The Spatial Eld of Plots

The spatial !eld of plots Space, time and plot in Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life; and winter, the trees, a novel

SUE PARKER

A thesis submitted in ful!lment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The University of New South Wales, Australia School of the Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

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Surname or Family name: Parker

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School: School of the Arts and Media Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Title: The Spatial Field of Plots: ‘Space, time and plot in Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life’ and a novel winter, the trees

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the enigma of Joseph Furphy’s iconic Australian novel Such is Life (1903) which hides a romance inside its realist portrayal of life in the Riverina at the end of the nineteenth century, and also hides a woman in a male character. An examination of the fragmentary plots in the novel reveals that this enigma can be mapped through the spatial field. It argues that in Such is Life the spatial field, as an isolated motif, and in its continual dialogue with the temporal field, is an active element in, and not a passive background to, the way stories are plotted and to ways we recognise these plots. The spatial field not only delivers the narratives embedded in the novel but is central to the novel’s design. An analysis of the spatial field shows the function of that field in the action of plotting. Using Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope (the fusion of time and space) we can understand that Furphy plays the spatial field of the novel against the temporal in a number of similarly structured plots. Joseph Furphy’s experimentation with our expectations of genre, and of plots and their outcomes provides evidence for a reading of the novel as a parody of literary genres. The operations of the spatial field of the novel, as distinct from the temporal field, allow readers to observe that Furphy infects realism with romance, and romance with realism in his journey to the emotional core of a woman.

The structure of my novel, winter, the trees, is organised spatially, as a first-person narrative framed by a flight from Zurich to Sydney via Singapore. Through this frame, stories embedded in past temporal and spatial fields tell the back story of the struggle faced by the unnamed narrator after the birth to her stillborn baby. The death of the baby causes her to reject her partner, to reject her society and to flee first to a hotel room in Brisbane, then to her mother’s home also in Brisbane in the naive belief that the past can answer questions that she can’t. From Brisbane the narrator travels to Europe and Egypt for her employer, a film director, who sends her to photograph locations for a film script he is writing. After losing her way in the desert in Fayoum, Egypt, the narrator chooses to return to Sydney to face the reality of her childlessness, her grief and the state of her marriage. The novel consciously explores the relevance of the spatial field to the structural integrity of the plots of the many stories embedded in my novel.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the University of New South Wales for the grant of an Australian

Postgraduate Award which enabled my study and to thank Associate Professor Roslyn Jolly and

Associate Professor Anne Brewster for their supervision.

Many friends and members of my family supported this work. I am grateful for their assistance, and humbled by their unwavering loyalty and their love.

Abstract -

This dissertation investigates the enigma of Joseph Furphy’s iconic Australian novel Such is Life

(1903) which hides a romance inside its realist portrayal of life in the Riverina at the end of the nineteenth century, and also hides a woman in a male character. An examination of the fragmentary plots in the novel reveals that this enigma can be mapped through the spatial field. It argues that in

Such is Life the spatial field, as an isolated motif, and in its continual dialogue with the temporal field, is an active element in, and not a passive background to, the way stories are plotted and to ways we recognise these plots. The spatial field not only delivers the narratives embedded in the novel but is central to the novel’s design. An analysis of the spatial field shows the function of that field in the action of plotting. Using Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope (the fusion of time and space) we can understand that Furphy plays the spatial field of the novel against the temporal in a number of similarly structured plots. Joseph Furphy’s experimentation with our expectations of genre, and of plots and their outcomes provides evidence for a reading of the novel as a parody of literary genres.

The operations of the spatial field of the novel, as distinct from the temporal field, allow readers to observe that Furphy infects realism with romance, and romance with realism in his journey to the emotional core of a woman.

Sydney to face the reality of her childlessness, her grief and the state of her marriage. The novel consciously explores the relevance of the spatial field to the structural integrity of the plots of the many stories embedded in my novel.

Table of Contents Page

Acknowledgements i Abstract ii

‘Space, time and plot in Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life’

Introduction 1

Part 1 Space, time and parody 1.1 The dual agenda of Such is Life 11 1.2 Literary realism 15 1.3 Motifs of romance in the novel 25 1.4 Parody 36 1.5 The plot of Such is Life 39 1.6 The spatial field in narrative theory 47 1.7 Literary time 51 1.8 Classing narrative events 57 1.9 The action of plotting 61

Part 2 Observations of the spatial field in Such is Life

Introduction 62 2.1 The structuring principal of binary operations 63 2.2 Real and imagined: the road as thread 66 2.3 Runnymede, the place of romance 75 2.4 Two (h)Alfs make a whole 77 2.5 Mirror narratives 87 2.6 Double space: the spatial field and the stories of the lost children 94 2.7 The story of Mary O’Halloran 101 2.8 Space within space 108

Conclusion 112

Works cited 123

Novel winter, the trees 130

‘Space, time and plot in Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life’

Introduction

Joseph Furphy’s iconic Australian novel, Such is Life, published in 1903, contains a curious dual agenda of romance and realism. While Furphy’s comic narrator, Tom Collins, asserts his veracity, Furphy has written a romance storyline into his chronicle that is intended for the reader and which he hides from Tom. These two narrative agendas, romance and realism, explore questions of whether novels need plots and whether a novel that is devoid of plot, such as a chronicle, will sustain a reader’s attention from beginning to end. Throughout the novel, plot gets in the way of plotlessness. Not only that, Furphy’s novel is full of plots whose structures mirror the narrative arc of the hidden romance. This dissertation will explore how the spatial field is an active element to both the act of plotting and of these plots. The structure of the novel is determined by the movement of the narrator over the geography of the Riverina. Movement over space is the consistent thread that leads the reader into and away from these plots. The structures of these plots assert conditions of separation whose momentum is to achieve union. They are plotted by separating characters in both time and space. The spatial field is the central trope through which Furphy conducts this unique experiment with literary form.

In traditional theories of narrative, the spatial field is considered to be a passive motif in literature, relegated to conveying the mood and setting of a narrative sequence while the relationship between narrative and the temporal frame is privileged. I will explore the reasons for this and argue that the spatial field is always indelibly interconnected to the relationship between temporality and narrative; indeed it must be because of the way we understand and measure the abstract concept of time comparatively through space. This dissertation argues that, in the theory of narrative plots and plotting, the spatial field and the temporal field are mutually interdependent. The concept of the interdependence of time and space is central to the Russian philologist and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (Bakhtin 1981, p. 84ff.). For Bakhtin, time and space were mutual components of the ever-changing exchange, or dialogue, between readers and texts. Bakhtin’s analysis of the novel and its genres, that he writes is dependent on the inter-relationship between time and space, informs much of the analysis in this dissertation of

Furphy’s novel Such is Life.

The spatial field, as much as the temporal field, is a dynamic and active component of narrative plots and plotting. In addition to the interdependence between the temporal and spatial field, a focus on the narrative function of the spatial field reveals that it is central to the processes by which we visualise narrative action through language and comparatively measure a narrative’s resemblance to the realities outside the world of the novel.

It is also through the spatial field that we recognise patterns that we classify extra-textually into a broader scheme of genre. This often involves a simultaneous process of reading for meaning inside the text while referring certain patterns or features to an extra-textual body of other texts within which we recognise particular patterns and features. The spatial field is important to the process of attributing genre to a work. It is through the spatial field, in its relationship to the temporal, that readers intuitively sense where a story is going, or whether the developing story conforms to, or works against, our expectation of its narrative course.

The spatial field, as it is bound to the temporal, also conveys the socio- historical context of a literary text from which readers understand the world of the literary text in relation to, and comparative with, their own socio- historical situation. A reading of Furphy’s novel as a portrayal of a particular place in time informed much early criticism of Such is Life and has enriched our understanding of aspects evident in the world of the text.

However, the novel’s relationship to reality is not as straightforward as it first appears, even though the title insists on a reading of the text as a

‘realist’ document of conditions in the Riverina at the close of the nineteenth century. The title is as ironic as the novel’s reality is illusory.

Whilst the title and the form of novel is structured as a chronicle that aspires to an objective and historical literary realism, this scheme is undone by a hidden romance storyline that appropriates many motifs,

themes and plots also commonly found in ancient Greek romance literature and Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. Furphy’s hidden romance storyline ultimately threatens the realism of the narrator Tom

Collins’ purported chronicle. However, Furphy’s agenda is not to ascribe ascendency to one literary scheme over another but rather to contaminate each genre with elements of the other. The result is a double-edged parody that targets our understanding and expectations of the techniques of literary realism and also our presumptions about romance storylines.

The exchange between genres in the novel resembles a dialogue between opposing literary schemes that results in a hybrid form of literature referred to by Gary Saul Morson as a metaparody (Morson 1989, p. 68). This dissertation will carefully examine the properties of the spatial field and its operations to the action of plotting to observe that in Furphy’s novel, the spatial field is central to the execution of a metaparody.

The spatial field of literary texts enables readers to picture, and then to map the world of the novel. It is through the spatial field that as readers we enter into stories and immerse ourselves in their landscapes. The spatial field is central to the way we follow plots and chart the movement of stories. This dissertation’s analysis of the spatial field in its relationship with the temporal within the plots of Such is Life will dissect how the spatial field is an active force to the way we follow plots and predict their outcomes. Many of the plots embedded in the novel are structured around the theme of separation and the desire for union, which also resembles the search of one lover for the other in ancient Greek romances. In the

structure of these plots the spatial field additionally operates metaphorically because it is through the spatial field that we understand the concept of separation and through which we map the various adventures and misadventures that move towards a reunion.

Part 1

This dissertation comprises two parts. The first part examines the claim that Furphy’s novel parodies the literary schemes of romance and literary realism. To understand how Furphy’s parody operates, the dissertation looks at the techniques of literary realism and the manifestations of romance to reveal their form in the novel and to draw attention to the ways

Furphy reconfigures our expectations of these literary schemes.

Against claims that the novel has no plot, or a very rambling one at that, this section will also look at plots, our expectations of endings, and the importance of spatial and temporal fields to the classification of plots into genre. According to Bakhtin, particular configurations of time and space, which are fused in his concept of the chronotope, determine particular types of narrative plot.

Central to an argument for the importance of the spatial field is the understanding that time is an abstract concept that can only be measured comparatively through events that occur in space. Cognitive linguists,

Lakoff and Johnson, propose that our concepts of time, and the metaphors which we use to express our understanding of time, are based on our

embodied relationship to the world which we conceive in terms of our own movement through space (Lakoff & Johnson 1999, p.194). But in literary texts time is disjointed and fragmented. Unlike time outside literary texts which is always open-ended, time in literary texts is bound to the narrative conditions that constitute the work. Where the abstract concept of time depends on the spatial field to be understood, time in literary texts is equally tied to the spatial field from which readers are able to visualise narrative events in a literary text and to distinguish change from one narrative event to another.

Against the proposition of the Russian Formalists, that as we read we reconfigure the plot of a literary text into a chronological and linear scheme they call story (determined by ‘what happened first, what happened next…’), is the awareness that there are other ways to describe the logic with which we organise narrative plots. Joseph Frank (1963) argues that the model proposed by the Russian Formalists is not relevant to certain modernist texts such as Joyce’s Ulysses which, he proposes, are organised according to the logic of spatiality. In these texts the time inside the literary text defies sequentiality. Time is layered. Time collapses.

Narrative events occur simultaneously. Frank’s model accommodates the logic of Furphy’s novel where a romance story is hidden from the narrator, and often from the reader, despite the fact that a linear and chronological scheme is declared to be the narrator’s objective. In Furphy’s novel, while the narrator moves from a point in time in a linear and chronological manner from the beginning to the end, the events he narrates occur in a

number of temporal zones. To discover this scheme, readers constantly need to read backwards to reappraise narrative events they may have discarded as insignificant and reconsider them in relation to the evolving meaning of the text. In Such is Life, events that happened simultaneously are narrated at different times. The process of making sense and determining meaning from Furphy’s novel defies a proposition that narrative events can be reconfigured into a linear chronological scheme.

The organisational logic of Furphy’s novel requires an approach that is more spatial than temporal.

Part 2

The second part of this dissertation comprises a close reading of the operations of the spatial field in its relationship with the temporal field in

Furphy’s novel Such is Life. This close reading will note how the categories of chronicle and romance fiction are the first of many binary sets whose terms are mutual and interdependent in the novel. The operations between the terms of a binary set are traditionally viewed hierarchically, where one term is favoured over its opposite. In Furphy’s novel, no one term of the binary set, chronicle and romance fiction, is ascendant. Rather, one term of this binary set is always in dialogue with the other. They are interdependent. In Furphy’s plots, space and time perform as a binary set used against each other. To this end, space is an active element in, not a passive background to, the action of plotting. It is through the spatial field that readers recognise the plots of separation whose narrative momentum is to achieve union. The cohesive thread

linking these plots is the spatial trope of the road. In addition, the spatial field, which is central to narrative events, harbours the ‘reality effect’ of the novel, which Furphy contrasts to the non-reality of romance.

The road is the central metaphor of the novel which is spatially dependent on the concept of chance. The road draws together all the narrative threads in Furphy’s novel. Central to structuring a novel of journey along the road is the concept of movement that binds the narratives of the novel to the idea of journey over geography. The movement of the narrator along the road engenders a form of spatial storytelling which furnishes the narrative with chance encounters with people who deliver stories and information and create motives that propel the narrator and his narration forward. This movement reveals an emotional geography, a lonely landscape where bullock drivers move in packs, where fathers are kept away from their children for days at a time, where lovers are separated, where dogs are lost by their owners and where, if you are not seen, you are presumed to be dead. The road is a masculine realm, an emotional wasteland that stands opposed, in the novel, to the idea of destination, of house and home which is ultimately where the road leads.

Off the road are the stations and properties that harbour the characters central to the plots. Furphy distinguishes between real space (the roads of the Riverina) and fictitious space (the homesteads and properties). There is further distinction between exterior and interior, between male worlds and female worlds. Many of Furphy’s binary sets are distinguished in the

spatial field, literally and metaphorically. Each of these binary sets reinforces Furphy’s parodic dialogue between the two literary forms of romance and realism.

This dissertation will analyse three romances in the novel: the hidden romance between Nosey Alf and Warrigal Alf, the false romance between the narrator and Maud Beaudesart who intends to marry him, and a marriage devoid of romance between Rory O’Halloran and his wife, who live in a bedroom with a partition down the middle. All these romances are configurations of plots of separation. However, in these plots, the denouement is always disunion. The spatial field is the central representational mode through which Furphy visualises these tales.

This dissertation then examines the story of the lost child, Mary

O’Halloran, and other narratives of lost children in chapter five of the novel to reveal that these stories are also structured according to the theme of separation whose narrative desire is for union. The spatial field, again, metaphorically reiterates the narrative structure of the search. In this storyline, Mary disappears into the same landscape which is being traversed by those who search for her. However, the searchers cannot read the landscape or find the clues to her whereabouts. The two narratives, one of loss and the other of search, divide the one piece of land into two spatial zones. One contains the child, the other the searchers. While the child and the searchers are on the same space, they are trying to bridge the gulf of time to result in contact with the lost child.

The operations of a divided spatial field metaphorically feature in many literary narrative texts. When a character enters the wrong world in

Furphy’s novel, which is the central narrative condition of his lost child narrative, we encounter death. The division of the land into two readings is articulated by white settler’s anxiety about place which is the narrative perspective of this story.

An analysis of the spatial field in Such is Life, that ultimately doubles space, equally doubles genre so that realism is shaped in a similar way to a romance plot and romance is vested with the tragedy of reality. The mutual interdependence of one genre with the other is evident in the way that the spatial field structures the narratives of the novel. At play in the novel is the idea that all roads ultimately lead to home, here it is not Tom

Collins’ home but the home of the transgendered boundary rider, Nosey

Alf, a doubled character who is both man and woman. This movement near the end of the novel from exterior to interior contrasts the concept of wandering to the concept of home. Inside the hut, we move inside the heart of its owner and the painful reality of her loneliness and heart break.

The arrival at this destination enables a reading of Tom’s movement over the land as mapping an emotional topography.

Part 1 Space, time and parody

1.1 The dual agenda of Such is Life

At the heart of Joseph Furphy’s classic novel, Such is Life1, is an engagement with the definition of the novel and our expectations, as readers, of its form. Underlying this engagement is the understanding that in the process of reading we identify themes, motifs—which can be defined as a concept, structure or object that recurs throughout a literary text—and plots which we use to make assumptions about genre and narrative outcomes. As we read we locate narrative events in the space in which they occur by visualising characters and places from the words in the text. We do this by locating the scenes, stories and places mentioned into an imagined space that is occupied by the characters within the text.

This form of reading integrates the spatiality of a text as a dynamic realm that is central to the reading process. Equally, readers map the movement of characters over space as they progress through the worlds of the novel.

Where narrative theory holds that the relationship between temporality and event is central to the way we read, this dissertation proposes that the spatial field must be considered of equal significance because narrative events take place in space. The way we recognise themes and motifs, I argue, is intrinsically spatial.

1 References throughout the dissertation, unless otherwise cited, are taken from The Annotated SUCH IS LIFE: being certain extracts from the diary of Tom Collins by Joseph Furphy, 1999, with an introduction and notes by Devlin-Glass, F., Eaden, R., Hoffmann, L. and Turner, G.W., Halstead Classics, Halstead Press, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney.

The spatial field is fundamental to the way that Furphy’s novel plays with our expectations of literary texts. In particular, Furphy contrasts literary realism with the very different type of literary scheme found in fictional romances. The generic premise of Such is Life is the narrator’s pledge to write a chronicle of events that occurred in a specific period of time. This literary form promises a detailed and continuous record of events in the order that they occurred in time (OED online 2013). This pledge is announced in the preface to the first chapter by its narrator, Tom Collins, who, now unemployed and with time on his hands, elects to write a chronicle from his “twenty-two consecutive editions of Letts’s (sic) Pocket

Diary” (SIL, p. 2) to give the reader a “fair picture of Life” (SIL, p. 2). The narrator’s scant diary entries record his movement over the roads and properties of the drought-stricken district of the Australian Riverina when he was employed as an Inspector of the New South Wales Lands

Department (SIL, p. 462, n.1). The narrator’s initial scheme is to amplify the events of one week (SIL, p. 2) into his chronicle of life, such as it is.

The first entry reads “SUN. SEPT. 9. Thom. Coop & c. 10-Mile Pines.

Cleo. Duff. Selec.” (SIL, p. 2), denoting the location of the narrator on a given date and the characters he met.

The diary is a temporal frame, a genre chosen to reconstruct events from real life that, in Furphy’s novel, commence in March 1893 and end in

March 1894. Our narrator Tom Collins’ diary entries are not only temporal, they are also spatial markers. These spatial markers note actual historical places from which we are able to determine not only the movement of

characters through the text but their socio-historical context. Tom’s choice of a chronicle is a form that promises a chronological and linear temporal scheme. Where Tom’s literary scheme proposes the disclosure of random events that occurred in time, and while each of Tom’s diary entries also indicates the geography over which the story events occur time is also space. Tom Collins’ chronicle moves over space in a linear chronological manner.

Tom Collins’ intention to write about real life is opposed, from the beginning, by a second literary scheme characterised by neat plots and an ornamental prose that Tom aligns with the genre of romance:

Whilst a peculiar defect—which I scarcely like to call an oversight in

mental construction—shuts me out from the flowery pathway of the

romancer, a co-ordinate requital endows me, I trust, with the more

sterling, if less ornamental qualities of the chronicler. (SIL, p. 1)

By contrasting the chronicler’s goal with the romancer’s on the first page of the novel, Furphy announces his intention to tackle not one, but two literary schemes. These literary schemes in the novel are both antithetical and interdependent in a number of ways. Over the course of the novel,

Furphy engages one genre against the other—chronicle against romance.

Furphy’s narrator’s distinction between one scheme and the other equally relates in the text to the distinction between plot and plotlessness:

The thread of narrative being thus purposely broken, no one of

these short and simple analyses can have any connection with

another – a point on which I congratulate the judicious reader and

the no less judicious writer ; for the former is thereby tacitly warned

against any expectation of plot or denouement, and so secured

against disappointment, whilst the latter is relieved from the (to him)

impossible task of investing prosaic people with romance, and a

generally hap-hazard economy with poetical justice. (SIL, p. 52)

But Tom’s intention to steer away from plots is only a proposition. Plots are central to the novel.

Against Tom Collins’ assertions of realism and readers’ expectations of a dry and straightforward, plotless chronicle, Furphy integrates plot lines into his novel whose structural principles of separation and union are consistent with the narrative trajectories of romance storylines. These plots constitute much of the amplified day-to-day encounters of Tom

Collins. While Tom fails to notice that his chronicle contains so many mirror plots, Furphy is steering the “observant reader” (SIL, p. 2) towards the central romance plot in chapter six, the second last chapter in the novel. From the first page of the novel, the evidence of plots, not to mention mirror plots, threatens and undermines the realist chronicle.

These plots, and their narrator, are ultimately bound inside the conditions of a fiction—to want to find out what happens to certain characters and situations as they move towards an ending. Against this, a chronicle is never bound by the events that it records. It continually moves forward in time and lacks narrative closure.

1.2 Literary realism

The reality of any literary text, most notably a novel, can only be an illusion, contingent on the fact that novels have beginnings and work towards endings. The events between a beginning and an end determine the design of the novel. Fred Kaplan in Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in

Victorian Literature describes that:

In literature, particularly in the novel, it [realism] stands for the use

of devices of style and structure that stress the illusion that the

world depicted by the author is governed by the same laws of

cause and effect and the same conditions of physical concreteness

that readers experience in their own lives. (Kaplan 1987, p. 6)

The trope of both the diary and chronicle are affiliated with the belief that the events described actually occurred. The narrator of Such is Life postulates that his chronicle, with its promise of veracity and its linear chronological structure of events that occurred in time, will better deliver a faithful and historical portrait of life at the close of the nineteenth century, than a plotted novel.

Yet the diary as a form of literature is not immune to the influence of literary stylistics2. The writing of a diary, although specifically referring to a specific date, is mostly written outside, but often close to, the date in which the events described occur. The act of writing a diary is one of

2 Stephen Garton, [speaking of the mourning diaries of Dr. John William Springthorpe published in Melbourne in 1897], comments that Springthorpe’s literary style quotes: “Romanticism, rationalism, spiritualism, superstition, Buddhism, liberal Protestantism.” (Garton 2002, p.41)

reminiscence, often written at the end of a day. It is a gaze backwards after the fact. In Such is Life the gap between Tom Collins’ notations in his

Letts’ Pocket Diary (themselves after the fact), and their amplification into the text of Tom’s chronicle is further distanced in time. Tom’s decision to write the chronicle was only possible when, “Unemployed at last!” (SIL, p.

1) he had time to gaze backwards, to remember and amplify. Susan K.

Martin (2013) refers to Furphy’s appropriation of this literary form as significant and unusual.

In the late nineteenth century, published diaries were predominantly a feminine literary form, “largely associated with women, girlish intimacy, and hidden sexuality” (Martin 2013, p. 2). Stephen Garton (2002) comments that:

As a number of scholars have argued, by the nineteenth century

the private diary was largely the preserve of middle-class women

and although women’s diaries were characterised by tensions

between the writing of a private self and a desire for a public record,

men were increasingly inclined to publish their autobiographies,

travel journals and diaries, rendering them as public documents.

(Garton 2002, p. 44)

Published diaries, as well as journals and memoirs, were texts “in which a self is invented” (Garton 2002, p. 44). The themes of these diaries (in particular feminine diaries) were primarily emotional and inward looking.

Giuliana Bruno in Atlas of Emotion, writing about eighteenth-century women’s travel diaries, notes that underpinning this genre was the idea

that travel to the exterior world of unknown places that took these women diarists far from home was at the same time a voyage of the self, a voyage into the self (Bruno 2002, p. 86).

It is my view that Furphy’s intention of writing an amplification of Tom

Collins’ diary entries has a more complex agenda that equally observes the psycho-geographic intentions of these eighteenth-century women’s travel diaries. On the surface, Furphy has converted a traditionally feminine literary form into a masculine, objective platform, specifically one that disables (in principal) the narrator from expressing his emotions. And although Tom Collins does not vent his own emotional state of mind, the central movement of the novel is towards and into the emotional demise of the protagonist of his hidden romance storyline, into the heart of a woman.

And because this protagonist is a woman dressed as a man, a fact that the narrator never realises, the novel equally discloses the heart of a loving, but unloved man. In effect this character’s emotional outpouring is the centrepiece of the novel.

Furphy’s engagement with the differences between a diary characterised by notations and a chronicle is playful and ironic. And as we will observe by Furphy’s contamination of realism with romance and equally, of romance with realism, the structure of Furphy’s chronicle incorporates the internal journey of the self, an objective, noted by Bruno, of eighteenth- century women’s travel diaries. While Susan K. Martin writes that, “The

‘diary-plan’ is both a way of holding the ‘novel’ together, and a way of

highlighting the fact that it was always falling apart” (Martin 2013, p. 11),

Furphy appropriates the central conceit of these women diarists to discover the inner heart of a self through journey. In Such is Life this revelation is not made by the narrator but discovered by him when he is witness to the effects of lovelessness upon this character.

Furphy’s decision to adopt the literary scheme of a chronicle presupposes a continuous historical record in a linear temporality. Within the course of the novel, the temporal frame (which is first an expansion of the events of seven consecutive days) is amended from as early as the second chapter because the initial dates selected did not deliver narrative events of consequence. In this way, the chronicle is gradually supplanted by an alternative narrative scheme that is progressively structured around narrative desire. The first shift in chapter two is credited to the boring conversation the narrator has with a group of sheep drovers whose names are Splodger, Parson, Dingo and Hairy-toothed Ike (SIL, p. 52). As a result, the new scheme proposes to elaborate on the events that transpired on the same date of consecutive months beginning on the ninth. This reduces the cast of characters that feature throughout the novel to those the reader was introduced to in chapter one.

From chapters two to six, Tom’s stories revolve around his encounters with a core of bullock drivers, boundary riders, housemaids, storekeepers and other characters that live and work in the Riverina. All of these encounters steer Tom into the hut of Nosey Alf in chapter six. This multi-

gendered boundary rider is the protagonist of the romance storyline. Her sad lament on the loss of her beauty3, on the importance of beauty for a woman, on why men love women, on loneliness and lovelessness, is the emotional kernel of the novel. It is this scene that transforms the chronicle into a plotted novel as, at the beginning of chapter seven, the last chapter in the novel, our narrator—having decided that the ninth day of that particular month was “not a desirable text” (SIL, p. 263)—succumbs to his desire to find out what became of Nosey Alf. The transformation of Such is

Life from a chronicle into a plotted novel driven by the narrator’s narrative desire also destabilises the novel’s claim to be portraying reality. Central to the conceit of the novel is Furphy’s engagement with the reader about whether literature needs plots, whether real life can also be literary, and whether romance can be real.

How real is literary reality? Roland Barthes (1982), in his essay ‘The

Reality Effect,’ proposes that literary realism is a literary effect derived from certain technical conventions. Robert Louis Stevenson in The Art of

Writing suggests something similar:

The question of realism, let it then be clearly understood, regards

not in the least degree the fundamental truth, but only the technical

method, of a work of art. Be as ideal or as abstract as you please,

you will be none the less veracious; but if you be weak, you run the

risk of being tedious and inexpressive; and if you be very strong

3 Nosey Alf was Molly Cooper, who was described by her brother as “a picter’ to look at” (SIL, p. 21), until she was disfigured after being kicked in the face by a horse and thereafter lost her beauty (SIL, p. 22).

and honest, you may chance upon a masterpiece. (Stevenson

1905, p. 93)

Realism in Such is Life, asserted through the linear temporal form of the chronicle and the promise of a narration of random events, at the same time, runs the real risk of being tedious and inexpressive. But any purported account of ‘real life’ created by a character called Tom Collins would have been immediately suspicious to an Australian reader at the turn of the twentieth century. The meaning of the author/narrator’s name has been lost over the more than hundred years since the novel was published, but in its day, ‘Tom Collins’ was an idiom for an imaginary character who was hard to catch or pin down. To name the author and narrator Tom Collins implied that, like Tom Collins himself, his narration is born out of rumour and innuendo. The elusive origin of this character is a central conceit of the novel and with that comes the understanding that any depiction of real life narrated by a ‘Tom Collins’ will be anything but real4. In Furphy’s time, a ‘Tom Collins’ was less a person than a concept, summonsed, especially in pubs, to deflect blame from the real culprit.

‘Tom Collins’ was always pursued to answer for touching others on ‘sore points’ and always managed to vanish before his destroyers, because he didn’t exist (Crowe 1895, p. 86). From the moment that a reader registers

4 In the 1903 first edition of Such is Life, Tom Collins was credited as the sole author. Furphy’s name did not appear until the 1917 Vance Palmer edition when it was printed, in brackets, under the title, Such is Life, being certain Extracts from the Diary of TOM COLLINS with [Joseph Furphy]. On the 1944 Angus and Robertson cover and the 1948 Chicago University Press cover, Tom Collins was credited as the sole author.

the fictitious origin of ‘Tom Collins,’ the novel’s realism becomes a contradiction in terms.

The fusion of the real with the fictional world is what Barthes describes as the illusion of ‘concrete reality’ (Barthes 1982, p. 15). Barthes’ concept of

‘concrete reality’ proposes that the reality of novelistic texts is illusory, literary, contained and bound within the novel. In reading Furphy’s novel more than one hundred years after it was first published, in cities far from the Riverina district, this illusory reality is now the imaginary realm of readers. Yet Furphy’s descriptions of the land and his faithful record of the patois of the characters encountered in this land still stimulate the effect of the reality of the narrative events described.

Foucault writes in ‘Of Other Spaces’ that the relations between actual sites and representations of them are relations of linkage and contradiction

(Foucault 1986, p. 23). He refers to the elemental conditions of fictional spaces as essentially “outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (Foucault 1986, p. 24).

Fictional places are a representation, an inversion and a contestation of the real. In Foucault’s terms, while the roads and the towns of the Riverina may mirror actual places, their inherent properties are not bound to the real, but to the discourse into which they are embedded. The landscape of

Furphy’s novel, based on both actual and fictional geographical locations, exists as a simulacrum of a past reality. The concepts of real place and

fictitious place in the novel become another component of Furphy’s dialogue between the literary schemes of romance and realism.

Early critics of Such is Life valued its realism, which they attributed to

Furphy’s portrayal of life in the Riverina district in the 1890s. Vance

Palmer, in the preface to the novel’s 1917 second edition, relates the novel’s realism to a reader’s recognition of the life-likeness of Furphy’s descriptions of the world of the bullock driver—its characters, their diverse dialects, and the landscape of a known part of Australia at a particular time in Australia’s history, “when our institutions, our ideals, and our particular national character, were in a fluid and mutable state” (Palmer 1917, p. 1).

For Palmer, the concept of reality bound the text to its representation of the social and historical world in which the narrative events occurred. The process through which the reader inherently aligned Furphy’s world with reality was a process of believing the novel described an historical truth that was situated in an actual place and time. Even though the contemporary reader is removed in time, the imagined reality of the past is presumed. When Palmer attributed the realism of the novel to its portrayal of life in the Riverina, his sense of literary realism was generated by the spatial field. From the way we create images from words, Palmer could recognise certain social-historical aspects of a specific past in a specific place. His perception was fixed by the novel’s socio-historical context.

Mikhail Bakhtin recognised that the text of a novel can never escape its context—the socio-historical world represented in the text. Bakhtin’s

concept of the chronotope (Bakhtin 1981, p. 84) determined that the time and space of a novel were not separate but indelibly fused. These time/space dimensions or chronotopes are how readers understand relations between texts and the worlds outside texts. Bakhtin describes the mutual interactions between texts, their fictional worlds and the real world to which they refer as a process that constantly changes through the time of the text’s reading:

The work and the world represented in it enter the real world and

enrich it, and the real world enters the work and its world as part of

the process of its creation, as well as part of its subsequent life, in a

continual renewing of the work through the creative perception of

listeners and readers. (Bakhtin 1981, p. 254)

As we read, (or watch) a narrative, we reconstruct narrative events in time and space—a dual enterprise that includes both the represented time of the narrative event, and the later historical time in which the reader is situated, a process that Bakhtin defines as a mutual interaction (Bakhtin

1981, p. 255). As we read a literary text, it is continually coming to life as though for the first time. This process, like the language with which it is written, is continually renewed by the varying cultural and social contexts within which the work was created and is received.

The illusion of a text’s realism is indelibly tied to the spatial field through which, by visualising narrative events, we imagine narrative events as possible within our sense of their reality. We presume that the narrative

events are taking place in a reality, whether we know that reality or imagine it. Where the benchmark of literary realism is an illusion of life- likeness, this illusion, in literary texts, is produced by processing language into images which enable us to visualise people, places and objects.

These images are then filtered through a concept of the real. This concept of the real ties space to time and is apparent through the spatial field of narrative events. Bakhtin writes that any and every literary image is chronotopic (Bakhtin 1981, p. 251). We differentiate one narrative event from another and one narrative sequence from another by charting the shifts and changes between narrative events. Central to this process is the interdependence between the perceived realism of narrative events and the spatial field in particular. It is the spatial field that principally speaks to our ability and need to visualise the events as they take place inside the world of the text, which is filtered through our own world view. We need to understand events as happening in space in order to understand them as resembling our ideas of the real.

As readers, we become virtual travellers who immerse our senses into the landscapes of novels. Our cues are the images we create from the spatial markers that come to life in the process of reading narrative events. In

Furphy’s chronicle, the effect of reality is created by a reader’s mental realisation of Furphy’s descriptions of the movement of Tom Collins along the roads, paths and properties of the Riverina in 1893 – 1894 yet the reader’s backward gaze cannot escape the filter of our own historicity and our own reality.

1.3 Motifs of romance in the novel

While it is true that Furphy’s novel presents a portrait of Australian life that is myth-makingly masculine and that champions the hardship of the bullock drivers’ world, written into the novel are several romance storylines. This aspect of the novel is easily missed and the significance of these storylines to the overall scheme of the novel, when the novel was first published was not noted, or was less valued than the novel’s realistic portrayal of life during that era5.

Romance takes many guises in Furphy’s novel. Initially it refers to a class of nineteenth-century colonialist novels that Tom Collins calls trashy and misleading (SIL, p. 164). Tom specifically cites Henry Kingsley’s

Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (SIL, p. 164), and the romantic novels of

Ouida6 and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Tom Collins views their unrealistic plots, neat conclusions and verbose expression as an inferior class of literature (SIL, p. 52). These novels stand between the chronicle genre and Furphy’s actual literary agenda which endows Tom Collins with a literariness that alludes to, and quotes from, a broad range of writers and texts. Amongst these texts Tom quotes the Bible, Demosthenes,

5 The history of the critical reception of this romance storyline is well chronicled by Robert Darby (1987). Darby argues against Cecil Hadgraft’s (1976) claim that the discovery of the ‘hidden’ romance is relatively recent. Darby explains the hidden romance was not necessarily a case of ‘not knowing,’ but rather that the sub-plot was not a primary focus of the critical attention and so its value was underestimated.

6 Ouida was the pen name of English novelist Maria Louise Ramé (1839 – 1908). In ‘Furphy and Romance: Such is Life Reconsidered,’ Nina Knight’s comparison of the trajectory of the central romance plot hidden in Furphy’s novel with the plot of Ouida’s novel, Strathmore (Knight 1969), notes the similarities and differences between these two texts.

Boccaccio, Cervantes, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Bunyan, Milton, Goldsmith,

Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Burns, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Goethe, Mary

Shelley, Tennyson, Carlyle, Longfellow, Trollope, Zola, and Shakespeare

(White 1989, p. 9).

Romance more consistently asserts itself as plots structured similarly to plots found in romances. Although Tom Collins participates in some of these plots, reports some of these plots and is surrounded by these plots, he more often than not fails to notice they are there, and often, so does the reader. Of these many mirror plots, the principal plot is the separation of the lovers who share the name of Alf—Warrigal Alf and Nosey Alf—and of one Alf’s journey in search of the other. This plot finally reconfigures

Tom’s chronicle into a plotted romance narrative.

The arc of this story is told from a number of different narrative perspectives. We first hear the story of the meeting of the lovers in chapter one of the novel when William Cooper, one of the bullock drivers, tells the group around the campfire why he hates the name Alf. William is an incidental character whose main function in the story is to introduce the story of his sister, Molly Cooper, and the man who broke her heart (SIL, pp. 16 – 22).

In William’s story, Molly Cooper meets and falls in love with Alf Morris, a neighbour who proposes to Molly but after Molly’s face is disfigured from a horse fall, Alf Morris loses interest and deserts her. Poor Molly, forlorn and

heart-broken, drowns in the Hawkesbury River. The reality is that Molly did not drown but transformed herself into the cross-gendered boundary rider,

Nosey Alf, who devotes her life to the pursuit of her beloved, Alf Morris

(also known by as Warrigal Alf).

The second part to this romance is narrated in chapter four when Tom

Collins finds Warrigal Alf on his deathbed. Thinking he is not long for this world, Alf tells Tom the story of his lost love, pledging his sorrow and his devotion to Molly. He mentions that he still loves Molly and was wrong to have walked away from her (SIL, pp. 147 – 152). The third part of the romance is relayed in chapter six when Tom spends the night at Nosey

Alf’s hut. By piecing together clues planted earlier in the novel, the reader understands that Nosey Alf has been shadowing Warrigal Alf ever since it was assumed she had drowned. In this chapter, Tom informs her he had recently seen Warrigal Alf. In fact, he tells her that Warrigal Alf spent the night in her paddock just outside her door. Tom also tells her that Warrigal

Alf is on his way to South-western Queensland. This information initiates the final course of Nosey Alf’s pursuit of Warrigal Alf as relayed in the final chapter when we learn that she has left Runnymede in pursuit of Warrigal

Alf. However, the lovers are not reunited in the novel.

Mikhail Bakhtin, analysing ancient Greek romances in his essay ‘Forms of

Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical

Poetic’ (Bakhtin 1981, pp. 84 ff.), provides a useful framework through which to understand some important conventions of romance plots.

Bakhtin observes that the plot of a romance is determined by two fixed narrative poles: one at the beginning when the lovers meet and one at the end when the lovers are reunited. Between the lovers’ meeting and their reunion is a series of adventurous obstacles that keep them apart (Bakhtin

1981, p. 87). Bakhtin writes that the narrative events of romance stories are organised around, and dominated by, themes of separation and union.

Plots of separation and union recur throughout Such is Life both within the hidden romance between Nosey Alf and Warrigal Alf and also across other narrative incidents that purport to represent Tom’s realistic portrayal of life in the Riverina. There is an embedded narrative that tells the story of a bull named Pilot who hates fences; this story is assigned to Warrigal Alf. The bull escapes and Warrigal Alf chases after Pilot and in this way is led directly to Nosey Alf’s paddock, although neither Nosey Alf nor Warrigal

Alf were aware of the other’s presence. In a different narrative strand,

Maud Beaudesart pursues Tom Collins to finalise details of their marriage.

Tom Collins is running away from his impending marriage to Maud (which is the pretext that takes him to Nosey Alf’s hut). Chapter five recounts several stories of the search for children who were lost in the bush. The principal story, told by the bullock driver Steve Thompson, is the search for

Mary O’Halloran. There is also the story of Martin, the boundary rider, who is searching for his stolen horse and of Thompson’s search for his lost dog, Monkey. The bullockies are searching for water and food for the bullocks and throughout the novel almost everyone searches for, and chases, bullocks.

In the midst of all these pursuits, the essential condition of the union of the lovers at the end of a romance plot is unfulfilled, which manifests as a situation of missed connections. In the final chapter of the novel, we learn that Warrigal Alf has moved outside the geography of the novel to a fixed destination in South-western Queensland (SIL, p. 248). In chapter seven, when we also learn the other half of the love story, Nosey Alf, has quit her job and was last seen moving north in the same direction as Warrigal Alf, we can infer that the final act of romance, the union of the lovers that does not take place inside the novel, lingers hopefully just outside the boundaries of the text. Furphy’s reconfiguration of the conventional union of lovers at the end of romance storylines into disunion can be viewed as one of the means by which he asserts Tom Collins’ realist agenda.

Nevertheless, the subversion of the traditional romance trajectory does not disguise the fact that Furphy, by structuring plots of separation and union, is still quoting this form7.

Between the two fixed poles of separation and union in a plot of romance—the meeting of the lovers at the beginning and their reunion at the end—are adventures. Bakhtin identifies the types of adventures that traditionally obstruct the course of fated true love in ancient Greek

7 In ‘“Double line to the terminus”: Marriage, sex, romance and Joseph Furphy,’ Susan Lever writes that Furphy’s pessimistic view of romance and marriage has a socio- historical precedent that reflects both the time and conditions in Australia during which the novel was written and the circumstances of Furphy’s own unhappy marriage (Lever 2013, p. 9). Furphy’s portrayal of Rory O’Halloran’s miserable marriage in Chapter II underlies the loss of their daughter Mary who perishes in the bush in Chapter V.

romances as being abstract because they “constitute time-sequences that are neither historical, quotidian, biographical, nor even biological and maturational” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 91). The adventures that befall the lovers in these texts are not organised by the logic of cause and effect but are dictated by chance, which Bakhtin identifies as random contingency

(Bakhtin 1981, p. 92), and which here preserve the narrative conditions of separation. The temporal field of romance stories is not chronological but is tied to chance. Events happen suddenly or later and it makes no difference if the male lover is eaten by a dragon before or after the female lover marries another man (Bakhtin 1981, p. 92), as long as the conclusion consists of a union in marriage.

Such random obstacles, keeping the lovers apart, are evident in Furphy’s novel. Bakhtin identifies these obstacles:

The abduction of the bride on the eve of the wedding, the absence

of parental consent (if parents exist), a different bridegroom and

bride intended for either of the lovers (false couples), the flight of

the lovers, their journey, a storm at sea, a shipwreck, a miraculous

rescue, an attack by pirates, captivity and prison, an attempt on the

innocence of the hero and heroine, the offering-up of the heroine as

a purifying sacrifice, wars, battles, being sold into slavery,

presumed deaths, disguising one’s identity, recognition and failures

of recognition, presumed betrayals, attempts on chastity and

fidelity, false accusations of crimes, court trials, court inquiries into

the chastity and fidelity of the lovers. (Bakhtin 1981, p. 88)

In Furphy’s novel, Molly Cooper transforms into Nosey Alf not only through the motif of cross-dressing but also through the motifs of a false death and false name, both of which result in narrative situations of mistaken identity as well as a situation where one lover fails to recognise the presence of the other. In Furphy’s novel, these motifs additionally operate to disguise the presence of a romance storyline from the narrator Tom Collins (which can confuse the reader). Because Tom Collins is unaware that a female character in the story is disguised as a man, so is the reader. This is why

Furphy asks for an “observant reader” (SIL, p. 2) who must carefully unravel the clues. Many of these clues are evident in the way a scene is described. For example in chapter four, when Tom is inside Nosey Alf’s hut, Furphy carefully describes a scene of the domestic harmony that is intended to signify feminine order. Certain details, such as Nosey Alf’s collection of books—that do not include any volumes on science—are a case in point:

Fifty of sixty volumes altogether – poetry, drama, popular theology,

reference, and a few miscellaneous works; history meagrely

represented, science and yellow-back fiction8 not at all. (SIL, p.

245)

When Tom revisits the hut in chapter seven, after Nosey Alf has departed and when Jack the Shellback is in residence, Tom’s description of its contents categorically signpost that the new occupant is male (SIL, p.

267).

8 Yellow-back fictions were cheap novels first produced in 1855, sold at railway stations (SIL, p. 439).

Many of the motifs Furphy uses—presumed death, disguising one’s identity, false identity and presumed betrayal—that both cue and conceal the romance storylines, also occur in the plots of Shakespeare’s comedies such as Twelfth Night, Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It9. Of these motifs, cross-dressing is common to many of Shakespeare’s comedies.

Consequently, this motif was not unfamiliar to readers of Victorian fiction10.

It is Furphy’s repeated use of this trope in Such is Life that alerts the observant reader to the fact that gender is not stable. It is possible to read another of Tom’s encounters with a girl he confuses with a boy, Jim

Quarterman, in chapter three who is revealed to be a Jemima (SIL, p. 115) as a signpost that boys may turn out to be girls. Yet, while Jim becomes

Jemima, the true identity of Nosey Alf is never revealed to either Tom or the reader.

The fact that Furphy never openly admits that Molly has become Nosey Alf eventuates in the situation where the trajectory of her story of unrequited love is difficult to find. What we are aware of, in chapter six, is the devastating reality of someone who longs for love and has been rejected.

When we register the emotional effect of the loss of love on Nosey Alf this trajectory converts from being simply a romance tale into a situation that is

9 R.S. White in Furphy’s Shakespeare (White 1989) notes and comments on Furphy’s extensive use and quotation of Shakespeare in Such is Life.

10 Nina Knight remarks on the occurrence of cross-dressing in Victorian fiction in her article ‘Furphy and Romance: Such is Life Reconsidered’ (Knight 1969, p. 253).

truer to life. And because Nosey Alf is a man and a woman, her emotional demise belongs to both genders and can be interpreted as an expression of a human condition.

Bakhtin distinguishes the operations of narrative events of romance which he says are untouched by the reality of life, from those he observed in the genre of ancient Greek biographies and in the genre he refers to as the adventure novel of everyday life (Bakhtin 1981, p. 111). This latter genre was discussed through Bakhtin’s analysis of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass and Petronius’ Satyricon. Bakhtin describes the form of the adventure novel of everyday life as a selection of critical moments in the life of the hero which have the effect of transforming him or her. Concepts of transformation and identity underlie the life of the hero in these novels

(Bakhtin 1981, p. 111). Central to this genre is the way the trajectory

“fuses the course of an individual’s life (at its major turning points) with his actual spatial course” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 120). Bakhtin describes the organisation of narrative events in Greek romances as abstract because the lovers are not affected by time or space. They are as young and beautiful at the beginning of their separation and the ensuing adventures as they are when they are reunited at the end. In spite of the fact that

Lucius, the protagonist of The Golden Ass, is transformed into an Ass, this genre more closely resembles novels we register as realist. In Apuleius’ tale the road is the space upon which the course of the protagonist Lucius’ life unfolds.

Kateryna Olijnyk Arthur’s (1987) reading of chronotopes in Furphy’s novel identifies features of Bakhtin’s biographical chronotope and the adventure story of everyday life within the structure of the text as a chronicle and because of Tom Collins’ movement along the roads of the Riverina.

However, it is the interplay between the narrative features of the romance genre and the purported reality of the adventure story of everyday life that is of greater interest to this dissertation. Bakhtin writes that the chronotope, as the field over which novelistic events are played, determines genres and at the same time the reverse is also true: genres determine chronotopes, both for authors and readers. As Arthur (1987) noted, one work of literature can contain a variety of chronotopes.

However, as easy as it is to recognise the boundaries of specific genres in literary texts, genres have no fixed rules. The features of texts from which we categorise them as belonging to certain classes of texts can never be described as finite. The boundaries that specify genre run into problems because of the existence of what Derrida defines as texts that “belong without belonging” (Derrida 1980, p. 65). In part, our recognition that certain narrative patterns subscribe to, or quote features of, a class of texts without necessarily belonging to that class, describes the interplay between genres that is at the heart of Furphy’s novel. This interplay, while appearing to conform to the conventions of genre, at the same time breaks important generic codes that in the process, creates a new form. But this does not detract from our ability to perceive that aspects of the text allow

us to recognise conventions we understand are common to a particular genre or class of texts. Derrida writes in ‘The Law of Genre’ that:

Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no

genreless text, there is always a genre and genres, yet such

participation never amounts to belonging. (Derrida 1980, p. 65)

Bakhtin writes that a distinguishing feature between the genre of romance and the adventure story of everyday life is precisely the effect of reality. In romance stories, the lovers are not marked by their (often extreme) adventures. In the adventure story of everyday life the protagonist is transformed and changed by the experiences he has had and the lessons he learns:

Although the poles of the plot would have remained the same

(passion at the beginning, marriage at the end), the events that

retard the marriage would have acquired in themselves a certain

biographical or at least psychological significance; they would give

the appearance of being stretched along the real time-line of the

heroes’ lives, and of effecting change in both the heroes and in the

events (the key events) of their lives. But this is precisely what is

lacking in the Greek romance; in it there is a sharp hiatus between

two moments of biographical time, a hiatus that leaves no trace in

the life of the heroes or in their personalities. (Bakhtin 1981, p. 90)

While the marks of reality may be lacking in ancient Greek romance, in

Such is Life the mark of reality on romance is Furphy’s greater inter-

generic mutation. Furphy’s romantic protagonists are as miserable, long suffering, and alone at the end of the novel as they were at the beginning.

In the storyline of the Alfs the adventures that keep them apart are determined by chance, of being in the wrong space at the wrong time, even though the arc of this storyline is driven by Nosey Alf’s indefatigable desire to find Warrigal Alf.

1.4 Parody

Throughout the novel, Furphy disfigures romance by injecting realism into it. At the same time, he plots his realism as if it were a romance. This describes the relationship between one genre and the other as interactive and interdependent, suggesting that Furphy’s novelistic objective may have been to target these two literary schemes in a parody of genre itself.

If, as Seamus Perry suggests in his review of The Oxford Book of

Parodies, parody is “a counter-song, that defines and sustains itself by establishing a relationship with some other song” (Perry 2010, p. 3), then

Furphy, in Such is Life, counters romance with realism, and realism with romance, in a model where each genre defines and sustains the other.

In ‘Parody, History, and Metaparody,’ Gary Saul Morson describes parody as “a comic literary work that imitates another literary work by means of exaggeration” (Morson 1989, p. 69). The intention of some literary parodies is to discredit “a literary movement, (e.g. romanticism), or a genre

(e.g. romance, pastoral, epic, folktale, utopia—or, in principle, any other genre)” (Morson 1989, p. 69). Morson outlines three conditions needed to

identify a text as a parody—conditions which are met in Furphy’s novel.

Firstly, a parody must evoke another utterance (text or style) which constitutes its target (Morson 1989, p. 67). In Such is Life, the interplay between both the genres of realism (the chronicle) and romance suggests that literary schemes are being targeted by Furphy. Secondly, Morson writes that parody must be antithetical to this target (Morson 1989, p. 67).

This condition is most interestingly served in Furphy’s novel which is antithetical to both genres. Morson’s third condition for parody is that the author’s intention to parody must clearly assert to the audience a predilection for one or another target (Morson 1989, p. 67). Morson writes:

When the third criterion is not satisfied – that is, when readers do

not know with which utterance they are expected to agree, or

suspect that the second utterance may be no more authoritative

than the first – then we do not have parody but another dialogical

relation, metaparody. (Morson 1989, p. 68)

Morson’s third condition relates to the way an audience is required to read the multiple utterances that operate in a parody in order to ascertain its target. This depends on the nature of the parodist’s agreement or disagreement with the original genre that is targeted and on the audience’s knowledge of the original target. In Such is Life, Furphy’s parody is complex because of its inherent self-reflexivity and because its cultural context has altered over time. Dwight Macdonald remarks that

“Parody ages faster than any other literary form” (Macdonald 1960, p. xi).

On one hand, when Furphy changes his literary scheme from a chronicle

to one that is determined by the narrator’s desire to find out what happens to a particular character in the final chapter (SIL, p. 263), he is asserting that plots of romance are more sustaining than the plotlessness of a realist chronicle. On the other hand, Furphy equally subverts our generic expectations of a romance plot by failing to write the union of the lovers.

Yet even this is ambiguous because Furphy lays the tracks for the reader to infer that it might be possible for the lovers to meet outside the boundaries of the novel.

