The Coast

Sun Herald

Sunday January 11, 2009

Tom Keneally

In the first of a six-part series of memoirs by Australian writers, Man Booker Prize winner Tom Keneally recalls one memorable summer spent on the NSW North Coast, dodging death and courting romance.

It was a summer so far back that the population of Australia was a mere 10 million. It was a summer before the onset of Vietnam. People were still mourning the recent shooting of John F. Kennedy. Bob Menzies was still prime minister and well did people sing, "There'll always be a Menzies..." It was still a time when, though the words hadn't been invented, everyone dressed like a dag and a bogan - a national duty. I read about a bunch of Liverpool hoodlums named The Beatles and what a stain on civilisation they were. That's how long ago it was.

It was also one of those years when suddenly most families had cars, and questions to do with cars were suddenly part of people's discourse. I'm not

going to get boring about it, but I'll say briefly that I possessed a yellow-and-white second-hand Vauxhall Victor, which I thought had a residue of modernity and style. Being a dag, I did not frequently transport young women in the Victor.

It was generally parents, aunts and my grandfather. Sometimes I drove it to

work, sometimes I didn't, since government transport didn't break down as

much as the Victor did. I gradually found that the high-school kids I taught thought it an unsmooth vehicle.

Once it saved my life. I had unexpectedly had a novel accepted, and then published to thunderous lack of recognition. So I decided to write another one, and to give myself a basic income while doing it, I collected insurance payments around the streets of Newtown part-time. If a person's policy lapsed, you had

to give them a part of their premium back, and there was a woman living in a terrace in Newtown whose policy had expired. I needed to return 30 shillings

to her. As I was at her door giving her the money on behalf of the insurance company, her huge and drunken husband came down the street.

I don't know if the former policyholder had a history, or if the man was berserkly jealous, but as he saw me pay her the money, he bayed with rage and came running at me. My unreliable Victor was down the street and I vaulted the wrought-iron railings of the little front yard and sprinted for it. But I knew the engine never started at once, and the slightest indiscretion with the accelerator "flooded" it. I swung myself into the front seat, turned the ignition, and the engine instantly sang. Later, after I was safely on the far side of King Street, I realised that at least some of the man's fury would have been redirected to the 30-bob woman.

Anyhow, to the question of summer! There was a girl; brown-haired, green-eyed, straight in posture, with a face both seraphic and sensuous. She nursed my mother after an operation in a hospital that no longer exists. My mother gave her a copy of my first novel. She told my mother she loved it. My mother told me. I asked the nurse out, etc, etc. Novels, even bad ones, do a lot for a young man's social confidence.

Summer came over us in all its robust humidity. The girl was due to go overseas by steamer. I pursued her, though. I was the insistent one. I could,

like most writers, talk a smooth line. We became engaged, and with hardly any money we looked for a house, as the young could and did then. Her mother -

a splendid, enduring woman who had raised six kids, lost one in childhood and then sweated through the years during which her other son flew more than 80 missions in the RAF's Bomber Command - intended to supplement our deposit with an amount that was a lot then. And, of course, the day was nigh when I would dispense with the cost of running the Victor and we would travel in the girl's jaunty and newer Mini Minor.

One afternoon, I mentioned to my girl and her mother that I might give the Victor to my mother and father, who had never had a car. As soon as I said it, I identified for the first time that unambiguous coldness women can emanate.

I realised I had made a massive mistake; one potentially fatal to my hopes. Obviously, we needed the funds that would come from its sale. As ever when bereft of wisdom, I talked for all I was worth.

At the time I uttered my stupid suggestion, we were due to head off on

a journey in her Mini Minor to encounter what I considered the epicentre of Australian summer - Crescent Head, a wonderful beach in the area my parents grew up in. Crescent Head is still the very spirit of Australian summer, with its

two great headlands named Big Nobby and Little Nobby, the front beach stretching away 20 kilometres to Hat Head, the back beaches running away south to the north bank of the Hastings River across from Port Macquarie.

That country had the power to make arguments I couldn't. We were reconciled enough to start the journey together.

But the Pacific Highway was as disgraceful and deadly as now. We left

Sydney in her little green scrap of a car and were fine until about the flood plain

of the Johns River, where the customary afternoon shower fell earlier than usual.

As a truck approached us, the rain on the hot road sent the Mini into a lazy sideways skid, rear wheels first, into the wrong lane. I don't think I braked, I don't think I did anything except recognise my powerlessness. At a late moment before impact, the Mini found its purchase again and we righted ourselves within the narrow margins that pernicious highway permitted us.

We turned off the highway just south of Kempsey and came down through paperbark swamps to Crescent Head. My faux pas of the week before seemed nothing now, beside the great fact of surviving.

On the very best day of our time there, we walked at first light along Front Beach for miles from the village, fished with hand-lines and - on a driftwood fire - cooked whiting and flathead in the dunes. There I read her poetry from The Oxford Book Of Modern Verse (depending on better men to do my talking for me) that I'd brought in the kitbag. There was no ambiguity in life that day. Beyond the horizons there might have been darknesses. There might have been darkness - apart from a random piece of mercy that mongrel of a road gave us - along the Pacific Highway, and there might have been darknesses in our own souls. But only the most vivid light was visible that day, and the authenticity of our survival and joy drove out everything else. To avoid heat sickness, wading in shallows across wet, firm sand, we took ourselves home before the worst of the day.

The trip back home was hot, of course. And uneventful. And certain. "

Searching For Schindler, by Tom Keneally (Vintage, $35), is out now.