Read Online The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt by Tracy Farr - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Tracy Farr
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make a film about my life, my art. Movies were made before, long ago. Newsreels, once upon a time. Then later, in New York, the people around me made movies all the time, usedcameras that were supposed to be mounted on tripods, carried them in their hands, made films that wobbled and swerved, focussed in and out and all over the place so you almost suffered seasickness as you watched them played back. Black-and-white films, or saturated colour, people sitting on beds and smoking, or at festivals, or talking about sex, or music, or art, or nothing. Lots of films about nothing. Faces staring into the camera. The soundtracks of these movies, more often than not, were found sounds, looping swirls of rhythm.
You see fragments of these films, occasionally, as part of earnest compilations at film festivals. You read about them, more often, or about the mythology around them. This film of hers, it will be different, from what she tells me. I wonder how much of those old mythologies she has absorbed; how much do they stick to me, these different mythologies from the past?
A VOYAGE BY SEA
M y cello, my uncle, and I left Fremantle just a few weeks after my mother’s death, boarding the MS Kangaroo on a hot summer day in 1927 to sail for Singapore. My memories of the voyage are vivid and detailed. Perhaps grief’s legacy was to render my mind receptive, perceptive, for surely I did not grieve deeply otherwise. My uncle put a brave face on his sadness at our loss and, I am sure, was relieved at my own stolidity. Grief had also, somehow, made me aware of the limitations of the books and recordings and reproductions I had held so dear. I was ready for life, for experience , ready to hold every sound and sight and smell in my mind and retain them, keep them airtight, watertight, forever.
I sat on my trunk in the stinking February heat, my shoes flat on the grubby wharf below me, my fingers tapping time with the clanking of the chains against the side of the ship and the wharf. Uncle Valentine returned from the booking office with our tickets stamped.
‘Rustle yourself,’ he told me, ‘we’ve a boat to board.’
My passport, newly obtained for my voyage, spelled my name at its top: Helena Margaret Gaunt. My place and dateof birth were recorded below my name: Singapore, May 31 st , 1910. The captain held the piece of thick paper, with its government stamp, its copperplate writing, at arms-length, peering at it; he recorded my name in a small book he held. He leered at me, nudged the man next to him who leaned on the railing of the Kangaroo counting boxes on the wharf still to be packed aboard.
‘Going home, are you, my darling? Don’t look like a Straits coolie to me, eh, does she, Georgie?’
‘Yes, Captain,’ I replied, ignoring his rudeness, and muster-ing all the hauteur my sixteen-year-old self possessed. ‘I am going home.’
The MS Kangaroo was old, stuffy and poorly designed – a little like the elder Miss Murray, left far behind me in Lesmurdie. She had black sides, a clipper bow, and she rolled abominably – I will say it again, the resemblance to Miss Murray was remarkable. The Kangaroo was crowded, with more passengers than sleeping quarters. Uncle Valentine, though he need not have, chose to camp on deck with the younger men.
‘To take the air, my dear! There’s nothing like sleeping in the open to give a man an appetite.’
The crew were mostly Chinese with some Malay deckhands. The passengers were squatters and pearlers returning north after holidays in the city; there were few women among the passengers, and fewer children.
We left Fremantle late in the morning and by night we were well out past Rottnest Island. We sailed for two days in calm seas to Geraldton, then on with a heavy roll developing until we berthed at Carnarvon jetty. Fromthere we sailed not on sea but on land, over the Carnarvon salt flats to the township. Our transport was a truck on a rail line, driven by a sail. Passengers piled
You see fragments of these films, occasionally, as part of earnest compilations at film festivals. You read about them, more often, or about the mythology around them. This film of hers, it will be different, from what she tells me. I wonder how much of those old mythologies she has absorbed; how much do they stick to me, these different mythologies from the past?
A VOYAGE BY SEA
M y cello, my uncle, and I left Fremantle just a few weeks after my mother’s death, boarding the MS Kangaroo on a hot summer day in 1927 to sail for Singapore. My memories of the voyage are vivid and detailed. Perhaps grief’s legacy was to render my mind receptive, perceptive, for surely I did not grieve deeply otherwise. My uncle put a brave face on his sadness at our loss and, I am sure, was relieved at my own stolidity. Grief had also, somehow, made me aware of the limitations of the books and recordings and reproductions I had held so dear. I was ready for life, for experience , ready to hold every sound and sight and smell in my mind and retain them, keep them airtight, watertight, forever.
I sat on my trunk in the stinking February heat, my shoes flat on the grubby wharf below me, my fingers tapping time with the clanking of the chains against the side of the ship and the wharf. Uncle Valentine returned from the booking office with our tickets stamped.
‘Rustle yourself,’ he told me, ‘we’ve a boat to board.’
My passport, newly obtained for my voyage, spelled my name at its top: Helena Margaret Gaunt. My place and dateof birth were recorded below my name: Singapore, May 31 st , 1910. The captain held the piece of thick paper, with its government stamp, its copperplate writing, at arms-length, peering at it; he recorded my name in a small book he held. He leered at me, nudged the man next to him who leaned on the railing of the Kangaroo counting boxes on the wharf still to be packed aboard.
‘Going home, are you, my darling? Don’t look like a Straits coolie to me, eh, does she, Georgie?’
‘Yes, Captain,’ I replied, ignoring his rudeness, and muster-ing all the hauteur my sixteen-year-old self possessed. ‘I am going home.’
The MS Kangaroo was old, stuffy and poorly designed – a little like the elder Miss Murray, left far behind me in Lesmurdie. She had black sides, a clipper bow, and she rolled abominably – I will say it again, the resemblance to Miss Murray was remarkable. The Kangaroo was crowded, with more passengers than sleeping quarters. Uncle Valentine, though he need not have, chose to camp on deck with the younger men.
‘To take the air, my dear! There’s nothing like sleeping in the open to give a man an appetite.’
The crew were mostly Chinese with some Malay deckhands. The passengers were squatters and pearlers returning north after holidays in the city; there were few women among the passengers, and fewer children.
We left Fremantle late in the morning and by night we were well out past Rottnest Island. We sailed for two days in calm seas to Geraldton, then on with a heavy roll developing until we berthed at Carnarvon jetty. Fromthere we sailed not on sea but on land, over the Carnarvon salt flats to the township. Our transport was a truck on a rail line, driven by a sail. Passengers piled
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