The Ballad of Beryl

In memory of Beryl Whatson (nee Pittard)

 1933 - 2022

In 1930s Auburn

Pittard’s Produce Store

sold coal and groceries

and offered

homemade scones

in the afternoons

to perk up the working man

My great aunt Armandine

was serving at the counter

when a larrikin sign writer

named Aubrey Paul

dropped by

and seduced her

over the strawberry jam

Armandine and her parents

grew flowers and veggies

on the double block

surrounding their Victorian house

and kept a pony and trap

for deliveries.

Aubrey and Armandine

lied to Maud and Fred

that they were wed.

Aubrey and his elegant sideboard

moved in 

The Pittards gathered

and gave them a nuptial party

and all was bliss

until a woman knocked on the door

one day

insisting her husband come home.

Maud threw Aubrey

and his sideboard out.

A few months later

on the coldest Sydney morning ever

Beryl was born

and given Maud as her middle name

in appreciation

Maud senior set herself as gate keeper

to keep both Armandine and Beryl

safe from the pernicious adulterer

who didn’t dare darken their doorstep again

As she grew Beryl

gleaned a few scant facts

about her father

by eavesdropping

on family exchanges

it seemed she had his height and thick wavy hair

During the week

to be near her work

in Sydney’s rag trade

Armandine boarded out

leaving Beryl to Maud’s offices

Maud kept her close

chiding her for exuberance,

and more than once

resorting to the strap

Fred indulged her though

and Beryl adored him

treasuring and keeping

his drawings even

his plan

for a chicken brooder

all her life.

Beryl wondered later

if the neighbours knew and judged

her origins 

like her nasty Auntie Joyce

who dubbed her ‘Illegitimate Beryl’

as if it were

a latinate name.

She was a lonely child

her nearest namesake friend

went off to a different school

and Beryl made four chimneys

she could see from her window

into fantasy playmates

she called Semy, Commy, Kivey and Co 

When she was thirteen

her uncle Clarrie bought her a bicycle

and her world expanded

She was allowed to

catch the train to town 

to meet her mother

after work to see a show

Once walking from the station

she didn’t recognise Armandine

and pondered who this woman was

sporting a perm and set

whose dress fabric seemed familiar

talking to a tall man with wavy hair.

Living in Narrabeen

with Fred and Maud

city schools were deemed too far away

and Beryl was sent to Manly Domestic High

her academic gifts sequestered

for now

She left at fifteen

to bring a few pounds to the family coffers

working at a belt and buckle factory

which she hated.

Later she became a machinist

making children’s clothes

for fashionable Marjory Daw

‘before all children’s clothes were made in Asia’

as she once said  in an email to me

By age eighteen Beryl had lost

Fred and Maud and Armandine

and lived with feckless bicycle buyer

Uncle Clarrie

but he had married Josephine

his second of four brides

who used green Estapol

on the Pittard heirloom clock

and made Beryl feel unwelcome

so she took a room in a city boarding house,

forming friendships and sharing interests

with fellow boarders.

On a bushwalk she met and liked

George and Alan Whatson

especially George

They married in 1957

at St Thomas’s, Enfield

Funds were short and kind neighbours

furnished the cake and wedding breakfast.

George and Beryl moved to Glenbrook

in the Mountains

Beryl had to quit work

to adopt their three kids

so turned her sewing skills

to outfitting her girls and boy

and her energies to

being an attentive parent.

Taking her eldest

to a youth camp in the 70s

she heard the name ‘Pittard’

and got to know my Mum

her cousin’s wife

as it turned out.

Beryl applied

her brain and tenacity

to family research

and discovered

Swiss forebears

with engineering prowess

a damp and dingy

Lambeth address

measles aboard an immigrant ship

more single motherhood

and seamstress skills

a forger in the ranks

and acquired gentility

that denied

much of the above.

When our paths crossed

in 2015

seeking grandfather Fred’s

first drowned love

and adding more flesh

to Aubrey Paul’s bones

became our holy grails.

Beryl had photographs

of a woman in white

resting her hand on Fred’s shoulder

and of the sailing boat

he purportedly sold

after her death.

We traded reports

of Aubrey’s early

criminal capers

and surmised

who the mystery fiancée

might have been.

We stitched together

Aubrey Paul’s story,

mugshot and all,

but Fred’s first love

eluded our grasp.

