All My Januaries: Pleasures of Life and Other Essays

By Barbara Blackman

'Somewhere in this world, in this lifetime, there is a place of simple things, of sitting beside a fire with friends, good company, quietly talking, no formidable decisions, no explanations, no threat, no guilt, no anguish. These are the days for walking on country roads.' From iconic author and patron of the Arts, Barbara Blackman, comes All My Januaries, a new collection of insightful and inspirational personal essays.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: Mar 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9780702257858

Book preview

ALSO BY BARBARA BLACKMAN

The Little Lives of Certain Chairs, a Table or Two and

Other Inanimates of Our Acquaintance

Barbara Blackman and Charles Blackman Talk About Food

Glass After Glass: Autobiographical Reflections

Dogs and Doggerel

Portrait of a Friendship: The Letters of Judith Wright

and Barbara Blackman 1950–2000 (edited by Bryony Cosgrove)

CONTENTS

Foreword by Quentin Bryce

Pleasures of Life: Words

Travelling Solo on a Bicycle Built for Two

Guess What? You’re Me

Do You Like It Being Blind?

Three Wishes

Musgrave Park

Grandmothers

Beware of the Knees

Pleasures of Life: Childhood Play

Love Governs

A Safe Place for Dreams

This Was the Way

Alfresco Nude with Black Stump

A Remembrance of a Friend Past

Embedded in Memories

Outdoor Television

Pleasures of Life: Coffee Drinking

Sea Voyage

The Lady with Green Eyes

Repose Gastronomique

A Wayside Inn

A Year in Paris

Links in the Chain to a Sore Foot

Pleasures of Life: Perfume

Dormouse

Seeing from Within

Peopling My Solitude

All My Januaries

Houses to Cider, Water to Wine

Good Paper

Pleasures of Life: Solitude

The Mystery of Islands

My Olympic Torch

In Praise of Win Bisset (1917–2013)

Brisbane, My Brisbane

My Pleasure

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Early on summer mornings as the sun lifts the sky, waking kookaburras and magpies, I like to walk in my neighbourhood. I go along the pathways – the ‘crooked mile up and down those steep hills’ – of Indooroopilly. Sometimes I go by the house in Essex Street where Barbara Blackman was born, where she returns again and again to remember, and I too remember with a love that touches me deeply and evokes nostalgia to wrap me in its arms. I see the little fair-fringed girl as she talks to herself, to her dolls, fifty-two of them in the playhouse kitchen, in make-believe, imagination sparking. I sense her composure, her inner life.

Each of these enchanting essays contains its own delights, wisdom, lyricism, humour, compassion, so much for intellect and heart. The most precious to me are those of the solitary childhood where ‘honeysuckle and quisqualis twined over verandah railing, intoxicating with their sweet and medicinal odours …’ I am reassured by those things and places of Barbara’s earliest memory that have stayed the same – geraniums and gerberas; hanging baskets of soft ferns; mango trees and persimmons; frangipani, yellow at its centre. Blackman is such a Queenslander in her love of colour, particularly yellow.

No more tender words of family reminiscence have been put on paper than those in ‘Travelling Solo on a Bicycle Built for Two’, stories of Barbara’s dearest, her building blocks of resilience, courage and character. Coralie, her twin, lived for only sixteen days but has been with Barbara for every one since. ‘Remember the pram for two that our mother kept? She rode you in it with the memory of me in its empty space. We came into this world as a bicycle built for two. Let us ride together.’ Intense loss and longing suffuses this haunting soliloquy. Barbara’s father died when she was three. He too became her enduring companion, a source of comfort when she was ‘alone and sodden with tears’, times when she was ‘miserable, defeated, abandoned, desperate’. His voice has accompanied her across life – ‘go forward’, ‘dance lightly’. She has.

Grandmas in flowered aprons and flowery dresses gave Barbara kindness in spades, planned treats, passed on lessons for life. The little Scottish granny was her favourite, tied by blood, thick braw Scots blood. The constant star in her sky, her mother Gertrude, read to her – Grimm and Dickens, not elves and fairies. Words, words, words. Barbara fell in love with them and decided when she was four to gather them in, to be a writer.

It is no surprise that Barbara became a relentless contributor to ABC Radio’s The Argonauts at seven, causing controversy with her precocious talent. No surprise either in her starting a diary when she was ten, a habit that came and went in significance and attention. ‘Miles of letters’ to ‘lonely gents in the armed services’ began her pen-friending and a lifetime of correspondence, the best known with our wondrous poet Judith Wright. I am pleased to have some of my own letters from Blackman tucked away in their brown envelopes.

