Everywhere I Look

EVERYWHERE I LOOK
is a collection of essays, diary entries and true stories spanning more than fifteen years of the work of one of Australia's greatest writers. Helen Garner takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for infanticide, from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading
Pride and Prejudice
. The collection includes her famous and controversial essay on the insults of age, her deeply moving tribute to her mother, and the story of her joy in discovering the ukulele.
Everywhere I Look
is a multifaceted, profound portrait of life. It glows with insight and wisdom.

PRAISE FOR HELEN GARNER

‘Garner is one of those wonderful writers whose voice one hears and whose eyes one sees through. Her style, conversational but never slack, is natural, supple and exact, her way of seeing is acute and sympathetic, you receive an instant impression of being in the company of a congenial friend and it is impossible not to follow her as she brings to life the events and feelings she is exploring.'

Diana Athill

‘A voice of great honesty and energy.'

Anne Enright

‘Scrupulously objective and profoundly personal.'

Kate Atkinson

‘Garner's spare, clean style flowers into magnificent poetry.'

Australian Book Review

‘She has a Jane Austen–like ability to whizz an arrow straight into the truest depths of human nature, including her own.'

Life Sentence

‘Compassionate and dispassionate in equal measure…She writes with a profound understanding of human vulnerability, and of the subtle workings of love, memory and remorse.'

Economist

‘Helen Garner's greatest skill is to encourage the reader not to make judgment but to listen.'

Australian

‘She watches, imagines, second-guesses, empathises, agonises. Her voice—intimate yet sharp, wry yet urgent—inspires trust.'

Atlantic

‘Garner's writing [is] so assured and compassionate that any reader will be enthralled and swept along.'

Australian Bookseller & Publisher

‘The words almost dance off the page.'

Launceston Examiner

‘Garner is a beautiful writer who winkles out difficult emotions from difficult hiding places.'

Sunday Telegraph

‘Her use of language is sublime.'

Scotsman

‘Garner writes with a fearsome, uplifting grace.'

Metro UK

‘A combination of wit and lyricism that is immensely alluring.'

Observer

‘Honest, unsparing and brave.'

New York Times

‘There's no denying the force of her storytelling.'

Telegraph

ALSO BY HELEN GARNER

FICTION

Monkey Grip

Honour and Other People's Children

The Children's Bach

Postcards from Surfers

Cosmo Cosmolino

The Spare Room

NON-FICTION

The First Stone

True Stories

The Feel of Steel

Joe Cinque's Consolation

This House of Grief

SCREENPLAYS

The Last Days of Chez Nous

Two Friends

Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. Her books include novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction.

The Text Publishing Company

Swann House

22 William Street

Melbourne Victoria 3000

Australia

textpublishing.com.au

Copyright © Helen Garner 2016

The moral right of Helen Garner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2016.

Many of the stories in this collection have been previously published. See
page 229
for details.

Lines on p. 102 from
An Experiment in Love
, Viking, 1995, © Hilary Mantel 1995, reproduced with permission.

Book & cover design by W. H. Chong

Cover photograph by Darren James

Typeset by J&M Typesetters

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication

Creator: Garner, Helen, 1942– author.

Title: Everywhere I look / by Helen Garner.

ISBN: 9781925355369 (paperback)

ISBN: 9781922253644 (ebook)

Subjects: Garner, Helen, 1942–

Garner, Helen, 1942—Criticism and interpretation.

Garner, Helen, 1942—Diaries.

Authorship.

Life.

