Bob Ellis Read online

  Turning forty is like going to that big city. In youth it went without saying that you were never going to die. At forty you know you must, and soon – in the next thousand weeks or fewer, or a little more. You begin to ask yourself on the point of sleep at night if you’ve still got time in the rest of your life to read The Lord of the Rings, as I have not, or Don Quixote, or War and Peace, or travel the Trans-Siberian Railway, or hunt the Loch Ness monster, or write a book of children’s songs to last down centuries unseen. You count the minutes wasted waiting for the young, who do not understand. You begin to know that every trip you take to each new place, even Surfers Paradise, may be your last, and you try to drink up every minute there is, like a hypochondriac taking every pill in the bottle. If the weather goes against you, or the traffic noise in your room, or the hotel staff, it hurts. That hurt can seem like pompous self-importance in the old, but to the old, since time’s run out, every detail matters, and so the chef is abused, and the tip withheld, and the word flashes round the kitchen, or the tourist bus: ‘Oh, God, here comes another one.’

  As a child, I remember, in the dark, on the point of sleep, trying to imagine ‘forever’. It was green hills and green hills, and running and running over the hills, and there always being more green hills. Forty is like the green hills suddenly stopping, and falling down and down into the dark. Whatever happened to good old forever? We wuz robbed, you cry as you fall on, down and down …

  I am glad to have grown up a Seventh Day Adventist and to have, under that religion’s arches, grown so sick of the end of the world that now, when everyone else believes in it daily and nightly, I cannot share their idiot fears and enjoy each day as it comes as a gift of time and the great river that unites us all. I know if I died tomorrow, I would have done some things I wanted and not postponed at least the attempt to do some others and – save for how, in the memory of my little son, I wouldn’t last as a concept as long as I would like – I could go gently down the great dark corridor towards the Being of Light with some of my address to the jury in good shape.

  I don’t know where it will end – or if it will – and I would not be surprised if we all end up in some dreary astral university common-room writing further symphonies and dictating into moving tumblers love letters to those who cannot or will not hear. But I would not be surprised as well if the worm, and the carbon cycle, is all there is, and certain rituals of posterity on microfilm and crematorium walls on a planet soon to plunge into a flaring sun. Being halfway down the road or more to where it will all be known, I can, with warring sorrows in my blood and equanimity in my nostrils, look back and forward to youth and age with moderate, decent, familial thanks, and remorse, and love, and awful despair, and an inch or two of hope.

  Letters to the Future (first published in Penthouse, 1987)

  ANCESTORS

  Over Christmas I learnt – because I finally asked of my mother in her caravan in her eighty-seventh year – a little of my forebears Percy Ward and Margaret Clark, who married in Parkes in 1897 and eventually begot my mother in Lismore in 1911. They each of them had eleven siblings, and in Parkes their families, the Wards and the Clarks, were known to each other as neighbouring clans as far back at the 1850s.

  When, however, Margaret and Percy, my grandparents, left Parkes for Lismore in 1910, they saw precious little of their twenty-two brothers and sisters ever again. My grandfather visited his mother once a year, but on her death his pilgrimages ceased, and my grandmother, by contrast, never saw her eleven brothers and sisters, most of whom she loved, from 1911 till her death in 1959. I grew up within reach of all her family, however – two aunties and an uncle, six cousins and a younger uncle’s grave, in Murwillumbah and Lismore; people you could walk down the street and stay with for a week if you liked.

  But then I moved to Sydney, which was a further dispiriting exile, far from that good village whose beckoning window light we all of us hitchhike towards, in dream, in dark, forever in vain. My mother had a hundred cousins in Parkes who she never met, and my wife, who comes from Melbourne and lives in Sydney, has a sister and mother in Adelaide she sees every two years, and a brother in Perth she sees, on average, every five years, five hundred dollars return fare being too great a price on love.