Poetry danced words on her page. We hear and sense and feel it in all that Blackman writes. Elegant, spare, crisp, concise, revealing, witty, delicious, beguiling, her essays are characterised by a vitality and urgency of rhythm. Sometimes a breathlessness comes through minimalism, her paring back, her rigour and energy. Time is taken to make sure things are both beautifully and exactly recorded and described. Barbara is a straight shooter, always honest. There is nothing wobbly about her, not on her pages, nor in her conversation. She loves to talk and her essays are utterly engaging, full of insightful observation, encouraging, giving. Her company has an ease infused with generosity. Sometimes she catches you unaware; always in play her rare skill and exceptional capacity for true listening. She delights in the occasion, friendship, ‘togethernessing’.

I have been enriched by lovely times beside her, whispering at a concert, eavesdropping on her exchanges with my husband, Michael, about their alma mater Brisbane State High, our great public school. ‘Sprawled on their separate provinces … all in full view of the headmaster’s watchtower, boys in long pants and girls bosomed and black-stockinged exchange glances, nicknames, notes.’

There are tidbits galore to charm, to tickle, bringing smiling recognition. Commentaries about knees, toys, the Olympic torch relay; about pockets – ‘safe places for dreams’; about washing day – ‘I know of no sweeter luxury than going to bed between sheets of unbleached calico sundried on dewy grass’. There are gems to treasure in her taking author Edna O’Brien to the Louvre for the first time. The lady with green eyes wished desperately that she could translate it all into words for Barbara – ‘Oh God, if only you could see this still life of Cézanne’s. Even the oranges have souls.’

Blackman has spoken of her blindness, teaching us so much that we should know, that we need to understand in our shared humanity. Near the time of her graduation from the University of Queensland, at twenty-one, she was told she had optic atrophy, that she could expect a rapid decline in her poor vision. Her essay ‘Seeing from Within’ includes the powerful address she presented at the University of Sydney’s Great Hall in 1997: ‘Blindness is a rich interior territory, a mystery, a different kind of seeing. Blindness is my gift. We do not choose our gifts. Our gifts choose us. Our task is to learn to use them well, let ourselves be well used by them.’ The writer has translated the ideas and the philosophy of her inspiring words into practice every day of her life.

All My Januaries is a text of gorgeous reading about a good life – happiness, beauty, fine values. A joyousness shines through the tough gullies, the dark nights. There is a light that surrounds Barbara Blackman. We see it in her philanthropy, her support for our artists, their paintings, our galleries, for music, our musicians, their festivals, our composers.

These essays share with us her ‘glimpse of the great, the great universe and its intimacy and how to live and how to know things’.

– Quentin Bryce, AD, CVO, Brisbane 2016

Pleasures of Life: Words

I

All I have ever wanted is for people to read to me. My mother read to me from earliest memory but did not, thank God, ever give me elves and fairies. Instead, she led me straight into Grimm, a first step towards Dickens, her bookshelf. From those Grimm Brothers I first felt the rumble and whinny, the wideness and deepness of cunning words.

To me, words were tangible, living things, hypnagogic. I felt the taste and touch of them. I cuddled up with words and wound them round me. I sang words to myself, heard and misheard. From a then-popular song I learned, ‘When I rishise a-smiling’ and thought I taught myself to properly rishise. I rishised in all directions to my satisfaction, unremarked upon by any adult. At Sunday school, like other adherents, I sang about the cross-eyed bear, but never found him anywhere; at Christmas about the shepherds who washed their socks by night, meaning of course their stockings, to hang up (wet?) for Santa; also about little children who were ‘reddened yellow, blackened white’, who were all precious in His sight, and knew, of course, that any child striped or tartaned with His colourful mix would be precious in anybody’s eyes. I loved the beginning of one of the Peter Rabbit books: ‘It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is soporific.’ I ate the lettuce growing in our back garden and waited in vain for ‘soporific’ to happen to me and decided it must happen only to boys.

We lived in a steep and hilly part of Brisbane. The kid up the road tried to ride his new bike down the hill, fell off, cut his head so badly he had to have stitches. Why didn’t he do what Jack did when Jill came tumbling after – have it bandaged with vinegar and brown paper? I found out the difference between storybooks and reality, and acquired my own story, incubating my own doppelgänger writer self.

I leapt out of home and nursery rhymes into school and proper learning. There were bridges, or at least crossing planks: tongue twisters, which, it seems, I can still cleverly remember in old age. ‘She sells sea shells on the sea shore’, which sloshes into ‘She shells sea cells on the she-saw’. Then there was Peter Piper, who picked a peck of pickled peppers, and, hardest to say very very fast, ‘Red Lorry Yellow Lorry’, because you can feel your tongue twisting. For a while I sat next to a girl who stammered, I used to rub her back whenever it happened. Poor stammerers – it must be like having the ball with fingers too slippery to hold it. Being tongue-tied is different, although being temporarily deprived of words through getting-the-shakes nervousness can be effective on stage if well done.

