| Larry Schwartz |
| AS if on cue, it rained the day Frank Hardy returned to the site of the old totalisator he has helped make a landmark in local lore. “When I was writing the book, I would come down here sometimes in the middle of the night and stand in the rain and try to imagine it.” Woollen scarf beneath his raincoat, he put away his pipe and strolled towards a lane at the rear of the building at 136 Johnston Street, Collingwood. “I can remember ’47 or ’48 or early ’49 here,” the bespectacled author said. “I’d just stand here at night. It was quite an eerie feeling. You could almost hear Wren still calling the race.” Hardy’s `Power Without Glory’ (1950), is set in these parts. He made a fictional Carringbush of Collingwood; a Jackson of Johnston Street; and a John West of controversial Melbourne identity John Wren, in a novel that culminated in his acquittal after a nine-month trial at which he was charged with libelling the entrepreneur’s wife. The play of fact and fancy that is his best-known book has left its mark. Carringbush would give its name to a regional library, a hotel, a firm of architects, a fish shop, a racehorse, a football team’s rallying song. Its creator was not aware of a florist bearing this name a little further east, at the corner of Johnston and Hoddle streets. “Some people think Collingwood used to be called Carringbush,” says the author. “But I made it up.” From Henry Goodrich’s `Raven Rockstrow’ (1864) (Collingwood and Fitzroy) to the Fitzroy of Helen Garner’s `Monkey Grip’ (1977) or Boyd Oxlade’s `Death In Brunswick’ (1987), Melbourne has been a backdrop in a host of literary works. Elsewhere, writer and place are linked in the popular imagination. We think of Charles Dickens’ London, Emile Zola’s Paris, James Joyce’s Dublin, Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, Tom Wolfe’s New York perhaps. Certainly this is simplistic _ no city has just one writer. Though city and suburbia have often been imaginatively observed or remembered, no single writer springs to mind when one thinks of Melbourne. IT is surely not that our creative talent is dissipated or gone as Chris Wallace-Crabbe suggests in a poem called `Melbourne’: “Nobody cares. The artists sail at dawn/ For brisker ports, or rot in public bars./ Though much has died here, nothing has been born.” Instead, we have come to associate Melbourne with many writers, some of whom took us up on a suggestion to revisit scenes used as a backdrop to their works. “With cities I always feel that people don’t appreciate them sufficiently,” said detective writer Kerry Greenwood. “This is a really nifty city. It really is stunning. It’s beautiful.” She has toyed with the idea of setting a Phryne Fisher novel in Sydney but, apart from the prospect of a lengthy stay needed for research to recreate it in the 1920s, finds that city stressful and “strained”. The point of the exercise in this story was two-fold. “I suppose that it can intensify your enjoyment of the books if you can associate what is being written about with actual places,” said Garry Kinnane, author of an acclaimed biography of the writer George Johnston. Kinnane took us on a lengthy tour of the Melbourne of Johnston (and that of his alter ego David Meredith), as described in `My Brother Jack’ (1964). He showed us the house where Johnston grew up, another where he lived during the early years of the first of his two marriages, places where he studied and worked. “The people, of course, are gone and, in any case, they’ve been changed into something else in the course of making characters,” he said. “But if you can get a sense of what Johnston would have felt about a place, a house, a factory, a street, a building, then I think you’re getting closer to the authorial experience of writing and perhaps what was intended to be conveyed …” Not just closer to the books, but, hopefully, the city of Melbourne itself. “If you live in a city too long, I think, you only associate it with going to work and getting home again,” said Kerry Greenwood, who accompanied us to the St Kilda home and haunts of her late 1920s detective, Phryne Fisher. Fiction depicting a city, she said, “let’s you look at it again … It refreshes the eye that has been dulled by just going past and going past”. Another writer, Gerald Murnane drew attention to the imaginative process, recalling R.K. Narayan’s claim that he invented the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi “because he wanted the pleasure of laying out a town, moving statues and things”. Murnane’s fictional world is invariably recognisable as Melbourne, not some imagined, antipodean Malgudi. However, in Bundoora, to the north- east of the city, the author showed how a landscape can be rearranged to suit fiction by shifting a kilometre or so the location of a scene remembered from youth, a ratter at work with his terriers in a pig sty. We spent much of a day with Garry