Short Takes IV

19/7/76
OF CARS AND KEGS AND DOUBTFUL LEGS

RECOUNTED IN HIS civilised and cheerful growl, this evening Alec Hope described for me a dream he had involving myself, Kevin Hart and David Campbell. Together we drove along a country road in ADH’s white station wagon, the back filled with kegs of beer and other provisions. Our destination was in general terms “the country”, which may have meant DC’s property, and this was where we intended to picnic on our supplies. Alec was at the wheel.

We became lost. Not long after discovering this, we found the car was ascending a hill where the gradient increased until the incline was so steep that the vehicle threatened to topple backwards. ADH managed to turn us around (at this point in the narrative he performed a hand gesture suggestive of turning a horse or a bicycle) and the car rolled to the bottom of the slope.

“What shall we do now?” asked DC dispiritedly.

“Never fear,” replied Alec. “You see that house set into the hill over there?” and he indicated a building wedged into the cliff. “Well I know a place just above it.”

Meanwhile, it seems, Gould had absented himself from the dream.

Hope, Hart and Campbell trooped over to the dwelling, and ADH climbed up to the house-above-thehouse by means of a convenient ladder. DC followed him, laden with a keg. On the point of reaching the top, the burly poet missed his foothold and plunged with his keg some distance to the ground.

“Are you all right?” called Alec, unable to see over the edge where his colleague had come to earth. There was a reply from below, negative and well spiced. So ADH called again. “Look, leave that stuff down there. We’ll haul it up when Alan brings the rope.”

Thereupon DC began to mount the slope again. As he gained the top, he placed his hand on some tiles, which proved to be loose, so came away, with the result that he plummeted once more to the bottom. “With no improvement in his mood,” Alec concluded for me, head nodding slightly, the quick sideways twinkle to see how the story had been received.

(Note 2007. A theme of poetic rivalry—the “house above the house”—is not impossible in this dream, but unreliable. Nonetheless, it does seem to belong to those later-life dreams dealing with anxieties aroused by frustrated designs, mess, and undependable structures, though interestingly the buoyant dreamer has transferred the frustration and misfortune that usually besets the dreamer onto one of his companions. How very suave. This conforms to the tranquil self-possession I always observed in Alec, while DC’s was to my mind a temperament more volatile and, oddly, given the sportsman and farmer he had been, less self-assured. The emotional authenticity of dreams, no wonder that ADH twinkle!)

24/9/99
A QUICKENING

TODAY, on either side of the cycle path, have appeared irregular tapestries of everlasting daisies, phosphorescent yellow against the green of the new grass. Mothers with strollers pause on the pavements, less to chat than to present themselves like jonquils to the vernal sunlight. A man from the council has arrived in his truck to water the Manchurian pear trees that were planted a few days ago as replacements for Mulga Street’s decrepit elders. The park’s plum trees have now lost their papery pink blossom in favour of claret foliage, though the low crabapple trees beside the little bridge over the stormwater drain resemble six frothy ballet dresses. The bees go from flower to flower like so many lobbyists at a parliamentary lawn party

And beneath the stringybarks near the children’s playground there is parked a flash white car—a vintage Wolseley perhaps—with interstate numberplates. A girl in a long skirt and a short vest is arched backward across the bonnet of this vehicle. Her arms and her stomach are pale and she has radiated her long dark hair in a fan around her face. Between her legs there is a burly man, tanned, with buzz-cut hair, sunglasses, a white smock and dark trousers. He is moving gently from side to side, not thrusting so much as brushing the girl’s mons veneris, for blithely, so blithely, they are copulating.

And as I observe what a proper, what a delightful flagrancy this insouciant bonk is at this season, I also observe I have not a literary thought in mind, least of all D.H. Lawrence. I enjoy the sheer naturalness of it. The act is as casually public as the lions or macaque monkeys I have seen at the same business, or its singular sublimation, at Mogo Zoo. The council man stands with his hose, directing a pattering jet of water at the pear trees. The mothers catch sunlight and rock their strollers slightly. Cyclists flit by in lycra gear that is the same yellow as the daisies while a senior citizen pauses nearby to let his dog sniff and pee. Why, these bonkers from interstate might be rehearsing a ballet routine or he, with his hands at some activity before him, might be plaiting the tail of a horse, talking quietly, soothingly as he does so. Or the casualness of their canoodle might mean this is all happening in dream, were it not for the flights of crimson rosellas trapezing from tree to tree with their urgent chip-chirrup, chip-chirrup, and a magpie somewhere carolling, “Federal funding! Federal funding!”

