The Biographer's Lover by Ruby J Murray

Author:Ruby J Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

The Biographer

A week before Remembrance Day in early November 1992, the first of the press coverage that Victoria and I had worked on placing came out: a double-spread in the Geelong Advertiser.

I walked down to Ng’s Milk Bar at the end of Mum’s street the morning that the articles ran. I bought up every copy Mr Ng had. I remember standing on the pavement, my arms full of newspapers, dancing on the spot to shake the adrenaline out of my legs. I felt as if I was perched on top of the diving platform at Eastern Beach, as if I had just pressed up, my toes leaving the wooden slats, with the sparkling summer water stretched out ahead of me.

Back home, I sat with the kitchen door open onto the scraggly backyard and carefully clipped articles, piling them in a neat stack. Within a year, the whole state would have begun to dry up, dry out, twelve years of drought descending, but that day I remember as the last of the wet. The air smelled of turned earth.

Geelong at War, bawled the headlines over a muddy reproduction of Edna’s Racecourse, the training tents set up in neat rows across the field, the boys with their scuffed knees watching from the sidelines. Below, the editors had chosen a smaller photo, of Smoko, a reworked 1961 oil of an earlier charcoal. A mother with a pram, standing on the platform of Geelong Station while a train full of uniformed troops pulled out of the station. Cigarettes rained down on her from an open train window. She was smiling, holding out a hand towards the train. In the distance, people gathered at the end of the platform, watching.

The article was about Edna’s time with the Australian Women’s Land Army. Edna as a brilliant recluse, a deliberate cipher, a patriot and a mother. ‘Edna Cranmer was a true Anzac,’ I had written. ‘Fiercely loyal to her husband, Max, throughout his health challenges, a longstanding legacy from his injuries in the Second World War, Edna dedicated the last two decades of her life to preserving the experiences and memories of those who worked on the land, even when the rest of Australia was forgetting. Her incredible body of work was only discovered after her death.’

The article was burly, blood and bones thrown out into the bay to attract sharks. After I had clipped each one, I put it in an envelope with a typed letter signed by both Victoria and myself. I addressed the envelopes to galleries and collectors. I licked stamp after stamp, stuck them down. The Age was going to run another article the following Sunday and, once they had, we would seal each envelope, send it off.

Victoria phoned me, triumphant. ‘It’s great,’ she said. ‘The article is so great. Are you free tomorrow? Gran finally wants to talk. I told her about The Age article coming out next week. She’ll want her name in it! She was Mum’s first real patron after all.

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