The Dressmaker's Daughter (24 page)

The Minister then gestured to me and said, ‘Go on.’ I had fallen silent. He had continued to sign letters throughout. ‘I don’t see the point; you are not listening to us.’ He said, ‘I am listening,’ and put down his pen and looked up.

Desperately, I said, ‘We represent people who have contributed to society. They have been soldiers, nurses and other things, and they deserve to be able to finish their studies. They went into their studies in good faith and now the Government has broken faith with them.’

There was a little more discussion among the men and then Clyde Cameron looked over at John Bannon and said, ‘Is it administrable?’ (That was the first time I’d heard that word.)

‘Yes, Minister, it can be.’ (The senior adviser was also a lawyer.)

The Minister picked up the telephone and dialled. ‘I’ve got a group of people here from…Where are you from?’ One of us told him again. ‘They reckon they need to have the NEAT Scheme continued because they have been cut off. Can you manage that?’ After a bit more of this, he put the phone down and said, ‘OK. Go back to your school and tell them they have got what they want.’

Amazed at this sudden turnaround, we thanked him and stood to leave. I said, ‘What changed your mind?’ He said, ‘You did. It was what you said about these people having contributed.’

Outside, waiting for the lift, we waved goodbye to John Bannon. He said, ‘Don’t go yet. I want to congratulate you. You are the first people who have ever come representing themselves. Only lawyers come here to represent people.’ He shook our hands and then the three of us from the school we went down in the lift, hugging each other and exclaiming about the miracle we had just witnessed. We felt we should go and have a drink to celebrate but it was too early and we were busy, so we melted away from each other. Back at school, they heard the news. We all felt saved.

John Bannon went on to become the Premier of the State. Ironically, Clyde Cameron is now a political historian.

W
hen Ghilly left to return to her mother’s home to study, Janie stayed on with me in my Dulwich home while we studied for our matriculation exam. We had incredible trouble dealing with men, most of whom were also students at the same school. I could not differentiate between ingrates or sane enough men who, like Janie and me, were searching for a way out of our dilemmas into something better. I had only one attitude to all and that was a sort of traditional country hospitality, and this, combined with an almost complete lack of discrimination towards the character of these men, meant that I was not only robbed of coats, scarves, Grandfather Llewellyn’s fifty-year-old stamp collection, a golden guinea the family had inherited from him, and many other things. I was also sometimes left with an astounding telephone bill.

People came to dinners and lunches because Janie and I kept inviting them, and we had parties. The house was
full of our books and papers, guests, food, washing-up, my children, and sometimes tenants to whom I let either the gallery or a bedroom.

The Vietnam War, the sexual revolution and the whole ethos of the times permeated the culture so that there was barely a place where its effects were not felt. From food to clothes to behaviour to the way we saw each other, our responsibilities towards our children, our partners, our friends, our landlords, our rubbish, our drugs, all were altered, some perhaps for the better, but much, I think now, for the worse. Food probably got better, being a time of wholegrain and bean-sprout fashion, if not complete vegetarianism, but the way we reared our children was, in many instances, very damaging to them and I bitterly regret it. I live with my shame and guilt and try to make amends in whatever ways I can. But the fact about rearing children is that you cannot ever go back and make it better. You can apologise because, while you thought you were doing things quite well and never had any intention of doing harm, the easygoing, if not completely careless, way I reared both my children at this time is a thing I do not like to think of in the night. I did not pay them enough attention.

On one occasion, I was startled when a man briefly came to stay and Hugh stood beside him, having been introduced at the living-room door, and said, ‘Don’t steal from my mother and don’t try to go to bed with her.’

‘So,’ I thought, ‘it has come to this. My own child has to take responsibility for me.’ I was ashamed.

The last straw came on New Year’s Eve. Hugh and Caroline were away staying with Becky and Richard, as they used to do occasionally. The final exams were over and Janie and I were waiting to see if we were to be accepted into university. It was about one in the morning. The doorbell rang and I got up and answered it. It was a man from our school. He said that he had tried to kill himself and he needed a bed for the night. Wearily I brought him in. He was coherent but I can’t remember what he said he had done to himself. Satisfied that he was not in danger, I said that he could stay but only if he promised not to try to get into bed with Janie. He promised. I brought out a spare mattress and made up a bed on the living-room floor. We turned out the lights and went to our rooms.

Janie woke me at about three in the morning. She asked if she could get into bed with me because the man had come into her room and got into her bed. I said that in the morning I was going to kill him if he hadn’t already succeeded in killing himself. I moved over and we went to sleep.

