Everywhere I Look Read online

  This is how I first found myself living, as an adult, in what I realised was ‘a suburb’—the very thing I had fled in 1961 when I left Geelong for Melbourne University, and had seen ever since as the emblem of everything I despised.

  As my domestic life began to centre on Moonee Ponds, its name so unfairly a byword for the pretentious and the ridiculous, my feelings underwent a change. The beauty of those two words—Moonee Ponds—dawned on me. They made me think of a chain of quiet billabongs under a blurred moon. Many years later, I was in the back seat of a car in which Christopher Logue, the English poet and great translator of Homer, was being driven across town. We rolled down Brunswick Road and over the freeway, where the first sign to Moonee Ponds stood. From the front passenger seat rose a drawling, highly educated Pommy voice: ‘I say…what’s a Moonee Pond?’ He had probably never heard of Edna Everage, and had no attitude towards the name of my erstwhile suburb, but the way he picked up the word in ironic tweezers made me want to seize him from my seat in the back and garrotte him.

  Last summer I was spending a week with my sister at a health farm outside Penrith. I should mention that I was fasting. I turned on the TV in my room and found in progress a documentary about Barry Humphries. It showed black-and-white footage from the 1950s: a man in tightly rolled up shirtsleeves polishing his new FJ Holden with exaggeratedly vigorous arm movements; a bunch of unsmiling middle-aged women in horn-rimmed spectacles and hats like meringues. These people were offered to us viewers for our mockery. But in the 1950s I was a provincial Australian schoolgirl. I lived back then, in a suburb of Geelong. In that documentary footage I saw nothing to sneer at. What struck me was the man’s cheerful pride and energy. I saw the women’s shyness, their anxiety about being no longer young, their uncertainty about whether they would be considered fashionable or attractive; and my heart cracked.

  Those mocked people in Moonee Ponds or Manifold Heights or Newtown—didn’t they too love and hope and work and suffer and try to help each other, and die? I wanted to speak up, now that it’s too late, for my parents, and for my parents’ friends—those shy, modest, public-spirited people. On weekends they built themselves a bowling green with their bare hands. On Saturday nights they did ballroom dancing in their clubhouse to a daggy amateur band. The fathers twirled us clumsy girls around in our layered petticoats and big white shoes. These people were kind to their neighbours’ children. They were proud of us and showed us their affection. They gave us a glass of lemon cordial and a biscuit after school, and let us play ‘Chopsticks’ and ‘Heart and Soul’ on their piano for hours without complaining. They weren’t related to us but we called them all Auntie and Uncle. They arrived at each other’s barbecues freshly dressed and smiling, carrying a plate of shortbread biscuits, or a bowl of salad covered with a damp tea towel. The women ran up cotton frocks on sewing machines. The men went fishing and brought home huge feasts of flounder. They worked hard and tried to live decently. In old age, long after the families had scattered all over the map, the survivors turned up faithfully at funerals.

  I’m ashamed now of my bohemian contempt for the suburbs of my childhood, of my longing to be sophisticated. In the 1990s I lived in Sydney, in Elizabeth Bay, a part of town full of flats and cool cafés, but empty of children; then on the border of Bellevue Hill and Bondi Junction, to me a place of loneliness and strange humiliation, where the young residents of my apartment building would sail through the lobby each morning without even granting the fact of their neighbours’ existence.

  In 2000 I came back to Melbourne and rented a house in the suburb of Ascot Vale. My daughter had found it for me: she chose it because it was right opposite a primary school. Working in my kitchen I would stop still and listen to the high, long, sweet, wordless cry that rises from children at play.

  Now, as a grandmother, I live in a suburb that to some of my friends is off the beaten track. To get this far west they have to work their way round obstacles: the cemetery and the university, the untracked wastes of Royal Park. They have to pass the zoo. They even have to cross the freeway.

