by Tracy Farr
‘The man who made it for me – it would have been, I think, 1930 this one – always said I didn’t need to know how it worked, but I should be able to maintain it. There are things I do, to keep it running. Routines. Yes, I suppose, a little like oiling and fuelling a car, like replacing spark plugs.’
‘Could I see it, do you think?’
‘Of course.’
In the room, she stands slightly to the side of the instrument, and too far away to touch it. The ozone smell and the warm, dry hum of the instrument fill the room. She moves closer, takes a step, puts her hand out, but not in any systematic way, not as a thereminist would approach the instrument. As her hand nears the pitch aerial, I reach past her and, as my own hand trills up the straight metal rod, a series of notes sound, wobbly and incomplete, poorly formed from my awkward position.
‘God, it’s – strange. Strangely beautiful. The sound; it’s warm, isn’t it?’
‘It’s the valves. Old-fashioned glass and solidity. Here, let me.’
I move in front of the machine, into the playing position. She moves away to the side, far enough that she won’t affect the sound. I reprise the Shostakovich she heard me play as she arrived.
The filmmaker watches me, prowling the room as I play. I notice her looking at her hands, looking down. I hear a heavy click and mechanical wind; she is looking down into the viewing lens of an old-fashioned camera, held low at her belly.
I finish playing, trail off just shy of the lead-up to the movement’s ending. I turn to face her. She stands, leaning against the wall in what I know to be the room’s sweet spot, where the sound from the speaker is pure and as perfect as it gets in this little wooden shack. If she has found that spot from five minutes listening, then she has a fine ear, a very fine ear. If she is there by chance, well, she is there by chance. These things happen.
I reach out and touch the camera.
‘Your camera is almost as old as my theremin.’
‘That was beautiful,’ she says.
‘Thank you.’
‘Was it the Shostakovich? The one you played at Transformer?’
I nod.
‘It didn’t sound quite finished. Sorry, maybe that sounds rude, or just ignorant. That wasn’t the end, was it? It sounded as if – well, I wanted more, wanted you to keep on playing.’
‘No, you’re right. There is more, but I didn’t play it. It seemed a little too – perhaps too showy for before we’ve even had coffee.’ We smile at each other.
As I turn to leave the room she places her hand on my arm, just above my wrist, stopping me. ‘Thank you for playing for me. Thank you so much.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘No, it’s not nothing. I’m sorry, but I just can’t get over how beautiful it sounds. Your playing. You draw out the most astonishing sounds. It’s what struck me the other week at Transformer. I’ve heard it played by other people – it can sound so tinny, so gimmicky. You make it sound beautiful.’ She shakes her head, slowly, drops her hand from my arm. ‘Magic. Just magic. No one plays like you.’
‘You’re very kind.’
She follows me out of the front room and into the hallway. I find myself saying to her, not looking at her as we walk, ‘I would like to help you make your film.’ It’s her finding the room’s sweet spot that has done it for me. That she should be there, just there; that she can hear that. That talks to me in a way I can trust. I know – without knowing, without reason – that this is the right decision.
THE VIEWING LENS
We sit again in the kitchen, coffee hot on the table in front of us, weather hot outside. She has asked if she can set up an audio tape, to record our conversation. The tape spools turn in the machine, a lead snaking to a microphone on a short stand on the table between us. She pushes her hair behind her ear, and picks up the pen from next to her notebook.
‘So,’ I say, ‘how does this work? Do you have a list of questions to ask me? Will you start filming first?’
‘No, I like to start with this’ – she touches the tape recorder – ‘some audio, and the images from my still camera.’ She has placed on the table the Rolleiflex she used to capture me in the front room. The heavy black camera sits on soft black fabric, with velcro tabs that close it snugly around the camera like a swaddling cloth.
Why do you really want to film me? I want to ask her. Why do you care? But instead, I gesture towards the camera.
‘A fine machine. I had one – well, used one – you know. Long ago.’
She hands the Rolleiflex to me. I look down into the viewing lens, see her framed in the window, the stove behind her.
