There Must Be More to Life

Belvedere Woman
by Ian Callinan
Arcadia, 2016, 212 pages, $29.95

The year is 1975 and Sandra Rentle, the subject of Belvedere Woman, Ian Callinan’s tenth novel, is facing her fiftieth birthday. Claire, the local dress-shop owner, probably sums her up best: “there was still something disarmingly young about Mrs Rentle … poor, spoilt, slightly stupid, slightly rich, snobbish Mrs Rentle, a nice woman, adrift, victim of her upbringing, struggling to get away from it all”.

And what she wants to flee is five decades in Thirlmere Street in Belvedere—at the centre of an enclave of twenty or thirty blocks, north of the Brisbane River, where the brilliance of the purple jacarandas, the red poincianas, and the red and purple bougainvilleas lining the streets almost distracted one from the grand houses that stood behind them—all within walking distance of the best churches (preferably Anglican), the best schools (predominantly Protestant), “and axiomatically, the best people”.

As Sandra’s best and oldest friend, the spirited Lucy, put it:

I can’t believe how restricted it was: everything; religion, schools, suburbs, colour, sex and money. The last is the same though, money. That’s important, but the rest … We were more like conscripts, compulsorily enrolled in marriage by our teachers, our parents and society itself.

The mention of parents calls up the book’s colossus—Sandra’s late father. “Daddy”—patriarch, patrician, plutocrat, prophet—saturates almost every page; his pronouncements and prejudices have always provided unquestioning reassurance and comfort to Sandra until she begins to navigate a mid-life crisis through a haze of disenchantment and chardonnay. Where does she belong?

We Australians have always been squeamish about discussing class. It challenges our egalitarian ethos, and is an affront to our much-prized notion of mateship. But as the Melbourne writer Thornton McCamish has put it, “Australian society has more layers than a MasterChef gateau.” In his very readable study in 1997, Class in Australia, Craig McGregor unabashedly insisted that class existed in Australia, that it still mattered, and that it determined people’s lives and futures. McGregor argued that “class is not just a matter of snobbery, which is merely stupid; it is a matter of ‘the right to rule’. And who has it.” The editor of the Age from 1979 to 1981, English-born Michael Davie, in his absorbing Anglo-Australian Attitudes (2000), wrote of a slice of Australian society with a social yearning

along English lines that would set them apart from the Aussie “gidday mate” rabble. The yearning reveals itself in snobbery and social rituals that pop up in, for instance, Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, the Adelaide Hills, or Melbourne’s South Yarra and Toorak.

He might have added, although the southern states would have regarded it as risible, Brisbane’s Ascot and Hamilton (undoubtedly the models for Belvedere).

In 1974, the country was shocked to read Dr Ron Wild’s study of a lightly disguised Bowral, which revealed a town as socially stratified as any town in the Home Counties. Bradstow: A Study of Status, Class and Power in a Small Australian Town was published the year before the setting of Belvedere Woman, revealing a hierarchy that would have been familiar to Sandra and de rigueur for Daddy.

Wild had spent nearly four years living in the Southern Highlands town studying its 1635 households and 5210 people. He identified six status groups: first, the descendants of old grazing families and those who had been enriched by mid-nineteenth-century industrial capitalism; second, the Grange-ites—Pitt Street farmers, professionals, plutocrats from the city, living in the Grange with large houses, manicured lawns and elaborate gardens. These two groups would have been Daddy’s sort of people. Next came the local bosses and self-made men of business; socially unacceptable to the graziers and Grange-ites. Fourth and fifth came the skilled manual workers and small shopkeepers; and then the semi-skilled tradesmen (40 per cent of the town’s population). Finally, in a heap (constituting 4 per cent of the town) were the unskilled and unemployed; known contemptuously as “the no-hopers”.

The general reaction to Bradstow was that it was a comical freak of a town. The Bulletin observed, “Fortunately Australia as a whole is not so stuffy and rigidly compartmented as Bradstow.” Callinan’s Belvedere certainly is and, although his novel is a work of fiction, it is also a roman à clef. His Belvedere did exist in Brisbane. Perhaps some of it still does.

The extraordinary aspect of Bradstow (Bowral) is that a re-examination twenty-five years later by academics Drew Cottle and Helen Masterman-Smith (a 1997 journal article titled “Bradstow Revisited”) observed no significant changes to the town’s social structure. While the focus of Callinan’s novel is narrower—a suburb rather than a country town—one should not be surprised to find that the bastions of Belvedere would still stand largely un-breached in 1997.