  This tragedy of familial estrangement – all the lost intimates we might so easily have had, and kept, and cherished and laughed with and wept with and dined with down the years of an unending saga of blood ties and family scandals and Christmas dinners and disputed wills and black sheep and school medals and overcrowded funerals, with the same nose all round the room – are lost in the Australian diaspora of unendurable distance. And so much kin-knowledge with it, and so much convivial enjoyment – go ask your uncle, he knows about these things – as my children are having this week with their Perth cousins, who are of similar ages and whom they barely know.

  Australia – at the start of its present chapter a land of convict exile – has a lot of internal suburban exile too, a lot of little Siberias far from love. It is the common tragedy of almost all of us that, in Sandy Stone’s immortal mutter, ‘You know, there are people you love and you never see them, and there are people you can’t stand, and you see them all the time.’ In a country where Sydney is as far from Perth as Dublin is from Tehran, and Hobart is as far from Darwin as Cairo is from Copenhagen, it could hardly be otherwise.

  No government has ever addressed this loss and this derangement of gene pool – unique, I think, to Australia – in the way it should – with, say, free train travel or free petrol or free phone calls one day a week. And we are all of us exiles now, each of us a stranger in a far land, wearing out his welcome in the prison of his days, amid alien tribes, learning new manners, catching up. No-one writes, and phone calls are few, and school reunions disaster areas because too long delayed. The shimmering distances taunt our exile from the towns and folk we loved, and all our lives become, in this tyranny of time and space, unfinished business there, and here, and where we go to meet.

  Home, said Robert Frost, is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. It sounds pretty wonderful to me.

  So It Goes (first broadcast on Radio National, January 1997)

  OUR DON BRADMAN

  I got a crystal set when I was six, and in the dark of my tiny bedroom sat up all night and listened keenly to Don Bradman flaying the Poms in faraway Great Britain. It was the first time I ever stayed up late, but my dad let me do it because this combat was important, a patriotic battle against the imperial enemy. Thirty years later, in a film I wrote, Fatty Finn worked and plotted hard to buy a crystal set for the same purpose: to hear, a world away, the mighty Bradman bat, and flay the Poms.

  It didn’t seem strange to me then, or to the millions thus tuned in across the world, that we couldn’t see him bat. Just to know he was doing it, accumulating all those improbable numbers, and how quickly he did it, had a magic of its own. And I never did see the Don on the playing field. He retired when I was eight, and my father never took me the hundred miles to a Brisbane test, so I never saw him bat. But neither did most of the hundreds of millions who mourned him on Monday and all this week.

  Strange that an artist whose art was never seen – apart from the six or seven sweeps and late cuts caught by the newsreels – could be so beloved by so many for his art. A Michelangelo whose Sistine Chapel was never viewed. A Shakespeare whose Hamlet was never acted. A Dickens never read. A Caruso never heard. But that is how it was with the Don. He defied the rules of the universe, and lived somehow in a dimension other than our common earthly one, a chapter of Valhalla, a suburb of Narnia, a slope of Mount Olympus where heroes dwelt. And he crossed, as heroes did – like Lawrence of Arabia, and Weary Dunlop, and Charles Lindberg, and Amy Johnson, and Douglas Bader – the line between fact and fiction.

  Comic strips were published about him, a pop song written, and stories told with wonder. The cricket stump with which he hit a cricket ball by the hour against a corrugated iron tank. The ti
me when, in a local game, he scored a century in three overs for a bet. The time when, for a bet, he hit successive balls clockwise to each man on the field. The simple afternoon headline in England that read: He’s Still In. He was how things should be in a world we dreamt, on the borders of sleep and waking, while the crystal set muttered and the legend grew …

  Draft for a speech, February 2001

  YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN

  I have this recurring dream where I’m having an ordinary rambling conversation with someone I knew as a child, and nagging at the back of my mind is a rumour – clearly untrue – that the person I’m talking to is, in fact, dead; and then I realise they are dead, and it’s only a dream. Then I try desperately not to wake up, because there’s so much I want to say to them and hear from them, but it’s too late, I’m rising to the surface of my mind like a swimmer unable any longer to stay under water. I’m waking up, and they’re dead, quite dead, and they were telling me things they didn’t tell me in life, and I’m trying to remember what those things were. And I wake up wondering if they’re really altogether dead, or if they’ve been yarning to me from the other side, and then I become afraid.

