Cardboard Constructions

There’s a nature reserve at the end of the street where the Whitlams lived in Cabramatta. It’s a narrow parcel of land curving around Cabramatta Creek, next to the Holiday Inn. I saw a sign about a flying fox colony there, and such is my level of suggestibility that when the air filled with a ping pinging all around, I assumed it was the foxes, though my two eyes, with their almost perfect vision, couldn’t see any.

This ping pinging sound, once I’d got a head full of it, followed me back up the street and into the house. Now I was attuned, I couldn’t stop hearing it, and even from quite a distance away, those pings would reach me in certain corners of the kitchen and bedroom. It was a cool sound with a soft edge, like a laser sound effect… I liked the idea that the Whitlam family might have lived their days with this same minimalist song in the background: Gough and Margaret and some of the kids are sitting around the table eating breakfast, making plans for the day, and all the while ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping.

I went to my desk in the room I’d been assigned for the week, what had once been the teen boys’ bedroom. I’d tried to tell Ali in the kitchen about the foxes and the pinging, but midway through I sensed the story didn’t quite add up and abruptly changed the subject. I checked the internet, and indeed, flying foxes aren’t known to make sounds like this. They screech and chatter – as I well knew. 

How human of me! Our minds make all kinds of improbable leaps like this because we are anticipatory creatures. We’re built for colouring raw perception with imagination, speculation, and memories: misfirings that lie unacknowledged until shown up. I extemporised in the search bar, looking for the right adjectives for the sound I was hearing, and soon identified the true originator as the bellbird, or bell miner.

The bellbird likes high canopies and sings all day, dawn to dusk. It is olive green, hard to spot, and common to remnant bushland areas.

I was on the Frank Moorhouse Residency with two other writers, Ali Jane Smith and Lur Alghurabi. We had been given a week together, in the house the Whitlam family had lived in for twenty years, until Gough’s ascendancy to Prime Minister. I’d scored a spot at the very last minute because another writer had fallen ill. The task was to write something that drew on an archive of books, mostly short story collections, that Moorhouse had donated to Western Sydney University. He’d intended to write about these books himself, as a lifelong student of both the short story and the anthology, five of which he edited over a thirty-year period. I thought of Gough and Frank as legendary influences on what we take for granted as the landscape of the arts in Australia. Gough Whitlam established the Australia Council and the first literature board grants for writers in the 1970s. In the same decade, Moorhouse was one of the chief campaigners and founders of what became the Copyright Agency. I met Moorhouse once, because he launched an issue of a university literary journal I had coedited. That night, to my delight, he pressed me on how we had made our editorial selections: had we been working to a theme? How did we manage the vexed problem of consensus? I found him to be a comradely spirit. At the time I met him, he was celebrating the publication of Cold Light, the last book in his Edith Campbell Berry trilogy, which won him the Miles Franklin. And I had just graduated from the shopping mall to a bookshop job.

Now our paths were crossing again.

Ali went straight for one of the few poetry anthologies. Lur picked up two volumes of women’s writing. Good gets for both of them. What was my thing going to be. The archive was stored in the shared office of Tegan Bennett Daylight and Felicity Castagna, creative writing lecturers at the university. By and large, the books were crappy, as Tegan had forewarned. Worn, dusty, testament to the values of the times they were written in. A pretty feral legacy. But I had not been under any illusions, had I?

Back at the Whitlam house I poured coffee into an ‘It’s Time’ mug, set myself up on the mid-century modern sofa and got stuck in. I’d been surprised by how loaded the collection felt. Most of the books I’d gathered up were from the 70s and 80s, and in no time at all I was drenched in shameless misogyny and other crimes of the era. There were moments of wonderful reprieve: in crept Paradise to Paranoia, a Queensland anthology from 1995 with a cracker of a short story about filming a cheap TV show on the Gold Coast (by Gleebooks’ own Morgan Smith!). But what began to intrigue me were the introductions to the anthologies. The introduction, I began to realise, was an arena where the editors would sling and serve across the various volumes. The arguments and postures themselves I have no desire to rehash. You have met twentieth-century men. But particular moves seemed to repeat, and I listed them:

The anthology introduction: some tropes

I thought I was on to something – perhaps not the most original idea ever, but something I could spin in my own poetic way. I could start by analysing Frank’s introductions, I thought – the source – and see where that led me.

