We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 113
WINTER 2008
MEMOIR
Jennifer Compton - Writing the Life of an Australian Village
I felt as if I was standing in the very centre of a paradox. I had scraped up an invitation to speak at the Circolo-Italo-Britannico in Venice and had arrived in the most beautiful city in the world bringing news of Wingello.
Wingello is not the ugliest village in the world, nor is it the most gormless, gobsmacked or slack-arse place on the planet. It has its stories, it has its history. It has its pride.
But put Venice in one hand and put Wingello in the other and the weight of them is equal and opposite. It seems quite ludicrous that one can set out from Wingello, catch the train at the unmanned Southern Highlands station and end the journey by stepping out of St Lucia to see the Grand Canal lapping at gondolas.
I admit I trembled. I had stepped into a blazing spotlight. I had stepped into an Idea. I was out of the forest, standing on a sunlit plain – vulnerable and exposed. Living in Wingello is like being in the middle of a secret. Like being nowhere. Like rainwater, it has the taste of no taste.
‘Speak about anything,’ she had told me when she had rung me at the poets’ flat in Rome. ‘Anything will do. But not poetry. Our members aren’t keen on poetry.’
As the Australia Council had shipped me off to the Whiting Library Studio in Rome for six months to do poetry I was at a loss, cut off at the pass. It came into my mind to speak about what was most nearly concerning me, the ethical dilemma that was lurking on the backburner of my peace of mind, the moral quandary that swamped me the nights the disco in Testaccio kept me awake, booming their simple beats off the walls of the canyon of flats. (I do know the next generation has to be born but must they seek incarnation to the same tape loop night after night?)
The fix I was in was this. We have lived in a small town called Wingello in the Southern Highlands of NSW since 1983. We have cleared blackberry and bracken, planted trees, raised a couple of kids. In 1982 we had plotted, in our Paddington flat, to close up the weekender in Wingello that the husband had bought on a whim, it was cheap as, give up the lease on the flat and spend at least six months in Tuscany. I would study the Italian peasantry and write about them. I was in the mood to delve into the secret life of a village. And the husband would soak up the sights etcetera.
But we didn’t know that on the first night we had spent in the tumbledown old weekender, seven kilometres off the Hume Highway, almost halfway between Sydney and Canberra, I had fallen pregnant. All of our plans fell into a heap, destiny shook us by the scruff of our necks. We quit the flat in Paddington and moved to Wingello and made the best of it.
One day, several years and two children later, I was slogging down Bumballa Road to the shop, clocking the landmarks, the wild plum tree, the skirl of black cockatoos above the pine trees, the drift of smoke from the chimney of the Vinnecombe’s cottage, lifting my hand to the odd car that passed, and I understood I was deeply inside the life of this village. I was one of the peasants. And I was the one who took it amiss when I was turning the compost heap or picking fruit, to be stared at and labelled ‘local colour’, ‘indigenous’, by the weekenders in their Country Road clothes strolling about for a look-see. The observer observed. The biter bit. And serve me right.
It had not occurred to me to write about where I lived. It was my safest place, as dull as the dusting and the ironing, but I knew it inside out.
I began to write the stories that belonged to this place. Approaching cautiously and sensitively. Poems about the weather, the way the ants knew a few days before rain to build sand barricades – and perhaps drag a leaf in on top as an umbrella – the frogmouth who swooped in to take bogong moths off our French doors and paused to peer inside at us. His blazing orange eyes, his potent, no-neck chutzpah.
And a radio play in which the locals participated. I imagined the fire back in the sixties that had razed Wingello (all but) and some of those who had been there, on the fire ground, made nonsense of my imaginings with their reminiscences. That should have been more humbling than it actually was. But I do think best effort is appreciated here. People still speak to me of it. One young woman moved here because she had heard the play. That should have been more humbling than it was. I am just trying to scrape a living, you know. Fate put me down here. So I prowl around gathering my objets trouves. It’s all grist to my mill.
We didn’t know about bushfires when we moved to Wingello. We didn’t know that the place had had two big ones. One in ’39 and again in ’65. We were immigrants from New Zealand. (Yes, of course we had had the odd memorable sunset because of the ash thrown up into the atmosphere from somewhere in Australia burning fiercely.) We arrived in ’72 and settled happily into Sydney and never had a reason to come to grips with the way Australia will burn. Apparently it needs to burn. The seeds of some plants won’t grow unless they have been through fire.
We moved into Wingello like innocents abroad, and as we were getting to know the place I realised that, apart from our house, which was built in 1924, there were hardly any old places in the village at all. So unlike the New Zealand landscape where one sees old shearing sheds and abandoned farm houses everywhere. It puzzled me. Perhaps they pull them down and reuse the materials, I thought. Perhaps white ants get into the timbers and turn them into Weet-Bix and the wind blows the shreds away.
When the penny dropped, I felt the fear.