  *

  While crossing Parramatta Road my sister Margaret was knocked eighteen feet in the air by an inattentive motorist without brakes, lights or a horn. After she died in the ambulance on the way to hospital, my grandmother – who was also called Margaret – woke to find Margaret sitting by the bed and looking strangely at her. They were very close, and Margaret often would come in at night and sit where she was sitting now and talk to Gran about her life, her boyfriends and her job, and so there was nothing strange about her being there. There was only the nagging suspicion in the back of Gran’s mind that Margaret was in Sydney, and couldn’t be there, and why wasn’t she talking, just staring? Then she faded and wasn’t there anymore, and it may have been a dream. Her body had died four hours before so it couldn’t have been that deathbed telepathy you hear so much about. Maybe it was a dream. The next day, in the heat of noon, Margaret came out on the verandah above the garage of our house and said to Mr Maros, an old Russian former opera singer who lived across the street, ‘I’ve been trying to talk to them, tell them things, but they don’t hear me, they don’t see me. There’s things I’ve got to tell them and there’s hardly any time left. How can I make them hear me?’

  My sister’s body came north in a coffin and I wouldn’t go to the funeral, I’m not sure why. I was ten years old and had my reasons. Doug Anthony went – he was one of her old boyfriends – and all the others. There were about five hundred people in the Lismore Seventh Day Adventist church: she was a marvellously popular girl. When they made Marg Ellis, a few of them said, they broke the mould. After the cemetery and the tea and biscuits, the assembled family played cricket on the recreation ground opposite the church, and I bowled Dad out with a yorker. Three days after the funeral a letter arrived for Margaret, accepting her for the job she’d always wanted as an air hostess.

  She talked to me a few times after that in dreams – nearly always, oddly, by telephone and usually at crisis points in my life, like when I was having exams. In the one dream where I saw her face to face, she told me urgently that she wasn’t really dead, she was imprisoned somewhere and the body in the grave wasn’t really hers. In terms of my upbringing this made sense: Seventh Day Adventists believe the dead are rotting in their graves.

  *

  Driving home this Christmas Eve I became aware that, as the countryside grew more familiar, it was embracing me uncritically, and somehow humbly, as one of its creatures. I was coming home. There seemed to be a warm, climactic finality about it. It felt in some way like the last time. The twilight grew more lovely over Brunswick Heads, Murwillumbah, Condong, some of the loveliest landscape in the world, and this, I felt, would be the quintessential time. The dead rose up in my mind, all the kindly dead, more of them now than the living. I was coming home.

  *

  In the last years of his long life my Uncle Claude spoke more and more of his childhood in Remornie, a riverside town to which the paddle-steamers came for the canned food factory, and of his horse, whose name was Tommy Dobbs, and their walks together through the countryside, and what bliss it was in that dawn to be ten and staring at your own face in the river. Remornie doesn’t exist anymore: it was a company town and was pulled down and entirely removed when the business went bust, but in Uncle Claude’s mind it was very clear. He told me all he remembered of it when I was in my twenties – marvellous, Mark Twainish things that I’ve since almost completely forgotten.

  As he drifted slowly towards death he became, in a worsening series of old people’s homes, something other than the dawdling old yarner I had known: a loud complainer, a nuisance to the nurses, a bad patient, one who should, the authorities felt, have met his oncoming death more decorously. He would wake up in his hospital bed and say to me sometimes, ‘I went back to Remornie last night.’ He knew he hadn’t really, but he also knew – and so did I – that what he implied was a great deal more than a dream.

  As I walked with his coffin on my shoulder I thought of these things and in my mind I began to talk to him as, under his weight, we approached the open grave. ‘It’s all right, Claude, it’s all right. Not long now. Another couple of minutes and it’ll be over. Another couple of minutes and you’ll be there.’ I never really knew what I meant by ‘there’, but the feeling was very strong that he had a destination, and somehow, as if in a dream, he could hear me speak. Doubts were expressed around the grave that he would go to heaven – he was, after all, a smoker, and on the Holy Sabbath would bet five bob on the races, and he hadn’t been to church in forty years. ‘A few more feet now, Claude, and you’ll be all right.’