One of the catalysts for Callinan’s writing Belvedere Woman was the paucity of Australian fiction about the upper classes. It is true, there have been few. In 1957, Elizabeth Harrower produced Down in the City, a striking novel, set in 1940s Sydney, about Esther Prescott, another young upper-middle-class woman, who had spent her whole life in closeted isolation in prosperous Rose Bay. Until, that is, her marriage—to a Kings Cross crook.

In 1969, more than a decade later, Patrick White wrote to a friend about his soon-to-be-published novel The Vivisector. White observed that he was writing about the Sydney plutocracy:

which I don’t think has been done before in any detail: Australian writers don’t seem to have considered it aesthetically desirable to write about the rich … At least with the rich, who are slightly more cosmopolitan, one can get away from what is referred to as “the Australian image”, which no longer interests me.

As Kerryn Goldsworthy observed in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature:

Satirical representations of the hated suburbs with their Bakelite telephones and pink chenille bedspreads disappear and are replaced [in White’s later fiction] by a far more complex set of representations of urban Sydney.

The days of rural Dogwoods and Sarsaparilla were behind him. Goldsworthy also observes:

White’s preoccupation with class difference and with the triumph of individual genius or virtue over class origins, for example, impels him to rewrite Cinderella three times in a row: first in The Vivisector, then in The Eye of the Storm, and finally in A Fringe of Leaves. In all of these novels the main characters are pulled free of humble class origins by mediocre people of a higher class who sense, and want to possess by marriage or adoption, their superior qualities.

In his letter, White did acknowledge the work of Martin Boyd, but by way of exception—Boyd’s upper-class focus was on Melbourne. Boyd’s elegant Langton tetralogy—The Cardboard Crown, A Difficult Young Man, Outbreak of Love and When Blackbirds Sing—published over a decade between 1952 and 1962, covered a century in the life of a family. Modelled on his own kin, the à Becketts and the Boyds, it is a picture of a well-to-do Anglo-Australian family in love, at war, at rest and play—but rarely at work. Although Boyd’s interest was more about the individual than in social groups, he occasionally gave way to a satiric aside. He deplored the public school myth:

To [our parents], school was simply something you made use of, like a shop, and the idea that grew up with the nineteenth-century middle-class, that one derived social standing from a school, had not reached them. They would have thought it as absurd to expect to derive social importance from their dentist.

He was also not above the occasional swipe. In A Difficult Young Man he sketched a withering portrait of an Australian social climber, Miss Barbara Stanger of Moonee Ponds.

Boyd’s Langtons tended to live in a cosmos of their own—a little like Galsworthy’s Forsytes—and, like Boyd himself, never quite at home anywhere—in Melbourne, London or the Home Counties. The inhabitants of Callinan’s Belvedere have their own world too—those twenty or thirty blocks that define them; but they have none of the Anglo-Australian restlessness of the Langtons. They are content in their privileged enclave. And so was Sandra—were it not for Dan Bencham, the clever, ambitious, state-school boy from the south side (a suburb Sandra had never heard of called Creekdale), a fitter-and-turner’s son, who from the day he met her, aged fourteen, at dancing class, declared his undying devotion. Dan was really Patrick White’s noble figure of modest origins who could rescue Sandra and make her better.

In one of his impassioned pleas, Dan says to Sandra:

We’re two young people living in unimportant suburbs in a little city thousands of miles from anywhere or anything that counts and I love you. That’s what we have in common. What divides us is a ridiculous misunderstanding by your parents and their friends about who they are and what they mean, here, or anywhere else. That illogical, dying, anachronistic, unforgivable social snobbery should divide us now, in the most egalitarian country in the western world, will be scoffed at in a few years.

Boyd’s swipe at Moonee Ponds recalls Barry Humphries’s best-known suburban icon, Dame Edna, but one of his forgotten gems was selected from a higher register. “Nice upper-middle-class” Debbie Thwaite (recorded in a falsetto monologue in 1960) is a type of Australian girl Humphries kept meeting in London at the end of the 1950s: “Often they succeeded in returning to Australia—always by steamer, in that far-off epoch—without having once met an English person.” Here is Debbie:

Last Friday night Bev brought home a terrifically sweet couple from Geelong and we invited the two Sydney girls from upstairs because they’re always complaining they never meet people … Sandra and I could see they were thrilled to bits. I honestly don’t understand girls who get homesick in London. There’s so much to do in our flat you never get time to think, and Patsie’s mother sends us big airmail parcels of the Women’s Weekly and the Bulletin supplement, so we never really think we’re out of things.

