The Man on the Headland Read online

  The handsome Rudl was once taken aback. He was holding forth in front of our fire about the laziness of Australians, their reluctance to work. “What would do them all good,” he said, smiling, “would be a little pushed labour. Not forced labour—no, no—but pushed.”

  Roddy asked, “And they would be all organized in gangs?”

  “Yes.” Rudl considered. “Possibly for roads and other works.”

  “There’s only one thing that would ruin your scheme.” Roddy’s voice was as pleasant as Rudl’s.

  “And what is that?” Rudl asked.

  “Well, you would be in charge of a gang, Rudl, and if it ever got to that stage, I would be in one of the gangs. And when your back was turned, Rudl, I would smash in your head with a shovel.”

  Rudl explained that he was only theoretically ready to form work gangs and Roddy said he was only theoretically going to smash in RudFs head with a shovel. After that Rudl did not so often criticize Australians. Twenty years later you could not tell Rudl, a distinguished public servant in Canberra, from any other Australian except by his extreme neatness and efficiency. He and quiet, sturdy Ella put their four children through the university—and how they worked!

  I was writing a book about travelling bee-keepers, The Honey Flow and Jack Koina, the boss of a bee-keeping outfit, came on a visit. When Rudl kissed my hand as he appeared for an evening of music Jack never flickered an eyelash, but later, hundreds of miles away, for the benefit of his friends round the campfire, he would give an imitation of Rudl telling about his courtship of Ella when she was a young doctor and he a ski instructor in the Austrian Alps. “I see zese girls,” Jack mimicked, “and I say, ‘I will have the one with the pretty ankles and the big income.’ “ Rudl worshipped Ella, tended her when she was tired in a way that would have amazed our fishermen, who thought their wives best occupied waiting on them.

  The new people at the post office had also this middle-class view that a husband and wife were a working team of equals. Mac was our new postmaster and he and his wife Bonte came from the New England ranges where I was now going off to work with the bee-keepers. Bonte’s mother, who was nicknamed James, supervised holiday cottages on the North Haven side of the breakwater. James had more loving-kindness than any woman I have known. She had had great tragedies, but had flowed over them as a wave sweeps over a rock.

  Bonte, who was pretty and elegant, liked social occasions, influential and exciting people, and musical evenings. She drove her two sons twenty-five miles so they could have violin lessons. The music club met at the school residence and Roddy bought an imposing new radiogram so that we could all listen to the records of classical music. The Brunswicks, the McLachlans, the Rodds, would gather round our fire and the great symphonies would be booming out, and then there would be the voice of Bonte, “Stop! Could we just have Coda A again? I missed the entrance of the clarinets.”

  My interest in symphonies was tepid. My mother, who now came to rule the school residence when I was on my travels, played the pipe organ and my childhood had had a background of Bach. I never became a competent musician because practice interfered with basketball and we always had mother to play for us when we sang innocently round the piano. Everyone sang in our house when I was young.

  Secretly I thought it rather pretentious to study the nine Beethoven symphonies, and down in the Pilliga scrub, arriving in camp dirty and sweaty, I would give a glad cry, “It’s Tuesday and I’ve missed another symphony!” My bee-keepers thought “You Are My Honeysuckle” was the height of music. They sang as they pushed the big trucks over the back roads through the forest. “Go for Ernie!” they would yell when they were bogged.

  Bonte and James always brought die supper for the musical gatherings, Bonte remarking that if they left it to me they would find diemselves eating dry biscuits with a hunk of cheese on top.

  “And you want cream cakes?”

  “Certainly I want cream cakes.” Bonte smiled. She was always trying to reform me, declaring that like so many comedians I had the nature of someone wrapped in a plaid on a Scottish crag waiting for doom. She was excited by events and pleasure. Nothing ever happened to me. If there was an earthquake I would have left before it began and returned to take down the accounts of eye-witnesses. I will probably die of boredom in extreme old age. Bonte insisted that I was indifferent to all that made life enjoyable. Look at me, going off where I was constantly in pain from bee-stings camped in the scrub with those oafs! Bonte came with me on one trip and was so gay and competent that she quite lit up the camp.

