In the early days. I walked to work round the corner while Joan drove Madeleine to Cammeray Kindergarten. Though Kate and John could walk to the North Sydney Demonstration School down the Pacific Highway, they were often late, leaving their run until the last moment, while children from far distant suburbs arrived on time.
Winter weekends.
I had built a barbecue in the back yard for winter lunches of cutlets and sausages, but often we took a portable barbecue with us into the bush. Down the hill lay Berry Island and “our” beach, kept secret by a steep descent through loose sandstone and Lantana. The photo shows two small rocks we could wade to. To the North lay Kuringai Chase, the large bush-land park with walks to spectacular views up the Hawkesbury river on one side, or out over the Barrenjoey peninsular to the Pacific horizon on the other. So here is Joan, sitting under the gum trees after a barbecue lunch, singing a mother’s song to Rebecca, hair waving like a blonde golliwog.
Summer weekends were spent at the beach. Each Saturday we would announce a new beach and each Saturday the children would complain “Why can’t we go to the one we went to last Saturday?” Whichever we went to there were always two rituals. As soon as it was time to go and we waved from the shore, the children immediately turned and faced the sea. Then, on the way home, there would be endless discussions over the choice of ice blocks while the shopkeeper waited patiently, as he had done for a thousand children over the years.
JOURNEYS WITH CHILDREN
Mendooran was about seven hours drive in those days in a mini-traveller that always boiled over going up Bellbird Hill. On one side of the Pampoo Street house there was a paddock of long brown grass, in the middle an old wrecked car to play in, full of weeds and spiders webs. On the other side was Pa’s orchard with a fowl run delivering a supply of fresh brown eggs. Later, when Gran visited from England, Pa had installed an indoor toilet. But before that, probably inspired by the Yom Kippur war, a replica battle broke out centred on the back yard dunny while I was sitting inside. Emerging cautiously I was nearly run down by an Israeli tank, a very old dolls pram pushed by the kids from across the street and from which Madeleine operated the machine gun. Next to the dunny were the Hogan girls’ old bikes, now put to use by the next generation. With new valve rubbers and hard pumping they could pick up quite a speed across the bridge from the top of the Tooraweena Road. In the photos Madeleine is helping me clean dead flies out of the mini’s radiator. The sketch of the water tank at the back must have been later, as it shows the back of the new indoor toilet. I have been criticized for not drawing the front of the house but backs of houses are much more interesting. The other drawing shows the swing hanging from the huge pine tree, giving welcome shade at 100 Farehnheit, and the back lane to Annie Monk’s place. Mum and Pa eventually moved to Sydney, shown here standing with me and Kate outside their retirement unit at Hunters Hill. Also in the bike shed at Mendooran we found the little blue table I wrote as the story below.
“I am a little blue table with twin sisters, tiny blue chairs. Henry Robert Hogan, schoolteacher, made us for his daughter Joan’s fourth birthday. Nothing went to waste in those days, and the cut outs from the old packing case were held together with strips of two-by-one, rough but honest. When we were new, bright and shiny the kids who came to school on horseback would also have a turn at playing tea parties with us, set up under the large red gum near the school residence.
One day a truck moved us to another school residence, the children grew up and we lived quietly for a while in a hut next to the dunny. But later, Henry Robert Hogan’s children had children and someone who was by now called Nana would clean us up so we could again entertain little children to tea, under the large pine. Then later still, another truck took the three of us to Sydney where today we have tea parties for the great grandchildren under the bougainvillea. My sisters sometimes complain about the size of today’s children, but I say that their plywood joints are simply getting old.