In his inimitable way, Humphries has Debbie prattle off no fewer than fifteen fellow Melburnians (including Jocelyn, Ailsa, Monica and Val; Miggs and Margery, Miriam and Shirl) boarding or disembarking from nine of the ships which plied the route between Australia and Southampton—from the Aurelia and the Fairsky to the Orcades and the Southern Cross. But not before shopping—and here the Master puts his finely tuned social antennae to use: “Alwyn; she’s a phys-ed instructress … also insisted on buying a box of Sheffield grapefruit spoons. Quite nice, but a bit Mrs Everage I thought.”

Debbie ends her monologue with: “It’s funny to think I’ll be back in Melbourne in such a short time. I don’t know what I’ll do. It’ll be all so different.” That stultifying provincialism was a mark of the time.

Callinan’s Sandra also joined that privileged clique. Daddy still called England home although his forebears hadn’t lived there for more than a century. Of course she met a cricketer on board the Oriana between Perth and Colombo—a member of the Second Australian Cricket Team. As the waspish Lucy snapped, “Second at cricket; Second Eleven socially.” Len Steer had told Sandra he was “in timber”. “Have you looked at his hands and fingernails?” shot back Lucy; “I bet he’s a carpenter’s apprentice.” Nothing came of this flirtation, nor of her time abroad. She was soon home and engaged—it was inevitable—to Jack, a doctor.

Daddy had reservations about Mummy’s (his rather genteel wife, Dawn’s) unqualified embrace of the medical profession:

There had been a time, he told her, when doctors, although they were received in society, we’re not really part of its inner circle. Just because you need a dentist does not mean you had to mix with them socially.

But Jack’s family lived in Belvedere, only a few streets from Sandra, and his father was a member of the Club so Daddy was prepared to allow the match. The distractions of the nurses, the rowing club and cards had slowed Jack’s completion of “med-sn” (to have heard medicine pronounced with three syllables would have given anyone away as an upstart in this circle; not to be entrusted with one’s life; and certainly not to be received socially). But: “It was no impediment to his halting progress that the Professor of Surgery had been nominated as a member of the Club by Jack’s father.”

Jack becomes a fashionable obstetrician and gynaecologist. Known as Peter Pan by his colleagues, he becomes a passionate jogger and a dedicated adulterer. The now loveless marriage had produced an estranged daughter (who blames her mother for her own disastrous marriage) and a nice, introverted son (who disappointed his father by becoming an accountant). By the mid-1970s, they are in their twenties and no longer living at home. Sandra’s sumptuous empty nest is even emptier, and she looks back to Dan.

Does she, can she, shake off the habits and prejudices of a lifetime and leave Belvedere for Dan? In this—although his tenth published novel, it was the first that he wrote—Ian Callinan is at his sardonic best. Yet the mocking is wry; a model of restraint. He has observed this world from the edges—and from the centre—all his life. What is extraordinary is that this leading Queen’s Counsel and retired High Court judge—now in his seventies—can carry a novel like this.

Daddy’s proclamations and pre-war perspectives are, of course, conveyed with aplomb, but that Callinan has been able to sustain a life story, and an intimate one at that, through the eyes of a woman is remarkable. He has accomplished this before—with Cecily Towne, another Queensland daughter of privilege, and the protagonist in his seventh novel, Betrayals. But he has not simply replicated Cecily in Sandra. Sandra is no match for the clever Cecily. Sandra’s snobbishness and simple acceptance of all that Daddy stood for should make her contemptible. But perhaps her lack of intellect, her level of self-awareness and her husband’s indifference make her vulnerable and make one wish for a happy ending.

Judges, even retired judges, are immune to popular opinion; bound to honour an obligation to pronounce the truth. In exposing the foibles of post-war Belvedere (yes, I know, it is now at least four decades ago, but patrician memories are elephantine), Ian Callinan may find fewer invitations finding their way from his contemporaries north of the Brisbane River. But there may still be a happy outcome: the author should have more time at his desk.