Other People's Houses

by Hilary McPhee

  At first, I had tried to return to the solitude of the dark little carrel in the Baillieu Library, with its reading light and bookstand holding the facsimile of the Lindisfarne Gospels that had so consumed me. But after a few weeks of putting on white gloves and turning the heavy pages, pretending to focus and hoping to see again what I’d been so excited by the year before—the glimpses of paganism in an early Christian monk’s illuminations—I walked away.

  Then Peter and I went on a cargo boat to Basra in the Persian Gulf—where we saw the Ma’dan people poling their boats through the reeds in the Shatt al-Arab.

  A generous friend, impatient with my sadness, gave me a puppy, which I should have refused, knowing this would curtail my travels and limit my options. I was not yet ready to settle in one place. My book about women’s bodies was coming back to life, now that the Burstall diaries were almost done, and I was planning a visit to London, to the Wellcome Collection, the next year.

  In the meantime, though, Diana also spurred me on to try to find out what happened to Peter William. There was no death certificate, no record of his burial at the church where my mother used to worship. The kindly priest I telephoned sent me his blessings and emailed that Your baby’s soul was taken into the church when he was baptized but his body was not in hallowed ground there.

  While my baby didn’t have a death certificate, he had two numbers against his name. He was No. 21761 in the Registry of Baptisms at St Agnes Anglican Church; and No. 295597 on his burial file for public grave No. 34, H Section E, at Springvale. On 1 May 1964, his body was bundled up ‘along with a lot of other bodies’; my father, the ‘authorising person’.

  My baby had lived for two days and there was a baptism. My mother’s parish priest went to the hospital, at her request, to christen him Peter William. Then I sat by his humidicrib and stroked his little red limbs, and he gripped my finger, and I watched his eyelids flutter, and his chest go up and down. I sat by him for all of one day and late into the night, until I was wheeled away into a room on my own and given a pill to make me sleep. Sometime later, I was awoken by the light of a torch on my face and the sister-in-charge telling me my baby had died. You could never have looked after him, she said. It was for the best. And I will remember forever the heavy thud of the door as it shut in the dark behind her.

  Diana suggested I contact Shurlee Swain, who had written about the history of childbirth, to get the name of a support group for women who have lost babies, through stillbirths and neonatal deaths. I went to several Sands meetings, where women spoke of loneliness and the deep silences that fell around their babies’ deaths, many of them a long time ago. I eventually spoke about Peter William, with two of the women holding my hands.

  Later, they showed me photos of the public burial ground at Springvale, and described the working bees organised years before by another Betty, whose surname no one could recall. She had been determined to have the ground at Springvale swept clear of rubbish, weeded and turned into a place that might offer some comfort to visitors. She persuaded Springvale’s management to position in the shrubbery a large rock on which small plaques could be displayed. The Sands women told me how to find it.

  I drove out there on 26 April, and became totally lost and frantic. I was about to give up when I found the place, not far from the neatly mown grass and recently turned sods of the children’s memorial garden, with its sad toys and plastic windmills. The small copse of gum trees and she-oaks behind the rock was very beautiful. I sat on a log and watched a pair of green parrots dive beneath the trees.

  Then I read the names and dates on the plaques; so many sad little stories. And that evening, a kind woman from Sands rang to see if I was okay. Yes, I think I am.

  When my daughter-in-law Jodie had baby Angus in January 2010, Sophie and I walked together down the street where I live to the hospital. The name Angus runs through each generation, from the Angus McPhee who brought his family from Skye in 1853, to my black-haired grandson. My heart sang when I saw the little boy with my son’s bright eyes, and his shock of thick black hair like his mother’s and my father’s, and when I saw Sophie holding him.

  Sophie, after her final year of school, had proposed that she live in one of my spare rooms the next year, suggesting that, when I travel again, as I must, two of her friends would move in. They were already sharing the puppy training and walking, which had been their idea.

  They spurred me on to have a party, offering to do all the work. A reckless sociability took us over, and seventy people were invited, including lots of Sophie’s friends. Two of the boys greeted people formally at the front door, taking their coats and handing them a glass of something. Sophie had made dozens of tiny quiches from her mother’s recipe. Eventually, we went outside, where her school friends Rosie and Alex performed—Rosie with her lovely voice, its perfect pitch, and Alex on the guitar—sitting on the steps up to the shed, among the yellow roses.

  Sharing the house with Sophie and her nearly 19-year-old friends was a challenge. For them, as well as for me. They all worked part time in cafés and bars, and pleased me by cooking enthusiastically in my old-fashioned kitchen. When our time in the house coincided, which wasn’t often, as they worked most nights, we ate together. On the flip side, the front door crashed shut in the small hours and the old windows shook. The electricity, gas and water bills soared. I left them, with large exclamation marks, lying on the kitchen table, with notes about shorter showers, which I imagined no one read. But they did read books, most of them, so the talk was sometimes of Cloudstreet and Monkey Grip. Of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

  Some of them were now studying music; others, international relations and politics. They were Greens supporters, and Sophie started to volunteer to help with campaigns in the run-up to the federal election in August 2010. She suggested the house as a venue for a meeting where Adam Bandt answered questions from her generation about how the Greens would handle the issues that were most important to them: the climate crisis and tertiary student debt, in particular. The house started to sprout Greens posters in the windows.