This year the person who just about everyone seemed to call Nana, at the age of 94, finally went to join Henry Robert Hogan. And after it was over, we heard the children talk of the long line of great grandchildren each placing little letters of good wishes for her journey on Nana’s casket. And the three of us now thank Henry Robert Hogan for the care that went into our creation, and Nana for keeping us in the family, and we look forward to tea parties one day with the great-great grandchildren. “
Ocean beach was our first caravan holiday and, on the first night, the children expected bedtime to be announced after supper. But “Right-Ho, now we’re going fishing” said Joan. Initial disbelief turned to frenzied excitement as the three ran and skipped along the wet, low-tide sand to the big rocks crouched at the end of the bay. We caught only inedible toad-fish but that didn’t matter, it was a lovely summer evening where the gum trees turn to orange at sun-set. And here is Kate turning a fast right on the foam board. We then hired a nine-foot “plank” and, by the end of a week of hard work, Kate and I were standing up on it.
South West Rocks was our next beach holiday. John and I had driven up to Urunga in the EJ Holden in the days when the highway still had occasional creek bed crossings. Our job was to book a shack in South West Rocks for the Christmas holidays. Coming back we camped overnight at Nelson Bay, trying out the paddle boats and riding a very small motor bike. In those days tents had no floors and I spent most of the night analyzing a noise like a scythe next to the tent wall. Next morning I saw the two-metre long goanna climbing the tree next to the tent. The holiday shack later turned out to be a bad choice, but we had fun on the beach with our first snorkel masks.
At Anna Bay we now had a tent whose small bedrooms had floors, and I also had my first real surfboard, called Henri and with good thick rails (edges). On the last day heavy rain drove us back to Sydney. “Instead of unpacking all this gear” said Joan, “let’s just go camping again, this time down the South Coast”. So we went home to sleep and wash clothes, and set off for more adventure, arriving almost by accident at Blackfellows Point.
Blackfellows Point. New Years Eve was the wrong day to start off on. At each campsite it was “Sorry, mate, booked out till February” By the time we had got to Bodalla I said “Better go inland across the mountains and find somewhere to sleep”. But Joan had a childhood memory that then took us East to Potato Point and then North to Tuross Lake. And there, miraculously, was an almost empty field. “Can we camp here?” “Suit yourself mate” “Who do we pay?” “Old man Sarkey should be around Thursday. See him then” And we did. It was as easy as that and, 33 years later, we are still camping there (see next chapter).
Murwillumbah. We had rented one of Dorothy Greenwood’s cottages at Clothiers Creek, halfway between Murwillumbah and Kingscliff beach, and Joan and I were running along the sand there. “Why are those people staring at us? It looks like Ann Crack.” It was, they were also holidaying, and we invited them up to the cottage. Sitting under a large fig tree in the Queensland heat, Brian described the local sugar factory. It sounded just like the ones in Guyana, massive steam-driven gear wheels dragging canes up the chute to the crushers. Maybe some designs never change. Much later, in the family reunion in that Madeleine had arranged in Venice, we met Ann and Jane in the piazza San Marco. There were horses on the Greenwood’s farm and here is John riding.
Kilcare. We had bought a block of land along the ridge, couldn’t afford to build, so eventually sold it. We then formed a family consortium to buy what is called a “Weekender”. And for 25 years the little fibro cottage in the photo provided annual holidays and weekends for children, grandchildren and friends (see next chapter).
Children have a disconcerting way of catching up to and rapidly overtaking their parents in abilities, for example Kate in singing, John in conducting, Madeleine in playing chess, and Rebecca in singing the Queen of the Night aria. And my children have now taught me a great deal I did not know about bringing up children. Which brings me now to my education in the hands of my grandchildren.
JOURNEYS WITH GRANDCHILDREN
Camping. Occasionally I emerge from preoccupations with the past and the future and listen to the present. So, for ten days of camping I have been quite absorbed watching Sophie, at that magical, entertaining age of three, recounting the day’s routine events with the wide-eyed excitement of an explorer discovering a new and marvellous land, cutting vegetables very carefully and methodically since she knows the knife is sharp, helping Kate stir delicious sauces, wiping up (she can’t reach the washing up bowl, otherwise she would do that too), singing fragments of different songs stitched together in her own unique libretto, and asleep, lips parted, in an innocent radiance which would have captivated any Renaissance painter. But once, when Chet Webber aged two wandered off with our tent mallet, she pinned him to the ground in silent struggle until he yielded possession. During the same ten days her sister “Wosie”, golden-haired and now caramel-tanned, has turned into a water nymph, fearlessly catching big waves and riding her boogie board right up onto the sand.