  *

  Talking again this Christmas with my old friend from the age of six, Leyland Minter, was a powerful experience for many reasons. One of them was that he hadn’t altered all that much in spite of his beard and his present career as a husband, father and sales manager of a chemical marketing company – their products killed insects, and caused plants to grow more branches, and hence more fruit, than was their ancient custom. Much of what he regarded as the exciting times of his life was in the childhood I had shared with him. Our bike ride to Minyon Falls. The time when I was losing at Monopoly and smote him over the head with the board and all its contents. The first time he climbed Mount Warning.

  I remembered us giggling behind our hymn books in church and making puns on the hymn writers’ names, and reading the dirty bits out of the Bible – the bloke who ravished his sister Tamar, the wine-sodden incest of Lot and his daughter and so on – and the strength of our smiling rivalry. We once wrote out what we hoped would be written about us in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1942–2042. Generally regarded as the greatest man who ever lived. Both of us would be test cricketers, Olympic decathlon winners, poets, inventors and prime ministers. Leyland chose to outlive me by a year and die at a hundred and one. I’m not sure how much of this we really believed: we both then thought of ourselves as Leonardo da Vincis, and I, to my shame, still at midnight echo that purple illusion.

  The thing I remembered most fondly about him related to his parsimonious upbringing. He was ten feet up in the air, pole-vaulting at the annual school athletics, when his mouth collided with the vaulting pole and one of his front teeth broke off. He went to see a dentist, uneasy about the cost of the oral repairs, and the dentist made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. ‘Why spend all that money on a single crown,’ he said, ‘when for less, much less, than the normal cost I can take out all of your teeth, every single one, and throw in two full plates of dentures for practically free?’ ‘Done,’ said Leyland, recognising a true bargain, and thereafter wore on his gums these two cheap, ill-fitting and uncharismatic dentures. Six months later, at an Adventist camp, he dived off a waterfall and, on impact with the water below, broke the top plate in two. Nothing daunted, he repaired it with a rather ineffective black glue, and for
days thereafter came to breakfast dribbling from his mouth this vile black substance on his Weet-Bix. Smiling, though, still smiling. Those dirt-cheap, shatter-prone false teeth were the worst bargain I ever heard of. They made me, I’m sure, the existential squanderer I am today.

  His optimism was the most attractive thing about him, that and his unflagging energy. Something of an existentialist himself, he’d throw himself with huge teetotalling enthusiasm into every new experience. ‘Look at that,’ he’d say to his yawning children, ‘the tallest telegraph pole in the southern hemisphere! The only natural causeway in the world!’ repeating the local mythology thought up for the most part by my dad, the patriotic hyperbolist.

  I find Leyland fairly hard to classify, if that’s ever possible with anyone. A religious fundamentalist with a vested interest in chemical mutations, who sleeps on a waterbed and plays Mastermind and squash, he defies the easy pigeonholes of those bourgeois myopics Freud and Marx and is triumphantly himself, and this is true of everyone on the north coast. Other factors are in play. Id and ego and territory and one-upmanship, and I and Thou come into it, I’m sure, but they’re not the whole story. What we’re looking at is a different sort of animal. Part, as Les Murray put it, of a funeral culture. Part, as I would add, of a road accident culture. Part of a lot of things.

  *

  When my uncle Col’s son, my cousin, Ken Ellis, was killed in the early morning in a hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour collision on the road outside Wyong, I came up on the train to his funeral. I’d only met him once, a few years back, and didn’t remember him very well, but people said I looked like him. I got there late, and as I entered the church a sort of gasp went up as people looked around. I sat beside Uncle Col, who held my hand very tightly through the sermon and looked at me intently. It was as though he wanted me to take the place of Ken, that Ken wasn’t really dead and had some existence through me. Nothing came of it though. It was only a moment, and soon Uncle Col himself was dead anyway, dead of stomach cancer at sixty-five. Retiring age.