Ian MacNeill: 2011

THEY WAY WE WERE: FIVE AUSTRALIAN NOVELISTS

Christina Stead,Thea Astley, Patrick White, Helen Garner and

Frank Moorhouse

The Basking Shark in Parsley Bay: the Style of Christina Stead

There is a curious moment in For Love Alone

"Come for a swim?" she asked her brother Lance.

'Too tired,' he said. "Don't swim alone, and look out, there are rays and Portuguese-man-of wars about."

"I'll stay in the light. You come and look-out."

"Not on your tintype."

Her father, sitting on a stone bench in the garden, slapping mosquitoes, said, "Have you got a look-out?"

"You come and watch," she said.

"Nuh," said he. "Too tired. Been making Kitty's hope chest all the afternoon. More hope than chest."

Lance from behind the door said: "Hmff," disgustedly.

"Lance doesn't care for women," laughed the father in his soft voice.

"Really!" cried Teresa. "Really! Doesn't he? Oh no!"

The father laughed. Teresa dropped her towel on the steps and splashed into the water; it was so still that the splash could be heard all over the bay.

"Not out of the lights," called her father. "I saw a large basking shark up Parsley Bay yesterday." The basking shark was pale, changing colour with the bottom and all but invisible.

Christina Stead was not given to inaccuracies and was very interested in marine biology – which is perhaps not surprising when we consider David G Stead was her father. Yet here we have a basking shark 'changing colour with the bottom and all but invisible' in Parsley Bay.

Teresa, the heroine of For Love Alone, is based on Stead and her experiences. Stead's need to render them seems the basis of her literary endeavour to a remarkable degree. Many of her characters and their situations were recognised by her friends and family; they often felt the resemblances painfully true.

Teresa had been to a wedding in Neutral Bay. It was an extremely hot day in Sydney, around Christmas time when the 'spring' tides (it is actually summer) cover beaches and wash over paths where one is accustomed to tread. The spring tides effect a magical transformation – one can glide through the water over rough paths along which one has had to pick one's way.

Teresa's journey home from the wedding in Neutral Bay on the other side of Sydney Harbour has included a stopover at her aunt's and cousin's who live a couple of bays closer to the city than Teresa's home. From their place she has had to climb a steep hill to descend via the byways only a local could know to reach her home, which like the day, the wedding reception and her aunt's home seethes with elan obliterating heat, with frustration, desperation, poverty and aspiration. The bride, grief stricken at her own wedding had begged Teresa, whom she hardly knows, not to think too badly of her for sinking to this marriage; the aunt holds Teresa's cousin Anne in vassalage so that she longs to escape into marriage – with anyone. The spring tides have washed their enchantment right up to Teresa's lawn; she must partake of what relief they can offer.

It is Sydney as it was up until the eighties and Depression Sydney in particular – determinedly Anglo-Celtic, desperately respectable and deeply sympathetic to good form yet prone to social defiance, threatened by nature and subject to magical transformations which threaten to envelop.

Teresa swims. Her splash can be heard all over the bay. Many are listening. She survives (sting) rays and Portuguese man-of-wars (a stinging jelly fish) and of course the basking shark which in any case could offer no threat because it is according to David G Stead harmless to all but 'small pelagic living things'.

What is this fantastic creature doing lazing about in Stead's vigorous sweep of fictionalised documentary narrative?

Stead's style exhausts her readers: it is relentlessly intense and particular. Seemingly raw in its reflection of 'reality', it insists upon her unsentimental clarity of vision.

For vision it is. This may or may not have actually happened to the young Stead like this but it is true in the literary sense: psychologically, socially, philosophically, historically, humanly, poetically. Stead's vision is faithful to a larger sphere than the autobiographical. Actual though they may have been, Stead's characters and their situations are a product of her mind, that mind which would not or could not seek comfort in the fantasised or ideal but which recorded for her readers a time, a place, characters and a situation – this is what it is, she says. What she gives us, her vision, is as unameliorated as it may be. Stead's insistence on the recording of character and situation can overwhelm her reader. Her unsentimentality and relentless particularising inspire awe but blear our attention. It is as if Stead had more pressing needs and higher goals than to inform and entertain us.

The Leftists of this period (and Stead was one) favoured 'realism' and this quality no doubt assisted Stead's publishing career, nevertheless the style is the woman. Her style is insistent in its determination to give more than a verisimilitude. Stead captures the surges, the backwashes, eddies, the tumults and flatnesses of situations and represents these phenomena in all their inevitable effect. Dialogue plays a big part in her efforts to represent her vision; it is sometimes laboured. While the thoughts, both spoken and unspoken, of her characters are registered in close texture, too often they partake of the dialectic so that Stead's dialogue lies heavily on the page and it is too often framed with verbs ('laughed the father') which are little more than devices of direct speech and adverbs such as 'disgustedly' (which adds very little to Lance's 'Hmff'). Stead's flow of detail is relatively unmediated in terms of narrative thrust (compare For Love Alone with Emma for example; her narrative drives neither towards reader-satisfying climax nor resolution) but it and her dialogue capture as no history ever has how it was to be these people and what that time did to them.

Of course Teresa's father would have disparaged the comeliness and therefore the marriageability of her sister Kitty because he was, in his straitened circumstances, desperate to get rid of her but also keen to keep her allure for himself. Similarly he disparages his son's masculinity by implying he might be homosexual, projecting that enticing possibility onto him. This is Sydney, the Depression, Australia, fatherhood and masculinity as it was then and perhaps universally is. It is also the theme of For Love Alone (wonderfully paradoxical title): marriage for women.

Teresa, exhausted and enchanted, manages to be aloof from this situation and to graciously humour her father as Stead herself must have done to the point of madness. Stead hated her father. Her rage against him drives her great novel The Man Who Loved Children. Perhaps drove her.

Why would Teresa's father warn her against a basking shark and why would Stead's authorial voice take up the nonsense of this threat and turn it into a rare moment in her prose – a recoiling from the unmitigated rendition of her characters' realities?

Watson's Bay (the first bay inside the great heads which protect the magnificent Sydney Harbour, the point of arrival and retreat from this edge of empire, redolent of marine adventure and disaster and in those days home to fisher people) is on this night enchanted with the great tide gently spilling across the shore and invading its sandstone littoral. So perhaps the great, colour changing and all but invisible shark is part of that enchantment. Though the spring tides do happen and this basking shark does not.

Is Stead visiting an obvious and foolish mistake upon the distinguished marine biologist her father (clearly the progenitor of her character, Teresa's father) in order to humiliate him? Is it a deliberate or an unconscious thrust into his reputation? Has Stead herself made a mistake, momentarily confusing a basking shark with the slow, also harmless (and very much smaller) carpet shark, species of which waggle their variegated ways across the bottom of the bays of Sydney Harbour? Or is the father character confident of his daughter's ignorance of sharks and in his ever sly, mocking and ambiguous manner nevertheless expressing a genuine concern for her safety? Though swimming where there is light is not going to save her (Teresa herself seems to believe a look-out might secure her) from attack by a (say, whaler) shark, a sting from a Portuguese man-of-war or from treading on a ray which might then also sting her dreadfully.

Is the point of this exchange that these men should have protected this woman or that these men are denying this woman a little refreshing adventure? Stead herself might have denied there was any general point implicit in this situation; she would have been annoyed by and vigorously resisted the idea that in this kind of way men oppress women. She was not in her fiction a propagandist and in her later life would brook no attacks on 'the patriarchy'. Yet we often do discern the universal or at least general in her vividly realised scenes and something else besides, something beyond the literal seems to be heightening their impact.

Is the basking shark an uncharacteristic moment in which Stead wishes to sensationalise her scene, maybe with her American readership in mind?

Stead knew her father's work very well. In 1906 David Stead had written of the basking shark 'The Basking Shark … attains huge dimensions and is one of the largest fishes existing, reaching a length of forty feet' and in 1963 somewhat unscientifically by today's standards, 'Apart from the verbal records given to me by seafaring men as to the occurrence of this shark in Australian waters, on three occasions ships' captains have reported to me that they have met with a "sleeper", or "sleeping", shark floating motionless at the surface of the ocean between Sydney and the New Zealand coast’. Other authorities are dubious about its existence in the South Pacific.

His daughter, the novelist is, with a high lack of the characteristic, fanciful on this subject. It seems likely then that the shark is not literal. It is a symbol swum from Christina's Stead's unconscious emerging as an absurdity which gives one pause.

The context is the necessity and the dreadfulness of marriage for women (the name of the bride is, terrifyingly enough, 'Malfi'). Teresa is being warned about something, to stay in the light, close to home. She needs a man to watch over her; neither father nor brother will do so and even if they did the light will do her little good for the shark is 'all but invisible'. Its camouflage is infinite, it can be anywhere and probably unnoticed. What can it be? It prowls or glides beneath in its wondrously changing colours. It is a shape, barely detectable. It seems to be a threat yet it is in a Bay called Parsley – one of the two herbs used regularly by Australian cooks of that time (the other being mint). 'Parsley' suggests the most ordinary of domestic settings. The historical Parsley Bay was more respectable than Watsons Bay. Is Stead's image of the basking shark in Parsley Bay one of the horror which glides beneath family homes, beneath the acceptable? The rest of her work and her life substantiate this interpretation. Is Teresa's father, dreadful in his domesticity, making this point in some unconscious symbolic way? Parsley, in the old wives tales of Sydney, was supposed to protect against pregnancy. Is the basking shark the very threat of a husband, of pregnancy? Maybe the most terrible thing about it is that it at any moment might, all forty feet of it, cease to bask.

Parsley Bay seems charming in its safeness yet that is where the basking shark was seen – or where Teresa's father claims to have seen it (one need not necessarily believe him, prone to teasing his children as he is).

Or does the warning come from the author herself? For it is she who has offered a comment on the shark's nature. Why would she need to mention this creature's near invisibility? It devours. It is huge. It is infinitely various. To risk a cliché of post modern commentary, is Stead imaging her own gift? Is the basking shark in Parsley Bay a trope for her art, an astonishment in this confined circumstance, ever changing with its absorption of context? It is submerged, in touch with the depths, glimpsed only as a shape and very frightening in its unknowableness.

The basking shark might then be the shape of the devouring tendency of Stead's art. We can only glimpse its defining and 'all but invisible' form which alerts us to its context by its responsiveness to that context. Think of the inexorable flight of the anecdote which has taken us from the almost unbearable heat of the wedding reception in Neutral Bay with its 'concupiscent fever' to the stifling home Aunt Bea shares with her daughter Anne in Rose Bay (it is a rented room) to Watson's Bay transfigured by a spring tide where a father is reluctantly preparing for the possibility of one of his daughter's marriage.

Are its devouring and transforming qualities alone those which make it dangerous?

The basking shark, we might also consider, is pale, as was the knight in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'. Chapter 24 of For Love Alone is titled "So Haggard and So Woebegone". Stead's mind was formed by English Literature in a way that few under sixty are now able to recognise. A young man who loves Teresa cries out to her in this chapter, "Yes, what do you care? … You're so pale and beautifully distracted, you're like a woman out of Shakespeare". Teresa only smiles at him. She is la belle dame and the knight 'palely loitering'. She must escape Australia. And thereby find a way past marriage.

Stead devoured her material - her life and that of others - in order to give it shape. Her memories were her imagination. Her detail is blindingly bright (she was very interested in the work of Virginia Woolf, she who wished to be free of the need for plot), she presses her readers to see and feel beyond the delight and horror of anecdote, to immerse themselves in the circumstances and interior life of her characters, to observe their actions and reactions thus (Stead's anecdote proliferates) unfolding. For all her insistence on the particular, her propensity for ramification – in the end because of this - Stead is able to give a sense of scale, of a – let us say tragic - force operating in the world which thwarts and frustrates and destroys people struggling for fulfilment. This prosaic tragic force is made up in no small part of the social conventions and institutions which other novelists endorse even while revealing their destructive power (think of marriage and Anna Karenina). As for the rest – we are the agents of our own undoing. Christina Stead's unflinching gaze at that process makes us squirm and start. 'Basking' in Parsley Bay may suggest complacency; Christina Stead hardly needed warning against that. But most of all, amongst the obsessive flow of her realities, the basking shark is a poetic presence, a transfiguring syncretic. Stead thus offers a sense of a higher vision than that of the mundane, the sordid - one which embraces it and makes it poignant, fabulous.

Christina Stead attracted a wide international readership who venerated her achievement. No writer was truer to her vision and she had the gift to astonish.

The Woman on the Beach: Thea Astley

It was typical of Thea Astley that she wrote about our nearest neighbours whom we consider of no significance and did our best to ignore. In Beachmasters she gives us a rebellion against a French/British ‘condominium’ administration on an island called ‘Kristi’. The name is vaguely associative of Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu; the French/English association strengthens this association though the independence struggle also alludes to that other very close neighbour New Caledonia, a French ‘possession’. France and Britain allowed the New Hebrides to become the independent nation of Vanuatu in 1980. Beachmasters was published in 1985.

Let us move to Serua Point on Kristi where people have fled from the not very great terrors of a local resistance event.

Cordingley could only goggle at his wife with a marvelling disgust.

They were not the first on the beach at Serua Point. A score of islanders were squatting fatalistically on the sand, simply gaping into a seascape that held less threat than the land at their backs.

Cordingley is the British Resident Agent and his wife is Belle and she is worth marvelling at (‘disgust’ is his limitation). In the following ten small pages Astley captures this colonial world, the immediate situation, them, other Europeans, Chinese traders and the Islanders whose fatalism guarantees the subsiding of the rebellion. Those ten pages are exciting, hilarious, satiric, poignant and true, for Astley’s focus is constantly shifting, wide and deep. There are few ten small pages in English literature which give us so much.

Thea Astley won the Miles Franklin more often than anyone else but some people suggested Angus and Robertson’s Editor Beatrice Davis should step down from the Miles Franklin selection committee because it didn’t look good when Astley, whom they published, won it so often (four times over nearly forty years). Davis dismissed this notion: she was above such considerations. Anyway, Astley’s Drylands won the Miles Franklin (in 2000 with Kim Scott’s Benang) long after Angus and Robertson’s and Beatrice Davis had ceased to be players. She was not entirely a comfortable favourite, Thea Astley, she made people slightly uneasy, even though she was so funny. They complained, But why must she write like that? And there was that mordant glance.

Like Beatrice Davis, Astley belonged to that preceding era when self-assurance was admired (it easily became arrogance), when a writer could confidently invoke a culture, a range of referents and not feel s/he was threatening, puzzling or god forbid turning off her readers. Astley could quote from the Schubert lieder in German, or Rilke or give us a French phrase or sentence or two (as could Helen Garner of the following generation) in the expectation that we would read on in our ignorance, look it up or ask someone to explain it. Astley went further, she freely invoked a world of sophisticated experience, knowledge, wisdom. And it often came from overseas. She was confidently and inevitably, given Australia, defiantly worldly. Yet she never fled these shores in search of what they could not provide – the higher culture, greater refinement, a trust in the imaginative, a wonder at the original. The last most of all. Astley made all of that her own through literature -

Belle and her damn bomb-shells. There’d been the time … he lolled heavily under the fringe of the burao trees and dragged his handkerchief over his blazing face … that time she’d quoted that bit of Samuel Johnson (Christ! None of them had even heard of Samuel Johnson, probably thought she was having a crack at Lyndon B.!) … something about dogs in their doggy world … and the Resident Commissioner droll behind rimless glasses because he was a bit of a books man too, hanging on her words, waiting for it, and she’d gone on about a pair of copulating terriers at a Washington garden party, imagine my dears, dogs in their doggy world at a Nuremberg rally might have changed the course of history …

and insight. She saw and induced. This was why she made people uneasy. How could she know that? they worried, knowing she knew.

Astley was a teacher, high school and university. She taught and she wrote until she retired then she wrote and talked very successfully. Always make them laugh was one of her public presentation principles. She was not afraid to talk on a boat sloughing through the algae and mangrove mud weighted waters of the Brisbane River or at rail stops along an improbable Queensland narrow-gauge railway line. She told them how they were wrecking the land. And they were developers and Queensland farmers. And she made them laugh. She made them laugh at Byron Bay a couple of weeks before she died. It was a wonderful story garnered from a ‘cattle class’ coach trip to see something of America. The story embraced poor black people and not having husbands and how the driver should get the black woman without a seat a husband and some old white woman offering hers. It was about democracy and solidarity and generosity and humour of course. Astley did the voices. Her own was post war, educated Queensland, deliberately uncultured, deliberate. She moved to Byron Bay to be near her son after her husband died. How are you finding it? she was asked. Now this question was put to the supposedly caustic Astley about the pseudo hippy, eighties rich, post glam, nouveau boho, smart backpackerier, Bali-sophisticated Byron Bay, ‘Oh it’s like Gladesville or something,’ she replied deliberately.

Astley could see where people lived in their spirits. Her prose was inflected with the figurative, the language of the unconscious, of myths and dreams. There was always a poet pressing this woman determined on the prosaic. She was accused of stretching credulity with scenes such as the fight to death by men with horns strapped on their heads. Perhaps it was more than that she knew North Queensland better than her critics; perhaps it was also a trope. She was not so much attracted to the bizarre as unafraid of what it said. Her style was not only complex in its reaching out to ensnare complex reality in few words (she is the antithesis of a prolix writer) but it was also vivid for she saw vividly.

His dream took him back to that embassy party and the dramatics of his wife, younger, prettier, her hair swinging in the blunt bob that was too schoolgirlish, her round face with its innocent high colour totally giving the lie to the outrageousness of her utterances. Only this time, the dream women were crowding her begging for more, their faces drawn into long bird-like looks of greed as Belle fluttered among them dashing obscenities with the guilelessness of her face unmarked by the prurience of her stories …

Astley not only gives us Belle’s winning shtick but what makes it winning – the needs of others – in this case female repression. If Astley was a feminist, she did not spare women by denying them their fallible humanity. But what makes her not caustic is her warmth, her unsentimental compassion. She turned her empathy to the despair of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders with what might have been considered an almost obsessive concern if it had not proved so just. She gave us Palm Island before it gave us itself. Her sceptical gaze embraces the unhappiness of those living in disaffection because the mores of their time and place offend their senses of decency and justice a she herself was so offended. Her sympathies were all for the underdog. Her locale is Australian (represented on this beach by ‘the Bipis’, Mr and ‘Misis’ B P, that company’s reps on Kristi, loathed by the diplomatic corps because they are so at home in this rough world where exploitation is the key signature). Astley was drawn to the tropics where the greeds are forced into indolent expressions and roughly cast in crude hues, where striving goodness cannot be starched and savagery so often prevails in the knowledge that civilisation and its rules are far away – well, in Brisbane in any case. Her readers often did not want to believe this was their country or people could behave like that but.

