1.
REGGIE’S DAUGHTER
1931–1947
SHIRLEY HAZZARD LOVED to tell the story of how she became a writer. It is a story that began with poetry, and a broken heart, and Italy, and in the course of being retold came to stand in for the story of her life and to encapsulate the largeness of her imaginative being. This is one version:
Auden said in that beautiful poem about Yeats that poetry altered nothing, that all the savagery of the world would be the same if no poet had ever written. But I know from my own small experience that it can change life radically. Poetry gave me companionship; it opened my mind and my heart—as far as they could be opened. It also changed the facts of my life.
When I was living in New Zealand in 1949–50, I read poems of Leopardi in translation by John Heath-Stubbs and I wanted to learn the originals: they were so beautiful. I remember it was a blue book.
I began to read Italian, 12,000 miles away without expectation of going to Italy. Later, it was because I had studied Italian that I was sent there by the United Nations and everything changed.
She would return over and over to this story of escape from terrible origins, the writing life that allowed her to save her life: “There was the idea that transformation in our lives would come through marriage, through falling in love and marrying, and the idea of rescue … I would have liked to be rescued but no one was going to rescue me, and I finally realized that I would have to rescue myself. And the only means … that I could see was to use the thing that was closest to my spirit, which was the literary life, the use of the word … I can say I lived happily ever after.”
She would return, too, to the importance of Italy in that rescued life: “In Italy, the mysteries remain important: the accidental quality of existence, the poetry of memory, the impassioned life that is animated by awareness of eventual death.” And she would give the delightful particulars of the transformation of her life—a villa outside Siena owned by a spirited and cultivated family who became her friends and prompted her to write. “In 1960 I wrote a story—a simple story of a young poet, derived from an evening in that Italian garden. I sent it to the New Yorker, without keeping a copy. It was accepted by William Maxwell, and I received his letter standing in the big, old kitchen of my friends’ villa. Moments like that don’t come twice: The Order of Release.” It is a compelling story, and true as far as it goes, but it glances over what was a more prolonged and laborious commencement to her writing life. Although the story about the young poet was indeed the one accepted by William Maxwell in the summer of 1960, it was not the first story she had sent to the magazine, nor was it the first published. That, appearing in April 1961, was a story set in Australia, about a child, a little girl, in suburban Sydney, where Shirley Hazzard had grown up and where her writer’s story really began.
“Woollahra Road” takes readers into the world of its author’s childhood: provincial, domestic, and shaped by forces just beyond the child’s grasp. It is signed with her birth date—“It was 1935, and Ida was four years old”—and with the time frame of the Great Depression. Shirley Hazzard was born on January 30, 1931, at the Bungalow Private Hospital in Chatswood on Sydney’s North Shore. Shortly after, she joined her parents, Reginald and Catherine, and sister Valerie, then two years old, in the family home in Bay Road, Waverton, close to the north pylon of the soon-to-be-completed Sydney Harbour Bridge. A year or two later the family moved a little farther out to the suburb of Willoughby, to a sizable, if unremarkable, suburban bungalow on a large block of land, where they lived until 1937. The house and garden were very like those described in some detail in “Woollahra Road,” a domestic haven edged by ever-encroaching remnants of native bushland:
The front garden … was on the shady side of the house, but even there the soft turf had died in the drought and been replaced by crisp, resistant buffalo grass, which also grew on the more exposed sides of the house. The steps were bordered with pink and blue hydrangeas, and with beds of fuchsia and daphne. Palm trees stood on the lawn. At the end of the soft drive were red hibiscus and trees of wattle and frangipani. At the side, a wall covered with wilted Dorothy Perkins roses separated this house from the [house next door] … The back garden was huge, and had beds of flowers and vegetables and an orchard. A swing had been built in the orchard, and if you were swung high enough you could touch the mandarin trees by extending your feet. Beyond the orchard was a field of high grass forbidden to children because of snakes. The snakes occasionally came into the garden and had to be killed with a heavy stick that was kept in the garage for the purpose. The grass of the field was cut down from time to time by Alfie, the man who did the garden, and lost cricket balls would turn up then, or an old kite, or singed rocket butts left over from Empire Night. The grass was never burned off now, because of the danger of fire. Even the orchard and the garden had their perils. There were bees in the grove of Buddleia. In the mornings, kookaburras perched on the lowest branches of the trees, looking for lizards or worms, and would burst out laughing right over your head. And there was a grey goanna, like a short, thick snake, harmless but horrible, that came to the kitchen door to be fed by the maid, Marge, with raw eggs.