Our last meeting was

in a nursing home

in Cooranbong

in COVID days

I shared my latest find

a transcript of another errant ancestor's

sympathy-seeking confession

Beryl showed mild interest

but her mind was on the indignities

of respite care

and the fate of her papers

of great significance to her

but of little to her adopted children

she thought.

Her funeral was last month.

The sun shone on neat lawns

and shiny cars

and her heavily pregnant granddaughter

read Mary Frye’s

Do not stand at my grave and weep

though we did.

I was and am the vessel

of your blood

and memories,

Beryl

Your eighty nine years and

four generations

leave their traces

in your papers,

in my computer files

and on this page.

Lost

Stella (2009 - 2022)

A corner shadow

that seems to form her silhouette

a metallic jingle that sounds like tags

factoring walk time into the day

then checking yourself

glancing at the backseat of the car

in vain

avoiding certain supermarket aisles

giving away her food

and bedding

hiding her leash

and squeaky pig

talking to every dog walker we see

for vicarious fulfilment

browsing the rescue sites

for another brindle friend

but it is much too soon.

Sunshine Super Girl by Andrea James, Performing Lines theatre company, Civic Theatre Wagga Wagga, 8 October 2022

Last night I had the great pleasure of seeing Sunshine Super Girl at Wagga’s Civic Theatre. The play is Yorta Yorta/Gunaikurnai woman, Andrea James’ immaculately crafted telling of Wiradjuri tennis star, Evonne Goolagong’s rise from her modest Barellan upbringing to international fame and acclaim.  Written with  Ms  Goolagong’s cooperation and using several of her real life anecdotes , the play treats small town life and community, incipient and overt racism, sexual predation, contemporary politics, 70s fashion,  the relentlessness of championship tennis and both Evonne’s vulnerability and tenacity  with a lightness of touch, sensitivity and humour  that make for a very rewarding production.

Ella Ferris is charismatic in the central role taking us from 3 year old Evonne’s first encounter with a tennis ball retrieved from the back seat of her dad’s beat up old car, through her parents’ dedication and neighbours’ assistance to learn to play tennis and get the right gear, to lodging with Vic Edwards (her coach)’s family in Sydney’s northern suburbs, to encountering the quaint traditions of Wimbledon and the gruelling impact of the international tennis scene. The last most poignantly affecting when Evonne learns of her father’s death in a motor accident while competing in the US Open and is persuaded that sedation and then playing on is preferable to going home for his funeral.

The Cawley–Goolagong love story is handled with the understatement and charm that was the hallmark of their blossoming relationship. The scene where they sneak a romantic picnic at the laundromat is delightful. Lincoln Elliot gets the honourable occasional G&T sipping Roger Cawley’s accent and body language beautifully. While Jax Compton's delightfully over the top caricature of John Newcombe brings a nice touch of broad humour to the Knightsbridge party scenes.

Apart from the play’s overall excellent construction and setting, Vicki Van Hout’s and  Katina Olsen’s choreographed tennis moves make the action hypnotic and show the audience Evonne’s evolving skills and the challenges she faced from opponents  like Margaret Court.

Evonne Goolagong-Cawley and playwright/director Andrea James (source: https://news.aboriginalartdirectory.com/2020/09/sunshine-supergirl.php)

There is so much to say in praise of Sunshine Super Girl but the other motifs that struck me were Evonne’s (and her Mum’s) love of fishing and their traditional knowledge about the best waters to fish in (images of which open and close the play) and the depiction of an Indigenous yarning circle making the link between all the forms of string and twine that bind and hold us, like the grip of a hand on a racquet!

One reviewer I read said they thought this play would enter the canon and be produced repeatedly over years to come. It certainly deserves that and judging by the number of young people in last night’s audience it will act as inspiration for new generations of potential tennis champions.

Unearthed Treasure

 1. The Thornbers

Before we moved to Wagga Wagga eight years ago I knew little about the city. I was vaguely aware from my time at the (now defunct) professional craft artists’ organisation, Craft Australia, that Wagga was home to a significant collection of Australian art glass. A reconnoitre mission prior to committing to the move yielded more positive findings.  As well as the Glass Gallery, Wagga has an impressive regional art gallery; Wagga has a pool complex that runs aqua aerobics every day of the week almost all year round, and Wagga’s Civic Theatre is on the circuit for enough of the performers and productions we want to see to keep our diaries happily full.  On arrival we also quickly discovered the charms of Pomilgalarna, the Wollundry Lagoon and the Victory Memorial and Botanic Gardens and the delight of seeing ‘womboynes’ (Wiradjuri word for kangaroos) bounding about behind our house.