Bushwalking. Returning along the Challenger Track “Can you carry me Gaga, my toes are getting heavy”. At Brennan Park Sophie prefers the challenge of climbing up the slide instead of the steps provided, but ten ascents and descents are too much, and so “Grandad, all my muscles have vanished”. At Berry Island last week Sophie helps Kate carry our picnic basket along the rocks to the tiny beach on which we all used to have barbecue picnics some 15 years ago, and today, from the jetty at Clifton Gardens, we watch a kindergarten of baby fish playing in the shallows while the adult fish cruised protectively further offshore. Finally, back home, “Sophie, you’ve left your Easter egg outside the front door.” “Akshully, I left it for the possums”. “Sophie, I need those cashew nuts for cooking”. “OK” says Sophie “I’ll only take one, (long pause) handful”.
At 33 Morton Street. Shivaji, aged two, has been told not to play with the telephone. But he gives himself away saying “Please check the number and dial again” as he comes trotting into the kitchen. Shivaji has learned how to lock me out of the back door, and can operate most kinds of equipment now. I found a very small teddy bear going round and round all alone in the tumble drier last week. At a family barbecue we ask him where Rebecca is, and he tells us “Mummy go to the T-O-I-L-E-T”.
The girls sometimes join me for early breakfast and today I do peanut butter on bread. First I carefully remove a piece of chewing gum, with Sophia-like indentations, neatly stored alongside the butter in the butter dish, then I spread the peanut butter, then “Grandad, please shut it, don’t cut it”. To collect letters we go to the “Chatterbox” and, in the pond, look for “Paddlepoles”. “Grandma, I did this puzzle all by myself, with Mummy’s help”. Shivaji likes watching ‘Madeline’, which he calls “Tomato-man” – my favourite is the one about Gerard ‘Diperdidoo’. And, half a world away, Madeleine’s name for Faith’s toy lamb is ‘Cutlet”.
At Kilcare beach John, Rebecca and I enjoy some body-surfing and then relax in the sun while Shivaji trots over to a group of giant life-savers. “Hi, what do you want?” they say. “I need to wipe my hands” says Shivaji, and proceeds to use their beach towels and they can’t help laughing.
Joan has gone to the chiropractor, Kate has gone to the dentist, fortunately taking Rosie and Sophie who will babysit Isabel in reception. That leaves Olympia, or Mukhi as she is called, who always cries when Kate goes out without her, but today tries to reassure me. “Mukhi happy” she says, tears streaming down her face. But together we mend the loop of wire that dips into the soapy water and soon she is happily chasing bubbles all over the back yard. Next she helps me clean up as Sophie has spilt milk into a drawer containing 18 teaspoons. Kate is making bread in the oven and has left the sort of clear, unambiguous, fool-proof instructions that she knows (though her mother does not!!) that elderly fathers need when left alone in the kitchen. But each time the timer rings for the next step in the program, or Mukhi needs to go to the toilet, the telephone rings and I must take a message, not always clear, unambiguous and fool-proof. After 8 such messages the relief expedition from the dentist arrives just in time through the front door.
Olympia tries to do most of the washing up, at any rate she spends a lot of creative time at the sink, and sometimes asks to have her evening bath in the sink. She has been teaching Kate to bake cakes, and she “helps” in the garden where her ability to distinguish weeds from herbs is about as good as that of her grandfather. Each morning she points out to me the places, always different, where the newspaper boy has hidden the Sydney Morning Herald, and she helps me carry it up, even on Saturdays when it must be the heaviest newspaper in the world. Later, if there are any letters to post, she takes me up to the corner chatterbox and makes sure they go in the right way. Sometimes we watch “Playschool” and “The Muppets”, and always, when it was on, “Madeline”, my favourite. She has become fascinated with bandaids, decorating many invisible wounds with them and, even asking for one because she had a tummy ache. Occasionally, sensing my impending disapproval of some little piece of routine devilment, she will wave to me and say “Bye bye Gaga”, loosely translated as “Get lost, grandad”. She is training Isabel to be an opera singer and they now make baby noises most incredibly loudly. I discovered “baby Belle” was wearing lipstick the other day.