The house was on McClelland Street, across from St. John’s Church, where Shirley attended nursery school. She remembered these times and places in a long oral history interview she gave in 2000: “There was what we called the paddock at the back beyond the garden, and it had knee-high grass or at least knee-high to a little child, and was mown every so often … And that atmosphere of childhood was, I can’t say a frontier town, but the bush was very close, and there was no feeling of this congestion that now any big city immediately generates.” This was not, of course, the big city in any sense. Up until the late 1920s Willoughby was semirural, with orchards, market gardens, dairies, small farms, and even tanneries, but these were decades of urban expansion, and the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932 saw the area quickly become suburban, most likely with such residual wildlife as goannas, kookaburras, snakes, and scope for long-remembered summer freedoms. A photograph of Shirley, aged about four years old, smiling happily with a doll cradled in each arm, a rough wooden fence behind, and scrubby grass all around, certainly conveys the country-town character of her first home. There is a sense of being somehow close to the bush, too, in “Woollahra Road,” with the arrival at the house of “a hawker … a man selling clothes props. The decrepit cart was laden with saplings of eucalyptus, roughly stripped and forked at one end.” Shirley returned to this memory as she began drafting The Great Fire in the early 1980s, a scene later discarded:
She remembered a morning when, kept home from nursery school for some childish ailment, she had lain in her little white bed secure in her special standing, her mother’s love, the bright day without and quiet shade within; the irruption, once in a while, of some sound from the quiet street—significant because isolated—a man with a horse and cart, selling clothes props for tuppence each. These, the scarcely honed saplings of new green; the rumble of a car. Realised that she was a child and would grow; but at this moment the world needed her for its (rightness). She fitted the scheme. Also, the sense of special indulgence. Of leisure, enhanced by contrast with general obligation to toil—of “getting away with it.”
Even then, she was alert to a sense of how remote was her location in the world:
I was three, I think, when I began to remember, to be there, and the sense of it, although a child doesn’t reason this way, the sense, the atmosphere of the place must have been very strong because I remember being aware that we were in a place that was far from somewhere else; “somewhere else” being the world, really. There really was the tyranny of distance that was borne in on one and we were on the edge of the bush, which as I grew up I understood it was also the desert, the edge of the dead heart of the continent, and that certainly was pervasive.
While she is drawing here on familiar tropes of Australia—desert, dead heart, “the tyranny of distance”—what prevails is her conviction that her early life was lived in a place that, because it remained unrecorded in literature, set its inhabitants “in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.” The Australia into which she was born was itself a recent invention. The colonies established through British imperial expansion through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had federated just three decades earlier, in 1901, and the national parliament had only just moved from Melbourne to the new “Bush Capital” at Canberra, three hours south of Sydney, in 1927. The legacies of Australia’s colonial origins were everywhere to be found through the interwar decades, including in the makeup of the population. From the mid-nineteenth century, emigration to Australia was almost wholly confined to British subjects, and this pattern continued for more than another century, sustained by the “White Australia policy,” the name popularly given to a series of restrictive acts of parliament defining the new nation as Anglo and European, beginning with the Immigration Restriction Act, which gave immigration officials enormous latitude to refuse entry into Australia on racial grounds. The first attorney general, Alfred Deakin, announced to the Parliament of Australia in 1901, “At the very first instant of our national career we are as one for a white Australia.”
After the establishment of the early colonies with populations largely comprised of convicts and military personnel, the European population in Australia had been controlled by the British Colonial Land and Emigration Office, which organised the funding of passages to Australia according to the principle that “the proportions sent out (as between English, Scottish and Irish) should be the same as in the home population,” with the aim of producing a “new Britannia” in the colonies. At Federation in 1901, the Australian population was 95 percent of British descent. Frontier wars between settlers and Indigenous people were sustained until the early decades of the twentieth century; Indigenous Australians were largely excluded from the franchise at Federation and were mostly not included in the national census until 1967. All this matters for Shirley Hazzard’s story, first because she makes much of the White Australia policy in The Great Fire—“We’ve had racial laws in Australia for generations,” Peter Exley tells Archie Crindle, who is concerned about the rise of fascism in Italy—but also because it speaks to the overwhelmingly Anglo-Australian world in which she grew up. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of these colonial and racial legacies in the Australia of her early years, legacies that had been confirmed and consolidated by the First World War. In his history of modern Australia, Tom Keneally observes that that war, “instead of repelling Australians from the arms of the Empire, drove them more firmly into it. Apart from the undeniable convictions of the great majority, this was also for the sake of a White Australia.” The historians Mark Peel and Christina Twomey describe the “defensive project” of Australia in these years, an “insularity” that yet maintained a decisive “sentimental attachment to Britain.”