  I came back from the city on one occasion bearing the records of Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and nothing would suit Bonte but that we must set aside an evening to listen to it. Terry Ewen had dropped in to hear any news and found himself with Roddy and Mac on the sofa by the fire where they promptly all went to sleep. Bonte and I looked over while The Rape of Lucretia wailed on, and there was dear old Mac big and bolt upright, his eyes shut, Roddy asleep on his shoulder, and Terry snoring with his chin sunk in his checked scarf. We broke into yells of laughter which woke them.

  “What a fuss to make about a bit of a do,” was Terry’s comment on die opera as he departed.

  Terry and his wife, Sadie, moved to the city later where Terry sold landrovers and Sadie sold furs in a big store. Sadie always won at the races and Terry always lost.

  “Why do you take him if he loses?” I asked Sadie.

  “Well, you couldn’t go on your own.”

  “Why doesn’t he bet on the horses you pick?”

  “That’s Terry.” Sadie smiled.

  Terry was full of complications and thoughts on religion, for he had once been a Catholic and an altar boy, and he had kindly impulses and generosity. He wanted to be a fisherman and go out on the snapper boats, but they all knew Terry would be no good at heavy lifting, He was a fascinating talker and, apart from women and religion, interested in doing what was correct.

  “Well, I mean to say, I took Sadie to this nightclub all got up in the old fur, out for a night of glitter and splendour, and who do I find is running the place when we sweep in? Why, nobody but Chris whom I have known from way back! ‘Terry, old man,’ he says, seizing my hand, ‘for you the best table! Do you remember the days when we cooked a saveloy over the gas-ring together in that crumby back room we were sharing and neither of us had a shirt to our backs?’ Now I mean to say, in front of my guests when I was trying to look like a big-time operator this was a bit much. And he keeps darting back to our table with happy boyhood reminiscences about us doing a starve together and how we hadn’t a shilling to put in the gas-meter. I can tell you it was a pall over the whole evening. ‘Here he comes again,’ Sadie would hiss. ‘He’s thought of something else.’ A man doesn’t want to be reminded amid wassail and song—he made me feel we were right back again with the old gas-ring.”

  Or his story might be: “There was a priest got into the cab the other day and it gave me a shiver just to see him as though I was back again with Brother Xavier wielding the strap. ‘Father,’ I says to him, ‘do you really believe that when we die that there is this after-life?’ And this priest just laughed. ‘Ho, ho,’ he said, ‘what a fool I’ll look if there isn’t! Ho, ho, what a surprise I’ll get!’ And he hops out of the cab still laughing. Well I meanter say, when a man wants some information and all he gets is a gink that goes away laughing ...”

  Ernie shared in the new stir of life in Laurieton, The returned soldiers had built themselves a clubhouse and Ernie’s contempt of those he termed “professional Returned Soldiers” did not prevent him from sampling its amenities. He always came in on Anzac Day to carouse a little. One Anzac Day his niece Dot called to me that she wished I would use my influence with Uncle. He was in no state to ride home.

  “The horse knows the way,” Ernie objected. He always left the horse in our yard. The sulky had fallen to pieces by this time. Over tea Ernie was gay and talkative. Roddy-decided that he would really trounce Ernie this t
ime at chess. He continued to ply Ernie with wine, meanly staying cold sober and even dropping a sleeping pill in the wine as he continued to lose. At midnight he had not won a single game and gave up in disgust, leaving Ernie ready to play and talk all night. He was gone before we were awake, taking a surf on the way to Dimandead. He said later that he had never felt better.

  Dimandead, which could in the rain be all eroded cliffs and rain-soaked dirt, glowed the more splendid as we so often found ourselves cut off by the awful road. Ernie began to think we were seduced by the pleasures of gracious living, but our tastes had always been aboriginal-meals cooked over a wood fire, surfing, sunning.

