The Dressmaker's Daughter (11 page)

T
ucker, his dyslexia still undiagnosed, had stayed for three years in Grade Five. ‘They couldn’t teach me,’ he says. He left school as soon as he was legally able to at fourteen. By then he had been rearing pigs in a yard with a sty on Lyncroft. With the money he made from breeding and selling pigs, he bought land nearby. At seventeen, he was too young to legally buy land so our father had to sign the documents for him.

Shy to the point of disability, Tucker could not bear to come inside our home if we had visitors. Even when men from the Department of Agriculture were having morning tea in the dining room – sometimes these were men whom he had met before – he could not enter the house.

Neither could he bear to wear new clothes. Almost everything had to be second-hand, or appear to be. Nobody had heard of Asperger syndrome then but I now wonder if Tucker had it. He certainly had many of the symptoms. Some he grew out of, some he used to his
advantage, and some, to this day, he still has. The piercing gaze, for instance, that he has even in the school photograph that sits beside my desk. His strange fixedness on certain things. His endless buying of land. He is still buying cattle and sheep stations in his late sixties. If that isn’t fixedness, I don’t know what is.

Tucker is one of those people who are most deeply themselves. He has never done anything but rear animals and then sell them, usually for a profit. No doubt sometimes in drought he has not made a profit, but that is an exception. Needing more careful handling than an unbroken horse at the first drop of a saddle onto its back, he is generous, short-tempered, high-minded and devoted to grand opera.

In fact, he likes opera so much that he decided one day, when he was listening to a record of Dame Malvina Major, the New Zealand soprano, as he was lying on his couch in his shed while recovering from a heart bypass operation, that he would stage an opera of his own in one of his paddocks. (My friend Wendy had joked to me years before when we were out walking among the deer and the mobs of cattle on Tucker’s home station, Watervalley, that she would not be surprised if
Aida
were to be staged down there in the flooded wetlands he had made.)

Now that I think back, Tucker had given me a hint of this idea before when he said that he thought that Pavarotti
might like to come out to the property to hunt ‘because quite a few Italians have flown in to do a bit of hunting’. Naturally I scoffed to myself and thought it a mighty exaggeration.

Rising from his couch, Tucker made a few phone calls to set his plan into action. Then he rang Dame Malvina and, with that combination of directness, passion, humility and strange audacity that marks him, invited her to come and sing in an opera concert in his wetlands. Not surprisingly, she said that she was busy but he pressed on and somehow she agreed to his proposal.

An Adelaide singer called Brian Gilbertson gave Tucker the name of the American tenor John Keyes, who was in Australia to sing as Siegmund in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which was being staged in Adelaide. The tenor agreed to come and sing on two conditions: one, that he could play golf; and two, that he could go fishing. Tucker has a boat that he seldom uses because he is too busy, and Patricia, his wife, knew that a man who managed one of their stations was a member of the local golf club, and so it came to pass that John Keyes found himself high up on a bulldozer’s scoop in a paddock singing to four thousand people sitting on a hillside.

Before that, though, a road was made so that the audience could drive to the paddock. The State Premier flew down in a helicopter, but the rest of us travelled by car. I was at the homestead when Dame Malvina drove
up with her assistant. She stepped out under the portico, blonde-haired and wearing pearls and a pale blue suit.

After we had lunch, Dame Malvina went off to rest and then we all drove out to a rehearsal on the site. It was there she first saw the bulldozers and realised that she was expected to climb a ladder attached to one of their scoops and to sing above the audience. Some tents were erected behind the stage for dressing-rooms and into one of these she and her assistant disappeared for a while. I like to imagine that smelling salts were needed.

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra sent sixteen musicians and a young conductor, Timothy Sexton, agreed to conduct the opera concert. We each paid twenty dollars and this was used to buy land for conservation, which is Tucker’s burning project. I sat with my nursing friends Joanie, Clare and Anne Guthleben, and Anne’s husband, Brian. We took a picnic and as dusk fell we put away the baskets and the wine and sat in rows with aisles marked out with ropes. In front of the audience, two gigantic Komatsu bulldozers, the biggest in the southern hemisphere, faced each other and between them a front-end loader had been placed to make the stage. The conductor stood up, and two bulldozer drivers in evening dress, (these were the men who drove the machines daily, making two hundred kilometres of drains on the stations), revved the engines and the hillside shook. With that, they
climbed down and joined us while a string quartet walked on to the stage and played Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

Clare turned to me and gripped my arm, and, in an eerie rearrangement of poor Mr M’s ominous words (‘You’ll end up sweeping the streets, Brinkworth!’), which she had never heard about, said, ‘Jilly, this is wonderful! You know, some people can’t even be bothered to sweep the floor and look what your brother has done!’

