Blue Skies (2 page)

The blue sky is a complex motif. Sometimes it is a perfect canvas in danger of being despoiled by the ‘passionate reds and purples and boiling yellow-green jealousies' contained, just, within the abject human body. Other times it is a blazing firmament scorching the ‘vulnerable, white bodies' that do not belong beneath it. In one startling pre-dawn scene the narrator even envisages the land as if from the sky itself, overseeing a tableau of the slaughter of Aborigines and seals, the fall of ‘crimson drops on the golden sand'.

Blue Skies
has many of the hallmarks of a first and youthful novel—confident and free-flowing imagery and dialogue, elements that appear to be semi-autobio.graphical, a risky ending. Like its narrator, the novel is sometimes abrasive and quirky, wilful and obsessive. But it had something that was immediately seen by editors at the venerable London publishing house Duckworth, that was also seen by contemporary critics and that will be seen by readers of this new edition:
Blue
Skies
shines with raw, hard-edged talent. This book is— now, as it was when it first hit the shelves, in 1976—quite out of the ordinary.

English perceptions of the novel from the time of its release are both amusing and smug. The original Duckworth edition's blurb described Tasmania as a place ‘where the sky is always blue and nothing ever happens', and I cannot help but smile at this, for I know how often it rains. London newspaper reviewers— nearly all positive—were almost too pleased to refer to Helen as a ‘chronicler of awful Australia', to liken her command of the Australian idiom to that of Barry Humphries and the ‘vulgarity' of one of her characters to that of Edna Everage.

The Duckworth edition of
Blue Skies
splashed the word ‘incest' on the jacket, without consultation with the author, and even though the text contains only a hint of an over-involved brother and sister. When Virago republished
Blue Skies
, in 1989—packaging it with Helen's second novel,
Jack and Jill
—the new blurb continued to promise incest, along with the murder and suicide that the book does contain. Helen puts this down to the English being rather too interested in the notion of Tasmania as Australia's incest capital.

In the Hobart press,
Blue Skies
was warmly reviewed by the local literary matriarch Joan Woodberry, to whom the novel is dedicated, but other mentions of the book in the local daily, the
Mercury
, betray a dependable deference to the cultural standards of the Mother Country. ‘A novel about Tasmania has recently been highly praised by London's hard to please literary critics,' boasted the newspaper in 1977. Then, in 1979, when Helen won England's prestigious Somerset Maugham Award for
Jack and Jill
, a
Mercury
headline made so bold as to claim her as a ‘Tasmanian author', though she had left the state in 1971 and would never live here again.

Home, for Helen Hodgman, has been Essex, Hobart, London, Vancouver and Sydney. Her concise debut, the product of two of those places, is a blister.ingly original contribution to Australian writing. Its bright colours undulled,
Blue Skies
remains a confronting snapshot of the social aridity of suburbia, the experience of marriage and motherhood, and life on the ‘heart-shaped island' south of the mainland.

Danielle Wood
Hobart, December 2010

At the bottom of Adventure Bay is a beautiful sandy beach… The other parts of the country adjoining the bay are quite hilly; and both those and the flat are an entire forest of very tall trees, rendered almost impassable by shrubs, brakes of fern, and fallen trees; except on the sides of some of the hills, where the trees are but thin, and a coarse grass is the interruption...In the afternoon, we were agreeably surprised, at the place where we were cutting wood, with a visit from some of the natives; eight men and a boy. They approached us from the woods, without betraying any marks of fear, or rather with the greatest confidence imaginable.

CAPTAIN COOK, WRITING OF HIS VISIT TO
VAN DIEMEN 'S LAND , JANUARY 1777

At the last ball at Government House, Hobart Town, there appeared the last male aboriginal inhabitant of Tasmania… As savages they were found, as savages they lived, and as savages they perished! Such an event is deserving of some notice.

EXTRACT FROM THE SOCIAL NEWS,
MERCURY
, OCTOBER 1864

I once had an aunt who went to Tasmania.

NOËL COWARD,
PRIVATE LIVES
, 1930

I'd watched it from the beginning.

Before she came, our house had been the last in the road: a tatty full stop to a long line of prosperous weatherboard bungalows. It stood out a bit, as it wasn't painted in a lurid pastel shade like the others—because I could never make up my mind what colour to do it. Dead colour-selection cards littered the house.

On the far side was a small patch of scrubby bush straggling to the beach, the one remaining unsold block. For days on end I could forget that I lived in a suburb just by looking out of the right windows.

Then the land was sold and cleared. Trenches were dug. Men built the house.