Frank’s introductions are witty and feel offhanded. He theorises and identifies patterns. He has a point of view. Types of things he says:

Of the five anthologies Moorhouse edited, the first was Coast to Coast (1973) and the last was Best of Australian Short Stories (2004). The former had a broader mandate as a prose anthology: it wasn’t limited to a single genre. As such the final piece in it isn’t a story, or an essay, but an interview with a surfer, an editorial choice I enjoyed. The guy in the interview is a surfing champion, but midway through the conversation he admits he has other dreams. He yearns to rest his hands in soft clay and become a potter…

Perhaps to your relief, and certainly to my own, I didn’t get very far into my conceit of dissecting the introductory mode. After reading the interview with the surfer, I flicked back through the issue to see what else was there.

I came across a story with a really great title: ‘Packaging at its apostrophe best’. It had the feel of autofiction: its protagonist works at a box factory in Chippendale, where he begins nicking sheets of flatform cardboard, designed to be folded into ashtrays. He starts making up the ashtrays at home and is quite taken by their colours, the play of light on them at different angles. He gets the idea to assemble the sheets as a sculpture and acquires a large piece of Masonite to stick them on. He tells his girlfriend Katie about his great idea, and she pitches in to help:

It occurs to him that maybe he can write up the process of making the sculpture as a story, send it off somewhere with a photo of the sculpture, and have them published together. Katie ribs him a little, and he seems to tolerate that, but suddenly she isn’t in the picture anymore.

The story is told out of chronological order and structured in short sections, each with a subheading: the first being, You will gradually make up more of the ashtrays, and the last, He finally assembles all the ashtrays. These perspectival shifts (‘you’ to ‘he’) add a further element. The story includes some diagrams of the flatform ashtray, but there isn’t a photo of the sculpture itself. This disappointed me: I felt I needed to know what it looked like, and that the story had set up the possibility that I would get to know. But then when I flipped to his bio note, I found a photo of a scruffy young man with a sculpture stuck up on the wall behind him.

I liked this story instantly and completely. According to my notes, my initial impressions were: ‘it’s sculpture in the expanded field, several years pre-Rosalind Krauss!’ (rather lofty of me; I guess I was already thinking about its essay potential), and ‘a story can come out of anywhere, and it can especially come out of a factory’. That part is right and true.

I also wrote: ‘Is it interesting how I felt finding this story?’

I turned from my spot on the couch to Lur and Ali, and told them about this great story I found by ‘Damien White’, a name I hadn’t heard before. He doesn’t seem like a creep, I said. They hadn’t heard of him either, but pledged to keep an eye out for any more writing by him.

Soon Lur came up with the goods, a short story called ‘Young Man with Paddy Pallin Walking Boots’, another chef’s kiss title, published in The State of the Art: The mood of contemporary Australia in short stories, which Frank edited in 1983. In this story, fortune has favoured our protagonist, who is in Rome on a trip funded by a Literature Board grant. He and Katie are back together, but for how long? A man on the street tries to pick him up. The protagonist enters a church and places a 100 lire coin in a slot, illuminating a painting by Caravaggio. He puts in another coin to have another little look. And then another. Besotted, he goes in search of every Caravaggio in Rome. His search increases in urgency as he tries to drown out his jealousy over Katie’s London tryst, which he is pretending to be chill about. He describes the Crucifixion of St Peter:

The next day Ali found something else: an entry in a 1981 special issue of Australian Literary Studies dedicated to the short story form. In an ‘Author Statement’, Damien writes that ‘the book that has been the most important to me over the last few years, has been Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook for the kind of synthesis it attempts.’

The Golden Notebook! That bible of second-wave feminism, a feat of intellect that continues to dazzle and vex, that diagnoses many of the hypocrisies of the left, that tallies the sacrifices writers and artists make in pursuing their vocation. I’d first read The Golden Notebook in my early twenties, when I wasn’t ready to take much of it in. What had stuck with me then was one of Lessing’s repeating injunctions, voiced by her novelist protagonist, Anna Wulf: ‘Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It’s childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I’m scared of being alone in what I feel.’ Over the years that last part would rise up every now and then in my mind, for some reason.