Shirley would later recall the deep identification of her family and social world with the ideals and dominance of the British Empire: “the globe marked out in pink” and the foldout coronation poster displayed at school—“jingoistic,” she said, “like some great protective thing over us … And suddenly it pulverised.” Her memories also turned to the darker aspects of the nation’s history, characterised by what she felt to be “ignoble endurance,” stemming from the conditions of its founding as a penal colony: “hardship, awfulness and no sense of pleasure.” Nor was there any sense, in the popular consciousness of her family and class, or in the reaches of her own imagination, of the immensity of the country’s Indigenous history, nor of the continuing presence of Indigenous people and cultures. And even while she would go on, in essays and lectures, to criticise the treatment of the First Australians by successive national governments, the language in which she evoked 1930s and 1940s Australia in The Transit of Venus—“a parched unvisited mystery, a forlorn horizon strung on a strand of slack barbed wire”—and her evocation of white Australians’ unfamiliarity with Indigenous people are themselves grounded in an incapacity to recognise these realities. In The Transit of Venus, Caro and Grace Bell learn that “Australia’s history soon terminated in unsuccess,” that it “was engulfed in a dark stench of nameless prisoners whose only apparent activity was to have built, for their own incarceration, the stone gaols, now empty monuments that little girls might tour for Sunday outings,” and that it “dwindled into the expeditions of doomed explorers, journeys without revelation or encounter endured by fleshless men whose portraits already gloomed, beforehand, with a wasted, unlucky look—the eyes fiercely shining from sockets that were already bone.” There was, it seems, to be no moving past these determinants, no other way of belonging to this place.
While Australians at this time looked mostly to its colonial past for their cultural moorings, the nation also participated in the global rush to modernity. Sydney, Australia’s largest city, older than the nation by more than a century, exemplified the attraction of city life after World War I, collecting an increasing proportion of New South Wales’s inhabitants, so that its population more than doubled from less than half a million at Federation to more than a million the year Shirley was born. Sydney was also more international, more energetically connected to the rhythms and opportunities of the modern world than was the second major city, Melbourne, which had built its wealth in the gold rushes of the previous century and remained the establishment city. In 1927 the artist Sydney Ure Smith described Sydney’s vitality: “grinding trams and busy motor cars and … uncompromising flats … and always the patch of blue harbour. Hills, noise, traffic, careless pedestrians, yellow cabs … ferries darting in a tangle into the harbour from Circular Quay. Tall buildings, ugly buildings … wharves, masses of deep sea liners, cargo boats, ships from everywhere … crowded houses on the foreshore … excitement, bustle and movement…” All these elements might be found, of course, in descriptions of any world city of the period, apart perhaps from the defining note of the harbour, described in 1916 by the architect John Sulman as “a great lung … which can never be closed.” Sydney has always been identified with its harbour, and by the Pacific Ocean into which the harbour opens, as in this paean from the city’s 1938 sesquicentenary: “Golden beaches. Sun-tanned men and maidens … Red-roofed villas terraced above the blue waters of the harbour … Even Melbourne seems like some grey and stately city of Northern Europe compared with Sydney’s sub-tropical splendours.”