  I was ambivalent about the Greens’ effectiveness, after attending a couple of meetings and seeing what sounded to me like US-style political sloganising at work. But I heard Sophie speaking at a Greens function and changed my vote. I’d missed so much of the Australian political drama of the past five years, Julia Gillard having only recently ousted Kevin Rudd, but election day at the local primary school welded me back on. The long queues of voters from everywhere, the young families from the Flats voting for the first time, the volunteers, the translators. Compulsory voting is a precious thing—and nobody round here took it lightly. When the Greens ended up with the balance of power and Julia Gillard was left having to fight off Tony Abbott, I felt absurdly culpable.

  Sometimes Sophie and her friends invited me to their gigs, so I went to live performances nearby at the Evelyn in Brunswick Street and the Wesley Anne in Northcote, feeling like an ancient crone. But there were parents and other grey heads present and we shared our pleasure that these young performers were really, really good. I remembered how much I love watching talented young musicians work.

  By December 2010 in Tunisia, the Arab Spring had begun. Demands for régime change and democratic elections spread rapidly through North Africa and the Middle East. By February, hopes were raised sky high when the Egyptians toppled the dictator Hosni Mubarak, ousted after thirty years. Social media was the driver; the activists were mainly the young and the unions. The US and Europe didn’t get it at first, unable to acknowledge that they had been supporting the tyrant because of their alignment with Israel’s interests. Tahrir Square became the peaceful centre of something that seemed unstoppable, as significant a moment as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Al Jazeera reported that Gaza would be liberated next. Monarchies and dictatorships would surely be replaced by democratically elected parliaments.

  Then the Egyptian president,
Mohamed Morsi, was overthrown by a coup d’état, pro-Morsi protestors were violently suppressed, and the army started firing on the students and unionists in Tahrir Square. In Jordan, King Abdullah dissolved parliament four times before the year was over and the demonstrations ceased. Al Jazeera reported that the Arab Winter had set in.

  In Dara’a in Syria, in March 2011, six boys were reported for painting anti-government slogans; a week later, protestors were fired on; then, in April, a sit-in in Homs, in the south of the country, was brutally suppressed. The south had had five years of the worst drought on record. The escalation of civil war throughout the country was rapid and horrifying. Hospitals were targeted, apartment blocks gutted. The authoritarian Bashar al-Assad régime, once seen as a force for modernisation and eventual democratic reform, used chemical weapons against its own people.

  I telephoned universities, seeking permission for Akram Ali to come to Melbourne to study. RMIT told me they would recognise his qualifications for admission to a first-year course. I would sponsor him and he could stay in the house for as long as he needed to. He was still in Italy, about to leave for Kabul. I rang the Australian embassy in Rome, and the woman on the other end told me firmly there was no way to help Akram, since he was Afghani and we were at war with Afghanistan. That he was Hazara made no difference; he was an enemy alien, this young poet who wanted to study, an asylum seeker who wanted to return to his country when he had obtained some qualifications. There was no category that I could find to put him in that would help him. If he flew in without a permit, he would be arrested. He would then go into detention. I should have found this out before I raised his hopes.

  We kept in touch. He went back to Afghanistan, then somehow managed to return to Italy. Then I stopped hearing from him. A few years ago, Lyndall told me she had heard that he was to marry an Italian girl.

  I offered to help out with a Housing Commission after-school reading program for children from South Sudan. The boys rushed in, pushing the girls out of the way, and grabbed the fruit we helpers had cut up for them. Because the girls held back, we would always make two large platters of watermelon and bananas. The girls were better readers than the boys and their writing was painfully neat. They grouped together and found quiet spots away from the boys’ rough-housing.

  The mothers, sometimes the grandmothers, who all knew each other, came to collect the children; fathers did so rarely, because they were seeking work. One man, from Egypt, who ran the program, told me how hard it was to bring up teenage sons in Australia. Everywhere you look, there is no modesty, he said. I looked anew at the advertising hoardings in Johnston Street, and the clothes women were wearing on Brunswick Street, whatever the weather. He was right. Modest dressing was difficult to find. A great deal of flesh was visible. Even the word ‘modest’ had fallen out of use.

  When Drusilla Modjeska suggested I go with her to Port Moresby, and on to Collingwood Bay on the north-east coast of Papua New Guinea, I was pleased. Her novel The Mountain was almost done. She had sent the manuscript to Russell Soaba, a Papua New Guinean poet and a writer of stories, who Drusilla had known for many years. She had based one of the novel’s main characters, Milton, on him, and had invited Russell to the resort we were staying at in Collingwood Bay, so they could go through it together.

  It was essential to her that he felt okay about her ‘appropriation’—that bludgeoning word for trying to reflect in English another culture. I recognised her ambivalence. Whatever is intended when writing about another culture, your code is always there, your lens an acquired one. Drusilla’s book, which I had read in draft, I thought remarkable, as the first big novel revealing aspects of PNG to the outside world.