I’d been resisting a quick google, enjoying the serendipity of what the archive turned up, with a little help from my friends. But now I simply had to know everything. Google didn’t get me very far. A couple more stories, an anthology Damien co-edited with Anna Couani in the early 80s, then nothing.

Pam Brown will know, I thought. Pam Brown the poet. I sent off an email. Then I shut my computer and grabbed my keys.

I was going to drive down to the Cabramatta shops to meet Lucy, my ex-partner, for dinner. But when I got in the car, something was amiss. There was a grocery bag on the passenger seat I didn’t recognise. I rummaged in it and found a brochure written in Thai. Then I looked out the windscreen and saw that my car was parked in front of me. I quickly made my exit. Side by side, the two cars were identical in colour, make, and model. Two 2007 blue Toyota Yarises. I’d clicked my button, but this imposter vehicle must have been unlocked. In the yard a woman was busily pulling out weeds. Her back was turned to me. I guessed it was her car and felt an exquisite wave of relief that I’d gotten away unseen.

At the restaurant Lucy tells me she wants to buy a new bed base, having recently moved house. She says she keeps being advertised this cardboard one with a concertina design that extends out. I say, hmm, and pull out my phone. This website custom makes anything you want out of cardboard. Like whole sets for high school theatre productions. I’m obsessed with their conference bollards and cardboard rope. Cardboard rope! She looks closely.

There’s a tonne of companies out there advertising this stuff with slogans like:

I longed to know what the cardboard rope looked and felt like, but I couldn’t justify spending $230 plus a $75 flat rate shipping fee to find out. I’d been searching for a job for months. I was taking on scraps of teaching and editing work, but freelancer budgets everywhere were drying up. The rent had increased $50 a week. All the advice I was getting was bad, and the same: I had to grit my teeth and numbers game it. A friend in similar circumstances reported doing their first AI interview. They walked into the office assuming there would be real people to meet and instead found themselves in an empty room, talking to a computer that transcribed their responses.

I imagined buying the bollards. I speculated on whether the materials would arrive preassembled in a large cardboard box of their own, or whether, as in Damien’s story, they’d be flatpacked, and I’d have to carefully read and follow some set instructions. I could see that being okay for the larger pieces, like the bases of the bollards, but could I assemble the rope that way? The rope probably required more skill – lots of tight and precise folding – than I had.

Once the bollards were unpacked and set up in my mind, I thought about where I’d put them. I imagined setting up a photo-shoot, thinking again of Damien and how satisfying it had been to discover the sculpture in the background of his headshot. I was being non-algorithmically influenced by him. This isn’t normally how we conceive of the role of literature. We don’t talk about the way it contrives to make us replicate a fictional character’s small and inconsequential choices.

As with many of the people I knew who had vivid imaginations and dreams of a better world, my apartment felt perpetually half done and unfinished. I had half a studio in my half a lounge room and a pink mat and pile of foam bricks and bolsters permanently scattered on the floor. There were a couple of artworks framed and stacked right below where I thought they would look good when hung, when I’d solved the problem of the couch. (The couch was a very aesthetic two-seater Tessa that drove me crazy to actually sit on, and I’d been wanting to replace it for years but couldn’t commit to an alternative, and now it needed some proper TLC to get back to good condition to sell with the accompanying armchairs I’d never used and had stored in the annex to my bedroom, a junk space I planned to clear out one day and fill with plants.) Instead of making an enclosure with one open part, as in the website image, I could position the bollards in a row and use them to split the room into two zones; it was imperative that part of the room remain reserved for yoga. 

By this point Lucy had long gone home. Driving past the train station, I’d seen someone walking a ferret. I was back in the teen boys’ bedroom, and Pam had come through with a response:

I closed the laptop and switched off the lamp. It was late in my little room at the Whitlam house, so late that even the bellbird had ceased its pinging…

Over the coming weeks, I speak to Gillian Leahy, who was Damien’s housemate in the early 70s. I speak to Anna Couani, with whom he co-edited two volumes of the literary anthology Island in the Sun. I speak to Jonathan Shaw, whose steady friendship with Damien began during their days as teenagers in the Marist Brothers. And I speak to the journalist David Leser, who, twenty years before my own search began, sketched out a version of the story I’m about to tell.