Us Queenslanders had the best twister – still good to recall and pass on:

Whether the weather be fine,

or whether the weather be not,

we’ll weather the weather,

whatever the weather,

whether we like it or not.

In our games we made speeches beginning not with the grown-up serious (sourious) ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, but with something sweeter on the lips, ‘Lollies and Jellybeans’.

My uncle, Fred Peters, went to America and sent me streams of books from there: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for my sixth birthday, all the Pollyanna books, the Chronicles of Avonlea, Little Women, Eight Cousins and follow-ons, and, mightily, a Webster’s Dictionary. So I brought myself up on American spelling: ‘odor’ instead of ‘odour’, ‘color’ instead of ‘colour’ and using plentiful ‘x’s and ‘z’s, surprized at every junxion.

I was forty when my first book was published. The Little Lives of Certain Chairs, a Table or Two and Other Inanimates of Our Acquaintance was affectionately known as Certain Chairs, although the title endangered it to being shelved in the Homewares department. It was published by the Alma Mater, the University of Queensland Press, whose director at that time, Frank Thompson, was an American and allowed my spelling. Trouble came thirty years later when Penguin decided to re-publish without the American taint.

I grew up. However, I did not put aside childish things. They were too enjoyable. I wrote a suite of Little Poems for Little People in the 1950s – mostly quatrain – when my own children were part of our daily doings. I circulated them myself, typing and carbon-papering them out on coloured paper, cutting and stapling them into little booklets for all my little friends.

Some sixty years later, I was at a Temenos Academy Conference in Oxford, England, and gleaned a telephone number for Mary Boyd (married at different times to artists John Perceval and Sidney Nolan), who was now living in the West Country. She had been my intense and intimate friend for twenty years or more, and when I phoned her house, her daughter, now a fine woman in her sixties and also a painter, answered the call. I announced myself. A pause. ‘Oh, Barbs.’ She sounded like a balloon blowing up, and then burst out:

‘A leaf blew in the kitchen door.

I don’t know what it’s looking for.

There’s no grass here. There’s only floor.

I think this leaf is lost for sure.’

One of my Little Poems. I was thrilled to bits. There ensued a wonderful exchange: two old ladies saying to each other across the rainswept miles of England, ‘I love you’, ‘I love you’, morphing into ‘I’m so grateful you were in my life’ – a wonderful moment of words, distance, voice, love.

As one ages, one comes closer to Beckett’s ‘terminal sadness’, Matthew Arnold’s ocean bringing ‘the eternal note of sadness in’. How splendid to have poets bearing us up. How would we ever get on without them? I wish, I wish that the library of my memory was more well-stocked. I envy friends who can remember miles and miles of poetry – and what a metaphor that is!

The first word that every child loves is the sound of their own name as something that belongs just to them. People are always saying it to them so they feel it implanted within their being. And I had a good one, especially as pronounced by the Scottish side of my family, rolling the ‘r’ and, later in life, by my French husband doing the aspirate, sounding me quite exotic: Bahbahrah.

Before I could read for myself, I thought of words as solid entities. I thought of long words as jumping along the page and of short words as hoppity-hopping between them, each page of print a houseful of linked words.

My mother, in her schooldays, had failed by one word to win the All-Queensland Spelling Bee. The word was ‘idiosyncrasy’, which I got off pat in case the same thing ever happened to me. By five I could spell probably the three longest words in the world: ‘Indooroopilly’, learned from tracing the letters on the seat of our local railway station platform; ‘Worcestershire’, from the hoarding on the opposite platform for Holbrooks sauce, with its label of a red-rosy-faced waiter, the bottle of black sauce sitting proudly on his tray; and ‘ornithorhynchus’, which every Queensland kid could spell even if they had never set eyes on a platypus.

Good children with kind parents got a weekly comic, mine Bubbles, which was swappable for Film Fun. Inspired by a cartoon of two scallywags turning the notice TO LET outside a cottage, by the insertion of one letter, into TOILET, we bold scallywags took to the sign on our school gate with after-hours scrapers and cleverly turned it to PLEASE SHIT THE CAT and were not found out. With stolen blackboard chalk we inscribed self-evident truths on the short bitumen road from school gate to railway station, thus: BOYS FUCK GIRLS and GIRLS FUCK BOYS. This time we were found out.

