Two giants talk books, method and life

Contemporary Australian novelist Rodney Hall, 88, sat down with historian Geoffrey Blainey, 94, to talk about writing. Turns out they’d met before.

Writer Rodney Hall, 88, (L) and historian Geoffrey Blainey, 94, met to discuss Hall’s new book, Vortex.

Rodney Hall is a giant of contemporary Australian literature. His debut novel, The Ship on the Coin, was published more than 50 years ago. He has twice won the Miles Franklin Literary Award (for Just Relations in 1982, and The Grisly Wife in 1994); five of his novels have been shortlisted. He has also twice been presented with the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society.

Hall’s new work, Vortex, is set in Brisbane in 1954, prior to the young Queen Elizabeth II’s visit, which he re-imagines in the most dazzling way. His publisher, Geordie Williamson, who is also The Australian’s chief literary critic describes the new book as one that Hall “has been preparing to write all his life”.

There are themes that seem true to Hall’s own life: the book features a fatherless boy in post-war Queensland, who sets out to become a man. (Hall was sent to boarding school in Brisbane after arriving by ship from England after World War II. He left school on his 16th birthday, for economic reasons, but always hoped to become a writer.)

Hall, now 88, sat with the distinguished Melbourne historian, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, 94, for this chat about life and work, and his new book. Turns out they’d met before, when Whitlam was prime minister.

I hope you enjoy this edited account of their lively conversation.

- Caroline Overington, Literary Editor

Geoffrey Blainey: Hello, Rodney. It is good to see you again.

Rodney Hall: It is. We met such a long time ago.

It was when Whitlam came to power …

Yes, that was the last time our paths crossed, 50 years ago, around the time of the creation of the literature board. You were chair.

I was, and it’s gone now. Creative Australia, they call it now, and I think that’s unfair, because it’s only for the arts, and creativity affects so many different facets of Australian life. Medicine, for example. We’ve been creative with medicine, and with the law ... anyway, Rodney, I like your book.

Oh, thank you.

It’s different territory to a book you’ve written before. It covers so much world history.

Well, I’ve written a lot about historic things before. I’ve been very influenced by you, of course.

That’s very generous.

No, it’s true. You’ve been a marvellous contributor. I was just delighted when I heard you were going to come and do this interview. I said, my goodness, this is the top brass.

Go on.

No, I did.

Well, tell me, when you began the book, did you have in mind the book that actually eventuated?

No, because I never plan any of the books. A great many projects never triggered a subconscious truth beyond my intention, so I abandoned them. They need to simply emerge, as it were, finding their own way. And that means trial and error.

Rodney Hall. Picture by Ross Bird.

Well then, what part did you write first?

There’s a bit of a story to this. We have to go back a few years to 2006. My house burnt down, and I lost everything. I mean, all my correspondence with Robert Graves and Judith Wright — it all went up in flames when the gas fridge blew up. It was a devastating loss. Moving forward to 2018, I got a phone call from an old friend, who said, I’m just downsizing my flat, and I came across an envelope with some typewritten pages from you. And he said, you might want them back. So he sent me this envelope, and what was in it was four (written) sketches that I had sent to him in the mail in 1971, for an opinion. It was only about 18 pages, but I thought this is interesting, and they suggested a world I wanted to go into.

And those four sketches appear in the book, do they?

Three of them do. The fourth one was about an Aboriginal card magician, but it was too dated. We’ve come a long way since 1971, but otherwise, I stitched three of them in. And then, when I finished writing them, I began to research. Which I always do after I’ve written. Because these days, it’s a trap, but it’s so easy to get meaningless research done that looks as if it’s actually research, and isn’t really. It’s just googling. I mean, I was given the best advice I was ever given by Robert Graves, to write first, research later.

You knew Robert Graves, did you? He was so famous as poet and scholar in his day. And about 40 years older than you?

Yes, I met him. I went to Europe when I was 22 and I spent most of the time walking around Europe for three years, very hungry and very lonely, on my own, without a plan, just roughly heading west from Genoa, but I called on Graves at his home, and he very graciously gave me what turned out to be two hours of advice … He was living in Majorca at that time.”

Rodney Hall as chief of Australia Council, at Alfresco’s, Rundle Street, Adelaide, in 1991.

How did you get to see him? How did you manage that?

Well, I was walking, and I got into Barcelona, and there was a notice at the port of a ferry boat to Majorca. So I paid for my ticket, and I sat up all night. I thought, Robert Graves lives around here, and then I saw a little shop called the English American Library, and since this was about seven in the morning, I hung around until somebody came, and when the lady came, I said, “I’m here to see Robert Graves, but I don’t know where he lives. It’s just somewhere on the island”. She said, “Well, I think he’s a member of ours.” She got out a card index — we would never do this to somebody these days — and finds Graves, Robert, and says, here is his address. But it turned out to be a block of eight small flats, and I thought it wasn’t right. But his name was on the door. And then some resident said, are you looking for Senor Graves? I said, Yes, I am. He said, it doesn’t live here. He lives in the village just 26km away, and so I walked there.

You walked the whole way?

Yes, I did, and his wife came to the door, and I said, Could I speak to Mr. Graves? She said, certainly not. I said, could you at least spare a glass of water? And she said, stay here, went inside, came back out, handing me a glass of water. And she said, you better hurry up if you’re going to catch the bus. I said, Oh, is there a bus? She said, How did you get here? I said, I walked. I wanted to see Mr Graves. She said, I better tell him … And then he came out, a big, tall man, with a bush of white hair, a huge presence. His work desk was about the size of this (conference) table, overlooking the Mediterranean and he sat on one side of the desk, and I sat the other and he started talking and it was a miraculous event for me. Two hours we were talking. Nobody disturbed us. We just talked. He said, “What are you up to? What are your projects?” So I read him three poems, and he said, “Well, the poetry stands. You don’t have to worry about that”, which was a huge thing, because I’d been systematically rejected, as we all have been. But he said, if you ever get to write novels, write first, research afterwards, because if you don’t write first, you don’t know what you need to look up.”

