Seven Poor Men of Sydney.

© 1934

Melbourne University Publishing

Carlton, Vic: , 2015.

In the location-based review of Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home I make reference to Watsons Bay – a sheltered cove on the western side of the Sydney Heads peninsula. The eastern side, pounded by the Pacific Ocean, is a landmark cliff face where lost souls have long gone to end it all in a fatal plunge from The Gap.

Christina Stead lived at Watsons Bay in the decade before she left Australia for London in 1928 and it’s the departure point (she called it ‘Fisherman’s Bay) for her 1934 novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney – a “dark love letter to” the city which portrays a lost generation of big city dwellers whose lives are as far-removed from ‘real Australia’ as can be imagined. Horse ridin’ whip crackin’ Miles Franklin disparaged Stead’s characters as engendered more by London’s Bloomsbury Set than Australia. Patrick White, on the other hand, pays tribute to Stead’s portrait of Sydney in his 1970 novel, The Vivisector.

The Baguenault brothers raise their Catholic families on Watsons Bay and we follow their children back and forth along the headland until Michael and Catherine Baguenault’s parents come into money and move into the middle class and across to the North Shore – though not via the coathanger because that’s still under construction in late 1920s Sydney.

The ferry is the primary commuter vehicle and just as the Baguenault children went back and forth up and down the headland, as adults they move in and out of Watson’s Bay. With their North Shore family home to fall back on, Michael and Catherine mooch about the inner city slums as lost souls and, seeking shelter, regularly return to Watson’s Bay. But shelter, for them, has always been accompanied by the ocean’s pounding roar, the knowledge that it’s merely a hop, step and a jump to annihilation.

Michael and Catherine’s young cousin, Joseph, is much less insecure. The windfall which saw his aunt and uncle move to the North Shore was to some extent a thirty pieces of silver scenario; no such cloud hangs over his parents’ head. Joseph has a steady city job to which he commutes. He’s a wage earner but the incompetent employer, Gregory Chamberlain, prey to a confidence trickster, hasn’t paid his employees for months. Joseph acquiesces, able to live off his parents; he’s content to remain their child, not questioning the teachings of their Catholic faith. Yet he’s not a babe in the woods; open-minded, he transitions seamlessly to manhood as circumstances allow, enthralled by physics lectures on the nature of light, for instance, to which a fellow worker, Baruch Mendelssohn, took him. The hard-headed scientific search for truth was one thing; abstract pontification concerning it another: Joseph’s (as against Hemingway’s) crap detector picked up on the language of modernism as nothing but sound and fury.

I drove from Watsons Bay to the Opera House during Friday peak hour. A red traffic light had me idling outside the Macquarie Street building where D H Lawrence had stayed in May 1922 and where, five or so years later, Joseph Baguenault walked during his lunch break. From the roundabout at the end of Macquarie Street adjacent to what had been the P & O wharf where the Malwa that had brought the Lawrences to Sydney had docked, I caught a glimpse of the famous Sails. My arrival had been in glorious sunshine whereas it had been dark clouds and pouring rain for Lawrence.

Lawrence wasn’t alone in being miserably wet on Macquarie Street. Joseph’s cousin, Catherine, walked along Macquarie towards Hyde Park after having been caught in the rain with Fulke, the married academic with whom she was hopelessly besotted. Fulke seems to have been inspired by Stead’s would-be romantic association with Walter Duncan the Sydney academic who championed education for the workingman and was appointed Adelaide University chair of history and political science in 1951. Catherine’s brother, Michael, flush with funds courtesy of Trickster at the races, crossed Macquarie Street near the mint on his disturbed spring ramble around and east across town to the South Head peninsula, night coming on. And it’s a Macquarie Street specialist that rescues Michael’s wheelchair bound companion, Kol Blount, from poverty and neglect.

Sydney was “all London without being London” for Richard Lovatt Somers in D H Lawrence’s Kangaroo, “made in five minutes, a substitute for the real thing.” Patsy Durack, though, had been enthralled by the city when he took the family there in 1862. Somers was homesick; Durack was at home in the colony but dissatisfied with the unintended consequence of the 1861 selection acts in the Goulburn district. He was, that is to say, the type of man that the famous Scottish explorer, William Landsborough, hoped to meet. They met at a Sydney livestock sale. Landsborough was there to purchase stud sheep for the newly established Bowen Downs station and Patsy because the livestock sale’s what he most liked about the big city. The canny Scot sold the Irishman a romantic portrait of the channel country he had explored, a land of wide open spaces where rugged pioneer settlers could breathe. The Duracks migrated to remote southwestern Queensland and established a toehold cattle station; D H Lawrence went to a cattle ranch in Taos New Mexico. (I went there too, when ‘Travelling Write’ across the USA years ago but I was in that neck o’ th’ woods on account of Bob Dylan’s song on the Pat Garret and Billy the Kid soundtrack.)

Those who live in real Australia partake of the pioneering spirit; it’s what differentiates them from people like Christina Stead’s Baruch Mendelssohn for whom the city verges on being a sacred space and Joseph Baguenault who was afraid of the silence of the bush. Patsy Durack’s granddaughter, Mary, goes so far as to say that we prosper as a nation to the extent that we continue to identify with those laconic bushmen who pushed back the frontier, that the crucible of real Australia is out in the sticks. And who can falsify the proposition?