At interval we drank wine that a local winery sold from stalls set up on the hillside. Then the two stars of the night sang duets and Dame Malvina danced a little waltz with John Keyes, who is a very tall man. The wind swept her dress around her ankles and she seemed to be enjoying herself.

Tucker had said to me before the event that he was very fond of ‘
Nessun dorma
’ and I had said I liked it too, but then who doesn’t. He said, ‘Yes, but do you know what it means?’ I didn’t. ‘It means none shall sleep!’ It was then that I saw that he felt it was a theme for himself. So when John Keyes climbed up into the bulldozer’s scoop, the full moon appeared from the long clouds, and a flight of ducks flew low across the lake as if the conductor had pulled a cord and ‘
Nessun dorma
’ floated above us.

Dame Malvina’s star turn was next and she came out in a full, gold lamé cape over a long red satin dress and she, too, was taken up into the sky in the bulldozer’s scoop where she sang ‘One Fine Day’. The moon
continued to float above the lake. Such strange things had never been seen there before.

Afterwards, there was a party back in Tucker’s shed, which holds tables and seating for two hundred people and has over fifty heads of stags and other animals mounted on the walls. I saw Tucker giving John a guided tour around these animals, some of which he’d shot in Africa. I hoped that the tenor was one of those Americans who love to hunt; if he wasn’t, he hid his distaste well enough.

So, John Keyes got his fishing and his golf, and Dame Malvina liked it all so much that the next year she came back with a friend for a holiday. And that is how Tucker got his very own opera concert and was satisfied.

It was a long way from the days when our mother carried a can for Ida Puckridge singing ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ on the town-hall stage.

W
hen I was fourteen, Mr M suggested to my parents that I should go to the city and learn to become a secretary. He had sent both his girls there, Dawn and June, and he was mightily pleased with their prospects.

As a consequence I was enrolled at the same place. Miss Manns’ Business College was run by two sisters, the Misses Mann. It was there I went every morning until lunchtime for a year to learn shorthand and typing.

Every weekday morning at eight o’clock, I ran out of the front gate and down to the train stop. Always late, clutching my brown bowler hat and a book, I skittered down the road, waving to the driver to ask him to wait. The books I held were those I had discovered in dark, neglected cupboards in the old farmhouse on the hatchery that my parents had bought.

Walter Scott’s
Marmion
was one of these books. We had no homework that I can remember, being required
to learn so little in the three hours we were taught. So I read.

One day I came to the part of the poem where Marmion falls on the field of battle. I looked up. To my amazement not a single person in the carriage had any idea that this had happened. They simply stared out of the window or went on reading their newspaper. Appalled, I thought that this immense tragedy could not have happened right then and there without them knowing. I read on, perplexed and astonished at this new insight into the indifference of people.

It did not occur to anybody that I might be taught subjects that were required for the high-school Intermediate Certificate. If I had, I would have been taught English Literature. Other girls, who stayed on for the afternoon classes, read novels for their exams. But not me. Even so, I was reading and though it was another twenty years before I got to learn to read properly, and to understand what books were about, I went on reading as if swimming, ignorant and happy.

At the end of the year, my best friend, Dinah, and I perused the jobs columns of
The Advertiser.
It was a time of full employment. We could more or less choose whatever secretarial jobs we wanted.

My first job at fifteen was with Siemens, a German electrical-engineering firm in Pirie Street, Adelaide. I stuffed some cottonwool inside a brassiere and wearing a
navy suit with a flared skirt I set out to work. My wastepaper basket was overflowing before lunchtime. We typists had only a rubber to erase mistakes and then had to reinsert the page and type over the rubbed-out section. Sometimes I would make a mistake again on that same section. More rubbing. A hole would appear. More pages into the basket. A new letter begun. A repeat of the process of rubbing until, in the end, a short grubby letter was taken downstairs to whichever of the men had dictated it for his signature.