While I was exploring the thicket of the reserve near the Whitlam House, I’d been thinking about Frank Moorhouse and the way he liked to disappear out bush. This is a fact handpicked from his own self-mythologising. A bio note from 1983 states that ‘his interests include bushwalking and nightclubs’, while a note from a few years later indicates an expansion of taste: ‘his interests include bushwalking, nightclubs, and opera’. I wondered how his time in the company of nature shaped his thinking and writing, if it was an ingredient for how he could soar so high on moods and vibes in his writing yet remain so canny. I liked to think that bushwalking was one of my interests too. For years I’d been talking about putting together a camping kit so I could just jump in the car and go. I found this an admirable fantasy, the idea of living so spontaneously. It was tied to a separate fantasy I had about the rhythms of a nine-to-five working life: Friday afternoon, work’s done, jump in the car, a short time later pitch the tent, wake up in paradise. 

Reality check. There I was, tucked away in a suburban pocket, thinking about the bush while traipsing around sightless in my city clothes.

Gillian, on the phone, tells me what she knows. She and Damien had lived together for a couple of years in the early 70s. Part of the same Sydney Uni set, in each other’s pockets, sharehouses, sexual revolution, philosophy, feminism, drugs. They were both part of the leftist activist group Students for a Democratic Society. Damien was serious about writing. He was sort of shy, a cute guy. In the early 80s, Damien moved with his girlfriend to the Blue Mountains. They were building a place together. Then, one day, his girlfriend came home and he was gone.

A few facts about Damien. He was born into a large Catholic family in Adelaide. He joined a religious order at a young age and left during his university years. He studied mathematics at the University of Sydney. He had lots of girlfriends. He is deceased.

This is a story David Leser told me. One day:

When Damien disappeared, his car was found parked at Tamarama, his clothes and shoes in a neat pile on a nearby rock. The assumption was that he had suicided. But sometime later – weeks later – his friend Jonathan got a phone call from the police. A person in Queensland was trying to use Jonathan’s identity to get a driver’s licence. Maybe Damien was still out there. A body was never found.

When I meet Jonathan at his sunny Marrickville apartment, he is pleased that I’m so taken with Damien’s stories. On the phone I’d told Gillian that Damien felt like a kindred spirit, to which she had offered a long hesitant pause. To my earlier question of how it had felt to come across Damien’s story in the archive, the answer is: completely enlivening. It was fresh, imaginative, unassuming, aiming for a version of truth rather than some attempt at genius. And it was funny, the way he sends himself up in it, willing to air his shame and anxieties, free of the self-aggrandisement that characterised so much writing from men of that period. It was the work of an energetic young writer full of promise:

Damien’s story was the answer to a question Moorhouse airs in the Coast to Coast introduction, a question about what lives:

Damien’s story had interested me precisely because it wasn’t quite of the time. And I wasn’t part of Moorhouse’s assumed ‘we’ – I was a reader who didn’t exist yet.

Jonathan fills me in on earlier details of Damien’s life. They had met in the scholasticate of the Marist Brothers. The boys would pile in a minibus and drive across Sydney to attend their classes at Sydney Uni. One night they ended up at a pub, and Damien went to buy a beer, realising too late that he’d need money to pay for it. Being of the church, they had no money – only packed lunches and a small emergency allowance, which Damien would secretly save and spend on paperbacks.

It was the late 60s. In the evenings, a small group – Damien, Jonathan, and a couple of other friends – would gather around and listen to the latest Dylan record. They had their hideout, where they’d trespass the rules of The Great Silence that bound them at night. Jonathan missed a momentous evening. Damien and one of the other boys had admitted to each other they no longer believed in God. At that moment there was a tremendous boom of thunder and lightning struck a tree outside the window. Slightly shaken, they held firm in their newly professed atheism. Damien left the Brothers, and Jonathan soon followed.