She gives us the innerscapes with wonderful economy and she revels in action; her novels are filled with drama and excitement: fights and hysteria, burnings and explosions.

Cordingley, using Belle’s arm as a kind of tiller, began pushing her with the other European refugees through the ranks of black flesh towards the top of the ramp. Flesh parted for the gavman man. Then there was a massive grinding and scraping as the Eudora shoved its ramp up the beach. The world was chocolate and white. Missionary Lampton from Thresher Bay became unhinged. ‘Back!’ he screamed, his hands in a triangle of prayer. ‘Back! Let the women through first!’ His voice was a thin high-pitched stream of word wings as his lean fanatic body went under the waves off his flock. ‘Pipol Trinitas! Pipol Malua!’ The feathers were plucked from the syllables in a frenzied rush of money-bag rattling Asiatic merchants, who, swinging satchels vigorously like clubs, cut a clear-way for themselves straight through and on to the landing barge.

Belle laughed at the outrageousness of it.

Astley loved place, understood how people might belong to the land rather than own it (‘like Gladesville or something’). Away from the beach at Serua Point the novel’s principal character, Gavi, is coming to terms with how

It’s right we go,’ the boy said without preamble. ‘I’ve been thinking about it. It’s right. I’m sorry about you and maman, but it is right. It is time. Maybe when I’m older I can come back. If the island will have me. When I’ve learned to – well – have myself.’

The French are deporting him, a thirteen year old, for his miserable, hapless part in the rebellion.

Cordingley escapes from the beach, emerging from his panic stricken flight and clownish behaviour with the appearance of more than dignity -

Cordingley sat very straight near the stern, his blood-streaked face turned into the sun.

…

‘Turned nasty did it?’ the First Secretary asked, looking admiringly at the cut across Cordingley’s forehead.

Cordingley floated a wisp of a smile.

‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t handle.’

Belle is still on the beach.

As the Eurydice headed west down the Channel, out to the heavy waters between Kristi and Trinitas, those who were near the rails began a relieved waving to the crowd still on the beach. Cordingley could see Belle remove her neck-scarf and trail it in the wind. It was baited with a kind of regretful memory. To his vast surprise he found himself waving, too, his arm lifting involuntarily, and to his further amazement, the people left on shore, mainly black now, were waving their despised hands in reply.

Despite all those Miles Franklins we have not yet been able to do Thea Astley justice.

Un Embarras de Richesse: Patrick White

The first, and perhaps the least confident of the three, had chosen an enormous satin bon-bon, of screeching pink, swathed so excessively on one side that the head conveyed an impression of disproportion, of deformity, of bulbous growth. But the uncertain lady was palpitating with her own daring, and glanced at the closer of her two companions, fishing for a scrap of praise. Her friend would not concede it, however. For the second lady was secure in her own seasoned carapace, and would not have recognized her acquaintance except by compulsion. The second lady was wearing on her head a lacquered crab-shell. She was quite oblivious of it, of course. But there it sat, one real claw offering a diamond starfish, the other dangling a miniature conch in polished crystal. The unconscious wearer had divested herself conventionally of her gloves and was restoring suppleness to her hands. As she tried her nails on the air, it was seen that those, by some chance, were exactly the same shade as the audacious crab.

How the waiters adored the three insolent ladies, but it was at the third and obviously eldest that their most Italianate smiles were directed.

The third, or by now, the first lady, affected the most amusing hat of all. On her blue curls she had perched an innocent little conical felt, of a drab, an earth colour, so simple and unassuming that the owner might have been mistaken for some old, displaced clown, until it was noticed that fashion had tweaked the felt almost imperceptibly, and that smoke – yes, actual smoke – was issuing out of the ingenious cone.

Patrick White was Australian Literature for some twenty-five years. No other writer approached his reputation and esteem which reached its apogee with the Nobel Prize in 1973. Some conservatives affected to ‘prefer’ the Martin Boyd of Lucinda Brayford, a superbly written soap opera devoted to snobbery. They need not have been so bothered by White, he was essentially a reactionary himself. He dished it out to all manners and classes of our classless society but there is a tacit presence, a matter more of reflex than statement in his work, suggesting a refined sensibility and spirituality which lies somewhere amongst an Establishment or amongst Europeans like Voss. The volcano lady of the above passage is a representative of this shadowy aristocracy. Really, White despaired of Australians and sought solace amongst the rejects upon whom he placed the burden of sainthood, of spiritual perception.

Though he was a man of the expressionist theatre, White loved the idea of the saintly, the humble, the self-effacing. This is not so extraordinary: the most egocentric theatricals employ mantra moments and some play casts initiate performances with a little meditative huddle, like net and footballers laying hands upon each other before flinging them into the air and charging out to trample their opponents or audiences. The theatricals believe their frisson of innerness lends inspiration, makes them deep, or even that it lays an ensemble spirit over their egos rampant. And so it might for the unconscious is an irresistible force.

White romped around in the psyche, bringing it to light like no other writer; he was at home there as he never was in the world. White snatched glimpses of the world and parlayed these etchings into fiction and plays. The latter have always proved the less satisfactory: while they are vivid and funny, they lack drive, they do not ‘journey’, which is odd, for the plot trajectory of White’s novels is irresistible in its sweep through many excursions and the dialogue in his novels is incomparable. White caught Australian English at its Anglo-Celtic height, before immigration from elsewhere and a diminution in the influence of the written sent it on simpler, more direct, rougher, less literate ways.

We fell about laughing at his rendition of us – ‘yairs’ we tried not to say and shrieked at ‘Kevon’. There we – well, they – were: the pretentious, the uneducated, the unsophisticated, the coarse and vulgar. We readers of Patrick White loved being lacerated by the mirror and tape-recorder he held up to the not-us. Barry Humphries was doing something of the same kind at the same time but in that case it was unmitigated by the human.

White also had trouble with the human; his characters, detailed though they are, are sometimes not fleshed out. We are asked to believe of Sister de Santis in The Eye of the Storm (surely the great White novel?) that when not attending on Elizabeth Hunter and drinking gin and wine with Sir Basil at Doyle’s fish restaurant she subsists on a diet of tea and bread with National Geographics for company. Still, White was after other dimensions than the mundane and he was able to parade before us an endless array of characters whom we recognised in print for the first time as those who surrounded us. They babble in tongues which make other writers’ attempts at Australian English seem factitious, or utter vatic, paradoxical statements. Besides saying ‘yairs’, they suck viciously at their dentures and/or their gums (the oral is a very strong presence), are yellowish with brown patches or liver spots, scarlet splattered and blue veined, their hair, where they have it, is a writhing uncontrollable force and their faces collapse or become rictus with terror or rage in various convincing ways (White knew Francis Bacon). White’s characters are often costumed in expressionistic flesh, which was a wonderful relief in those days of ‘dun coloured realism’ (his words) and often hilarious because deadly accurate and revelatory of the reality which surrounded us but which we ourselves could not bring to consciousness and so name. However there is the unfortunate danger of these characters becoming jangled literary puppets. When the ordinary are not vicious in their banality, they are saints and sometimes martyrs. The ordinary tend to belong to the lower orders. The saints apotheosise in wondrous illumination. Whilst experiencing hers, Sister de Santis is surrounded by beating wings (they belong to birds, a pigeon in particular, but we are meant to take them for angels). In rendering such moments of divine possession White took breathtaking risks with bathos and sentimentality but his readers do not realise this for they are swept along by his sincerity. His tonal range – from slapstick through satire to metaphysical exaltation – is as wide as it could be and utterly assured. His sincerity saves him from a sadistic laying about him at the vanities and defences of fallible humanity. Sincerity is a catalyst for melodrama; White also escaped this falseness, just. Perhaps it is his brilliantly rendered acerbity which protected him. There is another shadowy presence in his writing besides an implied aristocracy - compassion, a recognised common humanity. It is constantly at risk from his rage but survives everywhere in his work as a recognition of human decency.

The Nobel Prize honoured him as a writer who had ‘introduced a new continent to literature’. No doubt it gave some Europeans comfort that we were laughable in the ways they expected and thrilled others with exotic possibilities, not least of a religious nature (it was a neo religious era: people tried to read Hesse for example, or under the influence of the Beatles practised transcendental meditation or dressed only in orangey shades of what was supposed to be saffron in the service of their cult which instantly evaporated at the whiff of scandal). However much Australia was White’s world, his writing was universal in its appeal. He was translated and admired very widely. Overseas readers could consider the Other which was us and discover themselves.

The power of art is celebrated in his fiction, especially painting. Music is also a strong presence and theatricals blunder their ways across his pages. Painting and music speak for the spirit; the theatre is more a necessary witness to the anarchic in life. While poetry is everywhere it is little mentioned.

White was drawn to Jewishness. The lady in the screeching pink bon-bon above is fleeing her Jewishness. She has embraced a second husband and the Church of England in the shape of ‘St Marks’ (doubtless of Darling Point in Sydney, in those days a site of social aspirations). White is ambivalent; his attitude partakes of his time – Anglo-Celtic Australians tended to sneer at the social aspirations of Jews as they clambered out of the ghettos and concentration camps and into the social elite but he also had a deep respect for the adherents of the religion and an interest in their plight. Jews are parvenus and the Scapegoat. The saturnine Mrs Lippmann of The Eye of the Storm is a tragic figure, unable even in the antipodes to escape her fate – at which one must balk. Jews, for White (as they are in the present era for Christos Tsiolkas) are the dark side of Europe, a powerful, subterfuginous force. White, born to the Establishment himself, resented all kinds of parvenus and had little care for social injustice at any systemic level though he of course liked to ladle out charity (this is characteristic of the type). The Jews were fascinating in their place. The trouble was, their place was untenable. It satisfied White to abandon them to the tragedy he had allotted them. He was in his fanciful complacency both ridiculous and disgusting but let us not forget he needed his puppets and his clowns for his great art; Jews were part of his collection of stock characters.

White wrestled more with the plight of Aborigines. His Alf Dubbo (of Riders in the Chariot), Aboriginal painter, is a valiant effort but like Sister de Santis is not so much a character as a spirit presence, something White seems sadly aware of in his efforts to bring the Aboriginal to life.

God was White’s subject; he pursues it relentlessly, discovering it all over and under the place. Improbable though it might seem, the possibility of apotheosis, of sainthood, of goodness even enters the restaurant in which the Bon-bon, the Crab-shell and the Volcano sprawl, exhausted by their effort at seeming. The Volcano remembers a maid who was ‘a kind of saint’. She ‘cranes in the hopes that saving grace might just become visible in the depths of the purgatory in which they sat’ (the Italian waiters have turned the lights out on them). Her ‘crater was now extinct’.

Who else but Patrick White could give the hilarious such a plangent undertone?

White had a fecundity of invention, an imaginative power far beyond that of any other Australian writer. The Nobel publicists were not wrong, White told Australians of themselves as no other writer and revealed an emerging spiritscape to which Europeans had so far been oblivious.

SOURCES

Stead Christina 1983 For Love Alone Angus and Robertson Australia (according to this edition 'First published by Peter Davies in 1945' but Chris Williams in her biography Christina Stead A Life of Letters gives the details 'Harcourt Brace New York 1944) see p 35, p 67 & p 284

Stead David G 1906 Fishes of Australia A Popular Study and Systematic Guide to the Study of the Wealth within our Waters William Brooks and Co Sydney see p 235

Stead David G 1963 Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas Angus and Robertson Sydney see p 48 & p 50

Astley Thea Beachmasters Penguin Books Australian 1985 pp 118 – 128, p 182 & p 184

White Patrick 1976 (first published 1961) Riders in the Chariot Jonathan Cape London see pp 537 – 545

The quote about the Nobel Prize commendation comes from Marr David 1991 Patrick White A Life Random House Australia p 541

The Evanescent, Elusive, Desired Eternal

Helen Garner: Carlton, Victoria 1968 – Now

… Is it spring? Could it possibly be spring? This morning I sidled over the low stone fence and looked for the blossoming tree. And there it was, a pittosporum. Tears rushed into my eyes. My sister teases me for loving this tree. She finds it gloomy, even ugly. But it’s so mysterious, so withholding. If you approach it directly, head on, even push your face into its foliage, it will not give its scent. It prefers to take you unawares, to exude an aura into which you step on your way past, hurrying, your mind on something else. Nor can you pick the blossoms and take them home. The sap is sticky, the twigs tough. The perfume (electric, lemony, head-clearingly sweet) doesn’t survive the plucking. The tree exists. Its blossoming is brief. You have to be ready for the moment and accept it as it’s given. (‘Tower Diary’ the feel of steel pp 57 – 8).

Helen Garner has been with us forever, through doomed love in communal houses, sibling rivalry, aging and dying parents, children, divorce(s), struggles to be authentic, to be healthy, to be decent, to understand, to judge.

With Frank Moorhouse, she is the voice of the War/Baby Boomers. She has made her predicaments, conflicts, griefs, resolutions theirs and the world’s. It is through them that she speaks to la condition humaine.

In prose which is her: restrained by reflection, elegant, musical, juste. She is a remarkable stylist; the voice is idiosyncratic, carefully uningratiating yet charming in its considered clarity. She is also a poet manqué.

Along with her great achievement and to some degree inseparable from it, are her promotional activities; she is the publishing dream. She has appeared everywhere, she has been consistently in the news for forty years; she is not too good - she’s had her problems and there have been the odd controversy - but there’s been no major public-repulsing scandal. She’s been good mannered and sinned against far more than sinning (she’s partial to sinners).

She could be us if only we were better than we were, especially if we had insight into our hypocrisies and other failures, could express our inconsistencies, anxieties and come to grips with our angst with the eloquence and grace she does. But let’s face it, we just don’t have her powers of perception or the command of a medium to express them.

There is a sense of comedy implicit in her vision but for the most part it is pretty grim.

‘And,’ said Maxine … ‘have you ever seen an angel?’

…

‘I’ve seen the devil,’ said Janet casually.

… ‘Where,’ said Ray.

‘In Brunswick,’ said Janet. ‘He ran out of a shop as I was walking up Sydney Road. He looked straight at me.’

‘How did you know it was the devil?’ murmured Maxine …

‘By his face. It was tight and smooth, and he had a kind of brutal expression. Brutal and vain.’

‘I can’t stand vain men,’ said Maxine …

‘When I say “the devil”,’ said Janet, ‘of course I don’t mean “The Devil” … He was probably some sort of crim. Full of bad vibes.’

‘Do you want to know, by the way, Janet,’ said Maxine, ‘what I see in your aura?’ She carved on with slow diligence. ‘I see that in a previous life you were tortured. If you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘Tortured?’

‘Yes. For your religious beliefs.’ (‘Cosmo Cosmolino’ pp 97 – 8 Cosmo Cosmolino).

Garner’s work inclines to satire; she defends us (and herself?) from the brutal honesty of her observations, from the almost relentless scepticism of her gaze, with a careful irony. She not only records, as faithfully as she may, our customs and mores, our actions and manners, she assesses them finely and continuously. This mediation between the observed and recorded, whether its genre declares it reportage or imaginative, places Garner at a remove from Christina Stead in whose line she stands.

She does not surrender to fear. It is as if she actively seeks out the absurdities, the cruelties and worse (she won a Walkley Award in 1993 - Best Feature Article ‘Did Daniel Have to Die?’ for her investigation of the death of an abused child whose plight was neglected by the authorities).

… the day of the World Economic Forum. I hear hoarse shouting from inside my suburban railway station … Three young blokes come brawling backwards off the platform and crash, yelling and cursing, into the wall of the boarded-up ticket office.

…

They’re young, barely fifteen, ethnically various –

…

They are very drunk.

…

‘Let’s go poofter-bashing, hey? Poofter-bashing?’ The other boys, stumbling and grinning, ignore him. He shouts louder, ‘First junkie I see today I’m gunna bash roight?’

…

… ’Hey Meess! Meess!?’

No-one has called me Miss since 1972 at Fitzroy High …

‘’Scuse me Meess, I can control my drunkenness. But if you don’t like it I’ll shut them up. Those kids’ve drunk three bottles of Jim Beam.’

…

‘How come you’re all drunk at this early hour?’ I ask primly.

…

… ‘We’re goeen’ to the, uhm, protest, you know? Down at the casino?’

…

The brawling breaks out again. Foul words fly. ‘Have respect!’ he shouts over his shoulder. ‘We won’t get violent,’ he says to me, one hand out in a soothing gesture.

‘I’m not scared of you,’ I say. (‘Have Respect’ pp 168 – 171 the feel of steel).

She was perhaps in no great danger in this case though others might have been. The boys’ instincts were sure: Garner is rather school ma’amish. She was sacked by the Victorian Department of Education for, she says, ‘bad language’ and a sex lesson. This was in the days of the notoriously conservative (and worse) Bolte Government when class sizes were always well over thirty and there was no provision for English as a Second Language teaching in state high schools despite the fact they were accepting large numbers of recently arrived immigrant children. Garner taught at Fitzroy High School. It can’t have been easy. The papers reported the case, probably Garner’s first brush with publicity.

She was thus freed to pursue other interests. She was a denizen of La Mama Theatre in its headiest days when it was re-establishing Australian drama, she acted in the film Pure Shit (1975 – Garner was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress award) and wrote. Her first book Monkey Grip (1977) was also an outcome.

Monkey Grip was very successful and despite its limitations (relentless anecdotes, flatness of dialogue), has become a landmark in Australian literature – not only because it launched Garner as a writer. Monkey Grip was electrifying because Nora, (surely named with Nora of A Doll House in mind? also a pun on gnaw?) its voice, was in rebellion against the stultifying, the annihilating, the unjust culture of the times, perhaps best exemplified by the conservative Liberal/Country Party (now National Party) governments which had had, at state and federal levels, Australia in their seemingly unending grip until 1972 when Labor under Gough Whitlam at last came to power bringing with it a whole new way of life. The Seventies had arrived. We War Baby/Boomers carried our parents, traumatised (is it too strong a word?) by the effects of two world wars and the Great Depression, within us. They froze us. Monkey Grip details the struggles of a young (not so young actually, at one stage Nora announces she is thirty-three) woman to live in this new world that had at last arrived. Nora struggles to be, to love in ways feminism was suggesting were better – essential really, if you were ever to be authentic.

‘Don’t worry!’ she said, starting to grin. ‘You’re not the only one. The other night I went out with this guy – we were in my car, and he actually go me to let him drive.’

You’re kidding.’

‘No! He just didn’t like to be in a situation where I was in control.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Well, I let him. I sort of wanted to see how far he would go. He started by making some casual remarks about Volkswagens, how he always forgot to put them into top gear, and then he drove off round the Boulevard, to show what a great driver he was.’ Paddy raised her disdainful eyebrows, still half-smiling. ‘He was driving at an immense speed in third gear, and I pointed out, quite politely really, that it might be a good idea to change into top. ‘Oh!’ he said, ‘fourth in a VW is really an overdrive.’ Well, he could be right, I suppose, but … he wanted to drive handsomely – you know – scarf flying. Even me buying the ice-creams later was not quite right. And yet the thing was – he was putting himself across as one of us – into politics, teaching at Preston and being radical about that, living in Fitzroy’ - she made an ironic grimace.