When I walked into the kitchen several hours later, the young man was sitting at the table with a syringe in his hand. He asked me if I would give him his injection of insulin because, he explained, he was a diabetic. He
asked, too, if he could have some tomato juice, as he needed something to drink. I said that he could inject himself and that he could have something to drink but then he had to leave. I said, ‘You had promised not to bother Janie and yet you did. She had to sleep with me. You are going to go now and you are not coming back.’ He seemed surprised.

Janie and I talked things over. We packed our bathers, some food and a few clothes, and locked the front door behind us. I wrote a big notice, which we laid on the doormat. ‘The Dulwich branch of the Salvation Army is closed. Do not ring the bell. Drunks, drug addicts, thieves and layabouts are no longer welcome. We have closed permanently.’ And with that we hopped into a taxi and, highly pleased with ourselves, went to Julia’s, where we walked into the sea and swam, chortling at our wit and at our decision.

Naturally, friends came to the door, read the notice, and went away hurt. However, from then on, it was never again as chaotic and ruinous at my house as it had been that year. We passed our exams. Janie went back to England, where she had been born, and married her childhood friend, and Ghilly and I went to university.

Reading pages from my 1974 diary, I now think wryly of the ardour, the folly, my weakness and the way my gaze fell very often away from what was important. But the learning I never regretted.

I
n 1975 I met a man who knew about books. His name was Thomas Robson. It was the first term of my first year at university. ‘Oh,’ I said to him one day, ‘it must be marvellous to be able to spend your days reading.’ He asked what made me say that. I replied that I had discovered his title was ‘Reader in English’. He told me that this was merely a title used in Departments of English to denote where you stood in the hierarchy. Nonetheless, to me it seemed a better title than ‘Professor’, and one that fully described what he did. Soon after this, he began reading me.

The first time I saw him was when he walked into a lecture hall and began to talk for fifty minutes on Jane Austen. When I saw him crossing the courtyard wearing his green corduroy jacket, I caught up with him and told him how much my friends and I had liked his lecture. He thanked me and, with his long, striding gait, moved swiftly on.

The next time I met him was at an Amnesty International fundraiser at somebody’s home. I had recently joined Amnesty and had offered to make curry for this dinner. To eke out the meat, I had minced lamb’s liver and added chopped cabbage. Cower if you will, but people said it was delicious. The liver made a rich gravy. In those days, I was given to adding things to food to extend the main ingredients, or to use up what was in the fridge.

I was wearing a watermelon-pink silk shawl with a long fringe over a long, black dress, which was buttoned up to a high roll collar. He followed me from room to room and I thought, ‘He likes me!’ And I liked him. He drove me home with my pots and pans.

Then, a few weeks later, we met again in the university bistro at lunchtime. I was with friends and he joined us. I can’t remember how this happened. The lunch went on until about six o’clock and I went out into the corridor to the lavatory. As I walked back, I saw him and he pushed me up against a wall and kissed me. Then, after we had farewelled the people at the table, he drove me home. He forgot, he told me later, to collect his wife’s drycleaning, and, after he dropped me off, he crashed the car.

He said, ‘You are what I have been waiting for for a long time.’ Well, perhaps I had been waiting for him.

He used to spend his lunch hours riding up and down the escalators at the David Jones department store. Now
he had something new to do. He had lunch with me and then we often went to my house.

One day, as he drove down North Terrace, he told me the names of two authors who had written books on Chekhov. (This was because I was trying to write an essay on Chekhov for my first-year class in English Literary Criticism and was in a torment because I couldn’t do it. I had formed the idea that the only proper response to great literature was a respectful silence. To write about a great book seemed utterly disrespectful. It was as if you opened the book on an operating table, found the entrails and gazed at them, stuffed them back, stitched the book up and wrote a report. I had taken to cutting up the pages I had written in such distress, sticking together the paragraphs that seemed to make sense and then handing this hodgepodge in as an essay. I was not doing well and I saw no prospect of improving.)

‘You mean there are books about books?’ I said to him.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Hasn’t anybody told you that?’

I think he may have believed he had come across a creature who had miraculously been preserved from all common knowledge. I was electrified. I knew at once that these authors could tell me about the book and explain why I loved it. All I had before this news was my awe.

I had a strong feeling that English was my business. What I liked about this tall, thin man was that he knew
about books and I knew that he could talk to me about them.

