Mug Shots by Barry Oakley

Author:Barry Oakley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, BGFA, BIO005000
ISBN: 9781743051696
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2013-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

Three o’clock in the morning

Peter Mathers himself was a magic realist before the phrase was invented. His novel Trap, which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1967, was one of the first to move an Aboriginal character (Jack Trap) in from the fringes of Australian fiction. His second, The Wort Papers, is a wildly inventive account of two generations of the Wort family, with scenes of comic genius.

When we moved to Sydney Peter was a regular visitor. He liked to drink, smoke and tell stories. Some were on the tall side, but it didn’t matter. His tales were not so much highly coloured as imbued with the fantastic—they took on an imaginative truth.

One night, when he called in after an outback adventure, he claimed that in western Queensland he’d seen ‘an appetite of wild pigs’ crossing the road. He got out of his car, gave chase, and brought down a young one with a tackle, only to be menaced by a large sow. A bottle or two later he returned from our bathroom claiming to have seen a cockroach the size of a small dog, and wondered whether it would rear up and bark at him. Later still—Peter was a three o’clock in the morning man—there was music and dancing, and two of our sons came up to complain that plaster dust was raining down on them ‘like confetti’.

Sometimes, when we were in Melbourne, we’d visit him. He lived in what seemed a conventional brick villa on Richmond Hill, under a huge Pelaco sign. Once the door was opened, the contrast was total. Visitors had to twist and turn down a dark hallway whose walls were covered in paintings to reach the living room, where towers of books rose from every flat surface.

His kitchen was a vitreous museum of preserves, bottled from his vegetable garden, which was as densely packed as the house. One night—at three o’clock in the morning—he led us out to it. With the ice palaces of the city shining in the distance, he dug up a copy of The Wort Papers and extolled its virtues as compost. It had been remaindered, and he’d bought up a bulk lot and buried them.

In the 1980s Peter wrote plays, and in the nineties his vagabond imagination turned to sculpture, and he created a series of demonic figures from bread and plaster. Some had to be redone before being exhibited because weevils had got into them. These edible artifacts sold well, and one of them stares at me as I write. And in it I can see the wildness of Peter, who went sixteen rounds with pancreatic cancer in 2004, until finally he couldn’t get up again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.