The Glass Canoe, page 1
DAVID IRELAND was born in 1927 on a kitchen table in Lakemba in south-western Sydney. He lived in many places and worked at many jobs, including greenskeeper, factory hand, and for an extended period in an oil refinery, before he became a full-time writer.
Ireland started out writing poetry and drama but then turned to fiction. His first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. In the next decade he published five further novels, three of which won the Miles Franklin Award: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future.
David Ireland was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981. In 1985 he received the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for
his novel Archimedes and the Seagull.
David Ireland lives in New South Wales.
NICOLAS ROTHWELL is the author of Heaven and Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Journeys to the Interior and The Red Highway. He is the northern correspondent for the Australian.
ALSO BY DAVID IRELAND
The Chantic Bird
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner
The Flesheaters
Burn
A Woman of the Future
City of Women
Archimedes and the Seagle
Bloodfather
The Chosen
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Copyright © David Ireland 1976
Introduction copyright © Nicolas Rothwell 2012
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First published by Macmillan Publishers Australia 1976
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Hard Core by Nicolas Rothwell
The Glass Canoe
The most steadfast tradition of Australia’s cultural establishment is its resolve to forget the recent past. If there are achievements, dishonour them; if there are masterworks, neglect them, consign them to some discreet scrapheap of obscurity. The past can make people uncomfortable: many of those who survive from that strange place know more than us; they have seen more; their perspectives, most alarmingly, are different, and cast doubt on the universal validity of our own.
Of course this phenomenon is pretty familiar everywhere. Writers, artists and dramatists routinely go into a reputation slump once dead, or once their urgent heyday is done. They seem somehow tainted by their time, caught up in its delusions, representative of trends and attitudes we incline in later, more enlightened, years to disparage or mock. Often these disappearances are permanent: the mid-grade and the modish fade away, and we never hear their names again; they become no more than pale references for historians, evidence of views and customs that would be unthinkable without the lengthy explaining notes of scholars.
Sometimes, though more rarely, those vanished names return, like comets swinging back into proximity with the sun, their magnitude increasing as their approach draws nearer and the tail of blazing light behind them lengthens across the sky. Is the time at hand for the reappearance of the Ireland comet? Can he be assigned a place in the thin firmament of fixed Australian literary stars?
The story of David Ireland’s rise and eclipse is a tale from an earlier century, when literary romances were all dramatic elevations and giddying falls from grace. The writer was born in Sydney and raised in the city’s north-west. He took a range of jobs that find echo in his books: as a greenkeeper, as a refinery worker. By 1968 he was a novelist with a work in print; in 1971 he published The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, a book that received the Miles Franklin Award, as, in 1976, did the book you now hold in your hands. This was the reputation peak. The books, and prizes and honours, kept on, for several years, and one can almost imagine an alternative time path in which Ireland’s late saga, The Chosen, released to virtual silence in 1997, had a vast success and its author enjoyed an Indian summer of prestige and acclaim.
Almost. But no. Crack open the pages of The Glass Canoe, reader in waiting, and you’ll see why. The book has traction. It pulls you in. It’s the hard core. It’s art, not entertainment; action, not plot. It’s the lurking, dark beast of fear and beauty at the heart of Australian life. It is all we know, and all we seek to put behind us, and all that the literary world has struggled to evade and overcome. It has a geography, physical and social: it’s what lies beyond the beach; beyond the shore; Australia beyond the line of coastal suburbs and their aspirations. The set-up is simple. Ireland works this way: he disdains surface marks of coherence, he has no time for the long forms of narrative. It’s fragments, for him, snatched scenes, glimpses that show all.
This book is an anatomy: it tells the tale of The Southern Cross, a hotel, fairly clearly situated in Northmead, western Sydney, downwind of the Clyde refinery stacks, far from the city centre ‘where tall buildings stood, rich castles lit up all over like burning buildings with fire still feeding inside’. The hotel regulars are the book’s cast. They drink, they brawl, they dream, they weep. The episodes are short; they stitch together; they make up a mosaic. The view those fragments build up is hard to bear. The world is empty; its routines revolve round alcohol, blood and sex.