In search of a camp for the night, I drove across the Harbour Bridge and took a random exit from the Warringah Freeway to gird my loins at a cafe that happened to be just up the street from Mark and Lily Boyd’s Walter Burley Griffin designed Castlecrag atrium house from P G Horne’s Broken Signs. Sydney is devoid of free-camps so I booked a spot at the National Parks and Wildlife Service caravan park at Lane Cove. The site overlooks the river up which Catherine, Michael, Baruch, Joseph and their friends chugged to disembark for a Saturday picnic in the late 1920s. Cornelius Laffey had sung ‘Macushla’ there while courting Jessica Olive in the 1860s, Thea Astley tells us in It’s Raining in Mango.

In the 1960s a couple of boys found a dead body in the Lane Cove River reeds. The police came – and found another body. Ample evidence made clear that the couple in question – CSIRO physicist Dr Bogle and his work colleague’s wife, Mrs Chandler – had had sex on the riverbank beforehand. Salacious catnip in straight-laced Menzies era Australia, the Bogle-Chandler tryst became a celebrated unsolved ‘murder’ mystery that lined the pockets of newspaper proprietors and gave us something to talk about for years. The latest theory is that the lovers had been poisoned by hydrogen sulphide gas emanating from industrial waste in the river bed.

The train into town from North Ryde Station afforded a rich man’s view of the Harbour City. Alighting at Wynyard, opposite what had been David Hum’s Carrington Street office, (Hum is Trewhella in Kangaroo) I walked past the statue commemorating Caroline Chisholm’s bête noire, John Lang, examined remnants of early settlement in The Rocks (where Billy Keen, home from Pozieres, had settled on the barmaid in the pub as a suitable wife in David Malouf’s The Great World) and circumnavigated the Opera House overlooking the harbour which, despite longing for London, Richard Somers acknowledged “was an extraordinary place” with departing “two-decker brown ferry-boats sliding continuously from the Circular Quay.” Christina Stead, similarly impressed, describes those ferries arriving at Circular Quay to disgorge streams of CBD workers into Lachlan (Macquarie) Place and on up past the Customs House to the bond stores and shipping offices adjacent to Lachlan (Macquarie) Park on a sunny Spring morning, a down at heel Joseph Baguenault among them on his way to work as a printer at Gregory Chamberlain’s Tank Stream Press. He’d have liked to buy a boxed lunch but still hadn’t been paid the wages owed him so made do with the usual Peck’s Paste sandwich. He had shaved, but with twopenny (used) razorblades purchased from the tobacconist.

When the British arrived to establish a penal colony at Botany Bay in 1788 Governor Arthur Phillip, unlike Dr Bogle and Mrs Chandler, was wary of swamp marshes and so decamped and moved up the coast in search of a more suitable settlement location. Well before the ferries, Phillip described sailing into “one of the finest harbours in the world [and landing at a cove] which had the finest spring of water, and in which ships can anchor so close to the shore that … quays may be constructed at which the largest vessels may unload. … [He named the cove] in honour of Lord Sydney.”

Had the colonists not ruined the spring of water, Joseph would have been strolling alongside an estuary as he made his way south from where those quays were constructed down Macquarie Place toward the intersection with Bridge Street at Macquarie Park. Bridge Street was called that, Michael Cathcart tells us in The Water Dreamers, because it’s where First Fleet convicts built a log bridge across the creek which fanned out into the estuary.

The Cadigal Aborigines camped at the source (half a kilometre upstream from there near where Centrepoint Tower now stands) of that freshwater creek, the Cadigal stream, and walked among the tall trees through which the creek that sustained them threaded its way to the estuary at the head of the cove. We can imagine their dismay when one of Governor Phillip’s convict work gangs cut down those trees. Worse still, the newcomers went on to pollute the precious water supply with rubbish and faeces. British ignorance concerning water in a dry land had made its mark, then, more or less immediately upon the First Fleet’s arrival in Sydney Cove.

Phillip imposed a fifteen-metre wide buffer zone green belt on either side of the stream and had large cisterns carved into the sandstone to serve as reservoirs. They were dubbed ‘the tanks’ and the Cadigal stream became known as the Tank Stream. The path leading to the ‘spring water’ is today’s Spring Street, one block south of Macquarie Park’s Tank Stream Press where Joseph worked.

Phillip went home to England in December 1792 leaving the Rum Corps to undo his Enlightenment approach to the settlement, the military officers building houses for themselves where the green belt had been and allowing their livestock to foul the Tank Stream. Eventually most Australians understood that to pollute a watercourse is folly. Scientists tell us – if we need be told – that contaminating the atmosphere is equally foolish. But the modern day equivalent of the Rum Corps is having none of it – and they want your vote.

Michael Baguenault went to Haymarket most days, usually with Withers. I had lunch there – at the excellent Kogi Korean BBQ in the ‘1909 Dining Precinct’.

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The Man Who Loved Children

© 1940

Apollo, UK ; 2016

 

 

 

The man who loved children imagined himself to be a model citizen with his finger on the pulse – a man who’d lead the way to the ideal society. A deluded dreamer driven by an Adlerian will to power, the shadow of his reach extended no further than his immediate family – a disturbed wife and tribe of kids. The eldest child, his adolescent daughter from a previous marriage, bears the brunt of the man’s tyranny and the step-mother’s wicked neglect just as had Stead herself when growing up on Watson’s Bay in Sydney. ‘Tis a pity the novel is set in Washington DC and Baltimore but there’s no mistaking the psychological terrain: it’s that which Patrick White had staked out only to find Christina Stead had been there years beforehand. First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children puts a raft of recent fiction in the shad