Rodney Hall, poet and author.

Have you written about this?

No, it just changed everything in my life.

You were already a writer?

Yes. In my mind, I always have been some sort of artist. My mother was, also. She came from a little village in Kangaroo Valley, and she had a very beautiful singing voice. She persuaded her parents to take her to England to study music. They sold their farm to pay for her and afterwards she had an affair with a baritone from the chorus of the Birmingham Opera and was sacked. Then she met my father “Dick” Hall and what they had was a big thing, a permanent thing, except nine years later, he died of lung cancer. He was about 40 … I was six months old.

You were born in England, then?

I spent my early childhood in a small town 12 miles from Bristol. The most dramatic thing that happened to me as a small child was the German bombing raid. I mean, an inconceivable thing for a 5 year old, getting up in the morning and going to the window, and seeing that my friend Roger’s house right opposite our flat was gone. I think it marked me for life, that idea that nothing’s permanent and things can violently be taken off you. So that was one piece of good luck, in retrospect, because it was a very vivid thing to have happen. But other things also happened. We moved to Bath, and I had two-and-a-half years in the most wonderful school. We did 12 subjects. They were all compulsory. All of them were fascinating. And while my mother kept us out of churches, my grandmother was a high Church of England person. Bath Abbey is a small cathedral and a beautiful one, and I got picked to read the lesson from, I think, St Mark, which was a great honour. I was quite small, and the Bible that I was to read from was on a big brass eagle, and I was full of the importance of the occasion. I don’t recall having any nerves at all. I climbed up, I took hold of my eagle and the chorus was behind me. I remember that very well. And that we had no money. After my father died, my mother sold the house, bought a shop, and went broke. She then applied for us to be migrants back to Australia, and we went to Australia House in the Strand, and they said because she had a British passport, we wouldn’t qualify for the 10 pound scheme. And she said: “Now you look here” — she was about five foot two — she said, “I’m bringing my children back to Australia”, and she put on this tremendous, totally embarrassing, excruciating, wonderful performance, saying, you know, if Australia doesn’t welcome its own back, goodness knows where it’ll end up. And in the end, the official called in his senior and he said, just sign everybody up. Just be quiet. It was not in the rule book, they just did it.

Vortex, the new novel by Rodney Hall

How did you feel about moving to Australia?

Well, I used to dream about it. I knew exactly what to expect: kangaroos, you bet, all sorts of things that I got from the stamp album. And the voyage was just tremendous. My mother sold all our furniture to put my sister and I into a boarding school when we arrived. She got a job as a lady’s companion on a sheep and wheat station at Coonabarabran. I arrived at school two days early, and I had this very BBC accent — I’ve still got residue of it — and I said hello to the guy who was in the bed next to mine, and he said, “Fellas, I think we’ve got a Pom among us”. And then next minute, bang, I was on the floor. That’s what that school was like, private school, boarding school in Brisbane, awful. I stayed until I was 16. My 16th birthday was my last day at school because my mother could not afford to keep me there.

Do you recall what your first job was?

Yes, I was a shop assistant in a hardware store. I got sacked from all my early jobs because I was a daydreamer.

You say that self accusingly?

Well, the world of Brisbane in the 1950s was pretty rough and tumble. But so much happened to me in my 18th year, which was 1954, the year when the novel is set. For example, the Petrov defection did happen in 1954, and the Queen arrived, and you can play with historical facts like these, as long as you’re being fair with the reader. So my Queen — the queen in the book — is a fictional queen. She’s not the real queen. I have her coming to Australia through the Suez, which is the way I came, and I’ve still got good memories of that. The real one came via the Pacific and New Zealand.

Rodney Hall in the 1980s.

We’re just jumping around for a minute, but your book, it’s titled Vortex.

Yes. I originally added the subtitle “101 chapters to be read in any order”. Because I didn’t want the potential reader to think there was any orthodox logic to the book. It is 12 characters whose paths intersect. I came across a fascinating article about spiders — the way their webs are constructed. Also the way spiders communicate. And the idea that they actually tune the web. So the original idea was a story like a web, that the reader would dip in, or dip out. I mean, I like the idea of not producing a page turner (laughter). Rather, I hope to produce something that keeps you there, because you don’t want to turn the page. Incidentally, I get very tired of fiction that preaches messages. I don’t see that as my job as a novelist, because it’s that unique thing with fiction, it has two creators. There is the writer and there is the reader … ideally, the reader brings their own experience to the book, and I tend to want to intrigue them into bringing the thing alive, rather than telling them what colour people’s hair is and what their eyes are.

Can you tell us a bit about your writing? How you go about it? You started out writing with a pen?

I still write with a pen. I can handwrite at about the speed I’m thinking, whereas with the computer, it’s a very elegant thing, but it’s too quick. When I’m handwriting, I already know what two or three things are coming by the time I have the sentence down.”

Who transcribes it for you?

I do.

You write it longhand and then put it into the computer and then review it?

Yes, and I stand up to work, at a raised table. I’m hyperactive. I get fidgety if I’m sitting down all day.

And now that you are finished this book, do you find that you have more things to say?

Yes. I suffer little hesitancies … there’s been a physical wearing down, but the mind, the memory, is still good. Yes, I have more things to say.”