Dewey Number: A823.3

CONTENTS

PART ONE:
WHITE PAINT AND CALICO

Whisper and Hum

Some Furniture

White Paint and Calico

Suburbia

PART TWO:
NOTES FROM A BRIEF FRIENDSHIP

Dear Mrs Dunkley

Eight Views of Tim Winton

Notes from a Brief Friendship

From Frogmore, Victoria

My Dear Lift-Rat

PART THREE:
DREAMS OF HER REAL SELF

While Not Writing a Book: Diary 1

Red Dog: A Mutiny

Funk Paradise: Diary 2

Dreams of Her Real Self

Before Whatever Else Happens: Diary 3

PART FOUR:
ON DARKNESS

Punishing Karen

The Singular Rosie

The City at Night

The Man in the Dock

On Darkness

PART FIVE:
THE JOURNEY OF THE STAMP ANIMALS

The Journey of the Stamp Animals

Worse Things than Writers Can Invent

How to Marry Your Daughters

X-ray of a Pianist at Work

Gall and Barefaced Daring

The Rules of Engagement

The Rapture of Firsthand Encounters

Hit Me

PART SIX:
IN THE WINGS

My First Baby

Big Brass Bed

Dawn Service

A Party

The Insults of Age

In the Wings

PART ONE

White Paint and Calico

Whisper and Hum

WHEN I was in my forties I went on holiday to Vanuatu with a kind and very musical man to whom I would not much longer be married, though I didn't know it yet.

He was at ease in the Pacific climate, but I hated the tropics with a passion: all that sweating and melting and shapelessness and blurring. And what I hated most was the sight of a certain parasitic creeper that flourished aggressively, bowing the treetops down and binding them to each other in a dense, undifferentiated mat of choking foliage. I longed to be transported at once to Scotland where the air was sharp and the nights brisk, and where plants were encouraged to grow separately and upright, with individual dignity.

At nightfall the whole population of the island would walk into town, and so would my restless husband and his discontented wife. In velvety air and under a starry sky, a stream of people padded along a sandy track, quietly chattering and laughing.

One evening a Melanesian man in torn and baggy clothes was walking on his own in front of us. He seemed to be cradling something small against his chest. Occasionally he lowered his face over it. We heard faint rhythmic music, and when we passed him we saw that he was playing a tiny stringed instrument, strumming it very softly as he swung along by himself in the cheerful crowd. He wasn't performing, or wanting anyone else to hear what he was doing. He was playing just to keep himself company.

I wanted one of those instruments. I wanted to hold it in my arms.

I crushed this longing with my usual puritanical savagery. You're too old. You couldn't even learn the piano. You have no musical talent. You will make a fool of yourself and everyone will laugh at you. Pull yourself together, woman, and slog on.

But when we got home to Melbourne I took down the
Oxford Companion to Music
and looked up the ukulele. ‘It has four strings and a very long fingerboard…It was patented in Honolulu in 1917, from which date it gradually became popular in the United States amongst
people whose desire to perform was stronger than their willingness to acquire any difficult technique or their desire to make intimate acquaintance with any very elaborate music
.'

So. It was a cop-out for the lazy and talentless. I went straight downtown and bought the first one I saw that didn't look trashy. It was made in Czechoslovakia and it cost $45. I also bought Mel Bay's
You Can Teach Yourself Uke.
I put them in a cupboard under a pile of blankets and said nothing about them to anyone.

Whenever I was home alone I would rush upstairs and take the uke out of its cardboard box. It was so intimate, so un-awe-inspiring, with its curvaceous waist and pretty metal frets and creamy tuning pegs. A faint perfume drifted out of its woody little body. And, unlike the hulking piano which years earlier had brought me to my knees, it was small. No one could possibly be afraid of this instrument. I fell in love with it. I spent secret afternoons sitting on the bed strumming my way through the beginner's book. I learnt ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat' and ‘Camptown Races'. It was easy. It was natural. Four strings, four fingers, not like a guitar, where you're ganged up on every time you try to make a chord.

I found I could learn a three-chord song in about thirty seconds. It dawned on me that there are several million three-chord songs in the world, many of which I had effortlessly, long ago, stored in the mud at the very bottom of my memory. Up they came from the depths, dripping and sparkling—so fresh, shining with common human feeling. And I saw that the ukulele, despite the snotty entry in the Oxford Companion, has in fact a simple and benevolent purpose: to create a gentle bed of sound for the human voice; to enrich the single line of melody that a human voice is capable of.

Somewhere in the background of all this, my marriage crashed and my daughter grew up and left home. Next time I looked around I was living in Sydney with a severe modernist to whom the presence of a ukulele in the house would have been an outrage. With him it was Wagner or nothing. Even a string quartet or a solo piano was too minor. I had to put headphones on to listen to my funk tapes. It wasn't a dancing kind of marriage. How it flew past! Ejected, I scrambled to my feet in Bondi Junction Mall, dusted myself off, and got talking to a woman who was busking on a chunky little thing with a round body. She said it was called a pineapple uke and that her brother imported them from Hawaii. She gave me his phone number.