The novel ends ironically by unmasking its narrator, while at the same time the narrator attests to the reality of his narration:

Such is life, my fellow-mummers – just like a poor player, that bluffs

and feints his hour upon the stage, and then cheapens down to

mere nonentity. But let me not hear any small witticism to the

further effect that its story is a tale told by a vulgarian, full of slang

and blanky, signifying – nothing. (SIL, p. 297)

In terms of Furphy’s parody we can observe that he uses conventions from the genre of romance to describe realism. If we consider that a target of Furphy’s parody is literary form itself, then the novel is a metaparody.

Morson comments that Henry Fieldings’ Joseph Andrews, in the process of parodying Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, proposed a new style of realist writing. In this way:

By creating a new kind of structure that incorporates elements from

an old structure (or structures), parody can thus serve as an

important laboratory …for emerging forms and new genres.

(Morson 1989, p. 70)

Furphy’s dialogue between the genres of the chronicle and the romance novel reveals Furphy’s novel to be a generic hybrid that raises questions about the literariness of life and our need for plots. Dwight Macdonald calls parody “an intuitive kind of literary criticism, shorthand for what ‘serious’ critics must write out at length” (Macdonald 1960, p. xiii). To this end,

Furphy’s parodic engagement with readers’ recognition of the conventions of both realism and romance also engages with, and challenges, readers’ expectations of novels. Throughout, Furphy is playing with the process of reading, in particular with our desire to read towards satisfactory and harmonious endings (Kermode 1967, p. 59). And at the same time, when

Furphy the author hints that a harmonious resolution might exist outside the novel he is fooling around with the writer’s responsibility to create resolutions of harmonious concordance.

1.5 The plot of Such is Life

There have been many theories as to what constitutes the plot of Joseph

Furphy’s novel Such is Life from the early view that the novel has no plot.

H.M. Green’s claim made in 1930 that Such is Life is little more than a

“great formless slab…bolted loosely together by the intermittent recurrence of certain characters” (Green 1930, pp. 127- 8), typifies this view. Green saw the novel as a collection of diverse narrative threads stitched together by the movement of Tom Collins over the Riverina.

Green’s perception of what he considered a plotless structure was

coincident with the novel’s reception as a realistic representation of a period of Australian history in a specific geographical location.

Green’s view was later countered by the increasingly sophisticated response to the novel published in university literary journals from the

1940s onwards. Renewed interest in its structure in the 1940s shifted from the novel’s projection of a purported realism to a discussion of the importance of the hidden romance as a testament to its overall structural cohesion. A.K. Thomson’s article ‘The Greatness of Joseph Furphy,’ published in Meanjin in 1943, first proposed that the hidden romance shows that Furphy’s novel does indeed have a structure—albeit one of interweaving complementary narratives. Yet although Thomson admitted that Furphy’s novel contains many storylines, and that these stories quoted aspects of Shakespeare’s plots, he maintained that “in the ordinary meaning of the word the book has no plot” (Thomson 1943, p. 21). A.D.

Hope in his review of Miles Franklin’s biography of Joseph Furphy, published in Meanjin Papers in the spring of 1945, argued against

Thomson and Green’s assertion of the novel’s plotlessness to propose that Such is Life is “a novel based on a theory of the novel” (Hope 1945, p.

226). Hope’s argument was that Furphy’s attack on the conventions of plot were filtered through, and countered by, the digressive philosophic ramblings of the novel’s narrator, Tom Collins (Hope 1945, p. 227). Hope’s view of the novel’s structure was later supported by R.G. Howarth (1951),

Arthur Phillips (1955), Brian Kiernan (1962), and Z.P. Richters (1979).

Julian Croft later proposed that the novel’s construction was supported by

not one but two levels of narration—the diary and the hidden romance

(Croft 1983, p. 2). Basing his analysis of Furphy’s novel on biographical and archival evidence, John Barnes, in ‘The Structure of Joseph Furphy’s

Such is Life,’ proposes that the interconnectedness of Furphy’s plots is bound by the “inexplicable irony of circumstances” (Barnes 1956, p. 387).

The claim that the structure of the novel is ironic was also made by F.H.

Mares (Mares 1962, p. 64) whose interpretation of the novel’s irony relates to the novel’s presentation of life, such as it is.

These readings of the novel are underwritten by an understanding of the central conceit of a ‘Tom Collins’. Following from this knowledge, Furphy would have expected his reader to filter any claim of the novel’s realism through this veil. How can there be a realistic account of life from a fictitious, unreliable narrator? Tom Collins is the imaginary man who has no life beyond the written or spoken word.

This sort of tacit understanding, that was part of the exchange between the novel and its contemporaneous reader, prejudiced any claim to Tom’s veracity. Furphy extends the joke by creating the character Maud

Beaudesart, an equally fictitious fiancée for Tom. Maud’s father is Hungry

Buckley of Baroona, a character in Henry Kingsley’s Victorian romance novel The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (SIL, p. 209 & p.421 n.

209:11), one of the novels against which Tom Collins proposes his realist chronicle (SIL, p. 1 & p. 164). The coupling of a ‘Tom Collins’—a fictitious rabble rouser—with a ‘Maud Beaudesart’—a character who arose from the

pages of a Victorian romance novel—is another signpost that Tom’s realist realm is both ironic and literary. Within the parameters of Furphy’s parodic dialogue between romance and realism, the romance between Maud and

Tom, tied to the concept of the reality of the novel, is one of the many ways Furphy interplays the terms of one genre with another.

While Tom and Maud are creatures of fiction, critics of the novel have carefully traced the origins of Nosey Alf, the disfigured boundary rider, to an actual acquaintance of Furphy’s who lived in the Riverina. Judith

Rodriguez in ‘The Original Nosey Alf’ (Rodriguez 1975) describes Furphy’s knowledge of, and relationship with, Johanna Margherita Jorgensen, who, like Nosey Alf, suffered the terrible fate of being kicked in the face by a horse and who, like Nosey Alf, lost her nose and after, became a man known as Johann Martin Jorgensen. Her true gender was not discovered until she was dead. It is another ironic exchange from romance to realism that a character based on a real-life prototype is the heroine of Furphy’s buried romance.

Furphy’s ironic perspective has been discussed by G. W. Turner in his many articles on Furphy’s novel. Turner considers the diverse themes and digressions of Tom Collins as essentially satiric in the manner of

‘Menippean Satires’ such as Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, and Tristram

Shandy and the novels of Fielding and Cervantes (Turner 1971, p. vii).

Turner writes that we forget the significance of the fictitious nature of Tom

Collins, whose ‘unreliable’ first person narration categorically resists

omniscience (Turner 1990, p. 43), a point made earlier by Arthur Phillips

(1955). Turner refers to Tom Collins’ function in Furphy’s novel as a misguided philosopher whose story “must reveal a plot that he doesn’t understand” (Turner 1990, p. 49). The fact that the unreliable narrator is a false philosopher, Turner believes, contributes to the effect of the novel’s satire (Turner 1990, p. 51).

Robert Hartley’s analysis of Such is Life, ‘Tom Collins, Clot or Ham?: A

Literary Contract Re-Examined’ (Hartley 1986), also engages with

Furphy’s parodic intentions. Hartley identifies the interplay of the genres of the chronicle and romance in the novel, yet rather than focusing on the idea of their interdependence, Hartley argues that romance, rather than

‘life,’ is the ascendant form of the novel. Additionally, Hartley uses Tom

Collins’ reorganisation of his chronicle’s temporary scheme to support the view that Tom’s diary entries are more authored than real (Hartley 1986, p.

159). The temporal discrepancy between diary and novel supports

Hartley’s view that Furphy is parodying the literary form of the chronicle, a view additionally supported by the observation that Tom Collins filters reality through a literary veil. However, Hartley rejects the view that the

Nosey Alf and Warrigal Alf love story is ‘the main story,’ rather observing that it is the function of this story in the novel that is the more salient aspect (Hartley 1986, p. 165). Hartley argues that Tom Collins’

“philosophical and perceptual peregrinations” and the theme of “reading and writing (in both the literal and metaphorical senses of these words)”

(Hartley 1986, p. 165), are what holds the novel together. He concedes

that “Such is Life’s higher mimetic status, or authenticity, takes as its object not life per se, but textual or encoded life” (Hartley 1986, p. 170).

Hartley, while admitting the novel’s ironic agenda, does not recognise that literature and genre are amongst Furphy’s targets.

After more than a century of criticism, there is no consensus as to what the plot of the novel is. This is perhaps symptomatic of the fact that there is not one plot in the novel but many plots whose structures are bound to the chance meanderings of the narrator as he steers the reader across the

Riverina from one storyline to another. This dissertation argues that the antithetical and interdependent exchange between plots of romance and realism is at the heart of the novel’s complex and diverse structure and that central to these plots is the spatial field. Furphy’s diverse structure stands as a metaparody that aims to target specific literary forms. This reading of Furphy’s novel as a parody becomes evident through an examination of the importance of plot to the novel and an examination of the structure of these plots. By noting the types of plots that constitute

Tom Collins’ realism, we are better able to understand and to see how

Furphy re-transcribes reality with aspects of the plots of romance to enact his parody. Although I suggest that alongside Furphy’s parody of romance and realism, are questions about whether novels need plots.

Many of the plots embedded in the novel interact, mirror and jest with one another. This is most explicitly evidenced in the way the plot of the romance storyline of Nosey Alf and Warrigal Alf is repeated and alluded to

in other plots in the novel. The narrative momentum of these other plots is also driven by a desire for reunion that is rarely achieved. In The Sense of an Ending Frank Kermode writes that: “All such plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning”

(Kermode 1967, p. 46). Furphy plays with the readers’ expectation of any conventional generic ending by rewriting union as disunion. In this way,

Furphy is proposing that ‘real’ life, such as it is, rarely achieves a harmonious resolution.

The way Furphy thwarts readers’ expectations of any conventional outcome of his storylines contributed to the view that there is no cohesive scheme that explains the structure of the novel. Kermode writes that in order to make sense of literary texts, readers need a concordance uniting the beginning, middle and end of a text (Kermode 1967, p. 35). The shape of Such is Life, created by Tom Collins’ movement into and out of plots, is written against concordance. Such an absence of concordance, I suspect, can be interpreted as an assertion of reality and not fiction. This is evident in the title, Such is Life and in the last paragraph of the text (SIL, p. 297).

But in saying that, Furphy also teases his reader into believing a harmonious resolution might still be possible outside the boundaries of the novel. Many of Furphy’s similarly structured plots reflect the structural principles of romance but rarely obey the generically conventional resolution of concordance. Robert Hartley’s observation that “there is no resolution in Such is Life” (Hartley 1986, p. 155), sums up the novel’s ideas about endings. The absence of concordance is the central means by

which Furphy re-interprets romance as reality and asserts that life continues outside the boundaries of the novel.

Narratives structured around themes of separation and union are central to literary romances but are also commonly found in the plots of comedy.

The presence of these narrative structures in Furphy’s novel, while they signify the genre of romance, additionally marks these plots as comic. This is evident in the storyline of the romance between Tom Collins and Maud

Beaudesart. Aspects of Maud’s chase and Tom’s escape resemble structures of the comedic farces of Molière and Feydeau, and the comic structure of pantomime as well as referencing the course of the lovers in

Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. In these comic narrative schemes, comic tension is often measured by the nearness or farness of the lovers to each other, expressed as missed connections in time and in space.

Concepts of the nearness or farness of the lovers are represented through the spatial field, where time and space act with, or predominantly against, each other as elements of plot.

Throughout Furphy’s novel, the spatial field is central to the way readers are able to visualise Furphy’s narrative scheme of dropping plot threads and then picking them up at a later date. The spatial field is therefore the principal representational mode through which we are able to observe how

Furphy’s parody operates. Furphy’s spatial separation of his characters is pivotal to the way he adopts, then teases, then parodies both romance

and realist literary conventions. It is also a sharp reminder of the dynamic agency of the spatial field in the way literary texts are plotted.

1.6 The spatial field in narrative theory

The recognition of the importance of the spatial field to the way we follow plots, map movement and visualise events within a novel has suffered from the claim, in narrative theory, that narrative is a “language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent” (Ricoeur 2002, p. 35). In this theory, the spatial field that constitutes the setting or descriptive aspect of a narrative text is not considered in the close relationship between temporality and the narrative event. It is perceived as peripheral and “non- narrative” (Ronen 1997, p. 274). This thinking is tied to the idea that a primary function of reading consists of organising narrative events from plot into story. Traditionally, narrative theory regards the transformation of plot into story as essentially a chronological reorganisation of narrative events as they are written in a literary text into a sequential, temporal scheme according to what happened first, what happened next and so on to the end. Thus story in some respects is similar to the way we measure the duration of time based on past, present and future. But time is an abstract concept. We cannot see time. We can only understand the concept of time relative to a concrete and actual event or action. Ernst

Cassirer (1957) extends this understanding to assert that time has only perceived form and perceived action, which, in literature, is mediated through the system of language.

W. J. T. Mitchell describes the inherent interconnectedness of space as the mediating agency of our perception of the notion of time:

We cannot experience a spatial form except in time; we cannot talk

about our temporal experience without invoking spatial measures.

Instead of viewing space and time as antithetical modalities, we

ought to treat their relationship as one of complex interaction,

interdependence, and interpenetration. (Mitchell 1980, p. 544)

Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (which views time and space as indelibly fused) asserts that both time and space are the ground over which narrative events are played. It is time and space together that allow us to determine images from literature that we additionally process when a plot is reconstituted into a story. Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope situates the time/space of the represented world of a literary text in the context of actual socio-historical conditions. The relationship of text to context is considered by Bakhtin to have created types of stories that have emerged out of specific times and places. Bakhtin gives, as an example, the space of the parlour and salon in the early nineteenth-century novels of Stendhal and Balzac. These interiors, as with the road in an adventure novel, are settings that provoke and determine the narrative events that unfold there. The salon is the space where the “major spatial and temporal sequences of the novel intersect” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 246). Bakhtin’s essay on the chronotope prescribes that readers contextualise a text from the way we read time and space and from this, relate our recognition of

elements of these texts to other ‘like’ texts based on similar configurations of time and space.

Bakhtin holds that types of chronotopes lead to particular types of narrative plots or genres (Bakhtin 1981, pp. 84-85). From his understanding of ancient Greek literature, Bakhtin has categorised genre in novels according to the types of relationships that narrative events have in time and space. This concept has inspired a macro-reading of texts by

Franco Moretti in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary

History. Moretti analyses the history of the novel, its cycles and genres, which he then transfigures into maps and graphs. Moretti’s map of British novelistic genres 1740 – 1900 (Moretti 2005, p. 19, fig. 9) is an example of his quantitative approach to literature. One feature of Moretti’s approach is the observation that specific genres occur in cycles that appear and disappear every twenty-five to thirty years or so (Moretti 2005, pp. 17 –

20). This macro-reading, Moretti believes, exposes a synchrony between geographical locations, genres and gender of authors from 1750 to the late nineteenth century (Moretti 2005, p. 27). For Moretti, space generates and enables narrative: “Geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history ‘happens,’ but an active force that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth” (Moretti 1998, p. 3).

It is also true that many of the concepts and metaphors through which we understand and analyse literary texts are inherently spatial. The concept of plot and frame, for example, are spatial. The cognitive linguists George

Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that cognitive science determines that the system through which we understand the abstract concept of time, along with other abstract concepts, is fundamentally metaphorical (Lakoff &

Johnson 1999, p. 3). They assert that our understanding of abstract concepts has evolved from our relationship to the world around us, which we have come to understand through our own movement in space.

According to Lakoff and Johnson, our understanding of time is relative to other concepts, in particular, to concepts of motion, space and events

(Lakoff & Johnson 1999, p. 137). Because our embodiment is spatial, our understanding of these concepts is spatial. Our understanding of the abstract concept of time is inherently spatial on two levels. Firstly, the language we use to describe time invokes spatial concepts. Secondly, we measure the concept of the duration of time through events, and events happen in the spatial field.

Lakoff and Johnson argue that we perceive time as structured with a past behind and a future ahead, because we have additionally projected spatial motion into our concept of time. We view time, paradoxically, as both a stationary concept, towards which we move as in “we’re getting close to

Christmas” and as a concept that is empowered with its own movement as in “the deadline is approaching” (Lakoff & Johnson 1999, pp. 143 & 146).

This orientation can be configured into a movement along a line that transitions from the past and moves in the direction of the future and which, Lakoff and Johnson claim, stems from our embodied perspective which sees ahead and does not see behind (Lakoff & Johnson 1999, p.

140). Our understanding of the duration of time, as Einstein proposed, is measured comparatively through events that occur in time. Lakoff and

Johnson offer the following propositions about time:

Time is directional and irreversible because events are directional

and irreversible; events cannot “unhappen”.

Time is continuous because we experience events as continuous.

Time is segmentable because periodic events have beginnings and

ends.

Time can be measured because iterations of events can be

counted. (Lakoff & Johnson 1999, p. 138)

1.7 Literary time

Literary texts are composed of sequences of narrative events bound to, and realised through, the spatial field. What distinguishes one narrative event from another in a literary text, and what collectively moves a story towards its conclusion, is change, noticeably our ability to detect change from one event to another. Cassirer (1957, p. 163) describes the concept of time as a system within which we are able to make sense of change.

Equally our ability to discern differences between one narrative event and another is attributed to our recognition of change. And as we connect one narrative event to the other we compose order from chaos and assign a place for the reality of an event, central to which is our ability to visualise this through the spatial field. The changes between one event and another are organised in any number of ways, one of which is through the logic of cause and effect. One action necessitates another in time and in space.

If our understanding of the concept of time is inherently metaphorical, the concepts through which we perceive (and note) change are less metaphorical than actual (Lakoff & Johnson 1999, p. 171). Similarly as readers we discern when one narrative event ends and another starts. The relationship between these events may be causal, but not bindingly so.

Each action progresses a sequence or introduces another and each narrative event and the sum of the events represent a measure of time that is dependent on the spatial field through which we are able to visualise and discern change. A narrative event inherently binds the measure of time to space because narrative events need the spatial field to be realised.

The concept of time in literary texts is determined by the unique narrative conditions contained in a text. These conditions constitute an autonomous scheme which we read and from which we make sense. Bakhtin writes that novelistic time is unlike biological time because it is deprived of unity.

The temporal field of novels is fragmentary, and divided into segments.

Frank Kermode (1967, p. 47) distinguishes two types of time: the concept of chronos, which he writes is equivalent to quantitative or daily time, and the concept of kairos, which is a significant moment in time, a ‘moment of crisis.’ Novels include many moments of kairos which draw readers into a relationship between a significant narrative event that is central to a text’s outcome and thus to the overall meaning of the text. Kermode writes that:

We can use this kind of language to distinguish between what we

feel is happening in a fiction when mere successiveness, which we

feel to be the chief characteristic in the ordinary going-on of time, is

purged by the establishment of a significant relation between the

moment and a remote origin and end, a concord of past, present,

and future. (Kermode 1967, p. 50)

Kermode’s concept of chronos as successive time dominates Furphy’s intention to produce a chronicle of real life that is superseded by the more traditional novelistic structure that is tied to a reader’s desire for kairos, significant events that will move a narrative towards concordance. In Such is Life, chronos (as representative of the uneventful passing of time) is ultimately revealed to be an unsustainable narrative condition (SIL, pp. 52

& 263), and so the narrator of Furphy’s novel injects specific moments of crisis or kairos that provide the author with the momentum to abandon the chronicle and strive towards resolution. The most significant moment occurs inside Nosey Alf’s hut when she learns that her beloved, whom she has shadowed over time and space, spent the night outside her door. This information functions as a significant moment of crisis, a kairos, after which this romance trajectory is revealed (to the ‘observant reader’).

Between chapters six and seven the narrator is consumed by a desire to discover what has happened to the protagonist of the romance which converts the chronicle into a plot driven novel. At the same time, the steps taken to resolve the storyline of Nosey Alf’s broken heart propels the novel towards the concept of concordance. Although Furphy does not unite the

lovers, he suggests that geographically, the Alfs are on the same path and moving in the same direction—which could result in a union.

Ricoeur refers to the bound temporality of discourse with a spatial metaphor as a concept of containment, as time ‘in’ which events take place, or “within-time-ness” (Ricoeur 2002 p. 35). The concept of ‘within- time-ness’ addresses narrative time as a closed system within the narrative work which Kermode defines as always moving towards an end.

The Russian Formalist, Victor Shklovsky, writes that because narrative time is bound and enclosed, the laws of ordinary time do not coincide with the unique dimension of “literary time” (Shklovsky 1965, p. 36). However, the distinction made by the Russian Formalists between what they call fabula or story and syuzhet or plot conforms to a similar logic that orders time with a past behind, a present and a future. The sequential organisation of narrative events from plot into story resembles the open- ended linear chronology of our perception of time, with the difference that narrative stops at the last page of the text. Where a plot may be the actual representation of events as they have been written by the author, the

Russian Formalists believe that in order to make sense of a plot, readers reconfigure the events of a plot sequentially, according to a scheme of

‘what happened first, what happened next.’ It is the reordering of the events from the plot of a literary text into the story of the plot that is central to the view in narrative theory that positions temporality at the heart of narrative organisation. Peter Brooks proposes that the closer the organising system of a narrative approaches, and conforms to, the causal-

chronological re-sequencing of plot into story, the closer it corresponds to the linear-temporal model of time (Brooks 2002, p. 130). While we can visualise time as a line, we can also visualise story spatially as a line. Both the concept of a time-line and a chronology of narrative events of a story depend on a similar spatial representation. Where the concept of time is relative to events, events in literature are equally relative to the spatial field within which we are able to discern both movement and change.

However, in a narrative text, not all narrative events are considered important to the meaning of a text. Certain narrative sequences and types of novels defy chronological categorisation. Between beginnings and ends, reading involves several processes. In determining meaning, readers often need to read back through a text in order to relocate and reappraise the significance of a previously read event for a plot to take on meaning. At the same time, other narrative events, that were considered important at an earlier point in the process of reading, are discarded as new narrative events replace and rewrite meaning. The selection of relevant events to the meaning of a literary text changes through the process of reading. This process is inherently spatial as it necessitates mapping the field of the novel, and keeping a track of the location of events. Susan Stanford Friedman believes that:

Space restored to its full partnership with time as a generative force

for narrative allows for reading strategies focused on the dialogic

interplay of space and time as mediating co-constituents of human

thought and experience. (Friedman 2005, p. 195)

Such a reading strategy is required to discover the hidden romance storyline in Such is Life. This strategy is spatial on two levels. On one level

Furphy has hidden the clues to the background of this trajectory in specific spaces which requires the reader to back-track and re-track earlier parts of the novel to locate the information that describes how characters were in particular geographies at particular times. Susan Martin notes that: “The ostensible task set the reader, nevertheless, is to track the line of narrative, to navigate through a confusing landscape of hints and clues to locate meaning and sequence” (Martin 2007, p. 78). In this process, particularly after chapter six, narrative events that were thought to be inconsequential need to be reconsidered. In this reappraisal, it is revealed that Nosey Alf has been shadowing Warrigal Alf since she was presumed to have drowned in the Hawkesbury River (a fact we were told in chapter one). Her journey towards him and the problems she encounters in time and space are the romance storyline. The narrative momentum required to discover this is a form of cognitive mapping that would be constantly thwarted if you look solely at the concept that plot, as Brooks suggests, is

“the play of desire in time” (Brooks 1984, xiii). Furphy’s plots require readers to make and keep mental images of characters in space, a process that is fundamental to the detection of both the diversity and the repetition of plots in the novel. It is time/space that hides and reveals the author’s plots.

1.8 Classing narrative events

R.S. Crane distinguishes different categories of plot such as plots of action, plots of character, and plots of thought, and suggests that we classify and differentiate between narrative events on the basis of the dominance and importance of one or another of these elements as we make sense of the text as a whole (Crane 2002, p. 97). Joseph Frank

(1963 1977 1978), Wallace Martin (1986), and Brian Richardson (2002), assert that we negotiate the meaning of narrative texts by detecting patterns, based on the understanding that it is not only actions that impose

“rigorous formal constraints on the process of interpretation” (Martin 1986, p. 101) but configurations of narrative events. In Furphy’s novel, the repetitive use of plots of separation that desire union constitutes such a pattern.

The organisation of narrative sequences into patterns has revealed that not all literary texts are structured according to the logic of chronology or causality. In his 1963 work, The Widening Gyre, Joseph Frank used the concept of spatiality to explain the organisational schemes of some modern literary texts whose structures reveal a different logic of organisation such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s Le Temps

Retrouvé, and the poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Specifically,

Frank’s reference to spatiality denotes organisational schemes found in literary texts whose narrative events collapse, collide, fragment, and layer time. Frank observes that the temporal organisational logic of narrative sequences can be challenged when one event is described from a number

of perspectives. The fête in Flaubert’s Madam Bovary in which Flaubert writes a simultaneous relay of events that all occur at the same time, is given as an example of this. The reader then needs to place these events side by side, to visualise a picture of that point in time. Frank’s analysis of the organisation of modernist narrative discourse challenges the claim that narrative meaning is a deduction of, and a reduction into temporal, causal- chronological schemes. Frank demonstrates that there are a number of formulas and schemes to describe the ways readers organise narrative events.

While Furphy’s Such is Life purports to be a chronicle, the embedded tales that comprise the substance of that chronicle, many relayed to the narrator around the camp fire, reveal a complementary temporal scheme that is not

‘mere successiveness’ but is layered. This is because the novel contains a number of competing temporal schemes. There are the stories that are narrated and there is the act of narration itself. Tying this together is the reader’s dependency on an unreliable narrator, Tom Collins, to deliver all the information from which we make sense of the novel. In the novel, certain events occur simultaneously in different geographies but are narrated at different times in the book. Additionally, the reader must learn to disentangle Tom Collins’ narration from the stories he narrates. In doing this, the reader must often proceed backwards through the novel. The repetition of aspects of a previously given story told from an alternate point of view, the repeated appearance of characters, the numerous mentions of particular names (which requires the reader to cast back over earlier

episodes to connect this thread to the developing story), mean that in

Such is Life this organisational logic with which we make sense of the novel is not always linear. When Furphy warns his reader to be

‘observant,’ (SIL, p. 2) he is warning that the structure of his novel requires a more complex method of reading, and asks the reader to think beyond a straight-forward causal chronological scheme which the narrator ironically proposes on page one.

The story of the two Alfs is told in chapter one, then in chapter four and after in chapter six and is continued in chapter seven, the last chapter. The only clues for the reader are the name Molly and the citation of a location, the Hawkesbury River. What confuses the reader initially is the name Alf.

This is because the name Alf, while signifying the association between the two characters with this name, is ambiguous. For instance Warrigal Alf and

Alf Morris are one and the same person and so are Nosey Alf and Alf

Jones. To complicate matters further Nosey Alf was Molly Cooper. To understand the significance of the background story in chapter one, the reader must grasp that both Alfs—Warrigal Alf with Alf Morris—are one and the same person. To realise Molly has become Nosey Alf the reader must read her suicide as a false suicide, which is often not done. Then in chapter four the reader must remember the background of, and significance of, the name Molly when Warrigal Alf, in his delirium calls out that name. However, it is not until chapter six, when the reader is taken inside Nosey Alf’s harmoniously domesticated hut that the reader should

be in no doubt that Nosey Alf is a woman who is sad and is searching for her lost love whose name is Warrigal Alf Morris.

To reconnect the slipped stiches that thread this story together the reader must read backwards and forwards to pick up the threads between one story and another. Causality in Furphy’s novel is not totally transparent but is hidden behind motifs common to Shakespearean romantic comedies and romance stories such as false name, false gender and false death. It is true that once we know how Furphy is using these motifs the plots can be reconfigured into a linear sequential story that answers to, ‘what happened first, then next etc.’ Yet the prominent organisational scheme of the novel is better understood in reference to Joseph Frank’s definition of spatiality. In Such is Life, narrative events are scattered and fragmentary, time is layered, events collide and are also difficult to find. In this respect,

Furphy’s parodic agenda, which holds types of novels and readers’ expectations of novels at its heart, necessitates a reading that is unique.

Central to this reading, the narrator’s movement over a vast geographic area that delivers all stories is the sustaining metaphor of a reader’s movement through the novel. It is the spatial field that carries the psychodynamic, interactive, and situational natures of this narrative process. The spatial field is where text and context, writer and reader are connected (Stanford Friedman 1993, p. 19).

1.9 The action of plotting

The action of plotting is central to the process of connecting text and context, of reading for meaning and detecting the schemes that will deliver a literary text to its conclusion. In this respect, plot permits story (Brooks

1984, p. 14). In ‘Narrative Time’ Paul Ricoeur describes plot as “the intelligible whole that governs a succession of events in a story” (Ricoeur

2002, p. 37). While Peter Brooks and Ricoeur identify temporality as central to the action of plotting, we need to remind ourselves of how the spatial field fundamentally underlies this concept. Like a literary text, a plot is a spatial concept whose perimeters are bound and contained, for instance a plot is a small piece of land, or a garden, or a burial site. The plot of a novel is also a set of conditions bound to a particular literary text.

A plot is also a conspiracy, a plan or scheme. It is a curve on a graph. To plot is also to map. As readers engage with literary texts, they map or retain the memory of relevant narrative events from which they determine meaning.

The central action of plotting is the recognition of, and organisation of, types of narrative events whose relations, Seymour Chatman notes, are traditionally viewed as “radically correlative, enchaining, entailing”

(Chatman 1978, p. 45). The recognition of similarities to other texts is also central to the act of reading. This is how we categorise narrative texts into genre. As we read we are simultaneously reading narrative events in terms of their importance to the overall meaning of the text before us, as we also observe certain features that we class extra-textually, in relation to

a group of other texts they resemble. In Furphy’s novel, the recognition of extra-textual aspects is central to the conceit of Such is Life because genre is one of the targets of his parody. To understand Furphy’s interchange between genres and to understand why he taints one genre with features of another, we must realise the importance of plot to the novel and of how plot is presented in the novel. This, in turn, requires that we understand how temporal dynamics are manifested in and through the novel’s spatial field.

Part 2 Observations of the spatial field in Such is Life

A close reading of Furphy’s novel, Such is Life, focusing on the operations of the spatial field, reveals that space, both in its partnership with time and independently of it, is an active operative in the machinations of plots of separation and union that are prevalent in Furphy’s novel. One reason is that the spatial field enables us to visualise the movements of characters inside and outside these plots. The spatial field of the novel also harbours the ‘reality effect.’ But in this novel, reality is a concept that, from the first page, is in a relationship with the opposing concept of romance. Within the novel, realism is foremost a spatial concept, romance a literary conceit.

These two concepts form a binary set that prefigures a number of other binary sets scattered throughout the novel whose terms are in relationships that are less antithetical than they are interdependent.

2.1 The structuring principal of binary operations

Throughout the novel, the initial distinction between chronicle and romance fiction spawns other binary sets such as plotlessness and plots, realism and fiction, reality and imagination. This is most evident in the geography of the novel which constitutes a binary set of real, identifiable place and imaginary, fictitious place. Furphy’s remark in a letter to his friend William Cathels, as he was editing his manuscript of Such is Life in

1901, that his toponymy was strategic is indicative of this: “My station names: ‘Kerong’, ‘Yannonbar’, ‘Coorambah’ &c. are fictitious—which is right ; and meaningless—which is wrong11” (Barnes & Hoffman 1995, pp.

65-66). An awareness that the space of the novel divides between real geography and imaginary place alerts the reader to other binary sets: outside and inside, movement and stasis and most importantly male and female. The men move along the roads while the women of the novel (with the exception of Nosey Alf) are found in the homesteads like Runnymede, an imaginary site where Nosey Alf’s little weatherboard hut is located.

The interrelations between terms of a binary set throughout the novel are generally unstable because the author frequently contaminates one term of a binary set with attributes from the other. This methodology explains how, by the end of the novel, Furphy creates a plotted chronicle which is at the same time a realistic portrayal of romance. The interplay between the terms of binary sets is a particular structural principal that ripples through many aspects of the novel. The contamination of one term of a

11 The names Furphy mentions in this quote were changed again for the 1903 edition of Such is Life

binary set with the attributes of its opposing term may also help to explain the significance of the Nosey Alf character who embodies both genders— male and female. She masquerades as a man because, after her face was disfigured from a horse fall, she believes she has lost the requisite virtue of female beauty (SIL. p. 259), that disqualifies her, in her own eyes, from being a woman. Though an exemplary boundary rider in the exterior world, the domestic order of the interior world of her hut, her choice of music and literature, her sentimentality and lamentations of lost love12 are Furphy’s way of signposting her femininity, a femininity that is an interior subjectivity hiding behind the green curtain she placed over the window of her hut.

Traditionally, the relations between terms in a binary set are considered not only oppositional but, in addition, are viewed as hierarchical with one term dominant. The interrelations between the terms of a binary set in

Furphy’s novel may give voice to the concept of the dominance of one term of a binary set over its opposite but more frequently, throughout the text, the relations between the terms of a binary set are better described as entwined and interdependent. Such a reading of the relations between binary terms places one term in a mutual and necessary relationship to the other. One term of a binary set is always in dialogue with its opposite term.

It has earlier been noted that many of the plots of Such is Life are structured around the principles of separation and union. I have also noted

12 The last of six songs Alf sings to Tom Collins, as he considers the answer to Alf’s question of the qualities we love a woman for, is titled She is far from the land where her Young Hero Sleeps (SIL, p.258), which paraphrases her situation.

that we find these plots in romance novels. In these plots, the spatial field is not a background feature of, but an active and essential agent to, the way we recognise these plots. Here time and space constitute a binary set whose terms operate in opposition. For example we understand separation as a spatial concept as ‘y not being in the same place as x.’ In these plots, the interplay between the fields of space and time are the most significant organisational operatives. While Bakhtin writes of the indivisible fusion of time and space in his concept of the chronotope

(Bakhtin 1981, p. 84), he also recognises the separate and different function of time and space as operatives of plots. Bakhtin refers to this function as a negative motif:

As we have already shown in our analysis of the Greek romance, in

any meeting the temporal marker (“at one and the same time”) is

inseparable from the spatial marker (“in one and the same place”).

In the negative motif (“they did not meet,” “they were parted”) the

chronotopicity is retained but one or another member of the

chronotope bears a negative sign: they did not meet because they

did not arrive at the given place at the same time, or at the same

time they were in different places. (Bakhtin 1981, p. 97)

The prevalence of the negative operations of time and space throughout the novel enable us to detect the existence of these plots which is also how we can detect romance and, ultimately, its corruption in the name of realism. An analysis of the function of the spatial and temporal field as the building blocks of plotting in Joseph Furphy’s romance storylines in Such is Life, will aim to demonstrate and discover ways that plots of separation

and the desire for union depend on Bakhtin’s negative operations of both time and space in which the spatial field in an active component.

2.2 Real and imagined: the road as thread

In Such is Life, while the Riverina is the semiotic domain of Furphy’s novel, the road is its locus. The roads of the Riverina in Furphy’s novel metaphorically and literally reveal the novel’s structure as a very long thread that winds in and out, backwards and forwards, over and under a narrative and a geography whose myriad patterns coalesce into one hidden plot. The Riverina of the novel is topographically diverse, in equal measure to the diversity of Furphy’s characters, their languages, the types of narratives encountered in the novel, and the different styles of these narratives. Its geography is barren and fertile, wet and dry, and its place names are ironic, metaphorical and literal. The concept of movement along the road is the overwhelming narrative condition that connects story with story, place with place, and character with character whose narratives, although they may appear to be dissociated from each other, later, are often discovered to be interconnected. In Such is Life, the road is where characters trade horses, dogs, saddles and stories.

Moretti describes the road as “the great symbolic achievement of the picaresque” (Moretti 1998, p. 50). Bakhtin refers to the concept of the road in his essay on the chronotope as a site of narrative wealth. The road is the location of the unexpected.

On the road (“the high road”), the spatial and temporal paths of the

most varied people – representatives of all social classes, estates,

religions, nationalities, ages – intersect at one spatial and temporal

point. (Bakhtin 1981, p. 243)

The concept of the road prescribes a narrative that is determined through chance. The narrator’s movement along the road delivers chance encounters with the characters who lead the narrator and the reader into plots of separation that takes the novel and its narrator off the road and down the small tracks to the properties, and then across the properties and back to the road. J. Hillis Miller remarks that a novel’s linearity is always temporal (Miller 1992, p. 5) although in Such is Life the randomness of chance is determined by the geographical position of the narrator. The temporal thread of the novel is always tied to the geography of the setting from chapter one. In Furphy’s novel the temporal thread can never by separated from the narrator’s multidimensional movement over space.

Tom Collins’ movement on the road is driven less by a sense of destination than by his engagement with the journey itself, which he proposes is the search for a story of interest to tell the reader. In situations where Tom has a destination in mind—such as his desire to reach Nosey

Alf’s hut in chapter six to avoid Maud—he finds the tracks to Nosey Alf’s hut as difficult to follow as the story itself is for the reader (SIL, p. 232).

Furphy justifies Tom’s reason to be on the roads of the Riverina by giving him a job as a Sub-Inspector in the Department of Lands. This job also

gives the narrator a reason to move between A and B and to interact with all walks of life from swagmen, to the bullock drivers who move along the road, to the squatters, the storemen and the boundary riders who traverse the edges on and off the road. Tom is the point at which the all inter- connecting lines of narrative coalesce into his “fair picture of life” (SIL, p.

2).

Where the narrative scheme of Such is Life uses realism to reconfigure romance, and plots which confuse the concept of the real, Furphy also uses this same inversion and interplay to create a concept of the land that is, like the chronicle and the romance novel, both real and imaginary. The concepts of real space and imaginary space suggest that Furphy is using the spatial field of the novel to support and consolidate the distinctions between fiction and life that he negotiates throughout the novel. The novel’s citation of historical space refers to the Lachlan, Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers, and towns such as Deniliquin, Nyngan, Hay,

Kenilworth, Booligal, Ivanhoe, Cobar, Mossgeil, Echuca and Bendigo.

Furphy’s citation of actual places anchors the pathways of the bullock drivers and their teams to a reality that is identifiable and recorded on the historical maps of NSW Stock Routes13 of the late nineteenth century. The citation of real places also provides a scale which enables the reader to chart the temporal when seen as the movement of characters over space.

13 This map is included in Roger Osborne’s blog Tom Collins and Me http://www.nla.gov.au/lizardtech/iserv/getimage?cat=NLAObjects&img=/nla.map/rm/031/9 3/nla.map-rm03193- sd.sid&oif=jpeg&rgn=0.2209209476,0.4797746025,0.5403247272,0.9627691688&cmd=z oomin&wid=1200&hei=1200 (accessed October 17, 2013).

At the same time, the names of his properties are fictitious. These fictitious names are by no means accidental and operate in a variety of ways, literally, ironically and metaphorically. In The Road to Botany Bay, Paul

Carter reveals that James Cook adopted similar schemes when he named the coastline of Australia. Cook’s names were literally descriptive (such as

Sandy Point) or metaphorically descriptive (as in Cape Dromedary) while other names recalled sentiments evoked by the landscape and other distinctive qualities (like Magnetic Island, or the Glass House Mountains).

Other names alluded to the journey itself (Carter 1988, p. 2). Carter remarks that:

Their uniqueness lay not only in their spatial differentiation,

guaranteed them by the map: it resided also in their textuality, in

their belonging, each of them, uniquely to a journal, in which each

had its own place. (Carter 1988, p. 8)

The same contextual function is evident in an examination of Furphy’s toponymy which is always bound to the conditions of the novel. Furphy’s names are both ironic and literal such as the name of Dead Man’s Bend where Warrigal Alf lies dying in chapter four (SIL, p. 129), or Utopia paddock where the Irish Catholic boundary rider, Rory O’Halloran, lives in absolute misery with his Protestant wife. At the same time, because their daughter Mary O’Halloran, ‘the future Australian,’ as Tom Collins calls her,

lives here it is also utopian. Furphy’s renaming of existing places was his way of consolidating the narrative scheme of the novel.14

The relationship in the novel between fictitious space and real place categorises them as terms of a binary set. Because of the narrative episodes that occur there, Furphy ironically reconfigures fictional space into inferred historical space as a way of assigning verisimilitude to the setting of the novel (Miller 1995, p. 6). Throughout Such is Life, the concepts of the real are interconnected to the imaginary as an extension of Furphy’s negotiations between romance and reality. Where the roads that join actual towns anchor the text in a known geography, the properties on either side of the roadways—Runnymede, Avondale, Kooltopa,

Mondunbarra and Goolumbulla—are named by Furphy. It is only fitting then that the cast of characters in Furphy’s romance narratives—Maud

Beaudesart, Nosey Alf, Rory O’Halloran and his idyllic daughter Mary— predominantly inhabit his fictitious realm15. The distinction between the

14 Julian Croft in The Life and Opinions of Tom Collins (Crofts 1991, pp. 75 – 76) provides two maps of the geography of the novel. In one map Croft locates the actual properties alongside which he cites Furphy’s fictional names, indicating the setting of each chapter of the novel. Croft’s second map details the layout and paddocks of Runnymede, the property at the center of the narrative.

Roger Osborne in his 5/1/2012 entry to his blog Tom Collins and Me—Mapping Joseph Furphy’s “Such is Life,” utilises Google maps to annotate Furphy’s overview of the Riverina, pinning places cited by Furphy in the novel and in his life. Included in this blog entry is a map of the property Conoble, which Julian Croft suggests is the probable model for Runnymede. Osborne’s interactive website also provides access to additional maps including: an 1879 Map of the Riverina and northern and north-western pastoral districts; De Gruchy and Co’s 1877 squatting map of the Riverina; and the 1888 map of stock routes. (http://furphyarchive.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/mapping-tom-collins-update/) (accessed November 11, 2013).

15 Warrigal Alf stands apart from this scheme because Warrigal Alf is found, in Chapter IV at Dead Man’s Bend on the border of three properties. Warrigal Alf’s narrative trajectory is bound to a linear and chronological structure based on the theme of metamorphosis.

road and the properties is additionally able to be read as gendered. The male bullock drivers, swagmen and Warrigal Alf have no permanent ties to place while the women in Furphy’s novel (with the exception of the bi- gendered Nosey Alf)—Maud Beaudesart, Ida her housemaid, Rory’s wife, and Jim/Jemima Quarterman—inhabit the homesteads and properties off the road.

Within the binary set of the real place (the roads) and imaginary place (the homesteads and properties) we find also an additional binary set whose terms are fertile and infertile. Reflecting the great drought of 1883 during which the novel is set (SIL, p. 311, n. 4.27) the roads are largely infertile tracts while the pastures and riverbeds of Furphy’s imaginary homesteads are more fertile, both literally and narratively. The movement of the bullock drivers on the roads, between their point of departure and arrival, is diurnally driven towards fertile grounds which are reached at night. The need to feed and water the bullocks steers the bullockies and Tom Collins off the roads into private paddocks on land holdings where there is sufficient grass and water for the bullocks and horses. Everyone stops moving, night falls and the campsites become spaces of nocturnal stasis where there is fire and food and where stories are told. It is from these literal and narratively fertile sites that we first hear the background to

Furphy’s main romance storylines; this is also the soil on which the characters in these storylines live.

To locate his character on the road interestingly speaks of this character’s ignorance of his participation in a romance story and of his lack of the awareness that this trajectory is happening around him.

Within the novel, the borders between the roads and the fertile pastures are patrolled by the boundary riders. These boundary riders are a curious group of characters: Toby the Aboriginal, the Catholic Rory O’Halloran who is also known by his nickname Dan O’Connell, and Nosey Alf. These last two, like the borderlines between the real places and the fictitious places they patrol, are both central to Furphy’s greater dialogue between romance from realism. Both of these boundary riders have ‘huts’ which

Tom visits. In chapter two he visits Rory’s hut and in chapter six he stays the night with Nosey Alf.

The complex symbolic functions of the land in Furphy’s novel have been explored by many critics. In The Life and Opinions of Tom Collins (1991),

Julian Croft, in addition to his maps, provides a chapter by chapter breakdown of the actual and imaginary settings of the novel. In an earlier work, a chapter in Mapped But Not Known: The Australian Landscape of the Imagination, Croft distinguishes two spatial schemes in Such is Life, land (the realm of Tom Collins) and landscape (a concept that embraces

Furphy’s view of the land as mythic) (Croft 1986). Susan Keogh agrees with Croft that the land is a central thematic concern of the novel, but differs from Croft in her interpretation of the concept of landscape. Keogh refers to landscape as a specific way of perceiving the land (Keogh 1989, p. 54) viewing the differences between the concepts of land and landscape in the novel as contentious, but also inter-related. Keogh writes that the conflicting concepts of land and landscape intersect in the story of

the Alfs and particularly in the story of the lost child, Mary O’Halloran.

G.W. Turner in his chapter in Mapped But Not Known, considers the novel’s concept of landscape to metaphorically signify Furphy’s

“landscape of the mind” which he writes is brought together in the novel with its ‘uncivilised’ topography (Turner 1986, p. 171). Frances Devlin-

Glass also distinguishes between different concepts of the land in Such is

Life in terms of the real and “mythical” (Devlin-Glass 1991, p. 39). In her article ‘The Feminine as a Metaphor for Landscape,’ Devlin-Glass writes that the divisive portrayal of the land in Such is Life may be a reflection of

Furphy’s unconscious appropriation of Celtic myths, garnered from his

Irish ancestry, aligning the mythic sense of the land with the feminine as giver and destroyer (Devlin-Glass 1991, p. 49).

Croft believes the mythical quality of the land is evident in a number of the embedded narratives in the novel. I agree that the concept of the land in

Furphy’s novel expresses multiple values whose meanings appear to oppose one another. However, the represented world of the novel answers first and foremost to its function inside the discourse. An intra- textual reading of the land reveals another binary through which Furphy signposts his opposing literary schemes. The represented world of the novel is fundamentally fused to the spatial field from which we can plot our way through the narrative. The appearance of a number of opposing ways of considering the land and landscape allows the spatial field to assist

Furphy’s intra-literary schemes both literally and metaphorically. The simultaneously real and fictitious spatial field complements the dialogue

between romance and realism that Furphy is engaging in. The diverse spatial field of Furphy’s narrative equally mirrors the seemingly disparate narratives in the novel. Additionally, the spatial field is central to the way readers make the connections between narratives and plots that are scattered throughout the novel.

Tom Collins comments that the reader needs to “Champollion all this information from the cryptic utterances” (SIL, p. 176). This requires the reader to keep a map of Tom’s movements over space, remaining constantly aware of the stitches of narrative that are dropped at campsites and at the supply store of Runnymede, and that require being threaded back into their developing trajectories. These narratives are often confusing and intentionally misleading. Susan Martin comments that:

A great deal of the track of the story is mistrack, back-track, re-

track; the novel is full of lost or mistaken individuals, and searches

for people, bullocks, places, all within a space which is intermittently

unreadable or mis-readable. (Martin 2007, p. 79)

However, at the same time, the fragmented narratives repeat and echo aspects of the themes, structures and motifs of the hidden romance story in much the same ways as Hamlet’s play-within-a-play repeats and re- enacts Hamlet’s father’s murder. The device of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play is quoted by Tom Collins in chapter two as an example of how Hamlet’s action “committed the hero to a system of interlaced contingencies” (SIL, p. 69), possibly signposting Furphy’s adoption of the same technique as an over-riding structural principal. The romance between Nosey Alf and

Warrigal Alf, narratives of horses, dogs, bullocks, and saddles that are separated, bartered, renamed, lost, reappropriated and reunited with their original owners are similarly structured.

This can be read as an illustration of the extent to which Furphy’s romance storylines and realist storylines are intertwined and mutually interdependent. It is also possible to see that these repetitive plot structures serve to alert the reader to the romance between the two Alfs.

2.3 Runnymede, the place of romance

At the centre of these plots is the station Runnymede where Nosey Alf and

Maud Beaudesart live. Runnymede is the location where the significant stories in the novel take place. There are two dominant inter-connected and antithetical unions between men and women in Such is Life that occur at Runnymede. One is a tale of true love; the other is a tale of false love, again another binary set. One romance is hidden; the other is woven into the narratives told by Tom. The property of Runnymede, a fictitious space between the real roads of Tom’s Riverina, is the site that harbours the female characters of both of these romance storylines.

The story of true love is the tale of love between Nosey Alf and Warrigal

Alf in its various manifestations. The story of false love centres on Tom

Collins’ desperate ploys to avoid the clutches of his alleged fiancée Maud

Beaudesart. The trajectory of the story of true love concludes with Nosey

Alf pursuing Warrigal Alf outside the boundaries of the novel. The

trajectory of the second story of false love ends with Tom Collins on the run from Maud. This latter narrative plot enables the reader to learn that

Nosey Alf has left the geography of the novel and is following the footsteps of her true love to South-western Queensland. While Nosey Alf may be on the course to meet Warrigal Alf, no partners in these two distinctly different romances are united at the end of the novel.

Runnymede is a space that Tom Collins avoids (because Maud is waiting there for him) but is also drawn to. Tom’s push and pull towards and from

Runnymede mirrors his intention to avoid romance and Furphy’s secret interest in it. It can be inferred that Furphy’s choice of the name

Runnymede—an allusion to the site of the signing of the Magna Carta in

1215—given the almost feudal organisation of Australian station life, is also ironic. Runnymede is fashioned as a microcosm of colonial order, headed by the squatter Montgomery and his wife, whose social rank distinguishes them from the boundary men, store keepers, stockmen, narangys, and housemaids.

Like the Riverina, Runnymede is vast and takes considerable time to cross. This enables Warrigal Alf to camp in Nosey Alf’s paddock without either being the wiser. The scale of Runnymede is also the central means by which Tom Collins can be both near to, and far, from Maud Beaudesart.

Runnymede, while its social organisation mirrors squattocratic colonial

Australia, hides Nosey Alf who works as a man and keeps house as a woman. It is a space that enables the co-existence of several binary

terms: male and female, fiction and reality, romance and realism. In his essay ‘Of Other Spaces,’ Foucault talks of spaces as defined by the set of relations that take place in them (Foucault 1986, p. 23), and, in this respect, Runnymede is a mirror of the social structures in place at the time

Furphy wrote his novel. However, the significance of Runnymede in the novel is more importantly determined by the narrative events that take place there and of Furphy’s intention to cloud his realist chronicle with fiction and fictitious people.

2.4 Two (h)Alfs make a whole

A.K. Thomson, in his close reading of Such is Life, comments that the connective threads to the romance between Nosey Alf and Warrigal Alf:

are so far separated, or rather isolated, in different parts of the

book, and the connecting links are clear enough, only if and when

they are found, that it is safe to say that not one in a thousand

readers of Such is Life notices that the three stories form one story.

(Thomson 1943, p. 20)

The first signpost to the romance is the name Alf, the name Furphy assigns to both the male and female protagonists of his central romance.

The name Alf is also ironic, where two (h)Alfs make a whole16. Here, the naming of the two Alfs can also be identified with the motif of “false and double names” which is a feature of ancient Greek romances (Bakhtin

1981, p. 88) but which Furphy probably more specifically appropriated

16 This pun has also been noted by Susan Keogh in her essay ‘Land, Landscape and Such is Life’: “Nosey Alf as well as being the other ‘alf of this combination” (Keogh 1989, p. 62).

from Shakespeare’s romantic comedies17. This motif equally throws anyone but the ‘observant reader’ into confusion about the two Alfs. Such confusion is compounded by the additional information that both of these

Alfs have surnames—Nosey Alf is also Alf Jones and Warrigal Alf is Alf

Morris—and these characters are referred to, throughout the novel, in any number of variations of these names. When we first hear Cooper talk about Alf, neither William Cooper, the reader, nor the listeners to his story realise that the particular Alf in question, Warrigal Alf, is the same Alf

Morris who is the reason William is at the campsite telling us his tale.

