Craft For a Dry Lake

by Kim Mahood

  Her father had a mailbag with a change of clothes, and a damaged knee from a fall from a horse. He had escaped from hospital in Alice Springs and caught a plane to Perth in order to see her. No-one back home knew where he was. They plunged down the West Australian coast in a hired car, to some fictitious rendezvous in Albany. They were a pair of escapees, outlaws on the run. It was exhilarating and a little frightening. He stopped at the pub in every small coastal town to top up his dangerous spirit, and she sat in the car and waited for him unquestioningly. The pubs all looked the same, down at heel, with a midweek emptiness that gave them a clandestine air. She rolled cigarettes for him while he drove, sticking the paper to her bottom lip and breaking up the fine-cut tobacco with the heel of her hand. He said she was a good little mate.

  The weather was dank and overcast. Albany was grey and cold, with an icy wind blowing sheets of fine rain. They stayed in a motel with grey walls and brown furniture. He said he needed to see someone, and went away for a time, then came back and took her to the drive-in in the gusting rain. Her eyes hurt from the cigarette smoke. Over the next couple of days they drove about aimlessly. The harbour was the colour of old tin, a lustreless pocket of trapped ocean, and the ships looked like stranded beasts.

  She was not afraid while she was with him, only astounded into a knowledge that the forms of reality were so easily dislodged. This aimless flight through rain and fog with a strange man who was her father had become her reality. She knew he was in a tormented frame of mind, but she knew also that she would come to no harm while she was with him. She was his accomplice. In a curious way she felt protective towards him. So long as they stayed together no harm would come to either of them.

  He drank steadily, leaving her at intervals, though never for long, to spend an hour in a strange bar. She wondered if he spoke to anyone on these occasions, but did not ask. Neither did she ask him if and when he intended to return her to school. His removal of her had been a rescue of a kind. At some point he seemed to come to a decision. He turned north then and took her back. She would just as soon have stayed with him, on the run. He charmed the matron for his anarchic removal of her, and was gone as suddenly as he had arrived.

  She did not tell her schoolmates anything about where she had been. His visit had changed her status irrevocably. She did not feel bound to explain anything. She had been somewhere with him, another place, where the rules didn’t apply. She knew now that such places existed, and that they were part of the real world.

  I LOOK AT THE MYTHOLOGIAL options for daughters and they do not seem to be good. Iphigenia is sacrificed by Agamemnon to ensure a fair wind for Troy. Antigone’s fate was to lead blind Oedipus about the stony hills of Greece until his death, and later to be walled up alive by her uncle for sprinkling earth on the unburied body of her brother. The miller’s daughter paid with the loss of her hands for her father’s deal with the devil.

  But a closer reading shows something curious and interesting. Again and again daughters are cast out or incarcerated. They wander alone in the forest, or find themselves trapped in the presence of monsters and murderers. They do solitary penance away from the protective authority of the father, and they free themselves by this penance, this endurance. At this point they cease to be daughters and become women.

  WHEN I FIRST READ TRACKS, Robyn Davidson’s account of her camel trek across the desert to the West Australian coast, my response to it was ambivalent. I found the whole thing too close for comfort. She articulated too clearly the complicated impulses and female messiness and fears I hated in myself. There she was, raw and visible, a woman struggling as much with her own nature as with the practical and cultural obstacles involved in such a venture.

  My father’s reaction to the book was curious. He was oddly taken with her unflattering portrait of Alice Springs and its inhabitants, hugely impressed by her achievement, and found her introspection distasteful. He would hate this introspective tale of mine.

  WITHOUT MY FATHER I SHOULD never have known this country. It was men who explored it, men who were driven to find gold and land, and by less tangible desires to penetrate into the unknown. It is fashionable these days to interpret these desires in sexual terms. I think this is a simplistic view, clever and cynical, which overlooks the imaginative, the spiritual and the pragmatic elements which were also a part of the impulse. When I was a child it was my father who authorised the way we moved about the country, who decreed where the tracks should go, who traced the boundaries and fence lines on mud maps. Now it seems equally clear that the country exercised its own authority, which was acknowledged to a greater or lesser degree by the men who developed it. It was as if another country lay concealed under the tracery of tracks, bores and fence lines. This was the country which took hold of my father.

  Out here, travelling through my father’s country, I understand that the ‘father’ in my head has grown hugely beyond the dimensions of the man I remember. The man I glimpse in the pages of the station diary is preoccupied with the responsibilities of the job he has taken on, the people who are dependent on him. There are moments when he loses sight of his wife and children and struggles to find his way back to them. Even from this distance I am too close to him to see him clearly. He carries about him a certain intensity, he is isolated without being self-contained. He expects a great deal of himself, and his family is an extension of himself.

  When my father gave up drinking he also gave up much of his social persona, but he did not give up the reasons which had made him drink—the lack of confidence, the sense of having to prove himself, the fear of being found out. The irony of course is that there was nothing to find out. We already knew the boundaries and dimensions of his weaknesses. His integrity and his achievements easily balanced the ledger. But he was not a man to believe in the possibility of being loved regardless of flaws. Indeed he struggled with his own love for his flawed family, punishing us for our lapses in good sense and good judgement.