‘I’ll take some stills,’ she says, targeted in the crosshairs as I watch her through the lens, ‘some ideas for shots perhaps, but often more a reference for me as I go. And I’d like us to talk a little before we start filming, just find our feet I guess, get comfortable with each other. It’ll be good to record that on audio tape, those preliminary talks, like today, get some ideas for the filmed interviews. Sound okay?’
I raise my eye away from the viewfinder, and hand her back her camera. ‘It does.’
We talk, for an hour or more, about music, about the garden, about swimming, about time. It is comfortable; I do not feel as if I am being interviewed. When I close the door behind her departing back, I lean against it, kick my shoes off, walk to the bedroom and draw the curtain across the window, leaving cool darkness.
I sit on the bed, my feet flat on the the floor. Opposite me, perched on the table, is my small television, the spine of the video cassette filling the mouth of the VCR machine below it. I have only to lean forward and press my finger against the spine, against BEATRIX, to launch the tape into the machine again, to watch her contained on the little screen.
Now the filmmaker wants to film me, to make a film about my life, my art. Movies were made before, long ago. Newsreels, once upon a time. Then later, in New York, the people around me made movies all the time, used cameras that were supposed to be mounted on tripods, carried them in their hands, made films that wobbled and swerved, focussed in and out and all over the place so you almost suffered seasickness as you watched them played back. Black-and-white films, or saturated colour, people sitting on beds and smoking, or at festivals, or talking about sex, or music, or art, or nothing. Lots of films about nothing. Faces staring into the camera. The soundtracks of these movies, more often than not, were found sounds, looping swirls of rhythm.
You see fragments of these films, occasionally, as part of earnest compilations at film festivals. You read about them, more often, or about the mythology around them. This film of hers, it will be different, from what she tells me. I wonder how much of those old mythologies she has absorbed; how much do they stick to me, these different mythologies from the past?
MALACCA
1927
A low hum
A VOYAGE BY SEA
My cello, my uncle, and I left Fremantle just a few weeks after my mother’s death, boarding the MS Kangaroo on a hot summer day in 1927 to sail for Singapore. My memories of the voyage are vivid and detailed. Perhaps grief’s legacy was to render my mind receptive, perceptive, for surely I did not grieve deeply otherwise. My uncle put a brave face on his sadness at our loss and, I am sure, was relieved at my own stolidity. Grief had also, somehow, made me aware of the limitations of the books and recordings and reproductions I had held so dear. I was ready for life, for experience, ready to hold every sound and sight and smell in my mind and retain them, keep them airtight, watertight, forever.
I sat on my trunk in the stinking February heat, my shoes flat on the grubby wharf below me, my fingers tapping time with the clanking of the chains against the side of the ship and the wharf. Uncle Valentine returned from the booking office with our tickets stamped.
‘Rustle yourself,’ he told me, ‘we’ve a boat to board.’
My passport, newly obtained for my voyage, spelled my name at its top: Helena Margaret Gaunt. My place and date of birth wer
e recorded below my name: Singapore, May 31st, 1910. The captain held the piece of thick paper, with its government stamp, its copperplate writing, at arms-length, peering at it; he recorded my name in a small book he held. He leered at me, nudged the man next to him who leaned on the railing of the Kangaroo counting boxes on the wharf still to be packed aboard.
‘Going home, are you, my darling? Don’t look like a Straits coolie to me, eh, does she, Georgie?’
‘Yes, Captain,’ I replied, ignoring his rudeness, and muster-ing all the hauteur my sixteen-year-old self possessed. ‘I am going home.’
The MS Kangaroo was old, stuffy and poorly designed – a little like the elder Miss Murray, left far behind me in Lesmurdie. She had black sides, a clipper bow, and she rolled abominably – I will say it again, the resemblance to Miss Murray was remarkable. The Kangaroo was crowded, with more passengers than sleeping quarters. Uncle Valentine, though he need not have, chose to camp on deck with the younger men.
‘To take the air, my dear! There’s nothing like sleeping in the open to give a man an appetite.’