The motif of false gender is also a common feature in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. The triple motif of false name, false identity and false gender is used by Furphy to camouflage the heroine of his romance and to cover the tracks of this storyline from Tom Collins. The recognition that

Furphy’s use of these motif ‘quotes’ Shakespeare’s comedies supports the view that Furphy’s parodic intention is to target literature and literary schemes. The use of these motifs illustrates that elements central to

Furphy ‘realist’ agenda are also found in literary romantic comedies.

Furphy’s approach to female gender is intriguing. He describes all but one of the women in the novel as having moustaches18. This is one of Furphy’s

17 R.S. White in Furphy’s Shakespeare remarks that “There is a kind of dialogue going on between Tom Collins and Shakespeare. Certain prominent plot-devices in Such is Life are adapted from Shakespeare’s drama, and a recognition of these can help with some of the detective work needed to unravel strands of the plot” (White 1989, p. 10).

18 The exception to this is the character of Ida, the housemaid at Runnymede, who has a “straggly goatee of dirty white, with woolly side-boards of the same colour, in lieu of the

signposts that readers should approach gender with caution because nothing is what it seems. Tom’s observation that Nosey Alf has, “no scrub to burn off, except a faint moustache, unnoticeable but for its dark colour”

(SIL, p. 244), is deceptive. In ‘Why Do All These Woman have

Moustaches?: Gender, Boundary and Frontier in Such is Life and

Monsieur Caloche,’ Susan Martin writes that the fact that most of the women in the novel have a moustache is a “signifier of a profound disruption of the division between the sexes” (Martin 1992, p. 26). In the context of the novel, Nosey Alf’s moustache signifies that she is as likely to be feminine as masculine. The moustache in the novel is less a disguise than a sign for Furphy’s ‘observant reader’ that gender is an unstable proposition in the novel. The plasticity of gender throughout the novel allows us to read Nosey Alf as both man and woman.

The reveal of the romance, of which we have not been conscious, occurs in the second last chapter of the novel, chapter six, after Tom inadvertently tells Nosey Alf that her beloved Warrigal Alf spent the night on her paddock and is now on his way to Queensland. Before we register Nosey

Alf’s unmanly emotional responses, we have been given a considerable number of clues that would infer that he is a she central to which is the domestic order of Nosey Alf’s hut—its neatness, its fresh flowers, the specific genres of literature she reads (no science books on the shelf), the music she plays and the way she plays it—mark Nosey Alf’s gender.

These signposts have been given before Nosey Alf buries her head in her short silky moustache which is the piquant trade-mark of our country-woman” (SIL, p. 211).

hands and weeps when she learns that her heart’s desire was on her doorstep. From the rawness of her emotions, it is obvious that Nosey Alf can only be a woman. “Who is she?” (SIL, p. 258) comments Tom after hearing Nosey Alf’s love songs that displayed: “No suggestion of national inspiration; no stern challenge of wrong; only a hopeless, undying love, and an unspeakable self-pity” (SIL, p. 258). Catherine Lutz, in her analysis of the ideological functions of the concept of emotions, comments on the gendering of emotions:

Emotion occupies an important place in Western gender ideologies;

in identifying emotion primarily with irrationality, subjectivity, the

chaotic and other negative characteristics, and in subsequently

labelling women as the emotional gender, cultural belief reinforces

the ideological subordination of women. (Lutz 1986, p. 288)

Furphy’s description of Nosey Alf’s world and of the pain and heartbreak she has endured would have informed the reader at the beginning of the century of her gender. But at the same time, because Tom Collins is under the impression that Nosey Alf is a man, the reader can infer that her emotional response stands outside gender as a universal condition.

The confusion over Nosey Alf’s gender is compounded by Furphy’s use of the motif of false name. When William Cooper narrates the background to the romance between Molly Cooper and Warrigal Alf Morris in chapter one, we understand that the name Alf is important. However there are no clues that insist we attach any significance to the name Molly which

reappears some hundred pages further on when the second instalment of the romance (from the point of view of Warrigal Alf) is narrated in chapter four. In a conversation between Tom Collins and Warrigal Alf, whom Tom believes to be on his deathbed, the name Molly is mentioned for the second time. Warrigal Alf’s narration in chapter four retells aspects of

William Cooper’s story, including the information of how the lovers met in the geography of the Hawkesbury River. Warrigal Alf continues with the narrative of his life after his father threw him out of home. Alf then moved south and worked in a saw-mill he inherited from his uncle. He married another woman who was unfaithful to him and fathered a son, who died at the age of three. Alf sold the saw mill, settled up with his wife and took to the road. We also learn that Alf believes his bad choice of a wife and the sad death of his son are part of the long curse placed on him as a result of his rejection of Molly (SIL, p. 145). In chapter four, we learn that Alf still loves Molly with all his heart (SIL, p. 152) even though he has heard she is dead (SIL, p. 145).

The narrative structure of Warrigal Alf’s story is not dissimilar in cause and consequence from the story of Molly’s brother William who, after Molly

‘died,’ lost the family’s fortune, saving only enough for a bullock train he named the Hawkesbury (SIL, p. 3).The sequence of narrative events that informs the reader of Warrigal Alf’s story conforms to the narrative model of Bakhtin’s second genre in his essay on the chronotope, the adventure novel of everyday life (Bakhtin 1981, p. 111). The course of this narrative genre features the transformation of the hero. The narrative structure of

Alf’s story moves from a state of guilt, where his everyday life is a punishment, to redemption and then blessedness after Alf unburdens his heart to Tom Collins on his deathbed in chapter four as Warrigal Alf, in his delirium, hears “the glorious voice of Molly” from the spirit world (SIL, p.

145)19.

Warrigal Alf’s moment of redemption happens in the middle of the novel, in the presence of Tom Collins. Tom brings Alf medicine and arranges for him to be looked after by Stewart, the most benevolent of Furphy’s squatters, who promises to see Alf through (SIL, p. 174). Here, Tom

Collins is the agent of chance in the romance, because after Tom brings

Warrigal Alf together with Stewart, Alf is offered a permanent post at

Stewart’s new property in South-western Queensland. This prospect creates the end point for a possible reunion between the Alfs that would conform to a reader’s expectation of a romantic union.

The third segment of this romance storyline takes place in chapter six, and again Tom Collins is at the centre of the story. On the pretext of avoiding his fiancée Maud, Tom takes Moriarty’s advice and travels to Nosey Alf’s hut. When Tom spends the night with Nosey Alf, she enquires of him if he knows of anyone else with the name Alf. Tom remembers Warrigal Alf who, he relates spent the night in Nosey Alf’s horse paddock, “hovering about your hut that night like a guardian angel” (SIL, p. 251) some ten months previously. The paddock is large, it was night and neither noticed

19 The structure of Warrigal Alf’s story – transgression – expiation – redemption – is also noted by Nina Knight in “Furphy and Romance: Such is Life Reconsidered” (Knight 1969).

the other. On hearing about this missed connection, Nosey Alf turns pale and takes to her bed. Tom then narrates, without appearing to connect

Molly’s terrible sadness to the information he has just given her, that Alf, who was so close, is now so far. It is the reader who must observe that

Nosey Alf has been following Warrigal Alf since she ran away from the

Hawkesbury River. Then, in chapter seven the news that Nosey Alf has left the Riverina in the direction of, and one presumes in search of,

Warrigal Alf conforms to the narrative arc of the imminence of a union, yet one that fails to deliver.

As has already been noted, according to Bakhtin, the time of romance is abstract, because in this literary genre time leaves no mark on the characters. The lovers are always as young and as beautiful at the end of the ancient Greek romances as they are at the beginning (Bakhtin 1981, p.

90)20. In Bakhtin’s analysis of ancient Greek romances, the spatial field is also abstract, described as exotic and far away. It is possible to interpret

Runnymede, the fictitious property in Furphy’s Riverina, as performing the same function in Furphy’s romance storyline as the abstract space of ancient Greek romance. Runnymede is the exotic and faraway space over which the adventures that keep the lovers apart are played.

Bakhtin’s landscape of adventure or ordeal never changes the love, but merely interrupts its course. This is replicated in the missed connections between the two Alfs. In Furphy’s romance both fixed structural poles are

20 A response to this is Voltaire’s Candide whose lovers bear the mark of time and age as a result of their adventurous ordeals.

located outside the Riverina. William Cooper tells the story of how the lovers met in the Hawkesbury River area before the chronicle begins. We learn in the final chapter that if the lovers unite, it will be in South-western

Queensland, a location outside the Riverina. Within the romance storyline, the space of the Riverina represents the abstract landscape of ordeal, where the lovers fail to meet.

Between the meeting of the Alfs in the Hawkesbury River and the imminence of a union in South-western Queensland, Furphy plants the information in his chronicle that Nosey Alf and Warrigal Alf have shared common space not only in the Hawkesbury River but in the Bland

Country21. The reader is made aware that both lovers walked over the same space but at different times in what could be written as one lover following the other in the hope of a union. The common sightings of the lovers in the Bland Country suggest that the narrative course of the lovers takes the form of shadowing, initiated by Nosey Alf as she follows any clue that will lead her to Warrigal Alf.

The narrative events that convey this information to the reader appear in sections of the novel that are far apart and so complicate the cohesion of this tale. We learn that Molly disappeared some three to four years before

Nosey Alf was employed as a boundary rider at Runnymede, where she has been for five years (SIL, p. 232). In chapter one, William Cooper tells us that three to four years after Alf Morris jilted Molly at the altar he was

21 The Bland Country is north of the Riverina, approximate to Bland Creek, west of Young and north of Cootamundra, New South Wales.

seen driving bullocks in the Bland Country (SIL, p. 22). We are told, some two hundred pages later, that at this same time Nosey Alf also worked as a boundary rider in the Bland Country (SIL, p. 232). An analysis of these dates hints that while both of the lovers were in the Bland Country at the same time, temporally and spatially, Nosey Alf was always behind

Warrigal Alf, so that, as with their movements over the space of the

Riverina, there were no chance meetings. He was on the move; she was following. The narrative momentum of this storyline was less driven by chance than by purpose. This information provides a middle section to the trajectory of this romance that is located outside the geography of the

Riverina.

Furphy conveys these plots by playing time against space, yet it is the spatial field that speaks to the reader’s recognition that this story is a romance plot more clearly than any other narrative element. In Nosey Alf’s early shadowing of Warrigal Alf, and in the information given in chapter seven that implies a meeting might be imminent, the reader visualises this romance essentially through the spatial field. There are sufficient markers in the course of Nosey Alf’s plot to indicate that Furphy’s description of the movement over space by Nosey Alf and Warrigal Alf both quotes, and subverts, certain generic conventions of romance. The principal reason that Furphy’s central hidden story of romance differs from the generic norm is that the location of the romance in the novel is associated with movement and not with an end point. Both the absence of fixed anchors for the greater part of the novel, and the announcement of a fixed pole in

the form of Stewart’s property in South-western Queensland, contribute to the view that Runnymede in the Riverina, and the Bland Country before it, are the locations where Bakhtian adventures of romance take place. The transmission of the information of the nearness and farness of the lovers and the absence of their reunion serves Furphy’s parodic reconfiguration of the course of this romance which, in its unhappy ending, could be observed as relating less to literary fiction than to real life. In “ ‘Double line to the terminus’: Marriage, sex, romance and Joseph Furphy,” Susan

Lever writes of Furphy that:

He asserted that he was interested in the real, rather than fanciful

versions of life – and his interest in the failure of sexual relations

offers us insight into how poor people in the past handled the

breakdown of marriage, with no prospect of divorce. (Lever 2013, p.

Furphy never announces that the Alfs are lovers. It is up to the reader to read under the scene, as it were, and animate a plot from usually passive aspects of the text such as the description of the domestic harmony of

Nosey Alf’s hut, the songs of lost love she sings to Tom and especially her emotional responses when Tom brings Warrigal Alf to life for her. In this respect, the spatial field is deployed to activate a plot that Furphy has been steering the reader towards from the first page of the novel.

2.5 Mirror narratives

By breaching the conventional ending of a romance that reunites the lovers, Furphy transcribes realism into his plot. The failure of a meeting between the two Alfs at the end of the storyline, even though a meeting may be implied, reconfigures this love as tragic and unrequited. In contrast, Furphy creates a parallel storyline, between Tom Collins and

Maud Beaudesart that runs counter to the story of the Alfs and whose emotional connection is the opposite of readers’ understanding of the true feelings of love. This may be because both Maud and Tom are intended to be read as comic characters. Marriage in this fictitious realm has nothing to do with feelings. Here marriage is linked with social aspiration.

This narrative is driven by Maud Beaudesart’s need to re-establish her social status through marriage, a desire that equals Tom Collins’ negative desire to avoid marriage at all costs. The Tom Collins / Maud Beaudesart storyline mirrors the key movement of separation and union that characterises the romance storyline between Nosey Alf and Warrigal Alf, but here the outcomes are reversed. Where Nosey Alf’s romance plot always desires union, Tom Collins, in his relationship with Maud

Beaudesart, desires separation.

In both situations, romance is actively generated by the female character who possesses the inclination to be loved and, in Maud’s case, secure and protected in marriage. In the romance between the two Alfs the pursuit of one lover by the other happens as the result of a chance

meeting between Tom Collins and Nosey Alf in chapter six. The readers’ awareness of this plot is a consequence of Tom Collins’ ploys to avoid the pursuing Mrs Beaudesart. This creates the scenario where the avoidance of one romance activates another. The course of Tom and Maud’s union results in a continuance of separation which does nothing to discourage

Maud’s desire for union. Furphy suggests that this union would be fatal for

Tom, as Maud Beaudesart has a reputation for fast-tracking her husbands to their grave (SIL, p. 132). To marry Maud is therefore a death warrant, which is given as the principal justification for Tom Collins’ flight from her.

The idea of their coupling arose from a conversation in which Tom pretends to be someone he is not, someone whose peerage is very attractive to Maud, so attractive that such a match would reconstitute

Maud’s diminished social stature. The question of Tom’s false social pedigree began as a joke when Montgomery first introduced Tom Collins to Maud Beaudesart, claiming Tom was the last descendant of

Commander David Collins22 (SIL, p. 210). As David Collins had no offspring the imaginary man was sired by an imaginary father. However

Tom Collins played along with this lie that impressed Maud (SIL, p. 211).

The lies upon which their relationship was founded exponentially multiply until they are able to describe each other as “one pedigreed lady and a pedigreed gentleman” (SIL, p. 211) who reinscribe their social caste with greater superiority than Montgomery, the squattocratic station manager of

Runnymede, to whose benevolent kindness Maud’s livelihood is indebted

(SIL, p. 211).

22 Commander David Collins—the first Governor of Tasmania—never married so any offspring would be illegitimate (SIL, p. 422, n. 210.34).

Once Tom’s false claim to such peerage is established, Tom becomes the only eligible bachelor whom a lady of Mrs Beaudesart’s pedigree could marry, a fact of which Tom is informed by Moriarty, the storekeeper of

Runnymede (SIL, p. 228). When Tom hears of this, in order to avoid the marriage, he proposes two courses of action: one is to avoid Maud at all costs, the other is to ask Moriarty, at Runnymede, to spread a scandal about Tom in the hope that Maud will change her mind (SIL, p. 228).

Moriarty suggests that to avoid Maud, Tom should ride out to Nosey Alf’s hut at Round Swamp Paddock and stay there. Moriarty spreads dreadful rumours about Tom within Maud’s hearing (SIL, p. 228), but this has “no effect at all” (SIL, p. 228) in dissuading her. Tom tries to delay his marriage to Maud until he gets a promotion—a fact that the reader understands is nigh impossible and, from the first line of the novel,

“Unemployed at last!” was never realised. But Tom’s procrastinations and ruses to shake Maud off never dull her enthusiasm as, with or without the promotion, Maud intends to marry Tom (SIL, p. 228). The arc of this storyline, similar to the resolution of the romance between the Alfs, is one of imminent union (SIL, p. 297), although the terms are different.

The relationship between Tom Collins and Maud Beaudesart is, like the story of the Alfs, fragmented and relayed through small pieces of information planted throughout the novel. The character of Moriarty is a necessary accessory to this narrative. The Tom / Maud relationship also creates an impetus for Tom’s continual movement over the space of the

Riverina. This feeds directly into the relationship between space and narrative event. To avoid Maud, Tom travels away from the homestead of

Runnymede, and into Nosey Alf’s hut. Furphy transmits Tom’s reluctance to meet with Maud into a plot that, like the plot of the Alfs, aligns the farness of Tom from Maud to the nearness of the reader to a real romance. At the same time the romance storyline between Tom and Maud functions to contrast false love with true love. What are left are plots where the conditions of separation and the desire for union are differently arranged. Both plots of separation are shown spatially, and both take place in the imaginary site of Runnymede.

While Nosey Alf has been pursuing Warrigal Alf, and while Maud chases

Tom Collins, there is third couple described in chapter two of the novel whose partnership, although they are united in marriage, can nonetheless be observed to conform to those plots structured around the concepts of separation and union. Here Rory O’Halloran, the boundary rider who (like many characters in the novel) is also known by his nickname, Dan

O’Connell, lives with, but separately from, his wife in a bedroom “bisected by a partition, with a curtained doorway” (SIL, p. 75). Relations between

Rory and his wife, as with Tom and Maud, insinuate that the course of love and coupling in the novel is a state of perpetual separation.

In the narrative arc of Rory and his wife we can observe that their union in marriage equally manifests as a separation. Furphy justifies their division as a consequence of their different religions, a situation that reflects the

historic hostility between Catholics and Protestants in Australia at that time. Yet although the marriage between Rory and his wife is a disaster, out of their partnership they engendered young Mary O’Halloran, whom

Tom considers to be the perfect young Australian (SIL, p. 73). And Rory, though unhappily married is nevertheless infected with aspects of romance:

Rory’s character was made up of two fine elements, the poetic and

the prosaic, but these were not compounded. There was a dreamy,

idealistic Rory, born of a legend-loving race ; and there was a

painfully parsimonious Rory , trained down to the standard of a

model wealth-producer. (SIL, p. 61)

Rory, ironically, while barely talking to his wife, spends his nights writing a composition on the virtue of women titled “A Plea for Woman” (SIL, p. 75), whose objective is to prove that, at a certain point in the world’s history,

“the character of woman had undergone an instantaneous transformation”

(SIL, p. 76). The style of Rory’s composition is claimed to be so poetic, it

“Knocks Ouida into a cocked hat” (SIL, p. 64).

Rory is described as a character who is both prosaic and poetic thus embodying aspects of both literary schemes at the centre of Furphy’s novel. The notion of a poetic disposition is central to a rewriting of the land as equally embodying two aspects, a reality and a romantic poetic quality that is especially evoked in chapter five around the campfire where we are told the story of the lost children.

There is a fourth mini-narrative whose storyline is designed around the theme of separation and union, which mirrors the other romance storylines and serves to connect Nosey Alf to Warrigal Alf. This is the tale of Warrigal

Alf and Pilot the bull. This plot, like the narrative sequence that tells of the relationship between Maud and Tom, is relayed in bits and pieces from several narrative perspectives throughout the novel. The denouement of this narrative episode is the information that Pilot the bull led Warrigal Alf directly to Nosey Alf, but neither Warrigal Alf nor Nosey Alf knew.

In chapter one, the bullock driver Mosey Price tells of how he swapped a tear-away lead bull named Pilot for Warrigal Alf’s horse, Valiparaiser. This swap benefited Mosey because Pilot was “dear as a gift” (SIL, p. 16). Pilot has a problem with being bound in a paddock and in such situations, takes off. Fences are “like spiders’ webs to him” (SIL, p. 17). The first story describes how Pilot runs through sixty miles of fences with Warrigal Alf pursuing him on foot as he had given his horse away (SIL, p. 17). The second tale of Pilot the bull is set at Runnymede and describes how Pilot again escapes and of how Warrigal Alf pursues him all the way to Nosey

Alf’s paddock (SIL, p. 233).

This tale of Warrigal Alf’s pursuit of Pilot the bull is a mirror narrative that replicates Nosey Alf’s pursuit of Warrigal Alf. The mirror tale also leads

Warrigal Alf straight to Nosey Alf’s place without either of them discovering the presence of the other. Warrigal Alf leaves in the morning and Nosey

Alf is none the wiser until Tom Collins tells her this after which she stares

at Tom with a “wild, shrinking look” (SIL, p. 251). In this episode, the characters are in the same place at the same time but, in accordance with

Furphy’s perpetual deferment of the desired outcome of the romance, there is no fated meeting.

The scattering of mirror narratives that conform to a structural principal of the theme of separation and union is achieved through the negative operations of time and space. In this structure, temporal markers are intentionally displaced from spatial markers to create situations where characters were not in the same place at the same time and therefore did not meet (Bakhtin 1981, p. 97). The importance of this plot structure is also evidence of the importance of romance as a structural principal in the novel. In these storylines, the concept of the chase is important: both the chase to, and the chase from. Furphy tells these narratives by portraying his characters as near, but never near enough to each other in space.

Francis Devlin-Glass comments that:

Ultimately, the novel is a world removed from romance, but when it

does touch on romantic incidents – for example, Tom’s Petrarchan

infatuation with Jim (Miss Quarterman), the cruel death of Mary in

the bush, and the romance of the two Alfs – despite Tom’s

continual asseverations to the contrary, these events are not finally

very different in tone or subject matter from the ‘Ouida’, Henry

Kingsley or Marcus Clarke’s versions of the same events. Certainly

the tales are narrated differently, but they are ultimately the same

well worn tales. (Devlin-Glass 1974, p. 78)

Within Furphy’s novel, the course of these storylines attests to the truth that although Furphy was determined to write against the neat and tidy plots of Victorian romance novels of the Henry Kingsley and Ouida type, the embedded plots in his novel nevertheless pay homage to certain basic conventions from the genre of romance.

2.6 Double space: the spatial field and the stories of the lost children

In the romance tales of separation and continual denial of union, where space and time operate as negative motifs, the concept of separateness is defined by ‘not at the same time’ and ‘not in the same place.’ The one instance when Nosey Alf and Warrigal Alf were in the same place at the same time, it was night, and the paddock was so large neither noticed the other. In the narratives of the lost children told in chapter five of the novel, the spatial field also operates as a negative motif, although in these narratives, the same spatial field is read concurrently as the space where a child is lost and the space where the child is sought. These tales can also be seen as tales of separation with the desire for union, where, as in

Furphy’s other plots of romances, there is no union at the end of the search.

There are four ‘lost’ narrative episodes in chapter five of Such is Life. The first narrative episode concerns the disappearance of Steve Thompson’s dog, Monkey. Thompson tells the story of the morning he woke up on Old

Sollicker’s horse paddock after illegally camping there with his team of bullocks. To avoid being caught out by the approaching Sollicker,

Thompson sends his dog, Monkey, to distract Sollicker’s horses, which gives Thompson time to move his bullocks out of the horse-paddock.

Monkey runs for the horses’ ankles, the horses retreat, Sollicker turns and goes away. Thompson and his twenty bullocks go on their way but

Monkey is never seen again. Thompson spends the rest of that day and the following morning searching for his dog that “vanished out of the land of the living” (SIL, p. 180). Monkey’s disappearance is the first vanishing, suggesting that the lost dog has disappeared into a space that is

“different” and unreachable. Thompson’s first story also introduces the motif of the search, and here, the notion of sacrifice. It is possible to read

Monkey’s disappearance as a sacrifice that enabled Thompson to avoid prosecution for illegally camping on Sollicker’s land23.

The second ‘lost’ narrative is the central narrative episode of the chapter and concerns the disappearance and tragic death of little Mary O’Halloran in the bush (SIL, pp. 186-192). Like the tale of Monkey, this tale is told at night around the campfire by Steve Thompson. The third ‘lost’ narrative is told after Mary’s story by another of the bullockies, Saunders, and concerns a seven-year-old boy, Henry Bracy, who is lost in the bush. In this story, Saunders, a member of the search party, delivers a happy outcome. Hearing Henry’s muffled whimper, thinking first it was his

“’Magination” (SIL, p. 195), Saunders locates the source of his cry to the fallen log that Saunders just happens to be sitting on (SIL, pp. 195 – 196).

23 The truth here is that Sollicker stole Thompson’s dog, Monkey, and renamed him Jack. Tom Collins met this dog in the chapter four (SIL, pp. 139 – 141).

Visually, this story represents Saunders sitting on top of the space of the lost child but not in it. This spatial configuration speaks of the two separate places as also being one. Again, the association between the lost child and the concept of the ‘unreal’ is made, because the child’s cry for help was thought to have existed in Saunder’s imagination.

The fourth ‘lost’ story of the young Eddie Stevenson is as tragic as the story of Mary O’Halloran. Eddie is a boy of eight who, walking in the bush with his three brothers about a mile from their home annoys his big brother, Stevenson, the narrator of the story, who strikes him. This slap has the effect of making Eddie cry (SIL, pp. 196 – 198) and causes Eddie to start off for home, which after he disappears without a trace.

Stevenson’s story describes the search for Eddie and charts the devastating effects of his loss on the lives of Eddie’s family. Stevenson tells how his father spent all his money and his time searching for Eddie with the result that he neglected his property and lost his cattle. As a consequence, he faced financial ruin, took to drink and died four years after Eddie was lost (SIL, p. 198). Stevenson’s mother is so distraught that she overdoses on laudanum (SIL, p. 197). The family falls apart, with the three remaining brothers sent to live with relatives. Stevenson describes how he has been haunted by the memory of his action every night for twenty-five years with no relief. In this story there is no sense of the space into which Eddie has disappeared. The land holds no clues. There is only the last point of contact between Eddie and Stevenson that is so etched in

Stevenson’s memory that he, “could walk straight up to it in the middle of

the darkest night” (SIL, p. 197). In these ‘lost’ narratives, the consequences for Mary and Eddie are tragic and throughout their narration, the reader is made aware of the psychological effect these tragedies leave on the lives of those close to them. Their plot may echo the structure of romance but the consequences enact the effect of literary realism.

Henry Bracy is saved because Saunders and the lost child both were at the same space at the same time. In the other narratives, the lost children are not in the same space of the searchers but were there before the searchers arrive. These stories depend on the spatial field. The narrative objective is to bring the space of the lost child into the time and space of the searchers. Two time schemes operate in each story. The child exists in an earlier time scheme than the searchers. In this way, the temporal field is essentially dissociated from the spatial. The disconnection of time from space is central to how the ‘lost’ narrative of Mary O’Halloran is told.

Both the stories of the lost children and the central romance storyline are structured around the displacement of the fields of time and space.

The stories of the lost children in Chapter V of the novel are dependent on reconfiguring the spatial field into two distinct modalities: one relates to settlement and the other relates to the fact that this same area is also unfamiliar and unknown. The narrative objective of this episode is to find the child. In these stories the land divides into the space of the searchers and the space of the child. The land within which the child Mary O’Halloran

disappeared both is, and is not, the same land over which the search party look for her. In plotting her story (and those of other lost children) Furphy doubles the land. Here, the land can be read concurrently as two spaces: the real space from which the story is narrated, and the unknown, un- narrated land into which these children have disappeared.

A close reading of the story of the lost child, Mary O’Halloran, in Chapter V reveals that one spatial scheme is seeking a connection to the other. The space of the searchers, from which the story is narrated, carries what we interpret to be the concrete reality of the tale. The space into which the child has disappeared, which is the same physical space, has different connotations, from which the reader can infer that this space is other in the same way that Furphy’s novel refers to real place and fictitious place. The first clue that the child is other is given by Thompson at the beginning of the story: “there was something peculiar about her – not fretful, but dreaming” (SIL, p. 187).

Susan Martin’s essay, ‘“Us circling round and round”: The Track of

Narrative and the Ghosts of Lost Children in Such is Life,’ expands on the interaction between narrative and place in the novel. Martin draws our critical attention to the many functions of tracking, both literally and as it pertains to the narrative design of the novel. She writes that the movement of tracking describes the way we, as readers, make meaning of narrative texts, by following a trail through a discourse. Martin writes of how the circularity of narrative, amongst other narrative schemes, is an example of

the novel disrupting a linear narrative model, which is part of Furphy’s refusal to narrate a “coherent tale of settlement” (Martin 2007, p. 88). The circularity of the searchers also mirrors the spatial origin of these stories that were told in a circle around the camp-fire.

Martin comments that Furphy’s narratives about the lost children in

Chapter V of Such are Life are about reading and writing: “reading the marks left on the ground and environment, and tracing the story of the child, which is legible to the trackers” (Martin 2007, p. 77). In the story of

Mary O’Halloran, able-minded trackers are as difficult to find as the lost child. Without the mediation of the tracker, the searchers merely circle round and round (SIL, p. 190). The spatial field of the stories about lost children reveals that the one space is read in two ways. There are two stories: the story of the lost child, and the story of the searchers who read the land for clues of the lost child in order to find her. One story is known, the other is slowly pieced together from fragments—the tracks and clues— in a similar manner to the way the reader must find clues in Furphy’s many embedded fragments of narrative to read and find the hidden romance.

The thwarted objective of the stories of the lost children is to bring the two spaces together.

In the same way, where the boundaries between the real space of the road and the fictitious places off the roads are patrolled by the boundary riders, the author also enables two characters to cross the boundaries between the space of the searchers and the space where the child is lost.

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In the story of Mary O’Halloran, only two individuals are able to mediate between the two spatial realms because both of these individuals have inhabited the world of the lost child. One of these individuals is the able- bodied bushman, Barefooted Bob, who has lived with the Aboriginal people and speaks their language (SIL, p. 28 & p. 191). The other is an old Aboriginal woman who, even with one eye, could pick up the track “at a glance, and run it like a bloodhound” (SIL, p. 191).

Pierce describes the significance of Aboriginal trackers in these narratives as tokenistic of reconciliation between black and white Australians that was, too soon, forgotten (Pierce 1999, p. xiii). Felicity Collins and Therese

Davis in Australian Cinema After Mabo write that the relationship between the lost child and the fate of Aboriginal people subliminally reinforces the white concept of Aboriginal people as the ‘dying race’ (Collins & Davis

2004, p. 142). Devlin-Glass concurs that Furphy supported the view of his contemporaries that the extinction of Aboriginal was, without question, inevitable (Devlin-Glass 2013, p. 5).

In Furphy’s stories of the lost children, by crediting the Aboriginal woman tracker with such astute skill, he articulates white people and Aboriginal people’s different ways of reading the land. The drama of the search enabled the community to come together, and together they shared their fear that the known harbours the greater and more terrifying unknown.

Peter Pierce explains this fear in The Country of Lost Children:

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Symbolically, the lost child represents the anxieties of European

settlers because of the ties with home which they have cut in

coming to Australia, whether or not they journeyed here by choice.

The figure of the child stands in part for the apprehensions of adults

about having sought to settle in a place where they might never be

at peace. (Pierce 1999, p. xii)

2.7 The story of Mary O’Halloran

We first meet Mary O’Halloran in Chapter II as the daughter of the boundary rider, Rory O’Halloran. In this chapter, Tom Collins spends the night at Rory’s house in Utopia paddock on the property of Goolumbulla

(another of Furphy’s fictitious spaces). I have previously argued that

Rory’s miserable marriage is an example of coupling that is actually a separation. Mary is the product of this unhappy union. And like a child who is brought up in a place called Utopia she is symbolic of the new. Tom

Collins writes of Mary as a romantic ideal, embodying the “perfect Young-

Australian” (SIL, p. 73) whose affinity and sensibility to the land is expressed as utopian:

She was a child of the wilderness, a dryad among her kindred

trees. The long descended poetry of her nature made the bush

vocal with pure gladness of life; …she had marked the unfolding

bloom in the scrub, in its many-hued beauty; she had revelled in the

audacious black-and-scarlet glory of the desert pea. She knew the

dwelling-place of every loved companion; and, by necessity, she

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had her own names for them all…to her it was a new world, and

she saw that it was good. (SIL, p. 73)

Here, Mary’s affinity with nature marks her as different from other children.

Steve Thompson, who narrates this story, reports that on the day before

Mary’s disappearance, she presented differently, as though she was in a dream (SIL, p. 187). In Henry Kingsley’s 1859 novel The Recollections of

Geoffrey Hamlyn (which Tom cites as one of those plotted and overly poetic Victorian romance novels against which his chronicle of true life is opposed), there is also the story of a child lost in the bush24. Kingsley likewise attributes the eight-year old boy who is lost as having similar affinities with nature. The boy is described as “a strange, wild little bush child” (Kingsley 1859, p. 286), at one with the shell parrots who “twitted and ran to and fro quite busily, as though they said to him, ‘We don’t mind you my dear; you are quite one of us’ ” (Kingsley 1859, p. 288). In

Furphy’s description of Mary’s relationship to nature, his language tends more to the “flowery pathways of the romancer” (SIL, p.1), a style of writing which we find in Kingsley’s novel.

But while Mary is described as being at one with nature, her disappearance is also tied to fears for her father and fear of death. This is because while Tom Collins is on his way to Rory’s hut he passes a swagman who he thinks is calmly resting under a tree (SIL, p. 68). Tom leaves him in peace. In fact, the swagman, George Murdoch, is in the

24 John Scheckter (1981, p. 63) notes that the first international telling of this story appeared in Kingsley’s Geoffrey Hamlyn. In the context of this novel, the colonialist, Sam Buckley, comes to the boy’s rescue but too late. He is dead when they find him.

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throes of death. When the swagman is later found dead, Mary is so distressed that when her father does not return from a droving exercise after two days she walks off into the bush to look for him. Steve

Thompson, in his preamble to the story of the search for Mary, mentions that the girl was asking her mother ‘strange’ questions about a man who was found dead near their place earlier. Again, Tom’s mis-reading of the image of George Murdoch metaphorically mirrors the way the white searchers fail to read Mary’s presence in the land25.

The story of the search for Mary O’ Halloran begins when Thompson pulls into Kulkaroo with his team where he runs into Barefooted Bob who he believed had died26. Just as they are turning in for the night, news arrives that Dan O’Connell’s27 little girl is lost in the scrub. The search is also on for Aboriginals. Furphy proposes that the Aboriginal people have the necessary skills to read the landscape and thus to find Mary. When they are needed, they, like Mary, have vanished. No one can find them and no one knows where they went:

25 In this small incident Furphy equally mis-reads the trope of the dying bushman and its literary opportunities, a theme of many nineteenth-century Australian poems and stories as the 1894 editorial in the Bulletin expresses: The human tragedy has no grimmer scenes than those daily acted in the vast theatre of the Australian bush... Pitilessly pursued by the blind forces of destructive nature, isolated Man staggers continually across the stage, racked by hunger, consumed with thirst, crushed in sickness, yet turning feebly to confront his Furies, and fighting to the last against the inexorable which overwhelms him. (Jalland 2001, p. 44)

26 The supposed death of Barefooted Bob relayed in the first chapter is another mirror narrative on the theme of lost and found and another signpost about disappearance and reappearance.

27 Dan O’Connell is Rory O’Halloran’s alternative name (SIL, p. 56).

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Seems, there had been about a dozen of them camped near the

tank in the cattle-paddock for a month past, but they were just

gone, nobody knew where. And there had been an old lubra and a

young one camped within a mile of the station, and an old fellow

and his lubra near one of the boundary men’s places; but they all

happened to have shifted; and no one had the slightest idea where

they could be found. However, in a sense, everyone was after

them. (SIL, p. 188)

Thompson and Barefooted Bob travel through the night to Goolumbulla and arrive for breakfast where Steve narrates the circumstances of Mary’s disappearance. Rory had been out droving for three days. On the second day of her father’s absence, Mary was acting strangely. She was dreamy

(SIL, p. 187). On the third morning of Rory’s absence, Mary’s mother went off to milk the goats and when she came back, Mary had vanished. We learn that Mary took a billy can full of milk and half a loaf of bread and presumably had gone in search of her father (SIL, p. 188). On learning of her daughter’s disappearance, Mary’s mother rides twelve miles to the neighbour’s station to get help, arriving in the afternoon. The announcement that a child is lost in the bush spreads from property to property. The searchers travel from near and far to gather at Goolumbulla station. The search proper begins in the morning.

From this point on we are given to understand that the bush harbours two distinct spatial zones. One is perceived to be real and the other is alien,

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abstract and imagined. The real space is the space of Steve Thompson and the searchers. The unknown space is this same space that conceals both Mary and the Aboriginal people who have both vanished into it without a trace. The desire driving this narrative episode is to find a way to connect these two spaces in time. Mary is far, and Steve Thompson and the searchers must chase through real everyday time and space to get near her.

To do this, real time must catch up to lost time and unknown space must transform into real space. This crossing can only be mediated by those who know both worlds, and who are able to move between them. In this narrative episode Furphy proposes that the Aboriginals equally inhabit both the unknown space that harbours Mary and real space. This is signified by the evidence that they were seen here and there but when needed they have vanished (SIL, p. 188). Furphy also qualifies Barefooted

Bob with the skills to cross into both spaces. Although Bob is a white bullock driver, his legendary bush skills (SIL, p. 28, p. 186, p. 189) and his ability to speak the language of the local Aboriginals (SIL, p. 191) single him out from the rest of the men. This was signposted in Chapter I in the postscript to the story of the explorers Burke and Wills by the information that Barefooted Bob travelled the same expedition route that finished off

Burke and Wills many times without any problems (SIL, p. 28). In the narrative sequence of the search for Mary O’Halloran, before the

Aboriginal tracker is found, Barefooted Bob is the sole agent of mediation between the two spatial zones.

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On the first morning of the search, Barefooted Bob finds tracks five miles out of Rory’s paddock and leads the search. Bob follows the little girl’s footmarks, which in turn follow the tracks of a horse until the ground turns hard and the tracks disappear. Mary’s trace is momentarily lost until Bob looks carefully, changes course, and once more finds the footprint of her little boots. The first marker that time is closing in upon Mary’s lost space is when Barefooted Bob finds breadcrumbs, evidence of where Mary slept last night. From Steve Thompson’s narration, we understand that the searchers are several hours behind her. Threatening this narrative trajectory are signs that a thunderstorm is building on the horizon, which, if it breaks, would destroy all evidence of Mary’s tracks.

Then Bob discovers her little copper-toed boots which she had taken off.

This indicates that the tracks will be fainter and thus more difficult to read.

Bob is losing his connection to this space. The search for an Aboriginal tracker becomes more urgent. As another night passes, the searchers are further away from the space of the little lost girl, seemingly without hope.

Then, another searcher finds the third marker of the existence of the girl— her billy can—which she laid down to get through a fence. The tracks are fainter; thunder grumbles in the background; the searchers spread out but make little headway. When all seems lost, Spanker arrives with an old grey-haired Aboriginal tracker who is blind in one eye. No one but

Barefooted Bob can communicate with her. Bob’s function then shifts from tracking to translating.

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As soon as the Aboriginal tracker arrives, the pace of the search picks up.

The old Aboriginal finds Mary’s tracks, Bob translates. Thunder and lightning threaten all night but the rain keeps away. Thompson imagines the little girl, “lying worn-out, half-asleep and half-fainting – far more helpless than a sheep” (SIL, p. 191). In the morning the searchers hear the cry of “Dad-dee” (SIL, p. 191). However, the searchers can’t locate the call. The Aboriginal tracker ignores the call and concentrates on the evidence before her one functioning eye, following the traces of Mary that she finds on the ground. She discovers evidence of where Mary slept last night and the fourth marker of her existence—her bonnet. The men continue to try to locate the sound. The tracker reads the ground. The old

Aboriginal discovers that the little girl is weak and that she tumbled. The

Aboriginal tracker moves in a sharp turn and rushes. They are within an hour of Mary, then less than half an hour when the Aboriginal tracker comes to the end of the search by discovering Mary’s dead body fallen head first into a trough, caught in a bilby hole, so weak she was unable to save herself (SIL, p.192).

In this story, the temporal connection between the real space of the searchers and imagined space of the lost child happens half an hour too late. The narration by Thompson follows a chronological and linear trajectory, which ends in Mary’s tragic death. Her death leaves its indelible mark on Thompson and on the men who hear his story, including Tom

Collins who relays Thompson’s story to the reader. The greatest mark is

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left on the father, whose grief is related unsparingly. The tragic outcome can be interpreted as the impossibility of one narrative and one spatial scheme being able to connect with the other, separation that craves union.

This same narrative concept can be observed through the spatial field in

E.M. Forster’s Passage to India. Forster divides the sub-continent into

British India and Indian India. The narrative objective of Adella Quested is to cross from British India into the real India. Her desire leads to tragedy.

Both the story of the search for Mary O’Halloran and E. M. Forster’s novel are plotted through the spatial and temporal fields according to Bakhtin’s observation of negative motifs. Furphy suggests that certain people

(children, dreamers and the Aboriginal people) inhabit an unknown world that is separated from, but must be rejoined to, the known world of white settlement. The narrative momentum that constitutes the pace of the search is sustained by the diminishing temporal lag between the two spatial zones—the nearness and farness of the two worlds in the spatial and temporal fields.

2.8 Space within space

In the stories of the lost children in Chapter V of Such is Life, the language

Furphy uses to describes the unknown spaces of lost children (and

Thompson’s dog Monkey), words like vanish and dreamlike, reinforce the impression that the unknown land of the lost is a distinct and separate realm. One space is real, the second space is abstract. Furphy proposes this second space as other and specifies it through concepts that hint at

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the spectral and dreamy. This is evident in each tale. Thompson’s dog

“vanished out of the land of the living” (SIL, p. 180). Henry Bracy’s cries for help were first thought to be a figment of Saunder’s imagination (SIL, p.

195), and poor Eddie Stevenson is described as simply vanishing into space (SIL, p. 196). Eddie “got out of sight among the trees” (SIL, p. 197).

The time after Eddie disappeared is described by Stevenson as “like some horrible dream” (SIL, p. 197).

It is not only these children who vanish into thin air but also the Aboriginal people (SIL, p. 188). Furphy describes the Aboriginal group as having been at one place, then seen at another, but when they were wanted they had “shifted and no one had the slightest idea where they could be found”

(SIL, p. 188). Furphy creates an impression that the lost children, Monkey, and the Aboriginals have all disappeared into this unknown place. This link is confirmed in the story of the search for Mary O’Halloran where Furphy proposes that only those who can enter into the otherness of place—

Barefooted Bob and the one eyed Aboriginal tracker who have prior knowledge of this place—are able to retrieve her.

The land as other is an iteration of the white settlers’ perception that the

Australian bush harbours an alternate and mythical reality. Kay Schaffer refers to this otherness in terms of “an absorbing landscape, capable of sucking up its inhabitants” (Schaffer 1988, p. 52) and writes that this alternate view of the land thematically underwrites much of our history, film and fiction. Certainly this concept of land is evoked in Peter Weir’s Picnic

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at Hanging Rock, a film whose narrative, similar to Chapter V of Such is

Life, proposes that one space is both a real place and an unknown place that lures and captures the innocent child. This film’s narrative objective is, like Furphy’s tale of Mary O’Halloran, to connect one space to its other. In

Chapter V, Furphy imbues the other space that contains the lost child as unknown while at the same time he refers to the frustration of not being able to properly define, reach, nor understand this place:

Wandering about for miles; listening; hearing something in the

scrub, and finding it was only one of the other chaps, or some

sheep. Thunder and Lightning, on and off, all night; even two or

three drops of rain, toward morning. Once I heard the howl of a

dingo, and I thought of the little girl, lying, worn-out, half-sleep, and

half-fainting – far more helpless than a sheep…(SIL, p. 191)

The question of crossing, entering and trying to thematically link these worlds mirrors other narratives in this novel which require the reader to link stories and characters to one another from the scant clues embedded by

Furphy to understand their narrative arc such as the difficult clues given to the romance storyline between the Alfs. In Furphy’s novel, the concept of the division of space into real and unknown is also a binary set that contains a separate binaried distinction between actual or historical space and fictitious space. In this scheme, Furphy has given us fences whose borders are there to be transgressed and whose edges are patrolled by his boundary riders like Rory O’Halloran and Nosey Alf. The novel constantly proposes a desire for connection and linkage but its

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overwhelming assertion is that connections are missed and links are not made. In this sense, the stories of the lost children reiterate the narrative arc of Nosey Alf’s desire to connect with Warrigal Alf which never occurs inside the novel. That connections are sought but missed is precisely the point of Furphy’s ‘plays-within-plays,’ which ripple through his many fragmented narratives and which describes his view of life ‘such as it is.’

The tropes of doubling space (in the stories of the lost children) and of the desire to be reunited in the romance plots parallel the operations of the binaries at the heart of the novel—romance and realism, plots and plotlessness, the real and the imaginary. Like the interconnected dialogue between romance and realism in the novel, the plots of the stories of the lost children in Chapter V are similarly structured around the themes of separation and the failure to achieve a reunion. The missed connections that Furphy consistently asserts in these plots become the overwhelming condition of the reality of the novel, a reality that is dependent on a narrative structure that has been appropriated from a fictitious literary scheme. The fact that Furphy has adopted a recognisable narrative trajectory then reconfigured its denouement and that these plots metastasise throughout the novel constitutes both a reading of this novel as a hybrid metaparody and as a unique and complex work of fiction.

Central to all of these plots and to Furphy’s portrait of the world of the bullock driver at the end of the nineteenth century is the spatial field. It is through the dynamic actions of spatial field that we understand that we are

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again, inside these similarly structured plots. It is through the spatial field that we connect to the socio-historical world of the novel. It is the spatial field in its opposition to the temporal field through which we are able to chart the movement of characters. Where Gary Saul Morson writes that an objective of parody is to discredit its target (Morson 1989, p. 67), what

Furphy’s metaparody achieves is to extend and explore the boundaries of the novel and to engage readers in questions of our need of novels.

Conclusion

In Such is Life the spatial field is not only crucial to how we discover the narratives embedded in the novel but it is central to the structuring principles of the novel’s design. While the narrator, Tom Collins, promises to deliver the reader a linear narrative, it is anything but and any reading of the novel must be approached spatially. Readers need to back-track and re-track in order to reassign significance to certain narrative events that constitute a storyline whose telling is fragmentary. In addition, it is through the spatial field that we connect to the socio-historical context of the novel, namely Australia at the end of the nineteenth century, a reading that is both literal and ironical.

It is the displacement of space from time in many of the plots that enables us to recognise the interdependence of the two dominant genres of the novel—romance and realism. An awareness of how these two genres

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interact enables a reading of the novel as a metaparody that targets readers’ expectations of what constitutes a novel. Furphy’s engagement with form is enriched by also considering the spatial field as an indispensable agency of plotting that is here tied to the geographical organisation of the novel.

The road is the most important trope which metaphorically mirrors the circuitous narrative design of the novel and is the dominant spatial element that compels the types of narratives encountered by chance in the novel. The road is the central spatial concept that takes us into, and away from, characters and stories at the heart of the novel. To make sense of the narrative events in this novel ‘of the road’ that are scattered throughout requires a reading that Joseph Frank (1963) identifies as spatial. The clues to the narrative organisation of specific storylines, such as the Alfs, are dependent on the reader’s awareness of how repetitive spatial markers signify the existence of these narrative trajectories. Only by remembering who was in what space at what time can the reader piece together the background and the arc of this storyline.

The roads in Furphy’s novel lead to destinations that are real and fictional—the campsites and homesteads. And while the reader may need to backtrack and re-track to find the hidden romance, through the course of the novel, Furphy was always leading us to Nosey Alf’s hut in Chapter

VI where we come face to face with the overwhelming heartbreak and lovelessness of this man/woman. This narrative arc can be viewed as a

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movement from an exterior geography to an internal realm, from public space to private space. Furphy literally takes us off the road, and into

Runnymede where Nosey Alf’s hut is located. Once we are inside the hut we are taken inside the heart of the man/woman who lives there. The destination of Tom Collins’ journey is the vulnerability of the loveless.

Catherine Lutz in ‘Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as a

Cultural Category,’ enables a reading of emotions as gendered which is the crux of this chapter (Lutz 1986, p. 288). There are two different narrative strands at work in this chapter that can be read as intentionally gendered. One is the male narrator’s surprise at Nosey Alf’s emotional display which he considers uncharacteristic of a man, telling Alf to “Be a man” (SIL, p. 262) as they part their ways. The other is the emotional display which Tom narrates referring to Alf’s melancholic musical tone

(SIL, p. 258), Alf’s tears of despair (SIL, p. 259 & p. 261) and the appearance and domestic order of her hut (SIL, p. 245). At the end of the nineteenth century, when Australian men characterised themselves as

“laconic, rugged, frontiersmen” (Garton 2002, p. 42), Nosey Alf’s untrammelled display of emotion would have been one cue from which the reader could identify the subject as female, which was Furphy’s intention.

Furphy describes Tom’s approach to Nosey Alf’s hut to this end. These markers consist of her neater than average order, the radius swept clean and walls flanked by kerosene-tins containing garden-flowers and a green blind on the window (SIL, p. 243). Inside the hut, when Nosey Alf is visibly

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distressed on learning the whereabouts of her true love, her unrestrained emotional outpouring begs Tom to ask, “Who is she?” (SIL, p. 258).

Tom’s encounter with this heart-broken, transgendered boundary rider who plays the violin like a professional and laments that men only love beautiful women, is more curious for the fact that in the novel Nosey Alf is both male and female. Although there are enough signs for the reader to understand she is feminine, Tom never realises or acknowledges the true gender of Nosey Alf. Her emotional honesty at the turn of the century would have been usual, in writing, of a women character. But this reading is indeterminate because Tom ascribes this emotional outpouring to a man.

I would speculate that while Furphy seems to be drawing attention to

Nosey Alf’s excessive emotionalism as a sign of her sex, he is at the same time suggesting that the pain and heartbreak of the unloved has no gender. It is felt by both men and women alike. In spite of its myth- makingly masculine comic view of the world, where women all have moustaches, where marriage is endured but not enjoyed, the narrator’s care for the well-being of this character (who he suggests should leave the land and try his hand as a professional musician in the south) and his desire to know the end to her story, is the narrative event that transforms

Tom Collins’ chronicle into a plotted novel.

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Giuliana Bruno talks of Madeleine de Scudéry’s Carte du pays de Tendre

– her map of the land of tenderness – that accompanied the publication of her 1654 novel Clélie, as an example of how the exterior world her character mapped with its sea and rivers and lakes also mapped an interior landscape. Bruno describes Mme de Scudéry’s map as a chart where “emotion materializes as a moving topography” (Bruno 2005, p. 2). I would suggest that the narrative drive of Such is Life reveals a similar topography.

There are two mapped journeys in Furphy’s novel. One is Tom Collins’ journey across the Riverina and into Nosey Alf’s hut. The second map in the novel is Nosey Alf’s journey which, like Tom’s story, can only be mapped spatially. It was always Nosey Alf’s intention to find Warrigal Alf and reunite with him. She does this by asking around and when she discovers he is in a particular geography, she follows him there. By marking their shared path from the Hawkesbury River to the Bland

Country and across the Riverina it is apparent that this has been going on for ten years. And as the novel ends, she is still following him.

A relationship between tracking and narrative informs the creative component of this PhD submission, winter, the trees in a number of ways.

Where Nosey Alf makes tracks towards Warrigal Alf, the creative work’s narrator’s trajectory in winter, the trees is both a movement away from and towards her partner. The movement away from her home in Sydney enables the narrative of a self that has been challenged after a stillborn

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birth. In the creative project the landscape over which the narrator travels is a journey both to the past and to the unknown. The spatial field is central to the identification of these phases of the story and to the location of these trajectories which articulate different spheres of grief. It is, as is

Such is Life, a fiction dependent on the spatial field.