Jonathan asks me if I have a copy of Damien’s book. I had already discovered that a collection of short stories existed, but I hadn’t yet found a copy. I tell him I’ve planned to go looking for it in the second-hand stores. He laughs. I think you’d have a hard time finding it there, he says. He explains that Damien had gone to a lot of trouble to put the book together. He had received several rejections from publishers and ended up putting it out himself. But he was hopeless on the promotion. His friends got copies. The rest lived in boxes under his bed. Jonathan had been a big champion of Damien’s writing. He’d given feedback on some of the stories and had helped him approach publishers. And he had a spare copy to give me.

I open it. The epigraph: ‘For my friends’.

The short story collection opened up a wider vantage on Damien’s interests as a writer. The stories firmly anchor him within the inner-Sydney university sharehouse milieu, during what was in some, certainly not all, ways a halcyon and more innocent time, where great experiments in living were made possible by far better social resources – free university, a dole you could live on – and before the coming disaster of HIV/AIDS. Monkey Grip, the ur-text of this period, provides insight into the life of a single mother; reading Damien’s stories, I was struck by the protagonist’s relationship to his masculinity, which comes across as awkwardly constructed, unsettled, under pressure. Our self-effacing protagonist suffers the blight of ambition; more than a couple of stories slyly twist to centre on his attempts to elicit feedback from his friends on the quality of his writing. He is petrified at the thought of being criticised. He is equally unable to receive any words of praise.
            From the story ‘Taking Jacky to the Shop’:

Damien’s stories present a candid record of the agonies of building a creative life. Of being carried along by an inexplicable passion before having cultivated the inner resources necessary to feel okay in the world. His attempts to make these challenges intelligible to the reader moved me, no doubt because I identified with a few of them, and also because in my late thirties, the same age as Damien when he staged his disappearance, I have stuck it out long enough to know a more peaceful and generous version of myself than the young woman burning red Moorhouse met that day of the journal launch.

The collapsing of the distinction between becoming a writer and becoming a person – between Damien and his character, between his character and me, between Damien and me – appears to be an effect of my immersion in these stories. For the protagonist, becoming a writer is his only conceivable path to personhood. To think of the pressure of those kinds of stakes. Gillian tells me that Damien kept all his short story acceptance and rejection slips stuck up on the wall of his bedroom. The acceptances went above a line of joinery, and the rejections, of course far more numerous, were stuck below. A stark ledger to carry into nightly dreams.

The protagonist in Damien’s stories moonlights under various guises. He takes jobs as a factory worker and officer cleaner, at pains to acknowledge that, due to his education, he has more mobility than his comrades and is just passing though. The stories he features in are situational comedies; the joke usually on him, the ‘situation’ quotidian, like dealing with a sharehouse ant infestation, or giving the right response to a friend’s romantic drama, or completing a course in cleaning:

As with ‘Packaging at its apostrophe best’, most of his stories are experiments in perspective. The protagonist’s adventures as a cleaner are relayed back to the reader while he and his girlfriend – a girlfriend being quite a useful prop for a short-story writer – mill about uneasily on an unnamed island. They are stranded due to the eruption of a regional conflict. He is casting about for a useful skill to contribute as they wait things out. As in ‘Young Man with Paddy Pallin Walking Boots’, the protagonist relays that he is in Europe thanks to a Literature Board grant. Damien himself was a grant recipient in the very first round offered; with thanks again Gough, and Frank. A lifechanging honour. The yank of the story is that the protagonist feels useless once faced with real world matters. One – or is it two? Or is it three! – young writers taking themselves far too seriously and their skill not seriously enough.

In the collection’s final story, ‘Epistle to the Gilgandrans’, the protagonist and his friend Charles, raised in the Presbyterian church, make up verses that reflect their ‘shared taste for the orotundities of scriptural language’. The protagonist decides to write them up. Once again there is a scene where the protagonist stages a reading of his work to very patient housemates and is left to sweat it out while he waits for a response. The epistles riff on Aboriginal place names of NSW in a lofty Testament style: ‘Gunnedah begot Gundaroo, he who dwelt where the evil Canberra later made his home’ and on and on. He reflects privately on the criticism he fears his more politically astute friends will air. The story (and book) ends:

This attempt to wriggle out of accountability has some charm to it, even as I find this play to irony – that great Australian illness – deeply fatiguing. Damien’s failure to more fully inhabit the consciousness of his wiser self – the way he writes and publishes the story anyway and gives it prominence at the book’s conclusion, as if asking for punishment, is symbolic to me of how his work, flawed and compelling, remained only fledgling. Because he stopped writing, he chose to disappear.

