Leeward Read online

  GEOFFREY LEHMANN was born in Sydney in 1940. Aged sixteen, he began an Arts/Law course at the University of Sydney, where he performed indifferently, but co-edited literary magazines with poet Les Murray, with whom he co-published his first book of poetry, The Ilex Tree. He was the first Australian poet to be published by the leading English poetry publisher Faber & Faber, and his Spring Forest was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. His Poems 1957–2013 (UWAP 2014) won the Prime Minister’s prize for poetry. He has edited five poetry anthologies, including Australian Poetry Since 1788, co-edited with Robert Gray (UNSW Press 2011). He is co-author of a leading taxation textbook, was a partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, has been involved in the design of Australian tax legislation, and was Chairman of the Australian Tax Research Foundation.

  A NewSouth book

  Published by

  NewSouth Publishing

  University of New South Wales Press Ltd

  University of New South Wales

  Sydney NSW 2052

  AUSTRALIA

  newsouthpublishing.com

  © Geoffrey Lehmann 2018

  First published 2018

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  ISBN: 9781742236131 (paperback)

  9781742244426 (ebook)

  9781742248875 (ePDF)

  Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

  Cover design Lisa White

  Cover image High tide – full moon Peter Kingston

  Cover image photograph and author photograph Piers Laverty

  All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

  For Gail

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to acknowledge the encouragement and great support given by my publisher, Phillipa McGuinness of NewSouth, and by Kathy Bail, CEO of NewSouth.

  I was very lucky to have as my text editor Fiona Sim, who has been exceptional in her many suggestions, and had an uncanny ability to sense exactly where changes were needed.

  My wife Gail Pearson suggested more than five years ago that I write this book. Since then she has provided emotional support and constructive criticism during many drafts and revisions.

  I also thank the following individuals for reading and critiquing earlier drafts: my children Harry, Lucy and Julia; Gail’s sisters Cecily and Deborah; my friends Robert Gray (in particular with the structure of the book), Donald Kirby, Ruth Burgess, Rex Burgess and Nick Hordern; and my agent Fiona Inglis of Curtis Brown.

  Auguste and Andrea Blackman asked me to contribute to a family memoir about Charles and Barbara Blackman. This book includes an edited extract from that contribution.

  I thank Peter Kingston for allowing the use of his wonderful linocut on the cover and Piers Laverty for photographing it.

  For permission to use copyright material I gratefully acknowledge the following people: John Eldershaw for permission to use extracts from his father’s memoirs; Sally McInerney for the quotation from her poem ‘Cattle Incident’; Professor Margaret Harris for permission to quote from Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowlegments

  The red-roofed cottage

  The skinny house

  The Liberty

  The holiday in Queensland

  Mosman Prep

  ‘Fifty-three’

  Diana

  The house at Gordon

  Bella

  Shore School

  Iris

  Sydney University

  Johann

  The Sydney Push

  Studebaker years

  Leo

  Concrete nymphs

  Ten years

  Gail

  Brother and sister

  Currarong

  THE RED-ROOFED COTTAGE

  In May 1942 three Japanese midget submarines sneaked into Sydney Harbour; one sank a ferry and the others were depthcharged. There were distant explosions echoing across the water in the night. My sister was summoned from her attic bedroom. I was woken and led from my cot in my parents’ bedroom on the ground floor. The four of us assembled in the downstairs hallway in the dark. Some time after the detonations stopped we went back to bed. I was not quite two. It is my first memory.

  During the war the windows of our house were masked by brown paper, so light could not escape. I watched searchlights sweep across the night sky. My father had a gas mask and sometimes wore a khaki warden’s uniform; he was too old to be a soldier, I was told.