The narrative of winter, the trees, is framed through a plane journey from

Zurich to Sydney as the unnamed narrator returns to reunite with her husband whom she left following the birth of her stillborn daughter. Over the passage of this journey, we are told that her exile from home was driven by feelings of isolation and desolation. Initially she hides in a hotel room in Brisbane before staying with her widowed mother in a different part of that city. From Brisbane she travels to Europe and Egypt working as a location scout for her employer, a film director. After losing her way in the desert in Fayoum, Egypt, the narrator chooses to return to the home where she felt she had no place to face choices of how she lives with the reality of her childlessness, her grief and the fragile state of her marriage.

During this air journey the narrator relates the events that led to her departure and her return. Furphy’s road refers to identifiable and actual sites, and similarly the air route from Zurich to Singapore and on to

Sydney and space of the aeroplane that frames the fiction are also identifiable and real places. This is where the narrator encounters characters whose stories offer both a counterpoint to, and a mirror of, her situation. At the same time, like Furphy, the real sites are juxtaposed with

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fictional sites. In winter, the trees the hotel in Brisbane, the mother’s house, the hotel in Cairo are fictional sites although they approximate a known reality. However, the reality effect of winter, the trees is as illusory as Furphy’s homesteads. Both Furphy’s road and the unique space above the earth are liminal spaces. The space above the earth is a nebulous zone that crosses through time and over space in rapid succession. Both the journey by plane and Tom Collins’ movement on and off the roads is a narrative device that takes the narrator into narrative situations determined by chance. With the exception of the narrator’s initial decision to check into a hotel in Brisbane, her movement through the novel is determined by chance, in this case phone calls. In both texts, the concept of the journey also sustains and contains the plots of the novels.

The concept of mapping, of tracing over past footsteps is central to my creative project. The premise of this piece of fiction is grief, in particular the unique grief that affects women who have given birth to stillborn babies. This experience can challenge identity where this identity was bound to a concept of bearing and rearing children. The birth of a stillborn baby challenges presumptions about fertility, identity and gender. In the first section of the novel, the narrator travels to the landscape of her past.

Afterwards, she returns to the house of her mother in the hope that place will somehow heal and provide answers that can propel her from the stasis of grief and inertia back into life. Confused with this are notions of nurture, grief and madness. In the third section the narrator travels to Europe and then Egypt for her work, hoping distance will give her time to rationalise

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her situation. In Egypt two distinct narrative events alter the way she views her condition which ironically gives her the determination to return and confront the situations from which she ran.

Furphy’s novel first promises to be a chronicle, within which a plotted romance is hidden. My creative project winter, the trees, is a novel that hides two chronicles. One chronicle is the character Lydia’s old Letts’ diaries (one page to a week) that chronicle the years of her married life that the narrator discovers hidden in a cupboard. These diaries resonate with those that are the basis of Tom Collins’ amplification of life, such as he saw it. The second chronicle in winter, the trees is the narrator’s record of her work as a location scout for her employer, a film director. These reconnaissance chronicles record the place, date and people encountered there. The narrator suggests there may be a story hiding in its pages that, when she has time, she intends to write.

Furphy weaves a romance into his realistic portrayal of life on the roads of the Riverina. winter, the trees similarly engages with differing literary genres; realist fiction with a hint of the first-person memoir writing. In winter, the trees the back story of the narrator coming to terms with loss is written in the mode of realist fiction. The story of the baby’s death and the narrator’s struggle with this is countered by the plot of a fictitious film script devised by the film director, Rask. This story-within-a-story, whose theme is male grief, mirrors certain aspects of the narrator’s own story.

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Where Furphy’s novel asserts a masculine perspective, winter, the trees asserts a feminine position which questions assumptions we make about gender. Central to this is the creative project’s adoption of a first person narration that moves between an inner journey and an external journey.

Both Furphy’s novel and winter, the trees identify gender as a binary set.

At the core of Such is Life is the conferring of female emotional expression to a male character (who is really a woman). Furphy’s novel sets man against woman in the character of Nosey Alf. At the heart of the novel is an engagement with sentimentality as it was understood at the end of the nineteenth century. The subject of my fiction is the difficulty of grief. The terrain of the narrator’s journey is both topographical and emotional. In winter, the trees, the narrator’s journey is contrasted to the stasis of Will, her partner, who copes with his grief differently and of her mother who coped with a similar grief. There are additional historical references to female grief as a trigger for insanity and removal from society.

The first part of the winter, the trees takes place in a hotel room in

Brisbane, across an undefined period of time. The journey here is internal.

The emotional cartography centres on the event of the lost child. The past is an internal condition. From this the narrator moves to a different part of the city, to life with her mother who is undergoing an eye operation and the boundaries between nurture and nurtured occur as she tends to her mother’s needs. After, when her mother is strong, she resumes her work as a location scout for a film director and travels to Europe and then

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Egypt. In Egypt she is lost in the desert and on being saved, returns to her partner, Will, to sort out her problems.

Both the creative project and Furphy’s novel make literary allusions.

Furphy’s many literary citations counter any illusion that Tom Collins can write a prosaic chronicle as this aspect feeds the quotidian with a richer and poetic subtext. In winter, the trees, the narrator refers to the many stories of grief in Ovid’s Metamorphosis to suggest that the process of grief is transformative. Citations of various metamorphoses of women into trees, such as Ovid’s story of the Heliades, are used to iterate the stasis of grief, reflected in the narrative arc of the narrator.

Both texts explore aspects of lost child narratives. The search for Mary

O’Halloran in Chapter V of Such is Life reveals that a particular space operates within the narrative in a number of ways, in particular by being the site of the lost child and the site that lost the child. The loss of the baby at the heart of winter, the trees is the transformative narrative event that has metaphoric utterance in the space of the narrator’s home in Bronte.

The home transforms from a site of promise, where the narrator expected to bring up her child, into a space from which she had to escape once its narrative arc had changed. The narrator’s view of the house is central to the process of denial which she has to come to terms with as she returns.

Furphy’s novel, written more than a hundred years before my creative project, reflects the socio-historical world during which Furphy wrote. At its

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heart is an awareness of the how we accord gender to emotions and spaces. I suspect that Furphy is writing about men’s emotional response as tenderly as he is ascribing these same responses to a woman. winter, the trees is written from a female perspective that raises different questions about emotionalism, identity and gender.

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Works cited

Editions of Such is Life

Furphy, Joseph 1917, Such is Life: Being Certain Extracts from the Diary of Tom Collins (Joseph Furphy), second ed., The Specialty Press, Melbourne.

———1937, Such is Life: Being Certain Extracts from the Diary of Tom Collins (Joseph Furphy) edited by V. Palmer—The Palmer edition, Jonathan Cape, London.

———1944, Such is Life: Being Certain Extracts from the Diary of Tom Collins, reprint of 1903 Bulletin edition, Angus and Robertson, Sydney.

——— 1948, Such is Life: Being Certain Extracts from the Diary of Tom Collins with a Biographical Sketch of the author by C. Hartley Grattan, reproduction of 1903 first edition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois.

———1999, The Annotated SUCH IS LIFE: being certain extracts from the diary of Tom Collins, by Joseph Furphy, eds. Devlin-Glass F., Eaden R., Hoffmann L., & Turner G.W., Halstead Classics, Halstead Press, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney.

———1903, Such is Life, E-book 3740, (accessed October, 2013).

Literary Theory

Bakhtin, M M 1981, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist, M. Holquist (ed.), University of Texas Press Slavic Series, No. 1, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas.

Barthes, Roland 1982, ‘The Reality Effect’, in French Literary Theory Today, T. Todorov (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Austin, Texas, pp. 11 – 18.

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Brooks, Peter 1984, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

———2002, ‘Narrative Desire’, in Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, B. Richardson (ed.), The Ohio State University Press, Columbus, pp. 130 – 137.

Bruno, Giuliana 2002, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film, Verso, New York, New York.

Carter, Paul 1988, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, New York.

Cassirer, Ernst 1957, ‘The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms’, in The Phenomenology of Knowledge Vol. 3, trans. R. Manheim, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.

Chatman, Seymour 1978, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York.

Crane, R S 2002, ‘The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones’, in Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, B. Richardson (ed.), The Ohio State University Press, Columbus, pp. 94 – 101.

Derrida, Jacques 1980, ‘The Law of Genre’, translated Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry vol., 7, no. 1, Autumn 1980, pp. 55 – 81.

Forster, E M 1942, A Passage to India, J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., London, U.K.

Foucault, Michel 1986, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 22 – 27.

Frank, Joseph 1963, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

———1977, ‘Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 4, no. 2, winter 1977, pp. 231 – 252.

———1978, ‘Spatial Form: Some Further Reflections’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 2, winter 1978, pp. 275 – 290.

Friedman, Susan Stanford 1993, ‘Spatialization: A Strategy for Reading Narrative’, Narrative vol. 1, no. 1, January, pp. 12 – 23.

———2005, ‘Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things’, in James Phelan and Peter J Rabinowitz (eds.), A

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Companion to Narrative Theory, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, pp. 192 – 205.

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winter, the trees SUE PARKER August, 2014

Image: Isobel Parker Philip, coda, 2011, type C photograph © Isobel Parker Philip 130

The sky, the trees and the landscape in the distance disappeared. It was as though they had never been. Behind the glass wall in the terminal Sikhs,

Filipinos, women in saris, men in gallibayas and shalwar kameez, backpackers and older women with worried expressions on their faces were watching the snow fall. If my flight was cancelled I would miss my connection home.

Inside the terminal the letters and digits on the departure and arrival board were clicking over, flashing ‘final call’ for more than one flight. Planes were departing for London, Moscow, Stuttgart, Warsaw and for Budapest,

Istanbul and Washington, for New York and São Paulo. Outside, the planes slid out of their bays and proceeded towards the runway. My flight to Singapore and then on to Sydney was one of the last scheduled.

I had been inside the Zürich airport since the early evening when the long corridor of the transit hall had divided into differently coloured columns of light. Next to the bank of windows that over-looked the tarmac the light was blue black, then yellow near the centre and muddy brown between.

I stretched a bottle of mineral water over an empty hour. Single drinkers sat at the small tables in the bar. Beside me, a man searched through his travel bag. Its contents were strewn over the banquette: travel papers, a calculator, a cell phone, a magazine about computer games. He found a business card which he put in the suit pocket above his heart. Then, he repacked and snapped the lid closed. The woman on the other side of him did not look up from the thick paperback that rested on her lap. She was well into the last third of her book. Most of the others at the bar looked European. Not necessarily

Swiss, from other cultures, other time zones. A man wearing a dark navy suit rushed past as if he knew exactly where he was going, his pace calibrated to 131

arrive at the gate and walk straight onto the plane without having to stop. He didn’t seem to notice the snow as he swept past, nor the hanging crowd, nor the slow trudge of the security guards as they paced from one end of the concourse to the other.

On a bank of seats behind the bar people were stretched out trying to sleep, their heads resting on their backpacks, handbags, or suit jackets and winter coats they had rolled into cushions. A little boy was playing with a

Nintendo, his legs moving backwards and forwards under the seat. His mother looked tired. She stared into space, her arm rested on her sleeping toddler, a padded jacket blanketed over the little girl’s body, her stockinged legs splayed out.

Ever since my baby died, when I see mothers tending to their babies or young toddlers all the emotional chaos that I try, for the best part of each day to settle, stirs up. I still wonder why they were able to have children and I was not.

But I have learnt to cope with these situations by finding a distraction.

When I turn my mind to something else the moment passes, my breathing is regular again and I move on.

Just past the mother and sleeping toddler was a poster advertising Tag

Heuer watches, a slick photograph that seemed to make an analogy between the mechanics of a watch and the engine of a car. The colours of the photograph were platinum, although the overall palette was an industrial steel colour. I noted the importance of some information on the poster and the style and size of the fonts. And by the time I determined that the poster was really talking about gender and power, I had forgotten I saw the mother and her baby. 132

By then I was in front of a Lindt chocolate kiosk which gave me something else to think about.

Having made the decision to return home, I knew I would be exposed to this all the time, to situations that would be more emotionally difficult than seeing a sleeping toddler and her mother at the airport. Most of our friends had young children. All of my sisters had children. It seemed, in this phase of our life, what couples did. Before I left I avoided them all—friends, sisters, anyone I knew with young children. Some of my friends who have children did not particularly want them. They accidentally fell pregnant. Even though they may say they understand, because it had been so easy for them, I don’t believe they do. Now, after so much time away, they would expect me to be able to deal with it. I’m not so sure.

Some women can’t stop having children. They have so many they give them away or lose them. The newspapers are full of these stories. Recently, I read a story in the newspaper of a couple who, when they moved into a new house, discovered the skeleton of a toddler inside a toy box that had been left by the previous tenants. How could you do that to a child? There was another story of a little girl who was found dead in a fold-up pram. Her parents hadn’t even bought her a cot. She was starved to death and had significant frontal lobe damage where her mother’s de facto boyfriend had bashed her head into the tiled wall of the bathroom. And that mother had five other children!

… 133

Before I left Sydney, I used to avoid mothers and their children by sleeping all day and waking up at night. That way I didn’t see anyone. The supermarket in the next suburb opened until two in the morning. Not many people did their shopping at one-thirty in the morning when the supermarket was quiet and the neon lights flickered and spat like an electric chair. There were no windows in the supermarket so you couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. It was just neon.

I was pulling the trolley through the car park in the middle of one of these nights when Robert, an acquaintance of Will’s, drove by, recognised me and pulled his car up beside me. “Was it a girl or a boy?” he grinned, waiting for my response. “Neither. She died.” I had rehearsed what I would say when people asked what happened to our baby but my response that night was not in any of the scripts that I rehearsed when I couldn’t sleep. Nothing I had imagined I would say was as direct or as angry. “Shit,” he said looking at his lap; his hands clenching the steering wheel. “Sorry, I didn’t know. Shit, I’m so sorry.” Anyway,

Robert was not shocked. He actually asked what happened. “They don’t know,”

I said, “She died before she was born.” These words were easier to say. And it was true. They found no cause for her death, not even after the post mortem.

We were given no facts, no theories, nothing except that this just happens. The doctor said it happens more often than anyone talks about. I hated the doctor when he said that. 134

Robert took a deep breath, got out of his car, and came over to where I was standing and threw his arms around my entire body, locking me inside.

Robert squeezed his arms so tightly I couldn’t breathe. I could only just turn my head to see the trolley rolling backwards into an unlit area of the car park.

Robert let me go and got back in his car. “Unbelievable,” he said and called out to me, “Take care, you two,” while I ran after the shopping trolley. I saw his shaking head in silhouette as he slowly drove away. I still find it just as hard to believe.

…

The first few days after I came home from hospital, and after her funeral and cremation, I craved chocolate. I could taste chocolate in my mouth all the time. It was Easter eggs I wanted. But I denied myself any chocolate, almost as a punishment.

After six days of this denial, at three in the morning I gave in. Between getting the keys and scrambling around the bottom of old handbags looking for ten cent coins, fifty cent coins, dollar coins and stuffing them in my pocket and starting the car, the thought occurred that so long after Easter the eggs might have been cleared from the sale table at the petrol station, packed into boxes and put in the store room. In this case I was going to buy Old Gold. 135

In the early hours of the morning there were no other cars on Hewlett

Street. The white barrier between the end of the street and the endless Pacific

Ocean glowed in the headlights. I knew I was driving too fast down the hill. And maybe because of this I thought I could keep going through the white barrier and into the sea. It would be fast. I’d crash my head against the steering wheel and drown.

And in the split second I was thinking about driving through the barrier, the scene played out before my eyes like a stunt in a film. In slow motion I saw the car stall in the middle of the air and slowly fall into the water. I turned sharply into the esplanade, pulled over and stopped. I had to turn the engine off and empty that image from my mind. I rolled down the window. My heart was racing. My head was full of the sound of the waves crashing against the cliff.

The wind blew the sea across my face. I tasted salt on my lips.

There was one giant Easter egg left at the petrol station. I ate it so quickly I felt sick.

…

I only saw her face once after she was born. I had looked forward to the moment when I would finally gaze on the face that had grown inside me but after she was born I couldn’t look at her. Her wrists were blistered. Her lips were 136

a dark bruised colour. She looked very soft and otherworldly. Now I wished it had been different. In the five days that I stayed in the hospital they kept her in a fridge on the floor of the hospital where the labour rooms are. Will, my husband, held her over and over. It made him feel better about her death. Even though the nurse would swaddle her before she gave the baby to Will to hold, he was always surprised that she was so cold. Out of the window of the hospital room the violent wind thrashed the ghost gum.

…

She was still bleeding out of me for weeks after. Lying in bed, a river gushed between my legs. When I would try to plug the flow with my hands they would be covered in blood. The white sheets were stained. Blood dripped down the sides of the toilet bowl. I wiped as if trying to eliminate all trace of my sex. I washed the river of blood with a white facecloth then spent ages washing the blood out of the facecloth. Afterwards, I threw it out. In a peculiar way I was glad there was so much blood. Glad because it was a connection to her. The loss of her was still physical.

137

…

If I am honest, I can pinpoint the moment I believe she died.

It happened early in the evening. Just after I had gone to bed. She stopped moving. When Will came to bed later I said the baby was very quiet, she had stopped moving. His view of the many overly anxious problems I encountered during the pregnancy was that it was another instance of my unwarranted alarm. The baby might simply be sleeping he told me. There was a story we had heard from two of my sisters and my mother that babies will often become very quiet before they are born. We both convinced ourselves that that was it.

The baby was thirty-eight weeks and at the last visit to the obstetrician we were told I could go into labour at any time. I packed a bag to take to hospital.

At the top of the bag was an old passport wallet that held the information we needed to register—the medicare card and private health insurance card. This wallet also contained the phone numbers of friends and relatives who wanted to be told of the baby’s birth. I even packed a spare pen, a phone charger, a camera, a water bottle, Gatorade, thongs for the hospital shower, hair bands to tie back my hair, paw paw ointment for my lips, a heat pack, socks and soft shoes. I didn’t have slippers. I packed dozens of cheap undies that a website advised you buy in a larger than normal size. They were going to get stained with blood. After, you would throw them out. For the baby I had packed a wrap that was soft gauze that my mother Lydia, with all her experience with 138

newborns, had insisted was best for the baby and which she had bought for her and sent from Brisbane. There were so many things to think through.

Will woke me at four in the morning. “What if something is wrong?” He wanted us to go to the hospital then and there and ask them to perform an ultrasound. But I was the one who told him there probably wouldn’t be an ultrasound technician working at that hour and we’d only have to sit in emergency and wait for the technician to show up in the morning.

We went to the hospital just before eight. The first ultrasound machine could not pick up her heartbeat. “That machine is always playing up,” the technician said. “Let’s move into the room with the new machine.” The way she said those words sounded practiced. She didn’t fool me.

And then the obstetrician, who is so busy, whose waiting room is always groaning with women in various stages of pregnancy, just walked into the second ultrasound room as if he had nothing better to do. A hospital midwife came into the room with the doctor. The technician turned the screen of the ultrasound machine away from us. The doctor, the technician, the midwife looked at the image on the screen and spoke very softly together, but not for long. Then the doctor, who was wearing a lemon coloured shirt and a tie that I seem to remember had a number of burnt orange swirls, moved away from the screen and came to the side of the thin bed where I was lying. “There’re some problems,” he said, “some big problems.” They could not find the baby’s heartbeat. “Does that mean she’s dead?” Will asked. “Yes, that’s what we’re thinking.”

139

They—the doctor, the midwife and the technician—walked out of the room and left us alone to assimilate their words. Assimilate is a strange word to describe what happens to you when you are told your baby, your miracle baby who had succeeded where five IVF implantations had failed, had died like all the others. The floor collapsed although the ultrasound machine, the trolley on wheels that contained the gels and packets of sterile gauze and plastic gloves, the cloth basket for used bedding were where they had been before we heard those words. I gripped Will’s arm so hard it bruised. I heard him breathing deeply. Why did they leave us alone? Why don’t they come back and help us?

We’re not strong. And there were the questions, “How will the baby get out?” and “What was going to happen next?”

It was the midwife who came in alone. She spoke so softly I couldn’t hear her over the thumping in my ears. She said we must be very confused. “Most of all”, she said, “the baby has to be born.” A stillborn baby was as much a baby as any other. They would induce the birth. She asked us if we wanted a cup of tea. She left us again and returned with two cups of tea in Styrofoam cups and a packet of egg and lettuce sandwiches which Will ate, ravenously. The midwife said we should go home and wait. The hospital would phone to let us know when a delivery room was available. Will phoned his brothers and I spoke to my mother, Lydia, in Brisbane. She was silent. When she spoke she said that she would go to the airport now and fly to Sydney. She’d be there as soon as she could, she said. We didn’t call anyone else.

140

…

There seemed to be an endless amount of paperwork to fill in at the hospital. We signed this and asked questions about that. The midwife met us at the elevator and spoke in a soft voice. She took us to the delivery room. On the way down the corridor, she talked about what a beautiful winter’s day it had been. It was true. Outside the windows that lined the corridor of the hospital on the fifth floor, where the delivery rooms are, the sky was clear and you could see that, although the sun was now low in the west, it had been intensely blue.

Later, those details became significant because whenever I notice those high blue skies, I return to that walk down the corridor and everything else that followed.

The midwife, whose name was Roseanne, stayed with us until after the baby was born. It was this woman we trusted to take the baby away, to wrap her and measure her, and perform the same basic tests that are performed on every baby. Roseanne held her as if she might have been alive and stroked the side of her head and spoke to her with a gentleness that had me convinced, for a split second, the baby was alive. She had been with us in the ultrasound room and had said, from her experience, “You don’t need to be afraid.” But I was. I was so afraid. Later, I understood this fear was about seeing her dead which was quite a different thing from understanding that she had died.

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Nine years ago my father died very suddenly as a result of a heart attack.

After the police came to the house and informed my mother I accompanied her to the hospital to identify his body. We sat in the waiting room for a long time until someone took us to the bowels of the hospital. We did not know where my father was. There were a number of other people just quietly sitting on the chairs, waiting. A hospital administrative assistant introduced us to a wards man who escorted my mother and me to the basement where my father lay on a thin hospital table wearing the suit he had worn to work that morning. He seemed to be both my father and a stranger. Thinking back to that instant when we saw him I realised that the expression on my father’s face was not one that I had seen before. I could see the pain he must have suffered when he died. I could tell that he struggled with death. But more than this, I could see he was afraid.

Neither my mother nor I spoke about this. Much later, my mother said he looked angry. I had not been prepared to see any trace of his fight. And in the hospital morgue I felt him high in a corner of the room, watching our shock and distress and thought how sad and terrible it must be for him to have died so suddenly and to find himself on the other side of life. It was as if he, himself, had not adjusted to the situation he now found himself in.

In the period of time after we were told she had died and before she was born I was afraid that her own fear would haunt me. And I often wondered, during nights when I could not sleep, what had she felt when she died and what had happened to her small spirit? Was her spirit still inside my womb? Had it bled out of me?

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…

Outside the window of the Zürich terminal the world was like a black and white film. On the peripheral edge of the airport two shoulders of trees, pine trees, fir trees, looked as though they were wearing white hats. After a train of yellow snow ploughs passed through this frame I saw yellow everywhere. A group of school aged girls wore a uniform of brilliant yellow tracksuits. They were congregated near the escalator. The girls looked like they were fourteen, maybe older. I heard them questioning the leaders of the group in a South

African accent about whether their plane would depart or whether they would have to stay. A message came over the intercom in French, in German and in

English, notifying us to proceed to our gate and await information about our departure. I watched the group make their way down the escalator to catch the train to Terminal E.

On my way to my departure gate I passed another Lindt chocolate shop and the Victorinox shop where a gigantic Swiss Army knife was its central display. There was also a Swatch store. Switzerland was where Catherine

Barkley and Frederic Henry fled to have their baby in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. It had not gone well. Catherine Barkley, like me, gave birth to a stillborn baby. Then she died. After this happened, Hemingway finished the novel with a dialogue between the doctor and Frederic that articulated the way, after something like this happens to you, you just close everyone out. Frederic 143

says, “There’s nothing to say.” And three lines down he says, “I do not want to talk about it.” The doctor offers to take him to the hotel but instead, Frederic pushes into the room where his wife lies dead. Alone with death Hemingway writes that it was like “saying goodbye to a statue,” and leaves the reader with

Frederic’s numbness and introspection that more realistically feels like being inside the eye of the storm.

At the gate of the Swiss Air flight to Singapore everyone looked tired and a little exasperated or worried that the plane might not get away. “It’s stopped snowing,” I heard someone say. The crowd around the customer service desk at the gate was three deep; a husband looked over his shoulder at his wife who had probably sent him to find out what was going on. It was the sort of thing I would have asked Will to do, if he was here. “Go find out what’s going on,” I would have said to him. There were businessmen wanting confirmation that they would make their connections and the same elderly women who had watched the snow fall in the central plaza of the terminal were queueing up because they were worried. They looked unaccustomed to these dramas and, I thought, needed to be reassured that they were not going to be trapped here.

The departure gate indicated the plane was not cancelled but merely delayed. I did not want to be stuck here and I have learnt that the best thing to do with this sense of foreboding is to walk. I walked away from the departure gate in Terminal A to the end of the building and back. There were other corridors to walk up and down, gates B and D. The length of the airside center was 250 meters. In the center, a set of escalators led up to the first class lounges and more shops. There were fewer people on the upper level. There, looking out of the window I could see it had stopped snowing. Everything was 144

still. A wide radius of golden light from a tall light pole, demarcated a section in front of the terminal as if it was a stage.

On the upper level a Swiss craft and design shop displayed a variety of wooden toys painted in the red and white colours of the Swiss flag. A number of the plates, coffee mugs, fondue sets featured cows in their design. The cows reminded me of the boomerangs and Akubra hats that are sold at the Sydney

International Airport souvenir shops.

The shop attendant, a woman in her early twenties, sat on a stool behind the counter, her phone on her lap, her fingers rapidly texting. I was the only customer. She lifted her head when I entered then looked back down to her phone. I wandered slowly around the shop, picking up this, turning over the plates to see where they were made—Romania—and how much they cost.

Everything was expensive.

There were some watches locked in a glass cabinet. Out of boredom, I asked the shop assistant to show me a couple. Perhaps I’d buy one for Will.

They were chunky and expensive and flash. Will doesn’t even wear a watch. At the bottom of the watch cabinet were some earrings and necklaces that were within my price range but I haven’t worn jewellery for such a long time. They were medallions on thin gold chains. I thanked the attendant for unlocking the cabinet and showing me the watches and the jewellery. She meticulously laid each piece back on the shelf in the exact position they had been in before she removed them, relocked the cabinet and went back to text behind the counter.

Around B and D gates, people were sleeping on the floor or on banks of chairs, their overcoats acting as blankets. There seemed little difference between the airport and a refugee camp or a school gymnasium after a disaster 145

where everyone in the neighbourhood had congregated and were camping out together. Outside the runway had now been cleared. Snow was piled into neat rectangles that looked like the stripes of a zebra.

At the gate, people had begun to board. I waited until there were only a handful of us left, the stragglers who stand near the gate until the very end, even at the risk there would be no room in the overhead locker for their baggage. It didn’t matter to me. My bag would fit under the seat.

From my window seat I could see that a layer of snow had settled on the wings of the plane. We sat with the door closed for more than half an hour before we taxied out. There was an empty seat between me and the woman in the aisle seat. She leaned over and peered out of the window, “They won’t take off until they clear that snow.” I had never seen snow on the wings of a plane, which I told her. She had. She lived in Vancouver and said that they can’t take off until they wash it off. “It doesn’t take long, they use strong pressure hoses.

They know what they’re doing,” she added. And what she said was true. The plane was towed to a section on the side of the runway where the snow was sprayed from the wings. As we taxied towards the runway behind the airport, the landscape looked as if it had been dusted with silver. Thousands of trees ringed the airport. The plane moved into position at the head of the runway and we soared into the night.

Once we were in the air, passengers undid their seat belts and stood, rummaging in the overhead lockers for their bags. The woman beside me took off her shoes and put them under the seat in front. We climbed higher, past the snow and into the clear and cold air of the lower stratosphere. The world below was cushioned by cloud. 146

…

There were better ways to handle my baby’s death. I had had a long time to think about that, to castigate myself, to wish it had been different.

Three weeks after she died I left Sydney. First I went to Brisbane and after, to Europe and to Egypt. My thinking had not been entirely rational, but nor was it completely irrational either. I flew to Brisbane to stay with my mother. I always go back to Brisbane. I have an inane belief that the city can answer certain riddles I can’t.

I grew up in the north of Brisbane, close to the mouth of the Brisbane

River. My mother moved further down the river, in the south.

A short taxi driver at the Brisbane airport jumped out from his seat to assist me with my small bag. He wore grey shorts with long socks and polished black leather businessman’s shoes, the same post-colonial dress code of my father’s generation. I could find no apparent reason for the fact that men still dressed this way—except for the absolute negation of the passing of time. And that in itself was part of the attraction. In a ridiculous way I felt my father was close. I had run away and come back home.

147

…

Will said, “Go and stay with your mother until you feel better. Your mother will understand,” because he didn’t, I thought. He’d had enough. He was sorting through his own pain. He didn’t have time for mine. By sending me to

Brisbane he had moved our two different pains into two different places. I thought he was trying to get rid of me. Not that I blamed him. Why would he want to spend the rest of his life with a woman who had caused so much anguish, who had failed so fundamentally to make a family? I worried that I saw myself this way, through what I imagined were his eyes but there was no other mirror. I could not even admit to questions that refused to go away such as; what happens now? What does this mean for me? Is there anything left of us? I had no idea. I only knew my situation was complex and outside my control.

But Will did not see it in any of these terms. He said he was going to be busy. He would be working long hours. The way he explained it to me was that he worried about me being on my own in the house. I hated that house. There was so much sadness in the walls that you could feel it the moment you stepped past the front door. I wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere with no history, where the sun streamed into every room. I wanted a place with white walls, with different chairs and a new bed.

But I didn’t go to my mother’s. I didn’t even phone her. I went straight to one of the new hotels in The Valley and booked a room. “How long are you 148

staying?” the receptionist asked. “I don’t know.” She didn’t seem to mind how long I was going to be there. The hotel had only recently opened. After I checked in, the receptionist gave me a voucher for a complimentary cocktail at the bar and explained the loyalty program. If I stayed certain number of nights, I could earn enough points for a free night.

…

My room was at the end of the corridor on the third floor. The bed was at the far end of the room tucked into an alcove under a window. In front of the bed were two armchairs, a sofa and an oval table in front of an opaque glass partition that separated the bedroom from the bathroom. You could, if you wanted, slide back the partition and the bath would be part of the room. The bathroom was tiled with brick shaped cream tiles. The vanity and mirror were dark stained wood.

I wanted to sleep. I was awake. I wanted to sleep. The red digits of the alarm clock said 2:14. In the dark, outside the long window that extended the length of the desk, a giant’s hand scratched the glass like it wanted to come into the room. It was a frangipani on the roof terrace.

The room faced north. In the morning, when I opened the curtains, the light transformed everything. The room looked over a roof terrace with four 149

frangipanis in pots, one in each corner. It was winter and the trees had lost most of their leaves. The terrace was mostly an abandoned space. In one corner of the terrace were three wrought iron tables and chairs that looked as though someone started a French café then stopped before they finished. Marble chips in the white gravel dazzled when the sun hit them. Behind the terrace, occupying the length of my window was a massive billboard advertising apartments that were under construction on the other side of the street.

The billboard was a photograph of man and a woman, acting like they were a young married couple in the sleek and modern display kitchen in one of the unbuilt apartments. The kitchen was full of reflective surfaces and sparkling stainless steel fittings. On the glistening white stone bench was a bowl full of green figs, dark purple figs, and fresh dates. The man was sitting on the kitchen bench with his arms around his wife who was standing between his legs. He gazed lovingly at her while she looked out of the expansive window into their unwritten but very stylish future, and straight into my hotel room. Her belly was soft and the way he held her she looked to me like she was in the early stages of pregnancy. I called him Brendon. I called her Georgia. Their life projected everything I thought I was going to have—the children, the reflecting surfaces of the kitchen, the doting husband, the unchartered map ready to fill in. I closed the curtains. I just hated that woman on the billboard.

…

150

At the hospital Roseanne suggested that when I came home I should keep my mind busy. “You might be the sort of woman who needs to write your feelings out,” she had said. She suggested this in one of the hospital consulting rooms with its reproduction of Millet’s Gleaners, three women picking through a field of harvested wheat in a faux gold frame. There were boxes of tissues strategically positioned on the desk, on the coffee table, on top of an empty book case. And at the time, her suggestion would have helped make sense of my misery and of the black thoughts that bounced from one end of my brain to another. I could have filled up notebooks with those black thoughts. “Do it,”

Roseanne had urged. And later I would burn them or throw them off a cliff into the sea.

Roseanne also suggested that another thing that might help was to write the baby a letter telling her how much I loved her and the plans I had for her life.

I am not the sort of person who makes plans. If anything, I had hoped that I would slowly discover who she was, and she would make her own plans. Sure, I would be on the side, encouraging, helping in any way I could. This, I believed, had been my mother’s model. Roseanne said it was quite alright to write an imaginary future for the baby and put this in her little coffin. I didn’t do that. It made no sense. “There are no rules,” the midwife said, “You just have to do what is right for you.” Perhaps she suggested this because she had observed that Will and I were responding very differently to the baby’s death.

For Will it was simpler. He had a little box into which Roseanne had put a footprint of the baby, an imprint of her hand, her little hospital identification tag. I 151

was not ready to look at anything in the box before I went away. I know

Roseanne had taken photographs because she had said, “Later, when you’re ready, contact me.” I wasn’t ready then. I am now. I am coming home to see the imprint of her foot. I want to see as many photographs of her as there are.

…

After the funeral at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium in Sydney, my mother returned to Brisbane and Will started work on a new film. The days were so long. I would sit on the sofa unable to find anything to do. And after a while, I would stand in front of the fridge, hold the door open and look inside. At the same time every day the post was delivered. I would go outside soon after and collect the mail. I’d put the bills on the table. People were still sending bereavement cards. There were a considerable number of unopened cards in the drawer and even though I could not read them, it was strangely comforting that people were thinking of us. Sometimes the phone rang and I’d stand frozen while it rang out and was answered by the machine. If it was Will I would usually pick the receiver up and talk to him. He would ask me what I was doing.

Nothing, I’d tell him. Go for a walk on the beach, he’d say. Call someone and meet for coffee. Go to the shops. I spoke to my mother. No one else. In the 152

afternoon I’d phone Will and ask him to bring some milk, or bread, or detergent, or a take-away chicken on his way home.

Often I stood on the back veranda and looked into the gully. In the corner of the garden bed, beside the rocks against the wall that butts onto the gully, where the soil is dry and cracked and nothing ever grows, a blue tongue lizard had given birth to four little lizards. She sat in the small square of sun, close to her babies during the small window when the sun was out. She wasn’t there when one of the neighbour’s cats ravaged the nest and killed the babies. She was so distressed when she discovered what had happened that she marched up and down hissing, her blue tongue moving in and out of her mouth looking as if she’d kill the cat if she saw it.

There was never anything to watch on television. Anyway, I turned the sound off. All those people on the screen made me feel less alone. In those days I sat and stared at the television screen when it was turned off.

At other times I watched DVDs of movies I knew well—Antonioni’s La

Notte. I spent a long time contemplating the way Jeanne Moreau’s lips looked so sad. I wonder if that was why Antonioni cast her as the dislocated wife. She didn't have a great deal of dialogue to say in the film but she didn’t need to. I could see what she was thinking. I wished I was in Rome, wandering the streets. Another day I watched Chantal Akerman’s Hotel Monterey a film of greater stillness. A man was sitting on a bed in a hotel room in New York looking at the camera while I was sitting on the sofa looking at him.

153

…

Will didn’t often come home until after nine at night. We’d make something to eat. The food had no taste and I wasn’t hungry. After, Will always went for a walk. One night Will was in the small room at the front of the house watching television—a comedy. Waves of orchestrated laughter broke through the house. I was on the terrace. The night was so quiet you could hear the sea.

A blank journal in front of me, I picked up a pen and, without thinking, drew a horizontal line from one side of the page to the other. I was in one half. The baby was in the other. We had gone separate ways and, unlike the immortal

Orpheus, I was helpless to retrieve her. In the always dark hotel room, it felt like

I had followed her to the underworld.

When we think about death, it’s always about ascent. The Old Italian man, who used to hold court at the Colosseo Bar on Brunswick Street in The

Valley, had a different opinion. He would say she’s bobbing up and down with all the others in purgatory, in the sea with no horizon.

He also said you can see its light far, far out to sea around which all those spectres trapped between dying and somewhere else were biding their time, angling closer to the warmth of the eternal flame. There was room for them all on the surface of the sea, the Old Italian would say – all those souls whose business on this earth was unfinished, the unsettled dead who had been ripped from life. And even when storms raged and the wind whipped up the sea, 154

the light never dulled nor extinguished, not for one moment. But she wasn’t there. Anyway, she’s too small to tread water. She just wasn’t.

Once I had drawn the line I turned the page thinking so many wild thoughts that made no sense at all that it seemed a futile and embarrassing exercise to put them down on a page. I knew I was forever changed and I had managed to draw a picture of that.

That was when I could not stop thinking about Easter eggs and decided it would be easier to drive off the road and into the sea.

…

Roseanne said I would need room to accept the loss. There was no room in the house for me to do this. The house was the loss. I needed to be far away.

Then I would be able to see it better. During my work in the film industry, I spent months at a time living in hotel rooms. These hotel rooms were buffer zones, no man’s land. I have trouble sleeping in hotel rooms for the first few nights. I had trouble sleeping in the hotel room in Brisbane. I thought this was about the bed.

The pillows were too hard, too soft, the sheets too rough, too crinkled. I was too hot, too cold. My dreams were disturbing. They had no end, no beginning. I would lie awake trying to finish the dreams. I had to piece their fragments together to find the story. 155

In one of these dreams there was a body of water, perhaps a dam (the water was dark and cloudy). A young man, barely more than a teenager dressed as though he was a character in a pantomime—possibly even the Pied

Piper of Hamlyn—came up to me and pointed to a baby drowning in the water. I dived in and woke up with that image. I imagined myself reaching the baby before it hit the bottom. In another dream I was under clear and aqua water watching a baby slowly sink to the bottom. Its eyes were open and it was smiling. I woke then closed my eyes and caught the baby with both hands just before it reached the bottom. We pushed off from the floor of the pool into the air. I performed mouth to mouth resuscitation on the baby until the baby started to cough and came back to life. Another night I was swimming across the ocean to America. When I lifted my head to take a breath I saw an ocean liner in the distance.

In another dream we were on land. I was holding a baby in my arms. It had the same look as if we were in a silent film although it wasn’t black and white. The backdrop was a painting of an Alpine scene. There was a mountain range painted in jagged brushstrokes, in various shades of gaudy crimsons and purples and the sky above was aqua like the paintings of the Die Brücke artists.

The baby and I were seemingly lost in a forest of pine trees that might have been in Poland, or Germany. That didn’t matter. What did matter was my sense that the forest was a great distance from towns and cities with their buses and shelters, their museums and convenience stores. Both the pastoral scene and the crude brush strokes of the mountains and the sky contributed to my terror that we had left reality behind and I would not be able to find something for the baby to eat. Babies always need something to eat. 156

…

They gave me my own room at the hospital. This wasn’t because of private medical insurance but out of respect for our situation. During the night I heard other babies crying in the wards, the nurses’ shoes running up and down the waxed blue linoleum hallway. Once, a nurse who began her shift and was not told about our situation, poked her head into the room and asked if it was time to feed my baby. “Not now,” I said to her. I wanted to go home but I couldn’t face the emptiness of time. I wanted to live somewhere else.

The first night after her birth, I dreamt I was in a hotel in Sri Lanka and I was at the reception desk asking for milk for the baby. The hotel room in Sri

Lanka had a deep veranda. Crows had gathered on the wide lawn. When I came back into the room my baby had vanished. That was the moment I woke, my heart was palpitating. To calm myself down, as I often do on the first nights I am in an unfamiliar city, a new hotel, a new job, I closed my eyes and returned to the memory of the grey and white timber house in Underwood Street in the north of Brisbane where we grew up.

The jacaranda tree in my memory is always flowering. It was flowering in

November when we moved in. Before that we had been in London where my father, a psychiatrist, was writing up his doctorate. The house was in the same 157

area in the north of Brisbane where we lived before, where my grand-parents and great-aunts also lived. Inside my head I would return when it was late in the afternoon, between day and night, when the sun outside the window above the kitchen sink was low in the sky.

I would walk up the front stairs and let myself in through the side veranda. My great-aunt Cissie would be sitting on the cane chair with the high back, still as a statue.

I was usually thirsty so I’d walk through the breakfast room to the kitchen with the yellow chequered wall paper chosen by my mother because it was the colour of sunshine. Then straight to the cupboard where she kept the glasses.

The day glasses were in the top cupboard in the corner. The good glasses

(boxed and out of reach) were stored in the dark at the back of one of the bottom cupboards along with the Duralex glasses that exploded for no apparent reason. I’d take one of the glasses from the top cupboard and fill it with water from the cold tap. Through the window, the coffee tree would be covered in small white buds that smelt of lemons around Christmas, I could feel the cold water move down my throat. That moment was everything I missed.

When I returned, the adult walking inside her childhood, the house was empty and quiet. But when we lived there the house in Underwood Street was always full of noise and children. Even towards the end I would come home in the early hours of the morning to the murmurs of chattering sleepers. After my father died and we moved away from home, Lydia sold the house for a smaller one on the high part of Fig Tree Pocket surrounded by trees. Now all that’s left of the house in Underwood Street is the Cassia tree that was in front of my parent’s bedroom. 158

…

In the first four years we lived in the house in Underwood Street, my mother gave birth to two stillborn babies. She also had a miscarriage before my sister Setta was born.

While her stillborn babies were never a secret, my mother didn’t talk about how she felt about them until after my baby died. Perhaps she only spoke about this episode in her life because I could now relate to what she had gone through. Perhaps the death of my baby triggered her memory of that time. I don’t remember her ever seeming as disoriented and lost as I felt. But I was very young when this happened to her. I understood her sadness, even then, but I was not able to grasp the depth of her loss.

I cannot recall a time when my mother let herself go, or a time when the house in Underwood Street was in a state of chaos. There were enough children in the family for the level of mess to overwhelm most people and yet all

I remembered was its order. Even the breakfast room, where the family ate their meals, was always cleared and reset from one meal to another. And children’s toys were always tidied away at the end of the day and taken out again in the morning. 159

I was the opposite. Since my baby died everything stopped. If my father had still been alive, he would have advised me to do something practical to take my mind off my worries—like knitting. This was one of the things Roseanne at the hospital also suggested I try in the first weeks I was at home. It seems common advice for people with insurmountable problems: “Keep your hands busy. Transfer all those feelings into something.” My father had patients who had knitted scarves that were so long they were able to wrap around a house several times. After, when these people no longer needed to occupy themselves this way they would stand back and measure the physical manifestation of their grief or sadness.

…

My mother still dreams about babies. In one of these dreams she was making the bed and found the baby she’d lost in the bed clothes. I know a family who in fact lost their baby daughter this way. At the time it seemed incredible. How could you lose a baby? The story was that the baby was lying on the bed and had rolled and tangled herself in the sheets which were taken to the laundry to be washed. That was where they found her. 160

In these dreams, Lydia finds babies in the cupboard. “Oh there you are,” she says to the baby, noting how thin and neglected it is. So she takes the baby out of the cupboard and changes its clothes and gives it something to eat.

Lydia was pregnant when we moved into Underwood Street. There are two photographs taken on our return from London to Brisbane where you can tell. In one we are sitting on a bench in front of the Parthenon in Athens. In another we are on the steps leading from the river to the pagoda Wat Arun in

Bangkok which was referred to then as the Temple of the Dawn. We reached the temple on long boats with motors at the back, down the Chao Phraya River.

In the photograph my mother is holding the youngest while we three older girls stand around her.

Earlier that morning we must have gone to a market where we bought the red and green and gold paper umbrellas which my younger sister and I are holding in the photograph. My older sister Ada is wearing an ornate dancer’s headdress that bears the swollen dome and spire of the temple chedi’s. She and I had been taken to a performance of Thai dancing which explains why she is bending back her small fingers in the photograph. My mother carries the youngest on her hip while pinning down her dress with her spare hand to prevent the wind from blowing it up. You can see the outline of the baby in her stomach. While I can’t remember her like this I can clearly recall the slap of the river water against the boat, the scent of frangipani, the taste of red papaya and the coarse cotton of certain maternity dresses she wore again and again during that period.

Her pregnancies were always announced the same way. We would be called to the breakfast table before lunch on a Saturday or a Sunday where we 161

were sat down and, before there was any food, my father—who acted as the spokesman for their marriage—stood behind my mother with his hand on her shoulder and introduced the subject saying, “There’s something we have to tell you.” The reaction ranged from happiness, to a lack of interest, to Ada’s response which was to go to her room and slam the door.

I never made the connection between Lydia’s stillborn babies and the first years in the house. I was moving through childhood and was probably more preoccupied with the waxing and waning relationships between me and my sisters, although I vividly recalled the morning she returned home from the hospital after the first baby died—the family around the breakfast table— unusually silent. Well behaved even. And my mother’s mime show, kitchen to table, plate after plate, the steak and eggs she cooked for breakfast, or lamb chops and bacon, toast and juice for us. Swallowing all that loss. How terrible she must have felt. And if I had a sense of that, being a child, it was of feeling for her and not knowing the words to say. And she kept her sadness about her babies from all of us. “There was no time to grieve,” Lydia said when I asked her how long it had taken to get over those deaths. “Your father insisted that life went on. It had to. There were four of you then. The eldest was only eight. You were always hungry.”

Women were the fulcrum of the family in those days. Our family was all about movement. We were shunted between so many places on any given day—schools, kindergartens, swimming training, ballet lessons, art classes, sailing, choir, band practice, piano lessons. We made a great deal of noise.

Between us we played the euphonium, the piano, the flute, the drums, the guitar. We sang and fought and yelled. 162

And our bodies were constantly changing and morphing and outgrowing clothes. Our hair would be cut and then, as quickly, grow long again. Our teeth were falling out and growing back. We constantly ate. The laundry would pile with our washing. Grief would have ground the machine of the family to a halt and my mother knew this.

I can see her so tired on Saturday afternoons—I was older, now thirteen or fourteen—and I would say, “Why don’t you have a rest?” to which she always replied that if she stopped she might never start again.

…

Traces of the absent babies were found in the ways we, as girls, were encouraged to transfer the nurture we would have given the baby onto something else. I suspect that my parents might have had a discussion and decided to buy us each a new doll. The dolls were always treated harshly by us.

We cut their hair. Ripped out arms and legs and tried to put them back. In a family of girls, there were a lot of dolls.

We would spend weekends, my sisters and I, dressing and undressing our dolls and giving them virtual lives. The intricate scripts of these games were thinly veiled mirrors of the life we led. We would endow the dolls with aspects of our mother. The scenes we played out included looking after imaginary children, 163

going to the shops in the city, buying everyone new clothes that we would then put on the dolls. If a dress didn’t fit easily, you would have to take out the arm and then put it back. We fed them, cleaned up after them, took them to the doctors who operated on their legs, bathed them, put them to sleep in beds in the houses we built by joining random pieces of furniture together on the side veranda of the house in Underwood Street. The cane chair my great-aunt Cissie sat on, the long rectangular table where my mother stored her magazines on house interiors, the stools that my father brought back from the Trobriand

Islands. We left gaps between the furniture that became the roads and rivers of their world.

The dolls weren’t always mothers, sometimes they were school teachers.

My younger sister Livia had a Barbie doll which she would dress in a Pan Am uniform. When Livia held the doll in a horizontal position in the air we understood that this doll was hard at work far away in the sky. Livia would then return and inform us how things had been in America, in New Guinea, in Spain.

“I’m going to marry a Spaniard,” she would declare.

These games rarely included the dolls in national costume that my parents brought us back from the overseas conferences they attended where my father gave papers. These dolls ended up in one of the cupboards in the play room that was built at the end of the house after Setta was born. For a long time those dolls constituted our impressions of these foreign lands. Spain was a long red flamenco dress with black spots and layers of frills. She had jet black hair that trailed down her back into which a peineta comb was thrust for the mantilla that, over the years, was lost. America was a doll in a suede traditional

Native American dress with two long plaits, Japan was a Kimono, Holland was a 164

white apron with wooden clogs, New Zealand was a Maori doll with a fantastic tattooed face. Greece was a short full white skirt with pompoms sewn onto the tips of its shoes. I thought her face was very sweet, even if she had a moustache.

Those dolls fell apart or we destroyed them. We cut off their hair, we wrenched out their arms. Lydia threw them away when she cleaned out the toy cupboards. But I found them all again, years later, on display inside glass cabinets in a faux medieval castle in Bli Bli on the Sunshine Coast in

Queensland. Its rooms smelt of damp and mould. My youngest sister Setta implored Lydia to take her there when we would stay at the beach during the long Christmas vacations. The area had few tourist attractions except the Big

Pineapple and on those days when it rained, Bli Bli castle was somewhere to go. The building had a grand hall and a torture chamber which you had to pass through before you climbed up and then down to the dolls.

The dolls were crammed together like prisoners in the dark until the sensor was activated when someone walked into the room and the light came on. There were two floors of dolls. The dolls on the ground floor were grouped and displayed in dusty dioramas according to their nationality. The British diorama included a double decker bus and dolls dressed up as beefeaters as well as Barbie dolls dressed in 1960s mini-skirts. In another cabinet the dolls were from an assortment of European nations, propped up on a circular rotating display that was tiered. Beneath some of the dolls, but by no means all, were cards that stated the obvious, the ink now faded. The titles read Holland Doll, or

French Doll or Wax Dolls. 165

Upstairs the smell of mould and damp intensified. There were three more rooms in which hundreds of dolls had been stuffed onto shelf after shelf as though there was no difference between storage and display.

Several of the dolls’ eyes had fallen inside their hollow plastic cavities.

Their brittle hair was lank and unwashed. The colours of their skirts had faded and often the fabric had decayed. The shelves themselves seemed fragile and often on the point of collapse. Many of the dolls had fallen to the side and were resting on their neighbour for support. Amongst these dolls I found the same

Barbie dolls wearing the costumes we had played with as children, and the same large dolls that we were given after Lydia’s stillborn babies all jumbled together like battery hens, their wings clipped so they couldn’t fly away.

Growing up, the dolls were how every day, every play, the nurturing of children was branded onto us. And while I never thought life would actually be like the scripts of play we made up with dolls, I didn’t think it would be any different either. But I wanted to be a mother. I wanted this so badly it was an ache, then a desire that hammered at the back of every gesture of every day.

All my sisters fell pregnant but not me. I had to involve the assistance of lab technicians, doctors, nurses. I opened my legs for strangers to implant my fertilised eggs back inside. And after ten days, after the negative pregnancy test, I would wonder why I was being punished this way. And when finally the pregnancy test was positive, my joy was boundless. I was so elated because I felt like a normal woman.

166

…

After each of my mother’s stillborn babies, my two sisters and I were sent to stay with Aunt Neva in Toowoomba. She settled us in the north facing room she called the Sunshine Room that was the warmest part of her cold house.

When we stayed with her after the second baby died, Neva gave each of us a pet chicken.

We would put the chickens on leashes and take them for walks through

Neva’s garden where she grew sunflowers, snap dragons and fox gloves for the

Brisbane flower markets. We dragged the little chickens behind us all day. We gave them names, wrote songs for them, performed shows about them, performed shows for them, made them run up and down the piano keys in the living room until Neva banned them from being inside the house. At night they had to sleep in the hen house that Neva called Hong Kong. The chickens grew over the weeks we were there and, I thought, were quite domesticated for poultry.

