Poggio Mirteto, 1985

Wading through grass thick with dew beside the olive trees, leaves as still as alabaster reliefs against the early morning sky, for once I had no wish to be somewhere else. I returned from my walk as the sun crossed the line of poplars to the south, shaking debris from the hem of my skirt and resting my soaked shoes in front of the open fire.

Of course, you won’t remember how you and Ita slept until midday while I read An Imaginary Life beside the dark fireplace, my feet up on the old elongated sofa, its twisted springs covered with a Persian rug. Or, afterwards, how I sat with my notebook beside me, staring into the corners of the room, its shelves packed with dusty ornaments, old leatherbound volumes by Italian authors I had not yet heard of and a host of paperback thrillers in English left behind long ago.

The previous night, the three of us had discussed my future in front of the fire, as we drank a pitcher of wine drawn fresh from the barrel.

‘Have you decided yet? Will you stay in Italy or return to Australia?’, you asked, leaning forward, long arms resting on your knees as you gazed at me intently. ‘Surely there is nothing for you there.’ You were scathing, in those days, about the land of your birth. ‘That wasteland inhabited by drunks and bullies!’

Ita toasted the bread over the fire and I sliced tomatoes and fresh mozzarella for the bruschetta. She had taught me how to pronounce it properly, with the hard ‘k’ sound. For her, Australia was little more than a myth you conjured, of dubious meat pies, flavourless sliced bread and arid wilderness.

Ita never tried to influence my decision as to whether I should stay or go, but gave me a list of job advertisements for English language teachers wanted to fill temporary posts in Roman summer schools. I weighed up the pros and cons. As always, I prevaricated, weighing my perpetual sense of landlessness with affection for my family, tucked up with their own worries and adventures so far away.

Alone that night in bed and all through the following azure morning anything seemed possible. At last, the two of you emerged. I laid out the bread and cheese with the salad I had washed that morning in cold water from the well. Ita opened a jar of olives from the previous year’s harvest. You were amazed when she told us she cured and bottled them herself, with a sprig of rosemary in every jar. Neither of you were very hungry, having just woken, but I ate greedily, leaving nothing to waste.

Later that day, we walked along a pathway that followed the ridge into the town. We passed through a thick stone arch and nodded to various elderly denizens along the way. Salve,you said, buonasera, while I remained mute. Then, I had not learned the names of many Italian things, but I made a kind of catalogue in my notebook, writing down words I saw or heard and giving them meanings – definitions I guessed or even made up on my own account.

Neither of you were ever awake before noon, so I had plenty of time to create my new apparatus. Although I knew it was nothing more than the compendium of a stranger’s mistaken comprehension, it helped me to make a bridge between blank unknowing and some kind of recognition. I never showed it to anyone, but once or twice I made poems from the entries. Uscita, for instance, the word that dogged me everywhere I went. Eventually I took it as a reminder that soon it would be time to leave.

I wondered often about the slow creep of familiarity, and the resistant dissonance that plagued me during that time. Being here is magnificent, I told myself, echoing Rilke, but only because I can never stay. I could not completely become part of this new place, in spite of its charms. Even if I identified with Malouf’s Ovid, I could not ‘transcend’ myself (Malouf 2011, 62), however hard I tried. I would return, and having done so, I knew I would wish, again, to be away. So, I cast myself in the role of eternal exile, knowing I could never belong there, or here for that matter. Instead, I found myself falling in love over and over again, hopelessly, with the sequence of places I occupied, however temporary. In Poggio Mirteto, I wrote in my notebook of loneliness and the mournful beauty of ancient stone. At night I dreamt of the bush and the shaded swamp where, as a child, I watched the platypus dive. On the morning we returned to Rome, the last three words of An Imaginary Life echoed in my thoughts: ‘I am there’. Maybe ‘there’ could be anywhere, I thought, for a writer. Or, maybe I will never know the actual moment I arrive?

Brisbane, 1975

In late 1975, when I was sixteen years old, my parents sent me to spend a few weeks of the summer with my aunts in Brisbane. For various reasons, emotions were fraught at home. It was the holiday before my final year of school and my mother wanted me to have a proper break before the hard work, as she saw it, began. In the past we had always visited my father’s sisters, Aunties Ivy and Edna, as a family. This time I would be on my own. I was to stay with each one for about ten days.