Mr R, a rogue in sheep’s clothing, stared at my breasts. Indolent, good looking, he, I know now and vaguely sensed then, was trouble. He had ideas above his station, as my mother would have said. Letters from clients asking the price of a piece of farm equipment were answered six months late, if at all. I took down what he said in his letter. Then he would have a chat to me. He kept his legs apart behind his desk. I stared at his crotch, fascinated. Suddenly he looked down, alarmed. Nothing untoward there, he moved his legs and went on chatting. ‘I could go as their proxy,’ he said.

‘What does proxy mean, Mr R?’

‘It means I could go to that reception instead of them.’

Oh, you could, could you?

One day, just before leaving work, I stood up from my chair in front of his desk and said, ‘They are letting us out soon.’

‘You’re not at school now, Jill,’ he said. ‘What you should say now is that we are stopping work shortly.’

Mr R, as far as I could see, hardly ever began work. But none of his employers seemed to know and I said nothing.

‘16th November. Dear Sir, In reply to your inquiry 13th May, I can advise you that…’

Upstairs, Mrs Mackenzie, a pretty, dark-haired senior secretary, hastily emptied my wastepaper basket in case somebody should come along and notice the amount of discarded paper. At that time, paper was still valued highly, perhaps as an effect of the war, when it had been scarce, along with almost everything else. Mrs Mackenzie had a schoolboy son called Scott, for whom she had high hopes. ‘Scott, that’s a name that could go far, don’t you think?’ she asked. I assured her I agreed. What she had in mind, I did not know. It was certain that nobody had any hope for me, no hope that I would go any further than becoming a senior secretary. Then, with luck, I would marry a farmer and my life would be as fixed as a planet in its path.

I had no plans myself. I merely drifted, reading and wasting paper. Back and forth on the train I went. The new suburb of Elizabeth began to appear through paddocks of wheat. Great tree planting began to occur beside the railway line. These trees were the first indication I had that something new was afoot. Then we
heard of a new satellite city that was to appear. It was to solve the housing shortage and provide workers for big car plants built nearby. Nobody envisaged that this city would become a slum, a place of despair, for English migrants. The train ran back and forth and I kept my nose in my book.

One day on the way to work, the train stopped. Another train had broken down. Passengers got out of the train I was on and walked along the track to take a look. Suddenly another train appeared on the track beside our train, going north, away from the city. A man who had been strolling along that line saw the train bearing down and began to run in terror. I watched as the black train tore along, indifferent as fate, and suddenly the man was not there, only the train flashing past the window.

What struck me was that the man who was killed could have flung himself off the line and onto the embankment at any time from the moment he saw the train coming towards him. Instead, in his terror, he did what we all probably would do: he ran ahead and, in that way, he sealed himself for death. I thought that this is what we do in life; we cannot think how to fling ourselves through such a simple step, but instead go on implacably, unimaginatively, and make events that could be avoided unavoidable. Then we call it fate. That man and his terror and the way he threw his life away meant I have never got out of a train when it has stopped between stations. Even if most of the
people in the carriage have moved off the train, I have sat quietly, knowing what they perhaps do not.

After nine months or so at Siemens, with my typing little improved, Dinah, who had been working at the Executor Trustee Company, and I decided to change jobs. We idly thought we’d like a change. I got a new job with a company selling fertiliser.

There was a wall-sized wooden filing cabinet in the form of long thin boxes filled with small pieces of coloured cardboard containing the names of the farmers and their past records of orders. Three typists and one or two of the younger men spent hours filling in these order forms and filing them into these boxes. Sometimes we would take on extra staff during months when farmers began ordering in preparation for ploughing and planting.

One elegant, dark-haired man was a dancer with the Borovansky Ballet Company. He stood facing the filing system, cards in hand. He was the first artist I met and I had an idea that he did not think that filing was a greater part of his identity, nor his destiny. He seemed to be there and yet not there. He didn’t complain; he wasn’t unhappy as far as I could tell. It was simply that he had other things to think about – that he was planning to do other things. Unlike me.