Still to come though was the surprise of two family connections. I’ve been doing genealogy for a few years, filling the void created because my mother was an only child, we left England when I was eleven and my father maintained very few links with his Australian family. I’ve experienced the peculiarly modern day Australian delight of uncovering convict ancestors and then the disappointment of discovering that one of them, the famously spirited Tasmanian inn keeper, Rachel Hoddy who arrived on the Lady Juliana in 1789, was mis-identified as a relation.  

A felon of a later era does however retain his place in our tree. Henri Garnay (aka Henri Chapins /Adolphe Mathey) married my great grand aunt Pauline Emilie Pittard in 1885. For the marriage certificate he represented himself as ‘a photographer in private life’, not revealing his former incarceration in New Caledonia  for forgery or his  conviction for carrying housebreaking implements in Sydney some four years earlier.  It is one of his daughters (he and Pauline had time to conceive two before he was deported in 1887), Armandine Garnay, whose link to Wagga I first discovered. Despite her humble origins,  Armie married well. Her groom in 1911 was South Australian born Lawrence (Laurie) Rowland Thornber, from a successful family of bankers and teachers. His career with the Union Bank spanned 43 years and 22 of those were spent first in Wagga and then in nearby Henty.

Armandine & Laurie

When we sit outside at our favourite café in Johnston Street, the former Union Bank, where Laurie was accountant from 1923 to 1926, is directly in our line of vision. The building now houses Boyce Chartered Accountants, but its exterior remains little changed since Laurie’s day and it isn’t hard to imagine him at work behind his desk inside. Nor is it hard to picture the Thornbers out and about in 1920s Wagga pursuing their interests.   Both Laurie and my first cousin twice removed, Armie were keen golfers and their wins at the Wagga Golf Club, then situated on the site of the Murrumbidgee Turf Club, were frequently reported. Laurie was the club’s auditor in 1924 while Armie was a founding member and Treasurer of the Wagga Wagga Shakespeare Club.  

Henty Man

Their stay in Wagga was brief as in 1926 Laurie was promoted to manager of the Union Bank’s Henty branch some 60 kilometers away.  Far from diluting the sense of propinquity, learning this fact intrigued me further. I first heard of Henty and its annual Field Day from a colleague raised in Albury who regularly sang the Henty Field Day song to us at work. With that auspicious introduction, I was excited to visit the town. Initially unaware of the family connection I contented myself with admiring the famous (locally at least) Henty Man. When I returned it was to see the old Union Bank building in Sladen Street where Laurie, Armie and their daughter Norma had resided. The elegant two storey corner building combined banking premises and spacious accommodation but is now a private residence.

Former Union Bank, 33 Sladen Street, Henty

It was a balmy day and to my delight the current owner had the door open while renovating the hallway. When he saw me excitedly staring at the building and photographing the exterior he was kind enough to invite me in. I saw the banking chamber, the old safe door, Laurie’s office, the kitchen, living room and bedrooms. My spine tingled as I imagined Armie hosting CWA meetings to raise funds for the hospital or giving her celebrated needlework demonstrations there and Norma meeting with the local youth group, nattily named ‘The Younger Set’, up until her marriage in 1940 disqualified her from membership and she was presented with a parting gift of a 'Cutex' leather encased manicure set. It is hard to explain the frisson I experienced despite never having known or, until recently, known of, these relatives. I found treading where they had trod an emotional and rewarding experience.

Laurie and Armie remained in Henty for some 13 years after his retirement in 1945 eventually joining their daughter and her family in Quirindi, northern NSW where they died within a few months of one another in 1973.

2.  Semple Misfortune

The other coincidence is less jolly. It relates to my husband’s family and this time the DNA has not left the district!

My husband is descended from Welsh miners via Newcastle NSW on his mother’s side and London tradespeople via Melbourne on his father’s. While it is a popular belief that migrants from the UK generally benefited from relocating to Australia both sides of our families contain examples of misfortune hampering attempts to build a life in a new land.  A qualified engineer died a pauper in my family and my husband’s great great grandfather John Semple (1815-1860) perished under sad circumstances after trying for a decade to make a success of his timber business. John, his wife of 5 years, Mary, and daughters Susannah and Mary jnr arrived in Victoria aboard the Alice Maude in 1849. They had 4 more children in the following decade. Plotting his course via newspaper archives, I traced his involvement with the dissolution of the Golden Cross Timber Yard business in 1855, his fine for sourcing wood on Crown Land in 1857 and the establishment then lapse into bankruptcy of his own timber import and merchandising business at Melbourne’s Batman’s Hill during 1858-60.