Even for a reader of our time, replete as our environs are with images of sensual abandon and cinematic gore, the going is tough. Indeed it is almost unthinkable that a modern publisher would dare to send the Canoe, stuffed as it is with words of sexism, with prejudice and with brutal, escalating, unending violence, out into the world of literary festivals and cultural promotion tours. What did Ireland’s contemporaries think, when they reviewed him and elevated his reputation, if briefly, to the skies? The quality of the writing spoke, of course, for itself. It was sinew, it was the feel of life. And in its quality of attack it had no competitors, just as it has none now. The context was also striking. The publication time was the twilight of Whitlam’s Australia. The gilded paragon of Australian letters was Patrick White, who had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1973, and who published his sprawling, mythographic, moralising A Fringe of Leaves in the same year Ireland’s slim Canoe appeared—and it is an amusing thing to think of these two new releases in the bookshops, perhaps at Lesley McKay’s in New South Head Road, Double Bay, competing for the shelf space, but needing to be kept apart for fear their utterly divergent worldviews might produce a spontaneous annihilation of the cosmos.
Critics were kind, if cautious. The venerable Douglas Stewart in the National Times felt Ireland had identified in the pub ‘the last shaky refuge from industrialism’. The Penguin blurb suggested there was a degree of sardonic humour in the scenes of carnage and despair Ireland had sketched: ‘Perhaps it’s all to be taken on a bent elbow with another swallow.’ They were different times. Australians knew what Ireland was painting was there: you could still stroll down from your neat townhouse in Carlton or Edgecliff and wind up in a hotel where men with horizon eyes gazed at the race-screen and the aroma of stale beer hung like a sentence in the air. And of course you still can today, but those parts of Australia are now, for the most part, safely cordoned off, far from where books are read, and the books that once portrayed that other Australia are no longer seen as central to our literary life. Ireland’s writing journey continued: the establishment moved on to other, gentler books, with attitudes that did more to polish the moral virtues of the reading class.
The inescapable suspicion forms that Ireland was admired, and celebrated, not just as the hard voice of the people but as the chronicler of that world’s demise. And The Glass Canoe is cast as the tale of the old hotel’s passing. Even in the early pages it looks to the narrator figure like an illuminated tomb, ‘a sort of past solidified in masonry’. The Southern Cross is on the verge of being rebuilt. Its regulars are the flotsam of history, the losers on the refuse heap. But was that Ireland’s tilt? One reads The Glass Canoe today with
The book makes up a tapestry: many perspectives, many actors, their words, their breathing, the ways they mesh and move. The landscape, the sun and moon in the sky above the city, the gleam of the rainbow in fuel oil spilt on the pavement, the different kinds of grass blades in a greensward: fragments, a world of fragments—but over it all, spread over it like the heavens, an authorial perspective. That perspective is the thing that hits the reader most forcefully. Ireland is presenting, in his hotel, an Australia: an Australia now largely without literary voice. It is vernacular Australia, and it would be tempting, but not quite right, to see as its spokesman the articulate inebriate who steps up to the bar to speak from section to section, Alky Jack: ‘Never be ashamed of being an Australian,’ he’d say. ‘There’s plenty just as bad as us in the world.’ His audience looks around: the saloon’s a shambles, dirt everywhere, smoke too—now gone, its curtain never to be glimpsed again in a back bar’s filtered light. Alky Jack resumes: ‘Anything can happen. We started off in chains, we do our best when we’re not pushed, we pay back a good turn, say no to authority and upstarts, we’re casual, we like makeshift things, we’re ingenious, practical, self-reliant, good in emergencies, think we’re as good as anyone in the world, and always sympathise with the underdog.’
It’s not Ireland’s simple view, and he subverts it in the book right away—but it’s hard not to feel those words were written with a bit of love as well as a degree of irony. Hard not to feel that Australia is in your hands when you hold this book. An old Australia, wild, and picaresque, one worth a few words, the words Ireland pronounces, almost like a blessing, as he ends his phantasmagoria, still, as in every sentence, at perfect pitch: ‘I went to the bar to get us a small fleet of glass canoes to take us where we wanted to go. I thought of the tribes across Australia, each with its waterhole, its patch of bar, its standing space, its beloved territory. It was a great life.’ How resonant the past tense sounds, a deeper tense now, as we glance back today on this jewel in our literary tradition, long out of print. How much we have lost that still lives with us.
SHOOTING BUTTERFLIES
Down the back of the Southern Cross kids were shooting butterflies. Occasionally pellets tinkled harmlessly off the tinted glass windows of the saloon bar or made little dints in cars in the car park.