  He would be waiting for us at the week-end, coming out now he was a little deaf and couldn’t hear .the truck, to stand by the broken fence where the cow had pushed through to eat Clara’s roses. All that grew now were the pale pink Flowers of the West Wind thick in the grass by Ernie’s boots that never wore out. We did not come. He would remind himself that he had never meant to stay at Dimandead. Any time he wanted he could just walk off. In Queensland he would meet old mates who had been in the great strike at Mareeba or mined out from Cloncurry. He was a free man who was not, as some people are, tied to a single place.

  “A little spot of rain,” he would say, coming into my kitchen, “hardly enough to wet the grass.”

  “Ernie, it was pouring. If we’d got out we would never have got back.”

  “You could go round by Moorlands.”

  “The bogholes on the Moorland road are worse. Benison was disappointed, too.”

  As Laurieton prospered as a tourist resort Dimandead, which was once expected to be glossy and lucrative, sank into wilderness. The beach track was now a system of revetments, deep holes, moats into which invaders had thrown boulders and tree-trunks in an often vain attempt to get through. When a city newspaper photographer came up to take pictures for an article a friend had written he was so keen to see Ernie and Dimandead that we enlisted Laurie Bucton, the butcher, and four strong men with Laurie’s truck, known as the Maggot Waggon. With this task force to push when the Maggot Waggon was bogged, we struggled through, giving Ernie a great surprise. He posed with the goat or me patiently whenever Vic Johnson, the photographer, told him to, and Vic was enchanted by his beard, crouching round him at different angles and yelling, “Hold it!” or, “A little more to the left.”

  Vic had arrived on my doorstep in a downpour looking sad and grim as photographers usually do.

  “Who do you think the editor is going to blame for the rain?” I greeted him.

  “Me.”

  “Right. So you ring him up and tell him you have to stay until the weather clears up.”

  “Hell kill me.”

  I gave him a strong whisky which did his ulcers no good but made him feel happy. He rang the editor in an authoritative way and demanded an extra day. His orders had been to come the three hundred miles from the city and get back that night. Editors are like that. Vic did not get back for three days. He was a crack photographer and the scenery enthralled him, particularly Ernie. For years, when I saw him occasionally, he would ask after Ernie with the deep pleasure of a man who had found the Perfect Beard.

  My old truck, which could no longer take the long distances up to New England, finally gave out, just managing to stagger back in one last faithful burst, collapsing at the door of Ken Nolder’s garage at Kew seven miles from home. Trucks were dear and in those years not easy to come by. Roddy declared I must have a new one and after much consultation I applied for a Commonwealth Literary Fellowship, simply saying that I could not finish my book without a truck. The chairman of the Advisory Board was Vance Palmer, who knew the frustrations of a writer. I was given a fellowship and bought the truck. Nine months later a couple of red-baiting Members rose in Parliament and said the Fund was under Communist influence, and one claimed that I was a Communist using my fellowship to tour the country circulating propaganda. The Government had no right to bestow tax money on me.

  Roddy and I had a hearty dislike for Communist tactics and regarded the party leadership as authoritarian and out of touch with political realities. Years before when hawking cabbages in Lithgow I had once paid over two shillings for “a ticket”, which I never got, but it had been partly a gesture to my kind hosts. Also I was willing to join any organization to see how it worked.

  Now I was furious. “If I hadn’t spent the money,” I growled at my husband, “I’d give it back.”

  “Why not?”

  “We haven’t that much.”

  “We’ll raise it.”

  So we scraped the bottom of our bank balance, borrowed from my brother-in-law, and sent back a cheque exact to a penny. As this appeared to be the first time anyone could remember money being given back to the Government it created a stir in Parliament and the newspapers. The Member apologized to me in the House and repeated his former statement on the steps so that I could sue him for libel. To the annoyance of my tough city solicitor I accepted the apology and, to put an end to it, when the Prime Minister, who was chairman of the Fund, wrote me a handsome letter I accepted the money back. One newspaper which had rung up gave itself a full-page spread: “Author Sobs into Telephone when Name is Cleared”. “‘Those who clothe themselves in honour often come to lack any other garment,’” I had quoted. I was not sobbing, I was gulping, trying to swallow a mouthful of dinner which the call had interrupted.

