The Best Australian Essays 2014 (24 page)

Times Literary Supplement

Reading Geoff Cochrane

Carrie Tiffany

When I was a child I had two dolls in a box. Each night I placed the dolls on the floor of the box and covered them with a sheet of black paper. Sometimes the dolls required reassurance. I told them that the day was finished in their country, that it was no longer time for speaking and that all of the world was asleep.

I meet these two New Zealanders. They are brainy and handsome; they live in an old workers' cottage on the edge of Melbourne. There is a pāua shell ashtray. There are postcards of Colin McCahon.
Kia ora
, they murmur, when they pick up the telephone. I'm there one day when a relative arrives off the plane from Wellington. An old cardboard suitcase is snapped open; cake from a teashop on Lambton Quay, jars of bubbled honey, custard powder in an orange packet. The soft comforts of home … I score a slim volume of Geoff Cochrane. It's 2001 and this is how it begins.

It doesn't happen instantly. The Irish hold the ground. You duke it out, those first few years, with the American poet Donald Hall. But
Hypnic Jerks
(2005) seals it for me. I think of you each time I'm hooked back from sleep. I think of you in your crummy pad – the few forks and knives shivering in their drawer when the bus stops outside. I think of the view from your flat; pines, drainage ditches, rugby posts like gallows, wooded hills, a soft drink plant, red leaves that bounce like crisps, rain that inks the road.

I read your lines and I make you up. I foist you on to the few Australian poets and readers of poetry that I know. I take you out to dinner. I take you to London. I do a number on you in an interview for the women's hour on the BBC. The doughy host looks over her glasses at me. She pronounces
New Zealand
so archly the face powder on her soft English cheeks lifts and talcs the air. I take you to Calgary, Mildura, Ubud, Leeds, Port Hedland. I take you to Auckland where I mention you to a bookish crowd in a hotel bar. One of the drinkers is your publisher. I leave.

I read your lines and I follow them like tracks. There you are walking down the long hill towards Antarctica, watching the shunted clouds, taking in the smell of gorse fires, the sky is the colour of wet salt. I learn not to clarify. The waxy eye of the Kōwhai? She is not a bird; she is a tree with a yellow flower hanging limply penile. The poem is dead to me; the bird of my imagination forever tangled in its rhythms.

Your life is hectic, lonely, full of innocence and sin. Your books sit aslant on the table next to my bed. The white covers are not weathering well. The dentist's chair tilts and sinks, I think of you. The extractions, the full clearance, the needle's spiteful sting. There is your knowledge of household paint, cigarette lighters, pencils, addiction.

You write and you walk. You walk to resist the abyss. You walk to the supermarket at the foot of Tinakori Hill. You walk Wellington's ribboned pavements; you walk its harboured curve. You were walking before Sebald reached the Pacific and we sat in cafés discussing the
flâneur.
I sense you in my ankles at St Kilda as I hesitate on the kerb.

News comes. You have been seen in a shop. You are thin. I hear there are stacks of your manuscripts waiting for attention on your publisher's floor. The thought of all those poems spooling out in front of you – hovering voluptuously on the brink of being read. In
Vanilla Wine
(2003) you say you have a readership of perhaps twenty-three people. I make them up too.

The world is full of people we will never know, sitting at home, coughing quietly in their countries. It can be hard to bear the thought of these people who will always be remote, never in relation. When the day is finished in my country and I pull the black sheet over my face you are already in deep night. If I can't sleep I'll reach for you. Your poems have travelled across the sea from your island to mine in a kind of double movement – a silent athletics of writing and reading. I don't believe the poems you make are a symptom of estrangement, but of over-feeling. Although, who am I to say? I made you up. But you started it, Geoff Cochrane; you started it all those years ago when you sat down in your country and began to write.

Griffith Review

Vale Doris Lessing

Robyn Davidson

So the Big D has gone. Hardly unexpected. She was ninety-four and ill; we had talked about her impending death the last time I visited her in London. Yet when I heard the news, the kickback of knowing there would be no more of that consciousness in the world was enormous.