Our house survived because several of the grown-up children disobeyed the evacuation order and hid, as the fire passed over them, then ran out to put out the spot fires. That is what usually destroys houses. Not the main fire front. The embers in the eaves, or on the doormat. The outside dunny burned, the back door was singed, but our house was saved. They told me that the fire got into some windrows on the outskirts of the village and built up such a head of steam that it became a firestorm.
These are the kind of words that terrify. Firestorm. Microburst.
It was a microburst – an intense but localised tornado of fire, that our fire crew saw coming at them across the valley as they conducted a routine mop-up operation out in the forest. If it had been aiming at them it couldn’t have done a better job of hitting them fair and square as they sat in the old truck. The old truck felt the heat and its brakes locked. Couldn’t even roll it down hill. Jammed solid. And not enough fire blankets to go round. Up on the landing stage they had seen it coming, but the crew were down in a gully and out of radio contact. One man dead and the other seven terribly burned.
It was New Year’s Day and I was at a party and we knew something was going on. The sound of the sirens out on the road, then the helicopters thwacking over us. Then a camera crew in a nippy little car mistook my friend’s drive for a fire trail and came thundering up to the verandah.
‘Go away,’ we shouted. ‘No fire here.’
Then of course we turned on the telly to find out where, what and who.
I had an appointment with the dentist in Bowral the next day and sat in a cafe to have a strengthening coffee and take the trauma on board. And a bloke I vaguely knew sat down at my table. All the social rules had gone out the door. He asked how things were out in Wingello and I started crying. And he started crying too. We were drinking our coffee and tears were pouring down our faces. Not sobbing. Just this leakage.
I wrote a series of poems – what they call a suite – and I didn’t rearrange their faces and give them all another name. To get rid of the pain I had to write it for real. Then I had second thoughts. So I rang the poet Les Murray and threw myself onto his mercy. ‘I don’t want to be a cannibal!’ I averred.
And he said, ‘You’re not a cannibal if you eat yourself.’
And that is true, and fair enough as far as it goes.
But I do feel as if I am nibbling at the tender and delicious liver and lights of people who are, to all intents and purposes, my friends. Because my husband spent, at that time, much of his week up in Sydney, I fell in with a group of solo mothers. I was a part-time solo mother. We were gathered at Annette’s place, drinking coffee, eating walnut slice, while our kids ran amok out in the garden, and Annie mentioned she had seen a great show on TV the night before. I keep my doubts of, my scorn for, the taste and discretion of the underclass well hidden – at least, I hope I do – but I must have rolled a disbelieving eye. So Annie went on to describe the show – how very good it was – and didn’t I feel contrite when I realised it was Look Back In Anger, the version with Kenneth Branagh and Judy Dench which I had watched with great pleasure! I eagerly leaned forward and ran Annie through the history of the play, the Kenneth Tynan review, etc. She wasn’t interested in that, she just thought it was a good show. Which it was.
How I pondered as I herded my kids away up the dirt road and across the railway line. There was a play in this. But I felt I had to get them on side. I asked the girls, Gay, Annette and Annie, if I could write a play about them, they would have the right to veto anything, but I did want to write it as it was, the real thing. I asked their permission again and again as I asked them questions and observed them, like a twitcher in her hide. Suddenly I was the hunter and they were my prey.
Finally, Annie, who lived in the house her grandmother had left her and who was notorious for her free and easy ways, her cheerfully slack chutzpah, put me straight.
‘You’re the writer,’ she said. ‘We can’t write it. If you don’t write it, who will?’
Perhaps they thought it would come to nothing. But I dragged their play, The Big Picture, through all the stages of dramaturgy, rehearsed reading, to production and on to publication and thence to productions in other theatres, other countries. It achieved its own momentum. It lives on beyond us, beyond this fly speck on the map. I threw myself into the process of making it live because, simply, I wanted to save them. I am not sure what I wanted to save them from, perhaps it was as simple as my desire to make the moment stop. Gay laughs and slurps her coffee, Annie tells us girls how great the TV show was, Annette chivvies some walnut slice crumbs around the plate and we can hear the children yahooing outside. I see myself, like a thinking animal, I see outside myself and I look into myself.
I don’t know these girls anymore. Two have left the village, if I see the other there is an awkward moment and I have to be the first to say hullo. Maybe what I did was cruel and unusual.
But I was in too deep to go back. Too fascinated by my local knowledge. I turned my attention to my neighbours like a ravenous writing beast. The impetus for this fresh outrage was a travel site I belong to called Virtual Tourist. The members write pages about places they have visited and where they live. Wingello is on the database, which is a little surprising. The fact that Venice is on the database is not a bit surprising, I think it may have the most pages of any site on the database. Big pages, hundreds of tips, photos of the same place over and over again, Venice is top of the trees.