  Many years before I was born, peering down into the viewfinder of a large, cumbersome Zeiss camera, which hung suspended from his neck on a leather strap, my father recorded what he saw in black and white on large glass negatives. In my early childhood, he was still using this camera to photograph the groups of picnickers he took in his boat the Liberty on weekend daytrips up the Lane Cove River, an estuary of Sydney Harbour. He developed the negatives and prints in his darkroom, lit by a dim red electric globe which fascinated me as a child. Then he sold the photographs to the picnickers, or gave them away. He did not talk about the financial details.

  The glass negatives he favoured were already antiquated technology by the 1940s. As a child I sensed there was something beautiful and strange about these obsolete glass objects. None survive, but I have a couple of his group portraits: thirty or more picnickers, adults and children, none of whom I can recognise, sitting and standing in dappled shadow under trees.

  Born in June 1940, not long after the start of World War II, I was a statistical outlier. My mother was two weeks short of her forty-fourth birthday. A year or so before, she had miscarried, and my parents believed, perhaps regretfully, that my elder sister Diana would be their only child.

  For my first ten years I grew up in Lavender Bay, with the smell of salt water, in houses facing the grey curved eye of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There was a distant rumble, like thunder, when trains went across. At the end of the day a southerly buster often blew up, and the twenty or so moored yachts and motor launches pointed, like compass needles, down the bay into the wind. On rare occasions our bay was visited by a Chinese junk – with varnished planks and red sails like something out of a child’s picture book; it came and was gone.

  I have no memory of living in my first childhood house, ‘Leeward’, a two-storey grey weatherboard building at the head of the bay and backed by a wild escarpment of weeds and lantana. The ground shook when trains empty of passengers emerged from a tunnel set into a hill, then went across a viaduct to railway yards at the water’s edge.

  ‘Leeward’ was the rented house my parents – Leo and Iris – moved into when they married in 1935. My father had been courting Iris for about two years and waiting until ‘she’d got some sense’. One day he asked how old she was. Her answer shocked him – she was almost too old to have children. They married ‘hastily’ – as my father saw it – six months later. She was a thirty- nine-year-old spinster and he was a bachelor aged forty-four. When I was in my twenties my father would say: ‘Son, I got married too young – the older you are when you get married, the shorter the time you have to put up with it.’

  Using his large, cumbersome Zeiss camera he photographed the Orphan Rock, then famous as a scenic wonder, on their short honeymoon visiting the Blue Mountains and Jenolan Caves. He developed his glass negative and enhanced a large sepia print with natural tints. My mother gave up her job and joined a lending library, confident that keeping house for my father would allow a l
ifetime of reading books.

  ‘Leo, there’s always a bed for you in Walker Street, if you want to move back’, Leo’s sister Agnes told the newly married couple in her stentorian squawk. Until his marriage, my father had lived with Agnes and his brother Carl in the house in Walker Street, North Sydney where he was born. Agnes worked in a steam laundry most of her life. She wore the plainest of clothes and her metallic grey hair was tied back in a bun. A favourite word was ‘obstropolous’. She pronounced ‘going’ as goin’ and ‘opposite’ as oppo-sight. With her rounded shoulders, long trunk, short legs and loud voice, she was sceptical of my mother’s educated accent and delicate looks. Iris, she decided, had a bad case of ‘imaginitis’.

  ‘Leeward’ was less than a mile from the Walker Street house and was next to the Lavender Bay wharf. Each morning, from Monday to Friday, just after seven, my father’s launch, the Liberty, set out from there with twenty or so workmen on board. If the sky was unclouded, the boat and water were festive with early morning sunlight. Their destination was the engineering works of the Adelaide Steamship Company at Balmain, a dilapidated harbourside suburb, which was yet to become fashionable.

  At about 4.30 in the afternoon, the launch returned with the workmen to the wharf. Shadows would be forming. The sun would be disappearing over the hill. Between those two boat trips, which started and finished his day, my father’s launch took men and supplies to and from ships anchored in the harbour for the steamship company.