  I met my neighbours en masse one night after dinner, when some kids from the flats crashed a stolen car through the fence at the bottom of our street and down the bank of the railway line. Everybody rushed out to see. People introduced themselves; they welcomed me. A woman ran inside for a blanket and wrapped it round the shoulders of the driver, whose teeth were chattering with shock. When the cops turned up, an officious young policewoman told us to go back to our homes. My neighbours bristled. We all stood closer together. One bloke muttered, ‘I’m going to bring out my barbecue.’ It was our street, and we weren’t going inside till we were good and ready.

  My next-door neighbour Chris comes out to cut her nature strip, sees that mine is bedraggled, and runs her mower across it as a matter of course, without thinking of it as a favour or asking for appreciation. Her children’s white rabbit sneaks through a hole in the side fence and spends leisurely afternoons in my backyard. My grandchildren’s unloved guinea pig, Guadalupe, fled under the fence into Chris’s yard; a week or so later Chris let us know that it was now male, and its name was Philip. We stand out the front under the plane trees talking about chooks and the return of the foxes. We talk about compost. I begin to see that suburbia might be merely another term for dirt, or children, or vegetation.

  A few years ago the brilliantly original and eccentric Victorian writer Gerald Murnane won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. It’s a big prize, and half of it is supposed to be spent on overseas travel. When Murnane heard he’d been short-listed, he told the committee to withdraw his name, since he had never left the country and was resolutely opposed to the idea of doing so. The committee had the sense to relax the travel clause and award him the prize. In his acceptance speech he explained his refusal to go abroad, and outlined his simple plan for travel within Australia: he was going to visit all the houses in Melbourne that he had ever lived in.

  Then he tilted back his head, closed his eyes, and recited a long list of all his former addresses in the suburbs of Melbourne: plainly named streets in obscure, lower-middle-class suburbs that no one ever goes to or hears about in the news. And as he reeled them off, by heart, without hesitation, in chronological order, we all held our breath, with tears in our eyes, because we knew that he was reciting a splendid and mysterious poem. It was a naming of parts of the mighty machine that had created the imaginative world of an artist. And when he finished, and opened his eyes, the place went up in a roar of joy.

  2011

  PART TWO

  Notes from a Brief Friendship

  Dear Mrs Dunkley

  IN 1952, when I was nine and my name was Helen Ford, I came from Ocean Grove State School, where the teachers were kindly country people, to a private girls’ school in Geelong. I was put into your grade five class.

  You were very thin, with short black hair and hands that trembled. You wore heels, a black calf-length skirt and a black jacket with a nipped-in waist.

  We had Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia at home, and I thought I was pretty good at General Knowledge.

  ‘In what year was the Great Plague of London?’

  Up flew my hand. ‘1665.’

  You stared at me. ‘I beg your pardon?’ You mimicked my flat, nasal, state school accent. You corrected it. You humiliated me. I became such a blusher that other kids would call out, ‘Hey Fordie! What colour’s red?’

  I was weak at arithmetic. On such weakness you had no mercy. ‘Stand up, you great MOON CALF.’ You made us queue at your table to show you our hopelessly scratched-out and blotted exercise books. Close up you emitted a faint and terrifying odour: a medicinal sort of perfume. On your lapel twinkled a sinister marcasite brooch.

  Every morning, first thing after the bell, you would write in chalk on the blackboard the numerals of the clock face, then take the long wooden pointer and touch the figures, one by one, in random order, in a slow, inexorable rhythm. We had to add them silen
tly in our heads, and have the answer ready when you stopped. The name of this daily practice was THE DIGIT RING.

  You made us keep our hands on the desks so we couldn’t count on our fingers, but I learnt to make my movements too small to be visible: to this day I can add up on my fingers like lightning. But the psychic cost of the digit ring was high. My mother had to wake me from nightmares. ‘You were calling out in your sleep,’ she’d say. ‘You were screaming out “The digit ring! The digit ring!” What on earth,’ she asked innocently, ‘is a digit ring?’

  Dear Mrs Dunkley. You taught us not only arithmetic. One day, making us all sick with shame that our mothers had neglected their duties, you taught grade five to darn a sock. You taught us to spell, and how to write a proper letter: the address, the date, the courteous salutation, the correct layout of the page, the formal signing off. But most crucially, you taught us grammar and syntax. On the blackboard you drew up meticulous columns, and introduced us to Parts of Speech, Parsing, Analysis. You showed us how to take a sentence apart, identify its components, and fit them back together with a fresh understanding of the way they worked.