  Things changed after we moved to Queensland. It was so much tougher than we’d anticipated. The collapse of the beef market made cattle worthless. My mother supported the family by taking a teaching job at one of the nearby mining towns. An unsympathetic federal government reinforced the growing siege mentality that was overtaking the bush. As soon as the market recovered, the country suffered a series of droughts. The family bonds tightened in those early years and we all worked on the station at every opportunity.

  But there is a price for the bonds formed in hard times, especially on the land. Individual needs are subsumed in the larger difficulties, and we were not a family which encouraged emotional expression. My father’s natural reclusiveness was reinforced by the country itself. The tall eucalypt forest and impenetrable brigalow scrub was enclosed and secretive. It was a kind of hideout, a wilderness big enough to allow him to maintain his dream, his own idea of who he was. Although he appreciated our help, he could not tolerate the intrusion of our expanding worlds into his territory. And he did not want to hold us back from developing independent lives. He wanted us to be gone, so we went. We all came home from time to time, slipping off parts of our identities at the front gate and driving into the world he’d created. It was like driving into his mind. Bits of it were stalled, and bits of it were fantastically rich. There wasn’t really room for us in it, and yet we were enormously important to him. He loved to see us, but preferably one at a time, and not for too long.

  My mother continued to teach, even when it was no longer necessary. Reclusiveness did not suit her, and she had become attached to her independence. She maintained her own working life and circle of friends, and came home on weekends and holidays. It was an arrangement which suited them both. My father’s refusal to participate in social occasions was something we all took for granted. We did not expect him to make a speech as father of the groom when my brother Bob was married. We were not entirely sure that he would come to the wedding. He floored us all with a speech that was articulate and unselfconscious, a p
erfect balance of humour and warmth, utterly genuine. At Jim’s wedding he did it again. They were the only public occasions at which I heard my father speak.

  In an odd way these years were the most difficult for me with regard to my father. I was getting on with my own life, and the adjustment when I came to the station to visit was more and more difficult to make. He was always so delighted to see me. I think there were times when he was very lonely in his self-created isolation, and I still felt the sense of responsiblity towards him that had been established when I was a child. The work of running the station was far too much for one person, and his health was not particularly good. His authority was less assured, the vulnerability more visible. On every visit I felt the old pull to come back, to help out, to try to make everything all right, at the same time knowing it was absurd, that I would not be able to stand it, that in any case it was not what was required of me. What he needed was an empathetic listener, someone with whom he could discuss the ideas and thoughts that filled his mind while he mended fences and cut posts and laid pipelines. He needed someone to reassure him that the way he saw the world was legitimate, that the choices he had made for his life were good choices. I think too he wanted to know that I was happy.

  Often when I drove away from these visits I would find myself in tears, and at the same time profoundly relieved to be gone. The relief caused me more pain than the sadness.

  The thing I remember most about my father is his love of the land, his deep sense of identification with it, the sheer pleasure he took in it. This was something he carried with him from boyhood and which never changed. The boy was somehow always present in the delight he took in small details and events, the activities of birds and animals, the revelations of nature. He was not a cattleman at heart. When he looked at the country he did not see rolling acres and fat cattle. When he was younger he saw horizons, mystery, the unrevealed possibilities of the desert. Later he came to love the tall eucalypt forest and saw it as a respite, the place in which his spirit could be at home. It always seemed to him miraculous that he had somehow acquired such a tract of land. He was sceptical of the notion of ownership. He saw his relationship to land in terms of custodianship, an attitude he passed on to his children.

  —It’s always been here, he said. —It’s your job to look after it for your lifetime, and then you pass on the responsibility to someone else.

  I think this was a position which came naturally to him and did not derive from Aboriginal attitudes towards their country.

  The last time I saw my father there was a quiet affection between us. I had always known the dangerous ground, and it no longer cost me much to avoid it. There were still moments when he could provide for me a sense of comfort and security, of gentleness and generosity. I knew the art I was making would not meet with his approval, but we skirted around the contentious areas. He talked more and more about the importance of living close to nature, his gratitude for his life and family, the notion that life was full of checks and balances. He had evolved this philosophy through the hard years. It seemed to him that while things were difficult in terms of pratical survival, the family would be protected from misfortune and harm. As if there was a quota on luck, good and bad.

  I have this memory of my father. We are sitting on the front verandah of the homestead. It is evening, and a few shafts of sunset are caught in the bougainvillea which spills its dark red flowers among the branches of a quinine tree. At his feet lies a cluster of animals, a small ancient fluffy white terrier, a geriatric black and white cat and a sleek and elegant grey cat, sole survivor of a feral litter. He is particularly fond of this wild cat, who emerged from the bush as a tiny kitten and climbed onto his boot. She follows him about now like a dog. The evening sounds of the bush are close, the hootings and croakings and scurryings taking over from the daylight voice of the country.

  My father says—You have to forgive yourself, you have to give yourself some leeway for your life.

  He says—If I had my time over again, I would choose to be an artist.