Travelling around. Flying back from a week in Melbourne, Sophie asks the air hostess if she could go and see the “pirate”. And, on arrival “Granddad, jno what?” “No Sophie, what?” “Well, when my mamma was young she drived a plane”. And I do remember a sudden, sharp turn over the Peleponese as we dropped down to Athens in 1973, Kate having been invited to the flight deck.
Now in Hong Kong and, at first light Rosie and Sophie are watching a video of “Cosi fan Tootsie”. “Don’t wake Mummy”. “It’s all right, she’s nearly awake”. Then later “Grandad, can we watch Dumbo?” and I say “You’ll have to ask Mumbo”.
At Kilcare, I overhear Rebecca say “Is Uncle John awake? Go and tickle Uncle John”. Then Rosie, dubiously “He might not laugh”. Near bedtime and Sophie, now a bundle of wide-eyed energy, says “Grandad, it’s going to be late in a minute”, spoons up the last of her wheetbix, tilts her head back, and gargles with it, leaving me to struggle with the metaphysical meaning of her statement.
Photos. Here they all are together, and here is Olympia experimenting with rings and tubes. The four stooges seem to be holding up the window frame at Morton Street, while Faith shows Anya how to defy gravity. Finally, a strong Mum does a bit of weight lifting.
CATS
Bella is a cat “of little brain”. Waiting to get in through the front door in the morning, she nevertheless follows me down to get the paper, gets distracted, and forgets to come back. But then she claws wildly with both hands at windows front, back and sides till we let her in. Ruffles, Bella’s twin brother, left home years ago and we haven’t seen him since 1991, but he called in today for a cup of tea and a chat, so I gave him a saucer of milk in the kitchen, which so annoyed Bella that she “parked a custard” on the barbecue table.
JOURNEYS OF THE SOUL – MUSIC
It was during a Messiah rehearsal that David Hulme was warning me about coming in too soon. He called it “Solo for man bellowing”. But let me start with Bob and Judith Logan. We had met them just before we left England and then again six months later in Sydney at a barbecue. Bob and a friend were playing a new recording on a reel-to-reel tape which drew me like a magnet to something I had never heard before. I didn’t know what Baroque meant and I certainly hadn’t heard of Vivaldi or his Four Seasons. Soon Tim was then getting requests from me to ship out LPs from England (much cheaper than in Australia) and today I have collected more than 100 of Vivaldi’s works. Someone once said they didn’t understand music but they loved the noise it made. So it is now a great regret to me that, though I love music, I will never understand it. For me, baroque music seems like a cascade of sparkling jewels. But I can have opinions and if, as I am told, Bach towers over Vivaldi in choral music, I think Bach’s cheeky little foxtrots as they swagger along, do not compare with the fiery exuberant panache of the concertos from the Red Priest.
In England, my first classical record had been Sibelius’ Finlandia, in those days on a 78. Then, while visiting Tim in Cambridge, he unleashed symphony number two on me. At Farley Road Joan had heard a radio series on Sibelius, and we then started borrowing LPs from the Croydon library. Joan’s favourite, number seven, encapsulates “one of the greatest achievements in the history of symphonic music” in one single movement. Mine is number five, the happy, sunny second movement reminding me always of Kate aged six months. As a school girl Kate fell in love with the name Vladimir Ashkenazy and, years later, when he came to Sydney to conduct a Sibelius cycle, Joan and I went down memory lane to every single concert. He is actually quite small and unassuming as he trotted up to the podium, turned on his heel, and immediately launched the massive Sydney Symphony into Finlandia, stark, dark, heroic Nordic stuff. The concert ended with number two, probably his most romantic, if the groaning thunder of brass and percussion can be called romantic, and the audience rose to its feet after the climax. He once said “Some composers give you cocktails of flourish and frippery. I give you nothing but cold clear water.”