We took a break from the chickens in an area Neva called Hollywood.

This was a semi-circular courtyard whose entrance was a secret passage covered by low shrubs. Neva had furnished Hollywood with chairs she bought from a cinema that was being demolished. The seats lifted up and down. There was also an old soft drink dispensing machine, a tub of a thing that was not connected to any electricity but which Neva sometimes filled with soft drinks planted into ice. Hollywood was really all about intermission. There was no 167

screen, only the dense planting of shrubs which we stared at while we sat on the cinema seats, drinking an orange soft drink, three different movies running through three different heads.

On the last night, Neva killed and plucked and roasted one of the chickens—Redondo, my sister Livia’s chicken. On the way back home on the

Greyhound bus, on the seat behind the driver, I did not know where to place the violence of the chicken’s death nor the fact that I had swallowed its flesh.

…

After I had been in the hotel in Brisbane for a week I phoned Will. “Why didn’t you tell me where you were?” he said. He had phoned the hospitals and the morgue. He knew I was somewhere in Brisbane—the bank had given him this information.

“Why did you do that?” I didn’t speak. “Are you there? What on earth do you think you’re doing to me?” I didn’t know what to say. “Why didn’t you go to your mother’s? She’s worried sick.” I had no answer that made any sense.

“Speak to me,” he kept saying. That I wasn’t ready to go to my mother’s just yet was all I managed to tell him. “But why did you just disappear like that,” he repeated along with sentences that included the words immature, selfish, cruel, unnecessarily worrying, thoughtless, attention seeking. And “why” was a word 168

he used over and over. “You must have an explanation for what you did.” But I didn’t. I was numb. I told him that, I was just numb and I didn’t want to burden him. I didn’t want to burden anyone. “Is this your way of telling me you’re going to leave me,” he said.

I was not able to describe to him that I felt so empty, so angry, so undeserving and I felt lost. I told him I needed to be away from everyone. He should be able to understand that. “But not me,” he said, “Don’t forget we’re in this together.”

By the time I asked him how his work was he had calmed down. Even though this was a new project he was already working thirteen hour days. Will was a film editor. He worked to unrealistic deadlines. Near the end of our conversation he told me what he was thinking of cooking for dinner. He was like that. He took great comfort from the routines of his day to day life. He didn’t mind working long hours. That was how he managed to deal with his grief. I had been upset that so soon after our baby died he accepted an offer to work on a new film. Will rationalised it by saying this way he had no time to think about what had happened. And if there was food in the house, if he could surf on the weekend, if he watched certain programs he liked on television he could cope but I could tell from his voice that he wasn’t coping at all. “Have you even phoned your mother?” he asked in spite of the fact that he knew the answer.

I had not contacted her. I intended to. I thought I would arrive in Brisbane and take a taxi straight to her house but I didn’t. She was anxious about me, he said. They spoke every day, in case either had heard from me.

Will said he was just glad I was alive. He said he couldn’t bear for the baby to die and to lose me too. I told him I was in a hotel in The Valley. I told 169

him the name of the hotel. Then I mentioned my room number in the same breath as I told him I was sorry. I didn’t deserve his love. “Don’t cut me out again,” he said. I promised to phone regularly. That was all. “Don’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault,” he said before we hung up.

…

But it was. I knew that.

Why hadn’t I gone to the hospital as soon as I felt the baby had stopped moving? Why did I wait until the morning? If I went as soon as she stopped moving she might be alive. There might have been time to save her, to have an emergency caesarean. I went over and over the events of that night and I can’t understand why I waited until the morning. I had a premonition something was wrong but I ignored it. Because I waited, because I was too afraid to even think something like this had happened, I felt completely responsible for her death.

My father would have had a lot to say about that.

Will had had the same premonition. When he wanted us to go straight to the hospital in the middle of the night I stopped him. Why did I do that? I even told Will there would be no point. No one would be able to help us until the morning. Why did I say that? Did Will blame me for her death? Was that why he chose to work long hours on a new film instead of being around me at home? 170

Was that why he sent me away? This played over and over inside my head without any clarity.

…

The flight attendant served dinner. Everything on the tray was shades of grey-brown from the chicken stew to the potatoes to the French beans. The lettuce in the salad was pale and lank but at least the bread was warm. I cut open the sachet of Gruyere and put it in the still warm roll. The woman beside me noticed that was all I was eating and offered me her bread roll and her packet of Gruyere. She was lactose intolerant she said and wouldn’t be eating it. I asked her where she was going. “Singapore.”

She lived in Vancouver, although she had just come from Northern Italy where she was visiting her daughter who was researching the old anatomy theatre at the University of Bologna. I told my neighbour that my father was a doctor, a psychiatrist, and every year the morgue had given him a brain to dissect. The smell of formaldehyde leaked from the second fridge in the laundry. When the smell drove my mother mad, my father would take the brain out of the preservative and put it on the tray which one of us burnt making toffees. We would gather and listen to my father describe the sections of the brain, and what each section was responsible for. The brains were of homeless 171

people or alcoholics which he could detect by the shrinkage of the cerebellum.

My neighbour’s daughter was more interested in architecture than in medicine she told me. Now she was on her way to see her son who worked for CIBC, a

Canadian bank in Singapore. He had recently become engaged and she was going to meet his fiancée. Her son, whose name was Carter, would be about my age, she thought.

She did not like the humidity or the heat. She believed it raised her blood pressure. Most of the buildings are air conditioned, I told her. When I spent two months in Singapore looking for locations for a film that was never made, I stayed in one of the big hotels on Scott’s Road. The sudden shift between the heavy and humid air outside and the thin cold air inside the hotel was like constantly moving between summer and winter. Before that, when my sister

Livia lived there when she worked for Louis Vuitton—before she was married and before she had children—her apartment was so cold I went out and bought a navy blue padded winter coat suitable for the Arctic. Carter, it turned out, did not live far from the hotel I stayed in. We exchanged names. Delia was relieved that she had warm clothes with her. She had just come from winter in Bologna.

She wanted to know what I did on films and also the names of films I had worked on.

Some she had heard of and some she had seen. The majority of the time, I told her, I worked for one film director, although now he has retired from directing and just writes film scripts. My work assists his writing process. His name is Rask Rasmussen. He often writes as many as four scripts at the same time. The trouble is he can’t write a scene unless he has photographs of an actual setting in front of him. I look for these locations. Sometimes he has fixed 172

ideas about places. He spends ages on the internet, or looking through old magazines, art books and photographers’ monograms that he keeps in his library. He might have a photograph that’s more than eighty years old. He wants me to find out what the place that was photographed so long ago looks like now. I went to Griefswald in Germany to see the ruins of a monastery in Eldena from a nineteenth-century painting by Caspar David Friedrich that Rask wanted me to photograph. He was going to use the gateway as the entrance to the underworld. Other times Rask has dreamt about a location. The clues to his dreamscapes are often the most difficult to find unless the scenes can be located in paintings, or in photographs. Often it is the technical idiosyncrasies of a photograph rather than its subject matter that most translates to dream images.

When Rask needs my services, we devise a list of specific sites – types of roads or intersections, mountains, particular shadows cast by buildings, stations. Some of these sites are more urgent than others. Often he asks my help to determine how disparate locations can fit together. The actual sites he is looking for are then sorted into countries and the list is narrowed so that the work can be achieved in a reasonable amount of time. Rask deposits enough money for the cost of travel and accommodation, a wage and materials and I organise the ticket, the hotels and make an itinerary. Then I take my camera, my notebook and go. When I arrive at one of these locations, I will take numerous photographs in different lights, at different times of the day and from a number of perspectives. Sometimes I stay there for two or three days, depending on what it is that Rask is looking for. At the end of each day I write up my impressions of a place. At the top of each page I write the date, the 173

location and country and the time of day that I was there. I may have to write about the type of light. Rask is sensitive about light. I always take a photograph of a place at twilight, if this is possible. I might write that the grass was yellowed but during early summer, is lush and green. I might say that in spite of what it looked like, the place was exposed, windy and inhabited by a cranky old man who has lived there for sixty three years and who was not interested in telling me anything about the place. I may also slip a photograph of this cranky old man into my chronicle because although Rask might not be interested in him, I am. These books are full of photographs of the people I have met in these places and the stories they have told me. One day I would like to expand their stories into larger pieces of writing before I forget them. For Rask I only write facts that I know he finds significant: the names of plants, the types of trees, the birds that I was able to identify. I usually try to write about the mood of a place. I call these reconnaissance chronicles but they’re full of photographs for me.

Two years ago Rask was looking for a dirt road that sloped down a hill flanked on each side by an avenue of trees—chestnut, yew, plane trees. Rask was looking for pollarded trees. He thought these trees resembled hands. This was an old memory. As a boy, these trees reminded him of a boxer’s hand that had been damaged in a fight. He thought of this tree as masculine. Rask and I had talked about how trees are often gendered in myth and folk tales. For instance in the Grimm Brothers’ telling of the Cinderella myth, Cinderella’s recently deceased mother manifests as a hazel tree under which Cinderella sits and weeps. And when she wishes for something, it is this tree, via its messengers the birds, that grants her wishes. 174

I found a curving avenue of plain trees like this in Zeeland in the

Netherlands but they were on a flat plain. I later found an avenue of trees that were on a road that sloped downwards, away from the road. This aspect of the brief was perfect but the trees that lined the sides of the road were all prunus trees, cherry blossoms and a pink flowering weeping willow. None of them had been pollarded. I feared they were far too feminine. There was a wonderful gate that matched the brief Rask had specified in Burgundy, in France. It is often like this, I told Delia. The back of a house is filmed in one country and the view from the front door is shot in a different country entirely.

Sometimes one film script requires many years of work. Rask had been working on the same script on and off for nine years and like many of his scripts, Rask can’t find an ending. The script becomes more epic every year. At first it was a love story but now its theme is the survival of man on the planet in the face of chemical warfare. The scope of the script constantly expands. When

Rask thinks he has found the right end, he goes back over the script and changes it and then he has to find a new ending. I have been working with him on this script for seven years. Rask’s inspiration has been old photographs which portray a time that has gone. As the script becomes more and more complex, I have travelled to more and more countries. I’m always chasing the past. My photographs, my notes provide Rask with a number of different realities with the result that the focus of the script is always changing. There is still so much to do, Rask tells me. He fears he is stuck in the middle. He is further away from the beginning and the end.

When Rask receives my photographs he spreads them over the floor of his house, culls them and then pins the photos that interest him onto a wall in 175

his studio that he had purposely built for this. Over days and weeks, he organises the photographs in a variety of ways until, he says, the story finds him. Rask arranges the images like a cartoon that begins at the top left corner and moves across and then down. Sometimes one photograph on his wall refers to ten others that he has glued to a sheet of cardboard. When he is happy with the arrangement of images, he says, the words come easily. Most of the time, I have no idea which of the many photos I sent him were useful. And when a script is written and sold and in the hands of the director who is going to realise it, more often than not, none of the locations that inspired the original scene are used in the film. That was never the point.

We never discuss money. I never ask where the money comes from but it has never been a problem. Rask made a fortune from three very successful films he directed in the seventies in Los Angeles. He also inherited money.

We met on a film in the Dominican Republic. Rask was the producer. I was assigned to be his assistant. It was a slow film. We both spent hours waiting and talking. There is always a lot of waiting on a film set. When a scene is being filmed the actors, the camera crew, the grips and electrics are working while the people who set up the shot—the art department, other electrics, wardrobe and makeup—have finished their work and either watch in silence for the completion of the shot or play cards in their trailer or have a coffee until the next set-up begins and they work hard to prepare for the next shot. When these crew members are setting up, the stand-ins take the place of actors who are in their trailers or in make-up. The script supervisor writes up the previous shot.

The director of photography, the sparks and the grips, the cameraman and the assistant directors work more consistently than any other member of the crew— 176

unless it is one of the times when everyone waits for a storm or rain, or for the rain to finish or for a particular cloud to drift into the background. Then there is nothing to do but wait. On some films, such as David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter, the crew was paid to wait for a storm in Ireland for more than a year.

The film in the Dominican Republic was behind schedule and Rask was on set to analyse the reasons for this. When a film is behind schedule, it is usually over budget and this is always a problem. And because we were waiting, we spent a great deal of time talking. Rask asked my opinion as to why everything was so slow. I answered that some of the reasons could be explained by the different expectations of two different cultures—one experienced with film, the other not. We talked about politics, about history and colonialism. Rask knows a great deal about photography. He has an extensive collection of books on photography which has been both a passion of mine and the subject of my dissertation when I was at University. When we first started talking Rask spoke of his love of the great landscape photographs of Ansel

Adams, his photographs of mountains and skies. And when I think of the concept of a divine presence, the light on Ansel Adams’ wide mountain ranges is always inside the image that comes to mind. But there are many other ways to interpret the land and landscape such as the very subjective and personal perspective of the New Zealand photographer Laurence Aberhart. Towards the end of the film, Rask asked whether I would be interested in collaborating with him by helping him to find locations for a script he was thinking of writing. This was the love story. Rask confessed that before he was able to write a scene, he needed to see photographs of an actual place so that he could situate action into exact place. 177

Rask writes on the island of Rømø off the west coast of Denmark in a small house with a glass wall that looks over the long wide beaches and the edge of the sea. On the other side of the world, over the phone, I can hear the unrelenting wind outside his window. Even though he complains about the cold he insists that he works best under these conditions.

The winters last a long time and more than once, when he has been snowed in, he phones and asks me to travel somewhere warm. That was why I was in Singapore for two months, looking for a variety of locations—jungle, denuded jungle, industrial waste, stretches of road, rivers, tropical gardens, construction sites—which I noted in my chronicle, photographed and sent to

Denmark via DHL.

I am always careful to number, label and date all the photographs I take.

I note the numbers of the photographs in my chronicles beside the date that I was there. I always keep my own set of the photographs I send to Rask. I store all the photos as files on my computer, and in hard copy in boxes and envelopes. The chronicles are stored in document boxes. Each lid has a large label that has the dates of the photographs and the countries or type of sites such as bridges, or trees. There are boxes full of photographs of buildings catalogued according to their function, their design, their period and architects.

Rask has often inquired about a photograph I sent him years before and having this system enables me to quickly find, scan and re-send a photograph to him. I keep these boxes in the upstairs room in the house in Bronte. I have boxes of so many pockets of the world and of so many photographs of people I met there. There are so many different stories inside. Rask often asks, “Tell me who you met, tell me everything about them.” And our conversations, which would 178

sound strange to anyone else, often continue for days, rather like a game where someone starts a sentence and the story goes on and on. This is also useful,

Rask says and it is true, some of these tangents have found their way into his scripts. Often I have been asked to write the back story of characters, particularly women characters. Before Rask’s wife died, she would have helped him to realise these characters. Now he is alone.

I had thought the baby would threaten any future work with Rask. But I also thought that maybe it wouldn’t. When I phoned Rask to tell him that the baby died he said it was my decision when and if I wished to continue to work for him. “You’ll find your way,” he had said. He knew a great deal about grief.

Grief is the undertow of all his scripts. I suspected that he would ask about my grief, about what grief looked like for a woman.

Rask had been reading Apulius’ The Golden Ass which he said was a wonderful and moral tale. He had also been reading Diderot’s Jacques the

Fatalist and his Master, which he said I would enjoy. He had decided that a large portion of his story would take place on the road. This way the narrative is motivated by chance encounters. He called it his winter script because he wanted it to be filmed in winter. “Snow?” I asked. “Of course, winter is snow,” he said.

My work was the opposite of the type of work that Will does. Will works with the same small team, in one building in a dark room. His work is ordered and meticulous. He is very patient. You need these traits to be an editor.

Sometimes Will spends all day working out where one shot belongs, cutting and pasting, arranging, rearranging a scene according to the director’s notes and then, the next day, he has to start over with different shots which he will 179

organise into a different sequence which might better convey the weight of a scene. The director might want to see both sequences. It can take days to find the right balance. Some scenes never come together. If there is any money left in the filming budget, the director may end up reshooting a segment of a scene just to solve this problem. Will’s work is post-filmic. He sees this work as confronting problems of order. He enjoys finding solutions. We’re opposites.

The focus of my work is pre-filmic.

…

Carter loved living in Singapore, Delia told me. He was the sort of man who was just crazy about sports. And in Singapore he was a member of one of the clubs that has impressive sporting facilities. He’s made friends with many of the expats at the club. My sister Livia used to go to one of these clubs because many of the people she worked with held meetings there over lunch. I could just imagine Carter in the Tanglin Club eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding in the faux Tudor dining room called the Tavern, drinking beer with other young bankers. These clubs are cultural outposts. England is roast beef and soggy potatoes, bread and butter pudding and steaks. Sometimes, when I have been away for a long time, the very thought of cold fresh oranges reminds me of home. 180

I could imagine Carter taking part of the squash competitions and barbeques afterwards, eating grilled prawns and Char kwai teow. That’s what I did with my sister Livia when she lived there. The club membership was almost exclusively expatriates. This was where he met his fiancée Francine, Delia told me. Francine worked for a British law firm that had offices in Singapore. “Does she have blond hair?” I asked, imagining it was Francine on the poster outside the window of my hotel room in Brisbane, her perfect future rolling out before her. Of course she did.

Carter wanted to work in Hong Kong and China. I asked Delia if she had been to China. She would like to, she told me, now she has all the time in the world. Her husband had recently died.

Delia nursed him at home. “That must have been very hard,” I said to her. It was. They had been together for forty-three years, she told me. After

Owen died, she was very depressed. “Carter was a help,” she said, her desert now finished, the napkin tossed over the meal tray. She had to sell their family home which needed a lot of money spent on it. “Anyway it was too big for one person,” she told me. Delia said that by the time she started to look around, the prospect of moving was not as terrifying as she first thought it was going to be.

There were plenty of young families who were desperate to buy in the area.

“We had a lot of land and we were close to the lake. They’d raze it to the ground and build something new.” So in the end, Delia sold for a better price than she imagined, bought a duplex in town with new heating, broad wooden floors and only two bedrooms and invested the rest. And she loved her new place. It was not dark like the old house. It faced south and the sun streamed in all day. She 181

was surrounded by trees, and better than anything, she could close the door and go away and not worry about a thing.

Her husband was never interested in travelling and she always regretted that. From Singapore she was going to Bali and then Cambodia to see Angkor

Wat. But at the same time, she told me, she missed him and their old life.

I told Delia about our struggle with conceiving, the years of disappointment, the waiting, the hoping, the Jekyll and Hyde of hormones that every woman who has had IVF experiences, the miscarriages, and wanting a baby more than anything in the world. Finally, I told her about Nina, which was the name we gave our daughter. I had not picked out a name for her before she was born. I thought I would look at her face and her name would announce itself to me. But that moment was complicated. At the same time, it was very beautiful. It is such an effort to be born. When she was coming out, it was an exhilarating moment. I thought there’s just no way she has died. That was a lie.

A trick. You give birth no differently than a woman whose baby lives. After she was born, Roseanne took the baby and told her she was such a good baby to be born so well. “What’s her name?” Roseanne asked. “Nina,” I said. It was not one of the names we had considered at all.

“Will you adopt?” Delia asked after a while. She was not the first person to ask this. It seems that this is the last act for those of us who find having children difficult and who will not stop until they have a child. I didn’t know. I didn’t think so. I still feel so raw. And I didn’t like the idea of other people judging whether we were fit to be parents. I had just wanted Nina to live, that was all and I could not think beyond that. “You can’t blame yourself,” Delia said. “You just can’t afford to do that. These things happen.” 182

The flight attendant had cleared the meal trays and later, returned with ice creams. Out of the window the sky was clear, so clear that far, far below the lights of small encampments, villages became visible. We were in the desert corridor somewhere over Pakistan or Afghanistan or Northern India. Perhaps I was seeing desert fires. Delia watched Out of Africa even though she’d seen it a hundred times, she told me.

…

Before she was born, I didn’t buy anything for her. Not one thing. Not a packet of disposable nappies, no bath towels, no cot, no clothes, no pram.

Nothing. But that’s not the whole truth. I had studied which cot, which pram would be more suitable than another. I had been into shops and tried to fold up, fold down a pram and even timed this act. I wondered about a blue pram or a black pram and whether the fabric could be easily cleaned. But I stored this information silently inside until after the baby was born when I was going to send Will and my mother to buy the items I had decided I wanted. Inside the hotel room in Brisbane, I had wondered whether my decision not to buy anything for the baby until after she was born had been because I suspected something was going to happen. Because so many times before, it had. I wondered if this was a way of willing her out of a life. I couldn’t bear to consider 183

the consequences of that. It could also have been a subconscious response to my mother’s stillborn babies. Or the miscarriages. Constant failure had destroyed my confidence that she would be alright. And that I saw anything about her birth or her life as a denial worried me deeply.

During my pregnancy when I saw photographs of nurseries in magazines

I used to imagine how dreadful it would be to return to those spaces if something went wrong. And those nurseries, decorated in themes such as Alice in Wonderland, with the Mad Hatter and Alice and Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle

Dee stencilled on the walls, the change table set-up with nappies and creams, the pram in a corner ready to take the baby for a walk, the cot made up with blankets and soft sheets becomes a temple or a shrine to the baby. And if the baby dies, the door to this room would be closed. If I had set up a room for the baby, I would have found myself opening the door when I was on my own and sitting in the chair in which I would have fed her, cradled her, rocked her, kissed her and everything would have felt worse. For this reason the door would be shut. But I learnt that it made no difference whether there was a nursery or not, the house itself had been invaded by her death.

Roseanne had told me many women who had given birth to stillborn babies and who did not spend time with their baby had regretted this. She knew it was important. There were moments in the hotel room in Brisbane when I wondered if I was angry with the baby for dying and was that why I couldn’t look at her. I am ashamed to admit that; a monstrous thought. Her birth had been so exhilarating. Her birth was a moment of such triumph. I felt so unbelievably elated. It is hard to believe it’s possible for your body to go through such a great metamorphosis, that it can soften enough and expand enough for the baby to 184

disengage from the womb and enter the world. That seemed a miracle to me.

And even though she had died in the womb, and even though the labour had been induced, the process of giving birth was the same for me as it was for women who give birth to babies that live.

At first the waves of pain felt like my body was ripping inside. The pain waxed and waned, and at its most intense echoed through every organ, every limb. This pain continued to tear until the moment when you just know you have to push. And the midwife says “Harder, push now, harder…” Harder and harder you push with your eyes, your shoulders, your legs. All women who have experienced this type of birth know about that. But by then there was a shift and it felt like it was the baby that was telling me it had to be born. I was so confused because when I experienced this shift and the baby seemed to me to insist on being born, I felt she was alive. I could feel her life force. They had to be wrong. How could she be dead? After all that, how could she be dead? But she was.

…

There are days when I can’t remember what her face looked like. And that is one of the reasons that I want to go home. When I try to remember

Nina’s face, I hear my mother say, “It would have been the right face.” My 185

mother said she was glad she did not see her babies’ faces. If she had seen their faces, they would have belonged to her more and the loss would have been worse. By not knowing the face of a new baby she had no haunting image to stop her in her tracks.

During the birth of my mother’s first stillborn baby the obstetrician – who was not her usual doctor—badly tore her cervix. The baby was in breach position and had to be delivered with forceps. Because of the attending complications of a stillborn baby the tear to her cervix was forgotten. I know how the shock of a dead baby eclipses everything else. Lydia told me that after the birth, when she was back in the room, she began to haemorrhage. “That’s when

I had that out of body experience,” she said.

I had never heard her talk of this. “I’m sure I told you about that,” she had said when I was so surprised. But she can’t have because I would never have forgotten it. She went on to describe how when she was back in her room she lost so much blood that she passed out and this was when she experienced the sensation of floating on the ceiling looking down at herself on the bed. She felt a sense of calm as if dying at this point would have been easy. I asked her if she had seen light. Lydia saw a white light, at the same time as she had the sensation of overwhelming calmness. And then something pulled her back.

“Think of those children, you can’t go, you have to go back,” she remembered saying to herself.

I have a friend who also haemorrhaged during an operation and described the exact same scene, almost word for word. When my friend and I talked about it we assumed it was the moment right before death, and she came back. In all the years this was the first time that Lydia ever spoke of 186

having been there. And I looked back again to see her carrying those plates of food from the kitchen to the table and I factor in that she had pulled herself back from death. I wonder what you see on the edge of life and death and whether

Nina, who was inside my womb, who had no idea about the outside world, saw this too.

After the first baby died our father came home with a Siamese cat. We called the cat Arlee, after the gentle Thai tour guide who took us to the temple and to the performance of Thai dancing that had so profoundly affected both of my sisters. One imitated the movements and the other is still upset that she was deemed to be too young to attend the late night event, even though it was her sixth birthday. The cat was very little and required as much work as a new baby.

It would cry through the night and was constantly lost in one room or another.

Each and every one of us would fight as to who could love the cat the most.

Lydia took the little cat to the vet to be spayed and it died during the operation. “You poor children,” she had added, “nothing seemed to go right.”

…

Lydia’s second stillborn baby was born a year later.

My appendix ruptured just before my mother went into labour so I was oblivious of the fact that we were in the same hospital at the same time. I was in 187

the children’s ward. My mother did not visit me until the day after the operation when she was wheeled in a chair by one of the nurses to the ward in her pale pink Swiss voile nightgown and matching dressing gown. Her labour was unexpected; the baby was not more than twenty-four weeks old.

In Sydney around the table in the house in Bronte after the baby’s funeral, Lydia explained how the tear to her cervix prevented her from holding a baby to full term. And this tear was not even factored into the second pregnancy. When she went into labour, at twenty-four weeks, while she was at the hospital waiting for me to come out of the operating theatre, she was rushed into the theatre herself where her obstetrician sewed up her cervix, refusing to believe the baby’s birth was imminent, insisting this procedure would support the baby until full term. In between contractions, she pleaded with the anaesthetist, a friend of the family, to believe that she was in labour and to stop the doctor from sewing her up. Her friend agreed with her but was powerless.

She had to do as she was instructed.

They sewed up my mother’s cervix while her uterus continued to contract. The pain only increased until an hour later when the doctor admitted she was in labour and my mother was rushed back to theatre where they removed the stitches. She delivered a baby who was perfect although not strong enough to have withstood the trauma of the operation and the anaesthetic.

I didn’t know any of this.

When she told me the stories of her babies, her fingers tapped the top of the table as if she was striking the same chord on a piano again and again. She was still angry that her obstetrician ignored her when she said she was in 188

labour. Her tears welled but did not release. “The stars fell from my eyes,” she said. I have never heard my mother use this expression before and in my own dazed state, when I heard her say these words, I understood how profoundly impossible it is to accept the loss of a baby, for her, for me, for anyone.

He was what my mother referred to as one of the boy’s club—doctors my father had known since he was at University. This doctor lived in our suburb of

Brisbane. His children attended the same school as we did. My mother would run into his wife while she was shopping, or at swimming carnivals. They would be invited to the same dinner parties. The weekend before Lydia went into labour his own young son had drowned in the dam of the country property of a friend, the only son amongst five girls. Lydia could understand his despair but she still cannot understand why he was allowed to elect to work through his grief, which, she felt, clouded his judgement. And somehow the fact that her baby died was all connected to what she viewed as a system that supported men and ignored women.

No one could have imagined at what level she needed the baby to live.

Lydia would have approached this pregnancy with the expectation that this baby would have healed the painful loss of the first baby. This baby would have made her feel it was not her fault, that there was not something wrong with her. “I couldn’t afford to think about it,” she said when I asked her why she didn’t do something about it.

Ovid talks of the birth of Hercules in Book IX of Metamorphosis.

Hercules’ mother, Alcmena, was in labour for seven days and seven nights. Her impossible ordeal was a punishment by the goddess Juno who suspected her husband had fathered Hercules. As Alcmena’s labour continued, the pain was 189

more and more unbearable. Her screams kept the women of the village awake.

They prayed to Juno who refused to listen.

Instead, she sent her acolyte, the goddess Lucina, to sit outside

Alcmena’s house with her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, her sex snapped shut, murmuring spells and charms to prevent Hercules’ birth. When poor Alcmena could not take any more, her faithful and loving servant Galanthis took matters into her own hands. She went outside and told Lucina how wonderful it was that Alcmena had just given birth to a beautiful boy. The goddess was so shocked, so taken unawares, that she uncrossed her legs and in that very moment, Hercules was born. Lucina was so furious when she discovered Galanthis had tricked her that she transformed poor Galanthis, with her red hair and cheek, into a weasel that could only give birth through her mouth.

When Alcmena told the story of Hercules’ terrible birth tears fell from her eyes. And like my mother, the memory of her pain was as fresh as if it had just happened. I listened to my mother and watched her try to say her difficult words and noticed her fingers wipe the corner of her eye whenever a tear had started to form. I told Lydia that I was so sorry she had experienced all of this on her own. I was sorry that we were too young to know how to help. How hard she herself must be finding these days after my baby died. And I was able to say that I was so glad she was there with me for the baby’s funeral and after. I was so sorry that my own ordeal had stirred the memory of her loss and pain.

There is a temple on the walk from the Meguro Railway Station in Tokyo down the steep decline towards the Meguro Gajoen—a multi-storeyed building devoted to weddings—with a wooden golden Buddha. Locked into a corner 190

adjacent to the steep street is a large statue of Jizō, a Japanese deity who is believed to ease the suffering of those in hell and who guards the health and success of the living. Behind him are little Jizō figurines that are also found buried in hillsides and throughout the forests in Japan. This deity guards the children who have died before their parents. More recently he has been assigned the task of protecting the souls of miscarried, aborted and stillborn babies. Some of these small Jizō figures wear bibs and red crocheted baby’s hats. Little bottles of juice and milk have been placed at the feet of the large statue of Jizō.

I was in Japan just before I was pregnant with Nina and after the other implantations that had not survived. When I discovered the temple I felt a profound sense of relief that perhaps those babies of mine that had not survived were here, in Japan, being nurtured and cared for along with all the zillions of others. Three women came into the temple forecourt. One of these women rolled through the stone prayer scroll until she found her prayer. Another wrote on a tiny piece of paper and placed this in the letterbox that was beside the large Jizō. The third woman stood back and waited for her friends. They took less than three minutes and then regrouped and chatted with each other and walked down the street towards the wedding centre.

We left Nina’s ashes at the crematorium. We were told it was going to take some time before we could collect them. They asked us not to forget. Many people find it too difficult to collect the remains of relatives and leave them at the crematorium. I wasn’t sure what we would do with her ashes. Will wanted to dig her into the garden of the Bronte house and plant flowers over her. But this garden bed is in shade for most of the day. Nothing grows there. I wanted to 191

place her ashes somewhere neutral, and grow a tree above. I thought about a pink Cassia but this tree has to be planted somewhere warmer than Sydney, otherwise it won’t flower. The garden in the Bronte house is too cold. I don’t want her to remain in the house where she died. I want her to be outside this, somewhere else, although I don’t know where.

…

Lydia knew about pink Cassias. She’d say, “They need the heat, they need the sun, they have deep roots,” and she would advise me where I could plant this tree. If you walked around the garden in the house in Underwood

Street with her, late in the afternoon before dinner, she would recite the names of plants as she hosed them or snapped off their broken branches or removed their dead flowers. She’d tell their stories—about how this one flowered so beautifully or that grubs had attacked that one as she picked a snail off a leaf and crushed it on the path.

Before she started to cook dinner and just before my father would come home, Lydia would stand with the hose in her hand and talk to you about whatever it was that concerned you. She would lament the fact that the cats had broken off a delicate sapling she was nurturing in the undergrowth. As she hosed, the plants bobbed in the spray and when they straightened their stems 192

and lifted their tips as though in gratitude, she would move a little to the left or the right and the action would be repeated. And playing close, or walking beside her, I learnt the names of her plants. Remembering them was one way I could show her my love.

My mother’s garden in Underwood Street was the heart of the house: the purple flowers of the thunbergia creeper that grew on the tennis wire between our house and our neighbours, the perfume of the quisqualis creeper behind the old garage, the vine with the gidi-gidi beads from New Guinea, the heavy fruit of the tamarillo tree, the red flowering ixora, the yellow allamanda creeper, the schotia tree whose nectar made the parrots drunk, the hedge of azaleas whose pinks and whites transformed the garden when they flowered, the dogwood and philadelphus, the solandra vine with its monstrous yellow flowers that were shaped like a chalice, the pale pink datura, the mussaenda with its flowers that looked like white leaves, the cinnamon tree, the camellia lutchuensis which I later discovered is a species from which tea is made, the coffee tree, the long pods that hung from the vanilla vine that grew on the old wooden fence behind the sand pit, that all grew and died and regrew. The garden was both never the same and always the same.

As many plants as she had inherited, she found and propagated others herself, some taken from cuttings she had slipped into the country from Papua

New Guinea or from North Queensland. It had always been a woman’s garden, first planted by old Mrs Pigeon from whom my father bought the house. She was a horticulturalist and worked in the old Botanical Gardens when they used to be in the curve of the Brisbane River by the old University. Mrs Pigeon was possibly the origin of many of the rare plants in the garden—like the Gingko 193

tree, the only one I ever saw in Brisbane then, whose golden leaves transformed the garden in autumn.

My mother towered above most of the plants—except perhaps an unruly philadelphus and the Gingko tree. In those days she towered over us all. As much as I associate the garden with my mother, my father would equally take pleasure walking there in the early morning, his head bowed looking at the ground and his hands intertwined behind his back escaping the noise of breakfast to think through the day ahead and draft papers he was writing in his head. He would start from the back stairs and slowly circumnavigate the garden beds and come inside when we had left to go to school.

The garden had pathways that led to a number of areas defined by their different personalities. It was more diverse than it was enormous, with areas of the garden determined by the colour of their flowers. In one section the flowers were all white, in another, red and pink and in another were subtle shifts of green. To cover the back fence, Lydia planted a tabernaemontana, a dark green shrub with small white flowers that resembled wheels which slowly grew into a tree that emitted a rich perfume when it flowered. In August the westerly winds would clear the leaves from the undergrowth that spiralled and twisted in eddies before they dispersed all over the grass for us rake up into piles.

There were one or two areas of the garden my mother left alone—the tangle behind the old garage where the quisqualis creeper and the gidi-gidi vine, with its hard nut orange-red beads, were impossibly entwined. We sometimes hid here. This small area was the breeding ground of the mosquitoes that hovered throughout summer. When, many years later, I found the platelet-red flower of the quisqualis in Papua New Guinea, India, the 194

Philippines, and Guatemala, I picked one flower and placed its long base inside another just as I had as a child. Chains of the flowers would sit around our necks until the most fragile movement would break them.

My father would always come between my mother and her garden at the end of summer when she would ask him to trim the thunbergia creeper that had swallowed the tall tennis wire fence that bordered our house and the neighbours’. He would begin zealously in the morning, dressed in his shorts and sandshoes, and by eleven or so he had practically taken the creeper back to its roots. When my mother saw the naked tennis wire she would be so upset and then angry. He did this every year, and every year she asked him to trim the creeper. And every year the thunbergia covered the tennis wire and threatened their marriage.

Whenever I found one or another of my mother’s plants in Sri Lanka, in

Panama, in the Philippines, in the Dominican Republic, in Singapore, in India, in

Japan, in Thailand, in Java, in Haiti, in Cairo, I would return to the garden in

Underwood Street. I had thought my mother’s garden was the centre of the world but really it was the reverse. Someone had seen the world and transplanted it there.

…

195

My father preferred gardens with clean swept pathways and mass plantings of a single species—the opposite of my mother’s jumble of colour and scent, of height and leaf. My father extolled the beauty of large Botanical

Gardens. During the time we spent in London, before we returned to Brisbane and bought the house in Underwood Street, he would take us for walks around

Regent’s Park and Kensington Gardens, Kew, and the Chelsea Physic Garden.

There are several photographs of us—my father (having just set the self-timer) holding a faintly sea-sick-looking baby in his arms, crouched in front of a bed of red canna lilies, grinning at the camera. My father loved gardens that were designed by men in the spirit of empire, who nailed the botanical names of trees to their trunks.

He would drive us around the gardens at the University of Queensland and around the gardens of the large asylums. When we passed through a town in Queensland that had an asylum—Goodna, Ipswich, Toowoomba—my father would turn off the road and drive us around the grounds. To a child, these places appeared to be vast self-contained mini-cities whose buildings edged the web of roads. The administration wings, the staff headquarters and the doctors’ houses were in slightly better shape than (and a distance from) the wards. The largest buildings in the center housed the laundry and kitchens that were close to the incinerator, as if they were the engine that drove the entire process.

There were ovals and a theatre where the patients used to put on dances and plays. For a child the buildings looked dark with recessed windows and verandas that contained deep pockets of shade or cast long shadows over the grounds in the late afternoon. 196

My mother spent her wedding night in one of the doctors’ houses in the

Goodna Asylum where my father was working as a medical registrar attending to the coughs and colds, the bruises and cuts of the inmates. She remembers hearing the screams of the patients as they were rounded up in the afternoon and herded back to the wards. “It was primeval,” she would say of their screams, as if she was suddenly hearing it again. “Like wild hurt animals.”

The gardens at the Goodna Asylum were the legacy of Dr. H.B. Ellerton, who, in his twenty-eight years as Superintendent from 1909, initiated the transformation of the site from bushland to a tamed and cultured landscape that included a cricket oval, a greenhouse that grew flowers for the wards (when wards had flowers) and seedlings for the gardens—and later a golf course for the doctors and staff. During Ellerton’s tenure more money was spent on the construction of the buildings and the development of the grounds than on psychiatric therapy. Ellerton believed that indolence was fatal, even for the mentally ill. The male patients were rewarded with the privilege of labouring on the cricket oval or in the gardens while the women earned the right to work in the kitchen and the laundry.

On these drives, we stayed in the car, at a small remove from the wards but close enough to fear that the madness was going to jump through the window and contaminate us. It was similar to the way I imagined that a twenty foot anaconda could slide out of the page of a book and crush me to death.

On these drives the patients were walking in the grounds. They moved slowly, if at all, or they sat on benches like wax figures, their uniform clothing old and worn. And then in every asylum there were women walking in circles, 197

always the women, always the circles. I saw these circles as the madness, no beginning, no end, no life, no death, round and round.

Our faces were glued to the windows as we drove around and around them while my father (who would not have even noticed they were there) would direct our attention to a circular garden bed bursting with polyanthus or marigolds, the dragon trees, the elms, oaks and poplars or the ficus trees that were so ragged they had grown beards.

There were never any lights on in the wards. My mother said that was because they were not allowed to be in the wards during the day. The bars on the windows were so thick you could never escape, or get back in if it was raining. Then, Lydia said, they would all huddle under the trees.

I came upon photographs of some of these women much later, in a gallery in Sydney. The photographer, Anne Ferran, had enlarged and cropped archival images of women from an asylum in Sydney so that you only saw their torsos, collar bones and hands. They all wore the same striped dresses with soft belts of the same fabric tied around their waists. Some wore cardigans with missing buttons. One woman had a small piece of twine tied to her buttonhole, its curls evidence of her continuous twisting. I imagined this was a sign of her continuous fear.

The original images were taken in the 1940s. At this time, in Queensland and throughout the asylums in Australia, thousands of women were committed for their consuming grief over the loss of sons and husbands in the war; so many that I often wondered what grief was considered normal. And once the women were there, they lost their clothes and were made to wear these stripes like prisoners. They were not treated—they were stored. It was called custodial 198

care. They lost their names, their claim to money, their rights, their families.

They could not object to the experimental treatments they were given—the lobotomies, the shock treatments, the insulin coma therapy, the trial medications, the baths, the periods of time spent in seclusion in small cells in the basement of the buildings.

I imagine that the women who walked around and around in circles were asserting their inviolability. The circles were the way the women closed off the world, closed out the world, and sorted out their fear and distress.

…

The only person who ever went to the rooftop terrace of the hotel in

Brisbane was one of the housekeeping staff. I only ever saw her wearing black.

She worked the afternoon shift and during her break, she came onto the terrace and smoked two cigarettes. Whoever she talked to on her phone either annoyed her, or amused her, I couldn’t tell. She’d slap her hand on her forehead, pace the length of the terrace waving her free arm wildly in the air or roll her head back laughing hysterically. When she finished her cigarette she stubbed the butt on the white gravel then bent down, picked it up and put in the pocket of her apron. 199

We talked when she occasionally serviced my room. She was studying post-war American literature at University which was why she usually worked the late shift. She practically forced her way into my room. And if I had turned the “Do not disturb” light on, she took no notice. She knocked until I answered and insisted, in a voice that exuded authority that my room needed to be serviced. I would feel better if I had clean sheets and fresh towels. Of course she was right. Everything would feel better with clean sheets. And I did want fresh sheets. So many weeks after the baby died clumps of blood were still falling out of me. It seemed to me that it was a wound that would not heal. My father would have had something to say about that. My mother would have reminded me that the bleeding goes on for ages. The blood had stained the bottom sheet. I wanted someone to remove the sheet but I was also embarrassed about the mess I had made which was why I didn’t want to let housekeeping in. I couldn’t be in the room when that happened in case the blood had seeped through the mattress protector and stained the mattress.

After the housekeeper wheeled her trolley in, she opened both the curtains behind the bed and along the long window that overlooked the rooftop terrace which was transformed from gloomy darkness to bright light. I was now in direct sightline of Georgia, the woman on the billboard. I caught myself thinking ill of her, deflecting her far-into-the-future gaze with poison. I wished some terrible misfortune would befall her such as they’d have to forfeit on the mortgage, or she’d lose her job, or someone close to her died. But the housekeeper, who was talking to me about a band she had seen, opened the window and my sour and rotten thoughts escaped from the room. The bed was 200

made. The bathroom was clean with fresh towels. When she had gone I closed the curtains and Georgia disappeared. I took a long and slow shower.

When my hair was clean, my body and hands were washed, fresh white sheets were on the bed—one corner neatly turned down—the room smelt different. I decided that I would get dressed into something more than a t-shirt and pyjama pants. Looking through my small bag with its inventory of black clothes, I discovered the journal I started to write in Bronte and the copy of

Ovid’s Metamorphoses that I take everywhere with me. Ovid knew about grief. I put Ovid on the bedside table. Then I dressed in black pants and a clean long sleeve black t-shirt.

I opened the journal at the page where I had drawn the horizontal line.

The line was an image of two times, before the baby and after. And I had to remember that this divide would have happened regardless of whether the baby had lived or not. If she had lived both of us would have been above that line and my life would have been full of her wants and her needs.

I felt the line was also a tightrope and felt the same terrible anxiety of the tightrope walker. So I turned a page and re-drew the same horizontal line. Just above I drew a second horizontal line, creating a buffer zone, or a corridor. It was a self-contained world with its own rules. It was the safest place to be. I was in there with all the women in the asylums and Hecuba whose grief, Ovid writes, saw her turn into a dog that whined and barked and no one could understand her.

I drew pages of lines and coloured them differently with soft coloured pencils that I found loose at the bottom of my travel bag. I felt I was living inside the drawings of the artist Agnes Martin, whose neat pages of lines run 201

horizontally and vertically or intersect into small boxes, one like the other, so they resemble maths notebooks. In her art it is the lines that matter. Agnes

Martin was writing texts without words but then, I felt I knew what she was saying.

When I did write words it was a list of things people said when they learnt the baby had died with a number indicating the number of times I could remember hearing this:

You could have so easily died x 6.

I’m so sorry x 23 at least.

You must feel awful x 11.

Have you tried meditation x 2, both times by Livia.

You should start running x 1, by Diana who runs marathons.

Are you seeing a counsellor x 9

What about trying yoga x 15.

Few people asked questions about who the baby looked like, Will or me.

Few people asked about the birth. Had they presumed that this was too difficult to talk about? I wondered if their fear of the subject contributed to the unbearable weight of her death.

I felt that perhaps it was wrong that Will and I were together. Was that why our baby died? Had our meeting, our marrying, broken some unknown taboo and were we being punished with barrenness? I met Will through my sister Ada. We had a history, Ada and I, where anything that I had, or was given, she wanted. When I had a birthday, or our parents came back from overseas and we were each given a gift, she would want what my mother had chosen to give me. Usually I acquiesced and just gave it to her. I rationalised 202

that if Ada wanted it, then I didn’t. This was the same with friends. If a friend came to play and Ada enticed them away by suggesting better games than I could think of—which she frequently did—they were welcome to go. They were no longer my friend. That was my rule. In turn, whatever it was that she had, I had no interest in.

Will’s brother was one of Ada’s many boyfriends. Even though Will lived in Sydney, his brother attended university with Ada in Brisbane. At that time

Eddie, Will’s brother, was always at the house in Underwood Street. When Will was visiting, he came too. Will said he was attracted to me at once. I asked him why. He said it was my thick and unruly hair. I found that surprising because of all the things about myself, I hate my hair the most. In the fortnight that Will was in Brisbane, he stopped by the house almost every day, on one pretext or another—which Ada interpreted as his having taken an interest in her. When he was at the house, he would ask where I was and seek me out. After he returned to Sydney, we wrote to each other. We wrote to each other for nine months.

Then I travelled to Sydney to see him and he took me to his Uncle’s house on the Hawkesbury River. That was where we fell in love.

When Ada discovered that we were friends, and then more than friends, she was furious. She went into my bedroom and threw all the books in my bookcase on the floor. She returned all the clothing of mine she had borrowed.

She refused to speak to me. She refused to eat at the same table as me. If she was in the room and I walked in, she turned her back and walked out. If I was so unlucky to catch her eyes, they would narrow and I presume she hoped they would turn me to stone. 203

I’ve often wondered if she cursed us. Was that the reason we have remained childless? Has Ada, who married a man with a very loud laugh and an impressive career, who manages her young daughter Finola while working full time as a barrister, whose life to me seems complete, wished me ill? Is all this happening to me because I am in a relationship with someone she considered was hers?

…

The hotel in Brisbane had a library in an alcove to one side of the lobby.

In reality it was a room with a bookshelf full of DVDs and a coffee table piled with glossy large hardcovers on cities like Rome and Paris and monographs of artists like Warhol and Rothko and Monet. On the top of one of these piles was a book on the Mexican architect Luis Barragon. I had seen a few of Barragon’s buildings in Mexico City. To compile a box of photographs of Barragon’s buildings was one of my first assignments for Rask. Between the garden and the living room in Barragon’s house there are shutters made of solid boards of wood. When the shutters were closed, a white cross of light bled through the gaps between the four panels. There was a photograph of this effect inside the book. I had taken an almost identical photograph. The sign on the coffee table said no large format books were to be removed from the library. 204

There was another woman in the library looking through the DVDs. Even though it was the afternoon she wore pyjamas. The seat of her pants was so rent you could see her grey cotton underpants. The pyjamas looked like she’d been wearing them from the time she began high school through to the end of her university years and she was still wearing them. I imagined the hotel was full of single lonely women like me, like the woman in her pyjamas, watching television, making meals by adding boiling water to tubs of noodles and eating them with chopsticks propped up on pillows while watching TV or answering emails, all of us in a small box on the same page.

…

My friend Freya, who lived on the other side of the river, never married.

She had no kids. She had plenty to talk about without mentioning babies. I phoned Freya to tell her I was in Brisbane. She was on her way to yoga, she said. “Do you want to come? It might be good for you.” After yoga she had to pick up her dry cleaning and have a shower. Then she was free. She suggested we meet at a new restaurant on Brunswick Street that wasn’t far from the hotel.

Nowhere is far in Brisbane. There are so many looping and crossing highways and ring roads that you can get anywhere in twenty minutes. 205

Just before night the photo labs, the mechanics’ workshops and electrical supply warehouses along the street were cast in darkness while the sky above, with its smattering of rain clouds was a deep blue. By the time I walked up the slow rise to the end of the street the sky was black. The commercial lots with large signs advertising land for sale could have been on the borderlands of any number of cities—Phoenix, Arizona or San Antonio, Texas or even the edges of

Tijuana.

At the top of the hill and around a corner were rows of traditional

Queensland wooden houses. The fronts were all level to the streets. The back of these houses would be high off the ground, supported on wooden stilts. You could see the river from the back. Pocket front gardens were stuffed full of poinciana, banana and pawpaw trees. Daisy bushes and plumbagos, ixoras, begonias, allamandas and morning glory creepers bulged out of picket fences.

The still air was scented with frangipani. Rectangles of light glowed from rooms inside houses where their occupants made dinner, ironed shirts, watched television, walked up and down hallways between one room and another in the middle of the end of the day.

The front door of one of the houses was open. A young boy who looked about eight or nine was walking down the long central hallway swinging his arms in an exaggerated manner. In one of the bedrooms fronting the street a teenage girl was sitting in front of a computer. Maybe she was doing her homework or chatting with friends or procrastinating by shopping on the internet while waiting for dinner. Her bed was neatly made.

A cloud covered the moon. Fruit bats circled in the air above and around me. They whooped their chaos through the humid night air. They shrieked and 206

squawked then disappeared into the mango trees and ficus at the back of the houses.

A dog, head down, walked into a circle of yellow light thrown by a street lamp.

I walked through New Farm Park, its beds of roses trimmed to stumps, then under the heavy branches of the poinciana trees that almost touched the footpath. On towards the river, past the ragged palms and leopard trees, at the end of the bus line and the ferry terminal, I sat down on a bench under a leopard tree. A bus pulled in.

Four people alighted. Three were young men. One, dressed in black like me pulled his arms through the shoulder straps of his backpack as he stepped down to the footpath. The other two men wore light coloured shirts and ties, suits without jackets. If I came and sat at the bus stop at this same time tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, I was sure those same men would walk off this same bus.

If I sat at the bus stop for one day I would find an entire world of everyday, one day the same as another day. My hours adrift from the normal world were full of grief and mindlessness, of madness and woe. When I heard the cry of a baby in one of the houses over the street my breasts began to swell and wanted to make milk even after the Dostinex that I had been given to suppress this.

The last person off the bus wore her hair in a beehive and so much jewellery—earrings, a necklace, bracelets and rings. Her skirt and matching jacket were made from a coarse silk printed with hydrangea flowers in blues and greens that you find on cushions. The skirt was so tight it constricted her 207

gait. I followed her to the Merthyr Road shops, close enough to smell her stale perfume. She disappeared into a delicatessen and came out a few minutes later with a roast chicken and container of roasted vegetables – potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin. She crossed the road and walked down Moreton Street.

A cat overtook me and jumped up amongst the crucifix orchids that were clinging to the small crevices of the rock face. Cars hummed past. Music escaped from a television.

…

The restaurant used to be an Indian Restaurant painted red and gold.

Now it was beige. Everything had been pared back. Its neutral and minimal décor created a sleek and expensive tone. The walls were padded with lengths of fabric framed in a pale wood, perhaps ash. Some fabric was brown; other pieces were ivory and beige, all without pattern but possessing a distinctive texture. The fabric masking the tongue and groove walls was probably there to soak up the sound. Although on this night, there were not many customers.

The plates on the table where a young couple were sitting were empty.

On the table beside them a woman wearing a blond wig was sipping from a glass of wine. Freya hadn’t arrived. I was seated at a round table on a platform in the window. The table could have seated six or even eight guests, although 208

there were only going to be the two of us. I watched the woman in the wig lift her wine glass to her lips, her little finger curled out from her hand like a pig’s tail. That mannerism annoyed me. Her wig annoyed me. Then I stood back and wondered what right I had to be critical of her. Perhaps she wore a wig because she was undergoing chemotherapy. Maybe she had come to the city from a remote area—Charleville or Emerald or Rubyvale or Mundubbera—to have treatment for a cancer. She may have had no one to dine with her, no friends or relatives. I felt sorry for her. Perhaps this was a celebration, her reward to herself for having survived that awful ordeal. Maybe her cancer was in remission. Maybe it was her birthday.

