifully rich material but enthusing me with their frankness and desire for the truth to be told.

  Took it to Nelsons at midday, Monday – they near collapsed with the size of it. ‘Three books in one!’ Barney Rivers said – and then lunched me at Lazars until 4 pm. But it will take longer than that to unbind me. I’m tense in every fibre. My walk is jittery and I have pins and needles in finger tips and toes. My stomach is all of a twist, has been for months. But it’s done now. The baby has to battle alone now. Do wish me luck in the printing m’dear. I can now say to the surgeon: ‘Do your damnedest. I’m ready now.’

  The Anzacs hardly needed luck. It ran alone to best-seller lists for over a year, and still sells.

  One of the reviews of The Anzacs better describes the book than I can now do. Written by John Larkin of the Melbourne Age, it was headed ‘Real People in a Real War’: