MALAYA - a novel of colonial life

This novella (42k words) seeks to evoke a world now gone.

It is offered as a contrast to That Would Be Me.


All those yeas ago, when I still dreamed of print publication, I had a fantasy of the cover - ivory letters on white spelling Malaya (to suggest the evanescent quality of the country itself). Maybe the suggestion, in the palest green, of a coconut palm frond forming the top of the M of Malaya. Nothing else on front. My name and other things on back cover (in verdant green).

Wasn't I a silly billy?


CLICK HERE for MALAYA

MARIA MAGDALENE DIETRICH (1901 - 1992)

Louise Brooks, an American  who went to Germany to become a star (her Lulu is said to be wonderful) described Marlene Dietrich in her autobiography as `that contraption'.

And it is true that Marlene had recourse to tricks - even in the early days in Hollywood it was said a special gold dust was flown from Paris for her to sprinkle in her (then titian) hair; later an entire figure of latex to wear under the famous Jean Louis stage gown, a cloak of swansdown, the lighting, the makeup, the skin taped so taut she could hardly talk ... Believe what you will but remember, she was a professional beauty.

In army uniform, touring during the Second World War, she hardly looks so glamorous. She approaches the microphone, smiles and her eyes shine as she looks around,`Hello boys,' she says. And she is, with just a hint of irony (for she is in her forties) what they want. On a troop ship, she lets them lift her up so all can see when she waves her lovely legs at them. There is no evidence of strain, she has grasped the spirit of the occasion. She gives them glamour, a motherly sexiness. They are far from home. They have Betty Grable to pin up.

`All things become themselves in her'.

Whore, mother, aristocrat, clapped out cabaret performer, goddess.

She had a range of approximately seven notes but sang very affectingly; Noel's `Just a Gigolo' in her last film is infinitley touching.

She knew, as much as an artist can, what she was doing. She calculated her effects. The result was something one couldn't quite account for.

I saw her in Sydney in the late sixties. I sat in the gods of the old Theatre Royal. During the performance, tears ran down the face of the very butch woman in army uniform sitting next to me. During the applause at the end, she suddenly leapt to her feet and shouted her approval, radiant.

We of course waited at the stage door to see Marlene emerge. Let me tell you it was quite a crowd.

She finally emerged, dressed in a pale suit. She was indeed heavily madeup. We expressed our enthusiam, we were so happy to see her in dull, dull Australia. And Marlene was happy to see us, she instructed the cop standing near her American limousine to make a stirrup with his clasped hands, then she stepped back, ran a little in her high heels, put her foot into the stirrup and was on the white limousine, laughing and waving and throwing little cards with her picture and signature into the crowd. I still have mine. We chased her car down the street.

It was quite a show.

She spent her last years in seclusion; she was a professional.

Some thugs broke into her apartment, took her diaries and photographed the near ninety year old Marlene, alarmed and confused, in bed.

Her grandson, a literary agent in New York, accused gay adulators.

I don't think so.

He says he got the negatives and destroyed them. There's something about the whole story I don't believe. I wonder if her diaries will be on the market soon. Her grandson said he got them back.

Marlene was very much loved by Lesbians and gay men. Whether she was herself is hardly a question - she was, for us.

She was very glamorous and real, sexy and loving.

The contraption was lit from within by something not at all mechanical.

CLICK HERE for Black Market (Marlene knew)

FREE DOWNLOAD ENTIRE NOVELLA PREVIOUSLY SERIALISED ON THIS BLOG - THAT WOULD BE ME

free download THAT WOULD BE ME - entire - 70,000 words

This novella is just over seventy thousand words -

THAT WOULD BE ME

Ian MacNeill

That Would Be Me entire -  

ELIZABETH TAYLOR - I WROTE THIS IN 1995.

ELIZABETH

Elizabeth Rosamond Taylor was signed by MGM in 1942. Or rather, her parents signed for her as she was ten at the time. The Yanks were about to enter the War, Garbo had stepped down from the shimmering silver screen and begun the wanderings only death would still - forty-eight years later.

Elizabeth Taylor has never stopped making films.

She was born of American parents in England, returning to the States in 1939 when it became impossible to deny that Hitler really meant it. Her mother, who had been an actress until she married Elizabeth's art dealer father, Francis Taylor, first signed Elizabeth with Universal Studios where her daughter appeared briefly in two films.

At MGM Elizabeth immediately established herself in Lassie Come Home during the making of which her way with horses was noted and she was duly signed for the film version of Enid Bagnold's superb and highly original book National Velvet. Mickey Rooney was wonderful as the groom Mi, Angela Lansbury played the sister 'Dwina and Anne Revere was memorable as Mrs Brown who sacrifices the gold sovereigns she got for swimming the English Channel so that her daughter Velvet can do the impossible and ride in the English Derby. Taylor is unforgettable as Velvet Brown. The horse playing The Piebald, according to legend, threw Taylor thus beginning the lifetime's back pain which is one of the various physical ills Elizabeth Taylor has had to contend with.

So Elizabeth Taylor was almost immediately a star and a star at the very end of the era when the Great Stars still shone. She is one of them and she still shines. Very, very few of the others are still alive.

Through the rest of the forties Taylor maintained a reputation for giving creditable performances. At the age of seventeen she played Robert Taylor's wife in Conspirator. Mr Taylor had played Armand to Garbo's Camille in 1937. By this stage Elizabeth Taylor had acted with Irene Dunne, William Powell, Mary Astor, Wallace Beery, Jane Powell, Zasu Pitts, Carmen Miranda, Greer Garson, Walter Pigeon ... To come were: Dame Margaret Rutherford, Rex Harrison, Marlon Brando, Shelley Winters, Fernando Lamas, Peter Finch, Robert Morely, Eva Gabor, Kim Novak, Rock Hudson, Ava Gardner, Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, Mia Farrow, Katherine Hepburn, Maggie Smith, Noel Coward, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda etc. There are more yet to come. I think a claim could be made that if you haven't acted in a film with Elizabeth Taylor, you're not a real film star.

She also acted with Laurence Harvey, James Dean and the divine Montgomery Clift.

Shortly after graduating from University High, Los Angeles, Elizabeth Taylor married Nicky Hilton (of the hotels). They were both very young and the marriage lasted six months. Elizabeth sustained longer relationships with rather more complicated young men, young men she had probably got to know at school and on the set. Such as James Dean whose death in a car accident towards the end of the shooting of Giant caused the already sick Taylor to become hysterical. Two days later she was back on the set and giving a performance she has no need to be ashamed of (nor would Dean have, nor Rock Hudson who also had a demanding role in this film).

It was after a night out with Elizabeth and her new husband, the worldly bon vivant, Mike Wilding, that Montgomery Clift smashed his car and his face and began the slow descent via alcohol and pills which terminated in a fatal heart attack. Taylor and Clift made the very successful Raintree County together. The famous still of the pair kissing - Taylor's eyes lit by wonder and lust - comes from this film. Giant brought her an Academy Award nomination.

The fifties and Tennessee Williams. Williams gave expression to a queen's hysteria - the unendurable recognition that one is, to use the phrase from a wonderful story by Peter Wells, `one of them'. Only in Williams' plays it is women who brood with and try to shrug off with anything - booze, pills, paradoxically sex itself - the lust that crawls all over them. Elizabeth Taylor played Maggie the Cat to Paul Newman's pyjama-clad, leg in plaster, impotent hometown football hero, Brick. You can keep your bananas. Newman phewman. Taylor matched him in an Edith Head gown - strapless white and not so much fitted as coiled. All over the world they came in their cinema seats. (Burl Ives was Big Daddy, Judith Anderson Big Mama, an assortment of children played `Them no neck monsters'). Notch up another Oscar nomination for Elizabeth Taylor.

Another Williams` play, Suddenly Last Summer, was moved to the screen via a script by Gore Vidal. It was not a happy set. Montgomery Clift played the psychiatrist given the task by Mrs Venables (played by Katherine Hepburn) of making sure her niece gets what she deserves (a lobotomy) for being witness to her son Sebastian's death at the hands of the Caribbean rough trade he'd been in the habit of cavorting with. Not a happy set, not a happy subject but what a film! Sensational stuff for the fifties.

Before the fifties were over Elizabeth Taylor was to be hated - as the woman who took Eddie Fisher away from the woman responsible for all the Debbies, sweet (genuinely and toughly and she's still going very strong too) Ms Reynolds.

After divorcing Hilton, then Wilding, Taylor had married producer Mike Todd. Reynolds was bridesmaid and Fisher best man at the Jewish ceremony in Mexico. The Taylor-Todds had a daughter, Liza. A few months later Mike Todd was killed piloting his own plane. Elizabeth had to complete Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She converted to Judaism (in which she had already begun instruction while married to Todd). Fisher offered her comfort and support and they married.

All of this had happened within a couple of years. Elizabeth Taylor was scandal and news, news, news. She was forced by her contract with the Golden Lion into playing a call girl in Butterfield 8 (oh the frisson of the `type' casting) and won her first Oscar. Which they say was awarded in default for the one she should have received for work her work as Maggie the Cat.

Twentieth Century Fox had got wind of the fact that the Lion was losing it grip on the Last of the Great Stars and was making overtures which kept going up and up for Taylor to play Cleopatra.

The sixties were swirling in, Marilyn was the only other star who could touch Taylor when it came to all those things which make for stardom - glamour ... sure, scandal ... sure, tragedy, talent, beauty, work, work, work and perhaps some other ingredient of appeal both too ordinary and too complex to analyse but let's just call it a combination of audience identification and something that looks like type casting. Shirley McLain was doing well in musicals.

Taylor said,`Tell Fox I'll do it for a million.' This was an unheard of sum in those days. And she got it.

The set of Cleopatra was to provide Elizabeth Taylor's apotheosis. There was the scandal - suppressed and erupting - of her affair with Richard Burton and her near-death experience with pneumonia. All around the world there were regular broadcasts of the star's condition ... she was sinking, sinking, putting up a great battle but not expected to live. And then she rallied.

Can you imagine what it would have been like if Martina had won that last time at Wimbledon?

Her walk down that aisle at the Academy Award ceremony to collect her Oscar is an object lesson in stardom. Then she had to hand the heavy object to Best Actor Burt Lancaster (for Elmer Gantry) to hold as she had not yet regained her strength after the pneumonia. That was the 1960 Oscars.

Everyone went to see Cleopatra as much to get a glimpse of the tracheotomy scar as anything else.

They say the film's a dud. What do they know? Taylor/Cleopatra's entry into Rome is what Hollywood is all about - oh to hell with that, it's what film is about.

We hadn't drawn breath from that when the Richard Burton affair/fiasco began and went on and on. Elizabeth became Mrs Taylor-Burton. Their second marriage, for example, was in Botswana in 1975.

In 1965 Elizabeth Taylor had won another Oscar, for Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. She thought Burton better deserved one for his performance in the film but this was not to be.

During this period she showed a willingness to try many different kinds of roles - from the fabulously wealthy reclusive consumptive in another Tennessee Williams piece, Boom! (from his play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore) to Helen of Troy in a film of Marlowe's Dr Faustus, to Katharina the Shrew in The Taming of the ... (directed by Zefirelli) to the mature sultry southern belle Leonora Penderton opposite Marlon Brando's suppressed homosexual Major Penderton in the film of Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye. She gets up to lesbianism with Mia Farrow in Secret Ceremony and with Susannah York in Edna O'Brien's X, Y and Zee, though not with much ideological soundness, it must be said. She played Rosie Probert in the film of Under Milkwood and with the ailing Laurence Harvey in Nightwatch. In the huge joint American/USSR production of Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird Elizabeth Taylor played the  Fairy Berylune and Light.

Taylor continues to make films which perhaps don't have much box office appeal but which stretch her, such as Identikit (based on a Muriel Spark novel) and A Little Night Music (in which she sings `Bring on the Clowns').

Her work is characterised by a shrewd sense of her public appeal and the repeated essaying of roles which it must be obvious won't be easy for her. She has repeatedly given good accounts of herself - in many scenes, if sometimes not always in the entire role. She has repeatedly been generous in working with other actors in need, for example the almost bankrupt Rock Hudson in The Mirror Crack'd.

She has continued to marry and even if Larry Kramer accuses her of not having done so soon enough, she was among the very first to make AIDS her cause. At some stages of her involvement she's had to face jeering activists, staring them down and saying things like,`I've been invited here tonight to address this audience and I'm going to.'

She has supported the frighteningly unworldly Michael Jackson through the terrible blundering of his publicity machine (surely it was always obvious the press were going to turn?).

If she has had her lapses (who even recalls the boozy, druggy, overweight Club 54 years these days?), if she is vain and foolish at times, she is no more so than you or I - it's just that her scope is different.

As a star it is her duty to be ostentatious; she is so with a great deal of style - she sent an enormous floral tribute to Laurence Olivier's funeral, on the attached card was the only word, `Adieu'.

The aura of legend does not hover around Elizabeth Taylor as it does around Marilyn, now long dead, and perhaps it never will but that Elizabeth Taylor is of very, very considerable significance cannot sensibly be doubted. Her career by now must surely outstrip that of Barbara Stanwyck whose career in film was of great duration. Further it cannot be said that she has been denied inspiration - her delivery of the long and difficult climactic speech in Suddenly Last Summer convinces, her Shrew was lively and moving.

Elizabeth Taylor is a valiant and generous human being and artist.

Her beauty requires no comment.

MALOUF, WHITE, MARR, DESSAIX AND THE TWYBORN AFFAIR

WATCHING A SLOW T V PANEL PRESENTATION  

ON PATRICK WHITE I AGAIN ENCOUNTERED THE NOTION THAT THE TWYBORN AFFAIR IS HIS GREAT NOVEL (MANY, INCLUDING ROBERT DESSAIX SEEM TO THINK SO). DAVID MARR TALKS ABOUT THE 'CLARITY' OF THE PROSE. 

AN OTHER PANELIST, DAVID MUSGRAVE, 

HAS A GO AT EXPLAINING WHITE'S PROSE EXTRAVAGANCE IN TERMS OF A SORT OF PREQUEL 'PARODY', AN IDEA I FOUND FRUITFUL. 

CLICK HERE

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THE TWYBORN AFFAIR IS AS CLOSE TO RIDICULOUS AS WHITE COULD BE.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS MY 1997 ATTEMPT TO ADDRESS IT IN TERMS OF OTHER GAY WRITING RELATED MATTERS.

SAD END TO A MESSY BUSINESS

In David Marr’s biography of Patrick White we read of White’s complimenting David Malouf on his novel Johnno. It had (according to Malouf’s interpretation of this compliment) ‘saved everyone from the difficulties: the special pleading of homosexuality and the messy business of writing about sex between men. Malouf saw in White a genuine aesthetic reluctance to tackle the theme’. Well Malouf would, wouldn’t he? Marr himself passes with deceptive grace over the embarrassment of it all with scarcely a backward glance.

But White was to attempt to overcome his aesthetic reluctance. He waited until the gay libbers whom he so despised had effectively changed the climate and then came out with the The Twyborn Affair. He evidently thought this was some kind of statement, something that would ’earn me complete ostracism in Australia’. How disappointed, how perplexed he must have been when no-one batted an eyelid. Why would they? It was too late. Besides, the novel challenges nothing and its handling of homosexuality collides with the ludicrous. No-one could be offended by Eadith/Eddie, s/he is too remote from any reality,  too charmingly bizarre, a doomed character flitting through a series of historic and exotic landscapes, an Orlando persistently dragged back to earth by a burden of testicles. ‘Aesthetic’ is the appropriate word, for Eadith/Eddie is out of Aestheticism, s/he owes herself to Ronald Firbank and  Aubrey Beardsely (Luciana Arrighi, White’s niece, got it right when she drew White à la Beardsley for the novel’s jacket).

Novels do not challenge social structures; they are too dependent on them. This is perhaps why so many post modernists, formed in deconstruction, are impatient with the form.

We in the lesbian and gay writing movement failed, I think it can be said, to produce a good novel. The form itself - your form - defeated us.

You could be forgiven for not having noticed our existence, for not registering our passing. There were forces at work which were determined you wouldn’t, which applied themselves to making sure we only ever got to speak to one another; which did their best to make sure we were trapped in an echo chamber which would end up sending us mad.

We were compelled to write The Well of Loneliness over and over again. Yes, you allowed us our obsession, the autobiographical, (clever move that) because it was ipso facto dismal and therefore unreadable. Our styles were awkward or dull for we had no confidence, could assume no readership. And the experimental is a guarantee of obscurity. We were desperate for (forgive the expression now that Political Correctness lies stillborn) ‘positive images’. We were condemned to propaganda by our need for different paradigms. We yelled too loud and spoke too softly, we minded our p’s and q’s and didn’t know what we were talking about until we’d said it and then we were informed we’d been given our chance.

When? Where? Tell me that. Where were we given our opportunity, our part in the debate. Where were we ever in the (as they like to say now) discourse?

When she was challenged on this Jennifer Lee, then editor of Meanjin claimed she was always publishing lesbian and gay writing. When her claim did not live up to investigation she informed the press that she had to be careful, didn’t everyone agree? because the book went into schools and she had to consider subscriptions. The economic rationalist spin was smart, especially as it enabled her to avoid, while invoking, the Corruption of Youth. Pity if she actually thought school kids read the journal.

We would not have expected to be published in Southerly (have they published anything homo yet?). The Old Left vagaries of Overland were about as discouraging.

Where were our spokespeople to speak?

You had Malouf, you had Marr, oh you had White, Jolley whose lesbians are rather just that and you had the woman who wouldn’t be in Robert Dessaix’s 

Oxford Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing. An Anthology because people might think she was a lesbian (I don’t know either, you’ll have to ask him). You had your editors and reviewers who were wilfully ignorant, rigorously unfair, who were chosen for their lack of sympathy in the name of objectivity though none of us got a go at saying something like Oh not another hetero dishwash! Why can’t these people understand they’re trying to live a Cold War illusion in the service of capitalism?  Nor would we; we would have been too conscious of our responsibilities, the rarity of this opportunity. You had it all on your side.

We didn’t even have Humphrey McQueen. And many others who can’t be named because ... well that would be outing, wouldn’t it? You must have been thrilled when outing came along, it so maintained the status quo, so insured our invisibility, our silence. So ethical, Privacy.

So we did it for ourselves and you ignored what we did and now Queer’s put out that fatal tentacle of conciliation which means our funny little desperate characteristic moment is being diluted by the new post modernisms.

Queer has discovered that homosexuality can be integrated into the endlessly deconstructive discourses. Of the Univers(ity). It can pass. It thinks. After all, Meanjin finally saw its way, it went queer. For an issue. With a couple of guest editors. It was rather a disappointment but then it was meant to be, fifteen years too late. You queers don’t think Heat’s going to publish you by any chance, do you? May as well try Quadrant it seems to me.

We had our journals, our magazines, our publishing houses, our community radio programs in which we attempted to deal with the messy business. Yeah they weren’t big but they were there and they left things - products, artifacts of the spirit - for the future.

The mess was rich. Still is, and more tractable now.

Who knows if what we did with it will be found to have any interest.

Yep, we’ve had our day. We’re getting on and we can’t much be bothered any more. And you’ve taken us over. For your own purposes. Heavens, the queers are published by the multinationals, in glossy magazines, advertisers court them.

You must be relieved. That leaves you with Senator Harradine, sensationally placed to manipulate the Government. What’s he want? Fifties Catholicism, no less. With the cold self-righteousness of Robert Manne. You can just bet his deep disturbing by Darville as Demidenko has afforded him no insight and sympathy beyond that which he started out with - for European Jewry. That leaves you with Simon Leys into whose translation of Confucius I believe we make it as a Note  in which he troubles about our changing the meaning of the word ‘gay’; it is Leys’ view we are plainly and stridently not. Poor Confucius. Which leaves you with Pauline Hanson who understands we are ‘not natural’.

Sorry to tell you but  - hey you, Family Member! - that leaves you stuck in a past overrun by those without vision, those who’ve never had faith the world could be a better place.

Enjoy.

                                                               Ian MacNeill

gangland cultural elites and the new generation MARK DAVIS

REMEMBER THIS? IT CAME OUT IN 1997. 

gangland  cultural elites and the new generationalism  by mark davis  Allen and Unwin rrp $16.95

This is an important book. davis opens and closes with a mustering of facts which unequivocally demonstrate the socio/economic disadvantage visited on youth by a succession of our governments.

'Youth' in davis' terms is those aged from seventeen to early thirties. Australians in this category face not only huge current unemployment but a non-future in the way it is being figured by present governments and cultural shapers. Youth are excluded from cultural organs such as the intellectually pretentious broadsheet newspapers by the hegemony of overwhelmingly anglo, post Whitlam, conservative and neo conservative males. First generation feminists are co-opted by this press to support this male hegemony and to exclude all who threaten it, including youth. davis sides with those neo feminists who attacked Helen Garner's The First Stone, brilliantly characterising what he claims are Garner's modus operandi and repeatedly accusing her of being 'disingenuous' in her approach. He does not look closely at her text in support of this claim.

davis seems to me not good on the particular, he is however a dead shot when there's a big distance between him and his subject. His book rests on a series of generalisations which are alarmingly valid but which fail to do justice to the variety and complexity of the contemporary Australian reality. He tends to muster his evidence from the home paddock, relying on a really quite narrow range of sources with which to damn us Baby Boomers.

Christos Tsiolkas’ (evidently a friend) novel Loaded  must stand for much of grunge fiction in this very Melbourne University-oriented book (davis makes nothing of Loaded as a queer text). davis fails to give any sense of the the realities of oppression in his rather tokenistic references to queer.

There is too much of this kind of narrow sampling in gangland. Its style lurches too often into a dead demotic to convince that its author has real sympathy with the post modern world and davis is finally at such pains to cover over any sense of commitment to anything that his strength - polemic thrust - is vitiated.

Ian MacNeill

Mark Davis Catherine Lumby McKenzie Wark

THIS MUST HAVE HAPPENED TOWARDS THE END OF 1997 OR EARLY 1998

                          VIRTUAL RADICALS

A friend had told me about Mark Davis’ Gangland and the fuss it had been creating. I bought myself a copy. She had also told me there was to be a forum featuring Davis, columnist Catherine Lumby and McKenzie Wark who has recently brought out his latest book. The three authors were being considered as significant in a challenge to those who hold ideological/political, real power. They were offering a challenge to the neo as well as the more traditional sort of conservative. However, we couldn’t discover when the forum was to be held. My friend thought I had probably missed it.

I was disappointed as I had had time to glance at Davis’ book and it appears to mention lesbian, gay or queer issues (which particularly interest me) only in relation to Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Loaded. A ‘Christos T’ is also mentioned in the Introduction, part of a coy thank you list. What sort of a radical, what sort of a Post Modernist could Mark Davis be? And I do want to know what the new power elites are up to themselves.

The next day I set out for the rally in support of Native Title being held in Sydney’s Domain. On my way I passed the Gunnery in Woolloomooloo. I was early so I popped in to see the current art exhibition - supposedly some British/Australian artistic dialogue. It seemed quite awful but to tell the truth I didn’t give it more than a glance - a panel and discussion show was to start at 3 and lo and behold it was the very one I had wanted to attend - After the Culture Wars. The title of Wark’s new book is The Virtual Republic  Australia’s culture wars of the 1990s.

I rushed my reluctant sinews up the new stairs from the ‘Loo to the Domain, donated some money, signed a petition and dashed back to my happy find.

Paid my $5, got a hand-written receipt and I was in.

Davis, who had been flown up from Melbourne for this event by the Gunnery crowd, spoke first. His actual presence confirmed an impression I got from his book - that he is at pains to present as an average sort of bloke, unprepossessing, not a hint of zealotry. During the forum he was to go to quite extraordinary lengths to placate everybody. Lumby spoke second. She’s got style. The look is Louise Brooks gone Tarantino hard. She reminded me of Dame Leonie Kramer. She and Dame Leonie are polar opposites but in their own ways they’ve got the Right Style. To take them places. Lumby is also possessed by the Charged Presence - charged with a shimmer of self-righteousness, the vigilant hostile assertiveness born of a consciousness that Woman is ever in immanent danger of being Wronged. By her older Sisters as well as Men these days, it seems. Wark, under the ghastly glare of the two inquisitorial spots and behind a yellow and black acrylic furred podium, looked like a character out of  a film by Murnau transmorphed onto an Aldomovar set. He spoke, as he always does, cogently but less intensely than when he is berating a lesbian and gay audience for our insularity. I think the application being employed might have been Soft Pedagogy 7.1. 

Oh all three were sort of plausible. Lumby spiced her account of contemporary ideology/life with an instructive anecodote about how traditional Feminist Jocelyn Scutt had got Madonna utterly wrong. Scutt was convinced the two big black men she had seen hurrying Madonna along on t v were evidence of the performer’s patriarchal pawn status when in fact they were of course the bodyguards the entertainer employs. The male speakers didn’t say anything as memorable though I do recall Pauline Hanson’s name being mentioned and Mark Davis having a go at being funny about ‘little Johnny Howard and the thin line of foam on his upper lip’. He seemed to have the taste to realise it was too repulsive an image to get much of a laugh out of.

Their addresses were obliterated in my mind by what the audience, invited to question and contribute, made of their opportunity.

The event looked packed to me, that is to say, all seventy-five chairs had bums on them. We were not though a various crowd. I’d say half were acolytes of Lumby and Wark and that most were Post Modern, Generation X ... whatever.

Someone, a bitter taxi-driver with a Ph D, asked Wark (while assuring us all that he could ask this rude question because they were really mates) if Wark mentioned his bisexuality a lot in Higher Education   because it ensured his job. Wark replied with charm something to the effect that we all have our ploys, or so it seems in my recollection

Another man, explaining he had industrial deafness due to driving a taxi (it used to be lung complaints from working alongside the miners), asked a long question. Its elaborateness and his familiarity with Wark suggested he also had a Ph D. The ‘question’ was about - do you blokes employ Post Modern jargon to exclude the Working Man? All of the panel seemed to have a go at answering that one. No clear response could reasonably have been expected.

Then a John MacDonald (the art critic?) asked some hard questions. It seemed to him that it wasn’t true, as Mark Davis had asserted (and Lumby had emphatically nodded her assent to), that those who complained of the debilitating effects of affirmative action on educational standards in the U S were making an implicitly racist statement. This point was developed in discussion along the lines of which Bloom (Harold or Allan) had actually written what and what in any case they had intended. Its relation to the Australian experience was not clearly sustained. MacDonald, demanding rigour, came across as wanting to defend something traditional, something in the way of the conservative. This line of exploration was skilfully interrupted by Wark who was acting as Chair. MacDonald had previously taken Lumby up extensively on her use of a categorising term (was it ‘neo conservative’?) and asked her how she would categorise herself. ‘Post Modern Feminist Libertarian’ is my memory of the reply. Lumby began by thanking Macdonald for his question but ended a lengthy and increasingly defiant response unable to suppress a triumphant flick of the bangs as she made her way back to her seat.

The term ‘Post Modern’ was examined at length by panelists and some audience members. No-one would admit to embracing being one. It is apparently not something that one actually has to commit to; we are all Post Modern, as someone living in 1890 was Victorian. 

Post Modernism was opposed to notions of a traditional literary canon and the ‘shape’ of things rather than their actual content was the preferred manner of some for examining some things. One audience member posited a cool clear pond and a hot tub. He then placed Shakespeare in the latter.

It was more or less on this note that the forum was concluded by Wark.

I had some joy of it - ‘gay’ was mentioned once, as an afterthought to a short list of other minorities. Feminism and racism got the most mentions, it seemed to me, though almost nothing concrete was said about either.

I’d say the titles of the panelists’ books were mentioned about as often. All their books, published by Allen and Unwin, were available for sale at the back of the hall courtesy of Gleebooks.

The rally going on up in the Domain was not alluded to once, by anyone.

CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS DEAD EUROPE

I struggled to come to terms with Dead Europe for a book reviewing competition in (I think) the Australian Book Review. 

Dead Europe

by Christos Tsiolkas

Vintage 2005

Christos Tsiolkas’ three novels explore the descent of a hero into different kinds of extremis. His latest, Dead Europe, shares with his first, Loaded, the picaresque quality which helped to make its adaptation to the film Head On so successful. Dead Europe though would need to be a blockbuster, so various are its approaches to the hero’s fall.

Isaac, a Greek Australian, is in Athens for an exhibition of his photographs. On a visit to his mother’s village he learns through his cousin that his mother’s family is cursed. Isaac journeys on to Venice, Prague, Paris, Cambridge and London taking photographs which reveal the demonic Europe which, though immersed in it, he cannot ‘see’. During this inverted Grand Tour Isaac finds himself being dragged under by ‘Eurotrash’ who become, more and more, evil angels.

Myth is the other major element in Tsiolkas’ panoptic account of Isaac’s life. It relates the genesis and enactment of the curse which fell first on Isaac’s grandmother Lucia (LUISA?) – ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ – when she incited her husband to kill the Jewish boy the couple were sheltering from the Nazis. The ghost of the Jewish boy, Angelo, attaches himself to Reveka, Luisa’s daughter, as she makes her way to Australia.

The myth of Angelo, the avenging Jew, embraces the dreadful hardship of peasant Europe, the hardship many came to Australia to escape, haunted by their histories as Angelo haunts his beloved victims - with an unrelenting, icy grip. To some extent Angelo also represents guilt for the holocaust from which, Tsiolkas suggests, Europe will never free itself.

Australia is Reveka and her son’s youth. As Tsiolkas has it, for all its brutal treatment of its legal immigrants and decline into a nation where refugees/freedom seekers/illegal immigrants are locked up, Australia remains a place of warmth and light and innocence in contrast to the dark power of Europe.

Isaac’s inverted Grand Tour is a revelation of the appalling state of Europe. Refugees, into whose desperation the myth has given us insight, suck whatever life they can from the depravity of Europe. Very much of this depravity takes a homosexual form, embellished by drugs. Young male prostitutes abound.

Isaac is himself homosexual, constantly neglecting and calling on the strength of his lover at home – the big, butch, beautiful, caring, swastika-tattooed Anglo-Celtic Colin. Big, beautiful and butch is also to be found in Europe but there it takes much more complex and sinister forms.

The novel worries at ethnicity, deracination, modern history. What binds these various sources of anxiety is anti-Semitism. Jews seem to lurk behind the ills of Europe. In Prague Isaac encounters ‘King Kike’ who tells him ‘I am the real Jew, mate … You don’t know Jews, do you? You think we should be the nice old fella in the back of the store, wouldn’t hurt a fucking fly … I’m not that kind of Jew, cunt. That kind of mumza Jew is finished.’ ‘King Kike’ is a huge man, crushing.

By the time the reader encounters him, s/he is somewhat familiarised with the anti-Semitism expressed by the characters in Dead Europe. But we still want it to go somewhere, to be more than a noir gesture of Dirty Realism. Tsiolkas depicts it as a strong element in contemporary Europe, as having deep roots in its peasant past and at one point a character seems to justify anti-Semitism in terms of Judaism being the progenitor of Christianity and the Muslim faith (Dead Europe is au fond an anti-clerical novel). As already suggested, at the mythic level, Judaism is an eternal parasitic demon invoked by those who betrayed it.

The narrative thrust of Dead Europe is powerful up to a point, though I think most readers will baulk when Isaac sets off after Prague to discover yet again that Europe is all underbelly. When the novel’s myth coalesces with Isaac’s Grand Tour, the reader is caught in a flurry of horror which leans far too heavily on Anne Rice.

Humphrey McQueen has posed the fruitful idea of a comparison with Christina Stead’s The House of All Nations; Stead’s vision of a corrupt Europe centred on the practices of merchant banking. The style she employed had the clarity and force of documentary realism. Tsiolkas has a freer imagination than the great Stead but his style inclines to the melodramatic and to hectoring. The melodramatic has its place in a novel like Dead Europe but there is also an inclination to the sentimental.

Isaac takes photographs which reveal the demonic Europe, which though being immersed in it, he could not, until it was too late, ‘see’. In Dead Europe Tsiolkas seems to thrust at us a vision we have been wantonly oblivious to and from which he himself recoils in Gothic sensationalism and rant. 

PIETER-DIRK UYS -The Hero

I WROTE THIS IN 2002.

ON HIS 2002 TOUR MR UYS CAME OUT DURING INTERVAL TO SELL BEADWORK MADE BY SOUTH AFRICAN WOMEN WITH HIV. A SOUTH AFRICAN  EXPAT COUPLE IN SYDNEY TOOK THIS OPPORTUNITY TO BERATE HIM - THEY HAD COME TO HEAR WHAT SOUTH AFRICA WAS LIKE NOW,  NOT TO HAVE ALL THIS AIDS BUSINESS THRUST AT THEM. THEN THEY STORMED OFF.

HIS SHOW WAS AS HILARIOUS AS IT COULD BE ABOUT 'ALL THIS AIDS BUSINESS' AND INTENSELY INTERESTING (HIS ARCHBISHOP TUTU WAS A MARVEL).

AUSTRALIANS COULD NOT HELP COMPARING PIETER-DIRK UYS/MRS BEZHUIDENHOUT TO BARRY HUMPHREYS/DAME EDNA. UYS HAS PUT HIS LIFE ON THE LINE FOR THE ONES AT THE BOTTOM; HUMPHREYS,  RAVENOUS TO BE OF THE ESTABLISHMENT, WAFTS IN SOME ETIOLATED STRATOSPHERE AS FAR FROM THE DISTRESSES OF OPPRESSION AS HE CAN FLOAT.

THE HERO'S JOURNEY

It is the early sixties. After another day at school our hero sits at home in Cape Town. The sound of a rather badly played Chopin Ballade comes from the next room where his father, a civil servant, is earning extra money teaching a not very gifted student. Every afternoon he comes home from school he is greeted with similar sounds as his mother's afternoon piano students more or less stumble over the keys. He sighs and returns his scissors to the photograph of Sophia Loren he is lovingly excising from the woman's magazine.

He doesn't know it yet but he is suffused by the dark power, apartheid.

He must journey from his native land into the light to see the darkness.

The light is film school in London near the end of the sixties. Our hero turns an appalled gaze back home - what people think of South Africans!

He loves South Africa. He is South African.

He must return.

Our hero, Pieter-Dirk Uys, needs associates in his quest to bring light to his darkened homeland. He finds them in Cape Town's Space Theatre and the Johannesburg Market Theatre. Like all allies in the hero's quest, at first they seem unlikely. They are black and white and 'coloured'. They have what seem like unpromising competencies. They teach him how to sweep a stage, to work a sound box, to rig lights, to make up, to sew a dress, to vanish. Which is a most useful skill when the police appear. As they do.

In between performing in banned plays, writing banned plays and novels, our hero gets a gig working for the Johannesburg Sunday Express. He lives in interesting times. The Information Scandal brings about the fall of Prime Minister Vorster and the rise of P W Botha. The land is agog with scandals - embezzlement, outright theft and murder - stewing in the high pressure caused by the regime's censorship policies.

Our hero now moves beyond what he learned from his associates, beyond the art of disguise, to acquire the magic of transformation.

About once a month a figure begins to appear in his column in the Express. She is Evita Bezuidenhout (Mrs) and she utters all the outlandish truths the regime won't tolerate. She is Pieter-Dirk Uys's familiar, channel, accomplice, Other, anima ... whatever.

Utterly unlike him, she is stupidly incapable of self-reflection, of irony, of self deprecation. But let us not underestimate her, she is still with us and she has grown, or at least moved with the times. She has more than a genius for survival - she also has one for denial.

Under pressure from interviewers, Pieter-Dirk breathed life into his monster. She stood down from the page and bestrid the stage. Gradually she reveals all - that her husband was the well known Dr J J Bezuidenhout, M P for Laagerfontein, Minister for Black Housing and Water Affairs. She had a pioneering mother (now 102) Ouma Ossenwania Kakebenia Poggenpoel born in an English concentration camp in the Orange Free State. Ouma Poggenpoel has never forgiven the English.

Ouma is grandmother to Evita's three children who have tested everyone's capacity for denial. Daughter Billie-Jeanne has a Black husband with whom she has had three children. Evita's twin sons, Izan and De Kock, have found solace in White Supremacy and gay liberation, respectively. If she were capable of embarrassment, the reappearance of Evita's sister, Bambi Kellerman, after all of these years, with reminiscences of how satisfying life was with an S S husband (he reminded her of people she knew 'back home'), would give Evita pause. But such is not the case.

Pieter-Dirk may suffer; that is not in Evita's nature.

After all, she is a Star. Always has been. In the fifties she was repeatedly given top billing in South Africa's legendarily kitsch Killarney films. Having been an intimate of the leaders of the Apartheid regimes and then Chief Liaison Person for Afrikaans Cultural Affairs in President Mandela's office, she now finds herself residing alongside Mr Uys amongst many Blacks in a veldt railway stop town called Darling. There Mrs Bezuidenhout runs a restaurant, two theatres and a shop.

She sees that President Mbeki has blundered hideously on HIV/Aids and wonders why he had not called for her years ago. After all, in 2000 the Woman's International Centre made her a Living Legacy. Other Living Legacies have been Mother Teresa and Hilary Clinton. When Pieter-Dirk Uys heard his Creature was to honoured in this way, he contacted the Centre in San Diego and asked if they realised that ... she didn't 'exist'? 'Of course,' they replied, 'it's not necessary for a legend to exist, just to be.'

Our hero has completed a phase of his journey. His quest to bring light to his beloved country has been achieved. But he finds that the dark spirits, though disturbed and set back, have regrouped, reconfigured, found new methods of attack. Similar things could be said of Mrs Bezuidenhout. She now says she always loved the Blacks and never knew any racists, did you?

With the help of his associates (Sophia Loren sent him a pair of her glasses to help Mrs B to see) Pieter-Dirk Uys continues in his quest.

Ian MacNeill

THAT WOULD BE ME xiv - serialisation of chick lit (if you must) novel of neo colonialism and identity

That Would Be Me

Chapter Fourteen
In which our heroine exercises the confidence she has risked so much to build and exerts her wiles to their fullest and in which the future opens before her as it did on the beach in North Queensland a lifetime ago.

Mrs Richardson greeted her at the door, 'Hello, you must be Iseult.'

She smiled.

She was dressed in her pale blue linen but had bought pink sandals and bag for this occasion. At the bottom of her throat lay a perfect length of very fine gold holding a heavy small gold clam shell cross she had bought in Noumea, over a year ago now. She had decided not to wear pantyhose. It would be hot but that was not the reason - she wanted to appear a little casual.

As she followed her, Mrs Richardson said, 'Lou's in the kitchen, he's fussing over something, a salad. It had to be ready but not too soon, if you understand. Something about the dill wilting. As he's chopped it to a powder, I can't quite see ... but you know what men are like in the kitchen.' At this Mrs Richardson turned to look at her response.

It showed that she didn't.

She decided that she had brought the right wine.

They passed into a living area. A man who was obviously Lou's father was reading the Sunday paper. He glanced up and after looking at his wife, rose. There was also a beautiful, slim, elderly woman with very well coiffured hair, an elegant dress and shoes. Her eyes glittered with malice.

'This is Lou's friend, Iseult ... I don't know your surname.'

She looked from Lou's father to the elderly woman as she considered this. She almost decided on 'Minefield' but smiling, said, 'Court'.

'Mutti, this is Lou friend, Iseult Court. Iseult this is Lou's grandmother, Mrs Schapiro.'

'I am not deaf!' Mrs Schapiro snapped. Her lips were trembling as she spent her malicious gaze on this girl.

'How do you do.' She smiled and turned, having absorbed the spectacle, to Lou's father.

'I'm David.' He was Lou in twenty-five years. The curls had receded and frothed white, there was a complacent paunch.

Lou appeared and went across to her and gave her a kiss.

Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Mutti in a paroxysm. She heard the woman hiss.

Lou spirited her out of the room.

She had known it was to be a fairly bizarre occasion. She had gathered there were to be no other young guests, that she was being invited to meet the parents, for their inspection and approval. As their approval was of no particular concern to her, she felt no qualms, though she did want to win them.

She had already dismissed Mutti.

Months ago, when she had realised Lou was getting very serious, Allison had briefed her extensively. He was quite a successful architect. Mutti had the real money. Everyone said he had married her for the house. Most of its land was still intact, though they had sold off a bit at some stage. Mrs Richardson's ancestors had planted heavily because it was on such a high piece of land and exposed to winds and storms. Oh, and he took her name. It was said there was almost a divorce when he had tried to alter the house.

Lou took her wine, unwrapped it, looked pleased, said he would put it in the fridge to cool a bit more for lunch. She asked where she should leave her bag.

'I will show you around after lunch,' Mrs Richardson said after settling the bag.

She made pleasant, easy conversation, trying to include Mutti who answered resentfully when she must.

She wanted to laugh. But at lunch she was a little alarmed to see Mutti rush to sit next to Lou and glare triumphantly at her upon securing that place. The parents seemed to ignore this but Lou indulged it with a smiling, complacent shrug at her.

She began to find the inconsequential level of conversation difficult to maintain. She complimented Lou on the salad again and inquired about the garden. She could glimpse it, dissolving into the haze. She wondered how long it would be before she would be offered a whisky, maybe to wander the grounds with between courses.

'And where are the parents then?' Mutti demanded.

As the question did not seem to be addressed to her, she did not answer, then she realised Mr and Mrs Richardson and Lou were looking at her in expectation of a reply. 'Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realise you were talking to me,' she said to Mutti and continued eating.

'You see?' Mutti informed the Richardsons.

She looked at Mr Richardson in appeal - how did one handle this mad woman?

'Mutti wants to know where your parents are,' was his response.

This was intolerable. 'Where?' she said, venting her anger and appearing mystified by the question.

'They're in England, Mutti,' Mrs Richardson answered for her.

'Why has she left them?'

'She's out here, studying,' Lou supplied.

'Why isn't she studying at home, in her country?'

The Richardsons looked at her.

Surely she wasn't being required to respond to this mad woman's impertinences? She saw that she was. 'What a lovely vase,' she said to Mrs Richardson.

'Yes, it belongs to the house.'

'You see?'

She felt the blood drain from her face. She was enraged. She speared the largest of the pink and dill powdered prawns, looked at it, laid her fork aside and took a sip of her wine. She was about to say how good she thought her wine was when she determined that she need not speak at all. So she did not.

She rather enjoyed the silence. She rather enjoyed the wine. She took her fork up and put it down again. She wondered what she would do next. She might ask for a whisky, or get her bag and go. Then she thought she might get her bag and call Cal to see what he was doing. He might like to zip up here and save her. She would just sit in silence and wait for him.

A peacock screamed.

'Oh,' she said, 'you have peacocks. How big is your flock? Are they Blues or Greens?'

'There are three, at the moment. A dog got in and killed one.'

'Foxes harry them where I come from, dogs too, of course. And the hounds.'

'And where is that, Iseult?' it was Mr Richardson, being gently but firmly insistent.

'I would so like to see them, I miss them - just outside of Coventry, my parents have a farm. They don't keep them themselves but every now and again - quite often in spring and summer, actually - one wanders in from the neighbouring estate. My father always says they're looking for my mother. She's a vet and Lord Loughlowland calls her in to inspect his birds every now and again. Oh, there one is. Are they all Indian Blues? Do you have Spaldings in Australia? They are my favourites.'

Lou asked what Spaldings were.

After she had explained, there was another silence broken by Mutti saying, 'She is looking for a roof over her head.'

'Are you talking to me?'

Mutti ignored her, looked triumphantly at her son and daughter-in-law and then clutched at Lou, drawing his head down to caress his curls and kiss them. 'You won't leave your Mutti, will you?' She held his head and gazed in adoration. Mutti then cast another triumphant look in her direction.

Lou bridled and shifted in his seat, cast his guest a coy look.

The father smiled indulgently at his mother and son.

Mrs Richardson gathered some plates. 'I hope you like pork,' she announced as she left with the plates.

The settings might be hugely different but the tensions were only too familiar. She took comfort from this, drawing a deep breath.

There was a bustle getting the second course in and served.

She longed to tell Lauren of her fortunate escape. Did Allison know? Why hadn't she told her about this?

'We're having a rosé with it,' Lou said.

'What else?' she said and was not sarcastic.

He smiled warmly at her in appreciation.

She was polite about her uni subjects over the pork. Asked about Mr Richardson's current project, Mrs Richardson about the house.

'She is studying to be a what?' Mutti said.

'Communications, like I was,' Lou responded.

'Ah.'

'Mutti did Medicine. But she didn't practice.'

'I can hardly say what a pity. It's such a demanding profession,' she addressed the latter at Mutti, as if she were deaf.

Mutti looked puzzled as to a response.

She smiled at her.

Mutti’s puzzlement wavered back towards hatred.

‘We’re very proud of Mutti, she’s a very – ‘

She interrupted Mr Richardson by rising.

Everyone looked alarmed.

‘I must see those peacocks!’

‘What about dessert?’ Lou said, ‘Mutti made a sachertorte, especially.’

‘For my darling.’ Mutti clutched at him again. ‘You mustn't eat too much or you'll get pimples.' Mutti stroked his thigh.

She looked at Mutti's hand, moving below the table.

Lou sprang up. 'O K,' he said, 'they're always hovering about waiting to be fed.'

'Don't throw it all over the lawn, you'll bring the rats.'

Outside, Lou said, 'Mutti's not used to visitors.'

She turned towards him and said, 'Do you think I could have a whisky?'

'Don't you want to see the peacocks?'

One was stalking across the lawn towards them.

She considered whether she should say, 'Oh it's only another Indian Blue.'

'Mum will want to show you the place.'

'Only if I have a whisky in my paw.'

'I don't know if we've got any.'

'Oh god. Really? Cognac will do' She added brightly. And then couldn't help laughing.

He hesitated then laughed too and hugged her. 'This is great. You're just being yourself.'

She led him back inside.

'The cake is delicious,' she told Mutti.

She lost her rage somewhat during the tour of the grounds and also managed to let Mrs Richardson understand she must leave as soon as the tour was over, which it must be soon.

Mutti was ensconced, pleased, watching the somewhat hurried farewell but sat up in alarm as her rival swept over and crouched in front of her, laying a hand over hers. Mutti snatched it away but it was taken back, firmly and gently.

She was oblivious of all but the terrified angry face before her. 'You know, ' she said to it, 'I am sorry you're so unhappy but you probably don't have to be. And you don't have to try to make other people unhappy too, it makes you so ugly.' With which she rose and left.

Mrs Richardson caught up with her son and his intended on the drive. 'You go and help your father clear up, I'll drive Iseult to the station.'

Lou, astonished, stopped and Mrs Richardson took the keys from him and got into the car.

She turned to have a good look at the place as the car rolled down the drive. Lou was still standing there. He raised his hand, so she turned back to gaze at the gate.

'That was wonderful,' Mrs Richardson breathed, 'she's such a dragon. She resents me too. Because it's my house. And because I'm not Jewish.'

She kicked off her sandals.

At the station Mrs Richardson said again, 'That was wonderful. I'm so sorry if Mutti was a bit difficult. She can be. And I don't think it was ... I think it was one of her difficult days, she gets arthritis, badly. And the pain ... You must come again, soon, I didn't get a chance to show you over the house properly.'

'It was lovely,' she said from the pavement, 'the grounds. Thank you for the lift.'

Cal got out the whisky he kept for her. She drank it in three drafts. 'Yum,' she said, 'I can't stand Australians.' And she held out the glass. As she slowly sipped the second, bigger one, she thought she might ring Lauren. No, she would ring Allison. She had to tell someone. On her third, she could see why she shouldn't say anything, instead she would stay the night with Cal.

He was very pleased, as she had not stayed with him since she had moved into 'Casuarinas', though he thought this had as much to do with his dalliances as her not wanting to explain her overnight absences to Mrs Coleman. 'Cal like Australian girlfriend best,' he murmured to her in bed in the morning.

She was planning. She would send Mrs Richardson a bunch of very simple flowers. And the briefest of thank you notes. And that would be that.

Mrs Coleman looked at her when she came in.

'Good morning,' she said. And went on to her room.

She went in to see Mrs Coleman in the sunroom as she was leaving. 'I'm on my way out again. I'm going into town first to send Mrs Richardson some flowers. She insisted I spend the night. Do you think I should send her a nightie? She lent me one of hers.'

Mrs Coleman didn't think that was necessary.

'I'll make the bunch up with some other things,' the girl said.

'But that is exactly what I don't want you to do.'

'But it's going to cost you the same, it's the minimum charge.'

'I want you to send just this - ' she indicated the bunch of pink boronia, 'and the note. Nothing else.'

The girl looked resentfully at her. 'Very well. Ma'am,' she added.

Lou rang.

She said she was on the bus so they arranged to meet for coffee.

He told her not to worry about Mutti. 'She's a Child of a Survivor.'

'Oh,' she said, 'I could see there was something.'

He went on to explain the psychopathology of Children of Survivors. 'Mutti's got it all,' he said, 'there's this really good book.'

She told him she had too much other reading at the moment but maybe when she had the time.

'How lovely,' Mrs Richardson breathed without any greeting straight into the phone. 'Lou must have told you I don't like those awful plastic arrangements they send these days. They lop the flowers. I suppose it saves them space.'

She allowed a puzzled silence.

'Hullo?'

''Oh, Mrs Richardson! I had such a lovely time. Thank you.'

'Good. Thank you for the flowers. We want you to come again. Soon.'

'That would be - Perhaps after Easter, I have so much uni work at the moment.'

Mrs Richardson was taken aback. 'Could you spare and hour or so if I came into town? I want to talk to you. About something.'

'Certainly. Where?'

Mrs Richardson dithered so she said, 'What about the Royal International? You know near the Quay.'

'Oh yes! Good idea. I think we took Mutti there for supper after a concert once. Oh.' Mrs Richardson stopped as if she had made a mistake.

'Is everything alright?'

'Yes. Let's say ... '

She said she couldn't make it then so they settled on another time.

She arrived early so she could have a whisky.

A man smiled at her.

She bowed slightly in reply.

He sent over another whisky which she was about to reject when he arrived at her table.

'Oh accept it, no strings attached.' He spoke with an American accent.

At that moment Mrs Richardson appeared.

'Over here, Mrs Richardson.'

'So sorry I'm late, those trains ... '

'This is Mr Wales, a friend of my father's. Mrs Richardson ... Mr Wales was just going.'

The American said 'how do you do'.

'Mr Wales is in Sydney - as you see - my father asked him to look me up.'

'Oh. How are you finding us? First visit?'

'No. I was here before. But it was a long time ago. Well,' he turned to her, 'I'll tell your dad I saw you. He really misses you. Good-bye,' he said to Mrs Richardson.