The crew were mostly Chinese with some Malay deckhands. The passengers were squatters and pearlers returning north after holidays in the city; there were few women among the passengers, and fewer children.
We left Fremantle late in the morning and by night we were well out past Rottnest Island. We sailed for two days in calm seas to Geraldton, then on with a heavy roll developing until we berthed at Carnarvon jetty. From there we sailed not on sea but on land, over the Carnarvon salt flats to the township. Our transport was a truck on a rail line, driven by a sail. Passengers piled onto the back of the truck, many standing, some of us seated on rough wooden planks. I clung to my cello in its case, clamped tight between my legs, pushed against my skirt by the mass of baggage piled on the truck. Uncle Valentine stood towards the front, leaning back jauntily while his arm gripped tight to the railing. The captain climbed into the front with the driver, and two men raised the sail up a sturdy wooden mast clamped to the truck. Unfurled, the canvas hung loose, empty for a moment and then, with a whoomp, the wind caught it, filled it to a billowing belly-fullness, and with a jerk the truck was underway.
I looked up through the sail’s swell to the endless sky above it as we sailed into the railway station of Carnarvon town in a cloud of canvas and dust. How wonderful we must have appeared! But the people of the small town barely raised their eyes to us, so mundane to them was this marvellous apparition.
The railway station was a tin shed on the port side of the town, close to the best hotel, the Gascoyne, itself made of concrete, corrugate and pressed iron. The Gascoyne had ample rooms, and Uncle and I took a single room each. I went to sleep that night with the wind buffeting the window, the tin roof creaking and crackling as it cooled, and dreamed of sailing over the land, a full sail above me, powered by the wind, powerless to change course.
We were to wait two nights in Carnarvon for the arrival of the bright new motor ship Koolinda to continue on the next leg of our journey. I passed the time playing my cello, tuning and retuning it as the heat of the day flattened the pitch even of my gleaming aluminium machine. My sheet music was packed in my leather valise; I would prop it on the dressing table in front of me, pull the dressing table’s chair in and perch between the bed and the table, straddling my cello, play to resonate the room, to make the whole creaking building, the whole dusty windy township, reverberate with Haydn, Brahms, and the Bach I loved best.
We left Carnarvon on the Koolinda and steamed steady up the coast past Onslow, berthing at Hedland and Broome. We carried on to Derby where we took on a great stinking, lowing herd of cattle in addition to the cargo of sheep already destined for Singapore. We reeled out of King Sound on the swirl of a rip past Sunday Island, the ocean surging under us with the power of the sound’s tides. The animals muttered, as if under their breath, and only occasionally bellowed and roared with discomfort or displacement or fear.
We were in open seas, the land hazy, far-off. Flying fish leapt and soared, glistening blue-green, reflecting the sun; we saw whales like dark islands spouting, and sea snakes curved like bass clefs on the glassy roll of the ocean.
Despite the gentleness of the seas, and the claims of the Aluminum Company of America for the indestructibility of their instrument, I found myself unprepared to expose my cello to the extreme elements on board the vessel – so it stayed in its case, away from the salt and moisture. Still, I found myself itching to play. I would take out my sheet music and read through it all, fingering the pieces in the air, wielding my bow across the space where my cello should be. I hummed the music as I played it in the air, taking my beat from the engines of the Koolinda as she moved, lentissimo, on the swell of the ocean.
The heat was oppressive, the air heavy with all the smells of sheep and cattle, of oil, of garbage from the galley. The saloon boys and Chinese stewards stretched out on the decks and hatches on their backs as we forged ahead over a leaden sea with an oily roll. I felt peevish and quarrelsome, and snapped at the stewards when they brought me tea.