The Hope Inn, Fitzmaurice Street, Wagga

I can remember my surprise on obtaining a copy of John’s death certificate to discover that he had met his end just down the road (about 48 km away) from Wagga and about 464 km from his family home in St Kilda. Searching the newspaper archives revealed little until I tried the variations on the spelling of his surname: ‘Simple’ and ‘Semphill’. Then I found the full story of the tragic last weeks of his life. It seems that after he was discharged from bankruptcy John  must have sought work felling timber for the telegraph service which was being established between Deniliquin and Wagga. On or about 23 November  1860 he was leading a team when the tree the men were attempting to chop down fell unexpectedly; it hit John and fractured his spine. He was transported by cart to The Hope Inn in Fitzmaurice Street, Wagga where he languished under the care of Dr Allen Morgan and the unnamed publican and his wife until 3 December when he succumbed to his injuries. John’s wife Mary was informed by letter but he was not reunited with his family posthumously. It was summer and burial was urgent. According to his death certificate John Semple was interred in the new Wagga Wagga Monumental Cemetery the following day. While he is commemorated on a grave stone in St Kilda Cemetery, his burial site in Wagga’s extensive cemetery would have had only a wooden marker if it was indicated at all. 

St Kilda Cemetery, John's not there despite indications to the contrary

Thanks to the St John’s Church of England’s archivist, Leanne Diessel, we have recently discovered that John was only the 26th burial in the Anglican section of the cemetery and have been given a map that has allowed us to estimate his location. I like the fact that his great great grandson has been in his company so often over these past 8 years and that we are now  able to share information with other descendants about his unexpected final resting place.

Robert Erwin (John Semple's great great grandson) standing on the likely spot of John's interment

*it turns out that when checking out Wagga pre move we dined in the very building where John breathed his last, the old stone portion of what is now the Riverina Hotel! 

An Almost Timeless Classic

While not overly impressed with Barbara Brooks and Judith Clark’s biography of Eleanor Dark (blog post, 15 May 2022) it did inspire me to read her work. I decided to make a start with Waterway, her 1938 novel set in contemporary Sydney.  Unfortunately, when I searched the local library catalogue they didn’t have a copy, there was one at Gundagai but our library had suspended inter-library loans while they did a stock take or a review or performed some mysterious process which has affected ties with other libraries and services to readers across the Riverina region. The local paper claims that the mobile library service which used a very flash truck and trailer arrangement worth about $27K and visited 21 locations across over 50,000 square kilometres has ceased to operate, a very sad situation that I hope will be rectified soon.  But I digress,  Waterway seems to be out of print so I made a mega commitment and downloaded the approx. 600 page The Timeless Land to my Kindle instead.  I am agnostic about eBooks vs ‘real’ books. One advantage of a Kindle is that you can delude yourself that you are well into a doorstop-sized tome (even when the little percentage thingy says otherwise) and it is a lot lighter to carry around than a book of The Timeless Land’s bulk. Of course, marginalia are a problem and if this was a book group choice I would be woefully ill-prepared for our discussion.

The Riverina's Mercedes Benz Mobile Library truck & trailer whose fate is currently in the balance. Source Riverina Library Services Facebook page.

Anyway thanks to a bout of the flu, I‘ve finished reading The Timeless Land and feel sufficiently impressed by Dark’s achievement to want to make a few comments about the book.  I am not alone as Googling revealed hundreds of reviews from the most academic analyses of its literary form and cultural perspective to succinct ‘this was a good read’ type comments.  My blog isn’t the place to rehash all these as they are easily found and I do hope to be reasonably engaging. Here are just some my reactions to reading Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land …

Dark conveys the physical aspects of Australia, the sky, landscape, vegetation etc. with an authenticity that reflects many hours spent observing and forming a deep love of and respect for this country. Those  also inform the passion and conviction with which she writes about the Indigenous way of life and spiritualty. While primarily an imaginative exercise for her, albeit a highly researched one, which today would likely be regarded as appropriation and distortion, her decision to foreground Aboriginal experience in this novel - it opens with Bennilong (sic) and his father watching the tall ships of the First Fleet arrive - was a bold and radical departure from the colonial narrative of ‘settlement’ that abounded in the 1940s when she wrote.  Achieving this is testament to her deeply held liberal humanist values, to her painstaking and unflinching use of her sources and her considerable talent as a writer.