14/8/03
ATTACHING TO THE ANIMAL SPIRIT

THE CLUE to Gertrude’s character in Hamlet is the promptness with which she remarries. She has strength of character only to the degree that she attaches to a powerful male. One must watch her speeches in terms of those that are uttered in the presence of Claudius, and those where she is disconnected from that power source. The contrast is with Lady Macbeth, whose morale does not depend on attaching itself to a male with strong animal spirits for all that we recognise Macbeth, prior to his self-consciousness becoming acute, might have had them. Lady M has animal spirits inherently, and they include the manner in which her conscience expresses itself, reflexively, out of the anarchic regions of sleep. She is troubled as a cat might be troubled in its dream; the mind is recognising wrong, not sin.

Did Gertrude collude in the plot to kill her husband? One cannot tell much about old Hamlet except that he has the virtues of which young Hamlet approves—a wisdom born of years, a gentlemanliness and consideration towards his wife that may have aroused her impatience. The signs are that Claudius’ animal spirits are very much livelier than those of his older brother, or those of his nephew. As with many of Shakespeare’s plays, the rich texture of the play itself points to the intrigue of what one may suppose for the pre-play.

3/7/07
FRONTLINE DISPATCH

AT ANNE’S WORKPLACE in BG Hall there arrived R to take up a post as an assistant and who, in the slightness of her stature, resembles Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell. She has a stud gleaming from her left eyebrow, another implanted at the tip of her tongue, and the probability of other studs elsewhere about her person, while neat tattoos peep from various clefts of her flesh. Her hair is a shifting palette, though most vivid on those days when it bears a streak of lime-green to match the socks she wears. Her tight-fitting jackets are Carnaby Street in its psychedelic era.

Within a very short time Tinkerbell was promoted from humble assistant to Human Resources Manager at BG and, at twenty-one, it seems this is not the first time she has been appointed to authority in a corporate venture.

Despite her slight frame, Tinkerbell plays rugby for a Belconnen side and today showed her workmates the bruises she had sustained in the weekend match against the girls from the Australian Defence Force Academy, the cloud-blue of these injuries interleaving with the gunmetal blue of the tattoos along her thighs and shanks.

“Like …” she described the match for Anne and the other ladies of the office, “… like, they came at us with this chant, We’re for Australia! So we sang back, Yeah, and we’re for the Taliban.” Then Tinkerbell paused before adding her appraisal of the military girls. “Vicious bitches.”

10/12/07
LAYERS OF ANCIENT SCRUTINY

IN MY FORTY-ONE YEARS in Australia I believe I have heard the English disparaged more often than I have heard Aborigines disparaged, and I do not count in this the well-disposed chiacking directed at The Poms which, in the early months of my arrival here, struck me as kindly and essentially welcoming rather than spiteful.

The disparagement comes from grievance and the heat of that grievance is always a little startling. How have the English, as opposed to the British, as opposed to the English-speaking world, brought this ressentiment upon themselves?

The fact that the charges are, as a matter of historical accuracy, often simplistic, smaller than imagined, or fantasised entirely, can do nothing to dissolve the heat or persistence with which they are made. Some vexation in our time wants an anti-English cast of mind in place, and interestingly it remains anti-English. It is the English, not the British, who oppressed Ireland and America’s thirteen irresolute colonies, and who bombed Dresden. It is the English who whinge, are dirty, parochial, rude, so disappointing, who constitute a declining or even disintegrating society and yet are the world’s only imperialists with exclusive rights in the exercise of snobbery. And it is the English who, on the most preposterous suggestion of my ex-federal MP, owe Australia massive environmental compensation for ringbarking the continent’s trees.