‘None of that means anything.’ I said gloomily.

‘Y-e-es … well … one wonders sometimes, doesn’t one …’

‘I wonder sometimes if we ought to be giving men a miss.’ She laughed, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘But to be perfectly honest, I’ve got no plans to do that.’

‘Neither have I.’

On the contrary, two mornings later I was crawling round Gerald’s ankles outside the kitchen door, letting down his jeans.

‘If anyone from the women’s centre saw me doing this,’ I said, ‘my reputation would be shot to pieces.’

He clicked his tongue in pleased exasperation, ‘I don’t even think it’s necessary. They were all right before.’

‘They weren’t. You look a dag with your pants flapping round your calves. Don’t you want to be cool?’

‘What does it matter?’

‘Well,’ I mumbled out of the corner of my mouth past the row of pins, ‘ultimately, of course, it doesn’t, but the world being as it is, one may as well strive for a little elegance of line, don’t you think?’ (‘Too Ripped’ pp 153 – 4).

This is probably Garner’s most facile moment.

Overt feminism is to reappear only very occasionally in her future work. It always inclines to melodramatic vicitimhood.

Should I say ‘But violation is our destiny’? Or should I say ‘Nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent’? But before I can open my mouth, a worst moment came to me: the letter arrives from my best friend on the road in another country: ‘He was wearing mirror sunglasses which he did not take off, I tried to plead but I could not speak the language, he tore out handfuls of my hair, he kicked me and pushed me out of the car, I crawled to the river, I could smell the water, it was dirty but I washed myself, a farm girl found me, her family is looking after me, I think I will be all right, please answer, above all, don’t tell my father …

…

‘Violation,’ said Natalie, as if to gain time.

‘It would be necessary,’ I said, ‘to examine all of women’s writing, to see if the fear of violation is the major theme in it.’

‘Some feminist theoretician somewhere has probably already done it,’ said the stranger who had been surprised that Rigoletto could draw tears.

…

‘We don’ t have a tradition in the way you blokes do,’ I said.

…

‘It’s a shadow tradition,’ I said. ‘It’s there, but nobody knows what it is.’

‘We’ve been trained in your tradition,’ said Natalie. ‘We’re honourary men.’ (‘What we say’ in My hard heart Selected Fiction pp 19 – 20).

The nanna gets the vodka out of the freezer … well, what are they drinking to tonight, these two women from opposite sides of the baby’s family? Each other’s health, of course – but also to something else they have in common: problems with men …

To the nanna, recently divorced for the third time, the story unrolls against a complex backdrop of memories. In its difficult events the nanna recognises the pattern of each of her marriages. In the actions, non-actions of the man, she sees all the men she has ever loved. In the desperate self-abnegations of the woman, she hears her own history and that of virtually every woman she has ever known. There is nothing new here. It’s the story of men and women down the ages. And yet the auntie in her turn must live it out, suffer it as if it were freshly minted in the workshop of the gods. (‘Auntie’s Clean Bed’ in the feel of steel pp 164 -5).

Such moments jump out at us. In general ideology drifts into an informing background scree. This is a sensible move for a literary writer, (but not for a woman?).

Nora’s struggles are extreme: she has chosen (or has been chosen by?) ‘the life of art’ and is in love with a drug addict, also she is stupefyingly reflective and self-questioning. Nora embraces the possibilities of a whole new way of living with as much integrity as she can muster. Garner details her struggle almost unbearably but, and it is probably what marks her as a Real Writer, at just the moment when the reader feels they cannot endure another word of this ratiocination, can no longer remain immersed in this increasingly pointless squalor …

‘What have you been doing since I last saw you?’ she asked.

‘Oh – starving myself, and getting stoned, and fucking, and slugging it out with Javo – I’m exhausted, trying to work out how it all got blown.’ (‘Teach Me How to Feel Again’ p 127)

Garner opens the novel to a stream of vitality that refreshes her reader.

The novel was widely thought to be almost autobiographical; one could infer that it is based (too closely) on journal entries (Garner’s notebooking was notorious, much later she was to say it was a useless pursuit, she never used them).

I used to keep a diary. I still don’t go anywhere without my so-called writer’s notebook. I jot things down in it. I ‘save’ them from whatever their fate would be if I didn’t jot them down. (‘Woman in a Green Mantle’ the feel of steel pp 37 –8).

Despite its large success in critical and commercial terms in Australia (it won the Australian Book Council Award 1978), readers were not sure that Garner was a ‘real writer’ as we then understood them (Patrick White’s latest was widely and eagerly anticipated; Monkey Grip was published between The Eye of the Storm and The Twyborn Affair).

Honour & Other People’s Children (1980) put paid to those doubts. Garner had been wise not to rush into literary print again. Her second book was more accomplished than her first. The critic Don Anderson notably proclaimed the advance in her art. The two novellas that make up Honour & Other People‘s Children revealed something of her development as a writer. There was a remarkable advance in dialogue (now one of Garner’s strengths). She gives lives to the rough, vigorous, witty, figurative style supposed to be characteristic of Australian diction (far more likely to be encountered on the page than in the street). The book’s form suggested that she understood her limitations well; the novel as it was conventionally understood (three hundred or so pages) was not for her. Australian literary culture did not condemn her for this. In this period (the seventies through to the nineties) the short story flourished in Australian as nowhere else in the English-speaking world; the beneficiaries of Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton appreciated the shorter forms of fiction. Don Anderson would not have been discomforted by Garner’s structures and styles nor with the ethos that she pictured; he was a friend and champion of Frank Moorhouse who had been depicting a comparable milieu in Sydney (‘Balmain’ as against Garner’s ‘Carlton’). Moorhouse was developing a structure based on ‘discontinuous narratives’ which, between their covers, looked somewhat like a ‘novel’ (or was the term a rationalisation for not writing a novel with flowing chapters?). These discontinuous narratives were not whole in the way the novel was at least purported to be but they did approach and/or deviate from the traditional form in exciting and satisfying ways (decades later Moorhouse was to write a big novel and its sequel; a third is promised to complete as it were a traditional trilogy). ‘Honour’ and ‘Other People’s Children’ resonate with one another through the similarity of their milieu and in the common theme of two women attempting to come to terms with one another. Children are vibrant and complicating factors in both novellas, men are more or less hapless. Garner’s male characters are not as distinct as her female, they tend to need strong women and are often enough repulsive in their manners and mode of address (though none is as unsympathetic as Ruth of ‘Other People’s Children’). The apogee of male haplessness is Joe Cinque. In 2004 Garner reported on his being killed by an overbearing and unstable girlfriend in Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law. After Monkey Grip her prose style became pared and wonderfully reflective. It presses towards the figurative and while she eschews the more obvious literary tropes, the symbolic lingers as a possibility around her descriptions of place. On the rare occasions when she uses symbolism, the reader regrets her lapse into the obvious device –

… The saw her leap up and grab the high end of the see-saw.

…

They got up and picked their way barefoot off the grass and the lumpy gravel.

… They separated and walked away from each other, one to each end. They swung their legs over and placed themselves gingerly, easing their weight this way and that on the meandering board.

‘Let go, Floss.’

The child stepped back. Jenny, who was nearer the ground, gave a firm shove with one foot to send the plank into motion. It responded. It rose without haste, sweetly, to the level, steadied, and stopped.

They hung in the dark, airily balancing, motionless. (the conclusion of ‘Honour’ p 56).

It might also be noted of Don Anderson’s early, strong support of Garner that he was appreciative of Raymond Carver, an American ‘minimalist’ whose style influenced hers and whose success she felt validated her own development. Perhaps it was in insecure support of this validation that Garner thus attacked the much more freighted and layered style of Thea Astley

Stylistically, however, the book is like a very handsome, strong and fit woman with too much make-up on … This kind of writing drives me berserk. (Garner on Astley’s An Item from the Late News).

The crudity is notable. Garner need not have had any doubt: style was not to be her problem (she does abuse italics, possibly out of a lack of confidence in her readers’ ability to read for tone or in a desperate reaching for intensity).

Anderson again heralded her achievement with the (again well-timed) publication of The Children’s Bach in 1984 –

There are four perfect short novels in the English language. They are, in chronological order, Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Helen Garner's The Children's Bach.

The Children’s Bach was another considerable success, winning the South Australian Premier’s Festival Award.

Postcards from Surfers was published the next year. It won the NSW Premier’s Award. It is a remarkably various and original collection of ‘stories’. ‘All Those Bloody Young Catholics’, a monologue by a working class drunk who has been caught up amongst student types (as they moved into Carlton?) is the furthest reach of Garner’s empathic engagement and wonderfully dense writing. Her transposition into the mind and experiences of an Australian now-gay man living in Paris ‘La Chance Existe’ is more direct (closer to reportage) and therefore less intense and complex. There is insight into both characters who are the subject of this story but the now-gay man persona is too much a dummy voice, his commentary is too much the author’s (we note the characteristic homophobic anxiety about anal intercourse finding expression in the dwelling on shit, for example). Garner perhaps does not find the splitting off of personality into distinct personae so that they become Characters (the terrible gift of the true dramatist) comes easily to her. Perhaps also her keen ear for dialogue is not in synch with her lesser powers of characterisation. She does not have sufficient abandonment of self for that. ‘The Life of Art’ is a toccata and fugue revealing her wonderful control of prose rhythms. Garner is almost always a lyrical writer. Her severity affords her poignancy. Several stories in Postcards from Surfers do not seem to be fictions.

The dilemma Garner’s work and its reception posed was – is it fiction or ‘real’?

In the early stage of her career Garner seems to have wanted very much to investigate and to a lesser extent celebrate the life she chose and immersed herself in – the Carlton milieu of communal housing. Her imagination was much exercised also by extricating herself from it – the break-up of communal households is a theme she returned to. She also wanted to explore/explain women’s relationships with women – relationships in which the male characters seemed most important as catalysts for the emotional intimacies of women. Lesbians are nowhere to be found in this erotic flow; Garner gives us one glimpse of some, in the distance, dancing on the hard sand near the water’s edge at some St Kilda jaunt. A lesbian would have spoilt everything for her.

She offers a valediction for this Carlton seventies world in ‘A Happy Story’ in Postcards …

I turn forty-one. I buy the car. I drive it to the river-bank and park it under a tree --- I turn my back on the river and walk along the side of the Entertainment Centre … I am the only person at the counter ...

‘Two tickets to Talking Heads,’ I say.

…

‘I can’t wait,’ says my kid every morning … What will you wear?’ …

I’m too old. I won’t have the right clothes. It will start too late. The warm-up bands will be terrible. It’ll hurt my ears. I’ll get bored and spoil it for her. I’ll get bored. I’ll get bored. I’ll get bored.

I sell my ticket to my sister.

…

I do a U-turn … I shove in the first cassette my hand falls on. It is Elizabeth Schwarzkopf: she is singing a joyful song by Strauss. I do not understand the words but the chorus goes ‘Habe Dank!’ The light is weird … as I fly up the little rise beside Richmond football ground I say out loud, ‘This is it. I am finally on the far side of the line.’ Habe Dank! (pp 105 – 6 – Habe Dank means ‘have thanks’, the song is Richard Strauss’ ‘Dedication’ from his collection of eight songs Final Pages).

We might note in the above the evocation of divine intervention: the cassette coming to hand, the flying and the weird light. This ‘story’ is one of those which seems autobiographical.

God hovers closer.

Many readers these days declare a preference for non-fiction over fiction. Postmodernism has exacerbated (or created?) the doubts contemporary readers have about the imaginative by declaring that the boundaries between fact and fiction are more or less indeterminable because permeable. Postmodernist writers play on the tormenting distinction between the ‘real’ and the imagined, the ‘actual’ and its interpretations. Garner did not, one suspects, consciously engage in this process but she was inadvertently going to be caught up in its throes. The publication and success of Honour & Other Peoples’ Children saw her career as a publicist’s darling take off, this was to give some of her ‘readers’ (often enough those who had not actually read her but had opinions about her work anyhow) plenty to worry over. She began to offer up her life and her opinions, with some circumspection but always with a frankness that looked and sounded like radiant honesty, in service to the increasing demands of publishing houses for promotional activities by their authors. No doubt too her seeming openness was consonant with Garner’s sense of integrity, duty and decorum. Her self-presentation seemed consciously unostentatious but stylish, she was assured even when self-questioning. She always came across as sincere. In these publicity efforts Garner revealed autobiographical details which the listeners, observers and readers of these interviews, talks, participations … could then relate to her work. Her life evidently had a strong and quite direct bearing on what was presented as her fiction. To some she seemed to be crossing the (putative) boundary between fiction and life story with insufficient regard.

She is not an imaginative writer as say Thomas Keneally or Randolph Stow are. Her fiction, readers were coming to understand, was transformed little from her experience. Garner’s work is closer (as already suggested) to that of Christina Stead. Stead worked similarly, transcribing what she had observed but with even less inclination or ability to transfigure the observed (her recording has much greater density than Garner’s). When asked in a radio interview if the members of her family depicted in The Man Who Loved Children had been upset seeing themselves on the page, Stead dismissed the question with, ‘No-one committed suicide, if that’s what you mean.’ Garner’s imagination seems to take the form of presenting her direct experience and observation in the most elegant and telling way possible. She is, in this way and given her pellucid style, an excellent essayist and reviewer.

This considered, it is also not surprising that reportage has always interested her – that’s what she does. She has opinions, ways of interpreting which she wants to convey. She is a keen observer, adventurous in her curiosity. She wants to share her adventures and what she makes of them with us. She seems to need to share her life with us. We might understand those ‘stories’ from Postcards … which seem to be fairly direct accounts of lived experience such as ‘A Happy Story’ quoted above, in this light. This apparent blurring of the actual and the fictitious was to become a fraught issue as she undertook major work in investigative journalism.

Garner has published two such books: as already mentioned, in 2004 Joe Cinque’s Consolation … and the earlier (1995) The First Stone. Both attracted criticism for their fancifulness and were attacked as betrayals of feminism. The latter account was particularly criticised for its journalistic methodology: apparently Garner split a single person into several in order to create a mind-set of rigid feminism; her depiction of the two young women who brought charges against the Principal of Ormond College on sexual grounds was seen in some ways to be irrelevant to the issues at hand (we are informed the college room of one required professional cleaning after she had vacated it, for example). A book of critical essays, bodyjamming, has been published in refutation of the suppositions Garner brought to bear and the methodology she employed in writing The First Stone. Whatever its methodological invalidities and ideological shortcomings, the work is an enthralling read and characteristically courageous. Garner ventured into the territory of notions of sexual harassment and appropriate responses to them where before only male dramatists had trod. Sexual harassment remains a hotly contested issue in Australian life as current cases based in corporate and commercial practice demonstrate. In The First Stone Garner offered a complex account of the emotional and intellectual responses provoked by the case (her own not least). She faced feminist anger publicly in a dignified and stalwart manner. Some of this anger was defensive. No publicity is bad publicity; The First Stone was another great sales success for Garner and her publisher.

Amongst the issues raised by The First Stone was the way Garner ‘used’ people from her life as characters in her fiction. It was known that some so employed had been deeply hurt. Some women refused to be interviewed by Garner for The First Stone on the grounds that they did not want to provide material for what were considered her ‘cruel’ portraits. In my experience almost no-one likes the way they come across in a written account, no matter how guarded the depiction. Also people are jealous of ‘their’ story; they ‘own’ them and are enraged when another tells the story; probably especially if they were never going to get around to telling it themselves. Garner was a victim of this kind of vanity and unreasonableness. The book is a process of its author sorting through the issues for herself as well as her readers; few of Garner’s outraged critics had the ability or courage to undertake this kind of self-interrogation, preferring righteous indignation based on comparably simplistic and unrealistic ideological grounds. Unfortunately human complexities are hard to come to terms with in the fora of public debate; the complexities lose out to ‘positions’.

It would seem Garner’s characters are likely to be based on recognisable people. Is the converse then true – are her ‘real’ people characters? Anu Singh, Joe Cinque’s killer, refused to be interviewed by Garner. She is a striking presence in Joe Cinque’s Consolation. Garner had plenty of opportunity to observe her at Singh’s second trial and to come to terms with her through extensive interviews with people who knew her. Garner persisted with the book despite doubts inspired by the criticism she had received for not interviewing the young women whose actions she investigated in The First Stone (they had refused to speak to her). Again she was taking her readers into territory others had not realised the great interest of or who had not had the courage and perseverance to enter – such as the nether world of deracinated young adults come to Canberra for work and the inexplicable motivations of Anu Singh and her pathetic social satellites. Garner etches the people involved so tellingly that we recognise their types and understand that they would indeed act in the bizarre ways they did. If she was again, as some critics suggested, venting her hostility towards young women (especially ‘attractive’ ones), Anu Singh was the most deserving of subjects. Singh, not surprisingly, claims that she was not fairly represented in the book; subsequent reports attest otherwise. Garner might have been a little more scrupulous in keeping a journalistic distance from Maria Cinque. Mrs Cinque’s inclination to melodrama (there is a hint of hypochondria too) goes some way towards explaining her late son’s attraction to the volatile Anu Singh. Garner does not explore sufficiently what Joe Cinque was doing with Anu Singh, the nature of his seeming complicity in her astonishingly dreadful behaviour. The book was much shortlisted and shared the Ned Kelly Prize for Best True Crime 2005. Very few writers (Joan Didion?) could have presented the case and the many confusing issues it raised with the clarity and depth Garner did. Despite the sympathy Garner reveals for Maria Cinque (to whom she grew close and who seems to be the ‘Rosalba’ of The spare room who rings Garner for, it would seem, a confirmation of family values) there appears to have been, despite the complexity and vividness, the drama, nothing fictitious in Garner’s representation of those who make up Joe Cinque’s tragic story.

Garner’s ‘characters’, drawn from life to whatever degree also return given new (thin) disguises in the differing contexts of her books. The roman à clef aspect of her work expands towards a sort of metatext which we suspect is her life. She appears worried about this in

NOTE:

In this version of Two Friends, Louise’s mother is called Jenny, while in the film itself her name is Janet. I have made this change here in order to avoid confusion with another Janet, a character in a later novel Cosmo Cosmolino (1992). My double use of the name was completely accidental, though no doubt it has a meaning. (The Last Days of Chez Nous & Two Friends p 120).