Her lipstick matched her nail polish too perfectly. Her fastidiously ironed blouse and rigid colour co-ordination seemed too considered. To me, she wore far too much make-up and a pair of earrings that one of my great-aunts would have worn.

I wished we were sat at the very back of the restaurant where no one could see us but at that point I was tired and didn’t really care. I wasn’t hungry anyway. I just wanted to go back to the hotel. It was obvious that we were put in the window so that whoever walked, or drove past could see the restaurant was open and people were eating there. The waiter, who in all probability was the owner, paced back and forth from the kitchen to the front door and onto the pavement like the tiger in the Singapore Zoo whose cage was way too small.

The tiger seemed to say, “Go and stare at someone else. I’m a hopeless case.”

Freya wrapped her arms around me. The first thing I thought Freya would say was, “Are you alright?” I had thought of the answer to this on my walk. I would say, “I’m doing as well as I can.” But Freya didn’t say this. She 209

said, “I’m so sorry about the baby.” When Freya spoke, I couldn’t reply because

I was diverting my thoughts. I imagined the woman from the delicatessen eating her roast chicken in front of the evening news. She was wearing her dressing gown, worn white Chenille. I pictured her with a chicken leg in one hand, and chicken grease all over her lips. She had no serviette so I imagined she wiped the sleeve of her dressing gown across her mouth, leaving a trail of grease.

Of all people I thought Freya would have known not to use those words.

When people say “I’m so sorry,” it immediately distances them from the reality of what you really feel. Of all people Freya was now on the other side.

“Let’s order some wine,” she said. She was ravenous and then talked too much to compensate for my silence. It allowed me the time I needed to take stock and tell myself that really, it was not that bad, I could cope with this. Freya ordered scallops and rabbit rillettes, grilled snapper and more side dishes than either of us could eat. She talked about the lives of various friends we had in common and friends of hers I had not met but whose lives I am familiar with because she is always talking about them. Freya recently had her kitchen renovated and talked about her oven for a long time. She also mentioned her stovetop, her new dishwasher, two new cookbooks and five desserts she loved at the moment.

“How’s Will coping with everything?” she asked, to which I answered that

I didn’t really know. That was a lie. I couldn’t tell her that things had been difficult between us. That I didn’t even let him know I had booked into the hotel in The Valley. I couldn’t tell her that I had trouble sorting out my feelings. Or that

I couldn’t talk to Will about how I felt. Or that I suspected his life would be better if I wasn’t around. She gets on very well with Will. I couldn’t tell her that I had 210

doubts about staying in the marriage. I didn’t really answer her at all which was probably why she changed the subject and talked about Bali.

“Why don’t you take a holiday, just the two of you? You could go to

Thailand, or Bali, somewhere where it’s warm. People are always happy when the weather is warm and they’re close to water.” Freya had recently returned from a holiday in Bali so she was in a position to know, she said. We talked about the best hotel to stay in and what to eat. Freya had talked too quickly about Will and the steps Will and I needed to take to achieve harmony. Anyway,

Will had just started a new film and wouldn’t have time to go away for ages. I went to the bathroom.

When I went into the toilet, the woman in the blond wig was standing in front of the mirror re-applying more foundation to what I discerned, under the neon light, to be the shadow of a beard. Our eyes locked and I smiled at her.

When I came out of the cubicle she was still there, attending to her face as if she had been waiting for me. As I washed my hands in the other basin I told her

I liked her earrings (which I actually thought were over-the-top). She smiled back rather patronisingly as she redrew the outline of her lips with a lip crayon.

Her smile stayed on as she opened her handbag, and put her make-up back and snapped it shut. Before she finished, she pushed a little bit of hair back into place then walked out the bathroom with her shoulders back, her head high.

Her gender was seamless. It was true. She looked more like a woman than I ever had, or wanted to. I felt betrayed and confused about my gender.

Even though I suspect she thought I looked ungainly, sloppy, we had more in common than she would have thought. My hardened, milkless breasts, my emptied, broken womb, we were, both of us, unable to bear children. And I 211

wondered whether she wanted a womb. Was that part of her woman? Her appearance was so self-assured. Mine was not. I wasn’t sure who I was.

When I returned from the bathroom the woman in the wig had paid her bill. Her heady gardenia perfume lingered as she walked out of the restaurant.

Compared to her, both Freya and I looked slovenly and unkempt. After describing my encounter with the woman in the bathroom, Freya thought I had over analysed the situation. She also remarked on the woman’s daisy shaped clip-on earrings and her shoes. Freya thought I had over-imagined her back story. Besides, Freya added, she may have come to the restaurant for the food.

“Why aren’t you staying with Lydia?” Freya asked. I told her I was going to stay with her but not just yet. I had intended to go straight there; half expecting that she would be able to make things right like she had when I was a young girl. But I also knew that I had to sort this out myself. There I was, after I had given birth to my own child, wanting to reach back under her skin.

Freya talked about own mother whose forgetfulness had recently been diagnosed as the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease. Freya was pragmatic.

Recently, she had begun inspecting residential nursing homes.

At the last home she inspected, which cared for people with advanced dementia, there had been women sitting on chairs in the morning sun nursing dolls. Freya said the staff gave the women dolls. It was something to do with their hands. It passed the time. To rock a baby calmed them down. But at meal times the women became the babies. They were strapped into chairs with bibs tied behind their necks and spoon-fed pureed food that fell out of the side of their mouths. The nurses sat by them and scooped the food back in. She was having difficulty seeing her mother in this context. 212

I asked her what she was doing at work. “Well I’m not sure you want me to talk about that,” she had said but I insisted. Freya worked for the government, in the health department, for whom she was preparing a report about coronial inquests. “You would not believe what goes on there,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not going to tell you.” I mentioned that I didn’t want to know but she told me anyway. Freya talked about Project Sunshine, which, as far as she knew, had stopped. It was a secret partnership between certain State Governments, coroners, hospitals and the Atomic Energy Commission in the United States and Melbourne.

It sounded bright and optimistic but Project Sunshine concerned the theft of stillborn babies for radiation experiments. Babies, without the consent of their parents, were secretly sent to laboratories in the United States or Melbourne financed by the Atomic Energy Commission, where their bones and tissue were radiated with Strontium-90 and Cesium 137. Even after the babies were cremated, levels of radioactivity were measured from their ashes. Sometimes only parts of the dead babies, such as legs or arms, were sent to America. One of Freya’s complainants was traumatised when she discovered, at the burial of her stillborn daughter, her legs had been severed. The woman was not given an explanation and nor had they asked her consent.

Freya asked me if I knew that coroners were not required to get permission to perform an autopsy. She was currently looking into laws governing the rights of bodies. She suspected it was a small step from performing an autopsy where you remove an organ and forget to replace it to then severing an arm or a leg. 213

During the Cold War the performance of the radiation tests on stolen babies and their body parts was considered an honourable contribution to the better understanding of the effects of radiation on the population. They gathered bones and bodies of more than 1,500 babies from the United Kingdom,

Canada, Hong Kong, South America, India and Australia in secret. The practice began in the 1950s but in reality, Freya told me, continued into the 1980s, long after the original study on Strontium-90 was published in Science magazine in

1957 (which made no reference to how the specimens were gathered). “Can you believe it was called Project Sunshine?” she asked me.

While she was speaking, I realised this could so easily have been the fate of my mother’s babies. Lydia had said that after her babies were born they were taken away and that was the end of that. She was not told where they went, nor would she have ever known if something like this had happened. I felt grateful for the changes that had been made. How terrible it was to have taken the babies straight away. Even though I had found spending time with Nina difficult, Will had not. That he was able to spend as much time as he wanted with her had been so important. I thought about Roseanne and her kindness, her saying to us, “It is not the same for everyone.” And again, I felt sick when I thought of strangers cutting Nina up in the post mortem. I thought of the aloneness of Nina and all the other babies, and guilt that I had paid no attention to the reality of the post mortem that was performed on her body before she was cremated. Then it had been too hard.

214

…

All around me in the plane other passengers were sleeping. Delia, beside me, was snoring. It was difficult to make yourself comfortable in the confined space of an aeroplane seat. Delia had turned herself into a spear, angled from the middle of her chair in a straight line with her feet wedged under the seat in front. As she slept, her head tossed from side to side and her neat and well groomed bob became disordered. All of us in the dark cabin had become insular. We had no choice. The constant noise from the engine, the darkness and enclosure engendered a sense of being in a capsule. So far above the earth the security of being contained can only be deceptive; terrible things can happen to an aircraft. I sat and waited, transported from night to day, from cold to hot, from far to nearer. The dull phosphorescence of electronic screens radiated from random seats in a haphazard pattern. The rest of the cabin was hushed and sleeping. The flight attendants laughed in soft tones in the servery closest to where I was sitting from which the smell of brewed coffee floated down the aisle.

Sometimes, in the hotel room in Brisbane, all I could think about was coffee. The desire for coffee would wake me up. For a long time, I ordered coffee from room service but it was always cold by the time it reached the room, and never strong enough. It was this addiction more than anything else that catapulted me out of the numbness and darkness of those days. If I had left the window open at night, in the morning the aroma of coffee would drift in. In the 215

streets surrounding the hotel the scent of coffee roasting grew stronger and led me around the corner to the street behind the hotel. When I first stepped outside the hotel room in Brisbane in search of coffee the sky was bruised with the promise of rain. The hills and houses surrounding the hotel, the corrugated iron roofs of the buildings adjacent to the hotel glowed silver and gold. And the palm trees on the top of the hill were luminous. The soil in the garden bed on the footpath outside the hotel released its earthy, slightly mouldy breath in anticipation of the rain.

I followed other women and some men to a wooden warehouse where the smell of coffee was most intense. A giant coffee roaster occupied one window, turning over and over like a cement truck. The queue stretched from the counter just inside the building, around the corner and past the bus stop. I waited in line. Other people, with coffee in their hands, got on the bus to the city. Those people who got off joined the queue. Behind the counter were two coffee machines and in between a woman took your money, wrote the order on a small piece of paper, and despatched this alternately to one machine then the other. Each of the baristas worked quickly, turning the silver handle of the group, thumping the old beans into a plumbing pipe, grinding, filling, levelling fresh beans and while these coffees were being pressed through the machine, the baristas were ahead, emptying and loading another group, onto the next orders.

By the time I was inside the hotel, the full symphony of the rain began. I opened the curtain and watched single drops intermittently explode on the white gravel of the roof terrace. Then faster and faster, more and more drops fell and bounced like a chorus dancing. The rain fell in waves; at its peak it sounded like 216

applause. Then it would fade to silence. That morning in Brisbane, the rain thrashed the frangipanis in their pots, pulling the last of their leaves off the branches. And after, the mina birds descended onto the roof terrace and sipped from the puddles, opened their wings and stomped through the wet then flew away.

The best place to listen to the rain pelt the corrugated iron roof of the house in Underwood Street was in bed, under the sheets. Outside, the world seemed hostile, dangerous, frightening. In January and February when it was raining we were forced to play under the house.

Our traditional Queensland house was built up off the ground on stilts.

The pale grey and white painted house was a different world to the dark void underneath. The dark under house was invisible while the house itself, foregrounded by the wide stairs in the center, appeared to throw itself onto the street. Nowadays they convert these dark under-spaces into light and bright teenage bedrooms, media rooms, laundries, children’s entertaining areas.

Then, the cavernous area helped to keep the house cool.

There were no rooms under the house, just an open space divided by the stumps which held the house up. We made our own divisions by segmenting off areas between the stumps. This area was full of my father’s unfinished projects such as the table he built for a model railway. Half of the area under the house was room height and flat and cemented. The other half was loose dirt that sloped up so that if you crouched under the breakfast room you could spy on various members of the family and follow them as they walked above you on the wooden floor. You could catch snatches of conversations. 217

In the years we lived at Underwood Street three of my father’s patients used to sleep under the house. They would arrive after dark and stay until morning. There were no fences, no gates, no locks. There was no furniture, only the mess left after games had ended. It was not a comfortable place. My sister

Setta, whose bedroom was next to my parents’ directly above the gravelled area, used to lie awake late at night as still as a corpse listening as they walked about below her on the loose gravel, or coughed and murmured and knocked over toys. When she talked about the noises she heard as she lay in bed she was encouraged to believe the sounds were in her imagination. Some mornings

Setta would go downstairs and find someone had tidied up her dolls and arranged them in descending height on the ledge between the gravel and the dirt. Some would be missing. It was not until sometime after my father died, when Setta was in her twenties, that Lydia spoke about the women under the house. It was only then that Setta discovered the sounds she heard were based on fact and not fiction. “Oh yes,” Lydia said with her surely-you-must- have known-that expression. As if it was the most normal thing in the world.

Perhaps if the women who would stay under the house were suicidal, just knowing my father was close by prevented them from doing anything reckless. And, if my father sensed it, perhaps he may have casually mentioned how easy it was to walk off the street to the area under the house, so casually that they believed he was extending an invitation to them. If my mother knew this was going on, she kept it secret. And all their grief, their obsessive behaviours, their fear and terror, hurled as though snakes from the hair of one of the gorgons, crawled up to the dirt in the dark space under the kitchen, burrowed deep inside it and may still loom over that space. 218

Occasionally my father employed patients to do light work around the house. Many of his patients were never able to have the opportunity of a full time job. Work around our house gave them a sense of accomplishment and a sense of purpose.

One of these patients was a man called Bernard whose job was to maintain the garden in the front of the house. My father had said that Bernard chopped his wife’s head off with an axe. I don’t know if it was true or not but when my father told us this I admit I was extremely concerned—although my father said that I had nothing to fear unless I was married to him. He was shy man and obsessively neat, which my father thought was an excellent quality for a gardener to have. We were told that after he chopped his wife’s head off, he wiped all the blood away and dressed her torso in clean clothes. Bernard arrived for work while we were waking up, his hair plastered to his scalp in a uniform he designed himself, his name embroidered over the right chest pocket in a cursive font. You would hear him scratching the old leaves from under the

Schotia tree and the plumbagos and azaleas along the side of the house with a rake. He swept the leaves into piles and set them on fire.

Bernard built a garden bed for my father, outside his study window in the front of the house, from pieces of purple porphyry stone that looked, when he had finished, like a mouth of jagged and sharpened teeth. Lydia had no objections to Bernard’s contribution to the front garden but he was not allowed to work in the back garden.

219

…

Two hours before Singapore the cabin lights were switched on. The sun streamed through the windows. As passengers woke the sounds of noses blown and throats cleared punctured the silence. It would be the middle of the afternoon in Singapore. Inside the cabin, it was the early morning. We had passed over countries and seas. We had travelled through time and lost a day and were now only a short distance from Singapore, somewhere over the Bay of Bengal 1,000 miles away. On the screen before me the flight route was a green line that sliced a quarter of the world.

The slap and crash of trays taken out of the warming ovens and transferred to the serving trolleys was coming out of the servery as the flight attendants prepared breakfast. The air outside was so clear you could see the ocean far below. Passengers were now queuing in the aisle for the bathroom.

They stood half asleep. One woman pressed creases out of her skirt with her hands. On the walk back to their seats from the bathroom you could smell toothpaste. Other passengers were standing in the aisle next to their seats stretching their arms above their heads and twisting their torsos. Delia opened her eyes and closed them again. I put my hand on the window. The subzero air outside chilled my palm.

As the service trolley came closer, Delia sat up, adjusted the incline of her seat and dropped down the meal tray in time for the flight attendant to place her breakfast there. This consisted of orange juice, yoghurt, a bread roll and a 220

hot meal in the aluminium container. The attendant passed a tray over to me.

The hot breakfast comprised an omelette, two sausage-shaped hash browns, some spinach and tomato. I was hungry and ate everything, even the yoghurt and the bread roll. Delia looked at her watch, and then at the screen which was tuned to the flight route. Local time was three-thirty. She opened the cover of the hot breakfast and then closed it. As soon as she got off the plane, she’d be going to dinner, she told me. But she ate the bread roll.

When the breakfast trays had been collected a stillness and silence settled over the cabin. From behind, I heard the cry of a baby. Delia was still sipping coffee. The green line of the flight route on the screen in front of her had moved by half an inch. Without even looking at me she said, “I lost a daughter too.”

Delia told the story of Irina, her middle child, who died in a car accident when she was fourteen. The car had been driven by Irina’s closest friend’s father. There was ice on the road; the car skidded and hit a tree. The father and her friend survived, only just, but Irina was not wearing a safety belt and hit her head on the door and died.

“How did you find out?” I asked. She received a phone call from the police. The strange thing was, Delia said, she knew something terrible had happened even before the phone rang. She suddenly felt very cold, and her skin was covered in goose bumps. She turned around and saw a flash of light move through the kitchen, where she was. Later she wondered if the flash of light happened at the moment when her daughter died. When the phone rang, she made her husband answer because she knew that they were going to be told bad news. It had taken a long time to pry Irina from the wreckage of the car. 221

Irina was put in an ambulance and taken to Vancouver. She died on the way.

Irina’s friend’s father had multiple breaks and internal bleeding but he recovered after months in hospital. Irina’s friend was still in a coma. Delia didn’t know how she was now. She has moved away from any direct involvement with them. She had to do that for her own peace of mind, she told me. “But there’s never closure, no matter how far ahead in time you are.”

When Delia saw the body of her daughter she looked at peace. Her face was soft and her expression was calm, Delia told me. “Lucky for her, it had been quick. She was unconscious when they got her away from the car. She wouldn’t have suffered for very long.”

I asked her if she sued the father. “What was the point?” Delia said, “It wouldn’t bring her back. It was an accident and unfortunately, it was our child who was affected. But that’s not to say I wasn’t angry. I was angry for a long, long time.” This was fifteen years ago now. Irina would be twenty-nine. “Not one day passes without me thinking of her. Not one day,” Delia told me. I understood what she was talking about.

Delia’s came from a family of Spiritualists. Delia herself was sceptical but at the moment Irina died, and again after the funeral, she frequently felt Irina’s presence in the house. “I’d talk to her. And that was such a comfort. She still comes back, though not as often.” Delia told me that seeing her, knowing she was close, helped her to accept what had happened. Her death did not mean that Irina was not around, “It changed the terms,” Delia said. When her husband was dying in the hospital, Delia saw Irina there but her husband didn’t. I asked her if her late husband had also returned. “Not really, well no, when you think about it,” she told me. “His family were sceptics. They don’t believe in spirits. I 222

can understand that. It just wasn’t his style to return. He would have hated the idea that I sold the house and moved away.” “What about Irina?” I asked, “Oh she knows where I am,” was all she said.

“And your other children, how did they cope with their sister’s death?” I asked. “It was hard on them.” One reason, according to Delia, was because it took her such a long time to accept her daughter’s death. Carter went off the rails but he had been lucky that there was good pastoral care at his school, a fantastic counsellor he was comfortable talking to. She steered him back.

“Carter over compensated. He was determined to prove himself to us, to either make up for the loss of his sister or to get some attention.” Delia wasn’t sure which of these applied but she said the habit of hard work had paid off for him.

Her youngest daughter, Marley, went into her shell a bit. “Still there,” Delia told me. She was the daughter in Bologna doing her Masters in architectural theory.

Delia said it has taken a long time for each member of the family to find their way through Irina’s death. Roseanne at the hospital had said you have to take as much time as you need to feel all the sadness and you can’t get back until you have.

“After Irina died, I used to swim more than a hundred laps a day, seven days a week. Didn’t matter if it was snowing, if it was raining, or freezing, I’d drive to the pool and swim. In the water you don’t think, you just count and breathe and push through, lap after lap. That helped me more than anything else.” Will walked. Every day since Nina died, after he came home and we ate, however late, he’d walk for an hour or more. It was always the same walk, alongside the gully, down Hewlett Street, along the stretch of road that clings to the coastline, around Tamarama beach, and on to Bondi then up to the golf 223

course and back. He never asked me to go with him. And there I’d be, on my own again, hating the house.

…

Running away was selfish. I can see that now. And even though I was as alone in that hotel room in Brisbane as I had been in the Bronte house it was completely different. A hotel room is a neutral space. It holds no memories. I cannot think of the house without thinking of Nina, of fantasies for those days and weeks after she was born, of bathing her, of watching her kick her legs in the sun, of watching her grow, seeing her smile. But the truth is that this isn’t.

This was the house where she died, and that is so palpable that to survive her death I knew I had to leave. I could feel her loss as soon as the front door was opened.

There is a house in the United States where a family was slaughtered: the mother, the father, three children, the dog and the grandmother. It lay empty because no one would buy the house or even rent it because as soon as a potential renter or buyer walked through the door they sensed that something terrible happened there. The only solution was to bulldoze the house and leave the ground fallow in an attempt to dissipate those feelings and to enable the whole neighbourhood to heal. After enough time the vacant land was put on the 224

open market for a low price. Someone, with no idea about what happened there, and who was never told, built a new house and transformed the site. After they moved in, every member of the new owner’s family who slept under that roof had nightmares. After three years he sold the house.

And when I write this I am thinking of a house in the country in New

South Wales that was considered as a location for a film I was working on when

I was at Film School. The house was to have been the residence of a woman who had been outcast by society. This house was surrounded by dry and rolling grass, on the low side of a rise in the ground, a distance from any other dwelling—although there were several on the property. Long verandas covered sections of the house. It was always dark and the house had been vacant for a long time. The closer you walked to the house, the more you felt something was not right. And while no one could explain what this was each of us who inspected the site experienced the sensation that something ominous was trapped inside the rooms. Even though it was the best location, another house was found for the film. Some years later I met a person who lived in this area and I asked about the house. He told me that the farmer who lived there was imprisoned for repeatedly raping his daughter over a period of twelve years.

…

225

I preferred to be in a hotel. No one knew where I was until Will found me.

I had been there so long the management must have been frightened that I couldn’t afford to pay the bill. Then my mother called me. I asked her how she knew where I was. “Oh we all know where you are,” she said, referring to the hotel. “We’re leaving you alone.” We being herself and my sisters and anyone else who may have wanted to get in contact with me.

My mother suggested that if I had had enough of being in the hotel, I could come and stay with her. “No one will bother you. I won’t make any demands of you,” she said before she mentioned that she was having a small operation on her eye and actually needed someone to pick her up from the hospital and to stay with her for a few days.

I felt very guilty that I had not contacted her before this time but she didn’t seem to mind. “Can you come before Wednesday?” she said. The hotel bill had already consumed most of the money I had saved to buy a cot, the baby’s pram and clothes and was what I had intended to live on while I wasn’t working. I wouldn’t ask Will for the money to pay the hotel account, nor would I charge the hotel bill to our credit card, so she phoned at the perfect time.

At the reception desk, an older couple were checking out before me. I overheard the receptionist say, “It’s been great having you.” When the couple turned, I could tell, from the unsmiling expression on their faces that they did not believe her. Her tone was slightly patronising. She must have to say this phrase to all departing guests. After all, the hotel had only recently opened. Do we really talk to each other like that? But the truth is that we do – in cafes and restaurants. When it was my turn, as I was putting my credit card in my wallet, 226

the receptionist, in her high pitched voice, without even looking at me, said “It’s been great having you.” I thanked her and she seemed surprised.

…

Lydia lives close to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary on land the river had sculpted into the shape of a thumb. When the river floods many of the houses on the tip are under water. Perhaps that is why there are so many large tracts of open land close to the point. My mother’s house is on the high bank of the river, on a large block of land, above the flood line. A long solid brick wall with the numbers thirty-six painted next to the letterbox and the driveway are all you can see from the road. She lives by herself behind this fort-like barrier inside a circle of trees.

Unlike the house in Underwood Street there is no dark under-house. My mother’s new house is low to the ground. It was not built with wood but white rendered brick. The layout of the house is similar to many modern houses built in the 1960s and resembled the letter U. There are so many houses with a similar design in the hills in Los Angeles. Many have a swimming pool in the middle of the house but Lydia’s courtyard has large tubs of Bougainvillea. Their magenta and purple flowers are a counterpoint to the mute and often silver green of the trees above the river bank. From the front lawn, the house is 227

transparent. Through the panels of glass in the living room you can see through to the kitchen and the dining room at the back of the house. From the front you can also see the green chair that sits in a corner of Lydia’s bedroom.

Where the garden of my childhood was ordered and full of flowering trees and shrubs, Lydia’s current garden is its antithesis. There was less maintenance she had said when she was thinking about buying the property. A

University student comes once a week to rake the leaves and to collect the sheets of bark that constantly peel off the giant gums. My mother now spends more time looking at the garden than attending to it.

In spite of the many eucalyptus at the back, when my mother first occupied the house she planted other trees in the front garden she was sentimentally attached to. She planted a Gingko tree like the one left behind in

Underwood Street. Even though the Gingko grows slowly it is now a considerable size. When I arrived from the hotel, the last of its golden leaves were scattered over the front lawn and now the tree was bare you could see the alternate laddering of its branches. This arrangement had made it an easy tree to climb as a child. Lydia also planted five silver birch trees in a row to divide the driveway from the lawn. Close to the window is a persimmon tree heavy with fat orange fruit. In the late morning when the taxi pulled into her driveway the magpies were chatting high in the gums on the bank of the river, one voice at a time.

As I always do the moment I arrive home, I opened the fridge and stood there looking in. There was not much there—some eggs, some parsley, a lettuce and almost nothing in the pantry. Lydia made coffee. She laid two cups and saucers on the table and two slices of fruit cake. We drank the coffee at the 228

kitchen table overlooking the river as Lydia filled me in on the recent work she had done to the roof, on the constant problem she had with leaves and gutters, news of what my sisters and their children were up to and then the details about her eye operation. In the central courtyard two brown doves were pecking at seed she had sprinkled on the stones earlier in the day. When they had their fill, a pigeon that had been patiently waiting on a nearby branch swooped down and pecked at what remained.

She asked about Will, even though, I presumed, she knew more about what he was doing than I did. She was in daily contact with him. I told her I thought he was managing better than I was. “But you are alright, you two, aren’t you?” she said. And her saying that made me aware of the uncertainty that had crept into my feelings about the relationship since Nina died. “You’ve got to stand by each other through this,” she said, as she had stood by my father, by all of us, through everything. “You can’t lose him too.”

After we finished having coffee I put my bag in the second bedroom that is off a corner of the living room. I noticed that not one of the ornaments displayed along the low cabinet that stretched from one end of the living room to the other, were from the house in Underwood Street—the ceramic love birds from China, the celadon plates, the porcelain vases in blue and white, lacquer boxes.

I opened my suitcase and took my toiletries to the bathroom. I put Ovid and my journal on the side table beside the other books my mother thought I might find interesting—Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart amongst them. I lay on the bed; the high blue winter sky filled the window. Three birds flew across. I watched them turn and fly west until they were small dots in the 229

sky. Nina would have been twelve weeks old that very day. My instinct was to shut the door and close the world out. I opened Ovid randomly at Book IV where he compares the underworld to the ocean that fills with water from all the rivers of the world and never overflows. No matter how many mortal souls come to the underworld, there is room for them all. I could not accommodate my baby in this metaphor with its pulsing flow and thrash of waves, nor could I see her as part of the turbulent stormy sea. I imagined her somewhere dark, and calm, with no tidal response. More like deep space than the ocean. In deep space there is so much room the dead will never bump into each other. In deep space the dead drift further and further away in time.

My mother called out that dinner was ready. The tone of her voice reminded me of those days at Underwood Street when we were at school, locked away in our rooms, studying for exams. If you were studying, you were excused from helping set the table, or shelling the peas or clearing up. The call

“Dinner’s ready” was followed by doors slamming and my father’s heavy steps as he walked from his study through my parents’ bedroom, down the hallway past the living room and dining room. We ate at the long table in the breakfast room, our father at the head, furthest from the kitchen. That call, “Dinner’s ready,” more than anything, was symptomatic of her nurture, and there I was, an adult woman, hiding away in my room, waiting for her love. After my father died, she sold all three dining room tables. She said that she’d had enough of cooking. She wasn’t that person anymore. In the end, when we were less often home, when my father locked himself in his study more and more, cooking the family’s dinner had been a thankless and solitary task. 230

Lydia cooked lamb cutlets, a mountain of mashed potato, carrots and runner beans. We grew up eating lamb cutlets. And my mother grew up eating lamb cutlets. Her mother cooked this meal throughout her life—although my grandmother’s beans were so overcooked they turned grey and if she served peas they looked as shriveled as used bullets. My mother’s aunts, Thora and

Adelaide, ate this all their lives probably because their mother Gloria cooked this for dinner while they were growing up—the runner beans were picked off the vine that covered the water tank. My mother loves lamb cutlets, although now she doesn’t dip them in egg and breadcrumbs but grills them and eats them while they are still pink. And she doesn’t overcook the vegetables.

Sometimes she serves salad.

We sat at the Danish rosewood dining table overlooking the river. Her knife scraped the porcelain as she cut the meat from the bone. In the direction of the river, a pied currawong called out Jeff’rey, over and over like a mother calling her son in for the night. I chewed on steamed carrots and beans.

Afterwards we ate vanilla and elderberry ice cream in bowls that had belonged to my grandmother. The smell of lamb fat hung around the kitchen. This same smell would drift out of every house late in the early evening on the walk from the bus stop, down Healey Street all the way to Underwood Street.

I wiped down Lydia’s kitchen benches, wiped the stove top, the back of the stove and the range hood trying to erase the smell of lamb fat. Lydia poured herself a whiskey and asked if I would like to watch an episode of Maigret. My mother loves this television series. When I thought about it, my mother’s taste in books and television programs was dominated by the ghoulish and murder.

There are always programs in this genre on television. She watches them all 231

then she watches the reruns even though she can remember every detail of the story.

Over dinner we circumnavigated any direct conversation about grief, grieving, depression and what lay ahead for Will and me, although I knew these subjects were rolling about in her head. She suggested that long walks might help. They helped Will. “Push yourself to do something positive each day,” was what Roseanne had said before I was discharged from the hospital. We watched “Maigret and the Mad Woman.” It looked unrealistic, as though we were watching something on a stage. A neatly dressed older woman was dismissed as crazy by Maigret’s colleagues at the station when she turned up and insisted that someone was trying to kill her. In the next scene she was found dead. Maigret’s plodding, almost melancholic manner was annoying but my mother was sympathetic to his psychopathology and she loved the fact that

Maigret’s wife cooked him elaborate gourmet meals. The killer turned out to be a relative. After, we watched the news and she went to bed.

…

Under the cloud cover, as the plane neared Singapore, horizontal drops of rain hit the window like birds dropping from the sky. The cabin was quiet, everyone in their seat, waiting. When the cold high air hit the hot air of the 232

tropics, the cabin rattled and the plane bounced up and down. Lower, when the plane had steadied we were a small speck in the grey that had subsumed the sky, the harbor and the river. And out of the amorphous grey mass a tract of dark green land became visible, so dark it was almost black. As the plane dropped closer to the ground, the jungle gave way to red tiled roofs and cleared stretches of grass at the same time as the plane hit the runway. On the long ferry to Terminal 2, Delia said she hoped everything would go well for me. I wished her a happy time in Singapore. I asked if she still swam. “Yes, still,” she answered telling me Carter’s club had a fifty meter pool. She didn’t often get the opportunity to swim in an outdoor pool in Canada. There is nothing better than swimming in the rain, I told her and she just smiled. “Good luck with everything,” she said. Her hair was now brushed in place, her travel tote and duty free shopping bags were in one fist, her passport and landing card in the other. Delia looked ahead to the exit; her expression suggested she was preparing herself for what was ahead—her son Carter and the stranger who was to be a new member of her family.

I waited until almost everyone had alighted before I picked up my bag and walked off the plane into the long bridge where listless airport workers in bright green fluorescent jackets were propped against the wall, waiting for the last of the passengers to exit. The bridge fed into a river of passengers, from our plane and other planes that must have recently landed, all of us moving in the direction of the immigration hall or the central plaza. Those on foot walked twice as fast as those on the motorised conveyor belt. I followed. Outside the

Transit Lounge in Terminal 2 a number of us were just standing there, in a 233

daze. I was told to proceed to Terminal 3 to be issued with the new boarding pass.

The plane from Zurich had made up for its late departure and I had several hours to wait until my flight departed. On the way to the Skytrain that connected this terminal with Terminal 3, I passed a news agency and bookstore and went in to look at magazines and new release fiction. I used to dread occasions when I was forced to wait and had nothing to read. Even worse were times I travelled with books that, for any number of reasons, were the wrong books, like the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that I took to Indonesia. The intense humidity, the abundance of vegetation, the haze from wood fires that sat on the horizon, the call to prayer that cut through the end of the day had made it difficult to entertain the grey and rainy streets of Victorian London. After

Nina died, I read Ovid or nothing at all. I found it had been easy all along to just sit.

When I work overseas for extended periods of time, finding the right books to take has been a perennial problem. Either I finished reading all the books I had taken with me, or I had taken the wrong books. This often happened in cities and provincial areas where there were no book stores, like

Belize where even the majority of the books in the library had been destroyed by Hurricane Hattie. They were so waterlogged and the print so faded that they had to be thrown away. Then, my only option was the shelf behind the bar in the

Fort George Hotel where a handful of books left by guests were stored. I found myself reading James Bond novels, among them Doctor No and Live and Let

Die, and Jacqueline Suzann’s Valley of the Dolls. There were three copies on the shelf behind the bar left by separate people whose names were written in 234

ink on the first page. Belize is a humid country and all the books were swollen, their edges rippled as if they had fallen in the bath.

The terminal at Changi has a pale green carpet and an orchid garden displaying hundreds of purple Singapore orchids beside a pond where red and golden koi carp stare you in the eye as you pass. Throughout the many arms of the terminal tropical vegetation, such as palm trees, in pots are positioned on both sides of the electronic walkways as though, if you are not leaving the airport, the tropics are being brought to you. Outside, the rain turned the tarmac into a mirror that reflected the light of the end of the day. This was the first time I had been in daylight since I left Cairo, although it would only be daylight for a couple more hours.

...

Gradually, after Nina died, I became nocturnal. I maintained this pattern while I stayed in the hotel room in The Valley. But I knew that as soon as I went to stay with my mother, she would expect me to keep her hours. At first this was difficult. I would prepare for bed at a reasonable hour and as hard as I tried to sleep, I could not. I stared at the stars from my mother’s kitchen window, the night so clear it was as if the sky had been washed. I flicked through Ovid looking for something that interested me but often didn’t move beyond one 235

paragraph. I turned off the light. Through the wide glass window the moonlight washed the leaves outside with milk.

As my mother slept, the trees sounded flustered. They howled and hollered as the wind teased their leaves. In bed I could hear sheets of bark peel from the old gum by the river, savagely, like a rape. The bamboo close to the river whined like it was hurt. Each time it creaked it woke the dogs that started barking. A car passed by.

I got out of bed and wandered around my mother’s dark house then sat at her desk and turned on the small light intending to write in my journal. I did not write any words. Instead, I thought about space. On a new page I drew more lines that became shapes that I coloured in. I could see that the shapes I had drawn were similar to the floor plan of an apartment I stayed in once in

Hamburg. It had high ceilings. The walls were white and there were large windows that looked over water. There was so much clear light. This is the sort of space you find in Europe, never in Australia. Looking around my mother’s space it seemed that she had reinvented herself in this house. That may not have been true. Perhaps I was misreading her. Perhaps she simply became the woman she always was, before she met my father, before she was a mother. I wondered whether you do that. Would I be different after Nina? Was I already different? Would I be able to go back into the marriage? Had I already left?

I thought about cocoons. We had silkworms when we lived in Underwood

Street. They weren’t mine, although I contributed to their upkeep. The silkworms were kept in an old shoebox of my mother’s with air holes punctured in the lid.

They were under Minnie’s bed so perhaps they were hers. There were only two or three Mulberry trees in our neighbourhood. The closest tree was two streets 236

away. I suspect many other children were keeping silkworms at the same time because the trees were always surrounded by a circle of kids looking up and negotiating between themselves whose turn it was steal the leaves and risk being caught. Mrs Hanson was a grumpy woman who would stand watch behind the lattice of her front veranda and if she saw you climbing up the tree she’d open the front door and yell at you to stop stealing her leaves. We’d all scream and run away. She would say, “I’ll cut that tree down,” because when the branches were pulled down as we yanked the leaves off, the berries would spread over the ground and stain her footpath.

Silkworms were neither neat animals nor responsive pets. When they were fattening up for their long pupa phase we stuffed the shoebox with so many leaves many of them died. Their black pellet droppings littered the bottom of the box. And when they spun their cocoons they turned into a white nut of threads. I can vaguely remember the small and unattractive moths that emerged. Many of them were trapped and died. We found their carcases on the bottom of the box. And there is still an enormous gap between the messy vacated cocoons and a piece of silk.

…

237

There was an old photograph of Will lodged into one of the pages at the back of my journal. I know it’s a photo of Will but you can’t tell because he’s swimming underwater and his body is broken into several pieces by the refraction of the water. The sharp angles of the sun give the impression that the body under the water was fluid. After Will and I started a relationship, Lydia remarked that he seemed a solid young man.

I took the photograph in a swimming pool on the island of Isla Mujeres off the east coast of Mexico. We were on our way to Belize from where he would return to Sydney and I would stay to work on a film. We had taken the ferry to the island on impulse; having gone because of the mythical evocations conjured by its name which meant island of women. We had no idea where to stay. On the walk from the ferry stop, the hotel, on the eastern most point of the Island, rising seven or eight floors above the landscape, seemed by far the smartest hotel.

As we walked towards that point, we seemed to be getting further away.

Will wanted to keep walking. I found us a cab. The walls surrounding reception were painted in the strong pinks and purples of bougainvillea, the same colours painted on the courtyard walls of the Mexican architect Luis Barragan’s house in

Mexico City.

On the bay side of the hotel was a swimming pool nestled close to a white wall. Behind the wall, the hotel was perched on a headland. I found so many blues – the clean aqua of the pool, the muddy blue of the sea and the white blue of the sky. We spent an entire afternoon photographing each other under the aqua water of the swimming pool. 238

The lobby was full of young American couples. They wore a variety of resort clothes – matching tracksuits, polo shirts, tennis whites, strapless summer dresses.

Our hotel room was sparsely furnished with enormous windows that faced the eastern coast. There were no curtains. When I opened the window the crash of waves was so loud. We loved this. We lay on the bed and made love and slept with the wild sea.

When we woke it was night. Outside the window, against the rocks and the sea, a muddy yellow light uncovered a second pool. Long black shapes moved in straight lines until they hit an edge and changed direction.

We dressed and went to the dining room where the waiter, wearing black tie, sat us on the outer perimeter of the room. The young couples had showered and changed, the women were heavily made-up. Their muted whispers fell onto the cold terrazzo. After the meal we walked to the back of the hotel to look for the second pool. The wind skimmed the spray from the waves and covered us.

The long shapes we had seen from our room were sharks, many varieties of sharks, small, long, infants all swimming close to the surface of an aquarium.

A kitchen hand came with a tray of fish guts and heads from the restaurant and threw them into the water. The sharks attacked the food with frenzy. As they ravaged the scraps, the kitchen hand pointed to each shark and told us the names he had given them. We watched until the sharks had finished eating and the water was again calm. The sea coated us in salt. After, we made love again and slept. 239

In the early morning, before breakfast, we went back to the shark pool.

The sharks were still, dark shapes sleeping on the floor of the pool. The sea crashed against the rocks. We thought we were very happy.

…

When I could not sleep at my mother’s house I watched television with the sound turned low. The hard shadowless sun of the Kenyan plains bled into the room where a male and a female ranger were driving over the dirt roads of a wildlife park, as anxious as parents, looking for the orphaned lion cub, Elsa, in the film Born Free. It was the first time she had been left in the wild. When they arrived at the tree where they had dropped her off the night before, she was still in the same position where they had left her only she was dehydrated and nearly dead. I continued to watch until the final scene, a year later, when Elsa returned to this same tree from the wild where she was reunited with her human carers, her three young cubs trailed in the rear. After Nina died, my sister Ada had suggested we could start breeding dogs. At the time, I thought that was incredibly insensitive but now I could see what she meant.

After the film I fell into a deep sleep on the sofa until the laugh of a kookaburra set off all the other birds that live between my mother’s place on the river and the aviaries at Lone Pine. The rainbow lorikeets, magpies, 240

currawongs, mina birds, swamphens, butcherbirds and ibis, ducks, honeyeaters, bee-eaters, spoonbills, galahs, and cockatoos made so much noise it was impossible to sleep. It is no wonder my mother wakes early.

I heard her crashing around the kitchen, piling and clanging plates together as she emptied the dishwasher. I heard the whistle of the kettle and its pour as she made her pot of tea. I looked at the singular self-sufficiency with which she moved unnoticed around the kitchen in her celadon coloured robe and velvet slippers. I am sure she was not even conscious of her actions.

“You’re up early,” she said when she saw me. She was always cheery in the morning. I made myself coffee but couldn’t eat. It seemed absurdly early, the day so long ahead. “Have you any plans for the day,” she asked, and her asking required me to find a plan. “I might go for a walk,” I told her. “Take one of my jackets. It’s cold out.”

…

Inside the jacket I felt the wind’s chill on my wrists and pulled the sleeves as far down as they would go. All around me the wind was unnerving the trees.

Sometimes when Rask phoned the Danish wind could be heard roaring all the way to Australia. He never minded the wind, he said, he was inside and the wind was outside. On film sets, the wind made everyone snarl. I hate the wind 241

but I didn’t dare return home to my mother’s house for fear that she would send me out again. I covered my ears with a scarf and pulled my jacket tight across my chest. Walking up to Jesmond Road and down towards the tip of the peninsula, the wind was behind me.

A Moreton Bay fig stood alone on the side of a paddock laid with horse jumps made of logs of varying heights. The roots that began on the long branches had worked their way down and anchored into the soil in such a haphazard way they looked like intestines. The area between the roots and the trunk was so dark it was as though night was waiting there for the day to finish.

Thicker roots had wrapped themselves around the main trunk, like the tendons in the neck of a screaming woman.

This same species of ficus are strangling the stone buildings at Angkor

Wat like pythons coiled around prey. Each year the ficus planted in the parkland between Lady Macquarie’s Chair and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in

Sydney appear to be moving, their subterranean roots, like the arms of the living dead, can be seen pushing out of the embankment. Not so long ago, passing one of these trees beside the Botanical Gardens in Sydney where a branch had been removed, it looked as though it had grown an ear.

In the open ground just past the horse paddock a small mongrel dog was beside me. Its coat was coarsely clumped white fur, part Jack Russell, part something else. I took no notice of the dog as I walked towards the end of the peninsula but the less notice I took, the more the dog seemed to insist that I pay it attention. Even when I told the dog it might as well go back to where it came; it wagged its short tail and looked up at me. I wondered how long it had been following me. 242

The dog walked beside me down Jesmond Road, though most of the time it rushed ahead and sat, waiting for me to catch up. If I was too far behind the dog occupied himself by lifting its leg and spraying every tree, every shoot.

He had a patient nature, I could see that.

Then somewhere close to a creek crossing the dog disappeared under the lantana and I thought he had left me. Further on, past the creek, I found him again running across open stretches of land. His four paws lifted off the ground as though he was flying and barking in mid-air, he looked over to see if I was watching. I had mellowed in my feelings towards the dog. I even found myself throwing him a stick that he never failed to catch and drop at my feet. We played fetch all the way down to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary which was not yet open. The wind tossed dead leaves across the empty car park. The dog didn’t seem to mind the wind at all.

He led me to the bank of the river and into a stand of trees, so many trees, so many branches, their leaves shaking and howling like wailing women.

Most of the trees were the same eucalyptus, their trunks straight and tall, their restless branches crooked like an elbow joint. One tree after another swayed back and forth, their feet firmly tethered to the ground. While my own emotions had been tidily put away it seemed they had escaped and were surrounding me and the roar and wail that yowled from tree to tree had sprung from somewhere deep inside me.

Further down the road a number of older gums looked more uncannily human. Where the branches were attached to the trunk they had grown rolls of wrinkles that made me think of the parched folds of skin near the elbow or knee of thin old men and women. 243

The apex of the suburb gave way to streets that were named after Italian

Renaissance artists – Botticelli, Michelangelo, Donatello. The dog marched into the front of one house after another with such familiarity that, several times, I thought this must be where he lived but each time the dog headed straight for water and took a drink. In one garden a woman was winding up her hose after she had watered a row of stucco pots planted with hardy desert plants, succulents and cactus. A plaster Mexican with a red sombrero was asleep under an old frangipani tree with knotted limbs like swollen arthritic joints. “Hello

Pilot,” she said to the dog as he drank from her giant clam shell full of water before he wandered out again.

At one point on the long walk back to my mother’s Pilot just disappeared and returned at the junction of her street. “Where did you go?” I asked him, his little tail wagging all the way to Lydia’s house. We said our goodbyes outside her fence. My mother was having her one coffee and I told her about the wind, about the dog, “Oh Pilot! Everyone knows Pilot,” she said and rolled her eyes then walked into the kitchen. I took a glass of water and drank this looking at the brown water of the river as it cut through the land, moving towards the mouth.

…

244

When my mother left for the hospital I was still asleep. The day was winter grey. The damaging wind had severed branches that lay scattered across the front lawn. I wondered why she hadn’t woken me and asked me to drive her there, which I had offered to do the night before. She had left a note in the kitchen telling me where she was and that the hospital would phone when it was time to collect her. The remainder of her note was practical, the keys were in the bowl, don’t forget to lock the courtyard doors and the door to the garage, the coffee was in a jar in the freezer. It had taken Lydia a long time, after my father died, to learn to live on her own. At first, she found being a widow difficult because it changed the way people related to her. When this had first happened and she had need of friends to fill her days she found, after having devoted so many years of her life to the family, that this was not easy. “You have to work at friendship,” she had said, “And I never had time.” And when she had time many of her old friends had moved on, or moved overseas. Some were in the early stages of dementia. Colleagues of my father’s, who constituted the core of their social circle, were too busy for her or were no longer around, having retired to

Noosa or Buderim on the Sunshine Coast.

She said once the house was tidied, and the shopping done, there was little else to do. I suggested games. Other women she knew played Bridge or

Mahjong but she loathed cards, she said, which reminded her of my father’s parents’ bridge luncheons. She could have played tennis or golf which plenty of women her age do and where they find companionship and a sense of purpose but she disliked sports.

I suggested she join a book club which she tried but Lydia had found it hard to break the group’s very established bonds. She’d say she can’t stand 245

those pushy women and nor did she like the books the group was reading. And there had been too much emphasis on the repast—the orange cakes and citron tarts, the chicken sandwiches made for the occasion by a caterer, the hot mini quiches. Lydia thought these women were more interested in the morning tea than the books. She even spied one of the women in the group turning over a plate to check whether the brand was “good enough,” as Lydia would say, which translated as Christofle, Limogue, Royal Doulton, Wedgwood or Villaroy and Boch. The truth was probably that Lydia was very shy and I suspect she found these women intimidating.

Recently though, she had worked as a volunteer at the hospital, in the ward with the premature babies. She often sat with the babies when their parents had gone home for the night, and stroked their little fingers and delicate limbs which, they have discovered, helped the babies grow. One or two of these babies died, she told me. And then Nina died and she stopped going altogether.

Life with five daughters had been full and suddenly, there was nothing to do. She talked about how bit by bit everything was being taken from her. Is this what happens to the lives of women with no children? Was this going to happen to me? Was I going to become overly anxious about small things, like an unwiped kitchen bench top?

When the days are long nothing helps, according to Lydia, not reading, not even the television. When she complains that out of a hundred stations, there is never anything new to watch I feel guilty for living so far from her, for working so far away. But two of my sisters live in Brisbane, Livia and Ada. Livia has two children and Ada has Finola who is eighteen months old. Both of my sisters work full time. Before Livia’s children started school my mother spent two 246

days a week looking after her grandchildren at their home. But even Finola goes to day care four days a week now. She still comes to Lydia’s house one day a week, although this was suspended while I was there. When my nieces and nephews come to Lydia’s they tip the books and toys out on the rugs in the living room. After they have gone, Lydia picks everything up, just as she had done for us and puts them away. She washes those toys that were covered in spittle and food and throws out those that were broken. I cannot remember a time when my mother was not surrounded by children and babies.

…

When I opened the cupboard in my bedroom, looking for her boxes of photographs (which was how I intended to spend my time while I waited for the hospital to phone to say she was ready to pick up) tall piles of Lydia’s murder mysteries, political thrillers and crime stories tumbled out.

Behind the books were several boxes of shoes. Lydia has been hiding her shoes at the back of the cupboard since we lived at Underwood Street—

Salvatore Ferragamo and Sergio Rossi shoes in particular. When she was angry with my father for spending money on something extravagant (in her opinion) such as flying lessons, she would go shopping and buy shoes which she would hide at the back of the wardrobe. When she first wore them, my 247

father might comment, “Are they new shoes?” to which she could truthfully reply that she’d had them for ages.

On the shelf above the clothing racks, running the length of the cupboard, were all sorts of things I thought Lydia had thrown out when she moved—school magazines from all the years I, and my sisters, were in secondary school, trophies and pennants and ribbons we received from winning races at swimming and athletics, basketball and piano competitions. There were boxes with Lladró and Royal Copenhagen porcelain figurines wrapped in tissue that had sat on the sideboard in the dining room. I found the Waterford crystal jug that was a wedding present that Lydia filled with her special fruit cocktail of pineapple and orange juice, sliced lemon and orange wedges, fresh mint and ice blocks when people came to lunch on Sundays. My father’s pewter beer tankards were there, which surprised me. I thought she had gotten rid of them after he died. Further back were piles of my father’s papers, journals in which his articles were published, unfinished research, loose papers and a variety of psychiatric journals.

Beside my father’s academic output were Lydia’s old Letts’ appointment diaries, a week to a page, dating back from the first years of her marriage. No one in the family has ever seen them but everything is in there: every time we went to the dentist, the doctor, dinner invitations, lunch invitations, swimming carnivals, ballet recitals, school holidays, addresses of summer rentals. I opened one of the diaries of a year during which she had gone to Rome and

Paris. She had written the name of a restaurant inside the space for the

Tuesday they ate there and a particular dish that she had enjoyed. She also made notes of trees and plants she liked and comments on the colour of their 248

flowers, their height, whether they needed sun, or shade in the space for days when nothing much seemed to have been going on. Whenever someone had a birthday, their name was written on that date, or if a child was born, she made a record of this beside the name of the child. If I started at the first diary, I would be able to reconstruct the minutiae of family life that I thought was lost forever.

I often suggested that she should write about her childhood but her reply was that she wasn’t interested in returning there, as though it was a place that you could enter, and depart. Another time when I asked this same question she replied that she didn’t need to; it was inside her cupboards. The photographs, however, were not.

…

I waited most of the day for the hospital to phone. I wasn’t game to leave the house in case the hospital phoned and no one was there to pick up the phone. She would feel that I’d let her down. And she was always there when I needed her. The morning was very slow. I noticed that from a certain point in her living room the gum trees in distant gardens created a gentle and undulating line which made me think of pathways in Europe. I turned on the television and felt guilty. Lydia always had a thing about watching television during the day.

There were only chat shows and so I turned it off. Then I made a sandwich for 249

lunch and ate looking over the river. The sky outside looked cold. I wondered if birds felt the cold as much as I did.

Lydia had stored some of the boxes of photographs in the cupboards behind the kitchen. This was where I found an antique wicker pram that she must have bought fairly recently, certainly after we had left home and after my father died. Inside the pram was a porcelain Victorian era doll dressed in a starched white cotton apron over a pale blue cotton dress. She wore a bonnet made of cotton and lace under which hung two muddy orange plaits. There were two red circles for her rosy cheeks and disproportionately dark lips. The doll was obviously a collector’s piece and I couldn’t imagine why my mother had bought it. I wondered if the doll reminded her of a doll she had as a child, or perhaps it was a doll she always wanted but was never given. The doll was all alone and stored in the dark, like those unnourished babies she finds in her dreams.

