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Alister Kershaw was born in Melbourne in 1921. He contributed to Angry Penguins, Comment and Art in Australia prior to his departure for Europe in 1947, where he broadcast for the BBC. He moved to France in 1948, to work as secretary to the writer Richard Aldington. His books include The Lonely Verge (1941), Excellent Stranger (1944), Accent & Hazard (1953), Murder in France (1955), A History of the Guillotine (1958), Adrian Lawlor (1981), The Pleasure of Their Company (1986), Heydays (1991), A Word from Paris (1991), Collected Poems (1993) and Village to Village (1993), and A Second Denunciad (1994)
Kershaw was Paris correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Commission throughout the 1960s, and lived in a small village in the Sancerre region of the Loire Valley till his death in 1996.
This edition published by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay 2017
First published in Australia by Angus & Robertson 1991
Reprinted in 1992
Copyright © Estate of Alister Kershaw 1991, 2017
Cover photograph of the author 1946 by Albert Tucker
This book is copyright.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers:
ETT IMPRINT
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ISBN 9781925706147
For Peter Higginson
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A number of people have given a nudge to what is left of my memory or have helped in other ways with the writing of this book. With the usual proviso that they deserve no blame whatsoever for the contents, I extend my sincere thanks to Christopher Connolly, Patricia Davies, Geoffrey Dutton, Geoff Jones, Sylvain and Annie Kershaw, Jelka Kozmus, John Murphy, Justin O’Brien, Desmond O’Grady, Nicholas Pounder, Stephen Rantz and Albert Tucker.
INTRODUCTION
Poor unloved Melbourne! It never got a civil word from us. Its architecture was obnoxious, the climate was inclined to be peevish, you couldn’t buy a drink after six p.m. (unless you were dining in a restaurant when you could have a high old time right up to eight p.m.), the tiniest deviation from conformity in the way you dressed earned you some very dirty looks, and we writers and painters and composers weren’t treated with the respect we deserved. If the place didn’t pull itself together, we told each other, one of these days we’d up-anchor and go somewhere where we’d be appreciated and Melbourne would just have to try to get on without us.
Well, some of our complaints were justified—no question of that; and some weren’t. The drinking hours might have been a bit hard to take but later on some of us would find that, at any rate, the beer (when you could get to it) beat the stuff they served in London and Paris by miles. The shortcomings of the architecture could be matched in any other city. And compared to what went on in Europe, the climate was that of a tropic isle. Maybe artists weren’t looked upon with holy dread (we never asked ourselves why the hell they should be) but at least they were left alone. By the public, that is. Now and again, some artist of the old school would reach the end of his tether and start mumbling about decadence and incompetence and fraud and we avant-garde kids occasionally roughed each other up a bit; but that was as far as it went. In Paris, the rival schools practically used knuckle-dusters on each other. French artists spent more time warding off attacks from the enemy camp than they did actually painting or writing.
When you came down to it, the official censorship in Melbourne (and everywhere else in Australia unless Norfolk Island had been overlooked) was the worst we had to contend with. That was plenty, however. We weren’t allowed to read anything more sexually stimulating than Winnie-the-Pooh and writers were all but forbidden to use any word that began with F.
But the truth is that Melbourne, on the whole, was a pretty good spot and in my dotage I look back on it with an affection I was too brash to experience at the time. And it did, after all, harbour some blithe spirits who would have made any city worth living in: the fabulous (and I could add a dozen other adjectives and still not convey his unique character) Adrian Lawlor; the ebullient Max Harris; the tempestuous Denison Deasey; David Strachan, combining a luminous poetic vision with a splendidly scatological vocabulary; Albert Tucker, ·the only intellectual with any brains; and quite a few more. It had its Rogues’ Gallery too, to my way of thinking: the heresy-hunting Noel Counihan, the schoolmasterly John Reed—but they’ll all be cropping up in due course.
These are some of the people I’ve tried to recall in this book. If you find it heavy going, it’s my fault, not theirs.
Alister Kershaw
1991
ONE
Back in the Thirties and early Forties there were about fifty square yards at the top of Melbourne’s Little Collins Street where you could wear corduroy trousers without being taken for a poofter and where the sight of a beard didn’t provoke a display of popular indignation. You could even get away with sandals. The bewitching young artist Alannah Coleman could get away with more than that. Her costume was, as a rule, richly international. Once when we were having dinner together, she arrived wearing velvet trousers and a Breton fisherman’s striped shirt. A cape like those worn by officers of the Bersaglieri hung to her ankles. An Egyptian fez was perched becomingly on her long blonde hair. A quiver of arrows slung over her shoulders added a Robin Hood or Saxon touch. If she had anything on her feet at all, it can only have been a pair of Roman sandals. Anywhere else in the city, she might have been run in on a charge of disturbing the peace; here, she received no more attention than was due to an exceptionally attractive you ng woman.
There was a tremendously exotic cafe, the Petrushka, which was important to us. The Monte Carlo Ballet Company had settled more or less permanently in Melbourne and had gone straight to our heads. We were determined Slavophiles. Some of us learnt to say da svidanya and said it whenever we got a chance. When Sidney Nolan was commissioned to do the decor for a new ballet by Lichine, we ached with jealousy. It was as if he had been made an honorary cadet in the Preobrajensky Guards. The Petrushka was the only place where tea was served in glasses. We didn’t need any more than that to make us happy.
A seedy restaurant which we used to frequent laid on a memorably horrible meal for fifty cents. The solid citizens may have looked on us as an effete lot but I’d like to have seen them try to swallow the grisly morsels which were served up there. You had to be tough to manage it. The price included a small carafe of wine. That was what kept our custom. It came as close to being undrinkable as was permitted by the laws of God and man and we would have much preferred to drink beer anyway. But if tea in glasses was Old Saint Petersburg, wine on the table was Paris in the springtime and, as far as we were concerned, the next best thing to being Russian was being French.
There were a couple of art galleries in this Bohemian enclave and a couple of artists’ studios. With the sandals and corduroy trousers, the Petrushka