The first concert I ever took Joan to was to hear Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. Yesterday Joan took me to a film about Beethoven and I was pleased to hear a musicologist claim that Eroica’s first movement (as long as any symphony that had gone before) was the finest first movement of any symphony. The movie conveyed a profound commitment, but contained wit, “Mozart wrote for Saturday, Beethoven wrote for eternity”, and a quite unexpected tirade from a powerful baritone against the cultural trash of Facebook, Twitter and so on!
Kate’s music. Kate survived a high school love-hate relationship with Elizabeth Jones, her music teacher. Children have always informed their parents on a need to know basis, as for example when Kate said she had got into the zone for long distance. We hadn’t realised she was a runner and we didn’t even know what a zone was. So it was another surprise to me when, after dinner one night, I was bundled off to Saint Mary’s cathedral for a rehearsal of Haydn’s Jungen Messe, and to hear Kate’s and Joanna’s pure soprano voices intertwining high up in the gothic arches. Years later at a dinner party, Elizabeth’s pyrotechnic flashes of humour alternated with deep, snoring noises as five glasses of wine took effect. But she was soon sparking again & wanting to hear the tape of Kate & Joanna singing at the Mass for Youth at the cathedral. “They were just schoolgirls, for God’s sake. They could have got to Covent Garden, but they preferred to have babies!” Here is Kate, apparently able to pick up and play any instrument, with Olympia.
John’s music. We had told John, aged three I think, that we were crossing the Great Dividing Range and, there and then, he started to sing about it. I could see from Joan’s expression that we were both wondering how he would scan the last line. But he did it perfectly. Later, as a schoolboy, he had done well at a workshop run by a visiting English conductor but, in the performing arts, maybe only one in 50 makes any money at it. Not being a very perceptive father, I advised John to become a solicitor and do conducting in his spare time. As it turned out, however, John has now combined a secure job with his love of conducting as a high school music teacher. I did have storage problems, when he left home, finding room for huge collections of opera programs, records and music magazines.
Madeleine’s musicality was not immediately apparent to me, forced to play the violin in a primary school music fete (I used to call then fetes worse than death). But, at a high school concert, her loving performance of that beautiful slow movement from Vivaldi’s guitar concerto just blew my mind. But not all of us are musical and I felt I wanted to excommunicate the little old nun for being asleep at the side of the stage. I suppose we always expected musical success from Kate and John, so it was a surprise to get a letter from Madeline in England saying she had been auditioned and accepted into the London Philharmonic Choir. As luck would have it I was in London for her performance in the Beethoven Ninth. And, watching that Beethoven film the other day, I wondered how many men could say they heard a daughter in the Albert Hall, and a wife in the Opera House, both singing the Ninth. Perhaps because Madeleine prints banners for societies with strange names, she herself played in a group called Fingers and Frets and was a member of the Royal Society of Scribes and Illuminators. Here she is with a pepar in Macau, playing the Song of the Emperor’s Daughter from Chinese opera, which I will attempt to memorise and sing at Pinnochio’s restaurant next day. But that is another story..
Rebecca’s musicality emerged as a four year old, reaching the high notes of the Queen of the Night aria, and when she stumbled up the steps to the altar, uninvited, because she saw Kate, John and Madeleine singing there and she decided to join them. When she left India and was living with us we used to sing duets on Monday nights when Joan was at choir. And, joining my Acapella choir, Janet Swain soon picked her out as our soloist. Peter Clayton said her voice melted his heart. He had a soft spot for her, but not for Shivaji who once rolled a heavy drum of paper over his foot during rehearsals. Rebecca, Guitar, and Isabel at Morton Street.
Below are the recorder group at Morton street and Faith teaching piano to Anya.
Elizabeth Jones regarded Kate as her star music pupil at high school, Kate going on to get 148 out of 150 in the HSC. Elizabeth’s stories kept us amused for hours, getting backstage to talk with Cicilia Bartoli by pretending she was a representative of the Australian Opera. Travelling in France, and probably taller than most Frenchmen, she always wears her father’s Legion of Honour medal, instantly recognised by any Frenchman. So customs officers wave her through, porters stand to attention and salute, and doors open for her everywhere.