The text abounds with the  quite correct, but jarring to the modern reader,  use of ‘one’,  the gender neutral indefinite/impersonal pronoun, when Dark is crafting the inner monologues of her characters be they naval officers, convicts or Indigenous Australians.  This consistent usage, while understandable from the pen of a writer  of her background and era, evokes an upper middle class aloofness that doesn’t accord well with the varied kinds of human consciousness she is attempting to conjure. Having said that, her language suffers from very few archaisms and most of the time is admirably successful in persuading us that we are seeing 18thC existence through the eyes of her characters. Her sweeps of descriptive writing and her intricate construction of their trains of thought, particularly Bennilong’s and Arthur Phillip’s, are a triumph.

Bennelong dressed in some of the garments given to him in England. The caption of this portrait by an unknown artist states that upon his return to Australia he once again embraced his 'savage ways', expressing an imperialist reactionary sentiment that  Eleanor Dark did much to challenge. Source SLNSW.

Not all the characters are so convincingly drawn but one (I mean, I) certainly developed a soft spot for Watkin Tench whose 1788: Comprising A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson was the source of much of Dark’s material and whose reputed sophistication and sense of the absurd she captures beautifully, providing the novel with some of its few lighter hearted moments.

As well as the centrality of the Aboriginal narrative, Dark focuses on several aspects of gender relations, both Cunnembeillee and Ellen are forced into socially condoned sexual and domestic subservience and newly arrived free and convict women are treated as currency. However, in her desire to contrast cooperative, intuitive Aboriginal Law with hierarchical colonial ‘justice’ she perhaps buys too readily into the idea of the primitive club-wielding male warrior subduing the women of his tribe with violence. The white male colonialists avow more genteel and Christian attitudes, yet dispassionately dole out cruel floggings and conduct executions, both of which the Indigenous observers see as obscene.  The reality of gendered violence is complex and I would be interested to read if the level of violence toward women in Indigenous society at the time of colonisation Dark asserts as the norm can be substantiated  and how much that differed from the incidence in white society.

The depiction of Barangaroo is problematic. Dark uses the epithet ‘shrew’ of her repeatedly and suggests there is something erratic and childish about her expressions of emotion but is nevertheless  admiring of her pride in entering the Governor’s house in her natural unclothed state and her suspicion of the white invaders.  Having just watched a promotional video for the Sydney Harbour foreshore re-development named for Barangaroo which presents her in a revisionist ‘girl power’  light, I think we are still working out who she was in her own time and context and how we relate to her as a modern day cultural icon. 

As I am prone to, I have focused on some quibbles here, but I do need to say unequivocally that I am glad I read The Timeless Land and think it worth any reader’s while. I am awestruck by the conscientiousness and depth of Eleanor Dark’s historical research - she draws on a plethora of fascinating contemporary documents – and by the vast canvas she chose and then faithfully filled (especially considering there are two sequel novels, The Storm of Time and No Barrier). She sets the bar for social history that is both illuminating and interrogative. Her account of the establishment of the colony of New South Wales would have been revolutionary when first released. I wonder if the television adaptation did the books justice, not sure I have the courage to find out.

Eleanor Dark with the manuscript of The Storm in Time, the second novel

 in the trilogy. Source Varuna website

I would be intrigued to know what today’s Indigenous readers and writers think of the book(s). In my research for this post I discovered that Yothu Yindi had a 1990s hit with the song Timeless Land which suggests they didn’t disdain the connection.

References

Tim Piccione, The Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser, July 8 2022

https://www.dailyadvertiser.com.au/story/7812533/mobile-library-truck-ceases-operations-amid-dispute-with-wagga-council/

Antonio Simoes Da Silva’s Revising the past/Revisioning the future: A postcolonial reading of Eleanor Dark's 'The Timeless Land' trilogy

https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2481&context=lhapapers

Yothu Yindi ‘Timeless Land’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7TWJMO4k3k

More Errors than Comedy

Review: Comedy of Errors, Bell Shakespeare, Civic Theatre, Wagga Wagga, 9 July 2022