In this same first term, a poet called Andrew Taylor gave a lecture, during which he announced that there was a poetry prize open to the whole student body of the university and to those who had graduated in the previous six years. It was called the Bundey Prize and had been won by some famous people – Max Harris and Geoffrey Dutton among them. Andrew said we could enter some poems.

When I had first started university, I thought that I would meet feminists and also that the students would sit about under trees and discuss Homer and other writers. I was in for a few shocks. One was that because I had given up wearing a bra, young men had been staring at me for all of my first week. I wore one of those white smocked, round-necked peasant blouses with long sleeves gathered at the wrists and neck, and a long denim flared skirt and boots.

On the first Friday, passing a low stone wall outside the Barr Smith Library, I came to a line of young men who were talking about me. Leering and nudging, they went on until I drew up beside them and said, ‘Look, I can hear what you are saying. I’m not a doll, you know. I thought we could all be friends. Why are you talking about me like this?’ To a man, they drew back and gave the strong impression that they would have fallen behind the wall if they could have. I apologised and said, ‘Let’s
have a drink next time we meet.’ They said nothing and I went off to get my bike.

On the ride home, I thought, ‘That’s it. Next week, I’m wearing a bra. Somebody else can fight this battle.’

I thought that if men knew the effect that they had on women, surely they would not do some of the things that they did. Men were not, I felt, simply base wretches, but did these things because they knew no better. If I were able to write some poems about what it was like to be a woman, no civilised man, reading those poems, would ever do those things again. Surely.

So I set about writing some poems to enter for the Bundey Prize. I wrote them up at Barbara and Patrick Pak Poy’s house at Norton Summit where long ago Babs and I had cleaned the windows and the rooms before they had moved in. Cathy, their eldest daughter, was fifteen and she offered to type the poems. They were very simple poems, ardent and direct. I wrote them to convince. I broke all the normal rules for writing poetry because I didn’t know what the rules were. Preaching is what I was really doing in my mind.

On the last day of the competition, I ran up the steps of Elder Concert Hall and entered the poems in the contest. I was given the number eight as the contest was to be judged anonymously.

Andrew Taylor and Thomas were the judges of the competition. Both published poets and academics, I
believed they knew what a poem was. One day, having lunch with Thomas in a bistro in Norwood, he told me I had won the prize. I put my head against the rough stone wall and felt the miracle of winning. He told me he had wanted to give the prize to a poem about highland cattle, but Andrew had said that they should award it to ‘this girl’ who he said, ‘has terrific rhythm and never wastes a word’.

‘What is rhythm?’ I asked.

‘You should give up English, Jill. It will harm you.’

I said, as I was to say two years later, that English was my business. I had come to university to learn and I could not give it up.

The prize was twenty dollars and I used the money to buy a book of poems called
The Oxford Book of 2000 Years of Poetry.

While I had written the poems in the hope of changing men’s behaviour, I had no plan to continue writing. It never occurred to me before this that I could become a writer. At that time, being a writer had less of the charisma and glamour that it holds now. It was not something that was seen to be within the grasp of all. Yet, winning that prize had an effect on me. If two male poets who had degrees in English and who had taught at university for years, and who did not know my name, only that I was ‘number eight’, said that I could write poetry, then I thought, ‘Well, if you say I am a poet, I will be one. I will write poetry.’ And so I did.

It was as if a lid had been taken from a steaming kettle. Poems poured out of me. For the next three years, I wrote poetry and got my degree under the most specious circumstances. A feminist doctor called Margie Taylor was living with me, and, when it came time for the exams, she would take away all the poetry books beside my bed to stop me writing. She allowed me one haiku a day. And haiku is a form I have never wanted to write. I always thought that this Japanese form isn’t suitable for an Australian as our thought patterns and speech are different. Our aesthetic is different. I thought it the height of mannerism and effeteness to write haiku. I’d stay up all night reading Cicero or Maurice Bowra or some ancient Greek philosopher I could hardly make neither head nor tail of, and throttle any poems that rose in my throat.

(Margie had come to live with me because her home was also being used as a surgery until a new Women’s Centre, with a surgery, was built. She found it difficult living where the doorbell rang night and day. She had said, ‘Can I come and live with you?’ I asked why and she said, ‘You know about art and I would like to learn. I can’t live at home any more. It is too stressful.’ So Margie came and she stayed and a wonderful time we had of it. At first she set about cleaning out all the kitchen cupboards with a dustpan and small hand-broom. I would walk into the kitchen and she’d be on her knees with her head in one of my purple cupboards, brushing.