Garner is not in a good position to claim whatever immunities privacy may confer (defence of the ego?). She has written of her family, friends and acquaintances albeit with reasonable discretion over many years now in both fiction and essay. In the light of what we know of her techniques, how could she have done otherwise if she were to write at all? She is amongst the most directly personal of writers. We should not expect an autobiography from her because that is what her oeuvre amounts to. ‘Every time I write a book, I lose a husband’ (or some such) she quipped as publicity for The First Stone. She was referring to her third husband Murray Bail, author of the highly popular and deeply unreconstructed Eucalyptus. Previously, when things were better between them, Garner had announced she was abandoning fiction - That’s his territory, she explained. It was her most pathetic or careless moment.

She gives us an account of the trauma of their separation in ‘Tower Diary’ (the feel of steel). And of her return to Melbourne (Sydney was always too much in some ways for her)

They were from somewhere else. They were not from here. They were from further north, from the sunny place, the blue and yellow place, the sparkling place, the water place (‘The Dark, The Light’ Postcards from Surfers p 19)

to her beloved soul country, its ‘famous’ water, its dry air. To her aging and dying parents and her daughter and her daughter’s daughter and her many sisters. She becomes aunty and ‘Nanna’, a role she embraces (I think we are supposed to sweetly indulge the mawkishness of the title ‘The Nanna-Mobile’ in the feel of steel; the invocation of the Pope-Mobile is unfortunate). This ‘story’ includes a relinquishing of the role of writer

Indeed, my name was mentioned among those writers whose first novel sells secondhand at insultingly low prices, even in paperback.

My reaction was a double-decker. At first I felt bleak. A bit forlorn. Ah well, I thought with a sigh, sic transit Gloria. One must bow the head, and be drearily splendid. But then into my mind flashed an image of startling clarity: a woman and a small girl walking away along a dirt road, hand in hand, talking pleasantly … They were my future.

I described the moment to a psychoanalyst friend. He called it a ‘collapse of ambition’. Collapse? It felt more like a flourishing, am opening out. Ambition may have collapsed, but not me. Not this nanna (pp 189 -90)

for that of ‘nanna’ – a role she gloats over in several other ‘stories’ in the collection. Even if the self-consciousness of the prose didn’t alert you, commonsense should be alarmed.

The Carlton Garner, determined on making a fair fist of new possibilities for living, has given way to ‘Nanna’, church going and Family (though she is still in some kind of proximate communal house: Garner tells us of her daughter living next door and the poppings through the fence). So Garner’s work continues to reveal a desire to describe and explain her life, particularly in terms of intimate female connection. What we might note of this development in her art is that the themes remain familiar but the background scree of ideology consists now of ‘conservative values’ instead of radical ideals. The desire to celebrate her life is more to the fore. The questing and struggles of Monkey Grip have given way to wonder and satisfaction that she has come to this – substantial ease.

Some of her readers might feel uncomfortable with the matriarch pose, no-one though could deny Garner her right to it. Despite it all, she’s done what a matriarch is supposed to do: keep the line going and provide comfort for it. Good for her. But don’t we require more of our artists?

It’s not that we object to complacency in this case. Garner has provided us with details of her angst about her future as a writer, particularly in the feel of steel (at the time of the break-up from the man she abandoned fiction for)

I hate writing. Writing is a sickness, a neurosis, a mania … I’ve been a captive of it for most of my adult life (‘Woman in a Green Mantel’ p 37).

I love the game, [i e ‘Ex Libris, the literary pastiche game’] handling words, trying to make a sentence that was direct and clear. How on earth did I write the way I used to? How did I write Postcards from Surfers? I had no plan for any of those stories. I wrote one sentence, then another. The intellectual approach, long-range planning, doesn’t suit me … ‘let the unconscious take precedence’. Later you think. At the start, you just write. If you have the nerve.

I have lost my nerve. (‘Tower Diary’ p 65).

And of the cost of her kind of writing

Because the one who records will never be forgiven. Endured, yes, tolerated, put up with, borne, and still loved; but not forgiven (‘A Scrapbook, An Album’ in Sisters p 79)

(this reads as rhetorical flourish).

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood (from ‘Lady Lazarus’ Sylvia Plath)

What we require from Garner is that she continue to be our travel guide through the hell of contemporary life. It’s not as if she’s ever been a good time girl; she’s always insisted on more gravitas for herself than that

… I’d gone on holiday from Paris with some gay boys I knew, one Australia, one French, two Americans – four cheerful, affectionate hysterics. Privately I disapproved of their obsession with fun, with youthful beauty and clothes and sex and cruising and special cocktails. For some reason they seemed fond of me, and they were adorable – ingenious, kind, always laughing – but in my heart I thought of them as moral lightweights …

Twenty years later as far as I know only two are alive (‘moral lightweights’ as opposed I suppose to the moral heavyweight men Garner celebrates in Monkey Grip - and AIDS got the boys, you know it - ‘Das Bettelein’ in the feel of steel p 192 & p 194)

often in contrast to all who surround her – and she’s had some trouble having a good time. Indeed she’s sought out the tough trot, told us about it, explained it all to us. That is what we expect of her and that is, with her fine publishing instinct, what she provided us duly with.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell (from ‘Lady Lazarus’ by Sylvia Plath).

The spare room was published in 2008. In this novel, ‘Helen’ accompanies her friend Nicola on her journey to death from cancer. The ‘Helen’ seems like a deliberate provocation to those who might think the book was not ‘fiction’. Much in it, as so much of Garner’s other fiction has been, is ‘realistic’: recognisable to those who were acquainted with the places, characters and circumstances upon which she seems to have drawn for this ‘novel’. It won the Barbara Jefferis Award for the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society. Garner was the second recipient of this very lucrative ($35,000) prize. She accepted the award in a room in the old Education Department Building in Sydney but forgot to carry the cheque, placed on the lectern, back to her place with her after her speech. She had somewhat defensively proclaimed to an audience of her peers and the Runners-Up (it was an Australian Society of Authors event) that her book was a novel – ‘I’m telling you’. Not everyone in the room was convinced. There was a flounce in her return to the lectern to secure her cheque and her triumphant return to her seat. Garner does not flounce well. She dealt likewise somewhat awkwardly (‘Robert’s a friend of mine’) with Dessaix’s review of The spare room in The Monthly April 2008

Monkey Grip is called a novel, The Children’s Bach and Cosmo Cosmolino short novels, and now The Spare Room is declared “a perfect novel” by Peter Carey on the back cover. But they are not novels, they are all of them fine works of art and innovative explorations of literary approaches to non-fiction, every one of them an outstanding example of stylish reportage, but none of them is a novel. So why does Helen Garner at the very least collude in having them called novels? And why does it matter? …

Perhaps she believes with all that shaping, leaping, trimming and sharpening, her notebooks and diaries actually become novels. (‘Kitchen Table Candour’ p 58).

She defended The spare room qua novel in terms of the form, her declaration of it as fiction, giving her a freedom of expansiveness that, say, her investigative journalism had not. Oh, is that right?

Garner’s writing method has been remarkably homogeneous over a long career and many significant achievements. Her style has refined to great elegance; her moment of imaginative experimentation seems to have ceased with Cosmo Cosmolino.

Pedalling madly and dropping her head like a chopper, she plastered both arms along her side and unclenched her fists to let the seeping jonquils scatter down the rips of the wind. Janet! She yelled after them. Your knickers! I’ve still got them on! – but too late, too high – for I was over. I dropped off her like a split corset: there was no more I.

With a churning roll and a trample she picked up speed and rocketed, whistling-eared, dead vertical from the city’s paltry pencil-clump towards the meniscus of day. (p 215).

The metaphysical, the spiritual is to manifest Itself to Garner later, after, it would seem, Men have betrayed her yet again. The film The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992) for which she wrote the script has an oddly personal and significant and maybe even prescient moment. The main character, Beth, ‘betrayed’ by her husband and sister (thus echoing Garner’s life), wanders off in its final scene towards a consoling church spire, a spire which had seemed unobtainable to the character in her previous attempts to get there. Beth’s smile suggests she will get there this time. Garner had wanted a line of cypress trees (in the explanation below she also reveals why the film was not all that it might have been – it is a novelist’s film script; whatever its problems as a script though, Gillian Armstrong’s filming did not realise its potential)

In Chez Nous, for example, there are cypress trees.

From the main characters’ bedroom window I wanted a row of pencil cypress trees to be visible, growing in a distant and unidentifiable neighbourhood garden. These trees, to me, carry a heavy freight of meaning. They are Mediterranean, and connected with the origins of our culture. They are calm, sturdy, graceful. They are a reminder of darkness, of stillness, of death – and thus of the question of God, and the soul …

In this book you will read about the cypresses. But in the film of Chez Nous you will not see them. (‘Introduction’ p xi).

You will see the church spire. And this is pretty much the direction Garner was herself to go, eventually in her Nanna-Mobile.

She seeks advice from fellow novelist and Christian Tim Winton on the dark heaviness manifesting itself to her. He offers her an explanation: it is the Holy Spirit. And an account of the basis of his faith: the imaginative credibility of biblical stories (see ‘Sighs too Deep for Words’ the feel of steel p 82). Nothing more need be said about imaginative credibility.

Church itself seems to try Garner though she likes the service when well read and the music. Music is very important to her and in her work. Various members of the congregation interest her too. Communion, being blessed by a priest, is very, very important to her.

But none of that is where we will discover the basis of her faith. That lies in the numinous experience. Her work has been pursuing that since Monkey Grip. It can emerge as an abrupt apprehension of the poetic in the harsh reality she so successfully insists we pay attention to

‘What’s you favourite name of a metro station?’ she said.

‘What? I don’t know. Trocadéro.’

‘Mine’s Château d’Eau.’

‘Ever been on top of that station? You’d hate it. It’s not safe for women.’ ((a Château d’Eau amongst the mundane irritations and frustrations of this account is astonishing ’La Chance Existe’ p 46).

She finds it in the desolation of separation, in the drive away from the Entertainment Centre as Elizabeth Schwarzkopf sings to her, it hovers as a beneficent aura around her accounts of crematorium practices and colonic irrigation, of, less surprisingly, a Barmitzvah, of red wine spilt on a Vanessa Lucas dress, of much less surprisingly, the coming of spring and, she astonishes, in the blossoming of a common ragged tree. Elusive and evanescent though it is, there it is for sure in Cosmo Cosmolino, her most imaginative work.

Books referred to

the feel of steel 2001Picador

Cosmo Cosmolino 1992 McPhee Gribble

Monkey Grip Penguin Books 1987 (originally published by McPhee Gribble 1977)

My hard heart Selected Fiction 1998 Viking Penguin Australia

Honour & Other People‘s Children two stories 1980 McPhee Gribble

Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law 2004 Pan MacMillan

The Children’s Bach 1984 McPhee Gribble

Postcards from Surfers stories 1985 McPhee Gribble in association with Penguin Books

The First Stone 1995 Pan MacMillan Australia

bodyjamming 1997 Mead Jenna (ed) Random House

The spare room The Text Publishing Company 2008 The Last Days of Chez Nous & Two Friends 1992 McPhee Gribble Penguin Books

Sisters 1994 (first published 1993) ed Modjeska Drusilla Angus and Robertson Garner’s contribution is ‘A Scrap Book, An Album’

Permissions for the Plath quotes applied for (Faber and Faber) 16/10/10

Comportment: Frank Moorhouse

1. Always walk up to a man as if he owes you money.

2. Train yourself to look at the bridge of the other man’s nose, to give the impression that you are staring at him straight in the eye.

3. Speak out with a loud voice and you will finish strongly: begin weakly and you will finish weakly.

4. Sometimes to be heard amid the shouting it is necessary to speak softly.

5. Learn when to remain silent, thus forcing the other fellow to speak.

6. Before meeting with a stranger, make a list of conversational items.

7. Learn the beginning and end of a speech, so that you begin and end fluently.

8. Go out of your way to meet the Great. Keep the company of those older and superior to yourself. By doing so, you will gain knowledge and, at the same time, gain confidence through observing the weaknesses and foibles of your superiors.

9. Joust with your shyness by putting it constantly to the test.

10. Remember these are but tricks and rules. Learn your

trade well. Self-confidence grows from ability, as does your value as a person in the society of men.

Even so, in 1936, George McDowell was still dogged by shyness. The typed-out rules hung, pasted on cardboard, but he had to admit they’d become somewhat a fixture in the office. But also, he sincerely hoped, a fixture in his mind …

…………………………………………………………………………………………………..Yet one had to know how to play the fool without becoming a fool (The Electrical Experience p 65 and p 66).

Australia became aware of Frank Moorhouse in the sixties when the low tide of post war fearful and complacent conservatism began to turn. He had been a journalist but we noticed him as a short story writer. The form has a strong tradition in this country, one of our great writers, Henry Lawson, confined himself to it and verse, taking as his subject matter the downtrodden, particularly itinerant rural workers – drovers and shearers – on whose labours the wealthy pastoralists such as Patrick White’s family depended for their self-satisfaction. Lawson’s light shone into the dark and bare corners where the wives and children of the rural poor struggled to survive.

Moorhouse’s early work experience must have given him some insight into rural poverty: he worked (briefly) as a journalist for the Wagga Wagga Advertiser and the Riverina Express. However his sympathies lay elsewhere. He does seem to have a sense of responsibility towards the oppressed, in any case he flirted with theories of egalitarianism, be they socialist, anarchist, libertarian … whatever, they tended to the abstruse. He was (briefly) editor of The Australian Worker.

He was a champion of the short story, rather defiantly justifying it.

This was an understandable enough reaction in a period when the form was largely regarded by the guardians of literature as an apprenticeship for the novel which was the pre-eminent literary form. [i] A few eddies could just be detected in the stagnant pond of Australian drama. Script writing was inconsiderable given the Australian film was an extreme rarity and the halcyon days of radio drama were over. Television was (is still?) not a medium for the serious writer. Poetry floundered and seethed in the most unadventurous of ways. The rather factitious pseudo-indigenous nationalism of the Jindyworobaks (Rex Ingamells, Flexmore Hudson, Roland Robinson …) sounded faintly embarrassing in an era in which Aboriginal issues were just starting to irritate the Invader conscience and there was a desperation to be worldly.

Moorhouse was instrumental in establishing and maintaining through five issues in 1965, a mid city newspaper City Voices.

City Voices is in many ways a new concept. It is a weekly newspaper for the Sydney community of ideas and arts.

It is not a pressure group journal.

It aims to serve the cultural, the dissenting, the educational, the little political (sic – interesting slip?), the bohemian and the non-conforming.

In Sydney the inner city suburbs have come to be the rough physical boundary of this community but in reality it is not circumscribed by physical boundaries – it is characterised by attitudes of mind and areas of concern (Vo. 1 No. 2 September 24, 1965 p 1).

City Voices however did not publish short stories.

Moorhouse’s then friend Michael Wilding offers a survey of the opportunities for short story writers in ‘Tabloid Story’, a contribution to Moorhouse’s collection Days of Wine and Rage.

To us at that time the girlie magazines offered the only outlets for work that dealt with sexuality. [ii] … The girlie magazines … with circulation of between 40 000 and 100 000 … The literary quarterlies circulated between 1000 and 3000 – and much of that was dead circulation, straight into institutional library stacks. And the people who did read the quarterlies were already committed to literature. We wanted to reach that new audience that wouldn’t normally pick up the quarterlies with their daunting, expensive, permanent-seeming format … the mode we evolved was that we would produce not single stories for syndication, but an entire packaged magazine, already edited, typeset, designed and camera-ready. The host magazine taking Tabloid Story would give us a run-on of 2000 copies of the supplement for us to distribute to subscribers, contributors, bookshops and as complimentaries and exchanges with other magazines internationally. This way we got access to the host paper’s circulation – without having to build up sales ourselves, without having to sell advertising, deal with bookshops and newsagency distribution, or arrange printing. To be free of those problems that nearly always destroy literary magazines, we were happy to give the edited and designed package free to the host. We had little alternative ... One of the associated purposes of Tabloid Story – which often seemed as much a strategy as a magazine – was to encourage magazines that hadn’t run stories before to run them now – as Nation Review and National Times indeed soon began to, and have continued to do … Frank noted down a record of ‘the little things’ we did in our relations with contributors:

(a) We didn’t require them to type.

(b) We didn’t make them pay for a reply – the literary magazines were the only business in the world which required that their clients pay for the courtesy of a reply – usually a form-reply (although we appreciated the same as cost saving).

(d) We supplied multiple copies to contributors.

(e) We paid on acceptance – not publication.

We broke that haughtiness and contempt and discourtesy still found in literary magazines by recognising contributors as the source of life for little magazines … It was the first literary magazine to pay the Australian Society of Authors recommended minimum rate, and from the beginning we made public our payment rate – again the first time a literary magazine had done this. This was part of a calculated attempt to campaign to raise payments and to force other magazines to declare their rates of payment. Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland and Clem Christensen of Meanjin of course complained bitterly … the Literature Board made it official policy that magazines receiving subsidies should declare publicly in each issue how much they paid their contributors … We received a trial subsidy of $2000 … We shaped the first two issues from the available materials, and shaped them to show the sort of new writing we wanted to encourage – no more formula bush tales, no more restrictions to the beginning-middle-an-end story, no more preconceptions about the well-rounded tale … It was the domination of the formula bush tales, the straight narrative that we objected to … There were the fabulists … Then there is the literature of process – fiction interested in, self-conscious of, its own evolution … Then there was the confessional, revelatory mode … we also had a residual relationship with the socialist realist story … New writing often deals with sex. Not always, not compulsively, not inevitably – but often; and this was getting us into problems with the straight papers that were potential host magazines … (see pp 145 – 154). [iii]

With his first collection Futility and other animals (1969) Moorhouse offered a kind of apologia for his interconnected short stories, his ‘discontinuous narratives’

These are interlinked stories and although the narrative is discontinuous and there is no single plot, the environment and characters are continuous. In some ways, the people in the stories are a tribe; a modern, urban tribe which does not fully recognise itself as a tribe. Some of the people are central members of the tribe while others are hermits who live on the fringe. The shared environment is both internal (anxieties, pleasures and confusions) and external (the houses, streets, hotels and experiences.

The central dilemma is that of giving birth, of creating new life (prolegomenon to volume).

This ‘tribe’ was probably what he imagined as the core of the readership of City Voices.

Even though his oeuvre has culminated in a (at least proposed) trilogy of big conventionally structured novels (two, Grand Days and Dark Palace, have appeared), his predilection for the discontinuous narrative appears to have remained. A glance at the Contents of Grand Days confirms this impression e g

‘International Language: Scat Singing, its Ramifications, Magnitude and Consequences’

‘Confidence and the Giving of Confidences’

‘The Tenets of Civilization and Various Wonders Not to Be Talked Of’.

These could be the section or story headings of any of his books. We might note too the whimsicality which had become inevitable.