But the tension broke when it rained, as only the tropics can rain. Decks flooded from hatch to scupper, the bows of the ship were hidden from the bridge, cascades of water ran from the boat deck and down to the saloon deck below. The rain thundered, the noise of it drowning the grind of the Koolinda’s engines. Half speed and siren hooting, we steamed through the pouring, pelting rain. Then, just as suddenly as the rain had started, we steamed out into the bright daylight again, everything dripping wet and glistening with water for as long as it took the sun to raise the steam. Steam rose from the deckhouse, from the lifeboats, decks and winches; even the passengers steamed happily in the sun. Everything in sight was washed clean; even the surface of the sea seemed brighter.
I stood with Uncle Valentine on the deck. And as we stood there, out of the cloud appeared mountain peaks to starboard. Bali lay ahead of us, high and magical, like a fat woman squatting on the sea, her buttocks and hips obscured in cloud, her head rising high, held proud in the dazzling blue sky. All on board stopped to stare at her, transfixed; Uncle Valentine and I stayed and stared as the afternoon lingered then left. As night fell we saw lights on the shoreline ahead, then here and there twinkling lights higher up the slopes. Strange metallic music drifted across the water, bell-like over the sounds of voices, of shouting and calling and selling, from the night market.
‘That’s gamelan, that strange music,’ Uncle Valentine told me.
Such words! Gamelan, junks, sampans, flying fish; and Bali. I felt as far from dry old Lesmurdie and the Misses Murray as it was possible to get.
Night fell while we made for port. Uncle Valentine and I persuaded the steward to bring us our evening meal on the deck, and so we sat, we two, eating our meal and watching the land grow nearer. The sound and smell of the land seemed to come to us over the sea. We stayed on deck, smoking and watching the lights, until the captain called the watch.
I awoke early. I could see the cone of the island’s peak, a faint breath of steaming, lazy smoke curling up from the crater. Boats came out to meet the Koolinda, poled out from the shore at first, then a hoisted sail caught the breeze and they scraped alongside our ship. They were laden with pretty, small Balinese cattle, the colour of strong milky tea, destined for the Singapore market, so the steward told us. We gulped our breakfast in a flash, eager to get ashore.
We were paddled towards a white beach, long and smooth as the eye could see, with small boats just above the high-water mark and coconut palms leaning their heads down towards the sea, listening to it as a mother leans forward to catch her baby’s whisper. The sea beneath the prahu that carried us to shore was a clear, transparent jade green. We touched a small jetty and scrambled ashore.
Up the gently rising slope of the road from the jetty of the little town we walked. Gaudy fabrics were everywhere, scarlet jackets, bright batik, and brown women in semi-nudity, for they wore only a sarong from waist to calf. The Ko
olinda’s stewardess and I were the only women among our small party, and she slipped her arm through mine and walked with me, said I might feel more comfortable in the company of a married woman and mother such as herself in the presence of the naked native bodies all around us. But I was too thrilled to feel a blush even had I been guilty of one, and the beauty and naturalness of the Balinese women made their state seem not bold nor brazen, but perfect, natural. I heated and sweated under my heavy Australian clothing, yearning to shed my blouse and feel the cooling breeze against my own white skin.
As we came upon the marketplace, the pasar, I put my hand to the notebook in my skirt pocket. On the way north from Fremantle to Broome, Uncle Valentine had written in the small notebook phrases of Malay vocabulary, that I might gain some familiarity with the language, and quite a deal of my time on the Koolinda between Broome and Bali had been spent poring over the words which, written, were so strange to me. As the sounds of the market reached my ears though, and I matched them to the words in my little notebook, whispered them back to the hot air as I heard them, so I remembered the language in some fundamental way, matched it with sounds murmured above and around me in the Singapore of my earliest years.
The roadside stalls were piled with strange fruits: mangosteen, green oranges, rambutan, durian, bananas, coconuts and piles of glossy scarlet chillies. Over each small stall presided a brown woman, beautiful, smiling, and naked as far as the eye could see as the stall hid the lower part of her, clothed in her batik sarong. The women wore their jet-black hair drawn back severely from generous foreheads, as the Misses Murray had taught us to do for dancing. I wished the Misses Murray could be there to see the lines of women with their ballerina hair and their bosoms on display; how their faces would burn, their eyes pop!