I took down several boxes of photographs and spread them over the dining table. Near the top of the first box was the photo of my year group at kindergarten. There I am with my short hair, my fringe cut on an angle, sitting in the center of the front row cradling a doll whose hair had been shaved off. I can see from the expression on my face that I was in the middle of a very serious imaginary game where I was a mother. At this time my sister Minnie would have been the baby of the family and so I was acting out the scenes that were going on at home. New babies were such a novelty. I was probably quite bossy or demonstrative because I was sitting in the middle of the first row. And at the same time, I wonder what it means that the poor doll was so maimed. 250

When Will and I began to live together, the subject of children, our children, was alluded to in odd ways, sometimes mockingly when one or another would say to each other, “I wouldn’t do that in front of the children.”

These words presumed that children were part of our future life but we never talked about having children, not until I failed to conceive. I don’t remember either of us having an honest discussion about how children would have changed the way we lived. And in saying that, we must have wanted things to change. And while neither of us tackled the idea of children we would discuss the pragmatics of conception as if we were scientists.

Children were presumed. We were married, we had made a decision to stay with each other through whatever life presented, although honestly, while you may think this, you are never prepared when something that challenges this actually happens. Now, on my own, thinking back on the way we presumed so much I didn’t ever really know what Will thought at all. I don’t even know if he wanted children. We just negotiated our way from one misadventure to the next.

Now that having children has proved to be something I can’t do, I wonder if this is so bad for him. Did he really want children? Did I? Or did I just presume that children were part of the picture we had created of our life together?

Further down the box was a photograph taken of me in Surabaya on the first overseas film I worked on. If you put the young child next to the young woman, there was no way you would recognise they are the same person. The woman in Indonesia is not posing for the camera; she is lost in the moment of work. She looks confident, almost invincible. I placed this photo between the pages of my journal to remind myself that I am also her. There are so many parts of me that Will knows nothing about. He wouldn’t know who that woman 251

was, I was sure of that. And that working woman is nowhere near me. I feel so unsure of my way back, so lost and confused because on the other side of

Nina’s death are all sorts of lives I had not yet lived.

…

The surgery phoned at the end of the day. I drove along the river to

Indooroopilly and then along Coronation Drive to the hospital but took the wrong turn because the direction of the roads had changed since I last drove this way.

I ended up past the Grammar Schools and the Centenary Pool with its references to the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer. That was why I loved that building because whenever I drove past, or went swimming there, I was in

Brazil.

Lydia was waiting outside the main entrance to the hospital in Herston, her handbag was crooked over her elbow, while she clenched the plastic bag with her medication—gauze, eye drops and antibiotics—in her hand. I pulled up beside her. She opened the car door, settled herself in the passenger seat, and secured her seatbelt. “That was quick,” she said. Then with her one good eye she turned and looked me up and down. “Were you wearing that yesterday?” she said. I replied that these clothes were fresh. Everything I brought with me 252

was black. “That’s something you could do, go into the city and buy some new clothes.”

Every so often on the drive home she would breathe deeply as though she was moving through a wave of pain. At home she changed into her night gown. I helped her apply the antiseptic drops and brought her a glass of water and painkillers then sat on the chair beside her bed until she fell asleep.

Later, I made up a tray of bits and pieces that constituted a meal and brought this in to her with a glass of scotch whisky. She propped herself up on pillows and balanced the tray on her lap while I sat beside her. She only managed to take a couple of mouthfuls of food, though she drank the whiskey and then gave back the tray. She complained of pain. The operation had promised to be trouble free. I asked her if she needed me to take her to emergency. No, she could wait until the morning. I phoned the day surgery. No one was there. The answer machine deferred to the main switchboard of the hospital. I propped her up with more pillows, so there would be less pressure on her eye. The nurse at the hospital said to bring her in if her pain was unbearable but there wasn’t much they could do until the specialists arrived the following morning.

As she slept, she clenched her fists. I felt helpless. She looked fragile and small. Even though I knew she was having this operation I had no idea about what to do and truthfully had made little effort to learn about what was required. Because she was a nurse, she had a better understanding of illness and all through our lives we had always deferred to her knowledge and experience. Lydia supported me through all the IVF procedures by listening to my constant anxiety that the eggs would not take, and was there to listen to me 253

crying through the phone when they did not. She listened to my continual fears that something would happen during my pregnancy with Nina and she was there when it did. She was there for the birth, for the funeral and the difficult first days after. In all that time, not once did I think about her feelings, I had been so self-obsessed.

But now I can picture my mother outside the delivery room at the hospital, sitting on her own on the uncomfortable green leather banquette near the lift waiting until it was over. I wanted her to be in the delivery room and then

I didn’t want her there. I’m sure, given a choice, she was happy enough to be outside. Perhaps, if she was in the delivery room, our situation would have brought back the sickening memories of the births of her own stillborn babies.

Perhaps those memories were very close as she sat outside. She waited while I was in surgery once before, when I was having my appendix removed. And while waiting felt the pains of labour. That was the second stillborn baby. She was only twenty-four weeks. If Nina’s birth had stirred up those memories, she hid it well, the same way I was now hiding my own fear for her wellbeing. I felt helpless before my mother. She must have felt this too, standing aside and watching on that terrible day Nina died. There was nothing to do but look on helplessly.

At the beginning of Book II Ovid describes the death of Phaëton and the fate of his poor sisters whose grief after his death divided and elongated their limbs until they snaked under the surface of the cold ground where they took root. Was Phaёton his mother Clymenē’s favourite child? Was Clymenē so destroyed by this grief that her daughters realised they had not only lost their brother but their mother as well? Ovid describes the sister’s grief that hardened 254

their bodies into wood and bark, and entangled their arms and hair into branches and leaves. And when their mother tried to save them by breaking off branches (which she believed would retrieve them) her daughters’ blood oozed from the cuts and they cried out, “Stop hurting us, mother,” which of course was the last thing she intended to do.

As they gradually turned into trees the sisters lost their voices, their beating hearts, their beauty and their minds while Clymenē could only stand by and watch until she could no longer distinguish one daughter from the other.

She was still listening to their silence and when the wind shook and rustled their leaves, she believed it was her daughters trying to talk to her.

Was Ovid insinuating that it was the mother who was being punished? I wondered what for. Was it for loving her son and encouraging him to believe he could gain the trust of his work-obsessed father, the Sun? But the Sun had no time to be involved in the boy’s life. Ovid describes his responsibilities, as the creator of time, as all consuming. When the Sun steered his chariot from the east to the west across the sky he fashioned the minutes and hours, the days and months, the years and centuries. Phaёton, an impetuous and self-assured adolescent, hell bent on winning his father’s approval, asked his father if he could ride his father’s chariot across the sky, a task well beyond him, beyond the ability of any mortal. And Phaëton did not even consider the consequence that his failure could ruin the world, which it did.

On the ascent, Phaëton loosened his reins and the chariot lost its way and fire engulfed the world. The woods burned. Cities were destroyed. Nations were reduced to ash. I wondered if Ovid was talking about the eclipse of the sun which is as frightening a phenomenon. During a solar eclipse the birds roost. 255

The sea turns red and the sky is crimson. The world is cast into a terrible melancholy when the moon sweeps across the surface of the earth. In both events, all was put right.

Only Clymenē, his mother, was left alone to endure the progressive assault of time. And did she worry about her daughters on those days when the rain thrashed the trees, the wind tossing their tips this way and that, ripping branches, shredding bark? I believe none of that touched those girls. They were safely protected inside the heart of the tree. And though I couldn’t forget the metamorphosis of those sisters, I wondered also if he was talking about how mothers can only stand helplessly on the side and watch the pain and heartbreak their children endure. Poor Clymenē. Poor Lydia.

…

Lydia was no better in the morning. I went into the kitchen and phoned the day surgery. When the nurse answered the phone she was so unhelpful,

“Oh dear! Does she have the prescribed medication?” She did. “Does she have the antibiotic drops? Has she been taking painkillers?” The nurse went away from the phone to consult with someone. When she returned she instructed my mother to return to the hospital in the afternoon, when her doctor would have time to see her in emergency. 256

I prepared her breakfast and brought it to her in bed and watched my mother spoon yoghurt and berries into her mouth. When she finished I took the tray back to the kitchen and returned with fresh gauze to cover her weeping eye and painkillers. She drifted in and out of sleep for most of the morning. I stayed in the kitchen and watched the wind blow the gums leaves across the courtyard, at the river pulling towards the north, where we had grown up. After that I looked in the fridge, and then in the pantry. There was nothing to eat.

…

My mother usually goes to the small group of shops on Moggill Road.

“Look out for dogs when you reverse,” she called out when she heard the clinking sound of her car keys.

To buy food, prepare food, was something I had not done since I left

Sydney; even then, I avoided doing this. Now, it was something of a novelty.

And at the same time I was given the responsibility of caring for my mother. In the hotel room I ate one meal a day—usually scrambled eggs with spinach from room service. The rest of the time I ate from the mini-bar. If I went outside the hotel it was usually for coffee and now I had assumed my mother’s mantle, proving I was completely capable of the task. I just needed to be asked.

257

I bought eggs, spinach and sourdough bread, some lamb chops for my mother, two small pieces of beef eye fillet. There was no olive oil, vinegar or pickled dill cucumbers in her pantry so I put these in my trolley as well as anchovies and organic artisanal pasta from Italy that was on special. This made me think I then needed to buy parmesan cheese. The shop also sold some

Brebis cheese, imported from the Pyrenees that I bought because it had travelled so far to get to Fig Tree Pocket. I bought purple carrots and aubergines because I liked their colour, blueberries, raspberries, Belgian

Chocolate, nougat, vanilla and more elderberry ice cream.

And tomatoes, lots of tomatoes, cluster tomatoes attached to the vine. I brought them to my nose to see if they exuded that remarkable scent which I associate with Aunt Neva in Toowoomba. When we were sent to stay with her, every morning after breakfast, Ada, Livia and I were sent to Neva’s vegetable garden to report on the progress of the tomatoes. When we came back we were interrogated. What size were they? What colour were they? How many were red? Were they tight or loose on the stem? Could you smell them? She had said there was a specific smell that emanates from a ripe tomato. Over our stay, we watched the tomatoes change colour from green to red to the deep red when they were ripe. And when they were this colour the perfume released where it attaches to the vine is unforgettable. It was almost impossible to find the words to describe the very distinct perfume of a tomato on its vine but it is always a smell that I associate exclusively with Neva. We would one day tell her, “Yes we can smell them now,” then pester Neva to pick them because we could barely wait any longer. 258

Neva always said, “One more day. Give them one more day.” She knew when they would be ready because I suspect she had surveyed them for herself when she hosed the aisles of vegetables in the afternoon. Then one morning after we woke she would say it was time to pick the tomatoes. We did this with

Neva standing behind guiding us, reminding us to turn each tomato carefully at the stem.

The tomatoes went into Neva’s basket and were rushed into the kitchen and thinly sliced with the paring knife whose blade had worn so thin there was almost nothing left. The tomatoes were spread over freshly buttered bread, with a sprinkle of sugar for the acid and a pinch of salt and nothing ever tasted better than the first bite of those sandwiches, nothing in the world.

On the way back from the shops, behind a train of tourist buses on their way to Lone Pine, I saw Pilot on the side of the road, lying on his back using the bitumen to scratch himself. When I got home I made Lydia a tomato sandwich, in the best manner I could. I sprinkled a little sugar over the thinly sliced tomatoes and added a pinch of salt and put this between fat, crooked slices of sourdough which I took in to Lydia with a cup of tea and a small chunk of the

Brebis on a plate. They looked nothing like Neva’s sandwiches. “I’m not that keen on tomatoes, but thank you anyway,” she said.

…

259

Lydia was in pain. She stayed in bed until the later afternoon when it was time to return to the hospital. I sat close by while she showered and dressed in one of her immaculately ironed shirts, which she wore with a jacket and pants.

My mother always looked elegant and rarely steered beyond certain styles that she had rationalised suited her more than others, loose pieces she had combined for decades whose colours paid lip service to what was fashionable.

We sat silently in the emergency section of the hospital where an unattended older woman, lying on a stretcher in the corridor, was talking to herself. I noticed how frail my mother had become. She had no fear of dying, I could see that. She would meet that as it came and until then she would make herself busy, something she had forced herself to do after my father died.

When my mother’s name was called she disappeared behind the automatic doors that separated the waiting room from the consulting booths.

After she had left I felt a terrible anxiety that something was going to happen to her and that I would not be able to cope if it did. Then I worried that she might lose her sight. How would she cope? She spent all her time reading, or watching television, or looking at the river, the garden. What would she do?

The woman on the trolley began to recite details of meals she had eaten in her past. “Is the water on,” she said. “Denny’s coming over. He’s a big eater.

Better get more chops. Are the scones in the oven? Have you got the oxtail for the soup? Grace, pick some carrots. There’s too much salt on the lamb,” and she tried to spit the salt out of her mouth.

She talked about lamingtons and sandwiches and whether there was enough food to feed all the people she imagined in her mind. Lydia was gone 260

for a long time. A child and his mother were waiting nearby. I did not realise that

I was staring at the boy. It is a test, mothers and their children, but the older the child, the less difficult I find it to cope. The little boy stared back with an unengaged expression. His mother noticed and told me that her son had put a polystyrene ball from a bean bag into his ear which had to be vacuumed out. It was the third time this had happened.

When Lydia walked out of the doors of the emergency section of the hospital, her eye was covered in fresh gauze. She didn’t speak until we were in the car. It was peak hour. Lydia suggested we take one of the bypasses which confused me and I lost my bearings of the city’s geography. Each time I return to Brisbane there is an addition to the roads—a new freeway, a new by-pass.

On the drive back to Fig Tree Pocket Lydia told me the reason for her pain after her operation was because she had a condition that the doctor’s didn’t notice or factor into the operation. Now they understood what she suffered from it was easier to treat and she had been given a different type of eye drop and stronger painkillers. She also mentioned that her operation was not as successful as they’d hoped. It was going to take longer to heal. She was glad I was there, she said.

…

261

Lydia slept from the time we arrived home until the morning. She did not even stir when I brought her a tray of scrambled eggs and spinach. The moonlight recast the colours of the garden to the same ice greys and blues as the opening scene of Aliens that was on television. Sigourney Weaver was waking up after hibernating for 57 years. She had been floating through deep space. The scene was quiet, and this silence, the darkness of my mother’s house, the moving darkness of outer space made me feel uneasy. How terrifying it would be to find yourself floating away from earth in the endlessly expanding universe. Later Ridley found a young girl, Newt, whom she protected. In fact the film was all about mothers protecting their offspring. These mothers were ferocious and violent. Will was still in the editing suite at one in the morning. He thought he would be there all night. I asked if he was alone. His assistant, Claire, was also there. I told him I had been watching Aliens on television. It was one of his favourite films. “When are you coming home?” I didn’t want to be in Sydney. I didn’t want to be anywhere.

In the early morning Lydia was muttering confused and agitated words in her sleep. I rushed in, thinking something had gone wrong and she was in pain but she was only asleep. I stayed awake, listening for a signal that she needed me. She woke once and went to the bathroom, took some more pain killers and a glass of water and slept for the rest of the day and all through the night. A great deal of the time I sat beside her watching her sleep, carefully calibrating the rise of her diaphragm beneath her thin voile nightgown. I worried about what

I would do if she died.

262

…

The following morning Lydia was much better. She came into the kitchen as I was making her a pot of tea. While it was drawing she sprinkled bird seed on the floor of the courtyard for the doves that were waiting on the branch of a nearby tree. She threw a second handful off the courtyard for the wrens and later the crows and went back to bed. I brought her the tea and the newspaper which she opened and spread over the sheets. She had a patch over her sore eye. We spoke about whether there were any chores she wanted me to do but her house was so ordered and now we had food in the house it was unnecessary to leave. I had spoken about finding some of the boxes of photographs for looking inside. “I think there are some more up there,” she told me, nodding in the direction of the cupboards above the wardrobe in her bedroom. Even standing on my father’s green leather chair, I couldn’t reach or open them. I needed the wooden ladder from the laundry. At the edge of the cupboard was an old rectangular fish tank.

I asked her if she wanted me to throw out the fish tank, thinking she would not need it any more. “Don’t do that. You never know when one of the grandchildren might go through that fish phase.” I didn’t remember going through that fish phase but Lydia assured me that several of us had. The fish tank used to sit on a round table on the veranda in Underwood Street. Standing still, casting my memory back to that house, I formed an image of a small 263

square of sunlight on the surface of water on the side veranda, which may have been a memory of the fish tank. In the same memory I saw small red fish but I may have been thinking about other fish, somewhere else. Will’s aunt had an aquarium in her living room that was full of red fish. She sold her television and built an aquarium that was practically the size of a wall. At night, after she had washed up the dishes and cleaned the house, she pulled up her chair beside the wall of the aquarium and watched the fish. She was very stressed at that time. There were many small red fish in her aquarium but I don’t remember ever seeing sunlight on the water. After three years, the fish caught a virus and most of them died. She was not so stressed then so she dismantled the tank and bought a new flat screen television. Inside the fish tank in my mother’s cupboard was a ceramic deep sea diver lying face down. Beside the tank were two old flotation rings from the swimming pool at Underwood Street. They were so old they wouldn’t save anyone’s life. I called to her that the rings should be thrown away. Lydia thought they would come in handy in the future. “They’re rubber and not that thin plastic they use now.” I remembered they always leaked.

Behind the fish tank in the dark recesses of the cupboard were three cardboard boxes and a pile of large format books. I had to get a broom to push them forward before I could lift them down. I recognised the three boxes as those that had been stored under the house in Underwood Street, the very ones that disappeared after Lydia moved. She had looked for them for ages. Lydia thought the removalists must have thrown then out or lost them but instead, they must have put them high in her cupboard all that time ago. 264

As soon as the first box was opened, musty air burst into the room. The boxes were all that was left of my grandmother and her sisters Thora and

Adelaide—their letters, jewellery, and newspaper clippings glued into albums, hundreds of photographs, ribbons, hair clips, bus tickets, shopping lists, pieces of paper where a phone number was written down. The contents of the boxes were frozen in time like the boxes that, from 1974 until his death, Andy Warhol created. Warhol’s boxes were filled with everything he received on a given day—letters, notes, phone messages, dry cleaning dockets, envelops, tickets to movies, shows. There were photographs, newspaper articles, business correspondence, bills, letters from fans, dry cleaning dockets, invitations to gallery openings and poetry readings. Warhol made 612 of these boxes which were sealed and sent into storage and are now displayed in Warhol’s museum in Pittsburgh where I saw them.

My grandmother and her sisters Thora and Adelaide have been dead for a long time. I remember them when they were in their late eighties in the nursing home in Graceville. They were tiny women, their skin was like soft wax and their hair always looked overly groomed. They always dressed immaculately and smelt of lily-of-the-valley perfume. Neither sister married, I knew that. They were women of independent means, Lydia said. And there had also been Cissie, the baby of the family, who died some time before her sisters.

She may have been the youngest but, unlike her sisters, she was a big busted woman with mountains of purple hair.

The contents of my great-aunts’ boxes had been carelessly thrown together. Eras were so confused it was difficult to recognise who was who in most of the photographs. Near the top of the first box were the navy leather 265

jewellery cases that contained Thora and Adelaide’s marquisette watches that had turned grey over the decades. I used to think they were diamonds. The watch faces were so small I could barely see the hands. One of my great-aunts’ watches had stopped at four o’clock, the other at eleven. “Oh that’s where they were,” Lydia said when I brought the watches over to show her.

Near the jewellery cases was a photograph that was small and faded. I would guess it was taken in the early part of the century. In the middle of the photograph a nurse, wearing a starched white pinafore apron under a striped dress that reached to her ankles, was standing in the middle of the front veranda of a low Queensland colonial house. I asked Lydia, who held the photo up to her good eye, who she was. This was her grandmother, Gloria Byrd and she dated the photograph to the years just after the First World War. Her grandmother was standing in front of the nursing hospital she founded in her home, Rose Cottage where my grandmother and her sisters Cissie, Thora and

Adelaide grew up. “She looks so proud.”

“You know she provided for them all after her husband died. Cissie was barely a year old and Thora, the eldest, would have only been six,” Lydia said wanting me to understand the background to the photograph. “I thought she was a remarkable woman because after her husband died and she was left without any money, she farmed out the girls, retrained as a midwife and made a success of her life. This photo,” Lydia said, “was the beginning.” I had been told the lesson of Gloria Byrd’s resourcefulness before. Lydia would make this the subject of a short lecture to us when we were slothful or lazy as children.

Over her life, Gloria owned several small maternity hospitals. I asked if her independence was usual for women during that time. “Very,” Lydia told me, 266

“Men were dropping dead all the time. They were dangerous times, especially if you worked in the saw mills. There were always accidents. But those women weren’t feminists, quite the opposite.” Then Lydia added that these women, including her grandmother Gloria, had no choice. “But she paid a price,” Lydia continued. “She never properly bonded with her daughters. Mother was brought up by her sisters. And they were always close.” Gloria made her daughters promise to look after each other, before anyone, or anything else, which they did, until the end of their lives. That our great-aunts had looked after each other to the end of their lives was something that was told to us again and again, most often when we fought.

Gloria graduated as a midwife soon after shorter training courses for midwifery were introduced. After a Government Commission into the alarming rates of infant mortality, the need to train and register more midwives was an imperative. This Commission also led to Governmental subsidisation of births attended by a qualified midwife. Before that, midwives often had little or no qualifications except that they had given birth themselves. In Far North

Queensland, where Gloria lived, properties were so isolated and so far apart that it was often impossible for women to come into town to give birth. They had no choice but to use untrained midwives. For a trained midwife to travel out to them the two pound fee would have been unaffordable.

Infant mortality was so high during that time in Queensland that the population of the State was actually decreasing. More women and babies died at birth than men died during the First World War. So Gloria opened her lying-in cottage at the perfect time and capitalised on the new subsidies for child birth. 267

But in spite of higher standards of hygiene, babies still died. There was practically no birth control and the same women came back, year after year.

Unwanted babies were left behind. The Townsville orphanage would have opened around this time but otherwise, it was the midwife who often brought them up, or found homes for them. And if a baby died, the midwife was responsible for preparing a baby for burial. I thought how well Roseanne, who had looked after me in the hospital, would have fitted into this era. Her sense of responsibility to those babies made me wonder if my own relative may have been this sort of a woman. “She was quite stern,” Lydia said, “I was always frightened of her.”

…

In this box was also a large photograph of my great-aunt Cissie which

Lydia remembered was in a frame on top of the large box television that was the centre of Thora’s living room and later was always beside Thora’s bed. The photograph of Cissie was taken one summer at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary which, ironically, was just down the street. Cissie was wearing a striped cotton sundress, belted at the waist and a three strand pearl necklace around her neck. I remembered her wearing those pearls. I remembered the static and immoveable set of her lilac hair. She’s holding a big fat sleeping koala and 268

smiling. Lydia thought the photo was taken shortly before she died. “What happened to Cissie?” I asked. My mother’s answer surprised me. “I thought you knew. She set herself on fire.”

I had not been told about that because it was again, something that would have plagued me and which I would have worried about. Lydia said she had difficulties, by which she really meant that Cissie was either bipolar or schizophrenic. She heard voices sometimes. Cissie struggled with mental health throughout her adult life. My own memory of Cissie was of a large woman with a high pitched voice who was often on the cane chair on the side veranda of the house in Underwood Street. It was the same cane chair to which we were sent to think about whatever wrongful act we had committed. Setta called it the naughty chair. When I remembered that and told my mother, she laughed and added that when Cissie came over and sat on that chair on the veranda, she’d been sent by Thora to see my father because Thora wasn’t sure about Cissie’s state of mind. Lydia never minded her being there. She never got in the way. She just sat there until my father came home when he would talk to her and ask her specific questions and then either Cissie would return home or my father would arrange a bed for her in the private psychiatric hospital he sent patients to in New Farm.

Lydia said that a lot of the time Cissie was sent because she had threatened to kill herself. When she was moving towards this edge, my father would have become involved and she was sent to the house in Underwood

Street for safe keeping. Her sisters believed these threats were more like stunts, or performances and believed that Cissie was less disturbed than manipulative and attention seeking. They claimed that Cissie only resorted to 269

these threats when things weren’t going her way. Lydia had lived with Cissie’s threats all her life. “Mother talked about how Cissie would phone her and say she was going to throw herself in the river, or something similar. One time

Mother said ‘I wouldn’t do that Cissie if I were you, the water’s too cold.’” Her sisters grew quite complacent about these threats but Lydia knew that the reasons Cissie threatened to kill herself were far more complex. She said that whenever she would threaten to take her life, it was usually because she was angry with herself. Both my father and Lydia took her threats seriously.

Lydia had a saying that squeaky doors get oiled. This would apply to whoever in the family had made the most noise about something and that child would always get her attention. At the same time, Lydia would also say that it was the quiet ones you really had to worry about. Cissie made a lot of noise and over the years her sisters stopped hearing her.

When I asked Lydia why Cissie set herself on fire she answered that her sisters and mother believed, to their death, that it was an accident and that she hadn’t meant to actually go ahead and do this. Lydia said that, none the less, it was an unforgettable act. And frightening. And violent. I can remember the iconic photograph of the monk seated in the lotus position on a traffic island in

Saigon during the early years of the Vietnam War. The monk stares implacably ahead while flames devour his body. Lydia believed that Cissie must have stored that image and other later images in her imagination. She would have seen those images as they happened because they were all part of the propaganda against the war in Vietnam. They were in all the newspapers at the time as well as in Life magazine. Buddhist monks set themselves on fire several times during the course of the war. Members of Falun-Gong set themselves 270

alight in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. One hundred and twenty-five Tibetans set themselves on fire to protest against the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The

Czechoslovakian Jan Palach set himself on fire to protest against the Russia occupation of his country in 1968. There was a similar report of such a self- immolation only recently. Cissie was inspired by these other acts of protest.

“It was ritualistic,” Lydia told me, adding that there had been a Buddhist element to her ritual. Cissie laid various bowls on a tartan picnic rug in the back garden of the duplex close to the library in Hamilton where she lived on one side and her sisters on the other. She did all this when Thora and Adelaide were in their kitchen having morning tea so they would not fail to see her. One of the bowls contained kerosene which Cissie dabbed on her skin with little cotton balls. Some must have fallen onto her bri-nylon nightgown, which was highly flammable. She had a candle and after she had doused herself, she played around with matches. She lit a candle, and somewhere in the time between when she lit the match or the candle a gust of wind came out of nowhere and blew the flame to her nightgown which set alight. This part of the story had been told to Lydia by her mother. Thora and Adelaide, who watched the whole proceeding, rushed over to Cissie’s house but by the time they got to the back garden and then phoned the ambulance, Cissie was severely burnt.

She died in hospital three weeks later. We did not address the fact that Thora and Adelaide were quietly watching this and did not try to prevent her from proceeding. That was because they thought she had no intention of going ahead with it, Lydia thought. “How old was she when she died?” I asked. “In her mid-sixties,” Lydia replied. 271

“But it all started after the baby died.” “What baby?” I asked. “Cissie had a baby that died too,” Lydia said, “When she was between eighteen and twenty, possibly even earlier.” Lydia believed the loss of her baby triggered her mental illness. No one is alive to ask now. Even so, the details were suppressed when her mother and her sisters were alive so it’s impossible to know. What is known is that Cissie came home to Rose Cottage pregnant after an absence of two years when she worked as a singer on one of the coastal Steamships that were a principal form of transport up and down the coast of Australia. Either the baby died or was adopted.

Lydia supposed the most likely story was that the baby was born out of wedlock (although apparently Cissie sometimes claimed she had been married to a musician on the steamship). And if Cissie’s baby was illegitimate, Gloria was not the sort of woman who would have allowed Cissie to bring up a baby out of wedlock. An illegitimate grandchild would have damaged Gloria’s social standing and threatened her livelihood as a midwife. “You have to realise that

Gloria was illegitimate herself and those sorts of people sometimes overcompensate, as a way of drawing attention away from their own situation, if you understand what I mean.” The situation of Gloria’s birth was a deeply buried secret that was only discovered when they found the space on Thora’s birth certificate for Gloria’s father’s name was blank. “It’s in one of the boxes I think.”

My mother presumed that Cissie, like many hundreds of thousands of unmarried pregnant women, was sent away to have the baby. “She was disappeared,” as Lydia put it, cast out of her home and family. “I have no idea how they expected those women to just have a baby and then come back to the family as if nothing happened. They used to take their babies, without their 272

consent and adopt them out.” They were still doing this in the 1980s. “How can any woman be expected to recover from that? And the poor girls had to keep the fact that they had given birth to a baby secret.” Lydia had no idea whether the baby died or was sent to the orphanage in Townsville or whether Gloria made an arrangement for the baby to be adopted. Lydia understood that whatever happened, it had devastating consequences for Cissie and actually for all of them. Cissie may have stitched it all inside which, my mother thought, contributed to her fragile state of mind.

Ovid tells the story of Dryope that describes the dreadful pain mothers feel when they are separated from their babies. In this story Dryope gave birth to a baby boy who she still breastfed when, as a punishment, she was metamorphosed into a tree. As the bark closed around her all she could do was worry about who would care for her son when she could no longer feed him. As her arms extended into branches she could no longer even hold the baby who was wrenched from her. “Find him a wet nurse,” she implored, as she began to lose her voice. Before she was silenced, she asked that whoever cared for her baby should bring him to the tree and tell him his mother was hidden inside the bark. And before she lost her voice entirely she asked that her son be lifted to the tip of the tree so she could kiss him farewell. For a while the tree was warm with her blood but then, as she retreated further into the heart of the tree, the trunk was cold to touch.

“Cissie was very lucky because Thora looked after her,” Lydia continued, adding that Thora always accepted responsibility for Cissie when she was sick.

Thora and Adelaide were nurses, in fact Thora was the matron of many hospitals in which she held financial interests, which was how she was able to 273

keep Cissie out of the State Asylums like Goodna. Thora paid for the doctors, the medicine and hospitalisations. Cissie would get better and then she would find work until something would trigger a relapse and the cycle of psychiatrist, hospitalisation, medication would follow on from there. Lydia had heard that

Cissie had dredged up a lot of talk about her baby before she tried to self- immolate. She was convinced that something about the baby was underneath the reasons why she tried to kill herself.

I asked Lydia if Cissie’s baby was given a name. She didn’t think so although Lydia vaguely recalled Thora once refer to a baby called Doll. That might have been a name Cissie would give her daughter. I wondered whether

Thora or Cissie had registered the birth, which by law they were required to do.

From the 1920s all births had to be registered with the Department of Births,

Deaths and Marriage but I suspected it would still have been easy not to have registered the birth at all.

Because of all those feelings about the way we come into a name, which becomes a part of my history, Will’s history, the history Will and I have together,

I found it so hard to name my baby. I asked Lydia whether she named her two stillborn babies. “You had to for the death certificate,” she told me. One baby was named Robert. The other, a girl, she named Claire. I did not know that. So in our family there is Robert and Claire and Nina and Cissie’s lost baby. After

Lydia spoke about her babies that died I suggested we shouldn’t forget them.

Perhaps we could plant trees in her garden for them, one for each child like the leopard tree we planted for my father in the crematorium. “Those babies are never forgotten, not for one moment,” Lydia said. 274

Before Lydia sent me away so that she could sleep, I suggested that she write this all down. “They were such sad times,” she had said. I asked if my father was supportive after the babies died. “Not really,” she said. Lydia talked to a Sister in the hospital who understood what my mother was going through.

She came up to my mother and said, “There, there, don’t worry dear, men’s problems always come first. And she was a nun!” Lydia added.

Behind all her stories, I suspect Lydia was telling me there was no point in blaming yourself. She was also saying that life is precarious; the life of babies is fragile. Things happen. She was telling me that there is nothing to gain from brooding about something and storing up anger. Bad thoughts are poisonous.

They can make you go mad. It is best to move on.

…

The madness of women shadowed our lives. I suspect my father may have had more women patients than men which may have explained why we knew so many of his women patients’ stories. They may also have been more interesting to him. These stories constituted the bulk of his talk about his day at work. Now I wonder whether this was a reflection of the different lives women lived then and of the different ways women were valued. Only later, when I was on the other side of the world, did I realise Lydia may have told me Cissie’s 275

story as a cautionary tale. She was telling me to beware. These things can trigger mental illness. It was always clear, as we grew up, that there were the women patients of my father’s and there was us. But we have everything to thank these women for. If I am honest our shelter, our food and our education were beholden to these women. And around the dining table we, a family of girls, were taught to be sensitive to emotional signposts, to ask ourselves why people acted the way they did, responded the way they did and to think underneath the words teachers and friends said. We were well versed in symptoms of neurosis and hysteria; conditions that seemed were gendered female. While we did not know the names of my father’s patients we knew their stories, that so and so, poor thing, had relapsed, was back in hospital, had been caught shoplifting, was in hospital with depression, took her life, was found roaming the streets. My father, a Freudian, believed less in drugs than in talk but for his patients who were deeply depressed, or schizophrenic, he used shock therapy.

When I was around fifteen, having followed the debate in the newspapers against shock therapy, I argued with him that this practice was barbaric. I argued that it caused brain damage. He yelled back that I had no idea what I was talking about. He said that for certain conditions, it helped. They do not understand why, but in some cases, it did and he challenged me to see shock therapy first hand. Only after this, according to him, would I be qualified to debate him. He dared me. I had no choice. The opportunity came two or three weeks after.

I waited at the private psychiatric hospital in New Farm where he admitted his patients until a young female nurse was dispatched to fetch me. 276

She led me through a large white tiled bathroom with four showers in a row and beyond into a small room with a curtained window that looked into a consulting room. The patient, a woman, was already attached to the machine. She had been sedated. She was not much older than me. Her skin was so pale it was almost transparent. When I first looked at her I was overwhelmed by her frizzy and dry red hair. She had so much hair that it consumed her face.

I’m sure she had no idea that I was watching. She had no reason to look and in those days my father would not have thought to ask her. Patients had few rights. Patients in psychiatric hospitals had even less.

I think now that as he dialled the number on the shock therapy machine that looked like a Bakelite phone he looked in my direction with a half-smile.

And while I was absorbing that, the patient received the voltage before I was even aware. I did not remember anything except widened eyes. Even now I am not sure if I am remembering this correctly or whether I am remembering an image from a film. It happened so quickly. Maybe I closed my eyes and this image flashed before me. I am not sure if I noticed the girl though I can vividly recall the face of my father.

After the voltage, the patient was as still as a statue. Before my eyes, her translucence changed to transparency so that I could imagine I was able to see the blood in her purple veins stop in their tracks, as if she was freezing from the inside out. This was what happened to Niobe in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who turned to stone after she witnessed the death in one day of her seven sons and seven daughters. Whether Niobe deserved to have her fourteen children taken so cruelly from her or not is diminished by the enormity of her grief and loss – she was guilty of having boasted outrageously about her progeny. And for this 277

the poor woman lost everything; her past and her future were stripped away from her. She had implored the gods to at least spare her youngest daughter to no avail.

Such was her numbing shock that her tongue welded itself to her palate, her throat constricted and any words she was thinking or wanting to say were not able to be heard. The blood in her veins hardened. The expression on her face set and she turned to stone.

After, the wind took pity on her and carried her back to the land of her childhood where she was placed on the top of a mountain. In that inhospitable and lonely terrain, Niobe continued to weep. Her tears trickled down the crevices of the mountain and cooled the marble and watered the ground and formed streams and rivers which probably still flow to this day.

…

Silence is different from forgetting. The memory is always inside and the more I looked in my mother’s cupboards, the more uncomfortable aspects of my past seemed. Lydia stayed in bed. I scattered my great-aunts’ photos over the rugs in the living room. One consistent aspect of the photographs was the rigid and fixed poses which my great-aunts and my grandmother made in front of the camera. I wondered if they grew up thinking that photographs were a solemn 278

and ceremonial undertaking and just never changed. The boxes contained many photographs of birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations, all practically the same photograph of Thora and Adelaide holding a bowl shaped champagne glass up to the camera. Their hair still set and permed was held into place with hairspray. Their make-up was always immaculate, lipstick applied before the photo was taken, their smiles somewhat staged. I looked into their eyes looking for parts of my mother, for parts of my sisters but they remained characters in the stories my mother would tell.

There wasn’t a system to the way the photographs were stored. I asked

Lydia if she would like me to organise the photos chronologically but she didn’t want me to do that. “Just put them all back,” she said. She did not want anyone ordering her past for her. I scooped up the photographs, opened the boxes and placed them inside. It is always surprising how difficult it is to make something fit into a space the way you found it. I put the photo of Cissie at Lone Pine on the top of the box and sealed it. All the boxes went back in the top cupboard with the empty fish tank.

…

When the boxes were back where I found them, I lifted some of the books that were also stored in the dark with them. These were the books kept at 279

the bottom of my father’s bookshelves that I presumed Lydia had thrown away.

After my father died my mother removed all the books from his study and replaced them with her own books that were stored inside the empty cupboards around the house. She notified the College of Psychiatrists and the

Psychoanalytic Society that his books were for sale and sold or gave them away. These books included the complete works of Sigmund Freud that occupied all the shelves at his eye height around the room. Surrounding Freud were psychiatric text books from his university days and other texts that supported the various research projects he was and had worked on. Above and below Freud on the bookshelves were several translations of Sophocles’

Oedipus Rex as well as the literature he was passionate about—Dickens,

Samuel Johnson, G. K. Chesterton, Edgar Allen Poe, Conan Doyle, Milton,

Conrad, Forster, Evelyn Waugh—all written by men, most of them on the shores of Great Britain. The few books on his shelves penned by women were probably only there because he would have considered them case studies, amongst them the poetry of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. I don’t even think

Anna Freud was there, or Melanie Klein.

The taller bottom shelves were stacked with editions of The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, The British Journal of Psychiatry and the series of artists’ monographs that were so tall they did not fit anywhere else.

The art books were a Christmas gift from a grateful patient or a drug company.

We would open these large format books on the floor of his study when my father was absent from the house. They were our first exposure to art which, apart from the reproduction of a Renoir that was in the hallway close to the front door, was largely absent from our lives. Amongst these books was Picasso’s 280

portrait of Dora Maar, and Braque’s brown cubist paintings. Hieronymus

Bosch’s paintings were even more bizarre, landscapes where oversized and humanised birds devoured naked women and men, their bellies bloated, their pallor grey, their faces etched with terror. Parts of bodies had developed their own life—ears the size of monsters wielding knives. As a child growing up in the north of Brisbane, the scenes in Bosch’s nightmare did not fit into any scheme of the world that I had formulated. And nor did the swirling skies of El Greco.

We did not see them as art but as an extension of the work my father did.

I presumed Bosch’s paintings were images of madness and that was why my father had them. I wondered what mind saw Christ swirling in a sea sick green sky. And in the same breath, Picasso’s cubist paintings seemed to be pieces of a puzzle and I tried to piece them together to form a picture of the landscape within which my father worked. The paintings posed the most terrible fear that, even while turning the pages, you might become infected with these strange images and that outside the study, outside the family, outside the house, outside the street and the school and the blue skies and swimming pools was an abyss teeming with the terror of past ages, covered by a membrane as thin as eggshell that threatened to break and through which we would all fall.

The task of ordering the past that is locked away in my mother’s cupboards would be a job for another sister. While my mother dozed, I put everything back, went to the kitchen and made us a dinner of aubergines and carrots and eye fillet steak, cut very thin so that it didn’t bleed, as she liked it to be.

281

…

Will loved the house in Bronte even more after Nina died because she had become a part of its history, his history with the house. The house was also close to the editing suite near Centennial Park. He liked to surf and the house was a short walk to Bronte beach. He liked that in the still of the night he could hear the waves. Will had inherited the house from an Uncle who had brought him up after his parents died. The house was where he had been happy.

It was very selfish of me to refuse to return. If I looked at the situation through his eyes, it was almost too much to ask him to sell or move somewhere else. But at the same time, if I was honest with myself, I couldn’t return and I couldn’t think of a solution. When I thought of myself walking through those rooms, I became anxious. I didn’t know how to make this right. For me, the house was the problem, not the baby, not Will, not anything else. But under those words I knew it was something else. My father would have seen that in a flash. I kept telling Will that I wasn’t ready to go back. It was too soon. My mother said I had to be careful. “You can’t expect Will to stand by and wait for you forever. He’ll only wait for so long,” she had said.

… 282

As Lydia regained her sight she was glad of my company and I in turn was grateful for the respite her company gave from the constant guilt I felt about leaving Will. There were moments when the death of the baby was completely erased from my mind. During the time I stayed with her I sometimes forgot that I was married, that there was a husband waiting for me in another city. I slept during the night and woke at seven every morning. At night I’d phone Will who, aside from my mother, was the only person I communicated with. When my sisters would ring Lydia would put her hand over the receiver and take the phone into the courtyard to speak to them. I could hear her say, “I don’t think she’s ready to see you just yet,” or “She’s doing well, considering.” After, she would say, “That was Minnie,” or “That was Livia, whenever you’re ready, they’d love to see you.” My sister Setta phoned from Sydney to talk to me but I was not ready to talk to her either. Without even wanting to, Setta would mention something about the baby. I was not concerned about them. They all knew what had been going on because Lydia told them.

We went to lunch at a café in a nursery in Yeronga where Lydia introduced me to the owner. After lunch, we wandered down the corridors of young plants, my mother telling a small story about the ones she liked. Even before we came up to them, she would say, “Do you remember that from

Underwood Street. It was in the back, next to the so and so.” When I asked her if she missed that garden, she said “No, needed so much work.” Another day we went to the Queensland Art Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art where 283

there were some paintings by the Korean artist, Lee Ufan, minimal abstract canvases in soft colours. We also visited the Asian collection where there was a

Korean screen which was similar to a screen Lydia had near her study.

They are called Ch’aekkŏri, the scholar’s screens. The screens sat behind the desks of scholars and intellectuals at court where they kept watch over the process of their work. Lydia had placed her new screen in an inverse relationship to the desk so that she could look at it while she worked or read.

On each of the four folds, in a vertical column like a tail of smoke, were items fundamental to a scholar’s life—inks and scrolls and brushes, utensils for making tea and fruit to sustain the scholar through the long process of writing.

The curious aspect to the objects represented on the screen was that not one of the objects was connected to any other, except that each had a relationship to the production of writing, which was, conversely, only possible because of each item on the screen. I thought the screens were similar to my own situation which also could be described as fragments floating around in my head. All I had to do was find the connections between them.

After, we walked past the Library to the café on the lower level of the new gallery for contemporary art, on the bank of the river, where jacaranda trees helped protect this area from the wind. Lydia ordered rabbit rillettes and a glass of wine. “You can drive,” she said. In the following days we took turns to cook.

Whoever cooked did not clean up. I went for walks along the river bank, returning again and again to the eucalyptus along the river that I had seen dancing although that must have been a rare and magical moment. Every other time, they just looked like trees.

284

…

At night we watched a boxed set of Alfred Hitchcock’s films on DVD that one of my sisters’ husbands had given her last Christmas. “Now what do you think that was about?” she had said about The Birds. Lydia thought Hitchcock had a problem with mothers. I said I thought he had more of a problem with licentiousness. “Did you notice that Tippi Hedron’s character’s suit was the same colour as the love birds?” she said. In the morning I woke after a dream where I was surrounded by birds that were practically the size of houses. They sat there, waiting for someone to feed them, too big to fly. In the morning light, outside the window in my bedroom in Lydia’s house, two wedge-tailed eagles were circling something in the distance. Then they flew west.

In Tirukkalikundram in Southern India I climbed five hundred steps to the top of a rock to see the mythical eagles that, as the legend goes, fly there from

Varanasi to be fed by the priest. They have done this every day for more than a thousand years.

I was in India to look at and photograph the Dravidian Temples in the

South of India to use as a location for a film. It was not the high season and there were only a handful of guests at the hotel in Mahabalipuran where I stayed for three weeks—two Swiss girls with long blond hair and a Belgian academic who wore a thin white cotton robe. In the time I was there he did not 285

set one foot outside the grounds of the beautiful hotel on the shore of the Bay of

Bengal. He smoked a pipe and paced up and down the paths of the garden.

Each evening, after the meal was served, he expounded theories as to why

India would defeat modernisation with every attempt. He was a book. One night it was the economic factors. On another it was the caste system. On another it was corruption, then religion, the diversity of the culture. He was a chapter a night.

On the third day a woman close to my age named Lily arrived. She was from Belgium. It was the third consecutive year that she had returned to the hotel in Mahabalipuran. She loved the cottages and the grey sea even though you couldn’t swim in it because the rips and channels would sweep you to Sri

Lanka. Anyway, Lily didn’t swim. She had just been discharged from hospital following a barbiturate overdose. “I was trying to kill myself,” she said, as though

I had not understood the connection between the hospital and the barbiturates. I asked her if she knew why. “Oh,” she said, “It was cold.” I understand now that the connection between the barbiturates and weather was similar to the connection I made between Easter eggs and the darkness of the ocean. But that wasn’t it. Lily’s reason was a story of unrequited love.

As Lily began to tell me the details of her story I suspected I knew it anyway. He was married. He did not leave his wife. She took the barbiturates after she spent her birthday waiting for him to come. The sea was grey and the petals of the mussaendra flowers were a soft pink.

It had been Lily’s idea to climb the five hundred steps to see the eagles. I didn’t mind. Lily’s great faith in the appearance of the eagles was why she had returned to India. And from this height, she explained, I would be better able to 286

see the temples against the dry and barren plain. This was what I had come to do.

We waited for the birds in the crevice of a rock. The temple priest arrived and when he held out his arm, right on cue, those magnificent birds appeared in the sky. We watched them circle then rest on a rock overlooking the vastness of the plains. When the priest stepped forward, the two birds flew down and perched on his arm. They took the food and flew away.

We walked back down the long steps to the temple forecourt. The heat was almost unbearable. While we waited in the shade of the temple courtyard, out of a small opening in a mud building (that could have been a dog house) a strange looking man crawled out like a beast. His spine was twisted right around so it would not have been possible for him to walk. In his mouth was a tin cup. We sat in the shade and waited for him to pass. “You can give him some money,” Lily said and gave him as many rupees as she had in change.

He had the most beautiful face with shy eyes which lifted from the ground and stared straight into mine. I gave him all the coins I had and watched him crawl away.

When we stepped outside the temple walls, a hawker selling souvenirs sang a long song about the eagles. As he sang he pointed to one postcard then another and turned to draw our attention to an enlarged photo of the smiling priest with the eagles on his forearm that was pinned to the back of an empty television set. A band of children circled us, their hands outstretched for money.

Their hair was wild and matted with mud but they wore bright pinks and blues and when they smiled their teeth glowed white. 287

I wondered how long Lily wandered the world before she returned to

Belgium. I wondered where she was now and whether she had fallen in love again. She had told me it was her mother who been there to take her to hospital, to bring her home, and now I understood what that means when everything has turned upside down. Even though my mother said she enjoyed my company, I detected, when she was impatient with me, that it was time to go. I had to remember that she had become very comfortable living on her own.

…

Rask was happy to hear from me. “It is the saddest thing,” he had said when I spoke to him about Nina. Then he changed the subject and talked about the script he was currently working on which was at a point where he needed me to find locations. Was I interested, he asked. This would delay my return to

Sydney. He was having problems with the female character that he hoped my contribution would help to clarify.

Rask began to tell me the synopsis of his script that starts in the city.

Rask wasn’t certain which city it was. He thought it should be an old city. The function of the old buildings is to cast long shadows. It was important that the buildings were stone, granite preferably. He asked me if I knew the photographs of Paul Strand, in particular a photograph Strand took of New York in 1915 288

where the figures of men walking along the street are dwarfed by the dark rectangular recesses in the façade of the building. The recesses are so dark that they seemed to attract and to annihilate all matter, like black holes, Rask thought. Neither of us suspected that this image could be found in New York anymore but there are imposing stone buildings in East Berlin or even Mexico

City, I suggested. That was not important at this particular stage of the writing.

For him the city was important because it marked the look of the beginning of the story. From the streets we move inside an apartment where a beautiful woman dies. Her husband, Leo, is bereft. We see her funeral and the difficulty

Leo (who is the protagonist of the film) experiences coming to terms with his loss. Not long after, as he is walking amongst the long shadows of the streets of the city in which he lives he believes he sees his wife walk past on the other side of the road. This woman is the same height and weight (in fact the actress who plays the dead wife will also play this character). She has the same colouring, but her clothing is ragged. Leo crosses the road and follows her. She darts ahead of him, and leads him through unfamiliar streets and on, to the outskirts where she disappears. Leo is convinced she is his wife. If she is his wife, what is she doing there?

He tells his friends about his recent experience and asks their advice.

Rask imagines here a sequence of scenes in coffee shops, at dinners, the houses of his friends, in the studio where he works that will describe his life for the audience. Perhaps he is a designer, or an architect Rask thought. More than one of his friends comments that the mistaken sighting of a loved one is a trick-of-the-mind, and quite common in his stage of grief. But Leo is convinced that the woman he saw was real. He becomes obsessed with her. He can’t eat. 289

He can’t work. Every day he returns to the street where he saw her in the hope that she will return. He combs the city looking for her. More than once, in several different locations, he runs into the same destitute older woman who always asks him to buy her a coffee. Sometimes she asks him for money. The one time Leo buys her a coffee she offers him advice. It is as if she knows that

Leo is looking for the woman when she tells him to return to this very corner in three days and he will find what he is seeking. Leo rewards her with money even though the very thought that this old woman can read his mind seems incredible. But her prophecy fills him with such joy and such hope. In three days he returns to this spot and the beautiful woman who looks like his wife passes by again. He follows her out of the city and into a forest of winter trees where he loses her.

Leo thinks he is going mad. He seeks the old woman but she too seems to have disappeared. Leo returns to the forest to try to retrace her footsteps but the forest is like a labyrinth. When he has almost given up hope, he sees her again. This time Leo runs after her. She darts through the forest, through a field of giant boulders until she leads him to a wire fence. Attached to the wire fence are yellow triangles that warn that the area beyond the fence is radioactive.

Inside the fence are the remains of an old nuclear plant.

Leo stops at the fence. The woman crawls through a hole and enters. As she walks towards the ruins, a little girl of about three or four years runs up and hugs her. She kisses the child and takes something from under her skirt, some food, an orange, something like that. Behind, Leo also notices the older woman for whom he bought a coffee and who helped him earlier. He is confused. If this is his wife, who does the child belong to? Who is the old woman? And he 290

realises all of them—the beautiful woman, the child, the older woman—would be contaminated with radioactivity. If he crosses the fence, he will risk radiation himself.

Leo returns to the fence with blankets, food, medicine and fresh water for the women which, along with warm clothes and a doll for the little girl, he leaves outside the fence. There are problems with their communication, Rask added.

They speak different languages. She speaks Egyptian Arabic, although she knows some French. And the tone of her voice, the way her words sound, is different to his wife’s. That is something that strikes him when she tries to speak to him. Leo realises that although she is the image of his late wife, she is not his wife. But none of this matters because they have fallen in love and the desire each has for the other is frustrated by the contamination of radioactivity.

The crux seems to be that if he satisfies his desire he will endanger his health. If Leo crosses over and into area behind the wire fence, he will be forever marked by his encounter with these women. More than likely, he will die.