  Working-class Lavender Bay was a foreign planet for my mother. To get to the shops in Blues Point Road, she walked, clutching a string shopping bag, up a set of steep steps from ‘Leeward’ to King Georges Road. On her right was the tunnel from which empty trains sometimes thundered out. As she climbed higher, she could look across a wasteland of dense lantana. Local boys played among the dry, acrid foliage, in a warren of secret tracks through prickly branches that tore at skin and clothes if they were clumsy. One day Iris was walking up these steps – perhaps before Diana was born. A boy and girl were among the bushes, the girl’s ‘scanties’ around her feet. My mother called out to them to stop. The boy stood up and waved his penis at my mother: ‘D’yer want some too?’

  Only a couple of months into married life, my mother made a disconcerting discovery. She was pregnant. But even after my sister was born, she held onto her fantasy of the bookreading housewife. One morning my father had gone off to work and Diana, two months old, was asleep in her cot. Lock-ing the front door of ‘Leeward’, my mother hurried up to North Sydney station and boarded a train. Her plan was to steal a couple of hours in the city – to borrow more books from her lending library, or sit down in an arcade and have tea and a cake. Chatting to a woman sitting beside her in the train – a stranger – she confided she had left her baby asleep. The woman looked at her: ‘You can’t do that!’ My mother got off at the very next station, Milsons Point, and ran down the hill. She unlocked the front door. The house was silent and my sister still asleep.

  When I was born, the nurses nicknamed me ‘Buddha’, because of my large, melon-shaped head. Its size was later emphasised by my father’s cutting my hair very short, and at primary school I collected nicknames such as ‘Baldy’, ‘Bighead’ and ‘Boofhead’. ‘Boofhead’ was an Australian comic-strip character, with short black hair, clipped in the style preferred by my father, and was the nickname that I carried with me into high school, often shortened to ‘Boof ’. (By a strange coincidence the Australian cricketer Darren Lehmann also has the nickname ‘Boofhead’.)

  One morning, not long after the start of World War II, my parents were heading down Lavender Bay on the Liberty. My father pointed to three houses halfway along the bay on a steep site planted with large Moreton Bay fig trees. He indicated a white and beige wooden cottage with a red galvanised iron roof; higher up still, a decayed double-storey mansion, and next to it a strange edifice, one room wide and four stories high. Catching the ferry into the city, my mother had already given this singular building a name: ‘the skinny house’.

  ‘Iris, I’m buying those houses’, my father told her. She was astonished. In the six years since their marriage, nothing had changed her first impression that she had married a working-class man of modest means.

  For two decades my father had been depositing his earnings from the Liberty at the Erskine Street branch of the Bank of New South Wales – an elaborate sandstone building from the Vic- torian era, where I spent hours of my childhood, waiting on leather- bottomed wooden chairs. The houses had been part of a deceased estate since the nineteenth century and were selling cheaply, my father said. The Japanese army had already reached New Guinea. Waterfront properties were being sold at knock-down prices.

  My father paid cash. The amount – several thousand pounds – was a lot more than the accumulated sum of the annual earnings he recorded for income tax purposes in a small black cash book – which I still have – noting his receipts and expenses week by week in longhand in blue-black ink.

  We moved from ‘Leeward’ into the white and beige cottage with its red iron roof. Its postal address was 1 Lower Bayview Street, McMahons Point. My father made a wooden placard with silvery metal letters spelling ‘IVANHOE’ for the front gate. Iris loved the novels of Walter Scott and had chosen this name.

  A sloping path, bordered by blue plumbago, led downhill from the gate and stopped at some steps built into the rock-face. At the bottom of this small cliff, there was a small paved area and the red-roofed cottage.

  When I was a few years older, I wheeled a tricycle up and down the path. I remember my father rebuilding it in concrete with a couple of workmen: the wooden formwork, the cement mixer turning, the sieves and drying concrete. I also remember watching him tip kerosene into the preheating tray of a blowtorch, then light it. For a minute or so a yellow, smoky flame billowed around the flame tube. As this flickered out, he moved the pumping rod quickly up and down. There was a roaring sound and a concentrated blue flame I could barely see in full sunlight.