Shirley’s childhood was spent in full view of those splendours and blue waters and, like the city, was defined by the opportunities they provided. By the year of her birth, Sydney was in the process of being transformed by the construction of the iconic bridge, symbol of prosperity and the future. The bridge carried a particular resonance for the Hazzards, as Reginald and Catherine, known as Kit, had met in the bridge works office. Both were working for Dorman Long, the British engineering firm charged with the bridge’s construction—Reg in the post of secretary to the director of construction, Lawrence Ennis, whom Shirley remembered as “a dim, presiding figure of my infancy,” and Kit in the office of the chief engineer, Sir Ralph Freeman. Australia had been hit hard by the Great Depression, but because of the bridge, one of the very few construction projects to survive the downturn, the consequences of the 1929 crash took some years to hit Sydney. The completion of the bridge in 1932 meant an end to this cushioning, and the city saw a collapse worse than anywhere else in the country. By 1933 Australia’s unemployment rate was one of the highest in the world. Although the Hazzards were not directly affected, the larger deprivations were clear even to the very young Shirley: “I was lucky that my family did not actively suffer during the Depression, which was terrible in Australia. It’s not something a child lives through and ever forgets. It becomes a yardstick really for human experience when you’ve seen an entire populace humiliated, compounded by the penury of veterans of the First World War.” Those veterans too were burned into her consciousness, “spectres,” “apparitions,” standing alone or in groups around the city streets. “Who or what they had singly been … sunk in the delved sameness of the eyes. Nothing more could be done to them, but their unsurpassed worst would be sustained forever and ever.” She retained more domestic images of the bleakness of Depression-era suburbia, for instance the local shop where she and Valerie would be sent, “with those windows, no one thought of dressing them up, those windows in the summer with dead flies and bleached packets of this and that.”
Throughout her life Shirley Hazzard was at pains to establish a sense of distance from the country and the circumstances of her birth, claiming that “my temperament is not a very national one.” She was particularly oblique about the question, writing to her first UK publisher, “I have never lived in the UK, although my passport is certainly British and I expect that I am too … However, these things are perhaps more mysterious than I realise.” Her criticisms of Australia were pointed and sustained, but more than this, she was unwilling to saddle herself with its colonial burden, expressed sardonically by Transit’s narrator: “Australia required apologies, and was almost a subject for ribaldry. Australia could only have been mitigated by unabashed fortune from its newly minted sources—sheep, say, or sheep-dip.” At the same time, in her writing and in her memories can be found a profound connection to the locations of her childhood, in particular to the quality of light and the topography of Sydney’s North Shore, which set in place one of the essential coordinates of her lifelong visual imaginary: the sea. From the age of about five she lived in scenic Mosman, just above Balmoral Beach, on a high-ridged peninsula jutting out into Sydney’s Middle Harbour, rising some seventy or eighty feet (20–25 metres) above the sea, with nearly eleven miles (18 kilometres) of coastline, cliffs of dark yellow and white Hawkesbury sandstone, and beaches, many of them still, then, surrounded by untouched bushland.
She recalled that even before the family moved to Mosman, on hot afternoons her mother would drive her and Valerie from Willoughby to Balmoral to paddle in the sea. They would arrive at the beach “down a winding road whose asphalt was edged with morning glory” and return “by the sheer ascent of Awaba Street, in terror that the brake might fail.” She came to understand the sea as an essential part of her life: “All through my life I’ve lived near the sea and I think, sometimes, how difficult it would be for me to be landlocked.” On the one hand she recognised and looked to a distant and “authoritative world where seasons were reversed (it was implied, correctly),” but she also felt a forceful sense of connection to place and to the particular lived places of her childhood, to the mesmerizing detail of a world she was inventing, imagining for herself. We can see this in The Transit of Venus, where despite the imaginative and aesthetic circumscriptions of colonial society, the young Caro nonetheless apprehends another world yet to be verified, glimpsed in unknowing fragments:
There was nothing mythic at Sydney: momentous objects, beings, and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books. Sydney could never take for granted, as did the very meanest town in Europe, that a poet might be born there or a great painter walk beneath its windows. The likelihood did not arise, they did not feel they had deserved it. That was the measure of resentful obscurity: they could not imagine a person who might expose or exalt it … There was the harbour, and the open sea. It was an atmosphere in which a sunset might be comfortably admired, but not much else. Any more private joy—in light or dark, in leaf or gatepost—savoured of revelation and was uncountenanced; even in wisteria or wattle on mornings newer, surely, than anywhere else could by now achieve. There was a stillness on certain evenings, or a cast to rocks, or a design of languid branch against the sky that might be announcing glory. Though it could hardly be right to relish where Dora was aggrieved, the girls put their smooth faces to gardenias, inhaling December for a lifetime.