Kinnane, visiting landmarks fictionalised by George Johnston, who died in 1970, six years after publication of `My Brother Jack’. We had an advantage on the author. At the time Johnston wrote the book, he was living on the Greek isle of Hydra. Johnston was ill and feared he was dying. The book was intended “as a way of recovering the past”. The writer grew up at 11 Buxton Street, Elsternwick. His father, a tram maintenance engineer at the Glen Huntly depot, bought the house and the family moved in two years before Johnston’s birth in 1912. We stopped outside the house. “This is Avalon. The roof is the same. The chimney is the same. The gables the same. That’s a new front fence …” The house is yellowish in color. It was white when Kinnane last passed here, researching his acclaimed `George Johnston A Biography’ (Nelson Publishers, 1986). As a child, Johnston slept on the enclosed back veranda. In `My Brother Jack’ (page nine, Angus and Robertson, 1990 edition), Meredith describes lying awake at night, listening to the laughter of adults at the cribbage-board in the sitting-room or “the more furtive slithering noise which was made by a big creeper we called the Dollicus as it moved in the night against the screen of flywire’.’ There is just an indentation in the front lawn to remind us of the sugargum Meredith plants at a house at 7 Mackie Grove, East Brighton, which Johnston and his first wife, Elsie, rented from the late 1930s until they moved into a flat in East St Kilda in 1942. Once a tram conductor and driver, Ron Wearne has owned the house for 36 years. An aunt from Yarrawonga had rented it to the Johnstons. All that remained of the sugargum was a stump when he and his wife moved in. Meredith plants the gum against the wishes of his wife. “She doesn’t want a gum tree,” said Kinnane. “This is partly because it’s an Australian gum. The view in those days was that you put European or English trees or shrubs in because they were the most culturally acceptable.” Ron Wearne accompanied us through the sturdy house, pointing out the changes he had made. He even loaned a ladder, which Kinnane clambered up for a view that would have changed somewhat since Johnston’s Meredith saw from here a dreary suburbia in a treeless, fictional Beverley Park Gardens Estate. WE visited Johnston’s old workplace, `The Argus’, at 290 La Trobe Street, where he was hired on the strength of articles on shipping he had submitted. Nearby, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (then Melbourne Technical College), which he had attended on weekday evenings as apprentice lithographer and The National Gallery School for drawing classes from 1927. To become a journalist, Johnston broke his apprenticeship from the age of 15 with one of Melbourne’s most distinguished printing firms, Troedel and Cooper (Klebendorf and Hardt in the novel), which had premises in Bank Place, in the city, as well as 90 Bay Street, Port Melbourne. It was from either of these (Kinnane is not sure which) that he would wander down to the docks to sketch ships. He would watch the old coal hulks. “He thought it tragic that these once beautiful sailing ships were being used to haul coal up and down the river with their lovely tops cut off them.” The printers’ emblem is still on the facade of the Bay Street building, which now houses Envelope Manufacturers, part of North Broken Hill Ltd. Inside, we spoke to an employee who told us of consternation since a ghost was recently seen around midnight by a colleague on night-shift. On Footscray Road days later, we were able to drive unscathed past the entrance to Victoria Dock. Detective Phryne Fisher was not so lucky. The windscreen of her fire-engine red Hispano-Suiza was shattered by bullets at the start of Kerry Greenwood’s `Death at Victoria Dock’, set in 1928. “It would have been dangerous because they made them out of window glass in those days,” said Greenwood, a barrister and solicitor for Sunshine Legal Aid whose fifth Phryne Fisher book, `The Green Mill Murder’, comes out in February. The new book involves investigations into the murder of a man who dies at the Green Mill, a popular dance venue then in a disused mill near Flinders Street Station, where the Victorian Arts Centre now stands. Attempts to find the dead man’s brother take Fisher to Gippsland. Greenwood likens attention to detail in recreating another era with the discipline in writing a sonnet. “I’ve got to recreate the past to make it accurate. Anyone who was around at the time is going to know if I’ve got it wrong …” Ironically, her detective’s house was not where she had thought. We found it, on Beaconsfield Parade, St Kilda, an unnumbered two-storey home between 361 and 363. She refers to it in her books as 221, one of several nods to Sherlock Holmes, whose abode was at 221B Baker Street, London. Greenwood described the house: “Extremely rich Gold Rush. Two-storey with a tiled