Margie taught me her small-corn theory. She said that when living with people it was important to be able to tell each other what each found annoying. ‘If you have a small corn and somebody treads on it every day, you may say nothing for a long time until one day you start screaming and your friend is puzzled and startled because they had no idea that they were upsetting you in this way.’ So we used the small-corn theory and yet I never can remember anything Margie did that was annoying.)

Often, after staying up all night, I’d stagger, as many of my friends did, too, to the exam hall and write the answers to the questions as best I could.

At the time of my first-year exams, Hugh was afflicted with chronic earache. For most of the night before my history exam, Hugh had been unable to sleep because of the pain and so I had been trying to comfort him and study. The exam was in the afternoon so I studied all the next morning. Then I rode into the city and went to lunch at the new Festival Centre bistro with a friend, Robyn, who was the administrator of the new Women’s Centre.

It was a sparkling day. The Torrens lay there, languid as an olive-green snake in the sun. Robyn and I ate and drank. Suddenly she began to tell me that overnight the week before she had found herself able to speak in tongues and had become an evangelical Christian. At first it seemed that she had merely said this for a bet, as it was so unbelievable. Yet, as the lunch went on, she convinced
me. On a trip to the country, she and her girlfriend had come across a group who had befriended them. Some of these people spoke in tongues when they held a church service that Robyn and her friend attended. Suddenly, Robyn, too, could speak in tongues.

I poured the wine down my throat. Then, walking back to university along the river, I thought over this incredible tale. Before this, there could have been no more sceptical person who was less likely to change her beliefs than Robyn. At that time, feminism and Christianity, in my mind, did not go together, although now that is laughable.

I took the lift to Thomas’s office and knocked. ‘Come!’ he called, as he always did, like C.S. Lewis. I sat down, lit a thin cigar, sat with my grey boots on his desk and told him what I had heard. We talked for a while and then he said, ‘Don’t you have a history exam today?’ I said that I did, but that it was no use going because I had been awake all night with Hugh’s illness and I now was drunk. He said I was indeed going to that exam and he pushed me out of the door, took me down in the lift and steered me towards the exam room. I staggered down the aisle of the raked theatre, almost to the front where there was a vacant place.

‘We’d been wondering where you were,’ said the lecturer who was there to supervise the exam.

‘Well, I am as drunk as a lord, Doc!’ I said, and sat and read the first question. It was in Old English and was
Cromer’s address to Parliament. This irritated me. I stood up, thinking that if they couldn’t put the question in modern English, I could not be bothered to answer it. Then a small piece of sobriety arrived and I thought that I had worked all year for this exam and it would be a pity to throw it all away just because I didn’t like the way they put the question. I began to write and felt free to say anything that came into my head. On the matter of a question on witchcraft, I invoked God, and wrote, ‘God strike me dead if…’ and gave myself a fright because I thought she might.

I rode home, made dinner for the children and had an early night.

A few weeks later, there was a phone call from Doc, the history lecturer. He said, ‘Congratulations! You’ve passed; in fact, we have decided that, for a girl who was as drunk as you were, you should have a Credit.’

First-year Anthropology was much the same. I was no good at that subject. It seemed to me more like never being able to say exactly anything and full of words that qualified what had been said before qualifying yet a previous sentence or idea. At first I had simply used my nursing experience to explain something, but then I was soon out of my depth.

I had not read the books, had not understood the subject, had interrupted lectures when I thought that the lecturer said something sexist and had generally been a
nuisance. My friends Wendy and Sylvia loved this subject. Sylvia went on and wrote her PhD on circuses travelling round Europe, studying one particular circus for a year or more. But, to me, Anthropology was an arcane language that I could not decipher. I rolled around on my back lawn drinking brandy before the exam, shouting that I would fail – as I richly deserved to do. I passed by one mark and that, I think, was charity on the lecturer’s part.

In the same year, 1975, Ian Reid and Andrew Taylor from the Department of English had travelled to the United States. They’d been to poetry readings over there and decided we could have some. Eight of us – Andrew Taylor, Ian Reid, Richard Tipping, Rob Johnson, Nancy Gordon, Christine Churches, John Griffin and me – met one evening and I took a spinach tart. It surprised me that the men seemed shy with one another but we ate the tart and drank wine and set up Friendly Street Poets. Andrew said that there was nothing good on television on Tuesday nights so we should meet then. Richard wanted the group to be called ‘Friendly Street’ and we agreed. It is now the longest running poetry group in the country and it has published over fifty books.