Mrs Richardson sat down.

‘Now if you think of anything more, we didn’t really have enough … Don’t hesitate, please.' And Mr Wales was going.

‘Thank you, I won’t forget,' she called.

'Wasn't that nice?' Mrs Richardson said after they'd watched him leave. 'Oh look, he didn't have time ... '

'He bought that for me,' she said, taking a sip of the whisky.

'I'm sorry I was late, I ... '

'It worked out well. I got him to meet me here. First. We had time for a pleasant chat.'

'What is his business?'

'Cheese. He imports and exports. We make a cheddar that they like in the States. He's very impressed with Australian cheeses.'

'They've certainly come a long way since I was a girl.' Mrs Richardson's account of the development of the Australian cheese industry was interrupted by the waiter.

She promised herself the rest of the whisky when this interview, or whatever it was, was over.

Mrs Richardson all but proposed. 'We all so much liked you. And admired you. I know - you must know yourself, of course, how keen Lou is. My husband and I are very keen not to see him disappointed. And I had ... Mutti was rather difficult and it rather spoiled things.'

She took a sip of her whisky. Mrs Richardson was staring at it so she said, 'Would you like one?'

Mrs Richardson would, rather. After she too had taken a sip, Mrs Richardson continued, 'As you saw, we could give you a good home. There's plenty of room.'

The prospect sickened her. 'I have a home, Mrs Richardson. Several. Mrs Coleman is very fond of me and there's the farm which I still miss.'

'Of course. You would. You could visit. With Lou. We would love to meet your parents.'

'They can't leave ... I am rather settled here. It's been nearly three years now and the lifestyle suits me. And the climate. I never liked the cold. The farm gets so muddy.'

Mrs Richardson looked pleased. 'And you'll be finished your degree this year and Lou got credit for some subjects for his Law degree. He seems settled on a career in Media Law, so nothing was wasted, really.'

'I might do honours,' she reminded.

'Oh yes.'

Mrs Richardson didn't know how to go on.

She smiled as if she was puzzled and slightly curious about the older woman's apparent difficulty.

'Well. It was just ... Lou is a bit worried, he seems to think the visit didn't go ... You seemed a bit distant, he thought, after.'

She said nothing.

'I realise of course that Mutti upset you. She didn't mean to. She's the Child of a Survivor. And such a brilliant woman, once you get to know her.' Mrs Richardson looked at her in appeal.

'So Lou said. He recommended a book.'

The tone was lost on Mrs Richardson. 'Yes. You should read it, it's all there.'

She continued to regard this woman. She could feel her anger mounting.

'Your parents could ... Your mother might like to see the peacocks. It's a pity I gave up my ponies. The neighbours complained they brought flies. They complain about everything.'

This was quite interesting.

'Once she got to know you, Mutti ... It would make such a lovely home for you. You’d be secure.'

‘Secure? If Mrs Coleman felt she needed the space but that's unlikely ... If anything happened to Mrs Coleman, my parents have provided a home here for me in Australia, in case. And it gives me a little extra income at the moment, I've rented it out.'

'Oh. But surely you get lonely?'

She shrugged and took a sip of her whisky. She thought she should have worn something darker for this, as now she felt like shifting the tone towards something sad. Therese's necklace was hopelessly wrong, she should stop wearing it. Maybe she should sell it. Or give it away. To whom?

'We would make you feel very wanted, very secure, at home.'

'But ... Your mother-in-law ... '

'Don't worry about her.'

'It's all very well for you to say that, Mrs Richardson but I have no intention of throwing myself into a situation where I am - where my presence is cross-examined and not appreciated.'

'I knew it! I knew Mutti upset you. She can be so horrible. But you handled her brilliantly. You could help me handle her. You would be such an asset.'

She clasped her glass very lightly. 'I would need assurance of that, of my being welcomed. Into Lou's family.'

'Of course! I assure you.'

'Isn't it usual in any case for the family to give an earnest of their regard? Lou has ... given me nothing.'

'Oh. I see.' Though Mrs Richardson was perplexed. 'The ring! A ring. He ... ' She could not exactly say 'perhaps he wasn't sure' now, could she? 'He can be a bit slow off the mark.'

'No, not a ring. Yet. I have so ... I am so fortunate, I have so much. What am I being offered? Of course if my father were here. If only Mr Wales had stayed ... He would help me, I'm sure. But I know they would say you need to be sure, how do you know this family means what they say? Not Lou, I'm sure of him but ... what am I getting myself into?'

Mrs Richardson astonished her by saying, 'What would you need? To feel sure.'

'Need? Do you know ...?' And she named her jeweller. 'They know me as Miss Woodburn. It's something my father arranged.'

Mrs Richardson nodded.

'They know my taste.'

Mrs Richardson finished her whisky, very unsettled. 'Miss Woodburn,' she said.

On the way home she determined Mutti would pay, whatever it cost, eventually in any case.

She hurried to talk to Rohan and Mr Clinton straight away. 'I think someone will come in in a few days and mention my name. They will be looking for something suitable.'

Rohan was gaping.

Mr Clinton considered this, then said, 'May we offer you our felicitations?'

'No. Not yet. I want you to be very careful and very discreet. My name is Iseult. Don't make too much fuss, just show them the bracelet and say I have admired it. The ring will come later. Perhaps. If things work out. Is there anything suitable? I'll come in and we could go through a selection - three or four - that I could choose from, at the time. You know my style, no fuss in anything. Let me see it again to make sure.'

'Her' diamond bracelet was brought.

She tried it on and took it off, pointed to the slightly duller stone near the clasp. 'Charge them the full price but remember I'm overlooking this at the moment. I might want it replaced later on, or some restitution. We know one another too well to play around.'

Rohan gaped on. Mr Clinton nodded, very serious.

‘Their name is Richardson. You'll probably recognise her,' she said to Mr Clinton, 'but remember, these are very conservative people so discretion, please. Oh look,' she said to Rohan with a bright smile so that he almost jumped, 'I'm wearing the beach necklace. I just felt like it.' She laughed a little.

Mr Clinton accompanied her outside. 'You can trust me. I'll watch Rohan. I'll handle it. Trust me, I'll be so discreet, Miss Woodburn.'

'Oh call me Iseult, after all this time. I know I can trust you.' And she leant across and brushed his cheek very lightly with her own. And was gone.

Mr Clinton went back into the shop with tears in his eyes. After composing himself he began lecturing Rohan.

She went straight back to the Royal.

He was waiting.

He ordered her a whisky before saying anything.

He was very polite, very interested. For a moment she wondered if the Richardsons had sent him to spy then his card flashed into her mind and she dismissed this idea. In any case, she didn't care. She told him she was Australian but from Melbourne, studying here because it had the best course in Media. Her name was Sandra Dangerfield. He said he was in banking but knew people in the media in New York, where he was based.

She agreed to go on to dinner with him.

Then back to his hotel room.

As he watched her dressing he asked if they could have lunch tomorrow.

She said she had uni.

What about the day after?

She chose a very fashionable restaurant. 'I'm not sure you'll get a reservation,' she said. 'do you want me to make it?'

He was taken aback then said no, he'd manage, he knew a few people.

She decided she'd go if she could get the right dress; maybe a yellow of some sort, something light, for lunch. And she wanted to wear her diamond circle brooch. She might get some striking accessories - probably mauve, maybe a hat.

She got them, of course.

FIN