  I was also curious to see if the Ruwwad model of philanthropy, for young people wishing to continue their studies beyond their village schooling, might work there. The villages on the coast and in the mountains had started their own versions of ecotourism, which Drusilla had seen evolve over many visits. Her idea was for a small education fund, coming out of Australia, which would need to meet AusAID criteria for PNG. Her determination was impressive and infectious.

  On our first evening in Moresby, we had dinner with Drusilla’s friends Ros and Mekere Morauta, who was then leader of the opposition. Ros is a warm and funny woman who knows how things work in PNG.

  Those in government were doing deals all the time with the mining companies and the loggers, and giving nothing much back to the people. Loggers were bribing their way into the villages and denuding the forests. PNG was working through post-colonial chaos and corruption, which Mekere had been actively campaigning against. Vote buying was rife.

  Maternal deaths had doubled in the past decade, Ros told us. Electricity came and went in the barrios. The very rich lived in their compounds, and had yachts and private planes. There were parallels with the Middle East in the way people spoke of endemic corruption and the government always letting them down. Yet, despite the country having massive natural resources, such as liquefied petroleum gas, the people of PNG were very much poorer than the Jordanians.

  We flew over the mountains to fiord country and Collingwood Bay, beautiful beyond anything I’d imagined. There we were in a kind of sad paradise—a ‘lodge’ that was run on what looked like rather benign lines, with links to the villages over the mountains to the east, and where people like us paid 150 kina a night for ‘a village experience’.

  Drusilla’s book was in its last stages, and she needed to show it to some people and speak to others when she had used local events and settings, however tangentially. She knew people there from previous visits, and had constructed characters from some of them. She had been to Collingwood Bay many times before with an art dealer, a man who scattered largesse, sometimes to ‘the wrong families’, and there was a sense from some of the people we encountered that she was expected to continue his way of doing things.

  I got up very early the first morning, and sat in a rotunda looking out over the fiord, where children from far-off villages were canoeing to the primary school; two to each canoe, paddling towards the dock below. The light on the steep hillsides changed constantly. It was so beautiful, I was astonished.

  Evie, a young skin diver, took us snorkelling in the fiord. We went around the point and out into the main channel, to look at coral and the brilliantly coloured fish—as the children headed home in their canoes and the mists came and went over the mountains.

  Russell Soaba, looking like a PNG version of David Malouf, arrived at the resort, and immediately declared that he ‘loved Milton’, and that he wished he, too, were still in the first half of his life. He was gentle, political, delighted Drusilla’s book had been written from ‘her side of the mountain’. He now wanted to write from ‘his side’—which he told us a lot about over the next few days, when we walked up to the villages.

  Then he and Drusilla sat on the wide veranda of the lodge, going through the manuscript, making small corrections for accuracy and language. The most substantial seemed to have been about the role of mothers and grandmothers, and its larger meaning. Drusilla had an old woman dismissing the character Rika with a word meaning Go. Russell insisted it should be a howl of Mother, which Rika had failed to be, and would distress her to the end. ‘Like a fissure in the mountain,’ he said. Russell, a poet, thought in symbols—or so it seemed to me.

  We next visited the villages above the mangrove swamps, and stayed in guest houses made of bamboo poles and canes, where lines of light played on the straw mats and where sleeping under mosquito nets was easy. There was a feast to celebrate Drusilla coming back again. Babies had been named for her nieces who had visited the villages with her. Drusilla knew the families’ stories and they honoured her for it.

  A few people in the villages had shortwave radio and news of the Arab Spring had reached them. ‘Why would the rulers of Egypt shoot their own people?’ some of the men wanted to know. I found myself trying to explain how the uprising was spreading; drawing a map of Cairo, Tunisia and Lib
ya, with a stick in the sand on the top of one of the ridges.

  The Middle East was imploding along the lines Sidi Hassan predicted. By April 2011, there were more than 27 million Facebook users throughout the Middle East, and nine out of ten Egyptians used social media to organise polls and raise awareness of issues. In PNG, the wireless towers were already being installed across the mountains and the talk was about all the good things the internet could do for the remote schools, but some of the women told us they worried about social media: that there would be more people spying on each other, more violence, more divorce.

  In Orotuaba, one of the villages we climbed to, Barbara, a small woman with a lined face and a big smile, wanted to know why I was wearing several rings on both my hands when she had none. Good question. I gave her my wedding ring, which I had been wearing on my right hand, for no particular reason.

  Drusilla Modjeska and Lyndall Passerini have much in common, it occurred to me. Both wear shabby khaki cotton hats when they swim in the sea or the mineral springs, which makes me laugh. Both are English and eccentric with it, despite many years living elsewhere. Both are self-deprecating, political, absurdly uncertain, and expert networkers without realising it, determined to prevail. I wish they knew each other.

  The divorce was done. My ring was gone. My ex-husband and I had dinner once in a while, and it was easier. We shared the dogs sometimes, my young Lola wrestling with old Morry.

  A friend helped me clear out the battered boxes full of my papers and file copies of books McPhee Gribble had published, which were in a Fort Knox storage bin. I re-labelled everything for sorting later and piled them into the shed.