Question 7, page 7
The World Set Free was forgotten.
13
Yet Wells’s novel has a claim on subsequently becoming one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. One aspect gripped a few imaginations. ‘Trained scientist as he is,’ the Scientific American declared in its review of the novel, ‘he presents his atomic bomb with an air of definiteness and conclusiveness that almost convinces one it exists.’
This definite and conclusive idea of an atomic bomb proved resonant. Slowly it took purchase on influential minds. One was Wells’s good friend Winston Churchill, who routinely read all Wells’s novels twice. ‘Might a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings,’ Churchill asked in an article in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1924 tellingly titled ‘Shall we all commit suicide?’, ‘nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?’
14
‘Bomb away!’ said Thomas Ferebee and the B-29 bomber his captain, Colonel Paul Tibbets, had named Enola Gay after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets, banked steeply away to escape the blast while in Hiroshima 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 people were already dead. The dying, possessed of similar feelings towards their parents as the captain of the Enola Gay, were frequently heard to call one word over and over in their final agony, as they wandered lost and blind through the burning ruins of Hiroshima.
Mother, they kept saying as charred skin fell like long strands of kelp off their bodies and heads, mother.
Four
1
The past then was different than the past is now; further away and harder to find, it receded more quickly and was little recorded in comparison to today, existing only in archives far away or sometimes not at all. People died younger and memory struggled to see over the great embankments of history—the war, the Depression, the Great War.
And yet the past was also more present. On Anzac Day those who had fought not for Australia but for Tasmania and the British Empire in the Boer War still paraded. Change came slowly and it was possible to conceive of the nineteenth century as a time not unlike now. For a short while yet, people still talked of the arrival of electricity, the shock of the first telephone call and Al Jolson singing, and the exceedingly strange ways Americans were discovered to speak.
My father remembered how the coming of electric light killed ghost stories.
2
When I died on the Franklin River at the age of twenty-one it was as I had always known it would be. Everything ever since has been an astonishing dream. Increasingly, I expect that in my final moments I will wake in the river dark, discovering I never left and am now to drown, and that the only novel I ever wrote was my life.
Perhaps this is a ghost story and the ghost me.
3
I was struck at the death of both my mother and father how within only minutes of passing, their face was no longer them and yet it remained their face. After twenty-one I stole my face back from death but it was not my face. I saw bodies and faces that were me but which I hadn’t been allowed, rather this stranger’s body and face, like borrowed clothes at once too loose and too tight and smelling wrong. But there was nothing else to wear and so we got on with it, me and this ill-fitting costume that bears my name.
4
It was only many years after it happened that I began to understand. That what occurred is still occurring. I wrote about the story in one way a long time ago for another novel, my first. Though I tried to be honest, it was still happening and so it was dishonest. That’s what I couldn’t see then that I see now, that though it happened then it’s still happening now and it won’t ever stop happening, and that writing about it, that writing about anything, can’t be an opinion about what happened as if it had already happened when it is still happening, still unintelligible, still mysterious, and all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn’t. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it, seeking the answer to one insistent question: who loves longer?
5
Back when I was writing my first novel, writing being something in which I had no confidence, I was out walking through town one day and bumped into M—, the only writer I knew, a late-middle-aged English woman. When I say a writer, M— was an academic who had one small book of poems slightly larger than a cigarette pack to her credit at that time. But she thought like a writer and believed in writing and was very kind to people like me who wished to be a writer yet didn’t have to their name anything so remarkable as a book of poems slightly larger than a cigarette packet.
M— knew of literature: she had been to Cambridge in the 1950s where she knew Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. This was deeply impressive in 1980s Tasmania. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath may as well have been Count Vronsky and Anna Karenina. The idea of them as real people brought on a frisson of wonder in all who listened to M—’s tales. She had been at the infamous St Botolph’s Review party where Ted, as M— called him, abandoned his then girlfriend for Sylvia, as M— called her. The teary girlfriend sought solace in M—. Pointing to the new couple engaged in amorous intimacies in a distant dark corner, she sobbed, ‘Ted has run off with that awful American girl.’
‘Don’t worry,’ M— replied. ‘It won’t last.’
M— asked me what I was doing. I told her I was writing a novel. And when she asked what it was about I told her. Her eyes, moony and watery, dropped to the bitumen pavement as if searching for a lost ring and remained there. Finally she sighed.
‘Well, they do say there are only six stories in the world and a dying man is one of them.’
She said this ruminatively, which is to say like a cow chewing a cud it would rather not.
I hastily added that it had some other things in it too. I said this unconvincingly, perhaps because I was now unconvinced myself. I hadn’t known that what I had lived, was living and would forever live was something so commonplace as to be tedious and not worthy of literature.
M—’s first book has some poems I like to this day. The book’s page numbering though is a mystery, beginning at page 163 and ending at page 192, as if it is the conclusion to some larger, lost work. Or maybe that’s a poem too. It’s in fragments that we find ourselves.