  One day you listed the functions of the adverb. You said, ‘An adverb can modify an adjective.’ Until that moment I had known only that adverbs modified verbs: they laughed loudly; merrily we roll along. I knew I was supposed to be scratching away with my dip pen, copying the list into my exercise book, but I was so excited by this new idea that I put up my hand and said, ‘Mrs Dunkley, how can an adverb modify an adjective?’

  You paused, up there in front of the board with the pointer in your hand. My cheeks were just about to start burning when I saw on your face a mysterious thing. It was a tiny, crooked smile. You looked at me for a long moment—a slow, careful, serious look. You looked at me, and, for the first time, I knew that you had seen me.

  ‘Here’s an example,’ you said, in an almost intimate tone. ‘The wind was terribly cold.’

  I got it, and you saw me get it. Then your face snapped shut.

  I never lost my terror of you, nor you your savage contempt. But if arithmetic lessons continued to be a hell of failure and derision, your English classes were a paradise of branching and blossoming knowledge.

  Many years later, dear Mrs Dunkley, when I had turned you into an entertaining ogre from my childhood whose antics made people laugh and shudder, when I had published four books and felt at last that I could call myself a writer, I had a dream about you. In this dream I walked along the sandstone veranda of the school where you had taught me, and looked in through the French doors of the staffroom. Instead of the long tables at which the teachers of my childhood used to sit, marking exercise books and inventing horrible tests and exams, I saw a bizarre and miraculous scene.

  I saw you, Mrs Dunkley, moving in slow motion across the staffroom—but instead of your grim black 1940s wool suit, you were dressed in a jacket made of some wondrously tender and flexible material, like suede or buckskin, in soft, unstable colours that streamed off you into the air in wavy bands and ribbons and garlands, so that as you walked you drew along behind you a thick, smudged rainbow trail.

  In 1996 I described this dream in the introduction to a collection of my essays. A few months after the book came out, I received a letter from a stranger. She had enjoyed my book, she said, particularly the introduction. She enclosed a photo that she thought I might like to see.

  The photo shows a woman and a teenage girl standing in front of a leafy tree, in a suburban backyard. It’s an amateurish black-and-white snap of a mother and daughter: it cuts off both subjects at the ankles. The girl is dressed in a gingham school uniform. Her haircut places the picture in about 1960. She is slightly taller than the woman, and is looking at the camera with the corners of her mouth drawn back into her cheeks; but her eyes are not smiling; they are wary and guarded.

  The woman in the photo is in her late forties. She has short, dark, wavy hair combed back off her forehead. Her brows are dark and level, her nose thin, her lips firmly closed in an expression of bitter constraint. Deep, hard lines bracket her mouth. She’s wearing a straight black skirt and a black cardigan undone to show a neat white blouse buttoned to the neck. Her hands are hanging by her sides.

  I showed the photo to my husband. ‘What enormous hands!’ he said.

  I knew your hands, Mrs Dunkley. Not that they ever touched me, but I recall them as thin and sinewy and fierce looking, with purplish skin that seemed fragile. They quivered, in 1952, with what I thought was rage, as you skimmed your scornful pencil-point down my wonky long divisions and multiplications.

  ‘My mother,’ wrote the stranger in her letter, ‘was an alcoholic.’

  I thought I knew you, Mrs Dunkley. I thought that by writing about you I had tamed you and made you a part of me. But when I looked at that photo, I felt as if I’d walked into a strange room at night, and something imperfectly familiar had turned to me in the dark. The real Mrs Dunkley shifted out from under the grid of my creation, and I saw you at last, my teacher: an intense, damaged, dreadfully unhappy woman, only just holding on, fronting up to the school each morning, buttoned into your black clothes, savagely impatient, craving, suffering: a lost soul.