I can well believe there survives a type of English hauteur that holds colonials to be inevitably coarse. I meet this type most often when it is being caricatured by Oz nationals venting the above obscure grievances. Respect, liking, some good-natured envy, are the sentiments I recall being volunteered when Poms attitudinise about the Oz.

So the problem arises. English-born as I am, how do I think through an acceptable patriotism? The luminous, resilient contribution England (and Britain) have made to the civilisations of the world gives me pride. At the same time, like most of my fellow citizens here, I commit myself to the distinct contribution Australia makes to the same enterprise.

If I identify, say, the immediate three items that come to mind expressing my allegiance to England, what might they be? Certainly the more pastoral parts of Vaughan Williams’ music, the gypsy wildness of the 1950s countryside around the garrisons where I grew up, and the magnificent calm of Churchill’s wartime speeches. What arrives if I do the same for my Australian allegiance? I conjure Monaro and South Coast landscapes, the one blonde and austere, the other green, opulent, intrigued with mirror lakes and intimate valleys. Then I take Furphy’s Such Is Life and Paterson’s “Man from Snowy River” in the one grab because both these works present such a genuine spirit of welcome. And third I recall the spontaneous generosity of those who slept on the floors of their college rooms that I might get good rest in their beds, who then paid for my breakfasts so that I, along with other dissidents in those early 1970s, might confound the appalling conscription laws by playing hard to catch.

These images of my bi-focal allegiance are not exhaustive, but each has the effect of making a place dear, allowing me to be pro patria in one case and pro patria in another. But bi-focal allegiance is forever the New-chum’s dilemma, and this grows vexed when he is witness to one side venting a prejudice against the other in the expectation that it will be received as part of an accepted patriotic attitude. “The Poms have never liked our ANZUS treaty,” a fellow once appealed for my corroboration, “because we’ve gone with the side that gave them a whupping.” He referred to the War of Independence, and there were several assumptions I might have challenged here, had he not been my host at the time.

But what, under inspection, is this Native-born and New-chum distinction? Native-born, one assumes, have no necessary dissociation in their loyalties; we cannot be other than this soil’s plant, they claim fairly, though one knows the novelists, Richardson, Boyd, Stead, who felt the underlying instability of this and made relevant, wonderful art from it.

The New-chum, by contrast, is mindful of the dissociation and mindful of the reserve aroused in the Native-born by their wariness of unproven, unprovable, loyalties. Welcome to the land of the fair go, might be the Native-born’s fair-go warning sign at passport control. You are allowed to prosper, but should you get enthused about our sacred stuff, we warn that you will probably not be entirely believed.

What follows from this? I grow attached to the place where I live; it is my lived-in place. It contains forty-one years of my life, which, at a guess, is a duration longer than most people presently living on the continent have been alive. And yet, in addition to the periodic vilification of my country-of-birth, as an Australian author I live with the recognition that the biographical detail, “born London 1949, arrived Australia 1966” creates a reflex of defence in a part of what I might hope to be my readership. How can you talk about Australian place and experience without somehow trespassing? For trespass, I must concede, I somehow did by arriving here, and must suppose it for D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo and Boy in the Bush. Are Rolf Boldrewood, Marcus Clarke and Roland Robinson the only New-chum Australian canonical authors? Offhand I can think of no others.

Conversely, when in reaction to instances of the above anti-English disparagements, I express patriotic feeling towards my prior country, here is proof of how inconstant the New-chum proves himself to be. One needs to take care not to be disqualified from having a patria at all.

And yet maybe the Native-born wariness against the trespasser has a necessity that is understandable. Wariness, which in this instance arises from a conflicted welcome of new matters with a wish to be rid of an unsafe intrusion, is after all, the observable attitude of the Aboriginal people to all the trespassers on this continent since 1788. We, the interlopers, Native-born and New-chum both, know this well. “Well, I don’t suppose youse all are going to go back home,” replied a North Queensland Aboriginal fellow to a television interviewer’s enquiry about his view of the future of race relations here; a sanguine outlook, but it implied a preferred option. So we have been uneasy in our occupation. No wonder a part of the emotional response to that quiet scrutiny has been to manufacture parallel attitudes that allow one part of a community to authenticate itself by measuring itself against the other.

This is the fourth in Alan Gould’s series of “Short Takes” in Quadrant