Anna fills in a couple more details. Damien had trouble trying to get the Blue Mountains house built, had been borrowing sums of money from different friends. He hadn’t told his girlfriend – when he disappeared, she got lumped with the debt. Anna was close to him for a few years. She said that collaborating on Island in the Sun was a happy time, seeking out submissions, getting together to paste up the anthologies in an inner-city terrace. In their second issue they published Ania Walwicz’s broiling and ageless poem ‘Australia’. Anna said the friendship started to drift because Damien joined EST, a self-development group that was popular during the 70s. I knew of it because it’s a plot point in the TV show The Americans. Damien started to become obsessive about positive thinking; he couldn’t handle any kind of negativity or critical thinking about personal experiences. She felt he was being annoyingly patronising. The last time she saw him, he came to repay a debt of $500, worried that she might need the money.

As Gillian reported to me, during those missing years, Damien had landed in Darwin and was studying tourism at the university. Later, he turned up in Hobart, where he completed a PhD in Sociology and got a job as an academic in the department. He was, by first-hand accounts, a favourite teacher among students and a cherished colleague. His thesis acknowledgement gives a glimpse of his life there:

When someone stages their own disappearance, we imagine a life of obscurity. Dusty towns, alcoholism, the mines. The people I spoke to were left with a chasm to fill, no closure on whether he was alive or dead, and not a clue as to the kind of life he might have made for himself. Gillian, being a filmmaker, had an image of him on a long road trip, looking through the windscreen into a miasma of purple Paterson’s curse. Anna always thought they could have made some great books together, had he stuck around. Jonathan paused trying to find the right words, but there weren’t any. For twenty years Damien was hiding almost in plain sight. He’d reverted to his birth name, Robert White. (Damien was his middle name.) And because there was another Robert White in his department at UTAS, Robert became known as Bob.

In the early 2000s, a family member followed up the missing persons case with the police. With the advent of the internet, they were able to locate him almost instantly.

But how does someone reckon with a life they have cut ties from so completely? And so long ago? Bob/Robert/Damien didn’t want to be found. After the police made contact, he survived three days before taking his life.

I was thinking about ongoingness. ‘Other forms of life’ is the phrase I used when I first emailed Pam. The trail seemed to run cold in the early 80s. I hope he fell into another form of life, I said. 

It might be that I had already absorbed something of his style. In the final moments of editing this essay, I turned my copy of his short stories over and reread the blurb on the back:

Once his friends had told me of his aliases during those missing years, I was able to track down more information. His PhD thesis, produced at the tail-end of the 90s, was titled, Disciplinary Rhetorics and Fractal Orderings: A Study of Sociologies of Knowledge and of Presidential Addresses to the American Sociological Society/Association. There was a certain resonance I could identify with the young mind that had laboured over stories. Fractal orderings – making meaning from infinite potential combinations – suggested to me that his impulse to make the parts fit, in writing and in life, had continued unabated. So too the sociological impulse, something Damien shared with Frank, the secret writer among the ranks of cleaners and factory workers; to claim the role of sociologist is to make almost anything a point of interest and potential home. I found recognition and amusement, too: here was a whole thesis analysing a series of what could be considered paratexts.

Anna, Gillian, and Jonathan all still live within a stone’s throw of each other in Sydney’s inner west. Gillian went on to make films: the impact of her innovative film essay My Year Without Steve can be gleaned in Michelle de Kretser’s Theory and Practice. Jonathan continued to champion writers: his longstanding review blog is known to many. Anna has never stopped making art, writing books, and gathering people together. Her serial novel, The Western Horizon, was published in the first series of HEAT.

Choosing to be a writer is a freedom we assign to ourselves: but there are other choices, other forms of freedom. I wondered if Damien ever found his.

I could steal cardboard ashtrays from the factory I work in and combine them to make a wall sculpture. It might be terrible.

I could order cardboard bollards from the internet and stage a fantasy about how I want to live. It will serve no real purpose.

I could glue seven paper stories between a thin piece of cardboard and say: what lives are being made possible?