I was still in Third Babies class. The silvery ten-foot-tall and carbolic-soap-clean teacher had me bailed up. I felt the devil get into me, a determination to get this sham-shamed woman to say the naughty word before I would answer her accusation truthfully. She said it and then, of course, I suddenly remembered and owned up.

Punishment for little girls was to make them stand in conspicuous solitary confinement in the triangular cave made by the piano and the corner of the room. Uniform had to be taken off and thrown over to the teacher, not to be returned until the humiliation was sufficient. A boy called Tommy Tickle, who talked too much, was wrapped up in brown paper and tied with string to be posted to the police station. Tommy Tickle resisted posting. Upgraded class penance was to be kept in to write out a hundred lines, such as ‘I will not do whatever again’. However, we wrote the lines vertically, a column of a hundred ‘I’s, then a hundred ‘will’s – having the experience, one might say, but rather missing the message.

At seven, I inherited my first wireless set. I took to writing little pieces and sending them into a children’s program called Mike, the Magazine of the Air and hearing them read out. ‘Mike’ was later juggernauted down by the Argonauts Club, structured on the classic Greek journey of Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, us members anonymous, known by ship name and number. I was a first-nighter, Castor 28, my framed Golden Fleece certificate still hangs on my wall, its oath a guide for any child. The hour-long evening program took us children seriously, gave us talks on music, art, nature, literature, and invited our contributions. Relentlessly I wrote into all sections, but especially to the literary component hosted by Anthony Inkwell, whom I discovered, some long years later, to be the poet A.D. Hope. I loved to make for each letter a decorative heading, a sort of grand entrance. Some of my poems were published in The ABC Weekly magazine and caused controversy of the ‘If a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl wrote this, I’ll eat my hat’ variety. So, I published another poem about people eating their hats, accompanied by a critique of A.D. Hope’s view of poetry. This came out with some illustrations, which my mother proudly cut out for her scrapbook.

My magnum opus was a novel in umpteen chapters, simply called Adventure, probably quaint stuff. When I met Hope years later, he said he had kept it all, but then it was lost in a house fire that destroyed all his papers. Anyway, I had already decided at the age of four, while waiting for school to start, that I was going to be a writer, spend my life with words. A decade later, I decided I must write under the pseudonym Michael Lawrence, or become a famous woman writer, married to a man who would have to come at midnight and carry me away in his arms, prising me from my writing desk, and kiss me to sleep. Where was the naughty word then?

In Big School, there were libraries of sticky-fingered books in paper jackets. I took out Lasseter’s Last Ride by Ion Idriess, about the fabulous lost reef of gold in the inland desert and later in life traversed that country with a man who said he knew exactly where it was, and probably did: the great R.M. Williams. We acted little plays. I was Flora MacDonald helping in the escape of Bonnie Prince Charlie, over the seas to Skye. And, later, I went there too. As Christo wrapped up beaches and parks in plastic, I wrapped up my experiences in words, parcelled them up in diaries and letters. I leapt ahead with one diary by beginning each day right through with ‘Got Up’ in green ink, and lived to see my prediction come true.

After I left home I wrote my mother thrice fortnightly, in lieu of keeping a diary. Long, long letters about those eventful days in Melbourne – us new wave painters from other cities coming onto the stage vacated by the luminaries of the 1940s, like Albert Tucker, Yosl Bergner, Sidney Nolan, after their diaspora to Europe – the forming of the new Contemporary Art Society, the eruption of new galleries, the Gallery School, the suburban colleges, the private night classes that I cobbled with my full-time life-class nudities.

Most marvellous was my account of the opening of the Gallery of Contemporary Art. We all stood pressed hard against the walls of the back-lane-converted warehouse – walls ingeniously architected with metal lattice masking rough concrete, lest at one buckle twang it should all fall down, laden with its precious loading of paintings gifted by the new geniuses – that momentous day when John and Sunday Reed reappeared out from the mystic vale of Heide to take on the commercial side of art by managing a gallery.

So many more hectic events from the times: letters with ‘KEEP THIS’ printed large at the top. I knew my mother kept them in the big round spotted hatbox under her bed. However, when she was making the house ready to take in a couple of university students, she cleaned the best room out, burned the old hatbox stuff, burned anything in handwriting but kept my roneoed uni lecture notes. Oh the power of the printed word!

My brilliant career came down to the occasional publication of the odd piece or poem in obscure magazines, not the sort of thing to be accounted for in the maternal scrapbook. Particularly, I got published in the bi-monthly embryonic Barjai, a literary magazine for creative youth, my peer group late of Brisbane State High School. Max Harris later gave it review