The promotional material for Bell Shakespeare’s current production of The Comedy of Errors describes it as “a hilarious romp of swapped identities, misguided love, mistaken imprisonment and chaotic mishaps, leading to an unbelievably crazy day for bumbling twins”. It goes on to say, and this is where the first note of caution is sounded, “at the heart of this tale of comedic misfortune is an old man searching for his lost children. He finds himself in a hostile land, in the fight of his life... to save his life. As far-fetched coincidences unfold, chaotic hilarity ensues and a man’s life could be saved — if only everything would go to plan”

The Comedy of Errors is early Shakespeare. It is his shortest play, a farce composed of slapstick, mistaken identity and a tortuous amount of word play which, to a modern audience, is almost unfathomable without accompanying explanation or  skilfully enacted ‘shtick’ to illuminate the risqué or obscure analogies being made.  This Janine Watson-directed production only occasionally manages to provide that. The rest of the time we laugh with slight embarrassment knowing from the presentation that we are witnessing something supposedly uproarious but mystified as to what it might be. 

But back to that clue to Watson’s interpretation provided on the website. The old man, Egeon, is or would be a tragic figure if he were not so clearly a plot device. His role in the opening act is to give us the backstory so that we understand why there are 2 sets of identical twins roaming around oblivious to each other because they haven't clapped eyes on each other since becoming separated during a shipwreck some 30 years earlier.  We need a springboard for the absurd events of the play to enfold and some anchoring of the mayhem in a plausible event.  However Watson makes a strange choice – instead of making Egeon’s opening monologue the painless if poignant exposition it needs to be (I would have used projected graphics) she gets the actor to precede the speech with a series of writhing hand gestures which may or may not be intended to evoke the motion of ocean waves or be a nod to the Indigenous dance prowess of actor Maitland Schnaars. He then delivers a speech of 88 lines unalleviated by nuance, light or shade and the Duke of Ephesus, here played by female actor, Alex King, in militaristic khaki bedecked with a sash and medals and the most glistening red footwear since Dorothy’s ruby slippers, responds by saying it all sounds very sad, she is obliged to sentence him to death because he is an unwelcome Syracusian, but she will give him 24 hours to pay a fine that will spare him execution.

Between this, the next, and several following scenes there is much jiving to disco music of the 80s (so cute seeing the cast ironically recreating poses and outfits from an era before most of them were born) and choreographed hoisting and stacking of suitcases. We get it, one set of Antipholuses and Dromios is arriving in search of their matching bookend selves and all is in flux and frivolous on the island of Ephesus.

The series of ‘hilarious’ mix ups now ensues. Everyone mistakes each Antipholus and Dromio for the other pair including they themselves and poor Adriana, wife of the Ephesian Antipholus, rants, raves and almost rends her Osti patio gown in perplexity at his refusal first to come home to dinner and then to acknowledge her as his missus when he does. Giemi Contini, no doubt under strict direction, starts her performance at a histrionic fever pitch she maintains throughout the action until the penny drops about 5 minutes from the end of the play that her husband is an identical twin whereupon she goes all docile and lovey dovey.

Challenging unnecessary cis casting, Adriana’s sibling, Luciana/o is played, rather delightfully by Joseph ‘Wunujaka’ Althouse (the quotation marks are used in the program) as a wise, loyal and winsome gay man in Bermuda shorts and a fluoro fair isle vest that rivals Adriana’s tropical moo moo.  Watson thus manages to be both woke and to elicit a few old school giggles when Syracusian Antipholus comes on to him.

The star turns in The Comedy of Errors are the Dromios. As unofficial jesters to their masters they carry most of the verbal and physical humour. Just as the Antipholusus are made to resemble one another because they wear almost identical emerald green suits and mottled tan shirts, the Dromios are clearly twins because they both have slicked back blond hair and are dressed in white shirts and black trousers with braces.  Ella Prince and Julie Billington both bring quicksilver energy to the roles and do their utmost to convey to us the comedy in each bit of business or wordplay. The frequent beatings they endure are borne good naturedly and lessened in impact by the creative decision to employ balloons in place of any actual weapons, a device that doesn’t always work, especially when the balloons are later employed in a more conventional celebratory way. Often the pace of delivery means that any chance to ‘get’ and enjoy the Dromios’ lines is snatched away from us.  One example being the patter about the fat kitchen wench (another gender swap – to minimize the misogyny - in this production) in which Billington gives a virtuoso performance of accents and stereotypes in quick succession but that succession is so quick that we have no time to savour the material or the performance.