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND
El Salvador. It was during my first study leave that I had time to think beyond family and teaching activities. In London there had always been at least three classes of vibrant, enthusiastic students at the Henry George School. Here in Sydney I found a group of cranky old men who had not run any classes for years. But once a year they hired a hall in the Women’s College, invited speakers and put on a meal. So, after some boring speeches Joan and I exchanged meaningful looks. “Let’s go out instead and get a meal in Newtown.” And it was on a street corner in Newtown that I saw the lamp post. Stuck to it was an appeal to support a revolution in El Salvador. And, in a flash, I saw beyond the narrow horizons of the local Georgists, to the poverty caused by Latin-American feudal institutions, and to the futility of communism as a long-term solution. And since then I have written some 30 booklets, papers and articles on land reform in poor countries.
Models. “If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then to me “(Macbeth?) At Telecom Australia I had spent two years building software models that allowed managers to plan ahead, to “look into the seeds of time”. Soon after I enrolled in economics at Macquarie several things hit me. First, economists are criticized for building simple models of complex social situations. But simple models are better than no models at all. You and I use visual models of the street every time we cross it. These draw on historical models in your brain of the probable speeds of you and the cars you face. Second, my software models were similar to those used by economists and I saw, thinking now about El Salvador, that they could be adapted to forecasting the effects on poverty of alternative third world reforms. I demonstrated these ideas to the Department of Economics, they gave me a powerful computer and hinted that they would get some brownie points if I were to write some papers to AJES, the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Eventually, the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation in New York asked me to distil my papers into a book. Recently I heard the book was to be printed on demand and was to be place on their website.
Babel. I started enrolling in other subjects: politics, history, sociology and anthropology, and these led into international law, conflict resolution, human rights, and environmental and developmental studies. To my surprise I found that each had its own methodology and language and a fair degree of ignorance of the methods and languages of others. While I was comfortable with the algebra of economics, others were not. A familiarity with Latin was helpful in legal issues, and the law seemed to permeate all other studies. Political theory had never divorced itself from Marxist dialectic. And sociology was going through a phase of obfuscation called Post Modernism, and its obscure terminology was seeping into all the other social sciences. Let me give an example. “Some postmodern theories, therefore, while emphasising the crisis of the metanarratives, have never been sufficiently self-reflexive in recognising their own paradigmatic and chronic foregrounding of the temporal”. Since there are some experts at the tops of these disciplines who write in plain English, a common social science language should be possible. And since economics (the allocation of scarce resources) was fundamental but frightening, my economic models were made to resemble spreadsheets (familiar to anyone using Microsoft Office). The problem seemed to me to explain globalization in plain English with nothing more complex than spreadsheets.
Globalisation. At the end of ten years trawling through the Macquarie University library, I started to see globalization as a set of unsolved problems, for example development, human rights, conflict resolution and the environment. Though these were actually tightly interlocked problems, gigantic but quite separate bureaucratic empires had been set up, and quite separate, incompatible tools were being applied. These empires were drawn from UN, governments and non-governmental organizations. The tools were drawn from the social sciences, which I expanded to include history and law. The problem is to define the links between development, human rights, conflict resolution and the environment, and then to apply an integrated set of social science tools to the solution. More than 100 years ago JS Mill said that our future would depend on our combining a maximum of personal liberty with common ownership in the raw material of the globe. We are still trying.
FURTHER REFLECTIONS
On names. WHAT’S IN A NAME? I read last week of an English soccer team of prison inmates, 8 of whom are covicted murderers. They call themselves “Manslaughter United”. Saw Chris Ringstad last week, now an actuarial lecturer at Macquarie. He & Jo call Michael & Vincent, now left home but frequently returning, the “Baby Boomerangs”. “Have you tried genocide?” said the secretary. I had tried Philosophy on the 4th floor, but its professor’s office was on the 7th floor & locked. When I eventally found it, the “Centre for Genocide Studies” on the 6th floor didn’t open on Thursdays, my only day at Macquarie, so I went home & tried patience & meditation. I love Madeleine’s name for Faith’s toy lamb: ‘Cutlet”. Shivaji used to call Madeleine ‘Tomato-man’. He likes watching ‘Madeline’ – my favourite is the one about Gerard ‘Diperdidoo’.