The book is called Tricks of Memory.
6
There was almost no publicity for my first novel. I did do a spot on a late-night Melbourne radio boxing show because my cousin, Arthur ‘Mad Dog’ Kemp, had been a well-known Melbourne boxer in the late 1960s. Boxing did not feature in my first novel and novels did not feature in late-night Melbourne radio boxing shows as a matter of course. In that interview I talked about Arthur meeting Muhammad Ali when Ali flew into Australia in 1972 and asked to meet some black people. They took him to the Fitzroy Park in Melbourne where Arthur was sitting under a tree sharing a drink with some Aboriginal friends. Arthur recognised the great man, followed by a phalanx of media, walking towards them. Rising unsteadily to his feet Arthur shook Ali’s hand.
‘You’re not the greatest,’ Arthur said. ‘I am.’
‘No,’ Ali replied, ‘you’re just the ugliest.’
A year later, on Christmas Eve, after an afternoon of social drinking, I did a second radio interview about my novel, this time on local Tasmanian radio, and ended up feeling not unlike Cousin Arthur. The interviewer said he’d heard a story about me having once nearly drowned and was it true my novel was based on this experience?
I said, Mmm, and then he asked how I nearly drowned. I said Mmmmm. The sounds weren’t exactly Mmm, the sounds were lots of vowels and consonants stacked up, Jenga-like, in growing towers of complex sentences, but at the end of it all they can be summed up as one tall Mmmmm that kept collapsing.
After that I felt a wretched liar, an imposter, a fake.
After that I thought I am never going to talk about it again because to talk about it was only to lie.
7
Words seemed part of the problem, symbols in search of something to symbolise, and all too soon outdated, and some words, old words, no longer made sense. The words from my childhood, unknown today, common then in Tasmania: flogger (a figure of contempt), deadflog (someone who had no spirit and was irredeemably stupid), rummy (strange, odd), rummun (a likeable character), all are convict words. A flogger was originally the flagellator. To be flogged was an experience frequently compared with rape for the psychological and spiritual destruction that flowed from the physical horror. A deadflog was a man broken by flogging. To gammon (to make believe, make up, fantasy)—a word my father remembered as common in his childhood but which I have only heard used by Aboriginal people in far north Australia—was to dream and so escape.
All words are at best transitory and soon enough become archaic, ceasing to belong to language at all and instead becoming the property of data sets that after a further time return only dead URL links, so many 404 errors. In this sense, all words are at best IOUs that if not immediately redeemed fail to deliver on their initial promise. And how long before data sets, URL, link, 404 errors and IOU also vanish from shared understanding?
Yet words exist to grasp the world and if every day afresh the world eludes them, every tomorrow they are condemned to begin their crazy dance again: words to anchor, the world to fly; words to say it is so, the world to say it is not. And so they tango eternally, words and the world, writers no more than dancing shoes sliding between the dancer and the dance floor.
8
Don’t be a crawler, son, my mother would admonish me as a child. A fear, deeply buried, that kept surfacing. Meaning, don’t give in, stand up, be your own person. My father told me how his father, my grandfather, a railway fettler, looked down on the farm labourers on the big sheep farms that abutted the section of railway on which he laboured as a fettler, for he was a proud union man, a free man, while they were crawlers, still receiving the old convict ration, as they would until the 1940s, of seven pounds of flour, seven pounds of mutton, and so many ounces of tea and sugar each week, supplemented with the most meagre cash wage.
Starting my first job when I left school, chainman for a surveyor, I listened to David Bowie and the Sex Pistols, but I saved up to buy the de rigueur work wear for a labourer—a heavy black wool jacket known as a bluey, the same jacket once issued to convicts. Some workers in the seventies still even wore flannels, the old woollen long-tongued undershirts, peasant wear, convict wear.
There was a great remembering that was also a great forgetting, one hundred years of silence that sounded like a scream the closer you listened. You couldn’t be with a girl or the girl with you without being told gossip about their great-grandmother or a distant cousin a century before, and yet of the convicts and Aboriginal people little was ever said. Of a slave system and a genocide nothing. What remained was either silence or lies. Such as: the convicts and their children had all fled to the mainland during the gold rushes. Such as: the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were extinct, long gone, not one left on the island. Such as: everyone was descended from free settlers, not a touch of the tar brush or the convict stain on any of us. And yet when I began work in the 1970s as a labourer, I saved my paltry wages that arrived each week in a small brown envelope to buy a convict coat and dress like the convict I was told I never was.
To be free I had to squeeze the convict blood out of me drop by drop, word by word, book by book.
9
My mother and my father—how much I don’t know about them. How much is forever closed to my curiosity, how limited, in any case, is my curiosity. About their secret lives I see not so much closed doors as a child’s reticence to open another. But some things are clear. It never occurred to them that they might escape the fate life had decreed for them because destiny was unavoidable; what mattered to them was meeting fate looking it squarely in the eye. My father would quote his brother, my uncle Tom, the possum snarer and later railway yard labourer: ‘You can sit on me but you can’t shit on me.’