But, there is this feature on Virtual Tourist called ‘See all locations nearby’. I was a little bored with the exotic one night and clicked on locations nearby Wingello. To my surprise I found a place called Murrimba which was purportedly seven kilometres away from us. The road out to the highway is called Murrimba – but I had never heard of a village called Murrimba. After some extensive googling I found it had existed way back, just where Murrimba Road meets the Hume Highway at Paddys River. It used to have three coaching inns, a blacksmith’s shop and a general store. It is about three days’ ride from Sydney and one day’s ride from Goulburn, the oldest inland city in Australia. Nothing remains of it. The fire in ’64 must have finished off what the fire in ’39 started. And the yen to write my neighbours, without their permission or knowledge, took me over. I called Wingello Merrimba (two dislocations, one letter and seven km down the road) and applied for and got a grant from the Australia Council’s Literature Board to write these stories.
I am sure I do not have the right to write the stories that I only know because I have been pretending to live here for over twenty years – no one has the right to plunder other lives like that – but the government has given me money to do it. So I do it. I struggle with my censor and my saboteur, but as the old people who told me many of the stories die, and I become the old lady who knows the stories, I begin to think that if I don’t do it then nobody will. And Wingello, like Murrimba, will become just a location on a map, that once existed, and the bare bones of the fact of a general store/post office and a Mechanics’ Institute Hall will be its legacy. Its coordinates may be able to be googled, but it will be empty. For instance, if I don’t tell you that the floor of the hall is made of yarrawood
– the very best sort of floor for the Friday night dances – and that this was a great source of pride to the old identities, the only village in the district with a yarrawood floor – if I don’t tell you this, how would you know? I used to go down to watch the old campaigners dance the gypsy tap and the veleta (a great supper was always provided) and had a bit of a chuckle watching the old gents pop their hip back into place after a tricky whirl. The floor always gleamed. Reuben spent all day polishing it tenderly. He loved that floor. In the supper room behind the stage with the picture of Elizabeth R as a much younger woman, I would hear elderly dancers complaining about how slippery the floor was – too much Pops. I wondered vaguely what Pops might be, a technical ballroom dancing term maybe, until the day I was in a dusty hardware store in Mittagong (gone, gone, gone, now gone) and on a high shelf, covered with dust I saw containers of Pop’s Floor Polish.
Oh it’s a brand! I thought to myself.
These are the stories I brought to Venice. The inane and profound divertimento of our lives. I had typed it up carefully. I had rehearsed it sotto voce on the eighth floor in Trastevere for timing. I was imagining learned types. My prepared piece started with a disclaimer.
‘I’m not an educated woman. I’m a writer. I write for the theatre and for radio and television. I write poetry, and articles for magazines and newspapers. I write stories. And tonight I am talking about writing the life of an Australian village.’
I was imagining a small lecture theatre, a stage or rostrum of some sort, a lectern and a mike.
When I was escorted into the venue – all of aflutter and atwitter – it appeared to be the Venetian equivalent of a Mechanics’ Institute Hall. A large shabby room. Chairs set out willy-nilly. Local ladies of a certain age, with very little English to speak of, but dressed for a social event. The odd, older, lonely gent. And two carpetbagging Aussies buying up property in Venice, because they are not making it anymore. A harried coordinator who could only offer a hand-held mike and no lectern. When she saw my carefully typed pages she blurted out, ‘You’re not going to just read it!’ And then she wearily added that we had to keep the noise down because the Patriarch of Venice was at a meeting in the next room.
Then I saw the desk pushed up against the wall. A wondrous desk, made of many different types of woods, inlaid in an intricate fashion. A vast gleaming desk, a looming desk, a desk as big as a battlefield.
And sensing a defeat, I had misjudged this occasion so badly, I despairingly scattered my pages across its beauty and propped my bum against it. I take tension in my buttocks and when I am truly scared the right cheek starts to flutter and twitch. I seized the hand-held mike and prepared to go down in flames. I have rarely had a more difficult audience. The Aussies were in the front row and so on to every nuance. The rest of the audience stirred and muttered and deafly boomed at each other the Italian equivalent of ‘Wot the farrrk is she on about?’
And as I gathered up my typed pages I could not help but caress the smooth and beauteous gleam of the resplendent desk.
‘Has anyone told you about the desk?’ asked the coordinator, quite calm after one of the worst nights of her life was about to end and she could finally get home and sort whatever needed to be sorted.
‘No.’
‘That’s the desk where Napoleon signed the treaty with the Austrians.’
That was the desk upon which I had been propping my barbarian, postcolonial bum.
Isn’t that just Venice for you? So stuffed with treasures and rarities they can’t find house-room for most of them, and stuff them into dusty corners and up against walls.
And as for Wingello? Time will tell. The aboriginal language that the name Wingello comes from has evaporated in the last two hundred or so years since the Invasion. But according to best local knowledge it means the place of big winds and the place of big fires. Because if you get big winds you get big fires. No need to explain. That’s a given.
JENNIFER COMPTON is a poet and playwright who sometimes writes prose. She lives in Wingello in the Southern Highlands of NSW. In 2006 she spent six months at the Whiting Library Studio in Rome. She has two books ready to be published: a book of poetry, Barefoot, and a book of travel/memoir, The Wrong Side Of The Road.
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