Auntie Ivy lived in Annerley, in a weatherboard ‘Queenslander’ built by my grandfather, just after WWI. It was a green and white board house on stilts, with a wide verandah on two sides. The north facing verandah had been closed in with wooden shutters to make a private porch for afternoon reading and snoozing. The front garden was filled with hydrangeas and agapanthus, shaded by a pair of tall frangipani trees. There was an old mango in the back yard and a Hills Hoist clothes line with a broken handle.

By 1975, Auntie Ivy was widowed and in her early sixties. Her life had been rather constrained until after her husband Charl’s death some years earlier. She had a job in a state government office and believed in keeping herself nice for work, putting her hair into pin curls every evening before bed. She was a tall woman, almost as tall as my father, with an angular jaw and fine bright blue eyes. Once a week she had her nails done, in coral or rose pink, during the lunch hour at a salon near where she worked. The nails were a gentle rebellion against a husband who often pronounced that he detested ‘painted’ women. This was perhaps a dig at the women in my father’s family, including my mother, who wore lipstick and powder in company.

Ivy loved the job and the independence it brought her, but maintaining the old family house had become something of a burden. Bored during the day in the empty hot house, I offered to help with chores she hadn’t managed to get to herself: scrubbing the porch windows, coating the cracked wooden ‘squatter’s armchair’, with long flat arms, that sat near the front door three times in linseed oil, and polishing the silver cutlery for the family Christmas lunch she was to host in my honour.

Ivy believed in holding to family tradition, so it was a Sunday lunch after church, with roast turkey and vegetables, followed by a fruit salad with ice cream. The invitees included her sister, Auntie Edna and her daughter, my older cousin Anne. Ivy’s in-laws, Charl’s brother and his family, also joined us. Outside, the summer heat was fierce, but the dining room was in the centre of the house and remained reasonably cool. We sat around a big brown table covered by a white linen cloth with lace edges that Ivy kept for such special occasions. I had set the table with the polished cutlery and water tumblers from the blue-smoked glassware Ivy kept in a mirrored cabinet next to her mother’s fish-shaped crockery serving platter and her own wedding crystal, never used.

I remember two things, in particular, about that lunch. The first is an image of my aunts seated together at the laminated kitchen table before the others arrived, each with their legs crossed and an ankle tucked around a chrome table leg as they sliced crossways into the orange flesh of mango and pawpaw to make cubes for the festive fruit salad. The second thing is a discussion of David Malouf’s novel Johnno, which had been published earlier that year.

During the lunch, one of Ivy’s in-laws asked about novels set in Brisbane, possibly on my behalf. I was known by then as ‘a great reader’.

‘Oh, yes, Johnno. It’s marvellously true to life,’ my aunt Edna remarked. ‘I gave a copy to Ivy for her birthday. Have you read it?’ she asked, turning towards her sister. I didn’t sense it at the time, but the question was a kind of test. Edna often gave Ivy books, then later asked her questions about them, which Ivy never answered, as she preferred to read the newspaper or magazines such as the Women’s Weekly. This time, however, Ivy was on home ground and rose to the challenge.

‘Oh yes, I did. Well, I have read the first half so far. It’s surprisingly authentic,’ she pronounced. ‘It’s not my Brisbane, but it’s a picture of the city I recognise. And I liked the description of the flooded river. That’s just how it was. I wish he hadn’t called himself “Dante”, though. I think that’s pretentious.’

I could see Edna across the table smiling. It would have been like her to push Ivy a little further, perhaps by asking her which of the Brisbane floods Malouf referred to, or what she meant by ‘pretentious’. Ivy was saved, at that point, by her sister-in-law cutting in with a bright remark about a trip she and her husband were planning to Italy.

‘Florence?’ asked Edna, blandly.

Brisbane, 1984

It might have been the false promise of warm weather that possessed you and I to go to the Women and Labour History Conference. We travelled from Canberra separately. I flew, fitting the week in between school teaching terms. You had more time and endured the long coach journey. If we could have arrived together in summer, how different our visit might have been, but this was a cold, wet winter. Edna was overseas somewhere and we stayed in her open, unheated house, shivering through the days and nights. Even so, that week was a kind of conflagration.

The conference was held at the university and we felt tremendously excited to be there. We were, plainly, confronted by our ignorance. There were two moments that showed us how little we knew, in particular, about Indigenous women’s history. The first was a presentation to be given by a Sydney writer who had intended to create new short stories based on first nation narratives. She was stopped in her tracks when two Turrbal women stood up at the start of the session and questioned the ethical validity of her premise. This was followed by heated discussion in the room about ownership of culture and creative freedom. But the writer herself, however shocked, had the sensitivity to realise that, as a non-Indigenous woman, she simply could not proceed. It was not her right to appropriate Indigenous culture.