Between his first collection Futility and other animals (1969) and the first of the proposed trilogy of novels centred on the history of the League of Nations – Grand Days (1993) we may observe an increasing tendency to avoid the deeply engaging in favour of a desire to be clever and amusing. This cuteness takes the form of a whimsical commentary on ways of life and thinking. While it is satirical in manner, Moorhouse has not the savagery of the true satirist; he is far too embedded in the Establishment to attack it (scout [Queen’s?], school captain, Member of the Order of Australia 1985, awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society 1988, ‘Keating’ – an Australian Artists Creative Fellowship – recipient 1989). Through the span of his work he represents himself as, most importantly of all, a bon vivant, a man of the world, a butch epicure, then a serious journalist and fleetingly as a creative artist (this is fairly typical of the self-representation of successful Australian male artists).

Perhaps this was a necessary ploy, given that some large part of his income came from writing for magazines and the magazine section of newspapers – The Bulletin, National Times, Nation Review, Squire, Chance International … in which his opportunities for reappearance were dependent on being as amusing as possible to the socially and intellectually aspiring. It would be encouraging to know he could take more risk in confronting the readers of the literary/intellectual journals – Westerly, Southerly, Pluralist, ‘the underground liberationist paper’ Thor, Balcony, Red and Black, Quadrant, the already mentioned Tabloid Story, Australian Letters … but they too were committed to ‘protecting their readers from offence’ no matter what lip service was paid to being against censorship

About sub legislative censorship. Westerlye (sic) edited part of a story referring to a boy being masturbated by his girlfriend, without reference to me; Pluralist changed the word fuck to ??? because big bold Walter Stone wouldn’t print it; Gordon and Gotch forced Squire to edit out references to the thoughts of a character who was fucking a girl (he was thinking of something else); you know the Balcony case; printers complained to Squire about my story in a recent issue – said it was indecent and were considering not printing but did. Other case of interest was that binders refused to bind the Trial of Lady Chatterley (sic) Lover and it had to be flown to Victoria for binding. So in these cases you have printers, editors, distributors, and binders all exercising their dirty little moralism (letter to Michael Wilding 11/02/67 p 1).

Almost all of these publications were evanescent (Quadrant continues despite the drying up, as far as we know, of its CIA funding).

Moorhouse offers an account of living by the pen in those days

The Australian scene at present is different from any time I can remember as far as the outlets for short stories. Man has a young editor who wants to change its image to Playboy and is contacting writers for serious fiction. Mansworld another of the new girlies, Editor Ron Smith, is in the market and asking for fiction, Squire and Chance are publishing about six stories a month between them. But the literary journals are fewer (Balcony gone, Australian Letters gone), and seem less interested in stories.

The Man editor Ray Hall said he was uninterested in fiction and had tried to cut down on it in his new Man and had received a strong protest from readers. But that was for bloodgutsadventure fiction. I am now in the position of having no difficulty in publishing a short story a month (as a minimum) rates are still lousy $20 a page … I have little interest in publishing in any of the four magazines except as you say to keep my name in print – and to get the cheque which helps (letter to Michael Wilding 21/07/68 p 3).

His early work offers a tension and intensity he seems thenceforth to overbalance with the amusing, despite occasional later references to (personal) misery and withdrawal (e g see ‘Convalescence’ in the 1985 Room Service). Many of the stories in Futility and other animals convey a tormented interiority that Moorhouse left behind to the detriment of his art.

[Thomas is relating the story]

He looked shocking. He was pale and his eyes were bloody. He was staggering and shaking a little. I couldn’t smell any drink.

“I’m a little pilled up,” he said. “I’m a little sedated.” He wasn’t speaking clearly.

“You sick?” I asked.

We went into his book-filled mess of a bedroom. He rolled on the bed.

“I’m sick in the head,” he said.

“You’ve done psychology. Fix yourself up.”

…

His arm stuck out from the edge of the bed and his hand hung limp. He said in the same tired, forced voice: “It is like a party. It might be dull now or good now or you might be going to fight someone or get off with a girl, but the important thing is that you know what can happen and you know that if you stay something will happen, and that it will either excite you or bore you or do nothing to you. It’s deciding when to leave the party – deciding when you’ve had enough.”

I took my hand away. It was then I realised he was talking about suicide. I still didn’t know what to say.

…

… I was dazed because until now Jimmy had always had the world licked. He had always had the answers. And now he was lying there knocked out with pills. It made me feel alone and uneasy (‘What can you say?’ pp 18 – 20 passim).

I didn’t know why I wanted to lie somewhere by myself, like a sick cat. It didn’t sound reasonable to say to anyone. I suppose I had to have some excuse. Having something unusual or strange to do or say always bothered me and I would rather shrug out of it if I could (‘Walking out’ p 91).

Some of the consciousnesses we are invited into are enactments of the predominant mean, dull and repressed spirits the others – the tribe members - struggle to escape.

The girls at work think I’m thirty-one and still a virgin. They think I’m plain and can’t get men. But I got Doug … And I was married once, when I was seventeen, but he shot through … The new flat has eight windows … And it has two bedrooms, one where Dougie can sleep when he comes home drunk from the club. He can sleep there instead of snoring all night and keeping me awake and groping at me and making a mess over the sheets or in me … Housework takes me away from things ... I like to see little lumps of greasy fat disappear as I rub … I like to see those brown shitty stains on toilets go away and I scrub with the big loop brush right down into the bowl and up where you can’t see … The dirt can never touch me because I wear rubber gloves … One day I would like to own my own house. I would like there to be no men. But if there were no men there would only be dust. I don’t like dry dusty cleaning as much as greasy, mucky cleaning … I like things to be dry and clean when I’m finished but not at first. At first I like them to be greasy as long as I don’t have to touch them with my hands (‘I am a very clean person’ pp 70 76 passim).

Trudging up the narrow stairway, rolling and over-salivating his cigarette, away from the accountant’s office and to the toilet, and on the toilet seat making a spit in his mouth, moulding it and then driving it out against the wall. Watching it slide and hearing the gratifying words …

“Come in Mr Nish … It’s the William’s policy – can’t find a record of it. Says he’s been paying in for twenty years.”

…

“That‘s very odd.”

…

Now down at the Apex Club flicking through his secrets, standing there amongst the suits and ties and badges. See his secrets as glossy, dirty pictures. Running through them like Catholic beads – dark-street prostitution, toilet-writing masturbation, evil-dreaming, toilet–spitting, and record-burning. Shaking hands with the honoured guest speaker and being introduced as Mr Nish, chief clerk (‘Nish’ p 61 & p 63).

We encounter chief clerk Nish again in the ‘discontinuous narrative’ way in Marylou’s story

“Instead of going on the streets, Marylou, let’s start a call girl racket. What would be wrong with a call girl racket?”

“I’ve thought of it hundreds of times. Every girl in world (sic) must think about it at some time. I honestly don’t know why more girls aren’t doing it. I really can’t.”

“It’s just a matter of setting up.”

“The way I see it is that it is just another sort of work, only there’s less of it and it’s better paid. And not dull. Could even be fun.”

“Must meet some disgusting men though.”

“You have to put up with disgusting men everywhere.”

“The chief clerk – an animal called Nish at the last place – he literally perved all day. I mean he really did. And every remark a dirty innuendo: ‘Didn’t you get enough sleep last night Miss Henderson? – only naughty girls don’t get enough sleep.’ He’d go on and on and on” (‘ “No birds were flying overhead, there were no birds to fly” ’ p 25).

These stories are told in both the third and first person. Regardless of this, the focus is on a single character from whom our sense of social milieu radiates. The more limited the reader’s sense of social context, the more deeply mired the character is. Futility and other animals is divided into three parts –

THIS IS THE PART CALLED CONFUSION

THIS IS THE PART CALLED SICKNESS

THIS IS THE PART CALLED BRAVERY

This, along with the apologia quoted above, suggests that Moorhouse had catharsis in mind (‘of creating new life’), a resolution for those brave enough to face the challenges of the new liberated life they had found themselves lost in – the women trying not to be menial housewives, to have minds and abilities as well as vaginas, the men like Thomas in panicked flight from the wastes of suburban life, clinging to Jimmy Anderson for guidance only to discover his mentor’s capacity for messiness, Marylou who feels rejected for her glamorous style and longs for a more radiant life, like the several homosexuals floundering for purchase in the slippery nothingness that the time condemned them to.

“Yes. I’m home on a visit.”

The cab driver gave him another glance. Glanced at his hair, his sunglasses, his bracelet and then started the cab.

Satisfied?

“You’ve changed. I remember you as a kid. You wouldn’t remember me.”

“I do. I remember you but I don’t remember your name.”

“Jack Ryland. I run a couple of cabs.”

Jack Ryland pulled a card from the upholstery trim above the driver’s seat and without looking passes it back to him.

“You were a tough little bugger.”

What a lie. (‘The train will arrive shortly’ p 108).

Cindy, the lecturer, pregnant without a husband, thinks and speaks for the brave

Did they all require social patterns? Was it childish arrogance to think otherwise? Were social patterns congealed wisdom? Social patterns changed. And some people changed faster than social patterns. Some people were out of synchronisation …

“We just thought you might like to come home dear,” her mother said, her fangs retreating into a chatting mouth.

…

Relatives and acquaintances and society felt legally justified in applying all sorts of pressures to ensure that you conformed to their idea of marriage.

…

“I’ll do the toilet and then I must go.”

…

Her mother was now standing in the room, her hands on her aproned hips surveying the work she had done.

…

“Please think about what Father wrote to you. If only for baby’s sake. The little mite should have the protection of marriage – even if you don’t want it.”

…

“I want you to leave mother … I feel you have come here to impose yourself. You don’t like me. You don’t like my life. And you interfere. I don’t feel I can resist you any longer because I am tired and weak. Please go.”

“Cindy – I was only trying to help you.” Her mother put one hand on her. The other held a Wettex.

“Please go. I don’t want to fight with you.”

“We’ve never fought, Cindy dear. We’ve never.”

“Please leave.” Her voice was slightly louder.

“You can’t talk to me, your mother, like that.” Her mother’s voice became bitter and strong.

She went over and picked up her mother’s coat and hat. She handed them to her.

“Get out” (‘The third story of nature’ pp 164 – 173 passim).

Like Miles Franklin, Moorhouse seems to have sprung from Jove’s brow, his writer’s voice already formed (though he was thirty-one when Futility … was published, she twenty-two when My Brilliant Career was). It is assured, resolved despite its explorations. There is also and would be a tendency to exaggeration and stereotyping (the homosexuals), a drift towards caricaturing

I always leave a funny personal mess in my desk-drawer. But they’ll clean it out and throw it away gingerly – the poor puzzled things – sitting around saying: “She was odd, wasn’t she?”

…

My voice is too modulated. That’s why they won’t employ me sometimes. I’m too Vogue-dressed and too radio-spoken and too actress charming. Wouldn’t it give you the shits. Blame mother (“No birds were flying over head, there were no birds to fly” p 21).

The discontinuous narrative structure serves his exploration of the times and its mores extraordinarily well. [iv] The organisation of the individual narratives is strikingly original and happily various. Moorhouse ranges widely enough: the members of the Sydney Push and other bohemians imply by their rebellion the wider Sydney society. Moorhouse was never to achieve the intensity and originality of his early discontinuous narratives again.

The similarities between Helen Garner and Frank Moorhouse are extraordinary. Both emerged, in Melbourne and Sydney respectively, to address the angst felt by individuals in a time of marked social change (Garner established herself a decade later than Moorhouse). Both used the shorter forms of fiction to represent the struggle to create new ways of living, thinking, being. Both employed innovative structures and to some extent styles to enact the conflicts and resolutions implicit in their material. Both employed biographical elements more freely than was usually encountered in short fiction. Both ventured into other writing types – film and television scripts, social and political commentary, the essay - in the course of their long-sustained careers. They could both claim to be the ‘voices’ of the War/Baby Boomers. Moorhouse approaches philistinism: there are none of the references to music, painting, poetry one finds in Garner. In this he follows the tradition of the Sydney Push who, as Anne Coombs has pointed out, lived with bare walls. [v] Push members were far more likely to be found, when not at the bar or in bed, at the card table or racetrack than concert hall or gallery. Moorhouse’s art is sociological and psychological – particularly the former.

Later he went to the lavatory. In the lavatory standing side by side at the urinal he heard two young men talking about skiing, “She had the bottom part of her leg in plaster, you see,” one said, and the other laughed.

He felt distaste and resentment. Because of their exclusiveness.

…

… He desperately wanted to be pleased with himself. Standing at the Yacht Club with Young Liberals dancing around him, out of place, argumentatively drunk and no one to argue with. He felt distinctly displeased with himself (‘The Coca-Cola Kid’ in The Americans, Baby p 129 & p 130).

They are both rather cold writers, with the disengaged, objective eye which so marks the style of the much more powerful Christina Stead. A reader would not turn to Moorhouse for the poignant, the moving. He is a stronger writer of fiction than Garner, offering a far greater range of characters and situations, of plights, of depth and complexity. Hers is the finer sensibility and she is the much more accomplished stylist.

His keen interest in history is evinced by his next book, The Electrical Experience which is a precursor to the culminating trilogy (I read today – end of May - that the final of the three novels will be published in November of this year [2011] but it has been long and frequently promised) based on the history of the League of Nations. In The Electrical Experience Moorhouse visited the roots of some of the dullness, the oppression from which many of the characters (at least the central members of the discontinuous narrative tribe) are in flight. It is bodied in T. George McDowell, a successful soft drink manufacturer, recognised quite widely over the stretch of the South (i e of Nowra in T. George McDowell’s case) Coast of New South Wales where his bottles are purveyed. McDowell defines himself by his membership of Rotary. The Electrical Experience is also a quirky history of Moorhouse’s soul country, the scene of his childhood, McDowell’s field of operation.

In its discontinuous way The Electrical Experience offers a case history of McDowell, embracing his times (from the roaring twenties through the Great Depression into the sixties) and the mind-set, now almost incomprehensibly mean, colourless, xenophobic – generally paranoid, which beset the country and can still be observed, particularly in rural areas unliberated by the benefits of non Anglo-Celtic immigration.

Terri, even as a child, had a will of her own. They hadn’t put the birth in the paper. It was considered unwise to put birth notices in the newspaper. The unsavoury interest in whether a child had been conceived in wedlock. Not that there could be any doubt with Thelma and he, married fifteen years. But you couldn’t win. There was talk, suggestion and gossip that it had been a “mistake”. Thelma and he had planned to have three children and that was that. Some said that gypsies passing through a town would look to see if there were new births in the newspaper and then steal the child (‘A Black, Black Birth’ pp 3 – 4).

We have already met Terri, in the discontinuous manner, in The Americans, Baby (the technique in Moorhouse’s hands not only extends and binds narratives within volumes but across volumes and media) with a penchant for speed (the drug of choice in the sixties and early seventies) which may or may not be the source of her considerable psychiatric illness (her dreadful father is probably a contributing factor) and an art school education. [vi] T. George’s dreadfulness resides in his self-absorbed concern for appearances, for his place as a considerable person in his purlieu of small towns (it is true he has travelled, very frequently, to America, a country he admires enormously - the St Louis Rotary Convention of 1923 made a huge, indelible impression on him – whether and in what ways this has broadened his mind is one of the book’s larger themes). His dreadfulness resides in his relentless go-getter attitude (he considers himself a philosopher), in his complete eschewing of, or incapacity for the emotional (his daughter Terri has too much). He is the horror of rational, organisational Man.

“Where then,” he asked the American, “do you find Peace of Mind? Rotary does not pretend to solve the Great Mysteries, but it teaches how to organize life and give it a System. It has taken rules from many places and welded them into a creed and a code” (‘A Black, Black Birth’ The Electrical Experience p 9 – ‘The American’ is Becker whom we have already met in The Americans, Baby and will meet more fully in The Coca Cola Kid).

Though he does in some mystical or desperate way ascribe his younger daughter’s problems in part to having been born while a terrible bushfire raged through his world.

You never knew, perhaps the heat of the day of her birth had something to do with her personality, had scorched her. Seared her (ibid).

The Electrical Experience is partly made up of ‘Fragments’ which are in part an expression of the quirky, whimsical, self-indulgent aspect of Moorhouse’s style that threatens his stature as a ‘serious writer’. This is not to say one would deny him his humour, wit or quirky interests. It’s just that at times he seems incapable of a sustained probing of issues which have arrested his attention, instead retreating into whimsical dalliance. The issues which seem thus to overwhelm him are particularly those involved with a radical rethinking of human possibility or of what we intuit or infer are of deeply personal significance. This tendency to volte-face can be observed as early as his journalism for City Voices

Wharfies ignored by unionists

The Labour–day march on Monday showed an uncertain solidarity, with many unions dumb on the most currently urgent union issue – The Liberal Government’s attack on the Waterside Workers’ Federation.

…

There was the macabre truth of the retired workers’ bus with the wrongly adjusted destination sign reading “South Head Cemetery Special”.

The old splendidly painted canvas banners borne by eight workers gave the march a sense of history. Most carry symbolic depictions of the trade they represent and carry the union motto (Vol. 1, No. 4 October 8, 1965 p 1).

In the story ‘The Girl Who Met Simone de Beauvoir in Paris’ (The Americans, Baby) both narrative and his film adaptation, the issues raised about male/female relations and female oppression recede into talk of ‘back passages’ amongst the men

“How long can we hold out?” Cooper said to Stockwell who was white.

“The women have really got us holed up,” Cooper said grimly, looking through the curtain into the garden, “is there a back way out?”

“Yes there is a back passage,” Stockwell said with desperate hope (p 148).

This sly collusion-seeking innuendo comes at the conclusion as the male characters retreat from a confrontation with the female characters over sexism. This follows a trenchant if superficial critique of de Beauvoir, writer and person, by the protagonist Stockwell during the narrative’s progress (he also has a go at the reliance of contemporary women on the culinary expertise of Elizabeth David). The film, directed by the gay Richard Wherrett, lays this deflecting (from the seriousness of the issue) wit on with an even heavier hand. Moorhouse, bisexual, has always been awkward about homosexuality, taking care, it seems to me, to avoid the issue unless in the right company. [vii] The ‘Fragments’, which are presented as dividers of the ‘Narratives’ which make up The Electrical Experience are printed on a black page and are often accompanied by historic photographs (a few are concerned with T. George McDowell’s business interests, a bottling machine for example). This is an admirable way of bringing the period alive for the reader. The ‘Fragments’ offer a folk wisdom/history which might escape conventional historians and which is highly evocative.

Colouring Electric-light Globes

Clarifying Muddy Water

Why Ice is Superior to a Refrigerator

A Home-made Cooling System

Aerated Waters - Some Technical Considerations

Problems Facing the Milk-shake 1938

Moorhouse’s research has produced some snippets of knowledge which not only extend our senses of his hero, T. George McDowell’s concerns but also of the world he operates in.

