Distant Voices by John Pilger

Author:John Pilger [John Pilger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1994-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

VII

TRIBUTES

ELSIE AND CLAUDE

THIS WEEK HAS been the anniversary of Elsie’s death. Such has been my distraction lately that it has arrived and almost taken me unawares. The living make their demands, but the dead have rights too, especially those whose memory remains a source of strength in difficult times; in that way, they live on. ‘How’sitgoingluv?’ her telephone voice would say in the days when voices from afar sounded far away; when an imperious official would interrupt to say, ‘Nine minutes up. Are you extending?’

The last time I saw her in her natural habitat was that last day on the beach before Claude’s funeral. It was late autumn in the southern hemisphere. We sat in the place where we usually sat whenever I came home: in a saddle of sand against the promenade wall touched by the first spokes of early morning sun. ‘Now listen,’ I said to her almost as a ritual, ‘you may wear that hat [it was a wonderful straw sombrero] but you still have a lot of freckles.’ To which she gave her standard reply, ‘Do me a favour, love. Swim behind the shark net, will you?’

We had sat in that place for a few days during almost every one of the twenty-seven years since I had left Australia. My return meant much to her. For the first day, she would speak non-stop about Claude and the past, without ever saying his name. Then she would listen, her sunglasses on her nose. I would talk about perhaps coming back to Australia to live, to which she would say with due solemnity, ‘I think it’s too late, John.’ Year after year I would fly down from South-east Asia and tell her what I had seen and what had moved and shaken me. Her listening, during my divorce, saw me through it.

One of our rituals, on the beach, was to stare at those great gateposts to the South Pacific, Sydney Heads, and try to imagine the thoughts and fears of our Irish great-grandparents, Francis McCarthy and Mary Palmer, who arrived in leg-irons in the 1820s. Francis had been sentenced to fourteen years’ ‘penal servitude’ in New South Wales for ‘uttering unlawful oaths’ and ‘making political agitation’. Mary was an Irish scullery maid who was sentenced to death for stealing. This was commuted to ‘transportation for life’. They both belonged to what Queen Victoria called ‘the inflammable matter of Ireland’: animae viles, as Robert Hughes wrote, that had to be disposed of along with the ‘swinish multitude’ of the English lower orders.1

Most of Elsie’s large family – she was the fifth of nine children – did not wish it to be known publicly that ‘the Stain’ was upon them: that is, they had convict blood. (It is now fashionable to admit it.) In order to obliterate all evidence of this congenital flaw, her siblings embraced certain sub-Thatcherite poses, such as attempts (often hilarious) to eradicate the nasal sound from their speaking voice and the adoption of ‘English ways’, including

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