The second momentous event of the conference, and not just for us, was the address given by Lilla Watson. Joanne Watson captures this powerful speech in a way that perfectly echoes my own recollection:

You and I had read Angela Carter and Nawal al Sadawi, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. We believed that change would come partly through the insights and realisations of reading fiction. That had been part of our connection – that we understood feminism through the minds of women novelists who sought to change the frame of reference through which women were portrayed.

Late that night we huddled in front of a narrow electric bar heater and discussed the implications, for the first time coming to terms with the idea that, maybe, as the descendants of colonialists, we had no right to possession in this country.

‘Change has to come through living,’ you said, ‘living and thinking in a different way.’ This was a hard recognition because we did not know what that way would be. To fend off the cold, you tucked up your knees on the narrow chair and wrapped your arms around them, your dark, soft hair falling forward over your green tourmaline eyes. I knew then that all I really wanted was to kiss your lips, to touch their curves with my tongue and taste the wine we had drunk that night together again. I did not dare to kiss you then. It might have happened, once, years later, but by then we both wanted something or someone else.

After that, it was clear that books and writing were not enough. For you it led to a law degree. For me, it might have been the first time I felt the impossibility of being Australian. But what did it mean to be Australian? I had grown up in Australia and everything I assumed about myself was premised on that thin idea of nationhood, even though I was not even born there. Since childhood, I had encountered the world as much through reading as through my own experience, but, in fact, it now dawned on me, I had read comparatively little Australian literature, except what I had been forced to study at school or university.

Brisbane, 1975

In the early 1970s my Aunt Edna purchased a modern, split-level house, in Blackstone Street, Indooroopilly. Her daughter, Anne, had by then married and moved away. The house represented the high-water mark of Edna’s career. Its many appealing features included a high timber cathedral ceiling, a sunken shower/bath off the main bedroom and a narrow spiral staircase that led down to a self-contained basement apartment below a deck. There were paintings by well-known Australian artists on the walls which Edna had begun to collect. I loved it except for the fact that, to my way of thinking, there were too few books. Edna kept most of her books in her office at the University of Queensland, where she was the first woman appointed as Professor, then as Chair, in the field of Social Work in Australia. She was also the only member of our family in her own generation to have taken a university degree and my mother encouraged me to regard her as a role model.

Edna was shorter than Ivy, with reddish hair, and an intense, slightly disconcerting gaze. One of her eyes was blue, the other green, which became more obvious if she were wearing green or yellow light. Studious as a young woman, she nevertheless had a sharp sense of humour. Although rarely given to outright laughter and her eyes would crinkle with fine, easy amusement. Her role kept her busy, but she was less willing to leave me to my own devices than Ivy. Several times she took me into her department and introduced me to various colleagues. Another time she arranged for me to go shopping with the son of a friend. On the weekend we went to Bribie Island with Ivy, stopping for ice cream and sandwiches after a swim. She found it hard to believe that I didn’t mind being alone but some days she was occupied with meetings and was forced to abandon me to my own devices.

I relished the hours I spent alone in the house, prowling to my heart’s content. I read in snatches, or napped on the sofa, catlike. On my searches I unearthed a few travel guides and a dictionary on a low shelf in the tiny room Edna used as a study. In the basement apartment, I had more luck: a copy of Truth or Repose by Jessie Street, beside a handful of books by authors I didn’t recognise – novels by Thea Astley and Dymphna Cusack, a volume of short stories by D’Arcy Niland. The only other book on the shelf was David Malouf’s Johnno.

During those quiet hours before my aunt returned from the university, I began to read Johnno. Even then, I loved the description of the houses where ‘Dante’ grew up, and his descriptions of the ramshackle city. His reminiscences of Brisbane vividly reminded me of my father Maurice’s stories of growing up in old Annerley, playing in the bush as a boy along the creek behind the family house, overlooking market gardens now long gone, or riding his bicycle through the scrappy industrial debacle along Brisbane’s riverbank. For Maurice, Dante’s description rang true.

During my holiday, I had explored the edges of the bush near Ivy’s house – the place where my father was born and my grandparents shed their last breaths – hardly daring to descend what remained of the scraggy paths beyond the end of Marquis Street. Maurice regarded this lost landscape as a haven of adventure and freedom from daily pressures. Like Dante and Johnno, albeit a few years earlier, he left Brisbane for a different life, in Papua New Guinea and London. In over a decade he never visited, only re-appearing in 1959 with my mother, Edith, carrying me in a brown elongated rush basket. I was then six months old.