A Skin Bleach for Blackfellows From a talk delivered to the Science Club in 1928 by John Brill, local pharmacist, titled “Solving the Problem of Coloured Races” (p 91).

Moorhouse’s whimsical approach sometimes makes us wonder if the historical documents we are being offered are that and not, at least in part, a product of his fancy. They are fascinating nevertheless – who could not be interested in the description of the stupefyingly successful writer of westerns Zane Grey’s luxurious ‘camp sites’ at Bermagui and Bateman’s Bay and to learn of the greatest disappointment of his life? [viii] The appeal of very human history to Moorhouse is evident in the ‘Fragments’ as it was in his need to celebrate the unionists’ banners in the City Voices article quoted above. Moorhouse was at his most innovative and in some ways (use of the ‘Fragments’, the photographs and illustrations, the folk verse and wisdom) experimental with The Electrical Experience. The ‘Fragments’ work well for him here, despite their tendency to quirkiness.

To go further into the dark reaches of the human spirit than he did in The Americans, Baby would have condemned Moorhouse to nothing but depictions of madness and suicide. It is a despairing volume. It were as if he had given up completely any hope of a valid new way of living for the ‘central members of the tribe’.

Dell, a sort of female version of Thomas of ‘What can you say’ in Futility … who had fled rural nothingness (Thomas was in flight from urban nothingness) and was taken up by Anderson of the Push, regresses from Kim her teacher boyfriend (we have met him amongst the Young Liberals in the Yacht Club) and life amongst Sydney’s radicals to her family’s squalid home in the bush. Escaping that on a Sunday morning she voices almost uncomprehendingly what she has heard amongst the Sydney radicals to the local Labour politician who has dropped into the pub to press the flesh. She is there with an ex-ex boyfriend (he is a local) she is considering stooping to marry. But she has wandered too far from home to settle for that and yet cannot now bear the idea of her city life. Her desperate return to her home town, site of endemic ignorance, her beer blotted father and fearful and angry mother allows her to acknowledge that she is pregnant.

The sobbing, yelling Carl is trammelled by all that he knows of himself and wants in a hopeless attraction to the American Paul. [ix]

“Why are we doing this?” he said, from the same bewilderment and guilt as before, though less savage. He folded his arm around a pillow knowing that he was going to stay the night.

“Calm now,” Paul said, rubbing his back. “Be calm. I guess this is the way it is with us” (‘The American, Paul Jonson’ p 22).

These characters are caught, unable to move from their old selves into a future. The volume slides along that teetering stasis.

Louise of Futility …who met the glamorous Marylou in the bar running away from yet another job and chief clerk Nish is in a worse way than Dell or Carl.

“I’m disintegrating,” she said.

…

“But I feel it – and it’s faster than it should be … it’s because I’m sick to death of living.”

…

Her skin was lifeless … Her skin was like that of a frog, he thought, a frog. Lifeless skin. It gave off stale perfume which attempted to give the body some artificial attractiveness. She now gave away the forced enthusiasm and collapsed to a sort of sexual apathy and was lying still in his arms. She moved under him and whispered, “Be quick,” and added. “I’m tired” (‘Five Incidents Concerning the Flesh and the Blood’ ‘The incident of the lifeless skin’ p 67).

Perhaps Moorhouse’s falling so heavily backwards into the outstretched arms of Whimsy was recoil from this exposed despair. [x]

Moorhouse the historian is at his best in the script for the film Between Wars (1974). This is the one moment when he does not resort to the defensive cynicism, the whimsicality, the quirkiness, the ostentatious worldliness that can impede respect for his work. Nor are there signs of playing to the ‘central members’ of his actual ‘tribe’, which his broader readership thus excluded, probably resented. As already suggested these features of his style are evident from the earliest days - even in his reportage

Five separate, and in some way conflicting, political themes manifested themselves at the Vietnam Committee’s Martin Place demonstration last week.

…

Some simply protested the war without taking an Anti-American or pro-Viet Cong position.

…

Another group (possibly from the Royal George Hotel) “sent-up” the demonstration.

Their posters read “We Love London”, “Mr Ed for Governor General”, “Ban Commo Fronts;” “Leave Martin Place to the Boy Scouts and Anzacs”.

A small group of Anarchists, including Jack Grancharoff, the editor of the Anarchist Journal “The Red and the Black”, carried a banner saying: “As Usual the bourgeoisie has God on its side” (‘Viet demo displays diversity’ City Voices Vol. 1 No 2 September 24, 1965 p 1 – punctuation reproduced as accurately as possible).

The seriousness of Moorhouse’s script for Between Wars suggests he was deeply committed to and utterly engaged with his material.

This film initiated a collaboration between Moorhouse and director/producer Michael Thornhill which was to extend to the dramatisation for television of the Azaria Chamberlain murder case – The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain (1983) and the film adaptation of The Everlasting Secret Family (1988) over which we will not pass in silence. [xi]

In Between Wars Moorhouse takes up his already established themes of conventional society suffocating questing spirits. However the focus is now clearly on the villainy of the Establishment, particularly the medical in collaboration with the legal profession, oppressing and abusing those socially inferior to themselves in the conservative cause (any ‘progress’ must be ‘cautious and painstaking’). The Establishment refuses to allow any investigation of the inner life of humans, brutally denies its existence. The army officers at the front in France during the First World War deny there is such a thing as ‘shell shock’, insisting it is cowardice. This attitude is official, reaching to infirmaries full of such patients sent back to England. Freud represents an immense threat to their sense of the decent, of indeed the human. The hero, Trenbow, a doctor, offers mild enough resistance to this and befriends a captured German doctor who has some knowledge of early psychoanalytic practice. Trenbow stands by as patients are infected with malaria as a therapy for syphilis and later, what I took to be the use of insulin therapy inflicted on the depressed. He is complicit in these (the former was illegal) experiments and helps cover them up. Though he is hardly a dangerous radical, the medical establishment is seriously threatened by him, most of all by his interest in psychotherapy. This may seem excessive to anyone not familiar with the role the Australian medical profession took in bolstering conservatism. Its influence on the Liberal governments can be observed in the immediate major changes made by the now very eager to represent himself as an Elder Statesman Malcolm Fraser to the social health care program Medibank. Medibank, a public health insurance scheme, had been established at great public expense by the progressive Whitlam Government. Fraser, upon toppling the Whitlam government, set about immediately to dismantle it, leaving a shell. [xii] The chief concerns of the Australian medical establishment of those days were always greed and prestige.

‘You would wish to associate yourself with progress’ Trenbow is informed with extreme disapproval by his professional peers when back in Australia. He retreats to that familiar Moorhouse territory, the New South Wales South Coast with his wife and child for a quiet life. We meet him there in several stories in Futility … (see ‘A Black, Black Birth’ and ‘George McDowell Delivers a Message to General Juan Garcia of the Cuban Army’ for example).

The South Coast does not afford him the peace he seeks. He becomes involved with a ‘co-op’ organised to help Depression-hit families, is now accused of becoming involved in ‘dangerous politics’ by his professional peers and some of the locals brand him a ‘commo’. The co-op fete at the local showground is attacked by the local New Guard (fascists). At her request he begins analysis of a good time city girl who has a go at playing havoc with his family life before analysis has cured her of her interest in radical politics (Trenbow tells her that her altruism and trenchant political interests are expressions of the aggression ‘we are not allowed to express in our childhood’) and presumably the ‘nymphomania’ which she had found troubling. Adjusted now, she becomes a Labour party functionary and staunch supporter of the War Effort in which roles she assists in the invasion and search of the Sydney mansion Trenbow has removed his family to in order to get them away from the conflicts on the South Coast. Back in Sydney he has involved himself in Pacifism. The film ends with Trenbow’s son, always resentful of his father’s hapless interventions for social justice and now a medical student, going off to fight the Japs/Germans as his father had the Germans twenty years previously.

Between Wars is a considerable achievement, even if beset by the ineptitude which came of inexperienced film-making and low budgets; it addresses the complexities of its turbulent period with clarity and force. It was resonant: Australia had pulled out of (been defeated in?) the disastrous Vietnam War two years before. The Conservatives were to be back in power in 1975, the year after its release but the sure hold they had had on the minds and spirits of Australians since the Second World War had been broken. Through this script Moorhouse explored the deadening, nasty and very determined forces which are so much a tacit background to the plight of his discontinuous narrative characters. While the historical evocation offers to some degree a simplification of the human travail depicted in the narratives, it also represented an opportunity to muster a forceful case in structural terms against twentieth century Australian conservatism. The film shows how distressed spirits are not just a symptom of individual weaknesses but are also signs of how the lesser members of human society may be battered by historical forces shaped by the powerful. With this script Moorhouse served his interests in history, the sociological and the psychological and their interplay most effectively.

The television docudrama Who Killed Baby Azaria? A Personal Narration by Frank Moorhouse directed by Judy Rymer and produced by Michael Thornhill (1983) also allowed Moorhouse an opportunity to explore the tensions between the emotional, spiritual and the rational schematically, that is in a way that the demands of more imaginative, creative fiction do not allow. A presence on screen, he presents a variety of differing approaches for coming to terms with the infanticide case which took on mythical dimensions in the Australian consciousness (Moorhouse calls it ‘a psychic drama’). The schema was to relate the events and cultural context of the case in terms of the ‘rational’ legal system as against the folk tales which sprang up around the two coroner’s inquests into the infanticide and the subsequent trial of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain and Lindy’s imprisonment. This T V drama was produced before the dramatic chance discovery of the matinee jacket in 1986 during a search for possible missing bones of an English tourist who had fallen to his death from Uluru into an area full of dingo lairs. Mrs Chamberlain was immediately released, then exonerated and paid considerable compensation. The missing matinee jacket had been crucial to her case. Moorhouse is careful to attribute neither guilt nor innocence to Lindy Chamberlain in the drama though the repulsiveness of the prosecuting lawyer in contrast to the reasoning mildness of the defence lawyer, the bunglings of the police involved and the arrogant and misguided certainties of the expert witnesses called by the prosecution sway the viewer towards reconsidering the case. At the time, most Australians, the press and it seems the forensic-judicial system were convinced of Lindy Chamberlain’s guilt. Moorhouse shows us how the irrational took possession of Australian minds. People were convinced that ‘Azaria’ meant ‘sacrifice in the wilderness’ (it actually means ‘blessed of God’) and that the memorial cairn the Chamberlains had erected near the site of their daughter’s disappearance was an aspect of a blood ritual. The Chamberlains were Seventh Day Adventists; rumours sprang up about this denomination’s religious rites. Moorhouse takes pains to explain how the site itself (Uluru/Ayers Rock) played a very significant role in charging the case with its mythic load. It is the site of an Aboriginal legend about a killer dingo, it is surrounded by rock shelters and caves, one of which was known as the ‘Fertility Cave’ (Lindy Chamberlain fell pregnant during the second Coroner’s inquest and was near full term during her trial). Archetypes were invoked and according to Moorhouse a ‘chain of unreachable end’ (one with no authority) and a ‘chain of impeccable authority’ (one in which someone knew someone who knew the Chamberlains and said … ) bound minds to the irrational where the rational, empirical had failed to provide satisfactory accounts. This type of nomenclature is characteristic of his attempts to systematise the ‘strange, subterranean life’ which we so often wish to deny. He attempted to expose the hidden currents of the drama as folk history in the making. The elements of this folk history are familiar to us from the use of the ‘Fragments’ in The Electrical Experience. Though these ‘historical’ insights may appear fanciful to some in the context of the Azaria Chamberlain - a dingo’s got my baby case, they have little of the whimsy which colours the ‘Fragments’. It is clear that a strong sense of ‘the folk’ informs Moorhouse’s understanding of history. Through this sense of ‘folk’ he reaches for the archetypes he detects at work in the Chamberlain myth and case: fear of infanticide, fear that children will be stolen, fear of evil spirits represented by the Aboriginal myth of the killer dingo, blood sacrifices of children and fear of wicked mothers and stepmothers.

He seems to be at his steadiest in scripting historical themes. Who Killed Baby Azaria? A Personal Narration by Frank Moorhouse goes further into the dark reaches of the psyche than Between Wars. Moorhouse balances this exploration well with the conflicted and difficult forensic/judicial aspects of the narrative-now history.

He runs aground on archetypes in The Everlasting Secret Family. The film adaptation is a cult favourite for its awfulness. Right wing conservatism is associated with unconventional sexual practice. The implication is that only the rich can afford these erotic luxuries. Despite the triumph of ‘the everlasting secret family’ of dark sexual pleasure seekers, Moorhouse seems to be still trying in part to shrug off leftist homophobia which up until the seventies was inclined to dismiss homosexuality as a decadence which social reform would eradicate. We were assured there was no homosexuality in the Soviets or Cuba. While the exploration undertaken in ‘The Everlasting Secret Family’ (a novella in the eponymous volume) is extensive, it also veers towards hysteria. The novella poses a challenge to ways of reading – is it myth, erotic narration, an exploration of politico-sexuality or a complex rendering of all of that and more? The members of Moorhouse’s ‘tribe’ had been interested in the psychoanalytic-Marxist theories and practices of Wilhelm Reich; his influence also informs this novella.

The persona is not quite a character: he reflects on his situation in an authorial voice. Let us say he is a mask which narrates and illuminates. Moorhouse has some difficulty always in giving his characters their own idiom. All three characters: the demon lover, his slave and the demon lover’s son tend to use the same voice. But this is not the basic problem with ‘The Everlasting Secret Family’ – that lies in its overarching claims for archetypal patterns, in its blatancy

… I was joined to a line through history which went back to the first primitive tribal person who went my way, who took a virgin boy lover, and every lover, through to Socrates. I had played a part now in the continuation of that chain. I had played my first part as a child in becoming a man’s lover. I had now played my second part. I now belonged fully in that historical line. It was a way of passing on and preserving the special reality, a way of giving new life, the birth for the boy of new reality, a joining of him to a secret family, the other family. To belong to that chain is to belong to another life (p 204)

and in the simple incredulity it excites (an archetype must surely resonate immediately?) The most generous way to read this novella is probably as gothic horror. Its claims are too exaggerated to be taken very seriously and its revelation of an ‘archetype’ fatally overexposed. We are perplexed and overwhelmed when the demon lover’s son R is revealed to be taking oestrogen

He is fourteen now, with some soft facial hair, perhaps he would be shaving were it not for the oestrogen which he chooses to take, has long, groomed hair of the fashion now passing, which his sister and mother praise and brush.

…

But he is rugged in the Australian private-school way. although at the window of his face a dandy – and sometimes a lady – appear now and then (p 206).

Moorhouse, who boasted of ‘learning his masculinity in the Boy Scouts’ seems unhinged by a confusion between gender and sexuality. When he finally finds the strength to address his fears he is released into his most fluid, flexible, evocative, extensive and appealing writing. Like David Malouf, he was a little too old (being born in 1945 is about the cut-off point, both were born before then) not personally remarkable enough and too entwined in the Establishment to have properly embraced the liberation on offer. Whatever excuses we make for both these writers the term quisling comes to mind. While he could never be charged with being a ‘gay writer’ tribute must be paid to Moorhouse’s embracing male gay or homosexual characters and their situations. [xiii] For a brief moment no other Australian writer could touch him in this kind of depiction.

The novella came out in 1980, a year after Patrick White’s foolish attempt to address (and avoid) in The Twyborn Affair the issues which were being ferociously raised by Gay Liberation in Sydney where both lived. Let us just say both writers failed to grasp the nettle in these works – The Twyborn Affair and ‘The Secret Everlasting Family’. Moorhouse was influenced by straights whose response to homosexuality was an affectation of weary mocking indulgence (underneath lay a real savagery which Moorhouse knew well from his other explorations of conservative forces). He was a great friend of the infamously homophobic Don Anderson whom he seemed to regard as a mentor (see ‘The Poet and the Motor Car’ Days of Wine and Rage pp 156 -158). The trivialising by Moorhouse in ‘The Poet and the Motor Car’ is utterly characteristic of his inner tribe. One thinks particularly of the men: Donald Horne, Michael Wilding, John Tranter and Anderson for example.

Moorhouse wrote a film adaptation of the novella which was realised on screen in 1987. Michael Thornhill again directed and also produced. Part of what makes the film so bad is that it is so clearly a straight man’s longing fantasy of gay life - all luxury, indolence, youthful beauty, imaginative erotic indulgence, taste and good manners all burnished to numbing dullness. Audiences shriek at the gay parties in the film The Everlasting Secret Family. There are repeated lingering shots on Mark Lee’s curvaceous bum (Lee was far too old for the part as was Paul Goddard who plays the demon lover’s son – he is supposed to be fourteen turning fifteen). ‘Real’ deviancy is attributed to a mature Japanese man who is doing something with a crab to a screaming Mark Lee behind closed doors. 1987 was far too late for all of that. Moorhouse’s continued longing to learn ways of comporting himself in the world of prestige and power bleeds through every scene. The film makes very clear that homosexuality would make entry into that world in any public way impossible. The film ends with a triumphant paean by the youth. A star-filled night sky then a long shot with the three Secret Family Members entering a Dark Wood introduces us to the youth’s Voice/Over telling us that he had played a trick with the Everlasting Secret Family, that he had played a trick with Time. He has found a place, an order, a ranking which had no name and which had within it endless dark possibilities. The dramatic plunge to final black is accompanied by a melodramatic clashing instrumental chord. Cop out.

Through the eighties Moorhouse gave rein to his whimsicality in a number of magazine articles and collections. Their sparkle threw occasional dark shadows, cold, disturbing and in risky taste (humour is risky).

In Lucerne I went to a Hard Work Display (Arbeit Macht Frei). The Swiss are good workers and proud of it … (‘Blase in the Land if Swizzlestick Hard Work Display’ Room Service p 37).

The freedom to be funny did not necessarily allow him to rise above his tendency to stereotyping

I did the one-day American Express tour of Sodom which was full of Australian hairdressers. I was told I’d have to organise the trip to Onan myself (‘Hiltonia’ Room Service p 21).

Perhaps though his readers found the stereotyping a confirmation of their sophistication and the allusiveness reassuring of their being educated.

Moorhouse relies on allusiveness for much of his wit. It tends to the abstruse, making one think that perhaps he had a specific readership in mind – ‘the central members of the tribe’ and those who wanted to be, perhaps. He abandons his persona of Francois Blase, world roving journalist reporting back to Chief (Blase’s editor) in ‘An Incident from the Wake for Jack Kerouac’ to depict amongst the usual dangerous gaiety of tribe parties the florescence of a paranoid episode

‘Someone’s playing games with me and I don’t like it.’ Wesley’s brother said, standing away not only from Milton, but from us all, staring from one face to another angrily.

Wesley’s brother is a robust sort of poet, but prone to paranoia.