They never shot at the big neon sign riding high above the pub. It was a proud sign: The Southern Cross. They had a natural reverence for neon.
Butterflies flew free. They dazzled the eye and the mind with their freedom. Flight was something we could never know.
At night when the butterflies had gone to bed and there were no moving targets to hit, they’d pot fireflies. We don’t get fireflies down the back of the Southern Cross; fireflies were street light globes. Somebody put little shields round the globes to keep out rocks from shanghais or the human arm, but BBs or slugs couldn’t be kept out. Sometimes the street was in darkness for a mile in both directions. They were sodium lights. Perhaps that was the difference.
I used to do it once, but I’m not a kid anymore. None of us was too happy about it: globes weren’t moving targets. It was against the rules to aim at a butterfly when it stopped, you had to go for it on the wing. It made for a lot of stray shots.
In summer, what with daylight saving, the air-rifles would be popping till nine at night and by then the drunks from the pub would be too full to chase us. Anyway, they were our fathers or brothers or someone up the street.
When I could pass for eighteen I was initiated, and became a man. I went inside the pub and bought the beers. Before that we used to sit out in the cars and let Mick go in, or Flash, because they looked eighteen. At fifteen I was fresh-faced, I took longer to graduate.
On hot days we jumped fully clothed into our bottomless beer glasses and pushed off from shore without a backward look. Heading for the deep, where it was calm and cool.
The Mead was our territory, the Southern Cross our waterhole. The next tribe west drank at the Bull, and on the other side the nearest tribe holed up at the Exchange. While your tribe’s waterhole flowed, you never went walkabout to another tribe’s waterhole.
Unless there was trouble, some little matter to be settled.
HE ISN’T A PANTS MAN
After you have a fair bit to drink of an afternoon the future is sort of blank; the present is all there is. Sometimes you wonder. Where will I be when. Not often, though. Next moment you see a splash of rust on the tiles about belt level. Rust? Wet a finger, touch it. Ten to one it’s sticky.
It brings your wonderings smartly back to the present.
Out the door you see, around four o’clock, men coming from all directions, walking lightly between flying traffic, flittering and darting towards the Southern Cross, moths towards the light.
By five the place is crowded. The noise.
I had this job in an office for a while and what the pub noise reminded me of was going down to the factory. As soon as you opened the door the blast hit you. It was everywhere. There was so much of it that one of the old hands was taken sick one day and trying to tell someone what was the matter, but this guy couldn’t hear and thought he was just raving on, and turned away and the old joker kicked the bucket right there on the concrete floor. I didn’t like that noise, it tried to take you over, leaving no room for anything else. You couldn’t think. Unreal, it was. I got out of that job quick.
The noise at the pub was just as loud, but quite different. You could sort of swim in it after a while. By the time you got four or five schooners into you there seemed to be a cushion in your head, anyway. But that’s not why I loved to let it wash over me and carry me along. It’s because it was people-noise, not machine-noise. What silences there were—not many—were shallow. Like a few inches of water over sandflats.
The first time I drank any decent amount I got back home and wrote down on a bit of paper what I felt, like the feeling on the backs of your hands, your lips, the way your eyes feel. Where that paper is now I haven’t got a clue. I was very young.
They call me Meat Man. They reckon when I grow up I’ll be as big in the meat department as Fuse. He’s an old rodeo rider, very bandy. Instead of being a ton of dynamite with an inch and a half fuse, Fuse is eight stone wringing wet but in the meat department he’s never been beaten. When he’s challenged in the matter of length he’ll only bring out enough to win the challenge. No one has ever seen the whole thing.
Yet for all that he isn’t a pants man.
SUPPLIES
Men came round, usually Friday and Saturday, and sold things cheap from the backs of their vehicles. They’d go to the licensee, ask could they sell in the pub.
‘What are you selling?’
‘Shoes. Straight off the boat.’ Never which boat, it could be a Manly ferry.
‘How much you asking?’
‘Five bucks.’
The licensee would push out his lips, look doubtful, say nothing.
‘What size do you take?’ the hustler would say when he saw it was the only way.
‘Eight.’
Out would come eights. ‘They’re yours.’
‘No.’
‘Go on, take ’em. Do me a favour.’
‘I don’t know . . .’
‘It’d please me if you would.’
‘OK. Thanks. Sure, go for your life.’ And the salesman would put fifty cents on the next ten pairs to cover it. After all, he got them very cheaply. Left in the hand they raised blisters.