She would no doubt say something crisp like, ‘Robbie, you must stop
emot
ing.'

As always, the most banal wish: that I had said simply, ‘I love you, I admire you. I am profoundly grateful to you, difficult and prickly though you sometimes were.'

So what comes to mind immediately? The chaotic and prodigious English garden with bits of Africa scattered through it (pumpkin vines among the David Austin roses). Kittens following her up the stairs to her eyrie – a small bedroom cum writing room. The piles of washing-up, letters, postcards and books (always books) in the kitchen. The piles of magazines and books in the loo. Feeding the birds on the back porch. The way she noticed everything from that back porch, as people raised in the country do. However urban you become, that way of noticing the natural world remains.

The food. From the chaos of her small kitchen came food for fifty. Delicious, wicked food, with lots of fat and cream. Sunday lunches there would see an unlikely assortment of people – literary, famous, oddballs, old friends, lost souls she had taken under her wing, penniless immigrants (quietly, she would make sure they had money and shelter), her agent, her publisher, her son Peter sitting in his armchair, saying cryptic things … all of us expected to get along with one another, all felled by the calorific food and red wine, the new ones looking bewildered on the cathaired sofa or sitting on the floor amid the piles of books. Not for her the English socialising in which status, placement and food portion are carefully considered.

The older she got, the less she gave a damn what accolades or criticism came her way. There wasn't time for such trivia. ‘Oh Christ,' she said on hearing she had won the Nobel prize for literature. And those of us who knew her laughed and said how typically Doris that was. All the fuss over something so unimportant; it would eat into her time. ‘Oh Christ,' as she hauled the bags of shopping up steps that were becoming more difficult to negotiate because of the pain in her collapsing back. No point in complaining – about pain, or difficulty, or death. (What do we think life
is,
after all?)

She took me in not long after I'd crossed the Australian desert, in 1978. In the arrogance of youth, I had written to her. I had said how ‘useful' her books were. She wrote back, saying, ‘If you can write a good letter, you can write a good book.' We corresponded for a while. I decided to write
Tracks,
the story of that journey through the desert. I went to London. I met her. I adored her. Six months later, she invited me to live in the little flat at the bottom of her house. I was editing
Tracks
for publication by then. We seldom talked about writing, though we did talk about books. I remember complaining to her one day, ‘Doris, everything I write sounds the same.' She burst out laughing and said, ‘My dear, that's called having a style.'

And later, when
Tracks
came out, and it was apparent it was going to be a bestseller, she advised, ‘Don't bother reading what people say about you or the book. Reviews will tell you nothing useful about your work, only about the current fashion.' I took her advice and have found it to be sound.

Another time, she came down to sit by the fire with me. She was having trouble with a book. ‘Some come out so easily, and others just won't budge … Why? Why?' I was astonished that this woman who seemed to push out a novel every five minutes could suffer from something like writer's block.

She was both friend and mentor, someone I felt deeply in tune with (that colonial background, perhaps, the dislike of limit and of being categorised, the mistrust of ‘ism' and ideology, anything that trapped you or hemmed you in or limited your range of thinking and imagining) and at the same time shy of. In awe of. She was mother substitute and literary mother. Not because her books were ‘feminist' but because they took on so much and indicated how far outside the usual boundaries a female intelligence could go.

She gave so many of us younger women a cardinal point to help us navigate. She gave us something to admire. To emulate. She showed us that we did not have to be nice so much as we had to be courageous.

I ignored her books until I was in my mid twenties; I ignored them because they were by a woman. My reasoning was that I already knew how a woman thought and that I needed to understand how men thought, how power worked. Then someone gave me
The Golden Notebook.
I found it, as I so gormlessly said, ‘useful'. And how.

There are great human beings in the world who are not publicly visible. And there are great writers and public figures who are not great human beings. It is exceedingly rare, in my experience, that a great writer is also a great human being. Not perfect, not easy, not infallible, but great. Containing multitudes.