On families. “From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.”? Is this how a family works? Yes, roughly speaking, especially when the children are young. They are looked after according to need, and parents provide according to ability. Is this how a nation should work? Karl Marx, who invented the maxim, thought so. Experience has suggested otherwise with North Korea, for example, living on the edge of starvation. It seems that communism works in families, not in nations. But in between is a huge range of charities and non-profit organizations, and the non-paid work that is never recorded by economists in the National Income. These all contribute to social cohesion, social capital and the public good about which sociologists argue endlessly.
On art. John Henshaw once explained to me that a portrait is a painting of someone who has something wrong with their eyes, their nose and their mouth. And an Evelyn Waugh character, being put in the picture about some wartime attack, mused sadly that “To put you in the picture” came into vogue at the time when all the painters of the world had finally abandoned lucidity. But watercolour sketching is more down-to earth. So, years ago Kate and I packed a thermos, sandwiches and water colour gear in a haversack and hiked off down the hill to Berry Island on another beautiful, sparkling spring day with a strong but warm northerly breeze. We perched on enormous sandstone slabs above our old barbecue picnic beach and tackled the pink and contorted limbs of the angophera trees with their wrinkled “armpits” and tendency to rest an “elbow” on any convenient rock surface. Through the dense network of trees and across the emerald green creek lay a giant tanker at the Shell depot, a reminder that we were not 1000 miles from civilisation, but at the edge of a busy harbour. And we have sketched together many times since, at Kilcare, in Macau and at Blackfellows Point. I hope, in a later chapter, to collect up our family drawings and paintings into some sort of album. Meanwhile, I have two here, Madeleine’s painting of where she used to live in Kent, and Kate’s artwork for a Chamber Choir concert.
On architecture. We did have a neighbour who wanted to redesign and rebuild the rear of our house at Morton Street. His design for Joan’s kitchen was ergonomically and clinically perfect, a U-shaped work-station sealed off from society. But Joan wanted an open plan country kitchen where visitors could sit in an armchair and talk with her. The client’s needs had not been understood and, since the final costing was twice that we had expected, the plan was quietly shelved. Gran gave me a love of old churches. Here is one of them, at Stopham.
Years later I tried the more difficult perspective of “Les Pilliers du Collateral Sud” in the abbey at Tournus.
Poetry. As happens, a school teacher, quietly enthusiastic, had opened a door for me called poetry. I suppose this was classical poetry and it was a long time before I found the modern angry war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. At a performance of Britten’s War Requiem I had sat just behind Joan in the choir, one of the few seats left on the first night, but from there I got the full blast of the brass and I think the conductor was shouting too. My Sunday seat was much better, in front of the soloists, where I could catch each syllable of Wilfred Owen’s condemnations of war:
What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
“This is your week’s homework. Use prose or poetry”. I am doing a Creative Writing class, I tried poetry last week, and it took ten times longer than prose. Carolyn Gerrish, our tutor, is selling off her slim volume of poems cheap and I ask her “What is the market for poetry?” “Zilch” says Carolyn “In Sydney ten of us read to each other and some buy each other’s books.” But there are other roads to market. Madeleine has a book of poetry called “Other Men’s Flowers” edited by an English General and that sold very well. Wilfred Owen’s war poems are heard every time someone plays the CD of the “War Requiem” and Pink Floyd’s powerful images have been selling well for 25 years in “Dark Side of the Moon.” I thought that was new poetry, but maybe I missed the next stage, as someone explains it: “I gave up on new poetry …when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.”
Sport. You have two sides one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out and when he’s out he come in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out. When both sides have been in and out including the not outs, that’s the end of the game.