The disco theme wanes as the play progresses and Watson hints at something existential by briefly adding a neon ‘find yourself’ sign to the back drop that has displayed a ‘wish you were here’ sign throughout the production and having the two Dromios peer, pose and sway on either side of a mirror on wheels that substitutes for the doorway to Ephesian Antipholus’s house. I was half expecting a Patty Duke/Groucho Marx routine.  The most bizarre ‘who is really who?’ and ‘are we complete without our other self?’ moment comes when one Dromio/Antipholus pair wind a rope round the other. We know this is symbolic because of the slo mo, music and lighting but also because no one acknowledges that both sets of twins are participating in the same scene which they don’t officially do until the end of the play.  All presumably very deep, but signifying what?

I won’t dwell on the unsatisfying portrayal of Dr Pinch and the abortive attempts to exorcise the demons from Syracusian Antipholus except to say that Leilani Loau keeps on the white smock she wears to play the doctor when she transitions into the Abbess in the next scene, just deleting and adding accessories. She appeared much more comfortable pontificating about madness and sanctuary in a wide eyed elder states womanly way than she did being the quack.  She also gets to unravel the confusion about the two sets of twins and reveal that she is in fact Aegon’s long lost wife (a little matter she had kept schtumm about for 2 decades).

Finally we see brothers and parents, servants and masters reunited. For this Watson creates a kind of caterpillar group hug tableau evoking a profundity somewhat at odds with the preceding farce. Given her statement about ‘an old man searching for his lost children’ -  a reference to the stolen generations?

I’ve seen John Bell on Q & A arguing for the continued relevance of Shakespeare and his works’ infinite capacity for reinvention. There was a bit of that going on in this production. The most obvious being casting women in roles traditionally played by men which, as Upstart Crow reminds us, is any and all of them! Having gender fluid Dromios worked and the chemistry of the Dromios and Antipholuses worked too. (Skyler Ellis and Felix Jozeps were very enjoyable to watch). What felt forced and clunky was the imposition of the disco tunes and the resort imagery and costumes.  Were they supposed to evoke the other worldliness/fairyland quality of Ephesus? Then there was the ensemble dynamic which never quite gelled, partly because of the dissimilar styles of the performers and partly because the action was fragmented by the obsessive use of the moving sets of steps and protracted choreographed sequences reminiscent of Sean Micallef’s Clockwork Movement dance routines.

The Comedy of Errors is difficult to bring to contemporary audiences.  Its absurd plot demands total mastery of the farce style and its archaic textual references challenge an audience’s comprehension even in the hands and mouths of the most accomplished actors. Making the play accessible and funny today is a tall order and overlaying it with daffy disco hits, spurious social references and ponderous existential montages is not the way to do it.

Still a bit in the dark about Eleanor

 

Brooks' and Clark's biography of Australian author Eleanor Dark, 

Pan McMillan 1998 (my photograph).

I enjoy reading biographies.  Well-researched and written biographies provide insights into the subject’s career and character and illuminate an era. They can be immensely pleasurable and even transporting to read. Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale, John Lahr’s Prick Up Your Ears, Nadia Wheatley’s The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift and Hayden Herrera’s Frida all achieved that for me.   Two of those are quite hefty tomes, and another enjoyable read, Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens, is over 1000 pages.  So length is not a disincentive for me if the author keeps my interest and genuinely evokes the texture of its subject’s life and times.

Disappointingly though, Eleanor Dark - A Writer’s Life by Barbara Brooks (with Judith Clark) published by Pan McMillan Australia 1998 did not reward my perseverance through its 488 pages.   I confess I have not read any of Eleanor Dark’s novels though I had certainly heard of The Timeless Land.  I fully intend to read some now as this biography’s painstaking recounting of the plot of each of her works, replete with large slabs of quoted text, made me yearn for the source uninterrupted by commentary on what Miles Franklin or Nettie Palmer thought.  The frequent quotes from correspondence and reviews only serve to show that tastes differ and that few books are 100% successful in achieving what the writer sets out to do. They were overused and tedious, an exception being this response to The Timeless Land from US poet, Karl Shapiro which is so delightful that it made me resolve to track down his work.

(The Timeless Land) has left a wonderful flavor with me. It’s andante, acrid, blue, warm as sky,  inwoven like tapestry,  hung in that  space of Australian atmosphere, not quite tragic, wiser than nostalgia full of peace. (What a jumble of epithets that is)…  (quoted p. 360).