roof. Four main big rooms. Ornate and decorated style. Heritage colors. Beautiful iron lace. I love the hearts in the ironwork. Isn’t it beautiful? It’s stunning.” Across the parade is a gazebo at which Phryne’s maid, Dot, is shot at in the `Green Mill’ book. “It’s very Russian,” said the author. “It has an onion dome on it.” In `Cocaine Blues’, first in the series, Phryne returns to Melbourne from England and stays at the Windsor Hotel. She meets Dot (“her Watson”) in the Block Arcade, visits Russell Street Police Station (“exactly as it was and regretfully for the poor darlings who work there”), goes to church at St Paul’s Cathedral. `Madame Olga’s’, in Collins Street, where she buys fine clothes, is the late couturier Lil Wightman’s Le Louvre. Author Gerald Murnane has a strong interest in his place in the world about him. “I never stop thinking about answers to questions about `where am I? How did I get here? Should I be here? And should I be somewhere else? Or where is that other place?”‘ Murnane had suggested we meet not far from La Trobe University, near the intersection of Dunne Street and Plenty Road. He would be in a seven-year-old white Nissan `Bluebird’. Among Australia’s most highly regarded fiction writers, Murnane came armed with a copy of his 1990 collection, `Velvet Waters’ (McPhee Gribble), and a street directory. “Map 66A of Melways and you’ve got everything,” he said, pencilling in small arrows at relevant pages in the collection. Murnane, who lives at nearby Macleod, spent part of his childhood in this area. His father was assistant farm manager at Mont Park Hospital in the early 1940s. Now teaching at Deakin University, he wrote the story called `Stream System’ (page 31) during a stint as visiting writer at La Trobe in lieu of a lecture because “I hate talking in abstract terms about anything I’ve written”. The title is the name in the street directory for waterways passing through the university grounds. Locations in the story are mainly those seen walking to lectures from home. At traffic lights on Plenty Road, he said: “Now this is all imagined. I didn’t walk here actually but I could have.” And then, describing the fiction: “I stop. I turn and face roughly south west. `Over about diagonally opposite us … I’m looking towards what is now Kingsbury Drive at the house of red bricks on the south- eastern corner (912 Plenty Road) … it’s almost the first house that I remember. I even heard my first Melbourne Cup broadcast over there in that house.” We drove to a car park and walked to a stretch of lawn at La Trobe near the Stream System, as it is described in Melways, at which he had “looked fancifully” for his story. He imagined he saw in the pale blue waterways, the shape of a woman’s bra, a droopy moustach, lips. It was here, where well-fed geese waddled as we walked, that he had set an anecdote (pages 38 and 39) about a man watching his fox terriers driving rats from an infested pig sty. Murnane remembered the scene. “He just stood there and watched these amazing bloody dogs and they just piled them up. They didn’t try to eat them or anything. The fun of it was just biting their necks, dropping them down when they stopped struggling.” But it happened elsewhere. “In the way that fiction works the place, of course, where I’m walking to is not in fact where the ratting probably did happen. I just moved it half a mile in my mind.” A MILE in my mind. Frank Hardy, on the other hand, is concerned at changes at the site of the old tea shop that fronted for an illegal tote at 136 Johnston Street. Hardy has written to Collingwood Council of his displeasure in particular at a roller door installed at the rear. Now working on his memoirs, the author took us to a house in nearby Ballarat Street he now believes was the first home of John Wren (until recent years it was held to be in Gold Street). The house was ironically described in a later book, `The Obsessions of Oscar Oswald’ (1983), Hardy not realising its link with Wren. Observers, including Manning Clark, came to believe that John Wren was born, not in Gold Street, but in a small house (number 24) next to a flat (number 26) in Ballarat Street in which Hardy lived in the early 1980s. Kerry Greenwood talks of peeling back the layers of an onion to discover the Melbourne of a different era. Hardy’s memories of Collingwood stemmed from the 1940s. But, thanks to the confidences of old-timers in the Bendigo Hotel across the way, Hardy can describe the late 19th century-inner suburb he depicts in `Power Without Glory’. Joan Didion once wrote that certain places “seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner … “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image …” Who dares claim as much for Melbourne? As Kerry Greenwood says: “It’s not my city. The city doesn’t belong to me. I belong to it.” The Sunday Age, 29-Nov-1992 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 