My father’s childhood home, a railway worker’s cottage, sat on the railway line that ran through Colonel C—’s vast landholding, originally granted to John Batman, the man whose death squad massacred Aboriginal people throughout the north-east as he took their land. When Colonel C—’s man burst into my grandmother’s kitchen demanding Tom’s dog so that he might kill it, claiming it had been killing Colonel C—’s sheep, Tom, who trapped of a night and slept of a day, emerged from his bedroom with his hunting rifle and pointed it at Colonel C—’s man.
‘Shoot the dog,’ he said, ‘and I’ll shoot you.’
10
So much of my own life—perhaps the most important parts—are simply blank to me. What remains? Small, beautiful fragments. Me lying as a seven- (or eight- or nine-) year-old with my big sister in long grass in the old abandoned Forth River cemetery amidst half-drunk headstones of long-forgotten family, watching a cloud racing by, summer wind rustling the tall river eucalypts, my head slightly intoxicated by the somehow obscene funk of the thrusting, insistent green growth, a smell stronger than much else so much more substantial about which I can recall nothing. And vanished too whole years that I have been alive.
Capturing an old Clydesdale horse when camping as a twelve-year-old with the Wing brothers up North Motton by a creek we fished for blackfish and lobster, and riding the horse’s giant frame bareback, clutching its coarse black neck hair rough as old sisal, waiting for a great fall that never happens, and everyone laughing as they watch. And what remains after all that time is the incomparable joy I felt at that moment, the overwhelming odour and heat and power of the horse, and the race of uncontrollable laughter running between us. It was a time of wonder and all things had the shape of miracles. And like a miracle, no evidence that it ever happened remains.
11
When I try to recall them my family scatters into shards I cannot hold on to but only occasionally dragoon into parts of a story. First one uncle then another was driven off their small mixed farms, both broke, unable any longer to make a go of it. A mainlander buys a hobby farm. The two ideas seemed to me as a child mutually incompatible. Yet the two ideas are the future.
My eldest brother saw The Graduate and said his life had changed. An uncle who spent the Depression living and trapping in a cave in the snow country back of Ben Lomond dies playing darts in the St Leonards Hotel. My eldest sister sang the chorus to ‘America’ and ‘I Feel Pretty’ from West Side Story and shimmied her hips. She and her best friend A— turned up at our shack fresh from teachers’ college in Launceston both wearing pedal pushers, tight calf-length slacks that were all the fashion back in some long-ago golden summer. It must have seemed far from where she had been only a few years before when, at the loveless Deloraine convent school she hated, she had been given the first line of the essay her class was to write on Beatlemania: ‘The Beatles make me ashamed to be a woman.’
12
Sometimes they come to me in dreams as they once were, so young, one brother’s adolescent beard that will not join for what seems decades but is perhaps months, two wispy mutton chops parted by a small river of downy chin awaiting a final fording. By the time they join into a beard the sixties are over. He is arguing with my parents about the war—the only war, Vietnam—and of course the church, neither of which he agrees with, and walks off. Our elder brother, the most loyal and obedient of us, following his family and the church, his mother and grandmother’s Catholic anti-Communist line, supports the war but nevertheless stands up to my parents, arguing that our mutton-chopped brother is allowed to have his opinions. My mother sees his defence as disrespect.
His piercing light blue eyes that struck me even as a child as open to wonder glisten with tears, until there is something shocking about his rage and his sadness, and his inability to communicate what it is that is so upsetting him.
As I watch dumbstruck from afar my mutton-chopped brother tells me he—pointing to our brother—doesn’t want to go off to the war he supports. But he’ll still go, he says.
The war hung over us. The war hung over everyone then.
I won’t go, he continues. I ask what conscription is. He is brooding. I just won’t, he says.
I ask again. And when he explains conscription I too become frightened because I understand this much: that our family can now be pulled apart, that the war can take all my brothers, tear them away from us. That they can die.
Later my blue-eyed brother has what might be termed a breakdown. It was, I think now, a crisis of belief. He is some years making himself whole.
In that time he took me camping. He talked to me about the world he was discovering daily. He dreamt of making a kayak and never does. I do. I am not sure why. Perhaps because he made it sound magical, or because I wanted to emulate his spirit of adventure. Perhaps I was enchanted with rivers from the beginning and just needed a boat. Perhaps because when I was eleven, Olegas Truchanas, the celebrated Tasmanian photographer, drowned and the tremor of shock seemed to run through the island. Following the destruction by damming of the exquisite alpine Lake Pedder, Truchanas had returned to kayak the Gordon River and photograph its wonders. He drowned in the river he hoped his images might save from another destruction in another hydro-electric scheme. And then the Gordon was dammed and destroyed too.