The misty, alcoholic glee had blown away from around us, leaving a bright, fluorescent kitchen glare.

‘It’s not a game – the way you tame an eagle is to keep him tired.’

I was surprised that Milton kept repeating that phrase when it obviously was pressing on a nerve.

Wesley’s brother screamed again, putting his hands over his ears, ‘Don’t say that! Don’t say that!’

‘Anyone for telephones?’ Bunnny Stockwell- Anderson said, soft-shoeing it, or soft-socking it through the kitchen.

…

‘What about the ping pong ball?’ Wesley’s brother said with cold seriousness, all hysteria swallowed from his voice.

...

Wesley’s brother turned to me and said, in answer to my laugh, that someone had been bouncing a ping pong ball in the flat above his, keeping it up through the night in a steady beat, ‘When I get out of bed and go up to the flat above to complain it stops. I go back to my flat and get into bed and it starts again’ (Room Service pp 134 – 135).

Like Garner, Moorhouse takes risks in employing configurations (let us say) of people known to be known to him. Perhaps he, like her, needs to take his characters more or less directly from the life around him. He seems to derive more pleasure from this than she – her tone has a bass note of grim determination; his a bass note of existential angst above which sparkle the quirkiness, mischief and often dazzling allusiveness. He seems to revel in the cleverness of roman à clef exposure. Still, no-one seemed to complain. It was often as if Moorhouse were trying to flatter the friends and acquaintances so employed in the service of his art. One imagines certain types would be ‘chuffed’ to be represented in fiction which focussed on characters who, whatever their cares for social justice, were evidently superior. [xiv] Moorhouse also seems to relish a kind of obsequiousness, no doubt the obverse of the rather grand manner with which he favours the world. It is revealed most clearly in the dedications – ‘To Susie Carleton, friend, patron of the arts’ (Room Service), ‘For Don and Elisabeth, friends and patrons’ (Days of Wine and Rage), ‘To Murray and Meredith Sime, - friends and patrons of the arts’ (Lateshows) … Australians do not have ‘patrons’. He acknowledges indebtedness to ‘The Moorhouse Estate left by my father and mother, Frank Osborne and Purthanry Thames Moorhouse, administered by Arthur Moorhouse’ (Dark Palace). Perhaps this is Moorhouse’s way of expressing appreciation to those who have allowed him to bludge off them. He has garnered a great sum over the years from the various forms of the literature board of the Australian Council and film bodies.

From the earliest he seems to have had a clear idea of how the relationship between what/whoever and subsidising the arts should be

“Firstly, I don’t like the idea of the State becoming the direct employer of creative people, I feel that consumers of creative work should be the people who directly reward the creator.” He laughed. “If he’s wanted, he should be kept.” (‘Bull it seems is quite an improper word …’ Natalie Scott talks to Frank Moorhouse The Australian Saturday May 24 1969 p 101).

He is at pains to present himself or his personae (who in the end could tell the difference?) en haut even while travelling incognito as an innocent ever ready to learn from the decadent, wicked and well informed of the world – the grand. The de bas are obviously his ‘fringe dweller’ readers. He seems most determined to distance himself from them. In Room Service he exhibits his great familiarity with Hilton Hotels from here to Tel Aviv, taking in New York along the way; he speaks of ‘Clubs’ and the bars of famous hotels; mentions his residencies in Kings College Cambridge, at the University of Texas, Griffith University’s School of Arts on the Gold Coast, St Andrews College, University of Sydney … All of that was no doubt part of his fascination for the gaping us. However, he did regale us for too long about wining and dining in France. We can also detect the centrality of these pleasures to his being from the earliest

I’m enjoying eating and wine more than ever and my social life is more that sort of social life. Some of the push seem to share my interest too – a new concern with gracious living. We’re holding a formal banquet next month – ten courses black tie – and not as a send up. It’s hard to believe but it shows you we’re growing up.

We organised a poetry and prose reading for yesterday but it rained and we postponed it (letter to Michael Wilding 08/09/68 p 6). [xv]

Moorhouse’s work reveals an unending quest for worldliness. At its best this takes the form of exploring new ways of being, revealing the anguish of living new amongst the constraints of what and who formed one. At its worst it is a parading of sophisticated modes. His concern tends to be for manners, not morals; appearance, not integrity.

Perhaps the holding of a martini glass is part of our own ‘gesturalism’, and becomes part of our own image when we are seated in a bar holding a martini – what I call the affiliation awareness in the drinking of a martini. Perhaps, when holding a martini, we are fleetingly relocated into a scene composed of all the films, cartoons and books from which we have learned of the martini – perhaps we become part of a psychological image not of our own making, but one we’ve earned the right to inhabit if our attitude to life and to the martini are right (Martini A memoir pp 83 – 4). [xvi]

As his work developed it became increasingly difficult to know when he wanted us to take him seriously; this serves him ill: his reader suspects him of levity as an evasive response to the demands of rigour. Times were to come when he wanted us to take him very seriously indeed.

Grand Days is an even more astonishing advance in Moorhouse’s art than Honour & Other People’s Children had been in Garner’s. Moorhouse had seemed to be floundering in the shallows. It is a large novel embracing a large theme, a theme which had haunted modern history but which has now been relegated, as only History can, to a curious episode: the failure of the League of Nations. Cynicism has led us not to wonder why it failed: we hardly know what idealism is. Over to you Economic Rationalism. Moorhouse captures our now impossible relation to the League very well in the novel’s Frontispiece by quoting Emery Kellen (Peace in Their Time)

‘… all its grandeur has no power to sway us now, and all its misery cannot serve to teach us’.

While Grand Days is more about Edith Campbell Berry than the League, idealism glows through the endeavours of both organisation and heroine. Edith is a proper servant of the League.

Moorhouse seems to be announcing a resolution of all his work through this novel (and the two associated Palais des Nations novels). The arrival of (now simply) George McDowell in Geneva suggests a concatenation of the discontinuous narrative beyond which Moorhouse has now moved. It transpires that McDowell knew Edith on the South Coast. There is an erotic charge between them whereas T. George and the erotic did not seem to be on speaking terms. But this George McDowell is different from T. George – he is conceivable as a partner for Edith Campbell Berry (we seem to be in 1928, five years after T. George’s epiphanic experience of the St Louis Rotary Convention). The now suave and simply George McDowell is in Geneva on a mission (to liaise with the League on behalf of Rotary) and, as Edith is to note, is successful. More than the T have been dropped: McDowell is now subtle and worldly in a way which was completely beyond his comprehension back on the South Coast (he claims he is still ‘shy’ – as we know from the prologue to this essay he is still to be ‘dogged’ by this in 1936)). Moorhouse allows Edith a last glimpse of him which is triumphant

Edith’s last view of him was in the Captain’s cabin, having the controls explained to him, and then waving to her. It seemed to her he captained the boat out.

She smiled away a tear of affection for him and for patrie, for her dying mother (p 240).

George McDowell at the controls is a disturbing image (though evidently for neither Edith Campbell Berry nor Moorhouse); the rest is sentimental.

Moorhouse’s somewhat fulsome Thanks might suggest he was consciously embracing a larger prospect for his art than ever before

I thank the Australian people, who, through the Creative Fellowship Program and other agencies, made this book possible.

In particular, I thank the then Chairman of the Australian (sic? – Australia?) Council, Donald Horne, who with the then Australian Treasurer, Paul Keating, had the vision and will to set up the Creative Fellowship Program. [xvii]

The novel, grand though it is amongst Moorhouse’s other fiction, does not escape his characteristic manoeuvres. He cannot leave Edith Berry any kind of innocent: fellow League of Nations staffer, Major Ambrose Westwood (an army doctor like Trenbow of Between the Wars and considerably older than Edith Berry who is twenty-six)) is the agent of her increasing loss of innocence. [xviii] He inducts her into this novel’s secret everlasting family of sexual sophisticates. Once a member, Edith cannot return to the world of the more ordinary struggling League of Nations staff members. This is both triumph and exile though the former easily wins out.

Recoiling from her induction Edith prepares to unite herself with Robert Dole of fertile stock, resolutely masculine and well hung (of course)

[Edith reflects while preparing for dinner with Dole …] She was not going to be Bohemian any more in life. She wanted to have a decorous life (p 482).

However she appears to have been ruined by Ambrose for the ‘decorous’ life (the inadequacy of the epithet speaks to her confusion).

Moorhouse’s account of Edith’s ‘Sapphic’ experience is melodramatic and characteristically stereotypic: Edith’s female erotic interest is dressed all in beaded green (Serpent Woman) and turns out to be corrupt – the agent of an agent of arms dealers (‘perhaps a truly evil woman’ p 390). We could not really have expected better of him.

Ambrose’s induction of Edith into ‘dark wisdom’ had begun on the Paris to Geneva train during luncheon in the dining car. Moorhouse makes much of the menu, as he would. On the whole the historical detail in the novel is impressive, complex if not profoundly informing, and the great significance of the novel’s ostensible theme – the failure of the League of Nations – seems to mitigate Moorhouse’s propensity to indulge his whims for abstruse historical research (though evidence of idiosyncratic interests far pursued abounds). Despite these usual quirks an aura of reverence for the subject matter hovers over this novel as it had over the script for Between Wars which embraces the same period. Moorhouse maintains a steady sense of the historical context, integrating it very well as part of the texture of the narrative based on Edith’s career and life in Geneva as a staff member of the League of Nations. The difficulties the Kellogg-Briand Pact pose for the international community and the League beset her relationship with Dole for example. Robert Dole grasps the significance of the news from Berlin he has left their dinner table to take – the National Socialists have had 107 deputies elected as against their twelve representatives in the previous Reichstag – Edith does not, pondering in personal terms his taking the call.

During the luncheon with Ambrose Westwood (it was Edith’s ‘first lunch in a railway dining car’) Edith puts up a battle for (conversational) supremacy [xix] but stands no chance against the allure of male sexuality (a characteristic dynamic in Moorhouse). Ambrose drops the name of Vyvyan Wilde who belongs to his Club. Edith is his before the train reaches Geneva.

Despite the familiarity of these characteristic interests and manoeuvres there is a flexibility, flow, an amplitude and most of all a warmth in the writing in Grand Days that is of an entirely different order from what the reader has encountered in Moorhouse before. Not only has the grand historical theme focussed his historical interests, having a very clever, questing, gallant female character as a medium for his explorations, has ennobled his fiction. Moorhouse’s personal investment in Edith Berry is clear. She represents his beloved South Coast of New South Wales (Berry is a town in that region – actually Edith comes from Jaspers Brush but that is near Berry), she is determined to be worldly, already armed and poised with the sort of T. George McDowell maxims which opened this essay. She clings to these in the hope they will allow her to a least hold her own in the wider world and not least in the eternal war of the sexes fought this time against Major Ambrose Westwood over that six course luncheon in the dining car.

Maybe she’d been successful by her code, had dared to go to a new place in ideas. She’d been fearfully close to a blunder, a blunder could not be claimed as a manoeuvre (p 21).

There seems to be no critical distance at all in Moorhouse’s handling of Edith’s games playing ‘codes’, ‘manoeuvres’ and maxims; one begins to wonder if there had been any in the depiction of T. George McDowell’s also. She, like Moorhouse himself, seems to have no sense of the limits, the deadening limits, of this sense of the overwhelming importance of comportment.

She has ideals, principles, knows how to act in challenging situations and is not afraid to stoop to experience. She is both dedicated and adaptive and hungry for life. She is an almost fabulously responsive tabula rasa. No wonder Ambrose is almost as taken by her as she by him. Moorhouse has found his way into a character and situation which meet his almost antithetical desires - for historical perspective, personal interests, guarded and pragmatic idealism, decadence – the experience of the ‘dark side’ of the erotic, Australian freshness and enthusiasm and European or American worldliness, prestigious positioning amongst the Establishment with a regard for the socially and economically needy of this world (whom as always he keeps at a great distance). Moorhouse has found fulfilment in the character of Edith Campbell Berry. She gives generously to this, his most expansive in every way book. She is noble

[Ambrose quotes Wilde to the effect that going to a whore is ‘like eating chewed mutton’. Edith responds …] I find it rather appalling, that a man of alleged higher sensibilities should speak that way of another human being, a forlorn person, that he should speak that way of an encounter … (p 20).

It is her magnanimity that validates the ‘grand’ Moorhouse has attached to the book and it is that quality that makes her venturing heroic and even touching. She can also represent the foolish defensive snobbishness Moorhouse is prone to

She was, after all, well-bred. The bag was an object of ancestry (p 4).

Ambrose Westwood too seems a liberation. Epicene, transvestite, an adventurer and sybarite, he allows Moorhouse a relaxed confidence of exploration which is at a remove from the more usual perilous sallyings forth of his adventurous characters. Different though he is, Ambrose must, in the characteristic Moorhouse dynamic, break down. It is a male thing. Aspiring women lose the battle of the sexes, giving up everything in the hope of a good root; aspiring men break down. We have observed this character trajectory from the earliest (Futility and other animals) – how the self-assured mentor Jimmy Anderson appals his protégé from the desolating suburbs Thomas by breaking down. Even high jinxing Blase breaks down but is restored (presumably) by transferring to a Hilton (see ‘Convalescence’ in Room Service. High stepping out of line Ambrose must be brought low too. And is. Ambrose breaks down; Edith marries Robert Dole (the name is perfect).

However she discovers she prefers much about Ambrose Westwood including his ‘Cupid’s bow’ penis, infertility and tits (how tedious they become). This is an aspect of the increasing dilemma she faces as we enter Dark Palace, the second of the proposed Palais des Nations trilogy.

She was now prepared to sacrifice Robert, in some sense. She would, if necessary, sacrifice him for her vocation … Her vocation was her nature … she would not sacrifice the marriage. She would stick with that (Dark Palace p 50).

Despite the paradoxical – the term is not strong enough – despite the antithetical nature of the League itself: idealism underswept by the utmost of cynical machinations, there had been a triumphant ring to Grand Days. The novel resonates with a triumphalism not least to be found in Moorhouse’s tacit assumption that he is at last undertaking subject matter befitting him and for which he is at last prepared after four decades of work. Grand Days is flush with faith, despite the difficult diplomatic work which must be painstakingly undertaken, in what the League can offer, flush with enthusiasm and success. As the proposed trilogy is about the failure of the League of Nations, only disillusionment can follow. More than that, this edifice of idealism must collapse: not only disillusionment but dissolution is inevitable. It will be intriguing to see if Moorhouse can locate Edith Campbell Berry in any context where her abilities and experience can operate in any effective way (one suspects an unsatisfactory life and career in Canberra, a retreat to the South Coast and a somewhat baffled retirement farming in the southern Highlands for the third of the volumes).

It was over, this uncomfortable domesticity with its disfigured sexuality. For the indefinite future, at least ...

She felt an urgent burning need to unburden herself to Ambrose.

To tell him she’d flunked her marriage (Dark Palace p 80).

Edith herself seems to be in dissolution. She has ricocheted from Ambrose Westwood and ‘the Bohemian’, to Robert Dole and the ‘decorous’ onto ‘uncomfortable domesticity with its disfigured sexuality’. This leaves her, as she has glimpsed, with her vocation. Contraception has played a part in the ‘disfiguring’ but most of all neither Edith nor Robert wanted to be tied to ‘this domesticity’, both feel it trammels them. Dole seems to want Edith because one must have a presentable or, better still, admirable wife and as a base from which he can venture forth on his reportage, that is he wants a caretaker for his things and a housekeeper to keep the place ready and warm for him when he is ready to return, a hostess and escort who will be admired as distinguée. Moorhouse seems to be moving here towards a recognition of the limits of comportment, of the value of worldly prestige but more significantly Edith’s schema are unravelling in concert with the League. Dole, she decides, ‘hadn’t deserved the deeper truths of her life’ (p 86). Unfortunately these are merely the ‘dark ways’ Ambrose had encouraged her to explore. They are few (two in essence) and both sexual. Edith’s plight begins to ring with the hollowness of melodrama.

Moorhouse offers a series of grand scenes in Dark Palace which evoke the hastening dissolution of the League. Despite their contribution to a sense that this novel is somewhat prolix, they give powerful insight into this process and the effect the coming of Hitler’s War had on the organisation. One of the most striking of these is the ‘winter picnic’ for the Delegates to the Disarmament Conference. This is a wonderful invention. Poverty stricken, mutilated Great War veterans turn up to enjoy the food, wine and being cared for. Edith’s generosity (she is using an inheritance from her mother to pay for the picnic), experience and wisdom are undone. Miss Royden, a strident female pacifist repudiates Edith’s intentions stating ‘ … we are here for one thing only: pacifism – the end of all armies and weapons. Now and forever’. She and many others turn their backs on Edith during her speech. It is clear these people are entirely misguided in their determined idealism and that their plans for intervention if war is not completely and immediately outlawed are foolishly unrealistic. Edith’s magnanimous gesture ends in disarray, having achieved little beyond the momentary comfort of a few grotesquely neglected war veterans who barely, if at all, understood its purpose.

So too the League will sink under the weight of its ambitions, undermined by the forces who come to Geneva to exploit and manipulate it for their own self-interested and base or unrealistic ends and the diplomatic parrying which will stifle the implementation of its plans.

The Disarmament Conference is a failure.

Dissolution is a beautiful and fascinating process in Dark Palace. Prolixity and a pace close to tedious at times seem worthwhile for the variety of insights and connections we make with the League in its failing. The historical texture is dense and very well worked into Edith’s fortunes: her returning to the ‘shameless’, her promotion to League Liaison Officer to the Committee of Five (she works closely with the debonair Sir Anthony Eden), her neglect of her grooming, her increasing love of drinking and then the terrible diplomatic gaff of dropping a glass of champagne on the feet of Deputy Secretary Frank Walters (an incident of intensely serious concern in Moorhouse’s account – either such it was or Moorhouse is indulging his sense of the value of comportment) and her calling on Ambrose’s psychoanalyst Dr Vittoz for help. Moorhouse engrosses us in the synthesised fortunes of the League, his heroine and his idiosyncratic interests.

Dark Palace turns back towards his earlier work. Edith returns to Australia (she finds the bush simply appalling … grasping and twisted; she is reading Kangaroo), Jasper’s Brush, her widowed and failing father and a profoundly dissatisfied George McDowell who now wants to desert his wife Thelma who ‘drives him mad’ in order to attain ‘a bigger life. A much bigger life’ (p 293) in which ambition he sees Edith playing a major role. In this revisiting we discover no semblance of the contemporaneous T. George we had encountered in The Electrical Experience. [xx] However Dark Palace does not offer enough material to suggest the extent and manner of Moorhouse’s shift in attitude (always guarded) towards T. George/George McDowell.