If I loved the descriptions of Brisbane, in other ways Johnno eluded me. It was so very boyish, in places, with its pranks, alarms and aggravations. My sixteen-year-old self simply did not comprehend Dante’s relationship with Johnno. I could not put myself in the narrator’s shoes. Why did the two of them? roam so much through the nights? And, why did Dante put up with Johnno’s ridiculously bombastic proclamations? The novel’s literary allusions impressed me, but were also a reminder that I lacked what my mother called ‘a classical education’. Nevertheless, unlike Ivy, I didn’t mind that the narrator was nick-named Dante. I knew vaguely that Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet and somehow grasped that the name was given as a kind of benediction to the narrator.

Rome and Brisbane, 1985

On my final night in Rome, at the end of that burning summer, the evenings became milder and brown leaves started to fall from the trees along Via Nomentana. As the last red light of day cast itself against the old walls of the city, Ita took me for dinner in a piazza close to the Trevi Fountain. The profuse fountain itself we avoided, but the little piazza featured a restaurant with outdoor tables that served excellent Roman pizza. You were away teaching school children somewhere in Tuscany. We mixed our white wine with water and frittered away the evening, talking of our travels, of you, and so much more.

A week or so later, I flew into Brisbane. My parents drove up from Melbourne to meet me for a family reunion. Ivy was by then no longer living. Edna looked smaller and older after a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease, but was still bright and talkative in company, not yet quite ready to abandon her work at the university. She took us to lunch at the Staff Club and afterwards my mother said that she felt the occasion marked the best of us.

I had read Johnno fora second time on the flight home to Australia, a decade after my first attempt. If the bookhad been foreign to my way of thinking at sixteen, by twenty-six, it reflected back at me a two-directional pull, that now felt almost too familiar, the tension of my own discontent. It was a highly subjective reading for, while I could not help projecting some part of myself onto Dante, it occurred to me that it was Johnno to whom I could most relate. Like Johnno I had wanted to throw off the familiar cultural anorexia of the Australia I had known in the early 1980s. That country seemed to offer nothing for me, nothing, at least, that was within my grasp. Alone in Canberra, through 1983 and 1984, I had strained against the routines imposed by work and family expectation. I refused reason. I wanted to write. I wanted to travel. That was all.

Returning in 1985, I contemplated an uncertain future. I had abandoned all hope of staying in Rome to work. I had no job to come home to. Other than my parents’ house in suburban Melbourne, I had nowhere to live. My few possessions included a small collection of palm sized notebooks filled with untidy scribblings that even I could hardly read. Would any of it lead to anything, I worried, or had the trip been an utter waste of time?

I felt it rather sharply when I came to the part in Malouf’s book where Johnno scolds his poetic friend. ‘“The trouble with you, Dante,” Johnno told me severely, “is you’re a romantic! All you see is what you feel”’. Of course, Johnno’s accusation is as much a reflection of himself as it is a comment about Dante. Both are, in some sense, wanderers bent on renunciation amidst a landscape full of lost souls, their faces turned back to a world lost to time, hoping for revelation or union. In boyhood, Brisbane is their canvas to hurl themselves against. In adulthood, they veer towards and away from one another across cities and continents, returning eventually to the home town, at odds with each other and themselves. Dante is witness to the erasure of the old city and the rise of the new, with its harsh solid edges and blandly genteel landscaping: 

This was the Brisbane that confronted me on my return to Australia in 1985: a city that would soon make its international mark with the World Expo of 1988.

Reading Johnno a third time, inevitably, I see it as a portrait of a changing city as the remnants of pre-WWII Brisbane sink beneath the late-twentieth century tide of steel, glass and concrete hubris. It is also tempting to regard the book as a parable of Alighierian influence: a journey taken into darkness to find the path to ascent. For me, however, the book is, above all, a study in the implications of loss.

Purgatorio, n.d.

In the decades that have passed since I last saw you, I’ve been to Italy many times. I swear I never think of you, except for that one moment when the plane starts to descend. That’s when I remember how I felt the first time, the clutch in my belly, leaving you. We might have gone to our favourite café that morning in Canberra, leaning back in our chairs under the vines. We might have climbed a green and brown hill, afterwards staring at the view. We might have stood together on the side of an empty highway in harsh summer light. We might have argued or embraced. All of those things. Yet, at some point, we walked in opposite directions, evenly paced. Since then there have been many endings. I have lived them all.