The Monthly

Cry When We're Gone

Neil Murray

In January 1980 I arrived in Papunya, 260 kilometres west of Alice Springs, because a whitefella was needed to drive the store truck. An Aboriginal bloke couldn't drive the truck. Kinship obligations would require him to give away the food to family members. The store would lose money. Driving that truck proved a difficult enough job for me. I delivered food and supplies to surrounding outstations where people lived in semi-traditional camps, out bush, away from the government-established settlement of Papunya and its many problems: overcrowding, chronic illnesses, grog, violence, the sedentary lifestyle its people led. It seems clear to me now that my real reason for coming to Papunya was a quest for meaning, for a greater sense of belonging, and intuitively I felt Aboriginal people were the key to all that. I wanted to be with them, work with them, learn from them. Within a week I had a visitor.

He wanted to see my electric guitar: a gold Les Paul copy I'd saved up for and bought new at Allans Music shop in Melbourne. He cradled it admiringly, then for several minutes he made a sweet sound come out. Soon we were jamming. He was thoughtful, didn't say much, a handsome cat who could peel off stunning solos and find chords and rhythm without ever second-guessing. Sammy Butcher was his name.

Sammy brought in his brothers and other interested young men. They chucked in sit-down money and scrounged up drum kits, other instruments, amps, a rough PA. One or two nights a week we held concerts in the corrugated iron shed that was Papunya Town Hall. We'd play what we could: Chuck Berry, Beatles, Stones, Little Richard and AC/DC covers, R&B and country stuff. We swapped line-ups with each genre. For the rock & roll stuff I'd be at the microphone singing and cranking out rhythm guitar while the others played with their backs to the audience, because of
kurnta,
or shame.

A few kilometres east of Papunya was a low hill known as Warumpi. It was a honey-ant dreaming site. Had you sat up on those rocks, any one of those late afternoons in 1980, you'd have heard a jangle, jive and echo wafting up from the huddle of dusty buildings, piercing the quiet of the ancient, sleeping land. People called us the Warumpi Band. We pooled a few battered Holdens for our first away gigs, playing Hermannsburg on a Friday then travelling to Jay Creek next morning. On the road out we gave chase to a perentie – with a brilliant throw of a stone our bass player, Dennis, knocked it over. It was my first taste of road kill, and of how in the years ahead we'd never miss an opportunity for a feed.

Before entering Jay Creek community we stopped at a creek bed where a group of men sat drinking. One had an acoustic guitar. I've since encountered many blackfella songwriters, and invariably you meet them outdoors: in creek beds, on riverbanks, in laneways or backstreets, behind fences, under verandahs and bridges, round campfires. The man with the guitar was middle-aged. He was jolly, cherubic-looking, the brow of his Akubra turned down at the front. His name was Isaac Yama and he was singing, in Pitjantjatjara, his own country-style songs. The flagon was passed my way. I took a modest sip. Isaac asked me to play a song. His guitar had scratches and dings on it. Below the sound hole the paint was worn away down to the wood. I strummed and sang about missing the country where I was from, the Grampians region of western Victoria. Isaac nodded. Later that evening, outside the hall, before our show, I felt him touch the skin on my arm.

‘See that,' said Isaac, ‘that's nothing, that's only skin colour. You got the same heart like us.'

*

By August I had hardly touched the didge I got in the top end. Blackfellas, or Anangu, in central Australia don't traditionally use didge, or
yidaki.
Instead, with boomerang percussion, they concentrate on chanting song cycles, wielding a transformative power of enormous antiquity. One sleepy Sunday I gave my
yidaki
a drink of water and blew it a while, thinking I'd be bothering no one, on the verandah of my square one-roomed flat, the only serviceable space left in a block of four. The other three flats were trashed. Walking my way along the dusty street came a skinny fella in jeans and a denim jacket. He looked darker than the local desert blokes. His head was a shock of fluffed, frizzy hair. As I blew, attempting some rudimentary calls and rhythms I'd learnt from old David Blanasi at Barunga, the skinny man quickened his stride, angling across and into my front yard and landing, with a couple of steps, on the verandah, simultaneously clapping his hands and singing gustily in lingo.

I stopped. Had I done something, transgressed – flipped open a forbidden door?