The woman who had bought the block came each day to the site to oversee them. I eavesdropped behind my blinds as she whined at them to get on. The large sun-reddened men were unmoved. They took their time, pausing at regular intervals to brew billy tea, smoke and grin shyly at her through large mouthfuls of meat pie.

The work was quickly finished, and the house balanced on an uneven area of raw reddish earth. The men left. It was a wet time and afterwards rainwater stood round it in slick, sky-reflecting puddles. The sun glinted and flashed on those pools, surrounding the house with a fence of reflected metallic shards.

The woman hired another gang of large soft men, who levelled the earth and drained it. They dug it and primed it to receive the sackfuls of domesticated grass seeds.

These the woman tended herself. A square of spiky grass blades stood before the house, a vivid and unreal green. Impressive at a distance, but close to it looked pretty sad. The blades were far apart. The dusty earth, growing dustier as summer passed, showed through the gaps like mange and defied her daily watering.

The native grasses rustled and swayed at the edge of this pampered patch. Occasionally it would stake its aboriginal claim to the usurped homeland by launching a seed to fertilise and reclaim a centimetre. Tough though it was, it could not take the almost daily shaving.

In those first few lawn-laying days the woman would be at the house early in the morning supervising the seeds. She seemed in no hurry to move in, as she waited for the grass to grow. I would pass her as I walked back from the beach, but she was too absorbed to speak, keeping herself to herself, which was good while it lasted. If she introduced herself, the beach spell would be broken. With luck and no interruptions, it would work for me all day. The beach was the main reason for my living there.

I had found it during a weekend visit to my future in-laws. My pregnancy having been confirmed only twenty-four hours before, there was no hurry, I thought. But my husband liked to do things properly. The problem was to break the news and find somewhere to live.

I had gone for an early morning walk to ponder these things and came upon the beach, over a slight rise in the road at a point where it looked to go on forever but merged at the bottom of the slope into a stretch of cutting coarse seagrass, ending at the beach in a tangle of car tracks which petered out into the sand.

Surprised early in the morning, it was a marvellous beach—a holiday-brochure cover of a beach. On each side it stretched away, pale yellow and perfect. Startling black rocks jutted up in contrast at either end, the sea bluest blue with silver-lamé glitters. It was an absurd extravagance of beauty so early in the day, a whirl of colours that I associated with midnight hours. I sat down in the dust among the empty beer cans and wept.

I was stranded up on that beach like the poor dumb female turtle I once saw in a film. It had just laid a load of eggs in great distress and difficulty and hadn't a hope of making it back to the sea, but, exhausted, was going to die.

Walking back up the road I saw a house for sale.

We borrowed money, bought it and moved in. My husband worked hard; he needed to repay the loan and prepare for his financial fatherhood. I sat back like the turtle and waited to die.

It didn't happen. The days passed and I began to doubt it would—numberless days when the clock always said three in the afternoon, no matter what you did to it. You could try turning it upside down. You could try catching it out, peeking suddenly round the door and taking it by surprise. No matter what you tried, the day ran out then, and there was nothing left to fill it with.

All the other women in that nature reserve for females managed to invent something to fill their time in decorative and reassuring ways suggested by the women's magazines—those placebos prescribed to sugar-coat time and keep half the population quiet and useful. But such schemes required spirit, an urge to fill days acceptably. I had none.

The beach waited in its early morning perfection just for me and the odd dog-exerciser. When the sun rose higher, the pale yellow sand became an almost desert blaze. The black rocks crouched like primitive worship stones, antipodean Stonehenges.

Later, when the noon blaze subsided, the local women came down. Those nearest would walk laden with bright beach bags and babies, carting the many necessities for enjoying an hour in the open. Those from further up the road would drive, the wheels of their small economical second cars spurting up dust sprays and rutting the sand at the edge. Most people gathered together towards the ends of the beach. The hitherto mysterious rocks were then pressed into domestic service, their flat tops used as tables, their crevices as storage spaces for cold drinks and for keeping bits of clothing out of the sand.

As older children escaped from school they joined their families on the beach. The sand was dug up and shaped into castles, giant initials, holes through to China. The murmurings of mothers and sun-stoned babies were overpowered by shrill competitive shrieks, the sounds of unwinding that followed release from school. Mothers and babies gathered their things together and left. There were evening meals to be cooked for returning husbands, sprinklers to be switched on, clothes to be taken down from the rotary hoists standing in back yards—suburbia's garlanded totems. The older children lingered on, following their own patterns, guarding their freedom until their mothers' warning cries arose in the dusk and drove them back indoors.