US poet Karl Shapiro on leave in Katoomba during WW2, possibly at the Dark's home, Varuna (source: Blue Mountains Library)

Between 1934 and 1953 Eleanor Dark published 10 novels. She was initially known for her challenging, sometimes melodramatic, subject matter and a modernist style likened to Virginia Woolf’s. From 1941 and thereafter  she became synonymous with the epic historical saga of Australia’s early colonial days known collectively as The Timeless Land after the first novel in a trilogy which also included Storm of Time (1948) and No Barrier (1953)

Towards the end of her career, Eleanor Dark only wrote intermittently and was not satisfied with what she produced.  She published nothing new between 1956 and her death in 1985. Always restless and self-critical, Eleanor described herself (as the thinly disguised protagonist in an abandoned draft) as merely a ‘competent’ writer. I suspect she was being harsh but I have yet to experience her prose outside the clumps reproduced by Brooks.

The portrait of Eleanor Dark that emerges from this biography is of a cerebral rather aloof person with a strong social conscience and a belief in the lessons of history who did not suffer fools or organised politics gladly.  Retreating from a dysfunctional and fragmented family life she and husband Dr Eric Dark forged themselves a comfortable middle class existence in their spacious Katoomba house where Eleanor was able to write full-time  (notwithstanding maternal and domestic responsibilities which on a bad day irritated her significantly). She and Eric were part of the Blue Mountains intellectual set, great readers and theatre goers and keen bush walkers Eleanor’s spent many hours in the garden of their property Varuna incorporate cultivating native species, an environmentalist before the term was coined.  Both were committed to the Blue Mountains community, Eric offering affordable medical care to patients many decades before Medibank was introduced. The Darks were instrumental in organising child care and a library for evacuee children during WW2. Eleanor was supportive of her husband’s politics, more overtly socialist than her own, and both suffered from reactionary public opinion during the McCarthyist era.

In The Timeless Land and a 1944 essay for The Weekend Book , Eleanor  represented the truth about British colonisation of  Australia, in the latter  using the phrase ‘we stole their land’ in relation to the myth of terra nullius and the dispossession of the Aboriginal people probably for the first time in Australian writing

So, there is much I read in Brooks’ book that makes me admire and like Eleanor Dark before even opening the pages of any of her own work. But after 488 pages she still felt like a cypher to me. Her complex relationship with her father and his legacy, her reaction to her mother’s early death, the lukewarm reception she appears to have given the stepson she gained on marriage and the depression and ill health of her final years are all touched on very lightly. I felt there was more to say about these aspects of her life and how they forged her personality and the themes in her writing. A friend of mine who knows her descendants says Eleanor was much warmer than the biography suggests and that her family life was not as dull and serene as it seems from the pages of Brooks’ book.

I am very dutiful  when it comes to finishing a book I start and despite its shortcomings I am glad I read Eleanor Dark - A Writer’s Life to the end because  it has lead me to want to read Eleanor Dark’s books. Then there is her feminism, albeit a feminism that still adopted the pronoun ‘he’ for all humanity, her incorporation of an Aboriginal perspective in The Timeless Land, even if we may now consider her technique cultural appropriation, her apparently amazing evocation of contemporary Sydney in Waterway (1938) and a potential affinity with Virginia Woolf - all of which I am keen to encounter.

There are two ideas of Eleanor’s Brookes communicates which will really resonate with modern readers and which were revolutionary in her era. One is her view on white Australians’ relationship with the land: saying that in their quest to conquer a land perceived as hostile  Europeans had created ‘deserts and dustbowls, wasted natural resources  mutilated lovely places’ and ‘robbed ourselves of spiritual food’. As early as 1949 she proposed a ‘working agreement with the earth we live on’ (quoted on p. 344).  The other is her belief of the importance of us knowing our history including the impact of European arrival on first nations’ people. This belief was the  major impetus for the hundreds of hours spent in research at the Mitchell Library and for writing her Timeless Land trilogy  where the narratives of Bennilong (sic) and Cunembeille are as important as those of Arthur Philip and Stephen Mannion (reference p. 367).

Dust jacket of the 1941 edition of The Timeless Land depicting Bennilong (sic) and Booranga (?) watching the First Fleet arrive, artist uncredited (source: https://theaustralianlegend.wordpress.com/2021/01/23/the-timeless-land/)

I am sure I will find some aspects of Eleanor Dark’s writing of its time or uncomfortable  e.g. her interest in eugenics and her penchant for including a death or disaster as a way of tidying up threads of plot, but I am off to the library and will start with borrowing Waterway I think.