  Dear Mrs Dunkley. You’re long gone, and I’m nearly seventy. But, oh, I wish you weren’t dead. I’ve got some things here that I wouldn’t be ashamed to show you. And I’ve got something I want to say. I would like to thank you. It’s probably what you would have called hyperbole, but, Mrs Dunkley, you taught me everything I know. Other teachers, later, consolidated it. But you were the one who laid the groundwork. You showed me the glory and the power of an English sentence and the skills I would need to build one. You put into my hands the tools for the job.

  Dear Mrs Dunkley. I know that your first name was Grace; I hope you found some, in the end. Please accept, in whatever afterlife you earned or were vouchsafed, the enduring love, the sincere respect, and the eternal gratitude of your Great Moon Calf, Helen.

  2011

  Eight Views of Tim Winton

  one

  The first time I clapped eyes on the physical Tim Winton was in 1982. I’d reviewed his novel An Open Swimmer in the National Times, one of those publications ‘over east’ which Tim regarded with the dark suspicion of the dyed-in-the-wool West Australian.

  Soon after this, I was one of the east-coast guests, along with David Marr and Blanche d’Alpuget, at a writers’ weekend in Fremantle. On the plane out Blanche befriended me. I was impressed by her negative ion generator, her neat little cream suit and her work-in-progress, a biography of Bob Hawke. She and I were given adjoining rooms at the hotel. Early on the first morning she called me in. Charming, blonde, glamorous, she gave a brilliant demonstration of how to manage a laden breakfast tray while reclining against voluptuous movie-star pillows. I trudged to the day’s session, Bertha Bigfoot from Geelong.

  From the stage I scanned the audience. One young man’s head was tilted in a way I’d seen in a photo somewhere. A fall of straight shiny brown hair. An expression of earnest concentration on an egg-smooth, freckled face. And he was staring at me. Hell, wasn’t that Winton? Stabbed with panic, I scoured my memory for what I’d said in the review. I liked the novel and had said so; but from the lofty eminence of a minimalist who’d published fully two books, I’d drawn attention to what I saw as his overworked metaphors: a character doesn’t just take a mouthful of beer, for example, but nudges the bitter foam. Oh, Gawd. I dreaded the tea-break. And yet I knew I’d be more at home with this provincial long hair than with the suave political journalists from Sydney.

  two

  Cut to the state of having known each other forever. It’s an unlikely friendship—I’m almost as old as his mother. That day at Fremantle was the start of a long conversation. Thick envelopes arrived from Perth, neatly addressed in his sloping, clear, best-writer-grade-six hand, which is still the same today. Were the letters about what he was reading and writing, what vegetables they were planting, what fish they we
re catching and eating? He and Denise had just got married. They’d known each other since primary school. They were very happy. Secretly, in my inner-city, divorced feminist way, I thought what they’d done was very dangerous. When I eventually got to visit their house, I looked at their wedding photos on the mantelpiece and noticed once again that earnest expression of Tim’s. He stood behind Denise with his arms round her, and glared into the camera, his eyes almost crossing with intensity. I am her husband: she is my wife. Denise looked calm and sweet and funny. She was doing nursing, back then. On night shifts she used to write me quietly delirious letters on lined lecture pads and sign them Nurse Pam. Who the hell was Nurse Pam? A cartoon character? Our friendship was constructed on a grid of these references. And on jokes about farting, bums and general scatology, which are a Winton family tradition.

  three

  In 1984 Jesse, the first of the Wintons’ kids, was born. The planned home birth deteriorated into trauma and crisis. Along with the baby-and-mother photos, Tim sent me a picture of himself, bulging-eyed, staggering in a blood-stained boiler suit along the bare corridor of a hospital. I am a father. That year I was writer-in-residence at the University of Western Australia and lived in Perth for nine weeks. I hurried to their house and was handed the baby to hold. Happily I strolled about the neat living room, murmuring to this tiny Jesse, pulling rank, fancying myself as an experienced mother. Then something disturbed the baby and he began to wriggle, to whimper, to cry and then to squall. I rushed to find Tim in the other room and held out the bundle to him. He kept his hands in his pockets and grinned at me in an infuriating way. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You do it.’ So I had to, and I did.