Edith is momentarily attracted to the idea of a sexual encounter with McDowell in order for her ‘To be on track as a woman’ (p 297). Will she, one wonders, have a late life child in the third volume (and with whom?). Moorhouse can hardly have her advancing through middle age still bothered by increasingly inappropriate and always irrelevant notions of womanhood. One doubts she will turn lesbian, strongly though the proposition puts itself to her after her fight and reconciliation with close friend Jeanne back in Geneva. Moorhouse is at last able to give lesbianism a human potential, if only in passing.

Edith finds Australia ‘unfinished’. Particularly Canberra which she visits in order to make connections and open up possible directions for her future (her divorce will have had to come through as married women were not employed full time in the public service until 1966). Her return is greeted with hostility and resentment, not surprisingly by Thelma McDowell but also by an old Women’s College friend who is now attracted to Mussolini; Edith has left them far behind – what is she doing back? She finds the rooms in the home McDowell boasts of having designed meanly proportioned and the ceilings low. Is it possible that she could find any kind of satisfactory life in post war Australia? In contrast to the six course luncheon en route from Paris to Geneva on the train to the South Cosst

She had declined the refreshment service and spread out her own picnic to the rather amused glances of the few others who occupied her section.

She remembered enough about travel outside the cities in Australia to know that to eat well, one had to be gastronomically self-reliant … fresh fruit, leg ham, English mustard, Bodalla cheese ([the South Coast is a cheese region, this is one of the better-known] which she had yearned for in Geneva – and bread, albeit of doubtful quality (p 261).

The physical fight with Jeanne leaves her with ‘A feeling too, that it was part of the total disintegration of things round them’ (p 471).

To some degree too Moorhouse’s writing is in dissolution. The ‘narratives’ are now continuous in their pursuit of a declared theme and there is a return to the invention and originality we discovered in his very earliest work (though not the intensity and grittiness which would not in any case be appropriate in this context). The maxims, still irritating, are integrated into prose and dialogue flow (Edith notes modesty kills conversation and, apropos of McDowell and the house he designed, so does boasting). Before she leaves Australia she rallies at the last possible moment to face down the disillusionment expressed by a university audience invited to hear her talk on the League. She returns to the platform to offer a spirited account of the advantages and disadvantages of sanctions (always one of her favoured projects); this wins the audience.

In another remarkable scene she and her Women’s College friend encounter Scraper another old university associate whom they do not recognise because he has been disfigured in action in the Great War. Edith is able to meet this sophisticated and experienced man on his own terms and accede to his sexual demand with dignity and some degree of respect because, one feels, of her knowledge of erotic. In his turn, he is able to do her a favour.

The League has been reduced to good works, the Disarmament Conference, sanctions and armed intervention all having failed. As the Second World War engulfs it, it is reduced to a spectre (Moorhouse describes it as a ‘nucleus’). The nucleus struggles on despite suspicion and hostility – even from the Swiss who fear its presence in Geneva might provoke Hitler to invade as he had other neutral territories. Ambrose’s transvestite etc escape the Molly Club has taken on a layered clandestine role – it now provides forged papers for literal escapes. It is there that a homosexual German refugee brings news of the round-ups back home. Dieter remains somewhat one of Moorhouse’s stereotypes – one wanted a little glow of the individual in him, couldn’t he have had an interest in alpine flowers, say? – but in the rush of denouement there is little to complain of – he is generally disapprobative and one doesn’t really doubt he would have been otherwise. Edith is able to convey news of the Nazi persecutions to London by means of her association with Sir Anthony Eden. Moorhouse shows her in all her experience and power accomplishing the difficult feat. And we learn that even the rounding-up of the Jews is not being taken very seriously in London. Further, he complicates the matter well by having Ambrose debase himself through an encounter with the mercenary Dieter: history and hapless peccadillo.

The narrative concerning the attempt to secure papers and the means of escape from France for James Joyce and his institutionalised daughter Lucia into Switzerland is interesting in itself as well as being illustrative of the undercover work some League operatives were now undertaking; it is also somewhat of a digression, reminding us of Moorhouse’s somewhat unruly need to share his idiosyncratic interests with readers.

And it is a relief from the darkness engulfing the Palace.

History is the darkness, it is relegating the living, the aspirant to withered dreams.

The rest is not quite tragedy. Moorhouse enacts the celebratory birth of the U N from the shadows of the League. The old League Internationalists are deliberately and insultingly sidelined or omitted altogether from the proceedings – Edith can think of ‘no manoeuvre’ which can save them from being excluded (has Moorhouse at last reached the limits in his faith in ‘manoeuvres’?).

Dark Palace concludes in intense poignancy: the novel’s characters, historical or imaginary

This book is, in part, based on the dramatic reconstruction of real people, identified by their actual names, and on fictional characters who sometimes embody features of people who existed at the time, but who are essentially fictional (see ‘Who is Who’ …). Where people who actually existed say anything substantial, their words are taken from documentary sources.

All historical and politically substantial events depicted (and quite a few of the insubstantial events) are inspired by documentary sources.

But the book is, above all, a work of imagination (prolegomenon to Grand Days)

are now shadows flitting or threading through that historical curiosity.

Dark Palace enacts the spiritual schema of Moorhouse’s discontinuous narratives: confusion, sickness, bravery, birth. It seems Edith must undergo some sort of birth in the third of the Palais des Nations novels – rebirth, child?

America seems to be a site of Birth (we might recall the effect the St Louis Rotary Convention of 1923 had on T. George McDowell) as well as power and effectiveness. In a bar in the Algonquin Hotel in New York Edith had been able at last to repudiate Robert Dole thus heralding a new life for herself. She and other League functionaries travel to San Francisco to participate in the United Nations Conference. The post war organisation the United Nations is born from their confusion, sickness and bravery.

Dark Palace won the Miles Franklin in 2001. Moorhouse himself thought this was an attempt to make restitution because Grand Days had not won in 1994 because its Australian content had been deemed insufficient. The controversy this provoked led to a change of the judging guard for the Miles Franklin Literary Award (considered conservative, entrenched and narrow in their understanding of the Australian content requirement). This may be so but the strength or otherwise of the other candidates and the clarity of the judges’ decision were surely also factors. Despite its prolixity, the integration of history and character narrative is managed tellingly and originally, it has subtle dark tonal qualities and seems to embrace the rest of the Moorhouse oeuvre in ways that at least hint at the development of his vision and techniques. It is a more psychologically complex book than Grand Days. Dark Palace is a novel, which makes history only too human and moving.

Moorhouse won a Walkley Award for social equity journalism and the Alfred Deakin Prize for the best essay contributing to public debate for his long essay published in The Griffith Review Edition 14 2006 ‘The Writer in a Time of Terror’. It is a good, solid and probing, timely essay, written when Australia and much of the western world were experiencing increasingly restrictive legislation which exploited fear of terrorist attacks. The legislation enacted in these conditions encouraged bureaucratic/policing responses in various forms of roundings-up of likely suspects (this did occur in Australia, Moorhouse’s essay takes fifteen of such cases as starting points to further his analyses and arguments). Concomitant with this fear, and exploiting it, was an increase in the moral panic Australia seems forever prey to. This was encouraged by church leaders, xenophobes, the philistine and ignorant righteous whose numbers include prominent politicians of both major political parties (such a the current Liberal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and the Labour Party’s Kevin Rudd – the latter born Catholic now Anglican – both, it must be emphasised, notable philistines and unable to move their moral thinking beyond their childhood indoctrinations).

Freedoms of expression were being (again) curtailed.

Moorhouse invokes his own history as a victim of ‘Cold War’ censorship (see examples in the letters to Michael Wilding quoted earlier in this piece), contrasting this with the situation now where the ‘sexual revolution’ (surely this is just a trope, as he has shown in his discontinuous narratives, for a whole societal shift?) as an issue has been supplanted by xenophobias of various shades and degrees – religious, ethnic and simply, as he says, ‘not belonging to the mainstream’ (this is particularly weak on his behalf). He points out that in the three major cases fought in Australia over freedom of speech in the last fifty years, none of those whose rights were so fought for have respect themselves for freedom of speech – the Communists, the Islamists and fundamentalist Christians.

He is not afraid to return to basics: why should we value freedom of speech?

Maxim: Restricting freedom of expression mimics the enemy: it is bad politics.

Remind me, why do we defend free speech?

“Freedom of expression is may be described as the freedom par excellence; for without it no other freedom could survive,” Enid Campbell and Harry Whitmore wrote in Freedom in Australia (Sydney University Press, 1966).

Curiosities of free speech

Writing this essay has led me to discover what I called the curiosities of free speech, and there I owe a debt to the perverse thinking of Stanley Fish.

Is free speech really part of the Western tradition and heritage in the way we proclaim? Why do we claim that it is “part of the Western tradition” when we are still arguing about it and fighting for it? Is it what our forebears fought and died for? Were they fighting for sexually explicit free expression at Gallipoli? For the right to be blasphemous? Was it ever a war aim? Was it the driving motivation of those fighting world wars or other conflicts? [Stanley Fish wrote an essay ‘There is No Such Thing as Free Speech’ 1992 Oxford University Press].

And reveals the despicable (straight out of Animal Farm) confusions proffered by the Howard Government of the time he is writing

Defending his new restrictive laws, Attorney-General Ruddock turned this around when he said (and the Prime Minister has said this too): “The most important liberty is life.”

Life is not usually defined as a “liberty” but a pre-condition of “rights” – that is, for negotiated “living arrangements” of people in society once they have life.

Fear of terrorist attack cannot be used as a single, overriding arbiter of all national policy.

He does not flout the basic difficulties

There are vey distasteful, stupid, infuriating and threatening things said. Civic restraint is a hard lesson to learn, both by citizens and governments, and is never learned by loonies and bigots.

In this essay he exposes and explores his own relation to the concept of ‘freedom of speech’, plotting his evolving and deepening sense of its significance, personally, historically and in terms of current affairs but this essay also seems to provide Moorhouse with an opportunity to – not make explicit, the nature of the subject matter prohibits such a simplification – come to terms with an ethical system which haunts his work but is nowhere enacted in his writing. We sense the issue of ‘freedom’ in his discontinuous narratives, in Between Wars, The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain (freedom of religious expression) and the two Palais des Nations novels as if it were a bedrock against which the best of his work pressed. It was a fundamental concern of the Sydney Andersonian libertarians who provided Moorhouse with a formative milieu.

Maxim: Whatever the risk, whatever terrorist action transpires in Australia, the case for freedom of expression remains unchanged except for one thing: to reinforce its centrality to civilised life.

Maxim: It is the best (and worst) of us as writers and as citizens who ultimately define our freedom of expression by what we do with it (‘The Writer in a Time of Terror’).

BIBLIOGRAPHY – in order of reference …

by Frank Moorhouse

The Electrical Experience A Discontinuous Narrative 1974 Angus and Robertson Sydney

editor and driving force City Voices 5 issues mid 1965

editor Days of Wine and Rage 1980 Penguin Books Australia

Futility and other animals 1973 Angus and Robertson Australia (first published 1969 by Gareth Powell Associates)

letters to Michael Wilding – the latter’s papers, Mitchell Library, Box 02

The Coca Cola Kid Selected Stories Angus and Robertson 1985 first published as Selected Stories in Australia Angus and Robertson 1982

Grand Days Being Volume One of the Palais des Nations Novels 1993 Picador original First published 1993 by Pan Books [no place of publication]

Dark Palace The companion novel to Grand Days 2001 A vintage Book First published by Random House Sydney 2000

Room Service 1987 Penguin Australia first published Viking 1985

The Americans, Baby 1972 Angus and Robertson Sydney

Martini A memoir 2005 A Knopf book, Random House Australia

The Secret Everlasting Family And Other Secrets 1980 Angus and Robertson Australia

Lateshows 1990 Pan MacMillan then 2009 as A Vintage Book Random House Australia

Forty-Seventeen 1988 Viking Australia

‘The Writer in a Time of Terror’ 2006 Griffith Review Edition 14

* * *

[i] This is still the case, with short story collections being seen by agents and those clutching the reins of major publishing houses as journeyperson projects towards the novel. The career path is: publish in the small magazines, win a few prizes, get a collection published, show us your novel.

[ii] I doubt they did for Carmel Kelly, one of the ‘us’ nominated by Wilding as starting Tabloid Story – Wilding himself, Kelly and Moorhouse. The period notwithstanding (early seventies - Wilding claims pre ‘women’s movement’), his account of sexism is astonishingly clueless – ‘The girlie magazines were the first onslaught on bourgeois sexual repression; the women’s movement critique of sexism could only operate after sexism had at least become explicit in society …’ see pp 145 -6.

[iii] Moorhouse struck a blow for payment for story writers in City Voices

Ask the Write Price

The Australian Society of Authors’ Management Committee is urging all writers to place a price on all material submitted to periodicals.

…

An executive with a leading magazine had told the committee that Australia is a “sellers market” for short stories and articles.

“If short stories were marked up from £25 guineas up, writers would get it,” he said.

“We want stories. We’d have to pay for it. The whole thing is silly – why, we sometimes pay 12 guineas for something that costs us £50 - 60 pounds to illustrate” (Vol. 1, No. 3 p 6 – I have transcribed this as faithfully as I could. Perhaps the conversion to decimal currency led to the confused use of pounds and guineas. A guinea was one pound, one shilling if I remember correctly; it was used to price quality products. The words of the executive with a leading magazine are probably journalistic licence).

[iv] A similar, weaker, structural technique became popular in film, particularly after Pulp Fiction – weaker because in these films it is not much more than a cohering device for disparate narratives.

[v] Coombs Anne 1996 Sex and Anarchy The Life and Death of the Sydney Push Viking Australia

[vi] We meet McDowell’s other daughter Gwenth (‘… thirty-six year old, single woman … headmistress (primary)’ by way of her ‘Statement’ about her sister - ‘Gwenth McDowell’s Statement Concerning her Sister Teresa McDowell June 1969’ The Electrical Experience.

[vii] He did treat a select audience at one of the State Library of New South Wales’ soirées to the revelation of his liking to take it up the bum with his male partners and give it to his female – he was seventy or so at the time, no-one was enthralled. Also he was following a talk by editor and novelist Sophie Cunningham who had created a coming out atmosphere by talking of ‘my partner’ then revealing that person as ‘she’.

[viii] Ernest Hemingway refused to fish with him.

[ix] Americans seem to represent the stronger, the more savvy to Moorhouse at this stage of his development, through their eyes we see how parochial, limited, inept in every way, bizarre Australians are. Americans represent the solid, the effective, the strength which comes from being conventional. ‘Conventional’ was a word much used in the sixties to suggest the unimaginative, those bound by worn-out mores, the unadventurous. The American Becker, the Coca-Cola Kid does attempt suicide in the Yacht Club where Kim the teacher, Dell’s ex boyfriend was having such a bad time being excluded and wanting to be excluded. The South Coast of New South Wales or perhaps merely not being in Atlanta, headquarters of Coca Cola, drove him to this desperate act.

[x] Readers might be relieved to learn that Louise is saved by anal intercourse (see ‘The incident of the second meeting with Louise’ Five Incident Concerning the Flesh and the Blood’ p 80).

[xi] For Moorhouse’s account of the adaptation and production of The Coca Cola Kid see ‘Working with Makavejev’ in Lateshows.

[xii] The smashing of the power and influence of the medical profession in Australia was effected in the mid eighties by homosexual activists outraged by the attitudes, ignorance and incompetence evinced in the medical treatments being offered HIV/AIDS patients.

[xiii] Like all of his kind, the lesbian was utterly beyond him.

[xiv] The discontinuous character ‘Milton’ seems to have been Michael Wilding with whom Moorhouse seems to have had a tortured and needy relationship. Wilding was, as the quotes from Moorhouse’s letters above reveal, also a short story writer engaged with depicting a similar questing, challenging bohemia to that which lies at the heart of Moorhouse’s work. Wilding was a Professor and then Reader in English Literature at the University of Sydney; he had published on Milton.

[xv] Such a banquet would have been like the one described in ‘The American Poet’s Visit’

“Some supper then?” says Gillian, rising and leaving for the

other room where she has laid it out.

Some of us figuratively fall off our poufs because we haven’t had supper served at parties since high school. Some leap to their feet and bolt for the other room

…

Spread on the table had been a buffet of chicken legs, prawn cutlets, oyster savouries, asparagus rolls, and the rest. Marvin, Malden and Scott had eaten all the prawns, the chicken legs, and the oysters off the savouries. They were arguing about Jerry Lewis … The Americans, Baby p 60.

That ‘figuratively’ is not a good Moorhouse moment.

[xvi] Martini A memoir has as the epigraph ‘… it was an employment for his idle time which was then not idly spent’ - Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler). Edith hears from Ambrose of this modern martini (a Moorhouse obsession) in San Francisco whilst trying to secure places for the old League Internationalists at the United Nations conference.

[xvii] An exploration of Moorhouse’s close relationship with Donald Horne would prove illuminating in many ways.

[xviii] Moorhouse had developed a comparable theme in Forty Seventeen using his forty year old self’s affair with a seventeen year old girl.

[xix] She uses of ‘The Way of All Doors, which required her to try to be adept at talking of all things to all people. It would be the grandest way of all if she could ever confidently install it’ (p 12); this returns us to George McDowell was still dogged by shyness. The typed-out rules hung, pasted on cardboard, but he had to admit they’d become somewhat a fixture in the office. But also, he sincerely hoped, a fixture in his mind …

[xx] Even his daughter’s name has changed from ‘Gwenth’ to ‘Gweneth’.

* * *

This then is the complete Five Australian Novelists: Christina Stead, Thea Astely, Patrick White, Helen Garner and Frank Moorhouse.

Their influences overlapped in the seventies when the War/Baby Boomers were breaking fee of the constricting heritage of two World Wars and the Great Depression. These writers helped form us.

I have striven to write responsibly of them, only admiring and despising where I must. I am most aware that in writing of them at all I have necessarily reduced them to my capacities: all of them are greater than that.

Ian MacNeill

Ian MacNeill

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Colonialism gives way to Post Colonialism

INTERNATIONAL INTERIOR - My yellow English Coffee Pot

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

LANDSCAPE

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Interior: North Shore, the Twenties

Sunday, October 9, 2011

STILL LIFES and INTERIORS

Monday, October 3, 2011

contemporary miracle

Monday, September 19, 2011

For those who doubt they are poets

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

CREDO

Saying Farewell

Monday, August 22, 2011

THE TRAM CONDUCTRESS DREAMS THE LADY MURASAKI - poem

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

CLICK HERE for free download of THE WAY WE WERE FIVE AUSTRALIAN NOVELISTS Christina Stead, Thea Astley, Patrick White, Helen Garner and Frank Moorhouse

THE WAY WE WERE - FIVE AUSTRALIAN NOVELISTS Christina Stead, Thea Astley, Patrick White, Helen Garner and Frank Moorhouse