‘Don't stop. You got it. That's Bungaling-Bungaling.'

‘I don't know much,' I stammered, ‘that's all I know.'

‘Give it here. I'll show you.'

He took the didge. Out came a rich, deep, guttural throb that was precise, intricate – the proper score of what I'd been trying to play.

I was gushing. ‘That's great.'

He wasn't listening. He'd noticed something lying on the swag in my room.

‘Ah, you got a guitar!'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm a singer man.'

‘Are you now?'

‘What time you havin' band?'

‘Later in the hall.'

‘I'll see you there.'

That afternoon, at Papunya Town Hall, I learnt his name was George Rrurrambu and he hailed from Elcho Island. He'd come south to marry Suzina, the sister of Sammy. With George as Sammy's new brother-in-law there was no way he wasn't going to be in the band. We had our frontman. He even faced the audience. For the next twenty or so years I watched him develop until all he had to do was slip into his super Koori outfit – black jeans, sneakers, Aboriginal-flag waistcoat – flash an irresistible grin, leer into the microphone, strike a cocky pose, legs apart, stamp a foot, and the crowd would be his.

‘You wanna listen to Warumpi Band? You wanna listen or what? Don't be shy cause I'm black. You want rock & roll? You'll cry for us when we go. All right, all right, don't panic we'll play all night.'

We made three albums, played countless gigs, in Australia and overseas. All that time George was out front, exhorting the audience to join him, or else falling into a front row of girls and me and our manager David Cook having to yank him back on stage by the legs. Odd, quiet moments – him and me in a hotel room, listening to distant thunder, and George suddenly telling me a special word that could make a storm go away; both of us running a lap of a paddock through chilly twilight air to make ourselves really alive and alert before hitting the stage in Canberra.

But by mid-June 2006 I didn't want to see George anymore. We'd had our blues and I had said this before. This time I was adamant. That month, six years after the Warumpi Band's official retirement, we played a rare gig at the Dreaming Festival in Queensland. George's stamina and voice weren't there. Neither was he – he didn't want to be with us, preferring to hang with the other rock stars, get stoned with them, follow them round. I was disgusted at his subservience to others and disregard for us. I wanted to get the gig done and get out. But when it came time to leave we couldn't find George. Then when we did he was in a foul mood for us having interrupted his socialising. I wanted to leave him there. We all had planes to catch. He was angry and so was I. We almost came to blows. His were the usual complaints: he was being treated badly, I was to blame, I'd taken money or royalties, it should be his money.

‘Just get your bag and get in the car,' I seethed.

‘This my festival. Go find your own festival. Don't come round my festival, fuckin' prick.'

We overnighted in a motel near Brisbane airport. Next day he was still angry. When he threatened the tour manager I had to confront him. Here we were, nudging our fifties – I didn't want to fight him. Thankfully it did not come to that. He merely refused to acknowledge me. We reached the airport, caught our respective flights, and I set my mind to forgetting all about him. Six months later Sammy rang.

‘You heard from George?'

‘No.'

‘He's not well, he collapsed in Melbourne they say. He's in Darwin now. He's having tests. Something's wrong. You should call.'

‘I don't really feel like it. Not after what happened.'

‘Yuwa
– look, don't think about the bad times. Just think about the good times. You should call him. They saying he might have cancer.'

I remembered his diminished energy, his negative attitude; it all squared up. But it was not without apprehension that I phoned him.

‘I hear you are crook.'

George's voice came back croaky.
‘Yo
, can't hardly walk,' he said, indignant.

‘That's no good. What's the doctor say?'

‘Don't know yet.'

He made no mention of our disagreement. Neither did I. I sensed he was short of breath.

‘Have you got anyone looking after you?'

‘
Yo
.'

‘What you need is a feed of stingray.'

‘
Yo
, I'm trying for that one now.'

‘Get those Birdwave boys to help you.'

Birdwave were three young Adelaide guys on bass, drums and Hammond organ, George's backing band. Less than a month later Sammy rang again: George was diagnosed with lung cancer and back on Elcho Island with his family.