  Ernie never felt the same towards our son, a healthy and tranquil baby, as he had felt towards Benison- who gave us so much anxiety. He sensed that, just as with Benison he had gained, with the boy he lost us. He had been working out a cunning scheme. Dimandead always offered what a man thought he wanted most. This was one of its grandest illusions. Now Roddy and Ernie were working out how Roddy could open a school at Dimandead. It would be for “difficult” children, unwanted children. Ernie had the manual skills and we could teach anything else they needed. He pointed out that while he could not sell us land there was no reason why he couldn’t lease it to us. Somehow I never believed in this mirage because I knew that Dimandead would decoy us to itself and destroy us if we were committed. Ernie it never destroyed, keeping him as a pet the way terrible old ladies keep a pug dog. If we sank our future in Dimandead we would be the knights of San Merci wandering pale by the lonely sedge. But even I could almost see the long low buildings gleaming there.

  Some people from the city had bought the Twomey house over by the lake for a holiday resort, and for a time their barge plied gaily from Laurieton. The man’s wife fell ill and he left the house at Humbug. Fishermen stole everything in it and the house sank into the grass. Only a few stunted orange- and lemon-trees put out shoots nibbled by the wallabies. Years later you could hardly see that a house had been there.

  While I was waiting for my son to be born I gave up bee-keeping trips and wrote a play, which won a competition sponsored by the Commonwealth Government. It was about Alfred Deakin and I had foolishly provided about twenty male characters, so that it was too expensive to act. I had suggested to Ella Brunswick that she could deliver the baby at home. “Oh no, you don’t,” Ella said promptly, “It would be different if you were a fisherman’s daughter about eighteen. But I know your So, complaining to Roddy of Ella’s cautious nature, I set off for Melbourne, driving as far as Sydney and leaving Benison with my mother. I had to go to Melbourne about material for my play.

  Driving home we stopped with a friend in Maitland, who was chief librarian, and I thought I should make arrangements with a doctor to come back there. Also he could tell me when the baby would be born. He said four months. “Get out!” I exclaimed. “You’re not serious?” When I thought how I had nearly had to sleep in the park at Melbourne because I couldn’t find any lodging and had been given a sofa by strangers and had trudged in the cold from one end of the city to the other I realized the baby had been very undemanding. He inherited all the gentler traits which had missed Benison, the female Napoleon, and later he became a musici
an.

  When I left for hospital Roddy was still learning to drive the truck. After seeing him swipe off the school gatepost I insisted on driving myself to Maitland. Bonte was determined to wave my hair before I went and scattered her paraphernalia for the perm all over the kitchen. During this process there was some confused excitement outside. The living-room chimney had caught fire and they were keeping it from me. Bonte went out to see what was afoot and came back to ask, “Where is my neutralizing solution?”

  “Was that it in the jug? I thought it was hot water and poured it into the teapot and drank it”

  Bonte rushed to the telephone to call Ella.

  “Where is she now?” Ella asked.

  “She’s in the kitchen laughing.”

  “Well, if it had been poison she’d be dead by now.” Ella rang off, congratulating herself that she had refused to have anything to do with the birth of my son. Benison went with me to Maitland where I occupied myself cutting a long book which the publishers thought might get them into trouble with censors. I had to wait on Benison, who had caught influenza and gave it to me. I itched all over from the antibiotics pumped into me. I was so tired from being up all night that having a baby was secondary. I asked the nurse if I could take my detective story into the labour ward and she said it was all very well to be serene, but you could overdo it. Because I did not seem worried they left me there and I nearly had the baby by myself, seeing how long I could do without anaesthetic. I was discovered, however, and immediately rendered unconscious until the doctor could get there, spoiling my interest in having the baby by myself. I was going to show Ella I wouldn’t have been any trouble.