Tirra Lirra by the River

JESSICA ANDERSON
(1916–2010), née Queale, was born in Brisbane, the youngest of four children. Her mother was a part of the Queensland Labour Movement, and her father, a former farmer, worked in Brisbane teaching farmers how to treat disease in stock and crops. As a child she was mocked by her schoolmates for a speech impediment, and she left school at sixteen upon the death of her father. At eighteen, she moved to Sydney and labored at various odd jobs, including working in factories and designing electric signs; it was a time in her life she later characterized as “very poor but very free.” She eventually met Ross McGill, a painter, and they moved together to London. There, Anderson worked as a typist and magazine researcher. She later claimed to have written articles, as well, under numerous pen names, but she remained highly secretive about those publications. After marrying McGill in 1940, she returned with him to Sydney, where she worked as a fruit picker in the Australian Women’s Land Army. They had a child together—Laura—but she divorced McGill in 1955 and married Leonard Anderson, whose wealth permitted her to quit working and spend more time writing. Her first novel,
An Ordinary Lunacy
, was published in 1968, when she was forty-seven, to rave reviews. She would subsequently go on to capture numerous prizes for her work, including twice winning Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award: in 1978 for
Tirra Lirra by the River
, and in 1981 for
The Impersonators
. Anderson died in Sydney at the age of ninety-three.

ANNA FUNDER
is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and awarded writers. In 2012, her novel
All That I Am
won Australia’s most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin Prize, along with seven other literary prizes. Funder’s nonfiction book
Stasiland
, hailed as “a classic,” won the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize. Both books have been international bestsellers and are published in twenty countries. Funder lives with her husband and three children in New York City.

THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

I ARRIVE AT THE HOUSE WEARING A SUIT—greyish, it doesn’t matter. It is wool because even in these subtropical places spring afternoons can be cold. I am wearing a plain felt hat with a brim, and my bi-focal spectacles with the chain attached. I am not wearing the gloves Fred gave me because I have left them behind in the car, but I don’t know that yet.

The front stairs are just as I visualized them on the plane, fourteen planks spanning air, like a broad ladder propped against the verandah. The man who drove me here from the railway station sorts his keys as he bustles to take precedence of me. He is about sixty, tall and ponderous, with a turtle head. He introduced himself on the railway platform, but already I have forgotten his name. I am exhausted, holding myself by will-power above a black area of total collapse. My nephew in Sydney warned me about the train journey. ‘Six hundred miles, Aunt Nora,’ he said. But I wouldn’t listen; I said I simply adored trains. ‘You won’t adore that one,’ said Peter. But I said of course I should; I adored all trains.

The truth is, I was terrified to fly again.

As I follow the man across the verandah I hear my own footsteps, like a small calf on a quaking bridge, and think of the last time I crossed it, on my confident high heels, to trip down those stairs to the taxi. Mother and Grace standing here, and myself running down the path to the yellow taxi, which waits where the man’s car stands now. Mother and Grace wave. I lean forward in the back seat of the taxi and wave back. ‘Thank heaven that’s over,’ I am saying behind my smile.

The man is unlocking the door. I have had to talk and smile too much in his car, and as I wait I consciously rest my face.

He throws open the door, holds it back with one arm fully extended.

‘After you, Mrs Roche.’

‘Porteous,’ I say. Not that it matters.

‘Porteous. Of course. Sorry.’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘the big black hall-stand is still here.’

‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘Still here.’

I enter the hall, finding the echoes immediately familiar, and he falls in behind me, coughing rather respectfully. Through the long mirror of the big black hall stand I see a shape pass. It is the shape of an old woman who began to call herself old before she really was, partly to get in first and partly out of a fastidiousness about the word ‘elderly’, but who is now really old. She has allowed her shoulders to slump. I press back my shoulders and make first for the living room.

Definitely, I have hopes of the living room.

The man hurries ahead of me and throws open the door. We go in together. We both stop, and look largely around us.

And where now are my hopes?

‘Well,’ says the man, ‘here you are.’

‘Yes, here I am.’

By the tone of my voice, its sepulchral parody of doom, I know I have begun again to address my friends at number six. I warn myself to keep this game a private one, because I see that the man, who is looking about him with an almost liquid sentimentality, has put himself in my place, has taken upon himself the emotions of this ‘home-coming’, and I do not wish to offend him by my bitter jokes.

‘You have a sit-down, eh?’ he says. ‘While I start getting your ports up.’

I speak before I can stop myself. ‘Wait!’

‘What,’ he says, ‘what is it?’

‘No. No, it’s all right. It’s nothing.’

‘Right-oh, then.’ And off he goes.

Now, suppose I had said, ‘Wait, I’m not staying.’ What then? The train back to Sydney, and the plane back to London? Impossible. The household at number six is exploded. Exploded. Back only to Sydney then? No. I feel again the utter passivity, the relinquishment of the will to fate, that Hilda and Liza and I all felt on the way back to London from Coventry.