‘They saying he might only have three weeks,' said Sammy.

My whole history with George telescoped into the moment. I recalled an argument on a bus after a jail gig at Canning Vale, in Perth, when George was being particularly congratulatory about
his
performance and
his
show. This was 1999. I'd been increasingly alarmed about this trait in George. Maybe it is a peculiar syndrome of all lead singers to become like this. I reminded him then and there that we were – I thought – still a team, a band.

‘You weren't alone on that stage. We were there with you, backing you up, making the show work too.'

‘No, I did it myself. I made them all get up.'

He was getting on the nose. Quietly I proffered: ‘Okay, who writes the songs?'

George glared. Rising angrily in his seat, he roared – ‘Yes, you write the songs, but they get the message from me. I sing them! Me Rrurrambu! They get it from me!' He thumped his own chest for emphasis.

For George, the singer was more important than the song. For me, the song is paramount. Made for tension and drive in the band, perhaps. He had a point. So did I. I could appreciate his view. What did it matter now? George will always be the singer, the showman, the rocker, the livewire out front, the tip of the spear. Now he was dying.

As Sammy said, think of the good times. And there were plenty.

We were fat with good times. When George was on song, kicking up a storm, we'd win any crowd, hold ourselves against any band in the country. The energy that took over when we played was greater than the sum of our parts. That's what defines a good band. We'd made our mark. We'd made Aboriginal people proud. We'd sung the truth of blackfella experience and put it on the mainstream map. We couldn't have done it without George. He was the one to deliver that message. Would I never see his laugh, that cocky smile – George in all his dynamic glory – again?

Four years before, when my father died, I rang George to tell him. He broke into sobs, muttering, ‘Daddy's gone to his home.' His instant empathy and display of grief startled me. Now I had to make that call, give something back.

‘Hello, George?'

‘Yo
.'

‘You in Galiwinku?'

‘Yo
, at my island home.'

‘Manymak
, are you comfortable? Have you got painkillers?'

‘Nothing, only Panadol. Hey, brother, can you send me CD, Warumpi Band CDs? My kids wanna listen.'

As soon as you send them, Warumpi Band CDs disappear. They spirit out of houses, rooms, cars, bags. Vanish into scrub. No one person retains them very long.

‘Yo,
I'll post them.'

A silence. I think, is this the last time we'll speak? A freight of emotion arrived.

‘I love you and I'll miss you,' he sobbed.

‘I love you too.' I was choking up. ‘I'll see you down the track one day.'

‘Is it heaven?'

He was asking me the question. He really wanted to know: would he go to heaven? I sensed fears, and a guilt he was struggling with.

‘Yo.
I'll see you there, brother.'

Three weeks came and went. George was alive. Two months later I found myself in Nhulunbuy for a show with Shane Howard. George was alive. I chartered a plane to Elcho Island. His emaciated body, his face shrunken into its skull, strange hospital dressings attached to his chest – even in this weakened state he managed a lazy smile. Gently I embraced him. ‘I'm trying,' he murmured, ‘very hard.'

George wanted to live. He loved this life. He had more to give, more to create. He had songs and recordings to do with the Birdwave boys, who along with George's family were providing 24/7 care.

They said he'd been up all night. One of his aunties implored him, in language, to lie down and rest. George said he'd sleep when he's dead.

We went out the backyard. Someone produced an acoustic guitar. Helped onto an old bed, George lay back. I sat on a plastic chair. Nearby was his mother's grave. Softly I strummed and began singing ‘Fitzroy Crossing'.
If you see me on the track way out west of Rabbit Flat
… George joined in the chorus, a croaky whisper. Some of his family were tearing up. I tried a couple of other song fragments. Too much for him; he didn't have the strength. We would never sing these songs again. But George remained stoic. He was, after all, surrounded by family – and he had everyone's attention. When he was momentarily distracted I took the chance to expunge a few tears. Mostly we sat and said nothing. I watched his grandchildren play. Hours passed. A heavy feeling I'd had since arriving began to lift. Finally George was helped to a chair further down the yard. I went with him. When it was just the two of us I spoke.