That a poet might be born there. From her earliest responses to the topography of Sydney Harbour, its green folds and sandstone tracks, its gardens and blue vistas, the “private joy” it offered, Shirley Hazzard announced herself a writer. The poetic charge of these lines derives not only from their evocative precision but also from a sense that these images are being encountered for the first time. There is a tight enfolding of poetry with childhood memory, a combination of prospect and retrospect that is strikingly her own. The sensual experience of stillness, or of gardenias, is already washed with lost time, and what we are being given access to is not simply a past and a particular place and moment—the summer December scents of a 1930s Sydney childhood—but also a landscape of poetic and bodily apprehension. She later reflected on this not so much as a quality of her writing but as a phenomenon of memory itself. In 1984, on returning to Sydney to deliver a series of lectures, she told an interviewer that she had been struck by the particularity of place and time—a winter’s day in August—and by the alignment of a certain quality of light with memory. Struck by the gap of thirty years since she had last encountered the city in midyear, and struck, surely, after all this time, by the antipodean surprise of winter sunshine in August, just as by the scent of gardenias in December, she discovered that “light has properties of memory, like the scents of flowers. I find myself walking along and looking at Sydney and having memories pour over me. The whole content of one’s youth and one’s experience that’s lingering somewhere in one’s mind is brought to attention by this quality of light.” It’s as if her early years were lived primarily, imaginatively, as a process of setting down memory, of lyrical but as yet unvoiced response to the world around her, above all to the light and the sea. Even the city impressed her with its radiance; she remembered being driven there in early mornings, its towers “came into sight as one crossed the bridge. There was in fact a golden sun—sheer radiance!—on top of the building that housed the Sydney Sun. The whole thing, always, enchanted place to me when it suddenly appeared. (Then, few minutes later, descent into the narrow dark of George, Pitt, and Castlereagh, toast-rack trams, smell of sooty-city, lights on sometimes on winter mornings…).”
If the harbour at Mosman, the light, and the foliage could suggest the possibility of “glory” to her protagonist Caro years later, they were not able to deliver anything like that in the present tense of Shirley’s own childhood. She was eloquent about the misery of family life, aware as a child that both her parents had had hard beginnings. She described them as “scarred for life” by what they had undergone, as “fixated on money by their childhoods,” and as each selfishly battling to thwart the desires and pleasures of the other, with their two daughters caught miserably in the middle. From the age of about ten she witnessed what she recalled as a “terrible situation between my parents,” with arguments and constant raised voices. Before this, she felt, “in the early years of their marriage,” there had been some happiness and harmony between Kit and Reg. She described them as “both very good-looking, in their Celtic way—dark hair, blue eyes, fair skin, fairly tall. My mother was strikingly beautiful even into later life, and had fine taste in clothes.” (Here she might have been describing herself.) Their attractiveness to each other was evident to her, but also their wretched drive to separation, their selfishness and vindictive cruelty.
In assessing their almost lifelong incompatibility, Shirley acknowledged her parents’ difficult pasts and understood that they “in their best selves rejoiced in giving, to my sister and me, a better childhood than they themselves had had. My memories of very early life are touching in that way.” However, their origins were rather more benighted than perhaps she realized. Both Kit and Reg began their lives in circumstances of illegitimacy and considerable material deprivation. Reg’s background remains obscure. Shirley claimed to have his birth certificate stating that he was born in Wales, but there is no such document among her papers; there is, however, a letter from Somerset House public records office in London from 1968, a response to her inquiry, advising that there was no record of his birth in Wales at that time. She may have been thinking of her parents’ marriage certificate, which does indeed state his place of birth as Newport, Wales, and Newport is also recorded on his 1918 Australian Imperial Force enlistment papers, but neither of these documents carries the assurance of fact: the details on the marriage certificate were provided by Reg himself, and the enlistment form includes a declaration by his adoptive mother, Pauline A. Hazzard, that “to the best of my knowledge my adopted son, Reginald Hazzard, was born in Newport in Wales in the year 1899 on the 27 February.” A handwritten note records that his baptismal name was “Reginald Crawford,” and in response to the question “Are you a natural born British subject or a Naturalized British subject?” Reg, or perhaps Pauline, misunderstanding the import of the question, has at first written “British born,” again asserting his Welsh birth, and has then crossed that out and written over it “natural born.” (The question sought in fact to distinguish those born in Australia or Britain from those born elsewhere.) Despite these assertions, there is no record of the birth of a male child under the name of Reginald Crawford (or Crofford, Crosford, Crestford, or other possible variants) in the years around 1899 in the UK, or for that matter in Australia. Nor is there any record of his adoption, although this is not in itself unusual, as formal adoptions began in New South Wales only in 1923 and arrangements made before then were informal, private, and mostly undocumented. Shirley observed that her father’s early life was “shrouded in unspeakability.”
Copyright © 2022 by Brigitta Olubas