  Before her marriage Iris had lived with her mother Bella in a flat at Rose Bay. After my parents married, Bella moved to a flat at ‘Burundah Hall’ in East Crescent Street, a building of liver-coloured bricks and cream stucco decorations several doors up from the skinny house. I have a memory of cool halls with terrazzo floors. One afternoon as Bella opened her door I may have handed her a tribute of blue plumbago flowers. My grandmother wore old-ladies’-style long black dresses and had a black piano. She played it as we sat there in the afternoon sunlight, which I remember as yellow-tinted.

  I have a scatter of memories of my early childhood in ‘Ivanhoe’. In one, I’m about three years old and running around aimlessly one morning on the front lawn facing the harbour. There is a small orange tree. A disused brick outhouse with a primitive water closet at the bottom of some steps is a haven for mosquitoes. One weekend morning my father is pursuing my sister with a leather strap – this is unusual, he is rarely provoked and I’m scared he’ll get angry with me. In another memory, on a weekend afternoon, my sister and I are a year or so older. Diana is sitting on a chair at the back of the house under the shadow of the cliff. There is the snip snip of scissors and her hair falling on the concrete as my father gives her a basin cut, then panic and blood as his scissors gash her ear.

  Mrs Holmes owned the block of flats next to the red-roofed cottage and lived in the ground floor flat. She was the widow of Reginald Holmes, a boat builder who was shot three times, and killed, before he could give evidence in the ‘shark arm murder case’. (In April 1935 the tattooed arm of a petty criminal, Jim Smith – Holmes’s acquaintance – was vomited up by a tiger shark in the Coogee Aquarium Baths.) I was invited once or twice to play with her granddaughter Georgina, and was envious of Georgina’s large painted rocking horse. Mrs Holmes had a heavy smoker’s sallow face and years later burned to death in bed, having fallen asleep with a lighted cigarette.

  A large neutered tomcat, a tabby with a white bib, used to walk inquiringly aroun
d our garden. He was Mrs Holmes’s cat. My father called him Skipper and we called him Puss. I used to play with him and he eventually moved in with us, disappointing Mrs Holmes. My courting of this cat amused and mildly embarrassed my father (on account of Mrs Holmes) and he held me responsible for alienating Puss from his owner.

  The war ended. The brown paper was torn off the windows, neon shop signs were lit again and my mother took Diana and me into the city, to see the shops and lights, and join in the bustle and excitement. Long past our bedtime, on VJ night (Victory over Japan), my father took us in the Liberty out under the Harbour Bridge, cutting the engine when we reached the main body of Port Jackson, near Pinchgut Island. Other boats and ships surrounded us, bobbing in the liquorice water. Everyone was tooting. Nearby toots were answered by toots far away. Coloured lights played on great arcs of spray shooting up from fireboats. Fire-works were exploding and rockets painting the night sky, as acrid smoke drifted across the harbour.

  After the war, we moved from red-roofed ‘Ivanhoe’, further up the hill to the skinny house. Puss moved up the hill with us.

  THE SKINNY HOUSE

  I was five years old. Late in the afternoon I walked up the hill and watched furniture being carried into empty rooms, and my father checking the stove. There was a pop as he applied a match to gas escaping from each burner, and blue rings of flame lit up in the darkened kitchen. I was surprised to discover he owned this house, and the decayed mansion next door which we called by its street number, ‘Fifty-three’. Until then, the cottage lower down the hill and its patch of lawn, with a low wire fence separating it from the other two houses, had been the limit of my world. I sensed a new freedom. I could roam over a hillside. Property ownership was a novel concept.

  We stayed in the skinny house for the next five years. Those years, according to Freud, were my ‘latency phase’, an interlude where nothing much happens, after my more exciting ‘oral’, ‘anal’ and ‘phallic’ phases, and before my perturbed ‘genital phase’.