This idea was inspired by Rask’s very real distress about the perils of nuclear energy and recent nuclear accidents. He told me that, in spite of the fences that close off radioactive terrain, many people still live in these affected zones. They had chosen to remain in their homes, in spite of the risks to their lives. People are living in the ruins around Chernobyl, and around Fukushima. Rask says it is a disgrace that vast tracts of the planet are being completely destroyed in this manner.

“What I am not so sure about and where I need your help,” Rask told me,

“Is to write the story of the foreign woman.” Long ago he saw a film called

Ramparts of Clay directed by the Italian film director Bertocelli, not to be 291

confused with Bertolucci—who directed the big budget film The Last Emperor in

China. Images from Bertocelli’s film had been haunting him: the image of women on the high ramparts as black as crows, the sound of their ululation, the image of the outcast girl fleeing across the empty desert. So because Rask has a contact in Cairo, with whom he worked on other films, he imagined it would be a good place to start to look for a small village with tall ramparts (although they could also be constructed by an art department) where the female protagonist is raped by three soldiers after which she falls pregnant. The stigma of the pregnancy, the loss of her virginity makes it impossible for the girl to remain there so we must see her as she flees. In spite of her innocence, the woman is cast as promiscuous and thrown out of the village. Outside the village, she meets the old woman, herself an outcast, who helps to deliver the baby and the three of them take to the road, and make their way to Europe to look for a better life. They travel to Alexandria and across the Mediterranean to Greece and keep travelling north. This passage is marked by terrible adventures that Rask has not yet thought through or decided if he should film them as opposed to have her tell Leo and the audience about. This is how the three women end up living in the abandoned nuclear plant.

After first photographing abandoned power plants in winter (Rask suggested these need not actually have been nuclear power plants), Rask suggested that I travel to Cairo to look for the village where the girl comes from.

If a good village cannot be found in Egypt, there might be one in Turkey or

Armenia. Rask then remembered a particular description of a field of boulders written by the Russian Vasily Grossman who had described the strewn field as the skeleton of a broken mountain lying across the ground. That image 292

reminded me of the Medusa. Ovid, in the story of Perseus and Medusa, writes of Perseus on his way to find the Gorgon. He passes through fearful forests and fields strewn with boulders that were the once the forms of men and beasts who had glanced at the Medusa. Grossman was writing about Armenia in 1962. And in my mind Grossman’s description of Armenia and the path to the Medusa were one and the same. This was a situation where Rask was chasing an image that was written so long ago it may not be there anymore. It would be good if I was able to find the village and the field of boulders in the same vicinity, he had thought. Before going to Turkey or Armenia, and after going to

Europe, Rask suggested I first try to look for the locations around Cairo. It was an easier city to get around and they have had experience with foreign film production.

…

When I spoke with Will about this, his reaction was not been what I had anticipated. The tone of his voice was flat. He paused between sentences. “I thought you were coming home,” he said. “How long will you be away?” he wanted to know. I didn’t know. There was silence after this, during which I could tell that he thought this silence was better than saying what he really thought so

I goaded him: “What’s the matter now,” and “You were always so pleased when 293

I went away before. I thought you’d be glad I have a job since you haven’t got time for me.” I was deliberately cruel. He was afraid I was telling him that I wasn’t coming back. “Why would I do that?” I said, and he said he was relieved that I had yelled at him. “Might I remind you that you sent me away, you sent me to my mother’s because you couldn’t cope with my depression.” “That’s not true. I thought you’d be better off in Brisbane,” he replied. “You were going mad on your own in the empty house. Don’t you remember any of that?” When he said that I understood how little he knew about how I had felt after the baby died. He seemed relieved to have passed me on, given the problem to someone else, given me back to my mother. He had said, “She knows more about what you’re going through than I do.”

“Did you want to get rid of me the whole time?” We were silent for a long time after I said that. Will said he was sorry. He wanted me back. And before? I wondered.

I asked Will when he would be finished editing the film he was working on. There was at least another nine months, he said. I told him about Freya’s idea of going on a holiday somewhere warm, only I pretended it was my idea.

“What about Tahiti?” I asked him. “There’s no surf,” he replied. “What about

Bali, or Thailand?” “What about Bronte,” he said and I found myself telling him that I loved him. “There are so many things we haven’t done,” he said.

The thought of returning to work for Rask had created such elation, which, in itself, was confusing. And Will’s reticence had made the countering

‘you-don’t-deserve-this’ thought rise like a saboteur and crush any happiness I had felt. Will had never objected to my being away for work before. At the end of our conversation Will apologised and admitted it was a wonderful opportunity. 294

He envied me this. He was tired, that was all. I felt guilty and selfish. I was angry and sorry for Will all at the same time.

I asked him how his movie was going and he said it was depressing. It was a violent film about a road worker who picks up hitchhikers that he rapes, then murders and buries in National Parks along the east coast of Australia.

After we talked about his film he rationalised that my being overseas was no different from my being in Brisbane. We would have to be content with having a phone relationship.

…

I was to start in Europe because Rask was waiting for images of the disused nuclear power plant as this was where he wanted to start writing. This location was pivotal to the dramatic peak of the film. It was still winter in Europe, which was important for Rask. He wanted me to photograph these buildings in the snow. When this was done, and Rask was happy with the photographs, I was to travel on to Egypt and contact an associate that Rask had previously worked with. This man, Mr. Ibrahim, would be able to organise everything and provide a translator. And if Egypt did not have what Rask was looking for, then perhaps I would need to go to Western Turkey or Armenia.

295

…

I stayed with my mother until the westerly winds arrived and forced her to turn on the heating. The trees howled when I left early in the morning to catch a flight to Europe. My mother watched me through the wall of windows. “There’s nothing to gain by blaming yourself,” she had said for the second time, just before I left. We embraced. I was sad to leave her, although my going opened the way for my sisters to return. Walking down her driveway past the five silver birch trees, one for each daughter, the wind tugged at the last of their leaves and scattered them over the lawn. I looked at her, framed in the middle of the window; the sad stories from her past now restored to the dark of her cupboards. The taxi was waiting.

…

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I wandered through the north of Europe photographing disused power stations. One location was distinguished from another by slight differences in the size of hotel rooms, the degree to which the room was overly heated, and the different selections of breakfast cheeses and meats. I had not been prepared for the scale of the old power stations I photographed in Hungary, in

Belgium, in Luxembourg, in Sweden. Their monumental caverns reminded me of abandoned cathedrals. Their apocalyptic haunt, their colours, the emptiness and height of these buildings gave rise to feelings of melancholia, as if the world had decayed and lay in ruins and the great human experiment was destroyed.

The grey of cement, the moss and lichen, the green and rust of metal was sorrowful. I couldn’t be certain if my mood was prejudiced by my own despondence or whether the state of these buildings created these feelings but throughout, I was shadowed by the woman character in Rask’s film script.

In Chernobyl, in Fukushima in Japan, women, like this character, have chosen to continue to live around these disused nuclear power plants. I wonder whether their fear of adapting to life outside the bounds of what they know has made it easy for them to choose illness and death over change. Perhaps it is also economic, which, I imagined, was why Rask has located the three women in his script there. I have seen photographs of pockets of domestication in these radiated landscapes, a bottle containing flowers, a table laid for dinner, a woman picking wild flowers. Perhaps Rask had also seen these photographs.

Perhaps he was thinking of that when he chose to make a little girl live amongst all this poison.

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These abandoned power plants were the antithesis of a domestic environment. It was easy to grasp that these colossal wrecks would convey

Rask’s concept of the destruction of the planet and that he would also be able to insinuate that they were nuclear power plants. And what had so amazed me was that over the years these abandoned buildings shelter so much birdlife and such a rich variety of animals that must be forever grateful of their protection.

This human dystopia has, ironically, become a utopia for the birds.

The time that I spent travelling to and photographing old power plants merged into a blur of grey, of snow, of low skies, of browns and rust. Rask was very happy with these photographs whose common theme was their overwhelming scale which diminished the force of any human life. When Rask had enough photographs to continue to write, I was instructed to leave Europe to travel to Cairo.

…

My hotel room in Cairo was in the mid-section of a convex curve, on the fifth floor. The heat of the city was dry and after so many months spent in ice and snow, I felt as though I had suddenly thawed. Inside, the room was quiet 298

but when I stepped onto the small balcony over the Nile, the sounds of idling motor bikes, car horns, the smell of low-grade petrol mixed with charcoal braziers scented with cumin brought the city to life. On a balcony further along the row, a Filipina amah was crouched over a brazier cooking garlic, cumin and anchovies in a wok. Her three young charges were looking at her behind the glass door. She didn’t notice me but the children did. I watched her. They watched me.

I had always wanted to go to Cairo but when I arrived, my tiredness resembled an anaesthetic. I could barely lift my head from the bed. When I woke, the darkness was disorientating. I was not sure where I was or whether it was early in the morning, or the middle of the night. Lights stretched far into the distance on the other side of the river. A clock radio on one side of the bed read nine o’clock. Hunger became almost as overwhelming as the tiredness had been. I needed to eat. The hotel had a number of restaurants and I was worried that none would still be open. There was a Brasserie which I went looking for.

From the reception area, tapering from each side like shoulders were arcades of shops. There was a newsagency, a jewellery shop that specialised in selling gold cartouches with your name engraved in hieroglyphics. Beside this shop was a souvenir shop set up like a stall in the bazaar selling copper lights, brass trays, and slippers of the same design worn by Douglas Fairbanks Jnr when he played the thief of Baghdad in the 1924 film. There was no café or brasserie in this area. The second shoulder led to offices, a bakery and a tour office. Only the Bureau de Change was open.

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In the lobby, women in sequins and ball gowns, their thick strong hair rolled into mountains that were kept in place with hairspray, were cupping their hands, ululating. Their storm of perfume rained out from under the immense chandelier and spread across the lobby. Closer, the sulphurous white light of a sun-gun that was attached to a recording device bleached out the head of the bride who was in the middle of the women, on the grand staircase. All you could see was her voluminous white satin gown and hand clasping her father’s who steadied her as they ascended the staircase that led to the ballrooms on the mezzanine level. I thought of Marcel Duchamp. At the same time, the drummers and male musicians were corralling the bridegroom and his best men down the stairs until they met on the landing. The Brasserie was past the grand staircase, past the steps on the far side of the lobby. Behind the women were five or six young girls sitting on a sofa dressed as smaller versions of their mothers and aunts. The girls looked bored.

The Brasserie was almost empty. I sat myself at the edge of the room that overlooked the river and a circular swimming pool. A waiter some distance away watched me but made no approach. I helped myself to the buffet, to some rice and a meat dish that, after so long in the bain-marie, was dry. The meat was tough. Two men in suits were discussing business at a table near the buffet. The waiter would drop his head in sleep, then jolt his head up again.

After, walking towards the lift well, the wedding musicians could be heard from the inside of one of the ballrooms.

The room was hot and I tried to sleep with the door open imagining the constant purr of traffic in the distance would lull me to sleep but it only made me wonder what I was doing so far away. I thought of Will in the house in Bronte. I 300

pictured the empty rooms in my mind, imagining the scent of the sea. I thought of Will on the large veranda feeling lonely, staring into the dark gully. There would be little food in the house, but enough. I had no responsibility for this. He was able to care for himself. I slept and dreamt we were making love. It was soft and gentle. I woke and got out of bed to go to the bathroom. I had to turn the light on to remember the layout. I saw myself reflected in the mirror, bags under my eyes, my stomach bearing less trace of the pregnancy. My hair was now long and looked like it had been chewed by rats. I did not know who she was, this woman in the mirror who was so uncomfortable in her skin. There was a coward’s glint in her eye. No, not a coward’s glint but she looked like she was hiding something. If I could have rubbed the mirror to erase her I would have.

I needed reassuring. I phoned Will. “Do you love me still?”

“Of course,” he replied.

…

The booths in the Brasserie were occupied by Arab families eating breakfast. The husbands did not look at their wives. The wives did not look at their husbands. The booths were arranged around the circumference of the curved room. Outside, a lone woman in a grey bikini was sunbathing on a lounge. The husbands sat by the window and looked down towards the pool. 301

The wives sat at the edges of the booths and looked towards the entrance of the Brasserie. The children sat between them, their plates piled with food. Each family sat with an amah. These women were often smaller than the children.

The waiter told me in August the hotel is full of families from Kuwait and Saudi

Arabia on their summer vacation.

On a table opposite a small girl, maybe she was five or six, stared at me.

She scrutinised every detail about me, my face, my clothes, my hair about which I was suddenly embarrassed. She had long black hair that shined as if it had been waxed. It had been brushed and plaited. She was wearing a special pink dress with puffed sleeves, the sort of dress you would wear to a party. I returned her gaze and noted how her attention to me had singled herself out from her family group. She seemed headstrong and curious. Then I smiled at her. She made no response and continued to watch me eat a bowl of berries, some eggs. After, I phoned Rask’s contact, and arranged to meet him.

…

The offices of Mr Hussein Ibrahim were walking distance away, just off the Corniche-el-Nil, the long avenue that runs alongside the river. With clear instructions from the concierge about how to get there, I exited the hotel grounds, turned left and walked beside the river. Below, a boatman was asleep, 302

sprawled across a wooden bench of a Felucca Station, under the shade of a jacaranda. Over the road in the window of Shepheard's Hotel, two women, I guessed they were English, sipped tea. Even though I know this was only a replacement of the original Grand Shepheard's Hotel, I thought back to a scene in the film Gallipoli that was set there.

Mr. Ibrahim lived and worked from the fifth floor of a gracious apartment building. Drivers were sitting on stools around the entrance surrounding a hawker who cooked corn on a brazier. The smoke drifted towards the river. On one side of the ground floor was a pre-school. The third floor was a mosque.

The lift opened directly into Mr. Ibrahim’s apartment. His office was at the front of the building, behind the anteroom that was decorated with Louis XV furniture.

I sat on a sofa, upholstered in red velvet the colour of roses while I waited for

Mr. Ibrahim to finish a phone call. An assistant, whose name was Hannaa, brought me a mint tea.

I listened to Mr. Ibrahim speak for a long time on the telephone. When he was finished Hannaa came from another room and ushered me into his office.

On a sideboard, a Koran rested on an intricately carved bookstand where a muddy patch of sunlight from the window behind illuminated the page. The office reminded me of a bank manager’s. Mr Ibrahim was very formal and as he shook my hand he announced his name followed by his full title, Director of

International Films, Cairo. Then he asked where I came from. “Australia!”

Looking me up and down he told me he had set up several films for Australians.

Gallipoli, he said. He mentioned he set up most of the international productions that come to Egypt. How did I know Rask, he wanted to know, commenting that

Denmark was a long way from Australia. I answered that I had been working 303

with him for some time, not elaborating further. After, we talked about the film. I told him Rask was looking for several locations for a film that he is currently writing. In particular there was the terrain. He was also looking for a tall rampart and ruins. “Egypt is the country to come to for ruins,” he added, with no trace of humour. “Leave this with me, I will think of some places and find you a driver.

My assistant will speak with you at the hotel to confirm the arrangements.”

I walked from Mr Ibrahim’s house to the Egyptian Museum. The main chamber of the Museum echoed with the frightened squawks of trapped pigeons that were circling the high ceiling trying to find a way out. One of the families I noticed eating breakfast at the hotel were ahead of me: a father, his son, his wife and two daughters. The women, fully veiled, walked behind the father, and behind the son. The wife and her daughters gathered around an exhibit like large black birds. The wife opened the black muslin flap that covered her eyes and whispered the descriptions of the exhibit to her daughters.

There were so many objects to look at, so many displays that it was overwhelming and I had to focus on small objects such as the carvings of the boats and rowers who escorted the souls to the afterlife. I looked closely at the faces of the soldiers, each so different that you could imagine what sort of men they were. The designs on their shields resembled the strong shapes coloured in blacks and browns by the Australian artist John Coburn in the series of paintings he titled Tribal Lands.

I spent a long time looking at the face of one of the mummified kings.

Tufts of hair still clung to his scalp. His lips still held their shape. Skin-like hide.

Brittle husk. He could never have imagined it would be like this, inside a glass cabinet in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the hordes more curious about the 304

look of death than of his power and stature. It seemed a sacrilege to see him so exposed, so disempowered, so withered outside the magnificence of his sarcophagus. And those of us that stared for an uncomfortable amount of time were ultimately more interested in death, in its eternity, than anything else.

I could fix my gaze to his unseeing eyes but could not look into the face of my daughter. I could not meet my daughter’s eye because I did not deserve her purity, her fragile spirit, her essence. We have no history, the king and I and yet he managed to shake loose my secret shame that I had let her down, something that I then realised I had been hiding from myself. Perhaps all along I was never meant to have a child. Was this because I was not even able to care for the dolls, whose hair I cut, whose arms I wrenched from their sockets? Was her death a punishment for my past misdeeds? Did I fail to respect boundaries, propriety? Was I a bad daughter, a bad partner? I could see that I probably was.

It would be a terrible fate for a daughter to have me as her mother. But worse than anything, I had abandoned my daughter to the loneliness of death. The king had all of us to comfort him.

…

Outside, the temperature had risen. The hot wind baked my clothes. The leaves on the trees were coated with exhaust, dust and were no longer green 305

but a greasy black. The heat made me feel nauseous and sleepy. I walked along the Corniche, telling myself I needed to drink water. I needed to sleep. In the lobby French tourists were pouring out from a bus and frenetically darting around the lobby, in and out of the souvenir shops, inspecting the brassware like they were at a bazaar. Their darting presence created an uneven rhythm to the lobby.

I bought two drinks from the bakery and wandered up to the mezzanine level to explore this part of the hotel, to see where the bridal reception had taken place. The first level held four ballrooms. A cleaner was vacuuming the carpet. On the floor above, a loud kathunka drumbeat emanated from an empty room full of weights, bikes, running machines. A young Egyptian assistant in

Lycra shorts and new gym shoes was asleep on a chair. Further along the corridor was the Winter Pool. The frieze of pineapples, the Astro Turf, the umbrellas fringed with raffia stuck into white plastic outdoor tables lent a sad and decaying tropical mood to the room.

A woman was swimming backwards and forwards. Her head above the water, her legs trailed deep below like the tail of a tadpole. I watched her hands come from her sides and join in front propelling her ahead like the prow of a boat slices its way through a river. She stopped and from a far corner her

Filipina maid materialised with a large white towel which she held over the steps at the deep end, like a theatre curtain into which the woman climbed. She slipped into her oversized towelling robe and they walked out of the pool.

Beyond the Winter Pool was the Nefertiti Beauty Parlour. There were no names written against any of the times on the appointment diary that lay open on the small reception desk. I only meant to look around when a coarse woman 306

in a long housecoat yanked open the curtain at the rear of the salon and walked towards me, wiping food from her mouth with the back of her hand. “Come, come!” she said, holding open the curtain to the first cubicle and nodding at me, urging me in. She stood for some time and although I had no intention of submitting, I did.

She gestured to me to take off my shirt and also my black trousers and handed me a white cotton gown to put on and then she pointed to the beautician’s chair in the middle of the room. I changed and sat. The beautician returned with a pile of blankets in which she swaddled me, like a mummy, making sure my feet were firmly tucked in. To manoeuvre the chair she spread one hand over my forehead and pressed my head down as she forced the lever with her other hand. Her fingers were broad and swollen and coarse and smelt of hospital bleach.

Once she finished adjusting the height of the chair she left me straitjacketed there. At first I took strange comfort in being tucked up like a child and put to bed. The room was dark. I suspected I was listening to the mating calls of Arctic whales. Then I was worried that she had gone away and left me there.

The beautician returned wearing what looked like a miner’s helmet with a torch light in the front. She cupped my chin in her large hand and pulled my face this way and that inspecting the surface of my skin with her magnifying glass. It was impossible to imagine what she was thinking. After this she cleaned my skin with a soothing tonic that smelt like a combination of rosewater and orange blossom. Then she left the room. I was in the dark, constricted and contained like a corpse while around the room, the whales mated. 307

She applied a mask to my face that smelt like tar. It was hot and heavy and I could not move my head. Beside me, boiling water was bubbling in a vaporiser that the beautician dragged over to my side and pointed over my face.

When the steam was hissing and spitting, she turned on an overhead bank of lights whose illumination was so intense you could play night tennis on my face.

Then she walked away. The steam from the vaporiser and the heat from the overhead lights began to bake the mask that became heavier and heavier. Even if I tried, I couldn’t move my mouth. She must have forgotten me. I tried to call out but my ability to make any sound had been restrained by the mask.

The vaporiser ran out of water. The surface temperature of the mask cooled, and contracted which made it lift away from my skin. I heard her footsteps shuffling around one side of the chair. Abruptly, she lifted the mask off my face in which my look of frozen terror was perfectly cast. When the mask was off, the beautician scrubbed my face with what felt like a pot scourer, removing the last vestiges of the tar. She rubbed as if she intended to erase my identity. I suspected that was the end. She would apply a soothing balm and I would get dressed and charge the treatment to my room.

Instead, she filled her cupped hand with warmed oil that was dripped onto my forehead and massaged into my face with a series of vertical pulls of such force it was as though she was redesigning my face. The second stage to the massage involved her lifting her hands up and bringing them down one at a time in a rhythmic dance of slaps and punches and pinches on my cheeks. She punched and beat me beyond pain and humiliation. I wanted to tell her to stop, she was hurting me but when I opened my mouth a wavering warble was all I could manage. 308

Her miner’s helmet in place, with her magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers in her left hand she started to frenetically dig and poke into every pore. She darted around my face with no apparent scheme. First she dug around the base of my nose, then my chin, my cheeks, my forehead, and back to my nose again. When this was finished my face was painted with cucumber yoghurt. Two slices of cucumber covered each eye. My skin began to contract, to cool and to calm down. I found myself licking the edges of the mask. She spoke to me softly in Arabic but I could not understand what she was saying.

When she lifted the cucumber from my eyes, she was holding up beauty products, “You buy now?” she said in English. I smiled but didn’t commit.

After the cucumber yoghurt was scraped off my face, after she had untied the blankets, I was free to go. I got dressed. The skin on my face was tingling. I followed her to the front desk where she wrote down the amount I owed her and signed this to my room. As I was leaving she held out her hand for a tip and smiled. I gave her what I thought was appropriate and however much it was, she seemed happy.

I keep my head down all the way back to my room. In the bathroom mirror my face looked like it had been attacked by a swarm of wasps, and then burnt with acid. A web of small wounds covered my nose, my cheeks, my chin. I had no antiseptic lotion to bathe the cuts and when I dabbed the wounds with water they stung.

In the room I used as much moisturiser as I had to try to resurrect my face, to salvage my claim to the feminine. This was less certain. I could not alter the reality that my womb was broken, my breasts were useless. Had this been part of my own metamorphosis all along? Was I to be free of my gender? Was 309

this what I had to learn? My skin peeled for several days following but strangely, after, my skin looked finer, softer.

…

The driver arrived at six in the morning. We seemed to be driving away from Cairo. “Where are we going?” I asked a couple of times. The driver replied in Arabic. I didn’t understand. We drove west until the city disappeared, past low brown houses built of clay and mud until even they thinned out and we were driving alongside the desert. Looking out of the back window of the car I thought

I could glimpse the pyramids to the south.

It looked hot. Inside the car I couldn’t tell. The sand rolled by at the same speed as we were driving.

The driver played one song that lasted an entire CD over and over. The female singer disappeared and reappeared inside the music. We passed two cemeteries, one on the right, the other on the left side of the road about a kilometre further down. The graves were built off the ground, two slabs like the ends of a bed, the taller end pointed towards Mecca. A woman shrouded in black walked by the side of the road her robes picked up by the wind. Her feet were bare, I noticed, looking back at her. She carried nothing in her hands. The world was full of sad women I thought. 310

Further ahead the sand blew over the flat road. When we returned it could be covered. I was lulled to sleep.

When I opened my eyes we were beside a terracotta pigeon house.

Although I have seen photographs of them, I was not prepared for their scale.

They were the size of houses. Nor was I prepared for their sculptural austerity, their perfect form. I thought about wedding cakes. Even more beautiful were the broad strokes of black and white paint that decorated the tiered levels. I thought of Brancusi and aimed my camera but we were moving too fast.

We drove along an avenue of date palms. The word Fayoum was painted on a road sign in Arabic and English. The houses on the outskirts were far apart and blended in with the sand. Closer to the centre the dwellings were more substantial.

The driver parked the car in an open square by the side of a canal. He stepped out and stretched his arms over his head. He swivelled his torso to one side then the other. I noticed his tight abdominal muscles under his thin cotton shirt. He held his hands to his eyes as if he had an imaginary camera, urging me out of the car, asking if I wanted to take a photograph.

I shook my head. We were next to a drink stall. I used my hands to ask him if he would like a drink. He shook his head. I bought us both a Pepsi, if he didn’t want it now, he may later. Behind him was a restaurant built over the canal. There was no water in the canal. Four men were chewing pigeon bones at a table under an umbrella.

I wandered across the empty square to the general store opposite. The mannequin in the shop window had no legs. It was a male torso in a lemon 311

cotton shirt perched on a Russian twin-tub washing machine. A shiny motor bike helmet was beside it.

Inside the shop an old man slept in a chair. The plump little girl playing with her dolls under a serving table did not look up as I passed. Acres of fabrics were bulging out of racks that lined the walls up to the roof. More rolls of fabric, piled high on tables, crowded the narrow aisles. I bought a tablecloth that was thickly woven in blue and white. I thought of this for the house in Bronte but I couldn’t picture the table, so I couldn’t be sure whether the dimensions were similar. If it didn’t fit, I could give it away.

Outside, the streets were empty. The driver had reparked the car under the shade of a tree and was leaning against the driver’s door, smoking. I signalled to ask him if he wanted to eat. He shook his head. I asked him how much further we had to travel but he could only shrug his shoulders letting me know he didn’t understand what I had asked. I trusted he knew where we were going.

Further along the canal, an old village of mud brick houses was interspersed with trees. The driver pulled up under a date tree, next to the canal and gestured me out of the car. Perhaps this was one of our destinations. I looked at the date trees, the mud houses, the bank of the canal then noticed a bullock whose thin hide clung to the articulations of his rib cage. His matchstick legs barely supported his distended belly. He was tied to a wooden wheel which he walked around and around. The wheel fitted into a second wheel that was at ninety-degrees, fitted with pottery urns that turned through the canal and ladled water into a clay drain. I took my camera and photographed the animal, not so much for Rask but for its resemblance to the eternally tormented Ixion in the 312

Underworld in Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Ixion was also bound to his wheel from which he both fled from himself and followed himself at the one time. Ixion was one of those condemned to the Underworld along with

Sisyphus. The movement around the circle, although it was relative to how we see time, was here an example of the destruction of time’s relativity. There was no difference between morning and afternoon and evening, or day from day. All time was and is the same time like a trauma that you are condemned to return to again and again in perpetuity. The village was one of the destinations that Mr.

Ibrahim had in mind but for me the place could never escape the haunt of the bullock. Besides, Rask didn’t want any water.

…

When I looked up I noticed a cassia tree bursting with so many pink flowers it was as if it was exploding with joy. There had been a pink cassia in the garden in Underwood Street that encroached onto the footpath. Someone poisoned it and it had to be cut down. In its place, Lydia planted a yellow cassia tree. Although it was a thin tall tree, nevertheless it would be covered by the most brilliant yellow flowers. I had forgotten all about that tree in Underwood

Street but I knew, from that moment that this was the tree I would associate with

Nina. This was her tree—although it would need to be planted somewhere 313

warmer than Sydney. I took a photograph of the tree, from a distance, and close ups of the flowers which, when they were printed, were slipped into the back pages of my journal.

…

On our return we drove past grand houses built in a European style in the town center. At the edge of the town were more sand coloured huts that were crumbling, although they were still inhabited. I had thought that was what Rask had imagined. We stopped and I took photographs and marked their location on a map.

Further along the same desert road the car's engine clanked discordantly. The driver pulled off the road and parked under a pepper tree beside a small hut with an antique petrol bowser. He opened the bonnet of the car. Steam hissed with a shrill high note then bubbled out. As the radiator cooled, the metal twanged. The emptiness of the sky, the sand, so much space.

We waited beside the car listening to the caw of crows when, from the shadow of the hut, a young boy materialised.

He could have been there the entire time. It was difficult to tell his age; I thought he was around nine years old although he was probably older. He 314

motioned me to follow him. The car was broken. It looked like we would be there for a while.

I followed the boy into the desert. Periodically, he turned and gesticulated for me to catch up. Before I could catch up to him he had pushed further ahead.

We climbed over a second, larger sand dune walking in the direction of the sun.

The sand was loose which made it difficult to move with any swiftness. The boy was far ahead. Looking back, I no longer saw the pepper tree or the car. The loose sand had covered over our footsteps. From the top of a ridge a long stone hut became visible. The sun burned the crown of my head. The boy had pulled a loose scarf over his head. It was beige, like the sand. From the ridge, it was difficult to distinguish him from the surrounding land.

When I caught up to him he was holding open the door to the stone hut.

It was cool and dark inside. Light from a high window revealed large blocks of stone piled one on top of the other. On closer inspection, once my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw the stone was sections of broken columns, urns and the shattered heads of ancient Romans as cold as death to touch.

The boy coughed. He held the door open for me to follow him. We walked away from the hut up another ridge. At the top the boy pointed ahead and flicked his fingers as if to urge me to go down into the valley below to see what was there. I walked down the dune into a garden of stone. Turning around, the boy had disappeared.

In the center was the sculpture of a torso half submerged in the sand from which a number of pathways radiated. The paths of the garden were edged with the fallen limbs of Roman statues. One corner was outlined by the bent knee joint from the sculpture of a running man, the marble surface smooth. 315

Inside the break, the marble was rough. Another path was made from the crook of an elbow. There were many feet in sandals placed one behind the other to suggest a line to walk beside. The garden reminded me of an ancient battlefield, the dismembered and broken remains of its warriors lying where they fell were now turned to stone. I wondered who made the garden. Was it the boy, taking objects from the hut, moving them this way and that, placing them this way and that until one day the garden took this form? Was it someone else whose vision this had been? The formality of the design suggested its creator knew other gardens in other times.

As I walked along one path and then another I realised there was nothing random about the placement of the remains. One border was trimmed with upright toes. I could imagine the delight its creator must have had on finding so many toes and them coming to a decision to plant them in the sand. I followed the toes to the centre of the garden, to the torso of the Roman twisting at the waist. My eye traced the line that was suggested by the turn of his shoulders. I imagined his arms were in the process of throwing a spear, or a javelin. The

Roman’s form was perfect. By standing in the center of the garden beside the torso, the garden appeared differently. I could see the layout of pathways as though everything around the torso bore of his rage, scattered fragments thrown by those invisible arms, the mime of an action that had left its mark.

Some of the paths were created by a line of noses spaced further and further apart. I followed this line that led up a ridge and down the other side where it had evolved from chips of marble into a line of stone ears. The ears descended in size to smaller and more delicate ears still until they stopped.

Perhaps they were taken from the statues of children, lying flat on the sand, row 316

after row. Crumbling and incomplete ears were packed around the edge. The sharp contrast between the roughness of the broken ears and the smooth surface of the sculptured ears suggests that whoever made this garden was playing with that contrast.

I stood still and looked around. The sun had now moved behind me. It was low in the sky. The ears had long disappeared. All around was the desert. I seemed to have moved away from the ears and nor could I remember over which of six ridges they were. I couldn’t even recognise the ridge I had walked down. I climbed up a sand dune where I no longer even saw the stone garden. I moved in what I thought was the direction of the garden. I walked up and then down ridge after ridge not remembering how many ridges I had gone over since walking away from the car. And I had no markers so I could not tell if I was moving towards the car or away. Then I was certain I was moving away so I turned around and tried to remember the direction of the sun when I left the hut.

I thought it was in front, so I now moved with it at my back. I tried to retrace my steps. The wind covered my footprints. Where was the boy?

My attention turned inwards. I was inappropriately dressed. My mouth was dry. I needed to wet the inside of my mouth with water but I had not taken a water bottle with me. I had followed a young boy away from a broken car, not for a moment imagining that something like this could have happened. I panicked. Then I remembered to stand still. The Australian newspapers were full of stories of people who died in the outback when they wandered away from their cars after they had broken down. It was not foolproof because another couple, who stayed by their car, died of dehydration. I could be close to the hut 317

but I had no way of knowing. I called out. A distant crow answered. The desert stretched ahead, a labyrinth of an altogether different kind.

Against my own plan, I walked down the ridge and up another with the result that I became more and more confused, and then more and more agitated. The sun was now about to disappear. This was the moment when I decided to stop. In this way I would be better able to see someone. In this way, I could perhaps be seen.

They wouldn’t leave without me. I realised that. And the boy knew his way around. I had to remember that where this terrain was foreign to me, there were people like the boy who lived here, who knew it well. It was their back yard. And in saying that, I understood my fear had as much to do with the situation I was in as it also had to the loss of the baby. I had no correct course of action to take that would save me. I called out, half expecting the boy to walk over one of the ridges but that did not happen. The sun lowered behind the dunes. The temperature changed. The desert began to darken. It would soon be night. At this point, I had to rationalise that I might not be found. I might have to spend the night here. My only plan was not to move. Stay still. Later, after I had been saved and returned to Cairo, I was surprised at how urgently I needed to survive. When it seemed possible that I could perish, I did not want to. I wished I knew how to read the stars.

What eventuated was that out of the darkness I saw a torch light panning the sands of the desert. I ran towards the light. It was a woman wearing a black

Burka and veil who, when she saw me, took two dates out of her pocket and gave them to me. They were sweet and I chewed their pulp until it was liquid, then swallowed. As I chewed the woman had begun to walk back over the 318

dunes. I followed her. We did not exchange any words. She was unfazed, calm; if anything I sensed I had greatly inconvenienced her.

The driver was asleep in the car. I coughed and he woke. He offered me the Pepsi cola that I originally bought him. There was nothing else to drink. I offered the woman some coins which she coyly accepted, put in her pocket, turned and six steps away merged into the night. Whatever had been wrong with the car had been repaired. The driver started the engine, reversed and we returned to Cairo. We passed a truck that, like us, did not have headlights on. It was possible to see by the light of the moon.

We travelled against the movement of the sand, the driver played the same woman’s lament over and over. In places the desert sands moved more quickly than the car.

…

I did not want to eat at the Brasserie in the hotel. While the driver watched me in the rear vision mirror I mimed the act of eating by lifting my hands to my mouth and pretending to chew. He nodded his head. Close to the hotel and near to Mr. Ibrahim’s office he dropped me on a street where there were a number of small restaurants and cafés. The driver pointed to a restaurant where the scent of saffron was overwhelming. I sat at a table close to 319

the street to watch the passing night. Young boys were darting in and out of the traffic selling newspapers and small packets of Kleenex. In the café next door men were playing backgammon, drinking coffee, smoking hookahs whose perfumed tobacco rose and drifted towards the Nile.

My hunger surprised me. The tagine was delicious and tender. I shredded all the flesh off the saffron crusted chicken then scooped it up with wet couscous and roasted pistachios until there was nothing left. And after I ordered a pot of fresh mint tea that came with rose scented Turkish delight.

On the wall of the restaurant were a series of photographs, each blown- up to poster size. They had hung there for some years because those nearest to the door had faded. Those closest to the kitchen were coated with cooking fats. The subject of each photograph was a vendor, photographed beside their produce in roadside stalls and markets in India and the Middle East. The vendors in the photographs were all men, although there was one photograph of an Indian woman wearing a bold pink sari whose wares were spread over a sheet of blue plastic—hundreds of brilliant red chillies.

From the opposite wall a young ironsmith stared at me. He was maybe fourteen, fifteen; sitting behind an anvil in the corner of his workshop whose walls of old stone could have been medieval. I thought the photograph of the boy might have been taken in Aleppo or Damascus. His output—nails, and horseshoes—were fanned in front of him. The boy was staring straight into the lens of the camera, straight at the photographer. He was smiling but it seemed to me that the young man was just smiling at me. And his honest joy had met my eye. I drank my tea. The freshness of the mint, the sweetness of the sugar syrup was all that mattered in the world. 320

…

I phoned Will. It was the middle of the day in Sydney. I was glad to hear his voice. I told him the story of my journey into the desert, of the Roman torso, the fragments of soldiers, of how I was lost. I expressed that I had been frightened. He laughed. I said a woman wearing a black Burka had found me.

Later she blended in with the night. My story must have sounded like a dream.

Will said the crematorium had phoned to remind us to collect Nina’s ashes. Did I want him to do this? No. I wanted to be there. We began a conversation about what we should do with her ashes but this conversation was really about all the things I did not want Will to do, such as put her ashes in the garden in Bronte or sprinkle her ashes into the sea. “Not the sea,” I answered knowing then exactly what I wanted to do.

At this same moment of clarity I wanted to come home. I needed to be there, as soon as possible. It was important that I contributed to this decision and played a part.

… 321

For several nights after the conversation with Will I dreamt I entered a house that was, and was not, the house in Bronte. From the moment I opened the front door, the smell of excrement was toxic. There were piles of feathers in one room after the other. The walls were dirty, the furniture was trashed.

Rabbits and pigeons the size of elephants were entering and exiting the front and back doors. The cooing of doves could be heard from one of the rooms. As

I walked towards the kitchen other birds, some blue, others grey and brown nonchalantly walked past me. In this dream, Will had moved outside and was living in a tent on the back terrace. Everything in the tent was perfectly ordered, his bed neatly made, his sheets clean. He had organised a corner into a small kitchen with a burner and a pot. When he saw me he put his index finger to his lips “Shhh,” he said, “The birds are brooding.” I looked at the chaos, realising that I needed to scare the birds out of the house before I could start to clean everything up. I told Will the birds had to go. He told me to take small quiet steps for fear of frightening them into flapping their wings and making a mess with their feathers.

I printed the photos of the Egyptian village and phoned Rask and told him about the garden of stone without mentioning my experience of being lost. I knew Rask would be interested in the pathways edged with Roman toes and sandalled feet. I told him that I needed to return to Sydney because there was unfinished business with the baby and it was important that I was there to sort it out. After, I would resume the work that I had started. There had not been many 322

suitable locations in Egypt. Perhaps in Turkey I would be able to find a village that was suitable. I would be able to see if Grozman’s fields of boulders were still there. Because I was breaking the contract we had, I volunteered to pay for a return air ticket. But Rask answered that I had to take the time I needed. He had sufficient material to keep going. And in addition, he insisted on reimbursing me for my sudden return to Sydney.

I had to return from Zurich, which I used as a central point to catch flights through Europe and then on to Turkey, Cairo, and home, via Singapore. The

Swiss Air flights between Cairo and Zurich were full and I had to wait several days for a seat. During this time I looked for high walled ramparts, even though the ramparts in Rask’s imagination were in Tunisia. I knew that none of these locations met Rask’s needs and when I spoke with him about this, he confessed that he had been thinking of Persepolis, in Shiraz, Iran. But it was a UNESCO

World Heritage site and permission to film there would be very difficult. He also realised that if the film was to be made, the village and desert ruins may need to be constructed but that was not his problem.

While I was waiting for my flight from Cairo to Zurich, I swam in the

Winter Pool. There was never anyone there. I sat on the edge with my legs dangling in the water which sent an echo of waves to the far side of the pool that bounced and returned. Looking straight down, my calves appeared to have separated from the rest of my body. The most difficult moment for me is the time before you are wet, when you are undressed and in a bathing costume. I take my time to get into the water, allowing my body to adjust to the temperature of the air. I love the feeling of the air on my skin and until I have adjusted to this, I can’t bear the thought of cold water. I have always admired 323

those people like Will who walk into the water or dive straight in as if there is no difference between these elements. For me it is a gradual process that begins with the legs. Then just before I immerse myself fully, I cup my hand in the pool and splash this water behind my neck. This so disturbs my equilibrium and gives me such a sharp shock that the only way to adjust to the shock is to take a deep breath and slide into the water.

Under the water, at the bottom of the pool, I pushed off from the end as if

I was an arrow. My arms formed a point. My legs locked into a single muscle. I kept to the bottom of the pool like a stingray hugs the floor of the ocean. When it felt as if I was coming to a stop, I threw my head down and then up, pulled my shoulders forward creating a movement that rippled down my body to my legs which kicked like a porpoise. That propelled me forward. There was no sound under the water. There was no breath. Looking up, sunlight from the window created patches on the skin of the water. My eyes scanned the white pool tiles.

Small particles that were lying on the floor of the pool looked like tiny islands in a vast ocean.

And one moment I was moving along the bottom of the pool. In another, the urgency for air overtook everything. Then I broke out of the long line that I had become, planted my feet on the bottom of the pool and pushed up like a dart straight through the surface of the water, back to the world. In the instant just before I pushed up, when I was on the edge of breath and breathlessness there was no fear, only instinct.

324

…

There was a butterfly garden in Terminal 3 in Changi Airport. As you enter, you leave the air conditioning of the Terminal and walk into the humid

Singapore air. When I entered it was quiet and almost empty and through the glass top you could see the night sky. There were no stars, only a solid white haze created from the reflection of the many airport lights. The garden was ablaze with red flowering ixora against which black butterflies flamboyantly stood out. There were eight more black winged butterflies with white markings flapping their wings on a tray of pineapple slices that looked like a model of a galactic landing station. The only other people in the garden were an older

English couple. The man wore a soft cotton striped shirt and a backpack and smelt of the rancid stale perspiration that meant he had last been somewhere where he could have washed a long time ago. He knew the names of many of the species of butterflies which he exclaimed with such joy, out loud to his wife.

There were some pitcher plants in reds and greens attached to a tree and a thunderous waterfall. The air was dense and heavy. I was tired and wanted to find something to eat inside the air conditioning.

I found a restaurant and started to read the thick menu that rested on a lectern at the entrance to the restaurant. For such a small place the menu promised food from anywhere in the world. There was a selection of Middle

Eastern dishes, curries from Bhutan, from Nepal and Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, platters of dips from Syrian, Persia, sausages from the United Kingdom, 325

hamburgers from the United States. South America, Central America, Jamaica,

Trinidad and Zanzibar were represented by tropical fruit desserts. I was wondering whether I would eat a hamburger, or whether regional dishes like

Hainanese chicken rice or Char kway teow or Laksa would be fresher but a number of these dishes were already sitting in a bain-marie. I imagined they had been made a long time ago. Will had a thing about food from Bain-maries, having once gotten food poisoning this way. Always order something freshly made, he would insist. I thought if Will was here, he would pass up everything in the bain-marie and order the goat curry from Trincomalee on page nineteen.

Although the restaurant was almost empty, you could see it was popular. Empty plates, glasses, paper cups and scrunched napkins had not yet been cleared from many of the tables. Other tables had yet to be wiped. In the end I couldn’t decide what I felt like eating so I thought I would go for a walk.

Wandering aimlessly from one end of the terminal to the other, having forgotten about eating, and contemplating whether I should find one of the massage chairs someone called out my name. I looked around and saw a tall woman with long hair. She was in no doubt as to whom I was while I had to look hard to recognise her. She was elegantly dressed in a pencil skirt and jacket in a navy blue that was almost black. She looked as though she was on her way to a meeting. My face must have belied my confusion, “Shannon,” she said as though there was something wrong with me, “Shannon Bennett, school,” and at once I knew who she was.

We had not seen each other since then and it was a surprise to me that she recognised me. “You look just the same,” she said, when I asked her what there was about me she had recognised, “You’re practically wearing the same 326

clothes for one thing,” she said, “Though your hair is shorter.” On the other hand

Shannon looked nothing like she had at school. She had larger breasts for one thing and now had thick long hair which, at school, had been short and thin and a mousy colour. “I heard you were living in Sydney,” she said and I told her that

I’d been there for more than ten years. “I moved to Sydney when I married Will,”

I added.

“Have you got time for a drink,” she said walking us into Harry’s Bar where the American football was playing on a wide screen TV. Shannon ordered herself a vodka and soda. I never know what to order in a bar because, although I drink wine, I rarely drink spirits. “The same,” I said. Shannon was on her way to London where she had lined up several meetings. Some years ago she started a recruitment agency for nurses that had become very successful.

She had offices in every capital city in Australia and a huge number of nurses on her books that she placed in hospitals and private homes on short and long term placements. Over the past four years she had expanded her business and was now close to opening offices in some of the larger rural cities like Geelong and Orange. She was on her way to London to talk to someone who had expressed interest in buying her businesses. “The whole world’s getting old,” she told me, “The demands for home nursing, in particular, are a growth industry. There’s a fortune to be made in aged care if you think about it,” she said. I asked her if she was married, “Was,” she said, “Twice.” Shannon’s first husband was a thin boy called Toby who I vaguely remembered from the school formal because he had been Melissa Grimshaw’s date. Shannon stole him that night, she told me, and married him two years after leaving school. The marriage lasted ninety-seven days until Toby started seeing Melissa Grimshaw 327

again behind her back. Her second husband was a stock broker who invested in her name then lost a lot of money on futures that she was made to repay. When

Shannon discovered that, it was the end. Anyway Shannon had the last laugh because she is now worth three times more than he is. Shannon was never one of the brains at school but she obviously had skills in business that no one knew about, herself most especially.

I asked her if she saw any of the girls we were at school with. “Did you know Anne Bishop died from breast cancer, so did Linda Rabinowitz,” and this fact, that women my own age were dying of breast cancer came as such a shock. “And poor Xanthe Fotopoulos got married then, on her honeymoon, she slipped on some rocks. She’s still in a coma.” Shannon was full of worse news about several other girls who were in our year. “Have you got any kids,” she asked me. I felt there was no point in being dishonest with her, and partly I wondered if by surreptitiously circulating information about my situation, that I knew would be told to people I used to know, that I would stop any of them from questioning me on this subject if ever I saw them again. Shannon clearly passed on gossip and I could imagine that when she returned to Brisbane one of the first things she’d do was ring up her best friend Hilary Chambers and say,

“You’ll never guess who I ran into at Changi Airport and ….”

I told her that I had recently given birth to a baby girl who died before she was born. “No!” she said, and ordered another vodka and soda. Shannon came back with a bowl of peanuts and I told her about the five IVF treatments I had.

“What! And then the baby died! I don’t know how you did it. You must be a sucker for punishment,” she added. Then she asked me how I was, not giving me time to answer before she launched into the story of a couple in a 328

documentary she’d seen on television. After they’d lost their son their priest told them to join one of the groups of Storm Chasers that run after tornados in

Kansas and Missouri. Shannon said that all that chaos, cows flying through the air, buses propelled hundreds of meters from where they were, houses crushed, had helped them to understand what it meant to be alive. She wondered if Will was the sort of man who’d get off on something like that. “It’s worth considering,” she said adding that she’d recently taken up skydiving.

I asked her if she had any children. Shannon said she didn’t know how she’d cope if she had them. She was ok without kids. “It wouldn’t be fair on them,” she said. She hadn’t the time to look after a cat. Before, she said, not specifically referring to when, she had felt an overwhelming need to have children. She described it as a drive, a compulsion. I understood that too. “But it passed,” she said. She threw all her energy into her business instead which she had made such a success she was thinking of buying a house somewhere in the south of France. She already owns a house in Brisbane, near to where I grew up, and one at Sunshine Beach near Noosa Heads.

She loved not being in a relationship. And she was never short of men to go out with. We talked about the work I did for Rask, and how I travelled a lot with this work. And after, I complimented Shannon on how good she looked. “A lot of it’s fake,” she told me. She had treated herself to a breast augmentation after her second marriage failed. She was always quite flat chested and her husband often suggested she consider this. The breakup had been very demoralising and as soon as he was out of the picture, as she put it, she had her breasts done. It had been her way of saying “Up you!” With breasts she felt 329

more feminine. She had also dyed her hair and gotten hair extensions which changed her look completely.

I had forgotten many of the girls Shannon and I had been to school with and I wondered how many of them had experienced the strange difficulties with identity and gender that I had. “Probably more than you’ll ever know,” Shannon had reassured me. I thought of how we were each other’s witnesses in the tumultuous movement from young girls to women. Shannon thought I should treat myself to new breasts and make a concerted effort to be a different sort of woman. My flight left earlier than Shannon’s. I left her to order her third vodka and soda.

Walking towards the departure gate, I realised there is never one truth.

There is never one answer. Breasts would not do it for me but I could see other shifts and changes had happened already. And while I would have loved to say everything would settle into some other happily-ever-after, I knew that was never going to be. I was terrified of returning to the world I had left, to our circle of friends with their dinner parties, their talk about clothes, and money, too much, too little. In the narratives of their life they had cast me as the woman who was unable to bear children, the person in the group you had to step around with soft shoes, the person in front of whom you had to be careful about speaking openly on certain subjects because she found this difficult. I didn’t want to be her.

As I walked down the long corridors I also realised there were more choices than simply returning and trying to fit back into an old life. There were other lives ahead. And none of them were in Sydney.

330

…

I slept for most of the flight and when I woke, was suddenly surprised to find myself still inside the plane. Fragments of dreams pervaded my consciousness. The pink cassia tree that I had seen near Fayoum was in one of the dreams, exploding with pink flowers over and over like fireworks. I was beside a shoreline; the lapping sea slapping the sand then retreating, over and over. Behind the beach was a forest of eucalyptus. I recognised this dream place as the forest of gums near Bawley Point, south of Sydney, where the eucalypts come to the edge of the sand. You have to be so careful when you enter the forest because it is like a labyrinth. It’s easy to get lost. These were the same gum trees I saw close to where my mother lives, tall and straight with armlike branches whose leaves howled and wailed and roared in the wind. In another fragment of this dream, Will was there although he had turned into a giant currawong. I knew he was able to fly, but he seemed reluctant. He was calmly waiting on the seashore, quite still and quiet. I realised that the way I saw this scene was from above. I was looking down at the giant bird on the beach, at the trees, the sea. I must have been flying.

Ovid talks of dreams as empty shapes that lie in wait around Aurora, the god of sleep, who dwells deep in a cave, in a hollow mountain near the

Cimmerians where doors are forbidden, lest their hinges creak and disturb him. 331

It is Aurora who sends his messengers to fill the shapes and enact dreams:

Morpheus who is skilled at simulating human forms, Icelon who transforms himself into birds, serpents and beasts and Phantasas who morphs into the soil and rocks and trees, anything, Ovid writes, without a mind.

It was Morpheus who came to Alcyone in a dream that re-enacted her husband’s death in a shipwreck. When she woke she went down to the shore where she was told what had happened. She already knew because she had seen it all in a dream. The gods turned her into a bird that flew low over the cruel sea that had taken her husband’s life. She flew to where he floated and was able to kiss his lifeless body one last time. The gods then transformed

Ceyx, her husband, into the same type of kingfisher as his wife so that they could be together forever. And for seven days, in winter, Alcyone broods on a nest that floats upon the waves, Ceyx above, stands guard, calming the sea.

Sometimes these dreams I have are comforting, sometimes they are preferable to the reality into which I wake. And as I remembered where I was, and what was going to happen soon, the lights inside the cabin suddenly came on. Breakfast was served quickly. I didn’t want to eat. The plane dropped closer to the ground, the immense stretch of trees that fringed the Hawkesbury River was now visible.

The wheels locked into landing position. The plane veered out to sea and arced back to approach from the southern runway. The passengers were sitting quietly while the plane jolted as it entered the warmer air and I sensed the same feeling as if I were being delivered to the ground from the inside of a spear.

Over the intercom, an inconsequential piece of music that featured flutes and harps softened the mood, like a soundtrack over end credits. This was soon 332

drowned out by the thrust of the engine. It seemed that a part of the fear had come to an end. Will would be in the terminal waiting for me. We would go home. Stop along the way and buy some bread, so freshly baked it would still be warm and soft and after, we’d sit on the terrace with coffee and eat the bread with fig jam and talk about the surface of life. It would not be the same. It could not be the same. And when the time was right, I’d telephone Roseanne and ask to look at all the photographs she took of Nina. I’ll learn her face.