Leeward by Geoffrey Lehmann

Author:Geoffrey Lehmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742244426
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

Not only was my poem about the car’s imminent death wrong, I was mistaken about the marque and year of manufacture.

We often find our friends through long chains of people. Through the person I have called ‘Robert’, I got to know Ruth Hansman. She introduced me to Robin Pratt (daughter of Pixie O’Harris) and Robin introduced me to John Quinlem at the State Library. I habitually studied in the main public reading room that later became the Mitchell Reading Room. John was about twenty-nine and I was about twenty. He was often at the library – he read widely – and sometimes researched material for the handful of articles he wrote for The Observer, a monthly intellectual magazine edited by Donald Horne.

Hundreds of novel readers and movie goers who have never met him love John Quinlem. He is Billy Kwan in Christopher Koch’s novel The Year of Living Dangerously, and the subsequent film. The book is set in Indonesia at the time of the fall of Sukarno in 1965. Anthony Burgess wrote: ‘In Billy Kwan, Mr Koch has produced one of the most memorable characters of recent fiction’.

When I got to know John in about 1960 he was yet to become Billy Kwan. His father, whose original surname was Chong, acquired his strange Irish/Chinese sounding surname because an Australian customs officer could not quite understand what John’s father was saying and put down this name on a form. John dismissed his Thursday Island childhood as men on a jetty shooting sharks – a typical Quinlem aphorism.

Billy Kwan, in The Year of Living Dangerously, wanted to become a secondary school teacher but could not because of his ‘appearance’. Early in his life John Quinlem suffered similar discrimination. When he was only seventeen the Brisbane Courier Mail took up his cause to report his claim he had been excluded from an arts teacher fellowship because of his Chinese ethnicity. At age seventeen John was already a provocateur. The Courier Mail reported:

Quinlem last night removed his slippers to demonstrate he was 5ft. 4in. His speech is typically Australian, even to accent and colloquialisms. He challenged Mr. Edwards to prove that he suffered any speech impediment.

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