  HE NEVER RELINQUISHED the intention to paint. Every house we lived in had a studio. One room was always inviolate, my father’s private precinct. As a young child I would creep into it when he was away and touch the mysterious tools, the sharpened pencils, the soft sable-tipped brushes, the heavy creamy sheets of paper with their watermarks and deckled edges. The square ceramic dishes and scalpels and tins of pigment were as tempting and magical as the equipment of an alchemist, the names of the colours an invocation which would open the door into another world. Cerulean, ultramarine, alizarin, viridian, rose madder, indigo. I would recite the names, prize open the tins and carry off tiny quantities of the vivid powders, which I cherished and looked at but did not use. Although we children were forbidden to go into the studio I could not help myself. I could not resist touching things, sometimes even taking up the soft graphite pencils and tracing over the lines of my father’s drawing.

  He always seemed to know when I had been in the studio. I suspected the wooden artist’s mannikin of telling tales. It crouched above the desk like a voodoo doll, knowing and malevolent, with its faceless head and fingerless hands. I inherited it, as I inherited the tins of partly used powders which I still hoard and still do not use. I do not like the mannikin, and I have never used it as a drawing prop. But I am superstitious about it, as if it has been witness to my first clandestine marks, which I attempted to conceal within my father’s lines, and is witness now to the slow process through which I have come to make my own marks.

  My father was angry when I inadvertently defaced his work, but he praised and encouraged my drawing and bought me my first set of oil paints. Art was our shared passion. Over the years we exchanged gifts of books and materials, and my tastes and influences bore the mark of my father’s tastes and influences. He had a good eye and a respect for sound craftsmanship. He appreciated some forms of abstraction but was immensely scathing of the more esoteric aspects of modernism. Even now I cannot trust my initial response to a work of art and must examine whether my reaction stems from some learned prejudice. My first visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, at the age of twenty-five, was a revelation. My father was not much impressed with Van Gogh. I stood before the shimmering canvases and my head reeled. Paint rippled and exploded from surfaces, colour roared in my ears. My world turned upside down. I stood dazed before canvas after canvas, thinking, This work is wonderful. Thinking, My father is wrong. Thinking, I can’t tell him.

  He continued to draw and paint whenever he had the time, which was not often. The voice which is missing from the diary is everywhere present in the sketchbooks he filled and kept over the years. The drawings are strong and accomplished, whether brief sketches or more finished observations. There are the drawings he made to entertain himself and us. The drooling dragonlike creature made of sections of drain-pipe, which lived on the other side of the plughole in the bathtub and which we called the drainosaur. And a wonderful series of giant anthills which were transformed into monstrous gorillas, dragging their knuckles and glowering from under beetling brows.

  But the drawings are mostly of landscapes, the landscapes of memory and imagination as well as the landscape of his immediate surroundings. The notebooks are filled with the sketches he planned someday to turn into paintings. There are recurring motifs, the dance of cowled ghostly silhouettes of young desert oaks along a sand ridge, a solitary figure at the end of a line of fence posts, isolated by perspective and space. The voice, the sensibility is at once conventional and unique. It is a voice set firmly within the conventions of the pictorial narrative, but the story it has to tell is unique. It is impossible to guess what he might have done had he chosen art over country. There was no indication that he understood the choice would have been the deeper excursion into unknown country, but this is something I can never be sure of.

  24

  TIME SLOWS, OUT HERE. The life I drove away from only a few weeks ago has ceased to signify in any meaningf
ul way. I cannot imagine returning to it. The morning rises over the mulga trees. My work has always been a step or two ahead of me. Often I don’t understand it until long after it is done. The red bone shapes of my own printed flesh lie spread-eagled on the canvas groundsheet beneath me, a repetition of crosses which refuse to submit to the boundaries I have drawn for them. This body I inhabit, pale-skinned, female, unobtrusive, has announced itself emphatically, used its angry, ochre-coated physical presence to blot out the abstraction of the grid lines. Anarchic, sexual, it refuses to be reduced to an idea. I am here, it says. I am real.

  I remember this body at seventeen, standing here, in this namesake place, on a cold winter night, feeling its own vigour and power. On the other side of the fire a man stood, a young man I knew well. If sexual tension could be rendered visible, it existed in the rippling edge of flame where it met the chill edge of cold air. This body, such a simple thing, could render inarticulate the man across the boundary of firelight, could cause him to suffer violently. It pleased me then, and even now causes me to smile. She was so young, and testing the edges of things she barely understood. She knew that the man was decent and would not force himself on her, in spite of their being alone in the firelit darkness, with no-one likely to come upon them for hours yet. She knew she would not cross the boundary, had not yet crossed it, that this was not the time and place. But she took a deep, childish pleasure (childish because she gave no thought to the man) in knowing he desired her and would not harm her. I pay her homage now, that self-contained girl who did not care that a man suffered, who knew she would wait until she was ready and make an offering of herself on her own terms. Who revelled in the cold space around her and the heat of the fire and her own heartless vivid self-fulness. It is she who has come forward after all these years of blurred edges, of feeling the needs of other people, of losing her charmed edge, and said—I am here. Remember me.