CHESTER EAGLE The Garden Gate Chester THE Eagle The Garden Gate, a book full of stories and characters, takes as its starting point a historian's invitation to THE GARDEN GATE his family and friends to celebrate the completion of GARDEN a biography. The venue, chosen because the subject of his study is the botanist Ferdinand van Mueller, is the Royal Botanic Gardens, and it is through the several GATE gates of this famous garden that the characters enter our consciousness. The time is the late seventies, the place Melbourne, and the members of the group, hav- ing dispersed before the party has properly begun, are followed through their inertwining lives until the book returns to where it began. TROJAN THE GARDEN GATE Other books by Hail & Farewell! An evocation of Gippsland (1971) Who could love the nightingale? (1974) Four faces, wobbly mirror (1976) At the window (1984) The garden gate (1984) Mapping the paddocks (1985) Play together, dark blue twenty (1986) House of trees (reissue of Hail & Farewell! 1987) Victoria Challis (1991) House of music (1996) Wainwrights’ mountain (1997) Waking into dream (1998) didgeridoo (1999) Janus (2001) The Centre & other essays (2002) Love in the Age of Wings & other operas (2003) Melba: an Australian city (2004) The Wainwright Operas (2005) Oztralia (2005) Cloud of Knowing (2006) Benedictus (2006) Mini mags Escape (2004) Hallucination before departure (2006) THE GARDEN GATE Chester Eagle First published 1984 by Trojan Press. Typeset by Abb-Typesetting, Collingwood. Printed by Globe Press, Brunswick. Designed by Vane Lindesay. This electronic edition published 2006 by Chester Eagle, operating as Trojan Press, 23 Langs Road Ivanhoe 3079, phone (within Australia) (03) 9497 1018, email address [email protected] Je fais mon travail avec une passion concentrée qui semble s’accroître en se satisfaisant. Quelle sera la valeur du résultat? Dieu le sait. En tout cas, j’éprouve un veritable bonheur à creuser, à équiper, à mâter ce grand canot de Robinson que je ne pourrai pas lançer, si la mer ne vient elle- même le prendre; et je n’oublierai jamais, Princesse, que c’est à vous, à vous seule, que je dois de m’être livré à ce luxe de composition. Hector Berlioz à la Princesse Sayn-Wittgenstein 30/11/1857 1 Serene, Anglo-Australian, the gardens lay in sun, summating European science and British connoisseurship. Strollers regarded flora from six continents. In the lake, ducklings paddled; on the island, a host of seabirds crowded heavily in the trees, mysteriously distanced from each other, unmoving, like survivors of a cyclone, and foreboding, like vultures waiting for a death. Their presence contradicted the simple optimism of azaleas, hydrangeas, and children feeding swans. Through the gates of the garden came, variously, the members of a picnic party, carrying baskets and cane hampers, and in a flat overlooking the gar- dens, a fashionable South Yarra address, lay the one member of the party destined never to arrive. Through the kiosk gate came Murdy Miller, instigator of the gather- ing, and his wife Christie with their son and daughter. ‘Coming in here always makes me feel as if we’re acting out some corny rendition of a family,’ said the man. His use of the word family having connotations which downgraded her, the wife did not deign to answer. Still trying to be interesting, Murdy said, ‘The Baron waited here one time for two hours, but Euphemia never came. A year or so later he waited somewhere else because, I suspect, he thought this was where she might come in.’ Christie, having heard it before, remained silent. It was a matter of no importance to the children. Murdy Miller was the author of a biography of Baron Sir Ferdinand Jakob Heinrich von Mueller, government botanist of the colony of Victoria, and sixteen years director of the Royal Botanical Gardens. The gathering beginning to assemble was to celebrate the acceptance of the book by ______, publishers. A dozen people had been invited. Three of them — Bruce Beck, his lover Barbara and his wife Janis — were at that moment beside the her- barium in the high corner of the gardens diagonally opposed to the ple- beian kiosk entrance. Trees, bushes, and the white herbarium enclosed 1 a vestibule of lawn before a gateway formed by bamboo thickets and a pair of Norfolk pines. Janis, trying to efface herself, lagged behind, but the interest she affected in the herbarium was more obtrusive than if she had stayed close. Bruce called, ‘Oh Jesus, Janis, don’t clear off on us,’ but she merely shifted her attention from the gumleaf motifs above the ventilators to a bright azalea. ‘She’s niggly with us,’ said Barbara. ‘Oh well, where’s the picnic?’ She slung the carryall’s strap on her shoulder and bent with the weight. Bruce told her: ‘He said it was the one spot in the gardens you’d think for sure was planted by von Mueller.’ ‘Shit eh. Let’s just walk through here and see what we find.’ Passively mutinous, scared, Janis followed them past the sentinels of Norfolk pine. These trees, for Janis, had the persona of fairytale trees, something from a Rackham drawing; for Barbara, trees embodied a con- cept of earth and wholesomeness now under attack in capitalist society; for Bruce, they had the masculine strength of timber. A little way beyond the narrow point of entry was a huge oak, classi- fied Quercus Alba. Barefoot Barbara put her toe to the sign. ‘That’s what I’m trying to get away from. It’s got terrific potential, though. I’d like to see one out on some moorland somewhere, with a mist rolling in, you could really do something …’ Bruce said, ‘They had some good rituals, those people, they really had themselves centred.’ ‘If I know you,’ she said, ‘you’re thinking of phallic maypoles. Typical chauvinist!’ An even sexuality flowing towards him turned her doctrine into banter. ‘Anyway, what about you and Janis?’ This was a reference to a story Bruce had told her about he and Janis making love in their children’s treehouse one night when they had had an argument, and she had disappeared, and he found her, crying, in the treehouse, and they had tried to repair the damage. ‘That’s a pretty interrupted business,’ he said, in the way of males being non-committal. Janis approached them, brushing fondly against Barbara, took the carryall, and led them onto the Oak Lawn, as the sign declared it. They entered it like travellers discovering a continent. Arboreal princes shaded wide domains. Sunlight and grass favoured the unclaimed land between the principalities. Janis, obeying the fall of the land, and 2 attracted by a showy bougainvillea, hurried through the oaks and elms. Bruce called, ‘That wouldn’t be the way,’ but she ignored them. Something superstitious in her flight left husband and lover exchanging summatory glances. ‘From what Murdy tells me,’ said Bruce, ‘this’d be the other fellow’s work. Guilfoyle. He was into the Olde Englyshe stuff. I gather. I don’t know. Anyway, let’s try this path.’ They tried it. It was, in ways, inimical to them, too big; it curved authoritatively around the hill, giving glimpses of Government House, with its white tower, and its flag indicating that the Governor was at home. The Director’s residence snuggled close to this seat of central power, and outside its gate, closed to the public, stood a huge Algerian Oak, which, the sign declared, had been planted by William R. Guilfoyle on the 17th of August 1873. Bruce admired the tree, but Barbara checked him with, ‘Not bad for a hundred years, I suppose.’ Chasing her mood, Bruce found something denigratory to say. ‘This must be the tree Murdy was talking about! It really gets under his skin, apparently. This fellow Guilfoyle had been five weeks in the job when he planted it. Murdy says it was his declaration that he was boss and he was here to stay.’ ‘Looks like he was right, doesn’t it?’ Barbara was realistic enough. Fast moving clouds gave the day a dapple of sunlight and withdrawal of sun. The garden was shown, alternately, as a brilliant showpiece and as a closed system unlike the world about it. Trees from the Himalayas, Mexico, Chile, Spain and a region loosely termed the Orient had an air of special selection for a World XI to match the Australian eucalypts, tristanias, fern trees and cabbage palms. The pampered trees, well watered, drained, the soil at their feet turned over, or smoothed with lawn, appeared to be above all struggle. Such competition as occurred between them was carefully planned to bring each to its representa- tive best. The garden was a gathering of olympians, ennobled from the forests of the earth. Ancient cacti and ancient grass-trees took their appointed places in the parade of knowledge and mastery. ‘This place has an incredible assumption,’ said Bruce. 3 ‘So have most of the biggest shits on earth,’ said Barbara. ‘Is there any hurry? Let’s lie down a while.’ Punctuality was a vice for Barbara. She led him onto a wide stretch of lawn and took off her shirt. ‘You take off yours,’ she said, and then: ‘Put your arm under me. The grass’ll scratch my tit.’ ‘At last you’ve found a reason for the bra.’ She nudged him in the balls: ‘Careful Charlie,’ Bruce laughed. He said, ‘You know what my dad used to tell my sister? If some bloke’s after you, you can do an awful lot of damage with a spiked heel.’ She said,’ Bit out of date, that advice.